Accessibility

Accessibility

Accessibility is a subset of inclusive design that focuses on accommodating people with disabilities or impairments.

In theory, accessibility should result from an effective inclusive design process. If we've designed a product accessibly, it means we've successfully anticipated a variety of differences in which people might interact with our product.

In practice, we need to develop a deep understanding of disability and design for accessibility accordingly.

Understanding Disability

The first thing to recognize about disability is that it depends on context. A person might be disabled in one context, but not in another. For example, a person with myopia (nearsightedness) might have no issue reading a newspaper, but might have an issue reading a billboard.

Another critical thing to understand about disability is that it isn't all-or-nothing. There's a range for many impairments, where based on the design of your product, some people might need to invest slightly more effort to use a certain feature, some might need to invest a high amount of additional effort, and some might be excluded.

According to the World Bank (Links to an external site.), one billion people (15% of the world population) experience a form of disability. Designing for accessibility is a critical focus of UX design.

Designing for Accessibility

There are two ways users might access our product: direct access (using only features native to the app) and indirect access (using an assistive technology like a screen reader).

Recognizing this will help accommodate both groups, and in some cases, inform whether you should develop a native feature to handle certain cases.

Here are just a few things to consider:

• Don't rely on color: Many users are colorblind or otherwise visually impaired. In addition, cultural differences can influence how colors are perceived. Make sure wherever you're using color to convey information, there's also an additional way that includes these users.

• Make sure clickable/touchable areas are large: Make it easy for users to interact with elements in your product. This helps a great diversity of users.

• Ensure sufficient contrast among important elements: Make sure it's easy to distinguish important elements from each other with contrast by default. For example, the W3C's Web Contrast Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (Links to an external site.) define a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for most text.

• Make sure all non-text content is also available in text. For example, be sure to include any relevant text information during the design stage that should supplement non-text content, such as alt-text.

Another thing to consider is that some user differences are short-term, while others are long-term. A temporary medical condition might cause temporary disability—and many circumstances that influence usability are unrelated to disability, like glare on a screen.

Consider all of these factors during the design process, and you'll go a long way toward building inclusively and accessibly.