Accessibility

What's Inclusive Design?

Inclusive design is a philosophy that a product should be "accessible to, and usable by, as many people as reasonably possible ... without the need for special adaptation or specialized design" (British Standards Institute (Links to an external site.), 2005).

In short, we shouldn't need to adapt products after the fact to handle certain "special" groups of users (e.g., those with visual impairments, those with low language or tech literacy). Instead, we should try to design our product, from the start, to accommodate them in a first-class way.

Designing Inclusively

Inclusive design doesn't mean we'll be able to design perfectly for every single person who might use our product. After all, it would be impossible to anticipate every possible way in with people might differ and in which their experience with a product might be affected.

Instead, we can only do our best to make an effort to understand the diversity of our potential users as we develop our product, and apply that understanding to our design.

We can then consciously incorporate different ways for users to interact with our product.

And then regardless, we should make it easy to adapt or extend our product for those we weren't initially able to design for.

For example, Microsoft's resources on inclusive design (Links to an external site.) lays out three principles of inclusive design:

• Recognize exclusion

• Solve for one, extend to many

• Learn from diversity

If we designed a product based on simply our own perspective and abilities, we'd be producing a product biased heavily toward people just like us. What about the rest? What factors might you consider?

Building Inclusively and Accessibly

As a designer, you also need to understand how your designs will be implemented. That means developing deep insight into how your product will be built.

As a UX designer, in some contexts, you might not write any code—you'll develop detailed processes and designs and hand them off to engineers. In other contexts, you might write a significant amount of code, bringing your designs to fruition largely by yourself. Regardless, if you're going to be working on a team, you'll need to set the vision and direction for how you'll design inclusively and build for usability—and work to ensure your design solutions are indeed achievable for a wide variety of users.

Here are some great resources to reference as you design and build products to ensure you're incorporating accessibility from the ground up:

• W3C provides a wide variety of information and resources (Links to an external site.) for building accessibly on the web.

  • The W3C's Web Contrast Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (Links to an external site.) are something you should reference throughout Labs to continuously audit your product's accessibility!

• This article by Smashing Magazine (Links to an external site.) compiles a long list of of ways to build accessible frontend components.