You can wait for the future of inclusivity to come to you or you can do the future that is inclusive for all. In our digitalized world we are dealing with digital products on a daily basis, no matter what age we are or what physical or cognitive disabilities we might have, we still need to take care of our tasks and errands with digital services in order to survive.
Accessibility not only makes products and services equal for all disabilities, it also improves the quality of life for all humans in general by reducing the mental workload and making digital services more intuitive.
Improving accessibility of your digital service is not only improving the experience for those with disabilities, but it improves the experience for all users. Today´s cognitive load is huge for all of us, no matter our background. Increasingly all services and tasks are digitised and therefore it requires a lot of our attention and mental work in the digital world. Especially for those who are constantly dealing with different digital solutions throughout the day. But to achieve the status of accessibility, does not automatically guarantee that the solution is easy or enjoyable to use.
Their kids have hobbies and go to school and daycare. Not only do they deal with several different work related interfaces during the day, all in which have a different kind of user logic and architecture, some are more intuitive and some are just absolutely terrible to use (the ones every office worker avoids at all costs if possible, we all know instantly what these interfaces are!), but they log in in several school, daycare and hobby apps too during the day to communicate with teachers, coaches, inform about absences and mark down important events. They stay in contact with their family and friends through messaging apps, and are in dozens of group chats with other parents of their children's class, sports groups of their own and their kids, with work colleagues and all charity and community work they do to support schools and sports teams. In addition these parents also schedule doctors appointments, manages bank, insurance, investment accounts, pays bills and shops for clothes, food and all basic necessities online in between of being emotionally and mindfully available for their friends, family and co-workers. Quite a combo, isn't it? Well, let's add in dyslexia, colour blindness, mental disorder or a physical disability.
How does it sound now?
For this reason, accessibility not only makes products and services equal for all disabilities, it also improves the quality of life for all humans in general by reducing the mental workload and making digital services more intuitive. In general, a bad experience for an average user is usually much worse for someone with disabilities.
Accessibility is teamwork between designers, developers, copywriters and content creators, everyone must work together following the same principles and guidelines to achieve an accessible end product.
Accessible design basically equals how usable your digital service or web page is. It is really easy for users to quit using your solution due to bad experience.
Accessible design basically equals how usable your digital service or web page is. It is really easy for users to quit using your solution due to bad experience. Hence making sure ease of use and intuitivity, especially considering users who are impaired or disabled, are the foundation for creating accessible designs. Accessibility should evolve through iterations together with your solution, learning from user behaviour, collecting feedback from real users with disabilities, and recognizing new needs and responding to those needs accordingly.
The World Wide Web consortium (W3C) developed a series of accessibility standards, known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1 and WCAG 2.0). The standard makes sure the web content is more accessible to people with a wide variety of disabilities. The standard is broadly broken down into four principles:
Each of these different principles has a success rating of either A, AA, or AAA.
An A rating is the minimum requirement and AAA is the star standard of accessibility on the site.
Although it might seem like a lot of work, accessibility is much easier than you may think.
To check the status of your product or web page, for example Chrome web store offers extensions for accessibility testing and insights for designers and developers. There are also themes and text to speech extensions available for web browsing. Also Chrome and other browsers too have built in features for more accessible browsing.
Inclusivity is no more an option to thrive in the competition of the most enjoyable user experience, it is an essential part of it. Whenever we can reduce the stress and cognitive load from end users, we are able to find true success in exceptional user experiences that bring value and a feeling of belonging to all of the users no matter if they have disabilities.
Receive the latest news, tips, tools and more information around design and customer experience. Conveniently in your inbox monthly.