Presentation: A web for everyone: accessibility as a design problem
Sample submission from Whitney Quesenbery
Presentation: A Web for Everyone: Accessibility as a design problem
Whitney Quesenbery |
Short Description
Let's get past the idea that checklists and compliance all there is to accessibility. Designing for accessibility is a user experience design problem, starting with understanding how people with disabilities use your products. If we aim to design for all senses we can focus on easy interaction, helpful wayfinding, clean presentation, plain language and media instead of "rules." Doing so, we can create a web for everyone and a delightful user experience where accessibility and usability work together. Long Description This presentation will approach the question of how we design accessible web sites, applications or other technology through the lens of core principles for any UX design. Rather than a list of design and technology guidelines, or as a problem of compliance with regulatory standards, accessibility can be viewed as a challenge to design for a broader audience. I hope that by the end of the presentation, I will have been able to show that accessibility is not about “dumbing down” design by chaining it to mindless conformance. Broadening our vision to design for everyone is a conscious act of innovation. Instead of focusing on barriers, we can focus on enabling expression in multiple ways. This approach can be applied to any design problem, from physical objects to software to service design, but this presentation will focus on web sites and apps for web or mobile devices. The 7 core principles are:
When we put all this together, we get a user experience that is not only minimally usable and accessible, but creates delight by supporting exploration and discovery, being helpful and informative, and not creating barriers that block anyone’s way. A word about the presentation. This will not be a recitation of principles and guidelines, but an exploration of how they are put into practice. We’ll look at examples of both everyday and innovative uses of the web. A set of inclusive personas will help illustrate how the web can work for everyone. And, yes, we can connect the W3C WCAG (Web Accessibility Content Guidelines) to these principles, bringing design and compliance together. Goals Attendees will leave the session with:
Selected Reviewer Comments
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