Accessibility

Accessibility is a practice of designing user interfaces that enable people with disabilities to use and enjoy same products and services as everyone else.

When designing User Interfaces main disabilities that designers have to consider are related to vision. The issues might range from limited vision (e.g. colorblind) to no vision.

Designing for accessibility is not hard, but it does require some additional effort from UX designers, interaction designers, as well as development teams.

Best resource for up-to-date information on accessibility standards and learning resources is W3C WAI website.

If you are following design best practices you are probably doing most of the right things already. Here are some things you should pay attention to to ensure accessibility of designs:

  • structure content well
  • use sufficient contrast between design elements
  • test designs for colorblind (this is especially important if you are using monochromatic color schemes)
  • use alt tag for images appropriately

It is worth noting that alt tag is used by screen-readers to communicate the content of the image, so it has to be descriptive, and work well in the context where the image appears.

You can easily test your web pages as they would be read by a screen-reader on Mac and PC.

VoiceOver Utility on a Mac allows to test accessibility of your web pages
VoiceOver Utility options on a Mac

Books on Accessibility

Even thought designing for accessibility is not hard, accessibility is a big topic, and there are lots of nuances that need to be considered. Best resource for up-to-date information on accessibility standards and learning resources is W3C WAI website.

There are also some excellent books on the topic: