Design for all: Making digital products accessible

Designing for accessibility is a crucial but frequently ignored component of creating digital products. It entails designing user interfaces that users with disabilities, such as those with visual, hearing, or movement impairments, can use with ease. We can guarantee that all users, irrespective of their ability, can access and use our digital products by designing for accessibility.

Understanding Accessibility

Users of all abilities can comprehend, utilize, and enjoy the web thanks to accessibility. Our designers must make sure that our designs are usable by all users, regardless of their circumstances, skills, or context.

The first and foremost step to building an accessible product is to build empathy and install an inclusive design mentality.

Accessibility encompasses all people with disabilities, whether they are permanent, temporary, or situational. For example, having only one arm is a permanent condition, having an injured arm is a temporary condition, and holding a baby in one arm is a situational disability. However, accessibility is not limited to a group of users with specific abilities, such as visual, motor, auditory, speech, or cognitive disabilities. Instead, it includes anyone who is experiencing any disability.
Therefore, the aim is to make web content more usable to users in general.

How do we make our designs accessible?

1. Ask yourself where you are and where you need to go

First things first, a baseline measure.
Before you start, the accessibility of a current website can be tested using the AXE Chrome Extension. (Available at: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/axe-coconut/iobddmbdndbbbfjopjdgadphaoihpojp?hl=en)

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, (WCAG) break down accessibility into 4 main principles:

• Perceivable: Can the content be consumed in different ways?
• Operable: Can it function without confusion and without the use of a mouse or complex interactions?
• Understandable: Can a user understand how the user interface of the site functions and the information on the site?
• Robust: Can different assistive devices (screen readers, for example) understand the website?

Based on these categories, one can get ratings of A, AA, and AAA.
This complete set of guidelines is available here: https://.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

2. Be good with Colour

The ideal strategy in this case is to not rely solely on color to communicate information. Along with color, one can also utilize tooltips, thick borders, icons, bold text, underlines, italics, etc.

3. Visual cues

The use of visual cues is crucial when granting keyboard access. Even with a shaky hand, buttons and fonts should be large enough to click. Another beneficial connection is the TAB key link scrolling feature with an outline: 0; enabled in the backend CSS.
Clear boundaries, readable labels, and helper text are three essential components of forms that more modern minimalist designs have begun to omit. For users with cognitive and mobility problems, form fields should have clearly delineated bounds.
Keeping a label on a field is crucial for people with cognitive impairments because labels continue to be relevant even after placeholder text disappears when someone enters in the field.

4. Navigation & flow

Using the keyboard alone is not possible while hovering. Hover is frequently used in UX design for secondary actions while visibility is only used for primary actions. Actionable elements must be present on the screen for users of speech recognition navigation. Give people extra time to enter information relating to time. Allow users to reenter the flow if necessary, as everyone can make mistakes, but those with certain inhibiting factors are more likely to do so.

5. Test with all users

After all these efforts, is also important to include personas with varying abilities in the testing phase and use accessibility-testing tools (such as WAVE and Color Oracle) to test the design.
And right at the end, one can use this final checklist you can use just to make sure your design is accessible: https://accessibility.voxmedia.com/. We are on the brink of creating a new world.
We reserve the power to aim for one where every disability is treated like left-handedness — with a ubiquitous and seamless solution, free from stigma.
And maybe, just maybe, the physical world will hear us too.

Benefits of Inclusive and accessible designs:

• Increased accessibility: By designing for accessibility from the start, you can ensure that your product is usable by a wide range of people, including those with disabilities. This can help to increase the overall accessibility of your product, making it more usable and valuable to a wider audience.
• Improved user experience: Inclusive design can lead to a better user experience for everyone, not just people with disabilities. By considering the needs of a wide range of users and providing multiple ways to access information, you can create a product that is easy to use and understand for everyone.
• Increased market potential: By designing for accessibility, you can open up your product to a wider audience, including people with disabilities and older adults. This can help to increase your market potential and lead to more sales and revenue.
• Cost savings: By considering accessibility from the start of the design process, it can save a lot of money in the long run. It’s often cheaper to design for accessibility from the start, rather than trying to retrofit accessibility features later on.

Conclusion

Designing for accessibility is an essential aspect of digital product design. By creating user interfaces that are accessible to all users, we can ensure that our digital products are inclusive and usable by everyone. By following best practices and testing with real users with disabilities.