Do you love design, and web design? Looking into accessible design? Here are some resources that will help you understand the importance of accessibility and how you can leverage these practices into your own work. After all, design is about people, and good design is inclusive and accessible.
Inclusive Design
Microsoft published this site about Inclusive Design a few years ago, and remains a must for anyone looking into design. The inclusive toolkit manual offers simple principles that will broaden your perspective and help you serve more people.
Users with disabilities
It is very helpful to learn about the users that directly benefit from accessibility. Jakob Nielsen shares with us descriptions of various disabilities and the key issues that impact these users in Accessible Design for Users With Disabilities. These issues are but a mere glimpse into the potential issues users with disabilities face. Know that disabilities are a spectrum and in that spectrum there are nuances only the users themselves can teach us.
Tips for accessible design
The tips provided in the article Designing for Web Accessibility are fundamental ways in which you can start creating accessible designs today. It’s sort of a checklist. It’s not exhaustive, but it’s a good start.
Yet another checklist
If you are into checklists, here is another site that provides guides of best practices for key roles working on web products. There are sections for content editors, user experience designers and visual designers. Since design is sometimes fluid, it can be useful to look into each of these sections to ensure that you’re not forgetting anything relevant.
Accessibility Annotations
Lastly, when a design is passed onto another team, say the development team, it’s the designers responsibility to ensure that the intent and thought that has been put into the design is communicated. A Designer’s Guide to Documenting Accessibility & User Interactions written by Stéphanie Walter is an amazing tool that will help you help others and ultimately create a better product. There might be concepts that are new, but I promise that it’ll be worth the effort to research them more.
Conclusion
The design process of a digital product requires an understanding of the people it’s for. If your process includes user research, I urge you to consider adding people with disabilities in your pool of testers. Alwar Pillai wrote the article How the Accessible Usability Scale Makes User Research More Inclusive to demonstrate that user testing can also include people with disabilities.
Including accessibility into your work will make it more impactful and reach a much wider audience than you could have anticipated.