Name: A Web for Everyone
ISBN: 9781933820392

Sarah Horton

Whitney Quesenbery

If you are in charge of the user experience, development, or strategy for a web site, A Web for Everyone will help you make your site accessible without sacrificing design or innovation. Rooted in universal design principles, this book provides solutions: practical advice and examples of how to create sites that everyone can use.

Designing Accessible User Experiences

A Web for Everyone

Jaydee (she/her)

But it wasn't until I started working on the web that I came to a full understanding of the importance of the Golden Rule. Prior to becoming a developer, the ramifications of my decisions were fairly limited. But on the web, every decision I make can have a profound effect on hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people's lives. I can make checking into a flight a breeze, or I can make it a living hell.

In this book, we will present a design approach that begins and ends with people. We believe that great design starts by thinking about how to make products work for everyone. 

Design isn't simply about how something looks. A good design is visually appealing but also meets real needs, has substance and depth, and works well and intuitively.

Designing is an activity. When you make decisions about a product, and your decisions impact the lives of its users, you are designing- whether you think of yourself as a designer or not. The strategist defines the purpose and goals, the interaction designer focuses on how users will interact with the product, the visual designer creates the look, the content strategist gives the product a voice, and the developer makes everything work. Whatever the title and task, all of these roles are engaged in the activity of design.

The terms universal design, inclusive design, barrier-free design, human-centered design, and design-for-all are all concepts that strive toward a common goal: to make the user experience the first concern in making design decisions and to expand the description of users to include a wide range of human ability.

Universal design is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design. 

The Principles of Universal Design start from the premise that there is no typical, average, or normal user. Rather there is a basic understanding that user context will vary widely based on circumstances. 

No small set of personas can represent the entire world of people with disabilities. It's important to remember that a person with a disability is first, a person. They like their hometown sports team or love going to the theater. They are funny or quiet, or quick to anger, just like everyone else.

Each persona has a name, a gender, and an age. They all have a personal story about their family, their work, or where they live. These details are not meant to limit the views of the personas, but to anchor them in a realistic setting. The personas also include information about their abilities, aptitudes, and attitudes, using the model that Ginny Redish and Dana Chisnell developed in their work on how older adults use the web: 

• Ability: Information about their ability (physical, cognitive, language) and any assistive technology (AT) they use. 

• Aptitude: Their current knowledge and ability to make inferences. Attitude: Their motivation, emotion, risk tolerance, and persistence. 

•Attitude: their motivation, emotion, risk tolerance and persistence

User experience-including usability and accessibility-starts with users. Personas are a way to combine user research from many sources into realistic characters, to help you remember to put people first during the design process.

A clear purpose is a key to good user experience and accessibility. Sprawling, cluttered websites and complex, multi-layered web applications are harder for everyone to use. By maintaining focus on essential features and functionality and favoring simple solutions, designs are better for everyone.

Accessibility can be built in. Fixing problems in a design never works as well as avoiding them to begin with. And fixes made late in a process often require changes that compromise the design. When tie purpose is clear, design, code, usability, and accessibility can work together from the beginning.

All too often, teams dive into a project without a clear idea of its purpose and goals. They start knowing the site will have a shopping cart, video, social media, and then dive into designing the site without first knowing its core mission. 

The design team should be able to answer the questions, "Why does this website exist?" and "What value does this site provide for the people who use it?" It's easy to get excited about technology ideas or get bogged down in lists of features. But teams that work from a shared understanding of the clear purpose for a product make better decisions about features and functionality.

The digital environment is incredibly flexible-seemingly without boundaries. However, each new feature adds complexity and can adversely impact usability. And bad general usability can mean no usability for people with disabilities. Try focusing design and developmental efforts on critical aspects of the product--the content and functionality required for the product to achieve its purpose. Even when working on a complex product, look for ways to make it appear simple. When you can explain the purpose of the site or app clearly, it's easier to choose among design options.

Templates, widgets, and toolkits are the building blocks for many websites. Even experienced developers usually start from a template or sample code. The effort to make templates accessible pays off every time they are used, and sites built from accessible templates work better for everyone.

Accessibility is not black and white, on and off. You should aim for full accessibility, but when you hit roadblocks, it's helpful to think about a range of approaches, listed here from most to least desirable. 

• Universal (or inclusive) design-one site. Everyone has the same means of use, with elements that work for everyone, no matter what interaction mode is chosen. The goal of this book is to help you create universal or inclusive websites and apps, so no one is left out of the experience. For example, a video with captions and video description accessible video player lets everyone watch the same video. 

• Equivalent use-includes alternatives. Products contain similar ways to meet the same goals but present them in different ways. For example, a transcript for an audio file has the same information, but someone reading the information has a different experience than someone listening to the audio. 

• Accommodation-a separate accessible version. Accommodation is disability-speak for working around a barrier without moving it-"separate but not equal." Accommodations like a "text only version are not acceptable. It's not okay to create a separate design-one that delivers a separate and degraded experience--for people with disabilities.

Giles went back to the drawing board. Rather than have the software identify possible options, he had users create lists of locations and places that were of interest to them. The computer didn't try to work out whether or not the itinerary was practical-it gave people enough data to figure it out themselves. People are good at imagining the future. Computers are good at remembering stuff. By handing off the task of imagining to the user and the task ofremem- bering to the computer, it all worked out. The process taught mne apowerful lesson about where complexity belongs, who should own it.

Sequencing also matters for instructions. Sometimes, forms are coded so that instructions and labels appear after the form fields and buttons. Users (and assistive technology) have to read ahead to determine the purpose of each field and then backtrack to fill in the field. Be sure that the elements in a form follow a logical sequence: identify and describe an element before the interaction, both visually and in the code. Instructions and labels that appear inside the field are problematic because they disappear when the field is activated. Users who need to look at the keyboard as they type will miss the hint entirely. Others won't remember the details in the instructions and labels once they are no longer displayed.

Deciding whether to open a new window is a simple illustration of an important principle: Don't take actions on behalf of users that they can already accomplish on their own.

A Web for Everyone Designing Accessible User Experiences

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