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.

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