Regine M. Gilbert

What is inclusive design? It is simple. It means that your product has been created with the intention of being accessible to as many different users as possible. For a long time, the concept of accessibility has been limited in terms of only defining physical spaces. However, change is afoot: personal technology now plays a part in the everyday lives of most of us, and thus it is a responsibility for designers of apps, web pages, and more public-facing tech products to make them accessible to all. Our digital era brings progressive ideas and paradigm shifts – but they are only truly progressive if everybody can participate. In Inclusive Design for a Digital World, multiple crucial aspects of technological accessibility are confronted, followed by step-by-step solutions from User Experience Design professor and author Regine Gilbert. Think about every potential user who could be using your product. Could they be visually impaired? Have limited motor skills? Be deaf or hard of hearing? This book addresses a plethora of web accessibility issues that people with disabilities face. Your app might be blocking out an entire sector of the population without you ever intending or realizing it. For example, is your instructional text full of animated words and Emoji icons? This makes it difficult for a user with vision impairment to use an assistive reading device, such as a speech synthesizer, along with your app correctly. In Inclusive Design for a Digital World, Gilbert covers the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 requirements, emerging technologies such as VR and AR, best practices for web development, and more. As a creator in the modern digital era, your aim should be to make products that are inclusive of all people. Technology has, overall, increased connection and information equality around the world. To continue its impact, access and usability of such technology must be made a priority, and there is no better place to get started than Inclusive Design for a Digital World. What You’ll Learn The moral, ethical, and high level legal reasons for accessible design Tools and best practices for user research and web developers The different types of designs for disabilities on various platforms Familiarize yourself with web compliance guidelines Test products and usability best practices Understand past innovations and future opportunities for continued improvement Who This Book Is For Practitioners of product design, product development, content, and design can benefit from this book.

Designing with Accessibility in Mind

Inclusive Design for a Digital World

Jaydee (she/her)

There are many references throughout the book and they are not meant to provide a one-size-fits-all solution, because when it comes to accessibility and inclusive experiences, context needs to be taken into consideration. In all instances when dealing with accessibility, it is best to bring in an accessibility professional, working with people with disabilities by participatory/co-design, or get the training for your team. We all have to start somewhere, and this is a good place to be. Design is oftentimes the starting point and this is where the book begins, with designing with disability in mind. Let's get started!

 For the purpose of this book, we will use Webster's Dictionary to define accessibility. It is defined as follows: Easily used or accessed by people with disabilities: adapted for use by people with disabilities. Often times, accessibility is viewed as a series of checkboxes to complete; it doesn't have to be that way. Accessibility is not only about compliance, it is also about usability. 

As Kat Holmes said, "Design is much more likely to be the source of exclusion than inclusion"

When addressing accessibility, we need to keep in mind the areas accessibility focuses on: Visual: Blindness, low vision, color blindness Hearing: Deaf and hard of hearing Motor: Inability to use a mouse, slow response time, limited motor control Cognitive: Learning disabilities, distractability, inability to focus on large amounts of information • •

The social model of disability says that disability is caused by the way society is organized. The medical model of disability says that people are disabled by their impairments or differences. TI 1

One way to approacha project is to apply the W5H approach for design and development of your products. This could be an important first step into creating more Inclusive Designs. W5H stands for Who: Who is using your product? What: What are they doing? Where: Where are they doing it? When: When are they doing it? Why: Why are they doing it? How: How are they doing it? • • • • • •

More times than not, the content of your product is not available before development. However, it is best practice to develop the content ahead of the design by introducing a content model. In Carrie Hanes and Mike Atherton's book Designing Connected Content, they recommend starting with a content-first strategy. This will give structure for the creation of different representations and interfaces (think about how your users may access your product via mobile, desktop, ora voice application), allowing people to efficiently navigate through the content.

Though The consensus, particularly among accessibility advocates, that auto captions are not accessible. Note also that YouTube's automatic captions do not get indexed by Google because they are so error prone. The only way for your captions to be indexed is to upload them yourself. There are three really good reasons to caption: accessibility, searchability, and engagement. Accessible: 20% of Americans over age 12 experience significant enough hearing loss that it interferes with daily communication. Not captioning means that your videos are not accessible to 1/5 of your potential audience (in America, at least). Searchable: Also, Google and other search engines can't watch a video. Not captioning means that your videos can only be found based on their titles. What about all the incredible keywords and search terms you have in your video? Google has no idea about those. Engaging: At its core, captioning helps people understand more. If English is not your viewer's first language, they're more likely to follow if there are captions. Regardless, captions help all users engage more, which keeps them watching your video longer which search engines reward in rankings.

A house without a frame cannot stand on its own. One way of looking at a framework is to see it as the supportive approach to designing products. Frameworks can provide structure around how you might approach certain problems. In the EVVCC framework, the approach is to look at projects with an informed lens. The EVVCC stands for empathy, values, vision, context, and communication.

The framework is broken down into five areas: 

Empathy: The ability to understand and respond to our cO-Workers and customer needs 

Values: The core shared beliefs which inform organizational norms 

Vision: Shared alignment in organizational values, goals, and accountability to co-workers and customers 

Context: The challenge in relation to the project, person, urgency, risk, benefit, anda range of situational factors 

Communication: Articulating needs, goals, intentions, and feedback in conversations and products 

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