Guide to Accessibility, and Equity-Focused Design.

Accessibility

The design of products, devices, services, environments for people with different abilities.

When UX designers design the web experience they follow the?web content accessibility guide(WCAG).WCAG is one of the best resources for design accessibility. Accessibility focus on accommodating physical and cognitive disabilities.

Accessibility is also known as?“a11y”?in the industry.?a11y = aCCESSIBILITy. There are 11 letters in the middle.

There are four main categories of accessibilities.

1. Motor Disabilities

Motor disability applies to any condition that impedes sensations, movement, and coordination. People may have a motor disability, like limited mobility or tremors, that they were born with or left with after an accident or stroke. It’s really hard to hold down multiple keys, hard to move the mouse, or sometimes they can’t move the mouse or all. So UX designers need to provide assistive technologies like voice control, add an adoptive keyboard, single a few clicks to archive the task, add a search field to the website, reduce actions that need so many clicks or keypresses, and support keyboard navigation.

2. Auditory Disabilities

Deaf people and people with hard-to-hearing problems can use so many digital products. But if it came to multimedia products it will be a challenge for them. So UX designers can and transcripts for audio and need to add subtitles to Videos.

3. Cognitive Disabilities

UX designers need to consider users with cognitive disabilities, including developmental disabilities, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, ADHD, dyslexia, and epilepsy. It needs to use simple language, simple navigation, and simple information architecture. These adjustments will be a great experience for them.

4. Vision Disabilities

Blind people and people with vision impairment are in this category. UX designers need to give features like screen readers to get it done. Also, it’s really important to add a voice control feature to the screen reader to get done. Also, it’s really important to add voice central functions to digital products. Adding alt text to images is important too. Also, UX designers need to make UX design color blind friendly for people with a color blind situation by adding high contrast options and making font size adjustable.

By the way, accessible is all about making things accessible to all people. Because more than 1 billion people around the world have a disability. That’s hard to believe but it is the truth and it is 15% of the world’s population. That’s out of a global population of 7.96 billion. If we didn’t make it accessible so that means we miss the chance to make it easy for so many people.

In UX design we focused on “the social model of disability”. That means “define a disability as being caused by the way society is organized or how products are designed, rather than a person’s ability or difference.”

There are three types of disabilities.

1. Permanent?- Permanent loss of hearing or vision.
2. A Temporary - broken arm or a broken leg
3. Situational?- hearing unknown language

When we design the user experience we need to keep all of them in our mind. If we make the UX easier for people with disabilities, we also make it a better experience for everyone.

Equity Focused Design

Designing for groups that have been historically underrepresented or ignored when building products.

Sometimes inclusive design leaves some groups still left out. Then UX designers realized Inclusive design is not always enough. After that, they created a new solution called “equity-focused Design”. This design can bring a unique experience to people. The goal of equity-focused design is the uplift groups and cultures that have been excluded historically. First of all, let’s define equality and equity.

• Equality -?Equality Providing the same amount of opportunity and support to people
• Equity?-?Providing different levels of opportunity and support for each person to achieve fair outcomes.

In equity-focused design, we need to think through all the aspects of a designed product and make sure the product is both accessible and fair to all genders, races, cultures, and abilities. But the design specifically considers underrepresented and excluded groups.

Doing Equity Focused Design, UX designers need to make sure to :

• identify the excluded minority groups
• build cultural awareness.
• doing minority representing.
• build trust among these groups.
• get feedback from them.

Examples :

1. Usually, users need to select their gender in a form this way. But other forms make everyone feel included, and also it’s a good method to get accurate data. In the first form, it feels like excluded to some groups.

2. Use different images and illustrations of different cultures. It is a small thing. But it sends a powerful message. Because it feels like everyone is included.

3. People who have a smartphone with low ram and low internal storage can’t get a better user experience with products. So we need to build lite versions for the product. Then they can use it and get a better experience with it.

4. People who don’t have good and fast internet connections always face many problems. So we need to design a better offline experience for them. Like, give a video download option to them.

5. When releasing products to countries like Arab we need to display texts right to left. It feels welcome to them to the products.

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