You may not realize it, but your site might be actively discouraging user engagement because your content models are shaped by bias. Daniel Carter and Carra Martinez are here to help you to understand this phenomena and the steps you can take to address it.
Topic: Accessibility
Tips on making your site available to every person and every device: from networked gadgets to screen readers, desktop browsers to web-enabled TVs. ARIA and progressive enhancement. Contrast is king. The accessibility of WAI-ARIA. Deafness and the user experience. The inclusion principle. Accessibility via web standards. WAI in on WCAG.
Color Craft & Counterpoint: A Designer’s Life with Color Vision Deficiency
There’s a common cognitive dissonance about design: that good design can’t come from designers with color vision deficiencies. Much to the contrary, people with CVDs are far more aware of color and usability gaps, and can be invaluable during the design process. Sharing his first hand perspective as a color blind web professional, Noah Glushien discusses his career, living with CVDs, and how to enhance projects.
Building the Woke Web: Web Accessibility, Inclusion & Social Justice
From banking to civil services to education, the internet intersects every part of our lives in a way that was unthinkable 20 years ago. And yet the web remains inaccessible to vast swathes of people, with code issues far from the only roadblock. Olu explores the complexity of true accessibility, and offers a thoughtful approach to building a safer and more welcoming web.
Standards for Writing Accessibly
In this excerpt from Writing Is Designing, Michael J. Metts and Andy Welfle discuss critical accessibility considerations for content authors, including reading order, references to additional content, and instructions.
Getting to the Heart of Digital Accessibility
You’ve heard it before: there is not enough diversity in tech. But Carie Fisher offers one solution you may not have heard: that focusing on accessibility may be key in making the tech world itself more accessible.
Accessibility for Vestibular Disorders: How My Temporary Disability Changed My Perspective
Developer Facundo Corradini shares how his temporary disability taught him about why accessibility testing is so important. Focused on vestibular disorders, he both shares best practices to create sites that avoid triggering symptoms and informs us of the potential impact.
Semantics to Screen Readers
As an extension to our From URL to Interactive series, designer and front-end developer Melanie Richards takes a deep dive into how our content is accessed by a wide array of screen readers, which are highly customizable to users. Understanding the nuances of accessibility APIs, thorough testing approaches, and the wealth of resources available, site creators can create the most widely accessible content for the most users possible.
Paint the Picture, Not the Frame: How Browsers Provide Everything Users Need
Designers want to create fully branded experiences, which often results in customized highlighting colors or pixel-perfect typography. While these design touches can enhance the experience for some, they can render the experience inaccessible for others. Designer Eric Bailey makes a case for leaving key accessibility features to the browser to ensure the most accessible experience possible.
Designing for Cognitive Differences
Accessible design is often reduced to adding alt text and avoiding colors imperceptible by colorblindness. While physical differences are an important component of accessible design, cognitive differences are often ignored entirely. Brandon Gregory considers three common types—inattention, anxiety, and depression—and how they impact their users, patterns that trigger those conditions, and how designers can be more conscientious when design for them.
Conversational Semantics
Semantic markup has always mattered, but with voice interfaces rapidly becoming the norm, it now matters more than ever. Aaron Gustafson shows us how simple HTML tags can have a huge impact with voice interfaces.
