Articles about Accessibility
Color Contrast: Infographics and UI Accessibility
Sufficient color contrast is a prerequisite for readable text and accessible websites, and visual contrast has a significant role in the updated Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 3.0). Unfortunately, contrast is often given secondary importance by designers in lieu of other design elements. This article discusses color contrast for text readability and user interface design, the criteria for minimum color contrast of varying sizes of text, and methods to verify and improve your color contrast ratio, including interactive tools. [Read More]
Designing in Healthcare: Learning through Experience
A UX graduate entering an unexpected field yields career lessons gleaned from experiences in healthcare and Alzheimer’s research. [Read More]
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI): Inclusive Design Plus Accessibility
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the United States and across the globe result in inclusive and accessible design principles that can be implemented in everyday practice. [Read More]
Inclusive Design (Book Review)
Inclusive Design for a Digital World includes practical advice and strategies for designing inclusive and accessible products that take into consideration best practices used around the world. These strategies also ensure that people who have auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, visual disabilities, or situational challenges with access are fully able to use products we design. [Read More]
Technology Moats: The Dark Pattern of Intentional Friction Barriers
Corporations desire to hear their customer complaints…or do they? We take a close look at ways companies use technology to raise the drawbridge on customers. Technology barriers exist for many reasons; some are good and some are bad. Automated customer service systems can speed up the support process for customers while cutting costs for businesses. But when they are designed to slow customers down, they risk becoming a "technology moat": an intentional obstacle to make customers think twice before proceeding. In this article, you will learn the difference between technology moats and dark patterns and how to spot them. [Read More]
Digital Accessibility: Creating Inclusive Experiences and Avoiding Lawsuits
Web accessibility has always been good practice but, starting this year, it is a legal requirement that user experience professionals can no longer ignore. [Read More]
Variable Fonts: The Future of Typography
Variable fonts are here, and they’re going to change how you think about the relation between typography and user experience. [Read More]
Taking a UX Approach to Learning About Website Accessibility
The first step to include accessibility into a project is to dispel myths about accessible websites being “ugly”, expensive, hard to maintain, or off brand. [Read More]
How to Make Motion Design Accessible: UX Choreography Part Two
Following a few foundational guidelines for accessibility can make your motion design more inclusive and help you add polish and maturity to the overall user experience. [Read More]
Cultivating Collaboration with Structured Negotiation (Book Review)
A review of Structured Negotiation by Lainey Feingold. An approach to resolving disputes based on collaboration rather than conflict. [Read More]
Online Banking for Everyone: Designing for the Aging Brain
Designing for the aging brain or for those with little computer experience requires strictly defining the website functionality, clear workflows, and minimal page distractions. [Read More]
Make Your Presentations Accessible: Seven Easy Steps
Guidelines and how-to’s for creating accessible presentations, including font size, creating alt text, making charts and table accessible, slide information ordering, and other tips. [Read More]
Future Proofing Tomorrow’s Technology: UX for an Aging Population
Based on an analysis of current research, the framework presented can be used as a benchmarking or scoping tool in thinking about the design of assistive technologies that particularly consider older people’s needs. [Read More]
Useful Personal Health Records: Designing for Accessibility and Innovation
Designing specifically for people with disabilities can lead to electronic personal health records that are not only accessible, but innovative, useful, and beneficial for everyone. [Read More]
Patient Communication: What If You Had a Speech Disability?
A visit to the doctor can mean a lack of dignity and confidentiality for patients with speech disabilities because healthcare professionals rarely know how to interact with them. [Read More]
More than Mere Transcription: Closed Captioning as an Artful Practice
Closed captioning is more than mere transcription and critical to accessibility and usability. This article presents closed captioning texts as inherently subjective and interpretative. [Read More]
Personalization Services: Creating Accessible Public Terminals
A new generation of accessible and usable automated teller and ticket vending machines uses two personalization interaction approaches to overcome barriers faced by many people, including those who are disabled. [Read More]
Near Field Communications: How NFC Can Assist the Visually Impaired
Near Field Communications technology has potential to create great experiences for the visually impaired. This article examines some early forays into NFC leveraged for accessibility. [Read More]
Making the Web Accessible to All (Book Review)
A review of A Web for Everyone, by Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery. A vision of a future in which we all can use the Web. [Read More]
Should We Conduct this Usability Study? Ethics Considerations in Evaluations
Can it be unethical to conduct a user experience evaluation? An accessibility evaluation before a usability test can prevent frustrating, painful, or difficult situations. [Read More]
The “A” Word: Accessibility as Part of UX
Accessibility is often misunderstood, maligned, or misinterpreted. To create extraordinary digital experiences, accessibility must come together with usability, creativity, and technology. [Read More]
The Magic of Mobile Money Identification
How do blind people identify U.S. bills and other currency without help? Affordable mobile apps are liberating those with low vision. [Read More]
Separate but Unequal: Web Interfaces for People with Disabilities
A separate, unequal interface is not an acceptable accessibility solution. Good design values having one interface accessible to the widest range of users and situations. [Read More]
Looking Closely at e-Learning: Vision Research Reveals Ways to Improve Children’s Experiences
Research on the effects of children’s long-term computer use is extremely limited; there remain key research questions that need to be answered. [Read More]
Designing for Children with ADHD: The Search for Guidelines for Non-Experts
Expert designers sensitive to established usability guidelines should be capable of designing software that is suitable for both ADHD and non-ADHD children. [Read More]
Integrating Usability and Accessibility: Things Every UX Professional Should Know
Integrating usability and accessibility, which share a common goal, will enhance both practices and result in better user experiences. [Read More]
ICT and People with Cognitive Disabilities: Variations in Assistive Technology
Usability professionals should make a point of recruiting people with disabilities, including cognitive disabilities, for focus groups and for user test panels. [Read More]
Design to Read: Guidelines for People Who Do Not Read Easily
This article explores the possibility that similar guidelines for designing and writing clearly and simply can make reading easier for many groups and many situations. [Read More]
Accessible, Private, and Independent Voting: The Prime III Voting System
The Prime III Voting System is pursuing the ultimate goal of electronic voting systems; a single design that allows everyone to vote privately and independently. [Read More]
Usability Testing by People with Disabilities: Some Guerrilla Tactics
Guerrilla usability testing software assists testing with people with disabilities leading to more usable and accessible software for all users—disabled, non-disabled, and seniors. [Read More]
Universal Life: Multi-User Virtual Environments for People with Disabilities
It’s necessary to consider the benefit that barrier-free virtual environments provide for people with disabilities in terms of pain management, distraction, and socialization. [Read More]
Accessibility on the Web: The Web Accessibility Initiative
WAI provides an international forum for collaboration among industry, disability organizations, accessibility researchers, government, and individuals interested in web accessibility. [Read More]
Solving Interaction and Design for All: Tackling UX Challenges with Accessibility Insights
Focusing on accessibility objectives can help surface UX issues go beyond “accidental benefits” and improve a product or site’s overall usability through accessibility insights. [Read More]
STC Conference Accessibility Guides: How (and Why) They Were Created
The Conference Accessibility Guide of the Society for Technical Communication is a source of information for conference attendees with accessibility issues. [Read More]
The View from Here: A Call to Action for Universal Design from the United Nations
Usability professionals should lead the implementation of the dispositions of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities relative to accessibility and universal design. [Read More]
Book Review: Providing Access for All
This compendium provides intellectual tools for those active in changing the world by making products and services more available to all who could benefit from them. [Read More]
Editor’s Note: Why Usable Accessibility?
Say the word “accessibility” in a room full of usability professionals and you will get many reactions. For some it’s a cause. To others, it’s yet another requirement that has to be met. For many of the authors in this issue, it is simply part of usability. The ISO 9241-20 standard agrees, defining accessibility as […] [Read More]
What’s News: Blio Software: E-reader = Easy to Read?
Blio, designed to make e-books accessible to the visually impaired, allows users to read, or have read to them, e-books on regular computers or handheld devices. [Read More]
New Standards to Help Screen Readers Navigate Web Forms: Techniques to Improve Usability for All
Introduction Web 2.0 entices web authors with dynamic capabilities, but these advances in performance and functionality have proven a barrier to a growing contingent of users. Many interactive web elements, including forms with dynamic updates and error validation, can be disorienting to users and inaccessible to blind people who use a screen reader to access […] [Read More]
The View from Here: Raising the Floor
Raising the Floor is creating an open source set of tools to create free public access features built directly into information infrastructure, facilitating affordable assistive technologies. [Read More]
Forms Management: What Forms Managers Think About
To create really good electronic forms, as with paper forms, you need to consult with all parties to assess fully their needs. [Read More]
More than Skin Deep (Book Review)
This book’s focus on accessibility during the entire user-centered design process integrates accessibility throughout product development and provides readers with a readable introduction to incorporating these concerns into daily professional practice. [Read More]
Book Review: Seeing the World through a Differently Wired Brain
This book contains a matter-of-fact approach to dealing with the problems and strengths of autistic people by providing a different way of seeing the world. [Read More]
The View from Here: Game Over?
People with physical disabilities want, demand, and deserve to play games. Let’s make games more accessible, for them and for our future selves. [Read More]
