Writing Journal 11/4 - Accessibility
7 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about Accessibility and Accessibility guidelines for UX Designers bring the attention to the many different design factors that should be taken into consideration when designing anything for a group of people. First, in 7 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about Accessibility, Hausler talks about how designing a product, making it widely accessible does not mean that the product cannot be innovative or be boring and ugly. Next, he goes into detail the many different inaccessibility that people have that you need to account for when designing for a wider audience. Colorblindness is a major disability that many people can have, and only using color can severely hamper the usability of your product. For example, using only color to show an error in a text field can make it near impossible for someone who is color blind to figure out that there is an error and that is why the product is not working. Additionally, little contrast between colors can also make it hard for people to easily follow or distinguish between the text and its background. The WCAG states that the contrast ratio between a text and its background should be at least 4.5 to 1. This greatly helps low vision and color blind users as well as people with worsening vision. The other main concern that needs to be addressed, especially online is people only being able to use keyboards. Numerous websites are not designed with easy accessibility for keyboard only users. Additionally, many of the text fields and labels do not make it functional at all if you do not have a mouse. For example, having to hover over something to get attionaly info or move on, inability to access elements, and options in menus that require a mouse click. All of these can make navigating a nightmare for anyone who can not use a mouse (Hausler, 2015).
In Accessibility guidelines for UX Designers Kaur goes over similar themes of making things more accessible for people with disabilities or full accessibility. One should keep their design consistent throughout, making it easier to follow and understand. Additionally, design to make outside object interactions not the only way to interact. For example, make it easy to use with and without a mouse. Also, if there is a touch screen interaction, make sure that there is enough space and the interaction points to not overlap. Also keep the design clean, with varying contrast and still easy for color blind people to see and use. Also, do not make unnecessary links that would cause people with motor impairments do more for things they do not want, and also give notice before opening a new tab. Finally, make sure animations and pictures are not picked up my a website reader and no not induce seizures. To insure easier accessibility it is important to go through testing of your design and ask for feedback from others which can greatly improve the quality and accessibility of your website (Kaur, 2018).
Overall, this relates a lot to the field of computer science. A lot of work and care needs to go into designing and coding things for all users. It can sometimes be difficult to manage ease of use with accessibility and can take a lot of work. However, good and easy to use programs will be overall useful to anyone who uses it and can greatly benefit everyone.
In this post I use linguistic and visual rhetorical strategies. I used linguistic to summarize and expand upon the ideas of the articles. I used visual in the form of a gif that slowly turns colored pencils into a form that color blind people may see. I used this because it demonstrates how similar colors can be almost identical to color blind people compared to what people can normally see.













