Listen: inclusive design isn’t accessible design, and vice versa, Chicago edition
By: Skipper Chong Warson
Tags: Inclusive Design, Fjord, Chicago, Universal Design

Bob Alvarez and Vikki Highland talk about why we need to think about inclusive design more in our work

This is the second edition of our open topic discussion on Design Voices — this time around inclusive design—featuring Bob and Vikki from Fjord Chicago. We talk about the history of inclusive design, who it can help, why it’s important, and how we can apply these methodologies in our work as designers.

Today’s conversation covers the following topics:

What’s the history of inclusive design, how is it related to universal design and accessibility, and the Ontario College of Art and Design definition

Numbers from both the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization say that roughly 20% of the population in the industrialized world have some kind of permanent limitation

How Fjord is working to build the start of a point-of-view, including the principles of empathy, extensibility & interoperability (inspired by Tim Berners-Lee and his work on sharing documents across wide distances — HTML and the World Wide Web), end-to-end experience, designing for situations and behaviors (lighting, for instance, can change the level of contrast), and regulations (such as the Americans with Disabilities Act)

While 20% of the population identify as having a disability — or 1 in 3 households — inclusive design boils down to usability for everyone

Designers can start by changing attitudes around who will use our products and services, and how they will use them — not “that person will never use my app anyway” or “those people never use my product outside of its intended use” — and then looking at different personas and contexts of use of your product or service to your inputs as well as guidelines to help inform design considerations (like W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)

Good examples and not so good example of inclusive design

No legally enforceable standards under inclusive design in any country and in the US falls under the realm of civil rights (Americans with Disabilities Act), and procurement; in 2017, there were 814 lawsuits that went in front of the Dept of Justice

lawsuits that went in front of the Dept of Justice The growing awareness and progression of design, referencing the transition from design being digital, to being high quality, to (maybe) designing universally or in an inclusive fashion built around justice, opportunity, and human dignity

As part of the recommendations segment of our show, Vikki highlights Black Mirror on Netflix and the unintended consequences (a Fjord trend from 2017) that it plays out — but Skipper recommends not starting with season 1, episode 1 for new watchers

Bob recommends generally living with more empathy, reminding us that we’re all temporarily abled

Other resources:

The Fjord Voice UI Guide (voiceui.fjordnet.com)

Clarkson and Coleman’s book called Design for Inclusivity (a.co/8xLt9G5)

Microsoft’s site on Inclusive Design (www.microsoft.com/en-us/design/inclusive)

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/)

http://www.inclusivedesigntoolkit.com/whatis/whatis.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/05/22/inclusive-design-making-the-web-accessible-for-all/#7753bb232ab8

Soundcloud link for this show

The show notes are available on the Soundcloud page for this episode: https://soundcloud.com/fjord/inclusive-design-23-mar-2018.

As always, thanks for listening.