“Usability is Accessibility”
By: Kimberly Do
Tags: Product Design, Design, Accessible Design, UX Design, Accessibility

Disability access symbols; image credit (https://oae.stanford.edu/resources-faqs/disability-access-symbols)

How and why designers should think about accessibility.

Design for “Everyone”

Who do you design for? As designers, we aspire to create designs that have the potential to impact the world and people of all kinds of shapes, sizes, and backgrounds. Moreover, designers fixate on the importance of creating products that anyone can use; after all, usability is important, and designers must critically consider the efficacy of their products. Thus, inherent to design is the notion of “design for everyone” — that is, to create simple designs that “even your grandma can pickup and use!”

Junior designers (myself included) easily acknowledge and accept this utopian adage with eagerness, strictly follow the long and winding road of usability checklists, and gently fall into the lion’s den of non-inclusive design. What happened here? Usability checklists aren’t wrong; in contrast, they espouse great principles and I encourage you to continue following these checklists when creating your designs. The problem lies in what the designer failed to do — they failed to think as a designer. Design is more than just creating aesthetic details or manufacturing textbook usable motifs; design is about thinking about your audience. Unfortunately, attempting to design for everyone may accidentally cause designers to create overly-general designs that fail to accommodate the unique populations of users who may actually use your designs, but are not specifically mentioned in your general guidelines. That doesn’t mean it’s bad to create designs that benefit the most types of users, but you should be aware of how your perceptions of “everyone” might exclude particular audiences. The saccharine idea of universal design unfortunately poses an ironic dilemma — if you attempt to design for everyone, you can leave out anyone.

If you attempt to design for everyone, you can leave out anyone.

What happens when you attempt to design something that is usable by anyone? Can you design something that is usable by everyone? Who does your “everyone” exclude? Do you consider a working and pregnant mother in your designs? Do you consider the grandmother with Asperger's? A four-year old who recently scraped his hands after falling from his bike? A fifty-eight year old electrician with moderate eye strain? Or how about the teenager with thyroid cancer?

Whether implicitly or explicitly, your design will leave out particular audiences. This truth is unfortunate, but inherent to the politics of the artifact that you design. Now, as a designer, you may wonder, “How can I make sure that I’m designing for my user then?” The answer lies in the question: “design for the user.”

“How can I make sure that I’m designing for my user then?” The answer lies in the question: “design for the user.”

You may bat an eye at this statement. Isn’t designing for everyone designing for your user? The two ideas sound almost identical, but the results of religiously following one idea over the other create vastly different results. “Everyone” is an ambiguous term. Although it appears to stand for all people, it stands for not. It serves as a “catch-all” term that doesn’t cater towards anyone’s needs. And, unfortunately, the needs of “everyone” can leave out the unique traits that may characterize your user. Instead, critically identifying a discrete number of probable users (and noting their characteristics and skills) can enable you to vicariously avoid the pit of generalizing your user and specifically create great features that best suit the needs for the individuals who will actually utilize your app. After all, if your target audience never includes a particular type of user, why divest resources that could otherwise be used to craft a solution that accommodates your actual users?

Accessibility is for “Everyone” Usability Forgets

61% of adults in the United States have some type of disability — Center for Disease Control and Prevention

A real consequence of “designing for everyone” is forsaking unexpectedly large populations of common users; these common users are usually tech savvy individuals who rely on accessible technologies to live productively. Although you may counter that your app most likely will never be used by someone with “those demographics”, the numbers beg to differ. According to the CDC, 61% of adults in the United States have some type of disability. That’s 1 in 4 Americans. Again, you may counter that people with disabilities do not have the skills or needs to use technology, but again, you would be wrong. Pew Research reports that at least half of individuals with disability use the Internet on a daily basis. Although this number suggests that this population uses the Internet at a smaller percentage, it’s important to recognize that disabled populations still make up a significant percentage of possible users. Statistically speaking, it would be unwise to ignore the consideration of accessible designs and instead build for the idealized “everyone”.

…And Other Dangerous UX Myths

Accessible Design is Ugly

Even if designers agree that accessible design is important, it’s likely that they also think that accessible design is ugly. Although “ugly” accessible designs exist, accessible design is not inherently unattractive. (Moreover, accessible design is more than just creating aesthetic user interfaces but also includes creating accessible user flows and experiences.) Although few companies espouse accessibility in their design philosophies, beautiful accessible designs are not as uncommon as you may think.

Have you ever used an iPhone? How about a Mac? Or an Apple Watch? All of these products have several things in common but notably one: globally accessible features and designs. Perhaps surprisingly, all Apple products offer a suite of accessible options and tools that reflect its mindset towards accessible design. Throughout the years, Apple has remained dedicated towards creating beautiful products that remain accessible for individuals of a wide range of skills and abilities. Both disability advocates and designers praise Apple for its beautiful and accessible products.

People like Sadie (featured in the linked Apple advertisement) use accessible products to enjoy creative and productive lives like anyone and everyone else.

As much as designers hate ugly or bulky accessible designs, those with disabilities despite them just as much. Of course, those with disability embrace their identities, but that doesn’t mean that a stigma against those with disabilities doesn’t exist. Consequently, perhaps for the benefit and delight of both designers and those with disability, design shouldn’t be ugly.

Accessible Design is for Edge Cases

Both usability and accessibility checklists exist for designers to check and optimize their designs, but by no means are these checklists the end-all-be-all. Although heuristics exist to help promote accessible and usable designs, they don’t represent the nuanced designs necessary to create a unique, accessible product. Consequently, making a product accessible means more than just checking a box for using the right colors or the right fonts — it’s about creating user flows that reduce cognitive load or physical strain, and this type of attention to detail demands more consideration than just a PDF checklist from Nielsen Norman Group, even if it provides great heuristic guidelines. (Good) user experience designers don’t just create one-off designs, they create experiences, and accessible experiences should be created no differently. That said, making a product design does take time, but most likely not as much as you anticipated.

Accessible Design is Too Time Consuming

For individual developers or designers, creating accessible designs can feel overwhelming. To be fair, there exist many types of people with all kinds of disabilities. This can be intimidating to a junior designer who isn’t familiar with creating designs in the first place and certainly not accessible designs. And, it is likely that if you are a busy designer on a tight deadline, that making something accessible isn’t your first (or maybe even your last) thought — you just really, really need to ship this design by tonight so the devs can have it ready by the weekend.

First of all, accessibility shouldn’t be an afterthought; if you want to create quality designs that are usable for those populations, then you should treat disabled populations as real people and real users who deserve your attention. Additionally, because many resources for creating accessible technologies exist, nowadays, it’s especially easy to create accessible designs. Just as many common practices and motifs exist for creating usable designs, they also exist for accessible designs. Not only that, but usability and accessibility go hand in hand. After all, accessibility is usability for a significant, but marginalized and forgotten population.

Additionally, and luckily for our developer friends, many developer guides and tools exist to support accessible design. Developers can easily harness these tools to create websites that are both functional and accessible.

The Case for Designing for Accessibility

Expand Your Audience to Millions of People Worldwide

As I mentioned above, disability isn’t as uncommon as you think it is. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have a disability. Thus, not accommodating to these individuals not only leaves out a sizable population of those who can experience and enjoy your website, but it can also reduce your own audience and outreach. Accommodating the virtual workflow of millions of individuals is not only amicable, but it’s also economical.

Accommodate the Needs of Others

Disability is hidden. It’s likely that you take classes with people of a wide range or abilities with all kinds of necessary day-to-day accommodations. That said, although some disabilities may not be as blatantly obvious as absolute blindness or paraplegia, they still can impact how millions of people use or visit websites. Moreover, many individuals who don’t have disabilities use accessibility tools to also improve their workflows, so accommodating to general accessible needs helps a lot more people than you would imagine.

Set a Good Example

For better or for worse, a lot of companies and organizations claim to be welcoming to all people regardless of race, sexuality, gender, and more! I’ve seen it. You’ve seen it. We’ve all seen it. So if you claim to welcome people of all different shapes and sizes, races and ethnicities, genders and sexualities, then welcoming people of different abilities and skills is no exception. Although few companies (and a nonexistent number of student organizations) make it a priority to create products to accommodate a variety of audiences, setting a standard for being welcoming of a diversity of abilities makes a big difference.

Abide by WCAG 2.0

In the United States, WCAG 2.0 is a set of web accessibility guidelines that dictates standards that define web accessibility. It offers a comprehensive list for what supports accessible design. Although individuals have more freedom to create whatever website they want, there are penalties for not meeting accessibility standards in the United States for large corporations. Luckily, the United States government takes accessibility seriously, and this mentality should be reflected in all US-hosted websites.

How Do I Make My Designs Accessible?

WCAG 2.0 offers a list of guidelines for designers and developers on how to create more accessible, but I wanted to share a few easy but important ways to make your digital products more accessible.

Strong Color Contrast

Do you wear glasses? Do you wear contact lenses? Can you not see unsaturated reds or greens? Many Americans experience some type of visual impairment and many more wear glasses or contacts to correct their vision. One of the most well-known ways to enforce accessibility in your designs is with using colors with strong color contrast. Strong color contrast helps make certain elements more visible and distinguishable. Certain web browsers offer options for website users to turn on options to increase color contrasts, too.

Large or Variable Font Size

These days, using extra large, bold fonts are especially trendy, but that hasn’t always been the case. Using large fonts or offering large font options are important to a growing number of audiences with low vision. Consider offering these options to create an accessible solution to those people.

Descriptive Alt-Text

Did you know that Facebook and Instagram offer alt-text options when posting pictures? However, fewer than 0.1% of pictures on Twitter have captions, and most of these descriptions offer poor explanations of the depicted imagery. While including alt-text and captions is particularly important in creating an accessible website, maintaining descriptive, elaborated, and helpful descriptions is even more important to help those with low vision or blindness to understand the displayed content.

Keyboard Input Options

Many Americans with visual or motor disabilities rely on their keyboard to provide input or navigate websites. However, many websites fail to support this alternate method of navigation. Thus, to support these audiences, incorporating descriptive navigational menus into websites or apps is a necessary imperative.

Reduced Cognitive Load

This is a bit hard to explain, but if you are familiar with user experience principles, then it’s likely that you’ve heard of “cognitive load”. Simply put, reducing cognitive load is all about making things less complicated than it needs to be — keep it simple! This means that user flows should be straight forward, interactions should be logical, and descriptions should be succinct and informational.

And More!

WCAG 2.0 elaborates all of its standards for accessibility on its website. It’s a long list, but it helps to capture the needs of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world! I encourage you to take a look at the WCAG 2.0 website to better understand what steps you can take to make your website more accessible.

What Does an Accessible Design Look Like?

The Brain Exercise Initiative has the cutest mascot!

This summer of 2020 the Brain Exercise Initiative (“a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that uses simple math, writing and reading aloud exercises as an intervention to improve cognitive function in those with Alzheimer’s Disease”) reached out to Bits of Good. In the midst of the shelter at home orders, the Brain Exercise Initiative was having trouble reaching out to seniors to practice their reading, writing, and math skills; this meant that these seniors were unable to gain access to vital resources aimed to help improve their cognitive function. Thus, the Brain Exercise Initiative requested Bits of Good to create a mobile app that could serve as an intervention to improve cognitive function in those with Alzheimer’s Disease particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given this urgent task, Bits of Good organized a team of product managers, engineering managers, developers, and designers to create an app that would do just that, and I was one of three designers to help create this “brain exercise” app.

Reflecting on our design process, I am proud that my team of designers and I thought about accessibility long before we began to design. We knowingly understood that designing for seniors (and possibly seniors with moderate to mild cognitive impairment) meant that we had to think critically about how we designed our app and for whom we designed our app. Nonetheless, since we were mostly unfamiliar with accessible technology, we dedicated a few weeks to read articles upon articles about best practices for accessible design. Thus, identifying our users and target audience was especially crucial for creating the Brain Exercise Initiative app.

Our original wireframes for the Brain Exercise Initiative app were messy and unlike the final product, but it helped us think critically about what our next steps would be.

When we moved on from ideation to design, we not only opted to use vivid, high-contrast colors and bold, obvious fonts, but we also deliberately included several accessibility settings including ways to narrate text, change font size, increase contrast, reduce motion, and more. Although we understood that our main audience was likely seniors familiar with technology with moderate cognitive impairment, we also recognized that our aging population would likely have a wide range of abilities and skills, so we included features that would accommodate those users.

Later, as we iterated through our designs, our most difficult decisions were with choosing designs that would be most enjoyable and usable for our seniors. Reflecting on the effects of the world pandemic, we realized that these seniors, although in need of exercising their brains, were likely without visitors for months. That said, we included fun pictures, warm copy, and encouraging notifications to design a more delightful experience. Additionally, we organized several meetings (and consulted our point of contact from the Brain Exercise Initiative) to fiddle with layouts, formats, colors, and fonts as we tried to optimize the app for our senior audience. Altogether, designing for the specific audience was a new and challenging task, but our previous research and outstanding grit helped us design something fantastic.

Look for the official Brain Exercise Initiative app in the iOS App Store and Google Play Store!

I’m excited and proud of the work that my team of designers put into this app. We spent countless hours squabbling over which designs would be easier for our senior audience to use and enjoy, and I think that the elegant flows and designs of the app reflects this dedication for accessibility. Now, I’ll be the first one to admit that our app isn’t perfect; our app hasn’t been evaluated by an accessibility expert or consultant and it still needs a lot of user testing; but I look forward to potentially working with the Brain Exercise Initiative again this coming semester to continue improving the app.

Conclusion

When we design for “everyone”, it can be easy for us to forget who our actual users are. As designers, we should determine who our users are and make critical decisions that inform our designs. It’s important to recognize the users that would benefit from accessible designs. Although designers may have reservations about creating accessible options or accessible designs, they should remember that accessibility can be incorporated easily and beautifully while benefitting many. So, I’ll ask you again.

Who do you design for?

— Thank you to the Brain Exercise Initiative for working with us!

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