Weekly reflection #5

Accessibility design

Accessibility design is making all places and resources available for everyone at all times. Making online resources accessible is relatively simple compared to building accommodating infrastructure, but it is often overlooked in the design process. It never occurred to me that the command “click the green button to continue” to be inaccessible for the colourblind, however I have often thought about the colourblind using stoplights while driving. Although it is our ethical duty to ensure all work we publish to the general public is accessible by the everyone, it is also the law. These features are not only better for those with disabilities, as the improvements make the websites easier to use for all users.

Here is an example of closed captioning, a feature that provides speech to text for videos.

Here is an example of a photo that has been adapted for those with visual impairment using text-to-speech.

I think that digital accessibility is often overlooked for two reasons. First, checking a website to make sure it is accessible to everyone takes time and money for the producer of the website. If most people can easily access it, there is less incentive to make it available to the entire population. Second, I believe that many people have limited knowledge of digital accessibility and, although it is without any negative intent, the process of making a website suited for everyone can easily be overlooked.

The alternate text for images surprised me, mainly because making a website accessible for the visually impaired causes me to think about text as the main drawback of reading a website. The images of a website are essential, but when thinking about a disability as significant as this it can be overlooked.