How do we go about understanding the myriad of users and their needs? One of the most common problems when designing for accessibility is knowing what needs you should design for. The more inclusive you are to the needs of your users, the more accessible your design is. In this article, Steven Lambert will take a closer look at the different lenses of accessibility through which you can refine your designs.
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There are many different kinds of disabilities, however, there is a general agreement to categorize people with disability into four general categories: visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive. Including more diversity into your usability testing is vital for any product. In this article, Peter McNally provides lessons learned or tips to consider in planning and executing usability testing with participants with disabilities.
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One of the toughest challenges Harris Schneiderman came across is the reorderable drag-and-drop list. While a reorderable list is a somewhat commonly used widget with intuitive conventions for mouse users, it’s not clear how keyboard-only assistive technology users can perform this simple task. Dragon Drop seeks to fill this gap by providing means for all users to perform this somewhat common task. Due to the absence of supported ARIA attributes, Dragon Drop utilizes live regions to convey the information needed for all users to reorder a list.
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As an open-source community, we should all strive to localize our open-source contributions. Before you can transcribe your digital assets though, you have to internationalize your codebase. WordPress is currently fully localized for over 65 languages and offers partial translations for an additional 95 locales. If you haven’t internationalized your WordPress website yet, it’s probably time to do so.
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Links make the Internet what it is. A robust visual design is essential to making the user journey joyful. While underlining has its downsides, it remains one of the most explicit ways to indicate the presence of a link. Underlining text makes links both easy to find and easy to understand for visitors. In this article, Nick Babich will explain the concept of underlining and provide a few tips on how to use it to improve the web experience, and help you find out when and why underlines should be used in our digital products.
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Creating inclusive experiences is a question of using the right menu patterns in the right places, with the right markup and behavior. In design, we often make the mistake of giving different things the same name. They appear similar, but appearances can be deceptive. In terms of inclusion, it may lead you to repurpose a semantically and behaviorally inappropriate component. Users will expect one thing and get another. In this article, Heydon Pickering will give you an insight into inclusive menus and menu buttons.
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The visual interface is an obvious place to begin digging into accessibility. In this article, Tom Graham & André Gonçalves will discuss some of the most common visual impairments, focusing on color-blindness to explain how you can make small changes to your workflow and products to ensure you’re not alienating users.
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Our ears are the second-most important sensors we have, and in some situations, voice conversation is a very effective communication channel. But relying just on verbal communication is not enough. For example, would you buy a shoe without seeing it first? Of course not. As long as visual image-processing remains people’s main information source, and we are able to process complex information faster visually, the GUI is here to stay. On the other hand, more traditional GUI patterns cannot survive in their current form either. So, instead of radical predictions, David Pasztor suggests another idea: User interfaces will adapt to our sensors even more.
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With the current state of web apps, we can rely on various UI elements to interact with users. With the Web Speech API, we can develop rich web applications with natural user interactions and minimal visual interface, using voice commands. In this tutorial, Tomomi Imura will use the API to create an artificial intelligence (AI) voice chat interface in the browser. The app will listen to the user’s voice and reply with a synthetic voice. Because the Web Speech API is still experimental, the app works only in supported browsers. The features used for this article, both speech recognition and speech synthesis, are currently only in the Chromium-based browsers, including Chrome 25+ and Opera 27+, while Firefox, Edge and Safari support only speech synthesis at the moment.
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Recent analysis from VoiceLabs estimates that 24.5 million voice-driven devices will be shipped this year, almost four times as many as last year. As experience designers, we now have the opportunity to design voice experiences and interfaces! In this article, Lyndon Cerejo will look at how a typical genie in a bottle works, discuss the steps involved in designing voice experiences, and illustrate these steps by designing a voice app for Alexa.
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