Accessible Design - Book Club: Don't Make me Think - Chapter 12
Andrew Nolan
2023-05-14
Not only is accessibility an important part of usability, it is also a morally good thing to do. Adding accessibility features to your site is a great way to make your site usable by even more people. It is very rare that you can get a chance to make peoples' lives easier just by doing your job a little bit better.
Unfortunately, there are several (bad) reasons development teams often skip out on accessibility work.
- Someone says "people with x disability only make up __% of the population let's focus on the majority of users."
- Thinking that accessibility features will make the experience worse for other users.
- Fear that the design will become compromised.
- Fear that it will take more work.
However, these reasons are not true. Not only are there easy steps you can do now to make your site more accessible, but improving usability for accessible workflows often will improve usability for non-accessible workflows as well!
It can take a while to become an expert at accessibility, but there are some things you can do to get started:
- Fixing usability issues that affect everyone. If your website is confusing without accessibility tools, imagine how confusing it will be with a screen reader!
- Read up on the topic. If you have limited time, check out some blog posts or YouTube videos on the topic. This blog is a great place to start, but more importantly, check out work from disability advocates. There is lots of content out there and it is a great way to understand how you can improve your designs.
- Chip away at low hanging fruit. Even small changes can be a big help.
We call these tasks low hanging fruit but they do have a big impact on the accessibility of your website. This include things like:
- Adding alt text to all images.
- Use headings correctly.
- Test out your forms with keyboard controls and screen readers.
- Put "skip to main content" links at the beginning of each page.
- Make all content keyboard accessible.
- Create significant contrast between background colors and text.
These small changes should be baselines in every design, but many sites do not include them. You can make a big improvement in the usability for many people with these small changes.
If you want to test out a screen reader, I highly recommend checking out NVDA. It's free and widely used. You can catch many accessibility issues on your site by trying it this way.
Making sites accessible can be difficult. While there are a lot of tools to make programming and development easier, tools for accessibility are not all there yet. You can run automated tools to pick up high level issues like missing alt-text. But it is hard to truly capture all accessibility issues without actually running usability studies with the groups you are trying to help.
It takes a lot of practice to make a good accessible site. It's something I am still working on too. But with practice we can all improve our skills and sites and help make the web more usable for all.
Enjoyed this article? Subscribe to the RSS Feed!