Inclusive Design: How can we design for everyone's needs and abilities?

Getting Started

If you’re a website content author or designer, it’s important to understand the concept of inclusive design.

Inclusive design is the practice of designing websites, products, and services that can be used by everyone, regardless of their abilities or disabilities.

Inclusive design is not only ethical, but it also makes good business sense.

By making your website accessible to everyone, you increase your potential audience and improve your website’s usability.

Inclusive design is for everyone, not just people with disabilities.

It benefits everyone, including people with temporary disabilities, such as a broken arm, and people with situational disabilities, such as using a website in a noisy environment.

Inclusive design is also important for older people, who may have age-related disabilities, and for people with low literacy or limited language skills.

How To

1. Use clear and simple language. Avoid jargon and technical terms that may be difficult for some people to understand.
2. Provide alternative text for images. This helps people who use screen readers to understand the content of the image.
3. Use headings and subheadings to structure your content. This makes it easier for people with cognitive disabilities to understand the content.
4. Use high contrast colors. This helps people with visual impairments to read your content.
5. Ensure your website is keyboard accessible. This helps people who cannot use a mouse to navigate your website.
6. Provide closed captions for videos. This helps people who are deaf or hard of hearing to understand the content of the video.
7. Offer multiple ways to navigate your website. This helps people with different abilities to find the content they need.
8. Test your website for accessibility. Use tools such as WAVE or AChecker to check your website for accessibility issues.

Best Practices

• Design for flexibility. Your design should be flexible enough to accommodate different devices and screen sizes.
• Use semantic HTML. This helps people with assistive technologies to understand the content of your website.
• Provide clear and concise instructions. This helps people with cognitive disabilities to understand how to use your website.
• Test your website with real users. Get feedback from people with disabilities to ensure your website is accessible.

Examples

Let’s say you’re designing a website for a restaurant.

You want to make sure your website is accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities.

Here’s a role-play conversation between you and a colleague:

You: “We need to make sure our website is accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities.”

Colleague: “What do you mean by that?”

You: “Well, for example, we need to provide alternative text for images, so that people who use screen readers can understand the content of the image.

We also need to use high contrast colors, so that people with visual impairments can read our content.

And we need to ensure our website is keyboard accessible, so that people who cannot use a mouse can navigate our website.”

Colleague: “That makes sense.

How do we do that?”

You: “We can use tools such as WAVE or AChecker to check our website for accessibility issues.

We can also test our website with real users, including people with disabilities, to get feedback on how to improve our website’s accessibility.”

By following these best practices, you can ensure that your website is accessible to everyone, regardless of their abilities or disabilities.