flat lay photo of iphone ipad and earphones
Photo by Hasan Albari on Pexels.com

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect. —Tim Berners-Lee

The Accessibility Series consists of multiple posts covering fundamental concepts in the domain and existing resources that help practitioners to test, evaluate and refine design solutions to make them more accessible. Several types of disabilities must be taken into account when designing accessible systems. To better understand these disabilities and the guidelines that designers should follow we will breakdown the upcoming posts into four categories:

  • vision: blind, low-vision, color-blindness, etc.
  • hearing and speech: deaf, hard-of-hearing, stutter, non-verbal, etc.
  • motor: limited use of fingers, hands, wrists, arms, legs or mouth, etc.
  • cognitive and neural: Down Syndrome, Autism, Dementia, etc.

It is worthy noting that accessibility not only targets users with permanent and temporary impairments, it also applies for circumstances in which the interaction process is temporarily constrained –the so-called ‘situational impairments’ or ‘event-based impairments’. When a user is driving his/her attention levels will be reduced due to the cognitive load required to steer the wheel, change gears, and pay attention to the road, in addition to that his/her hands will be occupied steering the wheel. Some impairments (like a broken arm) may be temporary, whereas others are permanent (e.g. deafness).

On the web, accessibility is driven by Tim Berner’s Lee vision of an online space that is universally accessible, i.e. accessible regardless of user profile. The popularity of the web in a global scale makes accessibility one of its most essential requirements. Because one cannot anticipate who will be the actual users of contents and services that become publicly available, it is best to consider all users. If that sounds unfeasible, W3C (or the World Wide Web Consortium) facilitates the process by providing a number of accessibility guidelines (WCAG). The guidelines serve as best design practices, and by following their recommendations designers, developers and content generators reach larger audiences.