As a UX Designer, it is significant to create a community and also celebrates the accessibility requirements as some design constraints for building a better product. Accessibility is actually a wide subject and UI/UX designers must always strive for a user-centric design.
The UI/UX designs must be created, adapted, and presented in a way that all individuals in the target audience can effectively interact with the design easily and also accomplish their tasks. The usefulness and accessibility of design cannot be made certain by making it interactive and responsive.
Designers must understand their audience well and take care of all concerns that ensure that the design is easy to use and work with just as expected. In this blog, we will understand more about accessibility and it can be used for making products usable for users.
What is Accessibility In Designing?
Accessibility in designing is a concept that allows users to completely understand, use, and even enjoy the web. Being successful designers, it is our responsibility to ensure that we design to make something useful to all users regardless of their situations, abilities, and context.
The most important aspect of building an accessible product is to ensure empathy and also install an inclusive design mentality. Accessibility can never be limited to just a group of users with different abilities including motor, visual, speech, auditory, or cognitive disabilities. When it comes to UI/UX, the aim is to make web content more usable to users in general.
To understand more about accessibility in UX designing, we will delve into more details about what does UX designing include when it comes to accessibility.
Accessibility In UX Designing:
More often than not, it is thought that accessibility deals with people who have special needs but this is not very true for UX designers. While designing a product or a service, accessibility refers to all ways in which a design can be made useful and this includes special needs and the context in which a product is used.
In wide terms, UI/UX design is all about making a design accessible with all members of the target audience having equal access to a product or a service. This also means that the design is usable and useful in various settings and is capable of meeting many needs of the users.
It is important to think about the needs of an individual with disabilities and also create supportive technologies so that these needs can be fulfilled comprehensively. A UX designer should set a few principles for meeting these needs and this is exactly what a UX team is really after when they are referring to accessibility in UX design.
There are some things that must be kept in mind when it comes to ensuring accessibility in design.
- The designers must keep in mind that the experiences of a person who is visually impaired can be affected negatively by any lack of sufficient contrast.
- All media content with audio is not so useful for hearing-impaired users.
- For all forms of predefined input methods, various modern may be needed when targeting a wide range of audiences.
- While using a product or a service on smaller and handheld devices, you may need some specific features to become more responsive.
- While the users are interacting with a design in an environment, the mobility concerns require due consideration.
- In case a product or a service has some unique features, it may need a tutorial so that the users can understand how to learn the use of design.
Accessibility UX Design Principles:
There is a diverse range of reasons while understanding designing for accessibility. UI/UX designers must be able to ensure all these aspects ensuring that the products and services are representative, inclusive, and useful.
Even though there are never any set standards for including accessibility in designing products and services, there are some guidelines that designers can follow. Some can be considered on the basis of the design and designing process.
The below-mentioned guidelines or accessibility UX design principles can prove pretty useful when working on design projects.
- Empathy: An important principle of the UX designing process is empathy because when it comes to ensuring accessibility in design, it becomes important. The UI/UX designers must consider the needs of an audience and understand their concerns while interacting with a product or a service.From talking to users to looking at the prototypes from the perspective of an audience, everything must be taken into consideration. By making the most out of empathy, designers can relate to the audience and ensure their concerns as well.
- User Research: User research is an important aspect of design thinking and it is also important for creating an accessible design. While working on any project, the UI/UX designers should reach out to people and ensure that they consider individuals with varying physical and cognitive needs.To make the designs more accessible, designers should step into the real world, seek target audiences with varying needs, understand all their concerns, and also resolve their problems with innovative solutions.
- Inclusivity: UI/UX professionals must be able to adopt all standards of representation and inclusivity while working on a design project. In case a product is made for an international audience, the user research and persons must represent a global audience.In addition, the design process must also ensure that people with varying physical abilities are brought into the development of important prototypes.
- Navigation Control: Another accessibility principle of UX design is controlling the navigation and this is specifically important when it comes to web accessibility. The products and services used on web browsers or in the form of mobile applications can end up being complicated for some users.Hence, it is important to give users various options for navigation while ensuring that they have maximum control. Some users also need assistive devices and the designers must think about how they impact their interaction and provide options for them to control the way they interact with designs.
- Context: An important aspect that focuses on the news of all users regardless of their physical and cognitive abilities is the way in which a design is being used. This is the way in which a user interacts with a mobile application.The interaction can add an extra layer of complexity for the designers when it comes to ensuring that the design is responsive in all conditions. For the conditions in UX design, context is a defining factor.
Conclusion:
A design can be successful when it is useful to the target audience. UI/UX is supposed to work with a sense of improving the interaction of users with their products. This cannot be achieved effortlessly if the needs of some users are not considered when designing a product.
The accessibility principles ensure that all bias gets eliminated and minimized. While working on a design project, you must consider the target audience so that you can ensure accessibility in the UX design. Learn more about accessibility principles in User Experience by pursuing a Bachelor of Design in User Experience at Chitkara University.
