At the Chicago Digital Accessibility and Inclusive Design meetup, Derek Featherstone, founder of Simply Accessible spoke about inclusive design, what it means, and how to look beyond what we create.
Featherstone shared stories and tips for expanding our views of inclusive design to include our processes and tools.
Here are my notes:
- Inclusive design has two parts, an outcome, where you create something that is accessible or inclusive. The second part is inclusive design as a process.
- When we’re building a website, application, service, product, make sure the experiences we’re creating are inclusive. That means expanding our view beyond our design, to our team, to the tools and apps we use.
- Accessibility by the book, or accessibility as the only requirement, will get the job done. But at the expense of everything else in the project.
- Rather than making something compliant, consider creating a delightful and engaging accessible experience.
- Inclusion, as a core value of the designs we create, keeps us grounded in our goal. It changes how we approach things.
- You shouldn’t feel at fault for your inability to use a product or a service. It’s not your fault, it’s the poor design.
- When you use a product or service, you shouldn’t need to rely on another person for help
- Love this! Vancouver International Airport created a series of autism travel resources, including a printable checklist (PDF: 1MB) for each step of taking a flight. The airport wasn’t required to create the resources; they did it because it helps.
- Rather than thinking of the different forms of color blindness, think of how you can create a design so color doesn’t matter.
- Number one tool to get leadership buy-in for accessibility and inclusive design? Videos of people with disabilities struggling to use your service or product. Not one video, lots of videos. Nothing will convince them there’s a problem than seeing it.
- Strive for higher goals in your design work: enable participation and process. Include people with disabilities in all the work.
- Steps you can take now: include people with disabilities, conduct a process inventory, conduct a tools inventory for accessibility, make one of your tools or processes more inclusive each month for the next year
Photo credit: Dennis Deacon
