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Bringing inclusive design to life with Accessibility Personas
Last week, Alicia Crowther joined me on the UX, Coffee + Code podcast to talk about Accessibility and how researchers can bring the conversation to life through personas.
You might have seen us speak about this earlier this year at UXCrunch Manchester. The talk inspired some fantastic questions from the audience and many follow up conversations post-event. What was clear is that design and engineering teams far and wide understand the importance of creating Accessible experiences, but struggle knowing where to start — accessibility is truly a journey.
What is Accessibility?
Generally, Accessibility is concerned with a user’s level of access to products or services; whether they be physical locations such as a bank, or virtual services such as a website or telephone line.
In this article, we are focusing on Accessibility in technology — specifically, Web Accessibility.
Here, we use the term Accessibility to describe the tools and techniques we employ in creating inclusive experiences, that aim to make our websites and applications usable by everyone.
W3C help to articulate what constitutes an accessible experience through Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) — an industry-standard set of guidelines that define objective measures. According to W3C, an accessible experience is one that is; perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.
This may sound a little complex and niche, but really, Accessibility is just great usability.
In UX, we often approach user-centered design by first understanding our users’ goals, and then designing solutions to help our users achieve those goals.
Accessibility pushes user-centered design one step further and casts a wider net to…
