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Designing Inclusively — Empathy
Two exercises to really understand what inclusive design means.
These are powerful exercises to help you be more empathetic, with practical tools you can use now.
What we’re often taught with accessibility is how to be compliant, and honestly, how to not get sued. There are 70+ criteria, there are multiple guides on how to do this and not do that. Here’s my question:
Have you ever really sat and thought about accessibility and what it means for people who actually need these tools?
The most powerful experience I’ve had as a developer was at Google IO a few years ago. I visited an accessibility tent, not knowing what to expect, but I walked away with a deeper understanding of what it means to be accessible, and some tools to share. Here are two exercises you can do right now to better understand inclusive design.
Exercise 1
Take any webpage, perhaps one you’ve designed, and use an emulator to experience your site as someone who doesn’t have 20/20 vision. I used the NoCoffee extension in Firefox.
This is Medium in the eyes of…
somebody with macular degeneration:
somebody with retinal detachment:
These are just two different ways a user might see medium.com. Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t this give a new perspective on why we are building our websites with all of these different accessibility rules?
Unfortunately, we cannot cover all of the different visual impairments that exist in the world. However, I do have a practical tool you can use to cover quite a few of the common ones. You can actually emulate vision deficiencies straight from your Google Chrome browser.
