Inclusive Design for a Digital World


Book Description

What is inclusive design? It is simple. It means that your product has been created with the intention of being accessible to as many different users as possible. For a long time, the concept of accessibility has been limited in terms of only defining physical spaces. However, change is afoot: personal technology now plays a part in the everyday lives of most of us, and thus it is a responsibility for designers of apps, web pages, and more public-facing tech products to make them accessible to all. Our digital era brings progressive ideas and paradigm shifts – but they are only truly progressive if everybody can participate. In Inclusive Design for a Digital World, multiple crucial aspects of technological accessibility are confronted, followed by step-by-step solutions from User Experience Design professor and author Regine Gilbert. Think about every potential user who could be using your product. Could they be visually impaired? Have limited motor skills? Be deaf or hard of hearing? This book addresses a plethora of web accessibility issues that people with disabilities face. Your app might be blocking out an entire sector of the population without you ever intending or realizing it. For example, is your instructional text full of animated words and Emoji icons? This makes it difficult for a user with vision impairment to use an assistive reading device, such as a speech synthesizer, along with your app correctly. In Inclusive Design for a Digital World, Gilbert covers the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 requirements, emerging technologies such as VR and AR, best practices for web development, and more. As a creator in the modern digital era, your aim should be to make products that are inclusive of all people. Technology has, overall, increased connection and information equality around the world. To continue its impact, access and usability of such technology must be made a priority, and there is no better place to get started than Inclusive Design for a Digital World. What You’ll LearnThe moral, ethical, and high level legal reasons for accessible design Tools and best practices for user research and web developers The different types of designs for disabilities on various platforms Familiarize yourself with web compliance guidelines Test products and usability best practicesUnderstand past innovations and future opportunities for continued improvementWho This Book Is For Practitioners of product design, product development, content, and design can benefit from this book.




Ensuring Digital Accessibility through Process and Policy


Book Description

Ensuring Digital Accessibility through Process and Policy provides readers with a must-have resource to digital accessibility from both a technical and policy perspective. Inaccessible digital interfaces and content often lead to forms of societal discrimination that may be illegal under various laws. This book is unique in that it provides a multi-disciplinary understanding of digital accessibility. The book discusses the history of accessible computing, an understanding of why digital accessibility is socially and legally important, and provides both technical details (interface standards, evaluation methods) and legal details (laws, lawsuits, and regulations). The book provides real-world examples throughout, highlighting organizations that are doing an effective job with providing equal access to digital information for people with disabilities. This isn't a book strictly about interface design, nor is it a book strictly about law. For people who are charged with implementing accessible technology and content, this book will serve as a one-stop guide to understanding digital accessibility, offering an overview of current laws, regulations, technical standards, evaluation techniques, as well as best practices and suggestions for implementing solutions and monitoring for compliance. This combination of skills from the three authors—law, technical, and research, with experience in both corporate, government, and educational settings, is unique to this book, and does not exist in any other book about any aspect of IT accessibility. The authors' combination of skills marks a unique and valuable perspective, and provides insider knowledge on current best practices, corporate policies, and technical instructions. Together, we can ensure that the world of digital information is open to all users. - Learn about the societal and organizational benefits of making information technology accessible for people with disabilities - Understand the interface guidelines, accessibility evaluation methods, and compliance monitoring techniques, needed to ensure accessible content and technology - Understand the various laws and regulations that require accessible technology - Learn from case studies of organizations that are successfully implementing accessibility in their technologies and digital content




Designing Accessible Learning Content


Book Description

Making learning and development (L&D) content inclusive and accessible for everyone is not only a good thing to do, it's the right thing to do. Designing Accessible Learning Content provides evidence-based advice on designing digital learning content that ensures all learners are included and are therefore able to perform to their full potential. This is a practical guide on accessibility for anyone involved in the design, creation, development or testing of online learning content. It provides detailed guidance on how to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines making it essential reading for L&D professionals, instructional designers and course developers who need to comply with legal accessibility requirements. Using the author's 'eLearning Accessibility Framework', Designing Accessible Learning Content demystifies sometimes complex technical accessibility standards and provides an easy to follow contextual framework uniquely designed for learning content created using any authoring tool. This book also demonstrates how creating accessible learning content can improve usability and provide the best possible learning experience for everyone. In addition, it offers essential background information such as a focus on disability, an overview of assistive technology and an exploration of the case for digital accessibility. This guarantees that L&D professionals have the vital background knowledge they need to make sense of accessibility before they begin practically applying the principles. With online checklists, learner case studies, and industry perspectives, Designing Accessible Learning Content is an essential handbook for all L&D professionals seeking to harness the benefits of accessibility in order to improve their learning content for everyone.




A Web for Everyone


Book Description

If you are in charge of the user experience, development, or strategy for a web site, A Web for Everyone will help you make your site accessible without sacrificing design or innovation. Rooted in universal design principles, this book provides solutions: practical advice and examples of how to create sites that everyone can use.




Unleash Different


Book Description

If you discovered a new market comprising 53% of the world’s population, would you act to invest in it? There are 1.3 billion people around the world who identify as having a disability. When you include friends and family, the disability market touches 53% of all consumers. It is the world’s largest emerging market. Unleash Different illustrates how companies like Google, PepsiCo, and Nordstrom are attracting people with disabilities as customers and as employees. Replacing “nice to do” with “return on investment” allows market forces to take over and the world’s leading brands to do what they do best: serve a market segment — in this case, the disability market. Business managers will come to understand how taking a charity-oriented approach to people with disabilities has failed, what action is required to capitalize on the world’s biggest emerging market, and how their organizations can grow revenue and cut costs by attracting people with disabilities as customers and talent. Rich gives the reader a peek into how he rose from a Canadian school for “crippled children” to manage $6 billion for one of Wall Street’s leading firms. He makes it easy to relate to the business goal of serving disability — because he has actually done it.




Think Like a UX Researcher


Book Description

Think Like a UX Researcher will challenge your preconceptions about user experience (UX) research and encourage you to think beyond the obvious. You’ll discover how to plan and conduct UX research, analyze data, persuade teams to take action on the results and build a career in UX. The book will help you take a more strategic view of product design so you can focus on optimizing the user’s experience. UX Researchers, Designers, Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Business Analysts and Marketing Managers will find tools, inspiration and ideas to rejuvenate their thinking, inspire their team and improve their craft. Key Features A dive-in-anywhere book that offers practical advice and topical examples. Thought triggers, exercises and scenarios to test your knowledge of UX research. Workshop ideas to build a development team’s UX maturity. War stories from seasoned researchers to show you how UX research methods can be tailored to your own organization.




Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone


Book Description

Advocates for the rights of people with disabilities have worked hard to make universal design in the built environment "just part of what we do." We no longer see curb cuts, for instance, as accommodations for people with disabilities, but perceive their usefulness every time we ride our bikes or push our strollers through crosswalks. This is also a perfect model for Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework grounded in the neuroscience of why, what, and how people learn. Tobin and Behling show that, although it is often associated with students with disabilities, UDL can be profitably broadened toward a larger ease-of-use and general diversity framework. Captioned instructional videos, for example, benefit learners with hearing impairments but also the student who worries about waking her young children at night or those studying on a noisy team bus. Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone is aimed at faculty members, faculty-service staff, disability support providers, student-service staff, campus leaders, and graduate students who want to strengthen the engagement, interaction, and performance of all college students. It includes resources for readers who want to become UDL experts and advocates: real-world case studies, active-learning techniques, UDL coaching skills, micro- and macro-level UDL-adoption guidance, and use-them-now resources.




Access by Design


Book Description

In just over a decade, the Web has evolved from an experimental tool for a limited community of technically inclined people into a day-to-day necessity for millions upon millions of users. Today’s¿Web designers must consider not only the content needs of the sites they create, but also the wide range of additional needs their users may have: for example, those with physical or cognitive disabilities, those with slow modems or small screens, and those with limited education or familiarity with the Web. Bestselling author Sarah Horton argues that simply meeting the official standards and guidelines for Web accessibility is not enough. Her goal is universal usability, and in Access by Design: A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers, Sarah describes a design methodology¿ that addresses accessibility requirements but then goes beyond. As a result, designers learn how to optimize page designs to work more effectively for more users, disabled or not. Working through each of the main functional features of Web sites, she provides clear principles for using HTML and CSS to deal with elements such as text, forms, images, and tables, illustrating each with an example drawn from the real world. Through these guidelines, Sarah makes a convincing case that good design principles benefit all users of the Web. In this book you will find: Clear principles for using HTML and CSS to design functional and accessible Web sites Best practices for each of the main elements of Web pages—text, forms, images, tables, frames, links, interactivity, and page layout Seasoned advice for using style sheets that provide flexibility to both designer and user without compromising usability Illustrations of actual Web sites, from which designers can model their own pages Instructions for providing keyboard accessibility, flexible layouts, and user-controlled environments Practical tips on markup, and resources




Maximum Accessibility


Book Description

Written for Web developers this text provides the practical tools, design techniques, and testing methods to implement web accessibility standards without losing any of the functionality of a Web site.




Web Accessibility


Book Description

Web accessibility not just morally sound – there are legal obligations as well Very large potential audience, consisting of web developers and business managers Very little competition to this book