I’m 马克·赖特, a Lead Designer here at Made Tech. I am very passionate about making the web a more accessible place through design.
我被诊断出患有 难语症 at a very young age and found it difficult to use computers and read content for a very long time. 我今天仍然这样做, but now I have better coping mechanisms such as using assistive tech like Dragon speech to text, 举一个例子.
在这篇文章中, I’m going to take a look at three benefits of prioritising accessibility and share resources for further learning.
Why is accessibility so important?
I love this quote: “Individuals with an impairment are disabled by society’s failure to build an inclusive environment”. To me, it really says it all!
Accessibility is about making your digital service work for as many people as possible. While some companies may be hesitant to prioritise accessibility because they view it as costly or time-consuming when it comes down to it the benefits outweigh the costs. Let’s have a look at some of these benefits.
这是应该做的事
Plain and simple, making services accessible to 每一个人 is the right thing to do. 有 14.1 million people with disabilities in the UK. By not making your service accessible you are excluding these people and potentially losing out on £274 billion a year of extra spending power.
这是法律
When it comes to public sector services, accessibility is a 法律要求. As of 23 September 2018 public sector services have to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to a AA standard.
It’s more user friendly for 每一个人
后 好 无障碍设计实践 can benefit 每一个人, not just people with a disability. 有 plenty of things that frustrate people on the internet. 举个例子 旋转木马, which are awful for non-disabled people and even worse for people with access needs.
An accessible website gives access to information and interaction to 每一个人.
Here at Made Tech, we’re embarking on our own accessibility journey. As we’ve been building our internal design capabilities we have realised our own website is not entirely accessible and that some work is needed to make our content available to even more people.
This isn’t something we’re going to fix overnight but we believe this is important and are committed to iteratively improve things starting with us. Acknowledging an issue is the first step in the path to making things better!
有用的资源
有 plenty of useful resources on accessibility you can have a look at. I’ll leave you with a few recommendations on some you might want to use.
的 a11y项目 is a great open-source resource that helps break down the WCAG into small easy to understand steps.
的 accessibility in government blog is great and has a lot of super insightful research. I would especially recommend this post from the NHSBSA 全球最大的博彩平台创建 预算模拟实验室.
Overall, accessibility is about including 每一个人 no matter their background. Thinking about accessibility every step of the way when designing your digital service is incredibly important and you should put yourself in the shoes of a user with a particular accessibility need to understand how they feel.
本周是 30th Anniversary of Disability Awareness Day. To learn more about accessibility and other ways to get involved, there are some really 好 事件发生.
If you are interested in receiving design and accessibility content, sign up to the Made Tech 设计制作博客. We post weekly about everything user-centred design, including some of the work we are doing with our public sector clients.
