rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic
1,Why Bother with Accessibility?,"Web accessibility (known in other fields as inclusive design or universal design) is the degree to which a website is available to as many people as possible. Accessibility is most often used to describe how people with disabilities can access the web.
How we approach accessibility
In the web community, there’s a surprisingly inconsistent approach to accessibility. There are some who are endlessly dedicated to accessible web design, and there are some who believe it so intrinsic to the web that it shouldn’t be considered a separate topic. Still, of those who are familiar with accessibility, there’s an overwhelming number of designers, developers, clients and bosses who just aren’t that bothered.
Over the last few months I’ve spoken to a lot of people about accessibility, and I’ve heard the same reasons to ignore it over and over again. Let’s take a look at the most common excuses.
Excuse 1: “People with disabilities don’t really use the web”
Accessibility will make your site available to more people — the inclusion case
In the same way that the accessibility of a building isn’t just about access for wheelchair users, web accessibility isn’t just about blind users and screen readers. We can affect positively the lives of many people by making their access to the web easier.
There are four main types of disability that affect use of the web:
Visual
Blindness, low vision and colour-blindness
Auditory
Profoundly deaf and hard of hearing
Motor
The inability to use a mouse, slow response time, limited fine motor control
Cognitive
Learning difficulties, distractibility, the inability to focus on large amounts of information
None of these disabilities are completely black and white
Examining deafness, it’s clear from the medical scale that there are many grey areas between full hearing and total deafness:
mild
moderate
moderately severe
severe
profound
totally deaf
For eyesight, and brain conditions that affect what users see, there is a huge range of conditions and challenges:
astigmatism
colour blindness
akinetopsia (motion blindness)
scotopic visual sensitivity (visual stress related to light)
visual agnosia (impaired recognition or identification of objects)
While we might have medical and government-recognised definitions that tell us what makes a disability, day-to-day life is not so straightforward. People experience varying degrees of different conditions, and often one or more conditions at a time, creating a false divide when you view disability in terms of us and them.
Impairments aren’t always permanent
As we age, we’re more likely to experience different levels of visual, auditory, motor and cognitive impairments. We might have an accident or illness that affects us temporarily. We might struggle more earlier or later in the day. There are so many little physiological factors that affect the way people interact with the web that we can’t afford to make any assumptions based on our own limited experiences.
Impairments might be somewhere between the user and the website
There are also impairments that aren’t directly related to the user. Environmental factors have a huge effect on the way people interact with the web. These could be:
Low bandwidth, or intermittent internet connection
Bright light, rain, or other weather-based conditions
Noisy environments, or a location where the user doesn’t want to disturb their neighbours with sound
Browsing with mobile devices, games consoles and other non-desktop devices
Browsing with legacy browsers or operating systems
Such environmental factors show that it’s not just those with physical impairments who benefit from more accessible websites. We started designing responsive websites so we could be more future-friendly, and with a shared goal of better optimised experiences, accessibility should be at the core of responsive web design.
Excuse 2: “We don’t want to affect the experience for the majority of our users”
Accessibility will improve your site for all your users — the usability case
On a basic level, the different disability groups, as shown in the inclusion case, equate to simple usability goals:
Visual – make it easy to read
Auditory – make it easy to hear
Motor – make it easy to interact
Cognitive – make it easy to understand and focus
Taking care to ensure good usability in these areas will also have an impact on accessibility. Unless your site is catering specifically to a particular disability, where extreme optimisation is most beneficial, taking care to design with accessibility in mind will rarely negatively affect the experience of your wider audience.
Excuse 3: “We don’t have the budget for accessibility”
Accessibility will make you money — the business case
By reducing your audience through ignoring accessibility, you’re potentially excluding the income from those users. Designing with accessibility in mind from the beginning of a project makes it easier to make small inexpensive optimisations as part of the design and development process, rather than bolting on costly updates to increase your potential audience later on.
The following are excerpts from a white paper about companies that increased the accessibility of their websites to comply with government regulation.
Improvements in accessibility doubled Legal and General’s life insurance sales online.
Improvements in accessibility increased Tesco’s grocery home delivery sales by £13 million in 2005… To their surprise they found that many normal visitors preferred the ease of navigation and improved simplicity of the [parallel] accessible site and switched to use it. Tesco have replaced their ‘normal’ site with their accessible version and expect a further increase in revenues.
Improvements in accessibility increased Virgin.net sales by 68%.
Statistics all from WSI white paper: Improve your website’s usability and accessibility to increase sales (PDF).
Excuse 4: “Accessible websites are ugly”
Accessibility won’t stop your site from being beautiful — the beauty case
Many people use ugly accessible websites as proof that all accessible websites are ugly. This just isn’t the case. I’ve compiled some examples of beautiful and accessible websites with screenshots of how they look through the Color Oracle simulator and how they perform when run through Webaim’s Wave accessibility checker tool.
While automated tools are no substitute for real users, they can help you learn more about good practices, and give you guidance on where your site needs improvements to make it more accessible.
Amazon.co.uk
It may not be a decorated beauty, but Amazon is often first in functional design. It’s a huge website with a lot of interactive content, but it generates just five errors on the Wave test, and is easy to read under a Color Oracle filter.
Screenshot of Amazon website
Screenshot of Amazon’s Wave results – five errors
Screenshot of Amazon through a Color Oracle filter
24 ways
When Tim Van Damme redesigned 24 ways back in 2007, it was a striking and unusual design that showed what could be achieved with CSS and some imagination. Despite the complexity of the design, it gets an outstanding zero errors on the Wave test, and is still readable under a Color Oracle filter.
Screenshot of pre-2013 24 ways website design
Screenshot of 24 ways Wave results – zero errors
Screenshot of 24ways through a Color Oracle filter
Opera’s Shiny Demos
Demos and prototypes are notorious for ignoring accessibility, but Opera’s Shiny Demos site shows how exploring new technologies doesn’t have to exclude anyone. It only gets one error on the Wave test, and looks fine under a Color Oracle filter.
Screenshot of Opera’s Shiny Demos website
Screenshot of Opera’s Shiny Demos Wave results – 1 error
Screenshot of Opera’s Shiny Demos through a Color Oracle filter
SoundCloud
When a site is more app-like, relying on more interaction from the user, accessibility can be more challenging. However, SoundCloud only gets one error on the Wave test, and the colour contrast holds up well under a Color Oracle filter.
Screenshot of SoundCloud website
Screenshot of SoundCloud’s Wave results – one error
Screenshot of SoundCloud through a Color Oracle filter
Education and balance
As with most web design, doing accessibility well is about combining your knowledge of accessibility with your project’s context to create a balance that serves your users’ needs. Your types of content and interactions will dictate one set of constraints. Your users’ needs and goals will dictate another. In broad terms, web design as a practice is finding the equilibrium between these constraints.
And then there’s just caring. The web as a platform is open, affordable and available to many. Accessibility is our way to ensure that nobody gets shut out.",2013,Laura Kalbag,laurakalbag,2013-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/why-bother-with-accessibility/,design
93,Design Systems,"The most important part of responsive web design is that, no matter what the viewport width, the content is accessible in an optimum display. The best responsive designs are those that allow you to go from one optimised display to another, but with the feeling that these experiences are part of a greater product whole.
Responsive design: where we’ve been going wrong
Responsive web design was a shock to my web designer system. Those of us who had already been designing sites for mobile probably had the biggest leap to make. We might have been detecting user agents in order to deliver a mobile-specific site, or using the slightly more familiar Bushido technique to deliver sites optimised for device type and viewport size, but either way our focus was on devices. A site was optimised for either a mobile phone or a desktop.
Responsive web design brought us back to pre-table layout fluid sites that expanded or contracted to fit the viewport. This was a big difference to get our heads around when we were so used to designing for fixed-width layouts. Suddenly, an element could be any width or, at least, we needed to consider its maximum and minimum widths. Pixel perfection, while pretty, became wholly unrealistic, and a whole load of designers who prided themselves in detailed and precise designs got a bit scared.
Hanging on to our previous processes and typical deliverables led us to continue to optimise our sites for particular devices and provide pixel-perfect mockups for those device widths.
With all this we were concentrating on devices, not content, deliverables and not process, and making assumptions about users and their devices based on nothing but the width of the viewport.
I don’t think this is a crime, I think it was inevitable.
We can be up to date with our principles and ideals, but it’s never as easy in practice. That’s why it’s more important than ever to share our successful techniques and processes. Let’s drag each other into modern web design.
Design systems: the principles
What are design systems?
A visual design system is built out of the core components of typography, layout, shape or form, and colour. When considering the design of a whole product, a design system should also include patterns in user flow, content strategy, copy, and tone of voice. These concepts, design decisions or rules, created around the core components are used consistently across your product to create a cohesive feel, whether it’s from one element to another, page to page, or viewport width to viewport width.
Responsive design is one of the most important considerations in the components of a design system. For each component, you must decide what will unite the design across the viewports to maintain that consistent feel, and what parts of the design will differentiate in order to provide a flexible and optimal experience for different viewport sizes.
Components you might keep the same across viewports
typeface
base unit
colour
shape/form
Components you might differentiate across viewports
grids
layout
font size
measure (line length)
leading (line height)
Content: it must always be the same
The focus of a design system is the optimum display of content. As Mark Boulton put it, designing “content out, not canvas in.” Chris Armstrong puts the emphasis on not designing for viewports but for content – “we need to build on what we do know: content.” In order to do this, we must share the same content across all devices and focus on how best to display and represent content through design system components.
The practical: core visual components
Typography first
When you work with a lot of text content, typography is the easiest way to set the visual tone of the design across all viewport widths. It’s likely that you’ll choose one or two typefaces to use across the whole system, but you might change the most legible font size, balanced with the most comfortable measure, as the viewport width changes.
Where typography meets layout
The unit on which you choose to base the grid and layout design, font sizes and leading could be based on the typeface, an optimal reading size, or something more arbitrary. Sometimes I’ll choose a unit based on multiples of ten because it makes the maths in the CSS easier. Tim Brown suggests trying a modular scale. Chris Armstrong suggests basing it on your ideal measure, or the width of a fixed item of content such as an ad unit.
Grids and layouts
Sensible grid design can be a flexible yet solid foundation for your design system layout component. But you must be wary in responsive design that a grid might not work across all widths: even four columns could make for very cramped content and one-word measures on smaller screens.
Maybe the grid columns are something you differentiate across widths, but you can keep the concept of the grid consistent. If the content has blocks in groups of three, you might decide on a three-column grid which folds down to one column for narrow viewports. If the grid focuses on the idea of symmetry and has a four-column grid on larger viewports, it might fold down to two columns for narrower viewports. These consistencies may seem subtle, not at all obvious to many except the designer, but it’s all these little constants and patterns across the whole of the design system that makes design decisions easier to make (as they adhere to the guiding concepts of your system), and give the product a uniform feel no matter what the device.
Shape or form
The shape or form components are concepts you already use in fixed-width web design for a strong, consistent look and feel.
Since CSS border-radius became widely supported by browsers, a lot of designs feature circle themes. These are very distinctive and can be used across viewport widths giving them the same united feel, even if they’re not used in the same way. This could also apply to border styles, consistent shadows and any number of decorative details and textures. These are the elements that make up the shape or form of a design system.
Colour
Colour is the most basic way to reinforce a brand and unite experiences across viewports. The same hex colour used system-wide is instantly recognisable, no matter what the viewport width.
The process
While using a design system isn’t necessarily attached to any particular process, it does lend itself to some process ideals.
Detaching design considerations from viewport widths
A design system allows you to focus separately on the components that make up the system, disconnecting the look and feel from the layout. This helps prevent us getting stuck in the rut of the Apple breakpoints (brilliantly coined by Simon Foster) of mobile, tablet and desktop. It also forces us to design for variation in viewport experiences side by side, not one after the other.
Design in the browser
I can’t start off designing in the browser – it just doesn’t seem to bring out my creative side (and I’m incredibly envious of you if you can; I just have to start on paper) – but static mock-ups aren’t the only alternative. Style guides and style tiles are perfect for expressing the concepts of your design system. Pattern libraries could also work well.
Mock-ups and breakpoints
At some point, whether it’s to test your system ideas, or because a client needs help visualising how your system might work, you may end up producing some static mock-ups. It’s not the end of the world, but you must ensure that these consider all the viewports, not just those of the iDevices, or even the devices currently on the market. You need to decide the breakpoints where the states of your design change. The blocks within your content will always have optimum points for their display (based on their hierarchy, density, width, or type of interaction) and so your breakpoints should be based around these points.
These are probably the ideal points at which to produce static mockups; treat them as snapshots. They’re not necessarily mock-ups, so much as a way of capturing how your design system would be interpreted when frozen at that particular viewport width.
The future
Creating design systems will give us the flexibility we need for working with the unknown devices of the future. It may be a change in process, but it shouldn’t be too much of a difference in thinking. The pioneers in responsive design have a hard job. Some of these problems may have already been solved in other technologies or industries, but it’s up to the pioneers to find those connections and help us formulate solutions and standards that will make responsive design the best it can possibly be. We need to keep experimenting and communicating, particularly in the area of design, as good user experiences are the true sign of whether our products are a success.",2012,Laura Kalbag,laurakalbag,2012-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/design-systems/,design
213,Accessibility Through Semantic HTML,"Working on Better, a tracker blocker, I spend an awful lot of my time with my nose in other people’s page sources. I’m mostly there looking for harmful tracking scripts, but often notice the HTML on some of the world’s most popular sites is in a sad state of neglect.
What does neglected HTML look like? Here’s an example of the markup I found on a news site just yesterday. There’s a bit of text, a few links, and a few images. But mostly it’s div elements.
Some text more text
divs and spans, why do we use them so much?
While I find tracking scripts completely inexcusable, I do understand why people write HTML like the above. As developers, we like to use divs and spans as they’re generic elements. They come with no associated default browser styles or behaviour except that div displays as a block, and span displays inline. If we make our page up out of divs and spans, we know we’ll have absolute control over styles and behaviour cross-browser, and we won’t need a CSS reset.
Absolute control may seem like an advantage, but there’s a greater benefit to less generic, more semantic elements. Browsers render semantic elements with their own distinct styles and behaviours. For example, button looks and behaves differently from a. And ul is different from ol. These defaults are shortcuts to a more usable and accessible web. They provide consistent and well-tested components for common interactions.
Semantic elements aid usability
A good example of how browser defaults can benefit the usability of an element is in the