{"rowid": 1, "title": "Why Bother with Accessibility?", "contents": "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.\n\nHow we approach accessibility\n\nIn the web community, there\u2019s 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\u2019t be considered a separate topic. Still, of those who are familiar with accessibility, there\u2019s an overwhelming number of designers, developers, clients and bosses who just aren\u2019t that bothered.\n\nOver the last few months I\u2019ve spoken to a lot of people about accessibility, and I\u2019ve heard the same reasons to ignore it over and over again. Let\u2019s take a look at the most common excuses.\n\nExcuse 1: \u201cPeople with disabilities don\u2019t really use the web\u201d\n\nAccessibility will make your site available to more people \u2014 the inclusion case\n\nIn the same way that the accessibility of a building isn\u2019t just about access for wheelchair users, web accessibility isn\u2019t just about blind users and screen readers. We can affect positively the lives of many people by making their access to the web easier.\n\nThere are four main types of disability that affect use of the web:\n\n\n\tVisual\n\tBlindness, low vision and colour-blindness\n\tAuditory\n\tProfoundly deaf and hard of hearing\n\tMotor\n\tThe inability to use a mouse, slow response time, limited fine motor control\n\tCognitive\n\tLearning difficulties, distractibility, the inability to focus on large amounts of information\n\n\nNone of these disabilities are completely black and white\n\nExamining deafness, it\u2019s clear from the medical scale that there are many grey areas between full hearing and total deafness:\n\n\n\tmild\n\tmoderate\n\tmoderately severe\n\tsevere\n\tprofound\n\ttotally deaf\n\n\nFor eyesight, and brain conditions that affect what users see, there is a huge range of conditions and challenges:\n\n\n\tastigmatism\n\tcolour blindness\n\takinetopsia (motion blindness)\n\tscotopic visual sensitivity (visual stress related to light)\n\tvisual agnosia (impaired recognition or identification of objects)\n\n\nWhile 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.\n\nImpairments aren\u2019t always permanent\n\nAs we age, we\u2019re 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\u2019t afford to make any assumptions based on our own limited experiences.\n\nImpairments might be somewhere between the user and the website\n\nThere are also impairments that aren\u2019t directly related to the user. Environmental factors have a huge effect on the way people interact with the web. These could be:\n\n\n\tLow bandwidth, or intermittent internet connection\n\tBright light, rain, or other weather-based conditions\n\tNoisy environments, or a location where the user doesn\u2019t want to disturb their neighbours with sound\n\tBrowsing with mobile devices, games consoles and other non-desktop devices\n\tBrowsing with legacy browsers or operating systems\n\n\nSuch environmental factors show that it\u2019s 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.\n\nExcuse 2: \u201cWe don\u2019t want to affect the experience for the majority of our users\u201d\n\nAccessibility will improve your site for all your users \u2014 the usability case\n\nOn a basic level, the different disability groups, as shown in the inclusion case, equate to simple usability goals:\n\n\n\tVisual \u2013 make it easy to read\n\tAuditory \u2013 make it easy to hear\n\tMotor \u2013 make it easy to interact\n\tCognitive \u2013 make it easy to understand and focus\n\n\nTaking 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.\n\nExcuse 3: \u201cWe don\u2019t have the budget for accessibility\u201d\n\nAccessibility will make you money \u2014 the business case\n\nBy reducing your audience through ignoring accessibility, you\u2019re 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.\n\nThe following are excerpts from a white paper about companies that increased the accessibility of their websites to comply with government regulation.\n\n\n\tImprovements in accessibility doubled Legal and General\u2019s life insurance sales online.\n\n\n\n\tImprovements in accessibility increased Tesco\u2019s grocery home delivery sales by \u00a313 million in 2005\u2026 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 \u2018normal\u2019 site with their accessible version and expect a further increase in revenues.\n\n\n\n\tImprovements in accessibility increased Virgin.net sales by 68%.\n\n\nStatistics all from WSI white paper: Improve your website\u2019s usability and accessibility to increase sales (PDF).\n\nExcuse 4: \u201cAccessible websites are ugly\u201d\n\nAccessibility won\u2019t stop your site from being beautiful \u2014 the beauty case\n\nMany people use ugly accessible websites as proof that all accessible websites are ugly. This just isn\u2019t the case. I\u2019ve 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\u2019s Wave accessibility checker tool.\n\nWhile 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.\n\nAmazon.co.uk\n\nIt may not be a decorated beauty, but Amazon is often first in functional design. It\u2019s 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.\n\n Screenshot of Amazon website\n Screenshot of Amazon\u2019s Wave results \u2013 five errors\n Screenshot of Amazon through a Color Oracle filter\n\n24 ways\n\nWhen 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.\n\n Screenshot of pre-2013 24 ways website design\n Screenshot of 24 ways Wave results \u2013 zero errors\n Screenshot of 24ways through a Color Oracle filter\n\nOpera\u2019s Shiny Demos\n\nDemos and prototypes are notorious for ignoring accessibility, but Opera\u2019s Shiny Demos site shows how exploring new technologies doesn\u2019t have to exclude anyone. It only gets one error on the Wave test, and looks fine under a Color Oracle filter.\n\n Screenshot of Opera\u2019s Shiny Demos website\n Screenshot of Opera\u2019s Shiny Demos Wave results \u2013 1 error\n Screenshot of Opera\u2019s Shiny Demos through a Color Oracle filter\n\nSoundCloud\n\nWhen 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.\n\n Screenshot of SoundCloud website\n Screenshot of SoundCloud\u2019s Wave results \u2013 one error\n Screenshot of SoundCloud through a Color Oracle filter\n\nEducation and balance\n\nAs with most web design, doing accessibility well is about combining your knowledge of accessibility with your project\u2019s context to create a balance that serves your users\u2019 needs. Your types of content and interactions will dictate one set of constraints. Your users\u2019 needs and goals will dictate another. In broad terms, web design as a practice is finding the equilibrium between these constraints.\n\nAnd then there\u2019s 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.", "year": "2013", "author": "Laura Kalbag", "author_slug": "laurakalbag", "published": "2013-12-10T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2013/why-bother-with-accessibility/", "topic": "design"}
{"rowid": 93, "title": "Design Systems", "contents": "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.\n\nResponsive design: where we\u2019ve been going wrong\n\nResponsive 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.\n\nResponsive 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.\n\nHanging 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.\n\nWith 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.\n\nI don\u2019t think this is a crime, I think it was inevitable.\n\nWe can be up to date with our principles and ideals, but it\u2019s never as easy in practice. That\u2019s why it\u2019s more important than ever to share our successful techniques and processes. Let\u2019s drag each other into modern web design.\n\nDesign systems: the principles\n\nWhat are design systems?\n\nA 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\u2019s from one element to another, page to page, or viewport width to viewport width.\n\nResponsive 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.\n\nComponents you might keep the same across viewports\n\n\n\ttypeface\n\tbase unit\n\tcolour\n\tshape/form\n\n\nComponents you might differentiate across viewports\n\n\n\tgrids\n\tlayout\n\tfont size\n\tmeasure (line length)\n\tleading (line height)\n\n\nContent: it must always be the same\n\nThe focus of a design system is the optimum display of content. As Mark Boulton put it, designing \u201ccontent out, not canvas in.\u201d Chris Armstrong puts the emphasis on not designing for viewports but for content \u2013 \u201cwe need to build on what we do know: content.\u201d 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.\n\nThe practical: core visual components\n\nTypography first\n\nWhen 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\u2019s likely that you\u2019ll 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.\n\nWhere typography meets layout\n\nThe 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\u2019ll 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.\n\nGrids and layouts\n\nSensible 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.\n\nMaybe 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\u2019s 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.\n\nShape or form\n\nThe shape or form components are concepts you already use in fixed-width web design for a strong, consistent look and feel. \n\nSince 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\u2019re 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.\n\nColour\n\nColour 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.\n\nThe process\n\nWhile using a design system isn\u2019t necessarily attached to any particular process, it does lend itself to some process ideals.\n\nDetaching design considerations from viewport widths\n\nA 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.\n\nDesign in the browser\n\nI can\u2019t start off designing in the browser \u2013 it just doesn\u2019t seem to bring out my creative side (and I\u2019m incredibly envious of you if you can; I just have to start on paper) \u2013 but static mock-ups aren\u2019t the only alternative. Style guides and style tiles are perfect for expressing the concepts of your design system. Pattern libraries could also work well.\n\nMock-ups and breakpoints\n\nAt some point, whether it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\n\nThese are probably the ideal points at which to produce static mockups; treat them as snapshots. They\u2019re 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.\n\nThe future\n\nCreating 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.", "year": "2012", "author": "Laura Kalbag", "author_slug": "laurakalbag", "published": "2012-12-12T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2012/design-systems/", "topic": "design"}
{"rowid": 213, "title": "Accessibility Through Semantic HTML", "contents": "Working on Better, a tracker blocker, I spend an awful lot of my time with my nose in other people\u2019s page sources. I\u2019m mostly there looking for harmful tracking scripts, but often notice the HTML on some of the world\u2019s most popular sites is in a sad state of neglect.\nWhat does neglected HTML look like? Here\u2019s an example of the markup I found on a news site just yesterday. There\u2019s a bit of text, a few links, and a few images. But mostly it\u2019s div elements.\n
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\ndivs and spans, why do we use them so much?\nWhile 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\u2019re 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\u2019ll have absolute control over styles and behaviour cross-browser, and we won\u2019t need a CSS reset.\nAbsolute control may seem like an advantage, but there\u2019s 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.\nSemantic elements aid usability\nA good example of how browser defaults can benefit the usability of an element is in the