A presentation at Fronteers Online Meetup by Darice de Cuba
Unmeasurable Accessibility The Case for Inclusive design !♿#$%&’( Darice de Cuba June 19th 2020
Hi, I’m Darice @Darice • Web Developer • Expert by experience • Blogger • The Hague food places connoisseur • Tea addict
What most people understand under “Accessibility” • ARIA for screen-readers • Keyboard tabbable • Colours with minimum contrast ratio 4.5:1 • @media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) {} • All testable with tools or manually
Visible and nonvisible disabilities
Non visible “disabilities” • A deaf or hard of hearing person • A person with autism • A person with brain damage • Chronic illness • Depression
“In our lifetime most of us will have to deal with either long term or short-term illness, broken bones, high stress for long period of times. All kinds of illness or injuries that can make you temporary disabled or disabled for the rest of your life.”
Most people aren’t born disabled, but become disabled later in life • When I was 25 years old, I had a brain haemorrhage • When I was 26 years old, I lost the rest of my hearing
“I don’t consider myself disabled, rather I’m made disabled by the obstacles created by society. A society build only for the seeing, hearing, talking, walking, healthy, straight, cis male, white people.”
Deaf and deaf, a few quick facts deaf: Deaf: Deaf with a capital D means a person who culturally identifies as a deaf person. deaf with lower d is someone who became deaf later in life. • Born deaf • Sign language is their primary language • deaf later in life/Hard of hearing • Spoken language is their primary language.
Inclusive Design Inclusive design is a design approach that takes as many individuals; their background, needs, experience and ability into account from day one of the project. Accessibility is a part of inclusive design. We want as much people as possible to be able to use our products.
Small examples, big impact
Ordering food in lockdown Thuisbezorgd, UberEats or ordering directly? UberEats pros: • Message delivery person • Accurate tracker • Most inclusive https://www.darice.org/2020/05/07/accessibility-or-morals/
Chat widgets How to do it: • Real people and not a bot • Reasonable waiting times • Widget works in all modern browsers
No one ever said, “I wish this was written more difficult”.
It’s not new “How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better?” - Steve Krug The web is the ultimate customerempowering environment. He or she who clicks the mouse gets to decide everything. It is so easy to go elsewhere; all the competitors in the world are but a mouse click away. - Jakob Nielsen 1999 2000
You know what they say about assuming Assumption: only elderly people wear hearing aids. Reality: hearing loss can affect all ages; babies, kids, young adults, adults and the elderly.
Captions Captions increase view time of videos on Facebook with 12% • For HoH and d/Deaf people • Watching videos in noisy places or the silent train coupe • SEO • When the spoken language is not your primary language • Accents
Oh, Twitter you just can’t help yourself, can you?
SubRip Subtitle file .srt files have been popular since internet was fast enough to download media. Almost everyone always want or needs subtitles.
Auto Captioning, Not Good Enough • Auto-caption suffers from bias; doesn’t recognise accents • Fails with names • Depends on clear articulation • Depends how slowly someone speaks
Good Examples
Podcast needs transcriptions • d/Deaf people • HoH people • People with hearing sensitivity • People with ADHD • People in noisy environment • People in silent environment (silent train coupe, library) • Transcripts are also good for: • SEO • People whose primary language isn’t English • Looking up content
Transcriptions, not only for the deaf and HoH “This American Life began transcribing their radio archives in April, 2011 and completed the entire backlog by October, 2011. Since that time, transcripts have been posted within 24 hours after a program airs.” • 4.18% of all unique visitors landed on the site via a transcript page • Transcripts increased the number of unique visitors to its website by 4.18% • 7.23% of website visitors engaged with the transcripts
How inclusion works
Perspective It’s easy to think that being inclusive is too much work, time consuming and “expensive”. But it’s all about perspective and your priorities.
Thank you for listening! 🐦 @Darice 🖥 https://darice.org 📬 darice@darice.org
When people talk about accessibility they talk about making websites accessible for the use of screen readers (Hi, ARIA!), using good color contrast for visibility, and making sure you can navigate the website with the keyboard only. In this talk, Darice will give you a different perspective on accessibility. Because an automated audit can give you a 100% ‘accessible’ rating, but that does not mean the website is usable for everyone!
for free. You
can too.