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Inclusive design: more than a checklist

Design is powerful. It connects us to the world around us and shapes our lives. Inclusive design shapes products and services in ways that are useable by everyone. It requires a shared understanding of population diversity. Whether it’s a building a webpage, a policy framework or a town park, it ensures we “leave no-one behind“. Inclusive design is more than a checklist.

A blog page from Automattic says, “Truly inclusive designs are never really finished, and becoming fluent in inclusive design takes more than a checklist. We all need a map when we start exploring any new world”. This is the introduction to a “guidance map” aimed at leading individuals and teams through the processes of creating inclusive thinking and practice.

Although focused on technology, some of the principles and processes can be applied in other design situations. For example, “Learn about your audiences; their motivations, needs, behaviors, challenges, pain points and goals”. The key headings in this article on Design.blog are:

- - Broadening perspectives and building empathy;
  - Bringing diversity into teams and processes; and
  - Building inclusion into designs.

The article explains each of the three steps in more detail. Some concepts such as colour contrast are well-known to designers. Less considered factors are providing cost-accessible options of designs, and designing for low bandwidth. Designs should be adaptable for longer life and empower clients to continue without more designer input. These ideas really show that client needs are at the centre of the design. Designing out “pain points” is essential for all users.

Design is a powerful tool and inclusive design has the “potential to unite heterogeneous cultures in shared understanding. To make products and experiences globally accessible.” Good design is inclusive design.

Why icons should have labels

Icons are like abstract paintings – they need labels.

A brightly coloured abstract painting consisting of painbrush lines going in all directions.

Digital designers are great at creating icon puzzles for users. They make a good guessing game until you learn what they represent. We see icons everywhere – on microwaves, washing machines, and of course, apps. Like abstract paintings, icons have different meanings for different people. We might like ambiguity in art, but not on our smart phones. That’s why icons need labels.

Icons are used as a way to save space, or where space for instruction is limited. But designers make a lot of assumptions about previous experience with instructions. Hampus Sethfors explains that saving space at the expense of usability is not the way to go.

In his Axesslab article, Sethfors uses the example of trying to download a TED Talk on a smart phone for viewing later. He explains why icons are ruining interfaces and that icons need labels otherwise users give up and become unsatisfied with the app. Sethfors also uses Instagram, Gmail, and Apple apps as examples of what not to do. He goes on to look at icons on a washing machine dial, and then to icons that really work. You can really see the difference in the examples shown below.

Icons without titles or labels

Icons with labels

A related article from Axesslab is how to improve web page content. It shows practical examples of how to improve accessibility and how to avoid simple pitfalls.

The Australian Network on Disability has a blog page on writing accessible social media posts.

Reducing cognitive load

Reducing cognitive load means reducing the mental effort required to do something. Making designs easy to use and understand is part of the solution. Whether it’s digital information or walking the street, we can all do with some help by reducing cognitive load so we can process the important messages.

Jon Yablonski developed seven design principles for reducing cognitive load in relation to user interfaces in the digital world. But these are useful tips for other fields of design. The seven principles make a lot of sense and are explained simply. The principles are:

1. 1. Avoid unnecessary elements: less is more
  2. Leverage common design patterns: keep things familiar
  3. Eliminate unnecessary tasks: make it easy to stay focused
  4. Minimize choices for easy decision making
  5. Display choices as a group: to help with decisions
  6. Strive for readability: make it legible
  7. Use iconography with caution: they aren’t always intuitive

Yablonski’s website explains further the concept of cognitive load. Every time you visit a website or a new environment your brain has learn something new. You have to do two things at once – focus on learning how to get around and at the same time, remember why you are there. The mental effort required is called cognitive load. If you get more information than you can handle, the brain slows down. We can’t avoid cognitive load, but designers can help minimise it.

Academic Coaching for Post Secondary Students

Would academic coaching help post secondary students with disabilities achieve their education goals? That was the question for a pilot study. Not surprisingly, the coaching helped. Improved self esteem and confidence helped the students achieve degrees in STEM subjects. The key component of academic coaching for students was helping students with their executive functioning.

The title of the article is, Academic Coaching: Outcomes from a Pilot Group of Postsecondary STEM Students with Disabilities.

Abstract: Faced with poor retention and graduation rates for students with disabilities, postsecondary institutions have experimented with interventions to help students succeed in college. This practice brief describes a pilot initiative in which 41 students with disabilities pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees at three postsecondary institutions engaged in weekly academic coaching sessions primarily aimed at improving students’ executive functioning.

Data collected through an online survey of participants at the end of the initiative suggests that the academic coaching services increased their self-confidence, motivation, and determination to succeed. Participants reported that they gained skills in time management, studying, note taking, organization, prioritization, writing, self-advocacy, and stress management as a result of the academic coaching. Although literature regarding academic coaching and students with disabilities has often focused on students with LD or ADHD, results of the pilot initiative suggest that students with a variety of disabilities can benefit from coaching relationships.

Download PDF of the article.

Accessible design is parent friendly design

Infographic showing three groups of disability: permanent, temporary and situational. — Microsoft infographic: Permanent, temporary, situational disability

A light-hearted tone is no cover for the serious nature of accessibility. Hampus Sethfors explains “the dad-thing comes with a ton of accessibility needs”. Carrying a baby means the loss of one or both arms and hands. He also found he had less brain processing capacity. As Hampus says, accessible design is parent friendly design, and he explains why.

Holding a baby is a classic example of situational disability as described in the Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit. However, smart phone voice control and access to a headset means he can listen to a podcast. Other parent disabilities are mostly related to having less brain processing capacity. Sleep deprivation and constantly thinking about keeping a baby alive are just two factors. Captions on Netflix means he can keep the sound down or off completely.

This blog post is written in a lighthearted way, but there are important messages that all designers should heed. The access lab blog has easy to read content and is a great example of how to write more inclusively. Most of the articles are related to digital technology, but the principles are valid in other fields of design.

Personas for digital technology

There’s nothing like asking potential users what they think of a new product. Even better if you involve them in the design process. But sometimes it’s not possible and designers resort to personas. This is often the case in digital technology. The Inclusive Design Toolkit has a suite of 12 personas representing a broad view of potential users. Each one has a story to tell about their lifestyle and their connection to technology.

Many factors affect digital exclusion: prior experience, competence, motivation and general attitude about technology. The personas highlight these factors to make it easier for designers to be inclusive. Each persona has a description of their lifestyle, competency with technology, and physical and sensory capabilities.

The online resource is part of the Inclusive Design Toolkit with the option to download a PDF. You can take a deeper dive into the personas as a family set. This takes personas one step further by introducing family interactions. The Inclusive Design Toolkit also has an exclusion calculator that estimates the number of people unable to use a product or service.

The Inclusive Design Toolkit is based on thorough research over more than ten years. The personas were produced as part of a project to improve the inclusivity of railway journeys.

The team wrote a conference paper about using personas for product development. They assessed the task of carrying a tray of food across a cafe, taking into account how using mobility aids restricts hand use. The title of the paper is, Evaluating inclusivity using quantitative personas. The full paper is available by request from ResearchGate.

Handbook for accessible graphic design

Graphic design covers all kinds of creative design and visual communications. The accessibility of graphic design should always be considered in the production of websites, brochures or Word documents. Fortunately there is a great handbook for accessible graphic design to help.

Graphic design covers creative design, visual communications, applied design and technology sectors. The text covers typography, digital media, web accessibility, Office documents, accessible PDFs, print design, environmental graphic design, colour selection and more. It’s relatively easy to read and has a logical structure. At the end is a list of publications, links to websites and tools to help.

There are so many little things that graphic designers can do to make their creations more accessible. The guide shows how to make graphic creations accessible with little, if any, extra effort. The title of the guide is, AccessAbility 2: A Practical Handbook on Accessible Graphic Design, and comes from Ontario, Canada.

Beginning with some questions…

How do we plan a graphic design project to ensure it is as accessible as possible for the intended audience? What considerations do we need to make for accessibility across various media? And how does our desire to communicate effectively with people of varying abilities translate into specific design decisions?

This book is for a broad group of individuals, including professional graphic designers, clients, educators, students and many others.

UD, UDL, Accessibility and Ableism

Access to information during the COVID-19 pandemic became even more problematic for some users as everything went online. So what can UD, UDL and Accessibility do to help to combat ableism?

An article by John L. O’Neill discusses Universal Design, Universal Design for Learning and Inclusive Design. In this context, the concept of Inclusive Design has a focus on the digital world. He covers the history of each, much of which will be known to UD followers. O’Neill argues that all three can be combined in innovative ways to ensure access to information. This is logical because each has the same goal – inclusion. He uses a case study where he merges the UD principle of perceptible information, the tenet of multiple means of representation from UDL, and adaptive systems from Inclusive Design. This perspective is given the title of “Abilities Design”.

O’Neill claims ableism underpins barriers and that undoing ableism is not a form of charity. Legislation that requires access and accessibility does little to change ableist attitudes.

The title of the article is, Accessibility for All Abilities: How Universal Design, Universal Design for Learning, and Inclusive Design Combat Inaccessibility and Ableism.

Editor’s Note: I am not sure that inventing another design category based on inclusion takes us any further forward. However, it is an example of how designers new to inclusive concepts can use existing frameworks to help their design process.

From the Abstract

Discussions about accessibility surged at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic as people became more dependent on accessing information from the web. This article will explore different disability models to understand the oppression of people with disabilities. It will examine how the different principles and methods of Universal Design, Universal Design for Learning, and Inclusive Design can be combined in innovative ways to ensure that all citizens have access to information without barriers.

Accessibility in UX Design

The Web Accessibility Guidelines aren’t just for web designers and tech people. We all need to have an overall grasp of what they are about. As we do more online it is important we don’t make things inaccessible by mistake. Claire Benidig introduces the concepts of accessibility in UX design using the guide from Microsoft.

Cognition, Vision, Hearing, Mobility and Mental Health are all covered in an easy to read way. So, non-tech people can understand.

If we know about the basics of web accessibility, we can give a decent brief to a web designer. Then we will we can check if the Web Accessibility Guidelines were built in. Many designers still think of accessibility as an add-on feature.

Claire’s article is titled, Accessibility in UX Design. She says that accessibility is not confined to a group of users “with some different abilities”. Anyone can experience a permanent, temporary or situational disability. An example of situational disability is having just one arm free because you are holding a baby or the shopping.

Microsoft inclusive design principles state:

“Exclusion happens when we solve problems using our own biases. As Microsoft designers, we seek out those exclusions, and use them as opportunities to create new ideas and inclusive designs.”

UX and Mental Health

It’s safe to say that everyone has experienced a website or app that is difficult to use. But little is known on how difficult interactions with apps and websites affect people with mental health conditions. UX design, or user-centric design, is associated with digital and website design. However, UX is not quite the same as co-design with actual users.

Danae Botha says that “a confusing UX could trigger anxiety” and repetitive tasks can make depression worse. Repetitive alerts are not great for someone with an attention disorder either.

Design for mental health reduces or eliminates features that can aggravate symptoms of a disorder. For example, automating menial tasks may decrease the risk of boredom-induced depressive symptoms.

In her article, Botha offers some tips for organisations and companies to minimise communication barriers. She covers many of the different apps available such as Teams, Jira Slack, and Miro and explains their pros and cons.

The title of the article is, Kinder Tools: How to Improve Enterprise UX Design for Mental Health.

Talking to users: an introvert’s guide

What if you are a designer and you’re not sure how to engage with your user base? According to a UXDesign blog post, many designers are introverted and don’t know where to start with user interviews. A fear of talking to strangers brings up many thoughts:

I’m no researcher, what if I don’t ask the right questions?
What if I say something to offend the person?
How do I not contaminate the responses with my own views?

So some tips for stepping outside the comfort zone are helpful. The article has some practical advice such as, don’t jump straight into the questions without some light introductory chat. And fix the things you didn’t like about the interview process for the next time. The title of the article is An introvert’s guide to starting user interviews.

However, it might be the case that the personalities that go into ICT are not the people who are good at user interaction. This might be why higher education programs are not producing graduates who are skilled at this side of the design process. Indeed, according to an article from Norway, the institutions are not training people to even meet basic legal design requirements for accessibility.

Avoid Unintended Barriers Accessing Assistive Technology

An image of a braille keyboard and an audiobook keyboard. — Alternative keyboards, including braille keyboards, and audiobook players assist in reducing barriers to accessing technology.

Have you ever been given a tool or a piece of technology with the promise of it making life simpler…only to find it adds more complexity to your life because you just don’t know how to use it?

Consider the needs, then, of our learners using assistive technologies to access learning who may face unintended barriers. Being aware of some practical strategies to avoid inadvertently building more barriers to access learning through assistive technology is beneficial.

For anyone frustrated with an unresponsive program on their device, it is likely the keyboard command ‘Ctrl-Alt-Delete’ will come to the rescue. Having keyboard commands as alternatives to mouse functions supports accessibility. Therefore, provide alternate keyboard commands for mouse actions.

To improve access for learners and ensure students have alternatives to using a keyboard, deploy switch and scanning options. With the click of a switch, switch control assists uses to, for example, enter text, select from menus and move the cursor. Switch control is available in the ‘accessibility’ menu of many computers.

For keyboard users with physical, sensory, or cognitive challenges, standard keyboards pose functional barriers. Depending on your learner’s needs, AbilityNet highlights the following alternatives to standard keyboards:

- - ergonomic keyboards
  - smaller, compact keyboards
  - separate numeric keypads
  - keyboards with larger keys
  - high-contrast keyboards
  - early learning keyboards
  - more specialist keyboards – Braille, chording and expanded devices
  - typing without a keyboard

Spectronics provide information regarding a range of on-screen keyboards to limit or remove barriers to computer use stemming from a range of physical or cognitive challenges.

Tactile feedback overlays added to touch screens can improve their accessibility to vision-impaired users. Microsoft’s touchplates are tactile guides that provide tactile feedback for touch screens. Touchplates are physical guides that overlaid on the screen that are recognised by the underlying computer application. Additionally, customised overlays for touch screens and keyboards provide support for interacting with large touch screens or accessing spatial data. Read more regarding the challenges with touchscreens faced by vision-impaired users, and some overlay options.

Implementing the above practical strategies could go a long way in supporting access when using assistive technologies. Be sure that any software selected for use works flawlessly with the tools!

There are more practical suggestions on reducing barriers to learning on the CUDA website.

Inclusive online meetings: Preparation is key

There’s been a few articles about working remotely and participating in online meetings. But there are a few nuances, little things, that need attention so that meetings are inclusive. An article from the Commons Library says it is not about the technical details. Rather, it’s about the culture and processes particularly for mixed face to face and online participation.

The article covers:
– Meeting preparation
– Collaboration tools
– Meeting process
– After the meeting

Some of this is basic, but the transitions in and out of lockdowns means more hybrid meetings – some face to face and some online participants. This is not easy for participants. Internet dropouts and other tech problems such as poor sound add to the mix of issues. This is where the chair’s role is very important because body language and facial expression are all helpful in making sure everyone gets to contribute.

Hosting hybrid online meetings is also covered by Blueprints for Change. It has some Tips and Tricks.

For hybrid meetings, everyone in the room should be on camera. This can mean a rearrangement of the room and careful placement of the camera.

“In a hybrid meeting environment people who are on screen should be assigned a buddy who is in the physical room. Their buddy regularly checks in with them, talks to them on breaks, makes sure they can see and hear at all times. Buddies might even bring them to break/snack conversations so they don’t miss the in-room side conversations.”

Category: UD and ICT

Inclusive design: more than a checklist

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Why icons should have labels

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Reducing cognitive load

Academic Coaching for Post Secondary Students

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Accessible design is parent friendly design

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Personas for digital technology

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