Skip to main content

Designing for Accessibility

The software world has starting being more inclusive. After serving only the geeks and the techies, a lot of the software that is produced in this world has started looking at how it can be mor euseful.

One of the key constituencies of software usage is people with disability. The ADA (Americans with disability Act) has forced a lot of the software developers to look at this issue. The software world has also responded sensitively and with care making as much of the software usable by people with disability.

One of the key components that we are looking at in this are people with visual impairment.

Over a period of time, a lot of the software has made sure that the user experience is adjusted in such a way that is is intuitive. Google has been a front runner in this and a lot of others are also not left behind.

Text

The size and the font typology is very important. Choose those aspects with ADA in mind.

Media like Images


A lot of the media , including video and images , have been adjusted to be consumed by people with disability. Most of the videos contains a transcript and a readover text. This helps people with hearing disability to read through the text

All the images and the shades of the pages are toned to make sure people with color blindness understand the intent of an image

Finally, all images are now accompanies with alternative text that helps with the image descriptions

Overall User Journey

Visually impaired people use screen readers all the time. 

Design for a user experience based on how the screen reader interprets the site. You might be surprised on how the screen readers perceive our site and hence the user experience becomes very tedious for visually impaired.

More to come on how to start with making a site ADA compliant.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Counterfiet goods and the fledgeling e-commerce market places

India has a nascent and a very active market place. With good interest, the right climate for growth and right product mix, the indian retail marketplace seems to be going places. However, there are some alarming signals that seem to be ignored for growth that have a good chance of being dangerous to all the stakeholders involved. The issue I am talking about is the sale of counterfeit goods in all the indian market places. India has not had a history of strong Intellectual property rights. This time it is getting messier. The Indian marketplace model is very interesting and suits well to a country as diverse as India. The market place model floated by all the major e-railers suits the fact that the seller and the buyer can be connected for serving the needs for every day goods that are not necessarily covered by IP laws. India needs more effective IP laws since it is struggling with some products like traditional indian products that cannot be covered by IP versus modern produc...
Post a Comment
Read more

Finding your target audience

The biggest task of the product manager is to find your target audience. Typically it is a very tight rope walk. You define it too narrowly and you would struggle to generalize the product later. You define it too broad and you would struggle to satisfy a lot of people and the product might not take off at all. There is this awesome post by Dave Mcclure on why Niche target segment works. Blog link here . What he says is mostly right and that is what we did as well. We did it mostly by accident. We had to define our niche because we could only talk to those kind of retailers and get data from them to start developing the data. It did have its upside. We were very clear on what we wanted to develop and we are slowly talking to retailers and adding more scenarios. As we are doing this, we are also talking to a slightly different set of retailers. This helps us incrementally build our product while also generalizing the existing features. In our case, we did not fin...
Post a Comment
Read more

The right business model for your product

How would you decide what is the best business model for your product? Deciding on the right business model is very important for the product. It does not necessarily mean what is the price of your product. There could be no price for your product - though that is a myth. For example, we think google or Facebook is free. However, we are never the customers for Google or Facebook. It is the advertisers that are its customers. What we need to figure out when we decide on a business model are as follows: Who is my target audience? Who is my customer What is the price. How is the support model going to work Who are my partners While we do not absolutely need to price a product, we need to understand how we would make money. For example Open ERP does not price its product. However, its product is not the ERP software but really the hosting, service and training that it offers. While pricing is an important part, what is more important is in realising who is you...
Post a Comment
Read more