{"id":4316,"date":"2022-04-26T12:59:11","date_gmt":"2022-04-26T16:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.daed.com\/?p=4316"},"modified":"2024-07-11T10:59:13","modified_gmt":"2024-07-11T14:59:13","slug":"how-not-to-do-accessible-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.daed.com\/?p=4316","title":{"rendered":"How Not to Do Accessible Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In addition to directing User Experience at Daedalus, I am also heavily involved in my local community. I recently attended a learning conference for municipal personnel and sat in on a session about best practices for mass communication with residents, via things like email, mailers, text messages, social media, and municipal web pages.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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For the most part, the talk was interesting and informative, and the panelists even touched on accessibility, which I was delighted to hear. However, I was less delighted when one of the panelists said that he had begun to eliminate color from his communications due to concerns over color blindness.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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I\u2019ve had a couple of clients over the years make similar comments, and on the surface, you might think that it\u2019s not a bad idea. Inclusive design is an admirable goal. But being inclusive means understanding the barriers that people face and removing those barriers<\/em>; it does not mean removing stuff<\/em>. Inclusive design does not mean deliberately removing useful design elements and creating a less usable experience for all of your users<\/em> in order to accommodate users with disabilities, which is what this person\u2019s proposal would have done.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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To help you understand my reasoning, let’s consider another group of disabilities: hearing impairments. Obviously, we don\u2019t want to exclude the deaf community or those who are hard of hearing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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When we design a webpage, then, should we eliminate all audio content? That would certainly be one way to ensure that no information is communicated only through audio channels. So, let\u2019s say we eliminate the audio track for any videos that we post and replace it with captions that hearing-impaired users and most other users can read.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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There you have it: by eliminating audio content, we\u2019ve ensured that those with hearing impairments won\u2019t be excluded. But, of course, now 100% of users are excluded from accessing audio content and we\u2019ve also created new barriers for those with vision impairments. It\u2019s a pretty ridiculous \u201csolution\u201d, isn\u2019t it?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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Obviously, eliminating all audio is not what accessible design would recommend. Rather, accessible design would recommend providing easy alternative access to the audio information. Instead of eliminating audio, the solution is to provide captions or transcripts for those with hearing impairments to ensure that there is another way for those individuals to access that information.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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Far from removing useful content, we should turn our attention to ensuring that the content is presented in such a way that the highest number of people, regardless of disability, are able to engage with it. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

It is exactly the same with color blindness!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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Color Weakness<\/span><\/h2>\r\n

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But before we go any further, I’d like to explain why the phrase color blindness<\/em> is a misnomer. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n

For most people who are color blind, it is much more akin to being hard of hearing than it is to being deaf. Just as most hearing-impaired people can still hear to some extent, most people who have color blindness do still see color. But they have an altered perception of color, which can range from being very mild to quite severe. For this reason, I prefer to use phrases like color weakness <\/em>or color deficiency <\/em>when describing this type of disability.\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n

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Here\u2019s an example: The last time my daughter\u2019s Girl Scout Troop got together for a bonfire, we threw some chemical packets into the fire that turned the flames different colors and I captured the image below. If you have normal color vision, also called trichromacy, you should be able to see most of the colors of the rainbow in these flames.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n

\"Flames<\/a>
Chemically enhanced flames with a variety of colors as seen with normal color vision<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

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However, if your color vision is not typical, the image above might look more like one of the ones below, depending on the type of color weakness you have:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n