Enhance Your Design Skills by Catering for Diverse Needs

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

How do you become better at something? Picture yourself as a seasoned chef. You went to an excellent school to learn the basics of cooking, then worked your way up in a professional kitchen. How do you improve from there? More practice perhaps? Maybe, but you’d still be cooking for the same crowd. Ensuring that their same needs were catered for, if you pardon the pun.

At this stage, it might be better to work in a different restaurant. To see how your skills fare in front of a new audience. To see what concepts they like and what their specific needs are. From there, you’d improve, not by bettering your skills, but by understanding a new set of needs and being able to deliver.

In the landscape of digital design, the concept of User Experience (UX) is not merely about aesthetics; it’s about crafting seamless interactions for the user.

However, the challenge of designing products is that each user presents their own needs. Accessibility is about taking differing needs into account and incorporating them into your design. This is the cornerstone of inclusive design, ensuring that everyone, regardless of ability, can navigate the digital realm with ease.

For me, the importance of accessibility hits close to home. My family suffers from a rare genetic form of macular degeneration. So rare, in fact, that the world famous Moorfields Eye Hospital in London has mapped the genome of all my mother’s siblings to better understand the disease; the strain may take the family name.

I remember the first time I came into contact with the debilitating impact as my uncle was talking about his experience of losing his sight. “I wish it wasn’t my eyes,” he said as he was getting used to a new telephone that would call out the numbers as he dialled them. “Why couldn’t I lose my hearing instead? That way your aunty could nag as much as she liked”.

Although he was trying to make light of the situation, we knew he was hurting. He would miss watching his beloved grandkids play their football matches and feared losing his independence as he came to grips with becoming blind.

Witnessing his struggles first hand has illuminated the profound impact of accessible design.

The business case for accessibility

Accessibility is crucial for companies, no matter how you view it.

From a legal perspective, in 2025 the European Accessibility Act (EAA) will come into play with the remit to ensure that “… people with disabilities and older individuals can easily access a wide range of services and products”. Failure to comply could lead to legal challenges, fines, and a tarnished brand reputation.

Ethically, it is right. With 130 million people living with disabilities in the EU who may encounter daily hurdles to access digital products that are vital, such as banking and grocery shopping, it is shameful that they are excluded from interacting with the products that we take for granted.

CEOs will know their bottom line will improve by taking accessibility seriously, not just by avoiding fines and legal fees, but also by opening up their products to a larger number of users. According to The Valuable Truth Report, the global disability market controls $13 trillion of disposable income.

Visual impairments explained

Although there are four main types of disabilities — blindness, deafness, cognitive, and mobility — visual impairments account for up to 80% of digital accessibility issues. For that reason, it’s a good place to start.

Vision impairments encompass a spectrum of challenges — from colour blindness to low vision and complete blindness. Around 8% of men suffer from the most common form of colour blindness, and about 300 million people worldwide have an issue with seeing certain colours. This is a nice tool that you can use to screen test your design and see how they would be perceived by those with different colour blindness.

For people with low vision, they may use assistive technology such as screen magnifiers or text-to-talk software to aid their navigation. One of the most important aspects to consider is contrast, as it helps low vision users distinguish UI elements or important text on a screen. Test your own colour combinations using this tool and see if you pass the guideline standards.

For those who are completely blind, their primary tool to navigate the digital world is by using screen readers. Their performance has improved, but they require a webpage specifically designed for them. They work by reading the HTML code on a page and converting it to an audio description. Designing the layout with accessibility in mind is crucial from the start. This means ensuring correct tagging, using alt text for images, creating a logical hierarchy in the page structure, and labelling links correctly.

I’d recommend enabling the screen reader on your computer to browse a web page you’re familiar with. Close your eyes and navigate the page using the keyboard. Does it work correctly? Can you understand the layout as it’s presented to you? Could you complete a task such as making a purchase? If not, why not? Understanding these issues will bring you closer to understanding your user, which is key to creating good, inclusive design.

Conclusion

Catering for a new crowd will make you better at your job, whether that involves baking a cake or designing accessible digital products.

By understanding the needs of the user and involving them in research and testing, you will uncover accessibility issues that cannot be identified by simply working from a checklist of legislative guidelines.

Prioritising accessibility during design is crucial, rather than addressing it as an afterthought. Involving the whole team and educating them to design an inclusive experience — from the code, to the UI, and the content — will create a feeling of accomplishing the job well and allow more people to be involved in the user experience that otherwise may have been excluded.

Bringing stakeholders on board will get easier as time goes by and hopefully, as this becomes standard practice. If they need a nudge, just remind them of the chunk of pie they’ll be missing out on; nobody can resist a good tasting pie.