The practice of making your applications usable
Two months ago, my wife invite me to a “blind date”. It took place in a “blind restaurant” where the waitresses are blind, and the guests sit in complete darkness. For one evening I felt the challenges that people with disabilities have. It was just after I had the honor to lead an upgrade of our platform for better support for accessibility. This challenge help me to understand better why we should apply accessibility for all our users in the application. In this article, I want to share two lessons I learned from this evening.
Accessibility <> ugly
Just before we left the restaurant I wanted to go back in and turn on the lights to see the space we were in that night. I learned later on that the place was organized by a designer, even though no one sees the colors or feels the good materials the furnitures were made of. When starting to design the user experience, we should include the tech mythologies, when we design properly the tech parts it helps avoid some hacks and patches during the work. One of the great part about accessibility is that it helps you design your architecture properly. For example, when using the voice reader it is mandatory that the DOM is organized in a very tight and smart way. This mythology is important not only because of the voice reader, this approach will help also for re-using component on the platform, avoid repeating HTML and css structure, and if you use components based architecture it will help to organize the events between child and parent components.
Accessibility is needed for all users
When speaking about accessibility we always think about small amount of users who face various kind of disabilities. The truth is that accessibility can help each of our users, in different situations. for example, when you’re holding a cup of tea using your “strong” hand, while trying to type on your phone with your weak hand, or by waking up in the morning and trying to read the letters that flicker on your screen. I always find myself redirected to the wrong link, when I try to click on small links with my thick fingers.
“You’ve got to make the back of the fence, that nobody will see, just as good looking as the front of the fence”
Paul jobs
These words that Setve jobs’s dad said while building a fence - developed his design philosophy for Apple. The same attitude can be right regrading life, tech and specially for accessibility. Accessibility isn’t just about the user experience it includes also building the right architecture which will help deliver your application for each of your users.
