What is Accessibility?
Accessibility is when you design the world and/or your content to be useable by those with disabilities.
Examples in the Environment
Accessibility is all around you in public environments. A few examples of accessibility in the physical world would be:
- Curb cuts at corners, allowing wheelchair users to safely go from the sidewalk to the road
- Truncated domes, those yellow squares at cross walks with bumps all over them, is a physical way of warning people there is vehical traffic ahead
- Stop lights always having red on top, yellow in the middle, and green on the bottom allows color blind people to safely follow traffic lights
Digital Examples
Websites
You can find accessibility in many websites. It's shown in many places, such as:
- Buttons having an increased size so it doesnt take precision to click on them
- Videos, gifs, and audio do not automatically play when you visit a page
- Navigation panes are consistant across the site
Documents
Document accessibiliy is very similar to website accessibility, as they are both in a digitial environment and follow the same guidelines.
Most of document accessiblity involves working with the program to make your document able to be properly read by screen readers.
- Using a programs headings
- Creating "real" lists
- Making sure content is in the right order