Have you ever considered if your website’s design is inclusive for everyone?
Inclusive design is a newer concept, but an important one. Design always has two parts: an emotional aspect, and a functional aspect. The emotional aspect allows your user to identify with and feel connected to your brand, while the functional side is how your user interacts with the brand and design itself. Inclusive design focuses on both of these aspects, with the goal of being able to share your message with everyone, regardless of abilities.
Making an inclusive website simply means designing for everyone. Not only is it the more ethical thing to do, but it’s also a way to spread the reach of your brand. In this article, I’m going to explain the principles of inclusive website design for people with audio and visual disabilities.
Websites are fundamentally a visual medium, leading one to think that the hearing impaired would have no problem navigating a website on a day to day basis. However, there are many things that can impede how a person with hearing impairments interacts with a design or website.
Marie van Driessche, a Dutch designer based in Amsterdam, specializes in inclusive design for people with hearing impairments, like herself. She is fascinated by the way in which people interact with digital products and web pages. Let's look at the main obstacles of inclusive web design and her recommendations to overcome them.
For many deaf people, written language is their second language - the first being sign language. This can create some difficulties in understanding the information presented on a website. For example, some people may struggle to understand synonyms, play-on-words, puns, and metaphors because these concepts exist differently in sign language.
To increase understanding, van Driessche recommends these guidelines:
Videos are a fantastic method for communicating information in a visual way. But in many cases, narration can rest on spoken language alone, which creates accessibility issues for the hearing impaired. How can we solve it?
The ideal solution would be to have the videos “dubbed” in sign language. When you start playing the video, an icon pops up informing the user that the information is available in this language, allowing the user can choose which one to watch.
But due to budget constraints and interpreter availability, this is not an option for all companies.
The simpler solution in the majority of cases is to add subtitles to the video. There are a few guidelines you should follow when adding subtitles. For example, respecting the minimum time the words are on the screen and the maximum number of characters per line. The subtitles should reflect the content that is being spoken about, but it does not have to be a literal translation. In fact, it is okay to condense the information.
Finally, there is also the option to make a transcript of the video available to users. Automatic transcriptions can be a good initial step, but they often contain errors and can be difficult to read, so they need to be reviewed by a professional.
In the United States, there are around 4 million people with impaired vision, according to the US Department of Health. However, not everyone has the same circumstances or needs the same accommodations. It’s important to understand what kind of visual impairments exist:
Take a look at your website with your eyes squinted. If you can still read and understand it, then it is likely that you have a good amount of legibility and a more inclusive design.
The world uses colors as a way to communicate. For example, red is used as a warning and green is used to imply that something is right. But these tones are actually the most difficult tones to distinguish for most people with color blindness.
For an inclusive design, try using a variety of resources, such as symbols, texts, or textures. When you have finished designing a page on your website, take a look at it in grayscale and see if you can still understand the message.
Screen readers are a device that allows people with full blindness or extremely limited visibility to access to the web. To make it easy for screen readers to analyze a webpage, the following recommendations should be taken into account:
I hope these tips help you make your website more user-friendly and inclusive for everyone who uses it!