Category Accessibility

Websites aren’t just meant to look good — they are meant to be easy to use for everybody: people who rely on speech, are color-blind or live with dementia. There is no such thing as a normal user, or average user: keeping our content accessible to whatever comes into user’s way is critical for keeping content future-ready.

Improving The Color Accessibility For Color-Blind Users

by Adam Silver

8 min read
No meows just yet

June 21, 2016 — According to Colour Blind Awareness 4.5% of the population are color-blind. If your audience is mostly male this increases to 8%. Designing for color-blind people can be easily forgotten because most ... Read More…

22 more articles

Laurence Ivil & Paul Myles wrote

Designing A Dementia-Friendly Website

May 17, 2016 — Some well-established web design basics: minimize the number of choices that someone has to make; create self-explanatory navigation tools; help people get to what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. Sounds simple enough? Now consider this… An ever growing … Read More…

Rodney Rehm wrote

Making Accessibility Simpler, With Ally.js

December 12, 2015 — I’ve been a web developer for 15 years, but I’d never looked into accessibility. I didn’t know enough people with (serious) disabilities to properly understand the need for accessible applications and no customer has ever required me to know what ARIA is. But I got involved … Read More…

Marcy Sutton wrote

Notes On Client-Rendered Accessibility

May 6, 2015 — As creators of the web, we bring innovative, well-designed interfaces to life. We find satisfaction in improving our craft with each design or line of code. But this push to elevate our skills can be self-serving: Does a new CSS framework or JavaScript abstraction pattern … Read More…

Heydon Pickering wrote

"It's Alive!": Apps That Feed Back Accessibly

April 27, 2015 — It’s one thing to create a web application and quite another to create an accessible web application. That’s why Heydon Pickering, both author and editor at Smashing Magazine, wrote an eBook Apps For All: Coding Accessible Web Applications, outlining the roadmap … Read More…

Léonie Watson & Chaals McCathie Nevile wrote

Accessibility APIs: A Key To Web Accessibility

March 16, 2015 — Web accessibility is about people. Successful web accessibility is about anticipating the different needs of all sorts of people, understanding your fellow web users and the different ways they consume information, empathizing with them and their sense of what is convenient … Read More…

Henny Swan wrote

Accessibility Originates With UX: A BBC iPlayer Case Study

February 23, 2015 — Not long after I started working at the BBC, I fielded a complaint from a screen reader user who was having trouble finding a favorite show via the BBC iPlayer’s home page. The website had recently undergone an independent accessibility audit which indicated that, other than … Read More…

Ruth John wrote

Enhancing User Experience With The Web Speech API

December 5, 2014 — It’s an exciting time for web APIs, and one to watch out for is the Web Speech API. It enables websites and web apps not only to speak to you, but to listen, too. It’s still early days, but this functionality is set to open a whole array of use cases. I’d say that’s pretty … Read More…

Cathy O' Connor wrote

Color Contrast And Why You Should Rethink It

October 22, 2014 — When you browse your favorite website or check the latest version of your product on your device of choice, take a moment to look at it differently. Step back from the screen. Close your eyes slightly so that your vision is a bit clouded by your eyelashes. Can you still see … Read More…

Scott O'Hara wrote

How To Make Modal Windows Better For Everyone

September 15, 2014 — To you, modal windows might be a blessing of additional screen real estate, providing a way to deliver contextual information, notifications and other actions relevant to the current screen. On the other hand, modals might feel like a hack that you’ve been forced to commit … Read More…