Inclusive Design Patterns was written by Heydon Pickering.
Many web design articles and books are all about improving your workflow and making your life easier as a developer. Should you wish to adopt a framework or employ a processor to speed up your development process, be our guest. However, this book is not about you; it’s about your audience.
Inclusive Design Patterns covers all the techniques, gotchas and strategies you need to be aware of when building accessible, inclusive interfaces. We’ll explore the document outline, external links and “skip” links, navigation regions and landmarks, labelling and alternative text for illustrations, buttons, tables of contents, JavaScript patterns, touch targets, filter widgets and infinite scrolling and “load more” button and grid display and dynamic content and tab interfaces and password validation and web forms and error messages — and pretty much anything else you need to know about accessibility, including how to prototype with inclusivity in mind, how to deal with legacy browsers and dozens of practical snippets to use when building inclusive interfaces.
What’s in there for you? You can take the lessons learned in the book and apply them within any framework sufficiently flexible to allow you to write and organize good interfaces. One thing is certain: once you read the book, accessibility won’t appear difficult nor confusing any longer — you’ll know exactly what to do, and when.
There’s no such thing as an ‘average’ user, but there is such a thing as an average developer. This book will take you from average to expert in the area that matters the most: making things more readable and more usable to more people. You’ll learn:
Heydon Pickering is a writer, designer and public speaker, the accessibility editor for Smashing Magazine, and an accessibility consultant working with The Paciello Group. He’s interested in new and innovative ways to make The Web an inclusive place. User research, systems thinking and plain old semantic HTML all play their part. When Heydon isn’t writing, coding or illustrating, he experiments with sound design and thrashes out Doom Metal riffs of his detuned SG copy.
