Main Content
Yesterday, in my UI class, I participated in a UI UN Accessibility Summit workshop designed to help us learn about accessibility design in a new light. Each of us chose a population to research, represent, and advocate for during the workshop. We had to discuss and collaborate to come up with UI accessibility requirements for our redesign of the Sarpy County Voting website.
I represented the dyslexic population. Dyslexia is a life-long language-based learning disability that can make it difficult to read and write. They need clear/simple formatting, text to speech features, and appropriate low contrast between background and text color. My original recommendations for the redesign were to make the default body text size no smaller than 12 pixels, use the Open Dyslexic font, lower contrast between text and background color (making the background white and body text navy blue), and adding a text to speech feature.
Throughout the workshop, I fought for my recommendations to be heard and tried to talk to other students who represented populations with similar needs. I teamed up with the students that represented the photosensitive and blind populations. Their populations have similar needs – text to speech and low contrast – so we teamed up on writing a requirement to make a stronger case. In order to get the student representing the blind/color blind population to team up with me on the low contrast requirement, I had to change my requirement to be more flexible. We changed the website requirement to be including customizable color options with 1. Changeable contrast between text/background, 2. Light/dark mode, and 3. Colorblind mode.
The ally I was not expecting to team up with was the student who represented baby boomers. We teamed up to create a requirement for body headings – headings should use proper heading levels/sizes.
Sometimes, I had to prioritize some needs of another population over my own. My requirement of making the body font Open Dyslexic didn’t pass because no other group saw it as beneficial for them. I instead joined the others for their requirements of 1. Having a Flesch Kincaid reading ease score of greater than 90 and 2. Consistent/clear conveying of information. I supported these other requirements because they would benefit the greatest number of populations while also benefitting mine.
My greatest takeaways from the summit was that even though each group navigates the world differently and has different needs, we were able to work together to find similarities and create requirements that benefitted all of us. This can apply to several other projects I’ll do in the future. Even though groups of people may have different wants and needs, we can always work together to find an outcome that benefits everyone.
Presentation Slides
View my presentation slides here!