While
building digital products our teams focus on user-friendly flow,
attractive visuals, and performance. Accessibility is overlooked in
most of these scenarios and final product suffer from bad usability
issues or no usability at all in some case for visually impaired
people.
We
live in a world where approximately 1.3 billion people live with some
form of visual impairment, out of these nearly 36 million people are
blind and 217 million people are moderate to severe level visually
impaired. Having such a huge number of visually impaired people is a
big shout for the digital community for inclusiveness. It is not just
our responsibility, but we are morally obligated to serve this big
community.
What is Accessibility?
Accessibility
in design allows people with diverse abilities to access, understand
and perform the desired action with digital products. Improving the
accessibility of product enhances the usability of the interface for
people with low vision, blindness, hearing impairments, cognitive
impairments, motor impairments, and all other users. It not only
improves the usability of products for people with disability but
makes a product much easier to use for the rest of all users. People
with disabilities use assistive technologies, like screen readers,
braille and assistive keyboards for navigating websites and
applications.
Accessibility is for Inclusiveness
Often
it is mistaken by product teams, design accessibility is only for
visually impaired people, that is a half-truth. There are designs
with bad usability, they suffer accessibility issues even when used
by people with no disability. Imagine a digital interface, where
reading is difficult because of low contrast or small type size. Now
think how difficult would it be to read the same copy for people with
weak eyesight.
Read
more on Understanding
Accessibility And Inclusivity
