In this article, I will share my experience after taking the course by Interaction-Design Foundation, called “Accessibility: How to Design for All”. Personally, I think in this platform you can learn lots of new abilities and develop your skills related to UX Design but mostly, tools that will open new opportunities to keep creating positive impact in your communities.
Accessibility can be viewed as the concept of whether a product or service can be used by everyone - and be able to benefit from this system or entity. Nowadays is known to enable access to innovations, products, systems or everyday tasks to people with disabilities.
Accessibility and Usability
Commonly, both terms get confused and tangled between each other. When we talk about usability, it is about the effectiveness, efficiency and the satisfaction of the result designed. So, usability should already include accessibility. However, in most cases, it is still missing the accessible side that focuses on the user experience of people with disabilities.
About the course
How to design for all is a complete course where we will find specific tools created to make websites, applications, and software, mostly, as accessible as possible.
Frank Spillers is the expert that guides the whole course. He talks mainly from his experience in diverse companies and projects, where his role has been to collaborate in diverse teams to make systems and product more accessible. Through the whole course, he explains concisely the details of each tool that exists and gives a complete review into each one, which, in my opinion, helps us understand them even better.
The practical part of the course teaches diverse existing guidelines such as The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the use of content management system (CMS), personas (users), the importance of using the header tags and most of the formats in the right way, tools like WAVE, colour oracle and ARIA to assure that the design is accessible, among others. Before taking this course, I have never heard about this software that helps webpages, applications and interfaces to be accessible. But after using them for some exercises (suggested by IDX), I can easily identify them and keep track on how to use them for my projects.
In this course, I have learned how to proactively incorporate accessibility into design and development, so that products are meaningful and usable by all, regardless of disabilities. I also learned to build an accessibility program and execute it across an organization to ensure that people with visual, auditory, cognitive and mobility disabilities can use and operate technologies.
Also, during the course there is a couple of users being interviewed. One of my favourites, is near the middle of the course, where we can see in one chapter, an example of a moderated user testing with a person with visual disability. She is being monitored through each step of the prototype by Frank Spillers, of an application of a map around the city; and even though she is familiarized with accessible technology and specialized devices, she still struggles and has lots of pain points during the usage of this application.
This type of example shows the real struggles that users live every day to use the products we launch and for me, it is important to consider all these situations in order to be more assertive when designing. We must remember that the product will not complete the usability if it is not accessible.
Review
In summary, IDF’s course “Accessibility: How to Design For All” is a great course to begin your accessibility journey; even though they have some specific parameters that require previous knowledge, it gets as simple as pausing the course, researching for more details online and then coming back to keep note of the given tips and tools.
I would completely recommend to take this certification, since it is a very useful course not only for accessibility but also to understand the usability parameters; It is important to mention that the information that you get from here, will be useful for your UX processes in general.
If you need help to know if your product is accessible or not, Contact us for a consult.