User Experience
Accessibility
Plain English
Making sure everyone can use your product, including people with disabilities.
Definition
serviceAccessibilityFind accessibility issues early, improve usability, and build products that are more inclusive, usable, and compliant.Open service is the practice of designing products so they can be used by people with a wide range of abilities, including those with disabilities. It ensures that content and functionality are available to as many users as possible.
In practice
Used to design inclusive glossaryInterfaceAn interface is the point of interaction between a user and a system, where inputs are made and outputs are received. It can be visual, physical, or conversational.Open glossary term through standards such as glossaryWCAGWCAG is a set of guidelines for making digital content accessible to people with disabilities.Open glossary term, ensuring compatibility with assistive technologies and diverse user needs.
In context
It is cheapest when it is a constraint at the start and most expensive as a remediation at the end. The audit at the end of a project usually finds structural problems, not styling ones.
The reality
serviceAccessibilityFind accessibility issues early, improve usability, and build products that are more inclusive, usable, and compliant.Open service is often treated as an afterthought, but fixing it later is always harder and more expensive.
Compared with
Accessibility vs Inclusive Design
serviceAccessibilityFind accessibility issues early, improve usability, and build products that are more inclusive, usable, and compliant.Open service is largely about meeting defined needs and standards, often with a compliance test attached. glossaryInclusive DesignInclusive design is an approach that considers the full range of human diversity when creating products, ensuring they work for as many people as possible. It goes beyond accessibility by designing for different contexts, abilities, and experiences from the start.Open glossary term is a broader approach that considers the full range of human variation from the outset. One has a pass mark; the other does not.
FAQ
Common questions
A few practical answers to the questions that usually come up around this term.
What is accessibility in digital products?
It means designing products that can be used by people with a wide range of abilities.
Why is accessibility important?
It ensures equal access and improves glossaryUsabilityUsability is how easy and efficient it is for users to complete tasks within a product. It focuses on clarity, simplicity, and reducing effort so users can achieve their goals without confusion or friction.Open glossary term for all users.
What are accessibility standards?
Guidelines like glossaryWCAGWCAG is a set of guidelines for making digital content accessible to people with disabilities.Open glossary term that define how to make digital content accessible.
Who benefits from accessibility?
Everyone, including users with disabilities and those in different glossaryContextContext is the set of surrounding conditions that shape how someone behaves and decides, including their goal, their environment, their time pressure, and what happened immediately before. The same action can mean different things in different contexts.Open glossary term.
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