From Education & Outreach
Introduction
Scope of accessibility and inclusive design
- Accessibility
- Focused on the needs of people with disabilities exclusively
- Concerned with ensuring there are no barriers for use for people with disabilities
- Understanding how new technologies can be used by people with disabilities
- Inclusive design
- Developing products and services that are usable by the widest possible audience
- Responds to situational limitations, e.g. low bandwidth, poor lighting conditions, noisy environments
- Considers needs of people with disabilities but only in concert with other needs
Similarities
- [Tentative] This might not really be needed
How inclusive design helps people with disabilities
- Examples might help here:
- Creating high contrast will help people in poor lighting environments, such as outside in the sun. For people with colour discrimination high contrast might be necessary for them to be able to perceive the content.
- Adding captions to video will help people in noisy environments, but for people with hearing problems captions are vital to understanding video content.
- Need to explore instances where it does not help
- Using iconography as primary communication to help mobile or non-native speakers may cause problems for people with cognitive difficulties.
- ...
Benefits of an accessible approach
- Specialist accommodations have broader benefits
- Accessible interfaces tend to provide more usable interfaces
- Reduce barriers specific to people with disabilities
- Accessible approach demands better code structure; maintenance, reuse, clarity, quality, robust.
Learning more about accessibility
- Provide links to and summaries for developer resources
- Tutorials, BAD, How people with disabilities use the web,...
