Page Overview: Design
This page provides comprehensive guidelines and frameworks for designing accessible environments, products, and services, ensuring that all users, regardless of their abilities, can fully engage with and benefit from digital and physical spaces.
1. Disability Models: This section highlights the diversity of disabilities and the various factors that contribute to different experiences of disability. It emphasizes understanding and respecting the unique challenges faced by individuals, acknowledging that not everyone with a disability shares the same perspective or experience.
2. P.O.U.R. Principles: The acronym P.O.U.R. stands for Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust—key principles for accessible web design. This section outlines how to make content easily perceivable through various senses, operable with different assistive technologies, understandable with clear and consistent formats, and robust enough to work with a range of technologies.
3. Abilities Design: Combines Universal Design, Universal Design for Learning, and Inclusive Design into a comprehensive framework. It allows designers to incorporate elements from each approach to create accessible and inclusive solutions, represented visually by a puzzle with a triangle, circle, and square.
4. Inclusive Design: This section focuses on creating products and services that are usable by the widest range of people without needing special adaptations. Inclusive design involves making thoughtful decisions to accommodate diverse user needs and abilities from the start.
5. Universal Design: Aims to create environments, products, and services that are accessible and usable by everyone, regardless of their age, size, ability, or disability. It emphasizes designing solutions that are beneficial to all users and provides seven guiding principles to ensure broad inclusivity.
6. Universal Design for Learning (UDL): An educational framework that makes learning accessible and effective for all students by offering multiple ways to engage, represent information, and express understanding. This approach supports diverse learning styles and helps reduce barriers to education.
7. Cognitive Accessibility Guidelines: This section addresses how to design for cognitive accessibility to support individuals with cognitive and learning disabilities. It includes guidelines like ensuring content is adaptable, distinguishable, and predictable, as well as providing enough time and input assistance to enhance usability and engagement for all users.
Overall, this page offers detailed strategies and principles to guide the creation of accessible and inclusive designs, ensuring that all users have equal access to information and functionality.
Disability Models
Recognizing the diversity of disabilities is crucial for understanding the wide range of challenges disabled individuals face. It’s also important to acknowledge that not all disabled people share the same experiences or perspectives. Disabilities can arise from various factors, including birth conditions, illnesses, diseases, accidents, or aging. Some individuals may not identify themselves as having disabilities despite facing functional limitations, underscoring the complexity of disability experiences.
For instance, if you have a friend who has ADHD, you might ask them what that entails. Sometimes people are unaware of the struggles others are facing. It’s good for the listener, who gets a broader understanding of what life is like for their friend, and it’s good for the speaker, who can explain the matter properly so there’s no unnecessary confusion. This is what it’s all about: respect and understanding.
While this section isn’t a comprehensive list, it is a peek under the umbrella of disabilities, giving the viewer an idea of what their disabled peers experience.
Auditory
Auditory disabilities range from mild to moderate hearing loss in one or both ears, known as being “hard of hearing,” to severe and permanent hearing loss in both ears, known as “deafness.” Some people with auditory disabilities can hear sounds but may struggle to understand speech, especially with background noise, even if they use hearing aids.
Cognitive & Learning
Cognitive, learning, and neurological disabilities include various brain differences and disorders, as well as mental health issues. These disabilities can affect any part of the nervous system and impact hearing, movement, vision, speech, and understanding. However, they do not always affect a person’s intelligence.
Physical
Physical disabilities, also known as motor disabilities, include muscle weakness, involuntary movements like tremors, lack of coordination, paralysis, reduced sensation, joint problems like arthritis, pain that makes movement difficult, and missing limbs.
Speech
Speech disabilities involve difficulty speaking in a way that other people or voice recognition software can understand. For instance, a person’s voice might be too quiet or unclear to be easily understood.
Visual
Visual disabilities range from mild to moderate vision loss in one or both eyes, called “low vision,” to severe and permanent vision loss in both eyes, called “blindness.” Some people have difficulty seeing certain colors, known as “color blindness,” or are very sensitive to bright colors. These issues with seeing colors and brightness can happen even if their overall vision is otherwise fine.
Diverse Abilities
& Barriers
This page explores the wide diversity of people and abilities. It highlights some web accessibility barriers that people commonly experience because of inaccessible websites and web tools. This resource page is excellent for those who want to better understand the people and disabilities they’re designing for.
P.O.U.R.
Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust
The foundation of WCAG is built upon four main guiding principles, represented by the acronym
POUR: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. These fundamentals are essential for
building an accessible website.
PERCEIVABLE refers to the user’s ability to recognize content and interface elements through their senses.
This could involve visually perceiving a system for many users, while for others, it may involve perception through sound or touch.
OPERABLE indicates the ability of a user to effectively utilize controls, buttons, navigation, and other interactive elements. This often involves the use of assistive technologies such as voice recognition, keyboards, and screen readers for many users.
UNDERSTANDABLE entails that users can grasp the content and easily learn and remember how to navigate your website. Consistency in presentation and format, predictability in design and usage patterns, and suitability to the audience in voice and tone are essential aspects of an understandable website.
ROBUST signifies that content should be strong and reliable enough to be interpreted consistently by a diverse range of users, enabling them to select their preferred technology for interacting with websites, online documents, multimedia, and other information formats. Users should have the freedom to choose
their preferred technologies for accessing OER content.
Abilities Design
Abilities Design is a comprehensive framework that blends Universal Design, Universal Design for Learning,
and Inclusive Design. Its broad scope allows it to serve as an umbrella term for design work that prioritizes accessibility. Designers have the flexibility to mix and match elements from each discipline to create solutions
that meet their specific goals. This approach is visually represented by a puzzle illustration featuring a triangle, circle, and square.
Inclusive Design
Inclusive design is all about creating mainstream products and services that are accessible and usable by as many people as possible without requiring special adaptations. It involves making informed design decisions that consider user diversity, especially those with diverse needs and ability levels.
Universal Design
Universal Design is a design approach that focuses on creating environments, products, and services that are accessible, understandable, and usable by everyone, regardless of their age, size, ability, or disability.
Unlike designs that cater to a specific group, Universal Design aims to meet the needs of as many people as possible. Whether it’s a building, a tool, or a service, when something is designed with Universal Design principles, it becomes convenient and beneficial for everyone. This approach considers the diverse needs of all users from the start, ensuring that everyone can fully participate and enjoy the environment or product.
Universal Design is based on seven principles that guide the creation of more inclusive and user-friendly spaces, products, and systems.
1. Equitable Use: The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities, ensuring that everyone can use it with the same level of ease and dignity.
2. Flexibility in Use: The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities, allowing users to choose how they interact with it.
3. Simple & Intuitive Use: The design is easy to understand, regardless of the user’s experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level.
4. Perceptible Information: The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user’s sensory abilities.
5. Tolerance for Error: The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions, reducing the risk of harm.
6. Low Physical Effort & Size: The design can be used efficiently and comfortably, with minimal fatigue, making it accessible to people of all physical strengths and abilities.
7. Space for Approach & Use: The design ensures that appropriate size and space are provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use, regardless of the user’s body size, posture, or mobility.
Universal Design for Learning
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is an educational framework designed to make learning accessible and effective for all students, regardless of their abilities or learning styles. The main goal of UDL is to empower learners to become purposeful, resourceful, and action-oriented in their educational journey. UDL is built on three key principles:
1. Engagement: Offering different ways to motivate and engage students, ensuring they are interested and invested in their learning.
2. Representation: Presenting information in multiple ways so that all students can access and understand the material, whether through text, audio, visuals, or other methods.
3. Action & Expression: Providing students with various ways to demonstrate what they have learned, allowing them to express their understanding in ways that work best for them.
By applying these principles, UDL reduces barriers to learning and ensures that all students can participate in meaningful and challenging learning experiences.
Cognitive Accessibility Guidelines
Cognitive accessibility is crucial because it ensures that individuals with cognitive and learning disabilities can effectively process and interact with information. These disabilities, which include conditions like ADHD, autism, and dyslexia, impact how people perceive, remember, and understand content. By designing technology that accommodates different strategies for navigating and presenting information, we can create a more inclusive experience, optimizing engagement for those with cognitive challenges.
Existing standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), outline seven specific success criteria to support cognitive accessibility:
1. Adaptable: Ensures that content can be presented in various formats, such as visually, audibly, or tactilely, without losing its meaning or structure. This allows users to perceive information in ways that suit their individual needs and ensures accessibility through assistive technologies.
2. Distinguishable: Ensures that content is easy to perceive by separating foreground from background elements. This involves providing sufficient contrast in visual content and making sure that audio content is clear and louder than background noises.
3. Enough Time: Ensures users have sufficient time to read and interact with content, acknowledging that individuals with disabilities may require more time to complete tasks due to physical, visual, or technological reasons. This guideline aims to remove or extend time limits to accommodate varying user needs, ensuring everyone can fully engage with content without undue pressure.
4. Navigable: Ensures users can easily find and understand their current location within content by providing clear navigation options like headings and menus. This is especially important for users with assistive technologies or cognitive disabilities, as it helps them efficiently navigate and orient themselves in the content.
5. Readable: Ensures that text content is readable and accessible for all users, including those using assistive technologies. This involves making sure that text is presented clearly, with appropriate language and context, so users can comprehend the content whether they are reading it visually, hearing it read aloud, or experiencing it through other means.
6. Predictable: Ensures that web pages and their interactive elements are designed to appear and operate consistently across different pages This helps users easily understand and navigate content by maintaining a familiar layout and predictable behavior for components like navigation bars and buttons.
7. Input Assistance: Helps users avoid and correct errors by providing clear and effective error identification and recovery options. It focuses on minimizing mistakes and ensuring that users can easily detect, understand, and fix errors, especially for those using assistive technologies or with visual or cognitive impairments.