The Importance of Accessibility in Design

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Nico Blaser is a product designer at Xing, and he fights for the users. He says that when we design things intentionally to be more inclusive, we are making them better for everyone to begin with. In many cases where doing something in an accessible way has resulted in something that was more cluttered or was more difficult to use for people that weren't disabled,. I would argue that those designs were actually more flawed from the beginning.

Derek Featherstone teaches us how designing for people with disabilities is really just better design for everybody. He shows us how people with disabilities aren’t different from us, they just use different tools to accomplish the same things. He encourages us to apply empathy to grow our skills in learning how to design for accessibility. He also reveals how taking small steps to incorporate something new into our design process could change everything.

Origin Story (5:53)
What Were Your “Aha” Moments? (12:02)
Why Do We Tend to Forget About Disabled Users? (17:15)
Tools Disabled Folks Use to Navigate (20:47)
Accessibility, Greater Than Aesthetics (31:37)
Has Designing for Accessibility Ever Made Things Worse for Majority of “Able” Users? (36:14)
Story of Biggest Triumph in Designing for Inclusivity + Accessibility (42:36)
What’s a Roadmap for Learning this Stuff? (44:56)
Contact Info (47:35)

Check out the detailed show notes and Eli Jorgensen’s astonishing superhero artwork at userdefenders.com/051

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