Thursday 18 February 2021

Albert Shum on Inclusive Design

https://medium.com/microsoft-design/

Albert Shum's short article on Inclusive Design Thinking at Microsoft writing about how an inclusive process creates more accessible and ethical products.

Image source: https://miro.medium.com/max/4008/1*6sJ-KJPswlcvUAtveuBfvQ.png


Tuesday 16 February 2021

Thursday 11 February 2021

Designing for access seminars "We don't need to compromise..."

Designing for access seminars:

"We don't need to compromise between usability and access - it can be Yes And..."

Our guests will be talking about their experience as users and/or as designers, making apps and services accessible.
  • About the market need for accessibility to be met.
  • About some of the practical access-skills designers need to test the features and judge accessibility function/performance.
  • And some of the practicalities of how access design can become integral to the design/development lifecycle.

We touch on questions like:

  • What are the trade-offs (if any) between accessibility and usability for the things we design?
  • What are the challenges of making the case for accessibility from day one?
  • Is it our job to raise clients' awareness about accessibility requirements when pitching a project/product?
  • How tough is your audience of users who have access needs? How do you get them on-side?
  • How deep does access functionality need to go?
  • How do you evaluate an app for different kinds of accessibility use?
  • What lessons have you learnt that improved your approach on new projects?
  • Opening career paths... and organisations where accessibility is a core value?

Thursday 4 February 2021

Balally Luas stop: Time-lapse video

I was curious about how useable the various ticketing systems used for the Luas tram system are. The Luas is a light rail tram running in Dublin, Ireland.

There are two lines, the green line running from St Stephen's Green to Cherry Orchard near Bray, and the red line running from The Point/Connolley Station, to Saggart in the South West of County Dublin. The Balally Luas stop is halfway along the green line (link to map of Luas Green Line stops) and serves the Dundrum Town Centre shopping district, nearby Airfield Farm and surrounding suburban area. https://luas.ie/balally.html

This video covers a 15 minute period, using time-lapse, the footage is sped up 2,000%. I added a blur to anonymise the citizens and a vignette to provide a focusing effect.

Watch the sweep pattern of the two security personnel in black.

Watch 5 trams pass through as the person in orange struggles with the ticket machines on both platforms, and still doesn't catch the tram.

Tags: Luas, time-lapse, public transportation, Dundrum, Ireland
Balally Luas stop, Dundrum, Dublin. by Allen Higgins on Vimeo.

Wednesday 3 February 2021

A goldmine for designing for usability and access

Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft, has championed deep change in the organisation, placing a very high value on inclusive design and fluent design (the Fluent Design System is Microsoft's latest, highly capable, interface design tool/template suite)


Microsoft Inclusive Design page

As a company committed to access and inclusivity, Microsoft hosts a library of Inclusive Design resources - guidelines, and instructional material. Microsoft also provides software for reviewing other software for accessibility. For example, canvas apps are easily evaluated using the accessibility checker (intro. to the App Checker )



(51) IDEO Method Cards

A product design research methods compendium

These methods are organised into four families representing the emphasis in how each method may be applied. However, there is no reason why you shouldn't consider a method applicable to one of the other categories. These methods simply represent ways to inspire us to consider different ``ways to empathize with people'' to seek insights, understand behaviour, perceptions, needs, goals [IDEO, 2003]. All these methods and categories emphasise the empirical world as the source of ideas and inspirations. The empirical world encompassing social and material structure, attending empirical moments and events as nexuses of action, historical and scientific context, the happening of things of both great and small significance (global and local).

The idea underlying `Learn' is that hard data, measurements, statements of the facts as they may be known. Observations and data gathered from empirical settings, treating the world as a kind of living lab. This sort of data tends to be treated as more objective, scientific, and provides the material for more statistical and quantitative analyses. It offers the potential for revealing unexpected patterns and insights that demand the use of other methods to understand further. `Learn' methods help us build the data and evidence addressing focused research questions, to follow up hunches and ideas that may be tested or evidenced by measurement data (rather than data mining as such).

The `Look' category implies that people going about their lives and happenings in the world are our best teachers. These are methods for gathering insights from interpretive observations, shadowing and participating in `the wild' [Buxton, 2007]. These methods emphasise the value of the empirical world in the language and terms of its use by its participants. The data gathered depict social realities, actual happenings and incidents; evidence of real people with biographies coping in actual settings, surrounded and constituted in the (seemingly) ephemeral and trivial real-world of people. `Look methods' enable generalised undirected problem identification, the broad assessment of an area before narrowing down on a specific concern.

`Ask' methods seek people's direct participation in constructing research data. People aren't `social dopes', they understand their own conditions. People have points of view and knowledge that they will readily share if you enable them. While this kind of knowledge may be idiosyncratic and bounded the more of it you can gather the more universal may be our understanding overall. `Ask' methods are useful when you have identified a research goal, an application, and a context. They are ways of revealing insider knowledge and practical contingencies that your project will encounter and leverage.

`Try' methods are all kinds of action research, some in-vitro (experimental setting) and some in-vivo (in the wild). These are methods that test how your project may work, how it may change behaviour and understanding, how useful and applicable it is. `Try' methods are active designed interventions and thus quite experimental in character. They encompass controlled simulations, experimental scenarios, to living labs in `the wild'. The focus of these methods is testing. They test feasibility, practicality, understandability. They seek people's active involvement and feedback on the design and application of the project.




(source: the IDEO Method Cards booklet [IDEO, pp. 2-3, 2003])

References

Buxton, B. (2007). Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco.
IDEO (2003). IDEO Method Cards: 51 Ways to Inspire Design. William Stout, Palo Alto, CA.

Tuesday 2 February 2021

W3C and access to the web

  The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the international community behind the standards that the world wide web runs on. Its members develop the standards that the Web runs on. 

"Led by Web inventor and Director Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Jeffrey Jaffe, W3C's mission is to lead the Web to its full potential"
 

Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web is quoted as saying that "the power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."

W3C provides tools for testing web page accessibility and advice on the changes that we all need to make.

https://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at W3C provides a range of resources, guidelines, tools and applications to help make the Web accessible to people with auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual disabilities.