What is Inclusive Design?

Have you ever had an experience where you felt like you didn’t belong?

Think about it for a couple of minutes, what were you feeling in that moment? What kind of thoughts were racing through your mind? Was there ANYTHING that you could do about changing that experience? This is often how people with disabilities feel when they’re wanting to participate in an experience.

There are laws in the U.S. that allow for equal access due to the American Disability Act in July 1990. When the world wide web came into play in 1989, there were certainly no laws around that, at least not until May of 1999. That was 10 years until that came into play. Even in 2020, which is 20 years later, there’s still a lot of work to do around education of accessibility & inclusivity.

I’m going to be focusing on the Inclusive Design Principles. This is a foundational set of principles that can actually be applied to anything that you’re creating online. The focus generally is created for your website, but I do think you can apply this concept to anything that you’re creating online.

Inclusive Design Principles

As we go through these design principles, the idea is for you to think about how a person’s experience is as they go through your website, your online course, You want to be sure that a person with a disability would have a comparable experience as a person with no disabilities.

• Provide Comparable Experience

• Consider Situation

• Be Consistent

• Give Control

• Offer Choices

• Prioritize Content

• Add Value

Provide Comparable Experience

Ensure your platform provides a comparable experience for all people

• Content for Alternative: This refers to Alt Text, Transcriptions (for videos or podcasts), Audio Descriptions, Open/Closed Captions

  Each one of these makes it possible for the content to be accessible in a different way. You will need to consider how a person would experience your online course, your Instagram Stories, or your Website

• Ergonomic Features: A really good example of this is allowing for your audience to select how they can view their captions (ex. black box with white captions, or just yellow text with no box.) Enabling your audience to customize this feature would really make their experience much more comparable

Consider Situation

People will use your platform in different situations

You want to consider that not everyone is viewing your content in the exact same way. Some people are viewing it on their mobile phone, their laptops, via different website platforms such as Safari, Chrome, Firefox.

• Color Contrast: Often when someone is viewing something when they’re outside, it’s really hard to see on their phones. So if you enable that they can adjust the contrast, it’ll lessen the impact of the bright sunshine. Think about how Apple enabled us to adjust the brightness of our screen so that we don’t have that phone glare at nighttime. It’s a great feature.

• Captions on the Go: Having the video AUTO play is SUPER annoying. I probably don’t know one person that likes having the video auto play when they go onto someone’s website, or if they are scrolling through their feed and the sound is blasting. You want to consider that a lot of videos are actually consumed on mobile devices, and people will often have their sound automatically switched off, so they need to be able to turn the captions on/off.

• Context Sensitive Help: When creating a sales page, you may have multiple buttons that take you to a form that allows you to fill it out. If you just say click here, that doesn’t really tell the user where it’s going to take them.
  
  Be clear when you’re creating forms & interaction. It may feel redundant if you have multiple buttons on one single page where it takes them to the same page, but it really does help the user with decision making as to whether to click the button or not.

Be consistent

Use familiar platforms and apply them consistently

• Consistent Design Patterns: This should be easy to do especially if you’ve already developed your brand visuals. Use similar structures for your various sales pages, use what the website platform (Squarespace, Shopify, etc.) has created. They’ve designed their templates for a reason!

• Consistent Editorial: Everyone has written content. You’ll want to use the website’s style sheets to help you maintain consistency throughout your whole page. If you customize something, be sure to apply it across the board.

• Consistent Page Architecture: When you are consistent with your style sheets, you’ll be able to create a consistent page architecture. This will allow for people to be able to easily navigate through your website with limited issues. 

Think about when you go shopping online at your favorite store. Whether you’re looking for some shirts for you or your kid, the fundamental design of both pages is the same. All of this is because the company has made sure they were consistent throughout their website no matter what content was on the page.

Give Control

Ensure people are in control

Let your user be in control. They should be able to access and interact with content in their own preferred way. 

• Scrolling Control: If there is infinite scrolling, you’ll actually cause problems for users who are navigating by keyboard. This actually impedes them from going past a certain point on your website. Instead, it’s suggested that you add the load more button, so they can continue to view the content.

• Make it Stop: I know you’ve spent some money on having a video created for your website and it’s amazing! But some people just don’t like it. Let them have the ability to turn it off. Or parallax scrolling, it actually causes people nausea! So if they can disable that setting, that’s great!

• Allow Zoom: Think about when you’re on your mobile device such as your phone or tablet. And you’re trying to read something but they disabled the zoom effect. Well, i guess I’m not going to view your website. You need to allow for people to use the zoom gesture on their device.

Offer Choice

Give users different ways to complete the tasks

• Multiple ways to complete an action: think about how one may fill out a form. Whether someone wants to use the tab button or the mouse to jump from line to line.

• Accessible Alternatives: For an online course, you’ll want to consider offering different ways for your audience to consume the content. Some people don’t want to consume it via video, they may prefer to have an outline. Some prefer captions on their videos, some prefer transcripts.

• Layout: A great example is how Asana allows for people to view their projects in board or list view.

Prioritize Content

Help your users focus on core tasks, features and information by prioritizing them

Often times a site or an app (if you’re developing one may have a lot of information & functionality), people need to be able to focus on one thing at a time. You want to be able to identify the core purpose of the page, the app, that you have people on. 

• Keeping task focused: progressively reveal features and content when needed, not all in one go

• Prioritizing tasks: A great example of this is how your email can be structured. Your inbox is the priority over the rest. Spam and sent is later on down the list. 

• Prioritizing Content: Keeping people focused on the content that is important. For instance, one may create a landing page so that it focuses people on that one offer without having them be distracted to go to another portion of their website. Once the task is completed, then they’ll be shown the way for the rest of the website. 

Add Value

Consider the value of the features and how they improve the experience for your users

Emily Walker of Modern Leaders Collective, she is an expert in Design Learning. She places a ton of emphasis on honing in on exactly what you want to offer and offer that ALONE. It’s her mission to help people create programs that will actually be completed (the statistics say that less than 10% of course takers actually complete the course.)

• Pick and choose exactly what you’re teaching

• Keep your website simple

• Be weary of information overload

“I believe that while being accessible is important, it is only a part of inclusive design. Inclusive design is about designing for diversity, for anyone, anywhere, anytime. Design for one, design for all.”