Usability: the nexus of accessibily and design
recorded on November 04, 2020
As a developer, this scenario might sound familiar: You are puzzling over a design, trying to figure out that perfect combination of semantic markup and ARIA you'll need to build it. You spend hours on it but the deeper you get, the more you ask yourself, “Does this thing that I’m building even make sense?” You go to the designer to talk it through but end up in an uncomfortable conversation where you’re pretty sure that neither of you understood where the other was coming from. If Accessibility is the practice of designing and building things that can be used by everyone then Accessibility has to be present in the design before it can be built. And what you might not know is that everything you already know about Accessibility can be used as a way to talk about the troubled parts of a design in a way that designers understand. Accessibility and Design are like two languages that share a common root: Usability. In this episode I’ll talk about some common issues and how you can bring them up with your design partners in ways that you’ll both understand.**
