Inclusive designs: Accessibility solutions
With the start of a new decade in the world of design, there is an increasing focus on inclusive design. This implies that UX professionals all over the tech industry are more inclined towards making designs that are inclusive because it’s a user-friendly design.
Inclusive design is not new in the world of UX designing, rather it is at the heart of UX design. Whether it is designing of login screen, any search experiences or any buying process, if in case your users get the feeling of exclusion from the experience, they might drop out of it completely.
Inclusive design is one of the most effective ways to enhance the user experience of any kind of identity, experience, or background.
What is an inclusive design?
Also called universal design solutions, it is something that goes beyond accessibility to make a web page or app highly inclusive. In simple words, inclusive design is the practice of purposefully making the inclusion of users’ requirements who are more likely to experience exclusion in various aspects of their day-to-day lives because of being a part of an oppressed group.
A UI/UX solutions professional holds the power to shape things to change the nature and the direction of any project. That is a big responsibility and this means you keep the capability to affect design decisions in various ways that are beneficial for people often ignored.
Everybody who is contributing to the designing of a digital product such as the software developers, the product managers, and also the professionals of talent acquisition is responsible for the social effect of the solutions they are delivering, the decisions they are making, and those also which they choose not to make.
Thus, the simplest way of defining an inclusive design is a designing approach that allows the delivery of solutions that are not only easy to access but give people a welcoming, valued, and safe feeling.
Two important elements of an inclusive design
A perfect team
With a diverse team, it becomes easy to notice and overcome all individual biases. A design team that comprises people from various cultural backgrounds, different abilities, and gender identities is more powerful than a team with people who have the same look, behavior, thinking, and identification. Thus, it’s good to develop a team that can notice and design solutions for a wide range of user requirements.
Involvement of users
UI/ UX solutions depend on the belief that the users must be the main stakeholder, and a product and solutions must be shaped keeping them in the center. Contact the users as it is necessary while designing for groups of users whom you do not know. As per some expert views, it’s important to design with the users. If you think your design should offer value to all, then you need to design with the excluded communities. This is the main component of an inclusive design and all universal design solutions work.
Best practices of an inclusive design
When talking about inclusive design, the primary thing that people take into consideration is accessibility. It refers to designing products, services, atmosphere, and services that can be used by people having disabilities. While inclusive design is more than accessibility apprehensions, accessibility solutions are an important part of it.
Inclusive images
Each time, you are considering people through images or icons, make sure you have included a wide group of people. For instance, you can involve abstract images of both male and female individuals or make use of images that signify the complete spectrum of humanity. Inclusive images make sure that a wide group of people can be recounted for the images that are shown on your webpage.
Inclusive copies
An inclusive copy focuses on making words for all. The best place to start is the creation of an inclusive copy using easy-to-understand languages. By making use of simple language and short sentences, it becomes inclusive for all. Long and complicated sentences having technical jargon can make things complex for users having any disabilities.
Functional forms
One of the elements that is most neglected is forms. While doing a collection of sensible personal information like age, gender, and race, some people might feel excluded by the selections you are providing. To prevent this, take into consideration all answers to personal queries or facilitate users for typing answers into a field text.
Give priority to inclusive research practices
Make sure all your inclusive design methods are collecting information from a wide range of users. In addition, make sure you are asking queries that go beyond the traditional considerations and get input from persons with varied abilities, cultural backgrounds, and situational contexts. This makes sure all your designers have a strong understanding of several ways that users interact with and understand your products and services.
Advantages of an inclusive design
Inclusive design is beneficial for both you as well as your consumers and keeps the potential for making your product successful. Other than that there are some other benefits:
- Increased user experience: Right from allowing users to make adjustments to color contrast ratios or size of the text to auto-completion of the prompts and voice control, inclusive designs increase user experience substantially.
- The wide reach of audience: Inclusive design is best for optimization techniques as it includes alt text, descriptive link text, enclosed captioning, and transcripts. It assists users in finding content easily thereby increasing the reach of the audience.
- Legal adherence: When you create an inclusive design, it assists you in remaining in compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Americans with Disabilities. Compliance helps in lessening the chance of any lawsuits.
Thus, inclusive design is one of the approaches that create accessible products and experiences that are easily usable by a wide range of people. It goes beyond accessibility to consider the wide needs, experiences, and backgrounds of users.
The inclusive design method makes sure that all persons no matter what their gender, native language, physical abilities, and location, can enjoy and make use of products or services.
Conclusion
Inclusive designs are those that go beyond the assumptions of demographics to adapt to a wide range of human diversities. They offer the best user-centric design for granting equal access all over the board. When you make your design work accessible for people from every background, level of ability, and other such categories, it gives assurance of strong brand recognition