What is accessibility and why does it matter?

- [Instructor] The concept of accessibility is kind of self-describing. It's making content accessible to people, but it's important to understand specifically what is accessibility? Why is it so essential? And how do you make it happen? Let's start with a name to make the term more accessible. Accessibility is sometimes shortened to a11y or a one, one y pronounced that way, but never say ally because those are ones not L's and ally has a different meaning. Accessible design cannot be reduced to a list. An accessibility conscious manager will be thinking creatively about how to make sure that products are usable by the largest possible audience. But we can identify five categories to focus on, vision, hearing, motor skills, cognition, and medical issues that can be triggered by harmful flashing designs. Inclusivity is a new frontier in accessible design. It means what it sounds like it means, designing products that make people feel like they're welcome, regardless of disability, race, gender, nationality, or other factors that make our human race so diverse. A valuable resource for accessibility conscious managers is the web content accessibility guidelines. You can follow that work at https//www.w3.org/WAI. Now, I'm not going to lay a lot of URLs on you in this presentation, but here's one you want to make note of. The W3 stands for Worldwide Web. The WAI stands for the Web Accessibility Initiative. When in doubt, this is the go-to resource to help you manage accessible design. The acronym POUR is used by WCAG to provide a broad strokes definition of what it means to create accessible content. It must be content that anyone can perceive, operate, and understand, and products that can work on a range of devices under different conditions. Perceivable means including providing text alternatives for images and sound for people who can't see or hear them. Operable includes allowing functionality for people who can't use a keyboard. Understandable includes readable text and intuitive user interaction. Robust means the really strong pour over coffee that I rely on to get started in the morning. Okay, that's not exactly what it means in accessible design terms. Here it means digital products that work in a wide range of environments, not just phones, not just laptops, but in different environments and in places with poor lighting or noisy background. Accessibility adds value. According to a Georgetown University study, almost 20 million Americans, that's 8% of the population, have visual impairments and according to the US census today, 11 and a half million Americans have some sort of hearing impairment, ranging from difficulty in hearing a conversation to total hearing loss. That's another 10% of the population in the US. That's a huge audience to write off for any website, app, social media project. Better put, that's a large audience to include by ensuring that design and development is accessible, and accessibility improves the experience for everyone. Take closed captioning, for example. In today's culture and economy, people expect that web and app content will be accessible. And here's something else. Government requirements in the US, in Europe, in much of the world require accessibility. And really most fundamentally, making content accessible to everyone is the right thing to do. The more you become attuned to the significance and value of accessible projects, you'll start to notice rather amazing developments that leverage new technology and culture, making web and other digital content available to everyone. For example, there are recent advances in making phones translate visual content into audio instructions for blind people. There are new financial studies on why putting time and money into accessible products produces a positive return on investment, and you'll learn about the value of accessibility in online learning. A very hot topic that I know something about. I'm not going to lie to you, making content accessible takes work, creativity, and thinking, and that does translate into money. But the key to understand that is to keep reminding ourselves why accessible content is essential, and then infusing designers and developers that you work with and lead to be on a mission to create accessible content. And emphasizing accessibility includes developing systems that build accessibility into the entire design process. In short, making substantive arguments to stakeholders on why it is worth it to invest in and care about accessibility. Managing an accessible oriented environment involves testing. Here I'm displaying a quick report generated by the Wave evaluation tool extension in Chrome. In other videos in this course, I demonstrate how to use this tool to check for vision, hearing, operative, and cognitive accessibility. And this is a tool that's accessible to non-professional designers. Here, for example, the web accessibility evaluation tool that is the Wave tool is identifying this site is in compliance with key elements of accessible design, including text that is read aloud for vision impaired and blind users, and design elements that help blind users locate where they are within a page structure. There are defined issues to watch out for in accessible design, but there's also a role for common sense and intuition. People who manage design processes should raise concern if digital content doesn't make sense to them. Involving deaf, blind, motor and cognitive impaired, and excluded people is a critical part of creating and testing accessible products. In other videos in this course, I provide specific tips on how to do that. So, your mission as someone who manages digital design projects is to make sure that designers get the knowledge they need, and are inspired to create designs accessible to the widest range of users and uses, and to develop the backing of stakeholders to make that happen.