From the course: Accessibility-First Design

Use an accessibility-first workflow

From the course: Accessibility-First Design

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Use an accessibility-first workflow

“

- [Instructor] The native web is a strongly accessible experience by default. At its core, the web is for delivering content as efficiently, widely and accessibly as possible. A website with only raw HTML and no custom styles or functionality may not be the most visually exciting, but it'll load quickly, provide well-structured legible typography, respect user preferences, and handle layout responsively across different screen sizes. Additionally, interactive elements will clearly communicate their state, including focus styles when using the keyboard to interact with content. As designers of digital experiences, it's our job and responsibility to preserve this accessibility as we evolve a product from an initial idea to the final user experience. Here's an overview of the accessibility-first workflow. First, plan for accessibility as your team develops the content for your website or app. Written content should be easy to understand and have an intuitive structure like a helpful book outline. If your product has images, video or audio, it's important to create equivalent content such as alternative text, transcriptions or captions, so all users can benefit from this information. Next, it's time to jump directly into code to get the content into the final medium as soon as possible. While most teams wait for a design to be final before beginning development, this is a major missed opportunity for creating accessible user experiences. By getting content into its final medium early in the process, we can ensure it has the proper structure, semantics and interactions without the risk of having to retrofit them later, or worse, forget them entirely. Once the content is live, we can now begin visual design. This is something I call just-in-time design because we wait to make aesthetic decisions until we have a solid accessible foundation to build upon. By waiting until this stage, our designs will be more resilient, accessible and quicker to implement. From here, visual design and remaining development can happen in parallel to introduce custom styling, functionality and final polish. This leverages the shared knowledge of all disciplines. Teams can surface the opportunities and requirements of design and development together to create a more robust user experience. Throughout this process, all disciplines perform various types of accessibility testing to ensure everything is in an always-working state. From content creation to initial design and development through to the launched product, the team can identify and correct accessibility issues as soon as they arise, saving considerable time and effort. At a high level, an accessibility-first workflow is collaborative and iterative. It involves all disciplines working together and considering accessibility from the start to create the best user experience possible.

Contents