What is Inclusive Design ?

Inclusive design considers as many people’s needs and abilities as possible, it goes beyond accessibility which mainly focuses on disabilities and how to make site/apps usable for them. Inclusive design not only considers permanent disabilities but also considers temporary, situational or changing disabilities that affect us all. Situations such as noisy environments, screen glare from the sun or clicking on links that are too close to each other. These situations leave users temporarily disabled and unable to use the site/app. By including inclusive design into the design process, the site/app produced can have a further reach.

The Principles of Inclusive Design

Inclusive

Everyone is able to use your site/app safely, easily and with dignity

Responsive

Taking account of what people say they need and want

Flexible

Allow the product to be used in a variety of different ways

Convenient

Everyone can use your product with ease and suitable access

Accommodating

Regardless of age, gender, mobility, ethnicity or circumstances the product is useable

Welcoming

No barriers that may exclude some people

Realistic

Offering more than one solution to create the right balance and acknowledging that one solution may not work for all

Tips on how to design for everyone

Discover tips when including inclusive design into your process when building a new website or application and how you can make your product more inclusive.

Get to know the people you are designing for

You need to know the group of people you are designing for in order to know what difficulties people may have when using an app or website.

Every customer benefits

Without having accessibility at the very heart of what you do, you will produce products that not only frustrate disabled users but will also cause frustration to every customer. Frustrated customers will be willing to take their money elsewhere.

Identify your assumptions

Questioning assumptions by asking whether the assumptions you think are true and questioning if the opposite is true as well as finding facts to back it up.

Inclusive design should be part of every stage of product development

At the design stage, consider documenting keyboard interaction, reading order, colour contrast, text and media accessibility. Developers will need to know how the app/site behaves when users interact with the content

Design for uncommon users first

Design the product around a keyboard first and then start designing the more common interactions after by placing in the more visual elements.

Be considerate of colour

Colour can be used to enhance communication, however some people may not be able to see certain colours or unable to view the screen due to a poor set up. Firstly, you can use a good contrast with a ratio of 4:1. Avoid relying on colour for meaning, use design element to help enhance the flow and focus of interactions such as underlining links and adding textures as well as colours.

Design inclusive emails

Many email designs use large amounts of text in images however, this means users are unable to highlight the text to change the font or colour and the text will become blurred when zoomed in. For screen readers, there is no hierarchy and therefore the text is not searchable. When the images do not show, the alt text is often too small to read or not shown at all.