Original subtitles

Hi there. Earlier we introduced

inclusive design as a method for making

design choices that take into

account personal identifiers like ability,

race, economic status, language, age, and gender.

One of the biggest parts of

inclusive design is designing for accessibility.

In this video, we'll explore

the concept of accessibility.

First, we'll review what accessibility

means in the field of UX design.

Then we'll discuss how many people

have a disability globally.

Finally, we'll go through

three ways to think about disability.

Let's recap. The term "accessibility" refers to the design of

products, devices, services, or environments

for people with disabilities.

We call it a11Y in the industry, and

it's something that should guide all of our work.

Because I'm sure you're wondering,

the 11 in the middle refers to

the number of letters

between the first letter in the word

"accessibility" and the last letter.

Alright, let's zoom out a little. What are some of the groups of

people we're considering when we think about accessibility?

In academia and the tech industry,

we tend to think about accessibility

in four big categories:

People with motor disabilities;

people who are deaf or hard of hearing;

people with cognitive disabilities,

like developmental, learning, or intellectual disabilities;

and people with vision disabilities.

It's also important to keep in mind that

some people have concurrent disabilities, where

for example, a motor or

cognitive disability can contribute

to challenges with speech.

It's easy to assume that accessibility

just means solving for one specific need,

like mobility, but accessibility

is much broader than that.

Accessibility is about making things

accessible to all people,

whether they have an obvious disability or not.

You might be surprised to find out that

more than 1 billion people

around the world have a disability.

That's right, 1 billion.

That's out of a global population of 7.8 billion.

This means 13 percent of

people around the world have a disability.

In the U.S., one in

four adults identifies as having a disability.

In other words, people with

accessibility needs are a huge percentage of

the population, and we're missing out on helping

a lot of users if we don't build accessible products.

But demographics can be misleading;

there are a lot more people with

a disability than the statistics account for.

In the disability community and as UX designers,

we focus on the social model of disability,

which defines a disability as

being caused by the way society is

organized or how products are

designed rather than a person's ability or difference.

As designers, we need to

account for disabilities that are permanent,

temporary, or situational in our designs.

Someone with a permanent disability might have

permanent loss of hearing, sight, or smell.

Someone else might have a temporary impairment,

like a broken arm or

loss of hearing after a loud concert.

We also need to consider situational challenges.

Situational challenges

often aren't considered legal disabilities,

but we still need to solve them.

An example of a situational challenge

is when you're driving on a dark road late at night,

your vision is probably not as

clear as it would be in the daylight,

which is a situational challenge.

Another example is if you're visiting

a country where you don't speak the language,

your hearing is situationally limited.

As UX designers, we need to keep all of these types of

disabilities in mind as we

design features or new products.

Think about inclusive product features

that increase magnification,

like enlarged font. Or features that help

everyone understand videos, like Closed Captions.

These features were designed to enhance

the experience for people with a disability

but are used by a wide variety of

people, and sometimes products that are

originally adopted by the disability community

can reach a wider audience.

For example, when the typewriter

was invented hundreds of years ago,

it was an incredibly useful device

for people who were blind.

But most people who did not have a disability

didn't see why it was necessary,

when they could just write with pen and ink.

Later, the typewriter gained

more mainstream popularity and of course,

much later, it inspired the design of personal computers.

Here's the key takeaway:

If we make the design of

a product easier for people with disabilities,

we also often make it a

better experience for everyone else.

Designing for accessibility isn't an obstacle,

but a way to get our products to

as many users as possible.

We'll elaborate on how you can apply

accessibility principles to your designs

throughout the rest of the program.

We'll explore the idea of

equity-focused design in more detail later.