I’ve been thinking about how to describe what I am working on to people that are not interested in technologies at all. And as I focus on accessibility more and more, I thought about what does it really mean. I’ve came to a simple definition;
Giving people with different preferences alternatives – giving them freedom of choices.
my simplified definition of accessibility.
Yes – I really believe it “boils down to” offering alternatives to people that may want or need them. Simple example is alternative text on an image – we give people the alternative that allows them to understand the meaning of images even if they do not want to use their limited bandwidth or even if they can not see them. The same logic can be applied to audio content like podcasts or audio video content like videos. I’ve personally enjoyed the transcripts much more than to listen to whole podcasts just because I could search for keywords, scan them for content important to me and also because I could go through them much faster than listening to the whole thing.
There are also other alternatives we have to offer – for example information that is only based on color – it must offer alternatives for the people that are color blind and can not see anything. Again there must be multiple alternatives but text works best. At the same time we also need to think about interactions. With mobile devices overtaking classical desktop computers and laptops it is obvious that mouse interaction alone will cause problems for majority of users. You may have experienced some problems with content that appears on hover for example – it can sometimes even be difficult with mouse, but on a touch device it can really work odd or maybe not work at all. There is also the keyboard only usage that basically can’t do the hover but only focus, so it’s on interaction designers and developers to make sure that interaction should work for everybody.
Offering alternatives is therefore basis of accessibility as far as I am concerned. Alternatives for content, alternatives for design, alternatives for interactions. People are different, users are people, we have our own preferences and needs and we need alternatives. Web was made accessible from the start as it was text only. With it’s evolution to other media the content should still include text only alternatives as they can be consumed by majority of user agents and therefore also users. Thinking of alternatives is the key to success. From content, interactions, design, animations and so on. Try to understand the variations of user preferences and it will be easier.
