Designing with Empathy and Understanding


One of the keys for any designer of digital content is to understand the needs of their users, and the different ways that they may interact with what you create. However, it can difficult to truly understand how someone with a different experience of the digital world may perceive or navigate the content you create.

While online instructors don't need to become experts in the principles of web design, it is important to understand some basic principles of accessibility in digital spaces, and how our choices can impact users. In this compilation of ten short videos, produced by the Web Accessibility Initiative, we see the impact and benefits of creating accessible web-based content.

Web Accessibility Perspectives (7:36)



How People with Disabilities Use the Web

  • Stories of Web Users – stories of selected scenarios of people with disabilities using the Web, to highlight the effect of barriers and the broader benefits of accessible websites and web tools.
  • Diverse Abilities and Barriers – explores the wide range of diversity of people and abilities, and highlights some of the types of barriers that people commonly encounter due to inaccessible design.
  • Tools and Techniques – introduces some of the techniques and tools that people with disabilities use to interact with the Web, such as browser settings, text-to-speech, voice recognition, and many more.


Four Common Difficulties Associated with Using the Web

  • Lack of captions
  • Motions, animations, and cluttered pages
  • Wall of text
  • Small font size


Citations:
  • Abou_Zahra. S. (2017, May 15). .Mariger, H. (n.d.) How People with Disabilities Use the Web. W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/
  • Sethfors, H. (2017, June 4). Accessibility according to actual people with disabilities. Axess. https://axesslab.com/accessibility-according-to-pwd/
  • W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). (2016, August 3). Web Accessibility Perspectives - Compilation of 10 Topics/Videos [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/3f31oufqFSM

Last modified: Wednesday, March 16, 2022, 2:00 PM