11/04
In 7 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about Accessibility and Accessiblilty guidelines for UX Designers, both authors said just about the same thing that design is important to accessibility. They both mainly focus on people with disabilities or “different abilities”, to show designer the way they design website or interfaces are more than just color and typography. Most people just design to what they think is cool, attractive and will get attention but its also about how well the users can navigate through. A website can look good but if no one knows how to use it correctly, theres no point f the website and/or information will be missed.
Personally i never looked at things this way, when i designed my website, it was simple interaction and really color based, and while that looks good to me, i never thought how it would look to a colorblind person. I also never thought about little things like drop down menus and external links. As an art major, i mainly focus on layout and visual design, so that part made sense to me but i never thought about touch targets, device independent and keyboard-only users. I didn't know these were issues to look at but now i feel a little more knowledgeable on how to better my website to make it accessible to all. For my website, in selling art, i may have a variety of people checking it out and it i want to get my art sold, i do need to appeal to all customers, not just my needs and this really gave me a better insight.
I used linguistic to say my thoughts on the piece, and i used a gif saying design is the problem in a drink referencing hard to swallow things. People don't realize design is one of the biggest errors when trying to display information, especially on the internet.