Archive for ‘accessibility’

February 15, 2015

No Accessibility, no UX

No accessibility no UX (C) P. Bertini

No accessibility no UX (C) P. Bertini

Who are the users that User Experience professionals refer to when designing the ultimate digital experience?

They have many ways to describe the user: persona are a generally widely used method to bring users alive and create stereotypes of users. But stereotypes always lack detail and the core of UX is the ability to deliver details and experiences to all user, even those not captured by persona.

I cannot remember seeing a persona of a disabled user ever, but I may just have been unlucky.

However, the issue here is not Persona.

The key issue is that too many UX professionals do UX but do not practice accessibility. These two skills are often naturally considered distinct skill set, different domains of UX, and often managed by different people, where one is the Accessibility expert, the other the UX expert, with a help from the designers and consultants.

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February 8, 2015

Stop calling it Accessibility!

In the era of excluFeatured imagesivity, how can inclusivity survive and be attractive?

It’s time to change the rhetoric around accessibility and include accessibility in the wider framework of the world we live in.

We cannot talk about inclusivity in a society that promotes exclusivity as a status symbol and a value we need to reach.

In the age of wellness and eternal youth, none wants to acknowledge that sooner or later our physical and/or cognitive abilities will fade and we’ll become elder, eventually with some cognitive or physical impairment.

Today, ageing and the natural and biological transformations we are all subject to, are tabus: in a world where drugs and surgery can fake appearance and let us forget about time, it’s easy to forget that behind apparently smooth faces there is still an ageing body.

Our society rejects the thought of ageing, refuse to accept that we won’t be young forever, that technology cannot (yet) make us to stay young for ever.

How can then we convince such a society about the importance of accessibility and inclusivity?

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