CHRIS: Molly spoke at an event we organized at the start of this year, where she explained how she uses technology, how she sees the world, and how some of the products that she uses have helped promote inclusive and independent living. We are hoping to take the essence of Molly’s talk, along with some technical practical ideas, design patterns and techniques, and try to humanize some of the issues that Molly experiences. The idea is that we’ve all probably encountered some of these issues in our own lives and if you build something in a digital environment with this in mind, it actually makes it easier not just for people like Molly to use but for everybody else as well.  

MOLLY: A lot of what I’ll talk about comes from my own experiences going through education and the system, because I was born deaf and I’m now registered legally blind. I’ve encountered a lot of issues both online and in daily life where I don’t have the same accessibility and freedom that the next person has.

For example, the elderly. Eventually everyone is going to have some particular issue or issues later on in life.  Lots of the older generation are now using technology and experiencing difficulty with a lot of things that we come across online, whether it’s as simple as an email or booking a holiday, it’s not accessible to them. A lot of these issues  can be solved with simple awareness and design. So while a lot of what I’ll talk about will be personal to me it will also cover a wider range of people. I think when you say ‘accessibility’ a lot of people assume it’s something for a group of people that are disabled and it is but it also covers a much wider range of people than that.

CHRIS: To give you an idea, quite often when you talk about accessibility online, everyone focuses on screen readers and that’s a very small piece of the puzzle. If you think about visual impairments more broadly, let’s say you leave your glasses at home, you’ve got a problem where you might not be able to read stuff and might need to zoom in text on your desktop. On your smartphone, where you have small links to hit, you have to zoom in for that as well. Whereas if that text was bigger in the first place, it would help everyone quite easily. 

It’s  very normal for people like myself, who were born deaf but with sight and going blind to be very visual. 

I still have a bit of central vision that I use a lot, scanning through a tiny window to put together a picture, however, it’s exhausting. 

CHRIS: And then we’ve got five categories that we’re going to look at. We’re going to look at things like deafness, blindness, communication, isolation and also cognitive and learning difficulties. Quite often editors of websites love writing about a complicated piece of a problem which is interesting or stimulating to them. But the really easy stuff on quite a lot of websites doesn’t get a lot of attention because it’s not written particularly well and it doesn’t allow easy access to a lot of people. So considering the way you write something and the language you use can actually reduce barriers to getting into content as well and trying to think of how to join it up.

CHRIS: We can talk about responsive content. Quite often when people think about responsive design, they focus on the screen. Realistically, if you are using a desktop or a laptop, you are going to be using a keyboard and a mouse, but when you move over to a tablet, you are probably going to be using your fingers, your hands, or your speech. When people think responsive they tend to think visual, they don’t really think about the interaction.  So one of the design patterns is when you are on a tablet device, hit areas should increase. Buttons are important. For example, bigger buttons on tablet devices give better hit areas to someone who has cerebral palsy and has trouble using a mouse.  Thinking about different screens and different interactions actually allows you to make better choices across different devices as well.