When people talk about accessibility, people often refer to the web accessibility because that’s the domain which lacks the attention of accessibility the most. It’s very easy to be exclusive on the web because the web is such a place that everyone in the world is able to access but not designed for everyone.
However, in the physical world around us, let’s say in the United States, we can often see some good accessibility design. For example, most restrooms offer at least one accessible toilet that is designed to accommodate people with physical disabilities. According to Wikipedia, “Persons with reduced mobility find them useful, as do those with weak legs, as a higher toilet bowl makes it easier for them to stand up.” Another example is the accessible hand dryer, you can often see there’re two hand dryers which one is placed higher and one placed lower to accommodate not only the people in wheelchairs, but also kids. Thanks to ADA (The Americans with Disabilities Act) who had a major impact on architects, forcing them to adapt their designs to meet rigorous criteria. One of the criteria include “Hand dryers should be motion-activated and shouldn’t extend more than 4 inches from the wall” according to 2010 ADA Standards for Accessible Design. Because of the rule maker and law enforcement, accessibility design had been implemented relatively well in the United States compared to other countries.
Although there’s accessibility guidelines for the web, and there’s laws in certain counties to enforce the design, there’re still tons of websites that don’t meet the requirement, and it’s hard to measure the impact because the scope and number of the websites are infinite.
Apart from the accessibility, cross-culture design is also a factor that firms that have international business should concern. For example, providing different languages for the local users is essential nowadays because even though English is the international language, but there’s still a lot of countries that don’t use English. Because of that, firms may consider hiring local language experts to review the content on the website, not just simply Google translate them because users can immediately tell if the content is tailored to the market or not. Information density is another factor that designers should keep attention to. On some Asian countries’ websites, users are used to being presented with intense information one one page which is very different from the western website. The author of Cross-Cultural Design also discussed the text expansion factors, “Expansion factors calculate how long strings of text will be in different languages.” That is a rough way to anticipate space for text when it gets translated. Putting the content in consideration of design is a key factor to building a successful universal design that serves many people with different cultural backgrounds.
In conclusion, there are so many factors to consider to build an inclusive website including we discussed accessibility, language, visual density, and more. Because of that I believe that it’s important for companies to build a design team that is diverse enough to take the challenges of building an accessible website, product, or service.
Reference:
https://alistapart.com/article/cross-cultural-design/
https://alistapart.com/article/getting-to-the-heart-of-digital-accessibility/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Accessibility/What_is_accessibility
https://www.exceldryer.com/ada-compliant/
https://www.ada.gov/regs2010/2010ADAStandards/2010ADAstandards.htm
