🦆 Interaction Nerds by UXA | F23.03
The Accessibility Issue: Digital Accessibility, Accessible Toy Design @ Clixio, Figma's Contrast Plugins, and What It Means To Be Accessible with Alisa Grisham.
👋 Announcements — Join us for Kickoff!
Happy Tuesday, everyone! Hopefully you had a restful & not-too-tiring first two weeks of school… because it’s time to get ready for club kickoffs 🤩. Join us tomorrow, September 13th from 5-6pm in Tepper 2612! There will be refreshments, activities, exciting announcements, and a chance to get to know your fellow UXA members!
🍎 Campus Compass — Digital Accessibility- Ensuring Universal Access to the Information Society
Written and edited by: Eunice Lee 😊
When designing a digital product or service, a designer must consider how all users can have easy access. How can a visually impaired person navigate a website? How can a user with limited mobility use a computer application? What tools are available for these users? This semester in 67-220 Digital Accessibility, you can learn about and apply the issues that users with disabilities face in their digital environments & steps on how you can mitigate this.
🤔 What is Digital Accessibility?
In this course, students will discover the diverse problems that digital accessibility addresses. Digital Accessibility deals with a user’s ease of use for digital products & services, such as websites, electronic documents, and computer applications. In particular, digital accessibility considers how users are able to use such digital products without being disadvantaged by their visual, auditory, motor, cognitive, or temporal impairments. Digital accessibility topics include assistive technology and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
🧐 What do you do in Digital Accessibility?
Students will gain a comprehensive understanding of the problems that users with disabilities face during digital interactions and how assistive technology can bridge gaps in accessibility. To achieve this, you will learn inclusive design principles and content creation that considers its impact on digital accessibility. In this course you will also examine how to apply, test, and evaluate for WCAG standards & user-centered design principles into your own website.
😯 Who should take it?
This course is open for anyone at all levels of programming experience, and is offered in the fall!
🧑💻 Interview — What It Means To Be Accessible with Alisa Grisham
Written and edited by: Ahana Banerjee 🧸
From pixels to pavement, get ready for a rollercoaster of stories in our interview with Alisa Grisham, a disability advocate, as we unravel the reason behind why accessibility is one of the most important things to consider as a designer.
Disability is a normal, natural part of the human experience. It is not some big, scary thing. And the longer you live, the more likely it is that you or someone you love will become disabled. It's good to fight now when you're able to because you want the world to be ready for you when you need it to be accessible.
— Alisa Grisham
🎨 Resource — Figma ‘Contrast’ Plugin
Written and edited by: Kaitlyn Ng 🥸
One fundamental goal 🎯 of user-oriented design is to create designs the user can understand with little to no difficulty.
The Figma plugin “Contrast” 🎨 by WillowTree helps fulfill this goal by verifying which designs are more accessible to the visually impaired. Specifically, “Contrast” lets designers check whether or not the color contrast ratios of their designs pass WCAG 👩💻 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).
Some useful features of “Contrast” include:
🖼️ It works on any element such as text, images, and other graphics
🪣 It supports various types of “color” including gradients or solid/transparent fills
🏃♂️ It will update on the spot if you change any element’s color
We’re often biased by how we see the world 🔭. “Contrast” provides designers with greater perspective into how others see design, and aids in making designs accessible before they are shipped off to development!.
🦎 Editor’s Pick — Children’s Toy Clixo Proves Prioritizing Accessible Design Has Relevance Beyond Tech
Written and edited by: Sophie McGrady 😈
How can toys be made accessible? 🤔 Why does it matter? And what can learning about toy design teach us about designing other things like digital software? 💻 Join us this week as we delve into Clixo, an inclusive and accessible line of playful toys that help broaden kid’s creativities and teach us a little bit about the world as well.
Who’s behind the scenes?
Thanks for reading this week’s Interaction Nerds by CMU UXA! The editors behind this week’s issue are 😊 Eunice Lee, 🥸 Kaitlyn Ng, 😈 Sophie McGrady, 🧸 Ahana Banerjee, and 🦝 Caleb Sun.
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