From the course: Accessibility for Web Design

Accessibility and touch

- Designing and building touch friendly interfaces that work for people with all kinds of different needs serves as an important step in making your content more inclusive. In fact, it was the advent of touchscreen interfaces that caused a lot of people to think about accessibility differently. When creating more accessible content online, the mantra used to be "Keyboard, keyboard, keyboard," but it really isn't as simple as that anymore. Touch interfaces vary in size, as you can imagine. Anywhere from the 38-millimeter Apple Watch, all the way up to 28-inch diagonal Microsoft Surface Studio, and everything in between. They all use touch, multi-touch, gestures, and in some cases, 3D touch. And all of these have an impact on accessibility. In order to understand touchscreens a little better, we need to expand our understanding of accessibility a little more. We need to understand how people with disabilities might use these new ways of interacting with your content. Think back to our personas. Sean has low vision. Mary is blind. Maxine has dexterity issues. Rose is deaf. And Giovanni is autistic. And it's really likely that all of them have some sort of touch-enabled device. Let's add another one to the mix. Renata is a product owner at a national insurance company. A few years ago, she lost both of her arms above the elbow during her tour overseas as a reserve officer in the military. When she returned, Renata went through about 18 months of rehabilitation and she transitioned to working as a product owner again. At work, she's able to use the same systems as before, with some additional software and hardware technologies. She's just as enthusiastic as before about her job, and she uses podcasts to keep up with the Agile industry. Renata loves her smartphone when she's on the go, but she prefers her tablet when she's home with her family. There are some specific accessibility concepts we need to keep in mind when we're designing for touch screens, but the most important is this. We're not all the same. Let's think about that for a minute. How do you use your smartphone? Do you use your thumbs for scrolling, or your fingers? How do you type? Do you hold it in one hand or two? Does it depend? Maybe you don't even have a regular pattern. What about Renata? She doesn't have any thumbs or fingers. What if I told you she uses her feet to operate her tablet? How would that change your design if you literally optimized your design for foot operation? Mary might make her screen reader cursor move with a swipe or double-tap gesture to read the objects on the screen. Sean may use voiceover with magnification and a Bluetooth keyboard attached, where he literally doesn't ever touch the screen at all. And what about Christopher Hills? He has cerebral palsy, and operates his touchscreen devices with a switch that he activates with his head. If you haven't seen his YouTube videos before, you should definitely go check them out for a different perspective. That's what I meant when I said, "We're not all the same." We've seen scenarios before where a screen says, "Tap anywhere on the screen to continue." And while that might work for someone that can touch the screen, for a person using a screen reader, it's much better to have an actual button to activate to continue. We have to remember to design things that take into account these differences. When you design touch interfaces, consider that some people may never physically touch the screen. How can you make sure that they can achieve the same functionality? Answer this question, and you're on the right path to making your sites and apps more accessible.

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