I’m going to start with quite not politically correct, yet very much true statement. We, the developers, get sick and tired, as soon as we hear “accessibility”. There is a simple reason behind it. Often times the word “accessibility” is used very wrong. Many people think that accessibility equals aria labels and making you app usable by the blind. But this is only a small fraction of accessibility.

So what “accessibility” is?

Let’s start the other way round and explain disability. We all know disability as a permanent state where a body doesn’t have all motor skills, but that’s again, just part truth.

Looking at the picture above you probably already are aware that at some point of our lives we’ve all experienced some sort of disability. Either temporary (broken arm) or situational (occupied hands). Cambridge dictionary defines disability as “an illness, injury, or condition that makes it difficult for someone to do some things that other people do”. Taking this one step farther, physical disabilities are not the only ones that exist. Any learning impairment, like dyslexia, is also a disability, but again this one in a permanent one. Taking it a step back to temporary / situational mental disabilities as well as definition “difficult for someone to do things that other people do” even not knowing a language well, regardless if it’s due to some learning impairment or that language not being one’s native tongue.

For all this, I want to introduce a better way of saying “accessibility” namely, as the title of this article states, “universality”. To me this is a better term, as we all do want our apps, documentations, articles be universally accessible by as many people as possible, regardless of their physical location and their own ability to access your content.

What “accessibility” really is, is an answer to a question “Can I get access to information?”

Here, I don’t want to focus on good HTML structures or aria labels, there is plenty great articles about that. I want you to improve your way of thinking about accessibility. I want you to make information as much accessible as possible.

Touch

We’ve all seen people, usually older, using styluses to navigate their phone. Some of us might even laught, but have you ever wondered why they do it? It’s simply because they have hard time taping on items they’d like to navigate to. This happens because, as you get older your motor skills worsen, but to be completely honest with you, I sometimes struggle to tap on the thing I’d like to. Why? Mostly because of bad UX. See it for yourself.

Looking at this map, at the first glance you realize that, tapping on the correct map pin is nearly impossible. A very simple fix for this may be grouping some nearly located pins into one that would cause the map be zoomed in to that area with nicely spread pins.

Generally with any touchable / clickable area a great rule of thumb is “could I tap it”. The more touchable area the better, but the minimum should be 48dp (or 48px / ~3rem) [what is a dp?] .

Contrast

Here I won’t say a word about colorblindness, nor any other permanent disability. Just look at the picture below.

Screens get better and better in terms of brightness, but if you never had an issue with sun making your screen unreadable, you probably live in the dungeon. This one is a struggle for every single person in the world every single day. When you create your app with bad contrast or some unusual fonts, you make it a lot worse for your users to get the information they need from you website.

An excerpt from “Refactoring UI” by Adam Wathan & Steve Shoger says:

By designing in grayscale, you’re forced to use spacing, contrast and size to do the heavy lifting. It’s little more challenging, but you’ll end up with a clearer interface with a strong hierarchy that’s easy to enhance with color later.

Leave handwritten fonts for logos, leave weird colors schemes and just make it simple. Simple is better.

Language

Simple is better, but what’s even more better, especially with language, is plain. I left this one to the end on purpose. This is a point relevant not only to copy writers or developers, but honestly to everyone. Ever written documentation? Procedure? Email to employees? A Slack message? You need to understand that plain is better. And now plain language is also an ISO standard.

I said earlier that accessibility is the answer to “Can I get access to the information?” question. What is better for that than a language. A language is the key to get out message across. Regardless of what that message is.

If English is your native language, you are in a better position, as majority of the web is in English, but keep in mind that there are millions of users that either know English as a second language, or don’t know it at all. Think what is easier to translate. I personally worked with an app where where you could have peers instead of friends, principals instead of leaders and articles could be appreciated, not liked. People sometimes think if they do things different, they will be better, but in communication this is not the way.

If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.
If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.
If you’re happy and you know it, and you really want to show it.
If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.

We all know this nursery rhyme, it’s one of the most popular ones that is used in English as Second Language teaching as well. If you look at it again, what do you see? There’s a lot of repetition and simple words.

This brings me back down the memory lane when I was studing English teaching. We were to create a children Christmas story, but the goal was to use no more than 30 different words. Tough challange, but has its point. Same as the nursery rhyme. That’s how we learn and understand language the best. With simple words and repetition.

An average 5–6 year old child knows 2500–5000 different words, by the age they’re 9 their primary set of words is around 5000, and secondary around 10000. If you think it’s more when you’re an adult you’d be wrong. It is basically this for the rest of our lives. We tend to use same words over and over again, and you know what? It is good! Using complex and unusual words does not make us sound smarter. It’s just making us less understandable.

Keep it simple!

Look at the examples below, they both mean exactly the same, but which one is actually understandable?

The recently implemented categorical standardisation procedure on waste oil should not be applied before 1 January 2015.

or

Do not use the new waste oil standards before 1 January 2015.

What is more, when we use longer words (8 or 9 letters), users are more likely to skip shorter words (3, 4, or 5 letters) that follow it. People just don’t read one word at a time. They bounce around, especially online, and anticipate words, subconsciously filling them in. You don’t need to read every word to understand what is written. It is estimated that people can drop around 30% of text and still understand it perfectly. An exception from that rule are people with learning disabilities who read letter for letter, and do not bounce around like other users. However, keep in mind that they cannot understand a sentence if it’s too long!

THIS IS MEGA IMPORTANT

Capital letters are harder to read. By around 13 to 18%.

Capital letters were great when you started learning to read. At first, you might sound out every letter, but you did not understood the concept of lower and upper case by the age of 6. At this point instead of letters, you start recognising the shape of words. This speeds up comprehension and speed of reading.

People do not read words, people recognise the shape of a word and understand it. It is a lot faster that way, and we all value our time greatly.

Online vs Paper

Users read very differently online to paper. They do not read top to bottom or even from word to word. Instead, users only read about 20 to 28% of a web page. Think of a letter F, that is a shape in which users browse content of a web page. they want to complete their task as quickly as possible, so they skim across the top, then down the side, reading further across when they find what they need. So, Keep it Simple. Give access to the information as quickly as possible.

Learnings?

• be concise — simple and shorter is better. Be understood, especially when you write procedures.
• address the user — use active voice
• DO NOT CAPITALIZE — unless it’s logo
• use text version of signs — and is easier to read and understand than &, same with dates use to instead of —
• Be gender neutral — use plural “they”

And make sure you use plain language, see https://www.gov.uk/guidance/style-guide/a-to-z-of-gov-uk-style for full list of words that can be easily replaced. But to give you a few to avoid that I’ve seen use quite extensively:

• collaborate, use ‘work with’
• empower, use ‘allow’ or ‘give permission’
• key (unless it unlocks something), usually not needed but can use ‘important’ or ‘significant’
• streamline, use ‘simplify’ or ‘remove unnecessary administration’

I hope that now you understand better what is the goal of accessibility. It’s simply to allow as many users access the information you want to provide in a way they can understand it as you intended. I believe you want that too.