Keeping persona's in mind when you're designing a product,
how does accessibility play in the persona's?
>> Well, like with all persona's you want those to be based on information
from talking to real users.
And so again, is no different here.
So you want to go out and actually talk with people that have these impairments.
And when you're developing your persona, some key pieces of information that you
want to include are, what is their impairment?
What is the severity of it?
How do they kind of tackle and
get through their daily challenges with the impairment?
What are certain assistive technologies that they use?
What's or how experienced are they with those assistive technologies?
What's their skill level?
>> Mm-hm.
>> You want to talk about what are their pain points in trying
to achieve tasks that are related to your product.
The whole goal is just to really try to get in some important
insights into how they go about completing tasks,
and what are some of their different approaches that they might take that
maybe other users that you've already spoken to haven't.
>> And what if I don't have access necessarily to someone who
has an impairment, like who else could I contact, or how may I get that insight?
>> Well, you'd be surprised at because there is a wide range
of impairments like again,
if somebody that has just kind of lower vision versus somebody that's completely
blind, you probably do know somebody with some sort of impairment.
And just thinking about an older relative maybe that
has lost a bit of their vision or has arthritis and
their level of dexterity isn't as what it use to be
that's really valuable in sites that you can talk to them about or somebody who's
not a native speaker of the language that's prominent in your app.
They have to kind of approach things in a different way too,
that could be really insightful.
So there's a lot of people out there that you might not
immediately consider talking to, that would be really valuable.
>> Great.
What companies have you seen that have been designing for all users and
especially with those with impairments?
>> So, stepping out of the digital world for
a minute, I think two great examples are the Bradley Watch, which is right here.
The Bradley Watch was designed from the get go thinking about
people with impairments, at least with the visual impairments in particular.
And so what this watch allows you to do is tell time
with just feeling the watch.
And you can see there's two magnetic balls here that indicate the hour and
the minute, and this is obviously great for
people with disabilities in that it helps them tell the time, but
it also is visually appealing, it's very aesthetically pleasing.
And it doesn't look like anything very different than other watches.
So it doesn't draw attention to their disability,
which is always an added bonus to these types of devices.
But then just thinking about in situations where if you are sighted,
you might be in a dark movie theater, or in a meeting,
or discussion where you don't want to take your gaze away and
you want to still understand what time it is, it's really valuable.
>> Yeah, that's great.
>> Yeah, so you can see, this is a great example of thinking about
those needs upfront and coming up with a great product for everybody.
>> And the other one was Oxo.
>> Yes, and so, Oxo design is that they have a whole
design team that focus on universal design, which we talked about before.
And some of their products always have,
are always keeping in mind different needs.
And so some examples are, they talk about this again on their website where
they can use a basalts bender with one hand, or
their measuring cups are really unique, in that you don't have to kind of
bend down to see where the liquid is measuring.
You can look over and see where the numbers are.
So they take a lot of things into consideration.
Again, it benefits all users, not just those with disabilities.
>> And to wrap up, what are you final thoughts on accessibility?
>> I'd like to say that yes, it can be daunting.
It can be time-consuming if it's left to the end of the design development
process.
There's always a lot of retrofitting and
rethinking that needs to happen if it's left to the end.
There's no doubt about it.
So, to save everyone time and pain, think about it early.
Think about throughout the entire process and
just incorporate it into your existing process.
And in the end, not only will you have saved time.
But you will also come up with a much better product that's usable
for everybody.