WHY ACCESSIBILITY IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS FOR PRODUCT DESIGNERS TO CONSIDER.

THE PREMISE: IS IT POSSIBLE TO CREATE A PROFESSIONAL QUALITY DESIGN PRODUCT THAT CAN BE USED BY VISUALLY IMPAIRED DESIGNERS AND WHICH WILL DELIVER RESULTS ON A PAR WITH SKETCH AND FIGMA?

As the population of digital users age it's estimated that at some point in our lives 1 in 5 of us will need to use accessibility tools to complete our online tasks. And because of this it's been forecast that in the next 20 years accessibility will become the single most important consideration in building digital products.

Researching the viability of creating a product design tool for visually impaired designers has made me understand that I not only need to think of visually impaired design users but also design users with disabilities that impair their use of a mouse or touchscreen. It's a complex problem to solve, but one who's importance I'm increasingly aware of.

Some statistics on digital users with disabilities below that certainly gave me pause for reflection:

3.5% of the world's population live with vision impairment.

That's 253 million people (36 million are blind and 217 million have moderate to severe vision impairment)

Over 5% of the world's population has disabling hearing loss. 

That's 360 million people (328 million adults and 32 million children).

30% of working professionals have a disability. 62% of employees with a disability have an invisible disability or a disability that one cannot immediately identify upon meeting a person.

The ageing population is predicted to triple to 1.5 billion by 2050.

The common belief that accessibility is a minority problem or box ticking exercise is a dangerous myth. And designing for users with disabilities is something we should all be putting front and centre of our product roadmaps.

I WANT TO EXPLORE THE POSSIBILITY OF CREATING A DESIGN PRODUCT FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED DESIGNERS

IS IT POSSIBLE TO CREATE A PROFESSIONAL QUALITY DESIGN PRODUCT THAT CAN BE USED BY VISUALLY IMPAIRED DESIGNERS AND WHICH WILL DELIVER RESULTS ON A PAR WITH SKETCH AND FIGMA?

As a fully sighted designer and illustrator I’ve always assumed that having issues with your sight must be every visually creative person’s worst fear. Afterall, our careers and earning ability, and quite often large parts of our own identities, are dependent on us being able to see and make judgements on visual things, right? But then I stopped and became a little less self-focused - afterall MOST people’s careers and earning abilities depend to some greater or lesser extent on their vision.

So instead of thinking of how losing your sight as a designer would be the thing of nightmares, I decided to take my fear factor out of the subject and approach it as just another interesting product design problem to solve.

Firstly, it has to be said that creating a fully accessible product for designers has one huge advantage - the chances are that most of the intended users are all highly imaginative and practiced visualisers. And phyisological studies have shown that we really visualise with our brains, not our eyes; the analogy used in this case study is that our eyes are merely the camera lense we use for sensory input, it’s our brains that assemble and quantify what we’re actually seeing. Afterall, when we’re children we have to be taught what colours are - we don’t automatically know that red is red, etc. Hence why children love basic, bright colours - their brains haven’t yet learned the nuances of hues and tones. But as adults, all that knowledge is stored in our brains and can be drawn upon for reference.

The second advantage I have in designing this product is being a designer myself. I’m already in the mind set of the users, so I can ask myself the following questions:

• What tasks will designers want to achieve with this product?

• What features will make up an MVP (minimum viable product) that would make this product useful enough for uptake by visually impaired designers?

• What is the simplest and most direct way for these users to complete design tasks?

Over the next few weeks I’m going to research and build out this product idea further and hopefully end up by creating some mocks for proof of concept and MVP.

I’ll leave you with a final thought that really resonated with me recently, regarding accessibility and its importance in product design. As us generations who are completely dependent on, and immersed in, technology grow older, there will come a time when all of us will need some level of accessibility aid in our digital interactions. So accessibility should not be a design consideration for the minority, but a design necessity for the masses.