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The (not so) Surprising Parallels Between Responsive Design and Accessibility

This is my third session from the first day at the CSUN conference.  This session is hosted by my friend George Zamfir, who I met at this conference last year.  The session guide describes George’s session like so:  “Responsive design has borrowed principles & best practices from accessible design.  Learn about both and how to apply them to your projects.”

Presenter:  George Zamfir (@good_wally)

 

RESOURCES

 

In this post, I’m going to dispense with my normal slide-by-slide narrative structure.  George’s presentation moved way too fast and had lots of builds. 😉

 

George discovered that responsive design was a great way to build accessibility into his projects.  He showed us some of his previous work on the Scotiabank web site.  This ended up being TWO projects:  first for the desktop version of the site, then the mobile responsive version of the site.  He also worked on the mobile version of the bank’s credit card application.

 

What do all assistive technologies have in common?

  • They don’t care much about design, and they care to change it for the user (a lot like RSS readers)
  • Content trumps design, regardless of screen size
  • RWD is not about the design, it’s about updating the design to bring out the content

 

 

Visual, Auditory, Mobility, Cognitive & Speech.  Don’t measure people through the disability lens – which automatically focuses on what people are NOT able to do.  We now measure disability by what people CAN do.

 

Accessibility is contextual, so we should cater to users’ context.  You’re not necessarily engaging with someone working on a desktop computer with a large monitor, keyboard and mouse anymore.  He referred to a study of how people hold their phones and also the W3C’s BAD (Before After Demo) page.

  • One simple tip:  adding padding around text links increases the “hit size”
  • Keyboard accessibility translates well into touch-friendly interfaces.
  • Use native controls wherever possible.  On the bank side, they used <div> instead of <select> control, which was a problem when they went mobile.

 

Design for the edge cases (mobile first design)

If you start with a small screen, prioritization really matters. A variation of this model is designing for edge cases.  If you design for the harshest conditions first, the in-between cases are much easier to work out.  Consider accessibility as one of your edge cases!

 

RWD is a champion for A11Y, we have common goals for our users.

 

Question:  how do you handle navigation in RWD?  I target the simplest possible device and design progressively.

Question:  Do you do anything special about device orientation changes?  Answer:  why would you change the content?  Perhaps you change the layout, but you should not change the content.

Question:  What is your process when you have the luxury of a “clean sheet” design…how do you handle the lowest common denominator?  I like to start with everything besides the content.  We built the framework, and the content just fits into that framework.

Question:  what about hiding content based on context?  How do you handle that? Well, that’s probably not the best way to go…you’re probably doing it wrong if you’re doing it that way.

 

BONUS CONTENT:  CRASH COURSE IN RWD

Foundations of RWD:  fluid foundation, media queries, responsive images.  In short:  Make your layout flexible!

  • Use ratios (ems) and percentages instead of absolute values (px).
  • Adapt to the size of the viewport:  width = device-width, initial-scale=1
  • What apple does is assume that the normal viewport size is 960 pixels, so if you don’t add the viewport declaration, you can get pages with text that’s very small-looking on a small screen.
  • Media Queries in CSS:  start with smallest screen first, and then the larger screens are additive over that definition.
  • Responsive Images:  for simplicity’s sake, start with this: use max-width:100%, height: auto;

By Paul Schantz

CSUN Director of Web & Technology Services, Student Affairs. husband, father, gamer, part time aviator, fitness enthusiast, Apple fan, and iguana wrangler.

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