Half day accessibility for designers

This half day (approximately 4 hour) hands on workshop helps designers prevent accessibility issues at the source — in the design itself. Through guided exercises, designers learn how to annotate their designs so that engineers receive everything needed to implement an accessible experience the first time, across both Web and mobile UX.

Learners are expected to come in with a basic understanding of accessibility, the types of disabilities, the assistive technologies people use, and the POUR principles. Our 90 minute Accessibility basics for designers short training is the recommended prerequisite and provides exactly this grounding, including a live demo of a screen reader user navigating the Web.

Annotating designs for accessibility

The core of the workshop. Hands on exercises where designers take sample screens (Web and mobile) and add the annotations developers need, including:

  • Heading structure and hierarchy
  • Landmarks and page regions
  • Accessible names and labels for controls
  • Info and relationships (groupings, associations between labels, controls, and instructions)
  • Reading and focus order
  • Color contrast and non-color cues
  • Touch target size and spacing for mobile
  • States, focus indicators, and error messaging

Mobile UX considerations

Targeted exercises on the patterns that most often break on mobile — gestures, custom controls, dynamic type, orientation, and screen reader rotor/explore-by-touch behavior on iOS and Android.

Putting it together

Designers leave with a reusable annotation checklist and a sample annotated design they produced during the session, ready to apply to their own work the next day.

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