Foregrounding accessibility for user experience design

textI am interested in creating generative tools and techniques for designing accessible user experiences for end users. As a user experience designer, I am working on embracing the web accessibility standards and guidelines and including them from the beginning of the User Experience (UX) design process. My projects are directed at facilitating design students and professionals to understand two things: that the broad concept of web accessibility is important, and how they can embed web accessibility into the UX design process at a very early stage. To do this, I used different media (website, posters and videos etc.) to create awareness and educate designers in an interesting, simple and engaging way. In this report, I will discuss the definition and role of accessible design, identify limitations in existing tools and methods, and demonstrate how future designers might research, prototype, analyze, and implement their designs for all users.Desig

Standing on their own feet. You and your younger adolescent

Synopsis: Young children are cute and delightful or are having temper tantrums. Primary school children are eager and enthusiastic; gaining mastery of their world; defiant and difficult at times, but still mainly wanting to please, responding to suggestions and requirements. Then comes adolescence and the rules of engagement change. Young adolescents aged ten to fourteen years are still legally children: parents or carers are responsible for them and their behaviour. However, these young people begin to see themselves as separate independent individuals. Friendships become more intense and the peer group becomes increasingly significant. External issues can be vital: clothes, hair style, make up, activities, behaviour in school or outside all come to signify to which group the young person belongs. Home and the family become less and less important... Description: 'Early adolescence is a time of change, challenge and fun. Young people are rather like preschool children and want independence, but at the same time need support and firm parenting. Management of these conflicting needs is a developmental process for the young person and their parents. This book starts with developmental issues and describes how the young person must move forward, not only physically but emotionally, in social skills and relationships, and also intellectually and with a moral sense. Problems that can occur are considered: psychosocial problems when the young people struggle in their environment and with relationships, and then mental health problems. These latter can be frightening for the young person and it is important to recognise ‘adolescent turmoil’ where the mood and state of mind is distressing but fluctuates over time and is not fixed, and also the more long term difficulties which probably need outside help. The importance of parents is emphasised, for parents to manage the difficulties and hostility and yet to continue to be there when the young person needs help or is in trouble. Young people tend to open up and want to talk just at times when parents are weary and ready for bed. This is acknowledged but parents are encouraged to do their best to be available. Writing this book after many years of work with families when they had broken down was an interesting and different experience. Hopefully, despite the perspective being from the very troubled end, the book will provide useful thoughts about how to recognise, and when possible prevent, problems, and to alert parents to what they can manage themselves, and when other help needs to be sought.' - Judith Trowell ‘Once upon a time parents celebrated the arrival of puberty with pride, and in many cultures family and community joined together to celebrate this passage from childhood to adulthood and independence. It is sad that today we live in times when this transition is viewed with anxiety and fear. Of course, as ever before, the ex-child comes to this point in his/her life with a mixture of excitement and ambivalent anticipation, but now their parents often experience a sense of isolation and dread, not knowing how to ensure that the next ten to twelve years run smoothly for their child and for themselves. Judith Trowell has had a rich professional life working in a variety of settings and contexts with adolescents and their parents. In this book, she describes and discusses in a lucid and sensitive manner the physical and emotional changes that younger adolescents, aged between 10 and 14 years, go through and how these affect and are influenced by their parents.’ - Dr A.H. Brafman, from the Series Editor’s Forewor

Questions & Answers About Persons with Intellectual Disabilities in the Workplace and the Americans with Disabilities Act

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability. Title I of the ADA makes it unlawful for any employer to discriminate against a qualified applicant or employee because of a disability in any aspect of employment. The ADA covers employers with 15 or more employees, including state and local governments. Section 501 of the Rehabilitation Act provides the same protections for federal government employees and applicants. In addition, most states have their own laws prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of disability. Some of these state laws may apply to smaller employers and provide protections in addition to those available under the ADA

Progression skills module 3: Getting ahead – strategies for success

Progression skills modules are designed to support schools in delivering practical pupil workshops to help focus gifted and talented (G&T) or potential G&T pupils to aim high and achieve their best. This module helps pupils to begin to establish goals for their future, and learn to coach each other on tackling barriers and challenges. Comprises: teacher notes, slide presentation, & pupil handouts

Integrating Women and Girls With Disabilities Into Mainstream Vocational Training: A Practical Guide

[From Foreword] This guide has been developed as an ILO contribution to implementing the Agenda for Action of the Asian and Pacific Decade of Disabled Persons, 1993-2002, and to the Platform for Action adopted by the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing which has called specifically for action by Governments, in cooperation with employers, workers and trade unions, international and on-governmental organizations, including women’s and youth organizations, and educational institutions to ensure access to quality education and training for, among others, women with disabilities, to improve their employment opportunities. It is also part of the ILO strategy to promote the observance of the ILO Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment (Disabled Persons) Convention, 1983 (No. 159), and Recommendation, 1983 (No. 168). These are the main reference documents for the ILO activities on the employment and training of disabled persons, along with the ILO Recommendation on Vocational Rehabilitation of the Disabled, 1995 (No. 99). This guide is intended primarily for instructors and administrators in vocational training institutes in both the public and private sectors

Description's Objects: Austrian Variations

What did Wittgenstein take description to involve ? What are the objects of his descriptions ? What did he think he was doing in and by describing what he described ? In order to answer these three questions it will be useful to appeal to an object of comparison. But which ? First we need an answer to another question

Wittgenstein and Davidson on actions: A contrastive analysis

This paper seeks to bring out the difference between the later Wittgenstein’s and Davidson’s view of actions with a special focus. Initially it contrasts their respective approaches to the correlative notions of wish, will (intention) and actions, an issue which has customarily been categorized as reason-approach of Wittgenstein as against the mental causation theory endorsed by Davidson. The ultimate aim of this paper is to integrate the ontology of actions with the semantic issue of the distinction between reference and description action-words, or that between the extensionalist and intensionalist approach to actions. The author demonstrates how Davidson in spite of conscientiously problematising the task of separating the mental causal antecedent from the action, goes on to undertake a hair-splitting analysis to sustain the split; and thereby preserve the extensional identity of actions. This extensional identity in Davidson’s scheme turns out to be as brute physical events with bare spatio-temporal outlines - lying beyond the various intensional ascriptions. For Wittgenstein on the other hand, actions are not caused by mental antecedents, but blend with wish, will and the so-called mental antecedents to forge an indissoluble whole, leaving no scope for the proposed bare extension to take shape. The paper concludes with a brief indication of McDowell’s treatment of this cause/reason polemics phrased in terms of the non-conceptualist versus conceptualist debate suggesting a new direction to engage with Wittgenstein’s insights on action

Has the Roberts Court Plurality\u27s Colorblind Rhetoric Finally Broken \u3cem\u3eBrown\u27s\u3c/em\u3e Promise?

This Essay examines the continuing significance of the Keyes decision to the judicial vision of equality and racial isolation in public education. By comparing efforts to promote educational equality from the Keyes era through today, this Essay asserts that the judiciary has wrongly embraced a colorblind interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause. In so doing, courts have impeded the progress of children in Denver and around the country, ignored highly instructive social science studies on the benefits of desegregation, and broken the constitutional promise of equal citizenship. For future policy makers and lawyers to address these persistent problems, legal educators must equip students with tools to reclaim legal conversations about freedom and equaltiy. The author, Dean Phoebe A. Haddon of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, concludes with recollections of her late aunt, Rachel B. Noel, who played an instrumental part in the evolution of the Keyes case