Website Builders Still Contribute To Inaccessible Web Design

Website builders enable individuals without design or technical skills to create websites. However, it is unclear if modern websites created by website builders meet accessibility standards. We reviewed six popular website building platforms and found a lack of accessibility support. Wix provided the most comprehensive accessibility documentation and robust accessibility features. However, during an accessibility audit of 90 Wix webpages, we found many accessibility issues, raising concerns about how users are supported

Digital Accessibility in Iran: An Investigation Focusing on Iran\u27s National Policies on Accessibility and Disability Support

Digital accessibility has become an important topic in the field of HCI, but when looking at accessibility on a global scale, we find that the representation of accessibility research is mostly centered in the Global North with countries that are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Our paper explores digital accessibility in Iran, focusing exclusively on its national policies on accessibility. Iran is a non-WEIRD country located in the Global South, with no reports on its digital accessibility status from the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies (G3ict). We found that there is not enough focus on accessibility in Iran\u27s regulations and we conclude our paper by recommending directions for improving this situation such as HCI and disability organizations in Iran cooperating with G3ict

Exploring Accessibility Features and Plug-ins for Digital Prototyping Tools

Many digital systems are found to be inaccessible and a large part of the issue is that accessibility is not considered early enough in the design process. Digital prototyping tools are a powerful resource for designers to quickly explore both low and high fidelity design mockups during initial stages of product design and development. We evaluated 10 popular prototyping tools to understand their built-in and third-party accessibility features. We found that accessible design support is largely from third-party plug-ins rather than prototyping tools\u27 built-in features, and the availability of accessibility support varies from tool to tool. There is potential to improve accessible design by increasing the potential for accessibility to be consider earlier in the design process

Beyond Accessibility:Lifting Perceptual Limitations for Everyone

We propose that accessibility research can lay the foundation for technology that can be used to augment the perception of everyone. To show how this can be achieved, we present three case studies of our research in which we demonstrate our approaches for impaired colour vision, situational visual impairments and situational hearing impairment.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Addressing the Accessibility of Social Media

Social media platforms are deeply ingrained in society, and they offer many different spaces for people to engage with others. Unfortunately, accessibility barriers prevent people with disabilities from fully participating in these spaces. Social media users commonly post inaccessible media, including videos without captions (which are important for people who are deaf or hard of hearing) and images without alternative text (descriptions read aloud by screen readers for people who are blind). Users with motor impairments must find workarounds to deal with the complex user interfaces of these platforms, and users with cognitive disabilities may face barriers to composing and sharing information. Accessibility researchers, industry practitioners, and end-users with disabilities will come together to outline challenges and solutions for improving social media accessibility. The workshop starts with a panel of end-users with disabilities who will recount their Perspectives of Successes and Barriers. Industry professionals from social media companies (e.g., Facebook and LinkedIn) will detail their Design Process and Implementation Challenges in a panel with questions from attendees. The attendees will share their work and tackle Open Challenges and Future Research Directions. This workshop will forge collaborations between researchers and practitioners, and define high-priority accessibility challenges for social media platforms

Uncovering inclusivity gaps in design pedagogy through the digital design marginalization framework

Designers play a key role in the design of inclusive and socially conscious interfaces. Thus, it is imperative for designers to be thoughtful of the ethical and social implications of design. However, gaps in the foundational training that designers receive (e.g., as university students) can negatively impact their ability to consider the social implications of their design practice. This can result in consequences such as digital marginalization, which, as defined by the Digital Design Marginalization (DDM) framework, is the “pushing away”, whether intentional or not, of a defined group of users from a digital or online service or system, where the exclusion has additional, indirect, and long-lasting social consequences on that particular user group. Designers can contribute, even unintentionally, to digital marginalization through their design practices and the design choices they make. We argue that our role as educators includes ensuring not only that our design pedagogy is inclusive, but that the designers we train now are prepared to conduct their future design practice in a manner that is inclusive to all users. As such, we propose to use the Digital Design Marginalization as a lens to guide a reflection-based approach to identify gaps in our pedagogy that may lead to designers becoming ill-equipped to identify how their designs may lead to digital marginalization. Through seven case studies from our own teaching practice, we demonstrate the use of the DDM framework to guide marginalization-focused introspective reflections of curricula. These reflections through the DDM lens revealed gaps in our pedagogy with respect to providing future designers with training that enables them to consider the broader societal and individual implications of the design choices they will make in future practice. Based on our experience using the DDM framework, we then discuss in greater depth how reflection of social consequences of design pedagogy can be operationalized within institutions to reduce educational gaps that may be associated with design-mediated digital marginalization. Finally, we comment on avenues for further development of pedagogical reflection using DDM

An image-based visual strategy for working with color contrasts during design

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