With Easter Seals as one of our clients, we’re all into accessibility. I even got a coworker who’s visually impaired in one eye and she has strong opinions about some of our designs. Together with Richard (our accessibility compliance guru), that’s great for us because it means our team’s under the scrutiny of some pretty watchful and interested parties. It means we have accountability for this thing called accessibility that all too often gets short shrift in the www.

I recently read a post titled, Are you giving accessibility the consideration it deserves in the user experience? Talk about direct. But this is worth noting:

There are still lots of ways for designers to screw up accessibility, and I think that a lack of exposure to how our work behaves for people using assistive technologies means that we don’t understand the impact of the decisions we make sometimes.

Developing an understanding and awareness of simple ways to avoid common accessibility problems, and ensuring that, as we design, we spend just a little time checking our work to make sure that we’re making life easier and not unnecessarily difficult will provide lots of benefits for very little investment.

I guess that’s why subscribing to blogs like 456 Berea Street is a good thing, as is watching videos of people dealing with computer accessibility.