97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 22. Design for Universal Usability

Ann Chadwick-Dias

When designing for universal usability, there are some easy and useful guidelines to ensure you are designing in a way that allows for the broadest range of users to use your design. These guidelines not only make your design more usable for people who may use various assistive technologies (ATs), but they also help your design integrate more seamlessly with different types of user input (voice, eye tracking, touch, sip and puff, search engines, AI bots, and so on). Universal usability improves the UX for ALL users, humans and ATs.

Here are five guidelines for universally usable designs:

1. Keyboard access: Ensure full keyboard access to every element in your design (typically via tab or arrow keys), and stipulate in the code the order in which elements should be represented, including actionable items and static content. Making your design fully keyboard accessible also makes it accessible to ATs—remember, many users cannot use a mouse.

2. Color and contrast: Use colors to complement the meaning of elements and to enhance your visual design. But never use color alone to convey meaning—for example, red for loss and green for gain in financial services; too many people have color blindness, which might make it impossible to see a difference, especially between red and green. Instead, use a redundant cue: - and +, in this case. ...