How do you prioritize accessibility in UI/UX design?

Prioritizing accessibility in UI/UX design starts with embedding inclusivity at the core of the design process, ensuring that products are usable and enjoyable for people of all abilities. This involves adhering to established guidelines, like WCAG, and regularly testing with diverse user groups to uncover and address potential barriers.

Hi Ceren, as Gong noted, you can follow the WCAG accessibility guidelines available at W3 org, they are extensive and mandatory in some countries. Taking care of this early, in the design stage is super important because design accounts for a great percentage of accessibility issues in digital products. You need to follow 4 principles: 1. Perceptible: your content needs to be perceived independently from the sense or way by which it is perceived, visually or other. To ensure visual perception a contrast checker is a must. Figma has plugins like: Contrast and A11y - Color contrast Checker, which are very useful for running checks to ensure triple AAA compliance. Also, in some instances adding an icon to a text can be helpful. 2. Operable: It means people must be able to operate your product, even with assistive technologies. Tips to ensure operability: using Alt tags for images, making sure the content can be understood without the images (never display your text in image form). Also, make sure you enable character recognition and let users navigate the product by typing keyboard shortcuts and not only using a mouse or track-pad. 3. Comprehensible: This means you should give clear instructions and helpful messages. A common error here is having no warning messages and just a color red, or having warning messages that aren't clear enough i.e. instead of displaying "Invalid email", tell the user exactly what's the problem "Verify that your email is written correctly". Or using the infamous "404 error" with no context. Instead, display a helpful message like some brands do: "Ups, it seems the page/article your are looking for no longer exists" and add an option to go back to the home page. 4. Robust: Your product should work in more than one way without breaking. For example, at a 200 to 400% zoom interaction should still work and be visible without having to scroll horizontally. I think this also applies to being adaptable and flexible at many screen sizes, browsers, operating systems, etc. Finally, testing your product with people with any kind of disability, be it temporary, or permanent can provide you with a lot of insight into making your product more accessible.

Prioritizing accessibility in UI/UX design means ensuring that your product is usable and enjoyable for people with a wide range of abilities, from the very beginning of the design process. It involves integrating accessibility principles and testing with diverse user groups to create inclusive experiences that cater to everyone's needs.