From the course: Accessibility for Web Design

An ecommerce purchase

- In this course, we're going to explore accessible design from a lot of different angles using three typical scenarios. They're pretty common tasks that people will do online. And there are things that you the designer or developer need to think about as you're building sites for yourself or your clients. Here's a high-level walkthrough of those scenarios that we'll work through in this course. Let's say you're looking to buy a gift for your best friend to celebrate an occasion. Think about that process for a minute. How do you find that gift? You're going to go through several steps. You'll spend time looking for different ideas. Looking for inspiration. You read reviews. You research pricing. You do a lot of comparison. After all of that process, you find just the right thing. You check the price, select the color, maybe enter a promo code, and you add it to the shopping cart. You're ready to check out. So you fill in the shipping details, and payment details. You mark the order as a gift, which allows you to add a note, a gift receipt, and maybe even get it wrapped. Then you craft a meaningful, and playful message and you send off the order. You'll wait patiently for the shipping notice, and look for the gift to arrive so you can make your best friend's day. You need to arrange for a lawn mowing service to come and take care of your lawn for the upcoming summer season. You and your partner will be gone on a three month trip with your two teenage children. You saw an advertisement for a local landscaping service, so you go to their website, and look for their lawn maintenance packages. You review their services. Find that they have a weekly option, and then you fill out their form asking for a quote. You send it their way and wait for an email confirmation that tells you they've received your inquiry, and will get back to you as soon as they can. You love how popular podcasting has become. It's your main source for getting up-to-date information. To stay in-sync, you regularly load podcasts onto your phone. You share episodes you love with your friends, and colleagues, and you're always researching new podcasts for your library. You'll take them with you on your commute to work and listen every day as you travel to and from the office 25 minutes each way. Now that's a really high-level overview of those scenarios. Put yourself in the shoes of the person that is completing each of those tasks. Better yet. Put yourself inside their heads. Thinking about people with disabilities, and how they use digital things often seems very different to us, and yet it isn't. If you woke up and suddenly had no use of your hands, would your job change? Would your hobbies change if your vision started to deteriorate? No. The requirements of your job would stay the same, and your interests would stay the same. People with disabilities are trying to accomplish the same goals, and same tasks as you or me. They just might use specialized tools to do it. Here's what that means for you. As a designer, you'll need to keep a few things in mind as you're designing and working with others to write content, and build your sites. Okay, it's more than a few things but if you take some very specific actions, you're going to go a long way to making things accessible for everyone.

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