Lets say that youre designing a product, and you realize that people will only be able to use your product if theyre able to do X (where X might be they can see, or they can hear, or they can climb stairs). There are two ways you can fix your mistake. You can provide special accommodations for people without the ability to do X. Or you can design your product so that the ability to do X isnt necessary. For example, suppose that youre building a website, and you want to use colors to highlight positive and negative values. One approach would be to color positive numbers in green and negative numbers in red, and to have a colorblind checkbox that allows the user to choose different colors. Another approach is to use the colors red and blue, which are distinguishable with red-green colorblindness (or even with blue-yellow colorblindness). Even better is to prefix the numbers with a plus or minus sign, so that even if someone cant see color at all, they can still understand what theyre seeing. The same principles apply to place design. For example: - You can build curb cuts so that wheelchairs can enter and exit the sidewalk in a few designated spots. Or you can make the whole street level, without a height separation between the sidewalk and the rest of the street, so that no curb cuts are needed. - You can outfit public buses with wheelchair lifts. Or you can build vehicles with low floors, and stops with raised platforms, to eliminate the height difference. - You can build a ramp in front of your building, for people who cant climb stairs. Or you can skip the ramp and the stairs, and make your main entrance level with the street. - You can designate certain parking spaces for people with disabled placards. Or you can build cities where everything is so close together that you can cross from one end of the city to the other in about as much time as it would take to walk the length of a typical shopping mall. Accommodations are great when they exist. But they are never ubiquitous, and where they are absent (or broken), they severely limit the scope of what people with mobility disabilities can access. When possible, its much better to design so that no accommodations are necessary.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 03:29:39 +0000
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