For those who can’t get past 1998, universal design is about building things that everyone can use, no matter their level of capability. It is this simple:

“In terms of curriculum, universal design implies a design of instructional materials and activities that allows learning goals to be attainable by individuals with wide differences in their abilities to see, hear, speak, move, read, write, understand English, attend, organize, engage, and remember. Such a flexible, yet challenging, curriculum gives teachers the ability to provide each student access to the subject area without having to adapt the curriculum repeatedly to meet special needs.” ~ Curriculum Access and Universal Design for Learning

For goodness sake, universal design is trying to reduce the workload and number of special requests. That has to be positive, right?

The same goes for web sites. Good web designers/developers make an effort to create very well formed, semantic and progressively enhanced web sites. Not only does this approach help organize content in a cleaner, more reusable fashion, but paying attention to standards up front means that my web site is usable by everyone. I don’t have to go back and create a segregate site that is specifically accessible to certain people. Instead, I get to manage a single site that provides complete content to all users. With progressive enhancement (rooted in universal design principles), that content can be experienced by users with a broad range of capabilities.

People who don’t get UD feel that if they can’t have their Flash-only website, they are limited in some manner. I’ve found that web sites that follow a progressive enhancement model (build it first so it works for everyone, then add layers of the “whizz-bang” so you get the final product you want) end up more powerful and more robust. You have to work smarter on the front end, but there’s a kind of gestalt that happens when you do it well instead of just doing it with the latest/greatest technology (or the way you’ve always done it).

UD is meant to be an approach that takes the segregation out of accessibility efforts. Instead of accommodating after the fact, we are simply designing better content. If you do it right, you are not creating curriculum for the lowest common denominator. You are creating curriculum that can be consumed by the widest range of students possible. You are creating web sites that reach the widest possible audience. To attempt otherwise is to stick with the idea that all students (and web site visitors) are alike. We know they are not, and we know their learning/interaction styles are not the same (disability or no). Even if disabilities were not at issue here, universal design would still be the best way to create curricula, web sites, buildings, sidewalks, etc., because universal design recognizes that worthwhile learning and interaction cannot be homogeneous.

Pony up your stale curricula and inaccessible web sites, academia, and build something that works for each unique student or site visitor instead of something that works only for people with the same capabilities as you.

Presenters

Christopher Schmitt – Heat Vision

Eric Ellis – Bank of America

Kimberly Blessing – Comcast Interactive Media

Date

Sunday, March 15

Sites

web form elements research

jquery validation

moz monkey

Conversations

Conversations are rooted in trust. Good forms should be structured on trust. Think about people/relationships, and context. The way you speak to your users impacts their excitement/enjoyment. The way you label your forms focused on a label that makes sense to the user not just to you.

Expectation

Apparently expectation is obvious.

Flow

Can a user look at a page in a matter of seconds and understand the pattern of interaction.

[Managed] Noise

Forms that are not initiated or expected; noise is anything that inhibits the user’s ability to complete the task. Marginilization over removal.

Order

Important things (the task) first, then the rest should be add-on. But make sure I have completed something soon.

Progressive Engagement

Lead a user down a path and show them questions only if they are necessary to the context and the type of user you are (if I already know about you, don’t ask me to fill it in again).

HTML5 Form Elements

• Slider
• Input date (calendar) drop-down
• Input time
• Placeholder

Web Form Management

Forms get re-purposed most often. How can you manage all the different form purposes simplistically in a common application pattern library? An editorial style guide for web forms: how do we speak to our customer or about our services?

Pull together the people who care about standards and build a style guide from the ground up.

Validation

Client-side validation doesn’t get it all, and can expose your validation methods to DoS. Split validation between client/server: format v. required. Server-side response for validation errors at top so screen readers see it force.

These are notes from a session at sxsw interactive. My own take on topics are mixed in with what the presenters were actually saying, so do not assume all of this content is my own.