This week Sama and I were thinking about the type of
users that our app might have. As our app will provide information about
hospitals and health care clinics, we may encounter people with certain
disabilities using the app. So this question came up: Is our app prepared to
serve visually impaired people?
We hadn’t considered this possibility in our past
discussions. However, this is something that we want to encourage and promote
not only in our app, but also among the rest of websites and applications. These
types of practices help the visually impaired gain integration into the society.
How can we
make a website or app accessible to visually impaired people? You might think that doing this involves a lot of
cost and work. However, it’s not that complicated. You only need to follow some
basics tips:
- Allow users to select the size of the text. Some visually impaired people might only need to make the text larger in order to use the application.
- Don’t let the color do the entire job. A colorblind person won’t know the difference between two buttons, if you are relying on color to communicate the message.
- Consider to offer two versions of your website or application. One version will serve visually impaired people, and it should be designed using contrast between elements.
- Keep it simple. Displaying the information in logical order will help impaired users to identify the sections of the website or application.
- Use descriptive link names to provide meaningful information to users.
- Finally, make the application compatible with other assistance applications, such as: VoiceOver, TalkBack, Siri, Speak Screen, Dictation, Zoom and more.
Currently iOs and Android support a number of
applications that assist the visually impaired in everyday activities. We
would also recommend reading this
article from Reuters that explains the problems, new softwares and
developer’s challenges in this area.
