A List Apart
Broadening the user spectrum.
by Val Head · 12 Comments
For millions of people with vertigo and inner ear problems, large-scale web animations can trigger nausea, migraines, and dizziness. To make websites accessible for everyone, we don’t need to eliminate animation; we need to apply it more thoughtfully. Val Head walks us through some of the challenges posed by vestibular disorders and provides guidelines for designing with motion sensitivity in mind.
by Aimee Gonzalez-Cameron · 21 Comments
Registering for school, paying bills, updating government documents—we conduct a significant part of our daily lives through web forms. So when simply typing in your name breaks a form, well, user experience, we have a problem. As our population continues to diversify, we need designs that accommodate a broader range of naming conventions. Aimee Gonzalez shows how cultural assumptions affect what we build on the web—and how fostering awareness and refining our processes can start to change that.
The people who determine product strategy move through a world of analysts, media, division leads, shareholders, stakeholders, monetization, and marketability. They seldom get a chance to come back to the corner where users and designers mingle. Rian van der Merwe suspects that increasing the communication distance between the decision makers and the product’s builders and users leads to a loss of perspective—and the results are products with marketable features that no one really needs.
What the ALA staff has found around the web lately: how we can support Ahmed Mohamed and other young makers; reading the comments (no, really!) on the Coral Project; a plain-language guide to Amazon developer tools; the life and times of a type design legend; icon fonts vs. SVGs, revisited; learning to think first, challenge later; and a robot riding a unicorn (come on, who doesn’t need to see that?).
We all have those moments when we're asked to do something new and we cringe. It's tempting to just stick with what we know, but pushing through those moments of uncertainty is how we learn.
