By: Xin Feng
Can you tell us a little bit about your experience in accessibility design?
Sure. The first time I heard about the word accessibility design was in college when I was studying urban planning. At that time, accessibility design was only about one thing: the ramp for wheelchairs to pass. When designing stairs, I should always make sure there are ramps by the side.
Later, in the 2016 VELUX International Award competition, my team focused on children with visual impairment, transforming light and shadow into something touchable for them to learn about nature. The design was awarded Global Winner and Winner of Asia & Pacific. Me and my teammate Jiafeng Li presented the work at the World Architecture Festival in Berlin, and through that project, I understood accessibility design has a larger scope.
Then I joined Google, working across many different verticals of products facing enterprises and consumers, including ads, YouTube, and the Cloud. Accessibility design is nested and blended in the product design process. With the user scenario, goal, and steps different, the core value and methodologies of accessibility design remain largely the same: make information accessible to people with various abilities.
Can you tell us about some key projects you did in accessibility design?
There are two major projects I want to talk about in my career journey.
The first is the start project, “Light for the Blind,” which my team worked on in VELUX, as mentioned before. It’s a conceptual idea about using a specific light-sensitive and temperature-sensitive material to turn light and shadow change into something touchable. By putting their hands on the units, children learn about what light is and what shadow is in an intuitive way. I really love this project.
Photo Courtesy: Guiding Yao
The next one is a project I did at the Google Hackathon. Our team proposed an idea to help people with visual impairment to match outfits every day. There’s a common bias towards people who are visually impaired that they don’t care about color matches. Not at all; they care a lot about how they look, and they want to dress properly. It might be natural for us to pick a top and a bottom to go to work, but for them, it takes a long time to touch and tell whether the two pieces match especially the socks. The design helps them to tell the color, logo and brand of clothes and suggest color matches of clothes and socks, making their daily task much easier.
How do you define accessibility design?
Accessibility design is everything about making information equally accessible to people of various abilities, including hearing loss, visual impairment and mobility limitations. For example, if a design helps people who use wheelchairs to go to places they want to visit, it’s about accessibility design. If the accessibility tokens in design components enable people who use screen readers to catch information on websites, it’s also about accessibility design. The methods of accessing the information or reaching the goal may vary, but the goal is the same.
Photo Courtesy: Jiebei Yang
How does multimodal interaction fuel accessibility?
I will talk about visually impaired people as an example here because first, they cover the largest group, and second, 90% of dominant information is visual today.
A key problem product designers and engineers tackle today is how to turn visual signals into signals people with visual impairment can access. For example, screen readers can catch information on laptops and mobile devices, but that’s not enough. Many images and videos can hardly be accurately described.
The multimodal design allows signals to be passed in a non-visual way through voice, touch and even brain signals. It will allow more effective and efficient communication between people and the environment.
What’s the future of accessibility design from your perspective?
Photo Courtesy: Lushan Ao, Xiaoqi Chen and Jiawen Li
It will improve design quality and the improvement of design may alter the definition of it. Actually, there’s a huge overlap of accessibility with design for the elderly people. As we age, hearing, visual and mobility abilities gradually decrease. It’s critical to design for the new age of the elderly as well.
Published By: Aize Perez
