Dave Stanton runs development teams building mobile projects at Mobiquity. He has expertise with user interface, usability, design thinking and accessibility. He’ll be speaking at SNDSF on Designing for Everybody: “Design paradigms and tooling is changing so fast. In our race to keep pace, let us not forget the need to ensure our experiences are accessible to all.”
What can attendees expect from your talk?
Attendees will receive an overview of disability issues related to mobility, vision, hearing, and speaking. We’ll look at several news packages and discuss the accessibility shortfalls. Additionally, attendees will get hands-on skills with tools to measure and simulate accessibility.
Mobiquity creates products for companies in many industries. What can journalism design learn from other businesses?
Regardless of industry, the key to creating usable experiences is to design for primary access patterns while still allowing for secondary access patterns. There is no single profile that applies perfectly to all users, so we tend to create personas or other segmentation types to describe different types of users. However, we spend very little time thinking about negative cases for our access patterns. What if someone touches this twice? What if they cannot touch it at all? What if a user cannot detect color differences? Whether temporary or permanent, everyone will have disabilities throughout their lives that affect interface and information access. Let’s be sure we give appropriate attention to ensuring the things we design and build are accessible to everyone.
How does usability play a role in journalism’s financial success?
You get one chance to make an impact with a new user. If we don’t give our users a successful experience, we won’t have the opportunity to convert them into valuable, repeat customers.
Where are the areas of opportunity in journalism to improve mobile accessibility?
Color detection and contrast are at the top of the list. There are so many instances where simple color tweaks and tinting changes would make a design much easier for people with visual impairments to experience successfully. We also need to find ways to better structure and deliver our content both for humans with impairments as well as for robots. If a human cannot see content, the human must rely on assistive technology like text-to-speech. As robots and natural-language systems become more integrated into our daily lives, we’ll also have to understand how to better communicate content and design to bots.
What are you most looking forward to at SNDSF?
I love attending SND workshops because of the diversity of design. Whether you design for print or digital, through layouts or graphics, I don’t know of another conference that provides a more holistic and practical view into modern information and interface design.
Follow the hashtag #SNDSF on twitter for more updates. To register for the workshop, which runs April 7-9 in San Francisco, click here. Space will be limited.