 I am Rajesh Kalidindi, I am a user experience researcher and accessibility standards implementation leading Microsoft U.S.A. If you are treating, please use my Twitter tag Rajesh Design. Those who are treating, I have a free offer for you. If you treat more about this topic, the person who treats most about this topic will get one hour assessment of your design again as the universal design principle. Love it? Go for it. I would like to understand some of you. How many designers in the room? Most of you. Good. How many of you have implemented accessibility standards in your design practice? Almost half of the crowd, half of you have implemented accessibility standards. So for you, it could be repetitive information because I am grounding some of the basic principles of universal design bringing a perspective of people-centric design also. Those who haven't done it by end of this talk, you will be taking away a few small changes in your design practice will impact a lot of people. You will see who are those people. Before I dive into this, let's spend some time on understanding how the technology landscape is changing today. A body of United Nations ITU has published this data that by end of this year, over 3 billion internet users, over 3 billion people on the earth will be connected to the internet. 2.3 billion mobile broadband subscriptions are going to be there by end of this year. Probably it might have already reached by this time. When we say 3 billion internet users, that is a 40% of the population, the technology is changing very rapidly that it is available for people. And these users almost one third of these internet users are coming from the developing countries like India and Brazil. Now let's understand for the context of this conversation how people landscape is changing. World Health Organization last year, September, has published that over a billion people on this earth have some sorts of disability. They might have acquired over the period of their life stages or they might have it by birth. That is 15% of population has some sorts of disabilities. That is almost equals to India's population. When I'm talking about disabilities, just for, there are lots of variety of persons as we can talk about. This is very diversified content. Every person is different. Every person's need is different. Every fruit doesn't taste the same way. Every flower doesn't look the same way. The same way people have unique needs, especially when we're talking about people with disabilities. For the conversation sake, I just grouped them into this. Vision-related impairments, mobility, speech, cognitive and hearing. When people with disabilities, when they interact with the technology, they rely on assistive technologies. I think some of you who has implemented accessibility standards, you're already aware of it. Some examples are, for those who hasn't, let me quickly give you information about what it is. When a person is not able to use the technology with their existing abilities, they need some medium to interact with it. That medium is assistive technology. It could be a piece of hardware or it could be a piece of software. Some examples, it could be a wheelchair, a wheelchair with joysticks, screen readers, screen magnifiers, high contrast modes. There is a variety of assistive technology, but there is another problem here is that there is not enough assistive technologies as well. But we as designers, if we design for these people's needs, then this assistive technology can be disappearing. We also need to understand what governments are doing across the globe. United Nations 1997 created a convention on rights for people with disabilities. This particular body has worked with many countries across the globe, understanding that the people with disabilities rights are human rights. These people have the same right that any other normal person can interact with the technology. So this particular body work resulted that almost all countries, except those countries you see on the gray color in Africa and some countries in Asia, have not come onto this convention. But most of the countries have recognized the work and they said, okay, we will make sure that we will recognize their rights as well. And some countries went ahead and made some digital accessibility laws. Some of these countries could be strict in their laws when they are implementing it. Some countries may not, such as India. In 2009, India has published government web standards. Accessibility is part of it. I think the information I'm passing on, the technology landscape is changing. People needs are changing, where governments are coming ahead and making some laws. But here, today we need to understand that as designers, we don't need to wait for government to make a law and then tell us how we should design for these people. Today, we have, I believe, we have moral responsibility that we have skills, we have techniques, how we can design. It's a matter of us to recognize unique needs for these people and then make small changes. Before I'm going to talk about those small changes, I'm going to bring up some academic work just to bring the context. The seven principles of universal design. These principles have developed in North Carolina State University. By the way, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, also published universal design guidelines for India. Is anybody from NID Ahmedabad here? So, you may look for them and they also recognize the work what North Carolina State University published, seven universal design standards. Recognize the intent of this and they embrace some of them in their principles as well. This work has led by Ronald Mace, late Ronald Mace, and he is a great advocate making environment, not just the technology. He led a team of people, environmental design researchers, architects, engineers, quite extensive research they have done and they have come together and published these seven principles. Some of these principles could be a basic fundamentals for design and one of them, when I already talked about it. Before I'm going to go into the tactics, I just briefly mentioned about it so that you are aware where this academic work is coming from. You may be already aware of these principles as well. The first one is equitable use. The design should not disadvantage a set of people. It should be treated everyone equal. Flexibility and use. The design should recognize people abilities and their preferences. This is what, when I extensively talked about, simplicity. What I mentioned here is in this context of conversation that regardless of people's skills and knowledge, they should be able to utilize your design. People should be able to perceive the information effectively and efficiently regardless of their sensor abilities. One example could be a person could be having hearing impairment. If you are putting an audio file in your solution, the person may not be able to perceive the key information. You may need to think about how this particular person can be using the content, the key information you made into the audio file, how that person can be using it or consuming this information. Tolerance for error. I would say, I would challenge ourselves saying that we should design error-free solutions but that is not possible. When there are some errors that are happening, minimize those errors as much as possible and find a way where users can quickly recover from those mistakes. In other words, it should be safe to use the solution. People should not have a physical effort to use our solutions. It should be low physical impact on them when they are trying to use the solution. This one is very tricky in the context of technology, developers here and designers. The way we can look at it is that right now, today in the age of Internet of Things, touch interface is very common. So when people are touching the interface, every finger comes in different shapes and sizes. If they need to interact a particular key element on your screen, make sure that they can interact with it regardless of their shape and size of the finger without making any mistakes. So these are the seven principles. I called them, as I said earlier, a good design principle. So now let's talk about the tactics. This is a very good academic topic but what you can do to make one billion people, the work, what we are putting together, you work very hard to publish your design, right? Don't you think your design should be usable for 15% of the population on this earth? We all deserve that, right? So there are a few changes what we can do in our design practices will enable them. As designers, most of you raised your hands, we all love playing with color. We want to show off our creativity with the color but we do make some mistakes unknowingly. I don't critic ourselves that by knowing we will put this combination of colors. We might be doing it but today I am reminding ourselves that the impact on some of the choices we make is huge. And our hard work could be based, right? So we should use color very wisely while 1 in 4 adults have some sorts of visual impairments. That could be including a color blindness, right? That could be low visual impairment completely but we are talking about the color, those who can see at least. Anytime we put a light color font on a light color background, that means we are failing almost 50% of the population, almost. What I would suggest is that before we finalize our design next time, make sure there is enough color contrast ratio. If we have enough time, I am going to show you that there is a tool called color contrast analyzer. If I don't get to see, you can search on the internet, this is a free tool. You can download which will show you whether the choices you made is having enough contrast or not. That will make it easy. Not only the fonts color combination I am talking about, I also want to challenge us that gray scale your design, just turn off all your colors. And then test yourself, the key information is conveying without colors or not. Then we have a chance to make a greater impact. Conveying information through colors sometimes cannot be avoidable. But in that time, what you need to do is you need to find an extra elements help such as shapes. You can use a combination of shape and colors. Those who cannot see colors, at least they can differentiate with the combination of shapes or some text or some other different way. The next one is text. I believe yesterday there was a workshop about the fonts. I was watching some of the tweets. Some of these information could be repeating from that. I see some designs, we use variety of the fonts. What is the harm in doing it? The research shows that if you are using multiple fonts in the same design for the same context of scenario, it will reduce user speed. What happens when people are fed up reading your content, they stop reading it? Especially when we are an internet of things age, attention span on the screens is very less. We are getting less attention from the users to use our solutions. Go ahead. It depends on the age group. It depends on the age group which font you have to choose. That is a good point. It is a millennial grid. The users are going to be above 40, 50. The font size, the fonts, the antlers, the colors. Everything changes based on the user's aspect. The user's age group. What this gentleman is bringing us to recognize, based on the age, your needs may be changing. But I'm going to remind us some fundamentals. Regardless of the audience is five years old or 55 years old and above, the fonts should be legible. You may choose any type of font, but is this legible font where any human being can read? Those who are able to read it. You are choosing appropriate font sizes. I'm not going purposefully. I'm not talking about the standards, but you can search for those standards. I just wanted to remind you that whatever the font size you are picking up, make sure that that is legible and can be readable for everyone regardless of their age. I also see that we use all caps. I see a chunk of paragraphs with all capital letters. Same problem. The whole paragraph with italics. The same problem is that it will reduce user's speed when they are perceiving this information. Yes. Exactly. But if you have a small chunk of text, it could be a title, right? It could be a section heading. Then that is fine. But when you are putting the whole paragraph into all caps, right? So those are the things that we need to be aware of it. How sparingly we can use the text. And also the white space between the lines also matters. The narrow line spaces will reduce and may not able to use it, right? And I also see that these days the latest trend in the design is the carousel images or carousel text. Keep moving. Scrolling text. At large there is an issue with moving objects on your screen. I am just experimenting one thing. When I am talking about today's food is very great. I mean, Bangalore city is beautiful. When I am saying these things, I am bailing my hand. What is happening, whatever I am saying, you are not paying attention to it. The attention is grabbing by this moment, right? When we need people attention on our content, that's okay. Just go and grab their attention. But don't distract them by it. So we need to aware of that how the distraction will cause problems for some users. For anyone it could be distracting from what their task they are doing on the screens. But especially with the people with special needs, it could cause seizures, which could be a very traumatic experience for them. We need to aware of that. And the next one is content. When we are presenting content inside of our layouts, that content could be videos, audio files and images, lots of variety of word documents and PDF files, those kind of contents. When we are presenting some video to users, we need to recognize that some people may not able to hear or see that particular content in that video. So we need to think about, I am not saying that we should stop producing videos or audios, right? We need to find a way how everyone can get this information. As a designer, maybe with video and audio, it could be outside of your day-to-day job. But one mistake what I see, we convert text into images for various reasons. We just want to look it beautiful, right? There is an issue with that. Those people who rely on screen readers may not able to consume this information because they might be not including the alternative text. Try to avoid just sake of beautification of your content, converting text into images. But in case you have to convert, such as logos, right, you know, some other information, when you need to convert into images, think about the person who cannot see this image, how you are going to convey that information. That particular information you need to include in the alt tag. Again, you may not be responsible for creating, developing that content, but you as a designer ask that question, where is giving you that content? Hey, I need an alt tag for this. What do you think the user should take, key take away from this image that has to go into the alt tag? And the next thing is that as time is running out, I'm moving away from Word, Document and PDFs, but you know, you can search for that on the Internet. The user settings, this is a very key important, especially for people with disabilities. Every operating system these days, Apple, Mac OS, iOS, Windows, Android, every operating system comes with some native accessibility settings. Before you ship your design out, you as a designer are developer, turning out into the next discipline. Just switch on that high contrast mode. There are lots of settings, I'm just introducing you to one of those settings, that just switch on that high contrast mode and then see if your design is able to perceive in that high contrast mode. Usually images, it will be displayed the same, but if you are testing with Photoshop, they may not be good use of it. But if you are converting that into the HTML file, this is where a lot of creativity happens from our developers, that moving some of our images as a background images, those things will not be visible in some of the high contrast settings. So ensure that a small step in your process, you have the tool in your operating system. It's a matter of you knowing about it, and recognizing that just switch on that, and then see if your design is passing that, then you are good. If not, you may need to spend some more time making sure this is used. And there are a lot of other settings where you can increase your font sizes, the native text size, and then see whether that is usable for everyone or not. The next one is alternative input method. This is a radical thought I'm going to inject into your mind that don't think that every person uses mouse. Don't think that every person can able to touch your UI. Just for fun understanding, stepping into these people's lives, one hour, just keep your mouse away, and then search the internet or do whatever you typically do. How much time it takes for you to interact with it. That's the experience we're talking about when we are talking to people with disabilities experiences. Irrespective of the device. Yes, and also you need to think about what is the other combination we can provide to them. There are two things. One is that exclusively can this design usable with the keyboard? Exclusively can this design be usable with the touch? On top of it, can this design be a combination of something other input method? That will help you to reach out to the population, everyone. So these are some of the things I would like to remind today. But how many of you believe that these are the basic design principles? I think at least four of you believe that these are the basic design principles. I'm happy about that. But I would like to conclude this conversation that some of these things we talked about, it is not just for one, it is for everyone. There are some examples. Before I go into the, conclude with the examples. If you design keeping in mind for people with disabilities, you are helping everyone as an example. The high contrast model, we just talked about it. The high contrast mode originally designed for people with disabilities, but today when we are holding this mobile phone and then going into Sunday day, it is helping all of us. So like that, the font scaling, the response, today we're talking about responsive design from mobile screen to all the way into the big screens. If you think that is this design scalable for any, irrespective of the device size this gentleman was talking about, will enable everyone. So with that example I will conclude. I hope you are, you have realized that some of these things are easy to do. Are these? Okay, so I think now you have an opportunity to make your design consumable to everyone or you are reducing 15% of the population. That is your choice. I hope you will make your designs usable for everyone. And I would like to, this topic is an accessibility topic itself is a vast subject. Today I have grounded to very simple changes what we can do without learning a lot. Since you have seen these small changes, I will encourage you to go into web and search if you are interested. One hour a week, maybe one hour in a month, just spend some time on web content accessibility guidelines. Maybe you are not interested, just you want to follow the changes I have talked about it. Just search for accessibility checklist for designers. That is the second link you are going to go. Just follow this checklist for a while and then see the change in your design practices. With that I will conclude and open for any questions. Thank you. So the question is that do we need to target that I am designing for 80% of the population or do I need to worry about it. That is the whole point what I am trying to convey here is that just take our mind, take that 80-20% out of our mind. Our targeted users are certain users, but within those users one of them could be having some sort of these abilities we just talked about it. It will enable them even within that 80%. The gentleman is reminding about the regulations, but I take it as a moral responsibility, a social responsibility. Consider this person, not doing for them, do it for ourselves. We are working so hard to publish this design. Why can't we just spend one hour or more and give it to everyone on the end? On the morals, exactly. Thank you so much. Don't forget your free offer. I am going to watch the person who tweeted most about it. Then I am going to contact you. Thank you.