Accessibility has always been a slightly unsettling realm for web developers. Surrounded with myths, misunderstandings and contradicting best practices, it used to be a domain for a small group of experts who would "add" accessibility on top of the finished product. Today, in many simple and complex websites, it’s still unclear what makes up an accessible interface and what developers need to know to get there.
So let’s get to the bottom of it all: accessibility myths and rules of thumbs, WAI-ARIA roles, content accessibility guidelines, landmark roles, keyboard and touch accessibility, accessible markup and interaction patterns, accessible forms and widgets, multimedia accessibility and inclusive prototyping. Everything you need to know about accessibility gathered in one practical, smashing book, fully dedicated to building and designing accessible user interfaces.
Today we’re privileged to announce our brand new book on inclusive design patterns, written by Heydon Pickering, with dozens of practical examples of accessible interface components and inclusive design workflow, applicable to your work right away. With this book, you’ll know exactly how to keep interfaces accessible from the very start, and how to design and build inclusive websites without hassle and unnecessary code.
The book will be released in September 2016, but it’s already available in pre-sale as print and eBook as of today. The eBook will be ready in August.
Why An Accessibility Book?
We make inaccessible and unusable websites and apps all the time, but it’s not for lack of skill or talent. It’s just a case of doing things the wrong way. We try to build the best experiences we can, but we only make them for ourselves and people like us. We’ve got to fix this for good.
That’s why we set out with Heydon to work on a new accessibility book. The result, the Inclusive Design Patterns book looks at common accessible interface patterns from the perspective of an inclusive designer—someone trained in building experiences that cater to the huge diversity of abilities, preferences and circumstances out there.
There’s no such thing as an ‘average’ user, but there is such a thing as an average developer. This book will take you from average to expert in the area that matters the most: making things more readable and more usable to more people.
About The Book
Many web design articles and books are all about improving your workflow and making your life easier as a developer. Should you wish to adopt a framework or employ a processor to speed up your development process, be our guest. However, this book is not about you; it’s about your audience.
The Inclusive Design Patterns book covers all the techniques, gotchas and strategies you need to be aware of when building accessible, inclusive interfaces. We’ll explore the document outline, external links and "skip" links, navigation regions and landmarks, labelling and alternative text for illustrations, buttons, tables of contents, JavaScript patterns, touch targets, filter widgets and infinite scrolling and "load more" button and grid display and dynamic content and tab interfaces and password validation and web forms and error messages — and pretty much anything else you need to know about accessibility, including how to prototype with inclusivity in mind, how to deal with legacy browsers and dozens of practical snippets to use when building inclusive interfaces.
What’s in it for you? You can take away Heydon’s lessons learned and apply them within any framework sufficiently flexible to allow you to write and organize good interfaces. One thing is certain: once you read the book, accessibility won’t appear difficult nor confusing any longer — you’ll know exactly what to do, and when.
The book will be shipped worldwide via airmail. Available as print and eBook.
Table Of Contents
You’ve probably guessed it — the book doesn’t deal with theoretical concepts or things that are supposed to work. The book deals with practical design patterns and common interface components, and provides ready-to-use code snippets for applying to your work right away.
| CHAPTER | DETAILS |
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| Introduction | |
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Summary • We will look at an interactive element, a button, from the perspective of three types of designers. The purpose of this example is to show you how a little bit of knowledge about the medium can lead to a simpler and (therefore) more inclusive solution. Keywords • HTML • CSS • Inclusive Interface Design • Javascript |
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| 1. The Document | |
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Summary • We will look into discrete interface patterns; modules, components, widgets, conventions, whatever-you-want-to-call-thems. It would be foolhardy not to first acknowledge that each will ultimately belong to a web document. HTML pages vary dramatically in shape and size and can include any combination of patterns, but there are a handful of ’document level’ best practices to which we should adhere. The aim here is not to go in search of the ultimate ’boilerplate’ but to configure a parent web page to support inclusive design. Keywords • design systems • responsive design • font sizes • front-end techniques • pinch to zoom • subsetting fonts • progressive enhancement |
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| 2. A Paragraph | |
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Summary • We’ll be looking at typefaces, leading, measure, justification, contrast, focus indication and more, to help you design paragraphs suited for a hugely diverse audience. We’ll also tackle specific issues for folks with limited vision, dyslexia, Irlen syndrome, low literacy and limited technical knowledge. |
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| 3. A Blog Post | |
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Summary • We’ll show how to incorporate accessible landmarks and a sound section structure to make the content more navigable and interoperable to a diversity of users and parsers. This will be bolstered by giving well-written and context independent structural as well asand context independent structural and navigational cues. navigational cues. |
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| 4. Navigation | |
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Summary • We’ll progressively enhance HTML’s primitives to create the inclusive means to navigate within and between web pages. We will also cover design provisions transferable to many other patterns, including logical source order and the virtue of eliminating redundancy. We will also tackle how to progressively enhance the navigation with JavaScript. |
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| 5. A Menu Button | |
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Summary • In this chapter, we’ll ensure our menu button and the content it reveals are inclusive of differing user settings, circumstances, devices, and assistive technology software. |
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| 6. Inclusive Prototyping | |
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Summary • By going straight from paper to HTML, we lay the foundations for efficient code and inclusive experiences. |
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| 7. A List Of Products | |
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Summary • In this chapter, we’ll practice our inclusive design chops. As in previous patterns, the organization and structure of content is paramount. We’ll look deeply into image accessibility, from both the perspectives of alternative text composition and performance. In catering to blind consumers, to those who cannot afford generous data contracts, and anyone accessing your content from outside your interface, this is a chance to really push the limits of inclusive design. |
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| 8. A Filter Widget | |
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Summary • We’ll explore the importance of giving users choice and control over how their content is arranged. We’ll also use some techniques to make sure our design was tolerant of dynamic and fluctuating content. Inclusive design also means a visual design which is not too strict about the nature of the content imparted to it. |
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| 9. A Registration Form | |
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Summary • This chapter will give you everything you need to develop inclusive forms. By using standard form elements, effective labeling and facilitating the correction of errors, users of all walks are able to access and contribute to your websites and apps. By keeping the form simple and avoiding irritating experiences like disappearing labels and passwords that you cannot check, we’ve made sure using the form isn’t just possible but pleasurable. |
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About The Author
Heydon Pickering is a writer, designer and public speaker, the accessibility editor for Smashing Magazine and an accessibility consultant working with The Paciello Group. He’s interested in new and innovative ways to make The Web an inclusive place. User research, systems thinking and plain old semantic HTML all play their part. When Heydon isn’t writing, coding or illustrating, he experiments with sound design and thrashes out Doom Metal riffs of his detuned SG copy._
Technical Details
- 280 pages, 14 × 21 cm (5.5 × 8.25 inches),
- Quality hardcover with stitched binding and a ribbon page marker,
- The eBook contains PDF, EPUB, and Kindle.
- Free worldwide airmail shipping from Germany.
- Available as print and eBook.
Why This Book Is For You
If you’re looking for smart accessible design patterns and strategies for building fast, flexible websites efficiently, this book is just for you. It’s a handbook with valuable, time-saving techniques that will help you avoid hacky workarounds and solve common issues effectively. You’ll learn how to:
- Accessibility myths and misconceptions as well as common solutions and rules of thumbs,
- A library of well-tested accessible HTML/CSS components that you can use right away,
- How to properly use WAI-ARIA roles and Content Accessibility Guidelines,
- How to tackle common accessibility issues in responsive design,
- How to deal with "skip" links and external links, as well as navigation regions and landmarks,
- How to keep labels, buttons, tables of contents, dynamic widgets and tabbed interfaces accessible,
- How to implement infinite scrolling, grid display and dynamic content accessibly,
- How to deal with password validation, error messages, web forms, JavaScript patterns and touch targets,
- How to keep an interface accessible in legacy browsers,
- How to prototype with accessibility in mind.
Frequently Asked Questions
If you have any questions, we are right here to answer them. We love our customers, and we’d love to help you in any way or just listen to your story. So please feel free to ask questions via Twitter @smashingmag — we’ll get back to you right away. Just in case: here are answers to some frequently asked questions.
| Shipping costs for my country? | ||
| There’s no shipping costs for the Inclusive Design Patterns book or all orders above $20 — wherever you are in the world! We ship everywhere worldwide. We are paying a share of the shipping costs ourselves to make it possible for anyone to purchase the book. Our prices are transparent: we don’t have any hidden costs, and we won’t confuse you with tricky calculations. What you see is what you pay. | ||
| Delivery times to my country? | ||
| All books will be shipped via airmail to keep delivery times as short as possible. You can find the anticipated delivery time for your country in the delivery times overview. | ||
| Is the Inclusive Design Patterns book available as an eBook? | ||
| Yep, sure. The book is available in PDF, ePub and Amazon Kindle formats. You can pre-order the eBook as well. | ||
| What payment methods are accepted? | ||
| We accept PayPal, VISA, MasterCard and American Express. Of course, we use a secure connection, with 256-bit AES encryption and a green GeoTrust Extended Validation SSL CA certificate. And no, we don’t store your credit card data on our servers. | ||
| Is there a money-back guarantee? | ||
| Yes, absolutely! No risk is involved. Our 100-day full money-back guarantee keeps you safe. Don’t hesitate to return your purchase. You’ll get your money back with no ifs, ands, or buts! | ||
| I have a question that is not covered here. | ||
| Please leave a comment below, or get in touch with us via the contact form or via @SmashingSupport on Twitter. We would love to help you in any way we can — you know that! | ||
That’s it, everyone! We sincerely appreciate your support and trust, and we’ll make sure to deliver the book to you as soon as possible. And huge thanks to Heydon for writing a fantastic guide to accessible interfaces that we all can benefit from to make website more usable for everybody. Cheers!