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Simple accessibility tools for UX designers

Make your brain think and your work more inclusive

H Locke
6 min readApr 25, 2020

Having now ranted twice about the need for more focus on and commitment to accessibility, I thought it worth listing some of the tools and plugins that are available and how they can make our design work better and more usable.

Screenreaders

Ever listened to your website? How about trying to hear your inbox? I highly recommend it. Even if you’re not doing user testing with users who use these tools every day, you can understand what the experience is like and how your design effects it.

It also provides great material for discussion with developers. Even if you don’t know that much about code, screenreaders can literally tell you when something is not accessible, and you can grab a dev, and discuss what’s happening and how you can fix it. You can also point them to the fourth pillar of WCAG 2.0 — Robust, where lie coding requirements for AA-AAA standards.

picture of an iphone with the text “how to navigate with voiceover”
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDm7GiKra28

Screenreaders used to be a separate piece of software you had to install, but no more! Here are some easy-to-access tools inside the smart devices you already…

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H Locke
H Locke

Written by H Locke

UX person. I design things and I study humans. 150+ articles on Substack https://hlockeux.substack.com/