Product Design: How To Balance Accessibility And Interactivity Across Devices

Laura Allen, Accessibility Program Manager at Google (left) and Poornima Vijayashanker, founder of Femgineer(right)

Interview with Laura Allen, Accessibility Program Manager at Google for Chrome and the Chrome Operating System

In the last two episodes of Build we tackled and .

This week we’re going to answer two questions that inspired this series from one of our audience members: Jane. We chose these two because we figured they might also be on your mind!

Jane wrote:

Poornima,

Thanks for tackling a wide variety of topics when it comes to building software products. One area that I’m curious about is accessibility.

As a user experience designer, I know accessibility is important, but I’ve struggled when it comes to balancing out accessibility across devices and also making mobile apps interactive and fun without compromising on accessibility.

How should I think about web versus mobile and balancing out fun and engaging interactions with accessibility in mobile apps?

Sincerely,Jane

Jane thank you for writing in!

Laura Allen who is the Accessibility Program Manager at Google for Chrome and the Chrome operating system is back and together we are going to be answering Jane’s questions in today’s episode.

As you watch today’s episode you’ll learn:

• What are the similarities and differences when it comes to designing for accessibility on web versus mobile devices
• How to balance balance out fun and engaging interactions versus accessibility on mobile devices
• The various types of accessibility testing: manual versus automated and tradeoffs associated with both

Here are links to the resources Laura mentions in the video:

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• Android Developers Site
• iOS Human Interface Guidelines
• Android Accessibility Scanner
• Lighthouse

Listen to the episode on iTunes!

You can listen to this episode of Build on iTunes.

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Check out these additional resources on product design:

• Why Accessibility Needs To Be Prioritized In Product Design
• How To Get Your Teammates To Adopt Product Design Sprints
• How a Product Design Sprint Fast Tracks Testing Your Ideas
• What Is Product Debt And Why You Need To Prioritize Paying It Down
• Differentiating With Product Design
• The Art vs Science of UX Design
• How To Use Empathy To Build Software Products

Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.