Inclusive Design Patterns: Coding Accessibility Into Web Design

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 for people like us.

This book looks at common 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.

Ensuing chapters 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.