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Accessible Design / Inclusive Design / Enabling Design / Empowering Design

by | 18/03/2019 | Accessibility

This blogpost is the first blogpost about accessibility and inclusive design. It’s about naming.

Case 1: Enabling

I started submitting for conferences and user groups in 2016 and in my first slide I called ‘it’ – with ‘it’ I mean a way for making applications for people with disabilities – enabling apps, enabling design. The vision of enabling apps is clear and concrete: ‘apps that enable’. Apps that let people do things that the are not used to do before the use of the app.

The vision comes from the verb: ‘to enable’: to make tings possible. If you dig deeper in this approach, make things happen that are not able before. I give you some examples: let people who cannot read digest information. Inform people about x or y. Help people to get information via mobile.

Case 2: Accessible

Accessible apps / make things accessible. The most know term about accessibility is like accessible websites. The basic concept of accessibility is: you have something that works for people without disabilities, make it also work for people with disabilities. In websites it can be bigger fonts, it can be the use of headings in a way that narrators can read. .. Accessibility is hot on the web. In 2018 I gave a talk Accessible apps in Xamarin:

The biggest advantage with accessible apps in stead of enabling apps is: more and more people know what accessibility is. The biggest disadvantage: in apps it is not used a lot and the apps I am making is more to make things happen, to enable than just making things accessible.

Case 3: Inclusive

I did a few times a talk called: the power of inclusion. Inclusion is he fact more and more different kind of people are using pc’s, smartphones and apps and software. But inclusion is big. Where I got in contact with the fact inclusion it was only about people with or without disabilities. These days inclusion is more about all different kind of people. This means Also people with a different gender, people with language barrier, migration background and also people on the LGBT spectrum. At least the last part of LGBT is more about inclusive working environment. At this time I haven’t heard about LGBT apps or software and the need. But you aren’t allowed to think: something is not needed and if you do, some developer find a good use case.

Like I am saying in all of my talks I really strongly believe that the right apps can improve and help inclusion.

Case 4: Empowering

Do we need to change to another term who encapsulates making things happen and accessibility. Do we stay with accessibility? Move to inclusive apps?

Some things are sure: I make thing that change lives I strongly believe it’s more than accessibility and inclusion. But at this time there are some buzzwords do we need a new one?

So this was my first blog on the accessibility spectrum. Please comment on Twitter, here on this blog or everywhere you want.

Yours, Dennie