on accessible design
I’m writing this entire blog post with text to speech because I sliced my left hand on a kitchen knife. When I was in school, one of the things our professor taught us about was accessible design. The entire principle is that the things you design should be able to be used by people with a variety of abilities.
Many people argued with him, asking why you would design something for a minority of a population that doesn’t make sense from a prioritization standpoint. His best argument was that disabilities are not always limited to a subsection of the population.
His example was anyone who had ever broken a leg or broken. His arm might be temporarily disabled, and to look through the world in the lens of how that would be experienced.
Now working one-handed, I think back to accessible design, and once again, you quickly realize the things that are designed with more tolerance for error and the things that are not