Accessibility

Accessibility refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities

When you design for the people that use your product - people will use your product!

We've often blogged about Section 508 compliance as a means to convince very engineering-centric developers to consider their users.

Accessible designs work for everyone - Ever use a curb-cut!?

By thinking about a disabled user and designing a solution that works for them, developers adopt a human-centered design strategy without even knowing it.

It is an excellent foot-in-the-door for designing for an admin user, a casual user, the sales team, an expert user, and many of other personas associated with the solution.

Usability is the most important "ility."

The lack of usability of electronic health records (EHRs) and healthcare IT applications, in general, has been in the news again. A research report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) analyzed voluntary error reports associated with EHR systems and found that problems with EHR usability may have directly resulted in patient harm (Howe JL ; Adams KT ; Hettinger AZ; et al. Electronic health record usability issues and potential contribution to patient harm. JAMA. 2018; 319: 1276-1278).

Usability, Accessibility and Telehealth need to be BFFs

A while ago there were two healthcare conferences that we attended here in Washington DC on the same day. One was the American Telehealth Association’s Fall forum and the other was The Interagency Committee on Disability Research (ICDR)’s Accessibility and Usability in Health Information Technology (HIT)

Accessability (#A11y) and Usability are BFF's

We've often blogged about Section 508 compliance as a means to convince very engineering-centric developers to consider their users.

While watching the video feed from the recent ONC annual conference we were very glad to see the closed captions because we were able to watch and understand while multitasking on one of THOSE conference calls that seemed to go on and on forever.

Accessible designs work for everyone - see also Universal Design. Ever use a curb-cut?

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