During my study in Interaction Design, I found most student designers omit the importance of accessibility and think accessibility design is a “better-to-have” for products. Actually, accessibility design benefits far more than disable population, because in some cases, normal people could be situationally disabled, e.g. we are situationally blinded when we are driving, and situationally deafen when we are in a noisy environment. It is necessary to consider the possible use cases of the product and adjust the design to be accessible to everyone in every case, so that the product is truly user-friendly.

During spring 2020, I teamed with 2 UX designers in Chinese Computer Community in UCSD, researched on the standard, method, and tools to design and test an accessible design, and reported our research on this “A step by step guide to design & test an accessible product” to benefit more designers.