July 24, 2019

306: Is Ego Getting in the Way of Accessibility?

39 minutes

In today's episode we dig into two listener questions about when to use toggles versus checkboxes, and the current state of accessibility in product design. We also share a big milestone for the podcast, get caught up on some news, and as always, share our cool finds of the week.

Followup

We've crossed 5 million total downloads on Design Details! Thank you all for listening along with us for all these years 💜

News

Friend of the pod Kevin Gutowski created a Sketch plugin, Truncat. Truncat helps you automatically truncate strings! Brian wants this for Figma, too.

iOS 13 beta 4 is out, and we're jumping on board.

Listener questions

Soumya asks: what is the difference between a toggle and a checkbox?

Soumya sent along a great Medium post about the key differences and a guidelines document that might help.

Hubert asks: "Have you ever felt like our designer’s egos are getting in the way of designing for everyone, and that no matter how hard we try, we as an industry, will never be able to fully adopt accessibility as a core value of product design."

Hubert also wrote a piece for the Slack Design blog about accessibility as a design tool

Sam Soffes and MDS created Contrast, a small menu bar utility app to quickly check accessibility scores of color pairs.

MDS wrote a blog post about designing Contrast.

At this year's WWDC, Apple highlighted several major accessibility improvements.

The HIG has great typography guidelines and color guidelines.

The HIG and Material specs differ slightly on tab bar accessibility.

Read more about ARIA, the spec for Accessible Rich Internet Applications.

One Cool Thing:

Marshall shared a Mac menu bar application, Bartender, a tool to help you customize and manager your Mac's menu bar.

Brian shared a new Mac application, Dato, created by Sindre Sorhus. Dato is meant to replace the date and time item in your Mac's menu bar, providing a better interface to see a calendar and timezones. This reminded Marshall of iStat Menus by Marc Edwards.

Design Details on the Web:

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Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]

Marshall is @marshallbock

@Sarahberus and @Luperdev make us sound smarter than we are

Join the conversation on Spectrum or leave us a review on iTunes

BYEEEEE!

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