I thought this article was great for me to read because it covered a lot of information that I had never really thought of before. For example, I learned a new term – affordance. I definitely need to keep affordance in mind when designing my tiger webpage. Affordance allows us to look at something and intuitively understand how to interact with it. This is such an important element that often goes unnoticed in the web design process. Oftentimes designers think their sites are intuitive because they themselves designed it. They don’t think of stepping into the shoes of someone else to see if it’s actually easily navigable.
However, I also learned that affordance only gets you halfway there. For example, a problem arises when someone easily understands how to use an object, but cannot execute the action required to do so. This is when excellent web design comes in. Universal design is at play here as well and this is a concept that is useful for everyone to understand and put into practice. Universal design is essentially perceived affordance. It’s when the implicit understanding of how to interact with an object actually coincides with the user’s ability to execute the action. As this article states, “Universal design is, therefore, inherently accessible.” This is definitely something that I need to think about when designing my tiger page.
I also learned that universal design and accessible design are not synonymous. Video captions and text transcriptions of audio files are considered accessible web design while structural markup is universal web design. I can honestly relate to the part of the article about not every company feeling like they have to comply to accessibility guidelines and laws. But after reading this article, I really have a better understanding about why these requirements are in place and how they are helpful.