The Inclusion Principle was a good read for our class because it talks about a new topic that we haven’t covered until now-affordance. As Margit Link-Rodrigue explains it, “Affordance allows us to look at something and intuitively understand how to interact with it,” such as looking at stairs and knowing to walk up or down them or the automatic doors at the grocery store. As we have learned over the semester, a user’s accessibility and being able to navigate the website it KEY! One of the most important traits ever in a website. But then comes a road-block: universal design.
According go Wikipedia, Universal design refers to ideas meant to produce products and such that are accessible to older people, people with disabilities and those without. This “supposedly” is supposed to make things easier for us, having everything laid out simple and clean as we navigate through the page. So you’re probably thinking why this could be considered a road-block, huh?
If you remember from previous posts from me or others, Web designers are like architects. They are creative and want to make their site stand out from apart the rest. And some of them feel that the universal design limits their creativity. So some sometimes to ignore affordance and go straight for creativity. Which can leave their website as a big mess. Others then tend to lean towards the affordance and make it the easiest site for anyone to use. But the creativity lacking can leave users disappointed.
So then comes this big battle between going for was is most accessible and what is creative. To me, web designers (if they are truly talented) are the masters of being able to combine both terms and ideas for all users on the Internet. They need to take extensive training for accessibility so that they can understand and create an amazing website that is for everyone, not just those that are tech-savvy. We don’t want to have another law suit like the one between the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and Target.
Again, I have a long way to go to understand this since I am JUST starting on web designing. But It’s really important to keep these terms and concepts in mind for the future. For this week, it’s about making content that is accessible for all people and being able to mix creativity in it as well.