Topic: Reinventing the wheel - New Design Trends

  • Our sixth meeting, 15 people present. Google Group for the meeting is now open for anyone at CU to join oit-gg-aulplus@colorado.edu
  • This session is a continuation of our discussion of how breaking design conventions can be bad for accessibility.
  • Presented by Amelia Dickerson, AUL Accessibility Specialist.
  • Full notes from Amelia's talk are available as a MS Word document; some highlights below
    • We looked at 16 design patterns outlined in the article "Website Navigation Trends: 16 UI Patterns Totally Deconstructed"
    • While each of the patterns can lead to its own specific issues, there were four global patterns that applied to nearly all of them:
      • Keyboard Accessibility
      • Focus Handling
      • DOM Order
      • Basic Semantics
    • We then discussed a sampling of the 16 design patterns since we didn't have time to go through them one by one, the full notes from Amelia's talk include the patterns we discussed. For each pattern, we provide an explanation as well as a set of recommendations based on the content in the A11y database (on campus or VPN access only).