Design Details

306: Is Ego Getting in the Way of Accessibility?

Episode Summary

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.

Episode Notes

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.

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BYEEEEE!