To give you an idea of what I'm thinking of, I've looked into https://github.com/dennybritz/neal-react (unfortunately the hosted demo appears to no longer be up.) I'm sure this will bring out the "JavaScript shouldn't be abused like this!" haters, and I'm not the biggest React fan, but I like that I can position a few high-level components without having to think "I need 2 divs, one that's a panel, one that's X width and another 12-X, etc." Granted, I've never built anything with this React library and don't even know if it looks good, but it's closest to what I want in a page design system. Just give me a few high-level blocks that are responsive and look good, and I'll go from there.
So when i saw this, my initial thoughts were, hmmm another one of 'those' sites. However i'm pleasanlty surprised, sure the elements aren't perfect, and the colours could be more varied, but it's an almost complete site. Replace the graphics, the fonts and text, i'm good to go! I just need to focus on the content and not the boiler plate crap.
Thank you!
I agree. The simplest designs are the most visually appealing ones. I can honestly say that using a website that has better accessibility is nicer than one that is "pretty". Is there a way for you to print out your designs on a 3D medium so you can feel them? The spacing is way more important to the appeal than color.
>I don't even know where to begin with that
There are color swatches you can use and the correct colorization can be determined mathematically. Check out some of Google's guideliness at https://material.google.com/style/color.html#color-color-pal...
I skipped past a big swatch list because I think it could be annoying in a screen reader.
I implore you to keep designing websites. The fact is that designers focus way too much on the benign aspects of design and not enough on the ease of use and the mathematics that make them look good. If you focus on those aspects, you can make a great design.
But do take a close look at the text and background section. It's extremely useful for almost anything you design.
Totally! Your comment gelled a few things that always bothered me about material design. It's like they toss many of the colour conventions we've spent a lifetime building.
But if you stick to more neutral colours, the design guidelines are probably fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_R...
The basic stuff, like adding alt tags to images that have meaning and "skipnav", so readers can choose to skip directly to the content of a page without re-reading the navigation, are actually pretty straight forward to implement.
After you retrofit a site once, you'll find these things don't add much time as you incorporate them into the process the next time.
It's actually more about not disabling the accessibility features which so many web designers do. They're all built in and meant to work almost seamlessly alongside your design process, but people disable them because they are so self-centered they can't conceive of how someone with a disability might feel using their website.
Accessibility has been built in to the web for a very long time. The design process is "If I were blind, would I still be able to use this website? If I had mobility issues, would I be able to use this website?" Then you address those uses cases.
- What happens if I can't see this image?
- What happens when I disable focus hints and keyboard shortcuts?
- What happens if someone needs larger or smaller text on the page?
It's not a "kind of" design. It's just being considerate to other people's situations.
But really, the magic word you're looking for is "accessibility" (or "a11y" (eleven, not LL)) - spend an afternoon with that word and your favourite web search site.
It's a light set of styles that are applied over top of standard Bootstrap. If you buy a full "Theme" from Envato or where ever, even it's "Bootstrap Based" it is generally so stuffed full of random js libs and heavily customized that it's hard to work with.
1. It should "just work" to load via NPM and then later include the bootswatch theme afterwards.
2. If you use the LESS/SASS file compilation it will work as well, the Bootswatch variables will just replace the base Bootstrap ones.
While Bootstrap isn't a silver bullet in general, it's surely great if you don't want to write CSS, or only where necessary. And you can always build on top of that.
And needless to say, tastes vary wildly: I once started a side project with someone who was virtually my taste counterpart - he liked everything I found ugly and vice versa. So maybe you should get a second opinion on your designs... :P
I have no idea how big that market is, but I suspect a lot of developers are like myself - not opposed to making a site more accessible but clueless about where to start.
I'm thinking user groups like colorblind users and blind users. I'm sure I am missing more groups, so sorry for my ignorance upfront.
- Partially sighted users that are not technically literate enough to use assistive technologies.
- People with physical impairments that affect their ability to use input devices and may also dictate the types of device they can use.
- People with low levels of technical literacy.
- People with poor literacy in the language of the site.
- People with dyslexia, not forgetting those with poor working memory or slow processing speed.
- People with dementia.
- People with a host of other mental and cognitive disorders.
I've been through various audits with System Concepts in the UK, Annanpura in Finland, and opendoorsnfp in the USA.
Have you considered collaborating with a sighted person who is making the website for your project?
There are quite some api's that guess tags and descriptions for images. This doesn't look very complicated and might make inaccessible websites a bit more usable for you.
Unfortunately, when asked to select a hero block, I'm greeted with a series of images. Would you consider adding alt attributes to these? If I knew roughly what they looked like, I could probably pick and choose something semi-appropriate for a given project. I don't know what other issues I'm likely to hit, but I'd be interested in providing additional feedback if this at all seems like a viable direction.
Also, just noticed I can't select a hero block via the keyboard. Items aren't tab-focusable and keyboard-selectable. Maybe this won't work at all for me, but I'd really like something between "Here's a fully-formed theme" and "Here's a completely inaccessible website builder that gives you a blank canvas and assumes you don't want to touch the final HTML." :) If anyone knows of anything like that, please do share.