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Over the next several weeks, I will be blogging about Universal Design in the User Experience process at salesforce.com.  For those who are unfamiliar with universal design, the term was developed by architect Ron Mace as:

The design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.

Universal Design has since been applied to many fields including industrial design, education and learning, and in our case, web and application design. The goal is to consider all users with all devices. 

One design (and one implementation of that design) to rule them all.

What follows is a guide I developed for designers. I will update the links below as the posts are made:

Semantics and Structure

Interactions

Forms and links

  • Tab order specified on form fields
  • Labels and help text identified for each form element
  • Link text is meaningful on its own
  • Semantic input types used in mobile designs

Media

  • Informational images have ALT attribute text
  • Decorative images have an empty ALT attribute
  • Audio and video have captions, subtitles, or transcripts

Visual Design

  • Text has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1
  • All font sizes equal to or greater than 10pt
  • Links stand out from normal text
  • Visual indicators are used for mouse and keyboard focus
  • Color is not the only visual means of conveying information

Let us know what you think, and share our experiences with universal design. We look forward to hearing from you.

As always, all of the content and images in these posts fall under our safe harbor agreement.