Making your interface better for everyone means caring deeply about making quality products. A quality product should have a fantastic user experience (UX).
This includes:
It's important that Returnless products are usable and useful to everyone.
Everyone is a pretty big group. It includes our tenants, their customers, our development partners, our employees and the greater tech community at large. That also includes all members of our community who have disabilities.
Disabilities may affect how people move, see, hear, communicate, learn, understand, and process information. As a result, it's important to consider how to design and develop a product to support a wide range of needs and experiences.
Using our components is a way to improve accessibility and consistency when building products for Returnless.
The build-it-once, use-it-everywhere model means that accessibility knowledge of the designers and developers who build these components is available to all of Returnless and our partners. Because of this, users get a consistent experience that can be leveraged into accessible products.
Many accessibility features come free in the components. But, it's important to make sure that components are integrated in a way that doesn't create unforeseen accessibility barriers. Depending how components are used, there may be more design and implementation considerations.
Don't programmatically move focus to new content without user input. Components that use controls to display overlays, such as modals and popovers, manage focus automatically.
The only case where focus should be managed without the user's okay is when the user needs to be interrupted because they cannot continue their current workflow.
Users will expect to interact with controls and content in ways that follow the defaults for their browser, platform, and assistive technologies. Introducing non-standard features can give users better ways of accomplishing tasks, but they can also create barriers.
For example, users who rely on the keyboard will expect that buttons can be activated with the enter/return key or the space key. If buttons are programmed to be used with different keys, users will need to be instructed on how to use them.
Before designing or building custom features that use non-standard controls or interactions, first consider whether the goal can be met using native features.
If non-standard interactions are required:
Our components are tested for accessibility with automated and manual techniques. Users should expect to be able to access features built with our components using modern assistive technologies. These include native and third-party tools like:
To help people who rely on assistive technologies, such as a screen reader or other text to speech programs, our components use alternative text for icons and images used to convey information and actions (like buttons and links).
We target WCAG 2.1 Level A and Level AA success criteria, and seek to provide highly usable experience for everyone.
For more information, see the following resources: