Making our designs accessible is often something we do after we’ve utilized design thinking to help craft solutions to problems. But what if we could break the ‘do one and then the other’ approach and have both accessibility standards and design thinking work in tandem to develop innovative solutions? Rethinking the iterative approach of design thinking and adding accessibility checks throughout the entire process helps us to achieve truly universal design.
User experience professionals and groups that focus on usability tend to have their own methods and practices for performing a usability test. The Usability Working Group at Cornell University Library has worked to translate our list of methods into a format that can be shared and utilized by ourselves and others. We want to explain a few of the methods that we use frequently and the specific additions to this toolkit that make it unique.
