A Powerful Celebration of World Usability Day

November 8, 2022

November 10th is World Usability Day. Every year, the second Thursday of November is internationally observed to bring communities together to work on making the world an easier place to live. “It is about celebration and education—celebrating the strides we have made in creating usable products and educating the masses about how usability impacts our daily lives. It is about making our world work better. It is about reaching out to the common citizen and spreading the message: We don’t have to put up with products and services that don’t work well, and that human error is a misnomer.”

Powerful’s Commitment to Making Life Easier

Here at Powerful, we celebrate inclusion every day. With the human experience at the center of our work, we believe digital experiences should be easy and accessible for everyone to use. Our inclusive website design honors humans’ vast diversity: including the 70 million people in America who have ADHD, dyslexia, and other invisible disabilities.

Inclusive Design & Innovation

Here are some examples of how our web design process and platforms promote inclusivity:

We conduct user testing to go above and beyond compliance with accessibility standards.
Our sites are equipped with the Google Translate Tool. With over 133 languages available, multilingual visitors may access the website’s content in their preferred language.
Our content strategy optimizes information by breaking up large chunks of text to help website visitors focus on what’s important.
Every page within a website is enhanced to print.
Website visitors have the capability to increase font sizes for vision impairment with on-page zoom functionality.
Mouse-free navigation compatibility and testing for site visitors that may have limited or no use of their hands or in some cases a shaky and an unsteady hand.
Required alt-tags on images, to describe images to blind site visitors or others with a vision impairment.
Form field labels and compatibility for screen readers to describe forms and allow interaction with dropdown menus and other selections
Color contrast testing on each design
Ability to print interior pages with a thoughtful layout that redacts navigation menus, headers and footers to be conscious of what matters most to site visitors attempting to print content and ensuring those that have vision sensitivity to screen glare can assimilate content in their preferred format.
By default, utilizing slightly larger fonts with the ability to zoom in on fonts for site visitors that have vision impairments.
Landing page navigation tiles with large text and buttons assist site visitors with a vision impairment, shaky hands that have challenges with hovered dropdown menus and that integration iconography to assist those that speak English as a second language or those that have ADD/ADHD.
Limited and no use of italic text, as well as reduced margins for paragraph text to assist site visitors with dyslexia.
Adherence to sans-serif font usage for paragraph and non-heading content to assist those with limited vision.
No use of slideshows that can cause distractions to site visitors and hinder screen readers from providing an equal experience to those who site visitors that are blind.

Ben Lomand Connect utilizes our Navigation Tiles Web App to create touchscreen landing pages for site visitors with a shaky hand or anyone that has difficulty navigating dropdown menus. The navigation tiles are thoughtfully crafted to also assist site visitors with ADHD by creating a clear navigation path to the next logical step in a site’s hierarchy as well as providing iconography to help site visitors who prefer a more visualized approach to digesting content and an affirmation of the destination link to site visitors that may speak a different language other than English. All navigation tiles are compatible with translate tools such as Google Translate and use stark differences on hover effect to create an obvious change in visual display to show site visitors that may be color blind an obvious visual representation of which link is actively being hovered over.

While implementing a compliant design is an important step, organizations that prioritize accessibility must also know how to create and maintain compliant content.

Our curriculum-based accessibility training courses and other services are designed to empower your staff.

Advocate Accessibility

It is essential that your website provides equal access and equal opportunity to people with diverse disabilities. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognizes access to the Web, as a basic human right.

On World Usability Day, we encourage organizations and individuals to learn about how we can work together to uplift and empower everyone through accessibility and inclusion. With the help of tools and technologies, Powerful embraces the uniqueness of people’s different strengths and abilities.

Are you hoping to cultivate a more inclusive online platform? Powerful’s team of trusted web experts are here to help you create a more accessible user experience for all.