Designing with everyone in mind is not only a mandatory practice in the built environment sector, but it also opens up exhibits, booths, etc. to be more inclusive and inherently creative. Rebecca Ferlotti, Content Marketer, sat down with Don Nelson, Creative Designer, to understand how RGI uses the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Accessibility Guidelines to create a more enjoyable user experience (UX) for all.
Next month is National Disability Employment Awareness Month, so I wanted to understand how RGI uses ADA Accessibility Guidelines within projects to ensure everyone—including patrons and employees—is able to access those experiences.
The way we approach projects is first establishing an understanding of the scale, the scope, the messaging, and the audience. We want to make sure experiences are more accessible from both a physical standpoint and a cognitive standpoint—ultimately using ADA guidelines to create a better UX overall.
It’s about looking at different ways we’re considering the participant, the viewer, or the patron. We consider:
What’s the message?
What’s the story being told?
Who are the people viewing or interacting with this built environment?
What are the patrons’ potential limitations?
Is there anything within the proposed solution that makes the experience less accessible for others?
Accessibility guidelines are the first step in creating an equitable and universal UX so the messaging is being articulated in a way that everyone understands the story being told.
How do you ensure the stories are understood by everyone?
It’s a matter of being able to communicate in a way that’s free of overcomplicated language. Writing verbosely goes over everyone’s heads. It’s important to make the pieces digestible to the largest audience possible because you never know what audience you’re speaking to or what their level of comprehension is going to be.
Especially in the case of museums and libraries that have so many target markets—and the audiences within those target markets are broad as well. You want to make it enjoyable for folks with a 4th grade reading level, a 12th grade reading level, and even people who have a PhD.
Right. It behooves us to approach a designed environment from a more universal perspective. If it’s more of a teaching/learning environment like a museum exhibit or library, we’re typically gearing that toward younger people. But all people who come across it (like parents and teachers) need to be engaged as well. They all need to understand what you’re conveying in a really clear way. For example, if a display is more scientific, the challenge is to avoid scientist-level explanations that no one will understand except scientists. We have to think: How do we articulate the more advanced subjects in a way that people can actually understand? Even with some of the projects we’ve worked on, just trying to wrap your head around concepts can be a challenge even though the subjects are fascinating.
That keeps it exciting for us as we work on communicating these big ideas. We want to raise people up in their understanding as well as encourage them to go further in their knowledge exploration.
I’m sure it also helps when you don’t come in with that knowledge yourself, so you’re learning along with everyone else. You have that reference point to go back and say, “When I was trying to learn this concept to create this copy and build, how did I prefer it to be explained to me?”
We try to find ways to uncomplicate these concepts and communicate them in a simple yet impactful way, which makes the experience more enjoyable for patrons. ADA guidelines are the first step—acting as a framework to craft the overall experience. It’s critically important for our partners because they have stories they want to tell and messages they want to convey through their environments.
We consider physical accessibility of built environments such as museum exhibits based on scale—making sure the height and depths are consistent to create an equitable experience for our partners’ customers. We also keep in mind the touch points of all interfaces as well as legibility of the text and graphics. When we start to look at the care and consideration of design in our work, it keeps the focus around the messaging being conveyed in a way that’s memorable.
So the ADA guidelines are that prompt, not only covering physical disabilities but non-apparent disabilities as well. You have no idea who’s walking through a built environment, and it’s more than making sure wheelchairs are able to get into and through your exhibit; although, that’s of course a crucial aspect of it. But even still, the buildings themselves might not have ramps, which RGI can’t control.
To your point, it’s really a matter of building those accessible features into the piece—working with what you can control. We have to be considerate of the paths around exhibits for wheelchair accessibility. We also need to incorporate appropriate touchpoint heights to our displays that allow for universal accessibility.
One of our recent exhibits comes to mind that had those considerations built in by design. We created an interface in such a way that there were two different heights to it, accessible for both people in wheelchairs and those shorter in stature as well as one for people not living with a disability. Again, you’re expressing more of an equitable design with that type of interface approach—how that bakes into the design consideration of the exhibit. It’s all about developing creative solutions that are inclusive to all.