Designing Maximum Accessibility for ThinkUp

Portfolio | Please see my work here | http://samuelpushpak.com |

Contact | Email | samkay8@gmail.com |

About Me

              Name  Samuel Pushpak K

            School  National Institute of Design, R&D Campus, Bangalore, India

          Studying  Masters in Information and Interface Design

Skills

          Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, HTML, CSS (Advanced)

          User Research, Interaction Design, Usability Engineering (Advanced)

          Javascript, JQuery, D3.js (Beginner)

Proposal

          Phase 1 - Audit the current state of ThinkUp
          Using Accessibility Developer Tools by Google and an application called TOTAL VALIDATOR,
          the current ThinkUp code will be audited against Section 508 and WCAG 2.0.
          Then the coding patterns are labelled. The labels include pass/fail/warning/check/NA.
          Even though these tools give an overview, to achieve maximum accessibility manual audit is
          required.
          So the entire code is manually audited and at the same time the warnings generated by the tools
          are corrected. By this time I should have grasped how the code is written and organised.
   
          Phase 2a - Designing for color blindness and low vision
          The color schemes will be optimised so that people who are challenged with color blindness and
          low vision could get pleasant aesthetic feel with less distractions. A possibility to optimise
          images will also be explored. My goal in this phase is that ThinkUp should gracefully upgrade
          based on the user's preference.

          Phase 2b - Designing for completely blind
          The support for screen readers will be created at this stage. Just by writing alternate texts
          we cannot deliver a good experience. My goal is to create engaging text and captions that has
          logical flow so that the user can browse seamlessly.

          Phase 2c - Designing for hearing impairment
          Videos will be provided with captions. A possibility to create storyboards for the videos will
          be explored. So that, if the user doesn't want to play the video, he can just see
          images and read the related captions. Also efficient visual alerts whenever there is a complex
          navigation will be created.

          Phase 2d - Designing for physical and cognitive disabilities
          All the current I/O and navigation aspects will be thoroughly studied to find opportunities
          that might make the I/O operations much easier. Typography and layout consistency will be
          adapted for ADHD users.

Commitment

          A minimum of 15 hours per week will be dedicated to this project. I'm a student of Information
          and interface design, so Information Architecture, Web Accessibility, Usability engineering
          are the courses I study and this project totally gets integrated with my course. So this gives
          me more scope to spend quality time on this project all through the week. Also while doing the
          entire project, I'll completely adhere to the section 508 and WCAG 2.0 policies.

Thank You.