11 ms·
Inclusive Design Toolkit
- Kiro 10y agoSo... what is this?
- petepete 10y agoI'm not sure, I skimmed the entire thing and still don't know.
- tscs37 10y agoI read the entire thing forwards and backwards and either way does not make any more sense than the other. I guess marketing.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoColoured people, women in wheel chairs, and men who have babies. As far as I can tell.
- dmoo 10y agoHave a look at the PDFs. I guess it is designed to help you rethink the situations in which the software you write will be used, how it will be used and by whom.
- softgrow 10y agoIt's about building awareness. I read the title and was expecting to see something actionable like Web Content Accessibility Guidelines https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php which explains and then how to test a product against it. The only guidelines seem to be Universal Windows Platform that seems more about writing for the Windows ecosystem.
- OhSoHumble 10y agoI... think it's a set of standards around universal access? Or maybe a new program/initiative for creating more accessible technology in general? A public confirmation that they care about accessibility? I'm going with the first one after downloading and skimming the inclusive design guidelines pdf listed. However, I'm still confused. I don't know how much confidence I have in Microsoft being able to design universally accessible interfaces if this marketing vomit of a website does everything within its power to obscure what it's trying to actually say.
- jpalomaki 10y agoLooks like this is not about giving so "do this, do that" kind of guidelines but to guide your thinking process. So you would gather your design team and then go through the exercises listed in the PDF (the "Support cards" are listed at the end of it): http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/0/D/B0D4BF87-09CE-4417-8F28-D60703D672ED/Inclusive_Toolkit_Activities.pdf http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/0/D/B0D4BF87-09CE-4...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- blisse 10y agoTitle is not clear but this is Microsoft saying they are committed to designing for accessibility in mind. I believe they added a new section called the Inclusive Design Toolkit. Linking to the PDFs or something would be a lot more straightforward than linking to their general design page. The PDFs make some good points about how designing for accessibility has secondary, wider reaching impact. It's nice to see at the very least that Microsoft cares enough to make this.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- 0xFFC 10y agoDespite using Windows regularly and doing my development on it, I have serious problem with Microsoft approach. They literally tried to ignore many people who uses low dpi right now. I know people are going to adopt better monitor in somewhere along the line. But whole world is not just silicone valley and as far as I can see in third world countries (which is where Microsoft rules) 99% uses very low DPI monitors for desktop and laptop. That's because for a long time manufacturers produced and sold low dpi monitor. Changing your underlying technology ( as far as I know they adopted DirectWrite as replacements for ClearText) with out caring about your users experience (and ironically making it worse that what it was) does not mean anything other than ignoring and don't caring about your user base. Font rendering in Windows 10 is ridiculous. It is in worst possible shape. (In UWP and modern app). At the other hand, Ubuntu, Fedora (with freetype tweak) font rendering is fabulous. I hated that guy, Steve Ballmer. He didn't know basic rule of management. You as manager cannot force people to use something you want. You should provide them better experience overall. I know there are some technical issues there about ClearText (which was not that good -far from freetype-, but much better than DirectWrite). We are talking about biggest and most successful software company in history of mankind. There is got to be better way than ignoring your userbase. I am sure they can provide better font rendering for UWP in low DPI monitors. Let be honest nobody cared about windows modern apps before integrating them into Windows core itself. Right now every time i open settings app my eyes hurt. P.S. I do realize most people in HN have high DPI monitor, but if you can just try to use UWP app in 14 inch monitor with 1366x768 resolution (which is more than common in third world countries), and compare it to ClearText. P.S 2. this is not only for third world countries. As far as I know gamers tend to buy large screen but with 1080p resolution. I tested on it, font rendering on anything less than 200 DPI is fucking nightmare. And doesn't matter how much smoother UWPs animation's are. Or how much their design are cool. When text is ridiculously awful, it doesn't worth using. www.sven.de/dpi P.S 3 This is one of the saddest experience I had as SE. Microsoft knew they had desktop users locked in, and because of that they didn't care. Imagine a world which Microsoft had serious competitor in desktop/laptop OS space. I am sure they wouldn't dare to mess with user experience in such way. I am really happy with recent increase in Apple's iMac's and MacBook's.
- grogenaut 10y ago
- dqv 10y agoHere I am again to complain about bad focus support. The biggest travesty is people pushing the diversity narrative without... being inclusive. The page has javascript, so I know they can put in javascript that targets the keyboard and helps users know where the hell they are focused. The focus outlines on those damn buttons is way too non-obvious.
- Aldo_MX 10y agoThis is a document to increase awareness about accessibility and provide guidelines, yet the landing page fails to convey the intention of the document. Accessibility is about lowering barriers to people and making things actually easier, not about making a message difficult to understand with marketing gibberish. Why can't a landing page, especially one about accessibility, be concise and straight to the point?
- coriny 10y agoWow, right. When I first saw the link I thought, "Excellent, MS are contributing some good to the world via accessibility tools". By the time I had scanned the page, I had come to the conclusion that it was just marketing blather for their equivalent of material design. Maybe they're testing AI-generated content?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kbhn 10y ago"Human beings have been at the center of design practices for a long time." What does this sentence even mean? Who else would be at the center? Cats?
- taneq 10y agoWell, I guess it's not wrong?
- ncphillips 10y agoThey may be referencing IDEO's Human-Centered Design [1]. I think the danger is that if you don't intentionally use human-centered design processes, you could end up "just getting it done", or "reducing cost", or nothing at all in the center. Surely you've heard some horror story of engineers spending millions of dollars designing software, but they neglect to include the end users in the design process. What happens in this story? It finally makes it to the users and they deem it unusable. There was a fun little incident in Canada recently where this was probably part of the issue [2]. [1] http://www.designkit.org/human-centered-design http://www.designkit.org/human-centered-design [2] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/psac-protest-phoenix-pay-system-st-johns-1.3726011 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/psac-pro...
- izolate 10y agoJudging from the fact that Windows 10 still uses icons from 1995, I am surprised to learn that Microsoft even has a design department.
- kukx 10y agoInclusive Design Toolkit (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/design/practice#toolkit https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/design/practice#toolkit) consists of a downloadable manual and activities. The manual is an overview of the inclusive design problem. The activities are more like a guideline to researching possible design solutions. I didn't find there any ready to use design recipes.
- sergiotapia 10y agoThe amount of doublespeak in this document is absolutely off the charts. Disability equals Mismatched Human Interactions - really? http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/0/D/B0D4BF87-09CE-4417-8F28-D60703D672ED/INCLUSIVE_TOOLKIT_MANUAL_FINAL.pdf http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/0/D/B0D4BF87-09CE-4... Why not just accept that some people have disabilities and it's everybody's responsibility to help these people out to the best of our abilities? It's the moral thing to do. Why bend and squish words into different definitions?
- ZenoArrow 10y ago> "Why bend and squish words into different definitions?" It's not bending definitions, the World Health Organisation's definition of disability is a generic description of what a disability is. To be clear, the definition given was... “a mismatch in interaction between the features of a person’s body and the features of the environment in which they live.” In what way does that not line up with what a disability is?
- blfr 10y agoThis definition matches every discomfort.
- ZenoArrow 10y agoSuch as? Perhaps it helps to think of disability this way to shake the idea that it has to be a permanent state. If I break my leg, but it eventually heals, was I not temporarily disabled?
- blfr 10y agoSuch as not enough leg room on a plane, a chair with not enough padding or ventilation -- every possible discomfort, including most trivial ones, even to a fully-abled, mint-condition, picture-of-health human is some mismatch between them and their environment. (If I wanted to be snide, I'd include "using Windows".)
- grogenaut 10y agoinclusive design page captures the back event via a redirect page.
- andrewvijay 10y agoThat's quite a lot of reading to do in a landing page. Needs a tldr; section!
- chris_wot 10y agoIt's amazing there is so much text surrounded by negative space yet they have managed to say nothing at all. That's quite an accomplishment really.
- gyvastis 10y agoWhen did Microsoft became eligible to speak about design?
- ZenoArrow 10y agoThey've clearly stepped up their design chops in recent years. For example, I'd argue the Windows Phone UI is very good (the main thing holding it back isn't the OS, but a lack of apps and desirable phones).
- mixedCase 10y ago> They've clearly stepped up their design chops in recent years. 1) https://i.imgur.com/VAwaroi.jpg https://i.imgur.com/VAwaroi.jpg 2) https://i.imgur.com/mSGwDsg.jpg https://i.imgur.com/mSGwDsg.jpg 3) https://i.imgur.com/ZuOKBmF.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ZuOKBmF.jpg 4) https://i.imgur.com/IRTqmZL.jpg https://i.imgur.com/IRTqmZL.jpg
- chestnut-tree 10y agoMicrosoft has a long history of providing accessibility options in their products (long before Apple or Google started taking accessibility seriously). Microsoft have never been very good with visual and interaction design in their desktop operating system. However, Windows Phone is the exception. It's visually attractive, and has nice, well thought-out interactions. I think it's superior to Android and iOS in many ways. It's obvious that both Apple and Google took some cues from Windows Phone in the updates to their own mobile operating systems. (Undoubtedly, all these companies look at each others products when designing new features).
- icemelt8 10y agoSame windows phone that forgot to put a notification bar until Windows Phone 8.1 update?
- andriesm 10y agoOh no, the social justice warriors have invaded Microsoft!!! (Double speak, meaningless sentences abound - that if you were to strip them from the article no meaning would be lost.)
- chris_wot 10y agoWhen I eventually got to Microsoft's actual PDF that explains this I noticed two things: 1. The URL is http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/2/C/F2C19EC6-03E2-4D8C-B417-0265B808CD06/Microsoft-Design-Language-1603.pdf http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/2/C/F2C19EC6-03E2-4... Why the heck does everything at Microsoft have to involve URLs with GUIDs in it? 2. That PDF is one of the worst documents purportedly on design frameworks I've ever seen. It's not functional, or direct, the text is in a tiny font, there are pages that do nothing with no content. Ironically in page 20 they specify a minimum size of 12 EP, yet the label on the side is like half this size! Wut?
- ungzd 10y agoMicrosoft says they're changed but still designs everything for office slavery. Even graphical style emphasises it. Looking at this page first thoughts are: suits, ringing phones, cold calls. They're designing hamster wheels. They sell their software to business executives, not users who will use it.
- r0n0j0y 10y agoMicrosoft laying the foundation for Hololens apps?
- thrownaway23 10y agoso now accessibility is called "inclusiveness" ? Can we please stop with the marketing bullshit ?
- thrownaway23 10y agoso now accessibility is called "inclusiveness" ? Can we please stop with the marketing bullshit ?