Are you left handed? Have you noticed that many tools are built for right-handed people? If you’re tall, do you wonder why the tray tables on an airplane bang up against your knees all the time? If you wear glasses, do you find it annoying that you need to take them off to use a virtual reality headset?
These are minor annoyances — but they point towards a deeper truth — these products were designed by people who weren’t thinking about you when they designed them. Imagine what this is like if the whole world was designed by and for people not like you, and you begin to realize the challenges faced by persons with disabilities. As designers, this doesn’t sit well with us.
That’s why we teamed up with the WITH Foundation — a non-profit foundation dedicated to promoting comprehensive healthcare, deep empathy, and design that focuses on the needs of adults with developmental disabilities— to create a workshop that teaches tech product designers how to design for a more accessible world.
In March 2018, Sidebench and the WITH Foundation hosted the first 1-day pilot workshop, bringing a small group of the LA design community together with PwDs to promote universal design — the design and composition of a technology so that it can be accessed, understood, and used to the greatest extent possible by all people regardless of their age, size, ability or disabilities. Universal design creates an opportunity to ensure a significant portion of the American market can utilize our day-to-day technologies.
We can’t wait to gather even more insights from local designers, developers, founders, and disability community members before we take to the SXSW stage. This November, Sidebench and WITH are hosting a second round of Universal Design Events comprised of a Universal Design Symposium on 11/27 and a Beta Day on 11/28. If you are interested in learning more, please register to attend one or both of the workshop events at the Eventbrite links below.
Universal Design Symposium, November 27
This event aims to improve empathy and understanding and create a greater conversation around Universal Design. The symposium is an educational workshop comprised of a keynote speech about unlearning behaviors that contribute to non-inclusive design, empathy exercises, activities, a luncheon, and speaker sessions that address both the business case for Universal Design as well as some best practices for User Testing. This event is an excellent starting place for product designers, managers, and key decision makers in product-based businesses to get a sense of how to begin building Universal Design practices into their work. Please register for the Symposium event below:
WITH Foundation’s Beta Day, November 28
The WITH Foundation’s Beta Day event will enable product designer and developers to test the accessibility of their products with the PwD community. The Beta Day is an excellent starting place for anyone with an existing or new product to collect user feedback and gain a deeper understanding of Universal Design best practices. If you are interested, please register for the Beta Day event below:
Catch us at SXSW, March 8-13
When crafting our original vision, goals, objectives, and KPIS for the universal design event project, Sidebench and WITH Foundation established a global attitude shift within the tech community as the long-term mission of our initiative. Typically, our vision statements are used as a guiding light and an ideal picture of the 5+-year future. This time; however, the timeline to achieving our vision might be shorter: We are proud to announce that we have been selected to share our message with a larger audience in our Equitable Design for Persons with Disabilities session at SXSW 2019.
