Me and the homies.
Region of Peel
How developing an accessible site made me a stronger designer.
TLDR: As a Front-end Developer intern, I coded peelregion.ca to be more accessible, organized, and easy to use. No citizen should have to struggle to find their garbage collection schedule or where the nearest vaccination clinic is.
The lessons learned from this summer internship shaped both my career path and values as a designer.
I learned a lot.
The Region of Peel is one of Canada’s largest municipalities with over 1.4 million citizens from Mississauga, Brampton, and Caledon. Being involved in this massive design overhaul for such a large pool of users was both challenging and fun.
The previous interface, inacessible, unorganized, and hard to use.
The updated interface, strong colour contrast, clear information hieararchy, and easy to navigate.
Tasks that helped shape my values as a designer.
Coding in an organized manner.
To ensure hierarchy and organization on each page, I coded the site using H1, H2 tags, etc., alongside detailed HTML comments. Coding in a clean and readable manner, allowed for users with low-visibility to easily digest content using their Screen Readers.
As a designer, I follow this organized and hierarchical approach by labelling everything (screens, layers, etc.) and defining a clear start, middle, and end to user journeys.
Writing alt text.
Images are used everywhere. As an intern I would write alt text for images and leave decorative images blank.
What this taught me as a designer is that images should not be crucial to understanding the content. Also if the image is strictly only decorative, valuable written content should always be prioritized on the page.
Ensuring colour contrast.
I would ensure all text and images would follow AA contrast compliance.
As a designer I always prioritize visibility over an aesthetic. I view flashy UI trends (i.e. neumorphism, monochromatic text, etc.) through the lens of accessibility and critically think about their uses.
Improving navigation and information hierarchy.
The old site had information overload on each page. There would be three navigation bars on one page, multiple CTAs, and no content prioritization.
With all of my current projects, I design with clarity, simplicity, and purpose. The desired action from a user should never be confusing or muddled with other sub-tasks.
What I want to reiterate.
Empathy is key.
In 2017, one in five (22%) of the Canadian population aged 15 years and over had one or more disabilities.
With this statistic in mind, I never want accessibility to be an after-thought. As designers we are not creating products for a single user but for dozens of people with unique needs. People with physical, visual, and/or auditory impairments need to be able to understand your content.
Yes, beautiful designs are great but inclusive design is even better.