Vim. and..Accessible Design? (1/4 Accessibility in Design)

I’ll preface this post by saying that this was previously posted to EdStem as part of my work as an Undergraduate Learning Assistant for CS 352 Intro to Usability Engineering. This post is the first in a four part series discussing accessibility in design.

Nobody asked but..

The other week I was reminded how dependent I am on a computer mouse.

Vim.

That’s probably all I need to say to get the point across to many of you. But for those who don’t know. Vim is a text editor that runs mainly in the terminal and is the coding environment of choice for a certain type of developer. Vim gets a lot of disdain from many developers because of its steep learning curve.

Why? Vim takes primarily keyboard input when run from the terminal. Meaning a lot of things you normally do in your IDE of choice are invalid here. So simple things like copy-pasting, deleting lines, and exiting all require a quick trip to Google, or an extensive read through the manual to learn. Thus, you’ll have to re-teach yourself how to do nearly everything!

But Vim brings up a great point.

What if you could only interact with your computer using a keyboard? How would you open up applications, browse the web, use PyCharm, or turn off the computer!! Without a mouse or touch controls this would be very difficult. But for some systems/people this is a reality and so modern design must adapt. This semester I’m diving deeper into accessibility and how we can design our systems “smarter”. So I’ll post some of what I’m finding here for you all to incorporate into your designs. Whether they be for this course or other projects.

A good place to start for this is web design. W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) has created a set of international standards for web accessibility and has resources to boot. If you’ve ever used a screen reader to listen to course readings rather than read them yourself, you can probably thank W3C for pioneering the standards for that. If you want to learn the basics of web accessibility check out their introduction to accessibility. And one of the coolest things they have is a repository of accessibility tools for you to use, from color contrast checkers, to free full stack accessibility software (Try WAVE accessibility tool).

Web accessibility development skills are in high demand in the workplace, and that’s probably not going to go away in the near future. So it would probably pay dividends to pay attention to current best practices. In the future I’ll try and highlight some great accessibility tools and practices that I’m finding in my research. Or if there are any topics you want me to dive deeper into let me know. (i.e. ARIA, HTML rules, etc.)

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