We should all start an accessibility push in our organizations, here’s why:

• There are about 60 million people in the U.S. who can’t use a computer to get on the Internet in the normal fashion. For those people, a mix of screen reader software, keyboards with special buttons, and even motion-sensing Web cameras must take the place of the mouse and QWERTY keyboard.




• With a rapidly aging population in many parts of the world — notably the U.S. — accessibility requirements will become useful for today’s crop of baby boomers as they grow older




• In order to do business with the U.S. government, companies must comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which insists that electronic and information technology products sold to government agencies be designed with disabled employees in mind, and that government services produced by contractors consider disabled citizens in equal measure.

Performance, internationalization, and accessibility are not a feature, they should all be standard.

From the book The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.

Checkout the story of redesign of the ubiquitous prescription bottle led by Deborah Adler

I really enjoyed the article’s approach to guiding the reader through the process, and the result is stunning…Just far enough out of the box to be a real improvement, but not so unfamiliar as to make it un-marketable.

I don’t see a mention of this in the article, but judging from the bottles’ shape they can be packed more tightly to save shipping space and costs, as well.

You can see Debora Adler speak at Microsoft Mixx 09 Day 2 Keynote. (fast forward to 30:30)

1. Design awareness can and ideally should be something that every employee of a company makes their best effort to acquire. I would say exactly the same thing about technology awareness. In the corporate culture I dream about, there would be a balance between the two—along with a healthy respect for best business practices—in every employee.
2. Design literacy is also something that can be acquired with a bit more effort by any employee, regardless of background. If your company has employees who suffer from “Apple (AAPL) envy” in terms of the nature of the products that they produce, building such literacy is a very real and useful step in helping combat that particular affliction. Designers need technological literacy, too, and both need an equal dose of business acumen. Without this, none of us has any right to complain about not being understood by those in other disciplines. We all need to be able to handle multiple directions.
3. Design thinking is something that takes even more of an investment, requiring a level of competence that—with dedication and practice—can be acquired by anyone, to a reasonable degree. Cognitive science makes it clear that the strategies designers use in approaching problems or questions are different (not “better”) than those employed by those trained in engineering disciplines. Both strategies are complementary. Given the complexity of the problems that confront us, it seems to me that expanding our collective arsenal of techniques is something we could all benefit from.
4. Design practice, however, is not something available to everyone. This is a full-time job for highly trained professionals. It requires people who have invested just as much to acquire their set of skills as the computer scientists have put in for theirs. Yes, there are exceptions. There always are on both sides of the table. But it is risky, if not foolhardy, to generalize from the exception.

- David Lewis

Neat visual nav at Stylous.com. Check it out in action to see how it works.

- Donald Norman, author of “The Design of Everyday Things”

Here’s a screenshot of a great example not listed in the article above:

Victoria's Secret website: In my opinion, is the best of the fashion list.

In the showcase of fashion websites, you’ll see some variety, but you will also notice the presence of certain trends.

Fashion websites are sometimes a good source of inspiration. They really try to push the boundaries of what websites can achieve, through their design and functionality. But most of the times they pay the high cost of having poor usability and/or missing their target markets: