First, I love Sweden, I love the Nordics! If I go to there as a conference speaker, I always have a great time. The Nordics are innovative. And I am really looking forward to my next 3 trips to the Nordics in the beginning of 2020. I start with Oslo (Norway) in January, Stockholm (Sweden) in February and Helsinki (Finland) in March.

Thanks to my great network I saw this movie:

As I saw this movie I was worried as an expert in accessibility and inclusion.

So, let’s open the discussion on accessibility and inclusion from my part of view: people with disabilities.

To do this, I am going to focus on 2 disabilities: autism / Asperger (youngers with autism / Asperger) and people with learning disabilities.

(Youngsters) with autism  / Asperger

For a lot of people with autism / Asperger, especially for youngsters the physical world is important. The physical view of a banknote and how this banknote can be divided into other banknotes and in the end in coins is a very important view. Also, if you are caring an amount of physical money into your wallet and you want to go to a toy store it’s very concrete, what you can combine with the amount of money and what’s beyond your budget.

People with learning disabilities

There are people with learning disabilities. This can be adults with the knowledge of children below 10. There’s a lot of theory of learning disabilities. The most famous disability on this field is people with Downs Syndrome. But Downs isn’t the only disability that causes learning disabilities. As I tell in my story as a speaker each disability is a spectrum and the knowledge and intellectual functioning is different par person. Some adults have the IQ of a child of 9, even 6 or below 3. there are also adaptive skills and so on.

But what I see in the field if I work with people with learning disabilities is also the same as with youngsters with autism: the physical form of money is very important. As a parent or coach for a person with learning disabilities it’s very concrete t give a banknote of money and help them to split this into costs. A digital translation of money can be challenging.

Do you trust everybody?

Nice question. Can you give the bank card / the mobile application to pay to everybody surrounding the person with the disability (if this is a youngster with autism / Asperger or a person with learning disability it’s doesn’t matter)?

How to control the usage of the account linked to the card / app?

How to create a visible system that the persons with the disability understand. That provides trust and transparency for parents / care givers / coaches?

How to prevent that inclusion is going backwards?

Do make the last question concrete: I mean: Currently there are quite a lot of people with disabilities going to shops / warehouses on their own. How to prevent that these persons must be surrounded with a caregiver / coach for the payment?

How to build in safety for these vulnerable persons? If you have a banknote of 50 (Dollar by example / it doesn’t matter). The largest amount of money that can be stolen is 50 Dollar. If you share a bank account / app / card with the budget of 1000 Dollar, maybe 1000 Dollar can be stolen…

Are mobile apps the solution?

I believe. There are a lot of mobile payment apps. And as you all can read on my blog (in other blogposts). There a lot of possibilities to make mobile apps more accessible. Using Text To Speech, Color by Function, Simplify The Layout, Images and pictographs and so on.

At this time. I haven’t seen one mobile banking app that implements this accessibility concepts. I hope governments and banks will investigate how they make their apps accessible for people with different disabilities.

This is very important because we don’t want inclusion is going backwards.

More info on my accessibility concepts:

The Need of Accessible Apps

Simplify the layout

Color by Function

More concepts coming soon!

Thanks for reading! Can’t wait for your reactions.

In this blogpost I’d love to talk about ‘simplify the layout’. In other words this means making the lay-out easier to understand. In this blogpost I am going to tell you how to make a layout for an app that’s really accessible. Easy to use.

I am going to focus on people with autism, learning disabilities (in other words intellectual or cognitive disabilities) and people that are distracted very often. An example is people on the ADD / ADHD spectrum.

How to start with simplifying the layout?

You can start  simplifying  the layout of your application with cutting down the content of your application. Simplifying the lay-out is making the screen easy to understand. This can be done with less content par screen. Big busy screens with lot of divided content isn’t easy for everyone.

And I know, a lot of developers want to build applications with as much as possible options. Eye – catchers. For people that have difficulties with understanding the basic usage of your application are this options eye – killer.

Another adjustment to make an accessible lay-out is a bigger font. Of course, a bigger font is helpful for people with vision loss. But also for people with intellectual disabilities it’s easier to recognize words and text if the font is bigger.

For many people with disabilities it’s easy to have enough contrast. Use dark text on a white background. Specific for people with intellectual disabilities a white or light background is easier.

But if you really want to be accessible and inclusive for a lot of people you can add the option to switch to a dark background with a light text-color scheme. Some people with autism prefer this combination. They have the feeling to have less sensory overload with a dark color scheme.

Let’s introduce you to Color By Function. The vision of Color By Function is that you color the controls in you app by function and not or not only by control type or the place that makes the layout most beautiful.

Specifying functions by category

First you have to separate functions of an application. You need to make categories of functions. There can be similar tasks in each category.

Here an examples:

Category ‘navigate to another page’. Different tasks in this category:

–  Navigate to Settings Page.  

– Navigate to About Page

Our Main categories

We have currently following categories:

1. We have button’s that read-aloud some text. This is called text-to-speech. (Yellow)
2. We have buttons or other controls that navigate within a dataset. In fact you change the content of some controls but you stay in the same view. (Dark Gray)
3. We have buttons or other controls that navigate you to another view/page in the application. (Blue)

At this time I made apps with 3 these main categories. If I need an application with another main control function I have to link another color.

Multiple app approach

It’s also important if you plan to develop different apps for people with disabilities always make the same color by function color choices.

 

At this time many people around the world are using apps, computers and smartphones. Most of this people can do a lot of interesting stuff with this modern communication.

This modern communication made many people their life easier. So I going go tell you a story to show how modern and mobile technology helped our family and myself.

“We are 1995, I was a child and went on vacation with my parents to a family resort in my own country. There were business people and just working- life families. I was in the scene of a normal life family, my dad was working in the metal industry and my mom was selling pizza’s at a market. We walked to the swimming pool and we saw a business man calling with a mobile cell phone. We found it funny, my dad was laughing out loud with the  ‘mobile phone’ and in our family we made a role – playing – theater about calling with mobile phones.

4 Years later, my parents had a mobile phone. 7 Year later I had a mobile phone. After a while I switched do a PDA. Internet enabled device. And since quite long time we all have an smartphone, and are continuously connected to the outer world. I even have a Twitter account and via digital media I worked myself into a worldwide well known conference speaker.”

Dennie Declercq

Without this technology my speaker life wasn’t there. I have a lot of QoL (Quality of Life) improvements due to this modern technology.

So let me make the link through people with disabilities. Not all the people with disabilities have a smartphone yet. I have proven that it’s possible to make special-made apps that are user friendly for people who can’t read or have difficulties with most of the apps in Market Place / App Store.

Shouldn’t it be nice if we can open up the world also for those people. If we can not only make the impossible possible for people without disabilities, but also for people with disabilities?

This is the point were “Inclusion” comes in. People with disabilities (PWD) are living the same life as people without disabilities. All people together have a good life and a good QoL. This is inclusion this is my pride!

How do you to this? Well on this http://accessibledreams.home.blog I post a lot of blog about accessible software. I even share my speaker schedule. I am going to do a lot of blog posts ant talks about accessible software.

To give you a sneak preview: I talk a lot about Simplify the Layout, Color By Function and Text To Speech. More about this terms in following posts.

Yours, Dennie

Some people prefer a dark color scheme, some people prefer a light color scheme. And some people are just weird (people just like me).  More and more Microsoft and third party software provides the option to have a dark color mode and a light color mode. As I teased in the 2^nd sentence: some people are just weird (like me), I point that fact due to my autism that of course is also a disability. Most of the time I prefer the color scheme that is the basic and first color scheme of the software application. There is a special part in my brain telling me that this is the preferred layout- scheme by the developer team. For me it sounds irreligious to change this color scheme. It can take weeks or months of worrying if I should switch the color scheme. Of course in this timespan I have to learn myself that the developer team wanted to give me the choice, otherwise the option wouldn’t be in the product.

Since I am working in accessibility I talk to a lot of people with disabilities about their preferred color scheme. Most of the people with autism prefer a dark color scheme and most of the people with learning disabilities (in the past I used the term intellectual disabilities) prefer the light color scheme.

People with autism are telling me that the dark color scheme limits incentives from the outer world. incentives from the outer world can hurt people with autism. In this example it’s a visual incentive and it can hurt the eyes of the person. Some people with autism really feel physical pain due to the incentives.

I also hear that the dark color scheme is easier for the mind. Some people have headache with bright screen light and with a dark color scheme you limit the screen light.

If I talk about people with learning disabilities the situation is reversed. Most of the users with learning disabilities prefer a light color scheme. This is because it’s the color scheme as closest to the ‘normal-paper-analog-world’. The more similarities between the analog paper world and the digital world, the easier it seems to be for this people.

Let’s talk about my preferred color scheme. Most of the time I prefer a light color scheme. In the beginning of this post I talked about the irreligious fact to change the color scheme. I changed the color scheme for some applications: Visual Studio Code, and Microsoft Learn.

Visual Studio Code has as default the dark color scheme  I changed it after a long time of worrying to the light color scheme. I made this choice for 2 reasons:

• 1^st of all I prefer the light color scheme.
• 2^nd for me it more aligns to the Microsoft Visual Studio experience

The other application is Microsoft Learn, here I changed to dark mode.

Let’s analyze myself why I prefer the Dark Mode for Microsoft Learn. For me it is first of all a bigger separation between the learning theory and my developing environment.

2^nd It aligns more to PluralSight, the learning platform I used in my years as developer before. My autistic brain really links the first time that I use a product or a technology to further uses of this technologies and (competing) variations of the technology.

So that were my insights in Color Schemes! Feel free to share your experiences!

On the night of 13^th of July (CET +1) the 10x hype, or the 10x Engineer hype raised on Twitter! As some of you may know, I am not a fan of hypes. Or am I not? I don’t want to be a fan of hypes. But sometimes I am a fan of some hypes, and do participate in some hypes. Just to tease: I am planning to make a conference talk: “Mind the Hype”. This talk will be about the good, the bad and the ugly of hypes. If people are interested in this talk, please let me know!

So, let the introduction behind, let’s talk about the I am 10x, or the 10x Engineer hype!

Today I posted this tweet:

This tweet was based on the 10x engineer hype. I didn’t put in ‘engineer’ and I forgot the hashtag. Of course I didn’t forgot my own two hashtags. So I even could add: “I am too impulsive”. I see the Tweet and as fast as possible I want to make my own tweet without taking enough time to check if I added the correct hashtags or if I don’t have typo’s! If you see Tweets from me with typo’s it’s because I was too impulsive, a drawback of my autism.

But it’s not all negative. This tweet has a negative sound. But to be clear: autism also has a lot of advantages. So I could write:

“I am 10x autistic

– I am a proud volunteer

– I have unique insights

– I love to share my stories

– I am very honest.”