Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day and as advocates for inclusive design, our lens for accessibility considers how wayfinding impacts the estimated 1.3 billion people around the globe have disabilities. How people experience inaccessibility in their environments impacts everyday activities, mental health, and economic development. Accessibility can be defined as: the practice of designing products and services so that they can be used by everyone, regardless of disabilities.
Accessibility and inclusion are an integral part of the conversations we have about wayfinding systems and design. At Via Collective, we work to understand the underserved and under-resourced first, then deploy processes and solutions that align with the user’s needs. Following principles of inclusive design, it is our responsibility as designers of the built environments to seek to uncover the diversity of needs represented in public spaces that are not addressed in policy documents and are instead revealed in our commitment to discovery, engagement, and analysis of the comprehensive visitor experience.
Accessibility is a human right and we believe bringing greater awareness and educational resources to the issue will foster more change. In fact, the basic principles and philosophy of inclusive design, an integral part of our user experience design process, are a great place to start. With continued adoption of inclusive design, we are seeing a shift towards more accessible environments in recent years including wheelchair accessible beaches in Greece!
Click here to read a past blog post where we break down the history, principles and importance of inclusive design.