Designing products and websites for accessbility

News for Betty

Role: Co-creator

A few years ago, I went over my friend Betty’s apartment to drop off some spaghetti and meatballs. Betty was 89 and a news junkie. After we sat down and drank some tea, she asked me to help her find some news stories she wanted to read on her iPad.

“Sure,” I said, as we peered at her screen. “Why don’t you show me what you’re doing and I’ll see if I can help.”

Betty began to tap around on news websites. I watched her grow increasingly frustrated when she accidentally clicked on an ad or parts of the story she didn’t mean to click on. I also saw her grow increasingly worried that she wasn’t going to be able to return to her story or accidentally click on malware.

When I went home that night, I wrote a blog post about Betty and described what might be an ideal website for someone with limited eyesight or who might be unfamiliar with technology. It would have “no pop-ups, no overlaid ads, and big and easy scroll buttons,” I wrote. “It would need maybe two steps necessary to leave the page.”

A reader named Daniel reached out and said he wanted to help me make a website for Betty. In a few days, we put together News for Betty, a pretty minimal website that delivered Betty’s news. This Poynter column sums up what I learned from the experience.

Related pieces

Wikimedia Foundation, 2017

Making Twitter images accessible

18F.gsa.gov/blog, 2015

How accessible is your website for the disabled? Consider doing an audit to find out

Poynter, 2017

Rethinking a news homepage

Role: Idea generator

A few years ago, I gathered together a lot of very smart people who don’t work in news and asked them to design a new news homepage.

By news homepage, I mean any way for a user to first encounter content. A push notification could very well be the new news homepage. (Related: Ways to think about push notifications.) An app is a news homepage. An article or a newsletter is a news homepage. If you listen to the news, Overcast or Soundcloud or the iTunes store may be your homepage. YouTube can be your homepage. Homepage, to me, is simply a shorthand version for any of these things.

The idea was to think about accessibility, temporal relationships to news, geography - all of the many and mundane ways we encounter information throughout our lives.

Here are the 64 ideas we came up with - Quartz used one of them when redesigning their homepage. Here's a writeup in Nieman Lab about the project.

NPR quotable tool

Role: Idea generator

Audio is not a visual medium. We wanted an accessible way to share our stories on social media that would immediately resonate with audiences. In 2014, I helped create the Quotable tool, which allowed any NPR reporter to turn a quote from their story into a well designed image bearing that quote and the NPR logo.

The American Press Institute wrote up the tool here. It was later adapted by public radio stations across the country, as well as Vox, The New York Times, and Buzzfeed.