Technology Bytes

How to Create an Accessible and Inclusive Design?

Atul Jadhav — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 19:33:10 +0000

“When UX doesn’t consider ALL users, shouldn’t it be known as ‘SOME User Experience’ or… SUX?”

– Billy Gregory, Digital Accessibility Professional

Visualize this – you are in a garden, enjoying the nature around you. What did you think of? Beautiful blue sky, green grass, and colorful flowers? Now visualize the same world in muted colors – grey sky, grey grass, and not-so colorful flowers. This is exactly how some people with color blindness see everything around them. But not being able to enjoy the different colors of nature is not the biggest challenge a color-blind person faces.

Imagine another scenario where you are at a supermarket, buying groceries. You pick up a packaged food item and want to check if it is vegetarian or non-vegetarian. What do you do? You check for the green or brown symbol on the package. You then go to the fruits section and try to pick a ripe banana. You know you have to pick the yellow one as it is ripened, and not the green one. Then, you get into your car to drive back home but the traffic signal on the way is red. So, you stop and wait for it to turn green. Sounds like an everyday situation we face, right? But what would be the situation if we could not distinguish between these colors? There was no way to find out if the packaged food was veg or non-veg or what was the color of the traffic light. This is why we need accessible and inclusive designs. And accessibility and inclusivity are more than just adding an ‘others’ option in the gender section of a form.

What is Accessible and Inclusive Design?

Accessible and Inclusive design is not a different type of design process. It is just an approach and a series of practices that intentionally include and enable users who have a permanent, situational, or temporary disability or experience discrimination due to being part of a minority or oppressed group. It is about adding an extra dimension of inclusion to the existing design thinking process. At its core, accessible and inclusive design is about empathizing with users and adapting interfaces to address the various needs of those users.

With the ever-increasing internet reach, everyone is producing content and products that instantly have a global reach. With that power comes the responsibility to ensure that these products are accessible, inclusive, and respectful of their global audiences’ diverse requirements and social identities. Here are some statistics for people who might be skeptical about why it matters:

Over 1 billion people – about 15% of the world’s population live with some form of disability
44% of consumers worldwide feel they are not fully represented by the people they see in ads
49% of Gen-Z consumers, in the US, stopped purchasing from a brand that did not represent their values
Around 300 million people globally have color vision deficiency
Approximately 1 in 12 men (8%) and 1 in 200 women (0.5%) have color blindness

Digital interfaces that do not prioritize accessible and inclusive design can negatively impact the user experience of such a large audience.

Learning about Different Abilities

Mostly, people tend to categorize everyone into two groups when it comes to ability: Abled and disabled. But if we really think about it, everyone is just on different areas of the spectrum of ability. Some people can see everything clearly, some might need glasses, some might not be able to see some specific colors while others might not be able to see anything at all. Some can stand or walk without any difficulty, some might walk with a limp, some might need walking aids like crutches, and others might need a wheelchair. And it is just a matter of time before we change our position on this spectrum. Getting an eye check-up can dilate your pupils and leave you with temporary blurry vision or an injury on your leg can put you on temporary crutch support. Even with age, our abilities start to deteriorate. Hence, it is important to understand and learn about users of all backgrounds and abilities.

Color blindness (color vision deficiency, or CVD) is a common term used for the condition where individuals are not blind but just confuse shades or lose their ability to distinguish between different colors. This condition is caused due to defects in the cells of the eyes and the type and severity of these defects determine the type of color blindness. Different types of color blindness are:

1. Red-green color blindness

This is the most common type of color blindness which makes it difficult to tell the difference between red and green. There are 4 types of red-green color blindness: Deuteranomaly, Protanomaly, Protanopia, Deuteranopia

People who are red-green color blind are often surprised to find out that peanut butter is NOT green!

2. Blue-yellow color blindness

This type of color blindness makes it difficult to tell the difference between blue and green, and between yellow and red. There are 2 types of blue-yellow color blindness: Tritanomaly, and Tritanopia.

3. Complete color blindness

This type of color blindness is quite uncommon and is also called monochromacy. It takes away your ability to see colors at all and can also make you more sensitive to light.

Figure 1: Traffic Lights – Normal Vision

Figure 2: Traffic Lights – Protanopia (type of red-green color blindness)

Basic Considerations for Accessible and Inclusive Design

Some practices that can lead to accessible and inclusive design solutions are:

Working with the right team: Building a diverse team who have a multitude of identities and abilities helps in overcoming unconscious bias and exclusion behaviors.
Educating stakeholders: Engaging stakeholders in research, sharing examples, and explaining to them how different people use technology is essential.
Involving users: Using user research and co-creation to deliver to excluded communities, as designing with them is more important than designing for them.
Establishing design guidelines: It is essential to have guidelines in place and follow them for every product design and development. There are some web accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium which can be helpful.

Our design choices can inspire, motivate, connect, empower, and support users but can also alienate, offend, marginalize, misrepresent, and create barriers for them, which obviously is not a good user experience. Some design ideas to use are:

Not relying on color codes alone to convey information and use texture, pattern, shapes, numbers, etc in designs instead.
If color coding is required, being more intentional about what colors are paired together.
Providing sufficient contrast between foreground text color and background color.
Including text alternatives for non-text content like images and videos.
Using images and copy that includes people from different backgrounds and abilities.

Utilizing tools like color blindness simulator, to test product designs and ensure their accessibility.

Figure 3: Accessible UX design

Figure 4: Increasing accessibility using numbers

Figure 5: Accessible theme options

Figure 6: Using image that represents diversity

Conclusion

It’s long overdue for design thought leaders to normalize accessible and inclusive designs as foundational to design work instead of the occasional mention of it as a niche topic. We need to find ways and create designs and systems for people with all types of abilities to build empathy so that we do not end up serving them experiences that are any less than good.

References

Author

Priyanka Pandey

Priyanka is a software engineer at Neurealm with a passion for content writing. She is a feminist and is vocal about equality and inclusivity. She believes in the cycle of learning, unlearning and relearning. She likes to spend her free time baking, writing and reading articles especially about new technologies and social issues.

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The post How to Create an Accessible and Inclusive Design? appeared first on Neurealm.

Here’s Why Your Cloud Migration Strategy Needs AIOps

Atul Jadhav — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 12:59:21 +0000

Majority of businesses employ cloud enablement services to boost productivity and cut costs. For IT infrastructure and resources, a cloud environment is essential. Therefore, companies from various industries are moving their data to cloud storage. Businesses can extend their databases without sacrificing service quality by migrating to the cloud. There are specialized migration procedures in place, and the use of AIOps has become critical.

What role does AIOps play in cloud migration?

Every company is coping with digitization and technology advancements at a rapid pace. Businesses must move away from conventional methods of data storage and toward cloud computing to continue delivering profitable services to users. Because cloud models and on-premise platforms have different designs, digitalization and data migration might be problematic. Using automated solutions, AIOps eliminates the need for human intervention. Automation speeds up the migration process and lowers errors, and data is formatted to work with cloud-native infrastructure. Therefore, companies should invest in AIOps.

AIOps can help with data migration in a variety of ways, including:

Hybrid or Multi-vendor Environment

Usually, certain critical services offered by a company are stored in the data center. With AIOps, professionals or teams in charge of monitoring the data can use a specific cloud migration assessment tool for business. AIOps for monitoring also enables the involvement of various cloud migration toolsets and on-premise platforms. For on-premise old data, a certain degree of grooming is necessary before migration. Noise reduction algorithms can be applied to such data before it is integrated with operational data in cloud storage. This improves all services and helps to reduce the risks involved in migration.

Critical and Sensitive Business Services Transfer

With various new applications and services being developed, businesses need to focus on accelerating the movement of data to cloud storage. AIOps tools allow easy migration of legacy applications and eliminate the risk of delivery to cloud computing models. The use of AIOps for cloud migration can reduce the cost of data transfer and storage and help to completely avoid redundancy. If any issues had risen when the data was stored within on-premise infrastructure, the same problems can occur when the data is transferred to the cloud. If these issues occur when the migration is complete, it can be difficult to troubleshoot. This is because cloud resources change very quickly. Problems may even occur if the migration is rushed and there is a lack of thorough monitoring. However, the implementation of AIOps helps operations teams to automate the migration process and thus reduce error. The transition of data from on-premise architecture to the cloud computing model is smooth and helps to provide optimized service delivery to all end users.

Redesigning Microservices and Applications

At the time of data migration from on-premise architectures to cloud computing models, operations teams may find certain anomalies. This is because the application designs are not compatible with cloud storage. Therefore, all critical services and applications should be checked before migration. Redesigning these services and applications may be necessary to suit the native architecture of a particular cloud computing model. Apart from applications, microservices and new forms of monitoring are also essential. AIOps enables such redesigning and ensures seamless migration and integration of data. AIOps tools work as accelerants for the monitoring of microservices. The processes are extremely fast-paced, and every operations team needs to deal with a large volume of data at once. AIOps is ideal for a smooth transition of data as it enables event correlation across domains. All workflows can be easily maintained, and various different teams can collaborate to reduce error. Automation and remediation of all critical services and systems are made possible by AIOps tools.

AIOps at Various Stages of Cloud Migration

Companies must concentrate on finding the top AIOps platforms software for data migration to the cloud. There is a massive influx of data during migration, and the entire volume of data must be processed without appropriate visibility. Operations teams may have a better understanding of the migration process across the platform by using AIOps. AIOps also aids in the identification of areas that require further optimization. These insights can be used to improve the migration process and deliver better service.

AIOps tools can help with every phase of the cloud migration process, including:

Pre-Migration Phase

At the pre-migration stage, all applications should be tested for performance issues. The metrics will give insight into the applications that need optimization and what the performance goals after migration should be. AIOps tools can be used to accurately predict how the cloud migration will impact the entire IT structure of the company. Since AIOps improves visibility, it is easier to see the performance of applications before the migration process begins.

Migration

While AIOps assists in the entire process of migration, it also helps in monitoring resources that are not used frequently. During migration, the primary function of AIOps is to make sure the data is suitable for the cloud-native infrastructure. But tools like artificial intelligence and machine learning can be applied to various applications as well. This will reveal how the underused applications and resources can be used for the benefit of the business.

Post-Migration Phase

After the migration process is complete, AIOps can be utilized to monitor the performance of services. This helps to understand how the cloud migration has impacted the services and what user response can be expected. Since user preferences may change, integrating AIOps with cloud migration can help to automate the adaptation process. Instead of modifying specific services, AIOps tools can help all services adapt to the requirements once the migration has been completed.

Conclusion

The usage of cloud storage for data and services has aided businesses in optimizing their processes. The use of AIOps in cloud migration can help improve product and service performance. Users will be more engaged, and businesses will be able to make more revenue as a result.

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The post Here’s Why Your Cloud Migration Strategy Needs AIOps appeared first on Neurealm.

Using Configuration Management Data to Drive Automation

Atul Jadhav — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 12:38:13 +0000

In today’s IT world, automation has been playing an enthusiastic role. It has number of advantages in helping organizations deliver value. The most obvious benefits are improved productivity, efficiency and thus, the ability to be more competitive. The more simplistic and structured the task, the easier it is to automate. So, something linear – like opening a door automatically – should always work if the environment is clear of obstacles. Therefore, self-driving cars, with many dynamic variables, have been a long-term goal for automation.

Conversely, when automation goes wrong, your organization’s service delivery is going to suffer. Ensure you know about a process end-to end before you decide on automating it. This way you can prevent many issues.

Role of Service Configuration Management in Automation

In the technology world, configuration management is an IT management process that tracks individual configuration items of an IT system. IT systems are composed of IT assets that vary in granularity. An IT asset may represent a piece of software, or a server, or a cluster of servers.

Some examples of software configuration metadata are:

Specifications of computational hardware resource allocations for CPU, RAM, etc.
Endpoints that specify external connections to other services, databases, or domains
Confidential info like passwords and encryption keys

It’s easy for these configuration values to become an afterthought, leading to the configuration to become disorganized and scattered. Imagine numerous post-it notes with passwords and URLs scattered around an office. Configuration management solves this challenge by creating a “source of truth” with a central location for configuration.

And with the right service configuration information, you can automate new user licences, installations and accommodate needs with different nuances, such as user languages. The requirement for well-structured and maintained configuration data applies in the same way to everything you want to automate.

Let’s look at several automated service management examples that each rely on a bedrock of data, knowing stakeholders and gathering the right information:

Example 1: When a workload stops responding, the restoration steps involve restarting it on a different server that has available capacity to run it.

With the right service configuration information about the server capacity storage/disk space, it can automatically adopt different server.

Example 2: When an employee is onboarded to an organization, the IT team needs to create the O365 user accounts, system installation, group drive access, add them to projects based upon their skills, experience, and allotment.

With the right configuration information, you can easily automate new user account onboarding tasks including, granting access, creating credentials, installations, allotments, etc.

How Configuration Management aligns with DevOps, CI/CD and Agile

Configuration data has historically been hard to wrangle and can easily become an afterthought. It’s not really code, so it’s not immediately put in version control and it’s not first-class data, so it isn’t stored in a primary database.

The rise of cloud infrastructures has led to the development and adoption of new patterns of infrastructure management. Complex, cloud-based system architectures are managed and deployed using configuration data files. These new cloud platforms allow teams to specify the hardware resources and network connections they need provisioned through human and machine-readable data files like YAML. The data files are then read, and the infrastructure is provisioned in the cloud. This pattern is called Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

DevOps Configuration Management

DevOps configuration is the evolution and automation of the systems administration role, bringing automation to infrastructure management and deployment. Enterprises today utilize it to empower software engineers to request and provision needed resources on demand. This removes a potential organizational dependency bottleneck of a software development team waiting for resources from a separate system administration team.

CI/CD Configuration Management

CI/CD configuration management utilizes pull request-based code review workflows to automate deployment of code changes to a live software system. This same flow can be applied to configuration changes. CI/CD can be set up so that approved configuration change requests can immediately be deployed to a running system.

Agile Configuration Management

Configuration management enables agile teams to clearly triage and prioritize configuration work. Examples of configuration work are chores and tasks like:

Update the production SSL certificates
Add a new database endpoint
Change the password for dev, staging, and production email services
Add API keys for a new third-party integration

Once a configuration management platform is in place, teams have visibility into the work required for configuration tasks. Configuration management work can be identified as dependencies for other work and properly addressed as part of agile sprints.

In conclusion…

Configuration management is a necessary tool for managing complex software systems. Lack of configuration management can cause serious problems with reliability, uptime, and the ability to scale a system.

Many current software development tools have configuration management features built in. But one of the key service configuration management challenges is data that is managed by more than one person or team. This needs governance and guidance to enable people to do it properly.

And clearly, automation offers major benefits in terms of consistency and reducing human error. But gathering and managing the data that exists behind the ability to automate will make all the difference. The more you can bring a benefit back to the people responsible for managing the data, the easier it is to get them to do it and do it well. Therefore, understanding their needs and promoting the benefits become important activities, which need attention.

Author

Gouri Mahendru

Gouri is part of the Quality Management function, handling the Operations and Delivery excellence within ZIF Command Centres. She is passionate about driving business excellence through innovative IT Service Management in the Digital era and always looks for ways to deliver business value.

When she’s not playing with data and pivoting tables, she spends her time cooking, watching dramas and thrillers, and exploring places in and around the city.

Author

Karpagam Ramasamy

Karpagam is a part of Quality Assurance team. She is interested in learning new methods and technologies. Her passions include playing fencing and sketching. She enjoys music and travelling. She believes that, “If you are not willing to learn no one can help you”.

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