Broadly, making something accessible is making it easy for everyone to use. When you think of accessibility, physical accessibility may come to mind. Things like braile and wheelchair ramps are important for making our physical world accessible, but it's incredibly important that digital things are made to be accessible as well. Digital accessibility is often overlooked, which makes it very hard for some people to use digital products.
The two main forms of accessibility I will cover are as follows:
Learn more about these forms of accessibility below.
Not everyone views the world in the same way, many people in the world have little to no vision, or other vision differences. Imagine if you could not see the content of this website, but you still need to take in it's content, how would that work? Many platforms implement some kind of screen reader, and it's your job to ensure that your user interface is able to be easily understood by these screen readers, and therefore your users with vision differences. While often text requires no extra work to be parsed by screen reader tools, things like buttons and images often provide no useful context by default. If you had a vision imparement and you came across an image on a website, would you prefer if "IMG112348853.jpg" or "A photo of a young girl outside holding a boquet of red roses" was read out to you? What helps you build a better picture in your mind? This description is done using something often called alt text, or accessibility text. You should use alt text whenever your interface cannot be described by a screen reader.
Everyone hears the world in a different way, and some people have impared hearing. If your user interface involves audio in some way, it's important that you offer the option to describe it to people who cannot hear it, much in the same way that visual accessibility should be done. One common example of this is closed captions, they provide an overlay of the words being spoken, and sound happening in a video being displayed in a user interface. Provide closed captions whenever you play audio contant that does not already have them embeded. Some people are also more sensitive to certain types of sounds, such as loud sounds. Having loud soudns that cannot be disabled can make for an unpleasent experience for users who are sensitive to them. When loud sounds are present, provide an option to lower or dissable them.
Head my accessibility warnings, or you are sure to end up a UI criminal! One company that does accessibility great is Apple, if you need some inspiration on how to make your UI more accessibile, please visit this website: Accessibility - Apple.