9th Grade — Designing for Everyone: An Intro to Accessibility

⏰ Do Now — Start Here

Look at the nearest sign or poster in the room. Would someone with low vision be able to read it from across the room? Why or why not?

🎯 Today's Big Question

How do we design so people with different vision, hearing, or reading needs can still understand our work?

📈 By the End of Today, You Will Be Able To

Explain why color contrast matters for readers with low vision or color blindness.
Identify at least 3 real accessibility problems in a sample design (text too small, low contrast, color-only meaning).
Redesign a sample piece applying at least 2 accessibility fixes.

🧰 What You'll Need

Printed samples of real flyers/posters/apps (some accessible, some not)
Colored pencils or markers
A simple color-contrast checker (printed reference chart)

📋 Your Plan for Today

Day 1: Spotting the Problems

Do Now (5 min, above).
Mini-lesson (12 min): color contrast, color blindness, and text size, with real examples of designs that fail each one.
Guided practice (10 min): as a class, find and label accessibility problems on one sample.
Independent practice (15 min): find and label at least 3 accessibility problems on a different sample, in writing.
Share (3 min).

Day 2: Redesign for Accessibility

Do Now (5 min): name one accessibility problem from yesterday's samples.
Redesign workshop (30 min): hand-redesign a sample piece, applying at least 2 accessibility fixes (bigger/bolder text, higher contrast, a label or pattern added alongside color).
Written explanation (5 min): what you changed and why.
Gallery share (5 min).

🖨️ Print Your Handout

Word, picture, and definition for today's vocabulary, plus a place to write and draw. Available in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese.

Day 1: EN · ES · FR · AR · ZH
Day 2: EN · ES · FR · AR · ZH

🖥️ Today's Slide Deck

Short, on-the-board pacing slides — project these to follow along. (The full details are in the handout above, not here.)

Day 1

⬇️ Open / download this slide PDF

Day 2

⬇️ Open / download this slide PDF

📚 Key Words

Accessibility: Designing so people with different abilities (vision, hearing, reading level) can still use and understand the work.
Color Contrast: The difference in lightness between text and its background -- too little makes text hard to read for everyone, especially low-vision readers.
Color Blindness: A condition where certain colors (often red/green) are hard to tell apart -- designs that use color ALONE to show meaning can lose these readers.

✅ What Your Finished Work Should Include

Redesign + written explanation scored with a rubric checking for at least 2 real, correctly-applied accessibility fixes.

Exit Ticket: Name one accessibility fix you applied and explain, in one sentence, who it helps and why.

📊 Before You Leave

Quick, anonymous class check-in -- takes less than a minute.

Class Check-In

📤 How You Submit This — For Credit

Your physical projects don't stay in the classroom past the day you finish them -- you're responsible for your own completed work, the same way you'd be responsible for it in any job. The one exception is your class notebook: it has its own designated spot in the room (ask your teacher exactly where), and most students leave it there day to day -- but it's yours, so if you'd rather keep it with you or bring it home to study from, that's your call. Either way, always know where your own notebook actually is. Before a finished physical piece leaves your hands for good: ask your teacher for one of the classroom cameras, photograph your finished (or in-progress) work, then plug that camera's SD card into a classroom computer and upload the photo into your portfolio folder. That uploaded photo, with a short caption, IS your submission for credit -- the photo is what gets kept and graded, not the physical piece.

📁 Portfolio Update — Once a Week

Once a week (e.g. every Friday, or your class's last meeting of the week), photograph or save your best finished or in-progress piece from that week into your portfolio folder (a physical folder for now, or a Google Drive folder once one is set up) with a 1-2 sentence caption: what it is, and one skill it shows. In Grade 10 this becomes your Google Sites portfolio -- keep adding to it weekly from here on so you're not trying to reconstruct a whole semester of work at the end.

✍️ Example description for your Google Sites portfolio (fill in YOUR blanks -- don't just copy this):

For this piece, I made ______________ (name what you made) for “Designing for Everyone: An Intro to Accessibility.” This project asked: “How do we design so people with different vision, hearing, or reading needs can still understand our work?” I used Accessibility by ______________ (explain how you used it in THIS piece). The hardest part was ______________, and I solved it by ______________. I'm proud of ______________ because ______________.

🎓 ACP Exam Prep

This lesson connects to the Photoshop Adobe Certified Professional exam: Domain 1: Working in the Design Industry

🔗 Want to Learn More?

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative -- Introduction to Web Accessibility

🚀 The Extra Mile

Cross-Class Connection: The same universal-design thinking a Special Education or Health class covers when discussing accommodations.

Career Connection: Accessibility is a legally required, directly tested skill in UI/UX and Web Design professional work.

Go further -- turn this into a portfolio piece:

Audit a real flyer or handout from school for color-contrast and readability, then redesign it to pass accessibility basics. Start here: run the original flyer's text and background colors through a free contrast checker tool before you redesign anything.
Design an accessible version of a club's promotional material — larger text, higher contrast, alt-text notes — as real usable material. Start here: bump body text to at least 16pt and check the contrast ratio with a checker tool before you add any other design element.