Barret Anspach is a Design Technologist. Before joining Nearform in September 2021, Barret worked in both engineering and design capacities at Seattle Watch Company, Artifact Technologies, and Civilization. He is passionate about rich, engaging, and forward-looking web experiences, and building design systems and component libraries. In his spare time, Barret composes music and loves a good book.
Timing and Talking: Lessons from Working with Screen Readers
August 15, 2024
Often as digital product designers we consider our job to be entirely tied to the visual medium, and spend most of our time gauging the proportions of elements on the screen, what kinds of tactile actions a user can or should be able to perform, and how best to optimize our product’s intended function, look and feel.Keep It Simple: Language as a Tool for Designers and Users
August 8, 2024
Previously in this series, we discussed how to resolve conflicting accessibility best practices, and how the presentation of accessibility settings to users is as important as having them in the first place. Here, we’ll talk about the importance of simple language for designers and users both.Settings and Trust: Accessible Settings Design
August 1, 2024
Previously in this series, we discussed how to resolve conflicting accessibility best practices, and how we created a custom component library for a new mobile voting app named VoteHub. Here, we’ll talk a bit about the importance of trusting one’s users, and how our team created and iterated on the design for VoteHub’s accessibility settings interface.New Standards For A New Paradigm: Resolving Conflicts in Accessible Practices
July 23, 2024
Voting has a robust set of best practices that do not all translate cleanly to a mobile interface. Our team resolved these conflicts with care and worked these best practices into the foundations of the VoteHub mobile voting app by way of a custom component library.