Clubhouse App: why you cannot afford to treat accessibility as an afterthought within inclusion.
By: Beatriz González Mellídez
Tags: Innovation, A11y, Accessibility, Inclusion, Lean Startup

Ever since I joined Clubhouse last week I have been asked by several people what my stand is on the lack of accessibility for HoH (hard of hearing) and the deaf community. What a coincidence: the same exact week I gave a talk at the A11y Club Berlin about ‘Designing for the Extremes’ and making anyone into an accessibility Persona. You can also read the article I wrote for the last Global Accessible Awareness Day about this topic (and in German here).

A friend sent me this Instagram video (in German, with German captions) that sparked a passionate conversation at home. I’m guessing this tweet was the origin of the video:

Translated to english: “Great a social media App, that excludes deaf from the start. As if we didn’t have already enough barriers in our society. I only need an iPhone and an invitation, but also no disability. Something else? #clubhouse”

Context

I guess I’m a lucky person who got an invite to Clubhouse before I even heard about it. In case you haven’t heard, Clubhouse is a “new type of social network based on voice drop in conversations. It is audio only and real-time”. It is in its beta phase, and at the moment it is for iPhones and invite only.

Like the app description says, it is audio and real time. Clubhouse does not provide any type of video, text or other options for HoH or deaf people to be part of the conversations taking place on the app.

Facts –

Audio alternative is no “MUST”

First and foremost: There is no legal requirement or regulation that says an audio-only app needs to provide alternative content.

WCAG Criteria does not consider Audio only (Live) captioning an AA success criterium. Most anti-discrimination and procurement laws refer to this standard.

So far there is also no mention of a live Audio alternative being part of the newly published draft for WCAG 3.0

Audio live is triple A (AAA) which means even if you should, you must not provide alternatives. WCAG AA compliance does not mean your product or service is accessible. WCAG compliance is just the bare minimum you have to do.

Lean principles & Accessibility as an afterthought

I mentioned before that I doubt the Clubhouse founders wanted to exclude someone on purpose. They probably followed a Lean start-up principle: fail early and fail often. I also doubt they did proper user research on their user base, or had any colleague with a disability or accessibility (a11y) background.

I base these statements on the lack of preparation for the HoH shitstorm that anyone involved in the a11y or disability community could have seen coming, but also because they didn’t make it accessible for blind people neither.

What better audience for a social media app that uses only voice? Apparently thanks to Apple updates on accessibility, blind people can still join and use the App with some difficulties, but this seems to be just sheer luck.

Back to the lean Agile mentality both Lean Start up and Lean UX principles: i cannot agree more with having a healthy fail culture, but that fail is allowed it also requires a chain of action-reaction. Inaction to “failures” or negative feedback is not a good match to the lean agile mentality.

The thing is, when a whole community that feels discriminated against decides to stands up publicly speak against your products or services, is a tough thing to recover from. You need to act quickly before it gets worse.

Some people are saying to cut some slack as this is only the beta. Before the beta, there was probably an alpha, and

Another Silicon Valley Bros company?

With a quick linkedIn research, anyone can see that this is not the case.

Also in their Community Guidelines they aim to be inclusive. They’re trying, probably doing their best. The problem with how our society understands inclusion is that PwD (People with Disabilities), including people with chronic illness and mental health issues are usually forgotten as well as all intersectionality (i.e. black American blind woman with ADHD). This is not really the CEO nor the developers’ fault, while at the same time, they can do something to fix it.

In their job titles and job posts though, it seems they don’t have any (?) designers or researchers, and there is no mention of accessibility in any of their postings*.

*At the moment of writing this article is they have/offer jobs in Engineering, Trust & Safety and Community success.

Could this shit storm have been avoided?

YES. Let me elaborate.

This is just the BETA version: Dejà vue & lessons from the past

Some are saying this is just the BETA, and thing might change once the app is finished.

The problem with accessibility is this: bolting it on takes a lot more effort (and money) than baking it in. Talking from experience this usually means: if it’s not there at the beginning, it means it was not on scope and had no priority, and chances are really high it won’t make it in at the end. We all know deadlines, pressure and budgets, maybe somebody even fought for accessibility to be included and was even labelled as a trouble maker for that and their advice ignored.

Also this exact same thing happened last June at Twitter. Twitter not being a start up and their audio content being pre-recorded (and other factors) make that worse, but the team at Clubhouse could have seen it coming, only if they were willing to.

Then Covid got worse, and the deaf community after being totally left out from all official video and audio communications, after their work meetings made their lives more complicated, and after not being able to read lips through opaque masks…decided they’ve had enough. People are tired of being left behind and being forgotten even if there is no ill intention. Wouldn’t you?

They are not the target group — but why not?

There are some man-explainers on twitter saying HoH and deaf people (disabled people) are not the target group for Clubhouse. Well, the target group is iPhone users at the moment. And they have the highest percentage of members of the accessibility community of all smartphone makers.

Did you know Apple hires sign interpreters for their stores? They even provide special masks for lip reading to their employees.

Let’s imagine it was on purpose and we put aside social justice, inclusion, etc. do you really think this is a good business decision?

Is an impairment or a disability reason enough to exclude such a representative group?

Does this mean parents and people commuting on public transport who forgot their headsets, or people in really loud environments, are also not part of the target group? Just think about home office and construction workers, barking dogs or screaming children…

What about understanding non native speakers or people with heavy accents? Captions would benefit everyone. Even more if you save the captions in a transcript file that updates automatically. People loosing their network connectivity or people who are interrupted (post, delivery service, call, job, shower, family…) could still be able to follow the conversation. You can delete the transcript file after a room is closed. Before you yell privacy here: anyone can probably record the conversations on Clubhouse if they want to anyhow, even if it is against the ToS. There is always a way.

If you are purposely leaving out so many people out of your “target user base”, you can and will be loosing a lot of money… Anyone would like to do the math here?

People are not disabled, we disabled them with our design decisions — this is part of the social model of disability.

Captions are not a “charity feature for the poor crips”. Captions are a feature all your users benefit from.

But how could it have been avoided?

In the first stages of a project, when you think about who you are designing for, even if you have no accessibility expert on your team (which you should), you can use a Design Thinking Technique called Designing for the extremes. This exercise helps you get yourself out of your comfort zone and think about people and scenarios out of the ordinary. You don’t even need to think about deaf people, but you can think about people commuting to work with no headsets at hand, you can think about parents with light sleeping babies, you can think about people in loud environments (constructions works, barking dogs, loud music…), people multitasking (maybe you need double with a live webinar which does not need 100% of your attention…), maybe you somebody just went out of a concert or a great party and cannot use your voice anymore because you singed so passionately…. there are many many options to find extreme users in each project and scenario, you just need to take some minutes to think for example about what impediments would your users may have while using your products or services.

Kat Holmes has written a whole book about mismatches interactions: “Mismatch. How Inclusion Shapes Design”.

The Microsoft Inclusive design guidelines toolkit example below presents personas under permanent, temporary and situational scenarios. These two sets of mismatches would apply to Clubhouse, hear & speak: