Creating a positive culture around accessibility
By: Corey Roth
Tags: Usability, Design, UX, Accessibility, Ts

Last month marked the 31st anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. I was recently reminded about that fact while listening to a 99% Invisible episode that talks about the ADA and the history of curb cuts. The built environment has a long history of being harmful and exclusionary to anyone with a disability even after the law passed. In that episode, you hear the pain and frustration in the voices of those shut out of society and left unable to take control of their own lives.

Despite the struggles many faced in public spaces, it took the Capitol Crawl — wheelchair activists climbing the steps to express their frustration — to get this legislation passed. And finally, the ADA took longer-overdue steps to rectify this injustice.

Digital accessibility is also a work in progress. On a state-by-state level, lawmakers are slowly rectifying exclusionary practices in our digital spaces. This has resulted in several prominent lawsuits about inaccessible websites. As a result, many more businesses are considering accessibility while building software — excellent news for everyone.

But most look at it like it’s a chore or a task to be done instead of a cultural shift. This is troubling. So if lawsuits and legislation are the stick, where’s the carrot to encourage us along? There are plenty of great business cases for making it part of your company’s culture and DNA. Here are a few of them to help get your business informed and excited about inclusive design.

Money talks

The collective spending power of disabled people — known as the Purple Pound — is worth £249 billion to the UK economy. Likewise, in the US the annual discretionary spending of people with disabilities is over $200 billion.

The United States is also an aging population, and as we age, more and more of us will have some sort of recognized disability — even if we don’t identify as a “person with a disability”. This goes beyond vision, and extends to our other senses like touch, fine motor manipulation, cognition, and hearing. As our society ages, we will have to redesign many aspects of our built environment and digital environments to be more accommodating. Our economy will shift to support the needs of this new older population.

Inclusive design benefits everyone

Clear labels, better color contrast, and concise explanations are proof that accessibility guidelines are beneficial to everyone. Let’s take data visualization as an example. These have the potential to be a poor experience for people using screen readers when there’s nothing to indicate what’s happening visually with the graph. What’s more, it makes it difficult for anyone who isn’t familiar with the subject matter to understand the context. Adding in clear captions for the data benefits everyone, not the visually impaired.

An example demonstrating how clearer labels and better color contrast benefits a broad spectrum of use cases by clearly indicating what’s being shown.

Do you have glasses? They’re an assistive technology to help you in your daily life. About 75% of the world (including 20% of young people) have some form of corrective lenses. Anything you do for the visually impaired will also likely help that 75%.

Designs with better contrast, larger font sizes, and clear labels benefit everyone, whether they need glasses or not. Being thoughtful and presenting content in short, plain English not only improves the accessibility of your content, but creates a more compelling narrative. When you design for someone with an impairment, you’re also making the product easier to use for a broader range of people.

A stronger brand promise

Name fields are one of my personal pet peeves. There is no rational human explanation for attempting to validate a name field. The use cases for splitting a “Name” field into a “First” and “Last” field are equally slim. Despite this, the majority of businesses insist on both.

You might not be thinking about it in that way, but inclusive design means shifting engineering, business, and design cultures so that harmful experiences like these don’t get built. Keeping a simple text field for “Name” is an accessibility choice that pays dividends: not only will it ensure that your brand works internationally, it also drastically increases the likelihood someone will be able to fill out your form without hearing that their name is invalid, an incredibly hurtful experience. (Still not convinced? Check out Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names and Hello, My Name is <Error>)

Further, committing to building accessible products is a strong demonstration of corporate social responsibility. Accessible digital experiences will strengthen your brand promise and attract customers who “buy with their ethics’’. Something as simple as being more inclusive in picking photography and illustrations can help customers and employees see themselves in your brand and feel included.

Inclusive design has a knock-on effect with your hiring practices. A culture of building inclusive products feeds a diverse and inclusive employee culture, and vice versa. The more people who are able to see themselves in your brand and using your product, the bigger pool you’ll have for hiring.

Accessible code is higher quality code

By its nature, coding for accessibility means using modern, semantic markup and adhering to a stricter code standard. Accessible code is also easier for search engines to crawl (non-visual users aren’t always humans, after all). Not only will semantic markup improve SEO, but as more crawlers include experience as part of SEO, your product will rank higher on search engines as well. Breaking your content up into smaller, more manageable chunks will benefit people as well as search engines too.

Accessible design means building components in a standardized, predictable way. It also means designing those same components so that they’re POUR: perceivable (identifiable), operable (usable), understandable, and robust. As accessibility expert Eric Bailey puts it: kill your ego, separate yourself from the work, and keep things boring and predictable.

Standardized engineering practices that incorporate inclusive design benefits our entire industry. It improves the usability of the web, and it empowers individuals to voice their concerns when products may intentionally or unintentionally harm people.

Inclusivity breeds innovation

Learning to solve problems inclusively historically leads to novel product innovations. Many innovations started out as assistive technologies for people with disabilities. Touch screens, voice assistants, geolocation, and typewriters are all examples of this.

True innovation comes when we invite diverse perspectives into the design process and include those we’re designing for as participants. Consider the oft-repeated story of the OXO kitchen tools. The common narrative is that Sam Farber designed the soft, friendly grips for his arthritic wife. However, that savior-complex mythology denies her role in designing the new handles:

She was frustrated. The old-style metal peeler wasn’t good. Her background was in architecture and design. I think she initiated the idea of, “Sam, can you do something about this? Make a better handle.” She grabbed some clay and started on her own… She was very involved in looking at things, trying things, and giving her input along the way.

The story doesn’t stop there. They also recruited volunteers from the American Arthritis Foundation for testing. This example of inclusive design (from before that was a term) shows how important it is to avoid stigmatizing disabilities and focus on designing products that work for everyone, not just a subset of the problem.

We are all only temporarily able-bodied

At the time I’m writing this article, I’m 31. My eyesight is still pretty good. However, I’ve got a couple factors working against me as I age. Everyone in my immediate family wears glasses. I also have light-colored eyes, which means they’re more sensitive to light. That second one is exceptionally problematic, since my career means spending long periods of time staring at a glowing light box.

Everyone has the potential to be impacted by a situational disability like this. Touchscreen phones are a great interface until your hands are slick or you have gloves on. We’ve all been in a crowded room where it’s difficult to hear what someone is saying.

The whole experience keeps me centered on a Robin Christopherson quote: “we are all only temporarily able-bodied”. For more examples of situational impairments you probably aren’t considering, I recommend reading Anne Gibson’s Alphabet of Accessibility Issues.

Doing the work

When I moved from Boston’s historic Beacon Hill district and into Cambridge, something struck me about the neighborhood: Cambridge is so much better designed for modern life. Beacon Hill is full of tall townhouses with awkward steep staircases, rolling hills with winding cobblestone streets and narrow sidewalks. All are relics of an exclusive past. A built environment that, by choosing to design for a specific type of person, was an intentional choice to exclude so many others.

Acorn Street in Boston is one of the most photographed streets in the world. It’s also incredibly dangerous to walk down in winter. Photo by Tiffany Chan on Unsplash

Accessibility goes well beyond screen readers and color swatches. It means changing our entire culture around how we research, design, and develop products.

It means thinking about ways your product can be subverted, so you can proactively prevent bad actors from abusing your platform and harming others. It means being deliberate about who we invite to take part in the design process, and the steps we take to include diverse perspectives along the way.

“Saving the Internet requires a greater sense of shared ownership and fewer bystanders accepting whatever today’s Internet has to offer.” — Mitchell Baker

The choices we make have consequences. Disabilities are not an attribute of an individual, but a mismatch between an individual’s needs and their environment. A choice not to pursue accessible design, however well-intentioned, is a deliberate decision to exclude large groups of people. Inaccessible design is what happens when we try to solve problems only with our limited biases and personal experiences.

This is ever-more-important as designers are increasingly designing not just products, but the services surrounding those products and our impact on the world grows. We have an opportunity to shape our digital future, learn from our mistakes in the physical world, and design a digital one that includes us all.