The Accessibility Paradox

Date:: Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Author:: Śūnya
Reading time:: 8 min read

I am a neurodivergent software developer, and I have been working in the tech industry for over 24 years. I only became aware of myself as neurodivergent in the last 4 or 5 years. You might ask yourself how could I have gone so long and not have known? Well, I have always been aware I was different, but I have always thought that I was just “weird”, and “introverted” and just that I was kinda “stupid” about some things and good at others. I have multiple divergences, which has meant that, counter-intuitively, some of the worst difficulties I have are masked by aspects of the others. Consequently, I have been able to convince myself (in most areas) that I just need to try harder, and that mostly works, but there is a price to pay each day.

All of this is contextualise the following discussion from the point of view, both of someone who has seen a lot of the tech industry, and someone who has experienced the “invisible” challenges that people face when they interact with a world not shaped to cater for them, and more specifically, by our own products.

Accessibility as an afterthought

Recently the world has been getting better at accounting for people’s differences. However, I think that the way we are going about it is not always the best way; I have noticed that by creating an area of work called “accessibility”, we are making it possible, even “appropriate”, to build exclusive products and services.

It plays out something like this:

“I agree that we should, 100%, be making accessible software/services, but, given the constraints, we need to deliver value to the majority of our users first. Afterwards we can circle back and assess the effort needed to accommodate users with additional needs”.

Perhaps that seems, from a business point of view, to be sound reasoning. It may even seem “agile”. Nevertheless, as you will see, it is really inefficient, and harmful, both to our products and the world we live in.

Thought is the start - implicit bias

Let’s start by trying to understand what is meant by “the majority of our users”. It seems to be something setup in contrast to “users with additional needs”. This distinction implies that the majority of users are somehow “normal”, and then there are the other users who need special treatment.

But, what is a “normal person” anyway?

Our idea of “normality” belongs to a category of paradigms we form subconsciously, or implicitly, without ever really scrutinising them. We construct our sense of “what is normal” amorphously from cultural norms and our individual, personal social experience (much informed by the media we consume), using an innate pattern recognition capacity (about which little seems to be known).

Because these ideas are so “fluffy” and individual, it is hard to address them directly, but we can make a couple of useful, general, observations about them, and specifically, ideas about normality and cultural norms. Firstly, as seen above, they tend to ”… condition us to imagine – implicitly or explicitly – an audience that is exclusively able-bodied”. Equally, they are amazingly accommodating of a lot of change without prompting much reevaluation. Which means, to the person holding the idea of “normality”, it seems like a continuous, coherent idea, while actually changing a great deal - for example: a person’s behaviour and sense of normality when with family, is very different from their experience of normal when supporting their football team, or while at work, etc. Notably, some people, and behaviours could seem “normal” in some of these contexts, and out of the ordinary, or even unacceptable in others.

Given that this idea of normality is so mutable, it begs the question, how can even two people working together agree on the same definition, let alone a whole product team?

To better illustrate the way this type of idea forms and how it changes with context, here is a little thought experiment you can take part in. As you read, pay attention to your initial reactions and how they change as you get more information.

4 people are to meet at 2pm at the main entrance of the museum to see the new exhibition. Jeremy (45), Serena (40), Abdul (32) and Natasha (25). Which of these people is the odd one out?

Abdul is bringing his newborn twins down from Nottingham. Serena has just returned from a skiing holiday with a twisted ankle, she is using the bus. Jeremy is not very fit and has decided to walk. Natasha is a wheelchair user, and has come by underground. This museum’s main entrance has 10 steps leading up to it.

Thinking about your initial reactions, did you, at first, try using their names or their ages as a way of making a distinction? Did you perhaps group people together, or single people out of the group? How much extra information did you need before you decided what the “pattern” might be? How useful is it, now that you have identified a pattern? Are you now thinking about these people differently? Importantly, What information about the people has dropped out of consideration, now that you are focussed on what you think is pertinent to the pattern?

In fact, all the people in the experiment are hindered by the same obstacle, even though their challenges range from an inconvenience, all the way to a dangerous endeavour. In other words, the people and their needs are not the problem, the problem here is the stairs… and labelling the people doesn’t help identify the problem, rather it diverts attention from the problem, the stairs. Furthermore, as observed by Susan Sontag, it reduces the beautiful complexity of human experience to a binary state.

Having said that, sometimes it takes an extreme case to wake us up to something, or some people that have been overlooked. In this case, the thing that has been overlooked, the stairs might seem so simple for some, but for others they literally represent a mortal danger. Stairs are a good example because there is such an accepted and simple solution to the problem, a ramp.

A ramp helps everyone access a building without reducing the people themselves. In the same way, if we can identify the obstacles that people face when they interact with our product, we can make a ramp for them too and make our products, and our environment better. For everyone.

Some facts might help

According to the World Health Organisation, 16% of the world’s population experience some form of disability - this is 1 in 6 of your users.
Again, the WHO suggests that, in some circumstances, persons with disabilities are “15 times” more challenged than those without disabilities in that area.
These inequities can affect the health and mental well-being, education, employment and even life expectancy of people with disabilities.
Disability is not a binary state, it is a scale, and it is a scale that changes with context. Microsoft defines disability as “a mismatch between the needs of the person and the features of the environment in which they live”.
As of 2020, 22% of the world’s population is over 60 years old. This is noteworthy because, as we age, we will all experience changes in our abilities. Combined with the the 16% of the population who experience disability, this is nearly 40% of your users!
70 - 80% of people with disabilities have invisible disabilities. This means that you cannot tell that they have a disability just by looking at them. This is important because it means that you cannot tell who might be experiencing a challenge just by looking at them - and one’s subconscious ideas of “normality” cannot take them into account.
Finally, not all disabilities are long term, some are temporary, and some are situational. For example, a person might have a broken arm, or they might be carrying a child, or they might be in a noisy environment, etc. Long term or otherwise, their ability to achieve certain tasks is adversely affected.

All of which shows that, considering “users with additional needs” in opposition to “the majority of users” is not only unhelpful and reductionist, it is also a misrepresentation of the facts. The facts show a very large percentage of people experiences disability long term, and almost all of us will at some point in our lives. Despite that, the world, the “environment in which we live”, is designed for a non-existent “normal” person, and we all have to make do. This is not a situation that we should be perpetuating, and it is a situation we have the power to change.

Move the mountains

If we want to change this state of affairs, there is a short the journey, with just a few steps to take, but we may need to do it many times before it becomes second nature.

The first step is to replace this binary idea of “normal users” versus “users with additional needs” with the simpler idea of “obstacles hindering success” in our products and services.

The second step is to acknowledge that these hurdles are not all equal and not experienced equally - some are harder to overcome than others, and equally, some people have to work unduly hard to overcome them. In the thought experiment above, for some people the stairs are a minor inconvenience, for others they are a dangerous obstacle. It is appropriate to provide more help for those people who have to work harder to achieve their aims. This is the practice of equity over equality. It results in a fairer outcome, but it also ends up with a better product because the help we provide helps all people - the ramp will ease everyone’s access.

Thirdly, with these 2 considerations, we can reason about the obstacles impeding people when they interact with our work. It does take some initial practice to gain the skills we need; in a way, if we aren’t already experiencing them, we need to try and discover them for ourselves. To do that, it is helpful to adopt the practice of reviewing our work in the light of these 6 types of challenge that people might face when they interact with our products:

Visual (sight impairments, colour blindness, bright sunlight…)
Auditory (hearing impairments, tinnitus, noisy environment…)
Motor (paralysis, tremors, broken arm, carrying a child…)
Cognitive (dyslexia, ADHD, alzheimer’s, fever…)
Situational (temporary injury, financial (e.g. 300MB data plan on feature phone), technological impediment, noisy environment…)
Speech (speech impairments, fluency disorder, laryngitis…)

The most important thing is to do it right from the start rather than trying to “add the blueberries to the muffin once it has been baked”, including users in the process - “Nothing about us without us”. After all, this is fundamentally just real User Centred Design (UCD). Working outward from a user’s need and progressively removing obstacles to their goal. This makes for better products, delivered more efficiently because they are aligned to actual customer needs from the start.

As a final step, accept that it is OK to be wrong and to make mistakes; we have to be open to learn and to build in checkpoints to validate our thinking.

What does this look like?

While it is beyond the scope of this discussion to give a detailed breakdown of the process in practice, the following ara a few simple examples of using these 6 challenges to think about our products and some of the virtuous cycle of effects that can have:

When designing a product, like a webpage, if we remember that some users will be experiencing the page linearly (screen reader users, keyboard users, switch users), then we can design the page hierarchy so that it has good document ordering, and each section has all the context it needs, with clear calls to action. Coincidentally, this will also help with SEO and general usability for everyone (including cognitive challenges). It will also mean that the developers will find it easier to build the page with good, semantic markup, which, in turn will further help with accessibility and SEO and make the testing of the product more sensible, which will then lead to a more stable product, which will lead to efficiencies and happier customers…
If we consider users with motor challenges, we will make sure that the page is navigable with the keyboard, which will mean the focus states are clear and that the page is not jumping around. Equally we might think more thoroughly about grouping content logically. This will help users with cognitive challenges, and users with visual challenges, and users who have trouble with movement to understand, interact and navigate the page. Simultaneously making the page more usable, more testable and more SEO friendly.
If we consider users with situational challenges, we will make sure that the page is light and fast, and that it works on a variety of devices and connections. This will make our product have a better climate impact, improve SEO and increase our potential audience. Generally speaking, it will make the product better.

To really drive the nail home as to just how powerful and positive it is to approach our work in this way, not only do we make our products and services available to a wider audience in more circumstances and make the world better place, we automatically optimise it for AI assistance.

As you can see, by approaching our work inclusively, there are virtuous repercussions that lead to greater and greater inclusion and efficiency.

Summary

This approach promises a way to deliver better products that cost less to develop and have a better climate impact, all the while reaching more clients and platforms. Best of all, over time, we will be living in a world which is designed for everyone. It just takes these 4 steps:

Shift away from the essentially ableist way of thinking, where we label people rather than recognise people’s challenges using our services
Truly practice design with our real users at the centre of our process
Learn about the obstacles that people might face accessing our hard work
Put in the effort to not do what we always do, but rather build our products from the start without these stumbling blocks; then we will be delivering real value to all our customers, making happier clients and working more efficiently.