Tonight, I should have been part of a local UX groups panel discussion about web accessibility, but covid-19 had other plans. The event will be rescheduled, so I won’t go into some of the planned talking points here, but I wanted to type something up since I felt all ready to go and didn’t get to talk.
The biggest point I wanted to make, and it’s one I will repeat over and over until my voice is raspy and dry and everyone around me is sick to death of hearing it, is that accessibility is not difficult or costly. That misperception stems from two scenarios that are fairly common but shouldn’t be generalized from.
The first scenario is one where you’ve built an inaccessible product and suddenly need to retrofit it to be accessible. The second is often related and can seem like a one, two punch to the first, and that’s when your team has no clue what accessibility involves, so there’s a (sometimes long) learning period before you can actually get to work. These both play into the misconception of accessibility being difficult and costly, but let’s not forget that the same type of rework was needed for performance and security updates, yet we find the time to make those improvements and build them into our process. We don’t complain about them because the value is clear and the work is already known. The difference is that we can see and experience those improvements for ourselves, whereas accessibility is for “others.”
That’s the biggest problem accessibility faces. It is not cost, difficulty, tools or testing, but a lack of empathy by everyone involved.
Your junior designers eyes can read that white text on a light gray background, so why would contrast be a problem? A devs wireless mouse can click everywhere you need to go, so why check with a keyboard? Your flashy marketing team paid for a voice-over to be recorded, so why make a transcript or captions? These type of bad examples could go on forever, but the point is this: we’re terrible at thinking about how others live and work.
We assume that “normal” is an extension of ourselves, that the user is just like us, and it’s not based on analytics or testing but the embarrassing human flaw that makes too many of us honestly believe that the center of the universe is lodged right between our ears.
I’ve seen this while working with Art Directors who refuse to use a serif because they don’t like them. I’ve had to change colors on a page because a Creative Director got bad vibes during the review. Most clients want their logo bigger simply as a way of feeling ownership on a project they were cut out of. The bulk of decisions we make mid-project are centered around our own perceptions, and the uncomfortable truth accessibility forces us to confront is that other people’s different existence might be radically different from what we assumed was the norm.
That’s why UX is a great starting place for an accessibility program: we already research, test, and validate our work, so it fits right in. We should learn it, equate it with usability, and never look back, because for everyone living with an impairment permanent, temporary, or situational (>20% of the population), that’s all it is.
As the customers voice and their first line of defense, UX teams have to hold ourselves, our teammates, and our collaborators to a higher standard. It will take time and effort, just like anything worth doing, but when we’re done it should take no longer and cost no more to build something accessible vs inaccessible. And when you reach that point, don’t rest on your laurels or let things stagnate, instead look towards the horizon to see what new things are coming (eg: WCAG 2.2).
Our work is never done, and while that sentiment is a little intimidating, it should also be a little comforting; otherwise we’d eventually put ourselves out of work! So join the good fight and stretch those empathy muscles. You’ll be happy you did.
