I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about web accessibility lately. A lot of that thinking has been to do with how I can improve accessibility in the work I do. I do my best to design interfaces which are logical and easy to navigate, follow accessibility guidelines where they are applicable and appropriate and make sure that I write markup which is clean and semantic. I add little accessibility flourishes wherever possible to help those who use assistive devices, and make sure that copy is written to make sense even when it’s taken out of a visual context.
Al in all, I consider myself to be a pretty responsible practitioner of web standards and web accessibility. It’s something which I consider to be of great importance and it’s become an integral part of my design and development processes. It’s not an afterthought, it’s slap-bang in the middle of every design decision: whether technical or aesthetic.
So when I came to think about what else I could do, I was at a bit of a loss. I fell like I’ve ticked all the boxes for being a responsible web practitioner, but where can I go from here?
There’s been some tremendous work carried out over the years by various working groups and researchers, to raise the bar on web accessibility. It’s great to see that good accessibility has become an example of best practice within our industry, which in turn has had a positive impact on the workflows of designers and techies alike. Some might say that accessibility has dumbed-down creativity and made the web bland – I’d argue that we just haven’t been creative enough.
I came across this note recently, from an article written by Brian Kelly, summarising a paper he has co-written:
Disability is therefore a social construct and not an attribute of an individual. In particular, resource accessibility is the matching of a resource to an individual’s needs and preferences – and is not an attribute of a resource.
That really got me thinking about our perception of accessibility, and in particular the ways in which we view the people we are trying to help.
Accessibility is generally considered to be a way of helping those members of society who have a disability. We often think of users of websites as use cases, rather than individuals: a particular demographic, in a particular geographic location, or a group who behave in a particular way or have common interests.
And it’s often quite easy to fall into the trap of thinking of someone with a disability in a similar way – as a generalised group: someone who is blind, who is deaf, who is a wheelchair user. The fact is that not every disability is the same, and the acuteness and combinations of a disability can effect people in so many different ways.
For example, it may well surprise anyone who knows me to learn that I’m registered as blind. That doesn’t mean that I have no vision, it means I have low vision. Technically, I’m referred to as “blind/severely sight impaired” – there is a point at which my clinical diagnosis puts me into a particular group and classifies me as disabled.
But I’m a web designer, I make films, I do all sorts of outdoor pursuits my doctors cringe at – how can this be? Well, the fact is that because of the complicated nature of the various eye conditions I have, although my distance sight is useless, my near vision is pretty damn good: I might not be able to see a face across a room, but when I’m working with pixels, I’m on an equal footing.
I don’t really consider myself to be disabled, because I’ve spent my whole life learning to adapt and compensate. Out of necessity and downright stubbornness, I’ve had to shape my world to make it fit my wants and needs.
And that, I think, is a good starting point for a new way of looking at web accessibility, and why Brian Kelly’s words struck home so hard.
We, as practitioners of the web, should be creating experiences which are not just accessible to all, but which are intelligently designed to be adapted to a user’s own specific preferences.
And I think this is important to start thinking about now, because the way in which we all engage and interact with the online world will continue to evolve at a rapid pace. Our experience of the web is changing: from one where we visit websites, to one where we access services and information through our personal choice of digital devices. Our experience of our online world will become ever-more personalised and ubiquitous. And if we don’t consider the wants and needs of people with disabilities, then we run the risk of marginalising huge swathes of our society.
As we develop new devices, new applications and new experiences, there’s going to be a need for a more integrated, considered and downright innovative approach to design. But by taking that leap, by daring to think about inclusiveness and allowing the design process to be informed by more than just aesthetics and one-size-fits-all usability, there might be huge benefits to be gained by everyone, able and disabled – we will all be enabled on a level footing.
If you’re sceptical about these yoghurt-knitting ideas (and yes, they’re vague, but they’re just that: ideas) then head over to the Accessibility section of Apple’s website, have a good browse around, and then ask yourself: why would one of the premiere designers of digital technology commit so much time and resource to building accessibility into their products?