Suck it up and make things accessible already

Though I’m not currently disabled, I spent several years of my childhood chronically ill without a diagnosis (followed by emergency surgery and a full recovery). I’ve suffered shoulder injuries that kept me away from my pottery studio and prevented me from lifting grocery bags. Once, I twisted an ankle while travelling and relied on wheelchair service at the airport to make it home. I have non-verbal relatives in my extended family. In college, I cared for my grandmother as she lost her mobility alongside cognitive decline. I recently spent 10 days with a family member in the neurology ICU, where we faced the real possibility of life and everyday activity looking very different after discharge. All of these experiences, whether my own or someone else’s, are experiences with disability.

Maybe you’ve had similar experiences but haven’t thought about them through the lens of disability—a term I think we hesitate to apply as often as we could and even when it’s relevant. Thanks to ableism (which, whether we like it or not, many of us have deeply internalized), many folks reserve the term “disability” to describe something extreme or that they perceive as rare, like being unable to walk and needing to rely on a wheelchair to get around. But a recurring knee injury or chronic joint pain may require the same accessibility accommodations, regardless of whether the disability is short-term, long-term, or even just situational.

Disability is not a dirty word, it’s an adjective. And we will all experience it in our lives. People with disabilities make up one of the largest minority groups in the United States, and it is the only marginalized group that anyone can join at any time.

We’ve written about accessibility before (including why accessibility is for everyone, but whether it’s working to help clients understand that or just encountering debates about whether there’s a business case for creating accessible software, misconceptions about the value and relatively low time investment abound.

It still shocks me how often I encounter resistance to investing time and energy in accessibility.

So much of the way I work as a product designer and so many of the specs and standards that stay top of mind come directly from accessibility guidelines:

• the minimum size for a touch target (to make something feel “easy” to tap on a touch device)
• how far apart touch targets must be (to prevent users from tapping something else unintentionally)
• how dark text must be for legibility (to allow people to turn down the brightness on their phone to conserve battery, look at screens in sunny places, or read text from a greater distance than anticipated)
• the amount of contrast needed on the outline of a form field (so users realize it’s tappable and interactive)

These kinds of guidelines, for me, aren’t “just for accessibility” with only disabled people in mind. They are guidelines that help keep me accountable and remind me of the long checklist of things I’m responsible for when making a good, stable design with a strong foundation (that hopefully minimizes the need for rework). For everyone. For any user.

Being asked to justify the business case for building an accessible product can feel like being asked why a building should be built to code. Technically you can build a house without following local building code, but you might find that a new washing machine doesn’t fit through the front door, or the weight of a piano causes the floor to sag. And when it comes time to sell, potential buyers will have to contend with the additional expense of bringing something up to code with what could have been built that way from the start. Or you find that by not building to code, your insurance policy will be more expensive.

Accessibility standards make a product usable by anyone, now or in the future. It reduces headaches for Future You, for your designers, for your dev team. What may require 20% more expertise and 10% more time right now will save you a huge time-sink of retro-fitting and refactoring in the future.

• Designing and coding to accessibility standards can be:
• what makes your product usable on a phone (or a watch, or another yet-to-be-released device you don’t anticipate)
• what allows your product to expand to a younger user base with lower dexterity for small touch targets
• what makes your product navigable via keyboard by your super users (or by you, if you break your mousing wrist!)
• what protects you from a lawsuit that can sink your company

When folks dismiss accessibility as something they don’t need to spend time on or plan for—when they insist that none of their user base will rely on these standards being in place—what they often don’t realize is how expensive and consequential that dismissal is for their team, their business, and their user base. Accessibility standards aren’t simply about accommodating disabled people (who have money to spend! and use your product!).

Natalie MacLees breaks down how ridiculous (and costly) assumptions about accessibility can be: “Blind people don’t rent cameras” assumes that:

• blindness always means total blindness
• someone’s visions status predicts or limits their choice of hobbies or profession
• blind people don’t have friends, family, or colleagues who might want or need assistance renting a camera or performing an online task
• blind people don’t have jobs that involve purchasing decisions, including renting professional equipment

Underneath all these assumptions is the biggest one: “that accessibility is about building for a specific group of people you’ve identified in advance.” The thing about digital products and burgeoning businesses? They need to work for as many people as possible. Even people you didn’t know about when you started building.

Accessibility guidelines are standards for a reason. Accessibility is Just Good Design.

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Some disability and care work resources I love:

• Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
• The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
• The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America
• On Being podcast with Ai-jen Poo - This is Our (Caring) Revolution

If you’re looking for a team to help you discover the right thing to build and help you build it, get in touch.