Why I built accessthisability.com

Access denied; Access granted

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Web accessibility ensures that people of all abilities can perceive, understand, navigate, interact with, and contribute to the applications you create — essentially this means that the applications are Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust.

Let me start by saying — I don’t identify as having any disabilities. However, as you may see from my goals for 2018, I like being able to help others (especially those who are disadvantaged), in whatever way I can.

Creating accessible products — especially digital products — is something that I believe we can do.

Dr. Cox banging his head in frustration. How I feel when I use the internet

I actually get quite annoyed when I’m browsing a particular website, or using a particular app — and well, it doesn’t do what I expect it to do. It actually irritates me.

I, partially to do with my previous role as a digital analyst, generally have Javascript blocked or not running. It amazes me that so many websites rely on JS to actually function. It’s actually quite sad.

I also use a MacBook without a mouse — I don’t use the trackpad that much — so end up using my keyboard only to navigate a website. Again, it is staggering the amount of websites that just don’t work unless you have a mouse.

My favourite however, is when I inspect the code of websites and see when they style divs to make them look like specific elements; rather than using the semantic element itself.

Why bother?

I’m fully-abled, yet get incredibly pissed-off when things don’t work as I expect, and I am marginally inconvenienced.

Can you image what it feels like to have to live in a world when nobody seems to make an effort? Does it make you feel like nobody cares?

Imagine being blind and a fuck-off picture is used to describe the author’s sentiment. Imagine being a vision impairment and trying to use instagram or twitter.

A recent tweet by _Red_Long asking people to caption their images which went massively viral

There are numerous other example of how people are being effectively discriminated against, but will anything change?

Scale

How about if I told you the size of the number of people affected?

To give you an indication of scale (in the US alone):

• Number of adults with hearing trouble: 37.2 million
• Percent of adults with hearing trouble: 15.3%
• Number of adults with vision trouble: 22.9 million
• Percent of adults with vision trouble: 9.4%
• Number of adults unable (or very difficult) to walk a quarter mile: 18.2 million
• Percent of adults unable (or very difficult) to walk a quarter mile: 7.5%
• Number of adults with any physical functioning difficulty: 39.6 million
• Percent of adults with any physical functioning difficulty: 16.3%

Or to put this another way — 1 in 4 people identify as having some form of disability.

Surprised

Accessthisability

The ambition of accessthisability is straight forward.

To connects makers with people to make great products.

Simple really ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you are interested, all you have to do is sign-up.