Making Accessibility the Default
1. A Twitter Story
Sometime ago, I came across a tweet on my twitter feed. Rob Long, an army veteran who happened to be blind was imploring people to switch on their accessibility feature because he couldn’t properly engage with others.
“It helps us interact with your pictures,” he wrote, “and it makes a huge difference to our twitter experience.”
Like many others that responded to that tweet, I was surprised there was even a feature like that. Had I known, of course I’d have turned it on. This viral tweet made a lot of people turn on their accessibility feature. And I couldn’t help but wonder why this have to require a plea from a user, and why this wasn’t the default?
2. The Plea for Accessibility
Most of the plea for accessibility I’ve come across, whether on blogs, podcasts or books always argue the business need for it. Make your product accessible thereby increasing your sales or or increasing your SEO ratings.
While these arguments are reasonable and are meant to encourage companies to integrate accessibility into the core of their business, they also expose our vanity as humans. It’s almost immoral I think, to advocate accessibility (the very essence of including other people) strictly because it will bring us some gain.
So here I am, advocating from another perspective. Make accessibility the default because it’s the moral thing to do.
3. Affordability
There’s this principle in design called Affordability which simply implies that an item will be used the way it is designed. If you design something to look like a bin, it will most likely be used as a bin. If you design something to be inclusive, you will in fact, be creating a more inclusive space, thereby encouraging others to be more inclusive.
To not design products with accessibility in mind, might be seen as a faux pas with no intention of malice, but it doesn’t excuse the result. You are creating a world that excludes others. And whether deliberate or not, it is immoral.
4. Back to the Twitter Story
I imagined that the Twitter product team like many product teams argued in favour of not making accessibility the default because they didn’t want ruin the “average user experience”. The experience of many others who can see just fine and just wanna tweet and don’t want to have to go the extra mile in describing their images at all times.
There’s the option to turn it on, and that would be enough, they probably argued. Even though prior to Mr Long’s tweet, majority of us weren’t aware of it.
Seems like a solid argument, doesn’t it? At least the option exists. But this thinking is not only a lazy cop out, it also underestimates the empathy of humans. What it means to be able bodied but be aware that people who are disabled just want same experiences such as us, and would be willing to go just an extra length to make it happen.
It underestimates the principle of affordability. The notion that we can design a world where people wanna go an extra mile for other people.
5. Imagine an Accessible World
So imagine the accessibility feature is a default on twitter. And everyone who joins twitter, come right on ready to describe their images for other users who can’t see. Would that change the twitter experience in anyway? Would it make it any less fun? I doubt it.
So why isn’t it the default? Why isn’t creating a more inclusive world a moral default for all designers, developers and product owners?
