Disability is designed

Greg Alchin
Aug 31, 2018 · 6 min read

Our understanding of disability directly impacts upon our individual and organisational capacity to develop an inclusive culture, that includes and enables persons with a disability. A lack of understanding about disability leads to attitudes and actions that can create barriers to participation for employees and community members with a disability.

Defining disability

In the 1980s, disability was seen just as a personal attribute. Back then, the World Health Organization believed that, ‘In the context of health experience, a disability is any restriction or lack of ability, (resulting from an impairment) to perform an activity in the manner, or within the range considered normal, for a human being.’

Since then our understanding of disability has progressed from a simplistic medical model to a social model which views disability as a consequence of environmental, social and attitudinal barriers that prevent people with impairments from maximum participation in society. The W.H.O. now highlights ‘Disability is not just a health problem. It is a complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives.’

Furthermore, the social model of disability is embedded in legislation around the world. An example is within the Disability Inclusion Act 2014 (NSW), which states that ‘a disability involves a long-term physical, psychiatric, intellectual or sensory impairment that, in interaction with various barriers, may hinder the person’s full and effective participation in the community on an equal basis with others.’ Where there are mismatched interactions, there are points of physical, sensory, cognitive, and social exclusion. These points of exclusion are the real disabling barriers to participation for people with a disability.

If your understanding about disability is out of date then your individual and organisational responses usually are too.

So who has a disability?

People with disability are just people, they are people living with impairments. We are empowered to be fully participating and equal members of the community, through inclusively designed ‘barrier free’ environments.

Just as important is recognising that people with disability are not a homogeneous group, usually stereotypically characterised by a person with a mobility cane or wheelchair. Disability is so much more. It is diverse and dynamic as this snapshot of data from the Australian Bureau of Statisics demonstrates;

· It may be permanent or temporary.

· It may have existed from birth or may have been acquired due to an injury or illness or as part of the ageing process.

· It is often invisible, sometimes episodic or progressive while for others, it may be stable.

· It increases with age, from an average of 1 in 5 in the Australians population, to 1 in 3 by the age of 55 and finally 1 in 1 by the age of 85.

· 1 in 5 people in any year experience mental illness or 45 per cent of the population over their lifetime.

In otherwords, we will all have a disability in our lifetime. Some like myself, who was born with a visual impairment may wryly consider ourselves to be an ‘early adopter.’ Since we all have a disability, the removal barriers benefits and enables everyone.

Case study: print disability

Whilst print remains society’s dominant format for providing content, it is a barrier for anyone who has a print disability.

When imagining a person with a print disability, you may immediately think of someone who is blind or who has very low vision. This is a reasonable response, given that the WHO estimates there are 246 million people who have low vision worldwide (86% of those with visual impairments), while 39 million people are blind.

However, it might surprise you to know that print disability can also be experienced in other forms. For example, some people have reduced or lack of sensitivity to certain colours (‘colour blindness’), or increased sensitivity to excessive brightness in colours. Both of these variations in perception of colours and brightness can cause a print disability, even though they can be independent of the person’s visual acuity.

Similarly, many adults in their early to mid-40s may start to experience age-related vision problems which impact on their ability to read as easily as they did when they were younger. These problems can result in a need for more light, difficulty reading and doing close-up work, problems with glare, changes in colour perception and reduced tear production.

Print can also be a barrier for more than just those who are blind or vision impaired. Australia’s Copyright Act 1968(Part II, s. 10, p. 15) defines a ‘person with a print disability’ as a person:

  • without sight
  • whose sight is severely impaired
  • who is unable to focus or move their eyes
  • who is unable to hold or manipulate books, or
  • who has a perceptual disability.

Based upon this definition, print is also a barrier for:

  • people with severe arthritis who may have difficulty holding a book or turning pages,
  • people suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS) or neuromuscular disorders such as muscular dystrophy, who may have functional eyesight but are unable to read due to symptoms of the disease such as muscle weakness or shaking
  • people with other types of physical disability or injuries that inhibit the easy use of reading materials,
  • people with a perceptual disability, such as dyslexia.

Print can also be a barrier for people with low literacy or learning difficulties, and for native speakers of a language different from that of your content.

How do we remove the barrier?

There are two complementary responses to removing the barriers for people with a print disability. Each own there own is extremely useful, together they are transformational.

  1. The individual response is using assistive technologies
  2. The societal response is designing content to inclusive standards.

Assistive technologies

People with print disabilities use a range of assistive technologies to access digital text. Typical reading methods include using:

  • inbuilt scsynthetic speech: using screen reader software (e.g. JAWS, VoiceOver, NVDA, Window Eyes, ChromeVox, Talkback), or built-in screen readers in mainstream software (e.g. Read Aloud in Adobe Acrobat) or within portable devices (e.g. Victor Reader Stream)
  • refreshable Braille: using a portable Braille display connected to a desktop computer, laptop or tablet device, or within a stand-alone Braille notetaker
  • viewing onscreen: using specialised screen-magnification software, tools that customise colour combinations, tools that aid in tracking when reading, and built-in zoom functions within software and operating systems. These can be on mainstream technology or specialised devices such as desktop/handheld video magnifiers.

Designing content to standards

While these technologies help people with print disabilities to engage and interact with your content, they do not provide the complete solution. They still rely on you to ensure your content is properly formatted and tagged. In otherwords properly designed. For example, it is important to apply an appropriate heading structure to your publication (Headings 1, 2, 3 etc.). This will allow a person using a screen reader to gain a sense of scope and hierarchy, as well as to navigate your content.

The international standards for creating content that provides equal access to information and online services is the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines(WCAG 2). The standards are technology neutral and apply to both web based and non-web ICT. They are the international building codefor anything digital.

Through the use of modern devices and properly formatted content, the barriers to print can be removed.

So where do we start?

The identification and removal of barriers is everyone’s business. It is also a key performance indicator for all leaders.

It requires a coherent response. Barriers are design and/or implementation decisions gone wrong. There are lessons to be learnt on what worked and more importantly what didn’t. Barriers are preventable and/or solvable.

The biggest barrier is usually our assumptions. If we assume everyone can see, hear, say, and touch all the time in everyone we can exclude and disable people. If we assume that our own abilities and biases as the definitive snapshot of the ‘average or normal’ user, we end up creating or choosing things (products, content, systems and environments) that really only suit people of a specific gender, age, language ability, tech literacy, and physical or sensory ability. Furthermore if we use outdated understanding of disability we amplify our assumptions and magnify the impact of our assumptions.

There is no such as ‘normal’. Variability and diversity are the default, not the exception.

The response starts with empathy. IDEO’s Human-Centred Design Toolkit, define empathy as a “deep understanding of the problems and realities of the people you are designing for”. It involves learning about the difficulties people face, as well as uncovering their latent needs and desires in order to explain their behaviours. To do so, we need to have an understanding of the people’s environment, as well as their roles in and interactions with their environment.

When we open our thinking and design in from the margins of human variability first, we open up our products and experiences to more people with a wider range of abilities. It also reflects how people really are.

Whilst many embrace design thinking, the first two phases of empathy and design fail if your decisions are based upon flawed assumptions of disability and human variability.

For me, it is the powerfully simple principles of inclusive design that allow for the most sustainable coherent response:

  • Recognize exclusion,
  • Learn from diversity,
  • Solve for one, extend to many.

To learn more about inclusive design, I recommend reading Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit.

Greg Alchin

Written by

Inclusive design consultant, presenter and author. Certified Apple and Microsoft Accessibility Consultant.

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