Clubhouse App: why you cannot afford to treat accessibility as an afterthought within inclusion.

How to avoid a shitstorm and not to forget a whole user group in your products and services, even if there is no legal requirement to do so.

TLDR;

I was asked about my opinion on the fact that a new audio drop-in app didn’t consider HoH/deaf people in their beta phase. It is a complex issue, here is the summary of explanations and arguments:

Not the target audience: I don’t think this was on purpose, I do think they are trying to be inclusive, but don’t fully understand what inclusion means. Disability and accessibility is not something you learn about unless you go out looking for it, not in formal education and not at real life university unless you know PwD directly in your circles. Nobody wants to exclude such a percentage of possible paying customers: Just in the US, 1 in 20 Americans are deaf or HoH (hard of hearing), and people are getting older. By 2050 there will be more than 900 MILLION affected… also an ageing population, used to the radio and the telephone, could be the group that most benefits from and would use this type of functionality.

FACTS~A11y is good business: The App has no legal requirement to deliver accessibility at the level of captioning live audio (which is its main concept), but still I don’t think any innovative company can afford to forget about…