Just because there’s braille…doesn’t make it accessible
How a blind man reminded me of the importance of design thinking
The elevator opened to reveal a man- he stood calmly, stared straight ahead, and held a long stick. “Are you going up or down?” I asked as I stepped into the elevator. I looked at him inquisitively. There were no buttons clicked on the elevator.
“I was going up but I think I missed my floor” he replied. It was only then I realized… he was blind! He meant to go up to the fifth floor. Now we were on the seventh floor going down.
I clicked the button for the 5th floor for him and informed him once we arrived. He gratefully got off… but where would he go next? He was looking for a doctor’s office and the sign was ahead of him…but how would he know? He knew his doctor’s name, but the sign had no braille. And even he did find the correct office number, how would he find the door to the right office?
I got off with him, and we found where he needed to go together. But I was dumbfounded. As a UX designer, I always have some usability question in the back of my mind. I’ve stepped into elevators, seen the braille next to each floor, and assumed this was an accessible environment. But for two minutes, I experienced a tiny moment of what it is actually like to be blind.
Designing an elevator with braille is not enough to get the user to his end destination. It’s only the beginning. It took but a brief minute of contextual inquiry to see many obstacles in this user’s path. If anyone did a usability test for a blind person to get to their correct doctor’s office, the test would fail at step two!
Here is my very simple user flow with the following goal: Get to my doctor’s office.
Pre-step: Find the elevator (How did he manage this?)
Step 1: Select the correct floor — PASS
Step 2: Know when you have arrived at the correct floor — FAIL
Step 3: Find the correct office number for your doctor — FAIL
Step 4: Get to the location of the correct office for your doctor — FAIL
I had made a wrong assumption about accessibility until this point- If there is braille, then it is accessible for a blind person. It took me all of two minutes to enter into this man’s real experience and prove how wrong this assumption was!
The man’s first obstacle could have a quite simple solution such as an auditory cue, like announcing “5th floor” when it arrived. But I (and obviously the people who designed the elevator) would never get to this simple solution if we didn’t identify the problems and obstacles for this user.
The obstacles of step three and four would require more creative solutions, and yet even just getting the person to the correct floor is a big win. Even removing one more obstacle for this man empowers him and improves his life.
I was reminded in this small experience the value of truly practicing design thinking- to not skip over the step of studying and shadowing the user to understand the needs and obstacles he or she encounters; how only when we actually see the problems can we find a solution, and how one good solution can drastically improve a person’s life.
