Accessibility compliance isn’t enough
This weekend, I saw a tweet that asked why we address accessibility and then consider ableism and not the other way round. It helped to connect a few things in my brain — why our accessibility work isn’t enough and how we can link this to our other systemic change projects.
For people who aren’t familiar with it, ableism is a term that’s used to refer to discrimination in favour of non-disabled people. It means that in a situation where ableism is present the systemic processes and culture will favour a person without disabilities. Disablism is an alternative that could be used. Scope has a clear definition of ableism with examples if that’s useful.
I work in the Service Design team at the National Lottery Heritage Fund and we’re working to change our processes, systems and communications to be more inclusive and accessible — but in quite a limited way.
In our team, we talk a lot about “Doing the hard work to make things simple”. It’s an important point that we’ve applied to forms, guidance, website content and staff tools. We’ve applied it to processes, but until now we haven’t addressed the ableism in the room. We know there are barriers to inclusion built into the technical service that we’re actively working on, but we haven’t (yet) done a lot to address the barriers that aren’t technological but are behavioural or are embedded into the way we work. This applies to ableism as well as other forms of systemic and social inequality.
I’ve been working in and around accessibility for 6 years, and this problem has been the same in most teams or organisations. We’re considering the easier part of accessibility and avoiding the hard work of changing our systems, our processes and our organisations.
We focus on developing technical and functionally usable and accessible services. We’re addressing things like “is the application form usable for people who use screen readers?” or “is the help we provide usable for people with dyslexia?”. This means that they work well for people with disabilities, but an accessible form or website won’t remove all barriers for people with disabilities if the system, processes or organisation they’re linked to is fundamentally ableist. We’re putting a lot of time and energy into addressing a surface level issue. It’s an important one but doesn’t address the root cause of the problem.
Technical accessibility is important, but it doesn’t matter if the system and processes behind them don’t support or actively work against disabled people.
If the form is technically accessible, but the outcome of the form is judged on people’s ability to write succinctly and communicate well, or people are judged more harshly if there are spelling or grammatical mistakes in their answers then people with dyslexia or other specific learning differences may still have a worse outcome than someone without the condition. It isn’t an accessible form.
If the form is labelled well, but people still need assistance from someone else to understand what it’s asking them — it’s not an accessible form.
As accessibility specialists or people who care a lot about accessibility, we need to do more to address these built in and systemic barriers. It’s great if a website or a service meets WCAG 2.1 AA, but if a person fundamentally can’t achieve their goal or is disadvantaged by a process then it’s still not accessible.
By addressing ableism alongside other systemic change (like addressing biases like racism) we can make a fundamental difference to how people can use and can access our services and the outcome of those interactions.
Our team is working with people across the organisation to make sure the changes we make are substantial, long lasting and achieve the impact we need them to, but if this is something you’re working on I’d love to hear how you’re doing it.
We’re running continuous user research with a wide range of people to help us understand the lived experiences of people who interact with us and the barriers within our current processes, system and organisation that they’re facing. We also regularly want to talk to people who don’t have any experience of the National Lottery Heritage Fund. If you’d like to help us make these systemic changes to how people find, access and manage their funding, please consider joining our research panel or sending me a message.
