14: Now, what is equity-focused design? And how is it different from inclusive design?
I’m not even done with accessibility, universal design, and inclusive design; here comes equity-focused design.
People’s dependence on technology and digital devices is increasing with each passing day. And you can even look at yourself to notice how many online services you use every day on your smartphone. You book your LPG cylinder online, order food online, take a doctor appointment online, check weather online, use online navigation to reach everywhere, your kids get their homework online, play games online, chat with friends online etc.
So inspired by all these things, the Indian government launched a campaign called Digital India in 2015 to make the country digitally empowered in the field of technology. It was all good and shiny because it helped people, especially people with disabilities, do their work in a better and easier way. Now they could do things like open an account or get their pension without going to the bank.
Alas, this digital empowerment came with its own unique set of problems. Problems like forgetting to consider the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age, and other forms of human difference. The result: after so many years of the Digital India campaign, you can still see the situation like this:
According to the WHO, an estimated 1.3 billion people experience significant disabilities. This represents 16% of the world’s population. In India, the number of people with disabilities was stated as 26.8 million in the 2011 Census of India. Among them, 20.3% of people have movement disabilities, 18.9% have hearing impairments, 18.8% have visual impairments, and 5.6% have mental disabilities.
You can’t leave those people out while creating a product, service, or device. So what is the solution? The solution is accessibility. Accessibility means designing products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. And you can measure accessibility using various industry guidelines, such as the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). But there is an issue.
Due to the global nature of design, it’s not possible to measure accessibility in specific situations, sectors, or communities. For example, there are people who are not experiencing a permanent disability but a temporary or situational one. How do you measure that?
Let’s say there are three people: Eir, Bir, and Phatte.
- Eir, a person who is deaf
- Bir, a person having an ear infection
- Phatte, a bartender in a disco
What’s common between them? They all struggle to understand the audio content on their digital devices. All three face a disability:
- Eir’s disability is permanent
- Bir’s disability is temporary
- Phatte’s disability is situational
Now, accessibility has some guidelines to assist people who are deaf. But what about people who have a temporary disability (ear infection) or a situational disability (employee in a disco)? That’s why it’s necessary to create some kind of accessible design process. And that’s where universal design, inclusive design, and equity-focused design come into play. Let’s look at these three design strategies and how they affect accessibility.
Universal design
It all started with universal design. Universal design is the process of designing a product that is accessible to people regardless of their age, disability, or any other factors. A one-size-fits-all kind of design. For example, a curb cut or wheelchair ramp is not only used by people in wheelchairs but by other people as well.
When you design for disabilities, you make things better for everyone in the process. It’s called the curb-cut effect.
Principles of universal design
- Equitable use: Anyone can use the design.
- Flexibility in use: A wide range of abilities is accommodated.
- Simple, intuitive use: No prior experience is required.
- Perceptible information: Any necessary information is communicated to the user.
- Tolerance for error: Any adverse consequences of action are minimized.
- Low physical effort: The design can be used efficiently and comfortably.
- Size and space for approach & use: Regardless of the user’s body size, posture, or mobility, there is an appropriate size and space to approach and use the design.
But there is an issue with universal design. When you try to create one solution for everyone, a design loses its effectiveness. It’s like when you go to buy ready-to-wear clothes and find fitting issues. Sometimes they are loose, while other times they are tight. And every shop has a different kind of fitting for a particular size.
Everyone knows that at a particular size, there could be hundreds of types of body structures. So it’s impossible for a manufacturer to create a fit that looks good on everyone. The result: people either make some alteration to them according to their body structure or just wear them as they deem fit. But that doesn’t mean they’re satisfied. Generally, garments with a not-so-good fit lie in the back of people’s closets.
Universal design has the same problem. In their approach to being inclusive, they excluded many people. And as UX designers realized that a universal design couldn’t meet the needs of every user, they started to think about the concept of inclusive design, which focuses on finding solutions to meet different needs.
Inclusive design
Inclusive design is a design process to create a product that is usable for as many people as possible, especially those groups that are traditionally excluded from using the product. For example, when designing a product, you focus more on the needs of people who are deaf than the needs of people who can use their sense of hearing. Then, as you build the next version of a product, you design for more excluded groups.
Unlike universal design, which focuses on the similarities all people share, inclusive design highlights individual differences. If universal design is a one-size-fits-all solution, then consider inclusive design as “solve for one, extend to many.” In inclusive design, when it comes to people, there’s no such thing as “normal.” And there is no average user or target audience that you should design for.
Historically, inclusive design has been associated with designing for people with physical disabilities, and accessibility is one of the primary outcomes of an effective inclusive design process. However, inclusive design is a methodology that not only considers accessibility but also the full range of human diversity that could change a person’s ability to use a product, like age, gender, race, language, ability, and socio-economic status.
Inclusive designs make sure people feel welcome regardless of their background. For example, look at an app that flips its layout when a user changes the language that uses right-to-left (RTL) scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian. Such a feature considers people’s cultural and linguistic needs, and people feel included.
Unlike universal design, there are no generally agreed-upon guidelines for inclusive design. Some attempts borrow heavily from the definition of universal design. But I really like the following statement, which emphasizes that any user can experience disability:
Disability is a mismatch between the needs of a user and the design of a product.
Despite its good intentions, inclusive design fails to treat disabled people as equals. In reality, how many disabled UX designers have you worked with? Preaching is always easier than doing it. Inclusive design talks about including disabled people in the design process to get their unique perspective, but it lacks clear directives on how they’re included. Even if they are included in the design process, they are either underpaid or don’t feel represented. If design truly is to become more inclusive, the process needs to become more equitable.
Equity-focused design
What is the difference between equity and equality? Equality means providing the same resource or opportunity to all strata of society. That means everybody gets the same thing. Equity means fairness, providing different levels of opportunity for each person in order to get fair outcomes. Please take a look at the following image to better understand this concept:
The left image represents equality because every person gets the same box to stand on. But as each person has a different height, the tallest person gets the better view. The right image represents equity because every person gets what they need to have a better view.
In inclusive design, the goal is to create a design that is usable, particularly for people who were traditionally excluded in the past. Whereas in the equity-focused design, the goal is to focus on the individual person’s needs in that excluded group. Other than featuring disabled people in websites and apps and calling it a day, the design should be about the equal participation of disabled people.
Conclusion
All three processes you have seen are good on their own. It’s not like equity-focused design is going to solve all the problems, just like inclusive design and universal design aren’t. But they all try to include historically underrepresented groups or people into the design. Universal design follows a one-size-fits-all approach, and it might be helpful in the early design process.
You have to be realistic here. Inclusive design is a time-consuming process that could take a lot of resources, so not a lot of organizations are going to use it right away. Unless you are a multinational like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, or their ilk, it’s going to take a long time to adopt these processes. Other than that, inclusive design doesn’t have specific guidelines in place like universal design, and there is also a lot of ambiguity in terms.
In India, you call a disabled person divyang. Why? Because you don’t want to humiliate them. Divyang is a Hindi word that means the one with a divine body part. But what’s so divine about a disabled person? Nothing. Zilch. Nada. The word has no logic. But you could surely find people who give the logic that the word divyang provides moral upliftment to disabled people. That’s bullshit.
Let me ask you:
- When you underpay them, don’t they feel humiliated at that time?
- When you don’t give them a job, don’t they feel humiliated at that time?
- When you don’t include them in any decision-making process, don’t they feel humiliated at that time?
- When you even make basic things inaccessible to them, don’t they feel humiliated at that time?
There is no limit to hypocrisy. Disabled people really don’t care about inclusivity unless we give them equal opportunity. Give them that, and things will improve themselves.
