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Different meanings of Accessibility for Product Teams
“It’s just … I don’t like it,” I insist, emphatic over a spoken word band video. “It’s not accessible work. It’s not understandable. It’s mixed with the music in a way that words get dropped.”
While I am a user experience designer during work hours, I write poetry in my off time and perform on the weekend. In poetry when you say accessibility, it is not “does this follow the contrast standards for the Americans with Disabilities Act? Are we using appropriate Aria labeling for screen readers?” Accessibility is being easily understood or appreciated. It is being easy to reach, grasp by a person that doesn’t have expertise in poetry. Performance poetry was born out of a desire to keep oral traditions alive. You don’t need a degree in poetry to judge, listen, or write. In fact, while academia is often lead by the formally educated, life experience and language that is easily understandable but also woven in ways that subvert expectations or draw interesting metaphor is valued.
This is one part of accessibility that I feel is sometimes lost in tech. We are more often than not, digital natives or tech enamored. Tech workers in the United States (generally) earn above the poverty line, work in cities with good infrastructure, have a lot of provided perks and flexibility. Designing for low tech is as alien to some as designing for…
