70+ Reasons I Can’t Take The Nothing Company Seriously. Yet.
Nothing made a huge mistake and nope, I’m not being a sensationalist. Great phone (allegedly), but as a company, it needs to step up if it wants to be taken seriously.
The Nothing company seems to know — pun intended — nothing about accessibility and UX. There. The entire conclusion upfront. I was thinking of getting the phone, as it feels like the closest Android device to iOS you can find out there at the moment. It also looks good, and while I don’t plan to switch to Android, having an iPhone looking Android testing device would be great. Especially at that price. But then I checked the website out and within two minutes I was convinced Nothing does not deserve my hard-earned cash.
I wasn’t planning to do an accessibility audit on the Nothing site, but trying to navigate it, I found it unintuitive and difficult to use, which triggered my accessibility engineer curiosity. So, I ran an automated audit, and guess what? It’s horrible. Took less than 60 seconds to be so appalled by the accessibility audit result that it completely broke my confidence in the company and what it stands for. You’d expect Carl Pei — who previously co-founded OnePlus — to have learnt about the importance of inclusivity and diversity in both hardware and software, but clearly, looking at the site, that was never a consideration. Damn the 1.2 billion people dealing with disabilities, right? Apparently, to Nothing, they’re not a viable customer.
What kind of serious business in 2022 decides that 15% of its potential customers are worth ignoring?
What’s further shocking is that one of the main investors is Casey Neistat, the famous YouTuber who featured Molly Burke — a blind YouTuber — in the past on his channel, and had a first-hand experience in dealing with disability. I like Casey. So, naturally, I expected more. A lot more!
The missed low-hanging fruit…
Whenever I audit a website or web app, the very first thing I do, is run an automated test. My favourite tool is AXE, but lately, I started combining both Wave and AXE to get a comprehensive understanding of a page’s compliance state. I find AXE to be particularly great for software engineers as there are fewer bells and whistles and really just focuses on what really matters. Wave, on the other hand, is very visual, and particularly strong when it comes to detecting design issues. Running them both in parallel looks something like this:
While both AXE and Wave have a different way of calculating errors and in fairness AXE is set to WCAG 2.1 AAA level, we can all agree that neither of the tools report a low number of issues. “To err is human”, so when I see an issue here and there, while I won’t not report it, I feel a lot more inclined to accept them as part of an online business evolving, and things falling through the cracks.
The number of accessibility criterion failures on the Nothing site is not the result of human error, but complete ignorance.
Incredibly simple things, like unique IDs, alt text, correctly coded lists, unique landmarks, and in fact anything and everything AXE reports is so damn easy to prevent with just a bit of care and know-how, that it bothers the heck out of me when I see issues like these. Two words: semantic HTML. Learn it. Use it. It is by far the simplest part of web development. By far!
I cannot and will not accept in 2022 that web developers are still incapable of coding semantically correct pages.
Not acceptable. Not if it’s your little personal site, and most definitely not if you’re a multi-million $$$ business trying to sell a hot new phone.
Beyond automation…
Of course, semantic HTML alone won’t save anyone from getting sued for not meeting accessibility guidelines. Knowing this, you have to test the pages further. And that’s precisely what I did.
Another incredibly easy test to run is to start tabbing. Tab. Tab. Tab. See what gets highlighted. You’re essentially testing keyboard navigation, the most basic level of it. Unleashing my tab key at the Nothing website, proved in less than 30 seconds what I assumed — keyboard navigation is completely off. The reason I allowed myself to make this assumption was that seeing the defects reported in AXE and Wave, one can make a highly educated guess that tab navigation has no chance of working well. And it doesn’t. On the Nothing sire half the time I have no idea where the focus goes, and when focus is there, it’s both inconsistent or barely visible.
Keyboard navigation is so bad, it inadvertantly violates GDPR. The user doesn’t even get to first confirm the cookie settings because it’s last on the page and the confirm button never gets focus. 🤣
At this point, running a screen reader will just confirm everything I already know. It will all be impossible to use. But feck it, I got time to waste, no? I’ll run VoiceOver on it anyway, and go into rotor mode, it’s the quickest way to confirm just how bad things are. And yeah, it certainly could be worse, and I have seen worse, hitting CTRL-Opt-U to navigate by links, headings, form controls, etc reveals plenty of mistakes. There is one piece of good news, though. I can finally get to that confirm button, in the cookie bar. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t give me any context as to what I am confirming, but I can get to it.
I would really love to meet the designer…
I love designers, I genuinely do. In every company, I worked I eventually ended up becoming one of their best friends, and we managed to create great-looking accessible experiences for millions of users out there. But all of those relationships started with a common event — me ripping their designs to shreds. Sounds harsh? Well, here’s the thing. Reality is harsh. Try living blind, or not even blind, just dyslexic, and see how tough reality can be, and then find the audacity to tell me that having black text on black background is a good design choice. What the actual fudge?!?
Or, choosing Ndot-55 for a font is friendly to anyone other than the most funky trend-obsessed designer. A single top to bottom scroll on just one page reveals all the reasons why it’s a terrible font choice.
What’s worse, is that it’s not just Nothing’s font, it’s their brand. It’s a statement font. This is what they’re riding. It’s on the website, it’s in the phone’s OS and even the hardware. Brilliant. Way to mess up your branding from day 1, Nothing…
When it comes to accessibility, Nothing gets… nothing right. Nada. Zilch.
Their mission statement, on the Nothing Phone’s page, is almost hilarious, so I put a spin on it, from my perspective.
Pure (bad) Instinct.
Less distractions. More ignorance.
Just pure misguided instinct, formed as a soulless machine. Told through inaccessible symbols. Deeper interactions with only a subset of humans. And brave defiance of accessibility requirements.
Phone (1) can bring some of us back. To even less of us. Unless we’re disabled. Then we’re all fecked.
If the site is this bad, I don’t want to know how bad the Nothing OS Android skin is. Or, actually, you know what?
I bloody dare you Nothing, to send me a phone to test, and prove me wrong that at least you got the phone right. I feckin’ dare you! If it’s accessible, I’ll sell it, and donate the proceeds to charity dealing with disability.
Yet?
Exactly. Yet. This is a scathing review of Nothing’s website, but I don’t want to dismiss them for good. There is considerable value in learning what you’ve done wrong and acting on it, fixing it, and taking a better approach going forward. It requires quite a bit of work, and their entire branding needs to be rethought, but they wouldn’t be the first company to do that. Apple nearly went out of business, only to come back stronger than ever. LEGO had massive setbacks, yet it’s one of the most iconic brands in the world. Learning from mistakes at the right time can be transformational for a company. I’ll be here, waiting.
Yo! Nothing. Do more, do better, do something…
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, Lego fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer!
