Inclusive Design: Good for Business?
In Seattle, we are surrounded by tech. Filling the spaces between the Amazon, Facebook, and Airbnb office buildings are hundreds of start-ups creating different forms of new technology. A quote from Constructing Accessible Websites explains that “the explosive growth of electronic commerce continues to erect new barriers” [1]. This quote exemplifies the need for the adoption of inclusive design in the workflow of all of these new creations.
Exclusion is something that everyone faces in various forms, but feeling empathy for other people is not enough to change the ways of for-profit companies. Those organizations need to see profit in doing the research for diverse users in order to motivate the integration of inclusion into new designs for products or services.
Even thinking about how to make a company change its values — or in some cases, start sticking to their values — of inclusion seem overwhelming.
One successful case of a business incorporating inclusive design is Zappos.com. Allie Thu, a technologist at Zappos, spent a year building and raising awareness around inclusive design at the customer service company. Her work ultimately led her to pursue a career path in accessibility. While her experience shows that thinking inclusively on the company level requires passionate work and determination, it also proves how rewarding the outcome can be.
Here’s how Allie’s personal journey started. On the outskirts of a conference table, she listened to speakers at Amazon’s annual accessibility summit. The people talking were diverse in job positions and ability. This is where Allie’s eyes were opened to the broad world of accessibility and what it can become. She became determined to pursue an inclusive design path at Zappos.
“[I got] a glimpse into a whole world of work that I never really had considered in the past,” Allie said. “In regard to navigating our website, we just never thought about people who might not have great vision or be blind or be deaf or have mobility issues or whatever it might be. And that really touched my heart.”
She began asking questions like:
- “Where do we currently stand today?”
- “How do we get started?”
- “How can I work on this while also doing my current job?”
Allie split her career between design and programming. After starting in design, she transitioned to front end development. She found her passion in between these two career paths, where she understands the technical side of things but enjoys designing and creation.
This set her up well to singlehandedly kickstart accessible design at Zappos. Getting to her current position of overseeing accessibility in design wasn’t an easy path to take because it required a lot of time outside of her everyday job to build initial awareness around this initiative. But her passion motivated her, and she took every chance she could to bring awareness to accessibility.
“My determination for this initiative ultimately led me to become the go-to person for accessibility design within the organization,” Allie said. “Once this became clear, I realized the opportunity for it to hold an official role within the company.”
Allie’s experience highlights the complexities of accessible design and the need for more people to be involved. However, Allie only really focused on accessibility — imagine what it would take to be truly inclusive?
In order for Allie to move into an official role with accessibility design, she needed to prove the need. She conducted a ton of research and created a presentation that laid out both the customer and financial benefits of this new role — including the reduced development costs of designing inclusively at the onset. Upon review, the company agreed to create the position for her.
Greg Williams, Accessibility Program Office Executive from Deque Systems, calculates costs related to accessibility in his article, “The Huge Cost of Ignoring Accessibility When Designing Your Website.” [2]
In terms of lawsuits related to accessibility:
- “Using average compensation and labor timeframes gathered in the course of our work with Fortune 50 companies, we estimated that addressing . . . a single web accessibility complaint (a complaint through the ADA) costs almost $10,000.”
- “A simple and quickly settled digital accessibility lawsuit would cost the defendant an estimated $350,000.”
Another argument that people bring up against designing inclusively is that there are not that many people out there who are in need of inclusive products. However, the disposable income of various communities show that this is not the case:
- Working-Age Americans with disabilities: $490 billion
- Black Americans: $501 billion
- Hispanic Americans: $582 billion
To sum it up, “People with disabilities represent 35 percent of working-age adults — that’s 20 million people. If your website is not accessible, you are locking out huge market segments” [1].
Assumptions that businesses make when there is not user need for accessibility have made people hesitant to accept inclusive design. However, these numbers show that there is not only huge cost associated with not being accessible, but a large revenue opportunity in being accessible and inclusive. To do this effectively? Be inclusive from the start.
“The fact that if you solve for accessibility up front, it alleviates time, money, resources, headache, all of that, you know, down the road,” Allie explained. “I’m always on a broken record saying this needs to be addressed up front — the focus and time and resources need to be put into this, this chunk of work up front — to allow us to truly scale ourselves in the future and not have to constantly go back and fix things. Because that’s very expensive.”
In this article series, I share excerpts and stories from my book, Our Exclusive Society: Pathways Toward Inclusion by Design. I hope you enjoyed this post — if you enjoyed it and want to connect you can reach me here via email rhrodney97@gmail.com or connect with me on Twitter @RachelHRodney1. Also, you can also find my book on Amazon — here is the link to buy it.
Sources
[1] Jim Thatcher et al., Constructing Accessible Web Sites (Apress, 2002).
[2] Greg Williams, “The huge cost of ignoring accessibility when designing your website,” The Next Web, September 27, 2019.
