Cross-Human Compatibility

Designing for accessibility

I don’t usually get up at 6am. Anyone who knows me IRL is used to seeing my online indicator deep into the night. I just like it better. The world is a bit more still and quiet. The hum and din of the various appliances and machines whirring away in a soft white noise.

I’m grateful for the drone. If it gets too quiet the tinnitus in my ears takes over and it’s like I’m trying to listen to a field of singing cicadas.

Aside: Did you know slowed down cicadas sounds like classical composition? You should. Nature can be the best teacher sometimes.

But I take so much of that for granted. Hearing the din.

I rely on my ears, and I often find myself cursing their sensitivity. I hear power adapters whining, those sonic devices designed to keep insects and raccoons away work on me like an active area denial system. But it also lets me pick apart individual tracks in an audio file and decompose how they were generated, crucial when I’m recording or mixing.

My eyes and I aren’t nearly as good friends. I’ve got myopia and astigmatism. Basically meaning the lenses in my eyes decided they had to “go fast” and arranged themselves in a more aerodynamically beneficial arrangement. Unfortunately for them, they didn’t realize they’d spend a life time in vitreous humor and not the skies, so being spherical would have been more advantageous

But you know. Eyeballs gonna do what eyeballs gonna do.

Without my glasses, the blur factor on the world goes into overdrive. I can’t see in HD beyond my elbows. I’ve also been this way since I was a kid.

I didn’t get my first pair of glasses until I was about 11 or 12. I was in Grade 6 elementary school. Got in trouble for talking in class. But it was because my friend had superhero eyes and could see the chalk board. I was good at the maths, so we we’re a duo. He took great notes. I helped with the hard numbers. Teacher didn’t like the chatter. So to the back of the class I went. So did my grades. Up until then, no one really noticed I couldn’t see much.

Something else people who know me IRL can tell you is that I’m adaptable. It’s a survival trait of mine.

When I was growing up I spent a lot of time looking closely at many things. Old comic books were polka dot spreads. Dots of color and sharp lines. But the ridges of the rough recycled paper would give each dot a different texture.

See, an inch or a few centimeters from my face things were in perfect clarity. Threading a needle? Easy. Finding something lost in a pile carpet? Easy.

Not looking like a total weirdo in gym class because you’re staring oddly at everyone (because you’re trying to locate your friend amongst the amorphous blobs of humans without clearly defined faces). That was hard.

Looking back I’m pretty lucky. I used to bike to school.

But I never noticed it I guess, because I didn’t have a way to know it could be better. This was my world. This was my experience of life.

First time I put my glasses on. I learned that trees have LEAVES. Like individual singular leaves! They weren’t giant green fuzzy blobs.

I don’t know if I can tell you how rewarding it is when you’re able to take part in the world like everyone else can. If you’ve got human.extensions() compiling without any build or run errors or warnings, you really wont notice it unless you’re paying attention.

Truth is though, if we ever had a zombie apocalypse and I lost my glasses. The next item on the menu for me is probably brains. Just saying. I depend on them.

So when my wife, then girlfriend, and I adopted a small white ferret kit who grew into a most wonderful war dancing weasel I didn’t skip a beat when we found out he was totally and completely deaf.

Rico, king of all that was white and fluffy, was a short mustelid of incredible character. Where other ferrets would flee at the thundering sound of the vacuum. Rico simply investigated.

When raising a ferret, you quickly learn they are spear shaped little pilferers.

They also are clumsy.

So you really have to pay mind to making the world a better place for them. They’re too brave for their own good and will and do just swan dive off of beds or stairs or anything. They must have been wild cats or something somewhere in their evolutionary history. Because that pre-launch wiggle is too cat like to be coincidence.

Someone merged the code late in the night. And then it just got cargo-culted along the way.

But it was worth it. Rico could enjoy the world with stairs and ramps he could use. The various cords flowing with electricity he loved to chew safely out of the way and equally please yet not lethal replacements provided. He was a good weasel.

We also learned how to communicate with each other. Voice commands were out. And weasels spend a lot of time sleeping. They are obligate carnivores just like cats. They aren’t rodents. They EAT rodents. They have HUGE fangs and thick and tough skin. They’re magnificent hunters. But they’re also cute. Which is also a survival trait when applied in the right way.

I had to find a language we could both use and understand.

Weasels normally squeak and chatter. But Rico, being profoundly deaf from birth (Waardenburg syndrome in his case prevented hearing due to bone growth) didn’t vocalize much if at all. But he had soulful eyes. And agile feet.

I learned to use vibration and a pattern of on-all-fours patting and tapping with my hands and feet to let him know if it was play time or food time. He’d use the same kind of stomps to let me know about his weasely ways.

He became so in tune with the vibrations he could pick out my car down the street coming home from work. I could see him through the window perked up by the drapes.

We all adapt. That’s a given. But things get a little better when those around us take the time to see, hear, touch, smell, taste, nocicept, a moment in our shoes and think about how we all can make the world better for each of us. Even if our eyeballs are saucers. Or our ear canals are better suited for preventing concussion when diving from heights 10 times larger than we are.

Back to 6am.

The only time you’ll see me get up early is when it matters.

CSPS-EFPC had an awesome session on Design, Accessibility, and I had the pleasure of being on site for, helping set up in prep for the learners arrival and then assisting the schools learners getting to the good stuff.

I’m no stranger to accessibility issues. But aside from deaf ferrets and green-tier eyes (and tall cupboards, but I deal with those by jumping on the counter), accessibility is something I spend more time thinking about in the abstract.

As a developer it usually means key tags in the right places, following guidelines that someone else wrote to help you accomplish something you’ve been told is a good thing. But you haven’t really had to use the tech you built on the daily in this way. It’s like flossing and brushing, you know it’s important but you usually aren’t blogging about it.

The mark of a good teacher is one that can help you crystallize an understanding of something in an approachable yet fundamental way.

If you aren’t following Julianna Rowsell, you should. She made accessibility accessible.

All those little things I took for granted

Threading a needle

Seeing the dots on cartoon pulp

Hearing the din of the refrigerator

Jumping on my counter top

These aren’t insignificant. For MILLIONS of Canadians the daily lived experience includes some form of disability or challenge. It could be the things you might notice. It could be situational like trying to get up stairs with a stroller or a seeing eye dog.

But for a large number of Canadians it could be completely invisible. And just like no one noticed I couldn’t see much of anything for the first decade of my life many of us pass by without a second thought.

All art from that era reminds me of monet. In fact without my glasses the world is one large impressionist painting, where stars and street lights breathe and glow in celtic knots of tangled ouroboros’

The simple truth is, the daily friction of hard to use, exclusionary, good enough “normal” translates for some to being trapped at home because the plows didn’t clear the walks. Or it’s trying to click on a 5px x 5px dot when your mouse hand is in searing pain.

So you turn to your keyboard. But the “shortcuts” you have to use would make a concert pianist stretch. How long do you try and book that flight when the form you use is more like a byzantine spice market than a clear and concise service request.

I’m a designer and developer. I like to imagine things and use the mushroom textured magic between my ears to make it real.

But you know what? Making something that satisfies my intellectual jollies is no good if no one can actually get anything out of it.

Do you know what happens when someone gets to your page and its not in a language they understand or it isn’t accessible? They bounce.

You lost them.

Life is short, and no one has time for frustration and friction. But again, for MILLIONS of Canadians this is the daily business of being human.

We as developers and designers have a moral, and in some case legal, obligation to do better than good enough. 95% accessible means it’s still not accessible to people.

If you cook something and it burns. It’s not 5% burnt. It’s burnt.

But this isn’t about obligation or morals or legislation.

It’s about friends. And family. And new friends you haven’t even had a chance to meet yet.

It’s about inclusion. It’s about make sure the doors are open and you can come and go at your pace. Where you get to enjoy instead of try to enjoy. When you get to laugh instead of try and figure out why the close captioning that was auto-generated printed word salad.

It’s about knowing and caring that everyone truly is different, but that we all have something to contribute. We as developers and designs have the chance to make laughter and enjoyment part of the norm for everyone.

I want accessibility to be an afterthought. Not because you try and shoehorn it in at the end like a garnish, but an afterthought because you’ve already baked it right into the batter from the very beginning. It’s just normal. This is how we build pages. You don’t undercook a cake.

When you design with accessibility in mind, you’re walking a kilometer in someone else’s shoes or even with their seizure alert dog (did you know there are a whole A-Team of dogs who make the world a better place for humans? You should look into it!)

More importantly by realizing that we aren’t the user when we build apps or systems or our various castles in the sky. We accept a very basic truth.

We are creators.

With that perks comes one awesome capability. We have the ability to directly improve the daily lives of those who visit, use, depend on, and live with the tools and tech we build.

To get there all you have to do is look a little closer at the every day things you might not think are critical. Try buttoning your shirt with just your pinky and thumb. Try opening a jar of pickles with your forearm and bicep. Try and use your favorite site with just a keyboard. Or go all in and try out one of the screen readers and really and truly experience what it’s like.

There are some things in life which are “threshold concepts” once you learn them you can’t unlearn them. They change you.

We should build sites for humans, not web crawlers. A more human site is made in the image of it’s creator, imperfectly perfect humans.

It starts with us in the branches and merges, we have to start changing our definition of done and good enough.

It’s going to take us longer to build things at first. But if we keep stacking rocks on top of rocks, we will have a mountain before long. Building accessible, internationalized, reusable, patternable, approachable components and code, deployments, and processes will pay us back in ways we haven’t even thought of.

The next best thing could be out there, just waiting for a chance to take part and share.

It may not be as algorithmically challenging as network graph theory or the mental and multivariate calculus of deep learning, but it is equally rewarding. Because at the end of the day, it’s about sharing our lived experiences with others.

That’s what makes us human. We build tools. We share stories.

We do best when we work together as one. We thrive when everyone is included in the fun.

I’m in. How about you?

Weasel.out();