Accessibility is innovation, even though it shouldn’t be.
This article is structured as two intersecting and embedded pieces of writing, authored collaboratively by Babusi Nyoni, the UX consultant who designed the Innovation Service’s website, and Eva Hangartner, an intern with the Service. The main body contains the core argument and actions taken; the italicized and indented text is a personal narrative. They read as two separate pieces, sharing only the general theme denoted by the section headings. By the end, we hope you will see the connection to the main argument — that, in our imperfect world, accessibility is innovation.
Background
Last year, when we redesigned the UNHCR Innovation Service website, we documented how one of the key considerations was how the website would be experienced by people with different levels of Internet connectivity. Users with limited access to the Internet struggled to view the website due to the loading times induced by necessary data visualisations. Ultimately, we were successful in solving this challenge by initially segmenting the web experience based on perceived connectivity and then gradually progressing into the full experience.
In the same way that chronic or temporary poor Internet connectivity could have been an impairment to accessing the website, so too can physical, sensory, emotional and mental differences if not adequately designed for. In 2020, we have been confronted with a glaring shortcoming in the website’s lack of optimisation for use by people with impairments.
As a legally blind person who still relies on my eyesight, the layout of a website matters a lot in terms of how comfortable I am using that page. When I open any website for the first time, a string of questions flashes subconsciously through my mind: will the site zoom? Does it have high contrast? Does the menu stay on the screen when you scroll over it by accident? In which corner will the “close” button on the inevitable pop-up be?
Assumptions
In order to make the website accessible, we first interrogated what it means to be impaired, documenting how to tailor the website. Take, for instance, a user with an amputated arm. Designing a website with this person’s experiences in mind might mean making all functions fully navigable with a trackpad, as opposed to requiring a keyboard and thus two hands. This design would no doubt be equally as helpful to a person in an arm cast or to a new parent cradling their baby in one arm for a few moments. As these three scenarios show, the human condition allows for varying levels of impairment based on many situational, temporary, and permanent events. Keeping the most extreme of these cases — the amputee — in mind throughout the design process can produce unexpected positive externalities for everyone.
Given the ever-changing definition of what it means to have access, we began to reimagine the benefits of making a website as accessible as possible. In the same way that designing for an amputee is beneficial to more than just that person, you never know when designing for a deaf or autistic person will help the wider public.
Because the layout of the Innovation Service website was modern, simple, and aesthetic, I assumed that it would be a generally accessible website. For the duration of my web visit, I thought, my impairment would not negatively affect my interactions with the website because I could access the site just as easily as a sighted person. According to the social model of disability, it is not any somatic limitation or difference within me that limits what I am able to do; rather, it is the barriers in the physical world and in people’s attitudes toward disability that render me “disabled”.
By removing those barriers (in this case, inaccessible web design), I would no longer fall into the category of “disabled”.
And indeed, there were no pop-ups; the text supported Chrome extensions that change the colors of fonts; and the longer articles were compatible with my Text to Speech software. Most importantly, the text reflowed easily, meaning that each line of text got smaller as the size of the font got larger.
This matters tremendously given that I “Command/Control plus” between 8 and 10 times every time I go on a website. I sat back in my chair, as most people do when browsing the internet, no longer needing to rest on my desk to see my screen.
Methodology
One area in which we had a considerable head start was ensuring the website was approachable to people with cognitive differences. We have designed the website’s text to be as consensual as possible. Instead of presenting users with large and often unreadable paragraphs of text, we highlight the most important details and show only the questions in content structures such as the FAQ section. We then give users the option to expand a particular section.
Reducing such cognitive burdens facilitates engagement for first time web visitors, non-fluent English speakers, and neurodiverse users. Otherwise, we run the risk of overwhelming some with too much text and too many visuals.
In order to identify other shortcomings, we sought the aid of accessibility benchmarking solutions. We hoped that these would serve as both a guide to improvements and as a means to quantify our progress. The United Nations’ accessibility guidelines set the foundation for site-wide considerations, and Google’s Lighthouse tool provided ratings of each page’s accessibility score, calculated against our use of accepted page parameters and elements.
These tools identified alt tags as an area of needed improvement. Typically invisible, alt tags are read out loud by screen reader programmes in order to describe images to users with visual impairments. These descriptions also help non-human visitors to web pages, such as search engines, better understand the media elements. They can then return more accurate search results and people can more easily discover the web content. Additionally, images that fail to load due to interrupted Internet connections can display their alt descriptors, letting the user know the contents of the missing media. Accessibility wins truly are wins for all.
This ease made it all the more surprising when I tried to read the smaller content on the panels — and couldn’t. The text wouldn’t magnify. I remember pinching my fingers, using the “smart tap” feature on my mouse, and refreshing the page in an attempt to enlarge the panels, but they wouldn’t budge. Not seeing the light “next” button on the equally light background, I even tried scrolling through the panels. Because the website initially seemed so accessible, this was genuinely confusing. I resolved to shift my body weight back onto my desk, so that I could see the screen. Because of these barriers on the website, I became, once again, politically “disabled”.
Next steps
We have worked to bring the accessibility scores of each individual page above 90% and to improve the usability of the website. A few upcoming system-wide alterations will no doubt nudge the scorecards towards their peaks. Until then our focus lies in optimising the website’s cognitive demands on every type of user, by exploring both technical and non-technical ways to simplify complex concepts and use words strategically. We know that both diversity and inclusion are immensely important to successful innovation and how it is communicated. This shift towards accessibility-first processes is a first across UNHCR. Accessibility will thus be the goal of all innovation within the Innovation Service until it is the standard by which we operate.
All of this happened in the matter of seconds. These are the small inconveniences that I tend not to notice anymore. But knowing how responsive and invested my team is, I told them of these minor difficulties. They immediately brought Babusi into the conversation, who came up with a plan to address the issues. I had never expected the “maddeningly complex” UN bureaucracy to respond and implement so quickly solutions to seemingly minor problems. This was all the more surprising given that no other UNHCR website has implemented accessibility so extensively. Beyond accessibility being a right — being my right — I always forget that it can be helpful to others as well. Until it is the standard by which we operate, accessibility is true innovation.
