case study
Accessibility to the Face
“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.” -Jack Handey
PATTERN RECOGNITION
Have you ever considered buying a new car and then started seeing that car everywhere you go? Or perhaps you learned a new word and it seems you started hearing it more than you ever did before?
Cognitive psychologists call this “apophenia.” It describes the way our brain makes connections in random data. It also explains how when we’re presented with any new concept, that concept becomes part of our mental pattern recognition system and begins showing up in our conscious mind.
I’ll get back to apophenia in a minute.
Now, let’s talk about accessibility from an academic perspective. Wikipedia defines the word thusly:
Accessibility is a general term used to describe the degree to which a product (e.g., device, service, environment) is accessible by as many people as possible.
If you work in IT, you may have first heard the concept from a marketing department in your company. In the mid 90’s, the concept was championed largely by corporations, who in their desire for lucrative government contracts, would attempt to adhere to “Section 508 Compliance.” A whole slew of consultants and articles came out of the woodwork, promoting the idea and informing the web development and design community all about this latest buzzword.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into Section 508 or the Rehabilitation Act or any of the rest of that stuff. It’s all about politics and has nothing to do with what I’m going to talk about.
Also, I don’t care about any of it.
A DAY IN THE LIFE
The issues of accessibility are a daily reality for my family. For us, it’s not a political issue at all. Our oldest daughter, Ramona, has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair to get around.
Allow me to give you a glimpse of what this aspect of our life is like.
Last year, my wife and I took the kids to the Hogle Zoo here in Salt Lake. Before we left, my wife called the information desk to find out if the zoo train was an option for Ramona. Ramona loves to ride on trains.
Anna: “Is the train accessible to wheelchairs?”
The Girl: “Yes.”
Anna: “So how does that work? How do I actually get the wheelchair on the train?”
The Girl: “Well, you take the chair to the edge and then you would lift her out and into the train.”
Anna: “So it’s not wheelchair accessible.”
The Girl: “No, I guess not.”
The girl on the phone had never thought of a real situation. She just had a cursory knowledge of the concept. For her, accessibility was a policy.
A few months ago, Anna called ahead to an Italian restaurant we wanted to visit to find out if we could get inside easily with the wheelchair.
Anna: “Is your restaurant accessible?”
Host: “Yes.”
Anna: “So we won’t have any problem getting a wheelchair inside?”
Host: “Nope.”
So we arrived to the restaurant. I walked up a flight of steps and let the host know we had a wheelchair. He had us meet him at the back entrance where we walked through the kitchen and ran into a very tall step.
Host: “Oh, I guess there IS that one step. Sorry about that.”
Now, I’m a pretty big guy and after 11 years of lifting Ramona and her chair into all kinds of places, one step was not going to keep me from enjoying the evening. I eat steps like that for breakfast. That said, Ramona and her current (non-electric) wheelchair weigh about 170lbs. We’ve looked at electric (power) wheelchairs for her and the low-end from a weight perspective is about 150lbs. If she had a power chair, we would not have been eating baked ziti that night.
There are also a slew of places that are genuinely easy to get the wheelchair into but then the employees place obstacles like sales displays and other things right in the middle of the walkway. Some are worse than others and my wife has a phrase she uses a lot:
“Don’t even think about going antiquing if you’re in a wheelchair.” -Anna
SPECIES DIFFERENTIATION
I don’t tell these stories because I want sympathy. I don’t share them because I think it makes me a better, smarter, more compassionate person than you. These things are a fact of life for me and my family. And here’s the rub–examples like these and so many others are part of the life of anyone with a disability. In fact, this stuff happens so often that I forget about individual instances unless they’re really funny like the one at the zoo.
It’s not a sob story, but sometimes it really sucks. There are things that my daughter will never be able to do because it’s practically impossible for us to do them. There are rides at the local amusement park she will never be able to ride even though I know she would love them dearly.
Here’s my point–if your brother or sister had a disability, you would give a crap. But you don’t have to have a sibling in a wheelchair to genuinely care, even if it’s only in your work.
Empathy is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. We have an ability to imagine things the way that others see them and how it makes them feel. We don’t even have to have a disability ourselves.
And from my perspective, accessibility is about giving a crap.
Accessibility is NOT a checklist.
Accessibility is about usability.
Accessibility is a paradigm shift.
Accessibility is a personal issue.
WHY IT MATTERS
The odds you’ll ever hear a direct complaint from someone with a disability regarding your work is low. So unless your boss has asked you to care (because your company is going after a government contract) or you have become interested for other professional reasons, you’ll likely never need to care.
You see, the people in the stories I shared are likely very nice, understanding and caring people. They didn’t INTEND to be ignorant about the issues of accessibility, because for them, the reality of the concept didn’t actually exist. It was just a word, a policy, an item on a checklist. And I know this because before I had a child with a disability, I was ignorant too. The whole world of disabilities had not opened to me. And here’s the funny thing–much of it is still closed to me.
Ramona’s disability is just one in a sea of disabilities and every one is different. A few days ago I sat down with a senior gentleman to walk through an application I had designed. As I watched him use the computer, I was starkly reminded of just how hard it is for some senior folks to use the mouse. He doesn’t have the same fine motor control he did when he was 20. Fortunately, I had once taught a course on basic internet skills to a group of seniors and knew how hard some of the things we take for granted can be for them. Because of my understanding, I had made the buttons on the screen fairly large. Because of that knowledge, the application was a success.
This gentleman didn’t have what we typically think of as a disability. Usually, we think about wheelchairs, blindness, missing limbs, etc. But live long enough and disabilities will affect you in one way or another too.
So how then, do we get to where we understand accessibility? How can we internalize it and have a real paradigm shift about what it really means?
My hope with this article is to make accessibility issues surrounding disabilities become real for the reader. The ideal response for me would be for people to think a little harder about the people using your product or experience and what it might be like for those who may not have all their faculties.
MENTAL FLOSS
Ok, so back to apophenia.
I’m going to propose an experiment.
For the next hour or so, I’d like you to imagine you don’t have any hands. All you have are elbows and forearms. How would you scroll down on this article? How would you close the window or switch applications? When you leave your desk and get to a door, what would you do? When you need to eat your lunch, how would you do it? If you get an itch, how would you scratch it? Would you scratch it?
Do a similar exercise next time you think about the experience or product you design.
It seems silly, but putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is liberating. Understanding people and their concerns, needs and wants is a core part of what we do as designers but also helps us to be better people.
And we all want to be better people, right?
49 comments
Great wake-up call. Thanks Rob.
comment by Ted Boren 27 minutes later
Wow! Just wow! Thank you for this wonderful insight into disability and accessibility. I hope MANY people read this and catch the passion for accessibility that we share.
comment by Jared Smith about an hour later
Mission accomplished Rob. Great article. I am one you might consider putting in the accessibility as a checklist person. I put the alt attribute in in images, etc. But do I really ‘walk in their shoes’ as you say. I am going to start trying more now.
On the other hand, I work for an organization that is about the bottom line. I have actually heard said, ‘Let’s give them a $20,000 bonus and switch them to a new job so we don’t have to make our web app really accessible for…’ let’s say the blind or visually impaired.
So I will do my best in the world I live in.
comment by Nathan Philpot about an hour later
Bravo Rob, thank you for saying this! Too many people think accessibility is a checklist, a yes/no, an absolute. Its not! Its about people! And understanding.
I’m floored by Nathan’s organization’s attitude. Companies actually do that – move the blind guy so we don’t need to make our site accessible? And give him a bonus to keep him happy [and, no doubt, quiet]? Unbelievable!
Anna, I don’t go antiquing either for that very reason. Navigating stores during the Christmas season is difficult enough.
comment by Glenda Watson Hyatt 1 hour later
Amazing. I’m just glad that I found this article. I have no idea on how to respond to this article. Thanks for sharing indeed.
comment by Rafie 1 hour later
I just gave a workshop (@ CSUN) about the power of storytelling and accessibility. Your story is an excellent example of how using storytelling as a usability methodology can empathically convey user needs of individuals with disabilities to designers, developers and others. Thank you!
comment by Mike Paciello 2 hours later
Excellent post! I can relate in so many ways. My 7 year old son uses a wheelchair for mobility and I dread heading to the mall with him in tow. His favorite toy store is virtually impossible to manuever once you are past the entrance. Very frustrating for him…and a loss for the store. He would buy out the entire Thomas the Train stock that they carry…but alas…we can’t get inside.
Thank you so much.
PS. We dealt with the computer mouse issue with a touch screen monitor. You should see him surf the internet. Amazing kid!
comment by Lori-ann 2 hours later
Beautifully said. I’ll be referring people to this. I’ve been trying to explain accessibility to clients and coworkers for a long time, but haven’t been getting to them like this will. Thank you.
comment by Douglas T 2 hours later
Shout it from the roof-tops! Shout it far and wide.
As someone who is passionate about web accessibility (to a fault), I am none-the-less awed and inspired by your words. This is a MUST READ article for everyone – period.
Thank you for sharing this, and may it have the same impact on others that it did on me.
comment by John Foliot 2 hours later
I actually had the whole issue of disabilities hit a little close to home recently. Because I’d always known I was different, and couldn’t enjoy the same things that other people could, but it was only recently that I found out that it was because I was autistic.
Now I find myself wanting to stand up for other autistic people, and make sure that their needs are taken into account when planning activities and get-togethers.
Now I just need to remember to take other disabled people into account when designing my website …
comment by Jared Spurbeck 4 hours later
Excellent thought-provoking article, but I have one correction/nitpick. There is no hard and fast separator of humans from other animals, including empathy. No matter what definition people come up with to “separate” humans from animals, researchers always seem to come up with contradictory examples. For empathy in animals, see the work of Frans de Waal, for example.
comment by Thomas Ferraro 5 hours later
This article provides great insight. Those of us who value the internet and what it offers need to remember it is not open to all. You’re right – we need to empathise.
Thanks
comment by Kevin O'Neill 5 hours later
Please keep the comments on topic. I appreciate the feedback so far and I’ll be responding to a few of you later.
comment by Rob Foster 5 hours later
I do not mean to add to the “checklist” but native language adaptation (they call it “localization”) is a big part of accessibility. I am just reading a book about a Scheme dialect, written in Japanese, where the author mentions in a note that even though the language supports Unicode symbols, it is a bad idea to use Japanese words because it “keeps people who do not understand Japanese to contribute to the coding”... Similarly, translation of English technical books very often come with the original code and strings (in English) without any consideration for the reader’s language. Native language use/adaptation in the technical world is still in its infancy and sadly bound by the idea that the user must adapt itself to the circumstances of an ideal creator (ie to English use) to have access to the creation.
comment by Jean-Christophe Helary 6 hours later
Your article really floored me. You’re completely right, accessibility IS about the people, not just another bullet point when you’re trying to sell your application. Typically however, if an organization is not pushing for a contract, accessibility usually gets pushed down in the priority ladder, to make way for flashy features. It’s sad, and from now on I’ll try to put myself in the shoes of a disabled person more often. It will surely make the final product better. Flashy features or not.
comment by Bruno Abrantes 7 hours later
It was a very interesting read this article. Is excellent. My brother and I work in web and multimedia area and our focus is accessibility.
comment by Ruben Rojas 8 hours later
It’s always interesting to learn the pattern recognition. Especially dealing with human faces.
comment by rates 13 hours later
Great article, I did your experiment, for about 5 minutes I admit. I actually found I could navigate this page on my mac book pro with my elbows. It was slow but just workable. For 5 minutes. Kind of put things in perspective really.
comment by AndrewNim 14 hours later
Thanks for the great article, one to bookmark & come back to for sure.
A while back I was thinking that it would be cool to try and make an educational video (about accessibility) featuring a baguette figure & how you might go about making a web page accessible for them. (baguette inspired by Ze Franks’ earth sandwich project:)
One of the issues I notice around web accessibility currently is that people get very hung up on guidelines (which are more complex than they used to be), and how to fix things using code… where really you need to be thinking about the information & understanding that needs to be communicated. We’ll get there I’m sure!
comment by becs027 15 hours later
That was an insightful article Rob. You just taught us to think about accessibility, instead of reading a few books on accessibility, which mostly are filled with guidelines.
Thanks to Victor Tsaran, through whom I got to know about this article.
comment by Rajagopal one day later
This is quite simply the best article on accessibility I’ve read. Rather than approaching accessibility from the default standpoint of techniques, it focuses on the real human issues and made me rethink my ideas about the subject. Thanks for sharing this and giving us all your unique perspective on the issue.
comment by Mike Rickard one day later
Excellent article-beautifully clarifies what I was trying to articulate about real world accessibility versus checklists and standards bodies.Thanks!
comment by Ville one day later
After an accident I spent a few months in a wheelchair. Actually I had to live in my parents living room for a couple of months before I could even move back to my apartment, there were too many stairs. It changed my views on design and accessibility. I tried helping a few visually impaired people with computers but Windows has some very annoying limits. What many managers forget is that making it easier for the impaired also makes it easier for everyone else too. That saves loads of money over time. That $20k bonus probably cost them $1M in lost productivity and they didn’t even notice.
comment by Stephan F-- one day later
Hi what a fantastic article, I am blind myself and have rarely seen anything this powerful that I can send to people I am trying to educate as the accessibility manager for the organisation I work for. Keep up the good work.
comment by Hamish Mackenzie one day later
Great article – my only disagreement is the idea that ‘accessibility is about giving a crap’. To me, web development is about giving a crap, and that includes accessibility. If you’re doing web development just for the money, then you don’t really care about it, and suggesting you should care about accessibility in that case won’t work.
comment by mwiik one day later
@mwiik, I design websites for money. I like money. And I appreciate Rob’s reminder that you can make even more money by making your shiz more accessible. That’s what we tend to forget. Ignoring whole segments of people due to laziness or ignorance is costing us money, eyes, ears, and valuable users, readers, customers, people.
Rob, I’d like to see another post from you on the top accessibility blunders you’ve seen. These stories you told here help me think of ways I’m making life suck for people, and I’d like to see more.
comment by Jason Lynes one day later
Rob, Regarding “Why It matters” and elder access, one roadblock for elder access I have found is the insistence on using the traditional mouse.
Most post-60-ers who are new to mouse highlight/select/open problems have difficulty with an inadvertent drag of a screen object when they mean to double-click.
If you’ve got a home user, consider the installation of a trackball to substitute for the traditional mouse. A trackball (or trackpad) permits the user to separate the selecting activity from double-clicking. Thanks for the insightful article.
comment by john walsh about a day later
I sincerely appreciate this article, it’s very well written and thought-provoking.
I have one thing to add: that while all you mentioned is true (all that Accessibility is about….paradigm shifting is a great term), Accessibility is about Dollar Signs. $$$
1 in 4 Americans know someone with a disability, and 55 million Americans have one. But this doesn’t include the baby boomers, who will soon make up 25% of our population and will be aging to boot. This niche has a discretionary (spending) income of $220 BILLION annually. You ignore that, and you’re simply ignoring blatant income. You exclude them, and you’re excluding their money. Think about it.
@andyjehn
comment by Andrea Jehn Kennedy about a day later
Great article with some real world situations. It seems that most people I talk at events or my talks seem to think only blind people are why we have to do accessibility. I have been slowing gathering examples to help when explaining ways to make there designs and websites accessible.
Sent this article out on twitter to have people read and also to our web team to getting them thinking of these kind of items.
Thanks, again for such a great example of putting names and faces to the issues we are trying to help.
comment by John F Croston III about a day later
Great article. It put a few things in perspective for me, and had me thinking differently about some design decisions.
comment by Jeremy Lindblom about a day later
I always appreciate hearing others out there writing about this issue. I am in my twenties and suddenly became blind about two and a half years ago. Suddenly not being able to do many of my favorite things because of lack of accessibility made/makes me very angry. I cannot shop on, or visit the same websites I went to for years because of the sites’ inaccessibility.
comment by Gretchen Maune about a day later
Nicely put. Sad to say that in 10+ years of making websites for clients – small and medium sized businesses – I have rarely had the fortune to work with one who showed much interest in accessibility. Most small businesses seem to think “I don’t have any disabled customers, so it’s not a problem.” They only see the issue as a question of numbers – without any thought as to why the numbers are what they are. Thanks for sharing – for offering a human view into the issue.
comment by Bill Yehle 2 days later
People for whom accessibility is “just a word, a policy, and item on a checklist” as you say—just might be that way because they see definitions of accessibility that don’t contain the word “disability.” Like yours: it is “the degree to which a product (e.g., device, service, environment) is accessible by as many people as possible.” Nowhere in that sentence does the word “disability” occur. Is it any wonder that people see such definitions and don’t connect them with disability at all? Change your definitions! It’s “the degree to which a product…is accessible by people with disabilities.” Then, and only then, will people know what you’re talking about!
comment by Douglas Maurer 2 days later
Well-written. Succinct. Thought-provoking. Thanks, Rob, for the reminder about empathy and altruism.
comment by Mike Saraceno 2 days later
The problem I run into all too often is that it’s so very hard to convince clients – the people who pay me for my work – that accessibility matters. It’s not always a problem; the simpler the website, the simpler it is to design and develop it as accessible right from the start. But when a project gets larger and more complex, it gets harder and harder to convince people that those fifty extra hours of work will give them anything in return, since only a very small percentage of their userbase will even appreciate it.
The problem is that accessibility does not produce revenue for most companies; it’s an expense with little to no return other than some “feel good” publicity, if any at all. And my job consists of so many different tasks that preaching accessibility is hard when I can’t really back it up with any data that indicates that it can give a client more than just a tip of the hat from the people it would benefit.
This is sadly one of the problems with business; money talks. And every decision is based on cost and profit. If there is no profit in accessibility, it won’t even be considered. I’m not saying it is futile, I’m just saying putting this responsibility solely on developers and designers isn’t right. I believe every good designer and developer wants to make her / his work as accessible and enjoyable to as many people as possible, but eventually gets restrained by the restrictions of money.
comment by Tor D 2 days later
Not a developer or designer, but as a disability advocate, the flat-out pragmatic issues of the day-to-day are where lives are lived, not in checklists. Bravo Rob! Nice no-dexterity sim. For a psudo-cataract sim, try a film of vasoline on lightly tinted eyeglasses. For a low-contrast vision sim, wear dark sunglasses indoors. While doing each of these, read something with larger, strong print. Also, watch your favorite u-tube thing and use someone elses’s site navigation. Aging “boomers” and “the greatest generation”.
comment by James 3 days later
Wonderful thought Bob. I can’t imagine myself without even my little finger. Accessibility has changed its meaning for me.
comment by Siddharth 9 days later
Great article. As one who has written an accessibility checklist, I have to say that I can’t agree more with the statement, “Accessibility is NOT a checklist.” That’s not to say that we shouldn’t use check lists, but simply that’s not where our accessibility efforts should begin or end. Checking items off a list should not be our goal. Making our site work for as many people as possible should be our goal.
If you want good accessibility, you can’t just add alt atributes because someone told you you should, or label form fields because it’s on your list. You have to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, and to understand that, you have to understand the people who need accessibility.
comment by Aaron Cannon 12 days later
I teach Web accessibility in a french university, and even if I am aware of possible issues, I still encounter bad surprises…
I once had to welcome a student in a wheelchair. It took about two weeks to make the technical services of my university to lower the latch of the toilets (which were supposed to be designed for people with disabilities): it was about 50cm too high to be reached while in a wheelchair. Our tables were too low, too, so that he had to increase the character sizes on the screen. As we had booked a restaurant, we were told it was accessible for wheelchairs…. and of course, there was one big step at the entrance, and it was impossible to navigate in the restaurant, as the tables were separated by about 1m.
A colleague of mine is blind. One day, as she was sitting alone in her classroom, a person entered the room, noticed she was blind… and stole her video projector (OK, this is not an accessibility issue…)
I always ask people in front of which I have to talk, if somebody is daltonian… One day, I had to use a yellow chalk on a green board, and, of course, Murphy’s law applied: someone could not see at all what I was writing. It took about 15min to go and look for someone who could give me a white chalk…
If you begin to pay attention to what surrounds you, you will surely notice things which are claimed to be accessible, but are not (as that entrance of a building: there was an entrance ramp, but when it was renovated, somebody had had the brilliant idea to add one step)
There are so many disabilities that chances are very high that you one day encounter one you would never have thought about before… and for which your so well-thought design is a catastroph. You cannot ensure everything is accessible to everybody. At least, make sure you can make it accessible to everyone you can think about… and to accomplish this, checklists are no longer sufficient, as they are pure mechanics. Each time you have to take a decision, consider not only the checklists, but also the reasons why they have been imagined, and what kind of people may be affected by your decision: this is a very useful clue when you have to make choices…
comment by Gilles Chagnon 21 days later
great article,
As somebody who has no ability to use a mouse or keyboard because a repetitive stress injury keeps me from using my hands, I can sympathize with your frustration.
The introduction of RIA applications on the Web have caused entirely new realms of capability to be completely inaccessible to people who need to rely on hands-free computer access.
As the computer generation ages, and keyboard related injuries become a fact of life, maybe industry will finally start to seriously looked at alternate, and accessible interfaces to computers.
comment by Jeff Anderson 21 days later
Good read, I’ll be passing this on
comment by Tim Wright 21 days later
Great article. This has really opened my eyes. I can’t wait to share with my team.
comment by Ronn Ross 25 days later
Thanks for the insight. Really bangs home the message of accessibility.
comment by Media Surgery 47 days later
Nice! I’m always trying to find different ways to explain what accessibility is to people that just don’t get it. Love this post!
comment by Darren 49 days later
Simply … thank you x
comment by Karen Longstaff 87 days later
After reading the entire article, I sat like 5 minutes to find a word that would describe it. And I did. Inspirational!
Thank you for sharing your personal, sad experience – people will understand more from this than from an accessibility checklist for sure. I know I have!
Nick
comment by Nicusor Cheles 100 days later
Don’t forget about colorblindness either..
comment by cc 148 days later
I’m a web developer & very passionate about web accessibility. While doing research today I encountered this posting and am very glad to have discovered it.
Too often web accessibility issues are treated as a checklist items which is ignorant & wrong. Sharing your personal experiences & the writing of this article does the accessibility community a great service. This writing goes a long way in creating empathy for those that are either unaffected or have had very little exposure to the accessibility world.
Rob this is absolute must read for everyone. Thank you for sharing.
-PD
comment by Patrick Dunphy 253 days later
Great article. This has really opened my eyes. I can’t wait to share with
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