“Digital Accessibility” is another word for “empathy”
Positive influence of improved product accessibility was proven 15 years ago, but came to the spotlight in the last few years by Apple’s and Microsoft’s effort to focus on it in recent two years.
The global market of people with disabilities is over 1 billion people with a spending power of more than $6 trillion. Accessibility often improves the online experience for all users
— Disability as diversity in Fortune 100 companies
Even though more and more professionals and big players within a field started to talk about it, I witnessed myself and heard murmurs within the IT community that the cause is great, but there has to be time and resources to implement all the changes. Software solutions are universally perceived as tools that help the majority to execute tasks and with growing demands for better and improved tools (i.e. programs) there is indeed little to no time to keep up with competitors and implement accessibility at the same time.
Then 2020 happened and put a lot of things into perspective. The world was shaken by pandemic, political and cultural movements altered our perception of the everyday. We couldn’t pretend things were normal anymore. We also found ourselves in a place where empathy was more needed than ever. We became more exposed to how biases of different kinds influence our perception of the world. We have to open our eyes and listen to the people who have different needs from us and try to make things right.
We can’t solve all problems out there, but maybe now is the best time to give our best selves and be empathetic towards the people using our products?
While operating in big quantities of website visits or app downloads it is easy to emotionally distance the designer or developer from the person on another end interacting with a product. Maybe you are trying to keep being connected to the “user” by utilizing personas representing users. Personas are great tools, but if you are not focusing primarily on people with disabilities, how many of them will have accessibility limitations included?
Current social isolation is affecting people in ways that are yet to be explored and explained by scientists. We know for sure social isolation has an effect on both mental and physical health.
We know also that a lot of disabled people are stuck at home in self-quarantine which makes their dependency on software and web solutions out there bigger than ever (shopping, working, socialising, doctor visits).
One could argue that is a work for Microsoft, Google and Apple joined efforts to provide this demographic with accessibility to use different websites, software, or apps. One can opt-out for implementing accessibility overlays that not only can’t be one solution for many problems, but automatic accessibility tools are flawed. We do need to contribute our time, resources and empathy to solve this problem together.
A now-famous surrogate mother experiment conducted by Harry Harlow, shows that even in situations of absolute need, something exhibiting more “empathy” will always win.
In this study, Harlow took infant monkeys from their biological mothers and gave them two inanimate surrogate mothers: one was a simple construction of wire and wood, and the second was covered in foam rubber and soft terry cloth. While conducting different types of experiments Harlow found that the infant monkeys spent significantly more time with the terry cloth mother and expressed less stress than they did with the wire mother. When only the wire mother had food, the babies came to the wire mother to feed and immediately returned to cling to the cloth surrogate. Harlow’s work showed that infants also turned to inanimate surrogate mothers for comfort when they were faced with new and scary situations.
This year has shown us many examples of how bad things can play out if we ignore them for a long time. We, as designers and developers, of course could build solutions that would do the absolute needed minimum (“wire mothers”). But in this time of transformation and new sense of social responsibility, maybe we could try and at least learn how to add some rubber and terry cloth to our solutions. If monetary return of investment on the product might not interest us, then maybe pure human empathy could help us start the needed change that could lead to a world that is less scary.
If you want to make your first steps into learning more about Digital Accessibility I suggest to start with The Business Case for Digital Accessibility on Web Accessibility Website
This article was motivated by keynote presentation by Haraldur Thorleifsson Thank you for sharing your story and inspiring many people at Config Europe 2020!
