The value of inclusive design
As of 2020, web accessibility and disabilities are topics that rarely make it to management meetings. However, inclusive design carries great value for companies too and the industry should take action.
Have you ever thought about how your life would be without smartphones and the internet?
I’m not asking you to imagine a dystopian reality where those technologies never existed. Instead, think about your life today if you couldn’t use a smartphone and the internet, but everyone else could.
It’d be pretty limited, am I right?
Well, more people than you probably think are in that position today, in 2020.
Disabled users abandoning tech in droves
According to research from the Pew Research Center (2016), across all ages “disabled Americans are about three times as likely as those without a disability to say they never go online (23% vs. 8%)” and are less likely to have broadband and tech devices.
Also, a growing number of people choose to avoid the expense of a computer with broadband and prefer to rely solely on their smartphones to access the internet.
Within the field of universal design, web accessibility is an old topic with clear online guidelines provided by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and supported by many governments. However, according to the web agency PERILL, in 2018 less than 1% of websites were ADA compliant while according to the TIMES, none of the 2020 US presidential candidates’ websites are fully accessible to disabled voters.
Things like incorrect labelling of CTA buttons can affect visually impaired individuals. Same as poor contrast between text and background colours, or the choice to assign affordance to colours instead of using a combination of colour and shape. Fast transitions and plenty of movement in a UI can let down who struggle with anxiety and small interactive items can be difficult to be clicked if a user has low motor abilities.
These are just a few examples of what we are getting wrong, so it is no surprise that so many impaired people are giving up on accessing web services while it is surprising that companies are not proactive in fixing it since it is in their interest.
A11y-first like mobile-first
Remember when we started to hear the design motto “mobile-first”? When the industry understood that mobile phones were becoming the main gateway to access their online services, quickly emerged a worrying usability problem: the web wasn’t made for mobile screens.
Companies needed mobile-ready websites if they wanted to maintain high user retention and ROI. It was clear that interfaces thought for desktop screens were difficult or impossible to shrink into a mobile display without rethinking the entire layout and behaviour of a page.
Eventually, we flipped the design process and observed that starting it from mobile’s prohibitive screen real estate, all the options could be provided in a way that it takes then little effort to adapt the design to desktop screens too.
The industry had understood that responsive design was a necessity for user retention, or simply put, for their ROI, and that consistent user experience between mobile and desktop was the conduit for it.
More websites are now loaded on smartphones and tablets than on desktop computers, a milestone that underlines how computing is rapidly shifting to mobile devices and which threatens companies reliant on traditional PCs.
— Telegraph 2016
This new approach of mobile-first worked to solve a big usability problem and pushed innovation in such a way that now, as users, we can’t stand a website that doesn’t work well on mobile, do we?
If the same attention and approach were adopted to address the web accessibility problem, we could finally start to design a11y-first to reach inclusive design, as the mobile-first approach does with responsive design.
However, the numbers about tech abandonment mentioned above represent a smaller loss in user retention, or even user acquisition, for many companies, and that’s the usual excuse brought up to avoid the extra work: low ROI.
Why should companies care?
The main reason is: money
The common misconception leads to thinking that motor disabilities translate merely to walking disabilities, that mentally impaired people are just crazy or hypochondriacs and that, all in all, web accessibility addresses blind people only. So why even bother?
As said, companies don’t feel like investing much in improving the accessibility of their products because their managers can’t see the ROI in it. I think that they are just myope and conservative.
The number of disabled people in the world is around one billion.
Yes, 15% of the world population has some form of disability (data The World Bank). And the figures are not drastically increased by the poorest countries. Taking the US as an example, in 2015, 40 million Americans were disabled, that is about 12.6% of the US civilian non-institutionalized population.
That’s enough people to represent a good share of any company’s user base.
Another reason is: image
Image sells, and if customers have a positive experience with a product, they will improve the Net Promoter Score (NPS) of that business. So, why not include more people? The more, the merrier.
The last reason: it’s the law
Following the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, many countries around the world, and the EU as a whole, do support and adopt the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in their legislation. Therefore, poor accessibility can result in expensive lawsuits (1) (2).
Why should we all care?
It could be me, it could be you
As said, the shared idea of disability brings to our minds only some severe physical conditions and, like for mental disabilities, is affected by social biases that split mental conditions into the realms of craziness or hypochondriac nuances.
What’s important to highlight is that most of us do live with conditions of mild disabilities. One of the most common is probably to have a degraded eye-sight, as I have, and maybe you do too.
I need my glasses all day long, so I’m glad that browsers give me the option to rest my eyes a bit whenever I find some minuscule text online. Just increasing the text size or zooming into the webpage and, woilá! Although, not all the websites’ UI survive some Ctrl+.
The range of users encountering difficulties when interfacing with technology goes beyond what most of us think and The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) clearly explains how everybody does benefit from proper accessibility in this video:
So, even if you don’t have any impairment today, maybe you will, or someone of your family does. Would you be happy thinking that they can’t live their lives at best?
The benefit to society
A stigma that disabled people carry is to be less useful or useless to society when it is a fact that part of world history has been made by the incredible contributions of impaired people, often through assistive technology.
Helen Keller was deafblind but became author, political activist, and lecturer.
Franklin D. Roosevelt went through polio and became a wheelchair user to help with his resulting paraplegia.
Stephen Hawking, probably the best case for this article, has been one of the most well-known physicists in the world. He was diagnosed with a rare form of ALS when he was 21, a condition that left him completely paralysed. But through a special wheelchair and computer, he’s published several books, taught lessons of physics, and became one of the main contributors to the field of general relativity.
(Here and here some more people that had brilliant careers despite their disabilities.)
Conclusions
With the mobile-first approach, we understood that designing for the stricter requirements wasn’t a loss but rather a gain in experience quality and ROI. Companies nowadays should follow the same path and embrace the more demanding necessities of impaired people. Rethinking their design process to be a11y-first would finally lead to deliver properly inclusive products.
The industry (and so, we) have no valid excuse to push aside the extra work to make the digital world inclusive for all. Indeed, we can only get an improvement from that.
What business wants to lose millions of users because of accessibility?
And what society wants to miss the next Stephen Hawking or Helen Keller?
Suggested articles:
- Stop Talking About Accessibility. Start Talking About Inclusive Design.
- Why Accessibility Should Be a Top Priority for Every Business Website
- Wikipedia: Accessibility
Suggested movies:
