Slides available at: Accessibility and inclusive design - DECO2800 Guest Lecture (shared) - Google Slides
I'm an half Chinese half Australian person with short black hair and glasses, and I'm presenting this talk from my bedroom today, which is why I've turned on the blurred background filter. I live in Meanjin, or Brisbane Australia, land belonging to the Turrbal and Jagera peoples, to whom I pay my respects to today. I'm wearing a YOW! T-shirt which is some free swag I got from one of the most popular Australian software conferences. I am a cis-het woman and I and non-disabled.
I am describing myself, and will be describing any visual content in my talk, because as an accessibility specialist, it's a habit I am building, so that all of my public content will be accessible to folks who can only listen to the audio of this video. I've asked Richard if anyone in this class needed closed captions to be able to participate in this talk today, as that is a bit harder to organise and does cost a pretty penny, but I will be captioning and transcribing this lecture as soon as I can after we're finished up and it should be available tomorrow.
How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow morning, and found that you couldn't access 70% of the websites that you use every day?
How did you feel this morning, when you couldn't get on WhatsApp, Facebook, or Instagram?
This is what using the web, and phone apps, feels like everyday for a blind person. Research has found that 70% of the web is what we call "inaccessible" for blind and low-vision people. In Australia, between 0.4% and 1% of people have reported blindness in one or both eyes, that is around 130,000 Australians. UQ only has 55,300 students as a comparison. Blind people are a part of a larger group fo Australians, over 13 million, who have one or more chronic eye-related conditions, from mypopia (short-sightedness like myself) to astigmatism, to colour blindness, to cataracts and macular degeneration. 93% of people aged 65 and over are affected by long-term vision disorders.
Apart from vision, we also need to consider speech, hearing, physical, and cognitive disabilities. Deaf people who can't hear videos or Netflix, people with Parkinsons and Cerebral Palsy who can't use a mouse or keyboard, how people with Autism and Asperges experience the web and technology, you might be surprised to learn that these people all use the web and technology everyday, it's as much a part of their lives as it is for non-disabled folks.
Probably event more surprising, it wasn't until 30 years ago that the ADA or Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in the United States in 1990 - making discrimination against people with disabilities ILLEGAL. And it was 1992 that the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) was passed in Australia.
There is a great documentary on Netflix called "Crip Camp" which is about how the ADA came to be, through hunger strikes and marching, and people in wheelchairs or with mobility aids, casting their aids aside, and dragging themselves up the 83 stone steps to the U.S. Capitol building.
Crip Camp recently won several Oscars, and the disable cast and crew that walked or wheeled down teh red carpet, was an eye opening moment for a lot of non-disabled people, and another important moment in history for disability rights.
Since then, many lawsuits have been raised against companies for having inaccessible digital products or services. The most famous one recently is the one between a blind man and Domino's USA - where Domino's tried to argue the case, suggesting there is no need for the Domino's website/app to be accessible, when you can call up a physical store. Domino's did not win that case.
Closer to home, Coles online has been sued for their inaccessible online shopping experience, where a blind woman using a screen reader had tried to tell them that their once-accessible web app was broken. These kinds of lawsuits are increasing every year.
In fact, around 11,000 lawsuits were filed in 2020 against companies including online retail, banks, universities and many more sectors.
Technology talks a lot about "diversity" and bringing women into the industry. Yes, gender diversity is still big problem today, but it is one part of a larger "inclusion" problem. Women's issues are also compounded by race issues, gender identity, disability. Many companies are jumping on the bandwagon of gender diversity, hoping it would solve everything. Here's video to show you what I mean.
[ Diversish, meet the winners video - video description: this is a series of short snippets of a dark-skinned male interviewing leaders in various companies about their diversity efforts and whether they include disability as a part of that. This is a satire humour video and the interviews are staged. ]
As an organiser of Women Who Code meetup, and now Tech Leading Ladies, I've learnt that communities and organisations just working towards getting the gender balance right are not succeeding, and might actually be making the problem worse. To be inclusive, one must consider ALL people. Otherwise, how can you say you're "inclusive" if you're posting job-ads that are "women friendly" but on a website that is inaccessible to blind women, your promotion videos don't have captions and so exclude deaf women, or if the office is inaccessible to women who use a wheelchair?
The short answer is, we need to hire more disabled people - disabled people are statistically also of a minority ethnicity and gender - we call the study of this cross-over "intersectionality". Systemic and unconscious ableism means the unemployment rate of people with disabilities is much higher than non-disabled. Work places are not accessible, many offices are not even wheel-chair accessible. Most desktop software is inaccessible, even though we have the knowledge and skills to make them accessible.
So, lack of participation in the workforce, and lack of diversity in technology, in general, has meant we build software for people like us, and the people around us. A lot of us aren't aware that there's a whole world of disabled people out there living their lives, but with a lot more barriers, put there by non-disabled people - not on purpose, that's why raising awareness is so important, and why I do talks like this.
(The pandemic has brought a lot of changes to our lives, mostly horrible sad things, but some good. Remote work and learning is now becoming the norm, and people with disabilities have more opportunities to participate where it's not been possible before. But, systemic discrimination in medicine has also made life incredibly dangerous for people with disabilities, in particular immunocompromised people. )
A lot of people ask me, "we don't have any blind customers, why should be make our stuff accessible?" and "isn't it okay if we just account for MOST our users?". Firstly, blind people make up a very small percentage of all disabilities that we need to account for. And disability is a spectrum, no two people with the "same" disability will use technology in the same way, you will see this in a video later on. Inclusive design is designing for all spectrums of life and people, and makes designs accessible, and better for everyone - not just people with disabilities.
Microsoft have an "inclusive design" toolkit, which changed 3 fundamental things in my way of thinking.
- The "social model" of disability - defined by the world health organisation in 2001 - disability is the mismatch between a person and their environment. The lack of accommodation in the environment disables someone from going about their day. If the app accommodates the person's needs, they are no longer disabled by it, they can participate in society, just like everyone else.
- Disability is usually thought of as permanent, but can be temporary, for example an injury, or even situational, you can't hear well in a noisy environment.
- Inclusive design makes products or services a better experience for EVERYONE. For example, a wheelchair ramp is essential for wheelchair users to enter a building, but it also allows people with prams, or shopping trolleys, or cyclists or people with arthritis to travel comfortably. The same thing carries over into digital world. Captions are essential for deaf people, but they also make movies and TV accessible to people who don't speak the same language as the movie, or if you're playing a video in a loud environment, or if you forgot your headphones on the train.
On the other hand, any app or website that is hard to use, most definitely not accessible.
You may or may not have heard of the term "assistive technology". The broad definition of the term is that it's a tool that helps a disabled person achieve an action or goal, that they otherwise wouldn't be able to in the absence of the assistive technology. The first assistive technology most people think of is the wheelchair - wheelchair users can move around the world, without it they would not be able to.
I want to play a few videos that showcase many assistive technologies that disabled folks use to participate in the tech world.
[ How I use technology as a blind person! - Molly Burke 2:32 ]
[ Disability Technology | Jeff Paradee | TEDxLSSC 1:17 ]
[ Apple – Accessibility – Sady 1:41 ]
Public sector, such as government, agencies are legally required to make sure their websites are accessible, but even then, almost all of the COVID checkin apps were inaccessible to start with! You might remember some of them had a really bad user experience! They didn't fill in your details, or they just didn't work properly. They couldn't be used with screen readers, until the official QLD checkin app was built. But most private sector technology companies have no idea
In the survey I sent out, some of you had heard of accessibility overlays, but some have not. An accessibility overlay can be added by including a javascript snippet on your website. You can add to any webpage, and it claims to make your webpage "WCAG compliant and completely accessible, and won't get you sued" - unfortunately, this is completely wrong and as many as 200 lawsuits have been raised against one of the more popular widgets called "AccessiBe".
You cannot solve disability with a couple of lines of code. There is no technological silver bullet to solve any social problem, though technology will play a big part in the solution. In fact, disability has been the driver behind many inventions that form a part of our daily lives. The typewriter was invented by a sighted person who wanted to receive letters written by his blind lover, which later on evolved into the computer keyboard. The touchscreen on all our devices today was invented by an engineer with chronic RSI and could no longer use a keyboard. Other inventions include: email, telephone, curb cuts, audiobooks, flexible straws, and many more.
So, what is the solution for building more inclusive software? Here is my step-by-step guide:
- Increase your awareness of how people different from you live their lives. Not just by watching social justice documentaries like Crip Camp on Netflix, though that is absolutely a great place to start. But also seek out disabled people on Youtube, TikTok and all the other social medias. Don't be embarrassed to google "how to blind people x" and "how do people with x disability do y" - but don't ask disabled people to educate you, there's plenty of resources out there and easy to find, do your homework first.
- Reflect on your own privilege, and also your own barriers. Warning, this is a very uncomfortable exercise - even for me. Software that I have built in the past, has excluded, and probably continues to exclude people with disabilities from participating in society. They say ignorance is bliss, because now you cannot unseen that you have unknowingly excluded people in the past - but also this knowledge is so powerful, because I really think if we can have a society that is inclusive of disabilities, it will be a society inclusive of all people.
- Do a course on web accessibility (I will provide a link to a great one by Google on Udacity). Inclusive design and accessibility is not something a 2-hour lecture, or even 2-week course can teach you. Take your time, and just try to do better each day. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing". When I teach software engineers about accessibility, they very enthusiastically go straight to the solution for example "I need to add a button that plays a recording of what's on the webpage". That's like building a wheelchair ramp and adding a wheelchair to it too, the visitor already has a wheelchair (in the website example, they have a screen reader), and yours is just gonna get in the way, or worse, block them. Learning accessibility you must learning about the people and the technology they already have, and build software to the standards already out there.
- Make sure you always build WITH disabled people, not FOR them. There's a slogan in the disability community "nothing about us without us". There have been many products that have been built FOR people with disabilities, but didn't involve them in the process, and funnily enough, didn't actually solve problems disabled people had! Test with disabled folks, and design with disabled folks, and HIRE disabled people!
- Practice inclusion in your daily life. If you use social media, add a text description to any images you post (you can google how to write good alt text). If you post a video, make sure there are captions, and a text description of the video. Talk to your friends and colleagues about it, make sure you ask about it at future companies you work at. Remember that inclusion is not just about physical disabilities, invisible disabilities, or chronic illness, it's about the mismatch between people and their environment, and the exclusion that stems from that. Inclusive design also considers many other angles, such as social economic status, literacy, incarcerated people, people in high stress situations, people in domestic violence situations, gender non-binary and gender fluid, trans people, non heteronormative, non neurotypical, and of course, language, culture, and race.
I'll leave you with these posters from the UK Government Government Digital Services team, who have make many open source accessibility resources. These are posters that are useful reminders for designers and engineers to consider accessibility when building software. I hope you take a look at these after the lecture, and maybe even print them out and hang them on your wall!