Accessibility = innovation
“Innovation” is often used as an excuse for avoiding accessibility. Let’s pivot these conversations to get more people excited about accessibility and an awesome future.
A few days ago I stood on stage at a booked-out accessibility meetup in Stockholm, Sweden. Around 100 people showed up on their Thursday evening to talk, learn, and encourage each other to do better with accessibility.
How wonderful it was to see so many people putting time aside to be part of this fantastic community.
But: we shouldn’t have to gather like this.
In a perfect world, we shouldn’t need accessibility meetups. In a perfect world accessibility would be embedded in the way we design and develop products; the way we make content; the way we think and talk about the spaces we live in. It wouldn’t be a separate topic, but part of everything we do.
Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in today, so we do need to build these communities. Accessibility isn’t universally taught or understood, so we’re going to keep coming across people who don’t know about it. Or worse: we’ll come across people who know about accessibility but don’t care, or don’t value it highly.
The innovation excuse
Here’s one excuse I’ve heard. It takes some different forms, but it goes roughly like this: a team, an organisation or an individual says they can’t possibly prioritise accessibility because it stops them from being innovative. That, by spending time to make a product accessible, they’re not able to move quickly and be innovative and competitive.
I want to help you flip this excuse around so that, next time you hear it, you’ve got some techniques to shift these conversations back to a position where accessibility is valued and prioritised.
1. Accessibility drives innovation
How can you control a computer when you can’t use a mouse or keyboard? One option is to use eye-tracking technology, like that developed by Swedish company Tobii. These technologies enable people with motor impairments to navigate and use their computers with their eyes.
This is clearly innovative. And this technology, made better with accessibility, is an innovation for nondisabled people too. When I worked as a user researcher I used Tobii’s eye-tracking technology with nondisabled participants to better understand how they interact with websites. The technology let us design better layouts, labels, content and experiences.
Eye tracking technology also has applications in gaming, marketing, and it forms a foundation for immersive virtual and augmented realities.
Accessibility makes this tech better. It IS innovative.
While speaking at the accessibility meetup I was wearing a prop: an Emotiv EEG headset, reading signals from my brain. As a nondisabled person the headset is a cool gadget. It’s in the same category as the heart rate tracker I wear on my wrist — it’s nerdy and interesting, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the way I interact with the world.
Add accessibility in the mix — raise the stakes on what’s possible — and you innovate much more quickly. Emotiv headsets have been used by quadriplegic people to play games, conduct music, and even drive a race car.
So those are a couple of innovative applications related to motor disabilities. Let’s talk about another kind of disability. If we make a product accessible for people who don’t use one of their senses, then you’ve made a technology that is innovative — maybe even urgently needed — for some people. You’ve also given all users a new way to interact with it. You’ve given them options, and options lead to innovation.
Think of the way you can get directions on Google Maps with your eyes (looking at the map); ears (listening to directions); or even with tactile feedback (one kind of buzz to turn left, another to turn right). This is innovative for disabled people, and it’s innovative for others who can now get directions while driving; listening to a podcast; or multitasking in new, innovative ways.
So include disabled people in your user testing groups, and — if you don’t have any disabled people in your design and development teams already — recruit them to work on your products right from the start. You’ll more quickly find new solutions that benefit everyone.
2. Accessibility fixes problems
Here’s a different way of thinking about it. Accessibility is a way of making products more robust, because accessibility testing is an extremely fast way to identify bugs and find opportunities to improve your product.
As our expectations for technology increase, the more important it becomes to users — all users — for products to be reliable and adaptive to different contexts. Fixing problems is a requirement for making decent products, let alone innovative ones.
And if you’re afraid of finding out all the ways that your product fails, then maybe you need to reconsider whether innovation is really what you’re after. Maybe you just want to avoid criticism and the work that’s needed to create a solid product.
3. Accessibility future-proofs
Accessibility is also a method for future-proofing. There are countless examples of how accessible products have stood the tests of time, and how inaccessible products have failed.
Consider web design. Once we moved beyond simple HTML pages from the early days of the web, designers and developers went down a path where flashy, fashionable designs became the norm — websites were made in Flash, or they had pixel-perfect layouts for specific screen sizes.
If we had taken a different path where accessibility was at the forefront, we would not have had to do near as much work to prepare for the transition to responsive, mobile-friendly websites. By designing for people who need to change font sizes or zoom in, we would have been most of the way there.
As for today’s challenges, consider Alexa and Siri and other voice-based technologies, and how a website or app’s compatibility with them overlaps with screen reader compatibility. Plenty of websites still don’t work with screen readers, and they need to catch up.
Accessibility future-proofs because it makes our technology work in different situations, and with different input and output devices. It makes our products resilient, and less tied to a single possible mode of interaction. That prepares us for the future, and for situations we’ve yet to predict.
Accessibility is not a barrier
So, accessibility isn’t a barrier to innovation.
It IS innovation.
By its very definition, accessibility removes barriers. It frees us from constraints and gives us new, better, more resilient ways to interact with the world.
So the next time you hear someone make the innovation excuse, remind them:
- accessibility drives innovation
- accessibility fixes problems, and
- accessibility future-proofs.
This is not enough
But we can’t use innovation as the only reason to do accessibility. This is also a human rights issue. This is about access, inclusion, and discrimination.
So use these tips to combat the innovation excuse when it arises, but consider it as one tool in your toolkit. We need to keep working to dismantle the historical, structural, embedded problems of ableism.
Because “innovation” shouldn’t just be about making cool stuff. It should be about making cool stuff for everyone. I get excited when I think about all the possibilities of an inclusive, high-tech future. Let’s do our best to get others excited too!
Further reading
This post was based on the lightning talk I gave at the latest t12t meetup, and the talk was based on Heck yes, accessibility! Let’s make the future awesome. I wrote the “heck yes” piece for a broader audience, including those who mightn’t be a part of accessibility communities themselves — so you might like to share it with your colleagues who need a little nudge.
A couple years earlier I wrote a post called The inaccessible web: how we got into this mess. That one might be a wake-up call for people who don’t believe we’re in a mess at all, and it includes some broad ideas on what we need to do.
Credits and thanks
Huge thanks to Hampus, Ida and the rest of the t12t crew for organising the meetup and inviting me to speak. It really is a wonderful community, and although it’s a shame it has to exist, I’m very glad it exists today! The group is looking for sponsors for future events, so if anyone reading this would like to contribute, please get in touch via the t12t meetup page. That could include recording future events to share with the rest of the world.
Thanks also to Adam Van Winden whose wonderful illustrations I re-used in the slides for the meetup; and Ace Ratcliff for feedback on an earlier draft of my talk and the article it was based on.
You can find more from me on Twitter @MischaAndrews.
