Last week, I was winding up for the day. I was writing an article for the getstark.co blog, and was proof-reading the article in my Google docs account.
In the middle of all this, my internet service provider decided it was time to take a long nap. My Wi-Fi started acting up, before dying with the whimper of a Duracell bunny on its last legs. A few minutes later, I receive a message from the provider — apparently it was a technical issue, and it would take a few hours for them to restore the connectivity.
Now I had no internet connection, and my half-baked article was still lying in my drafts. There were many suggestions and comments added by my editor, which I needed to incorporate in the article. Considering it was around night time, one would have been expected to close the laptop and call it an early night.
But not me; I’ve this incurable habit of not resting easy until I complete my tasks for the day. There was no way I could leave the suggestions and comments unattended overnight. I took my mobile phone, turned on the 4g data, and opened the Google docs app on my device. My document loaded fully without much as a blink, and I continued to edit the document.
For the next one hour, I was working on the entire article from my mobile phone. The UX of incorporating suggestions and comments in the Google docs app was so well thought out and somehow intuitive, and I did not experience any lags or delays on the somewhat snail-paced 4g connectivity. My editor gave more suggestions in parallel with my own edits, and I still was able to perform the proof-reading and rewriting of the entire article to the last word without as much a drop in performance.
This proved to be quite a turning point for me. Aside from Twitter, I have not seen any app perform so flawlessly on an unreliable 4g network, and Google docs was showing the impact of solving for low bandwidth and data-scarce scenarios.
This also opened my eyes to the fact that accessibility comes in one more shape — access to platforms and services even in the most unreliable coverage. I just did not feel that I had to give up something just because my Wi-Fi stopped working, and that feeling was very liberating, to say the least.
We are all habituated to working from our expensive MacBook pros on fast internet speeds, and we tend to forget that we are part of the privileged few in the entire world with access to such technology and resources. While technology continues to grow in leaps and bounds, access to such technology and stability continues to scale at a much slower pace across cities and countries. Even in the United States, especially in the rural parts, there is only 4g connection and no internet, so the potential for platforms to reach them can be maximized by solving for low data and spotty networks.
When I brought up this incident in the Stark slack community, one of the members put across a brilliant point:
If you think about accessibility as "ability to access", and ensure equity of the ability to access, you get interesting How Might Someone who.. design prompts. Take for instance, a designer at BBC who explained how they could design their site for an Arctic explorer who might want to read the news in the Northern hemisphere.
Such a simple yet profound example! It’s time we look at accessibility in design as the ability to provide equitable access to any kind of users for our products — this might even come under the ambit of inclusion, if we are being technical here. Either way, we should advocate strongly for the 1% population we normally do not design for. Because making products usable for the 1% makes the experience a 1000 times better for the rest 99%.
Thanks for the lesson, Google docs. May the 4g continue to be with us!