Putting accessibility into practice
How do you wake up one day and start designing for empathy?
Despite nursing my ambitions of making a difference for disabled folks since childhood, I must admit accessibility and inclusivity a recent interest of mine which picked up only last year.
In Nov 2018, I had a brief encounter with Lauren Celenza during the Annual DesignUp conference, which led to a series of continued correspondence over the next few months, culminating with Lauren flying all the way to Bangalore to give us an exclusive workshop on inclusivity and bias to my company’s design and product team.
This was one of the best workshops I’ve ever had in my life. We learnt so much about the biases that exist in our line of work, and had hands-on activities to expose us to the limitations of people with disabilities and how we could design with them in mind.
There was a certain expectation from ourselves post the workshop to implement our learnings in our design practice, with Lauren volunteering to follow up with the team. But months flew by; we got caught up with our own busy projects and fighting tight timelines. Then CoVid came along and essentially upended life as we know it, forcing us into remote working overnight - a daunting situation which we all struggled with and tried to make the best of.
Accessibility and inclusivity were buried deep underneath these priorities.
So what changed now? It all began when my old hearing aids started faltering, and my audiologist also pointed out that my hearing was getting worse by the years with analog hearing aids.
She strongly advised me to purchase a very expensive pair of bluetooth-enabled hearing aids, which was compatible with the hearing aid accessibility feature on iPhone. After months of deliberation, i finally got my pair of new hearing aids in August.
Now comes the interesting part - not only did my hearing and mental alertness drastically improve overnight, but the iPhone hearing aid compatibility feature enabled me to communicate more clearly and effectively over video calls, something I had been struggling with in the recent months!
All it took was a first-hand experience with the immense difference enabled by a well-designed accessible product, to re-kindle the fire inside me and give me a renewed sense of purpose towards championing accessibility.
Based on my experience with the aftermath of Lauren’s workshop, and the new hearing aid features, i’ve come to understand one possible truth.
As designers, we tend to become more empathetic towards designing for marginalized and disabled users, only if we (or someone we know personally) have encountered these difficulties directly, and could benefit from a solution enabled by technology.
Here’s my logical reasoning. If you are keen to start designing accessible solutions, you must first develop empathy for the users who have an altogether different way of life from you. The best way to go about this is to start small, by focusing on your family members, friends or anyone with physical difficulties. Keep them in mind when you design your workflows.
A trick I generally follow myself after reiterating and refining my designs and UX copy is “Will my mother find this flow easy to understand and operate?” or “Will someone who is used to WhatsApp chats still find this chatbot understandable?”. Such a tactic allows me to dumb down my design solutions as much as I can. Now I need to start including people of all disabilities in my future designs - poor vision, one-handed use, voice-driven technology users and color blinded folks, to name some - to truly begin my journey of designing accessible solutions. I need to be asking the questions “Can someone with 50% vision notice this communication?” or “Can someone use this with one hand or should I move this important Call To Action closer to the bottom of the screen?”
I have an opportunity in my current workplace to include accessibility as a core component of the process, and can’t wait to see this come to fruition soon!
Later, then. Remember to be kind to yourself, once in a while.