Maybe you never worried too much about building an accessible product. And maybe you thought: “It doesn’t apply to me”.
Think twice because one thing I learned is that there are three different types of disabilities and everyone, literally everyone, can be or is impacted. And that’s the key because the product that is usable in most scenarios is a competitive advantage.
Types of disabilities
Here’s the image that started it all for me. This is from the Microsoft Design Toolkit and it defines the three types of disabilities that you can find. Some of them are permanent, these are the ones my mind would go to when thinking about disabilities.
But then you have the temporary and the situational. So you can quickly realize that if you’re watching a video but didn’t have headphones, and maybe you’re on the tube and it’s not in a noisy environment or didn’t want to wake up somebody, or you’re reading the screen and there’s direct sunlight and the contrast is not there, then it’s hard for you to enjoy a video or read the content of a website. And all those things can be addressed by your product. That is something that you can work on, that you can improve, and it doesn’t take years to get there.
My situational disability
The reason I am writing this is because of museum in Italy. There, I started noticing small things that could’ve made the life of people easier.
For example, the first floor elevators were located at the beginning of the exhibition, while the stairs connected the first and second floors at the end of the first floor exhibition. This meant that if you needed the elevator and completed the first floor exhibition, you would have to backtrack to reach the second floor. Not ideal.
But the most noticeable issue was on the third floor.
There, we entered a room with a large ship in the center. On the left side, the path was blocked, and on the right side, stairs led up to the ship. There was no space to walk around the stairs to access the slope, so we would have had to go back through the exhibition to reach it from a different entrance.
If the slope was on both sides, or if there was a shorter way to get to the other side, it would’ve been easier for me to access the ship, but this was not the case.
I had a stroller and there I was, looking at the stairs and thinking: “I’m lucky that I can lift this stroller, but still, could this be approached differently?”
Don’t save on accessibility
Accessibility for web products is even easier than physical products.
There are so many tools and products that you can use today to improve the accessibility of your website or web tool. many there are m so many free courses that you can take just search online. They’re super easy. More of them than not, they’re very comprehensive. And w
What you’ll build will be better for every user’s, not just the one with permanent disabilities, but for every user. Think about that when you build something.
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