Digital Accessibility: why it matters now more than ever.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Digital Accessibility was finally starting to get the much-needed attention it deserved.

As the world comes to terms with COVID-19, and as we learn to adapt to the new world, it is vital that the focus on accessibility and inclusive design is not lost — for the sake of both users and businesses.

When I first started working as a web designer — nearly 13 years ago — I didn’t really know anything about digital accessibility. WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) to me was this unachievable and unrealistic list of requirements that should be met but would likely lead to me having to make some kind of aesthetic compromise. Web Design was still very much skeuomorphic — the rise of the iPhone meant gradients, rounded corners, drop-shadows, and textures became go-to trends, all with a single purpose — making the internet look and feel ‘real’.

Naively, I believed that the visual aesthetics of a website or email were all that really mattered.

Accessibility was something at the top of the list to discard should budgets or timescales get tight, or should it just be too difficult to achieve — and if something is discarded frequently enough, eventually it gets forgotten. I can’t begin to comprehend just how difficult it must have been for users who are reliant on assistive tech to browse the web. I feel compelled to apologize for retrospective design decisions to anyone who may have struggled to use a site that I’d worked on because you couldn’t effectively navigate it using your keyboard, or you couldn’t read the content as the text was presented in an image, because “Arial is boring”.

The Accessibility Renaissance

Thankfully, a lot has changed since I started in web design. Accessibility has become much more important, and there are a whole host of reasons for this.

As a society, I believe we’ve become more empathetic. Social injustice has become a lot more visible, and consequently less tolerated. It feels like collectively we’ve developed a stronger moral compass. Don’t get me wrong, we’re a long way from perfect and there’s certainly a lot of things wrong with the world, but from my own perspective it certainly feels like the bulk of the population cares more — be it about the planet, the future, diversity or equality.

Our perspectives on societal issues have matured — public displays of racism and sexism are captured on camera, shared on social media and met with a tidal wave of scorn and intolerance for intolerance. We’ve started taking recycling seriously, we’ve started favouring sustainable energy suppliers, the list of examples of how society has become more consciencous can go on and on. Thankfully, societal attitudes towards accessibility have also started to mature — perhaps not as much as other movements, but we have certainly seen progress. In recent years, we’ve seen more and more people referencing the Social Model of Disability, which proposes that people are not disabled by a medical condition, but are actually disabled by the infrastructure and attitudes of society. I first became aware of this model when I attended a session hosted by Craig Abbott of the DWP, and his quote has now become somewhat of a mantra for me:

“People are not always disabled by their impairments; they are disabled by poorly designed environments”

As well as an attitudinal change, the ease of access to assistive technology has empowered those who need it, meaning that the voices of the millions of users with access needs is not only being heard, but finally being listened to.

With all this in mind, it’s perhaps understandable that Digital Accessibility has enjoyed a renaissance. It’s been recognised as an area of much needed attention, and there’s been a real movement within the design community to focus on delivering inclusive experiences. We’re a long way from getting things perfect, and there is an awful lot of work to do, but we now at least acknowledge that something has to be done.

We have online design forums, after-work networking groups, and international conferences where those who are passionate about inclusive design can come together and discuss challenges and opportunities, and support each other in making the web accessible to all. We have become a supportive community, and by the end of 2019 it really felt like delivering a truly accessible web was within our reach.

Then COVID happened.

The impact of COVID-19

For many years we’d enjoyed the luxury of ‘channel of choice’. For example. if we wanted to buy a pint of milk, we could:

• Ring a milkperson, and subscribe to a traditional delivery service
• Visit a supermarket, and then choose whether or not to interact with checkout staff or a self-checkout machine.
• Buy milk online using a grocery delivery service, which would then be delivered to your door via a brightly coloured van
• Buy a pint of milk from Amazon, and a drone would drop it in your garden.

We reached a point where we’d become almost spoilt for choice, enabling us to find the most convenient routines for our individual needs. Businesses had worked hard on prioritising convenience, putting experience front-and-centre, agnostic of a user's preference of channel, and as users and consumers, we could find an individual, tailored balance of interactions with businesses.

Then, almost overnight, the landscape for consumers changed: Supermarkets struggled to meet the demands of a meteoric rise in online grocery orders, panic-buyers stripped shelves bare, colleague numbers in contact centres were reduced, and the high street closed. Our aforementioned choices and convenience had been impaired, and we found ourselves queuing outside supermarkets, and relying on using home delivery for everything else.

For many of us, the pandemic brought with it a change to everyday life that was, well, really inconvenient. We had our hand forced to interact with businesses in a way that we perhaps didn’t previously want or like to do. Convenience had been replaced by necessity, and we had to adapt.

But what about those who couldn’t adapt? What about the millions of people that previously utilise a specific channel not through through choice, but because that was the only way they could interact. The luxury of choice is brilliant, but sadly it is not a luxury that all can enjoy, and the COVID pandemic has highlighted the need to ensure that these people aren’t forgotten. Yes, it’s great that we can give consumers a choice, but we need to remember as service providers that what we may consider a ‘choice’ may be the only way that a certain group of people can interact with us. Previously a business may have accepted a risk that their Mobile App may not work with assistive tech, but that’s ok because a blind person can ring us, or visit a store. However, if your store is closed for 2 months, and your contact centre wait times are over an hour, what is that blind person supposed to do?

The COVID pandemic does present us with opportunities, too. As consumers, we have enjoyed the convenience of choice, and we’ve found our own ways to make our consumer habits fit around our lifestyles. And, as I mentioned above, overnight that convenience was taken away from us. We had to adapt to how the world was, rather than making the world adapt to us, and we really didn’t like it. On top of this, the restrictions placed on society meant that we could no longer see friends or family, we were house bound, socially isolated.

We should take the opportunity to learn from how this has made us feel, to empathise more with those who were already living that life long before anyone was panicking in Wuhan. The life many of us have lived for the past few months is the life that many vulnerable people have lived for a lot, lot longer. I mentioned before that we care more, that we’re more consciencous — what’s stopping us from going further? We should relate as best we can to the challenges faced by those with access needs, and drive inclusive solutions and services not as a choice, but as a necessity.

What about the recession?

Being realistic for a second, it’s reasonable to expect that businesses will now not have the resources they would like, given the financial impact of the pandemic and the now ‘official’ recession we find ourselves in. It’s understandable that, for the foreseeable future, the priority for businesses will be to just survive. When the last recession hit I was just starting my career at Bradford & Bingley, and I know just how scary it is to see a business disappear from underneath you. For the coming months, businesses will focus on improving cashflow, or in the worst case battening down the hatches.

In this environment, it’s key that we don’t revert back to accessibility being a ‘nice to have’ — it needs to be a ‘must’, not only for the people it affects, but also for businesses themselves, as:

• More than 20% of potential UK consumers live a disability
• UK Businesses lose £2bn a month by ignoring the needs of disabled people

As the Purple Pound study shows, it’s not just disabled users who stand to benefit from a more accessible world, but businesses and service providers will reap the rewards too. Imagine, as a business, if you could increase your target customer base by 20% just by making your products and services more accessible? This data isn’t new, but against the backdrop of a recession, it highlights the need for accessibility to be prioritised even higher.

It’s natural in times of crisis to focus on our own biases, see things through our own lens again, as we revert to a mentality of self-preservation. But, having worked so hard to get businesses to consider the needs of those with disabilities, we need to make sure that the progress we made isn’t forgotten, and the voice of the millions of users with non-standard access needs is still listened to. Post COVID, we need to realise that providing amazing multi-channel experiences isn’t just about providing users with a choice that suits their own preference — it’s providing many users with the essential means to interact with us independently.

(First published Aug 2020 on LinkedIn)

images from Unsplash and Pexels