For those of you in the US of a certain age, you may remember a funny commercial for Fram oil filters. The punch line was “you can pay me now or you can pay me later” Accessibility is like that…
If you aren’t doing user research with users with disabilities, you aren’t doing real user research.
User research has been whacked in the most recent rounds of tech layoffs Do you know what that means? The limited amount of research that has been going on with people with disabilities has been severely curtailed 20 % of…
Accessibility is the little red hen of the business world. Almost everyone wants the accessible experience, however, not everyone wants the responsibility of making that happen
The Little Red Hen did all the work. She sewed the grain, pulled the weeds, watered the sprouts, harvested the grain and baked the bread. All along she asked for help but no one was there with her until they…
You want to appear inclusive? Do something that you think might help people with a specific disability. You want to BE inclusive? Do something that all people with disabilities can equally use, and include them in the process
Who are accessibility celebrations for? We have National Disability Employment Awareness Month, but the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is still more than double that of non-disabled individuals. We have Autism Awareness/Acceptance/Action Month, but 85 % of autistic people…
Product owners don’t wake up in the morning and say to themselves “hey, I’m going to break the law and completely ignore and annoy 20% of my potential customers.” But, that is what companies do when accessibility is not part…
Never make decisions for your users. Either make decisions with your users, or build enough flexibility that your users can make the decisions for themselves
Making decisions for your users leads to frustration, especially for people with disabilities who will waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to undo the decisions you made if it is not what they wanted. Start with…
When someone tells you something is impossible because of your disability… Take that as an express invitation to show them how it’s done
Anyone who has had a disability for any length of time can recount dozens of times they’ve been told either a) something couldn’t be done to include them or b) the person with a disability shouldn’t be trying to do…
When organizations do not bake accessibility reviews into its entire management process for both code and content, remediated digital properties are all but guaranteed to backslide into inaccessibility.
True story. In 2010, I went to an accessibility conference in Oakland. I had an emphatic conversation over lunch with some folx at my table about how important it was to embed accessibility into every part of an organization because…
The First rule of Providing Support to Customers with Disabilities is to Have Multiple Modalities that Use Different Senses
Making things difficult for your customers is an excellent way to drive them to your competitors. If your customer support solely relies on voice communication, you’re likely losing potential customers who cannot or prefer not to communicate in this way.…
Accessibility is like Oxygen. Without it, Disabled People Cannot Thrive
Sometimes I complain publicly about something inaccessible, and I’m told I’m overreacting, either directly or indirectly. This takes the form of statements that start with words like: “Why didn’t you just (blah blah blah)”: where “blah blah blah” is something…