Accessibility & Inclusive Design
When I work with teams to assess their digital governance maturity, I always look for an accessibility policy and supporting standards…
When I work with teams to assess their digital governance maturity, I always look for an accessibility policy and supporting standards. Most organizations have the policy — and standards. The policy is finely tuned to express good intention and align the organization with the legal requirements for accessibility in their various operational locales. And, the standards often point to some level of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Good job — on the surface.
When I look at the on-the-ground tactics associated with building and deploying the organization’s digital portfolio, the digital team often isn’t upholding the standard. Dig a little deeper, and I discover there aren’t any processes or educational programs in place to help those who design and build digital products and services follow those standards — and even fewer tactics for measuring if the organization is following its own rules. So, the organization is good in theory regarding accessibility but not so good in practice. To be sure, this is true across the board for many other areas of development, privacy being another domain that can fall into this pattern.
It’s easy to point the finger at big companies for not doing the right thing — but we fail on this front as individuals as well. For example, it’s easy to ignore the request for alt text when posting images online. If I’m honest, it’s embarrassing to see that I sometimes value 30 seconds of my time against the value that content would bring to everyone — not just those with disabilities. And, parents sometimes don’t think about the privacy of their children when they post family photos online. Yes, it takes time — but not so much if we think about these considerations first instead of after your team deploys an entire application. Or after we find ourselves emotionally attached to our photo-laden social media feed.
As the next and hopefully more socially conscious wave of web development happens, I hope that we can take the time to do a better job. In this Surfacing podcast episode, Andy Vitale and I talked with the user experience designer, educator, and author, Reginé Gilbert. Reginé talks about some of the fundamentals of accessibility and inclusive design and helps to illuminate why accessibility is important to the entire human family.