Unmeasurable Accessibility The Case for Inclusive Design

Darice de Cuba đź‘ľ @Darice đź‘ľ darice.org WordPress Accessibility Day October 2, 2020

Hi, I’m Darice

• Web Developer • Expert by experience • Writer • The Hague food places connoisseur • Tea addict

What most people understand under “Accessibility”

• ARIA for screen-readers • Keyboard tabbable • Colours with minimum contrast ratio 4.5:1 • @media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) {} • All testable with tools or manually

Visible and non-visible disabilities

Non visible “disabilities”

• A deaf or hard of hearing person • A person with autism • A person with brain damage • Chronic illness • Depression

“In our lifetime most of us will have to deal with either long term or short-term illness, broken bones, high stress for long period of times. All kinds of illness or injuries that can make you temporary disabled or disabled for the rest of your life.”

Most people aren’t born disabled, but become disabled later in life

• When I was 25 years old, I had a brain haemorrhage • When I was 26 years old, I lost the rest of my hearing

“I don’t consider myself disabled, rather I’m made disabled by the obstacles created by society. A society build only for the seeing, hearing, talking, walking, healthy, straight, cis male, white people.” –Me

Deaf and deaf, a few quick facts Deaf

deaf: Deaf with a capital D means a person who culturally identifies as a deaf person. deaf with lower d is someone who became deaf later in life. • Born deaf • Sign language is their • deaf later in life/Hard of primary language hearing • Spoken language is their primary language.

Inclusive Design

Inclusive design is a design approach that takes as many individuals; their background, needs, experience and ability into account from day one of the projects. Accessibility is a part of inclusive design. We want as many people as possible to be able to use our products.

Small examples, big impact

Chat widgets How to do it

• Real people and not a bot • Reasonable waiting times • Widget works in all modern browsers

no-reply@yourdomain.com

A no no-reply mail with no contact info and a website link with only a phone number is not accessible for many people.

Leave the difficult words for your thesis

No one ever said, “I wish this was written more difficult”.

A photo says more than a thousand words

Captions

Captions increase view time of videos on Facebook with 12% • For HoH and d/Deaf people • Watching videos in noisy places or the silent train coupe • SEO • When the spoken language is not your primary language • Accents

SubRip Subtitle file

.srt files have been popular since the internet was fast enough to download media. Almost everyone always wants subtitles.

Auto Captioning, Not Good Enough

• Auto-caption suffers from bias; doesn’t recognise accents • Fails with names • Depends on clear articulation • Depends how slowly someone speaks

Good Examples

Transcriptions, not only for the deaf and HoH

“This American Life began transcribing their radio archives in April, 2011 and completed the entire backlog by October, 2011. Since that time, transcripts have been posted within 24 hours after a program airs.” https://www.3playmedia.com/why-3play/case-studies/this-american-life/

Why Transcripts Matters Podcast are inaccessible to: - d/Deaf people HoH people People with hearing sensitivity People with ADHD People in noisy environment People in silent environment (silent train coupe, library) Transcripts are also good for: - SEO - People whose primary language isn’t English - Fast referencing or quoting

How inclusion works

@lizandmollie

Perspective

@davidnoob

Thank you for listening!

Questions? Darice de Cuba đź‘ľ @Darice đź‘ľ darice.org