Sconner.net

Ideas for Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)

2024-04-10T00:00:00Z

Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is coming up on May 16th! GAAD is a perfect opportunity to celebrate your accessibility progress, get people engaged in the work, and to talk loudly about accessibility. In this post, I’m sharing some ideas you might find helpful for your GAAD activities.

Events and workshops

I have had a lot of success with talks and workshops during GAAD. They’re a powerful way to get people engaged with the work.

Host a talk, webinar or panel discussion

I’ve done both internal talks and paid external speakers to deliver talks during GAAD. Paid speakers can add more weight to your work; hearing an outside perspective definitely has its benefits.

Last year, I talked to everyone at Monzo about “Accessibility in numbers.” It spoke a bit about accessibility, the social and medical models of disability, and some stats from the Family Resources Survey.

I then reframed them to show what they meant within the context of our business. I used the how-many app and the Department for Education’s “how many users” calculators to generate some stats around disabilities within the context of our x million customers. This landed very, very well! It was very high-level, and it meant something to everyone there.

Remember to tailor your talks to your audience and assume they know nothing. If the talk is for an all-staff call, you might want to consider things like:

inviting (and paying!) disabled speakers to talk to your company about accessibility
an introduction to accessibility
accessibility in numbers
common accessibility fails and why they’re important
progress updates

If you’re presenting to more specific audiences, like, let’s say, a user-centered design community, you could cover things like:

common design/content/test/code issues (again, be relatively light on the detail because you don’t want people dozing off when they don’t understand the detail)
an introduction to assistive technologies
accessible service design guide
show and tells
running an accessibility clinc where teams can come to you about specific problems

If you’re talking to specific disciplines, you can go into all the low-level details because they will understand them within the context of their role. You could also consider things like a knowledge sharing sessions where people can share different books, tutorials or articles they’ve found.

Run workshops

Running workshops can be a powerful way to demystify accessibility and build capability at the same time.

You could consider things like:

an assistive technology workshop
an introduction to accessibility testing
an inclusive user research workshop
an accessible design workshop
creating accessible documents workshop
accessible social media content workshop
an introduction to accessible content design
common accessibility fails (and how to fix them)
a cognitive biases workshop
an accessibility empathy lab session
host an ideation session where you think about what amazing looks like, or run a gap assessment session to identify opportunites for improvement

I could write hundreds more. How detailed or high-level you want to make your workshops is up to you. I advise looking for gaps in capability and engaging that specific area for more impact.

Community enagegement

If you’re looking to go beyond basic accessibility compliance, engaging your users should be front and centre of your approach. Understanding and solving the real challenges they are facing will help you build a much better, accessible product.

Use the #GAAD hashtag and share informative posts about accessibility. You can create infographics, short videos, or accessibility tips and share them throughout the week.

Blog posts or articles

Write about the importance of accessibility and the benefits it offers to everyone. Don’t be afraid to put content out; you don’t have to have done some groundbreaking work. Most people are thrilled to see progress over perfection. Some other ideas could be:

talk about your progress, celebrate the work you’ve done this year
talk about what you’ve found during research (Monzo wrote a great article on why ADHD can cost you £1600 a year)
talk about your roadmap, or your strategy
talk about what you’re doing for GAAD!
write a tutorial on something accessibility related

Again, the world is your oyster with this type of content. You’ll probably have loads to talk about!

Host a podcast

Get a few people interested in accessibility together and have a podcast discussion. You could also ask someone in the community if they’d be down for an interview or debate. You could make multiple and put them out over time.

Host a Q&A session

Invite an accessibility expert to answer questions from your community on social media or a live platform.

Host listening sessions

Listening sessions are a brilliant exercise. You can invite individuals or groups to come and contribute to a discussion to express their thoughts and opinions on your product or a specific topic.

These are done with your users or even disability charities who can speak on behalf of groups of people. If you do a listening event with a charity, they can ask their communities questions and give feedback during the session. If you invite disabled people to contribute, ensure this is a paid gig.

If you’re working for a small business without user research capability, listening sessions are a fantastic source of qualitative data.

Call to action

GAAD is an excellent way to get commitment so you can get the ball rolling for accessibility work. With everything I have covered, you should be looking for opportunities to identify sponsors for the work. Expand your network as much as you can.

Carry out an accessibility audit of your website, documents or office space to identify areas for improvement

If you’re just getting started, you could see about getting an accessibility audit done. An audit helps you understand the current state of play. It’s also something you could blog about.

Launch some training

I did this at Monzo, and it meant that every single person will have basic accessibility training. You can expand this to role-based training. Even if it’s not mandatory, GAAD is a good opportunity to launch any type of training.

Host a hackathon

A hackathon is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period, such as 24 or 48 hours.

We loved a hackathon when I was at Monzo. You could feed into a board of ideas, and then people would vote on the hackathon’s focus, usually picking a few of them to build. Accessibility ideas would almost always be picked up, which was great! They’re a solid mechanism to get some stuff done outside business cases and other priorities.

Establish an accessibility champions network

Accessibility champions networks are a force multiplier for a lot of organisations. Because accessibility teams don’t exist often or are tiny, launching a network of like-minded folk is a great way to start thinking about what you might want to do to improve accessibility. Champions networks can also open many doors and help take the work forward.

Look out for events that your team can attend

Over the years, I’ve always made time for my teams to attend other GAAD events. There’s usually a lot going on, and you’ll always learn something new. LinkedIn is an excellent source to find events happening during GAAD.

Volunteer your time

This year, I have committed some time to helping others in the community. Accessibility can be a slog, especially when you’re just starting out. I’ve had a lot of help from others in this wonderful community, and I like to pay it forward.

I’d encourage others to do the same. Having someone else who is an outsider to your company could be the leverage you need to get the buy-in you’ve been trying to get or the commitment to make the change.

Mastering job applications

2024-02-21T00:00:00Z

Today’s post will cover applying for accessibility jobs, but my advice will be helpful when applying for any job. I am a hiring manager, and just this week, I have sifted a lot of applications for a senior role. Recruiting is always frustrating for me because so many great people don’t make the cut. This blog post will cover why, and provide you some tips to master your next job application.

Understanding how your application is scored

I’ve been a hiring manager at four companies, and all four have used a similar system to score candidates’ suitability for a role. Usually, scoring is based on your job history and your cover letter or supporting information. We have (and shouldn’t have) no leeway regarding the scoring criteria.

You’ll usually get points for demonstrating that you meet the essential and desirable criteria. Scoring systems are different from place to place, but they are usually something like this:

doesn’t meet the requirement (one point)
somewhat meets the requirement (two points)
meets the requirement (three points)
exceeds the requirement (four points)
greatly exceeds the requirement (five points)

So, let’s say the job you’re applying for has six ‘essential skills’ and eight ‘desirable skills’. If the perfect application comes in, they could score seventy points. I’ve never had anyone score top marks (and likely never will), and usually, depending on how many people have applied, the threshold for an interview could be people who score fifty or above.

Hopefully, you’re beginning to understand why it’s vital for the recruiter to know how you meet the essential and desirable criteria. You can discuss your experience and how it aligns with those criteria in your supporting information or cover letter.

Understanding the supporting information or cover letter

The number of applications I needed to reject because the candidate only had one or two sentences in their supporting information or cover letter is astounding. Sometimes, I’ll read through the job history and think they’d be ideal, only not to be able to score them because of a poor cover letter or supporting information.

Your cover letter or supporting information should complement your resume by providing additional context and insight on why you’re the perfect candidate for the role. Usually, you’ll have around one thousand words to get this across.

The importance of structure

Refer back to the essential and desirable criteria and think about a few real examples that you can use that best showcase how you meet them. Use the situation, task, action and result (STAR) or challenge, action, result (CAR) methods. STAR or CAR is also instrumental if you get an interview.

Other things to consider

Here are some more tips to help you write a great cover letter. The list isn’t exhaustive, but they’ll definitely help!

Format your text so it’s easy for me to read

I’ve had many an application that wasn’t formatted into paragraphs or sections. My ADHD brain does not want to read a thousand words in one paragraph. Some roles could have hundreds of applicants. It can be mentally fatiguing, especially when I have to try to focus on huge blocks of text.

Stop using acronyms

I’ve lost count of how often people have used multiple acronyms in examples, leading to me not knowing what they’re talking about. This will often lead to a lower score because I’m sat scratching my head, wondering what it is you’re talking about.

I’m less interested in your brilliant vocabulary and more interested in your brilliant work

A common thing I’ve seen is people using the most complex language imaginable. I shouldn’t have to Google the long words you’re using. Please keep it simple. We’ll never score your vocabulary, only your great work.

You can’t see the forest for the trees

This one is specific to accessibility roles. A lot of people are focusing their cover letters on low-level technical details. It’s great that you know the technical stuff, but very rarely do people talk about the users and the impact our work has on real people.

We want to know why you want to work in accessibility and why you’re passionate about it. A bit about you, what led you here? As a recruiting manager, I want to know if you’ll fit into my team, not just that you’re super technical.

Follow instructions

If the job advert asks you not to disclose information that can identify you, then please don’t. This is for good reason and helps prevent any bias in the recruitment process. It protects you.

Don’t let big job descriptions put you off

Some job descriptions are massive and it could be enough to put you off applying. You should always still put your name into the hat, because nobody will ever have all of the essential and desireable criteria. For things you don’t have, you can position them as learning opportunities within your cover letter or personal statement. It’s absolutely fine to do this!

Wrapping up

I don’t know why how applicartions are scored isn’t common knowledge to candidates. It’s almost a bit of a secret, that, unless you’ve recruited someone before, you might not know about. Everyone gets a better experience if employers are up front about how it works in the background.

The latest jobs I’ve recruited for got a lot of applications. Putting the time and effort in to your cover letter or supporting information is super important to get you to the top of our list. Getting an interview can be difficult, but if you know the dance, you can pretty much guarantee one if you have the right experience.

It can be tempting to copy and paste if you’re applying for multiple jobs, but spending the time on your supporting information or cover letter is really important. It’ll likely be the difference between getting an interview or not.

Getting to an accessibility strategy

2024-02-15T00:00:00Z

This blog will discuss the steps I took to get to an accessibility strategy for a company with eight million customers. I’ll caveat this post by saying my approach is not perfect, but it worked for me, and it might just work for you. I was supported by some exceptional, very senior ‘strategy people’ who provided steer and guidance throughout.

Understanding the problem

To form a strategy for anything, you first need to understand the problem you’re trying to solve. I’ve spoken to several people in the last year whose strategies consist of compliance and auditing to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Technical compliance is necessary, but the technical standard isn’t a silver bullet. All too often, we’re tied up in compliance and need to remember the most important thing. People. Your users. Focus on your users. It’s all about outcomes for users. What are the real barriers your they are experiencing? A lot of them can fall outside of WCAG compliance anyway.

Planning your strategy is an opportunity to think about where you really want to go. What does amazing look like? How can your product or service be the best it can be?

There’s a lot of overlap with accessibility, usability and inclusive design. For me, a good accessibility strategy focuses on all of these things. So, where do we even begin?

Gap analysis

“A gap analysis is the process companies use to compare their current performance with their desired, expected performance.”

Think of a gap analysis like this:

what is the current state?
what is the future state?
what is the gap?
how can we close the gap?

Leveraging any data you already have is an excellent start to support your gap assessment. Consider things like:

customer complaints
any quantitative data you might have, such as Google Analytics
research and usability testing findings
focus groups with real users, surveys, social media outreach. The people are more than willing!

Look for obvious things. Does your company have large print and braille alternatives for vital information? Does your service design require someone to call your call centre to do a thing? Does your company do regular usability testing with disabled people? Look for things that might be excluding people. You usually don’t have to look far to find them.

A gap analysis was front and centre of my approach to getting to a strategy. There are many different frameworks that you can use, but I created my own. It focussed on six things:

1. Documenting the gap

Talk about what the gap is. This should be fact-based, make sure you’re articulating what what it currently looks like (or doesn’t).

2. What is the impact?

Who are we currently excluding, and what does that actually mean in practice? What happens if we don’t fix it? What are the benefits of closing the gap? It’s essential to zoom out here; not everyone will care about it being the right thing to do. (Think about brand loyalty, customer sentiment, more customer sign-ups, competitive advantage etc.)

3. Identifying and understanding risks

Think about legislative, regulatory and industry standards the gap doesn’t meet (WCAG, Consumer Duty, Equality Act, European Accessibility Act, etc.). Talk about reputational damage, negative press and any other risks.

4. Possible mitigations

What does good look like? Provide some high-level options and caveat them with a high-level effort to implement. I’ve found multiple options tend to land better. The important thing here is to involve people early.

5. Who are the stakeholders?

Who needs to be involved? Again, it’s essential to zoom out. If the gap has a knock-on effect on any team (which is usually the case), they must be bought in and engaged throughout.

6. Reporting, monitoring and process development

How will you measure success? What operational processes will underpin and be key to the success of this work?

Communication is key

While doing my gap assessment, I was constantly in touch with different areas of the business. Fact-finding and building relationships with those I knew I needed to influence and work with. Don’t feel like the gap assessment needs to be done in isolation. People are usually very forthcoming with information, reasons why things hadn’t been done already and possible mitigations.

It’s crucial to involve the teams you’re reporting gaps within. First and foremost, they’ll have much more detail than you do. You should also approach a gap assessment delicately. People don’t like it when you call their baby ugly!

Collaborating with teams will give you an initial idea of how difficult a solution is to implement or when teams or business areas can collaborate with you to deliver a solution.

A gap assessment isn’t a once-and-done thing. It was important to timebox the initial assessment, or I could still be finding gaps to this day! Creating a process to review and add new gaps regularly kept my strategy fresh and positioned me to continuously improve. We’re never done with this stuff.

Writing project plans

Once I did my gap assessment, I knew what I needed to deliver as part of my strategy. Next, I engaged senior leaders and the stakeholders identified in my gap assessment to run through it all. There was a lot of back and forth about mitigations, but that is precisely what I wanted.

People are far more likely to buy into something if they’re involved and their ideas are heard. I’m acutely aware that I am one opinion and a set of ideas, and those ideas are not always the best ones.

When everyone was aligned on some deliverables, I was able to create some project plans. Having project plans will give you a high-level idea of how much work you have to do and how long it might take.

I’ve seen incredibly detailed project plans, but I kept mine relatively high-level with some milestones included. In my experience, things rarely run to plan anyway, and some of the things I’d never done before, so I wasn’t sure exactly how long it would take.

For example, I’ve never procured a supplier to supply braille grades one and two for critical information. Scoping what information is ‘critical’ and what isn’t would be monumental. My assumption was that it would take around a year.

Creating a roadmap

Once I had all my project plans containing some lower-level details, I could begin prioritising a roadmap. This part involved senior people and any stakeholders. We looked at each thing, taking into account things like:

legal and regulatory requirements
the effort to deliver vs impact on customers
quick wins, especially those with the most significant customer impact

Some things were completely deprioritised at this point. An example was something with very low customer impact and no legal, regulatory, or industry standard requirements that would cost millions to implement.

It wasn’t worth it to the company, and that is fine. You won’t get everything your way; celebrate the things you do get prioritised.

My initial roadmap contained around twenty-five deliverables spanning nearly three years of effort to deliver. Many quick wins were to be delivered first, with longer, more strategic items coming later when teams could align their resources to support the delivery.

When road mapping, I advise factoring in things outside the roadmap when estimating how long something will take. Things will always crop up outside of what you’re meant to do. You could use the 60:20:20 method.

60% of your time is spent working on planned work
20% of your time is working on unplanned work (i.e. ‘can you just’)
20% of your time is spent on debt (improving processes, documentation, etc.)

I cannot stress to you how important having a roadmap is for our work. It’s particularly useful to manage burnout. We work in a profession where the ‘can you just’ requests rack up very quickly. Having a roadmap helps you and your team understand what you’re meant to be working on versus what you should be prioritising at a different stage of your roadmap.

The accessibility strategy

By this point, you’ll have the details you need to write a solid accessibility strategy. I recommend reading Craig Abbott’s article on defining an accessibility strategy. I wax lyrical about Craig’s work a lot because it’s brilliant. I have implemented Craig’s approach around culture, compliance and education as three strategic pillars. It works beautifully in practice.

From here on out, it’s rolling up the details to a higher level in a strategy document. You can roll it up further into a nice deck you can share. You’ll be able to demonstrate the what, how and when in detail.

It took me around six months to get to a point where I was ready to write a strategy. I found that starting with the low level detail and progressively rolling it up made writing the strategy itself straightforward and easy (especially if you follow Craig’s article!).

I hope this has been somewhat useful, and as always I’m keen to hear any feedback or ideas about how you’ve approached getting to an accessibility strategy.

Five things I've learned working in digital accessibility

2023-08-03T00:00:00Z

I’ve been working in digital accessibility for around eight years now. I began my journey as a front-end developer and have since led accessibility teams and set the strategic direction for organisations around accessibility and inclusion. Here are five things I’ve learned on my journey.

Moving the needle is hard

I haven’t met anyone who wants to go out of their way to exclude disabled people. Most people want to do what is right, but the problem with most organisations I’ve worked for is that accessibility is considered too late in the product development lifecycle.

It’s often a tickbox exercise at the end of the process. Teams will build a thing, and as long as it’s WCAG compliant, it is considered accessible. When I worked at HMRC, my team began usability testing as part of the accessibility auditing process. What ended up happening is that teams would ignore the usability issues entirely.

I put this down to two reasons, we decided not to mark usability issues as must-fix and instead chose to tell teams they should fix them. Taking this approach gave teams an out. And the second reason is that usability issues often involve redesigning pages and journeys rather than minor technical fixes. Because the thing was ready for release, redesigning entire parts of a journey wasn’t possible.

Digital accessibility at scale is complicated, especially in larger organisations. This is because while you might succeed in introducing, let’s say, auditing, I have yet to work for a single organisation where it wasn’t done right at the end.

Because the audit was done right at the end, it usually means that teams will drop any fails on an accessibility report into their backlogs and hope nobody ever mentions them again.

I read something recently that said over seventy per cent of accessibility issues could be avoided in the design phase of a project. My personal opinion is that accessibility begins with user research. Getting disabled people (ones who use your product or service) involved in your research will provide infinitely more value than an audit.

So why isn’t this the standard approach? Anecdotally speaking, there are a few issues. One is culture. It is challenging to change the culture of an organisation, especially larger organisations. I’ve had great success with the culture at Monzo, but it’s a much smaller organisation. And even still, when you think you’ve cracked the culture, you’ve usually only cracked some pockets of people.

Another reason is that people don’t know enough about accessibility. People think screen readers and blind people. But it’s much more nuanced than that, and it can be overwhelming for people. Much of my role is educating people, and it’s a constant effort. The second you stop talking about accessibility is when people stop caring about it.

I also need to balance not completely overwhelming people and giving them the information they need to succeed in their roles. Give them too much, and they’ll be spooked, give them too little, and they won’t give it the respect it deserves.

If you’re walking into a role expecting to deliver transformative change, you’ll probably not get it. Get comfortable with small wins, and celebrate them when you get them. Accessibility is cross-cutting, and getting everyone bought in is nigh-on impossible.

Frustration is part of the job

The last eight years of my life have been some of the most frustrating of my career. There have been many, many days where I’ve wanted to give up. If you’re considering working as an accessibility specialist, you must have thick skin. You must also like the sound of your voice because you will say the same stuff repeatedly.

For me, this has primarily been down to where accessibility fits within the product lifecycle. If your company does it at the end, you’ll be constantly frustrated. Seeing project managers point up a ticket for a label not associated with an input as three days of work is some of the most frustrating shit I’ve ever seen.

Here are some other classics you will encounter:

thinking you have buy-in but not actually having the buy-in.
teams claiming to have fixed their accessibility issues, despite not fixing them at all.
seeing the same fails over and over again.
“But disabled people don’t use our thing.” multiple times a week.
“We didn’t have time to make it accessible.”
being looped in at the very last minute. Every single time. With them expecting a silver bullet.

My advice would be to focus on proactive consultancy. How soon can you get involved? The sooner, the better. I appreciate it’s not always possible to resource the level of commitment you’d need to do this successfully. Having your team available to support teams from the get-go or at regular intervals will yield much better results and hopefully reduce the amount of auditing you need.

What processes can you piggyback on? Does your org have design and content crits? Get a seat at the table. What other ceremonies can you infiltrate? Use existing processes and embed into them. I’ve had a lot of success doing this.

The perfectly accessible thing to everyone doesn’t exist

I remember when I first took an interest in accessibility. I wanted to fix everything for everyone. Who wouldn’t? It took me a few years to realise that I’d never be able to do that. The perfectly accessible thing to everyone doesn’t exist, and I’d call the person who claims their thing is fully accessible a liar. We’re always excluding someone, and you know what? That’s fine.

For me, accessibility is making things work for more people. Gareth Ford-Williams said brilliantly, “Start with who you’re willing to exclude”. Getting my head around this concept took me a while, but it works. If you’re building a bank, you can safely exclude three-year-olds. Create a list of people who you’re willing to exclude, and whatever you’re left with is who you need to make it accessible for.

The same can be said about user research. If you’re creating a terms of service page with a lot of content, you should consider researching those with ADHD or dyslexia. Who is most likely to be impacted by the thing we’re building? Focus on those people. Bringing in a token blind person who doesn’t even use your product will not give as good outcomes.

The standards and tools will only take you so far

Young, naive Shaun thought that compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines meant that the product or service was accessible. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know I speak a lot about this. WCAG is a technical standard that has somehow slid into company processes and is used to measure how accessible something is. I’m not saying WCAG is useless because it isn’t. It should be viewed as a floor, not a ceiling, to gauge accessibility.

WCAG compliance is a good start, but WCAG itself is, ironically, relatively inaccessible. It’s open to interpretation and doesn’t cover cognitive accessibility. I can develop something compliant but inaccessible very easily. I’ve said it a few times, but testing with real users will give you much better outcomes than complying with a technical standard.

The same can be said about the various automated accessibility tools. When used together, they will find around forty per cent of accessibility issues. They’re definitely useful, but you can’t automate your way to disability inclusion. Test with real users.

Burnout is real

I’m not the first to talk about burnout and accessibility. I’ve seen many others talking about it too. Craig Abbott did a brilliant podcast recently, and burnout was a topic of discussion. I have personally been burned out this year. I ended up off sick because of it. For me, burnout happened for a lot of reasons, but here are a few:

I was a single point of contact/failure for all things accessibility for an entire organisation
My job description covered about five different jobs
I tried to help too many people/teams
I was dejected because I hold myself to super high standards that I couldn’t meet because I never had time to think, let alone do my best work

Accessibility is not one person’s job, but too often, accessibility specialists are either one person or tiny teams. I’ve only ever worked at one place where there was a big accessibility team, and it worked beautifully. Recognising burnout is so important, if you’re in this line of work, please look after your mental health, it can be a tough ride.

One thing I’ve gotten better with over time is not trying to do too much. I accept I can’t do everything and be everywhere. I accept small wins, and I celebrate them when they happen. We’d all love to do more and achieve more, but ultimately it burns you out. Falling out of love with something I’m passionate about is non-negotiable to me. I was almost there, and it sucked!

Closing thoughts

This post ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be. But I hope there are some lessons others can learn. Despite saying that working in accessibility is really frustrating, it is also the most rewarding job I’ve ever done. Seeing the penny drop is the best feeling for me. When you see people ‘get it’.

I’ve achieved a lot in the last eight years. I’m immensely proud of my work and feel privileged to have educated thousands of colleagues over this time. Seeing changes you suggest make it into production or seeing a team U-turn on a design decision is so fulfilling, knowing the impact it will have on real people.

Working in accessibility is very rewarding…once you get past all the bullshit. And don’t get me wrong, attitudes towards accessibility have improved ten-fold over the years, but it’s still vastly underfunded!

Setting up an accessibility empathy lab

2022-11-23T00:00:00Z

An accessibility empathy lab can be a powerful tool to help build empathy and understanding towards the challenges that disabled people are up against in the digital world. Empathy labs can also really help educate people on the role they can play in influencing and making services accessible.

In this blog, I will cover what an empathy lab is, the benefits of having one, the downsides of simulating disability, and how you can start your own, including links to all the equipment and useful posters.

Let’s talk numbers

There are 66 million people currently living in the United Kingdom. 21% of the population have a long term illness, impairment or disability.

Disability percentages by age:

17% of people are disabled at birth
11% of children are disabled
24% of working age people are disabled
45% of over 64s are disabled

The 5 most common impairments in the United Kingdom:

26% have a dexterity impairment
14% have a hearing impairment
13% have a learning difficulty
12% have a vision impairment
10% have dyslexia

75% of disabled people have more than one impairment, and 390,000 people in the United Kingdom are both deaf and blind. 1.15 million disabled Britons have never gone online or used the internet before, and 9 out of 10 jobs in the future will require some digital skills.

Hopefully, you’re starting to understand why we must raise more awareness, build empathy and empower people who may not think they can impact accessibility to take action. An empathy lab is a positive step in the right direction for making this happen.

What is an accessibility empathy lab?

An accessibility empathy lab is a place where people can come to learn about some of the challenges that that disabled people may face online. You can get hands on with various bits of equipment that help to demonstrate various barriers that exist for a disabled person.

Benefits of an accessibility empathy lab

Having an empathy lab can really get the conversation flowing around accessibility. There is a misconception that I have observed among groups that visit our empathy lab that accessibility is just screen readers. Accessibility, particularly in the public sector (where we’re legally required to make things accessible) is misunderstood…a lot.

Teams are often gobsmacked once they get hands-on with some of the kit. I always ask about family or friends who may have disabilities; of course, they’re never far away, which helps deepen that empathy.

The empathy lab has been a product of empowerment for my team. We always ask before our sessions the context in which the groups are visiting us work. This means on the day, we can provide valuable accessibility advice based on what they’re working on.

Too often, people think that accessibility isn’t part of their role, but having an empathy lab can help change those perceptions and send people away feeling empowered to do more. I will always give people information and useful things they can do as part of their role whilst they’re visiting the lab that will have a direct impact on accessibility.

The unintended negative consequences of disability simulations

As rightly pointed out by Matthew Deeprose on Twitter, this post should also touch on the harm of simulating disability in more detail. Crip for a Day: The Unintended Negative Consequences of Disability Simulations is a peer reviewed research paper looking at just that.

For the first time, across disabled and non-disabled participants in field and laboratory experiments, simulating disabilities increased negative emotions and self-ascribed disability stereotypes while heightening feelings of empathetic concern (warmth) toward disabled people as a group. Both experiments left people feeling more confused, anxious, embarrassed, helpless, and more vulnerable to becoming disabled themselves.

Our studies reaffirm these recommendations with evidence establishing the detrimental impacts of disability simulation for emotional well-being, self-stereotypes, and interaction attitudes.

Matthew sent another fantastic article Empathy Cannot Sustain Action in Technology Accessibility

We don’t wait to put security into a product until we have an empathy exercise where I come in and steal your wallet so you can feel what it feels like to have your money go away, and now you care and you’ll build in security. But… that’s still how we treat accessibility

It goes without saying, that spending time with and hearing about the lived experiences of disabled people is far more potent than an empathy lab, so if you have the resources available to do this, please do.

Real inclusion happens when we hire disabled people and research, design and iterate with them. This would also mitigate the need for an empathy lab, but many orgs aren’t there yet, unfortunately.

What kit is in an accessibility empathy lab?

The kit is a big part of what makes an empathy lab, it helps the sessions be as engaging as possible.

Simulation glasses

We have simulation glasses that people can try on that simulate various visual impairments such as cataracts, tunnel vision and blurred vision. People are often astounded at how difficult or, in some cases, impossible it is to see whilst using some of the glasses.

Buy simulation glasses

Ear defenders

We bought ear defenders, which help people to experience what it is like to have severe hearing loss. We have an exercise we ask people to try and complete on one of our laptops containing a video without subtitles. It’s tough!

Buy ear defenders

Simulation gloves

The Cambridge simulation gloves provide insight into how limitations in hand movement can affect product use. Such limitations can be caused by various conditions such as arthritis. The gloves can build empathy with users and can be used to examine the accessibility of products and services, helping to create better, more inclusive designs.

Buy simulation gloves

Laptops running a virtual persona simulation

My team members developed a virtual simulation that uses the accessibility personas created by the Government Digital Service accessibility team. These were enhanced to use JavaScript to, for example, hijack the mouse to simulate tremors, or jumble text on the screen to simulate dyslexia. Some personas also require using assistive technology.

A simulation is never an accurate representation of an impairment. It’s only a tool to make some things roughly as tricky for someone without that impairment.

Accessibility posters

Our empathy lab contains the Home Office Digital accessibility posters. These brilliant resources contain dos and don’ts for designing for users with various disabilities.

Closing thoughts

Buying the kit for your empathy lab is the easiest part of developing a lab as a product. As with everything accessibility, it takes constant work. My team and I are always shouting about the empathy lab, trying to bring people in.

Fortunately, over the last few months, the interest in our lab has taken off, and as a result, we’ve bought kit in multiple office locations and even got a mobile setup too! To stop the sessions running too quickly, I found that asking what the teams are working on beforehand, then delivering a presentation to them on the basics of accessibility within the context of their work, really made them more engaged and able to walk away with new skills to support their roles.

Having an active empathy lab allows you to understand some of the problems that people face across the wider business (if you’re from a large org), or on teams you may not be aware of. The sessions are always well recieved and they’re fun to run, too!

There’s a real appetite from people to learn more about accessibility, sometimes they just don’t know where to start. An empathy lab provides a foot in the door for those people to connect with your accessibility specialists so they can build their knowledge and understanding. Our accessibility advocates network has grown significantly off the back of empathy lab engagement, and it’s refreshing to see!

If you have your own empathy lab I’d be really interested to hear about it. If you have any feedback on this post, you can find let me know over on Twitter. This is my first time writing a blog, so looking for some tips on how I can improve!

Sconner.net

Ideas for Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)

Events and workshops

Host a talk, webinar or panel discussion

Run workshops

Community enagegement

Social media campaigns

Blog posts or articles

Host a podcast

Host a Q&A session

Host listening sessions

Call to action

Carry out an accessibility audit of your website, documents or office space to identify areas for improvement

Launch some training

Host a hackathon

Establish an accessibility champions network

Look out for events that your team can attend

Volunteer your time

Mastering job applications

Understanding how your application is scored

Understanding the supporting information or cover letter

The importance of structure

Other things to consider

Format your text so it’s easy for me to read

Stop using acronyms

I’m less interested in your brilliant vocabulary and more interested in your brilliant work

You can’t see the forest for the trees

Follow instructions

Don’t let big job descriptions put you off

Wrapping up

Getting to an accessibility strategy

Understanding the problem

Gap analysis

1. Documenting the gap

2. What is the impact?

3. Identifying and understanding risks

4. Possible mitigations

5. Who are the stakeholders?

6. Reporting, monitoring and process development

Communication is key

Writing project plans

Creating a roadmap

The accessibility strategy

Five things I've learned working in digital accessibility

Moving the needle is hard

Frustration is part of the job

The perfectly accessible thing to everyone doesn’t exist

The standards and tools will only take you so far

Burnout is real

Closing thoughts

Setting up an accessibility empathy lab

Let’s talk numbers

What is an accessibility empathy lab?

Benefits of an accessibility empathy lab

The unintended negative consequences of disability simulations

What kit is in an accessibility empathy lab?

Simulation glasses

Ear defenders

Simulation gloves

Laptops running a virtual persona simulation

Accessibility posters

Closing thoughts