In June 2020, I had the option to renew my DL online, as it was. Or go in person to make any changes. At the time, we were still a year away from a COVID vaccine so I chose the physically safer option. But today, the wait was over. I was able to quickly change my gender designation to nonbinary. And update my photograph (my hair color and eyeglasses have changed 5 or 6 times in the last 8 years).
Since my last drivers license renewal, I’ve also been formally diagnosed with Autism and ADHD.
Studies suggest that individuals with gender and sexual identities outside the cis-hetero binary were also three to six times more likely to have a diagnosis of autism.
The Swaddle: The Link Between Neurodivergence and Queerness, Explained
This all serves to help me understand myself and feel more confident in myself. Happy Pride, all!
When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described “hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn’s disease and tinnitus,” there was no returning to “normal.” Suddenly well-meaning people called her an “inspiration” while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don’t want what the abled assume they want—nor are they generally asked. Almost everyone will experience disability at some point in their lives, yet the abled persistently frame disability as an individual’s problem rather than a social one.
Skipping back to October, a couple of significant things occurred. After years of wondering, I was formally diagnosed with autism and ADHD. On the same day I had my final session with my fantastic clinician, a book I pre-ordered arrived. And, in the most ADHD move ever, another copy of the same book showed up the next day. Apparently, I’d pre-ordered it two days in a row without realizing it. That book was Unmasked: The Ultimate Guide to ADHD, Autism and Neurodivergence by Ellie Middleton. Thankfully, I was able to give the second copy to a friend who has been pondering her own neurodivergence.
“Learning the way my brain works has changed everything for me,” she says, and describes herself as almost being a poster girl for what can happen when you get the answers you need.
Somehow it’s already November. But every October, it is National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM). This celebrates the contributions of America’s workers with disabilities. And showcases supportive, inclusive employment policies and practices that benefit employers and employees. The Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) chose “Advancing Access and Equity” as the theme for NDEAM 2023.
I shared these resources within my company at our monthly Accessibility Community of Practice meeting:
I also shared the good news that civil rights litigator Karla Gilbride was sworn at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The role was vacant as she waited a year and a half to be confirmed. She will lead the EEOC’s critical litigation efforts on behalf of workers accusing their employers of discrimination based on race, sex, age, disability, and other characters. Gilbride is blind and the first person with a known disability in the role of general counsel at the EEOC. This is in line with our “Nothing About Us Without Us” motto and I’m glad of it.
It is springtime in Minnesota. Which means we reached a high of 88° one April afternoon, then it snowed just days later. Despite the wildly fluctuating weather, I feel the urge to purge. I’ve tossed piles of junk mail in the recycling bin. Winter sweaters will be moved to storage (soon, I hope). Other items will be given away via our local Buy Nothing group. I may not go the full Marie Kondo method with my tidying, but controlling clutter in my physical space makes me feel better, mentally. You know what else sparks joy for me? Accessible content!
Recently, WebAIM released their annual report on the most popular 1,000,000 home pages on the web. 96.3% of them detected WCAG 2 failures. And that’s just what automated testing found. Manual testing would likely reveal many more.
Across the one million home pages, 49,991,225 distinct accessibility errors were detected—an average of 50.0 errors per page.
Many of those pages may not be relevant anymore and could be retired. Or portions of their content are likely out of date. Clean it up! Disability and accessibility expert Sheri Byrne-Haber has a great post about this:
Sometimes the best way to make something #accessible is to get rid of it.
I wrote an article about this a while back – the very first thing accessibility leaders should think about when tackling remediation is “do we need this at all?”
– Do we need this graphic / table? – Do we need this CAPTCHA? – Do we need this 17 year old inaccessible report that no one ever opens – Do we need a press release on the election of someone to the board that is no longer on the board?
Don’t pack all your content indiscriminately and move it over to the new accessible template. Go through a cleanup first, and just bring the valuable content over that your users still need.
There’s more on her website. Her blog post Starting a new accessibility remediation project? outlines helpful “approaches and prioritization that will make your end goal of an accessible website easier and cheaper.” As someone who has been involved in many, many content migration projects, I fully back this approach. The most successful ones only ported what was still purposeful. Content that has been removed doesn’t need to be remediated. Unnecessary content is a distraction. Inaccessible content can be a blocker. Slimming websites down to the essentials will reduce cognitive load, making them more usable for everyone. Ditch that carousel no one clicks through. Get rid of that busy graphic. Embrace the joys of minimalism.
In 2018, the United Nations issued a proclamation declaring January 4th to be World Braille Day, on the anniversary of Louis Braille’s birth. Read more about his life on this page with 19 Fascinating Facts About Louis Braille. We celebrate him now as someone determined to invent a system of reading and writing to bridge the gap in communication between the sighted and the blind. In his own words:
Access to communication in the widest sense is access to knowledge, and that is vitally important for us if we [the blind] are not to go on being despised or patronized by condescending sighted people. We do not need pity, nor do we need to be reminded we are vulnerable. We must be treated as equals – and communication is the way this can be brought about.
Braille is a tactile representation of alphabetic and numerical symbols using six dots to represent each letter and number, and even musical, mathematical and scientific symbols. Braille (named after its inventor in 19th century France, Louis Braille) is used by blind and partially sighted people to read the same books and periodicals as those printed in a visual font.
Braille is essential in the context of education, freedom of expression and opinion, as well as social inclusion.
Braille has come a long way since the 1800s. Now there are refreshable braille displays — computer hardware which has a series of refreshable, or fluid, braille cells on its surface.
Braille displays provide access to information on a computer screen by electronically raising and lowering different combinations of pins in braille cells. A braille display can show up to 80 characters from the screen and is refreshable—that is, it changes continuously as the user moves the cursor around on the screen, using either the command keys, cursor routing keys, or Windows and screen reader commands. The braille display sits on the user’s desk, often underneath the computer keyboard. The advantages of braille displays over synthetic speech are that it provides direct access to information; allows the user to check format, spacing, and spelling; and is quiet.
It’s a bit like carrying around an e-book vs lugging around boxes and boxes of books. Though this equipment is still expensive, it is becoming more affordable as the technology advances.
However, more needs to be done. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not mandate the inclusion of braille lettering on pharmaceutical drug packaging. In many cases, these examples are the exception rather than the rule. I want inclusive communication, in all forms, to become the norm.
The annual global event, World Usability Day, will be observed on Thursday, November 10th, 2022. I’m slated to deliver accessibility training to international colleagues that day, so I’ll be missing my local UXPA MN event but I’m a big fan. World Usability Day is a single day of events occurring around the world that brings together communities of professional, industrial, educational, citizen, and government groups for a common objective: to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use. The theme for this year’s World Usability Day is “Our Health.”
In our theme “Our Health” we look to explore systems that provide healthcare in all its many forms such as virtual/telehealth, electronic health records, healthcare products and all digital health related solutions. This theme will help us explore timely and important issues such as continuity of care, access to treatment, telemedicine, systems for mental health, exercise, nutrition and many more. In addition, Our Health includes health problems related to environmental issues such as air and water pollution impact on health.
If the UN recognizes usability as a core digital technology value, this will create an awareness of HCI/UX at the policy making level, increase the public engagement with the investment in user experience, potentially lead to a global impact, and let usability do its part for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Writer, disability-justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha knows that it’s possible for society to become more equitable. They envision a future in which “people are free to be, regardless of their ability to fit into capitalist institutions.”
I’m excited by the work of activists like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. And their latest book that “lays out a bare-bones agenda for what is needed to make the U.S. more socially just: affordable, available and accessible housing; healthcare and pharmacare; a universal basic income for all residents; free, high-quality public education programs; and the elimination of punitive policing and incarceration.” A resounding YES PLEASE to all of it!
Unfortunately, the systems in place are resistant to change. Instead, those in power propose much smaller, incremental tweaks. For example, recently the State Department announced the finalization of their Five-year Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Strategic Plan. Don’t get me wrong, this more intersectional approach is a step in the right direction. But it will only protect federal employees. Only 20% of people with disabilities are employed, compared to 64% of non-disabled people, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a huge gap. Only 4% of DEI initiatives include disability and that’s just in organizations that even have a DEI initiative. Most companies don’t have their disabled employees or customers in mind. A perfect example came from the amazing Meryl Evans. Yesterday she posted about her experience with an Apple Watch, and more.
“People with disabilities can bring a lot more to your team than what you see on their resumes.
They have an uncanny ability to come up with innovative ideas and solutions. Feeling excluded has a way of driving people with disabilities.
For instance, I never wanted an Apple Watch. I hadn’t worn a watch in years. A friend convinced me to try it. It made my life as a deaf person easier!
How? It became an accessibility tool.
It buzzes when cooked food is ready. No more overcooked food! It buzzes when someone is at the door. No more packages sitting on the porch for stealing. No more leaving my sister stranded on my doorstep when she dropped by unexpectedly.
No one advertises these benefits. Apple never marketed it that way. If they had, they may have gotten more buyers and fans.
These are examples of how someone who is different from you can innovate and come up with creative solutions.
We don’t always click when we meet someone. This isn’t because of a bad interview. We tend to click with those most like us. You’ll gain more when hiring someone different from you.
The thought of creating a more accessible hiring process feels overwhelming. Just start. How can you get started?
– Ask every candidate what accessibility they require. – Verify the online application process is accessible for keyboard-only navigation and works with screen readers.
These are starting points. Keep working on it and adding more pieces. Progress over perfection. Just start.”
Again, yes to all of these things! I’m neurodivergent and have an auditory processing disorder. I wear noise-canceling headphones a good portion of the day. The Apple Watch’s haptic feedback has made my life so much easier too. And I want that for others. There’s so much we could do, as a society, to improve the quality of life for our fellow humans. But the pace of change is moving too slowly. More people are being forced to survive with less…while profit margins are on the rise for those at the top. We could all be thriving instead.
September is id24 time! I didn’t think of it in time this year, but I have gotten approval to have my employer support the conference in 2023. For now, I will follow along September 21st into September 22nd.
The inspiration behind Inclusive Design 24 (#id24) was to bring together the global community to share knowledge and ideas without the difficulties of attending a traditional conference. From the beginning, #id24 has only been possible because of the community. It took just three weeks to organise the first conference, and everyone gave their time generously. We had no budget, but many respected and notable people gladly agreed to give a talk because they wanted to help.
Occasionally people outside of my field ask me to explain digital accessibility. I like to break it down to the basics. It’s about communication. About ensuring people can access information, unhindered. There’s a lot more nuance to it, of course. Especially with the minutiae involved in making that happen. But providing a few common examples usually gets the point across. For example, say you built a desktop web page. And users can only identify a link by hovering over it with a mouse or activating the link by clicking on it. Then people who use keyboards without a mouse will be unable to access the links. Likewise, for visually impaired and blind folks who use screen readers, an image on its own isn’t going to be useful. Unless that image is paired with a decent description of it.
Alt Text
A couple of things are on my mind today. First, alternative text on twitter. A while back, I started following the AltTxtReminder account. If you follow that account, you will automatically receive a direct message letting you know when you’ve posted an image without alt text. Twitter doesn’t allow editing published tweets, but one option is to quickly delete the tweet and recreate it with alt text. I think AltTxtReminder is a wonderful service but the account only has about 20,000 followers. A drop in the bucket considering there are close to 400 million twitter users. Today, Twitter officially began rolling out a similar feature. Twitter announced that this feature has been pushed to 10% of global users. Pretty neat.
Fun with Captions
First off, captions are designed for viewers who cannot hear the audio in a video. Subtitles are designed for viewers who can hear but do not understand the language being spoken in the video. I see these terms being used interchangeably. As in this fun write-up: Wet Writhing and Eldritch Gurgling: A Chat With the Stranger Things Subtitles Team. I’m a fan of the show and I’m glad other folks who enjoy it are getting a kick out of the captions. But sometimes less is more. I follow Deaf accessibility professional Meryl Evans on LinkedIn and Twitter and find her posts to be insightful.
If I notice the captions, it’s usually a sign that there’s a problem. I noticed them in Season 4, Chapter 5. There were too many sound captions. It took away from the show.
Imagine watching a baseball game and the captions show [thwack] every time someone hits the ball or [blip] when the ball lands in a glove. That would weigh down the viewing of the game.
Every sound does not need captioning. Just like when we describe images in alt text, the key is to describe them in context to the content. We don’t describe every single detail, only the key points.
The key is to answer: What sound is important to the story that may not be obvious from visuals?
I got this minifig with a wheelchair and I was so excited like “ooh look at this representation” but turns out it’s also a representation of accessibility issues bc the wheelchair doesn’t fit through the door frames.
The Good: Not directly related to accessibility, but positive news nonetheless — Google and Figma are bringing Figma to education chromebooks. Figma has some accessibility issues of its own, but it is an incredibly robust tool that can be used to design accessible, reusable components in design systems. When I teach the front-end website design class at Minneapolis College, I tell my students that Figma is like Google Docs for design. And have them use it to build design briefs, mood boards, and mockups as I talk about how Figma can be used to promote accessibility.
The Bad: I spend a significant amount of time listening to podcasts. Unfortunately, even many of my favorite podcasters have not invested the time to make their podcasts more accessible. It could be that they are unaware of the need to do so, or how to go about it. Recently, someone in my network shared a great resource intended to help podcasters.
Your podcast should be accessible. But what does that mean, exactly? Why should you care? What can you do to improve the accessibility?
The Ugly: I’m solidly GenX. When I was growing up, I would have been awed to know that one day I would have a powerful computer in my pocket — or hand — at all times. But I also recognize the inherent danger of smartphones. And now a study bears that out.
Apple CarPlay, Android Auto distract drivers more than pot, alcohol, says study: A new study says driver reaction times using this tech were worse than motorists with alcohol or cannabis in their system.
