Digital Accessibility

https://digitalaccessibility.virginia.edu/non-text-element-accessibility-enhancing-digital-content-all-users-august-30

The workshop was delivered via presentation. The presenter went through some slides and talked about the different non-text elements available and deciding on which ones should have alt-text, but also when the alt-text should be applied.

Reflection

Recently, I took a workshop on digital accessibility. I always wanted to learn more about accessibility as it is often neglected because most people who use the internet are all non-disabled. This mindset towards accessibility, in fact, heavily impacts the ways in which people make the internet and strays from the point that the internet should be usable for all. From the workshop itself, we were taught about the general non-text element functions in HTML to enable screen readers. These were the standard set of aria labels, fig captions, and headers.

What was interesting in particular is that there are design patterns set in place to make the screen reader parse the HTML better. I was kind of glad that even though digital accessibility is heavily neglected, some work is still being done to make the internet marginally better. An example was placing an image in a div with the aria-text saying: please go to header x for more information. Then, the header would contain the actual text for the image. Doing some of my own research, there could be better solutions out there as well, with updates to aria-label.

Besides what I learned about digital accessibility, I want to make the case that designing digital accessibility and building it on the internet will benefit everyone, not only those who are not temporarily non-disabled. Accessibility and usability are mutually beneficial concepts.

Going off that, I want to list technologies that were made to address accessibility but have been used by everyone. Speech technology (car GPS, search results), e-books, and closed captions are a small grouping of the wide variety of everyday technology we gained from addressing accessibility. Just as the wheelchair door button saves you in moments when you are carrying things or extremely tired, practical accessibility implementations may help all users of the internet.

As I researched the topic more, I became disheartened. I knew it was not a major focus because the category of “disabled” is necessarily marginal to a business. That’s why modern disability studies have pushed the term temporary able-bodied against the dichotomy of able vs. disabled. Anyway, accessibility is cool, but there is also a reason why it’s not focused on, but should that be the case?

Citations

Kulkarni, M. (2019). Digital accessibility: Challenges and opportunities. IIMB Management Review, 31(1), 91–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iimb.2018.05.009