Digital Accessibility
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 general attitude towards accessibility heavily impacts the ways in which people make the internet.
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 somewhat glad that, despite digital accessibility being heavily neglected, some work is still being done to make the internet marginally better.
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 able-bodied.” Accessibility and usability are mutually beneficial concepts.
Building on that, I want to list technologies that were designed to address accessibility but have been adopted by everyone. Speech technology, e-books, and closed captions are just a small subset of the everyday technology we have gained from addressing accessibility. Just as the wheelchair door button saves you in moments when you are carrying things or are extremely tired, practical accessibility benefits 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 marginal to a business. That’s why people have pushed the term “temporarily able-bodied’ to get more buy-in. Regardless, digital accessibility is cool and needs to be prioritized a tad bit more.
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