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Accessibility and altruism

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I have been working hard to catch up on everything since getting slammed with work a couple months ago. I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel getting back to all the clients and friends who've been reaching out for the last few weeks about things. But in my quest to retain some balance, I've also been doing other important things and not letting them fall quite to the wayside – like this newsletter! 🎉

I'm speaking at WP Accessibility Day with Brian tomorrow and accessibility in general has been on my mind a lot these last couple weeks.

In fact, accessibility – digital accessibility – has been on my mind so much that I wrote a very long note (but really, it's a post) about it last week, filled with thoughts, resources, and rules of thumb I apply.

It's not perfect – in fact, much like any user experience, perfection is not possible, but you can still try, you can still improve, and you can still do what you can to make things user friendly for people.

While writing that note, I wrote something that I keep turning over in my mind:

Doing something for goodness' sake

Let's ignore the conundrum of altruism for a second, and consider that most people talk about accessibility mattering because it's the right thing to do, because we should strive to make the web accessible to all regardless of (dis)ability.

For the most part, when people talk about accessibility, they talk about the benefits it provides to other people, and how we should do x, y, z because we should care about our users.

We should do it because it's good to do. That's what the argument boils down to. And I think it's a wonderful argument.

But not a very practical way to rally people to the cause of accessibility. If that were true, we'd all eat oat bran for breakfast because it's good for our health. And it may be – but it's also boring and yucky.

But what do I get out of it?

And you might say to someone who asks what they get out of it, "why – more users, a larger audience, a happier audience!"

But then that someone might say, "But at what cost?"

Everything we do, we do because we get something out of it. This is as true as the fact that we need oxygen in order to survive. And we are motivated to do things that cost us as little as possible – as little energy, as little effort. We even have a quip for it, "more bang for your buck!"

So when we want to get people onboard with accessibility, wouldn't it be more successful to strengthen our argument with a) what they get out of it by making their work more accessible and b) how they can do it efficiently and cost effectively?

This is why accessibility overlays are popular

I won't get into why accessibility overlays aren't a great solution, smarter people than me have written about it extensively.

But it's easy to understand why they are popular. They seemingly make your website more accessible and all you have to do is pay a little fee and pop a few lines of code onto your server – wham, bam, thank you ma'am.

So how can we make actual accessibility a no-brainer? How can we make being accessible and "altruistic" an economic win, worth the cost, worth the effort?

And perhaps even more importantly, how can we express the advantages and benefits of accessibility in a way that makes expending that effort worth it?

Accessibility: once the developer's vale of shadows

Well, that's a dramatic heading – but what I mean is, there was a time when accessibility was this big unknown, you knew it was important, you knew you had to keep it in mind, but there was no map, no guide, no clear way to learn or understand how to achieve it.

That's not the case anymore. Guides on accessibility are easier to find, there are conferences, blogs, experts, courses, and webinars on the topic spanning all the way from content accessibility to the technical.

Don't get me wrong, we're not there yet. The real win will be when we don't have to talk about accessibility separately from talking about the web in general. When it's so baked into the way we consider and create that people talking about accessibility will be viewed quizzically – like how if someone pitched a talk called "How to use an anchor tag to connect two different pages on the web": you'd nod slowly and wonder what era they came from.

But for now, there's a ton of resources old and new, and it isn't hard to learn it. Creating accessible work is easier than ever and the knowledge you need is more..accessible than ever (what a terrible attempt at a pun). But until creating accessibly makes economic sense, it won't be as prevalent as we like.

Because pitching accessibility as an act of altruism is doing a disservice to accessibility.

Since I last emailed you, I've written a few other "notes" as ideas and thoughts have risen to mind, which you may find interesting:

Developing for the design vs developing for agilityThe conundrum of hourly knowledge workWhat does deliberate practice look like for a developer?

Happy Tuesday, y’all.

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Aurooba Ahmed ​​

113 Cherry St #92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2205
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