Listen To Everyone - Follow No One

Does anybody else find it tiresome how quickly new products come on the market that claim to solve the latest web headache? “Track your twitter followers quicker!” “Gain better insights into the women who liked your FB updates recently!” “Discover what really makes those Pinterest fanatics tick tick tick.” “Engage with more people.” “Jump on this bandwagon.” “Look at all the shiny colours.” “Like me.” “Love me.” “Follow me.” “Connect with me.” It can become quite pain in the fundament.

If you kick your hexadecimal ball into my accessible garden you’re not getting it back.

But as the emphasis has been placed on speed, instant gratification and getting the next big thing now, I feel that something is missing. I work in the field of inclusive technology, particularly the creation and provision of accessible educational materials. In a personal setting, I am extremely interested in creating experiences and environments that foster inclusion and promote discussion on something that has always fascinated me - human nature and the human spirit. And I believe that accessibility is quite often pushed to the end of the design process; an afterthought, a tick-the-box exercise. And whose fault is this? It’s mine. It’s yours. Mainstream designers and accessible technology specialists have grown apart; happy to remain on opposite sides of the wall and if you do ask for our advice on the proverbial ball, we’ll promptly puncture it before restitching so it can be played on every possible surface imaginable.

“Where did I leave my padding-bottom?”

The current buzzword in application design and development for the last while is “mobile-first” - i.e. focus on the mobile experience from the get-go and work your way up to a desktop environment. It’s a more fluid process to code for smaller viewports and build your code up rather than adding in media queries after initial CSS markup and subsequently deleting repetitive lines of code thereafter. IBM released a statement last year that 90% of mobile users keep their device within arms reach 100% of the time. I can well believe it. But another important factor is making your content appealing to the widest array of users and potential customers via mindful inclusive practices. If this is moved from the final step of the waterfall design mentality to a ubiquitous part of the agile one then so many more web environments and experiences can be transformed overnight.

Looking Forward

I hear a great deal of chatter online at the moment on this very topic. “We should do this.” “We missed the opportunity.” “The big corporations need to see that there was benefits to using 24 px sans-serif font on their landing page with ARIA role=”navigation” on the navbar. You tell them sonny!”I could be totally wrong but I’ve heard these points raised since 2010 in various settings and it seems like it’s the same people talking about the same stuff they were 5 years ago …….

Snooze. Fest …..

It’s the designers and coders and project managers who are the ones who understand the complexities and intricate nature of moulding a digital product into something that can be enjoyed by everyone of any ability.  If you complain, it’s called criticism. If you complain systematically, then it’s called testing. Stop talking about what could be done and actually go out and do it.

And fear not, fellow users. Trying something new won’t break the internet. Bend it? Maybe. Piss a few people off? Possibly.  But hey, if we’re right we’ll know it and if we’re wrong we can fix it.