Accessibility can be defined as the qualities that make an experience open or usable (specifically for people with disabilities). Accessibility is often spelled as “a11y” for short.
The medical model of disability frames disabilities and impairments as aspects of a human that can be researched, cured and eliminated. This has been the prominent view of disability for much of human history for many types of disabilities. The social model of disability contends that disability arises from how society is structured around a normative expectation of human behavior. Instead of attempting to cure or eliminate disabilities, the social model says that the ways in which societies are built should change to be more inclusive and accessible.
<aside> 🎒 Consider how the two models have been applied to autism or people with wheelchairs.
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The medical model for blindness might suggest research into ways to cure blindness while the social model would try to make infrastructures more inclusive of people who are blind (e.g., braille translations).
The curb cut effect is the idea that features that are designed to help people with disabilities are often beneficial for non-disabled people as well. For example, curb cuts (i.e., ramp cutouts in the middle of a curb) were intended to help people with wheelchairs get on top of a curb, but are commonly used by walking pedestrians. Further examples include closed captioning and alternative text. This effect falls under the more general concept of universal design — that designers should build to be as accessible as possible.
Relatedly, we can broaden the scope of accessibility and disability by considering situational and temporary impairment. When you think of a person who is disabled, you may think of someone who is permanently blind or someone with a missing arm. However, disability need not be permanent — a person can practically have their vision diminished in various situations (e.g., during the night, when the sun is glaring, intoxication, etc.), or a person might not be able to use both of their arms (e.g., a mother holding a baby, someone carrying grocery bags).
The Journey to Accessible Apps, Microsoft
In the expanded definition of accessibility (i.e., the qualities that make an experience open or usable) that includes people who are not disabled, we can frame other aspects that engineers and designers usually already care about. For example, our field often considers performance for people who may not have access to high-bandwidth Internet.
<aside> 💡 We don’t have a good gauge of how many people who consume our content have permanent disabilities. But it matters not the number because of the principle. It is expected (and legally mandatory) that engineers who design and build physical systems such as airplanes and buildings consider accessibility. Software engineers (should) have that same expectation.
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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international standards organization for the Web. The W3C has produced several guidelines for how browsers should understand HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The W3C, through the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guides digital accessibility through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). As a standard, the WCAG continues to be updated, with a new version expected to be finalized in May 2023.
I don’t usually find myself actually looking through the WCAG — the document itself is fairly dense and verbose. That said, WCAG and other W3C pages are trusted sources of truth on accessibility. Here are some other resources I’d recommend looking at:
WPDS - Accessibility | Resources
Pages from Deque University and WebAIM are also trusted. Otherwise, I also find that many universities provide material on accessibility.