I have a lightning talk I deliver internally at my job that's intentionally given to non-accessibility practitioners, so mainly engineers, designers, and product folk.
I've attached the first two slides that set the tone to this post.
The talk is about exploring macOS' Accessibility system preferences. It points out different features, like offline white noise sounds, color filters, and magnification.
It deliberately avoids mentioning VoiceOver, or screen readers in general.
The reason for this is internalized ableism. People don't consider themselves as disabled, so they don't think the accessibility preference area applies to them.
This breaks my heart because there are inevitably comments in the chat along the lines of, "Wow, I had no idea this existed!" and "This is going to be life changing!"
Accessibility preferences are a balancing act, in that with a sufficiently complicated experience you'll likely need categories for you preferences. That is balanced against discovery.
Combined with social factors and this is how someone's ability to self-serve can be impacted.
There is also the situation where a preference that is legitimately an accessibility setting gets promoted to a different category. Think Apple placing setting scrollbars as always visible in its Appearance category.
This is nice in that it side-steps the identity problem, but ironically can also prevent discovery.
Fortunately, there's also a search feature. This is a great example of the spirit of WCAG SC 2.4.5: Multiple Ways.
It aids in discovery, bypasses the tyranny of category, and helps for disability conditions such as cognitive concerns. https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/multiple-ways.html
So, to wrap things up:
* Self-identity can affect your ability to operate technology,
* Accessibility preferences is more than just screen reader modifications,
* Information architecture is tricky, and
* Multiple ways of accessing content is helpful for all.
Why not take a moment to poke around in your OS' accessibility settings if you have a moment? You might find something there that helps you out!
I agree. This would be a great blog post.
As an aside, maybe it's just me, but I often "discover" blog posts this way.
Start writing something shortform here or, previously, on twitter, when that was a thing.
Then there's more.So you reply. To yourself.
Then another. And another.
After a while, you think "I actually have a fair amount to say on this" at which point it becomes v0.1 of a blog post.
@eric I think I've seen discussion about this in games as well. (Probably on ye olde twitter)
Have an accessibility section with settings, or make it an inclusive experience and don't isolate them? I think it was a nice big It Depends™️. But I think "both" was a pretty good starting point.
So it's more of a tag-structure than a category-structure.
@eric Would it be too weird from a UX perspective to allow particular settings to be adjustable from multiple places? I.e. you could have the "scrollbars always visible" setting officially reside under Appearance, but then also have a separate Accessibility section that aggregated the accessibility-related settings regardless of their "official" category?
Obviously it would take some thought to do it right, but that might improve discovery somewhat.
Wow. Those statements are really good. Sometimes I ask myself why I didn't come up with something so obvious and clear.
Thanks.
Eric
Eric Eggert
David O'Brien
Sukil Etxenike
Erik Kroes ✅
Pauxlll Kruczynski
kechpaja
Jens Grochtdreis