I’m often thinking about new angles. New ways of phrasing or framing why accessibility is important. Here’s one I’m liking at the moment.
A human
does a thing.
That’s it! A big part of doing accessibility work is bringing it back to the person and the task. The human doing the thing.
Working on the web, we can maybe be a little more specific.
A human
using technology
does a thing.
One example could be:
A human
using Safari on a Mac with a trackpad
does a thing.
That’s a specific set of tech that a human might be using to do a thing. But as soon as we start poking at that, we can see that there’s a lot of possible variation. Here are some ideas that come to mind:
A human
using Safari / Chrome / Firefox / Edge
on Mac / Windows / Linux / iOS / Android
with a mouse / trackpad / keyboard
on a desktop / laptop / tablet / phone
in light mode / dark mode
does a thing.
Wow! That’s a lot. And that’s not even touching on an accessibility-specific stuff. How about this?
A human
with smaller / larger text size
using ZoomText
in high contrast mode
using voice control / voice assistant
using JAWS / NVDA / VoiceOver / TalkBack
does a thing.
But whatever browser or Operating System or input device or assistive technology someone is using, it comes back to the same thing. We’re designing and developing these things so that:
A human
using technology
can do a thing.
When we don’t do a good job of making accessible things, we can create mismatched interactions that lead to barriers to access. We stop a human from doing a thing!