What Is a Disability?

First, it’s important to understand what we mean by the term disability. Disability is defined as a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movements, senses, or activities.¹ The organization that develops the guidelines for digital accessibility, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), considers disabilities ranging from visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, to neurological.

Note that this definition does not consider whether the disability is temporary, momentary, or permanent. A person focused on driving a car is effectively disabled from looking at their smartphone while driving. Similarly, someone without a speech impediment, who speaks to a voice assistant with an accent that the device does not understand, is effectively speech impaired for that interaction.

People also perform movements and activities in response to or because of their environment. It is not necessarily a disability that puts them at a disadvantage but how the world around them is built that prevents them from effectively engaging with it. The WHO (World Health Organization) changed its definition of a disability from a “personal attribute” as it was described in 1980, to include personal and environmental factors.²

This broader understanding of disability helps builders of software products empathize with users who do have permanent disabilities, understand they have the power to change the environment around people with disabilities to make it more friendly, and as a result, build better products for everyone. This definition is also consistent with the social model³ (as opposed to the medical model) of disability, which considers social and environmental factors as limitations instead of a person’s medical condition.

What Is Accessibility? What Is Inclusion? What Is the Difference?

In short, accessibility is the quality of being easy to approach, reach, enter, speak with, use, or understand,⁴ for everyone including people with disabilities. Automatic sliding doors are more accessible to someone with muscular dystrophy than a push handle door. A Kindle is more accessible to someone with glaucoma than a small print book.

The term accessibility is often confused with regulatory compliance or meeting standards set by third parties. The goal of compliance is to ensure that providers meet a minimum set of requirements which do not guarantee a product is usable.

Compliance may be enough legally, but industry-leading products such as the iPhone are not built only to meet minimum requirements. They are loved because they are inclusive, exceed minimum regulatory requirements, and are delightful to use. They exceed customer expectations.

Consider the difference between the two ramps shown in Figures 1-1 and 1-2, both compliant, and yet so very different.⁵

Fun fact: Accessibility is also referred to as a11y in the tech industry. It is pronounced A-Eleven-Y. The 11 stands for the number of characters between the a and the y.

Power in Numbers

Fifteen percent of the world’s population is a significant number. Business leaders and policymakers are coming to understand that it simply makes good business sense for products to be accessible (Figure 1-3). For software businesses, being inaccessible means they are limiting their reach and failing to retain existing customers who with age might develop disabilities.

Why do 97% of the top one million websites still have basic accessibility issues?

One example of this is the need for large tap targets on touch-screen devices. While these will benefit people with motor impairments, partial vision, and cognitive disabilities, they also limit the amount of content that can be displayed on a given screen size. So, for example, users with low vision might need to scroll or scroll more often to access all of the content. In Chapter 7, we will discuss personalization, multimodal interactions, and emerging technologies as potential solutions.

Disability methods, thresholds, and reporting vary widely by country, which is why available global statistics are only approximations. To get a relative sense of the scale and a high-level breakdown of the types of disabilities, we can look at the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC)⁷ statistics for the United States in Figure 1-4.

Summing up the numbers in Figure 1-4 exceeds 15% of the US population. This is because many people have multiple disabilities, and simply summing up people represented in each of the categories would lead to double-counting.

Note that globally, the percentage of people with disabilities is much higher given the differences in nutrition levels, healthcare, social services, etc. According to the World Health Organization, 80% of people with disabilities live in developing countries.⁸

The Rich History of Innovation Inspired by People with Disabilities

When we build products to address the needs of people with disabilities, we almost always end up building better products for everyone. Several mainstream technologies we use today are the result of innovations that were originally built for people with disabilities.

People with disabilities are often some of the most creative problem solvers because they constantly have to navigate a world where large parts simply weren’t built with them in mind.

If this isn’t enough to motivate investment in accessibility, maybe this excerpt from a 2018 Accenture report will be

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy categorizes persons with disabilities as the third-largest market segment in the U.S., after Hispanics and African-Americans. The discretionary income for working-age persons with disabilities is $21 billion—greater than that of the African-American and Hispanic segments combined.¹⁸

Policy and Regulations

This section will explore some of the existing policy frameworks that are widely used by technology companies and regulators as benchmarks for assessing digital accessibility. While the nuances and implementation vary, the spirit of these regulations and guidelines is the same – to establish a baseline for accessibility.

In a landmark decision in October 2019, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of a blind user who sued Domino’s after being unable to order a pizza from their website.¹⁹ The defense lawyers argued that ADA only applied to brick-and-mortar retail stores but not online stores. This was a win for disability advocates who argued that this interpretation was against the spirit of the ADA to provide equal access, and that not applying it to (new) online stores would shut people with disabilities out of a substantial portion of the economy.

Meeting regulatory requirements is a good first step but it is not a replacement for common sense, or enough to meet the real goal of making products delightful and usable for all. In Chapter 4, we’ll cover how individual products can adapt guidelines and frameworks to meet the needs of their users.

But as a first step, it is essential to understand the difference between law, policy, and guidelines applicable to your business. For companies operating in different global markets, requirements might vary, and the best course of action is to check with the respective legal and regulatory teams.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where professional groups, companies, academic experts and industry experts, full-time staff, and the public work together to develop open Web Standards. The Web Accessibility Initiative within W3C develops standards and support materials to help understand and implement accessibility.

While WCAG guidelines are not regulatory requirements, they are commonly referenced by regulatory guidelines as a way to evaluate accessibility. They became the basis for Section 508 in the United States in 2017 and EN 301 549 used in Europe.²⁰ Additionally, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada reference WCAG as the standard for government-related websites. For example, government sites in the United Kingdom must strive for WCAG-level AA compliance.²¹

Since 1990, this civil rights law prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and private places that are open to the general public.

The CVAA makes sure that accessibility laws enacted in the 1980s and 1990s are brought up to date with 21st century technologies, including new digital, broadband, and mobile innovations.²⁴

This includes expanding closed captioning requirements for broadcast TV content to its Internet distribution, and for browsers and advanced communication services²⁵ (ACS) to be accessible by people with disabilities.

This EU directive requires accessibility for all public sector websites. Other significant requirements include providing:

The European accessibility act passed in 2019²⁸ covers products and services that have been identified as being most important for persons with disabilities while being most likely to have diverging accessibility requirements across EU countries.

These products and services include computers and operating systems, smartphones, TV equipment related to digital television services, banking services, ebooks, and ecommerce, among others.

Data collection and privacy limitations vary by the markets, that is, geographies you serve. While these are not directly accessibility regulations, they influence the measurement and tracking of accessibility initiatives in consumer technology products.

Some regions might require special permission from the user. Others might restrict the collection of data or analysis of user behavior on products based on types of disabilities. One example of this in the United States is HIPAA³⁰ that prohibits collection and use of certain health-related data, which can be interpreted to mean disability data.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a law on data protection and privacy in the European Union (EU) that limits the collection of specific categories of personal data and gives users the right to control and manage their data. In certain countries, data related to disability is categorized as health data and is either not allowed for collection for general software providers or is highly restrictive in its provisions.³¹

Case Study: Data Visualization for the Blind

Let’s walk-through a case study of a solution I designed and implemented with the Yahoo Finance and accessibility team in 2017 to demonstrate how going beyond basic compliance guidelines can move the status quo forward.

Figure 1-5 shows a line chart representing the stock price of Apple Inc. over a year. There are 365 data points, one for each day of the year, on a small section of the screen that give most users a summary of the trend. A sighted user can take one quick look at the chart and know that there was a significant dip in March and a significant rise in September of 2020.

Now let’s think about the experience for a user who is blind or visually impaired and relies on a screen reader.

Currently, the status quo for popular financial products is to either have the screen reader just skip over the chart or only read the chart title without any key data points. In the first instance, the screen reader user doesn’t know there is a chart. In the second instance, they know there is a chart but not what it is trying to communicate. Obviously, both of these are highly undesirable experiences and vastly different from the experience of sighted people. This is likely because of the reasons discussed in Chapter 1 – prioritization and technical difficulty of implementing a better solution.

While this is an improvement from just speaking a description, it is not even close to the experience of getting a quick summary from large amounts of data a sighted user could glean in a few seconds. A few applications such as Google Finance extract key data points, including the high, low, and the previous close price, which is a great improvement over the table-like structure. However, it still doesn’t give the user the option to interact with all data points and interact with data points that they may find interesting besides those chosen for them.

Can we do better? Of course, we can. As one of my mentors, Jean-Baptiste Quéru pointed out, “Being the best at something doesn’t mean you’re good at it.” This is a case where going beyond, or deviating from the guidelines leads to a better experience.

The thought process for most accessibility solutions includes leveraging the physical cognitive and sensory capabilities that are available to the user. In the case of blindness, we use sounds and haptics (touch) to convey information that cannot be accessed visually.

Figure 1-6 shows how the experience looks visually. To watch the feature in action, visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_c-auuDsz

Let us now break down the experience and why these design and implementation choices were made.

Step 1: How Do We Summarize the Information Without a Visual Representation?

Using music, more specifically tones that vary in pitch as the price goes up and down, can help users who are able to recognize these differences get a quick summary of the trend of the data. In user studies my team conducted with users with blindness, about 80% of people tested could draw the overall pattern after listening to the corresponding tones. Figure 1-7 shows an image with a sample of those drawings from real users.

Step 6: How Else Can We Make This Better?

Before the user dives into the experience, it is often helpful to give them a summary of the data they might be looking for. In the case of financial charts, four data points that most users are interested in are the previous day’s price, the highest price, the lowest price, and the current price over the range they have selected.

We read this information as soon as the user focuses their screen reader on the chart, along with the name of the stock and the currently selected time range. In addition, if the user decides to navigate by heading instead of using the default setting, they can skip through these data points on the chart without having to parse through the entire dataset.

The use of haptics or vibration provides reinforcement. It conveys to the user points of importance or gives them feedback when they stop after scrubbing and listening to tones.

Another layer of information in the case of financial charts comes from whether the current data point is above or below the previous closing price, something that traders care about. It is drawn as a horizontal line as shown in Figure 1-8.

In this experience, we use the texture of sound to add an echo when the user is interacting with data points below the closing price vs. above. The echo can be turned off if the user finds it distracting – always an important option when introducing innovative new features or enhancements.

The Greatest Challenge

Suppose you ask any product team whether they care about making their product accessible or if it is an important area to focus on. In that case, you will almost always get a similar response to “Absolutely, but we don’t know where to begin.” Depending on who you speak to, this response might mean one or more of the following:

At most academic institutions training future technology professionals, learning about accessibility is not a requirement, so knowledge is scarce. People with disabilities are also often not represented in the technology workforce. Building inclusively, therefore, requires unlearning years of practice without these considerations. The good news is that none of these challenges are insurmountable.

While having every possible user need represented within a team or even a company is impossible, we can engage people with lived experience in our processes. One of the greatest gifts we have as humans is the ability to empathize with others who might not share the same background, needs, and challenges as us. Putting yourself in temporary situations where you might experience a disability is at least one step closer to lived experience than no experience at all. Insights from these experiences are extremely powerful when combined with observations from real users, in realizing the full potential of our products.

In the following chapters, we will go over concepts, principles, and actionable steps to address each of these questions. Chapter 2 will answer the critical question that helps drive investment in accessibility – how do we measure impact and prioritize? Chapter 3 will cover the overall product development lifecycle, and the various business functions involved.

In Chapter 4, we will deep dive into the specifics of implementation on platforms that are not as well documented as the web, with examples. Chapters 5 and 6 will go in-depth on testing for accessibility, including automated and manual testing to close the loop on building maintainable, accessible products.

Lastly, we will discuss cutting-edge developments in the accessibility space and how emerging technologies such as augmented reality (AR), extended reality (XR), mixed reality (MR), and virtual reality (VR) will change the future of assistive technology.

Solving for accessibility at scale is still a relatively new field and something companies may be conscious of, but perhaps not actively addressing. Challenges around education, documentation, automation, handling of accessibility data, and personalization to meet users’ unique needs make the space ripe for disruption. This is why, as we discuss best practices, we will also uncover opportunities for innovation.

Mobile Focus

The World Advertising Research Center predicts that 72% of all Internet users will use only their smartphones to access the web by 2025.³⁷ Mobile phones³⁸ are the most financially accessible means to interact with the online world, and the most convenient. Android phones are available for as low as $20.³⁹

Mobile devices come equipped with sensors that leverage location, biomarkers (facial recognition, heart rate, etc.), visual, and sound cues to enable experiences that haven’t traditionally been possible. For instance, six out of ten smartphone users have tried voice search in the past year.⁴⁰ Furthermore, mobile has unlocked whole new industries. For example, apps such as Uber and Lyft (highly successful ride-hailing apps used worldwide) wouldn’t exist without mobile. Wearables and mobile payments add even newer dimensions to how enveloped mobile experiences are in our daily lives. The size of the mobile payments market is projected to increase at a 30% annual rate to reach $12 trillion by 2027⁴¹ (Figure 1-9).

The definition of mobile covers phones, tablets, and wearables. If a website is optimized to be accessible on these, it will only perform better on a larger surface with more computing power. This includes both the UI (user interface) and factors that make mobile devices financially accessible, such as network usage, battery consumption, and memory utilization.

Summary