Why Aren’t We Doing This Already? : What I’ve Learned About Accessibility in the Tech Industry

About a year ago, I left my job as a Customer Success Manager at a small startup and started my own company. With wide-eyed optimism and naivety in spades, I stupidly figured providing philanthropy opportunities to tech companies would be an easy sell. It’s a cool thing to do, right? Spoiler: it’s apparently not. One year, one failed startup, and one completely depleted bank account later, I began considering my next move.

I’ve always loved and worked with product. Products are the core of our businesses. They drive our revenue, narrate our story, and shape our culture. It was an easy choice. Product management it is!

Social impact and meaningful philanthropy are my heart, so I knew I wanted to work on a product that was helpful to other people. Not like, “this is a nice product that I could live with or without” but “this is an essential product that truly elevates my experience as a human”. I wanted to use my skills in philanthropy to build something truly meaningful.

I also have a background in Accessibility.

A bit of backstory: When I was in 5th grade, my mom got into a terrible car accident that left her with multiple brain injuries. In the span of about 7 seconds, our lives as individuals and as a family were inextricably linked with this word: Accessibility. Forevermore, we would come to see accessibility as a demanding but unwanted bedfellow — guiding our every decision and dictating what would forever be the quality of our lives.

I knew, as I went through college and grad school, that I wanted to help people with disabilities.

Neuroscience was off the table (blood makes me queasy and day one of clinicals would have been embarrassing not just for me but for everyone) — Library Science and Technology were not.

I can’t say this about everything, but libraries are leaps and bounds ahead in accessibility than the tech industry. I know this because I’ve worked in both.

Armed with my newfound purpose as an Accessibility Product Manager, I did a cursory LinkedIn search to see if Accessibility Product Managers actually exist. To my delight, they do. There are about 15 of them, primarily working in behemoth companies such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Oath, Adobe, etc. and, as I learned through cold-email-prompted conversations, they are brilliant and wonderful and incredibly generous people.

Which brings me to this article.

At first, I selfishly wanted to write this to accelerate my job search (I’m still looking for PM jobs, by the way, so if you know anyone…)

But now I realize that, accessibility job or no accessibility job, I would like to share what I’ve learned about accessibility as it exists right now in the tech industry.

Very few people know what Accessibility even is.

The term ‘Accessibility’ in tech refers to people who experience disabilities. More often than not, when we talk about ‘accessibility’, we’re talking about people who have vision or hearing impairments. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A disability could refer to anything from ADHD, dyslexia, epilepsy, brain injuries, chronic migraines, autism, depression and anxiety, and yes — hearing and vision impairments, among so many other things. Even people with limited Internet or technology access can fall under this purview. You probably know someone or know someone who knows someone who struggles with some kind of disability.

Pro tip: a person with epilepsy doesn’t appreciate having to download Flash to run your website. A person with anxiety doesn’t want to click through twelve different screens just to pay for their lavender-scented candles. A person with depression doesn’t appreciate your NPS score of ‘smiley face if you’d recommend this’. And a person using a screen reader needs to be able to read the got-damn text on your website.

Accessibility isn’t on anyone’s radar — until it is.

As with social impact, accessibility isn’t a thing stakeholders consider until a) they’re large enough to follow the likes of the Googles and the Facebooks of the world, or b) they’re slapped with a big fat lawsuit.

The truth is, accessibility is not on most companies’ radars until they’re threatened with a significant loss of revenue without it. (And even if you as a private company aren’t concerned with compliance, your clients might be.) And you know what? This is fine. What matters is that we consider accessibility at all.

But here’s the thing: Nearly 1 in 5 Americans and more than 1 billion people worldwide live with a disability of some sort. That’s a substantial market cap — even in niche markets — even for the smallest of startups (once you become a unicorn, you’ll have to integrate accessibility anyway so you may as well start now). The earlier you consider accessibility, the better off you’ll be. Seriously — from a business standpoint — you’re opening yourself up to a world of bottom-line.

Accessibility, at this point in time, is more of an Art than a Science.

I asked an Accessibility Director at a large company this question: “How do you know a product is accessible?”

Accessibility Director: “Do you like art?”

Me: “Yup.”

AD: “Well, what is good art?”

Me: “Umm, been a while since my Art History days, but… ::awkward silence::.. I guess I just know it when I see it?”

AD: “Yes, you know it when you see it. That’s good accessibility exactly.”

He had a great point. You can hit all of the WCAG and 508 guidelines to your heart’s desire, but at the end of the day, an accessible product is a beautifully designed product, and that’s hard to quantify.

Take iPhone vs. Android. Is Android a technically superior product? Perhaps (disclosure to all Google and Apple people reading this: I have an iPhone because someone gave it to me. No particular bias. Y’all do amazing work.) But is the iPhone a more complete design experience? Absolutely. Is it because the physical specs are x% more compact? Maybe. Is it because the home button fits ever-so-perfectly to my thumb? Maybe. Does any of this matter individually? No. But in aggregate, there’s something about Apple design that is BE.A.U.TI.FUL. It is beautiful and I want it. Can I completely quantify the delight of the experience? No. But I know it when I see it.

So it is with accessibility. At this time, we have accessibility standards but they’re geared primarily towards websites, they aren’t complete, and they don’t encompass burgeoning technologies. Blockchain, IoT, AI, VR? No standards. As accessibility leaders, we have to get creative, and we need to know that beautiful, accessible design when we see it.

The more useable you make your products, the more useable they’ll be.

So this sounds like the most obvious statement in the world, right? You’d be surprised. I cannot belabor this point enough — the more accessible you make your products for people with disabilities, the more accessible your products will be in general. For everyone.

It’s worth noting — some of the most prolific technologies on the market today started because of assistive technology tools: voice-to-text, ATMs, your Google Home, even your Kindle, all came about because of innovations in assistive technologies.

Think of your product. Now think of the best use-case for your product. What is the best possible thing it can do for the world? Great. Now consider that adding accessible features can enable you to innovate even further.

Think of your product again, except this time think of someone with a disability using it. How did your product change? Take that deficit and consider the enormous implications. Boom. There’s your opportunity for innovation.

“Diversity and Inclusion” is a thing — and Accessibility is a big part of it.

I know this comes as a shock to everyone, but tech has a big diversity problem. My experience as a female in the tech industry is an entirely different article so I’ll not even go there. But I’ll say this: when we talk about diversity and inclusion, we are commonly talking about gender and race. And, while diversity and inclusion in gender and race are incredibly important, failing to include people with disabilities in this conversation is a massive misstep and, I believe, a gross oversight as an industry.

If we really want an equal playing field for all people, then we have to make it equal for all people. This includes the 20%+ of the population living with disabilities.

When we make our products accessible, then people using our products have better quality of life. When that happens, there are more people who are able to work and to take on crucial roles in our companies. When THAT happens, we benefit from the valuable perspective of ALL our employees — we value accessibility because we work with colleagues who speak from experience. We hear about a different experience than our own. And thus our products become more accessible to everyone. It’s an awesome circle.

…

Have you watched HBO’s Silicon Valley? Before I got into tech I genuinely thought it was satire, but now I’m convinced it’s a documentary. I digress.

There’s this great montage in Season 1 where the main characters are presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt, and the competition repeats variants of this phrase: “We’re changing the world by ::insert something that’s not really changing the entire world here::”. The show plays with this theme repeatedly.

I love this montage, because, in the tech industry, we like to say we’re changing the world. And you know what? I really believe we are. Is every product that comes out solving world hunger? No. Should it be? Mmmm maybe. I don’t know. But I do know this: The day we prioritize other people’s experiences because they are other people’s experiences and not because we have a personal understanding of them — the day we consider others’ experiences as important as our own — is the day we truly innovate, we truly diversify, and we truly make the world a better place.

This story is published in Noteworthy, where 10,000+ readers come every day to learn about the people & ideas shaping the products we love.

Follow our publication to see more product & design stories featured by the Journal team.