Lessons on Accessibility From my corgi
Who is halloumi?
Halloumi is our little corgi. For the uninitiated, corgis have short little stubby legs, a long body,… and in general an awkward physique for a breed that just loves to be active.
In the nine months that we’ve shared our lives with our little Cheesy boy, we have learned a lot from him.
As I watched my boy struggle to leap up and down from the couch, it reminded me how important accessibility is when you are trying to win over customers.
“As I watched my boy struggle to leap up and down from the couch, it reminded me how important accessibility is when you are trying to win over customers.”
Accessibility
Accessibility (a11y) is often one of the most overlooked aspects of building good user interfaces. If everyone just stuck to simple HTML, we wouldn’t be in this mess. But in a world where every one wants their UI/UX to look a bit different, we end up with Design Systems that are some times an absolute nightmare for those who are out of the norm. In my decades of experience, this is probably the area that has caused me the most friction when giving feedback to organizations wanting to beat their targets. To most, accessibility is as important as the regulators say they are. Investing in building accessible applications does not sound a sexy as a new feature that the sales team can sell.
However, this is far from the mark. For one, without adherence to certain levels of accessibility, your product is automatically barred from certain areas such as the public sector. But going beyond the regulatory mandates, having an inclusive application means you are being more inclusive with your user base.
According to some Stat Canada numbers, 1 in 5 Canadian suffers from some form of disability. This did not always mean the user is missing a whole entire functions. It could simply be a “slight” hinderance on their day to day.
Speaking as a person who went through a 5 year recovery period for sinovitus (finger joint inflammation), this is honestly too real. During those 5 years, I converted my entire workflow to be keyboard based because one of the leading cause for a flare up is “tracking device usage”. Yup, because tracking devices such as trackpads and mouses taxes your fine motor skills, prolonged usage causes my middle finger to swell up and lose range of motion.
During that time, I eliminated countless “mainstream” applications due to inaccessible features. Yes. Those application were best in class*. (* for those who do not get painful swelling from using a mouse). For me, they were a royal pain in the joint.
To be frank, getting these little a11y features into your UI components bloats your sprints. It turns a simple drop down menu into a whole blown feature.
But when I see a $50 set of foam stair turn my couch hating pup into a cuddle monster, I am left thinking that the extra hour of effort fixing those tab orders isn’t such a big deal after all.
“But when I see a $50 set of foam stair turn my couch hating pup into a cuddle monster, I am left thinking that the extra hour of effort fixing those tab orders isn’t such a big deal after all.”
