Advantageous for Everyone: The Case for Universal Accessibility
- Rebecca
- Aug 30, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 16, 2024
My first job as I emerged bright-eyed from College was at a university eLearning department. A large focus of my job responsibilities was to assess and edit our eLearning content to ensue that it was accessible to people with disabilities.
It turns out that university had been recently sued by the National Federation of the Blind for their lack of accessibility and were scrambling to play catchup and protect themselves from further litigation.
This heavy focus on accessibility early in my career gave me a passion that I carried with me ever since. I believed strongly in accessibility, in the idea that there should be as few barriers as possible for anyone to take training. But sometimes, especially back then, putting in the extra effort for accessibility is a hard sell to leadership. After all, in their eyes we were asking to put in so many extra hours to benefit maybe 10% of the workforce.
It was only later that I learned a concept that would have helped me so much in those conversations: Universal Accessibility.
At a high level, Universal Accessibility is the idea that accessible features can benefit anyone, not just the initial target audience of people with disabilities.
Below I'll put a few examples from of Universal Accessibility in learning design.
Accessibility for vision is essential when you have a migraine
In 2020, I began to have frequent migraines. It took about half a year and several types of doctors to figure out what was going on. And in that half a year, suddenly accessibility for vision became extremely important for me to do my work.
For example, when I had a headache or migraine, it was so much harder to read text that had too little contrast with the background. When you have a migraine, you don't want to have to squint and put your nose up to the computer screen to be able to read something.
Great and easy to read! | Terrible when you have a migraine! |
|---|---|
This is some text! | This is some text! |
Accessibility for vision is not only great for people who are colorblind, or people who have limited or no vision. Any one of us might need it at any time!
Captions and transcripts are great in loud environments
I spent many years in a company with an open office floorplan. One of the features of this type of layout is being able to hear all of the conversations around you. And I was seated near people whose job it was to be constantly on the phone with clients.
How helpful it would have been if I could have turned on captions or been able to read a transcript when I had to watch a video! Instead I had to choose between turning the volume in my headset loud enough to potentially hurt my ears or have to deal with occasionally not having any idea what the video said.
Imagine someone trying to take a training from home where their kids are playing, or in an office where construction is going on just outside.
Accessibility for people with deafness or hearing loss is so helpful to all of us when things get loud around us!
Cognitive accessibility helps worldwide teams
There are many aspects to cognitive accessibility. One of them is writing clear, concise content and avoiding jargon. This is just good design, as well as inclusive for people with cognitive disabilities. But it's also fantastic for worldwide teams.
In 2015 I created a training that was originally meant for a team in Seattle. Later, that training was delivered to a sister team in another country. The feedback I got was that the training didn't go very well. The trainer had to halt several times to explain jargon.
The lesson talked about how it's not permitted to "cherrypick" in the ticketing system and the trainer reported that he had to pause the lesson to explain what cherrypicking meant and how it applied to the ticketing system. This was a great lesson to me to be more considerate about the jargon and vocabulary I was using when making something for a company with teams spread out over the world.
Simple, clear vocabulary is best for all of us. Keeping your content free of idioms and jargon as much as possible means you can deploy that content to a wider audience without having to make edits.
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