More on What Makes a Good Accessibility Designer

Published on by David A. Kennedy

In my last post on the same topic, I touched on many soft skills that a designer should know working in accessibility. If you want to go deeper on foundational aspects of accessibility for a designer, start here.

Working in accessibility means you’re diving into one of the most complex, challenging spaces for a designer. Buckle up.

Design with Disabled People

I made a glaring omission in the last post: Centering people with disabilities in the work. I didn’t intend for that to happen. I wanted to focus on the less obvious aspects that a designer needs to understand. I should have made that clear.

As a designer who wants to improve how your product works for people with disabilities, you need to think critically about how they participate in your work. Are they leading through participatory design? Who has the power? You or them? Asking these questions and integrating power structures can center them in a “with” rather than a “for” fashion. It means you design for a better experience, rather than compliance alone.

When many designers first dive into accessibility, they try to make a project compliant, with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), or a similar standard or law. You can stop there, but that doesn’t mean you’ve created something that people with disabilities can or want to use. Compliance is an outcome of designing for the experience, not the goal. Designing for compliance means you’re aiming to meet a standard or law. Designing for a good experience means you’re aiming to create something that helps people get a job done and gets out of the way.

That job-first approach can mean you need to shed your preconceived notions of what a designer does. What good design means might be different than what you thought. See “Be Curious” and “Assume Nothing” in the first post. You’re not in control here. You’re a conduit rather than the power source. Good design can be boring and innovative. More often, bad design is exciting, but pointless. Aim for the former, rather than the latter.

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Learn HTML

I’m not someone who thinks all designers should know how to code. A designer can go in many directions to provide value. However, learning HTML means you understand the final form your designs will take. There’s nothing more valuable than grasping the medium in which you work.

If you’re providing accessibility feedback to product managers, other designers or engineers, you’ll need to understand HTML. The same goes for native code on platforms like Android and iOS, if that’s part of your stack.

Understanding HTML means you can communicate the impact that code choices make for people with disabilities who use what gets designed and created. You can start to analyze a design and spot its weaknesses before a line of code gets written. That provides instant value because the easiest way to make an experience accessible is to prevent bugs before they happen.

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Embrace that Accessibility Work is Political and be Prepared to Engage

When you decide to engage in accessibility, you’re saying you want to ensure that people with disabilities have their civil rights met. Accessibility is always political. You can’t avoid that.

I like the way Sheri Byrne-Haber puts it:

You can’t talk about accessibility without talking about disability because accessibility is inherently tied to the experiences and needs of people with disabilities. When we explore accessibility for people with disabilities, we are talking about physical access to buildings as well as digital access to information, technology, education, employment, and every facet of life. Accessibility is a fundamental issue of civil rights and social justice.

Many systems impact whether an experience is accessible or can be made accessible. These include, but aren’t limited to morality, ethics, ableism, capitalism, the law, privilege, employment inequalities, and lived experience. Plus, people are complex and bring intersectionality. If they’re a person of color and have a disability, for example, their journey and lived experience has more challenges.

You’ll hit walls in all those systems, plus more, which I haven’t mentioned. When you do, pause. Remind yourself that you don’t have a lot of control. Interrogate the system to better understand it for the future. When you can, learn from disability justice.

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Learn What Self-Regulation Techniques Help You Continue this Work for the Long Haul

Accessibility work is hard. Complicated. Never ending. Thankless. Frustrating. Burnout inducing.

Accessibility work is also rewarding. Morally and ethically right. A place to learn every day. Capable of making profound impacts on people’s lives.

When you work in this area, you’ll experience all that. Sometimes in the same day. If you’re disabled and do this work, you not only have to fight this in your job, but your everyday life too. If you want to stay in it for the long haul, try to develop self-regulation techniques that can give you the space you need to recharge and be ready for the next challenge.

I once had a CEO tell me accessibility wasn’t my job. I’ve watched designers and developers create career obstacles for themselves when leadership says that they can’t make an experience more accessible, but they kept trying. This comes with power imbalances. You can’t change it all.

The field itself can intimidate even experienced accessibility professionals, myself included. If you start contributing widely to the space, you’ll often get drive-by criticism, valid and invalid. You need to learn how to parse it. If you don’t, you can put too much weight into feedback and ideas that may be less important.

In parsing it, you need to develop a hierarchy that makes sense to you. Is it:

  • Constructive feedback? Feedback you can use and helps you shape a direction. You can act on it.
  • Destructive feedback? Feedback you can’t use and puts you off course from your goal. You may struggle to act on it.
  • From a disabled person? This feedback will often prove most valuable. However, not always.
  • From a non-disabled person? Still valuable feedback, but you need to weigh how it intersects with your hierarchy.
  • Opinion? Is this something that someone has shared without backing up their reasoning. It may be weaker in that regard.
  • An access need? Is what’s offered going to enable someone with a disability to get a job done? This feedback is always valuable.
  • A change that will work for a wider audience? You have to find balance in this work. A wider audience often gets prioritized over those with disabilities. Is that for the right reasons or not?
  • Politically fraught? As someone who specializes in accessibility, you may have a limited amount of political capital. Spend it wisely.

You may dive into a problem space and discover the straightforward answer you’re looking for doesn’t exist, and you’ll need to make tradeoffs. It’s easy to feel like you know nothing at times.

My strategies for staying in this work revolve around:

  • Favoring pragmatism over perfection. I like to aim for small changes, made often vs. big payoffs.
  • Owning the spaces that I can control and trying to influence the ones I don’t through allies and data. It’s not always perfect, but it helps me delegate the work.
  • Focus on the people and processes that can and want to be changed. Guiding people and processes toward change will exhaust you, but what gets created will last longer.

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Yes, accessibility comes with complexity. It takes more than soft skills and the usual bevy of abilities that a designer builds up over time. Focus on these areas though, and you might begin to feel like you can make a difference in the work.

Thank you to Josh Kim and Eric Bailey for feedback on this post. They helped shape it and improved it greatly.

Tagged Accessibility,  Web Design