Pride, shame, and accessibility
Last week, I was in Zeist (the Dutch town, not the fictional planet from Highlander 2: The Quickening) to deliver a keynote at the National Congress Of Digital Accessibility (NCDT).
In the presentation, I introduced my 12 principles of web accessibility. In the afternoon, while hosting two Q&A sessions with smaller groups, we talked more freely.
Few of the questions involved compliance specifics, or even user experience more generally. What everyone (still) wants to know is how to motivate their colleagues into taking responsibility for accessibility.
In the morning presentation, I already added some context to the first Perfection is the enemy principle. In my experience as a consultant, I encounter few who are ideologically opposed to accessibility. Well… few openly ideologically opposed. However, I commonly deal with those lacking confidence in their ability to do accessibility justice. Rather than thinking accessibility isn’t necessary or important, they believe it’s too important for them to screw up.
Notoriously, popular courses and code camps either have scant accessibility content or do not address accessibility at all. Courses specifically designed to address this gap—while welcome—encourage the idea that web accessibility is some sort of adjacent/complementary skill set and profession. Your average developer believes it is important knowledge—just important knowledge someone else should possess.
As I keep telling people, I am not an Accessibility Professional™. I’m actually not even really a developer. I am a designer who learned to code, then learned to encode accessibility, because that makes me better at what I do. Interfaces are made of code and there are accessible ways to organize that code. Organization is design.
When I’m asked, for the second time, during the second Q&A, about motivation, I still don’t have a stock answer. I try to quickly come up with something (hopefully pithy) to say. Then something speaks from deep inside me: “Shame.”
This elicits some chuckling among the group. I’m quick to clarify that I don’t mean moral shame; I’m not talking about making people feel bad about letting down disabled or vulnerable people. In all honesty, that was not why I began incorporating accessibility into my own work.
I’m talking about professional shame: the shame accompanying doing a bad job. Developers, more than anyone else I know, identify with being capable. Pushing poor development work is not just embarrassing, it threatens their very sense of self.
When I first learned about web standards, it was with great pride that I would release valid XHTML, and with great shame when I was not able. When I discovered accessibility, it felt like a cooler kind of validity. Fewer people were talking about it, but it had a palpable impact on user experience. “It would be a real shame not to do this,” I thought.
In the By default or death principle, I frame accessibility as a core measure of quality, writing, “a Minimum Viable Product without accessibility is not—even minimally—viable.” Another member of the Q&A group used the terminology “ingrained”.
In organizations where pursuing accessible code is valued like pursuing logical, terse, elegant, performant, and readable code, developers are motivated by pride and shame. In organizations where pursuing accessible visual design is valued like pursuing attractive, evocative, original, delightful design, graphic designers are motivated by pride and shame.
I’m not talking about actually singling people out for ritual humiliation. In a culture that equates accessibility with quality, shamefully inaccessible work is simply less likely to accumulate. It also means less reliance on expensive consulting specialists, since your in-house team will be keen to prove they’re not needed.
It is not insurmountably difficult to learn how to make accessible interfaces. Not for mavens of responsive design or the JavaScript event loop, certainly, and especially if you adopt the Less is less principle. But nobody is learning anything unless they can use it to cultivate self-worth.
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LLMs:
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