“For theirs is a land with a wall around it
And mine is a faith in my fellow man
Theirs is a land of hope and glory
Mine is the green field and the factory floor”
Between the Wars by Billy Bragg
At the end of a road of small two-up two-down Victorian terraced houses in an unfashionable area of an unfashionable working class city, sit two non-descript industrial units — shuttered by grey metal roll blinds — the kind of place you’d take no notice of as you passed them to the local pub or walking to St Mary’s Football Stadium.
But in one of these units sits a place that has a more positive impact on people’s lives than the most glitzy and glamorous agency in the country.
The Southampton Special Purpose Workshop provides a place where people with disabilities can work. Where they can turn their skills to carpentry, metal work, ornamental garden creation and even farming.
There are hundreds of similar places across the country, time and again staffed by local residents, unassuming people who simply give their time, skills and sense of community to providing opportunities to those who would otherwise miss out. A contribution that isn’t done for reward, awards or status, but for the good of the community.
And it’s from this attitude of community mindedness I believe we need to learn when we consider our work in accessibility and inclusive design.
Fashion is fleeting, trends are damaging
In the last few years, Inclusive Design has become a fashion or trend in our industry. We see talks extolling the virtues of its purpose driven approach, we see awards handed out to those advocating it — often for personal gain — at places like Cannes.
But in doing so we’ve lost real contact with what Inclusive Design — and its much less fashionable peer Accessibility — are truly about. We’ve allowed those who haven’t put in the hard work to drive the conversation to a point where the craft has lost meaning.
On GAAD, I believe we need to challenge the idea of Accessibility & Inclusive Design as a trend. Instead I urge you to make accessibility unfashionable again; to reconnect it to those it helps and to celebrate the hard work of those involved. If we don’t, there is a risk it remains simply meaningless posturing.
This work is not about awards. It is not about finding the newest, shiniest or flashiest thing. It is about access and opportunity for those who’ve long been excluded from the conversation.
The reality is that the disability pay gap in the UK sits currently at around 12% and the opportunities for work are harder still. Only around half of those with disabilities of working age find jobs compared to almost 80% of people without disabilities.
Given that platforms to apply for jobs now increasingly exist online and that Webaim’s recent “million” survey showed that 97% of websites have basic accessibility failings, is it a surprise that the route to access for many people with disabilities is blocked?
Whilst the move to purpose-driven marketing can be a good thing, especially when it includes those with disabilities, marketing a product people cannot afford to buy because they lack access to jobs solves nothing. If the platform the product is sold on is also inaccessible then it becomes borderline offensive.
Instead we should be focusing on the first point of contact. We need to ensure our digital platforms — for recruitment, access to goods or transport, housing or education — are accessible.
And this means being boring.
Boring is not our enemy. Boring is good. It means meticulously testing and using the core principles of the web to produce semantic mark-up and javascript that doesn’t block assistive technologies. Boring means finding out if your recruitment platform genuinely needs auto-playing video or animations.
Boring should beat beautiful, if beautiful blocks access.
Boring is egalitarian. Boring is freedom. Boring is crafting genuinely accessible and inclusive digital experiences. It’s knowing the detail behind the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and how to apply the success criteria. What’s more, boring is understanding “the why”; why those criteria are valid and helpful.
So on GAAD, let us all become more boring. Let’s drop the charade of inclusion as fashion; let us understand that trends are harmful; let us absorb the documentation, sweat the details and make the world work fairly and properly for everyone. Let us be the workshop, not the award winners. Because long after the awards are gone, the workshop will still be offering real purpose to the people who matter.
Kevin Mar-Molinero Kin+Carta Director of Experience Technologies. BIMA Inclusive Design Council & Member of W3c COGA.