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Who do we think of when we think of an assistive tech user? We think of a blind screen reader user and a wheelchair user, and that’s often it. Our blind personas effortlessly use a screen reader across all their devices, and if we wanna throw a curveball, we make our wheelchair user… a woman! Escandalo!
Does it make a difference for your design process? Because there are plenty of nuances, but all too often it feels like a primarily aesthetic choice.
Disability & Gender
We don’t think of the women who make up a bigger portion of the disabled population. Statistically speaking, women are more likely to be disabled. This is in part due to a higher life expectancy and the naturally higher rate of disability that comes with aging, but also to the gender healthcare gap. Regardless of the reasons why, it is a fact.
Being female (or perceived as female) and disabled comes with a special set of barriers. The already mentioned gender healthcare gap is one of many:
* Sexual violence : Girls and women with disabilities are more likely to experience sexual violence. An example of this is the recent trend of Trisomy 21 filters to promote sexually explicit content. TLDR: Adult actresses (not gendering here on purpose) post videos with this filter and a caption suggesting that they have Down syndrome to generate engagement from comments. This problematic trend illustrates one thing clearly: That women with disabilities are often perceived as ‘helpless’ and hence ‘easier targets’.
I’d be happy to go in depth in another article, but I currently only know of a couple of studies addressing this. If you have sources from your countries, please share them with me.
Childcare and social stigma: While there is no way to live up to society’s expectations of “a good mother”, disabled women face the additional scrutiny of being asked whether they are even fit to be a parent. I highly recommend the blog by Jessica Slice and her book Unfit Parent for more insights on this topic.
Mobility patterns: While disability plays a role in movement patterns, it is only one of multiple factors. Women mostly have multi-stop mobility patterns instead of A-to-B trips. Women with disabilities are no exception to this, except that they are additionally dependent on station and carriage accessibility. This means that you may have to wait for the next or the next but one train or bus, may have to take a detour to transfer at an accessible station, and for wheelchair and power wheelchair users, it often also means going one more stop back or forth to find a working elevator.
The Better Mobility trend report investigated exactly that.
And breaking news: Disabled people don’t have to be cis gender! Any gender identity you can think of also applies to disabled demographics.
Disability & Invisible Stigma
We don’t think of the traveler with anxiety disorder who’d like to reschedule a flight but can’t find where to do it online.
Having an invisible disability myself, I am astonished by how it seems to be both a fan favorite among web design professionals breaking into accessibility, while at the same time, blatantly disregarded in practice.
Invisible disabilities are not new, but new as a concept to broader demographics. Therefore, the outsider's view of it is still quite stereotyped. Quick exercise: Think about which invisible disabilities you know.
Ready? How many types of neurodivergence did you think of? Did you include varieties of vision and hearing loss? What about stroke, epilepsy, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, and cancer? What about depression, anxiety, or panic disorders? And that’s just an assorted selection of what falls under “invisible disability”.
From my interactions with web professionals, I get the vibe that invisible disability is often equated to neurodivergence. Not fully incorrect, but it misses the point. Not everything that is invisible is exclusively happening inside your brain.
An invisible disability is a physical, mental or neurological condition that is not visible from the outside, yet can limit or challenge a person’s movements, senses, or activities. Unfortunately, the very fact that these symptoms are invisible can lead to misunderstandings, false perceptions, and judgments.
The idea behind the label ‘invisible’ is to get people to understand that disabilities are not always observable, but are nonetheless real. Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The idea is to challenge presumptions that disabilities are clear-cut. If we only apply this to types of neurodivergence, we’re not progressing far.
Hidden Disability Sunflower
Some also see the Hidden Disability Sunflower as a solution to this, but I would consider it more of a temporary fix rather than a solution: The sunflower is a tool for disabled people to use when they see fit, not for non-disabled people to recognize disability in the wild.
Through the sunflower lanyard scheme, the sunflower became an indicator that the wearer has a non-visible disability. The campaign is most popular with airports, other big transportation hubs, and, recently, also festivals. And there it makes perfect sense to let staff know a traveler or attendee may need extra time or assistance. However. Let’s do a little thought experiment: You are traveling, maybe even alone. What is the tourists’ number one enemy? The pickpocket. Especially for people with low vision, this is a significant concern because their smartphone is their number one navigation tool. Now, for white cane users, this is a permanent concern, and for some individuals, also a deterring factor that makes them not want to use a white cane, despite recognizing the benefits it would bring.
While it’s great to have a universally recognized indicator when you’re inside a contained, security-checked area, it can quickly become a stigmatizing indicator in less secure settings.
To say the sunflower is the solution to access issues because it provides people around you a heads-up that you are disabled is not empathetic to the lived situation and mental load of being disabled. While the sunflower takes away the mental load of having to anticipate, explain, justify, and maybe even prove that you have a disability, it does not change your access requirements.
Besides that, we are not entitled to know who has and hasn’t a disability and what kind. If we needed this information in order to accommodate people, it would only contribute to distinction and division, not inclusion.
Disability & Language Settings
We don’t think of the multilingual blind person whose screen reader has a strong Hispanic accent because their device is set to Spanish.
A bit of technical background for this: There are device-based and browser-based screen readers. If you are using a screen reader full time, you are likely listening to this on your device-based screen reader. Browser-based ones are more commonly used for the read-aloud function of articles. For example, the Substack app has a read-aloud function, and A11y News is read out by the voice called Taylor.
Device-based screenreaders read everything (that is present in the accessibility tree). You set them up on your device; some come pre-installed, like VoiceOver on macOS, and some you have to install yourself, such as NVDA and JAWS. You configure them to your liking: I’m talking speed, accent, male or female voice. For English, you often have a variety to pick from, but for less global languages, you get maybe one or two options.
And while you technically could pick a British pronunciation for Talk Back while your Android system is set to French, it sounds weird.
In some cases, it also doesn’t work: For example, my phone is set to Japanese, so when I want to check image alt text, it is read out with a comically over-the-top Japanese accent. When I tried switching only SR pronunciation to English, it could read the content, but not the system information - which app I’m selecting, link, button - which was still in Japanese. And for, to me still unknown, reasons, it replaced every Japanese word with Yuan ¥.
The other way around, the Japanese voice was still able to pronounce Latin-based alphabets. So, depending on your device language, it may not even be an option to switch to a different pronunciation without changing the entire system language.
Disability & Lifestyle Identity
We don’t think of the quadriplegic wellness fan who would like to try a new pilates studio but can’t find any information about building accessibility. Okay, at least in Europe we don’t. Maybe it’s different in your region, but I find it already hard enough to determine if a studio has showers, let alone an elevator in the building, a ramp at the entrance, tactile floorlines leading to the toilet, or if the studio space itself is step-free.
Brace yourself for an existential crisis: No person exists just to exist; we all have something we want to do.
So much of designing for access covers only the necessities. This is precisely because we don’t design with accessibility in mind. We have the concept, we build the MVP, and at some point, we realize, “Oh shit, we need to be compliant!” That’s where we start retrofitting accessibility.
This is not inclusive design. Again, all design should be inclusive from the start, but inclusive design in particular teaches to design for the widest audience possible. However, this does not happen if we only apply it partially.
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