- During our New York Virtual UX conference,
Jakob Nielsen held a Q&A session,
where he discussed the role of accessibility in UX,
and how to persuade hard to convince audiences
about the need for UX.
- I think that accessibility is to me, a type of usability.
So it's a matter of a person
or group of people using design.
And so this is where this phrase that's sometimes,
differently abled.
I personally hate political correctness.
I don't like these weird circumscribed way
of referring to things.
Just be simple in your language.
But this is actually one of those cases where that phrase,
differently abled, actually has some value.
Because that's really what we're talking about here.
So there's people who are using the information
in a different modality, a different way.
And so let's say you have a blind person.
Well, let me say, can't see.
So that means again, that they're getting
an auditory representation of the information.
Well, let's take a deaf person,
well, that means they can't hear.
Now they're not getting the auditory representation,
they're going to have the subtitles,
if you're doing video, for example.
So for every one of these disabilities,
you could say it's really a different type of modality,
a different interaction channel,
but it's still user interface, and still person using
the interface to try to accomplish a task.
So that's the fundamentals of usability.
So it's just a different interface because
it's an auditory representation of the information
instead of a visual, or it's a visual instead of an auditory
or somebody who can't, motor skill impairments.
They can't use a mouse, they can't use a touchscreen.
So now they are not using the input that you would use
if you could touch in a normal way.
So it's all just a different modality,
but it's still an interface.
It's a communication channel.
And so, what I would like to ideally see and this is ideal,
but what I ideally would like to see
would be completely treated as usability problem.
So you would say in your meeting, we want to increase
our conversion rate more, make more money from blind users.
So we want to make more money
from these other type of users.
And so we got to design better for them.
And then you got to test people who use
your material with that, what in that modality,
and you will see what problems they have.
And you will see how you can make it better for them
and you will design for them.
And that's a little bit similar to what you would do
if you want to cater to people who are,
some people access your website
from a big monitor desktop computer,
other people from a small mobile phone.
Well you got to ideally design different interfaces
for the two. Similarly, you should ideally
design different user interface
for somebody who can see a website
or somebody who can hear the information.
There's two different modalities now.
That's ideal.
Now in practice, only very few very big
and very rich organizations can actually afford to do that.
Because there are, you know, so many different modalities
that you would have to take into account.
That, I think is why we have that kind of fallback,
which is more technical accessibility,
which I don't like nearly as much, which is to say,
well, we'll design for the majority of the users,
and then we'll make it possible for the smaller number
of people who have different modalities
to still get information.
It's just never gonna be as good.
And that I think, is not not happy.
But sometimes, again, your pragmatics come into play,
and you can't afford to design
the perfect interface for everybody.
But that's what you ideally should do.
Ideally, you should really think about
is a different modality, it's still people.
They still have a task,
and it's a standard usability problem.
And so that's what it should be.
Now, what it often becomes instead is
that you check that if the information is read aloud,
rather than being seen,
the information still appears, for example,
you have text as text, not as sort of a picture of text.
So there's a right of those type of accessibility guidelines
that just exist to make sure the information
is all available.
But that doesn't mean it's going to be easy to use or
it's communicating well, or it solved the person's problem,
which is what I would like to see.
And so that's what I would say would be the recommendations
for those companies that either because they're rich,
can afford it or because they specifically cater
to an audience with a lot of disabilities,
and therefore it becomes extra important
for them to do that.
That's what they should do.
They just treat it as a usability problem just as
any other, their users, their task,
and there is, you know, communication channel
and we've gotta study that.
- I love kind of bringing it back to this idea of
inclusive design and just they are all people.
And I feel like so much of it always comes back down
to convincing others about that importance.
So actually, Tara and Manisha had both
asked questions around persuading people
about that value of UX.
And how do we persuade people that
there is that need for UX maybe that need for accessibility,
both inside or external in our organization,
especially to people who just are hard to convince
or just aren't convinced that there is that value?
- Well, I think that there are two main ways
of doing in this, like the logical
and the emotional way, I guess.
And so the logical way, which goes back a lot to KPIs
or key performance indicators, various type of metrics.
That's where it's lovely if you're on e-commerce side,
because every time you improve the design your sales
when you do go up, and so that should be convincing
from most of the even most skeptical people,
if they sell more, let's do it that way.
So that's what you could if you could do something
you can measure, and then you can roll it out again,
you can measure that now it's actually better
we have various metrics have improved.
That is really in many ways,
the ultimate and it convinces a lot of people.
Then there's the other approach,
which is I said more the emotional approach.
It's not so logical, but it's more a matter of
if you can get somebody to observe user testing
and see how your users cannot use something
or they keep clicking the wrong button.
And when more than one user because one user,
they could always just be an idiot
but if it's like several people still keep making
the same mistake, eventually you gotta acknowledge
that it's not because the users are wrong,
it's because you're wrong.
And and the design is wrong, really.
Right?
And it doesn't have to be people don't have to sit
and watch 10 users, they can just watch a couple
and it's already very, very convincing.
And if you can't get them to sit and watch
through an entire usability study,
that's where the video clips come in very handy.
And if you do a montage of here's like five different users
all having the same type of issue on this particular screen
or something that can often be quite compelling.
So that's clearly that the two the two main methodologies,
I guess, are convince by logic or convince
by more emotion like empathy,
like oh, the poor user.
Again, the next person, oh, no,
the next person again, the same thing.
And you keep seeing it and you've been more and more
wow, we gotta fix this.
And so those are I think
would be the main two approaches.