Why You Shouldn't Ignore Accessibility

Hello again everybody and welcome back to another episode. I'm Christian and as always here with Alex. Hi Christian. Alex, how accessible are you for a conversation today? I already know that you want to talk about accessibility. Exactly. Yeah, I was reading a couple of posts and articles about it on LinkedIn especially and I was really thinking about it because I think it was in 2018 I visited a conference and I think it was Google who was speaking about accessibility and yeah, how important it is and how easy it is to forget about it. So I thought maybe I pick a designer's brain with a lot of experience to talk about that. Yeah, and I think it is indeed a very interesting topic. I have to admit I'm definitely no expert or big advocate for accessibility. How can you say that? No, I say that because I know there is a lot of people that rightfully are very passionate about it and really push for it. I tend to leave it up to those people. Like I usually always have people on the team and so on who were the drivers and who really owned conversations around accessibility and made sure that they get a ear, that they get heard or that the whole topic gets enough attention. That's why I'm saying I am probably answering or talking a little bit from a non-expert perspective, but I think it's great to have this conversation and also to kind of think more a little bit. So why don't we do that? I mean, you read a lot about it recently. What are kind of the key things that people bring up? Is it more like about accessibility in general? Should we think about it or what got your attention? Well, I mean, there are many articles about different point of views, but one thing that caught me is first of all, raising awareness about it because it's so easy to forget about accessibility and also who's your user base or what kind of user base are you actually excluding sometimes by trying to be fast and launching a product fast to hit the goals, make money, do lean thinking, whatever. But then on the other hand, also, yeah, letting the people who have issues paying the price. Yeah. And I mean, I think it's, it's a bit also the conversation of when is the right time to invest in accessibility. I think it's, it's also something. Let's talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think I've like, even myself, I keep thinking about it, right? Because like, do you want to move fast? Do you want to ship like things? And it's not only accessibility. It's a lot of, and I remember we had this conversation around edge cases and including them. It could be everything from, okay, what is like the different country options that you give in a dropdown? What is like some prefixes? What are like certain passports that you accept in a KYC process? And so on and so forth, right? So there is, there is definitely a wide range of edge cases, not only accessibility, that do play a big role. But they also eat a lot of time, right? And I think like a lot of the time would also say, okay, it's, it's sometimes important to get things out of the door to death, to test them, to get feedback quickly, to be able to iterate. But you definitely need to make sure that you don't exclude people. And I think this is where, where accessibility comes in, right? Because even if there is only a small percentage of your users that might have a specific disability, it's often about like sight or color and so on. But you also need to accommodate for them to not lose a single client and to also make sure that as a company, you show that you like really care and that you don't only optimize for whoever is in the room. And I think this is where a lot of it starts, right? Because most of the time, the people working on a product miss out on opportunities to improve for accessibility, because they don't have any disability in a sense, or they only know a certain way of thinking, or they all have the same cultural background and so on. And that's why, in the first place, a lot of these, let's say, exclusions happen, and where a lot of these things get pretty much forgotten, because nobody knows. Yeah, I agree. I mean, missing diversity within the team can even lead to missing accessibility in your product. But I was also wondering, I think somehow it also depends on the state of your company and of your product. So I think it's fair to say, hey, once you are about to launch a complete new product, and you're going to have, let's say, a smaller customer base, I think it's not fine, but it's okay to say, okay, we are going to launch an MVP, which maybe won't include all the accessibility features, or maybe none of them. But let's say you are a company, you have a working product, you are developing new features, or you're making huge upsells to a big customer base. I think part of the MVP and part of the lean thinking process is to have accessibility as part of the development process. So excluding that just to save a couple of days of time will hurt your customer base, it might hurt your NPS, or whatever you use to track customer satisfaction. So and I think there, it's very important to be critical and ask yourself, have I covered the most important things? And first of all, do I really understand what our customer base needs? I mean, we're talking a lot about, let's say, software development, right? But I mean, let's just take scissors. Most of the scissors are made for right hand people, right? Or let's say, let's take the iPhone, right? So the on off button is on the right hand side, but on the left hand side, so you should be aware of what you're doing. And for sure, you always go with the biggest, yeah, the biggest group of people. However, I think not missing out on the other hand, on the other part is very important. So you need to go through that process of analyzing what kind of edge cases there are. And eventually, what number of people you would potentially exclude if you're not covering it? Yeah. And believe me, the number is not that small. Always depending on right, there's a broad variety of like accessibility features, and there's different standards in place that you can solve for. But even if we look at like, color blindness, or certain specific color blindness, or problems with contrast, you would be surprised of how many people actually have issues with that. And it's it's very easy to solve for, right? Because if you approach the design, and it comes down to, as you said, right, you need to prioritize it. And if you approach the design from a perspective that it's like a priority right from the beginning, and that you think about it right from the beginning, I think everyone can benefit from the contrast. I mean, it's not necessarily something I mean, in insert for certain governmental sites, or in certain countries, you have like different regulations also for accessibility. And you sometimes see like these crazy things where you can turn on the high contrast of the page and so on and so forth. Well, I mean, while that is a feature, well, it's usually then perceived as okay, it's definitely not the most aesthetic solution. But I think there is also a middle ground where you can design for contrast, for broader audience without having to introduce a feature that then forces contrast or different colors on it, or puts the whole website into a inverted state. So that it's easier to read, right? I mean, I think, especially at the beginning of internet, there have been a lot of like these special accessibility features in place that I can't really. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's also about keeping up the standard, right? Let's say you have launched a product, you are about to enhance it with a new feature. So if the original product has evolved over time, and includes all relevant accessibility features that are relevant for your customer base, and you start to launch something new, putting something new on top, and you try to be fast, you're going to pull down the standard because people are used to it. And now you're putting something new on top that does not exclude include them always mixing it up. It's late, it's late. So at this in this moment, you're going to keep the standard down. And even though even if the customer base is small, these people will be the one for good reason, who will shout out the loudest by complaining on social media, sending you emails calling customer support eventually. So which is understandable, by the way. So therefore, I think that's actually my point when it comes to accessibility. It's part of the process. Once you have established it, I think it should be part of the process. And then again, I think, as I mentioned earlier, right, I've always had the benefit of working with people who would advocate for it, right. And I think it's some sort of like also the responsibility from an ethics perspective of a designer, of a product manager, to make sure to also take the time, right. It's not only black and white, and not everything. Oh, my God, that was a bad one. Okay, well played, well played. By the way, that's like Christian's type of humor, right. So. But yeah, it's not always black and white. Well, sometimes it is. But you can always like also put a number behind it, right? It's not that, okay, you can justify the features, for example, on pure return of investment perspective. Sometimes it's like really about, okay, we need to, with the values that we have for our company, we need to kind of make sure that we work in an inclusive way. Is it for disability? Is it for different cultures? Is it for different backgrounds, whatever we need to do. And you mentioned the diverse team, the diverse team is extremely important also to cover these things. People who push for ethics is part of a diverse team, you need to have people who prioritize that for themselves, and who will push for it and who will fight for it to make sure that that the company prioritize certain things. And I think it's, it's also maybe important for everyone who works in a product company, to keep thinking about ethics to keep thinking about the values that they have, and to prioritize them. Like if you work for a company that completely neglects these topics, maybe it's time to change company, right? Because, because I think if you only try to look at measuring things, and you try to look at, okay, what is like the addressable market is that I miss out on? If I don't have a website that's optimized for colorblindness, and people don't see the reports, well, then maybe you won't prioritize it. Is it important that you create a product that accommodates everyone and that you're not excluding anyone in any sort of way? Yes, I think so. And I think it's, it's more also from a human perspective that we need to prioritize these things and make sure that the companies prioritize these things. Maybe a closing question for you. Would you say based on what you've just mentioned that accessibility should be part of a design teams, especially design teams, principles and values? I mean, the thing with design is that design, in its nature is supposed to be very close to the users. I think every other role in the company is as well, right? I mean, a successful company should be close to the users, they should constantly talk to the users. But I think it's more of like, okay, the designers job description is like, yeah, you're user centric. And so on and so forth. So that's where I think, obviously, like for a designer, it's a very close topic and important topic to have empathy with all the different types of users, and therefore prioritize it. Where a product manager probably has like more hard business KPIs in mind, and that's like their priority. So yes, it could be within design, but it could be within all the other teams as well. And it's, I've seen a lot of developers, for example, also being the advocates for it, and pushing for it, right? I think it always comes like, okay, myself, who's interested in this topic, and who wants to drive it forward? And back to the diversity topic, the more diverse the team is, the more people you have to think differently, or that have a different background or have different influences and different friends, the easier it will be for a company to then also realize these topics, right? Because I mean, it starts with the realization. And if you have a very monotonous, small team, same age group, same class, same school, same city, well, guess what, they won't figure out a lot of the things. And I mean, I've just recently, I recently realized that I was on a I, I, so, okay, well, every once in a while, it happens that I see an Instagram ad, and I'm like, okay, let me just buy this. There's this company, I'm not gonna mention their name, but man, I've seen their ads, every day, every time I opened Instagram, multiple times, I'm like, okay, fuck, okay. Either because of the either because of the good targeting, or because I really think it could be an interesting product, I kind of subscribed, downloaded it, and so on. Oh, you have too much money and buy shit on the internet? No, no, no. You know, I'm cheap. I have like those very short arms that don't reach the pocket. Tyrannosaurus rex. Oh, damn. And I went through that, that onboarding. And it was the most discriminating onboarding that I ever had, like from all the questions, the way they've been written or sourced, like you could see that literally, the team is probably just two people. And that's why they haven't thought about any edge cases about any other backgrounds, but even reasons why someone would use the app, right? I mean, maybe we can make an episode on its own to just go through that onboarding and analyze it and look at why it's not good. I love to hate about it. It's not hating. I mean, I think they all come from a very good place. But actually, we wanted to hate about starting a new position in LinkedIn design. Then we have to hate. You're right. It's the second, third, fifth episode where you're hating on that. I think everyone knows you hate that feature. I need to make a deep dive. It's bad. How bad? Well, from a scale from one to 10, zero. I mean, it's okay. You don't like the visuals. Yeah. What else? I think the colors are also not very inviting. Are they accessible? Well, let's ask our audience. What do you think about LinkedIn design and accessibility for sure? Yes. Any accessibility advocates, go check out. Exactly. Let us know what you think. Link in new job posts and send us your suggestions. We will maybe. Maybe not. Make a special episode out of it. Well, looking forward to hearing back from our audience. And in case you made it this far, don't forget to press the follow button and share this episode in case you liked it. Yes. Thanks a lot, Christian. Alex, it was a pleasure. Have a nice one. Bye bye. Ciao.