Accessibilityempathy at population scale

Accessibility is Heart at population scale. The rest of Heart works one person, one decision at a time. Accessibility asks it to work at the scale of the whole product, across everyone who might ever use it. That change of scale is where you find out what a designer’s Heart actually commits to. Casual empathy does not survive the jump.

In most product organisations, accessibility defaults to compliance. WCAG standards are met. Automated checks pass. Legal and procurement are satisfied. Compliance is necessary, and it is nowhere near enough. A product can be fully WCAG-AA-compliant and still lock out whole groups of people: people with cognitive differences, people with low reading literacy, people whose first language is not the one the interface is in, people on slow connections or old phones. And people in ordinary situations, bright sun, one hand full, a crowded train, where the design fails even for someone with no disability at all.

Compliance and inclusive design ask different things of you. Compliance treats accessibility as a set of technical constraints, contrast ratios, alt text, keyboard navigation, ARIA labels, that you can hand to a specialist and audit at the end. Inclusive design treats it as part of every decision from the start: who can use this? who cannot? who can, but at a cost we have never owned up to?

Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit puts a frame on this that makes it concrete: permanent, temporary, and situational disability.¹

• Permanent: someone who is blind, someone who has lost an arm, someone with ADHD.
• Temporary: someone with a broken wrist, a concussion, an ear infection.
• Situational: someone holding a baby, someone in bright sunlight, someone trying to read on a phone in a moving taxi.