At work, one of my teams uses a web page, a "dashboard", to coordinate
activities for each release. When we start to work on a new release,
a (specific) member of the group creates a new dashboard for that release.
This dashboard is mostly populated by tables of features, bugs, and other
tasks. Each table has several relevant columns, like title, priority,
who it's assigned to, and status.
We've been doing this for a while and the dashboards keep growing,
so before doing the current one we had a conversation about what
we do and don't want. We identified some sections we could get rid of,
and I also brought up that the two-column format we were using does not
play well with font zoom (which is also obvious in meetings) and could
we make it one column? No one objected to that, and the dashboard
person published the new one.
A week later he quietly switched it to two columns. Not only that, but
the tables were wider and in both columns now so it even more did not fit
for me. I said words to the effect of "hey, what happened to the single
column we had?", and he said he didn't agree to that and he prefers two columns.
When I reminded him that this is an accessibility issue and not a mere
preference for me, he said something that's far too common: "oh, you can
just..." -- in this case, "oh, you can just make your own copy with
one column". He dismissed my need with a "solution" that let him keep
his preference without having to make any changes himself.
Yeah. That is not a solution.
I responded that the team resource needs to be accessible to everybody
and I was not going to maintain my own copy (and have to track changes to
the other one). I also explained to him that as someone with a visual
disability I already have to either work around or give up using
quite a few resources that are designed for people with perfect vision,
that's really tiring, and I should not have to face such stumbling blocks
at work from my team. He made a second copy "for people who want
this version". A more enlightened approach would have been to fix the
"standard" version and then, if he wanted, "just" make his own, but I
wasn't going to push that.
That happens a lot, and I don't just mean to me. When someone who
isn't part of the default majority finally gets any sort of accommodation,
we count is as a victory and don't push for the correct, inclusive
change, the one that says "you are equal to me" instead of "I will
accommodate you". We know that if we push for what's truly right, we
run the risk of being marginalized even more, of being labeled as
"whiny" or "needy", of not having the support of our peers and superiors.
(And sometimes people do cast preferences as needs and get whiny, muddying
those waters for the rest of us.) Thoughtful, informed allies matter, and
we don't always have them -- not that people have ill intention but
rather that this, too, is a thing that has to be learned.
It's a thing I've had to learn in areas that don't directly affect me.
I assume we're all still learning. I cringe some when thinking about
an SCA event I ran about 30 years ago and how the site wasn't completely
wheelchair-accessible but there were "only" three steps at the front door
and we could "just help so-and-so into the hall", right? Yeah, I cluelessly
said that, not realizing how many barriers so-and-so faced every day,
how this one more thing was one more obstacle. I hope I've gotten a
little less clueless around the mobility-impaired, and I'm sure I'm still
missing some important clues (there and elsewhere).
I mentioned that I already have to work around or abandon a lot of
things because of vision. Let me give you two examples. First,
web sites -- there are lots of bad patterns there (I think the UX people
call them "dark patterns"). Font zoom is usually the first thing I reach
for, but often it's more complicated -- poor contrast (whoever thought
light gray text on white backgrounds was a good idea?), layouts that
don't work after you zoom a couple notches, that sort of thing. Each
time I encounter this I have to ask myself: is this web site
really necessary? If it is, I have to invest in writing custom styling
and sometimes go begging people to write userscripts to fix these problems,
and often those styles and scripts are fragile. ("But can't you just learn
web programming/JavaScript/jQuery?" That's not a small thing.)
I've got a ton of these kinds of
modifications for Stack Exchange; the site is important enough to me
that I don't want to walk away, but good heavens, accessibility is
not their strong suit, and they have sometimes been pretty uncaring about
that. I had to basically throw a fit to get a fix for something that
prevented me from moderating, and then it was a fellow moderator, not
an SE employee, who helped me out with a script. (They might be getting
better about stuff like this; jury's still out. They did fix another
moderation barrier; I had an actual meeting with the product manager about it.)
Here's an example from the physical world. Back before I kept kosher,
I went to fast-food places fairly often. These are the kinds of places
that post the menu behind the counter. Paper copies of the menu? Why
would we need that? Any time I went to such a place, I had to decide
whether to ask somebody to read me parts of the menu -- was I
willing to both inconvenience someone and embarrass myself? -- or just
order blind ("they have cheeseburgers here, right?") and possibly miss
out on something I would have liked more but didn't know about. My
friends probably thought I ordered the same thing almost every time
because I particularly liked it or was in a rut; no, it was because I
had learned from past visits something that each restaurant had, so
I just went with that most of the time. Nowadays I have fewer choices
in restaurants but there are still menu-behind-the-counter places
sometimes. Do you know how liberating smartphones are? Now I can
take a picture of the menu and use that to order -- not an option
that was available in my student days!
People "self-accommodate" by opting out, like I used to with fast food,
all the time. The wheelchair user might decide it's too hard to visit
that store, city park, or friend's house. The
hearing-challenged person learns to fake the less-important conversations
to conserve the "could you repeat that?"s for things that matter more.
The person who can't afford that restaurant but who doesn't want to be
ostracized orders a side salad and a glass of water and tells people
"I'm not very hungry". The person whose gender doesn't match outward
appearances learns to hold it instead of using restrooms in certain places.
The religious-minority student has to decide what to do about the mandatory
Christmas pageant. And all the while, people are saying "but can't you
just..." -- mouth the words, use the "right" (for the speaker) restroom,
commute on a bike to save the cost of the bus pass so you can go to
restaurants, learn to read lips, shop online.
I do think it's incumbent on those of us with limitations to do our
share of the work. The world
doesn't owe me paper menus at the counter if I can take a picture.
Web sites don't owe me bigger fonts if I can zoom without breaking the
site. But when we've done what we reasonably can do and we still face
barriers, we need to be able to get our needs met without a fuss.
And those of us in the default majority (as most of us are about
something) need that to be second nature, not an "oh sigh, I guess,
if you insist, but next time we go with my preference..." sort of
thing. I don't know how we learn to do that, but one ingredient in the
solution is awareness.
A couple weeks later we used that dashboard in a meeting (distributed team),
and the person driving the display pulled up the two-column one. As usual
I asked for some zoom, which broke the view, and then I said "let's use
the one-column one" (which I had proactively linked to from the agenda
page). The same person who had edited the dashboard said "can't you
just pull it up on your end?". As a matter of fact, I couldn't. But it
shouldn't have even been a question.
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