After last November, I heard a number of people in my professional life say things like “good UX isn’t political” or “building products that work for everyone isn’t political” or even “accessibility isn’t political.”
When the new administration issued an executive order targeting DEIA programs, I heard people express shock that the “A” stands for “Accessibility.” They felt that it somehow felt out of place alongside diversity, equity, and inclusion, that it was a different thing.
When the dust from that order started to settle, I heard people emphasizing that there’s a difference between the accessibility that I do — technical stuff, stuff where people are writing code, stuff related to Section 508 compliance — and some other kind of accessibility, the DEIA kind, that’s all about training and hiring and non-technical stuff like that.
It is not currently in my financial interests to comment on any of the specifics of what’s happening in the world. But I do want to comment briefly on the inherently political nature of accessibility.
A quick-and-dirty trip back in time
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the industry standard for defining minimum requirements for accessibility, and the foundation for just about everything we do in this field. They’ve been directly or indirectly codified into the laws and legal precedents of countries around the world, including the United States. WCAG is a technical specification generated by the W3C — but that’s not the same as politically neutral.
The first iteration of WCAG was published in 1999, just eight years after Tim Berners-Lee published the initial draft specification for HTML and just six years after the MOSAIC web browser was first released. Two of WCAG 1.0’s three editors, Wendy Chisholm and Gregg Vanderheiden, were at the Trace R&D Center, at the time affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Before work began on WCAG under the auspices of the W3C, Chisholm and Vanderheiden had already created eight iterations of what they called the Unified Web Site Accessibility Guidelines. Prior to those guidelines, Vanderheiden had published an article in January 1995 titled “Design of HTML (Mosaic) Pages to Increase their Accessibility to Users with Disabilities Strategies for Today and Tomorrow,” which identifies a series of common accessibility barriers and provides design or code solutions. (Incidentally, some of the problems identified remain things the web struggles with.)
But it’s important to understand that Vanderheiden, Chisholm, and the Trace Center weren’t unique visionaries who stood separate from the world. They were part of a community that, from its earliest days, understood and valued accessibility.
Vanderheiden had attended at the Second International WWW Conference: Mosaic and the Web in beautiful Chicago, Illinois in October 1994 — just a few months before his January 1995 article. So did Paul Fontaine and Mike Paciello, both also speaking on disability and accessibility. At that conference, Tim Berners-Lee identified accessibility as an important focus area as the web continued to grow and develop. Accessibility was very much in the air in the formative stages of the web.
That was a quick-and-dirty history — a too-short narrative that absolutely leaves out a ton of people and details. It’s not the whole story by any measure, and crucially it glosses over the contributions of a large and diverse community that includes a lot of people with disabilities.
But telling this slice of the story sets up the narrative I want to share in a really clean way. I’m sharing it this way for two big reasons.
First: So you’ll have something to keep in your back pocket the next time you hear someone complain about “all these new accessibility requirements that we didn’t have to worry about before.” Accessibility was a major topic of discussion dating back to when you could buy a phone book for the internet that listed every website in existence.
Second, so I could ask: But why?
Why was accessibility on the minds of these early web pioneers? Why did Vanderheiden and Chisholm and these other talented humans even have this on their radar? Why did they land on a solution that emphasized the independence of disabled users?
Activism and advocacy
Both of those documents that I linked to from the Trace Center include a note at the top acknowledging the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research as a funding source (now the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research, or NIDILRR).
Money matters a ton to how technology develops, so it leads naturally to the question: where did NIDILRR come from, and why does it exist?
NIDILRR was established as part of a 1978 amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. As many in the digital accessibility community know, the Rehabilitation Act is one of the landmark American civil rights laws for people with disabilities. It’s by no means the only significant law (and its cousin the Americans with Disabilities Act will always get the headlines). But it was still a major event in the timeline of disability rights.
Section 508, which is more directly relevant to the work that we do in digital accessibility, came in an amendment to the Rehabilitation Act about 25 years later. But Section 504 was in the original legislation, and includes this:
No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States… shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance or under any program or activity conducted by any Executive agency or by the United States Postal Service.
And for the first time, as a matter of law, people with disabilities had the same rights to government benefits and services as everyone else in our country.
Like all civil rights legislation (and, really, all legislation period), this didn’t just happen on its own. It was the culmination of decades of activism and advocacy efforts by disabled Americans: Judith Huemann and Disabled in Action, Robert Payne and the Disabled Miners and Widows, Ed Roberts and the Rolling Quads, and so many others. In the 1960s and 1970s especially, people with disabilities were forcing themselves into the conversation to advocate for the radical idea that they had right to participate in the economic, social, and political life of our country. The Rehabilitation Act and other disability rights laws were a product of their efforts.
And like all civil rights legislation, there was significant opposition. President Richard Nixon had vetoed two earlier versions of the Rehabilitation Act. Once passed, a number of government agencies largely ignored it — leading to the 504 Sit-In, in which disabled activists occupied federal buildings across the country, with the San Francisco sit-in lasting nearly a month. It was massively disruptive and controversial. They were not respectable tactics, but they were effective.
Necessary conditions
Let’s shift back to our web accessibility pioneers at the Trace Center. Gregg Vanderheiden described how he got his start in the world of accessibility and assistive technology in an interview:
At that point in time, I was a senior in college but had never met somebody with a disability. Now, that’s a hard thing to imagine today, but this is 50 years ago. People with disabilities didn’t have the opportunities to be out and about like they do now. I thought I was going to find some poor boy who had cerebral palsy. This image I had was from telethons was someone to be pitied and taken care of. Instead, I met a little guy who was 12 years old who was a real character. He had a piece of wood that someone had wood-burned the letters of the alphabet onto. He would slowly point to one letter at a time – about 2-3 second per letter. It was slow but he had an acerbic wit. So what I found was this kid with all of this personality, no independent way to communicate, do homework or participate in class.
Wendy Chisholm shared her story in an interview as well:
When I was studying computer science and psychology as an undergrad, one of my psychology professors asked me to tutor a student in statistics. I agreed. When I met him, I realized he was blind and that I had no idea what I was doing.
We got really creative and used LEGO to create tactile versions of bar charts and I poked a pin through the back of a textbook page to make a raised line drawing of a scatter plot. It planted the seed of the question, “Isn’t there something computers could do?”
These experiences occurred very much in the swirl of the disability rights activism that exploded in the middle of the 20th century. Activists were fighting for legislative victories, but they were also fighting to change perceptions of people with disabilities, where they belong, and what they’re capable of doing.
What are the necessary conditions for a major technological innovation? You need resources, which the Rehabilitation Act and subsequent legislation provided to the Trace Center via the NIDILRR. But you also need social conditions such that the people involved can perceive the problem in a new way.
A few generations earlier, a blind student taking a university statistics class would have simply not been allowed to take the class. A few generations earlier, the idea that a disabled kid could and should be able to live an independent life would have been rejected as impractical.
Vanderheiden and Chisholm each describe formative experiences interacting with disabled people in educational spaces — spaces that might have been closed off a few generations earlier. They each sought to solve a problem that implicitly assumed these disabled students were capable and deserved to be there.
Technological innovations happen in a cultural context, and the ideas at the heart of digital accessibility very much occurred in the context of the disability rights and independent living movements. Decades of activism created the conditions that made innovation possible.
An intensely political statement
The core concept of digital accessibility is that everyone, including people with disabilities, should be able to access information and accomplish tasks via computer independently. We code for compatibility with assistive technologies and we design to reduce cognitive load and we provide transcripts and alt text and so on, all for the purpose of ensuring that any person can use their device, on their own and without assistance from us or anyone else.
Or, to play on the words of Section 504, our work is to ensure that no users shall, solely by reason of their disability, be excluded from our digital experiences.
This is an intensely political statement, backed by decades of protests and lobbying and litigation. And that’s important context for understanding everything else that’s happening now.