2024 Recap: Why Accessibility is Important

You might have seen me on the Virtual Coffee Slack channel or attending one of the virtual coffees on Thursday. I’ve been very quiet on social media and disappeared from Slack since September. I have only recently started posting again on certain platforms and have been slowly active on GitHub. 

It has been a couple of months, but after some silence and a lot of thought, I felt it was time to share a little update and talk about something that’s been on my mind for a while. I decided to join Virtual Coffee’s blogging challenge this year to talk about accessibility for a little bit. This post shares what I’ve learned about it in the past couple of months and why developers need to think more about accessibility in the future.

Why did I disappear?

I wasn’t sure how much to share since the entire story is personal. So in short  I got very sick and almost died in September. I had 6 strokes at the beginning of the month. I spent 3 weeks in 2 different hospitals in two different networkings recovering and had over a million dollars worth of testing to figure out what caused everything to happen. 

I am ok now and out of the hospital. However, I’m not out of the woods yet. The doctors have learned a lot more about me, but there are still questions they are looking for answers. One of the things they discovered is that I have resistant hypertension. Resistant hypertension means that I have much higher blood pressure than the average person so it is more challenging to control.

The doctors think the strokes were minor ones, but they all happened on the part of my brain that handles vision. This resulted in my vision being very blurry and hard to see. When people ask me what my vision is like, it is similar to how the transparency sheets looked on the overhead projectors the teachers would use in the 90s before they had access to smartboards. I could see the text and images, but there was another layer with spots over it so it made it harder for me to see.

My life has changed a lot since August, and I’m still adjusting to living life in a body I am getting to know again. Right now, I am taking a medical break from Coding with Kids, so I won’t be teaching again until the beginning of the new year. They are aware of the situation and have been great at making sure my classes have been covered. 

In the meantime, I’ve been doing lots of vision therapy to see if it will improve my vision or get my vision back to normal as much as it can be. I am using a blood pressure machine to track my blood pressure every day and am currently on a low-sodium diet to help keep my blood pressure down. I haven’t done any coding in a while but I’m slowly getting back into old habits by revisiting old projects to make sure everything is updated and working smoothly.

So how does this relate to accessibility?

Accessibility centers around the idea that information can be accessed by all. This means anyone regardless of what specific situations (i.e. visual, auditory, cognitive, physical) they are dealing with can access and understand information. This idea is essential for web development and is found in all high-quality web applications. 

Lots of the websites and tools you use every day think about accessibility. You’ll know because they provide accessibility sections or have pages designated on their website for websites. One great example is Google. Google has an entire page for accessibility that goes over its vision of accessibility, how it makes Google tools accessible, and examples of how its tools are used by real-life people.

Accessibility can be best described by something one of my professors at Otterbein used to say. He would always tell us to “pitch to every kid’s strike zone” because every kid’s strike zone is unique. Pitchers don’t just throw the same pitch each time. They pick and choose different pitches each time a new person comes to bat.

So we can’t just apply a one-size-fits-all approach to all of our users and hope it sticks. Instead, we need to get to know our users to figure out what their individual needs are and what they are working with so we can help them accomplish a specific action. This be accessing information on a topic or buying something online... 

How do websites become more accessible?

All developers need to understand the basics of web design. It doesn’t matter if you have the best design skills or how much web design you do on a project. It is a good idea to at least know the basics. Knowing the design fundamentals will help you as a developer because it will always keep you focused on your users. 

Many of the best developers remind newbies about this because it can become easy to forget who you are building your web application for. This is especially key for accessibility. 
When I was in the hospital, I tried figuring out how to add some of the vision features to my phone so I could better see my text messages and apps. I ended up not being able to figure it out and ended up giving up, feeling defeated and frustrated.

That’s something as developers we don’t want any user to feel when they are using technology. This can be prevented by how we do user testing. User testing with different groups will give you a better picture of how accessible your web application is. You will get lots of data on what your users do to accomplish a specific goal action and what they struggled with to get a specific task done.

Accessibility reminds us to walk a mile in another person’s shoes.

Throughout my experience, there are plenty of people who just think they automatically know what I’m experiencing so they know what to do. However, life isn’t always black and white. What I was seeing didn’t match what they thought I was seeing. 

I’ve learned it is best to be as descriptive as I can so people can understand what I am experiencing. However, these descriptions often got ignored by the people. While some people were trying to be helpful, they weren’t listening to me and sticking with what they knew best. This did the opposite effect of what they intended to do and were shocked when they were called out for this behavior.

We can’t have that attitude when it comes to web accessibility. Remember real people will be using the web applications you build in the future. What you might think will be a great idea could be incredibly hard for certain people to do.

User experience is the blueprint for accessibility.

As I played around with the accessibility features on my iPhone and laptop, I kept thinking back to Skillcrush 100 and what I learned about UX design. When I started to learn about UX design, I learned about user personas, wireframes, and mood boards. These were great ways to help me think about specific users what they do the minute they enter my web application to what they do once they leave the web.

Accessibility shares a lot of similarities with teaching special education. Good accessible websites have specific plans in place with goals that need to be accomplished. This is based on all data obtained around the users that are being focused on. Then steps are modified or differentiated to help specific users end with the same result..

Great user experience is a team effort so collaboration is key to accomplishing great accessibility. Having access to people who know UX and web design can bring fresh perspectives to a project and spot things you might not have noticed. Newbies don’t be afraid to share your observations if you see something that might not be accessible because it is something the other team members might not have noticed..

Ultimately accessibility is meant to empower people.

The last few months have given me a renewed appreciation for web accessibility. I’m not sure if my vision will ever return to normal, but having accessibility features available on devices and software I regularly use has helped me get back to some sense of normalcy. I still plan on continuing coding no matter what happens with my vision and plan on revisiting old projects I’ve done to see how I can make them more accessible.

One of the things I’ve always loved about technology is how it is something everyone is able to use in different ways. It can be as simple as looking up an article on a website, playing a game, or a tool that helps people accomplish a task. Adda Birnir wrote on Skillcrush how tech is for all and I 100% agree with her. Accessibility is something all developers are able to do and work towards.