Link tags: inclusion

To hell with the business case

I agree with everything that Matt says here. Evangelising accessibility by extolling the business benefits might be a good strategy for dealing with psychopaths, but it’s a lousy way to convince most humans.

The moment you frame the case for any kind of inclusion or equity around the money an organization stands to gain (or save), you have already lost. What you have done is turn a moral case, one where you have the high ground, into an economic one, where, unless you have an MBA in your pocket, you are hopelessly out of your depth.

If you win a business-case argument, the users you wanted to benefit are no longer your north star. It’s money.

Representation and what happened to women in Tech

Men specialized in hardware while software development was seen as an exciting alternative to secretarial work. In 1967, Cosmopolitan published an article titled The Computer Girls, encouraging young women to pursue careers in computer science. So the curve went up, and continued to do so up until 1984. That’s when personal computers appeared.

Marketing matters:

When Apple released the Macintosh 128K and the Commodore 64 was introduced to the market, they were presented as toys. And, as toys were gendered, they were targeted at boys. We can look at advertisements from that time and quickly find a pattern: fathers and sons, young men, even one where a man is being undressed by two women with the motto Two bytes are better than one. It’s more evident with the ads for computer games; if women appear, they do so sexualized and half-naked. Not that appealing for young girls, one could imagine.

The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation” – Chelsea Troy

Businesses focus on efficiencies—doing the things that net them the most money for the least effort. By contrast, taxpayer-funded public programs are designed and expected to cover everyone—including, and especially, the most marginalized. That’s why they’re taxpayer-funded; so they don’t face existential risk be eschewing profit-driven decision-making. Does this work perfectly? No. But I think about it a lot when people shit on the bigness and slowness of government. That bigness & slowness is supposed to create space and resources to account for the communities, that a “lean,” fast approach deliberately ignores.

Columbia & Elm; Fairfield & Gloucester. — Ethan Marcotte

Coffee talk with Ethan Marcotte. Today’s special: inclusivity.

I want to get there: to have nuanced discussions about text descriptions; I want to read poetry in alt text; to have our work’s success measured by how broadly it can be accessed; to create moving, beautiful experiences for people who may not use the web like I do.

Building accessible websites and apps is a moral obligation | Go Make Things

• Morality is not always relative.
• You’re a web professional.
• The web is accessible out-of-the-box. We break it.
• It’s not on people with disabilities to tell you how you screwed up.
• It should be easier. This is our job.

Be Kind, Design – Nat Dudley – Medium

The transcript of Nat’s superb Webstock talk.

We need to start thinking about inclusivity the same way as we think about mobile design. We realised with mobile, that we have to put that experience at the centre of what we do, otherwise it won’t be successful and we’ll fail mobile users. We realised we have to design mobile-first.

The same is true for inclusivity. Instead of it being an afterthought if it’s thought about at all, it needs to be our first thought. It needs to be central to our strategy, embedded in how we analyse and solve the problems we encounter. Designing inclusive-first is the only way we’ll manage to serve and protect all of the people who use what we build.