Adaptive beauty
Universal accessibility is the next evolutionary step for web design - and we’re going to do it by making the accessible beautiful
Phil Powell of We Make Media made a really good post on Boagworld the other day about adaptive accessibility. He tries to answer the question: Ignoring disabled members of society in the physical world is wholly unacceptable, so why do we still tolerate it in our virtual world?
He rightly thinks this is partly because of the skewed way we think about disability. Unfortunately, the dominant perception of disabled people still follows the medical model of disability: differences in ability are a malfunction of “normal” physical processes. Disabled people have struggled for decades to challenge this misconception.
Disabled people favour the social model of disability, which “proposes that systemic barriers, negative attitudes and exclusion by society (purposely or inadvertently) are the ultimate factors defining who is disabled and who is not” Ahem. what? It’s much easier to illustrate this with a real world example:
Wheelchair & step - what is causing the impairment? The doctor says it’s the inability of the person to walk up the steps.
Wheelchair & ramp - where is the impairment now?
A common argument against creating accessible facilities is that they work against the requirements of the mainstream, or interfere with the purity of the original design. Adding a ramp to an existing building “ticks a box”, but often looks dreadful, and creates double work for the builder. However, since EVERYONE can use the ramp, the steps are redundant. Why not leave them out completely and just have a beautifully designed ramp?
Frank Lloyd Wright’s New York Guggenheim Museum. I doubt Lloyd Wright speicifically thought about wheelchair users during the 15 years he obsessed over this masterwork, but you’d be hard pressed to find a more beautiful building that’s completely accessible to people of limited mobility. The cantilevered ramp rises over 100 feet, and yet the entire building has only 1 floor.
Web technology evolves quickly- and standards are fluid, giving us plenty of opportunities to promote good habits. I hope with greater awareness of the social approach to disability we can remove the barriers to entry and enhance the lives of surfers not just with physical disabilities, but cognitive disabilities too.
And this doesn’t mean adding accessibility features or providing alternative sites - because a design that is approached in an inclusive way is more accessible to everybody- and can be beautiful too.
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