The Business of UX Writing (for True Epub) by Yael Ben-David

Author:Yael Ben-David
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781952616259
Publisher: A Book Apart
Published: 2022-11-23T16:37:28+00:00

Accessibility

Tech is the future. It’s unethical to limit innovations in tech to a select few. If tech evolves only for certain groups, privilege is exacerbated and the chasm between the haves and the have-nots deepens, depriving us all of synergy left untapped. Products are more useful, businesses more successful, and humanity better off when tech behaves ethically—and UXW has a big role to play in that.

Accessibility means making products usable for people who might otherwise face barriers to entry beyond their control. Originally, permanent physical barriers were at the core of the conversation, and screen readers used by people with visual impairments were the primary use case. “Accessibility” at that time was often a buzzword for alt text and similar UXW tools and techniques used for making visual UI accessible to people who consume content in ways that are not dependent on sight.

Over time, the accessibility conversation broadened to include not only additional permanent physical barriers like color vision deficiency, but also long-term, nonphysical barriers like neurodiversity, low literacy, and low digital literacy; temporary barriers like injury; and situational barriers like a new parent dealing with constant distractions and extreme fatigue, or a person trying to use a voice interface in a loud, public space.

It’s easy to see how making products accessible to those with permanent, temporary, and situational barriers to entry is ethical, but it also makes good (business) sense. Without accommodating people who experience these barriers, a huge potential market—an estimated 18 percent of the population in the UK lives with a disability (https://bkaprt.com/buxw43/03-07)—is off-limits to the business. Furthermore, accessibility is becoming a legal requirement in more countries, and risking lawsuits is not in the business’s best interest (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [WCAG] 2.1) (https://bkaprt.com/buxw43/03-08).

Writing alt text for images and meaningful link text (as opposed to “Learn more” and “Click here”) makes visual content accessible to users who, for any number of reasons, consume content using screen readers. Closed captioning on videos helps lower barriers to consuming audio content for those who are hard of hearing or located in a quiet library or on loud public transportation. Alt text, meaningful link text, and closed captioning all fall within the realm of UXW (https://bkaprt.com/buxw43/03-09).

We can write without reference to design elements like “tabs” and “windows,” or to tech jargon like “navigate,” to make flows accessible to people with low digital literacy. We can use tools like Hemingway App (https://bkaprt.com/buxw43/03-10) to make sure we keep our copy at an accessible reading level for everyone, and we can apply evidence-based recommendations in the crowd-sourced Readability Guidelines (https://bkaprt.com/buxw43/03-11). These are all in the UX writer’s purview.

Products can also integrate out-of-the-box solutions, including accessiBe (Fig 3.14), which can help us catch the lowest-hanging fruit until we’re able to expand our in-house accessibility efforts.

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