Disabilities in Real Life
Image from mollyburkeofficial.com
I research usability and accessibility daily as a UX Designer. The topic of disabilities and how different they are comes up a lot in my reading and research. Often times it is we, the designers, who have to point out the accessibility and user interactions our users will experience and how we can align that with standard practices. Sometimes it’s faster to ignore accessibility and come up with excuses like, “A blind person will not use our app, we don’t need to think about that!” (which I’ve had a past employer say to me).
I personally don’t have any disabilities that keep me from using products or living a relatively normal life, besides adult ADHD and the difficulties that come with that (but that’s another post one day). I have to admit though, I'm that person who spends a lot of time on YouTube in my free time (But surprisingly does not pay for an ad-free experience). There are two disabled YouTubers that come to mind that inspire me every day with their content.
Molly Burke
Molly Burke is a blind content creator whose videos focus on her experiences with blindness, fashion and makeup advice, and vlogs about her daily life and activities with her service dog. She lives half her time in Canada and half in the United States in California.
Recently, Molly had a potentially life-threatening event occur after only a few hours of moving into her new apartment. The fire alarm went off, followed by a big explosion! She didn't know where the emergency exits were located and she didn't know where to go in case of a fire (she'd only been there for a few hours and was going to do it the next morning). There's a video where she talks about the difficulties and anxiety it brought her when she realized she was in quite the predicament and could not see where to go, which way the danger was, and where she could find safety.
From a Designer and User Experience perspective, this could have been handled by the management company that leased her the apartment. A quick tour after giving her the keys, having brail on exit signs in the hallways, and having a brail or tactile emergency exit map posted inside her apartment would all have been solutions and would have taken minutes to show Molly.
Assumptions like, "We can do it the next day" could have meant life or death for her if her mom had not been staying over with her that night.
There is a video where Molly compares two shoe websites and shows how she navigates the broken site and how miserable her experience was trying to buy custom shoes without help from a sighted person. She confessed in the video that she had already spent a few hours on the site with a sighted person so she could make the video she wanted. She expressed her frustration about the amount of time she spends navigating something a sighted person could do so quickly. If you are a UX Designer or Web Designer, I highly recommend you watch the video linked and share it with your design friends.
This intrigued me so much, that I ended up giving a presentation to my colleagues to talk about the importance of something as tiny as adding alt tags, making sure the tabbing works, and making the site screen reader-friendly.
Another video was when she struggled as a blind person renovating an apartment. Something as simple as choosing appliances for her kitchen was extremely difficult for her. She ran into multiple issues: the buttons not being tactical (like touch screen), the tactile appliances being very outdating looking (resale value is very important to her), and the appliances having no auditory cues.
"Smart Appliances" were suggested to her, but she would have to have constant Internet access to use her kitchen appliances. (Which at a glance sounds like something that was created for people with disabilities, but further investigating she realized she would not be able to use her kitchen if her wifi was acting up. And not to mention, when she tested the app in the store, it ended up not even being fully accessible!)
I think a lot of people without disabilities tend to forget that there are simple things we can do to make life a little bit easier for people who need a bit of help with technical things, especially blind or hard of seeing people.
“I can’t be all blind people, but I can share my story as Molly.”
Jessica Kellgren-Fozard
Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, whose videos focus on disability awareness, LGBT history, and vintage fashion. She suffers from multiple ailments including deafness, hereditary neuropathy with liability to pressure palsy, Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (which sort of means she has trouble moving, standing, and walking far distances, has difficulties remembering things, and tires easily.)
Jessica doesn't share as much about navigating the world, but she does have a few videos about being frustrated as a disabled parent. When her child was born, she ended up overdoing her body to the point that she paralyzed her body for a few weeks as a result of her issues with her nerves. She talks positively about ways to get around her disabilities. Like in the video mentioned above, she shared the responsibility of childcare with her wife by spending feedings, quiet time, tummy time, etc with her son on the floor or on the bed since she could not move around at the time.
She talks about the stigmatism that comes with her "not looking disabled" enough. Because of her syndromes, she can walk a bit and do a little bit of motor movement, but some days she can't at all. She talks about times when she was judged about riding a motorized scooter because she didn't "look disabled" enough or when people did not believe that she was fully deaf because she had learned to speak and read lips.
“Let’s remember that not all disabilities are visible and many illnesses really don’t care how old you are, they’re going come after your body anyway”
I've watched these two powerful women jump through all sorts of hoops to align with "normal" people and the "normal" world.
After reading this and watching some of the videos I've linked, what do you think? Can you be more mindful of all the different disabilities and the ways we can contribute, as designers to making the world a little more accessible? You might think, well what I do doesn't have anything to do with disabled people. But remember, there are silent disabilities everywhere. Deafness, blindness, color blindness, poor sight, difficulties understanding or reading, or even just being old are all things we should take into account as designers.
The things we design should be intuitive and easy to use. Remember that!
I am in no way affiliated with either of these content creators. I am just an inspired designer who likes to watch Youtube. There are many other disabled content creators out there, Molly and Jessica are only two of the amazing people out there. Follow these inspiring women on their social media accounts or YouTube to learn more about them and their content.
Molly Burke
Instagram: @mollyburkeofficial
Facebook: http://facebook.com/mollyburkeofficial
Twitter: @mollybofficial
TikTok: @mollyburkeofficial
Website: http://mollyburkeofficial.com
Jessica Kellgren-Fozard
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/JessicaOutO...
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JessicaOOTC
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JessicaOutOf...
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jessicaoutoft...
