Misunderstanding Inclusive Content Strategy

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Designers who misunderstand inclusive content as “over-empathising” don’t understand the problem and may cost your business. We’re designing for all abilities and not a disability. Inclusive content benefits everyone when using our products.

Ability is a range

Ability includes the way people access content, how they think about it, and how they respond to it. An inclusive content strategy supports most abilities. It safeguards usability for the widest range of potential customers.

Barriers are personal

We all experience barriers when our range of ability changes. Those changes can be permanent or temporary. They include changes to our senses, thinking, and movement. Any change can take effort to adapt to different scenarios. The effort can consume resources and time, or block progress entirely. That is frustrating.

What barriers people experience differ for each individual. For example, processing unfamiliar content and reading in a non-native language are abilities. When those abilities don’t match the content’s demands and the content is not understood, then that’s a barrier.

The following formula from Horton in Barnet & du Toit (2018) illustrates that disability is caused by the barriers we design:

Ability (functional capability) + Barrier (created by our product) = Disability (conflict between ability and barrier)

Consequences

We can’t rely on people to provide their own coping and support strategies. When a person experiences a barrier they’ll move to a product or service they can use.

There are no edge cases and only a range of scenarios. Failing to design for one person is a business risk. For example, the chief operating officer of a $70m prospect is testing our product. They can’t use it and we can’t design solutions within their deadline. We lose the prospect.

References

Barnett, S., & du Toit, N. (2018, December 8). Disability is a spectrum, not a binary. Retrieved from https://www.24a11y.com/2018/disability-is-a-spectrum-not-a-binary/.