Moving from ACCESS to DELIGHT for people with Disability
Moving from ACCESS to DELIGHT for people with Disability
My rant delivered at the “What Grinds my Gears” event at Intopia’s A11yCamp Melbourne meetup, Thursday 10 Nov 2022.
Below is my rant delivered at the “What Grinds my Gears” event at Intopia’s A11yCamp Melbourne meetup, Thursday 10 Nov 2022.
<begin rant>
I’m Erin and I’m the Design and Accessibility Manager at Transpire and I am a person with a disability.
I can’t be there in person as I’ve got a nasty virus - hence my gravelly voice.
Thanks to my altered state, this is going to be a mix of fever dream, rant and wishlist. Not really that different from me communicating when I'm not virussy, but it’s a good excuse nonetheless for this stream of consciousness.
So onto my topic:
How can we move from ACCESS to DELIGHT for people with disability?
The world is not designed for people with disabilities, we all know that. That’s why were are here.
However, on the rare occasion where people do try, the design doesn’t go far enough.
UX designers talk a lot about the ultimate goal of “delighting’’ users.
But I don’t see that happening for people with disabilities. We are supposed to be satisfied with just having access.
Accessibility and WCAG compliance is like the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, alongside water and air. It’s the thing that lets us do the bare minimum: function.
To use a metaphor, (because we all know that’s very accessible, just like my sarcasm) let’s compare accessibility to entering a fancy hotel.
Accessibility and inclusive design is often about just getting us in the door. It doesn’t mean we get a delightful experience.
People without disability entering the metaphorical front doors get the bell-person, the red carpet, the thousand thread count bedlinen and comped mini bar.
We with disabilities instead get the digital equivalent of entering via the grimy back door through the kitchen, dirty sheets and a stale sandwich.
Damn it, I want to be DELIGHTED once in a while.
Being a person with a disability can be expensive and frustrating.
Managing the systems that are there (in theory) to “help’ us is like a second job.
And it’s not even a good job that pays you to live.
For this crummy job, you pay IT to live.
The job is a series of appointments, forms, sick leave, medicines, specialists, and if you’re like me, losing things, buying that same thing again, finding the first thing you lost under the couch so now you have two, and so on… it drains away your money and sanity.
So, product people - delight me, delight us. Start taking parts of my second job away.
Remove the barriers that the systems impose on me.
To use an example of one part of my job I'd love someone to take away:
The Medicare app - otherwise known as the barrier between me and my money.
How the system works:
Pay exorbitant and ever increasing fee to specialist
Eventually get invoices from the specialist, download them or take a photo of each one with the crummy in-app camera
Upload them one by one (because god forbid you could be allowed to upload in bulk)
Fill in a form in the app for each invoice, by finding the various codes and dates that are littered around the invoice like a where’s wally puzzle
Input these individually into a series of identical forms.
And if you are neurodivergent like me, that means having all the invoices open and switching back and forth between the Medicare app and the invoice for each field you input because you can’t keep more than 3 consecutive digits in your head at any one time thanks to ADHD goldfish brain
Keep on inputting until you reach the arbitrary 6 invoice limit.
Check the forms, submit.
Pray to the Medicare gods that it eventually gets processed
Get your money back. Hopefully, one day.
Thing is, I get a decent amount of money back if I actually go through this process.
But it’s so arduous that I put it off until I have the energy, which is sometimes months. And I could really use that money. Life’s expensive.
This is just one example of where I would LOVE to be delighted.
(This is where I threw to the panel for their thoughts. Below is my final thoughts)
HOW I WOULD FIX THIS
Medicare app
Why can’t the app have optical recognition to read and input my invoice data for me?
Instead of some random codes to input that mean nothing to me, why can’t I instead use the actual name of the specialist I've been seeing for 15 years and let me select her from a list instead?
And really, why is the system dependent on me, the customer, to do the heavy lifting for Medicare, the provider?
Frankly, why do *I* need to submit invoices AT ALL? 😡
Why can’t my specialist just charge me the gap fee, and seek the rest of the payment directly from Medicare, without me having to do it?
The answer is because that would be a system that is designed for us.
So - how to move from just letting people with disability ‘in the door’ to making experiences that are ‘truly delightful’ for us
In an ideal world, UX and accessibility experts should not have to push up, persuade up.
We should already have the mandate to do our jobs properly and design delightful experiences for people with disabilities.
To allow that to happen, an organisation has to make disability their focus.
Your organisation’s staff makeup should reflect the community it serves. 18% of Australians have a form of disability.
Make a goal of having 18% of your staff people with disabilities. This should be spread across the business with particular emphasis on any area that delivers product to customers.
This also means people with disabilities at EVERY level of your organisation, right up to the board.
From those who write the business case, to those who approve them, the project managers, the agile team, the change managers, the support team. Their managers, and their manager’s managers. The CEO.
Set up a system to have regular consultation with customers with a wide range of disabilities and complex needs. (And also, pay them for the work they do.)
And finally, apply Inclusive design to your ENTIRE service and make that delightful too.
Because a delightful accessible app in an otherwise inaccessible service is just a band aid solution.
Do better.
Moving from ACCESS to DELIGHT for people with Disability was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.