Context

Before diving in to the broader discussion for this blog post, I think it is important that I give some insight into some of the perspectives and opinions I have pertaining to accessibility design.

This past summer, I worked as a Content Design Intern for a FinTech company called PrimeRevenue. Outside of being insanely thankful that I even had a job in this job market, the internship itself presented me with a lot of growth opportunities. My task for this summer? Compose their Content Style Guide.

Going into it, I had a couple of really important values I wanted to keep at the forefront of my mind: accessibility, and translatability.

While my job focused specifically on their written work, I found myself pulled into other meetings, centered around content and web design. My scope within web design was limited for a variety of reasons, but I was able to at least weigh in on some of the designs presented for our application. And throughout it all I was preoccupied with simplifying our designs and our written content down so that it was easy to navigate and understand for everyone, regardless of background.

Suffice to say, I think content and navigational accessibility is a hill I’d die on, and this book was very helpful in articulating some of the motivations that I struggled to explain to my colleagues this summer.

Melonçon’s Broader Definition of Disability is Genius

I’m going to start first by addressing the broader definition of disability that Melonçon posited in Chapter 6 of her book, Rhetorical Accessibility. In it, she describes disability as “any diminished capability in a person’s ability to perform a given task” (Melonçon 2004). And I really had never thought of it like that, especially because it broadens the group of people who could be considered disabled by her standards to include people who are temporarily incapacitated for some reason or another.

This broader definitions includes people with concussions, or even people who have come down with a cold. Which, post COVID-era, is an incredibly important state to take into consideration especially if you are in school or working. The work does not stop for you even if you are quarantining for 14 days, and if you’re symptomatic, the odds that you are hopped up on cold drugs so that you are not incapacitated is likely.

I also really liked the inclusion of Jonathan Lazar’s defining of universal accessibility (UA), which the quote from his work explained as a branch of usability engineering. Particularly, where it includes the diversity of the users background and locale, which was a topic that came up frequently in my work at PrimeRevenue.

Speaking to the holistic approach of this section of her book, I think that this is an excellent rule of thumb, regardless of if you are designing for the web. I would argue that it can be incorporated even further when it comes to writing style and rhetoric in documents and books, particularly those that are designed for a much more general audience. The more general the audience the easier it should be to engage with your document or artifact, digital or otherwise.

Simpler Design

My goal with this is not to tell you how to simplify your designs, or force you to do it. I think that design on a broader scale is about striking a balance between something that is simple, satisfying to look at, and keeps your audience in mind.

As a graphic designer, the balance between simplicity and satisfying designs is a hard one to find. Sometimes the prettiest designs are the most difficult for everyone to comprehend, and you start venturing into art instead of a product that is supposed to serve a larger function. I am extremely guilty of that.

But at the end of the day it is about the user when designing, not you. The same thing comes with informative writing. One of my biggest struggles when composing the Style Guide at PrimeRevenue was simplifying my language so that it was at the standard 8th-grade level for technical documents. As a fiction writer, it almost made me break out in hives, but I realized that I wasn’t the one who was going to use this Style Guide the most, so I pivoted.

Melonçon states that “it’s important to discuss the role of designing with accessibility at the beginning of the project cycle.” And this sentence resonated with me, and I am fairly certain that I said it at least five or six separate times to colleagues and it probably made it into the Style Guide somewhere. Because thinking about accessibility in the early project cycle is synonymous with thinking about your audience. Thinking about who is interacting with your work and the possible roadblocks they might encounter.

For artists and writers out there, trying to fit themselves in to the corporate working environment by taking up some of these positions, I want to tell you that there is something inherently satisfying about looking back at a project and knowing that everyone will be able to engage with it and understand it. It may not be the most “cutting-edge” design, but what does “cutting-edge” design even matter if people can’t use your product or understand your work?

Web accessibility, and accessibility in general, is overlooked frequently. I invite you to start considering it in more detail as you work on projects that are designed for practicality. Because there is nothing more fulfilling than someone thanking you for the changes and adjustments you’ve made and telling you that you made their life easier.