6 months of Practical Tips!
by Matt May
Happy half-birthday to this newsletter! On October 30, 2023, the first issue of Practical Tips went out. I didn’t know if this would work, or if I could keep up with writing a thousand-plus-word essay a week, but apart from a couple holiday breaks, I’ve been able to serve up a hot take on deadline.
I’m going to brag about one thing. One Monday, I hit publish and went away for a couple hours. When I came back, I saw that about half of you had already opened the newsletter. The fact that so many of you would drop what you’re doing just because you see another looooong email from me in your inbox is what has kept me going. Many of you have replied to me to cheer me on, and I’m sorry for not getting back as often as I should. I’m just not that good at receiving complimentary feedback. I’ll work on it, and thanks to you all.
It occurred to me that most of you have seen less than half of what I’ve written, so I’ve picked out a few articles from the archive in case you’d like to get caught up. This was harder than I expected because a) re-reading my own writing (cringe), and b) at over 25,000 words, which is about half of a mass-market UX book, it adds up. But I’ve picked out a few that I think you’ll like if you missed them the first time. And if you’re one of my handful of original subscribers, to thank you for that leap of faith, I’m giving you the week off. 😉
“[We] need to stop making (the term) 'accessibility’ do the heavy lifting. The issues that we’re facing are disability inclusion and equity issues. This is a matter of human rights, not legal or technical compliance. The people who work in this field, by and large, are not motivated to change things solely because we’re working through a checklist. It’s time to decouple the needs and lived experiences of disabled citizens from what people are obligated to do by law or policy. Disability rights work is DEI work. It’s already in there. We don’t need to rename it to claim it.”
When equity work isn’t worth it
“If this organization is successful, what are the outcomes I am enabling? I feel like this part is overlooked, especially in the AI space. Plenty of companies pay a lot, and treat their employees reasonably well. But I don’t think an equity-centric role can truly be successful if it enables a company to eliminate entire categories of employment. Or to advance surveillance capitalism. Or to fabricate ways to deny medical care to people who need it. Or to facilitate deportations, or (police) reproductive health. Or to wage war. Your red lines may be different from mine. But in all too many cases, the product is the poison.”
“Making an ROI case is a cheap shortcut. Once you have focused a company on how much money it can make by doing the right thing, once they’re not making money—for any reason—they will blame it on doing the right thing. If you’re scratching your head as to why railing against the very term ‘DEI’ is a rallying cry for soulless turbocapitalists, there’s your answer. When things are going great for a company, they’ll take a flyer on all kinds of projects they see as beneficial to the brand—not because they are morally or ethically ‘right,’ but because they believe it’ll make them richer. When times are tight, though, see how they turn on those same initiatives.”
“If you ask the average Fortune 500 company what they’re doing for disabled people, they will likely point you to their accessibility team and the work they’re doing. But if you ask what they’re doing for racial or gender equity, they will point you to the DEI teams in their human resources organizations. In other words, companies direct their disability activities primarily toward the products they make, while they direct their efforts for the benefit of other historically underinvested groups primarily into hiring and employee experience. That leaves two gaps.”
And finally, issue #1: Stay Human
“I cringe whenever I hear a given organization is ‘data-driven.’ It reminds me of all the times I brought a list of accessibility issues to an engineering manager, only to hear those dreaded words: ‘how many people are we talking about here, really?'”' One gets the sense from talking with a lot of engineers that life would be a lot easier if we all just happened to do tasks the same way. If we all fit neatly in a small number of categories. Preferably two or fewer. In other words, it’d make a lot of technologists’ lives easier if we behaved more like machines.”
There’s also a three-parter on my views of the relationship between accessibility, inclusive design and product equity, if that’s your thing Here’s the whole archive..
Thank you all for egging me on with your subscribes, shares and replies. New content returns next week.
Office hours
…are canceled for this week. If you’re going to be at the Aspen Institute product equity summit this week, let’s meet up.
Have a great week.