How could IDEA be a bad idea?
by Matt May
Welcome to Practical Tips. I’m Matt May, Chief Hot Take Officer at Practical Equity and Inclusion. Hello, new subscribers! This is issue #3. If you read this and need more now, you can get caught up here.
Whenever I talk about disability in public, I ask myself if I’m going to give an indoor voice or an outdoor voice talk. An outdoor voice talk assumes I’m introducing my audience to one or more aspects of disability for the first time, and that I need to stay positive and keep the nitpicking down to a minimum. It’s my indoor voice talks where I can tell other members of the community what I think we need to do. To be clear, this is an indoor-voice newsletter. I’ve been working on disability issues for over half my life, and I’ve been disabled for longer than that, so I’m most critical of what and who I know best. In other words: I’m only this mean because I love you. ❤️
I have a big, loooong post coming on some of my issues with the accessibility community in relation to the broader community of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Possibly too long to make you read in an email. But something keeps coming up that I want to address (slightly) more briefly, and that’s the concept of expanding DEI to include “accessibility” (to wit: DEIA, or the more mnemonic IDEA).
DEI is a space in constant evolution. That’s literally why it has three names. But it’s still fundamentally built around individuals who were looking for a way to address their own unequal treatment, sought community with others like them, then often (but not always) broadened their horizons from there. It’s safe to say, though, that not all DEI practitioners are fully-evolved and intersectional advocates, putting their weight behind both issues that speak to the identities they have and the ones that do not.
“Diversity includes disability” is a popular modern-day rallying cry (though I could trace the phrase back at least as far as the mid-1990s, to Dale S. Brown of the President's Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities in Washington, DC). It’s been clear enough, at least to disabled people, that we have standing in DEI spaces. There is a fair bit of ableism and ignorance about disability among DEI professionals; it should also be recognized that disability advocates can bring their own racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and even their own forms of ableism to the table as well. It’s fair to remind non-disabled people from other marginalized backgrounds of the unique and shared issues our communities face. But that requires us to show up and do our work, as well. (See Vilissa Thompson and #DisabilityTooWhite for an example.)
I believe one of the main obstacles we face in making things better for disabled people is that we haven’t curated the word “accessibility” very well. It’s been so loaded with different meanings that it’s almost a Rorschach test of disability awareness. Is it technical compliance? Equal participation? Advocacy? It depends on who you ask, and when.
I don’t believe that lumping all disability issues represented under one term does disabled communities any favors, because it confuses the legal, political and moral aspects of disability inclusion and equity.
I’ll give an example. Say you’re making a generative-AI text-to-image model (e.g. DALL-E, Midjourney). You may be approached with any number of user experience issues that relate to technical access to your product, such as how to add alternate text to an image the model just created. By all definitions, that’s accessibility.
You will also get feedback about the results that appear based on a prompt like “blind person,” or “Down syndrome,” and how the human-shaped figures responding to those prompts appear stereotypical or otherwise offensive. What you have here is an issue of representation. This is well within the bounds of DEI—but you won’t find a remedy in accessibility standards, and you may not find the skills (or the authority) to address it in most accessibility organizations, which are funded to oversee standards compliance.
Adding accessibility to the DEI abbreviation presents the disability community with a dilemma:
assert that DEI does not include disability, and thus assign all issues specific to disabled people as “accessibility,” a category of its own; or
further broaden the definition of “accessibility” as an addition to diversity, equity and inclusion, to encompass the obstacles faced by all marginalized identities to products, services or experiences.
These are both awful choices. The first modifies the term DEI only to sequester disability issues away from it. And the second even further muddles the term “accessibility,” and opens the disability community (or rather, the accessibility community) up to accusations of claiming expertise over identities they don’t necessarily have in common.
So, that’s a mess. It’s true that disability advocates can point to any number of cases where accessibility was not taken into consideration within other marginalized communities. But to me, the solution is not to demand a letter of our own, but to do better in our own coalition work.
In other words, I think “diversity includes disability” is the right next step. We should be hearing about disability not just in products but also in hiring, employee experience, research, etc. But with that, we also have to recognize that other marginalized communities face barriers to many of the same products, services and experiences we do. When that happens, a DEI lens on accessibility—not just an A tacked on—means sharing advocacy for improving the state of things all around, not focusing only on what’s on our checklists.
There’s one other thing we need to do, urgently: we need to stop making “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.
What to read
Speaking of indoor-voice posts… Baldur Bjarnason wrote one called “Web developers: remarkably untalented and careless?” It’s pretty brutal, and if you happen to be a web developer, take a deep breath before diving in. But… ehhhh, he’s got more than one point. I’m in the market for a corporate website, and you would not believe how terrible the starting points are. I’m building what is in essence a four-page brochure, and some of the templates in these systems are throwing up 10MB+ of JavaScript, sometimes in 2 or more frameworks. And, as Bjarnason says, “Don’t get me started on accessibility.”
This might be the burnout talking, but I definitely get the appeal of a small web movement.
Office hours
…are off for this week and next. My birthday is tomorrow (not an important one, save up for next year), and next Thursday is Thanksgiving in the US, so it’s a good time for me to start with a clean slate on Calendly. (Google Calendar’s been awful for this, so I’m going back to what works.)
I will also be launching paid slots two weeks from today. Here’s how it’ll work: I will open a fixed number of free slots weekly, as I do now. I’m adopting a “buy one, give one” model: for every paid session, I will open one more free slot the following week. Paid slots can be booked for any open block during the week; free slots are on Thursdays. That’s the only difference. I’m not putting any other limits on free slots for the time being, but I will be looking to make sure college and early-career folks don’t get crowded out. Oh, and all slots are now 50 minutes, up from 30.
Office hours have been the most fun I’ve had working over the last six years. When I posted a poll to float the idea of charging for them, I expected maybe one in four would say it’s a good idea. It turned out to be 97%, with 38% saying they might sign up themselves. I’m humbled by the response, and I would love for this to be a good chunk of what I do going forward.
Have a great week. Go out and rattle some cages. Blame it on me if you have to. 😉