In the spirit of International Women’s Day (IWD) last month, we sat down with Suzanne Hayley, our new Product Designer at Accessibility NSW. Suzanne has spent the past 20 years working hard to make sure that everyone has access to what we create online regardless of ability, context, or situation. In this chat, we ask Suzanne about common web accessibility myths, how to get started on accessibility and some of the online barriers she would like to see knocked down.
Let’s get started:
Hi Suzanne, welcome to the team! Tell us a little about your role and how you got your start in accessibility?
Hello, thank you! I’m currently a product designer for Accessibility NSW, where we’ll be helping other NSW government agencies in designing and developing accessible products and services.
My accessibility start date was when WCAG 1.0 came out, which was about 20 years ago now. When organisational support for it has been absent, I have been planting seeds for it and making lots of polite suggestions. When it’s had support, I’ve introduced accessibility into design systems and supporting software engineers with implementation code-side as well.
I think the empathy that I always had was really baked in when I was working at Cochlear (for six and a half years). I listened to the stories of people with severe to profound hearing loss and the stories of their clinicians and really carried those stories with me.
What is an accessibility barrier you would like to see solved?
Rather than choose a direct barrier experienced by someone, I’m going to say that systemic barriers are the big problem. There are many people who would willingly implement inclusive practices that result in accessibility, but they don’t know how, or they don’t have support from either their manager or their organisation. If I was to mention a direct barrier, I’d mention another big overarching one: overall access to information, products and services. We should all be able to access the same information or experiences as everyone else. We all want to be included, right?
Is there a common web accessibility misconception you see come up often? If so, how do we myth bust it?
That accessibility practices are for agencies or companies with a very small and specific audience of people with permanent disabilities. Statistics show that people with disabilities make up about 20% of the population but it’s more than that. So many people don’t identify as having a disability and don’t use any services for this. I’m thinking about someone close to me who struggled with hearing loss before deciding they needed to look into hearing devices or someone else who has trouble reading text with low contrast because they are colour blind. Many of us are also temporarily impaired through accidents or illness. A very famous streaming service found that more than 80% of members used closed captions at least once a month. Making things accessible is just good design and good practice, because by doing it, we make things easier for everyone.
How do we bust this myth that accessibility practices are only for a few people? Education, visibility, training and support will help in normalising it. It should just be how we work.
A lot of organisations have no idea where to start with accessibility. What’s your advice to them?
There is help out there! There are accessibility experts that you can hire, and they will help you get to where you need to be, but you can also look at some of the great tools out there that show you how easy it is to make a part of your process. As a designer, I can tell you that there are plugins for some of the most common design tools that will walk you through the steps, highlight anything you’ve missed and annotate the design with accessibility notes for handoff to developers. WAVE by WebAIM has a free tool for checking your website and highlights where improvements can be made as well.
If you could share one book, podcast, video, or general resource that everyone should look into, what would it be?
Hmm. So many, but I’ll say “Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design” by Kat Holmes. The book discusses all kinds of accessibility, some accessibility pioneers and how inclusive design can be a catalyst for innovation and growth.
Our team at Accessibility NSW are creating some great guidelines for achieving digital accessibility.
For more information visit Accessibility and Inclusivity.