Future & Contribution
Designing So More People Can Take Part
Also called: Accessibility
- Personal interest
- Philosophical question
- Working interpretation
A tool that helps someone communicate or take part more fully is one of the clearest kinds of progress I know. It reminds me that clever technology should serve people's own ability to choose and act.
Who is shut out right now by the way we have designed the system?
Why it attracts me
Most technology makes something faster or cheaper. Accessible design can do something rarer: let a person take part where they were shut out before. That kind of progress is easy to see and hard to argue with.
The idea
Accessibility starts with the reflective question: who is blocked by the way this was designed? Removing those barriers often helps everyone, a pattern known as the curb-cut effect. It also starts with respect for other minds (Understanding Other People's Inner Lives). I cannot know someone's experience from the inside, so the person using the tool has to lead, and the design has to leave room for them to correct it.
An example
A Voice Before Words is a side project on this site about AAC, short for augmentative and alternative communication: tools for people who cannot rely on speech. Symbol-based systems can leave a person speaking in compressed strings like "I · GO · BATHROOM". The project explores a language layer that offers complete sentences, such as "I need to go to the bathroom," and lets the person pick the one they mean. Eye-gaze control is planned for a future app but does not work in the browser demo. It is a development project, not a finished device.
Where it connects
This idea grows out of Engineering That Respects How People Work, which treats people's real needs as design information. It also shares a rule with Using Automation Responsibly: software can propose, but the person decides.
Questions I'm still exploring
- How do I include the people a tool is for in designing it, not just in testing it?
- When does helpful software start speaking for someone instead of with them?
- Which barriers in ordinary tools have I stopped noticing because they do not affect me?
Sources and further reading
- Angela Glover Blackwell, "The Curb-Cut Effect", Stanford Social Innovation Review (Winter 2017) — How changes made for people who are left out tend to benefit everyone.
- W3C, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 — The main international standard for making web content accessible.
Working interpretation: drafted from my notes and interests for review. It is not a direct quotation, and I may still change it.