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This is probably more of a rant but its been niggling me for years that certain lines aren’t drawn between social disability and accessibility on the web. When we talk about accessibility we often visualise physical or mental impairments, or even the technical impairments of bandwidth constraint and browser functionality. We can draw the line to include those who are young, not well educated or are not natural speakers of our language. But we often overlook social disability.

Social Disability & the Poor

By social disability I mean two crucial groups - the socially isolated and the economically disenfranchised. These are the lumped together as the poor.

The interesting thing about the poor are their diversity. The unemployed, long term unemployed, disability pension recipients, single mothers. Many are socially isolated and lack social support mechanisms. They lack access to opportunity for themselves and their children. This, in my perspective, identifies them as disadvantaged.

The Impact of Poverty

So where does accessibility get impacted by poverty? It should be reasonably easy to correlate a lot of what we’re already accepting about accessibility straight across to the poor. Let’s look at what they probably don’t have - broadband access, strong literacy and numeracy skills, technical skillsets, and the ability to buy or replace equipment. These are people who you could almost guarantee will be using old monitors and slow refurbished computers. But we should all know that instinctively and it just never seems to get onto our radar.

A Friend’s Story

A friend of mine was here last year learning (in her 30’s) how to use the Internet. She’s used it before but only to retrieve emails. Things she didn’t understand included much of what I take for granted - the double click and the folder metaphor. She’s been on manic depressive medication for two decades and has appalling motor skills - I had to turn the mouse down to the slowest setting and still double click was only a one in four chance of success. Her mental model didn’t include the scrolling mouse and she had extreme difficulty dealing with interfaces in general.

My friend is an exception. She falls into other categories that we’re comfortable with so we box her in as mentally disabled, or physically disabled from her long term medication. But she’s also socially isolated by poverty - she can’t afford internet access or a computer of her own. She’s economically isolated because when you’re poor you don’t get out to meet new people so your influences are minimised and nobody is telling you about new things and metaphors like desktops and folders.

The Poor are Large in Number

The interesting thing about accepting that accessibility includes the poor is that we’re no longer talking about small sub-groups of people that can be pushed to the sideline. Even in Australia we’re talking millions of people. And while they don’t have a lot of money we can’t ignore the poor - they have a combined spending that is a force to be appreciated. And they generally spend everything they get instead of poking it away in banks and investments.

Our Social Responsibility as Developers

As web developers we need to consider that by creating web solutions that disenfranchise the poor we would be contributing to a greater social effect. Our job should be one of building a social structure that supports society. Clay Shirky’s line comes to mind:

A society that has an Internet is a different kind of society than a society that doesn’t, just as a society that had a printing press was a different kind of a society than a society that didn’t.Clay Shirky

Our responsibility to society through our work lays in the realisation of that principle. That a society with the internet is a different society than one without it. You can infer from that a situation where those without access to that internet are severely impacted. The poor have the ability to fall between the cracks and get left behind. Because poverty is a disability and if you’ve ever experienced it you’ll have an idea of its impact.

To clarify my point: we need to appreciate accessibility has an important role to play in providing sufficient access to some users particularly for government and business web solutions. Being poor should not preclude an individual from being able to use a government website, for example, simply because we’ve developed for a broadband only audience on the expectation that users can afford fast processors, high quality monitors and have the capacity to absorb complicated jargon effectively.

Its the developers’ job to create robust solutions not the users job to get around barriers. That should be a maxim on our office walls.

Example: Disability Support Pensioner

For example, on average a male in Tasmania on a disability support pension generally has spent 1 year unemployed, 2 years long term unemployed, and then 7 and a half years on the disability support pension. That pension masks true unemployment by pushing them off the radar. They immediately impact health systems with a sharp spike in mental illness and greater use of hospitals. There are strong intergenerational links between poverty and unemployment. They have four times more chance of dying than leaving the disability support pension with a full time job.

Conclusion

This is a long rant but hopefully just one other person out there will see the link between building accessible web solutions - particularly for business and government - that is inclusive of that demographic. Accessibility is about access and the lack of it. We’re hitting the mark in various places of that demographic but somehow failing to accept that just being impoverished is a disability in itself. It impacts how people interact on the web and their ability to use our interfaces.

Sadly, especially in business and government, this point is missed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 12:06 pm and is filed under accessibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.