Inclusive Technologies

There’s a new book out called “The Plenitude” by Rich Gold, the late polymath designer/artist/engineer/scientist. He makes many interesting points about the nature of design. The title is his word (drawn from a Wiccan concept of Nature) for the incessant profusion of products that surrounds us. It’s kind of a re-framing of the concept of “post-scarcity”, except this is a design and market view rather than an economic and political one.

Both products and their features have exploded into the Plenitude. Today you simply cannot buy a media device that cannot compute, or a computer that cannot play media, or a damn wireless phone that does both. The era of weak, single function products with hardwired interfaces is over. Remember the old black phone that the installer screwed into the wall, or the adding machine that couldn’t subtract, or the typewriter that couldn’t correct your spelling? All gone.

I think this change has great relevance for our field. Many of the electronic products we experience contain a lot of potential accessibility — multimedia capability, flexible interfaces, network awareness. All of them can be adjusted to suit the user in some way. It’s true that only a few of them actually expose that accessibility, and that’s a shame. But it’s less of a shame than what used to be, back when there was only one model phone and it was unusable by deaf or even hard of hearing people. Looking at today’s products, the accessibility is in there, we just have to figure out how to get it out.

In fact, most assistive technologies are harvested from the Plenitude; they base their value on technological features created not for accessibility but for the mass market, like speech synthesis, digital audio, and adjustable font displays. Assistive technology companies have figured out how to refine the accessibility, like the first people to pickle the otherwise inedibly bitter olive. Much of the rest of accessibility is loose in the wild, discoverable if you look in the right direction.

But we still organize public policy on accessibility as if it’s scarce. We prescribe it, regulate it, certify it, and even license expertise in it. Perhaps it’s time to let some of that go, in favor of a more naturalistic approach. Years ago Harry Murphy, the founder of the CSUN conference, said that the role of accessibility clinician might evolve from therapeutic intervenor into “recommender”. That sounded right to me then, and it sounds even better now.

An online searchable database contains all the keyboard shortcuts from all the key applications on all the key operating systems.  Having those shortcuts is only half the solution — the rest is knowing about them!
KeyXL keyboard shortcuts

A Portland, Oregon artist’s project sticks braille statements on walls around town. It’s not the informative braille that tells you how to use an ATM, just interesting statements about braille and blindness. The project was informed by the artist’s conversations with some people in the blind community. No alt text on the website, though….
Braille Graffiti