The importance of inclusive design

Why is inclusive design important?

My first response to this question is to flip it on its head:

Why isn't inclusive design important?

Of course, this argument isn't going to go far. It's going to take a lot more to convince people than to simply say “why not?”

However, what lies behind my question is - “OK, are you are willing to ignore 22% of the population?”

22% of the UK population are disabled. That's 13,200,000 people. The 22% have a spending power of £250bn.

I'll let the above stats sink in for a moment...

This means that “standard practice” often discriminates against 22% of our population, but at some point it will discriminate 100% of us over the course of our lives. At some point, we are all vulnerable, either temporarily or permanently.

I’ll just explain what I mean by us all being vulnerable at some point in our lives. It’s not necessarily linked to disabilities or mental health issues, although there is a link. Vulnerability is circumstantial and I’ll talk about this in greater detail below. We must remember that vulnerability sits alongside impairment.

What is impairment?

Broadly speaking we can say impairment sits across three categories and, when we design accessible services and products we should support all three impairment types:

Permanent impairment – more commonly called disabilities – these are permanent or long term conditions which impact on the individual over their lifetime. In this example, we’ve got someone with a lower leg amputation.
Temporary impairment – we’d probably all call this group injuries and they generally last less than 12 months. In this example we’ve got someone with a broken foot.
Situational impairment – occurs when the situation we’re currently in makes it difficult or impossible to complete an activity. In this example we’ve got a parent pushing a pram, making it difficult to use her arms to complete a task.

In these cases we can understand that each of these different groups have broadly the same requirement – to be able to complete an activity using just one arm/leg. They are, however, not necessarily vulnerable. It’s only when the circumstance they are in has not been designed to support them that they are vulnerable.

What is vulnerability?

Vulnerability is slightly different to impairment. Because we can all be vulnerable depending on the circumstance, vulnerability doesn’t necessarily mean you need to have an impairment.

Vulnerability covers a whole host of circumstances that we can all find ourselves in at any time and therefore it can be difficult to support people who could become vulnerable as it’s all circumstantial.

For example, all of the following could make someone vulnerable – although it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone would be:

Buying your first house
Having your first child
Losing a loved one
Gambling addiction
Losing your job
Age
‘Non-standard’ grocery requirements
Disability

The scale of vulnerability in the UK

The scale of vulnerability can sometimes be difficult to articulate because it can affect everyone and at any time. However, there are some groups of people who are more likely to be vulnerable particularly in ecommerce environments. Here’s a few examples which show the scale of the issue in the UK.

1 in 7 adults in the UK have a literacy level (also known as reading age) of or lower than an 11 year old. Knowing this, we need to be mindful of the language we use on our digital platforms.
1 in 2 adults in the UK have a numeracy level of or lower than an 11 year old – again we need to be mindful of this particularly around our checkout/trolley experiences
By 2021, half of the UK population will have a cancer diagnosis
1 in 6 people over 80 has dementia
1 in 8 adults in the UK have an unpaid caring responsibility
And, let's not forget Covid-19

All of these examples don’t automatically make someone vulnerable but they increase their chances of becoming vulnerable whilst shopping. Thinking about these types of situations can help us improve design.

I regularly use the Barclays inclusive design principles and I highly recommend taking a closer look at them. You can find full details about all of them at inclusivedesignprinciples.org but as a quick overview the principles are:

Provide comparable experience
Give control - ensure people are in control. People should be able to access and interact with content in their preferred way
Offer choice
Consider situation
Be consistent
Prioritise content – help users focus on core tasks, features, and information by prioritising them within the content and layout
Add Value – consider the value of features and how they improve the experience for different users.

Case study: Dominos

There's nothing more irresponsible than design that is expensive to fix and opens you up to liability issues. Just last year, the pizza giant Domino’s were in hot water over accessibility issues on their website. A man with sight impairments named Guillermo Robles sued the pizza chain after he was unable to order food on Domino’s website and mobile app despite using screen-reading software.

The Supreme Court denied a petition from Domino’s shortly after Robles' claim, to hear whether its website is required to be accessible to the disabled, leaving in place a lower court decision against the company.

The decision not to hear the case is a loss for the company and a win for accessibility advocates, who have argued that if businesses do not have to maintain accessible sites, disabled people could be effectively shut out of substantial portions of the economy.

Robles’ attorney, Joe Manning, said in a statement that the decision was “the right call on every level. The blind and visually impaired must have access to websites and apps to fully and equally participate in modern society - something nobody disputes,” he said. “This outcome furthers that critical objective for them and is a credit to our society.”

This is brilliant news for accessibility advocates but Dominos were not happy.

I have difficulty understanding why Dominos wanted to contest it. Accessibility benefits everyone.