Accessibility and Inclusion
When reading the web article, Recognizing Exclusion is the Key to Inclusive Design: In Conversation with Kat Holmes, one thing written that stuck out to me was: The key to inclusive design, is working closely with excluded communities to create better solutions. Living in a society dominated by standards of “white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism”. As diverse as the human race is, our technology should be able to match or adapt to individual needs as much as possible. There are so many intersections between design, accessibility, and inclusion — and all three really predicate on the idea of identity. Race, gender, ability, social-class, and more. In recent news, TikTok was under fire, as the algorithm was pushing black content creators out of the platform, and prioritizing white creator’s posts. Because so much happens on platforms with privacy, algorithms, and data, without the user knowing, they are consuming biased content.
Accessibility is related to inclusion in many ways, however they are not necessarily synonymous. Accessibility allows for inclusion. We see accessibility in many different big and small ways. Closed captions, being able to adjust font size and color, screen darkness, voice control and more. Often, people will believe these tools are for those with obvious disabilities, however accessibility reaches much farther than just that. However, not all technological devices are made equitably, and full accessibility is not yet possible. Putting one’s pronouns on an account also demonstrates accessibility being related to inclusion in that it erases the standards mentioned in the first paragraph, like heteropatriarchy — with the importance of pronouns stemming from the LGBTQ+ community, that has been actively excluded from many virtual and physical grounds.
