1. Current situation

1. Report & Causes

Creating a website became an unavoidable step to reach more people. Anyone with access to the internet and a computer can put together digital content, create a one page and publish it.

It explains the diversity of the websites and apps it encounters : public institutions’ showcase, e-commerce platforms, forums, brand websites, portfolios, blogs ... Social networks occupy a very special place on the web, they became part of our everyday life and even played a role as the trigger of certain social movements. Who would have thought that simply having access to Facebook or Twitter would have killed dictatorships for instance ?

Nowadays, nearly everything can be done digitally, even governments allow us to complete procedures online rather than on paper. Not being able to access those platforms became a real handicap. States’ website could count today as the most accessible content websites. Service designers and UX designers are working on making them the easiest to use.

The United Kingdom’s government even added a page to point out to the users what was not accessible yet and allowed them to give their feedback.

For a few years, we can also observe the increasing launch of immersive and playful websites. Inspired by the video game experiences and design, they outperform the simple idea of a web page and appear as technical thrill gems. Nevertheless, they do not usually use all the progress and ideas game designers would have thought of.

The video game industry is a good example for its creative process. Its starting point gathers innovation as well as adapting to the user. A lot of games allow the users to disable settings like ‘motion blur’ and ‘camera shake’. Most of them let the players customize the controls to fit their needs. I can’t help but observe that this is not a standard practice on the web. In fact, AAA Games, games with a higher marketing budget and resources, focuse on accessibility to reach more players and earn more money. They target people with disabilities. The World Health Organization estimates that 15% of the world’s population lives some form of disabiliy.

And as AAA games and indie games can inspire each other and exchange processes and ideas, accessibility became a common question, even a milestone.

Interaction Design involves creating products people will use. We should not ignore the social and political grounds, aspects and impacts of our creations. Nevertheless, it can be difficult to split our work from the way we see and experience the world. In a globalized world like ours today, the society we live in implies interacting and sharing with each other all the time. What if the world was not designed for you ?

During my research, I discovered that some articles were written in the late nineties and early 2000s to make an effort as designers on accessibility. It seems like the internet did not take that turn. Jakob Nielsen warned us to design more accessible websites in 1996. 1 4 years later, in April 2000, in an article titled « A Dao of Web Design », John Allsopp explained that designers still wouldn’t see the web as it is. They still design for print and screens the same way, implementing print limitations in every web page. Those articles were written more than twenty years ago but the issue of Inclusion is still more alive than ever.

1. Current situation

2. Inclusion in the world

I dug into the word «Inclusion» first, then in its different meanings depending on the context.

Oxford Languages defines Inclusion as : 1 - the action or state of including or of being included within a group or structure. 2 - the practice or policy of providing equal access to opportunities and resources for people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized, such as those who have physical or mental disabilities and members of other minority groups.

Inclusion is semantically the antonym of the word exclusion. Both are Latin rooted and were built on the word «cludere» which means «to close», «to prohibit the access to». Those two questioned concepts evolved through the centuries.

For instance, the sense of exclusion was discussed and defined during the 17th century by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal as «to reject one thing as incompatible with another». Progressively, sociologists took the question over and added a context to the concept of «exclusion». They entrenched to it the idea of a power balance between the society and the individual.

Vulnerability is a concept clarified by the sociologist Robert Castel in his writings 1 on social inclusion. He defines vulnerability as the summation of all the social parameters of an individual (gender, origin, age, social group, etc...) that differs from the social settings of the social majority. That concept is linked to the weakening an individual or a collective is exposed to, as well as its risks, that could lead to social exclusion. In other terms, we can only be different compared to someone else and those differences can be the main reason to be excluded from a dominant group.

Now that I am aware of those possible differences and what they can imply, I am ready to go back to the definition of inclusion. During my research, a definition especially caught my attention. In the famous French dictionary Larousse, inclusion is defined as the act of integrating a person or a group, to end their exclusion. I then realized that «inclusion» and «integration» were used as synonyms, even though various institutes and structures distinguish these terms.

This graphic is massively shared to highlight that subtlety :

Exclusion

Segregation

Integration

Inclusion

I also wondered about the distinction between inclusivity and diversity. What is the difference between a diverse team and an inclusive team for instance ? Vernā Myers, vice-president of Inclusion Strategy at Netflix, explained it as : «Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance.» on her website.

The A11y project1, a reference in making digital accessibility easier, specifiesIntegration allows an individual to access a space, whereas inclusion provides the right and the freedom to be there. Inclusion also implies that the effort comes more from the society than from the individuals themselves.

«Accessibility is important. Inclusion is essential.
Without representation, it is impossible to understand, much less effectively make accessible digital experiences.
In addition, accessibility work is oftentimes done after the fact to great expense. Inclusivity asks people making digital experiences to consider early and often what barriers and biases might keep people from being present, and what they can do about it.»

This means that to make inclusive experiences, we need to consider and expect the impacts and outcomes and act towards fixing them before launching the product.

An interesting fact I also encountered in my research is the function Inclusion can have. It can be a process, and it is called digital inclusion or e-inclusion. This process aims at making the information online accessible to everyone for both economic and social ends. It reaches for solutions to reduce the digital divide, that is, the inequalities (or if I dare use the concept of «vulnerability») in the access to both the material and the experience of the digital world.

More tangibly, The e-inclusion seeks to reply to material needs by providing better internet coverage or giving access to informatic tools, as well as the need to understand how it works by educating people to The Information and Communications Technology. The needs are generally the same but the programs and ways of deploying them change depending on the country, whether it is in Argentina, France or Ghana.

Those measures aspire to ensure a certain autonomy towards online information. And that acquired autonomy can eventually ease the social and economic inclusion. As professionals working on an online product, we play a role in this process.

We can’t deny that, in some ways, we hold a responsibility towards the user when sharing information on the web.

2. Launching a product

1. Design thinking and products’ early conception

Numerous designers, studios and more famous structures developed principles and prescriptions to follow for an inclusive website, that is, some practices exist and could be applied.

Nowadays, design thinking is talked about everywhere in the «design world», it is the process and the prescriptions to follow to create innovative products and services. It is usually shown as a five-step method :

These steps are also the basis of the methodic approach of Design Sprints, which is a condensed way to find a solution to your design problems in 5 days. It shows great results especially if the team already knows the subject, the context and the issues.

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I always found the first step rather curious. But it is indeed thanks to it that the Design Thinking method manages to include the user as a human, with all their complexity, in the products’ study and creation process.

Debbie Levitt, CEO of Delta CX, designer, CX and UX strategist, explains in an article that Design Thinking is not user experience, she questions the role of empathy in the design thinking process. She wrote

« You’ll often see that step No. 1 is done by asking yourself to describe what the user is feeling. This is more likely to be an expression of sympathy or intellectualizing on the customer’s experience. Only through proper user research can we know what the user is feeling or experiencing. All things beyond that are essentially guesses, assumptions or arrogance, which should not be part of the process. »

Empathy still plays an important role to include consciously in our products. It is the mechanism that comes before the initiative to include.

Neuroscientific discoveries of the 2000s show that, as humans, we evolved to connect with each other. Our brain has mirror-neuron which allow us to understand the actions in front of us as well as what they feel and their intentions. We can even mimic and reproduce their movements and facial expression, which is called motor empathy. We can also read in these articles that we can train our empathy.

A whole branch of research at Microsoft works on Inclusive Design, and they offered us inclusivity toolkits. In one of their booklets, they define Inclusive design as « A design methodology that enables and draws on the full range of human diversity. Most importantly, this means including and learning from people with a range of perspectives. Designing inclusively doesn’t mean you are making one thing for all people. » They explain that this methodology allows us to create different paths for a same experience so that anyone has the power to participate. It comes first by understanding who is excluded and how. By acting for inclusion, we can allow individuals, who are unable to participate in certain social aspects (physical and digital), to do it with a sense of belonging.

The booklets Microsoft gave away count activities based on those 3 steps that you can add to your user researches, your conception phase in general, or your user tests.

Mike Monteiro wrote « I intend to show you that design is a political act. What we choose to design and more importantly, what we choose not to design and, even more importantly, who we exclude from the design process—these are all political acts. »

Another method based on circular economy inspired me, it filled me with hope. What we call circular design is a way of designing by thinking ahead on the products’ impacts, including from the beginning responsible choices of resources, conception, fabrication and use. Tim Brown, from the IDEO agency, explains that this way of designing is the opposite of how our linear economy works right now. Instead of creating a product, launching it, let it die and begin a new one from scratch ; he is encouraging us to see our launched product as a resource. This way of thinking is a great economic, social and nature-friendly opportunity to stay in touch with the current context.

Design systems can be a good start for preventing a project to crumble from A to Z.

From the interviews I led, I heard that there was a lag between the roles of a UX and UI Designer. Their roles can be either not taken that seriously (thinking they are quite the same), or so distinct that the UX does not correct the UI and the UI is not helping from the beginning of the conception.

The first draft of the user experience, the architecture of the system, empathizing with the user is on the UX designer’s shoulders, even though all of this will evolve and change when the UI designer and the developer will work on it. It should not be the responsibility of the UX designer only because : including or not including is political (from the point of view of the users), more than an economic choice (from the point of view of the client and design teams), especially if the product is online and accessible by everyone.

2. Launching a product

2. Production & the eternal dilemma : Aesthetic vs functionality

The facade of the product is what the users experience first.

Everyone’s visual taste and references are different. Our work will never appeal to everyone. Our role is to create recognizable and understandable designs. Inclusive design is not the end of your creative drive, it is more than ever a more ethical framework.

In the field of UX, the ideation step is usually bursting with ideas and none of them is owned by anyone, the team’s role is to grow it. Nevertheless, it does not happen the same way with graphics. The ego of the visual creator is still present in the conception of a product. But UI designs also should be tested. Thinking side by side with a UX designer can be the opportunity to develop a design system and moreover, UI design can be tested to adjust it to the product’s target. It can be hard to hear that what you created is not clear enough, but we should not forget that this product is aimed to be used by others after all. Documented Concepts and decisions made thanks to user tests are more powerful than any selling point.

My interviewees had very different point of views. The only common point was the fact that changing the routine of an established team was more expensive than simply following new inclusive methods. From the questions I asked, I noticed that having issues while surfing on the web was also related to that moral imperative to include.

On one hand, Ross highlighted the lack of time, budget and the implication of the client, as well as reducing the impact of the digital experience in the name of accessibility. On the other hand, Chandler explained that inclusion in digital products was a question of motivation and priority (you can be inclusive even with less time or money).

He quoted Swiss graphic design to counter the idea that accessibility can’t be aesthetic ; and that designing a responsive website was time-consuming, but we should all do it, so why wouldn’t we use more time for inclusion ?

He explained to me that handicap was not an on/off status but a spectrum and then adds that it is more accurate to talk about situations of handicap than disabled people in the framework of accessibility.

2. Launching a product

3. What about the code today ?

I was intrigued to know what people who code can do to minimize exclusion too, and I discovered an ocean of useful websites with resources that I am glad to share with you.

The creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, founded in 1994 the most important web organization : W3C, World Wide Web Consortium. Its purpose is « Developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web. »

The W3C guidelines and especially the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) became the basic reference when talking about accessibility. You can find a list of open-source resources as a designer, or a developer.

They created accessibility standards, levels you can measure to know how accessible a website is. They registered those levels as A, AA and AAA, going from the minimum required for an accessible content to the level you need for a specialized support.

Another tool, the A11y project (read as : the Accessibility Project), is an open-source software that stages accessibility AND INCLUSION. They provide design and development resources as well as a checklist based on WCAG, quick tips and tests. They present this platform as «a community-driven effort to make digital accessibility easier.»

The system of checklist is present everywhere, a website accessibility is even «quantified» by Lighthouse (a tool for developers made by google) by analysing some aspects of the code and the content. Even though it does not check everything, it can definitely help to notice some basic accessibility problems before even testing the website.

By talking with developers I learned about a method of writing code called : Progressive enhancement. Since then, I did not stop mentioning it to every coder I met. My professor, Louis-Jean Teitelbaum who is a creative technologist, even told me «It is an old method, that we should use. But nobody really does... Even though it seems to be the right way to code for the web !»

This method makes sure that everything the user needs to read or see is properly written in the HTML, all the rest is an enhancing styling addition. It checks with the browser that is used and which options the website needs to consider to be adapted for the user. It enables the access to people using screen readers, those who block the CSS and JavaScript, those who limit animations and especially those with poor internet connexion. Furthermore, it looks like relying on it is political, just like design or as any opinion on any tech language or method.

Louis-Jean also explained to me that nowadays, new creative developers who specialize in technical show-off websites weren’t usually using Progressive enhancement but : Graceful degradation. They make the best product they can, then adapt it to fit in the accessibility guidelines.

On the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, African startups and organizations decided to find other solutions to satisfy their needs. By focusing on local problems, they used the material they had to innovate and find solutions based on recycling and educating young ones to programming. For instance, Africa Tech, a renowned festival, is aiming to Unite Tech and Talent for a Socio-Economic Impact. These measures allowed the continent to rise a little more and some major occidental companies are implementing new digital centers (thank you, Orange) or expanding the e-commerce field now. Mastercard just decided in January 2021 to launch a digital payment platform for the MEA (Middle-East and Africa) ! I wonder how things will evolve, is it good for the continent itself ? Will it complicate diplomatic relationships ?

Digital low Tech is one of the replies for going against an imposed «occidental» capitalist system. It is a sustainable, accessible and useful approach to innovation. It is mostly based on recycling and designing the most ecologically possible.

Some initiatives like Kris de Decker’s website are so low energy consuming, that loading them became easier and faster than usual websites. That ecological drive helps people. Designers should try to look into it too a little more. Not every problem needs a high tech solution.

3. Improvements

1. As people : Awareness-raising & sharing instead of fearing

If we never encountered any recurrent problem due to what we are, it can be difficult to understand that others do.

During our interview, Chandler told me «I would like the world to acknowledge its diversity... But we have well-implanted archetypes and very limited representations of the world.» And Joey explained to me that what was more important was : awareness-raising.

We can’t blame people for not knowing, everyone seeing the world through his experiences. Not all of us have the opportunity to meet different people and be open to various issues. So it is important to go directly to them.

It reminds me of the issue of the position of an ally in activist movements. What can an ally, so a person who is not directly concerned by the problem, do to fight for the LGBT+ cause or the Black Lives Matter movement etc… ? The reply we hear the most is : highlight the voice and pitch of a directly concerned person and share it with their network. It helps to legitimate the issue and the discourse and hopefully make a change.

Inclusion in our society is an emerging political issue. And some people are taking it more seriously by going toward people who are different from them and their close ones. This idea may imply including them in Society by helping them and accepting their help in return.

The generation taking over today seems more engaged and more willing to change the system. All my interviewees were hopeful that the emerging generation of aware adults will fight for more equality, more eco-responsibility and less blind and alpha leadership.

« You should be the change you want to see. If everyone puts a little energy in that direction (inclusion), eventually, new standards will emerge because new expectations will emerge. » Chandler

3. Improvements

2. As designer & members of a creative team : Responsibility and Impact

To help launch inclusive products, a solution can be to notify every creative team member that they have an impact on the product, whatever is their position in the pipeline of work. Whatever is our position, we are responsible for the product we launch online.

For instance, an aware coder or designer is developing a new online product. They ask themselves if the product is as accessible and inclusive as it is. But will they act on it if they think they don’t have an impact ?

As an immigrant young female student working part-time in a big digital agency, I directly surrendered to not being heard. I thought that my advice or my work wouldn’t be either legitimate or heard. But the day I understood that my work was still having an impact on a public, I did the best I could to convince of the importance of Inclusion and helped build new ideas and new ways of doing.

For this particular point, a freelancer could experiment and change his method, faster and easier than a much fuller team that relies on their best practices and routine to simply satisfy the clients’ needs without questioning it.

Sometimes the «method» is here to help include a diversity of users, sometimes the team itself can help make all this true.

In his book ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It, Mike Monteiro wrote : “ Empathy is a pretty word for exclusion. I’ve seen allmale all-white teams taking “empathy workshops” to see how women think. If you want to know how women would use something you’re designing, get a woman on your design team. They’re not extinct. We don’t need to study them. We can hire them! ”

Mike Monteiro is right in a sense that, having a much diverse and inclusive team, can also prevent going into a dominant exclusive path. If those team members know they have an impact on the product before it is launched, they will not let you go there.

If you cannot change your method, a potential solution can be to hire people different from you and give them a sense of responsibility.

3. Improvements

3. As teachers : What can we teach differently ?

As changing routines is the most expensive, challenging the root of the routine can be considered.

I studied in the public schools of Applied Arts in France and I learned a lot of different things. They taught us about typography, colours, geometry, and their histories. The only references of accessibility notified us to : use sans-serif to read comfortably on a screen for average people and use colours that daltonians can see. It is like the issue did not exist at all.

As inclusion is now a more ‘famous’ issue, a solution can be to add chapters or even a course that explains the whole world of accessibility. If a student’s dream is to design public institutes’ websites, why are they not prepared to do so ? Why do they have to discover a whole new part of design by themselves ?

Nowadays, if you want to know more about accessibility, you can choose to contact accessibility organizations to teach you how to do it. You could write to associations like access42 for workshops for you and your team. Or, if you are in France, you can send them the link of design.numerique.gouv.fr and benefit from their timid initiative for more digital accessibility.

Teaching inclusion in colleges and universities can help spread awareness and democratize the solutions. While the effort is conscious, it will seem complicated to follow the guidelines. Teaching it could lead to automatic inclusion reflexes, hence something easy to do. Inclusion could become so basic that the term itself won’t have to be used.

3. Improvements

4. As governments : Can we do something to push to inclusiveness ?

During my interview with Ross, who worked a lot for the city of Luxembourg, taught me that in the Grand-Duché, an accessibility controller is in charge of checking public websites. Whenever his studio has a project in the public sector, he follows all the guidelines. On the other hand, he also told me that if he had to launch a fun project for himself, he would not make the effort to make it accessible.

If some feel the moral imperative to make all their online projects inclusive, some do not, and not even for public institutions.

Some countries decided to take measures against disabled peoples’ discrimination and some of these count laws that framework its digital aspect. Amongst all the countries, around 25 changed their laws to make their websites more accessible. The European Union definitely helped some of them to do so.

Laws and other policies are usually based on the WCAG.

At the moment I am writing this paper, these are the countries/Unions that W3C mentions on their website:
Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, TheEuropean Union, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, The Republic of Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, The United Kingdom and The United States.
We could also count Argentina, Iceland, The Phillippines and other European countries like Belgium or Luxembourg amongst them.

The W3C even has a page to help develop organizational policies on web accessibility. Nevertheless, the protocols differ depending on the country.

For instance, in the UK, you need to add a page to the website explaining to whom it is not accessible. In Luxembourg, you need to fill an accessibility declaration for every mobile app or website you create through their national digital accessibility portal.

It is also noticeable that the majority of the countries who took the turn are relatively wealthy. We can say it is a matter of financial priority.If the laws exist, governments should work in that sense. For instance, in France, I had to face a duality in their own public websites, it seems like the existence of the law is not enough.

On one hand, lastly, they employed a «UX commando» to revisit their websites and procedures. On the other hand, the procedure to recover your residence permit implies that you have to make an appointment through a website with a timer. As an able digital native, I had to do it twice. What about those who have fewer chances than I do ?

States play a role in pushing towards inclusion. Making their online services at least accessible is as important for them than for the web and the users themselves.As the official Belgian web accessibility highlights :

« The public targeted by accessibility is not only made up of people with disabilities, it is everyone’s business! »