Episode 14
· 33:25
Frequently people think that, well, I don't have a disability or I don't have customers who have disability or I don't want staff who have disability, but disability is a universal reality. And besides death, it is the most reliable prediction. Everyone will eventually, often when they least expect it, experience a disability.
Sonia Kang:Accessibility is about making information, resources, activities, and environments, well, accessible. That means that everyone should be able to engage with these things with minimal effort and as meaningfully as possible. Understanding how important accessibility is for equity and justice, countries around the world, including Canada and the US, have adopted accessibility laws. That said, there's still a huge disconnect between how important this issue is and how much attention it receives. Many people don't even think about accessibility at all, ever.
Sonia Kang:Or if they do, they think of it as a nice to have that's kind of optional or that it's just about accommodations and modifications to physical space. Today, we'll be busting this myth. The myth that accessibility is optional. I'm doctor Sonia Kang, Canada Research Chair in Identity, Diversity, and Inclusion and academic director of GATE.
Carmina Ravanera:And I'm Carmina Ravanera, senior research associate at GATE.
Sonia Kang:I'm glad we're tackling the myth that accessibility is optional because accessibility is so often misunderstood and ignored, even in conversations about equity, diversity, and inclusion. So let's get right into it. First off, what is accessibility exactly?
Carmina Ravanera:I talked to some experts to better understand what accessibility is and how to make it a priority. I first spoke to Dr. Mahadeo Sukhai, who is the head of research and chief accessibility officer for the Canadian National Institute For the Blind or CNIB. Here's what he had to say about defining accessibility, including in the workplace.
Mahadeo Sukhai:The basic definition that I think that a lot of people might be familiar with is is the the one that says that, I've got to be able to interact with something. So if something is accessible to me, I'm able to interact with it. Right? And so so there is, there is a more complex definition that talks about the the design and implementation of systems, policies, practices, and processes, in order to ensure that persons with lived experience with disabilities, have, have full and equal or equivalent opportunity to participate in the tasks that they are supposed to participate in, whatever those might be, whether they are in the daily, whether in in daily living, or in the community, or in school, or in the workplace. So the problem with the term accessibility is that it's an umbrella term, and people tend to use it in the more basic context, which is, can I interact with the thing I'm supposed to interact with?
Mahadeo Sukhai:The more wholesome definition that I just gave you, I think, is the definition that we really should be thinking about. But but often what ends up happening is, is is the the word accessibility - much like a few other words within the space, accommodation is a particularly bad culprit - this word means many different things to many different people, and the real conceptual barrier that exists is that the persons don't tend to think about persons with disabilities when they're thinking about the term accessibility. And and so so hey. Is this accessible to you?
Mahadeo Sukhai:Well, can I get there? Hey. Is it accessible to you? Well, can I can I interact with it? I'll get on a 30 second soapbox because people, people make this mistake all the time with with, portable document format documents.
Mahadeo Sukhai:Right? So PDF files. PDF is universally available. You can open it on any device without requiring specialized software. But availability and accessibility are synonyms to one another in the English language.
Mahadeo Sukhai:And so so when somebody says, is this an accessible PDF? Most people will default to, well, it's available to me, so therefore, it's accessible. Meanwhile, to actually make a PDF accessible to persons with lived experience with disabilities requires a textbook the size of a biochem textbook, 30, 1300 pages. So the answer is not by default. Right?
Mahadeo Sukhai:And so I think, I think when we when we talk about accessibility, generally, we run into this problem of English is a messy language. One word, accessibility, means multiple things in different contexts. So I I care about the inclusion of persons with disabilities in the workplace. And I care about what that means and, and how that how that is framed and what is that experience like, and how do we how do we maximize that? And, and what everyone cares about is, well, well, can I interact with this thing?
Mahadeo Sukhai:Right? Or is this thing available to me? And and, yes, in the the basic concept of accessible for persons with disabilities, as a person with a disability, I have to be able to interact with the thing, but it goes above and beyond that. It speaks to intentionality. It speaks to, it speaks to systemic thinking, which is, which is sadly in short supply when when we talk about accessibility.
Sonia Kang:So people often think of accessibility in a very specific context. They think of it as whether something is available to people with disabilities or whether they can interact with something. But we need to think about accessibility in a broad systemic way. Can people participate easily and meaningfully in whatever activities they need or want to participate in, whether we're talking about work, home, or in public?
Carmina Ravanera:And another important distinction that he made is that accessibility and inclusion are two different things.
Mahadeo Sukhai:So accessibility is a requirement for inclusion. But just because something might be accessible doesn't make it inclusive. There's a formal difference between accessibility and inclusion. Inclusion is the equitable opportunity for everybody to participate, to the fullest extent, of, of the environment and, and their own desires.
Mahadeo Sukhai:So you're able to participate to whatever level you choose as opposed to you're able to participate to whatever level the environment sets for you, or whatever level the native accessibility sets for you. Right? So so there there are no barriers to your own choice to participate is what inclusion basically means. Accessibility is part and parcel of that, but is not the entire story. Something can be accessible but not necessarily inclusive.
Mahadeo Sukhai:Something can strive for inclusion but not achieve it because it's not accessible.
Sonia Kang:Right. So something may be accessible but not necessarily inclusive.
Carmina Ravanera:Exactly. So let's get to busting the myth. One of the reasons that accessibility simply isn't optional is because so many people have some form of disability or will in the future. So if you aren't considering accessibility, you're neglecting and marginalizing a significant portion of the population. Mahadeo was super clear about how a huge proportion of the workforce has a disability.
Mahadeo Sukhai:27% of of the entire Canadian population, even if you just took the working age population, 25 to 64, that's still about a quarter of the population, maybe a little bit less. So one person in 4 in your workforce is going to self identify as living with a disability. 95% of them will not tell you. The other challenge then is that when people think disability, people think wheelchair, people think scooter, people think cane, think dog, people think ASL interpreter. And so if you think about that population, you're actually only thinking about 5% of all persons with disabilities in the country.
Mahadeo Sukhai:That's actually the problem. You're thinking about 5% of a quarter of your workforce. Right? 5% of a quarter of your workforce is about 1% of your workforce. Right?
Mahadeo Sukhai:So out of a 100 people, that's 1 person. Out of a 1000 people, it's 10 people. And then then you go right ahead and you play that numbers game. But you're not actually thinking about just those human beings. You're thinking about all the other human beings whose lived experiences are such that it's not gonna be obvious.
Mahadeo Sukhai:Doesn't make it less real. Doesn't make it less important. It's just less obvious.
Carmina Ravanera:And I also spoke to doctor Jutta Treviranus, who is the director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. And we talked about why accessibility is so universally important.
Jutta Treviranus:Accessibility is basically creating the conditions whereby people can participate. And, it's usually, spoken about when you're talking about the participation of people with disabilities. And frequently people think that, well, I don't have a disability or I don't have customers who have disability, or I don't have staff who have disability, but disability is a universal reality. And besides death, it is the most reliable prediction. Everyone will eventually often when they least expected experience of disability, either themselves or a loved one that they care quite a bit about. And in that sense, accessibility can be seen as enlightened self interest.
Jutta Treviranus:It prepares us for the future. So it's not just websites, it's not just, entrances or built environment. It's thinking, in everything that we design or that we choose that, can, is there the opportunity for the full range of of diverse humans to participate here? And who are we excluding by the particular design decisions that we're making? There are so many benefits to it because designing our systems inclusively saves time and money in the medium term.
Jutta Treviranus:If we attend to the full spectrum of needs, our systems are more adaptable and dynamically resilient. They have greater longevity. They, we won't need to retrofit, bolt on modifications or abandoned systems because they have become too brittle, say. So it's, just as inclusive design is a mindset, attending to the criteria of accessibility is also a mindset, and it can apply to to everything we do, whether it's policies, services, just how we design our meetings, how we design what we publish, how we, all of the the various things that we attend to during our day.
Sonia Kang:Whether it's visible or not, disability is something that affects everyone at some point. So why would organizations just treat accessibility as something optional?
Carmina Ravanera:Well, like a lot of things, it often comes down to money. People worry that accessibility is going to be too expensive and they'd rather just push it onto someone else or ignore it. But as Jutta mentioned, it's actually cheaper to make practices and products accessible from the get go rather than retrofitting. Mahadeo gave me a great example.
Mahadeo Sukhai:But at the end of the day, everybody looks at accessibility, and everybody says accessibility costs money. The problem with that line of thinking is everybody looks at retrofit accessibility, not, not, accessibility by design. Accessibility by design is actually cheaper. And, and you can, you can think of any number of use cases where accessibility by design is, yes, it's gonna cost you up front to do the thing that you need to do, but the upfront cost of doing the thing that you need to do can be amortized over the lifetime of the thing that you're actually building. Right? And is also guaranteed cheaper than retrofitting it. All the time, it's gonna be cheaper than retrofitting it. The problem is the way, that the way that people build a budget, the calculus is, do I factor in this expense now, or do I kick it down the road and deal with it later? Right?
Mahadeo Sukhai:And and, the answer to the question almost always is if I factor in the expense now, I have to find a way of paying for it. If I kick it down the road and deal with it later, it becomes somebody else's problem. The problem around accessibility by design is it runs into that buzz saw called, you know, budgeting for today, not budgeting for tomorrow. And and so , you know, for example, if if you're doing an accessible website, what's it gonna cost you to make that website accessible? You need a graphic designer who knows what it is they're doing.
Mahadeo Sukhai:You need, you need website designers who know what they're doing. You need, some accessibility and usability testers, and you put that into your budget upfront, and it, it changes the cost of your website from x to x plus, you know, 10%, say. Right? But then if you build that inaccessible web, and, by the way, that accessible website is now gonna last you for the next 5 years until your next company rebrand, or the next 10 years until your next company rebrand. But then on the other hand, if you say, I'm not gonna do that because I, I can't afford that plus 10% now.
Mahadeo Sukhai:Right? And I'm gonna kick this down the road for somebody else. So okay. The very first legislation driven complaint that you receive. Right?
Mahadeo Sukhai:The very first, oh, you're not AODA compliant. Let's go deal with that. Right? The very first human rights complaint that you receive, number 1, all of a sudden, you've got lawyers bills. And number 2, you're gonna be told, because you're gonna lose the case,
Mahadeo Sukhai:You you're gonna be told that, let's go ahead and make the website accessible now. And then
Mahadeo Sukhai:somebody's gonna come in and tell you, it's actually not gonna cost the original plus 10%. It's now gonna cost plus 25% because you've gotta gut the interior of the code and rebuild it. Right? So go ahead and add that plus 25% now because you have to.
Mahadeo Sukhai:And by the way, you've got to pay the lawyers on top ofthat.
Carmina Ravanera:And keep in mind that when you're designing for accessibility, whatever you're creating, a product, a service or policy, is just overall going to be better than if you didn't make it accessible.
Jutta Treviranus:Those accessibility considerations that you need to take into account enable the system that you're designing to be much more adaptable and flexible. If we attend to the the accessibility criteria and here, there are many checklists, but, of course, those are just in large part, they're intended to be the the lowest level of accessibility. It's more about considering how do we make sure that people with divergent criteria or divergent needs can participate. by designing for that diversity and variability, you create a system that's much more adaptable. And you not only increase your customer base, you enable your customers to change and mature, and you can flex to unexpected changes. So there's, there are quite a number of reasons why it's a good thing to think about accessibility right at the beginning, beyond cost, beyond the laws, and beyond those mandatory requirements for procurement for a variety of other reasons.
Sonia Kang:There are a ton of consequences for organizations that aren't prioritizing accessibility. Like we said at the top, many countries have accessibility laws now. So, obviously, there are financial and legal risks for not paying attention to it. It's definitely not optional. And there's also the reality that without considering accessibility, you're not creating something that can reach the largest and most diverse population.
Sonia Kang:Something that's flexible and adaptable to whatever change is inevitably going to happen. Customers and the populations that organizations serve are always changing, just like our society is always changing. I'm thinking of how the pandemic showed us how important it is to adapt quickly. Organizations suddenly had to make sure everyone could work remotely and most were caught completely off guard. If they listened to all of the people asking for remote work accommodations before the pandemic, they would have been much better prepared.
Sonia Kang:So it's clear that accessibility is not optional. What do organizations need to do to start centering accessibility?
Carmina Ravanera:Well, Mahadeo spoke to me about where accessibility needs to live in an organization.
Mahadeo Sukhai:What can organizations do? You need an accessibility lead. You need that lead to report to somebody who has the title chief accessibility officer. That person needs to be independent of any department in their own office.
Mahadeo Sukhai:That person and that office needs a budget. That office needs the ability to receive conversation and initiate conversation at all levels across the organization. It's not just about the website. It's not just about your HR rules. It's about those things and everything else on top of it.
Mahadeo Sukhai:It's about the culture. It's about the environment. My perspective and this is this is copyright pending kind of thing. But my perspective is if you're gonna build culture, you build culture with commitment, conversation, competency, and policy. So if you're gonna build culture with with those things, then you need an an office of of accessibility that's empowered to act on all of those levels.
Mahadeo Sukhai:It's empowered to collaborate with all sorts of people. It's empowered to make change across the organization, but it's actually got, it's got a mandate that people take seriously. Burying it isn't gonna do that. Stuffing it inside IT or HR isn't gonna do that.
Sonia Kang:Right. So there should be a chief accessibility officer who reports directly to executives, not someone who's in HR or IT. Every part of the organization needs to be directly impacted by and able to interact with the accessibility office.
Carmina Ravanera:Exactly. And Jutta shared a couple more things that need to happen too, like having more diverse leadership and changing our processes and decision making from linear and fixed to something more adaptable to include diverse perspectives.
Jutta Treviranus:I think one of the first steps is to seek out diverse perspective. Ask whose perspective is missing in your design process and your design decisions, who's excluded or harmed by the design choices made. And some people or companies will do things like look at their feedback mechanisms, you know, who's, who's suggesting that the system doesn't work for them, etcetera, or, look at who are on your design team, who are around your board table, and see, well whose perspectives are not included here, and bring those individuals into the process to help, you make decisions. We have a somewhat different process, which we call the virtuous tornado, which is the iterative design process whereby, we begin with, in our design, inviting those individuals that are, have not been included before and going through a full iteration with them where they help us to design the process of design, but also to arrive at the first iteration of a design. And rather than, there's another design process called design thinking, where there's a design thinking squiggle where you iterate towards a winning solution.
Jutta Treviranus:So you competitively decide what is the winning solution, and that's the solution that that you go with and that you scale. In inclusive design, what we do is instead of reducing to a single winning solution, we try to create a system that expands out to provide flexibility and adaptability for a greater number of individuals, and that creates a much more adaptable, flexible system. And so we use that virtuous tornado to go through these cycles of iterations, understanding that perfection and stasis is not something that you can arrive at. So things are never actually fixed if they are the really critical fundamental issues that you're trying to address. There are things that you have to be constantly vigilant to, and that you, you continuously, iterate towards a more adaptive design.
Jutta Treviranus:One of the things we also try to do is to avoid cobra effects or the unintended consequences of over simplistic solutions to complex problems, using only linear thinking. I think a lot of people have been brought up on Gantt charts and those sort of engineering models of how to design things where you complete one step and then you put the next brick on, then you, and you do it by a certain timeline. But, a lot of the process we're encountering because of the complexity and because of how entangled issues tend to be when we're looking at, inclusion and at human diversity, we need a much more organic process where we can't make the assumption that, we do this step completed and then go on to the next step. We have to consider the complex adaptive system we live in and make course adjustments all the time. So a, a better way of of saying it is we use our virtuous tornado to create a, a system that can adapt and flex and that provides sufficient choices so that a diversity of individuals can participate and attend to the individuals that are most vulnerable to exclusion.
Sonia Kang:So this really speaks to a different way of thinking about how we design everything. Like Jutta says, rather than being linear and just picking a single solution and sticking with it, we have to be more flexible and do the work to figure out how practices and processes can be adapted or redesigned to make room for complexity and diverse and marginalized perspectives.
Carmina Ravanera:Yeah. Her research center does a lot of work on inclusive design. Jutta also spoke to me more about what inclusive design involves, and I found it really inspiring. Her view is that mindsets and practices need to shift towards accessibility in everything we design and do.
Jutta Treviranus:Inclusive design, as we've established the practice in Canada, is a mindset. It's a process that recognizes human diversity and variability, acknowledges complexity, and prepares us for unpredictable change. And as a practice, it inverts or contests quite a number of our usual conventions with respect to design or other mindsets that we use to to, conduct business, to conduct many of the systems that, we go through in our life. We do things like reject the notion of the average human as a norm or a basis of design decisions because we are all very variable. And certainly since the topic here is accessibility, people with disabilities tend to be more different from each other than people who are average are different from each other.
Jutta Treviranus:We contest the presumption that survival of the fittest is the engine for evolutionary advance rather than, in fact, diversification of evolutionary choices. We push against fragmentation, silos, tribalism, and imposing human categories and the type of stagnation that results from our tendency to seek comfort in monocultures, which of course many of the emerging digital systems are encouraging us to do. We, from a business perspective, we contest the 80 20 principle that asserts that you ignore the difficult 20% that take 80% of the effort. That this, we can say that this ends up causing you to miss weak signals, emerging crises and costs more in the long run. We argue for less reductionist forms of evidence and research.
Jutta Treviranus:My background is academia and, what we see as, the ideal form of research, empirical evidence using statistical power to make determinations, causes statistical discrimination of outliers and small historically marginalized minorities, and that causes knowledge disparity. So we push against that knowledge disparity and we like to expand other notions like the idea of scaling or impact, rather than scaling a winning formula, to many, many individuals, a sort of form of colonialism, we support scaling by diversification and impact, by not just the number of people impacted, but also the quality of that impact. And even democracy, we go beyond 1 person, 1 vote, and majority rules as the democratic ideal to recognizing responsibility to address the needs of people who are most vulnerable. So, that was probably a very large description of it. But, if I had to put it down into one sentence, it's, design that considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age, and other forms of human difference and designing with that diversity.
Jutta Treviranus:I'm very involved now in artificial intelligence.
Jutta Treviranus:And the way that AI amplifies, accelerates, and automates the current sort of discrimination, and, or takes past successes and propagates them into the future. And the large part of, what we're looking at is just how the individuals with disabilities or people that are at the margins feel the, the, both the greatest harms and the greatest opportunities of those. And it's a, it's a great way of mirroring or manifesting some of the things that are happening with respect to accessibility and inclusive design. So the, what we're pursuing right now is looking at what we call statistical discrimination within AI because it's using statistical reasoning and it's propagating much of what we're contesting in that. It's almost like a digital eugenics.
Jutta Treviranus:It is, encouraging you to, be like, or be interested in people like you. It is selecting people who are to be hired based upon past successes. It's, and it even the really mundane and what are seen as low impact effects are to eliminate people who are outliers or or those interests that are outlying, or that where there isn't a popularity push or, a statistical number of people attending to something, etcetera. So the the the area of AI is is really showing us where are the cracks in our current conventions and intelligence because it's, it's heightening our awareness of many of the assumptions and presumptions that we've made.
Sonia Kang:That's fascinating. This mindset could be transformational for making all types of organizations from government to tech more inclusive and more accessible. Questioning the idea that there is an average human, refusing to ignore people on the margins, and understanding and considering the full range of human diversity when designing anything, rather than treating it as something to address after decisions have already been made. All of these ideas are really exciting when it comes to thinking about how we can have a more equitable and accessible world.
Carmina Ravanera:Absolutely. I encourage listeners to go to inclusivedesign.ca to learn more about how they can think differently when it comes to design, whether that's designing products, services, or policies. They can also check out genderanalytics.org. GATE has created some courses to help leaders learn how to analyze and create more inclusively.
Sonia Kang:So let's bust the myth that accessibility is optional once and for all. If I heard someone say that that accessibility in an organization or anywhere else is just a nice to have, what's something I could say to help bust this myth?
Carmina Ravanera:Well, let's hear what our experts have to say.
Jutta Treviranus:Treating accessibility as optional implies treating the human condition as optional, excluding your own inevitable future reality. And, you you don't want to do that. Designing systems that will be, that will last is what considering accessibility involves. If we don't design accessibly from the beginning, we're designing systems that we will be disposable in the near future because they can't adapt to change. And we are intensifying the disparity that we're already feeling and many of the crises we all feel the impact of, are due to that disparity.
Jutta Treviranus:So accessibility, supports a huge range of, of the the ideals that, everyone espouses.
Mahadeo Sukhai:I mean, first of all, I would say, why do you think that? Get somebody to articulate why they actually feel that way. I'm not gonna suggest 10,000,000 ways to to bust the myth because it all depends on the nature of the organization. But I'm I'm a scientist.
Mahadeo Sukhai:The question I ask before I ask all others is why. If you're gonna make a statement like that, why do you believe that? It's a very important question, my 2 year old asks it all the time. It's a good question. Ask it.
Mahadeo Sukhai:If you're gonna make a statement like that, why do you believe that? Then I can actually come around and show you the data. I can show you that 27% of Canadians identify as living with a disability. I can show you that accessibility is cheap. It's not expensive.
Mahadeo Sukhai:But tell me why. Why is it you think that accessibility is optional in this space, in this time, in this place? If you can give me your reasons, then I can tell you why you're wrong.
Sonia Kang:With that, please make sure to subscribe so you don't miss our next episode of Busted. We'll be busting myths about women in politics.
Carmina Ravanera:Until next time, happy myth busting!
Carmina Ravanera:GATE's Busted podcast is made possible by generous support from BMO. If you liked this episode, please rate and subscribe to busted. You can also find more interesting podcast series from the Institute For Gender and the Economy by searching GATE Audio wherever you find your podcasts. Thanks
Carmina Ravanera:for
Carmina Ravanera:tuning
Carmina Ravanera:in.
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