Tenets for Social Accessibility

TLDR

Despite years of addressing disability in technology design and advocating user‑centered practices, mainstream technologies remain largely inaccessible for people with disabilities. The study investigated how student designers regard disability and explored how designing for multiple disabled and nondisabled users encourages students to think about accessibility in the design process. The study involved two university design courses, one year apart, where students worked on design projects with people with and without disabilities, learned user‑centered techniques, and compared disability‑focused approaches. Students who designed for multiple stakeholders with and without disabilities gained a broader understanding of accessible design, learned to manage diverse abilities and social factors, and the results informed three tenets for Design for Social Accessibility that integrate functional and social considerations and encourage inclusive tools.

Abstract

Despite years of addressing disability in technology design and advocating user-centered design practices, popular mainstream technologies remain largely inaccessible for people with disabilities. We conducted a design course study investigating how student designers regard disability and explored how designing for multiple disabled and nondisabled users encouraged students to think about accessibility in the design process. Across two university course offerings one year apart, we examined how students focused on a design project while learning user-centered design concepts and techniques, working with people with and without disabilities throughout the project. In addition, we compared how students incorporated disability-focused design approaches within a classroom setting. We found that designing for multiple stakeholders with and without disabilities expanded student understanding of accessible design by demonstrating that people with the same disability could have diverse needs and by aligning such needs with those of nondisabled users. We also found that using approaches targeted toward designing for people with disabilities complemented interactions with users, particularly with regard to managing varying abilities across users, or incorporating social aspects. Our findings contribute to an understanding about how we might incur change in design practice by working with multiple stakeholders with and without disabilities whenever possible. We refined Design for Social Accessibility by incorporating these findings into three tenets emphasizing: (1) design for disability ought to incorporate users with and without disabilities, (2) design should address functional and social factors simultaneously, and (3) design should include tools to spur consideration of social factors in accessible design.