In Austria we have this little child game called “Ich sehe was, das du nicht siehst”, where you have to choose an object from your surrounding and your game partner has to guess which one it is. The only thing you reveal is the color of the chosen thing. I loved it when I was a child. It helped my parents through long car drives and boring afternoons for us kids.

When listening to Tim Kadlec’s fantastic speech about “The Unseen” (sounds like a thrilling movie title, doesn’t it?) at beyond tellerrand conference in Berlin 2016 I was constantly thinking of the beloved game, which accompanied me through all the years. And to be honest, my memories are not that far away from what Tim was talking about: The Web as a platform for EVERYONE, a platform of empowerment. A platform where so many things are unseen. But more to that later.

In the following blogpost I try to play back and reflect on all the things mentioned. Why? Because it’s damn important to raise awareness for accessibility on the web (and also a bit because it’s a task for a lecture called “Accessibility & Multiscreen Design”, which I visit in the context of my master studies Content Strategy at the FH JOANNEUM Graz ;-)). For the ones, who don’t like reading that much – I’ll link the video at the end of the post.

As a start Tim mentioned – more generally – the four barriers to access the web. They are:

1. User capability (things as digital literacy, language literacy, etc.)
2. Incentives (lack of awareness and use cases, cultural and social acceptance, etc.). What was shocking for me in that context is the fact that in India 114 million more men than women have cellphones. “Mobile phones are really dangerous for women” – that is the explanation we get from India. According to Tim the real reason is that in the Indian culture women are not supposed to be empowered.
3.  Affordability (low income, low purchasing power, cost of data plan, etc.)
4.  Infrastructure (lack of coverage or access, low speed connections).

A study, where they analyzed each country in the world according to these four categories revealed that in the USA (1) and Germany (2) people have the least barriers to use the web (Austria might not be that worse either). That was eye-opening for me. We - living in these privileged countries - are not the “normal case”. We are on the front. And there are still areas where you only get 2G internet connection and others, which are still not covered at all.

When it comes to making websites, we shouldn’t forget that. We have to remove our privileged assumptions and it’s important to broaden our perspective. It’s important to also think of the people, who get only low speed connections, because they have the same right to visit our pages (progressive enhancement is the keyword here). In Tim’s words we must not forget that 

“Less-than-ideal is inherent in the web.”

Another noteworthy quote Tim cited in the talk was one from Ariel Cotton:

“No matter how cool your objects look, when people can’t use them, they’re failed products.”

And that’s exactly the thing with inaccessible websites!! 

What leads us to the next point. As I already learned in the lecture at FH (kudos to Eric Eggert, who opened my eyes in terms of accessibility in the web), about 583.000.000 people in the world suffer from disabilities – which means that 1 in 6 has some sort of disability. That is a lot and as web people we must not forget about them.

According to Paul Lewis from Google there are three fundamental pillars of the web, which are fundamental and critical for every site. 

But there are two main problems which come along, as Tim stresses in his talk:

• The main challenge is – which leads us to the crux of the matter - that they are invisible (at least until something goes wrong). You don’t go to a page, look at it and immediately see “Oh this page is inaccessible” (maybe some experts may, but not the majority). People don’t fit in buckets, and we have to deal with fluid states. At some time, everyone is in these scenarios of disability. Maybe you were always able to use mouse but one day you have to rely on the keyboard because you broke your arm, etc.

• There are no specific responsibilities for these three pillars. There is no “security cop” or anything similar. It’s the responsibility of EVERYONE who touches the website – be it the developer, the UX designer, the information architect, the content strategist or the copywriter.

Our duty is to make it visible as soon as possible. Because you can’t fix what you can’t see. We have to find ways to make people conscious. As Tim stated for him “expert” doesn’t apply here. You should not be intimidated that you don’t know that much about the pillars. The main thing is that you do it once and then do it better. Knowledge isn’t accumulated overnight. Because there is no perfect performance, accessibility or security.

And to close with another fantastic quote from Tim:

“The web is meant to be for EVERYONE – and that absolutely matters.”

For me Tim's talk was another reminder that there is so much to do about equality and accessability issues on the web. We must not forget that there are so many people out there, who suffer from disabilites (1 in 6, as we learned), nevertheless have the same right to access "our websites". Thanks to Eric's lecture I got so sensitive about these issues and I surf the internet with completely different eyes. And that's a good thing! Let's start today to make the web a better place for all of us.

You like what you've just read? Then you should also have a look at Paloma's (a COS19 colleague) blogpost about Tim Kadlec's speech. As promised, here you can watch the video: