Tovey-Walsh, Bethan Siân. “Disabled by Default: how markup can support best practice in accessibility.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2020, Washington, DC, July 27 - 31, 2020. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2020. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 25 (2020). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol25.Tovey-Walsh01.
Balisage: The Markup Conference 2020 July 27 - 31, 2020
Balisage Paper: Disabled by Default: how markup can support best practice in accessibility
Bethan Siân Tovey-Walsh
Bethan Tovey-Walsh is a PhD student in linguistics, studying the
language-mixing behaviour of Welsh-English bilinguals, and is working
on a part-of-speech tagger for mixed Welsh-English texts. She is
particularly interested in the problem of automatic language
recognition for individual words. She was formerly a content architect
at Oxford University Press. Even more formerly, she worked for the
Oxford English Dictionary, specialising in medieval English.
Accessibility is not a single, straightforward concept. For a
particular user, the accessibility of any resource is determined by a
web of factors, first by the nature and severity of the disability
(cognitive, physical, or mental), then influenced by poverty, tech
access, language, and many other factors. Designing content to take
account of accessibility on this wide scale is a daunting task. Markup
is well placed to address accessibility, because markup is optimized
to encourage choice. It allows us to say what things are, and choose
later (or, better, allow the user to choose) what that means for how
content is displayed, printed, spoken, or otherwise manifested in the
output. It also allows us to say how things relate to each other, so
that we can easily offer choices of the same content in different
formats. Concrete examples of what this means in some common markup
outputs will highlight things we could be doing in our own practice to
encourage more accessible content creation from markup.
In June 2020, Twitter introduced a new feature: in addition to
typing out 280-character masterpieces, users on iOS can now record
up to 140 seconds of audio to share as a tweet Patterson2020. Once details of the
new feature became clear, Deaf/hard-of-hearing Twitter users were
quick to condemn its complete inaccessibility Katz2020.
The problem is not so much that the audio recordings themselves are
inaccessible to Deaf people, but that Twitter had included no way to
caption or add alt-text to audio tweets. Even if a tweeter wanted to
make their audio tweet accessible, there was no obvious way to do
so. It emerged that Twitter has no dedicated accessibility team, but
rather relies on a group of employees who volunteer
some of their regular work time to accessibility initiatives Lyons2020.
This lack of trained accessibility experts may help to explain
Twitter’s well-meaning but wrong-headed response to criticism, which
was to argue that making audio tweets accessible would have delayed
the release of the new feature by a year or more Alcantara2020. In response to
lawyer and disability advocate Matthew Cortland, the @TwitterSupport
account claimed that this is an early version of this feature
and we’re exploring ways to make these types of Tweets accessible to
everyone.TwitterSupport2020. However, as Cortland pointed out, national
legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits
this accessibility-as-afterthought approach Cortland2020. Accessibility must, by
law (in the United States, at least), be baked in to new products
and features. The voice-tweets debacle highlighted the neglect of
accessibility in technology development. Even companies with
significant resources to spare are either unwilling to consider the
needs of disabled users, or unaware of the pressing need to do so.
Technology companies are keen to publicize their efforts to create
an inclusive culture for employees, yet disability rarely (if ever)
features in reports of workforce diversity OHear2016.
Disability in the British and American workplace
In the U.K., disabled people are less likely to work in
higher-skilled jobs DWP2020. Disabled people make up around 19% of people
of working age in the U.K. and 13% of the total U.K. workforce,
meaning that 57% of U.K. disabled people are in the workforce
(employed or unemployed), as compared to 85% of non-disabled
people BCS2020. In the United States, only around 21% of disabled people
are part of the workforce, compared with around 69% of
non-disabled people Katz2020. Disabled people are significantly more
likely to be unemployed in the U.S.A. (7.3% versus 3.5% of
non-disabled people BLS2020a). In the U.K., they are somewhat more likely
to be unemployed (4% versus 3% of non-disabled people BCS2020).
On average only 11% of U.K. IT specialists are disabled, a number
which drops to 7% in London BCS2020. Only 8% of IT directors are
disabled; disabled IT specialists are most likely to be employed
as user support technicians BCS2020. IT specialists with disabilities
earn around 10% less than those without disabilities, and are more
likely to be unemployed or self-employed BCS2020. In the U.S., 3.4% of
non-disabled workers are employed in computer and mathematical
occupations, while only 2.2% of disabled workers are employed in
the same category. Furthermore, only 1.2% of disabled women are
employed in these occupations, compared with 3% of disabled men
and 4.8% of non-disabled men. In terms of absolute numbers, this
means that around 129,000 disabled people and around 5,157,000
non-disabled people are employed in computer and mathematical
occupations BLS2020a.[1]
The reasons why disabled people are underrepresented in
employment, in IT-related occupations in general, and in senior IT
roles in particular are complex. It would be reductive to
attribute these figures entirely to prejudice, to doubts about the
capacity of disabled people to perform well in employment, or to
unwillingness to make workplaces accessible, although these
factors undoubtedly play a part BonaccioEtal2020. In the U.K., for example,
disabled people are less likely to have attained higher education
qualifications, making it harder for them to apply successfully
for so-called higher-skilled jobs Berthoud2011; ONS2019. Nonetheless, whatever the causes of
underrepresentation, these figures show that it is a real
phenomenon. Furthermore, the category of disability
is broad, and (depending on whose statistics we are reading) may
cover deafness and hearing difficulties, blindness and vision
difficulties, mobility difficulties, difficulties with decision
making, concentration, and memory, emotional and mental
difficulties, and more BLS2020b; DWP2020. Employment rates for people with
different kinds of disability vary greatly: in the U.K., for
example, people with mental health conditions are significantly
less likely to be employed than those with a muskuloskeletal
condition DWP2020. Even a company that employs numerous people who class
themselves, or are classed by others, as disabled may have little
or no representation for a particular type of disability in its
workforce.
Markup technologies and disability
These statistics provide valuable context for Twitter’s failure to
produce accessible technology. By failing to include the
perspectives of disabled users in their development process, and
failing to have a dedicated team with expertise in accessibility
at the centre of the design of new features, Twitter created a
professional environment in which accessibility is peripheral and
optional.
The creation of fully or partially inaccessible technology
products, systems, and services is not exclusive to Twitter, of
course. Accessibility failures in online resources have been
identified as a significant barrier for disabled people’s access
to employment Cahalane2018. Universities in the United States have been sued
for using software and data formats that are not fully accessible
to blind students Sidley2014. In parallel with these impediments to
functioning in domains such as employment and education,
inaccessibility can also impede disabled people from participating
fully in social and cultural community, locking them out from
political candidates’ websites or the shared discourse of social
media memes Abrams2019; Greenspan2020.
However, technology undoubtedly has the potential to improve
disabled people’s quality of life. Modern technologies can
facilitate flexible employment, providing ways for workers to work
outside the traditional office environment, or making it possible
for physically disabled workers to interact with work equipment Joachim2006.
They can provide community for people whose disabilities impede
socializing in person Ryan2018, and allow disabled activists to organize
political protests Ryan2014. They can improve access to education, for
example by making materials available without the need to travel
to libraries, or by offering virtual learning environments and
e-learning content CannEtal2002; Sloan2002. They key requirement is, of course, to ensure
that any technology is accessible.
I will consider how markup technologies, in particular, can help
developers and engineers improve accessibility. Before discussing
this, however, it is important to ensure that we understand what
is meant by disability, which is a more complex
concept than it might at first appear. Following a discussion of
disability, I will briefly consider what it means to create
accessible technology, before outlining three key features of
markup that can easily be exploited to improve accessibility.
Defining Disability
The ISO 7001:2007 (Graphical symbols—Public information symbols)
standard specifies the symbol as the
International Symbol of Access (ISA) ISO2007. The stylized image of a stick
figure using a wheelchair is ubiquitous in countries worldwide,
labelling toilets, entrances and exits, buildings, seats, parking
spaces, buttons, vehicles, and a range of other things which are
accessible (or claim to be accessible) to people with disabilities.
Although clear and widely understood, the symbol has been criticized
by many disabled people. There are those who feel that the icon is
too static, representing the disabled body as passive, and who
advocate for an updated icon representing a wheelchair user
propelling the chair forward (Figure 1) Hendren2016.
Figure 1: The Accessible Icon Project’s Modified
ISA icon.
For other disabled people, the focus on wheelchair users is itself a
problem, as it encourages a simplistic and monolithic understanding
of disability. This, they believe, exacerbates the difficulties
faced by people with invisible disabilities (i.e. those which are
not immediately obvious by looking at the person’s body or at the
assistive devices they use), who experience harassment and may be
prevented from using accessible services by staff or by interference
from members of the public who believe that a disabled person will
always look disabledAce2020; Carrington2020; JaniFriend2019.
Disability is clearly not as simple a phenomenon as the most
prevalent cultural representation of disabled bodies would have us
believe. This is why it is essential to define our use of the term
before trying to think about making technology that is accessible to
disabled users: until we know who we mean by disabled
users, it is impossible to consider their needs. The
following discussion will not attempt to give a comprehensive survey
of every aspect of the theory of disability. Neither does it claim
to provide the single correct or authoritative analysis of
disability as a concept. Rather, the discussion will offer one way
of thinking about disability which I believe will be helpful to
markup technologists who want to integrate accessibility into their
work.
Disability and impairment: a brief overview of the
theoretical debate
Some of the most prominent definitions of disability are those
used by governments and international agencies in order to collect
data, write legislation, and enforce legal standards. Two features
which are found in most such definitions are:
A trait (physical or mental) which is labeled or experienced
as an impairment or a dysfunction;
A limitation (social or personal) associated with this trait.
WassermanEtal2016
Such definitions fit broadly under what is called the Medical
Model of disability, which sees disability as a biomedical
characteristic of the individual and prioritizes medical
intervention to bring the individual as far as possible into line
with social norms HaegeleHodge2016. As such, the Medical Model necessarily
characterizes a disabled individual as deficient, and in need of
correction. The Medical Model became the dominant way of
interpreting disability in many societies by stepping into the
void left by the waning of superstitious models, in which
disability is seen as a punishment from a god or other
supernatural agency. The Medical Model is primarily controlled by
medical and allied professionals, rather than by disabled people
themselves. Its dominant form of discourse is to present
disability as a personal tragedy whose best outcome is treatment
make the disabled person as normal as possible Finkelstein1999.
In its dual conception of disability as the interaction between an
impairment on the one hand and the barriers experienced as a
result of that impairment on the other, modern definitions
constructed under the Medical Model align with those put forward
by proponents of the Social Model of disability. This latter
model, developed in Britain in the 1970s, defines impairment as a
physical or mental condition and disability as the barriers
experienced by a person as a result of their impairment. Whereas
Medical Model definitions tend (as summarized above) to fold both
the impairment and the limitations it causes into one overall
concept, and to call that concept disability,
the Social Model emphasizes the view that people with impairments
are disabled by society’s unwillingness to accommodate them ShakespeareWatson1997. In
this interpretation, disabled is as much a
verb as it is an adjective: the disabled person has been disabled
by society. Disabled is
not an individual characteristic, necessarily ascribed to any
impaired person, but the description of a state caused by systemic
oppression. Whereas the medical model implies that impairment is,
in itself, a barrier to well-being, the social model instead
argues that reduction in well-being is not an inevitable
consequence of impairment, but rather the result of facing
socially-constructed barriers WassermanEtal2016.
Critics of the social model argue that, in its effort to highlight
the impact of systemic barriers, it fails to account for many
aspects of the lived experience of disabled people. In particular,
they claim that the social model’s separation of impairment and
disability does not allow for an examination of how these two
aspects of experience are interwoven in the lives of disabled
people, ignoring the reality of embodiment Pinder1995. There are aspects of
many impairments which are either objectively harmful to quality
of life (such as chronic pain) or which necessarily exclude
disabled individuals from experiences considered enjoyable or
important (e.g. a blind person’s inability to perceive a work of
visual art) Tremain2017. In response to such
criticisms, Finkelstein2001 asserts that the
social model is not intended to model the lives of individuals
with impairments. While a given individual may interpret their
impairment(s) in a variety of ways, on a sociopolitical level
having an impairment means being a member of an oppressed class.
The social model of disability is concerned with systems of
oppression (that is, with the processes which disable people), not
with individual characteristics. Individual experiences relate to
the nature of impairment and not to the nature of disability as a
social force Finkelstein2001. Criticizing the Social Model for failing to account
for individual experience is therefore something of a category
error, because the Social Model is not intended as a way to
understand impairment.
A concrete example may help to clarify the terms used in this
ongoing debate. A person with high myopia (whose uncorrected
vision is 20/400 or worse) has an impairment, which may be
categorized as a type of blindness WHO2015. Their visual functioning is
much worse than that of the average person, with high myopia
currently affecting only around 3% of the world’s population WHO2015. In
most wealthy countries high myopia is rarely thought of in the
same terms as blindness; indeed, people with high myopia are
unlikely to think of themselves as disabled, and are unlikely to
be classified as such for legal purposes, because their myopia can
be corrected to statistically normal (or 20/20) vision with
glasses[2]Duff2019; Katz2020; SuttonvUSA1999. Without corrective lenses, however, the consequences
of high myopia can be devastating, leading to loss of educational
and professional opportunities, and making everyday activities
difficult to accomplish, as well as potentially causing headaches
and fatigue Jacobs2018. In Social Model terms, high
myopia is always an impairment, but it is only a disability in contexts where
corrective lenses are not provided to those who need them. In
countries where eyeglasses are affordable and easily-acquired, and
particularly where there is governmental assistance for those who
could not otherwise afford eyeglasses, high myopia is essentially
not disabling: it is easily corrected; there is little or no
social stigma attached to wearing eyeglasses; and (when corrected)
it causes no secondary symptoms which might reduce functioning.
However, where people with high myopia are prevented by poverty or
other circumstances from acquiring eyeglasses, they are disabled.
Medical models of disability see this as an individual attribute: the
individual is disabled because they have an impairment that
impedes daily functioning. The Social Model sees it instead as an imposed
state: the individual is disabled by society, because the means to
compensate for their impairment is available, but not provided.
In the remainder of this paper, I will use the terms
impairment and
disability in their Social Model senses, the
former to refer to reduction of physical, mental, or emotional
function or capacity as compared to the statistical norm, and the
latter to refer to the social barriers that prevent people with
impairments from participating fully in daily life. I will use the
term disabled people to refer to people with
all kinds of impairments; I prefer this term to people
with disabilities, which implies that disabilities are
attributes of the individual, rather than being socially imposed.
Accessibility Requirements
Seeing the wood, not the trees
While these (and other) debates over the best way to interpret
disability may seem quite removed from the day to day activities
of the markup technologist, designing well for accessibility is in
fact made easier by grasping the distinction between impairment
and disability. If we focus our accessibility concerns on
impairments, we may do well at providing solutions for specific
groups of people and the barriers caused by their impairments.
However, we are nonetheless likely to fail at producing genuinely
accessible outputs, because we are solving for individual
attributes, and not for systemic barriers. We need not necessarily
pick a side to support in the ongoing philosophical debates, but
our attempts to provide genuinely accessible products and services
will be aided by thinking about how the disablement of disabled
people happens.
To return briefly to the example of Twitter’s audio tweets, we
might at first think that, for Twitter to avoid accessibility
problems, it would have been enough to include Deaf people with
expertise in accessibility in the design process. Certainly, this
would probably have alerted the company to the need for some
function such as captions or alt-text in order to include Deaf and
hard of hearing users. However, the voice tweets also show a
flashing image of the user’s profile picture while the audio tweet
is playing. Flashing images can cause seizures in people with
epilepsy. In addition, the voice tweets may be inaccessible to
blind users whose assistive software (such as screen readers)
cannot identify an audio tweet Katz2020. Thinking of accessibility on a
specific-impairment level is almost always inadequate. This
includes assuming that having one disabled person on a team is
enough for accessibility requirements. A single person with a
particular profile of impairments can never represent disability
as a whole, and should never be expected to do so.
Demolishing barriers before building new toys
Keeping accessibility central to any process means listening to
disabled people when they talk about the barriers they face.
Technological solutions that fail to address the
actual needs of disabled people are not an accessibility triumph.
A notorious example is the succession of sign-language
gloves which regularly make the news, win prizes, and are
encouraged by academic engineering or design departments without
input from experts in the signed language. Sign languages are
generally much more than just the hand shapes, using facial
expression, eyebrow position, and body stance for various
grammatical functions Erard2017. This is just one of the many reasons why
sign-language translation gloves are a practical impossibility, at
least without some very significant advances in technology GrieveSmith2016. More
importantly, such solutions add little value to the
everyday lives of Deaf and hard of hearing people. In many cases,
they basically do no more than speak as the person signs English
words letter-by-letter. They can hardly make daily interactions
more accessible for Deaf people, and require no effort on the part
of anyone except the Deaf person (unlike, say, encouraging the
widespread learning of signed languages, or providing funding for
interpreters) GrieveSmith2016.
Jackson2019 refers to this type of technological gimmick as a
Disability Dongle, a well intended
elegant, yet useless solution to a problem we never knew we had[,
...] most often conceived of and created in design
schools. This kind of project is often put together with
little or no input from the disabled people it claims to help,
solving problems in ways that are expensive and
unlikely ever to make it to production, let alone general
availability Eveleth2017; Smith2019.
As Smith2019 points out, these fanciful approaches to
accessibility also locate responsibility with the disabled
individual, instead of with their environment. If a place is
inaccessible because of stairs, the sensible answer is to install
ramps and lifts, or to build alternative routes, rather than
expecting every single person with a mobility impairment to
acquire an expensive, clunky, precarious stair-climbing wheelchair
Smith2019. Designing for accessibility is not just about thinking up new
ways of compensating for particular types of physical or mental
difference. In particular, it is not about trying to make disabled
people’s bodies and minds function like those of their
non-disabled counterparts. Instead, it is about developing an
understanding of society’s disabling barriers.
Understanding these barriers entails understanding how disablement
interacts with other group characteristics such as age,
nationality, and wealth.[3] As discussed above, an impairment like myopia that is
barely a problem in some countries may be a source of significant
disablement in others. It is also more likely to be disabling for
poor people than for the wealthy, who are unlikely to lack access
to corrective lenses WHO2015. The example of myopia is also a reminder
that there are groups of people who, although they may not
categorize themselves as disabled, will nonetheless benefit from
greater accessibility. These include people who experience loss of
function or capacity as the natural result of
ageing: in the United States, 75% of people aged over 70 have
hearing loss Rooth2017, and the prevalence of vision impairment rises from
5.25% for people aged 75-79, to 25.6% for those aged 80 and above NEI2010. Furthermore, fairly large numbers of people with impairments of
various kinds (especially developmental or mental health
conditions) go undiagnosed, a problem which, in the U.K. and U.S.
at least, is suffered disproportionately by minoritized groups
(particularly women/girls, people of colour, and people in
low-income households) DavisEtal2008; Gould2011; Haney2016; WigginsEtal2020; YeattsEtal2003. This
is another strong motivation for
targeting barriers rather than individuals’ impairments: removing
barriers does not require that individuals must identify (or be
identified) as disabled in order to benefit from accessibility,
and it does not wait until a disabled person speaks up to say that
they are experiencing a barrier. Accessibility is instead offered
to all as a standard part of the product or service.
Markup and Accessibility
Having outlined what I believe to be the most useful way to approach
accessibility, by thinking of disability in terms of barriers to be
demolished, I will now briefly sketch out three aspects of markup
which are particularly well suited to supporting accessible design.
Labelling
In a very basic sense, markup is a way of labelling content. It
takes data, and stores the things we want to say about that data
alongside it, but separate from it. This has numerous advantages
for accessible design. Not only does it facilitate the two
characteristics of markup discussed below (optionality and
deferment), it also allows us to label our content in as many ways
as is useful to us and to our users.
Both explicit and hidden labels can be of use in accessible
design. Although the rise in demands for trigger
warnings on potentially distressing materials has led to
outrage and is a matter of ongoing debate Halberstam2017, the medical research
largely supports their usefulness in decreasing the likelihood of
distress Boysen2017. Like age ratings, or the little text boxes on the back
of a DVD case declaring that the contents contain strong language
and nudity, trigger warnings allow the consumer the choice to
avoid content which they consider inappropriate. And whereas
clinicians may argue that trigger warnings are specifically an
accommodation for students with mental health impairments Boysen2017, the
accessibility approach advocated here instead offers this kind of
labelling as an accommodation for anyone who finds it useful,
regardless of their diagnosis status. Whether or not distress or
any other emotional reaction is considered pathological is not
decided by those who experience the distress, but by the medical
community, whose track record of undervaluing reports of pain and
distress is not encouraging ChenEtal2008; DovidioEtal2016; DubbinEtal2013; HoffmanTarzian2001; PelletierEtal2014; SamulowitzEtal2018. Offering as much control as possible
to content consumers bypasses the need for them to seek medical
endorsement before expressing their accessibility needs.
Other types of labelling can help to identify content with a
variety of potentially inaccessible features. It needn’t be the
case that designers have to give up on features they find
attractive, such as low-contrast colour palettes, flashing images,
audio or video content, as long as these aspects of the content
are clearly labelled as such. Knowing what to label is, of course,
key to making the most of this aspect of markup, which is why
involving a variety of disabled people in the design process is
crucial wherever possible.
Optionality
Markup can shape what we do with content, making certain actions
easier or harder to perform than others SperbergMcQueen1991.
One of the most powerful features of full-featured declarative markup,
from an accessibility standpoint, is its support for optionality. While
labelling is useful, it can only go so far. It may be helpful to a
user to warn them that a particular part of the content contains a
flashing image, but it is more helpful to replicate the content
without the flashing image and give the user the option to
experience that content instead.
Because declarative markup, and XML in particular, can describe
the relationship between chunks of content easily and intuitively,
it is easy to represent various different options as, in essence,
the same content, by making them all siblings,
children of a parent X. The children have a
shared identity as child of X,
allowing an intuitive understanding of them as interchangeable,
but different, representations of the content of
X. When an end-user accesses
X, they can (for example) be offered the
option of these different formats or versions, or use settings to
control which version is served up to them automatically. They
might also choose to omit content that has particular labels, such
as trigger warnings or age ratings, regardless of its format, or
they might be offered the option to ask for a warning before such
content is presented to them.
By facilitating optionality in content development, a markup
language like XML makes accessibility far easier to achieve. A
single document can be maintained which manages different versions
of the content, labelled according to the accessibility barriers
which are present or absent in each version. By considering which
barriers are addressed by a given version of a chunk of content,
we are reminded that accessibility is not all-or-nothing.
Different impairments have different needs, and accommodations for
one group may construct barriers for another. We should not be
attempting to force content into a single
accessible format, because there is no such thing.
Instead, embracing optionality is a recognition that any content
entails the presence of barriers to some people’s access, and that
the only truly accessible solution is to provide different
versions that target different barriers.
Deferment
Declarative markup allows us to defer decisions about how content
should be processed, representing what the content
is, and allowing decisions about what that
means for how it is presented or used to be taken at a later stage SperbergMcQueen1994. In this sense, it intersects with what Piez2001 calls proleptic
markup, whose primary aim is to facilitate future
productive uses and exchanges of the content, rather than to
document it in a specific, pre-existing format.
Deferment is the logical consequence of prioritizing optionality
in accessible design. To a large extent, the process of deferment
should continue until the content reaches the end-user. Of course,
this is a relative statement: decisions about the content itself,
as well as aesthetic decisions about its presentation, need not be
deferred to the user. But letting the user have control over
whether they receive audio or video or written content, or whether
the audio content includes background music and sound effects, or
whether the video content includes captions, and so on, allows the
user to define their own, bespoke set of accessibility needs.
Rather than offering content for specific sets of users, as
defined by particular impairments, the deferment approach simply
offers content, with access to a variety of options. Of course,
this level of deferment will not always be possible: marked-up
content whose end-purpose is physical printing must reach a fixed
form before being sent to its end consumers, for example.
Nonetheless, well-designed markup can allow various different
printed versions with different accessibility features. And with
so much marked-up content destined for digital formats, it is
certainly worthwhile for all markup technologists to explore the
advantages of deferment in producing accessible content.
Conclusions
This paper is a brief and introductory overview, aiming to inspire discussion about
the accessibility advantages of using declarative markup. I have not discussed questions
of the accessibility of markup technologies themselves, or the diversity and disability
awareness of markup as a specific corner of the tech industry. These are questions
which nonetheless need to be investigated, since supporting accessibility with markup
is only a partial victory if the technologies to do so are not themselves accessible.
Nevertheless, I hope that the outline above will serve to provide an up-to-date theoretical
background for markup technologists who want to engage with accessibility. Thinking
about markup in terms of what it can offer not only to the immediate end-user, but
also to future users with potential new accessibility technologies available to them,
is a starting point for creating markup projects with high value for disabled users.
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[1]
By comparison, 17.6% of disabled women are employed in food
preparation, food serving, and sales, while 13.6% of disabled
men and 14.2% of non-disabled men work in these fields.
Disabled people are also more likely to work in buildings and
grounds cleaning and maintenance jobs: 5.6% of disabled
compared with 3.6% of non-disabled workers (6%/5.1% of
disabled men/women; 3.9%/3.2% of non-disabled men/women) BLS2020a.
[2]
As has been noted in a dissenting opinion by U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Stevens, this is an interesting state of
affairs, since most people requiring assistive devices to
compensate for an impairment (such as people who wear
prosthetic limbs) are considered disabled because of their
uncorrected functioning in comparison
with statistical norms SuttonvUSA1999.
[3]
Although this paper focuses on disability, I am not arguing
that disability should be the only concern of accessible
design. Recognition of the different needs of people with a
variety of cultural, linguistic, and educational backgrounds
is also key, as is ensuring that products and services are
equally usable by people of different sexes, ethnicities, skin
tones, and body sizes, amongst other characteristics.
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requires accessibility from the start. You don’t, as a matter of civil rights law,
get to roll out an inaccessible feature and then, only later, make it accessible. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/mattbc/status/1273343680645140490
Davis, R. G., Ressler, K. J., Schwartz, A. C., Stephens, K. J., & Bradley, R. G. (2008).
Treatment barriers for low-income, urban African Americans with undiagnosed posttraumatic
stress disorder. Journal of Traumatic Stress: Official Publication of The International Society for
Traumatic Stress Studies, 21, 218–222. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.20313.
Dovidio, J. F., Eggly, S., Albrecht, T. L., Hagiwara, N., & Penner, L. A. (2016).
Racial biases in medicine and healthcare disparities. TPM: Testing, Psychometrics, Methodology in Applied Psychology, 23, 489–510. doi:https://doi.org/10.4473/TPM23.4.5.
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... Pilote, L. (2014). Sex-related differences in access to care among patients with
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Samulowitz, A., Gremyr, I., Eriksson, E., & Hensing, G. (2018). “Brave men” and “emotional
women”: A theory-guided literature review on gender bias in health care and gendered
norms towards patients with chronic pain. Pain Research and Management. doi:https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/6358624.
Sloan, D. (2002). Creating accessible e-learning content. In J. Seale, L. Phipps,
& A. Sutherland (Eds.), Access all areas: Technology, disability and learning (pp. 35–41). Association for Learning Technology.
Smith, S. E. (2019). Disabled people don’t need so many fancy new gadgets. We just need more ramps. Retrieved April 30, 2019, from https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/4/30/18523006/disabled-wheelchair-access-ramps-stair-climbing
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. (1991). Text in the electronic age: Texual study and textual
study and text encoding, with examples from medieval texts. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 6, 34–46. doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/6.1.34.
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. (1994). The Text Encoding Initiative: Electronic text markup
for research. In Literary texts in an electronic age: Scholarly implications and library services (papers
presented at the 1994 clinic on library applications of data processing) (pp. 35–55). University of Illinois.
Wasserman, D., Asch, A., Blustein, J., & Putnam, D. (2016). Disability: Definitions,
models, experience. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2016). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
Wiggins, L. D., Durkin, M., Esler, A., Lee, L.-C., Zahorodny, W., Rice, C., ... Morrier,
M. J., et al. (2020). Disparities in documented diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder
based on demographic, individual, and service factors. Autism Research, 13, 464–473. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.2255.
World Health Organization. (2015). The impact of myopia and high myopia: Report of the Joint World Health Organization–Brien
Holden Vision Institute global scientific meeting on myopia. World Health Organization.
Yeatts, K., Davis, K. J., Sotir, M., Herget, C., & Shy, C. (2003). Who gets diagnosed
with asthma? frequent wheeze among adolescents with and without a diagnosis of asthma.
Pediatrics, 111, 1046–1054. doi:https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.111.5.1046.
