We all have a role in supporting and advancing disability inclusion in the digital world. In our book, What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility, Dave Sloan and I join with members of the global accessibility and disability communities to help build a foundation of awareness, knowledge, and skills to help cement digital accessibility in professional practice, for all of us.
In the spring of 2021, I was invited by Phil Laplante, editor of the What Every Engineer Should Know book series, to submit a proposal for a book on digital accessibility. I had connected with him previously about my opinion article, Empathy Cannot Sustain Action in Technology Accessibility, for the Web Accessibility Research Topic in Frontiers in Computer Science. I emailed him to let him know that I had been inspired by his IEEE Computer article on software professionalism and had quoted him in my article:
Society expects a standard of competence, professionalism, and accountability from its doctors, nurses, and other professionals who hold lives in trust. Yet anyone can write software that can appear in or interact with critical systems, so what does “software professional” mean, and what are society’s expectations for those individuals? (Phil Laplante, A Brief History of Software Professionalism and the Way Forward)
This led to a follow-up article for his Software Engineering column in Computer, Building an Accessible Digital World, and his invitation to submit a book proposal. I recruited my partner, David Sloan, as co-author, and our proposal was accepted in October 2021.
At the time I was working as a research fellow on the Teaching Accessibility in the Digital Skill Set research project at the Centre for Inclusion at Southampton Education School. I’d spent most of my career in higher education but always supporting scholars, not being one. I’d also had an intensive 7+ years as an accessibility consultant with TPG, now TPGi. That combined experience was enough for the research team to give me a chance. Over 2 years I worked with Sarah Lewthwaite and Andy Coverdale, learning how to apply research methods and frameworks to thinking and sense-making. I also learned from educators about approaches to teaching accessibility in workplace and education programs. One key theme was the need to establish a common foundation of awareness and understanding before moving on to building role-based knowledge and skills.
Dave and I spent many months working on an outline of what every engineer should know about digital accessibility. We keep coming back to the “every” part of the title, and the “should,” and how that meant the coverage should be broadly relevant, avoiding the deep-dive rabbit holes of what some engineers must know. We also had to come to terms with what the “engineer” role means in the context of digital accessibility. Eventually we came to understand that the lowercase “engineer” is similar to the lowercase “designer” — a term that describes the person who makes decisions and engineers things that affect the experience of others. In other words, every one of us. That broad definition combined with the foundational approach to teaching accessibility lead to our book structure, where we first establish accessibility foundations and then focus on methods.
What we ended up with for What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility is excerpted from the book as follows.
In Part 1, Foundations of Accessibility we cover the building blocks of digital accessibility, who benefits from accessibility and in what ways, and overarching approaches to addressing accessibility needs.
- Chapter 1, Introduction to Digital Accessibility, defines digital accessibility and describes its beneficiaries and characteristics.
- Chapter 2, Disability and Digital Inclusion, focuses on establishing the core concepts of disability, disability discrimination, and the promise of digital inclusion.
- Chapter 3, User Accessibility Needs, covers a range of accessibility needs arising from disability, aging, and other impairments, as well as the situational and temporal nature of accessibility needs.
- Chapter 4, Assistive Technology, presents assistive technologies and accessibility strategies and how they manifest in both open and closed systems.
- Chapter 5, Core Attributes, focuses on characteristics such as flexibility and compatibility that make digital technologies particularly effective at meeting accessibility needs.
- Chapter 6, Guiding Principles, covers the principles, guidelines, and standards that underpin accessible design and engineering methods and practices.
- Chapter 7, Accessibility in Practice, brings it all together with guidance on how to integrate the foundations into professional practice.
In Part 2, Methods for Engineering Digital Accessibility, we present a proactive, holistic approach to accessibility, with creative, user‑centered methods and tasks to be performed by all roles on the product team in all phases of the product lifecycle.
- Chapter 8, Requirements Specification, presents approaches for surfacing and defining accessibility requirements and ways to describe them meaningfully in requirements documentation.
- Chapter 9, Core Requirements, uses global accessibility principles and guidelines as a framework for describing core requirements, their purpose and intent, and considerations for meeting them in design and implementation.
- Chapter 10, Design and Development, provides approaches to designing and implementing accessibility requirements.
- Chapter 11, Testing and Evaluation, covers automated and manual accessibility testing and accessibility evaluation methods, as well as ways for recording and acting on issues that are identified.
- Chapter 12, Documentation and Support, focuses on best practices for documenting the status of accessibility in digital products and considerations when communicating accessibility status and supporting end users.
We close the book with Chapter 13, The Future of Digital Accessibility, inviting the reader to step forward as an accessibility‑informed and competent design and technology professional, ready to contribute to engineering an accessible and inclusive digital world.
We recognized from the very beginning of our writing process that our perspective on what every engineer should know about digital accessibility is limited by our own awareness, knowledge, and skills, and lived experience. To help fill the gap, we asked for contributions from members of the global accessibility and disability communities. The book features sidebars with community perspectives, each one completing the sentence, Every engineer should know…
- Inaccessible software does not only eliminate or limit access, but it can also cause harm to some users (Yasmine Elglaly)
- How to talk about disability — an excerpt from Demystifying Disability (Emily Ladau)
- About neuro‑inclusive digital accessibility (Lē Silveus)
- People with disabilities have a wide and diverse range of user needs (Jonathan Avila)
- People with disabilities use a variety of assistive technologies and accessibility strategies (Jonathan Avila)
- Content and functionality must be machine readable (Makoto Ueki)
- Those who have been marginalized get it (Jonee Meiser)
- Accessibility is a team effort. It is not exclusive to user research or front‑end development (Yasmine Elglaly)
- Not all user needs or barriers will be addressed by the “current” WCAG guidelines at any given time (Erich Manser)
- Custom UI components need extra information to be accessible (Kate Kalcevich)
- Accessibility requirements for neurodivergent people (Lē Silveus)
- Disabled people are digital creators and consumers. We need accessibility in design and development tools (Yasmine Elglaly)
- Supporting your team and engaging with communities makes a difference (Matthew Tylee Atkinson)
- You can’t rely on testing tools. They can test only 20%–30% (Makoto Ueki)
- You need to bake layers of accessibility testing into your process (Kate Kalcevich)
- Inaccessible design is the problem, not the user who raises the issue (Erich Manser)
We’re really happy with how the book came together — its breadth of coverage and the richness provided by the community perspectives. We’re so grateful to everyone who contributed, directly and indirectly.
We hope the book will help build the accessibility awareness, knowledge, and skills needed to ensure that the digital world is for all of us.
Buy What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility directly from Routledge and get a 20% discount with code SMA22.
Sarah Horton 