For me, accessibility was a game changer in thinking about the purpose of design.

As a starving musician, I stumbled into design in the course of trying to put food on the table. Without a design education I was never quite sure of what design was all about. As an interaction designer, I was torn between delighting the eye and quietly helping people on their way—both visible and invisible, imposing and encouraging, shouting, “Look at me!” and murmuring, “You’re on the right track.” I muddled along, confused.

In 2001 I attended a Nercomp conference on Web Accessibility and presented a talk called “Practical Accessibility in Web Page Design.” This was my second presentation on the topic, the first a few months earlier at another higher ed/IT conference. Web accessibility was new to me and new to higher education.

Before lunch, Gerald Neufeld, PhD, gave a talk called “Visually-Impaired Students and the Struggle to Survive.” Dr Neufeld is visually impaired, and he described his time as a student, listening to texts on reel-to-reel tapes. He said that he could not afford to listen to a book more than once because of the time it took. He contrasted his pre-digital experience with his current experience of reading online, demonstrating the unimaginably fast reading speed he uses with his screen reader. He spoke of how digital technologies have leveled the playing field, removing obstacles such as reading and writing time for people with visual disabilities. “In 1980, the mountain I was climbing had no end. Twenty years later, that mountain is no more.”

Dr Neufeld was a compelling storytelling. I felt his frustration and distress, and worried with him about keeping up with such compromised access to primary materials. I also felt worry transform into delight at the world of opportunity presented by electronic texts, and software to read them. And while his access was much improved by electronic documents, he had stories to tell of obstacles he encountered, such as image-based PDFs. I felt discouraged by obstacles that could so easily have been avoided—opportunities that were so close, yet still so far.

Empathy is a powerful learning tool. Dr Neufeld told stories in such a way that encouraged others to step into his shoes and broaden their knowledge and understanding of the world. From Dr Neufeld I learned that the purpose of design is delivering content and functionality, without obstacles, to as many people as possible.

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) recently raised the possibility of civil rights violations arising from the use of Google Apps for Education, and asked the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division to investigate. In their March 15, 2011 press release, Adoption of Google Apps Program Discriminates Against the Blind, they claim that both New York University (NYU) and Northwestern University, along with several Oregon public schools, have committed civil rights violations by utilizing these applications that have “significant accessibility barriers for blind people” to deliver email, calendaring, and collaboration tools to their students and faculty.

In following the story I discovered that NFB has devoted resources to preparing (captioned) videos demonstrating the types of barriers encountered by screen reader users in using these tools. As a long-time advocate of accessibility, who has tried countless methods for raising awareness about nonvisual access to webpages, this video collection is a goldmine. The videos illustrate both the challenges of nonvisual access, but also the ease of solving these challenges using good coding and design practices. The issues demonstrated using Google as an example are transferable (unfortunately) to many—maybe even most—web-based applications. Developers should view and learn from these videos, and avoid making the same mistakes.

I have long admired NFB for their work in ensuring equal access for nonvisual users. To admiration I now add my gratitude for providing exceptional content that can be used for education and awareness-raising by accessibility advocates, and to make real the barriers as well as the solutions for the people who code the pages.

Thank you, NFB!