Another thing: part of why certain digital access needs get ignored like this has to do with the way we as a society don't consider pain or discomfort or energetic expenditure as legitimate access concerns.
https://twitter.com/alexhaagaard/status/1425594727429193732
"Access barrier" gets defined as "can literally, absolutely not do the thing without accommodation"
If you can *technically* do the thing but it causes you so much pain or fatigue you can't do anything else for the rest of the day, that gets deemed illegitimate, and ignored.
If you can *technically* do the thing but it causes you so much pain or fatigue you can't do anything else for the rest of the day, that gets deemed illegitimate, and ignored.
And there are a lot of other factors too, of course. The way certain categories of disabled experience have a much longer history of coherent community and therefore of organized self-advocacy.
The way the clinical gaze positions some experiences of disability as functional deficits, and some as moral deficits.
And anyway, ALL these factors (and many others) have profoundly shaped how design understand and approaches disability. What gets to count as an access need, who is considered deserving of "adaptation."
And this interface update is an example of the very real material consequences for the disabled folks who get invisibilized by the clinical gaze, by society at large, and by nominally "inclusive" design processes.
And this is far from the first time Twitter has deemed the specific needs of chronically ill people as irrelevant from an #a11y perspective.
Fleets and Spaces were and/are temporally inaccessible which renders them unavailable to many chronically ill folks.
When I brought this to their attention, they ignored it and ended the conversation.
When I brought this to their attention, they ignored it and ended the conversation.
Social media platforms were a watershed moment for the development of chronically ill community, culture and advocacy.
And many of us are now contending with the fact that one of the principal spaces where we work and socialize and advocate can no longer be used safely because our access needs are routinely considered irrelevant.
(Worth keeping in mind too that the new WCAG working group on cognitive accessibility did not include chronically ill people in their recruitment demographics 🙃)
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