Stef Walter Profile picture
Jul 7 10 tweets 3 min read
We need to unpack a few things about the words we use when talking about web #accessibility.
A thread (maybe an article on the blog one day) on complex topics and things I hear around sometimes
1/
2. “Accessibility benefits everyone: video transcripts help people in the train without headphones”. Not everything we put in place to make sites accessible benefits every person. And this is okay. The goal is to make sure people with all sorts of disabilities have equal access.
3. Benefiting non-disabled people is a nice bonus. But it should not be the main argument and goal when advocating for accessibility. Otherwise, we, again, erase the needs of disabled people.
4. "We need empathy for everyone, like people with slow connection, this is accessibility too” So, yes, performance benefits everyone and is important. But you can have a super performant site that is also not accessible to disabled users.
5. There’s some intersection between performance and accessibility just like there is between usability and accessibility. And we need it all. But performance (or usability) is not accessibility.
6. There's this whole confusion about accessibility and the "making sites that everyone can use everywhere”. And I get it, it took me years to understand the fine nuances here. I too want to make sites and apps that work for everyone.
7. This starts with acknowledging the technologies we use introduced barriers for disabled people. And accessibility is about following some standards (WCAG) to remove those barriers and guarantee equal access.
8. Finally, different flavors of “I don’t like putting the “disability” label on people” is ableist. It means you consider disability as something bad, something to be avoided? Ask yourself "why does this word make me feel uncomfortable"?
9. Links:
- Why you can and should say disabled by @KittyGiraudel kittygiraudel.com/2021/11/12/can…
- Why empathy reifies disability vimeo.com/319388683?utm_… by @elizejackson
@KittyGiraudel @elizejackson 10. And again, everyone makes mistakes, and those concepts are hard to grasp sometimes. The goal is to improve together.

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More from @WalterStephanie

Jun 29, 2019
#WTMsummit #waw there are only 2 types of speaker in the world: 1. The nervous 2. The liars.
Glossophobia is the fear of public speaking and it's perfectly normal 🤗
#WTMsummit #waw Everyone has a story to tell, something you build, something you tried, etc.
If the audience is large and mixed you can do maybe 20% for beginners, 60% for middle and 20% for experts?
#WTMsummit #waw some advice
One month before
- Follow a structure
- Write down what you want to talk about (hah I have 14pages of gdocs for each talk)
Read 22 tweets
May 30, 2019
"Be humble it's a privilege to talk to a conference so pay for your own travel and hotel and check your ego at the door". Wow. The level of bullshit here is amazing. linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…
This reminds me of some people who went from "we will sponsor your event, you will have the venue and organize a workshop for your community" to "please create a specific workshop for our community first and we will then let you the venue in 4 months"
I asked "How do you do this, do you pay workshop speakers" they explained to me that no, and usually companies like IBM pay to give a workshop. I told them we are not IBM and have nothing to sell to their community and creating a workshop just for them is a lot of work.
Read 7 tweets

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