When Virgin Airlines made their assistive site in 2015, it gathered a lot of flack. It was ugly – but worse, it was useless. Karl Groves, a self-proclaimed accessibility expert, discussed his thoughts on the topic.
First, Karl Groves goes into the topic “What is accessibility?”. To him, accessibility means that people with disabilities can use it. He mentions that making a text-only website isn’t very helpful – this is because people who will need help reading one website will need help reading all websites; therefore, they will have the technology to do so, negating the need for individual websites to do so. He also mentions that the money spent on making the assistive site could have gone towards improving the current site for the technology there.
The next part delves into the mistakes made by the airline: essentially, in their assistive version, they included all the features of assistive technologies. He describes that these are useless. I never thought of it that way before – of course those with disabilities would have a way to read things on all websites because not all websites are accessible. This is something I take for granted – I am able to access any website with ease and do not have to rely on developers who may not consider my needs a priority to make the website usable to me.
One of the most important parts of the article, I feel, is the part where Karl Groves goes into the types of disabilities – hearing and visual impairment are not the most common disabilites, cognitive impairment is. Also, about half of those with disabilites have multiple disabilities. The statistics mentioned in the article were mindblowing. UX developers tend to develop for visual and hearing impaired people (if they do so) and forget about the many other types of disabilities when they do so.
Overall, I thought the article was very informative. I learned a lot by reading it and I would suggest anyone new to the realm of ux design read this article and the ones he linked in it. Karl Groves does a good job of making sure that the articles are understandable and interesting. My only complaint with the article is that there weren’t more subheadings to divide the content – it came across as one long rant instead of an article. This is fine, as it is his own personal site, but it looks less official.
LIS 4022 Spring 2020 