Good design is good for everyone. It is good especially for people who have certain needs that should always be considered in design and accommodated, such as visual, audio, physical, or mental/emotional disability. If a road sign is big enough for most near-sighted people to see it, then everyone who should reasonably be driving will be able to see it.
There are layers of good design and accessibility. Design that works for some folks, might exclude others. That's why it's important to test designs with a randomly sampled (or widely sampled) group. You might have a friend who has color-blindness who sees your pink on pink website and say they cannot read the words very well. Then you have another friend who is blind who reads it and doesn't know what the images are of without alt text in the html code for the images. So you can put the code in there and then when a visually impaired person reading an article on your reader will know what the image is of because it will tell them the words describing the image that you wrote as copy for the alt text script.
But this isn't just good for visually impaired people, honestly a lot of us are multi-tasking, and trying to do multiple things at once while listening to stuff like podcasts (me, I paint while listening to Morbid: A True Crime Podcast all the time, Ash and Alaina are amazing!), and it's kind of nice to know there is a picture there and what it is of without having to look at the screen because you're busy looking at like three other things like walking the dogs, or feeding your kids, or working from home, or taking out the trash, etc. Or sometimes the code on another part of the page that affects the image could break, or the link the image comes from could be taken down, and you're left with a broken image link (you know the one- the big, empty square in the box with the x in the corner and the text at the bottom). If the person who wrote the code for the image on the website included an alt text, it will often show up in place of the image. So even if there is no image displayed, the reader can still at least know what the image is of. If it is a very famous image, it may even be something they could find and replace the link to, linking to the same image but in a different location. Alt Text is super powerful as a function and not just because it helps a LOT of people. I just want to say up front so there is no ambiguity that I <3 ACCESSIBILITY. Honestly, I myself ALWAYS watch netflix (period. i always watch netflix. jk. not jk.) with subtitles on because I am like 95% sure I have auditory processing disorder because I can't hear like most of what people say on shows. I LOVE SUBTITLES, YOU GUYS!! Also anime with "subs" or the original Japanese translated into subtitles in English, is WAY better than english "dubs" when they have English voice actors talking over the original animation.
Doorhandles that people can see, find, and operate, even under duress, are good for everyone. Buttons that are obviously buttons, in bright colors, with recognizable symbols, and relatively few words, are even better. Buttons that are within the reach of most people sitting in motorized wheelchairs who are the most likely to be far away from the wall where the button is mounted. Or maybe the button could be on a panel in the middle of a bisected walkway (?!) Buttons that work - a lot of the buttons at UB that are supposed to open the door when you press them do not work - I worked with people and had had friends who operate wheelchairs and use those doors and many of them remained inoperable through the periods of (2017-2019) when I was working on my dissertation and teaching at UB. It was incredibly frustrating.
This next example is super upsetting and frustrating so trigger warning, y'all.
TRIGGER WARNING: Death by fall. In January of 2019, Malaysia Goodson fell down the stairs into a New York City subway station and was found unconscious on a subway platform at 7th and 53rd. Her daughter was found strapped in her stroller at the bottom of the stairs, conscious and unhurt. Malaysia later died and it was discovered that she had been trying to drag her one-year-old child's buggy down several flights of stairs because the subway system only had TWO ESCALATORS GOING UP AND NO DOWN ESCALATOR. (plus, it was January so it was more likely to have been icy on the stairs or in the tunnel that day though I cannot prove that for sure) This prompted Mayor Bill deBlasio to tweet "“The subway system is not accessible for everyone and that's an environment the MTA should not allow." The medical examiner that examined Malaysia's body found that she died from complications from heart problems that were worsened while walking down the stairs, contributing to her falling down the stairs and becoming unconscious.
According to Patrick Mulligan The NYC Lens (2020): "The young mother became a face of the argument for accessibility in a system where roughly one out of every four stations (119 of the total 472) has an elevator." I can report in my experiences of the Buffalo metro system it is similar here. A different friend and I walked all over Buffalo looking for a station with an elevator so we could get from central terminal back to their apartment down on on Delaware and we ended up walking like 7 or 8 miles at least all over buffalo in the middle of the night because none of these stations had a working elevator so my friend couldn't get down into the subway station. Come on guys, this is 2021. The ADA is 22! It probably still remembers 9-11. We need to do better. It doesn't even make any sense to have elevators that ONLY GO UP. Lots of people need elevators that go down, too. Elderly people, people carrying big bags of groceries, people with walkers, broken feet or legs in casts, and LITTLE KIDS AND PEOPLE WITH LITTLE KIDS. Who is making these decisions? They are obviously not trying to juggle multiple, developing human bodies and psyches down several flights of outside stairs in the middle of January while also suffering from a debilitating heart condition. You know what would have been really be helpful in this situation? An elevator.
What hurts my sociologist heart is that this was of course a young African American woman who was relying on public transportation. Chronic heart conditions, diabetes, and other health conditions more often afflict and cause the death of members of the African American community due to major disparities in access to and distribution of healthcare in the United States and elsewhere. So she was more likely to have that heart condition just because of who she is and where she is before she ever set foot on those stairs. Then her vulnerability skyrocketed because she had a child in a stroller and couldn't just walk briskly down the stairs like most unencumbered people using the subway that day. The intersectional ways in which Malaysia was underserved and neglected by the NYC metro system but also by our healthcare system are apparent in the ways in which the lack of consideration of women with babies and health conditions were taken into account when they were deciding whether to put in elevators or escalators that go down.
Source: http://nycitylens.com/blog/2020/02/12/mta-meeting-promises-make-subway-accessible/
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