Briefly on conflicts between aesthetics and accessibility requirements

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Question of dealing with conflicts between aesthetics and accessibility comes up a lot and sometimes it’s easy to just let one side win and be done with it. I think that we need a cultural shift to have both of them.

I really do believe that accessible design can also be beautifully aesthetic. But this is me now, after decades of experiences and surely also a sign of me getting older. Perhaps you can learn from my mistakes…

In the old days, where we would host our websites on some free hosting, or perhaps even from the basement, it was way more play and way less function. It was more about us and less about the user.

Draw a lovely image and cut it into parts, position them within HTML table, add images, text and interactive image maps and there it was – a very aesthetic website with three dimensional buttons and whatever seemed cool at that time (remember blinking text and marquee texts?).

I am guilty of making a website that looked like a ancient proclamation of a local lord, a papyrus nailed to a tree trunk, where I used HTML tables to position all the elements and added animated backgrounds that made the papyrus behave like it was exposed to wind, waving. It only worked on a single screen dimension, and I didn’t even bother to test other dimensions, or what happened when zoomed, and I did not have a clue of how it worked without computer mouse. It was getting noticed and stakeholders loved to brag to other people with an aesthetic website they got.

When Macromedia Flash arrived I was totally enjoying it. It was amazing what could be done with the technology that looked more like an video editing software, with key-frames and loops. Until Steve Jobs killed it. Many have tried after, but didn’t quite reach that artistic freedom that was available there. Not to mention installing proprietary plugins. No wonder, when people needed to install the browser plugin just to use a website. I am now very happy that happened, even if I miss some artistic parts of making a highly (sometimes even hyper) interactive web application that worked on all browsers (that had the plugin installed).

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were there, but they were totally unknown to many of us, me included. Nowadays it’s finally not possible to totally ignore accessibility. At least not fully. Thanks to legislation, as well as awareness growing from the better usability and search engine optimization initiatives. Unfortunately we need even more legislation to get better effects. Yes, unfortunately, because legislation is often just a reaction to problems and often just trying to do the minimum viable solutions. Keeping WCAG as the goal, instead of having better usability with accessibility.

WCAG being ignored for so long… No wonder we need to go for the metaphoric stick versus carrot when people are literally ignored for so long.

And no, it’s not about WCAG and technical standards. Those are basically just helping tools that can set us on the right direction, and often just a baseline. We need our culture to change and get better understanding that it is about people that can’t use products and services because some small group of people is not considering the limitation of the web. Ignoring different ways of using the web. Ignoring different people.

And here we are – when people understand that there are other people that use their products in other ways – for example with assistive technologies – then it’s obvious that accessibility needs to lead and sometimes limit aesthetics. We all love aesthetics, it’s a part of good design. But aesthetics is beyond visible. Invisible aesthetics is, for me, good usability, even if we use a screen reader and don’t see the page or app or document with all the visually appealing elements.

Good design indeed needs limitations, or suddenly every website starts with an explosion of visuals that can make people physically ill, adding full beat techno music playing at 100% volume when you just opened a search engine result trying to find a food and drinks menu for a new restaurant nearby. Because somebody wanted to “think outside of the box” instead of trying to use user centered limitations to make a presentation that works for most people.

Unfortunately aesthetics still wins more than accessibility, at least when they are being weighted against each-other. Most of stakeholder still support visual aesthetics over robustness and accessibility. That is a fact, especially when we can still see all the poor contrasts out there. When we can’t read or even have it difficult to identify interactive icons… Even after a quarter of century with WCAG, we still see a lot of design out there that fails even basic guidelines. Because somebody decided to put aesthetics in front, before usability and accessibility.

But that is only the tip of the iceberg.

We need more awareness and we need culture to shift towards accessibility and usability that are prerequisites to aesthetics. Sorry if you do not agree – it is your right not to agree, but it is also your responsibility to support rights of other people. And when it comes to people with disabilities – they have a right to use your product or service, or just a right to get to the same information that you are trying to communicate.

If they have a choice and your solution is not working for them – they will go to your competition, that’s a fact. If they do not have a choice, because your product or service really is unique (or just a public sector organization), then they will not have anything left but to get help. And with that their independence can vanish, their personal things may be revealed and sometimes even abused.

Putting accessibility and usability before aesthetics is kind of a law already, even if perhaps you don’t know it, or even if perhaps that is not a fact (yet) in your case. So please consider this before you try to make a product or service that you want many to use. It will make you a better designer, and it will make your products or services better, more inclusive and automatically available for more users than you will ever know.

Author: Bogdan Cerovac

I am IAAP certified Web Accessibility Specialist (from 2020) and was Google certified Mobile Web Specialist.

Work as digital agency co-owner web developer and accessibility lead.

Sole entrepreneur behind IDEA-lab Cerovac (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility lab) after work. Check out my Accessibility Services if you want me to help your with digital accessibility.

Also head of the expert council at Institute for Digital Accessibility A11Y.si (in Slovenian).

Living and working in Norway (🇳🇴), originally from Slovenia (🇸🇮), loves exploring the globe (🌐).

Nurturing the web from 1999, this blog from 2019.

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