Digital Accessibility and the Promise of the Web

A little self discipline

It was tenth grade when I was struggling in my literature class. I just couldn’t get into a novel we had been assigned. I know, “struggle” probably seems like too strong of a word, but stay with me. It was a novel that an entire series of essays and assignments were based upon and I found it exceptionally uninteresting. I tried. I tried several times to read through the first couple of chapters, but I kept giving up, exasperated. My usual high A had dropped to the middle B range over the course of several weeks. That is when my teacher pulled me aside to find out what was wrong.

“The story is just so boring… I have tried to get into it, but I can’t. I try to read it and I get distracted and then I try again.”

My tenth grade literature teacher told me that I just needed to develop some “self discipline and maturity.” Once I “hunkered down” I would get through it.

She wasn’t wrong. Once I got through what at the time seemed like endless exposition, I was finally able to start engaging with the material. I started to become interested in the story and the characters. It seemed like all I had needed was a little extra will power.

That idea stuck, and for my remaining years in high school, any struggle I had with regard to reading material I defined as a “self discipline problem.” I was always reprimanding myself for not having more self discipline. I was always telling myself to “just make yourself do this, read this, or finish that.”

But I wasn’t always as successful as I was with that tenth grade novel. Some books I struggled with and failed to get through. Like many students taking a heavy load of advanced placement classes, I had figured out how to get by while reading as little as possible. I figured out how to use end-of-chapter questions and highlights to study for tests without ever actually reading the material. I wrote whole research papers on books and material that I never read, and I got good grades on those papers.

Yet, I still tried many times to get through my assigned reading material. I tried to force myself. I tried to hunker down. I even tried learning to meditate because I was told that it would help with my focus. I failed over and over, but my grades were fine, I got by with mostly A’s. By senior year, I didn’t even try to get through assigned reading.

I figured that “self-discipline” problem could only be fixed with maturity and maturity comes with age. In the meantime, I developed strategies for doing well in all of those classes that I really needed to read the material in but couldn’t.

It turns out that good writing and reasoning skills will actually make up for quite a bit. High school teachers often want to give you credit for a well reasoned argument even if your facts or interpretation of the material is a little inventive.

I never had any trouble reading my math books — they were full of diagrams, charts, history snippets, and theorems — exactly the kind of thing that drew my interest. It was the endless kind-of-awful stories in my literature classes and my oh-so-dry science books that I struggled with.

Eventually, I convinced myself that all of my self discipline and maturity would arrive the moment I stepped foot on a college campus for my first college class. (I was such a teenager…)

That is not what happened.

The end of my non-reading academic success

Instead, my struggle got worse when I moved onto a college campus. Two years after starting at the University of Georgia, I left without a degree, feeling quite defeated.

I remember spending so many hours trying to force myself to read my physics book, that I got eye strain. But I was just reading the same page over and over. After many hours, I might make it through a chapter while barely understanding what I had read.

I told my friends that the material just went in one eyeball and out the other. That’s what it was like. I could read the material but it just didn’t seem to actually go in. I ended up in the very bizarre situation of getting an A in my physics lab but failing the lecture portion.

It was all very confusing. I had been an early reader and celebrated for my writing skills from a very young age. I excelled in my english classes and literature classes throughout my school career. I got high A’s in my high school physics and chemistry classes. But I left UGA thinking that I must not have been ready for college, because no matter how hard I tried I could not seem to get myself to focus. Self discipline and maturity had apparently eluded me.

Instead, I became a licensed massage therapist and a registered yoga teacher. After a few years as a therapist I started my own practice — a small business that I ran for 5 years, but I eventually decided to return to school over a decade after my first attempt.

That is when everything would change.

A second trip through college

I started reading college level material again, but this time it was different. I remember reading Beowulf for the first time and flying through it. I read several shakespeare histories, and multiple non-fiction books that I had been meaning to pick up for years. I found them so easy to read that I just kept buying more. Books that used to take me months or even years to get through — when I hadn’t given up on them — flew by in a weekend.

I was so thrilled. I sincerely believed that my missing “self discipline” had finally arrived.

That was short-lived. I quickly discovered that I was still struggling with some of my textbooks and class materials in the exact same way that I always had. Some of my books seemed unreadable while others were a breeze. Something was going on and it didn’t appear to have much to do with getting older.

It turns out that the biggest difference in my reading materials was the device that I was reading the material on. I was taking a British literature class and I had bought a kindle when my first semester started so that I could get many of those old literature books for free.

Reading on the kindle was practically effortless.

After a little investigation I realized that I had resized the text on my kindle. The larger text meant less words on the page, and less words on the page meant that my “maturity/self-discipline problem” suddenly vanished.

I wasn’t rereading. I wasn’t perpetually losing my spot. I wasn’t forgetting to pay attention to the words I was reading. I wasn’t reading whole chapters and failing to comprehend what I just read. I was just reading and understanding what I had read without the need to force myself to stay focused.

I wish I could say that it immediately dawned on me that I had had a reading problem for all of those years, but it didn’t. It took a few weeks before it slowly occurs to me that I had entirely misunderstood and misdefined years of struggling with an actual cognitive, reading problem.

Then all of a sudden it is staring me in the face. If a simple change in how the material was delivered to me, a presentational change, was all that was needed for my focus, comprehension, and engagement with the material to come alive, then my struggle had never been with a character flaw. I had struggled with a real, definable, cognitive issue.

I have heard very similar stories from many people now. People with conditions like dyslexia, ADHD, and certain kinds of brain injuries often find themselves in a similar circumstance — a circumstance in which a simple tweak in presentation makes all the difference in whether or not content can be meaningfully read or understood.

So I was back at school, on my second trip through college, and suddenly I am painfully aware that I couldn’t take my tools and my learning strategies for granted. I had to be willing to use as many resources as were available to me, and in some cases to create my own. I went to tutors, organized study groups, tutored others, found alternative sources for my textbooks whenever I could, and I even recorded my lectures. I struggled when some professors wouldn’t allow me to use an Ipad for notes, or who resisted my desire to record their lectures. And I struggled the most when the textbook was only available as a large brick-like object made of paper and ink with small text and hundreds of words per page.

But I ultimately succeeded. I got degrees in chemistry and math, and I also went to a developer bootcamp where I learned how to build web applications.

A few years back I dived into web accessibility due to the needs of a client whose site I had built. Since then web accessibility has dominated my professional life, and I have found myself to be intensely passionate about the issue.

That passion comes from my firsthand knowledge of how incredibly powerful a little tiny end-user customization can be.

A passion for customizable UI

Of course, web accessibility is bigger than that. Accessibility in general, has complex social and cultural issues underpinning it, and I do not mean to oversimplify it or imply that all that matters is end-user customization.

For me, there was so much power in that one little aspect. From a presentational perspective, all I did was make the text larger. From a technological perspective the whole layout dynamically changed for me. This is not a small difference from a printed sheet of paper.

That “small change” drastically improved my ability to read and comprehend what I was reading. That in turn changed my understanding of myself and my own brain. It changed my approach to my own education, and it made me see for the first time that no amount of will power and intellect could resolve a problem that had been entirely misunderstood and misdefined.

The brilliant flexibility of digital content

Digital content can be tweaked. It can be reorganized and adapted in nearly any way imaginable. It is flexible in ways that printed material simply cannot be. That flexibility can open very powerful doors for people who function differently from what we are taught to expect. This is also why digital content and services can be such powerful agents of change.

We can’t build a web for one kind of user. Instead, we should be building the most adaptable, universal web that we can.

That is why we need to stop thinking of our users or site visitors as “people who interact with a mouse.” Instead, we need to start discovering that there are great many ways of thinking, interacting, perceiving, learning, engaging, and being.

The promise of the web is not in reaching one type of clearly defined human, and web accessibility is not about reaching the humans that are less than that definition. The promise of the web is in unlocking human potential — the potential that will become apparent when all of us, regardless of how we differ from each other, are able to engage with the shared knowledge, services, and talents of our fellow humans via the web.

For now, web accessibility is about filling in the gaps, figuring out all the ways that our web applications and sites are falling short of being adaptable to all of our users and fixing those issues. One day, I hope web accessibility will simply be an understood part of working with and building digital content and services online or anywhere.

I still struggle to define my “reading problem.” Was it a disorder? I have been told that the problem I have described comes up in kids with ADHD — it’s related to how much information we can process at a time.

But I believe the problem to be cultural. I grew up believing I was smart, and that smart meant that I tended to get to the answer first, that I learned more quickly than others, or that I was a more skilled writer and reader than my classmates. That is why I couldn’t imagine that I was struggling with reading comprehension. The undisciplined, bored, smart kid was an easy conclusion to come to, but it was wrong. We were all assuming that there was one way to think, one way to excel, and one way to be ‘smart.’