Equivalent facilitation is ableist

70s style header replicating the post title

I’ve been noodling on the idea of “equivalent facilitation” [EF]. Regulatory definition below but, in short, a specific thing needn’t be accessible of there exists something else that is and provides access to the same thing. So, a front door doesn’t need a wheelchair ramp if there’s a side entrance to the same building that does. In the case of technology and example would be screen readers users can get the same information from a table when a graph isn’t directly accessible.

I’ll talk mostly about screen readers below but understand this is about access and not about screen readers and software.

Equivalent facilitation is ableist.

Definition

From Section 508 of the ADA 36 CFR appendix A§ E101.2 Equivalent Facilitation: The use of an alternative design or technology that results in substantially equivalent or greater accessibility and usability by individuals with disabilities than would be provided by conformance to one or more of the requirements in Chapters 4 and 5 of the Revised 508 Standards is permitted. The functional performance criteria in Chapter 3 shall be used to determine whether substantially equivalent or greater accessibility and usability is provided to individuals with disabilities.

I like definitions. My world works better in words so I use them a lot in writing.

Here’s an example of a feature for my own job. Genetic and family relationships can be organized in a tree-like structure called a Pedigree:

Caption: a family tree showing three generations that includes visual indications of related traits passed between each generation

Aside from showing a person’s family, one of the cool things in Pedigrees is a semi-standardized visual notation that allows for rapid review and search for specific traits across a family tree. From there, you can understand heritability of certain things and, if in a medical context, potentially help understand the symptoms stemming from a genetic anomaly.

Reference: Duke University standard pedigree symbols - PDF

It’s freaking cool. If you can see.

But what if I can’t?

At my job, we have a process that allows various stakeholders to apply for an equivalent facilitation override on a project where the nature of it either cannot be readily made accessible, in some particular accessibility mode, or there are equivalent functions in the software that can stand in for it.

All the information available in the Pedigree is available in a separate activity that is accessible to screen readers. So what we did for this was redirect screen reader sets to the more accessible version of the data. That version was, essentially, a table that included all the same information

Good, right? Everyone gets what they need?

When you tell a person that they can do the thing, they just need to go elsewhere to do it, it creates two separate spaces and states for people. “Separate but equal”. But is it really equal?

Separate, but unequal

Noted above, the visuals of the Pedigree can greatly increase a user’s ability to track traits across families. The data appearing in the Pedigree is often easy to structure in tables - a row is a family member, a column is a trait or other descriptor for that member like parent or sibling.

Tables are well understood concepts. They’ve been around for a while so most screen readers know how to handle them and, subsequently, most screen reader users do as well. So presenting a user with a table does, in fact, grant them access to the specific facts held within relatively quickly. For example, screen reader users can read the full row or columns contents from current selection, the row or column contents up to the current cell, the content from the current cell to the end of the row or column.

Pretty much anything listed in those linear dimensions can be quickly noted. But is that equal to the tree? How would a screen reader user trace a trait across families quickly? How would they swap focusable traits?

It may be accessible, but it damn well isn’t equivalent.

So WTF is equivalent then?

No one knows.

(One of) the problem with EF is that it was written primarily for physical access to locations and not technology. Literal, physical access to services. Because, once you’re in the building, there would be no more barriers to access, yes?

Lol, hardly, but that’s the underlying assumption with EF. Once you’re in the building, everything is peachy. It’s missing the trees for the forest. And further, equivalent facilitation provides no method for evaluating the equivalence. How do we even begin to create an equivalent experience if there’s no rubric?

Making a Pedigree accessible and making an accessible experience equivalent to the new one is tough. It requires designers to understand both what it is they are creating that offers the innovating experience for the new tool but also the way to offer those same innovations to users with low or no vision.

Are there ways to do that? Absolutely. Any problem can be solved.
Is it easy? NO.

But… The goal here is not to talk about what it would make to create an accessible version of a Pedigree. We can do that later - it’s a really engaging design problem. What matters is that “equivalent facilitation” creates two worlds. One world with the glitz glamor of new features and one world of flat data tables and no innovation. No one knows how to make that glamor translate to the accessible experience.

Equivalent facilitation creates a separate but equal world for people with disabilities even when it was supposed to offer the same level of service. But that’s not where we get, practically, when all the incentives in the world are stacked against doing the hard work of making the new thing accessible, of making the front stairs.

Trust Layer

And now we’re suffering from the very openness and ease of connection that the internet was built on. Because a collection of angry people talking past each other isn’t a community. Without persistence of presence, some sort of identity and a shared set of ideals, goals and consequences, humans aren’t particularly tempted to bring their best selves to the table.

The system is being architected against our best impulses. Humans understand that local leadership, sacrifice and generosity build community, and that fights and scandals simply create crowds. Countless people are showing up, leading and pushing back, but algorithms are powerful and resilient, and we need some of them to be rebuilt. Seth’s blog: https://seths.blog/2021/02/tribes-and-the-trust-layer/

Very interesting take on the fundamental problems with internet culture. Namely, that there aren’t the tools to build a quality one. It’s tribalism without the sacrifice and trust that builds community.

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/trust-layer

On doing versus improving.

When we do our job, what happens to it? Does it go away, to be replaced by tomorrow’s endless list of tasks? What would happen if we had enough confidence and trust to reconsider the implications of how we do what we do? Seth’s blog: https://seths.blog/2021/02/im-just-doing-my-job/

I have never been great at just doing a thing. I am regularly trying to find ways to “do better.” With work, it’s valuable because it keeps me advancing - new skills, new efficiencies, better results.

But. In life? This can be a problem. Take hobbies. Hobbies should be fun and enriching. I have an incredibly hard time just enjoying a hobby if there is “no value” it produces. My last hobby? I turned it into a business. And 5 years later, I was completely tired of it.

Now I don’t do that anymore.

Though I’ve tried, I can’t convince myself that doing a thing because I like it is enough. And that’s sad.

#LateStageCapitalism

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/on-doing-versus-improving.

On Ranking

A high SAT score is a measure of whether or not you scored well on the SAT. That’s it. A bank balance is a measure of how much money you have in the bank. That’s all.

In the face of the difficulty the system has in measuring things that don’t measure, we create proxies. Things like popularity as a proxy for whether a work of human creativity has worth or not. Seth’s Blog: https://seths.blog/2021/02/ranking-the-unrankable/

The human brain remembers things best when it has multiple traits to do so. Measures, rankings, location, color - all of that make things more memorable. But they are just traits.

These are not value. Value is not a measurable thing. It can be defined by a person but that is only that person’s definition. And it says more about them than you.

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/on-ranking

First run of 2021

Our hero’s toes on ice floes

020 isolation sort of restricted my desire to run. I mean, restricted my desire to do anything but running, in particular, seemed bad. There were all those people out there and that virus… and I’d be breathing heavy and sweaty.

Stay Healthy

The above is a laser-light photo of the cloud of droplets you expel when you say the phrase “stay healthy.” This was the “normal” range of focalization, i.e. the person was speaking at typical Volker and rate. That highlighted area? That is the fleck generated by the “th” in “healthy”. To produce that sound in English, you press your tongue to the bottom of your front teeth and flick outward with a puff of hair. It is a “voiced dental fricative” sound which is one that requires constrictive air be pushed across the vocal cords and over a grooved tongue, which accelerates outward when you flick your tongue at the end.

This is a fancy way to say that those TH’s produce a special blob of droplets by which COVID can be transmitted. The TH cloud can hang around a person for up to 8 minutes depending on ventilation and even that little bit a thstuff in the air can be life threatening to encounter. And that’s just from talking TH’s

If I, the dude huffing down the street, has a symptomatic COVID, that cloud could extend for dozens of feet behind me. One long infecthion train. I’m not interested ing in either running through that cloud, breathing at an increased rate, or being the guy making clouds like that.

So, no, I didn’t run much in 2020. And now I’m considering never using TH voiced dental fricatives again too…

Get reinvigorated

Veracity known, (and why else am I here?) I hadn’t been running much in 2019 because my respiration issues were not well controlled and new responsibilities with the new house and some relationship stuff sapped both time an energy. I wasn’t out of shape exactly - our orchard had me working outside consistently - but I had lost much of the pulmonary conditioning I’d gained in previous years.

And my mood was … not great. 2019 going into 2020 was a rough shift to begin.. and 2020’s end? What’s a little insurrection between constituents… a guy is liable to just take a pass on 2021.

Each year I pick a word to ascribe to it - last year’s was “community” (more reason why 2020 was a special kind of sad for me) and 2019’s was “cultivation” (we bought an orchard, you see) - and 2021 needs to be a return to the activties that were lost to a year indoors. Many activties lost.

While 2020 forced us to simplify - Alyska and I cut our spending nearly in half from not eating out or.. going out? Which is bonkers. But amidst all of our “can’t go out” we stopped doing any activities we liked - like art, or like running. And looking back at 2020, I can see the acts I keenly missed.

Like art and running.

So 2021 is all about reinvigoration. A return to the vigor or art and exercise and the vigor created in turn.

Dusty feet

So today I went for a run. I saw no people out around me, which was a little surprising considering how beautiful it was today.

It was hardly a glamorous one, like one from a Tom Hanks movie, but it wasn’t hard. I was breathing heavy but in a reasonable way. My asthma was in decent shape - honestly, I actually lost weight in quarantine and it probably helped some? But I’m definitely a far cry from where I used to be.

Stuff seems better around the US (marginally) with a new president and locals in Madison seemingly starting to actually care about COVID precautions. Our rates are reasonably low. Vaccines are getting in arms.

A guy may just be liable to be optimistic and make some art and dust…

Cui Bono

In Latin, the expression is Cui Bono. Who benefits? If it’s you, if it’s us, then fashion is working for us. On the other hand, if it leads to negative outcomes, disappointment and disconnection, it’s worth asking if it’s something we want to keep doing, even (especially) if it feels right in the moment. Because everything we do feels right in the moment.

From Seth’s Blog: https://seths.blog/2021/01/the-coordinators/

Part of the “what is the product” question for free services. Who is getting what, including the provider, from the transaction? Am I ok with that? Is it worth it?

Free is never actually free.

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/cui-bono