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.

Ask all the people

If you shipped it to the world (or even showed it to a colleague) it might be because you liked it. You made it for yourself.

But if your music, your graphic design, your website–whatever your work is–isn’t resonating with the market, it might be because you forgot to make it for them.

Source: “Well, it seems great to me” by , https://seths.blog/2021/03/well-it-seems-great-to-me/

The first ship, the one for yourself, is a foundation. Designing for all types of people makes your product soar.

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/ask-all-the-people

A little sluggish

The wisdom of occasionally using these various stimulants for intellectual purposes is proved by a single consideration. Each of us has a little cleverness and a great deal of sluggish stupidity. There are certain occasions when we absolutely need the little cleverness 41 that we possess.

Source: The Project Gutenberg eBook of the Intellectual Life, by Philip Gilbert Hamerton. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32151/32151-h/32151-h.htm

Clever turn of phrase I rather like. The previous passage on coffee tea/tobacco and stimulants was interesting insofar as smoking was thought to be harmless. Back when this was written, maybe they were less harmless?

But, also, there’s talk of the meal habits if famous intellectuals and they all include some amount of fasting. I KNOW I feel better when reducing the number of meals in a day… and yet I still struggle to do it regularly.

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/a-little-sluggish

What work should be

But all of these arguments are built on the supposition of work as the primary, enduring locus of meaning in your life. Think of it this way: Maybe office workers feel the need to make friends at work is because they spend so much time working that there’s little time to cultivate or sustain friendship elsewhere. Maybe it’s so hard to make friends in your 30s because you’re working all the time.

What remote and hybrid works supposes — and what this book I’ve been working on these last six months with my partner, Charlie, argues — is the potential for a different posture towards work, in which, again, the work itself becomes malleable, even an accessory, to the rest of our lives.

Source: The Future of Remote Work is the Opposite of Lonely by Anne Helen Petersen, https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-future-of-remote-work-is-the

We seem to have lost the thread in this late stage capitalistic society. Work is to support a life worth living, not the other way around. And while I, specifically, call what I do a vocation, I still don’t want to do it constantly.

But the idea that I could blend it into my life in a way where I can, say, work from a coffee shop some days, have a quiet office some days, or even finish up a task in the evening without feeling guilty? That would be nice.

If at the end of the day, everyone is satisfied with the things I’m accomplishing and I’m making deadlines, why does it matter when or how long I work on a given day?

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/what-work-should-be

Ideal worker

While there has been much discourse around burnout, and much evidence of kids popping in on Zoom calls, all this visibility hasn’t necessarily led to employers changing their demands on workers: Americans are actually working more hours per day on average now than when the pandemic began. And experts say it’s not enough for companies to just be okay with kids making an appearance during a meeting — they need to make real changes like hiring more employees and reducing hours so that people actually have time to tend to their lives. Meanwhile, policymakers need to consider reforms from paid family leave to universal basic income that would make it possible for everyone to meet their needs.

Overall, it’s long past time for the idea of the “ideal worker” to retire

Source: The problem is work by Anna North, https://www.vox.com/22321909/covid-19-pandemic-school-work-parents-remote

My workplace is aggressively “ideal worker” concept. There is even a particular person that gets rolled out into stage whoever there’s a new “work is hard, suck it up” message - usually around a benefit changing, or some cockamamie scheme to “better balance work and life.” They have kids but manage to work really long hours and it gets glorified on stage.

It doesn’t surprise me that hours are up in part because people feel the need to “make up time” after kids go to bed.

How many problems could we solve if we just… capped CEO pay and hired more people with that money? Or even…. cap the work day for real.

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/ideal-worker

Be The Thorn

There will be no common set of knowledge of practices, procedures, and processes regarding anything. Don’t look towards your management and leadership either, as they’re none the wiser. If privacy is a factor in your future workplaces, it’s likely to be driven by the legal department as a strictly reactive, scary, and deeply resented legal compliance obligation whose purpose is to cover your company’s backside rather than protect the people in your data.

All of that means that someone in your workplaces, and on your career journeys, needs to show leadership in privacy, and it might as well be you.

Source: What would a privacy curriculum for future developers look like? - Hi, I’m Heather Burns by Heather Burns, https://webdevlaw.uk/2021/03/21/privacy-curriculum-developers/

It is absolutely worthwhile to be the One Person pushing for change at a company, any company. Especially in areas that have a regulatory component.

Being the thorn in the side of the company can move mountains. Whether it can wake that mountain up to move itself is a whole other thing…

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/be-the-thorn