Saying “No-one using our service has accessibility needs” is a bit like saying “We don’t need a ramp, no-one in a wheelchair has ever come up the stairs”.
I remember once, a long time ago, a colleague asked me to publish some content on our website.
It was marketing material, for a conference. PDF, of course. And very inaccessible.
I declined, and we had a meeting. I explained why I couldn’t publish the material in its current state and they said “But there won’t be any blind people at this conference!”
To which I replied, “No, there won’t, because your marketing means they can’t possibly even know it is on.”
To be fair to my colleague, when I explained it to them, they got it.
It literally hadn’t occurred to them. Why would it? Their job was to sell out a conference on renewable energy, or whatever it was.
But in my experience, almost everyone gets it once you give them context.
Almost everyone knows someone with accessibility needs, even if they currently have none themselves.
Ableism is a silent assassin in our culture. It pervades our discourse.
We must hear the voices of disabled people. Among whom I now count myself.
But most people are decent, and kind.
And want to do the right thing.
Don’t scold them. Help them understand, and find a solution.
On this occasion, I published the content as html with a friendly URL, and the PDF as an optional download. Win/win.
No idea how many visually impaired people showed up at the conference, but that is emphatically not the point.
This post is based on a series of posts on Mastodon in March 2025.
I'm a service designer in Scottish Enterprise's unsurprisingly-named service design team. I've been a content designer, editor, UX designer and giant haystacks developer on the web for (gulp) over 25 years.
