#some sort of silly thing just to learn how to work with motors and sensors and Bluetooth

[bytebun]

hm… although i more or less stopped progressing (purposefully) in my technical art skill, id reached a point where i could easily “see” ways to improve - like if i wanted to work on any particular aspect (perspective, anatomy, style, comic pacing, etc.) i’d know exactly how to go about it

I’d… like to reach a place like that with my other abilities - programming or engineering or design are all just so big that i don’t even know how to identify what i should be pursuing. the sort of stuff i’d really like more experience with (firmware & hardware development) only seem accessible through doing actual jobs involving those skills. i cant see the ”path” to improvement; i dont know what resources i can access (most of the stuff online seems too basic, aka for complete beginners, or too expert level)

but like, ”art” is also such a broad category of skill… maybe its because i know what i want from my art, and not at all from my tech skills…

[douglassmiith]

Equivalent Experiences: What Are They?

About The Author

Eric is a Boston-based designer who helps create straightforward solutions that address a person’s practical, physical, cognitive, and emotional needs. More about Eric Bailey …

An equivalent experience is one that has been deliberately conceived of and built to be able to be used by the widest possible range of people. To create an equivalent experience, you must understand all the different ways people interact with technology, as well as common barriers they experience.

If you spend enough time interacting with digital accessibility practitioners, you may encounter the phrase “equivalent experience.” This saying concisely sums up a lot of the philosophy behind accessibility work.

Our industry tends to place a lot of focus on how, often at the expense of why. For accessibility-related concerns, it is vital to learn about the history, and lived experiences of disabled people as a context for understanding the need for design and code created with access in mind.

This is the first of two articles on the topic of equivalency, and how it relates to digital accessibility. It will help us define what an equivalent experience is. Once we have a common understanding established, I’ll then discuss how to go about implementing equivalent experiences for common accessibility-related issues.

The State Of Things

The truth of the matter is that even though we live in a multi-device world full of smartphones, augmented reality, voice assistants, and IoT smart sensors, our default is still predominately:

Visual,

large screen,

fast connection,

powerful computer and display,

male,

white,

wealthy,

young,

Western,

technologically-literate,

and abled.

This is reflective of the biases that are inherent in how we design, develop and grow products.

The previous list may not be the most comfortable thing to read. If you haven’t closed the browser tab already, take a moment to consider your daily workflows, as well as who your coworkers are, and you’ll begin to understand what I’m getting at.

At its core, delivering an equivalent experience is ultimately about preserving intent — with the intent being the motivating force behind creating a website or web app and all the content and features it contains.

This translates to making the meaning behind every interaction, every component, every photo or illustration, every line of code being understandable by the widest range of people, regardless of their device or ability.

Prior Art

I’m not the first person to discuss this topic (and hopefully not the last). Speaker, trainer, and consultant Nicolas Steenhout is one such advocate. His great post, Accessibility is about people, not standards, is well worth reading.

If you’re the kind of person who is into podcasts, his A11y Rules has a wonderful series called Soundbites. It features “short discussions with people with disabilities about the barriers they encounter on the web.” These insightful interviews also touch on what this article discusses.

What Isn’t An Equivalent Experience?

Showing examples of what something is not can be a way to help define it. For equivalent experiences, an example would be a web app geared towards use by the general public not having a mobile breakpoint.

It’s not difficult to imagine a situation where I’d want to adjust my work benefits while on the go. (Large preview)

With this example, everyone using a device with a small display is forced to pinch, pan, and zoom to get what they need. Here, the burden is placed on anyone whose only crime was using a smartphone.

Most likely, whoever conceived of, designed, and developed this didn’t stop to think about circumstances other than their own. In this sort of (unfortunately still all too common) scenario, I all but guarantee that the web app looks great on the laptops or desktops of the designers and developers who made it.

A designer saying, “it has enough contrast for me and my ‘old’ eyes” is the same as when a dev says, “works on my machine.”

The thing is though, we don’t design or develop for ourselves.

So, are we really ok with saying, “you don’t matter” to folks who are not like us? #a11y

— Heather (@_hmig) December 19, 2019

People using a smartphone to access this website are victims of circumstance. The extra effort someone needs to do to get it to work indirectly communicates that they weren’t a priority, and therefore not valued. If you’ve used the web for any significant portion of time, I’m willing to bet this, or a similar experience has happened to you.

This example is also a hop, skip, and a jump away from another common, yet serious accessibility issue we often don’t consider: screen zooming:

Screen Zooming

Screen zooming is when someone is prevented from being able to zoom their displays and make text larger—many native mobile apps are guilty of this. When you disallow this sort of behavior, you’re telling prospective users that unless they have vision similar to you, you aren’t interested in them being able to use your app.

For this scenario, a gentle reminder that we will all get older, and with aging comes a whole host of vision-related concerns. A question you should be asking yourself is if your future self will be capable of using the things your present self is making. A follow-up question is if you’re also asking the people you’re managing this.

I just had my eyes dilated, so I can’t read any text that isn’t comically large. I don’t know how to use a screen reader. I’ll be fine in a few hours, but this has been a fascinating journey into how well third-party iOS apps respect text size accessibility settings!

(Thread)

— Em Lazer-Walker (@lazerwalker) January 29, 2020

Accessible Experiences Aren’t Necessarily Equivalent Ones

This might be a little difficult of a concept to grasp at first. Let’s use this Rube Goldberg machine made by Joseph Herscher to pass the pepper to his dinner guest to compare:

[embedded content]

To pass the pepper, the machine, sends it through an elaborate system of weights, counterweights, ramps, rolling objects, catapults, guillotines, burners, timers, carousels, etc. — all constructed from commonly found kitchen items. While this setup will technically ensure the pepper is passed, it is an annoying, overwrought, time-intensive process.

Many digital experiences are a lot like a Rube Goldberg machine when it comes to accessibility. Since accessibility issues are so prevalent, many forms of assistive technology provide a large suite of features to allow their user to work around common obstacles.

Unfortunately, discovering obstacles, and then figuring out and activating the appropriate combination of features to overcome them can take a disproportionate amount of time and effort.

To say it another way: A simple click on a button for an abled person may take far more time and effort for a disabled person, depending on how the button has been made.

Chilling Effects

Frustratingly, the extra time and effort a disabled person has to put into operating a technically accessible experience may feed back into their disability condition(s). For example, the presence of a motor control disability such as arthritis may make the overall experience even more taxing.

Cognitive accessibility concerns are also another important thing to consider. What may seem easy to understand or intuitive to use for one person may not be for another. This is especially prevalent in situations where there is:

Cognitive accessibility isn’t an abstract concern, either. Poor user interface design that ignores the circumstances of the end user and dumps too much cognitive load onto them can have very real, very serious consequences.

The military is full of examples of poor interfaces being forced on people who don’t have a choice in the matter. It’s also one of the origins of Inclusive Design thinking. (Large preview)

Compounding Effects

These factors are not mutually exclusive. Proponents of Spoon Theory know that inaccessible experiences conspire to sap a person’s mental and physical energy, leaving them exhausted and demotivated. Worse, these sorts of scenarios are often more than just a person perpetually operating at a diminished capacity.

Frustrating digital experiences can lead to a person abandoning them outright, internalizing the system’s fault as their own personal failure. This abandonment may also translate to a person’s willingness and ability to operate other digital interfaces. In other words: the more we turn people away, the more they’ll stop trying to show up.

“Nobody has complained before” is a silly excuse for not caring about accessibility. You’re right, they didn’t complain. They left.

— Vote blue, no matter who. (@karlgroves) December 8, 2018

Don’t Take My Word For It

To make the abstract immediate, I reached out on Twitter to ask people about their experiences using assistive technology to browse the web.

I also took a purposely loose definition of assistive technology. All-too-often we assume the term “accessible” only means “works in a screen reader.” The truth of the matter is that assistive technology is so much more than that.

The way the web is built — its foundational principles and behaviors — make it extraordinarily adaptable. It’s us, the people who build on and for the web, who break that. By failing to consider these devices and methods of interacting with web content, we implicitly drift further away from equivalency.

Consistency

For some, assistive technology can mean specialized browser extensions. These micro-apps are used to enhance, augment, and customize a browsing experience to better suit someone’s needs.

Damien Senger, digital designer, uses a browser extension called Midnight Lizard to enforce a similar experience across multiple websites. This helps them “to focus on the content directly and to limit having too big differences between websites. It is also helping me to avoid too harsh color contrasts that are really uncomfortable.“

Damien also writes, “Often websites are really difficult to read for me because either of the lack of consistency in the layout, too narrow lines or just not enough balance between font size and line height. Related to that, color can create a lot of unhelpful distraction and I am struggling when too harsh contrast is nearby text.”

How To Maintain Equivalency

In addition, Damien also augments their browsing experience by using ad blocking technology “not only for ads but to block animations or content that are too distracting for my ADHD.”

It’s not too difficult to imagine why distracting and annoying your users is a bad idea. In the case of ads, the industry is unregulated, meaning that rules to prohibit ADHD, migraine, and/or seizure-triggering animations aren’t honored. Through this lens, an ad blocker is a form of consumer self-defense.

I’ll say it again: Telling users their access isn’t as important as your bottom line is a BAD take. Ads are fine as long as they don’t create a barrier by moving! #ADHD #A11y #PSH #WCAG https://t.co/i6mifI0JRE

— Shell Little (@ShellELittle) February 27, 2020

Kenny Hitt also chimes in about ads: “…regardless of the platform, the thing that annoys me most are websites with ads that essentially cause the site to constantly auto update. This prevents me as a screen reader user from reading the content of those websites.”

Again, a lack of regulation means the user must take measures into their own hands to keep the experience equivalent.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Opportunity

A lack of an equivalent experience translates directly to lost opportunity. Many individuals I spoke with mentioned that they’d abandon a digital experience that was inaccessible more often than not.

Brian Moore mentions, “there are web sites where I like their products a lot but won’t buy them because the site itself is such a struggle, and attempts to reach out have met with either silence or resistance to taking any action.”

Brian cites the Fluance website as the most recent example. The bugs present in its shopping user flows prevents him from buying high-end consumer audio equipment.

Fluance’s entire web presence exists to sell products. While updating a website or web app to be accessible can be an effort-intensive process, it would definitely be in Fluance’s best interest to make sure its checkout user flow is as robust as it could be.

Those lost sales add up. (Large preview)

Opportunity isn’t limited to just e-commerce, either. As more and more services digitize, we paradoxically push more people out of being to live in the society that relies on these digitized services—people with protected rights. Again, this shift away from an equivalent experience is the culprit.

Justin Yarbrough was “applying for an accessibility-related job with the Arizona Department of Economic Security over the summer, where they wanted me to take an assessment. The button to start the assessment was a clickable div. They wound up waving the assessment requirement for the position.”

Jim Kiely tells me about his brother, who “has stopped paying his water bill online because the city water website [doesn’t] work well with a screen reader and high contrast.”

Personally, I have friends who have been prevented from submitting résumés to multiple sites because their job application portals were inaccessible.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Adaptability

Soren Hamby, product marketing agency manager and design advocate, writes of their experiences using screen magnification software and screen reading capabilities. Soren has “varying levels of vision so [they] tend to not always need the same level of accommodation.”

Of note, Soren mentions their struggles with grocery delivery apps, specifically “the carts often only read the quantities rather than the item name. It’s much easier to order with a sighted person.”

There are three things to consider here:

First is the surface-level acknowledgment that the app operates differently for different people, the main point this article is driving at.

Second is the fact that Soren uses multiple forms of assistive technology, with the mix a shifting combination depending on a combination of their task at hand and how well the digital interface meets their access needs.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Make sure that the labels for your interactive controls are relevant and concise.

Incorporate disability scenarios and conditions into your design personas.

Avoid using absolute length units. (No, seriously.)

Avoid setting maximum widths and heights.

Avoid using fixed and sticky-scrolling components, especially larger-sized ones.

Test your layouts by zooming and/or increasing your default type size to make sure that content does not get obscured.

This brings us to our third and most important point:

Autonomy

Having to rely on the help of a sighted person to order groceries is not ideal. For many, the acquiring, preparation, and consuming of food can be highly personal acts. Being forced to incorporate outside assistance into this process is far different than willingly inviting someone in to share an experience. The same notion applies to every other digital product, as well.

Kenny also mentions grocery apps: “…my local Kroger grocery store has started an app redesign in June 2019 that is breaking accessibility with their app.” In discussing this regression, he goes on to elaborate, “Because I can’t financially change to another business, I won’t let it drop. Kroger is going to discover that I don’t stop with a problem. Persistence in solving problems is a requirement for any disabled person if you want to succeed in the world.”

This app looks great, provided you can see it. (Large preview)

Equality

Kroger would be wise to listen to Kenny’s feedback. The grocery company Winn-Dixie was recently successfully sued for not being operable with a screen reader. The lawsuit argued that the grocer’s website was heavily integrated with their physical stores, and therefore violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Another recent case involves the Domino’s Pizza franchise. Taken all the way to the Supreme Court, the ruling clearly and unambiguously states that preventing someone from using a website or app, simply because they used screen reading software, is unconstitutional.

For both cases, the cost to implement fixes were far cheaper than going to court—something to think about the next time you’re deciding where to order pizza.

Despite some ugly misconceptions about the ruling, the evidence is clear: in the United States, there is now legal precedent for private companies to be sued for violating civil rights via an inaccessible digital experience. Europe and some parts of Asia have similar laws, as well.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Reactivity

Another way to maintain an equivalent experience — one that is often not thought about — is to give reports about accessibility issues the same weight and concern as other software bugs.

Reported accessibility issues are oftentimes downplayed and ignored, or are sent to someone ignorant of the issue and/or powerless to fix it.

Kenny, who started using a computer with a screen reader in 1984 says, “When I run into accessibility issues nowadays, I’ll try reporting it, when I get the usual response from the feedback of the person not caring, I just give up and walk away. If [the response] comes from somebody in marketing agency who doesn’t understand accessibility, I just give up and go away. There’s no point in trying to teach these people about accessibility.”

Kenny’s view is shared by many others in the disability community. Remember what I said about compounding effects earlier.

Brian reports that,

“If I find significant issues with a site, I do report it. Depending on who I talk to it ranges from ‘here’s what doesn’t work’ to all kinds of technical detail about why if I can get to the right people.”

Getting it to the right people is key. Another part of equivalent experience is handling feedback in a timely and constructive way, much as how you would with any other issue with your product or service.

Responding to an accessibility issue is easy:

Thank the person for taking the time and effort to report the issue.

Acknowledge the issue and identify what person or team will be handling it.

Ask clarifying questions as needed.

Offer potential workarounds, with the understanding that they’re only temporary until the underlying issue is addressed.

Offer to involve them in the process, including notifying them when the issue has been fixed.

Being open, honest, and transparent about your bug fixing process goes a long way to establishing trust in a population that has historically and routinely been overlooked.

Also know that assigning someone to mind an email address to conduct tasks on behalf of an assistive technology user is not an appropriate, effective, or sustainable solution. Remember the concerns surrounding autonomy discussed earlier.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Create an accessibility statement, including known issues, a tentative timeline for their fixes, and easy to discover contact information.

Ensure that anyone customer-facing (quality assurance, customer support, marketing agency, etc.) are trained on protocol for accessibility-related issue reporting.

Quantify accessibility-related issues, both internal and reported.

Be on the lookout for patterns and trends with discovered accessibility issues, as they represent learning opportunities.

Understand that not all platforms to collect feedback are created equal.

Motivation

We’ve covered actual people’s everyday frustrations, as well as civil rights and the current legal landscape. If these don’t motivate you, allow me to present another factor to consider: profit.

There are two provoking studies I’d like to call attention to, but they are by no means the only studies performed in this space.

(Large preview)

First is the Click Away Pound Survey, a survey conducted in both 2016 and 2019 to “explore the online shopping experience of people with disabilities and examine the cost to business of ignoring disabled shoppers.”

The survey discovered that more than 4 million people abandoned a retail website because of the access barriers they found. These people represent 17.1 billion pounds (~$21.1 billion USD) in lost potential revenue.

Second is the The Purchasing Power of Working-Age Adults With Disabilities (PDF), conducted in 2018 by the American Institutes for Research. This study discovered that there is an estimated $490 billion in disposable income amongst disabled working-age adults. That’s billion with a capital B.

There are two of the (many) takeaways from these studies I’d like to highlight:

First is that from a historical perspective, the web is still very much new. On top of that, its ubiquity is even more recent, meaning that use by the general population is a small sliver of the amount of time it’s been around.

Second is that the general population contains many people who are disabled, and that their needs are not being met. These unmet needs represent billions of dollars of potential revenue.

This is a gigantic market that we, as an industry, are only now becoming aware of. Rather than approaching accessibility with a mindset of risk aversion, why not use this learning as a great way to view your current and future business opportunities?

Complying with the ADA is by definition the legally required minimum for accessibility. It doesn’t account for a good user experience, usability, and innovation. Unless you strive for the minimum all the time, compliance is not enough.https://t.co/qOYw6ji23u

— mikey is at home (@mikeyil) March 5, 2020

Let’s Not Stop Here

Too often we think of accessibility as a problem to be solved, rather than a way of looking at the world. Equivalent experiences necessitate that we question our assumptions and biases and think about experiences outside of our own. It can be an uncomfortable thing to think about at first, but it’s all in the service of making things usable for all.

As web professionals, it is our job, and our privilege to ensure that the experiences we deliver are equivalent. In the second part, we’ll investigate how to do just that.

Further Reading

“WCAG Primer,” Tetra Logical

“The Web Accessibility Basics,” Marco Zehe’s Accessibility Blog

“Web Accessibility Checklist: 15 Things To Improve Your Website Accessibility,” WebsiteSetup.org

“The Importance Of Manual Accessibility Testing: Call The Professionals,” Eric Bailey, Smashing Magazine

“Taking Accessibility Beyond Compliance,” Dennis Deacon, 24 Accessibility

“Videos Of People With Disabilities Using Tech,” Hampus Sethfors, Axess Lab

“Web Accessibility Perspectives: Explore The Impact And Benefits For Everyone,” Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), W3C

Thank you to Brian Moore, Damien Senger, Jim Kiely, Justin Yarbrough, Kenny Hitt, and Soren Hamby for sharing their insights and experiences.

(ra, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

Via http://www.scpie.org/equivalent-experiences-what-are-they/

source https://scpie.weebly.com/blog/equivalent-experiences-what-are-they

[laurelkrugerr]

Equivalent Experiences: What Are They?

About The Author

Eric is a Boston-based designer who helps create straightforward solutions that address a person’s practical, physical, cognitive, and emotional needs. More about Eric Bailey …

An equivalent experience is one that has been deliberately conceived of and built to be able to be used by the widest possible range of people. To create an equivalent experience, you must understand all the different ways people interact with technology, as well as common barriers they experience.

If you spend enough time interacting with digital accessibility practitioners, you may encounter the phrase “equivalent experience.” This saying concisely sums up a lot of the philosophy behind accessibility work.

Our industry tends to place a lot of focus on how, often at the expense of why. For accessibility-related concerns, it is vital to learn about the history, and lived experiences of disabled people as a context for understanding the need for design and code created with access in mind.

This is the first of two articles on the topic of equivalency, and how it relates to digital accessibility. It will help us define what an equivalent experience is. Once we have a common understanding established, I’ll then discuss how to go about implementing equivalent experiences for common accessibility-related issues.

The State Of Things

The truth of the matter is that even though we live in a multi-device world full of smartphones, augmented reality, voice assistants, and IoT smart sensors, our default is still predominately:

Visual,

large screen,

fast connection,

powerful computer and display,

male,

white,

wealthy,

young,

Western,

technologically-literate,

and abled.

This is reflective of the biases that are inherent in how we design, develop and grow products.

The previous list may not be the most comfortable thing to read. If you haven’t closed the browser tab already, take a moment to consider your daily workflows, as well as who your coworkers are, and you’ll begin to understand what I’m getting at.

At its core, delivering an equivalent experience is ultimately about preserving intent — with the intent being the motivating force behind creating a website or web app and all the content and features it contains.

This translates to making the meaning behind every interaction, every component, every photo or illustration, every line of code being understandable by the widest range of people, regardless of their device or ability.

Prior Art

I’m not the first person to discuss this topic (and hopefully not the last). Speaker, trainer, and consultant Nicolas Steenhout is one such advocate. His great post, Accessibility is about people, not standards, is well worth reading.

If you’re the kind of person who is into podcasts, his A11y Rules has a wonderful series called Soundbites. It features “short discussions with people with disabilities about the barriers they encounter on the web.” These insightful interviews also touch on what this article discusses.

What Isn’t An Equivalent Experience?

Showing examples of what something is not can be a way to help define it. For equivalent experiences, an example would be a web app geared towards use by the general public not having a mobile breakpoint.

It’s not difficult to imagine a situation where I’d want to adjust my work benefits while on the go. (Large preview)

With this example, everyone using a device with a small display is forced to pinch, pan, and zoom to get what they need. Here, the burden is placed on anyone whose only crime was using a smartphone.

Most likely, whoever conceived of, designed, and developed this didn’t stop to think about circumstances other than their own. In this sort of (unfortunately still all too common) scenario, I all but guarantee that the web app looks great on the laptops or desktops of the designers and developers who made it.

A designer saying, “it has enough contrast for me and my ‘old’ eyes” is the same as when a dev says, “works on my machine.”

The thing is though, we don’t design or develop for ourselves.

So, are we really ok with saying, “you don’t matter” to folks who are not like us? #a11y

— Heather (@_hmig) December 19, 2019

People using a smartphone to access this website are victims of circumstance. The extra effort someone needs to do to get it to work indirectly communicates that they weren’t a priority, and therefore not valued. If you’ve used the web for any significant portion of time, I’m willing to bet this, or a similar experience has happened to you.

This example is also a hop, skip, and a jump away from another common, yet serious accessibility issue we often don’t consider: screen zooming:

Screen Zooming

Screen zooming is when someone is prevented from being able to zoom their displays and make text larger—many native mobile apps are guilty of this. When you disallow this sort of behavior, you’re telling prospective users that unless they have vision similar to you, you aren’t interested in them being able to use your app.

For this scenario, a gentle reminder that we will all get older, and with aging comes a whole host of vision-related concerns. A question you should be asking yourself is if your future self will be capable of using the things your present self is making. A follow-up question is if you’re also asking the people you’re managing this.

I just had my eyes dilated, so I can’t read any text that isn’t comically large. I don’t know how to use a screen reader. I’ll be fine in a few hours, but this has been a fascinating journey into how well third-party iOS apps respect text size accessibility settings!

(Thread)

— Em Lazer-Walker (@lazerwalker) January 29, 2020

Accessible Experiences Aren’t Necessarily Equivalent Ones

This might be a little difficult of a concept to grasp at first. Let’s use this Rube Goldberg machine made by Joseph Herscher to pass the pepper to his dinner guest to compare:

[embedded content]

To pass the pepper, the machine, sends it through an elaborate system of weights, counterweights, ramps, rolling objects, catapults, guillotines, burners, timers, carousels, etc. — all constructed from commonly found kitchen items. While this setup will technically ensure the pepper is passed, it is an annoying, overwrought, time-intensive process.

Many digital experiences are a lot like a Rube Goldberg machine when it comes to accessibility. Since accessibility issues are so prevalent, many forms of assistive technology provide a large suite of features to allow their user to work around common obstacles.

Unfortunately, discovering obstacles, and then figuring out and activating the appropriate combination of features to overcome them can take a disproportionate amount of time and effort.

To say it another way: A simple click on a button for an abled person may take far more time and effort for a disabled person, depending on how the button has been made.

Chilling Effects

Frustratingly, the extra time and effort a disabled person has to put into operating a technically accessible experience may feed back into their disability condition(s). For example, the presence of a motor control disability such as arthritis may make the overall experience even more taxing.

Cognitive accessibility concerns are also another important thing to consider. What may seem easy to understand or intuitive to use for one person may not be for another. This is especially prevalent in situations where there is:

Cognitive accessibility isn’t an abstract concern, either. Poor user interface design that ignores the circumstances of the end user and dumps too much cognitive load onto them can have very real, very serious consequences.

The military is full of examples of poor interfaces being forced on people who don’t have a choice in the matter. It’s also one of the origins of Inclusive Design thinking. (Large preview)

Compounding Effects

These factors are not mutually exclusive. Proponents of Spoon Theory know that inaccessible experiences conspire to sap a person’s mental and physical energy, leaving them exhausted and demotivated. Worse, these sorts of scenarios are often more than just a person perpetually operating at a diminished capacity.

Frustrating digital experiences can lead to a person abandoning them outright, internalizing the system’s fault as their own personal failure. This abandonment may also translate to a person’s willingness and ability to operate other digital interfaces. In other words: the more we turn people away, the more they’ll stop trying to show up.

“Nobody has complained before” is a silly excuse for not caring about accessibility. You’re right, they didn’t complain. They left.

— Vote blue, no matter who. (@karlgroves) December 8, 2018

Don’t Take My Word For It

To make the abstract immediate, I reached out on Twitter to ask people about their experiences using assistive technology to browse the web.

I also took a purposely loose definition of assistive technology. All-too-often we assume the term “accessible” only means “works in a screen reader.” The truth of the matter is that assistive technology is so much more than that.

The way the web is built — its foundational principles and behaviors — make it extraordinarily adaptable. It’s us, the people who build on and for the web, who break that. By failing to consider these devices and methods of interacting with web content, we implicitly drift further away from equivalency.

Consistency

For some, assistive technology can mean specialized browser extensions. These micro-apps are used to enhance, augment, and customize a browsing experience to better suit someone’s needs.

Damien Senger, digital designer, uses a browser extension called Midnight Lizard to enforce a similar experience across multiple websites. This helps them “to focus on the content directly and to limit having too big differences between websites. It is also helping me to avoid too harsh color contrasts that are really uncomfortable.“

Damien also writes, “Often websites are really difficult to read for me because either of the lack of consistency in the layout, too narrow lines or just not enough balance between font size and line height. Related to that, color can create a lot of unhelpful distraction and I am struggling when too harsh contrast is nearby text.”

How To Maintain Equivalency

In addition, Damien also augments their browsing experience by using ad blocking technology “not only for ads but to block animations or content that are too distracting for my ADHD.”

It’s not too difficult to imagine why distracting and annoying your users is a bad idea. In the case of ads, the industry is unregulated, meaning that rules to prohibit ADHD, migraine, and/or seizure-triggering animations aren’t honored. Through this lens, an ad blocker is a form of consumer self-defense.

I’ll say it again: Telling users their access isn’t as important as your bottom line is a BAD take. Ads are fine as long as they don’t create a barrier by moving! #ADHD #A11y #PSH #WCAG https://t.co/i6mifI0JRE

— Shell Little (@ShellELittle) February 27, 2020

Kenny Hitt also chimes in about ads: “…regardless of the platform, the thing that annoys me most are websites with ads that essentially cause the site to constantly auto update. This prevents me as a screen reader user from reading the content of those websites.”

Again, a lack of regulation means the user must take measures into their own hands to keep the experience equivalent.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Opportunity

A lack of an equivalent experience translates directly to lost opportunity. Many individuals I spoke with mentioned that they’d abandon a digital experience that was inaccessible more often than not.

Brian Moore mentions, “there are web sites where I like their products a lot but won’t buy them because the site itself is such a struggle, and attempts to reach out have met with either silence or resistance to taking any action.”

Brian cites the Fluance website as the most recent example. The bugs present in its shopping user flows prevents him from buying high-end consumer audio equipment.

Fluance’s entire web presence exists to sell products. While updating a website or web app to be accessible can be an effort-intensive process, it would definitely be in Fluance’s best interest to make sure its checkout user flow is as robust as it could be.

Those lost sales add up. (Large preview)

Opportunity isn’t limited to just e-commerce, either. As more and more services digitize, we paradoxically push more people out of being to live in the society that relies on these digitized services—people with protected rights. Again, this shift away from an equivalent experience is the culprit.

Justin Yarbrough was “applying for an accessibility-related job with the Arizona Department of Economic Security over the summer, where they wanted me to take an assessment. The button to start the assessment was a clickable div. They wound up waving the assessment requirement for the position.”

Jim Kiely tells me about his brother, who “has stopped paying his water bill online because the city water website [doesn’t] work well with a screen reader and high contrast.”

Personally, I have friends who have been prevented from submitting résumés to multiple sites because their job application portals were inaccessible.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Adaptability

Soren Hamby, product marketing agency manager and design advocate, writes of their experiences using screen magnification software and screen reading capabilities. Soren has “varying levels of vision so [they] tend to not always need the same level of accommodation.”

Of note, Soren mentions their struggles with grocery delivery apps, specifically “the carts often only read the quantities rather than the item name. It’s much easier to order with a sighted person.”

There are three things to consider here:

First is the surface-level acknowledgment that the app operates differently for different people, the main point this article is driving at.

Second is the fact that Soren uses multiple forms of assistive technology, with the mix a shifting combination depending on a combination of their task at hand and how well the digital interface meets their access needs.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Make sure that the labels for your interactive controls are relevant and concise.

Incorporate disability scenarios and conditions into your design personas.

Avoid using absolute length units. (No, seriously.)

Avoid setting maximum widths and heights.

Avoid using fixed and sticky-scrolling components, especially larger-sized ones.

Test your layouts by zooming and/or increasing your default type size to make sure that content does not get obscured.

This brings us to our third and most important point:

Autonomy

Having to rely on the help of a sighted person to order groceries is not ideal. For many, the acquiring, preparation, and consuming of food can be highly personal acts. Being forced to incorporate outside assistance into this process is far different than willingly inviting someone in to share an experience. The same notion applies to every other digital product, as well.

Kenny also mentions grocery apps: “…my local Kroger grocery store has started an app redesign in June 2019 that is breaking accessibility with their app.” In discussing this regression, he goes on to elaborate, “Because I can’t financially change to another business, I won’t let it drop. Kroger is going to discover that I don’t stop with a problem. Persistence in solving problems is a requirement for any disabled person if you want to succeed in the world.”

This app looks great, provided you can see it. (Large preview)

Equality

Kroger would be wise to listen to Kenny’s feedback. The grocery company Winn-Dixie was recently successfully sued for not being operable with a screen reader. The lawsuit argued that the grocer’s website was heavily integrated with their physical stores, and therefore violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Another recent case involves the Domino’s Pizza franchise. Taken all the way to the Supreme Court, the ruling clearly and unambiguously states that preventing someone from using a website or app, simply because they used screen reading software, is unconstitutional.

For both cases, the cost to implement fixes were far cheaper than going to court—something to think about the next time you’re deciding where to order pizza.

Despite some ugly misconceptions about the ruling, the evidence is clear: in the United States, there is now legal precedent for private companies to be sued for violating civil rights via an inaccessible digital experience. Europe and some parts of Asia have similar laws, as well.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Reactivity

Another way to maintain an equivalent experience — one that is often not thought about — is to give reports about accessibility issues the same weight and concern as other software bugs.

Reported accessibility issues are oftentimes downplayed and ignored, or are sent to someone ignorant of the issue and/or powerless to fix it.

Kenny, who started using a computer with a screen reader in 1984 says, “When I run into accessibility issues nowadays, I’ll try reporting it, when I get the usual response from the feedback of the person not caring, I just give up and walk away. If [the response] comes from somebody in marketing agency who doesn’t understand accessibility, I just give up and go away. There’s no point in trying to teach these people about accessibility.”

Kenny’s view is shared by many others in the disability community. Remember what I said about compounding effects earlier.

Brian reports that,

“If I find significant issues with a site, I do report it. Depending on who I talk to it ranges from ‘here’s what doesn’t work’ to all kinds of technical detail about why if I can get to the right people.”

Getting it to the right people is key. Another part of equivalent experience is handling feedback in a timely and constructive way, much as how you would with any other issue with your product or service.

Responding to an accessibility issue is easy:

Thank the person for taking the time and effort to report the issue.

Acknowledge the issue and identify what person or team will be handling it.

Ask clarifying questions as needed.

Offer potential workarounds, with the understanding that they’re only temporary until the underlying issue is addressed.

Offer to involve them in the process, including notifying them when the issue has been fixed.

Being open, honest, and transparent about your bug fixing process goes a long way to establishing trust in a population that has historically and routinely been overlooked.

Also know that assigning someone to mind an email address to conduct tasks on behalf of an assistive technology user is not an appropriate, effective, or sustainable solution. Remember the concerns surrounding autonomy discussed earlier.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Create an accessibility statement, including known issues, a tentative timeline for their fixes, and easy to discover contact information.

Ensure that anyone customer-facing (quality assurance, customer support, marketing agency, etc.) are trained on protocol for accessibility-related issue reporting.

Quantify accessibility-related issues, both internal and reported.

Be on the lookout for patterns and trends with discovered accessibility issues, as they represent learning opportunities.

Understand that not all platforms to collect feedback are created equal.

Motivation

We’ve covered actual people’s everyday frustrations, as well as civil rights and the current legal landscape. If these don’t motivate you, allow me to present another factor to consider: profit.

There are two provoking studies I’d like to call attention to, but they are by no means the only studies performed in this space.

(Large preview)

First is the Click Away Pound Survey, a survey conducted in both 2016 and 2019 to “explore the online shopping experience of people with disabilities and examine the cost to business of ignoring disabled shoppers.”

The survey discovered that more than 4 million people abandoned a retail website because of the access barriers they found. These people represent 17.1 billion pounds (~$21.1 billion USD) in lost potential revenue.

Second is the The Purchasing Power of Working-Age Adults With Disabilities (PDF), conducted in 2018 by the American Institutes for Research. This study discovered that there is an estimated $490 billion in disposable income amongst disabled working-age adults. That’s billion with a capital B.

There are two of the (many) takeaways from these studies I’d like to highlight:

First is that from a historical perspective, the web is still very much new. On top of that, its ubiquity is even more recent, meaning that use by the general population is a small sliver of the amount of time it’s been around.

Second is that the general population contains many people who are disabled, and that their needs are not being met. These unmet needs represent billions of dollars of potential revenue.

This is a gigantic market that we, as an industry, are only now becoming aware of. Rather than approaching accessibility with a mindset of risk aversion, why not use this learning as a great way to view your current and future business opportunities?

Complying with the ADA is by definition the legally required minimum for accessibility. It doesn’t account for a good user experience, usability, and innovation. Unless you strive for the minimum all the time, compliance is not enough.https://t.co/qOYw6ji23u

— mikey is at home (@mikeyil) March 5, 2020

Let’s Not Stop Here

Too often we think of accessibility as a problem to be solved, rather than a way of looking at the world. Equivalent experiences necessitate that we question our assumptions and biases and think about experiences outside of our own. It can be an uncomfortable thing to think about at first, but it’s all in the service of making things usable for all.

As web professionals, it is our job, and our privilege to ensure that the experiences we deliver are equivalent. In the second part, we’ll investigate how to do just that.

Further Reading

“WCAG Primer,” Tetra Logical

“The Web Accessibility Basics,” Marco Zehe’s Accessibility Blog

“Web Accessibility Checklist: 15 Things To Improve Your Website Accessibility,” WebsiteSetup.org

“The Importance Of Manual Accessibility Testing: Call The Professionals,” Eric Bailey, Smashing Magazine

“Taking Accessibility Beyond Compliance,” Dennis Deacon, 24 Accessibility

“Videos Of People With Disabilities Using Tech,” Hampus Sethfors, Axess Lab

“Web Accessibility Perspectives: Explore The Impact And Benefits For Everyone,” Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), W3C

Thank you to Brian Moore, Damien Senger, Jim Kiely, Justin Yarbrough, Kenny Hitt, and Soren Hamby for sharing their insights and experiences.

(ra, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/equivalent-experiences-what-are-they/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/05/equivalent-experiences-what-are-they.html

[riichardwilson]

Equivalent Experiences: What Are They?

About The Author

Eric is a Boston-based designer who helps create straightforward solutions that address a person’s practical, physical, cognitive, and emotional needs. More about Eric Bailey …

An equivalent experience is one that has been deliberately conceived of and built to be able to be used by the widest possible range of people. To create an equivalent experience, you must understand all the different ways people interact with technology, as well as common barriers they experience.

If you spend enough time interacting with digital accessibility practitioners, you may encounter the phrase “equivalent experience.” This saying concisely sums up a lot of the philosophy behind accessibility work.

Our industry tends to place a lot of focus on how, often at the expense of why. For accessibility-related concerns, it is vital to learn about the history, and lived experiences of disabled people as a context for understanding the need for design and code created with access in mind.

This is the first of two articles on the topic of equivalency, and how it relates to digital accessibility. It will help us define what an equivalent experience is. Once we have a common understanding established, I’ll then discuss how to go about implementing equivalent experiences for common accessibility-related issues.

The State Of Things

The truth of the matter is that even though we live in a multi-device world full of smartphones, augmented reality, voice assistants, and IoT smart sensors, our default is still predominately:

Visual,

large screen,

fast connection,

powerful computer and display,

male,

white,

wealthy,

young,

Western,

technologically-literate,

and abled.

This is reflective of the biases that are inherent in how we design, develop and grow products.

The previous list may not be the most comfortable thing to read. If you haven’t closed the browser tab already, take a moment to consider your daily workflows, as well as who your coworkers are, and you’ll begin to understand what I’m getting at.

At its core, delivering an equivalent experience is ultimately about preserving intent — with the intent being the motivating force behind creating a website or web app and all the content and features it contains.

This translates to making the meaning behind every interaction, every component, every photo or illustration, every line of code being understandable by the widest range of people, regardless of their device or ability.

Prior Art

I’m not the first person to discuss this topic (and hopefully not the last). Speaker, trainer, and consultant Nicolas Steenhout is one such advocate. His great post, Accessibility is about people, not standards, is well worth reading.

If you’re the kind of person who is into podcasts, his A11y Rules has a wonderful series called Soundbites. It features “short discussions with people with disabilities about the barriers they encounter on the web.” These insightful interviews also touch on what this article discusses.

What Isn’t An Equivalent Experience?

Showing examples of what something is not can be a way to help define it. For equivalent experiences, an example would be a web app geared towards use by the general public not having a mobile breakpoint.

It’s not difficult to imagine a situation where I’d want to adjust my work benefits while on the go. (Large preview)

With this example, everyone using a device with a small display is forced to pinch, pan, and zoom to get what they need. Here, the burden is placed on anyone whose only crime was using a smartphone.

Most likely, whoever conceived of, designed, and developed this didn’t stop to think about circumstances other than their own. In this sort of (unfortunately still all too common) scenario, I all but guarantee that the web app looks great on the laptops or desktops of the designers and developers who made it.

A designer saying, “it has enough contrast for me and my ‘old’ eyes” is the same as when a dev says, “works on my machine.”

The thing is though, we don’t design or develop for ourselves.

So, are we really ok with saying, “you don’t matter” to folks who are not like us? #a11y

— Heather (@_hmig) December 19, 2019

People using a smartphone to access this website are victims of circumstance. The extra effort someone needs to do to get it to work indirectly communicates that they weren’t a priority, and therefore not valued. If you’ve used the web for any significant portion of time, I’m willing to bet this, or a similar experience has happened to you.

This example is also a hop, skip, and a jump away from another common, yet serious accessibility issue we often don’t consider: screen zooming:

Screen Zooming

Screen zooming is when someone is prevented from being able to zoom their displays and make text larger—many native mobile apps are guilty of this. When you disallow this sort of behavior, you’re telling prospective users that unless they have vision similar to you, you aren’t interested in them being able to use your app.

For this scenario, a gentle reminder that we will all get older, and with aging comes a whole host of vision-related concerns. A question you should be asking yourself is if your future self will be capable of using the things your present self is making. A follow-up question is if you’re also asking the people you’re managing this.

I just had my eyes dilated, so I can’t read any text that isn’t comically large. I don’t know how to use a screen reader. I’ll be fine in a few hours, but this has been a fascinating journey into how well third-party iOS apps respect text size accessibility settings!

(Thread)

— Em Lazer-Walker (@lazerwalker) January 29, 2020

Accessible Experiences Aren’t Necessarily Equivalent Ones

This might be a little difficult of a concept to grasp at first. Let’s use this Rube Goldberg machine made by Joseph Herscher to pass the pepper to his dinner guest to compare:

[embedded content]

To pass the pepper, the machine, sends it through an elaborate system of weights, counterweights, ramps, rolling objects, catapults, guillotines, burners, timers, carousels, etc. — all constructed from commonly found kitchen items. While this setup will technically ensure the pepper is passed, it is an annoying, overwrought, time-intensive process.

Many digital experiences are a lot like a Rube Goldberg machine when it comes to accessibility. Since accessibility issues are so prevalent, many forms of assistive technology provide a large suite of features to allow their user to work around common obstacles.

Unfortunately, discovering obstacles, and then figuring out and activating the appropriate combination of features to overcome them can take a disproportionate amount of time and effort.

To say it another way: A simple click on a button for an abled person may take far more time and effort for a disabled person, depending on how the button has been made.

Chilling Effects

Frustratingly, the extra time and effort a disabled person has to put into operating a technically accessible experience may feed back into their disability condition(s). For example, the presence of a motor control disability such as arthritis may make the overall experience even more taxing.

Cognitive accessibility concerns are also another important thing to consider. What may seem easy to understand or intuitive to use for one person may not be for another. This is especially prevalent in situations where there is:

Cognitive accessibility isn’t an abstract concern, either. Poor user interface design that ignores the circumstances of the end user and dumps too much cognitive load onto them can have very real, very serious consequences.

The military is full of examples of poor interfaces being forced on people who don’t have a choice in the matter. It’s also one of the origins of Inclusive Design thinking. (Large preview)

Compounding Effects

These factors are not mutually exclusive. Proponents of Spoon Theory know that inaccessible experiences conspire to sap a person’s mental and physical energy, leaving them exhausted and demotivated. Worse, these sorts of scenarios are often more than just a person perpetually operating at a diminished capacity.

Frustrating digital experiences can lead to a person abandoning them outright, internalizing the system’s fault as their own personal failure. This abandonment may also translate to a person’s willingness and ability to operate other digital interfaces. In other words: the more we turn people away, the more they’ll stop trying to show up.

“Nobody has complained before” is a silly excuse for not caring about accessibility. You’re right, they didn’t complain. They left.

— Vote blue, no matter who. (@karlgroves) December 8, 2018

Don’t Take My Word For It

To make the abstract immediate, I reached out on Twitter to ask people about their experiences using assistive technology to browse the web.

I also took a purposely loose definition of assistive technology. All-too-often we assume the term “accessible” only means “works in a screen reader.” The truth of the matter is that assistive technology is so much more than that.

The way the web is built — its foundational principles and behaviors — make it extraordinarily adaptable. It’s us, the people who build on and for the web, who break that. By failing to consider these devices and methods of interacting with web content, we implicitly drift further away from equivalency.

Consistency

For some, assistive technology can mean specialized browser extensions. These micro-apps are used to enhance, augment, and customize a browsing experience to better suit someone’s needs.

Damien Senger, digital designer, uses a browser extension called Midnight Lizard to enforce a similar experience across multiple websites. This helps them “to focus on the content directly and to limit having too big differences between websites. It is also helping me to avoid too harsh color contrasts that are really uncomfortable.“

Damien also writes, “Often websites are really difficult to read for me because either of the lack of consistency in the layout, too narrow lines or just not enough balance between font size and line height. Related to that, color can create a lot of unhelpful distraction and I am struggling when too harsh contrast is nearby text.”

How To Maintain Equivalency

In addition, Damien also augments their browsing experience by using ad blocking technology “not only for ads but to block animations or content that are too distracting for my ADHD.”

It’s not too difficult to imagine why distracting and annoying your users is a bad idea. In the case of ads, the industry is unregulated, meaning that rules to prohibit ADHD, migraine, and/or seizure-triggering animations aren’t honored. Through this lens, an ad blocker is a form of consumer self-defense.

I’ll say it again: Telling users their access isn’t as important as your bottom line is a BAD take. Ads are fine as long as they don’t create a barrier by moving! #ADHD #A11y #PSH #WCAG https://t.co/i6mifI0JRE

— Shell Little (@ShellELittle) February 27, 2020

Kenny Hitt also chimes in about ads: “…regardless of the platform, the thing that annoys me most are websites with ads that essentially cause the site to constantly auto update. This prevents me as a screen reader user from reading the content of those websites.”

Again, a lack of regulation means the user must take measures into their own hands to keep the experience equivalent.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Opportunity

A lack of an equivalent experience translates directly to lost opportunity. Many individuals I spoke with mentioned that they’d abandon a digital experience that was inaccessible more often than not.

Brian Moore mentions, “there are web sites where I like their products a lot but won’t buy them because the site itself is such a struggle, and attempts to reach out have met with either silence or resistance to taking any action.”

Brian cites the Fluance website as the most recent example. The bugs present in its shopping user flows prevents him from buying high-end consumer audio equipment.

Fluance’s entire web presence exists to sell products. While updating a website or web app to be accessible can be an effort-intensive process, it would definitely be in Fluance’s best interest to make sure its checkout user flow is as robust as it could be.

Those lost sales add up. (Large preview)

Opportunity isn’t limited to just e-commerce, either. As more and more services digitize, we paradoxically push more people out of being to live in the society that relies on these digitized services—people with protected rights. Again, this shift away from an equivalent experience is the culprit.

Justin Yarbrough was “applying for an accessibility-related job with the Arizona Department of Economic Security over the summer, where they wanted me to take an assessment. The button to start the assessment was a clickable div. They wound up waving the assessment requirement for the position.”

Jim Kiely tells me about his brother, who “has stopped paying his water bill online because the city water website [doesn’t] work well with a screen reader and high contrast.”

Personally, I have friends who have been prevented from submitting résumés to multiple sites because their job application portals were inaccessible.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Adaptability

Soren Hamby, product marketing agency manager and design advocate, writes of their experiences using screen magnification software and screen reading capabilities. Soren has “varying levels of vision so [they] tend to not always need the same level of accommodation.”

Of note, Soren mentions their struggles with grocery delivery apps, specifically “the carts often only read the quantities rather than the item name. It’s much easier to order with a sighted person.”

There are three things to consider here:

First is the surface-level acknowledgment that the app operates differently for different people, the main point this article is driving at.

Second is the fact that Soren uses multiple forms of assistive technology, with the mix a shifting combination depending on a combination of their task at hand and how well the digital interface meets their access needs.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Make sure that the labels for your interactive controls are relevant and concise.

Incorporate disability scenarios and conditions into your design personas.

Avoid using absolute length units. (No, seriously.)

Avoid setting maximum widths and heights.

Avoid using fixed and sticky-scrolling components, especially larger-sized ones.

Test your layouts by zooming and/or increasing your default type size to make sure that content does not get obscured.

This brings us to our third and most important point:

Autonomy

Having to rely on the help of a sighted person to order groceries is not ideal. For many, the acquiring, preparation, and consuming of food can be highly personal acts. Being forced to incorporate outside assistance into this process is far different than willingly inviting someone in to share an experience. The same notion applies to every other digital product, as well.

Kenny also mentions grocery apps: “…my local Kroger grocery store has started an app redesign in June 2019 that is breaking accessibility with their app.” In discussing this regression, he goes on to elaborate, “Because I can’t financially change to another business, I won’t let it drop. Kroger is going to discover that I don’t stop with a problem. Persistence in solving problems is a requirement for any disabled person if you want to succeed in the world.”

This app looks great, provided you can see it. (Large preview)

Equality

Kroger would be wise to listen to Kenny’s feedback. The grocery company Winn-Dixie was recently successfully sued for not being operable with a screen reader. The lawsuit argued that the grocer’s website was heavily integrated with their physical stores, and therefore violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Another recent case involves the Domino’s Pizza franchise. Taken all the way to the Supreme Court, the ruling clearly and unambiguously states that preventing someone from using a website or app, simply because they used screen reading software, is unconstitutional.

For both cases, the cost to implement fixes were far cheaper than going to court—something to think about the next time you’re deciding where to order pizza.

Despite some ugly misconceptions about the ruling, the evidence is clear: in the United States, there is now legal precedent for private companies to be sued for violating civil rights via an inaccessible digital experience. Europe and some parts of Asia have similar laws, as well.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Reactivity

Another way to maintain an equivalent experience — one that is often not thought about — is to give reports about accessibility issues the same weight and concern as other software bugs.

Reported accessibility issues are oftentimes downplayed and ignored, or are sent to someone ignorant of the issue and/or powerless to fix it.

Kenny, who started using a computer with a screen reader in 1984 says, “When I run into accessibility issues nowadays, I’ll try reporting it, when I get the usual response from the feedback of the person not caring, I just give up and walk away. If [the response] comes from somebody in marketing agency who doesn’t understand accessibility, I just give up and go away. There’s no point in trying to teach these people about accessibility.”

Kenny’s view is shared by many others in the disability community. Remember what I said about compounding effects earlier.

Brian reports that,

“If I find significant issues with a site, I do report it. Depending on who I talk to it ranges from ‘here’s what doesn’t work’ to all kinds of technical detail about why if I can get to the right people.”

Getting it to the right people is key. Another part of equivalent experience is handling feedback in a timely and constructive way, much as how you would with any other issue with your product or service.

Responding to an accessibility issue is easy:

Thank the person for taking the time and effort to report the issue.

Acknowledge the issue and identify what person or team will be handling it.

Ask clarifying questions as needed.

Offer potential workarounds, with the understanding that they’re only temporary until the underlying issue is addressed.

Offer to involve them in the process, including notifying them when the issue has been fixed.

Being open, honest, and transparent about your bug fixing process goes a long way to establishing trust in a population that has historically and routinely been overlooked.

Also know that assigning someone to mind an email address to conduct tasks on behalf of an assistive technology user is not an appropriate, effective, or sustainable solution. Remember the concerns surrounding autonomy discussed earlier.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Create an accessibility statement, including known issues, a tentative timeline for their fixes, and easy to discover contact information.

Ensure that anyone customer-facing (quality assurance, customer support, marketing agency, etc.) are trained on protocol for accessibility-related issue reporting.

Quantify accessibility-related issues, both internal and reported.

Be on the lookout for patterns and trends with discovered accessibility issues, as they represent learning opportunities.

Understand that not all platforms to collect feedback are created equal.

Motivation

We’ve covered actual people’s everyday frustrations, as well as civil rights and the current legal landscape. If these don’t motivate you, allow me to present another factor to consider: profit.

There are two provoking studies I’d like to call attention to, but they are by no means the only studies performed in this space.

(Large preview)

First is the Click Away Pound Survey, a survey conducted in both 2016 and 2019 to “explore the online shopping experience of people with disabilities and examine the cost to business of ignoring disabled shoppers.”

The survey discovered that more than 4 million people abandoned a retail website because of the access barriers they found. These people represent 17.1 billion pounds (~$21.1 billion USD) in lost potential revenue.

Second is the The Purchasing Power of Working-Age Adults With Disabilities (PDF), conducted in 2018 by the American Institutes for Research. This study discovered that there is an estimated $490 billion in disposable income amongst disabled working-age adults. That’s billion with a capital B.

There are two of the (many) takeaways from these studies I’d like to highlight:

First is that from a historical perspective, the web is still very much new. On top of that, its ubiquity is even more recent, meaning that use by the general population is a small sliver of the amount of time it’s been around.

Second is that the general population contains many people who are disabled, and that their needs are not being met. These unmet needs represent billions of dollars of potential revenue.

This is a gigantic market that we, as an industry, are only now becoming aware of. Rather than approaching accessibility with a mindset of risk aversion, why not use this learning as a great way to view your current and future business opportunities?

Complying with the ADA is by definition the legally required minimum for accessibility. It doesn’t account for a good user experience, usability, and innovation. Unless you strive for the minimum all the time, compliance is not enough.https://t.co/qOYw6ji23u

— mikey is at home (@mikeyil) March 5, 2020

Let’s Not Stop Here

Too often we think of accessibility as a problem to be solved, rather than a way of looking at the world. Equivalent experiences necessitate that we question our assumptions and biases and think about experiences outside of our own. It can be an uncomfortable thing to think about at first, but it’s all in the service of making things usable for all.

As web professionals, it is our job, and our privilege to ensure that the experiences we deliver are equivalent. In the second part, we’ll investigate how to do just that.

Further Reading

“WCAG Primer,” Tetra Logical

“The Web Accessibility Basics,” Marco Zehe’s Accessibility Blog

“Web Accessibility Checklist: 15 Things To Improve Your Website Accessibility,” WebsiteSetup.org

“The Importance Of Manual Accessibility Testing: Call The Professionals,” Eric Bailey, Smashing Magazine

“Taking Accessibility Beyond Compliance,” Dennis Deacon, 24 Accessibility

“Videos Of People With Disabilities Using Tech,” Hampus Sethfors, Axess Lab

“Web Accessibility Perspectives: Explore The Impact And Benefits For Everyone,” Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), W3C

Thank you to Brian Moore, Damien Senger, Jim Kiely, Justin Yarbrough, Kenny Hitt, and Soren Hamby for sharing their insights and experiences.

(ra, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/equivalent-experiences-what-are-they/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/619383176177090560

[scpie]

Equivalent Experiences: What Are They?

About The Author

Eric is a Boston-based designer who helps create straightforward solutions that address a person’s practical, physical, cognitive, and emotional needs. More about Eric Bailey …

An equivalent experience is one that has been deliberately conceived of and built to be able to be used by the widest possible range of people. To create an equivalent experience, you must understand all the different ways people interact with technology, as well as common barriers they experience.

If you spend enough time interacting with digital accessibility practitioners, you may encounter the phrase “equivalent experience.” This saying concisely sums up a lot of the philosophy behind accessibility work.

Our industry tends to place a lot of focus on how, often at the expense of why. For accessibility-related concerns, it is vital to learn about the history, and lived experiences of disabled people as a context for understanding the need for design and code created with access in mind.

This is the first of two articles on the topic of equivalency, and how it relates to digital accessibility. It will help us define what an equivalent experience is. Once we have a common understanding established, I’ll then discuss how to go about implementing equivalent experiences for common accessibility-related issues.

The State Of Things

The truth of the matter is that even though we live in a multi-device world full of smartphones, augmented reality, voice assistants, and IoT smart sensors, our default is still predominately:

Visual,

large screen,

fast connection,

powerful computer and display,

male,

white,

wealthy,

young,

Western,

technologically-literate,

and abled.

This is reflective of the biases that are inherent in how we design, develop and grow products.

The previous list may not be the most comfortable thing to read. If you haven’t closed the browser tab already, take a moment to consider your daily workflows, as well as who your coworkers are, and you’ll begin to understand what I’m getting at.

At its core, delivering an equivalent experience is ultimately about preserving intent — with the intent being the motivating force behind creating a website or web app and all the content and features it contains.

This translates to making the meaning behind every interaction, every component, every photo or illustration, every line of code being understandable by the widest range of people, regardless of their device or ability.

Prior Art

I’m not the first person to discuss this topic (and hopefully not the last). Speaker, trainer, and consultant Nicolas Steenhout is one such advocate. His great post, Accessibility is about people, not standards, is well worth reading.

If you’re the kind of person who is into podcasts, his A11y Rules has a wonderful series called Soundbites. It features “short discussions with people with disabilities about the barriers they encounter on the web.” These insightful interviews also touch on what this article discusses.

What Isn’t An Equivalent Experience?

Showing examples of what something is not can be a way to help define it. For equivalent experiences, an example would be a web app geared towards use by the general public not having a mobile breakpoint.

It’s not difficult to imagine a situation where I’d want to adjust my work benefits while on the go. (Large preview)

With this example, everyone using a device with a small display is forced to pinch, pan, and zoom to get what they need. Here, the burden is placed on anyone whose only crime was using a smartphone.

Most likely, whoever conceived of, designed, and developed this didn’t stop to think about circumstances other than their own. In this sort of (unfortunately still all too common) scenario, I all but guarantee that the web app looks great on the laptops or desktops of the designers and developers who made it.

A designer saying, “it has enough contrast for me and my ‘old’ eyes” is the same as when a dev says, “works on my machine.”

The thing is though, we don’t design or develop for ourselves.

So, are we really ok with saying, “you don’t matter” to folks who are not like us? #a11y

— Heather (@_hmig) December 19, 2019

People using a smartphone to access this website are victims of circumstance. The extra effort someone needs to do to get it to work indirectly communicates that they weren’t a priority, and therefore not valued. If you’ve used the web for any significant portion of time, I’m willing to bet this, or a similar experience has happened to you.

This example is also a hop, skip, and a jump away from another common, yet serious accessibility issue we often don’t consider: screen zooming:

Screen Zooming

Screen zooming is when someone is prevented from being able to zoom their displays and make text larger—many native mobile apps are guilty of this. When you disallow this sort of behavior, you’re telling prospective users that unless they have vision similar to you, you aren’t interested in them being able to use your app.

For this scenario, a gentle reminder that we will all get older, and with aging comes a whole host of vision-related concerns. A question you should be asking yourself is if your future self will be capable of using the things your present self is making. A follow-up question is if you’re also asking the people you’re managing this.

I just had my eyes dilated, so I can’t read any text that isn’t comically large. I don’t know how to use a screen reader. I’ll be fine in a few hours, but this has been a fascinating journey into how well third-party iOS apps respect text size accessibility settings!

(Thread)

— Em Lazer-Walker (@lazerwalker) January 29, 2020

Accessible Experiences Aren’t Necessarily Equivalent Ones

This might be a little difficult of a concept to grasp at first. Let’s use this Rube Goldberg machine made by Joseph Herscher to pass the pepper to his dinner guest to compare:

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To pass the pepper, the machine, sends it through an elaborate system of weights, counterweights, ramps, rolling objects, catapults, guillotines, burners, timers, carousels, etc. — all constructed from commonly found kitchen items. While this setup will technically ensure the pepper is passed, it is an annoying, overwrought, time-intensive process.

Many digital experiences are a lot like a Rube Goldberg machine when it comes to accessibility. Since accessibility issues are so prevalent, many forms of assistive technology provide a large suite of features to allow their user to work around common obstacles.

Unfortunately, discovering obstacles, and then figuring out and activating the appropriate combination of features to overcome them can take a disproportionate amount of time and effort.

To say it another way: A simple click on a button for an abled person may take far more time and effort for a disabled person, depending on how the button has been made.

Chilling Effects

Frustratingly, the extra time and effort a disabled person has to put into operating a technically accessible experience may feed back into their disability condition(s). For example, the presence of a motor control disability such as arthritis may make the overall experience even more taxing.

Cognitive accessibility concerns are also another important thing to consider. What may seem easy to understand or intuitive to use for one person may not be for another. This is especially prevalent in situations where there is:

Cognitive accessibility isn’t an abstract concern, either. Poor user interface design that ignores the circumstances of the end user and dumps too much cognitive load onto them can have very real, very serious consequences.

The military is full of examples of poor interfaces being forced on people who don’t have a choice in the matter. It’s also one of the origins of Inclusive Design thinking. (Large preview)

Compounding Effects

These factors are not mutually exclusive. Proponents of Spoon Theory know that inaccessible experiences conspire to sap a person’s mental and physical energy, leaving them exhausted and demotivated. Worse, these sorts of scenarios are often more than just a person perpetually operating at a diminished capacity.

Frustrating digital experiences can lead to a person abandoning them outright, internalizing the system’s fault as their own personal failure. This abandonment may also translate to a person’s willingness and ability to operate other digital interfaces. In other words: the more we turn people away, the more they’ll stop trying to show up.

“Nobody has complained before” is a silly excuse for not caring about accessibility. You’re right, they didn’t complain. They left.

— Vote blue, no matter who. (@karlgroves) December 8, 2018

Don’t Take My Word For It

To make the abstract immediate, I reached out on Twitter to ask people about their experiences using assistive technology to browse the web.

I also took a purposely loose definition of assistive technology. All-too-often we assume the term “accessible” only means “works in a screen reader.” The truth of the matter is that assistive technology is so much more than that.

The way the web is built — its foundational principles and behaviors — make it extraordinarily adaptable. It’s us, the people who build on and for the web, who break that. By failing to consider these devices and methods of interacting with web content, we implicitly drift further away from equivalency.

Consistency

For some, assistive technology can mean specialized browser extensions. These micro-apps are used to enhance, augment, and customize a browsing experience to better suit someone’s needs.

Damien Senger, digital designer, uses a browser extension called Midnight Lizard to enforce a similar experience across multiple websites. This helps them “to focus on the content directly and to limit having too big differences between websites. It is also helping me to avoid too harsh color contrasts that are really uncomfortable.“

Damien also writes, “Often websites are really difficult to read for me because either of the lack of consistency in the layout, too narrow lines or just not enough balance between font size and line height. Related to that, color can create a lot of unhelpful distraction and I am struggling when too harsh contrast is nearby text.”

How To Maintain Equivalency

In addition, Damien also augments their browsing experience by using ad blocking technology “not only for ads but to block animations or content that are too distracting for my ADHD.”

It’s not too difficult to imagine why distracting and annoying your users is a bad idea. In the case of ads, the industry is unregulated, meaning that rules to prohibit ADHD, migraine, and/or seizure-triggering animations aren’t honored. Through this lens, an ad blocker is a form of consumer self-defense.

I’ll say it again: Telling users their access isn’t as important as your bottom line is a BAD take. Ads are fine as long as they don’t create a barrier by moving! #ADHD #A11y #PSH #WCAG https://t.co/i6mifI0JRE

— Shell Little (@ShellELittle) February 27, 2020

Kenny Hitt also chimes in about ads: “…regardless of the platform, the thing that annoys me most are websites with ads that essentially cause the site to constantly auto update. This prevents me as a screen reader user from reading the content of those websites.”

Again, a lack of regulation means the user must take measures into their own hands to keep the experience equivalent.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Opportunity

A lack of an equivalent experience translates directly to lost opportunity. Many individuals I spoke with mentioned that they’d abandon a digital experience that was inaccessible more often than not.

Brian Moore mentions, “there are web sites where I like their products a lot but won’t buy them because the site itself is such a struggle, and attempts to reach out have met with either silence or resistance to taking any action.”

Brian cites the Fluance website as the most recent example. The bugs present in its shopping user flows prevents him from buying high-end consumer audio equipment.

Fluance’s entire web presence exists to sell products. While updating a website or web app to be accessible can be an effort-intensive process, it would definitely be in Fluance’s best interest to make sure its checkout user flow is as robust as it could be.

Those lost sales add up. (Large preview)

Opportunity isn’t limited to just e-commerce, either. As more and more services digitize, we paradoxically push more people out of being to live in the society that relies on these digitized services—people with protected rights. Again, this shift away from an equivalent experience is the culprit.

Justin Yarbrough was “applying for an accessibility-related job with the Arizona Department of Economic Security over the summer, where they wanted me to take an assessment. The button to start the assessment was a clickable div. They wound up waving the assessment requirement for the position.”

Jim Kiely tells me about his brother, who “has stopped paying his water bill online because the city water website [doesn’t] work well with a screen reader and high contrast.”

Personally, I have friends who have been prevented from submitting résumés to multiple sites because their job application portals were inaccessible.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Adaptability

Soren Hamby, product marketing agency manager and design advocate, writes of their experiences using screen magnification software and screen reading capabilities. Soren has “varying levels of vision so [they] tend to not always need the same level of accommodation.”

Of note, Soren mentions their struggles with grocery delivery apps, specifically “the carts often only read the quantities rather than the item name. It’s much easier to order with a sighted person.”

There are three things to consider here:

First is the surface-level acknowledgment that the app operates differently for different people, the main point this article is driving at.

Second is the fact that Soren uses multiple forms of assistive technology, with the mix a shifting combination depending on a combination of their task at hand and how well the digital interface meets their access needs.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Make sure that the labels for your interactive controls are relevant and concise.

Incorporate disability scenarios and conditions into your design personas.

Avoid using absolute length units. (No, seriously.)

Avoid setting maximum widths and heights.

Avoid using fixed and sticky-scrolling components, especially larger-sized ones.

Test your layouts by zooming and/or increasing your default type size to make sure that content does not get obscured.

This brings us to our third and most important point:

Autonomy

Having to rely on the help of a sighted person to order groceries is not ideal. For many, the acquiring, preparation, and consuming of food can be highly personal acts. Being forced to incorporate outside assistance into this process is far different than willingly inviting someone in to share an experience. The same notion applies to every other digital product, as well.

Kenny also mentions grocery apps: “…my local Kroger grocery store has started an app redesign in June 2019 that is breaking accessibility with their app.” In discussing this regression, he goes on to elaborate, “Because I can’t financially change to another business, I won’t let it drop. Kroger is going to discover that I don’t stop with a problem. Persistence in solving problems is a requirement for any disabled person if you want to succeed in the world.”

This app looks great, provided you can see it. (Large preview)

Equality

Kroger would be wise to listen to Kenny’s feedback. The grocery company Winn-Dixie was recently successfully sued for not being operable with a screen reader. The lawsuit argued that the grocer’s website was heavily integrated with their physical stores, and therefore violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Another recent case involves the Domino’s Pizza franchise. Taken all the way to the Supreme Court, the ruling clearly and unambiguously states that preventing someone from using a website or app, simply because they used screen reading software, is unconstitutional.

For both cases, the cost to implement fixes were far cheaper than going to court—something to think about the next time you’re deciding where to order pizza.

Despite some ugly misconceptions about the ruling, the evidence is clear: in the United States, there is now legal precedent for private companies to be sued for violating civil rights via an inaccessible digital experience. Europe and some parts of Asia have similar laws, as well.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Reactivity

Another way to maintain an equivalent experience — one that is often not thought about — is to give reports about accessibility issues the same weight and concern as other software bugs.

Reported accessibility issues are oftentimes downplayed and ignored, or are sent to someone ignorant of the issue and/or powerless to fix it.

Kenny, who started using a computer with a screen reader in 1984 says, “When I run into accessibility issues nowadays, I’ll try reporting it, when I get the usual response from the feedback of the person not caring, I just give up and walk away. If [the response] comes from somebody in marketing agency who doesn’t understand accessibility, I just give up and go away. There’s no point in trying to teach these people about accessibility.”

Kenny’s view is shared by many others in the disability community. Remember what I said about compounding effects earlier.

Brian reports that,

“If I find significant issues with a site, I do report it. Depending on who I talk to it ranges from ‘here’s what doesn’t work’ to all kinds of technical detail about why if I can get to the right people.”

Getting it to the right people is key. Another part of equivalent experience is handling feedback in a timely and constructive way, much as how you would with any other issue with your product or service.

Responding to an accessibility issue is easy:

Thank the person for taking the time and effort to report the issue.

Acknowledge the issue and identify what person or team will be handling it.

Ask clarifying questions as needed.

Offer potential workarounds, with the understanding that they’re only temporary until the underlying issue is addressed.

Offer to involve them in the process, including notifying them when the issue has been fixed.

Being open, honest, and transparent about your bug fixing process goes a long way to establishing trust in a population that has historically and routinely been overlooked.

Also know that assigning someone to mind an email address to conduct tasks on behalf of an assistive technology user is not an appropriate, effective, or sustainable solution. Remember the concerns surrounding autonomy discussed earlier.

How To Maintain Equivalency

Create an accessibility statement, including known issues, a tentative timeline for their fixes, and easy to discover contact information.

Ensure that anyone customer-facing (quality assurance, customer support, marketing agency, etc.) are trained on protocol for accessibility-related issue reporting.

Quantify accessibility-related issues, both internal and reported.

Be on the lookout for patterns and trends with discovered accessibility issues, as they represent learning opportunities.

Understand that not all platforms to collect feedback are created equal.

Motivation

We’ve covered actual people’s everyday frustrations, as well as civil rights and the current legal landscape. If these don’t motivate you, allow me to present another factor to consider: profit.

There are two provoking studies I’d like to call attention to, but they are by no means the only studies performed in this space.

(Large preview)

First is the Click Away Pound Survey, a survey conducted in both 2016 and 2019 to “explore the online shopping experience of people with disabilities and examine the cost to business of ignoring disabled shoppers.”

The survey discovered that more than 4 million people abandoned a retail website because of the access barriers they found. These people represent 17.1 billion pounds (~$21.1 billion USD) in lost potential revenue.

Second is the The Purchasing Power of Working-Age Adults With Disabilities (PDF), conducted in 2018 by the American Institutes for Research. This study discovered that there is an estimated $490 billion in disposable income amongst disabled working-age adults. That’s billion with a capital B.

There are two of the (many) takeaways from these studies I’d like to highlight:

First is that from a historical perspective, the web is still very much new. On top of that, its ubiquity is even more recent, meaning that use by the general population is a small sliver of the amount of time it’s been around.

Second is that the general population contains many people who are disabled, and that their needs are not being met. These unmet needs represent billions of dollars of potential revenue.

This is a gigantic market that we, as an industry, are only now becoming aware of. Rather than approaching accessibility with a mindset of risk aversion, why not use this learning as a great way to view your current and future business opportunities?

Complying with the ADA is by definition the legally required minimum for accessibility. It doesn’t account for a good user experience, usability, and innovation. Unless you strive for the minimum all the time, compliance is not enough.https://t.co/qOYw6ji23u

— mikey is at home (@mikeyil) March 5, 2020

Let’s Not Stop Here

Too often we think of accessibility as a problem to be solved, rather than a way of looking at the world. Equivalent experiences necessitate that we question our assumptions and biases and think about experiences outside of our own. It can be an uncomfortable thing to think about at first, but it’s all in the service of making things usable for all.

As web professionals, it is our job, and our privilege to ensure that the experiences we deliver are equivalent. In the second part, we’ll investigate how to do just that.

Further Reading

“WCAG Primer,” Tetra Logical

“The Web Accessibility Basics,” Marco Zehe’s Accessibility Blog

“Web Accessibility Checklist: 15 Things To Improve Your Website Accessibility,” WebsiteSetup.org

“The Importance Of Manual Accessibility Testing: Call The Professionals,” Eric Bailey, Smashing Magazine

“Taking Accessibility Beyond Compliance,” Dennis Deacon, 24 Accessibility

“Videos Of People With Disabilities Using Tech,” Hampus Sethfors, Axess Lab

“Web Accessibility Perspectives: Explore The Impact And Benefits For Everyone,” Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), W3C

Thank you to Brian Moore, Damien Senger, Jim Kiely, Justin Yarbrough, Kenny Hitt, and Soren Hamby for sharing their insights and experiences.

(ra, il)

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source http://www.scpie.org/equivalent-experiences-what-are-they/

[getotheoffer]

This is the One plus 7T so if you followed the leaks take a promo. You've probably seen pretty much every angle of this thing but now it's officially been unveiled. This is a pretty easy phone to explain so one plus the company they have. They're sort of upper mid-range phones somewhere around five hundred six hundred dollars like One Plus 7. More Technology Information for You: 9 New future gadgets and Invention of 2020 This Best Mini Photo Printer For Your Smartphone Gallery This key finder will be the best essentials of 2020 Then they have their premium high-end flagship stuff like One Plus 7 Pro. That's closer to seven-eight hundred bucks so, this phone the One Plus 7T kind of a hard name to say out loud. it's not the seventy but it's the One Plus 7T. This phone is sort of a Frankenstein between those two groups, it's right between the Super High end and the upper mid-range.  if that makes any sense so to be perfectly clear it is a really great phone for the price. which is basically the One Plus, special at this point they've continued this fascinating slow creep up in price, but when you go over this phone and everything they've combined in here. OnePlus 7T Design and Display It's pretty on point for what you're getting for $599.95 combination of things despite not being the highest end display. You know it gets pretty bright up to a thousand knits, so outdoor visibility is no problem and the teardrop not being a little smaller makes it super easy to ignore on this gigantic screen, But it's also 1080p not 1440p.  The bezels are just a little bit thicker a tiny bit, as you can see and I have noticed some real off-axis color tint and rainbowing, and other consistencies like that.  You'll notice on not so high-end OLED displays so, it's not the super best of the best, but it's like right underneath. It's right in between its making Sense right. They're bringing things down from the higher end phone that makes sense while keeping the sort of baseline of the mid-range.  The High refresh rate I think is the most important thing that they brought down, that I just love it, some 90 Hertz some high refresh rate goodness. so that's good to see and then just the design of this phone, in general, is also a bit of a Frankenstein. you've probably noticed it by now, there's this or a blue color again although. this time it's not as matte as before it's kind of closer to like a satin, because it has more of a sheen to it.  it's not really glossy like some other phones. But you definitely do still see fingerprints much more than a matte phone, so it's somewhere in between again the 7 pro is more matte than this one. some other improvements you do have the alert slider is tighter, so it's more satisfying to move between the three Positions.   that's pretty sweet they brought down the high-end really precise haptic motor, that's honestly only really matched on Android by the pixel at this point. so that was great and they brought the optical fingerprint reader underneath the glass. that's also the same sensor as the one from the 7 Pro. OnePlus 7T Sound Speaker and Battery I think one of the best in any Phone under the Glass. Right now, these Speakers are also just as good as a 7 throat, they sound loud and full and there's also a bigger speaker grow up at the top. Charging is now even faster, so they're calling it to warp charge 30 Tit's still a 30-watt fast charger but thanks to improved battery chemistry.  In the 3800-milliamp hour battery in this phone, it'll charge 23% faster than warp charge 30 already did, so in other words, it's silly fast and it's kind of you to know a different philosophy on battery management on one hand. This massive battery inside and all-day battery life.  That was crazy fast charging just lets you have this peace of mind at any time. you're starting to get low, you can just plugin for a couple minutes and be right back up to set 80%. it's like a different kind of confidence in the battery. I don't really have a preference between the two. it would be great to have both but this one is much better.  this we're charged 30 t they say we'll get you to 70% from dead in half an hour and that's awesome but I'm even more impressed by just how much you can add from plugging in for five minutes ten minutes and just giving you a massive boost for the rest of the day. so, the 7T does have a decent battery life but this is the steady compromise they make for not having the best battery life. OnePlus 7T Camera Details Of course, the gigantic camera circle on the back it's genuinely. I think the first design from one plus that doesn't feel to me like really sleek or clean like they've done triple cameras before, even but this one is very different.  it’s kind of reminds me of somewhere between Motorola or the red hydrogen or you might even remember the Nokia Lumia series back in the day. so, anything is these are essentially the same exact cameras that the oneplus 7 pro, already has same standard 48megapixel standard camera same 117degree ultra-wide and then a shorter 2x telephoto zoom camera instead of a 3x, so if you're actually looking for some big camera improvements for the 7T that is not what's happening here.  it's actually not like the One plus 7 pro camera was bad, it's just that it was the one part of the phone that wasn't you know best-in-class. it sorts of holding it back from being an arguably perfect phone in a way, but in a $600 phone in the Starts of 2019, this set of cameras is perfectly good.  I've been taking photos and videos with it just to see if I notice any substantial differences around but there isn't anything too drastic. still very solid and daylight and a bit color fringy and soft around the edges with close up subjects and passable, but not amazing shots in less than ideal lighting. if you think about other cameras in this six-hundred-dollar price range, that's about right.  Actually, right up until they start to get blown out the water by the $700 iPhone 11. you can take portrait mode shots now in telephoto or standard cameras now, which is cool. They are also enabling 4k 30fps video from the ultra-wide camera so they've heard our feedback, they are going to do that. I think them impressive improvement here is the new super macro mode so, you hit the little Flower icon in the top corner and you can get way up close to things to point five to eight centimeters away from the camera lens, which most smartphones do struggle with.  if they don't have a macro mode and so with this, I was able to take some close-ups that I couldn't even get with the iPhone 11. and Then, of course, this wouldn't be a new one plus phone without really killer high-end on-paper specs. OnePlus 7T Performance Snapdragon 855+ the newest chip 8gb of ram, not 12 and 128 or 256gb of Usb 3.0 storage so, this thing is fast and it's running the latest version of Oxygen OS 10 on top of Android 10. which I think makes this the first non-pixel Android 10 phone. they're early 2 updates and performance has actually been really smooth.  A lot of Android apps for other things Twitter to switch between accounts, flamingo for Twitter, TikTok, your Whatsapp, Google Photos, the Play store I mean a lot of Google apps use that hamburger menu.  The screen is so big on this phone that We don't really want to reach up to the corner, with one hand to press the hamburger menu every single time. but aside from that Android 10 has been really nice really smooth as you'd expect on a new phone, with a 90 Hertz screen and all the optimizations one plus is continually working on for oxygen OS. they really show so all that for me using this phone has added up to it being a pretty solid set of trade-offs, that add up to a pretty good phone for a pretty great price.  it really feels like they're taking the stuff that they learned how to do better and more efficiently from the 7 Pro and bringing it down to a more competitive price which is a great way of sell a lot of phones. now for to be perfectly clear the one plus 7 pro is still a better phone than this just because of this small bit of trade-offs.  they've kept a higher quality display higher resolution not as much color fringing and things like that bigger battery-less ugly camera bump on the back.  and the notch-less the screen on the front so all of that sort of adds up to a few trade-offs here. but overall this is that incremental update you expect from a t phone from one plus. with the X-Factor of that 90 Hertz display that is so hard to switch back from. so, that's the statement that the phone leaves me with is that I'm glad that one plus is doubling down on the high refresh rate stuff to really make phones feel smooth high refresh rate all the things. this is gonna be a really good buy for people who want to spend like 600 bucks on a phone. Get Oneplus 7T now-

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