Iris tells us that “The web has gotten more and more inaccessible over my lifetime”.
Transcript
Nic
Hi, I’m Nic Steenhout. And you’re listening to the accessibility rules soundbite, a series of short podcasts where disabled people explain their impairment, and what barriers they encounter on the web. Today I’m talking to Iris McCleary. Hey, Iris, how are you?
Iris
I’m doing well today made it to work in time to record which is that smallest.
Nic
That’s a bonus. I’m very, very happy to talk to you. We’ve been, we’ve been trying to organize this for a few weeks now. And finally, the stars align. So let me ask you this, what’s your disability or your impairment?
Iris
Three main ones, ADHD, bipolar type two and chronic pain. The ADHD is definitely the one that gets me in the most trouble on the web, it’s gotten more and more inaccessible over my lifetime.
Nic
More and more inaccessible. That’s that’s actually a dire indictment of the state of the web. If you had one major pet peeve or barrier to talk about what, what would be the biggest thing that causes problem for you?
Iris
Oh the monetization of everything, and the rise of the addiction based model of value measurement, the idea that the best thing you can do as a product is keep eyes on your product or on your website for as long as possible, because that very intentionally hooks into those parts of the brain that are involved in hyperfocus and addictive tendencies. And I can’t use social media anymore since the rise of infinite scroll and the algorithmic feed, because it’s designed to hook and keep your attention. And I can’t get out. I f I open Facebook, I’m losing minimum an hour of my life no matter how self aware I am, so I just can’t use it anymore, which is a shame because there are friends whose contact info I primarily have on there, and it’s a struggle to get back in touch.
Nic
That’s actually quite a massive barrier considering more and more of our human interactions are happening on social media.
Iris
Yep, for example, I live in San Francisco and Munis primary method of an most reliable method of disseminating service alerts is Twitter. And I don’t have an active Twitter account, it only lets you scroll so far without giving you the little login block.
Nic
Right. That is, yeah, that’s quite, quite something. So what’s the solution?
Iris
I think fundamentally, the incentives for the industry are pretty majorly broken. The incentives to monetize everything at all costs, the ignoring of the effect on human attention. I understand wanting, there’s a difference between getting people to return to your product and holding them on it for as long as possible in each interaction. And that is, I think, something that the company I work at, has started to recognize and we’ve started to do in our product where we’re much more interested in did we get you to value fast? Because if you’re spending your entire day looking at your product analytics and Mixpanel, we have failed as a product because we’re not giving you answers, and you’re not spending your time doing your actual job with that data. And then, then the question is, okay, well, Was it useful? Did you come back and do it again, and then go do whatever your actual job is, then do to come back and find more data and then go do whatever your actual job was? Like? I think that kind of model is much. It’s much healthier. And also, interestingly, it’s much more. We are a b2b company. And so that is part of it. Like we know that people are using our product to do their jobs.
Nic
Yeah
Iris
They’re spending their entire day on it. That’s no one’s 100% day job. But I think that kind of model for something like a social platform could also be valuable. It’s like, you logged in and you did some stuff and you and you had good interactions with some friends. And then you wandered off and did something in the real world. You chose to come back and it’s that lack of trust that your customers will choose to come back. Or maybe your investors lack of trust that they will choose to come back that I think really drives that pattern.
Nic
Yeah, yeah. I think in some ways, this barrier you’re experiencing on the web is really a reflection of a broken society. And there’s no easy fix there, unless we get a massive meteor that comes and wipes us out. But that’s also not really a solution. I don’t think.
Iris
No, not so much wishing for the apocalypse doesn’t seem like… That’s, that’s a big one. And that’s one that’s hard to… It’s big. And it’s very societally structural, and it’s hard to directly counteract there are, there are a lot of smaller ones, though, like websites have gotten more complicated, infinite scroll in and of itself, rather than having to click to the next page, it removes that moment of interaction that would give me a chance to reflect and go do I actually want to click the button like that? That minuscule instant is something I could potentially hook into? And decide, no, I don’t want to load more of whatever this is. I need to go do the dishes.
Nic
You shouldn’t be able to multitask. You can do infinite scroll, and the dishes at the same time if your device is waterproof, right?
Iris
Oh, that sounds like a recipe for a huge mess. I’m just imagining my kitchen after this attempt.
Nic
Yeah. Hey, Iris, if you had one message for designers of developers, other than you know, don’t keep me hooked up and don’t use infinite scroll. What would you suggest to them? I know, asking you to pick one thing is a bit of a torture thing. But
Iris
Oh, decision paralysis. Keep your design, layout and content simple and easy to navigate.
Nic
Keep design and layout simple and easy to navigate. I like that. Keep it simple.
Iris
Yeah, that’s the modern web is kept getting more complicated more bells and whistles, more things, animate and move and drag my eyes off to some other part of the screen. And, you know, bits that don’t appear until you hover over them or… it’s just hard for my brain to process. And the navigation layout of websites is not as… I mean, there were times when the old web was extremely ugly. But it was not hard to navigate a lot of the time.
Nic
Yeah
Iris
Find where the links were no one got rid of Link formatting. You don’t have to mouse over every line of text looking for where you put the link. That is exhausting.
Nic
Yeah, yep. Bring back HTML 1, gray pages, black headings, blue links, purple underline visited links. There is something to that though, isn’t there? It’s it was fugly, but it was usable?
Iris
Yeah, it was. And then even progressing beyond that you can start adding some styling to it and maybe your link, you know, maybe your color scheme was something that you found prettier. But and maybe the margins of your page were more visually pleasant and readable. But it retained that sort of fundamental structure and the links had their own styling and color for a long time. And then we got fancier and we moved farther and farther away from that, and it feels like bells and whistles, animated, aesthetically pleasing, and it’s a lot harder to just read a website and read the data, even if it looks way, way prettier.
Nic
Yeah. Iris, thank you for being such a great guest. I look forward to people’s reaction to this podcast. And we’ll talk to you at some point in the near future, I’m sure.
Iris
Yeah, sounds good. And if you ever want to have me back, you know where to find me.
Nic
I will find you I will hunt you down. That didn’t sound right But yeah, let’s chat. Cheers.
Iris
Thank you