I really enjoyed this article, thank you! Your widening of the definition of accessibility to include "stress cases" closely mirrors, in my opinion, changing attitudes towards special education in schools. When I was studying education, I learned that moving special education teachers into general ed classes to "co-teach" also opened up lots of new possibilities for differentiation, that is that catering to students with disabilities could also cater to students who weren't disabled but could benefit from more help or even more enrichment. Web users are much the same. When we enrich experiences for users with special needs or circumstances, we can enrich them for the general user base as well.
Another interesting point that came up at my own job in recent days, now in the tech world, my co-workers are asking each other, "What's accessibility and usability look like for users under duress?" We work on insurance products, and when people visit our part of the app, it's because something's gone wrong in their lives. We user test every design before going to code, but we don't test with people who just lost their house or were in a bad car accident. Serving those people better would be more morally correct and humane, but it also makes life easier on CSRs, cuts costs and creates fewer legal battles.
Anyway, sorry for writing such a lengthy comment, but I've had a lot of thoughts on this lately!
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I really enjoyed this article, thank you! Your widening of the definition of accessibility to include "stress cases" closely mirrors, in my opinion, changing attitudes towards special education in schools. When I was studying education, I learned that moving special education teachers into general ed classes to "co-teach" also opened up lots of new possibilities for differentiation, that is that catering to students with disabilities could also cater to students who weren't disabled but could benefit from more help or even more enrichment. Web users are much the same. When we enrich experiences for users with special needs or circumstances, we can enrich them for the general user base as well.
Another interesting point that came up at my own job in recent days, now in the tech world, my co-workers are asking each other, "What's accessibility and usability look like for users under duress?" We work on insurance products, and when people visit our part of the app, it's because something's gone wrong in their lives. We user test every design before going to code, but we don't test with people who just lost their house or were in a bad car accident. Serving those people better would be more morally correct and humane, but it also makes life easier on CSRs, cuts costs and creates fewer legal battles.
Anyway, sorry for writing such a lengthy comment, but I've had a lot of thoughts on this lately!