The Death of Accessibility

I saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 recently. Buried under the fashion, just like the original was a critique of modern times. While there's the flashy obvious satire, there's also a eulogy to accessibility that you might not blink and miss anyway.

The movie opens with a scandal. Miranda Priestly is accused of supporting unethical labor practices and she's the bad guy on the internet. Stepping out onto the red carpet of the gala in a dress the majority of those commenting outrage can't afford, Nigel whispers the news in her ear and holds the phone. She waves away the phone because she can't see without her glasses and just asks for what's relevant.

Her lifestyle is inaccessible to them. Their opinions are inaccessible to her.

At a time when anything you can imagine can be made with a few prompts made in a few minutes over an AI tool of your choice, everyone has access to specialized expertise, debatable hallucinations aside.

The tools of modern creation, technology, is more accessible than ever. But when you reduce the time between creation and sharing your vibecoded project with the world, you also reduce the time to discern whether it is accessible to others.

In our egocentric bubbles, with our AI sycophantic cheerleaders, every idea seems brilliant. For design teams working with coders facing the bottleneck of production-ready interfaces, voila! No more waiting. The genie delivers what you asked for, exactly what you asked for.

Traditional design, pre-whatever iteration of design free-for-all we're living in now, had gatekeepers. You can even argue taste is gatekeeping, the picking of the specific cerulean belt from the original movie that Andy can't see the difference in.

But as Miranda explains, she understands her responsibility as a tastemaker as her decisions get filtered through institutions of high fashion to designers to a sweater that's on sale in a corner store. It’s always represented millions of dollars and countless jobs.

We've compressed the timelines to design and it impacts all of us.

The trouble with tools isn’t that you can’t build a complete output with them. It’s that they make building something shippable seem like the mastery of the entire building process. The cost of convenience is the invisibility of knowing the labor that goes into learning the specifics of the discipline, what a variable is in coding or what a color means for contrast, and the lack of knowledge costs those who vibecode the actual mastery so they can build independently and the end users something broken in ways that they can’t articulate.

For the adaptable, the change is easy. For someone who has trouble seeing without their glasses, the lack of contrast, the anarchy of fonts and sizes, the interactions in apps that we use every day changing on a whim - all of these make them give up.

The world is hard enough already, we don't need to make it harder by changing the established mental models for UX design that  users rely on. At least while we're still designing experiences for users and not bots.

With the great power of creation, comes the responsibility of making that creation accessible if you want that creation to be used by people of all ages, all levels of sight, all levels of resources, including time available for understanding what you're creating.

Learn the latest web accessibility guidelines from the World Wide Web Consortium here.

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About Chavi

As a kid who made drawings turned writer turned marketer turned designer, I've grown up alongside technology, tinkering to customize it to what I needed. Now I use the same skills to design to solve interesting problems with interesting people. You can find me on my website where I'm still tinkering as I learn to code. And also, occasionally on LinkedIn.