"How cool would it be if accessibility was just an everyday thing?": an interview with Alex Chen

A couple of months ago I got to speak to the excellent, generous, revolutionary Alex Chen. Alex is a product designer whose work revolves around accessibility, and they share their knowledge on their website, in articles on Medium, and through Access Guide - a friendly introduction to improving your accessibility that you can find at accessguide.io and on instagram (@access_guide_). In this long read, we chat about how Alex is influenced by the Disability Justice movement, investing in accessibility, and what they hope the future looks like.

Image description: a street protest - several people are marching, facing away from the camera. The sun is low in the sky and there are long shadows stretched along the tarmac, lens flare, and a few backlit buildings in the background.

Georgie: Your background is in tech and product design – has accessibility always been present in your work there? Or was there a moment when accessibility became more important in what you were doing?

That's a great question. Similar to architecture, accessibility is actually a tech industry requirement, but compliance is not consistently enforced unless a disability rights organization has the resources to take legal action, so unfortunately a lot of product teams aren't held accountable.

I never received formal training in accessibility. After working as a designer for a few years, I met my now friend Sky, who runs a wearables line that focuses on trans and disabled bodies (Rebirth Garments). They told me about various accessibility techniques for clothing - such as dresses that are shorter in the back for wheelchair users, or avoiding certain buttons for people with dexterity issues. This made me realize while I was very interested in accessibility, I didn't have a toolbox of practical techniques the way that they did. So I started to research digital accessibility.

In my research, I quickly realized that there were a lot of things I did that made my designs completely inaccessible - small text, low contrast, inconsistent navigation, lack of page titles and headers, the list goes on. And keep in mind I wasn't only reading about accessibility, but Disability Justice as well. It wasn't a good feeling to realize that I was attributing to structural ableism through my designs, even if it was unintentional. So I quickly committed to making it an essential part of my work.

Georgie: Does your work in accessibility overlap with any other industries/areas aside from tech, such as your workshops for activist groups? If so, is there anything that you’ve learnt from that work?

Yeah for sure accessibility overlaps with other areas. I recently started giving accessibility training workshops for producing content from an activist perspective. I've heard from many disabled folks, Leah Lakshmi being a major voice, that when the BLM uprising took off last summer, a lot of disabled activists were cut off because communication was inaccessible. This reminds me of Annie Segarra's campaign "The Future is Accessible" in response to the overwhelming white, cis, straight, and able-bodied Women's March.

If you think about it, a lot of aspects of activism are inaccessible, from flyers with no image descriptions to speeches with no captions to marches that span several miles. I'm not suggesting that we should make all activism accessible for everyone all the time - the state violence actually makes that kind of impossible. But I do believe our communication should be as accessible as possible to lay a foundation of community care.

I'm also very big on martial arts, namely BJJ, Kali, and Muay Thai. There's a lot of disability in martial arts, partially due to the constant injuries, but also because there are practitioners and teachers who are Blind, wheelchair users, quadriplegics, etc. I don't often train with them but it is cool to watch them train online and learn how to make training more accessible (such as saying, "put your left hand on my right hip" instead of "put your hand here" to a Blind person). Unfortunately the martial arts community is also very ableist (yay toxic masculinity) so it makes this a lost opportunity to have some very cool disabled community leaders and make the space more accessible.

Georgie: What are some of the obstacles to what you do?

Haha, so many. I base my materials on WCAG (web content accessibility guidelines) and they are so impossibly dense, full of jargon, and difficult to understand. It takes so long just to figure out what they're talking about.

I think certainly more companies are aware that they need to be accessible, not just for compliance but because it's the right thing to do. But to prepare for that, companies also need to invest in their people to be able to pull that off. That means we need to be properly trained and incorporate accessibility testing in the agile process. Accessibility needs to be something that you invest in, or else it's always going to fall to the side. I haven’t really seen that investment on the scale that I think it needs to happen, but I would really like to.

Georgie: What motivates you? Is there an end goal for your work?

I think solidarity is a huge motivator. When I envision liberation for oppressed peoples I think a lot about how we are stronger together. I want to show up for other people the way I want them to show up for me (i.e. others showing up for trans rights or immigrant rights for me). From a young age, we internalize that we should put down others in an effort to lift ourselves up. It's pretty gross if you think about it, because that doesn't benefit us, but it does benefit our oppressor. This makes me think of the Marxist saying "Workers of the world, unite!" and Audre Lorde's "I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” The more I engage in accessibility the more unlearning I have to do, and the more I unlearn the more determined I feel to put in the work.

Georgie: Who do you do your work for? How does this affect the way you work?

Honestly, I do my work for people with a similar outlook as me: "I really want to be accessible but I have no fucking clue what this is." I was really overwhelmed when I started reading WCAG documentation. So the angle that I try to take is a very playful, approachable, and simple angle.

To be fair, I'm not the first person ever to take WCAG and make it more understandable - several people and organizations on the internet have done this. But I also wanted to give people as many tools as possible to actually take action. Some articles out there will literally say, "it's inaccessible to have background noise. Make sure you don't have background noise." And that's it. Ok?? That doesn't actually tell me what I need to do.

For something like background noise, I try to give more specific, action-oriented tips - you need to find a quiet room and get a good mic. Here are some articles that give acoustic insulation tips. Or try your local library and see if they have a recording studio. Part of me also assumes that people might be doing it all themselves or with a very low budget, they might not necessarily have the organizational or financial support to pull it off, so I want to provide more meaningful support. I’m not always able to be so tangible since I’m trained in design and not in development, but that’s another area I’m hoping to grow in.

Georgie: How does accessibility and disability justice intersect in your eyes?

I've learned a lot from activists such as Alice Wong, Annie Segarra, Liz Jackson, Mia Mingus, Stacey Park Milbern (rest in power), Imani Barbarian, Patty Berne, and other members of Sins Invalid on this topic. Local to Chicago, Carrie Kaufman, Sky Cubacub, Alison Kopit, Bex Leon, and Sandie Yi have been very influential as well.

Accessibility provides the necessary foundation to Disability Justice but many leaders don’t consider them the same thing. Accessibility is the ramp, the ASL interpretation, the big text, etc. - it makes it so that disabled people can be in the room. Disability Justice envisions a world where we are liberated from oppression, and that includes ableism but also capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, racism, etc. This means that disabled people are not only in the room but meaningfully included and community leaders, a vision that Carrie Kaufman shared with me.

Georgie: Part of what you do – and how I discovered your work – is posting access guides on your Instagram (@access_guide_). When did you start doing this and why?

Honestly, instagram just felt like the best way to reach people. I went on a whole thing in 2019 where I was trying to get everyone to write image descriptions. I would post on facebook groups and give them instructions and try to get them to include it in the community guidelines. It wasn't catching on and honestly I think people found me annoying. At that time, Access Guide was in progress but not public yet. At a certain point I just decided I didn't need to finish Access Guide to share it, I just needed to share something with my network and make it cute so it doesn't feel like I'm aggressively coming after people. I had a whole plan to publish a zine and make a website but then I thought no, people need to be accessible now, so I just started posting on instagram and it surprisingly took off.

Georgie: If there was one change that you could encourage people to make to improve their digital accessibility, what would it be?

Can I get two changes? The two most common types of content that people upload are photos and videos. If I were to encourage people to do anything, it would be to describe your images and caption your videos. This would make the internet soooo much more accessible. They can be simple descriptions too. "Me and my friends at the bar" or "my dog playing at the park." I write really detailed descriptions because I have the spoons to do so (Georgie: you can read about spoon theory here) and because I produce visual content, so the details matter, but long descriptions of everyday photos aren't necessary to be accessible (this is just my way of trying to persuade you to take the 10 seconds to add the description!). Same with captions - you can get an app to automate that or just spend some extra time typing what you say. (Georgie: Also, some social media apps have recently integrated automatic captioning! Here’s how to add captions to your Instagram stories)

And for people who don’t have the spoons to write descriptions, that’s something the community can help with too! I know in Chicago, Bex Leon runs a facebook group called “People’s Image Descriptions” so that’s a great option to crowd-source descriptions and discuss writing techniques.

Georgie: Do you ever meet any resistance or criticism of your work? How do you deal with it?

Only a couple times. The Facebook group disagreement I mentioned earlier - we just compromised that I could post accessibility suggestions but they wouldn't be part of the community guidelines. And also one time I sent out a survey asking Blind folks for their preferences on image descriptions and someone replied that it was useless and I was virtue signaling. Honestly, I did read over my survey questions and change some of them to be more simple and direct, but I still needed to do the survey. It was difficult to process that I made someone very angry but I think that's actually a very good check for me as a mostly able-bodied person doing accessibility work. I just sort of sat with my sadness and then went back to work.

Georgie: How do you imagine the way we think about and talk about accessibility changing in the future?

I think (and hope) that accessibility will almost be a non-factor because everything is accessible. Right now it feels like a stressful but highly desired thing, "We need to be accessible! But it's so difficult and expensive!" I'm exaggerating a bit and I think a few organizations are already becoming more accessible, such as with Allied Media Conference. But how cool would it be if it were just a normal, everyday thing? And if something were inaccessible, all it took was a quick reminder to fix it, rather than a federal lawsuit and the emotional labor of disabled people everywhere? I think that would be the ideal future.