Inaccessible Technology Quickly Widens Lifetime Inequalities
It’s 6 o’clock and the working day is over. You’re already looking forward to the coding webinar you signed up to tomorrow. With a cup of refreshing tea beside you, you get going on the admin jobs that need doing. Starting with doing your banking.
As scenarios go, this is hardly a radical one. It’s one many of us encounter on a day to day basis. What I want you to consider is it’s that very fact — that we encounter situations like this almost constantly — that makes it so important. I want to take a closer look at the timeline leading up to it, and the timeline leading away from it. And I want to suggest that this, combined with the frequency of such events, provides a fundamental challenge to the way technology, and society as a whole, thinks about accessibility and, specifically, the consequences of inaccessibility.
Let’s work backwards first. Most people know what it’s like to feel tired after a hard day at work. But, as my spouse often comments, “When people say ‘we all feel tired at the end of the week’, the fact most of them can then go out for a drink with friends or relax in the bath with a book shows they really don’t feel it the same way we (neurodivergent people) do.”
That observation makes a key point. What most people experience as an inconvenience, some of us experience as debilitating. Banking is a very good example of this. Whether it’s multi-factor authentication required to carry out transactions, or trying to ask a question using webchat because the telephone is inaccessible to you, the number of what feel like additional steps you need to take, the nature of those steps, and the fact that some of them (justifying why you need to ask a question by webchat by referring to intimate medical details, knowing that you will often have to repeat it), the process of doing basic banking takes huge levels of resources.
We might all put “do banking” in the diary. The above is why for some of us we do so not just to remind ourselves to do it but because we know we need to carry out an extensive planning process (taking up yet more resources).
So, to go back to the timeline leading up to “doing the banking”, let’s spell out what that means.
First, because we know the minimum resources the task will take, we need to clear space in advance. And because too often we know that things will take more than the minimum (those repeated questions arising from being passed from pillar to post by people who think data protection means never passing on your details rather than passing them on as and when you ask), we need to clear even more time.
This means two things. First, we cannot do anything else that day. I know that some tasks mean I need to book a day of annual leave before I do them. That, of course, has more knock-on effects that exacerbate inequality. I start with fewer mental resources than my neurotypical peers. Because I have to book leave simply to be able to do basic admin, I get less genuine rest than they do. Over years, this adds up to performance, income, and ultimately health differences. And second, it means that when “life happens”, it can have catastrophic knock-on effects. Even the smallest of “urgent” tasks that just has to be done as soon as it happens means that vitally important tasks you had inked in simply cannot be done — and that is how deadlines get missed with all the attendant consequences. Think about that next time you tell someone that something’s urgent.
And that brings us to the second point, which is that life does happen. And even if it’s not at a level that renders other tasks impossible, it takes very little to have a huge impact on how effectively we can do tasks. It might be something as unavoidable and seemingly small as a neighbour doing their lawnmowing that day causing sensory overload (and no, in such situations, “just going out” would cost us MORE than staying in and getting overloaded).
This means that we are more likely to make mistakes when we do the task, each of which has consequences.
All of these elements leading up to a “simple” task increase the chance of disengagement. And disengagement from essential services has devastating consequences on lives, often for years to come. Simply knowing how hard a task will be, and the impact of it going wrong, adds to the possibility of disengagement. Even if the likelihood of disengaging in any one instance is tiny, over the course of years — in which these situations crop up on sometimes a weekly basis — the likelihood becomes huge. Here as with other consequences of “friction”, it is the sheer frequency of situations in which we encounter it that makes the consequences so devastating.
When service providers think about the consequences of friction (as anything other than a blip in user experience), they naturally think of disengagement. But for those of us on the other side, the consumers, the consequence of hard to use banking technology is not just that we lose access to that service that affects us (though it can have a huge impact). It is all the other things we can’t do because we have thrown the last of our resources at getting the essential tasks don.
Which brings us to the second part of our timeline — the one that stretches forwards.
An important background context for this is a recent report by the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute called Mind the Income Gap. Its findings on the difference in earnings between those with poor mental health and their mentally well peers are eyebrow raising. If you have depression and anxiety, you will, on average, earn 68p for every pound earned by those who don’t, equating to a difference of around £8,400 per year.
If we look at the impact of friction, it becomes very clear, very quickly, how gaps like this could widen very easily.
To go back to my spouse’s observation, if 6 o’clock is when we do our banking, the rest of the evening will be lost. That doesn’t just mean, contrary to what the people who find complex forms an inconvenience might find, that we are unable to do any work. It means we can’t do the nice things either. We can’t go to the pub. Sometimes we just need to sit in the dark and recover.
And that, as we’ve seen before in relation to annual leave, has a knock-on effect on our wellbeing. We find it harder to access support networks, we get less proper rest even though we need more, we are unable to spend time and energy doing things we enjoy because every ounce of energy goes into things we have to do, we get out of our homes less. The result is isolation, loneliness, frustration — conditions bound to make our mental health deteriorate further.
But it also impacte what we can do in the days following, and that brings us back to where we came in. That coding webinar? Ah, well, maybe next time. And that is how our CVs start to lag behind. In order to manage the essentials of life so that we don’t end up losing access to essential services, we use energy that can’t be spent doing things that would give us more skills, or greater opportunities. And the more that happens, the fewer qualifications and less experience we have, so the fewer promotions we achieve, and so we arrive in places where we do not even have the opportunity to develop our talent or fulfil our potential — because those careers are all open only to people who were able to go on the courses and do the evening classes and take on the projects they were able to because accessing the basic things they need like banking and utilities was nothing more than a minor inconvenience.
When I say that the friction in a digital process has a wider impact than just the process itself, this is what I mean. It is the cumulative effect of these frictions that gives our lives different shapes, sets us on different courses, gives us very different destinations — and robs the world of the essential contributions we could make.
I’ll look more later at what we can do about this. But if we really want to empower neurodivergent people, to ensure the world has our best ideas, then we have to take friction seriously as a problem, and we need service providers, policymakers, regulators — and wider society to recognise the need to reduce it wherever possible.
Find out more about how I help organizations with accessibility and creativity at Rogue Interrobang.
