The beauty of partnership and teamwork to improve access
Morgan Murrah
There was a phrase I used back in the day. It came from my heritage, and inspired by the ideals I learned from being the son of a vietnam veteran who was drafted and resisted war afterwards for the rest of his life.
Neither Master Nor Slave - an emotive phrase that expressed a value for peership, collaboration, over top down power structures.
In this world we have a few roles. We are either a breaker of chains or we are chained, or we put the chains on others. Sometimes these roles change, and develop, and change back again. We contain multitudes.
What does this mean for my volunteer work on access
It influences me how I think and act about certain causes, largely all in my volunteer spare time.
I volunteer unpaid for:
- Whatcom Public Hospital .org
- Whole Washington
- World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
These approximate to causes which are broadly specifically:
- Local
- State
- International
I have been a volunteer on website development for causes for over a decade. All almost all mostly healthcare focused and related.
And I have decided, there can only be one role in these environments:
Break the chains wherever you can, in partnership with peers
Ideally, you can always find a way to include Disabled people early or earlier in your ideation process, development and execution to build a lasting product or website. I am making a healthcare website for the County area where I live. From the very start I am partnering with peers who use Screen Readers to access websites to make sure its clear and navigable as possible with Semantic HTML. No Overlay, No fluff, just the source code that allows a reader to read.
Ive done it before, with several websites that shifted the needle. The tip of the spear is those who access differently. Everyone benefits, necessary for some. This is a practice which adds real value, practically and in principle. Qualitative and quantitative as they say.
Testing early for accessibility uncovers issues when they are cheapest to fix. Early accessibility testing also creates a space for continuous feedback from real users — screen reader users, keyboard-only users, and people with cognitive differences. Engaging them early improves usability for everyone, surfaces edge cases developers might miss, and builds empathy into the product development process.