November 25, 2024
As the internet is becoming increasingly imperative to function, it’s also becoming apparent that the digital sphere is not quite ready to take on the task. Lynn Priestley (SCI '23), a freelance designer and former digital narrative and interactive design (DNID) student, is working to ensure that digital spaces––recognized now as public spaces––are as accessible as possible.
“I think it’s very easy to forget that not everyone accesses the internet in the same way,” Priestley says. As a disabled person themselves, Priestley knew they wanted to work with the disabled community. They were introduced to accessibility in design through books like Mismatch by Kat Holmes and Design Meets Disability by Graham Pullin around the same time they discovered DNID.
“Given the fact that everyone’s abilities shift with time (whether by illness, injury, or age),” says Priestley, “we need to be making spaces accessible [for those who are living with disability] now and all the people who will join the disability community in the future.”
While accessibility is a necessity, it can oftentimes be viewed as extra work. Priestley believes this idea is centered around the myth that disabled people are so small a minority that it’s unnecessary to cater to them.
“In reality,” as Priestley says, “around 20% of the world’s population live with disability, and almost all of us need access to the internet to live our lives. Job postings, e commerce, healthcare portals/telehealth—all of that is increasingly moving online.”
Accessibility is beginning to be viewed as a more fundamental practice, but there is a lack of the proper skills and knowledge in the field. For students and professionals looking to develop these skills, Priestley suggests an incremental approach, implementing something new to each project. For example, researching and utilizing fonts accessible for neurodivergence and/or low vision on your resume, and then using that same knowledge and accompanying it with accessible visuals on your portfolio or website, such as adding alt text to images or discovering color palettes optimized for contrast levels or colorblindness.
“My favorite part of DNID was the fact that we were learning technical skills but applying them in deeply creative ways,” outlines Priestley. DNID is the product of a partnership between SCI and the Department of English with the Dietrich School that combines fundamental technical knowledge with the foundations of English composition and media studies. Priestley describes a humanities class project where they utilized Python skills developed in a SCI course to code a simulator of Panopticon. “DNID teaches how to make, and how to think about the ethics and impacts of what we make, which I think is equally, if not more, important in the age of ‘move fast, break things.’”
To learn more about or from Lynn Priestley, you can find their portfolio here or reach out to them directly at cap189@pitt.edu for inquiries about design education or accessibility.