Thinking today about the affordances available to disabled individuals vs. people who have no disability or access challenges. IE, a car allows people to get from one place to another, but blind people may never know the affordance of actually driving a car. A computer is an affordance which allows screen reader users to access pages that are not accessible on mobile. The same goes for other disability types. Something may not work on mobile for them, but if they have access to a computer, they still gain the affordance of a more accessible web and user experience. If you lack computer access, you lose out on the affordance of a more accessible web. When we ask people for help with a given task, that is accessing someone else’s affordance instead of creating our own. So, for example, if we ask someone to use a stove instead of learning to use it ourselves, we are using someone’s working eyes as an affordance instead of using tactile or non-visual cooking methods. Non-visual cooking methods help us create our own affordances. Personally, my goal is to maximize the amount of affordances available to me. But I don’t live with any abled people. I guess I’m finding myself wondering how much I just borrowed my sighted then-husband’s affordances instead of creating my own. It can be easy to overuse someone’s lack of disability as an affordance. Is this something I did to anyone in my family? If so, how? And what can I do to show them I’m a different person now.
https://dequeuniversity.com/class/ux/affordances/defining
Note: This is behind a paywall, but signing in with Google should allow you to view this page of the course only if you do not have an account with Deque.