About two Christmases ago, my partner got me a Lego set of a racing car. I love legos and have so since I was a kid. When you grow up though, life gets in the way of having fun. Which is why it was only last night that I managed to find the time to build the racing car.
So here I was sat on the couch, manual in front of me and I started pulling apart the plastic bag marked "1." I went through it step by step and slowly but surely the car was starting to take shape. I didn't really understand it at first. How could this lead to a car? Where are the wheels? Where's the steering? The roof?
Instead of all that, the first 20 or so steps had me laying brick upon brick that made no sense. Why on Earth am I putting this here? What does it matter if the piece is brown or black? Three-long or two? No one's going to see any of it once we put the roof on.
I stuck with it nonetheless. And about an hour later, give or take a few minutes for a setback where I had to backtrack a few steps because I missed a piece, I was looking at a nice racing car, wheels, steering and roof.
Legos is one of the things where I can just 100% zoom in and focus. Everything else fades away and time just gets away from me.
Accessibility is another. It does the same thing to my brain. It locks me in, shuts everything else out and the noise disappears until it's just me and the problem I'm looking at.
But there's also another thing that brings accessibility and legos together for me.
The Lego set, any Lego set, most of it, like accessibility, is invisible. The work that makes a product experience seamless is buried under the surface. Just like those brown bricks nobody sees once the roof goes on. But if you start pulling those out, the whole thing falls apart.
When accessibility is missing, people notice. It's a button they can't reach or a page that won't work with their screen reader. That's the brown brick someone pulled out or didn't even put in. The whole thing starts to wobble. The more brown bricks you ignore, the weaker the end product becomes, until it all comes crashing down.
A lot of accessibility work feels like those first 20 steps. We're adding a form label here, fixing a colour contrast there and it feels like placing a brown brick in the dark. Nobody's going to see this. Maybe it doesn't even matter.
But it does! Someone will feel it. Maybe not in the way you'd notice. But they'll feel it when it isn't there.
But when we do it right, with accessibility, nobody notices. I think that's exactly the point.