When someone gets frustrated trying to use your website with a screen reader, how does your team react? Do they respond with empathy and curiosity, or do they get defensive?
When a team member shares their personal experience with cognitive disabilities, do others lean in to understand or subtly dismiss their perspective?
If these things make you uncomfortable, you might have an emotional intelligence gap.
Many teams treat accessibility like a technical challenge. It's just a set of code requirements they need to satisfy. Add some ARIA labels, slap some alt text on images, make sure your headings are in order.
But accessibility is more than that. It requires deep emotional understanding. It demands that teams collectively develop the capacity to perceive, understand and respond to the diverse emotional experiences of users with disabilities.
Without it, you're just ticking off boxes. That might be good enough for the short term. But it's certainly not something your PR team can brag about.
Collective emotional intelligence isn't about being nice. You need to create an environment where everyone on your team can process the emotional weight of accessibility work together. You need to be sure that when there is frustration with the challenges of accessibility, and there will be, you meet it with support rather than judgement.
We talked about technical agility last time. That is an important metric, but to be an effective team you need to be more than just technically proficient. You need to be emotionally attuned to both your users and each other.
Accessibility work can be emotionally demanding. Recognise that and develop the collective capacity to handle that demand together as a team.
You could look at things like:
- the presence of emotional language in accessibility documentation
- the number of user stories that include emotional context
- sharing personal experiences related to accessibility
- user interview questions beyond technical issues
- direct user engagement sessions
If all this sounds a bit wishy-washy, it's because it is. You can't precisely measure it, touch it or see it. But it's there and it plays a pretty vital role.