Yesterday, I wrote about compassion and empathy. I didn't define either of these, thinking everyone knows these things. Maybe so. Or maybe not. So here goes.
Empathy is your ability to understand what someone else is experiencing. It's not feeling sorry for someone. That's sympathy. And it's not the same as compassion either.
Sympathy is feeling bad for someone from a distance. Empathy is understanding what they're going through. Compassion is empathy plus action, even when we don't really relate to what they're going through. It's when understanding moves you to actually do something about it.
Think of it like this.
Your friend tells you they're stressed about money. Sympathy is saying "uh, that's tough." Empathy is understanding the knot in their stomach when bills arrive and the way it colours everything else in their life. Compassion is you offering to help.
The thing is, empathy isn't automatic. It takes effort on your part. Effort to really listen, to ask questions and be willing to see the world differently than you do right now.
Now, say you're building a website.
Empathy means understanding what it's actually like for people with disabilities to use the web. Not what you imagine it's like. What it's actually like.
And this is where most people get it wrong.
They follow the advice of imagining they're blind and trying to use a website. Someone suggests they navigate their site with just a keyboard to understand visual impairments. They close their eyes. They maybe blindfold themselves. And they fumble around with a screen reader for five minutes. Naturally, they feel frustrated. They think "right, now I understand."
They don't.
That approach is pretty useless. Here's why.
If you're cosplaying disability for five minutes whilst knowing you can stop whenever you want, that's not neither here nor there. A person who is blind cannot open their eyes when it gets difficult. You can. Someone with motor disabilities can't suddenly use a mouse when the keyboard navigation is shit. You can.
Worse, these exercises often lead to the wrong conclusions.
You might think "well, I managed to do it eventually, so it's fine."
But you're missing years of expertise. Disabled people who use assistive technology every day are often incredibly skilled at it. You can't ever replicate that in your brief experiment. If something was hard for you as a beginner, it might be trivial for them. And if something seems easy to you, it might actually have massive barriers you didn't notice because you don't know what to look for.
So let's get back to the definition of empathy.
It's understanding what someone is experiencing by listening to them.
Start listening.
Talk to people with disabilities. Read what they write about their experiences. Watch videos of real people using assistive technology. Hire people to test your sites and pay them properly for their expertise.
When someone tells you "this doesn't work for me," don't explain how it should work. Don't suggest workarounds. Say "I see what that's like. I'm so glad you told me." And then fix it.
The goal isn't to imagine yourself into someone else's experience. Empathy in accessibility isn't about feeling what others feel. That's impossible.
Instead, try to respect their lived experience enough to listen, learn and build accordingly.
And to close this off, the best explainer about empathy I've come across is this video from Dr Brené Brown on Empathy vs Sympathy.