The next accessibility revolution is time

We have gotten considerably better at recognizing that places can be inaccessible.

A building with stairs but no ramp excludes some people. A video without captions excludes others. Narrow doorways, inaccessible bathrooms, and websites that cannot be navigated with a screen reader all create barriers between people and the things they want or need to do.

We are still learning, sometimes grudgingly, to design around those barriers. But there is another form of accessibility we talk about much less often: Time can be inaccessible too.

A class that requires real-time participation assumes your brain will cooperate during those particular fifty minutes. A doctor’s office that only accepts phone calls between 8 and 4 assumes you can make a phone call during that window. A livestream assumes that being able to watch means being able to watch right now.

Even many accommodations preserve this assumption. You don’t have to come into the office, but you do have to appear on Zoom at 8:30. You can attend the conference remotely, but only while it is happening. You can participate in the discussion from home, but the conversation will disappear when the meeting ends.

For many disabled and chronically ill people, that’s only half an accommodation.

Bodies don't keep business hours

My body does not respect my calendar.

I can plan what I want to do. I can arrange my workspace, gather what I need, charge my devices, and set aside the time. What I cannot do is guarantee what kind of body I will wake up in.

Pain changes. Migraines happen. Medications affect alertness. Some days my brain works beautifully while my body stages a minor insurrection. Other days I have the physical capacity to do something but cannot summon the cognitive machinery required for it.

This doesn’t mean I can’t participate in the world, but I can’t always participate at the world’s preferred time.

A person who cannot reliably work from 9 to 5 may still be capable of doing excellent work. Someone who cannot sit through a two-hour meeting may be perfectly capable of reading the transcript, thinking about the issues, and providing useful input later. A student who struggles to formulate an answer instantly in a classroom discussion may write an insightful response that evening.

We routinely mistake inability to perform on demand for inability to perform. They aren’t the same thing, and disability isn’t the only reason.

Parents have to work around children’s schedules. Shift workers sleep while the rest of the world is conducting business. Someone grieving may be perfectly functional for two hours and useless for the next four. Pregnancy can turn an ordinary afternoon into an urgent appointment with the nearest horizontal surface. The customer service department may only be open during working hours, when the person who needs it has to be at their own job.

The tyranny of right now

To be fair, some things have to be done right away. If my appendix is about to burst, I would strongly prefer that my surgeon not respond to the situation within the next three business days.

Also, some conversations benefit enormously from people occupying the same moment. Brainstorming can be more energetic in real time. Teaching sometimes depends on immediate interaction. Friendship would be considerably less satisfying if every conversation operated like nineteenth-century correspondence.

But what I’m suggesting is that we stop requiring Tuesday at 2 p.m. when Tuesday at 2 p.m. isn’t actually necessary.

A remarkable amount of modern life still operates synchronously just because that’s how we’ve always done it. Classes require attendance because that used to be the only way you could listen to the lecture. Conferences disappear after they end because an event has traditionally been something you attend while it occurs.

Customer service requires a phone call because somewhere, apparently, there is a constitutional requirement that changing an account must involve listening to hold music.

Then the pandemic forced us to conduct an enormous experiment.

Millions of people discovered that work could happen without everyone being in the same building. Classes could be streamed and recorded. Documents could be collaboratively edited without six people sitting around a table.

We learned that location was more flexible than we thought. The next step is realizing that time can be, too.

Asynchronous access is still access

An asynchronous society wouldn’t mean everyone drifting through life, working only when inspiration strikes. It would mean separating things that genuinely require simultaneous participation from things we’ve merely become accustomed to doing that way.

Give employees a window for completing work instead of requiring them to be visibly online every minute that work is occurring. Allow patients to schedule appointments online instead of requiring a phone conversation. Let customer service happen through email or messaging. Build deadlines around when something actually needs to be completed, rather than when we have traditionally demanded it.

And most importantly, stop treating delayed participation as lesser participation.

That part may be the hardest.

We have cultural ideas about what engagement looks like. Engaged people show up. They raise their hands. They answer quickly. Presence becomes evidence of commitment. Speed becomes evidence of competence.

In reality, someone who takes twelve hours to respond may have spent considerably more time thinking about the question than someone who answered in twelve seconds.

Changing who gets heard

There is another advantage to this that goes beyond physical stamina.

Real-time conversation rewards a particular kind of communicator. You have to process what someone else is saying, formulate your response, decide when to enter the conversation, recognize social cues, and speak before the discussion moves on. For some people, that’s effortless.

For others, it is an elaborate cognitive obstacle course.

Autistic people may need additional processing time. People with ADHD may lose the conversational thread. Someone with anxiety may know exactly what they want to say ten minutes after the meeting ends. People with speech disabilities may communicate more easily in writing. Introverts may produce better ideas when they have time to think.

Give everyone access to a persistent written discussion and something interesting happens: the fastest voice no longer automatically becomes the loudest voice. People can reread, think, revise, and participate in their own time.

Time flexibility is often cheap

One of the most frustrating things about inaccessible systems is that some barriers are difficult and expensive to remove. Old buildings really can be hard to retrofit. Transportation infrastructure costs money. Sometimes accessibility requires significant engineering, construction, or staffing.

Time flexibility isn't like this. Recording something that is already being streamed requires little additional infrastructure. Leaving a discussion forum open costs almost nothing. Accepting an emailed question instead of requiring someone to ask it live may cost nothing at all.

The biggest barrier isn’t technological, it's philosophical. We have decided that the person should adapt to the schedule rather than the schedule adapting to the person.

That’s how inaccessible design often works. The staircase looks unavoidable until someone builds a ramp. The printed page stands alone until someone creates an audiobook. The office looks inevitable until millions of people work from home.

And the 10 a.m. meeting seems necessary until someone asks a question: Why does everyone need to be here at the same time?

Designing for unpredictable humans

The accessibility movement has changed how we think about space. We increasingly understand that a person should not have to possess a particular kind of body to enter a building or use a bathroom. The next accessibility revolution will require us to apply the same principle to time.

A person should not have to possess a body that functions reliably at 9 a.m. to have a job. Nor should they have to have a life free of caregiving, medical appointments, fatigue, pain, insomnia, grief, or interruption to participate fully in society.

The future of accessibility isn’t simply putting ramps in more places. It is giving people more ways to arrive. Sometimes that means entering through another door. Sometimes it means joining from another place. And sometimes it means getting there three hours later.