One drizzly morning in 1988 I arrived at the infamous San Francisco DMV office.

There were two lines for service, one noticeably shorter than the other, and since I was already running late for work, I stepped into that shorter line. At my turn at the counter, I completed the paperwork for a state identification card instead of a driver's license, which didn't seem that important to me at the time, since it'd been already two years since I last drove a car, and now I lived in SF, which had passable public transit. It wasn't this grand activist moment for me, this kind of Damascus Road flash of insight--no, it was just my deciding that driving wasn't very important to me.

And I was right. Not driving proved more important.

Try getting around the United States without a motor vehicle.

Try it for a while. Try it while also attempting to sustain a career, relationships, household, your sanity. You will learn, as I did, very important lessons about how user experience can be structured to assist or thwart your journey.

Here are some of my discoveries:

Places with more than one way to access them have greater vitality.

As Jane Jacobs pointed out, small city blocks encourage walking and transit use. Places which permit access only by motor vehicle are dead-feeling and often moribund, which is why a high WalkScore is becoming so attractive to potential buyers.

In Web terms, how many of us enjoy visits to sites which permit access only through needless Flash intros or mandatory registration? These pages act like those guard kiosks in suburban gated communities. Or how about the sites with no provision for usage by mobile devices?

No, I am not going to watch your pointless branding animation, nor wait for your bloated JavaScript form validation script to load: I'm going to shop at your competitor's site.

You can't "set it and forget it."

All over the United States, roads and transit systems are crumbling into unusability because of deferred maintenance. The jagged potholes in my neighborhood act as the speed bumps the City of Oakland can't commit to installing in this dire period for municipal budgets. A couple blocks away, the once-handy AC Transit bus system runs fewer and fewer buses, thanks to neverending budget cuts. Being stranded for 45 minutes waiting for the next bus after missing one by just seconds is a pretty common experience for us commuters.

Out there on the Web are so many undermaintained, tatty sites that I really don't need to link to them. Outdated copyright date on the footer? "Best viewed in Netscape" graphic? Visual design so old it's on the cusp of being retro-cool? Those are easy to remedy--if you commit time and money to fixing them.

Accessibility is pricey to build in...and exorbitant to bolt on later.

When the Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990, there was the usual unappealing backlash of nay-sayers claiming that the Act's provisions were merely nice-to-have and too expensive to require. Despite that, the built environment of the United States changed rapidly to include curb cuts, ramps, and wheelchair-accessible bathrooms. Building owners whimpered about the expense of retrofitting for ADA-compliance; new construction posed the advantage of having these features built in from the start.

The question of Web accessibility arose pretty early in the medium's history, but remains incompletely answered. Too many site owners consider accessibility a "nice-to-have, but...", or something at which you can toss a few inadequate "alt tags" and be done with it, whereas true accessibility requires assessing how your application or site is used in different situations: can this site be used without a keyboard? Without a monitor? Without color contrast?

Making something accessible also makes it relevant to use cases we can't anticipate. When I injured my knee in 1992, I sure appreciated those buildings with elevators and ramps. When I started browsing the Web on my Palm Treo in 2005, I admired those sites with text-heavy, low-graphics means of interacting with them.

You're free to think you don't need to accommodate a diversity of users, of course, just as you're free to require a motor vehicle to access your physical location. And you're free to destroy your own brand with slipshod UX. It's a free world.

Tags: accessibility, development, environment, innovation, tools