The Universal Design Concept (UDC) is design framework that aims to be accessible and accepting to the widest range of people. My peers and I examined the Collegia Advisor webpage through a transgender lens to evaluate its inclusivity. Unlike other groups where the physical design layout of the page had a large impact in its accessibility (i.e. disabled individuals), our my group focused more on the acceptability component. We found it rather difficult to put ourselves into the shoes of transgender individuals where social considerations were much more of a factor versus physical constraints.
Our general findings were that the page’s design conformed largely to the ideas of the UDC. The colours and font used were neutral in their styling and did not convey a preference for any specific demographic. The text also did not imply any partiality for certain groups, with its use of gender neutral pronouns. Any aspects of the page that did exclude had to do with the job description, but referred to skills and experiences required for the position and did not discriminate towards transgender peoples. One particular concern that my group members and I did have pertained to the main photo on the web page, whose caption when lingered on with a cursor revealed “man and woman conversation”. We concluded that the designers found an apparent need to identity the gender of the individuals in the picture. Scrolling through other pages on the “Campus Life” domain, we didn’t find any other photo captions where gender was mentioned.
While this one case on the Collegia web page can be read into as being discriminatory, my personal opinion is that the web designer wished to implement the values of UDC by incorporating different genders. The gender binaries of “man” and “woman” used does not stipulate transgender discrimination. Rather, it is possible that the individuals in the photo are transgender. How does one even tell if an individual is transgender, or for that matter, a part of any defined social group (i.e. Aboriginal, disabled) solely based on physical appearance? By judging individuals based on physical appearances to be categorized into different groups is partisan. Stereotypes of these groups have all been socially constructed and by continuing to use them to as indicators to distinguish members of society from one another, are we not guilty of propriety?
This is what brought my group to conclude that even attempting to “walk in someone else’s shoes” is an inherently flawed concept. It assumes two things, both which are dangerous if taken to an extreme. Firstly, as my group members and I do not identify as transgender, our knowledge of transgender people was very much restricted to our stereotyped ideas of what we thought they would feel. Our analysis was therefore largely subjective and speculative, with possibilities for inaccuracies and misrepresentation. Secondly, by framing transgender people as a separate group we automatically assumed binaries. We fabricated a dichotomy of an “us” and a “them”, (similar to how the designers created gender binaries of man and women) which is unnecessary if not discriminatory. So perhaps the most puzzling and paradoxical part the UDC is that in order to be inclusive and we first have be exclusive.