# Stress: A Factor To Consider During Accessibility Research
*Samuel Proulx, Accessibility Evangelist at Fable*  
*August 23, 2023*

A few years ago, while relaxing in my back yard, I managed to miss a porch step; I fell, and my knee hit the brick, shattering. As I was taken by ambulance to the hospital, tired, in pain, and upset, I was the most stressed I’ve ever felt. I’ll never forget getting checked in by the nurse. One of the first things she did was to ask me my home phone number. Now, my home phone number hasn’t changed in over 30 years. Normally I can recite it in my sleep. But in that place, at that time, I couldn’t remember it for the life of me. I decided I’d unlock my phone, open up my contacts, and check my own number. My phone asked for my pin. The same pin I’ve been entering multiple times a day for 10 years. I couldn’t remember that, either.  The home phone number field on the form had to be left blank. 

I’m telling this story because I think we all have a tendency to drastically underestimate the ways that stress affects us. I’m not immune to the problem. Very early on in my career, I was making an online presentation on a platform I’d never used before. It was almost entirely accessible, but three important buttons (toggle camera, toggle mic, and share screen) were completely unlabelled. No big deal, I thought. It’s just three buttons! I can memorize the order of three buttons, no problem. I do it all the time! The day of the presentation came, and I froze completely. Was my microphone unmuted? Was it the first or second button to toggle my camera? Suddenly, those buttons that I had perfectly memorized just hours before were a complete mystery to me. I panicked, pressing buttons randomly, eventually disconnecting myself from the platform entirely. It took me ten minutes to breathe, get reconnected, and relearn the buttons. But I never did manage to get completely comfortable, and the presentation was nowhere near as good as it should have been. 

We talk a lot about permanent, temporary, and situational disabilities. But what we often don’t think about is how those three types of disabilities can interact. My situational disability (stress) caused things that would normally be easy for me to accomplish with my permanent disability (blindness) to suddenly become not just difficult, but utterly impossible. When we’re thinking about how accessible something is, I would encourage us to stop for a minute and ask ourselves: would this still be accessible to me if I’m upset, panicked, or stressed? Would this still be usable to me on some of the worst days of my life? Until we ask ourselves those questions, we’ll continue to create things that can only be used by some of the people some of the time, not all of the people all of the time. 

One of the best ways we can do that is by working with a variety of people with disabilities, with a variety of assistive technologies and abilities. If that’s something you need, get in touch with us at Fable!

--- 

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stress-testing-accessibility-samuel-proulx/](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stress-testing-accessibility-samuel-proulx/)