Dismissing audience members as edge cases

One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to inclusive speaking typically occurs when I discuss the needs and expectations of audience members with disabilities with professional speakers. At some point or another, almost invariably, someone who’s otherwise well-intentioned will refer to these needs and expectations as a series of edge cases.

I’ll tell you right off the bat, the words “edge cases” just make my skin crawl. They just do.

What they mean is that the particular needs of people with disabilities relate to unlikely situations that are far from what would otherwise be considered a direct or obvious business priority. Their focus automatically goes to the expected effort needed to make their content accessible, as opposed to the benefits of including more people in the conversation. I can hardly blame them.

Designing a presentation or a workshop so that it works well for a potential client makes sense, when that particular client represents your expected, average audience member. But what happens when that same potential client (let’s call him John), turns out to be visually impaired, deaf, or dyslexic?

All of a sudden, John no longer fits within the parameters of what you would call expected, or “normal”. Yet John is still, in every other aspect, a perfect representation of your target audience. John just also happens to be blind. Or deaf. Or dyslexic. Because of this particular attribute related to his disability, John is no longer perceived as a person, he is now perceived as a problem to address, or dismiss.

John no longer fits the mold and becomes the perfect representation of an edge case.

In inclusive communication terms, edge cases are situations that threaten to cause a breakdown in the conversation (or the experience of that conversation), as they introduce an unlikely set of parameters. As an example, if you were to design a workshop, you would probably think of your typical audience members as people who can see, hear, and move around the room. But what if a participant could not do one or more of those things? Can the workshop support that individual? Is the conversation even built to support that kind of stress, or would it just fall flat on its face, and bring the audience member down with it?

For many people first being introduced to inclusive speaking, accessibility considerations and the needs and expectations of people with disabilities are one such perfect example of edge cases. Just how many blind people ever attend our events, anyway? What’s the likelihood of someone with ADHD or dyslexia ever sitting through our content? When was the last time someone with a mobility impairment used our website? And are any of these people even worth marketing to?

Those of us in the know understand that inclusive speaking principles benefit everyone, not just people who have disabilities. But still, disability in Canada is much more prevalent than we think! Even when we only focus on people with disabilities (big emphasis on the word people, here), statistics show that over 20% of working-age Canadians have disabilities and collectively control over $55 billion annually, in purchasing power.

Much larger than we think

And what about other demographic groups that are also often left out because we’re quick to dismiss them as edge cases? People over the age of 50, whose senses slowly start to deteriorate due to ageing, non-native speakers who might struggle with the words that we use, folks who end up being marginalized by our use of technology, or by the way we deliver our content?

What about the close relatives, loved ones, and colleagues of the people whom we leave out of the conversations, and who might also grow to resent the speakers and trainers that are not inclusive of the people they care about?

Start factoring in all of these potential edge cases, and you’ll quickly realize that they add up pretty fast. And before we know it, we are talking about a much bigger group than any of us actually realize… What does that mean for professional communicators trying to appeal to all of their audience?

Ultimately, edge cases define the boundaries of who and what we care about. And while I’m ok with anyone dismissing a thing (the what), I guess that I’m much less comfortable with the idea of dismissing a person (the who).

There is much need in design to recognize that a one-size-fits-all approach to inclusion can never truly work. That designing for the extremes of human experiences is the only way to truly be inclusive of everyone. So, if you speak in front of audiences, if you communicate professionally, or if you have some degree of influence over large groups of people, I urge you to stop referring to edge cases when it comes to accessibility and the needs and expectations of people with disabilities.

And if you’re a person with a disability yourself, then I respectfully suggest that you no longer accept to be labeled that way by communication professionals who, frankly, should know better.

Embracing the idea of stress cases instead of edge cases goes a long way in recognizing the importance of inclusion. As we begin to think this way, then we let the stresses happening at the extremes of the spectrum of human experiences influence how each situation will be lived in the middle of that same spectrum, where our average audience members supposedly live.

In other words, if we design our presentations for people who live on the far ends of the bell curve, then we can trust that the experiences we design will also naturally work better for those of us who live closer to the middle of that same bell curve.

Todd Rose, author of “The End of Average“, has demonstrated, thanks to the pioneer work of researchers such as Gilbert S. Daniels and Adolphe Quetelet, that the very idea of the average user is flawed, and that in fact, the average audience member doesn’t even exist. It’s embarrassing that despite this documented knowledge, most of us are still operating from the limiting belief that appealing mainly to a perceived target audience means we are marketing to the right people.

If instead, speakers opened up their communication channels to the people who live on the extremes of human experiences, then a lot more people would feel like they matter and that they belong…

Words do matter, and whether we realize it or not, the words we use and the context in which we use them reveal a lot more about ourselves than we realize. Not everyone picks up on these signals but these words are signals, nonetheless. Only by making changes to the way we respond to the challenges introduced by the needs of people with disabilities can we hope to truly affect change in society.

And that begins by stopping to dismiss people with disabilities as edge cases, and rather, recognizing their experiences as inspiration to better understand how to craft an experience that can be truly inclusive of everyone.