Slack Gives Shoutout to Simplified Layout Mode
Last Thursday, Global Accessibility Awareness Day, I was alerted to this X post by Slack:
The post links to this page on Slack’s website wherein the Salesforce-owned company details its Simplified Layout mode in its desktop app. As Slack’s post says, the streamlined mode has been built with accessibility in mind—particularly helpful to those who are neurodivergent or cope with intellectual conditions affecting cognition.
“Simplified layout mode for the Slack desktop app helps you focus by showing one section of Slack at a time,” Slack writes about Simplified Layout on its website. “This mode provides simplified layouts and minimizes distractions, which may benefit single-taskers and people using assistive technology.”
In broad strokes, what Slack is doing here is neither novel nor revolutionary. Even for people without disabilities, the Slack user interface, whether on the desktop or on the web, can be inscrutable and incongruous at times. Companies such as Apple, what with its Assistive Access feature on iOS, have rightly recognized there exists a subset of users for whom their ostensibly “simple” UI paradigms remain complex and out of reach in terms of comprehensibility. Hence, that tools like Assistive Access—or, in this case, Slack’s Simplified Layout—have cropped up in the last few years is a conscious choice by platform owners to remedy the inaccessibility for a portion, however tiny it may be in absolute number, by stripping down its software to make it even more conceptually simpler. It’s also worth noting this particular nod to inclusivity is a prime example of accessibility’s return on investment being immaterial; to wit, companies like Apple and Slack care not about the financial coats it incurs to allocate resources to building something like Simplified Layout. It’s obvious the target demographic for the functionality is a fraction of the fraction who use accessibility software, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is something like Simplified Layout (or Assistive Access) worthwhile because it diversifies the platform even further by providing a service to those who can truly benefit from it. Put another way, tools like Simplified Layout exemplify what GAAD co-founder Joe Devon recently told me about why accessibility awareness is so crucial: it’s not only good for users, it’s also good for business. The more flexible and richer one’s product is, the more users one attracts—and the disability community comprises a lot of potential users to which companies can cater.
Assistive Access, by the way, is coming “later this year” to Apple’s TV app.
