Ravelry's Accessibility Blunder--and Why You Should Care
The year 2020 has been limping along from one disaster to another, so it should be no surprise that a pillar of the fiber arts community is buried miles deep in its own (completely avoidable) mess.
But it still hurts.
In case you somehow missed it, I’ll do my best to summarize:
In June, Ravelry launched a site redesign. As with any big change, there were both fans and a fair number of users less-than-enamored with it. But unlike with most other Big, Unwelcome Changes on the Internet, there was a third group—people who were physically harmed by the new site. In a matter of days, users were reporting eye strain, migraines, even seizures, triggered after spending just a few minutes on the newly redesigned site.
The new site doesn’t impact me, fortunately. And I am not a doctor. But I am in a camp that advocates for a fairly simple human interaction policy: when someone says something is harming them, you believe them. You acknowledge the harm and you do what you can to mitigate or eliminate it.
Ravelry took a different approach. After making a few minor tweaks to the site, they basically threw up their hands and said “we’ve done all we can.” They provided a toggle to the old site—which can only be activated by navigating through the new site. They stopped responding to feedback, shut down discussion threads, and disabled/deleted comments on social media. Cassidy insisted that “a doctor who specializes in seizures and migraines” said the site was fine. She called users who reported problems liars. Calls to hire a expert to analyze the site and pinpoint the necessary changes have been ignored. A letter signed by over 300 designers calling on Ravelry to address the issues was met with a trite, dismissive reply.
Ravelry doesn’t seem to care. They like their site the way it is, and refuse to take straightforward steps to address problems or to acknowledge the hurt they’ve caused. From a business that has always (seemingly) upheld values like inclusion and diversity, this reaction is doubly disappointing.
But, as long as you can still use the site, why should you care?
For starters, because Ravelry is such an essential hub for the fiber arts community, it has a LOT of power. You could reasonably argue that the knitting renaissance and active fiber arts community of the early 21st century are due in large part to its very existence. Independent pattern design literally could not be what it is without Ravelry. And as someone wise* once said, with great power comes great responsibility. Ravelry has a responsibility to the fiber arts community, and excluding members of that community due to their disabilities is ableist and shameful—particularly when the problem can be addressed simply by consulting a web accessibility expert, a step which should’ve been taken long before the new site launched. (Too expensive? Hey, I get it, trust me. But how many of their 8 million members would’ve stepped up to crowdfund a consultant if asked?)
And while Ravelry’s team created and maintains a valuable resource that is offered to the community for free, a lot of it was built on the backs of their members. Feeding Ravelry’s databases, moderating the forums, editing and correcting pattern and yarn pages—all of this is/was done by volunteers. Ravelry owes a lot to its members—members it has turned its back on.
Ravelry is, in many instances, synonymous with knitting—do you really want your hobby or business associated with this behavior?
Because of the wealth of information it contains, the way it has centralized an Internet’s worth of fiber arts resources and activities into a single, easily-navigable hub, the number of businesses that depend on it to exist, Ravelry is almost impossible to replicate. To do so would take years. While we should all feel disappointed, and even angry, with Ravelry and its team, ultimately it is in all of our best interests to push Ravelry to fix this problem, rather than looking to alternatives that simply do not and will not—in the short term, at least—meet our needs.
And to do that, we all need to work together—including those of us who aren’t impacted by the redesign.
So, if they’re not listening, what can we do?
As with pretty much the entire world, we need to hit them where it counts: their wallet.
This approach is not without risks—most indie designers cannot maintain their businesses without Ravelry sales. (And we’ve already discussed how underpaid we are to begin with.) I certainly don’t want to see anyone going out of business. But until Ravelry faces some concrete consequences of their inaction, they have no incentive to change. (I mean, other than being good humans, and that’s clearly not working out.)
A two pronged approach may give us some leverage:
First, don’t stop supporting your favorite indies—but take your business elsewhere when you can. Most designers are already offering their patterns on at least one other platform (Lovecrafts, Payhip, Etsy) or their personal websites. You can still use Ravelry to search for patterns, log your projects, chat in the forums—just don’t shop through them, if you can avoid it. (No, the pattern won’t be in your Ravelry library. Keep your receipt, and if and when Ravelry has fixed this mess, email the designer and ask them to add it manually, if you’re so inclined.)
No Ravelry advertising. Whether you’re a designer, tech editor, yarnie, whatever, if at all possible, STOP advertising on Ravelry. Take your ad dollars elsewhere for a couple months, or save them to do a big ad buy if and when the site is fixed.
A full 90% of Ravelry’s revenue comes from ads (54%) and pattern sales (34%), according to their own data as of 2018. If we can make a reasonable dent in that, then we are better positioned to push for the needs of our members experiencing these negative health impacts from the new site to be met.
Do I actually think this is going to work? Honestly, no. It requires a solidarity we like to imagine dwells within our community but is more aspiration than reality.
But it’s probably the best hope we’ve got. And I’d be very happy to be proven wrong.
While Ravelry continues to exclude members experiencing the ill effects of its redesign, I will be avoiding the site as much as possible. You can also find MediaPeruana Designs patterns on Payhip and LoveKnitting. Any marketing materials I send out will link to those alternate platforms, and I am in the process of switching out links throughout my website. Any discount codes that are active on Ravelry will also be active on Payhip. (And right now, to encourage you to check out my shop there, you can save 15% on your pattern purchase on Payhip only with code PAYHIP15, through the end of the month.)
*Voltaire; or alternately, Spiderman’s Uncle Ben