[Dennis]: Please give a warm, Chicago welcome, to Derek Featherstone.
[Applause]
[Derek]: This is a little scary because I have a microphone and a lapel microphone and my presentation remote ... I don't know how this is gonna work. I also like to walk around a lot. I am ready to trip over the cord at some point.
So, I am feather on Twitter if you want to reach out to me there connect there I'd be happy to hear from you. I've got open DMs and like almost nobody sends me DMs. So, like please, send me please not all at the same time though. If you want to connect, feel free to email as well, or you can if you want to get in touch about something you have a question, go to our website simplyaccessible.com, and you can go to the contact page and have a form there and that goes into not just me. I tend to travel quite a bit so it's easier when that that message comes to everybody because then they all know what to do with it while I'm still traveling. I going to be gone the rest of the week in Toronto, so I won't be checking in nearly as much, so feel free to connect, I'd love to hear from you and I just I like talking to people. So it's kind of fun when when you send me messages, just don't get mad if I don't send it back right away.
Alright, this is a gentleman named Henry Butler, and he is a jazz pianist. And one of the things that was sort of a really incredible experience for me was going to this performance that Henry was part of called Sight, Sound, Soul. And it happened in Austin Texas and it was probably the most inclusive event that I've ever been to. It was amazingly incredible. They had taken into account accessibility from as many different perspectives as you as you could imagine. It didn't stop at the ... to have a physically accessible space and we're going to make sure that we have captioning for the performance, they actually went beyond that, and I'd like to share some of that with you.
Now this is ... it was in an old barn type building, but it was redone and it was all refinished inside, it was very accessible. And there was loads of people there, it was quite, quite an incredible experience to see that many people come to this performance. And again, it's called Sight Sounds Soul, which is really kind of this mysterious intriguing thing, like what is what does this actually mean?
And this is the theme. It's not just about Henry, although he's the primary performer. There's a number of other pieces that are part of the performance. So you can see Henry here sitting at his piano with his back to the audience. He's got his sunglasses on he actually looks really cool. It's a red kind of velvet suit, which I think is appropriate for a jazz pianist.
There's also an ASL interpreter there and there is also a person that is doing live captions sitting down next to the ASL interpreter and sitting down next to the live captioner is an audio describer. They have really taken a lot into account here. And it this I'm going to just share it with you and because when I was living this experience, it kind of blew my mind how inclusive it was. So I'm gonna let it play and for those of you they can't see it, there will be an audio description of it coming,
So I asked you to just kind of be patient, it's a couple of slides after this a little bit of the performance, or it's actually the next slide after this performance, so you'll get an audio description almost right away. So you might need to check the volume on this.
[Piano Music]
[Derek]: And I'm gonna move to the next, the next slide, and just kind of pause that there for a minute. The ... I literally I'd never been to a captioned performance before with somebody doing it ... sorry, not a caption performance. Well, I hadn't been to a caption performance and I haven't been to a signed performance before. And I had no idea. I was like, how are they going to sign?
And I don't know how how much you noticed but the ASL interpreter was actually not really interpreting any words at all but she was interpreting a whole lot of other pieces about the performance. One of the very first things that she did ... showing, I don't know if you saw with her left hand, she was showing how Henry was tapping his feet to the music. And so she was kind of reflecting that in what she was showing. And she gets to the point where ... a bit of that clip she's actually almost in time with him and when you can hear his fingers going up and down the keyboard of the piano, she's doing the same thing in the air.
And that ... and I'm getting goosebumps just talking about it because, living that experience was ... to see because it really opened my mind to things I hadn't ever considered before. I was like, why do we need captioning for an instrumental piece? Why do we need interpretation for it? And it became an integral part of the performance. And now, and so of course there was live captioning on the board up there. I think it's about a three line captioning sign.
And now, we're gonna turn to ... this is one of my favorite parts. Celia Hughes is an incredible audio describer, [clears throat] excuse me, and this is what she does for a living and I'm just going to let you have a listen to the way that she describes this. It's really quite fantastic.
[Video]: [Applause]
[Video]: [Woman speaking, describing what Harold is wearing]
[Video]: [Woman describing what Harold is wearing (cont.)]
[Video]: [Woman describing what Harold is wearing (cont.)]
[Video]: [Woman describing what another woman is wearing]
[Video]: [Applause]
[Video]: Harold introducing the next song he is about to play.
[Derek]: Now, I know it got a little bit meta there because we were actually having an audio description and a person doing ASL interpretation of the audio description of the first ASL interpreter. So it kind of got a little bit weird there for a minute, but she painted that picture incredibly well, even to the point of explaining what that noise might be that people might be hearing from overhead. The huge room is cooled by whirling ceiling fans or I can't remember exactly her phrasing. That audio description was just as much a piece of performance art as the person playing the piano was creating. It was integral to everything
Now just when you think ... incredibly inclusive event, it gets even better. You see here the part where Celia was talking about the two large boards of plywood with the six sheets of white paper, and they talked about paint and Carroll with the two pigtails and the bandanna I think in her hair. Here's what happens next and actually throughout almost the entire performance, Carol paints at the exact same time as the musical performance is happening. So I have a few clips of that for you as well.
[Video]: [Music]
[Derek]: So this is at kinda of the beginning. She's kind of laying the background. She's painting slowly as he's playing slowly. And if we move to the next level or kind of later in the performance, this is kind of that that side view and you can see she's looking over her shoulder at Henry to figure out what he's doing.
[Video]: [Music]
[Derek]: When we get to the point where she's actually finishing up the painting and you can see here this is kind of the last song, and you can see that she is painting, you can see that she's done kind of an abstraction of that piano in blue. She's got Henry there, you can actually see right from the beginning where they talked about how Henry's foot was tapping in time for the music. I think Celia even said his his foot pounded the floor ...
... painting and you can see that she's actually reflected that in the painting itself, by showing like multiple legs to convey that motion. Absolutely every aspect of this is crafted and created and they play and when Henry hits his last note she finishes the painting.
[Video]: [Music]
[Video]: [Applause]
[Derek]: And, the painting is finished and they take that painting and they auction it off for his charity. Add to all of that, the fact that Henry has been blind almost his entire life and this is what I think of when I think of inclusion and what that means. This entire experience was handcrafted methodically thought-out and intentionally created to be an inclusive experience.
This is what I want on us to do in digital spaces. Building things for the web, when we're building a mobile app, when we're building creating a kiosk. I mean, I don't want us to paint pictures of the kiosk, I want us to actually make sure that the experiences that we are creating are as well thought-out as this. This is, to me, what inclusion is about and I love this as an example of something for us to kind of strive towards in our work. All the time that you know we talk about accessibility and we talk of being inclusive, but we have some kind of limits on what that is because of decisions that other people have made.
Somebody has decided that this is what accessibility means and this is what inclusion means. I want us to kind of expand that that mindset a little bit and make sure that we are actually thinking about these kinds of things. If you think of design as a process through which we're kind of creating things and refining and then ultimately expressing our intent, that gives us a really kind of far-reaching mandate in terms of creating a great design.
... house in the UK and it's actually a house that's like community housing. It's subsidized housing for people that are in a lower income bracket. And you can see here there's ... it's a house, it's a duplex and they've got this you know front yard that is, you know, I mean, it's not huge, but it's probably 100 feet long and then, it's the width of the the entire house, and it's kind of these rolling hills and you can see the steps on the left hand side, there's multiple levels of steps about six steps each.
And there's a woman that lives there with her child who happens to be in a wheelchair. And they ... because it was community housing and they needed to make sure that it was an accessible entrance, they actually said, well we need to do something about this. And so they looked to make it an accessible entrance. And so what they did was created a ramp ... essentially fills up the entire front yard. It's gray, not the most beautiful steel in the world, and it literally takes up the entire yard. The grass has all been replaced with, I don't know if you can see it, but there's gravel everywhere. And the ramp probably makes one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, maybe eight switchback turns.
Now this ramp meets all the requirements for accessibility. It's the right slope, it's got the right turning radius and the right amount of room to get around a corner if you're in a scooter or in a wheelchair. But it certainly doesn't do anything in terms of maintaining and preserving that back yard. This is kind of ... I mean ... here's other another view of it from the side. And the state local skateboarding ... loves it. They think it's fantastic. This is kind of and this is a view from the house, kind of looking down at the street, where they've literally lost their entire yard.
There's a lot more to the story, but this is kind of like ... this is accessibility as an afterthought, right? They didn't really have a choice, because the only way that they could do it was to build this monstrous ramp. Now, it got the job done, but it was kind of like it was the only requirement instead of one of the requirements. If they had actually had a requirement, that, we need a mechanism to get somebody in the front door accessibly, but also maintain the front yard, they might have come up with very different solutions. They might have created some kind of a lift system or, you know, there might have been many other ways to solve this problem.
It's kind of like, it's accessibility by the book and its accessibility as the only requirement. It's accessibility at the expense of everything else. Now that access is really important. The interesting thing was, the project cost about forty thousand dollars roughly forty thousand dollars US. It was in Britain, so it was something like you know, twenty five thousand pounds or something like that. I think they did some analysis and they actually found out later on that if they had packed up their entire house, paid to pack up the entire house, move them to another location, in the community housing and one of the newer, more recently built houses that was accessible, where the entrance was at ground street level, it would have probably cost them twenty thousand dollars.
And I think they realized that like way too late. They were already in so far that they kind of missed that opportunity. But when we look at accessibility this way, as a by-the-book thing, as a ... anything else, yes, we still get access, but we don't have something that is actually an inclusive, necessarily an inclusive process or an inclusive best outcome. So I want you to kind of be thinking about those types of things as well.
This is a sign at the CNIB in Toronto and they built a new facility several years ago. We went on a tour. And this is the sign for ... just outside their deafblind literacy lab. And there's a whole bunch of things that are really accessible, really obviously accessible about this. One of them is the big, the very large white lettering that's on a dark background. Interestingly enough, those letters and, it's tough to see here, but those letters are recessed, so that somebody can trace those letters with their finger, and read them that way. So if they were just kind of like sublimated and pressed onto the sign, ... have the opportunity to do that. So a nice large high contrast lettering, it's recessed, and then you can see down here, below the main part of the sign, there's this extra part or this part where they've got Braille. And they've got, instead of recessed lettering, they've got raised all-caps lettering, so that somebody could trace those letter forms as well to figure out what room it is. But my favorite part is that where the Braille is and the raised lettering, that piece is on a kind of a piece that protrudes out from the sign at about a 45 degree angle.
And I asked them why, so this is really fascinating, tell me more about that. They said it's really straightforward. We noticed in our old building that people would walk along the hallway a feeling for a sign. They would have their hand on the wall, and they would be feeling for the sign. And when they felt the sign, we saw that they were like dropping their shoulder and had to turn their hand so that they could get a flat ... those raised characters in the Braille. They said, so we just put it on an angle and it means that when as people walk along, it's just a natural reading angle. That's like, brilliant!
That's kind of the thing that I want us to do on the web, right? We thought about making this easy to use. We talk a lot in UX as we want to create delightful and seductive experiences. We talked about creating engagement for someone with with a disability. It might actually be really wonderful to have that as well and not just a thing that passes the minimum level of compliance. That's kind of the way that I'd love for us in this, and I don't mean us, I mean like us to take that to the companies that we work for and advocate for that.
Because I think all of you in this room are probably already thinking along those lines, or would be very ... it's like a very short jump for you to do that. But we report to, that make decisions, those are the ones that we need to kind of think about convincing them that this is the way that we want to go.
So there's two sides, when I spend a lot of time thinking about and working on inclusive design and there's two sides to it.
There's an inclusive design, which means we've created the design that is inclusive. That's an outcome, right? Access or accessibility is an outcome, and I really like to think about inclusive design, the process, right? Inclusive design, too often, ends up being a thing about we're going to create an inclusive design in terms of the outcome. And then, it focuses on code and not the design aspects itself. So let's think about that.
I want you to think about that duality that design is actually a it can be a noun or it can be a verb, right, and in that way we're really thinking of inclusive as the adjective. So accessibility might be the ability to be accessed or readily used by people with disabilities. There's a definition of inclusive design. It's handy. It comes from a British standard. The thing that I love about it the most the design of mainstream products and/or services that are accessible to and usable by as many people as reasonably possible without the need for special adaptation or specialized design. It's a very, I mean, it's a useful definition but it's very much a book academic type definition.
My favorite part of it is the focus on products and/or services. We're often thinking about product in the work that we do and we don't necessarily think about service. There's actually a huge kind of, I don't wanna say movement, but there's there's a large group of people that are working on service design now. And so, my take on a lot of that is ... service design actually mean.
And so, let's look at that with a little bit more of this framework. I look at inclusive UX design as intentional facilitation and a crafting of interactions, touch points, and processes within a product or services ecosystem, Where inclusion is actually a core value. And that to me is the difference about what we're talking about here. These last ... five words, inclusion as a core value, to me makes all the difference. When we incorporate it as a core value into the things that we do, and we're constantly looking at that as a kind of a check point as a thing to keep us grounded in our goal is inclusion as a core value does this live up to that? If we look at that throughout the entire process of what we do, then that changes how we approach things in a few ways.
Another example and then we'll kind of, I can't even tell how long I've been going so I'm just going to keep talking.
This is one that I learned about. It's at the Vancouver Airport in Canada. And, because Canada, they've created this program called "You can do it," and it is, people that are new travelers, but particularly for children with autism. But not just children, but even adults with autism that are taking their first journey on a plane. And they know that one of the things that people that are somewhere on the autistic spectrum, in many ways crave is kind of that, and this is not something that you can say about every person with autism, but there's a predictability to what's going to happen that is very useful for helping people with autism work through new experiences.
So knowing, you know, having that predictability and knowing what they're about to experience can make that less of an anxiety ridden experience, right? So there's probably always going to be some anxiety, but they've actually gone to the point of creating things so that they help reduce that anxiety. And I find this fascinating, they actually created a series of printable checklist as part of a book. So they were printable on their own, but they're actually there's like almost like a coloring book type thing that you would give to, you provide to people to say here's what that journey is about to be like.
And so on this one, going to the gate. So this is, and it's always in the form, I love this form. Because it's a series of four check boxes ... statement about what you need to do in really simple terms, and then there's like an illustrated pictograph-type image that is beside it to kind of remind you about what that's about, to kind of anchor that experience. So the first one is check box check your gate number and there's a little picture of of their boarding pass to kind of show them that that's the thing they need to check their gate number on. If you need help, ask for information and there's a picture of the the big circle with the eye in it, and somebody that's actually talking to that eye to kind of signifying ask for information. Walk to the gate, the picture of a person walking, And then, I love this, all done, picture of a happy face, right?
And if you look at the next one on the journey, here's what happens at the gate. I won't go through them all, but wait for your turn to board, choose an activity while you wait, listen for your turn to board, and then again, all done.
The next one, take off. Listen to announcements, put your tray table up, put away your phone, tablet, laptop, seat is up, nice and straight, all done.
You see where that predictability is coming into it? I love the fact that it's the same thing every time and there's actually a thing that says you're done when you've checked off this thing. So, it's an explicit done, not just, you got them all done. There's no more to check off, it's like there's actually a certain satisfaction and they're creating that expectation that this is actually a good step to be in. This is where we show the happy face and we're reducing anxiety. I love this. Airplane ride, choose an activity, ask before going to the toilet, the bathroom is very small and makes it very loud flush noise. Helping people to predict the unpredictable. You can cover your ears if you want, all done.
This, to me, is an incredible display of understanding what people with autism are actually maybe going to go through on their particular journey, literally not just like their customer journey but on their journey. They didn't need to do this, this is not part of any law. They just did it and it's the airport that did it. I have lots of friends that work at airlines. The Air Carrier Access Act in any way shape or form, this is not one airline that's saying we're gonna do this.
This is the airport saying we're gonna do this, because it helps ... and we're seeing a lot more and more of this type of thing happening, where there's early boarding for a ... certain airlines will do this, where they have noise free boarding. And they will actually have the opportunity, if you have some form of autism or some other, you know, some other particular need, like, it's like we do that pre-boarding like you know people with disabilities and children under two ages, you and your families can go on first. They've actually set this up.
Prior to that, they set it up and say we're gonna now have a silent boarding for five minutes so that you can go in and get settled in your chair, in your seat with nothing else happening ... ... nothing else happening. Stores, retail stores are instituting hours of quiet shopping, where the music isn't playing, where there's no announcements, where it's just kind of silent shopping. And they know that everybody is you know gonna minimize their talking. You know, I think a lot of us would like that, exactly.
So there's a lot more of this that's happening and you should be expecting to see more people and more organizations kind of taking that kind of thing on and embracing it and and being part of it. I had talked really, really briefly about web accessibility and the Air Carrier Access Act, because we're in Chicago, done a lot of work with airlines over the last three years in terms of their accessibility initiatives.
One of the things that the Air Carrier Access Act does is it says, not only do you need to make sure that you meet the technical standard, you also have to meet some kind of usability and performance standards. And they've got this wording in there that says, the ACAA requires carriers to test the usability of their accessible primary web sites in consultation with individuals or organizations representing visual, auditory, tactile and cognitive disabilities. It's brilliant. This is actually in the legislation.
It's not enough to build to that standard anymore, they're actually, publicly recognizing, you need to really test this, with real people. Not people that work for your airline, because people that work for your airline they know too much. Way, way too much. They know exactly how it's supposed to work, right? So, and I love this, and there's a lot of really good lessons and things that we learned from working with Airlines, like there are some really good things, like they basically said right away, let's do this with real people, this is good. Like, that was my, this is my favorite piece of legislation related to accessibility, ever, at least for now. Because they built this requirement in, like you have to do this.
The only negative that we saw with it was that there were people like to take words and talk about those words a lot and say things like it doesn't say with those results, we just have to test in consultation with them. And when we say in consultation with them, does that mean we can test and just kind of talk to them about it? Like real conversations, alright, real conversations.
So when we get into wording and accessibility people, for whatever reason, we really like to dive deep into the meaning of words, to find like what do they mean by that and what does that mean that I actually have to do, and sometimes, not you, sometimes other people will be like, because of the way this is worded, I think we can get out of doing it, right? Like completely missing the point of doing it in the first place. So those words can be used and twisted.
Then when they worked on the ACAA, they said we have several seven core travel functions. Make and change a reservation, check-in, your actual itinerary, flight status, frequent flyer account, flight schedules, and carrier contact information. The thing that I love about this and saying what they did about the seven core travel functions and they kind of rolled it out differently, they said, in the first year you need to do the seven core travel functions. And then, in the second year, you need to do the rest of the site and make it accessible.
Smart ... really smart. Why? They prioritize it. Now, they change the dates on things. They've made December 2015 into June 2016. They left December 2016 as it was, but one of the cool and we don't know what's gonna happen next, nobody knows what's gonna happen next. But, the huge lesson, it was awesome because they kind of pre-prioritized it and said let's focus on these things, right? When we were working with airlines, we said okay, frequent flyer, yes that's important, but ... and flight status is important, itinerary is important, and check-in is important, but if you can't book a flight in the first place, none of that other stuff matters, right? So they kind of did some prioritization on this, and said these are the seven most important things, and even in the way that they listed them, they kind of went along that customer journey, and helped you make some sense of that, so that you could actually prioritize. So, really, really good from a prioritization perspective.
Interesting thing though, the whole thing was kind of pre-siloed, we hate silos, right? I mean, I assume, maybe not everybody hates silos, but people tend to hate ...tend to hate silos.
And here's one of the things that the Department of Transportation built in. Their stance on mobile was kind of like this and I say this because all of this legislation happened, and get ready for some sound here, because why would I not do this, ... on the Air Carrier Access Act. This Act has been in place for decades, right? It's only just recently that they made these amendments to include the web and digital things. So they were working on it kind of ... a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
♫ [Music] ♫
[Derek]: I have to do that because it's one of my favorite movies at all time. We'll move on from it though ...
They were building this or creating this in 2011, 2012 type era... it's going to be in 2015, 2016. So when they were working on it in 2011 and 2012, the state of things was much different, right? So mobile websites, mobile apps and other electronic communications technology, they actually said, we believe that certain factors, however, preclude introducing new accessibility requirements for electronic information communication technologies other than websites at this time. You just make your websites accessible.
Don't worry about your mobile app. You know, the thing that now 90% of people probably go to first. They basically created a silo by the way that they created this legislation, and with their stuff. They said this no accessibility standards specifically exist for mobile websites at this time. Like we're good there now. Like there's some really good accessibility standards.
It's called WCAG and it applies to mobile websites. Period. We do responsive design now that kind of takes care of a lot of this stuff. Accessibility standards such as WCAG2 cannot be readily applied to mobile apps designed for mobile platforms that are not accessible.
Well guess what? The platform's are now accessible. They're not perfect, but they are way more accessible than they were. Most mobile devices currently on the market are not accessible to individuals who are blind or visually impaired ... ... who and the need to focus carrier attention on reason and resources on bringing existing websites into compliance with WCAG 2 Double A. They basically created their own silos, right?
So they did say this.
We, and I'll pull out ... this is a big thing, I'm gonna let it go.
But they've basically said, we encourage everybody to also do accessibility features when they're doing email and text messaging and other electronic things. But, you know, you kind of don't have to we think it's gonna make your life easier down the road but you don't have to.
... the future and less costly, but you don't have to. So how many people do you think actually said like yeah well let's go all-in on it and spend that time now, 'cause ... you know that they didn't. Some organizations did in certain ways. Some people were already building things to be responsive and use responsive web design and so it worked. They already had some of that.
So they're giving an important lesson, like, "hey go ahead and be proactive about this because it's not there yet." But ... also said this is not important right now put everything you have into your website. Like what's your website now and even like how do you even define it? They're really had that old ... the website is the thing that you go to on your desktop computer or your laptop and they didn't even really ... yeah you know, I don't know what was in their heads. I'm not Kreskin, I don't know. I just don't know.
So, they kind of pre-siloed things, right. And when we think of products, when we build things, we often think of products and channels as these siloed things. So we have web, we have the app, we have email channels, it's fine.
Only this one, the rest of them are all good, well that one is. We'll get it back.
If this screen was on, you would see five silos. One of them says web, one of them says app, one of them says email, one of them says ticketing, and one of them says something that I can't read from here and I also forget what it says. What does it say ... helpdesk. Each one of those things, when we think of them as products or as channels, they are necessarily siloed, right, because that's the way that we think about it.
Oh, yes, thank you.
So the trouble with some of that silo-ism, I don't even think that's a thing, but, I made up that word, that silo-ism, there's no shared learnings between people that are working on the app and say on the web. Now they have really, really important lessons to teach one another and they're going through the same pains, and yet they don't have the opportunity, because of the way organizations are often set up. The other thing that was actually a tough lesson to learn is that they ended up spending more time and more effort on it, because they were siloed.
So when we think of things from a service perspective, we want to kind of think of them at a more holistic level. You don't see these things until you are actually working on real projects. We do ... one of the things that we do, because many of our clients require it is we do background checks.
This is Rhea, who's on our team, and Rhea is a young woman in the Philippines. She is blind and uses a screen reader, and so we do background checks. We have to, it's just like, that's what we have to do. And so I said to her, "I don't know what this process is like. Are you willing to kind of, experiment on it with us?" And I actually talked with the vendor about it and said you know is this accessible to people with disabilities? And they're like, I don't know, let me talk to the team and they got back and they said well ...
... it's mostly accessible to people with disabilities, particularly if you have somebody that's blind. If somebody sits there with them and kind of tells them what's on the screen, you should be just fine. I like ... what?
So Rhea was was doing her background check for us and goes through this form and everything seems okay. And I asked her like, how was it, you know, just so you know everything came back clean, it was all good. But I said, you know, how was it? And, keeping in mind that it's a background check, she said it was pretty accessible, except for two things. I'm like, okay cool, let's figure out what this is.
She said, first thing, I really I had to get my brother to help me with my birthday. Like adding my birth date into it.
And the second thing I really needed my brother's help was with doing my signature.
Like, those two things are actually pretty important for a background check. Kind of like probably some of the most important things birthday and your actual authorization to go in and figure out whether all this data is true or not. Really, really kind of difficult.
If you seen, know this violinist, Itzhak Perlman? So, a thing happened with with Air Canada. They kind of left him there. They escorted him part of the way to his flight and then stopped. And he was interviewed about it afterwards, and he said you know he helped me with one bag, which he carried unwillingly, and then he said, ... you're gonna ...
[Laughter]
I don't have time for this. My heart dropped when I read this interview. Like wha ... This dude ... is a world-class violinist, is worth multiple millions of dollars, and he needed help carrying it and his other bags and this is what happened to him. Like ... I just ... I can't even ... like, wow.
These experiences, I wish they were like once in like a million. We've seen, we've all seen what happens. We've seen what happens, right?Now this is not to say that it only happens in Airlines, this happens everywhere, right? It happens. I think in many ways is diversity by default.
And, I've only got a few more things here and then we'll just kind of talk for the rest of the time.
Diversity by default. And one of my favorite phrases comes from, there's actually two gentlemen that kind of said the same thing at almost the same time. And one of them was this gentleman, Michaelmas Sousa, South African gentleman.
"Nothing about us, without us." He had a disability himself and he said, "nothing about us, without us."
He was one of the first people to say that, in kind of the early not early 90s. We do so many things that we talk about as being beneficial for people with disabilities, or that, you know, we're doing this for these or we're creating accessible things or we're creating inclusive experiences. But we don't actually involve people with disabilities in it. Very rare. We like to think that we're doing much better than we are. And I'm gonna ... I will put my hand up and say I know I can do better in this. We all can. I love this idea, nothing about us without us. And that that means a few things.
So can you meet these higher goals?
Independence. Your use of a product or service should not require you to rely on any other individual, like our friend Rhea, who relied on her brother for two critical pieces in that process.
Dignity. Your use of a product or service should not require you to ask anyone else for help. Period. It may happen, but it should not require it. You should have the dignity, or be able to maintain your dignity by being able to do this on your own. My dad, we went to Disney in October of last year, and he sent me a text message one morning that said, you know, he was having trouble ... when you go to Disney, you get the Magic Band that goes on your wrist and they connect your tickets to it and your hotel room key, it's all one thing and you just Magic Band everything and magic happens. That's my guess why they call it the Magic Band. But he was trying to get his tickets connected to his Magic Band and he couldn't do it. He's trying and trying and trying to put in his reservation number the ticket number and it wouldn't connect it, wouldn't connect. And I'm like, do you want me to help? He's like, no, no, it's okay, it's okay. And my dad, he doesn't want to ask for help very much. But he sent me a text message this morning. He said okay I got it figured out. I went down to the front desk ... and I got the person at the counter to help me. He said, he couldn't do it either and he had to go into the main system to get the two things connected. And he said, so now I no longer feel like an idiot. I was like, he's my dad, you know, like, and he feels like insignificant as part of this.
So your use of a product or service should not induce feelings that you are at fault for the barriers that the service imposes. He assumed that he was doing it wrong, because he was getting error messages on the screen. So therefore, it was his fault ... nothing to do with you. The main person at the desk couldn't even do it.
Choice. Your use of a product or service should not prevent you from making choices that other people have. What I mean by that is, we cannot set up systems where your fallback position is that you call a help center from 8:00 a.m. Eastern until 8:00 p.m. Pacific. I work the night shift. I get home from work at 4:00 a.m. and therefore that's when I have time to do my whatever it is. And that call center or whatever it is, is not open. You don't have that choice anymore because it's something they did.
Security and privacy. Your use of a product or service should not require you to disclose sensitive personal information to a third party other than those you're disclosing the information to.
I think of Rhea. I think of a friend of mine, Stacy, who was blind and using a screen reader. And when he was trying to sign up for his online banking, he needed to get somebody else to do it because when he, no word of a lie, when he was going through the process himself, he was getting his screen reader to read out his bank card number so that he could activate it, and the the customer service rep on the other end of the phone could hear his screen reader, and thought that there was somebody else in the room there that was coercing him into doing that. And, so he ended up actually, to get it to work, he had to disclose his card number to somebody else and his personal details to somebody else to get them to go through that because they didn't know how to deal with a screen reader, reading on the other side of it.
Now, you probably could have put in headphones, but that also makes it difficult to manage two conversations. One with his screen reader and one with the person on the other end. But you should never have to disclose something sensitive to a third party, just because a system happens to be inaccessible.
So these are kind of the higher goals that I want to think of and we want to be thinking about enabling participation in process. So I want you, as you're thinking about this, as you're moving forward to do things like making sure that you're including people with disabilities in all of the work. In the original design. In talking about the original design, and doing the research in doing all of the pieces that go there and even look at your processes and the tools that you use, how many people in here, just you know raise your hand and say "I", how many people in here know that they use a piece of software, whether it's a website, a web app, or some software, that they know is not accessible?
Raise your hand and say "I". You didn't say enough eyes. Cause I know there's more than that. That was about sixty percent of the room.
Those tools that you're using that aren't accessible prevent you from even hiring somebody with a disability to do that job or to participate in the process. Whether you're hiring them for an hour to give you feedback or you're hiring them as a permanent member of your team or you're hiring them for a six-month contract, think not just about the tools but the process.
How many people do a daily stand-up as part of their as part of their work? Hands up and say "I". So about a third of you. Does that daily stand up an in-person thing where you're gathered around a physical scrum board or a Kanban board? Most of you are saying yes, some of you are saying no. How easy is it for someone that is, for someone they can't see that physical board to participate in that stand-up? It's potentially much easier for them if they have a digital manifestation of that board, with all of the ability to take something from one column and move it to another?
So not just the tools that you use, but the processes that you use, right? What's your ... how many of you do all these things ... by meetings? We've ... we actually looked at our own process and said, because we had a potential client that came to us and they had a ... the lead for their accessibility initiatives was deaf. And we had to question everything from the very beginning and it was great, because that person actually said to us, you know, hey, when we're talking, you know email or some other text communication form is best for me, because, you know, I'm deaf. Like, awesome! First thing we did how do you feel about having a meeting with us at Slack? And so we real-time it. We invited them as a single-channel guest. We had that entire sales kind of conversation in Slack. We were a hundred percent open to it. We looked at it right away and said, let's do this. Why wouldn't we do this?
So I want you to, and that's part of why I add this last piece here, I want you to think about making one of your tools or your processes more inclusive each month for the next year.
Those small changes that you make can actually be incredibly empowering, and even if you can't change all of them, critically looking at the things that you have built into the way that you work can actually uncover a lot of barriers in your own work and your own tools that help you see things from a different perspective about the work that you're actually doing.
Hope that makes sense. With that I'm gonna say, I'm done talking.
However, I know ... what do we ,what do we do from here, Dennis, are we gonna do Q&A? I could talk until forever but i don't know how long we have this room.
[Dennis]:[off mic]
[Derek]: So we'll do 10 minutes of Q&A, and then we can just hang out after that
[Dennis]: Yeah, so, Nick is going to pass the microphone to those who have questions, and then we'll get it back to you.
[Derek]: Alright, I'm going to take water.
[Attendee]: Derek, first of all, this is Ray Campbell. Thank you for your presentation. It hit all the notes that I am thinking of, as I think about my company. I guess, the question that I would have for you, and maybe you could help a little bit and impart some words of wisdom, we may, in our work groups and stuff, want to do the right things, they want to use tools and processes, but how do we get that message up to leadership that's making decisions about what tools we're going to use, what processes we're going to use? But, oh, we're not going to do mobile right now because it's not required, and things like that?
And the second question is a little broader and that is, what kinds of things do you think that the community of people with disabilities and those who are interested in these subjects, need to do to get into the ear of people? We now have a lawsuit against the eats our restaurant chain in New York, because nobody thought, they put in iPads for ordering food and stuff. Somebody thought ... they even covered up ... the Voiceover covered up that will turn up the home button and then some do things on the iPad. What do we need to do to get into these companies ears and get them to think inclusive?
[Derek]: That's a lot of questions all in one.
[Laughter]
[Derek]: I'm gonna try and give you the the short answer I even forget what the first question was. What was the first question?
[Attendee]: Getting leadership to buy-in ...
[Derek]: Getting leadership buy-in. I think your number one tool... we've used this method a lot and it works. It may not work for everyone, your mileage may vary. And I also have to admit that because I work for somebody that's not at the organization, people listen to me more. And I don't necessarily like that, I don't. But that's just reality, right? That is the reality of the stuff that we need to deal with every day. I can come in and say exactly the same thing that you have been for 10 years and in ten minutes I can get more action, simply because I'm from the outside. And as a Canadian, I will just say I'm sorry for that.
[Laughter]
[Derek]: That's just how it is, though. Number one tool that we use is video evidence. People absolutely struggling with this stuff, and not just one video, not just two videos, but videos that happen every single time you do usability testing with people with disabilities, those videos make their way into every part of the culture. Those videos are real, and they are painful, and they wake leadership up.
Whether we ... you know ... and I don't like doing that kind of like, we're gonna put this on display because there's like even kind of icky feelings about that, but man does it get the job done. So we use videos for almost everything. We record, we record sessions and we show them like here's your engaging experience and here's why it sucks.
That thing that you thought, you know, ...the other tool that we use is we get executive and leadership to kind of like, predict how it will take for somebody to do this thing, right? They are like, you know, it's like product management or like VP's of product and things like that, how long do you think it's gonna take for this person to do "X"?
You know, to check out a book or to check to see if a book is in stock in the library, Or if it's in the library or not. To reserve that book, how long do you think that's going to take? That should take like 45 seconds. And then you show them reality where there's somebody with a disability, and probably even people without a disability and it's not taking 45 seconds, it's actually taking five minutes. And for someone with a disability, it's taking 17 minutes. And the stuff has evidence all the time.
The second part of your question was what can we do as the community ... to ... was it to get the same buy-in or was it a different ...
[Attendee]: [Indecipherable]
[Derek]: Right right right right ... Companies don't know what proactive means. Because they're all being asked to do too much with too little. So that's the reality of the problem with that. So anything that we do, and again I think it's, in many ways, it's evidence, it's not proactive, they're gonna be reactive once, and then after that, if it's worked well, they're not going to be reactive in that same kind of life cycle. They're going to start to become more proactive. But I also think that we can't just say, we're expecting you to be completely proactive about absolutely everything now. We have to be ... we have to keep going at it and going at it and going at it, it's ... think of Agile, and I talked about this in my my talk earlier today at An Event Apart here in Chicago, we've got to eliminate the idea of being perfect, and really focus on better and getting better and better and better and better and better.
I don't think lawsuits are going to go away and I think they help, but that's like the stick. And there's other ways to do it with the carrot as well. And dealing with and showing demonstrably some of the benefits of things as well. I'm not sure if that's a community, what can you do as a community answer, but it's certainly the way that we certainly approach it so I hope that's helpful.
[Attendee]: So my question is ... when we're talking about people with disabilities, we're not just talking about, oh yeah, there are blind people, there are deaf people, there are people in wheelchairs, there's a full range of disability, right? [Indecipherable] How do you account for that entire range of disability when designing your product? Because there is so much out there that you need to account for.
[Derek] Ranges and spectrums. A lot of people ... if I were to ask you to draw a spectrum, and I'll ask you to do this, draw me what a spectrum looks like. When we say somebody's on the autistic spectrum, what does that look like? Draw that in the air for me. Or don't, that's fine too, I'm totally fine with not ... Almost everybody does something like this... or they do this, right?
And one of the most helpful things for me was to understand that it's actually more like this. Then it's not about being some spot between two end points on the line... that it's actually ... and I don't have this slide in here, so I can't show you but I have a slide where it's basically a color wheel. And there's five different kind of functional things around it and we all exist... if you think of your verbal skills, your auditory skills, your executive function, which is kind of what helps control whether you like, I shouldn't say this thing right now or I should say this thing right now, your people skills, your empathy skills, all of those things all exist on their independent kind of lines. But they actually are a multi-dimensional whole. So I think an important part of this is thinking about it that way.
The other part of it is not thinking about the ridiculous number of infinite combinations that there are in terms of what disability actually means and what that means for somebody's hearing or their sight or their whatever it is. Think of it in functional terms. So, don't think of five different forms of colorblindness, and someone that's completely blind, or somebody that has low vision, that it's very blurry and so they can't tell about the color, don't think about ... we have to design for someone that's red-green deficient, somebody that has difficulty with blue and yellow, somebody that can't see color at all, and somebody that can really struggle seeing the color, think of not all the individual things but think of it as a broader thing like how do I do this so the color doesn't matter?
When you think of all of the things that way, like almost every kind of neurodiversity or cognitive thing relates to one of a few functional things, like there's, I'm gonna really extract like be really superlative here, but there's zillions of reasons for having short-term memory problems. Like zillions. Concussion. Alzheimer's. I can't remember anymore ... so you see what I did there?
[Attendee]: Short term, you could have a hangover ...
[Derek]: Well, I wasn't gonna say hangover but, I totally, it's the same thing. You haven't had your coffee in the morning yet, right? All of those things are related to memory. It doesn't matter why it's there. It matters that there's a short-term memory issue, and so what we do is we find ways to design better for people that are having difficulties with short-term memory. I hope that it helps. Don't think about the zillions of things, think about the functional impact of those things and focus on those.
[Attendee]: Can I just build on that?
[Dennis]: Sure, one second, let's get you a microphone so everyone can hear you.
[Attendee]: I just wanted to add to his short term memory. When people under lots of stress, so they're going through health issues, then they have sometimes cognitive problems. You're going through emotional event, somebody's sick, somebody's dying, just imagine being online, going to a website it's so complicated that you can't think straight. So these issues of disability aren't necessarily something that's chronic or a long term. It can be short term, they can be just instantaneous. So when you think of Universal Design, it can be design for everything, for everybody, a little bit of perspective a lot of times you're creating about your experience for everybody, under different conditions. I just wanted to add that.
[Derek]: [warble] ... not even just sometimes like all the time right but the cool part about it is that if I'm, you know, crack my head and I'm suddenly can't remember something and that's gonna come back, you know that the things that we do to create inclusion and accessibility aren't really for me, they just happen to benefit me. That's not something for me that is protected as a civil right and the beauty of doing the things that we do from an accessibility perspective and inclusion perspective... for as the main reason for people with disabilities, it happens to benefit lots of other people.
But it's a civil right of people with disabilities. And so there is an important distinction I want you to think about there, but definitely use the ... sell it as much as you need to with the ... this benefits everybody, but it's actually a you know a civil right for people that actually have disabilities. So, think about that side of it as well.
[Dennis]: One more question.
[Derek]: Just one more.
[Attendee]: Hi, Derek, that was a great presentation. Actually, this is my first accessible presentation ... I didn't know accessibility in design. So, really fascinated by it. So, understanding your presentation, I just wanted to ask you one thing, that when I design a solution for people who are not disabled, how do I paint accessibility? How do I think that, okay, what is the starting point? Because how do I think that, okay, now I have to make it accessible to other people who are not able to see, or hear, or other disability. How do I paint accessibility? Because, in my mind, I'm designing a solution for people which are, you know, not disabled, and then how do I think, what is my starting point, what is the tool that I use that, now I have to make it inclusive all inclusive, for people who cannot use this. So I just want to know, as being an entry to the design field.
[Derek]: So that is like a full-day workshop, is like what the starting point is. Because there's a lot to it. However, let me say this. When you design with empathy, and an understanding of what people that aren't in your shoes are actually going through, and I've got some things that I can share with you as well, that are actual like, here's an inclusive design tool kit that will help you. Right, to understand that. So that's a thing that we can talk about later.
But, when you design with empathy and I really want, I really need to make this distinction, I hope you all understand the difference. There's a difference between ... there's a difference between designing with empathy and designing with sympathy. They are incredibly different things. Use that as your starting point, and if you take empathy on and really understand what that means, that's what leads you down the correct path.
There are simple things that we can talk about as well from a design perspective that can actually help create that empathy. And there's lots of things that help on that helped the developers with it as well. But, that to me is a great starting point. There's a lot of resources that you can find but that mindset, understanding that accessibility is non-binary, right, that there's a lot of shades of grey in between, that it's not just about, did we meet the requirement, is this actually easy to use. That to me, that mindset is what will take you a long long way.
Inclusive Design
Derek Featherstone- Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Source recording
[Dennis]: Please give a warm, Chicago welcome, to Derek Featherstone.
[Applause]
[Derek]: This is a little scary because I have a microphone and a lapel microphone and my presentation remote ... I don't know how this is gonna work. I also like to walk around a lot. I am ready to trip over the cord at some point.
So, I am feather on Twitter if you want to reach out to me there connect there I'd be happy to hear from you. I've got open DMs and like almost nobody sends me DMs. So, like please, send me please not all at the same time though. If you want to connect, feel free to email as well, or you can if you want to get in touch about something you have a question, go to our website simplyaccessible.com, and you can go to the contact page and have a form there and that goes into not just me. I tend to travel quite a bit so it's easier when that that message comes to everybody because then they all know what to do with it while I'm still traveling. I going to be gone the rest of the week in Toronto, so I won't be checking in nearly as much, so feel free to connect, I'd love to hear from you and I just I like talking to people. So it's kind of fun when when you send me messages, just don't get mad if I don't send it back right away.
Alright, this is a gentleman named Henry Butler, and he is a jazz pianist. And one of the things that was sort of a really incredible experience for me was going to this performance that Henry was part of called Sight, Sound, Soul. And it happened in Austin Texas and it was probably the most inclusive event that I've ever been to. It was amazingly incredible. They had taken into account accessibility from as many different perspectives as you as you could imagine. It didn't stop at the ... to have a physically accessible space and we're going to make sure that we have captioning for the performance, they actually went beyond that, and I'd like to share some of that with you.
Now this is ... it was in an old barn type building, but it was redone and it was all refinished inside, it was very accessible. And there was loads of people there, it was quite, quite an incredible experience to see that many people come to this performance. And again, it's called Sight Sounds Soul, which is really kind of this mysterious intriguing thing, like what is what does this actually mean?
And this is the theme. It's not just about Henry, although he's the primary performer. There's a number of other pieces that are part of the performance. So you can see Henry here sitting at his piano with his back to the audience. He's got his sunglasses on he actually looks really cool. It's a red kind of velvet suit, which I think is appropriate for a jazz pianist.
There's also an ASL interpreter there and there is also a person that is doing live captions sitting down next to the ASL interpreter and sitting down next to the live captioner is an audio describer. They have really taken a lot into account here. And it this I'm going to just share it with you and because when I was living this experience, it kind of blew my mind how inclusive it was. So I'm gonna let it play and for those of you they can't see it, there will be an audio description of it coming,
So I asked you to just kind of be patient, it's a couple of slides after this a little bit of the performance, or it's actually the next slide after this performance, so you'll get an audio description almost right away. So you might need to check the volume on this.
[Piano Music]
[Derek]: And I'm gonna move to the next, the next slide, and just kind of pause that there for a minute. The ... I literally I'd never been to a captioned performance before with somebody doing it ... sorry, not a caption performance. Well, I hadn't been to a caption performance and I haven't been to a signed performance before. And I had no idea. I was like, how are they going to sign?
And I don't know how how much you noticed but the ASL interpreter was actually not really interpreting any words at all but she was interpreting a whole lot of other pieces about the performance. One of the very first things that she did ... showing, I don't know if you saw with her left hand, she was showing how Henry was tapping his feet to the music. And so she was kind of reflecting that in what she was showing. And she gets to the point where ... a bit of that clip she's actually almost in time with him and when you can hear his fingers going up and down the keyboard of the piano, she's doing the same thing in the air.
And that ... and I'm getting goosebumps just talking about it because, living that experience was ... to see because it really opened my mind to things I hadn't ever considered before. I was like, why do we need captioning for an instrumental piece? Why do we need interpretation for it? And it became an integral part of the performance. And now, and so of course there was live captioning on the board up there. I think it's about a three line captioning sign.
And now, we're gonna turn to ... this is one of my favorite parts. Celia Hughes is an incredible audio describer, [clears throat] excuse me, and this is what she does for a living and I'm just going to let you have a listen to the way that she describes this. It's really quite fantastic.
[Video]: [Applause]
[Video]: [Woman speaking, describing what Harold is wearing]
[Video]: [Woman describing what Harold is wearing (cont.)]
[Video]: [Woman describing what Harold is wearing (cont.)]
[Video]: [Woman describing what another woman is wearing]
[Video]: [Applause]
[Video]: Harold introducing the next song he is about to play.
[Derek]: Now, I know it got a little bit meta there because we were actually having an audio description and a person doing ASL interpretation of the audio description of the first ASL interpreter. So it kind of got a little bit weird there for a minute, but she painted that picture incredibly well, even to the point of explaining what that noise might be that people might be hearing from overhead. The huge room is cooled by whirling ceiling fans or I can't remember exactly her phrasing. That audio description was just as much a piece of performance art as the person playing the piano was creating. It was integral to everything
Now just when you think ... incredibly inclusive event, it gets even better. You see here the part where Celia was talking about the two large boards of plywood with the six sheets of white paper, and they talked about paint and Carroll with the two pigtails and the bandanna I think in her hair. Here's what happens next and actually throughout almost the entire performance, Carol paints at the exact same time as the musical performance is happening. So I have a few clips of that for you as well.
[Video]: [Music]
[Derek]: So this is at kinda of the beginning. She's kind of laying the background. She's painting slowly as he's playing slowly. And if we move to the next level or kind of later in the performance, this is kind of that that side view and you can see she's looking over her shoulder at Henry to figure out what he's doing.
[Video]: [Music]
[Derek]: When we get to the point where she's actually finishing up the painting and you can see here this is kind of the last song, and you can see that she is painting, you can see that she's done kind of an abstraction of that piano in blue. She's got Henry there, you can actually see right from the beginning where they talked about how Henry's foot was tapping in time for the music. I think Celia even said his his foot pounded the floor ...
... painting and you can see that she's actually reflected that in the painting itself, by showing like multiple legs to convey that motion. Absolutely every aspect of this is crafted and created and they play and when Henry hits his last note she finishes the painting.
[Video]: [Music]
[Video]: [Applause]
[Derek]: And, the painting is finished and they take that painting and they auction it off for his charity. Add to all of that, the fact that Henry has been blind almost his entire life and this is what I think of when I think of inclusion and what that means. This entire experience was handcrafted methodically thought-out and intentionally created to be an inclusive experience.
This is what I want on us to do in digital spaces. Building things for the web, when we're building a mobile app, when we're building creating a kiosk. I mean, I don't want us to paint pictures of the kiosk, I want us to actually make sure that the experiences that we are creating are as well thought-out as this. This is, to me, what inclusion is about and I love this as an example of something for us to kind of strive towards in our work. All the time that you know we talk about accessibility and we talk of being inclusive, but we have some kind of limits on what that is because of decisions that other people have made.
Somebody has decided that this is what accessibility means and this is what inclusion means. I want us to kind of expand that that mindset a little bit and make sure that we are actually thinking about these kinds of things. If you think of design as a process through which we're kind of creating things and refining and then ultimately expressing our intent, that gives us a really kind of far-reaching mandate in terms of creating a great design.
... house in the UK and it's actually a house that's like community housing. It's subsidized housing for people that are in a lower income bracket. And you can see here there's ... it's a house, it's a duplex and they've got this you know front yard that is, you know, I mean, it's not huge, but it's probably 100 feet long and then, it's the width of the the entire house, and it's kind of these rolling hills and you can see the steps on the left hand side, there's multiple levels of steps about six steps each.
And there's a woman that lives there with her child who happens to be in a wheelchair. And they ... because it was community housing and they needed to make sure that it was an accessible entrance, they actually said, well we need to do something about this. And so they looked to make it an accessible entrance. And so what they did was created a ramp ... essentially fills up the entire front yard. It's gray, not the most beautiful steel in the world, and it literally takes up the entire yard. The grass has all been replaced with, I don't know if you can see it, but there's gravel everywhere. And the ramp probably makes one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, maybe eight switchback turns.
Now this ramp meets all the requirements for accessibility. It's the right slope, it's got the right turning radius and the right amount of room to get around a corner if you're in a scooter or in a wheelchair. But it certainly doesn't do anything in terms of maintaining and preserving that back yard. This is kind of ... I mean ... here's other another view of it from the side. And the state local skateboarding ... loves it. They think it's fantastic. This is kind of and this is a view from the house, kind of looking down at the street, where they've literally lost their entire yard.
There's a lot more to the story, but this is kind of like ... this is accessibility as an afterthought, right? They didn't really have a choice, because the only way that they could do it was to build this monstrous ramp. Now, it got the job done, but it was kind of like it was the only requirement instead of one of the requirements. If they had actually had a requirement, that, we need a mechanism to get somebody in the front door accessibly, but also maintain the front yard, they might have come up with very different solutions. They might have created some kind of a lift system or, you know, there might have been many other ways to solve this problem.
It's kind of like, it's accessibility by the book and its accessibility as the only requirement. It's accessibility at the expense of everything else. Now that access is really important. The interesting thing was, the project cost about forty thousand dollars roughly forty thousand dollars US. It was in Britain, so it was something like you know, twenty five thousand pounds or something like that. I think they did some analysis and they actually found out later on that if they had packed up their entire house, paid to pack up the entire house, move them to another location, in the community housing and one of the newer, more recently built houses that was accessible, where the entrance was at ground street level, it would have probably cost them twenty thousand dollars.
And I think they realized that like way too late. They were already in so far that they kind of missed that opportunity. But when we look at accessibility this way, as a by-the-book thing, as a ... anything else, yes, we still get access, but we don't have something that is actually an inclusive, necessarily an inclusive process or an inclusive best outcome. So I want you to kind of be thinking about those types of things as well.
This is a sign at the CNIB in Toronto and they built a new facility several years ago. We went on a tour. And this is the sign for ... just outside their deafblind literacy lab. And there's a whole bunch of things that are really accessible, really obviously accessible about this. One of them is the big, the very large white lettering that's on a dark background. Interestingly enough, those letters and, it's tough to see here, but those letters are recessed, so that somebody can trace those letters with their finger, and read them that way. So if they were just kind of like sublimated and pressed onto the sign, ... have the opportunity to do that. So a nice large high contrast lettering, it's recessed, and then you can see down here, below the main part of the sign, there's this extra part or this part where they've got Braille. And they've got, instead of recessed lettering, they've got raised all-caps lettering, so that somebody could trace those letter forms as well to figure out what room it is. But my favorite part is that where the Braille is and the raised lettering, that piece is on a kind of a piece that protrudes out from the sign at about a 45 degree angle.
And I asked them why, so this is really fascinating, tell me more about that. They said it's really straightforward. We noticed in our old building that people would walk along the hallway a feeling for a sign. They would have their hand on the wall, and they would be feeling for the sign. And when they felt the sign, we saw that they were like dropping their shoulder and had to turn their hand so that they could get a flat ... those raised characters in the Braille. They said, so we just put it on an angle and it means that when as people walk along, it's just a natural reading angle. That's like, brilliant!
That's kind of the thing that I want us to do on the web, right? We thought about making this easy to use. We talk a lot in UX as we want to create delightful and seductive experiences. We talked about creating engagement for someone with with a disability. It might actually be really wonderful to have that as well and not just a thing that passes the minimum level of compliance. That's kind of the way that I'd love for us in this, and I don't mean us, I mean like us to take that to the companies that we work for and advocate for that.
Because I think all of you in this room are probably already thinking along those lines, or would be very ... it's like a very short jump for you to do that. But we report to, that make decisions, those are the ones that we need to kind of think about convincing them that this is the way that we want to go.
So there's two sides, when I spend a lot of time thinking about and working on inclusive design and there's two sides to it.
There's an inclusive design, which means we've created the design that is inclusive. That's an outcome, right? Access or accessibility is an outcome, and I really like to think about inclusive design, the process, right? Inclusive design, too often, ends up being a thing about we're going to create an inclusive design in terms of the outcome. And then, it focuses on code and not the design aspects itself. So let's think about that.
I want you to think about that duality that design is actually a it can be a noun or it can be a verb, right, and in that way we're really thinking of inclusive as the adjective. So accessibility might be the ability to be accessed or readily used by people with disabilities. There's a definition of inclusive design. It's handy. It comes from a British standard. The thing that I love about it the most the design of mainstream products and/or services that are accessible to and usable by as many people as reasonably possible without the need for special adaptation or specialized design. It's a very, I mean, it's a useful definition but it's very much a book academic type definition.
My favorite part of it is the focus on products and/or services. We're often thinking about product in the work that we do and we don't necessarily think about service. There's actually a huge kind of, I don't wanna say movement, but there's there's a large group of people that are working on service design now. And so, my take on a lot of that is ... service design actually mean.
And so, let's look at that with a little bit more of this framework. I look at inclusive UX design as intentional facilitation and a crafting of interactions, touch points, and processes within a product or services ecosystem, Where inclusion is actually a core value. And that to me is the difference about what we're talking about here. These last ... five words, inclusion as a core value, to me makes all the difference. When we incorporate it as a core value into the things that we do, and we're constantly looking at that as a kind of a check point as a thing to keep us grounded in our goal is inclusion as a core value does this live up to that? If we look at that throughout the entire process of what we do, then that changes how we approach things in a few ways.
Another example and then we'll kind of, I can't even tell how long I've been going so I'm just going to keep talking.
This is one that I learned about. It's at the Vancouver Airport in Canada. And, because Canada, they've created this program called "You can do it," and it is, people that are new travelers, but particularly for children with autism. But not just children, but even adults with autism that are taking their first journey on a plane. And they know that one of the things that people that are somewhere on the autistic spectrum, in many ways crave is kind of that, and this is not something that you can say about every person with autism, but there's a predictability to what's going to happen that is very useful for helping people with autism work through new experiences.
So knowing, you know, having that predictability and knowing what they're about to experience can make that less of an anxiety ridden experience, right? So there's probably always going to be some anxiety, but they've actually gone to the point of creating things so that they help reduce that anxiety. And I find this fascinating, they actually created a series of printable checklist as part of a book. So they were printable on their own, but they're actually there's like almost like a coloring book type thing that you would give to, you provide to people to say here's what that journey is about to be like.
And so on this one, going to the gate. So this is, and it's always in the form, I love this form. Because it's a series of four check boxes ... statement about what you need to do in really simple terms, and then there's like an illustrated pictograph-type image that is beside it to kind of remind you about what that's about, to kind of anchor that experience. So the first one is check box check your gate number and there's a little picture of of their boarding pass to kind of show them that that's the thing they need to check their gate number on. If you need help, ask for information and there's a picture of the the big circle with the eye in it, and somebody that's actually talking to that eye to kind of signifying ask for information. Walk to the gate, the picture of a person walking, And then, I love this, all done, picture of a happy face, right?
And if you look at the next one on the journey, here's what happens at the gate. I won't go through them all, but wait for your turn to board, choose an activity while you wait, listen for your turn to board, and then again, all done.
The next one, take off. Listen to announcements, put your tray table up, put away your phone, tablet, laptop, seat is up, nice and straight, all done.
You see where that predictability is coming into it? I love the fact that it's the same thing every time and there's actually a thing that says you're done when you've checked off this thing. So, it's an explicit done, not just, you got them all done. There's no more to check off, it's like there's actually a certain satisfaction and they're creating that expectation that this is actually a good step to be in. This is where we show the happy face and we're reducing anxiety. I love this. Airplane ride, choose an activity, ask before going to the toilet, the bathroom is very small and makes it very loud flush noise. Helping people to predict the unpredictable. You can cover your ears if you want, all done.
This, to me, is an incredible display of understanding what people with autism are actually maybe going to go through on their particular journey, literally not just like their customer journey but on their journey. They didn't need to do this, this is not part of any law. They just did it and it's the airport that did it. I have lots of friends that work at airlines. The Air Carrier Access Act in any way shape or form, this is not one airline that's saying we're gonna do this.
This is the airport saying we're gonna do this, because it helps ... and we're seeing a lot more and more of this type of thing happening, where there's early boarding for a ... certain airlines will do this, where they have noise free boarding. And they will actually have the opportunity, if you have some form of autism or some other, you know, some other particular need, like, it's like we do that pre-boarding like you know people with disabilities and children under two ages, you and your families can go on first. They've actually set this up.
Prior to that, they set it up and say we're gonna now have a silent boarding for five minutes so that you can go in and get settled in your chair, in your seat with nothing else happening ... ... nothing else happening. Stores, retail stores are instituting hours of quiet shopping, where the music isn't playing, where there's no announcements, where it's just kind of silent shopping. And they know that everybody is you know gonna minimize their talking. You know, I think a lot of us would like that, exactly.
So there's a lot more of this that's happening and you should be expecting to see more people and more organizations kind of taking that kind of thing on and embracing it and and being part of it. I had talked really, really briefly about web accessibility and the Air Carrier Access Act, because we're in Chicago, done a lot of work with airlines over the last three years in terms of their accessibility initiatives.
One of the things that the Air Carrier Access Act does is it says, not only do you need to make sure that you meet the technical standard, you also have to meet some kind of usability and performance standards. And they've got this wording in there that says, the ACAA requires carriers to test the usability of their accessible primary web sites in consultation with individuals or organizations representing visual, auditory, tactile and cognitive disabilities. It's brilliant. This is actually in the legislation.
It's not enough to build to that standard anymore, they're actually, publicly recognizing, you need to really test this, with real people. Not people that work for your airline, because people that work for your airline they know too much. Way, way too much. They know exactly how it's supposed to work, right? So, and I love this, and there's a lot of really good lessons and things that we learned from working with Airlines, like there are some really good things, like they basically said right away, let's do this with real people, this is good. Like, that was my, this is my favorite piece of legislation related to accessibility, ever, at least for now. Because they built this requirement in, like you have to do this.
The only negative that we saw with it was that there were people like to take words and talk about those words a lot and say things like it doesn't say with those results, we just have to test in consultation with them. And when we say in consultation with them, does that mean we can test and just kind of talk to them about it? Like real conversations, alright, real conversations.
So when we get into wording and accessibility people, for whatever reason, we really like to dive deep into the meaning of words, to find like what do they mean by that and what does that mean that I actually have to do, and sometimes, not you, sometimes other people will be like, because of the way this is worded, I think we can get out of doing it, right? Like completely missing the point of doing it in the first place. So those words can be used and twisted.
Then when they worked on the ACAA, they said we have several seven core travel functions. Make and change a reservation, check-in, your actual itinerary, flight status, frequent flyer account, flight schedules, and carrier contact information. The thing that I love about this and saying what they did about the seven core travel functions and they kind of rolled it out differently, they said, in the first year you need to do the seven core travel functions. And then, in the second year, you need to do the rest of the site and make it accessible.
Smart ... really smart. Why? They prioritize it. Now, they change the dates on things. They've made December 2015 into June 2016. They left December 2016 as it was, but one of the cool and we don't know what's gonna happen next, nobody knows what's gonna happen next. But, the huge lesson, it was awesome because they kind of pre-prioritized it and said let's focus on these things, right? When we were working with airlines, we said okay, frequent flyer, yes that's important, but ... and flight status is important, itinerary is important, and check-in is important, but if you can't book a flight in the first place, none of that other stuff matters, right? So they kind of did some prioritization on this, and said these are the seven most important things, and even in the way that they listed them, they kind of went along that customer journey, and helped you make some sense of that, so that you could actually prioritize. So, really, really good from a prioritization perspective.
Interesting thing though, the whole thing was kind of pre-siloed, we hate silos, right? I mean, I assume, maybe not everybody hates silos, but people tend to hate ...tend to hate silos.
And here's one of the things that the Department of Transportation built in. Their stance on mobile was kind of like this and I say this because all of this legislation happened, and get ready for some sound here, because why would I not do this, ... on the Air Carrier Access Act. This Act has been in place for decades, right? It's only just recently that they made these amendments to include the web and digital things. So they were working on it kind of ... a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
♫ [Music] ♫
[Derek]: I have to do that because it's one of my favorite movies at all time. We'll move on from it though ...
They were building this or creating this in 2011, 2012 type era... it's going to be in 2015, 2016. So when they were working on it in 2011 and 2012, the state of things was much different, right? So mobile websites, mobile apps and other electronic communications technology, they actually said, we believe that certain factors, however, preclude introducing new accessibility requirements for electronic information communication technologies other than websites at this time. You just make your websites accessible.
Don't worry about your mobile app. You know, the thing that now 90% of people probably go to first. They basically created a silo by the way that they created this legislation, and with their stuff. They said this no accessibility standards specifically exist for mobile websites at this time. Like we're good there now. Like there's some really good accessibility standards.
It's called WCAG and it applies to mobile websites. Period. We do responsive design now that kind of takes care of a lot of this stuff. Accessibility standards such as WCAG2 cannot be readily applied to mobile apps designed for mobile platforms that are not accessible.
Well guess what? The platform's are now accessible. They're not perfect, but they are way more accessible than they were. Most mobile devices currently on the market are not accessible to individuals who are blind or visually impaired ... ... who and the need to focus carrier attention on reason and resources on bringing existing websites into compliance with WCAG 2 Double A. They basically created their own silos, right?
So they did say this.
We, and I'll pull out ... this is a big thing, I'm gonna let it go.
But they've basically said, we encourage everybody to also do accessibility features when they're doing email and text messaging and other electronic things. But, you know, you kind of don't have to we think it's gonna make your life easier down the road but you don't have to.
... the future and less costly, but you don't have to. So how many people do you think actually said like yeah well let's go all-in on it and spend that time now, 'cause ... you know that they didn't. Some organizations did in certain ways. Some people were already building things to be responsive and use responsive web design and so it worked. They already had some of that.
So they're giving an important lesson, like, "hey go ahead and be proactive about this because it's not there yet." But ... also said this is not important right now put everything you have into your website. Like what's your website now and even like how do you even define it? They're really had that old ... the website is the thing that you go to on your desktop computer or your laptop and they didn't even really ... yeah you know, I don't know what was in their heads. I'm not Kreskin, I don't know. I just don't know.
So, they kind of pre-siloed things, right. And when we think of products, when we build things, we often think of products and channels as these siloed things. So we have web, we have the app, we have email channels, it's fine.
Only this one, the rest of them are all good, well that one is. We'll get it back.
If this screen was on, you would see five silos. One of them says web, one of them says app, one of them says email, one of them says ticketing, and one of them says something that I can't read from here and I also forget what it says. What does it say ... helpdesk. Each one of those things, when we think of them as products or as channels, they are necessarily siloed, right, because that's the way that we think about it.
Oh, yes, thank you.
So the trouble with some of that silo-ism, I don't even think that's a thing, but, I made up that word, that silo-ism, there's no shared learnings between people that are working on the app and say on the web. Now they have really, really important lessons to teach one another and they're going through the same pains, and yet they don't have the opportunity, because of the way organizations are often set up. The other thing that was actually a tough lesson to learn is that they ended up spending more time and more effort on it, because they were siloed.
So when we think of things from a service perspective, we want to kind of think of them at a more holistic level. You don't see these things until you are actually working on real projects. We do ... one of the things that we do, because many of our clients require it is we do background checks.
This is Rhea, who's on our team, and Rhea is a young woman in the Philippines. She is blind and uses a screen reader, and so we do background checks. We have to, it's just like, that's what we have to do. And so I said to her, "I don't know what this process is like. Are you willing to kind of, experiment on it with us?" And I actually talked with the vendor about it and said you know is this accessible to people with disabilities? And they're like, I don't know, let me talk to the team and they got back and they said well ...
... it's mostly accessible to people with disabilities, particularly if you have somebody that's blind. If somebody sits there with them and kind of tells them what's on the screen, you should be just fine. I like ... what?
So Rhea was was doing her background check for us and goes through this form and everything seems okay. And I asked her like, how was it, you know, just so you know everything came back clean, it was all good. But I said, you know, how was it? And, keeping in mind that it's a background check, she said it was pretty accessible, except for two things. I'm like, okay cool, let's figure out what this is.
She said, first thing, I really I had to get my brother to help me with my birthday. Like adding my birth date into it.
And the second thing I really needed my brother's help was with doing my signature.
Like, those two things are actually pretty important for a background check. Kind of like probably some of the most important things birthday and your actual authorization to go in and figure out whether all this data is true or not. Really, really kind of difficult.
If you seen, know this violinist, Itzhak Perlman? So, a thing happened with with Air Canada. They kind of left him there. They escorted him part of the way to his flight and then stopped. And he was interviewed about it afterwards, and he said you know he helped me with one bag, which he carried unwillingly, and then he said, ... you're gonna ...
[Laughter]
I don't have time for this. My heart dropped when I read this interview. Like wha ... This dude ... is a world-class violinist, is worth multiple millions of dollars, and he needed help carrying it and his other bags and this is what happened to him. Like ... I just ... I can't even ... like, wow.
These experiences, I wish they were like once in like a million. We've seen, we've all seen what happens. We've seen what happens, right?Now this is not to say that it only happens in Airlines, this happens everywhere, right? It happens. I think in many ways is diversity by default.
And, I've only got a few more things here and then we'll just kind of talk for the rest of the time.
Diversity by default. And one of my favorite phrases comes from, there's actually two gentlemen that kind of said the same thing at almost the same time. And one of them was this gentleman, Michaelmas Sousa, South African gentleman.
"Nothing about us, without us." He had a disability himself and he said, "nothing about us, without us."
He was one of the first people to say that, in kind of the early not early 90s. We do so many things that we talk about as being beneficial for people with disabilities, or that, you know, we're doing this for these or we're creating accessible things or we're creating inclusive experiences. But we don't actually involve people with disabilities in it. Very rare. We like to think that we're doing much better than we are. And I'm gonna ... I will put my hand up and say I know I can do better in this. We all can. I love this idea, nothing about us without us. And that that means a few things.
So can you meet these higher goals?
Independence. Your use of a product or service should not require you to rely on any other individual, like our friend Rhea, who relied on her brother for two critical pieces in that process.
Dignity. Your use of a product or service should not require you to ask anyone else for help. Period. It may happen, but it should not require it. You should have the dignity, or be able to maintain your dignity by being able to do this on your own. My dad, we went to Disney in October of last year, and he sent me a text message one morning that said, you know, he was having trouble ... when you go to Disney, you get the Magic Band that goes on your wrist and they connect your tickets to it and your hotel room key, it's all one thing and you just Magic Band everything and magic happens. That's my guess why they call it the Magic Band. But he was trying to get his tickets connected to his Magic Band and he couldn't do it. He's trying and trying and trying to put in his reservation number the ticket number and it wouldn't connect it, wouldn't connect. And I'm like, do you want me to help? He's like, no, no, it's okay, it's okay. And my dad, he doesn't want to ask for help very much. But he sent me a text message this morning. He said okay I got it figured out. I went down to the front desk ... and I got the person at the counter to help me. He said, he couldn't do it either and he had to go into the main system to get the two things connected. And he said, so now I no longer feel like an idiot. I was like, he's my dad, you know, like, and he feels like insignificant as part of this.
So your use of a product or service should not induce feelings that you are at fault for the barriers that the service imposes. He assumed that he was doing it wrong, because he was getting error messages on the screen. So therefore, it was his fault ... nothing to do with you. The main person at the desk couldn't even do it.
Choice. Your use of a product or service should not prevent you from making choices that other people have. What I mean by that is, we cannot set up systems where your fallback position is that you call a help center from 8:00 a.m. Eastern until 8:00 p.m. Pacific. I work the night shift. I get home from work at 4:00 a.m. and therefore that's when I have time to do my whatever it is. And that call center or whatever it is, is not open. You don't have that choice anymore because it's something they did.
Security and privacy. Your use of a product or service should not require you to disclose sensitive personal information to a third party other than those you're disclosing the information to.
I think of Rhea. I think of a friend of mine, Stacy, who was blind and using a screen reader. And when he was trying to sign up for his online banking, he needed to get somebody else to do it because when he, no word of a lie, when he was going through the process himself, he was getting his screen reader to read out his bank card number so that he could activate it, and the the customer service rep on the other end of the phone could hear his screen reader, and thought that there was somebody else in the room there that was coercing him into doing that. And, so he ended up actually, to get it to work, he had to disclose his card number to somebody else and his personal details to somebody else to get them to go through that because they didn't know how to deal with a screen reader, reading on the other side of it.
Now, you probably could have put in headphones, but that also makes it difficult to manage two conversations. One with his screen reader and one with the person on the other end. But you should never have to disclose something sensitive to a third party, just because a system happens to be inaccessible.
So these are kind of the higher goals that I want to think of and we want to be thinking about enabling participation in process. So I want you, as you're thinking about this, as you're moving forward to do things like making sure that you're including people with disabilities in all of the work. In the original design. In talking about the original design, and doing the research in doing all of the pieces that go there and even look at your processes and the tools that you use, how many people in here, just you know raise your hand and say "I", how many people in here know that they use a piece of software, whether it's a website, a web app, or some software, that they know is not accessible?
Raise your hand and say "I". You didn't say enough eyes. Cause I know there's more than that. That was about sixty percent of the room.
Those tools that you're using that aren't accessible prevent you from even hiring somebody with a disability to do that job or to participate in the process. Whether you're hiring them for an hour to give you feedback or you're hiring them as a permanent member of your team or you're hiring them for a six-month contract, think not just about the tools but the process.
How many people do a daily stand-up as part of their as part of their work? Hands up and say "I". So about a third of you. Does that daily stand up an in-person thing where you're gathered around a physical scrum board or a Kanban board? Most of you are saying yes, some of you are saying no. How easy is it for someone that is, for someone they can't see that physical board to participate in that stand-up? It's potentially much easier for them if they have a digital manifestation of that board, with all of the ability to take something from one column and move it to another?
So not just the tools that you use, but the processes that you use, right? What's your ... how many of you do all these things ... by meetings? We've ... we actually looked at our own process and said, because we had a potential client that came to us and they had a ... the lead for their accessibility initiatives was deaf. And we had to question everything from the very beginning and it was great, because that person actually said to us, you know, hey, when we're talking, you know email or some other text communication form is best for me, because, you know, I'm deaf. Like, awesome! First thing we did how do you feel about having a meeting with us at Slack? And so we real-time it. We invited them as a single-channel guest. We had that entire sales kind of conversation in Slack. We were a hundred percent open to it. We looked at it right away and said, let's do this. Why wouldn't we do this?
So I want you to, and that's part of why I add this last piece here, I want you to think about making one of your tools or your processes more inclusive each month for the next year.
Those small changes that you make can actually be incredibly empowering, and even if you can't change all of them, critically looking at the things that you have built into the way that you work can actually uncover a lot of barriers in your own work and your own tools that help you see things from a different perspective about the work that you're actually doing.
Hope that makes sense. With that I'm gonna say, I'm done talking.
However, I know ... what do we ,what do we do from here, Dennis, are we gonna do Q&A? I could talk until forever but i don't know how long we have this room.
[Dennis]: [off mic]
[Derek]: So we'll do 10 minutes of Q&A, and then we can just hang out after that
[Dennis]: Yeah, so, Nick is going to pass the microphone to those who have questions, and then we'll get it back to you.
[Derek]: Alright, I'm going to take water.
[Attendee]: Derek, first of all, this is Ray Campbell. Thank you for your presentation. It hit all the notes that I am thinking of, as I think about my company. I guess, the question that I would have for you, and maybe you could help a little bit and impart some words of wisdom, we may, in our work groups and stuff, want to do the right things, they want to use tools and processes, but how do we get that message up to leadership that's making decisions about what tools we're going to use, what processes we're going to use? But, oh, we're not going to do mobile right now because it's not required, and things like that?
And the second question is a little broader and that is, what kinds of things do you think that the community of people with disabilities and those who are interested in these subjects, need to do to get into the ear of people? We now have a lawsuit against the eats our restaurant chain in New York, because nobody thought, they put in iPads for ordering food and stuff. Somebody thought ... they even covered up ... the Voiceover covered up that will turn up the home button and then some do things on the iPad. What do we need to do to get into these companies ears and get them to think inclusive?
[Derek]: That's a lot of questions all in one.
[Laughter]
[Derek]: I'm gonna try and give you the the short answer I even forget what the first question was. What was the first question?
[Attendee]: Getting leadership to buy-in ...
[Derek]: Getting leadership buy-in. I think your number one tool... we've used this method a lot and it works. It may not work for everyone, your mileage may vary. And I also have to admit that because I work for somebody that's not at the organization, people listen to me more. And I don't necessarily like that, I don't. But that's just reality, right? That is the reality of the stuff that we need to deal with every day. I can come in and say exactly the same thing that you have been for 10 years and in ten minutes I can get more action, simply because I'm from the outside. And as a Canadian, I will just say I'm sorry for that.
[Laughter]
[Derek]: That's just how it is, though. Number one tool that we use is video evidence. People absolutely struggling with this stuff, and not just one video, not just two videos, but videos that happen every single time you do usability testing with people with disabilities, those videos make their way into every part of the culture. Those videos are real, and they are painful, and they wake leadership up.
Whether we ... you know ... and I don't like doing that kind of like, we're gonna put this on display because there's like even kind of icky feelings about that, but man does it get the job done. So we use videos for almost everything. We record, we record sessions and we show them like here's your engaging experience and here's why it sucks.
That thing that you thought, you know, ...the other tool that we use is we get executive and leadership to kind of like, predict how it will take for somebody to do this thing, right? They are like, you know, it's like product management or like VP's of product and things like that, how long do you think it's gonna take for this person to do "X"?
You know, to check out a book or to check to see if a book is in stock in the library, Or if it's in the library or not. To reserve that book, how long do you think that's going to take? That should take like 45 seconds. And then you show them reality where there's somebody with a disability, and probably even people without a disability and it's not taking 45 seconds, it's actually taking five minutes. And for someone with a disability, it's taking 17 minutes. And the stuff has evidence all the time.
The second part of your question was what can we do as the community ... to ... was it to get the same buy-in or was it a different ...
[Attendee]: [Indecipherable]
[Derek]: Right right right right ... Companies don't know what proactive means. Because they're all being asked to do too much with too little. So that's the reality of the problem with that. So anything that we do, and again I think it's, in many ways, it's evidence, it's not proactive, they're gonna be reactive once, and then after that, if it's worked well, they're not going to be reactive in that same kind of life cycle. They're going to start to become more proactive. But I also think that we can't just say, we're expecting you to be completely proactive about absolutely everything now. We have to be ... we have to keep going at it and going at it and going at it, it's ... think of Agile, and I talked about this in my my talk earlier today at An Event Apart here in Chicago, we've got to eliminate the idea of being perfect, and really focus on better and getting better and better and better and better and better.
I don't think lawsuits are going to go away and I think they help, but that's like the stick. And there's other ways to do it with the carrot as well. And dealing with and showing demonstrably some of the benefits of things as well. I'm not sure if that's a community, what can you do as a community answer, but it's certainly the way that we certainly approach it so I hope that's helpful.
[Attendee]: So my question is ... when we're talking about people with disabilities, we're not just talking about, oh yeah, there are blind people, there are deaf people, there are people in wheelchairs, there's a full range of disability, right? [Indecipherable] How do you account for that entire range of disability when designing your product? Because there is so much out there that you need to account for.
[Derek] Ranges and spectrums. A lot of people ... if I were to ask you to draw a spectrum, and I'll ask you to do this, draw me what a spectrum looks like. When we say somebody's on the autistic spectrum, what does that look like? Draw that in the air for me. Or don't, that's fine too, I'm totally fine with not ... Almost everybody does something like this... or they do this, right?
And one of the most helpful things for me was to understand that it's actually more like this. Then it's not about being some spot between two end points on the line... that it's actually ... and I don't have this slide in here, so I can't show you but I have a slide where it's basically a color wheel. And there's five different kind of functional things around it and we all exist... if you think of your verbal skills, your auditory skills, your executive function, which is kind of what helps control whether you like, I shouldn't say this thing right now or I should say this thing right now, your people skills, your empathy skills, all of those things all exist on their independent kind of lines. But they actually are a multi-dimensional whole. So I think an important part of this is thinking about it that way.
The other part of it is not thinking about the ridiculous number of infinite combinations that there are in terms of what disability actually means and what that means for somebody's hearing or their sight or their whatever it is. Think of it in functional terms. So, don't think of five different forms of colorblindness, and someone that's completely blind, or somebody that has low vision, that it's very blurry and so they can't tell about the color, don't think about ... we have to design for someone that's red-green deficient, somebody that has difficulty with blue and yellow, somebody that can't see color at all, and somebody that can really struggle seeing the color, think of not all the individual things but think of it as a broader thing like how do I do this so the color doesn't matter?
When you think of all of the things that way, like almost every kind of neurodiversity or cognitive thing relates to one of a few functional things, like there's, I'm gonna really extract like be really superlative here, but there's zillions of reasons for having short-term memory problems. Like zillions. Concussion. Alzheimer's. I can't remember anymore ... so you see what I did there?
[Attendee]: Short term, you could have a hangover ...
[Derek]: Well, I wasn't gonna say hangover but, I totally, it's the same thing. You haven't had your coffee in the morning yet, right? All of those things are related to memory. It doesn't matter why it's there. It matters that there's a short-term memory issue, and so what we do is we find ways to design better for people that are having difficulties with short-term memory. I hope that it helps. Don't think about the zillions of things, think about the functional impact of those things and focus on those.
[Attendee]: Can I just build on that?
[Dennis]: Sure, one second, let's get you a microphone so everyone can hear you.
[Attendee]: I just wanted to add to his short term memory. When people under lots of stress, so they're going through health issues, then they have sometimes cognitive problems. You're going through emotional event, somebody's sick, somebody's dying, just imagine being online, going to a website it's so complicated that you can't think straight. So these issues of disability aren't necessarily something that's chronic or a long term. It can be short term, they can be just instantaneous. So when you think of Universal Design, it can be design for everything, for everybody, a little bit of perspective a lot of times you're creating about your experience for everybody, under different conditions. I just wanted to add that.
[Derek]: [warble] ... not even just sometimes like all the time right but the cool part about it is that if I'm, you know, crack my head and I'm suddenly can't remember something and that's gonna come back, you know that the things that we do to create inclusion and accessibility aren't really for me, they just happen to benefit me. That's not something for me that is protected as a civil right and the beauty of doing the things that we do from an accessibility perspective and inclusion perspective... for as the main reason for people with disabilities, it happens to benefit lots of other people.
But it's a civil right of people with disabilities. And so there is an important distinction I want you to think about there, but definitely use the ... sell it as much as you need to with the ... this benefits everybody, but it's actually a you know a civil right for people that actually have disabilities. So, think about that side of it as well.
[Dennis]: One more question.
[Derek]: Just one more.
[Attendee]: Hi, Derek, that was a great presentation. Actually, this is my first accessible presentation ... I didn't know accessibility in design. So, really fascinated by it. So, understanding your presentation, I just wanted to ask you one thing, that when I design a solution for people who are not disabled, how do I paint accessibility? How do I think that, okay, what is the starting point? Because how do I think that, okay, now I have to make it accessible to other people who are not able to see, or hear, or other disability. How do I paint accessibility? Because, in my mind, I'm designing a solution for people which are, you know, not disabled, and then how do I think, what is my starting point, what is the tool that I use that, now I have to make it inclusive all inclusive, for people who cannot use this. So I just want to know, as being an entry to the design field.
[Derek]: So that is like a full-day workshop, is like what the starting point is. Because there's a lot to it. However, let me say this. When you design with empathy, and an understanding of what people that aren't in your shoes are actually going through, and I've got some things that I can share with you as well, that are actual like, here's an inclusive design tool kit that will help you. Right, to understand that. So that's a thing that we can talk about later.
But, when you design with empathy and I really want, I really need to make this distinction, I hope you all understand the difference. There's a difference between ... there's a difference between designing with empathy and designing with sympathy. They are incredibly different things. Use that as your starting point, and if you take empathy on and really understand what that means, that's what leads you down the correct path.
There are simple things that we can talk about as well from a design perspective that can actually help create that empathy. And there's lots of things that help on that helped the developers with it as well. But, that to me is a great starting point. There's a lot of resources that you can find but that mindset, understanding that accessibility is non-binary, right, that there's a lot of shades of grey in between, that it's not just about, did we meet the requirement, is this actually easy to use. That to me, that mindset is what will take you a long long way.
Alright, thank you very much, everybody.
[Applause]