Accessibility and Innovation

Atlassian Design Week, Sydney, March 2018

Context:
What follows are my slides and speaker notes from a presentation I gave at Atlassian's internal design conference in March 2018.

I leveraged our design culture's love of memes and dry humor to:
1. help keep attendees engaged in what can often be a dry topic, and
2. soften what can sometimes feel like a guilt or shaming pitch,
which often makes engagement in the topic difficult.

To my happy surprise, this talk not only got the laughs I was hoping for, but I found that attendees stayed both engaged in the topic and processed the information and lessons, repeating them back to me with related examples in the days following the talk. Months later, I'm still pinged by attendees with questions and observations on the topic—yay! :)

Cover slide: the suprise benefits of universal design. a.k.a. designing for accessibility up-levels experience for all
Slide image: Level set: doingt the right thing

Whenever we talk about the subject of accessibility, there are always a few elephants in the room. So before I start the main topic, let’s level set on those first.

It should be obvious to all that building for accessibility is the right thing to do. So I’m not going to lecture you about how…

Slide image: open by design logo

...this conference theme is openness, we value inclusion and empower all types of teams...

Slide image: value icons for building with heart and balance and don't f*** the customer

...two important Atlassian values are "Build with Heart & Balance" and "Don't F&%# the Customer..."

Slide image: illustration of meeple teammates in a hot air balloon

...the tools we make decide who gets to be included in work...

Slide image: illustration of brick wall with a lock

...and that by making our products accessible or not, we have an effect on who doesn’t get to participate in team work

Slide image: duh

That should be a duh.

And I do think we all care.

Slide image: animation: all the good things up in flames, replaced by money face emoji and for arguments sake...jk, money

But for the sake of argument let’s be good capitalists and pretend that money is what matters to us.

Slide image: Meme Buzz Lightyear shows Woody landscape Work, work everywhere

We all already work a lot. There's a lot of stuff to do. And we do a lot of stuff. All that stuff has to get prioritized into stuff we need to do now and stuff we’ll do later.

Slide image: Meme animated of math problems being solved in-air

Understandably, most teams and their leads do some simple math that looks something like this…

Slide image: animation: circle of users with small subcircle of disabled user. Very larger circle moves in title time, resources, effort, death start fades in behind it

If this circle is our pool of users, accessibility is going to solve roughly this many users’ problems within that circle (small number of people).

Designing for accessibility, conversely, especially retrofitting, sounds like giant amount of time, resources, and effort (very big scary circle).

Slide image: meme animation little girls says Ugh! One more time, 1:1 is...f**k it

So it’s not great, but you can see how things happen next, and priority-wise, it falls to the wayside.

I would argue, however, this way of thinking leaves us vulnerable to two key missed opportunities…

Slide image: sad bread, sticker for animals are friends not food, eaters circle with smaller circle of people with dietary needs

One: What I’m going to call the "Team Dinner Effect."

When I go out to eat in a large group of my colleagues, there are a handful of us out of 25 or so that have dietary restrictions.

I have an auto-immune disease called Celiac. It affects 1% of the population and means that I can’t eat what most people would consider the foundation of life, bread. I also have colleagues who are vegan, vegetarian, and pescatarian.

So of the group of 30 eaters, 5 of us have special needs Do the five of us go off and have our own dinner?

No, we want to eat as a team, so the restaurant that gets our business for 30 people is the restaurant with a flexible enough menu to accommodate those 5 of us.

Slide image: illustrations for government and education crossed out

You guys are all pretty smart, so I think it’s pretty easy from there to draw the parallel to how this applies to providers of software to teams (ahem, us). In particular, we miss out on the business of organizations that are most legally bound to be equal opportunity employers and service providers, mostly government and public educational institutions.

Slide image: Wiki page of server team's accessibility initiative proposal, yay fox over the top

By the way, shout out, I know there are some folks on the server team already making this case for their products for Fiscal Year 19, so…yay!

Slide image: Must not (not really) be the money

But I’m pretty sure that the reason we’re really in our jobs as designers isn’t so much money, but more about the good stuff...

Slide image: flashy innovation title and meeples building a giant unicorn

Designers are mostly motivated by making cool things. And since I’m talking to designers, the subject of this talk is mostly about opportunity number two: innovation.


This talk is about universal and accessible design and how it naturally pushes breakthroughs and innovations.

By designing for accessibility, we may *think* we’re just designing for that small circle of people, but the thing we’re doing at the foundation is opening up more ways for everyone in more contexts to access the functionality of what we’re making.

animation of accessibility changing to accessible changing to access, directions of access, and then universal

Most of the time when we think about the word accessibility, we actually think about people with disabilities.

But if we break down the word "accessibility" it’s really about making things accessible.

We’re opening up more angles to access the information and functionality of what we’re making. This is why some people prefer to use the word "universal design" over "accessible design."

Slide image: photo of a modern keyboard

Let’s kick this idea off with a story we can all relate to. How many of you use some kind of keyboard every day?

Slide image: old illustration of a typewriter

All the 80s children know that evolved from this, the typewriter.

Slide image: old hand written letter

Before the typewriter, though, if we wanted to write to each other, we had to do this - hand writing.

Slide image: photo of Turri

Well there was this guy — an inventor/designer/innovator Pellogrino Turri, who had an accessibility problem to solve.

He had a friend. Or “friend” depending on which 18-aughts gossip you follow. His friend was a woman he very much adored and he wanted her to be able to write him letters, but she was blind, and writing letters by hand required seeing.

So, being that he was an inventor, or designer of sorts, he created a device that allows you to print letters by pressing buttons. Once you learned where the letters were, you could touch the buttons instead of using sight to write them.

Slide image: Meme animated gif of Seinfeld and Elaine shrugging

...which turned out to be totally not that big of a deal because it’s only helpful for the, like, 2% of people who are legally blind, right?

Slide image: montage of variety of keyboards over the years

Sike. it turns out that making things easier for a blind woman made things easier for everyone, plus it enabled a lot of stuff that came after it.

Slide image: mobile on-screen keyboard

The irony of this last image of a mobile keyboard is that it’s a keyboard, but, full circle, one needs sight to operate it. Maybe there’s an innovation there like using haptics to give physical feedback that helps users find the edges of the keys?

Slide image: Mem of suprised pug saying He said my story was cool. and he called me bro

Ok, so yeah, cool story, but it's not just an anecdote.

Breakthroughs we make for accessibility tend to be breakthroughs for everyone because at their core, those breakthroughs are about opening up access and context.

Turri’s motivation may have been writing letters to his friend, but, at the foundation, what he did was create a new mode of access to written communication for everyone.

Slide image: groups for blind, visual impairments, motor disabilities, cognitive disabilities, hearing impairments, speech impairments

When we design specifically for accessibility guidelines, we tend to break our audience into these groups, roughly categorized by the mode by which they can or cannot access what we make.

Slide image of spoken text

So if we start out with our group of blind users, we see define a blind user as someone who can’t do anything that requires looking at a screen.

Slide image of spoken text

Other people who can't look at screens include...

  • Someone driving
  • Someone cooking or cleaning
  • Someone walking to work
  • Someone in a meeting who wants to know if their pregnant wife calls
  • Someone in a dark theater not wanting to disturb others
  • My partner in bed trying to read the news at 3am without waking me up

Slide image: phone with directions posted up in a car

Here are some examples of things that have been made for not looking at screens that might help people in those contexts...

I can have driving directions read to me so I don’t have to look away from the road.

Slide image: voice assist typing message What am I your cauffer, drive yourself!

While driving, I can voice text a friend to politely ask them to drive themselves.

Slide image: phone with serial podcast

I can listen to audio content via podcasts on my commute to work.

Slide image: Appl watch face with haptics settings

I can set the haptics on my phone and watch to vibrate when specific important people call.

Slide image: buttons on sides of the iphone

I can operate functions on a phone using the physical buttons on the side I can feel while it’s still in my pocket.

Slide image: a modern keyboard

And of course there’s the keyboard.

Slide image: repeating lists of contexts

Turns out many of these contexts have ways of accessing functionality and content outside of looking at a screen.

Slide image: haven't solved for a dark theater or reading the news in bed with a partner sleeping

These ones haven’t so much been solved, but hey, innovation opportunity!

Slide image: (spoken text)

Let’s unpack motor disabilities. Someone with a motor disability can’t use their hands to operate a device and/or can’t move with precision.

Slide image: (spoken text)

Other people who can't use their hands to operate a device and/or can't operate it with precision inclue folks who are:

  • Walking
  • In a moving car or train
  • Driving
  • Inebriated
  • Just waking up and hitting snooze
  • Using a remote
  • Using a teeny tiny on-screen keyboard
  • Their phone is across the room and they're feeling really lazy

Slide image: autocomplete on Etsy completes ha with harry potter

As you listened to that list, autocomplete may have come to mind as something that’s made access easier for those limited mobility contexts.

Slide image: Google search result for autocomplete invented

If you Google how and when autocomplete was invented you might conclude that autocomplete was invented by Google around 2004.

Slide image: a scene from Theory of everything where Intel rep introduces Stephen Hawking and family to new type assist device

But if you were to do a bit of research and watch the movie Theory of Everything, you’ll notice that Stephen Hawking had autocomplete wayyy before the rest of us. Pretty sure this was before 1990 judging by that powder blue track jacket.

Slide image: photo of Stephen Hawking on stage with planets behind him on screen

Ok, if you do some actual research, you come up with a year around 1985.

Turns out we decided this guy, who had some major challenges with both movement and speech, was pretty important. So some people, including Intel, wanted to help create access for him to do those things.

The innovations for that access helped not only other disabled folks, but contributed tech foundations that now allow the rest of us to text our friends faster, and get mad when we start a search string that doesn’t complete itself after we’ve typed half of it.


P.S. RIP you wonderful human being, Stephen Hawking


And p.s., jokes aside, thanks to Google for making auto-complete ubiquitous to our Web and app interaction experiences.

Slide image: accessibility leads to making cool things leads to profit

More companies than Google are taking advantage of accessibility’s tendency to push innovation, though.

Slide image: Instagram post from Amber Case where someone shows off their very badly smashed phone that is tsill functional without the screen working

Some of you lucky or unlucky ones may have smashed your iPhone phone screen and, if you don’t have insurance, out of desperation found you can actually access a lot of the functionality of the phone by taking advantage of the fairly robust accessibility features. This kind of thing definitely helps the rep of Apple product design too.

Slide image: image of a lifehacker article The Secret Powers Hidden in Your iPhone's Accessibility Options

This is an article from lifehacker that describes some ways to use iPhone accessibility features to make your life better, physically disabled or not. Turns out people who are blind have been getting the news read to them by robots for decades before Alexa!

Slide image: screen shot from Microsofts Inclusive Design guide, The persona spectrum

For all the unsexiness that Microsoft usually embodies for designers, they have actually published an inclusive design framework with guidelines, examples, and activities that I would argue ought to be as exciting to the design community as Google Material design was.

Slide image: flashy things are getting better title with meeples building a unicorn

Things are getting better for all of us as things improve for accessibility.

  • I can watch captioned videos on the subway to access that content even if I haven’t brought my headphones,
  • I can tap the power button on the edge of my phone from inside my pocket if I get kidnapped and want to initiate a call to emergency,
  • I can ask Alexa to order me more cat food when I run out,
  • and I could set up a Google Home for my grandma in case she has an accident where she can’t get to a phone in the house and needs to call for help.
  • I can text a friend while driving,
  • as well as add things to my grocery list in the middle of doing dishes when I remember I need hot sauce by asking Siri to do so from across the room.

Slide image: Growing separation of content from format, device, delivery mechanism, method and context for exploration

As companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple make their experiences more accessible, building foundations of better experience for all their users, expectations for how we’re able to use our devices and products is elevating.

Slide image: (spoken text)

The old way:

I need to…

  • give an app or software experience my full attention visually,
  • be able to see the screen with clear vision,
  • have all of my motor facilities work with some level of accuracy,
  • use sound to access video content or recorded content,
  • and have a certain amount of intellectual ability and engagement with the content and mechanisms

…to benefit from the experiences. 

Slide image: (spoken text)

The new way:

I have…

  • multiple options for accessing content and interaction,
  • I can use the assistance of the software or app in multiple contexts
  • including those in which I’m not able to give my full visual attention or precise motor abilities,
  • I can access these experiences whether I am in a loud or quiet space even if I haven’t connected my headphones

…the experience caters to me and my context, not the other way around.

Slide image: animation of shrug emoji crossed out, then replaced with word Absolutely!

All these talks are about openness and inclusion, but in this new framework, we don’t need to actually talk to disabled users, right?

Wrong.

Just like when you visit Sydney or San Francisco or Gdansk or Manila or…(all the places that Trello people live), you ask an Atlassian colleague who lives there what are the tips and tricks of being there (i.e. best food and places to play and stay).

People who live with not being able to see or move precisely or hear or speak already have some pretty good ideas about the most efficient and reliable ways to solve challenges of access. We should be working together closely on these tech solutions.

Slide image: What's next, how do I do this even

So, assuming I’ve totally convinced you that this is a worthwhile thing to invest energy into, there are few things you can do to start on this now…

Slide image: disablility groups: blind, visual impairments, motor disabilities, cognitive disabilities, hearing impairments, speech impairments

One: Next time you’re solving a design problem, take a look at this list of disabilities or blockers to access and ask yourself what other ways could content be accessed?

What are some ways, for example, I might be able to get caught up on Jira on my morning commute when I’m not looking directly at a screen?

Slide image: screenshot of page from training portal

Two: In the spirit of progress over perfection, on a recent shipit, Anthony Nomorosa and I *started* a training portal to collect materials to increase exposure and understanding of how disabled users access digital experiences. Keep an eye out for a beta release and blog post.

Slide image: conference open by design logo

Three: And then finally, full circle, we need to include disabled users into our design problem space just like we invite other users to chat with us and tell us about their experiences with our products.

Slide image: Thank you, image of Simpson's character squinting, Can see bright future

Thank you!

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