Samuel Proulx

Episode 93
Brave UX

Designing for Dignity Through Accessibility

In this episode of Brave UX, Samuel Proulx shares his experience of the digital world as a blind person, his thoughts on autonomous vehicles, and how inclusive design makes everyones' experience better.

Highlights include:

How do you feel about the prospect of autonomous vehicles?
Why did the gaming industry say accessibility couldn’t be achieved?
How has your father also being being blind shaped your relationship?
Why does the term ableism sometimes make you uncomfortable?
How does the Medical Model of Disability influence how we design?

October 4, 202201:05:48

Listen on:

Who is Samuel Proulx?

Sam is the Accessibility Evangelist at Fable, a user research platform that connects people with disabilities, with people who want to create a more accessible Internet. Fable also provides those same people with custom training, so they can build more inclusive products.

At Fable - as Sam’s title would suggest - he is responsible for evangelising accessibility and inclusive design. This means keeping those subjects on the radar of our world’s enterprises and helping them to see that accessibility can be more than an exercise in compliance.

He is also very involved in the broader accessibility community, including as a long-time moderator of the official sub-reddit for Blind and Visually Impaired people. He is also the co-host of the Disability Bandwidth podcast and host of The Inclusion Hub podcast.

Recently, named on Royal Bank of Canada’s Future of Good 2022 list, Sam is one of 30 Young Impact Leaders who have recently been celebrated as people creating impactful and positive change in their communities.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of TheSpace InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.conz. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the learnings, stories and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Samuel Proulx. Samuel is the accessibility evangelist at Fable, a user research platform that connects people with disabilities with people who want to create a more accessible internet. Fable also provides those same people with custom training so they can gain the skills needed to build more inclusive products.
At Fable (as Sam's title would suggest) he is responsible for evangelizing accessibility and inclusive design. This means keeping those subjects on the radar of our world's enterprises and helping them to see that accessibility can be more than an exercise in compliance. To that end, much of Sam's time is invested in writing articles, speaking at events (which is how we met) and providing valuable content like this to industry. He is also very involved in the broader accessibility community, including as a longtime moderator of the official subreddit for blind and visually impaired people. He's also the co-host of the Disability Bandwidth podcast and host of the Inclusion Hub podcast. Definitely check those out. I'll put links to them in the show notes. Recently named on Royal Bank of Canada's Future of Good 2022 list. Sam is one of 30 young impact leaders who have recently been celebrated as people creating impactful and positive change in their communities, and preparing for today's conversation and having recently heard Sam speak at Rosenfeld Media's Design at Scale conference, I understand why he's on that list. And now it's my great pleasure to have him here with me on Brave UX. Sam, welcome to the show.
Samuel Proulx:
Hey lovely to be here. What an amazing intro. I think I'll just clip that out and use it as the intro of for everything I do in future.
Brendan Jarvis:
You are most welcome, Sam, and it's all of your wonderful achievements. So be my guest, [laugh], be my guest. Hey Sam, you are someone who, as far as I can tell, is a big sci-fi and fantasy fan. Yes. And I also understand that you are a gamer, so when you're not busy evangelizing accessibility, you spend a bit of time playing games. Sure. What's the last game that you played?
Samuel Proulx:
Oh boy. I'm about to get into the new release of the last US because they made the last of us too accessible and now that the last of us one is being remastered, they're adding accessibility to that. I also, over the summer, kind of played a bunch of Hearthstone as you do when you're off and you're not working. And there's a really interesting sort of empire building and kingdom management game called War which is available on steam that I put a bunch of hours into because when you get off work, what better to do than more resource management? Right. [laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
A hundred percent. I try and not look at the amount of time that I've spent playing certain games cuz it scares me.
Samuel Proulx:
Oh yeah, I know. I mean, steam's the worst. It says right there in your library you spent 146 hours. Oh geez. Thanks.
Brendan Jarvis:
Hey we both played last of us too. What did you think about it?
Samuel Proulx:
First of all to get the kind of obvious thing out that has to be said is that it is revolutionary in being kind of the first AAA console title that can be played completely by someone without vision. So I mean obviously that is revolutionary and needs to be stated up upfront also because it's the first console title that is fully accessible For me growing up, nobody in my family was a gamer. None of my friends were really gamers. And so I had never used anyone else's console or owned a console myself. When I took up gaming, it was all on the PC because games could be modded to add accessibility and the screen reader was on the PC and it wasn't on the console. And so was also, I found it quite surprising how the kind of different UX and the difference affordances of being on a console, the first kind of two hours of my gaming experience was just getting used to that and the way the PlayStation works.
So it's all tangled up in there, but they did a really good job adding the accessibility features that making it playable at an incredibly high quality for something that is the first one you always expect. Oh, it's the first one. So we have to make a whole bunch of allowances because it's the first and they tried really hard and they got there, but there's all these problems. It didn't feel like a first one, if that makes any sense. It did feel very polished and I think the reason for that is because they had a number of folks with disabilities testing it and making suggestions and providing feedback throughout the development process so that when it got into my hands, it was obvious that other people with disabilities had played this thing before in a real way. I wasn't the first because they'd been given feedback all the way through the process.
Brendan Jarvis:
And that sounds like that made a huge difference. Like you said, you couldn't really discern whether it was a first or whether it was in the one and a long line of these types of things. But like you said earlier, it was the first AAA console game that had been made fully accessible. So it is real milestone. How has that advancement in making AAA titles on console more accessible or accessible in their entirety? How has that changed the gaming industry?
Samuel Proulx:
I think it's done a few things. First of all, of course the last of us two cut a great deal of press and attention and fanfare for doing what it did. And so that started conversations at many other organizations about, well, can we do this? How can we do this? Second of all, it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt something that we in the accessibility community knew, but something that they in the gaming community didn't know, which is that it is possible to do this. It's not this impossible lift that's going to cost billions of dollars and just never be doable. This is something that is practical and an achievement and a milestone that can actually be reached. Because too often when you talk to gaming companies, they're like, oh, well can't, it's not possible. No techniques. There's no guidelines. This is a totally uncharted road.
And so now the last of us too has created some examples and shown that this can be done. So it makes it harder for another gaming company to say, well, we can't either to say that to gamers who are advocating to get access to things or to say that to regulators who are wondering, well, all of these years we've exempt, we've exempted games from all of the kind of accessibility regulations that we have because we've been told it's not possible. And I think the last of us two features have also proven that it is possible to make a game accessible without lowering the difficulty. Because too many times people think, oh, well, if I have to make an auto targeting system and I have to do all this stuff for people, what I'm doing is I'm my game. I'm making it easier so that these people who turn on accessibility mode, maybe cited players, will just turn on accessibility mode to cheat because it's making the game easier so they can get a high score.
And if you're a game designer, you're really against people cheating at your game. And so I think it's really proven that more accessible doesn't mean easier or doesn't mean reduc doesn't have to mean reducing difficulty. It can mean reducing difficulty. It can mean changing difficulty, changing certain tasks, but it doesn't have to be right. I think a really good example of that is the last of us two, when you have the accessibility mode on, it kind of has ledge detection so that even if I'm directing the character to walk straight off of a ledge and fall to her death, she just won't. Right. And I mean, sure, maybe that's making it easier, but what sided player is struggling to not walk their character off a ledge, you wouldn't turn that on and be like, Ooh, this is a real cheat for me to get a high score. Right.
Brendan Jarvis:
It sounds like an industry led strawman argument. It's remarkable coming from an industry, and I know we said off here that we wouldn't come down a ton of bricks on any company in particular, and in this case it's an industry, so don't let me get too dark on this, but it just strikes me to be a remarkable and a bad way excuse to be making from an industry that is so innovative in so many ways.
Samuel Proulx:
But I think
Brendan Jarvis:
That's because you suggest that it couldn't be done
Samuel Proulx:
Right. Well, but it's because I think industries, the gaming industry is very good at creating these experiences and telling these stories, but how many UX designers work in gaming? And so I think that the gaming industry as a whole is only slowly getting to the point where they're realizing we can separate the stories and challenges in our games from the UX of our game. And so when you're making accessibility changes, often you're changing the UX al. Although now that I say that, maybe it's thinking out aloud here, but maybe it's not as separate as you feel it is because I know when I was playing the last of us too, going back to that edge detection example, it actually felt like it sort of personalized the characters a little bit more for me because if I try to walk them straight off ledge, they just won't. And I found myself embodying some of these accessibility features in the character because in the last of us two, you are not the character in the game. And so it's very easy to, oh, well of course you won't do that. That's a dumb thing to do. Right?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. It's almost like it allows you to get to another level. And I don't wanna suggest that children are a form of a situational disability. Gaming has recently introduced story mode. This isn't something I hadn't thought about before we jumped on the call, but story mode allows, in this case, it's one of my good friends who has far less time now that he's got two kids to play games than before, allows him to participate in the experience of playing that game without the difficulty that a person who had perhaps more time a sighted person with more time would experience.
Samuel Proulx:
And I think that's also something that we get into when we are talking about UX, when we are talking about design, when we are talking about experience. Because gaming, you want the experience of playing a game to be different from the experience of watching a video on Netflix, even in story mode. They keep enough interaction there that it's not sitting down to watch a video. And so again, I think that gets into we're separating the game from the interface elements of the game and the controls games and the other things. And I think also as the target audience for games begins to skew a little bit older and games are no longer just being marketed sort of exclusively at teenagers, male teenagers to be specific, I think game designers and game industries are also starting to realize that it's no longer their job to be sort of the fun police if what does cheating at a story game mean? It means you get to experience the whole story, right?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, a hundred percent. So
Samuel Proulx:
I think gaming companies are letting go of this. Every game should have brain busting puzzles. And if you can't solve the puzzle, it's because you're not good enough. And so you don't deserve to experience this game. Right. [laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
Like, right. Yeah. Yeah. It's that moving away from that purest type way of imagining what the user experience should be and instead recognizing that we have a wide variety of people with various abilities and needs and wants, and we need to give them an experience that works for them.
Samuel Proulx:
And it really is a key change. I don't know if you're old enough to remember and the seventies and eighties, the computer gaming magazines, and it was like you'd get a prize for being the first to solve this adventure game. And it was a real bragging rights to solve all these fiddly little puzzles where they'd have in the infocom adventures of old, that last lousy point that was almost impossible to get and you had to try everything to finally get it. And I think we're moving away from that.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Hey, moving on to something else that you've been doing for a while now, and that is moderating the official blind and visually impaired community on Reddit. Just how long have you been doing that?
Samuel Proulx:
Oh boy. Was certainly before I started at Fable, so six or seven years I want to say.
Brendan Jarvis:
That seems to me, I had a look at the community, which is very active. I think there's something upwards of 17,000
Samuel Proulx:
We're the largest gathering of blind and visually impaired people on the internet. As far as I can discern.
Brendan Jarvis:
That seems like a lot of work.
Samuel Proulx:
And no, the lovely thing about Reddit, and one of the reasons I was so excited to take this on and I'm still excited to do it, is that the participants in the community get to have a voice in the way that they do not in any other form or communication system. So if I'm a piece of content that's posted and I'm like, ah, maybe this is off topic or I'm a little bit dubious it, you just leave it there. And if the community doesn't like it, they'll down vote it, and then it will get hidden and go away because the things with the most up votes rise to the top. And so it lets moderation be done with a bit more of a free hand because the community has a very easy way to express what they would like and expect from posts and comments and really control for themselves what gets attention and what does not.
Brendan Jarvis:
So you get to see these conversations and these topics that come up across time and representative of, like you said, it's the largest online community of its sorts. Is there a particular personality that you've seen the community embody? Is it something that can be reduced to such a thing?
Samuel Proulx:
Short answer is no. And the reason is because there are communities of blind folks that are in places other than Reddit. And those places tend to be, remember back in the day you had a, you'd start up a website and go, and it was your forum that you've run with pH pbb or whatever it was. And a lot of those still exist. But in order to know about them, you have to be somebody who is already embedded in the blindness community. And so that traditionally means that maybe you are someone who was born blind or who is blind as a child and has grown up being a person with a disability, being a person who is blind. Reddit is so open. If you have a Reddit account, you can just pop in to our blind and you can post and it's searchable and it's easy to find.
And so we have people who have that experience who are part of the traditionally blind spaces in the traditional blind community. And we have folks who got the diagnosis yesterday from their doctor that they'll be blind in three months and now. So it's a very mixed group of folks who are at all different places in their journey of being a person who is blind, who is living life of accepting and processing what it means to be blind and deciding what, if anything, that identity means to you. If it's an identity you embrace or if to you blindness is just a nuisance to be worked around. So it is a very mixed bag of folks. I think the only thing that the entire community has in common would be that we all tend to be very quick to vote. People who come into the sub and say, Hey, I just thought of this great new idea for a product that would help blind people.
And I have never spoken to a blind person and I haven't done three minutes of research to see if this already exists. And what do you think of my great new product idea? I think there's a desire in the engineering communities, right? Oh, blindness is a problem to be solved. And so you want to get to solving without looking at existing challenges and existing solutions. And so that happens all the time and those poor folks get downloaded so quickly. I think that's the one thing that the whole community, I guess has in common maybe is that frustration.
Brendan Jarvis:
Right. You mentioned that the Reddit community is, it sounded like, and I don't wanna put words in your mouth here more open than some of the perhaps older or other communities of maybe
Samuel Proulx:
Discoverable is a better word.
Brendan Jarvis:
Discoverable. Okay. Yeah, good word. Good word. That ability to be discovered for people who haven't been born blind and who have received, I think used the term diagnosis that in three or four months they may lose their sight or they're likely to lose their sight. What is the most common question or concern that they have when they come to the community for the first time?
Samuel Proulx:
The first thing is that there is a lot of grief. I often consider myself to be lucky as somebody who was born blind because I have never experienced sight. And so I do not have a loss to grieve. But I think that the loss of sight in the same way say the death of a parent or a close relative sticks with you, I think that it is perfectly possible to continue and have an excellent, wonderful, productive, amazing life as somebody who is blind, just as is possible to go on if your husband or wife dies. But it is something that does stay with you forever and that you have to learn to process. And the big learning for me been a learning for me as I moderate the community because I tend to think, oh, these people are just like they're way overblowing it. I mean, you can turn a screen reader on in your computer and you can learn to use a cane and you'll be fine.
It has been a learning for me to really come to realize that there is a grief here at a legitimate loss. And by me accepting that these people who have that, the people who have lost their sight are feeling this grief, it doesn't mean that I'm accepting that my life is in some way lesser or that their lives will be in some way lesser or less productive. But there is a grief there, and it is okay for those of us who are born blind to accept that people who are losing their sight have this grief and have to process this grief. And it does not take away from our abilities or our capabilities or quality of our lives. Does that make sense?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, it does. Does a hundred percent. Now, you mentioned that you are someone who was born blind, and I think I've heard you use in the past the term completely blind. Yes. But let me know if there's a term that you prefer other
Samuel Proulx:
Than that. I mean, so blind in theory means completely blind but there has been this sort of shift into like, oh, well visually impaired is the politically correct term for blind. And so it's sort of made the two terms in interchangeable in a way that they didn't start off being. And it is something that I have posted about publicly, even on unread it. And even as part of our faq, I will tell someone I'm blind, they don't want to be politically incorrect. So they will change it to, oh, he's visually impaired, and suddenly I get a large print menu with no braille and my needs have not been met because you change the label that I use for myself in an effort to be politically correct. The use of labels isn't in prescribing us or isn't in telling us what we can't do. But the effective use of labels is in making us able to do things and in making sure that we get the support that we need to do everything we want to do.
Brendan Jarvis:
It also sounded like the swapping of the label from blind to visually impaired. In your particular circumstance, it sounded like maybe there was a little bit of a front to your identity in that person making that decision to refer to you different to how you prefer to be referred to.
Samuel Proulx:
Possibly. Probably. But at the time, it is almost certainly drowned out by the frustration in not getting the support [laugh] that I need. Right. Because if you're visually impaired, it means you have some vision. And so you might be able to read magnified high color contrast text or you might be able to see lights and shadows or you know, might be able to walk around a space without the use of a cane or something like that. And those things are not true for me. So when the label gets changed for blind divisionally impaired, it is now setting up a whole bunch of false expectations in other people. And now whoever it is that I'm in interacting with, who maybe had the label changed by a third party now has to feel the awkwardness of like, oh, well we tried really hard to be ready for a visually impaired person. We're not ready for you. Right.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. The word really do matter,
Samuel Proulx:
But yeah, so when I say completely blind, I'm just emphasizing no light perception and just because those words have become interchangeable in that way.
Brendan Jarvis:
Got it. Yeah. Just so that people really truly understand what it is that you mean. Yeah. I want to come to your upbringing. I understand that your father, he worked at ibm. Yes. And that he is also blind. Was he also blind since birth?
Samuel Proulx:
Yes. He was born blind himself. And the thinking at the time was that his blindness would not be heritable. And so it was a very great surprise when I was born blind and the sort of, nobody was expecting it. And there's a rare disease database [laugh] like that. I'm part of [laugh], but I don't know that it would've changed any of the decisions that he made necessarily. But I think it was just an adjustment for him in the very first sort of few months when I was born that like, oh, this is a thing that I didn't know about myself in a way.
Brendan Jarvis:
Right. Yeah. A big surprise. How has, you mentioned that you had recently recorded a podcast episode with your dad.
Samuel Proulx:
It's not out yet, but I've recorded it. Yes.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I actually, I'm really looking forward to having a listen to that one. I was curious about your relationship. So how did both of you being blind, how did it shape your relationship that you have today?
Samuel Proulx:
I mean, it's hard to say because it is the relationship that I grew up with. I'm an only child, so I have a very close relationship with
Brendan Jarvis:
Both of my parents. Oh, me too. Me too.
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah. It siblings really seem to change things, don't they? For the parental relationship dynamic in ways that I don't think we as only child, only children have come to grips with
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. It's hard to say though, isn't it? Cuz you and I have only both grown up as only children.
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah. We've never had a sibling. So when you say how is your relationship different? Cause you're an only child, do you have to think to yourself, oh, I don't really know because I don't have a sibling. I remember the sort of one of my earliest memories when I was like, I don't know, three or four cuz my mother is completely sighted. And so I had gone over to a friend's house and I was staying with them and we were having a sleepover and we were going to go out, I think to a theme park or something and we got in the car and my friend's father got on the driver's seat and I said, what daddy's drive? And just at that three or four years old, it had never occurred to me that my father didn't drive because he was blind. I had just, oh well dad, daddies don't drive. Just because my father was so normal to me,
Brendan Jarvis:
The innocence of childhood and that almost that, I wouldn't say it's the ripping off of the Band-Aid, but it's one of, it sounds at least one to me to be one of those moments of realization as you grow up that the world isn't what it once was. The second before you came to that realization
Samuel Proulx:
Or the world isn't what you think it is or the world. Because for me it was that ripping off of that bandaid and that sort of realization when I was four because in the eighties things were a little bit more conservative than there today. And this sort of classic gender roles were alive and well. And it hadn't really occurred to me how my father's blindness had changed them in some ways and reinforced them in others. To me it was just the normal f, it's just how things work. Daddy works and mommy cooks and mommy drives when you're a kid. Yeah. That's how it is. That's how families work.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Yeah. Now you mentioned driving, and this isn't something that again I hadn't thought about before we jumped on, which is, hey, that's the beauty of conversation. How excited or not are you about the prospect of autonomous vehicles?
Samuel Proulx:
I am so mixed and I have very mixed feelings. And the first of all, I'll start off by saying obviously I am super excited about the potential one day for me to jump into an autonomous vehicle and get where I'm going and not have to have a cab. And the options for independent travel that it will unlock are incredible. And so I obviously I want my self-driving car yesterday, but at the same time as somebody who's a person with a disability who works in this space, I am intimately aware just how difficult it is for self-driving cars to detect pedestrians who use wheelchairs to time, how long it will take a pedestrian who is on crutches to cross the street to understand the way that someone with a walker moves. And so I sometimes feel like a hesitancy to talk about how great this would be for me because in a very real way it would be life-changing for me as a person who is blind, but if not rolled out well, could have tremendously deleterious effects on other people with disabilities.
And I very much resist and push back against this idea that accessibility is a limited pie and it has to be divided up. And we all have to fight for our share of this limited pie in the way that when audio description was becoming a thing, people who were deaf had expressed worries that, well, if studios have to spend all this money doing audio descriptions, there's going to be less money for captions. And so this feeling that like, oh, well if blind people all advocate for self-driving cars, then deleterious things are going to happen to people who use wheelchairs and things like that. And I think it's very important that we all advocate together and that we really come to understand that a rising tide always lifts all boats and that a self-driving car that is not good enough to detect a pedestrian in a wheelchair is not good enough for me to trust my life to, and that these things are connected and that it's not okay to say, well, it's good enough for blind people now and these other people don't matter because it's not that that's selfish, it's that that's not true.
If it's not good enough to detect and understand these people, it's not ready for me as someone who can't see to put my life in its hands.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. There's not acceptable to have a self-driving car that is not able to recognize all humans or forms of life when it's scanning. Is this another example of ableism playing out and technology in particular in engineering?
Samuel Proulx:
I think it is a very good example of systemic ableism because there is no engineer that wakes up and gets outta bed in the morning and says, I don't like people in wheelchairs, so I don't care if my electric car runs them over. There's nobody saying that. And there's nobody who gets up in the morning and says, I don't care about blind people, I don't like them. I'm going to make my website inaccessible. That's not what's happening in the way that, for example, sometimes with racism there are people who are bigoted and who will say, I don't like people of this ethnicity or from this place. Nobody's doing that with disability. What it is, is it's systemic. It's the AI systems aren't getting training data that includes people with disabilities. They aren't properly taking into account the people with disabilities that do exist in their training data.
Because when you're training an AI system, you you're training it for the 99% and you're sort of intentionally excluding the 1% is like bad data. Uda Trevor Ranni has some great material about this and about the way we need to rethink the way that we are using data to make sure that we're including the edge cases because we're all in edge case in some way and that AI will never be ready and until it can do this. And so yeah, I think self-driving cars are a very good example of the way people with disabilities are systemically excluded from our highly data based society. We see it again in exam proctoring software that thinks that I'm cheating because it's eye detection, thinks I'm looking away at something off camera or that can't recognize the face of somebody who has muscle difficulties and can't move half their face or things like that. It's all systemic database exclusion in these cases. And it is exclusion that comes from not actively trying to be inclusive because if we're not trying to be inclusive, we're we're excluding by default. But the difference is that it doesn't take or require malice to exclude. It just requires not intentionally
Brendan Jarvis:
Including plenty of terrible things happen. Not because people want them to happen, but because they don't do enough to consider what might happen if they take certain actions.
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah, exactly. And that's why sometimes the term ableism makes me a little bit uncomfortable. I mean, how I am a Canadian, and I don't know if you're familiar with some of the stories about the residential schools for indigenous folks that have come up over the last few years.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's interesting you mentioned that I had Dr. Sam Ladner on the show earlier in the year, and Sam's grandmother was a teacher at one of those residential schools. And I had a conversation about that. I won't do story justice today on this episode but yes, I had heard of some of the atrocities that had happened and the under the state,
Samuel Proulx:
And that feels that racism feels very different and malicious and intentional in a way that the thing we're talking about when we say ableism is not. And so sometimes the term ableism makes me just a tad uncomfortable cause people are ableism and they want to tie it to, oh, it's like racism or it's chauvinism or it's like, right, but a, so many of these other isms are tied up in malice or in intentional dislike and distrust and genocide and a whole bunch of other things. People with disabilities have had that experience. Of course, I mean if you look at what happened during World War ii, people with disabilities were included on the list of undesirables. But I think at least today in the technology industry, it's not that. And so is ableism really a great term? I won't say not use it, but I always use it with caution.
Brendan Jarvis:
So it is different and I understand what you pointing to there in terms of the origin or the source of it is not from that same place of ill intent. So if it is different and if that term ableism or ableist isn't helpful or isn't being as helpful as it could be in certain contexts, what is a more progressive or more helpful, more useful way of talking about these issues specifically in technology circles so that we can achieve the outcome that we are not currently achieving with some of these technologies?
Samuel Proulx:
I mean, isn't that kind of the million dollar question? That's always why there's the temptation to use ableist because every, oh, well I know exactly what you mean when you say that. And then they usually move on to stop accusing me of this thing [laugh]. Right? Which
Brendan Jarvis:
Is not puts people on the back foot. People get pretty defensive when they're called anything with an nest.
Samuel Proulx:
And being defensive is not going to fix accessibility. Shame is your feeling bad that your product is inaccessible is not going to fix it. So rather we just get beyond you feeling bad, you know what I mean? And just fix it and just fix it. Yes, yes. Exactly. And so
Brendan Jarvis:
It's a problem, fix it.
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah. I think that's why in the technology space there's such a focus on the term accessibility and to call a product inaccessible and to call the company inaccessible or to say that somebody's not committed to accessibility or not committed to inclusion because it describes that exact problem V very succinctly as in to say they are not doing, or in some cases refusing to do a thing they should do and that they need to do as opposed to saying they're actively doing something negative towards people with disabilities. Right,
Brendan Jarvis:
Right. Yeah. Hey, I know we've been talking about the current state of technology sort of way out there with where things might go with autonomous vehicles. I want to wind the clock back a little bit now, maybe around 30 years or so and come back to your dad. I mentioned that he'd worked at IBM and I understand that his job at IBM gave you access to some pretty radical technology for its time as you were growing up.
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah, I mean I had the rare privilege of having access to all of it, whether it was going to my dad's office and seeing the early mainframe terminals that printed things out on braille paper or the OS two computer in our home, the early blindness specific note takers and braille displays and braille devices. My dad had one of the swell reading machines, which was the first ever machine that could, you know, put a book on it and it could OCR the text and then sort of read it in this extremely robotic voice.
Brendan Jarvis:
Do you remember the first time you used that?
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah, I was in, I say grade two maybe. And there was a book that wasn't in braille that I was supposed to read and do a quiz on the next day. And so my dad put it on the reading machine and had the machine read it to me. I didn't like it. It was getting half the reads, the words wrong, can't mom just read it [laugh]? Right. Because that's where I was like when you're in grade two y yeah, that's where you're at at the time and you're not thinking about in independence because no child is thinking about independence. It feels like you are right to have your parent do things for you. So as you grow older, then you start having these thoughts about independence and wishing I could do it myself and with more dignity. And that's one of the things that I was so lucky having my father being blind.
It was not an adjustment for my mother to have a blind son because she married my dad. She knows what a blind person is capable of because there's so many children who grow up with disabilities where their parents don't understand that living an independent life is possible for them and shelter them and don't bring them up to value those things. And so for me, helping me be more independent wasn't something my parents had to figure out what to do. The journey was me just getting my very first computer, the Apple two, and then getting a Windows computer and transitioning to doing my assignments on the computer and transitioning to scanning in my own articles as opposed to having someone read them. But it was an easy and natural feeling transition for me as opposed to a worry. I
Brendan Jarvis:
Guess I understand that the type of assistive technology you use most often is the screen reader. Yep. There's probably the clues in the name there, but just so I'm crystal clear myself and that whoever's listening to this episode is also clear on that, what exactly is a screen reader and how does it assist you?
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah, so a screen reader can output the text on the screen via synthetic text to speech voices or if you have the correct equipment as I do in braille. And the braille actually these days it's not printed out on paper anymore, it's a refreshable braille display. So it has 40 cells and the cell, the braille dots kind of appear and disappear as a screen. But of course a screen reader, you don't wanna read everything on the screen at all times. There's a lot of things on a screen if you think about it. And so that's why things like the focus is so important when you're thinking about UX and focus states. When you press a submit button, where is the focus going to go? Because the screen reader will always try to read the element that has the focus. And so it also provides a lot of hot keys to quickly jump around the screen because when I say load your homepage, I can't visually glance at it.
I'm at the top and I don't wanna read from the top down and read everything. And so that's why there is such an emphasis around semantic markup because I get, for example, a shortcut key that can jump me to the first heading one on the page or the first heading two on the page. And so for example, when I go to a new webpage in order to replicate that visual overview, I'll tell my screen reader to just jump from one heading to the next and I'll pick, oh, this heading a search result, so this is going to have the stuff I want underneath it, right? And so mm-hmm never taking in the whole page or the whole screen all at once. I'm using the commands that the screen reader provides to allow me to interrogate the screen to go directly to the place that I want or to get exactly the information that I need. And that is really dependent on developers labeling things properly and using correct semantic markup and labeling it a button if it is a button and things like that.
Brendan Jarvis:
How much of your frustration, if you feel when you encounter a website that isn't using semantic markup correctly as per the spec sheet, how much of your frustration that you experience on a regular basis is based on just the basics not being followed?
Samuel Proulx:
It can be quite frustrating. I think for me, as somebody who has been using a screen reader in one form or another for over 30 years, I have, as you do, created quite a muscle memory. And so I know all of the tips and tricks and so if there's a WebP page with no headings, I know okay, there's four other techniques that I can try to work around this thing and I don't even have to think about it and problem solve my way out of it. Whereas for someone like we talked about earlier who maybe lost their site last year and is learning to use a screen reader, that's hugely frustrating for them cuz well all the things that I learned don't work. It doesn't work the way they told me it would work and they don't have any of these techniques to fall back on.
But the thing that really frustrates me is when the spec sheet is not followed in ways that I can't work around. So it's the form that I filled out and it says please collect, correct all the errors highlighted in red, can't see the colors. So now I'm just stuck. It's the button that can't be pressed with the keyboard. So well now it's the image that contains critical information A and has no alt text, the capture that I can't solve the website where absolutely none of the buttons are labeled. So now I can't just work around an awkward user interface cause I don't know what anything does. Those things that are frus, they're the frustration. I think it's a statement on where the industry is at that I am so used to perform all kinds of workarounds every day that it doesn't even sort of enter my sphere of awareness because it's just what I do and I don't get frustrated until all the workarounds stop working.
Brendan Jarvis:
So if anyone has thought in the past or currently thinks that things like form field validation don't really matter what you are saying, it sounds like they have a direct impact on your ability to experience the digital world with dignity. If they're not done in a way that is accessible,
Samuel Proulx:
They do and they have a direct impact. And even when I can work around it, there's an impact in time. So if you can do something in three and a half minutes that it takes me 12 minutes to do, can we really call that accessible? Well, I did it, I got through it, I accomplished the task that I set out to accomplish, but did I really have an accessible experience? And I think the answer is no. Because if I'm going to work and live, I can't be taking nine times longer to do a thing. Then it took you, it's been a very interesting journey for me as I work here at Fable, right? Because when I started out at Fable, I was one of the first employees directly after the founders and now we're a team of 50. And so as companies grow, the work increases and the responsibilities increase. And it has actually been, I think a reversal is too strong of a word, but it has been an interesting reflection for me as I have had to say, well I could do this but it would take half an hour and I can ask one of the colleagues on my team to do it and they'll have it done in three minutes. And so there are other things more valuable than my independence in performing this task. It's an interesting,
Brendan Jarvis:
How does that sit with you? How do you feel about that?
Samuel Proulx:
I mean we all wish we could do everything by ourselves, right? [affirmative], in an ideal world, I would be able to accomplish all of my tasks taking the same amount of time and cognitive effort as anyone else. And I think that's the ultimate goal is that everyone is having an experience online that is easy and that is efficient and that suits their particular needs. I don't, I've been focusing on time and this just as an example, but I don't wanna focus on time cuz if you're, maybe you're Stephen Hawking using a switch system, I mean of course something is going to take you longer. And so we never want to benchmark based on time, but we want everybody to be having a good useful online experience as opposed to being frustrated and working around things and having blockers and not being able to accomplish tasks. And we want people to, competitive is the wrong word, but there shouldn't be a disadvantage say to a company hiring a person with a disability
Brendan Jarvis:
In that particular circumstance. Why I sort of wanted to dig into that with you a little bit more. It strikes me as one where a hundred percent, like you say, it shouldn't put anybody at a disadvantage. The technology shouldn't be putting anyone at a disadvantage regardless of whether they have a disability or not. And that's the aim. But in this particular case, as Babel's grown, your responsibilities have evolved, which means your time, as you said, is better spent doing other things that you could be doing with that time. So in some respect it's seems like this weird tension between an increase in responsibility, which is taking your attention elsewhere and necessitating delegation, but some of the source of that delegation is actually coming from an unacceptable circumstance with the technology not enabling you to do those tasks.
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah, it's an interesting balance because you never want to fall into the trap that all the allegation is wrong and bad. People who are busy hire someone to do their taxes and then they don't have to do it anymore. But I think the key factor is that it should be my choice to delegate because I don't want to do it anymore. Not because it is inconvenient or difficult for me to
Brendan Jarvis:
Do. Yes, a hundred percent. Yep. You've just cleared that up. Hey, I saw you give a demo of you using your screen reader and there's that robotic voice that people have likely heard if you've accidentally, in my case, I enable voice dictation on my Mac occasionally by mistake. I'm not sure still watch keys, I'm pressing. But it happens on a semi-regular basis. It would be command and voice
Samuel Proulx:
Five
Brendan Jarvis:
Commander five. Okay. I know I'll commit that to memory.
Samuel Proulx:
There you go. [laugh],
Brendan Jarvis:
The voice that your screen reader was reading, what was on the screen was phenomenally fast. And I was watching what I was watching at one and a half speed and I thought, okay, well I'll just slow it down to one speed. It can't be that fast. And even at one speed it was unintelligible to me. I had no idea what was going on. Is it true that you can listen to that voice, that robotic voice that's reading your screen up to a round 800 words permanent?
Samuel Proulx:
Yep, it is. I mean sometimes I will slow it down if I'm reading a particularly dense thing. I don't know a legal agreement, you wanna slow it down a little bit. But I think that really replicates when a aside person, you'll sometimes read slower when you're reading some dense material. But yes, it hovers around 800, which is something that I always like to talk about because it gives a very clear example of why you as a designer or a developer can't just test a thing and be having the same experience that I'm test that I'm having, right? Cuz I'll have someone who's running their voice at, I think speaking is a hundred words per minute or something. And so yeah, they'll test with a screen reader and they'll say this, there's no way I can make this fast and efficient. It's just too slow and terrible.
But first of all, your voice, you have the voice way slower. Second of all, you haven't memorized all the shortcut keys to the point where they're muscle memory, right? So that is why it's so important to get the voices of people with disabilities involved in accessibility because we've been solving these problems and we've been using this tech for our lives and we have this lived experience to bring to bear that that can really help you figure out what isn't working and what is working and move towards solving some of those problems perhaps even in ways that you yourself might not have even thought of
Brendan Jarvis:
A hundred percent. And that was that light bulb moment for me when I was watching that demo. It was so foreign to me, this concept that you could listen to something at that speed, make sense of it and be able to do something with that knowledge. You, you're right, it's around about 150 words per minute that we speak at, which must make this conversation for you really painful.
Samuel Proulx:
No but one of the
Brendan Jarvis:
Interesting things, it's a remarkable
Samuel Proulx:
One of
Brendan Jarvis:
Your ability to do that's remarkable.
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah. One of the interesting things about these screen reader voices is that because we want to go so fast blind people prefer the robotic voice. And so as technology is improving, there are screen reader voices that sound more and more natural and blind people don't like. Cause I couldn't listen to you speaking at 800 words per minute. You do not in tone things exactly the same. You might pronounce the same word slightly differently two different times or put the emphasis on a different syllable. I mean, of course you've got an accent that I don't hear every day. Whereas the robotic screen reader voice, it always pauses the same amount of time for a comma and a period. It always puts the emphasis in the same place. If you give it a word, it'll say that word the same way four times in a row. In fact, in the latest iOS and Mac operating system updates, apple has gotten a lot of kudos from the blind community for specifically bringing a text tope system called eloquence to their phones and computers.
And the interesting thing about eloquence is that it was developed in 1998 and so it's quite old at this point, speech technology, but blind people, it has been the standard on windows because it is so robotic that you can listen to it very, very, very quickly. And so Apple has leading natural voices on iOS and Mac as they work with people who are blind in their testing, in their development. It became very clear to them, well no wait, we have to modernize and include these really old robotic sounding voices because blind people put so much stock in efficiency in being able to listen, listen quickly.
Brendan Jarvis:
So it sounds like you can, you've internalized the patterns that are inherent within that voice, which enables you to read, to read at speed.
Samuel Proulx:
And I think it's one of those things that those insights that only comes to you if you are talking to people with disabilities, intuitive, you, you'd think, oh, a blind person is using a screen reader and they're listening to this voice every day. So I put all of my massive r and d development into making it sound more and more natural and making it sound better and better cuz that's what I'd want and a voice that I have to listen to. And it's only when you are working with people who are blinded, you find out that no, that's not the desire and it doesn't match the use case, but it's like counterintuitive.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, a hundred percent. One of the recent criticisms of Hollywood has been its casting of non-disabled actors to play disabled characters. So when it comes to, you know, were talking there about we need to involve people with disabilities in the design of these products. So when it comes to that, is there a parallel there? Is there a danger that design teams who are made up exclusively of non-disabled people, despite their best intentions, forget that they are not their users,
Samuel Proulx:
Forget that they're not their users, or think that they understand the needs of their users in ways that they don't. Because we can all think really hard about how to solve the needs of our users, but we are not them. And no matter how much effort we put into trying to be them, we can't be right. There was this idea sometimes called simulation that like, oh, well what we should do is we should all wear a blindfold for a day and then we'll learn what it's like to be blind. And no people spend years learning what learning how to blind. And so the only way to get those insights is to talk to your users who are people with disabilities. And it's also the only way that you'll get to understand the guidelines, right? Too often we fall back on guidelines as like, oh, I'm going to check all of the WIC ag boxes and then it'll be accessible and not necessarily, you can make a horrible user interface that follows all of the WIC ag guidelines and is still totally inaccessible and interesting.
Me, I saw floating around a little while ago was the accessible volume control. And what it was was a properly labeled button with all of the correct labels and landmarks and keyboard accessible and the button was change volume. And every time you press it, it set the volume to a random number. But if you put that through an accessibility tester, the button's labeled, and if you do automated testing, it's fully compliant. But accessibility is about thinking about the interaction, not just the kind of technical check boxes for compliance and thinking of like, oh, well we've complied with all of the guidelines, so we've done everything that we need to do. And no, the guidelines are, they are the web content accessibility guidelines, not the web content accessibility commandments written on tablets of stone. And once you have obeyed all of the commandments, you are guaranteed accessibility, right?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Almost as if there's a posture adopted there where meeting the guidelines is seen as enough
Samuel Proulx:
Or all that we need to do or all of the requirements, the guidelines are just a
Brendan Jarvis:
Framework. So I mean, thinking about this challenge that's ahead of us to create a more accessible world. I've heard you say something and I'll quote you now, you've said accessible design means design that works for our future selves because people with disabilities someday will be us, not just these other people. Now, I was reflecting on this yesterday actually, and where I got to was that there seems to be an ability that is more common in people to maximize for their current state than there is for us to maximize for a potential future state. So how do you encourage people to see past their current degree of ability?
Samuel Proulx:
I think it's why I never talk about that future state in isolation. Because you're right people, I mean, when you're 20, you don't believe that you're ever going to get old, right? [laugh] like you're never going to have arthritis, you're going to, you don't. And so I think that's also why it is important and interesting to talk about things like situational disabilities, which is the things that we've all experienced. You're dependent on the automatic doors because your arms are full of groceries and you need the curb cut because you're pushing a stroller and you're needing Siri text of speech because you're in your car and need the text message read out to you. I think that makes the idea of change of state and change in ability more palatable to people. And it's the old trick once you get them to accept that, okay, yeah, my abilities change all the time, then it's easier for people to think about, well yeah, of course my abilities are going to be different in the future. They're different now. I sometimes talk about the cognitive disability, the situational cognitive disability that comes from lack of sleep. Maybe you got half an hour of sleep last night, but today you still have to do your banking and you still have to go to work and you still have to accomplish all the things. So they better be accessible and easy to use because the fact that Brendan didn't get any sleep last night doesn't mean the to-do list magically evaporates, right?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Have to still have a somewhat coherent conversation on brave view X in the morning.
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah, very good. There you go. But how many mistakes have been caused by people who are in an unusual situation for them and getting older is one of those future states, but your state and your abilities change all the time based on what you're doing and who you are. And I don't ever mean, of course, you can't directly compare your car and being unable to read your text message to being blind, but it is a useful thought exercise. A, to accept that your capabilities at any given time change and B, to help understand why more customizable and accessible designs will make things that are better for everyone because it may enable me to do something for the first time. An example I like to use for this is kind of the smart home. I got a smart thermostat and I got a home bo, and it was the first time I was able to check the temperature in my home and set it by myself. A real barrier removed there but it also made it easier for you. You can now check it with your voice. It's easier, it's more convenient, it's better. And so when we remove barriers for people with disabilities to make new experiences possible for people before couldn't do things, we make the experience for us better as well.
Brendan Jarvis:
I was watching one of your talks last week, and my son came home from daycare and bless Teddy, he's a wonderful full of energy, young boy, four year old boy.
Samuel Proulx:
And so you know what it's like to not have gotten any sleep. I
Brendan Jarvis:
Know. Yeah. Well, I know in terms of the sleep thing, but in this particular situation it was just the noise. I couldn't focus on what it was that you were saying. And so I enabled the caption feature on YouTube. And again, I know you've used this example in other talks yourself, but that was just a very personal and directly relatable experience that I had in preparing for today's conversation. And if that feature wasn't there, I would've had to either have turned the volume way up or come back to it at a later time.
Samuel Proulx:
And of course, turning the volume way up, now you risk damaging your own hearing if you're using AirPods or anything like that. Which
Brendan Jarvis:
Headphones, which my Apple Watch would tell me that I'm in an environment that's too noisy. You're also making me think of a conversation I had a few months back with Katie Swindler who had been studying the human stress response and design. And a number of her case studies were about how our physiology changes our ability to interact, in particular with physical products and just how the design of certain things like phone keypads and on the Apple iPhone, the ability to activate the SOS function, how these are critical to enable us in a situational change like that where we're under a lot of pressure. Maybe we've witnessed an accident or something like that, that this can actually be these sorts. Affordances in our designs can actually be life and death. And as we've been talking about earlier, contribute a lot to someone's experience in the world being one of dignity as opposed to one of distress.
Samuel Proulx:
And I think even when it's not life and death, I mean, I was talking earlier about how all of these workarounds that I use are just so second nature to me that I, sometimes they're frustrating, but it's just what I do. And as I started at Fable, I became sort of more and more aware of these things because as you're thinking about accessibility in the state of landscape, you're really being self-reflective. And I also started doing these kinds of presentations and demos and things, and it was actually quite surprising to me how something that I found to be perfectly accessible and thought that I could use without any difficulty was suddenly totally inaccessible and impossible for me to use when I was on a stage demoing it, right? Because the pressure level is suddenly different.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Like you were talking with regard to sleep deprivation, it's a similar change in our chemistry and it changes how we can use things. So that further reinforces the importance of actually them being more greatly, inherently accessible than when we're in our normal cognition and able to use things normally in inverted com is there.
Samuel Proulx:
And the thing that is, that we can use when we're suffering from sleep deprivation is now a better design thing that is also easier for us to use normally. Right? Hundred percent. I'm sure we've got enough stress going on in our lives mean the more we can remove from the world in the way that we design and build our products, the better.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now just conscious of time, I wanna bring things down to a close in a moment. Before we do that though, I was curious about this school of thought that seems to exist out there, that accessible designs are simple designs. And I know you spoke very early on in our conversation about that not needing to be the case. And by simple I mean things that have fewer features or are missing things that the full experience might contain. That sounds to me a lot like the medical model of disability playing out in design.
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah, it is. It's the model that says people with disabilities are broken. There's something wrong with them. And so we are now being forced to compensate for the fact that there is something wrong with our users. I mean, if you put it that way as a designer, if you said, well, there's something wrong with my users, so I have to change my design, I think don't how you do your research, at least I hope not, right? And so that's the mindset that we had adopted towards people with disabilities. And it resulted in, I don't know if I remember back in the day, right, there was always the text only alternative to the website where you click and you get the text only, and of course that would never be maintained. And there was the limited feature set, and there's things like this. I think the place we really started to see a change in that is with the transition to mobile, because you probably remember back in the day, the mobile app couldn't do as much as the website and the app would, well, if you want to do that, you have to go to desktop because we have to simplify things for you and mobile because you have a smaller screen.
And that very quickly became unacceptable to people. And so I think that was the time and place where designers really started to learn that we can make designs easier and smaller and responsive and fluent without removing features and without simplifying the tasks that we can accomplish. And that learning was carried on in dialogue with accessibility, right? Because as we got to grips with the idea that things can be responsive and customizable and easier to use without removing features, it really also clarified and carried that over into the accessibility space, right? Because now that's a thing that the designers can understand, that you have to design things for different modalities, and that doesn't mean simplifying them for the other
Brendan Jarvis:
Modality. Sam, as we bring the conversation down to a close, I have one final question for you. I and everyone else who's listening, what do we need to remember if we are going to create a digital world that is accessible for all of us, no matter our ability?
Samuel Proulx:
There are so many good answers to that, but I, I'll boil it down to sort of the key thing, which is that accessibility is a journey and a process, just like designs are always changing and technology is always changing, we need to make sure that accessibility is iterating to keep up. And the first thing you do when you make an accessible, when you try to make something more accessible won't be perfect. And that's okay as long as it's a little bit better because accessibility comes through a process of iteration. And for that process to work, we need to be including the voices of people with disabilities so that we can bring that lived experience into the processes and into the iteration. I think that's as pithy as I can make it.
Brendan Jarvis:
It was wonderfully pithy and a wonderful note to end on. Sam, thank you. This has been such a wonderful way for me to start my day. I really appreciate you sharing your stories and your insights and going to such detail in doing so with me today.
Samuel Proulx:
Hey thanks so much. And to close on what I just said, accessibility is a process and learning and a conversation. And so I would love if this listen to this episode brought up questions. For those of you who are hearing it, absolutely feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. That's what Brendan did, and I'm here now so I do get to my LinkedIn messages but I would love to continue on this journey and this conversation and you can find out more about me and about what Fable and about what we're up to over at makeitfable.com. And we'd love to help you move the accessibility of your team and your organization forward.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thanks, Sam. What a great mission. And to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've been talking about today will be in the show notes where you can find Sam, where you can find Fable. Everything will be there. Please check them out. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast. Also, share the podcast with just one other person that you think would find value in these conversations at depth and subscribe. So it arrives weekly in whichever app you prefer to listen on. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis. There's also a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes if you wanna find me that way. Or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Samuel Proulx

Designing for Dignity Through Accessibility

Subscribe

Who is Samuel Proulx?

Transcript