Reginé Gilbert
Inclusive Design Isn’t Someone Else’s Job
In this episode of Brave UX, Reginé Gilbert shares what it takes to create accessible experiences, how her students are helping NASA to hear a solar eclipse, and why inclusive design is everyones job.
Highlights include:
- How are inclusive design and accessibility different, yet related?
- Why is disability not seen in the same light as other DE&I initiatives?
- What should people do to make the digital world more accessible?
- If big tech can’t do basic accessibility, what hope do we have?
- Why is it important to include people with disabilities in the design process?
Who is Reginé Gilbert?
Reginé is an Industry Assistant Professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, where she is teaching the next generation of UX designers about the importance of accessibility and inclusive design - in both regular reality and cross-reality experiences.
Before joining NYU, Reginé was the Chief Creative Officer of Gilbert Consulting Group, where she advised organisations - large and small - on accessibility. She has also worked as User Experience Lead at Ralph Lauren and, prior to entering UX, was a Senior Product Manager at Michael Kors.
She is the author of the book “Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind”, an excellent starting point for anybody new to accessibility. Rumour has it that Reginé is also working on a new book called “Human Spatial Computing”, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2023.
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 dearest product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. 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 stories, learnings, and expert advice of worldclass UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Reginé Gilbert. Reginé is an Industry Assistant Professor at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering, where she's teaching the next generation of UX designers about the importance of accessibility and inclusive design in both regular reality and cross reality experiences.
- Before joining NYU, Reginé was the Chief Creative Officer of Gilbert Consulting Group, where she advised organizations large and small on accessibility. She has also worked as a User Experience Lead at Ralph Lauren and prior to entering UX was a Senior Product Manager at Michael Kors. Reginé gives her skills and energy to a range of UX and accessibility initiatives, including as a member of the AD Council's UX committee, as a researcher for Virtual Experience Interaction Lab, as a steering committee member for Teach Access, as the chair of the Internet Accessibility Rally, and as an advisory board member for the W3C. She is the author of the book, Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind, an excellent starting point for anybody new to accessibility. Rumor has it that Reginé is also working on a new book called Human Spatial Computing, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2023. A sought after speaker, Reginé has graced the stage at events such as Design at Scale, Stanford's HCI lecture series, South by Southwest. Design Matters, The State of Black Design and Ethics in Design. And now she's gracing this virtual studio for a conversation with me on Brave UX today. Reginé, welcome to the show.
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Thank you. Very happy to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm happy to have you here. And I discovered something about you that I thought was somewhat unique. Actually. I don't think I've ever come across this before in any of my previous guests. And that's, you used to be a fashion designer and you found your way to UX through other areas of it. But your starting point was fashion and you once wrote a post where you were sharing your observations of the parallels that exists between fashion design and UX. What were those parallels that you saw?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- So let me first start by saying I was a technical fashion designer. Technical fashion designer focuses on the fit of a garment. And one of the things that I saw, I noticed in I think the title of the Medium Post was approaching UX with a fashion designer's eye. And it was the fact that when you do fashion design, you have some sort of inspiration, right? You'll do some sketches, you will go and make something in MUS, what they call muslin, which is like a beige looking fabric. So you'll make in essence a mockup. And the same for UX design. You get inspired, you look at other websites, you look at other apps, and then you'll sketch some ideas and then you'll mock something up and you'll make it low fidelity. And the same low fidelity in fashion would be making something in muslin before you actually make it in the real fabric. So there were a lot of parallels that I saw between the fashion world and the UX design world.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you spent, from what I gather, two or three years in that technical fashion designer role. Yeah. What was it that motivated you to mix up things, change up your career and leave fashion behind?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- I didn't like my boss mean [laugh] the truth. I didn't like my boss. And I had talked to a person who was working in the IT department who said, I know you don't like it, but don't leave the company. We have an opening in the IT department for an IT trainer, you should come because the system very well. And I said, I don't know IT trainer, like I'm going to go from a fashion designer to an IT trainer, what is that? But I did, I interviewed and I got the job. And so I stayed within my same company. But that got me into the technology side of things.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I've heard you talk about this. So you spent about eight years or so in non UX focused technology roles before you made your way to UX. You said, and I'll just you now, you said I got bored and started taking UX classes. So what was it about those other roles, the role as an IT trainer, the role in product management? What was it about these types of roles that didn't quite captivate you like it seems user experience has?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- I think for me, I love the constant learning. And I think with UX design, the learning that you get is you never know what your users are thinking. When I worked in it, I worked in internal systems. I was a very heavily [laugh] into systems, into the supply chain, side of fashion. I worked in fashion for a very long time. And that was, to me, it is interesting. I don't get me wrong, supply chain is fascinating. It's a whole new world. But for me, I really desired to be working on the other side of digital, not that internal side, but what are customers seeing, not what the internal teams are seeing
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And your time in those other roles. So you mentioned you spent time in the, maybe I'm putting words in your mouth here, but more so the back office, the systems that drive things like supply chain, serving the internal customers within the business as opposed to the end user. How did working in those other roles, if you reflect back on your journey through those roles, how did it help you, if at all, in your work in UX? How has that helped to shape your practice and the way in which you teach?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Well, I was a UX designer without being a UX designer. That's what I learned. A lot of the stuff I did as a business analyst going to talk stakeholders, getting an understand of the business process, doing a mock-up in Excel. Okay, that's what I was doing. I wasn't using any systems. And then the first time that I did learn UX, I learned Accure, which not a lot of people use these days, although it's an awesome product because people hopped on the Figma train and sketch train and all of that. But what I would say is it provided me with the foundation of getting to understand business, understanding the customer, understanding who your user is in order to facilitate. Cuz a lot of the stuff I worked on was building out of new systems and incorporating business process into that. So I would say it gave me a great foundation for UX because when I got into UX, I thought, oh, I'm, I'm a junior UX designer. And then as I talked to people, they said, you're certainly not a junior, right? Because I had experience. But that experience, I think it comes down to the lingo and saying the right words, buzzwords. I didn't necessarily have those buzzwords, but I did have the understanding of how the business worked.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It definitely sounds like substance over style maybe served you quite well there.
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Yeah, it worked out.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I want to come to something slightly different now, but in the vein of both substance and style, which is presentation and the delivery of talks. And something that I learned about you is, as I watched some of your previous talks, is that you have purposefully or at least appears to have purposefully adopted an approach to the way in which you give your conference talks. That actually runs counter to some of the popular advice out there. And I believe it's to do with making them more accessible. So what is that approach that you've adopted to the way in which you present?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Yeah, I read everything on my slides, which is something that people say never do that. However, there are people who can't see your slides. If I have something on my slides and it's an image of something that's important, I describe it, which a lot of people don't do. They say that thing over there. And you know what, if you're in the very, very back you can't see it. So I'll give an example. I was just speaking at a conference a few last week actually, and I do my best to describe important images on the screen. And someone came up to me afterward and said, thank you for describing the images because I have low vision and I couldn't see everything, but you described them. So I knew what was going on. And I've had people give me that commentary. And yes, I've gotten the feedback, don't read everything on your slides.
- Too bad. I'm going to read everything on my slides because it's important and not everybody can see it. Because the thing is, especially with when things have gone online, people will step away from their computer, but they're still listening. And if somebody's stepped away and they can't see what you're talking about, they're not really clued in as to what's fully happening. They're not getting that full experience. So I just think it's best to describe things, and I ask questions of the audience, even when I record a talk, because what I've found as an educator is that I can't teach anybody anything. All I can do is ask questions that hopefully will make you think. And so I like asking questions even if I don't get a response of an answer.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I like asking questions too, which is funnily enough, I run a podcast [laugh] where I get to ask a lot of them. You talked about the moment at that conference just last week when the person came up to you and thanked you for putting in the effort, taking the time to actually describe what was on the screen when you first became interested in accessibility. I understand that you attended a meetup in New York City and you met two people, of which both of them you considered to still be friends. And one of them who's a blind person asked you a question that stuck with you ever since. What was that question?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- So the person Yeah, who asked me the question is named Nefertiti. And yeah, she's a dear I adore her. She's a great, she does all the audio description, a lot of audio descriptions for Netflix now. But she asked me what I did for a living, and I said, I'm a UX designer. She goes, well, what do they do? And I said, oh, they make things more usable and I do this and I do that and I work in e-commerce, blah, blah, blah. And she said, well, do people like you, designers, think about people like me, people who are blind. And I thought for a moment, which seemed like eternity for me, [laugh] sitting there and I told her, no, no, but whatever I do in the future, I will make sure to think about you and I will make sure whoever is around me will also think about people like you as well. So that I had already had interest in accessibility, but that got me more interested in accessibility and doing deeper dives into understanding the W three C and creating guidelines. Nobody asked for [laugh] around accessibility. So yeah, I got really into it and then I started speaking about it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've spoken a whole lot about it and you've obviously, as I mentioned in your introduction, you've also dedicated a lot of time and energy to various initiatives, which is ongoing. And no doubt there will be more in the future. I was curious, as someone who has described, you've described yourself in the past as someone without any obvious disabilities, how has that affected the way in which you and the work which you've done a lot of in this space has been received? Has this always lent itself to a warm reception?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- No, [laugh], certainly not. I mean, some things work well, some things don't come across well, some things. I was doing a presentation a few weeks back on extended reality and accessibility, and my slides had a lot of motion in them. And somebody commented like, I'm getting sick from your presentation because there's too much going on in terms of the motion. And I said, oh my goodness, I work in this field. I do my best to not make sure I create things to be as accessible as I can, but I still will. It's a learning process and it's a life learning process. I don't feel that I am always going to get things right. I am open to critique and feedback, and I don't take it personally because I cannot. I wrote a book where not everybody liked it. And so it's a matter of, I think being open and learning and learning about accessibility is an ongoing thing. Learning about disability is an ongoing thing. In the past two years, almost three years now that we've been in this pandemic, which we are still in, we have seen folks with long covid, which is now a new disability where people have shorter attention spans, they're not able to focus, they have brain fog. All of these things need to be thought about when we're designing. So I would say some things are well received, some things are not, some things I learned from and then correct and move forward.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about the book. So the book is Inclusive Design for a Digital World, designing with Accessibility in Mind. Now, you mentioned there was a range of feedback that you received after you put the book out there into the world. What has surprised you the most about that feedback that you've received about putting all this time and energy into making something like this book?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Well, in general, I've gotten pretty good feedback from the book and folks who have read it. I actually got a really cool, and I haven't posted this yet, but I need to, A person who attend attended school in Canada reached out to me because they had taken a motion graphics course, and in the motion graphics course, they had to do a book, a book motion graphic. A motion graphic based on a book. And they decided to choose my book. And they made this really cool, really cute motion graphic, and they shared it with me. And I said, oh my goodness, I love that. I never, ever in a million years would think that somebody would read my book and then make this 32nd, one minute, I don't know how long it is, motion graphic. And yeah, I've gotten people who said, I didn't really know anything about this, and I learned from your book. And to me, what is very exciting is that people are willing and open to learn about this. And it was really cool cause I dedicated the book to, well, one of the inspirations for the book was my cousin Tammy, who is deaf, and she was like, you did this. And I was like, you inspired me when I was young to learn more to have a different understanding of the world other than a perspective of my own.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And when you were writing the book, what involvement from members of the disability community, people with disabilities, did you have Insh shaping it?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- So yeah, my technical reviewer for the book, Sarah Allen is deaf. And so that she was part of the whole process. But I also, throughout the process had different folks who work in accessibility and who are disabled review parts of the book. So even when I got the negative feedback that I got for the book, I said, I did go through a process when I was writing this book because nothing about us, without us, it wasn't a point of me writing this and saying, well, I am writing this and for this, no, I wrote it with, I wrote it. And so I got really good feedback and I changed some things in the book because of that feedback.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Okay. So it sounds like good bad feedback as opposed to bad feedback. Now, there may be some people listening to us today that aren't as familiar with the world of accessibility and inclusive design. So for people that are just picking this subject up, how is inclusive design and accessible design, how are they different yet related?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- So accessibility specifically refers to disability and ensuring things that are accessible for folks with disabilities. So when you're thinking about the web, for example, they have the, there's a thing called the web Content Accessibility guidelines that exist that is put forth by the W three. And so with those, you have four areas that are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust meaning. So whether I can see or not, I can still perceive something whether I have hands or no hands or whatever the case may be, I can still operate something regardless of cognitive abilities. I can understand something and something needs to be robust, meaning I need to be able to understand it and I need to be able to operate it. So thinking about it, it truly means having options. So for example, if I am listening to a podcast or I want to listen to a podcast and I can't hear, then transcripts should be available for that podcast. Or if I don't have the time to listen and I just wanna read it or I wanna use my speech to text or whatever the case may be, I like to give the example of texting, which everybody on the planet does it seems, and how texting was created in the nineties. S m s was created for the deaf community, but yet today in 2022, we all benefit from it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's so true. I was preparing for something the other day and my son was being quite loud and I may have actually mentioned this on the previous episode, so if you're hearing this twice, people then forgive me, but I couldn't actually listen to what was being said. And so I ended up turning on captions and I was able to read as my son was enjoying himself, perhaps a little bit too much. So you're right, everyone does benefit from these features.
- I read something that you'd written, and I've seen this reference before, and that is that 98% of the web biz currently non-compliant with W C A G 2.0 level aa, which is the mid-level of compliance with the guidelines. So this isn't the ultimate level. This is somewhere in the middle and 2.0 I think has been replaced now by 2.1, so it's probably right even worse now. But that's a high percentage, right? That's nearly 99%. So if you are using a screen reader or any other form of assistive technology that can make your experience pretty frustrating if at all, impossible, sometimes impossible to enjoy and participate in the digital world. So what are some of the more common usability, or sorry, accessibility sins that if we could just stop making those in our work, we would make a big or an outsized positive difference?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Well web aim.org is a great organization out of Utah State University. They have great resources around accessibility and they also have, you can check your website to see how accessible it is, but always do a manual check. I will just say that. But one of the things they do every annually is they call it the web aim million, and they look at a million of the top websites and they run these websites through their checker, and this checker is on par with the web content accessibility guidelines. And the number one issue for years has been color contrast still. So this is still an issue regardless of the fact that color contrast checkers exist for everything from Sketch to Figma, all these things you can put in a plugin for whatever browser you're using. So that is probably it. It's funny, but not funny that that's still an issue because certain designers will say, well, this, I'm putting constraints or you're making me less creative. And it's not necessarily the case in my opinion,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Not that I am someone who believes in casting the blame net on any one particular group here, but I do wonder how much of that can be attributed to people outside of the digital space. And in particular, I'm talking about groups of designers such as those that operate in brand design. And I wonder if you're aware of I, this isn't something that I thought about prior to our conversation, but I wonder if there are any initiatives underway that you're aware of where we are trying to educate those designers whose work is outside of digital but has an undeniable impact on the experiences that we are shaping for people with disabilities?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- No, but that would be a really good initiative for somebody to pick up. I think that thinking about accessibility, and there's another great organization called dq, D E Q U E, and they also have great resources and classes that you can take. They did a case study where they discovered 67% of accessibility issues were from design. So that's a pretty, I mean it's over 50%. And so there is, I think just in general education in general in the workplace, there isn't education around accessibility or what that means and what does it mean for your work, and that is a very contextual thing that needs to be considered.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've spoken about an architect in the past called Ronald Mace. Ronald coined the term universal design, which is the concept of designing all products and the built environment to be aesthetic and usable to the greatest extent possible by everyone regardless of their age, ability, or status in life. Now, there are seven understand seven principles of universal design, and they include things like equitable use, perceptible information, and low physical effort. So what is it that you feel that UX designers, but perhaps as we've just been speaking about now, designers more broadly can learn from these principles?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- I think so universal design initially was created around buildings. So thinking about how someone is entering and exiting and getting around a building. And I think when we encounter a digital space, we also need to think about that. For example, somebody may enter a building and they have use of both legs. Someone may enter a building and they have use of a wheelchair. When someone visits our website, they may wear glasses or they may have forgotten their glasses. Is the font is type of, are these things big enough for us to see when we maximize them? How do things look? These kind of things we have to think about as designers is the fact that there are a variety of different people who could be accessing the content we create. We don't know how they're going to access it, we don't know who they are. But what I have found in general is that folks with disabilities are usually the last folks that people think about when they're making something. When I think it should be quite the opposite. It should be the first.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let's talk about that notion of thinking about people with disabilities last, and you've said something else, and I'll quote you again. Now, you've said, I think we have an issue in society with ableism and that it is one of the root causes as to why things are not made accessible or accessibility isn't thought about. And you've also suggested, you went on to suggest that this is perhaps not necessarily something that is consciously happening.
- Reginé Gilbert:
- I mean, ableism is so built into our society, it's so built into capitalism, it is something to be unlearned. And culturally, it is dependent because different cultures experience ableism in different ways. I live in the United States and there are certain words that should not be used when speaking about particular groups of people because it's highly offensive. And when I did a talk, this talk I did last week, the first thing that I brought up was ableism. But before I brought up ableism, I asked people, has anybody said anything to you that made you feel bad about yourself? Or they've called you something and you didn't like it? I could see the heads nodding. And I said, well, this oftentimes happens with ableism. I said, that feeling of feeling bad because somebody said something to you is something that we have control over. When we're creating experiences, we have that opportunity to not make somebody feel bad potentially
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The work that is done in design and the interactions as that we have as designers with other parts of our organizations, parts like product and engineering, there's a degree of complexity in those. And particularly when it comes to accessibility, there is a crossover between design and engineering and the way in which those experiences are either accessible or inaccessible to people. And what I'm wondering about here is whether or not this complexity is sometimes used as a cover or an excuse to not give accessibility and inclusive design the consideration that it deserves.
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Yeah, I think this a lot of times comes down to an education issue of people not knowing a lot about accessibility, and therefore if they don't know how to do it, people feel very uncomfortable saying, I don't know. So instead they say, we're not going to do it right, instead of maybe learning or finding out more about the situation or saying it's going to take too long to do it, so we're just not going to do it. And I don't necessarily think that's the answer. I think that there is an opportunity to build things slowly and add things in as you go. If you're working and you're doing two week sprints or whatever it is, you can add a little bit of accessibility to eat in every sprint. You do not have to put everything in all at once. I've given the analogy of if somebody is building a brick building, they don't just get a bunch of bricks and then throw them, right? That's not how you make a building. You will put a brick, you'll put the mortar, you'll put more brick, you know, build it. And I think that is a possibility when it comes to accessibility and the complexity of working cross-functionally. I don't think it needs to be something that is, let's do it all at once. It doesn't work like that. Nothing does. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I think it would've been over a year ago now. I had a conversation with Sherry Berne Haber on the podcast, and we explored the notion of diversity, equity, and inclusion not extending to include accessibility and people with disabilities. And that you wouldn't have an organization that would say, well, we're just not going to do de and i it's too hard, it's going to take too long, and we don't really know how to do it yet for some reason it seems that it's acceptable enough even though there is a bit of a stick in the US in terms of the regulations that govern the space to opt out. What's that about?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- To be honest, again, it goes back to our society. Our society in general does not think about folks with disabilities until it's too late. Every single person will encounter disability at one point or another in their lives. By the way, I will tell your audience, everybody should get Sherry's book, [laugh] give a damn about accessibility and follow. Her writing is brilliant and she is, she's just such a great voice in the accessibility field. I think that it goes back to when we think about, I think it's important for us to think about the root causes of how we got to where we are and why are things an afterthought and where is our humanity. And this can be a difficult thing to do when you're working in a corporate environment and you're just trying to get the work out the door. But again, Rome was not built on a day, nor does the accessibility. Making things more accessible, inclusive does not have to happen in a day. It could happen incrementally and it could build into something great.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You, you've talked about in the past, this notion of design culture, a culture of accessibility within the enterprise as being part of that overall design culture. And you've said, and I'll quote you again, are you incorporating inclusion and accessibility into your organizational culture to which you believe that there's five key elements of this? And I'll just go through those quick, quickly. The first is standards, the second is education and training for specific roles. The third is accountability. The fourth is about inclusive hiring and research. And the fifth and final one is, it's a quote actually, it's everyone's job. It can't be everyone's job. Can it?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Yes, I think it can because if we're talking about design, everyone does some design in one way or another. Maybe people are not doing it in a formal way, but everything is by design, everything. And so I do think that design is a way of thinking. And so incorporating accessibility into that way of thinking is possible. And therefore, yes, it is everyone's job to think about it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you've got three questions that designers, and perhaps more broadly speaking now, people in organizations that care about making their experiences more accessible can ask. And I wondered if we could just touch on each of those briefly. The first of which is do you include people with disabilities in your design process? Tell me about that one.
- Reginé Gilbert:
- So one of the things to consider, and this has come from my work experience, is are you incorporating folks with disabilities in the process anywhere along the way? Hopefully from the beginning. Have you talked to people with disabilities about what you're working on or you just working on it? Are you incorporating them? Maybe a lot of folks get involved in the usability testing piece as somebody who, I'm an educator and one of the classes that I co-teach is called Looking Forward, and it's all about assistive tech that blind and low vision folks use. And I co-teach it with someone who is blind. And that for me has been such an insightful experience in part because I wouldn't get that knowledge if I were just learning it on my own. There's nothing that beats talking to someone and engaging with someone with lived experience. You can't beat it honestly.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, well it's a illuminating and it's a critical part of design, or at least it should be. Like you say though, it can be overlooked and as a result we miss out on a great deal of things. Your second question that you put to people within enterprises, are your design solutions intended to be used by your future self? You tell me about that. Cuz you touched on that briefly just before. I think by suggesting that every one of us will experience disability at some stage of our lives.
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Yes. So one of the things that I've done in the past is a workshop designing for your future self where I have people think about themselves in the future, not some imaginary person, this is you. Do you wear glasses now? Do you work out? How are those knees? Have you been sitting? How's your back? All these things that we need to think about now because if we start designing stuff when we're older, it's too late, we're too late, we need to start thinking about it now. So one of the reasons I started looking at inclusion and accessibility in the extended reality space is because I like VR and I said I'm going to use this when I get older. What does accessibility look like in this space? And then I started doing some research and realizing that it's not as accessible as it could be. There are people, there are organizations, there are academics who are working on things, which is great, but why aren't we doing this on a grander scale if a lot of these companies are talking about us being in the future?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, I've got a thought about this and that's sparked by something that you said. Actually you gave an example of how using Camel case, which is for people not familiar, it's where you capitalize the first letter of every word in the context of hashtags. And I was thinking about this because every episode I put out for the show, I also will tweet about it and I will put some hashtags that are relevant to the content in there. And Twitter forces the default to being all lowercase for hashtags. So my question is, if Twitter can't even embrace the accessibility principles of Camel case and the context of hashtags, what hope do we have that something as bleeding edges cross reality experiences will be accessible at all and at least in the short term
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Without hope? What do we have? That's what I say. Again, the small things can turn into big things. I think one of the things that we won, you should tweet that at Twitter and tell them this shouldn't default is this and tweet at the Twitter accessibility key. But I would say one of the things we saw come out of Twitter actually in the last year is the option for alternative text and for that to be readily available for everyone. I got to beta test it early, which was really cool and I love seeing it. I hate seeing when people don't add it. It's super frustrating to me, especially a celebrity or a brand. It's so simple to do it, just add it so that more folks can have access to it. But also the thing with all of this stuff is like people will take advantage of it as well and people are putting different things in the alt text that they shouldn't because that's always going to happen. That's always part of the risks associated with this technology, the good and the bad.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think you played a video in one of your talks where people, it was a tweet actually of somebody else's where they were commenting that the use of different stylized fonts in people's Twitter handles or in their tweets actually creates havoc from the perspective of someone trying to use a screen reader because the screen reader has to articulate the ky if the KY name, the full KY name of the type, or at least that's what it sounded like to me as it's going through. And that's a similar issue, but different to what I was talking there about Camel case, which I should have clarified, which is if you don't capitalize the first letter of every word in your hashtag, the screen reader is unable to determine between those different words because it's looking for, I imagine spaces between words or changes in case in order to be able to do that,
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Right? Yeah, it will read it as one word if you don't have it camel case. And sometimes those hashtags are don't make sense [laugh] otherwise without, without the camel case.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And your last question for enterprise people and enterprise was does your product promote an inclusive language? Now this is the one that I was least clear on or I felt like there was rich territory to go into here with you. I can make a whole bunch of assumptions about what you meant, but hey, seeing that you are here, I may as well ask you what it was that you meant and you can enlighten all of us as to what you were getting at there.
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Yeah, so thinking about inclusive language is considering who your audience is and the context with which you are putting that information out there. I think when you are doing something that's on a global scale, are you using language that is simple enough for everybody to understand and when it gets translated, does it make sense? I think that when we create things, we tend to think of things in the lens of just us or our team seeing it. But if this is going to be seen by a broader audience, how are they taking that in? Are you using language that makes people feel included or are you using language that makes people feel like that doesn't affect me, that I don't understand that. And the only way that you can really understand that is if the community that you're serving and getting to understand your user at the end of the day.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So when you think about the context of a global brand delivering a global experience that may touch many dozens of different cultures and communities across the world, are there any bounds to the lengths to which organizations, designers, the people involved in creating these experiences should go to? Is there such a concept here is it's good enough or is that something that's abhorrent and should never be really entertained in this context?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Well, I think if you can have local people [laugh] doing that work, it's always helpful. If you can't, obviously you have to do the best you can, but getting as much feedback from the community again that you're serving as possible or or having them be a part of it. I'm a big fan of participatory design or co-design where people are involved in the process. So that can take a little bit of effort, but the rewards of having some, putting something out there that has been seen by the community before you put it out is an awesome thing to be able to
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do. Yeah, a hundred percent. The success or failure of these initiatives around accessibility, around inclusive design sometimes feel like they're outside and maybe they often are outside of the immediate control of the people who believe in them. And I know that you've talked about in the past that you've had some successes and some failures in embodying helping organizations to embody a culture that is open and receptive to this type of thinking and this way of helping other people to experience the world. What are some of the things that have separated your successes in the space and failures from one another, particularly when it relates to engaging with senior leadership on these issues?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Well, the success is when the support comes from the top. I think when you have the support to create more accessible experiences, it's an awesome thing. When you don't have that support and you feel, you have people tell you it's going to take too long, we're going to do something, get an overlay, which don't ever get overlays, we're going to do that instead because we need to get, everything needs to be done quickly and in business. And so when people see that it's going to take too long, then this is where I've, I feel like I've not, I've failed and learned is there are some people's minds you won't change. So for me, what I ended up doing was I would sneak in accessibility where I could, what I did. I like it a bit of without saying in sometimes. Well yeah, because sometimes you wanna incorporate stuff and just don't call it accessibility and we're adding this feature or we're doing this thing, we're updating this feature and it's going to do this now.
- And you don't, because again, let's be, I work in the education space, I get the pleasure of teaching students and a lot of times it's just like these ideal scenarios, the reality of when somebody goes into a job and they're trying to implement stuff and they can't, I, I had a couple students who reached out to me in tears because they really wanted to incorporate accessibility and they were getting major pushback. And it hurt my heart. It hurt my heart. And one of the things that I've incorporated into my classes and what I tell people is, you have to take care of yourself first. UX and self-care is a thing.
- I got introduced to UX and self-care by Vivian Castillo and who is an awesome person. And I think that if you are getting such massive pushback to the efforts that you're trying to do and people don't wanna do it, you have to take care of yourself first and maybe you start looking for another job somewhere else if that's the case. But the thing is, you can't keep trying in that frustrated space because it's not healthy for you. I just stress that to my students. I have told them about situations in my past where I've had to deal with stuff and it's a lesson learned. I didn't take care of myself, this is what I've learned, but now I can tell others, make sure that you're taking care of yourself first and this process that this is a job. You are not your job. And yes, you want to do the best. Yes, you wanna make things more accessible, you wanna make things more inclusive, but it shouldn't be at the cost of your health and your wellbeing. At the end of the day, I
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Definitely don't wanna underemphasize or devalue the importance of self-care. I also don't want to let practitioners, each of us off the hook easily here either. And you've challenged people, parti practitioners in particular to be critical in their thinking and examine and examine the assumptions that they hold, encouraging them to answer a couple of questions. And those questions are, and I'll quote you again here, what are your assumptions about what the people and the context that you are researching, so what do you hold to be true that may or may not be? And the second is have you double checked the truth about your assumptions? So how do you shake out those assumptions? How do you make clear or bring to bring into the light what those assumptions are?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Well, one that came from the designer's critical alphabet by Dr. Leslie Andal, which I like to use often. And I think every design team should have them. They're low set of cards you can order on Etsy. And one is we have an idea of a product, we have an idea of who's going to use it. We have an idea of what we want the outcomes to be, what KPIs are possible. We have these ideas, those are our assumptions because we don't know anything until we actually talk to people. Now we may have had something similar in the past with data that backs it up, but we don't actually know. Well, we don't know what we don't know. And so that's where our assumptions come in when we have an idea of the product, what it's going to be, what it's going to do, those are our assumptions. How are we double checking that what we think is right and have we thought about how inclusive or accessible this thing is as part of that process? More than likely not because more than likely the case is we just wanna make this thing or so-and-so needs this thing and it needs to be done in two weeks.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You spoke about your teaching style earlier, much earlier on in our conversation and just then you spoke about not knowing anything until we talk to people as sounds like part of your underlying design philosophy. And I understand in your classes, which is related to this, you've been making an effort to make accessibility real for your students. And in part this has been achieved by inviting people with disabilities into the classroom for conversation with these students that you are teaching. So how has this very tangible way of making disability and the experience of people with disabilities real for your students, how has that influenced the way in which you have observed them grasp the importance of this work?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Yeah, well I said earlier there's nothing like talking to people with lived experience and for my students that I think it's been incredibly a good learning experience for them. A lot of what I've seen is that there's a lot of assumptions about folks with disabilities because people in general don't interact with people with disabilities. And this is across the board. And so again, there's a lot of assumptions made, but when you actually start to talk to people and then you get to understand, especially because my students work with disability and technology and kind of bridging that gap is there's a lot of assumptions made about what people use and how they use it and what people will find valuable that are completely wrong. So I think again, and one of the things that we have emphasized in my courses is designing with and not designing for the disability community. So making sure that you're always talking to someone. Sometimes with the pandemic, it was difficult for folks to meet with people and so I was like, go on social media and find folks with, a lot of people will actually engage, reach out, you never know who will reach back. And my students are like, oh, so-and-so message me back. And I said, that's great. So I think again, there's nothing like engaging with folks with real life real lived experiences. Nothing beats that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And something else that you've been doing in the classroom to help make the experience of the digital world more clear to people without disabilities has been to relate it to them. In terms of the senses, I'll quote again now, you said if we think of things in terms of senses instead of accessibility, then it's a little easier to comprehend and to understand. So how can conceptualizing or communicating accessibility in terms of sensors, how does that make the practical realities of accessibility easier for people to grasp?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Yeah, I think in the context of whenever I said that, I don't remember when I said that, but thinking about people think of our five senses. So if you can't, I mean you gave a great example earlier of turning on captions. I think that if we think about things from a sense perspective, it gives us a different way of looking at things. So if I am for example, wanting to, this is something I've done in the past where I'm like, I wanna watch this movie but I need to clean my house. What I'm going to do, I'm going to turn on the audio descriptions so that I can still catch what's happening and not necessarily have to see it while I'm cleaning up or doing whatever I'm doing. So I think thinking about things from a perspective of if this sense is taken away, if the sense of hearing is not available, then what are my options to access this thing or experience this thing if I'm not able to speak or what are my options then if I can't hear or whatever it is. I think that it's just a different lens and perspective of looking at things and one that I have encouraged in the past.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So while we're on this theme of design education, something that you have shared with the community of designers has been some frustration that accessibility is little more than a footnote. And most of our design educations, or at least in the design education that you've been exposed to. I understand you recently received a grant from an organization called Teach Access to help you to change that. What has that grant enabled you to do?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Oh, so it wasn't recent but I did get a grant a few year, I think it was a couple years ago. So Teach Access is a great organization. I recently just joined the board of, and they are working with educators to get them to incorporate accessibility into their curriculum and therefore they're able to educate students and get more students involved in putting accessibility out there in the corporate space. So it's not just you learn it in the class and oh I learned and then you never apply it. It's learning it, applying it. And for me, I was able to, because I was working on a course with virtual reality, I was able to purchase some VR headsets with that. And then some other, I'm a fan of physical cards and so getting the alphabet, there's an alpha a set of cards, which is an alphabet of different types of disabilities to apply different lenses for students to think about. And so I was able to use the funds for that and I also was able to provide my curriculum and share that with others as part of the teach access and learn from others as well as how they're incorporating it
- Brendan Jarvis:
- In. This sounds very tangible, very practical things that you invested in as a result of that grant. And I also understand that you're a big believer in providing your students with, well, quite frankly, some fairly amazing opportunities. There's one of those that I wanted to discuss with you today, which I believe is called Eclipse soundscapes. And that's a project that you're working in conjunction with an organization called ERISA Lab and the National Federation of the Blind. And it's for quite a special organization that I think has got fairly global renowned it for and what's it about?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Yeah, so I'll just tell this story. So a few, this was right before the pandemic hit in February of 2020. I volunteered as part of an event to blind folks were learning physical computing, so they were learning how to solder. And so I was just there to hand things cuz I'm not a physical computing person whatsoever. And at this event, another volunteer named Trey Winter, he and I started talking and he is an astrophysicist and he was telling me about his work and I said, oh well I teach user experience design and my students always have a real life client that I think the semester previous Microsoft was my client for my students. So it, it's been really cool. And so he said, he asked me, how would your students feel about having NASA as a client? And on the inside I am screaming [laugh] like that would be amazing.
- And I said, oh that would be cool. I tried to keep it cool. So Trey is part of Arisa Labs and Arisa Labs applied for a NASA grant and received it and my students and I are part of that grant. So the grant is to make eclipse accessible for the blind and low vision communities. In order to do that, people will record sounds on these audio moth recorders during the eclipse of 2023 and 2024. They will upload the sounds to a website and be able to experience the sounds of the eclipse. So if you're blind or low vision, you cannot see an eclipse, but you could hear the sounds that happened during it. And so my students have been working on the UX UI for the website and some of the other things and thinking about how to promote citizen science. So one of the things was creating an accessible Instagram filter, which Instagram is not that accessible stories and reels are actually not screen reader friendly. However, I do have a group of 20 students this semester who are working on part of my research team as a, they're working on defining accessibility in the extended reality space. So yeah, my students client is NASA indirectly, directly. Yeah, it's pretty
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Cool. I wanna come back to what you said there around the audio recordings of an eclipse. How are the sounds during an eclipse any different to the sounds that you might hear on either side of it?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Yeah, so one of the example that the folks that are whistle labs give is the sound of crickets. So before an eclipse you won't hear crickets during an eclipse you'll hear crickets because the crickets thing gets night and then after the eclipse you don't hear them. So there's all these different sounds that happen in nature. And so one of the things that those sounds have that associated with them and so folks can compare the sounds that will be coming out next year to the sounds that happened five years ago and see if there's a difference between those. Right? There's always story and data.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What a marvelous initiative. How can people that are listening today, if at all, how can they get involved in this and contribute, maybe be one of the people that can record those sounds?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Yeah, so I think it's only for us folks at the moment as far as I know, but people can email me if they have interest and I can direct them.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wonderful. I wanna come to XR now. You sort of touched on that briefly there at the end of the story about the NASA project. Now this is fascinating for me, this intersection between accessibility and XR but also just XR in general, which for people listening I understand to be anything that involves VR and ar but you might be able to do this greater justice than I can. Yeah. What is XR and how did you get involved in this particular space of design?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- So XR is extended reality and in general it's a debatable term [laugh]. Some people like mm-hmm it some people don't. I mean this is the world we live in. So XR in general covers augmented reality and virtual reality. How I got into it, when I had my consulting business, I worked out of a WeWork and I sat next to an augmented reality company and they said, oh what do you do? I said, I do UX. They said we need some UX help. And I ended up doing a little bit of work with them around some usability testing and that got me interested in that field. And then I ended up incorporating it into my UX courses. So I incorporated a little bit of augmented reality, but this is when they would really like using AR on the phones, would just kill the battery immediately. This is what I recall from that time.
- And then I ended up working on a course for U co-creating a course a UX for AR and VR course. And I actually worked on two courses for nyu. And then yeah, I started researching it and learning more. And a few years ago I got involved with XR Access, which is a organization out of Cornell Tech. And I started working closely with them. And then yeah, I said I wanna use VR when I get old. And so that's what kicked off my interest and research into inclusion and accessibility in the extended reality space. And that what I did in the beginning was look at a majority of tools and used in the XR space and ended up creating a huge spreadsheet and then turning that spreadsheet. Cause I am a designer and I worked with my grad research assistant and we made it into a subway map. So if you are interested in learning ar, what are the tools or if you're interested in drawing, what are the tools? So we ended up putting that out on medium and LinkedIn.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a really useful resource and I'll link to that in the show notes as well. I was curious about your observations of the challenge that lies ahead of designers in the XR space in particular. Are there any notable differences in the nature of the scale of that challenge in terms of making XR accessible when you contrast that against the regular non xr, the real reality digital world that we've had prior?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Yeah, I think there's a lot of one, there's a lot of technical constraints within the systems that you build these experiences too. Thinking about for designers who are moving from a 2D space to a 3D space, thinking about space itself and how to design for space. I always say that people who are interior designers, urban planners architects are so primed to get into the VR an AR space because they understand space. Not a digital space, but real space. And that's what you have to think about in order to really build things that will be work well. I think that we are seeing today, I, I'm teaching a class called Human Spatial Computing, which is based off a book with Doug North Cook that'll be coming out in 2023. And I was talking to the students about one ethics and privacy today, but that's a whole other issue, [laugh] in this space.
- But talking about the fact, we were talking about the different tools, the different platforms that exist in the XR space, which are vast, I think designers really should get to understand the space itself, what tools are being used in the space, what's necessary and with, when it comes to design, the classic answer is it depends. And so it often depends on what you're doing. However, accessibility is again, not oftentimes thought about in this space at all because why people say, well why would a blind person use a VR headset? Well why wouldn't they use a VR headset? So there are different folks working on really cool hand tracking type of things in the space. There are people working on audio things in the space. So there are folks working on accessible things in this space, which is cool.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Reginé, just mindful of time and wanting to bring the show down to a close so you can get off to your pre-season b A game Oh, thank you. There wouldn't be many people in UX who aren't aware of the importance of accessibility. Maybe that's a big assumption on my behalf, and maybe that awareness extends into people in the product community as well. Yet we still have a regular internet, a regular web, not to mention even an XR experience of the world that's fairly, if not largely inaccessible. If there was just one thing that people listening to our conversation could do after they put down this podcast, what should that be?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Oh, one thing that people should do, I think that folks can really be awake to the world. I think that is one of the bigger things, be awake to the world. And when I say be awake to the world, it's truly looking at the world, not just through your lens, but how other people may see it or experience it. And I think that many times we're just on this automatic, we just go about our days. We don't really look up. We just heads down and working. And I think that in order for us to really design a more inclusive and accessible world, one, we have to look at ourselves because I think self awareness, self-reflection is important. And then we need to also take a look at the world. That's what I would say.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Take the red pill people. It's been great speaking with you. I've really enjoyed today's conversation. Plenty of things in here for me. And I'm sure everyone else that's been listening to have a really good critical and hard think about. Thank you for sharing your stories and your insights with me today.
- Reginé Gilbert:
- Thank you so much. It was a great, great talking to you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're welcome. If people wanna find out more about you, about your work in UX and accessibility about your upcoming book, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Reginé Gilbert:
- I would say I'm pretty active on Twitter, so you can find me at r e g underscore i n e e.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thanks, Reginé. And to everyone else who's been listening, it's been great having you here as well. Listening or watching everything or reading. Everything we've been covering today will be in the show notes, so don't forget to check those out, including where you can find Reginé and the other things that we've spoken about, including the subway map for xr. 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. If you're listening on a platform where that's possible, subscribe. So it turns up every week in your list of things to listen to and tell someone else about the show. Just one other person, if you feel that they would get value from these conversations about design at depth. If you want to reach out to me, you can find a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes on LinkedIn. You 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.