[MUSIC PLAYING]
ELISE ROY: My name is Elise, and I'm
the Accessibility and Inclusion Lead for Corporate Engineering.
The work we do touches most of Google's products
in that we are creating the internal stuff that
helps ensure the new products that we create eventually
are accessible and inclusive.
I love teaching teams that there's value in difference,
in the difference that we find within human beings.
Difference helps us think creatively and helps
us see gaps in our products.
Often, when we look into those gaps and the insights
that we gain from looking at people who experience
the world differently, we build better products
that are more adaptable, that are longer lasting, and more
innovative.
When we talk about accessibility,
we are talking about how to make a product accessible by people
with different abilities.
But when we talk about inclusive design, what we're doing
is we're looking to difference, to their different experiences
and their needs because of their different capabilities,
and gathering these insights and applying it in a way
that it will benefit everyone whether they have a disability
or not.
If we go back in terms of how we used to do websites,
they used to be very text heavy.
They used to be more like a book.
And people with disabilities for years
had been advocating for larger text and less content--
much more like smaller chunks of text.
And when we started to design for accessibility,
we created sites that were much more easily consumed.
So accessibility is important to me
personally because I have a hearing loss, severe hearing
loss.
I began losing my hearing at 10, and it
progressed over five years until it reached the profound range.
So if you were to cover your mouth, say a hundred words,
and I guessed at every single one, I might get one right.
As someone with a hearing loss, I'm
constantly struggling with situations where I need
to communicate with others.
I use assistive technology in a lot of different ways.
Captioning is the most valuable thing for me.
I also use things such as Google's Live Transcribe, which
helps in real-time conversations with people.
I use Google Meet's closed captions
to help me understand meetings that I have with my colleagues.
There's also something called InnoCaption,
which captions telephone calls using a live transcriber.
That completely changed my world because before that
was created, I couldn't use a telephone,
and that was something that really blocked my capabilities
in the work setting.
The first piece of advice is to consider edge cases or users
with difference in all of your product development processes.
This is where you're going to gain
some really valuable insight.
It should be a normal part of your development process.
It shouldn't be an add-on.
It should be considered from the beginning.
But I think, also, it's extremely important
to diversify your own network.
Start getting to know people who are different from you.
Start learning from them.
Ask them what their experiences are
like with different technology as they go about their world.
Learning these unique experiences
is what's going to make you see opportunities
for great design in your products.
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