in my vision of the future everything is accessible including the digital world
over a billion people in the world have disabilities and a lot of us are online
gaining access to online information can feel incredible for me when the web
became available I could go anywhere I could study the science and technology
and I could travel all over the world of ideas in the online world we have a
seemingly infinite amount of information available but we're still putting
barriers in front of some people we can change that you're probably familiar of
the concept of accessibility from the physical world the design of products
and communications in environments so that they work for people with
disabilities if you picture a building and there's a flight of stairs going up
to the entrance not everyone can get up those stairs but if you add a ramp
there's an accessible way in but then if you think of accessibility from the
design stage forward you could design a level no step entrance and everyone
could come in the front door that's Universal or inclusive design I work on
accessibility in the digital world and I want to tell you about some things
that can make it easier for everyone to use the web including people with
disabilities and also things like building accessible virtual worlds here
are some things that you can do on the web if you have images or video and you
embed descriptions then everyone can access the information in those images
even if they cannot see well or see at all if you add captions to audio
everyone can learn what's being said even if they can't hear well or hear at
all if a website works well with voice recognition then everyone can interact
with that website even if you can't use your hands
and if you design the navigation menus in a consistent way then everyone can
find their way around the site more easily including people with
intellectual disabilities or people who might have memory impairments perhaps
due to aging digital accessibility goes well beyond the web it includes the
design of mobile phones online games digital books telepresence robots and
more digital accessibility enables us to capture the creative contributions of
everyone the Steven Hawkings and the Stevie Wonder's as well as the creative
contributions of more ordinary people with disabilities so how do we build an
accessible world what elements are most important awareness is a very important
piece of the foundation a colleague of mine invites all the new hires at the
tech firm that he works at to come to the accessibility Center that he has and
he surveys them to see who might have already heard about accessibility issues
and technologies as of a few years ago it wasn't any more than 10% and any
group of visitors that would come to the center we have an awareness problem
there's a history of exclusion of people with disabilities going back centuries
millennia and it's only gradually starting to change and some disabilities
are not necessarily visible such as hearing impairments and so awareness of
disabilities is actually much lower than the reality and many people including
people who design technologies haven't gotten a lot of exposure to this
dimension of human variation and ironically we then go and design
technologies and environments that are inaccessible and that perpetuate that
exclusion we could be teaching people about the diverse user needs when we
prepare people for careers in engineering and design so awareness is
one thing rights are another very important element the United Nations
Convention on rights of persons with disabilities has been ratified by 177
countries that's an international consensus and it establishes important
rights such as access to education and to civic participation and more
including accessibility of information and communications technologies and
around the world many governments have laws and regulations that require web
accessibility and accessibility of other technologies but sometimes getting
people to implement accessibility feels like the hardest part so I want to tell
you a story back in the physical world for a minute I ran into a friend a few
years after the Americans with Disabilities Act had been passed in 1990
she was a longtime advocate for accessible transportation and I asked
her enjoying finally having our civil rights it seemed like a safe question to
ask but she said no she said she'd been waiting at this bus stop and a bus came
by but it didn't have a lift on it so she couldn't get on and then the second
bus came by and it had a lift but it was broken the third bus came by and the
driver said well I haven't had any training on how to use it yet and the
fourth bus came by and the driver said I'm running behind schedule I don't have
time to run this lift for you and the fifth bus just zoomed right past her and
so there were some teens who had been watching her for a few hours as she was
waiting and they came over and mugged her so in the physical world
inaccessibility has consequences the bus company was away
and my friend had rights but something went wrong in the implementation and
accessibility didn't happen implementation also matters in the
digital world so a lot of times products get shipped without the accessibility
bugs fixed and sometimes critical new accessibility features get postponed to
the next version and the next version and the next version blind friends tell
me that one of the most frustrating things is they will go all the way
through filling out an online form and they'll go to hit that submit button to
confirm and that button wasn't coded right to work with the screen reading
technology that they rely on and what if that button was at the bottom of an
online job application and you really needed that job or what if you're deaf
in a rural area and you need to talk with a specialist over a telemedicine
platform and what if nobody got around to figuring out how to integrate
captions into that telemedicine platform implementation matters here's the good
news digital accessibility is getting better
tech firms are starting to declare accessibility as a public commitment
some are starting to appoint chief accessibility officer so that
accessibility is considered in management decisions accessibility bugs
are sometimes getting showstopper status meaning fix the bugs before you ship the
product and accessibility is sometimes being included as part of corporate
social responsibility and inclusive design is increasingly getting
recognized as an innovation driver and we're starting to see some exciting
accessible products and services as a result of all of this
so there's another thing that's changing as well there's a lot more resources to
explain how to make technology accessible think of an online shopping
site for a moment and let's say that all the items on sale are only
differentiated by the color red now there's a lot of people who have
colorblindness and they're not going to be able to tell
just from that one distinction which items are on sale so what our group does
is we develop guidelines and we have an internationally recognized standard
called the web content accessibility guidelines that explains how to fix that
as well as many many other things that it that are covered in that and what you
can do is you can add a bit of text or some kind of icon to indicate give a
redundant indication of what was indicated in the color and then people
can make their choices and buy what they want - another thing that those
guidelines do remember that confirm or the submit problem that I mentioned a
few minutes ago it will tell you how to code that in a way that will work
regardless of the assistive technology that a person with disability might be
using with your website and that way everyone can apply for that job we have
a lot of different introductory materials as well as more technical
materials that explain how to make technologies accessible and another
thing that's changed is that there is this large international community a
wonderful community that is it that includes people from industry in the
disability community and research and government building this expanding set
of resources that explain how to make technologies accessible and this is
causing a ripple effect through the whole field one of my favorite things is
looking at the possibilities of advanced tools and technologies to make
accessibility easier to design and develop and sometimes - even in
on the accessibility in the physical world let me give you a few examples of
the possibilities some people get a seizure reaction from
photographic flash or strobing lights now if you were to combine machine
learning which is a type of artificial intelligence or AI with video processing
you can analyze the variations the fluctuations in the brightness and you
can buffer that before it's displayed on a computer screen or a wearable headset
thus reducing the seizure risk for people with color blindness or more
properly a typical color perception you can analyze the colors in a video stream
and you can shift them to colors that are more readily perceived by an
individual and some people on the autism spectrum have difficulty recognizing
emotions in people's facial expressions and so you can use machine learning to
analyze those emotions and to tag the video stream once you start thinking in
terms of accessibility you may see opportunities everywhere think of
automatic speech recognition the quality of that the accuracy of recognition has
improved immensely we're using it on our mobile phones and our digital assistants
it's not quite at a level of accuracy accuracy yet that works for fully
reliable captions but one of the things that still quite difficult in speech
recognition is recognizing the speech of people of some people who are deaf and
the speech of some people with speech disabilities and artificial intelligence
can also help us there because it's better at recognizing some of the subtle
patterns and so that will eventually enable us to more equitably transcribe
and caption the speech of people with different types of speech a colleague
though has noticed that there's some interesting issues that come up with
artificial intelligence and disabilities you've probably heard of AI bias around
for instance racial and gender characteristics well similar things can
happen with disabilities and she was looking at speech recognition and
noticed that it particularly the the speech of people with speech
disabilities and she noticed that the accuracy of recognition was declining
when the size of the reference dataset was expanding because the recognition
was weighted more strongly towards the average pronunciations and then she
started looking at autonomous vehicles self-driving cars and that she was
testing how well these were trained against different simulated obstacles
that might be crossing the street in front of a car and she took video of
people with certain kinds of wheelchair users and she found that the simulated
cars were hitting the simulated wheelchair users and so she experimented
with different transformations of this reference data set and she found she had
to do very radical transformations to the data set not just amplifying the
outliers the less frequent data samples but actually taking out the entire
central core of the database before she could successfully train these vehicles
not to hit the simulated wheelchair users so advanced technologies can help
us design accessible environments if we use them mindfully and back to that
thing I mentioned earlier about creating accessible virtual worlds think of all
the different senses and information across all the different functional
capabilities with different kinds of disabilities that you might be able to
take advantage of for instance haptic output that includes vibrational effects
and that includes a gravity well that kind of pulling sensation you can get in
space there's always different kind of modalities you can rely on
to help make technologies accessible and in doing so to make environments that
work better for everyone so when I talk about digital accessibility a lot of
times people feel like there's nothing that they can do I want to challenge
that sometimes it's a simple matter of looking as looking at a situation and
thinking have people thought about accessibility have people considered
that and asking questions for instance the school website
there's probably parents who have disabilities and want to be able to
catch up with the school events and if your town has online emergency
preparedness training materials and an emergency notification system that's
life or death information how about we all make sure that that's accessible in
the physical world there's still ongoing work to make everything accessible it
takes many hands given the pace the accelerating pace of Technology change
we need even more hands at the table on accessibility so that means that all of
the tech courses all of the science labs the maker spaces where you can fabricate
3d objects all need to be accessible and in making those accessible we'll
probably come up with some interesting new innovations as well so if you're a
mobile app developer you can build accessible apps anywhere you work in the
tech or science field their thing there's there's a role that you have
where you can help if you're a quality assurance tester you can get the tools
and the training to test for accessibility if you're a developer with
a disability in a country with no accessibility businesses yet you can be
the first one to open a business if you're a manager you can prioritize
inclusive design as an innovation driver but you can all
so ensure a reliable baseline of accessibility of all your products and
services if you're a recruiter you can pursue inclusive hiring including at the
management and board levels so that accessibility is considered among other
aspects of diversity in improving everything you do and if you speak other
if you speak multiple languages you can help us get the word out around the
world I want to welcome you to join us in building an accessible digital future
and particularly in asking questions when you notice places where others
might not have thought of accessibility thank you