Hello. It's great to be here. You might be noticing that
I have a female voice. That's speaking for me right now.
That's because my interpreter is a woman. If I could have chosen
if I could have picked anyone for tonight, I think it probably
would have been a British man
Have you ever been in that situation, maybe you're in a
supermarket or you're walking down a hallway and you're
walking towards a stranger coming the opposite direction.
And you start that awkward dance where you're trying to pass them
and you go to the right and they go to the right and you go to
the left. You know how awkward that is? If you've ever been
there. So suppose you were deaf like I am. And you're going down
the hallway, and the person coming towards you is completely
blind, and you start the awkward dance? What would you do? Have
you ever thought about that? How would you communicate? This
happened to my friend. He's completely deaf. And he was
coming down the hallway, and there was a blind person coming
towards him. And they started the awkward dance and the blind
man began to talk. And my friend, what was he going to do?
He couldn't hear. So his first intuition is to gesture point to
his ears and say, you know, I'm deaf, but obviously, the blind
man's not gonna see that. So his second intuition was to take out
his phone and type in his notes. The blind man's not gonna see
that either. So the third thing he did was a little unusual. He
grabbed the blind man's hand, and he held it up to his ear.
And he shook his head, no. And the plain man felt this and
immediately understood, Oh, this guy's deaf. The awkward dance is
over, they were able to just kind of share a laugh and pass
each other. So let's change the story a little bit. What if my
friend was himself, he was deaf. But this person wasn't blind at
all. He could still see maybe he spoke a different language. If
my friend decided to do the same thing, anyway, grab his hand,
put it up to his ear and shake his head? No. Would that person
still understand them? Probably. It might be a little awkward.
But it'd be universally understood. This is what I do.
Every day as a creative for Amazon, and a designer. I make
visuals on the front page of the world's largest online
storefront. I solve these problems that have to be
accessible to millions and millions of different kinds of
people with different backgrounds. As a deaf person, I
have to innovate solutions all the time I do this in my
everyday life. My communication medium changes with every
interaction I have. Everything from a pitch, pitching an idea
to a client to going into a bar and simply ordering a beer. My
communication style has to change. I'm constantly thinking
about how to make a better solution. And sometimes my
solutions are awkward. Like for example, you see me signing with
two hands right now. But then I have to stop to click that's one
example. But I would like to argue that everyone in this room
has a disability. Regardless of if it's permanent or temporary.
It could be something as simple as being pregnant having a
broken arm, being older or being a child. Everyone has to figure
out a way to cope and navigate around their disability. And
these solutions are worth sharing. One example would be my
wife. She's hearing and we visited Iceland a few years ago.
She's an educator and she wanted to take a tour of a school for
the deaf. Now neither of us can read or write Icelandic and I
can't speak Icelandic sign language. But being a native
signer, I could understand much better than she could. And so I
ended up interpreting for her for the first time in our entire
relationship. Often I'm considered the date fabled one
but in this situation she was the one with a disability. So
what is universal design anyway? There was a professor named Ron
Mays, who passed away a few years ago, he taught at the
Center for Universal Design in North Carolina. And he said that
universal design is the design of products and environments to
be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible without
the need for any adaptation or specialized design.
So, humans interact with objects every day. And all these objects
fall somewhere on the spectrum of universal design from very
universal to not at all. So let's use a doorknob as a common
example. doorknobs are not really usable by children, they
struggle. People with arthritis struggle to use doorknobs and
this guy.
So how can we improve on this design? Well, the door lever,
it's a lot better. This guy can use it now. But think about
people with wheelchairs have you ever seen them try to go through
a door. It's horrible. It's really tough for them. Or
parents with baby strollers. It's really difficult, not fully
accessible. So to even improve upon the door design further,
the automatic sliding door was invented. This is such a
universal design. It doesn't leave anyone out. Even animals
can use it.
One of my projects recently was to work on something to make it
more universally accessible. Do you remember when Google Glass
came out? It was so exciting a few years ago? Now, May it rest
in peace?
But I started thinking about how could I use that? How can I make
that really awesome new technology beneficial for people
like me. So I thought of my mother, immediately. My mother
is deaf and she loves going to movies. Often, movie theaters
would release a movie with subtitles that were imposed on
the screen. And that was a really exciting event. I don't
know if you know this, but deaf options in a movie theater are
really bleak. And you usually have to wear something like
this. Can you imagine going in your first day looking like
this? Yeah. So I thought, how can I make this better? I
decided to get a file for movie script and put it in an app so
that you could have a timed app where you could press play and
go into any movie theater and see the script on your Google
Glass. No one had done that before. And I had to move pretty
fast on it. And the biggest reward was seeing was not only
realizing that it helps people like my mom, or people like me.
But also anyone can use it. Imagine if you go to a different
country and you go into a movie theater or you want to watch a
movie, you can watch it in your own language. Or you could even
have an app become your own personal karaoke machine and
habit play lyrics. That is the genius of universal design. When
you achieve universal design, it snowballs to the point where
people even if you don't share the same disability, everyone
benefits from it. Disability drives innovation. The existence
of disability forces you to come up with new solutions. It does
not impair you. All of us have a disability. Regardless of if
it's physical or cognitive, emotional, or even temporary.
What is your solution? Share it with us. It's what unifies us us
as humans, let's stop making that awkward dance so awkward.
Thank you