Looks like we are good to go.
So I'm going to go ahead and get started.
Thanks, everybody, for joining us today.
For those of you who I don't know, my name's Brianna Blaser.
I work at the University of Washington in the DO-IT Center.
And through this recent grant from the United Engineering
Foundation, we're working to build more resources
and community around accessibility and engineering.
So part of that is webinars like this.
We have an online community, as well,
where we post relevant articles and have some discussion.
And we'll be building some written resources
for our website, as well.
So if you're not getting emails from us on a regular basis
about these sorts of things and would like to, I invite you
to email us at DO-IT, D-O-I-T, at uw.edu and get connected.
And I'll put that in the chat, as well.
And I'll also share with you that after today's webinar,
we'll be sending an evaluation.
And we always appreciate it if folks fill those out
so we can share with our funders about the work that we're doing
and improve in the future.
So I'm not going to say much more about that,
and I'll hand it over to Kayla to introduce today's panel
discussion and panelists.
Hi, everyone.
So my name is Kayla, and I also work with Brianna
on access computing.
And I'm really excited to be able to host a panel today.
I myself have a disability.
And so one thing that I really like to do
is when we're doing outreach in our programs,
we really want to have people with disabilities
involved in the conversation as much as possible.
So panels are a great way to do that.
And I reached out to our network of folks
to see who would want to be on our panel,
and I got three lovely folks to participate.
And I'll have them introduce themselves,
but we've got Hannah, Nolan, and Ather.
So the way this is going to work is
I have some questions that I can throw out there.
But if any time you, the audience,
wants to ask something, feel free to put it in the chat
or let me know.
And we really don't mind audience questions at all.
And there will be space at the end.
We'll make sure there's time, as well.
So the first thing I want to do is have our panelists
introduce themselves to you.
Nolan, would you like to go first?
I would love to hear a little bit about you,
where you went to school, and what you're up to now,
and if there's anything else you want to share.
Awesome.
Thank you so much.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Nolan.
I am a recent graduate of McDaniel College in Maryland.
I studied political science.
I'm super excited for the 2020 election.
And I am interested in going into advertising.
So that's sort of where I'm headed, hopefully,
at the moment.
Awesome.
Hannah, do you want to go?
Can people hear me?
Yup.
OK, cool.
Hi, everybody.
I'm Hannah.
I just graduated this spring from the University
of Washington.
I majored in computer science and minored
in physics and math.
And I'm going to be a software development
engineer starting in the fall.
And I have a visual impairment.
Great.
Thank you.
Ather?
Sure.
Thank you so much for organizing this panel.
Really excited to be a part of it.
My name is Ather.
I am a rising second year PhD student at the University
of Washington.
I joined in last year.
Very happy to be done with the first year
and very excited to be starting the second year.
I also work as a software engineer at Comcast, and just
really excited to be on this panel.
Great.
Thank you.
So the first question that I have is, how, if anything,
has your disability influenced your career choices,
your career path, what you've studied?
And if it has, how so?
Nolan, would you want to start there?
Yeah.
I mean, it's always hard to sort of answer
the question of how has your disability influenced
your life, because it's hard to say
how it has versus how the bad decisions I
make on a daily basis have.
Joking.
But one of the things that I wanted to do when I was younger
was I really thought detective work was really cool.
And at my high school job fair, there
was I think it was the Washington State
Troopers or someone.
It doesn't matter.
They came and had a sort of a table set up,
and I was just asking about what it sort of it
takes to be a detective.
And the guy who was standing there just sort of looked me
up and down and was like, well, you're
going to have to be a police officer first,
and you can't really do that.
So you're sort of out of luck.
Thankfully, there's a whole bunch of other stuff I can do,
and I think advertising is really cool.
But that was sort of the most outwardly
I guess ableist sort of stopping point in a career path,
for me at least.
That's the only major thing that's come to mind.
Great.
Hannah, would you like to go?
Yeah, sure.
I think for me, it's kind of similar to Nolan.
I'm not really sure how much my disability actually
impacted my choices of what I wanted to study.
I feel like I more went with what was interesting to me
and what classes I liked the most
and what I could see myself doing in the future.
And I never really considered, I guess,
how my disability played into that
or how it influenced my choices.
It took me a little while in college
to figure out what I wanted to do to begin with.
But in all that time and in all the things that I tried,
I never really considered that I wouldn't
be able to do something because of my disability.
I just assumed I would figure it out, what I wanted to do,
and might as well go and follow what my interests were.
Great.
Thank you.
Ather?
Sure.
So my experiences have been a little bit different.
I got injured after I graduated with an undergraduate degree
and while I was pursuing my master's degree.
So at that point in time, I was already very focused
on getting a degree in software engineering.
But after I got injured--
and that was a car accident--
I actually tried to get away from that field,
just because that field requires a lot of hand function
and a lot of typing.
So I actually tried to go away from that field based
on my disability.
And I considered that very heavily.
I looked at other options, things
that do not require that much of typing
or anything of a computer usage, for that matter.
Because at that point in time, in my mind,
it was pretty much that it would be
very hard to compete and to be in this tech world
without having something that is implicitly required,
and that is a fully functional hand.
But it was later on that I realized that there are ways
that you could adapt to it.
And then I talked to a few people,
and they kind of motivated me into coming back to this field.
And one of the major things that stood out
there was that, what if you could
use the knowledge that you have now
that you have a different perspective of things?
Help other people with disabilities.
So just because you have this interesting perspective,
how would it be if you applied that knowledge to the work
that you will do in the future?
And that actually did change my path within computer science.
So before that, I was very interested
in systems and network.
And then I realized that my interests now
lie in the field of human/computer interaction.
And that was one of the reasons why I started
doing a PhD in this field.
Great.
Thank you.
So with our audience in mind, I wanted
to ask the panelists, what are some tools and assistive
technologies or assistive devices
that you use in your everyday life?
I can speak for myself, that when
I talk to engineers about some of the tools
that I use personally--
I use a wheelchair.
I have muscle weakness.
One of them is a very simple loop on my phone,
and that helps me not drop my phone, which has actually
gotten a lot more common now.
A lot more people have those on their phones.
But little things like that.
Does anyone have an example of a tool
that they use that they would want to talk about?
It doesn't have to be fancy.
It can be anything.
So I have a couple examples of tools I would not probably
want to mention.
But as far as tools that I would,
I use, for example, a buttoner.
So it's basically a little wire on a stick
that you can sort of stick through your buttonhole
and connect to the button and then pull it back through,
and it buttons your shirt for you.
And that's been really helpful, just
because doing fine motor skills up
here can be difficult for me.
That is sort of the first thing that comes to mind.
And something I think we'll get to later in this conversation
is a lot of the assistive technology
I use is not necessarily assistive technology.
But just I have a problem, and this thing seems is in reach,
and it seems like it might solve this problem.
And I'm going to try it, and if it doesn't work,
I'm going to reach for something else
and see if I can solve the problem that way.
So there's a lot of trial and error there.
And then you find something, and you go back to it.
And suddenly, it becomes a system.
I actually agree with Nolan a lot there.
A lot of technologies that I use are trial and error,
kind of trying it out and see if it really works for us or not.
I wouldn't say there's a universal tool that
would work for everybody with a certain kind of disability.
I think it's very specific to everyone else's need,
and it's unique that way.
I personally use a button opener, just like Nolan.
And there was a point in my life where I kind of
went full on rebellion against assistive technology,
because I wanted to feel really normal and just like everybody
else.
At that point, I didn't really realize what normal meant.
But since then, I've used a bunch of other technology
devices.
One of them is a button opener.
I've also used Dragon dictate for a little while.
And I think those are the two main technology
products that I've used and settled on using one of them.
Yeah, I kind of agree with what the others
have said so far, as well.
It's kind of trial and error type thing.
And a lot of times, I find myself
kind of using tools that weren't necessarily
made to be assistive technology, but they help me, so it works.
One example of that is the camera on my phone.
So for me, I like to be minimalist.
I don't like to carry a lot of stuff with me when I go places.
So usually, I just have my phone and my wallet,
and I don't like to carry around a magnifying glass
or anything like that.
So if I go out to eat with my friends
or if I go to the shopping mall and I need to read the price
tags on something, I can just pull out my phone
and take a picture of whatever I want to see
and then use the capabilities on the phone
to zoom in on it and kind of use that as a pseudo magnifying
glass in the event that, most likely,
I probably don't have one with me.
Great.
A lot of creativity there.
I can certainly relate.
So what advice would you give engineers
who are designing products that could help people
with disabilities?
Nolan, do you want to go first?
Not really, but that's sort of the order now.
That's a really hard question, because--
and I'm sure other people are going
to have much better answers for this question
as it gets fleshed out.
But one of the things I think is really interesting--
and sort of off our last point--
is don't be so rigid about your solution
that you're coming up with.
You might set out to solve a problem
and create something that completely solves
a different problem for a different subset
of the community, and that's OK.
I think, also, another important thing is just
to be conscious of how many disabilities there are
and how diverse those disabilities are.
If you make a piece of assistive technology and only a third--
and you're only thinking about a third
of the community that could use it,
you're going to miss out on a lot of great user
experience for a lot of people who might need it.
And so I hope that that wasn't so jumbled,
but hopefully, everyone else will have
some better ideas than I do.
That was great.
Yeah.
I think that was a pretty good answer.
Just to add to that, I think I would
say that it is super important to think
about these types of things when you are designing
new technology, like think about all the different people who
could possibly use it and then more,
because there's always people with different needs
that you probably never even thought about.
And the reason that I think that this is so important
is because the next great idea can really come from anywhere.
It can come from inside anybody's mind.
It can come from any person, no matter what their ability is.
So it's really important, I think, to allow people to use--
or give people opportunity to use the technology
that we're creating.
And I think the best way to do that, or one of the best ways
to do that, is to actually include
these people in the design process
and to do user testing before you even--
or user surveys, before you even start building something,
to see, if you're specifically making
a piece of assistive technology, what these people actually
want.
Look at your target audience and ask
them questions to see what they would
like to see in this device.
Because sometimes the answers may surprise you,
and people may not want the things
that you think that they want.
And they may want things that you never even
thought about them wanting.
So it's a delicate balance.
And again, everybody's going to have
their own ideas and their own creative solutions
that they've come up with to try to get around these problems.
So I think just talking to people
and making sure to include these things while you're coming up
with a design, like before things even start being built.
And this goes for things that aren't specifically
assistive technology.
Just any sort of technology, any sort of tool,
I think it's a good idea to just take
a survey of who could potentially be using this
and what these different needs are
and making sure that all of the core
needs for all the groups of people are met.
I agree with both Hannah and Nolan on this.
I think a lot of good products come out
of great ideas and people playing around with new stuff.
I do want to add to that that the problem definition is
by far, to me, the most important part in the process.
When someone decides that, well, this
is a problem that we want to solve,
I think that it's really important
that we put a lot of effort and time
into understanding what the problem is.
Who does it address?
Is that actually a problem?
If we're going to put all this effort into solving
this particular problem, what is there
that exists today that is already addressing
the problem in certain ways?
How can we make it better?
Sometimes it happens that people tend
to start solving a problem, and then
they realize that the past few months,
they've spent on building something
that is already out there in one way or the other.
So they don't understand how we can make it better.
And that is, at that point in time,
if I may, a waste of time for everybody.
So it's very important that we think about the problem
thoroughly, involve people who are the intended audience
for that product to be involved in the design process
fairly early on, as Hannah said.
And then go into iterations of how is it
working, what can we do to improve it?
And not just do the user testing at the very beginning
or at the end, but also throughout the process
at stages.
So it's important to kind of keep track of, well,
we've built this.
Are we on the right track?
How can we improve this?
And then go into iterations before a product
gets finalized.
Those are really great points.
And I often think about how to talk about the definition
of problems.
I think a lot of non-disabled people
have these ideas of what the problem is
for people with disabilities.
They think, oh, well, this person uses a wheelchair,
so they obviously have this problem.
And oftentimes, when I have conversations with people,
I say, well, that's not really a problem for me.
Maybe it is for somebody else.
But really, what's more important to me is this.
And so we're very quick to make assumptions
about what problems are and what needs to be solved.
Sometimes there isn't a problem where you think there is one.
So I think that's a really good point.
So another question I wanted to ask is, with the assumptions
in mind, are there any struggles or problems
that you come up with throughout the day that maybe you
think something could be created or altered to make
it a little bit easier for you?
Like, for example, my answer is always
my biggest struggle is doors.
I really hate doors.
And I actually choose which coffee
shop that I go to in the morning based on the door.
So I go to a specific Starbucks that the door opens and closes
both ways.
So I can push to get in, push to get out.
So I wish that door hinges could be different.
That's what I wish that I could change
that would help my day-to-day struggles with my disability.
So do any of you have any ideas or things
you would want made better?
I guess I'm up again.
It's hard to sort of point out specific things,
just because again, you deal with it so often that you're
dealing with minor things throughout the day where you're
like, wow, they could have changed this just a little bit
and made my life 1,000 times easier
in that specific interaction there.
I think one of the things I've struggled with and a lot
of people I know have struggled with--
and please correct me if I'm wrong--
is many of my disabled peers struggle
with getting dressed, as well as I struggle with,
and I'm sure other people struggle with, making food.
And so those are two very central things--
super basic, but very central parts
of living in the 21st century.
And they're not-- everyone on this call is dressed, I think.
But it's hard to--
so everyone on this call has figured it out.
But the amount of hurdles that people go through
to figure it out are different and often sort of unfair
would be my answer to that.
OK.
That's a good question.
I think, for me, the biggest thing-- it's kind of simple,
but I would like it so that I don't
have to use two hands to use my phone.
Because I use zoom on my phone, so when I have the zoom on,
I have to double-tap and then move it around with one hand
and hold the phone with the other hand.
So if I'm carrying things or something,
I often can't use my phone.
If I'm walking down the street, it's really hard
to navigate with Google Maps if I'm also, for example,
helping my friend move her into a new apartment.
I don't have a free hand.
I can't use both my hands to use my phone.
So it would be really cool if there is a way that I--
most people who don't have to use zoom,
they could just pull their phone out of their pocket and glance
at it to see if they're going in the right direction
or who messaged them.
But for me, I would have to stop, put everything down, take
out my phone, zoom in, see what the things said,
pick everything back up, and keep walking.
So it's a simple thing, but it would make
a lot of things a lot easier.
But again, like Nolan said, you kind of just
figure it out and deal with it.
But it would definitely make things easier.
I would definitely agree with that.
I think one of the superpowers that people with disabilities
have is that we adapt things really fast
based on whatever's around us, whatever surrounds us.
We make use of it.
We learn how to do it.
I would very much like to live in a world
where there were no stairs.
And we could just, I don't know, levitate
into a building or something.
But not having push buttons has been a problem
for me getting in and out.
And I've been at places where the definition
of accessibility, especially in Europe,
is four people lifting you up, putting you
through a flight of stairs.
And it doesn't matter how much you weigh, doesn't matter
how much the chair weighs.
There's no ramp, and there's no push button.
So heavy doors, stairs have been a major hindrance
to getting to places.
And it's really good to see that being
at University of Washington, we have
those push buttons installed.
So it's easier to get in.
But out in older cities, older buildings,
it's just really tough.
Similarly for elevators, as well.
I just want to jump in, because I saw something yesterday.
Ather, you mentioned stairs, and I saw this really great example
of stairs that had been designed with this idea
of accessibility.
So it was a set of stairs.
It's in Vancouver.
And there's a ramp zigzagging across the stairs, which
seems like a really cool way to work the ramp in so that it
was attractive.
It wasn't a big ramp jutting out that looked like an addition
and an afterthought.
But then a lot of the reaction from people with disabilities
was, well, the designer was trying
to think about disability, but as a wheelchair user,
they might be worried about accidentally going off
the side of the ramp and getting a wheel stuck on a step.
Or a person with a visual impairment
maybe can't see that those steps are uneven heights,
because some of them are only a couple inches because the ramp
cuts across the steps.
It was this really interesting example of somewhere
where somebody tried to think about accessibility
but didn't engage with people with disabilities.
And so it wasn't actually a great staircase
at the end in terms of serving a bunch of people.
You know, you couldn't even have handrails that went up it,
because if you had a handrail, it would cut off the ramp.
And of course, the worst part was the ramp
isn't very useful, because it was way
too steep, given that it was trying to follow the steps.
So I guess part of my question is whether you all
have examples of things that you've
seen where folks have tried to do some really
great thing for accessibility, but if they had engaged
with people with disabilities, might have
had a more successful product?
Absolutely.
I saw that one, as well, and I had some very similar thoughts.
I was very focused on the handrails.
And if somebody was in a manual chair,
this is a lot of pushing to going zigzag.
It's almost like taking a dance class.
We generally see that a lot in terms of digital accessibility,
where somebody tried really hard to make something so accessible
that, for anybody else, it just didn't work at all.
We give examples of, generally, when
people are designing things on the web,
they would talk about colorblindness,
but they would completely miss out
the part where somebody could just not see that at all.
So they would consider their solutions
as accessible by saying that, yes, we included
all of these contrasting colors, but they
don't address those problems in terms of somebody who uses
a screen reader, for example.
So the entire web is full of elements like that.
In terms of physical accessibility,
I just came back from a trip from Philly.
And I was in a new building.
And turns out that they put the push button
on one side and not the other.
So basically, for you to come from the other side,
you have to go up the stairs and then push the press button--
press the push button and then come up.
So things like that happen quite often,
where people do not consult people with disabilities
or test them out.
So it ends up being a checkmark on the list, which
is not tested.
And it ends up not working for people.
Sorry, I just want to chime in on this,
because I hear this specific rant being talked about a lot.
And I just wanted to talk about this from an advocacy
perspective.
The one that's usually canonically referred to
is in Vancouver, and Brianna posted this post
by [INAUDIBLE] in the group chat.
It was designed in 1978 and built in the early '80s,
so before there was ADA, before there were any metrics
or standards, before even the term universal design was
a thing.
So when this comes up, there's the idea to say,
oh, this was meant to be like a universal design.
It wasn't.
It was before any of that had been done.
And people have taken that and said, oh, this
is great universal design.
And that's the problem that we have to push back on.
People see this and say, I want to emulate this.
And that's the opportunity to start talking about,
this is exactly the wrong way to go about this.
When you try to emulate these things that are unrelated,
then you're only making problems worse.
We only ever get better by actually integrating
the disabled users in the process of the design
from the beginning.
Thanks, Matt.
That's a great point.
Yeah, I've always wanted to see those stairs in person.
And when I first looked at the picture of that--
and it really is visual.
There's something visual about it that's very appealing,
which is the main thing that I have to--
I feel like when I'm talking to designers,
they also want their end product to look appealing to people.
And they think, oh, well a ramp isn't
as impressive as a flight of stairs.
And so the intent was definitely there
to maybe make it look appealing, as well.
But there is a way they could have done that better.
I've always wanted to see the stairs.
I don't think I would use them, use those particular stairs.
But I can see myself just kind of like not
being able to see it very well and falling off.
But yeah, I do think that's a really great example, Brianna.
Any other thoughts on that?
So out of curiosity--
and anyone can jump in on this--
are there any tools that were created for non-disabled people
that you use in everyday life, specifically for something
disability related?
I can share an example, slightly embarrassing.
But I got a dog a couple years ago,
and I was trying out various Pooper Scoopers.
And they have some for people with arthritis
and can't lean down to do that.
And I bought one, and I loved it so much--
not for that, but for picking other things up off my floor.
So I now only use it for in my home
when I'm trying to pick up something that I dropped.
Because I can't use the claws that you
have to squeeze to operate.
So I had to find something different
that I didn't have to have any strong muscles to use.
So that's always the one that people make fun of me about,
is using a Pooper Scooper in my home.
Do any of you guys have examples of things you use?
Nothing I would especially want to share,
nor do I think you guys want to hear comes to mind.
But I do use things like that in my daily life.
Like I was saying, sometimes you're just sort of in a jam,
quite literally with your pants down,
and you have to sort of reach for whatever you
have at arm's length.
And for me, with arthrogryposis, arm's length
is quite a bit more restricting than someone else's arms
length.
So you just have to make do with a nearby doorknob
to help getting dressed or whatever you can sort of find.
Again, it's hard to think of anything that comes
to mind that I use regularly.
But there's plenty of things that I'll just grab and be
like, I wonder if this will--
if I can reach where I need with this tool.
For me, I think I already mentioned my phone
and using that to double as a magnifying glass,
even though it definitely was not made to do that.
There's just a lot of other apps that I use on my phone, too,
I think.
Some of them are made to be accessibility tools,
like an app called Read To Go, which
I use to read books or textbooks, often.
And some are just, I don't know, helpful
apps to have that I'm not really sure if they were meant
to be an assistive technology thing to begin with,
but are nice anyway.
And I think something else that I do is for me--
again, this is totally not something
that was made to be an assistive technology.
But I really like those brightly colored folders,
because then I can use those to organize my different papers
or files or that kind of thing.
And that way, for me, I just remember
what color I put different categories of stuff in.
And even just different colored boxes
or different colored containers or anything,
like when I'm putting food away in the fridge.
Because then I don't actually have
to go and try to read the label on the thing
to see what it is or actually like go and pull it out, like
an object in a box out to inspect
it to make sure that I know that I'm in the right place.
I just remember the color and can find things that way.
I do have a shameless plug, because I worked for Comcast.
The Comcast remote, the Xfinity remote, was actually just--
the voice remote, as they call it,
was just designed just because voice was a cool feature.
And now it is one of the major marketing strategies for them
in terms of accessibility.
So it wasn't made thinking about, OK, well, this
will help other people who will find the buttons really
hard to press or who would--
it would be easier for them to use the voice.
So things like that, tools like that have helped me
tremendously, by not pressing all the buttons
and going through channels, but just interacting with the TV
without having to press more buttons.
And things like that, I think, are really helpful,
because they weren't designed in an assistive technology
and accessibility manner, but they but they
do help us a lot in performing daily life activities.
LA called out in chat the read-aloud feature in Word.
She says, I don't think this was made
for people with disabilities, but it helps me when I can't m
but I can still see broad shapes and paragraphs.
It's much easier and faster for me to use than a regular screen
reader, but it still allows me to read long texts.
So similar sort of story to what Ather was suggesting.
Yeah, that's great.
So I have more questions I can ask the panelists,
but I want to throw it out there to anyone
who's on the call with us.
If you have any questions, feel free to let
me know or shout it out now.
I know, it's always hard on a phone call or a webinar.
Well, let me know.
Do put it in the text or let us know somehow
if you want to ask questions.
So we're hearing a lot about people
with disabilities needing to be creative
and maybe using tools that weren't developed specifically
for people with disabilities to help them.
We talked about strategies for engineers
to talk with people with disabilities,
but is there anything specifically
that you would want an engineer to know
about you or your disability?
Is there anything you'd want to share with them, just
in general, about you if they're working on products that
help people with disabilities?
Sorry, I sort of jumped in just because I know the order here.
I think one of the important things that
sort of become a theme of this call is don't assume things.
And that's through no fault of the engineers.
I'm sure everyone in engineering is super smart.
I know I can't--
I'm not smart enough to be an engineer.
But I think they just don't have the life experience,
and they're not--
there's no sort of media presence around accessibility.
We were sort of talking about this right
before everyone got on.
There's just so few examples of good media coverage
around accessibility that it's hard to get
a view into the life of someone with a disability
as a casual observer.
And so when you're doing this, you really
need to do your homework and do a deep dive into the community.
Because the media isn't going to help you as much as I think
it would in a different context.
And so that would be my advice, is
just you're going to have to do a little more homework.
And I'm sorry, but that's where we're at right now.
Yeah, I agree with that, definitely.
I think, yeah, doing research and talking
to people is going to be the most helpful.
I think for me, personally, if there's something
that I would want an engineer to know about me as they're
designing things is--
maybe it's not even about me specifically.
But just the fact that there is a spectrum of blindness.
And just because somebody uses a white cane
doesn't mean that they can't see anything.
So for me, whenever I have use my cane,
people always assume that I'm able to see anything
about where I'm going.
And when I do go in for some accessibility interviews
or these pre-user studies, there's
a lot of just initial assumptions that are made.
But in reality, for me, I can actually see a fair amount.
I just don't have great depth perception.
So just because somebody says that they're blind
or someone says that they're legally blind or visually
impaired, that doesn't necessarily
mean that they fit into the same box or the same category.
There's a lot of different ways people still
can sense the world visually, potentially,
even if they use a cane or not.
Again, it's a spectrum, from one end to the other.
And just keeping that in mind.
People everywhere on that spectrum
are going to have different needs
and are going to have different wants for whatever device
or whatever new, cool assistive technology is being created.
So it's important, if you want it
to be used by a lot of people, to design for that spectrum
and not for just one specific part of it,
unless you are targeting one specific part of it.
Then, by all means, talk to those people
and understand that it's not going
to be used for everybody else.
I agree with that.
I think one thing that Hannah mentioned
I think is really spot on, very important as well,
is that we start seeing ability as a spectrum
instead of living it, instead of making it
a dichotomy between an able-bodied person
and disabled person.
It's a big spectrum.
It's very important that we start seeing it like that.
And just because it's a spectrum with everybody
being so unique and so uniquely different,
it's hard to take the element of assumption
out of this equation.
Making something and building a product or doing some research,
it's very hard to target every single person representing
every single bit of that spectrum.
I think the important part there is
that when the assumption has to happen,
it has to be an educated assumption.
It cannot be an assumption that was just made out of nowhere.
And this leads us into a very, very critical and important
part of the discussion is that it's all about education.
For anybody conducting research or building products
for people with disabilities or doing anything
that benefits people with disabilities,
it is very important that we educate ourselves
to understand what are the different needs of people
with disabilities.
What are the different kinds of disabilities?
How can we address them?
What are the daily life experiences,
as Nolan mentioned?
I'm really glad, on that front, that at least one TV show
has started to pick up on it a little bit, which is there
was an episode on Queer Eye.
I don't know if you guys have watched it
or not, but that was an episode for someone who
uses a wheelchair.
So things like that really help.
But I think what also helps is participating in meet-ups,
reaching out, making sure that we are all educated about that.
Reading articles on just blog posts,
I know a lot of my other peers who
have some sort of disability do a really, really great job
in explaining things that they encounter and experience
in their daily lives.
I think it's just fascinating.
Even as a person with a disability
myself, it's really fascinating to kind of learn
about other people's experiences we have
different kind of disabilities.
So it's really important that we educate ourselves.
And then, if we do have to make an assumption,
that has to come from some sort of educational foundation.
Because without that, it will be very meaningless.
Awesome.
Can we jump to the question in the chat?
Yeah, absolutely.
I love that answer, by the way.
Nice job.
Let me just read the question in the chat.
OK.
I have a question, as a researcher.
We keep talking about how designers and engineers need
to reach out to and co-create with people with disabilities
to make the best, most accessible products.
My question is, how do you feel about being recruited
for things like research or design studies based off
of your ability status?
Doesn't it annoy you after a point,
because you get a lot of requests?
Is it OK that people are reaching out
for your expertise based specifically
on your ability status?
Go ahead.
Sorry.
Can I answer this?
I'm super excited.
I love complaining about things, and so I
love helping people with quality assurance around products.
I worked on a study with Ather earlier this month.
And I did it last year, too, I think.
I can't remember now.
And he had really amazing work that he was doing,
but it was super cool to go in and do some tests
and sort of think about how it can be applied
to systems in the future.
I don't want to get too into it, because I
don't know how much he would want to talk about it.
But one of the things that sort of has--
that I thought about while he was
giving his answer was that Queer Eye episode,
I watched it, as well.
And one of the things I do with media
is I'll go into watching media around accessibility.
I'll go search it out sometimes and just, in my mind,
try to poke holes in it and be like, OK, they did this wrong,
and they did this wrong.
And you know, I don't think it was the perfect episode,
but I could tell that Netflix did their homework,
almost to a point where I felt like they--
and granted, everyone's experience with disability
is different.
But I felt like they were talking about accessibility
in a way that connected with me better than I
thought the guy who they were helping
who was in the wheelchair.
He was talking about accessibility in a way
that I was like, that doesn't resonate with me as well.
So please, I'll have--
I don't know if you guys want my information.
But I would love to be part of studies.
I'd love to help.
Super fun for me to look at things and help
grow products like that.
I just want to chime in here and say
that Nolan has been a part of my study every time I've done it,
and thank you so much for being a part of that.
I think it's really helpful.
But I'm on both sides of that, where I have recruited people
with disabilities.
And I've also-- and Kayla has been a part
of all of those studies, too.
So I've recruited people with disabilities,
but I've also been asked many, many times if I
want to participate in a study.
I think, for me, on one side, I'm really curious
about to know what is going on in the research world,
being a part of the studies, learning
from other researchers, learning about the study, helping out.
But I also understand that I have
a lot of other commitments in my daily schedule.
So I would not hesitate in politely saying no
to an offer to be a part of a study if I'm unable to do so.
I think it's important to understand
that I try to take the positive approach
and say that the more requests I get
is an indication of how much work is being done for people
with disabilities.
If I look at that way, then I'm seeing it on a positive angle.
If somebody reaches out to me, it just makes me really happy
that somebody is thinking about those things,
trying to address those problems,
and trying do some research work.
But I also would not hesitate in politely saying no, that
can't be a part of this study, if I have any other commitment
or if I have something that takes a priority over that.
Yeah, I would agree.
I also love to be asked to do user studies.
But again, if I can't make it, then I can't make it,
and I'm not shy about saying so.
But I think that it's super important
that they're getting done.
And I always love to go give my feedback, too.
As Ather said, it's really cool just
to see what people are working on
and all the cool things that are being done in this field
and to help, hopefully, make things better for more people.
So I, again, do not mind getting the requests.
But if I can't make it, then I can't make it.
And I'm not going to really go out
of my way to rearrange my schedule most of the time.
But it is super fun to get the requests,
and I love to go when I can go.
But one other thing that I would add
is I do like to go to these studies and participate,
but it is a lot less fun when the studies aren't conducted
in a productive manner.
I'm trying to find the right words.
I think it's really important, especially as a researcher,
you probably learned that asking the right questions
is one of the most important things when doing research,
and especially when doing a user study.
Because you don't really want to--
the point of a user study is to learn from the user
and to see what they need and how they're interacting
with the technology and what would be good,
what would be bad.
And I've definitely participated in accessibility-related
studies before where people kind of make assumptions.
Like the researchers that are conducting
the study have made assumptions about what
would be easier for me, what would be harder,
just based on the way that I'm using the technology.
It's different than what they've seen anybody--
how they've seen people use it before.
And then they automatically assume
that because it's different, it's hard.
But for me, that was just how I use the technology.
That was easy.
That was something that--
and it took me basically the whole interview
to kind of explain that, no, this is actually fine.
It's OK for people to use the magnifier this way.
This is how I do it all the time.
It's OK.
Yeah, just as a tip, make sure that you're
kind of keeping an open mind and making sure to be aware
of what the people you're interviewing actually
are saying, not what you just think that they're saying
or what they should be saying.
Great.
That was a wonderful question.
I think that is something everyone
should be reflecting on.
I do, as well--
when I'm organizing panels, we always
pay our panelists, because it is time and expertise.
So I think that's also one way that people can respect
their work with people with disabilities,
whether it's a study or just getting feedback on something
early on.
Always should be compensated in some way.
Being disabled and having those experiences,
that has value to it.
So I really like that question.
Well, thank you guys so much for coming.
And thank you, panelists.
I appreciate you all for joining, as well.
Brianna, do you have anything else you want
to say before we finish up?
No.
Just thank everybody for coming out and engaging
in this conversation.
I always appreciate hearing not only from our panelists,
but also from our community.
And so as a reminder, I'll be following up
with an evaluation, a link to an evaluation,
and we appreciate your feedback.
And we hope to have you continue to stay
involved in things we're doing.
Thanks.
Yes, thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks.