Accessibility NYC Meetup Recap: Transdisciplinary and Inclusive Approaches to Accessibility

Okay. All right! So hello, everyone. It is July, obviously, by our sweaty attire today.

Really excited to have our meetup this month. Want to just start off with some acknowledgements of our sponsors. We've got Tyson here from Thoughtbot. I also to thank the internet Society of New York, Joly Macphie back here, the rock star who gets us live on the internet with these captions.

If you haven't been to our YouTube page, all of our previous meetups have been archived there. And with the captions, they're very easy to search and find specific things you're looking for. My name is Thomas. I'm one of the organizers here.

We've got Shawn in the back. Another one of our organizers. If you haven't met us, please come up and meet us. We're excited to always see more people coming, different people coming.

Every month, we're looking to do different topics. If anyone has any topics you would be interested in presenting, please feel free to reach out to us. I wanted to point out just quickly for next Sunday the Disability Pride Parade is happening in New York City. I think this is the third year.

Third or fourth year that they've had it. But I've been to it the past couple years. And it's definitely a great event. So if anyone's interested, we have some posting on the Meetup page, but there's a group from DiverseAbility that's marching, so if you're interested in participating in that, it's a great event.

All right. Without further ado, it's exciting to have Claire today to present to us lots of exciting research and ideas from the AbilityLab.

Thank you! Howdy! Thanks, Thomas! What a pleasure to be here.

Thanks for inviting me. So my name is Claire Kearney-Volpe. And today I'm going to talk to you just about some projects that I've been working on for the last few years now. And my approach to disability, which I like to think of as a transdisability and inclusive approach to access, but before I get started, I'll just do a quick access check.

Can everyone hear me okay? Okay, all right. I'll get a little closer to the mic. Is my speed okay?

If at any time I start talking too fast, which I can do when I get a little nervous, feel free to slow me down. Also, if you need further explanation for any of the weird, wild stuff I'm gonna throw at you, please stop me. I would love to keep this kind of informal. It takes the pressure off me.

And kind of conversational. Sure. And I'll pass around the mic, if you have a question. And I'll be describing images as I go.

And if you would like a digital -- an accessible digital version of the presentation, I'm happy to send it around. Just let me know, and I can email you a copy of the presentation. So I'm gonna first start by defining: What does transdisciplinary mean, what does inclusive design mean to me. And I'm gonna sort of provide examples of the kind of work that I've done over the last few years.

So to begin with, what the heck does transdisciplinary mean? What does transdisciplinarity mean? There are a lot of different thoughts and no one clean definition, but to me, long story short, it's a complex systems approach to problem solving and design that involves people with different domain-specific skills and knowledge coming together to sort of create a common language, create new knowledge, and really value openness and sort of exchange of ideas and information within and between different disciplines.

So in preparation for this talk, I revisited a really wonderful talk that I saw in person in 2016, by a hero and mentor of mine named Sara Hendren. And for those of how don't know her, she's a non-engineer who works as an engineering college called Olin College. And the title of her talk was: Design for know-nothings, dilettantes, and melancholy interlopers, translators, impresarios, believers, and the heartbroken. She's very intense, and a wonderful person.

She's an artist, educator, activist, and in her talk, she describes herself as an archivist, an impresario. An amplifier. A believer. Somebody that sort of facilitates these sort of assistive tech design projects and accessibility design projects in a sort of sea of engineers and different stakeholders.

And as an outsider to engineering proper, she has nonetheless been a really influential co-author, impresario, of these really impressive accessibility and assistive tech-related projects. She talks in this talk that she gave at IO about the value of having sort of multiple hyphenated nouns associated with her professional identity. And with anyone's professional identity. And so I thought that this was actually very personal to me.

I didn't have a very straightforward route to the work that I do. Which is teaching at the NYU engineering school, and being a research fellow in assistive tech and accessibility. Rather, I started out as, like, a Studio art major. And then pivoted and then became an art therapist, became a health researcher, until I went back to school for my masters at ITP, in Interactive Telecommunications.

So it's not a straightforward career path, but I've followed my interests and have picked up a diverse skill set that still serves me in the work that I do, and I'll explain how this relates to transdisciplinarity. So she talks about the value of mixed nouns in our titles and addresses the question of how to do meaningful work that connects to others. And in this slide, I have an image of Sara speaking at a lectern with an overlay slide containing all the words that she uses to describe herself, as a professional.

So broadly defined, digital accessibility in my sort of mind is a sort of technically mediated experience that helps people participate in the digital world. And I'm not an engineer. But I can contribute this transdisciplinary attitude and this tool kit of skills that I've picked up along the way in my career. So there's a scholar from San Francisco State University.

Her name is Tanya Augsburg. And she talks about becoming a transdisciplinary individual. She has a sort of list of characteristics or attributes that are sort of characteristic of people that are transdisciplinary. I don't know how I feel about this kind of prescriptive view, but it's something.

Food for thought. She describes having an appreciation of an array of skills or a transdisciplinary attitude. The tendency to take risks intellectually and challenge existing knowledge or transgress institutional knowledge. Also, having some kind of insights in the nuance of transdisciplinary practice, meaning open communication, value for other people's ideas, attending to conflicts where they arise, and also a respect for the role of creative inquiry, cultural diversity, and cultural relativism.

And I think that's kind of an interesting thing to consider. All right. So inclusive design. And I know this is a lot of definitions and stuff.

And I'll get to examples of the work in just a moment. So when I talk about inclusive design, I'm not necessarily relating or referring to, like, universal design everybody can use, but a process in which you include end users from the beginning to the end of your design work, or your accessibility work. And I sort of view this sort of continuation of participation in the design work that I do as sort of going from one end of the spectrum or the continuum, of totally participatory design, in which you're working with an end user to co-design something, and make something that's highly tailored for them, or also led by a community.

And then on the other end is, like, more user-informed, which is like agency or organization-led, with user testing. So the work that I do and the lab that I work in is towards participatory design, but depending on the time and the resources, and if it's client work, we'll sort of tip the scale and go towards more user-informed design work. But always, always guided by this principle that technology serves people best when they participate in its design.

So the image on this slide is of the NYU Ability Project logo. Which is where I've had the privilege to work for the last -- almost four years now. And work in a transdisciplinary and an inclusive way, as a research fellow and adjunct professor. And the NYU Ability Project, although it's physically housed in the engineering school, is actually a cross disciplinary research and development effort between Tisch School of the Arts, in particular the Interactive Telecommunications Department there, and Tandon and Steinhardt.

This has meant I've had to report to three bosses, but I've also had amazing resources and information and wisdom from the folks that are all collaborators in these three departments. And also collaboration with the students across all the schools are welcomed, and anyone interested, actually, university-wide, in participating in the projects that we do, is absolutely welcome. So on this slide, I have an image of a diagram that links the names of the three participating schools in the Ability Project together.

Okay. Next slide is an image of three students and their client in discussion. And this image is taken from a class which is our flagship annual -- we teach this every fall. It's called developing assistive technology, and really sort of exemplifies a sort of cross disciplinary pillars of the Ability Project, which is students from occupational therapy, students from engineering, and students from design fields come together to work on an assistive tech project for a client that has an idea for some kind of assistive technology or accessibility solution.

And they work on it all together. So I'm gonna talk now about some of the projects outside of the coursework, outside of the courses that we teach. We've done a number of projects, and they all seem to fall into one of three categories. One is the sort of corporate consulting work that we do.

And I'm gonna talk about the work we did for Charter Communications, formerly Time Warner Communications. We also work with cultural institutions, and I'm gonna talk about the work we did with Cooper Hewitt or the Smithsonian Design Museum, and we work with higher ed institutions. I just came from CUNY, where I'm a web access fellow, and also we work on the accessibility of curricula. So I'm gonna talk about a coding accessibility project that I've been working on for the last few years.

So these are the three main projects. Anybody have any questions so far? Going okay? All right.

So charter accessibility. We were actually commissioned by Charter Communications to explore the accessibility of their home entertainment products and services. We spoke with and met with their heads of design, sort of visual design, industrial design, and accessibility, to sort of formulate a plan for an 8-week interdisciplinary and student-led project. And on this slide, there's an image of the ADAPT community members, formerly United Cerebral Palsy members.

The NYU student team, and ADAPT support workers. And this work was really supported by people that are members of ADAPT Community Network. Helen Keller Services. Friends and affiliates of the Mayor's Office for Persons with Disabilities, and the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library.

And everybody that participated reported having a range of disabilities, including hearing, vision, intellectual disabilities, and motor-related disabilities. And we also worked with a team of occupation a therapists, industrial designers, creative technologists, UX researchers, and support staff from the participating agencies. So it was a huge mix of people that all kind of contributed to this product evaluation, which yielded huge insights into some of the accessibility issues of Charter Communications products and services.

We took those insights. We created some prototypes, including a novel application for artificial intelligence and crowd sourcing, metadata solutions for them, because they were having trouble getting closed captioning through their metadata provider. We also made some changes or proposed changes to their UI, including improvements to their information architecture, their menus, color contrasts, text size, all sorts of stuff. And on this slide are nine tiled images of users making remotes out of cardboard cut-outs.

So as I mentioned, we tested with some of the prototypes we created, but as is our way, we also incorporated some participatory design methods by asking participants in our prototype testing session to build their own ideal remote control. We did this because we were interested in really sort of moving beyond the standard form factor for remote design. And getting information about important features and placement of different features that are kind of common, and perhaps uncommon on remotes.

So from this participatory design exercise, we yielded these sort of three very speculative, very responsive -- responding directly to the feedback we got -- designs for remotes and proposed them to Charter. On the left -- there are three images on this slide. On the far left is an idea that came out of this idea that people -- a lot of people have cell phones already, that are sort of configured with their accessibility settings already.

And if they have an iOS device and VoiceOver, they can easily sort of use a remote that's paired with their device on their phone. So it would be a downloadable app that's modular, and you can adapt it and change it in settings. And then also in the middle image, it's of a very pared down, simplified remote control with large text and icons, and on the far right, this one is very speculative.

It's like a malleable, rechargeable, flexible material remote that would fit, like, on your lap or on a desk or anywhere. So from that project, overall, participants obviously, having their input in the design of projects is an important thing, and reported increased user satisfaction with the prototypes. Obviously where they could actually use some of the products that Charter was putting out was definitely a huge improvement. And we put together a white paper for Charter, a journal article, and a presentation with all of our findings.

Okay. The next project -- any questions about that Charter Communications thing? Okay. So the next project I'm gonna talk about is sort of, again, relating to more like cultural institution accessibility, and in 2016, we worked with the Cooper-Hewitt, which is a Smithsonian Design Institution, with the plan of reimagining the Cooper-Hewitt's physical space.

The accessibility of how to move around in the spaces. As well as the digital part of it. Has anyone been there? They have the glass tables and the pens, you can create your own unique URL with all the pieces from the collection that you really enjoyed and go home and learn more about those objects later.

All of which is not accessible at all, and didn't have accessibility considered at all when they were creating this stuff. As fun as it is for some people. So much like the Charter project, we began by checking out their current situation, evaluating the physical space, evaluating the digital interactives that they had. And also the website that they had at the time.

So to do this work, we invited friends, colleagues, and community members with disabilities to join students from NYU, the three different programs, to sort of visit the Cooper-Hewitt with us. Multiple times. And had these open forums and discussions with the museum's support staff, education staff, and curation and exhibition design staff. Which was really interesting.

And kind of difficult. So the team was huge. In addition to having a million guest lecturers, to prepare us for this work, because most of us hadn't done any kind of museum design or access work before, we had Georgia Krantz, a wonderful seasoned veteran of museum access, come and talk to us. We worked with artists, educators, members of ADAPT Community Network, who actually have a group that go to different museums every week, so they know everything about museum access.

We worked with Walei Sabry, Gus Chalkias, Xian Horn, Anita Perr, our resident occupational therapist, and we had a professor of environmental design, as well as all the support from the Cooper-Hewitt staff. Similarly, we evaluated everything. We built and tested experimental prototypes, and with the input of experts and museum-goers with disabilities, we worked on four sort of separate responses to the museum's access. So one was an augmented reality-based verbal description app.

One was a prototype using beacons to sort of map out the indoor space, for indoor wayfinding of the museum. Another thing that we created was a tutorial for exhibition and design staff, around how to ensure the sort of physical accessibility of the exhibitions that they designed. And then finally we worked on the accessibility of their website. So on the screen, I have an image of a cell phone held up to a piece of art, which, using sort of common AR marker recognition, was trained to recognize objects in their design collection and initiate this sort of recognition and description of the piece itself.

Another project, as I mentioned, was the wayfinding with beacons. And the students actually put together a functioning prototype of this, that the museum was very interested in. And kept working with them, with the students. Actually hired them after the class.

Just gonna take a sip. And then, again, as I mentioned, the group pored over ADA requirements and checked the physical parameters for the design staff. And finally, the students audited the website. We used automated tools, VoiceOver, JAWS, and native screen reader user feedback to develop a series of redesigns for the whole website, as well as a sort of user-informed new accessibility web page that had all the information about the accessibility features at the museum.

And on this slide, I have an image of some of the errors that were outlined on the website. Primarily the website included their entire collection, design collection, online, without any sort of alternative text description for the pieces and images on the website. So that was a huge issue. And then finally I'm gonna talk about the coding accessibility project, which is the hugest project, and has taken a really long time to sort of develop, and has many different facet.

And it actually began as a co-design project that I worked on with Chancey Fleet, over at the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library. I wanted to do this project with her, because every year she has to plan a banquet for her job, and at the time had no way to sort of diagram spatially the seating arrangements and save and share those plans with anybody digitally. So she and I started working on a touch screen sort of web-based application that would allow her to move...

It was sonified, so if you had a table, you could move the tables around. If they would overlap, it would make a sound until you move them away from each other. And you could add labels for who was sitting there. But when it came time for Chancey to roll up her sleeves and do some of the web development work, we found that a lot of the tutorials and resources that are online that people use to teach themselves how to code quite often are really lacking in terms of accessibility support.

So this project was born out of this sort of desire to learn web development, and finding that there's not a lot of stuff out there. So this gave way to the p5 Access Project. Excuse me. And on this slide is an image of Lauren McCarthy, who is the creator of p5, which is...

Do people know the Processing programming language? It's a visually oriented programming language that a lot of people who are beginners to coding use to learn how to code. And it's also a programming language that's used by a lot of creative technologists, artists, in their work. And we wanted to make it more accessible.

And I know that sounds kind of wild. And we met some pushback from the Processing Foundation. They were like... Why do you want to make this visually oriented programming language accessible to screen reader users?

And we were like... Well, because we want to. And Chancey wants to, so why the heck not? But in addition to that, in addition to the demand from Chancey and other people, p5 and Processing is pretty widespread.

It's used everywhere. It's used to make data visualizations, games, websites, and a whole host of interactives that combine audio and visual outputs. And the Processing Foundation has put a lot of work -- it's this big Open Source community, and they put a lot of work into developing their resources. Their coding pedagogy.

And it's really, as I mentioned, really widely taught. So yeah. We kind of pushed forward. And fortunately, because the Processing Foundation's mission, core mission, is to promote software literacy, and this is a quote from their website -- and I have on the screen a screen cap from their website -- is to promote software literacy and empower people of all interests and backgrounds to learn how to program and make creative work with code.

So they gave us money. And resources. And access to their Open Source community, their lead developers, and sort of decided to work with us, and we have been doing this work now for a couple of years. And in order to do this work, we enlisted the help of three fabulous programmers that are also blind and experts in human-computer interaction, accessibility, and those experts are Josh Miele, who is the associate director of technology, research, and development at the Smith-Kettlewell Rehab Engineering Center on Low Vision and Blindness, Sina Bahram, who was a doctoral student at the Discovery Lab, at North Carolina State University, and is also an entrepreneur, an educator, and all-around super generous guy.

And also, third on our advisory committee was Austin Serafin, who is an accessibility consultant and programmer for decades. So these guys really helped me get my head around: How do people that are blind program? How do people learn how it program? What editors do they use?

What efforts have come before, in terms of making programming and coding more accessible? What are some of the pitfalls of previous attempts, and where could we kind of go forward from what's been done? And we spoke pretty regularly -- I would say probably once a month, and we still talk regularly with Josh Miele and Sina Bahram, consulting on this project, that's like this slow-moving, ongoing, community-based effort. So in addition to this sort of...

Laying the groundwork, doing the initial research with an expert panel, we also wanted to start speaking with end users, as soon as possible. So that means going to screen reader users that had some interest in learning how to program, and holding workshops. So we held about 7 of these workshops. 7 workshops now.

In which we would teach, like, programming language principles and web development, for about two hours. And then at the end, tack on, like, a user testing, focus group-style round table, to get some feedback on some of the prototypes and on some of the work that we were doing, including getting feedback on the workshop that we had just taught. So out of these workshops came the invention of my colleague, my co-teacher for the workshop.

Called pode. Which is this GitHub-hosted web development platform where users -- it's fully accessible. Users can go in and edit this HTML shell, and when they're ready to save changes, they can go to their GitHub-hosted web page. It takes away from a lot of the setup and worrying about how to host their web page.

So if you're interested, this is still live at pode.herokuapp.com. Which is an interesting thing that came out of these workshops. We also put out -- and are still working on the accessibility of p5's web editor, which is the development environment for Processing's web JavaScript library. And we also have made a sort of standalone library that you can install and use.

And what these accessibility... What the accessibility support does is translates the sort of visual information that's outputted by p5, so the visualizations, into plain text descriptions of some of these objects that are on the canvas, for static canvases or outputs, and then where there are animations, we also have incorporated a tonal system, using panning left and right on the speakers, as well as frequency changes, to indicate movement or objects that are in the upper or lower parts of the canvas.

So I have really low quality videos that have examples of what it sounds like for the screen reader, reading aloud the text description of three objects on the canvas. And I'll play those now. It might be really hard to hear, but... Anybody that's super interested beyond this, I can share the documentation for this work.

Sketch button. Enter text dash output region. Heading level to output. Text output summary main region.

Grey left paren 220 million, 220,000, canvases 400x400 of area 160000 contains three objects. One red, one triangle.

Okay. So it's listing off the pixel dimensions of the canvas. The fact that it has a grey background. There are three objects in it.

And what they are. And you can bore down into more specifics about the colors of the objects, the size, the percentage of the canvas that they occupy. And these descriptions have also gone through a number of different iterations to make them more human-understandable. And pare them down.

Because right now it's kind of TL;DR. So for the sound output, here's a really early iteration.

Reference radiobutton checks out. Console grabbing xif enter. Web editor. p5 sketch button.

Enter. Text-output...

So Gus has pressed play, and there are objects moving from two ellipses that are moving... One is moving diagonally, from the top left to the bottom right of the canvas, and another one appeared briefly, and they have these pulsing tones, and it's really hard to hear now. But where they move from left to right, the panning audio changes in the speakers. Or headphones.

Okay. So p5 is still going. There's an Open Source community working on it. There's a team at Processing that meets once a week.

We're still developing lessons and Hello World tutorials on p5's website. Also, out of the research and user testing that we did, we created this high contrast, this WCAG-compliant editor mode. We also worked on the accessibility of p5's resources, tutorials, online, and created this color namer, which is an interesting output of the work, which allows users to enter in any hex values, or RGB values, and have the color name outputted to the screen reader, which is something that a lot of people found fun.

So that's the seven workshops, and a lot of the user research, and development work that we've been doing for a couple of years, and just recently, in January, I guess by word of mouth, we were contacted by an organization called Oysters and Pearls, which is a private organization that sponsors technology camps in the summer and winter months for about 150 Ugandan students that range in ages from 12 to 30. And the camps take place in the mid-East of Africa, in the northern part of Uganda, in a city called Gulu.

And on the screen, I have a map of the location of the work that we did. Which, again, is in the mid-East of Africa. So at this camp, there are, as I mentioned, about 150 students, 30 of which are blind. And the non-blind students enjoy tech workshops and classes around robotics, coding, 3D modeling, and up until we showed up, the blind students took part in courses and workshops in productivity software.

So Word and Excel, and Brailling. So we were actually invited in response to demand from these students that were like... We want to get more involved in tech and do the cool stuff that the other students at the camp were involved in. So on this slide, I have an image of the classroom.

Where we taught our web development workshop. Which is a long, open-air, concrete classroom, with really spotty Wi-Fi. And these two-person desks that are arranged around the center of the room. In our class, we had 13 students that are blind, or had low vision.

In the class. And they came from all over Uganda. There were two women and 11 dudes. Each had completed JAWS training and had JAWS certification, so everyone was really good with their screen readers, which was, I think, really important.

And my co-teacher and I, his name is Scott Fitzgerald, and he's another tandem professor who teaches web development there. We wanted to give the students good attention and be able to run around and troubleshoot with the students, so we split them up into two groups. We had an afternoon class of 6 students and an evening class of 7 students. Everybody had been to the camp before.

Some were year-round students of the Gulu High School, which is where the camp took place. Some were students at the local university. McKerr University. And others were teachers at the high school.

So it was a really nice mix of people. And we had this sort of initial goal of passing down the curriculum to everybody that was a teacher, to the university students, so that they could teach their classmates some of the work that we were doing, and that made for a really sort of interesting back and forth sort of discussion about how we can improve the curriculum from the beginning. So to do this work, we did a precourse meeting and interviews with the students.

On this slide, I have an image of me writing down notes while talking to two of the McKerr university students, who are describing their internet usage for me. I talked to them all about: What types of websites they go to, how often they use the internet, and what their goals for the class were. And that was really important to inform the curriculum that we developed. We also worked with the Blind Annex teachers, which is how they referred to the classrooms that had courses for the blind students, and we did a postcourse evaluation, a focus group, and an email survey, so we can keep iterating and working on the curriculum.

I want to tell you about the findings. Okay. I'll just keep going. So the way that the class was structured, it was over six days.

It was pretty short. And we started out with an overview of like: What is the web, what is the internet, we talked about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and then on the sixth day, we did a project development studio, where all the students were working on their websites, and we would go around and help them out so they could finish their work. And we had this really interesting, consistent metaphor, throughout the whole class, which seemed to really resonate with the students, which was this metaphor of: Web pages, like a human system.

Like, the HTML is like the bones. CSS is the skin. And JavaScript is the nervous system. So each class was like a mix of lectures, discussions, and then we had these applied activities at the end.

And on this slide I have an image of students, the TA, and my co-teacher Scott working into the night, at the desks in the classroom. And we found that the students were just really, really motivated, and would come away from the class and work around the whole night and come back with new websites. It was really awesome. And they did really great work, while we were there.

Some of the tools that we used for the curriculum -- we recycled the p5 color namer. And on this slide, I have an image, a screen capture, of the RGB color generator. And we also, in order to communicate ideas of styling in CSS, and actually, with training from the tactile graphics workshop at the Braille and Talking Book Library, we developed these sort of... How to describe this?

So the image on the left is of the Google homepage, with styling. So all of the elements are sort of centered in the middle of the screen. And it's all in Braille and sort of raised outlines of where the text input field is, and where the buttons are. And then the image on the right is the Google homepage without any styling.

All of the elements are sort of butted up against the left side of the screen. And this is an important... And I think most of the students found this really helpful to communicate ideas of alignment in CSS, if that makes sense. We also made board games with the students and teachers.

They had a Braille embosser. They had a glue gun. And we made board games that had little HTML quiz cards and stuff like that. And used a Braille dice.

And then towards the end, as I mentioned, we had a focus group, and got huge insights into how we can improve the course that we developed. First of all, the time was way too short. The students really, really wanted more time to sort of dive more deeply into the different concepts in web development and programming in general. And they also obviously...

We didn't think of this, and we totally should have... But told us that they would like to learn more about design systems. So that's something that we're kind of developing further, as we're reiterating or working on this stuff again. And then also they wanted...

The students responded that they wanted a greater introduction to accessibility-related concepts and potentially jobs. Which I think is obviously another thing that we should have introduced a little bit more thoroughly, but will for the next time. So since the course ended, students have started a WhatsApp group, and they meet every week at McKerr University, for the students that attend the school. So I'm on the WhatsApp group, and answering questions.

But the students are super self-sufficient and kind of taking it and running with it on their own. And are gonna be teaching a section of it in their summer camp in August, which is awesome. And I'm hoping to return in January to work with them, to sort of do a next level version of it. So yeah.

That's that project! It was really awesome. Continues to be awesome. And is kind of like...

I think gonna become my dissertation work for my PhD that I'm working on right now. And that's it! How far have I gotten? I was talking so fast, and it's already 7:50.

I have on this slide an image of all of the partners that we worked with over the last three years. As I mentioned, sort of higher ed, we don't have CUNY on here. We don't have higher ed on here. But cultural institutions, we have the Smithsonian, the New York Public Library, obviously, MOPD, Charter, ADAPT Community Network, p5, and we just got a TEACH access faculty grant, so I'll be working on curriculum for the engineering school's web classes, to sort of inject some accessibility best practices into those courses, and also working with the Google Creative Lab on a series of experiments that are accessible creativity tools, like drawing and music-making tools.

It has been very fun. If you guys are interested in learning more or even collaborating with your businesses, or organizations, whatever, please feel free to reach out. We're very transdisciplinary. Or open to collaboration.

Cool! That's it. Thank you! Whew!

(applause) Any questions? Anybody? Thomas? This one.

Test. It's working.

You mentioned earlier, with your project with the Uganda kids, that they wanted to learn more about design systems. Could you elaborate on that?

Mm-hm. So I think... Yeah. So teaching the students -- and this varied, depending on whether or not the students had been born blind or had lost their sight.

Didn't really get much value out of the color namer tool if they had not seen colors before. So as an example, learning about complementary colors and design systems -- like grid systems -- is a more structured, logical approach to visual design that makes sense, given some of the audience. If that makes sense. Yeah.

The slide you had with the Braille outline of the Google homepage... So what's kind of rendered on the two sides?

So the content is the exact same. So it's whatever appears on the Google homepage. There's like the login button, there's like the different links that are along the top. And I don't read Braille, so I can't tell you live.

But it's everything that's along the sort of top of the thing. And then Google is rendered in Braille, in the image on the left, in the center of the screen, above the search field. Which has contained within it an icon of the mic. And then below it are the search button and the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

Is this something you could run on other sites? Or is it custom?

Custom. Handmade. But what's wonderful about the resources they have at the Braille and Talking Book Library is they have this program called Tactile View, which is open to the public, and you can put any image and text into the program, and it will spit it out with the Braille embosser, in Braille. Which is a super awesome thing that everybody should go now and play around with.

Yeah.

Cool, thank you.

Hi. I'm Christopher. This is really wonderful. And I'm kind of curious about where you see this -- especially the Ability Lab scaling.

And I'm thinking especially like... Something I've thought for a while and some of the work I've done has been around this idea that people with disabilities are sort of natural hackers, so all the technology that we see around us, we sort of adapt on our own. And I'm curious if you -- how you sort of take this outside of your controlled settings and start doing hackathons and start crowd sourcing from the community and how you sort of scale that to broaden your impact, and what your plans and thoughts are there.

Yeah. So... How do I say this? So I would love to see more of that type of stuff.

And I think the coding accessibility project is this initiative that I would love to have out of my hands and in the hands of screen reader users that are interested in learning how to code. And I think that's the idea with the students at Oysters and Pearls, that they would take this curriculum and develop it further and make it their own and be hackers on the web. And I think that there's an attitude -- especially within the occupational therapy department -- that OTs are kind of like hackers.

Or a lot of them are too. They're like MacGyver, making splints out of funny stuff. So there is that spirit. But there is not yet like a co-design hackathon that we've done.

And I think back, after the last four years, and how I've kind of learned from everybody around me, every person that I've worked with, with... I don't want to put it down. But we did a hackathon, where we had exemplars, or people with disabilities, that we were designing for, or the participants in this hackathon were designing for, and I would love to scrap that old model and have it actually be like...

The end users are the designers, and there's no sort of line or distinction between the hackers and the exemplars or the people to be designed for. So I think that we're... This kind of transdisciplinary, inclusive thinking is kind of newer, and we're sort of sitting with it, and we're definitely thinking about it, as we go forward, and plan new events, and courses. Does that answer the question okay?

Okay.

So you mentioned Teach Access, and basically getting some things into curriculums, so that people will develop things more with accessibility in mind. I'm curious -- how much are you able to get the stuff that you were doing, describing having people with vision impairments and blind -- learning to code themselves... How much were you able to get that kind of material into just mainstream universities? So that mainstream universities can teach people with disabilities how to code just as well?

Yeah. So that's something that we would like to incorporate in the curriculum. That not only are sort of end products or user-facing products accessible, that people are working on, but authoring tools as well. And that's a huge part of what we want to talk about in the curriculum that we're working on with Teach Access.

And I'm also working with ITP to sort of help make their curriculum more accessible. Because there have been a couple cases where students come in, and they're not necessarily given all the tools that students that are in the program more generally are, and so we're working on it. Yeah. If that makes sense.

Yes, thank you.

Hi. I'm just wondering if Cooper-Hewitt has seen an uptick in their revenue since you've done this design initiative. And whether there are any dedicated programs to continue to grow the disability market. Because it's such a massive emerging market.

So with the Cooper-Hewitt specifically, I'm not continuing to work with them, and I don't have any insights into how they're doing, financially. But I do know that they just had... I think in part due to some of the work that we did with them... The access design exhibition, and now have a whole host of programming that's available to try to bring more accessibility to their exhibitions.

So I know that they're keeping up with the work. Because they have to. And I think they're also, within the museum, fairly passionate and interested in accessibility. Yeah.

Hi. This is really a comment and a thank you to you. I was at Cooper-Hewitt, right after you were there, and so part of my work on the Digital Media Team was implementing some of your recommendations. So I'm not there anymore.

So I don't know if they're continuing that.

Oh, cool! Oh, no.

Yeah. It was really awesome to have all of those thoughts and really helped us make some decisions.

Cool. Yeah. The students and the collaborators that we had -- I mean, it was a huge effort. So I'm glad that it was helpful.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Any other questions? Joly?

I mentioned that I'm with the Internet Society. And our Kenya Chapter is doing an Accessibility Conference in August. And I'll put you in touch with them, and I'm sure they'll be very interested in your work.

Sure, yeah. Thank you.

Let me see. I'm trying to frame my question a little bit better than normal. I have a friend that works at NASA, and they have an internal joke about... Needing another seven acronyms when they're talking about solutions.

And so my question is: How do you combat all the sort of new language and shorthand that's being developed in these projects?

The new language. So in terms of, like, when people from a bunch of different fields with a bunch of different skills get together, how do they talk to each other about what they do? It's really challenging, and varies with every project. Sometimes we make up new words.

Like... The spinning doodad. And that'll be... It's complicated, and it changes with every project.

But there's a piece of it that's like... Explaining why your field refers to something with the terminology they do. And then if that doesn't sink in, kind of coming up with new ways to describe it. If that makes sense.

But it is a really challenging piece, because oftentimes, at first, when these groups get together, we're all kind of speaking foreign languages, and it takes a lot to better understand what we're all talking about. Is that the question that you had?

Is there a library you're developing of terms or something like that?

No, but that's a really interesting idea.

An archive or resource that says this is what these words are. Sort of keep it evolving. Like a thesaurus or something.

No, I hadn't thought of that, but it's something to consider, going forward.

I realized that I had a follow-up question on something totally unrelated to that. So from the translation of the visuals on the screen into sound, how complicated did that get? Because I know Processing can do a lot of things. So you can do particle fields, and you can do gradients, and you can do all kinds of facial mapping, and integration with sound.

So into how much detail did you get with that?

Where does it break? It breaks pretty easily right now. But we worked with Josh Miele, who also has a PhD in psychoacoustics. So he really helped us develop this sort of common auditory diagram prototype, that we have working now.

Part of the work that I'm doing with the Google Creative Lab I'm hoping will sort of translate and sort of cross pollinate with the p5 folks to sort of incorporate... What happens when there's particle physics going on, and when there are 100 different moving objects on the screen. Right now, it doesn't work. But it works for simple sketches.

Yeah. But that's part of the work that is ongoing. Yeah.

Thank you. Here comes the mic.

So I consider myself a techie, in the sense that I build websites for people. Like, personal websites. But one of the things that I've been doing lately is that... So I have a hearing aid, and I've just been thinking: How can I connect my hearing aid to the AirPods from the Apple products?

And I took some silicone and I started playing around with it, and it came out wonderful. And I made an ear mold that connected the AirPod to my hearing aid. And I was like... Oh my God, this could totally be a career.

And I found out about you and the work that you're doing, and hearing about all the amazing things that you're doing, I'm like... There are a million and one ideas that I have for ways that I could use technology to make my hearing aid more adaptable and accessible. So my question is: Now that I have all of these great ideas, and this is the type of work that you're doing, how would I get started?

Hm. So we could talk about that. I mean, afterwards. We definitely...

So we're teaching the developing assistive tech class in the fall. And it might be a good way, if you have a design idea or something that you want people that have OT expertise, design expertise, and engineering expertise to kind of work with you to build out a little bit more... You could come and work as part of the class, to sort of see your idea through. And then that also might give you some insights into what those fields are like, if you're interested in studying design or studying engineering.

But yeah. Let's talk. I'm more than happy to talk through how we can get you realizing this thing even further. It sounds cool!

Awesome.

Yeah.

All right. Last call, as I make my way up to the front. Round the corner, that I couldn't see? All right.

Well, thank you so much. That was awesome. Thank you for taking us through that. (applause)