Digital Design and Accessibility
Article 19 dives into accessible digital design and how to embrace it.
Joined by Tamman designers, Tom Hall and Sam Waterman, we explore the intersection of digital design and accessibility! Diving deep into Tamman’s approach and how our team meets accessibility guidelines in both, professional designs and their personal projects.
This episode is part of a three-part series focused on marketing and digital design with accessibility in mind. Check out the other episodes:
- Article 19’s episode on Using Emojis with Accessibility in Mind
- Article 19’s episode on Marketing with an Accessibility Mindset
Listen to more Article 19 Podcast Episodes
Full Transcript
Produced Introduction with music bed.
Expression is one of the most powerful tools we have. A voice, a pen, a keyboard. “The real change which must give to people throughout the world their human rights must come about in the hearts of people. We must want our fellow human beings to have rights and freedoms which give them dignity.” Article 19 is the voice in the room.
Harper:
Welcome to Article 19. This is a podcast rooted in the firm belief that access to information is a human right. Here we offer conversations and interviews to increase awareness, empathy, and expertise around the intersection of technology and inclusivity. We are here to discover, grow, and share some laughs together. My name is Harper Yatvin, Marketing Specialist and Associate Podcast Producer at Tamman, and I’m the host for our conversation today. We want to discuss how Tamman’s designers approach the relationship between art and accessibility. This includes how our team meets accessibility guidelines in professional designs and in their own personal projects. First, let’s dive into some context. One of the problems we often hear with designing for accessibility is that sometimes we may have to sacrifice aesthetics and pushing design boundaries to maximize accessibility and inclusivity. This may leave you wondering if your website basically has to look like Craigslist to maximize the user experience. No offense, Craigslist. You’re great. Designers at Tamman know that this isn’t true. They understand how to make both engaging and accessible digital assets, websites, and more. Today I am joined by three skilled professionals who understand that design and accessibility don’t have to be locked in a struggle of limitations. In fact, they actually complement each other. I am joined by Sam Waterman, Digital Designer, Tom Hall, Digital Designer, and Sloan Miller, our VP of Partnership Operations. Today we’ll discuss core principles of accessible digital design, ranging from what to do, to how to do it. Now, let’s get rolling. Tom, would you like to lead us off introducing yourself, as well as what you do at Tamman, and a little bit about your artistic journey and background?
Tom:
Hi, I’m Tom Hall, and I’m a Motion Graphics Designer and Art Director with Tamman. I’ve had a long career of many types of design and illustration, currently focused on video and motion graphics with 3D animation and voiceover tracks, that sort of thing. That’s typically what I do. That’s about it for me.
Harper:
Sam?
Sam:
I’m Sam Waterman. I am an Art Director for Tamman and Bank of America. I am mostly in the web social space. I also like a lot of photography things in my personal time. And crafting pretty much anything, any kind of art medium that you can throw at me. That’s pretty much it for me.
Harper:
Very nice. And Sam, you’re well known at Tamman as being head of the crafting corner. You’ve definitely got that section locked down.
Sam:
[laughter]Thank you.
Harper:
Welcome. And Sloan?
Sloan:
I’m Sloan Miller, the VP of Partnership Operations here at Tamman. My creative journey is a little bit different than our two other guests. I’ve worked in the creative and technology industry for my 20-plus-year career, but more on the operations, project management, business development, client support side, so I say I’m in the creative industry but not the most creative of people. But I have practiced and do practice photography. The other skills of creating, whether it’s crafting, painting, or digital design, elude me.
Harper:
So, to dive into it a little bit, this is a question for Tom and Sam to start, and then Sloan, bring you in afterwards. What is user experience to you?
Sam:
What user experience means to me is, first of all, you want something that everyone can use, so the aesthetic is great, and as a designer that’s my favorite part. But a lot of it comes from the workflow and the content first, and then you kind of have to make the design something that everyone can use. So, if you’re doing color correcting and making sure that you have the right contrast on the page, that’s a huge thing for user experience, which is a big part of what I run into daily.
Harper:
Interesting. I definitely want to get into more about making something work for all types of users, but first, Tom, any thoughts on this? Do you have similar thoughts? How do you feel about it?
Tom:
From a professional standpoint, they usually classify user experience as anything that isn’t user interface design, so it’s more of a high-level look at web experience or virtual reality experience, whatever you’re designing. It’s more of the overall roadmap of how the user flows through your project. We sort of look at user interface as more the visual nuts and bolts of how things are put together, and user experience is more of a, well, it’s the experience. It’s how you flow through the journey of the project itself; the roadmap. That’s kind of how I look at it.
Harper:
We’ve all used different apps that have different levels of user experience in everything, whether it’s music app or finding a restaurant on Google; anything. At what point do you see accessibility being considered in the process of user experience?
Tom:
I think accessibility kind of overlaps with just good, readable, understandable design. You don’t necessarily have to have any kind of disability to appreciate a design that communicates clearly, has good contrast, has large enough fonts, and things like that. So it’s a matter of considering all those things, but I think there’s a good overlap between what is considered sensible design and what is considered accessible design.
Harper:
Sloan, I wanna bring you in on this topic, because I feel like in business there’s often a bridge that is not always crossed between acceptable design and accessible design. What is kind of the marker for making those overlap, and how does someone go from one side of that bridge to the other?
Sloan:
Great question. So, I’ll tie it to user experience as well, right? In my perspective, in my understanding and approach, like, user experience is trying to craft that entire audio, visual, and physical experience that an individual is having when they interface with either your user interface, your event, your artwork, whatever it is. Really having that emotional sense of, you know, bringing someone in. And when it comes to balancing accessibility and design, it’s always important to remember that art and design is opinionated, right? The artist, the designer, is trying to do something intentional, right? They’ve set out on that path, and that they’re allowed to have that opinion. I think it’s adjusting that opinion to meet the needs of a wider audience, is where the accessibility factor comes into it. And again, accessibility is essential for some, but it does make everyone’s experience a little bit better if you consider what the accessibility use cases are.
Harper:
It absolutely does. Real quick, do you have a specific use case off the top of your head that you wanna leave us with from your business experience?
Sloan:
I think generally speaking, when we’re talking about audio captions on videos, right, or audio descriptions. Right, super important medium. Video has become one of the primary storytelling mechanisms, and you can’t always expect the audience member or the person viewing the video to have their sound on, right? A lot of social media platforms now use captions or descriptions on top of images, on top of video, so that adjustment, right? Meeting people where they are, understanding that video is probably the medium of choice for a lot of people, but that they won’t always be listening to the video with the sound on, I think that’s an accessible consideration when designing or applying your opinionated, creative focus to a message or a story you’re trying to tell.
Harper:
I agree with that, but I am not the designers in the room. Sam and Tom, how do you two feel about this, about definitely inputting your opinion in any design? Do you feel that it plays a big role in how you guys balance the aesthetic appeal and the requirements of digital accessibility in a design?
Sam:
I think a lot of it has to do with the communication and who your content provider is. With a lot of the accessibility stuff, there is some guidelines that you will have to follow for whatever branding or whatever that kind of stuff that you’re dealing with, but I think that where my opinion will come in is colors and icons and that kind of stuff, and usually that’s a pretty big role, especially if the content provided was a huge three paragraph thing, and you need to cut it down to a single paragraph just so that it’s easier to read, and it’s more legible, the typography and font choices and stuff.
Harper:
Could you dive in a little deeper on once you get the design assignment, how do you balance needing to make something accessible while wanting to make it as aesthetically incredible as possible?
Sam:
So, when I get a project that has accessibility in mind, I actually work backwards, I’ve noticed. I will lay out all the content, and then I’ll go back in and design it. Say it’s being saved out to a PDF and you want it to read correctly and in order. You wanna make sure you have the headers, the subheaders, bullets—the whole thing can’t be like that, so just laying out the content and then going back and kind of massaging it as more of a design secondary, instead of going design first, that’s just my personal way of handling it. Tom, I don’t know if you do something similar or if your process is a little different.
Tom:
I’ll speak to the video aspect of things since that’s what I’ve been focused on for the last few years. When we tackle video projects, I’d say something that’s a new consideration that maybe wasn’t there, you know, 10 years ago, is allowing for the lower third of the screen to be reserved for closed captioning. And so we sort of put a lot of conscious thought into that now, keeping the visual elements up in the upper two-thirds of the screen so that they won’t interfere with the closed captioning. Also, as we’re recording voice-over for the project, you know, keeping the background music very low so it doesn’t interfere with the audibility of the voice-over track. Just keeping all communications as clear as they can be, which is really, it’s good design practice all around anyway. It’s just being conscious of it, you’re trying to be a better communicator for the entire audience, instead of just part of the audience. So I would say that’s one of the big sort of changes in being aware of accessibility for me. One of the challenges has been maybe knowing that there’s going to be closed captioning across the bottom of the screen. You’re more aware of what your on-screen text is saying, and how that might conflict with the transcript of the audio that’s being used for the closed captioning. So I’m a big fan of having the on-screen text match exactly the audio track, the voice-over transcript so that they’re reinforcing; everybody’s saying the same thing at the same time. The voice-over saying the same thing as the on-screen text is saying the same thing as the closed captioning, if that is turned on. So it’s all just reinforcing the same message as you go through. I’d say that’s been one of the bigger challenges/focus of what I do.
Sloan:
I think that’s a great point. I think at its core, right, design is a communication medium, right? It’s just another approach, another way to communicate the story or the point that you’re trying to make. So that remembering the storytelling aspect, remembering how to make accommodations for those viewing the medium, whether it’s a piece of art in an art gallery, a digital design, a postcard, or a video, is an important aspect of design, and considering accessibility when designing.
Harper:
You all make some excellent points. I absolutely agree that design is about communicating what we want people to understand, and that visual design is about communicating that without any words, and within as little time as possible, so that is all very key, key pieces. Just to cover real quick—Tom, you dived into it; if you have any more, as well as Sam—what are some design principles that you think of when designing something, when you get to the design phase? Especially when coming at it from an accessibility requirement and accessibility forward angle.
Tom:
I think we both, we’re used to dealing in an environment that’s a fairly corporate, restricted environment in terms of what color palettes, what fonts, things like that. We’re working within a style guide that’s already been chosen for us. So some of the choices we get to make are live video and, you know, images, illustrations, things like that, and we have to make sure we get enough legibility and contrast, and just readability in everything that we use, so that there’s no obscurity to any of it. And I think that, again, goes along with, you know, that’s clear communications, and it works for everyone. It works for the entire audience. So I know my son watches—you know, he’s obviously much younger than me, and watches—pretty much every movie he watches. He keeps the closed captioning on. And I know a lot of people from his generation are doing the same. So it’s kind of become a thing where that’s part of the communication now, you know, for everyone, not just from an accessibility standpoint. So I think considering these things is just sort of a way of moving forward into the future.
Harper:
I agree, and I can tell from my personal experience, captions are always on. It’s just way better, it’s way easier, just a fun little homework assignment for everyone, if you’re feeling up to it. If you’ve ever seen Shawshank Redemption, watch it again with the subtitles on; it totally changes some of the scenes. My goodness. So, diving back in, Tom, when you had talked about having some of those—some things like the color palettes, and some pieces of your designs are already in place, that is one aspect that is required. And when we’re creating accessible designs, there are elements of it that are required. How do you take these requirements and still create something visually striking and appealing? And how do you develop a solution that is—it works on all levels, both in communication and in simply the style points factor?
Tom:
I don’t know if I have any secret formula for that, other than what is the standard sort of design practices that everyone goes to. And I don’t know that we always achieve, like, excellence in design, but we try. You know, it’s like, that’s kind of the struggle of all of it, is to make something that looks good and still communicates well. We’re always under many different kinds of limitations when doing corporate work. So it’s not just a free-for-all, and you don’t get to do just anything that pops into your head. You know that’s not gonna make it past any kind of review. So you do what you know is gonna make it to the finish line, and you try to make it as good of a communication and as interesting as it can be within the constraints that you have to work with, so.
Harper:
Interesting. Sloan, I’ll bring you in on this, coming from a large part of the corporate side. Any perspective on this?
Sloan:
Again, right, we talked about design being communication, and I think when we talk about pushing those boundaries, right? That’s really where the balance or the main focus of you know working within accessible design limitations, working with your creative vision, and what you wanna communicate on the perceived audience side comes into play, right? So it is about being simple, succinct, meaningful, and intentional. And again, in a corporate environment where there’s brand standards and a palette that exists, you can still push the design limits, you can still push the communication limits in certain areas. Not by adding other colors. Not by deviating from the brand guideline or style palette. But in use of white space, in use of icons, in use of background images, right? There are other design elements, design features, beyond the color palette and the brand standards of the organization you’re working with. And I think you know we’ve experienced this a lot at Tamman, is working with organizations whose core brand colors are not really as accessible as possible, right? Even our own colors, right? Tamman, for years, had a very bright orange in our color palette. And over the last couple years as we’ve delved into the accessibility side of things, we’ve recognized that working with colors like red and orange and some shades of green are very, very difficult on the accessibility side. So we’ve darkened up the orange, we’ve moved the orange to more of a secondary or tertiary color that is an accent rather than a primary feature. Just because accessibility has been a main focus, and over time evolving a brand and evolving our brand standards and brand guides, have had to adjust to our desire to be inclusive for all.
Harper:
I think that is an excellent point, Sloan, and really speaks to just how much goes into making something accessible for everybody. And how important it is. Now, Sam, something that I wanted to ask was, we heard quite a bit about Tom’s strategy for making his design successful. And I want to know, how can accessibility influence and even improve your aesthetic choices for a design and, if so, how?
Sam:
So, when I started at Tamman, I was familiar with accessibility. But here at Tamman, everyone is just a champion for it. Just meeting Liza made me better at accessibility. Because sometimes when you have an e-commerce background like me, you’re kind of pushed to the sales side of things, so people just wanna get things out. But here you get to take a little bit more time. So I think just the design process for me has changed with a lot of the typography and color choices that I make now, after learning more about accessibility. Just one example that comes to mind is when you have a capital O and a zero, having the zero with a strike-through is so much better when there’s a reader, or just at a glance, so you know immediately that was meant to be a zero or an O. So I think that’s kind of how I’ve gotten better, just specifically in that space.
Sloan:
And do we wanna jump into a typography conversation, one of my favorite aspects of design?
Sam:
[laughter] Oh, we can.
Sloan:
Let’s do it.
Sam:
Well, do you wanna start off with your favorites, and then Tom and I will weigh in?
Sloan:
I can talk a little bit about the process. Like, over the years, a decade ago, I was not a typography-focused individual, right? If it was legible, if it was readable, it was great. And I think over the last couple of years, working with some talented designers who are, you know, typography nerds, for lack of a better word. Or very excited and knowledgeable at typography, you start to understand some of the core differences and some of the core structures, and as you mentioned, you know the difference between a letter O and a capital letter O and a zero or, you know, an L and an I. These are some of the more accessible aspects of font that come into play. And, you know, having been involved in dozens of website redesign projects over my career, considering typography is incredibly important, especially of how it interacts on a daily basis with how people use. So specifically for Tamman, we have used Verdana as our core although, you know, many people date Verdana back to, like, a 1990s, late ‘90s, pre-tech boom, and bust font, it was rated as one of the most accessible fonts out there on a number of different categories. Personally, right, the Sans Serif is a preference of mine. Over and over, I think it’s more legible, I think it’s more modern, less traditional. All caps has been a huge issue in the past. Legibility for all caps when it comes to people who are dyslexic, whether it’s kerning or character spacing or line spacing, you need to take those into consideration as well. In a traditional sense, right, I have a number of typewriters, so I do love physically typing out on a typewriter in that you know Courier New or that New Times Roman kind of approach. But that is more of a historic throwback and a personal—like when you get a note in the mail from me, that feels more authentic to who I am, rather than on the digital side of things.
Sam:
OK, Sloan, you can send a letter to all of us, if you’d like. But I agree with you, the letting and the kerning are a huge thing, because if you’re running letters together, I mean, your brain might wanna read it that way, but it doesn’t always, especially with dyslexia. Even just the italics and the underlining; if it’s too close, it makes it a whole block of words. So I’ve seen a lot of Helvetica or Verdana, Arial, Futura, you know, the Sans Serifs. But I really think that in recent times, just looking across the internet at different sites, that people are starting to actually get it, that you need to read things. It doesn’t need to be in red and all caps. Your sale is a sale whether or not you have capital S-A-L-E at the top.
Harper:
I absolutely agree. There is so much more that goes into a font than just, oh, can I read it? Or, oh, it’s not Jokerman, it’s fine. There are a lot of small pieces and nuances that go into it, and Sloan, like you had mentioned, typography nerds, typography enthusiasts, they know a lot for a reason, because it’s a whole world, and web design is—there’s a saying of, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” This is a totally different take on that. It’s not what it reads, it’s how it’s being read. You know, whether or not someone can read it if they’re a person with low vision, anything of that sort of nature, is really important.
Tom:
I think typography has always been contrast between font styles, between sizes, between colors in every way, and I think you have to sort of tone that down in order to make things read better. Especially on the internet. I think you always have to consider sort of a minimum-size font that’s usable for web design. You know, and I’m not sure what that is; it depends on how you’re describing the fonts in code, but that’s a consideration you always have to have. And I think also the color of the font itself, good design typically will sort of minimize the contrast between the background and the font to sort of make things softer on the eyes, so you’re not getting the harsh contrast of bright white against a really dark background, or black font against a really white background. But we sort of have to weigh those design decisions against legibility. Which almost looks better with simpler fonts and, you know, a closer ratio between the largest and the smallest font on the page. So you have to sort of tone down the extreme design decisions in order to get closer to what’s a universally legible experience.
Sloan:
I’d reiterate, you know what Tom is talking about, the design trend of lighter gray font on a white background on a lot of internet pages, is incredibly hard to read for a lot of people, right? That color contrast is very important, and that’s one of those items that you kind of have to really consider when you’re lightening up text for design purposes, like a light gray versus a medium gray versus a dark gray, the dark gray closer to black is so much easier to read, and I think it has become one of those very unfortunate trends in the last few years, that light gray font is something that designers are choosing often, and for me personally it’s very, very difficult to read.
Harper:
Yes, I think that’s an excellent point by both of you. I actually just experienced that earlier today with the dark gray on a white background.
Tom:
Yeah, I think that there’s a trend in the design field that says, basically, the more contrast and typography, you know, in terms of sizes and font styles and things like that, you sort of always pair the heavy with the light, and the dark with the light, and the different italic fonts against heavy Sans Serif, that sort of thing; you know contrast in design style, as well as the lack of contrast in colors. As Sloan was mentioning, light grays against slightly darker grays, very light gray text against a white background, or a dark color-on-color type of treatment. These are all sort of trends that are considered to be visually good design but might be incredibly hard to read. So that, and I think a minimum size for internet usage on web pages, and for phone usage, is always something you should consider. You should never have something that’s smaller than what’s easily legible, and that’s another thing that good designers tend to like to do. They like to have lots of tiny, small fonts in a light gray, on a white background, and it’s just something we should really wean ourselves off of if we want to reach the broader audience, and I think that’s a good awareness that I’ve sort of come into in the past few years, that even though these things might look good, you sort of have to just let them go. And it’s for the greater good.
Harper:
I absolutely agree. There’s something that, as you’re saying this, what I’m thinking of is, it works on paper, but in practice, it just doesn’t come off as cleanly. So jumping off of that, how can user testing and feedback help designers create more accessible and aesthetically pleasing designs? Because it’s one thing to have it on paper or on the screen, on the PDF; it’s another thing to have it be viewed or interpreted in practice.
Sam:
So, I think when it comes to user testing and feedback, I personally love that as a designer. I will give anybody my artwork and say, “Tell me what you think of this,” because art is subjective. You know, as much as you do user testing, you’ll get one major thing coming out, if it’s a red flag or if it’s something people love. But I think it could really help if you have someone who’s using a screen reader, and someone who has a hard time—they might be experiencing colorblindness. Just having different perspectives that way could really help with making these pages more accessible, so once you output your final product and you get these user responses, then you can either fix what you have out there; either way you’re gonna get better as a designer, because you hear, you know, the people that are using your site, in this instance, what they have to say, and if they would come back.
Harper:
I think that’s a great point. Sloan, how can user testing and feedback to help designers be incorporated more into accessible and quality design?
Sloan:
Let’s just talk through this question. We don’t do user feedback when it comes to a lot of business development, right? Like, it’s opinionated, we do it internally. So when it comes to creating a document or a postcard or a piece of collateral, something that we’re giving out, say, at a booth or to a potential client. The user feedback you get is more anecdotal, right? It’s more about how it’s being received by that person that you’re engaging with at that moment, or its effectiveness, right? So if you create a postcard that has a QR code on it, and people scan the QR code and visit whatever site you’re sending them to, or fill out a form or something along those lines, right? You know based on the conversions and the interactions how effective it is. But again, it’s not like you’re doing user testing. It’s not like you’re doing a variety of data-driven items. It’s, again, much more anecdotal, in someone commenting, someone taking action upon the collateral, the marketing material that you’ve provided to them.
Harper:
Interesting. That’s definitely a different perspective between before the design gets out of the gate, and when it’s out into the wild and field testing, and especially when it’s collateral that it’s printed versus something that’s digital and you can just update it, you know, within a few minutes. It definitely is important to have that feedback and understand, get the entire team on it and understand the overall perspective. So, coming back to Tom, your opinions on user feedback and testing for your designs?
Tom:
I think my outlook on that is even more grim than Sloan. We don’t get user feedback. That’s not something designers get, ever. We’re two phases removed from anyone that would actually get feedback from the user base. The only feedback we might get at all is at the end of the year if something is submitted and, say, “Hey, your project won an award” or whatever. But that’s really the only real-world feedback we get. We’re not plugged into any feedback that’s on the web end of things. It really just doesn’t exist. So when we make decisions, we’re just going by what we consider to be an industry standard, or a product standard, or a company standard. There’s no user driven information at all, so.
Harper:
Jumping to a more business side, going off of that, Sloan, coming from the business side of design, how is accessibility in design viewed from the business perspective, and how should it be viewed, in your opinion?
Sloan:
That’s a great question. So I think far too often when we get into the discussion about accessibility in design, it focuses more on what’s right and what’s wrong, and I think that’s too black and white. I think that’s too rigid of a discussion, right? If you look at a design and you say, that’s not right, it has to be changed because of accessibility, you’re limiting the revisions, the creativity, the approach of the designer. I think a better perspective when it comes to thinking about how accessibility and design work well together, it’s more about having a motto of like, how can we make it better? What can we do here to make both the legibility, the audience who is receiving it, understand the content better and the design better, right? How can we push the design limits to make the best possible version of what we’re working on? Again, getting away from the “This is right, this is wrong, this is not accessible,” the black and white side to, “How do we keep iterating to get to an element of design, a creative aspect that is both the best possible design, the best possible content, and the best possible outcome or desired outcome for the audience member?”
Harper:
I like that. It’s really a philosophy of consistent iteration and putting people first, and about what is their—as you touched on at the beginning, what is their emotional experience going to be, and what is their journey going to be when using and interacting with the design? Winding down to our last couple questions, I wanted to know, how would you describe the balance between art and accessibility in your personal artistic life? Sam and Tom, how does it work when it’s not on a business end and you have this different set of tools and abilities to work with?
Sam:
Like I mentioned earlier, I make a lot of things with my hands outside of work. So just as an example of what I’m doing currently, is I am casting pressed flowers in resin, but I don’t pour it enough that you can’t feel the texture of the flower, so I’ve been trying to kind of focus on that so that non-seeing people can actually feel what this jewelry is. So that’s been kind of my most recent accessibility venture. I’m also learning how to dry flowers with silica gel so they’re not pressed, and you can feel all of the petals. So I’ll be making wreaths out of those and, you know, it just gives it more texture. I’m really into, like, making sure that there’s different aspects of my craft; not just what you see, but what you feel. Some of this is, you know, scented; that kind of stuff. That’s how I incorporate it.
Harper:
Tom?
Tom:
I would say most of my work over the past few years has been just purely visual experiments that weren’t really telling a story. Recently I’ve started a project that is an animated series of videos that’s targeted more of, like, a toddler-age audience. And for those, I think the way I would view that in terms of accessibility is that it should be, since they’re not readers anyway [laughter], they’re not going to be reading closed captions, so it’s just to make the thing enjoyable visually. If all they could see was the visual, it would be enjoyable. And if all they could hear was the audio, it would be enjoyable. And that way, you know, if you can make each portion of the experience entertaining on its own, then that’s a win. So, you know, moving forward with that project, I think I’ll be focusing on that even more than I would have, but that would be the goal. I don’t know of any readers at two years old or five years old, even, so I don’t think I have to worry about the closed captioning portion as much. Maybe I’ll put that in just to help them learn to read or something, but that’s as far as that goes, so.
Harper:
I think that they’re a very easy audience to make happy [laughter]. You know, as long as there’s colors and sounds, it’s probably gonna be a good day for them. Sloan, you had mentioned photography at the top of this. Anything that you wanna jump in with?
Sloan:
Most of my photography is personal, things that I encounter that I want to take pictures of. I have no intention of really posting them, sharing them, those type of things. But again, I think when you’re coming at it from a perspective of what you’re trying to capture in the moment, I think that’s a little bit of an intentionality, similar along the lines of the intentionality you take when focused on accessibility. You know, what about this moment is worth capturing? What are you framing? What do you want to really, kind of, whether it’s an emotional state or a memory that you wanna trigger, what is that intention? So I think there’s, again, not quite accessibility, but definitely intentionality.
Harper:
A very important point. For our final question, we have kind of a palate cleanser. Sloan, you already know this question, but Sam and Tom, you’ll be hearing it for the first time. If you had a billboard in Times Square, and you could put any message you want on it for a day, what do you say on the billboard and why?
Sam:
Oh, I think—I don’t know if it’s cliché. I think I would put “You are important,” because people are looking up and they’re seeing ads, and they’re seeing things that, you know, they wanna see, or they can afford, or they can’t afford. But like, I feel like not everyone hears that, and they need to, especially in the state of the world now.
Harper:
I’d say that’s a pretty good one. Everyone deserves to feel that they are important and they matter, because they do. Tom?
Tom:
I’d probably say something cliché like “Clean up the ocean” or “Save the whales” or something like that [laughter]. I don’t think there’s anything you could put on a billboard that people would really pay attention to these days. People are pretty much jaded and set in their own track of thinking, and as many well-meaning messages as I could think to put on there, I don’t think it would matter much, because I don’t think people are really listening anymore, so that’s, unfortunately, my take on it.
Harper:
That’s why you’ve gotta put the message on the new project for little kids, because that way their ears are still open and their eyes are still open, and they’re able to take in that information.
Tom:
Get them when they’re still malleable and still positive.
Harper:
Still positive. Sloan, any new ones for today?
Sloan:
No, I think an adjustment of the one I made last time is probably in line, right? It’s about being kind. Recognizing that everyone else is a human being living their own lived experiences, and far too often, people don’t come at a conversation or an interaction with another human being from that kindness perspective or understanding that they are human. So be kind, be human.
Harper:
Be kind, be human. There is something I’ve been thinking of since the last time you had spoken about that. There is a term called “sonder.” And it’s a word for anyone who passes you by has just as complex and fulfilling and intentional and emotional life as you do, and I live right near a highway, and there are cars passing by, and I just think everyone that passes my by, that they’re a sonder. They have their own life, and they all deserve to be treated with kindness and like a real human being, so I think that is an excellent place to leave it. So, if you like what you heard today and want to explore more about digital accessibility, design, technology, our company culture and more, or if you’d like to schedule a time to meet with us—and you definitely do—you can find the whole Tamman team at tammaninc.com. That’s T-A-M-M-A-N-I-N-C dot com. Don’t forget to sign up with us for our newsletter, too, so you never miss an event or an insight from us. Be sure to rate our podcast five stars on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. It really helps our podcast grow and reach new audiences. Be sure to send it to someone who you think might like it, or someone who you think doesn’t know anything about accessibility, and turn them into an ally. You never know what might click with them. Also, make sure to follow us and hit that bell icon, so you never miss an episode and are subscribed. If social media is more your style, you can follow us @tammaninc on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, and share our podcast on your favorite platform. Until next time, thank you for listening and being part of Article 19. Take care.
Show Notes
- Article 19’s episode on Marketing with Accessibility
- Article 19’s episode on Using Emojis with Accessibility in Mind
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Using Emojis with Accessibility in Mind
