Article 19 – Mismatch Book Talk
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This podcast is the recording of our company book talk discussing Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes.
Mismatch is the second book we held in 2023. This conversation goes over forming a business case for inclusive design, multiple examples of billion-dollar products that began as accessible technology (such as the iPhone), common myths in inclusive design, and much more. The accessibility champions leading today’s podcast are:
Harper Yatvin, Tamman’s Marketing Specialist and Article 19 Associate Podcast Producer
Kristen Witucki, Tamman contributor, author, and teacher
Today’s internal champions are:
Full Transcript
Marty:
Well, welcome everyone. I very much appreciate folks coming and spending a little bit of their lunch with us. Unlike most meetings at Tamman, this is one where you are very welcome to turn off your videos if you like. We know folks might be eating, we know folks might be just listening in. Whatever the case is, you don’t have to have your video on. So for those of you that do already, thank you, but don’t feel compelled to leave it on, especially if you need to go and chow down on something. This is our second book talk. I was corrected by Kristen earlier, technically our third, but it’s our second one of 2023 and I am so excited that we are able to continue this now new and nascent, but growing tradition of engaging with information as a group and sharing that information. This book talk is going to be led by Kristen Witucki and Harper Yatvin. So thank you both for all of the preparation and all the planning that you put into this. Like most of our community meetings and activities, we will have a chat. I’ll be monitoring the chat. I will be making sure that anyone who’s in the waiting room gets in all that sort of administrative stuff in the background, I’ll be handling that. Finally, I do know that some folks might need to drop. You might only be able to be with us for a certain time. That is totally fine. We understand that everyone has a very busy day and if you need to take care of other things, we just appreciate the time that you’re able to spend with us. So you can feel comfortable doing all the things that we ordinarily do in a meeting. If you wanna jump into the conversation, you can raise your hand using the reactions button at the bottom of the Zoom or you can post a question to me in the chat and we will get to that as well. So with that, let me introduce our moderator for today’s book talk. Kristen Witucki, you know her, she has been a part of us and a great contributor at Tamman now for, gosh, Kristen, has it been a year?
Kristen:
Almost a year and a half.
Marty:
Almost a year. Oh my god. Almost 18 months. That’s crazy. Yeah, time is flying. Well, thank you again for stepping up. So I’m gonna let you take it away from here, everybody. Kristen Witucki.
Kristen:
Hi everyone. Thank you so, so much for joining us to talk about a book. I know how many million things you have to do, but we hope that this book talk and the book will help to get back to the work that we’re doing all the time. So the book that we are discussing today is one that Harper chose, and it’s called Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes. Just before we even get into too much of the nitty-gritty of the book, I’d like to start with a quote that follows us from kindergarten through the rest of our lives. It’s a great quote. I actually remember reading the original book as an education student and it’s kind of a provocative one to start us off. Imagine you work in an office with other people. One day you arrive at work to discover new rules in effect, maybe it’s sent to you by the CEO of the company or simply printed on a poster by the coffee machine, you can’t say you can’t play.
Kristen:
Effective immediately, if anyone wants to participate in your project, you must agree to let them join. And yes, you will still be held accountable for the success of your work. How would you react? Although the exact results might vary, there’s a good chance that most adults might mirror the reactions you’d find with a group of young children. Anger, defiance, a few tears in her book, you can’t say you can’t play. Teacher Vivian Gussin Paley recounts what happened when she proposed this rule to her kindergarten class. Before enacting the rule, she and her students speculated on what might happen. Their reactions ranged from fear to excitement, fear that their games would cease to be fun, fear that an overwhelming number of people would want to join in thus ruining the game or that unwanted people might intrude into the game. And the children who were most often excluded were excited about the protection the new rule would provide them. Paley was inspired to introduce the rule after teaching countless students. Every year, a few children in each class would be consistently excluded, sometimes to an extreme. As her former students became adults, they’d recount stories of rejection as the most difficult times in their education. She created the rule as a way to study why this happens year over year, looking for ways to disrupt the pattern. Paley writes, exclusion is written into the game of play. And play as we know will soon be the game of life. Along comes school, it’s the first real exposure to the public arena and children are required to share materials and teachers in a space that belongs to everyone. Equal participation is the cornerstone of most classrooms. This notion usually involves everything except free play, which is generally a private matter. Yet in truth, free acceptance in play, partnerships, and teams is what matters most to any child. Basically, it matters most to any person as this book basically testifies. So I’d like to start with your thoughts on that section, Harper. How would you feel if that rule came into effect at Tamman and how does the concept of accessibility fit into all this?
Harper:
Thank you Kristen. I would be very excited and kind of motivated about this new rule because to me it means people who I don’t normally work with, I could really get to know professionally and personally and we could create some very interesting work, work that normally wouldn’t occur. And to me, the way accessibility fits into this is when you have people who don’t always get to have that voice in the room.
I think it’s interesting because sometimes people may take over a meeting and say, I’m gonna raise my hand. I got it, I got it. But if you have someone who is quiet and they’re kind of put in that position of we want to hear what you have to say, you know, this is a real opportunity for you. Different ideas are likely going to come about. I feel that’s very fascinating and inspiring.
Kristen:
Yeah, I think that’s true. I understand the fear that people have even as a person who would’ve probably been excluded often because, you know, if you’re working on a project with your colleagues and you figure out who’s in the group and you kind of have that border around the group, you would imagine what they would think and thought patterns would be sort of predictable. Even if people come up with ideas that haven’t occurred, you know what to expect. So I can imagine that opening the group to whoever wanted to join the group could present some feelings of unease or insecurity.
Harper:
I feel that it could but I feel like as colleagues we would do what the kids in the kindergarten class would do, which is they would adjust their games and we would adjust what we do as colleagues. You know, if the work would still get done, it would just get done in a different way with a different system and people who were normally excluded, suddenly they could have a key role and their ideas could come to the surface and it could really shift how we write design, engineer develop. A lot more things can happen when new ideas are included.
Kristen:
So who is Kat Holmes and why did she write this book and how did it resonate with you?
Harper:
Kat Holmes is a really smart cookie, very accomplished. She was the principal director for inclusive design at Microsoft for four years and she led the company’s executive program for inclusive product innovation and that was working on inclusive hardware, software had a hand in video game controller design. She was an adjunct professor at the University of Washington near Seattle and she met some incredible people there that we may get to later on. And she’s currently the chief design officer and executive vice president at Salesforce. And she wrote this book to guide people’s decision-making for people who have authority and decision-making ability towards inclusion to really open their eyes to how to shift inclusion towards a business case and really make more inclusive designs, products, and circumstances for people who often are excluded. And it resonated with me because as someone who is newer to the field of accessibility, I really wanted to know what can I do to better understand that dynamic and how I can assist in as Game of Thrones, the nearest tar says break the wheel and then build something better. How can we break the wheel of exclusion and build something much more inclusive?
Kristen:
Yeah, like how can inclusion be a part of the fabric and that like tacked on? Yeah, I get that. Before we go any further, could anyone who feels comfortable just right in the chat if you got a chance to read the book, how far you are into it? I’ll to just kind of inform where we go from here.
Harper:
So we’ve got a couple people here who are partway through, halfway through more. So that’ll inform where we go from here. Some beginners, some people who got an insight to what we’re gonna talk about today.
Kristen:
So for those who just started and want a spoiler Harper, what is a mismatch?
Harper:
So a mismatch has a couple of definitions but it really comes down to it’s when something that is in society does not mesh with the abilities of someone who is using that piece of technology or item in society. And that really comes down to it’s a barrier to interacting with the world around us. And it’s often a byproduct of how our world is designed and these are really the building blocks of exclusion. They are accessible to some people but not all people. And an example of this can be a restaurant menu that is written in a language you don’t understand, which can be if you’re traveling abroad or if you just go somewhere and let’s say you’re traveling to a McDonald’s in Japan, it’s very hard to understand or a person who is blind is trying to buy a house and the alt text on the photos for the website for looking at houses and checking them out. It’s very generic and it’s very non-descriptive. And so you essentially don’t know what you are going to be getting. And a really common one is if you’re a person in a wheelchair and you get into an elevator and the elevator buttons are too high and you physically are unable or it’s very difficult to push that button to the penthouse that you so rightfully purchased for your awesome weekend.
Kristen:
No, that’s true. And actually, just a fun little side note is that when the buttons are actually where they’re supposed to be, toddlers can also set up off the elevator alarms, which is always fun for parents to explain. But that being said, I think sometimes that’s literally a reason that there are people who will always come back to you and say, oh well, I don’t wanna change this design because it would cause this problem. And so one mistake that we make is if it doesn’t work for everyone or we can think of a scenario why it doesn’t work, then we shouldn’t do it. So what would you say to people who are thinking this way?
Harper:
Actually Kristen, could you please repeat your question?
Kristen:
So sometimes people think of a reason not to do a design that would make a lot of sense. So say you wanted to lower the buttons and I said, well that’s great for those people but it’s not great for these people. And so then no progress is being made because you’re not adjusting to people who are very often excluded. So what would you say to people who just want to maintain the status quo basically who will argue that if a solution doesn’t work for everyone, it should work for nobody?
Harper:
Absolutely. I think that is a great question, Kristen. So a couple of thoughts I have is that if you never take an action in one direction or the other, progress is never going to get made. Just because it’s not successful the first time, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try again or can’t try again. We absolutely can. And that’s part of the iterative design process for any product. And making a solution for one type of person doesn’t mean that’s going to work for everybody, but you can take a solution and extend it to others once it’s successful. Making a universal solution, it often means that it’s not going to be successful for just one group of people. You wanna make multiple groups of people be able to have an equal experience or the ability to participate without having to adjust themselves. And that’s a really big definition of inclusive design in my opinion.
Kristen:
She talks about that in her example with airplanes design. I don’t know if you wanted to jump to that…
Harper:
Absolutely happy to jump around. In this example, it talks about in the US military they were designing airplane seats and these were seats designed for the “average” person for their average human average body type. And this is the quote from the book, it’s on page 96 in chapter seven, there’s no such thing as normal and the subsection is everyone and no one. Rose provides a vivid example from the history of the US Air Force. In the 1940s, the first fighter jets were designed to fit the average pilot. The US Air Force measured hundreds of bodily dimensions across thousands of pilots and used the averages of that data to design the instruments of the flight deck or cockpit. Every feature of the flight deck was fixed into place without adjustability. The assumption was that any individual pilot could adjust himself to overcome the gap in reaching any element of the flight deck that wasn’t a perfect fit for him.
However, the Air Force was experiencing a high rate of crashes that couldn’t be attributed to mechanical failure or pilot error. A lieutenant and researcher, Gilbert Daniels studied just 10 of those human dimensions that were used in the design of the original flight deck. He measured 4,000 pilots to confirm how many of them fit all 10 dimensions. The answer was zero. Not a single pilot out of 4,000 matched all 10 dimensions. Everyone differed in at least one way. In essence, the US Air Force had designed a flight deck for everybody and thus nobody. And that led to a lot of new advancements, things like adjustable seats, whether you can move them back for more leg room or higher, lower for height. And this technology, while it was designed for just the US Air Force, it was extended to cars in civil society. So when you have someone who needs to move up or back or higher or lower in a car seat that originated from the US Air Force and they took it and then they applied it to a whole new market and created a very successful business case for that technology.
Kristen:
Yeah, I love that story. I love all of the work that she does in deconstructing our ideas of average and normal and I can’t wait to share that with particularly one of my students who really just feels that his goal should be to be as normal as possible. How does the concept of accessibility fit into inclusive design and what roles do designers have in promoting accessibility in their work?
Harper:
So the concept of accessibility fits into inclusive design because multiple types of people have an avenue to participate and enjoy an experience without adjusting them. And what that means is if you’re enjoying a design, it’s gonna be a good inclusive design. If multiple people can enjoy it without having to think or feel or do anything physically to fit into it much like how you don’t have to change how you are into an airline seat, you’re kind of squish into it. You are just able to enjoy it as you are and the design can adjust to you instead of the other way around. It’s a much more emotionally comfortable concept because, and it’s a little nuanced than deep, it’s almost like the design is telling you this situation is not for you, this design is not for you. And that could be very rejecting because as it states in the book, you expect people to reject you from time to time. You don’t expect computers or products or digital interfaces to reject you in any way. And that can be very disheartening. I would say that the role designers have in promoting accessibility in their work is there’s a responsibility for each designer to speak to people who have this wealth of knowledge and experience on the side of exclusion about their experiences because they’re able to say pretty easily and show this is the right solution for this problem. And someone who is fully able-bodied may not have that experience on how to solve that problem. This could be due to unconscious biases through no fault of the person, but they just may not have that experience. And that absolutely applies to me as well. You just don’t know what you don’t know and while there’s nothing to be done about that, that’s why you bring in someone who has that experience because they do know.
Kristen:
No, that’s so true. Can you give like two or three quick examples of products that Kat Holmes mentioned in the book that started out as accessible technology and then were extended to other people?
Harper:
So the big shiny example is Wayne Westman’s finger works. It was a way for people with severe carpal tunnel syndrome or large hand disabilities to use a computer without a mouse or keyboard. And it was essentially two touch pads where people could interact with computer wherever they needed and it had a pretty good user base. And then this technology company, Apple acquired them and used their touchpads to develop the very first iPhone. And Wayne Westerman is on the very first iPhone patent through no small contribution and now his technology is being used throughout the world on so many models of smartphones. It’s very incredible and a very fun story is that there was a couple who an Italian inventor was having an affair with someone, you know, they didn’t want anyone to know and she was starting to have low vision and it was tough to communicate.
Harper:
So he invented the typewriter so that way they could communicate and that way she could write him letters and that they could talk about it without anyone knowing it. And then over time, this turned into keyboards, which it’s one solution for an edge case problem that turned into one of the biggest markets and most essential parts of technology in the world. And continuing with that technology, Vince Cert, C-E-R-F who is the known as the father of the internet, he and his wife had hearing disabilities. So when they were away from each other they couldn’t really call and talk to each other he created email so that way they could stay connected while they were apart. And as Kristen, you noted this extended into other chat platforms like Slack and Teams and those are a few examples of pieces of accessible technology that while they started from just helping a small problem, they extended into very successful and essential pieces of technology throughout personal life businesses of all types.
Kristen:
This chat for this book by the way for those people who are listening to this later in a podcast form is incredibly active. So we’re going to move to that in a second. Before we do though, Harper, can you just give one more example of why people should read the book by talking about your ideas about video game design and how they relate to the examples in this book?
Harper:
I would love to thank you, Kristen. So there’s a very accomplished man, John R. Porter who is a disabled video gamer. He worked with Kat Holmes to create an accessible video game controller at the University of Washington. He worked with Microsoft as well to assist them with that. And he basically noted that when you have a video game controller, it really defines who is included in that and who is excluded in that. And I never really noticed this before as a video gamer myself, but to play a video game currently before the were accessible controllers, you need two hands, be able to respond to things promptly, and be able to use your hands to push buttons, react. Oftentimes you may need to hear if they’re audio cues and there’s a lot going on that I never really perceived before as to how crucial it was. And Porter was an essential part of making an accessible video game controller for Microsoft. And it’s funny, Sony for their PlayStation video game console just came out what their own accessible video game controller to assist the disabled community and compete in that market. And it has been doing very well. That’s an example of how someone had a need filled the need and this was an example of someone having technology reject them whether inadvertently and then they used their ability to make a workaround and then they developed an incredible successful model for how to play and enjoy.
Kristen:
What do you mean when you say technology rejecting them?
Harper:
I’d spoken a little bit about this earlier and I’m happy to kind of get more into it. Technology is built by people and people who likely unintentionally they may have implicit biases as to how a piece of technology is built. And if you’re someone who is able-bodied walking around, you have full use of all your extremities and you’ve never really know what it’s like to have to use a piece of assistive technology to live your life, then you may be designing technology for people who are also like that. And that may mean that the technology you build is rejecting people because they simply cannot use that technology as they are and they may have to adjust to use it. And that is not an inclusive design, that is an exclusive design. And so when you design it, you really need to think about how can people who are unlike me use it. And sometimes it is a significant advancement to just ask your team and other times it’s an even more incredible amplification to step up and get someone outside of your realm of your company and able-bodiedness and include them on the design. And I think that’s a really important role is designing with people and gathering their opinions and experience not just for people and assuming you know what they need.
Kristen:
And Kat Holmes talks about how people are even more offended when technology rejects them than when people reject them because technology’s supposed to be like this impartial thing that works for everybody. But the reality is that it often doesn’t. And as I was reading the book, I mean video game design was a huge source of exclusion for me as a kid, which turned me into a reader might may have been a good thing in the end, but I often felt excluded by video games. And still when I was reading the book, the idea of the controller just never even occurred to me. And before I read that and I was like, oh.
So it just shows that even when you are excluded you can sometimes, if you’re not trained fully only recognize the patterns of exclusion that affect you. So it’s very interesting. I’d like to open it up if people feel comfortable talking. I’d like to open it up to just anyone who’d like to discuss the book because I think there are some excellent questions and answers coming in through the chat and it’d be great to hear them verbally if people feel comfortable talking about these things. I mean, how do you keep inclusion at the forefront of what you are doing every single day and how do you make the case for it to people who are only interested if they can afford it or if they think they can afford it?
Marty:
Yeah, that’s really hard. This is Marty. I wanna switch it around and bring my colleague Emma into the conversation because Emma and I are kind of having a [crosstalk 00:24:16].
Kristen:
I would love to bring Emma, I just didn’t want to.
Marty:
Yeah, no, I’m point of personal privilege. So Emma talks about in our very active chat, you know, just this idea of making it tangible, right? Bringing awareness to someone and it helps from a design perspective or development perspective, this idea of personas is really important. It’s core to what designers are thinking about already, but it’s fairly fine right to their lived and exposed to experiences, right? I mean, there’s only so much that you can do. Emma, you said making it tangible and I couldn’t agree more. I just didn’t know if you wanted to expound on that a little bit when you talk about inclusion.
Emma:
Yeah, sure. This is Emma. I think some of what where that reply or that comment came from is, you know, I tend to think of myself as like a person who cares about these kinds of things, a person who wants to do what’s right. And before I came to Tamman, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And I think so much of it is just about getting exposed to people who are different from yourself and that extends to like in ways that you hadn’t even thought to consider, which is so easy. I mean, with the way our society is built, our society really, you know, separates people in so many ways. And, you know, you think about, until I moved to a place that has like a really big deaf community, right? I didn’t really come across people who were deaf or things like that where you just because of all the barriers that our society has created, it separates folks, which means that you don’t really understand the human side of it. You know, it can be abstract in your brain where you say, oh yeah, inclusion is good and that might mean that for years I, as a data analyst who does reporting built reports that were fully inaccessible to anyone who had low or no vision and didn’t even realize how much exclusion I was creating in my work until it was made more tangible to me. And now, you know, once you open your eyes to it, you see it everywhere. And so I think that when it remains kind of theoretical or abstract, it becomes much easier to be like, oh well that’s too expensive. We maybe next quarter we can afford it or maybe next year we can afford it and making it more tangible. And, you know, Marty replied with a great comment, which is like, there’s also a fine line between, you know, we don’t want to get to it feeling exploitative and things like that, but just bringing people in and having it tangible where it’s like, oh these are the actual people. This is a person who couldn’t access something that I was providing, I think forces you to realize the real impact in a tangible way rather than an abstract way.
Marty:
Yeah, I think that that’s great Emma and I agree, it makes me think, and we don’t usually have an opportunity to explore this side is who. I wanna bring you in for a minute if it’s okay and just get just through your thoughts. And I don’t wanna put you too much on the spot, but I’m curious, as someone who has worked for a long time in sort of more of a mass market media environment, like we’re talking highest levels, biggest audiences, is this a part of the conversation when you’re working in the media in your role as a designer?
Steve:
Just add context. Marty is speaking to my role at NBC. I work for NBC Today’s show. And I recently resigned off of NBC’s Meet the Press to come along with Tamman because it was a whole lot, it was a pressure cooker. But we only have a small like rules and regulations to follow when it comes to inclusion in terms of our techs and our font sizes. Our font sizes are not supposed to go below 70 points. And when you’re dealing with a lot of information, sometimes at one time on the screen you do take them below 70 points and then producers will say, “OK, yeah, let’s just, we understand it’s a lot so let’s put it all on the screen.” And they’re doing that to cover a spot. And it’s not a big conversation about, well you know, there’s gonna be people that don’t see this the way that they need to see this, or it’s gonna be people that can’t really read this. It’s never come up in any of the discussions that we’ve had. Even when we had script discussions where everybody’s sitting around and talking about what’s going to go on this spot, it’s really not been in any discussion that I’ve had on a designer level and producer level. Even the executive producer, it’s not on those discussions either when they talk to us. So it definitely is a need for it. I’m pretty sure is somewhere along the line those discussions are happening, I’m just not a part of them.
Marty:
There’s definitely a, the leadership component, I think Kat Holmes talks a little bit about it in her book, but Harper to kind of bring it back to that area and I, again, I know that she has brought up aspects of why it’s good for business in general, but I haven’t reached a part in the book where she’s really speaking to leaders. Did she ever speak to leaders taking the lead and making this a priority?
Harper:
She doesn’t have a section where she’s speaking directly to leaders and CEOs. She, I suppose, wrote the book for a kind of an ethos to CEOs for them to kind of read between the lines. There’s a section right at the end where she talks about making a business case for inclusive products and having an inclusive process, which I do have some materials prepared about that. And it is very helpful. I more interpreted the book as for designers and for people who are really making decisions instead of the CEO who’s just saying, this is what we’re gonna do. It’s more decisions that they’re making at the product level, not the process level.
Marty:
Excellent.
Kristen:
Right at the beginning of the book, she has three myths about inclusion that people often hold and she never really calls out leaders who hold them specifically, but they are interesting and maybe a good start to a rallying cry at least. The first one is that inclusion isn’t nice. It’s not nice to a lot of people as it disrupts the cycles of what have always been happening and can sometimes not even be nice as it tries to include people occasionally it’s imperfect, which I think is a big one for people because, you know, as we were talking about earlier, some people would worry like about, okay, well if it’s not perfect, why should we even change it? And that it’s ongoing. So you can always build inclusion into the D of a design instead of tacking it on at the end. But in the end, inclusion is always a work in progress. It’s just important to keep all those things in mind.
Marty:
Yeah, from a business perspective, it’s always more expensive to remediate than it is to have it at the very beginning of your process.
Kristen:
Right.
Harper:
It is. And just to follow up on what you said Kristen, and bringing it back a little bit as well. A large part about companies maybe not taking action or not wanting to change status quo and kind of keep things as they are is they can be afraid of taking that next step. They can be afraid of making it be a wrong step. Maybe saying the wrong thing in a press release, making an A design that or decision that will be accessible for some people, but not all people. Personally, I would rather see a company take a step in the right direction. Even if it’s two steps forward, one step back, that’s still a step forward. And I would rather see that progress tried for and missed than not tried at all.
Steve:
Yeah. I just had a question. So is it that certain companies are saying that if you add inclusion in certain areas, you basically, it’s kind of working the other way around? Like it’s you’re adding inclusion, but then by doing that you’re excluding people in your inclusion. Am I making any sense here because I’m having a hard time articulating where I’m trying to go with it?
Harper:
That makes sense. An example that Kat Holmes gives in the book is a restroom that is accessible for able-bodied people is likely not accessible for someone who uses a wheelchair. And yet if you make a restroom that is designed for people who use a wheelchair, it’s often going to be too low for a six-foot-three person who was able-bodied. So I think they’re more conservative companies may be worried about backlash through, you did this but you didn’t do it right. And I think they’re worried about maybe a lot of investments in iterations before you get something universal. But that’s kind of the large part about inclusionary design is that it’s not one size fits all much like any proprietary information or process, it’s gonna be individual to that company.
And once you get that right part of inclusive design is making an equal experience for many, not one design that is gonna be accessible for everybody. I don’t think there’s one design that is accessible for every type of situation in the world. We just may not be hearing about those use cases because they are edge cases, you know, set in quotes.
Kristen:
Yeah, it’s definitely seems to be about one design fitting, one she argued sometimes, and one design fitting several or extending one to many. So thinking about one person’s experience and then trying to understand how it can help as many people as possible.
Harper:
Yes. And as Marty says in the chat, equitable not equal. That’s a very good summation of it.
Kristen:
Harper, did you have any last thoughts or just quotes you wanted to bring up or just anything you wanted to talk about?
Harper:
Yes, there in the latter section of the book, Holmes does make a- she has a section about making a business case for inclusive products and investing in inclusion and helping people with disabilities. And just going into that really quickly, first step is customer engagement and contribution. Talk to people who have disabilities, see what kind of hacks and complications they use from using your product or service. And that will let people know, oh, there’s a real problem here, people will likely buy it. See how you can use those constraints that foster creativity to grow a larger customer base and extend the solution to others and then innovation and differentiation. I think there’s an important stat here that I heard a long time ago. The most successful companies in a new market are not the ones that get there first. They’re the ones that build a solution that is modified off of the initial one.
Part of getting into inclusionary design is building something that is accessible not just for one, but is built to help multiple people. That is kind of a great goal. So when you make something that is accessible to many people, it doesn’t have to be we’re gonna rebuild the wheel, it can be, oh, we had an old idea and now we’re gonna repurpose it. Like a great example is for people who are low vision, they had screen contrast for computers and that was great. And then it wasn’t really used at all. It would’ve been shut into the dark except mobile phones came out and suddenly screen contractors were all the rage because when you go to the beach it’s hard to see on your phone. So that suddenly became a really huge market and a really huge deal. And then when you do that to start, include disability inclusionary design at the start. You don’t have to retrofit it later. And that is just a really important piece of the puzzle.
Kristen:
Yeah, that’s so true or like curb cuts initially being designed for people in wheelchairs trying to cross streets and then that actually ends up benefiting pretty much everybody at this point.
Harper:
Precisely.
Kristen:
Does anyone in the audience have any questions or comments that you’d like to ask verbally before we end this book talk?
Harper:
Or can you think of any examples of mismatches in your day-to-day lives?
Marty:
Mr. Steve?
Steve:
Yeah, one of the things as I was reading the book that just kept kind of nagging at me is that I’ve worked for some really great organizations that had great intentions, wanted to do the right thing, and we used to have a lot of sessions on unconscious bias, but it was always cultural in nature. And as I’m reading through this, I kept thinking to myself, gosh, we really missed the boat. We were spending so many cycles on unconscious bias and it was beneficial. It helped people, it helped us communicate with each other, but we totally missed the vote in accessibility by not addressing it in that area. So I think if you start with unconscious bias, you’re gonna end up in a better place because you’re not trying to catch up. That was just something I got out of the book.
Kristen:
I think that’s true. And to be fair to this book, and one of the reasons I love it is it does get into culture. It definitely has accessibility bias as more of the center of the book, but there are some really fascinating pieces about cultural bias, particularly in architecture. And so I feel like incorporating all of these, it wasn’t wrong to spend so much time on that because it’s certainly a different coexisting problem, but if they can both be incorporated together, it’s even better.
Harper:
Nothing big but just to say that even the technology that we’re using today could stand to have some improvement. And that just came in from Kristen where she said Marty, when anyone raised her hand, just to have them speak because she couldn’t tell. So how could someone be able to tell, you know what I mean, in this software? So that’d be something that could be added to think about.
Kristen:
So interestingly, I can answer that because if I’m the host, hint, hint, I guess that I can hear if someone raises their hand. But if I’m not the host then I can’t. So that’s where it needs to be improved so that participants can just hear that. You can hear that if you’re the host. Cause I’ve heard it before, unless they just totally messed it up since I’ve been a host last, which is entirely possible. Also, by the way, you don’t have to just click on the icon to raise your hand. You can do Alt Y or option Y with the keyboard.
Marty:
That’s so fun. I just did it. Okay, thank you for that. Not only a great book talk but also Zoom tips, keyboard tips for thank you Kristen. And yeah, we probably should make you host when you’re hosting next time. So that’s a great point and I agree who for sure and what a timely thing to point out. Well done everyone. Well first and foremost, I want to thank Harper and Kristen. Awesome, great job. Lots of ground covered, lots of things to consider, but still done in a really concise way. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Before I get to what our next book for next month is going to be, Kristen, that’s a warning to go be ready for that cuz I’m gonna ask, I want to thank everyone for coming on and spending some time with us and whether you were with us in the moment here and on book Tucker, you’re listening on Article 19 or watching this video later on. We really, really appreciate folks engaging in a different way and in a common way, and in a community way with the books that we are choosing to talk about. So thank you, everyone. So Kristen, what are we talking about? Next month in March?
Kristen:
I can give you a sneak preview already. So at the end of March, we’re doing a book that’s kind of a combination of memoir and cultural history called Their Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness by M. Leona Godin. And it’s also available on Audible if you’d like to hear her read the book. I haven’t heard her read it yet. And then in April, I am trying my best. So interestingly, our US poet laureate has a disability, I believe it’s a motor disability, something related to cerebral palsy, Ada Limón, and she is our poet laureate this year. And all of her books were on Audible. When I originally thought of this idea, I went back to look and they were all gone. And I was like, how did this happen? And so I was like, I’m now in battles with Audible and her publisher and I’m like, you cannot remove the US poet laureate’s books. Like what happened? So April is to be determined, but we are hoping for a poet for National Poetry Month and I’ll keep you posted.
Marty:
Love it. Got a preview two months ahead and we get to join you in battle [crosstalk 00:40:08] to help you. That’s great.
Kristen:
Because the poor Audible rep was like, what’s the poet laureate? And I’m like, you don’t know what poet laureate is like, come on.
Marty:
It’s OK. It’s OK. We’re gonna build some additional awareness there too. That’s good. Well, thank you everyone, and have a great rest of your day. If you like what you heard today and you want to explore more about digital accessibility technology or our company culture, you can schedule a time to meet with us at tamman.com. That’s T-A-M-M-A-N-I-N-C.com. Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter too, so you never miss an event or an insight from us. Be sure to rate this podcast five stars on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or wherever you happen to be listening. It really helps our podcast grow and reach new audiences. And please make sure if you do follow us, hit that bell icon so you never miss an episode. If social media’s more your style, you can follow us at Tamman Inc. On LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, you can share our podcast on your favorite platform. We really do appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining us today and we look forward to continuing the conversation next time.
Show Notes:
Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design physical book format and audiobook format.
Kat Holmes interview and a short bio.
Wayne Westerman describes his accessibility-driven inspiration for his multi-touch technology, which became a key part of the iPhone.
Wayne Westerman is included on the original iPhone patent.
Bio on Vint Cerf, who is recognized as one of “the fathers of the Internet.”
John R. Porter’s video game website.
John R. Porter’s accessible Xbox controller.
Sony unveils its accessible PlayStation 5 controller.
This was not discussed, but as one of Harper’s favorites, we encourage you to check out this story about Terry Garrett, a video gamer who is blind and beat the legendary game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time primarily through the game’s sound design.
