One day, I got an email saying Jonathan Lazar was going to do a talk at our faculty. The email had a link to an article about him. I googled him on YouTube and was interested enough to book a one-on-one with him to ask him some questions. I’ve heavily edited our talk for clear and quick reading, so please treat it as fictional.
JL: Okay. So tell me about yourself and your interests.
MB: Yeah. My name is Boyd.
JL: Yes. Fantastic.
MB: Nice. I’m on an MSc + PhD program and have just started. The idea behind the program is to have humans at the center of (tech-driven) innovation and that’s why I was drawn to it. I was reading through your bio and thought to myself, “Oh, this might be interesting!” after I watched a talk where you gave an example about people with Down syndrome ending up in the three F’s; food, flowers, filth. Coming from Uganda, I relate when you when you talk about the lack of employment, or the lack of opportunity. So, I have a few accessibility questions…
Why accessible tech?
MB: Why bother with it, you know?
JL: If you don’t build for accessibility, you build discrimination into the future. For example; building tools to teach tech jobs and the blind can’t use them == no blind people will be able to do tech jobs.
Accessibility == Innovation?
MB: What does accessibility have to do with pushing the technological envelope when you think about innovation?
JL: But accessibility IS innovation!
JL: I can actually answer that really quickly. Accessibility is innovation, right? Think about a lot of things that started out as assistive devices for people disabilities. They get adopted by the general population. So for instance, e-books started as recordable books for the blind, voice recognition started as a technology for the blind, word prediction started as a technology for people who have limited use of hands. Sorry, voice recognition is for people with limited use of hands, and word prediction for people with motor impairments. Captioning started out as technology for the deaf, right? So there are all these technologies that are invented for people with disabilities, and then adopted by much broader population of people.
MB: Yeah, I think I’ll have to think more about that because that’s quite nice. It opens opens up a lot for me to think about.
Deeper versus Wider
MB: What about the challenge of racing forward versus spreading out? Wouldn’t attention to accessibility ‘slow us down’?
JL: What do you mean by that?
MB: I mean that, with a finite amount of resources, why would someone spend them making a product accessible rather than make the product better in other (money-making) ways. If your website hasn’t been accessible, you can either use money to add a new feature to the website OR you can use it to make / redo the website to be accessible.
JL: Okay, so that that’s based on the misunderstanding of the fact that you actually have customers who you aren’t serving. So, the most cost justifiable thing to do would be to make it accessible. Why? Because you have (PwD) customers who you aren’t serving so you’re missing market opportunity, and also you may have legal compliance risk.
MB: But if implementing accessibility is optional, then someone can choose not to do it even if they know that it’s right.
JL: Yeah. Again it’s enforcement which can be done by a lawsuit (e.g., in the USA). Here in the UK, it’s probably done by government? But, that’s where the legal compliance comes in.
Disability grouping == bias?
MB: So there are so many disabilities. It seems like starting afresh is rethinking our whole approach to creating technology. Is it feasible? How do we group them? Is grouping them introducing bias?
JL: If it’s something where you know, there’s gonna be an install base of a lot of blind users, or a lot of deaf users, you start with that disability population. If not, you can start with a cross-disability group. That includes people a lot of disabilities. Then, with the technical standards, there’s WCAG where we talk about the web content accessibility, and that covers multiple disabilities.
MB: Okay, so you could start with cross-disabilities, you could start with the disability group that needs it the most, and then look at the standards that have been advised. Got it!
Advice for the interested?
MB: Now, I have one more question. One last one. This is something new to me and it’s it seems like there’s something that makes sense to me. If you have any advice for new researchers, where the gaps so how can they help?
JL: So I would say, always go first to the disability rights groups. That’s really important, talk to them first, find out the needs.
JL: If you’re new to it and you want to learn a good way to do it, it’s to get a certification when accessibility for instance from IAAP which is the International Association of Accessibility Professionals.
Accessibility is not expensive, it’s remediation that’s expensive.
Jonathan Lazar
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