hi everybody my name is andrew bagel i am a white male with brown hair and i'm wearing a blue sweater i identify as he and him pronouns and i have adhd i'm a principal researcher at microsoft research and i focus a lot of my work on helping people with invisible disabilities make use of and become more comfortable with technology hi i'm nancy doyle i am a white woman with brown hair i use the pronoun she and her i'm wearing a navy suit and with my new glasses i'm styling a professor mcgonagall look i am an industrial organizational psychologist and i specialize in the management science of disability inclusion i am adhd and i'm ceo of genius within and the co-director of the center for neurodiversity research work at the university of london hi i'm marisol antanera i'm a latino woman i have long brown hair i'm wearing a great t-shirt that says know your customers i identify with anxiety and also how the pronoun she and her i'm a senior accessibility program manager working in microsoft cloud nai and i'm working at the moment with folks who identify as neurodivergent and i work with andy and michael versmich i at a weekly basis at least and collaborating here with nancy super super glad to do that hiya i'm michael vermesh i'm autistic and dyspraxic a white male with gray hair from belgium my bronze are he hiss i'm wearing glasses and a purple shirt i'm the digital inclusion lead at microsoft uk i'm also the chair of the disability employee resource group at microsoft uk great okay let's go to the first slide and what we're talking about is uh first of all what is neurodiversity um then andy and i is are going to go through neurodiversity research at microsoft um then nancy is going to talk about how to bring neurodiversity into universal design and finally michael is going to talk about what are the benefits to customers so nancy give it away thank you marisol so let's talk about neurodiversity and the neurodiversity movement which has fundamentally reshaped the way we think about autism in particular in 1998 judy singer the australian sociologist completed her bachelor's thesis concerning her lived experience in the middle of three generations of autism that she of women that she considers somewhere on the autistic spectrum judy's thesis was that autism was a natural variation in human cognition an unusual neurotype but one that deserved consideration as being valuable judy argued that neurodiversity was an essential biological feature a form of biodiversity the result of human evolution towards community living where there are natural specialisms and generalisms in skill capability character and strength and when we think about autism as part of this wider biological diversity the picture that you can see on the screen which is of a series of animals a graph a bear a goldfish a baboon a zebra an elephant and a penguin and they're standing in front of a tree and they're being asked for a fair selection that they all have to take the same exam and that is to please climb that tree and when we think about um the picture and the the kind of metaphor of those animals all been trying to do the same thing the disablement the idea of the social model of disability that we are disabled by what we're being asked to do rather than who we inherently are starts to make sense in our modern world we've set up systems that require rigid performance of a limited skill range we're at a weird point of history and it's all about just about to change soon spelling will become an obsolete skill a lot of workplace performance will be achievable remotely by robot hologram or multimedia submission we're not going to need the same skills we do now different people might be disabled instead of dyslexia we might have a literary literacy dependency syndrome where people need to write in order to think adhd might be replaced with sedentary limited concentration disorder for those who have to sit still to think instead of autism we might have sensory underwhelming condition where sensory perception is considered to lack acuity leading to deta mistakes in detailed perception there's a lot of recognition that the talents that we need for the future may well be the neurodivergent ones the future of work is shifting away from standardization into personalization from institutions and homogeneity into flexible hubs and diversity throughout history developments in technology have parallels developments in our thinking for example impressionism in the arts and social science occurred at the same time that the camera was invented behaviorist thinking accompanied mechanical engineering the idea of the brain as a cognitive processor and our understanding of memory accompanied digitization and now in the 21st century we're starting to move away from inflexible singular communication to networked social hubs where specialists can be connected into a larger system without needing to change or be blacks of all trades we're allowing people to be masters of the things they do well this is where the autistic employee and equally the adhd employee the dyspraxic employee the uh dyslexic employee or entrepreneur might find that they can spend less of their cognitive energy trying to fit in and more time trying to solve problems what i'm describing to you is the social model of disability where disablement happens because the world doesn't accommodate not because the individual is broken this is distinct from the medical model of disability wherein we've looked solely at what an individual can't do on this next slide that i'm showing you we have a venn diagram of the conditions that are associated with neuro minority types or neurotypes that are in a minority previously we've caused called these conditions neurodevelopment disorders or specific learning disabilities we've talked about discalcula dyslexia attention deficit hyperactivity disorder we've talked about autistic spectrum disorder we focused on all the things that people with these labels find difficult and mainly those things are to do with literacy or sitting still or having to process whilst being very distracted because their senses our senses are um are highly um tuned to the world around us and the idea of the neural neurodiversity movement is that we actually focus on what people with these labels can do and that we sought for positives not negatives the majority of the human population is neurotypical which means that they have a balance of strengths and struggles and most things that they do are about even so their visual perception might be about the same uh ability as their memory their verbal skills will be about the same level as their processing speed neurodivergent thinkers like people with these conditions tend to have a spiky profile where some things are absolute standout skills or some things are very strong competent abilities and other things are struggling a minority of people fall into this category and there are lots of words around this at the moment neurodiverse neurodivergent neural minority and one of the things i want to introduce to you in in introducing this movement is that if it feels confusing that's because it is and so as someone with lived experience and somebody who's doing professional research in this field i want to reassure you you haven't missed a memo there's not a right answer out there at the moment exactly what neurodiversity is exactly what newer minorities are and what that means it's an emerging concept choosing the right words is part of the progress in in understanding the ideas and developing our concepts around what we mean and just as the world of workers in flux this is our way of communicating as a human species is in flux so is the language around how we talk about neurodiversity and what that means similar to other social inclusion movements is it's important for us to ask how people like to identify and to use the language that people have chosen for themselves and that would be my advice to you in in working out how to talk the neurodiverse or divergent people and now i'm going to hand over to marisol and andrew to talk about the work that microsoft are doing in this space hi again um so now me and andy are going to be talking about a super passionate project that we're working on uh for to design for developers who are neurodivergent um so if i go to the next slide i'm going to tell you what we are up to so in talking to uh people with neurodiversity who use usher um we've been conducted a series conducting a series of activities um one has been focus groups um with users that are internal to microsoft and we have been conducting also interviews uh one-on-one interviews with neurodiverse i.t pros and developers who use asher and we've been learning a lot of things we've been learning about their pain points we we have been learning about how they work around issues that microsoft poses through their technology and they have been talking to us about what their wants are what do they want in an ideal world what are their suggestions so the um just to say what the project of our of uh project goal is is to create a neurodiversity inclusive ux design principles and improve products such as usher and other microsoft products such as visual studio so we'll talk to you a little bit about what the process has been and what we've heard so take it away andy sure so in our interviews with uh developers and i2 pros we asked them questions about uh the challenges that they were having using microsoft azure and we have some interesting quotes here we want to present to you because they illustrate some of the issues that were coming up so we have a quote from stefania who's a developer with adhd stefanie says i have a low working memory versus my overall iq plus i have adhd i get distracted and i forget what i was doing we also talked to david who's an i.t professional who identifies as having adhd he says i only do one thing at a time when add kicks in i forget what i was doing if that happens i wait to see if something's not working i try to keep the windows where i'm working open and what we see is that the people we spoke with many of them talked about avoiding multitasking and what we see in azure is there's quite a few tasks that require completing a lot of complicated subtasks where you have in order to fill out one screen you have to go off and do a few different tasks to find out the data you need to put into the forms and to enter there and what we found is that as people completed their subcast they said that they had difficulty remembering where they left off and what in fact they were even trying to do in the first place so we organized this into a design principle that some azure designs expect their users to do several tasks at a time while they wait for each to finish and we think that designers could try to scaffold the user flow for complex tasks in order to help users accomplish them more effectively now we also talked to michelle michelle is a developer and data analyst who identifies as having asperger's syndrome and ptsd with the azure portal there's so much going on that i usually don't know what to do github is a bit cleaner there's less going on it's easier to tell where you have to go for certain things paula who's an analyst identifies as having dyslexia adhd and dysgraphia and paula said sometimes it's hard for me to focus on something when reading it through there are too many tools and buttons i go dear eyed and i can't process everything what we find here is there's what we call extraneous cognitive load basically the amount the amount of brain power it takes to process an interface is very difficult when the interface screen offers too many things to look at and to read and the design principle here is ui clutter and which is their words not ours makes it difficult to prioritize the importance of on-screen elements and there are many screens that are dependent on written explanations which create indecipherable walls of text for users with dyslexia we think that designers could reduce the amount of text and visual clutter on their screens to help direct the user's attention in order to find out what's most important for their task marcel once you take on the next few quotes thank you andy um so yeah we also talked to yuko she's a data analyst and identifies with adhd and what yuco told us is i'll keep timers i'll take a step back and if something takes me too long it makes more sense that it should be done relatively easy in an hour we also talked to jason who's a developer and identifies with adhd and anxiety and jason said there are definitely places where i start wanting to figure something out but then i see something that catches my attention unless i'm really driven to finish there will be times when that's a challenge so here we see that maintaining attention and focus is a struggle when users cannot focus they cannot complete tasks so completing one single task at a time in extended periods of time can be can be difficult so completing tasks in smaller chunks is going to be more useful for neurodiverse users so as a design principle here we say that some designs require users to complete multiple complex tasks in a single view which extends the time it takes to complete them but designers can actually ensure that the important tasks on the user flow can be accomplished in short blocks of time then we talked to teresa she's a developer with adhd and anxiety and what teresa says is having consistency no double meaning to one thing meaning don't use new or unique names on elements that look exactly like objects i see in other apps and then we talked to michelle again the data analyst and developer as andy said and he identified with asperger's and ptsd and what michelle says is i want to set up a new vm a new virtual machine but if i choose a wrong kind of machine i'll get charged a lot more than i want we don't want that so that leads to unpredictability causing anxiety and so nor diverse users tend to feel anxious when they are unable to predict whether their actions will cause negative results so users don't react well to unpredictability example charges to customers that they actually are incurring on or data deletion so if customers data is getting deleted that's probably not a good thing um if they do something wrong they this can cause those effects we don't want that unpredictability can be easily caused by the application's task flow and the lack of consistency across its uis or users and user interfaces so as a design principle here ambiguity is an application's task flow or a lack of consistency across its uis can result in unpredictability designing for predictable and reciprocal patterns of ui behavior helps users learn and become more comfortable with all of our software let's try to follow that and for our next step sandy do you want to talk to folks what we're doing yeah so uh once since we've finished now the sort of qualitative portion of our study understanding the diversity of types of issues that people are facing with azure our next step is really to expand this out into survey and look at a large population of neurodiverse i.t pros and developers
and in this way identify the most impactful problems that we can work on first and once we have identified those particular issues that we think are important to tackle we're connecting with designers and researchers to come up with solutions and then developing a timeline with azure product teams to both implement and evaluate those solutions so next up is nancy who's going to talk a little bit about universal design principles i am thank you andrew and and i just think it's really important to note that those detailed products um projects that you guys are working on are the how we dismantle the social barriers that are creating disablement you know it's really exciting to to be part of this time where you're applying universal design to make it easier for a wider range of people to contribute in education and the workplace um it's very exciting so universal design principles um these are often applied in in technology and to how we kind of arrange buildings so that we can allow for disabled people to have greater access um i've got a design on the slide which is is just some icons with the second principles which are um simple and intuitive design perceptible information flexibility low physical effort tolerance for error considering the size and shape for approach and use and equitable use and um what i've been working on in my research is how do we apply these to social infrastructure because we you guys have made huge advances in how you apply it to technology we understand now that with buildings we have to have ramped access we have to have wide gangways there are things we've been able to do i'm using these principles but with neural minorities disability is often hidden and a lot of it is in the communication and the way we organize ourselves in relation to human resources so applying universal design principles to human resources is the focus of my research and practical work so if we take each one if we think about equitable use the aim of equitable use is to avoid segregation and the need for disabled people to have a different service or a different experience and the question you need to ask if you want to apply this principle is are any of the accommodations that you might be providing for individuals simply best practice and could they be applied for everybody as a standard and we've seen this start to play out in autism hiring programs where we've done an amazing job of figuring out that actually if we take away recruitment barriers we can invite autistic people into teams and they can perform at a very very high level and so now the question we're starting to ask in autism hiring is well what was wrong with our recruitment processes in the first place that made it not possible for people to come in uh when we were doing things in a standard way and should we be updating our standard hiring so that people can come in without having to be segregated and without having to have a special program if we think about flexibility and use we need to build in preferences outside the norm for example being able to adjust the pace of information when i'm doing video lectures at the university i can slow down or speed up the pace of which i'm watching them and you know i can record them and people can slow down or speed up and then you can adjust the uh the information to be right i like to speak quite quickly i always have to try and slow myself down but with with these kind of technologies we can build those into training and development as standard and then we have flexibility of use in training and development with simple and intuitive use um we take care to avoid unnecessary complexity and a really good example of this is is when we're creating human resource um documents such as policies procedures induction manuals um that we use things like the flesh kinkade scale which is a grading system using average word length sentence length and paragraph length to estimate the reading level um the fish pincade scale is built into the advanced grammar checks of microsoft word and therefore most human resource teams would be able to use it before releasing company documents the federal plain language guide advises in the usa advises that recruitment and hr materials be pitched at the level that matches the job role for example when we're thinking about perceptible information we're thinking about the sensory modality of communication that we're thinking about in embedded descriptions of visual images um and the kind of you know use of of of uh auto captioning and while we've thought about this in terms of sensory impairments in the past we can also think about these in terms of social context so people who are wanting to um understand a picture or metaphor having the alt text uh in in in training and development documents be really useful inter intolerance for error we're allowing for mistakes and and edits so for example in hiring processes do the online forms allow you to go back and correct things are you able to edit in the text are you able to review your answers um you need to build these things into the processes so that people have that equal access in the principle of low physical effort um it's worth pointing out that many neural minorities experience a great deal of physical discomfort so this might be uh the tension created by staying still when we need to move it might be about managing sensory overwhelm if the information if the environment is busy um and that this can actually be experienced as pain for some people so it's really worth paying attention to with dyspraxia um the additional physical effort for use of some tools can cause pain and cause additional uh fatigue and so in terms of human resources we need to think about these things when we're designing jobs and apply um accommodations such as flexible hours and remote working so that everyone has the opportunity to avoid a busy noisy distracting commute for example um which will make a world i mean the last year has made so much difference for people who have had trouble with um commuting overwhelm it's just released and unleashed so much productivity for neuro minorities and building on that size and space for approach of use is where you know when we're when we're designing our workplaces and when we're thinking about where people work we need to bear this in mind a lot of my clients who are employed come um you know they're having difficulties in their workplace they're in need of accommodations because they've had a an office change and and as the office change was planned and the redesign was was thought through neuro minorities weren't considered and so building those things in is a way we can um move forward on on that kind of um inclusion so just kind of thinking about the employee life cycle um the employee life cycle and someone could move the slide on for me yeah there we go so the employee life cycle is the way management scientists think about the employee experience within an organization we think about it from the very start of kind of job design through hiring through contracting um learning and development and and talent as you as you press within the organization the way that you review performance and the way that we manage well-being um in an organization and if we just pick one example which is tolerance for error in in the design of jobs we can ensure that risk and and safety and client-facing deliverables have second checks and automation built into the design to reduce the need for 100 accuracy in hiring we can we can allow candidates to review and edit information and we can make sure that the hiring principles that we're using actually match the job performance so we're not um specifically asking for things like team building or influencing skills when actually what we need is someone who can do data analytics to a high degree of accuracy or we're not checking for spelling and grammar when on the job you would be able to use assistive technology and so therefore the skill isn't really necessary when we're doing contracting and onboarding we can apply tolerance for error by allowing reviews of that process making opportunity for people to ask questions and make sure they've understood we can create little quizzes to make sure that the information it has been um absorbed and to show that we've predicted that it might be difficult to take it all on board um when we're in training we might do something like setting a tone for the permission of silly questions and creating an environment of positive regard uh so that people know that they're allowed to get things wrong and that that's okay and welcomed we might permit multiple attempts at knowledge tests and allow practice tests um in performance review we might build intolerance for error by allowing for appeal or negotiation where performance ratings have resulted from misunderstanding and in well-being we might create feedback loops for employees to submit their experiences both negative and positive to ensure employee voice is captured and acted upon so i think you know when we start thinking about the universal divide design principles that microsoft are building as a product but also start thinking about universal design principles um within the social infrastructure we really starting to use the social model of disability in what it was intended to do which is to understand where those barriers are being created inadvertently and where we can break them down and i think this is really exciting for students employees and entrepreneurs but it also has a direct link the customers of of your services so just if you'd like to know more about genius within's work or the research that i'm doing at the center at london then please do find us on social media and please feel free to reach out and ask questions and to engage with us about studies and impact data that you might want to know more about thank you and so now i'm going to hand over to michael and he's going to talk more about how this is useful for customers as well thank you that was awesome we have seen some great solutions here on how to bridge gaps so many guests both on a social uh both on a technical level and these are very real for for people with disabilities um as nancy says we've seen some great solutions to not only harness more talent but also engage with more talent out there to create the products of the future but still you could be asking yourself why would you well let's look at some statistics one in five people have a disability and that that's a big number to say no to in the us alone the purchasing power of the disabled community is 490 billion dollars why would you not want a slice of that market uh i think i think you would the discretionary spend that's the luxury or non-essential purchasing power in the u.s for people with cognitive differences is estimated at 1.1 billion dollars that that's a market share that counts you want that market share 73 of disabled people found accessibility barriers and e-commerce so what do they do well many of them go spend their money elsewhere in the uk in 2016 a survey found that more than four million people abandoned a retail website because of the barriers they found taking with them an estimated spend of 11.75 billion pounds in 2019 it didn't get any better three years later that lost business what we call the click away pound had grown to 17.1 billion pounds so the situation is not getting any better the uk estimated lost
revenue in banking due to inaccessibility amounts to 935 million pounds so what you do well apart from adopting what you learned today let's hope so let's check out some other facts well microsoft commissioned forrester consulting to conduct an independent study to identify and quantify economic and socio-economic outcomes resulting from an investment in accessible technologies to enable easier access for both employees and customers to better understand the economic and socio-economic benefits for leveraging accessible technologies for us to discuss with interviewees the role they can play in facilitating access both internally supporting employees and externally in customer-facing applications what we have seen is that accessible technologies deliver tangible value for employers through the interviews it was found that accessible technologies can deliver significant and tangible value to organizations through increased productivity and higher employee retention the discussion also reveals some intangible benefits for employers including risk mitigation higher employee morale satisfaction trust and access to the best talent available because of their accessibility strategy we also have seen that revenue associated with winding the pool of potential customers can be huge also explored was the impact of accessible technologies on customer engagement it was found that private sector organizations have the potential to see higher revenue through more accessible websites and reduce costs by being able to digitally serve people with disabilities something that we've actually learned to do over covert 19 right as one interviewee said customers are aware of the needs of people with disabilities and make purchasing decisions based on this kind of factor it is evident that accessibility is an opportunity here we see research from accenture also recommending to be more inclusive accessibility is an opportunity we've learned that companies that embrace best practices for employing and supporting persons with disabilities in the workplace outperform their peers in a 2018 study done in partnership with accenture they found that 45 companies identified as standing out for their leadership in areas specific to disability employment and inclusion had on average over the four-year period 28 percent higher revenue double the net income and 30 percent higher economic profit margins than their peers they also attract and keep top talent as inclusion is especially important to millennials when asked in millennials who will be 75 percent of the global workforce by 2025 say they want to work at places that reflect their values diversity and inclusion are on top of their lists so so think again think future which brings us to the conclusion inclusion is a moral social and economic imperative we all win when everyone reaches their potential thank you
2021-05-14