UXPA UK May 2021 - Global Accessibility Awareness Day: The After Party

okay then we'll kick off i'm sure we'll have a few more joiners uh as we uh continue the event uh people are obviously dining in uh after work um welcome everyone to the 10th global accessibility awareness day in the after party guide was last week as you know there was probably hundreds of events that you were either attending at or so publicized and we're happy to continue the tradition um i know our friends over at accessibility london held a great remote event which i attended at and i was involved with two internal events myself at work we're going to go straight into the talks this evening because we're very lucky to have i mean one of the few um advantages shall we save the current situation is that we've been able to engage speakers from outside the uk for our talk so we're very lucky to have eden with us from right here but just before we start just to let you know that we have captions available so if you would like captions please activate the closed captions button at the bottom of the zoom window um i've also pasted a link in the chat which will take you to a new browser window that allows you to customize and personalize the text in which the captions are displayed a little bit more but also there is some functionality in zoom to adjust the size of the captions so just wanted to make you aware that um that is available should you wish to follow the event with captions let's say we're very lucky uh with us to have eden from right here and he is going to talk about his experience in developing what looks like a fantastic product and is really addressing a really complex solution and accessibility so i'm very pleased to introduce eden from right here eden over to you and if you'd like to share your screen of course thank you so much chris uh i'll try to share my screen and i guess the permission for that uh but it's a pleasure uh pleasure being here it's uh 8 p.m here in israel and uh see your screen no permission yet listen i guess we'll have that no worries um there you go even sorry apologies for that all right no worries all right so here it is okay just let me know that you can see it right now and i will share it away like this do you see it right now yep that's perfect great so again ma it's a pleasure being here at uxpa uk and thank you so much chris for inviting me as i said my name is idan and i'm 34 years old here in israel a father of two lovely kids and i studied psychology and business in the open university here in israel and priority right here i've co-founded the habanena which was one of the hop startups here in israel it was a great school for me for understanding how to build a startup company and in the five or almost five uh past years i'm a co-founder and ceo of right here and uh i will explain more about right here in this 20 or 25 minutes as much as i have uh today with you uh but it's not the goal the goal is not talking about right here what we're doing i think the goal for me is talking mostly about uh this new era of accessible wayfinding and obviously the challenges that we had with the ux side of things because obviously a ux evening for all of us so uh as part of this uh guide initiative so um so this is me a big part of my life is getting lost okay i always getting lost this is me getting lost in the nature this time and wherever i go with friends or with with my family if it's a new vacation to a new place i'm usually the one that's the last thing about pidan it's on the right it's not on the left when you go out to the elevators or things like that i'm always getting lost so i feel i know from a very first hand the frustration of not knowing where you are or not necessarily knowing where to go um for again almost five years ago we thought that if we'll be able to solve such a challenge for those who have the biggest challenge uh when we thought if people who are blind or visually impaired eventually i'll be able to solve my own challenge of getting lost the way we do what we do it right here very briefly is we basically developed an audible wayfinding system we're going to show you in a minute how it's kind of looks and feels for a bit just so we have context for the whole talk but basically it's a system that uh runs through an app uh from the user perspective it's also managed through the cloud we're using beacons in in the physical space and let me just share with you one minute video how it actually looks in action and then i wanted to again to discuss mostly about what it means uh having audible wave finding system in the built environment and where it goes in the next few years as well as on the ux challenges we don't have a lot of time so i'll start facing things up um here we go and i'm sharing and i started right away facebook right here welcome to mcdonald's you are next to the entrance door to the counter continue [Music] left to the restrooms continue in this direction for 10 feet and then mcdonald's is right here [Music] okay so all right so what i want to discuss with you this is just to give a bit of look and feel of what is that audible wave funding system at all for those of you this is the first time hearing about it uh i would like to in the next 20 minutes or so that i have to talk about what we have for now in the present as in terms of uh accessibility for people who are blind or visually impaired or with severe i would say or significant orientation challenges how the future is gonna looks like what are the technologies that are available for that what were the ux challenges that we face with at the beginning and even today and a bit of case studies and let's just i kind of as i said base things up because of time so first a little bit about numbers if you're talking about people uh with orientation challenges according to our research this is 5.4 of the population uh and with under this umbrella of people with orientation challenges we included people that have some cognitive disability that cut them to orientation challenge of course again people who are blind or visually impaired but also people with different mental disabilities this 5.4 of the population specifically in the us is around 18 million so it's a lot of people out there that just like me getting lost but in a more more significant way than i do uh what do we have uh to offer to this uh or specifically to people who are blind or visually impaired in the building environment so first we have the tactile and brow signage which you can see on the left side on the screen the problem with that uh is that you need to know where the sign is right to be able to read it and touch it and secondly you not necessarily want to touch a public surface and there were one more problem with rail which i'll disclose in a second but the second to that to the brown science or the tactile signage we also have tactile paving which you've seen on the floor which allow a person basically knowing the erection not necessarily where it leads to but there is a direction somewhere so you might want to go through this line and here's a here's a very interesting fact that maybe some of you know but others might not 90 of the blind community even more than 90 percent do not know to read braille at all okay so even if they were lucky enough to know where the sign is and brave enough to even touch it again with kobe 19 outside uh they won't necessarily know how to read it because again 90 of the online community do not know to read braille so obviously when you ask people who are blind or visually impaired how do you operate in the world how do you find your store in the mall or how do you find the doctor's clinic at the hospital the answer is always with somebody again their whole life is depending on others to be able to go from one place to another and it's just absurd we have a way in our team we have a d is a software engineer and also uh happened to be blind from birth and when i asked him what is his main challenge at work finding the office or finding the elevators is just unbelievable uh and in the past year specifically the the need for uh i would say independent wayfinding uh has increased dramatically right because as i said if they used to go with somebody this somebody wasn't there in the past year you had to find your way to do it yourself uh there were no companions so the need for audible wayfinding system or independent wayfinding has increased dramatically just in the past year and myself and i think our team's teases as well is that audible wayfinding systems will be everywhere by 2025. now you know nobody knows the

future not not me as well but this is our really strong assumption that we have a few evidence to that that i'd like to share with you before we get into the the bits and bytes of how how we do that but there are a few assumptions where we believe that in the next few years uh audible wayfinding system will be everywhere so one is precedent regulation in other countries here in israel having talking signs or audible wayfinding system is already regulated you have to have it this is one of the reasons we've been able to grow so well in the past few years because businesses whether it's a mall whether if it's a stadium whether if it's an office building you name it has to have some sort of audibly way finding system that could be a speaker that could be something else but they have to have it of course not in everywhere around the building in israel it's only in the entrances next to information centers next to elevators but still you have to have them and we believe that this type of regulations are compliant will go into more countries we've seen that happening online with online accessibility which is discussed a lot i'm pretty sure also here we've got we were expecting to see regulations in the field also in the physical environment where it's needed again we're still humans we're not robots so as much as it's important to have the digital sphere accessible it is equally important to have the physical sphere also accessible so this is one the regulation is one i would say evidence for this thesis the second one is the speed of technology development right so why don't we see anything like like that in in you know out there why do we see it only braille signs because that's what technology has to offer in the past 30 years for that or even more but in i believe in the 10 last years we all see that the the speed of technology development is rapidly increasing and increasing and i put here this image of the boston dynamics dog which i guess some of you are familiar with who knows that might be the next guiding dog when you think about it technology is changing very very fast uh just like we are now developing our own next generation of the system pretty sure there are other technologies that are coming more and more available and therefore the cost for them is usually also decreasing and therefore the need is is there and when you combine them too you have another reason why it will be so ubiquitous a third reason and i will end with that as they create increasing in awareness for inclusion and accessibility in general this specific event is part of this get global accessibility awareness day it's which celebrating 10 years see what happened in the past 10 years see what see how it's getting more and more into people's awareness and how it's become more more dominant in the discussions so as i said the awareness around inclusion accessibility is rising and it's another reason why in the next two three maybe four years uh most businesses and and in general public spaces will understand that they have to have something like that i'm sorry that for running so fast i do want to kind of cover as much things as i can so uh chris you tell me if i'm running too fast or if it's every if it's okay i want to kind of cover really quick about the technologies a little bit so there's many different positioning technologies out there uh i kind of pick up three only three main ones that are when i say main ones are the most in use or more available most available the more uh popular so one is the ibeacon technology which is basically best based on bluetooth the other one is wi-fi and thirdly is i would say camera-based type of solutions which identify the environment through a computer vision to summarize the good and bad of all of these i kind of allow myself to put this in the table uh i don't think we need to get too drill down to it because we wanted to discuss other things but i'm happy to share this presentation later with whoever would like that uh talking a little bit about the camera-based type of solutions and from the us ux but not necessarily only ux perspective also from other perspectives there are privacy issues that is part of that imagine a person uh with uh like me here with a smart glass and a camera that is on helping him go out out about the different places sounds cool sounds great but uh you not might not necessarily want it to be together with you when you go to the restrooms and you might not necessarily consider it as accessibility to be relying on someone else on the other side of the camera if it's like a remote type of assistant as well um i'll move forward again just because i want to cover as much as i can as one of the main challenges around audible wave finding systems is the mapping challenge when you think about a wave finding system you basically need to have the map and the positioning of the person on that nap so in indoor environment obviously outdoors we have gps we all know that and probably using it but in indoor environment we don't have the maps you are always available there are different projects by google and others who trying to map the indoor spaces of the world but with as many technology it could be it will take more time at least as we said it takes time because you have to be there to map it up and that's a physical uh kind of barrier to that um specifically in our case that right here we're using the layout that the business or the venue already has and based on that we identify the different points of interest uh so just to let you know we've discussed about the technologies before the ibeacon the wi-fi the camera base they are great for positioning but there are still the challenge of the mapping uh there are so many opportunities with the new reality of audible wave finding system that we've been able to to be exposed to to experience uh uh i will i won't i won't kind of share all of their experiences and testimonials this is a d by the way which i mentioned earlier it was working with us but it could be from from the workspace towards the daily life in in retail or shopping in a mall or a specific pharmacy in this case and even before that through the public transportation being able to identify the bus station and all your way toward your desired destination and happily in our case that right here we've been able to do that in different environments and this one specifically is a shared space in france that we've done the system installed and when you think about it you know again back from accessibility in mind a lot of times the discussion is on the digital sphere we're all aware of that but how can you really expect a person to work in a whatever job it is if you cannot find himself uh the restrooms for example it's it's a basic need right being or being able to find a certain uh meeting room so we believe that by turning having wayfinding system installed in the workplace right we truly not necessarily assets right here but as a category we're truly uh pushing this inclusion forward uh and answering basic needs of of a very big i would say population so here's an example in a shared space we've done that also in restaurants this is a picture from a restaurant in san diego specifically and i put here inclusion is also being uh social a lot of times in in coffee shops or in restaurants you go there not just because you're hungry you go there because you want to be socialized with other people and again think about it if it's a date or if it's just a meeting with friends you know being able to be part of the of this event or getting there or feeling equally like everyone else there you need to have audible wayfinding system so there's another another example for that another interesting example uh is this one from a universal design perspective in this picture you can see ohad ohad is one of our users who use the app but does he have a great site he had no challenges with site but he's using our solution uh as a supermarket because one of the features that we have there is to call for local assistant so if a hud cannot reach a certain shelf it just calls somebody will help him in a specific task so it's still not a full accessibility in terms of he's not fully independent but he have more and more tools to use to reach that ultimate ideal ideal independence in his daily lives so uh i want you to remember when you've been talking about audible way finding systems we're not only talking about people who are blind or visually impaired or even necessarily people with orientation challenges we're talking about again everybody that might need to use certain features whether if it's a call for local assistant whether it's just hearing the information in his own language i think about yourself if maybe some of you have been to israel if you go to a lot of places in israel all the signs are only in hebrew right so you might see perfectly you might also being able to read perfectly but if you don't know the language you might find yourself lost i would like to discuss a little bit of the ux challenges that we face because again it's a ux event so um i will i'll name a few so one is the first first challenge that we had is the hands-free challenge all of our system is uh is based on an app in the smartphone and when you think about our users many of them using guide dogs or a ykk so one hand is already taken for for avoiding obstacles again whether it's the guide dog or the white can and then the other hand is holding the the the smartphone you're basically you cannot you cannot use your hands all of a sudden so this hands-free challenge is a big challenge for us because we want the system to be hands-free uh whether if it's through this picture here on on smart watches but not all of them all of not everyone have a smart watch and not all functionalities has been able to be function on the smartwatch when we just started so that's just one of the the challenges that we were facing with this hands-free uh challenge another challenge that we were facing with and realized that is the the struggle or the challenge of going straight in a very far distance okay try to imagine yourself uh closing your eyes and going to a hundred meters distance uh towards a certain destination you might start to go you know slightly right or slightly left and not necessarily directly uh straight ahead to be able to overcome that i'll give you an example of we kind of address that we put this sky mode feature in the app so which basically means that once a user is turning his device from a horizontal hole to a vertical hold what the app will basically do is is kind of sticking into a certain direction that the user is facing to and whenever the user is slightly right or left we kind of alert him on that with vibration or sound so so for example if it's in the uh entrance to a certain building you might hear that in this towards the west there are the uh information center it would like to go there if it's a hundred meter distance it will just take his smart from from a horizontal hole to a vertical hold and then he can just go there and whenever he change uh his direction we will help him fix that in the early second round another challenge that we have and small probably mostly locally here as with the texas speech in hebrew it doesn't work well as it is in english and it's in as much as it might be uh uh surprising most of our users are already used to have the different uh nuances with the hebrew text to speech uh but it was very hard for our customers or buildings owners or venues owners to to hear that they were like well how can you say my brand in this uh way in hebrew for example it doesn't sound like my name yes this is true but this is how your users or our users or this is how popular this population is already used to hear your name in here you know in the online newspaper for example this is how the text-to-speech is already functioning so it was more of the mainstream challenge to to realize that rather than our end users uh challenge but it's still a challenge from our side as a business to deal with another challenge i would like to share with you is the recording feature the recording feature is basically one of the features that allow our users to landmarks a a certain point of interest in space and in the outdoor space actually so imagine if i would like to go to a friend for example and there is an intersection and each time in this intersection i will turn right into in instead of turning the left okay so next time i'll be there i can record myself you're done please turn left and not right please turn left so then the next time i'll be there i'll get this prompt of adam this is where you need to turn left kind of a memo audible memo which is location based as well this is the feature now what was the challenge is gps is not that accurate as we used to have in indoor so this is still a challenge that we're still facing with we have different ways of solving it and name one what we've done is uh whenever the signal from the gps is not accurate enough this feature is just not functioning anymore and when it's you do have a great uh satellite signals so this feature is available for you therefore the accuracy of the gps is better and your your experience will be better so this is another challenge we had uh lastly i will i will uh share with you one of the main challenges that we had in the beginning we kind of feel like we've been able to make a very big progress there but still have some challenges is the audible descriptions themselves right when you when you would like to describe a person uh his environment around him doesn't require a lot of challenges right so for example take a look at the picture now on the slide of this lady entering to a building you might not necessarily think to let her know that the doors are automatic sliding doors right because if if you're a sighted person you just see it and you take it for granted that you will get it towards that you'll recognize that it will continue but for a blind person that's a very important information to know if you won't tell him that there is a sliding door automatic siding door there he will just miss the entrance you want to understand where is that in space so uh no putting attention to what should be mentioned what should be described and how uh it could also go through you know distances in the beginning we were talking about go towards this direction 20 steps and then we realize steps are different from different people so for the tall one it's only five steps but for the shorter one is is way more than that so we've changed it to meters but again in other countries it should be feet so today our users can just pick up whatever they prefer whether if it's a feat or metric uh but uh this type of uh challenges that we had with the descriptions themselves are still challenging us and i think there is a great know-how within it you we're all by the way familiar with uh uh audio descriptions for movies right uh there's there's a profession of being uh audible being able to sort of a profession of audio descriptions for movies uh we believe that same professionality around it will be also for describing the physical environment as well um maybe two suggestions takeaways and i will end with that uh first again we believe that uh audible wayfinding system should and will be everywhere uh i think why why it should be everywhere is clear to everyone but the fact that it's actually happening and will be everywhere is not that clear time will tell but this is our art series uh and and secondly to be able to get to that reality where it's everywhere and everyone could feel included in the in the physical space or in public spaces and there's a lot of awareness and professional activism to get that and i know i guess that the part of you are working for companies or working for towards different uh products uh i kind of invite you to encourage your places to think about it to have to make sure that your physical space is accessible as much as your digital uh assets as well a lot of discussion as i said are on the digital sphere not enough on the physical we're still human so keep that in mind um happy to stay in touch chris i i hope it was uh not too fast but i'm trying to put as much as i could into this 25 minutes thank you eden that was great and it certainly we're finding is something i struggle with myself there are very few um tube stations in london i can actually get out of an exit without having to then turn on google maps to figure out whether it needs to go left right uh or straight on um are you okay to take a few questions if we have them i know i'm happy to take any questions yeah of course i'd like to open the photo questions if you want to use the q a panel or raise your hand in the participants channel or in the participants panel sorry but if not i will kick off i have a couple um how did you get from the kind of the initial concept to the product where it is now i mean have you been working with um users on a constant basis um you know with every iteration yes yes absolutely so in the very beginning we we had no clue of how even people outlined using smartphone at all like we had to learn so much and uh we met a lot of a lot of people we even joined them to our team in different stages to be part of it and we also today have people who are blind and visually impaired in the team and even even our name and a lot of people know that but even our name right here is like a self-reminder for us that the right thing to do is to hear but basically to listen to the end users we do not understand the needs and the interest as our end users are so absolutely evolving that from the very beginning i've mentioned a day in my talk and adi is has a very unique combination of understanding the technology behind it because it's software engineering himself and also understanding the need as a blind person from birth so having him together with us as a product strategist is i think is a great uh asset that we have and uh even today every new feature before we launch it up we have close a better group users that we discuss with them we let them try it first having their feedback and based on that and continue forward i have another one and it's about offices i know when we spoke before this event i mentioned where i work and the challenges of the layout on every floor is often the same or but what we're seeing now is that officers are moving towards flexible workspaces where the layout might change from week to week or month to month right have you considered how to address that solution or are you currently able to address that that that problem yeah yeah absolutely so yeah so the way as i might have mentioned before we have basically three main components one is the app the second is the beacon that we are installing in the venue and then thirdly is the online dashboard and with the online dashboard us and also the the facility manager can control edit and manage all the audible descriptions that later on will be audibly displayed to our users so usually when we put in the audio descriptions and again there are a lot of challenges around that but when we put them in this in the system we've tried to put the information that won't change very often for example the elevators will stay at the same place probably for a long long time as well as the main entrances the restrooms and things like that so obviously if an office if chris office is now in this room and maybe next month it won't be chris office anymore but someone sells office or whatever something like that this can be changed through the online dashboard uh the challenge with that by the way is maintaining it from from the the management around the facility but we we believe first that it's easier to change it online the this you know think about it right here a lot of a lot of way in a like an audible science right so you also need to change the sign on this room all of a sudden right it's not crazy office anymore it's phil's room for for example right so you need to change the sign there you need to print it you need to hang it we're already used to that where we're doing some changes in the facility in right here's the case you don't need to do anything aside of going to this online portal and change it in the text clicking save and that's it so in that perspective it's easier but what is difficult is remembering that and putting that into the awareness of the facility to do that um so yeah there are still challenges with that but it is it is uh for those companies that we work with who care about it it is working pretty well to maintain it we do have a we have two more questions so one in the q a panel um did you only do research with visually impaired participants and how was the research process not only but well it depends when when we just started we yes in the very very beginning it was actually only people who are blind not even visually impaired only people who are blind we were looking only for uh total total blind uh again in the in later stage we've done that with today we've done it not necessarily even with people with visual impairment but we also with other orientation challenges as i mentioned earlier sometimes it's cognitive or even mental uh because again the way we see you know this whole system is to provide independent and it's part of it is from the way finding side of things but there are other aspects of accessibility in the built environment that we put into it uh how as the research process goes uh we in the beginning we've just invited or even today we're inviting a certain number usually it's around 10. we've tried to do it more than that but we don't always have the the ability to reach more than that around 10 users we interview them then we let them try some uh uh if we already have some prototyping of what we have in mind and and this is usually how we iterate we launch it get the feedback and launch it launch a new one it's kind of it's an iterating iterative uh process although all the way um i i hope it's answered the the question there is another question i think by anita here chris do you want to maybe read it out uh i think phil had a question sorry i think phil had a question oh go ahead sorry you go yeah yeah i just wanted to know what the the response of the um individual organizations that you're dealing with um because you you sort of mentioned at the end there um do they do they respond well is there a sort of overarching response that they will have or is it yeah so you know it's a good point it's it's uh it also depends which which company which brand and all and and when so in the very very beginning it was really really hard and and even today when we're starting to penetrate a new market specifically the uk for example we didn't have it we didn't find yet unfortunately the the the pioneer we usually try to find a very well reputed uh brand to work with once they do it others are following but finding the first one to believe in that and adopting that that's the hardest challenge so as i said it depends in what sectors we feel that there is more of care around that in for example the education sector less of that in other sectors but it also depends on the stages and and we've seen that happening here in israel it's it's kind of like uh uh snowball when it starts so it starts and and it's and it's growing and others are following and joining this uh but having the first are always the most challenging part of it and by the way i mentioned that in my talk i truly believe that in in a few years time it will become required so there will basically no way around that you'll you'll just be obligated you know by by different uh uh accessibility regulations to have something like that so we hope that we'll push that forward as well i realize we're running behind schedule but i think we just have that one last question from anita um and it's about where do you get your users as test participants uh because we all know that can be quite challenging oh yeah oh yeah so there are two ways so again depending on the time in the beginning and even today we're working to very closely with the uh blind uh organizations and not just in israel by the way also actually in the uk rnab or henshaws in in north of the uk and thanks to them we are able to reach to certain groups of users when we meet with them we share with them our vision and i think at the end of the day it's a hundred percent free solution for them it always has been it always will be and we kind of share with them that to be able to have the world more accessible we need to work together with our community with our end users to bring it up uh to to everywhere um so first through through the the blind organization and then i think we're doing a very good job and um create crea i would say connecting them to the vision and to the mission and so we have you know many whatsapp groups already around that and facebook group and where we discuss the different ideas challenges uh and feedback so that's the way we do that thank you that's great uh eden i'd like to wish you good evening we'll let you go now we realize it's late over there i believe the app is available in the uk and you can demonstrate it if you check check several locations i've i've had a look at it so uh we hope to hear from you again soon and see the progress as the app develops so i'd like to wish you good evening thank you for joining us thank you so much it's been a real pleasure happy to invite you all connecting me and asking more questions if you have later and until next time have a nice evening everyone thank you chris thank you so just to introduce our next speaker a few years ago i was working at um vodafone i can talk about this because actually the product never launched in the uk and we were developing a tv service the vodafone um was developing an over-the-top tv service similar to what you might find for sky and they sent the mail pick list can you do the accessibility policy i said yeah sure no problem and they were like okay so our package contains a tv remote control a set-top box uh an epg it has uh packaging with set of instructions and we need you to make our lights accessible and all of a sudden i realized something that i thought should have been relatively straightforward wasn't and part of the reason was that we were relying a lot on the capabilities of the tv devices themselves so no matter what we put into the epg to make it accessible it all was dependent on the device itself and one thing that phil is going to talk about a challenge i'm sure we've all experienced is the tv remote control over to you phil if you'd like to share your screen hi guys um so um thanks chris for uh running this event um i've uh my name's phil robertson um i've been working in technology quite some time um i've grown up with it a lot of the toys that i have as a kid here in the background this is not a fake background these are real tangible computers from the 80s um i my father was a computer engineer so he used to bring um large mainframe computers home and let me play with him as a six seven eight year old and i switched the bbc by the time i was nine um i was into programming by the time i was 10 11. and i've used computers all that that time um and one thing that has always interested me is is the um scalability of technology the ability for um it to be more ubiquitous and i realized around about the time i was 18 19 i was working in recording studios and um i realized just how difficult some pieces of technology were to use and then when the ipad came along and people who were significantly younger and significantly older was starting to use it that's when i sort of woke up to accessibility um so i've worked in many large organizations i've actually defined out the accessibility standards for diageo thompson reuters ubs um johnstone johnson um and we'll continue to do so and i'm i'm happy to see that um accessibility standards are actually becoming um a common practice amongst designers not just a legal requirement that people feel they need to meet um one thing that sort of younger designers ask me how do i get better at design if you're genuinely stuck i would say um look at accessibility as a design a practice it will improve your design skills um so what i want to go through is the four areas of accessibility uh i wanna explain why they make us better better designers um i've also got a bit of a case study to do with capture um this is something that chris and i were both talking about um and then i'm gonna go over the uh the new samson remote um which i worked as part of the research team um on this very briefly um not as a designer um so the four areas of accessibility are visual physical auditory and cognitive now the reason why accessibility isn't just something that we do as a legal requirement or as an inclusive way to design is because not all um accessibility issues are due to the fact that they could be permanent um someone who has you know a visual impairment it can be temporary or it could be situational so when we look at visibility we have permanent visibility conditions some people just wear glasses and they have poor eyesight other people have various color blindnesses there are many different color deficiencies but the there are some that are more prominent than others um recently in fact after i put this uh presentation together somebody showed me um a plug-in for uh an app called storybook which is a ui development tool that actually will simulate all of the different um color deficiencies so you can open up your component or your interface you run the plugin and it will simulate the condition and it will also tell you uh how far you've gone along the wcag accessibility standards um there's also people like ourselves who are temporarily um in a situation where we might have an iron an eye injury um some people uh are more sensitive to flashing objects this is very common in uh car accidents people say that uh they crash their car because they're glinting um other people um under extreme emotional vibration find that they are unable to read properly um there's also situational you could just simply be in a very shiny environment with a shiny screen this is a big complaint of glossy versus matte screen finishes you can also have visual overload a lot of the time some interfaces aren't considerate of the users um so you get a lot of visual overload uh and this will put users at a loss even if they have um no requirements at all um there's also what they call the secondary task or blocked view again another common one from cars is the idea that you have something that's temporarily blocking your view um they say you know don't park cars on corners because people can't see around them um so as you can see even regardless of whether um what our situation is if we take into consideration these um permanent temporary and situational moments in our design we'll be able to design products that actually um work better if we go across to physical we do have people with congenital conditions motor skills and joint disorders as we move across into temporary this can just be somebody who simply has a hand injury and again motion and vibration can affect people but also when people are temporarily ill or they could be intoxicated a lot of the time people worry about the comment section of certain websites but they don't take into consideration that at the time maybe that person was intoxicated when they made the comment um we also have a situational um so mums new moms generally tend not to put babies down so they've only got access to one hand um people who are reclining because they're just tired uh and then there is a quite a common problem within kiosk work and this is um in public spaces uh people who are very tall often complain that uh cash machines and ticket machines um are unusually low for them uh and people who are in uh wheelchairs or who are just very short find that they're too high so we have to make sure that when we're designing um away from the computer out in public spaces that we take these into consideration as well we move over to auditory um we can see that we've got things like full hearing loss and partial hearing loss this is a fantastic area of not just accessibility but design in general a lot of companies are now moving into this i'll show you an example later on with samsung but as voice activated interfaces are coming along this is splitting off into its own area of ux now um voice commands and um assisted hearing devices are really sort of driving the forefront of that so it's a it's a great area to get into um right now i've also got temporary auditory conditions which is people with ear infections um or somebody who's just been required to wear safety clothing um protective ear protectors um and then you can have situational as well so um if you're in a loud environment such as a bar you might not be able to hear very well big complaint amongst users is uh audio drop out um poor internet connections um and then the final one is is heavy accents um i don't know if many of you are aware but uh siri had a strong problem with scottish accents when it first came out a lot of scottish people did not like syria at all it would understand english actions all of the variations fairly well but when it came to scotland um it failed quite a lot so i want to talk um a little bit about how we realize this in the real world when we're dealing with accessibility and all the different conditions that people have um how this is has become a problem um with people who use um assist assisted devices or have conditions and they get blocked and a classic example is the world of security um capture was um originally um bought in in order to stop um automated bots uh creating accounts um generating um feeds and commentary um there have been quite a few iterations on it um and it's not been great um i think the first uh version of capture that i came across um that was installed on our uh platform for sainsbury's back in i think 2009 actually ended up taking the entire site down so the technology wasn't very good when it first rolled out and it hasn't really got much better since then um so if we look at what users say um about all of the different capture forms um we can see that they fail quite quite obviously um i think some of you will have seen these examples online yourself but um i've just highlighted some of the biggest offenders so the number one is the picture capture where it asks you uh to select squares with street signs and there's nothing in them um there's also uh visually baffled baffling um examples um this one here is privy not a robot click on the animals an image below and then some sort of abstract mess um there was a recent report done into discount clear um it's quite common um about 35 of um adults uh suffer from some form of uh fairly high level dyscalculia um but uh 70 of adults say that they really don't like um being given numeric tasks in general um so a lot of the time you can get just failure from the general public with uh maths tests that come in there's also um some terrible examples of uh scrawly text that come up microsoft was particularly bad with this one um where they would choose an inappropriate font and then they'd twist it around and those fonts could could potentially change the meaning um does that say barrymore or does it say bar me more it's not using english words so it's not like you can refer to a spelling standard um these these really fail poorly with um uh people with dyslexia as well um there is also screen readers that people use who have visual impairment they fail terribly in fact a lot of the time in order for bots to um be put off accessing the audio option they'll put distortion into the actual audio itself um so these are two comments that were made by users um it could be really hard to hear the message since it's got to be distorted enough so the computers can't figure it out the screen reader audio starts playing before you can find the input text field because screen readers are driven by audio you don't know when you're actually in focus so the focus should be put on the field before you actually um input your text and often it isn't um webinographer did an online usability test of um all the different uh capture systems out there 62 percent of users completed capture on the first try so as you can see there's a big chunk of users there that don't actually um get the capture 23 struggled through multiple attempts and then 15 gave up entirely so if your organization is uh working and they're suggesting that they put a captcha on the page um just know that 15 percent of your users are just going to give up and another large chunk of them are not going to be happy uh that you've put it on there um somebody has said to me you know what are the solutions to that well we'll talk about that in a bit there's there are um multiple ways to get around capture and there are other other technologies out there um i just want to go over a an example of what it's like um to use uh capture this is um what they call recapture from google this was a response to the fact that capture itself was relatively failed technology and it was cutting off a lot of users so um somebody made this uh video to show what it's like using a screen reader with the new and improved recaptcha tab terms link tab tab toolbar refresh left parenthesis tab google tab toolbar on tab recaptcha link tab by zero underline one four one seven seven three two zero three five five eight four frame tab another robot check box now checked tab unverified tab privacy link tag shift shift tab and there shift tab another open space partially checked i 0 underline 1 4 1 7 7 3 2 0 3 5 5 8 4 frame i zero underline one four one seven seven three two zero three five five eight four frame opening challenge so as you can see there um this video does go on and it gets worse um it's it's not great uh so we have to ask ourselves what are the responses um if somebody's saying that they want capture on the site well here's six um i've seen a lot more uh there are plenty of websites out there that will show you different methods it entirely depends on the technology and the platform you're using one that i've personally used and liked was called datadome it's invisible sits on your website and it looks to see if the mouse is moving in certain ways and the keyboard is actually being pressed um the scroll is being used in a way that a human would scroll and that the page is being interacted with as though a genuine user would use it as a result it is extremely accurate and detects 98 of um bot behavior um but it's also extremely reliable at um understanding when humans are on there it there are configurable options where if it doesn't think you're human because you just so happen to be an extremely fast typer and scroller um with superhuman abilities um it might then inject um a capture form um but in general it um actually only shows any security options um less than 0.01

of the time so data dome is a great product um there's capture skip which is um basically a phone verification uh so it's it's two-step verification two-step verification is becoming a lot more popular because of the fact that it is one of the more successful security um methods uh google has kicked in two-step uh across its um platforms now and it will ask you to to two-step verify um instead of doing um captures and this is from the company that eventually originally pioneered the capture system there's also biometric and face ids these are great for logging into apps but they're also um great ways that if you're building um uh anything for mobile and you can access the face id or the biometrics um do so because people have always got a face or a finger there is sms two-factor as well this is a very similar um to capture skip this is where you physically get a code in the sms itself and then that auto populates um into the actual object that you've you've programmed because it will be connected via the cam there's a thing called a harneypop method um this is a field that is hidden from the user um it's actually physically there but it's underneath a um a white square and bots can't see that there's a white square there um so it's hidden using css and the display itself gets picked up by bots and if it gets filled in the user then is rejected uh and then finally um just get rid of it there's uh if if you're getting highly spammed or there's a lot of fake activity coming onto your site um then you know try a different technology but there's a very strong argument for just getting rid of recapture um usability wise it it doesn't offer that much security and uh an instance where we took off for capture for unilever um who have a you know extremely large offering um we actually found out that we only got spam and bots um in very minimal amounts of cases and we were actually able to just go into the email accounts and delete the junk um we set up junk filters and that caught a lot of it uh so we we didn't actually get anything from capture um or recaptures we were using the time so we just found that actually just getting rid of it was um was probably best secondly i want to move into the case study of the remote control remote control is a an extremely ubiquitous piece of technology um it's one of the most hated objects in the house um mostly because people either lose them but also um i think it was um a research group looked into how many people actually knew um what the functionality was uh on their remote controls and the results were pretty poor most people couldn't name at least seven buttons on the actual interface um a large swathe of them uh only knew what a fraction of them did and as you can see in the middle here we've got an example of uh responses to um elderly parents trying to use the tv um so their siblings or someone around them has come in and basically gaffer taped over the buttons that they don't need to use and it's quite a lot of the remote control to the right here is apple's second response to the remote their last remote was meant to be revolutionary but in fact even apple failed at this one and the uh the last apple tv remote was genuinely seen to be uh a bit of a failed object so um when we were doing our research at samson we actually realized that um you know if apple can't get this right then we were going to have a struggle as well so when we looked at the standard samsung remote one thing that samson had done was try to simplify it to reduce it down there are standard requirements across all remote controls and that is this um central wheel layout you'll find it on 95 of tv remote controls but in general the remote itself still suffered even color coding the buttons trying to break the buttons out into different patterns didn't test well when we asked users what their complaints were they would say well they're easy to use the buttons are confusing the icons don't seem to make sense um a lot of buttons contain no affordance with their features so users would simply press them to see what happened one of the other things that was quite specific samson was that 72-page manual that came with the television with some of the tiniest print i've ever seen we did actually have to get the magnifying glass out just to read parts of it um the manuals also aren't necessarily device specific so um a lot of the time manuals that are written for functionality of tv that is accessible from the remote itself um just isn't quite in enough detail and in some instances menus will render themselves differently from what's shown in the manual there are buttons on the uh remote controls that have no functionality whatsoever um not necessarily a entirely um just samsung but there were um some remote controls from sony and panasonic that the buttons didn't appear to actually do anything at all there was no voice control and also every time you buy a samsung device you would get a remote control with it now if you have a samsung tv and a samsung soundbar and other samsung hi-fi objects you cannot end up with a table full of remote controls and because they've all got samsung logos on them you don't know which one's the tv you don't know which one's the soundbar so that was another issue that we realized they did actually respond by putting the tv button up at the top but again most users didn't spot this also one thing that other manufacturers had started doing was sticking netflix buttons um on their remote controls however because the amount of streaming services um have sort of gone through the roof especially over covid it seems as though it was favoring one system uh over the others and if you're a amazon watcher then a netflix button is much used to you um also with the actual streaming services themselves the remotes um would vary the experience of using the tv remote control with streaming services tended to shift so with netflix it seemed to work better but with iplayer seemed to work really poorly also on the actual tv itself when you actually hit the menu button or the tools buttons on the remote itself you would get very generic menu systems that would come up that you then have to kind of guess how you use those menus with the remote control so a lot of users would simply start pressing around in order to try and work out whether a menu system was was um multi-page menu or single list view um and they didn't know uh most most users when we asked them said that they found that the actual layout functionality the menus themselves using the remote was confusing so samson came up with what they call the um one remote this um is a universal remote it controls any object in your house um it controls any samsung product uh that has a remote control um it can learn very quickly and it uses a bit of tech inside it to work out what it is that you're actually controlling and if it's not you can tell it and it'll learn um they did stick the netflix and the prime video buttons on there as you'll see i'm not entirely sure whether that was um was a great idea but um they went on there because uh they had a third button for an another service that you could assign um but in general this was a universal remote that that would um work with anything um it would accept voice commands it would also read out um in invoice uh objects on the screen um it would have this is voice feedback to you so if you turn these options on it would tell you that you've just turned the channel up or down it would work across multiple device you could it had a hot button that you could assign to anything that you wanted to so if you were using a specific service you press the hot button then it would activate that service um they cut the amount of buttons down um they tried to simplify even further at one point but um they stuck with um i think 11 objects actually in there with the scroll wheel um it also has uh it's got an auto detector in it so it uses a a new form of um sort of ir to measure what's in the room and will come up with commands on the tv to say would you like to control this device with this remote it has app support so you can access extra features on your mobile device it has a built-in voice guide that was would appear on the tv with auto description it had a learn remote button so you could actually pick up other remotes get it to learn that remote and take on board that fake that remote functionality it all also has a learn menu that when you activate it it will bring it up inside the tv to teach you how to use the um the actual features of the remote control itself um and then the other thing you do is you could invert the menus in terms of colors and it had dark mode it would you could change the contrast on the menus themselves uh it also had a sign language and a zoom feature and a whole bunch of accessibility shortcuts so as you can see this is a much more advanced object um it's moved on and it's still got some flaws but it's definitely an improvement over um the old designs if you actually um buy one of these you'll see that the learn remote functionality is built into the television where you would turn it on and it will actually walk you through all the features it'll speak to you when you press a button either via the remote itself or from the television it'll teach you how to do things so next time your nan wants to know how to access something you can press the hot button and it will teach you how to actually use those features on the television itself the voice guide is a another feature that they brought in that you can turn this on or turn it off but it will affection effectively speak every button press and every um change in setting to you there is um different uh color modes that you could get so people with um color vision deficiencies would have a setting that they could tell the tv what condition they have and it will adjust um the actual tv itself the the picture um and allow you to actually experience um color as uh and finally there's um the comfortable viewing mode which was um basically their response to the fact that a lot of menus are simply just big garish menus um so you could invert them you could have dark backgrounds um you could set it for depending on what your disability is and it's all split out as you can see at the top here vision hearing and physical disabilities just to make the entire device much more um accessible and samson didn't see this as a as a sort of exercise in accessibility they just saw it as a better design tv when it was tested the the device the the remote control was seen as a significant step forward um and it was actually given an award by the rnib as being the most accessible television on the market so um thanks for listening um if you've got any questions let me know and i will hand back to chris thank you phil i think that's a great example of a company willing to invest in accessibility and seeing it as a general selling point one of the challenges i had when working on the tv remote was i suggested a few of the features that were in your list um and was told quite honestly by the product owner that there was a maximum unit cost that vodafone were willing to spend and that some of these features just wouldn't be possible in the budget the product was very much going to be a budget product and sadly that meant it was going to have a lower degree of accessibility um pretty much yeah all i can say about that uh are there any questions from the um from the audience i did notice um a presentation i think last week that i was able to dip into i believe one of the values of this is that samsung have actually put some of these features into their telephones so i think the color the color change the future yeah there's i mean the the the reason why a lot of remote controls are actually um such failed objects is because they were designed to one template and a lot of tv companies don't actually make their remote controls they buy them pre-packaged and then tweak them but with new 3d printing technology and stuff like um you know the raspberry pi tiny little computers um we were able to build different versions of things and and just test them and realize the physicality of them and not have to mass produce thousands of them before we got something right it was it's very much a case of we're in a we're in an age now where the maker community is actually really driving this a lot you can 3d print something you can shove a raspberry pi in it and you can get it to control almost anything with relatively low levels of code so it's um it's a really good time to be involved with sort of physical um electronic design especially when it comes to the stuff that's that's just been sort of glossed over quite a lot were there any features that either through research or through like i said like i said british considerations or just technical limitations that you identified as things that would be useful for the user but just weren't able to uh get into the current generation of products um i think the main thing was the fact that um there was just a general reluctance to approach the the topic itself the the a lot of tv features that come out there try and expand the feature set of the television and a classic example is 3d tv i never knew anybody who actually said they liked it and a lot of people in the industry who were product reviewers just said it's not some there was no real demand for it it was it was almost like a feature that was pushed onto users um with this what samsung have done is actually create something that that have taken um a section of their audience and just made a better design product and as as a result people who are more elderly or they're unwell or they have um some disability are now included in that set and it's it's not going to be um you know a barrier for them and that that number is actually pretty large uh they were saying that um there are more

2021-06-22 00:59

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