- Thanks so much Ryan I really appreciate the introduction and I certainly appreciate the invitation from DQ to participate in today's event. I also wanna thank Anna who is our ASL interpreter. Now this is hard work and it's very much appreciated. I also wanna tell you how much respect I have for Hoben Germa whom I have met once and who is a perfect example of the power of assistive technology when it's applied well and when the person who's using it has learned to use it extremely effectively. So we had a conversation backstage and I came away much impressed. You know, it is often said that there are a billion people in the world with a disability of some kind some of them invisible and that helping them is helping a billion people. I wanna remind you that every time a person with a disability is assisted in some way that you may actually be affecting positively another 6 billion people, because the rest of the world interacts with those people with disabilities. And to the extent that we assist a person with a disability to engage with the rest of the world's population we really benefit everyone. And so I would say that that 1 billion number is a low ball estimate for the impact of high quality assistance and accommodation. And I wanna make sure that you understand that when I speak of assistance, I'm also thinking of accommodation, which simply means thinking about how one interacts with a person who has a disability you should make no assumptions and you should ask, "how can I be helpful?" Sometimes the answer is, "I don't need help thank you very much." And sometimes it might be, "please face me when you're speaking, because I'm speech reading or lip reading." I'm sure there are lots of other answers like that but don't be afraid to ask, in the worst case, someone will say, "thank you very much I don't need help." In a number of cases you might very well elicit a helpful response. I wanna switch now to thinking more about the design of a assistive technology for a moment. There are literally hundreds of thousands maybe even millions of programmers out there. And I would guess that most of them are not very familiar with techniques for making their software, their user interfaces accessible. It's not because they're stupid. It's simply because they don't have experience with programming for accessibility. And in the absence of experience there is very little on which to base intuition. And honestly, the design of intuitive software is hard to begin with regardless of whether it's addressing disabilities or any other convenience of use. But intuition for for designing accessible software is hard to come by. The implication of that from my point of view is that people with disabilities need to be part of the design equation. We need to listen to them and understand what works and what does not work. Moreover, it's important for designers to appreciate that disabilities come in all shapes and depths in my case, for example, my disability which is a hearing impairment is largely corrected by wearing binaural hearing aids. But there are people who have much more severe losses and who hear nothing in which case they need a different kind of accommodation than I do and the same argument can be made for people with visual impairments. Some simply need some magnification or an improvement in contrast and others are blind and they require an alternative presentation specifically voiced presentation of the interface that they're trying to use. So the reason I mentioned this is that figuring out how to make a piece of software accessible over a broad range of disabilities is very, very hard. If think for a moment about someone with a motor disability and isn't able to use a keyboard. So of course we have eye trackers and other kinds of mechanisms to try to adapt to that person's capabilities. But again, any one user interface is unlikely to be able to address all possible combinations and degrees of accommodation that's required. So I wanna come back to that in a little while but we'd like to also suggest to you that when we try to figure out how to make it easier for someone who wants to make their software accessible we can think about design principles, design tools, libraries of software with well tested methods and I will have to emphasize persistent user interfaces. One of the most difficult things in the world for everyone disability or not is changing user interfaces and destroying whatever it was that you remembered about how this interface works. I think the most aggressive complaints that I can remember seeing about any software changes are, why did you change that? I've gotten accustomed to using this interface, and then many bad words follow. So I think that all the designers ought to be thinking seriously about how to make sure that their software has a theme of use which is persistent over time, if that's at all possible. Of course, when you add new features it's understood that you may have to make changes to the way the interface works, but many people including those without disabilities will thank you for some kind of stability in the user interfaces. Imagine for a moment that you're confronted with a web page, but you're blind and the question is how are you going to encounter the web page? And many of you are familiar with software systems called screen readers which attempt to present a web page in some kind of serial fashion. Well, if you're a web page designer and you care about making things accessible, one of the questions you might ask yourself is, how would I present this webpage in a serial fashion to someone who cannot see it? And this of course is exactly what the screen readers are confronted with and the users of this screen readers make use of for example keyboard shortcuts in order to move around on the web page but they need acoustic cues to say where they are and what they can do on that web page. Another example of a thoughtful design is to minimize the number of things that you have to tell the user if she hear she can do at this moment. So anyone who's ever used a telephone automatic response system and has been confronted with 16 different alternatives right at the very beginning and then a giant tree of options which you get lost in and can't figure out how to get back to the top. We'll appreciate limitation on the number of choices you have at any moment while you're interacting with a web page. All of these things are in my opinion, useful design principles not only to make things more accessible but also for people with normal capabilities but who would appreciate a simplification wherever possible. I'm sure that everyone who has a visual impairment would appreciate that any image that's part of a web page or computer application has some alternative description of it so that at least you know what it is you would see if you could see. And this led me to thinking about another kind of interesting possibility for many films and movies and television programs there is something called a kind of visual commentary that's available for someone who is blind the is to describe what's happening in the scene enters spurs between the dialogue among the actors and it occurred to me in a not very well formed thought that if you were designing a web page and you were thinking about accommodating someone who couldn't see it, I wonder if there would be kind of utility in having a visual commentary about the web page which you could enable or disable at will in order to get some sense for what's on it. This is separate from the idea of an image description which you could ask for it, but this would be more like here is your guide to this web page has just shown up. I'm sure that that would get very old very quickly if you had to be repeatedly exposed to it just like the telephone answering system where you tire very quickly or hearing the same instructions over and over again. So you'd want to be able to turn that off as you became familiar with that particular web page but having a kind of guide to the web page strikes me as an interesting idea. Now this is coming from someone who has not used a screen reader and is visually oriented and so it could be a stupid idea and I won't be either embarrassed or angry if somebody in the Q&A part it says you don't know what you're talking about but I would love to hear comments from people who are familiar with the visual commentary that's available to say whether or not that idea is applicable. I want to come back to something which I mentioned earlier it has to do with the design of user interfaces for a broad range of accommodation. In some cases, it may turn out to be simply too hard to design something that works for more than let's say 80% of the various conditions that one is trying to accommodate. And at that point, as I'm thinking now about design for interfaces to any software based system we might think for a moment about the application and its interface as two separate pieces think like head and body for example. And so imagine that the body is the application and it has an API which allows you to activate the various capabilities of the application. The head however, is designed to accommodate specific and perhaps extreme accommodation requirements. The idea of designing an application that has an API that's programmable and will allow different interfaces to be fitted to the body, might be at least a design tactic that we could keep in mind. Of course what that means is that the body, the application has to have the application programming interface which will allow the head software to drive it in any way necessary. So taking alternative information from what the user needs to convey to the application whether you're using the keyboard or using an eye tracker or using some speech to text interpreter or something else all of those are generating signals that need to be expressed in the API. But designing a head body architecture might turn out to be a useful tactic in order to deal with the more extreme cases. I'd like to spend some time now talking about my wife's story because hers is a wonderful example of the exercise of technology. Sigrid was born with normal hearing and so in the story that ensues keep in mind that she's post lingually deaf. She lost her hearing when she was three, no thanks to spinal meningitis. The high temperature destroyed the sillier hairs in her cochlea so she was profoundly deaf after that experience her mother took her to the John Tracy Clinic in Los Angeles where her mother learned how to help Sigrid maintain her speech because she had had the acoustic exposure. She was speaking by the age of three. And so the idea was to maintain her speech which she was capable of doing. So her speech was relatively normal unlike, for example some speech that is not as facile for someone who was born deaf and has never heard sound the brain has never been exposed to sound and doesn't know what speech sounds like. So Sigrid speech was almost normal but she had spent the next 50 years lip reading. That's all she could do. She did not learn to sign her parents took the view that she should try to live in a hearing world by accommodation through speech reading. She was really really good at it. She went through all of her schooling, including college without any special accommodation except for her efforts to lip read. But at age 53 she got on the internet it's nice to be able to tell this part of the story because she made use of something I helped to build and discovered cochlear implants and got ahold of a doctor John de Parco at Johns Hopkins University and went up to be tested and they discovered that indeed her cochlea was still working it just didn't have the sillier hairs it needed so she was a candidate for a cochlear implant. And in 1996, she got her first implant. It was spectacularly successful. I mean, for the statisticians in the crowd this is a Six Sigma case. She went up for the operation it's an outpatient operation basically 45 minutes or something and then went back two or three weeks later after everything healed and they turned on the speech processor and within about 20 or 30 minutes of turning it on she picked up the phone and called me we've been married for 30 years at that point and we had not been able to use the telephone. So we had our first telephone conversation it wasn't a deep conversation, but it was very moving. And then I finally got home and I discovered that I had a 53 year old teenager I couldn't get her off the phone. She was talking to everybody including the telephone calls coming in from solicitors. Now it happens I was at that point a senior vice president at MCI. AT&T calls and Sigrid of course picks up the phone and says, "Oh, hello, what are you calling about?" And they saying, "well, we're calling from AT&T would you like to switch to our service?" And she says, "Oh, well, where are you?" And they'll say, "Oh, Bengaluru India" "Oh, how fascinating your speech is very good. Where did you learn your English?" This is go on for about half an hour. This poor sales person is saying at the end would you like to switch to AT&T? And she says, "well, no my husband works for MCI, but thanks for calling." And then she hangs up. Then she decides that there are words that she hasn't heard and so she needs to hear them. So she calls the library, remember she's on the phone. She calls the library and says, "can I sign up for recorded books for the blind?" And they say of course, no problem what's your name and address and phone number? And then they say, "now you're blind, aren't you?" And she says, "no, I'm deaf." And there's this long pause and they're trying to figure out how's that gonna work? She listens to 500 books on tape and eventually is able to distinguish accents and recognize when people are mispronouncing words but it doesn't stop there. It turns out that her speech processor has an auxiliary input port and so she can attach a microphone on a wire which she could then clip to somebody's lapel. So if she's walking through let's say an art gallery with a guide she clips the microphone through the guide's lapel and she's getting perfect sound because the distance between the mouth and the microphone is six inches she's getting very high quality signal to noise ratio from that. And then of course, no decibel will go on detected. She decides to get an FM transmitter receiver so you can hang the FM transmitter around the neck of a lecturer at an auditorium, for example and hear perfect sound from 150 feet away. Then she also gets optical receivers so if there's a movie theater that is broadcasting the sound by way of optical she can pick that up and plug that into the speech processor as well or she can get a patch cord and on an airplane plug the speech processor into the audio out of the movie and hear only the sound of the movie and not the screaming three year old who's two seats away. So Sigrid has mastered the use of technology to augment her ability to capture sound. And I think what's important about this story is the persistent determination that she had to use every possible alternative in order to obtain access to sound. Now, the story goes on after 22 years that particular implant failed and in the meantime she'd had a second implant in the other ear so she was binaurally cochlear implanted. Then one of the implants failed a new implant was put in a few months later and with the new technology this is just in 2019 of the new technology was so much better than the 1996 technology that now when she listens to music, it's actually worth listening to in the first implant, when I took her through a concert, it was a Bach Organ Concert and after the first 10 minutes she said, "this sounds like a garbage disposal," and we left the concert. Now after the new implant was put in I was playing some Beethoven and she said, "Oh, that sounds very nice." And of course we drop everything and I pull up Wagner and Bach and everything else. She now she enjoys pretty complex music. Thanks to the newer assistive technology. So let me, let me stop there I mean, I could go on and on, but what I am interested in hearing from you of course, is what your experiences are? What your advices about people like me and others who care about building software that's accessible. And perhaps we can together come up with some advice to the people at DQ and elsewhere who care about solving these problems. So everyone in the world has access to the technology that they deserve. So Ryan I'll stop there and we'll find out whether anyone has some questions or comments to make.

- Yeah, yeah thanks Vint so much. I love the personal story you were able to share with us. Thank you for sharing that. I also love the head and body analogy. We have a couple of questions already that I can direct our attention toward here. Anyone else that has questions, please direct your attention to that Q&A widget and submit them there and we'll try to get to as many of these as we can. So this question is particularly interesting it states I work in B2B designing the back office systems of our organization. I'm able to make a couple of accessibility related fixes yet to make our systems WCAG compliant I'll need to get buy in from higher management. How would you suggest I present accessibility and its ROI to management?

- So thank you that is an excellent question and in a sense, yeah I'm gonna argue for just a second it's a bad metric. It may be that the installed base of your users has a small number of people with disabilities. However, let me suggest the following lines of reasoning. The first one is that if you are able to introduce a very good accommodation you may actually grow your user base particularly in the set of potential users who have need for that accommodation. So that's the first point is that you can tout that you can say look it's sort of like you know, say Espanyol you know, we speak Spanish as well as English or some other language. So that's the first point. The second point is that everyone in the world at one time or another is going to experience a disability. It may not be permanent, but I can tell you that anyone who's ever broken their legs and has had to use a wheelchair will gain great sympathy for people who have to use wheelchairs all the time and can't find a ramp or an elevator or something else conveniently and you'd think twice after having that kind of experience, well there are gonna be other similar sorts of things maybe you broke your hand and you can't type with two hands. I had a friend who broke both arms, for example and this was really tough for several weeks, if not months to recover from that. How about when you land from an airplane ride and your ears are all plugged up and you can't hear the thing. I remember one general that I was meeting with from the army landed and suddenly one of his ears is all plugged up and he said this is the most frustrating experience he ever had. Of course, I'm glad he told me that it was the airplane that did it 'cause I thought maybe if he had been a tank driver it was all the noise of the dans going off that might've caused him to be more permanently deaf. So that's the second point that everyone will have experienced a disability of one kind or another and so the accommodation will be appreciated by them even though that may not be a permanent condition. The third observation I would make is, it's just the right thing to do and you know I can't over emphasize that it just strikes me that the computer in particular is probably the most flexible device that has ever been invented. I mean, it'll do anything you can figure out how to program and that suggests to me that there are no excuses for failing to figure out how to adapt this wonderful and adaptable device to accommodate for people who have a need for assistive respondents. So those are some of the arguments that you can use to top management. And I would say that it may even be a marketing opportunity which I hinted out at the beginning to say that we believe that this accommodation is important. So I think those are the first things that come to my mind in response to a very good question.

- Yeah, fantastic yeah. I know empathy right is a significant driver I don't think I've ever met, you know someone that works on a deaf team that goes to the office and says, I'm gonna build an app that's not accessible to people with disabilities today. There's definitely some learning and some empathy building that needs to be done.

- So Ryan if I could interrupt you for a second before you asked that question, your comment about empathy reminds me of a wonderful book that it turns out that John Hennessy is the former president of Stanford University he's a dear friend and he's chairman of the Board of Alphabet, which is the holding company for Google. He wrote a book called "Leading Matters" which is a lovely two word plan and at the beginning of the book I think in the first chapter if I remember right, he focuses on empathy and how powerful and important it is for leadership lack of empathy interferes with your ability to lead. So thank you for bringing that up. I would urge you to have a look at at John Hennessy's book to see the power of empathy.

- That's a great suggestion thank you. Okay, I've got another question here for you. Do you have any suggestions for recruiting people with disabilities in participating in the accessibility testing process or user acceptance testing?

- Yes, I think of two possibilities here. The first one is that if you hired people as we do at Google who happened to have disabilities we often will turn to them and ask for help. But let me tell you that, it sounds good on the surface but let me say that when we hire people with disabilities we usually don't hire them for their disabilities we hire them to do some work which may have nothing to do with their disabilities at all. I haven't been hired to be a tester hearing interfaces and things like that because I have to wear hearing aids I was hired because I guess they wanted somebody around to they can try it out and say, he was around at the beginning of the internet. So the important point here is that you need to design into the development process a capability to test against needs of people with disabilities. Now there are companies that exist that do exactly that they have deliberately hired people for their disabilities for purposes of testing, accommodation and accessibility. And I've not gonna advertise, you know which ones here just because it'd be inappropriate, but I will say they exist and you should look for them and you should do a Google search for accessibility testing and I bet a bunch of them would pop up. So that would be the most obvious thing to do would be to turn to companies that are deliberately focused on that. There is an issue and that one has to do with secrecy. A lot of companies don't want their next version of something should be out there in front of the competition and so the testing facility has to sign up for secrecy. This is not too different than what happens in the film industry. Lemmie pick an example of Skywalker's sandwich just to pick something I have heard of when they are working on a movie they typically will isolate a little group of people and say, "don't tell anything about this movie to anybody," because it's a big secret until they release the film. And so they create these little vacuum walls of people. That doesn't work very well when you need the full scope of testing for all kinds of impairments and so that means everybody has to sign up to keep confidential that which is being tested but that's the best way to get a full scope of testing. I would turn to organizations like the National Association for the Deaf just to pick an example, do ask for possible volunteers, but again they would have to sign non disclosure agreements and be subject to penalties if they failed to keep the disclosure agreement valid. So those are some of the things that come to my mind knowing about getting things tested. A commitment to do the testing though is probably the most important thing.

- Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All the better when you're paying those folks do the testing for you, right? So thank you for that. I have got another question here. You probably get a question like this a lot and I'm sure you saw it coming but if you went back in time knowing what the state of the internet is now, and more specifically the state of digital accessibility with to put it mildly lots of room to grow, would you have done anything differently?

- You know that's such an interesting question. I don't get that one as often. I usually get the, what would you tell your younger self that usually it's built in more security and things like that by the way make sure you start with IP version six instead of IP stuff like that. So this is a really really profound kind of question and it's relevant in the following senses. I was very much drawn to computers and eventually computer networking, partly because of my hearing impairment, electronic mail was invented in 1971 or '72 is this pre-internet but it was invented in the context of the ARPANET project which is a defense department project. The advanced research projects agency of the defense department wanted to find out whether it could link disparate computers together from different manufacturers over some kind of network. So that researchers doing research in artificial intelligence in the late '60 and early '70 could share their resources and their software in order to advance the state of the art more quickly. So they designed or had designed and built a packet switch network called ARPANET and one of the first and most popular applications and so very popular application was electronic mail. Well, this was hugely helpful to me for two reasons. First of all, it dealt with the time zone problem I didn't have to be up at the same time that a colleague in Japan was up in order to have a phone call because we could just do our email whenever we were awake. And second, of course it was more precise than struggling to hear what someone said on the phone and asking for repetition. So I was drawn to the internet essentially partly because it was part of the email environment or supported the email environment. I think was not thinking much at the time, however about building around the concept of accessibility. I took advantage of what it offered but I wasn't thinking closely about that. And honestly, if I could go back I think I would remind my younger self that speaking from the future that we had not done a very good job of accommodating people with disabilities and that we should be thinking about that sooner than we had make that kind of moral commitment as part of the design process and I would want to inject that into the classes that we were teaching in computer science. And I have to tell you that in today's world, when we look at the internet and we see the abuses that show up in especially in some social networking contexts, the notion of ethical programming has become increasingly important and I would incorporate into the philosophy of ethical programming, the idea of naturally accommodating disability as part of the ethical responsibility. And so if I could I would go back and try to inject that into the system and get more people thinking about how to design and build accessible software.

- Yeah, fantastic response I love that. I'm sure you couldn't have forecasted where we are today but yeah, I think that's great I love that idea of ethical programming. I have a similar question building off of that. You probably didn't forecast the state of the internet of things and her quotes, where do you see the future of accessibility being impacted by by the internet of things?

- So first of all I was thinking and talking and lecturing about the internet of things before that term was adopted. Probably I would say process as much as 15 years ago maybe even more maybe 20. I'd have to go back and look at my 1997 PowerPoint slides to see whether or not that claim can be established but it's certainly been a long time, decades a couple of decades at least. So I was already worried about the potential proliferation of the devices first of all, then I became and continued to be extremely worried about safety and security because often these devices are not very expensive. And so the people who build them just grab stuff out of their open source libraries and throw it into the device and then sell it to you and then say, "I have your money to buy." And then what if it breaks? What if it has a bud? What if it's used to snoop on you? What if it performs and fails to perform properly and the house burns down, to me they're all all kinds of horrible scenarios associated with this because the economics are not matched up with the notion of let's again say ethical programming and attention to the safety and security and privacy and so on. So I worry a lot about the internet of things for a number of reasons. Now, let me turn it to the specific question that you're asking in fact I have a good friend who's passed away now but he was losing his sight as he got older but he installed a Google product and I'm not trying to make an advertisement here is just a factual example it was Google home but he could have used other similar products. This was a voice activated system and so he could say tune into this channel on the television, or turn the lights off and or take other actions around the house. And he was really happy about that because it enabled him to do things he didn't have to ask someone else to do it for him. And I would say that within the IOT space, there is a real opportunity to enhance people's independence, to give them agency that they might not otherwise have. And I think everyone on this call who has experienced a loss of agency will appreciate the potential that IOT kinds of devices offered and one thing I will say that's quite exciting is an adjacent notion that's called edge computing. And what that is intended to mean is that if you had a collection of devices that are in your home or your office, or a manufacturing plant rather than relying on interaction from those devices all the way out to some server in the cloud you might imagine having something in between that is capable of performing local processing with low latency and so there's a effort at Google and elsewhere to put things like machine learning capabilities into these edge computing devices so local interactions can be taken and to illustrate this for a different purpose, think about space exploration. All of us saw the perseverance rover land successfully on Mars hats off to the jet propulsion lab, what an accomplishment, right? When you think about all the information that they're gonna be collecting with that thing it might be very helpful to have local onboard processing to analyze as much as possible so as to compress the amount of information that has to be sent back or to draw attention to something that should be examined more thoroughly because the local processing says, "Oh this meets the criteria for something really weird and you should go look more carefully about it." So edge computing may help us deal with the IOT space but I certainly eager to see the IOT concept applied to assistive technology in order to enable people to be more independent.

- Thank you, thank you so much. I think we're at time here. I really, really appreciate the time you've taken and donated to all of us at DQ and the attendees here, we were in debt for this amazing beast that we have that we're all exchanging our lives on today. So thank you and thank you for your time especially today. For those of you that are watching thank you for attending EXCON thank you for practicing accessibility and I hope to see you a lot over the next day or two here.

- Thanks so much Ryan. Good luck with the rest of the program.

- Appreciate it.