structured settlement

>> so, thank you. wow, a clap and i haven't even started yet. i want to say that this is one of the most hospitable conferences that i've ever been to and spoken at. the exchange rate for hospitality is quite high. yesterday i gave somebody-- how many of you guys are from penn state and this area? yea, so kudos to you, because shawn smith,

fantastic representative of hospitality. he was looking for a dongle, which if you're a presenter you know that's like gold. and if you don't have it and you're presenting in like an hour as he was yesterday he was a little bit frantic. so, i went up to my room and i gave it to him and i just gave him my card like you know please don't forget who i am,

because i'm actually speaking tomorrow. and instead of the dongle i got the dongle and this awesome t-shirt. it's penn state university rugby football club, which i probably wouldn't have got in any other case. so, how awesome is that, right? i mean that's pretty impressive so you guys do a tremendous job. and i have the distinct dubious honor of being

between you and your food. so, i will go at somewhat of a clip a little bit to make sure that you guys have some time too. we can discuss and talk about whatever's on your mind with regards to accessibility. here's what we're not going to talk about today. most of the time when people think about web accessibility one of the first things that comes to mind are all the devices that people tend to use,

assistive technology that allows them to be able to interact with web content. don't get me wrong. this is an absolutely important part of understanding how to be able to create universally accessible experiences. with that said there are things that are much larger than that at play, especially in the growing trends of the internet and the population and how people are consuming content.

so, we're not going to be talking about so much devices. you won't hear the word screen reader other than right now. you won't hear aria, but if you do want to talk about those things later on today, happy to talk to you about that. this is a picture of my dad and he was a big man, larger than life, about six foot four, had seven kids, hugely influential in all of our lives. and several years ago he had a stroke and he was

in the hospital for several months. and this is one of my favorite photos. it's a little hard to see. this is a photo of six out of the seven kids and we're all surrounding him and talking to him. he had had several strokes repeatedly afterwards when he was in the hospital. and so he had a lot of limited mobility and pretty significant vision loss

as a result of those strokes. but, what you see is a huge grin on his face, because he's having this unique opportunity to have almost all of his kids in the same room. we're talking about where we are with our lives, how much we appreciate everything that he did to influence it. and he was really, really proud of everything we'd done. i had about a month of being able to spend every day

with him while we were in the hospital and we talked about some of the work that i was doing and he was very proud of it. i had just started working on-- we had just finished a redesign of-- i worked at a large fortune 100 company. we finished a redesign of the medicare website, the humana medicare website. and he thought well, this is pretty appropriate.

he said you know i'm interested in maybe looking at a new plan. i'm not exactly happy with how things are going. maybe you can kind of show me what you've been working on. and i had started working in web accessibility about two years previous to that, so i was really, really proud to be able to show him what we had done. we had done extensive accessibility testing on this site. so, this is the add a prescription tool that's

on the humana medicare site. and there's three columns. the first one is to search for a drug. the middle column are the search results. and the final column is after you've added that drug your list of prescriptions. and they had done really well like i said with accessibility testing. we felt really comfortable with that.

so i said, "alright dad, we're going to through this." this is exciting. we get to see it really live. what's your first drug? he said coumadin, which is a blood thinner and, of course, i spelled it wrong. and i was happy to see that all these results came back and that the real drug was actually there. that was great.

and he said look you know, let me see that. so, he pulls it in there and he selects add coumadin and this is what we kind of expected to see. this is the modal that pops up afterwards that allows you to figure out the dosage and the form you take it in and how often you take it. only because of the fact that he had this vision loss he was having to bump up the screen quite significantly

so this is actually what he saw. this is more likely the case when somebody has low vision or glaucoma. this is what they're actually looking at. so, i don't know about you, but i really have a hard time understanding what that is. so, it took him a little while and he went through and as he went through he's looking and he's adding how often he takes the drug,

how much he gets it refilled and everything like that. and he selects it and you can see like far in the right corner that coumadin is now in his prescription list. and so that was about five to seven minutes worth of activity. i said, "okay, first drug entered." how many more drugs do you take and he said 10. so, there was this sort of awkward pause,

a little bit of silence. and i think he felt a little sheepish, because the next question he said, is hey can i ask you something and he was almost kind of afraid to ask me. i was like sure. and this is a question i will never forget. if it's accessible, why is it so hard to use? and that really plagued me.

i had done so much work to try and make something accessible to people with disabilities. we had done all of this testing. we were using best practices and we had done our best efforts. why was it so hard to use? and so then i thought well, was my dad the exception to the rule? how many drugs do seniors take on average?

anybody have a guess? >> twelve. >> well, maybe it's becoming that way. the average though is 11. so, my dad was exactly average as far as what we expected. but, when we had done usability testing with seniors, when we had done accessibility testing what we never considered was how many times someone would have to use this tool over and over and over.

so, now i have this personal rule, rule 11 and that is if i test something once and i think it's accessible, i test it 10 more times to see how that really feels. so, today's talk is called the mindfulness of accessibility and it's really about designing and thinking about the way that you approach accessibility beyond a checklist, beyond a technical specification, beyond any of those things and really designing for a universally accessible web.

in case you're in the wrong room my name is elle waters and i work at simply accessible and you can find me at nethermind and that's kind of a shortcut to places where we generally speak. so, 13 percent of the u.s. population is currently 65 and older according to the administration of aging and some other data. twenty three percent of those seniors speak english as a second language and 37 percent

of those seniors report having a severe disability. so, when we're looking at those disabilities let's think about just as a list we'll run down a lot of the common ones. age related mobility impairments include arthritis, muscular weakening, bone frailty, slower reflexes, tremors and one that people often forget about that's pretty significant, which is fatigue. age related auditory disabilities can include partial

hearing loss, ringing in the ears, inability to distinguish high pitched noises, inability to distinguish phonemes and deafness. one that's definitely on the rise with the increase in dementia, i saw a statistic the other day, couldn't find it so i'm not going to put it on slide deck. might be bogus, but it was terrifying, which is that every 59 seconds someone in this country is diagnosed with early onset of dementia;

that's pretty terrifying. age related cognitive disabilities can include problem solving issues, attention issues, confusion, memory lapses, math, visual, linguistic comprehension. and ones that people think about more often age related disabilities, glaucoma, cataracts, macular degeneration. these two next words are just fancy words for nearsighted and blind-- nearsighted and farsighted

and then total blindness. so, if somebody was say had a macular degeneration typically what it would look like and i just picked on penn state of course, it would be a website that would have a lot of blurry vision right, around the corners and then you'd have this spot in the middle. and it's really difficult to design for something like that, right. i mean that's not really something that you're going in

and you're saying i'm going to create a persona and i'm make sure that right in the center where most people think about the eye focus right, that there's no significant content there. patrick talked about this yesterday in his talk. this is what's known very pretty commonly referred to as the silver tsunami. so, this really kind of puts in perspective of what we're talking about.

if it's a just few old people then maybe you'd say well, these aren't our target demographic, although there's been a whole lot about aging into the third stage of your life and the increase in attending higher ed, because they want to retool their careers, individuals who are older. there were in 2010, 40 million people who were age 65 and older.

that's projected to be 55 million in 2020 and 72 million in 2030. that's just in the united states alone. that's one in every five americans, right. so, the silver tsunami is coming your way and the question is are you ready. so, why do i bring this up? i bring this up because age impacts accessibility and i really want people to start thinking outside

of the typical persona that they imagine when they think about a person with disabilities. age impacts accessibility. what about language implications? so, i don't know if any of you guys are familiar with the street vendor project in new york city. it's one of the coolest things that's happened. so, if you visited new york city you know that there is a thriving,

thriving community of street vendors from hot dog vendors to people are selling flowers to people who are artists, who are selling on the street. there's over 20,000 street vendors in new york city alone. and a lot of those are people who are imigrating from another country and this is their opportunity to really change both their life and the lives of their children and their children's children. unfortunately, there's so many rules about parking

and where you can in new york city right, at any given time. the city ordinances are staggering. and on average there are over 40,000 tickets and 10,000 arrests issued to street vendors a year. and the vast majority of that is where they can place their wares, where they can park their table or their food truck, which is kind of stunning. because, if you are more than 18 inches away from the curb

in new york city with your table of wares you're fined 1000 dollars, which is essentially like putting them out of business, right. and yet when you're looking at the city ordinance code this is a picture of what it looks like, which is a giant wall of text, like i don't want to read this. i can't even imagine someone who might be using english

as a second language coming in and trying to make sense of all of this, right. that's crazy. that's just really not sustainable. so, there is an artist named candy chang. she does a lot of public installations. i don't know if you guys have ever seen this, but there's big chalkboards around the country that say before i die i want to and people go up

and they're able to participate and fill in. and so it's a real public interaction space. it's super cool. she decided to partner with a couple of other groups and create a plain language based, design based, really thoughtful approach to explaining to vendors what the rules were. and in doing that basically they just empowered all of these vendors.

and if you look on this you'll see that it's really simplified. it has a picture of a person with a table and it's saying like 10 feet from the curb cut and 18 inches from the side, from the road. and so, because of this they had this drastic decrease in the amount of tickets. and because of this vendors felt empowered. they felt like this is really something they can take

ownership of. and there are a lot of things that have happened as a result of this, because of the fact that there were people who were willing to be able to empower them through mechanisms and means other than you must learn the native language and i'm just going to recite this the way it is. so, how prevalent is a literacy issue in this country? twenty one percent of the american population have a reading

level below fifth grade. and this statistic right here, this 19 percent is up on the screen, because this is particularly i think important for higher ed. nineteen percent of high school graduates can't read. so, there's that as far as what we're looking at. so, when we think about who is affected right by that, you have to ask yourself, sometimes it's--

you know you're looking at it. and you say well, this is what it must feel like to be reading you know content in another language. but, sometimes we're talking about people who are born and raised in the united states with a single language family that's an english speaking family. if you're looking at it this is kind of the content you might think and how much more helpful is

that right, if you put the yellow triangle with an exclamation point, red octagon with an x and green circle with a checkmark. suddenly this has meaning, right. this is a lot more meaningful to us. and so when you're thinking about images and you're thinking about accessibility you have to ask yourself, is this actually content. and don't dismiss icons as purely decorative all the time,

because there may be a group of people who are depending on that for way finding tools to be able to understand how to be able to get around. additionally, there are people who may not even be english second language speakers. there may be people who have things like dyslexia. five to 17 percent of the united states population have some form of dyslexia. so, because i was picking on penn state i figured

that i would go ahead and show you what maybe a really rough mockup looks like of somebody who might have the letter transposition of specific vowels and consonants. so, that's maybe what the first impression that someone with dyslexia would have. there's some really great simulations online and i'll post those as well on sa teaches. great simulations of children's fairytales

and what they look like and what they sound like to nonnative english speakers and people who might have some form of language impairment. and it's really indecipherable, but it's a really common thing. and then you can see the after and see the two and compare the two. so, language impacts accessibility and sort of related to that what about cultural considerations?

this is something where now we're really taking it much further out. and when we talk to corporations this is something where there's a huge motivation to go global, right. and so they're thinking about the global marketplace. and when we're talking to higher ed institutions we're thinking about what about all of the other student groups that aren't represented on your campus, right.

so, a lot of what i like to kind of focus on and this is really something that i've been doing a lot of studying on, because i'm really excited, fascinated and terrified by this. edward hall was an anthropologist back in 1976. he wrote a book called, "beyond culture" and he took two basic definitions, high context and low context. and these are somewhat generalized

and there's definitely gradients within that. but, it's really helpful to take a look at this and if you start looking at the way that countries identify communication techniques and how they organize information this has a huge impact on how you design and how you consider accessibility within that. so, a low context culture, which is typically everywhere in the united states except for the south,

which is where i'm from, everywhere in canada except for quebec, which is where deni is from and a lot of western countries. so, a low context country you'll see that when you're looking at communication techniques that the meaning is overt and explicit. you don't need a guide book to be able to understand, because people speak in universally understood terms and they expect that the context

of the message is everything that they need, that they shouldn't have to have something that they come to that in for-- in that communication with. and that speed is valued over accuracy and you'll see this played out time and time again that speed is a huge factor in low context cultures. minimalism is lauded and praised. this is the most awesome thing ever and that the user experience is generally a private one.

we're talking about the individual and so a lot of the marketing messages in low context cultures will be catering towards what individual needs are. if you contrast that to high context cultures everything has an implied meaning. you have to kind of know the scenario beforehand. so, if you've ever visited the south, i'm from louisiana, which is probably the worst of all high context cultures,

because there is jokes about red versus brown rue and like and whether or not you know if you're from northern louisiana well, you're not actually from louisiana. you're really arkansas that kind of spilled over. and there's all this sort of insider knowledge when you go into high context cultures. accuracy is valued over speed. that's a huge difference.

the idea of doing things properly, taking your time, doing them methodically and doing them right means that you have much less tolerance for error and much more tolerance for the amount of time it takes. again, a historic shared culture, if you walk into a high context culture there's a whole lot you kind of need to absorb and understand before you even understand some of the communication that's happening.

and the user experience is public. it's a shared thing. when people talk about goals more often than not marketing messages to high context cultures have to do with group goals. so, how does this play out on the web? symbols depend on universally understood definitions. so, the idea when you're thinking about symbology and icons in a low context culture you're going

to be using things that are explicit and understood and, therefore, everyone kind of has that shared meaning. quick task completion is prioritized. this is a really important difference. so, if you look at studies they'll show that error messaging ends up, actually a very good error recovery mechanism actually increases peoples' engagement in low context cultures. because the idea is not so much that i make a mistake, but,

the fact that i make a mistake and you help me recover. and they've actually shown that's increased engagement. there's a level of customer service that's expected and then what i found most, again most troubling is the fact that everything that we think about in user experience as far as best practices really centers in this north american concept of what best practices are. it's very low context. when you think about a simplified, i don't know.

i'm just going to pick on twitter-bootstrap. have a bootstrap and everybody's very excited about this or flat designs. all of these things are all about minimalism and they're all about explicit meaning and a simplified navigation system. all of that is actually low context. and they've done research. they've done user studies and global companies have put out different websites in a localized context.

and they found that actually high use of animation in connections with images of moving people and group interaction like forums over a live chat one on one scenario. and probably most troubling lots and lots of sidebars and menus and links that open in new browser windows, that actually increases a lot of the user engagement in these high context cultures, which is like everything that i don't want to read, right.

i'm looking at that like i can't-- i don't know what to do with that information, right. like why is it that this is way? this is the way because of the fact that they've found that in high context cultures that kind of information retrieval is really effective. and so imagine a card sorting exercise in india versus a card sorting exercise in i don't know, palo alto. it's going to be really very different.

and so if you have this increasing globalization whether it be at you know your university or whether it be because you have a company that's looking to expand its footprint. this is something really difficult to grapple with. and if the-- if content is what powers the web, it's really that transaction, that engagement and that relationship with people that we're talking about everything is really the mechanism.

if that's the case then how are we wrestling with this when we're thinking about the increase in disabilities and people specifically with cognitive disabilities? so again, this is something that i just kind of really kind of shook me to the core. there is a, there's an artist, there's a chinese artist who lived in germany so she had this really great cross-cultural reference and she created a few concepts and put them in a low context version

and a high context version. and i'd thought i'd share that, because i think it's really again pictures really communicate that meaning. so, the concept of an opinion in a low context culture is i have an opinion; i share it with you, right. and i'm going to tell you my opinion. in a high context culture you see this kind of maze right,

that somebody has to go through all of these machinations in order to be able to communicate their opinion. punctuality, low context, if you say five o'clock you mean five o'clock, right. high context if you say five you mean you know sometime around that that might sometime involve late evening. i missed a flight from rio because of this, because i had a host family in brazil and you know [foreign language spoken] brazil.

i learned that phrase. it's the way of the brazilian. and it means you know-- i mean it's an international flight. i understand. but, as long as we get there before the flight leaves that should be fine. and there was my host father arguing with the people like not letting me on the plane, because five o'clock actually does mean five o'clock.

here's a comparison of queue. the meaning of the queue in a low context culture is we automatically think line, right, maybe straight, but definitely a line. don't group next to me. that's-- you're doing it wrong, right. high context culture queue means everybody group, let's go. we're all there doing it. and finally way of life, which is really i think,

pretty much sums it up. way of life in a low context culture if you think about a way of life, everybody automatically thinks about the individual approach, right. in a high context culture you're looking at the group. way of life means those people, your family, your community. mcdonald's put out four different websites in four different countries and you'll see that they're really radically different.

the upper left one is in india. the upper right one is pakistan. this bottom left one is germany. and the bottom right is the united states. the top two are high context cultures. the bottom two are low context cultures. the top two are things that i would never until now recommend for navigation. it's a really cluttered feeling

and it's got all this predominance of the color red, which to us, we're like oh we don't do that, because that's, you know that's error messaging and that's all these, you know anger. and yet they're saying oh no, it's lively and empowering for people. and this concept of minimal design, which we are so excited about and we really embrace. we have to ask ourselves is this really our context

that we're applying to that when we develop what we consider best practices. and then you just kind of blow it all up, more people in the world on cellphones than toilets according to the u.n. in 2013. and so if you think about that and you understand that not only is the world getting so lateralized and people are able to access content then you add the devices onto that.

and you have to accept that culture impacts accessibility. if someone can't find your content, if they're confused and they're already coming at that with maybe aging into a disability or they were born with a disability and looking at that their culture is the predefined context that they access your content with in the first place. so, age, language, culture, how important are these for accessibility? and ask yourself what cost are we placing on the user

if we don't consider these factors? this is just a stat that i think is really kind of significant. this is the growth in numbers of people with dementia in high income countries and low and middle income countries. and as you can tell this is in the millions. in 2010 we're just below 40 million. but, it's going to exceed well over 100 up to close

to 120 million people by 2050. so, when you're considering accessibility while devices are important, this is why i keep pointing out there is a huge amount of accessibility considerations that have to do with things that are not so apparent and things that are sort of nuanced that people should come to. this is kind of where i was after i started looking at the navigation paths in high context cultures

and that whole feeling, that unraveling of things that you previously had thought this is really like concrete. this will not change. this is that thing i can know. these best practices are what i've accepted to be true. and yet, we were here before, before the adoption of mobile devices, before mobile first we were here, right.

when we had ideas that we had that were set in stone that we really believed in and we had tested and we knew this is exactly where it is and so now what? now, when we know that we're going global and we know that it's mobile first and we know also the rise in people with disabilities and we know too that there's a cultural impact to all of this, now what? so, i have a few mantras that are important i think to consider.

the first one is to accept impermanence. the reality is that every time we develop a persona that it's automatically fictional. by the time we create it it's a fictional thing. there is no amy whose 25 getting her master's and she loves your website, right. she doesn't exist and that's okay. if we accept the fact that people exist on a continuum and that they are not binary creatures

and human beings are those that are constantly changing and moving and their needs change and move. if we get used to the fact that the ground is shifting underneath us and we just embrace that then what we can do is start looking at this. susana gonzalez put out this a couple of years ago and you can find it too. it's referenced in, "smashing magazine."

it was a little bit controversial at times. but, her recommendation was to design for the extremes. and so when we talk to designers we tell them we are all extreme users on some level. none of us are amy, right. amy isn't real. and so if you design for the extremes and especially when you're approaching things from an inclusive design perspective then you will meet the

needs of the many. and this time and time again we find this to be true. the second thing i'll say is integrate, don't decorate. this is one of my favorite awful photographs ever. there was a-- there is a concept within the fashion industry called the centrality of whiteness and it is that they would take these predominantly white models and throw them into these exotic locations.

and there they would be posed next to all the natives with all the culture and isn't that quaint and isn't that something that's just really attractive? and so obviously there's a whole lot of criticism of that. but, i would say that the same thing holds true when people start thinking about people who are older, when they think about people who are nonnative english speakers. they think about people with disabilities.

and you know you hear that phrase don't bolt accessibility on at the end. and if you've ever had to pay the price for that you know why right, because it's not just a cost. it's also having to go back to leadership and get new designs approved and all of those things and it's really, really tedious. but, that's the negative aspect and at times i've seen it as almost like a quaint thing as well where people look

at it and they kind of decorate the edges with accessibility considerations. they mean well, but because they didn't integrate it into their systems it's not something that's ever really going to be a part of their system. and that's a huge piece of this. the global village construction kit, open source ecology, i don't know if you guys know about this. this has happened about two or three years ago

and i love the approach that they're taking. basically they're looking at creating 50 mechanical industrial machines to start a civilization, to start a modern civilization. what are the 50 things that you need in order to be able to start a civilization? and i love it because of the fact that they're tenants, the things that are required in order to be able to do this, it must be open source.

it must be low cost. it has to be modular. and the closed loop manufacture is my favorite too, because of the fact that it takes the device to create more of its kind in parts. and so how many of you guys have had phillips screwdrivers and flathead screwdrivers and there's one in canada. i don't even know what it's called. it's-- there's other types of screws

and there's all these different types of screws. and when the truth is one of those would probably service almost everything that you needed. and so this is kind of how we need to approach design and development as the start, right. so, it's like a giant set of tinker toys, right. and so it's very, very cool. this is the example of all the things

that they have created. so, they have a laser cutter. they have a 3-d printer, which is pretty cool. they have a bioplastic extruder, a sawmill, a bulldozer, a backhoe and basically they're able to go in and it doesn't matter the particular climate. it doesn't matter, because all of those things get pulled in as those are the variations of the particular climate and they're able to create these awesome experiences.

and so i started thinking about what about a open source design ecology, right? like taking the concept of design pattern libraries and really, really exploring that. so, if you had text and media forms, data, navigation, in page interactions and all of this was working really, really well and i was thinking this is awesome. this is totally exactly what we need. we need a global construction village kit only for design

and then i got to users and of course, they completely and totally upended that, because that is not standardized user again, like we said. so, the third thing would be beware of the seduction of certainty. i think that there is a comfort that we have in design pattern libraries in the web content accessibility guidelines in any kind of checklist, that we look at that and we say well,

these are the things that we build with an so, therefore, we know the outcome and we know that that's going to happen. and there's only really one thing that will allow you to know whether something is accessible. and i'm sure it's pretty obvious maybe to everybody, right. is it accessible? i don't know is it, right? so, like looking at that with my father when we were doing that sort of just run through i went under the assumption

that it was accessible. but wow, user testing sure does reveal a whole lot, right. and so if you're really, really comfortable in what you're doing and where you're at you have to ask yourself is this really kind of in that echo chamber where i'm really designing for myself. have i tested it with the people who are going to use that? and by that i mean those extremes. this is a good example.

this was a ramp that was created as a government project for a woman whose daughter had-- was in a wheelchair and they needed-- they had sort of an incline, a slope from her house. and in scotland this was something that was handled by the local government as part of paying taxes. and 60,000 pounds later this is what they had created for her in order to be able to get down the hill. so, there's a big difference right,

between something that is compliant, technically this is compliant and something that's actually accessible. so, the last thing that i wanted to talk about is really about practicing design wu. wu wei is a term in daoism and it literally translates into emptiness. and from a western mentality we think about emptiness as this void, the-- like that which is lacking.

but, in daoism and in eastern philosophy when you think about wu wei and emptiness what you're really thinking about is more like a vessel and it's about what is get to be included inside of that. so, if you saw me and i was standing on the edge of a lake or whatever and i was looking at a boat and i said hey you know or maybe not a lake, maybe an ocean. i'm going to st. lucia, right. see, i'm currently going to st. lucia.

you'd be like um, i think there's a disconnect there. you're not actually in the boat moving, because the boat is not the destination, right. by looking at that thing you're not already there. the boat is just the tool that gets you there. and so likewise all of the standards and the things that we develop, design and develop for websites, that in and of itself is not the user experience. that is not getting to accessibility.

what accessibility is, is in context, those users inside of that. so, considering that from a design perspective think about everything that you're creating and really all of those are just vessels that carry that user experience. and that user experience is filled as that interaction between you and the user. i just came across this and i was really intrigued by this. i'm always, as you can tell, i like real world examples

of things that are the same concepts as what we do online. and sweden has a law called vision, called vision zero and about 20 years ago they were having a pretty high amount of fatalities and injuries due to traffic accidents. and they decided rather aggressively that what they were going to do was they wanted to have absolutely zero tolerance and that they would have no fatalities as a result of traffic accidents, which is pretty-- that's pretty bold.

two decades later the national death rate due to traffic accidents in sweden is the lowest in the world. and the way that they approach this is that they looked at everything that was traditional thinking and they re-envisioned it and they looked at it very differently. so, traditional thinking is you look at how many accidents you have. but, vision zero one of the tenants is to look

on the fatalities and serious injuries, to prioritize human beings over those kinds of stats. traditional thinking and this is the biggest piece of it i think is perfect human behavior. so, you create traffic laws and you say this is the law. you must stop here. people will turn here. and then you kind of look at people as if they're supposed to change to adapt to that

when the reality is we all know people are failing right and they make mistakes. and so if you understand and integrate the failing human into your design then you're adapting those things for them. again, traditional thinking was individual responsibility and instead they looked at it as a shared responsibility. so, there used to be you know if you caused a traffic accident that one person was to blame.

and instead now in sweden if an accident is caused they need to rethink the designs and look at and see if there is something that needs to change because of it. and so again, the industry has to be forced into this was the traditional thinking and instead there was a lot of positive encouragement about the industry can be stimulated. and it went from saving lives is expensive

to saving lives is cheap, because the cost is not a number that's based in currency. but, the cost is about how many people that they're able to save. and one of my favorite quotes from this is claes tingvall, the director of traffic safety said, "design around the human as we are." so, it would be wonderful if people would be able to actually you know conform to our web design standards.

that would be awesome. that would be great if we know right, we know it's a beautiful website. and we know that it's really, really well done and that the content mapping is then really thoughtfully approached. so, why are those people messing up everything that we do, right? well, design around the humans as we are, build that boat

and recognize that the majority of what's happening is what's on the inside of that boat. there's a taoist proverb that says, "the mind of a perfect man is like a mirror. it grasps nothing. it expects nothing. it reflects but does not hold." and i really think that the more that we approach our design and our development with that the closer we come

to understanding what universal accessibility really is. we understand then that people are constantly moving, changing and that they don't adapt to us, that we need to adapt to them. so, i have some further resources and listed here and would love to have a discussion if anybody has any questions. with all due respect to the math professors in the room i do have xkcd comic on certainty,

because there are some things like math, which is certain, everything else probably up for grabs. but, thanks very much you guys and i appreciate your time. anybody have any questions, thanks? [ applause ] [ silence ] >> so, penn state is operating now under a legal, legally binding settlement with the national federation. >> well aware.

>> and that the deadline is coming up in october. >> um huh. >> and so i think this is more of an observation, because i really did love this presentation. but, you know we find that most people want that certainty. >> i know. they definitely do. people need to not always have everything in flux, right. there's a need for human beings to have this is settled

and i don't have to keep revisiting it. but, go ahead. >> so, you know a perfect recipe for extreme frustration is to tell people that go ahead and use these automated tools, but know that this is not-- does not actually prove the accessibility. >> right. >> so, sorry. >> so, i'm-- again, if you've been in any

of the other accessibility sessions or probably ever attended one you'll hear this quoted quite a lot. that automated tools will capture about 25 to at most maybe 30 percent of the issues, because there is only so many things that can be machine testable, right. with that said probably the most important thing that i recommend and i do a lot of workshops on like process

and procurement and much less esoteric than this. but, this is the kind of thing that i think is really helpful to continue to up in the apple cart a little bit every once in a while to have people rethinking that. but, when i'm talking with people and we're working together on process that is probably the most important piece. and as long as you build and this is going to sound weird, if you build uncertainty

into the process then there's a certain amount of comfort. so, if you guys have ever looked at different kinds of development or design methodology like lean for example, there is permission to fail built within that process and it's not chaotic. it's not a system that doesn't promote a predictable method of design and development. i mean when it's implemented badly yes, right, like fragile or whatever.

but-- or hurry up instead of agile. but, when you're looking at it specifically within that methodology there is a period of time to be able to do user testing and take those learnings and say wow, we failed spectacularly. that was awesome, because we learned so much from that, right. and so really that's the recommendation. i think that for people who need that sense of certainty and

yet you know that ultimately it's not going-- if you do it without involving a user and without learning to change and adapt you're never going to approach accessibility. and even if it is a legal mandate, even if it is something that's happening under a structured settlement for example, the way that gets tested is not from a clean report, right. the way that gets tested is real users will start using

those systems and they'll not complain and they won't go and look to disability rights advocacy groups in order to be able to represent them, because they don't feel discriminated against. they feel that they've been empowered to make their own choices online. and so the only way to approach that is to have a system that includes that level of constant reflection and testing and learning and changing.

so, build a process around uncertainty would be my recommendation. >> build for an imperfect world. >> i think build for an imperfect world and then always know that your understanding today must change. people change. needs change, context changes so you have to account for that somehow and i think people like to take the thing and they make it into sort of this codified process

without realizing the thing happened because of change. there's a whole lot that could be said about innovation and how companies that are really spearheading innovation, then they get kind of settled on protecting that innovation, right. and then they go back. they leave that world of the unknown and they go into this defensive posture and how they're protecting that discovery that they've made.

and the same happens to us. we find we have a discovery about this is the most wonderful way to design a particular experience in a responsive context, right. and then we never revisit it, because we feel like this is a truth and it's you know it's absolutely unchangeable. when the reality is we came upon that because of change.

so, there's my waxing philosophical, but yes. >> eastman kodak company. they were in the film business rather than the memory business. >> exactly. >> now, they're just a brand and not a company anymore. >> exactly, that's exactly right. >> that's what you're saying. >> hi jeremy.

>> you've got all these different kinds of people-- >> yes. >> cultural differences [inaudible] age difference and all this. do you then attempt to fragment what your [inaudible] try to tailor what [inaudible] those individual people, because that kind of scares me going back-- >> sure. [inaudible audience comments]

>> right. hey, you can go to the back of bus. >> i swear it's just as good as the other, yea. >> yea separate, but equal. >> yea, yea. and that's a huge fight from a-- >> so, do you attempt to still deliver you know a universal thing? >> so, yes and no. to quote derrick, it depends.

>> yea. >> right. what we've found is and a lot of that revolves around user testing, obviously a huge piece of it. but, what we've found is we start with what we understand to be best practices. we understand these things to be accessibility, usability, ux and code best practices and we go into any project with that. but, we're also recognizing that we hold on very loosely

to those, because context changes a lot. and then we approach that and our goal at every turn is to find a way for users to feel empowered to personalize their own experience. so as an example, we have two different projects that are actually running simultaneously right now and i'm excited, because they're totally different audiences. and we're testing out a dockable menu on a mobile experience

and a dockable menu on a video player. and we want to see if users feel that they're able to then customize their experience based on right to left reading languages, based on different levels of mobility impairments, based on just preference. as a left handed mobile user i have to say nobody thinks about us, right. like luke has the hard, hard, easy kind of stuff and i'm thinking no, actually it's mostly hard.

it's frigging hard. it's-- you know, because it's all based on this idea that i'm a right handed user. but, with a dockable menu i can make that selection. and so from a university perspective people can self-select the kind of-- you know and often too if you have an international student group they're going to be going to specific areas of the website. but, having that user feel enabled

to make those choices i think is one of the ways that we've approached that. >> that kind of answers what my follow up question i have is a lot of the stuff you're talking about like culture-- >> it's fairly undetectable and can be a part of the problem. >> you know the user right. >> there's no way to-- yea.

>> so-- >> yea there's user age and detection. >> [inaudible] to just put that power in their hands. >> absolutely, yea. the more we get out of the way of the user and then the more it's their experience that they're having and not our experience we're shoving down their throats. [ inaudible background comments ] >> i haven't seen that to be the case.

i've seen-- well and most of the time when you're talking about an entire website that's built like with a high context culture in mind that localization is done at like the national level. it's done at like a country level, right. and so that's something that-- you know mcdonald's was just one, but there's a lot of these other companies that really invested in understanding how

and it definitely increases engagement and they've done a lot of testing to show the difference. and so most of what i've seen is from the beginning of that experience. and so i think the nuance is if you have that as one small segment and you're looking at a global presence and i think that you just have to test and find out what is-- you know what is the most engaging experience for users,

what makes the most sense. and card sorting is-- you know sometimes people kind of look at that like ah, that's kind of old fashioned or whatever, but it really helps with regards to that content hierarchy. >> when it comes to that idea of user tests and stuff like that, i mean obviously for you know again for our perspective students you know within the u.s. and stuff like that it's pretty easy

to find people you can test with. but, if we are you know targeting for instance you know new students in china or something like that. >> i mean how do you guys you know kind of go about testing with audiences that you don't have readily on hand? >> well, i haven't-- we haven't really found that to be quite the same scenario. but, i think that if you'd look at users who are

in a similar particular demographic. so, if you have graduate students who are from china, likely they have enough of a comparable-- you know they are the present of who you're looking to have for future, right. so, i would say that i would look to the student population that represent those particular user groups. alright, thanks very much you guys. i appreciate it and hey and time for lunch.

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