[Title slide: FREE SAGOV meetup: Designing for everyone, an introduction to inclusive [design], presentation opens visually to group of 4 people presented the Microsoft Teams format]

Acknowledgement to Country statement read to attendees before session recording commenced.

00:03

[Josh Crawford, Vision Australia] ... which is partly leading up our inclusive design services.

What it's really been teaching me is actually how little I knew about design, and how much more I still need to learn, and I am learning every day. So to start with, I thought I'd talk about a chair. It's a chair called the Aeron chair designed by Herman Miller. And some of you may be familiar with it. It's pretty much the most popular office chair on the market. So for example, Wired had an article they brought out last year, Why the Aeron Is Still the Most Coveted Seat in the Office. It's not just popular, it's also got a spot in the MoMA Museum as well as being a design icon, and an example of classic design. It's even featured in Simpsons.

So this chair, and often we don't think about chairs too much, it's really well-known, and it's a really, really popular product. And the two designers behind it are Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf. The process which I'm going to talk about in a second that they actually went through to design this chair is actually a early example of inclusive design from the late '80s and the early '90s.

1:23

So where the chair starts, the Aeron chair, it actually starts with a different chair, called the Sarah chair, and this is a chair that Don and Bill designed in 1988. And it was primarily designed for older people and for use in hospitals, so the idea was mostly in a medical context. You might notice the table is really closely positioned to the chair, and same with the shelving. And the thinking of the designers at that time was that people might need to easily access a lot of their things, whether it's a cup of tea or a magazine that they want to read.

But one of the key innovations of this chair was that they figured out a way to use really some plastic as the seating, and then they could have a really thin cushion above that. And what that meant was that it created airflow, which meant that the chair didn't get as hot when you sat on it, and it also was really comfortable as well. That was actually quite a controversial decision at the time. It was really challenging a lot of existing thinking around chairs, which was they needed a really sort of thick foam cushion to be comfortable.

02:34

Another design of this chair, Bill Stumpf, in particular, was big on research, so they brought in orthopedic specialists. They did focus groups with a really diverse range of people, all to create a chair that would be really, really comfortable, and it was. I've taken a quote from their head of the R&D department at the time, Gary Miller, who said, "People became emotionally attached to that chair." So they designed a really, really comfortable chair, but no one could figure out how to sell it.

So Herman Miller decided to kill the Sarah. They thought they just didn't know how to take it to market and didn't know how to sell it, and they thought they wouldn't make enough money out of it. They said, "I'm going to kill this product, and we won't sell it anymore." But that's not the end of the Aeron in this era. It's actually the beginning because a few years later, Herman Miller, so we're talking about the early '90's, they thought that computers that were going to be a big part of the office and that people would be sitting for large amounts of time in front of computers, and talk and cables and things like that.

03:46

So they contacted Bill and Don and said to them, "Is there anything we can take from the Sarah, any of those innovations that made it really comfortable, really ergonomic, and apply them to an office chair?" And they said, "Yeah. Absolutely. All of this stuff we could put into an office chair." So they set forward again into designing a chair, an office chair, that's designed for people sitting for a long period of time. Once again, they did a heap of research and they said they wanted to design a chair that everybody could sit on. It was really, really important. And they used a lot of innovations from the Sarah, so for example the plastic under the thin cushion, it's now a wire meshing but that was an iteration on that idea.

04:37

They even brought in a woman who was 4'7" and they got her to test the chair, and what they found was that she could kind of sometimes adjust it, but not always. She sometimes had to get out of the chair to adjust it to her height. And that actually set them back a year. They said, "We're going to cancel production until we can make this chair work for this woman." So they basically said, "We want to design something for everybody," and they got lots of different body shapes and sizes and everything to sit on the chair and also adjust it. And then a few years later they end up with a chair they're happy with, and there's a patent that comes out in April, 26 1994. When they released to the market, and I've taken a quote from a Fast Company article, the quote says, "One dealer in Hollywood, shortly after it's unveiling of October of 1994 reported putting his first floor sample in the window and hearing cars screech to a halt upon seeing it." His chair was an absolute instant success.

05:40

And then today we have it all around the world in lots of office spaces, and they've iterated the product more recently. So even, for example, my last job, we Aeron chairs in the office. So it's been a hugely successful product, but what most people don't know is that the effort they took in the beginning to design this chair, and that a lot of the innovations that make it comfortable were actually innovations for people who were older and designed for more of a hospital or a medical context. That's a really good example of inclusive design as it's been practiced, and you might be thinking, "Maybe this is just a cherry-picked example. How many other products have been designed this way?" And in fact lots of products have been designed this way, countless. So we've got the OXO Good Grips. The starting for these kitchen products were people with arthritis. So I think that the peeler, for example, was designed for a woman called Betsey who has arthritis. Or we're got the measuring cup that lets you see the level from the sides as well as above.

06:46

And the reason you can see it from above is because for some people bending their knees is really painful and now they don't have to bend their knees. So OXO Good Grips are another good example of inclusive design. We have easy open packaging, and this is the one that I really, really like. I love it when packaging is easy to open. And, for example, the Kellogg's Corn Flakes packet that's in the picture, that was originally designed for people with arthritis, and Arthritis Australia even have a service called the Accessible Design Division, which is around designing easy open packaging.

We have captions, and these have really, really blown up. So originally there is a requirement as part of the WCAG standard for people who are deaf or have hearing loss, and now lots of people are using them and expect to see them in videos. And I've put out a article from the Guardian last year where they actually ask the question, "Is it time captions became the norm?" Because lots of people benefit from captions. You might be in a room and there's a baby sleeping next door, and you want the volume down. So you turn the captions on. I know lots of people who watch educational videos and they say that they learn it better if they can watch the captions along with the video itself. So captions have really, really blown up. But the starting point was people who are deaf or have hearing loss and then lots of other people have benefited from the solution.

08:25

And we've also got curb cuts, which are really sort of popular example of inclusive design that's often talked about. The starting point for these was people in wheelchairs so they could get over a gutter. But lots of other people benefit as well. Whether it's, you're wielding a pram, it could be a kid riding a bike, it could be you're wheeling some luggage, lots of people benefit from curb cuts. And I can't imagine a world now where we didn't have curb cuts and we had to sort of walk over a gutter. I mean, you might even trip.

This example is so popular, it's actually led to the name of an effect, which is called the curb cut effect. And that says that laws and products designed for people with disabilities often end up benefiting everyone. And that's a really, really important concept when it comes to inclusive design. And I truly believe this. I've seen it with my own eyes. When we design for disability, we can benefit everyone. Everyone benefits. There's a really good Ted talk about this topic if you're interested in learning a bit more by Elise Roy, which is titled When We Design For Disability We All Benefit.

09:37

So what is inclusive design? I put out a quote from Susan Goltsman, who was really in this space because I think she articulates it really well. And she says, "It doesn't mean you're designing one thing for all people. It means you're designing a diversity of ways for people to participate in an experience so that everyone has a sense of belonging." And if you want to look at a couple of examples of this, so we have the Kindle, and this is a product that's designed for reading books and the person can read the book with their eyes, or alternatively, they can listen to the book using text-to-speech. And that might be because they're blind, or it might be because they have dyslexia, or it could just be, maybe they're just really tired, or maybe they're sitting on a train on their way to work or something.

10:29

[inaudible 00:10:29] can't just listen or read the book with your eyes for the Kindle. You can also do things like adjust the font. You can change the text size. There's lots of ways you can customise the device to meet your needs, whatever they are. So it's a real diverse range of ways of being able to read a book. Whereas if we sort of wind back 20 years ago, you're probably pretty limited to either buying a book and just trying to deal with the font and maybe the font size, or you can maybe listen to an audio book that maybe that particular book wasn't available as an audio book or as a CD. You're really, really limited. Whereas what digital and technology has enabled is for us to provide a really diverse range of ways for people to read a book.

11:19

Another example is the Samsung washing machine. So some of the newer models you can now control with your voice. I don't know if some people in the blind community have the Samsung washing machines. So prior to that, you would have purchased the washing machine with some buttons, but there is no kind of tactile feedback or anything telling you what the buttons are. So you probably have to stick some kind of tactile labeling on them. Whereas these days you can use your voice or even use your phone as well to control it, which might benefit some people with physical and motor disabilities as well. But what you can do is there's now multiple ways you can control your washing machine, whereas previously there was just one way.

12:04

Inclusive design is a methodology. It's a methodology where we recognise exclusion as the starting point. So I see it more as a way of practicing design as opposed to necessarily an outcome. It's an approach to design and a methodology. One of the key principles of inclusive design is that there's no such thing as average. And there's a really good book that came out a few years ago called The End of Average by Todd Rose. And he cites lots of examples and evidence to basically say that there's no such thing as an average person. One of the case studies that he cites in the book is about the design of cockpits. And this was in the 1950s, and basically pilots were complaining. They were saying the cockpit was uncomfortable. It was hard to control the plane.

12:55

And when they took an average of 10 dimensions across a sample size of, I think it was just over 4,000, what they found was that nobody was that average. So essentially it was a cockpit designed for nobody. And even when they reduced it down to three dimensions, it was still only a really small number of people that were the average of those three dimensions. So what the outcome of that case study led to was basically innovations like adjustable seats, or even adjustable steering wheels. So you can now adjust the cockpit to your dimensions, so it's more comfortable and it meets your needs better.

13:36

A second principle that the 20% can provide some of the most important information to create better products. And I've used the photo from Nike of LeBron James and a person, Matthew, to illustrate this. So Nike have a product called FlyEase they released a few years ago, and basically it's a laceless shoe. And you can buy a basketball shoe now which is influenced partly by LeBron James. I don't know how much input he had into the design, but I see certainly he was involved in those products and that the decisions around that, and Matthew has cerebral palsy, who tying up laces is not that easy to do. And by focusing on what some people call the extremes or this 20%, basically they can provide really rich information into our designs and different perspectives in different angles that maybe we wouldn't have considered ourselves.

14:37

So this is a really, really key part of inclusive design as well. By focusing on this 20%, and that includes people with disabilities, we're actually going to get really good rich information to inform our design decisions and make better products and services out of it.

Next principle, flexibility is key. So design can't be a one size fits all. And even the Aeron chair, I talked about earlier, I think they originally sort of estimated it was around 95% of people could sit and use that chair. They've ended up, when they remastered it a few years later, or a few years ago, they've now got three different sizes. So they've set a goal for this chair. It has to meet 100% of people's needs, 95% is not good enough. And to get to that result, they end up having to have three sizes. So flexibility is really key.

15:33

You can't get too stuck on one particular design, that's really inflexible, because it's not going to take in some of the different perspectives and needs that people have, or even unintended or unpredictable scenarios. So for example, COVID-19 has created an environment where people are uncomfortable touching screens. We've been rolling out touch screens all around the place. So flexibility's really key in this as well.

And finally, for organisations to survive, they must adapt. So a big part of inclusive design is learning. I truly believe we're sort of in the really early stages of this idea and how we can actually put it into practice. And the only way we're really going to survive as organisations is if we adapt, because in my belief, this is the new reality. We need to design for lots of different needs and lots of different scenarios. So this is really, really important as well.

16:34

So what are the benefits of practicing inclusive design? Well, firstly, it's going to mean that more people can use and experience the product or the service, which is a really, really good thing. It's also a source of innovation. So hopefully a few of those case studies I've just shown you because of that, I really believe that by using a lens, so using the lens of inclusive design, can bring up lots of creative ideas about how we can innovate. Thirdly, there's the avoidance of legal risks and the cost of remediation. So if you take a product or a service to the market, the last thing you want to have to do is remediate it because you hadn't factored in some particular thing. It can be a really, really expensive exercise, and also it's just not that enjoyable for the team as well. And there are some really high profile cases where discriminating against people with disabilities has become a legal risk for organisations. So one example I can think of is the Commonwealth Bank Albert payment terminal, which was difficult for people who were blind to use.

17:45

We've also got the curb cut effect we just talked about where everyone's going to benefit from this as well. So all of your customers or your clients, or whoever's using your services or your products, they're all going to benefit. And finally, there's a point that I think is talked about enough, and that is that by practicing inclusive design, it's going to help you attract and maintain talent. So if you really want to attract staff, you've got to give them a feeling, particularly in design, I think, you've got to give them a feeling that they're actually doing something good for the world. And by practicing inclusive design, you're going to help them feel that way, that they're putting something good out in the world and that's something that they're proud of. So it's going to help attract and maintain talent inside your organisations.

18:37

We're going to go on a little bit on about how to get started with inclusive design. Firstly, what I thought was we'd have just a quick look at what a disability is as well. We take a step back. The World Health Organisation mission. They say, "In recent years, the understanding of disability has moved away from a physical or medical perspective to one that takes into account a person's physical, social and political context. Today disability is understood to arise from the interaction between a person's health condition or impairment and the multitude of influencing factors in their environment." And there's a book that came out, I think a couple of years ago called Mismatched by Kat Holmes, who used to work for Microsoft and worked on an inclusive design toolkit. And she uses the term mismatch to describe what they're saying there.

19:28

And an example of that is, say, if you have a wheelchair and some stairs, and there's kind of a mismatch between the design of those stairs and the person in the wheelchair, it's probably going to not be that easy for a person with a wheelchair to get upstairs. Whereas if you had, say, for example, a ramp that's got a gradual incline, then that's a much better match and it's a much better design for that scenario and for that particular person. In terms of statistics, so one in five Australians have a disability and these can be kind of loosely categorised into areas such as vision loss. You've got hearing loss, you have a speech disabilities and these can be physical or they can relate to cognitive processing as well.

20:17

You've got physical and motor disabilities. Example of that is arthritis. You've got cognitive learning and neurological disabilities, which is a really, really broad category. It can cover everything from dyslexia to autism. And finally you've got mental health. And this can relate to things like addiction, which is pretty high up on the agenda at the moment, particularly when it comes to social media, or other areas such as traumatic stress disorder as well or depression too.

There's also model called the persona spectrum, and this has sort of been adapted from the Microsoft inclusive design toolkit. And this is a really interesting model because I think it illustrates the curb cut effect really, really well. And what they're saying with this model is that we can kind of frame disabilities as being permanent, temporary or situational. So permanent disability is likely going to be there permanently. The person's going to be living with that disability for the rest of their life. And an example of that is a person who has only the use of one arm. Then you have a temporary form, and an example that is a broken arm, and a person might have a broken arm for say four or five weeks, and then it's mended and they might have the use of that arm again.

21:47

And finally you have a situational impairment. So an example of that is cooking, maybe while you're stirring the pot, you've only got the use of one arm. And so if you're looking at the recipe on your phone or a tablet device. And these situational impairments tend to come about due to environmental factors or something external to the person. It could be you're holding a baby, that's another example where you might only have the use of one arm. And this is really, really powerful as a model because what it illustrates is how many other people can benefit from the solutions that you come up with. And if we look at the person with one arm and the person with a broken arm and the person who's cooking, they're all sharing a similar characteristic where maybe they've only got the use of one arm.

22:38

And when we start to think about solutions or doing our research, we can sort of have them in mind and start to think about, "Okay, what's a good solution for all these different personas?" And the other really important areas to get a good understanding of when we're talking about inclusive design is also assistive technologies. This is a really, really exciting space at the moment. There's lots of technologies and devices and different ways that people are interacting with services and products at the moment, primarily online. One example is a BrailleNote. So they output the content that's on a website in braille format so that a person that can read braille can read it with their hands. Or we have voice control. That's another example where you completely control your computer using your voice. And the primary demographic this has been designed for is people with physical or motor disabilities, who it might be really hard for them, or they're unable to use a keyboard and a mouse.

23:47

Or we have switch controls as well, and if you don't know what they are, they are those little colored buttons I've got in the photo. So I've got a blue, red, yellow, and green a button, and they can be used by people using their elbows, they can be used with people's mouth, with their lips, you can tap them on the side of your heads. They used in lots of different ways, primarily by people who have physical and motor disabilities as well. So this in the slides, I've just got six examples, it's probably going to the hundreds and it feels like every two weeks there'll be a new assistive technology or setting that comes out. I was just reading even yesterday that Apple, I think in iOS, the latest version of iOS in the iPhone, they're releasing a feature that lets you detect if there's a person in your vicinity, say six feet away if you're blind. It can actually vibrate and tell you there's a person six feet away.

So this is a really, really hot category. I read an article last year called The Golden Age of Assisted Technology, so I really think it is a golden age.

24:58

So how to get started with inclusive design. So I've just got a few pointers of how you can get started with it in your organisation. So firstly, you want to tell the why story for your organisation, particularly if a leadership team, or maybe even your team and your colleagues aren't really aware of this idea. And one of the key ways to do that is to figure out what will grab the interest of the leadership team. So you can use things like case studies. So some leadership teams really, really like to see the case studies. Who's doing this? Who's doing it internationally? Who's doing in Australia? You can talk about expanding the market, so you can use, for example, the persona spectrum, as a way of illustrating that curb cut effect. It could be direct customer feedback as well. So sometimes you might have heard somebody actually provide some feedback saying they don't find the product... or maybe it's your website as accessible as they would like, or it meets their needs.

26:00

Another thing you can do is also plan lunch and learn sessions and create online channels for discussion. So it could be creating a channel if you've got Microsoft Teams, for example, inside your organisation, you could create an online channel for people to discuss it, or maybe you might bring in somebody who has a disability to talk about the challenges they come up with in their lives as a lunch and learn session.

Secondly, you want to broaden your team's awareness of disabilities and assistive technologies. So once again, you can organise people with disabilities to come in and speak to your team. This can be a really, really valuable exercise. I even learn things all the time when I see people come in and talk, things I hadn't realized or thought about before. You can learn about the different ways people interact with your services and products. So try to engage people, and we'll talk about this in a second, whether it's through usability testing, whether it's by doing interviews, really try to get a gauge of the different ways people interact with your services and products.

27:06

It would be just, say, if you were a retail organisation or private sector, not just customers, you also want to look to perspective customers as well. And finally, share videos of the various assistive technologies that are out there. And there's quite a few out there now, so you can find some on YouTube if you Google it. Apple, if you type in Apple accessibility, you'll come across lots of good videos of real variety of assistive technologies that Apple support, and same with the Microsoft inclusive design toolkit. You put that into Google, there's lots of good videos that come up in that section of the website as well that you can share with your colleagues.

Thirdly, equip team members with the tools and processes. So it's really, really important for you to find who's responsible for what. This is one of the biggest issues that I see quite often for our clients when it comes to accessibility, where it's kind of like, is it the developer's responsibility? Is it a QA tester? Is it the designer's responsibility? Who's responsible for what parts of accessibility? Secondly, define where accessibility fits into your workflow. So if you're practicing as a designer, then you probably want to do some checks to make sure that your work is inclusive. That could be by bringing in people with lived experience to do usability testing maybe of a prototype you've got. It could be just going through a checklist and just checking, "I think colour contrast looks good," or it could be if you do design critiques as well as a group with your colleagues, that's a really good way of sharing learnings too and different perspectives.

28:51

You also want to look at what tools your team can use. So if you want to know about tools, there are some good ones out there. There's stock colorblindness simulator, there's the color contrast analyzer, so Vision Australia has one of those, or there's another good one, which I really like called the Paciello Group Colour Contrast Analyzer. I really do hope as well that there are more tools that do come out that can help us test our work. And also provide a place for people to go for information. So it might be when you onboard a new staff member, how do they learn a bit more about inclusive design and accessibility? Where can they go for that kind of information? How can they learn about these technologies? I think that might just be simply some videos that are up on your intranet or in your knowledge base that they can watch.

29:45

Four, include people with disabilities in user research studies. So this is a really important part of inclusive design. We do have the WCAG standards, and that has a really good bunch of requirements and recommendations as to how we can design more inclusively. And we do have some evidence-based research as well. So if you dig around, you can find academic research and some design patterns you can use, but they're not going to cover everything. So for example, if you think about using biometrics for a login on your website, or maybe you're using voice ID and you're a bank, you really need to include people with disabilities in all your design decision-making, whether it's you doing interviews, whether you're doing usability testing, to really gain their perspective as to whether this is going to meet their needs, or if they're going to be able to use it, or what are some of the risks and ways they might not be able to use it as well?

30:53

And you want to try and get this fairly regularly. So you might include people with disabilities in multiple stages of the project. You might include them in a discovery phase where you're doing interviews, whether that's a workshop or whether it's just doing one-to-one interviews. You can include them by doing usability testing, whether that's of a prototype or at the end of the project once the code's been built. The idea is you want to get this feedback as often as you can because it's going to help you look at things at different angles and create a much better product. When you do get findings, try to share them as well internally. So it could be an internal blog post, it could be a post on a channel if you have one on Microsoft Teams, and videos as well. By sharing findings, you're going to make people more aware of them and you can kind of almost celebrate it as a bit of a winner as well. You can say, "Hey, we learned this. Really, really interesting. It's going to change this angle or this perspective we've taken on the design into something different."

32.01

Five, employ people with disabilities. So one of the most important and powerful things you can do is employ people with disabilities on projects, not just for testing, but actually employ them as designers or developers. They'll be a really, really valuable part of your team. They'll be there to advocate, they'll be there to educate, and they can offer different perspectives that you may not have had. And I personally think that we need more people with disabilities there to actually make design decisions, people with lived experience, because they've got skin in the game.

If you ask, say, for example me, if this particular issue is a big issue for people using screen readers, I can offer some insights based on my experience and what I've learned working in the space, but I still don't have skin in the game, and they'll be able to provide a much, much better insights into your decision-making. Six, communicate the story. So when you do practice inclusive design, communicate the story internally. What were the outcomes? What were the great ideas that ended up being built into the solution? And then do it externally if it's a really, really big win. What you want to do is showcase and celebrate your wins and make them visible so that the leadership team can see them and they'll start embracing them. They'll be like, "This is a really good thing. We need to start investing in this."

33:39

And I think Microsoft, although I don't work there, is a really good example of that. They're really heavily investing in people with disabilities, whether it's through hiring, whether it's through artificial intelligence, or whether it's through the design of their products because they're seeing it as a real win, and clearly their CEO does as well.

And seven, learn, be curious and practice. So as I sort of said in the beginning, I think we're really in the early stages of inclusive design and we're still figuring out how to put it into practice. And what that's going to mean is, is that you need to learn how to learn. We've got to learn better, and we've got to learn how we can learn better. And we need to sort of see ourselves as design generalists as well. So break out of your bubble sometimes and go into other design disciplines, whether it's service design, whether it's industrial design. A lot of the examples I used at the start of the session were about industrial design. You want to work on your listening skills and your observation skills. So I keep a scrapbook, for example, of examples I come across where people aren't maybe talking about inclusive design or anything too specific, but it kind of captures a perspective that I hadn't thought of before.

35:00

And finally, don't be afraid to make mistakes. So we are going to make some mistakes as we practice as designers. Things are going to go out into production that six months later we realise actually that wasn't a fantastic design decision. But if we treat it as a learning process and as a growth process, and we have taken in lots of perspectives before we've gone into production, then we can just treat it as a learning exercise.

Finally, I've taken a quote, if we take it back to the Aeron chair, from bill Stumpf, the Aeron chair designer. And he said, before he passed away, "The design confronts reality. It doesn't try to hide things. Design advocates for the future." And I truly believe that the reality now is inclusive design and it's something we really need to stop practicing more and more, and it's going to play a big, big part in the future. So thanks everyone for taking the time out today to hear me talk about inclusive design. We do run a course as well that I primarily teach called Inclusive Design. It's a full day course where we dig into this into a lot more detail. It's a lot to cover in 40 minutes, but hopefully you got some insights out of it, and you're in a place now where you can maybe start to try to get started if you haven't already inside your organisations. So thanks everyone. And I'm at the 40 minute Mark, so we might go out now and see if anybody's got any questions.

36:42

[Cliff Edwards, South Australian Government] There's a few comments in the chat there as well, Josh, for you.

[Josh] Right there. I might just unshare my screen. I'll just have to scroll up a little bit. So Yvette, is an inclusive design the same as universal design? Well, yeah, we're kind of getting into semantics a little bit. The difference I'll say between universal design and inclusive design, and some of those products are used in the original case studies, they are called inclusive design as well. The difference I would say is that, A, inclusive is a sort of methodology or process you go through and, B, universal design tends to aim for more of a one size fits all, which we often require in the built environment. So it might be for example, automated doors which open for anybody could be an example of universal design. It's not in the built environment, and even with physical products, you can't often go for lots of diverse range of ways for people to use them. Whereas digital lets us actually provide things in lots of different ways.

38:12

Even for example, if you work in communications, I know a lot of people these days are talking about Easy Read. So that's providing information in a different format that meets specific people's needs. Just trying to find any other questions.

[Cliff] I think there's a couple down the bottom, Josh. I've just scrolled to them myself. It's just taking a little while to load for me.

[Josh] Yeah. So we have Rosalie, "Can you think of the most common missed step that you find and that's a well-known barrier to inclusion?" That's a really good question. Off the top of my head, it really depends on the domain you're talking about, but if we were, say, talking about web, I think having headings above sections is really, really important. Lots of people can benefit from it, whether you're using a screen reader. People are using a screen reader, primarily people who are blind, and they'll be... they've got a shortcut key they can use in their keyboard to skip through headings on a page. Headings also benefits people with cognitive and learning disabilities. So they help you find the section on the page you're looking for. And I think that they're really good because they're typically not that hard for us to include in our content as well. So that's probably one I think that's often missed. Often headings are included, but they're not included above each section of a page, just some sections.

39:56

Tips for web content design testing. We have limited ability in government to use assistive technology at our end and limited ability to test in a meaningful way. So I would, in that instance, if a focus on content, if there's some kind of checklist, there are some available on the web. We do provide something for our clients as well around a checklist you can go through with your content. So it's around headings, a list not marked up correctly, describing images using old text. That's one way, through checklists. The other way is through whether it's plugins and tools. So if you are a little bit more technical, particularly around the WCAG standards, there's a really good free plugin available for Chrome called the Axe plugin. I'll send, or if somebody wants to put a link, I think you're familiar with that, Cliff? [Cliff] Yep.

[Josh] I think there was also this, as part of the SA Accessibly Toolkit, they're fantastic as a resource as well you can use. But outside of that and some of the settings on your phones as well, so you might not be able to use a screen reader, but you can do things like... most phones or tablets will have the ability to do things like zooming in, or changing the colors. So you can play around with some of the accessibility settings in those as well.

41:29

Victoria, is there a checklist of the types of comms that should be delivered in order to include all people with disabilities other than captions, Easy Read? Good question. I haven't seen a checklist about that. But I think that'd be really useful. Maybe a description as well, describing what each are and who primarily uses them. And that's a really good idea. Somebody might take that idea up and work on it.

This is from Carissa, in the current COVID-19 situation where it may be difficult to conduct usability testing with people with disabilities, what alternatives are there in this case? So with COVID-19 situation, although we can't do in-person testing, there's no reason why we can't do usability testing remotely. So if you want to know, we do quite a bit of remote usability testing. And Zoom is the one we use, which we find being quite an accessible product to do that with. You may not get everything you get [inaudible 00:42:38], but one of the benefits you do get is you can go out to rural areas and maybe reach out to people who traditionally may not have been able to get into your usability testing level into your office where you're doing your testing.

42:56

Kate, is there an organisation that certifies, endorsers your site has an inclusive website web design? So there are organisations out there. So for example, my team has a service around auditing that's against the WCAG standards. We do sometimes include some best practice recommendations as well. But if you're talking about inclusion or inclusive web design, the best way to do it really is to bring a diverse range of people into doing usability testing on it. That's the only way you're really going to be able to get answers. I'd still recommend you aim to meet the WCAG standards. And then, like I said, there are some existing design patterns that are all evidence-based that you can utilise as well. But if you really want to be 100% confident, then you're going to have to bring people in to actually test it.

43:51

Benny, what's the UI component you hate most considering accessibility but can't get rid of it? For example, sliders with heaps of controls and hyperlinks and WYSIWYG. Any tips to take a stand on avoiding such components? So probably two other ones, the one that used to frustrate me most was carousels or slideshows that were auto-scrolling. I found them really, really distracting myself, but also they weren't particularly screen reader accessible quite often. And I imagine there it could be quite striking for people with ADHD, or if you had, say for example, dyslexia it took you a bit longer to read the text, but then the next slides come across. That was probably one of my sort of earlier big frustrations. More recently, I've seen some dynamic forms that have a... it's easier technique called progressive disclosure where maybe one question is displayed a time and then you press next and you move onto the next question.

44:57

And I've seen a few examples where there's no back button. So you press, you select an answer out of a multiple choice question and it just loads the next question immediately, and then there's no back button. I think that's particularly bad. A, it's hard to make it accessible for people using a keyboard, because typically when you select a radio button, it's not going to load the next question in a form. And also the fact that there's no back button. So how do you go back? Maybe you made a mistake, you clicked on the wrong thing or you pressed enter key on the wrong radio button and there's no way of going back. That's another really bad example I think where it hasn't really been thought through the impacts.

45:45

Just moving down. Thomas, how much does successful inclusive design rely on principles based standards and how much of it is directly measurable? Does one usually get more air time than the other? It's a really, really good question. What we tend to recommend at Vision Australia is aiming to meet the WCAG standard if it's a website or web application. And then after that, doing usability testing, because what usability testing will present is potentially a lot of the issues that would have been picked up when you're trying to meet the standard already. In terms of being measurable, it's much, much harder. So, say for example, usability testing, you can try to measure task completion rates, but they're not really valuable unless you're recruiting a lot of people. So if you've only got, say for example, two people who are blind in your group, then it's not really statistically strong enough to say that's measurable in terms of how many people could complete the task and who couldn't. I'd more focus on the quality of sides, and looking for patterns.

46:55

Even if you make it work better for one person, that's a really good result because it's that curb cut effect. You don't know who else might benefit from that solution. It's likely not just to be that one person. And that doesn't really answer your question on measurable. Another way to measure it is just around customer feedback. So just general customer feedback, is it getting more positive or is it getting more negative? That might give you some insights as well. But I'd say WCAG standards does get more airtime, but I think it's a little bit sad because I think there's a lot missed in the mix by focusing just on standards, which are a little bit more measurable. You can then say it either passes or fails or it complies or doesn't comply.

So I think that's it for the questions for me. And I can see there's one for you Cliff.

47:59

[Cliff] Yeah. Just followed that one up with Victoria and they are happy to have a chat on that Victoria if you're still in the session. You got one more Josh.

[Josh] One more?

[Cliff] Just from Sally, just down the bottom.

[Josh Yeah. With voice control speech-to-text, can you delete unwanted stuff by just saying delete? I'm fairly sure you can. It obviously depends on the voice control technology, but I'm pretty sure, at least with Apple's one, you can tell it to delete things as well, but you'd have to confirm with a particular voice controlled speech-to-text product that you're talking about. I don't know if you can just say delete though. I know you can program them sometimes to say if you say a specific word, that can act as a shortcut to do a particular thing.

48:56

[Cliff] Thanks Josh. Thanks everyone. A great presentation. Oh, is the WebAIM's WAVE tool Chrome extension as good as Axe's. Do you want me to stop recording while you answer that?

[Josh] I'm actually admittedly not that familiar with WAVE. I had used it a number of years ago. So I'm not probably up to date with how good it is today. My personal favorite is Axe. I really like it's open source. So lots of people contributing from all around the world from my understanding. So I can't really comment, but I do know a lot of people use WAVE and really like it as a tool.

49:44

[Cliff] Thank again, Josh, for your time and everybody coming today. As I said before, the numbers have been brilliant for this one and help get support for the next one. We have got something planned for International Day of People With Disability with Microsoft. So, more information coming out on that a bit later on. Just would love to thank everybody again. Thanks Alison, for setting this up and we're working that, and thanks for your time, Josh.

[Josh] Yeah, thanks a lot. Really appreciate it.

[Cliff] Cool. Got lots of questions coming in now. Can't even delete them all. We'll get to those.