Increase Your Understanding of Persons With Disabilities

A blind professional talks about social views, terminology, access technologies and more in honor of International Day of Persons With Disabilities

Tables turned

Imagine the majority of people were blind. There are so few sighted people that designers have no exposure to them. Sighted people must rely on announcements over the PA for trains/planes instead of on boards displaying this information. They must use earbuds and spoken prompts to get cash out of the ATM. Since there are no screens, there are no onscreen notifications that would aid sighted users, they’re only in audio. People who need special accommodation to spatially display information can buy a pixel display, but they are very expensive. These are just a few of the challenges that would be met by sighted people.

As a sighted user, wouldn’t you want to be involved in the efforts to make this experience better, rather than to have it designed for you without any input?

Understand and honor our differences

Applause recognizes the United Nations International Day of Persons With Disabilities, designed to “promote an understanding of disability issues and mobilize support for the dignity, rights and well-being of persons with disabilities. It also seeks to increase awareness of gains to be derived from the integration of persons with disabilities in every aspect of political, social, economic and cultural life.”

With that in mind, I was fortunate to interview Danielle Montour. Danielle is a blind braille and tactile literacy educator, XR researcher and inclusive design advocate. She is also a member of the Applause uTest community of global testers. It’s the uTest connection that led me to Danielle. In this blog, I focus on a few key components that align most with the spirit of International Day of Persons With Disabilities.

Learn the basics

What’s in a name?

A lot. When referring to people with disabilities, Danielle prefers to use the term “disabled.” Danielle understands why some people choose not to use the term as their own moniker, but she doesn’t see disability as a bad term, rather one that’s quite apt as a descriptor. For more on this, see the Be My Eyes Inclusive Language Guide, specifically, “Part 2 – Unbuttoning the person-first straightjacket” section.

Still, Danielle would encourage anyone who is interacting with a blind, neurodiverse or any other disabled person to simply ask how they would like to be referred to. It’s tantamount to asking an Ecuadorian-American whether they want to be referred to as Hispanic (this means a person from a country whose primary language is Spanish) or as Latino (meaning they come from a country in Latin America or the Caribbean). Though slightly different, all of these terms can be accurately used in this case. It comes down to choice.

Don’t be afraid

Disabled people are just trying to live their best lives like everyone else, but Danielle’s perspective is that society sees disabled people “as a bit of a curiosity and with a degree of fear. We have these things called empathy sessions to try to learn more about these people we don’t fully understand.” People can be overly worried when interacting with a person with a disability, as they tend to let the perceived differences between them override the similarities. I can attest to this fault.

I’ve been working in the accessibility space for approximately two years and I’m still learning quite a bit.

One of my main concerns when speaking with a disabled person is that I might inadvertently be offensive. Danielle’s antidote to this very common syndrome? Make a concerted effort to – at a minimum – speak and interact with disabled people.

Sure, we live in a world where you can learn a lot about disability online. For example, a common path for people who want to learn about accessibility is to pursue the International Association of Accessibility Professionals’ CPACC (Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies) certification. Danielle states, “This is great; it provides a solid baseline, but it’s pixelated, not human.” The optimal scenario is to physically go and meet with people. There’s no better way to know any person – not just one with a disability – than to share physical space with them. And, Danielle is quick to add, the U.S. has a significant disabled population, so we should all prioritize gaining the diversity of experience that comes from interacting with someone with a disability. Danielle says, “There’s no reason to not hang out with a disabled person. You miss out if you don’t.”

Out with assistive, in with access

“Assistive technology” has an ableist overtone. It perpetuates the thinking that disabled people need help. We wouldn’t think this way and, indeed, it wouldn’t be the case, if we hadn’t excluded disabled people from the design and input into the spaces in which we all operate. Instead, Danielle embraces the preferred term, “access technology,” as it replaces the “helping” angle with one of autonomy and empowerment.

Approaching empathy

Danielle feels very strongly about empathy sessions, gatherings where people observe and interact with a disabled person as a way to gain emotional connection/empathy. She takes issue with the term “empathy” if it’s not used in a very specific context.

“We don’t really fully synthesize information unless we can personally connect with it. Watching a blind person use a screen reader doesn’t make you empathetic, since you’ve not established a care network in the brain. The neurons haven’t fired to do this. It’s a similar mechanism to why we integrate information better when we write it down, and why we teach children to read before they write.”

However, when people are exposed to a screen reader – and given tools such as a cheat sheet to help enable initial basic use so they don’t just give up –  then, as they build the neural pathways by stumbling and making headway, they begin to construct empathy. That is impactful.

The same goes for hanging out with a blind person. A coworker of mine, who is local to Danielle, recently had this experience. She met Danielle and they went to a rose garden and experienced that together. They got pastries and just hung out. My coworker learned what it was like to walk with Danielle, cross a street, describe what was ahead. The experience had real shape: it was three dimensional and brimming with humanity.

Compliance is violence?

Danielle is sharp, quick and provocative. As our conversation shifted to her views on compliance and improvements in access technologies over the last few years, she said, “I like to say that compliance is violence,” and then paused for dramatic effect (it worked). Since I didn’t immediately grasp the concept, she explained that meeting compliance for a standard, say, WCAG 2.2 AA, for example, is a simple checklist. Achieving it doesn’t guarantee a smooth digital experience for the disabled user. It’s a foundational effort on the ongoing inclusive design journey, which integrates more comprehensive elements along the spectrum of human diversity – language, ability, gender, economic levels, culture and race.

Inclusive design works toward creating products and services that are maximally usable by as many people as possible. In my mind, I envisaged an entrance to a home densely overgrown with bushes with massive thorns. With compliance in place, you might be able to get through the bushes and enter, but you’d inevitably end up with a lot of cuts.

Though Danielle and many others believe that there are downsides to the “compliance checklist,” largely born out of fear of lawsuits, there are some upsides. Perhaps the biggest of these is the disability awareness that has grown considerably over the last 10-15 years. She notes that we are particularly fortunate in the U.S., because there are many countries where there is much less of a focus on disability. Still, when Danielle mentions her First Nations racial heritage, she points out that she knows no blind First Nations people; they are simply not as prominent in her experience.

“There have been government standards in our country for a long time. It [digital access] has recently experienced a boom in popularity and notice. We’ve had these standards, it’s not like they’ve gotten more stringent over the past 10 years. They’ve become more prominent because the consequences have become more prominent as we’ve shifted our spaces from more exclusively physical spaces to mixed media spaces or hybrid spaces where we are also having digital components. I think that’s probably what’s facilitated it over anything else. If we were still back in 2004, there wasn’t so much of a need for all of this accessibility hierarchy then.”

Technology as a reflection of progress

Danielle and I talked a bit about access technology changes over the last 10-15 years. “In a macro way, we’ve gone more multimodal. We’re getting multi-line braille displays. They’ve developed things called dot arrays. The one that’s most recently out is the Monarch from American Printing House; this has an equidistant grid of dots. That way, low-quality images can be rendered in tactile views instead of just braille. That’s pretty revolutionary.” Danielle points out that, just 10 years ago, there were only one-line braille displays.

Screen readers continue to improve too. About 15 years back, there were just a few major screen readers: Dolphin and Window-Eyes, for example. Now, there are many out-of-box screen readers. Apple products have had VoiceOver for approximately 15 years and Microsoft Narrator, now almost 25 years old, continues to make big improvements. According to Danielle, until recently, it wasn’t even remotely comparable to a full-featured screen reader from specialized accessibility companies, but that gap has closed. “Now, if for whatever reason, a primary screen reader of mine turns off, I can use Narrator to do some things at least and fix my problem. And, with Narrator, you can set up a computer as a blind person all by yourself. You never used to be able to do that.”

Danielle notes that we now have an open-source freeware screen reader, NVDA (non-visual desktop access) for Windows. It’s donation-based and designed by blind people. It’s very comparable to paid software, like JAWS, which has been around for well over 25 years. NVDA is revolutionary because screen reader software has been historically very expensive.

Danielle tells me about one final area of access technology improvement: visual interpretation (see video for a demo example. This is an on-demand way for blind people to call sighted people and ask for their visual assistance as needed. “It’s a cool thing. The blind person gets to decide how and why they ask for help. It gives sighted people a great way to engage with blind people where it centers our autonomy.”

The final word

At the end of our conversation, I ask Danielle what message she’d like to wrap up the blog with.

“I would encourage companies to humanize the people they’re serving. This is not a checklist. These are people. This is personal to us. I don’t do accessibility because it’s good money or because it’s a checklist. I do it because it actively improves my quality of life.”

“Inclusive design not only impacts disabled people, but also their family members, their friends, people around them. Which is why I wish companies would humanize disabled folks more – and this means hiring disabled people, and not just for accessibility jobs. This means consulting disabled people. Your access professionals shouldn’t be people who have never interacted with disability. This means having people who really deeply are impacted by this work and benefit from this work and have experience with this work.”

Contact Applause to connect with diverse testers like Danielle.