Why Inclusive Design Matters More Than Ever

About This Episode

Special Guest

Transcript

(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)

DAVID CARTY: For many parkgoers, the perfect finale to a day at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom is a stroll down Main Street, USA, and finding that perfect spot to view the end-of-the-night fireworks. For kiddos and adults alike, it can be, well, as the name suggests, a magical experience. Or if you’re William Reuschel, you can just watch those fireworks from your window. He lives a stone’s throw from Magic Kingdom and has a perfect view of the fireworks. OK, but are there churros?

WILLIAM REUSCHEL: I’m actually on the back side of Magic Kingdom, the way that that is all set up. I’m in a town called Winter Garden, the south part of it. If you’re in the Orlando area, you are in proximity of something, and we are in proximity of Disney World.

And so sometimes I tell people that I can look outside my window at night and watch the fireworks because almost everybody around here can. And so it’s a really interesting perspective to just be able to literally set your watch by when the fireworks go off. Or when they’re late, or when the weather is bad and you don’t hear the explosions in the background, it’s kind of a surreal experience to not hear them.

We all get to be participants in the fireworks show. So it’s a lot of fun.

CARTY: Living in the greater Orlando area can be a bit of an interesting experience. It’s common to rub elbows in the grocery store with government contractors and Broadway talent. And they both might be just a little bit secretive about their work. It’s an area filled with transplants, with different specialties. Yet just outside of the city, it’s a slice of Americana.

REUSCHEL: In those places, I think a lot of people just go in and visit, sometimes there’s a veneer where you don’t realize that people actually built this and made this happen. And it’s kind of fun to– you’re at the dog park, and you’re like, hey, yeah, I’m the director of so-and-so show. And I’m like, oh, cool, that’s awesome. And then that’s kind of a realization that people made that happen.

I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone from the area that has grown up and lived there. So everyone has either come in or is transient. And so that certainly is an interesting experience.

There’s certainly some of that. So you’re not going to have the old world charm in Orlando proper. But you can also go out to where I live. I don’t actually live in Orlando. Historic Winter Garden has a wonderful downtown, a beautiful farmers market, and the character that you can find in small-town USA or anywhere else. So that’s where– outside of that immediate population center is where you’re going to find the things that make home feel like home.

So while you might go through a strip where it’s all hotels and all short-term rentals and things like that, there certainly is a community if you know where to find it.

CARTY: Just one word of caution– be careful on the roads. Between the travelers cruising in rental cars and, yeah, the occasional Florida man, it can be a treacherous transportation experience.

REUSCHEL: The traffic– as far as I know, we still hold the record for the most dangerous section of interstate right where I live. We’ve got just millions of people that have never driven on that section of road and lots of traffic there. So that is a little bit challenging. So as a local, you figure out how to navigate the side roads and to avoid the fact that these people don’t know what they’re doing, because they come here, like, once every five years. And they’re on vacation. So those are some of the things that you learn to look out for. But overall, it’s quite an interesting experience being here. I get to tell people I watch fireworks every night.

CARTY: This is the Ready, Test, Go. podcast brought to you by Applause. I’m David Carty.

Today’s guest is spark-seeker and inclusive design expert William Reuschel. William is the inclusive design practice lead here at Applause and a true advocate for accessibility and inclusive technology. William has spent over a decade working with assistive technology users and product teams to help empower digital experiences.

While it doesn’t happen all the time in today’s world, sometimes the right thing and the smart thing are the same thing. That applies to accessibility testing and inclusive design, where people with disabilities are both an underserved market and one that deserves advocacy and support. Many organizations see accessibility as a legal hurdle. William sees something very different– an opportunity to reach more customers, design smarter, and build better products. With the European Accessibility Act now in play, the stakes are rising. But so are the opportunities. Let’s talk about what building an effective accessibility and inclusive design program looks like and why it should be a high-priority agenda item. Let’s get into it.

William, for leaders and teams who aren’t yet convinced of its value, how do you explain inclusive design in a way that really resonates for them?

REUSCHEL: Well, first of all, we explain accessibility. So there are people who use something called assistive technology to enable access to different devices. So if we think about someone who’s blind or somebody who doesn’t have the use of their hands and needs to use an alternative method for accessing technology, there are these assistive technologies that they will be using that are typically built into platforms like– iOS and Android and Windows desktop platforms all have these tools built into them that enable access. This is a layer of software that goes on top of the operating system and enables access to the application you have built. That’s what accessibility is.

Accessibility is a legal requirement as well. And accessibility impacts more people than you anticipate. So the CDC says, and has data that backs up that one in four people in America have some sort of disability. That’s not saying that they’re all using assistive technologies, that they all require a screen reader to access technology. But it does say that one in four people, at minimum, could benefit from a product that is easier to use with a feature that is more accessible than it was.

So inclusive design is thinking holistically about that accessibility, which is, can we avoid compatibility issues with assistive technology? This is doing testing against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and ensuring that we comply with all of those standards. That’s very important. Inclusive design is thinking more holistically about who all we’re benefiting from making products easier to use. And that is, yes, making it easy to use with assistive technology. That is testing with users who are using assistive technology and making better decisions about how we present different user interfaces that anyone can benefit from.

So if you’re not convinced that accessibility is something that’s important, and the legal argument doesn’t work, just thinking about the impact from, certainly, in the consumer marketplace of the number of people that have a disability or are adjacent to those who have a disability and rely on assistive technologies, it’s much larger than people anticipate. And the benefits of thinking holistically about making products easier to use and more inclusive is certainly more impactful than, upon first glance, we might think, because a lot of people don’t have that personal experience using assistive technology that they know of. But they know somebody that does.

CARTY: Right, especially when you factor in temporary disabilities or just situations where users might need a more easy-to-access experience. Low-connectivity, low-light, high-volume settings, these are all situations where inclusive design can go a long way.

And to that point, you work with a lot of clients on their accessibility practices, different levels of commitment, maturity, and investment. What differentiates a company that treats accessibility as a competitive advantage from one that treats it purely as a legal or compliance risk?

REUSCHEL: Yeah, so I’ve found that accessibility and how a company handles accessibility is actually a decent indicator for how efficiently they handle other compliance obligations– so thinking about GDPR and security requirements, so privacy and security. If a company is fumbling around how to handle those obviously important topics, they’re often fumbling around with accessibility as well. But when you have a holistic practice that understands what these obligations are and design processes to ensure that things get built in the correct way, overall, the processes are more efficient, and the outcomes are better.

So if we think about accessibility as a competitive advantage, we, one, need to recognize that we have to do this. So we’re making our product accessible one way or the other. We can do it the easy way or the hard way, basically. We can go and we can patchwork things together after we identify issues that have already made it into production. And we can fix triage based on complaints that we have, and we can dodge lawsuits and things like that. Or we can take a proactive approach to fixing things in sprint cycles and design reviews and having processes and protocols in place to ensure that designers and engineers are thinking about accessibility as they are building something, as opposed to then getting something built and going back and then treating accessibility like technical debt, which isn’t scalable and creates an adversarial relationship with accessibility, which then makes it harder.

So it’s like a negative feedback loop when you’re only treating accessibility like a legal risk. So a company that is treating it like a competitive advantage is both minimizing the total cost of ownership for accessibility by investing in training, investing in processes, but also understanding that while maybe we can’t measure directly the return on investment for a change or a bug we fixed– that might not drive huge returns in our analytics because of the population that we are benefiting– that doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t other benefits to making accessible product– things like, first of all, it’s the right thing to do, which is great. So people want to do the right thing, and they want to be advocates, and they want people to have a good experience. But it also puts brand reputation on the line. If you have an inaccessible product, and people are saying that my blind friend can’t use this app because of XYZ bug you have in it, that starts opening up questions as to the other quality in the app and the other issues that might be part of it.

So accessibility being an advantage in understanding that we are increasing the number of people that can use the app, but also, we increase the opportunities that we have to capitalize on that goodwill, but also to sell products to companies that also value accessibility.

So there are reasons that a B2B product needs to make their products accessible as well. So if you want to sell to the US federal government, you need to be Section 508-compliant. Those are accessibility requirements which align very closely with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and actually overlap in most cases. And so if you want to sell to a company that also has a dedicated dedication to accessibility, you need to make sure your product is accessible, and you need to advertise and prove that your product is accessible as well and lean on that as a reason why my product is better than yours. So that’s what I see when companies start understanding accessibility as the competitive advantage it is, because it’s something that we own that we have to reduce the cost of complying, but also, it opens up opportunities to do business with other companies that also value accessibility.

CARTY: Right. If somebody offers you the easy way versus the hard way, don’t be stubborn. Just take the easy way. It’s not a Robert Frost poem. You can take the road more traveled. It’s fine.

So the idea is that accessibility expands the total addressable market in addition to being the right thing to do ethically, as you mentioned. Do you see any ways where inclusive design can actually be a catalyst for innovation, rather than the perception that it holds it back?

REUSCHEL: Yeah, and that perception is one that we fight quite a bit, especially with teams that are new to accessibility and are really focused on the way that their design is perceived by users. And so to be blunt, a lot of misconceptions come from dedicated accessibility products, where we have– let’s just think about an amazing technology, hearing aids. So this enables access for millions of people to live a more complete life, to be able to restore their hearing. And early hearing aids were enormous boxes. And they were ugly because there is less focus on a dedicated accessibility product on industrial design because the cost is already so high. Early accessibility, dedicated accessibility products, it doesn’t really matter when. If it’s a new, specific product, it’s going to be on the orders of thousands of dollars to acquire this. And so if you also have to spend for your research and development, put millions more dollars in industrial design to make it look beautiful as well, that kind of edges people out from being able to access this specialized technology as well. So that is, I think, where some of the misconception about accessibility and aesthetic might come from, where there are historically some devices which do amazing things. But industrial design did not take a forefront role, because they were focused on making it available to people and making it functional for people.

Aesthetics come later, and that has changed dramatically over time as well as things get miniaturized. But let’s go back to companies that aren’t making dedicated accessible products. So if we think that an accessible product is the color of a hearing aid from 1980s, an amazing technology, incredible piece of technology that people rely on– but if we think that that’s what accessibility has to look like, and my website that serves millions of people, my e-commerce website that serves millions of people has to be the color of a hearing aid and look like a hearing aid to be accessible, that’s not going to get very far, right? But that just isn’t the case. So accessibility puts a layer of constraints on things that we can’t do that make things impossible for certain segments of the market to use. So an accessible site has to have metadata that a screen reader can use. That doesn’t affect visually the site at all to make something compatible with a screen reader. There are certain requirements for contrast and color being used in a way so that we don’t have super low-contrast text, or we’re not relying on colors to indicate information. So if you’re red-green colorblind, and we have a status page with just red and green indicators, you can’t tell the difference between that. So that is a constraint that accessibility puts on it. So we need to make it more usable and come up with an alternative solution. That doesn’t mean that your status page can’t otherwise be beautiful. So that is something that we work with designers a lot with, to break through that and say that we’re not telling you can’t do anything. We’re giving you some guardrails to make sure that you don’t make a product that is exclusionary.

But that doesn’t limit the innovation that you have. So let’s look at some specific examples. There’s actually a concept for this called a digital curb cut. So a curb cut is, in the US– they’re called other things globally. But if you’ve got a sidewalk, and you’ve then got like a parking lot, the curb cut is a ramp that allows you to transfer between the parking lot, the lower elevation, to the higher elevation, on top of the sidewalk itself. So crosswalks, they all have curb cuts. That is because we need to allow access for people who are using wheelchairs. That’s why those curb cuts exist. But the benefit goes beyond that. Think about people who are riding bikes, people who are pushing strollers, people who have shopping carts. All benefit from having those curb cuts. So it’s an ADA requirement to have them, but everybody benefits from it.

So that innovation really improves everything. So digital curb cut are features that get built with accessibility in mind to solve a problem for maybe somebody that has a disability and is using a screen reader but that benefits everyone else. So some of those famous examples are things like captions. Captions are for people who are deaf or hard of hearing that can’t hear speech in synchronous media. But they can read it. Captions are used primarily by people who can hear the speech but who are in a situation that that is not an easy thing to do. So, for example, you’re in a sports bar or something like that, and it’s noisy, and you’ve got, like, 14 TVs. You might have captions on so you can still see what the announcers are saying. Or this is also a tremendous benefit for language learners. So 80% or more of captions users are not for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. They’re because people benefit from having those captions or subtitles.

The same thing– you already mentioned contrast. So having brighter screens, higher contrast, allows you to use your device or your phone or your app in more locations. If you expect your users to have an app on a phone and not just be sitting at their desk in office lighting, holding their phone at arm’s length in ideal scenarios, they’re going to be out in the world doing things. So they’re going to step out into the sun. They’re going to be in shadow. They’re going to have glare. All these things are going to be happening. And so having a readable display, a readable app, a readable UI benefits everyone, but also meets accessibility requirements.

And one more that I think people really just aren’t aware of is OCR, so being able to scan a page and get the text out of it, extracting text, which is a huge thing that’s happening with the ingestion of AI data and training data. Being able to OCR things accurately is a huge driver. And it enables so many different things, like taking a picture of a sign and getting a translation of it in real time. That was invented to benefit people who were blind that needed to be able to access information in books and text materials primarily for education. So a named Ray Kurzweil invented the OCR, came out with the first product. And this was used in universities and schools to enable people who are blind to access course material that otherwise they would need to have somebody be a reader for them. And it’s tremendously expensive to have somebody sit with you and read text to you, and takes away your independence as well. That technology, OCR, which is ubiquitous, massive uses, was invented as an accessibility feature.

So that’s what a digital curb cut is. That’s what can happen when we’re thinking about what are the possibilities with inclusive design, how are we solving problems for people, and then how that feature, that inclusive thinking about solving people’s problems where they are and the environments they’re in with the abilities that they have, and how does that benefit everyone.

CARTY: And OCR is such a great example because the use cases, as you mentioned, are seemingly infinite with the influx of, as you mentioned, AI-infused apps and things like that. It’s almost limitless when you think about it.

To take this in a different direction, now that the European Accessibility Act has come into effect, what does this mean for companies who do business in the EU, or maybe even large companies that don’t do business in the EU? What practical shifts will they have to make, especially those that might be lagging behind in accessibility maturity, which can even include a lot of EU companies?

REUSCHEL: Yes, absolutely. So the EAA, which came into effect– we’ve known about the EAA for many years now. But the deadline has finally passed where enforcement can begin. So if you do business in the EU, you have to comply with the European Accessibility Act, and specifically the national transpositions of that legislation, which will be enforced in various different EU member states. So if you have a mature accessibility practice and you’re already doing this, the impact on you is actually going to be relatively low. Mature accessibility practices that are already doing testing, that are already fixing bugs, that are already reporting internally what the accessibility of their products are like, are in good shape.

So the changes that actually are occurring there’s a couple more checkpoints you need to look into. There’s a couple of specific reporting requirements that, depending on which country you’re actually doing business in, you might need to report out to proactively. Or you might get a request for a report from the market authorities. And you need to publish an accessibility statement. So those are broadly what a company that’s already focused on accessibility need to do. However, if you don’t have accessibility practice, you’ve never done anything with accessibility and you’re doing business in the EU, you have to do something now. And take a look at the act yourself. There are some exceptions, but the exceptions are not very generous. So if you are a micro-enterprise, if you’ve got, like, less than 10 people in your company, if you have only legacy products, those are accepted from the EAA itself. But if you have an active product that you’re maintaining, a service that you’re delivering, a website that EU customers are using, EAA does apply to you.

And you are obligated to make your site accessible to people with disabilities. So the best way to get started is to understand and to characterize where you are presently. And so you can run an audit to identify your major accessibility issues and major gaps. I would strongly recommend you not focus only on an automated solution for this, because automation is something that we might talk about, but there’s limitations to what automation can find. Even with the amazing things that we’re doing with AI, finding accessibility bugs still needs to be done by a human.

And so we need to at least sample pages on your side to see where you are. And I would recommend identifying what your core flows are. So if you’re an e-commerce site, can I search for a product? Can I view the page? Can I add that product to my cart? Can I check out? That’s the core flow that I need to make sure is accessible. And if you find that you’ve got blocking issues with accessibility, you can’t move forward with that, you need to come up with a plan for remediating that.

So every company in the EU also is going to be needing to publish an accessibility statement. That statement will specify basically what your level of compliance is now, which you can’t specify if you haven’t done an audit. And then most countries are requiring a roadmap to fix. And so there are mechanisms in the EAA that specify if a person with a disability has an issue with your site, they can report this issue to your local market regulation authorities in their local jurisdiction. And that local authority can and will reach out to understand how you’re going to fix that issue and how you’re going to unblock the problem for your customer that had an issue. And if you don’t, there are significant penalties that can be applied, up to the point where your product might be forced off the market in Europe in the most extreme cases.

So these are all things that certainly we are learning about the best way to move forward. We’re learning about how the market authorities want to operate and how they’re prioritizing and how you should prioritize the issues that should be fixed. But if you haven’t done anything with accessibility, you can’t plead ignorance. That isn’t going to work.

CARTY: It’s probably better to assume EAA applies to you, or that even future legislation applies to you, and to work toward that rather than turning a blind eye to it, in other words.

But there is some confusion–I’m sure you’ve run into this–when it comes to measuring the success or the maturity of an inclusive design or an accessibility program. It’s not as simple as measuring WCAG issues. So what ways can organizations measure accessibility success that really better capture that user experience?

REUSCHEL: Yeah, so if you want to understand if the issues exist within your product, you need to identify them by issues, and you need to fix those issues. But if you’re building an accessibility practice and you’re measuring yourself on the number of issues we’re finding and fixing, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing a good job. That means that you’re finding issues to fix. There are a number of different things that that means. One, that is maybe you’re just really focused on finding and fixing issues, which is generally good. But that means that you’re rewarding yourself for finding those issues. You’re not necessarily rewarding yourself for improving the product experience for people that are using it.

So one thing that I would focus on is we need to understand how teams are performing. We want to reduce the number of issues that we’re finding in totality, which means that we know what our baseline is. We want to make that issue count go down. And then we want to keep pressure downward on that issue and make sure that we are not doing things that change the way that we measure those numbers to game our own internal metrics. So we talked about EAA compliance. Again, the different European countries have a slightly different take on this, but it doesn’t matter. Any number of issues that you have is a problem with compliance. That means you are partially conformant, and that means that you do have work to do. So this is never a “we’re finished” kind of project. So identifying issues and continually searching for them is a very good thing. But the reality, especially if you’re new to accessibility and you haven’t been doing testing, the reality is if you have a large product, you’re going to have a lot of issues to fix. You’re going to have thousands of issues in some cases.

And it is not feasible to fix them all. And we need to understand how we are going to fix the most important issues first to unblock people from being able to use your application. That is what I think that is the most important way to think about whether or not you’re being successful with your accessibility practice. So how do we actually do that, and why does it matter? So compliance is important. We need to have a viewpoint of what issues we have according to the WCAG standards, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or the European guidelines as well, which is very similar. But the fact is you probably have hundreds if not thousands of issues on your site that need to be fixed. And you’re not going to be able to fix them all. So a better thing for us to be doing, in addition to just identifying issues, is to actually test whether or not somebody can use your product. And I think that is going to go a lot further, especially with regulators who are chasing down companies that are receiving a lot of complaints, to understand that, yes, maybe in some of our peripheral pages we have some issues, but we’re really focused on identifying the core experiences that we need– that we want everyone to be able to have a really good experience with.

So I’m an e-commerce site. You need to be able to search products, add them to your cart, verify details of that product, and check out. Those are the things that if we can prove that we actually have had a screen reader user, we’ve had a keyboard user, an alt nav user, go through those key flows and report back on what the experiences they had, that is going to really narrow down the number of issues that you need to focus on first, and then that gives you a canary to understand, am I fixing the right issues, and am I improving the product for people that this legislation, this law, was actually written for, because– the EAA, the ADA, these laws and regulations don’t buy your product like people do. And so we want to make sure that those people want to buy and use your product.

And the best way to do that is by asking them if the experience is good. So we have a focus on a mature practice. It has a focus on regularly engaging with people from the disability community to provide feedback in a structured way against the most important features of an application and report on that alongside with compliance data to show whether or not things are improving, because I’ve seen many, many compliance dashboards where we’ve fixed 500 bugs. We’ve spent 10,000 dev hours fixing these bugs, whatever the numbers are. They can scale very high. But we haven’t actually made the experience any better, because we’re not focused on the right thing.

And that’s really what we want to be avoiding. And there are ways to prioritize issues just intrinsically on how severe they are. But there’s also the perspective of what a user is bringing with them to the experience when they’re trying to go through it, and how that changes the prioritization of what those experiences are, and how fixes can be made in context to improve those experiences and unblock people much faster than trying to address 10,000 issues.

CARTY: In a previous discussion, you mentioned that young engineers and designers often enter the workforce with almost no accessibility training. I find that surprising in 2025. Why is that, and how do we close that gap in engineering education and in the workforce?

REUSCHEL: Yes, so this is a major problem that we have with scaling programs and creating sustainable programs. And the way we address this is by owning the fact that this is the case and understanding that we need to prioritize hiring for people that understand what accessibility is, training the people that we already have what accessibility is, and retaining that talent as something that we value as a company. Otherwise, you are going to be constantly retraining and constantly dealing with the churn of the fact that people go through boot camps, they go through design training, and they don’t have any focus on accessibility. And then they are presented with 100 accessibility bugs with technologies they’ve never heard of, and they’re just trying to close these tickets as fast as they can. And that causes so much more churn than somebody that really can understand, diagnose what an issue is, and fix it right the first time.

And these investments have to be made intentionally. So why is this the case? There are a lot of great organizations. I’ve worked with an organization called Teach Access that is focused on changing curriculum in higher education to ensure that accessibility is taught as part of a module. Your high-quality boot camps are going to have a section on accessibility. And there are changes to this happening. The ACM is Association for Computing Machinery, who is responsible for accreditation of– or the curriculum for computer science students is working on this as well. And so there is an increase. But the timeline for actually having changes is so long that a company is not going to be able to rely on that. And so as a company that wants to do this right, we have to understand that this is an investment we have to make. And in making this investment early and really valuing– as we’re hiring new candidates, valuing those that have this rare skill is something that’s going to set us up for success in the future.

And investing in training in the right way is also going to be part of it. I also work with companies that have external development teams that work with contractors and whole contracted teams. And in those cases, maybe you don’t invest in training for your contracted developers, but you emphasize in your contracts that this is something that the people that work for me need to have this skill set, and you either figure out how to provide that training for them before we sign a contract with you, or you hire those people that already have the skill set as well.

So there is pressure that needs to be put on both the hiring practices as well as procurement practices and contracting practices to make sure that this is something we’re looking for before we staff up with a whole bunch of people that then we’re paying a lot of money to go back to the drawing board and take a boot camp and spend 15 hours in a training session with me, which I love doing. I love meeting engineers. But the fact is that is a massive cost to a company to have your engineers sitting in a set of training courses to get them skilled up for something that, otherwise, we could have screened for at the beginning.

CARTY: Yeah, they need to come in with that sort of base level of skills.

It’s sort of a running joke on this podcast. Where we are a technology podcast, we are obligated to mention AI. And we’ve avoided it for the most part in this conversation intentionally. But you have raised concerns about autonomy for people with disabilities as it pertains to AI. You brought up the example of how there’s a risk of interpreters making decisions on someone else’s behalf. With poor implementation, AI could be guilty of the same thing on a much bigger scale. So how can AI be designed to support autonomy rather than erode it?

REUSCHEL: So this is not a unique issue to people with disabilities. This is an issue that, in my research and my conversations, people are sensitive to, for a number of different reasons. So as you said, there is this sensitivity towards people who are providing support to someone with a disability to ensure that they are not removing autonomy. And that’s exactly what our AI agents are doing for us. They are providing support to us, but we want to make sure that they are doing exactly what we tell them to do and they’re not making decisions for us unless we have authorized them to make that decision. So this is something that, as an advocate, as somebody who has worked for a nonprofit organization for many years before joining Applause, this is something that is a constant conversation, which is– let’s say someone is blind or deafblind, a deafblind person in particular. There is a role called either a support service provider or a co-navigator, which is basically the interpreter that you were talking about. But it’s a very specific, structured role that allows somebody who is deafblind, which means that they cannot see or hear, which means that they are reliant on someone to provide feedback around about their surroundings, to interact with the world– go to the store, to ride the bus, those things.

So if you are interacting, if you’re going to work, you might have one of these individuals providing support to you. If you’re at the store, as, for an example, there is a lot of sensitivity that this individual who’s providing support to you is not just saying, oh, you need a can of beans. I’m going to grab the can of beans that I think you need and put it in the cart for you. That is not the role of somebody who is providing support to an individual who is deafblind. And so when I have conversations with people with disabilities who work with interpreters or who are used to people just casually removing autonomy from them that say, hey, let me grab this for you because I think you need help, or let me grab onto your arm and lead you to where you need to go because I think I know where you need to go. I’m going to remove the autonomy from you. That is a significant problem in the disability community that is top of mind.

So when we think about artificial intelligence, we think about agents and the things that– decisions that AI can make for individuals. One of the topics that comes up consistently is traceability and really understanding that I still have control over the decisions that I’m making. And this isn’t unique to the disability community at all. This is what everybody wants. But this is a particular sensitivity that comes from the experiences that someone with a disability might have every day as they just go through life that somebody who doesn’t have support partners or doesn’t have people who– and by the way, it’s great to want to offer support. I’m not suggesting people don’t want you to not be helpful to somebody with a disability. It’s about understanding the right way to do that. And so there’s a lot of good intentions that people have that often end in interactions that are not positive just because there’s that gap in understanding.

So I’m not saying that people shouldn’t try to be helpful and that people never need help. It’s about that autonomy. It’s about, if someone has a disability, they choose when they are going somewhere. They choose what brand of beans they’re getting at the store. And so sometimes there are tasks that we want to offload. So sometimes I want to order Instacart and have it show up a few hours later. That’s an amazing service that I’ve chosen to engage with. And I understand what’s happening. What people are sensitive to is when they go to an experience, and they say, ah, I see that you are using a screen reader or you are blind. Our website doesn’t work very well for screen reader users. We have this chatbot here. Just tell it what you want, and it’ll figure it out for you. That’s the kind of thing that people are sensitive to, because that is kind of a separate experience that is removing the experience that other people are having and not allowing them to engage in the same way.

So when we’re talking about AI, there’s so much to be excited about, so many great things that can happen. But there’s always kind of that undertone of ensuring that– the lesson to be learned from the disability community, which is people need to have confidence that they have autonomy over the decisions that they’re making, there’s traceability as to how decisions are being made, and they can stop something if they don’t want it to keep going. And this is something that comes up all the time when we’re doing focus groups. So AI is great. We support it. We want to push it forward. But there are certainly things that we need to learn from the disability community before we implement something without being thoughtful.

CARTY: And it’s a good distinction to say that it’s not exclusive to people with disabilities, because I think, in our digital experiences, we do lose some autonomy. And even things like data protection laws, I think, are intended to bring some of that autonomy back. So it is a nice distinction.

If we’re looking ahead five years, what types of emerging technology do you think will help serve people with disabilities? And what will be the keys to making those experiences as seamless as possible?

REUSCHEL: I think that the best way for a company to think about artificial intelligence and the features that are going to benefit people with disabilities is to think about what problems it’s solving for everyone. And again, when we think about good usage of AI, we’re thinking about problems that are difficult for everyone that are more difficult for other people. So one conversation I was having was about comparison shopping, where, if I’m going to website A to buy a laptop, and I’m going to website B to buy a different laptop, but I want to compare the specs across it, visually, things are laid out on the table. I can go through. I can scan things. I can bring up windows side by side. I can figure that out relatively quickly. But if you’re using a screen reader– and those of you who have not actually used a screen reader or heard a screen reader in action, you hear a ton of information. You have to read a page from top to bottom. There are ways to navigate through it in more efficient ways. But the fact is, speech is linear. You can’t quickly scan through things. And so if you’ve got a table structured in one way over here and a table structured in another way over here, comparing line items can take a long time. And that’s not because using a screen reader or somebody who’s using a screen reader needs information in a different way. It’s just because the tool itself, in this very specific instance, is holding back somebody’s ability to access the information they need in an efficient manner.

This is exactly the same problem that I have. As someone who’s sighted, I don’t use a screen reader in day-to-day life. I can pull those up side by side. I can do it more efficiently. But I’m still prone to error. I still can make mistakes. It still takes time for me to do comparison shopping. This is a great opportunity to say, hey, there’s an agent out there where I can say, I’m looking for a laptop with so-and-so specs, and it goes out, and it scans the page, it pulls out the relevant detail, and it provides me a summary that I can trust, and I can trace and confirm what it’s saying. But that task which would take me, as a sighted person, maybe 20 seconds, a screen reader user maybe three minutes, an AI agent is going to take both of us now five seconds. So it’s those features that benefit everybody, but have that kind of inordinate benefit for somebody who’s using assistive technology in a way that there are just some tasks that– for all that we want to make things more inclusive and we want to make things more accessible, there are just some tasks that the reality is it takes longer to do with a screen reader, or with a keyboard, or with some of the other tools that we have. That’s an equalizer. That’s a great equalizer, and that has been a great usage on the conversations we’ve had of some of the opportunities.

And then, of course, with the ability to query images, there is a lot of legacy inaccessible material out on the web. We’d love for that to all be fixed, but the reality is it’s not going to be. There are ways to enable a screen reader user and assistive technology user to enhance that experience through AI in a way that allows access to something they haven’t had before. And I want to be very clear here. This is not something that we– again, the distinction between enhancing an experience for something that we didn’t have access to previously and replacing the experience and providing this is the only way you can access our product is something that’s very different. But being able to, especially in storefronts, reselling stores, auction sites, things like that, where people are posting images of their material, merchandise, being able to use AI to query an image and to double-check what the product images look like is an excellent usage of AI and something that a lot of the screen reader users that I’ve talked to are excited about being able to do.

We’re not to the point where we can fix websites with AI. We’re not to the point where we can replace experiences with AI. And I don’t think that we will ever be there. I think AI is going to be able to enhance and make experiences better and fix problems faster, but we’re still going to need to have the core, the foundations are going to need to be accessible, and they’re going to need to be built correctly to move forward.

But these thoughtful usages of AI are really exciting. And I think what companies should be thinking about– frame this as what problem am I solving for everybody, and then think about bring people into the conversation that might have an inordinate benefit from that. So a screen reader user that previously had a task that would take 10 minutes now can be done in five seconds, which is a net gain of nine and a half minutes over our sighted users. Those are the kinds of metrics that I think are really exciting and that AI can start delivering today.

CARTY: Lightning round for you, William. First question– what is the most important characteristic of a high-quality application?

REUSCHEL: I think it’s customer satisfaction, which comes from solving a need that somebody has consistently and easily. Accessibility bugs, functional bugs are going to factor into that. Confusing UI, which aren’t technically a bug, factors into that. So these are all factors that can ultimately contribute to quality. But the perception that somebody has when they’re using your application and what problem it solves for them, is the most important characteristic of a high-quality application.

CARTY: What should software development organizations be doing more of?

REUSCHEL: Hearing from their customers, conducting research, understanding niche use cases. Obviously, inclusive design, as something we’ve been talking about, is a really good way to do that because that breaks out of the bubble that people live in and breaks the misconceptions we might have. Because we live in our apps day in and day out, we need to hear from people, hear alternative perspectives, and hear people that are on the edges, that are using the technology in different ways that we didn’t even know about.

CARTY: On the flip side, what should software development organizations be doing less of?

REUSCHEL: Waiting until something is launched to think about accessibility.

CARTY: Way too late in the game, huh? To put it mildly. And finally, William, what is something that you are hopeful for?

REUSCHEL: I’m hopeful that we’re going to maintain our focus on people and the experiences they have in improving the lives that they have, and the opportunities with AI and technology we have are in the mission to improve people’s lives.

CARTY: When you put people first, that goes a long way.

REUSCHEL: It sure does.

CARTY: William, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been fun.

REUSCHEL: Thank you.

CARTY: Appreciate our colleague William Reuschel joining the podcast. He’s really doing some great work around inclusive design. Check out our podcast notes for more about Applause’s accessibility testing solution and expertise.

Thanks to our producers Joe Stella and Samsu Sallah, editor Ian Lippincott, and graphic designer Karley Searles. Go ahead and subscribe to Ready, Test, Go. You can find us on most podcast platforms. You can also subscribe to the Applause YouTube channel. The handle for that is @applausedotcom. And you can let us know what you think of the podcast by emailing [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks for joining us.