Inclusive Design + Empathy: A Roundtable Discussion

Moderator: Emma Stone In Conversation Josephine Holmboe and Anne Petersen

Emma Stone:

To start off our conversation today, I want to clarify some terminology and definitions and really understand what we intend to talk about before we discuss the why and the how. Anne, I’m going to start with you. To help frame up the conversation, I want to hear from your point of view what the difference is between inclusive design, accessible design. What are we really talking about and how do these differentiate or differ from other terms and types of design that we often hear in tandem? So whether it be human-centered design or design thinking or DI at large, would love for you to kick it off.

Anne Petersen:

Absolutely. Let me take a step back and say these definitions often vary between people. Even in the industry there’s some variance on how people interpret them, but to me anyway, accessible design is a subset of inclusive design. We need both. We need to be inclusive by being accessible. You’ll also hear the term universal design, and that’s a very one size fits all approach. One solution will solve everything which I think is probably more often found in city planning or physical product design.

I am unconvinced this works as universally as we’d want, especially in digital contexts because something that might work well for one particular set of challenges may not work well for another particular set of challenges, but we can also find cases where one solution will apply to another. Things like captions, which I’m literally using right now. Captions, for example, are both an example of inclusive design and accessible design. I do not need them because I can’t hear, but they help me because of my particular neurodivergence. They help me follow along.

You can find lots of examples of this from curb cuts to many, many other cases, like other cases in which captions might be useful, might be like if you want to turn the sound off on a subway so that not everybody around you can hear something if you don’t have headphones with you. If you’re trying to soothe a crying child and don’t want extra noise. There are so many examples where something that benefits one set of folks will also benefit other sets of folks, but sometimes there are clashes. Again, you have to consider all of the cases to be as inclusive as you can.

Emma Stone:

Exactly. Thank you. Josephine, I was wondering if you could provide some examples at an organizational level. Do you have any specific examples of accessible or inaccessible design?

Josephine Holmboe:

Digitally in my world, we have a mandate to make sure all of our products are accessible for hearing impaired and vision impaired folks. As a designer on those products, you just immediately make sure a lot of things are implemented. This needs to be reader accessibility, this needs to be tactile, there needs to be some sort of feedback if someone is interacting with our app on a mobile device. We also do a lot of testing. Making sure that we have advisory groups made up of our customers who do have some of these disabilities. We’re making sure that they are continuously getting access to new features and being able to test them and give us feedback so we can learn and continually improve on how we implement our digital products and services.

Emma Stone:

Why do we care about accessible design? What value does it serve consumers, both those who do or do not identify as disabled? It’s probably more obvious for those that are disabled, but for those that are not, and I think Anne, you touched on this a bit with universal design, but then also designers, why do we care? As leaders and then policy makers as we start to talk about policy as well. I’ll let either one start. Who wants to take this first?

Josephine Holmboe:

It’s a big one. I think the word that you used was equitable. A reason we should care is that as designers, we are providing solutions for folks, for humans. When you narrow your mindset, when you are tasked with designing a product, a service, a digital experience, I always like to say you’re not the user. You might be one user, but you aren’t the all-inclusive user. As designers, I think we have a responsibility to have an understanding of who we’re designing for. It might be a more narrow audience, it might be a universal audience, but really getting to know who that is. 

I became a designer so I could help people and only worked on projects that were actually helping people in some form or function. I think to be able to care or why we should care is, it sounds really trite, but it makes everything better. I think the seed of where we can all start caring more is just straightforward empathy, making sure that whatever we’re doing, we’ve considered not what we’re making, but who we’re making it for.

Emma Stone:

Anne, I’m curious to get your thoughts on the sort of awareness around and the importance of education, whether that be within your organization, or more broadly. How do we raise awareness and how do we convince leaders to think and design in this way?

Anne Petersen:

That is also a big question. Also I kind of want to step back a second just to say that we are designing for humans, but we are also designing for the future. In terms of convincing leaders, I would say that I have found that the education piece is an important one, and I’ve heard this over and over and I’ve found it to be true, that leaders and policymakers and developers and those in charge of programs, all of them tend to respond well to really experiencing people who are having trouble with the current state of things. Videos are powerful even if it’s just someone’s voice or alternately quotes or a transcript, but the closer they can experience it, the more effective it is and the more it will hopefully provoke a sense of empathy if they hadn’t had one to that point. Hearing about or experiencing someone else’s frustration is really impactful and makes you realize how difficult it can be for people and for that matter.

Emma Stone:

Thinking about the role of policy, Anne, what types of guidelines exist today when it comes to standardizing accessible and inclusive design practices? And then, do you find the current state to be effective where you’ve seen them implemented? I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on that.

Anne Petersen:

Yeah, absolutely. There’s Section 508, which is part of the American federal requirement that information and communication technology be accessible to those with disabilities. Those are kind of the basics. Many other guidelines exist throughout government at federal, state, local levels. Another set of federal guidelines was just published a few weeks ago entitled, Delivering a Digital-First Public Experience, which for policy heads is M-23-22. That includes a hundred plus different actions for federal agencies, intended to improve the public’s experience with government online over the next 10 years. 

Policy guidelines and standards,unfortunately, often aren’t enough on their own to motivate people in teams to action. You can make something technically correct but the application can be less effective.

To cope with that, I would say, that showing the why, providing the tools, making it as easy as possible for the implementers to apply to their particular use case because there are many of them. Especially when you are standardizing across a wide variety of things, those are key to getting things more mature as a practice in terms of accessibility and inclusivity.

Emma Stone:

Josephine, do you have anything to add with regard to the role of policy standards? This could be along the lines of what else needs to be done to make these types of standards and policies and tools more widely adopted, more effective, or even just an example of something you’ve seen in your own organization that’s worked or didn’t work so well with regard to implementing this approach and embracing this mindset as well.

Josephine Holmboe:

I can only speak from my experience designing digital products. Fortunately there’s the W3C, the Worldwide Web Consortium, they’ve been around a long time. They develop the standards and guidelines to help everyone build, web-based on the principles of accessibility. Whether companies that develop digital products adhere to them or not does not get enforced. As I said earlier, it’s a mandate for my company. We adhere to them. But as Anne was talking, I was also thinking it’s a layered complex system for anything, getting anything done. What I think is really important and having this conversation is to help designers understand that it does start with them. If their responsibility is to provide products, experiences, services, to be more curious about how to help people and to understand what they can do or can’t do.

Emma Stone:

In this space, what are some of the greatest challenges? I think we’ve started to touch on them, but to get more explicit on what are the limitations when it comes to standardizing and relying too heavily on policy to make change. Because again, a mandate, an incentive, a regulation can only go so far. I want to hear from both of you what challenges you’ve seen and how that translates into an opportunity.

Josephine Holmboe:

Because I work on emerging technologies, I see challenges going into the future. We’re talking about AI, we’re talking about VR, we’re talking about a whole slew of technologies. We really haven’t had an opportunity to understand how to make those more inclusive. VR, virtual reality for one, you could put on a headset and experience something in the virtual reality space that is regardless of what your physical disabilities might be, you can walk around. In some ways that helps people with disabilities experience something they might not in real life, but at the same time, people who are vision impaired can’t access that. VR is not inclusive. I think that’s going to be the challenge of how to interpret some of those technologies for a wide variety of individuals. That’s the one that comes to mind first for me.

Anne Petersen:

Yeah, there’s a federal agency that’s doing testing on facial recognition, which they use for one of their products and that they have already noted that has difficulty recognizing people of various races. And so they’re testing to find out at what point does the technology advance so much that we can implement this. Some folks who have had a stroke have facial changes, where part of their face does not look the way it used to, so it might not match their license. There are many, many examples in which the technologies that we’re implementing that are fairly new might not work for everyone.

I would also say that kind of referring back to what I mentioned, standards are very much a least common denominator. They’re the minimum that you have to do and if they’re applied across a large organization or set of organizations or are a required standard across the board, that often can make it tougher for teams to apply to their particular use case or figure out how it applies to their particular use case. The way I’ve worked with this in the past is introducing things like a maturity model and providing those toolkits. I mentioned that teams can see how they can start with the minimum, but continue to grow in doing the right thing by adopting the mindset, not just the policy, not just the standard and thus doing better by the people who need the service and increasingly so over time.

Josephine Holmboe:

I love that Anne, because it isn’t a one and done, we should never think one and done because technology is moving so quickly and there’s so much we don’t know yet. The constant iteration, learning, pivoting, then making sure we’re attending to everybody as they evolve, as those technologies evolve. I think that’s a really important point.

Emma Stone:

Great. I think one of the things you said, Anne, as well,  just reminded me to step back and acknowledge that when we’re talking about disability too, specifically, there’s quite a range of disabilities. I think that’s really important to note when we’re discussing the different needs and maybe there’s different shortcomings of technology. We have physical disabilities, cognitive disabilities, sensory disabilities. Some folks identify as having a disability if they have a chronic illness. Just to recognize that we talked about disability at large, but there’s such a spectrum range, which adds to the challenge of thinking about what makes a product accessible when you have to adhere to policy that improves accessibility regardless of the disability. Again, challenge breeds creativity and design. I think these constraints and these factors can make us all the better as society and as designers.

Before talking a little more about the future, I want to make sure we don’t lose anything or nothing is lost in conversation. For either of you, is there anything that we didn’t really cover in this conversation so far that you think is really important to bring up? And it could be more broadly what typically gets lost in the conversation when folks are talking about inclusive and accessible design?

I would love to hear from each of you one piece of advice or one recommendation. I’ll give you two options. Either one piece of advice that you would give to young designers or young policymakers based on your experience. Or one tangible action item, big or small, that can really help move the needle in this space that is directed at the audience here today. 

Josephine Holmboe:

I’ll go first. I have spent the last 10 years with interns and co-ops within our company. I see a lot of young designers. In the 10 years or more that I go out and I interview and I see their portfolios and I talk to them, I am so absolutely amazed and impressed and hopeful about the work I see them doing. What I’m seeing now coming out of schools are more approaches around real world problems. They’re not just trying to design widgets and apps and gamify everything. They’re really starting to think about real world problems, which makes me so very hopeful.

They’ve got so much that we didn’t have when we were going through design school because of conversations like this, because of policies that have been made, because of an awareness level that exists now that didn’t exist when I went to design school. I think we need to learn from them as much as they’re learning from us and really encourage those young designers to lean into problems that are really valuable to all people. So I learn a lot from them. I would say to young designers coming out of school, just keep being curious. Being curious about everything is going to make you a much better designer and it’s going to help all your designs get out into the world in a good way.

Anne Petersen:

I actually want to answer both if I can, and I’ll start with a piece of advice. I’ve learned that we need to design for those who need it most, not necessarily those who will be using it most. The folks who will be using it most, you usually have covered, but if you can cover those who need it most everyone else will benefit. Just bottom line, I would say fancier and flashier is not always better for usability or accessibility or equity or inclusivity.

The things that we can do, one thing that we can do to move the needle, I would say, is implement things like equity pauses. Equity pauses are a practice. You can find the questions for them online. It’s a practice introduced by equityXdesign. But these questions help you disrupt your usual way of thinking and resist the sense of urgency that’s typical of business culture, tech culture, and white supremacy, and consider those and that which is not present, whether that’s people history, words, nature, or practices.