18: Software Accessibility

Join Tricia and Damon as they discuss how they design and build software with accessibility in mind.

Transcript

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Matt Dole  0:11  
In this episode of Artsy Engineering Radio product designer Tricia and software engineer Damon discuss why it's important to design and build software with accessibility in mind, and the ins and outs of actually doing so. Stick with us.

Tricia Ofuono  0:29  
Hi everyone, welcome to Artsy Engineering podcast. I'm Patricia, I'm a black woman I have long black chunky twists can often be found wearing either black or white. I'm a product designer at Artsy on the Find and explore team and I work closely with software engineer Damon. In this week's episode myself and Damon discuss accessibility. 

Damon Z  0:52  
Hi, I'm Damon. And I am a software engineer also on the Find and explore team with Trici a here. I'm a white man, six foot one shaved head. I'm wearing white today, all white, which is actually very uncharacteristic of me. I usually wear all black, but you know, it's a beautiful spring day. Bring it up a little bit. 

Tricia Ofuono  1:11  
So How you doing today, Damon apart from the bright spring day? 

Damon Z  1:15  
Pretty good. Had I had an early dentist appointment, which is always fun. 

Tricia Ofuono  1:20  
Nice. 

Damon Z  1:21  
How are you?

Tricia Ofuono  1:22  
I'm okay. I'm okay. The weather. I imagine as just to be clear, I'm based in London. And Damon you're based in? 

Damon Z  1:33  
I'm sitting here in sunny Philadelphia. 

Tricia Ofuono  1:35  
Yep. So we're recording this remotely. So yeah, so the weather like in Philadelphia in London is getting better, which is good. So let's kick it off. We're going to be talking about accessibility. So I want to know, if you had to summarize what accessibility means to you. How would you do that? 

Damon Z  1:55  
Well, I mean, the operative word here is access, right? You know, I used to work in more on like the IT side of it, like a arts archival, sort of company. And the meme there was that digitization does not equal access, right, like, so there's more steps you have to do to like putting something online to make it accessible. And simply just putting it online is not really adequate. And so for like equitable access, you know, that means certain things like making things easy to find, but also making your UI accessible to assistive technologies. 

Tricia Ofuono  2:34  
Okay, so the key word there is definitely accessible. So, can you tell everyone when you first discovered accessibility and engineering,

Damon Z  2:44  
I mean, I came at it from a from a pretty weird angle, you know, my background is in art. And the kind of art that I was interested in is like, min, like sort of minimal and post minimal works from like the 60s and 70s. This is sort of like what I kind of hold close to my heart. And that type of work. It has a lot to do with your sort of like full perceptual facilities when like you're viewing something. So like, you bring your sort of whole body into the viewing experience. It's like a very physical and present tense kind of way of like looking at work. And so I'm an artist, right. And so I was interested in making work online. And you could kind of see like, how I would start to like, take notice of sort of assistive technology and so forth is thinking about ways in which we perceive things online, in the same way that like, we bring our whole body to a sculpture, we bring our whole body to, you know, viewing something online, and when what are some, like different ways of looking at the world, different ways of looking at the world online. And so I sort of started to get interested in like screen readers. And you know, how text is read how text is perceived, how we come to understand things. And so a very roundabout way of getting there. I wasn't like, immediately interested in like, oh, like making things accessible for, you know, legal reasons or moral reasons. I was just more interested in like altered perceptual states.

Tricia Ofuono  4:08  
That's interesting that you say you come across, you came across it through your art, have you applied, anything that you've learned for using screen readers for your own artwork? To start off wonder?

Damon Z  4:21  
Uh, yeah, I've made a lot of stuff. You know, I've made I've like republished books with every word misspelled in a very particular way that sort of supposedly mimics the way that dyslexia functions. And so it's very like for you as like a non disabled person to read it. You have like a very, like, different experience of reading a book. I've also done a lot of work with, like color perception and a lot of things with orientation and audio composition and stuff like that. So, yeah.

Tricia Ofuono  4:48  
Okay, so you've done a lot of a lot of excessive, you've done some works that have the relationship with accessibility. So I'm interested in talking a little bit more about your past experiences with creating accessible products, some of the challenges and the motivations you have.

Damon Z  5:07  
I mean, you know, I previously worked at a sort of larger luxury ecommerce website. And the motivation there I think was strictly, you know, from a business person. I mean, this is this is the way it tends to be, you know, in most companies, it's, it's, it's driven by like a business perspective, rather than, like, necessarily a moral one, or a legal one, you know, there was like, Well, okay, like a substantial portion of our audience, you know, needs to be able to access this, this website. And so, making the website as accessible to the widest audiences, you know, that's a business imperative. So, in that case, it was pretty clear cut. I mean, you know, we had certain guidelines that we were given and like, told to meet them. And it was pretty straightforward, because we were, we were dealing with a Greenfield project, a full ground up rewrite from, you know, from nothing for the front end. And so when you approach something from like, from the very beginning, it's way it's much easier than like trying to retrofit something that's existing, which is sort of sort of the case where we have at Artsy right now, it's much more challenging, because we're dealing with a much older codebase. And there's little layers to how difficult certain aspects of that are. But obviously, like when you're starting from scratch, if you think about it from the very beginning, it's actually very easy, I think, to reach a pretty reasonable level of compliance with like, WCAG

Tricia Ofuono  6:31  
You used an acronym now, which was

Damon Z  6:33  
WCAG,

Tricia Ofuono  6:35  
WCAG,

Damon Z  6:37  
which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Those are a set of guidelines for like authoring content. And there's three levels to them. A double A and triple A, and triple A is typically reserved for like government websites. And it's can be a little trickier to reach. And double A is what most businesses strive to hit. Although there as far as I know, there's no legal requirement for businesses to comply with those guidelines specifically, which is interesting.

Tricia Ofuono  7:04  
Yeah. Most in my experience, I'm not sure what it's like, and then I'm not sure about the laws in the US, but definitely, in the UK, government websites at least have to comply with double A.

Damon Z  7:17  
Yeah,

Tricia Ofuono  7:18  
I can imagine it's probably the same in the US. But yeah, I mean, you're right, no, no, no actual website has to be fully accessibility compliant.

Damon Z  7:29  
We do have the ADA here, which is the Americans with Disabilities Act. And supposedly that does apply to websites, there was a famous case with like Domino's Pizza. 

Tricia Ofuono  7:37  
Yeah. 

Damon Z  7:37  
But like, you know, the specifics of that are a little unclear. Like, it's like your website has to be or your app has to be accessible. You know, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to comply with a specific set of guidelines.

Tricia Ofuono  7:49  
So that's some of the challenges, right? There's still a lot of gray areas in what is fully accessible compliance site, is it double A? Or is it triple A, or is A enough? So I want to talk a little bit more about your collaboration with designers, any good or bad examples, given that I'm a designer would be interesting to hear, from your perspective, your past collaborations with designers,

Damon Z  8:20  
I mean, obviously, everything like is always gonna start with the designers. You know, engineers can only do so much like if the if the if you're trying to build something to like a design spec where the the fonts are smaller, the color contrast is too low. Like, you know, there's not a lot we can do about that other than complain. Looking at the guidelines for colors in particular is a really interesting thing. I, you know, previously in my career, I built a website where a lot of information was conveyed with color. And this obviously, is a huge problem, because of, you know, color blindness and so forth. And so like, you know, things, things regarding, like, privacy levels were, like, oh, red or whatever, you know, that was something that obviously had to change. And but, you know, that's, that's something that that starts with designing can be very obvious once you're made aware of the issues.

Tricia Ofuono  9:10  
Yeah. It's interesting, you're talking about color, obviously, our platform is based on artworks and artworks is, you know, the foundations of artworks is mainly through color, and the use of color. So it's interesting to hear that an engineer is so passionate about creating an accessible website for an art platform. What what gets you excited about this, considering these nuances,

Damon Z  9:41  
Well like, you know, first of all, like art doesn't, that isn't necessarily like purely a visual thing, right? Like, there's many kinds of art. And obviously, you know, when you're dealing with a website or a PC, a lot of that, you know, with images and so forth, like things are gonna be visual, but a lot of the work on our platform is, you know, sound or deals with language, so there's that. And then there's also like, I have a lot of I have a few friends that are disabled artists like that have motor neuromuscular disabilities and, you know, still paint. And that's still, it's still part of like making an accessible website, you know, a big push that we've been making at Artsy is to make the website accessible via keyboard. And that's, you know, not everybody can use a pointing device or a touch device. And so, you know, it doesn't have to be just a visual impairments, you know, that we're talking about here. But there are famous art collectors who have been partially behind this is not this is not unheard of. 

Tricia Ofuono  10:39  
Yeah

Damon Z  10:40  
There's a an interesting anecdote about a famous art collector who accidentally punched a hole in $130 million Picasso painting. So

Tricia Ofuono  10:54  
yeah, yeah, I think that's a good call out that artists and just visual, you're right, the foundation's meaning, aren't there is this common perception that the foundations are, are through color, but you're right, it does come in sound, it comes in textures, and sculptures, you know, it comes in all sorts of forms. So you've touched on some things that you've explored at Artsy in terms of making the platform more accessible, such as the keyboards making focus states more easier. So making the site easier to navigate. As an engineer, what do you think an interesting thing would be to understand what you think is the most important thing that you know, any engineer out there should consider when they're building an accessible product? Is it the contrast, as you touched on earlier? Is it the alt text where they're able to navigate around the site easily? Or have an understanding of what what is there on the screen? So for blind people? Is it important that they have an understanding what the artwork is through descriptive text? Or is it the focus state where they're able to? To navigate around the site easier? What do you think is the most important?

Damon Z  12:03  
You know, there's no one thing that's the most important necessarily, some things are harder than others of course to do. I mean, you know, one of the big problems that we have is, you know, we have we have millions of artworks, to have our partners or for us to do descriptive text for all of the images would be, you know, it's a pretty big deal. I mean, we've we've started to explore maybe possibly, you know, doing like, computer vision descriptions, or, you know, we've looked into that a little bit, and I think that's something we'll look into it more in the future. But as far as like an end and other engineer trying to understand what's going on, or what's more important, I mean, I think the the, the only thing that that's made me sort of realize is to just turn on these tools and look at things and try to try to navigate your website, using only a keyboard or using only a screenwriter, what engineers tend to do is use these sort of like automated tools that give you checklists, right? And you check off all the boxes, and you know, you score all the points, and you're like, Okay, well, I did it. And that can leave you know, glaring issues that aren't automatable that aren't, that can't be solved by like, you know, just like pointing a tool at your site to see what's wrong with it, you have to like sort of try to use it. That's, it's a very eye opening experience. I think I just, you know, as an engineer, I just keep the accessibility menu into my, you know, my OSX top bar there, and I just turned it on, whenever I'm done with something, I'll just turn it on and turn on the screen reader and just like double check my work to see what's going on. And it's you know, every time I see something new and or something I've missed, and it doesn't take long. Yeah, it's very easy thing to do.

Tricia Ofuono  13:44  
I guess you'd also give that that similar advice to designers as well, you know, put yourself in the shoes. Oh, yeah. Based on your experience with working with designers, what do you think is key for them to think of, you know, if they're starting out and accessibility, they want to start somewhere? What What do you think is from an engineer point of view that they should focus on?

Damon Z  14:05  
Frequently what happens to the designers, it tends to be you're dealing with static medium when you're designing like it. I mean, some people use, you know, more dynamic tools for mocking up things and creating interface states. But I think that tends to not be the case, you know, at least in my experience. And so it's it's difficult for designers to sort of, like feel what the work is like, without maybe a prototyping step, right? Where you're where you really see like, what are all the states that this thing can be in? It doesn't have to be like, just necessarily thinking about, oh, how is the screen reader going to use this, there's, there's a lot of things that happen even when just using a pointing device, different affordances and so forth, that maybe they're overlooked. And so, you know, either like a prototyping step or a more like dynamic medium for doing design, I think can can go a really long way in improving like the fidelity of like, your interfaces and You know, how responsive they feel, how they, how other assistive technologies work with them? It's really difficult, I think to design just, you know, from coming from a static perspective,

Tricia Ofuono  15:10  
just to have stills is not enough. So,

Damon Z  15:12  
yeah, I mean, how do you typically think about? Like, how do you how do you because I know you tend to use a static medium, right? Is that an accurate assessment?

Tricia Ofuono  15:21  
Yeah, I use, I use both a static medium. And I also try and get the work prototypes as well. And I think for me, it's key to get the work prototype and test as well, whether it's internal, because they're stuff that I do miss when I built, you know, like, feedback states, that's a, that's a, that's a big one that I that sometimes I miss when I'm designing. So that's why it's important for me to prototype it, test it and see like, is there is there a feedback state here missing? Does it need a feedback state, sometimes you can kind of overkill with feedback state. So it's important to get the the balance of feedback states, right. But I think some of the important things for me that a designer to ask to know. And I think it's often overlooked is how they organize their files for build. And I think for me, historically, when I've delivered specifications for engineers, I've ordered them in a way where how I expect the focus state to go. So I think this is this is this is a hygiene thing. But I think it's also important because it kind of helps the engineer, you know, be able to think, okay, if they're going to navigate this page, what's the expectation from an experience point of view of where they would if they tap through with their focus, like, what's the expectation for the user to navigate through the site. So I think little little details like that is quite, quite helpful. It goes beyond I think the contrast, I mean, the contrast is, is something that I think should be incorporated within your design system in the first place. And that's something that should be shouldn't have to worry about, because it's already inherently built within your design system. But I think if you go in a step further to if you're collaborating with engineers, really creating your layout in a way that they that the engineer can see through the layers, what the expectation of the tabbing and the focus states are.

Damon Z  17:15  
I mean, you mentioned, you mentioned design systems, right. And that's not something that not everybody has, and I you know, those are, I think, design systems are a really interesting lever to pull in terms of like getting accessibility baked in a much lower level, like all of your, if all of your parts and pieces are accessible, that you have a much better chance of, you know, having a product that's as a whole accessible when you put them all together. And as well, like just like in terms of like, reducing, like cognitive friction, like making sure all of like things, everything's consistent and works in sort of like a way that you expect. Yeah, you know, that's that I think that's frequently, you know, people think about design systems only, only in terms of like, maybe making their own lives. He I don't know, what is, it's funny, because it is it is something that's really caught on in the past few years. And I think the benefits of them are so clear on so many levels, but the accessibility level is something that I don't think it's talked about as much.

Tricia Ofuono  18:19  
I agree, you know, yeah,

Damon Z  18:21  
that's one of one of the one of the great selling points of a design system. But

Tricia Ofuono  18:26  
yeah, yeah, it's often looked at with design systems of like, is it's part of the product, we need it because it will be scalable, it will empower teams to work faster. But there's also the question of accessibility as a feature within the design system. I think that that often gets overlooked. And most places that do it, well embed it within their design principles, embed accessibility as part of their design principles. And it's always good when you find a non government site that has actually thought about, including accessibility within their design system preferences.

Damon Z  19:05  
So So why is it that it's, I mean, I don't know I can't help but think about, you know, what's the what's the motivating factor here for all of this? Like, what's like, does capitalism really is really the thing that is that should that rears its head? What you know, once again, like, what's the thing that, you know, I'm not going to do it unless unless there's like a business reason to do it. I'm not going to do it unless there's like a legal threat.

Tricia Ofuono  19:29  
Yeah. And I think it's a shame to look at it that way. I think, ultimately, it's terror. It's kind of a dark thing to say. But ultimately, each and every one of us are going to have some sort of access needs, whether it's temporarily or whether it's something that's going to be pretty permanent. So I'm a parent, and I have a daughter and I'm about to have another, another daughter. And for, for temporarily, I'm going to be I'm going to be temporarily disabled, because I'm ultimately just going to be able to work with one hand. So navigating on devices, such as my phone, and the computer, or even working the remote control for a TV is going to be a completely different experience for quite a long period of time. And I think that's, that's what people don't, don't don't think about is that, you know, I could be in the situation temporarily, where I need to navigate devices, you know, seamlessly or, you know, my, I'm gonna lose my hand or something, or I may have an operation or laser eye treatment, and I may have one eye that's, that's, that's not working. And I think that's what, that's what people forget that we are all at some point, no matter what going to be affected by some sort of access needs. And I think that should be the motivation as opposed to, can we get more people onto our site? It should be that you know, one day, as much as I love this product, I'm going to want to go on this site, and I'm going to want to make a purchase, and I'm going to find it difficult. Or you know, you get to that particular age where you find yourself increasing the text size of your mobile phone. 

Damon Z  21:15  
I'm already there. 

Tricia Ofuono  21:16  
Exactly. That happens quicker. quicker than you expect. Right?

Damon Z  21:21  
I make I make great use of the OSX zoom feature. But yeah, apparently, apparently, it at least in the US, 19% of the population, one in five people have significant functional difficulties. did not know that, actually. 

Tricia Ofuono  21:34  
Yeah. Yeah. 

Damon Z  21:35  
That's the ADA data.

Tricia Ofuono  21:37  
Yeah. So there's lots of data out there. But there's also that, that key important thing that it may happen temporarily, or it may happen permanently. But you are going to end up in a situation where you, you need help with access needs. And I think that's, that's my primary motivation for shouting about accessibility and making sure that everybody understands why it's important, like, just from a business perspective, you know, but also from, from a human perspective,

Damon Z  22:08  
you're looking out for your future self.

Tricia Ofuono  22:09  
Yeah, yeah, it's not just the right thing to do. It's also like, you know, sit with your mother, to have a have a day where you sit next to your, your mom or your dad, and see how they navigate their mobile phone, they may surprise you that they've they found ways of little tricks of using it. Or they may surprise you that they don't have any issues at all, because that particular brand has figured out a way of making sure that things are really, really accessible. That's where you learn, you think, okay, I can incorporate that interaction into my work, because it works well, for everyone. I think children are also good ways of seeing what's working and what's not working, because they, they use devices very intuitively, I watch my daughter a lot. And she's taught me a lot about a lot about how the mobile phone works,

Damon Z  23:01  
Have you ever had your daughter try using any of your Artsy work?

Tricia Ofuono  23:06  
No, I don't think that would be exciting enough for her. No, I haven't actually had her. I've had my mother, I use my mother as a good a good baseline into, into if I want to introduce an interaction, and I need to validate whether that interaction is something that is understood by all, I will go to my mother, my brother, and I'll be like, Well, how do you? How do you delete messages on your iPhone? Can you just show me and you know, if they swipe left, then I know Okay, so they get this interaction? I'll test it with a few people. 

So, at the moment, speaking of Artsy, it'll be interesting to know, what you're doing to make the product more accessible. And what what challenges you've had.

Damon Z  23:52  
Yeah, I mean, I mean, it's worth noting, we've got a long way to go. It is by no means like, an exemplary site. I mean, you know, we've we've come a long way, though, when I did initially rejoin it, it was just last year actually there was like, you know, something as simple as there was no outlines on anything when you're tabbing around. And it's interesting because frequently, like we've actually gotten bug reports from people when there was outlines, you know, that now that there are outlines in certain certain parts of the site, where they think it's actually a defect, but one of the things one of the first things we did was there's a there's a new standard coming out, it was recently accepted into the spec for CSS, which is a pseudo software called focus visible. And so typically, you know, when you when you click on something, you know, it will trigger the focus state of a given object, right. And so you get the you know, by default, you've got that like blue focus ring. So that's something that designers tend to not like. And one of the one of the first things I that you know, that always happens is star selector and outline zero. Turn it off on everything, which you know, you don't, you do not want to do that. But if this is your company, and that's happened to you, a great thing to do is there's a polyfill for the pseudo selector focus visible. And focus visible is a focus state that only is enacted when you're using a keyboard to navigate. So mouse clicks won't trigger it, which actually makes quite a bit of sense if you think about it. And so you still get focus rings, but only when you're tapping around on your keyboard. And so that was one of the first things we did was turn turn that on, you know, that gets you pretty far that that's, that's a great thing to do. And then, you know, recently, we've been rebuilding the the design system. And so I've had the opportunity to touch all of our, like, lower level components and making sure that they comply with, you know, the guidelines that WAI-ARIA put out. And so, you know, recently we made all of our filters, keyboard accessible, which they weren't previously. And that's, you know, that's a big, that's a big part of the site, being able to go and find and filter and search for art. And so making those keyboard accessible was was, you know, a good thing to do and a big deal.

Tricia Ofuono  26:05  
Yeah, certainly, because actually navigating filters in general, even if you don't have access needs, can can some, some products can make them really more complicated than they need to be. 

Damon Z  26:19  
Yeah, it's a super complicated piece of UI, you know, I think I think we strike a good balance. And it's pretty, it's pretty easy to find stuff, it's actually pretty easy to, you know, build up a complex filter, stay on our keyboard now.

Tricia Ofuono  26:32  
And do you have more plans for the future? For the Artsy products? As you mentioned, it's not it's not in perfect shape from an accessibility point of view. But you're, there's an organization, we're on our journey to improve it. What other key things would you like to be included within the product?

Damon Z  26:50  
Yeah, I mean, a new thing that I've started to look at is actually just tab stop order. We've got like, you know, masonry grids, which are, currently what happens is, when you when you tap around on them, it goes, it goes like sort of down a column, and then up to the next column, and then down, and then up to the next. And we've got a lot of like, extraneous tab stops in there. And so like, just just trying to make a more intuitive tab experience. It's one of the one of the next things I'm going to start looking at. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's one of the things, if you're thinking about it from the start, it's not difficult. If you're trying to retrofit it, it starts to get a little complicated. And so in our case, it is it is a little trickier than it has to be, but we will prevail.

Tricia Ofuono  27:32  
Yeah, yeah. It will it will get there and yeah, I mean, I can imagine also the results on the on the masonry, which we call it the artwork grid, and you can get so many results of artworks, right? And can you imagine having to tap through hundreds and hundreds of pieces of artworks and it keeps jumping up and down, it must be something that needs, a challenge that's going to be interesting to fix. So, in the in the future, you know, if you had to give advice to engineers, or designers starting starting out, how can how can I go about learning how to build accessible products? How did you go about learning because I can imagine it's not something that is, it definitely wasn't for me, as a designer, something that I learned academically was something that I learned on the job through through pairing with engineers and working with other designers that had experiences with it, and skimming through government blog site blogs, and reads, how do you how do you think engineers and other designers can go about outside of what I've said, 

Damon Z  28:40  
You know, I mean, for me, it just started, like, I just wanted to build something correctly. Yeah, you know, I mean, you know, some one of the things that happens is like, you know, an engineer will just like, you know, I need to make like a, like a drop down or something. And so, I install some UI library that implements a drop down, and I kind of trust that they say, Oh, yeah, and it's accessible. And it complies with, you know, whatever. My like, sort of craftsperson, you know, mindset makes me, you know, I don't really necessarily want to do that, I want to, like, build it and look at the specs and build it the right way. You know, and know that it's correct. And typically, what I'll do is I'll just, you know, just google WCAG drop down, usually, there's, you know, an example that you can build from, you know, an implements, like, you know, you could do tables, like, okay, these are, these are the keyboard interactions you have to have, these are the things you have to do. And the nice thing that happens is all of a sudden your UI feels better, it looks better. It's like it's just better. And you build a better product, it's very much worth the doing. You know, there's so many subtle things that I think when you're using a piece of UI that you don't necessarily realize they're there until you build them and then you're like, all of a sudden, oh, this feels like a native control. All of a sudden, this feels better, and it's like you didn't realize it was even there to begin with. And so that's, that's always really interesting to me, like these invisible things that are there. But it's just like, you know, just like knowing that things are built correctly, I think is it makes me happy as an engineer. And I think I think most, you know, a lot of engineers get that, that sense of pride of like, you know, building something the right way. And yeah, there's a lot of invisible things that you overlook, if you're just kind of freestyling it.

Tricia Ofuono  30:27  
Yeah, I think that's, that's, that's, that's good advice for engineers. And that's definitely a motivational bit of advice. For both engineers and designers. As you know, there are invisible things that you need to design for that is actually quite rewarding. 

Random question. To finish off, I want to talk about what in the in the space of the real world or within the online world do you think what what products or what, what object or what you know what piece of work or anything that you've seen that you think, oh, my goodness, this is like, really solving access needs really, really well. And you know, if this could be applied, I don't know online, or, in this particular space, it would be amazing, you know, that, wow, that piece of Wow, that you've, you've come across in your life. So I can give you an example. For me. I didn't know for a long time about this. And in the UK, they have a little secret button underneath the when you go to cross the road. And that secret button basically helps empowers people who are blind to be able to get to the edge of the curb, and they turn on the button and the button basically, will increase the volume of the, of the noise for the crossing. I've had so many moments where I've crossed the street with my daughter, now that I now after I discovered this button, and she's she's always tried to point out this button to me, and I've always been like, hurry up cross the road cross the road, it wasn't until somebody pointed out to me that there is this actual secret button where they can increase the volume. And it will it will empower them to cross without feeling like okay, well, am I going to get hit by a car

Damon Z  32:09  
Where your daughter only saw cuz she's shorter?

Tricia Ofuono  32:11  
Exactly. There's so many, so many times that she tried to point out this button to me, you know, because, you know, they like to hit the button so they can cross the road. But she's had so many situations where she's tried to tell me about the secret button. And I've ignored her because I've been in a rush. And then somebody actually, at a previous place I worked told me about the secret button. And I was like, Wow, that is actually pretty neat way of solving access needs, you know, anything like that, that you've come across it you think, Wow, that's really, that's, that's solving a good access? 

Damon Z  32:44  
You know, first of all, I love that, you know, your daughter, you know, obviously children are small. And so they have this, like completely different way of looking at the world. That's just, you know, it's something as simple as like being half your height. Like I love that, that, you know, you can notice new things. I mean, I don't know I've apparently there's like a lot of different sonar technology being developed for blind navigation, which I think is fascinating. And so like different, you know, because Because obviously, like cell phones and cameras have like, everything's gotten a lot faster and smaller. And so like it starts to become practical to like, do real time audio, like sonar, and it's just crazy to me. So that's really exciting. I also was like, I was kind of fascinated with the idea of blind sailing for a while. There's sort of a subculture of sailors who are blind, I guess. And there's a lot of audio technologies that go along with that the make selling possible. That's super interesting. I'm not a sailor, but I just I guess I just find that idea very beautiful.

Tricia Ofuono  33:05  
So how does this work? Are they do they navigate through the seas using audio?

Damon Z  33:54  
Well yeah, like audible buoys. I've never, I've never seen it, seen it. And just know it's a possibility. And I think that's great. 

Tricia Ofuono  34:03  
Yeah. 

Damon Z  34:03  
So there, yeah, there's a lot of like, audio assistance, stuff that I think is particularly interesting. You know, obviously, I said, I was playing around a lot with like, audio compositions and stuff, you know, my artistic practice. And so, you know, the sonification of the environments. It's a cool idea.

Tricia Ofuono  34:17  
Yeah, I can imagine.

Damon Z  34:20  
I've also seen some, some, some demos, some tech demos of like, translating it to into touch. So like, you know, sort of presenting a camera's view in a, you know, a touch sensitive like on your palm. And so I can, you know, similar kind of like sensor placement navigation technology. Really interesting.

Tricia Ofuono  34:37  
Yeah, there's some some exciting things. exciting things are coming out in terms of sensory. You know, I think the last few years, audio has been quite big, but it's nice to see that the sense of touch is becoming something that's quite important.

Damon Z  34:52  
These are the knock on effects of like, cell phones getting better. Like everything, you know, you know, it raises all of the other boats in the sea. So I think that's great.

Tricia Ofuono  35:02  
Yeah, who would have thought that we'd be using touch devices as opposed to clicking on loads of buttons to send a text message,

Damon Z  35:10  
and voice interfaces all the time. Like, I remember I remember reading, like a Ray Kurzweil, you know, Ray Kurzweil, he's like a futurist believes in the technological singularity.

Tricia Ofuono  35:21  
No, I haven't heard of this guy.

Damon Z  35:23  
He's a really interesting character. He makes a lot of predictions about the future. And I remember reading his book in like, 2005, that we'd all be using voice interfaces in like 2015. And when I was like, No way, like that, so clunky, no, and he was dead on here we are using everybody uses voice interfaces all the time. Really interesting.

Tricia Ofuono  35:45  
It's definitely I think, going to be the default way for the generation coming up. Because you know, it's impossible to talk to my daughter on the phone. Just through audio, it has to be a video call. 

Damon Z  35:58  
Does she get bored? 

Tricia Ofuono  35:59  
Yeah, she'll just walk off and then you'll just end up screaming on the phone. But yeah, but yeah, there has to definitely be video. And conversations I've noticed with young children are done through emojis and they think to get each other they seem to understand what they're saying for imagery, which I think is from an access point of view is very interesting. It's no longer about just you know, words and written words. It's about symbols as well which is, which I guess is going to close the gap for for different languages as well. should be interesting. This has been really nice talking to you. Thank you. I've learned so much. I'm sure everybody else that's been listening has learned so much.

Damon Z  36:44  
Always a pleasure to talk to you Tricia.

Matt Dole  36:47  
Thanks for listening to another episode of Artsy Engineering Radio. This episode was recorded by Trisha Ofuono, who you could find on Twitter as @avisualtinker and by Damon Z. It was produced by Aja Simpson and our theme music is by Eve Essex, who you can find on all major streaming platforms. Follow us on Twitter @artsyopensource and you can find the Artsy engineering blog at artsy.github.io. See you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai