Transcript of Elana Berton: Top tips for including people who are blind or have low vision

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Dan
Welcome to the “Innovate for Impact” podcast. This podcast is for leaders in the social sector like you, who want to make a difference. Each episode is packed with practical ideas on how you can be more innovative and create an even bigger social impact. We share our ideas on what you can do, and also speak to leaders from the sector to share best practice. So let's get into it, and let's talk impact.

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Hey, you're listening to the innovate for impact Podcast. I'm Dan Bentley. I've got Tracy Newman here as well. And today, we're joined by Elana Berton. Elana, welcome to the podcast.

Elana
Hi, thanks, both. It's really exciting to be here.

Dan
Great to have you on the show. Hey, you want to tell listeners a bit about who you are and what you do?

Elana
Yeah, sure. So my name is Elana, as you said, and I work at digital access consulting, which is a small social enterprise that kind of sits within Vision Australia. So we charge for our services, banks, government organisations, literally anyone can come to us, and ask us to help them with their accessibility of their products and services. And then we put our profits back into Vision Australia. So it's really nice, cyclical, impact driven work that we're doing, as well, on a personal level. So we have digital access as a team. And then there's two teams that sit within digital access. So we have the auditing, accessibility auditing side, and the design and user experience side as well. So I sit in the user research design side, and we help consult on making your products and services more user friendly for people with disabilities.

Dan
That's great. And the reason we got you on the show is I came across an article that you’d posted on medium, which was all about tips for focus groups with people who are blind or have low vision. And I thought it was a great article, you had some really great tips for people, did you want to maybe tell our listeners sort of how that article came about?

Elana
Yeah. So basically, it was one of our clients came to us they wanted to do some focus groups. Focus groups isn't something that we do often our bread and butter is usually one on one usability sessions. So this was a really great opportunity for us to delve into the focus groups a little bit more. And I learned a lot from doing that. So I really wanted to communicate all the learnings that I had found from conducting that. So I was a little bit worried about doing it, just because it wasn't something that I was used to, even though it was very similar. So I actually wrote down a bunch of questions for myself, and actually went to one of our Vision Australia staff who are blind and ask them their opinion, to kind of debunk some of the assumptions before I went in. So that was a really nice learning experience, where I was kind of designing the workshop. And then obviously, we learned a lot as well throughout actually conducting them.

Tracey
That's really cool that you actually have that opportunity to do that often Dan and I talk about co-designing the co-design, which is the same thing like actually, rather than trying to know everything about every community actually going to people from within that community and just sort of say, “Hey, this is what I'm thinking”, you know, because that way you get to find out like the things that you don't know, you don't know. And that way you can avoid those sort of uncomfortable situations where you've inadvertently not included something or someone or approach something in a way that's helpful for people.

Elana
Yeah, exactly. It is a very unique situation, in Vision Australia, so trying to make sure that we're, you know, using our resources, and then sharing it widely to those people who don't have access to that sort of situation as well.

Dan
Yeah, one of the reasons why we wanted to have you on the show and why I in particular found this article really good is that people with low vision, or blindness quite often left out from focus groups and different types of co-design engagements, because sometimes people forget about them is what we get told, and then sometimes others think, well, it's sometimes a little bit difficult to have them involved. So that's why I thought this was a really great article, because you've got some really practical tips here on how these people can be included in a really meaningful way. So hey, I might pass it back over to you. Did you want to maybe run us through what some of your tips were?

Elana
Yeah, sure. So I do sort of five tips in the article. And the first one is about choosing the right location. The second one is just basically explaining, the fact that asking people to put their hands up is actually okay, so that was one of my assumptions I had was can you actually ask someone who's blind put up their hand? Is that like, a rude thing to do? Because it's very sighted or biased is something that me as a sighted facilitator is using, as well as noting the fact that vision is a spectrum. So that's the third point. So your recruitment and interview guide should reflect that. So when I talk about vision spectrum, that's the fact that you can get people who are totally blind all the way to people who are just got some low vision. So there's a really large spectrum between that. And we need to make sure how our guide and our recruitment is reflective of it. As well as point number four, which is, have at least one other colleague with you to guide people in and out the room. And then my fifth tip is about general rules, you can keep in your toolbox that I've learned, just doing general usability testing, and interviews with people who are blind and low vision. So I guess, diving into the first point, I really talked about the fact that you need to choose a location that has easier access. So we're very privileged in Vision Australia, because we have an office that literally is on the doorstep of a train station. And that's obviously by design, because we have people who are blind and low vision, coming to our offices for a variety of things. But just making sure you have options like transport methods, or you know, some sort of parking that's out the front. So they say the taxi can drop people off, or their support worker or whatever it is. Providing really detailed instructions about where they should go, where the nearest train station is, if there isn't any, that they should know that because they're going to have to organize transport. So just making it as easy as possible. Because that can be a bit of a barrier for people actually getting to the location can be a lot harder when you are blind or low vision, just because you do have to be a bit more organized about it. So unknown locations can be a bit tricky sometimes if you're not providing that sort of extra guidance. And as well as that just making sure that you're providing contact details, so that when they do arrive, you can well, they can call you up and say I'm here and you can go and get them rather than them having to try and find where the door is or, you know, things like that. So it's just giving them the confidence that you're going to be there to greet them essentially. And then the last point around that is really making sure you always reimburse people for their travel costs, because they are going out of their way to be here for this session. So not only paying them for the session, but also for their taxi costs if they have to do that.

Dan
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's one of the things that we talk to our clients a lot about too, in this space is around location. Sometimes we can often think, oh, we have this amazing facility in the council building, that will be perfect. And we don't sometimes think about, well, who have we invited? And how does this location doesn't work for them. And I think when we do put that lens over it, we can quite often find that that location doesn't and that there are probably more appropriate locations. But we do need to make sure that we do that thinking, don't we? When we are setting up any type of engagement and inviting people to come in, because if that location is not accessible, then they're just not going to turn up. Or if they do, they're going to find it really hard to participate.

Elana
Yeah, it increases the barriers for them, which is, you know, one of the things we're trying to reduce generally by inviting them. So it's really important to think about accessibility from your facilitation point of view to that whole experience. Even things like choosing the ground floor, the you know, closest meeting room you can, just so there's less mazes to go through and elevators to go up and down, especially if you're guiding them and they've got their dog potentially, as well, their dog guide, just thinking about all those things in terms of location.

Tracey
I think it's good that you call it out, making sure people know that they can call you as soon as they get there, often we plan to do things like that. But we don't necessarily remember to tell people and just that reassurance so that people actually arrive, feeling confident that they know everything that's going to happen is really important. So it's not just us doing that planning, but it's also us communicating that we've done that planning is also really helpful.

Elana
Yeah, exactly. And sometimes it's not possible to get the most accessible location. Like we've done sessions in warehouses in Sydney before and we had to be really detailed about, you know, it's this location, this parking lot number, you can park here and then call us straight away and we'll come get you and guide you in just because it was so complex then. So it's okay if you don't have that as long as you're providing that assistance and detail to just reduce the fear factor around that. So, moving on as well to some more like things I talked about in terms of location, in terms of people who are blind and low vision, thinking about your lighting is also really important. Having a place that can, you know, have lines or dimmed lights is really important too, because people who are blind and low vision can often get affected by really high light, like bright light, or even on the other end of the spectrum, and they can, it can impact their ability to see if there's not enough light, that's kind of that spectrum thing that I was talking about is just having the ability to adjust the room, so that you can kind of walk into that room, ask the people who are there, “how is this working for you?”, and then trying to find a middle ground between all the participants, so it's not too overwhelming in there, feeling uncomfortable throughout, as well as that just the space around the tables is super important. Yeah, so we made a mistake in one of our focus groups where we put the table too close to the wall. And then we had different people we were guiding into the session, but one of them had sat on the edge, because that was the easiest for them to get to, and for us to guide them into. But then when the other person came in, he had to get them in the middle of the three people. And there was not much room around them to get around and to guide them and their dog into that spot. So it became very awkward, where we had to ask them to shuffle over and things like that. So that was one learning that I really took away was just make sure there's enough space, because there is a little bit more to consider if they do have their dog guide with them, as well as just the space in between the chairs so that their dog can sit at their feet. There's multiple people with dogs, that's quite a lot of room. So just making sure that there's enough spacing between the chairs. And as I mentioned, that person sitting at the first chair was because it was the most simple pathway to sort of get there. So making sure that your pathways are really simple. And there's not like a lot of obstacles, it's just kind of like a straight line, if possible. And then setting up the room in that way. And moving on to the second point that I talked about, about asking people to put their hand up, just noting that that's actually fine. Just mention it. Like at the beginning, I might be asking you to put your hands up today, just so we can ensure the conversation flows, and everyone gets a chance to speak or contribute. So if you are interested in commenting, if you do put your hand up, I will call on you by name, and making sure you do call on them by their name. Because obviously, if they can't see you, you can't just say “oh, yes, you go ahead”, because they might think three other people have their hands up as well. So just being clear that it's them. And so you will have to do a bit of prep beforehand to make sure you remember everyone's names. If you really want to, you can get them to put like name tags on and things if that's going to help you as well. And then on the third point about vision, vision being a spectrum, this was a learning that we got from our focus group, which was really, that we recruited for two groups. So we had the low vision group and the blind group. And even within that we had a lot of spectrum within. So some people in the blind group, they are in the blind group, because they're legally blind. However, they do have a little bit more sight than some of the other people who were also in that blind group. So we had actually split up our recruitment guide, or interview guide, sorry, into two different ones, we're gonna deduct the low vision questions and the blind questions, because obviously, you don't want to be asking people who are blind about lots of color and text and things like that. But what we found is that we actually did need to have both questions ready, because there was some people in the blind group that were talking about color contrast, and texts and stuff, because they did have partial sight sightedness. And just the fact I really want to stress that if you are recruiting for vision, vision disabilities, there is that nuance between low vision and blind.

Tracey
I like the way that you've made sure that you include questions for both in that that interview guide so that you're really asking a broad range of questions and allowing for people to give you that information, as well as you know, making it so that because one of the things that I'm hearing in all the different things that you're saying is that it's really a lot of it comes down to being really flexible on the day so that you can continually ask people and adapt what you're doing in real time to suit their needs and their requirements. And I think that that interview guide is another example of that. So that you're finding that there are some people within that workshop that do have some vision, and they're directing the conversation in a different way. And having those questions available facilitates you being really flexible.

Elana
Exactly. And I think it's important as well, within that spectrum, it's easy to really assume, like when we made that assumption, we're like, “oh, people in the blind group, we're not going to talk about text, sizes and color contrast, because they're not going to be able to see that and they're not going to be able to rely on it.” But even someone like me, who's been in this constant usability, testing spin, and I've talked to people day to day, I still made that assumption. And I was again, surprised, which is great, because that's why I love my job. But it really is important to say to someone, like if they say, Oh, I can't read that, ask them how they'd prefer the information to be displayed or made accessible to them, rather than just saying, Oh, they can't read that. So that's not important information for them or something like that. So just really asking, I think, as well in those questions, what their expectations are, that’s something we do quite a lot, how would you expect this information to be displayed to you instead, and on that sort of language and interview guide sphere, I guess, thinking about just the transition between tasks as well during a session. So we had to hand out like physical things to these people for them to test. And rather than saying things like, “here you go have this thing”, we have to say specifically, “I'm going to hand you now this product, it is on the table in front of you, feel free to have a look at it when you are ready.” Rather than just assuming they're going to know it's in front of them, the amount of times I've put something back, especially at the start of my career in this, I would put something in front of someone and they would be just sitting there, like waiting for me to prompt and I'm like, oh, stupid. So don't do that mistake. And as I said before, I said the word “look”, or if you know the word “see”, people can often be scared to say those words to people who are blind or have low vision. But it's actually okay to say those words, as long as you are saying it in a way that's like “have a look at the product”, because they are looking just in a different way. So it's just a colloquial term, part of our language, it's absolutely fine if you say something like that, it's just a bit different if you say like, “as you can see here”. And if you don't explain that, then that's a bit different. Because that's now being ableist. And on the fourth sort of point, we're talking about having at least one other colleague with you to guide people in and out of the room. So guiding is something that I personally was very scared or worried about in the beginning, because I just had no experience guiding people who are blind or low vision. I've since learned so much about it. And it's really not that scary. So I really wanted to debunk that for a lot of people. Because if you do do it in person, focus groups, that's something you're going to have to do. And there are a lot of resources on our Vision Australia website about guiding people who are blind and low vision. So I have linked those in the article on the point and before. And it's just important to really remember, when you're interacting with someone who's blind or low vision, you approach them, and hopefully you know their name. So it'd be like, “Hi, Sam. It's Alana here.” So then they know who's there and who you are. “I’m the facilitator for today's session, thanks so much for coming. Would you like me to guide you into the room today?” And if they say yes, then you ask them, “How would you like me to guide you?”, and then they'll tell you how they prefer. So some people with dog guides don't need to touch you or hold you, their dog will basically follow you and be their eyes. Otherwise, some people with dog guides will still want to hold on to your arm, say, so that's one of the ways that you can guide someone is they'll hold on to your arm. And then you'll basically walk together and they will basically tell you what their preference is because they've done this a gazillion times. And they know that not everyone's used to that. So if you have questions, just ask. They’ll be used to answering them as well. So that's why it's simple. You want have at least one other colleague with you. Because if you've got five people, you need to guide all five people potentially at different times into the room. So you might have to stagger that. And one person might need to stay in the room with you. So one of your colleagues would need to stay with people, so they're not left on their own. And just making sure that when you do guide them into that room, remembering that the room is completely unknown to that person at that point, potentially, so introducing them to whoever is in the room so they know how many people are in the room, who is there. And the important point to note on that is, some people who are low vision might not need your help at all. So when people say yes or no, you really have to listen to them and their preferences.

Dan
I really liked how you framed up that whole introduction with people as “Hi, this is my name, this is my role.” What assistance? I can't remember exactly what you said. But it was something around like, do you need assistance, rather than just assuming and grabbing them or something? Because like you said, people experience this in many different ways and the assistance that they need, they can tell you, they do this regularly. So I think that's a really simple but a very effective tip.

Elana
Yeah, something that sometimes it's an unknown, but as soon as you know, that sort of script, it just becomes really easy. And yet, at least now you've got something in your toolbox to start with, other than being awkward and scared to approach someone. The other thing that I was really worried about when starting this focus group was like, “Oh, my gosh, how am I going to guide five people as the room all at once?” Because at least on the way in, people are probably staggered. But on the way out, it's like, oh, “we're done here”. So how do you get everyone out of the room? And that was one of the questions that I really got into with that Vision Australia staff member. And some interesting ways that the staff member had actually experienced themselves was basically if there's a group of people, you can just ask people, “where are you going?”, so you kind of find where the groups are, if people need to go the taxi, if other people have support working with them or a family or friend, you kind of need to understand where they're going, so then you can count like, “Okay, we need to take three people to where the taxi will go, two people to where the train stations are.” So at least you first identify what the groups are and how they're getting home. And then you can essentially call on them by name, like “Alex and Ed, I'll take you to the taxi rank now”. Another really interesting one was that I have had never tried myself personally, but like having literally a line of people, so each person hold on to another person. And you've basically got this like “train”. So then you can guide a big group of people once. I haven't done that, because I feel like it might be more suited to people who know each other well. He might be in like groups or community groups and things like that, that see each other regularly. But yeah, so that's kind of some ways or you can just tell people, “I'll guide you out one at a time”, and then just do each person individually. In fact, I'll come back to get you to the number of ways. And on the taxi, sort of train station transport situation, I did just really want to flag that I personally have had some pretty terrible experiences with taxi drivers, or rideshare drivers. So this is just down to the fact that a lot of people don't have education around people with disabilities. They're just unaware what they need to say or do. But also there's a lot of discrimination against not letting dog guides into their car. So what has happened to a lot of my participants is they'll call a taxi, the taxi will arrive and be like, “Oh, I'm not taking that dog, sorry, you're not going to be able to come with me.” And then that we have to explain. It's actually against the law to refuse assistance, dog, blah, blah, blah, and they get like, it's all a bit awkward and complicated. And even people just saying, I'm just not taking you or even not even coming up just driving off before they even come. So the person who's blind just has no idea, right? So they're waiting for this taxi and the taxi is calm and driven off that they can't see. So I've had people ask me, “Can you just wait with me at the taxi rank just so you can be my eyes and your situation? Because I've had a bit of experience with discrimination”. So I would actually tell everyone to ask people “would you like me to wait with you” and be proactive about it? Because these things do happen. And another issue is that people might, if you're waiting, talk to you as the sighted person, and not to the person who's blind or low vision, just remind them, the person can talk to you themselves, they can let you know what their address is, you know, you don't have to talk to me, I'm just here for support, and just reminding them that, and also, if they are being rude, taking a picture of their number plate and reporting them, or a lot, in lot of cases, the person who's blind or low vision would have had experience doing that. So they will do it on their own, especially with Uber, I think they can have all the access to that information themselves and report them.

Tracey
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Yeah, there's lots of things that keep coming up, which are very common that we're hearing, which is all about just actually being respectful, you know, talking to people and asking them questions, and allowing them to tell you what they need, and really just carefully listening to their responses. But it's great to understand all these different potential points that come up along the way. So that as a facilitator, you can be really proactive and make sure that somebody's experience is good, because if somebody comes to a workshop, and they have a great experience, but then right at the very end, they have an experience like that, and they don't have that support, that can really tarnish that whole workshop for them, because those two things are joined. And it's usually the last thing that we really remember. So it's good to think about all of those different points, not just, you know, the beginning and getting people in the room and making sure that that workshop is really successful, it's good to sort of think about all those things that happen afterwards, as well. So thanks.

Elana
Yeah, creating relationships is so important, because especially in the disability community, just from sheer facts, there are less people in terms of a recruitment pool. So holding on to those people is really valuable, because it can be really hard to actually recruit people with these specific niche. People who use screen readers, that's an actual, like specialty and a skill that you're recruiting for. So yeah, it is so super important to keep those relationships healthy, and consider the trust that goes into it. So I'm just gonna give you some other general rules, because I couldn't keep this to five. And essentially, I wanted to just say that these focus groups, even though I've outlined all these little nuances, it really is no different to focus groups with people who are fully sighted. So those little things around the location and the guiding and things, they become pretty natural once you've done it a couple times, and they become less scary or nerve wracking after that point. And once you're actually inside the building, everyone sat down having a conversation, it's actually just no different in the end. And something else as well is that if you're unsure about anything, always just ask, never assume, that's kind of a general usability or UX principle anyway. So I think we're all pretty good at that, if we're doing this in a day job. Don't talk to people who are blind or low vision any differently than fully sighted people. So what we tend to find is that as a sighted person, people can maybe raise their voice talk a bit louder than they might ordinarily because they're trying to, like, interact in this different way. So it might just be a knee jerk reaction that you have. So just being really conscious of the fact that actually people who are blind or low vision have even better hearing than most people. So definitely don't yell at them. They've got often very sensitive hearing, because all their sight has been changed into auditory processing. And never never interact with their dog guide, or distracted or guide, because that dog guide is working and is acting as their support or their eyes. So having that become a distraction can be really dangerous. And he's really bad for their training as well, those dogs because a lot of work goes into training them. And good habits is really important. I've even had people at my office like they're training a puppy and I've snapped into that. And I've been like saying goodbye to them and then said goodbye to their puppy and I'm like, “Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry.” So, just being really aware of that.

Dan
I was gonna say, I reckon that's the toughest one of the tips that you've given us so far there, Elana. I think everybody when they see a little baby Golden Retriever, just like, “I want to just pat that thing”. But you know, as you mentioned, there's some some real, some consequences if we do that, right. So we're just all going to have to hold ourselves back, no pats, take yourself down the dog park after the workshop, you can pat as many dogs as you want down there.

Elana
Exactly. Get it out of your system. And yeah, I would just really encourage people, especially if this is your first, second, third time and you're still feeling a little bit not confident with it. Just running a pilot test, just one interview with someone who's blind, just recruiting an extra person that you can do that pilot session with will do a world of difference, because it will get all that nerves out of the way, you'll be able to ask them questions like, Oh, was that a weird question? Or notice how they respond to it? If you're actually being a bit silly by adding that question in or something like that, which happens with all any sort of usability testing or research anyway. So I think that's probably the last thing that I would suggest.

Dan
Awesome. So many good tips. And we will link to the article in the show notes. So that if people would like to have a look at that, and use that as a bit of a guide, rather than having to take a bunch of notes from all those great things you've just said, they can do so. Hey, one last question I had for you as well. What about if you’re doing this online with people?

Elana
Yeah, so doing online usability testing, or user research is actually the main way that we generally do our sessions. So it's actually beneficial to do them online where possible, because you've essentially got someone in their house, in their natural environment with their setup in a comfortable room, they've got their computer, their devices, whatever. Especially with people with disabilities, they've often got really nuanced accessibility settings on or assistive tech that is attached to their computers or phones. So it's just easier, and you actually get better results from doing it virtually where possible. One of the issues that we do encounter is, it's still a bit hard to do mobile for screen reader specifically. So screen readers is assistive technology that someone who's blind will use. So we actually genuinely do those still in person, just because it is a little bit hard to get the screen sharing happening. But other than that, it's just easier for everyone I think, and it's more accessible. So you don't have to deal with all the location stuff, trying to get there, the taxis. Yeah.

Dan
I think that's a great tip, because I feel like some people might be sitting there thinking that could be more difficult. If they didn't think about all the devices and the settings that are set up on the person with low vision or blindness has on their end, I think that's just a really good thing for people to know that yeah, sometimes that's actually even better than getting them in. But you can also get them in if you follow with some of those great tips you gave us earlier.

Elana
Yeah, we actually use Zoom for our video conferencing, because that is actually the most accessible video conferencing platform to use, especially with people who are using screen readers, they can get access to zoom, and we've done thousands of tests on over that. So I would definitely encourage you to use that if you are doing sessions with people who are blind. And using screen readers. As well as this, I did just want to talk about the distinction between discovery research or like that primary research that you might do, where you're not doing any testing. And also, the difference between that and usability testing. Because we don't just focus on vision. Even though we are employed by Vision Australia, we actually do ten disabilities. So we do, they’re called functional groups or disability groups where we have vision is one, which is blind and low vision. We have hearing, deaf and hard of hearing, physical and motor disabilities, cognitive and learning disabilities, speech and language disabilities. And actually mental health is another functional group. Mental health is something that we don't do much of in our sphere, because it is quite specialized. But in terms of discovery research, I would always encourage people to focus on the disability group in that scenario. So actually recruiting for those specific disabilities. But in terms of usability, it's actually more important to focus on the assistive technology when you're recruiting. So rather than recruiting people who are blind or low vision, you would recruit for people who use screen reader or use a screen magnifier instead because, again, there's that spectrum, so some people who are low vision might use a mixture of screen reader and screen magnifiers. So, it's more important to get that assistive technology tested in a usability setting, especially with physical and motor, you've got voice control users, you've got Switch Control users, there's a bunch of different assistive tech. And that's really what you want to focus on in that scenario. In terms of some do's and don'ts of accessibility, the first thing I want to say is accessibility is a little bit more nuanced than just I think a lot of people think about WCAG, this Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and doing accessibility audits to kind of tick that box of accessibility. I've done an audit, blah, blah, blah, it's now complete. But really, you want to do an audit first. So if you're ever trying to make your product or service accessible, get an audit done first before you start usability testing, because then you can fix all those bugs and things that come up before you do usability testing. And then when you're in usability testing, you can really focus on the user experience. And people are less likely to come across those bugs that really aren't very interesting from a user experience point of view, because like they could’ve been fixed easily, just by a quick development change. So always do an audit first, and then do usability testing. We always recommend doing usability testing with people with disabilities, because even after an audit has been done and everything's been fixed, you will still find a significant amount of usability issues on a website. And that's just from our pure experience doing this every day. So it's really important that they come hand in hand, it's not one or the other. And in terms of how many participants you should recruit, something that we often hear from people is “I just want to get one person who's blind, one person with low vision, one person with cognitive and learning disabilities, one person with physical motor”. And we have to let them know that actually, that's not good research. Because if you get the voice of just one person who's blind, that's going to be extremely biased. And that's just like any sort of research like you'd never just get one user in for a session. But I guess in the disability sphere, it's that nuance of people often think of disability as a user group, when actually there's multiple user groups within that, it's just an umbrella term. So what we generally recommend is you'd have three people who are blind, three people who are low vision, three people with cognitive and learning disabilities, etc. So three would be the minimum we would suggest from each functional group or disability group. People often also ask, do we need to do usability testing with people without disabilities as well. And what I've found out throughout my experience is really, you should start with people with disabilities, because they actually experience all the regular usability things that come across, as well as accessibility things. So you're getting both in the same session, which is actually really, I guess, from a financial point of view, efficient and economical. Because if you start there, then you're getting both. And then you can supplement with people without disabilities, if you'd like. So just have like, two or three people extra, rather than doing it the opposite way, which is usually people without disabilities, and then one or two people with disabilities. And in terms of when to start doing this research. So really, what we want to focus on is this idea of shifting left, which is something that's a bit jargony in the accessibility world. But what’s that saying is you want to start researching with people with disabilities as early as possible, because the earlier you start, the less cost it is down the track to fix issues that arise. So that's a similar thing to any sort of user research principle. But it also applies to accessibility, which is why we say start, even at the beginning with Discovery interviews, have a bunch of people with disabilities, do some just discovery research with you, so that you can understand their needs and the jobs to be done and all that from an accessibility point of view, because that's going to actually make your product or service better for everyone. Because as I said, they experience the general issues as well as the accessibility issues. And there's that whole theory of cost prevention, if that's $1 cost prevention, then cost of correction is actually $10. And cost of failure is $100. And if you then put that into terms of products and services, that could actually be millions of dollars to correct a failure at the end. So just do it at the beginning, do it with people with disabilities, and you will be saving a lot of money in the long run, and helping a lot of people.

Dan
That's awesome. So so many great tips there. So we're obviously put a link through to in the show notes through to the article. But if you have any other resources you'd like to share with our listeners.

Elana
Yeah, so we've actually just recently produced an on-demand e-learning course. So it's called “Introduction to Digital Accessibility”. It was made by my friend and colleague just sent her as well as a bunch of other people in our team helping out with the content and production of this. So I would definitely recommend having a look at that. It's only $49 to So we've tried to make it as financially accessible as possible, because we think this is really important stuff for people to be learning about. So that's one thing. We also have our YouTube, which has some webinars, interviews with people with disability, just short ones, as well as like demos for a screen reader, screen magnifier. So you can see what those assistive technologies look like. And we're going to be releasing more assistive technology demonstrations over the course of the global accessibility awareness day that's coming up in May. So they'll be coming out too. We have our blog. We also do facilitate virtual facilitated training. So they'll we can put a list up there but I think what your listeners might be interested in is the Inclusive Design course that we run, which is super awesome. I did that before I even joined Vision Australia. But yeah, so lots of content there, some free, some paid. So.

Dan
So we'll put all that in the show notes. And people can choose which of those I'd like to go through and have a look at.
Hey, thanks so much for being so generous with all these things that you've learned over your time there. And I learned to heap and really helped me personally really look at some of the ways that we can do things better for all sorts of different types of people we have involved in our work. So, thank you so much. It's been great having you on the show.

Elana
Thanks, Dan. And Tracy, I really appreciate it. So grateful that you could reach out and we can have this chat, because I think it's so valuable.

Audio: Rock and pop style, upbeat music

Dan
Thanks for listening to another episode of the “Innovate for Impact” podcast. Any links to what we spoke about today will be posted in the show notes. If you'd like to know more about social innovation, visit our website where we have a heap of tools to help you on your way. Visit impactoconsulting.com.au. Thanks for listening. Now go out there and make an impact.

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Pub: 14 Apr 2023 04:57 UTC

Edit: 14 Apr 2023 05:04 UTC

Views: 207