Episode 4: Regine Gilbert on Accessibility and Inclusive Design

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Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Surfacing. In this episode hosts, Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale spoke to designer, speaker, and educator Regine Gilbert. Regine is the author of inclusive design for a digital world, designing with accessibility in mind. Regine explained what accessibility means and considers why makers and businesses don't build accessible products, and how to shift that trend. Regine also offered advice for designers and makers that work in organizations where accessibility and inclusive design aren't a priority.

Lisa Welchman:

So thank you so much for agreeing to come on to our new podcast. Before we start answering questions, we're kind of excited because we've actually launched it now and it's getting a good reception, which was kind of not surprising.

Regine Gilbert:

Of course it is.

Lisa Welchman:

You say, of course, but I don't know why, like it could have not but it is. So I'm super excited. I really was excited after talking to you. You've got amazing energy. I'm looking forward to this conversation. I'm going to hand it over to Andy because he hasn't talked to you yet and let him kick things off.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. I mean, it's great to meet you. So thanks for coming on. Regine, I just would love to hear a little bit about you and what you've got going on.

Regine Gilbert:

So currently I am at NYU in the Tandon School of Engineering in the integrated design and media program. I am an industry assistant professor, I am full time faculty. And my focus is teaching-wise is on user experience design, as well as assistive technology. So I am lucky I get to co-teach typically in the spring, a class called Looking Forward with Gus Chalkias who, Gus is an assistive technology trainer with Helen Keller, and he is also blind. So Gus gives the assistive tech side I give the UX and general accessibility side. And then I also teach user experience design. That's a little bit I'm doing more stuff. I'm actually doing some research right now into the XR space, so virtual reality and augmented reality. And I've been working on a list of tools and looking to see if they're inclusive or not. So are they affordable? Are they free? Do they cost money? Is there any sort of accessibility associated with them? And for funsies, making it into a subway map-

Andy Vitale:

Oh wow.

Regine Gilbert:

... design. So I'm hoping that by the time this airs, this will be out.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, well, we hope so too. So Andy asked you that one of these fundamental questions, before we get rolling in this conversation, and just in all that you described, I can think of a lot of things that I'd like to talk about with you. But I ran into you because I ran into your book, which is called Inclusive Design for a Digital World, and the subtitle is Designing with Accessibility in Mind. And just for the cool people in the room, who might not know what inclusive design is or may not understand what the term accessibility is, can you give us some definitions of that just to kind of bring everybody on an even playing field?

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah, sure. So inclusive design is always something that is a little bit challenging to define. If you ask five people, they'll give you five different answers. I go back to what Kat Holmes, the author of Mismatch Design says, and she's like, "We don't really know what inclusion is, but we know what exclusion is. We know what it's like to leave people out." When it comes to accessibility, and specifically digital accessibility, that means that the products that you create are accessible for people with disabilities. And that's all encompassing, there's so many, many things involved in that process.

Andy Vitale:

What's interesting that I was reading about you on inclusion hub is what really got you into focusing on inclusive design. I read something about you went to a meetup in New York and you ran into two friends or you met two friends who happen to be blind. Can you tell us a little bit more about that story and what happened?

Regine Gilbert:

So yeah, I one day said I want to get into accessibility. I don't know what that is, so I found a meetup in New York City, called I think at the time, it was called the Accessibility Design Meetup. They changed their name since to the A11Y Meetup. So I went, and I don't even remember what the session was about. But after we did like a happy hour, and I ended up speaking with two people who are my friends to this day. And I was telling one of them, I'm a UX designer. She said, "Oh, what's that?" And I was telling her, "You know I want make things usable? And I'm working on this E-commerce site," and she's blind. And she said, "Do people like you think about people like me?" And it had me pause and then I said, "No." Because I had thought about it and up to that point in my school and my education and even in my job, I did not hear people saying, "Oh, we're going to make sure that this is good for folks who are blind."

Regine Gilbert:

So I told her, I said, "Well, no, but if I work on anything, I will make sure that people think about it." And that is something that I think I've held on to this day. So I started teaching at General Assembly in 2015. So I started incorporating accessibility into my teaching. I worked in a place where I made, no one asked for it, but I made accessibility guidelines. So it just kind of just spilled over and I started speaking about it. The first place ever spoke about accessibility and design was at regional conference of the National Association of Black Journalists. So I got to talk to journalists about accessibility, which they were like, "Whoa, I didn't even think about that." So it's been kind of a cool, fun, interesting and sometimes tiring, right.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, no, it's one of the things that's sort of embarrassing for me to reflect on personally. And I may have said this before on a podcast is just how deep into my own career as somebody working in a digital space, I mean, I stopped being a maker very early, I was probably a digital maker for maybe four or five years and then now I'm a management consultant. So I'm never putting in my hands on things and building things. But even in that context, I was aware of accessibility issues, because there was a usability lab at Cisco Systems where I started my career in the digital space. And we were testing things, but it was never really integrated. There was always just the sense that it wasn't a fundamental thing, but a nice to have, which I'm saying with some embarrassment because, and for what I know now, I think that reflects poorly on me.

Lisa Welchman:

But also just represents a certain level of ignorance that I had, and a narrowness of experience that I have. I didn't have people in my life, or I didn't think about people who are in my life who might be struggling with various technologies. And it leads me to ask you, what do you think keeps that blindness in place? Why are people so resistant or unable to just accept this and apply these principles that you talk about in your books upstream in the design process? What do you think is going on?

Regine Gilbert:

I think, because it's not happening to them. One of the things that I've done in the past few years is I started doing, actually the first time I did it was with Matt May at Adobe, who runs their Inclusive Design Department, he asked if I would join him to do a workshop on accessibility. I was like, "What am I going to do it? This seems like a big time opportunity for me to work with Matt May, he's an amazing person. So I read this article by Don Norman, the author of Design of Everyday Things where he basically said in this article, "I wrote the book on design and I did a disservice to the elderly. I'm 83 years old." He was 83, I think when he wrote the article, and he said, "I didn't think about my older self." And I said, you know because one of the questions I would ask my students all the time is like, "Who do you think about the most and why do you think it's hard to design for other people?" Because you're thinking about yourself the most.

Regine Gilbert:

So I said, because we think about ourselves the most, I think it would be good for people to think about themselves as their 73-year-old self, and create a persona for their 73-year-old self. And it was really, really eye opening for folks to think about themselves as they get older. Because I think when we were young, we think about turning 16, we think about turning 18, we think about turning 21. We think like, if we're driving a car, when we turn 25, our car insurance is going to go down, right? But we don't think about getting older and what that means. And if you are a designer, what does that mean for the things that you're creating? And what does that mean for the stuff you're creating for yourself?

Regine Gilbert:

So part of the barrier is because we are thinking about ourselves, and if we are not experiencing some form of disability, even though we're all going to experience that, at some point in our life, if we're not experiencing it in the moment, then we don't care. And that's just what I've seen. So in order for us to start to care, I've started doing these workshops, which have been really good and really thought provoking, because people tell me, I never thought about myself getting older like this.

Andy Vitale:

I started in design, like Lisa had mentioned, accessibility wasn't a primary focus. And then some of the companies that I was working for at the time when like Wells Fargo got hit with a lawsuit and Target got hit with a lawsuit, that's when all of a sudden they're like, "Well, we don't want to get sued. We don't want that to be us." I think that opened a lot of eyes to what accessibility is and why we need to focus on it. But it also allowed the people who do focus on it to explain the value of having inclusive design and making sure your design is accessible and being able to... For us, one of the best tools we've had is to take executives through an empathy lab. Just figure out different ways that they can go through having different abilities than they have today and see what that impact is of our products on them. But one of the things is watching them play for the first time with assistive technologies, and you mentioned assistive technologies right off the bat. I just wanted to ask like what is the world of assistive technology looking like as it evolves?

Regine Gilbert:

Well, the world of assistive tech is very interesting in that we don't think of... like so many people wear glasses, but they don't think of those as assistive technology and yet, they are. One of the things that we talk about in our class is how expensive assistive technology is, when we have students play guess how much this thing is, and we're like, "How much is this Braille display?" And they're like, "$500 $200." And we're like, "No, it's $5,000." So one of the things when it comes to the landscape of assistive tech, it's across the board. I mean, there's so many different things that are low tech and high tech, some things are digital, some things are not.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah, it varies. I mean, there's so much and I just want to go back to the point of, because this is a bit of a controversial thing when it comes to the accessibility and disability community. When it comes to simulations, some people think it's good for people to try simulation, some people think it's not. They don't find it helpful because and I'll just give an example of something that I've done in workshops and classes where I've had people try a screen reader for the first time. And for folks who are listening and don't know what a screen reader is, a screen reader is what it sounds like. It will read the screen, it will read website, and this is oftentimes used by folks who are blind or have low vision.

Regine Gilbert:

And when people try it for the first time, like this is hard and oh, we feel sorry. No, don't feel sorry because if you're trying something for the first time, I don't care who you are, you're probably not going to be good at it. And so anything and everything takes practice. And so it's also not coming from the perspective of pity. It's really coming from a perspective of understanding and then are [crosstalk 00:14:49], yeah, sorry.

Andy Vitale:

Exactly. No, I was teaching an accessible design course at Kent State. So I teach online in their master's program and that was the first thing we did is had one of the exercises where you're going to turn on your iPhone or your mobile devices, like screen reading capabilities, and try to interact with a handful of websites. And everybody in the class was like, "This was the hardest assignment I've had to date. Like, just the frustration of going through this." And they develop a bit of empathy in the way that people have to use different devices that are differently than they do. But I think what it helped them realize is how important it is to create designs that the screen reader can easily navigate through so that it doesn't add barriers or context that shouldn't exist.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah, no, it's great for people to see how it works for sure.

Lisa Welchman:

You keep mentioning about students and talking, and Andy is talking about students, or whatever. What do you see? And I would imagine those people might be of a lot of different ages, but most of them are relatively young. So what do you see happening? Do you see any differences between that demographic of folks, new people coming into the space into the UX design space, and their understanding around these issues or their willingness to design from a more inclusive perspective? Or do you think it's just more of the same? Do you see any shifts in that area?

Regine Gilbert:

Well, I am seeing more people interested in this area of accessibility, which is great to see. The students are lovely, they're open-minded. One of the things that they say like have the mind of a child and then some people are like, "Grow up." And it's like, you should never grow up because when we're grown up, we shut our minds and we close our minds. And when we're closed minded, and we think we know everything, we are not open to innovation, we are not open to creativity. So what I am seeing is more of an interest in accessibility from people who are already, who have been doing design for a while, which is great.

Regine Gilbert:

I have lots of people reach out to me on LinkedIn, because I do different talks all over the place. So that's been really nice to see, like where can I get more resources? So I ended up making a list of resources, right? So I could just say here's this Google Doc, for you to go and learn some more. So that I have been seeing kind of across the board. And just in general, a lot of students just they don't learn about accessibility throughout their college, or even if they're doing boot camp careers.

Lisa Welchman:

What do you think? So I'm working with large organizations all the time. And as I mentioned, at the start of this interview, people just don't want to address accessibility. You mentioned or Andy mentioned, folks are getting sued and I remember that big trend as well, but people still sit back. I mean, work with large governmental agencies, it's almost appalling how unaddressed this is inside of organizations. So my experience with a large for profit enterprise is that nobody does something because it's the right thing to do. They do it because it's beneficial to the bottom line, and I'm not saying that was cynicism, that's what they are about. They're a for profit business and they cut corners in a lot of different ways to maximize profits and it's a whole different conversation about how we feel about that trend.

Lisa Welchman:

But that's just what I say and so what suggestions would you have for folks who are working in a context like that, that could help motivate and create change inside the organization? If they're not going to go for the, it's the right thing to do because honestly, in my experience, that's usually not the right... That's not the bus people are going to get on.

Regine Gilbert:

No. That isn't it. I mean, there is the opportunity to engage more people, meaning if you gain more people, that's more money. That's one lens. Another lens is yeah, it is against the law not to have an accessible website. If you are a government entity, it is required for you to do have that.

Lisa Welchman:

And has been for a very long time.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. And has been. This is something that that has kind of come up in the last few weeks, actually, I've had former students who are now working, I've had the pleasure of teaching them about accessibility. And they have told me that nobody wants to do it. And they've gotten into arguments with people and they are now being frustrated and upset and I have to tell them, "Listen, for your psychological safety in the workplace, because I firmly believe in that, you need to back off." Right? And it's unfortunate because you can't... some people will say, "Well keep pushing, keep pushing." That is not good for your health. It's not good for your job security. Like, let's be real. And I say, I'm a big, big fan of planting seeds, and understanding that change takes time. So if we can go ahead and get all tech's added to things, great. If we can make sure that color contrast has been updated, great. What little things can we do that will make a change in the long run?

Regine Gilbert:

Because I think especially nowadays most people will job hop, they don't stay at a place long enough to see change happen. So if you're fighting for this thing, you're like, "Oh, forget it. I've been here a year already, so now I'm out." Then you're not going to see that. But if if you really want to see change, and you're willing to hang in there then do that. So there's different paths and everybody's different and I believe firmly in doing what is safe and healthiest for you. I also have started telling my students, if you are going to go down the path of wanting to work in accessibility, or incorporating it into your work, it is a lifelong work. This isn't something you're going to do just in my class or at a particular job. This is something like, basically, it's a form of injustice when things are not accessible. And frankly, I feel that injustice is something that you fight your entire life. You never rest on your...

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah, you don't rest on your laurels, so you keep going. So that's how I feel about that whole thing. I mean, do what you can but also take care of yourself.

Lisa Welchman:

Now, that's inspiring. And I think really, really helpful advice. Thanks for that.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, I love that idea, especially the incremental wins, because in so many organizations I've worked in, the accessibility team is small. I just came from a bank that had one of the largest accessibility teams, which was probably like 10 ish. It was some digital accessibility folks, a physical accessibility person for things like ATMs and branches. But ultimately just piggybacking on what we were just talking about, what are some advice? What are some of the areas of focus for that person that's on that small team to help them grow that team in the organization? Like what are some of the things they should be looking for? What are some of the like, I don't want to call it low hanging fruit, but some of the like baseline things they can do to gain momentum?

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah, so I like to refer to webaim.org did a survey of a million websites, and they looked at the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So some people listening may be familiar with them, some people may not, but the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are international guidelines around accessibility. So WebAIM looked at a million web pages and they looked at like the top, I think, six issues. And the top issue number one was color contrast, which is an easy thing to fix. There are color contrast checkers everywhere, Alt text was another one. There were like the hierarchy of the page. So a lot, there are some web pages where there's multiple each ones, like that is horrible for someone with a screen reader. Like when a designer, whoever is working on a web page, what is the hierarchy look like of that page. So I would say those are like three things that people can look at.

Regine Gilbert:

One is like color contrast, which is easy to fix, at making sure images have alternative text, any video has caption and if you can possibly provide transcripts, that's great, especially for the deaf blind community. And then hierarchy of the page, like how are you laying out this page and does a page make sense? Does the page make sense from a perspective of if I'm using my keyboard, how am I navigating this? So those are three areas that I say to look at. And then I would look further or look at the WebAIM, it's called the WebAIM Million to see what the top issues are, because it's general across the board especially for websites, those issues.

Lisa Welchman:

One of the things that I don't hear a lot but that I have heard and maybe not just in the context of digital spaces, but sort of real world spaces, if we can even differentiate between those two things, they're just blending more and more every single day, is that creating an accessible experience is going to be an inconvenience for the people that don't require the tweak to what they would consider a, "Normal experience." And that always seems sort of like a sideways thing. What are your thoughts about what an accessible world looks like for everyone, just for everyone involved. And how can you describe that world to folks so that their understanding that's a value to everyone. You mentioned earlier on if like, imagine yourself being older, putting, centering yourself in that type of experience.

Lisa Welchman:

But I still see a lot of people and here in my own head even to a certain extent going like, well, but we're helping out some other people as opposed to, it's kind of like the way that I look at algorithmic bias. I'm outraged that people just won't put me in the set of people worth caring about from the very beginning. I can't understand why they can't get why that would be an important thing. And I would imagine someone who needs the color contrast, or the screen reader to work feels the exact same way about that. I guess maybe there's not a question in here, I'm just wondering if you have any insight around what it's going to take to reframe that mindset as a society to...

Regine Gilbert:

That's a big question.

Lisa Welchman:

It is. It is. It took me a while to get to it but that was rolling up to it, that's the question.

Regine Gilbert:

Well, I will counter your question with a question.

Lisa Welchman:

Okay.

Regine Gilbert:

Because as you were asking the question, I said, "Okay, but what is what does that mean?" Nearly everyone sends a text message, right?

Lisa Welchman:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Regine Gilbert:

So imagine a world where you weren't able to text message. If you had a world where you couldn't text message, how would you be communicating? How do we communicate before text messaging?

Lisa Welchman:

Phone, email, pagers.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. So text messaging has brought a lot of convenience to our lives, has it not?

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah.

Regine Gilbert:

Right. It's a great, great technology that was not made for people who can hear. It was made for people who were deaf. SMS was made for people who are deaf and yet, it is something we all benefit from.

Lisa Welchman:

Perfect.

Regine Gilbert:

Right. And so, yeah, there's so many things that especially when they're, I have this in my book, cruise control was invented by a blind man, because he didn't like the way he was being driven. So there is a convenience that we could have to all of our lives if things were made accessible. And frankly, whether we like it or not in the United States, right? I like to refer to this statistic because it is a fascinating one. In 14 short years, we are in the year 2021. In 2035, we are going to have more people over the age of 65 than under the age of 65. What do people over the age of 65 need?

Lisa Welchman:

Glasses to read.

Regine Gilbert:

Amongst other things. Right? Hearing aids. So my point is like let's start making, I think about, because I will fall in that range. Like why, I want to start making stuff now for my older self. I think about myself too the most, right? So I'm being selfish here. Why are we making stuff accessible now? It just like it, like it drives me nuts, like people are just, I get it, we're pressed, like we're present, as present as we can be. However, all this fancy technology, and we're not thinking about how we could use this stuff to scale for ourselves in the future.

Andy Vitale:

But yeah, that's almost taking or that is taking a sustainability lens on our own lives or our own, like how we grow older, and then figuring out why don't we plan for that now and make sure that we're building in our ability to use these products 20 years from now.

Regine Gilbert:

Like when a parent is like, "Oh, I want to get that car seat that's going to be like the baby car seat, but turn into the toddler car seat or I want to get that baby bed that's going to turn into the toddler bed." Like why aren't we doing this stuff for ourselves like with everything? It would be so cool to have everything just be modular.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. When I asked earlier, one of the motivators is you're doing it for your future self. Right?

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

So I love how-- I love though, how you turn that question around on me, because it goes back into something that I will probably say over and over again on this podcast, which is the sort of scarcity of resources and perspectives and knowledge that go into the product development process, and a lack of my knowledge in this case about where technologies come from how they spawn. And it's just showing us that being inclusive in the design process, not only because you're being empathetic, or trying to show compassion to people you think have an issue or somehow disabled. But because you might get something better by including these various perspectives in the front end of this design process. And I think that's a really sort of beautiful thought. I think for a person who works into design space, maybe not the person who's counting the euros or the dollars and cents in the business, that that kind of gets me kind of emotionally up. Like the idea, that's a hopeful way of looking at it and an inclusive way of looking at it. So I really appreciate that.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, where my mind was going to, just through this conversation, as you also talked about mixed reality, augmented reality, virtual reality. And I'm wondering, I've got an oculus that I put that on and I'm just curious what accessibility looks like in that new world?

Regine Gilbert:

Well, we're working on it. So I'm part of a group called XR Access, which is spearheaded by Cornell Tech. And it's a group, Verizon media is part of it and my usability project, which I'm part of is part of it. And a lot of volunteers are looking into this and looking to make sure that this like new... Well, it's not new technology but it's starting to have a come up, is accessible, right? Because oftentimes again, accessibility is like the last thing that people think about. So it's the mission of XR Access to make sure that whatever is happening is including accessibility in that process. So this is a third year that there's going to be a symposium in June, which I'm really looking forward to, where people share and it's a lot of university work, but it's also companies like Facebook coming in. And they recently released some guidelines around accessibility, but it's a slow roll.

Regine Gilbert:

I had a conversation with someone who is a blogger about VR, and made a video about accessibility. And I was like, so excited to speak to this person and watch the video and then I put the video on, and there were no captions. And it was on YouTube, which YouTube can provide auto captions, right? And then you could correct them as needed. And when I asked this person, "Why isn't there captions on your four minute video accessibility?" And they said, "Well, it's too difficult." So I said, "It's actually not. And if you're making a video about accessibility and VR, you should probably add some captions to it." So there's a lot of work to be done especially from the design and development sides of things. I think there's just in general, I feel that the root issue or root cause of a lot of the lack of knowledge of accessibility is awareness of it in the first place.

Regine Gilbert:

And then once you're aware of it, it's like, well, people feel overwhelmed with all the things that you would have to learn. However, like what are we here for if we're not to learn new things? So there's a lot of opportunity. I actually had a conversation with somebody from UC Davis about using VR for folks with different types of disabilities for learning. And in particular, he was talking about folks with low vision and being able to put on a VR headset, because everything is really close, right? It's like right here. And so there's a lot, a lot of opportunity in this space. I think we're first going to see a, we'll see more augmented reality than virtual reality, I feel. And for those who may not know the difference, augmented reality is like your filters you put on yourself in Instagram and virtual reality tend to put on a headset of some sort, but many people don't. I think 97% of the world has never tried VR. So we have some ways to go there but yeah, there's just a lot of potential.

Lisa Welchman:

Well, I think one of the cool things and what I really liked in when I read your book is that I think, and this is me, saying, get Regine's book is it's just an excellent primer. I think you can't walk away from that book and not know the top five things that you need to do, or the easy things that you can do, it a really outlines things as well. So I really urge people to take a look at that Inclusive Design for a Digital World, because once you read that, I think there's going to be no turning back and you won't have any excuses.

Andy Vitale:

No, I'm interested in the courses that you're teaching and wanted to hear a little bit more about those and the types of students that are taking obviously there, it's a lot of design related things. But I definitely want to hear more about the different subjects and you touched on it a little bit, but just a little bit deeper in case there's someone out there that's like, "Hey, I want to I want to go to school for that. I want to take that course."

Regine Gilbert:

Okay. Yeah. So I teach user experience design and it's a general UX course. I'm currently teaching a grad version of the UX course, but I also have undergrad students. My students are mixed. I have computer science students. I have students who are studying design. And they just have a general interest in user experience design. For all of my classes, I have my students work with a real life client. Currently, my students are working with Arista Labs and the project I think is pretty cool, I'm very excited about it. It's NASA Soundscapes. So it's good for the students to... They'll ask me questions, and I'm like, that's a question you need to ask your client. Because if you want to really understand what their needs are, you need to figure that out.

Regine Gilbert:

The NASA Soundscapes is so cool, like I'm very much looking forward to it, basically, to sum it up. And in 2023, 2024, there's going to be a full Eclipse and a partial eclipse. I can't remember which is which at the moment. So how do you experience that if you are blind or low vision? And folks are going to send in recordings of sounds during that time. And one of the stories from the co-founder of Arista Labs was that when it's daytime, typically when the eclipse happens and during the daytime and generally speaking, you don't hear crickets. So the last time there was an eclipse, during the time of the eclipse, you could hear the crickets.

Lisa Welchman:

Because they thought it was night.

Regine Gilbert:

Because they thought it was night and then it goes away. So citizen scientists from all over the country are going to record sounds during that time and the sounds are going to get uploaded to a website. And that's what my students ultimately are, their research is leading to the design of that. It's really cool because I was talking to somebody earlier today and they're like, "I remember the last eclipse I couldn't see it very well but that's not what I remember the most is the part I could see, what I remember what I felt and what I heard." They said it got really cold in those few moment---

Lisa Welchman:

That's so fascinating. It just makes you realize the bias you have with your eyes, the bias of the experience around being able to see that in a particular or if you're going to a concert the bias of your ears are just what is actually leading, I guess I shouldn't say bias, actually leads. But that cricket thing kind of gave me chills because I was like, "Yes, that's probably a really different experience--"

Regine Gilbert:

Very different. And yeah, this woman that I spoke to earlier was saying that she remembers it got cold. And that in the moment of the eclipse, like before the eclipse, she heard the birds chirp and then when the eclipse happened, she did not hear the birds.

Andy Vitale:

Wow.

Regine Gilbert:

And then when the eclipse finished, she heard the birds. So it's really what, one of the things that I find fascinating is that we have all these senses that we don't pay attention to. We're looking at these screens all day, with headphones on but there's more to us and then there could be more really cool design for our senses. So yeah, that's just one way of looking at it. So that's one class and the other class I teach is looking forward and that's a really cool class that I get to teach with Gus. And we teach students about assistive tech and we have different guest speakers come in who talk about web design. We had a person who is blind, but they do web testing and they were showing us what it's like to have a screen reader going with these accessibility overlays, which I am not a fan of, and how they conflict with each other. So it's good to see that.

Lisa Welchman:

What is that? What is the screen reader with accessibility overlays? I don't know what that is.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah, screen reader [crosstalk 00:41:30].

Lisa Welchman:

I know what the screen reader is, but I don't know what the other part is.

Regine Gilbert:

So an accessibility overlay, it's kind of new ish and they're these companies that come and say we can make your website accessible with one line of code. And it's like, instead of actually fixing your sight, it's like, here's this band-aid thing, but---

Lisa Welchman:

It's a business opportunity, there's lawsuits.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. Exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

We'll get sued.

Regine Gilbert:

Exactly. So the students getting to see that we also bring in educators to teach the students about what it's like to teach young blind folks how to maneuver in the world, and how a lot of the things that sighted folks learn is through sight. So how do you know how to do something? You normally see it, so if you don't see it, then how do you learn how to do that thing? So we bring in different educators to teach about that how, how folks use a cane and get around. And so it's really cool for the students. It's cool for me too, because I learned something new. We just watched this, and I'll have to find the link for it, but we just watched this amazing, amazing, and I think both of you will find this beautiful. I'll send you the link.

Regine Gilbert:

A beautiful Oscar nominated film that is audio described about a deaf blind man. I think both of you will, you'll find it. Yeah, it's an amazing, amazing story. So yeah, it's how do you describe something to someone who can't see it? I teach with Gus and Gus is blind and Gus will ask a question, and he'll say, "I can't see you nodding your heads." And then they go, "Ooh."

Lisa Welchman:

Talk to me.

Regine Gilbert:

Right. Talk to me, and even with us being on Zoom, and so you're on a big Zoom, and somebody starts talking, you're like, "Who is that talking?" And one of the things we don't do is like announce who we are. So there's a lot of things that the students learn that I learned and I really enjoy getting to teach the classes. Next semester I'm very excited, I'm teaching a new class. I'm going to teach voice user interface. So because I think that's a very exciting area to think about and how we use voice and how those things can also be made accessible too, because not everybody can speak but what are the alternatives? Right? And thinking about that always because accessibility is options, and always making sure whatever it is that you make, that there's options for it. So that's just a little bit about my classes. I never thought in a million, if you would have told me 10 years ago when I was like a business analyst that I'd be a professor at NYU and be like, "Yeah, right."

Lisa Welchman:

Well,

Regine Gilbert:

It's wild.

Lisa Welchman:

You've gotten me very excited about these things and smiling on a Friday evening, because after all of us have had a long week. So thank you for having this conversation, but just the possibilities, the rich possibilities that are around being human and the experiences that you can have in all of these spaces that we're not having, or we're having and not noticing. So I think that's really powerful.

Regine Gilbert:

That's actually how I start my class is I asked the students to kind of affinity map, what does it mean to be human? And none of the things have to do with how much money you have, where you come from, how smart you are, none of them. And I say at the heart of what you do, you're designing for human beings. And I also have them address their own bias and understand where they come from. Because I think it's very important for designers to understand who they are, what their biases are in order to design for someone else, because you have to do that step back and go, "Oh, that's not me." So that's how I started doing that, because I got to co-create a class with Doug North Cook out of Chatham University last fall.

Regine Gilbert:

So we worked on a human centered design course together and that was something we decided to start the class width. And I think it's important to define what what it means to be human because we're not users, right? Even though I teach user experience design. I've said, I'm a user experienced... We're humans, and we design for them and we have feelings and we don't like to be left out.

Andy Vitale:

Great. Yeah, it's a mix of both empathy and self awareness. So there's no better way to end than on that note. So I would love to just have you take a second and let people know how they can continue to find out about what you have going on or how they can get in touch with you.

Regine Gilbert:

Sure. So you can visit my website Reginegilbert.com. I am pretty active on Twitter, R-E-G_ I-N-E-E, Reg_inee.

Andy Vitale:

Awesome. Well, Regine, thank you so much for coming on our show. It's been, the time just flew by. It's such great conversation.

Lisa Welchman:

It is.

Regine Gilbert:

Thank you.

Lisa Welchman:

It is. It is wonderful.

Regine Gilbert:

Thank you both.

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