- [Kari] Good afternoon, everybody. We're just gonna give a couple minutes, let everybody get into the room, and then I'll make a few announcements and we'll get things started today. Give it just one more minute here before we get started. So just hang tight, guys. Oh, good morning, good afternoon to everybody. My name is Kari Kernen and I am the sales development manager here at TPGi. Thanks again for joining us today for "A beginner's guide to inclusive UX Design" with David Swallow and David Sloan. Just gonna go through a few housekeeping items and then I will let our presenters introduce themselves. This session is being recorded, and we will email everyone the recording after the event. We have captions available, so feel free to use them as needed. And lastly, we will have time for some live Q and A at the end of the session, so please use the Q and A box and we will answer as many questions as we can. If we do not get to your question at the end of the session, we will reach out to you after, making sure that everyone's questions are answered. And lastly, if anyone needs any accessibility, support, training, usability testing, we will send out an email after the event with a link to schedule some time to speak with one of our experts. And with that, I will let David and David get started and provide quick introductions of themselves.

- Thanks, Kari. So I'll start. My name's David Sloan. I'm TPGi's UX practice manager. I've been with the company for about 10 years coming up in May. I am from Scotland, although I'm talking to you all from Brookline, Massachusetts. Just now I'll hand over to my co-presenter to introduce himself.

- Hello, I'm David Swallow, the other David. I'm coming at you from York in the UK. I'm Principal UX consultant here at TPGi, and I've been here around just over six years now.

- There'll be a short test at the end of the webinar to distinguish the two David S' from the UK. No, only kidding. So the way we're gonna work this webinar is, we'll do it in three steps. So as a brief outline, I'm gonna start by introducing Inclusive Design as a concept and process. Then I'll hand over to Dave to present some best practices in inclusive design, really focused on non-coders. So that one of the goals of this presentation is to kind of present inclusive design from a non-coding, non-programming perspective. And then Dave will hand back to me to finish off with a couple of thoughts on where you might be able to adapt existing processes for creating digital resources to be made more inclusive. One thing to note is that we are accessibility specialists. TPGi is an accessibility consultancy. So for this webinar, our focus on inclusive design is disability. That's the core group of people that we work with, that we support. But inclusion and inclusive design goes broader than disability, when we think about characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, religious belief, and many other characteristics. And throughout this webinar and beyond, we want you to be thinking of other underrepresented groups that are part of your audience and how you can be more deliberate in meeting the needs of those groups. And this is especially important when you consider that people with disabilities might also be members of other underrepresented or excluded groups. Another thing to consider throughout the webinar, we hope that some of the challenges that you might perceive as existing in terms of, you know, stopping you from creating more inclusive experiences, we hope that those challenges won't be as significant as you might think, we'll do this by emphasizing that accessibility is a shared responsibility, something that everyone can make some progress on, even if you start with baby steps. And we'll also show you that an intention to accessibility through inclusive design has benefits for people with disabilities and for others too. Secondary beneficiaries, which can message, you know, benefit your message, your organization, and also help to widen your audience. So let's talk about some core concepts. And we're gonna, you know, in order to, really sort of frame what we're talking about here, it's helpful, to introduce a few key terms that sometimes can get mixed up or kind of conflated. So hopefully this will help us kind of clarify what we mean when we use these related terms. So firstly, accessibility, the way that we are defining accessibility is "the extent to which people with disabilities can access and use digital products and services". Related to that, usability is "the degree to which users can use a digital product efficiently, effectively, and satisfactorily." Largely objective measure, something that can be measured through data, but then we move on to thinking about user experience or UX for short. And that's what we'd consider the kind of broader, more subjective experience of interacting with a digital product or service. You know, something that's not necessarily, something that's kind of, you know, easily measurable or sort of consistent from one person to another, something that's more subjective. And then inclusive design is really the process of intentionally including in this case, people with disabilities, but also other underrepresented groups in design decision making. So inclusive design is a process of helping you move towards a situation where a digital product provides a better user experience for more people. When we think about some of these terms and how we apply them, it's important to think about the context of use, especially usability. Usability doesn't necessarily mean that everybody in the world can equally use a digital product or service. It's about applying, you know, usability to the target audience, using a product in an expected context of use. But that also requires you to think about who you're designing for, why and when. Accessibility sometimes overlaps with usability, the line between ability to access something and use it, can be quite fuzzy. There is also a potential legal distinction. In some situations. You might not have legal obligations to make your products or content usable, that's more of a market decision and whether you build something that people can use, but you are likely to have some legal obligations not to discriminate against people because of a disability, which kind of then, it sort of extends to whether somebody with a disability can use the product or not. So these core terms are kind of overlapping. One helpful way to sort of visualize these terms, is to think about Peter Morville's UX honeycomb diagram. Now this is an interconnected set of seven hexagons, six of them clustered around a central one, labeled "valuable". The six clustered around that central hexagon are findable, usable, useful, desirable, accessible, and credible. And that helps us kind of distinguish different components of user experience, but all centered around this core quality of valuable. And when we adopt an inclusive design approach, we increase the chances that a digital product will be valued by people with disabilities because all of these other qualities are accessible. So let's talk for a moment, about the different groups of people that we, that will benefit from an inclusive design process, benefit from accessibility features. And there are some fairly well recognized disability groups, visual disabilities, people who have limited sight or no vision, people who are blind and have no functional vision, or people who have color deficit who may be unable to perceive certain color combinations. There are the group of that we refer to as auditory disabilities, people who are deaf and don't have any usable hearing, as well as people who have hearing limitations. And that group may or may not use sign language as a primary means of communication. Then a broad group of people that fall under the physical disabilities group in terms of interacting with digital content, that tends to focus on restricted dexterity, restricted physical movement, that means that somebody may not be using a standard mouse and keyboard, or if they are, they might find it difficult to make precise movements or clicks or swipes or other interactions. They may, people in this group may be using alternative input devices, whether it's a key, you know, specialized keyboard or some other way to interact with a computer or a smartphone or a tablet or a digital device. Then a very broad category of cognitive disability, that can include people with autism spectrum disorders, people with learning difficulties, dementia, attention deficit disorders, symptoms and consequences of traumatic brain injuries or stroke, or people with anxiety, people with limited concentration, people who have difficulty reading and processing content. It's a very broad group that has a particular value when you focus inclusive design on including the needs of people with cognitive disabilities. Speech disabilities can impact on anyone who is required to interact with any kind of digital system that includes speech input. You know, particularly, automated telephone hotlines, any voice operated software. And there are a number of different conditions that make it difficult for people to produce recognizable speech. And these are all, you know, the primary groups that we want an inclusive design process to focus on. But there are many secondary groups who also benefit from an inclusive design process who have similar accessibility needs, to those disability groups that I mentioned, including situational impairments. The diagram on the slide that we're showing just now has a picture of my esteemed co-speaker who's fast asleep with his baby daughter under his arm, dealing with the situational impairment of being a tired new parent who's, you know, restricted dexterity because he's is holding a baby in one hand. So there's an example of a situational impairment where designing for disability may also benefit an additional audience. A temporary impairment could be encountered by people who, you know, maybe may have a fractured arm or, you know, repetitive strain injury or some other condition that affects dexterity or maybe it's something to do, that affects concentration or ability to focus on a computer screen. So there are multiple situations where temporary impairments can create a set of accessibility needs for somebody at a given point in time, even though they might not consider that they need those, that they have those needs, longer term. And then kind of combining everything as we age, we gradually may start to acquire specific impairments related to the aging process, in terms of vision, in terms of short-term memory, cognitive processing, in terms of dexterity. So another factor to consider is that, you know, as a population ages, so they begin to acquire, at a different rate and different levels of detail, acquire additional accessibility needs. But ultimately, this group, the the group represented in this slide is that, there's a large number of people who benefit from accessible design. I did notice one question that came up there, if you, I'll just attend to it right now. "How is holding a baby a situational impairment?" Good question. One is that if somebody's, you know, you're holding something very precious in one hand, if you were required to, use two hands to interact with a device, then that definitely limits things. If the baby's sleeping and you're interacting with something that has audio, that can't be turned off, then you know, that might be a problem. So, you know, it's an illustration of a situational impairment, in the same way that in interacting with a device in sunshine and cold weather, in a place where it's either very noisy or very quiet, you know, it's one way to illustrate where at a given point in time, somebody may benefit from accessible design of a digital resource. So let's shift on to talk about inclusive design as a deliberate process. You know, one of the things that we want to emphasize on this webinar, is that inclusive design takes deliberate attention. And it's something that for each of us, if you're new to the concept, it's something that's probably best started slowly. And as you apply inclusive design more deliberately in your processes and practices, you'll start to gain momentum. And the more that you focus on inclusion, the more you'll start to see other opportunities to adjust your assumptions about the users you're creating digital content for, and that you'll accommodate decisions to support greater diversity. So approaches you can take, you know, firstly, is to consider the needs of diverse users when designing digital products and services. You should also look to following accessibility best practices that are relevant to your role and responsibilities, you know, one thing that will emphasize in this introduction is that depending on your role and your responsibility, you have a particular set of inclusive design responsibilities and knowing what you are responsible for and what others are responsible for, help you work as a team within your organization. Involving people with disabilities when figuring out what to do and evaluating what you did, is another critical part of inclusive design. You know, the best practices are there to follow based on learned experience over time, but also when your decision making for your particular context, then seeking the input of people with disabilities is helpful in ensuring that you solve the right problems and not attempt to solve the wrong problems. And ultimately this, the goal is really to improve accessibility and by extension, the usability and the user experience of whatever digital product you're involved in creating. Ultimately, inclusive designs are about encouraging you away from a tendency that we all have to design for people like us and to consider the many different dimensions of diversity that are represented in the audience that you're designing for. And at this point, I'm gonna hand over to Dave, who's going to introduce some key best practices in inclusive design.

- Okay, thank you, Dave. Okay, so yeah, we're gonna take a look at a few things that everyone, regardless of their role can and should apply in their work to make their digital experiences more accessible and usable. So something that you'll hear a lot about in accessibility and inclusive design is the concept of shifting left. This is about adding accessibility into your design and development processes as early as possible. So leaving accessibility until the very end, once product has been built, is not a very efficient way of doing things. It can be very costly and time consuming to remediate accessibility after the fact. And it also fails to reflect the reality that accessibility is everyone's job. So we encourage organizations to shift left and incorporate accessibility as early as possible. And regardless of your role, if you create or manage or manipulate digital content in some way, you have accessibility responsibilities. So I'm just gonna give you a sample of some key accessible UX principles that you can apply, not just to web content but also to digital documents and social media posts. Okay, so one of the fundamental types of content on the web is text. And the good news is that screen readers and assisted technologies should cope just fine with text. But that's not to say that text doesn't need any attention from an accessibility perspective. So for instance, it's important to use plain language that's appropriate for your audience. So this means writing in a way that's clear, concise, and free of technical jargon that the average reader may not understand. Using plain language is particularly important for people with reading disabilities such as dyslexia, and also people with broader cognitive disabilities. Also, helps people who are learning to read or who are less fluent in the language spoken. Clear and simple language helps all users understand, navigate and interact with your content quickly and easily. However, while clarity is crucial, it's important not to make the content too simple and potentially patronizing. Certain accessibility guidance promotes the avoidance of complicated words or complex phrases and figures of speech. And while this is good advice in general, the emphasis needs to be on, "don't over complicate it" rather than, you know, "don't use big long words". Use whatever's appropriate for the content and the audience. so don't over complicate it but equally, if you are talking about a a legal treaty or physics theory, you may need to use words that are, you know, a bit longer, a bit more specialized. It's also important to ensure your content is structured clearly and appropriately using headings and paragraphs and lists and tables and other structural elements. This helps users understand what information is contained in webpages and documents and how that information is organized. And structure is also very useful to screen reader users who frequently navigate by different content types such as by heading. It's also important to think about the appearance of text and choose a readable typeface. Now this is a bit of a murky areas. There's no single accessible typeface or font size. You might have heard about so-called dyslexia friendly type faces, you may even use them, but the evidence behind these is lacking. The truth is that everyone is different and dyslexia is a the complex multifaceted disorder. So what works for one dyslexic person is unlikely to work for everyone. So in general, avoid justified texts and Italics and lean towards sensory typefaces and larger font sizes with plenty of line spacing and paragraph spacing and you should be okay. You should also support resizing of texts so that users with low vision consume your website or app or whatever it is, sometimes up to 200% without it breaking. And finally, people with low vision or who are colorblind may have trouble distinguishing text from a background color if the contrast is insufficient. So make sure there's enough contrast between text and its background. And there are various free tools to support you in doing this, such as the color contrast analyzer provided by TPGi. And this gives you a little eyedropper that you can use to determine the precise color of text and its background and it tells you whether the combination is compliant. So images, as I mentioned on the previous slide, screen readers have no problem with text on webpages. Any non-text content, be it images or charts or icons or whatever, must have a text alternative. And this helps to convey meaning that's otherwise not available in the page to some people. So this is Accessibility 101, something that most people are aware of, even if they've had little exposure to web accessibility. But that said, it's something that's frequently overlooked. Now there are different ways to use images and the way in which you use them, dictates what type of text alternative is required. So for example, images might form part of the content, such as an image or a chart in a news article. So for images used in this way, this should be a succinct description of the information provided by the image. Images might be decorative, so this is when they're used for formatting purposes or as a background image, something like that. For images that are used in this way, there shouldn't be a text alternative. It should be marked as decorative so that screen readers can safely ignore them. And images might also be functional. So that is, they're used to label things that are interactive, such as links or buttons. So for images used in this way, the text alternative of the image should describe the functionality such as a "submit" button or a user profile menu, or whatever it is. It shouldn't literally describe the image. So if you had a play button, on a video player, literally describing it would be, you know, a black triangle pointing right. No, you provide a text alternative that conveys the function of that button, which is to play. Another recommendation is to use true text or actual text wherever possible. So images of text should be avoided unless they are a logo type, which are exempt from these requirements. And there's a number of reasons for preferring actual text. It scales better than images of text and it won't become pixelated when it's zoomed in. It's easy to read. Actual text loads faster than an image and it's easier to translate. But if images of text must be used, then the text alternatives should contain the same words as the image. So video. So for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, one of the most obvious things you can do is to provide captions. Now as you'll know, captions are the words that are shown at the bottom of videos and animations to explain what's being said or what's happening. Captions primarily benefit people who are deaf and cannot hear audio and people with cognitive and learning disabilities who need to see and hear the content to better understand it. However, picking up on what Dave was just saying, captions also have many additional benefits. They can be used in loud environments such as a busy office where you can't hear the audio. They can be used in quiet environments, like a library where you can't or you shouldn't turn on sound. Captions might mean the content's better understood by people who are less fluent in the language spoken. And content that's in text form, be it caption files or transcripts, can be better indexed by search engines, making the content easier to find. So as is the case for many of these best practices, captions benefit everyone. When creating video content and you're planning voiceovers, try to aim for self-described video so that someone without sight can understand all that's happening. If that's not possible, then ideally provide a separate audio described version of the video. So audio description is spoken commentary that's added to a video to describe content that can be seen but not heard. It's formatted to fit into the spaces between dialogue and sound effects and music on the existing audio track. So essentially it fills the gaps for people who can't see the visuals. And as well as blind people, audio description also benefits people with low vision, people with cognitive disabilities, people who are multitasking and people who prefer or need to listen to, rather than watch a video. And another alternative is to provide a transcript that people can download. So a transcript is the same word-for-word content as captions, but presented in a separate document. And transcripts are usually sufficient for audio only content, but transcripts alone are not the very good alternative to video content. Users would have to switch back and forth between watching the video and reading the transcript, which can be a very distracting, disjointed experience. And you can sort of lose your place and miss key moments on the screen, just get out of sync. So ideally provide captions and the transcript, and as I say, if information is communicated visually not through dialogue, then provide audio description. And... Here's an example of how audio description can be embedded neatly into the existing content. So this is the opening title sequence from an accessibility focused video series on YouTube called "The Viking and the Lumberjack", which is well worth a watch. Hopefully, you can hear this.

- [Audio describer] Montage of California scenery, a hotel, a viewing pond, Billy and Carl walking through a hotel lobby, a view of the San Diego Harbor with the SF midway. Stevie Wonder exiting a hotel. Title screen to "The Viking and the Lumberjack".

- Okay, yeah, so there's an example of how audio description can be embedded into that, the existing content there. Moving on to-

- [Audio Describer] The montage of California.

- Forms. So forms are another area where it's important to make sure they're designed in an accessible way. And there's a few things to consider here as well. For each form fields who should provide a visible label that explains what data the field collects so people know what to enter into each field. You should also indicate any required input fields or specific data formats like a telephone number or a postal code that needs to be structured in a certain way. You should also use appropriate input elements for the data you're collecting. So if you have a question which requires users to choose a single option, then use a a radio button. If they choose multiple options and you use check boxes. And if users are entering something long like a bank account number, don't use an input that requires them to manually increment the number one by one. I have seen this, it's very frustrating. All form controls and indeed anything that's interactive must be operable using a keyboard. So, as Dave mentioned before, some people who use assisted technology or who can't use a mouse will rely on keyboard support. Now, hopefully your clear instructions and your labels will help users to avoid any errors, but if errors do occur, you need to handle them in an accessible way. And error messages must clearly indicate where the error occurs and what users can do to fix the error. Okay, so as well as web content, you're likely to be creating digital documents and it's important that these are created in an accessible way and this could be an entire webinar in itself. But some of the key things to consider include styles, so much like defining headings and other structural components in the web, it's important to use inbuilt styles to structure digital documents. Layouts. Complex layouts can make it hard for screen readers to infer the correct order in which to read out content. So try to keep layouts as simple as possible. Most Microsoft Office products include an accessibility inspector, which can be found under the review tab. There's a little image of that on the slide. This is a really helpful feature, which it not only highlights potential issues in your documents, but also provides information and advice on how to fix them. And you can keep it running in the background that you know, so it'll alert you to any issues that pop up. PDFs. So PDFs can be created using dedicated altering software like Adobe Acrobat Pro. But a more popular and a less expensive way is to export as a pdf from Microsoft Word. But when documents are converted to PDF, they rely on the accessibility of the originating document. So this is another reason to make sure that the original Word document is accessible and well-structured and that will then translate into an accessible PDF. And as I mentioned earlier, all images should have text alternatives and this is no different for digital documents. Microsoft Office provides the facility to include text alternatives on images. It even has a go at describing them automatically, but I definitely wouldn't recommend relying on that. Okay, and then, finally, it's gonna take a look at social media, which is an important part of any product strategy. So social media posts present the same sort of accessibility risks as other digital content. So they're subject to the same best practice for accessibility. However, while your organization might be making great strides in accessibility, the social media platforms themselves are largely out of your control. Facebook is reasonably good, it supports image alternative text, it can even auto-generate alternative text, but as with Microsoft Word, it's not very good. It also supports video captions. You can upload a captions file with your videos. Twitter. Twitter has made great strides in accessibility, particularly when it comes to images, which is important 'cause tweets with images are more likely to be engaged with. Users will click and retweet tweets with images more often than those without images. But suddenly, recent changes in ownership at Twitter have resulted in the entire accessibility team being laid off and we're already starting to see previous accessibility features degrade or even disappear. So we'll have to see what happens there With Twitter. Instagram is fairly poor when it comes to accessibility. Also generated captions can be added to videos and stories and reels and for images, text alternatives can be added but only through the app. And even then it's buried in a advanced settings. Snapchat has no built in accessibility features. You need to think carefully about the videos you upload to Snapchat, whether you can sneak in accessibility by providing your own captions or audio description as part of the audio content. TikTok, it's a similar story there. TikTok has a very limited built in accessibility features. Much like Instagram, TikTok can display captions, videos that you upload, but they're auto-generated and you can either switch them on or off, you can't edit them. It also provides a photo sensitive epilepsy toggle, allowing you to flag any content that you upload that may cause problems or people who are sensitive to flashing content. But that's on a per account basis. So it's up to you to flag that. So yeah, so there's not a lot you can do about the platforms, but there are a number of best practices for ensuring accessibility of social media content. So you should use inclusive language, social media post content should follow best practices and inclusive language, including when talking about people with disabilities. You should provide text alternatives or images including animated images. So any social media post with an image requires a text alternative so that the content's readable, otherwise it would be extremely useless. Also be wary of using animation, which can be distracting for some people, especially if there's no way to pause or stop the animation. Make sure that video is captioned. So video with spoken audio content should be captioned before sharing through social media. And if captioning is not feasible, then include a link to a transcript in the post that shares the video. Check third party content for accessibility issues before sharing. So sharing inaccessible third party content creates a reputational risk. So before sharing, review the accessibility of the content and take steps to address any barriers. Appropriate steps might include writing a text alternative as part of the message used to share that content. If you're retweeting a tweet, you can add a content, add a message with that, where you could provide the text alternative. Alternatively, consider choosing not to show to share the content and instead reach out to the provider to ask them to improve the accessibility first. Avoid overuse of emoji. So social media posts make frequent use of emoji to convey content and emotion. Emoji can be interpreted accurately by screen readers. So in principle, that shouldn't cause a problem, but overuse and especially repetition can distort the meaning of content when it's read out by screen readers. And use CamelCase for hashtags. So hashtags are valuable content for social media posts, but can be difficult to interpret for some users, especially hashtags that comprise multiple words. So are you familiar with CamelCase? You probably are, probably without realizing. CamelCase is a way to separate the words in a phrase by making the first letter of each word capitalized and not using spaces. So we recommend that you use CamelCase for hashtags containing multiple words to ensure that they're pronounced in a meaningful way by its screen readers and just a more readable in general. And we've got an extreme example here of how casing can impact the accessibility of hashtags. So I'm gonna play your recording of a screen reader announcing two hashtags, one with CamelCase and one without. Okay and both blur together so it's hard to pick out. I'll play a couple of things. So here we go. First ones with, second ones without.

- [Screen Reader] Link UND number, this is a hashtag using CamelCase for screen readers and better readability. Link number, this hashtag assessment capitalization and is harder for listeners to red.

- Okay, play that again.

- [Screen Reader] Link UND number, this is a hashtag using CamelCase for screen readers and better readability. Link number, this hashtag assessment capitalization and is harder for all listeners to red.

- Okay, so the first one using CamelCase is reasonably clear. In the second example, it's all mushed together, is one word. It gives you syllables like "shash" and "offers to toe red" and nonsense. So yeah, that is just a demonstration of how CamelCasing vastly improves the readability of hashtags. So to summarize, social media prevent similar accessibility risks to other types of content, and this is not helped by platforms that vary in their support for accessibility. However, there are various best practices to consider when generating social media content. And ultimately we'd like to stress, you know, you can still use multimedia, you can still use social media to share content, just needs a little bit of thought and planning to do so in an accessible way. And with that, I'm now gonna hand you back to Dave, who's going to talk about integrating accessibility into digital processes.

- Thanks, Dave. So yes, just to finish off, it's just emphasizing that inclusive design is a process. And again, with our focus on today's webinar on the disability angle of inclusive design, we want to share just a few ways that you can adjust the processes that exist for creating and maintaining digital resources to be more inclusive of people with disabilities. So let's think of a few examples where we can integrate accessibility into digital processes. And one, going back to something I said earlier in a webinar, is to involve people with disabilities whenever you gather data from users. So whether you are gathering data from existing users to figure out how to make things better, or you have a product idea and you want to do some competitive research and you're kind of asking people about how they currently do something, include people with disabilities in that effort. And by extension, to be more inclusive of other groups and be deliberate in including representation from from other diverse user groups rather than asking just coworkers or family, you know, without kind of casting your net more broadly. Whenever you create something and you want to evaluate how effective that solution is to solving a problem, then again, include people with disabilities, in any user focused evaluation that you undertake. Take advantage of the testing tools for accessibility available in applications used to create digital content. Dave already showed an example of the inbuilt tools that Microsoft Office applications have, which have come on leaps and bounds over the last few years are, you know, have got so much better at integrating accessibility checks as you go rather than having it as a kind of discreet separate activity that once you've finished, just before you launch, this is something that you can integrate as you go. The slide I'm showing just now has a screenshot of YouTube's tool for editing automatically generated captions. And you know, I was monitoring the chat during Dave's session in this webinar and there was quite a lot of conversation about caption creation and editing and some different applications and techniques used. YouTube, as a starter, YouTube is a pretty good interface that allows you to edit an automatically generated caption file. And while it is true that automatically generated captions are likely to contain a lot of errors, which can significantly degrade the quality of the captions as an accessible alternative, one thing they do do really well is generate the timestamps in an accurate way. So that's work that you don't have to then do, and then you can go to the captions and edit things, edit the text to fix errors. So, you know, it's a good way to get started in the task of adding captions to video. So there are lots of different accessibility testing tools out there that are, that you could integrate into the process of creating digital content, whether it's office-based documents or multimedia or whatever. Making accessibility checks part of your sign-off process is another important way that you can make sure that there's, you know, accessibility is part of the quality assurance process, even if it's, you know, asking somebody to build something for you and making sure that they consider accessibility and that they have evidence that they have thought about that and have considered that and verified that in whatever it is they produce. And related to that, including accessibility in vendor contracts and relationships helps you manage your responsibility to provide accessible and inclusive digital content that has been produced by a third party. So looking at the process for procurement, for considering third party tools and services and making sure accessibility is managed there, helps you, again, reduce risk and increase the chances that you provide inclusive digital experiences, when some of those experiences rely on part or on content created by third parties. Then we can think about disability sensitive communication and marketing as another part of the broader inclusive design process. When you have invested effort and time in creating an accessible digital product or service, think about opportunities to promote those accessibility features. You can use that if you are demonstrating the product. Focus on highlighting ways to make the product easier to use in more situations, including those situational, you know, areas where accessibility features might benefit others in specific contexts and situations. Make sure that everyone involved in promoting the digital product is familiar with and can share accessibility documentation and make sure that that documentation exists if you are working on any kind of digital product that has documentation that helps people use it effectively, make sure that that documentation includes advice and configuring it to meet specific accessibility needs. If there are staff employed as help desk or customer support, make sure that they're aware of the products accessibility features, that they can advise people who are needing help and may need it from the perspective of making the product accessible to them. And that includes, you know, making sure that the help desk and customer support staff are aware of the way that people with disabilities use digital products and services so that they can provide appropriate feedback and advice and can pass on any issues that are reported by users with disabilities to the relevant person responsible for addressing those issues. When you are marketing a digital product or indeed marketing anything that represents users of that service, product, customers of a business, make sure that people with disabilities are appropriately represented and do so sensitively. And extending an inclusive design beyond disability to other underrepresented groups and look for ways to include that diversity in marketing materials and do so sensitively and appropriately. You know, don't be tokenistic, don't kind of make it very artificial, but try and present disability, in as natural a way as possible. One company that we can look to as an example of, you know, very sort of progressive way of, of including accessibility features in their product suite, is Apple. And we'll finish with giving an example of a marketing video that Apple produced for one of their products. And it wasn't, it was thoughtfully done in that it wasn't an explicit marketing of their, of accessibility features, but more, a creative and thoughtful way to show how somebody used a product and happened to take advantage of the accessibility features of that product. This was a video producer CD, who happened to have accessibility requirements. So by looking for the CD, Apple accessibility ad video on YouTube, you can see how Apple approached that task of presenting product accessibility without, you know, kind of over-emphasizing and showing the context of somebody using product to do their job. So just to summarize what we've shared with you today, a deliberate focus on accessibility through inclusive design will help you make better user experiences for more people. We want to emphasize that inclusive design and it's something that everybody involved in digital content creation can contribute to regardless of your role. And by taking small steps to integrate accessibility into your digital processes, that can help you and your organization make progress in reducing barriers and increasing inclusion. And you know, while we've presented in inclusive design today, from through the lens of disability, on the one hand, best practices in improving accessible user experience can be experienced by many other user groups as well. And by, you know, turning your attention to underrepresented groups, you'll start to look at other areas where you may be less aware or know less about certain sectors of the population that you could think about ways and how you could better involve them in the content design creation process and representation once you have produced that content. So thank you everyone for your attention. We have a few minutes for questions and answers. So Kari, do you want to sort of lead that and Dave and I can answer questions as you know, depending on what the question is.

- [Kari] So the first question we had in here was from Greg. "With audio descriptions on video, if there's music playing like the example shared, should that be set to mute when the audio description is playing?"

- Hmm. Yeah, well yeah, the mute, I won't mute it. Maybe duck it a bit, for the audio description starts to play. Yeah, I don't think it needs to be muted completely.

- [Kari] Next question we had is, "how would you set a form to be more focused on the visually impaired, if this focuses on the visual aspects on error messages, how would they navigate to the error without seeing it?"

- Okay, so there's things you can do to associate an error message with an incorrect form input using Aria-describedby which when the screen reader encounters that, erroneous input, it will announce the associated error, you can list errors at the top of a form and then you can shift focus to the top of the form, so that that will be then announced by the screen reader. Yeah, there's a number of techniques really, to make sure they are exposed to a non-sighted user, using a screen reader.

- [Kari] All right, this one is a rather long one. "How would you label a filter widget that has a heading level too, named "messages", followed by an edit filled used to filter messages with no visual label, just edit field and the magnifier glass used for search again with no visual label, then right under their three tabs used to display the filtered results labeled "All, English, French". Very, very interface, not descriptive visual labels only, added hidden text for screen reader users behind the scene for creating an accessible experience, only for screen reader users. Is that a good approach to design accessible and inclusive user interfaces? We were told that adding descriptor labels to the filter and tabs results, are not good for UX because it clutters the screen. What is your opinion on this? Where do we draw the line between usability and accessibility? Is this a current trend to prioritize just the screen reader experience and for all the rest should be intuitive enough?"

- Wow, good grief. I'm struggling a bit to understand the example there. It would help be helpful to see that. I'm gonna just, look the question, I would say, I would try and promote the Aria programming guide... The name of it now-

- It sounds like a question we could answer offline by email, Dave.

- Yeah, that would be easier.

- It's deeper than that.

- [Kari] I will make sure to send it to you, guys.

- I would recommend conforming

- To establish patterns is what I was going say, but yeah, happy to go into more detail offline with that one.

- [Kari] The next question we have here, "how can I find users with certain disabilities so I can involve them in my design process?"

- I'll take that one. It's a really good question because I think that the perception can be that it's very difficult to find people with disabilities to involve in user research and evaluation. I mean, one answer is to look at, you know, wherever you live there is likely to be an independent living center or some other disability advocacy group that you could reach out to and say, you know, "we are interested in recruiting people to take part in various designer research activities." You can use social media to to contact people and invite them, again, depending on how many people you need and what kind of feedback that you want. Social media can be a helpful way, especially if you, again, try and target, you know, disability groups rather kinda just a broader general messaging. And there are also organizations who can work with you. You know, there are several organizations, whether it's consultancies like us or nonprofits that can connect you with potential participants with disabilities and user research activities or even manage and facilitate the process themselves. So it's, you know, it's exciting that there are more options than ever before and more expectations that this is part of the design process, which is really encouraging.

- And we're about out of time. We'll do one more question and then any other questions we did not get to, we will try to reach back out offline and reach out to you via email. Our next question here is, "what is best practice to make an unfriendly URL accessible for screen readers? For example, a long URL for a website citation."

- Tricky, again. Yeah, mean where possible, reduce the length of the URL if you can, I wouldn't recommend URL shorteners because you've lost the context of what that link is gonna be, where it's gonna take people. But I can't think of any other tips I would give, really, for improving that.

- [Kari] We'll try get one more in here. "How did you guys get started in this field? What certificates, credentials would you recommend to someone looking to get started in a career in UX?"

- I think Dave and I both had similar career pathways in that we were both at universities. I mean, certainly from my perspective, I fell into the profession, you know, without necessarily thinking it was something that I wanted to do right from, you know, high school. And I ended up at, studying at a university that had a research group, a large research group focusing on accessibility and inclusive design. And I just got really interested in it and, you know, ended up, you know, moving from academia into consultancy like this. And I think the best advice I can give is just talk to, talk to people with disabilities, talk to look at, you know, broadening your perspective of who you think you're designing for by contacting and reading up on designing for diversity. You know, it's one of the best things you can do, is to talk to people and learn experience of tech that works, tech that doesn't work so well. Mistakes people have made and it's sometimes one of the best ways is to learn from other people's mistakes, you know, and just go from there. So, you know, that would be my main advice, I think. And just to reiterate a couple of comments that others have said, yes, if you are involving people with disabilities in user research, then compensating them for their time is really important because you're effectively partnering with them, almost as expert consultants and you've given the additional expense that somebody who might have to pay for transportation to get to where you are, if you're doing an in-person research study or you are, you know, you're taking up a lot of their time, then certainly, you know, very respectful to provide some form of compensation. As much as you can, given the project budget you're working with. So that was an answer to two separate questions, but yes, reading and talking to people and just immersing yourself in stories of diversity, you know, really encourage that.

- [Kari] Right. Well, the sort of thing to end off our time here, just wanna thank our host, our presenters, as well as everyone for, you know, keeping that chat active, providing lots of great questions. If, again, we did not get to your question, we will be reaching out afterwards. We can get an answer to you later. If you have additional questions you wanna reach out to us, you can email Ida it's ida@TPGi.com and we can get additional questions answered for you there as well. And this session was recorded and the recording and the transcription will be emailed out to everyone later this week. And with that, everyone had a great rest of your day. Thanks again, guys.

- Thank you everyone for attending.

- [David Swallow] Thanks a lot.

- We appreciate it.