- Welcome to "The State of Accessibility Podcast" from TPGi on LinkedIn Live. I am Mark Miller, and this is my co-host, Dr. David Sloan, chief accessibility officer for Vispero, co-author of "What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility," and a user research and accessibility strategy specialist.

- And Mark is a sales director for TPGi and a member of W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative Accessibility Maturity Model Task Force.

- David, we have a special guest this month.

- We do.

- The one and only Matt Ater, Vispero's senior vice president for business development and the person who may well have a world record for taking the most video recordings of inaccessible kiosks. Welcome, Matt.

- Thanks, thanks, Mark. Thanks, David. I'm so happy to be here. I also take videos of ones that are good, too.

- Oh.

- So not just the bad ones, you know?

- So you have two world records then, fantastic.

- Maybe three 'cause it would be inaccessible, accessible, and just kiosks overall, right?

- Well, the funny thing about the videos is probably the number one video that gets watched on LinkedIn is one about using an elevator. And for any of you, and I know you both have seen these in hotels before, where now, you know, they're using touchscreens for elevators, which nobody has a problem with if touchscreens are accessible, but they added a button to basically turn on the text-to-speech, and it's indicated by a wheelchair button, right?

- Mm-hmm.

- Which is the symbol for, the global symbol for accessibility. And when you press it, it just starts counting down. Well, if you're on floor 74, and you wanna go to floor one, it's a long count from 74 down to floor one. Not the greatest experience.

- But what if you miss it halfway down the countdown? What if you're like, oh, I wanted three, and it's on to two now?

- Exactly, and then you end up on two, and that's part of the challenge, so.

- Wow, well, you know, it's an appropriate video for today because we say the word kiosk all the time, but really, what we mean is enclosed systems, which is anytime hardware and software is sort of married together, which is the case with this elevator as well. So that's a good example of the types of things that we're gonna talk about today. So, on that note, Matt, can you kinda give us your definition of kiosk? What do you mean when you say the word kiosk, like what is that broader meaning that you personally have?

- I think you said it, Mark. I mean, it's really closed systems. It's anything you can't, as a person with a disability, bring your own assistive technology to. You know, it could be a conference system that's in a conference room that has a tablet attached, and you can't add your own screen reader, you can't add your own keyboard. You know, this is something that's in a conference room supplied by a third-party vendor. It could be, you know, the tablet on the bike. It could be the elevator that we already gave. And then, you know, the more common ones that people think about are self-service kiosks, self-checkout in restaurants, or, excuse me, in grocery stores and places like that. Vending machines now are being outfitted with tablets on the front to manage inventory and do all kinds of stuff that, you know, a traditional vending machine wouldn't have done. Those are now, you know, basically kiosks or self-service devices. Payment devices, you know, we've all, you know, make payments at counters now. Are those accessible? We make payments at our table sometimes. Are those accessible? And, you know, people who are blind or have other disabilities, they wanna be able to do the same things everybody else is doing. And, you know, in a payment device, I wanna be able to know what my tip is, I wanna know what the amount is, otherwise somebody else is actually doing it for me, which doesn't seem that accessible.

- So I guess it's, we often might think they're just the big heavy stationary things that you walk up to or roll up to and use, but, really, it's like any handheld device as well that you might be given or lent to do something, and then you've gotta give it back, and you can't configure it.

- Right, you may be able to configure it if the text-to-speech or the keypad's been added, you may be able to turn that on, but by default, you know, if they've not added this functionality, it becomes an inaccessible device. And broadly, like both of you have said, it's if you can't add your own stuff, it becomes somewhat of a closed device, closed systems. And, you know, we started with this with ATMs in the United States. You know, with ATMs, there's a headphone jack, a keypad, there's braille descriptions on how to use it. You know, those are things that have existed for a while thanks to, you know, organizations like the National Federation of the Blind and others who pushed for accessibility.

- Um,-

- So, we'll,

- well,-

- yeah, go ahead, Mark.

- thanks, yeah, one of the things that struck me, Matt, you know, you were talking about like, and to your point, David, that we think of kiosks as these big, heavy things. But when you sit down at a restaurant now, somebody hands you essentially a handheld kiosk to make your payment and put your tip in for your meal. And I can remember, Matt, when you and I first met, so this was probably 2013, 2014, way back when, we had a meal together, and you had me help you because you're one of the people who would use this assistive technology, right, being that you're blind. You had me help you with a receipt, which, at that time, was printed out in manual, and you wanted me to help you with a tip and make sure you're signing in the right spot. Well, now, you can be very independent with that, and if those devices come with assistive technology, because, to your point, you're not able to bring your own. So can you tell us a little bit more about, like why designing these types of things, these experiences, is it because now that is the way you're interacting in a restaurant or wherever the case may be? Why is there so much attention to it today?

- Well, some of it is laws and regulations. You know, the European Accessibility Act has put some emphasis on it. We also have businesses who care, right, which is also a big plus.

- Yeah.

- I still believe that the overall business segment of accessibility around self-service or these types of closed devices is probably 10 years behind web accessibility in terms of people understanding the needs of the person with a disability and/or putting the requirements in to make it accessible. Now, one would argue that, you know, if 96 to 99% of websites are inaccessible, you know, you could probably say something very similar to even a higher level for self-service devices or closed system devices. So I think part of it is that part of it is the influence by the disability community to push for change. You know, so there's been some really great successes in it, and then there's been some real negative ones. I mean, if you look at the check-in experience at, two of the biggest lawsuits in the last couple years were around Labcorp and Quest Diagnostics, and whether or not a blind person was able to check in in one of those places where they don't have somebody at a counter checking you in, it's just a tablet screen.

- And just for the audience, Matt, who may not be familiar with those companies, this is kinda healthcare settings, right?

- Yeah, it's where you, in the United States, and I'm not sure it's anywhere else in the world with those two companies, but it's where you go get your blood drawn, right? You go get your diagnostics done. And so, if your doctor says you need to go get blood work done, then they're probably one of the two places. There may be three, but they're two of the places that you're most likely to be sent to.

- So, in that case, it's there is accessibility barriers preventing somebody from receiving some aspect of healthcare, which is-

- Yes.

- [David Sloan] not a good situation to be in.

- Yep.

- So, you know, you mentioned web accessibility there. What makes building accessible kiosk experiences different to other digital accessibility efforts? I mean, you know, there's a lot of conversation about building accessible websites or mobile apps and a lot of understanding of what needs to happen, even if it hasn't always happened as well as we'd like. Why is building accessible kiosks different?

- It's probably more directly focused on the user's workflow than it is the entire screen. You know, it's mostly about an interaction and the time to get an interaction done. You know, if I went up to a kiosk and took 10 minutes to place an order, I got people in the queue behind me, it's probably very frustrating for a business to think that that's an efficient use case. So, you know, when we look at a kiosk, and I think the Air Carrier Access Act had it right in terms of functional accessibility, meaning that can you functionally, and this is my term not theirs, can you functionally perform the tasks on the device? Can you go to an airline and check in, print your boarding pass? Can you make a payment on a payment device? Can you at a restaurant, say it's a McDonald's, can you order a hamburger, get a french fry and a drink, change your drink from small to large, add a tip, and then hit submit, and get your receipt and get your food? I mean, if we can do those things, then it becomes very similar. There are some differences to drive the user through the workflow that we may, you know, that WCAG doesn't take account for, that the WCAG does not take account for in terms of how do you move the user fast through a workflow. And so, there's probably a few things that, in design, that we may break to drive the user that are, you know, I'm not gonna call them non-compliant, but, you know, one would argue that they probably are not exactly the same as what WCAG calls for.

- Hmm, like, I'm just thinking, you know, that WCAG kind of sort of assumes that we're providing flexibility for how somebody interacts with an interface or, for example, a screen reader user navigating a webpage might choose to navigate through using heading navigation or maybe using Tab key to jump to tabbable objects, and then, or might be searching for specific content. But, with a kiosk, you don't have the full QWERTY keyboard and the full selection of keyboard shortcuts, which must change things significantly.

- It's more of a prescribed path. And it strikes me, too, that if you think about all of the different areas where you run into a kiosk, like, I always think of the airport, right? You gotta print out your baggage tag or even just buy, for those of you who travel a lot, you probably haven't had to interact with somebody if you're buying, you know, your mixed nuts before you get on the plane or whatever it is. All those things are now kiosks, so it's gotta be even more, even sort of scarier and more important when those things aren't accessible when you run into... If you're at home at your computer, it's a definite frustration, but I think that it kind of levels up the seriousness of it.

- Yeah, and the example that David gave about not having a QWERTY keyboard is a big part of it. It's like you don't need to read by word and character in line and check spelling of things in a kiosk. You don't have the time to do it. And if you are spending the time doing it, then it's probably not the good use case. When you're limited to the number of keys you have or swipe gestures you have, you know, the navigation methods are just different, and so they're more like Tab, Shift, Tab, they're more like Enter, move by heading or region depending on what the, it's gonna be one or the other, but not both. Increase volume or speed, which, you know, volume is key. I think speed is, this is an opinion, not, you know, individual opinion not a fact of, you know, each business will make their own decision here. I don't think speed of the screen reader is as critical for a two-minute experience, whereas some would say, "Hey, I need to have the ability to adjust speed of the kiosk, of the screen reader."

- So what do you think, what are the biggest challenges? We've sort of talked around these things, but if you had to call out the biggest challenges that we see today and where today's kiosks tend to fall short, what are those things in your mind?

- First, laws and regulations are not caught up to really push. I mean, the United States is a perfect example of that. The European Accessibility Act is doing a better job at this for Europe. Two, businesses are not putting requirements in, and unless they put the requirements in, the people building the kiosks, either hardware or software, and I'll talk about both of them in a second, they're not gonna add accessibility features if they're not required to, because if accessibility costs even a dollar more, they don't wanna lose an opportunity to somebody else who didn't add it. And then, when you think about from a hardware perspective, if the business is going through a hardware manufacturer, you know, they are not that involved in the software accessibility, but they will do the things. I think most people follow the regulations around hardware accessibility, you know, screen height, tilt, having objects in the way of, you know, a wheelchair pulling up or a cane getting stuck, you know, things like that. Most companies are getting those things right. When we get into the software side, those software companies may be the interaction between the customer or they may be being built by the customer themselves, and are they adding the accessibility features and components. And so I think it's how the customer is, one, you know, following regulations, two, not putting requirements in, and three, you know, working with a vendor that may be hardware or software who doesn't understand accessibility.

- And that there need-

- So what does that,-

- Oh, go ahead, David.

- I was gonna say, what does that lead to, and what are the biggest accessibility barriers you've encountered when using a kiosk?

- People will think about the hardware accessibility first. So you'll go and you'll see a kiosk that has a headphone jack and a keypad, and you'll plug in headphones and nothing happens. So they've met the requirements, and they said, "Oh, make this ADA compliant." That's like the best phrase in the world, ADA compliant, and then they'll put the physical accessibility pieces in for hardware but they won't add anything for software, so they've not considered the connection between the two. And then, you know, on top of that, you know, we have just a broad problem in terms of getting businesses to truly understand and adapt accessibility in their portfolio. And you see it with, you know, self-checkout today. I mean, as of today, I've not seen a single self-checkout machine that's accessible in a store where you go and process your own order of things that you have in the cart, not one. And maybe there's one coming. Maybe there's one coming.

- I'm gonna go,-

- But-

- I'm gonna go search, Matt, for one, and I'm gonna take a video of it, so I can win-

- Yeah, I would love to see it.

- an award for it, be the only person to get a video of a accessible self-checkout.

- Prove it to me. Prove it to me. Somebody out there in the world, prove it to me. I'd love to see it.

- Yeah.

- And I know folks who are working on it today, which I think is great.

- [Mark Miller] So all-

- And we'll see something this year, I'm pretty sure.

- That's fantastic. And so, on that note, right, kind of flipping the script around here, what is good out there? What have you seen out in the wild from a kiosk standpoint that's really working well at this time?

- I think there are some great payment devices from Stripe, from Adyen. They're based out of the Netherlands. Stripe's in the US, and I think they're deploying in Canada and places like that. I think McDonald's does an amazing job, mostly in the US today, South Korea, starting Europe soon. I am really impressed with some of the work that even things like the blood pressure machines in your CVSs and your Walgreens, Rite Aids, I mean, I'm not even sure how many of those types of companies, pharmacies and grocery stores, where you sit down at a machine. There's some of those that have the ability for you to check your blood pressure. United Airlines I think has done an amazing job with their accessibility. And I think airlines have been on top of this longer because of the Air Carrier Access Act and the requirements around it. You know, I think everybody should bring a set of headphones with you and try it. I mean, that's the number one thing. Like, even if you're not blind today, try the experience and see if you can listen to it and go through the whole experience. I've seen taxis that have the tablets on the back of the passenger front seat where you pay through the tablet, and I've been really impressed with that user experience. So, those are some examples, but, I mean, there's plenty of them out there.

- And just for people who may not know, Matt, you've mentioned that headphones a couple times, and that is because of ATMs and because they've been accessible for so long. When you plug that headphone jack into a device, the idea and what would happen with an ATM or another accessible kiosk is that it automatically knows now that a person who needs the screen reader included in that, you know, that's available onboard that kiosk, and it starts to announce things through the screen reader. Is that why you-

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- were mentioning that, to try the headphones?

- Yeah, and I would add, there's a couple of reasons for the headphones. One is that we want privacy in some cases, so you need that. Two, we need the ability to start and stop it. And I've seen some kiosks that have like a button on the bottom right corner of the screen to tap to get audio or, in the case of the taxis, you just triple tap with your finger, and it starts the audio. But we also have, you know, the need, as I mentioned, the privacy side, but, you know, there's also a point where businesses don't want something talking out loud.

- Right.

- You know, if you're in a store that's already noisy, like a restaurant or a self-checkout at a store, and if it starts chattering everything you're doing. And there may be things you're scanning that you don't want everybody to know what you're scanning, even though sighted people can look over your shoulder and see it. But you-

- It's different than having it announced out loud.

- Right, and-

- Hey, look at what this guy's buying. These are Oreos over here.

- Exactly, and, you know, something we added in software that Vispero and TPGi has is that we add privacy, so you can actually turn the screen off as a feature. And that kinda stuff is, I think, really important. We did, in some use cases, support USB-C headphones, but, you know, right now, the 3.5-millimeter jack headphones is the most standard. I know people think, oh, that's old technology. Why aren't we using Bluetooth? Well, it's a security problem around Bluetooth, and then secondly, how do you pair it? And it becomes a problem of how do you-

- Left, yeah.

- go around pairing, and does your device stay paired when you're finished? And how do you pair it if you're blind if you can't start it in the first place to actually get the pairing process started? So there's a lot of things that we could be thinking about a good solution for down the road, and maybe those technologies will change over time, but today, sadly, we still carry around the 3.5-millimeter jack headphones, like the old-fashioned radios we'd carry.

- At least it's not a transistor, right?

- The Walkman, the Walkman.

- Yeah, the Walkman, right. So can you talk to us about some successful strategies for creating accessible kiosks?

- Well, I think first is get a consultant to sit down with you and think through the workflow of the user. Make sure that you can interact with all elements on the page. Those are, you know, basic. You know, they could be buttons, links, whatever they are. Contain as many things within the element as possible. To choose the example of ordering food, you don't want it to say burger, then separately you figure out the price, separately you figure out the calories. You want 'em all combined into one element so that the user can easily get through it. You need to be able to support dialogues properly. You need to have proper alerts and messaging being provided to the user in terms of starting and stopping, or messaging around things being added to the bag or removed or quantity increases, price increases as you increase quantities. There is a lotta kinda things in that, but adding a screen reader is a critical component. Working with somebody with a keyboard, not a keyboard, a keypad, like for example, Storm AudioNav. Supporting touch, and we mimic using an iPhone in our touch experiences, because some people still like to use touch experiences. Understand the differences between accessibility on the three, you know, kinda main platforms. Windows, Android, and Linux are kinda the three main platforms. Making sure that you understand if you're a manufacturer of this tech or you're someone buying this technology, understanding the limitations to each. Some handle audio better than others, some handle peripherals better than others, some handle keyboards better than others, and I'm talking like onscreen keyboards, become a different experience. You know, blind people use onscreen keyboards every day with their iPhone. You start expanding that to a wide screen, that onscreen keyboard has a different feel and experience, and it takes longer to navigate. And I'm not saying it can't be done, it's just a totally different experience. Those are probably some of the main themes that I can think of.

- I was just gonna, you know, I was thinking out loud about the, or I am thinking out loud about some of the other challenges. You know, just, I love the way you talked earlier about the focus and task completion and user experience, and when you think about where kiosks are in public spaces, you know, in places where people might be operating under stress 'cause there's a big line of people behind them, or in an airport, you know, where people are coming, flying from another country, jet-lagged, speaking a different language, that kind of ease of use and simplicity must be really important. And I was also thinking about the instructions for using the kiosk, and I remember an example of a recent kiosk evaluation I did where there was audio instructions telling you where everything was laid out, but they were wrong because they might've been recorded or programmed for a previous kiosk, and it said that the input device was at three o'clock to the screen, but it wasn't, it was at the bottom of the screen. So I guess that speaks to the need to be connected, you know, like, or to have everything integrated in terms of accessibility. Like, you don't just use the same instructions over and over because the device might be in a different place. And I feel like you told me, Matt, about an example of like a train ticket machine where the instructions were wrong.

- Yeah. Yep.

- It was accessible, but the instructions made you think it wasn't.

- Yeah, and that one was the Virginia Rail Express. I mean, I love throwing a few people, there's a great video, great videos on this topic. It is a fully accessible machine, so I wanna be really clear. So I don't want anybody to go out there and complain that they don't make an accessible machine. But their instructions fail. Their instructions in braille tell you to plug in headphones. Now, this is where the failure between hardware and software happened. So, you know, someone else made the hardware, put the braille on there, put the headphone jack, and all of those things and tell you to do that, but then nothing happens when you plug in the headphones. But somebody walked up behind me and says, "Well, if you're looking for audio, you just tap the bottom right corner of the screen, and it'll start talking." And it did, but it does it out of the speaker, so the headphone jack is completely not needed on this device. So the collaboration between the software and the hardware failed in this case. I didn't mention this, but I think also positioning of that keypad in a convenient place is also great and very important because if it's not, you're gonna have to put braille instructions somewhere to tell somebody where it is. I find braille instructions all the way down almost to the bottom of machines sometimes, like vending machines. I found a keypad at the bottom of a vending machine. Well, who's feeling all the way down to the bottom corner of the vending machine for the keypad? And so those kind of experiences, you know, again, are things that people should be thinking about. Where's the appropriate place to put it? What's the appropriate angle to put it at? And I know that, I'm not sure how much time we have, but I'll give an example of an elevator. You know, think about braille in an elevator, and if the buttons are really low on the elevator, a blind person's reading braille upside down, they're not reading it right side up. And that's okay just because I can't take my hand and position it like this and read letters that are down by my knee, and so I'm gonna read it upside down. But helping people understand how that method works can also help people understand when they're building self-service devices, putting braille way down at the bottom of the machine, if you don't know it's there, is probably problematic.

- So I guess we're, you know, as we get towards the end of the conversation, looking into the future. You know, it's almost like every podcast, is it, Mark, we end up talking about AI or EAA or both.

- Oh, we have to talk about AI.

- So how do you see AI disrupting the kiosk user experience? You know, is it gonna make a difference, do you think?

- So, so I think what it's gonna do is it's doing a lot of transactional stuff behind the screen that is not something that the user's interacting with. Where you see it being impactful today is in things like drive-through ordering. A lot of that is AI today.

- Oh, yeah.

- It's hearing you speak and saying what you want, and you'll see things getting added and removed from the thing as you tell it to do it. But does a restaurant want that to happen inside of a store, like where you're talking to the machine, and it's talking back to you out loud, probably not. But what it is doing is doing a lotta the other things, like, hey, it knows it's me, and it's bringing up ideas and things that are based on my, you know, profile and what I've done in the past. You know, but the concept of, and there is really great technology out there. One of 'em is called SoundHound, and SoundHound's doing this for drive-through. I think their experiences are amazing. What I don't know is how often that's gonna be inside of a place rather than outside from the experiences.

- That makes sense. Well, Matt, this has been a fascinating discussion, and I feel like we could just keep going. Unfortunately, we only have a half an hour, so we do have to wrap it up. But it's just amazing to me how we can know digital accessibility, we can understand hardware or physical accessibility, but when you combine the two, you really have something different, and it's clear that it's our next frontier, right? We need to really work to understand it and understand how to put it into processes and get all these different elements, the hardware, the software, the customer, the consultant working together to deliver accessible kiosks. So thank you very much. Before we sign off, I wanna remind everyone, please join us on September 23rd at 10:30 AM Eastern Standard Time for the next "State of Accessibility Podcast" on LinkedIn Live, when we're gonna talk about the Inclusive Design 24 event, also known as id24. Now you know the state of accessibility. I am Mark Miller, thanking David Sloan and Matt Ater, and reminding you that the state of accessibility is always changing, so please help us affect change.