Ep. 221 - Regine Gilbert, Author of Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind on the Accessibility Process and Future Technologies

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Regine Gilbert, author of Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind. Regine and I talk about what inclusive design is and how teams and companies can build accessibility into their processes and the impact of future technologies in the space. Let's get started. 

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that helps innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Regine Gilbert

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me today is Regine Gilbert. Regine is a user experience designer, educator, international public speaker, and author of the book Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind. Welcome to the show, Regine. 

Regine Gilbert: Thank you, Brian. Happy to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. Not only for the fact that we're going to talk about your book and all the things that you are an expert in when it comes to design, but you're also going to be at the IO2020 Summit here, coming up next week. And we're excited to have you to talk to our audience a little bit more there, but we wanted to jump into it and get a little sneak preview of some of the things they're going to be seeing at the event and hearing from you. So, thanks for coming on. Maybe to start, what is inclusive design? 

Regine Gilbert: Well, that is the million-dollar question. You could ask five different people. They'll tell you five different things, when it comes to inclusion and what inclusion means. I like to take a chapter out of Kat Holmes's book. Kat Holmes says that we don't really know what inclusion is. She wrote the book Mismatch Design. But she says, we do know what exclusion is. We do know what it's like to be left out of something. 

And so that's what I think about when I think about inclusion. I actually think about exclusion and I think about who are we leaving out when we create products? When we create services, when just this morning, I was talking to one of my friends who's a makeup artist. She's a professional makeup artist. And she's like, Oh, you would really like, forget the pop stars name, but she has a condition that makes it hard for her to like open things. And she's like, Oh, she has a new makeup line. And the way to open it is so easy. You should really look into it. And she's like, I thought of you when I saw the packaging. 

And I said, yeah, that's the kind of thing. I think about packaging now, you know, and things that are hard to open and I'm in my forties. And as we get older, our dexterity changes and it doesn't improve. I mean, it doesn't, you know, everything is relative to our bodies and whatever happens, but when I find something hard to open, I'm like, WHY!!! 

Brian Ardinger: Exactly Or hard to read. 

Regine Gilbert: Yes. Or hard to read. 

Brian Ardinger: Can we get rid of the eight-point font please. 

Regine Gilbert: Yeah. I mean, at this point, you know, most people are looking at screens all day. We're, most of us are engaged with some sort of technology at all times, especially during this pandemic and with that, we're getting fatigued. Right. And so, we don't need things that are cumbersome or hard to see. Yeah. That's a whole thing. 

Brian Ardinger: So, if I'm not a designer, why should I really care or pay attention to this trend? What are some of the reasons why everyone should be really caring about accessible design? 

Regine Gilbert: I think of it this way, that everyone is temporarily able bodied. If you wear glasses, you may not think of yourself as someone with a disability, but if you take off those glasses, are you still able to see? And if you're not, then that is a disability, right? So those glasses are an assisted technology, that help you function in this world. And that's basically what we need to be doing throughout our society is providing the glasses or providing whatever assistive technology that is needed to help people do what they need to do.

Brian Ardinger: Personally, we've gone through that particular journey. My daughter here's what cochlear implants. And so, having that assistive technology to be able to access the hearing world. It has been a game changer for us and has led me personally, try to figure out how do people talk to each other and how do they interact with each other. And can you talk about the design process and where accessible design fits into that process? Is it something that happens at the beginning of the end or where can people go wrong with it? 

Regine Gilbert: The classic answer when it comes to design, is it depends. And it truly does depend. For me in my classes. I teach accessibility from the beginning, right? The first readings I have for my students to do and the first couple of weeks of classes are on inclusion and accessibility. And what are these things and what do they mean? And how do you incorporate those into the research plans for what you're about to do? 

When it comes to the corporate side of things a lot of times it's not thought about in the beginning, it's only thought about when a company has been sued, right? They've been sued because their website isn't accessible to people with disabilities. And then, Oh, no then everybody's in a panic. We need to fix the website. We need trainings. Oh, and you know what? We'll just settle. We're not even going to fix it. We'll just leave that to the side. 

I mean, there's so many different things. I mean, just, I think it was just last year where Domino's Pizza was sued because their website wasn't accessible and then they took it up to the Supreme court and the Supreme court was like, you got to make the site accessible. It's part of the American with Disabilities Act. Now, technically speaking, the American with Disabilities Act came out in the early nineties before we have the internet that we have today. So, them applying this old statute to something new was quite eye opening and people were like, yes, this means like, make it accessible.

And why not? In the United States, I like to throw this stat out.  In the year 2035, which is 15 years from now, which is not a long time, we're going to have more old people in this country and old, I mean like 65. I won't be old when I'm that age. Cause I'm not that far from it. You know, we'll have more people who are over the age of 65 than under the age of 65. I am trying to plant little seeds with my students to like start making stuff for your older self now, because when you reach that age, it's too late.

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