Reading Inclusively.
A weekly collection of things that i’ve read on inclusive design, accessibility and ethics, things that were interesting to me and hopefully to you too.
Inclusive Design
From Invisibility to radical empathy. A brilliant and powerful article about living with invisible disabilities and what that experience is like for a woman of colour. I would say more on this but this article is so powerful i’d just suggest you read the words of Dr. Dédé yourself.
The NaviLens System is Helping Blind Travelers Find Their Way Around Town. The city of Barcelona is somewhere I think of as my second home, I spent large periods of my childhood not far from it and have spent many hours and days navigating it’s public transport system. But like many I hadn’t considered how hard this was for people with visual impairments. This new system has been designed to help with just that scenario & is a magnificent example of inclusive design.
OpenDyslexic font for chrome. Ok this might not be the most engaging of links, but it is damn clever and to someone effected by dyslexia like myself it’s damn handy too. The OpenDyslexic font has been created to aid reading for people with dyslexia and this chrome extension can change any sites font to it to help.
‘Sesame Street’ Changing Attitudes About Autism. Back in 2015 Sesame Street introduced an autistic character to try and change the way people reacted to people living on the spectrum, a group of researchers have looked into it and have said what we all often thought, representation matters.
Accessibility
The difference between keyboard and screen reader navigation. The ever great Leonie Watson explains the difference between two key modes of navigation for people with impairments, and what you should be considering when designing and developing for them.
What Face ID means for accessibility. Face ID for many of might seem like a nifty tool, a new piece of tech that lets us continue our addiction to phones with minimal effort, but for another group of people it can mean easier access and a more frictionless experience for larger groups of people.
Microsoft gives devs an AI-powered tool to build reading accessibility into their apps. Microsoft are a company doing great things in the inclusive design and accessibility space and this is yet another example of that, an Azure cognitive service that allows developers to text reading and comprehension capabilities into apps to make them more inclusive. It’s early stage tech but very smart and something i’ll be keeping an eye on.
Ethics
Who’s watching the algorithms? As we see an extension of the use of facial recognition, and decisions being made in our life by the AI and algorithms behind them, we must ask ourselves the question, who’s watching these algorithms and making sure they’re fair. Xueyin Zha asks the questions of the tech companies and raises the ethical questions behind systems that are 10 to 100 times more likely to wrongly identify racial minorities.
It’s almost impossible to avoid triggering content on TikTok. TikTok is everywhere right now, it’s an unavoidable part of lockdown life, be that dances, marketers, buyouts and even Trump using his usual “insight” to talk about it. But one thing that’s not been talked about a lot is that it’s also a place where it’s almost impossible to avoid content that triggers people, from eating disorders to videos on self harm or worse TikTok is promoting content that can cause many people harm.
AI & Machine learning
People of colour aren’t empowered to make changes they’re brought in to make. Colm Gorey talks to Inioluwa Deborah Raji of the AI Now Institute about the lack of involvement from diverse groups in AI, and poses questions about what this means to products created with it, but also how we can — and should — address this.
