Accessibility Scotland 2019 — My experience and learnings

Ever since having the opportunity to first carry out accessibility research, in 2016, I’ve been inspired to ensure the services I work on are striving to be accessible and inclusive to all. Last Friday, I attended Accessibility Scotland and loved every second of it. All changes we make to be more accessible are worthwhile. Making services accessible is a journey and not something we can simply switch on or off, rather it’s something which we can aim to make positive steps towards day by day.
The conference itself had a great set up, with round tables for attendees to sit around, three large screens, live captions and sign language. It’s amazing how much better conferences are when you can easily see a screen and you have live captions to not only assist those who are hard of hearing, but also help people jot down any quotes or points they might have missed!
Cat Macaulay @operanomad — Accessible public services — Are we there yet?
I work as a user researcher on government services, so Cat Macaulay’s talk was of keen interest for me. She started her talk by saying: “For all of our best efforts, we don’t get it right often enough.” and I couldn’t agree more. I think often we have the best intentions when designing products and services, however aren’t able to deliver them as well as we’d like and sometimes we’ll blame these things on limited time or budget. Cat made a brilliant point that actually, our services aren’t accessible as the tools and methods we’re using to design them are also not accessible. Not everyone can see and interact with a lot of Post-its, in a room with a lot of people.
“Too many of our methods exclude too many people. We need to change this.”
When designing services, we can often fail to think about situational disabilities, those that are temporary or of sudden on-set. Cognitive impairment due to stress was the example that Cat provided. With a cognitive disability you are unable to make decisions as well as you could before. We need to consider how stress impacts people and therefore how it impacts their ability to access your service or services they may need to engage with to meet their needs.
Unfortunately, most government services are designed with policies in mind, making it difficult for anyone to piece the different bits together. With the challenges we’re facing, we need to think through the problems and the possible solutions together. One of the best ways to tackle these problems is through collaborative sense making; bring a mix of people together in order to get a wider unbiased understanding.
“If we could get every public service in the country engaging with citizens at this level… that’s hundreds of thousands of people engaging in design and problem solving and in turn improving the relationship with the state. Understanding more about each other and the value there is in our differences, we can really make changes happen that matter for the better.”
When taking steps to improve our processes, Cat fills us with hope that we don’t have to “reinvent the wheel, we just need to adapt our methods”, we need to work with people who have disabilities in order to understand them and find out what they need and what we can do to help.
The takeaway message from Cat was that we must work to solve problems in ways that inflict the least amount of pain for everyone. Even leaving one person behind is too many. We must make sure our tools and methods are inclusive and accessible.
Léonie Watson @LéonieWatson — I, Human
Léonie Watson used Isaac Asimov’s ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ to talk about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). She provided great examples of how AI works, but also explored its weaknesses.
‘Seeing AI’ is a Microsoft tool that uses a phone’s camera to identify people and objects, the app then describes the appearance of these to people. This is a great application for helping the visually impaired. AI can automatically add alt-text descriptions to images online, again when this is accurate it can really help those with visual impairments to experience more online. However, these tools have limitations. AI may struggle with more abstract objects, such as this chair.

A human can interpret what they’re seeing and conclude that it is a chair, however AI is limited by its data set. My takeaway from Léonie’s talk was that AI is great and it can really help people (especially those with accessibility needs) however it’s still only as good as the data sets it learns from. It’s incredibly vulnerable and still requires human intelligence. We have to be aware of what we’re teaching it and ensure our data sets are diverse and representative; too many biases exist in our systems using artificial intelligence. We must do better to stop this.
Ashley Peacock @Time_is_ticking — Design to build bridges: when to use disability simulation
Ashley Peacock’s talk was about how, in order to build a more inclusive world, we have to understand that we cannot use a one size fits all approach. She talked about three projects that her company, Passio, have worked on and how they used different research methods to gain the most valuable insight.
For a project where they were asked to create an Autism Simulator, Ashley learnt that the usual one to one interview with a discussion guide wasn’t helping them gather insights the way they needed to. They found that if you “ask black and white questions, you get black and white answers.” Rather than saying “what’s your daily routine?” they found it was better to ask questions such as “what does a successful day look like?”. They removed their interview scripts and have discussion prompts for themes they were looking to explore, rather than scripted questions. Off the back of the research they were able to create a powerful autism simulator, to allow people to experience what life is like with autism, therefore building a greater understanding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOlIa2tzA_c
For a project called ‘Public transport assist’, they were looking to design an application to help people with disabilities such as visual impairments, dementia or wheelchair users. For this, interviews wouldn’t provide the information they needed, it wouldn’t allow them to experience what it would be like for a person with a disability. They considered the possibility of them trying to get around using a wheelchair in order to see what the experience might be like but realised they would spend too much time trying to learn how to get around (and would get exhausted in the process). The best method they found for this was Shadowing — spending time with people for the day. This allowed them to see what people experience and ask in the moment questions about what was happening, increasing their understanding of people’s actual thoughts and feelings.
The third project was ‘Read clear’, this aimed to help people who have the condition Posterior Cortical Atrophy. They struggle with visual processes such as reading. Through their research they found users had conflicting requirements to one another so they needed their application to be as adaptable as possible to meet the range of needs. When designing this product they used co-design in order to observe different people and the tools they have for coping and they encouraged people to talk and share their current solutions and strategies.
In all of these projects it was essential for the users to be involved from the beginning as they are the people with the expertise that allows such accessible and inclusive products to exist.
Matt May @MattMay — Designing without empathy
As a user researcher we are often told our teams need to build empathy towards users. We’re told we need to empathise in order to understand. However, in this talk, Matt May explained why this might not be the best thing for us to do.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another and it’s been around for a long time. However, we often find that just because people empathise with one another, it doesn’t mean change happens. Through this talk I quickly found myself asking if empathising is not good for us or the recipient, why do we talk about it so much?
Matt explained how when we say “I feel for you” we remove the person we’re meant to be helping from the equation. We silence them. If we continually tell ourselves that we understand the problem and how they feel we stop listening to them and their experience as we’re thinking about ours.
In some roles being empathetic is completely inappropriate. Imagine you’re going to have open heart surgery, the last thing you’d want is your surgeon empathising with you, experiencing your pain and the surgery with you.
Being empathetic is exhausting and taking on other people’s pain will kill you in the process. It is unsustainable.
Matt suggested we’d be best to replace empathy with some principles of Buddhism:
- compassion
- professionalism
- authority
- equity
To design better services and experiences we should forget about empathy. What we need to do is make space for people, allowing them to participate and represent themselves.
Laura Kalbag @LauraKalbag — Accessible unethical technology
Laura spoke in depth about the lack of privacy we now have online. Often websites are harvesting a lot of information about us including our exact location and our personal data such as our name, date of birth, address etc. They’re collecting this information to make assumptions and profile who we are. They then sell this to companies who target us with adverts based on these assumptions. Often not providing our data comes at a price to us; we have to consent to the data being collected in order to use the website or the product. This is not consent, consent only exists if a person has a real choice. Mistreatment of information is detrimental to everyone, but especially those who are more vulnerable already. The point that stuck with me from Laura’s talk is that
“Making our technology inclusive and accessible is not enough if the driving forces behind that technology are unethical.”
We can be the driving force behind being mindful of what data we are gathering and how it is being used.
I left Accessibility Scotland feeling inspired, knowing that we have the power to make the change we need to see in the world. I know that working with Hippo, we’ll push forward to make the services we work on more accessible. I cannot wait to attend again next year!
You can find the full speakers slides here — https://accessibility.scot/slides/

