Wow, you know, Frances, you've been a huge advocate and voice for accessibility, and you've been advocating since your early days at IBM, and you were the first chief accessibility officer. I think, actually, you were the first in the industry. And you believe that the focus has to be much broader, much more than DEI, and sometimes companies might think of this as an HR initiative, but it has to be more of a company and a CEO imperative. How do you see that, and how do you see...you make sure that companies think that way and make it more of a whole company imperative.
Yeah, I always tell people that I'm an accidental accessibility person. I spent actually 25 years in IBM sales and marketing. You know, you can think of it as a mainstream selling hardware, software, opening, you know, market like in China and installing, you know, chip processors or, you know, creating solution for Shanghai Stock Exchange and working with Allianz Insurance Company in Germany. So these are my kind of a core business initiative. And then I had the opportunity to go into IBM research to head up the Human Ability and Accessibility Center. And I thought it was just going to be a three-year, you know, assignment like all the prior assignments I had at IBM. And then I ended up, you know, I always say jokingly that it started out as a job and it became a career and it became a calling, right? And one of the things what I realized once I got into it was that, you know, this is really technology for humanity, right? If you think about accessibility, for all the talk that we hear about, whether it's DEI or ESG, you know, people talk about inclusion. But if you really want to have inclusion and then you, if you agree that technology underpins everything we do, how we learn, how we work and how we live, how we socialize, then by definition, you have to bring everybody along. So accessibility to me is articulation of the technology's role in supporting human. So I have this idea of that, that it really is about human first thinking, right? I mean, technology is a tool. It should not overcome or overtake humans. So that's why I think accessibility has to be a top-down. And if any CEOs talk about digital transformation, which of course we know everybody's talking about that, or even artificial intelligence, but artificial intelligence is trying to mimic human. And if you put human in the center, whether it's a people-centered internet or what I call the human first thinking, then the deduction of that logic is that accessibility is a must-do. But today there is not that much of awareness, partially because I think if you think about the evolution of technology in the first 30, 40, 50 years, you know, when IBM was producing mainframe, it's really about productivity, efficiency, right? But now technology is in the form factor of a cell phone. So it's a personalized technology. When you start personalizing technology, then you really have to think about future function of accessibility. And some people say, well, what is accessibility? Well, accessibility is little things like font size 14. I don't know about you, but when I read a Word document, you know, I want font size 14. I want color contrast to be better on a website, right? Or when I'm reading, when I'm watching a video, I would like to have captioning, especially if it's a foreign film or foreign language. These are actually by definition accessibility feature and functions. And just think about how, you know, everybody can benefit from that.
Yeah. Now you mentioned something about putting people at the center and people forward, and it's something that I deeply believe in that. And that technology should be the enabler and technology it is to help people. It's in service of people, not the other way around. But how do we do that in the age of AI? How do we create solutions that place people at the center, accessible solutions that place people at the center in right now in the age of AI?
Well, if you think about people or human, you know, then we know that the human comes in very different kinds, just like a bell curve, right? And we have different abilities. And actually one would say, if you ask evolutionists, they will say it's the human diversity, you know, makes human the most resilient creature in the world. And so I think, especially we're on the edge of starting this AI journey, that it is almost imperative that we take into consideration the entire bell curve. And a lot of times, when I was at IBM, when we were in research, when we look out the horizon, you know, we think about how do you design a technology that actually accommodate or made available or usable by what we call the edge users? You know, the edge users in this case, it could be people with disabilities, or it could be people who are aging in the 80s and 90s. If you can crack the code, so to speak, and create a solution that can be used, for example, an 89 years old person with a vision impairment, I can guarantee you that design thinking and the experience is going to be that much intuitive and that much elegant. And I still remember one of the senior VP and head of research said to me when I took the job, he says, you know, simplicity is the most elegant form. And then what accessibility is about is really design and thinking about the solution that is so simple that it's intuitive. So I think that's why we have to think about, you know, the different ability, different perspective and different experience has to be codified into the AI logic and also the AI collection of data sets.
You know, that's a great point, right? And designing for simplicity is not easy, actually. It's more complicated to design for simplicity so that the experience is, the burden of the experience is actually not put on the user, it's put on the designer so that everybody has it a lot easier. Given where we have advances in AI, is that something where we can actually see new opportunities emerge to actually do that so that we can actually deliver on that level of personalization?
Well, you know, it's kind of funny because I listen to all these chat GPT, you know, AI talk, but if you look at it fundamentally, a lot of the AI basic technology, so for example, natural language processing, right? I mean, taking speech and translate into text and then ingest that as part of the AI training. And the speech to text technology was originally designed for people with disabilities, right? So that was a foundational kind of accessibility technology, one could say, that actually gets mainstreamed and of course, but it is a foundation. And then another technology, we think about, you know, remember the IBM Watson AI, you know, one of the first use case was working with radiologists processing image, right? So image processing is another part, big part of the AI kind of a build out and tagging things, like tagging, this is a dog, this is a cat, you know, but that technology or that thinking actually is using technology for people who are blind. So when you say you create an accessible website and you show a picture, you need to put in what they call the alt text, you know, alternative text describing what it is. But once you put that in there, you know, it's good for the blind person or a person with a low vision, but at the same time, you're actually creating a data set that can be, you know, leveraged and used. So there's actually such a synergy and the foundational usage, you know, from the need of accessibility that can be transplanted over. But a lot of, so that's why I always say, like, we should lead with accessibility, not think of it as an afterthought. And once you flip your thinking, it's like, I see accessibility as a must do everywhere. You know, it's not like, oh, do we have to train people to think about it? No, if you want to have your technology be used by everybody, isn't that what any business wants, expand your market access, then why would you not do it? You got to embed it into your thinking and your product. I know Allison mentioned aging. I mean, there will be like 1.3 billion people, right? I mean, already in Europe, 25% of population in Italy, in Spain is over 65. I mean, people think about Japan as an aging country, but no, every country is aging with a diminishing birth rate, you're going to need technology to support, you know, the entire society. And so why not start with, you know, your solution and thinking and design a product differentiation with accessibility built in now versus wait for later.
Yeah. Who do you think is doing it right?
Well, they are, you know, by industry, I think the most industries that are consumer facing, you know, the banks, the financial services, especially the banking industries, retail industries are definitely are ahead of the curve. I think earlier we, I heard Allison talking about shopping, you know, you know, a target, for example, at one point was sued by a UC Berkeley student of the website of their website, not being accessible. And that actually triggered a debate at the court, whether a virtual marketplace is a place because the ADA, American Disability Act at that point was interpreted only apply to physical space, you know, like you need to have a ramp and you need to have elevator. But what about virtual spaces? But since then, for example, Target has gone far beyond and they partner, for example, with this technology startup company called Aira, A-I-R-A. So any person who entered the Target, they can turn, use their cell phone, they can have an agent, a remote agent come on to help the blind person shop at Target. They can also, Starbucks use the same technology from this company, Aira. How cool is that? You know?
Yeah, this is a whole new experience. Well, Frances, this is amazing. We're with Frances West, founder of Frances West & Co. She's an accessibility pioneer, champion, and change agent. Thank you so much for being on Impact TV.
Well, thank you for the invitation.
Wow, we're learning a lot here today, right? So many advancements, so much change. These machines are going to behave sometimes predictably and sometimes unpredictably. Just like humans can hallucinate, guess what? So can machines. So I sort of put forward the acronym, which is ABLE, which is Always Be Learning Environments, that the best organization is one that is always recognizing that they have more to learn, that they don't assume they know everything. And if you look at the last decade, there may have been some large tech entities that thought they knew everything, or they didn't think about the second and third and fourth order effects of a product they rolled out. I submit that we're living in an era in which the best way to be alert for accessibility, best way to be alert for how AI is being used positively, but also possibly things that you might need to have guardrails on, is to always be learning environments and be actively cultivating the ability that you actually have people that can actually give early warning if something's happening with whatever user experience that you've designed. These are not available for humans, is not working on a certain screen reader, is not working in terms of a certain voice assistant, or similarly, your AI is doing something too, because at the end of the day, you can plan for something to be used a certain way, but you may discover that other people are using in ways that either are not intended or actually misuse of the product.
Well, you know, we talked a lot about here today how accessibility, it is about people, and it's done by people and for people. And we have to create it with people in mind, which we often, I think sometimes we forget. But who do you think is designing solutions today that put people at the center and others could learn from?
So actually, I will give a shout out to a quiet champion, and she didn't know I was going to do this, but there's a person by the name of Teresa Shea-Buehr, who is at the National Institutes of Health, and her story was she lost vision later in life, and she has been a thriver. She has been championing actually thinking about this at the NIH and leading the way forward. You can find a bit of her online, but to me, it's an example of she saw a challenge. It was obviously personal to her, but she made it larger than her in terms of let's find solutions. And she has put forward that, you know, as we look at technology advancements, not only do we need to think about how those technology advancements as we move forward for the next best thing might not be accessible and including to all, but similarly, technology advancements are changing the modality in which people who have needs can actually interact with this content. And some may actually interact and choose to actually, you know, we're now getting to the point where some people that have lost sight may be able to find actual ways to get sight back if they want. But actually, it's interesting. It's not everyone's going in one way or another. There are cases where some people actually prefer to a certain path. And so, again, I go back to this could be any one of us. We never know what's going to happen in our life. We never know what's going to happen to our family members. And I think it's almost a human obligation to all of us to think about how we uplift this. But, yeah, I would give a shout out to Teresa Shea-Buehr, who I've known now for more than a decade. And I would say she is an example of someone who is actually a positive change agent on a national scale.
Wow, that's a great point, Sharon. As we talk about other technologies like AI and other things that are enhancing our capabilities to augment humanity, what are the risks and opportunities for improving digital accessibility? We probably got less than 30 seconds here.
All right, the risks and the opportunities. The risk, you mislabel something, you mistag something, you think it's describing something that it's not. The opportunities, involve your customers, involve your citizens, involve your stakeholders. Always be learning. If anything, that creates a tighter relationship with them. And so companies that do this not only will be doing the right thing for all of us, but actually getting to know their customers or citizens or constituents better.
Great closing thoughts here. Thank you so much, Dr. David Bray, distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center. So thanks for your insights and, of course, thanks for sharing a little bit of a historical perspective as well.
Great conversation, Ray. A lot has been going on. Yeah, it's just been interesting. We started out with a conversation talking about what's happening today in terms of accessibility, how organizations, Alice was talking about how we could champion that internally and really why there's a need and demand. I couldn't believe less than 2% of websites are accessible. We've learned more from Frances about what she was doing to pioneer some of these capabilities, thinking about how we got from where we are today to where we are now. And I think that's really interesting about how we can invest more in digital inclusion, especially as we keep aging in place and more things will be happening to us. I was really not looking forward to that aging in place and future. I don't know about you, Theresa, about that.
Yeah, I'm not looking forward to that. I'm not looking forward to that either. I was like, no, no, no, I don't want to age. But, you know, the big takeaway for me here is like accessibility is a human right and we have to think of that way as it's done for people, but it's by people. It has to be intentional. And I feel that we haven't really as a mindset, we haven't embraced it to say this is something we all have to do, every company, every product.
It's not an afterthought. It is not a silo. It has something has to be embedded into every company. And I think that's really a mindset and has to be really top down.
I definitely agree. It has to be a mindset. And then we got to Dr. David Bray. I think it was interesting to see how that cooperation is in place, how people are using technology. There are risks. Right. And it's really in how we actually design it. So this is a very exciting episode in Impact TV. Any final thoughts on your end?
No, I'm not. Look, I'm actually this has been a great sort of awareness for me. So I feel like I can carry that message forward. Well, this is great for the audience out there. Feel free to reach out to us. Follow Impact TV, follow the Publicis Sapient website as well as at Publicis Sapient on Twitter. I'm Ray Wong with Constellation Research with my awesome co-host, Teresa Barrera, and we'll see you on the next episode. Thank you.