Samuel Proulx, Accessibility Evangelist at Fable, talks to Maze about the importance of accessible design and how to incorporate accessibility into the development process to create better digital experiences.
The Optimal Path is a podcast about product decision-making from the team at Maze. Each episode brings in a product expert and looks at the stories, ideas, and frameworks they use to achieve better product decision-making—and how you can do the same.
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Ash Oliver:
Welcome to The Optimal Path, a podcast about product decision-making brought to you by Maze. I'm your host, Ash Oliver, UX Designer & Design Advocate. Great products are the result of great decisions, decisions that deliver value for customers and the organization. In this podcast, you'll hear from designers, product managers, and researchers about the ideas informing decision-making across all aspects of product development.
Ash Oliver:
If you're listening to this episode on its original release day, first of all, thank you so much for your support. And second, I want to personally invite you to a Maze Community Event happening on Thursday May 19 in support of Global Accessibility Awareness Day. you can join me and a guest panel for discussion on how to initiate, research, and build more accessible digital products. You can find out more and register for the event by going to community.maze.co. Looking forward to catch you there.
Ash Oliver:
Today I'm joined by Samuel Proulx. Sam is an Accessibility Evangelist at Fable, a leading accessibility testing platform powered by people with disabilities. As a blind individual, Sam knows and values the importance of accessibility in all aspects of life. He's a strong advocate for the inclusion of people with disabilities in the digital world. Sam, thanks so much for being here.
Samuel Proulx:
Great to be here.
Ash Oliver:
Let's dive right in with a little bit about your history and some of the work that you do. I know obviously you work at Fable. Can you explain a little bit about what Fable is and what work you do there?
Samuel Proulx:
Sure. Really our vision and our goal is to increase the accessibility of all digital products by making sure that people with disabilities are involved in every step of the process, from the beginnings of ideation and product design, right through the research and the alpha and beta testing, and the development and the maintenance of an ongoing product. Because right now there's this mode in accessibility that you release a thing and then you remediate and it's very costly and you don't have a great accessible foundation. But what Fable really focuses on doing is helping you get to that accessible foundation. The way we do that is by involving the voices of people with disabilities, because there's a saying in the disability and diversity community that "nothing about us without us." You wouldn't expect to understand the needs of any user, or the experiences of any user, without getting them involved in the process. And it's the same for accessibility.
Ash Oliver:
Tremendous. I mean, Fable's such an immense resource. I don't know of another company like it. And to that point, your role as an accessibility evangelist, what does that day in the life look like for you?
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah. For me, as a person with a disability myself—I am completely blind and I have been a screen reader user for over 30 years—and so for me it's really important that the voices of people with disabilities are centered in everything that Fable does. And so I spend a lot of time speaking at conferences, events, podcasts, talking to large organizations about why accessibility, how to do accessibility, and the reasons it's so critical to involve people with disabilities in the accessibility process. But I also do my best to make sure that people with disabilities are centered in Fable's branding and Fable's marketing, and to uplift and make space for the voices of other people in Fable's community of testers who have disabilities to make sure that their voices are heard as well.
Samuel Proulx:
The Genesis for what I do now came out of attending several accessibility conferences, and realizing that over 80% of the speakers were people without disabilities talking to a conference that was focused on accessibility. It just occurred to me, if this was a conference about, I don't know, women in tech, and 80% of the speakers were men, we'd be like, "Hey, maybe that's not the way we should be doing things." And so as I recognized this problem. I thought, "If I think this is a problem, then what I should be doing is trying to leverage opportunities to change it. There's no point in just complaining or being negative about anything really."
Ash Oliver:
I hadn't really considered the aspect of your work including not just the actual endeavor for ensuring that there are people with disabilities that are included in the process, but even so much as ensuring that the marketing and the branding of Fable also includes that accessibility perspective. That's really interesting. I guess for level setting, since we might have lots of folks that span the gamut in regards to their awareness with accessibility, can you go through some definitions? What is accessibility? I think to start would be a good place.
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah, absolutely. Accessibility is a very wide and all encompassing field, but one thing you might hear about, and that I think is a really good way to frame any accessibility conversation, is by looking at the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. WCAG is the acronym for that. They're put out by the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium. This industry loves its acronyms. They set out a framework to think about accessibility. In that framework, they talk about the POUR guidelines, P-O-U-R. And by that they mean, perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. A product in order to be accessible, needs to be perceivable to everyone. For blind folks, the images need to have alt texts so that our screen readers can read that out. For deaf folks, there needs to be captions and so on.
Samuel Proulx:
Operable. You probably hear a lot about making sure that everything works with the keyboard and is keyboard operable. Understandable for perhaps folks who experience cognitive challenges, or even for folks who speak English as a second language, or things like that. That's important. And then robust. Making sure that everything works not just on lower end devices, but if you have JavaScript turned off for some reason, or if you're using a different browser, or if you're on reading output by braille instead of speech, or any of these unexpected things. At Fable, we do talk a lot about moving beyond compliance and not using these guidelines as a set of check boxes, and a legalistic document to ensure accessibility. But I do think that they provide an extremely useful framework for framing this conversation.
Samuel Proulx:
And then of course, another important term that I use a lot that I think is important to define is assistive technology. What do I mean by that? Really it's technology that people use so that they can access their computer or their phone or their other digital devices. In my case, that's a screen reader. It will read the screen out to me based on what element has focus and so on. There are screen magnifiers. Everyone is probably familiar with like pinch to Zoom and the idea that you can magnify content in your browser, but there are magnifiers that can follow the mouse and you use that as a magnifying glass, or that can just magnify the entire system screen to 800% and more. And then there are other assistive technologies for those who have physical challenges that make them unable to use a keyboard or mouse.
Samuel Proulx:
When we talk about those, we're talking about voice control software. Some of you may be familiar with technology like dragon naturally speaking, or we're talking about switch systems. If you think about the late great Stephen Hawking, and the technology that he used at the end of his life, when he could only use one muscle on his cheek, and he could still operate the entire computer, that's the sort of system. And of course, there are many other assistive technologies available, but I always find it useful to give those examples to those who may be just completely new to the field.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. No, absolutely. That's very helpful. I think one of the things that you had mentioned is the WCAG as moving beyond the checklist. I think there's a difference between accessibility compliance and accessibility conformance. Can you speak a little bit about what the difference is there? Because I believe WCAG applies to both in that sense, is that correct?
Samuel Proulx:
It does. But the problem comes when you tape WCAG as a big list of checkbox, and you have to check off the check boxes, even the acronym itself, what it stands for, are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, not the web content accessibility check boxes and commandments. WCAG, what it really is, is the set of guidelines and techniques and suggestions, and a framework to help you think about accessibility, to understand all the stuff you need to be taking into account. But at Fable, we really encourage people not to think from a compliance and from a checklist point of view. Think about accessibility from an experience point of view. If you are designing your products so that every person who uses them is having a great experience, then compliance will take care of itself. Whereas if you design a product specifically to be compliant, it is possible to make a product that is fully compliant with the check boxes, and that is still a terrible experience to actually use.
Ash Oliver:
Well said. As we're just getting a sense of some of the different terminology and definitions, one of the pairings that I've come to find, accessible and inclusive design go hand in hand. I'm curious about what you think the difference between accessible and inclusive design is. Between the two, how you think we should be thinking about the difference between them.
Samuel Proulx:
Accessibility is a very important part of inclusive design, but inclusive design is really a design methodology. Inclusive design means working with more folks than just people with disabilities. There's the people who are of different ages, different experience levels, different cultures, all of that stuff folds into inclusive design. But what inclusive design really means is designing collaboratively with people to come up with solutions that work for them, as opposed to you fully designing a system, and then putting it out for testing as a thing that you've just come up with completely in isolation, and then wondering why the product doesn't work for anyone, and why the testing isn't successful.
Samuel Proulx:
Inclusive design is one of the best ways to get to accessibility, but it's really just changing the way that you design, so that you are collaborating, and you're working with people, and you're ideating with all different kinds of people. You're getting a variety of diverse voices involved, not just in your research process, but also in your design team, and the people who work for you and with you and around you. There's also lots of methodologies to do that generative work, to do idea generation, to design more inclusively, but inclusive design's really about the methods and accessibility is one of the outcomes that we're hoping for.
Ash Oliver:
That's a really tangible way of being able to distinguish the two and see how accessibility folds into inclusive design. When you think about what makes up an accessible interface, since we're primarily talking about digital experiences, what do you think designers need to know in order to get there? Especially in regards to what you talked about with the mindset shift, from WCAG being a checklist to more of experience building.
Samuel Proulx:
The first thing is really thinking about multiple modalities. I mean, designers by the nature of who they are, are going to be very visual thinkers, obviously. But when you are a visual thinker, you are not necessarily thinking about other things like the information architecture behind your content and the way it is semantically organized. A mistake that many websites do is that HTML has six different heading levels. Many websites will just use those different heading levels as a way to visually mark up their content with no keeping in mind what those heading levels actually mean. And so I as a screen reader user will go to that website and find the first heading levels on the page is the heading level six. Then we have two heading level two and heading level three, and how are these related again? Which section is part of which other section? It's difficult to tell.
Samuel Proulx:
And so the first shift is trying to think about the information architecture behind your designs and the meaning of your designs and the things you're trying to communicate. The same thing goes for alt text. I'm often asked, "Well, what is good alt text for an image? How do we do alt text?" The first thing that I always take it back to is, okay, well, why is this image here? What are you trying to communicate? If you're trying to communicate save, the alt text floppy disc for that icon is probably not great alt text. Again, it's about going back to thinking about what are you trying to communicate with this design, and making sure that is communicated in audio. And when you do that, you'll also be working for, for example, users of voice control software, where they're speaking to their computer.
Samuel Proulx:
They may want to say something like "click save". And if that icon has been labeled "save", that will work for them. They're never going to see that floppy disc icon and think to orally say, "Click floppy disc." Because look, that's not how we think. It's that first step of thinking about the meaning and the multiple layers of interaction behind your designs, instead of just thinking exclusively visually. And then once you think about that, it's thinking about how to communicate these things in your design system. There are lots of plugins for design systems like Figma to attach accessibility information, but if it's not communicated as part of your design, the developers may not think to do it. Who best to decide what the icon should be labeled? The designer should do that. Why leave that up to the developer?
Ash Oliver:
I'm thinking this is reminiscent of mobile first. That championing of design with mobile first in mind. Do you see there being a world in which accessibility is positioned in the same way as mobile first?
Samuel Proulx:
Absolutely. There was a great quote I heard at a conference that I attended recently, which was, "when you design for the edges, you get the middle for free." Too often we think about edge cases as these extreme cases that only apply to a few people, and I'm going to have to do this special work that won't make things better for everyone. But the thing about accessibility is that an accessible product is a more customizable product. It's an easier to use product.
Samuel Proulx:
It's a more flexible product. It's better for SEO, because search engines are computers that need to read your thing anyway. I think a good example of that is that mobile first is an accessibility win, because if you think about a mobile screen, you have to include the same number of features on far less screen real estate. And so that has helped designers simplify and declutter, and cut down, and think about, "Okay, I can't cut out features from my mobile app, but I don't have a big, enormous monitor now. So how are we going to get all these features in?" And those designs tend to wind up being more accessible, just because they're often easier to use.
Ash Oliver:
Absolutely. It's interesting to hear that perspective. If you could expand a little bit more because what you're talking about also translates to how teams might be trying to champion this internally. When teams are trying to maybe mature their practices, and are maybe meeting with stakeholders or trying to champion accessibility, what are some of the pitfalls that they might encounter and how might they unblock that?
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah. There often is that pitfall of you need to have leadership buy-in in order to do accessibility. The thing that I always talk about there is accessibility is an extremely incredible opportunity to innovate. So many things have started out as accessibility features that are now used by everyone and are just mainstream expectations. Think about dark mode. It started out really as an accessibility feature, but now if you have a product that doesn't work with dark mode, even though you may not identify as a person with a disability, you are irritated. This should work.
Samuel Proulx:
There's all kinds of things like that. I mean, look at people who have been using voice control for many, many years, and now suddenly there's Google Home and Amazon, and everyone is now using voice control and expecting that to work. I mean, the electric toothbrush was developed for people with physical challenges that made it difficult for them to brush their teeth, and then suddenly realize, "Hey, this is just better." That story repeats itself over and over again. I could go on. I mean, captions are critical for those who are hard of hearing, but if the sports bar TV didn't have captions on, everyone would be annoyed at this point.
Ash Oliver:
Absolutely. Yeah. Even YouTube videos or anything scrolling through social media. You're on the bus and you don't have a pair of headphones, how do we ensure that these types of things are there not just for accessibility, but beyond that?
Samuel Proulx:
That gets into the way we think about disability, because there's two models. One model commonly referred to as the medical model says that there is something wrong with a person with a disability, and they should be fixed. The burden is on the person with a disability. There's something wrong with you. Whereas the social model of disability says that the reason people are unable to do things or disabled is because of the world.
Samuel Proulx:
A deaf person who has access to captions can watch that video just like everyone else. One in five people now have a disability. Everyone will experience disability as we age. We all experience what is commonly called situational disability. As in wanting to watch a video and not having access to headphones, wanting to enter a door and having your arms full of groceries, pushing a stroller and not being able to go up the stairs, all of those things. And so to think about disability as somehow abnormal or a problem that needs to be fixed is inaccurate and is not useful, because are we going to say that every single human being is broken and should be fixed. That doesn't seem reasonable.
Ash Oliver:
What are some of the tangible ways that you think teams can build an accessible and inclusive process?
Samuel Proulx:
First of all, I think it's important to stop thinking about accessibility as a binary. Too often people get into this mindset where they say, "Our product is accessible." Or, "Our product is not accessible." The question that you then have to ask is, "Well, accessible to whom?" Accessibility is a process, and you need to start the process now. The best day was yesterday, and the second best day is today. You're not going to achieve 100% accessibility to everyone immediately, but you can get started. You might be able to fix problems that happen when the screen is magnified and make it more accessible to those with low vision. You might be able to fix up your color contrast. You might be able to add alt text. You might be able to add labels to your buttons. But the important thing is, first of all, to stop thinking about accessibility as a binary, it is or it isn't.
Samuel Proulx:
Second of all, to stop thinking of it as a project that happens once every five years, we're going to do an accessibility audit, and we're going to spend two months on accessibility, and then we're going to forget about it for five years. Accessibility has to be a process that is ongoing, just like any other process in your organization. That means that everyone has a tiny part to play. Designers need to make sure that accessibility information is included in your designs, that color contrast has been thought about, and developers need to make sure that they know and understand the correct code to implement this stuff. Content writers need to make sure that they're using heading structurally and providing all texts. There's a piece for everyone to do in the accessibility process, and figuring out what your piece is and getting good at it, is one of the things that you can do as opposed to trying to know it all and be perfect. It's just important to start.
Ash Oliver:
I really love the quote you just said about accessibility being an ongoing process. I think to a similar degree, we've seen research be treated in a very similar category where it happens on a project basis and it's done at certain instances and then forgotten until it resurfaces again. I've been thinking about empathy building. Obviously empathy is a huge part of design, but I'm wondering how teams might be able to start or strengthen this process, specifically as it relates to accessibility. If you're a designer that doesn't experience that disability, how can empathy building be strengthened as a practice?
Samuel Proulx:
The most important thing to do is to bring people with disabilities, with accessibility needs, in whenever you possibly can, because too often I will be talking to designers and that they'll be so enthused and they'll have so many questions for me. I'll realize this is probably the first and only time they're going to talk to someone with a disability in two and a half years. You can't grow to understand and empathize with users that way. And so part of it is getting involved in the research and in the testing. Some of it is just perhaps bringing someone with a disability in for a lunch and learn, or for a training, or even just to demo their assistive technology, and have someone perform some tasks on your website using a screen reader, and just take video of what their experience is.
Ash Oliver:
That's really great advice. Are there resources that you would recommend that would help mature the accessibility, learning, and understanding for teams?
Samuel Proulx:
Fable has actually just launched a training product, Fable Upskill. And so we offer customized accessibility training to organizations that not only involves people with disabilities, but that can involve your own organization's website and products and assets.
Ash Oliver:
Fable's really leading the industry in my mind in regards to this, so it's really exciting to hear about that launch.
Samuel Proulx:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Training is something that we get asked about all the time, and we really felt that we wanted to be able to provide people-centered training around accessibility, because often, a lot of the training is very compliance focused, and it's important to move beyond that and to think differently. There are great resources out there. If you are very new to accessibility, I think the best thing that you can do is go hunt around YouTube. People with disabilities are there and they're demoing their technology, and they're showing off what they do and how they do it. There's nothing better than watching people to understand them. And so that can be very helpful, very useful. Similarly, try to interact with people with disabilities, try to include folks. Lastly, most devices do have assistive technology built in.
Samuel Proulx:
Now, it's important to say that when you launch a screen reader for the first time, you're not having the same experience that I am having as somebody who's used this for 30 years, and I just use it by muscle memory. But in some cases there's nothing like a little bit of just hands on messing around with a thing. If you use iOS or Android, you've got a screen magnifier built in, you've got a screen reader built in, you've got voice control built in. So you can just play with it a little bit, learn about it, with the understanding that your experience is very different from a person with a disabilities' experience, but it can at least give you an overview and help you understand what's out there, and maybe even how your own apps and websites are functioning at the moment.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. I love that practical advice. To close on this, I just would love to hear your personal perspective and reflection. We've talked a lot about accessibility and the ways in which we can improve. I know we've made mention of this, but in your mind, where are we in terms of getting towards a more modern era of digital accessibility being just a part of the process? How do you think that the road ahead gets us there?
Samuel Proulx:
There are a lot of positives. People today are a lot more aware than they ever have been. Big companies such as Apple and Microsoft and Google are working very hard to improve the tooling. Not only the tooling when it comes to people with disabilities, but also the tooling for designers and developers. There's a lot of exciting developments there, but we are I think on the precipice of a sea change in the way that we use and think about technology. It's very important that we start thinking and having foundational conversations about what does accessibility look like in VR? How do we make sure our AI is not biased against people with disabilities and can account for the needs of people with disabilities? We've got to be talking about this stuff and thinking about this stuff now, so that when the technology does get here or more here than it is already, we'll have that foundation and we'll be ready. I think there's a rosy future ahead, but these new things are coming, and every new thing means a new challenge.
Ash Oliver:
Amazing. Sam, I really appreciate you spending time talking about this topic. I want to shift gears into what we're calling hat-trick questions. I've got three questions here that we ask everybody on the podcast. The first one is, what's one thing that you think you've done in your career that has helped you succeed, that you think very few other people do?
Samuel Proulx:
That's a very interesting question. I think that for me, my road to doing what I do today has been a long unwinding one. I didn't set out to come out of university and be like, "As a person with a disability, I want to work in accessibility, and that's all I want to do." I think that's applicable to everyone. If you set your career goals too early and make them too solid, you don't get to become perhaps as well rounded as it would be useful for you to be.
Samuel Proulx:
When I started at Fable, I started out as one of Fable's first accessibility testers, and then I moved into community management, and now I'm doing what I do now, but the only reason I'm good at doing what I do now is because I actually went to university for journalism. If I hadn't done that, I don't think I would be able to occupy this position, and make the differences that I'm making. And so just be open to where life takes you, and don't set yourself a goal and focus on it to the exclusion of all else, because you're going to find someday that there's something you really want to do. And if only you hadn't been so single minded on something else, you might be better equipped to do it, if that makes sense.
Ash Oliver:
Oh, absolutely. Profound advice. I really appreciate that. The next question, I know that we share this in common being vicious readers. What is the industry related book that you've either given or recommended the most?
Samuel Proulx:
Oh, that's easy. There's a book called The End of Average by Todd Rose. It is an incredibly good book to shift your mind away from thinking about the average anything, because there's this idea that average is somehow what we should be designing for. One of the stories that Todd Rosen tells in the early part of the book is about the air force. They measured all of their men, and they said, "Okay. We're going to design a cockpit for the average pilot." And then they realized that not a single pilot was the average pilot, some were shorter, some had bigger hand. And so they realized that when they designed the cockpit for the average pilot, they actually designed it for nobody, because there is no average person. And so then they designed adjustable seats and adjustable headrest, and adjustable controls. The End of Average really does a very good job at better and more articulately explaining this than I have. About going into the practical advice of what does this mean for our research and for our testing if we're not just taking the data and averaging it anymore.
Ash Oliver:
That's excellent. I'm definitely going to look this up. That sounds wonderful, and a next step as to what we've just been discussing. My last question for you, Sam, is what is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you absolutely love?
Samuel Proulx:
I think the thing that people find the oddest about me is that I am a collector with no interest in physical items. One of my earliest hobbies that has stayed with me is I am very interested in old radio shows from the 1910s through the 1960s, and old recordings of Edison Cylinders from the 1890s through the 1920s. I collect digital MP3 files of all of this stuff. I was involved in the community. I'd have people offering me like, "Hey, do you want me to send you the original reel?" And I'm just like, "No, just digitize it and send me the digital copy. When I have that, I'm satisfied."
Ash Oliver:
I love that. Yeah. No footprint, and yet you have this archive that dates back to 1910.
Samuel Proulx:
Oh, before that. I mean, I have the only recording ever made of the voice of queen Victoria.
Ash Oliver:
Oh my goodness. Wow, that is amazing. Sam, it's been such a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and wisdom and experience with the podcast. I really appreciate all of the work that you do at Fable.
Samuel Proulx:
Thanks so much for having me. It's really been fun. If you've been listening to this podcast and are thinking, "Man, I'd love to keep this conversation going." Come find me on LinkedIn, come find us at makeitfable.com, and let's keep the conversation going because accessibility is a process, and that means ongoing conversation.
Ash Oliver:
Absolutely. It has been such a pleasure. The Optimal Path is hosted by Ash Oliver and brought to you by Maze, a product research platform designed for product teams. If you enjoyed this episode, you can find resources linked in the show notes. If you want to hear more, you can subscribe to The Optimal Path by visiting maze.co/podcast. Thanks for listening. And until next time.