Equity in Tech: Making Applications Accessible

What if the applications we use every day were designed with everyone in mind? Join us on AXSChat as we welcome Sara Faatz, Director of Community Relations at Progress, who shares her expertise on the importance of human-centric software and accessibility in the digital realm. Discover why a whopping 98% of application developers and IT decision-makers recognize the need for human-centric software yet only 34% actively work towards it. Learn how the pandemic has transformed digital access from a convenience into an essential need, and why inclusive design should be at the forefront of every developer's mind.

Explore the profound impact of inclusive design on user experiences as we dive into shocking statistics, like how 78% of users abandon sites they cannot access. Hear personal stories that highlight the real-world consequences of neglecting accessibility, such as the frustration of booking medical appointments online. The discussion underscores the vital importance of user testing and the thoughtful consideration of human factors, encouraging developers to go beyond mere compliance and focus on creating seamless, intuitive experiences for all.

In our final segment, we tackle the challenges of integrating accessibility into application development head-on. Sara sheds light on the intricate balance between refining existing features and innovating with an accessibility-first mindset. We discuss the complexities of updating legacy systems, the need for specialized skills, and the industry's collective responsibility to raise accessibility awareness. By championing initiatives like apprenticeship standards for digital accessibility specialists, we emphasize the need for systemic change through education and government support. Join us in advocating for continuous, collective efforts to make digital platforms accessible for everyone.

Chapters

• 0:01 The Importance of Human-Centric Software
• 10:12 The Impact of Inclusive Design
• 17:44 Advancing Human-Centric Application Development
• 29:09 Embracing Accessibility in Application Development

Transcript

Neil MIlliken: 0:01

Hello and welcome to Access Chat. I'm delighted that we're joined today by Sarah Fats, who is the Director of Community Relations at Progress. Sarah is and I'm really jealous about this joining us from a boat off the coast of Florida. Why would I be jealous of that, I wonder, being in the rainy UK. So, Sarah, thank you so much for joining us today. I wonder. Being in the rainy UK. So, Sarah, thank you so much for joining us today. We were just talking, before we came on air, about the work that you've been doing and your focus on usability and human-centric software and services and so on, so please tell us a bit more about who you are and the work that you're doing.

Sara Faatz: 0:43

Absolutely Thank you, and thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. This is a topic that is not only important to Progress, but it's near and dear to my heart, and Progress is a software company that's been around for 40 plus years and we help organizations develop, deploy and manage responsible AI-powered applications and experiences. And the responsible word, I think, is really important there, right, because that goes beyond just what we think about from an AI perspective. It goes to what we do and how we deliver software in general and what we enable our customers to do.

Sara Faatz: 1:18

I had mentioned earlier before one of my favorite things to say is humans use software.

Sara Faatz: 1:23

One of my favorite things to say is humans use software. And that might sound, you know, it might be the Captain Obvious statement of the day, but it's true, and as technologists, we sometimes forget that we get very excited about what technology can do and we forget that there are people behind it. So we put together a study back in the spring to find out what people are thinking about, how they're viewing human-centric software and the importance. So we interviewed 700, more than 700 application developers and IT decision makers from organizations all over the world, and you know what it showed was amazing that 98% believe that human centric software is important. But the hard part, the sad part, and where we have a lot of work to do, is that only 34% of them are actually doing something today to fix that, and there are a lot of reasons behind that, but to me at least, it was helpful to know that they at least believe that's a good step in the right direction, that we really need to be thinking about software and the humans who are using it.

Neil MIlliken: 2:32

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that we frequently see people believing that something is useful and worthwhile, useful and worthwhile, and then we have the, the implementation gap, if you like, between, um, you know, belief that something might be good and people actually getting off their behinds and doing something about it, and I think that we really see that gap in the, in the accessibility space. I know deborah's got a question, so I'll hand question.

Debra Ruh: 3:04

And Sarah, welcome to the program. We were really. I know that when your team sent me what you are doing, I was very impressed, but also whenever we before we got on air as we were talking, you know one thing that we see. You admit you were talking a little bit about you know what happened during the pandemic and I just thought those were some really good points and I was wondering if maybe you would just talk a little bit more about, because I know that also influenced what y'all did. So maybe you could just talk a little bit about that. The audience would enjoy that.

Sara Faatz: 3:39

Yeah, absolutely so. You know, during during the pandemic, we had apps that had previously been used for convenience All of a sudden became apps of necessity. Right, we couldn't we couldn't go necessarily to the store and spend time there to pick up our groceries, right, so you ordered online medication, doctor's visits, all of those things, and since then our reliance on technology has just skyrocketed. Right that we're not looking back from that and people expect to be able to have these seamless digital experiences that replicate what they could have in real life. But with that it becomes incredibly important that we actually are making those apps accessible for everyone. Right, and you know you can look at the number of studies, I think you know the UN says.

Sara Faatz: 4:26

At the number of studies, I think you know the UN says one in six people has some sort of impairment. You know, they're all different numbers out there. I would argue that every single human on the face of this earth will have some sort of an impairment at some point in their life, permanent or temporary, and that could mean even something as simple as breaking your arm and you can no longer, you know, type with your dominant hand. Right, and that might not seem. You know that's that's critical in the moment, right. So we need to be thinking about how are the applications we're building, how are they, how are they accessible to every single person who needs to use them? Because there is again that that between life and digital, and they're blurry.

Debra Ruh: 5:08

Right, and humans are using your applications. Humans are using your applications and we know how to make things fully accessible for all humans. We just, for whatever reason, do not do it, and society needs to care about all humans, and it's just really interesting to watch us continually to be in denial about this, and that's one reason why we do Access Chat. We're in our 10th year in Access Chat and the three hosts we foolishly were saying, oh, I'm sure they won't do this for a couple of years and we'll be run out of topics. Yeah, so I'm sure we will all be doing this till the end of our lives and then, hopefully, others will come in. But you know, the reality is we must stop designing things that do not work for humans designing buildings, designing software, designing websites, designing AI, I mean yeah. And so I really appreciate that y'all took the time to do this study, because we find that there's continued people are continued to not do this. We, some of our findings are chilling because we're making progress. And then I just heard which I won't say of a very large, very large global company that is just about to put out something that millions and millions and millions of people use and it's not accessible. They've been accessible in the past, but for some reason they forgot how to do accessibility, and it's a major company, so we're hoping that we're going to discourage them enough that they're going to go ahead and include humans.

Debra Ruh: 6:45

But I also want to say something, sarah, and then I'm going to turn it over to Antonio or Neil, but also what you were saying. You were using the word impairment. I just think that we're biological creatures and sometimes we can see and sometimes we can't, and sometimes we can hear and sometimes we can't. Sometimes we can partially hear, can't, and sometimes we can hear and sometimes we can't. Sometimes we can partially hear, sometimes we. I mean, I just wish we would stop saying well, you should include them because of this. You should include them because they are a human right, and why would we build anything that hurts our planet or hurts humans right?

Sara Faatz: 7:18

well, the amazing thing there is, if you think about it, if, if I'm building for, for everyone, I am I am making that user experience. Even if I'm building for everyone, I am making that user experience. Even if I'm building for the person who has vision issues or has auditory problems, I'm actually making it a better user experience for everybody, right. And so if you start there, if you think about that, the hard part is and this is my battle cry for software developers let's start with an accessibility mindset first. Right.

Sara Faatz: 7:48

If you think about accessibility in the application development process right early on, and if we start teaching developers to think about that, it's really not that difficult to implement, whereas the challenge is to retrofit right. That becomes very difficult. There's a tool that my daughter just graduated from high school but the county school district had a portal where I could go in and I could look at her grades to say that you need support with something. The problem is that button covered, I could move it four different places and every place I moved it it covered something of function. So, right there, their part was in the right place, but their implementation was very, very poor, and part of that is because it's retrofitting right, but then modernization of applications is messy, so it's very it's a complicated. You know it's complicated right now, but it doesn't mean that it's not the right thing for us to be doing.

Antonio Santos: 8:49

I agree, and that also brings another question. The example that you've provided is, you know, is procurement and how important it is for schools, when they are buying or reaching out to new service providers, to make sure that they are able to buy solutions or choose solutions that are accessible. You know, in this case, that you mentioned for the families and for the students.

Sara Faatz: 9:20

Right, right, absolutely yeah, yeah. And again, I think it's about education in a lot of ways. I mean, I think that initially, people talked about accessibility because there are laws, right, and, and tried to scare people into, you know, from an app dev perspective, just following the laws, because they're going to be fines. What I don't think that the industry our industry was good at was really helping developers. It was, in Forbes, 78% of all people will leave a site that they cannot access in some capacity, whether it's visual or auditory, and if you think about that, that is a massive number of people that you're losing because you weren't able to think ahead and say, oh you know what, I need to make sure that I have a way for everybody, for all humans, to access this.

Antonio Santos: 10:29

And today many of us use a mobile device. Yes, when you know, sometimes things are very tiny, you can't read and we might be tired at the end of the day. So we talk about this. We were hopeful that people in marketing and sales would understand that if you make life easier for everyone, you can increase sales.

Sara Faatz: 10:57

Right, right, absolutely.

Neil MIlliken: 11:01

So this is the thing about accessibility and design. This is about communication. If you don't design it well, you're not communicating. And Tammy and I work for a really large IT service provider and integrator and some of the things we do are like run help desks and actually, you know, everybody's been over the last decade or so, and particularly since COVID, has been trying to sort of get people onto bots or to avoid, you know, having to ring up on the call center.

Neil MIlliken: 11:35

Right, and sometimes you, as a human, don't want to ring the call center, you want to avoid it, but at the same time you don't want to ring the call center, you want to avoid it, but but at the same time, you don't design it right. Actually, the default is to go back to the call center and, and you know, every time that someone calls that call center, there's an additional cost, you know, and actually the cost of each one of those calls is several dollars, right, it's, it's, it's not a small amount of money. So, so when you start, um, rather than sometimes you have to frame your arguments for this, depending on your audience, and sometimes you know, altruism and doing what's good for humanity is not the argument that we'll win through, but um the fact that if you don't do this, it's gonna like double your call center costs.

Debra Ruh: 12:22

That can have an impact.

Neil MIlliken: 12:24

And it's the same, actually, with the awful quality of the process for booking an appointment at my local doctor's. It's so bad that I pretty much guarantee that no person over the age of 60 will be able to complete the online process of booking an appointment. Right, because it's so confusing. I'm technology literate, my wife's technology literate. We still end up ringing the doctor because the thing doesn't work and it's not designed well. It's not even that it's inaccessible, which I can assure you it's also it's cognitively inaccessible, it's completely unusable. And so, you know, not only is it costing them more money in terms of bad design, it's possibly damaging people's health well, quite likely to be damaging people's health, because they either give up or or, you know, are having to wait and they're getting delays in terms of being seen for medical care and stuff like this right, absolutely.

Sara Faatz: 13:31

I mean design is actually crucially important and includes design and good, clear design in, you know, critical applications like you mentioned right can be the difference between health and sickness, life and death in certain circles yeah, and in a situation like that, obviously, user, either user testing wasn't done or user testing wasn't done. Well, um, because those are the things you know, there's no excuse for that, and I think that there's, and there's so many different ways to test an application, right, and I think people, developers in particular, are guilty of sometimes saying oh, you know what, checked all the boxes, we're good to go without again thinking about the human at the other end. There's a great book that was about website design, but it's called Don't Make Me Think and it's Stephen Krug wrote it and it's super short, very easy read, which you would hope with a book like that. What it really talks about and addresses the fact that that your digital interactions should not make people think. Talking about, you know, trying to make an appointment.

Sara Faatz: 14:34

There are things you know that everybody should be thinking about when they're creating forms. You know, as an example, is the form filled long enough? We have a lot of people now who have hyphenated last names. Right? Do you have enough character spaces there? Have you given enough time for somebody to fill in a form? If somebody's making an appointment to go see a doctor, there is a very good chance that they are suffering from some sort of ailment or impairment in the moment right. Have you given them enough time? And those are the kinds of things that you know. It goes back to knowing your audience, but if you also understand that your audience is humans you're going to have, you know, you'll take those types of things into consideration.

Antonio Santos: 15:17

And also with the prevalence of services going online or from utilities. If you choose your provider online, if you decide to receive your bills by email, you can save money. So if you are not able to do some of the tasks online, you end up being excluded and you end up spending more money. So I think that's also an important factor and there are studies on that area as well.

Sara Faatz: 15:46

Absolutely. I mean inclusive design, whether it's of an application. Accessibility is one part of that. Inclusive design is also a huge topic and something that we should all be considering. And that's language, that's all of those things.

Debra Ruh: 16:04

It's economic ability, it's access to technology, All of those things yeah, and I would also say that I think something that happens very frequently is that whenever developers don't take the time to include us, when somebody is struggling to do it, whatever they're trying to do make an appointment, get access to something really important it makes the person feel like something's wrong with them, and we know it does, and that's really bad because so many people are in trouble.

Debra Ruh: 16:39

We're having suicide rates and just saying to the developers not putting this all on you, but the reality is you make this so hard for us to get access. You just it just hurts people. It hurts people in ways we don't even understand. Right, and so I just, it's a really huge issue. But, sarah, do you mind telling us more about the study and the findings and, excuse me, how has it been accepted? I know when y'all send it to me I was like, wow, I, I had no idea so, but do you mind just explaining? We definitely want to make sure our audience can get access to the information and but I was just wondering if you'd spend a little time on that.

Sara Faatz: 17:22

Yeah, absolutely, and I'll make sure you have a link to easily download it. But you know, so the, I think the, if you view it in aggregate, you know what we found was that A, as I mentioned before, organizations know it's important, but they're having a hard time understanding, either understanding how they can implement it or even just fitting it into their business model. Right, because in a lot of cases it means you know, those barriers to development are things like how do you meet your customers demands? This is the ironic thing. How do you meet your current customer demands while adding this to your development process? Right? So it to a certain extent, it comes down to prioritization, but it also comes down to hey, I need to deliver this new feature or this new functionality, do I have time? And that's an ethical conversation, but that's also a business conversation. Long term, you need those champions internally.

Sara Faatz: 18:14

It also is access to its complexity, lack of agility in the development process probably a legacy application, but also lack of in-house skills, right? So that is something that we as an industry need to address. It's something that we have. You know, we have probably more than 50 articles on our blogs currently about accessibility and how you can, you know tools and information about how to create accessible applications. Tools and information about how to create accessible applications there's information out there, but, as I said before, this battle cry needs to be that we need to be thinking about accessibility first. So that's one thing, but again it also means for the second piece that we kind of got out of the entire survey was that human centricity means thinking about both the overall digital experience and the application development itself, right?

Sara Faatz: 19:06

So when you think about you had mentioned your, you know your phone. We all have them, most everybody has a mobile phone on them. A lot of us have wearables, right, your watch A lot of times. And you know, we access applications, we access websites. A lot of times, those digital experiences were built in silos and they were built separately and, as everybody started 20 years ago with a website and then, oh, I can put that on a phone, I need to put this in, make it accessible, the content accessible in other ways, and so that strategy is sometimes very siloed for each one of those applications.

Sara Faatz: 19:44

So thinking about that from a broader perspective is something it requires people to stop and think, right, and so that's been. That is a challenge for a lot of people. And then finally just you know, I mentioned it before in the training but normalizing human-centric applications. That is something and, again, it's something that I think we're only going to do through awareness, through podcasts like this and other pieces of information and organizations stepping up and saying again, this is how we need to lead the charge moving forward. If we are going to be a digital first society, then we need to make sure that everybody has access.

Debra Ruh: 20:27

I agree. I know that Neil had something that I thought really helped one of the items that you talked about. Now, neil, to come in but also just want to comment real quickly that accessibility should be considered as seriously as privacy and security. Absolutely, neil, I agree.

Neil MIlliken: 20:46

Yeah, so, and I hope we will get there right, and, on the other hand, we still know that companies forget privacy and they forget security too. So you know there's a lot of work that we need to do, and I take your point about silos In terms of the skilling piece, you know we need people to get better and understand accessibility better and to understand that it's everybody's job, but there's also a room for specialists as well, so it's not either or. I think you know we there is always going to be need for subject matter expertise and we need more accessibility experts, and so some of the work that we've done within our own organization then wider was we'd like to work to create a, an apprenticeship standard for digital accessibility specialists in the UK which is open source, and I'm encouraging various different countries and universities and education providers to pick this up and run with it, because it's a framework for skills, knowledge, skills, behaviours, competencies, etc. We started this a few years ago. These kind of things things especially when you're working with government take a long time to to come to fruition. But but I was looking back the other day and we were going well, we've got two, so you know, two education providers doing it and then I actually found there are seven now. So there are, there are seven colleges and universities offering this course now, so people can get a professional qualification.

Neil MIlliken: 22:31

What it also means is the government has recognised it as an occupation. So then it means that it gets into the sort of planning framework and skills framework for government at a national level and skills framework for government at a national level, and it percolates both down into the skills that kids have to learn and up into sort of job frameworks. So the UK civil service have then actually created accessibility, job, specialist job descriptions and stuff like this, and so it becomes, you know, a civil service, you know job framework as well as an educational framework. So there you've got some seeding of accessibility and embedding stuff. And when you were talking about the silos and the legacy of code and stuff, we're not going to solve that quickly. This is something that you need. These are systemic issues. So the sort of approach we were taking with apprenticeships is kind of hopefully building systems that can remediate this and improve things in the future.

Neil MIlliken: 23:36

But I do think that by getting people into the mindset of thinking about people before they start they developing the specs um, you know it's, it's discussing it right from the beginning, understanding what problem they're trying to solve and and really building the sort of a broad set of personas and understandings of how people might use this. So the user journeys are going to be different, even if the end results that they wish to achieve and the problem they need to solve is going to be the same can help in terms of how you architect something before you start coding it exactly, because once you've started coding it's it's kind of too late, right, because you know the costs go up exponentially, right, right? Um, you know we, we know from our own experience of having to fix stuff where people forgot, you know it can be more than the entire cost of the original project.

Sara Faatz: 24:33

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, user testing prior to development is critical, but you also should be doing that user testing afterwards, even if are you know? Yes, retrofitting is is, yeah, incredibly expensive and it's a challenge, but there may be some tweaks that you could make there could be some minor things yeah absolutely we are.

Neil MIlliken: 24:53

Now, you know we're in an agile development world, right? So it's not like products are static anymore, right, you know so? So then it's, you know, actually, accessibility and usability and human centricity needs to be part of every single script, and so there will be incremental improvements that you can do. And what we need to make sure is that accessibility isn't in the backlog, because that's the thing you know is, you will always have items in the backlog and things that you know don't get fixed this time because of the financial priorities or because of the expediencies of speed or whatever needs to happen. Maybe you've got a critical security issue you need to fix, right, you know what? Yeah, you're going to ship that without accessibility because you have to, but you shouldn't leave the accessibility in the backlog. And accessibility issues are bugs, right. Absolutely, they are bugs, right, and that is something that people shouldn't treat them as, something that isn't a bug, right?

Sara Faatz: 25:55

Totally agree.

Sara Faatz: 25:56

Yeah, if it's part of your design spec, if it's part of your application spec, then it's built in and you're right, it can be featured, impacted, impacted or treated like a bug and taken care of from there.

Sara Faatz: 26:09

We found, you know it's interesting, the survey showed us where people see the benefits of human-centric design and you know it's there is a business. They do see business value in it. So that's the interesting thing to me, right, that it's that we still are in a world where 98 percent say they understand we should be doing it, but only 34 percent are. When you have, you know, they say customer appeal, increased market opportunity, right, things like positive financial results. Those are the kinds of things from a business perspective that if you're thinking about what often drives those decisions from a development perspective, you know we need to get those numbers in front of more people, right? So they understand this is, you know, 54% say that they have enhanced digital trust when they have a human-centric application. Right, think about that. And if what we're saying is, and if we can all agree that we are leaning more digital in our engagements than ever before, that is a huge number, right? I agree, I agree.

Neil MIlliken: 27:22

So I mean Antonio commented a little bit on cost, but I think this end. So I'm really interested to understand. So if your respondents understand that there are benefits, why is it that they're not acting on it? Is it because in the development community, in the IT community, we are fixated on cost rather than value? Do you think that there is a cultural issue that we need to address it?

Sara Faatz: 27:54

Yeah, I think it doesn't show. You know one of the things we said. You know the highest challenge, highest rated challenge that people had was managing or meeting customer demands. So they're not seeing it, which is ironic, again, I think you know they. They believe that, uh, their time and their prioritization is around specific feature features or functionality within an existing application, as opposed to having this, this.

Sara Faatz: 28:22

It's almost like a silent bug, right, and to a certain extent right, because they don't necessarily there are people who will try to come to your application or your website to use it and never come back again and you might not ever know that, right? You know there are tools to talk about. You know dropoff rates and things like that, but truly understanding who's coming and who's leaving is very difficult, right? So I think that until you can quantify that as a feature that needs to be fixed, right, it's very hard to get that into the backlog. And then you know complexity and lack of agility in the application development process.

Sara Faatz: 29:05

That was the second rated challenge that people have and why they're not doing it. So I think, if we can I love the, the apprenticeship, I think if we can continue to provide educational resources and upskilling across the board so people understand that this is what they need to be thinking about. Um, you know, I feel like this is. You know, if we, if people, take baby steps in, particularly in legacy applications, and and chip away at things, even if it's slowly, it's at least a step in the right direction, and then all new applications or websites that are created should be thought of with an accessibility first mindset yeah, absolutely.

Neil MIlliken: 29:42

We have a moral responsibility to that. And at the same time, I agree, you know progress is better than doing nothing. You know so. For for those legacy apps, some improvement is better than just going. You know it's too hard. So so thank you so much for spending time with us today. We've reached the end of our half hour. It's flown by. I just want to thank Amazon for sponsoring us and supporting us, mycleartext for keeping us captioned and accessible. Your support is really important to us, and so is the support of our community. So thank you, sarah. It's been a great pleasure to talk to you today. Sarah HARTLEY Thank you so much.

Sara Faatz: 30:23

Thank you, thank you very.