Design By Committee, Episode 17: Accessibility and Inclusive Design with Derek Featherstone
Justin Davis and Matthew Grocki talk with me on the Design By Committee show about the distinction between inclusive design and accessibility. The show is no longer online, so the episode details and the show's published transcript are preserved here.
This is a preserved copy of Episode 17 of Design By Committee, recorded in April 2019 with hosts Justin Davis and Matthew Grocki as part of their month on accessibility. The show and its audio are no longer online, and I haven't found a surviving copy of the recording, so I've preserved what remains: the episode details and the full transcript the show published alongside it.
From the show's own episode notes: "In this week’s pod, we continue our accessibility series as we sit down with expert Derek Featherstone. Derek discusses the distinction between inclusive design and accessibility and why inclusive design is necessary to make any digital experience accessible. Derek teases out his latest venture that may or may not include writing a book. Matt and Justin also take a look at LinkedIn tactical marketing plan and you’ll be surprised by their feedback."
Transcript note: this is the transcript Design By Committee published with the episode (prepared by Rev.com, April 2019), reformatted for the web. Timestamps and bracketed notes are theirs.
Full transcript
Justin Davis: Oh my God. There we go. There we are.
Matthew Grocki: All right, one more time. Sorry. We're pros here Derek, trust us.
Justin Davis: All right, welcome in here to Design By Committee. Thank you guys so much for being here as part of this show this week, yet again as we talk about user experience, product design, content research, user research, really anything that helps you do web and tech better and bring a better experience to the folks at your trying to serve on the web. That's what we want to do here for this show, so we thank you for being part of it and thank you for tuning in.
Justin Davis: If you want to join us on the show, just give us an email @askdbcshow.com you can also call us. We have a phone number, you can give us a ring at (813) 485-4866 leave us a voicemail. If you want to come on the show, let us know. We'd love to have you on the show. Ask questions to some of the folks that we're talking to, ask questions to us, talk about what you're working on. We want to have you be part of this and you can join us on the web @dbcshow.com on Twitter, at the DBC show ... we're kind of all over the place.
Justin Davis: Another week, my name is Justin Davis. I'm a user experience designer and developer based down in Tampa, Florida and joined by my cohost Matthew Grockiwho is up particularly more north than [crosstalk 00:01:16]
Matthew Grocki: Mixing it up a little bit in my a western Maine year this time around as opposed to being over on this t-coast. So if I sound like I'm a doing a little bit of [inaudible 00:01:28] and "Hey, your gos." It's because I'm a deep in the woods of western Maine for the week. But still absolutely excited to have our podcast on today, so I'll looking forward to it.
Justin Davis: Yeah, you made the remote studio work and it sounds pretty normal.
Matthew Grocki: I'm holding the microphone like I am ... I'm pretending like I'm a news reporter from the 1980s. Like, I've got the microphone in my hand as opposed to like my usual boom. It's kind of set up like how you do. So if I start making really good points and shaking my voice around, let me know and I'll calm down.
Justin Davis: Well you send me a picture of the setup and you had the microphone laying on a pillow on the bed. And for a moment I wondered if you were going to be laying down and doing the show, but it sounds like you're upright.
Matthew Grocki: I am very much upright. No, it was not selling that well but we're making it work.
Justin Davis: Excellent. Excellent. So yeah, very cool. So a lot of great stuff happening this weekend. This is going to be a really fun episode. We're continuing this whole month of accessibility, so far we've had two really great shows. If you guys haven't listened to those yet, go back and listen to the previous two shows. If you're interested in accessibility, plain language and being just more accessible with everything that you're doing on the web, you don't want to miss all of these episodes. And we're going to continue that today. We have a really, really great guest. We're going to bring on the show here in just a moment, to continue that.
Justin Davis: Before we get to that though that I wanted to talk about something that I stumbled across actually earlier this morning, we talk a lot on the show content strategy. We talk a lot about helping you do content better and one of the things that we know, is that when you want to do content marketing and use content effectively as a sales and marketing tool, you have to have a plan. Editorial calendars are kind of standard in the content world, but a lot of folks aren't really thinking about the plan that goes behind their content production. And it's something that is ... it requires a lot of thought to put together.
Matthew Grocki: Well, and what's interesting about what you had shared over is it's a content marketing plan within the context of Linkedin. And I think for some many of us we get stymied by all the platforms and we know that we want to write the thing and promote the thing and put it on our site and or promote it through a third parties with Linkedin, what it affords you is the ability ... the platform's already there. And so this plan that you had showed me, it really is one very, very easy dashboard, if you will, to get your arms around what you would need to do knowing that you don't have to worry about your own website or worry about setting up a newsletter and you know, all that stuff. Because again, your entire ecosystem is already, hopefully established within Linkedin.
Justin Davis: Yeah. So if you guys want to look this up, you can probably Google like the Linkedin content marketing tactical plan. I was on Linkedin and I ended up coming ... they had an ad for basically, "Hey, here's a portal to help you get engaged with Linkedin marketing." And this was one of the assets that they had there. So look up the Linkedin content marketing tactical plan. What's really nice about it is it goes through the different kind of channels within Linkedin from pages, slide share groups, publishing, sponsored content, et cetera and it talks about what the time requirement is, it talks about what types of things you should be sharing, what your brand objective should be, the key metrics you should be looking at as well as what your daily action items are to really engage and put that channel into use.
Justin Davis: And it's one of the most, for me, I think it's one of the easiest to understand plans for content marketing because it literally is almost a checklist of stuff for you to do every day to really enable these channels on Linkedin. It's very comprehensive and to be honest, I mean I learned, I've been at Linkedin for a long time, I learned a lot about like some areas of Linkedin I didn't even know existed, let alone thought about how to use those to engage an audience. Really, really interesting stuff. And they've actually paired this with a whole portal that walks through a lot of the strategy behind this and everything, so it's not this just singular document. It's really part of a larger thing.
Justin Davis: So definitely be on the lookout for that, I was Pretty impressed. One of the things that I thought was really nice about it was that it has the time commitments listed out there, which is great. This is something that seems so basic, but I think it's something that a lot folks don't think about. When you are putting together a concept plan, it's like you got to think about how long is this going to take me every day so I can resource this appropriately.
Matthew Grocki: Yeah. And I mean anything from an hour within your day versus 20 minutes of your day [inaudible 00:06:10] feel like I just started, getting through the day is emails, before I've even started to dig in on something. And so once you can [inaudible 00:06:28] take anything from talking about your company news to, promoting your blog content or case studies or anything like that, it also, I think too, for folks who are working together within a team to share in that time commitment as well. Like if there's a way that we can divide and conquer and have a task take half as long for each of us, but we can each knock off of half of it, we're looking pretty good for the day and it becomes a lot more easy. You know, we always like when we see those half hour meetings as opposed to those hour long meetings, so what's the way in which we can extend that into our content marketing initiatives?
Justin Davis: Yeah. So check that out if you guys are looking for looking for some tips on how to get your Linkedin game and your content strategy game on Linkedin put together, look for that Linkedin content marketing, tactical planning. I think it's something that's a really interesting and really is a great model for how you can start to think about your content plans in general. By the way, I want to mention during that little segment there, Matt, you probably didn't need hear it on either side, but I had a little bit of audio dropped out because my internet connection got stable I turned off my video. So we'll see if I can fix that in post. If not, we'll fill it with like some really fun music in the little gaps while you were talking.
Matthew Grocki: Awesome. I didn't notice it at all, but we've had some audio drops in the past that were not translated in the recording, so cross fingers.
Justin Davis: So we'll see. So you guys like, we do this thing live, we're not like editing this thing together, we're doing this as a live show and the you know, you get everything.
Matthew Grocki: It's just like the Tonight Show where they never stopped they always went, Jay Leno never went to break that he kept rolling the entire time. There was never segments that were edited in and out of order. This is as you see it. So lumps and all.
Justin Davis: Exactly. All right. So exciting, exciting show today. Again, continuing our accessibility tat chat with somebody who is one of the foremost experts on this in the world, really.
Matthew Grocki: Completely agree. And just before I introduce our guests, I did want to say that the reason why we are doing this entire series is because we received a letter from folks just like you who heard us talking about accessibility with Coralville Hower a couple episodes ago and one it was looking for a deeper dive. And this really was an opportunity for us to say, you know what, we know that we're not the experts and we know ... but we also know that we have influence as consultants, as folks that sit along product design teams, product development teams, and how do we not only better educate ourselves so that we become better consultants, but also impart better experience, better knowledge on to our clients in the world of accessibility.
Matthew Grocki: So all that to say is if you want to hear more about some of the topics that we discussed in our podcasts, by all means just give us a call or send us an email. So without further ado, I will say we're delighted to bring in Derek Featherstone who's the chief experience officer at Level Access. You know, actually why don't we just welcome onto the show? How are you doing Derek?
Derek Featherstone: I'm doing really well. How are you guys doing?
Matthew Grocki: We're hanging in there. We're hanging in there. We are probably better than that. I think it's really ... as we were putting together this series of podcasts centered around accessibility, we wanted to ask around to some of our peers, some of the folks and say, you know, we know some of the amazing minds are out there, but who am I missing? Who should we be talking to? And numerous people were basically like, "Have you talked to Derek? You must know Derek. Why would you not talk to Derek?" And so I was like, "I must know Derek, I must meet Derek." And so you are quite sought after in the world of accessibility and we again are very thankful to have you on the show.
Derek Featherstone: Well thanks. Thanks for having me. That's very, very flattering to hear that people think that out there and have that in their minds. So I am very grateful for all the opportunities that I've been given to just speak about this publicly and to come on shows like this to share some of the things that I'm thinking with you and your audience too.
Matthew Grocki: Fantastic. Well, I think getting right to it, one of the things that we were talking about briefly off air was the difference between accessibility and inclusive design. Curious on your perspective on the differences between the two and how we should be thinking about the differences between those.
Derek Featherstone: Yeah, I'll start with a really simple distinction I think, that I've been using for quite a while. Accessibility is an outcome. It's a thing that we measure, t's a thing that we use to check to see how well we are creating things that work really well for people with disabilities. Inclusive design is a process. It's a methodology and a process that we can use to achieve that outcome of accessibility.
Derek Featherstone: And we can achieve accessibility and lots of different, sometimes it's by accident, sometimes it's on purpose, sometimes we use other methodologies. But inclusive design is a way of thinking about creating a design process that directly includes the people that we are aiming to include in our end product.
Derek Featherstone: So that's the the main distinction that I see out there is one is like, accessibility. That's like a ... that's the outcome, that's the thing that we're measuring. But inclusive design is really a process that's an action oriented thing. We're talking about design as a verb and inclusive as an adverb.
Derek Featherstone: A lot of people throw out the words inclusive design and they're actually talking about, an inclusive design where design is like the manifestation and it's like the noun and inclusive is the adjective. But I like to really distinguish those two by thinking about inclusive design as the action part. Think about design as a verb and inclusive as the adverb and descriptor that goes with it.
Matthew Grocki: So one thing that you had mentioned as you were talking about that, I think it's really interesting and I kind of want to dig into a bit is that, we're talking about this inclusive design as a process and you'd said, "Involving the people for whom you're designing." Talk a little bit more about that. Are we talking about just, "I'm going to design inclusively, I'm going to like put a picture of these people up on the wall so I remember." Or are we talking about bringing them in and saying sit down and talk to me about your perspective so that I can better develop empathy and design to that. How much are you involving those folks in the design process, if at all?
Derek Featherstone: Yeah, we should be doing it much more than we do to be really honest. Even leaders in the inclusive design field are doing a great job of involving people with disabilities in the process. And I would say that probably all of those people would argue and say, "Yes, we're involving people a lot as participants, as co-creators, as co-designers in this process. But we should be doing more." And so I think it really does go well beyond that. Let's put a photo up and create a persona and put that on the wall and have that be a thing that is a constant reminder to us of the people that we are designing for.
Derek Featherstone: But there's a distinction here and I think it's really comes down to when we are doing like design thinking or inclusive design thinking, that's kind of when we're taking those personas and we're involving or we're incorporating accessibility needs and characteristics into those personas and we're taping them on the wall, that's when we are designing for people with disabilities.
Derek Featherstone: But when we actually include people in the process as participants, as co-designers, as co-creators, that's when we get to designing with people with disabilities and not just designing for them. So that involving people, as deeply as we can, as early as we can in the process is really where we ultimately want to go. If we're ... we see lots of people and organizations that are including people with disabilities as people that test and evaluate a solution.
Derek Featherstone: We do all the design work because we're the smart ones and of course we're going to do all the design and we're gonna make all the decisions and then we throw it over the fence and we do some usability testing with people with disabilities and we get those results and we take those results and we react to them. We make changes or we defer things until later or we say, "Hey, we need to investigate this a little bit further."
Derek Featherstone: All of that is doing that at a very base level. We are having people react to and evaluate the solution that we have come up with and what we're really looking for now and if we can, is involving people with disabilities much earlier in the process so that they can be kind of that ... that's when I started using those words like co-designers and co-creators, getting the input from people so that we're not just making all the decisions that people with disabilities are helping make the decisions that are going to have an impact on them and the things that they're going to be using in everyday life.
Matthew Grocki: Yeah, that's great. I think it's such an important thing to keep front of mind. One thing that kind of comes to mind when I hear you talk about that is, we're talking about a process that has a bit of a continuum to it in terms of just like how involved it gets from maybe personas all the way down to this co-design type of situation. But what we're talking about is this inclusive design process being a very intentional process to say, "As we designed, we're going to keep this set of people in the forefront of our mind." That probably makes a lot of sense if you're working at an organization that you're involved with a product or something like that, that is marketed to those people.
Matthew Grocki: I work for wheelchair company or something like that, then it's easy to sort of, for the stakeholders and the team to think about keeping those people in front of the mind. If you're not, if you work at a random consumer App or an enterprise company, where this the set of people, the folks who we need to be keeping in mind like this, how do we convince the team and the stakeholders and make the case that it's important to expend the effort, I guess, as it were to put these folks kind of front and center in this inclusive design process?
Derek Featherstone: There's a couple of different things. I think one is there's a realization that people need to have at some point that, this is the ... people with disabilities is not about ... the people with disabilities is not some other group. We all have a chance of joining that group at any time. And that's kind of ... there's a bit of a harsh reality to that, that people don't often really think about. They're like ... especially when I was younger, I remember when I was in my early twenties, whatever, I remember like I was invincible. "What do you mean? Like what do you mean this thing that we're designing or building doesn't work for somebody else? Isn't everybody out there just like me."
Derek Featherstone: And I think part of it is just that perspective thing. So one of the things to keep in mind is that that realization that this could be anybody at any given time. The thing that goes with that or the off sited a side benefit that goes with that is if we create things that work really well for somebody, say like my grandfather who, he had a stroke in the mid 1980s he passed away a while ago, but he had a stroke in the mid 1980s and he was only ever able to use one hand right after his stroke, because his left ... the mobility and movement in his left arm never really came back.
Derek Featherstone: So if we were able to design things that worked well for him so that he could use things well with one hand, then doing that for him as a person with a disability that has that as a thing that he has to deal with all the time, that also has the benefit of making it work really well for all kinds of people in temporary situations where they break a wrist, they break an arm, they are a holding their young child in one arm and they only have one hand available to operate their computer or whatever it is. All of the things that we create that work well for people with different disabilities, they end up helping somebody else in some other way.
Derek Featherstone: And I've long believed that when we design, I did a talk a few years ago about this called extreme design. And there's a design kind of methodology out there that really looks at if we designed for these extreme cases and we successfully designed for those extreme cases, we end up taking care of all the people that fall somewhere in between those extremes.
Derek Featherstone: So if you look at that as a general principle, whether it's 100% true or not as another thing, but conceptually if you think about looking at extreme scenarios and designing so that things work really well in those scenarios, then they tend to work really well and be really easy to use in almost every other scenario. So that's, that's one of the ways that I think we can start to make some of that case.
Derek Featherstone: The other thing is I think a lot of the technology that we use today, things like voice recognition that we use on our iOS devices and Android devices, other things like predictive typing and predictive text. A lot of that functionality is stuff that was invented for people with disabilities. And so the things that we do today, when we look at a design process, when we look at product, when we look at these things, if we look at those through the lens of making this work really well for someone with a disability, we're presented with a tremendous opportunity for innovation.
Derek Featherstone: And so that's part of the reason that I liked the concept of inclusive design, is that when we talk with and work very directly with people with disabilities, at that the concepting or at the ideation stage when we're really just starting to get going, there are all kinds of ideas that come from that process just by engaging people with disabilities and finding out what their needs are and those innovation opportunities may not arise otherwise.
Derek Featherstone: So I think there's some definite benefits to inclusive design that just make good economic sense in general and make ... kind of there's some excitement I guess that goes with it as well from a, "Hey, if we develop something that worked really well in consultation with people with disabilities, the innovation opportunity that's there is pretty significant." And that can be quite exciting for people. So I would ... those are two ways I look at and I feel like I'm talking a heck of a lot here, so I'm going to breathe in a moment. But, those are two ways that I think we can really make a difference and start making the case for inclusive design because that's what other companies are starting to do.
Derek Featherstone: If you look at companies like Microsoft they are all over this and they continue to do this. Microsoft's doing it, Google is doing it, Pinterest is doing it, Airbnb is doing it. Lots of organizations are talking inclusive design because of the massive benefits that also come with also doing the right thing.
Matthew Grocki: That's such an important point. One of the things with accessibility is you're always, and I don't mean to the complete the two, so I'll stick with inclusive design, but if we were to stick with inclusive design to use that as a wedge for innovation or that is a way to quote unquote sell that within, to your client or in house. And I don't want to say that as a product designers, we have to be, what's the right word? That we have to look ... find different ways in which to sell in inclusive design into the work that we do.
Matthew Grocki: But when you think of it that way, it's really reframing the conversation, so much of what you were saying before, I can see the opposite of it someone saying, "Well, that's too edge casey. Why would we design for this small subset of users? That really seems like an edge case to us." Like that's a trap that I think that you can very easily fall into.
Matthew Grocki: And I think one of the things that we've also done is, and I've been guilty about this in the past is, as product designers we say, "Well, we can't be everything to everyone." We try to have a homepage that is everything to everyone and then we've got one page with 40 links and 800 graphics and we've lost our audience because we need to focus in and hone in on that one thing. How do we reframe that conversation or rethink that argument so that folks really do see the true value in an inclusive design process?
Derek Featherstone: I think there's a lot that's to it and on the edge case side of it, most people talk about it's designers and developers and technologists that talk about that stuff being edge case. I would actually argue that the world that we live in as designers, developers and technologists and product people, we're actually the edge case.
Derek Featherstone: There's way more people out there that are not like us than are like us and you get that sense if you talk to anybody. When you go out and do usability testing, whether it's formally or informally, if you get out there and talk to people that use your stuff, in a lot of cases the people that we're talking to when we are designing and building things for them, they are not at all, nearly as tech savvy as we assume that they are.
Derek Featherstone: So I would actually argue that in many cases we are the edge case, and I think that probably starts to reframe things a little bit. I would argue that people with disabilities are more like a general audience than we are. So designing something for ourselves, which that can be a totally valid product strategy, as long as that's actually the market that you're really trying to serve. I would say that that people with disabilities are not actually the edge case at all.
Matthew Grocki: That's a really great point. And I mean it comes back to the old, somewhat tried statement, but the whole, you are not your user thing. Which is about saying, you know, I could think exactly what you were saying, which is we as designers or developers or whoever's building the thing, we aren't representative and this larger audience definitely offers a little bit more of a glimpse at what a cross section of our market probably actually looks like instead of just looking in the mirror at ourselves.
Matthew Grocki: It's an important reminder. And again it underscores kind of what we think about all the time, what we talk about all the time as user experience designers, is it's about empathy and it's about developing that empathy and really keeping that at the forefront of your process in the forefront of your thinking.
Matthew Grocki: Amazing stuff so far. This has been a great conversation so far here with Derek Featherstone. We're going to take a quick break. We get back from the break, digging in a lot more into accessibility and inclusive design, that process, some things that you might be able to do in order to get started with this in your organization, if maybe you aren't practicing this way right now, how you could start practicing that a little bit more intentionally starting tomorrow. All of that coming back up right after this break. You're listening to Designed By Committee. All right, so there's a little break. Great stuff there. This is amazing.
Derek Featherstone: This is perfect.
Matthew Grocki: I teased out because one thing I'm going to ask kind of at the end is I want to ... sort of the typical, hey, so somebody is listening and they have never done this before, they're not in an environment where they designed in this way. What are some ways that get started? What are some of the conversations or tools or things that they can start to think about? So I'll, I'll probably tee that up at the end. A couple of the things I thought about that I might want to chat about a little bit in this next segment is you'd mentioned the voice in predictive texts and some of those things that started as accessibility tools that have worked their way into mainstream technology.
Matthew Grocki: I'm actually interested to get your opinion on whether it's becoming more difficult or easier to design inclusively. And also one thing, I'm interested actually I think and I think folks listening would be interested in, I'm actually interested to hear how you got started in this? Because this is a pretty focused thing and you definitely are very passionate about this. I'm curious if there was like an event in your life or something like that, that like caused this to start. So we may start after the break with that story if that's cool.
Derek Featherstone: Totally fine. I'm very happy to tell my origin story. It's not like as super exciting as many people's. But yeah, I'm totally down with sharing that.
Matthew Grocki: Nice. The one thing I'll add is I'm not going to let you go before asking about why you gave up chocolate for this year.
Derek Featherstone: All right.
Matthew Grocki: Yeah, that'll probably be a good light way to end. So maybe-
Derek Featherstone: Yeah that's cool.
Matthew Grocki: Nice. Very good. All right. We'll come right back and get back into it. Thanks. All right, welcome back here to Design by Committee. The show where we're talking about, today we're talking about accessibility and inclusive design and really it's what we like to talk about on the show all the time, which is about keeping the user in mind, developing for the user, designing for the user really making sure that you've got empathy for the folks that you're are designing for. By the way, if you want to join us on this show, if you want to be either part of this, you want to be at a guest, you want to come in and ask some questions or if you just have a question that you want us to answer on the show or talk about something like that, or do you want to just come and talk about some stuff, work with us, email us, ask@dbcshow.com or give us a call at (813) 485-4866. Visit us online at dbcshow.com and follow on Twitter at the @thedbcshow, I'm not even get a mention Instagram because were so horrible at it.
Justin Davis: You can mention Linkedin though. We were more active on Linkedin.
Matthew Grocki: We are active on Linkedin. That is true.
Justin Davis: So we're going to be imparting some of our digital content marketing tactics that we talked about earlier in the show.
Matthew Grocki: So we're going to start with some of those on Linkedin. I like it. Yeah, exactly. So there's a lot of different ways to find us out there and we'd love for you all to connect with us and also wherever you're listening to this, make sure you're subscribing and then give us a rating, give us a review, let us know how we're doing. We want to hear about that. We want to make this thing better and more for you because it's really not about us. It's really for you guys.
Matthew Grocki: So before we jumped to the break, we we're talking a lot about this difference between accessibility and inclusive design, how you can get started, how you can make the case to stakeholders for it and why it's so important. Derek, I was curious to, to know kind of you're very passionate about this. It's very clear and you've obviously been very successful in this particular aspect of design work. How did you get started in this? Was there like an event that happened that, that causes or what was it kind of as your career went about that you said, you know, "I want to help design more inclusively, make things more accessible." Where did that come from?
Derek Featherstone: It comes from a lot of different places, I think. If I look back at my life, I was ... I can't identify one specific event, but there's a number of things that I experienced. And one of them was, I mentioned my grandfather had a stroke in the mid 1980s and I lived with my grandparents for a couple of years, not for a couple of years, but a couple of summers. So when I was working my summer job when I was still in high school, and we did a lot of stuff together as a family. I needed to help him and help him get around and I saw some of the barriers that he faced. I was born with a club foot myself, which basically means that my left leg was kind of straight forward, but my left foot was kind of pointing over to the right side of my body, so it was kind of curved and turned under. That's kind of always been with me.
Derek Featherstone: I've never really considered it a disability, but it's something that as I'm getting older now, I'm starting to notice it more. I find that my ankle is in a little bit more pain, my foot is in more pain. Not that it's like ... comparatively speaking, it's probably nearly no pain at all compared to what some other people would deal with. But it does kind of work its way up the left side of my body and that even has an impact on how long I can sit at the computer. So I alternate between a standing desk and a sitting desk and that sort of thing, which is probably good for me anyways. So I've got that, I was born with that club foot.
Derek Featherstone: I had all kinds of things when I was a ... these all sorts of different things, events happened as I was teaching. I used to teach high school and I was building web based resources for my students. And I remember very, very clearly the day that things worked for me in Internet Explorer three, but they didn't work for me in Netscape three, and I was angry. Like, "Why does it work fine there, but I can't see anything in the page in Netscape three." And that kind of led me down the path of standards, like web standards and so accessibility kind of followed from that. It really made sense to me that this medium which in the mid 1990s was when I was kind of getting into this, I looked at it and said this, "Of course this medium is for everybody. This isn't just for a privileged few, this is a medium that is for everybody in the entire world."
Derek Featherstone: That has a lot of other implications with it. But the accessibility side of that and making sure that things work for people with disabilities was a very natural fit with my mindset as as a teacher. And so when I left teaching full time and got into the web development and design side of things, I started out as mostly a developer and I kind of kept seeing all of these things where we could build a thing and have it be technically accessible, but then we found out that, yes it was technically accessible, but it wasn't actually a very good design and the design had some implications that that made it not accessible to someone with low vision or made it difficult to use because of, even though you could technically use a keyboard to make it happen, it wasn't easy to use with the keyboard.
Derek Featherstone: And so that really got me interested very early on in shifting towards the design side of things. And so it's kind of been a natural progression over time where, focusing on the design side of things is one of my ... is probably one of my most passionate things because it happens earlier in the process. And so if we can encourage people to be thinking about and advocating for and working with people with disabilities from the very beginning of a process, we have a much greater chance at achieving that accessible outcome that ends up working for everybody with any disabilities. So that's kind of the short version of it. It's kind of this confluence of events that that happened, it wasn't just one specific thing. There's a whole bunch of different things that all come together to lead me to where I am today.
Matthew Grocki: Yeah. And you know, you've had the had the advantage of being routed this for a long time. I was kind of in the same boat, started in the late nineties for myself, 98 or so, 97, 98 kind of on the web. A lot of folks who didn't start that early, don't have the benefit of remembering what IE three versus Netscape three was like, even the IE six days. Right and the hair pulling that went on all the time.
Matthew Grocki: We've come a long way with regards to that. Kind of from your perspective, looking at that over the past 20 years that you've seen this mature, where are we at today we see lately as I know you're very acutely aware of all the lawsuits, Ada lawsuits that have been happening and this is putting a little bit of fear in a number of folks and understandably so. But overall, like how are we doing on this across the web? We are obviously doing better. Do we have a long let it go? Are we doing pretty well? But what's the state of the state in your mind?
Derek Featherstone: I'll be honest, every time I think we're doing well, I look and I see something that happens and I'm like, "Oh, we're not doing well." It feels like we make progress on certain things. Even with some of our clients and large companies that we work with, we'll do things with them and we'll see how things evolve and they ... I feel like there's like waves, like there's a swell of momentum because it becomes a hot topic and then there's like things feel like we're making progress and so people will relax maybe a bit too much, and then suddenly we're like backsliding.
Derek Featherstone: We've seen that with people over time where, and probably I'm saying, with specific, not really what specific organizations, but as a whole, I think there's like these waves where we experienced this, where accessibility gets a huge mind share and people make all kinds of differences and then I don't know if people move on into different positions or if they move out of the industry or what happens. But it feels like a little bit of the tension that is required to keep it moving forward and bubbling up, disappears because everybody feels like, "Hey, we're doing pretty well." And then it kind of tails off again.
Derek Featherstone: So as much as I think there have been great things, we've seen great things happen with lots of clients as an industry, I think we keep getting to the point where we see things kind of back off a little bit and that has a pretty significant impact on overall mindset within the industry too. We think we're doing well and then, "Oh, maybe we're not doing so well." I think part of that too is our minimum bar that we set, has probably evolved over time. So we think we're doing well but we're doing ... maybe we're doing well by 1999 standards or by 2008 standards. But the kind of general culture these days is this, there is a much higher bar to what is considered success now, than there was 10 years ago.
Derek Featherstone: So it could be that it's just kind of that evolving nature of accessibility and what inclusion means, that maybe that's a big part of why it feels like we're making progress, but then we're not. We're making progress and we're judging that by past years, I want to say standards, but it's not even about the ... not as in like the standard, as in the web content accessibility guidelines. I mean just in terms of what we expect of a great user experience or customer experience.
Matthew Grocki: So let, let me follow up with that for a second, one of the things, as the chief experience officer, you are not only dealing with your team and managing a team, managing projects, you're also managing new leads or potential clients. And you're talking to folks, are you leading with the accessibility discussion or do you lead more with the inclusive design discussion? Which one tends to get folks more, I don't want to say more interested or excited, but you know, does this one term resonate more with certain individuals or certain organizations than others ... than in the other?
Derek Featherstone: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head right there. It really depends on who we're talking to and who's coming to us and why. So when people come to us, and people come to us all the time because they've been served with one of these suits, with one of these legal actions, when they come to us and if we were to talk to them right out of the gate about inclusive design, it's just not going to resonate. So it really depends on why somebody is coming to us when people are coming to us and they are being proactive and they're a very ... when we talk with them and we determined that, hey they're pretty user centric and design friendly organization that has kind of embraced design.
Derek Featherstone: Then that inclusive design discussion and leading with some of that is certainly helpful there. When we're talking with people come to us from a very legal kind of compliance perspective, it wouldn't make sense to do that. So we definitely talk on the accessibility side of things. The reality is, even when I'm talking with clients that come to us, that are desiring centric, it's still a discussion about accessibility. Because that's the outcome that we're really trying to achieve. So the inclusive design discussions tend to be things that happen, it's not like it's one, I guess what I'm saying is it's not like it's one or the other, it's both in varying degrees depending on whom were ... the people we're talking to.
Matthew Grocki: Okay, great. It's sounds a lot like what we deal with or would I deal with on the content strategy side of things, where the phone will ring sometimes and Justin's like, "Oh folks want to ... they need a new website." And then we talk to them and it's like, "Oh, they need a content strategy." Like it's not until you have these conversations where you really see what the problem is. We talk about how we need to define the problem a lot of the times before we can truly help our clients. And so it sounds like that certainly helped happens on the accessibility side of things.
Derek Featherstone: Yeah, it's exactly that. There's always ... people tend, I say this, this is not a blanket statement, even though it comes across that way, but people often think about the tactical and so they ask for the tactical and we find out when we talked to them that they actually need a good piece of the strategic side of it too, which is exactly what happened as you were saying with the content strategy.
Derek Featherstone: And sometimes it's that, I think this is like client services wide, like across all organizations, this is not like a specific thing. I think people tend to ask for the tactical because they don't know necessarily what to ask for in a strategic way. And so that's I think a thing that goes well beyond that content side of things or the accessibility side of things. It's really much broader than that. This is business right. We think tactical and we don't always necessarily think about what the broader strategic side of things is.
Matthew Grocki: Certainly, certainly I totally hear you on that. It's ... I don't think ... I haven't had many clients come to me and saying, "I need help with organizational design." But nine times out of 10, that's certainly kind of what it can manifest itself into.
Derek Featherstone: Yeah, exactly.
Matthew Grocki: Okay, great. Well, what are the things, you are really one of the foremost voices in accessibility. I know that you give a ton of talks, I know that you're maybe working on a writing project, there's a couple of different things that you are working on right now. Where can people find you? I guess, what's the best place to find you on the socials and also, what are some things that are coming up that you're going to be working on?
Derek Featherstone: I am most prolific on Twitter, that's usually the best place to find me. So I'm Feather on Twitter, just Feather F-E-A-T-H-E-R.
Matthew Grocki: But you had to get in early for that.
Derek Featherstone: Oh yeah. That's like November, 2006 that I started on there and that was back when we all talked on Twitter in the third person.
Matthew Grocki: Right, right, right. @Feather is-
Derek Featherstone: Is, exactly.
Matthew Grocki: Yep. Yep.
Derek Featherstone: I think my first tweet was something like, "@feather is joining another social network." Kind of thing. I think that was my first tweet. But I'm there. I'm also on Linkedin, just Derek Featherstone on Linkedin. You can can find me there. I'm also on Instagram, but I tend to post photos of ... that's like family life and speaker life. I post photos of my socks when I'm about to go onstage and speak at a conference and I, I post photos of the Bourbon that I drink because I need a little bit of that release as well. But I'm on Instagram as well.
Matthew Grocki: We never ... let's talk about that.
Justin Davis: We never talk ... yeah let's talk about that. So what Bourbon you drinking? We're big bourbon drinkers ourselves.
Derek Featherstone: So that the last one that I had actually was the ... my wife actually got me this bourbon advent calendar. And it was like basically 24 drams of Bourbon all sealed up came in an advent calendar box. It was amazing. But it took me an entire year to drink it. Because I just don't have that much time to kind of just sit down and do that. But yeah, it took me a year to drink it, but that was fantastic. So there was all kinds of stuff in there. Keeping track of what I most recently had though, just a little while ago I made a bourbon chicken in our instant pot. So I made a bourbon chicken recipe and I used some Wild Turkey. So the last bourbon that I had, was Wild Turkey and it was excellent.
Matthew Grocki: So Wild Turkey 101 is like my nightly driver. It's surprisingly good. I think what people hear in Wild Turkey they think, "Really? Wild Turkey?" But like Wild Turkey 101 is a pretty decent bourbon.
Justin Davis: Pretty strong one.
Derek Featherstone: I was pretty impressed, the kids, sorry that that's not going to come across right when I talk about the kids. The kids ate the bourbon chicken and they could ... they got some of that sweetness. I mean all the alcohol burns off, but that sweetness that comes with it, that is a really nice kind of buttery Bourbon, not very smokey and it's kind of like, yeah, this is ... it was perfect for the bourbon chicken and it was a great accompaniment after. So, yeah, I'm a fan.
Justin Davis: Love it.
Matthew Grocki: Well, you mention sweetness, so I do have to ask you, I saw on Twitter that you have not had chocolate this year, so-
Derek Featherstone: I have not.
Matthew Grocki: -Talked to me a little bit about that.
Derek Featherstone: Oh, it sucks. It's hard. I don't like it. I don't like it at all.
Matthew Grocki: Why would you do this to yourself?
Derek Featherstone: So we had a bunch of friends over on New Year's eve and longtime friends and we were all like, "Hey, we're going do a thing, a resolution." And so the plan was we're going to give up one thing for the entire year and then each month we're also going to give up one thing. So one thing for the entire year and then January we're going to give up X, February we'll give up Y just kind of keep going through the year.
Derek Featherstone: So I decided for my yearly thing and I was going to give up watching my phone in bed. I had convinced myself like, "Oh, it's bed time. I'm going to go to bed, but I'm going to wind down and let my mind wander by watching some Netflix." And the next thing you know, it's way too late. And it was like, "No."
Derek Featherstone: So I changed that part way through the year after January, I decided that I couldn't just say, "I'm not going to watch my phone in bed to watch Netflix or whatever." I had to change that to be, "I'm not going to watch after 10:00 PM." Because all it meant was I would sit on the couch and watch instead of going to bed.
Matthew Grocki: You found like an indoor round on your own restriction.
Derek Featherstone: Yeah, I know. I totally, totally did that to myself. So I decided, "Okay so I'm going to cut it off. I'm not going to watch anything." And I eliminated it from being the phone to being anything because I could have easily got around that as well. So basically it's like no entertainments or television, Netflix, Amazon prime, whatever after 10:00 PM. So I changed that for February. That's going well. I gave ... so that is like my goal.
Derek Featherstone: I was going to do that for the year, and then my wife said that she was going to give up chocolate for the year. And she was saying something about it and I was like, "You know what? This is going to be hard. I'm going to support her in that." Because if everybody else in the family was eating chocolate and just she wasn't, that would be like super difficult.
Derek Featherstone: So I decided to throw my hat into the ring on that one as well. And so I decided to give up chocolate for the year as well. And yeah, I don't like it, but I don't really ... I would chocolate every day, easily but I don't anymore. Like even when there's no chocolate in the house, I would go up into the cupboard and grab the bag of chocolate chips for baking-
Matthew Grocki: Oh yeah.
Derek Featherstone: Well yeah, I'm going to have some of those. So I haven't had any chocolate since December 31st and yeah, that's where I am right now with that.
Matthew Grocki: Well, good for you. I will say I'm 20 months in on not having chocolate and it is ... I want to say that it gets easier. But as I sat down this morning and my daughter sunk her teeth into a Boston cream donut with like about an inch thick chocolate glaze on top of it, I just sat there and I just, it's like, "What are you looking at?" I'm like, "Nothing. I must go into another room now."
Derek Featherstone: Wow, 20 months in, that's intense. Like I'm a month and a ... Well, I'm almost two months now and, and that's been difficult enough. 20 months? Wow. But why did you do it though?
Matthew Grocki: It was an overall goal to just try to reduce the amount of sugar intake on my end.
Derek Featherstone: Not dumb. It's reasonably healthy. Of course, I don't know ... I'm not good at doing, they say that whole all things in moderation, I'm not good at that. Like, if there is a bit of chocolate there, I will eat all of it. Because I'm like, "Yeah, I want to eat all of it." So if I could moderate a little bit better on certain things, then maybe I could allow myself chocolate. So we'll see what happens on January 1st of 2020. But for now I'm, you know, whatever, 57 days, 58 days without chocolate.
Matthew Grocki: Well, you know, as they say one day at a time, I guess.
Derek Featherstone: Yes.
Matthew Grocki: I do think that moderation is like a genetic thing. Because I'm with you, like I don't really have an ability to moderate, I would just go all in on things. I think the people who have that ability, are very special.
Derek Featherstone: Indeed. Indeed.
Matthew Grocki: Before we wrap up here, I did want to mention a couple of it ... we'll bring the conversation back to accessibility [inaudible 00:55:42] for just a second. but I wanted to mention a couple things. I know that you have got this Linkedin learning series, and if people want to get a direct link to that, then go to your Twitter account @feather and it's pinned right there at the top of, but talk a little bit about what that is and what that's for.
Derek Featherstone: Yeah. So in the Linkedin learning space there's like a ... it's a wonderful online learning community and resource that's available there for people. And I know some people that worked, so lynda.com was where things kind of started originally started and then that kind of Lynda.com got bought by Linkedin to become Linkedin Learning. And so I have friends that worked at Lynda and they asked me quite a while ago like, "Hey, could you do a course on accessibility, on the UX side of it." Because that was an underserved market really is, what can designers do on the UX side of things and how do we help people understand how accessibility is part of UX and not just a technical thing? And so they asked me to do that at course.
Derek Featherstone: And so I did that one and then they asked me a couple of years later to do a course accessibility for web design for people that are in the web design field, whether they sole practitioners or work at an agency or whatever it is. So I've got a two courses on there that I did that kind of represent that generalist approach to understanding accessibility and also a very design focused. I would say they're both great resources for getting started in accessibility and they're available on Linkedin Learning.
Derek Featherstone: So that's a thing that is ... I'm pretty proud of those courses. And I have had lots of great feedback from them. People actually tell me that they watched the course and things just made sense for them or it inspired them to explore the field of accessibility a little bit more or bring more accessibility consideration and intention into their design practice. So every time I get one of those things ... one of those messages I'm super happy about that. So that's what those Linkedin Learning courses are all about.
Matthew Grocki: So this may be a bit of a softball here., but if folks are listening to this episode and they're fired up as they should be about going in and doing more inclusive design and striving for more accessible experiences, is that the place to start? Is that where they should go to kind of dive in if they've never done this before?
Derek Featherstone: Yeah, that's a good place to start but keeping in mind that ... so those two courses were really focused on the accessibility side of it. The outcome that we're trying to achieve. They were not nearly as focused on the inclusive design side of things. So the inclusive design side of things and that's the, thank you for the softball, I'm actually working on a book right now on inclusive design and I do workshops all over the place at conferences and speak about it. Our company Level Access, we do a lot of that work as people want to get started, both with accessibility but also with the inclusive design side of things. And we have people coming to us every day kind of saying, "Hey, we need to make this a part of our practice." Many people come to us from that legal perspective, but there's just as many people, I think these days that are coming to us trying to be proactive in saying, "I work at, big fortune 500 company or fortune 100 company and we want to figure out how to make this part of our practice both from an inclusive design perspective, but also how do we incorporate accessibility into everything we do, right from design through to development and testing and how do we manage that."
Derek Featherstone: So that's one of the things that we do at Level Access is we help teams with that. We have design related activities, we have development related activities and we have a software that basically is a platform of tools that help you manage the process and incorporate accessibility into pretty much everything you do. So people can ... easiest thing is probably for people to get in touch with me, directly over Twitter or Linkedin, my DMs are open, so happy to do that. Or go to levelaccess.com and get in touch with us there and just mention that you heard me on the podcast or whatever and get in touch that way and we can set up time to talk and see about how we can help you.
Matthew Grocki: Yeah. If you guys have any accessibility questions or need any help with that, I mean from large or small, from the Dev design, whatever sides it is, definitely go check out Level Access, that levelaccess.com. We're going to link to all of this, the Linkedin learning series Level Access, everything we'll link to from the show notes as well so that you can get access to that as well.
Matthew Grocki: Well this has been great. Thank you so much for all of the incredible insight and conversation around this. This has been such a fascinating three episodes for us because I think it's allowed us to go a lot deeper into an area that maybe we didn't know as much about, and I think we have a lot greater respect for now and certainly I think it something that'll find its way into [inaudible 01:01:55] work as well, which I think is really important. So we're all learning from this and it's been a great conversation. Derek, thanks so much for being part of this.
Derek Featherstone: Very, very happy to share and happy to hear that you both picked up some stuff and it can work this into your work. We should check in, and I'm going to ... maybe I'm going to interview you on your podcast, see how things have changed six months from now and see what you're doing differently and what you're doing better.
Matthew Grocki: I love it. That's a great idea. We'll schedule that check in for sure.
Derek Featherstone: Awesome.
Matthew Grocki: Excellent. Well, listen, thanks everybody for joining us on this episode of Design By Committee. Again, we really appreciate you being part of this and we hope that it's helpful for to you. We hope that we're covering the things that help you make a bigger impact in your work and help you do your job better and make the world a more accessible and inclusive place, as well as one that is just a little bit more ... a little bit better to experience. If you want to email us at the show, you can email us and ask@dbshow.com or give us a call at (813) 485 4866 and visit us on the web @dbcshow.com where you can subscribe to the show as well as find us on Twitter and all of the other social networks.
Matthew Grocki: Thank you all again for being part of this. We will talk with you next week. All right. Very good. Derek, thanks a bunch.
Derek Featherstone: Thank you. That was fun.
Matthew Grocki: Yeah.
Justin Davis: Awesome.