New Adventures 2019 - Helen Joy's Whose Design is it Anyway

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Helen Joy gave a great talk about inclusive design, full of brilliant explanations for why it is is important and how to get better at it. But there were a couple of stories she told that I will not forget easily, both stories were about mechanics. One had to traipse from the garage through multiple workshops to get to the computer, which could be being used already by somebody else. The other was about someone who when in a user research session explained how a good feature for the website would be for it to talk to him because of his bad dyslexia.

Apparently he could talk to it through Dragon Naturally Speaking but not the other way around. So someone on Helen's team installed a Chrome extension for text-to-speech... he called this "life changing". Both of these people would have been classed as near expert on the Digital Inclusion Scale. Incredible really to think of the things I can do on my mobile phone that other people would call life changing or need to drop everything and wait in line for a computer to do.

We are lucky to be in the positions we are as folk that make the web and it just shows using our skillset a little bit to do something simple like add a Chrome extension can actually be a massive weight of someone else's shoulder. Here are my notes of Helen's really interesting talk.

Feel free to read the rest of my notes from New Adventures.