Free Download Perfect Mismatch 2 In Hindi In Mp4
Blanchefle Strycker
The author of the beautiful accessibility book Mismatch, Kat Holmes, comes on to share her own personal journey and how inclusive design can take some of its greatest learnings through examining acts of exclusion.
Hello, everyone, and thanks for listening to 13 Letters. Before we get to today's episode, we have a couple quick announcements. The first thing is to give a huge thank you to our long time transcript sponsor, Diamond. What a cool company Diamond is. If you look at their website, it says Diamond is an inclusive digital agency specializing in scalable, accessible and high-performance web and mobile applications, but they're really so much more than that. They are the ones who make sure that transcripts are printed. Well, not printed, but you know what I mean, for every single episode of 13 Letters, so thank you, Diamond, for your sponsorship.
The other cool thing I wanted to share today is all of the new companies that are coming on to the Be My Eyes app to provide specialized video support to our blind community. This week, we're super excited to share that Verizon is now on Be My Eyes, so if you're a Be My Eyes user, you can now call up Verizon to get support with accessibility features as well as jobs for Humanity who just launched their new job board at blind.jobs. They're also answering calls on Be My Eyes to help you find the job that's right for you. They have companies all over the world committed to listing jobs that blind people can apply for.
Even better than that, they've committed to interviewing the top blind candidates for each. Check them out as well. If you're in the United Kingdom, our at-home COVID testing support line is off the ground with the department of health and social care in the UK. That means anyone in the UK can now use Be My Eyes for video support with home COVID testing. More to come on that front, but I just wanted to make sure everyone got the news about these wonderful announcements and more. Now, on to our episode for the week.
I know. I always say I'm excited about these interviews. I'm really stoked. Let me start this over again. I need to not actually say that. Let's start it again. Will, I can't think of any word other than excited. Why is it my vacation this week?
stupendous Salesforce, but yeah, Kat is truly stupendous. I've had the pleasure of working with her for about the past year, because she joined Salesforce as a VP of user experience, I think, in March of 2020. Anyway, she's fantastic. She has an incredible history of inclusive design expertise. She wrote a phenomenal book called Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design, which is one of my favorite books on my bookshelf. I feel really honored to work with her every day. I'm sorry, Will, that you don't have that luxury.
She tells a great story in this episode about when she explained accessibility to the CEO of Microsoft, and a light bulb went off. Of course, who knows where this was at in the journey, but I mean, Kat had a real effect among a few others at Microsoft, had a real effect on changing the course of that company with regard to accessibility.
Something that I really love about this interview is we talk a lot about what it means to be a leader, what it means to give space to people, so they can create beautiful and inclusive things. I feel like I learned a lot from her.
Well, I feel extraordinarily lucky. I'll tell you, Will, when Kat was about to join Salesforce, I was meeting with some other design leader who was like, "I can't tell you who's coming to the company. I'm not allowed to say yet, but have you read this book Mismatch?" I was like, "Oh my gosh, Kat Holmes." It's been-
It still baffles me that folks other than my mom have read my books. It's super flattering and always humbling to hear, but I have worked with a lot of accessibility teams. I have to say that Cordelia and the crew at Salesforce are some of the best I've worked with. It's nothing to diminish the other folks I've worked with, but I think we really have something special happening in our team.
I know. Well, Kat, thanks so much for being here. We're super excited to talk to you. We'll talk about your book too and all the stuff. I gotta say, though, I was reading your book over the weekend, and you pose this question in there that has so many wonderful possible answers that I just was like... Should we kick it off with this question? What was the exact way you worded it? How is a public restroom like a smartphone? I was like, "Oh my gosh, there are so many possible answers to that question."
Yes, the answer to the question. I think the metaphors and analogies and examples to help people connect with that very first moment of recognizing, "Oh, this environment I'm using is working for me, because it was designed with me in mind." It's something that when we work in digital products, it can be more challenging, I think, sometimes for folks to see that relationship between them and the product, but something like a bathroom or getting out of a vehicle. There's places where people bump into these mismatches everywhere in their lives, but drawing the correlation between that and then these really complex digital experiences that we make is something that I try to focus on, because it can feel very abstract without something like, "Okay, can you get onto this toilet? Yes or no?"
No, it's great. It's great. It's an example that no matter where I go, and I'm amazed... I've really been lucky to speak and visit and meet with a really wide range of people from healthcare to financial, big banks to high tech to middle school students. Everywhere I go, if I put up a picture of a toilet, we can have a conversation. We can all have a similar conversation, and I use an example of one that has a digital sensor on the back as a flushing mechanism. It's just such a great example that everybody can get into to say, "Wait a minute, we thought we're doing maybe something innovative by putting a sensor or a touchscreen or something into an environment."
But the moment we do that, it creates new kinds of mismatches, and requires different abilities to interact with. What is true for a public restroom or bathroom with a digital sensor is true for a touchscreen inside of a grocery store, or to buy a ticket to the subway. The moment we put that "innovation" into an environment, it dramatically changes who and who cannot use that interaction.
Oh, gosh, I was born and raised in Oakland, California, and was there all the way through my undergraduate degree. I'm a Bay Area native at heart, East Bay. My parents chose to raise us there because we're a multiracial family. It's a place where there are a lot of different backgrounds, identities, but also, really active place for conversations around diversity, and growing up in Oakland and spent a lot of time in Berkeley as well as a child, those are the birthplaces of a lot of different types of social justice and political action movements, including a huge portion of the independent living movement. But what's fascinating is I grew up...
It wasn't until I was at Berkeley for college that I learned about Ed Roberts and the work that he and so many students at UC Berkeley did and in Berkeley, the city, to really fight for and also bring the next level of awareness on what accessibility and environments meant and look like. Walking through the campus every day not fully aware of that history just baffles me. It always stuck with me that for all the kind of conversations we have about the Free Speech Movement and Civil Rights Movement. I didn't learn about independent living movement.
I didn't learn about disability rights and disability justice leaders, disability inclusion leaders, and I didn't certainly learn about accessibility in my education as an engineer. I studied material science engineering in college, and mechanical engineering, and thought I was going to design prosthetics.
I have no clear line I can draw for you in terms of why, other than I... Within my community growing up, the combination of arts and sciences and people that I had an... adults and teachers I learned from my head teachers who themselves had worked in a lot of different social justice movements, teachers with disabilities. Part of my awareness, I think, coming into school was so many of the assistive technologies and the system devices were basically medical devices first and foremost. As a kid who loved art, and then I was a huge math nerd, it always felt like something that was expressive.
Well, just because something replicates a medical like... There's a huge conversation that I don't think we have nearly enough in our workspaces about the impact of a design and how it can send a signal of being a patient or needing help or needing... The design itself indicates the relationship, especially as a signal to people around us of a device that looks like a medical device maybe indicates something different than a prosthetic that is expressive and beautiful, something that's... I remember seeing this prosthetic arm that was leather and gold painted on it, and look nothing like trying to replicate a human arm.
It was an expression of a person in a way that was very personal. I just always thought about that matching up of between a human and the technology that's pretty intimate to each of us is a place where a lot of art and beauty could happen if we thought about it through a human lens as opposed through a medical lens. Then I also was really excited about the idea. This is the time where bio tech growing bone, growing... It was just one of those times in the field where there was a lot of what if, what could we create through the mediums that maybe are less rigid and more fluid instead of-
Huge ethical questions that were coming up at that time. This is during the first tech, boom, mid 90s. It was also a time where a lot of my peers were heading straight to a start up, quitting school for six-figure jobs. I've always been a... I'm not a Luddite, but I'm definitely old school at heart. But if you make something, you make it so it's built to last, and understanding the very basic material level, how something works, was really interesting to me. That's to say that that was the depth of my nerdiness at that time, which still, of course is part of who I am.
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