and generally speaking all of the innovation is great no matter what with the field is but in most of those cases the access to that innovation on a global scale is still extremely limited  so in an effort to really establish a solid benchmark and always deliver an a game an a quality experience or product or service or whatever it is we're working on the question becomes not can we innovate by  definition humans that is what enabled us to survive our ability to innovate so it's not can we innovate but rather in what ways can we increase the chances for a majority of people in the world access that innovation that we're kicking out as early as possible and so one example of that is prosthetics prosthetics have come a very long way and i can geek out on the o an exoskeleton and while that's great d printing in particular is one of the ways the hurdle of access is removed because it's more affordable it's because the material itself is more affordable and the same holds true for software and that for me in particular is something that i've come to focus deeply on you know we know that you generally speaking around the world wouldn't construct a building without having a wheelchair ramp why are we building software digital products without accounting for who  and if there's one thing that i want everyone no matter the designer engineer product manager stakeholder someone just generally interested in the topic if there is one thing i want you to get out of this talk it's that  organizations you may need to have a discussion about resource allocation and the like there are a number of quick wins quick hits that can be baked in right now with little to no bottlenecks just to have those really nice for your team and not need to necessarily worry about a number of extra resources and let's start simply by educating ourselves as individuals and learning how to apply it in our everyday work but i think the one thing i've come to realize is that it starts first and foremost by being able to acknowledge the existence of individuals by being able to  people first one thing that i don't think a lot of people realize is that only fifty nine percent of individuals have access to the internet and when we think internet for me i  grew up at one point having the internet in my house but it wasn't a default my daughter doesn't know what it looks like to get onto the internet or sign onto the internet because by default you're just on but what actually is the internet the internet is preventative health it's education it's business building to help your family go from one income level to the next and so when i think about fifty nine percent i mean generally speaking anything more than fifty one percent is a majority but i always like to understand what that secondary number is the related number fifty nine percent  world of how many billion people are we at now is very low ultimately we need to make the world's software accessible we need to make it so that we're not just thinking by default  stereotypical images that come to mind when we hear accessibility there's so much more that comes to it just for some background at stark our mission is to make the world's digital managers already use stark ends up meeting people where they are and we optimize their workflow through intelligent automation the result is a significant reduction in cost and decrease in time to compliance and financial and legal risk which gold standard you know removing the stigmas that come with this work and changing the framework of how it's approached by teams and making this work human approachable education was always the pillar but one thing we've come to realize is that one of the biggest hurdles for us in tech is an education hurdle that is an access hurdle for us i remember when we first started building stark and we were running through can't it's blocking me from being able to ensure what i'm doing is compliant what i'm doing isn't excluding individuals by default out of the gate right i can't talk about how i  designed and built a product that had this phenomenal experience by default it excludes a number of individuals when you're having these conversations with stakeholders or we're in conversations with fortune five hundred board members the word compliance scares the shit out of people and it's because it's directly correlated to things like lawsuit and profit loss and customer loss and very well it should be  we've come to find that the conversation can be made so much more streamlined when we get to the root of what's happening when we get to the root of making clear that your product is accessible because it meets these guidelines much like other guidelines you have to meet you have to meet accessible you need to do what is necessary to ensure you're not excluding based on these general profiles and i'm gonna cover a multitude of ways that you can ensure that  we're gonna design and ship something that's cross platform and that's exciting that's increased market reach right but products need to succeed more so across abilities not just across platforms and one can argue certain platforms are more accessible than others but you reach more on an individual platform when you don't exclude than shipping they can't access their money they can't access being able to order their next prescription because the software wasn't translated in their native language you only have access to one arm because your newborn child is in your other arm situational i'd call it inability and for some it may be a disability but in this case it's an inability being born to this world second by second at astronomical rates and so you see just how that downplaying of whether or not this was something worth paying attention to became a very high multiple that is problematic if you don't address it not only again are you excluding individuals realistically the moves that companies make are always strategic when pitching those stakeholders you have to talk about numbers i wish we lived in a world where it could only be from the perspective of this is just the right thing to do but they're looking to see that they're getting a return on their investment and so when you don't account for the mass multiples that are happening with just using this framework in your process you realize how much what we were just talking about what's the bottom line the bottom line is increased market reach it's minimizing your financial and legal risk it's maximizing your brand value these are the things  very pointed statement to say this was important and this would be a core focus and so in those cases you have a few things that come together one is you know executives that are making a conscious decision to make this a core focus then you also have the question of well how the hell do you allocate resources for this right because it becomes a topic of resource allocation and load  balancing and figuring out how much do you invest now and how much of the return is going to come from that and over what time horizon that's that formula that stark is working on for organizations because when you control the currency you have a very different conversation and that ultimately is the way any conversation navigate that conversation but realistically there are like i said quick wins to implement now realistically colors matter and so does contrast evaluating your design  potentially be like for some individuals but realistically when it comes to blurred vision the odds are likely that a lot of you much like experience that and if you're young and have absolutely perfect vision well enjoy it while you can so the other thing is write good alt text  whether an individual simply is unable to see an image or internet connection data connection is not great images won't load and individuals deserve to know what the context of that image is even though they can't physically see it at the time that's part of the experience and writing really good alt text ensures they can experience it despite that individual not being at this point there's absolutely no excuse why this shouldn't be the case i understand that there are a number of organizations that we've worked with that simply don't have a testing process which is i would argue a much easier  segue into establishing one versus a company that has a testing process and that completely excludes a diverse group of individuals because you're having a very different conversation at that point but by including a diverse group of individuals in user testing it achieves the same goal as you ensuring your team is diverse by doing so you don't hinder innovation there certain things for you as a team if you fall into this what we call the male pale yale category that you can't anticipate that you can't account for like even myself as a white woman i cannot understand or rather i can be compassionate to but i can't empathize with the struggles with certain software or the bias in technology that a black woman experiences and so how the hell am i supposed to solve the problem if i don't truly understand the problem and i can't account for these things in testing having your team diverse ensures that you have a product that is reflective of the people that use it right our goal is to create a product that has  opinion and because it has opinion it has character and because it has character it has soul it feels human people can fall in love with it you can't do that if your product is a reflection of your team and your team is not even remotely diverse is great but we need to make sure that the products that we're designing and shipping into this world put people first and account for the individuals that have too long been forgotten the individuals that generally weren't invited to that lunch table to sit and eat and if they were invited were not encouraged to  participate in the conversation and i think we're at a point now where  be designers be engineers our jobs can't be to just you know push around squares or push pixels that's not our fucking job your job is to solve the problem your job is to service the business your do what's responsible what you signed up to with your craft and of course there's a ton of help out there at the risk of self plugging the stark community is phenomenal  there's so much help readily available to you you can ignore the entire stark team and the entire stark product if you want to and still get a ton of educational material and benefit from the amazing individuals that participate in that community on a regular basis so if there are any questions please don't hesitate to reach out to me either on twitter imcatnoone or email catgetstark  cameron so i love this idea of like new generations having different expectations can you take a much broader approach to building stark and doing that i had to pay attention to understand what technology looks like or will look like five ten  and we said we need to develop a model for this community driven consumer grade and enterprise ready company by doing so we pressed this idea that younger people who are sort of digital natives i guess if you can say that expect a certain level of quality regardless of what their disability status is or it's one of those trade offs i know that needs to be in there and i know it'll directly compete but it being defaulted in the software that we use sends a very clear signal to individuals that are us cameron awesome i'm gonna cue up a question from marcelo i think you can see the question there but it says how do you see the design industry accelerating to bring fortune five hundred companies is happening who are the individuals responsible for implementing that for kicking off those initiatives design right so i think it's like one of those things where  not yet nailed down that accessibility is a by product and once we understand that the start of that is design and anything else is ass backwards then we get to a point  where we start to invoke true change otherwise it's gonna be you know there's either there's a couple of things that are either gonna happen one we start to see more designers hit the boardroom first about a five year process so far and they're not done yet but what they started was creating an entire company wide design system to at least kickstart that project and then what needs to happen is they need to account for  twenty whatever how many decades of legacy tech debt that they have to rectify this is a multimillion dollar project but they invest in it because they know what the time horizon the return on th a few ways one they can accept that the majority of the time they are biased actually accepting that bias the other is having a design team that don't look like that entire category right just white male pale yale able bodied quote unquote like fitting into these stereotypical silicon valley categories that we've all come to know right that is the reason why that's how we got here in the first place and  they reflect their creator's world view and subjective lens and for quite some time now even before tech these same groups of people have been overseeing these faulty data unseen and forgotten and as data progresses that loop ends up snowballing in the same way that innovation snowballs we're dealing with machine learning models that we're designing and building and if they're taught long enough not being like a b c white able bodied cisgender means not being normal they're building on that foundation and that starts in the design process that starts by designers determining who it is we choose to recognize in our  knowing that because then you have a design driven organization but unfortunately we're not at a point where the majority of the organizations the fortune five hundred or whatever tier you want to categorize  are design driven or community driven organizations right and we're at a point where data is currency we're gonna do everything we can to ensure we still collect that  having said that worth noting that there's also organizations that have chiefs of diversity and inclusion and they completely shaft that role because it's just for show and it doesn't do it isn't specifically dedicated is any organization specifically dedicated to accessibility except accessibility organizations you know i don't think we're there yet themselves as an inclusive first organization that's the only reason why i wouldn't like i wouldn't bucket it there but i may be wrong for doing that what do you think m