[VANESSA] It looks like we've all sat down. 
It looks like we've
eaten all the pizza which is wonderful, 
we've had some wonderful chats
Please welcome, Dawn!
[applause] Hi! So,
I was supposed to come here today 
to talk to everyone about accessibility
Unfortunately before I got here, 
my talk got disabled so I'm actually
going to spend the next 45 minutes or so
explaining to you how you would go about 
re-enabling it
If that doesn't make sense now, don't worry.
It should make sense
at the end of the 45 minutes
uh, if you still have questions
you can ask them then.
So, Who am I?
I have already been introduced but 
here's the longer bio um
My name is Dawn. I work at MYOB
I am an accidental accessibility advocate
and in my spare time I am also an 
occasional author and kitchen alchemist
Sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn't
And a raging sports-ball fan, 
which is why that picture up there
is a picture of me at Marvel Stadium.
Now accidental accessibility advocate is 
kind of an interesting phrase
Uh, you might be wondering a bit about that 
and I wouldn't blame you
because those are words that you wouldn't
necessarily think about
being strung together in a sentence.
Accessibility advocate sure, 
but where does the accidental come from?
Well... typically from things like this
[nervous audience laughter]
Perhaps not particularly useful 
when your accessible bathroom
is up a set of stairs. 
Particularly given that
the universal wheelchair symbol 
does actually have
something that symbolises a wheel in it.
So before we get into the meat of this talk
we should probably
define a couple of terms.
Um, first of all disability, which is
a continuing condition which restricts 
everyday activities.
Uh, that's the legal definition 
that's used in Australia
"Continuing" being a condition that's 
expected to last
for six months or more.
"Restricting Everyday Activities" I think is
fairly self explanatory.
And accessibility is not JUST a term
about disability
Basically, in a nutshell, it's the degree to which
a thing or activity or something 
can be done by everyone.
So, something could be 
'accessible' or 'inaccessible'
but something might be accessible to blind people 
but not to deaf people
It might be accessible to white people 
but not to black people
It might be accessible to men
but not to women
There are a lot of different ways 
that you can break down accessibility
and saying that something is "accessible" 
doesn't mean that it's
accessible for everyone. 
It's a very nuanced term.
Now this is where we get political 
for a minute so,  please forgive me.
Um, there are briefly two ways 
that you consider...
can consider disability. 
There's the medical model and the social model
The medical model effectively holds that 
disability is a problem
It's something to be cured, 
it's something to be solved
As you can see we've got our doctor there
comforting the patient in a wheelchair.
On the other hand, the social model holds that
It's not actually disability that's the problem,
it's the fact that disability makes things
inaccessible for people
in that our society is not really 
designed for disabled people
so it's not disability then that's the problem
but accessibility.
and when the social model goes well 
we get things like this.
We've got our wheelchair users here 
playing wheelchair sports
who all look quite happy with that
and they're able to do that because 
we have adapted things to them
We've set it up so that rather than considering
their DISABILITY a problem 
and something to cure
we've set it up so that they can 
get involved with things
We've adapted activities, 
we've made them accessible.
And the medical model has it's values
I wouldn't want to dismiss it entirely 
but for the purposes of this talk
We're basically going to talking 
about things in terms of
the social model of disability.
Let's define a couple more terms 
before we keep going
Accessible design is basically about
building a world that everyone can 
navigate and use and as I said before
that's not just about disability. 
If you have an AI
that doesn't recognise black people's faces 
that's not an especially
accessible piece of design 
and adaptive technology
are tools that disabled people use 
to improve access
Now that can be very low tech.
This - my walking stick
is a piece of adaptive technology.
Other pieces of adaptive technology might be...
alternative and augmentative communication
that people who are unable to speak might use.
Wheelchairs are a form of adaptive technology.
So, adaptive technology. 
There are a lot of different
things that encompass that term 
but it's something that when you're
designing for accessibility 
you're going to run into a lot
And if you're here I feel pretty safe in saying, 
this is part of your job
Accessibility is something we should do 
from the ground up
it's something that, if you integrate the 
concept of accessible design
into everything you do then 
you don't have to worry then about
the things that you build
but if you don't think about it then
people can't use what you build.
And accessible design, typically, is good design.
What do I mean by this? 
Namely that if you follow
the principles of good design 
then the things that you build are
more likely than not to be accessible.
The better your
design principles are the less work you're going to have to do
to make the things that you design 
accessible to everyone.
This is an example of bad design. This is arngren.net
and I didn't have to look very hard to find this.
It's actually on quite a number of 
'Top 10 Worst Websites Ever' lists.
We've got, as you can see, a lot of 
different colours.
Not particularly much structure. 
A bunch of pictures with
not really much information about what they mean.
Maybe it would make more sense 
if you spoke Norwegian but it's still not
really ideal in terms of the way that 
we design things.
And unsurprisingly, uh, it's not accessible.
You cannot get around it with keyboard navigation.
It's very hard to get around if you're colourblind.
There are a lot of issues with accessibility 
with this website
that become very obvious because
it's badly designed in the first place
And then there's 'distincive design.' 
This is Ling's Cars.
It may or may not surprise you to learn that this is actually
one of the most successful car leasing businesses in the UK.
And Ling, the titular owner, has very much built a brand around
this distinctive website. 
Um, now there's a lot of flashing text.
That uh, tongue is animated. The stop sign is animated.
Ling's face in the top-left-hand corner 
is animated. And my favourite,
which I couldn't actually get into the 
screenshot if the animated GIF of
Boris Johnson [audience laughter] 
just below the YouTube video
describing the 'Boris Brexit Guarantee' 
[audience laughs and moans]
Now, Ling's Cars is distinctive. 
It's built a brand.
And it's accessible in some aspects 
but not in others.
A lot of the pictures do not have alt text, 
so someone tabbing around
does not actually know what those pictures are 
if they can't see them.
The menu is relatively accessible 
but it's not great.
It doesn't scale well.
So there a lot of issues with the site 
that you kind of have to consider.
If... that when you're building 
a distinctive brand
something that's a bit out of the norm,
you may have to go
to a little bit of extra trouble 
to make things accessible.
Now if we want to talk about good design,
here's a website that probably everyone here uses
on a fairly regular basis and that is GitHub.
Now, GitHub is not perfect. 
GitHub is not perfectly accessible
but GitHub is a very good baseline to look at in terms of accessibility.
One of the things that they do 
that is really good for both
accessibility and general design is...
that top bar.
The four pieces of information there are not 
'Home, Contents, Help'
it's 'Pull Request, Issues, 
Marketplace, Explore' and that's because
if you're going around GitHub
those are probably going to be
the four places that you're 
most commonly going to go to.
It scales very well.
It doesn't use colour as a sole way
to convey information anywhere.
You can always, even with that colour strip 
that tells you what language it is
you can mouse over and get at tool tip 
that will actually
give you that in text.
And this is actually the, uh, repository for NVDA
which is a free, open source screen reader for windows
And the reason that they use GitHub 
is because it's really accessible
to screen reader users if they want to 
submit a bug with the software
or raise a new feature request. 
The users of NVDA and the creators of NVDA
have worked out, this is actually the 
most accessible way to do this.
So, that in and of itself kind of [humm] 
speaks to how good an example it
GitHub is of both good design and accessibility.
If you want to do this, there are 
a lot of resources out there.
The 'Web Content Accessibility Guidelines' are
kind of the baseline that everyone goes by.
And 'The Acessibility Project' built a...
an accessibility checklist
off that which is a simpler, easier to understand way
that you can go through and work out 
does your website
actually meet these guidelines.
And if we've got any DevOps people in the room
uh, that can actually be automated 
into your build pipelines.
Um, the 'axe Acessibility Checker' 
is the one that I've used
because it's one of the ones 
that's been around the longest
but there are a number of open source projects 
that will allow you
to automate as much of the accessibility guidelines 
as possible.
and you can even integrate them into 
your build pipeline
and they will tell you when 
things that you're doing fail
the 'Web Content Acessibility Guidelines' checks.
If you're looking at some more specific examples
colourblindness is one of the big ones 
because that's about 5% of the
population have some form of colourblindness 
and so you've got
the 'Web Page Filter', you've got the 'Image Filter'.
Um, the one that I really like is the 'Colour Oracle Desktop Filter'
because that's a piece of software 
that you can install on your desktop
and just select it and it will give 
you all of the different types of
colourblindness including blue 
colourblindness and monochrome
vision which are fairly uncommon.
And if you want to
test how accessible your site is 
with a screen reader,
the Paciello group put together 
a list of basic screen reader commands
which will allow you to install 
any of the commonly used screen readers
NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, 
there are a couple of others
and go through your website using 
those instructions
which is something that I 
absolutely recommend that you do.
Guidelines are great. 
Unfortunately, when we're dealing
with accessibility, 
one of the issues is that the
guidelines don't actually tell the whole story.
I mentioned the 'Web Content 
Accessibility Guidelines' earlier
One of the things that 
really irritates me about them is that
they don't cover all accessibility requirements 
namely,
one that I actually need; minimum font size 
on a webpage.
They have recommendations about 
how big font should be but uh,
and they say that it should be... zoomed up.
You should be able to zoom it up to 200X but
if you're giving me a 6pt font 
and then telling me to zoom that up to 200X
uh, 200x 6pt is still *pretty* small. 
So you need to wary of
what if someone has accessibility requirements
that the guidelines don't cover? 
What if different groups of people
have clashing requirements? 
And vision impairments is a good
uh, one to talk about here because
some people with different 
vision impairments can have
requirements for things that 
clash with each other.
Um, some people with vision impairments 
need to use light modes
some people with vision impairments 
need to use high-contrast modes
which tend to be dark modes 
and that can depend on
if you have issues with the amount of light 
that your eyes let in.
So sometimes you kind of have to be aware 
that there's a degree of
customisation that you might have to do 
to get things to work.
What if you're overwriting someone's 
local accessibility settings?
This happens depressingly frequently, 
that you'll
look around and you'll see blog posts or 
comments or
people have called call centers and said "Hey!
I've installed your software on my desktop 
and I use High Contrast mode
and your software is overwriting it. 
It won't let me actually see things
in High Contrast mode. 
So it's worth clicking around the accessibility
requirements and checking to make sure 
that you're not actually
overwriting anyone's settings.
What if the guidelines are misleading?
There are couple of interesting cases for this and one of them is the
contrast requirement that you get in
'Web Content Accessibility Guidelines'
because if you have a light blue button 
on a white background
with black text, that's going to 
pass the guidelines
but it's still very very difficult to see.
On the other hand, if you put white text 
on your light blue button,
that's going to fail the guidelines 
but is going to be much easier to see.
Someone actually did a study of this, looking at
light blue and light orange buttons
with both colourblind and non-colourblind users.
and found that if those buttons 
were on a white background -
despite the fact that they would fail 
the content checkers -
it was actually better off to have white text
because people usually couldn't see 
the black text.
So you need to be aware of those kinds of edge cases
when you're developing for this sort of thing.
What if the guideline's priorities 
are wrong for your use case?
If you have a website with lots of deaf users
and you're using something
like the 'Web Content Accessibility Guidelines' 
which tends to be more
focused towards keyboard users, 
screen readers and blind users.
That might not actually be the best use case.
Um, so if you know that you're building a website that's going to cater
to one particular type of disability 
or you do focus testing and
you discover that you've got a lot of users 
with one type of disability
It's worth going out and looking to see 
whether you can find a guideline
that's actually specifically designed 
for those kinds of users.
What if the guidelines only cover good, 
not better?
I'm sure that just about everyone here 
has heard of the 80/20 principle
and the guidelines will cover 80% of the 
use cases that you come up against
but that other 20% are going to come through 
your call centers
they're going to come through people 
complaining in blog posts
and on forums and those are the 20% 
that you're going to have to put
a lot of work into, so it's good to be aware
that while the guidelines are a starting point
they're not actually going to tell you 
everything that you need to know
So, with all of that in mind, 
how does design go wrong?
This is Atlassian Confluence.
I'm fairly sure that most people hear will have -
[audience chuckling]
yeah... there's a few laughs in the audience
[audience murmering]
I'm sure that most people here 
have heard of Confluence
Um, it's a piece of software - for anyone 
who hasn't heard of it - that
allows you to set up documentation 
and share it around an organisation
and this is a fairly standard view of 
what a Confluence space,
which is like a group's documentation, 
will look like.
And if you want to create a new space,
or a new document in that space
You go through. You look at this dialog.
You click a button.
You create a web page 
that looks something like this.
Looks fine right? 
Let's go back and have another look at that.
Despite the fact that this web page was created
in my space.
And you can tell because my name's up there.
The page itself was actually created 
by someone called Matthew Gregory
That's not me. That's my manager.
This is why. Because when I try to create a page on my 
zoomed in 200x screen
the create button's cut off the bottom of it.
See that red circle?
Oops.
So you can kind of get around the pop-up.
You can get to a point where 
you can go through halfway through
the process of actually creating a page 
but when you want to create it, uh
that button's cut off the bottom of the screen and
I'm sure you can image the difficulty this causes
if you want to create a page 
and you have to get someone else to do it for you
every time because the buttons are disappearing.
So how do we improve it? Um,
make sure that UI elements are scrollable
and that nothing is cut off 
the bottom of the screen.
And some people, and some websites do this 
even when they're not zoomed in
which kind of boggles my mind a little bit 
but play around.
Zoom things in, zoom them out - have a look. 
Make sure that you're not
cutting everything off 
and if you can have a pop-up that
scrolls with the page or a pop-up 
that you can scroll from top to bottom,
that's going to be the best way to do this.
Test your pop-up windows for basic accessibility.
Are you blocking out other UI elements?
Can you actually close them if -
Can they be navigated using adaptive technology?
Can someone with a screen reader 
or using keyboard navigation
get around the pop-up and actually manage 
to successfully close it?
And ultimately, if you want to do this properly, um
- either magnify your screen yourself 
or get users of magnified screens
to test your application 
because this is one of the most common
accessibility use cases 
that you're going to run into.
"I need a human screen reader"
I wasn't the person who said that, um.
This was said by my friend's grandmother 
who due to her disability, uh
degenerative, um, genetic disease. 
Uh, later on in life became blind
And was fairly tech savvy so 
she used a screen reader to navigate around
the internet. Now, my friend's grandmother 
was a person of faith
and she used the 'patheos' website 
which bills itself as "Hosting the
Conversation on Faith" to keep in contact 
with her religious community
and when she started using it in late 2016, 
it looked something like this
Now, this is a snapshot from the WayBack Machine
and some of
the design here is not ideal 
but you'd be able to see fairly clearly
there are tabs, um, 
it's relatively easy to navigate around it
the text is clear, 
there aren't too many clashing colours.
So, if you wanted to get around this 
with a screen reader
it wasn't perfect but it was navigable.
Then in late 2017, early 2018, patheos went through a re-design and
after the re-design it looks like this...
Now I can't actually show you 
the problems with this website
because modern browsers, the ones that, uh,
the new, latest versions of 
Chrome, Firefox and Safari
that were released about six months ago, uh,
think that the advertisements 
and the pop-up videos are so obnoxious
that they block them on sight.  
See that text down there?
That's... that's the remnants 
of one of the advertisements
that gets blocked on sight. 
I wasn't using an adblocker
when I took this screenshot. 
It just blocks it out.
And that made my friend's grandmother 
feel something like this.
Uh, she was pretty frustrated 
and she was not very happy.
because when you rely on websites to get around
keep in contact with communities 
and you're not able to do that anymore
that's incredibly frustrating.
Coles, the retailer, actually 
got sued at one point because
a screen reader user couldn't 
place orders through their website
and they lost that case and now
if you want to look at examples of accessibility
Coles is one of them
because now they know they have to do it.
[audience laughter]
[humoured sigh] So, that's not great, is it?
Oops.
And one of the main issues with this website 
was the auto-playing videos
because if you're trying to navigate 
around a website
with a screen reader, the sound on 
auto-playing videos will talk over it
which means that when you're trying to 
tab around a website,
if you can't actually hear 
what the tabs are telling you in terms of
shutting up that video, you're going to be
navigating around it for a very long time.
And if you can't see you're not going to know 
where the video is on the page
which make it really hard to close it.
And when they have the pop-up ads 
that were clipping over other elements
and were not correctly placed in the dong.
That also made websites
very very hard to navigate because 
every sing- second thing you'd
pick up would be an advertisment.
Now, there is a thing called 'reader mode'
Safari has it.
I believe that Chrome and Firefox now have it.
Where you can click a button which 
w- in Safari is in your address bar
And that will bring up basically a version of the page that just has
the text and pictures everything else
 is stripped out and that's great
except that in order to do that 
you need to properly format your HTML
so you need to make sure the text is 
IN &lt;div tags&gt; IN paragraph tags
So that it can be picked up. 
Unfortunately, the designers of patheos
didn't actually do this so 
reader mode couldn't be used
on the website either.
So, how do we improve it?
Well, this should be obvious 
as it's a good design principle but
let people decide whether they want to play videos
instead of auto-playing them. 
I'm fairly sure that everyone here
knows about the annoyance 
that auto-playing videos cause
and they're also an accessibility issue
which is just one more good reason not to do this.
If you do have pop-up elements on your website
which is sometimes going to be unavoidable
you want to make it easy for users of 
screen readers to close them
and so that means having them placed 
in an area where they're unobtrusive
And making sure that 
they're correctly placed in the dong
So that if someone wants to get around a menu
they can do that without having to worry 
about the pop-ups.
It's always a good idea to check to see 
whether Reader Mode
works on your website. It - 
provided that you have Safari installed or
one of the other browsers that has it 
and I'm not giving a list because
I can't remember what they are. 
You can just click that button.
See if it works, see if the button 
appears on your website.
And if it doesn't there are instructions on the web 
for how to set this up.
And in terms of testing, put on a blindfold, 
cover your screen
get that list of commands up and 
have a go at navigating your website
yourself with a screen reader. 
I actually did this with someone at work
who wanted to know how accessible 
their website was
it took me about 15 minutes to 
find the first accessibility issue
and after we'd gone through it for an hour, 
we discovered that
a large amount of the text 
which was contextual information that people
needed to be able to use that particular page, 
was not being read out.
and that's not necessarily a failure 
on people's part it's just
something you wouldn't actually know 
unless you try it yourself.
Does anyone here remember GeoCities?
[audience murmurs]
Yep. Smiles and nods. 
There are a few people in the audience
who are old enough to remember GeoCities.
For anyone who's NOT old enough to 
remember GeoCities
um, websites that were created with GeoCities 
tended to look something
like this. Now, I don't actually know 
what any of this says
because it's in Thai but, um, 
we've got the classic clashing colours
animated penguin, um, text that 
doesn't really go anywhere
All that's missing is a few dancing elements.
Now, GeoCities is actually dead. 
It was owned by Yahoo!
and they killed it off, I believe, in March of 2019.
Unfortunately,
there are still a few people out there 
from the GeoCites era
who think that some of the, um, 
quirkier elements of GeoCities design
are a good thing to use in their 
corporate websites.
Which is basically the equivalent of taking your 
fancy corporate website
"We are very amazing and we will show you why"
and putting a Nyan Cat on it.
[loud audience laughter]
I have a friend who has photosensitive epilepsy
and she had something of an encounter 
with one of these um - enterprising
designers who works for a company 
that shall remain unnamed
He had decided that in order to spruce up 
their corporate website
he was going to re-design the homepage, 
and as part of that re-design
he turned about two thirds of the homepage
into a giant, strobing, pink element.
My friend, who has photosensitive epilepsy
heard about the company,
went to check it out, and had a seizure.
Which resulted
in a phone call that I think the designer probably didn't want to have.
[audience laughs]
Oops.
The thing about photosensitive epilepsy is that
if you've ever seen old video games, and some new video games
that have a warning on the back of them that says
"this game contains
flashing and strobing effects
please be aware of it if you're sensitive
to that". That's generally for the benefit 
of people with
photosensitive epilepsy because 
flashing, flickering and strobing
effects are a major cause of seizures.
Now photosensitive epilepsy itself 
IS a spectrum from mild to severe
So my friend obviously being on the 
more severe end of the spectrum
does run into these issues more frequently 
than she would like
but in this case, because the giant 
strobing element was saturated pink
which is one of the most likely colours 
to trigger seizures
um, perhaps that could have been 
designed a bit better
So how do we improve it? 
Well, the obvious thing here is
if you can possibly avoid it, 
don't use flashing, flickering, strobing
type effects on your websites. 
Um, even for people who don't have
photosensitive epilepsy there are a lot of people who are sensitive
to this so it's generally better not to do it 
if you can avoid it.
If you do need to, you want to make sure 
that they're low contrast.
So if you have, say, a dark green and a dark blue 
where there's not a lot of
contrast between those two colours, 
um, that's going to be a lot better
for someone with photosensitive epilepsy 
than flashing between
bright red and white or flashing between 
bright red and bright green.
And try and limit the size. So don't do the thing of
let's have a top banner that's, you know, bright pink and strobing, um,
that's where you're going to run into a lot of those issues.
And don't use saturated reds and pinks if you can.
Even if it's your brand colours 
you can probably tone it down a bit
a little bit, you can use 
alternative brand colours. You can use
slightly lighter versions of the colours 
which will help a little bit
and if you need to, and you want to do this very well, you can give people
the option to disable flashing effects and animations on your website
entirely and that's not just 
beneficial for people
with photosensitive epilepsy 
that can also save everyone else time.
Now there is actually a reasonable amount 
of precedent for
disabled people being involved in 
integrated sports.
Rejto Ildiko, the hungarian fencer 
won several medals at the olympics
Whitly Loper, the American trap shooter 
also competed in the Olympics
and more recently, Shaquem Griffin, um, 
went through college football
and now competes in the American's NFL, 
the National Football League,
for the Seattle Seahawks. 
There are also more modern versions of sports
and I'm sure that SOME of the people 
in the audience would have heard
about Esports which is what this case study 
is about.
Specifically League of Legends.
Now, League of Legends 
for those who aren't aware of it is
basically a team game where you have teams of five people who aim to
defeat the other team and 
people can pick different champions
with different abilities 
and one of those champions is Tahm Kench
the titular catfish. 
Now, when he was first introduced he had a mechanic
that no other characters in this game had, 
which was called grey health.
And this is where we find out 
how many colourblind people
are in the audience tonight because anyone who's not colourblind
will be able to see that to the 
right-hand side of those bars
there's a little area that's kind of
very light red and very light green
Now, the rest of that bar is grey health 
which basically indicates that
this character is currently unkillable but...
if you run a colourblind filter over that - 
that's not so clear.
And unfortunately for Riot Games, 
the creator of League of Legends, um
that resulted in this tweet 
from a professional player.
"If you didn't know, I'm colourblind along with 
[two other members of my
team] all 3 of us can't see 
what health he's at in colourblind mode"
"he" of course here being Tahm Kench. 
Uh, what this meant was that they
never knew whether the opposing player 
was about to die or not
which made it very difficult to actually 
play the game and do their job.
Oops.
Colourblindness is actually one of the 
more common things that you'll
run into when you're dealing with accessibility 
because about 5%
of the population, mostly men, are colourblind.
And most colourblind people 
can't tell the difference between red
and green. If you can't see a colour 
it will generally look grey or black,
as you saw in the previous slide.
Um, there are also other forms of colourblindness
you can be blue colourblind 
and you can have no colour vision at all
but generally the most common use cases 
are red and green
which is not great when we indicate 
good with green and bad with red
but colourblind people will use contrast 
to tell the difference
between colours they can't see.
So if you have a very dark green 
and a very bright red,
they're going to be able to tell the difference
 between that but of the
issues with the previous slide was that 
the saturation of the red
was about the same as the saturation of the grey, 
which meant that
if you're colourblind you just couldn't 
tell the difference.
Now some people will use icons to 
indicate information
without using only colour and that's good
But if you're going to do that 
you should make sure that the icons
are unambiguous. 
I have actually seen a colourblind mode
where the three icons were a square, 
a rounded rectangle and a circle
which is not as good as if you had say,
a heart, a star and a lightening bolt
which would clearly indicate 
what those things are doing.
So how do we improve it? Well...
First of all, use a contrast checker to ensure that
elements will be viewable and again 
that doesn't just help
colourblind people that helps a whole lot of 
other people as well
and if you do have a colourblind mode 
for your website,
you'll want to try and put 
colourblindness filters over it beforehand.
They're not going to be perfect 
but they'll give you some idea
of what it will look like from the perspective of 
a colourblind person.
Even better, if you've got colourblind people
 in your office
in your testing pool, 
get them to come over and test it.
This is also something that I have 
recommended that people do.
And when you develop software
if you're going to have colourblind modes
it's worth having modes for 
blue colourblindness and achromatopsia
which is for people with no colour vision at all.
Slack does this really well. 
Um, if you go into Slack's preferences
and accessibility settings, 
they actually have specific themes
that are designed for protanopia 
and deuteranopia
which are red/green colourblindness 
but also for tritanopia which is
blue colourblindness. Very uncommon 
but I know someone who has it
and as I said before, if you're going to use icons 
make sure that you use
meaningful icons to indicate different 
elements and states.
A good place that you can apply that is that
if you have login forms,
check to see whether if you enter 
information incorrectly into the
login form it just goes red, 
or does it give you a cross to tell you that
that information's invalid.
Hacking an artificial pancreas
That's a sentence that has two meanings
because we could be talking about 
hacking together
an artificial pancreas 
or we could be talking about hacking INTO
an artificial pancreas
Diabetics, in more recent years 
have started to use something called
an insulin pump. 
Basically what you can do with an insulin pump is
you hook it up, 
and then rather than having to inject yourself
with insulin regularly, 
it will do all of thqt for you
it manages it for you, 
it makes things a lot easier.
and this here is a MiniMed insulin pump, 
which is made by Medtronic
who are one of the biggest 
medical device manufacturers
for diabetic medical equipment in the world.
Now this line of
MiniMed insulin pumps 
had a really interesting security flaw.
and the effect of that was,  
that a number of diabetics
started hunting them down to
hack together an artificial pancreas.
because another recent invention 
is the constant blood glucose monitor
which is placed about a centimeter 
below the skin and releases
information through Bluetooth connection.
Now what some enterprising people worked out 
is that because
these MiniMed insulin pumps had a security flaw
which would allow you to hook them up to, 
any common radio frequency
you could hook them up to your 
blood glucose monitor
and you could effectively 
hack an artificial pancreas so when
your blood glucose dropped, the insulin pump would release insulin
for you. Now that's really clever. 
The problem with that is,
that if something is discoverable 
on all common radio frequencies
um, it's also going to be 
somewhat vulnerable to hacker attacks
and that resulted in headlines like this 
because when the FDA issued
their new alert on Medtronic 
insulin pump security
they'd just discovered that 
not only could you hack into
these insulin pumps with phones. 
You could also hack into
them with basically all TV remotes. 
[audience laughter]
Not ideal. Um, this happened, uh,
people didn't take too much notice for a while
and then a few hackers that decided 
that the FDA, the US regulator,
wasn't really taking this very seriously 
and so they
made an android app that you could use to 
hook into these insulin pumps
and deliver a lethal dose of insulin 
to anyone in your immediate vicinity.
Not great. Which then resulted 
[audience laughter]
in Medtronic recalling 
the vulnerable MiniMed insulin pumps.
Oh dear. And this is why accessibility 
is not just about good design
because security on medical devices 
can be an accessibility issue.
And if you've got people's health data
you're going to have to comply with regulation.
It's really important that you make sure 
that medical devices are secure
it's somewhat compounded by the fact 
that if you're regulated by an
external organisation like the FDA in the US.
They may not actually tell you 
about these issues quickly.
Or tell you about them at all. 
Um it took quite a bit of pressure for the FDA
to actually convince Medtronic 
to recall these insulin pumps
but you may not get that information 
through your regulator.
It may be something you need to be 
on the lookout for constantly.
And it's fairly important because 
if you're making medical devices
you hold people's lives in your hands.
I did not think that I would ever be giving a talk 
where I would be talking
about people creating an app 
that you could use to kill people
but here I am.
So how do we improve it? 
Well, I guess you just do good security in general
in that you want to consider 
the possible attack vectors
and if you possibly can, 
have people come in and conduct
penetration testing 
before your device goes to market.
because generally any pen-testers 
that you have come in
will have a fairly good idea 
of the security landscape
they're going to know where your 
vulnerabilities are
more likely than you are. 
So you do want to have external people come in
when you're devising medical devices. 
Have them conduct pen-testing.
If people do raise security vulnerabilities,
make sure that you respond promptly.
Uh, Medtronic
if they'd been keeping their fingers 
on the pulse of the news
would have actually known they had 
this security vulnerability
when people started buying up 
these insulin pumps
to hack together artificial pancreases
and the really sad bit about this 
is that unintended uses can actually be
a business opportunity because if 
Medtronic had seen those headlines
and had seen people talking about this 
and had gone
"Hey, that's great!
Maybe not everyone can hack this together
but we're going to create a device 
that will do this for you"
it would've sold like hotcakes 
and it would have opened up that
sort of functionality to people who might not have been
tech savvy enough to do it themselves.
Medtronic are working on such a device, 
um, as of the time of speaking
it has not yet come out. 
Uh, it's been about five years.
and I imagine that if they had been able
to do it before now
the would have been a huge market for it.
Now, I've been giving this talk 
for about six months
and as a result of doing this, 
I became a lot more interested in
accessibility as a topic in general.
Um, one of the ways that I kept my 
finger on the pulse in terms of
what was going on with accessibility 
was through my LinkedIn feed.
And one day a post from someone 
popped up suggesting
that I should come along to a venue
and hear an accessibility consultant 
give a talk about accessibility
I thought, great! Cool. 
I know some things about accessibility
but I can't know everything 
and I'm always willing to learn
so let's go along and hear what 
this person has to say.
So I left work at 4:30 and took myself along.
Arrived at the venue
to see this.
I hope that it would generally 
strike people, um, fairly quickly
why having a set of stairs up to
a venue where you're giving 
an accessibility talk is not ideal.
The kicker was that, 
that wasn't the only set of stairs
there were actually three flights of stairs 
to get up to the lift
that would then take you to level one.
And no, there wasn't an accessible entrance. I checked.
Which makes you feel, 
if you're like me or in a wheelchair,
something like Claptrap here who, gets around on a wheel and
can't actually get up stairs. Or...
as I coined after this, um,
like a Roomba
that basically spends all its time shouting 
"Error 406"
which for people who are not versed 
in HTML error codes
means 'Not Acceptable'
[audience hums]
Now, the best bit about this was. 
That wasn't the only accessibility es-
issue that they had.  I went to go and find - 
after staggering up the stairs
a set of accessible bathrooms 
or indeed bathrooms at all
and I discovered that not only 
were there no bathroom...
no accessible bathrooms in the building. 
The only bathrooms that
were in the building were down the fire escape
which was another three flights of stairs.
I don't think that I really need to 
explain the irony here.
So how do we improve it?
Well, make sure that your venues 
are wheelchair and have
disabled bathrooms. 
Um, if your venues are not wheelchair accessible
and do not have disabled bathrooms 
people will not show up to them.
So, if you're organising a meetup
um, it's something worth considering
how... if we had a wheelchair user want to come or
we had a disabled person want to come, 
how would we let them in?
If you want to go a bit more complex 
and cater to some
invisible disabilities, um, 
you can look at providing things like
quiet spaces and make sure 
that you provide adaptive technology
Uh, people with hearing aides 
will generally tend to use hearing loops
at places like train stations 
and other theatre venues
um, if you have a hearing loop, 
make sure that you get your head around
the technology, and you can hook it up.
I actually have a friend who uses hearing aides 
and did not know that
hearing loops were a thing
and discovered that hearing loops
were a thing and called me one day 
and she was very pleased
because she could suddenly hear 
the announcements
at the train station after five years.
If you're going to have discussions about 
accessibility, you probably
want to include people 
with disabilities in those discussions
because those discussions are for us 
but they're often not had WITH us.
And a good litmus test is to ask yourself, 
"Who's not in the room
and why aren't they here?"
If everyone in the room has the same skin colour, 
why is that?
If we have no disabled people in the room, 
why is that?
Are there things we could be doing 
to make it more inclusive?
Have we set up barriers that we could pull down?
Those are kind of questions 
that you want to be asking yourselves
all the time
when you're having these discussions.
So, to recap. 
Accessibility benefits everyone
not just disabled people
and that's partly because
a lot of accessibility is good design principles.
Obviously there's more work 
that you have to do there
but using good design principles will 
kind of start you on the journey
to making things accessible.
One quote that someone gave me
while I was in the process of doing this 
that I really liked
was that screen readers are great 
if you're blind but they're also
great if you've got two toddlers
and you just wanna be able to read a book.
and a lot of the technology
and advances that we come up with
for accessibility tend to get used 
in a lot of other places as well
that may not be obvious.
And although a lot of accessibility issues 
will be about design,
other issues like security risks 
can also be accessibility issues if
they're not addressed properly.
Thorough testing is important 
and part of thorough testing is thinking
about the things that disabled people 
might need to do differently.
Obviously, I have trouble getting up stairs.
Other disabled people may not 
be able to hear properly,
they may not be able to see properly.
People may have
learning disabilities 
they may have cognigitive disabilities
there are many types of disability and
when you start querying those assumptions 
about what do people need
that's going to be something 
that's very important
in terms of thorough testing
and if you can,
the best thing to do is always to get 
adaptive technology users
to test your software. If you can get 
people who used zoomed in screens
people who use screen readers 
on a day-to-day basis they're going
to have a much better idea of 
how to navigate that technology than
your QA's are. And most importantly, 
Listen to your users.
If someone comes to you 
with an accessibility complaint and says
"This is not accessible. 
What can we do to make it accessible?"
It's going to be much better if you say
"Hey, thanks for
bringing this to our attention. 
Let's see what we can do about it" than
"Well we've followed the guidelines and... 
that's all we're really
interested in doing because 
the guidelines have told us everything
we need to know."
So listening is generally paramount.
There are a few thanks due, um to...
Melissa Orr who created the 
'Fancy Corporate Website' for me, um,
to Matt, my manager who 
produced all of the screenshots of
Atlassian Confluence and to 
my friend Annie, of Travelling Cat Studios
who drew up the fantastic 
Accessibility Roomba picture for me.
We've reached the end of the 45 minutes, um,
if anyone has questions now is the time.
[VANESSA] Before we do, 
can we give you a round of applause?
[DAWN] Sure!
[Dawn laughs] [audience applauds]
[room movement sounds, 
footsteps and audience murmuring]
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Uh, I've recently been 
trying to understand
accessibility stuff 
building a desktop application.
And using a Mac I tried to actually use the 
ss- the forgot what it's called
uh, voice over to see how the 
computer works and I felt completely
clueless how anyone actually manages to achieve
something using this technology. 
What I'm curious about is what
resources I can find to find out how people 
u- normally use a screen reader
and how I can use it myself 
so I can then do the blindfolded trick
and try to use my computer to try 
and understand how to make that app better
[DAWN] So, when I did this with the QI at work, 
um, what I did
was I actually turned off the 
screen brightness and I brought up that
list of developer, the list of 
screen reader commands that was on the
slides, which, the slides will be distributed.
And I talked her through
this is how you use it 
and we tabbed through the website.
If you can as well, 
see if you can reach out to organisations like
Vision Australia or see if people know 
people who use this software
in their day to day lives and get those people in. 
Pay them for their time,
treat them as a resource 
and learn whatever you can from them.
But like, there's a lot of stuff on the internet
and you can learn it to a degree 
but there's no substitute - even me -
and I have a reasonable understanding 
of accessibility
because I talk to a lot of 
other disabled people as well.
Even I'm not a substitute for someone 
who uses that software day to day
and if you want to really learn about it 
you need to learn from those people
[VANESSA]  More questions?
That's it, thank-you very much Dawn.
[DAWN] Cool!
