All language subtitles for 30 - Elise - The importance of assistive technology.en

My name is Elise and
I'm the accessibility and

inclusion lead for
corporate engineering.

The work we do touches most
of Google's products,

in that we are creating the internal
stuff that helps ensure the products

that we create, eventually,
are accessible and inclusive.

I love teaching teams that
there's value in difference,

in the difference that we find
within human beings.

Difference helps us think creatively and
helps us see gaps in our products.

Often when we look into those gaps and
the insights that we gain from

looking at people who experience
the world differently,

we build better products
that are more adaptable,

that are longer-lasting, and
more innovative.

When we talk about accessibility,
we are talking about how to

make a product accessible by people
with different abilities.

But when we talk about inclusive design,
what we're doing is we're

looking to difference,
to their different experiences and

their needs, because of
their different capabilities.

And gathering these insights, and
applying it in a way that

it will benefit everyone, whether
they have a disability or not.

If we go back in terms of
how we used to do websites,

they used to be very text heavy.

They used to be more like a book.

And people with disabilities, for years,

had been advocating for
larger text and

less content, much more
smaller chunks of text.

And when we started to
design for accessibility,

we created sites that were
much more easily consumed.

Accessibility is
important to me personally,

because I have a hearing loss,
severe hearing loss.

I began losing my hearing at 10,
and it progressed over five years,

until it reached the profound range.

So if you were to cover your mouth and
say 100 words, and

I guessed at every single one,
I might get one right.

As someone with a hearing loss,

I'm constantly struggling with situations
where I need to communicate with others.

I use assistive technology
in a lot of different ways.

Captioning is the most
valuable thing for me.

I also use things such as
Google's Live Transcribe,

which helps in real-time
conversations with people.

I use Google Meet's Closed Captions
to help me understand meetings

that I have with my colleagues.

There's also something called InnoCaption,

which captions telephone
calls using a live transcriber.

That completely changed my world.

Because before that was created,
I couldn't use a telephone.

And that was something that really blocked
my capabilities in the work setting.

The first piece of advice is
to consider edge cases, or

users with difference, in all of
your product development processes.

This is where you're going to gain
some really valuable insight.

It should be a normal part
of your development process.

It shouldn't be an add-on.

It should be considered
from the beginning.

But I think, also, it's extremely
important to diversify your own network.

Start getting to know people
who are different from you,

start learning from them.

Ask them what their experiences
are like with different

technology as they go about their world.

Learning these unique experiences
is what's going to make you see

opportunities for
great design in your products.