Episode 2

Chancey Fleet

Chancey Fleet is a Brooklyn-based tech educator and activist who identifies as Blind. Chancey is the Assistive Technology Coordinator at the New York Public Library. In that role, she curates accessible technology in the branch, collaborates across the NYPL system to improve equity of access, and coordinates a diverse team of staff and volunteers who provide one-to-one tech coaching and group workshops, free of charge and open to all. Through a 2017 NYPL Innovation grant, she founded and maintains the Dimensions Project, a free open lab for the exploration and creation of accessible images, models and data representations through tactile graphics, 3d models and nonvisual approaches to coding, CAD and “visual” arts.

Transcript (interactive)

Transcript (PDF)

Transcript
Matt May:

This is InEx, a show about inclusive design.

Matt May:

I'm your host, Matt May.

Matt May:

In this episode:

Chancey Fleet:

Graphics were something that I received.

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They were not something that I requested or chose.

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They were curated for me by textbook publishers and other sighted folks.

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There was never a direct path from my curiosity to an

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image being under my fingers.

Matt May:

A conversation with Chancey Fleet.

Matt May:

And now I am honored to introduce you all to Chancey Fleet.

Matt May:

Thank for coming in and being on the show.

Chancey Fleet:

I am so happy to be here, Matt.

Chancey Fleet:

Thank you.

Matt May:

This is going to be fun.

Matt May:

I'm going to start with your bio here.

Matt May:

Chancey Fleet is a Brooklyn-based tech educator and activist who

Matt May:

identifies as capital B Blind.

Matt May:

Chancey is the assistant technology coordinator at

Matt May:

the New York Public Library.

Matt May:

In that role, she curates accessible technology in the branch collaborates

Matt May:

across the New York Public Library system to improve equity of access and

Matt May:

coordinates a diverse team of staff and volunteers who provide one-to-one tech

Matt May:

coaching and group workshops, free of charge and open to all through a 2017

Matt May:

New York Public Library innovation grant, she founded and maintains a

Matt May:

dimensions project, a free OpenLab for the exploration and creation

Matt May:

of accessible images, models, and data representations through tactile

Matt May:

graphics, 3D models, and non visual approaches to coding CAD and visual arts.

Matt May:

And I want to add on the land acknowledgment.

Matt May:

OCAD University acknowledges the ancestral and traditional

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territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the

Matt May:

Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat.

Matt May:

Chancey and I are presently on the ancestral and traditional territories

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of the Duwamish and Coast Salish Peoples and the Lenape, who are the

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original owners and custodians of the land on which we stand and create.

Matt May:

So thank you again.

Matt May:

I want to get started because I have so much to talk with you about,

Matt May:

and I want to start first with just your background, how your career

Matt May:

started, how your education came up.

Matt May:

What's your origin story?

Chancey Fleet:

Oh, so I'm in my late thirties now and I was born in a tiny

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town in Virginia called Aylett to sighted parents who were not expecting

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a Blind child, but who turned out to be extremely prepared to have one.

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Both of them are really free spirits, very creative, very

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driven and enjoy problem solving.

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So that worked out well.

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They pushed me from the very beginning to make my own way in the

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world to find my own ways of doing things and to set myself up for big

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dreams, for big self expectations.

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They were also really good at telling the world to value me and include me.

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So just I'll share a couple of things.

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When I was six years old, my father got me a Toshiba laptop.

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The kind with two, three and a half inch floppy disks.

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And I had Arctic Business Vision on my laptop as a child.

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I could write assignments and print them out right there in the classroom.

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And I could read notes from my parents, like the ones that parents

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usually put in kids' lunches and I could play Zork and use a calculator

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and stuff like that from grade one.

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And I realized, although probably not consciously, it was just always true for

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me, that technology would help me do stuff without a bunch of people in the middle,

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holding my hands and slowing me down.

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My mom was really instrumental in making sure that I got a quality

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education, including braille can travel instruction, that kind of thing.

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And she taught me a lot about self-advocacy.

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She went to bat for me so many times, and she made sure that even as a

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young child, I was in my own IEP meetings and that my voice was heard.

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And both of my parents really supported me to be an advocate and an outspoken person.

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And they allowed me to talk back to adults who were being ableist.

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My father tells this story about a time when I was like three in the

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grocery store, in the little cart in the grocery store, sitting in the cart.

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And some lady comes by and says to me, because my eyes are doing their

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own little dance, as they will do, little girl, you better be careful.

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If you keep rolling your eyes like that, they'll get stuck.

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And I said, it wouldn't matter.

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I'm Blind anyway.

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And she just ran down the aisle.

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So that was the vibe in my childhood.

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Technology continued to play a pivotal role in my education through

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middle school, through high school.

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I went away to a school for the Blind for two years and learned a sense of

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community for the first time there.

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When I was in middle school, I have a really strong memory

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of my computer teacher, Ms.

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Rinker introducing me to an OCR machine, the Reading Edge.

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And one day we were snowed in for the weekend on the

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campus and couldn't go home.

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And this little lady picked up the five, $10,000 Reading Edge in her two arms

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and walked it out of the computer lab and across the street and into my dorm

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room for the weekend so that I could just sit there and read a print book.

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And I will never forget that.

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When I was like 10 years old, my father brought me to the VCU library and I'm not

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sure why they let a 10 year old child have the key to the disability accessibility

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lab, but he would drop me off.

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And I would go to the desk as though I were a college student

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and ask for the key, they would give me the key and just let me go.

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And I would sit there and hang out and use the OCR tools there.

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I always had this excitement and joy and sense of possibility around tech.

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And when I got to college, I didn't have a lot of Blind role models yet.

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I had read a couple of biographies by Blind folks that went into psychology.

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So I majored in psychology cause I didn't know what I wanted to do.

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But halfway through college, I started working part-time for our state agency

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training other Blind and visually impaired folks on how to use their tech.

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And I was like, wow, I like this.

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It's like being a therapist, but instead of problems I'm not sure if

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I've solved, I can deal with problems that have really concrete solutions.

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And it also involves working with people and helping people feel

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confident and empowered, but in a precise way, a measurable way.

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And that appealed to me.

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And so this became my career.

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When I was a freshman in college, I got hooked up with the National

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Federation of the Blind, which is a civil rights organization.

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And they drew me in as they do with a state scholarship.

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And I started finally meeting Blind people that I wanted to

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be around and wanted to emulate.

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And that sealed the deal for me.

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I had some negative thoughts in my head about the Blind

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community when I was a kid.

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And those thoughts just flew out the window that they opened for me when

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they started to introduce me to Blind mentors in different fields and to

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do things like tell me to go meet my host family in Washington, DC.

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And tell me to take three trains and not even ask whether that

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was going to be a problem for me.

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And I just loved it.

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I loved the trust that they put in me.

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I loved the high bar that they set for everyone in the

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organization and that involvement.

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And specifically my involvement in doing early testing and promotion for the

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first KNFB Reader got me recruited to my first sort of grown-up job after college.

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There was a recruiter in the audience one day when I was

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presenting the canopy reader.

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And next thing I was flying around the country, teaching federal employees with

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disabilities, how to use their tech.

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And now here I am.

Matt May:

I want to talk about where you are now, because I've actually

Matt May:

gotten to visit you in your library.

Matt May:

The Heiskell Library in New York City.

Matt May:

We got to do a tour of the braille library and this just fascinates me.

Matt May:

And I think it's important for sighted people to understand what

Matt May:

real libraries are and what they mean.

Matt May:

So could you talk a little bit about just the print archives and what that means

Matt May:

for the, consumers of braille content, how it gets distributed, et cetera.

Chancey Fleet:

Oh yeah, absolutely.

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The National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled is

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part of the Library of Congress.

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And it's been around for almost a hundred years, I believe, and has

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traditionally sent out braille materials and audio books through the mail.

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These days, there's an app, the Bard, braille, and audio reading and download

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app where you can download Bard books on a computer and you can tune in to

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talking books or to digital braille books.

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And we still of course have physical audio books available and hard copy braille.

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What's cool about the New York Public Library, Andrew Heiskell Braille

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and Talking Book Library branch, where I work is that in our state,

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the NLS cooperating library is us.

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So sometimes in a lot of states, regional libraries are just NLS

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libraries and they're totally separate from the public library.

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In our case, we're both, we are the NYPL and we're the NLS regional library, which

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means that our building has a diversity of people coming into it every day.

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So community patrons who might not have disabilities are there to go to

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story time and use the wifi and use computer labs, pick up their holds.

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And then there are a bunch of Blind people and visually impaired people

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and people with disabilities coming in to do everything from picking up

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books, to learning about technology, attending film series, going to

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crossword club, going to knitting club.

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And so it's a really dynamic space.

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And one of the things I love about it is that it's an integrated space where

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communities of disability and the general sort of able culture collide and interact.

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And I find that to be really special.

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Another thing that's special about our branch is that in a lot of states, the

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braille books specifically, because they're so large and they're typically

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mailed out in a lot of states, the braille books and the audio books are

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in a warehouse and you call up to get them, or you fill out a form to get

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them, and they come to you by mail.

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But our stacks are open for braille books in New York.

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And so when you walk up to the second floor, There are stacks just like

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there would be for a print library and you can just browse to your

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heart's content and pull books down and see if you want to check them out.

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And you can skim through things.

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And I first visited this library when I was visiting from Virginia,

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again, around the age of 10 or 11.

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Just the fact that you could go in and choose a book and read a book and

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decide if it was worth taking home.

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That stuck with me for years.

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And I was so happy when I moved to New York to reconnect with the library

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first as a patron, and then as a volunteer and now as part of the staff.

Matt May:

There are a couple of things I want to take off from this, but

Matt May:

I want to stay on the braille for one second, because that transition

Matt May:

from the printed braille world into the electronic braille world, with

Matt May:

refreshable braille displays and content that starts to become accessible.

Matt May:

That itself is very powerful, but also.

Matt May:

We're not nearly where we could have been.

Matt May:

Because the idea of the book turning into something electronic also came

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with all of these other things that came along like DRM or just scanning

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the pages of books early on to make them look like pictures of a page.

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And so you didn't get any of the benefit of that work that had to be done in order

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to braille, a trade publication or a novel or whatever that was distinct to bespoke

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work and these books for a braille book.

Matt May:

Can you talk about if it's a 500 page printed book, what a braille

Matt May:

version of that is like physically.

Chancey Fleet:

It's going to be a lot larger.

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A bound braille book is going to be a lot larger.

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I had a pocket dictionary in middle school, the quote unquote

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pocket dictionary, which was a small paper back in print.

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And it was eight major notebook sized, 11.5"x11" volumes that

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took up half a bookshelf.

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I believe the Harry Potter books, an average Harry Potter book might be, ah, I

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don't actually want to speculate on what the exact number is, but it's larger.

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If braille were print, it would be size 29.

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So that's going to take up a lot of space

Matt May:

Like a 29-point font.

Chancey Fleet:

Yeah.

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A 29-point font.

Chancey Fleet:

Exactly.

Matt May:

So, enormous.

Matt May:

And just the idea of shifting these things around the country, and the cost

Matt May:

that's involved, and like you were saying the difficulty for you to browse that

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kind of material, you just had a catalog and you got it and you picked something

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out and you might wait years for the most popular things to come through.

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That kind of could go away with the advent of eBooks, but instead we

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still have these kinds of barriers.

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And then there are things like the Chafee Amendment, which is essentially

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a law that enables people to break DRM specifically for the purposes of making

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it available to print disabled people, which is just the fact that you had to

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have that just in order for books to even be remotely available, not just in

Matt May:

the library setting, but in education still underscores how big the gap is

Matt May:

between print and braille content.

Chancey Fleet:

For me as an individual who has a considerable amount of

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privilege in that I've always had access to digital braille devices

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since I came to college, that gap has not existed for me in large measure

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since the very early two thousands.

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And that's thanks to Jim Fruchterman and Bookshare, part

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of the Benetech organization.

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In the very early two thousands, Jim realized that Blind folks all over

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the country and all over the world and their allies were using flatbed

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scanners to turn page by page, through books and make their own access.

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I remember doing this from early college onward.

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And I would just get my music together or start reading a

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book while I was scanning it.

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And I might spend two or three hours to scan in a single textbook or a

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book for leisure sometimes more.

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But even then being able to do that.

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And get a scan that was readable was another really intense

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memory and magic moment for me.

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I remember the first time that I OCRed something and then sent it

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over to a braille display using automatic translation errors.

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What is this amount of power?

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I couldn't even believe my luck, but Jim realized that we could

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avoid that duplication of effort by banding together, and we could deepen

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and broaden the availability of accessible texts for people that use

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digital braille, for people that use text-to-speech audio, magnification,

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all kinds of ways to read a book.

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And this was particularly welcome for me because I love to read.

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I've always been a voracious reader, and also somebody with esoteric interests.

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I have had interests over the years in speculative fiction authors that didn't

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ever quite make it to the NLS collection.

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I remember as a queer kid growing up in the nineties, not being able to find

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much representation of people like me in the NLS collections, all of that has

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changed a lot in the intervening years, but it was this anarchic wonderful

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thing when Jim started bringing us all together so that we could upload those

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individual scans that each of us had done on our own for ourselves and just

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amplify the impact that those had.

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And at first, a lot of major publishers were upset.

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They were resistant, they were doing their best to create friction, but Jim

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constructed an infrastructure where piracy was taken seriously and folks using

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the system in abusive ways were really removed and faced actual consequences.

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And Jim's team and our community gradually earned the trust of major publishers

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to the point that now, most new titles that are added to Bookshare, I believe,

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are submitted directly by the publisher, which means there aren't OCR errors,

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there aren't weird little omissions, and now we're all kind of playing on

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the same team and just scoring win after win for digital accessibility

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for folks that are Blind, visually impaired, have cognitive and learning

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disabilities, have fine motor impairments that make it hard to hold a book.

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I love NLS, and I love what the NLS has done for digital

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braille and the Blind community.

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But just as important is this radical idea that Jim had, that we could take our

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individual efforts and channel them into something that would invent eventually

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absolutely transformed the landscape for digital accessibility of books.

Matt May:

Yeah.

Matt May:

And I think that one thing here that's important is the idea of mutual aid and of

Matt May:

the agency of the Blind people themselves in this work, that there wasn't.

Matt May:

So Jim, who, as I understand it is sighted.

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It wasn't that he came into a community and just said, here,

Matt May:

I'm going to fix it for you.

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That there is a community that is self-advocating and that is working on

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the solution itself, and coordinates with other communities to make that happen.

Matt May:

It has to be clear that it's a partnership and not just a bestowal of

Matt May:

rights from sighted to Blind people.

Chancey Fleet:

Exactly.

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He took what we were already doing and channeled it.

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And there was nothing, there was no saviorism, there was no paternalism.

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It was just, how can we take the power you already have and make it do more.

Matt May:

Yeah, the same thing with we mentioned the late Jim Thatcher

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and the screen reader project that he had worked on that was so

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that he could share mathematical equations with his Blind boss.

Matt May:

These are the parts of the story that tend to be elided from the history here.

Matt May:

That is always in partnership with that.

Matt May:

It's always in collaboration with, it's always for the benefit of

Matt May:

the user that we're talking about.

Matt May:

And not like it springs forth from nowhere.

Chancey Fleet:

Exactly.

Chancey Fleet:

I wrote Benetech a tongue in cheek.

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It was actually a compliment, but a quote unquote complaint letter because

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as a Blind child and teen and young adult, I had always managed to read

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the entire catalog of braille titles.

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And so I knew exactly what my choices were.

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Cause we always had this feeling of scarcity and one never wanted to

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miss something that might be good.

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And I said, I'd like to register a complaint.

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There are too many titles and I cannot any longer keep track of everything

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that's available to read and that that's making me feel so much anxiety.

Matt May:

That's funny, that reminds me of, I grew up in a small town

Matt May:

in Massachusetts and there was one record store in my town and I knew

Matt May:

everything that they had there.

Matt May:

And then I remember going to San Francisco one time and I went to Amoeba

Matt May:

Records, and it's like a football field.

Matt May:

I had my own existential crisis of, I am never going to spend

Matt May:

enough time in my life to consume all of this musical content.

Matt May:

It was that feeling of just unbounded potential.

Chancey Fleet:

Exactly.

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That's what it was.

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That's what it is.

Matt May:

So I want to turn this to design because I don't know

Matt May:

how you identify yourself, but I definitely think of you as a designer.

Matt May:

And I think a lot of people just instinctually think of design as

Matt May:

being a visual science or visual art, that it's something that has

Matt May:

to have a visual component to it.

Matt May:

And I know a lot of UX designers think of it that way.

Matt May:

But I want to talk about what design means when you're Blind

Matt May:

or when you have low vision.

Matt May:

What is the impetus, what is the process?

Matt May:

What are the things that you wish people knew about Blindness and

Matt May:

the lived experience of Blind users when it comes to making products?

Chancey Fleet:

So, wow.

Chancey Fleet:

So I think part of my lived experience stems from Blindness itself.

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So as a Blind person, I benefit from elegant spatial representations that

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are non-visual, whether that's the quick and easy and very legible audio graphs

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that are available in the health app on my iPhone, or whether that means a

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team app that shows the relationships between streets and their points of

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intersection and their names in the most minimal pleasing way possible.

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I can speak to my sensibility as a reader and lately a creator

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of tactile designs and other non visual spatial representations.

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But the fire in me for catalyzing community work in tactile design in

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particular comes from having realized fairly late on in my Blindness

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journey that I had been living in image poverty this whole time.

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And that it was avoidable.

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As a young child, I got lots of braille and I probably got more tactile

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graphics than most people because I got a steady supply of braille books.

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So a few times a year, a picture book would show up and often I would get

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maps or diagrams in my textbooks.

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But when I say often, maybe there would be 10 graphics in my entire textbook.

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I don't mean that I got the same amount of images as my contemporaries

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who were sighted, and graphics were something that I received.

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They were not something that I requested or chose.

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They were curated for me by textbook publishers and other sighted folks.

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There was never a direct path from my curiosity to an

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image being under my fingers.

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And I came to believe that I was strong and my verbal abilities and pretty

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poor at spatial thinking the arts, mathematics, science, all of that stuff.

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And I assumed a lot of things about my aptitudes and those assumptions

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drove my career trajectory and my studies and I have no regrets.

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I love it where I am right now.

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But I discovered as I met the Blind community during and after college, I

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started to discover that there were Blind people who were joyful, absolute spatial

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thinkers, who could communicate something by drawing, who could understand a map

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in seconds who understood the things best when they were presented spatially

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Blind people who, if they were sighted would call themselves visual learners.

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And I realized, oh my God, that's me.

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If you can explain an intersection to me, five times verbally.

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I will nod and smile and I will do my best and I will get

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about 40% of what you told me.

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If you show me a diagram of the same thing, I'm good.

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I've got it.

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It's in my brain now.

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And I'm going to negotiate that intersection, I'm going to make

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my way through the streets.

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On the map that I saw, I'm going to be able to wire up a circuit

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based on a diagram, way more so than I can from a narrative.

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And I had no idea until I started meeting people at Blindness

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conferences who were doing this on the daily and who could show me how.

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And so by the point that all this happened, I was already a tech educator.

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When I started to really focus on tactile design, I was already at New

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York Public Library in particular, a.

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A Blind person that was very well connected.

Chancey Fleet:

A CEO reached out to me in 2016 and said, hey, where can I get a five-borough map?

Chancey Fleet:

Because I'm moving to New York.

Chancey Fleet:

And I want to understand how the boroughs interrelate to one another.

Chancey Fleet:

And I had to say, gosh, I don't think I know how to get you an answer.

Chancey Fleet:

And that's when I started reflecting really hardcore on why we didn't

Chancey Fleet:

have the ability to make a straight path from an inquiry to a tactile.

Chancey Fleet:

And I realized that as long as we don't have access to the means of production

Chancey Fleet:

for tactile graphics, and as long as tactical graphics are something that

Chancey Fleet:

were handed and not something that we create, we're not going to move forward.

Chancey Fleet:

The state of spatial thinking creativity, self-expression in our

Chancey Fleet:

community and it's going to remain the territory of a very few Blind elite.

Chancey Fleet:

And I decided that I wanted to spend a big chunk of my life fixing that.

Chancey Fleet:

And so I started the Dimensions Project in 2017.

Chancey Fleet:

Got that CEO, their five borough map, by the way.

Chancey Fleet:

And now anybody can come in and make tactile graphics and 3D models.

Chancey Fleet:

And so I consider myself if I am a designer, and see, I still

Chancey Fleet:

make a make disclaimers and I need to learn to stop doing that.

Chancey Fleet:

So although I am, as a designer, I am an outsider designer.

Chancey Fleet:

I'm not someone who has that background.

Chancey Fleet:

I'm someone who has a keen awareness of what it feels like to be missing

Chancey Fleet:

that background and everything that I'm doing now and everything

Chancey Fleet:

that I'm pursuing knowledge of and everything that I'm building in my

Chancey Fleet:

community is a response to that.

Chancey Fleet:

That lived experience of finding out that I had an entire part of my

Chancey Fleet:

brain that was under utilized because I didn't have images in my life.

Matt May:

So I can say as somebody that is working on my master of design

Matt May:

project, that there's room outside of the imposter syndrome for both of us.

Matt May:

I'm trying so hard just to be okay with this, but here I am.

Matt May:

I've worked in a design company for 15 years now.

Matt May:

I'm going through this program.

Matt May:

I still struggle to call myself a designer.

Matt May:

So I think that there's room for a lot more people who are coming up

Matt May:

with creative solutions to things that people are dealing with every day

Matt May:

to just say it, that this is design.

Matt May:

And on top of that, just the things that you're doing at the library.

Matt May:

I think when we did the inclusive design workshop, you co-facilitated

Matt May:

the session at the library and showed us some things like 3D.

Matt May:

And I think you've done soldering projects.

Matt May:

Like you've taught soldering in there in the library.

Matt May:

And I think CAD, were you doing OpenSCAD or something for generating the 3D models?

Chancey Fleet:

So we teach.

Chancey Fleet:

If you're Blind or working on visually typical CAD programs that involve

Chancey Fleet:

rendering a rotatable 2D image on screen are not yet possible for us because the

Chancey Fleet:

first generation of refreshable tactile graphics displays is still in development.

Chancey Fleet:

And even when it comes to market, it's going to be initially fairly low res.

Chancey Fleet:

And so we're left with two, two great choices that we can mix and match.

Chancey Fleet:

We can collaborate with sighted folks and we can co-design,

Chancey Fleet:

which is a fun thing to do.

Chancey Fleet:

When I was in lockdown and my community partner, Claire was in lockdown

Chancey Fleet:

somewhere else, on the last day, the library was opened in March, 2020.

Chancey Fleet:

I brought home a bunch of graphics equipment like Apocalypse Now style,

Chancey Fleet:

just let me carry everything I can.

Chancey Fleet:

Even thinking it was going to be two weeks, cause I couldn't be separated from

Chancey Fleet:

graphics for two weeks at that point.

Chancey Fleet:

And I brought home the embosser and we'd get on the phone and talk

Chancey Fleet:

about a graphic that we needed to design for our web development class.

Chancey Fleet:

Maybe a color wheel that's tactile that shows folks the relationships

Chancey Fleet:

between complimentary colors and maybe a tactile that shows different font

Chancey Fleet:

types and sizes and serifs and sans and something that illustrates the box model.

Chancey Fleet:

So we would talk it out and then she would jump into Adobe

Chancey Fleet:

Illustrator and send me a draft.

Chancey Fleet:

I would emboss the draft and then we'd get back on FaceTime.

Chancey Fleet:

And I would just point to things under the camera and say, hey, this here is great.

Chancey Fleet:

This is really strong.

Chancey Fleet:

Here's a place where we need a little bit more contrast with our dot heights.

Chancey Fleet:

This is filled in and that's making it feel blurry.

Chancey Fleet:

So let's make it a cleaner shape with white space in the middle.

Chancey Fleet:

And it was just the most satisfying thing during a time that was

Chancey Fleet:

pretty, pretty scary and lonely.

Chancey Fleet:

It was such a joy to co-design with someone and bring my experience of

Chancey Fleet:

tactile design together with her experience of graphic design and make

Chancey Fleet:

something that hadn't been done before.

Chancey Fleet:

So collaborating is an option that we have.

Chancey Fleet:

And then the other option we have is doing our own design work, either using analog

Chancey Fleet:

tools, like tactile drawing tablets and 3D printing pens and other, almost anything

Chancey Fleet:

that's an art supply that's a usable done visually can be used as a design tool.

Chancey Fleet:

But if we want to make something that's really precise, we

Chancey Fleet:

might use code specifically.

Chancey Fleet:

We might use OpenSCAD to create complex designs that are made of

Chancey Fleet:

parametric shapes that we combine, that we rotate, that we translate,

Chancey Fleet:

that we group and duplicate and scale.

Chancey Fleet:

And all that can be done with a coding language that's in my view,

Chancey Fleet:

pretty much just as friendly as HTML.

Chancey Fleet:

And we have been able to teach it to several cohorts of Blind and sighted

Chancey Fleet:

folks that don't have previous CAD experience and don't necessarily

Chancey Fleet:

have previous code experience either.

Chancey Fleet:

And I'm good enough to make something basic.

Chancey Fleet:

So if you asked me to create a chess piece or a a signature guide

Chancey Fleet:

or a minimal box, I could do that.

Chancey Fleet:

Some of my students have surpassed me by leaps and

Chancey Fleet:

bounds, which is very gratifying.

Chancey Fleet:

I have one volunteer whose first name is Steven.

Chancey Fleet:

If you've worked with him on OpenSCAD you'll know him, and he can take a look

Chancey Fleet:

at something complex, like an entire puzzle with movable parts and he can go

Chancey Fleet:

into OpenSCAD and recreate the thing.

Chancey Fleet:

And he also does original design.

Chancey Fleet:

So there are folks in our community now that are really pushing the limits of

Chancey Fleet:

what OpenSCAD can do for a Blind designer.

Matt May:

So that's great.

Matt May:

And also ties into one of the core practices of inclusive design.

Matt May:

So I want to use this to segue into the next segment.

Matt May:

We're going to take a pause right here.

Matt May:

I will be right back with Chancey Fleet.

Matt May:

InEx is a major research project by me, Matt May, as part of the master

Matt May:

of design degree program at OCAD University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Matt May:

Episodes and transcripts of this podcast can be found at inex.show.

Matt May:

That's I-N-E-X dot show.

Matt May:

Follow InEx on Twitter at @inexpodcast.

Matt May:

And we're back with Chancey Fleet, and we're going to get into inclusive design.

Matt May:

And the question that I have been asking has been about inclusive design as a

Matt May:

term of art versus inclusive design, as whatever people think is inclusive,

Matt May:

plus whatever people think is designed to go back to the definition that

Matt May:

the Inclusive Design Research Centre puts forth from OCAD University."

Matt May:

Inclusive design is designed that is inclusive of the full range of human

Matt May:

diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age, and

Matt May:

other forms of human difference."

Matt May:

So how do you see that reflected in the world versus I guess anything

Matt May:

that you just hear is inclusive.

Chancey Fleet:

Oh, that's a big question.

Chancey Fleet:

My first response is that the ways in which people interpret and implement

Chancey Fleet:

what they think that means create just a symphony of total chaos with

Chancey Fleet:

a lot of unnecessary and unintended consequence generating designs

Chancey Fleet:

and a lot of missed opportunities and occasionally some real wins.

Matt May:

I think it comes down to the composition of that interaction, of what

Matt May:

inclusion is actually happening here.

Matt May:

And I think in the last segment you specifically mentioned co-design

Matt May:

and that to me is the baseline.

Matt May:

There is not just some level of participation, not just that you've

Matt May:

done some user research and you've already validated everything, but

Matt May:

you're just going to go past a group of users and say, is this good for you?

Matt May:

But that the people that you're learning from, that you're

Matt May:

collaborating with, you're doing from the instantiation of the idea.

Matt May:

So this is where we get the idea of participatory action research, where

Matt May:

the outcome isn't already there.

Matt May:

It isn't something that's been proposed, that people are discussing,

Matt May:

but that it's almost like you have a green field, you can think of anything

Matt May:

that could possibly be created.

Matt May:

And that is the beginning of the relationship.

Matt May:

And the levels of power in that relationship are more, even.

Matt May:

That it isn't just, we have a researcher who is telling you all

Matt May:

what to do, and then what they do with that information is all theirs.

Matt May:

Do you see that as being something that's being propagated, that's

Matt May:

being coming more popularized or is that still in the margins?

Chancey Fleet:

I think so.

Chancey Fleet:

I mentioned my friend Claire earlier.

Chancey Fleet:

I met her when she was a grad student at NYU ITP and she was doing a participatory

Chancey Fleet:

design project and needed to find somebody to build with and for, and asked me what

Chancey Fleet:

kind of problem I had to solve for myself.

Chancey Fleet:

And I said, I'd like to solve my problem of having to plan frequently large exhibit

Chancey Fleet:

halls that might have 30 or 40 tables.

Chancey Fleet:

And I wanted a digital way to move them around spatially in a non visual manner.

Chancey Fleet:

Because again, I don't do well with textual narratives.

Chancey Fleet:

And we started playing with some potential prototype solutions to that problem.

Chancey Fleet:

And eventually I was able to solve that particular problem in a different way,

Chancey Fleet:

but we discovered that we had a really similar ethos and had the same kinds

Chancey Fleet:

of thoughts about how to do actual good things in our communities with designs.

Chancey Fleet:

And so she and I have worked together over the years on several things.

Chancey Fleet:

One thing that I really appreciate about her and about a lot of my other

Chancey Fleet:

collaborators that are in academia, is that when they, and now we are

Chancey Fleet:

doing research, we try to create things that feel organic and that not

Chancey Fleet:

only are participatory, but provide a real benefit to the community that

Chancey Fleet:

is more than just the hypothetical benefit that research provides.

Chancey Fleet:

And it's more than just a gift card.

Chancey Fleet:

For example, we were able to do some research around that soldering workshop

Chancey Fleet:

at NYU ITP that you mentioned, by getting voluntary feedback from the participants

Chancey Fleet:

and also self-reporting as instructors.

Chancey Fleet:

But we didn't do structured interviews with folks that took a long time and

Chancey Fleet:

we were able to get those research goals met while offering an actual

Chancey Fleet:

three-day soldering intensive that Blind people and visually impaired

Chancey Fleet:

people and sighted allies were excited to attend from all over the country.

Chancey Fleet:

Regardless of what we got in terms of our research, everybody learned to solder.

Chancey Fleet:

And similarly when Claire and I have worked together on teaching web

Chancey Fleet:

development, JavaScript and CSS concepts, to folks who are Blind or visually

Chancey Fleet:

impaired, we did get some research outcomes, validating the worth of tactile

Chancey Fleet:

graphics in that instructional context.

Chancey Fleet:

But our main mission was to make sure that Blind and visually impaired people had a

Chancey Fleet:

chance to learn of development concepts.

Chancey Fleet:

And so I really like this idea of taking it one step farther than participatory

Chancey Fleet:

action research to creating situations where research can happen, but research

Chancey Fleet:

is not necessarily the only thing or the main thing that's happening and that a

Chancey Fleet:

community benefit is being created there.

Chancey Fleet:

And that's a different way to make sure that people have power.

Chancey Fleet:

Are you giving something to people that's worth their time?

Chancey Fleet:

Are you opening up a meaningful experience that didn't exist before?

Chancey Fleet:

And I'm not going to claim that the model that I believe in right now is

Chancey Fleet:

perfect because I think my thinking is always evolving and there's always

Chancey Fleet:

more things to learn about ways to do things better and even more equitably.

Chancey Fleet:

But I really enjoy that model.

Chancey Fleet:

And I also enjoy being at the New York Public Library where we don't

Chancey Fleet:

do research and having braille study groups and the Dimensions lab and

Chancey Fleet:

accessible tech education, where, because we're a public library, we

Chancey Fleet:

don't actually need you to be Blind, to take advantage of those opportunities.

Chancey Fleet:

And so Sometimes what will happen these days, is a grad student who may or may not

Chancey Fleet:

have a ton of inclusive design awareness or may not know about the conversation

Chancey Fleet:

being had about participatory research.

Chancey Fleet:

They may drop by to do some fact finding, and I'll roll them right

Chancey Fleet:

into a braille study group with everyone else, or I'll roll them

Chancey Fleet:

into whatever everyone else is doing.

Chancey Fleet:

And rather than me telling them how to do their research or that their

Chancey Fleet:

project is headed down a terrible road, I can just shut up and introduce

Chancey Fleet:

them to the community and let them observe how things are actually

Chancey Fleet:

happening in the world where we live.

Chancey Fleet:

And nine times out of 10, once they start talking to other people in that

Chancey Fleet:

library space, or just observing, they will start to course correct.

Chancey Fleet:

And it doesn't have to be a big didactic thing coming from me,

Chancey Fleet:

because I have more power than an average sighted grad student.

Chancey Fleet:

And a lot of ways, if I were to say, you're doing this all wrong, that

Chancey Fleet:

could feel very intimidating and that could probably shut somebody down.

Chancey Fleet:

And what we don't want to do is make people feel bad or make people not want

Chancey Fleet:

to engage in communities of disability.

Chancey Fleet:

We want people to be mindful and observant and use common sense and build

Chancey Fleet:

the kind of relationships that inform good design and excellent outcomes.

Chancey Fleet:

And I think one of my favorite things about the library is that

Chancey Fleet:

it's a place where you can just build an organic relationship with the

Chancey Fleet:

community if you're willing to do so.

Chancey Fleet:

I think that really improves the chances that your design will be meaningfully

Chancey Fleet:

centered on the lived experiences and wisdom of people with disabilities.

Matt May:

You actually brought up two of the kind of hallmarks

Matt May:

of real equity in the discussion.

Matt May:

Number one, the workshops that you're doing, we are proposing an exchange

Matt May:

by which we gain this information, and you learn how to solder.

Matt May:

Right?

Matt May:

Everybody is getting something and everyone has a stake in the

Matt May:

arrangement, as opposed to, as you were saying, the gift card, whatever.

Matt May:

It's just almost a passing off of of that responsibility.

Chancey Fleet:

Yeah, it's a gig.

Chancey Fleet:

It's a gig.

Matt May:

And the second one is where you're talking about

Matt May:

being listened to in the room.

Matt May:

That responsibility is born across all of the stakeholders in the discussion.

Matt May:

I think a lot of the time, the discussion of equity is mostly

Matt May:

about money for services.

Matt May:

And that makes sense in terms of the stock market, obviously it's got a big

Matt May:

connection to the term of money, but not everyone wants to be a software engineer.

Matt May:

Not everybody wants to be a product designer.

Matt May:

Sometimes the people want to pick up this tool because they want to get the

Matt May:

thing done, that the tool affords them.

Matt May:

And that's it.

Matt May:

If they want to be an artist for art's sake, they don't need to make the product

Matt May:

and be involved in all of the decisions.

Matt May:

Everybody has a different thing that they want to get out of it and being

Matt May:

able to tease out what is a fair exchange for that is also a form of equity work.

Chancey Fleet:

Yeah.

Chancey Fleet:

And I think that cuts both ways.

Chancey Fleet:

If you're a sighted designer and you are self-propelled or for whatever

Chancey Fleet:

reason, you don't have a budget and you can't engage in that gift

Chancey Fleet:

card economy to get good answers.

Chancey Fleet:

Like maybe you can do something else.

Chancey Fleet:

Can you, are you good photographer?

Chancey Fleet:

Can you take some good photos in exchange?

Chancey Fleet:

Can you advise on something else?

Chancey Fleet:

Can you volunteer a couple hours of your time to do a

Chancey Fleet:

thing that somebody else needs?

Chancey Fleet:

I think when we think about equity, it's not only about ensuring equity

Chancey Fleet:

for people with disabilities, although that's super important.

Chancey Fleet:

It's also ensuring that financial contribution is not the only way

Chancey Fleet:

that folks who need our expertise and wisdom can get that need met.

Chancey Fleet:

Because we can all offer different things to each other.

Chancey Fleet:

And a lot of the meaningful projects that I've been involved in that turned out

Chancey Fleet:

to be rewarding and generative didn't involve any financial transactions.

Chancey Fleet:

Claire over the years has written us whole curriculums and

Chancey Fleet:

volunteered a ton of her time.

Chancey Fleet:

Another community partner, Lauren Race, who's at Twitter now, decided

Chancey Fleet:

to make her entire master's thesis a complete flight of tactile

Chancey Fleet:

graphics for physical computing.

Chancey Fleet:

You can find it at tactileschematics.com.

Chancey Fleet:

I hope she learned a lot from us and we've become really generative

Chancey Fleet:

colleagues in a lot of ways, but again, she didn't need to offer funding.

Chancey Fleet:

She offered her really unique and deep expertise and a willingness

Chancey Fleet:

to address immediate needs that we had in our community.

Chancey Fleet:

And I just, I want to see more of that.

Matt May:

Yeah.

Matt May:

And I want to juxtapose this against what I think are the least

Matt May:

equitable kinds of arrangements.

Matt May:

My understanding in the Blind community is that the example

Matt May:

of this is the magic cane.

Matt May:

What if we took the white cane and we made it something that

Matt May:

was technologically superior...

Chancey Fleet:

What if we added lasers?

Matt May:

What if we added lasers?

Matt May:

What if we had the laser cane?

Matt May:

And so many different examples of this come up over the years

Matt May:

where you can see that they didn't think about what the cane does.

Matt May:

And so not being a white cane user, I would like for you to explain what the

Matt May:

cane does, that's important that if you were to, if you were to explain why this

Matt May:

thing matters in the format that it's in, so that you could talk the next generation

Matt May:

of laser cane people into doing something more productive with their lives.

Chancey Fleet:

Oh my gosh.

Chancey Fleet:

Yep.

Chancey Fleet:

This is great.

Chancey Fleet:

So among our staff and volunteers in the tech department and the back

Chancey Fleet:

office, we always joke around we should have a public awareness campaign.

Chancey Fleet:

That's just the, it's a stick campaign.

Chancey Fleet:

Why are traditional canes more effective.

Chancey Fleet:

And normally you shouldn't call a white cane a stick, but we're going to make an

Chancey Fleet:

exception here because it's literally...

Chancey Fleet:

don't complicate it.

Chancey Fleet:

It's a stick.

Chancey Fleet:

Okay?

Chancey Fleet:

What if you break it or lose it?

Chancey Fleet:

What if you drop it down an elevator shaft or onto the subway tracks?

Chancey Fleet:

Both of which things I've done.

Chancey Fleet:

What if you break it on something and have to put it back together with

Chancey Fleet:

a splint of a pencil and duct tape?

Chancey Fleet:

It doesn't matter.

Chancey Fleet:

It's a stick.

Chancey Fleet:

It costs $30.

Chancey Fleet:

What if it rains on it?

Chancey Fleet:

What if you are kayaking and all kinds of sand gets in it,

Chancey Fleet:

it's not really a big deal.

Chancey Fleet:

Cause it's a stick.

Chancey Fleet:

It costs $30.

Chancey Fleet:

You don't have to charge it.

Chancey Fleet:

It won't track you...

Chancey Fleet:

cause it's a stick.

Chancey Fleet:

You just move it back and forth and it finds things.

Chancey Fleet:

And when you damage it, you get another one.

Matt May:

And that's the part that I think is just the most fascinating

Matt May:

to me about this, because it seems like a lot of these projects are a

Matt May:

hammer in search of a nail, right?

Matt May:

It's almost like the exchange that's being offered is for you to be dependent

Matt May:

on financially and with your own security to this company's product.

Matt May:

And that seems to be the opposite of what it is that we should be doing.

Matt May:

And it boggled the mind when I first got into accessibility to find out that

Matt May:

something like JAWS, one of the major screen readers for know for Blind and

Matt May:

print-dis abled people was $1,300.

Matt May:

And with that, you got one release.

Matt May:

You got one update.

Matt May:

Which was an annual update for it.

Matt May:

And then that was it.

Matt May:

And that was the baseline.

Matt May:

That was what you needed in order to use a computer, unless you

Matt May:

wanted to use maybe Orca on Linux.

Matt May:

This is before kind of VoiceOver took over on the Mac and iOS, but that

Matt May:

idea that it costs a lot to be Blind.

Matt May:

In order to, just to have the baseline, like access to technology.

Matt May:

And just to tell a little story about the green room experience today,

Matt May:

when Chancey logged in, I think we spent at least a half an hour trying

Matt May:

to get everything up and running.

Matt May:

And we ran into problems with the browsers.

Matt May:

We ran into problems with the laptop, with the wifi, with the streaming product

Matt May:

that we're using to record this, Zencastr.

Matt May:

And one of the things was just getting to the buttons, the access to simply

Matt May:

read the labels of the buttons.

Matt May:

That's important to me because I want to talk to you.

Matt May:

And so the arguments about this on the web accessibility side of providing

Matt May:

equity in these arrangements is another one, which is that it's about the

Matt May:

community and the connectivity, and about the equanimity of the people that

Matt May:

are working on these things together.

Matt May:

Everything that's happening right now is about collaborative software tools.

Matt May:

And so if you have a mixed abled-disabled population of employees, which,

Matt May:

parenthetically, you do, the idea of accessibility being something that

Matt May:

is an add-on, or a nice to have, or we'll do it in another release.

Matt May:

It doesn't work.

Matt May:

You can't do that.

Matt May:

And larger companies are hiring product managers whose entire job

Matt May:

it is to evaluate products that they might buy because their own employees

Matt May:

might not be able to use them.

Chancey Fleet:

Yeah.

Chancey Fleet:

I want to address the consequences of digital inaccessibility a little bit,

Chancey Fleet:

because even if you're working in digital accessibility and you're meeting people

Chancey Fleet:

like me who are Blind or disabled people in tech or tech adjacent, you're not

Chancey Fleet:

meeting all your users and you're not seeing what I see as a tech educator.

Chancey Fleet:

For me, you could see me getting upset in a laughing about it way when things

Chancey Fleet:

weren't going according to plan today.

Chancey Fleet:

But I kinda knew that I would make it to the finish line and I have made it

Chancey Fleet:

a practice to deal with roadblocks in a way that doesn't really get to me and it

Chancey Fleet:

doesn't get to my self image as somebody who's going to be a good problem solver

Chancey Fleet:

and be happy to use digital tools.

Chancey Fleet:

As a tech educator.

Chancey Fleet:

I'm often working with someone who's newly Blind as in like maybe two weeks ago.

Chancey Fleet:

And I'm often working with people that have had low vision or print

Chancey Fleet:

reading disability, or have been Blind for a long time, but who don't

Chancey Fleet:

have access to the most premium forms of assistive technology.

Chancey Fleet:

So for example, they might not be able to afford an iPhone.

Chancey Fleet:

They might be working on a lifeline Android phone, which has pretty

Chancey Fleet:

shaky support for TalkBack and other assistive technology features.

Chancey Fleet:

If you have a user who is not temperamentally perfectly suited to

Chancey Fleet:

troubleshooting as almost a hobby, a couple of things can happen.

Chancey Fleet:

A user can very quickly develop a self-belief that they're not good

Chancey Fleet:

at technology, and that technology is frustrating and that they

Chancey Fleet:

should avoid it whenever possible.

Chancey Fleet:

Which means that you have done something harmful in their life

Chancey Fleet:

and you have also lost a customer.

Chancey Fleet:

And then the other thing that can happen is that users can be frustrated

Chancey Fleet:

by a single experience with your tech and they will never come back.

Chancey Fleet:

I still have people telling me that some technologies that they tried, five

Chancey Fleet:

plus years ago, notably Microsoft Edge.

Chancey Fleet:

Oh, I'm never going to use that again.

Chancey Fleet:

It was terrible.

Chancey Fleet:

And Microsoft Edge has been totally rewritten.

Chancey Fleet:

It's using Chromium now.

Chancey Fleet:

It works great with screen readers now in my view, but a

Chancey Fleet:

bunch of users will not be back.

Chancey Fleet:

Narrator is another one.

Chancey Fleet:

And I'm sorry to focus on Microsoft, but I'm thinking about Microsoft.

Chancey Fleet:

Narrator in it's first in instantiation around I believe Windows XP had a very

Chancey Fleet:

quiet, hard to hear voice, and could only read a few things and really

Chancey Fleet:

couldn't be used at all on the web and was pretty laborious to even use,

Chancey Fleet:

to go through basic system settings.

Chancey Fleet:

And now Narrator has great braille support.

Chancey Fleet:

It's easy to use.

Chancey Fleet:

It works out of the box.

Chancey Fleet:

It may not be the screen reader that I would choose just yet for my

Chancey Fleet:

primary, but it's like pretty great.

Chancey Fleet:

If I'm at a public computer or I need to fix somebody else's machine or show

Chancey Fleet:

a sighted person, how their tech works.

Chancey Fleet:

And I, I need a screen reader while I'm doing that, but there are probably

Chancey Fleet:

thousands, tens of thousands of fine people who tried Narrator in 2003.

Chancey Fleet:

And aren't going to try it again.

Chancey Fleet:

So the stakes are high and you want to get people.

Chancey Fleet:

You want to get digital accessibility, right?

Chancey Fleet:

As quickly as you can.

Chancey Fleet:

So that the first impression that you make, which may be the

Chancey Fleet:

only impression you ever get to make is going to be a good one.

Matt May:

I have had my fill of this whole experiment.

Matt May:

I think that's what you're talking about.

Matt May:

Like that if I'm tired of this, if I've reached my frustration

Matt May:

tolerance for this, then no more.

Matt May:

And so it's additive from product to product.

Matt May:

If your experience is to be excluded, then it doesn't take 10,000 times to do it.

Matt May:

It's the first time where it lines up with all of your previous experiences

Matt May:

of exclusion to feel left out of that experience, which is why you have

Matt May:

to get it right as soon as possible.

Chancey Fleet:

Exactly.

Chancey Fleet:

And then if you are in an organization and you know that you have a legacy

Chancey Fleet:

of impressions that you don't like the consequences of, and again,

Chancey Fleet:

I'm going to focus on Microsoft because what I have to say right

Chancey Fleet:

now is ultimately I think positive.

Chancey Fleet:

Microsoft has done a lot in recent years to turn impressions around.

Chancey Fleet:

They created one of the first comprehensive disability answer desks.

Chancey Fleet:

They integrated that with BeMyEyes.

Chancey Fleet:

So if you're an emerging computer user and you need an app that gives you an

Chancey Fleet:

easier way to connect with someone, you can dial in, you can do ASL.

Chancey Fleet:

There are lots of pathways to tech support.

Chancey Fleet:

And then they've also really been dedicating resources, not only

Chancey Fleet:

to developing built-in assistive technologies, but to doing like

Chancey Fleet:

pretty heavy community outreach and building advisory mechanisms, so that

Chancey Fleet:

their pivot is noticed and perhaps embraced by communities of disability.

Chancey Fleet:

So it's not the end of the world.

Chancey Fleet:

If you're in a company that's been doing work for 30 years and, you've

Chancey Fleet:

got some legacy reputation to manage.

Chancey Fleet:

But it does mean having a really bold and well-resourced

Chancey Fleet:

strategy for turning that around.

Matt May:

Great.

Matt May:

This is a good place to pause.

Matt May:

So we're going to take a short break, and we will have our

Matt May:

last segment with Chancey Fleet.

Matt May:

On the next episode of InEx:

Timothy Bardlavens:

I think if you are an individual contributor and you don't

Timothy Bardlavens:

believe in the work that you're doing is equitable, or you don't believe that

Timothy Bardlavens:

the organization itself is equitable, or whatever the case may be, find a new job.

Timothy Bardlavens:

Because you don't have the power to make the changes and you are going

Timothy Bardlavens:

to create so much harm for yourself by trying to go against the grain.

Matt May:

A conversation with Timothy Bardlavens.

Matt May:

And we're back with Chancey Fleet.

Matt May:

And we're going to talk about the equitable life.

Matt May:

You, Chancey, have your goals for how you want to live your life.

Matt May:

What do you think equity looks like to you?

Matt May:

What is the average day for Chancey Fleet?

Matt May:

Things that aren't equitable to you now, what do they feel like

Matt May:

to you in an equitable world?

Chancey Fleet:

I dream of a world where my community demands and receives ubiquitous

Chancey Fleet:

access to non visual representations of spatial information, whether that means

Chancey Fleet:

statistics, art pieces, images, maps, on par with what sighted people receive

Chancey Fleet:

I think that we've done a pretty good job as a community as a movement to make

Chancey Fleet:

it clear that we all deserve equitable access to books and text and the web.

Chancey Fleet:

But we are so behind on our access to images.

Chancey Fleet:

And so many of us, we have had our aptitudes untested and untried in

Chancey Fleet:

the arena of spatial communication and expression and understanding

Chancey Fleet:

that we don't even have the demand necessary to generate the change

Chancey Fleet:

that I want to see in the world.

Chancey Fleet:

I want to light a fire of curiosity and joy and surprise and mastery

Chancey Fleet:

in the brain of every Blind and low vision person that I meet.

Chancey Fleet:

And I want to end image poverty in our community during my lifetime.

Chancey Fleet:

I want to take tactile design down off the pedestal and put

Chancey Fleet:

it in every pair of hands.

Chancey Fleet:

And I want to see that the technologies that we've had for doing spatial

Chancey Fleet:

representation and a tactile, or sonified way, the technologies that we've had

Chancey Fleet:

for decades need to stop feeling arcane, mysterious and above somebody's reach.

Chancey Fleet:

They need to be for everyone.

Chancey Fleet:

And that needs to happen pretty much immediately.

Chancey Fleet:

So in an equitable world, I would roll into a museum and find

Chancey Fleet:

ubiquitous, 3D prints that represent the things that are behind glass,

Chancey Fleet:

that we're not allowed to touch.

Chancey Fleet:

When I enter a subway station, I would get a quick little map that illustrates

Chancey Fleet:

where all the platforms and turns are.

Chancey Fleet:

When I hang out with my nephews, I would have access to books that we

Chancey Fleet:

could use together as Blind and sighted and those images, not just the texts,

Chancey Fleet:

but those images would be accessible.

Chancey Fleet:

And as a consequence of all that Blind people who think they're bad travelers

Chancey Fleet:

would find out that they're spatial learners and they're good travelers

Chancey Fleet:

and Blind people to think that they're bad at math and science would find out

Chancey Fleet:

that they just needed to experience these things in a different way.

Chancey Fleet:

And, there are people that don't prefer spatial communication, and I get that.

Chancey Fleet:

It's not for everyone, but the opportunity is for everyone that's got to happen.

Chancey Fleet:

And then I guess the other thing that I really think about in terms of how I want

Chancey Fleet:

to protect and defend my own equity is that I don't just want to be included.

Chancey Fleet:

Inclusion is a low bar.

Chancey Fleet:

I want to be respected.

Chancey Fleet:

I want to be asked for my consent and preferences and I want to be relied

Chancey Fleet:

on to be a trusted contributor.

Chancey Fleet:

So that can mean something as simple as, today I was in a waiting

Chancey Fleet:

room and reapproaching my chair that I'd been sitting in earlier.

Chancey Fleet:

And somebody reached out and touched my arm to guide me.

Chancey Fleet:

And I was like, oh, we don't have consent.

Chancey Fleet:

And, that changed the conversation to something that she was familiar with.

Chancey Fleet:

We had a nice exchange about it and I was like, oh, no worries.

Chancey Fleet:

I just, in an ideal world, an equitable world, somebody that's just been

Chancey Fleet:

informed about a boundary in a friendly way, isn't going to get upset and I'm

Chancey Fleet:

not going to be afraid of retaliation.

Chancey Fleet:

And we're going to do the emotional work that we do in that moment to make it all

Chancey Fleet:

good and move on, which is exactly what happened today, but it's not always.

Chancey Fleet:

Equity in the cultural context also means that people will ask me for

Chancey Fleet:

as much as they want to give me.

Chancey Fleet:

That they will come to me for help, that they will come to me for skills and

Chancey Fleet:

perspective, and happily that happens a lot at the library more and more.

Chancey Fleet:

But I think we have to get past this idea that Blind and disabled people

Chancey Fleet:

are going to be the recipients of design or of anything else that

Chancey Fleet:

takes skill and talent because we have an amazing amount of talent

Chancey Fleet:

and resilience and so much to offer.

Chancey Fleet:

But at this point in my life, being in a job that I love in a context that makes

Chancey Fleet:

sense to me and having the tools that I need, and finally feeling like I figured

Chancey Fleet:

out what my worth is in this world, it becomes my next project and a pretty high

Chancey Fleet:

priority for me to think about whether I'm providing the most equitable and

Chancey Fleet:

welcoming experiences to other people.

Chancey Fleet:

And so that means realizing that as a Blind woman, I know one lived experience

Chancey Fleet:

of Blindness and I don't actually know what it's like to be newly Blind

Chancey Fleet:

and navigate competing priorities.

Chancey Fleet:

And that means I need to listen in spaces sometimes more than I talk, even though

Chancey Fleet:

my career has rewarded me for talking.

Chancey Fleet:

It's time for me to step back now and let other folks tell me about their

Chancey Fleet:

accessibility needs, their preferences, their dreams, the support they need.

Chancey Fleet:

And for me to resist the urge to tell anyone how to do Blindness

Chancey Fleet:

and to just present options.

Chancey Fleet:

And I think as we grow in the organized Blind movement and in communities of

Chancey Fleet:

disability, a certain generosity of spirit where we know that we don't actually

Chancey Fleet:

have all the answers and that we are not a one-way wisdom dispenser either.

Chancey Fleet:

That's that's going to be the next step.

Matt May:

So many quotes from this.

Matt May:

My ability to talk has helped my career greatly.

Matt May:

Yeah.

Matt May:

And the idea of listening, I continued to be humbled just by hosting this show.

Matt May:

But the, what you were talking about there, what the Blind community

Matt May:

has to give kind of reminds me of this other thing that I

Matt May:

learned fairly early in my career.

Matt May:

The guy that taught me this was William Loughborough, and he

Matt May:

he talked about blindlessness.

Matt May:

What you lose by not being Blind.

Matt May:

Which flips the script I think for a lot of other people.

Matt May:

In the Deaf community, they talk about Deaf Gain.

Matt May:

These are the things that Deaf people are good at by virtue of being Deaf.

Matt May:

And I wonder if you have any of those, if that resonates with you,

Matt May:

are there things that you think that, that sighted people can learn?

Matt May:

And I know that you talked, you just talked about this as my lived

Matt May:

experience and there are others, but collectively, what is it about Blindness

Matt May:

that you think sighted people need to know or could learn for themselves?

Chancey Fleet:

Speaking from my experience, I think having any disability

Chancey Fleet:

that surfaces itself when you're interacting with spaces and people in

Chancey Fleet:

technology has the potential to make you a really resilient problem-solver and good

Chancey Fleet:

at anything that demands improvisation.

Chancey Fleet:

And I've certainly found that to be true in my life and in a lot of the people

Chancey Fleet:

that I admire and am in community with.

Chancey Fleet:

And there are a lot of ways to get that gain, but Blindness

Chancey Fleet:

is definitely one of them.

Chancey Fleet:

Being able to communicate complicated things through narrative.

Chancey Fleet:

Noticing patterns in your environment.

Chancey Fleet:

So for example, noticing terrain changes, sounds, openness or closeness of a

Chancey Fleet:

space, and building a rich, spatial understanding of where something

Chancey Fleet:

is without having a visual context.

Chancey Fleet:

I think that's probably pretty powerful.

Chancey Fleet:

And then particularly as someone who centers my career and my life

Chancey Fleet:

around community building, in the broader world, there's a lot of

Chancey Fleet:

things that are really hard and scary and seem unsolvable right now.

Chancey Fleet:

So we all have opinions about how the pandemic's being managed,

Chancey Fleet:

and we all worry about politics, no matter what side we're on.

Chancey Fleet:

And it can feel like everything is so big and terrible.

Chancey Fleet:

And ever since I've been in the organized Blind movement, ever since

Chancey Fleet:

2001, I've been able to take on issues directly and really notice that I

Chancey Fleet:

was able to help solve a problem.

Chancey Fleet:

So I remember going to Congress and advocating for the Help America Vote Act.

Chancey Fleet:

And then we got accessible voting machines.

Chancey Fleet:

I came to the library as a volunteer and said, hey, let's

Chancey Fleet:

start a tech education program.

Chancey Fleet:

And then I got hired and then I made the Dimensions lab.

Chancey Fleet:

And now we're we've got a lot of momentum and I did that

Chancey Fleet:

with a couple of my friends.

Chancey Fleet:

That happened.

Chancey Fleet:

Just the sense of agency in a scary world, that there are things that we can see

Chancey Fleet:

and improve and maintain and care for really helps me feel good about my time

Chancey Fleet:

and my life in a way that I think, and again, there's a lot of ways to get there.

Chancey Fleet:

There are a lot of ways that, that non-disabled, people can find that

Chancey Fleet:

joy in, in community and joy in the maintenance and care of the

Chancey Fleet:

infrastructures that make life better.

Chancey Fleet:

But blindness was certainly a very efficient way to get there.

Chancey Fleet:

And I'm not sure that I would feel the same way about my career and

Chancey Fleet:

whatever my contributions end up being.

Chancey Fleet:

And such gratitude for the support that I've received.

Chancey Fleet:

If I weren't in this community, it basically feels late being,

Chancey Fleet:

even though I'm in New York City, Blindness feels like a small town

Chancey Fleet:

and I find that very comforting.

Matt May:

Great.

Matt May:

So one last question.

Matt May:

Who do you think is doing good work?

Matt May:

Who should we be paying attention to?

Matt May:

What things do you want to highlight?

Chancey Fleet:

Oh my gosh.

Chancey Fleet:

So many people.

Chancey Fleet:

For one thing, check me out on Twitter.

Chancey Fleet:

Cause I'm always shouting out good stuff and sometimes dragging bad design.

Chancey Fleet:

So both things can be found on my Twitter, I'm @chanceyfleet.

Chancey Fleet:

Oh gosh.

Chancey Fleet:

I'm in awe of the work that's being done by the San Francisco Lighthouse

Chancey Fleet:

for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

Chancey Fleet:

I'm a bit biased because a couple of years ago I did join the board.

Chancey Fleet:

So they do immersion training for newly Blind adults.

Chancey Fleet:

They've designed a beautiful building that embraces and highlights the strengths of

Chancey Fleet:

Blind perception in some phenomenal ways.

Chancey Fleet:

So for example, in the boardroom, there's a microphone system

Chancey Fleet:

that amplifies everybody, but doesn't lose the directionality.

Chancey Fleet:

So you know where somebody is sitting in relation to yourself, there's the design

Chancey Fleet:

is done by the building was designed by Chris Downey, who's a Blind architect.

Chancey Fleet:

And so there are tons of little touches and features everything from lighting

Chancey Fleet:

to accommodate every conceivable type of vision to textures that are subtle

Chancey Fleet:

and beautiful and rich and help you orient to where you are in the building.

Chancey Fleet:

So there's a central sort of granite pathway.

Chancey Fleet:

That's the way that you circulate through different sections, and the acoustics

Chancey Fleet:

have been handled with love and care.

Chancey Fleet:

You can go up to the Enchanted Hills camp and and everything is

Chancey Fleet:

accessible, but also just beautiful and natural and ambitious things are

Chancey Fleet:

happening up there like stem camps and music camps and those immersions.

Chancey Fleet:

So I always look to the Lighthouse.

Chancey Fleet:

When I think about what I hope for my own work, the Lighthouse hosts TMAP,

Chancey Fleet:

which is a way to use open street map data, to create tactile maps on demand.

Chancey Fleet:

That was invented by Dr.

Chancey Fleet:

Josh Miele, who's definitely somebody to watch.

Chancey Fleet:

And now the impact of that work is being amplified by Lighthouse.

Chancey Fleet:

We make TMAPs available with the library.

Chancey Fleet:

If you want to check them out.

Chancey Fleet:

During the pandemic, I was tremendously happy to introduce the work of Ed Summers,

Chancey Fleet:

who works for SAS and has developed the SAS graphics accelerator tool.

Chancey Fleet:

It's a Chrome extension that lets you bring in CSV data and turn it into

Chancey Fleet:

rich explorable sonified data sets.

Chancey Fleet:

So when we were worried about COVID stats in a pretty intense way in March 2020,

Chancey Fleet:

I was able to bring that free technology to our library, patrons and reach over

Chancey Fleet:

a hundred people and show everybody, we know that a lot of the data visualizations

Chancey Fleet:

about COVID right now aren't accessible, but here's what you can do.

Chancey Fleet:

There is a way.

Chancey Fleet:

And I could just mention hundreds, more hundreds, more people I've already shouted

Chancey Fleet:

out Lauren, Claire, two of my community partners that are doing amazing things.

Chancey Fleet:

But I think just generally during the pandemic and because of our new

Chancey Fleet:

willingness to try things out in a virtual context, I've found out that there are

Chancey Fleet:

more Blind and sighted people quietly doing novel, groundbreaking, welcoming,

Chancey Fleet:

joyful stuff than I could even imagine.

Chancey Fleet:

It turns out that we've got a pretty deep bench for innovation in the community.

Chancey Fleet:

And I would just say, use your social media.

Chancey Fleet:

If you're comfortable doing that, pop in on free virtual events, do what you can to

Chancey Fleet:

find out about what's going on in corners of the disability world that you're not

Chancey Fleet:

directly connected to because there's so much out there and you can never shout

Chancey Fleet:

out the best work because there is an abundance of awesome work being done.

Matt May:

Chancey Fleet, as always, it is a pleasure.

Matt May:

I'm so glad that I had a chance to talk with you today.

Matt May:

So thank you.

Chancey Fleet:

Alright.

Chancey Fleet:

Thank you, Matt.

Chancey Fleet:

This has been great.

Matt May:

That's our show.

Matt May:

Show notes and transcripts for all InEx episodes are available at inex.show.

Matt May:

That's I-N-E-X dot show.

Matt May:

All episodes are released under Creative Commons Attribution,

Matt May:

4.0 International license.

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About the Podcast

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InEx: a show about inclusive design

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About your host

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Matthew May

InEx is Matt's major research project for his Master of Design in Inclusive Design degree at OCAD University.