Kevin says: Give user choice: “Obviously what’s good for me won’t be good for someone else. We shouldn’t be designing for a kind of homogeneous grade of people.”
Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode.
Transcript
Nic
I’m Nic Steenhout. And you’re listening to the accessibility soundbites, a series of short podcasts where disabled people explain their impairments, and what barrier they encounter on the web. Of course, first, I need to thank Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Tenon provide accessibility as a service, they offer testing, training and tooling to help fix accessibility fast. Today, I’m talking with Kevin Mar-Molinero. Hey, Kev, how are you?
Kevin
Very good. Thank you.
Nic
Thank you for joining me, I know this the end of the day for you, it’s the start of the day for me. So we have a little bit of time split. Let me jump right into it and ask you, what’s your disability or your impairment?
Kevin
So I have a couple actually. So I’ve only admitted to them I found out about them relatively recently. So I have dyscalculia, which is effectively the dyslexia of numbers. Numbers, frankly, to me make no sense. I find it very, very difficult to comprehend. When I see them, I see them as shapes. And I by and large survived kind of got through my life, my life through memory tricks and through kind of running my finger over a screen or just remembering what shapes looked like and what the shape expected shapes coming out of the bar. It’s incredibly similar to dyslexia in that you can often place new numbers or completely arbitrarily miss numbers out of strings, so on and so forth. So it’s kind of, I guess, it’s a less a less well known cousin of dyslexia. But I am also dyslexic. So this is something which I’ve probably known all of my life, but I never went to get diagnosed. My sister is quite heavily dyslexic. My dad has dyslexia, my brother has dyslexia. I was of a generation where it wasn’t something that was considered at school. So I was never diagnosed at school. And I went through my working career for years and years and years, right up to my late 30s, kind of avoiding the very obvious thing that I was dyslexic. And eventually, after a lot of nagging from my sister went to get it actually checked out and get it diagnosed. My dyslexia tend to be more, it’s less around the kind of confusion of letters and within a sentence, I tend to manifest both in just completely arbitrarily missing words in a sentence, or, I guess from experience, I get the words, the wrong words in the wrong places. And I add things in. I do this quite regularly. It’s understanding it has allowed me to kind of have coping mechanisms, I think it’s been very interesting to kind of finally be honest about the fact that I have dyslexia and kind of realizing that sometimes my communication may be a bit more abrupt because I will think something in my head that won’t appear out of my mouth. And certainly when I’m typing, it’s, it’s all over the place. Likewise, we chatted briefly before we came into the call. But I mentioned that today is the end of a long day of zooms. And I think for a lot of people, they see zoom and zoom fatigue has been a real problem. I’m the opposite. At the end of the day, I’d much rather do a zoom call, or do a telephone call, because I just reach the end of the day, and I don’t want to read anything else that I want to type anything else, because I’m making so many mistakes.
Nic
It must be quite difficult to have dyslexia or any other condition and go through life and struggling with that. And then finally, when you’re in your 30s, get that confirmed,. How much of a relief versus you know, I should have done this earlier versus do I have coping strategies that are established? And is that going to change with the diagnosis? How much of that happened?
Kevin
It was a bit of an embarrassment about not doing it earlier? Absolutely. I think, I guess, kind of, I grew up in the 80s and 90s. And there was still a lot of ableist language around there’s still a kind of, there’s a bit of shame in having something like that. And I think I perhaps carry some of that over with me as I got older. I think finally accepting and kind of going and having it checked out and thank God, my sister nagged me into it. It made me realize, yes, I have coping strategies, but these coping strategies don’t necessarily work. And actually, once I started to look into it as I speak to people and I started to understand what this was, I’ve I’ve become a little more productive in the way I do things. I don’t feel so embarrassed to ask somebody to jump onto a phone call when I need to talk through something. I understand as well why, if I’m sat trying to do collaborative working, I’m not going to work as well, when I’m in a shared Google document, I’m going to need to be in a room, I need to be listening to people, because that’s how that sparks my thought process. And the written, the written word is always going to be something which it just doesn’t work properly for me.
Nic
Yeah. So this thing that everybody goes on about, you know, this meeting could have been an email. Really, you would take the opposite approach, right?
Kevin
It’s the worst possible thing for me? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I do understand why. And I understand that the kind of you get the cognitive fatigue, if you if you’ve, if you are on meetings all day long, but I’m the opposite. I need a phone call, I need to speak I need to hear I need to listen and I to respond through speech. Because it’s… I just get tired of reading, I just, my brain does not want to read anything else by the end of the day.
Nic
So let me let me ask you this. Apart from this… This fatigue, what would be your greatest barrier on the web?
Kevin
So dyscalculia… My dyscalculia far worse than my dyslexia. Numbers. So if we’re talking about direct barrier, something which I’ll give you two prime examples of things, which really, really just infuriate me. Phone numbers. Phone numbers might seem like such a small thing to most people, a long phone number, which is grouped together with no gaps in it, I will get wrong every single time. I just will, I know, I know, mobile phone number, for example, I need to break it down into into segments to be able to get it right. I rely very heavily on if I’m doing something copying and pasting out. So let’s say I take in the UK, we have postcodes, and I’ve got postcode, and I want to find out what something is. A lot of people will make those clickable links which open in a specific app. The minute I go to copy it open to an app, or it copies all the metadata behind it. And I can’t just paste that into the thing I want to paste it in. And this, it just angers me because otherwise, I have to and particularly on my phone, actually which I find easier. I open the browser tabs and then I almost have them side by side and get the first two digits and then go back and get the next two digits and then go back until I’ve got what I need to be able to input because I will not hold that in my head in the same way. I will get it wrong. So because they’re arbitrary, they’re not… They’re not word. So I’ll get it wrong. Also alongside this reading, so I didn’t realize I was doing this. And this is you interesting to talk about coping techniques. And until I kind of spoke to other people with dyslexia and realized it’s fairly normal. Quite often when I read I will highlight text. So highlight a chunk of the paragraph with my… Literally take the cursor and highlight it. So I can read that specific bit without muddling it up with the lines above and below. It is so common nowadays. Firstly, that it’s not designed for you to have a highlight. So I cannot highlight the text. And secondly, and immeasurably more annoying. Someone somewhere has decided the fact I’m highlighting it means I want to share it on social media. And a pop up appears. And I don’t want to share it on social media, I want to be able to read it. It’s just it’s that kind of I guess it’s the arrogance of the person doing I think, well, with the highlighting it definitely wants to share. It’s like no, I want to get to the end of that chunk. And then do the same thing just down below so that we can carry on reading.
Nic
Yeah. See, I’m so glad I’m talking to you because that was not something I would have thought about. So yeah! We hear a lot about sighted screen reader users. And the use case that people talk a lot about is folks with severe dyslexia. Have you played around with using a screen reader to alleviate some of that? That cognitive load?
Kevin
Not intentionally. So I do use screen readers at work for testing purposes. I do find some of the functions a hell of a lot easier than scanning and reading a site. But I’ve not intentionally used one in a knowing way. As opposed to you know, I haven’t thought to go and use one in the knowing why. I think… I think I’ve just kind of gotten used to how I am if that makes sense. I don’t really look for… I quite often will just kind of if there’s a mistake which I’ve done I’ll just think it’s my fault.
Nic
Fair enough.
Kevin
So it’s not something which I’ve had personal experience with. Going back to the other point, which I find really frustrating. And it’s something which I think a lot of people may be surprised by because they may not realize this but type ahead or predictive search when you have search boxes. I misspell things. It will almost always bring up the wrong thing, which I’m looking for. When for many people, it seems kind of a valuable thing to have these things coming down. I’m just going, why isn’t it showing what I want. Actually, I prefer to be able to type in my word. And then once it’s all in be able to use the AutoCorrect to change it and then search.
Nic
So what’s the solution there? Is it providing a toggle to turn on or off the word prediction? Or how do we reconcile the usability for folks that actually find that useful and the accessibility for folks like you that need it?
Kevin
It’s choice. It’s choice, I think, obviously, what’s good for me won’t be good for somebody else. And we shouldn’t be designing for kind of a homogenous grey of people. So actually, what I want is, rather than it start, for example, filtering stuff out, before I finish typing, I prefer it to wait to the end, if you’ve got a predictive text, by all means, start showing underneath what’s there. Because I can filter that out. I can ignore that. I mean, there’s just something going on below the screen. But don’t start editing the products. Don’t start editing the page, don’t start changing the user experience around me. Allow me to make that that deliberate choice at the end to do that.
Nic
So while we’re mentioning design, what what would be one message you have for designers or developers?
Kevin
Well, I mean, two messages, really. First message is: Let me copy and paste things I need to do it. Please don’t think that your your UI decisions should hijack that native behavior of me being able to copy and paste stuff. I need to Google word sometimes I need to be able to copy and copy and paste out so that I don’t have to remember things. And also, I need to be able to highlight the text to read it.
Nic
Fantastic. Kevin, thank you so much. You’ve been a great guest and you’ve, you’ve taught me stuff I hadn’t thought about. So that’s that’s wonderful. I’m sure the audience is going to enjoy that as well.
Kevin
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on this
Nic
Cheers.