E58: Designing for Everyone: Stéphanie Walter on Enterprise UX and Digital Accessibility

In this episode, UX researcher and accessibility expert Stéphanie Walter explores how to integrate digital accessibility into enterprise UX, sharing strategies to overcome organizational barriers, improve collaboration with developers, and ensure inclusive product design. She also introduces Neuro Spicy, her initiative to raise awareness of neurodiversity and invisible disabilities in tech and offers practical tips for building accessible digital tools that go beyond compliance.

Transcript

Speaker 00:04

Welcome to the IAAP United in Accessibility podcast. Today's guest is Stéphanie Walter, a UX researcher and accessible product designer specializing in enterprise UX. With over a decade of experience creating complex digital tools for industries from banking to healthcare, she has championed inclusive design by embedding accessibility into every stage of the workflow. Stéphanie shares how early encounters with inaccessibility in education shaped her career, why enterprise UX often lags in digital accessibility, and how she partners with developers, testers and stakeholders to close that gap. We'll explore her advocacy for better documentation, co-founding of Neuro Spicy to raise awareness of invisible and cognitive disabilities, and her insights on modern CSS procurement strategies and inclusive workplace tools. Let's dive into it on the United in Accessibility podcast.

Sam Evans 01:00

Hello. This is Sam Evans, the Certification Director at IAAP, the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, and on our podcast today, I'm so excited to have the opportunity to have some time to talk with Stéphanie Walter. Stéphanie, welcome and thank you for joining us today. Could you start by introducing yourself into sharing a little bit about your journey into accessibility and user experience. So, they're not always the same. Good accessibility should have user experience, but a lot of times we bring people to accessibility from user experience, so please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your journey into accessibility and your work in UX.

Stéphanie Walter 01:39

Sure. Hi, thanks for having me first. So yeah, I'm Stéphanie Walter. I'm a UX researcher. I'm mostly working in enterprise UX those days, which is I design tools and software for people who work with them on a daily basis. So, my journey in accessibility in UX, that's a big topic. So, I've discovered accessibility as a student. We had a blind student in my year in bachelor degree, and we had a wheelchair student user and friend in my master's degree, and I had the kind of sad privilege of witnessing how the educational system in France, but also, like the whole city, was very inaccessible, like lack of accommodation, but also like very horrible people, ableist teachers. So, this is kind of where I kind of encountered this idea of okay, accessibility is about making things work better. It was mostly at the time around like physical accessibility in the building, things like that. And then I started working as a designer and got more interested into digital accessibility, and it came at the same time as my journey in UX, because when you start reading about UX design, very, very quickly, actually, you usually start learning about inclusion, inclusive design and when you start like learning about psychology, you talk about cognitive biases, and then you talk about cognitive accessibility as well. So, it's kind of all a little bit linked. There's like, as soon as you start talking about human beings who use the interfaces or use spaces, or use anything that's basically building then, of course, you start, like, talking about needs of users and then you're like, well, there's a lot of users with a lot of different needs. And then you're like, Yeah, okay, accessibility is about the needs of the users with different types of disabilities, part of, like, inclusion, very, very small part of inclusive design, but yeah, so the whole thing is very, like, all linked together, I think.

Sam Evans 03:59

You talked about being a UX researcher, and so I am not familiar enough with that. Is that research that happened in an academic arena first, or was that part of your work when you came to work in enterprise, corporate UX work?

Stéphanie Walter 04:15

So, I actually did the opposite, like a lot of people I know in UX research, they started, like in Human-Technology Interaction or Human-Computer Interaction, and then they went into more digital field. I did the other way around. I started in web design. I discovered UX. Eventually I ended up working as a UX researcher for an HTI department at a university, but like way later in the career, but usually when you are doing like studies, especially academical studies, on UX HTI, like, I think almost all my friends who studied HTI at school were taught about accessibility at some point, at least. Maybe not enough, but at least they heard the word you know.

Sam Evans 05:04

And do you think so in working in enterprise, so larger corporate spaces or business dynamics and larger systems in UX. Have you always encountered accessibility in that? Or were there moments in time when you introduced or saw big changes happen?

Stéphanie Walter 05:23

Fortunately, accessibility is something that we see, I think even less in enterprise setup, there's a lot of laws on accessibility for B to C products, and if you work for governments, but still, there's not many laws on accessibility regarding like internal products, at least in Europe, I think there's more in the US and the UK, from what I understand between Europe at the moment, it's mostly laws about discrimination, which you can tie back to accessibility, because if you are a disabled person and the tools they provide to you are not accessible, and you cannot work on or do your job on a daily basis. You can say, okay, this is discrimination, you know. But I think we are still into this kind of not great area where a lot of disabled people are unemployed or struggle finding work. And at the end of the day, we have this stigma where basically people are like, Yeah, but we do not have disabled employee. So why should the tool be accessible? And then you're like, yeah, maybe you do not have disabled employee because your recruiting website is not even accessible. So how can you expect someone to go through the whole recruitment process, even if the like, the first step, which is the website where you're recruiting, is not accessible? So, I think we have a giant problem with that in like enterprise UX, where people think like, yeah, we do not have disabled employees. Or sometimes they're like, well, yeah, we have this guy. He's in a wheelchair. We have elevators. It's covered, you know. So, I arrived in companies where I went, Yeah, or either it's covered or worse, like the poor person is tokenized, you know, every year they get the picture. I was like, Yeah, kind of weird thing. And, yeah, I've kind of worked in places where I arrived and was like, Okay, what's about the accessibility of the tool? I assume we need to be WCAG compliant, you know? And I went to the people in charge of, like, the disabled community in those places, and they were like, what's WCAG? I was like, Oh, okay. So, I ended up in an environment where I was like the one teaching digital accessibility to the people who are in charge of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. So, they're like, Yeah, accessibility. Okay, wheelchair user’s elevators covered. So, they kind of, I think, have more experience with physical space accessibility. But as soon as you start talking about the tools that people use on a daily basis, it's becoming a little bit tricky. That being said, I've also seen very interesting things happening like at the moment, I'm working for a bank, and they're looking for beta testers, because Microsoft has a whole set of new tools taking account a lot of new things for accessibility, including for dyslexic people, like the ability to be have some text to speech and speak through text tools like that. So not only like a screen reader but being able to talk to your computer and not having to type all the time things like that. So yeah, they're like, oh, who wants to test those tools? We need, like, better tests. I'm like, I want. I want. Let me. Let's hope you know for digital accessibility.

Sam Evans 09:00

And Stephanie and talking about those barriers where I think a lot of times organizations, large and small, think that accessibility is curb cuts, elevators, grab bars, maybe we get to raise dots, you know, for navigation, warning signals, kind of thing. Or perhaps in more advanced you know, the elevator talk, so you don't have to look at a screen. But what other kinds of hurdles have you faced in organizations and enterprises?

Stéphanie Walter 09:30

So usually, I don't give them a choice. There's a joke in my previous team with developers, and my colleague was like, yeah, do not ask Stephanie about colors, or you get a lecture explaining to you all the contrast ratio and why we have this specific shade of orange. I was like, yeah, yeah, that's checks, you know. So usually, I'm in a position where I'm like, more like, bottom to top, because I'm a consultant. I'm contributing on a daily basis with the developers and all of that. So usually, if I'm lucky enough to be in a place where we can build the tool. So actually, I'm hired to help, like in IT department, for instance, I'm often hired in IT department to help them build tools directly within the company, and then your users are technically your colleagues. And here, yeah, I'm often, sadly, more knowledgeable about accessibility than my developers. But the cool thing is, I've never worked with a developer, who told me I do not care. I've worked with developer who told me I don't know anything about that, but if you, like, want, like, keyboard support, and you point me towards the resources, I'm willing to help and I'm willing to, like, make that happen. Same for the testers. I was talking to a tester about how we are doing automated testing, so you have a little robot who can click, click, click, click. And I was like, hey, do you have automated keyboard testing? He said, Nope, not yet, but the tool can do it. So, let's check. Like, yes. So usually, I try to work directly with the development team, the testing team, with other designers, and have a very bottom to top approach. And this is when I can actually, like, build a tool. One of the biggest problems for me is when I'm not, like, working with a tool that we build, but when I have to work with third power vendors. So now, in like it and tech, you have these cycles, like, we need to outsource it. We need to internalize it. And at the moment, we are in this weird cycle where everyone is again, going into what we need to outsource it. We want to buy packages. And then it's kind of very complicated, because a lot of those third vendors, third party tool that you are going to integrate in your stack, they do not care about accessibility. And usually, you're not involved as a designer on the, you know, the choice of the tool. So, in such cases like sometimes, I'm becoming very annoying as well. I'm like, hey, can we actually report some accessibility issues to them and maybe hope they will fix them eventually, which is very kind of annoying because you end up doing free accessibility audit for a tool that your client is paying, you know? So, it's like, meh. So, this is usually kind of a tricky situation, like this. Third part thing is definitely, I think, a big problem when it comes to accessibility in enterprise, because you do not control at all the code, and you can do improvements on those basically.

Sam Evans 12:44

I think that that procurement and our choices in understanding what that means, that requires some good thought process on the part of the people reviewing what's out in third party tools. And that's probably organizations that have already worked with you and may have built their knowledge up a good bit, might have more awareness, but I think that awareness is missing when those packages or tool suites are purchased, and so that puts companies at a an inability to really affect the change they might want to because they've already got something in their tech stack that they don't control. 

Stéphanie Walter 13:18

Yeah, exactly. 

Sam Evans 13:18

So that's, I think, an organizational maturity challenge of as they grow, where we find accessibility actually built into the knowledge and awareness at all steps so but I think that a lot of dev teams inherit products and suites and third party tools that someone, somewhere, made a decision and most likely didn't consider accessibility or it wasn't a required part of their process. Part of their process, that's a challenge for all of us to tackle in another day. So, I regularly give people resources they're looking for, where they can read or learn more. We just talked about developers, but I think designers too, and this kind of segue is that I refer a lot of people out to an article that you wrote about a designer's guide to documenting accessibility and user interactions. I come from the way back machine where I inherited undocumented code and it was impossible to remediate because there was no information about what it does, why it does it, and it was almost more effective way back, this as many decades back, to just rewrite a whole database, then to try to interpret undocumented stuff. So, can you talk a little bit about in this space, the value and the collaboration between designers and developers with documentation and how it helps both sides or both teams?

Stéphanie Walter 14:38

Yeah. So first, just to be clear, documentation doesn't mean no communication, because sometimes people are like, Yeah, I can document once I've documented it, I just throw it away to the developer and they can implement it. So no, just because you document something doesn't mean you get to not talk to people that that's not working like that. And so usually the way we work is when we are like, let's say we want to add a new component to the design system. I would be talking to the developers up front about how this is going to work, and we would have like, super long discussions about all of that. Usually then we will test the idea of the component with end users, and by the time the actual JIRA ticket ends up with the developer might be six months, you know, sometimes. So here, like the documentation is a way to communicate what we decided up front. So, it's not like I do documentation, and I tell developer, do it like that. It's more like we discuss, how is this thing going to work? How is it going to work with keyboard interaction? What are we going to do? Then I document the component as a way to remember in a couple of months how we decided it was supposed to be implemented. And then again, it's super helpful we talk about developers, but it's also super helpful for testers, because then they also know how this thing is supposed to work. In my experience, working with a lot of developers, they do not like to read JIRA tickets that are as long as a chapter of Lord of the Rings, you know. So, most of the time having this kind of small little, what we call interaction flow, which is basically like the component cut into small pieces, explaining what happens when you navigate that with a mouse, what happens when you navigate that with a keyboard? And it's like one PNG, but you have the whole interaction here. Makes it way easier to understand for most developers and explain with words fully. When you do that, you do this, and you click here. So also, it's very annoying to write for the business people. So, when I'm saying something like documenting it is really like having a conversation, and the documentation is putting in images on paper what was discussed before. And this, of course, helps, like clear requirements, make sure that this component is going to work the way we wanted it to work. Also, it kind of reduces assumptions on the development side, like guesswork, misinterpretations, things like that. Because, again, we talked about this in the past, and now we have everything. I have, German word, sorry. Festgestellt. It's fixed, let's say, to make it easier. Last thing is, like, again, sometimes you will have developers on board, on the project who do not know anything about accessibility. And when they start like, seeing this kind of documentation, they're like, Oh, that's interesting. Let me kind of learn a little bit more about how this thing is supposed to work. Let me check how I can actually implement keyboard navigation, something like that. So, it's kind of also a nice way to onboard people to accessibility if they do not know anything, because then you give them an example of what is expected, basically.

Sam Evans 18:01

That sounds a lot more useful than the old-fashioned coding. And you know, documentation and code alone. It sounds more like an interactive and possibly a multi-mode way of explaining things with more than just words. So, do people revisit that? Does that spark conversations? Or is that the goal, so that when they come to that documentation part, that they have resources to learn to understand context and then where to go to ask questions?

Stéphanie Walter 18:29

It usually depends, like, sometimes I have links to some stuff. I don't remember what I documented once, but I had a link to an example of a I think it was a pop up. I was like, okay, this one works nicely. It's been like double checked by multiple experts. So, if you need an example, here is so, yeah, sometimes I also add like, examples of what we want from good examples from other projects and from a lot of like public design system like the UK one was pretty nice. I think the US one is also, at the moment, still pretty accessible. I hope it will stay at that with the current situation. Fingers cross, but yeah, for sure, there's like links when it's and again, it's a discussion. So, there's things I do not know how to do technically, like I had some examples where I had an icon, and I didn't know how the developer was going to implement the icon. Is it going to be an image? Is it going to be an SVG? So, the thing I documented is basically, okay, this is a component that is a toggle switch, to switch between a table view and graph view. And we do not have label. It's on the icon. So, the screen reader needs to read something like view table and then view graph. And I don't know how the developer will technically implement that. So, what I'm documenting is like, I need a screen reader to read that, and then is it going to be an alt text? Is it going to be something in DSVG? I don't remember. I don't remember if it's title or yeah. I don't remember. Technically, that's their job, you know, I need this to read that and for a screen reader. And that's it. You do, you the code the way you need it to do. You know, there's because there's multiple ways to technically implement that. So that's the type of documentation we do. We do not like to tell developers how to implement it. We do our job as UX designers, which is, as a UX designer, I imagine how something is going to work with a mouse, then as a UX designer, I imagine how something is going to work with keyboard support. As UX designer I also imagine how something is going to sound like with a screen reader, if needed, and that's it. That's part of the documentation.

Sam Evans 20:49

I think that all developer teams would benefit from having a UX designer interact with them so that they could consider and then learn how and why to make changes, or how or why to develop what they're going to deploy. We'll keep our fingers crossed that this is a trend that continues to grow.

Stéphanie Walter 21:09

That's why I prefer enterprise UX to working in an agency, because I only work directly within the development team. So, what I'd really hated when I was working with an agency was like, okay, you do your design and then it goes somewhere to developer on the client side, and if they have questions, sometimes they are not even allowed to talk to you. I know people love working in agency, because you switch projects and then it's new and fun. And they're like, Yeah, I would be so bored working on the same project for four years. I'm like Nope, I love it, because I can do such things exactly, having a close relationship with the developer, talking directly to them, that's, but that's me. That's also why I love this kind of setup. I know not everyone likes it like that.

Speaker 21:54

The IAAP Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies, CPACC credential is IAAP foundational certification representing broad cross disciplinary conceptual knowledge about thoughtful design, policy and management to be inclusive of all. The CPACC is the ideal credential for those who manage and support accessibility, but who may not personally design, implement or evaluate the technical details of accessible solutions. Check out the exam content outline on our website.

Sam Evans 22:27

Now I'm going to have questions for everybody I know that worked in enterprise to see how their design team works with what their favorite parts are about working with UX designers. And if they ask me what I mean, I'm going to have them come back to this podcast and have them consider why they don't have a UX designer yet. So, we were talking about your article about the designer's guide to document accessibility and user interactions. But you've also founded Neuro Spicy, and so we're talking about design and user experience design. So, can you talk a little bit about your inspiration for founding the initiative, and what you hope Neuro Spicy will do?

Stéphanie Walter 23:08

So, it's about raising awareness towards neurodiversity in tech, in design, but also like broader topic. So, the thing is, when you think about disability, you rarely think about invisible disabilities, and you even more rarely think about cognitive disabilities. But it's a big part of the disability spectrum, and I kind of want to make that part more visible, because there's a lot of people with cognitive disabilities for different reasons. And I want to understand that a website, a web app, a native application, can sometimes be built, designed in a way that prevents neurodiverse people from interacting with the content, but also it means it prevents them from buying the products and things like that. So, there's a huge market also here. So, it's always very hard to help people understand, you know, like invisible disability. I once had a guy who came to me and asked me about some animation of cards that he was building, and I explained to him, like, I'm sorry, but your animation is making me nauseous. It's like, Oh, you're such a drama queen. I'm like, I am not. I have a vestibular disorder. Some animations are triggering motion sickness. It's the same for video games. Like, there's some video games I can play for three hours. I should not, but I can. Some video games after five minutes. I know my brain is fried for half of the day I will be nauseous. You know, it's not in your stomach. So that's, I think, the worst kind of nausea, you know, like motion sickness. No, there's no stomach medication like ginger that you can take. So, yeah, the idea of neuro space is exactly that. It's like helping people understand that. No, we're not drama queens. And when you have a dyslexic person explaining to you that I cannot pass your content because of all the moving things around that are like blinking and all of that, and it makes their dyslexia worse, basically. They're not like being annoying or dramatic. They just have a brain that doesn't work the same way. And it's the same for ADHD or autism, like explaining to someone that no, if you have blinking stuff, someone with ADHD will have a very, very, very hard focusing on your content. So, I want to make these disabilities more visible. And also, I really like to do stuff with my business partner, Miriam. So, it's also just kind of an excuse for us to have an official place to do things together. The way I always describe it is like we are two people, and each of us has three raccoons inside of us. The raccoons are like dancing most of the time. And when you could put the six raccoons together, you have a lot of ideas, a lot of energy. And yeah, we basically, like all of those ideas and energies are like tools we want to bring. At the moment we are working on kind of role-playing sheets that would be a tool to help neurodiverse people in the workplace, among other things that we want HR people to use. It is about communication styles like and the really, really cool thing is that tool. It's not like outing people. So, we're not like giving that to your ADHD workers. I give this to all your workers. Basically, you will discover how they prefer to manage things like communication rewards. So really about, well, being in the in the workplace. And by doing that for all workers, the ones who have special needs, like ADHD people, or like someone who is autistic and might have lightness sensitivity, can use that kind of tool to explain that they need a less bright environment. We don't have to explain why. You know, because the tool is really focused on, how do you prefer to work? We do not care why. Just tell us how. So, yeah, we're this is the kind of stuff we want to bring like tools like that for HR people to make like working in tech a little bit easier for us.

Sam Evans 23:09

Yeah, I think that this has been for a lot of years in companies or in teams. Like, let's learn how each person communicates. So those kind of team building projects and practices have been in place for a long time. So, if you could infuse something like that, how do you like to work best? It's still communication. And it doesn't mean somebody has to disclose a disability, but it's if everyone participates, it's a way for actually, better environments to be built. So, I'll be ready to roll out my recommendation for Stéphanie and Miriam's tools and suggestions. So, they'll have to keep us. I'll follow along to see where that comes out of Neuro Spicy. That would be, I think, I think it would be a really soft way for people to accomplish a lot more equity in the workplace without it being focused on I'm doing this for one person, because I promise people who don't live as a disabled person, or don't recognize that they do or don't have a disability are going to have preferences that will also be aligned with everyone else, so they probably also would have requests for things that work better for them, so whether or not they're diagnosed or, you know, self or otherwise. So, I think, I think that would be a great way to level the playing field and make a better workspace. So, you spend a good bit of time teaching designers to integrate accessibility into their workflow and with clients and otherwise, because I see you engage with people in the larger workspace community, and you're an educator, you teach too. So, I mean, you teach a lot of people how to do this, but what are some key principles, if you have to say maybe, like, what are the top four principles that you might want to emphasize when you teach designers to integrate accessibility? So, there’s probably not a longer list. But like, what are the top four?

Stéphanie Walter 29:04

I don't know if I have four, but, like, usually, my main message is I want designers to understand that accessibility, or to be more specific, like, WCAG guidelines, are just another design rule. And as designers, we have a lot of rules and constraints. We have gestalt laws about proximity, making sure that when things are close to each other, it means they belong to together, things like that. And we are not cringing about those. We like respecting them, and they make our design better, you know. And I get a feeling that for a lot of designers, they see accessibility as, oh, another rule that will kill my creativity, and for me, it's not the case. So, I want to help designers understand that it's just another rules. So, for instance, I'm often asked, okay, what colors are accessible? I'm like, none of them or all of them. Yeah. There's no answer to that. You know, you can use all the colors that you want. You can use pastel, as long as you use it as text. So, you can use all the colors, colors of your dreams, as long as you make sure that the ones that you use for text have sufficient contrast ratio with the background. Be my guest. Be as creative as you want, you know. So, my main message here is to help, like the students, understand that, like the WCAG rules, the accessibility guidelines that we have is kind of a baseline guideline. Then how do you implement that is still your creativity as a designer, you know? So, I have an exercise where I'm asking them to design a current page indicator that does not only rely on the color, and I have different groups who come up with different solutions. I'm like, you see, everyone is creative, so you all found creative ways. That's the rule. Okay? You all respected the rule, and, yeah, it didn't kill anyone's creativity, you know? So that's, I think that's the win once we help designers understand that accessibility is a set of guidelines, and you as designer, we already have heuristics. We have already many guidelines we follow. It's just another guideline to follow, and that's it. I think it's a little bit scary also, because if you take a look at the WCAG, it gets better, honestly, like W3C has a very, very good website. There's, like, full of examples and all of that. A couple of years ago, it was very hard to digest. So, the second thing is like I want people to understand that WCAG is just a technical baseline. It's a strict minimum to do to be compliant, and compliance doesn't mean it's a good experience. It doesn't mean people will be able to navigate on their website. I think at some point I will do that. I will make a website that is compliant but that has a shitty experience, just so that people understand the difference between compliance, technically compliance, which is making sure that you do not introduce more barriers to people with disabilities, versus usable. Nice to use good usability, which is something that you build on top of that. So, you have the baseline and of course, we want to go beyond that. But if you look at the website that we have today, like every year, we have these top 10 accessibility issues on 1 million websites, and it's always the same. And I'm like, we do not even have the baseline. You know, it's like, my pet peeve these forms, like, I think half of the form I have to navigate on a daily basis do not follow basic accessibility rules, which, in case of form the good news is usually it's also good usability rules, and even that people can undo. So, I'm like accessibility is a baseline, and then you build on top of that to make your website usable, on top of being accessible by actually testing your users, real users, not just like your boss. Yeah, that's my main two messages.

Sam Evans 33:11

So, one of my favorite designers that I used to work with. She was a graphic designer, but we did presentations for their guild, their national guild, that accessible design does not mean giving up creative and beautiful design, because there's a premise that if I make it accessible, it's going to be bland, boring, just black and white alt text. And so that that barrier, that still, that concept, still exists. And so, the aha moments when people realize, oh, I already have to consider text size, font, weight, placement, location, flow, those are all things that designers know already. So, this is just another guideline to help them produce something that can be used and appreciated in whatever they're creating. So that aha moment of a flip that means I don't have to give up my creativity is if we can get that that turn. Just like you said, you've never met a developer who didn't want to do better. So those shifts in concept about processes is important so. And then compliance is the floor. That's the starting point that does it. We need to go beyond compliance. So that non usable, fully compliant website, I think that'll be a hit with a lot of people. So UX has grown a lot. And so, what do you think like in the next five years? What kind of role do you think, we know AI is here and that exists, but what do you think about AI in UX and inclusive design for the next five years?

Stéphanie Walter 34:37

I'm very bad at predicting anything, good, I'm curious, like I've read a couple of articles on how different types of AI can help disabled people, like something around image recognition for blind people, or tools like ChatGPT, how they help dyslexic people craft better sentences and be. Sometimes a little bit less ashamed when they send emails, because they're afraid there will be mistakes and all of that. Also, like helping autistic people communicate better by email. So, there's a lot of things that can be done there. So, I think AI has a very nice potential to help disabled people. But I also want to avoid falling into the trap of, okay, we have AI. We do not need accessibility. Let's outsource all the work to DEI and you know, I had discussion like that on LinkedIn on screen readers, and we were explaining how the fu bold on LinkedIn posts is impossible for screen reader users, because those are not real letters. They're like, mathematical symbols that are nonsense when a screen reader reads them, and the guy was like, Yeah, but I don't understand why we could not have an AI who would translate those or, like, why would the screen reader not solve that technically? It's like, can we stop so we as humans create a problem. We are using things that are not meant for reading, and you want a computer to solve the problem, while the solution is humans don’t do crappy things, and then we do not have the problem. So I'm really afraid that we will end up in this kind of tech no solutionism area where we'll be like, Oh, we have AI, so we kind of can make less effort on accessibility, because the AI will is like, no. The reason we have AI to help disabled people is because our human accessibility efforts are very, very bad. So nope. There's also kind of an ecological cost, at least at the moment, because with every new technology at the beginning, it's going to be costly for the environment. That's I hope it will get better. But there's a French Deaf person who wrote an amazing article about that, where she explained the paradigm of like she's trying to be environmental friendly, but she's a Deaf person, and there's a lot of videos on the internet that don't have captions, so she relies on AI automated captions, but then she's like, Yeah, but AI is bad for the environment, but still, it helps me as a Deaf person, you know. So she's in this kind of cognitive dissonance about feeling bad about using a technology that is actually helping her. So I really, really hope we get better with that, with all the environmental costs and also the human and ethical cost of AI, I understand how complicated it can be for someone who, like, I have this tool can that can help me, but the cost of this tool is like human being who had to go through shitty data sets and were not paid very well. Servers who are, like, burning the planet and so, yeah, I really hope we get better at that. And of course, like build on stolen content also. So, I understand these two things, like, you want to use the tool that because they will help you on daily basis as a disabled person, but also, the cost of those tools is not just like the monthly cost of using ChatGPT, for instance.

Sam Evans 38:04

We have some colleagues that do a lot of work in sustainability and accessibility. So there's, there's some really great folks in our communities that talk a good bit about that, so I think the cost of not just being monetary is a mindset about our considerations, about what we engage with. And so, I'm not sure everybody is engaged at that level yet. So, can we do one more kind of techno, geeky thing here to talk about CSS and an example of how, like modern CSS techniques might have helped solve some accessibility challenges? So,

Stéphanie Walter 38:55

So, yeah, CSS is a very high-level definition. It would be like a programming language that lets you do the layout, call off on typography, also a little bit of the like interactivity, hover effect, focus effect and animations of a page. So, it's like the visual plus a little bit of interaction of a page. And like one technology that I really like in CSS, and I wish more websites were using it, is we have this thing called prefers reduce motion, which is a CSS three, I think of CSS five, new media query. So, if you are a person with vestibular disorder, we come back to that some animation, especially parallax, for instance, on a website, might trigger your motion sickness. So, on Mac, but also on Windows, I think, and on a mobile phone, you can go into your operating system and check a box that says, I want to reduce motion. So normally, what happens with that on Mac is that you get way less motion, which actually. This was introduced. I don't remember which iPhone made people sick, but after an iPhone, like the animation of things moving around, made people sick, they introduced this option and then this option was popularized on other systems. So, we have this option at system level. What the CSS part does is it's able to check is this option checked, and then you can write specific CSS to either remove the animations or tone them down to make them less annoying. So, for instance, if you have like parallax, you could imagine either completely removing it or having maybe a slight fade in. So, there's a lot of different options, and unfortunately, I do not see a lot of websites respecting that. The option exists in CSS. You can also target it with JavaScript. But then, yeah, I wish more people would like to use the reduce motion function to have a version of the website that doesn’t have all the parallax effect and all the things like moving around that make a couple of people sick, please use it.

Sam Evans 40:56

I'm hoping that trend of parallax, parallax meaning, like the whole screen has a moving video behind it, or motion behind it as the background, and there's no way to turn it off, because it's not a video player. It's a design choice, and, uh, it was really popular about 20 years ago, and it's still here. I use that on my iPhone. I've had it turned on for a long time to reduce motion. I remember when it came out. I don't remember how long ago it was, but it's made my mobile usage far more enjoyable, a lot less than me setting my phone down and walking away. Yes, exactly. So, we've covered a lot of things, and it's been just a delight to talk with you today. But do you have any upcoming projects that you're working on that you want to share?

Stéphanie Walter 41:50

So yeah, so this template to help, like neurodivergent people communicate in the workplace. So, we want to put it online so that people can use HR, people can download it, and then they can use it. So, I need to work on that. Also, I've been invited to talk to a conference about UX and libraries, and I'm super happy about that. And for them, I'm working on a keynote talk on barriers and invisible disabilities, so how to make libraries more welcoming for people with invisible disability so beyond like, again, the usual things around having a ramp and things like that, and I'm also, like, preparing a workshop for them, which means I'm preparing a template and I’m preparing new cards on accessibility barriers. So I haven't started preparing them, but I love designing workshops, like the whole, how can I say like the plan of the workshop, the steps, but also like the visual artifacts used in the workshop. And here I will be designing some very nice cards. So, I'm looking forward to that, because I'm specialized in digital accessibility, and it means that here I got an excuse to learn more about non digital accessibility, like spaces and all of that, which is something I'm also very interested in. So yeah, let's see where this goes.

Sam Evans 43:17

Well, that'll be exciting. So, I've already made note. I have a little sticky note on my computer and a reminder to check back to, to look at your spicy checklist thing, and to get some of my friends that work in HR associations to consider, hey, let's take a look at this when it comes out. What about key takeaways? If you had one or two things that you would want somebody who might be new, UX is probably the, I think, one of the bigger growing areas, if we put aside code development kind of things, UX and understanding that, what are some key takeaways you would want for people to that are considering UX as a pathway to know?

Stéphanie Walter 43:57

Hmm, it's like accessibility. Every time you go to a new client, you need to explain to them what you do for a living. It's like the level of maturity around accessibility is low. The level of maturity around UX, especially in enterprise, is also very, very low. So be prepared to have to explain and justify your work all the time, which can be sometimes a little bit exhausting, but also at the same time, I think people are quite open. So, if you can, like, find allies, whether it's for the UX side, the accessibility and both, like, developers are usually really, really happy. I think, like most developers I work with, hate it when we ask them to develop something they do not understand. So, they are more than happy to listen to me explain to them. Why? From a user perspective, we are going to do that, you know, just explain the context to them. And for me, this is how you need to turn the people around you into allies and then into advocates. And once you have developer, who can explain to another developer why the orange is like that and why we're not changing the orange? You know, your job is done because he's becoming an advocate for the accessible orange on those projects. So, yeah, it's exhausting, but there's hope, like most people, most of the time in tech, are still like good people, you know, like a couple of exceptions, of course, but they're willing, as long as you explain and then, yeah, if you can turn your colleagues into allies, that's, that's big win.

Sam Evans 45:30

So, I think that that's the magic there. Is that UX enables you to explain the who and the why behind the what and the how, and that's where you change practice when people understand why, and it's not about code, but it's about the people. I think that's a real thing. I think that's a big game changer in in making practices change. And if that's one of the roles and functions that a UX designer can deliver, that's pretty powerful. So again, everybody who's listening and or reading today, we've been so lucky to have Stéphanie Walter with us today, learning a little bit more based on Stéphanie's experience in enterprise UX and UX design, and a little tidbit on to start watching for their product tools in Neuro Spicy as well. So Stéphanie, thank you so much for making time to join us and to share just a little bit more about your background and the really extreme value add that UX design brings to systems and enterprise, and hopefully will become a more established and regularly occurring, expected part of teams in enterprise systems and accessibility. 

Stéphanie Walter 46:45

Thanks a lot.

Speaker 46:48

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