Chancey Fleet, a Brooklyn-based accessibility advocate, coordinates technology education programs at the New York Public Library’s Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library. Chancey was recognized as a 2017 "Library Journal" Mover and Shaker. She writes and presents to disability rights groups, policy-makers, and professionals about the intersections of disability and technology. During her fellowship at Data & Society, she worked to advance public understanding of and explore best practices for visual interpreter services as well as other technologies for accessibility whose implications resonate with the broader global conversations about digital equity, data ethics, and privacy. She proudly serves as the Vice President of the National Federation of the Blind of New York.
Chancey Fleet, a Brooklyn-based accessibility advocate, coordinates technology education programs at the New York Public Library’s Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library. Chancey was recognized as a 2017 "Library Journal" Mover and Shaker. She writes and presents to disability rights groups, policy-makers, and professionals about the intersections of disability and technology. During her fellowship at Data & Society, she worked to advance public understanding of and explore best practices for visual interpreter services as well as other technologies for accessibility whose implications resonate with the broader global conversations about digital equity, data ethics, and privacy. She proudly serves as the Vice President of the National Federation of the Blind of New York.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Databites are Data & Society's speaker series designed to bridge our interdisciplinary research with broader public conversations about the societal implications of data and automation.
Sareeta Amrute (00:12):
Hi everyone. My name is Sareeta Amrute, I'm the Director of Research at Data & Society. It's my sincere pleasure to welcome you tonight for the first of three Wednesdays featuring this year's fellow cohort talking about their work. So, I'll first introduce Chancey Fleet. Chancey Fleet is going to talk to us today on dark patterns in accessibility tech. Chancey is a Brooklyn based accessibility advocate who coordinates technology education programs at the New York Public Libraries, Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library. Chancey was recognized as a 2017 Library Journal Mover and Shaker and proudly serves as the Vice President of the National Federation of the Blind of New York. She writes and presents to disability rights groups, policy makers, and professionals about the intersections of disability and technology. Please help me welcome Chancey.
Chancey Fleet (01:13):
So, I'm Chancey. My pronoun is she and the adjective that most informs my professional practice is blind. Not everyone with a marginalizing optical situation identifies this way, but I have chosen it because it defines how I live in the world without implying that I'm diminished or impaired. It aligns me with a wise creative resilient community of practice. As Cloud connected technology's pervade our lives more and more our ability to move from any intention to any accomplishment is supported or impaired. Not just by the existence of distribution of information in the digital commons, but by whether it's represented legibly to us and situated in a way whose elements are consistently compatible with our strengths.
Chancey Fleet (02:06):
Whether it's a visualization of the shifting flood plain over time when you're trying to find your next home or a simple ticketing system when you want to join an event, the state of non-visual access to everyday digital interactions I think is a trouble map that deserves more exploration by technologists working in the public interest. So, imagine this: I'm standing around with two blind friends on a Saturday night having a very New York experience. The jazz club that we wanted to go to is closed for a private party and we have no idea where we're going to go now. Then I remember that there's a science comedy show called Rocket's Versus Rollercoasters downtown and I find the link to buy our tickets on Eventbrite. The moment I open the form, the app starts telling my screen reader to count down how much more time I have to fill the form. There's new information every second. The countdown is unstoppable and interrupts my attempts to find out when I'm supposed to put in these fields. I might as well be trying to fill this thing on a rocket or a rollercoaster.
Chancey Fleet (03:16):
So, I ended up working with a visual interpreter to deal with that and we made it to the show. That particular situation didn't make or break our day. But, I take a perverse enjoyment in hacking my way through technical friction, so much so that I think doing that for a living is a fun job. But, technical friction, even when you can step over it is cumulatively stressful and it makes a lot of people pessimistic and insecure when they consider their ability to accomplish the next thing independently using technology. So, I want to call that a dark pattern and I struggle with whether to call this type of sort of encoded inhospitality as a dark pattern because it's probably not calibrated to do harm. Instead, it's just designed without blind users in the development cycle, either as coders or testers. So, what we have here is, if you will, ghost written code. Whereas a ghost writer is paid to compose a narrative someone else can't be bothered to write, ghost written code is a product of an organizational decision to task programmers with designing for users that the organization can't be bothered to engage or employ.
Chancey Fleet (04:44):
Ghost written code is rarely overtly hostile, but routinely creates unnecessary friction that would be noticed and addressed if the development process were accountable to actual users. Ghost written code besides making ordinary tasks harder and slower, can miss opportunities to make them easier and faster. Consider Apple's Siri, it's gender language and accent are a matter of user preference. But, all Siri's speak at a leisurely conversational pace. For many blind people who use text to speech as a reading medium and routinely set it to 500 words per minute or more to get through the day, Siri imparts information so slowly that we often avoid it altogether. Ghost written code reflects the perception that accessibility features are for disabled people. Rather than the reality that since we share one ecosystem they are for everyone.
Chancey Fleet (05:49):
Consider, Twitter allows anybody to use alternative text to describe the images they post, but this isn't a required field. It isn't even probably on your screen, instead it's an opt in hiding in settings like an Easter egg for self identified allies. This design decision means that although Twitter image description is easy to use and works very well and although the presence of image description has peripheral benefits for machine learning and search ability, less than 1 in 100 images on Twitter are described. Blind people working in tech often encounter inaccessible content that's easy to fix. Undescribed images, PDFs that don't have text in them, slides that are at the front of a room, but aren't available anywhere digitally. As colleagues, as friends, we must routinely decide how to phrase things and when feedback about accessibility would be well received and when speaking up might make us less welcome or create the perception that we're always thinking about ourselves.
Chancey Fleet (07:09):
Sometimes speaking up about accessibility means never being invited back into a space. It's a lot of emotional labor, but it's not much easier for the person who receives the information. That person has to process the fact that they have an accessibility problem they didn't know about, balance our community's needs against competing demands on their time, and decide individually and organizationally how much energy to devote to remediating old content and workflows. This isn't necessary, popular digital tools from social networking to document creation and presentation ware could position accessibility errors like spelling and grammar mistakes. Imagine, required fields that haunt you until you feel them with description, little white canes and guide dogs relentlessly tapping your improperly classed web elements and running circles around them. It's not the industry's practice to do this because extra steps create friction and the industry doesn't want to disturb your flow and your loyalty by bringing to your attention the needs of people you won't meet.
Chancey Fleet (08:34):
But, when you do meet us, as colleagues, friends, visitors, clients, you may find that the friction you've been spared ten seconds at a time, you haven't been spared at all. It's been accumulating and when the moment arrives, that you learn a massive images, documents, presentations, or code needs your immediate and extensive attention, you'll know what it feels like to live with ghost written code. In pursuit of a more equitable digital commons, we need to strategically advocate as technologists for tools that treat accessibility as part of sound infrastructure, not as a feature for edge cases. Not just for people who need accessibility, but for all of us who need to make accessible content. To do that, organizations must engage assistive technology users into the development cycle by recruiting programmers, designers, and other professionals as colleagues. By designing user testing programs that feature access to proposed interfaces before they ship. By structuring frequent and substitutive two way communication, not between each lone user and essential organizational contact. But, among users and organizational reps in conversation and by defining clear and discoverable paths for ordinary users who need assistive technology to report friction and track how it's addressed.
Chancey Fleet (10:07):
As more disabled people engage in the digital commons, integrated education, and the workforce, As more people than ever age into disabilities while remaining active contributors in their organizations and communities, investment in accessibility as infrastructure is critical. When developers stop ghost writing us into their code and start making space for us to represent ourselves and our interests, the digital ecosystem will be more useful, equitable, and welcoming for all of us. Thank you.
(Music).