Original subtitles

My name is Elise and I'm the accessibility and

inclusion lead for corporate engineering.

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

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

that we create, eventually, are accessible and inclusive.

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

in the difference that we find within human beings.

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

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

looking at people who experience the world differently,

we build better products that are more adaptable,

that are longer-lasting, and more innovative.

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

make a product accessible by people with different abilities.

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

looking to difference, to their different experiences and

their needs, because of their different capabilities.

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

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

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

they used to be very text heavy.

They used to be more like a book.

And people with disabilities, for years,

had been advocating for larger text and

less content, much more smaller chunks of text.

And when we started to design for accessibility,

we created sites that were much more easily consumed.

Accessibility is important to me personally,

because I have a hearing loss, severe hearing loss.

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

until it reached the profound range.

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

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

As someone with a hearing loss,

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

I use assistive technology in a lot of different ways.

Captioning is the most valuable thing for me.

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

which helps in real-time conversations with people.

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

that I have with my colleagues.

There's also something called InnoCaption,

which captions telephone calls using a live transcriber.

That completely changed my world.

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

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

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

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

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

It should be a normal part of your development process.

It shouldn't be an add-on.

It should be considered from the beginning.

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

Start getting to know people who are different from you,

start learning from them.

Ask them what their experiences are like with different

technology as they go about their world.

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

opportunities for great design in your products.