Currently the EMEA Lead for Accessibility and Disability Inclusion at Google, Christopher Patnoe has also worked at Apple and Sony Ericsson helping to design products that are now household names. Christopher Patnoe chats with hosts Nikki and Sam about the future of XR accessibility, and the need to emphasize disability in workplace DEI practices.
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Transcript:
[00:00:00] Music
[00:00:05] Sam Proulx: Welcome to Season One of Disability Bandwidth.
[00:00:12] Nikki Nolan: A show where we talk with disability leaders each week about career, life, and technology.
[00:00:17] I’m Nikki Nolan.
[00:00:18] Sam Proulx: And I’m Sam Proulx.
[00:00:19] Let’s get started.
[00:00:20] Nikki Nolan: So let’s have you introduce yourself.
[00:00:22] Christopher Patnoe: My name is Christopher Patnoe. My pronouns are he/his. I am a white male with gray hair, black glasses, black headphones, and a black sweater that follows the old guy goth style in terms of what I’m looking like I guess. And my title is Head of Accessibility and Disability Inclusion for Google in EMEA. Which covers Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
[00:00:45] Nikki Nolan: I would love to know about your path from opera singer-musician to the Head of Accessibility and Disability Inclusion for EMEA at Google.
[00:00:52] Christopher Patnoe: I think the key part is I’m a failed musician. I couldn’t make it. But I got to say they’re two really important things about music that are relevant to the work that I do. One is that music is about patterns of people. If you understand patterns, you can easily memorize music. You learn languages because they’re patterns.
[00:01:10] And in opera, I studied German, French, Italian, and Russian. So I have an understanding of languages and cultures. And that helps me do just general people business stuff. The waiting on tables part was also really important because it taught me how to deal with people for real. Like they’re coming in and they’re hungry and they’re angry and they give me money when I’m done.
[00:01:33] So I learned how to crack a joke. I learned how to read between the lines. I learned how to tell people what I think without actually saying it out loud. It was a real gift of communication. And these are great training skills for business as a whole. Being a failed musician makes me better at what I’m doing now. But because I’ve failed as a musician that had to make money.
[00:01:54] I was born and raised in Silicon valley. Raised in Cupertino. And I found myself after someone gave me a hand at this little company called Apple. So I spent 10 years at Apple. I worked on the first iTunes. I worked with the first iPod. I worked on the G4 towers, the G5 towers, and Final Cut Studio. Did that for about 10 years.
[00:02:16] And then I went to Sony Ericsson and made phones for a couple of years. Then I went to Disney, made games for a year, and then I’ve been at Google now for almost 10 years. And one really cool thing about Google is that you’re encouraged to do different kinds of things in your career. You’re encouraged to go try different things.
[00:02:33] So when I joined Google, I was on the Platforms team making networking cards and storage trays and the kind of networking gear that makes google.com go. My second gig was a Google Play Music. And this is important because this is where I learned about accessibility. My product wasn’t accessible.
[00:02:50] And I learned it because a test engineer came into where I would run meetings. She turned on the voiceover and I heard button, button, button, button. I asked what’s that? And she said, well, this is a Google Play Music for someone who’s blind. I said, how do they use it? And she said, that’s why I’m here.
[00:03:07] And that’s why I’m here with a perfect answer. There was no “shame on you that you should be doing this”. “It’s this is something that you have to deal with.” Or my case I get to deal with. And within a couple of months, I had the opportunity to take on accessibility for all of the Google Play suite of products. Google Play, Google Books, Google Music, Google Store, games.
[00:03:25] And I hired this test engineer. PhD. She herself is a blind woman. And I hired her to teach me what I didn’t know, because I knew I didn’t know anything. And we did this together for a couple of years, and now she’s running the accessibility program for Google Play now. So she actually inherited the job from me after I left. I then spent a couple of years in daydream, which is Google’s AR and VR platform. And that I’ve been doing accessibility full-time for four and a half years.
[00:03:52] My job is to make all of Google’s products accessible and to make Google a place to work where people with disabilities can thrive. This is an important part because they’re closely related. So it’s all through people. I did none of it myself, but I partnered with a bunch of super passionate people, made relationships, helped them figure out the story, helped them figure out the business case.
[00:04:15] And then last year I realized I’ve done this for a couple of years, was getting a little itchy and I recognized there is the European Accessibility Act here in Europe. And we weren’t as involved as we should have been because we had no one in accessibility in Europe. So I volunteered and they said yes.
[00:04:33] So I moved my family and we now live in London. And I’m here to help understand what disability means in Europe and Africa, because it’s different. And if you don’t ask the question, if you don’t partner with a community, you’re never going to get the answer of what’s broken and you’re never going to understand what the solution can be because only by working with the community, can you understand those things.
[00:04:55] Sam Proulx: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean there’s so many incredible sorts of threads in that story to talk about and to pull on. I’m spoiled for choice. But I think a question that frequently arises today as accessibility awareness has really mushroomed and expanded almost exponentially over COVID which is a really interesting time to move countries by the way, and take your family with you.
[00:05:19] But there are so many people now who are in that position that you were in a few years ago with Google Play Music and you were ahead of the curve. You get exposed to this for the first time you realize that it’s not working and you have your first exposure to accessibility. How do you go from that from nothing to getting good at it? What’s the path? Where do people who are new to this field start?
[00:05:45] Christopher Patnoe: I think the most important thing is to start. And to keep going. One of the first things that I learned is that this can be utterly all consuming because it is a work that is interesting and has work that is challenging and it works that makes your heart happy. So it is a marathon. You need to pace yourself and if you don’t pace yourself, you’re going to burnout. I’ve seen way too many people care. I don’t wanna say too much, but be unable to find that balance of work and passion and pragmatism. The most important thing I think is to learn to be pragmatic. You’re never going to get everything done.
[00:06:25] So what’s the most important thing? How do you get started? Start with easy things or start with the most important things. Either one of these ways of starting is important. I sometimes like to start with easy things, because then you start to build up the language and of accessibility in and disability inclusion.
[00:06:45] You’ll learn how to talk about things like WCAG and you need to talk about ARIA and these things that seem awfully scary when you get started. But when you realize that it’s just another language that you need to understand and when you get it, you get it. So I’d say get started and pick some easy things to work on. Volunteer.
[00:07:04]I did it as a 20% at Google and I had a mentor who helped me and that was really helpful. So, find mentorship. Find people who are really willing to help you, because there are so many people that are doing this now. There’s mentorship programs popping up out of the ether.
[00:07:20] It’s quite interesting that there’s a lot of community helping each other.
[00:07:24] Sam Proulx: Absolutely. And it’s the process of accessibility, right? Perfect is the enemy of the good, you’re not going to start perfectly. You’re better to just start. I think it’s really interesting that you’re talking about starting with the easy things.
[00:07:39] I think there’s this impression perhaps, if it’s easy to do, it must also be low impact. Sometimes labeling a button is easy to do and can make all the difference. Do you find that correlation that sometimes it’s almost reversed, right? The easiest things can be the highest impact things in some ways.
[00:07:59] Christopher Patnoe: Well, it depends on what you’re measuring.
[00:08:01] If you’re measuring complexity, the hard things are hard to do. And there’s a reward when you solve a really challenging problem. So that has value. But if you value the impact towards a user, a button is so important. Colors are so important or better yet shapes and colors are even better.
[00:08:22] These things aren’t really that hard. The hardest thing really is just getting started and learning how to bring a consciousness of inclusion around what you’re trying to put together, because you want to bring it into the design. You want to bring it into the engineering and you wanna bring it to the testing. All of these things have to come together.
[00:08:39] Sam Proulx: Yeah, it’s so true. And to pull on that one last thread sort of, before I pass it over to Nikki to keep moving us forward here, you did mention that you’ve worked in Daydream and VR, for quite some time. I mean speaking of complex problems and things that need hard solutioning.
[00:08:56] Where do you see augmented reality accessibility and VR accessibility going in the next few years? Because it seems like this is a product that is on the ground floor now, and that is going to be like the next big thing in five years. And if we don’t start thinking about accessibility now, right, we’re going to have a problem.
[00:09:13] So where do you see it going? What do you think some of the big challenges that we have solved are? And what are the challenges that are left?
[00:09:20] Christopher Patnoe: That’s a big, big question about a big space. I think we’re going to be better than we were with phones. I don’t think we’ll ever be perfect, but what I can say is people are working on accessibility of XR, which is the acronym for VR and AR. XR. And accessibility is being talked about by companies, by large companies.
[00:09:42] There’s two things that I do outside of my work at Google that I’m particularly proud of that are relevant to this space. One is I chair with the W3C, a community group, talking about captions in VR. We’re just about to publish a paper. The result of two years of research of 360 VR captions recommendations.
[00:10:01] And in this work group, we have people who are deaf. We have people who are hard of hearing. We have people that are hearing. We have people who only sign and we have people with cochlear implants. So they’re verbal. It’s a broad swath of community. We have researchers from Gallaudet, RIT, Salford, Brandeis. We have people from the NID that are there. We have filmmakers, we have advocates. It is a wonderfully rich and broad group. And Meta is actually sponsoring it and giving us hardware so we can actually, we can actually prototype this stuff. I’m really excited with where that’s going.
[00:10:36] For me, the big question of VR and that will lead interestingly into AR is how they describe a 360 scene.
[00:10:45] So say you’re plopped in the middle of a 3D rendered environment around you. How would you, how would I describe it to you, Sam? What’s the important thing to tell you? How would I use ordinal numbers? What do you do to clock face? Would I use like north, south, east, west when I say 11 o’clock there’s a bird at 2 o’clock.
[00:11:03] There’s a car. Understanding sort of at an algorithmic level, what’s important and what’s not important. And what happens when you move and everything around you changes? How often do you need to keep this up to date?
[00:11:16] Sam Proulx: Yeah.
[00:11:17] Christopher Patnoe: So really exciting stuff, and people are starting to talk about it.
[00:11:21] So I’m excited that we’re getting to the point where Accessibility is significantly more important than it was when we started using phones twelve, thirteen years ago. And I think it’s because of frankly, Microsoft and their huge push in terms of accessibility of gaming.
[00:11:38] Sam Proulx: Incredible.
[00:11:38] Christopher Patnoe: Their Xbox adaptive controller was groundbreaking. It was massive in terms of awareness. Because it was Microsoft and because they did a Superbowl ad about this piece of hardware that’s made to help kids with disabilities. My gosh that changed the perspective of accessibility. There are real significant ways. And then also the accessibility and gaming has become a thing in and of itself.
[00:11:59] So of course, when that happens, you look at VR and everything that happens in a game is also relevant towards game experiences in VR.
[00:12:09] Sam Proulx: And do you think all of these techniques that we’re learning and that we’re figuring out and solving in VR are going to have knock on effects, for example, in desktop accessibility and in website accessibility, as we find better ways to algorithmically describe things?
[00:12:23] Christopher Patnoe: Yes. And I think it also helps the future where we have wearables with cameras. We understand how to describe a virtual world. We can use this same methodology when describing the real world. Once we have computer vision that is strong enough and AI that is strong enough at networking, that’s fast enough. We can take what we learned in VR and provide you a real world, live contextual information of the real world.
[00:12:49] So for me, that’s really exciting about this accessibility object model of VR. It becomes the accessibility object model of the RR- the real world. Real reality.
[00:12:59] Nikki Nolan: Yeah. How are you working with disabled people in a way that makes sure that it’s not saying that their disability is something that needs to be cured? There’s some things that happen in the disability space where it’s like, oh, we’re going to help a blind person see. But maybe blind people don’t want to have that. That’s seen as an access issue or a problem. So how do you sort of like listening to this, like describing the real world, potentially with this object modeling, how do you work with the disabled community to make sure that you’re not trying to cure? Know, like there’s this like curing of disability that happens sometimes.
[00:13:41] Just curious about your thoughts on that.
[00:13:42] Christopher Patnoe: Yeah, I think there’s sort of a medical model and social model of disability. And my personal belief, it’s sort of a combination of both. They should have both, there is a little bit of stuff that you need to, to accommodate for, not solve, not cure. You need to accommodate, but this was a social aspect of it because having an impairment is just having an impairment.
[00:14:03] It doesn’t become a disability until someone’s designed something that you can’t access. That’s when it becomes a disability. Two people who are deaf can communicate through walls. But the moment they need it to go on onto a video site and they don’t have captions. Their deafness becomes a disability.
[00:14:19] So, to your question, the important thing is to understand that one, not all people within a specific dimension of disability are the same. You’ve met one deaf person. You’ve met one deaf person. You’ve met one blind person. You’ve met one blind person. Because everyone is unique. So the way we make sure that we don’t, that we create a technology that is relevant to people is to co-design. It’s to co-invent. It’s to test.
[00:14:43] We talked about this earlier, before the recording, you want to build with the community, not for the community. Empathy can be really dangerous because I could put on a pair of blindfolds and I know what it’s like to be blind. No, you just know what it’s like to have a blindfold on. It’s not really being blind.
[00:14:59] You don’t have the training, you don’t have experience. You have none of the skills that make a person who is blind successful. So empathy doesn’t help you get there. Talking with lots of people. Start with one person and then ask a couple more people. And then ask you a couple more people and you get a sense of what the patterns are, but you have to create something that’s robust and flexible so people can customize it to their needs.
[00:15:24] Sam Proulx: I want to ask a controversial question, as we are talking about the way we think about disability in the social model and the medical model, and kind of defining this community. I saw a really interesting LinkedIn post a while ago, sharing the State of Accessibility Report.
[00:15:41] And you had commented that you don’t really agree with the accessibility number there and the way that sort of people with disabilities are counted and numerated. I would love to hear more about that, to hear your thoughts. What do you think is being done wrong when we’re coming up with this statistic of, there are X number of people with disabilities in the world, and, what’s not useful about that? Maybe how should it be done better?
[00:16:04] Christopher Patnoe: I want to say I deeply respect Diamond and I deeply respect Joe. And the Accessibility Report is really important. It’s a great review of how things are going. They quoted something: they quoted a statistic of 1.8 billion people with disabilities. And I can’t find any documentation for how that number comes from.
[00:16:24] I sought it. I saw it in one rod report and other people started to pick it up because it’s a big number and it’s sexy to have a big number, but I can’t figure out how they came up with it. The WHO quotes and the WHO was a source that I trust, they say 15% of the world has a disability. And for not just needing glasses.
[00:16:44] A disability is something that really gets in the way of your daily life, of the work that you do, of the way you live your life. And if you’re going up to 1.8 billion, wonder if they’re stretching the definition of what it is an impairment in terms of disability. But until I see what the methodology of it came to that number is I’m not going to believe it.
[00:17:08] I personally believe if we follow that sort of 15%, we’re closer to 1.2, 1.25. That’s closer to where we would be given the population of the planet. So I’m starting to say more than 1 billion or around 1.2 billion. When I talk about these things,
[00:17:23] Sam Proulx: Interesting. And that’s also where we get the one in five stat, right? Is that big one in five people in the world have a disability.
[00:17:28] Christopher Patnoe: Yeah, that comes to 20%. But here in the UK, this is a statistic they do use is 20%. So in the UK, I think that’s an appropriate thing to talk about because the government is giving that statistic. But worldwide it’s, it’s, it’s not being there. And is the number of disabilities under reported? Absolutely. You have this, so it’s stigmatized and especially in emerging markets, when it comes to disability, there has to be under-reporting. Is it a 600 million person under report? That feels hard for me to grasp until I understand the methodology where they came through it.
[00:18:05] One of the things that you did say that I’m curious about is you, you say that, oh, well, if you just wear glasses, you’re not a person with a disability. I mean, there’s an argument that is sometimes made that glasses are an assistive technology, and that it is better and useful for us to widen the disability inclusion tent, opposed to sort of narrowing it. But, I’m guessing that you wouldn’t agree with that.
[00:18:31] Christopher Patnoe: I don’t. Because I think the stigma, the impact in terms of school, the impact in terms of jobs and impact in terms of life, for a person who wears glasses is significantly lower than someone who is blind or is deaf, or is neurodiverse. The impact on your life is what makes the difference for me between having an impairment and having a disability.
[00:18:54] I am dyslexic. I have bad eyesight because I’m old, not really old, but older than I used to be. And I need glasses now. I don’t feel that I’m disabled, but I feel I have some things where I need a little help.
[00:19:06] Nikki Nolan: Interesting. So I was going to that. So I’ve been having these conversations with my grandma who is slowly, I believe, becoming disabled for movement and things like that. And she really struggles with identifying as disabled as well. So I’m like, I’m curious about that. Cause you’re dyslexic and I’m dyslexic as well.
[00:19:24] And I consider myself disabled. So I think that’s where there’s this rift in between the identification and the people self-identifying in that number. I think that it isn’t very clear what is disabled or what is not disabled. and so I guess I’m curious because from my view, you are disabled.
[00:19:48] So it’s a fascinating space between identifying as disabled and not identifying as disabled.
[00:19:53] Christopher Patnoe: I have impairments. I don’t feel that I’m disabled. I can’t read the same list three times and get the same list. I’ve spent my life having my mother tell me that you’re really bad at details. I had my fifth grade math teacher throw an eraser at me because I got the number wrong. But this is just the way I’ve lived my life.
[00:20:10] I never thought about myself as being disabled. But I certainly have some tools that make my life easier and understand that my brain just worked differently. I mean, I go into a room, nobody knows what they’re about to get into. I think differently, I talk differently. I come up with different perspectives.
[00:20:27] The reason I’m a musician is because I had this attraction to people and the magic of music and theater. But I have a different perspective on things. I have a different background. And some of it is just the way my brain works. And some of it is in my experience and education.
[00:20:41] Sam Proulx: Is there another discussion that people have in this industry is that we should be talking less about accessible design, accessibility research and talking more about inclusive design? Of course, then there’s the fear that like that’s gonna water down kind of accessibility for those who need it. Obviously in your title you consider yourself to work in accessibility and it’s a very specific thing. Should we just sort of, you know, set the line there that like accessibility is one thing and inclusion is a different thing? And perhaps be clear about these lines and labels rather than trying to lump everything together?
[00:21:18] Christopher Patnoe: I think it’s even more different than that. I do see the process of creating a product that is inclusive. It’s also inclusive of people with disabilities. The problem is if you talk about disability and inclusion, like DEI kind of stuff, gender and race tends to take all the oxygen. Disability really hasn’t come to the same level as race and gender. When it comes to technology you have some really interesting things where race and gender are just as important as disability. If you think about AI, a great example is soap dispensers, and water dispensers. They have light sensors and if they do the wrong work, they won’t work for people who are black.
[00:22:01] If they didn’t test with people who are black, it doesn’t work often. Same thing for people with disabilities. So when it comes to technology, I think race and gender are as important as disability, but how you address these issues are often different. For a woman in technology, you don’t need to make special accommodations in technology for a woman for example. The efforts to do it are different, but the thought process is the same. How do we make sure that our product is inclusive in terms of our research, in terms of our design, in terms of color palette? If you’re doing a hard piece of hardware, have we tested it with different women?
[00:22:44] Have we tested with tall women, short women, tall men, short men, people from different races, different genders, different countries? Because how you use things are different. But accessibility is slightly more specialized because there’s new technology you have to apply. You have to make your product work for screen readers or they’re colors you really shouldn’t use if you want it to be thoughtful. Or if you do use, remember to use shapes. There’s some things that you could do that are very clear and easy to point to, because we can go to the WCAG and say, this is what you need to do. Nothing like that exists for race. That exists for gender.
[00:23:19] And so it’s almost easier for accessibility. But I personally think to design for everybody you design for everybody, because there might be a woman who is disabled. Or there might be a person of color who is disabled. Because people are complex and we are not defined by our gender or race or sexual orientation or our disability.
[00:23:42] Sam Proulx: But you kind of believe it’d be there. There are two processes that are both important that need to happen, but they’re two separate processes and they can’t be sort of put in one.
[00:23:50] Christopher Patnoe: I don’t know if I believe that. I think again, the efforts to make something accessible is pretty clear. There are tests you can say, is this accessible or not? You can go through the WCAG guidelines and say, does it pass this test or not? It’s a little harder for that for race and gender.
[00:24:06] Sam Proulx: But even though I’m in automated accessibility sort of testing, I could only catch 30% of the thing. Right?
[00:24:12] Christopher Patnoe: Oh, you do automation of accessibility, but let alone automation of making a website accessible is not where we are. The technology certainly can get better. And I think there’s a place for platforms like Apples and Googles and Microsofts. There are things that we can do and things that you’re seeing that are being done to make it easier for content that is not accessible, more accessible.
[00:24:37] Voiceover has the ability to provide captions for images through voiceover that can give you an alternative to an image. Chrome does this today and I think in like 14 different languages. So anything that you go into on the web, Chrome can provide you with a computer generated alt tag. If the person didn’t bother to do it is something is better than nothing,
[00:24:58] Sam Proulx: Now there’s an interesting privacy discussion to be had there. My understanding is that when an image is missing alt text, it’s sent to Google servers to be described. And so it kind of introduces a tension between accessibility and privacy.
[00:25:10] Christopher Patnoe: But the web, these pictures are posted on the public internet anyway.
[00:25:14] Sam Proulx: Not necessarily, I know as a Chrome user, it does do it to like websites where I have to provide a username and password and login.
[00:25:20] Christopher Patnoe: Well, but we have to get access to it somehow, so I can see your point.
[00:25:23] Sam Proulx: Yeah, yeah. It’s an interesting tension. A thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about in a conversation that I have, because I don’t want that the community, people with disabilities, to fall into this thing where you can have accessibility or you can have privacy. But you can’t have them both.
[00:25:38] It’s a kind of new field and I don’t know where that’s all going.
[00:25:42] Nikki Nolan: Yeah, you brought this up in another conversation, Sam, about detecting that someone has a screen. Detecting, being able to tap in, to turn on accessibility features and what you decided-which I’ve never thought about because I don’t have those things where people are tracking the specific things about my disability.
[00:26:01] Sam Proulx: There’s no detection for someone who’s not neuro-typical. But yes, it’s something I think about a lot, but let’s move on. This is a great conversation.
[00:26:07] Christopher Patnoe: Actually I do want to bring up, I want to bring up one thing though about this is that there are things that can be done. And what you have to, what you actually end up sacrificing is the quality of say the alt text, as to the privacy. So for example, our ASR, our automatic speech recognition, runs locally under machines.
[00:26:27] So the audio that’s being played so Chrome could also provide English captions for almost any audio source on the way. And that happens locally. Nothing gets sent to the cloud. Live captions on pixel phones, on Android phones happen locally on your device in English. Provides captions for almost any audio source on your phone.
[00:26:44] It’s local, not web. But because we’re able to make the model small enough and good enough to be able to run it locally, I think that this privacy problem will go away, eventually as the nature of technology advances, because you won’t have to use the cloud as much.
[00:27:00] Sam Proulx: Yeah, absolutely. And I suppose if we say, oh, we’re going to wait for the privacy problem to be solved, then we won’t have the models because we just won’t have done anything. It seems very analogous to in the sixties, right? Everything was done on a mainframe and it was all cloud computing. And now it’s not. I mean, we’re going back there with AI, you know, there’s a shift.
[00:27:17] Before we get to our next question, let’s take a quick break to talk about our sponsor.
[00:27:21] Tin: Hi, I’m Tin the Platform Coordinator here at Fable. I’m a full-time voice navigation user. And before becoming the Platform Coordinator, I started out as a member of our community of accessibility testers. Now I help support the community of assistive technology users and fables customers as they work with us.
[00:27:37] If you’re listening to this podcast, you probably know just how important it is to integrate the voices of people with disabilities into every aspect of your accessibility journey. Fable can help you do that from improving your team’s accessibility training with Fable Up-skill to working directly with assistive technology users with Fable Engage, we can help you take the next step on your accessibility journey.
[00:27:57] To learn more, check out our website at makeitfable.com.
[00:28:00] Sam Proulx: And with that we’re back.
[00:28:01] Let’s get on with the interview.
[00:28:03] Nikki Nolan: Let’s change topics. What are some of the things that are actually happening in the disabled space that are exciting to you, technology wise?
[00:28:10] Christopher Patnoe: I talked earlier about the ARBR stuff. For me this is really the future. When we are able to provide contextual awareness, whether in virtual space or real space and provide you relevant information. Privacy centers, of course Sam. But for me, that is a really interesting future. And we are on the cusp of these things happening because of 5G, because of the advances in AI, because of the nature of wearables.
[00:28:36] Ray Ban came out with their first story based off of Facebook’s platform. Big companies are coming out with glasses. They’re proving themselves out for wearables. For me, that’s a really, really exciting space. Another thing that’s interesting for me is just sort of the advances in machine learning and how it’s changing interaction methods.
[00:28:55] I don’t want to be here just to shill on Google, but I’m really proud of the things that we’ve done. This is a really cool thing around project euphonia. Yeah. Euphonia is a technology that helps people communicate. It was originally designed to support people with aphasia, non-typical speech patterns. And it’s been expanded into facial recognition.
[00:29:16] So we’ve recently released some really interesting features on our switch access called camera switches. Where we can use a facial gesture to be able to recognize and manipulate your phone. So you hit your face, basically becoming the switch. We’ve also recently released a thing in the US and a couple of other English speaking countries. We’ve released an application called Project Relate. Which allows a person to create their own local voice model.
[00:29:42] So a person with non-typical speech patterns can recite into the phone and you can copy paste it and send it out or share it. You can have it read it back to you and have it say what you said. Or you could actually integrate this and speak directly to say the Google assistant and have a kickoff, a selfie, or draw to music.
[00:30:01] Sam Proulx: That’s fascinating. And if it’s all powered by AI and while I’m being, perhaps a bit of a tiny grumpy alarmist, I think one of the other important discussions to have is around bias of these models and these kinds of machine learning elements. The example that I always go to is you’re trying to perhaps make something that automatically describes images for blind folks.
[00:30:27] But there are some people who say, well, I don’t want a computer guessing and gendering me based on how I look. A, how do you, how do you eliminate bias? And when there is tension between the needs of, say a blind person to have an image of described and the needs of someone else to be gendered correctly, how do we move forward there?
[00:30:43] People who are much smarter than I are working on this right now. There’s no easy answer, but yes, there is bias. People with disabilities need to be included in the process of not just building the results. Like what do you want to say? But we also need to make sure that people with disabilities are included in the data sets.
[00:31:01] We need to make sure that one of my favorite stories is this: the researchers at IBM discovered that some autonomous vehicle software, if it were put into production, would hit people in wheelchairs if they were pushing themselves backwards? Because there was an assumption that all wheelchairs go forward. Some people can go faster by pushing themselves and it looks like you’re going backwards, but this is where they want it to go. They just use the wheelchair in a different way.
[00:31:28] So there is always bias in anything made by people, but the broader the data sets, the more inclusive the data sets, the better chance we have of getting an algorithm that will be less biased. To your point, how do you handle mis-gendering people? I have no idea. And I think the answer is don’t don’t describe gender first until you’re sure. Or give someone an option to say yes, I want to understand gender or not. And then make sure people understand that this is an assumption based on how things look. People are complicated.
[00:32:02] People are hard. I don’t think anyone can solve that at this point, because what goes on in your head, I don’t want to be, to be mis-gendered. How do you tell an algorithm that?
[00:32:12] Nikki Nolan: It’s a hard space. I kind of want to pivot into, what has been the biggest frustration in your career and is it still happening?
[00:32:20] Christopher Patnoe: For me, the biggest frustration is that there aren’t any more of me. I wish there were two of me, so I could do more. Like I said, this burnout thing is real and this is something that I suffer with and struggle with on a regular basis. I took today off for example because I’ve worked until 10 o’clock every night this week, because it’s just the way it worked.
[00:32:43] But I do it because it’s the right thing to do. I do it because it’s important to me. And the frustration is that I’m not better at minding my own boundaries because I care too much about what this is. And if I’m going to be able to be here 10 years from now, I need to be better so I can continue to do this work. So the frustrations with me. Nothing’s perfect, but things are consistently getting better, but I need to get better myself.
[00:33:09] Nikki Nolan: What do you feel has been your biggest success?
[00:33:11] Christopher Patnoe: I don’t know if I have the biggest success. I think the fact that people listen, people care what I have to say, what I think about, is really frightening. And it makes me a little embarrassed, but also really proud that people think what I have to say is important enough that they’ll ask me to come and have a podcast with them.
[00:33:32] I mean, I’m just some schmuck who studied opera and failed at it. That’s how I see myself. I love what I do and I hope it shows.
[00:33:39] Sam Proulx: Yeah. Well, I mean to toot your horn as a screen reader user, I guess I’ve been, I used Google Music from the day it became accessible to the date it was discontinued. So you must’ve had some success.
[00:33:50] Nikki Nolan: So, we’re coming really close to the end and so super curious: What is the first piece of technology you remember using and what was it for?
[00:33:57] Christopher Patnoe: First, other than TV, which is like super cheating. I think it was a I’m digging myself here, but I think it was a Walkman. It is the first thing that really helped identify who I was. It gave me the opportunity to, I had my tape, I had my mixtape and I put the songs that I wanted or a friend would give me a tape that they wanted me to have.
[00:34:16] And this is how you found your tribe. I found my goth friends through tapes that we would give each other. And the Walkman is for me a seminal piece of technology that really helped define who I am as a person in that really important 11, 12, 13 year old timeframe.
[00:34:34] Sam Proulx: Imagine if you’d go back and tell your 13 year old self that soon you’d be working on Google Music, the ultimate Walkman replacement, right?
[00:34:41] Christopher Patnoe: I’d say what’s Google cause I’m that old.
[00:34:46] Sam Proulx: How far we’ve come. Sometimes it’s just such a thrill to go back and think about, you know, the record player that I had back in the day and think, wow, now we’ve got it on YouTube.
[00:34:56] Nikki Nolan: Is there anything that we haven’t asked you about that you specifically would like to touch on or talk about?
[00:35:02] Christopher Patnoe: I guess if I were to just talk about one thing, it is to come back to Sam’s question about involving people in the process. And this has to do with bias. This has to do with the creation of technology. If we don’t involve people with disabilities into the process, you’re never going to create a product that meets their needs. You need to co-design, hire, build, test.
[00:35:24] The entire life cycle should be involved with as broad a perspective of humanity as you can. I had a phone call with a buddy of mine today who said he had a team of 14 people and 11 of them were from different countries. And he said he was the best team he ever had because everybody had a different perspective and everybody thought about things in just a slightly different way. And he said it was the most impactful and effective team he ever had because of that diversity.
[00:35:49] Sam Proulx: It’s just brought into a little bit about what you’ve been saying today, and about your current position now in Europe and Africa, those are challenging positions. What are the big ideas and the big plans? Because I think it’s really important that people with disabilities are involved in research and testing, but we also have to be there and on the team and getting the jobs.
[00:36:11] But I think that in a lot of the world outside of some very specific places, access to assistive technology isn’t what it should be. Access to education isn’t what it should be. And so what do big companies do and what role do you have to play in solving those problems? To get people with disabilities, actually working full-time at Google and not just part of the research and design kind of interviews.
[00:36:34] Christopher Patnoe: So part of my job is disability inclusion. And this is about exactly what you’re talking about Sam. It’s hiring. It is performance management. It is job satisfaction. It is understanding where the bathrooms are and making sure we have tools we that meets everyone’s needs.
[00:36:49] It is really being holistic in terms of understanding the needs of people with disabilities and making sure that Google’s tools can meet those needs. There’s so much legacy software out there. There’s always going to be a problem, but I’m really pleased to see how hard Google is trying to do the right thing and push the boundary and do it right.
[00:37:11] And we may never get there, but we’re trying really hard. And I’m really proud to be part of the team that is making this work happen.
[00:37:19] Nikki Nolan: What can a company do to make inclusion and access a part of their company or product?
[00:37:27] Christopher Patnoe: Step one is making an intention. Decide that this is important to do, because if you don’t have the intention, if you’re doing it because quote unquote, it’s the right thing to do, it’ll always be down prioritized compared to other things. Have the intention based on the understanding that if you have a diverse workforce, you’re going to have a better product.
[00:37:44] You’re going to have better culture. You’re going to have an environment where people do their best work. And sometimes you need to make accommodations for it. And it’s scary if it’s your first time. But, driving was scary the first time you did it. Going outside with a kid would be scary the first time you’re doing it.
[00:38:01] You have to start with an intention that is more than just it’s the right thing to do. You need to understand that there are true business benefits to having a diverse environment.
[00:38:10] This is true for disability, race, gender, sexual orientation, et cetera. Because everyone brings something unique to the table. When it comes to disability because of the technical expectations to build software that meets the needs of people with disabilities, if you have people with disabilities on your team it is much easier to get the team to make that change. To make the culture change, it just becomes what you do. Instead of something that you have to do.
[00:38:33] Sam Proulx: So as we move towards the end, this has been a great conversation. Never want them to end, but they always have to. Where can people find you? Where can they find out about what you’re up to and what you’re doing? And is there anything in particular that you would like to plug?
[00:38:46] Christopher Patnoe: If I were to be anywhere that you would, where I would actually talk back to you, it’d be on LinkedIn. I have exported to Twitter, but Twitter scares me. Just as there are too many grumpy people there. So if you want to actually have me talk back to you, find me on LinkedIn. And in terms of the work that I’m doing, nothing to plug.
[00:39:01] There is so much great stuff happening all over the world. Apple does great stuff and Microsoft does good stuff. Google does great stuff. In terms of these big companies, it’s all important. Everyone’s doing really meaningful, powerful things, and it all deserves attention. So just keep your eyes opened and find what’s interesting.
[00:39:18] Find what helps you and share it. Because understanding what’s out there is really hard because there’s so much happening all at the same time. So if you think something’s cool, share it. Let somebody else know. That’s the only way, that’s how I started. I thought something was cool. I shared it.
[00:39:34] And someone said, I liked that too. So I shared something else and then I shared something else. And now I’m on LinkedIn, probably a couple of times a week just saying, I think this is cool.
[00:39:43] Nikki Nolan: Thank you so much for being here. This was so much fun to get to know you and learn all of these really cool things that now our listeners get to know too.
[00:39:51] Christopher Patnoe: I hope I was helpful. Thank you so much for inviting me. This is a lot of fun.
[00:39:54] Sam Proulx: Absolutely.
[00:39:55] Thanks for listening to Disability Bandwidth. If you liked this episode of Disability Bandwidth, please subscribe and share it with friends and family. Today’s episode was hosted by Sam Proulx and Nikki Nolan. Edited and produced by Nikki Nolan. Transcripts are written by Emma Klauber. Feed music is created by Efe Akmen.
Special thanks to everyone at Fable who without their support. This show would not be possible.
You can find out more about Disability Bandwidth on Twitter, @disability_band and Instagram, @disabilitybandwidth, or on our website https://disabilitybandwidth.com/.
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