B (19:48)
So in the role that I'm in now, and I'm glad we're talking about this because I wanted to mention something on this. So as far as accommodations, I don't have any specific assistive technology. I have my Mac. I run voiceover on it. The only thing I asked for was a larger monitor that they provided me. And that's really helpful for when I know I can't see all the stuff on the screen, but I can at least get a sense spatially of where things are. And the bigger the screen, the better. It also helped because you know a lot because I'm working remotely and a lot of people are all over the world. We do a lot of video calls, we do a lot of meetings. And when I was on a laptop and I would just open the laptop lid first off, I might not always be sitting straight in the frame because I can't see where I am in the video, but I'm also like, because we're on the call and then I'm trying to do something else. If I'm trying to review a document that people are sharing, I'd be leaning close to the screen and then I like, you know, I look like I'm right in front of the camera for everybody. Yeah, exactly. So, so I got one of these monitors that has like the pass through where it's got speakers and microphones and the camera already built in. So I have this nice 27 inch monitor, it's one of the LG ones and it's just sitting right in front of me. And I'm always going to be centered because I have that center stage thing that Apple has built in. But also it's also on the top edge of the screen and the way that, sorry, it's on the top edge of the bezel of the monitor and the way I sit, I'm never going to have that happen again, which is nice. So that was the only technology accommodation I asked for was just if they wouldn't mind providing me one of these types of monitors. But as far as accommodations in the workplace, the thing I wanted to talk about is for me there's a big part of my job is there's new features that come out that have been designed, they've been prototyped, they've been kind of thought through with our product teams, our engineering teams, our design teams and they have these high fidelity prototypes that are usually built in a program called figma. And figma. Think of like the most inaccessible PDF you've ever interacted with. That's figma. And it's not figma's fault. It's inherently a very visual process because you're talking about where you're going to position buttons on the screen, what the text is going to say, what the colors are going to be. So that is a barrier for me and it's a barrier for most people who can't use, who have to rely on a screen reader to navigate figma. And like with all companies, they're, they're making strides. Figma, they're making strides to make their experience accessible. But right now, for what I do for my work, it's still not there. So what I've had to do, and this is, this actually ties into something that you were talking about a minute ago around, you know, overcoming adversity and telling stories and interviews. One thing that I've, I don't know if I've coined the phrase, but I talk about it as what's called text based wireframes. So in this, in the industry with design, there's something called wireframes where you kind of, it's like a rough sketch of what your UI or user interface is going to look like. And I call it text based wireframes because what I normally do is I'll partner with a designer and we'll have a meeting, typically 15 to 30 minutes, and they'll walk me through the design and they'll describe it live. What we typically do is I'll either write notes or they'll provide me with notes, but it's all just written out in text and it describes everything that's going on with the ui, both from a flow perspective. So user clicks this thing, this will happen. User clicks this thing that will happen. And I use that to build this mental model in my head and then I go through and I write all the requirements for the accessibility experience. So that I guess would probably be the biggest accommodation that I've had to do because I had to partner with the design team and I had to talk to them and explain what I needed and why that was beneficial but not the unknown. I knew it was going to happen, but they didn't. The cool thing that has happened is it gives the design team a different perspective on their own designs. It's almost like if you ever remember when you were in school and people said, you know, read your essay three times, have somebody read it back to you, read it backwards. So you catch any like weird grammar or thing because you, you kind of, you get brain bright, brain blind to your own content. You think, oh, I went back and I made that color yellow. But then you go through, you're like, oh, I actually didn't, but you just assume you did. So your brain kind of fills in those gaps when it needs to. So the same concept for these designs and these design reviews. So I've had multiple designers tell me later, they're like, it's really hard but they're like, it's super helpful. And it helped me. This is me being them. They say it helped them to look at it differently. And they actually changed some things in their design. Sometimes on the fly, they'll change. They'll be like, hang on, I'm going to change something. And they change it on the fly, which is pretty fun. So it's a really cool experience. I love when we have those meetings.
