Chancey Fleet is a Brooklyn-based tech educator and activist who identifies as Blind. Chancey is the Assistive Technology Coordinator at the New York Public Library. In that role, she curates accessible technology in the branch, collaborates across the NYPL system to improve equity of access, and coordinates a diverse team of staff and volunteers who provide one-to-one tech coaching and group workshops, free of charge and open to all. Through a 2017 NYPL Innovation grant, she founded and maintains the Dimensions Project, a free open lab for the exploration and creation of accessible images, models and data representations through tactile graphics, 3d models and nonvisual approaches to coding, CAD and “visual” arts.

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Transcript (PDF)

This is InEx, a show about inclusive design.

I'm your host, Matt May.

In this episode:

Graphics were something that I received.

They were not something that I requested or chose.

They were curated for me by textbook publishers and other sighted folks.

There was never a direct path from my curiosity to an

image being under my fingers.

A conversation with Chancey Fleet.

And now I am honored to introduce you all to Chancey Fleet.

Thank for coming in and being on the show.

I am so happy to be here, Matt.

Thank you.

This is going to be fun.

I'm going to start with your bio here.

Chancey Fleet is a Brooklyn-based tech educator and activist who

identifies as capital B Blind.

Chancey is the assistant technology coordinator at

the New York Public Library.

In that role, she curates accessible technology in the branch collaborates

across the New York Public Library system to improve equity of access and

coordinates a diverse team of staff and volunteers who provide one-to-one tech

coaching and group workshops, free of charge and open to all through a 2017

New York Public Library innovation grant, she founded and maintains a

dimensions project, a free OpenLab for the exploration and creation

of accessible images, models, and data representations through tactile

graphics, 3D models, and non visual approaches to coding CAD and visual arts.

And I want to add on the land acknowledgment.

OCAD University acknowledges the ancestral and traditional

territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the

Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat.

Chancey and I are presently on the ancestral and traditional territories

of the Duwamish and Coast Salish Peoples and the Lenape, who are the

original owners and custodians of the land on which we stand and create.

So thank you again.

I want to get started because I have so much to talk with you about,

and I want to start first with just your background, how your career

started, how your education came up.

What's your origin story?

Oh, so I'm in my late thirties now and I was born in a tiny

town in Virginia called Aylett to sighted parents who were not expecting

a Blind child, but who turned out to be extremely prepared to have one.

Both of them are really free spirits, very creative, very

driven and enjoy problem solving.

So that worked out well.

They pushed me from the very beginning to make my own way in the

world to find my own ways of doing things and to set myself up for big

dreams, for big self expectations.

They were also really good at telling the world to value me and include me.

So just I'll share a couple of things.

When I was six years old, my father got me a Toshiba laptop.

The kind with two, three and a half inch floppy disks.

And I had Arctic Business Vision on my laptop as a child.

I could write assignments and print them out right there in the classroom.

And I could read notes from my parents, like the ones that parents

usually put in kids' lunches and I could play Zork and use a calculator

and stuff like that from grade one.

And I realized, although probably not consciously, it was just always true for

me, that technology would help me do stuff without a bunch of people in the middle,

holding my hands and slowing me down.

My mom was really instrumental in making sure that I got a quality

education, including braille can travel instruction, that kind of thing.

And she taught me a lot about self-advocacy.

She went to bat for me so many times, and she made sure that even as a

young child, I was in my own IEP meetings and that my voice was heard.

And both of my parents really supported me to be an advocate and an outspoken person.

And they allowed me to talk back to adults who were being ableist.

My father tells this story about a time when I was like three in the

grocery store, in the little cart in the grocery store, sitting in the cart.

And some lady comes by and says to me, because my eyes are doing their

own little dance, as they will do, little girl, you better be careful.

If you keep rolling your eyes like that, they'll get stuck.

And I said, it wouldn't matter.

I'm Blind anyway.

And she just ran down the aisle.

So that was the vibe in my childhood.

Technology continued to play a pivotal role in my education through

middle school, through high school.

I went away to a school for the Blind for two years and learned a sense of

community for the first time there.

When I was in middle school, I have a really strong memory

of my computer teacher, Ms.

Rinker introducing me to an OCR machine, the Reading Edge.

And one day we were snowed in for the weekend on the

campus and couldn't go home.

And this little lady picked up the five, $10,000 Reading Edge in her two arms

and walked it out of the computer lab and across the street and into my dorm

room for the weekend so that I could just sit there and read a print book.

And I will never forget that.

When I was like 10 years old, my father brought me to the VCU library and I'm not

sure why they let a 10 year old child have the key to the disability accessibility

lab, but he would drop me off.

And I would go to the desk as though I were a college student

and ask for the key, they would give me the key and just let me go.

And I would sit there and hang out and use the OCR tools there.

I always had this excitement and joy and sense of possibility around tech.

And when I got to college, I didn't have a lot of Blind role models yet.

I had read a couple of biographies by Blind folks that went into psychology.

So I majored in psychology cause I didn't know what I wanted to do.

But halfway through college, I started working part-time for our state agency

training other Blind and visually impaired folks on how to use their tech.

And I was like, wow, I like this.

It's like being a therapist, but instead of problems I'm not sure if

I've solved, I can deal with problems that have really concrete solutions.

And it also involves working with people and helping people feel

confident and empowered, but in a precise way, a measurable way.

And that appealed to me.

And so this became my career.

When I was a freshman in college, I got hooked up with the National

Federation of the Blind, which is a civil rights organization.

And they drew me in as they do with a state scholarship.

And I started finally meeting Blind people that I wanted to

be around and wanted to emulate.

And that sealed the deal for me.

I had some negative thoughts in my head about the Blind

community when I was a kid.

And those thoughts just flew out the window that they opened for me when

they started to introduce me to Blind mentors in different fields and to

do things like tell me to go meet my host family in Washington, DC.

And tell me to take three trains and not even ask whether that

was going to be a problem for me.

And I just loved it.

I loved the trust that they put in me.

I loved the high bar that they set for everyone in the

organization and that involvement.

And specifically my involvement in doing early testing and promotion for the

first KNFB Reader got me recruited to my first sort of grown-up job after college.

There was a recruiter in the audience one day when I was

presenting the canopy reader.

And next thing I was flying around the country, teaching federal employees with

disabilities, how to use their tech.

And now here I am.

I want to talk about where you are now, because I've actually

gotten to visit you in your library.

The Heiskell Library in New York City.

We got to do a tour of the braille library and this just fascinates me.

And I think it's important for sighted people to understand what

real libraries are and what they mean.

So could you talk a little bit about just the print archives and what that means

for the, consumers of braille content, how it gets distributed, et cetera.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

The National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled is

part of the Library of Congress.

And it's been around for almost a hundred years, I believe, and has

traditionally sent out braille materials and audio books through the mail.

These days, there's an app, the Bard, braille, and audio reading and download

app where you can download Bard books on a computer and you can tune in to

talking books or to digital braille books.

And we still of course have physical audio books available and hard copy braille.

What's cool about the New York Public Library, Andrew Heiskell Braille

and Talking Book Library branch, where I work is that in our state,

the NLS cooperating library is us.

So sometimes in a lot of states, regional libraries are just NLS

libraries and they're totally separate from the public library.

In our case, we're both, we are the NYPL and we're the NLS regional library, which

means that our building has a diversity of people coming into it every day.

So community patrons who might not have disabilities are there to go to

story time and use the wifi and use computer labs, pick up their holds.

And then there are a bunch of Blind people and visually impaired people

and people with disabilities coming in to do everything from picking up

books, to learning about technology, attending film series, going to

crossword club, going to knitting club.

And so it's a really dynamic space.

And one of the things I love about it is that it's an integrated space where

communities of disability and the general sort of able culture collide and interact.

And I find that to be really special.

Another thing that's special about our branch is that in a lot of states, the

braille books specifically, because they're so large and they're typically

mailed out in a lot of states, the braille books and the audio books are

in a warehouse and you call up to get them, or you fill out a form to get

them, and they come to you by mail.

But our stacks are open for braille books in New York.

And so when you walk up to the second floor, There are stacks just like

there would be for a print library and you can just browse to your

heart's content and pull books down and see if you want to check them out.

And you can skim through things.

And I first visited this library when I was visiting from Virginia,

again, around the age of 10 or 11.

Just the fact that you could go in and choose a book and read a book and

decide if it was worth taking home.

That stuck with me for years.

And I was so happy when I moved to New York to reconnect with the library

first as a patron, and then as a volunteer and now as part of the staff.

There are a couple of things I want to take off from this, but

I want to stay on the braille for one second, because that transition

from the printed braille world into the electronic braille world, with

refreshable braille displays and content that starts to become accessible.

That itself is very powerful, but also.

We're not nearly where we could have been.

Because the idea of the book turning into something electronic also came

with all of these other things that came along like DRM or just scanning

the pages of books early on to make them look like pictures of a page.

And so you didn't get any of the benefit of that work that had to be done in order

to braille, a trade publication or a novel or whatever that was distinct to bespoke

work and these books for a braille book.

Can you talk about if it's a 500 page printed book, what a braille

version of that is like physically.

It's going to be a lot larger.

A bound braille book is going to be a lot larger.

I had a pocket dictionary in middle school, the quote unquote

pocket dictionary, which was a small paper back in print.

And it was eight major notebook sized, 11.5"x11" volumes that

took up half a bookshelf.

I believe the Harry Potter books, an average Harry Potter book might be, ah, I

don't actually want to speculate on what the exact number is, but it's larger.

If braille were print, it would be size 29.

So that's going to take up a lot of space

Like a 29-point font.

Yeah.

A 29-point font.

Exactly.

So, enormous.

And just the idea of shifting these things around the country, and the cost

that's involved, and like you were saying the difficulty for you to browse that

kind of material, you just had a catalog and you got it and you picked something

out and you might wait years for the most popular things to come through.

That kind of could go away with the advent of eBooks, but instead we

still have these kinds of barriers.

And then there are things like the Chafee Amendment, which is essentially

a law that enables people to break DRM specifically for the purposes of making

it available to print disabled people, which is just the fact that you had to

have that just in order for books to even be remotely available, not just in

the library setting, but in education still underscores how big the gap is

between print and braille content.

For me as an individual who has a considerable amount of

privilege in that I've always had access to digital braille devices

since I came to college, that gap has not existed for me in large measure

since the very early two thousands.

And that's thanks to Jim Fruchterman and Bookshare, part

of the Benetech organization.

In the very early two thousands, Jim realized that Blind folks all over

the country and all over the world and their allies were using flatbed

scanners to turn page by page, through books and make their own access.

I remember doing this from early college onward.

And I would just get my music together or start reading a

book while I was scanning it.

And I might spend two or three hours to scan in a single textbook or a

book for leisure sometimes more.

But even then being able to do that.

And get a scan that was readable was another really intense

memory and magic moment for me.

I remember the first time that I OCRed something and then sent it

over to a braille display using automatic translation errors.

What is this amount of power?

I couldn't even believe my luck, but Jim realized that we could

avoid that duplication of effort by banding together, and we could deepen

and broaden the availability of accessible texts for people that use

digital braille, for people that use text-to-speech audio, magnification,

all kinds of ways to read a book.

And this was particularly welcome for me because I love to read.

I've always been a voracious reader, and also somebody with esoteric interests.

I have had interests over the years in speculative fiction authors that didn't

ever quite make it to the NLS collection.

I remember as a queer kid growing up in the nineties, not being able to find

much representation of people like me in the NLS collections, all of that has

changed a lot in the intervening years, but it was this anarchic wonderful

thing when Jim started bringing us all together so that we could upload those

individual scans that each of us had done on our own for ourselves and just

amplify the impact that those had.

And at first, a lot of major publishers were upset.

They were resistant, they were doing their best to create friction, but Jim

constructed an infrastructure where piracy was taken seriously and folks using

the system in abusive ways were really removed and faced actual consequences.

And Jim's team and our community gradually earned the trust of major publishers

to the point that now, most new titles that are added to Bookshare, I believe,

are submitted directly by the publisher, which means there aren't OCR errors,

there aren't weird little omissions, and now we're all kind of playing on

the same team and just scoring win after win for digital accessibility

for folks that are Blind, visually impaired, have cognitive and learning

disabilities, have fine motor impairments that make it hard to hold a book.

I love NLS, and I love what the NLS has done for digital

braille and the Blind community.

But just as important is this radical idea that Jim had, that we could take our

individual efforts and channel them into something that would invent eventually

absolutely transformed the landscape for digital accessibility of books.

Yeah.

And I think that one thing here that's important is the idea of mutual aid and of

the agency of the Blind people themselves in this work, that there wasn't.

So Jim, who, as I understand it is sighted.

It wasn't that he came into a community and just said, here,

I'm going to fix it for you.

That there is a community that is self-advocating and that is working on

the solution itself, and coordinates with other communities to make that happen.

It has to be clear that it's a partnership and not just a bestowal of

rights from sighted to Blind people.

Exactly.

He took what we were already doing and channeled it.

And there was nothing, there was no saviorism, there was no paternalism.

It was just, how can we take the power you already have and make it do more.

Yeah, the same thing with we mentioned the late Jim Thatcher

and the screen reader project that he had worked on that was so

that he could share mathematical equations with his Blind boss.

These are the parts of the story that tend to be elided from the history here.

That is always in partnership with that.

It's always in collaboration with, it's always for the benefit of

the user that we're talking about.

And not like it springs forth from nowhere.

Exactly.

I wrote Benetech a tongue in cheek.

It was actually a compliment, but a quote unquote complaint letter because

as a Blind child and teen and young adult, I had always managed to read

the entire catalog of braille titles.

And so I knew exactly what my choices were.

Cause we always had this feeling of scarcity and one never wanted to

miss something that might be good.

And I said, I'd like to register a complaint.

There are too many titles and I cannot any longer keep track of everything

that's available to read and that that's making me feel so much anxiety.

That's funny, that reminds me of, I grew up in a small town

in Massachusetts and there was one record store in my town and I knew

everything that they had there.

And then I remember going to San Francisco one time and I went to Amoeba

Records, and it's like a football field.

I had my own existential crisis of, I am never going to spend

enough time in my life to consume all of this musical content.

It was that feeling of just unbounded potential.

Exactly.

That's what it was.

That's what it is.

So I want to turn this to design because I don't know

how you identify yourself, but I definitely think of you as a designer.

And I think a lot of people just instinctually think of design as

being a visual science or visual art, that it's something that has

to have a visual component to it.

And I know a lot of UX designers think of it that way.

But I want to talk about what design means when you're Blind

or when you have low vision.

What is the impetus, what is the process?

What are the things that you wish people knew about Blindness and

the lived experience of Blind users when it comes to making products?

So, wow.

So I think part of my lived experience stems from Blindness itself.

So as a Blind person, I benefit from elegant spatial representations that

are non-visual, whether that's the quick and easy and very legible audio graphs

that are available in the health app on my iPhone, or whether that means a

team app that shows the relationships between streets and their points of

intersection and their names in the most minimal pleasing way possible.

I can speak to my sensibility as a reader and lately a creator

of tactile designs and other non visual spatial representations.

But the fire in me for catalyzing community work in tactile design in

particular comes from having realized fairly late on in my Blindness

journey that I had been living in image poverty this whole time.

And that it was avoidable.

As a young child, I got lots of braille and I probably got more tactile

graphics than most people because I got a steady supply of braille books.

So a few times a year, a picture book would show up and often I would get

maps or diagrams in my textbooks.

But when I say often, maybe there would be 10 graphics in my entire textbook.

I don't mean that I got the same amount of images as my contemporaries

who were sighted, and graphics were something that I received.

They were not something that I requested or chose.

They were curated for me by textbook publishers and other sighted folks.

There was never a direct path from my curiosity to an

image being under my fingers.

And I came to believe that I was strong and my verbal abilities and pretty

poor at spatial thinking the arts, mathematics, science, all of that stuff.

And I assumed a lot of things about my aptitudes and those assumptions

drove my career trajectory and my studies and I have no regrets.

I love it where I am right now.

But I discovered as I met the Blind community during and after college, I

started to discover that there were Blind people who were joyful, absolute spatial

thinkers, who could communicate something by drawing, who could understand a map

in seconds who understood the things best when they were presented spatially

Blind people who, if they were sighted would call themselves visual learners.

And I realized, oh my God, that's me.

If you can explain an intersection to me, five times verbally.

I will nod and smile and I will do my best and I will get

about 40% of what you told me.

If you show me a diagram of the same thing, I'm good.

I've got it.

It's in my brain now.

And I'm going to negotiate that intersection, I'm going to make

my way through the streets.

On the map that I saw, I'm going to be able to wire up a circuit

based on a diagram, way more so than I can from a narrative.

And I had no idea until I started meeting people at Blindness

conferences who were doing this on the daily and who could show me how.

And so by the point that all this happened, I was already a tech educator.

When I started to really focus on tactile design, I was already at New

York Public Library in particular, a.

A Blind person that was very well connected.

A CEO reached out to me in 2016 and said, hey, where can I get a five-borough map?

Because I'm moving to New York.

And I want to understand how the boroughs interrelate to one another.

And I had to say, gosh, I don't think I know how to get you an answer.

And that's when I started reflecting really hardcore on why we didn't

have the ability to make a straight path from an inquiry to a tactile.

And I realized that as long as we don't have access to the means of production

for tactile graphics, and as long as tactical graphics are something that

were handed and not something that we create, we're not going to move forward.

The state of spatial thinking creativity, self-expression in our

community and it's going to remain the territory of a very few Blind elite.

And I decided that I wanted to spend a big chunk of my life fixing that.

And so I started the Dimensions Project in 2017.

Got that CEO, their five borough map, by the way.

And now anybody can come in and make tactile graphics and 3D models.

And so I consider myself if I am a designer, and see, I still

make a make disclaimers and I need to learn to stop doing that.

So although I am, as a designer, I am an outsider designer.

I'm not someone who has that background.

I'm someone who has a keen awareness of what it feels like to be missing

that background and everything that I'm doing now and everything

that I'm pursuing knowledge of and everything that I'm building in my

community is a response to that.

That lived experience of finding out that I had an entire part of my

brain that was under utilized because I didn't have images in my life.

So I can say as somebody that is working on my master of design

project, that there's room outside of the imposter syndrome for both of us.

I'm trying so hard just to be okay with this, but here I am.

I've worked in a design company for 15 years now.

I'm going through this program.

I still struggle to call myself a designer.

So I think that there's room for a lot more people who are coming up

with creative solutions to things that people are dealing with every day

to just say it, that this is design.

And on top of that, just the things that you're doing at the library.

I think when we did the inclusive design workshop, you co-facilitated

the session at the library and showed us some things like 3D.

And I think you've done soldering projects.

Like you've taught soldering in there in the library.

And I think CAD, were you doing OpenSCAD or something for generating the 3D models?

So we teach.

If you're Blind or working on visually typical CAD programs that involve

rendering a rotatable 2D image on screen are not yet possible for us because the

first generation of refreshable tactile graphics displays is still in development.

And even when it comes to market, it's going to be initially fairly low res.

And so we're left with two, two great choices that we can mix and match.

We can collaborate with sighted folks and we can co-design,

which is a fun thing to do.

When I was in lockdown and my community partner, Claire was in lockdown

somewhere else, on the last day, the library was opened in March, 2020.

I brought home a bunch of graphics equipment like Apocalypse Now style,

just let me carry everything I can.

Even thinking it was going to be two weeks, cause I couldn't be separated from

graphics for two weeks at that point.

And I brought home the embosser and we'd get on the phone and talk

about a graphic that we needed to design for our web development class.

Maybe a color wheel that's tactile that shows folks the relationships

between complimentary colors and maybe a tactile that shows different font

types and sizes and serifs and sans and something that illustrates the box model.

So we would talk it out and then she would jump into Adobe

Illustrator and send me a draft.

I would emboss the draft and then we'd get back on FaceTime.

And I would just point to things under the camera and say, hey, this here is great.

This is really strong.

Here's a place where we need a little bit more contrast with our dot heights.

This is filled in and that's making it feel blurry.

So let's make it a cleaner shape with white space in the middle.

And it was just the most satisfying thing during a time that was

pretty, pretty scary and lonely.

It was such a joy to co-design with someone and bring my experience of

tactile design together with her experience of graphic design and make

something that hadn't been done before.

So collaborating is an option that we have.

And then the other option we have is doing our own design work, either using analog

tools, like tactile drawing tablets and 3D printing pens and other, almost anything

that's an art supply that's a usable done visually can be used as a design tool.

But if we want to make something that's really precise, we

might use code specifically.

We might use OpenSCAD to create complex designs that are made of

parametric shapes that we combine, that we rotate, that we translate,

that we group and duplicate and scale.

And all that can be done with a coding language that's in my view,

pretty much just as friendly as HTML.

And we have been able to teach it to several cohorts of Blind and sighted

folks that don't have previous CAD experience and don't necessarily

have previous code experience either.

And I'm good enough to make something basic.

So if you asked me to create a chess piece or a a signature guide

or a minimal box, I could do that.

Some of my students have surpassed me by leaps and

bounds, which is very gratifying.

I have one volunteer whose first name is Steven.

If you've worked with him on OpenSCAD you'll know him, and he can take a look

at something complex, like an entire puzzle with movable parts and he can go

into OpenSCAD and recreate the thing.

And he also does original design.

So there are folks in our community now that are really pushing the limits of

what OpenSCAD can do for a Blind designer.

So that's great.

And also ties into one of the core practices of inclusive design.

So I want to use this to segue into the next segment.

We're going to take a pause right here.

I will be right back with Chancey Fleet.

InEx is a major research project by me, Matt May, as part of the master

of design degree program at OCAD University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Episodes and transcripts of this podcast can be found at inex.show.

That's I-N-E-X dot show.

Follow InEx on Twitter at @inexpodcast.

And we're back with Chancey Fleet, and we're going to get into inclusive design.

And the question that I have been asking has been about inclusive design as a

term of art versus inclusive design, as whatever people think is inclusive,

plus whatever people think is designed to go back to the definition that

the Inclusive Design Research Centre puts forth from OCAD University."

Inclusive design is designed that is inclusive of the full range of human

diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age, and

other forms of human difference."

So how do you see that reflected in the world versus I guess anything

that you just hear is inclusive.

Oh, that's a big question.

My first response is that the ways in which people interpret and implement

what they think that means create just a symphony of total chaos with

a lot of unnecessary and unintended consequence generating designs

and a lot of missed opportunities and occasionally some real wins.

I think it comes down to the composition of that interaction, of what

inclusion is actually happening here.

And I think in the last segment you specifically mentioned co-design

and that to me is the baseline.

There is not just some level of participation, not just that you've

done some user research and you've already validated everything, but

you're just going to go past a group of users and say, is this good for you?

But that the people that you're learning from, that you're

collaborating with, you're doing from the instantiation of the idea.

So this is where we get the idea of participatory action research, where

the outcome isn't already there.

It isn't something that's been proposed, that people are discussing,

but that it's almost like you have a green field, you can think of anything

that could possibly be created.

And that is the beginning of the relationship.

And the levels of power in that relationship are more, even.

That it isn't just, we have a researcher who is telling you all

what to do, and then what they do with that information is all theirs.

Do you see that as being something that's being propagated, that's

being coming more popularized or is that still in the margins?

I think so.

I mentioned my friend Claire earlier.

I met her when she was a grad student at NYU ITP and she was doing a participatory

design project and needed to find somebody to build with and for, and asked me what

kind of problem I had to solve for myself.

And I said, I'd like to solve my problem of having to plan frequently large exhibit

halls that might have 30 or 40 tables.

And I wanted a digital way to move them around spatially in a non visual manner.

Because again, I don't do well with textual narratives.

And we started playing with some potential prototype solutions to that problem.

And eventually I was able to solve that particular problem in a different way,

but we discovered that we had a really similar ethos and had the same kinds

of thoughts about how to do actual good things in our communities with designs.

And so she and I have worked together over the years on several things.

One thing that I really appreciate about her and about a lot of my other

collaborators that are in academia, is that when they, and now we are

doing research, we try to create things that feel organic and that not

only are participatory, but provide a real benefit to the community that

is more than just the hypothetical benefit that research provides.

And it's more than just a gift card.

For example, we were able to do some research around that soldering workshop

at NYU ITP that you mentioned, by getting voluntary feedback from the participants

and also self-reporting as instructors.

But we didn't do structured interviews with folks that took a long time and

we were able to get those research goals met while offering an actual

three-day soldering intensive that Blind people and visually impaired

people and sighted allies were excited to attend from all over the country.

Regardless of what we got in terms of our research, everybody learned to solder.

And similarly when Claire and I have worked together on teaching web

development, JavaScript and CSS concepts, to folks who are Blind or visually

impaired, we did get some research outcomes, validating the worth of tactile

graphics in that instructional context.

But our main mission was to make sure that Blind and visually impaired people had a

chance to learn of development concepts.

And so I really like this idea of taking it one step farther than participatory

action research to creating situations where research can happen, but research

is not necessarily the only thing or the main thing that's happening and that a

community benefit is being created there.

And that's a different way to make sure that people have power.

Are you giving something to people that's worth their time?

Are you opening up a meaningful experience that didn't exist before?

And I'm not going to claim that the model that I believe in right now is

perfect because I think my thinking is always evolving and there's always

more things to learn about ways to do things better and even more equitably.

But I really enjoy that model.

And I also enjoy being at the New York Public Library where we don't

do research and having braille study groups and the Dimensions lab and

accessible tech education, where, because we're a public library, we

don't actually need you to be Blind, to take advantage of those opportunities.

And so Sometimes what will happen these days, is a grad student who may or may not

have a ton of inclusive design awareness or may not know about the conversation

being had about participatory research.

They may drop by to do some fact finding, and I'll roll them right

into a braille study group with everyone else, or I'll roll them

into whatever everyone else is doing.

And rather than me telling them how to do their research or that their

project is headed down a terrible road, I can just shut up and introduce

them to the community and let them observe how things are actually

happening in the world where we live.

And nine times out of 10, once they start talking to other people in that

library space, or just observing, they will start to course correct.

And it doesn't have to be a big didactic thing coming from me,

because I have more power than an average sighted grad student.

And a lot of ways, if I were to say, you're doing this all wrong, that

could feel very intimidating and that could probably shut somebody down.

And what we don't want to do is make people feel bad or make people not want

to engage in communities of disability.

We want people to be mindful and observant and use common sense and build

the kind of relationships that inform good design and excellent outcomes.

And I think one of my favorite things about the library is that

it's a place where you can just build an organic relationship with the

community if you're willing to do so.

I think that really improves the chances that your design will be meaningfully

centered on the lived experiences and wisdom of people with disabilities.

You actually brought up two of the kind of hallmarks

of real equity in the discussion.

Number one, the workshops that you're doing, we are proposing an exchange

by which we gain this information, and you learn how to solder.

Right?

Everybody is getting something and everyone has a stake in the

arrangement, as opposed to, as you were saying, the gift card, whatever.

It's just almost a passing off of of that responsibility.

Yeah, it's a gig.

It's a gig.

And the second one is where you're talking about

being listened to in the room.

That responsibility is born across all of the stakeholders in the discussion.

I think a lot of the time, the discussion of equity is mostly

about money for services.

And that makes sense in terms of the stock market, obviously it's got a big

connection to the term of money, but not everyone wants to be a software engineer.

Not everybody wants to be a product designer.

Sometimes the people want to pick up this tool because they want to get the

thing done, that the tool affords them.

And that's it.

If they want to be an artist for art's sake, they don't need to make the product

and be involved in all of the decisions.

Everybody has a different thing that they want to get out of it and being

able to tease out what is a fair exchange for that is also a form of equity work.

Yeah.

And I think that cuts both ways.

If you're a sighted designer and you are self-propelled or for whatever

reason, you don't have a budget and you can't engage in that gift

card economy to get good answers.

Like maybe you can do something else.

Can you, are you good photographer?

Can you take some good photos in exchange?

Can you advise on something else?

Can you volunteer a couple hours of your time to do a

thing that somebody else needs?

I think when we think about equity, it's not only about ensuring equity

for people with disabilities, although that's super important.

It's also ensuring that financial contribution is not the only way

that folks who need our expertise and wisdom can get that need met.

Because we can all offer different things to each other.

And a lot of the meaningful projects that I've been involved in that turned out

to be rewarding and generative didn't involve any financial transactions.

Claire over the years has written us whole curriculums and

volunteered a ton of her time.

Another community partner, Lauren Race, who's at Twitter now, decided

to make her entire master's thesis a complete flight of tactile

graphics for physical computing.

You can find it at tactileschematics.com.

I hope she learned a lot from us and we've become really generative

colleagues in a lot of ways, but again, she didn't need to offer funding.

She offered her really unique and deep expertise and a willingness

to address immediate needs that we had in our community.

And I just, I want to see more of that.

Yeah.

And I want to juxtapose this against what I think are the least

equitable kinds of arrangements.

My understanding in the Blind community is that the example

of this is the magic cane.

What if we took the white cane and we made it something that

was technologically superior...

What if we added lasers?

What if we added lasers?

What if we had the laser cane?

And so many different examples of this come up over the years

where you can see that they didn't think about what the cane does.

And so not being a white cane user, I would like for you to explain what the

cane does, that's important that if you were to, if you were to explain why this

thing matters in the format that it's in, so that you could talk the next generation

of laser cane people into doing something more productive with their lives.

Oh my gosh.

Yep.

This is great.

So among our staff and volunteers in the tech department and the back

office, we always joke around we should have a public awareness campaign.

That's just the, it's a stick campaign.

Why are traditional canes more effective.

And normally you shouldn't call a white cane a stick, but we're going to make an

exception here because it's literally...

don't complicate it.

It's a stick.

Okay?

What if you break it or lose it?

What if you drop it down an elevator shaft or onto the subway tracks?

Both of which things I've done.

What if you break it on something and have to put it back together with

a splint of a pencil and duct tape?

It doesn't matter.

It's a stick.

It costs $30.

What if it rains on it?

What if you are kayaking and all kinds of sand gets in it,

it's not really a big deal.

Cause it's a stick.

It costs $30.

You don't have to charge it.

It won't track you...

cause it's a stick.

You just move it back and forth and it finds things.

And when you damage it, you get another one.

And that's the part that I think is just the most fascinating

to me about this, because it seems like a lot of these projects are a

hammer in search of a nail, right?

It's almost like the exchange that's being offered is for you to be dependent

on financially and with your own security to this company's product.

And that seems to be the opposite of what it is that we should be doing.

And it boggled the mind when I first got into accessibility to find out that

something like JAWS, one of the major screen readers for know for Blind and

print-dis abled people was $1,300.

And with that, you got one release.

You got one update.

Which was an annual update for it.

And then that was it.

And that was the baseline.

That was what you needed in order to use a computer, unless you

wanted to use maybe Orca on Linux.

This is before kind of VoiceOver took over on the Mac and iOS, but that

idea that it costs a lot to be Blind.

In order to, just to have the baseline, like access to technology.

And just to tell a little story about the green room experience today,

when Chancey logged in, I think we spent at least a half an hour trying

to get everything up and running.

And we ran into problems with the browsers.

We ran into problems with the laptop, with the wifi, with the streaming product

that we're using to record this, Zencastr.

And one of the things was just getting to the buttons, the access to simply

read the labels of the buttons.

That's important to me because I want to talk to you.

And so the arguments about this on the web accessibility side of providing

equity in these arrangements is another one, which is that it's about the

community and the connectivity, and about the equanimity of the people that

are working on these things together.

Everything that's happening right now is about collaborative software tools.

And so if you have a mixed abled-disabled population of employees, which,

parenthetically, you do, the idea of accessibility being something that

is an add-on, or a nice to have, or we'll do it in another release.

It doesn't work.

You can't do that.

And larger companies are hiring product managers whose entire job

it is to evaluate products that they might buy because their own employees

might not be able to use them.

Yeah.

I want to address the consequences of digital inaccessibility a little bit,

because even if you're working in digital accessibility and you're meeting people

like me who are Blind or disabled people in tech or tech adjacent, you're not

meeting all your users and you're not seeing what I see as a tech educator.

For me, you could see me getting upset in a laughing about it way when things

weren't going according to plan today.

But I kinda knew that I would make it to the finish line and I have made it

a practice to deal with roadblocks in a way that doesn't really get to me and it

doesn't get to my self image as somebody who's going to be a good problem solver

and be happy to use digital tools.

As a tech educator.

I'm often working with someone who's newly Blind as in like maybe two weeks ago.

And I'm often working with people that have had low vision or print

reading disability, or have been Blind for a long time, but who don't

have access to the most premium forms of assistive technology.

So for example, they might not be able to afford an iPhone.

They might be working on a lifeline Android phone, which has pretty

shaky support for TalkBack and other assistive technology features.

If you have a user who is not temperamentally perfectly suited to

troubleshooting as almost a hobby, a couple of things can happen.

A user can very quickly develop a self-belief that they're not good

at technology, and that technology is frustrating and that they

should avoid it whenever possible.

Which means that you have done something harmful in their life

and you have also lost a customer.

And then the other thing that can happen is that users can be frustrated

by a single experience with your tech and they will never come back.

I still have people telling me that some technologies that they tried, five

plus years ago, notably Microsoft Edge.

Oh, I'm never going to use that again.

It was terrible.

And Microsoft Edge has been totally rewritten.

It's using Chromium now.

It works great with screen readers now in my view, but a

bunch of users will not be back.

Narrator is another one.

And I'm sorry to focus on Microsoft, but I'm thinking about Microsoft.

Narrator in it's first in instantiation around I believe Windows XP had a very

quiet, hard to hear voice, and could only read a few things and really

couldn't be used at all on the web and was pretty laborious to even use,

to go through basic system settings.

And now Narrator has great braille support.

It's easy to use.

It works out of the box.

It may not be the screen reader that I would choose just yet for my

primary, but it's like pretty great.

If I'm at a public computer or I need to fix somebody else's machine or show

a sighted person, how their tech works.

And I, I need a screen reader while I'm doing that, but there are probably

thousands, tens of thousands of fine people who tried Narrator in 2003.

And aren't going to try it again.

So the stakes are high and you want to get people.

You want to get digital accessibility, right?

As quickly as you can.

So that the first impression that you make, which may be the

only impression you ever get to make is going to be a good one.

I have had my fill of this whole experiment.

I think that's what you're talking about.

Like that if I'm tired of this, if I've reached my frustration

tolerance for this, then no more.

And so it's additive from product to product.

If your experience is to be excluded, then it doesn't take 10,000 times to do it.

It's the first time where it lines up with all of your previous experiences

of exclusion to feel left out of that experience, which is why you have

to get it right as soon as possible.

Exactly.

And then if you are in an organization and you know that you have a legacy

of impressions that you don't like the consequences of, and again,

I'm going to focus on Microsoft because what I have to say right

now is ultimately I think positive.

Microsoft has done a lot in recent years to turn impressions around.

They created one of the first comprehensive disability answer desks.

They integrated that with BeMyEyes.

So if you're an emerging computer user and you need an app that gives you an

easier way to connect with someone, you can dial in, you can do ASL.

There are lots of pathways to tech support.

And then they've also really been dedicating resources, not only

to developing built-in assistive technologies, but to doing like

pretty heavy community outreach and building advisory mechanisms, so that

their pivot is noticed and perhaps embraced by communities of disability.

So it's not the end of the world.

If you're in a company that's been doing work for 30 years and, you've

got some legacy reputation to manage.

But it does mean having a really bold and well-resourced

strategy for turning that around.

Great.

This is a good place to pause.

So we're going to take a short break, and we will have our

last segment with Chancey Fleet.

On the next episode of InEx:

I think if you are an individual contributor and you don't

believe in the work that you're doing is equitable, or you don't believe that

the organization itself is equitable, or whatever the case may be, find a new job.

Because you don't have the power to make the changes and you are going

to create so much harm for yourself by trying to go against the grain.

A conversation with Timothy Bardlavens.

And we're back with Chancey Fleet.

And we're going to talk about the equitable life.

You, Chancey, have your goals for how you want to live your life.

What do you think equity looks like to you?

What is the average day for Chancey Fleet?

Things that aren't equitable to you now, what do they feel like

to you in an equitable world?

I dream of a world where my community demands and receives ubiquitous

access to non visual representations of spatial information, whether that means

statistics, art pieces, images, maps, on par with what sighted people receive

I think that we've done a pretty good job as a community as a movement to make

it clear that we all deserve equitable access to books and text and the web.

But we are so behind on our access to images.

And so many of us, we have had our aptitudes untested and untried in

the arena of spatial communication and expression and understanding

that we don't even have the demand necessary to generate the change

that I want to see in the world.

I want to light a fire of curiosity and joy and surprise and mastery

in the brain of every Blind and low vision person that I meet.

And I want to end image poverty in our community during my lifetime.

I want to take tactile design down off the pedestal and put

it in every pair of hands.

And I want to see that the technologies that we've had for doing spatial

representation and a tactile, or sonified way, the technologies that we've had

for decades need to stop feeling arcane, mysterious and above somebody's reach.

They need to be for everyone.

And that needs to happen pretty much immediately.

So in an equitable world, I would roll into a museum and find

ubiquitous, 3D prints that represent the things that are behind glass,

that we're not allowed to touch.

When I enter a subway station, I would get a quick little map that illustrates

where all the platforms and turns are.

When I hang out with my nephews, I would have access to books that we

could use together as Blind and sighted and those images, not just the texts,

but those images would be accessible.

And as a consequence of all that Blind people who think they're bad travelers

would find out that they're spatial learners and they're good travelers

and Blind people to think that they're bad at math and science would find out

that they just needed to experience these things in a different way.

And, there are people that don't prefer spatial communication, and I get that.

It's not for everyone, but the opportunity is for everyone that's got to happen.

And then I guess the other thing that I really think about in terms of how I want

to protect and defend my own equity is that I don't just want to be included.

Inclusion is a low bar.

I want to be respected.

I want to be asked for my consent and preferences and I want to be relied

on to be a trusted contributor.

So that can mean something as simple as, today I was in a waiting

room and reapproaching my chair that I'd been sitting in earlier.

And somebody reached out and touched my arm to guide me.

And I was like, oh, we don't have consent.

And, that changed the conversation to something that she was familiar with.

We had a nice exchange about it and I was like, oh, no worries.

I just, in an ideal world, an equitable world, somebody that's just been

informed about a boundary in a friendly way, isn't going to get upset and I'm

not going to be afraid of retaliation.

And we're going to do the emotional work that we do in that moment to make it all

good and move on, which is exactly what happened today, but it's not always.

Equity in the cultural context also means that people will ask me for

as much as they want to give me.

That they will come to me for help, that they will come to me for skills and

perspective, and happily that happens a lot at the library more and more.

But I think we have to get past this idea that Blind and disabled people

are going to be the recipients of design or of anything else that

takes skill and talent because we have an amazing amount of talent

and resilience and so much to offer.

But at this point in my life, being in a job that I love in a context that makes

sense to me and having the tools that I need, and finally feeling like I figured

out what my worth is in this world, it becomes my next project and a pretty high

priority for me to think about whether I'm providing the most equitable and

welcoming experiences to other people.

And so that means realizing that as a Blind woman, I know one lived experience

of Blindness and I don't actually know what it's like to be newly Blind

and navigate competing priorities.

And that means I need to listen in spaces sometimes more than I talk, even though

my career has rewarded me for talking.

It's time for me to step back now and let other folks tell me about their

accessibility needs, their preferences, their dreams, the support they need.

And for me to resist the urge to tell anyone how to do Blindness

and to just present options.

And I think as we grow in the organized Blind movement and in communities of

disability, a certain generosity of spirit where we know that we don't actually

have all the answers and that we are not a one-way wisdom dispenser either.

That's that's going to be the next step.

So many quotes from this.

My ability to talk has helped my career greatly.

Yeah.

And the idea of listening, I continued to be humbled just by hosting this show.

But the, what you were talking about there, what the Blind community

has to give kind of reminds me of this other thing that I

learned fairly early in my career.

The guy that taught me this was William Loughborough, and he

he talked about blindlessness.

What you lose by not being Blind.

Which flips the script I think for a lot of other people.

In the Deaf community, they talk about Deaf Gain.

These are the things that Deaf people are good at by virtue of being Deaf.

And I wonder if you have any of those, if that resonates with you,

are there things that you think that, that sighted people can learn?

And I know that you talked, you just talked about this as my lived

experience and there are others, but collectively, what is it about Blindness

that you think sighted people need to know or could learn for themselves?

Speaking from my experience, I think having any disability

that surfaces itself when you're interacting with spaces and people in

technology has the potential to make you a really resilient problem-solver and good

at anything that demands improvisation.

And I've certainly found that to be true in my life and in a lot of the people

that I admire and am in community with.

And there are a lot of ways to get that gain, but Blindness

is definitely one of them.

Being able to communicate complicated things through narrative.

Noticing patterns in your environment.

So for example, noticing terrain changes, sounds, openness or closeness of a

space, and building a rich, spatial understanding of where something

is without having a visual context.

I think that's probably pretty powerful.

And then particularly as someone who centers my career and my life

around community building, in the broader world, there's a lot of

things that are really hard and scary and seem unsolvable right now.

So we all have opinions about how the pandemic's being managed,

and we all worry about politics, no matter what side we're on.

And it can feel like everything is so big and terrible.

And ever since I've been in the organized Blind movement, ever since

2001, I've been able to take on issues directly and really notice that I

was able to help solve a problem.

So I remember going to Congress and advocating for the Help America Vote Act.

And then we got accessible voting machines.

I came to the library as a volunteer and said, hey, let's

start a tech education program.

And then I got hired and then I made the Dimensions lab.

And now we're we've got a lot of momentum and I did that

with a couple of my friends.

That happened.

Just the sense of agency in a scary world, that there are things that we can see

and improve and maintain and care for really helps me feel good about my time

and my life in a way that I think, and again, there's a lot of ways to get there.

There are a lot of ways that, that non-disabled, people can find that

joy in, in community and joy in the maintenance and care of the

infrastructures that make life better.

But blindness was certainly a very efficient way to get there.

And I'm not sure that I would feel the same way about my career and

whatever my contributions end up being.

And such gratitude for the support that I've received.

If I weren't in this community, it basically feels late being,

even though I'm in New York City, Blindness feels like a small town

and I find that very comforting.

Great.

So one last question.

Who do you think is doing good work?

Who should we be paying attention to?

What things do you want to highlight?

Oh my gosh.

So many people.

For one thing, check me out on Twitter.

Cause I'm always shouting out good stuff and sometimes dragging bad design.

So both things can be found on my Twitter, I'm @chanceyfleet.

Oh gosh.

I'm in awe of the work that's being done by the San Francisco Lighthouse

for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

I'm a bit biased because a couple of years ago I did join the board.

So they do immersion training for newly Blind adults.

They've designed a beautiful building that embraces and highlights the strengths of

Blind perception in some phenomenal ways.

So for example, in the boardroom, there's a microphone system

that amplifies everybody, but doesn't lose the directionality.

So you know where somebody is sitting in relation to yourself, there's the design

is done by the building was designed by Chris Downey, who's a Blind architect.

And so there are tons of little touches and features everything from lighting

to accommodate every conceivable type of vision to textures that are subtle

and beautiful and rich and help you orient to where you are in the building.

So there's a central sort of granite pathway.

That's the way that you circulate through different sections, and the acoustics

have been handled with love and care.

You can go up to the Enchanted Hills camp and and everything is

accessible, but also just beautiful and natural and ambitious things are

happening up there like stem camps and music camps and those immersions.

So I always look to the Lighthouse.

When I think about what I hope for my own work, the Lighthouse hosts TMAP,

which is a way to use open street map data, to create tactile maps on demand.

That was invented by Dr.

Josh Miele, who's definitely somebody to watch.

And now the impact of that work is being amplified by Lighthouse.

We make TMAPs available with the library.

If you want to check them out.

During the pandemic, I was tremendously happy to introduce the work of Ed Summers,

who works for SAS and has developed the SAS graphics accelerator tool.

It's a Chrome extension that lets you bring in CSV data and turn it into

rich explorable sonified data sets.

So when we were worried about COVID stats in a pretty intense way in March 2020,

I was able to bring that free technology to our library, patrons and reach over

a hundred people and show everybody, we know that a lot of the data visualizations

about COVID right now aren't accessible, but here's what you can do.

There is a way.

And I could just mention hundreds, more hundreds, more people I've already shouted

out Lauren, Claire, two of my community partners that are doing amazing things.

But I think just generally during the pandemic and because of our new

willingness to try things out in a virtual context, I've found out that there are

more Blind and sighted people quietly doing novel, groundbreaking, welcoming,

joyful stuff than I could even imagine.

It turns out that we've got a pretty deep bench for innovation in the community.

And I would just say, use your social media.

If you're comfortable doing that, pop in on free virtual events, do what you can to

find out about what's going on in corners of the disability world that you're not

directly connected to because there's so much out there and you can never shout

out the best work because there is an abundance of awesome work being done.

Chancey Fleet, as always, it is a pleasure.

I'm so glad that I had a chance to talk with you today.

So thank you.

Alright.

Thank you, Matt.

This has been great.

That's our show.

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