Reginé Gilbert, NYU Assistant Professor

Reginé talks about growing up with a family member who is deaf and taking that awareness into her UX studies and the digital accessibility community. She describes her research evaluating the accessibility associated with immersive technologies. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

(dramatic upbeat music)

- Hello, this is Digital Accessibility

for People Behind the Progress.

I'm Joe Welinske,

the creator and host of this series.

And as an accessibility professional myself,

I find it very interesting

as to how others have found their way into this profession.

So let's meet one of those people right now

and hear about their journey.

(upbeat music)

Well, let's get into this interview

and I'm very pleased to be talking today

with Regine Gilbert.

Hello, Regine.

How are you doing today?

- Hi, it's good to be here.

I'm so happy to be talking to you today.

- Yeah, well, we hadn't talked before,

so that's really good to able to meet you in this format.

And I'm in my home office

in Vashon, Washington,

which is an island near Seattle.

You either have a beautiful background

or a beautiful place,

but why don't you let us know

where you're talking to us from?

- Yeah, so I'm actually sitting in my office at NYU

in Brooklyn, New York.

- All right, well, I'm glad

we're able to get together for this.

And probably a good place to start is, you know,

if you just talk a little bit

about, you know,

the work that you're doing right now

and then we kinda go from there.

- Sure, so I'm currently an industry assistant professor

in the integrated design and media program

that's part of the Tandon School of Engineering.

And I teach user experience design,

as well as I co-teach an assistive tech class

with Gus Chalkias

and we teach students about the assistive tech

that blind and low vision folks use.

Gus is blind.

And then I bring in the UX piece and my,

I mean, he is definitely way more of an expert

on assistive tech than me,

but I have learned so much from him

and teaching the classes is a lot of fun.

And this upcoming semester,

I'm actually going to be teaching

a voice user interface class for the first time

and incorporating accessibility into it.

- Well, everything you just talked about

is really progressive.

Is that department that you're in,

you know, particularly pointed

toward providing that type of curriculum content

or is it something that you've thought

and it helped foster there?

- Yeah, so this department I really love

because it's really diverse

in the learnings that students can get.

My colleagues are, you know,

experts in virtual reality, in augmented reality,

in wearables and technology and art,

you know, and like biology,

and really like working with plants and technology.

So there's like all kinds of things

that folks are working on in my department.

So students have a lot of options when it comes to learning.

- Well, yeah, I wanted to talk more

about the work that you're doing now,

but one of the themes

of this series of interviews that I'm doing

is to look at the journey

that people have taken to

that has resulted in where they are today.

Maybe you could think about, you know,

a place that you'd like to pick as a starting point.

It doesn't have to be accessibility specific.

You know, and just maybe help us understand

what some of the formative things were

that got you on the journey to where you are today.

- Yeah, one of the things that had a huge impact on me

when I was growing up is my cousin, Tammy, is deaf.

And like interacting with her,

learning a little bit of sign language,

getting to see how she is in the world,

and that really had a lot of influence on me

saying, you know,

I think I started questioning when I was young,

like, "Why isn't more stuff better?"

Like, "Why isn't this thing better?"

Or "Why isn't this thing better?

And why can't we do more things better to communicate?"

And then, you know, fast forward.

Years later, I worked,

I worked in information technology

for a lot of years

and I got bored

and started taking UX classes.

And in my UX class,

there was one slide about accessibility.

This is what I remember clearly.

And I think that sparks something else in me.

And that led me to wanting to learn more

and going to a meetup.

And from there,

it's just I dove right on in

and got really interested in learning,

in doing incorporating it into my UX job.

I created guidelines at one job

and nobody asks for them.

I created accessibility guidelines

because I was so interested in it.

I really wanted people to apply it to their work.

And then I started teaching UX in 2015 at general assembly.

And I incorporated

accessibility into my courses

by having my students do a lot of assumptions

around what in particular blind folks might do

when they're in the kitchen.

And I would have my students come up with a concept,

you know, sketch it out.

And I say, "You know,

you should be able to describe this."

And then I actually brought in

folks who were blind to critique.

And that really was informative for my students to say,

"Oh, you know,

this is user experience, right?

You have to talk to people.

You can't just assume

because all of their ideas

were busted, right?

Like they realized, you know,

we can't really make stuff

if we don't involve

and talk to the people who this applies to.

- Well, you know, just going back a little bit,

you know, before the teaching to that work

that you were doing in UX for organizations,

I know, you know, as a lot of us,

you know, that's a logical stuff for a lot of us,

but sometimes, you know, we'll do things,

but then we run into obstacles at an organization

that maybe isn't ready to put in the resources.

Some of the Fortunate few

find that they're, you know, immediately supported.

What was that experience like for you?

You're not necessarily, you know,

specifics about an organization,

but I mean what was your experience there?

- I mean, I've had both

where people are very supportive

and where people just don't care.

So when, you know, I was getting support

and the higher ups were like,

"Yeah, let's do all of the things."

It just made my life easier.

Made my job easier.

It was easier for communication

between the developers and our teams.

And when we didn't,

you know, have support,

it was a challenge.

It was a huge challenge to kind of fight for what's right,

but then have to back down.

- And in those situations,

what type of strategies did you use?

Was it like, you know, return on investment metrics

about maybe, you know, audience that was new,

or was it kind of more the stick versus the carrot

related to legal or what.

You know, what were some of the ways

that you were able to build support for that

or build a case for your work?

- The ways that I built a case

was search engine optimization

and partnering with the marketing teams

in the search engine folks.

That was one that was very successful.

Another way, yeah, is to dangle that carrot

about the legal reasons why,

you know, we should be accessible.

And then I think the biggest and best strategy

is to just ask questions,

and to ask questions

that are promoting accessibility

but without saying the words.

Because what I found in my previous work experience

is when I said accessibility,

automatically people would shut down.

Say that's too hard, right?

So then it was asking the questions.

You know, "Are we sure about these colors?"

"Are we sure we wanna do this thing, right?"

"Have we thought about this, right?"

So just asking questions

related to what we were working on

and seeing what people would answer.

'Cause then I could say,

"Oh, we could maybe try this."

Or, you know.

So that was my way around.

I think asking questions

is the best thing anyone can do

to get people to think,

I like to say, you know, as an educator,

I cannot teach anybody anything.

I can only hope that the questions that I ask

provoke people to think.

- Well, it sounds like a great approach.

And, you know, you mentioned the SEO,

which is something that,

you know, that I've delved into

related to accessibility.

But I think a lot of people,

even in the accessibility area

may not, you know,

understand the how's.

How the two pieces can really work together

with accessibility components

adding signals to search engine optimization.

And was that something

that you just like identified individually

or was there GF some colleagues in marketing

where you explored this area?

- Oh, yeah, so in one particular instance,

I work directly

with the search engine optimization person,

like the person in the company.

And I was like.

And he was like,

"I know that accessibility helps SEO.

I don't know how it does it exactly,

but I know it works."

And so I said, "Okay, great."

You know, he was so happy

to have someone,

you know, support him and he supported me.

And then we got marketing involved

and marketing's like, "Yeah.

We need to be at the top of Google.

So how can we do this?"

- Well, now that you're involved

in the work at NYU

and in teaching regularly,

how does that kind of manifest itself

with your students?

Are they interested specifically in that topic

or they maybe are just

exploring it or a mix

or kinda how is that set up where you're at?

- Yeah, so I teach user experience design primarily,

and I incorporate accessibility from day one.

Like we started talking about it from the beginning.

And therefore, the students work on,

my students will work on

individual projects and team projects.

And their team projects are always with a real-life client.

Both our team and individual projects

have accessibility components in them

from the beginning,

from the research phase,

from the planning phase.

And just this past semester,

and even this summer,

my students are working on a project

that is through Arista Labs,

and Arista Labs received a grant from NASA

to make the eclipse

that are upcoming in the next couple years

accessible in particular to the blind

and low vision community through sound.

And so this particular project

involves a lot of data and sound.

And so my students last semester did a lot of research

in regards to best practice.

They did user interviews.

They did, you know,

looking at scholarly articles.

And this summer,

my grad research assistant and I

are working on the designs.

And to do that, we have been working

with subject matter experts,

as well as people getting input from folks

in the blind and low vision community.

So we are...

And my teaching is also practice

because we're always working

with real-life clients every semester.

- Well, one of the things that I read recently

was the article that I saw on LinkedIn,

which was where you're talking about

developing accessibility guidelines for extended reality.

And that was an area.

I mean, there's so many areas of accessibility.

It's hard to keep up with everything.

But it was one that I hadn't really been familiar with,

thought about at all,

but I found the article,

you know, really illuminating.

Maybe talk a little bit about that technology

and your work specifically in that area.

- Sure, you know, in my past life,

I had a consulting business.

And I worked in a coworking space

with a group that was working on augmented reality.

And they were like, "We need UX help.

And I was like, "What is this stuff you're working on?

It seems cool."

And so I ended up doing some usability testing

for this augmented reality company.

And that kinda got me

into what they call XR.

Some people, it's extended reality.

So extended reality XR is an umbrella term

for virtual reality,

augmented reality, mixed reality,

and any sort of immersive technology

or anything that's using spatial computing.

AI could fall in that umbrella, too.

And so I started thinking about,

and this came from last summer,

what I was talking to Gus,

my co-teacher for the assistive technology class,

and I was talking to him about Pokemon Go.

And he said,

"I wish I could play Pokemon Go."

And then I thought to myself,

"Well, okay, Gus is blind,

and he can't play Pokemon Go because it's not accessible.

Why isn't it and why isn't augmented reality accessible?"

And so last summer,

my students worked with Gus

and a company called Rose Digital

to create concepts around accessible augmented reality.

So they didn't build anything,

but they did create concepts.

And that had me thinking about accessibility overall

in the XR space and where does it start?

You know, "Where do you start?"

And he said, "Well, people start with the tools."

And are these tools accessible

not just from a standpoint disability,

but accessible from a cost perspective?

And so my grad assistant,

Saki Asakawa, and I

went through as many tools

as we could find the popular tools.

And we looked at about 60 tools,

specifically looking at the price,

looking at the hardware needed,

software needed to run these programs,

and if there was any accessibility associated with them.

And from there,

we ended up writing this article

and we created a subway map,

which this upcoming semester

I hope I can make in a tactile version,

but we created a subway map

and the subway map lists out

what's free, what costs money,

what has accessibility related.

And each subway line has a purpose.

So there's, you know,

for like drawing or things of that nature.

So that's kind of the long story of how I got into that.

And in addition to that, I'm part of XR Access,

which was started by Cornell Tech,

and it's really,

it's a large group working to make sure

that accessibility is getting built into,

you know, this emerging technology

that a lot more people are using.

And I'm also doing a research with design patterns

with an organization called Vail

and it's researchers from all over the world

examining design patterns with different tiles.

And then I'm working on a second book,

which is I'm co-authoring with Doug North Cook.

And it's about the human side of spatial computing

where we will talk about accessibility in there.

So yeah, that's in a nutshell

how I got into the XR Suisse

and what I'm doing now.

- Well, yeah, that's a great story to hear about that.

And it's obviously gonna be something

that we're going to be learning about

and working with more and more moving into the future.

You briefly mentioned, you know, a new book

and some things that you're working on.

Maybe talk a little bit about, you know,

kinda what future plans

or things that you're currently really passionate about,

anything you can share about your latest projects.

- Yeah, sure.

So the NASA soundscapes project

is an ongoing project.

It's a five-year project

and my students will be every semester

working on something different with the project.

And my research

around inclusive and accessible XR,

it continues I'm hoping in the coming time.

Actually, because of the pandemic,

I felt a little thrown off with, "Where do I go?"

"What do I do if I'm not able to be with people?"

So what I'm working on now

or what I've been working on over the summer

is looking at inclusiveness and accessibility

for different titles,

specifically with one type of headset.

So it's my hope to expand that,

to try other headsets and see how that goes.

And in addition,

continue working and researching for my book

and getting real understanding

of the layout of the space

and really the human side of things

and how we can make these experiences

overall more accessible,

not just from a disability perspective,

but from a true inclusive perspective.

- Well, yeah, obviously keep yourself really busy.

And I wanna thank you for taking time

out of your busy schedule to chat with me

and good luck with your book.

And hopefully we can meet some time in the physical world,

but if not, it's really great chatting with you.