How Exclusion Shapes Bravery

Can artificial intelligence be racist? Well, it depends. Let’s say you’re an African-American student at a school that uses facial recognition software. The school uses it to access the building and online homework assignments. But the software’s got a problem. Its makers used only light-skinned test subjects to train its algorithms. Your skin is darker, and the software has trouble recognizing you. Sometimes you’re late to class, or can’t get your assignments on time. Your grades suffer. The result is discrimination based solely on skin color.

Inclusive design is a term that leads people to think about an expanding audience, with expanding wants and needs, which, in turn, gives them more to think about as they design products. 

Legally blind since age 18, my father missed out on the first digital revolution. For Dad, the Amazon Echo doesn’t carry information so much as it facilitates independence of connection.

In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.

A revealing look at how tech industry bias and blind spots get baked into digital products―and harm us all.

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated.

How design for disabled people and mainstream design could inspire, provoke, and radically change each other.Eyeglasses have been transformed from medical necessity to fashion accessory. This revolution has come about through embracing the design culture of the fashion industry. Why shouldn't design sensibilities also be applied to hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, and communication aids? In return, disability can provoke radical new directions in mainstream design. 

Building Access investigates twentieth-century strategies for designing the world with disability in mind. 

This is an adapted training course to introduce people to the concepts and terminology used around disability and accessibility in the workplace.

Making work accessible creates a better experience across the board. Use this checklist to help build accessibility into your process no matter your role or stage in a project.

Tools and resources for checking color contrast.

Guidance on how screen readers work.

Universal Design for Web Applications teaches you how to build websites that are more accessible to people with disabilities and explains why doing so is good business. It takes more work up front, but the potential payoff is huge -- especially when mobile users need to access your sites.