Episode 5 - Arianne Donoghue

Arianne Donoghue steps into the podcast studio to chat to Mike Hartley in this episode of 365 a11y the podcast.

Arianne was a successful marketing expert who decided to make the switch to IT with Code First Girls. Now a successful developer, Arianne offers her insights into Accessibility, Technology, and the Role + Future of AI.

Transcript

Mike Hartley (00:00)
Hello everybody and welcome to yet another 365 ally the podcast episode. My name is Mike Hartley and Today I am really happy to welcome the wonderful the amazing the awesome Arianne Donaghue to the podcast welcome Arianne

Arianne (00:17)
Hello.

Hello, thank you very much for the invitation.

Mike Hartley (00:20)
I mean, this is a little strange because it's kind of like a collision of worlds because obviously we work at the same place. We've kind of worked together a bit. And now here we are recording podcast as well. mean, cool.

Arianne (00:32)
It feels a bit strange out of hours, like somehow

illicit in some way, but I don't know quite how.

Mike Hartley (00:37)
It definitely feels strange, yeah, but tell us a bit about yourself. Tell us who you are, all about you.

Arianne (00:46)
All about me, goodness, well, how long have we got? Because I've had quite a journey. So as you've mentioned, you and I work together, which is how we know each other at Capgemini. And my role at Capgemini is my first role in tech. So I've been there for about two and a half years now. But before that, I had a 17 year career in digital marketing and career switched after kind of having enough of that and having done a little bit of everything that I could have wanted to do in that industry and always having had this.

hankering to get into tech, but having never really been able to make it work. And so I signed up to do some free coding courses in the evening and then managed to get onto a scheme with CodeFast Girls sponsored by Capgemini, where they offered me a place in a junior role after completing a 14 week bootcamp and then a four week additional cloud course afterwards. So it was quite the roller coaster and it feels like it's been.

10, 12 years in the making, actually getting to the point of working in the industry as a software engineer now, day to day, which is what I do with primarily power platform stuff like yourself. But yeah, very glad to be here. It's such a different kind of way of looking at the world now, very different focus, very different work-life balance, and much happier for having made the change. So yeah, it's been a roller coaster, but a good one.

Mike Hartley (02:01)
cool, no, no, it's been really good. I mean, definitely one of the stars to have come out of Code First Girls, that's for sure. So no, it's absolutely epic and really cool to have you here.

First up really, I mean, in the world of Arianne, what does accessibility mean to you?

Arianne (02:21)
There's no easy answer to this because having had my past career and having spent a lot of the two careers that I've had being involved in a lot of DE &I initiatives, it has multiple meanings to me. The main meaning that it has, if I think about it from that perspective, I don't know if you're familiar with, there's a little cartoon that you can find online that has the meaning of equality versus equity, and it's two little pictures side by side.

And on the left-hand side, you've got three people looking over at a baseball game. And you've got one person who's say six foot tall, one who's say five foot tall, and one who's, you know, four foot tall, and they're in front of a fence. And equality is everybody has a box that they can stand on. And the tall person can see just fine. The middle-sized person can see. Short person can't see. Even with the aid of the box, they're still not tall enough to see over the fence. But then...

Equity is about taking those three boxes and it's distributing them amongst the three people so that everyone can have the same experience of watching the game. Tall person doesn't need the box. Medium sized person has one box and the small person takes two boxes. And suddenly everybody can see over the fence and everyone can see and participate. And that for me in some ways is a really good explanation of what accessibility is. It's removing those barriers from people so that those who

want to participate or play a part in something can without other arbitrary things that they can't control limiting them, whether that be health, whether it be finances, whether it be location or circumstance, it can be any of those things. But then also coming at it from my past career working in digital marketing, mainly with the paid search side, which also feeds into the SEO side, there's that whole argument of what does it also look like from a marketing and a web perspective?

with Google's big push to things like accessibility and mobile first and how all that feeds into part of the algorithm, I guess it ties into that whole notion of wherever someone is, can they have an equivalent experience to someone else regardless of device, regardless of location? So it's maybe the same principle in a way, but I come at it very much from a sense of removing those barriers so that anyone who could be capable of doing something.

without other things getting in the way. Anyone can become a doctor if they've got the skill and desire to do so, regardless of money, can they afford it, where they live, access to learning, and it's removing those kinds of barriers so that everyone can have the opportunities that they deserve.

Mike Hartley (04:50)
Yeah, no, no, that's cool. Yeah, I have to say I like that cartoon, cartoon image because yeah, no, it explains it all just so clearly and in an easy way for people to understand what the difference is. So no, no, that's really cool. And I guess really, I mean, in your daily life, what

Arianne (05:08)
Exactly.

Mike Hartley (05:15)
What's accessibility look like in your day to day?

Arianne (05:19)
It's mix of things for me. So in my late twenties, so over a decade ago now, I found out I was neurodiverse. And as I've increasingly tried to embrace that part of myself, I've become more aware of accommodations that I might need or sensitivities that I might have. Things that I thought were previously maybe symptoms of burnout or depression are evidently just, you know, neurodiverse overload.

⁓ that can often happen in terms of noise or people or space or proximity or, you know, just sheer exhaustion and overload. And so that's something that I've become very aware of from an accessibility point of view and accommodations that are sometimes required. But then I also have quite severe arthritis in both hips. So I'm the very epitome of an invisible disability. I'm not so bad at the moment that I need crutches or anything like that, but I appear to be relatively young, relatively healthy.

but then it's things like I will use accessible bathrooms, I will take those priority seats on a train or a bus. And it's those issues as well. So for me often that's how a lot of it presents. And the third strand is my partner, we have to be very careful because of his health since COVID. We managed to dodge it until last year and it finally caught us after five years, but we still mask everywhere. And there's a lot of things that aren't.

Mike Hartley (06:32)
Go.

Arianne (06:36)
available to us or that aren't open for us as people who are wanting to be still safe and be careful for health reasons. while the reality is that for many people COVID is long in the rear view mirror, there's still many people who are living in functional isolation six years on. And we're not quite that isolated. We do go out sometimes, but we have to choose very carefully what we do, what the risk level is, and just assess very carefully whether doing something.

is worth the risk that it poses. So there's a definite accessibility angle there as well that I think many people don't think twice about anymore, but it is a very present reality still for an awful lot of people.

Mike Hartley (07:15)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So constant permanent battle and or balancing out for you. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so ⁓ no, that's that's really interesting. And

Arianne (07:20)
Yeah, exactly.

Mike Hartley (07:29)
Obviously, the world we know nowadays, we're all about the whole AI, AI co-pilots. I think there's more co-pilots than actual pilots are nowadays. ⁓ The way that Microsoft are going with everything has to have a co-pilot and let alone all the other AI we've got out there. But what...

Arianne (07:42)
Mm.

and good

Mike Hartley (07:54)
What have you seen or experienced from an AI perspective and accessibility? Good, bad, ugly, positive, negative? ⁓

Arianne (08:06)
It's something that I

have really mixed feelings on. So I would not consider myself a Luddite by any means. But one of the reasons I left advertising is having worked alongside Google, Meta and others for over a decade and a half. I've seen a lot of things. I know what happens to your data. I know how this information is used. I myself have done things.

in the early days of those platforms that might be considered slightly shady or a little bit unethical because it was just what you did and the data was there. And we've seen the consequences with various elections and Brexit as to how some of that data can be used and weaponized. And it gives me a very cautious eye about how a lot of this is used because the phrase is always, if you aren't paying for a tool, you are the product, right? So, you know, we already know that everything that you enter into many of these tools is

uploaded and stored and cataloged and used to kind of feed the beast. And it leads me, it leaves me with a lot of dual thinking about this, because on the one hand, it could have immense power for good. know, Sam Altman talked years ago about how we can use it to solve things like global warming and world hunger. And we're not, they're now going to be using it to make porn and people using grok to take clothes off women digitally. And you know, we're not necessarily using it for

Mike Hartley (09:23)
Yeah, yeah.

Arianne (09:25)
a lot of great and valued purposes. And you've also got the environmental and sustainability aspects of it, you know, how it's impacting water supplies and, you know, ⁓ living standards for people who live near these data centers. So I have a lot of conflicting thoughts on it, but it also, when used correctly, as with any tool, has some huge potential for good. I think where we have to be careful is, and you see this a lot with

marketing and other areas of technology, if you can pay for something, you can have privacy. If you can pay for an iPhone, you have a device that is maybe inherently more respectful of your data than a Google-driven Android device. If you pay to use some of these platforms, you can have your data protected and not uploaded to the cloud, or you can access the better tools and platforms. So there's a cost element to really being able to get the most out of it.

Now I don't use any of the online platforms. I've been experimenting with running models locally at home. I bought a new machine at the end of last year that has 128 gigabytes of RAM. Great investment before the prices went up. Goodness knows what that would cost me now. But I can then do that and I can run that locally and privately and have it ingest my own data and use it for the purposes that I want, such as a replacement for my home assistant. I won't say her name or she'll spark to life.

Mike Hartley (10:18)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Arianne (10:38)
⁓ but that comes with a cost limitation as well. You have to have the hardware to be able to do that or the know how to be able to do that. So I think using it for genuinely beneficial purposes comes with accessibility issues, either in terms of cost for people or supply or knowledge. Anyone can go on chat GPT and have a Studio Ghibli inspired image of themselves made, which, you know,

has a ton of ethical issues in terms of theft and data center usage. But how can you set that up at home on your own hardware? It's not easy. It's not straightforward. And I think that's where we're going to start to see a little bit of a digital skills divide. It will be the new divide. First, it was people who knew how to use the internet or knew how to use phones or iPads or other devices. And I think there's a real danger of a lot of people being left behind and therefore being potentially abused, I guess, for their data.

by lack of a better word for companies because they are unwilling or unable to pay for services or to set things up in a way that gives them greater protection. So I think there's huge potential around it, but as always the novelty and the misuse aspects worry me. And I think it's gonna take a while before we see this be properly democratized in the way that it could be truly used for good. Cause you've got issues all around.

data training sets and who trains these models and the bias inherently that goes into those. I think there's still a lot to be worked through ethically. Some companies do a better job with that than others, naming their names.

Mike Hartley (12:03)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah, no, no, I get you. I get you completely on that one. Yeah, so I mean, when we look at when we take a look, sort of moving ahead into sort of, I would say the future, but I mean, the future could be as little as six months or a year away. I mean, how how do you think AI is going to

Arianne (12:07)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hartley (12:31)
affect the future of accessibility. So for people with neurodiversity or physical disability or mental health or all of those wonderful things that we all know and love so much.

Arianne (12:44)
think there could be multiple aspects, because as you've said, they're kind of putting it into everything, right? AI and co-pilots in everything. So in theory, that should make some things more accessible. You know, the fact that I can easily ask co-pilot to make me a learning plan for something that I want to learn in my own time. And that can help me kind of find the sources that I need and put together a plan and practice and pace myself.

That can be a lot easier than trying to scour the internet to find those resources myself to create a personal curriculum. I think that there can be a huge advantage to that. But what if it misses some really useful resources that could be key in enhancing my learning experience? My main worry is from an accessibility point of view, because it removes some of that friction and it almost makes things too easy. There was that very interesting study.

I think may have come out of Stanford and I appreciate it was only small scale, but it looked at the impact on kind of learning and cognition for people who relied heavily on tools like ChatGPT versus those who didn't use them. And the impact on people's ability to think and reason and create from scratch declined significantly with what you might call an overreliance on tools like this. So my worry is it could wind up very negatively impacting people looking for

support with their needs or people looking for that next dopamine hit, know, those with ADHD, you're very much primed to get that quick hit, get that quick fix, find that information and removing that friction while gratifying and simple in the moment could down the road potentially lead to challenges. But I think if you use wisely, it can only be a good thing for accessibility because it improves access to knowledge.

It empowers people to find things out on their own, to learn things unaccompanied that they could maybe never have learned on their own before. And as it kind of progresses into more use of a lot of the visual generation tools, the ability to unlock the ability to see things and for people to have experiences and to do things online that they may never have been able to do or could not have envisaged, I think becomes really interesting, particularly when people have had these conversations years ago about, you know, travel, but using VR.

Mike Hartley (14:52)
Mm.

Arianne (14:52)
that you apply some of those ideas to AI and accessibility instead. While we don't want to all become shut-ins and never have to leave the house, it is quite interesting thinking of all the stuff that this generational tech can unlock for us potentially in the things that can help us imagine. But I don't want us to fall into a trap of, as a post I often see doing the realms on social media that says, I want AI to do my dishes and my laundry so that I can paint pictures and I can create music and I can imagine.

but I don't want it to do the imagining for me so that I can do my dishes and my laundry and all that stuff. So again, it's wise use, yeah, my personal jury is out a little bit until we see what way some of that heads. Immense power, good, but it always with a dark side, right?

Mike Hartley (15:38)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, I completely get it. It's I mean, it it's so interesting. I just the other month sort of seeing all the robotics and what have you at CES and they were showing them trying to fold clothes and it was like this robot took 10 minutes to fold a t shirt and it didn't do a great job and and

Yeah, you're of you're watching some some of them trying to

load the dishwasher or what have you and things are clattering to the floor and you're just like yeah but they're the jobs I want you to do I mean ⁓

Arianne (16:17)
I know. How do you think

feel about things like virtual pets? Because they keep showing. I remember at CS, I was seeing a lot of like digital dogs this year, they've done a new kind of brand of digital pet that people can have and, you know, digital, almost people in homes to help do basic care functions for those who might need it. I mean, where do you stand on things like that, like digital pets and that kind of support?

Mike Hartley (16:32)
Mm.

Digital pets I have no issue with. I think they can be really good. mean, a lot of people have allergies to things like fur and feather, so they can't have pets necessarily. Or they don't have the attention to be able to constantly keep looking after them. mean,

Again, you kind of go to the ADHD hyper focus on something for a while and then squirrel. And all of a sudden you're onto something else. And I mean, there's the, there's the whole thing. A dog is for life, not just for Christmas, but if you're a person living on your own and you do have ADHD or something like that, maintaining that constant routine with.

Arianne (17:06)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hartley (17:28)
with a pet can be challenging.

Arianne (17:31)
Yeah,

if you struggle to keep a plant alive, right, but you want a pet, what do you do?

Mike Hartley (17:35)
Exactly. And then there's the whole cost of owning a pet, the vet bills, the food and everything else. if it's somebody who's living off disability payments and not able to work, then they don't have enough money to afford a pet necessarily, unless it's sort of a service animal. But again,

we know that service animals, they're in short supply. There's more demand than there is supply because of the training they need. So digital pets open a lot of doors for people that I can see being beneficial. The flip side is obviously increased screen time or that kind of thing. And you've got to be careful with that.

Arianne (18:04)
Anymore.

Mike Hartley (18:21)
Digital care assistance.

⁓ I'm on the fence on those ones. need to see a good example of what one could be to really judge, because at the moment we're seeing very early alpha versions that, I mean, even calling them alpha is probably too early for that. Yeah, so I'm not seeing anything that...

Arianne (18:31)
Yeah.

What do you call pre-alpha, right? What's the word for that? Yeah.

Mike Hartley (18:49)
that convinces me on that sort of thing yet, but I don't want to rule it out because I think for the right person it could be a very good thing. Yeah, and if you've got people who really don't like having strangers come into their home or they really do struggle, but then again, are you creating an isolated

Arianne (18:58)
Have the companionship.

Yeah.

Mike Hartley (19:14)
had a gilded cage for them by not having human interaction. So there's all these ethical topics and challenges that I'd like to think that we're capable of solving, but I worry that the wrong people will be making the decisions on them. And therefore the decisions won't necessarily be the right ones.

Arianne (19:20)
honest.

Mike Hartley (19:40)
Hey, I don't know, we might get surprised. We might get surprised and shocked.

Arianne (19:42)
Yeah, it's a danger when profit

comes into it, think, doesn't it? Profit rather than altruism.

Mike Hartley (19:48)
yeah, yeah, yeah, there's definitely that. It's all about following the money. It's all about the bank balances of the ⁓ 0.01%. ⁓

Arianne (19:57)
Google were all

about don't be evil until they saw that it stood in the way of shareholder value.

Mike Hartley (20:03)
yes. Yes, there is that. There is that one. OK. So I guess really sort of the final question. And this is this is for you to give your wonderful advice, your wonderful personal hot tip for accessibility for all of our listeners out there. What would be your

Arianne (20:05)
Yeah.

Mike Hartley (20:24)
be your one hot tip for accessibility.

Arianne (20:27)
So I have to do some scene setting to give the answer to this. And this is a nice Microsoft tie-in actually back in 2019 when I was still in the midst of my marketing career. I went to a Microsoft event and they talked about how accessibility was going to be the future of modern marketing. And one of the things that I remember we did is we had a workshop where they took us through this model of how a disability can be permanent.

So you may have lost an arm. It may be temporary. So I may have broken my arm and it might be in a cast for a period of time, or I might have a disability that's situational. I might be holding a baby and therefore that arm is out of action for as long as I'm wrangling this child. And the reality is that any of the accommodations or adjustments that you would make for the person who is permanently disabled benefits the person who has broken their arm or is holding the baby for 20 minutes.

So when you're thinking about accessibility, it isn't just those who benefit from it permanently, because that could be you one day, but it's also more likely to be you on a temporary basis or a situational basis. You generally I can walk on my own two legs most of the time. But as I know, when I was post-surgery and suddenly reduced to being around on crutches,

it's really hard to get around an office and carry your stuff when you've got crutches. And I would reduce myself to having a bag that I would put things in around my neck and I'd kind of hobble up the stairs with my crutches. And so it ties into really for me, disability and the need for accessibility. So much of it is in our minds and it's a construct that we have. I saw a very interesting presentation at a conference a couple of years ago that talked about the medical versus social model of disability.

And the medical model focuses very much on, we must fix the problem that this person has. This person cannot walk, we must make it so that they can walk. The social model says, well, they can't walk, let's put ramps everywhere so that everything becomes accessible. This person can't hear, okay. The medical model says, let's fix their hearing impairment. The social model says, let's provide access to...

you know, sign language interpreters or to captions or to other things that make it a non-issue for everybody. Because when you think about stuff like that, how many of us, think particularly the NeuroSpicy, you watch the content on your phone with the sound off but the captions on? I think a lot of us, I can't hear without the subtitles on the television, right? So my two ways work perfectly well as far as I'm aware, but that's an accommodation that helps me get the most out of what I'm doing.

On the flip side, my partner who is neurodiverse but has dyslexia ends up trying to read them and he can't focus on the content, right? So, you what works for one doesn't work for the other. But that's a really long way of saying be kind and be thoughtful. I think that's the biggest tip I can give for accessibility. Ask people when you meet them if there's anything that you can do to make things easier for them.

Mike Hartley (23:04)
Mm.

Arianne (23:20)
Don't make them come out and say, can I have these accommodations? Because that introduces the idea of them being the burden, them who's asking. If you're offering, how can I make your life easier? What can I do? We do this when you join us who join the company. When we ring them before they join, we say, hey, we're going to take you out for lunch on your first day. Do you have any food requirements or access requirements we need to know about? That way they don't have to go, ⁓ sorry, you know, I'm vegetarian or I'm vegan. We've...

put it out there and we've asked straight away, the onus is on us to ask the question. So yeah, I would just say that to people, be mindful, be thoughtful. You never know what situational, temporary or even permanent issues someone may be dealing with. I might be fit and healthy. I am not in reality. Don't make me have to justify myself, right? Don't make people explain why. Just be kind, be thoughtful.

Don't think twice when someone asks you for something because if they've gone to the trouble of saying, can I please have this thing, don't then make them justify it because it will take them a lot to even ask for said thing in the first place. So I think kindness goes a long way and is often underrated by people that I think would do so much for accessibility and for people's feeling comfortable to give and receive accommodation.

Mike Hartley (24:32)
I love that. No, I absolutely love that. No, it's absolutely brilliant. It is a fantastic answer. is an amazing answer. Yeah, I love it. I can't say any more than that because I do. I just love that whole be kind, be thoughtful and just, yeah, don't ask the why, just do it.

Arianne (24:34)
Wasn't a sure answer, I'm sorry.

You

Yeah.

Yeah. And I'd love everyone to go

away and read about that is to read about the medical versus social model of disability. And so much of our attitude to disability and accessibility is based as a society around this medical model, where it is all about the person has the impairment, the person is the problem.

Whereas the societal model is all about, well, access should be better. These barriers should not be in front of people. We should do what we can as a society to make it available for everyone. Because the same accommodations that benefit wheelchairs, benefit push chairs, the benefit, you know, people in all manner of situations when you're carrying a wheelie suitcase and you're trying to go up and down a curb, right? This stuff benefits everyone. So I would really encourage people.

if they took one thing away from this, would be to go and look that up and to potentially challenge your own assumptions about what disability looks like and how we should go about tackling it as a society.

Mike Hartley (25:53)
No, brilliant. So there you go, people. You've got homework. You have got homework to do. You have been set a task and I have made a note and I'll be going away and reading as well because I made a note before I got assigned the homework. So I was being a teacher's pet there. But no, that has has been brilliant. yeah, Arianne, thank you so much for giving up some of your time and ⁓

Arianne (25:55)
Please!

There we go.

Mike Hartley (26:17)
Yeah, having to deal with me outside of work hours as well. I know what a burden that is for anybody. So, no, well done for surviving that and really enjoyed spending time with you. So thank you very much for being part of this. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Arianne (26:20)
It's been a pleasure.

You're very welcome.

It's been good fun and thank you again for the invite.

Mike Hartley (26:35)
Awesome. So folks, that was Arianne. Don't forget your homework, the medical and social models of disability. Take a look at that. And we will catch you next time on the 365 Ally, the podcast. So we'll catch you soon, folks. Thanks a lot and bye.

Arianne (26:54)
Bye.