Episode 12 - Juliana Smith

Juliana Smith is an amazing Accessibility advocate who has also developed tools and frameworks for BI that made Data accessible.

She joins Mike for this episode of 365 a11y the podcast to share her perspectives and thoughts, and provide some eye-opening insights and ideas.

#a11y #Accessibility #AI #Data #PowerBI

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Transcript

Mike Hartley (00:00)
Hello there everyone. Welcome to another episode of 365 Ally the podcast. I am Mike Hartley, at least I was last time I checked. welcome everybody. And for this episode, I am just overjoyed to welcome Juliana to the podcast.

She's, I'm not going to say anything about Juliana because I want Juliana. Introduce yourself, tell us all about you because you can do a better job than I can.

Juliana S. (00:27)
It's fine. So hello, thanks a lot for having me, Mike. I'm Juliana. I'm based in Manchester, UK, but I'm actually from Brazil. And I am far from home from now over 10 years. I have a very interesting career because I am actually an oceanographer. So I started in data science and ocean research. I got bored and I became a navigator. So I sail around the world as a navigator.

And then I had an injury that unfortunately I ended up with nerve damage in both of my hands. And I settled for a corporate job. So I've been working with Power BI and using interface design for approximately, I don't know, since about 2020. And for the past two years, I have really, really specialized tried to understand WCAG and how I could translate WCAG to my design process.

Mike Hartley (01:16)
no, cool. that's awesome. Well, it's really wonderful to have you on the podcast. Yeah, I'm going to stop myself going down a rabbit hole because I want to hear all the stories, but I won't. I won't. I'll be good because as regular listeners will know, do have a set of questions that I go through and it's not

because I'm lacking imagination. It's because I want to hear different voices and different perspectives on the same kind of topics and subjects and really give that education and information out to people who can hear all the different accessibility voices from people who have neurodiversities or disabilities.

people who are carers, people who are just allies who really feel passionate about all this and people even who implemented in their work but they actually don't have anybody neurodiverse or disabled in their immediate circle kind of thing. it's a really good way of hearing just different perspectives on this.

massive subject called accessibility, which the more I spend time in it, the more I realize, it's a black hole of just you go down it it never ends. There's always more to learn. So it is really cool. the first question, and I love to open with this one because it really is the personal question is

For you, what does accessibility mean for you?

Juliana S. (02:48)
It means enabling, so enabling people to do their job, enabling people to have a life, enabling people to live at their own pace. And I actually had that experience myself working when I got back to work, I said that I have no damage. So I have a multi-disability in both of my hands. I have lost dexterity, mobility, strength, everything that I could do with my hands, I can't necessarily do anymore. And

I didn't know about accessibility, I was not into it and I was struggling without knowing that I could call myself, yes you have a disability because I didn't know the meaning, right? What does it mean? And I used to be terrified of losing my job because I couldn't use the mouse, I couldn't use the mouse. I was not given with the right way to work and I thought, it's part of my job, I have to do it, so if I don't do it I'm gonna be fired.

And once I understood that that's not the case, and I actually got a specialist mouse that I can work. And I was like, oh, that has enabled me to have, be better my job, to feel confident, not to be scared of being fired, to, know, oh, I'm an imposter. I can't actually align my design because I can't have any fine adjustments. So it is about being enabled to do what you have to do, whether your job, your passions, or just, you know, just live your life.

Mike Hartley (04:06)
Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah, I have various accommodations I have to live with. I have nerve damage in my neck, in my spinal cord, so it radiates through. I use a vertical mouse and I use a natural keyboard as well.

Juliana S. (04:23)
have used them else yet.

Mike Hartley (04:28)
which people always think is odd but if I have to use a regular keyboard for too long or a regular mouse for too long I can do it for a little while but if I do it too long it radiates up it causes a lot of pain and I then can't work so

Juliana S. (04:39)
Yeah. You have to.

of the life

you end up having chronic pain and it's so hard to explain to someone how you I have pain I feel pain all the time right and I had to learn how to manage pain how to live in pain and I think it's it's very difficult to understand that when you don't you don't you don't go through it so I also have here all my pads in my workstation set up in a way that I can tolerate my pain right and then when people come to the office and they are like

You don't know what it means for me to go to a completely different workstation that's not set up the way that I won't sleep at night because I'm going to be in agony because at night it feels like the pain is the worst time for me to manage. Pain. It is at night. It's lonely so it already messes how you feel and then you can't speak to anyone. I often just wake up crying because I feel lonely and I feel I don't want to wake up my husband. I don't want to wake up my son and it hurts.

It hurts and it's no pain. Normal painkillers don't do anything. They don't.

Mike Hartley (05:47)
No, no, no, and

it's also one of those where, because it's a hidden disability, people look at you, you don't look disabled, you don't look as though there's anything wrong with you and it's like, but there is, I live with this chronic pain and yeah, I get a prescription and we joke that I...

I empty out the pharmacy with my prescription and people said, well, well, just come off the drugs, come off the medications. I'm like, if I did that, I would be curled up in a ball in the corner, crying and screaming simultaneously because I would be in so much pain. so yeah, it's and the whole office thing, hot desking.

I get the idea, but it's the worst thing possible because kind of eight, 10 years ago, I worked in a place. had my desk. It had my keyboard, my mouse, the monitor set up how I wanted them. If anybody ever touched that set up, I would know and there'd be trouble, but I always knew that I could go.

Juliana S. (06:30)
Yes.

it.

Mike Hartley (06:53)
Nowadays, I go into an office and it's like, I can't guarantee what equipment and I can't carry a keyboard and a mouse and everything else with me because I can't physically carry that much weight.

Juliana S. (07:03)
Move to space.

I want to start having to commit to carrying two laptops and I was like I can't carry this I start bringing a suitcase to my client's office and then no no you need to bring something more suitable so like are you gonna give me something else so only after that really in my little suitcase they gave me a backpack on the wheels so but I just I decided I think I hit for too long I hit too long and

Mike Hartley (07:21)
Hehehehehe

Yeah.

Juliana S. (07:29)
and it's not right, I don't feel like I have to hide it anymore. So I started a new job and I was like, you have such a fancy mouth, I am disabled. That's why I have this mouth that looks fancy so I can do my job. Right?

Mike Hartley (07:42)
Yeah,

yeah. it sometimes it's those it's just those little things that make the massive difference to to just our daily lives and and working and living with it. It took me a long time to actually be able to say I was disabled and I had disability because it was like

I feel an imposter in that world and it's like, but I can't do these things and I can't do this and if I do this then I'm going to be in serious pain. That's disability and I have the sunflower lanyard for the hidden disabilities.

Juliana S. (08:22)
I used

to wear it until my office they don't allow you to wear it. And I went through a really embarrassing situation because I also have a hearing loss. And English is not my first language so I really struggle with names. I need to read to know what the sound is so I struggle to identify the sounds. And I tried to say that in a meeting, I said, sorry, I can't hear very well, I have a hearing loss. And I had a colleague that she couldn't stop laughing. She was laughing really loud. She couldn't...

Mike Hartley (08:27)
Really?

Juliana S. (08:49)
Everybody was quiet and I was just like, what's wrong about having a disability? When I said that, she laughed even harder, right? And then she looked at me, you're joking. I said like, why someone would joke saying that it has a disability? Why you don't trust when someone says that I have a disability? Respect that. Why would you laugh at someone who says I have hearing loss, right? Why?

Mike Hartley (09:10)
Yeah. Yeah, it's.

Juliana S. (09:11)
And then

I have apologies, I was like, okay, but the way that you make me feel, it's not going to change. If I had my lanyard, maybe she would take me serious. yeah, she's got this lanyard, she's got something. And at the same time, I felt like maybe I shouldn't use the lanyard because people look at me and I don't look disabled, right? So I feel so conscious about saying that I am.

Mike Hartley (09:18)
Yeah.

Juliana S. (09:35)
because I know that there are people that you look at, I just feel like I need to shut up, right? Because these people, they live with a much more severe condition and they thrive or they are on their way. They do so much work. I went to an award ceremony and two winners, were like, the work that they did, I was just like, I actually was in one of the categories, I just like, I wouldn't vote for myself. I wouldn't, right? So I...

We have things in our mind, but at the same time it's good to normalize, right? Disability looks different and you don't have to prove it. You shouldn't have to prove it. You shouldn't have to wait someone to stop laughing at you to take you seriously.

Mike Hartley (10:14)
Yeah, and you shouldn't have to justify it either. yeah, yeah, it's really sad when those things happen. It's really sad and you kind of think we've come on a long way, but we've still got a long way to go.

Juliana S. (10:29)
lot yeah we are far from where we should be.

Mike Hartley (10:32)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. It's, it's, it's sad. It is sad at times. So yeah.

So we've naturally talked about accessibility in daily life there. So that's awesome. That's great.

We both work in technology world. We both work IT and different aspects of the Microsoft stack. I'm sort of core power platform, power apps, verse, all that. Your power BI and data, which data is a world that I have been in as well.

We all know that AI has exploded onto the scene in the last sort of five years or so, and you can't open up a website nowadays. It doesn't matter what kind of website. You can't open up a website without seeing some mention of AI somewhere. So from your perspective, what would you...

What would you say the impact of AI has been on your world, either technologically, from an accessibility perspective, positive and or negative, because everybody has different experiences?

Juliana S. (11:43)
Yes, I think in terms of Power BI, I don't think much has been done. There is a lot of people trying to, oh, we're going to use AI, all the fancy, all the pretty things, but nothing is done in terms of accessibility within Power BI. So I look, for example, to Microsoft, to PowerPoint, right? You have the accessibility checks, you run, it not be perfect, but I think it is really good even for you to raise some awareness that there are a few things you have to worry about. And unfortunately,

Power BI itself doesn't have that. If you're Power BI desktop, it's not very easy to understand that you have to worry about that. Microsoft has got the documentation, which is really good on accessibility, Power BI, the accessibility features. It's not fancy, right? So I tried to speak in conference about accessibility and I find it quite difficult, especially when I start talking about WCAG. Okay, how can we learn from WCAG and do it in our work?

I know that copilot is got really good features, for accessibility. I don't know. I have never tried to integrate that with power BI necessarily. so I think there is a lot of potential in terms of AI. What actually we should perhaps spend effort into using AI to help we can make people's life, better. So it's something like I have a blog, a WordPress, and I wanted to add a plugin.

for accessibility and it was paid. It was paid and I tried to use the free version and it was worse than not having it. And I was just like, unless I want to pay from my pocket because I'm not selling anything, and then I may decide, okay, I'm not gonna pay for it, but it's not gonna be on me. It's gonna be on people who may lose on those features. But WordPress also offers AI now when I'm creating content.

It gives me AI is that to help me with color contrast, alternative text. So that kind of thing is really good when it's built in the tool that you use. And I really like to see something like that built in Power BI. It would be great if we could have something like that. So I think there is a lot of potential more in terms of the tool that I work with, but I know Copilot does a really good job on that. I don't know.

if it is the paid version or if they're one that comes naturally with 365. But if we could just move a little bit to that to power BI would be great. It would make people's life easier because I have a lot of people asking that and I said, no, unfortunately we have to do all these checks separately. Alternative tax, for example, it is so difficult, AI could help to make it more dynamic.

When I create alternative text, it's so much text. It's so because you have to structure your calculations. have to follow a specific, you know, they have to be good enough for the language to understand and for you to convert into a text string and to read out loud and make sense out of it. So wouldn't be perfect if AI built in Power BI would help us to create alternative text.

Mike Hartley (14:37)
Yeah, and it's an odd one that because you look at all the effort that Microsoft put into shouting about Copilot in Excel and the way that it can analyze all your data. You can ask questions about your data and create charts using Copilot and everything else. And then you look at PowerPoint where you can ask it to generate slides.

As you say, you've got accessibility checker in there, which has got so much better over the years and is a fantastic tool. And you think out of all the tools that we've got, you would think that something like Power BI where it's presenting information and data and sometimes lots of it, sometimes stuff that's really complex or

quite overwhelming. You would think that would be a natural candidate for having an accessibility check, for having co-pilot there to help you go, okay, yeah, you need to think about the colors of the chart. One company I worked at, this was, it was just before I got into doing accessibility.

that's going back about 10 years or so, and they came out with the insistence that all the weekly project reports, they had to present them with red, amber, green dots, but you weren't allowed to put any text.

It just had to be the dots because it was the style guidelines. Well, one of the project managers was red, green colourblind.

How could he create these reports? How could he read these reports? He couldn't. it ended up we had to really argue it from a disability discrimination perspective before they went, OK, well, yeah, we can add text in there. And I know that's 10 years ago. And I'll be honest, in those 10 years, a lot of things have moved on, but there's still a lot that hasn't.

Juliana S. (16:36)
Right.

I think red on my brain is the easiest to fix, right. In terms of accessibility is the easiest because we don't even need the tool to pass red and green. You know, that's going to cause issues, right. Um, but it's the hardest and, and I started now when I, I create like risk matrix, I don't use the right rag colors and I'll use completely different colors. And that is in my portfolio. So when someone asks me to see my portfolio,

my portfolio and my risk matrix doesn't have rag colors. I start doing that. whenever I'm working with, you know, well, let's do conditional formatting, red for bad, green for good, I use orange and blue. Doing that naturally now, and people are not asking me, and what I do, I just say what the color means. Because even if you don't see blue as blue, if you know that there are different colors of what each one of them mean, that's it.

And it's such minor change. Like how does it impact people, you know, if you don't rely on accessibility, you still can see the colors, right? Why is it so difficult to move away from that? And everybody knows about colorblindness, but nobody thinks that when you create your conditional format, Excel, Power BI, whatever, you use red, ump, and green. It's like, it's so, and it happened to me, right? I knew about colorblindness. I worked when I was a navigator.

Uh, we use a software that it was to see the data being acquired and it was red, um, but I'm green. I went to the office to do a course in Edinburgh on the, the software vendor. And they said, because it's so we have a colleague who is colorblind. How about, they said, oh no, no, no, no, we have the same software with the option to use blue and orange. Because there is, we have another company who actually asked to have the diesel. And I was like, why the company that I worked for has not.

required that as well. So I knew about it. I knew that would cause issues. And I went to reporting, right, and I create all my rag, all my red, all my green. And I had a stakeholder for six months who would message me every week, can you give an update? And I thought, guy needs to go back to school. How difficult it is. And then after six months, I was really busy. was like, what's wrong? And you access the file, can you open it? Yeah, what is the problem?

I'm so sorry, Juliana, I am colorblind. And that I think was the worst day in my career because I judged that guy. I thought he was just being, you know, he's just trying to make my life fail. In any moment, it came through my mind that maybe he can all see this story that I'm trying to tell and I felt terrible. And that I had that with me for the past years and...

That's when I said I have to do something about it and I don't want people to feel how I felt and I don't want people who have a disability and they don't want to say and they cannot do the work and I remember from my mouth how much it changed my life. So it is and that's why I started doing all these sessions. I started with color blindness, color contrast because in data visualization, it's so important and it's not hard to fix. It's just not hard.

Mike Hartley (19:34)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah, it is just one of those things. So yeah, so that's where we are currently.

considering how fast the world is moving at the moment, if you were to look even just six months a year into the future with AI, or even longer term, even sort of going three, five years out, what would you?

imagine the world of accessibility would look like or what would you hope it would look like? What would be sort of Juliana's perfect world of accessibility with an AI overlord?

Juliana S. (20:12)
think it goes beyond AI, because for example, my son, he's neurodivergent and he comes back from school with homework and I look at the homework, the font size, everything come together, how does like, he's seven, right? He struggles and they bring this struggle to read. So I think the schools, they have to understand that as well. So it goes beyond that because it's a printer, it's a paper, it's not on that tablet or anything.

So I think it has to go beyond AI, has to go beyond digital environment. think people need to understand what it means to live in a world that's not designed for them. If you experience that, I think that's when you're start thinking, wow, yeah, that's actually hard. It's not as easy, right? And if you go through that, if you have empathy, the human being have empathy,

how people live their lives differently because of abilities, circumstances, right? I think we didn't have to worry about what do we do with AI? We would naturally use AI. You see people using AI to generate like porn, generate things that are so irrelevant and we don't need that. If you have empathy, can we just use for something to make people's life better, right? Should we all worry about biased data? Let's not forget that.

how you build your models. Are we considering that when we're building our models as well? From a factor of world would be an empathy being used in technology and also just in our daily lives.

Mike Hartley (21:31)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I must admit, I I think, I think when I look at the possibilities with AI, I look at things like smart glasses. Smart glasses for me, I think, have the potential to be a life changing piece of technology because

People who are dyslexic or colourblind or have poor vision full stop, whether it's restricted or whether it's completely blind. The idea of people being able to just wear spectacles that, let's be honest, nobody gives you a second look when you're wearing glasses.

they could have an earpiece, an earbud in, that those glasses help identify that they could be looking at that book and the glasses, smart display, highlighting the text and using colour filters and even reading it out if that's what's needed.

But again, people used early smart glasses for the wrong things.

Juliana S. (22:42)
They

And then you lose

the If you lose the trust, people who actually would benefit from it may not even be able to even try.

Mike Hartley (22:53)
Yeah, yeah. I've seen some brilliant examples of people with disabilities using smart glasses and it's... I saw one that was a demonstration that was run by Meta of all people and of course we don't trust Meta particularly because they've not necessarily been the most...

honest of companies, let's say. But then none of the big tech, you can say that about all of them, but they had those glasses and it's just like watching this person using them and seeing the look on their face as they were getting this information fed to them. And it was like they were able, they'd got vision difficulties and

they were able to walk down the street and identify buildings and where they were without needing a phone in their hands, without needing anything to ask anybody.

got so much potential.

Juliana S. (23:49)
It's enabling, enables people to live, right?

Mike Hartley (23:52)
100 % totally. And I think if we get it right, if we can just get the focus right and we can get people to pay attention, I think there's just so much possibility. I mean, technologies always have the possibility to do so much and we've squandered it, but...

I think AI really does have a big amount of potential for people. So yeah, let's, well, we'll keep our fingers crossed and we'll keep shouting at people like Microsoft, please improve accessibility and power BI. Give us a co-pilot there that will sit there and tell us your color contrast isn't right.

that will read the data out to people. Please, please, please come on. I seem to have made quite a few requests to Microsoft in this podcast over the different weeks. yeah, final question, because I mean, this has been awesome. This has been really good. I could chat to you for hours, I think.

Juliana S. (24:39)
I know, right?

Mike Hartley (24:51)
But the final question is

for you, if somebody came up to you and said, where do I get started? What would be your first tip for people with accessibility or your hot tip for them to get started in it?

Juliana S. (25:06)
So first of all, to understand that we don't design for ourselves, we design for an audience, for someone else. So even if we think that something is clear, it's not only about colors, about how you use the language you use, the complexity of the data visualization, right? You've seen some charts where people post these fancy tutorials and I just look, okay, if there is a non-technical person, will that person understand? And so...

First of all, understand your design for someone else. Different people will have abilities, disabilities, they feel, I'll get anxious with technology. You have to account for that as well. The circumstances that they live. So empathy in first place, you don't design for yourself, you design for someone else. And second, you have to look. So Power BI, for example, if your tool is Power BI, Power BI Learn has got documentation accessibility. If you work with Power BI,

Put on your search and it's going to pop for you. Read it. Read what it means in Power BI because they will talk about color contrast. They will say about testing. Testing is not only testing with tools to have people to test your report. So whatever tool you use, Power BI, Power App, don't know, Tableau, whatever, look into it. Put on a search. You will find that there are accessibility features. What is available?

Learn what else can you and because one thing you're gonna start thinking about oh how about that because that's how I started right I started because I wanted to fix my red and my green colors Be curious and you have to want to improve your design and not see because I was asked how much we charge our clients for accessibility And I said you shouldn't you have to have you built in your design? Processes and you're gonna design better interfaces

and they will be accessible, don't charge. I think you can't, it's unfair. Why do you charge people who have a condition that... So it would be empathy in first place. Go to the internet, there are tutorials, are learn page that will get you started, but you have to want to look into it, not feel like it's a tick box.

Right? Because if you just feel like it's a tick box, it's not going to be, you're not going to be able to do it because I carry so much that I do some checks before I even open Power BI. I am already thinking about that. and that's because it's not tick box for me. It is because I'm passionate about it. want to be with people to understand, I don't want to exclude anyone. so empathy and learn that your tool will definitely have some kind of accessibility feature.

Mike Hartley (27:38)
brilliant. You said two words there that I immediately latched onto that I thought were brilliant as well alongside the empathy and that was be curious. I think that

That seems to be the start for a lot of people on accessibility journeys. They come across one person with an accessible need, and then they start to get a little bit curious and start digging a bit deeper and digging a bit deeper. It's how I started in accessibility. So, yeah, I think be curious.

Empathy above all, empathy has to be there 100%. We've got to have empathy. have, but that was awesome. Thank you so much, Juliana. It has been really brilliant talking to you and chatting.

talking about topic that we both care about and getting your views on it. It has been really good. So thank you so much for your time and for sharing with us all. folks, that is it for this episode of 365 Ally the podcast. Thank you for listening. I will ask you

Please spread the word, share this podcast with your colleagues, with your friends, with your networks. Engage with us on LinkedIn, on TikTok, on YouTube, on all the podcast platforms. We're everywhere. You can't go anywhere without finding us. But please follow us, share us, like our content, comment. We chat. We're happy to chat. So please do.

Thank you for listening and we'll see you on the next episode. So thank you very much people. Bye bye.

Juliana S. (29:30)
Thank you. Bye.