Hi, David;
This one's good.
Lillian
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The following article appeared this past week on Cnet.
cnet.com
This Comcast exec turns accessible tech into something for all
Joan E. Solsman
tech-enabled.jpg
This is part of CNET's "Tech Enabled" series about the role technology
plays in helping the disability community.
Tom Wlodkowski is working hard to put himself out of a job.
Wlodkowski is the head of accessibility at Comcast, having joined four
years ago from AOL. After working 25 years to make technology more
inclusive for people with disabilities, he's aiming for the day when
it's just part of the routine.
"We'll know we're there when you don't need dedicated accessibility
groups anymore," Wlodkowski, who was born blind, said in an interview
three weeks ago in his lab at the towering Comcast skyscraper in
Philadelphia. "People are starting to realize now that...if you really
focus on accessible design, you make a better product for everyone."
tomwlodkowskiportrait.jpg
Tom Wlodkowski, who joined Comcast as its first vice president of
accessibility in 2012, navigates the company's streaming app on his iPhone.
Joan E. Solsman/CNET
A trend stretching back centuries, tools built for accessibility
underpin tech essential to your daily life. Whether you lean on the
closed-caption subtitles on your Facebook News Feed's videos or
voice-command powers baked into today's phones and speakers, features
that help with disabilities cure headaches for the masses too. It's the
crux of inclusive design, a concept Wlodkowski and his team at Comcast
have promoted inside their own monolithic media company: You reach more
people when you consider and include all of them, and that makes for
stronger business -- and better tech.
Comcast isn't alone in this trend. Both Apple and Microsoft kicked off
their events last week with videos about the importance of designing
products to be more inclusive. There was heightened awareness of the
issue in October because it was National Disability Employment Awareness
Month.
Technology has a long track record of breakthroughs aimed at
accommodating a disability that ended up helping everyone else.
Alexander Graham Bell's work on the telephone went hand-in-hand with
research into deafness. The first working typewriter was crafted by
Pellegrino Turri so his blind lover could return his letters. Vint Cerf,
a "father of the Internet" who is hard of hearing, developed early email
protocols so he and his deaf wife could communicate easier.
Casting a wide net
For Wlodkowski, inclusion was baked into his upbringing.
comcast-accessibility-labs.jpg
Wlodkowski and his team team work in an accessibility lab in Comcast's
headquarters.
Comcast
The youngest of four brothers, he jokes that his mother didn't have the
bandwidth to coddle her blind son with a houseful of boys wreaking
havoc. Despite Wlodkowski's wisecracks about his parents setting him
loose in the streets of the Connecticut suburb of Southington, when the
time came for him to ride a bike, his mom found herself fighting back
her instinct to protect him, she told him later.
"We were in a schoolyard in our neighborhood, and I fell off like every
kid does, but I probably attributed it to the fact I couldn't see," he
recounted. When he complained that he wanted to stop, she told him they
wouldn't leave until he got back on the bike, even if they stayed in the
schoolyard all night.
"She said it was the hardest thing for her to stay true, because it
would have been easy to say, 'You know what, let's just go walk the bike
home and we're done,' right?" he said. "But that was probably the best
thing she could've done."
Wlodkowski realized early in his career that inclusion meant casting a
wide net to the disability community at large, even those with the same
disability as himself.
He began working in accessibility and tech in the early 1990s at public
radio and TV station WGBH in Boston. The company at the time was
developing video descriptive services for people who have low vision or
are blind like him; the audio descriptions narrate the action of a show
during breaks in dialogue.
"When I first got there, I was like, "Well, I'm the consumer. Won't you
just tell me what's on the screen?" he said. He failed to grasp the
nuances that make video description most helpful, he said. A kids' show,
for example, needs to speak relatively, like calling something "as big
as a dinner plate" rather than 12-inches around. Grown-up programming
descriptions should be neutral, so viewers can draw their own
conclusions about why a character is, say, standing silently in the corner.
It taught him a lesson that he has carried through to the present day at
Comcast, where his team holds frequent roundtables to get first-hand
accounts from people with all kinds of disabilities.
"You can put ten of us in a room who are blind, and I might have one way
of doing it, and [another person] might have another," Wlodkowski said.
At Comcast, "it's our job to sift through all of that feedback and reach
that common denominator that at least gives everybody a good jumping off
point and a usable experience."
More than a niche feature
voice-remote-sree-blog-hero.jpg
Wlodkowski's team has enhanced accessibility features into Comcast's
pay-TV service, like a voice remote that responds to spoken commands
with the push of a button.
Comcast
Comcast's voice remote is the company's prime example of how an
accessible technology makes mass-market products better. The remotes
have a voice-command button that lets anyone pull up a program, movie,
or channel just by asking. Since Comcast introduced them to subscribers
of its advanced X1 pay-TV service a year and a half ago, the company has
deployed more than 10 million to customers.
It's tech that sprung from Wlodkowski's team.
For people with a visual disability like him, that kind of control puts
watching television in closer reach. It also allows the people who help
care for someone with a disability -- a spouse, a parent, a roommate --
to do something else while their loved ones command their couch surfing
on their own. And for the sighted masses, it helps liberates everyone
from that design monstrosity dating back to the dawn of cable TV: the
channel grid.
"People may think of this as a niche audience, but there is broader
value to it," he said. More than one in three US households have a
member that identifies with a disability, according to panel research by
Nielsen this month. And a landmark study by Forrester and Microsoft more
than a decade ago found that 60 percent of working-age US adults were
likely to benefit from accessible technology, even if they don't
necessarily identify as having what's commonly categorized as a
"disability."
Wlodkowski is starting to see signs that more companies are paying
attention. Yes, his job at Comcast is still intact, but he's noticed
attendance explode at business conferences centered on accessibility in
recent years. The number of attendees at the US Business Leadership
Network's annual confab, which focuses on strategies for including
people with disabilities in the workplace, has spiked 88 percent this
year from levels in 2013.
Wlodkowski said his team continues to work on advanced technology, like
eye-gaze tracking that can help people who can move only their pupils to
pick exactly what they want to watch on TV. But he said their meaningful
role is simply helping others at the company realize how little it takes
to help so many.
"It's not like we're doing rocket science over in this lab," he said.
"We're here to connect all the dots."
You are invited to visit the moderator's Web site at WWW.DavidGoldfield.Info
for additional resources and information about assistive technology training
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