And so, when I was listening to the latest episode of The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, I was struck by how the left and right may actually be more aligned on DEI than the headlines lead us to believe.

In the episode, Stewart was interviewing former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican. When the topic of DEI came up, they got into a discussion of merit vs. diversity in the context of the Secretary of Defense role. Both agreed that, in terms of merit, General Lloyd Austin was a much better hire than Fox’s former weekend host Pete Hegseth. The fact that Austin is also Black has no more impact on his being a better candidate than the fact that Pete Hegseth being White makes him a worse candidate. What Austin does bring to the table, however, is first-hand knowledge of what it’s like to rise up the ranks as a Black soldier. That’s a significant knowledge gap when it comes to the U.S. military, whose top brass isn’t representative of the diversity of its personnel.

This is something that Christie actually points out when discussing becoming the U.S. Attorney in New Jersey back in 2002:

When I got there, I just did a lot of walking around the office to see, okay, who’s here? Jon, it was the whitest, malest office I had ever been in in my life. And I was coming from private law practice.

He, rightly, saw this as a problem and wanted to address it. He told his staff

[We need] to go out and recruit candidates who are African-American, Latino, Asian, women. Bring them to me. If they’re not good, I’m not going to hire them. But I’m convinced we’re not seeing them.

His approach to address this was perfectly rational and aligned with the approach Jon had discussed mere moments before:

What I found was hiring has a certain inertia to it, right? Generally, the people that started whatever industry or whatever office did, generally hire close to people that resemble them. So I’m not even talking about White/Black. I’m talking about like… I’ll just go with late-night comedy, right?

David Letterman revolutionized late-night comedy. He did it with a lot of Harvard, Lampoon, SNL, same way, writers. The comedy writing industry was for a long time — not necessarily out of malevolence or prejudice — the inertia of it, the status quo of it, was nerdy white dudes from Harvard and the other Ivy Leagues.

But even when we went to like, “Oh, we’re going to do blind submissions,” what we didn’t realize is all the agents are also steeped in that same status quo. So all the resumes — even when we would get them — still predominantly [trails off]. When we went specifically to say — now, this is what you would consider DEI — “Give us not that. Open it up to make sure you give us women, people of color, other writers, so that we can at least see what that is.” And all of a sudden, we found these incredible writers. Now, you could say, “Oh, you put diversity over competence,” but that’s the red herring. We didn’t. We opened up what were stagnant pools. Pools that were incestuous. And we opened up those tributaries. Isn’t that what increases competition, not decreases it?

What’s fascinating here is that they are both making the same point. As Christie says later

We then went about this process of hiring a large number of African-American, Latino, and Asian prosecutors, but I would tell you that every one of them checked both boxes. They checked the box of, “they now look more like the community we represent than we did before.” And these are really good lawyers.

So these two men from very different political viewpoints totally agree on the importance of representation. So where’s the issue?

# The Issue is Tokenism

When Stewart highlighted how aligned their two perspectives were and Christie pushed back, stating that DEI policies were problematic:

I think there have been a number of areas where there are people who hire certain folks just for their diversity. I’ve seen it happen here in New Jersey, in the government since I left. Where people say, “I am going to make sure that I have one of every…” It’s almost like a half a Noah’s Ark. “I’m going to have one of these and one of these and one one of these and one of these.”

Stewart questioned that:

But you just told me that’s what you did in the prosecutor’s office.

But Christie didn’t see it that way:

No, what I did was get them in to interview them. If it turned out, Jon, that they were also really good lawyers, they got hired. I’m talking about something different. I’m talking about predetermining the outcome in the way that you just talked about — and I believe that legacy admissions predetermined the outcome — that there have been some in charge of government across this country who have predetermined determined outcomes and said, “I am going to have this many African-Americans, this many Latinos, this many Asians, this many lesbians, this many gay men…” I think that when people see that, they say to themselves, “That’s not right either.”

What he’s talking about is what I’d call performative DEI. It’s not substantive, but attempts to give off the appearance of being so. It’s the DEI equivalent of greenwashing.

# DEI Cannot be Performative

When people hire folks or celebrate folks for their diversity rather than their diversity plus their competence or talents, it undermines the legitimacy of DEI programs that are attempting to do what they both discussed being important: representation.

As they both said, we need to screen in job applicants who wouldn’t otherwise consider applying for roles in our organizations. Christie talked about this too:

The aha moment for me on that concept and why it was the right way to go was there was a young guy that I hired very early on: African-American, University of Michigan, University of Penn Law School, clerk for Alan Page — the former Minnesota Viking, defensive tackle in the Supreme Court of Minnesota— He’s from New Jersey, grew up in Maplewood. I said to him, “Why didn’t you ever apply here before?” He said, “Because I knew people like me wouldn’t get hired.”

Hiring is just part of the process though. You can widen the applicant funnel and bring in a more representative — which is to say diverse — applicant pool with relatively little effort. Where things often fall short is retention.

# Is Your Organization Even Ready?

If your organization isn’t excited at the prospect of a more diverse workforce and prepared to support them when they are onboarded, you need to press pause and get prepared. Similarly, if your company is eager, but very homogenous, you’ve also got work to do. No one wants to come into a job and feel like “the only” or “the token” anything. And even if they were the most qualified applicant for the position, some jackass will say something that implies they are. It’s a tale as old as time and you need to be prepared for that reality.

The first thing you need to do is educate. You need to help folks on your team understand the gaps in your collective knowledge & experience. They need to see that a more diverse team can help fill those gaps. The data that shows that more diverse organizations are more successful. Share that! I’m guessing most of your team is there because they want your organization to be as successful as possible.

And make sure they understand the historical barriers folks from different communities have faced in getting access to jobs at organizations like yours… even when they were equally or more accomplished than folks from the dominant group. As Stewart said on the show:

It’s not rigging [the system] in a different direction, it’s unrigging it.

It’s also important to note that the process here needs to be inclusive as well… call people in, don’t call them out. Everyone is on their own journey and deserves the space to fail and learn from their mistakes. If someone says something offensive, let them know that it’s offensive and why. Tell them what they should say — if anything — instead.

If you approach people with empathy, you’re much more likely to get a positive response. And, Twitter aside, most folks aren’t out in these streets trying to be trolls. People are a product of their own experiences and those experiences can be quite different from yours. Help your colleagues broaden their perspectives with positive reinforcement, not chastising.

That said, you also need the proper mechanisms in place to address non-inclusive behaviors when they become a pattern or reach a certain threshold of severity. Those mechanisms need to outline the consequences for such behavior. The severity of the consequence needs to align with the severity of the harm, but it may need to escalate in severity for repeat offenses. Depending on the size of your organization, coming up with these policies and consequences could be a group activity to ensure both awareness and buy-in.

# Embrace DEI and Pave the Way for Mediocrity

To be clear, neither Jon Stewart nor the progressive left are pushing for diversity quotas like Christie seems to think they are. But there are folks out there who are. These performative DEI programs have got to go. As my colleague and friend Ebele Okoli says “bake it in, don’t cake it on.”

Don’t hire or promote someone just because you think their headshot would help to melanate your About page. That’s not what DEI is about and it doesn’t help us to reverse the dire course the U.S. government and cowardly companies are taking currently. DEI needs to be a part of every process in your organization on order to give everyone — white men like me included — an equal chance to succeed.

Cast a wide net. Hire and promote for competence and to address the knowledge gaps your team absolutely has. Foster an inclusive workplace that values the different lived experience and perspectives brought to the table by each and every employee. That is how you succeed with DEI. It’s also how DEI will help your organization succeed in its mission and grow to hire more folks.

And as more of the incredibly talented people out there get hired on at organizations like yours, all boats will rise, creating more jobs and space for mediocre people of all stripes to get hired and rise up the ranks too. But they won’t get there just because or who they know, what they look like, or because they tick a particular box on your diversity bingo card.

The post was largely about how the web enables us to be there for one another in times of crisis. Molly shared how she found solace—while reeling from the emergency hospitalization of her mother—in the support of her community through email, Twitter, and Facebook.

Molly recognized the power of the web—and the Open Web in particular—to connect people and communities for the betterment of all humans. Sure, she saw the downsides too and would grumble about them quite often, but she was a firm believer that the web was a net positive for the world.

As I reflected on her life last year when we lost her, this passage really struck me:

Mortality reminds us in very cold, frightening terms how fragile our life and times truly are. The Web, which is a naturally social and interactive communications platform, can help bring us all closer. The fighting, the drama, the debates - they all become irrelevant in these very mortal moments. Let us all reach for the greatness within ourselves and put it into our Web work every day, because even on those days we feel it’s overwhelming or doesn’t matter, it really truly does. One world, one Web, one love, my brothers and sisters.

I cannot think of a better way to remember Molly on this day.

Much love to you and your communities!

This passage from Micah Altman of MIT’s Center for Research in Equitable and Open Scholarship really resonated with me (emphasis mine):

Decisions determined by algorithms affecting our lives are increasingly governed by opaque algorithms, from the temperature of our office buildings to what interest rate we’re charged for a loan to whether we are offered bail after an arrest. More specifically complex, opaque, dynamic and commercially developed algorithms are increasingly replacing complex, obscure, static and bureaucratically authored rules.

Over the next decade and a half, this trend is likely to accelerate. Most of the important decisions affecting us in the commercial and government sphere will be ‘made’ by automated evaluation processes. For the most high-profile decisions, people may continue to be ‘in the loop,’ or even have final authority. Nevertheless, most of the information that these human decision-makers will have access to will be based on automated analyses and summary scores – leaving little for nominal decision-makers to do but flag the most obvious anomalies or add some additional noise into the system.

This outcome is not all bad. Despite many automated decisions being outside of both our practical and legal (if nominal) control, there are often advantages from a shift to out-of-control automaticity. Algorithmic decisions often make mistakes, embed questionable policy assumptions, inherit bias, are gameable, and sometimes result in decisions that seem (and for practical purposes, are) capricious. But this is nothing new – other complex human decision systems behave this way as well, and algorithmic decisions often do better, at least in the ways we can most readily measure. Further, automated systems, in theory, can be instrumented, rerun, traced, verified, audited, and even prompted to explain themselves – all at a level of detail, frequency and interactivity that would be practically impossible to conduct on human decision systems: This affordance creates the potential for a substantial degree of meaningful control.

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to you, wherever you are in the world. My name is Aaron Gustafson. My pronouns he, him, and his. I am a middle-aged white man with long, wavy hair, glasses, and a red and grey beard my wife refers to as “salt & paprika.” I am speaking to you from Seattle, WA on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples, most notably the Duwamish, whose longhouse is not too far from my home.

Some of you may be familiar with my work. I’ve been a web designer and developer since the mid ’90s. In that time I’ve authored dozens of articles and a few books and given over a hundred talks on web development. In fact, if my math is correct, I believe this is my 150th talk.

Over the years I’ve been best known for my work in progressive enhancement and accessibility, but I also led the Web Standards Project back in the day and am the Editor in Chief of A List Apart.

I have deep roots in the web dev community, particularly in the accessibility space, but that’s not why I’m here today. I’m here today because about 9 months ago I decided to change things up and use my accessibility skills in other ways.

In my case, I joined the Microsoft Accessibility Innovation team to lead our investments through the AI for Accessibility grant program.But I’m not here to talk about AI, I’m here to talk about how you can put your accessibility skills to work, beyond finding and remediating accessibility bugs.

# Cruel irony: accessibility devs face barriers too

In my career, I’ve found it’s really easy to get typecast or pigeon-holed when you’re a developer whose focus is accessibility. This is a bit of a cruel irony as many of us are driven by a desire to tear down the barriers to access for others.

Our companies, organizations, and sometimes even our colleagues put us in a box. They don’t seem to realize that knowledge of how to make products accessible has huge value beyond compliance (and avoiding lawsuits). In our careers, we might be able to level up from a junior to senior role or even make it to principal, based on our performance, but growth beyond that is often limited to moving into people management, which is a wholly different skill set. And maybe that’s your aspiration… that’s totally cool if it is, but what if you want to grow as an independent contributor?

When our organizations put us in a box, they make it really difficult to grow our scope and increase the impact we can have for both the organization and the people we serve.

Don’t get me wrong, I love compliance work. I’m not here to disparage it in any way; it’s critically important and means so much to our customers. But after years in this industry, I also see the downsides of life in the “accessibility dev” box. Perhaps you relate to a few of these:

• Colleagues don’t understand (or value) what I do.
• I need like three (or more) of me to handle the workload.
• Teams are resistant to changing the way they do things.
• Progress feels glacially slow and some days I feel I’m going backwards.
• I feel isolated on the team or the company

Again, I am not trying to cast code compliance work in a bad light, and I’m not trying to get you down on it. What I want to do is build you up.

# You’ve got so much more to offer

I believe you, as a developer interested in accessibility, have so much to offer your organizations, your customers, and this industry. That’s what I am here to talk to you about today.

I’m here to talk to you about opportunity!

When I was doing this work on the regular, I struggled to see how I could grow my impact. In the intervening years, however, I’ve discovered a bunch of ways we can bring our knowledge and passion for accessibility to other areas of both web development and the tech industry overall.

As I mentioned, I’ve been in this industry and held a lot of different roles since the mid ’90s. I’ve held just about every web-related role you could name. I’ve been an educator, publisher, spec editor at the W3C. I’ve worked in Developer Relations and strategic roles. I’ve worn an awful lot of hats (which is totally fine with me as my hair is thinning in the back).

All of this is to say that I’ve seen and experienced a lot of ways you can be valuable to your current employer or, perhaps, a future one.I am going to share 5 of them with you today:

1. Design Systems
2. Product Design
3. Data Science
4. AI Research & Ethics
5. Diversity & Inclusion

These are by no means your only options and, as I mentioned, if you’re happy with what you’re doing, please don’t consider this talk a nudge to get you to change things up. I just want to make you aware of the value you can bring to other kinds of roles, some of which you may not have considered before.

Also: I want to make it clear that I am not advocating that you take on any of these responsibilities in addition to your current work. Far too often, organizations ask those of us with accessibility skills to do things beyond our job description without any additional compensation for that work. Please don’t fall into that trap as it will lead to burnout.

# Design Systems & Strategies: Codify coding best practices

If you’re really interested in software development, an area that keeps you in that area is working on design systems.

I’m not going to go deep on design systems—there are a bunch of talks and even whole conferences focused on that topic—but I will give you the Cliffs Notes if you’re unfamiliar: Design systems (and pattern libraries within them) codify your organization’s design and coding guidelines in such a way that the software you produce is consistent and the teams working on delivering that software are able to be more efficient because they aren’t having to design and build every interface from scratch.Having a design system that is accessible enables teams to avoid introducing new accessibility bugs in the process of creating bespoke interfaces. It also means finding and fixing an accessibility bug in the design system should fix it in all of the products using that design system. (That last part isn’t always perfect, but I don’t have time to get into that today.)

If you work in a small organization, it’s possible that you aren’t working with a design system yet. Knowing what you do about their accessibility benefits, you could advocate for the creation of one and for its creating, care & maintenance to be your job.

In this role, you can:

• Work directly with other engineers to create system components.
• Audit the system regularly for compliance issues (paying special attention to how combinations of components can create issues).
• Provide in-house accessibility training to the design & engineering folks to help them level-up their own skills.
• Provide design system training and implementation guidance to the folks implementing the design system and new hires as they come in.
• Celebrate the successes of teams using the design system, particularly when it comes to their accessibility wins; you could do this in-person, in online meetings, or via email depending on the size and distribution of your team.

If you’re in a larger organization that already has a design system, you could be a bit more strategic in your approach:

• Being the accessibility advocate within the design system as well as in the context of all software development practices within your organization.
• Be the conduit to your organization’s senior management as well as individual product owners to ensure accessibility is top of mind for them and baked into their roadmaps. Part of that is also advocating for the necessary funding to achieve your accessibility goals (and alleviating the issue we often face on not being appropriately-resourced).
• Provide guidance and create structure within your organization to ensure your accessibility goals are met.
• Educate and mentor folks from across your organization on accessibility.
• And again, celebrate the heck out of any and all accessibility wins, no matter how small. We’ve already discussed some of the challenges we face ad accessibility devs, and getting publicly recognized for our accomplishments can really boost morale.

As an accessibility dev, your unique perspective and skills will help build greater alignment on accessibility among teams and improve morale by speeding up development & reducing bugs!

# Product Design: Shape what you build

As I mentioned, the role in larger orgs can be more strategic. Another strategic role is shaping the products that we build, as a product designer, product owner, product manager, or similar. (Different companies have different titles for this kind of work.)

In this kind of a role, we can put the “shift left” credo we advocate for regularly into practice. It involves

• Embedding yourself with feature teams to understand what motivates them. Understanding their vision in goals will help you frame your recommendations in a way that they will be welcomed and embraced. Being embedded with a team also means you can discover potential hazards early and eliminate them; you can educate them as to the issue and how to avoid it which makes it less likely they will run into it again.
• Asking questions and offering to up-skill the team, helping them learn to build products that will reach and be usable by more customers.
• Making sure people with disabilities are included (and paid for their contributions) in all research, co-creation, and testing so the team has a better understanding of their needs.

All of this work has huge business value for your organization:

1. It saves your engineering and quality assurance teams a ton of time, and time is money.
2. You reduce the legal risk to your company for lack of compliance, which also saves money in legal fees (not to mention settlements).
3. You will build products that work better for more people, leading to better overall customer satisfaction and reduced churn.
4. You’ll also create new revenue opportunities by increasing the number of folks you can serve.

On that last point, I often point to WhatsApp as a perfect example of this. When they launched, there were nearly 8,000 chat apps in the iOS App Store. If they’d only offered their app to that audience, they would not have found the level of success they did because the competition was so high. They expanded their potential customer base by supporting OSes others were ignoring: older Android versions, Blackberry, Symbian, Nokia Series 40, Windows Phone. Some of those weren’t even smartphone OSes! When WhatsApp sold to Facebook for $19B, they had over 600M users worldwide because they made their product accessible—in a broader sense—to more people.

By considering accessibility in the same way as WhatsApp considered OS support, we can grow—or to think about it another way, stop artificially suppressing—our customer base and succeed where our competition fails.

As an accessibility dev, your unique perspective and skills will ensure your company ships higher quality products, with fewer bugs, for less money!

# Data Science: Measure the right things

Moving a bit further afield, I want to talk about how much we need your skills in the world of data science. As part of a data science team, you could bring attention to accessibility in our product metrics by

• Ensuring key business metrics include data from people with disabilities.
• Adding new product metrics that reflect the experience of different disability communities.
• Measuring the time necessary to complete key tasks when using different AT and track improvements & regressions for them over time.

Apart from products, you could also have a profound impact on your organizations’ internal processes, especially around how compliance work is done and tracked:

• Capture automated testing passes and track compliance over time.
• Highlight accessibility bug activity
  • How many new?
  • How many remediated?
  • How many outstanding?
  • How many marked “won’t fix”?
  • Average age of outstanding bugs
• Include this data in top-level product reports

And if you wanted to keep working in the UI space, you could put your skills to work improving the quality of the dashboards and tools used by your company:

• Ensure all analysis tools are accessible.
• Ensure charts are accessible.
• Provide access to raw data tables.
• Enable API access to data to enable colleagues to create additional tooling that works better for them.

This is incredibly necessary work as we often neglect the accessibility of our own internal tools.

As an accessibility dev, your unique perspective and skills can help your company make decisions that result in more inclusive and accessible products that provide a better user experience (and may even increase revenue).

# AI Research & Ethics: Protect us from “the machines”

The fourth area desperately in need of your skills and perspective is AI research and ethics. AI is a hot topic right now, for sure, and it absolutely has the potential to meaningfully improve people’s lives, including those of people with disabilities, but to get there, organizations need your help!

You have the knowledge and connections in this space to harness the power of AI in service of people with disabilities.

As part of an AI research team you can…

• Observe how people with disabilities interact with the world today and consider how AI can
  • increase their independence;
  • make certain actions easier, more intuitive, or efficient; and
  • increase the richness of experiences for them.
• Co-design with folks from a range of disability communities; but remember not to assume everyone from a given community wants the same thing.

This is the space I’m very grateful to be in right now. As part of the Accessibility Innovation team at Microsoft, I get to identify and fund projects that are using AI to improve the lives of people with disabilities.

For example: the ORBIT project. There’s been lots of work in the object detection space, but there is a lot of focus on labelling “high-quality” images. This doesn’t really help folks in the real world. A blind person, for instance, is likely to have a hard time providing the image recognizer a with a perfectly-framed, perfectly focused capture of an object they need identified.

The Orbit project, from the City University of London, worked to enable “few-shot learning” of novel objects by training the model on brief videos taken by blind & low vision collectors. These videos are “imperfect” in that they are likely to be poorly framed, blurry, and so on.This increases the noise-to-signal ratio, which is actually a good thing in training a machine learning model. Enabling AI systems to recognize objects captured in imprecise ways makes for a more robust recognizer that is capable of identifying objects in less than ideal contexts.That, in turn, improves the overall quality of these systems for everyone.

Another example is Mentra, who has been using AI to help pair neurodivergent folks with employers who recognize the profound contributions they can make in their companies. Mentra’s platform collects holistic data on job seekers:

• cognitive strengths,
• aptitudes,
• environmental sensitivities,
• and necessary accommodations.

It takes these into account when matching individuals to available positions (which also include comparable information).

Mentra takes care not to “screen out” individuals with non-traditional backgrounds. It also works in a “reverse job fair” model, where applicants only fill in one profile, letting Mentra’s AI recommend them for jobs that are a good fit. Employers indicate their interest and invite job seekers to interview, lessening the stress level on the job seeker.

Mentra’s straightforward approach also reduces the need for job seekers to “cover” in a new role as they’ve made it clear what accommodations they need in order to be successful.

The third project I’ll share with you is iWill, who are working in the mental health space.

There are tons of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) chatbots out there, but we were really intrigued by work being undertaken by iWill in India. First of all, there is a profound scarcity of mental health professionals in India. Training and deploying enough professionals to meet the mental health needs of the population is not feasible in the near term, which is why chat bots are a compelling stop-gap.

Most CBT chatbots are trained in English. We are funding them to train a CBT model end-to-end in Hindi as we believe it’s the only way to avoid potential problems inherent in translation (Hindi to English for the ML then back again) and biases that would be inherent from the involvement of English.

I could spend hours talking about all of the good AI can do in the world, but I also recognize that AI can also perpetuate or exacerbate exclusion.

AI teams need your skills to help them address bias toward and exclusion of people with disabilities. They also need you to be there protecting the privacy of people with disabilities.

You would bring a lot to an AI team in this regard:

• Identify bias (or potential bias) in datasets.
• Promote representation of people with disabilities in datasets.
• Ensure people with disabilities are not exploited by datasets.
• Ensure all interfaces to the AI tools are accessible.
• Ensure the products created by AI are accessible.
• Validate that the products of AI are not directly biased or exclusionary and they they cannot be used to perpetuate bias or exclusion.

As an accessibility dev, your unique perspective and skills can help can ensure advancements in AI/ML are beneficial (and not harmful) to people with disabilities!

# Diversity & Inclusion: Build & grow inclusive teams

The last role I’ll talk about is probably the furthest afield from development, but it also has the most profound impact on the teams that do the work and that’s D&I. I don’t imagine I need to spend a ton of time making a case to this audience for why diversity matters, but here’s a quick run-down just in case:

• Diverse teams bring with them diverse perspectives & lived experiences.
• If valued, that knowledge can make it easier to identify potential barriers (and opportunities) earlier in a project.
• Diverse teams are more likely to exhibit empathy toward all users, including those with disabilities.
• Diverse teams are more innovative.
• Diverse teams make better decisions

For more on those last two points, you should read this piece in the Harvard Business Review.

As someone who is keenly aware of the importance of having diverse teams to build inclusive products, you can do a lot to ensure your organization embraces diversity in its recruiting efforts. Fixing leaks in “the pipeline,” if you will.

A lot of it starts with asking important questions:

• Do we have a disability hiring policy?
• Are our recruiters “screening in” people with disabilities?
• Where are we posting jobs? Are theyreaching people with disabilities?
• Is the language of our job postings exclusionary?
• Is our interview process inclusive and accommodating of people’s disabilities?

It’s also important to actively solicit disabled talent for roles in your company.

Some of this is actually work you could do without being part of any official D&I team, if you wanted, but if it is something you want to focus on, you might consider a job in recruiting.

A lot of folks focus on the pipeline, but in my experience that’s not where the bulk of the problems lie. If we want diverse teams, we need to ensure we have an environment and culture that values and supports them. Diverse talent will flee an unwelcoming environment and employee churn is expensive.

In order to retain diverse talent, we need to make sure the teams they join recognize the value they bring to an organization. This is where D&I training and coaching comes in.

You can influence team culture to improve retention by framing diversity in the context of your business goals and organizational success:

• Lack of diversity creates knowledge gaps.
• Diverse hiring helps to fill those gaps.
• Diverse colleagues’ knowledge & livedexperiences have value.

Once the framing has been established, be sure to “call in” non-inclusive/biased behaviors. Leading with curiosity can help you understand where someone is coming from so you can help them grapple with concepts like privilege and bias. Don’t burn yourself out trying to change the mind of folks who are openly antagonistic to this message, but you’ll often be surprised at how a non-confrontational, nonjudgmental conversation can both diffuse a tense situation and help to shift someone’s perspectives.

Another step you can take to improve retention include examining the inclusiveness (or lack thereof) of your team’s processes, built environments, and such. Are your hybrid meetings being monopolized by folks in the physical meeting space, alienating people on the call? Are your team morale events all scheduled in the evenings, making it hard for parents or caregivers on the team? Are they being held in bars, which makes it uncomfortable for folks who don’t drink alcohol, or in inaccessible venues?

Finally, it can be really beneficial to normalize disability in everyday interactions, especially if you are someone with privilege in your workplace as you can create space for others to acknowledge their own disabilities.

I was thankful that my last role enabled me to make this kind of D&I work a formal third of my core responsibilities. With my management’s backing, I was able to lead D&I trainings and events across the company while still being able to do the other work I love.

Many companies have formal D&I teams (some in HR, some not) for whom this is their whole job, so there are certainly opportunities there. That said, those teams often rely on advocacy from elsewhere in the company for their efforts to be successful, so you might also be able to formally support their efforts from outside that organization, as I did.

If there is no room for diverse talent to grow in their careers, many will leave. As I mentioned, churn is expensive. And just as not feeling respected & valued will likely result in a diverse employee leaving, the same goes for not having the same career advancement opportunities enjoyed by people from more privileged groups. Depending on where you are in your organization, you can help address this problem in different ways:

1. Write recommendations for colleagues, prioritizing them for colleagues whose diversity needs to be seen as an asset.
2. Observe promotions and ask questions of management if you don’t see diverse representation.
3. Mentor and reverse-mentor colleagues with a goal of growing the careers of people with disabilities.

This work is especially important to undertake if you are from a privileged group in your organization as your advocacy carries more weight. Treat your privilege as a currency and spend it on your colleagues.

Finally, and in perhaps the most formal way, working full-time in D&I you can shape company policies & trainings:

• Suggest edits to existing company policies.
• Draft new policies.
• Suggest freely-available accessibility and D&I trainings to colleagues.
• Create (or co-create) workshops & trainings for your company or team.
• Push for your company to mandate accessibility and D&I training; be sure to include additional training specifically for people managers as they have more to consider in this regard.
• Advocate for diverse representation and the modeling of inclusive behavior in all in-house trainings.

As an accessibility dev, your unique perspective and skills can help increase the inclusiveness of your company for fellow employees, which will lead to the creation of more inclusive products and services!

# These are just five areas that need you

In this talk, I introduced five areas desperately in need of your skills and perspectives: Design Systems, Product Design, Data Science, AI Research & Ethics, and Diversity & Inclusion.

There are way more (I only have so much time).

If you’re feeling stuck, hopefully this gives you some idea of the kinds of opportunities that are out there for you. And if you only come away from this session with one thing, let it be this:

You are more valuable than you realize.

You are change maker.

Thank you!

Despite their seemingly magical “knowledge,” Large Language Models (LLMs) are only able to respond with things they know (or think they know). They aren’t able to create novel connections between subjects in the way that people can.

That’s why it’s absolutely critical that LLMs be trained on content from a variety of sources, perspectives, etc. A LLM is only as good as the data it’s fed. To create truly powerful, creative, and exhaustive LLMs, we need to train them on content created by people whose voices aren’t often centered and subjects that extend far into the long tail.

It all goes hand-in-hand:

1. Screen in for diverse perspectives during the interview process.
2. Foster inclusive teams that value and promote people for not only their productive capacity, but also their unique experiences & perspectives.
3. Empower everyone to influence product/service design.
4. Release products that serve everyone because those products were created by people who share lived experiences with everyone.

Throughout my career, I’ve often defaulted to using alt text for photography with people in it that mentions the people, but rarely mentions things like their gender, skin tone, and the like. Often this was because I thought about people as just, well, people. Their individual characteristics were almost always immaterial to the primary purpose of describing the photo. If their difference served a purpose in the context, I included it, but that was my line.

In reading this piece from Léonie, however, I realized that I was approaching my image labeling from a very privileged position. I didn’t include information about these individuals because I am privileged. In my life experience, my gender, race, orientation, etc. seemed—to me—unimportant because these attributes are highly valued by the society I exist in. Because I didn’t see the value of my own attributes, I could sweep away other people’s differences and focus on their human-ness. And that can seem like a good thing, but it’s insidious. Like exclaiming “I don’t see color” it erases people and their many intersecting identities.

By including information about people’s physical attributes in the alt text we author, we can both normalize and embrace our differences. We can celebrate diversity and promote representation.

To describe a photo as “Doctor Smith handing a file to a colleague” is not nearly as meaningful as “Doctor Smith, a Black woman, handing a file to her office manager, Jenifer Jones, a Filipino woman who uses a wheelchair.” If I was blind, I could learn a lot of useful information about the medical practice from this extra bit of detail. Taking it further, if I was Black, I might feel more comfortable seeing Doctor Smith, knowing she was Black as well (especially given the unequal treatment Black folks receive in the U.S. medical system). If I use a support cane to get around, knowing the office manager uses a wheelchair tells me a good portion of the office is likely to offer generous pathways for me to walk around.

So I’m going to take Léonie’s advice to heart and work on my making my alt text more inclusive. The one area I will exercise restraint in my descriptions, however, is with respect to assigning folks a gender identity. Unless I have explicit knowledge of how they identify, it’s something best left to them to share.

I’ve found Kim Crayton’s approach of starting with definitions to be very helpful, so I’ll take a page from her and start there:

Equality

Providing the same level of opportunity and assistance to all people.

Equity

Providing various levels of support and assistance depending on specific needs or abilities.

Prior to working on diversity and inclusion efforts, I often framed these two states in the context of user experience. In that context, “equality” requires that we design our services such that everyone is given the same opportunity regardless of their situation. That may sound great, but the concept of equality makes a lot of assumptions about individuals and their circumstances. I’ll circle back to that in a moment.

“Equity,” on the other hand, recognizes that we are all different and our situations are different and seeks to create services that can adapt to meet each person’s individual needs. Though I didn’t make the connection until much later, the philosophy of progressive enhancement in web design, which I’ve been advocating for nearly two decades now, is very much the embodiment of equity. It’s concerned with building interfaces that adapt to a wide range of circumstances, both tied to an individual user’s capabilities as well as those of the devices, networks, and environment in which they are accessing our creations.

I’ve seen dozens of attempts to explain the difference between equality and equity, but most seem to miss the mark in one way or another and haven’t quite sat right with me. There are a few analogies I like, however, and I want to share one with you. It also comes from Kim Crayton and I first heard share it in her “Profit Without Oppression“ talk at the Apollo GraphQL conference.

I’m paraphrasing, but the gist is this: Your job is to distribute $200 to people in need to enable them to purchase healthy food. Consider two different customers; as it’s my paraphrase, I’ll call them Sally and Dave. Equality requires you to treat Sally and Dave the same, so you give them each $100. As I mentioned, while seemingly fair, this approach makes a lot of assumptions. For example: What if Sally lives close to a grocery store and Dave does not. Sally could walk to get her groceries on her lunch break, but Dave has to drive or take public transit, which is an additional expense. If it’s a particularly long way Dave may also be penalized through lost wages as he reallocates that time to getting to and from the grocery store. The problem is that the “equality” approach assumes Sally and Dave are interchangeable. If, however, you were to approach this situation with a focus on equity, you would take into account the differing capabilities of and circumstances surrounding each user and do your best to account for that in how you distribute the funds, perhaps giving Sally $85 and Dave $115 such that both end up with the same amount of money to spend on healthy groceries.

People are complex, as are our circumstances. Nothing is cut and dry and we need to build systems that are able to adapt to provide the right level of support in the right circumstances. That’s what equity is about and why it’s so powerful. It’s also why I’ve found so much alignment between it and my long-time passion for accessibility and progressive enhancement. Equity benefits everyone.

According to Merriam Webster, egalitarianism is:

1. a belief in human equality especially with respect to social, political, and economic affairs;
2. a social philosophy advocating the removal of inequalities among people.

It’s a simple philosophy inspired by the Golden Rule, an ethical code which is central to most major religions:

Buddhism

Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find harmful.

Christianity

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Islam

No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.

Judaism

What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. That is the entire law; all the rest is commentary.

Heck, even Confucius said “Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself”.

With so much emphasis on treating others with the sort of respect that we would like to be given, you’d think that inequality would be a non-issue. Obviously that’s not the case.

For centuries, we humans—even those of us who ascribe to these and the other countless Golden Rule abiding religions and philosophies—have failed to recognize ourselves in others and have erected barriers (both physical and societal) to their ability to lead the sort of happy, fulfilled life that we want for ourselves and our families.

Almost every way we mistreat others—from rude or snarky comments to genocide—stems from our inability to empathize with another person or group of people. It’s hard to connect with people who are different than us—people who have different life experiences, people who have different perspectives, people who are challenged in ways we have never been—and when we struggle to create a connection, it becomes easy for us to view them as “the other”. And when we begin to look at other people this way, we lose sight of their humanity and we lose sight of all of the things that make us similar.

While it is completely true that I have a very different life than a woman growing up in Dharavi, I have to believe that we have a lot in common too. We both want a good life for our families. We both want to feel safe. We both crack jokes. We’re both human. Our respective societies may view us very differently, but she is no less valuable than I am.

And this is why I am so passionate about the philosophy of egalitarianism. It grounds us in the notion that we are all equally valuable and should be granted equal opportunity to all that life has to offer.

John Rawls has a great thought experiment that I often cite in my talks on empathy. In it, he would ask you to imagine your ideal society. It could be a monarchy, anarchy, capitalist, or communist. It could be ruled by people of one particular gender or color. It could be governed by people of a particular tribe. It could be Panem. It could be Erewhon. It could be Brobdingnag. The choice is yours.

Once you’ve been ruminating on this a bit, he drops the bombshell: You have no control over or knowledge of where you fit in this society. This is called the Veil of Ignorance, a creation of John Harsanyi (an economist and early father of game theory). Rawls found that, with the Veil of Ignorance in play, people who participated in this thought experiment gravitated toward creating the most egalitarian societies possible.

It makes complete sense: What rational human being would create a society that enslaves people if they themselves could turn out to be a slave? Who would create a society that excludes women if they might be female? Who would build a world full of stairs if they could be in a wheelchair?

I love this exercise because it makes it easy to create at least basic connections between you and a wide variety of people who are different than you. It helps you realize that we are all equal and all worthy of consideration.

What is interesting about egalitarianism, as opposed to similar sounding philosophies like modern communism, is that it recognizes that equality of opportunity does not necessitate equality of outcome. In other words, while pushing for equality, it simultaneously recognizes that we have differences in capability, capacity, and interest.

We are different. We are similar in more ways than we are different, but to ignore our differences is to deny us our individuality, our personhood, our true selves. But recognizing differences is not the same as assigning a value to those differences. That’s an incredibly important distinction and bears repeating: Just because you recognize that someone is different does not imply you should view or treat them as any more or less human on account of what makes them different. That said, recognizing differences is the first step towards being able to create equality of opportunity.

This is such an important concept in life, but I was not a philosophy major, so I’ll stick to discussing it in terms of what I know a lot about: The Web. Specifically, Web accessibility.

For a great many of us, ensuring our websites are accessible is an afterthought. We talk a good game when it comes to “user centered” this or that, but often treat the word “accessibility” as a synonym for “screen reader”. It’s so much more than that. “Accessibility” is about people. People consume content and use interfaces in many different ways, some similar and some not so similar to how we do it.

Sure, people with visual impairments often use a screen reader to consume content. They might also use a braille touch feedback device or a braille printer. They probably also use a keyboard. Or they may use a touchscreen in concert with audio cues. And yes, visual impairment affects a great percentage of people, but they are only part of the “accessibility” puzzle.

The dimensions of interactive elements—links, buttons, etc.—and their proximity to one another is an important factor in ensuring an interface actually registers our intent (i.e. it helps us avoid fat fingering). Design is an accessibility concern.

The color contrast between text and the background is an important factor in ensuring content remains readable in different lighting situations. Color is an accessibility concern.

The language we use on our sites and in our interfaces directly affects how easy it is for our users to understand what we do, the products we are offering, and why it matters. It also affects how we make our users feel. Language is an accessibility concern.

The size of our Web pages and their associated assets has a direct affect on how long our pages take to download, how much it costs our customers to access them, and (sometimes) even whether or not the content can be reached. Performance is an accessibility concern.

I could keep going, but I’m sure you’re starting to get the point. “Accessibility” is ultimately about ensuring people have equal opportunity to access your content while simultaneously recognizing that we all have special needs—physical limitations, bandwidth limitations, device limitations, etc.—that lead us to have different experiences of the same Web page.

Accessibility is egalitarianism.

We are all different, but we all human. We all deserve respect. We all deserve to be treated equally. To be treated fairly.

We need more egalitarianism in this world and the good news is that we can make it happen.

I was an only child, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I grew up thinking the world revolved around me. In fact, I’ll be the first to admit that I was a pretty selfish kid. Well behaved, certainly, but not terribly concerned with how my actions affected others.

As an only child, the Golden Rule my grandparents insisted was so important—Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—didn’t really resonate. But I was a kid, what did I know? I was sheltered. I was young. I was the sole beneficiary of my parents’ love, time, and money. I had a pretty good life, but I lacked perspective.

I like to think I’ve grown immensely in the intervening years. Through my work, travel, and moving around a lot, I’ve experienced dozens of cultures, and I’ve met hundreds of new people, each with their own life experiences, needs, and desires. Exposure to their unique perspectives has broadened my own and helped me break down the psychological barriers I maintained between me and the “others.”

But it wasn’t until I started working on the web that I came to a full understanding of the importance of the Golden Rule. Prior to becoming a developer, the ramifications of my decisions were fairly limited. But on the web, every decision I make can have a profound effect on hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people’s lives. I can make checking into a flight a breeze, or I can make it a living hell.

That’s a lot of power. And to quote Stan Lee: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

My mom always told me that if you choose to do something, you should do it well, so I made it my mission to make the web an easy-to-use, friendly, and accessible place. I chose to make the Golden Rule central to my work.

As schmaltzy and self-aggrandizing as all that may sound, it’s also pretty shrewd. The Golden Rule can do wonders for your business. After all, what is good customer service if not treating someone like a human being worthy of your time, consideration, and respect? If we spend every day looking for new ways to make our customers’ lives better, we’ll create a lasting legacy and build a strong base of customer advocates along the way.

A commitment to universal accessibility is the highest form of customer service. It recognizes that we all have one special need or another at one time or another in our lives, and that fact should not preclude us from experiencing all the web has to offer. It’s about providing everyone with equal opportunity to engage with your brand experience, even though they may do so in different ways. It breaks down the barriers between “us” and “them” and recognizes the humanity in our customers.

And it’s really not that hard.

In the pages that follow, Whitney and Sarah beautifully lay out the case for accessibility, show you what it looks like, and demonstrate just how simple it is to achieve. They introduce us to a series of personas—Trevor, Emily, Jacob, Lea, Vishnu, Steven, Maria, and Carol—and help us effortlessly slip into each of their shoes, to see the struggles they experience when using the web, and to recognize our own needs and desires in their own.

In a time when many of us are scrambling to keep up with technological advancements and the opportunities they create, this book grounds us in what really matters: people. This book is a roadmap to providing incredible customer service and realizing the Golden Rule in our work and—much like the code we write and experiences we design—the ripple effect it generates is sure to bring about a more equitable web.

This twist to Rawls’s experiment can be attributed to the “Veil of Ingorance” Theory conceived by John Harsanyi (a father of game theory), and it had a profound impact on how Groups chose to organize their hypothetical societies. 

What Rawls discovered through these experiments is that when the Veil of Ignorance is in play, people gravitate toward the deepest and broadest forms of egalitarianism in order to ensure that even the least well-off or marginalized people are treatly justly. In essence, it forces people to “walk a mile” in someone else’s shoes. After all, as a self-interested, rational human being, who would want to create a society that treats the elderly like crap if he might turn out to be elderly in that society?

The Veil of Ignorance is something we have to deal with in web design as well: As much as we may try to understand trends in our users—the browsers they use, the devices they are on, etc.—we can never know the full story. For instance, we may know that someone is coming to us on an iPhone, but we can’t (at least at this point) know whether they are using assistive technology like VoiceOver or even a braille touch feedback device. This is why concepts such as Usability and, moreover, Accessibility are so important. It’s also why progressive enhancement is my guiding philosophy—the use of progressive enhancement in web design is what egalitarianism is in society. 

Of course, whenever you start talking about egalitarianism, you attract the haters (and haters are going to hate). Here’s Gary Hull of the Ayn Rand Institute:

Egalitarianism, which claims only to want an ‘equality’ in end results, hates the exceptional man who, through his own mental effort, achieves that which others cannot…. Talent and ability create inequality…. To rectify this supposed injustice, we are told to sacrifice the able to the unable. Egalitarianism demands the punishment and envy of anyone who is better than someone else at anything.

Sounds a lot like the hardboiled/graceful degradation camp right? To paraphrase: Progressive enhancement is holding us back by requiring us to give all users a dumbed-down experience.Wrong! Like egalitarianism’s critics, many of progressive enhancement’s critics fail to grasp the meaning of “equality” used by egalitarians (instead using a definition more akin to that used by socialist and communist philosophies). To quote Alexander Berkman (emphasis mine):

[E]quality does not mean an equal amount but equal opportunity…. Do not make the mistake of identifying equality in liberty with the forced equality of the convict camp. … It does not mean that every one must eat, drink, or wear the same things, do the same work, or live in the same manner. Far from it: the very reverse in fact…. Individual needs and tastes differ, as appetites differ. It is equal opportunity to satisfy them that constitutes true equality… Far from levelling, such equality opens the door for the greatest possible variety of activity and development.

Were Berkman a web designer (rather than an early 20th century anarchist) he would probably fall down on the side of progressive enhancement as his statement echoes egalitarian aims perfectly: access to content and functionality without technological restriction. Progressive enhancement does not aim to give the same experience to every person on every device in every browser; that would be ludicrous. It simply asks that you honor your users (and your content) by giving them a positive experience irrespective of the their capabilities or that of their technology.

In my life, I’ve always been drawn to egalitarianism; I credit my grandparents for that. From a very young age, my grandparents encouraged me to follow the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It’s a simple maxim, but like egalitarianism it asks that you put yourself in someone else’s place and consider how your choices affect them. Would you want to be treated the way you treat others?

Surprisingly enough, even the Golden Rule has its critics. Whereas I see the Golden Rule as a positive motivator, some folks look at it and see it as a play to our inherent self-interest (e.g. selfishness). In other words, they argue that the message of the Golden Rule is more about you than it is about the “others.” I don’t really want to get into the whole is-a-truly-selfless-act-really-possible debate (Friends already nailed it anyway) because I think that line of thinking misses the point. To me, the point is simply consideration of the “other” in how you conduct yourself. To look outside yourself and your realm of knowledge and experience and actually empathize with another human being.

Progressive enhancement follows the Golden Rule because it is concerned with the “other”. That’s why accessibility is such a key part of building websites following the progressive enhancement philosophy. It’s about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes—someone whose abilities and situation probably differ from yours. We are a diverse lot after all.

Of course whenever I bring up the importance of acessibility, I get reactions like this: My business is selling TVs. Blind people don’t buy TVs so why should I cater to them?

Really? I know a lot of blind people with TVs. Sure, they may not be able to see it themselves, but their spouses, children, and friends likely can. And they can listen to it.

Back at my old ad agency, I had an email run-in with a department head over the National Federation for the Blind’s lawsuit againt Target. The NFB was suing Target because the company refused to address issues with the accessibility of its website that prevented blind users (among others) from being able to shop there. So I passed around a link to Derek Featherstone’s post on the subject as suggested reading. The reaction I got from the department head was that of your typical free-market libertarian:

Is Target forcing blind people to shop there? If they don’t, does Target hurt them in some way?

If it doesn’t meet web standards, why don’t blind people just shop somewhere else?

These are fair points and are the very arguments we often hear against equality legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act. Ignoring the legal requirements and altruistic motivations behind doing something to provide equal opportunity—and ignoring the fact that in many cases the government will give you tax credits for making your business more accessible—let’s consider the business benefits of being more accessible.

To return to the TV store analogy, for all we know, a potential customer—who just happens to be blind (or even just vision-impaired)—might be on the hunt for an awesome home theater system that would be a huge sale for whoever gets her business. If she can’t easily navigate our site to find what she’s looking for—or access our physical storefront—do you think she’s going to stick around and struggle through a frustrating (or potentially humiliating) experience just to give you her money? No way, she’s going to make her purchase from somewhere that is more accomodating, that gives her equal opportunity to make a purchase by respecting her needs. So beyond doing the “right thing,” it’s in our self-interest to be as respectful as possible of our customers and potential customers—that’s good customer service.

Progressive enhancement considers customer service (a.k.a. user experience) at every level of an interface because it instructs us to provide equal opportunities to access content and functionality.

Back in January, Ben Hoh demonstrated his complete understanding of the progressive enhancement philosophy:

[Progressive enhancement] keeps the design open to possibilities of sexiness in opportune contexts, rather than starting with a “whole” experience that must be compromised. While it might simply seem like another way to achieve graceful degradation’s exact goal from the opposite direction, this newer approach is qualitatively different: because progressive enhancement doesn’t presume a single, ideal state to fall back from, it deals much better with emerging landscapes and multiple contexts. For example, developing an integrated design that provides an equally “full” and contextually appropriate experience for both mobile and desktop browsers is easier with progressive enhancement.

What a great way to put it. Eloquent, to say the least.

Interestingly, the intent of Ben’s post was not to sell people on the benefits of the progressive enhancement approach to web design but rather to ponder the question: what might progressive enhancement suggest in the world of culture and politics? It’s a subject I have been mulling over in my head for years and I thank him for finally coaxing it out of me.

Many people say it’s impolite to discuss politics (or religion), but I live for these discussions. Discussing either topic gives you so much insight into the what makes a person tick, and I love getting to know people. And despite having never formally studied it, I just love philosophy and believe that my personal philosophy (which is largely shared by the team here at Easy) greatly informs the work that we do. I hope sharing it leads to some interesting discussions both here in the comments and (just maybe) out in the real world when we run into each other—be it at conferences or the coffeshop.

P.S.: To see other perspectives on progressive enhancement and politics, I highly recommend reading Ben Hoh’s post and Barry Saunders’ follow-up.

It all started when I visited Home Elephant on a tip from GOOD magazine. It looks like an interesting service, but, as I have chosen not to create a Facebook account, is not something I can sign up for. And so it sparked this tweet:

AaronGustafson reminds you that not everyone has (or wants) a @facebook account. You’re limiting your reach by requiring one for sign up. /cc @HomeElephant

It prompted the following response from Jeff:

I’ll remind you that the limited reach may be a perfectly acceptable business decision, given other trade-offs.

To which I replied:

AaronGustafson agrees, @jcroft, a business may want to limit signups when starting up, but is 500 million potential users really a limit?

Jeff clarified his position (this was aseriesoftweets I’ve combined here so it’s easier to follow):

No, that’s not what I meant. What I meant was: Facebook offers you things you can’t get elsewhere. Those might be essential to your product. Or, it may not be worth the effort to build a version of your product that works without them. You said, “you’re limiting your reach.” I’m saying, “yeah, but I may be increasing my bottom line.” Sometimes doing what it takes to support standalone accounts means putting an excessive amount of resources into something.

I agreed with his position… to a point:

AaronGustafson sees your point, @jcroft. Still, it seems like there are services that offer options in addition to Facebook if you’re looking for shortcuts

To which he responded (combined from a shortseries oftweets):

What other service offers a social graph and auth? And if I used it, would you just complain that I require THAT service? If I need to accommodate people who don’t want to use Facebook (or whatever), I now have to build my own auth and graph which may be too costly. It’s a business decision. Maybe I’ll trade the extra users for the cost associated with them.

My reply (again, combined from twotweets):

AaronGustafson wouldn’t complain about a service that allows people who use different services to register/log in @jcroft. @janrain, for instance. AaronGustafson used @janrain in building the @StandardsSherpa site (in addition to supporting local system accounts). There’s a free version.

His response:

All I’m saying is, you have to balance business goals with technical and user goals. Multiple sign-ins is a user goal.

In a little cross-conversation, I replied

AaronGustafson agrees about finding a balance, @jcroft. But from a user’s perspective, being excluded from a service because you don’t is a turn off.

Jeff continued (again, from aseriesoftweets):

JanRain is great, but it’s only for auth, right? Doesn’t have graph, events, pages, groups, photos, etc. that FB has. If those things are essential to your app, you either use FB, or build them yourself (again, increasing cost). Really, I’m just making an observation that us UX people often forget that there are business goals, as well, and sometimes they conflict with the UX goals. Sometimes there are tradeoffs between optimal UX and cost.

And Jeff’s responseto my earlier comment:

Yep, I agree. Just pointing out, we don’t know WHY that site requires Facebook. Maybe they totally agree that it’d be better if they didn’t, but doing so would have cost them millions. I dunno.

Myresponse:

AaronGustafson agrees, @jcroft. There is a trade-off, but there are a lot of cons to @Facebook from a user perspective (many of which are privacy-related). They could have a valid reason, but it I think many companies take that route because they think “everyone” is on @Facebook

I then offered an anecdote (and a thank you):

AaronGustafson found that on @StandardsSherpa, with 6 login options + local, the split was 50-50 local vs oAuth. And that’s with a tech crowd. Aaron Gustafson enjoyed that discussion @jcroft. Thank you!

Jeff had a similarexperience:

Yeah, I get the same thing on Lendle. About 50% sign up without FB or Twitter. But, it DID take me more time to allow that. For me, it was worth it. But if others come to another conclusion, that’s cool, too. And yeah, great discussion! :)

Anyway, I just thought it was worth preserving and sharing that conversation with all of you as login/auth and Facebook integration is a hot topic right now. Coincidentally, GOOD published an article yesterday about why one of their senior editors is not on Facebook.

Oh, and Home Elephant got back to me at the end of my conversation with Jeff:

@AaronGustafson Working our tails off right now for non-FB signups. Stay tuned…