Episode highlights
- 00:02:07 – Stefan’s personal journey with accessibility
- 00:19:28 – Examples of accessibility challenges in manufacturing
- 00:28:20 – Medication and temporary disabilities in accessibility
- 00:32:14 – Testing as the key to accessible design
- 00:33:46 – Where to follow Stefan’s journey
At some point in life, we all experience disability, whether temporary or permanent. Accessibility isn’t just for 'those people' - it’s about creating a world that works for everyone.
About our guest
Stefan is an expert in designing accessible technology and creating ergonomic products that are both practical and usable for diverse audiences. He leads large-scale projects across various industries, including transportation, city planning, medical technology, and manufacturing.
As the cofounder of incluthon.com, Stefan focuses on connecting accessibility experts with businesses, helping them understand accessibility needs and empowering them to create inclusive solutions.
He emphasizes the importance of involving the audience in the creation process, stating: “Include people with disabilities in your product teams!”
Stefan’s vision is to use accessibility as a jump-off point for product innovations beyond the visual level.
Podcast transcript
[00:00:00] Tina Ličková:
Welcome to UX Research Geeks, where we geek out with researchers from all around the world on topics they are passionate about. I’m your host Tina Ličková, a researcher and a strategist, and this podcast is brought to you by UXtweak, an all-in-one UX research tool.
This is the episode 51 of UXR Geeks, and today’s conversation is both deeply personal and profoundly insightful. Joining us is Stefan, a father, a husband, an accessibility advocate who brings a wealth of experience from industries as diverse as packaging and software design. Together we’ll dive into the philosophy and practicality of accessibility, not just as a design consideration, but as a fight for justice. Stefan shares his own life experiences, how childhood labels and professional assignments in manufacturing fueled his passion for inclusive design. And we’ll explore the challenges and opportunities and surprising moments that accessibility reveals in our digital and physical worlds.
Tune in.
Stefan, before I ask who you are, what do you do, I want to make sure that in this episode, everybody understands that I am coming from a little bit of a vulnerable place in that meaning that I’m talking to you as a sister of a deaf writer. So in some extent, this is a thing which when talking about accessibility, I might get a little emotional about stuff, but I also know that you are also emotional about accessibility as well.
And it’s not emotional passionate. So tell me who is the passionate accessibility Stefan?
[00:02:07] Stefan Barac: Yeah, basically I’m a proud father, lucky husband, sports fanatic. And as one of my idols, Winston Churchill always said for himself, I’m a little bit accident prone. So I have encountered a few accessibility issues myself.
And as a child, I’ve always been labeled as handicapped, like mentally, uh, handicapped within like my relations and family. Cause I was odd and it was falling over a lot and had strange behavior compared to the dawn normals made me quite emotional when I was young. And I was like, I’m going to show you.
[00:02:54] Tina Ličková: How are you showing it?
[00:02:56] Stefan Barac: Basically, every time I started fighting, like fighting everything and everybody, if somebody tried to exclude other people, I started to fight and that didn’t get me to a good place. That got me more to an emotionally very empty kind of space where I was always angry in my teens, but teenagers.
Most of the times are angry, right?
[00:03:20] Tina Ličková: Some of them. But I have 50 shades of anger completely on your side.
[00:03:29] Stefan Barac: Yeah. And, and I think like now I do get it. It’s like, it’s not intentional. And that’s why I’m so passionate about accessibility. And I’m, I’ve mellowed down because there’s two things I’ve realized is like, You reach more audiences and for longer time periods, if you stay calm and explain facts and figures.
Numbers and give quantitative to business people and like how much money can I make or how many more people can I integrate in percentages and for those people who are empathetic, who have common empathy for their fellow beings, just go and show them the cases of people like, yeah, this red green blind person.
Couldn’t see the call to action yet, but why it’s so clear it’s marked with a, with an arrow sign. Yeah, because the arrow and the info sign are on the same shape of background. So visually they can’t distinguish between the red and the green. Unluckily, the initial color was green and then it switched to red and red, green plant people.
And in testings, for example, I had one person who forgot that they were red, green, black. They told me, why didn’t you make it obvious? It’s like, in what case, please specify that. Yeah, you should have made it red. Yeah, it is red. And then, oh my god, I forgot. I’m red brain blind.
[00:04:59] Tina Ličková: Before we dive into examples, even more, there are definitely a lot of Definitions of accessibility.
I’m just wondering how you define accessibility.
[00:05:18] Stefan Barac: Pretty literally ability to access a certain services and products with minimum mental load or cognitive load. And the acceptance criteria is that people need to reach their goals. So it’s not just getting access to the information, but also being able to execute.
So it’s like in three parts. Sensory inputs, reaching me, cognitive functions, being able to process and motory actions like speaking or using my hand gestures or my face gestures to interact with the system. So in these three parts.
[00:05:57] Tina Ličková: And now I’m a little bit wondering because you pointed out the really nice thing being an alt kit.
I wouldn’t say I was a weirder, but I had a deaf brother. So we were known where we lived. I had to, I didn’t have to, but I was fighting for him and for myself a lot of times. And I think this is where my feeling of injustice towards some people is coming from, and that I want to fight for justice for them.
How would you define, and this is a pretty philosophical question, I’m aware, so feel free to translate it as you want, accessibility as a fight for justice. What is the link for you there?
[00:06:43] Stefan Barac: The link there is for me that All people are created equally. And if we follow that train of thought that every life is worth the same and equal, like women, men disabled or labeled as disabled in a certain kind of way, or fully done normal, like this every day kind of Joe going about their lives is like, every life has the same kind of value.
Then we need to give equal opportunities to people. And since we are equal but different in the way we work, we process things, and we are able to move about with things. Or perceive things we need to specify our value propositions to people. We need to open many more channels, talk back features are starting to get a grip or screen readers have come up for getting or including more and more people.
And philosophically, I think we’re doing a good job making the world a better place by giving more people access to business opportunities or trading opportunities so that they can get self sustained.
[00:07:58] Tina Ličková: Hmm. Yeah. It’s interesting for me to hear this as well, because. I’m thinking about my brother and how the internet helped him to solve a lot of things he probably couldn’t solve before, as well getting his access to information.
Although I am the one studying political science, he is much better at knowing our national politics and being the political scientist in the family because he got He asks us and he could way more inform himself, but I am sure there are situation on the internet for everybody, but for him, especially where he gets stuck because he doesn’t understand some terms or something.
And when looking at the research process, sorry, I’m like getting there, very branching there. But I have the experience when I tell somebody, Oh, I have a deaf brother. There are people very curious about it, which I am then a little bit like bored because. Come on, I’m almost 40 years old and 38 of these years I’m explaining how it’s with my brother.
And the second thing is when we were researching with him, because there were some cases where I called him like, okay, calm. We want to also see your perspective. For example, when I had my company, my researchers in my team were a little bit behaving differently. And again, because they were not used to, but it brought me to the idea of.
How to really make sure that it’s inclusive and that we, yeah, how to really make sure that it’s inclusive from the start till the end of the
[00:09:38] Stefan Barac: research. So the illusion of getting a hundred percent inclusivity, I can take away immediately. So that’s the common misunderstanding. Yeah. But if I follow the WCAG, like this web content accessibility guidelines, everything will be good.
No, it won’t. So you, we can only try to make it accessible for as many people as possible. There’s still so much growth opportunity, like accessibility is a growth market. If you look at it in the EU, there’s 80 million people label or falling under the label of the European accessibility act. And how many people do we have in the European union?
It’s roughly like 450 million. So it’s one person out of six. That is officially labeled to fall under the European Accessibility Act to include them on as many channels as possible, or us on as many channels as possible. And to the second part of what I’ve understood is that people react in an odd kind of way and treat people with disabilities different than their so called normal people, right?
It’s basically just like. Getting used to or accepting that it’s also a normal, it’s not a different, it’s not an oddball kind of thing. And it doesn’t help if you treat people differently that might be having hearing issues or motoric issues in other, in their bodily functions. It was like, yeah, if you go to the machining industry, I got laughed at, for example, because, uh, we proposed like a Gorilla Grip reset for the machines.
And then the chief engineer said, should we tell Mr. Barak how many of our engineering guys have five fingers still? And basically it’s like getting used to the situation. It’s like societies are changing, times are changing, and we can only try to educate people and showing them, Hey, it’s also normal.
There is no perfect Greek God. There is no Greek goddess is that’s the normal. The norm is what we are. It’s just, what do you cater towards? Do you cater towards mainly people who are like, red green blind? Like, male audiences? Then you should take care of that first of all, and prioritize that do we tend to cater towards people who are deaf, then we should really take care of the screen reading options in the conception phase first, and it’s specify what your target audience for your value proposition will be and what kind of challenges they already face.
[00:12:25] Tina Ličková: How do you proceed when learning about a target audience? What are your best practices in that one?
[00:12:33] Stefan Barac: Persona is like a burnt thing because it’s five pages. So I love what Strategizer did and I think it was 2017 or a little bit earlier. I have no idea. They wrote a book like the value proposition design book and they wrote many other books.
Very cool tools. I use empathy mapping and combined that with job profiles and I call them accessibility profiles. So basically I look at a certain age group that the target audience might be in. There’s like a range. And since, and what kind of sex. It’s addressing towards like, if I look at the medical applications that I have done in the past, yeah, there is not so many male people as a medical practitioners assistance is 99 percent women.
So basically I profile them by age, by sex. Because accessibility is sexist. That’s one thing because younger females tend to be more farsighted. Like I think 40, 40 percent and 45 percent of younger males, like in between their twenties and thirties are nearsighted like me, but I’m not in my thirties or my twenties anymore, so that doesn’t count.
So profiling is a good thing. And that I do through. Interviews through job boards, where I post questionnaires, then I love to also take use of journey mapping and just put two more lanes in there. That one thing being like the channel and the other thing, the physical device that people are using, and then noting the problems, the difficulties a certain person would have, that would be like my two accessibility lanes.
In the, because user journeys, like we have a current state, which is the problem state. It’s like our current value proposition, and that should be amended. And then there is like a future state that people want to create that serves as a base for user stories. If you do user story mapping, for example, and I’m not only speaking about digital design, I’m I’m more like a holistic approaching designer.
So coming out of machinery, I’ve done physical designs for machines where there were a lot of ergonomics to be considered. And combine that with the digital, because I also do like software consultancy or software products. Those are the basic tools in like the beginning phases of a project that I love to use.
I love to do workshops with the guys and show them in also invite users and show them what. Disabilities their users face when, or their target audiences face when I have the developers and the users, then talking to each other, sometimes it’s not a good idea because developers can get very emotional about their products.
And that’s like the first lesson we have to do is let go of our darlings, kill our darlings. What my mentor always told me.
[00:15:41] Tina Ličková: What do you mean by that?
[00:15:42] Stefan Barac: Kill your darlings is we also always fall in love with our own ideas. And Hartmut, he always came and he said, looking good, what you’re doing, but now you’re doing this.
And he deliberately told us like to tell him what our favorites are. And then he was like, Nope, you’re not doing that one. And then he forbade it to us. So that’s how he taught us to kill our darlings and learn that the design is not for you. The development is not for you. It’s for the people who have to use it.
And in that kind of sense, testing is the best source of killing your darlings because you have a hypothesis or we have a hypothesis and this is so easy to use. Everybody understands it so clear. And then you see like after testing with five people is if four out of five can’t read your input texts or can’t make out where your select input fields are or where the button for progress is.
Then it’s not good enough.
[00:16:39] Tina Ličková: And argue with me if you feel that what I’m telling you is not the truth, but I feel that accessibility or the UX of accessibility is considered in company like something special. Oh, we did already build something and now it’s maybe the time or even better in companies is usually, yeah, we will do the accessibility, but it’s somewhere in the roadmap far in the future and leave the roadmap very magically.
In your opinion, when you hear this, is it like that for you, or do you have a different?
[00:17:19] Stefan Barac: It’s like in UX. Yeah, we just make it function right now, like technical function, and then we can make it pretty later.
[00:17:25] Tina Ličková: Or
[00:17:27] Stefan Barac: let’s just implement this right now so that it works. And I promise you next year, the MVP will be transverted into something that is beautiful.
We’ll make it work. And tomorrow never comes next year, never comes that doesn’t phase me anymore. What I do is I go out now with the European Accessibility Act. I have the perfect set up because accessibility now is. Becoming the law. So everybody who’s discriminating and in the past said, I have no disabled people at my workplace because I have to also say, I am mainly doing B2B solutions.
[00:18:03] Tina Ličková: But in
[00:18:05] Stefan Barac: the past, so for banking or medical or machining industry, it’s mainly business users have to use the machines or the devices that I helped design. And in that kind of sense, People say, yeah, but it’s only for internal application or it’s only for manufacturing or it’s only for this. And what I asked them, like in the beginning, it was like, and those people are not humans.
And then faces were falling and it was like, yeah, maybe we shouldn’t combine like the rubber boots in our packaging factory with the stainless steel floors. Maybe we should try to, because it was in that case, a packaging, a manufacturer. And there we had the concept of. Having their next factory physical and digitally, they had in the current state, stainless steel floors, rubber boots and a high moisture environment, which was big indicator for trouble because many people like slipped and broke their arms, legs, sometimes even necks.
And that’s also an accessibility kind of question. Accessibility is a super easy sell in the manufacturing industry because there it’s Yeah, super easy. As soon as a person says, we have no disabled people, I asked, do you want to disable people? And then,
[00:19:26] Tina Ličková: Oh my God. Okay.
[00:19:28] Stefan Barac: No, it’s in German. We say in the, in the manufacturing, because if you, for example, grab into a spindle of a milling, drilling, or honing machine, and that thing is on.
Then you’ll love the red button that is right next to you that says emergency stop. I can speak from my own experience. I had that experience when I was doing my internships in a glass manufacturing company in Corinthia, where I come from, when I was like 15 and I was changing the brimstone in there that roughed up the edges of glass and suddenly the machine was going on and my hand was still in there.
So I was never that lucky. It was really like spaghettis. It peeled the meat off my bones immediately. And I was so happy to have this button there. And I bring those examples as well. And then people are listening more carefully because it’s about safety and security, but not only for that product. It’s about their people because workforce is really hard to come by.
[00:20:29] Tina Ličková: That’s really interesting because just as you were mentioning it, and I was trying to listen, but what came up to me. Was a situation when I was getting schooled in a training. And I think my brother just closed the door with the keys inside and there was, and it’s years back and there was no way of helping him because he couldn’t call the company.
I somehow managed to know what kind of situation he is. And the company wasn’t just comprehending that deaf person. And I’m always wondering, especially when we get older, how are we going to manage situation, which are a matter of life and death in, I think the number one, one, two is already, you can send an SMS, but in, in situations.
You are in, sometimes in a very hard situation, life threatening situation, you are not able to send an SMS. It’s an interesting point that accessibility could be, and definitely is, a matter of life and death.
[00:21:43] Stefan Barac: Yeah. If you look at it, it’s just saving time. It’s About the effect, can I reach my goal and about the efficiency, like how much faster can I reach this goal?
And it’s very similar to usability because it also has the ergonomics in there. And it’s in my opinion, a reason because it’s a subpart of usability, like accessibility is coming first, but. Is a sub part of usability because this ergonomics and human health and wellbeing story has already been told by usability.
And yeah, as you said, there’s so many opportunities, there’s a huge potential market out there of just making things work better for all different variations of people and making them work faster or making them work and market work faster in that kind of sense.
[00:22:46] Tina Ličková: And this is interesting also, and I’m going a little bit back with in our discussion, because if you’re saying, okay, accessibility is coming first, but it is a subset of usability.
And we were talking about this case in companies where accessibility is like something special and maybe, you know, praising each other for even doing it, which should be normal as it’s now a law, how do you. Persuade people in the digital space where it’s maybe not the life and death matter to do the accessibility first.
[00:23:22] Stefan Barac: That’s a tough word. That’s why we shortened it by A11Y. Okay.
[00:23:29] Tina Ličková: Nice. Okay, now I get it.
[00:23:31] Stefan Barac: It’s like those 11 letters in between the A and the Y that are so complicated. I mainly try to go and appeal to their business sense. It’s mainly if you have mainly male operators that are, and funnily enough, I just discussed it with a friend from Holland, Jared Huke.
And he said to me, did you know that like in oil rigs, there’s like even 20 percent red, green, blind people. I was like, really? That’s odd. So it’s like higher than the norm because on average in the world, it’s 8%. I
[00:24:06] Tina Ličková: think.
[00:24:07] Stefan Barac: And in India, it’s the highest rate. I think up there is like with 13 percent of male having trouble with colors.
Color perception in Norway and North and Europe, it’s also like 11 to 12%. And if you go to south to southern parts of Europe is 7% or so, 8%. But still, I try to appeal to that. So statistics say conversion rate. If you look at conversion rate and people throw millions at improving their conversion rate.
Statistically, you can go on the statista and find it out. The average that you make it better is in between 0. 9 and maximum 2%, like 1. 9%. And if you make it better for already 8%, or if you’re in Norway for 12 percent of the users, you were already like in a different kind of 10 digits. It’s like one to 10.
And in that kind of sense, I appeal to their business motivation, like how much do you want to have as a turnover, 10 percent more, or just 1 percent more for much more money. We look at the Eisenhower model, like what’s important and what’s urgent is. And also like, uh, another model, is it easy to achieve and is it making a huge effect, like catering towards accessibility is easy to be done, costs me very little money because sometimes it’s just hacks as well.
You might call it and trying things out, experimenting with what you’ve got, your tech base or whatever. And it has a huge effect for your customers. And then for your purse as well, because the faster your customers or the happier your customers, the more they are going to buy into your product.
[00:25:58] Tina Ličková: Is then the empathy following?
[00:26:00] Stefan Barac: Empathy is a good thing. And many of us have it. Some don’t have empathy or a lack of empathy. And it’s nothing bad. It’s just socially we’re as human beings constructed differently. As I said, that’s the reason why most of humankind’s non empathetic people are sitting in C suite management. At least if I trust the sources that I’m reading, they’re not sitting in prison.
They’re sitting in management because they’re quick deciders, they’re fact based and they’re. merciless sometimes. Okay, what’s the turnover rate? What’s the cost? Okay, too little. Zack, thank you. Done. So empathy follows on a broader kind of level. It’s more like the operations, like you, me, many people in the operations field are very empathetic.
I do not say that C suite management is not empathetic. For example, Microsoft, we had this topic before. It’s trying to make it harder for every one of us, but not deliberately. Actually, I know that there was a person in C suite management that who had a disabled son or kid. I don’t know if it was a son or a daughter.
And through that, the empathy for disabled people and the curiosity towards accessibility In the whole company of those, they’re still doing a very horrid job because those patches are making it more difficult on other levels, but at least they’re caring. At least they are trying. And that’s because Somebody in their C suite management had a, somebody who was there has empathy towards people through own experience, like you or me.
[00:27:52] Tina Ličková: I have two questions to close up. We were talking about the permanent disabilities. We were talking about short term injuries. And I’m looking into our notes and I find pretty fascinating. Then you have a note there. What about people who take medication? And I’m even wondering, how do you find out even before recruiting them?
Tell me how, and how is it affecting accessibility?
[00:28:20] Stefan Barac: It’s got a huge impact. If you look at the site informations of a medication, it says, do not conduct driving in driving, or do not do this. Do not operate heavy machinery while taking these and the cancer patients, for example, to have an extreme example.
And cancer is getting like more and more popular in these days because it’s due to our lifestyle. And we get older as well. And so that’s a factor. And the therapy has a huge influence on the population that’s still working because people who have cancer treatments are still working. It’s like in the, in my forties, I am at a big risk of having cancer of a certain degree.
sort. I’m not saying that I’m having one. I’m just saying then the medication that I would get or the therapy that I would get would have a huge implication on my job. If I would be a machinery operator or something, and still I would need a livelihood and still I would need to operate those machineries.
and it influences us in cognitive abilities. It already raises our cognitive load because we deal with our bodily functions like cognitive load and cognitive abilities are two opposite things. For example, a cognitive potential that we have is like 120 bits per second of rate of understanding, of sensing, and of perceiving.
That’s the cognitive ability. And if I, or if you are listening to me actively right now, I am, or the active listening is reducing your cognitive ability already by minimum 50%. So you are still only able to operate with 60 bits per second on other tasks. Let’s say if you’re moving around or Breathing or anything else.
And that gets lower and lower. And if you already have medication that already happens, your cognitive ability in extreme cases, or if you’re drunk or hungover from three days ago, you still have the effects of being drunk, although you are having been drunk, you, although you might not have anything over 0.
0 per mil anymore. So technically you are not drunk anymore, but practically you are still having the cognitive disabilities that are inflicted upon us through this cultural behavior or medication from pain medication from a tooth doctor visit, like a dentist visit or any operation, or maybe we gave birth me less likely, but a woman giving birth.
Or a man having an operation, like an arm operation or whatever. So, that’s a factor that needs to be considered. And it’s out there. People are starting to get curious about that. Like the short term and the mid term and maybe even long term effects. If I break something or I slit my wrist and lose nerve functions or those kind of things.
That needs a very long time to, to come back. But that’s the next kind of cell with accessibility that it’s not just for them or those guys because we have the normals here, but basically we all at a certain point in life are going to be disabled or are disabled.
[00:31:45] Tina Ličková: And my last question would be, because we are talking as two people, maybe short sighted, both with glasses, but pretty privileged people, and I feel this is maybe the same thing as talking about sexism, racism, like, how do we as white, privileged, wealthy people should be talking about accessibility further, and how should we reflect on it?
[00:32:14] Stefan Barac: I believe in the practical approach of leading by doing. So I love to have. examples, cases out there that prove that put the pudding in the proof or the, or the proof in the pudding, they say the other way around. So don’t just, let’s just not talk. Let’s just do walk the walk and have projects and try to get things better and experiment.
I think you had Stephanie podcast. She’s also a big advocate for, yeah, you don’t want to do it wrong, but sometimes you go wrong, at least experiment. And at least do and put it out and I went wrong in, in my past often, much more often than I went, right. And the thing is, I’m also talking about like on Congresses or conferences about, okay, don’t do this, don’t do that.
Or you end up like this or that or that. So I show my belly flops. To educate people, young researchers, young design doers is you can try it. I’ve ended up there. I don’t know. Maybe you succeed. I didn’t, but always go and test for it. So pick your audiences. That’s the main message I’m having. Testing is really killing our darlings so quickly and educating us so quickly on what our customers or target audiences can do and cannot do.
There’s nothing faster and it costs so little.
[00:33:45] Tina Ličková: Where can people follow you
[00:33:46] Stefan Barac: On LinkedIn I am quite active. And yeah, I’ll have a few announcements in the near future, because with this accessibility topic, I’m really going on my own now in the next year, that’s a planned step and yeah, whoever wants to learn about accessibility or at least the point of view on accessibility, please follow me on LinkedIn.
I’ve also put the QR code on here.
[00:34:13] Tina Ličková: Thank you for your time.
[00:34:15] Stefan Barac: Thank you, Tina. Thanks for having me.
[00:34:22] Tina Ličková:
Thank you for listening to UXR Geeks. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow our podcast and share it with your friends or colleagues. Your support is really what keeps us going.
If you have any tips on fantastic speakers from across the globe, feedback, or any questions, we’d love to hear from you too. Reach out to geekspodcast@uxtweak.com.
Special thanks goes to our podcast producer, Jana Filušová, our social media specialist Daria Krasovskaya and our audio specialist Melisa Danišová. And to all of you. Thank you for tuning in.
💡 This podcast was brought to you by UXtweak, an all-in-one UX research tool.
