[applause]
Hello!
It's great to be here.
You might be noticing that I have a female
voice that's speaking for me right now.
That's because my interpreter is a woman.
If I could have chosen, if I could have
picked anyone for tonight, I think it
probably would have been a British man.
[laughter]
Have you ever been in that situation—
maybe you're in a supermarket
or you're walking down a hallway—
and you're walking towards a stranger
coming the opposite direction,
and you start that awkward dance where
you're trying to pass them
and you go to the right,
and they go to the right,
and you go to the left.
You know how awkward that is?
Have you ever been there?
[laughter]
So suppose you were deaf like I am
and you're going down the hallway
and the person coming towards you
is completely blind
and you start the awkward dance.
What would you do?
Have you ever thought about that?
How would you communicate?
This happened to my friend.
He's completely deaf,
and he was coming down the hallway
and there was a blind person
coming towards him.
And they started the awkward dance
and the blind man began to talk.
And my deaf friend--
what was he going to do?
He couldn't hear.
So his first intuition is to gesture,
point to his ears, and say, you know,
“I'm deaf,” but obviously
the blind man's not going to see that.
So his second intuition was to take out
his phone and type in his notes.
The blind man's not going to
see that, either.
So the third thing he did
was a little unusual.
He grabbed the blind man's hand, and he held it up to his ear
and he shook his head no.
And the blind man felt this and immediately understood,
“oh, this guy's deaf.”
That awkward dance was over.
They were able to just kind of share a laugh and pass each other.
So let's change the story a little bit.
What if my friend was himself-- he was deaf-- but this person wasn't
blind at all.
He could still see.
Maybe he spoke a different language.
If my friend decided to do the same thing, anyway--
grab his hand, put it up to his ear, and shake his head no—
would that person still understand him?
Probably.
Might be a little awkward, but it'd be universally understood.
This is what I do every day as a creative for Amazon and a designer.
I make visuals on the front page of the world's largest online storefront.
I solve these problems that have to be accessible to millions and millions
of different kinds of people with different backgrounds.
As a deaf person, I have to innovate solutions all the time.
I do this in my everyday life.
My communication medium changes with every interaction I have.
Everything from a pitch-- pitching an idea to a client--
to going into a bar and simply ordering a beer.
My communication style has to change.
I'm constantly thinking about
how to make a better solution and sometimes my solutions are awkward.
Like, for example, you see me signing with two hands right now,
but then I have to stop to click.
That's one example.
But I would like to argue that everyone in this room
has a disability, regardless of if it's permanent or temporary.
It could be something as simple as being pregnant,
having a broken arm, being older, or being a child.
Everyone has to figure out a way to cope and navigate around their disability,
and these solutions are worth sharing.
One example would be my wife.
She's hearing, and we visited Iceland a few years ago.
She's an educator, and she wanted to take a tour of a school for the deaf.
Now, neither of us can read or write Icelandic,
and I can't speak Icelandic Sign Language.
But being a native signer, I could understand much better than she could,
and so I ended up interpreting for her
for the first time in our entire relationship.
Often, I'm considered the disabled one,
but in this situation she was the one with a disability.
So what is Universal Design, anyway?
There was a professor named Ron Mace who passed away a few years ago.
He taught at the Center for Universal Design in North Carolina,
and he said that Universal Design
is the design of products and environments
to be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible
without the need for any adaptation or specialized design.
So humans interact with objects every day,
and all these objects fall somewhere on the spectrum of Universal Design,
from very universal to not at all.
So let's use a doorknob as a common example.
Doorknobs are not really usable by children.
They struggle. People with arthritis struggle to use doorknobs, and this guy.
[laughter]
So how could we improve on this design?
Well, the door lever. It's a lot better.
This guy can use it now.
But think about people with wheelchairs.
Have you ever seen them try to go through a door? It' horrible.
It's really tough for them.
Or parents with baby strollers.
It's really difficult, not fully accessible.
So to even improve upon the door design further,
the automatic sliding door was invented.
This is such a Universal Design.
It doesn't leave anyone out; even animals can use it.
One of my projects recently was to work on something
to make it more universally accessible.
Remember when Google glass came out--
It was so exciting a few years ago?
Now, may it rest in peace. [laughter]
But I started thinking about how could I use that--
how could I make that really awesome new technology beneficial--
for people like me?
So I thought of my mother immediately.
My mother is deaf, and she loves going to movies.
Often, movie theaters would release a movie with subtitles
that were imposed on the screen, and that was a really exciting event.
I don't know if you know this but deaf options in a movie theater
are really bleak, and you usually have to wear something like this.
Can you imagine going on your first date looking like this?
[laughter] Yeah.
So I thought, how can I make this better?
I decided to get a file for a movie script and put it in an app
so that you could have a timed app where you could press play
and go into any movie theatre and see the script on your Google Glass.
No one had done that before and I had to move pretty fast on that.
And the biggest reward was seeing --
was not only realizing that it helps people like my mom or people like me,
but also anyone can use it.
Imagine if you go to a different country and you go into a movie theatre--
you want to watch a movie-- you can watch it in your own language.
Or you could even have an app
become your own personal karaoke machine and have it play lyrics.
That is the genius of Universal Design.
When you achieve Universal Design,
it snowballs to the point where people--
even if you don't share the same disability--
everyone benefits from it.
Disability drives innovation.
The existence of disability forces you to come up with new solutions.
It does not impair you.
All of us have a disability,
regardless of if it's physical or cognitive, emotional or even temporary.
What is your solution?
Share it with us. It's what unifies us as humans.
Let's stop making that awkward dance so awkward. Thank you.
[applause]