PwC's Tech While You Trek: Tech Innovation for Accessibility and Inclusive Design

Tune into another episode of Tech While You Trek to hear PwC Managing Director Ramona Pierson and Director Thomas Hawkins talk about how they are using artificial intelligence to create more inclusive and accessible technology products.

Transcript

 Tech Innovation for Accessibility and Inclusivity Design 

Adam (00:08):

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of PwC's Tech While You Trek. I am your host, Adam. And today I have with me, Ramona Pierson and Thomas Hawkins to talk about the tech innovation they are doing to help products be more inclusive and accessible for everyone. So why don't you all introduce yourselves?

Ramona Pierson (00:25):

So I'm Ramona Pierson and I recently joined PwC a little over a year ago. And before joining PwC, I had been CEO of multiple education companies, and then worked for FAANG companies in the fraud and abuse space, and then joined PwC to really work on some really interesting next generation products in transforming workplace learning.

Thomas Hawkins (00:52):

My name is Thomas Hawkins, director of science and technology. I lead a team of software engineers and data scientists in development of digital products for the firm and our clients. I'm a computer scientist by training. I've been in this field for over 20 years across a variety of industries, including e-commerce, logistics and defense.

Adam (01:11):

So why don't we start with Ramona? Why don't you tell us a little bit about your personal journey with disabilities and how it's helped you to get where you are today in your role at PwC?

Ramona Pierson (01:21):

I had gone out for a run and one evening I got hit by a drunk driver. My left foot got caught up in the wheel-well of the car. My head hit the ground. And I woke up 18 months later, blind, unable to walk or talk and had to rebuild my life again. So I had many years where I lived in a senior home. I ended up with a seeing eye dog. I was completely blind. The senior citizens helped me speak again, and I had multiple surgeries to help me get on my feet, literally, again, and to be able to speak and also walk.

Ramona Pierson (02:00):

And throughout my journey, I had confronted education systems that wouldn't let me enter education systems, fought with the ADA programs, the Americans Disability Act, to get me into college. And then, even finding myself in college, there weren't the tools. There wasn't text to speech technologies. I had to barter with students to read the notes for me, and it was very much a struggle. And over time, I had the opportunity of having brain surgery and my left eye repaired, and now I see out of one eye. But going through that process and having to learn everything all over again, and to be able to innovate technologies and tools for myself, to be able to get a job, finish my education and to pursue a career over time had been a challenge.

Adam (03:00):

That's a pretty incredible story of resilience. How did that affect the way that you sort of shaped your professional career from that point forward?

Ramona Pierson (03:08):

I realized that so many people sacrificed, raised money, helped me recover that I had to pay it forward in some way and bring the culmination of my experiences to bear. And so, even the choices in education and what colleges I went to were intentional. And then, when I ended up in doing a lot of neuro research and I had the opportunity to enter into education, I chose to do that. So many times it felt like education was a barrier to me because I could not access the information a professor put on the whiteboard or the textbooks and had to really problem solve in that space. And so, I really wanted to partner with different foundations to fund innovations that would allow better accessibility into education.

Adam (04:06):

So what do you do in your team of product innovations? Why was there a need for a team like that at PwC?

Ramona Pierson (04:13):

What we're doing right now, we have five pillars in inclusivity. Regardless of socioeconomic background or race or abilities, companies are trying to embrace differences. And all the cognitive diversity that you can have in a company, and research is really showing that that diversity is transforming businesses. And so, what we're doing is very important in that space. We also have a pillar around ethical AI and ethical data. So companies now have an ethical requirement to really think through the models that they're using, privacy, the ethics of AI, and how do we bring inclusion in those models so that we're not creating silos in how we think, what we know, how we read, and who we connect with. PwC takes all of this very seriously and they develop this space so that we can revisit all of our technologies and start to innovate in this space.

Adam (05:19):

So what would be your nominee for the most unique advancement in this space? What's the one that is the game changer?

Thomas Hawkins (05:28):

Yeah. Interesting. I'm going to say the commodification of AI-generated content, and let me unpack that a bit. Content for digital products is time-consuming to create. When you're building a website or application, even something as simple as a photo or an icon takes time to produce professional quality. In the accessibility space, we also have to build the non-visual alternatives to the information that you want to present. So if you create a video, you have to create the alternative text. You have to create the audio or other control mechanisms for fast-forwarding or rewinding the video. And the skillset required to create that content is challenging to get because it's a combination of both artistic and technical skills, and that's where the commodification comes in.

Thomas Hawkins (06:16):

We need mechanisms and tools to generate the content more quickly, but to make sure that that content is also accessible. And the solution that we're bringing to the space is the use of AI-based tools, such as natural language processing, deep learning. We're enabling designers and developers to accelerate the creation process through software that can, in a sense, learn from what the human is doing and produce additional content in parallel to accelerate their work.

Adam (06:45):

So what are some of the challenges in the space?

Ramona Pierson (06:48):

When you think about virtual reality now, I happen to have only one eye. So my experience with 3D is a little hampered. Now, imagine if I'm a blind person and I'm using virtual reality for a training that my company is requiring, I have no idea what's happening in the background. Not only are we tackling those issues, but we're also trying to figure out, can we get signals from inside the room, bring it in to the virtual space and explain the space? So for instance, if I were blind wearing a headset, I might be able to now hear where my keys are on the table, or be cued into the real space around me and not just the virtual space. If you're deaf, how do you get the amplification or the information? And so, being able to put sign language inside of the headset or texts to help explain what's happening in there.

Thomas Hawkins (07:50):

Yeah. Those technical challenges that Ramona described are significant enough in their own right. And then building software in this space is also challenging because many other requirements are non-quantifiable. Traditional software attempts to hit a functional target you can measure. But we also have to make sure that the applications and the content that we create are on brand. They need to support diversity and inclusion initiatives, or other types of accessibility that are not something that's classically measured. And these aspects are much harder to quantify, especially as we build out assistive AI technologies that require data to learn and train what do you mean in all cases by inclusivity, what do you mean in many cases by brand. It takes a little bit to quantify that and train the systems up to be truly useful to you in that space.

Adam (08:38):

So I'd love to know, when you start developing a piece of software, is there a list of disabilities you have to account for? Is it sort of a brainstorming kind of thing? Is it open-ended? How does that work?

Thomas Hawkins (08:50):

From a software requirement standpoint, we also consult the guidelines published in particular industries, depending on the application. So for example, if you're building a classic web-based application, then the web content accessibility guidelines or WCAG series of guidelines for various types of web accessibility that one should consider. So we also develop requirements from those various standards.

Thomas Hawkins (09:14):

For things like VR, XR, AR it's a very interesting time in those spaces because while there are some lessons learned in the classic 2D world, a lot of the guidelines have yet to be developed for the 3D space or VR space. And so, for a lot of those, we try to extend best practices from 2D, but are also an active area of research for us to develop at the same time best practices to consider all of the accessibility challenges and that new mode of communication.

Adam (09:43):

So how is what you all are doing going to bring innovation to the essential emerging technologies? And how will this change the way people create content and products?

Thomas Hawkins (09:53):

The essential 8 are the core technologies that we see impacting every industry over the next three to five years. And what's interesting about these disruptive technologies is that the majority of them are fundamentally based on 3D technology, virtual and augmented reality happen in the 3D world, robotics, drones, many AI applications also require 3D simulations to test and build your systems. And obviously 3D printing relies on it. So the tools that we're creating in our space to assist differently abled in a 3D world are going to be highly applicable to a wide variety of industries that are going to be impacted by these disruptive technologies of the next five years.

Ramona Pierson (10:33):

As we are driving into the spaces and companies are seeing what we're doing, companies are now using virtual reality for training, governments are doing it for training their soldiers. Also, now we're able to bring the outside world into these spaces, and with the work that we're doing, being able to lower the bar for entry for all companies in education to be able to enter is going to be phenomenal. Reducing the bar to entry for this technology will allow for this technology to grow exponentially quickly.

Adam (11:20):

So before I let you all go, I'm going to ask you one last question just for fun. Are you ready?

Ramona Pierson (11:24):

Yeah, I can't wait.

Thomas Hawkins (11:26)

Go ahead.

Adam (11:28):

So what would you have 20 years ago be most surprised, impressed, blown away that the you of today uses from a technology standpoint?

Ramona Pierson (11:37):

I just got my sight back about 20 years ago and it was new to me. So I think that being able to team up with people and technology and to use these conference technologies are phenomenal for us. To be able to bring people from all over the place into a single space, and to have cellular technology that allow us to have all of these apps on one platform is crazy. I don't have to see any more because everything speaks to me and I can speak into the app. So if I had these technologies before, it would have made my life so much easier than it was way back then.

Thomas Hawkins (12:25):

Yeah. 20 years ago, I would have expected the vast majority of mainstream technologies to become hyper-focused on the private and the proprietary. And there's certainly a lot of that. But we see startling counterexamples, at least to me, in operating systems and software, I would have expected intellectual property hoarding. And yet, I use open source operating systems and software free of charge. And even the asset creation that we've been discussing has a tremendous ecosystem of free content, both amateur and professional productions of entertainment videos, how to blogs, creative commons, licensed material that one can use free of charge and as is. So I think that was surprising to me, the world of technology is a lot more open than one might've expected and it does make an exciting time for innovators since there's a wealth of material for you to use in your creations.

Adam (13:13):

Well, listen, Ramona Pierson, Thomas Hawkins, thank you so much for your time.

Ramona Pierson (13:16):

Thank you. It's our pleasure.

Thomas Hawkins (13:18):

Appreciate it.

Adam (13:20):

This has been another episode of Tech While You Trek. I've been your host, Adam, and we will talk to you again next time.

Speaker 4 (13:30):

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