During one part of her lecture, Chancey, allowed us to hear what she was listening to as she went through her presentation. Being visually impaired, she used a text to speech device that tells her everything going on. When she allowed us to listen to what she’s listening to, it sounded almost like gibberish to me. It was extremely sped up for my ears and I honestly could not tell what was going on but she understood it very well since she has been using it for a long time and was used to it. One very interesting thing that truly stuck with me was how much the text-to-speech and voice-to-text features are taken for granted by people who don’t necessarily require braille. This is something that I talked about in my midterm. Although I researched this topic very much, it didn't really hit me how important these features are until our speaker talked about how they personally impact her daily life. Such features are imperative for those that are visually impaired and many times even the slightest issues can cause a significant disturbance. Chancey brought up the example of the accessibility aspect of the Eventbrite. The text to speech feature, although it was meant to make navigation of the page easier, actually made it much harder and annoying to use. Thankfully such glitches are being worked on but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be as much push for better improvements.
In the second part of the class our speaker, Max Evans, spoke out about inclusivity, or rather lack of, when it comes to gender roles on the internet. Different websites such as youtube, facebook, and so many others, ask for the typical info when registering: name, age, date of birth, and gender! Why do these sites need to know someone’s gender but more importantly, if they really want to know, why do they only have the binary genders listed as options. This is something that Max was very passionate about in his presentation. In another class we discussed a similar topic and found that many times companies do this for marketing and profit purposes while unknowingly discriminating against people who may identify as something other than “the norm”. Max talked about how this can cause someone to misgender themselves and because of this, AI, that is constantly learning from our activity, will therefore also make similar mistakes. When this happens, the human behind the website/company is no longer the one interacting with other humans, it is AI that has control at that point.