Interview with Denis Boudreau

QUESTION 01 Can you tell us a bit about yourself, and how your disability might impact your experience, as someone who attends live in-person and virtual events?

I’m a French-Canadian digital accessibility and inclusion advocate who has been working in this space for over 22 years at this point. I was born colourblind, so the concept of colours has always been a bit of a mystery to me. As years go by, I’m experiencing age-related vision and hearing loss, which used to be amusing when it started hitting me around the age of 45, but now that I’m 51, it’s starting to have quite a significant impact on my day-to-day life and interactions.

I’ve always identified myself as being a hopeless introvert, but I recently concluded that what I have is probably more akin to social anxiety in certain settings. Finally, conducting a lot of research on disabilities as part of my daily practice, I’ve also been exploring the realm of neurodiversity, and I’m growing quite convinced that I might be living somewhere on the edges on the autism spectrum, too. It would certainly explain a lot about some of my behaviours and habits. I’m thinking about getting a formal diagnosis eventually.

All these things have an impact on my experience attending live, in-person or virtual events. They’re a constant reminder that I just don’t fit the mold of the average audience member anymore. Assuming I was ever a fit.

QUESTION 02 Thinking back on some of your experiences attending in-person or virtual events, what are some of the worst things speakers, trainers, and other communication experts can do to ruin your experience as an attendee?

The aspects that impact me the most definitely relate to my inability to reliably perceive colours, or information that is only conveyed through colours. When speakers and trainers make use of colours in their materials, when they present charts and graphs based on colours, I usually am unable to connect the dots because I can’t associate key data points. I’ll miss short links in paragraphs of content when they’re only identified by poorly contrasted colours, and some content will be hard to read (and sometimes almost painful) when the contrasts are too bright, like a bright red on a bright green background.

Besides colour perception challenges, I find more and more regularly that I like to depend on captions or transcripts when attending virtual presentations, as my hearing isn’t what it used to be. In the context of in-person presentations, I’ll make sure to sit closer to the sound system or speaker, to improve my chance of hearing properly. So, any information that is not communicated through the microphone stands a pretty high risk of being at least partially lost on me.

Finally, due to my partial vision loss, things are definitely blurrier than they used to from a distance, so if I sit a little too far from the action, being able to perceive what’s going on also quickly gets more complicated. While I can control how far I sit from the screen or the stage, what I can’t control is how small the text will be on the presenter’s slides, or how legible that font will be. If it’s too small or fancy, it will quickly get very frustrating. Slight headaches might also be involved, from all the squinting and extra cognitive load.

These are some of the perks of getting older, I guess. Accommodations are so important.

QUESTION 03 Can you share some of the great things speakers, trainers, and other communication experts sometimes do that make a positive impact on your ability to fully enjoy your in-person or virtual event experiences?

In the same train of thoughts, any speaker who will make sure to follow basic accessibility guidelines for use of colours and content is sure to become my next new best friend! Making sure that sufficient contrasts are systematically used in their materials and slides, supporting any important information they share through colours with text or other visual cues, making use of the microphone, repeating questions from the audience before answering them, and making sure their content can be comfortably read from the back of the room are all great ways to make my experience that much more enjoyable.

On top of all those things, if the videos they share happen to be captioned, and they don’t ask us to do some silly, embarrassing things that might require me to get out of my comfort zone, then I might just fall in love! Platonically, of course.

QUESTION 04 If you had one piece of advice to give speakers, trainers, and other communication experts, so their content became more inclusive of people who have disabilities, what would it be?

My one piece of advice would be to educate yourself about inclusive communication practices, to better understand how diverse the audience actually is. One-size-fits-all approaches never work for everyone, and you will systematically leave people out if you are not paying attention to diversity. Keeping in mind that about 40% of any audience composition will likely deal with one of more situations related to a disability, ageing, or marginalization based on technology should have a dramatic impact on what speakers consider important, if they really care to truly connect with all of their audience members.

QUESTION 05 Thank you for sharing some of your insights with us today. As we wrap up our conversation, is there anything that you’d like to add, such as another thought, another piece of advice, another perspective, etc.?

Maybe that one of the best ways for speakers to become inclusive is simply to stop assuming that their audience is an extension of themselves (people who think like them, look like them, and act like them). The more they do make this assumption, the higher the risk will be that part of their audience will disengage from them and their message. The bigger their assumptions are that their own preferences, biases, needs, and expectations reflect the preferences, biases, needs and expectations of their audience members, the bigger the disconnect will be with audience members who don’t happen to agree with their perspective.