Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes

If you’ve been following, you know that over the last few months, we’ve explored different ways in which communication can break down for parts of your audience. Especially in cases where inclusion is not sitting at the forefront of our considerations, when it comes to creating our content and delivering it to our audience members.

For kicks, in today’s post, I figured we could analyze a few common areas where communication can easily break down for people in your audience when they happen to live with a disability related to colour perception. When we allow ourselves to revisit what we take for granted in any aspect of our lives, oftentimes, what we find can seriously change our perspectives for the better. This is no different when it comes to speaking professionals, seeking to develop a better grasp on what it means to speak more inclusively.

So let’s consider a few easy examples together.

Colour perception, or lack thereof…

What about the people in your audience who deal with colour perception issues, and can’t clearly perceive the colours being used in your slides? Those amongst you reading this who are colourblind, as I am, are already very familiar with that particular pain point. But even if you’re not colourblind and just happen to be a bit older, you might also be feeling your own variation of the same challenges when it comes to colour perception. After all, as we age, we intrinsically start to understand how colours tend to look a bit more dull or washed out…

While those are different conditions, they ultimately lead to similar frustrations when speaking professionals choose to rely only on colours to convey meaningful information.

Now, let’s consider something a bit more complex, such as the representation of complex data through graphs or pie charts for example. Have you ever given any thought to the struggles that part of your audience might experience when they attempt to associate each colour of your graphs to its respective data point on the screen? How they might possibly differentiate one data point from another when the colours used to identify each one is not a distinguishable or reliable cue for them? What about the folks who might not be able to make out the text on the screen, because it’s too small for comfort? Because it’s too thin? Because its contrast is too low?

How might some audience members possibly follow along with what you’re saying, if they can’t even visually identify what you’re talking about in the first place? What if some of them can’t focus on what you’re saying because they’re busy squinting, trying to read the slide? What if some of them are so focused on your every word, that they miss key complementary information presented on the slides that you didn’t bother to verbalize? What if some of them can’t easily perceive some of the details on your slides, or can’t even see the slides at all, because they’re visually impaired, or even blind? What if others can’t properly hear you, as you’re going through each slide? What if? What if? What if…

As you can tell just by looking at these not-all-that-uncommon examples, the list of ways in which things can go wrong for some of your audience members can get quite long. Can you predict and avoid all of those challenges today? Probably not. But could you learn to do so eventually? Absolutely.

All you need to do is pay a bit more attention to other people’s perspectives, and stop making so many assumptions about what your audience prefers, needs, or expects. Remembering that we are not representative of our audience members is crucial in building the skillset to becoming a truly inclusive speaking professional.

A new set of shiny exit ramps to Fadeout town

By making assumptions about people’s ability to interpret and understand our data, our materials, and our content, what we’re doing is offering our audience members yet another brand new set of shiny exit ramps to Fadeout Town.

By failing to make each concept or idea in our presentation clearly distinctive from the others in ways that don’t rely solely on a unique sensory characteristic (such as its colour, its location, its shape, or its visual association), we’re causing some people in our audience to struggle, and incidentally, disengage from us. From our content. From our brand.

By not clearly describing each data point orally as we introduce their brilliance, we’re offering some of them yet even more potential reasons to fade out from the conversation. We can, and must, do better. Because by now, we know that Fadeout Town is just around the corner and this is exactly what our audience members with disabilities have unconsciously come to expect because sadly, they’ve been down that road before…

Standing in front of an entire audience, in the spur of the moment, it’s easy to forget that we’re not talking to a homogeneous group of people, but rather to a multitude of individuals, who all have their own specific sets of biases, needs, preferences and expectations.

It comes down to a simple observation.

If we’re not explicitly doing our very best to address the diverse sets of biases, needs, preferences, and expectations of every individual in our audience, then we’re implicitly only going to appeal to the biases, needs, preferences and expectations of a limited subset of that group. That’s just the way it is!

So how can we approach our content delivery in such a way, that no one unconsciously starts looking for the next exit ramp to Fadeout Town? I’m glad you asked! To make that point, let’s zoom in on some of the people that could very well be sitting in that audience of ours that day. Let’s imagine a few of the not-so-uncommon folks that almost always make up parts of our audiences.

People who have dyslexia. People who are colourblind. People who are blind. People who have vestibular disorders. People who are deaf, or hard of hearing. People who have ADHD. People who are on the autism spectrum. People who are simply getting older. Let’s walk a mile in their shoes, and think of how they might experience our presentation. But from THEIR point of view, not ours.

Learning from other people’s perspectives

So, over the next few weeks, we’ll discover a few typical personas of audience members who have common disabilities, so we can start thinking about them, who they are, and how to learn from their experiences as well. We’ll explore how your presentation might be perceived from their own perspectives, and how it may radically differ from what you’d normally expect. As we go through these perspectives, we’ll analyze some of the challenges faced, and what we can do about mitigating them as inclusive speaking professionals.

Through them, I’ll teach you yet even more tips and techniques to apply to your content delivery, to ensure that you are indeed speaking inclusively, so that your audience can, in turn, be empowered to truly connect with you, your message, your brand, and your offering.

Armed with an understanding of the different stages involved in the journey to becoming a more inclusive speaking professional, we’ll be able to identify easy solutions to make your delivery and style that much more inclusive for everyone. One step at a time, one inclusive speaking strategy at a time.

But let’s put a pin in that for now. Just make sure to come back next week for more.