Design For All feat. Cameron Farwell

In this Design For All blog, we talk with Cameron Farwell, Senior Designer at assistive tech company CareScribe, about his journey from agency work to designing for tech-for-good.

Cameron discusses the importance of embedding accessibility into every stage of design and how small changes can lead to meaningful, lasting impact.

The purpose of the series ‘Design For All’ is to demonstrate the importance of inclusivity in design and share knowledge on how to create more inclusive and accessible design experiences.

Can you please introduce yourself, what you do and tell us about your experience? 

Hey Chris! Sure thing – I’m Cameron Farwell, a Senior Designer at Bristol-based assistive tech company CareScribe. Our mission is to provide innovative solutions that empower people with disabilities to capture and comprehend information.  

I joined CareScribe 3 years ago having worked in a design agency until that point. Working agency-side helped my kickstart my career and the opportunity to work on lots of interesting projects for various household names was always interesting, but I missed being part of the longer-term product journeys once an agency project came to an end. Learning about users and  iterating, and helping a product grow and evolve over time off the back of this is the most rewarding part of the job to me. Wanting that experience pushed me towards an in-house role, and pairing that with tech-for-good was perfect fit. 

During my 3 years at CareScribe both the business and our products have grown quickly. We currently offer two products; TalkType is highly accurate, lightning-fast dictation software, designed to help users transform speech into text. Caption.Ed is note-taking and captioning software, which helps people better comprehend and retain the huge amounts of information thrown at them in their busy lives. 

My role has seen me working across both our products, but our recent relaunch of TalkType and the growth of our design team has meant I can now focus more of my time on Caption.Ed. 

How important is inclusion to your work? 

Very. From a personal perspective, this focus was a big part of the reason I decided to join CareScribe and it’s baked into just about everything throughout the company. Coming from an agency role, all too often accessibility and inclusion were buzzwords thrown around at the early stages of a project, only to tumble down the list of priorities as budgets and timelines were squeezed. I love the feeling of knowing that our work at CareScribe is helping make people’s lives that little bit easier. 

Making products accessible broadens the audience who can use, and benefit from, your product. If we think about the design hierarchy of needs, if a user can’t perform basic actions in your product you’ve fallen at the first hurdle, and any effort put into the upper echelons of the hierarchy will become irrelevant to them. 

That focus on inclusion goes a long way and helps individuals build that strong affinity with your brand and product that can only be a good thing over time. A common piece of feedback we hear is that many users of assistive tech feel self-conscious about accessibility products because of a perceived stigma around using them. A long-term goal of ours at CareScribe is to help bring about a change in attitude around accessible products.  People shouldn’t have to feel extra stress and anxiety about using a product that is there to benefit them. Every time any of us makes a decision or action that promotes inclusion is a small step in this direction. 

How are you promoting inclusive design through your work and what are some of the challenges you’ve faced? 

One thing I feel very grateful for at CareScribe is that there is never a sense of having to fight the corner of accessibility and inclusion, everyone is totally bought into this and given the nature of our products it’s always at the forefront of people’s minds. There is a great enthusiasm and knowledge base around accessibility throughout CareScribe’s engineering and QA team. Between this and the nature of the business/our products, the conversation is ‘how can we do better’ rather than ‘is this really necessary’ when it comes to making our products more inclusive. 

Speaking specifically in terms of the design process, there are a few things we’re consciously trying to do to go further. As we grow we’re placing more focus on ensuring we have scaleable design systems that include robust documentation for accessibility needs and considerations so that we can have a consistent and predictable approach (from a user perspective) that can be replicated across our products. 

We’re also making sure we test designs sooner and more often, and most importantly, with a range of users with different needs to learn and iterate quickly before releasing a change or new feature. 

In terms of challenges, we are a small team here at CareScribe and although we’re always improving, we know there is more that can be done with accessibility in our products – prioritisation is key. Accessibility is not something that can ever be ‘finished’. As in any business there is always a need for some compromise, such as figuring out the best point to release a project we’ve been working on. In situations like this where we reach certain accessibility standards but know there is more that could be done, it’s a case of documenting these next steps and staying accountable so that we can come back to them in future. We know we have some pockets of accessibility debt in areas of our products built when the company was still in its infancy, and that’s something we’re very keen to address. Perhaps this one is less a ‘challenge’ and more something that is always a consideration, even in an assistive tech organisation. 

What are 2-3 tips you’d share to other designers trying to design more inclusively 

1. Don’t treat accessibility as a checkbox exercise. Something I was guilty of in the early days. It’s easy to run through WCAG’s guidance and tick everything off, but it’s important to really consider the needs of different users and how you can make a product usable and enjoyable rather than purely functional. This can take on different guises depending on resource and time available, but demonstrating this empathy, considering real user feedback, and observing real usage of your product, can help to go beyond the checklist.
   
2. Don’t think you know everything, and be ok admitting it. Often there is an assumption that a designer should have all things accessibility committed to memory – it’s next to impossible. Guidelines are huge, there is no one-size-fits-all approach and accessibility extends beyond just the design process. Admitting you don’t know the answer, or that something goes beyond your area of expertise, can unlock a better solution either through research, or learning from another member of the team who has more experience with that aspect of accessibility.
3. Something is better than nothing. If an organisation isn’t as willing to invest in accessibility as much as it ideally should, it’s worth noting that bringing in some elements of accessibility is better than none. Lots of beneficial things can be achieved with fairly low effort and, over time, these small gains will begin to add up. It also makes the potential task of further improvements less daunting when there you aren’t starting from zero. 

What are some of the resources you’ve found helpful to develop your understanding of accessibility and inclusion when it comes to your design work? 

I enjoyed Nomensa’s Virtual11y conference over the summer. Lots of superb talks over a range of topics and all available for free on YouTube. 

WebAIM’s WCAG summary resources are excellent as an ‘at-a-glance’ summary of the full guidelines. 

Steve Krug’s ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ is 200 pages of guiding principles and all-round gold that I’d recommend to just about anyone, designer or not. 

Although not strictly related to design, I’d also like to shout out CareScribe’s Skill Sessions webinars – a series designed to boost knowledge across different areas of disability or neurodiversity. They’re a brilliant and engaging resource that can help build greater empathy and understanding of an audience.

Following the insightful recommendations from our Design For All participants, we’ve curated an extensive collection of tools, guides, articles, books, blogs, and videos. This resource is specifically designed to support accessibility and inclusion specialists at every stage of their journey.

View Accessible Design Resources