Making a more inclusive technology experience with Tom Wlodkowski, VP of Accessibility, Comcast

Intro: When it comes to remodeling and renovating your home, there is no better show on your radio. This is Around the House with Eric G. Everybody stop what you're doing, please. From your back fence to the sidewalk, Eric will tell you how to keep it all in tip top shape while helping you save a buck while doing it. If you like DIY projects, it takes a lot of practice to get good at it. And Eric is here to guide the way. These are the wrong plans. These are the old plans. All that and more on the fastest two hours of Home Improvement radio. Stop it! Stop what you’re -- Welcome to Around the House with Eric G.

Eric G: Welcome back to Around the House with Eric G. This is where we talk home improvement every single weekend. Thanks for joining us. Coming up this next week is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. And this is something that really means a lot to me. And technology out there has been so helpful in making everything more accessible for everyone out there. And today we've got Thomas Wlodkowski, Vice President of Accessibility for Comcast. Welcome to Around the House, brother. Really appreciate you coming on today. And you've got an amazing story to tell and how you guys are really helping people out there.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Hey, Eric, thanks for having me and it’s nice to be with you around the house.

Eric G: Thanks, man. I appreciate it. I was reading through your bio and you grew up in a house of four boys exactly how I did. I have three brothers as well. So I know the fun, the pain, the learning and the experience of that.

Thomas Wlodkowski: What were you at? The oldest or the youngest?

Eric G: I was the oldest.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Okay, so I was the youngest. So I got more abuse than you did.

Eric G: Yeah. I was the trailblazer for my brothers. I was the one that taught them what not to do it seemed for the many times. My youngest brother goes, I really learned a lot from you of how not to do things. And I'm like, well, thanks, man. Happy I could help. Yeah, I wanted to talk today about your experience and what's going on here with Comcast? I’m a user so I have Xfinity in my house. And you guys have done so much as an organization to make things easily accessible for many.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Well, you know, it really starts out with the premise that if you build accessibility into your product or now what we're starting to talk more about is inclusive design, if you have a focus on inclusive design right from the beginning of your product lifecycle, you're going to end up with a better product for everyone because you're focused on all little aspects of accessibility. So, you're taking it from the premise that not everyone can use a mouse, not everyone can speak. And so you're thinking about multimodal experiences, inclusive experiences right from the get-go. And if you can follow that all the way through the lifecycle, not only do I as someone who's blind and other people with disabilities win, everybody wins.

Eric G: That's awesome. That's awesome. And I really learned some of that when I was designing my parents’ house. So my dad passed about seven years ago but we designed kind of their forever home and I really designed a lot not this side of things but we made all the doors three foot wide. There's no steps up. And when you design something from start to finish with that in mind, it's so true because it just naturally lends a hand to more inclusivity for people.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Absolutely, absolutely.

Eric G: Well, you guys have got some great stuff. And even just the Voice Guidance stuff on the Xfinity X One system is so easy to use for me and I can't imagine for somebody that has more struggles to get around or use it. It's impressive just how that works on its own.

Thomas Wlodkowski: The Voice Guidance is our feature that enables people who are blind or visually impaired to independently navigate their entertainment experience on X One and now Flex, which is our free video product that we add to our broadband only customers and so similar platform. And so Voice Guidance will read the on screen menu. It will read the tv listings, will help you schedule and playback DVR recording. So it's really the voice out where your TV is talking to you. And then you combine that with our voice remote where you as the customer are talking to the TV to say, hey, watch NBC. When are the Mariners playing? Whatever it is. And then you combine that and now you have that whole conversation going on between you and the TV. For someone who can't see, the searches come up on the screen, it really makes for an inclusive experience. And it's easy to turn on or off, you can use the voice commands and say Voice Guidance on, Voice Guidance off. We have shortcut keys that we map into the remote. So on your remote on X One, you can press the D button twice and that's the default shortcut to turn on and off the Voice Guidance. It’s the one keyboard shortcut that everyone else in my house knows because they're all sighted. But that's the beauty part of inclusive design. It's an experience that's there when I'm controlling the TV. And it's an experience that might be beneficial to others. Maybe they’re just tired of looking at a screen all day and they want the [indistinct]. But if they want to go back to the quote/unquote, traditional way of navigating TV in a visual way, hit that button twice or say Voice Guidance off and voila, you’ve got your normal experience back and you're off and running. And that's the way my wife and son would do that. I come in, I turn it on, and I'm off and running,

Eric G: It's so easy to use, that voice remote. I have really tried to throw it for a loop sometimes. And it is about 97% accurate to me compared to many other voice activated things in my house. I don't talk smack about anybody. But some of those things I'm having to ask four or five times to finally get someplace with it that I'm trying to get. That doesn't happen with the voice remote with me personally because unless there's like multiple options, like there's a show or a movie that has, you know, there's seven of them with the same similar name, it works really flawlessly for me.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Yeah, I know that we've really leaned in on the entertainment experience, and really tuning our voice commands. But the beauty part about X One and our Flex platform is that now that we're into this cloud infrastructure and it's a cloud based system, we can bring in the rest of our features. So you can control your Wi Fi for your voice remote X One. You can look at our Xfinity Home Security cameras through your TV now. So you can get a notification of when somebody's got the door and you can check things out.

Eric G: That's really helpful because if I've got friends coming over to watch sports or something like that, I've got that same system and I can set it up on the TV. So when somebody pulls into my driveway, I can see that someone's coming. I can be to the door before I hear the doorbell ring, which is pretty handy when I'm when I've got that situation going on.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Yeah, or if you’re in the basement and the big screen’s in the basement and you can’t necessarily hear who’s knocking at the door. So they pop up on your camera, you get a notification. And we can now detect people, vehicles, and pets through machine learning and AI. So I have a notification that says, tell me when the camera detects a person and it’s pretty wild, which you can find out. And then the nice thing for me as a blind user, we offer the ability to have audio as part of the camera. Now I can tell if the package deliver, throwing the box up on the front porch or if it’s a neighbor or whatever it is or if the guy’s cutting the lawns, you can hear the leaf blower in the background or whatever it is. I can get something out of it too because of that audio.

Eric G: And that audio is clear because I've got two of the cameras at my house and they work super well. And you can definitely hear what's going on. I caught one of my delivery drivers running accidentally across my lawn. I was like who put the tire tracks in my yard? Sure enough, it was a delivery driver that hadn't made it through backing the truck up day. But you know what I mean, it worked out well because I could go back 12 hours and go find it. So it was it was pretty cool. You guys have come out too, which I saw the video on your website, but the X1 Icontrol.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Yeah, that's our X1 adaptive remote. And that's another beneficiary of being in a cloud based platform where what this is, meeting the customer where they are. So in this case, we're talking about customers with physical disabilities, maybe somebody with Lou Gehrig's disease, ALS, where the traditional remote just isn't an option for them. And so they're able to use the technology they want to use, which might be in this case Microsoft [indistinct] does a lot with eye tracking. And so they might use a Surface tablet with the Tobii eye gaze, the hardware connected to it. And as long as they can navigate through to the web browser and navigate a web page, they can log into xfin.tv/access and go through, enter their use name and password. And as long as they have X1, they can pick which box they want to control. And now their eyes are the mouth. And so they can hover over the menu button, for example, and they can set the dwell time for their gaze. And so say it’s like a second and a half or whatever it might be, they dwell on that button and it triggers the button. And so this has been a really effective way for people for whom voice isn't possible or for whom holding a remote is impossible, but they can navigate through their preferred assistive technology. And so we look at inclusive design as really twofold. One, building solutions directly into our product. Voice guidance is a great example of that. And then meeting the customer where they are with the technology that they bring to our doorstep every day. And the excellent adaptive remote is a good example of that.

Eric G: Well, that just gives so much freedom because let's say somebody with ALS, so they're sitting there and they've got somebody that's caring for them that can control that. But as soon as they walk off, they're stuck watching whatever's on TV and they had no way before to control that. Now they've got complete control to be able to manage that. And that's brilliant.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Yeah, no, that's exactly what we've heard from customers. They’re stuck on the channel that the caregiver left it on. And that's just not acceptable in today's world with the technology capabilities that we have.

Eric G: Yeah, it's incredible. And I'm sure you guys have a lot of other stuff that you're doing as well as stuff in the books out there. Because it seems that every single year, there's such big jumps in accessibility like this, just because technology keeps getting better and better and quite frankly, easier to navigate.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Yeah and one thing we're looking at right now is something called dynamic audio. This is good for people with PTSD. We have it in select boxes right now, some of our newer X1 boxes, where we reduce spikes in audio. So think about explosions in action movies. And we enhanced the dialogue on the other end. And so that's one that we're starting to talk about now. And in our lab, if you look under the settings menu of X1, you'll see Comcast Labs. And that's where we try a lot of different things before they actually move into their permanent home on the platform. And so dynamic audio, if you have one of our wireless boxes, you can try that out. Bluetooth hearing aid. I know my dad, he's 88 and I go home the TV’s turned up to 11. And that’s fine but now he can pair up his Bluetooth hearing aid and we can all watch it together at a much more comfortable volume, both for him and for us.

Eric G: You can watch TV without making the neighbor's mad. That's cool.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Yeah. Later this year, we're going to come out with a large button remote. And we do have one but that was a third party remote. So we designed one from the ground up, and it's going to have our voice capability in there as well. Older adults, people with dexterity challenges, people with visual impairments, they're going to be able to use that remote. We've done some things where if you want to change the battery, you don't have to take the back completely off the remote, it just slides down like a drawer and we tried to put some tabs in there so it's easier to kind of get those batteries out. The labeling of the buttons, the backlighting of the of the buttons, those types of things are some of what you'll find. And it fits nice and flat so if somebody needs to operate it with two hands and put it on a tray or a table, it's nice and stable. So just a few things that we have coming out. We also worked with our general mobile app, our Xfinity stream app, which is our second screen experience or the Xfinity app, which is how you manage your home network and set up profiles for people in your home and navigate your smart home technology, things like that. So accessibility really comes across the company. Sometimes we're looking at building in features that that we build in. Sometimes we're looking at just making sure our web applications, web pages, mobile applications are tagged correctly so that they work with traditional assistive technology built into that operating system or made for that operating system, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, whatever it is. And so it's really a comprehensive approach.

Eric G: That's awesome. I know somebody that's a caregiver and they love that Xfinity app, where they can watch TV on it because they can be sitting there with the person that they're helping and they might fall asleep. So they can turn the TV down so it's not going to wake them back up again. But they grab their phone and they can actually watch that TV show in the house there with their headphones on without disturbing their patient that's there. So that goes for caregivers, as well as the people that are receiving the care.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Yeah, we do have Bluetooth audio, again, for the hearing aid but you can also use it to pair up a Bluetooth speaker, Bluetooth headset. A lot of people use it. Same thing with close captioning. If you think about it, we talk about including, making a better product for everyone. Close captioning, how many people use that just to follow a show?

Eric G: Oh, I do all the time. I do all the time. The reason why is sometimes I’ll be watching a British comedy or something that I miss some of those little details on the snarkiness or whatever. And it’s nice to have it on there because I can catch it.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Yeah, my wife does the same thing and it tells me when the captions aren't right. And, like, geez, I can't even get away from work even when I'm home.

Eric G: The talking guide as well if stuff that you guys -- we talked a little bit about that stuff. But I think there’s just so many things for the users out there to explore within Comcast that can help just everybody, including those that really need it. I think there's a lot of usability function here for even just the general public that don't have these challenges that other people do.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Absolutely. And we talked about the excellent adaptive remote for the eye tracker, but that's just a web version of a traditional remote. And so anyone can, if you have X1, use that with any -- one of our folks says she’s always losing her remote so she just always has the page up on her iPhone and that’s how she controls the TV. So same thing with Bluetooth audio, keyboard short cuts or short cuts that you add to the remote, you can turn on and off closed captioning. You can do other things with that. So it’s really trying to find areas -- building for [indistinct] but in doing so, coming up with a feature that just really makes it better for everybody. How many people are using the wheelchair ramps at a street crossing? Far more people than who they were originally designed for. And so that’s kind of what we’re thinking about. It’s the electronic equivalent of curb cut.

Eric G: Yeah, even the bumps that warn somebody walking, I think on those same wheelchair ramps, those are great for the people that are texting on their phone, crossing the street knowing that hey, there's a curb coming.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Absolutely. Yeah.

Eric G: So it all works out. Well, Tom, thanks for coming on today, man. I really appreciate it. You gave us such great information today about what Comcast has going on with this, where you guys are headed, and it's going to be super helpful and great for everyone to be able to navigate this stuff.

Thomas Wlodkowski: Thanks for having me.

Eric G: As we head out to break, make sure you hit us up on Facebook, Instagram, Clubhouse, Around the House with Eric G. And make sure you hit us up here and listen to the podcast anywhere you catch podcasts and that's aroundthehouseonline.com or your favorite podcast player. We’ll be right back.