You may have seen the device in this photo before if you’ve attended one of my training courses or talks. I’ll often tell the story of why it sits on my desk as a reminder of why I do what I do, and how its influence on me took me over a decade to realise.

If you don’t know the story, let me tell it to you.

It’s a Ross digital talking alarm clock. You press the button on top and it tells you the current time in a very robotic-sounding American accent.

I’ve had this thing for over 30 years now. It’s lost a piece of its screen, but it still works! I think I got it for my 11th birthday – yup, I was a geeky kid! In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the Argos catalogue – affectionately referred to as the Book of Dreams – was likely to be one of your main sources of birthday present ideas. (Anybody else, or just me?!) Well, the Internet Archive reliably informs me that this gadget was published in the Argos Autumn/Winter catalogue in 1991/92.

It wasn’t long after this birthday that my mum became registered blind having battled complications with her diabetes. It was around this time that I first became aware of the great work that organisations like RNIB> and Leonard Cheshire do. She could no longer run her business, a popular guest house in North Devon, and she became reliant on carers, of which I was one.

At this time, I realised that my geeky gadget was more than just that. It could help Mum to do something she could no longer do easily – tell the time. So I gave the talking alarm clock to her. This was my first experience of accessible digital technology.

I’d later study at the University of York, where much research is conducted in communications technology, audio technology and acoustics, including speech synthesis.

As part of my studies in music technology and digital signal processing, I learned about the early work of Bell Labs in creating speech synthesis technology, and later by Texas Instruments through the ’70s, who created the chips that would be used in my Speak & Spell toy, which I had when I was around 6 years old.

With fictional television shows like Knight Rider further fuelling my interest in technology and human-computer interaction, and growing up with a close family member living with disability, it’s no wonder I ended up working in the field of digital accessibility.

I find it interesting, though, that the influence that this talking alarm clock had on my life didn’t really occur to me until I’d already been working in accessibility for 10 years.

I often used to think that it was my experience working on accessible music software in my early 20s that was the reason I began working in digital accessibility. Certainly, the transition out of my final year project working with Drake Music to learning about web accessibility and building accessible websites was a straight enough line. But it was while clearing out Dad’s house that I found the clock and I remembered this much earlier experience, and my story changed.

This was a way that I could use technology, and my geeky nature, to enable someone I love to independently do something so essential: to tell the time.

I realised that my drive for inclusion, justice and fairness likely comes not just from my nature and values, but this was drawn out of me and amplified by the environment I grew up in, the experience of a loved one living with disability, and my experience as a carer.

While my experience working with Drake Music on accessible music software was a way that I could use my skills to enable Disabled people to access music – something I love and that’s deeply important to me – I was probably drawn to that opportunity because of Mum. Indeed, I started work on my final year project earlier than my peers and ended up with a larger body of work at the end of the project than most.

My relationship with understanding identity

Thinking about all this, I realised something about my relationship with Mum. (She passed away when I was 15, so any and all insights into this are precious to me.) To me, Mum was Mum rather than someone I thought of as a disabled person. I rarely think of Mum as a Disabled person. She was disabled – by society; by the world around her – but to me, she was Mum.

Perhaps this experience of growing up in a social, business environment and living with a disabled mother helped me to understand the role of identity in disability better than most.

Fear over understanding

When we meet new people, humans have a greater tendency towards interpreting what another person is rather than who they are. Our brains ask “What is this, and is this a threat?” before they ask “Who is this person?”

I think that my early environment and experiences have conditioned me to look for identity and to build relationships with others first – to look for further information before making snap judgements.

Threat/trust assessment is a process in our brains that has protected us for thousands of years. It’s an emotion-driven reactionary function of our amygdala, the oldest part of the human brain, which processes emotions. It is especially responsible for our fear and stress responses. A stranger-danger response is often nurtured in us when we are young with the intent of protecting us from threat. However, much research suggests that this is an unhelpful approach as it oversimplifies our ideas of safety, creates unnecessary fears, and assess real threats. After all, strangers can be both helpful and dangerous.

Our brains may have been trained towards protectiveness over collaboration, and this means that we may also have been trained to fear before seeking understanding.

However, such processing is able to adapt over time in response to experiences and environmental influences. Such plasticity is key for learning new fears as much as it is for unlearning old ones. We can change this through learning from our experiences and intentional practice.

Think about what happens as we build trust or love for others. We build up an emotional connection with those we love, which over time builds an identity in our heads that represents that person as more than our quick-to-judge rational interpretation of that person. We love who they are more than what they are.

Let’s build skills in identifying identity

What if we choose to think differently about others? What if we choose to seek understanding of someone’s identity over making a judgement based on what we think we know about them? Perhaps we can circumvent this tendency to judge quickly and bring our biases to the table, whether we mean to or not.

And I feel it is a choice. I feel so used to letting automatic gut-feelings drive my thinking, that it feels… hard to change.

I wonder: By choosing to discover and understand a person’s identity rather than letting our often preconceived view drive our thinking, would it force us to understand others more, engage more meaningfully and productively?