Social Impact Tech: Google’s NM Dayton On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing NM Dayton.

NM Dayton is a Technical Program Manager at Google and leads the company’s web and mobile accessibility standards, working to make Google’s products accessible to everyone — especially the disability community. Previously, NM was a software engineer on the Google Workspace team focused on Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides accessibility.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

I grew up in a tight knit, working class Italian-American family on the Jersey Shore, in a town divided into McMansions and more typical suburban homes like my family’s. It was the kind of place where my elementary school shock at a friend’s home having two bathrooms was met with her mother’s “Doesn’t everyone’s?”

The environment put a bit of a chip on my shoulder, and I set a goal to one day work in Manhattan like most adults in my hometown seemed to. That, plus my parents’s support and encouragement to dream big, led me to a public magnet high school centered around media and communications. I had been planning to go into public relations and work on behalf of nonprofits, but at the urging of high school teachers who nurtured my love of tech I received a bachelor’s in computer science from Wellesley College, a historically women’s liberal arts college in Massachusetts.

I first started noticing signs of my disabilities when I was in high school, around the time I took my first Java class. A fibromyalgia diagnosis shifted to rheumatoid arthritis, but it wasn’t until a year and half out of college that I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and really took the time to learn about the disability community I’m a part of. I’m currently enrolled in a disability studies master’s program through the CUNY School of Professional Studies and enjoying every minute of my classes.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

It was a full circle moment for me to have the opportunity to work on the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides accessibility team, where I worked on support for assistive technologies like screen readers, braille displays, and the same voice typing feature I used to write my college papers. It’s really no exaggeration to say that Google Docs Voice Typing helped me graduate college!

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I interned at Google every summer of college, and spent a significant part of my first internship adjusting to working in a very different environment than the one I grew up in. While my internship program was primarily geared towards first and second year students with limited engineering experience, my cohort was actually a mixture that included second and third generation engineers, meaning their parents and grandparents were also engineers. These other interns arrived with experience and knowledge I simply hadn’t been exposed to yet, and it was easy to feel like I was being compared to others who had been programming since they were young. Without the lead of the internship program at the time, Katie Girskis, stepping in and providing this feedback to my internship hosts on my behalf, my road to a full time tech job could have been incredibly bumpy. Katie went out of her way to let me know I was indeed doing everything expected of me, rebuilding my confidence in my engineering skills. She really looked at every intern as a whole person, not just a number, and took making sure we were well-supported seriously. Thanks again for the support, Katie!

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Early in my career I was often the least experienced person in a room full of nondisabled men. Sticking out as a blue-haired sore thumb could have led to an internal complex, making the structural barriers I was already facing feel even worse, but I kept hearing my dad’s voice in my head. Whenever I doubted myself as a kid, he always said the same thing: “Who’s better than you?”

It wasn’t meant in a pompous way, trying to imply I was better than everyone else. Instead, those words reinforced the real value of every single person, including myself. If I was really going to believe that no one is inherently better than anyone else, a core truth I hold dear, I needed to know my playing field could be leveled. I needed to know I belonged in every room I was sitting in. Not only did I need to know it, I needed to genuinely believe it, because it’s powerful. At the end of the day, no one’s better than you.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

My journey to the tech industry started with a poster on the wall of my college’s Science Center advertising an upcoming info session for Google internships. It was my first or second week of my first semester at Wellesley, and I was looking to absorb as much information as humanly possible. The poster stated the info session was only for sophomores through seniors, but I decided to quietly attend anyway, take notes, and make a plan to apply to the program the following year.

Info session day came, and I had somehow mixed up the time of the event. I arrived a half hour early, realized my mistake, and sheepishly went to leave. Before I did so I helped the Google recruiter giving the talk set up the projector, as I’d noticed she was having a hard time. At the eventual end of the info session I tried to sneak out a side door and not draw further attention to my not-a-sophomore self, but the recruiter flagged me down and asked me to attend a resume review session the following day. I ran to my dorm, Googled “how to write a resume”, and would go on to intern at Google for the rest of my college summers.

I didn’t realize it then, but I was training some muscles in my character that would open so many doors for me in the future. I’d had the boldness to show up where I wasn’t necessarily wanted, but knew I should be. I had the determination to still attend the info session despite being embarrassed by my time slot mix up. I was able to face the unexpected, here in the form of that resume review session the next day, and present a confident face despite being nervous. These traits are things I fall back on frequently and have provided me with just about every career opportunity I’ve had.

In short: If you think a door is closed, try to push instead of pulling the handle.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?

Over one billion people in the world have a disability, and everyone, disabled or not, deserves access to technology. This number is only set to rise as people get older and live longer. Accessibility is also a much broader space than many people think. In addition to helping people with permanent disabilities, an emphasis on accessibility helps people with situational or temporary disabilities like a broken leg or concussion. With the internet so ingrained in our daily lives, digital accessibility unlocks more than just websites. It’s key to jobs, education, benefits, and more. Myself and others working in accessibility are aiming to provide access to everyone.

How do you think your technology can address this?

Accessibility has the power to help level the playing field and Google is committed to building products and services with and for people with disabilities. However, in order to build products and features that can help everyone access and enjoy the world, both virtually and physically, we must provide developers with the resources they need to integrate accessibility into their products.

Ensuring Google’s products are accessible to everyone is no small feat, but it’s one that impacts the billion people in the disability community. The diversity in experience among people with disabilities is something I continuously think about in my work. I plan and help write guidelines that ensure engineers and developers are able to create all sorts of products and features that are both useful and accessible, from disability-first products like Lookout for blind and low-vision communities to the same Google Docs features people who don’t use assistive technology know and love.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

My disabilities really started ramping up during college. I struggled to type my papers during my senior year of college, and I couldn’t afford a copy of commonly used voice typing software. I went looking for free alternatives, which led me to Voice Typing in Google Docs.

These days, I use Select-to-Speak and Voice Typing almost daily. Working in accessibility now and understanding all of my assistive tech options, I look back at my time in college and realize things could have been a lot easier for me. I wish that I had known the full scope of my disabilities earlier and could have utilized tools to accommodate them.

I want to ensure no one else has to hit the same roadblocks I did. I’m passionate about removing barriers standing between many disabled people and equal opportunities.

How do you think this might change the world?

Accessibility is all about leveling the playing field for disabled people by providing equitable access to everything nondisabled people have access to. Products and services will only get better and more accessible if technologists continue to educate ourselves about disability, accessibility, and ask people with disabilities what they need.

I didn’t know anyone who worked in tech when I was growing up, let alone anyone I could relate to. I deeply value being able to bring visibility to the queer, disabled technologist representation I wasn’t exposed to as a kid. Moreover, you can’t build for someone you don’t understand, and I get to leverage my experiences to make technology that was not always accessible to me more accessible to others.

Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

The ethical path forward in accessibility is so clear, and it’s one of the things I value most about my position. Accessibility done right, allowing disabled people equitable access to the same opportunities as nondisabled people, has no drawbacks. But accessibility done wrong, or completely ignored? That’s what’s harmful. There’s also the Disability Dongle phenomenon, a term coined by Liz Jackson of The Disabled List to describe tech purported to solve something for disabled people that was clearly designed without serious input from the disability community. Stair climbing wheelchairs are a frequent example — why build something much too expensive and unwieldy to be widely useful for disabled people, when you could have invested that money into ramps and elevators? Disability Dongles can be funny in a why-would-you-make-that kind of way, but they also reinforce the disabled-as-helpless stereotype by getting tons of press attention for a supposed solution, made by nondisabled people, to problems actual people with disabilities don’t even have. They also take funding away from products designed by actual disabled people who are the authorities on our own lives. Any attempt at creating accessible tech needs to put the real opinions and needs of disabled people before all else.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

1. The best way to incorporate accessibility into a product is from the very beginning — and you don’t need to be a part of a dedicated accessibility team to start implementing accessibility into your work. Consider the accessibility of proposed features from the brainstorming phase.
2. Technical standards can be a guide, but you must consider usability. Sure, the “send” button on an email may be technically reachable for someone using a screen reader, but how much effort does it take to reach that button?
3. User testing is key. If you haven’t tested your product or feature with its intended audience, you truly have no idea if you’re hitting the mark. This is more when considering accessibility, for sure, but equally important when creating technology for any marginalized population.
4. Designers play an important role in making technology accessible. Is the contrast between elements high enough? Have you ensured all elements of the design are accessible for people with different types of color blindness? Is the touch target size of different buttons sufficiently large?
5. Not all assistive technology is created equal. This is not to say that some are better or worse than others, but to point out that each comes with its own set of benefits, challenges, and bugs. Just because you tested your product using one screen reader does not mean a different brand of screen reader software won’t encounter bugs. Test with a range of assistive technologies on multiple browsers to catch as many issues as possible.

There are also lots of technical resources to help you get started. For example, Google has a free online course called “Introduction to Web Accessibility.” On the testing side, Accessibility Scanner can assist you in finding common accessibility bugs in applications before they reach your users.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

Well, I’d hope they’d want to already! If not, I would ask them to really consider what their own definition of success is. We’re societally driven to see classic status symbols as marks of achievement, despite what such “achievement” might cost both ourselves and our communities. I’ve found that self-fulfillment and taking care of one another tend to go hand in hand. I’d also point out the importance of really knowing and actively consulting the group you are trying to help before diving in and accidentally creating harm. In the disability community we often say “nothing about us without us”, and that sentiment really applies to all groups.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? They might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

I’d love to sit down with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, who is an incredible writer and cultural worker in the disability justice space. I’m about to start their newest book The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs. Their 2018 book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice is something I find myself going back to frequently.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can follow me on Twitter or connect with me on LinkedIn.

To learn more about Google’s accessibility work, visit Google’s accessibility homepage.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.