👋🏼 I'm Danny. I'm a design lead of accessibility apps at Google. I live in Seattle with my wife and dog. I'm generally interested in art, design, culture, food, and human behavior. Recently, I've been trying to merge my creative skills with human rights advocacy.
If you would like to chat or collaborate, reach me at danfarra@gmail.com. (LinkedIn)
The goal of my design work is to elevate the quality of life for underserved people.
Accessibility products and services should be free, the same way healthcare should be free.
I have designed AI experiences, though I find myself concerned with the inhumane military and environmental effects of AI.
I describe how we should go beyond compliance for accessibility apps in Evolving Lookout: A progressive approach to designing accessibility apps.
A part of what informs my philosophy is what I read. I'm currently reading:
Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook by Dori Tunstall
CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It by Ruben Pater
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
Lookout is an app for blind or nearly blind people. Mostly, people use it to point the camera at text, and it says it out loud. Most people use it on things like documents, food labels, and currency, and Lookout reads it out loud. Lookout also describes photos using AI, and can help users navigate to bathrooms, open seating, vehicles, and more. I've been working on Lookout since May 2022.
I designed Image Q&A in Lookout: an accessible way to capture photos with guided framing, have photos described using Gemini, and it even answers your questions about the photo.
I led design for Lookout's "Images mode". Before, Images mode required users to upload or share a photo, so they could extract the text in it or get a very basic description. Now, Images mode opens to a photo-capturing experience with assistive framing which helps you center your selfie or other objects it can identify. People with blindness can line up their shot, snap a photo, have AI describe it, and ask follow up questions.
Video description: Introduction to Lookout (2024) tutorial video I helped produce which we show in the app onboarding. I give most credit to a great team of designers and producers, I just think it's the most accessible way of explaining the app in-detail, so I share it here. I initiated the idea of redoing our previous tutorial video based on users' learning preferences, secured budget for the video, defined an outline, tweaked our UI mocks for the video, and helped edit the final script and video.
Lookout was growing in the number of capabilities it had, which users needed to navigate easily. It was using an older design system, and when I joined the team, I was asked to develop a point of view on whether we should make the investment to upgrade to a more modern design system. I concluded we should. I wrote about this experience on Google's Design site. Evolving Lookout: A progressive approach to designing accessibility apps
I was featured on Google's LinkedIn for World Arabic Language Day for our launch supporting Arabic in Lookout, and building out support for all right-to-left languages.
Inside Google’s Image Q&A On Android And Using AI For All (Forbes)
Android can now analyze any image and describe it to you — here's how it works (Tom's Guide)
AI Principles Case Study - Responsible Development of Lookout (Google)
Before this role, I was on the Cloud Inclusive Design team where I helped design improvements to the accessibility of Cloud products:
Product design (Cloud Console search experience, keyboard shortcut helper)
Compliance (Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates or "VPATs") and design system work
And then way before, I was designing ads products, where I began my accessible design journey as a subject matter expert.