Shivangi is a full-time Product Designer at Microsoft Teams SMB, A11y champion and part-time pizza eater. She was born with congenital Anosmia which is the inability to smell since birth. Congential Anosmia is a rare and pretty unheard of invisible disability and over the course the past 10 years she has talked about it with atleast 4k people in India as a human book title "Smell Blind". It is her hope that through enough discussions on Anosmia the right people would study and understand the implication and causes of this disorder. Though often alienating, this disorder has taught her a lot about how to be a sensible and inclusive designer.
Inclusive designCongenital Anosmia is like the thought experience Mary's room, where what you have not experienced (here my sense of smell) is still missed due to it being a consistent theme in all forms of life literature and even conversations. I will be sharing my experiences with a world without the sense of smell and how it has its ups and downs; and highlight how this lack of sense of scent has made me a more sensible designer.