Episode 4

Accessibility Spans Across All Different Industries

Glen Walker, TIAA, Principal Accessibility Architect

Glen talks about his early years as a software engineer and his personal interest in keyboard support. This lead him to accessibility work that included solving screen reader issues and compliance with Section 508 and WCAG. In his consulting work he continues to help other developers by sharing knowledge in a variety of ways. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

Transcript
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(upbeat music)

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- Hello, this is Digital Accessibility.

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The people behind the progress.

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I'm Joe Welinske the creator and host of this series.

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And as an accessibility professional myself,

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I find it very interesting as to how others

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found their way into this profession.

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So let's meet one of those people right now

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and hear about their journey.

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(upbeat music)

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All right, well, here we go with another interview

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with an accessibility practitioner.

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And today I'm really pleased

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to be speaking with Glen Walker.

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Hello, Glen, how are you today?

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- Hey, good morning.

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I'm doing well today, thanks, Joe.

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- Yeah, it's good to have you here with me

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for this conversation.

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I'm currently in my Vashon Island home office,

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which is near Blink's headquarters in Seattle, Washington.

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Where are you talking to us from?

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- I'm in northern Utah, up near the Idaho border.

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- All right, well, yeah,

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I've been through that area a number of times,

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and a beautiful area.

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So, well, again, thanks for being part of this

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and good place always to start is just with you,

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briefly letting us know,

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what kind of work that you're doing now.

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- All right, yeah, so I've worked for a variety

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of different companies with accessibility.

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And the first company I got started with

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is where I got my accessibility beginnings,

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and it was a software company

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and we had a lot of different products.

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So we're helping different teams

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with a variety of different things,

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working with developers, and testers, and designers,

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as well as the product managers,

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and working out new features.

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So I've done both working at individual companies

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where we do all of our accessibility work internally,

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not outsourcing any of the accessibility,

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but I've also worked for companies

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that help other companies with accessibility.

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So we worked with companies that did outsource

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their accessibility work.

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So working both internally, as well as with other companies

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that worked with a variety,

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so we'd work with financial institutions, or universities,

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or retail, quite a variety of experience

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because as you know accessibility spans

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across all different industries,

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if every company has a website, so they're gonna have

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some kind of digital properties out there.

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And it really doesn't matter what the focus

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of the company is because accessibility is going to touch it

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pretty much no matter what it is.

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- Well, one of the main purposes

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of having these conversations is to help those

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who may not see a path for a career in accessibility

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to let them know our stories

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so why don't we do that with you?

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If we can kinda go back in time,

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you can sort of maybe pick out some of the early things

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that led you on the journey that brought you here today.

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And then we can kind of move our way up to

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what you're doing today.

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- Okay, yeah, I never imagined

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that I would be doing accessibility full time,

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and that it could be your whole job,

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a hundred percent of your job is accessibility work.

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So when I started, it was kind of for

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maybe personal selfish reasons.

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I'm very much a keyboard user.

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So I have a software engineering background,

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a computer science degree.

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And so I wrote code for a long time,

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very much a keyboard user when you're a software engineer.

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And the company I worked for,

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we had a lot of different products.

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And over time we were losing some of the keyboard,

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I guess, keyboard accessibility of the product itself.

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We started off as a mainframe product

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and then when PCs came out and this goes back of ways,

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but when the mouse was coming out,

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you're very much a mouse point and click type interface.

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And as we focused on that,

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we moved away from remembering that the keyboard

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was a very integral part of interacting with the computer.

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And so for me that it kind of bugged me that I could not use

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the keyboard for a lot of features in our software

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for me personally.

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I didn't like picking up the mouse

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and having to go click on things.

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So I started working on code to fix keyboard issues.

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So it was very much kind of a self-serving purpose.

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I wanted to work better for me.

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So I wanted to go fix the code, and have the keyboard work,

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and this was in the early 2000s.

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And I really had not heard of accessibility.

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It was still pretty new.

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I mean, WCAG 1.0, had only come out in 1999.

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So it was only a few years after that,

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that I started working on keyboard issues.

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And like I said, it was really

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to help things work better for me.

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And I didn't really know I was doing

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accessibility work at that time.

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But I also had a friend who was visually impaired

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that used a screen reader as well.

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And he was also a software engineer.

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And so he wrote code using the screen reader.

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And so I got to understand

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a little bit more about how a screen reader works.

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We talked about some of the technical details

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like of the API and how the accessibility tree,

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and all these kind of internal details,

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which are interesting to learn about

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if you like the technical side.

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But I think probably more important

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was more of the user experience with how someone expects

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a screen reader to work and interact with software.

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What is the user experience like to navigate through pages,

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and using all the different shortcut keys

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that a screen reader software has.

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And so I started expanding the work that I was doing

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in the coding area to work on

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in screen reader issues as well.

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So that was really the first time I got into it.

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And prior to that, it was really just coding for features,

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and things like that.

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And then it more and more involved with working

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on accessibility related issues that our software had.

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And so I spent less time writing new features and more time

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writing code that would fix accessibility issues.

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- Yeah, let me just jump in there

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and just explore that part of your career a little bit more.

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And so you had this,

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already a deep understanding of code,

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and identifying how that was related to accessibility.

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At that point in time, looking back 20 years ago,

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the web accessibility initiative was still relatively young,

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like how did you pull the piece together

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in knowing what was the best practices

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and things at the time?

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What kind resources did you find at the time

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to be able to help you move forward?

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- Yeah, the resources were more limited at the time,

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or perhaps the resources were there,

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but we didn't about them, right?

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There's a lot of great companies out there today that have,

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you can go on YouTube and just do a search on accessibility,

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best practices, and you can find tons of stuff now.

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I mean, we have conferences, and people posting podcasts,

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and doing interviews like yours,

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and there's all kinds of information out there now,

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which is fantastic.

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Back then much more limited.

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So a lot of it was self-taught,

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and things that we would work on,

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kind of bouncing ideas off each other.

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Internally, we started building up

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a small group of accessibility people.

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And so we would bounce ideas off each other.

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We mainly had to use the,

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really 'cause we're a US company,

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we had to use the section 508 rule set,

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which had a checklist of things to work on.

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This was prior to section 508,

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getting in line with WCAG 2.0 at the time.

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So it had its own list of things that you would check for.

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So that's what we would base it on.

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I guess we had WCAG 1.0 as well.

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But so it was really nice when 2.0 came out,

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I think that was around 2009, 2008, 2009.

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So when that came out and then it was fantastic

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when section 508 was updated,

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was refreshed to point to WCAG 2.0.

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So now we had a common set of things that we could check for

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and it was fantastic.

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It made things so much more consistent,

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especially when other countries started using

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that same guideline.

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So now when you're focusing on a checklist like WCAG

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that you knew it was gonna be good for the US,

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it's good for Canada, it's good for Europe,

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it's good for Asia, it was fantastic at that point.

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- And so then after this early period,

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what was the next stage that you moved into?

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- Yeah, we quickly found out that having me write code

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to fix accessibility issues.

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And then, well, when I was writing it initially,

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it was great for the particular product I was working on,

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but certainly did not scale.

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You know, any company that has more than one product,

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you can't have one developer work on one particular area,

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the thing, and fix it all.

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And so we hired a few other developers

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that were interested in accessibility.

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And so we expanded our team a little bit,

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and we were able to cover a few more products.

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And that was okay for a while too.

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But again, it does not scale, especially when you have,

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we had a hundred over a hundred products,

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different software product.

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And so, it took a while for this light bulb to go off

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to say, hey, we need to really scale this better.

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And really, and I'm talking from the technical standpoint,

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but from a software engineering perspective,

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every developer should be responsible for their own code.

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Just like it is now with any kind of

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functionality that you write in your code,

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that a developer should be responsible for their own code

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and the accessibility of their own code,

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the internationalization, the localization,

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all the features that go with a particular piece of code

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developers should own all of that.

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So we wanted to share the knowledge that we had

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of writing code to be accessible with all our developers.

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And so we started doing training.

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I came up with a curriculum and wrote some classes,

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and started teaching and sharing to other developers,

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the things that I had done and the things that I had learned

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so that we could spread that knowledge out to everybody.

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And really that was the key,

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that's when we started making a lot of progress.

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And just a quick side note on that.

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So, once we got things fixed,

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and this was kind of a reactive approach, right?

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We already had code that was written.

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We wanted to see how accessible it was.

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And we had to go back and fix issues.

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That's not the best way to do it,

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if you have the time set aside,

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really you need to back up that whole process,

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and work with designers and make sure that

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accessibility is built in from the beginning.

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And that designs are reviewed for accessibility,

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they're annotated and written up so that when developers

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get those designs, they understand and can code

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accessibility right from the beginning.

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And so it's not reactive,

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you're not writing a whole bunch of code

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and then figuring out, hey, is this accessible?

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You're actually doing it from the beginning.

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So we started training designers as well.

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And then we also wanted to teach and train testers

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because even though you trust the developer

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to do the right thing, you wanna confirm, right,

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that everything was done properly.

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So you need a way to test that at the end.

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And hopefully the developer is testing as well

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as they're writing code,

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but you need a system of checks and balances.

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You wanna make sure that indeed the code was written

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properly and that it works great with a braille device,

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or a magnification, or a screen reader,

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or all different types of assistive technology.

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So the key there really was training and education,

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which was a fantastic thing for me to learn.

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And it's what I've taken into other companies,

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no matter which company I go into,

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especially ones that wanna really do a lot of the work

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in house instead of hiring out.

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But education is the key,

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just understanding really the basics of accessibility,

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and what to think about, and what to look for

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as you're designing, and as you're coding,

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and as you're testing.

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- And then is that what led you into being more

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on the consulting side of things or advisory?

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- Yeah, it did.

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And I did had accessibility work for a long time

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at the first company I was at.

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And then the more I saw, and it was great work.

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As I mentioned earlier, we had a lot of different products,

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and it was fantastic.

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But I started seeing that there's lots of companies

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out there that need help.

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And so I just started kinda looking around

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to see what else was out there,

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and more and more accessibility companies were coming about

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that really their main focus

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was helping other companies with accessibility.

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And I found that very fascinating because then instead of me

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helping one company on a particular type of product,

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I was able to branch out and work

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with banks or credit card companies,

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or work with universities,

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or work with the big retail companies,

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just to see the variety.

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Well, it's kind of two sides of it.

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You see the variety of the different type of work

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that all these companies need,

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but then you also see the commonality, right?

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They all need help with headings, and tables, and lists,

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and image alternate text, and user interface,

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and keyboard, and screen reader.

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Really it's like they're all different,

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but they're all the same.

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So it was really fascinating seeing that aspect.

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- You mentioned, that important concept

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sometimes called Shift Left,

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where work is going into foundational search and design,

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which then leads to a design specification

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with the accessibility built in.

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And that's certainly a really great way to approach that.

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I work with evangelizing accessibility

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to the clients of our organization.

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And I still find that a lot of those conversations

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are still kind of stalker or at least begin with

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the remediation compliance part of it.

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That's kind of where a lot of organizations

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first start thinking about it.

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When you were working in that advisory role,

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or consulting role, what was your experience in that area?

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Did you have a lot of that,

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or were you able to find more progressive situations?

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- I think probably one of the biggest challenges

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is getting a company to care about accessibility.

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Developers can be very passionate about it,

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designers can be very passionate about it,

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but if you don't have upper management

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that really is locked into it, and interested in it,

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and understanding the importance of it,

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it can sometimes be hard to make some headway that way.

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And you might have to do some internal evangelizing

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to try to get, I guess, the motivation out there.

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And there's all kinds of great reasons for accessibility.

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One of my favorite though, is in the actual definition

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of WCAG where it talks about,

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if you just took like a Google search on WCAG 2.1

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or whatever your favorite version is,

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you get to the main W3.org webpage, and it talks about,

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what are the web accessibility guidelines.

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That it says, yes, if you follow the guidelines,

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you can make your software more accessible

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to a greater variety of people, which is fantastic.

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But for me, the key is like the second part

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of that sentence, where it says,

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and it also makes your product just usable,

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more usable for everybody, right?

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It just makes a better product.

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So that's really fantastic feature.

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And that really should be the driving focus

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for most companies.

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There's tons of other reasons you want people

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to be able to use the software and be self-sufficient.

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If I'm on a doctor website,

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I should be able to log in, check test results,

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or schedule a meeting, a doctor's appointment,

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without having to get a neighbor to come in and go,

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"Hey, can you read these test results for me,

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because it's not accessible with a screen reader."

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And that's kinda a privacy personal issue.

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So it's really a self-sufficiency thing

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that you help people be able to do what they wanna do,

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just like everybody else wants to do what they wanna do.

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And those are really some of the driving factors there.

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And of course, legal mitigation,

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that comes into play, but I always try to,

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I don't downplay it because it certainly

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is an important issue, but I really don't want

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that to be a motivating factor, right.

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'Cause when you think about legal issues,

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it's kind of a fear factor and fear is not a great motivator

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for doing work.

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Really you wanna do it for more,

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maybe an altruistic type for reasonings.

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- And certainly the return on investment,

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there's so many. - Oh yeah.

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Organizations I've talked with that just never really

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realized that potentially they've been shutting out

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a significant portion of their possible customer base

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by not being fully accessible.

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- Exactly, yeah, and I think one of the,

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probably one of the misconceptions,

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or one of the most common misconceptions with companies

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thinking about accessibility is that it's such a huge,

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I don't know if it's a huge thing to overcome,

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or it's a huge topic.

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And while accessibility does cover a lot of areas,

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and especially if you're just getting into it,

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and you're going, all right, so where's my checklist.

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All right, WCAG which version we're gonna use.

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All right, we'll use 2.1, we wanna be level AA.

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You've got all these terms initially

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that could be kinda confusing at first,

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but even once you get all that down, you go,

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"Man, here's a list of 50 things I need to look at

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on every screen in my mobile app

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or every page on my website.

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That's a lot of checking I have to do, right,

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to see if everything, and that's a minimal baseline.

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WCAG really is just,

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here's the minimum you need to do,

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and hopefully we can go above and beyond that

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and focus on usability in addition to accessibility.

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But given all of that,

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even though it might feel very large at first,

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when it comes down to it,

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anytime I review a website or an app,

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most of the issues are pretty simple.

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They're very easy to fix for the most part, I would say,

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85, if you wanna put a number on it, 85, 90%

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of accessibility issues are one or two line changes,

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add an attribute here or there, super easy to fix.

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And I think where maybe some of the time constraints come in

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are that maybe it's the volume

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of issues that you find, right?

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Maybe you don't have any headings on your page,

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Well, it's easy to fix,

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change it to an H2 or an H3.

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Well, but if you have a lot of heading and you have

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150 websites or web pages on your thing,

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well, that adds up, so.

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But I think, I try to ease some of the anxiety there

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to say that look, when it comes down to it,

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fixing accessibility issues it's super easy,

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thinking about it in advanced

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as you mentioned Shift Left with the design,

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making sure it's annotated in the design is super easy.

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And fixing the things, as long as you have time,

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if you're in a reactive mode and you have to existing code,

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that really it's not too bad,

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especially when you have pages that are built on templates.

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So you the template and now,

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it just fixed a whole bunch of other pages.

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- And it's not a monolithic do all of this or nothing.

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We're in such an iterative situation.

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There's so many things you can do.

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And any one of them help move things forward,

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and improve some of the aspect for our users.

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- That's an excellent point, yeah fantastic.

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Yeah, you don't have to eat a whole elephant

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in one bite, right?

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You just do a piece meal, and really anything that you do,

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let's say you only fix a dozen bugs on this age or whatever.

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Well, that's great, that's much better.

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And it certainly is a timeline and kind of a spectrum

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on how much you can fix.

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And every bit that you can do now will be fantastic.

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And that anything that you fix now, you also learn that,

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oh, well, I see how I should have done this

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in the first place.

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So now when you're writing the next page,

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you're gonna do that automatically.

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And so you already are a step ahead

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when you're writing new pages

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'cause of that past experience.

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- Well, you had variety of experience in accessibility.

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What are some of the things

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that you're passionate about now?

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Are there any particular initiatives, or techniques,

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or technologies, or processes

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that you're particularly excited with now,

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or looking into the future?

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- I like to share what I've learned.

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And I think most people in the accessibility area

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are the same, and it it's really a fascinating area

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just because most people are in the accessibility field

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because either for personal reasons,

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they need some accessibility features

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where they have family members, or friends,

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or other people that need accessibility features.

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So there's a lot of personal tie in to accessibility work.

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And so really accessibility community

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is just a fantastic group of people.

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Everyone has great attitudes and wants to help each other.

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And so I just like to share what I've learned

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over these years.

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There's a variety of different ways I do that.

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And there's lots of online forums.

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There's forms where people post questions,

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and then people answer.

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And even given what I've done for these many years,

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I'm always learning from other people's postings,

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or maybe a feature here or there,

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or an attribute that I say,

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oh, I've never really used that, let me go play with it.

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And I learned something new

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just from other people posting it.

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So I focus a lot, one of the things I really enjoy,

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whether it's internally at a single company,

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or if I'm working with a variety of different companies,

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is this education piece.

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And being able to share that and help teach.

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I've always thought about being a teacher in general,

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like a school teacher and sharing knowledge.

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And so this is kind of a little bit of a way

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that I can kind of get that feeling,

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but I'm sharing technical knowledge in this particular case.

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And so that's what I enjoy doing.

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And then I love working because of

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my engineering background.

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I love working with development teams.

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I speak that language because I am that kind of person.

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I am still an engineer.

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And so I love to work with developers.

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And again, going back to the easing that anxiety type thing

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where if they've been asked to focus on accessibility,

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they're not quite sure what it is, what is ARIA?

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what are these ARIA attributes and HTML?

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Is this another language or what?

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And I say, "No, it's just, it's part of HTML.

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It's part of what you've been doing all along."

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And being able to share that.

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So, yeah, my passion right now,

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I think is sharing the knowledge,

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whether it's through official training type classes,

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or informally with online forms or slack channels

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is just a great thing.

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Especially working with people

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who are just getting into accessibility,

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'cause we wanna keep this ball rolling

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with the work we've done with accessibility in the past,

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and get more and more people involved with it

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and excited about it.

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- One of the things I like to ask people about

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in this series since so many of you have such

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a lot of experiences just kind of

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reflect on perspective of how far we've come,

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how far we still have to go.

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I've been doing this work for about 20 years,

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and when I kinda look back,

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in some ways I think there's just been amazing

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dramatic shifts assisted by technology.

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And then in other ways I, if I went back 20 years,

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I would've thought we would've been a little farther along

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than we are today in terms of accessibility

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being widely available.

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So may I toss it over to you

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kind of what's been your perspective in that area.

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- Yeah, there certainly are.

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I mean, you can look at the pros and cons

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of where we are today.

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I think one of the great things that WebAIM,

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which is an accessibility research company,

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that they've done over the past couple of years

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is the WebAIM Million.

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I don't know if you've heard of that,

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but they analyze the top 1 million websites

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that are popular I think it's around the world, globally.

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And just analyzing the results there,

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and see what kind of accessibility issues are,

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just on the homepages of these most popular things,

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and most popular companies.

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And it's kind of, it's disheartening to see how many issues

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are still out there, even though, as you mentioned,

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we've been doing this for 20 years or so.

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But it's also great to see, I think, from a job perspective,

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there are companies out there always posting all the time

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that they want accessibility,

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maybe not accessibility experts

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because it takes time to learn all this stuff,

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but somebody who is interested and has a desire

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to learn about accessibility that it's there,

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the job aspect out there is fantastic, right?

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I mean, you can go to A11yjobs.com,

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and there's always job postings out there.

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You can go to the Slack channel.

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Well, the Slack workspace has a jobs channel

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for accessibility and there's always postings there as well.

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And really if you were just interested

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in any particular company,

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you could go to their job career site and list the job page

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and do a search for the term accessibility and the title.

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And you can almost always find something.

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So in that respect, it's kind of a pro, right?

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Because there are some great jobs out there.

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That also means that companies are listening

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and our interested in accessibility

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and so much so that they wanna hire someone

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who's full-time job is accessibility.

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So in that respect, it's great,

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the word is getting out there,

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and companies are interested in it.

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But as I mentioned before, where we are now,

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why we aren't further ahead than we are,

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it takes time, but I try not to look at

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maybe not how far along we are,

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or how depressing it might be that we aren't further along,

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but looking at how much progress we have made,

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and how it's getting more and more popular out there now.

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- Well, I think it's great that you brought up that

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your positive optimistic reality

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that there are so many opportunities for people

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to decide to come into this area.

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So I'm glad you brought that up,

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and mention all those resources.

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And I'll put those into the show notes

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because it certainly is a great time

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to be looking for opportunities

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to be a professional in this area.

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- Yeah, it really is.

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And there's a new group of,

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a new generation of accessibility people coming in.

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And one of the things I wish we had more of was

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in university curriculum, right?

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As part of the computer science degree program,

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or as part of a digital design degree program

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is to have a class, a full semester class,

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at least on accessibility.

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I think that would be fantastic.

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'cause it really is something that all developers

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that take a computer science degree should understand about,

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and all designers because of the Shift Left,

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and designers have a lot of impact on what developers do,

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that everyone understands all things.

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So it would be great if we could work more with universities

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in getting that built into to curriculum.

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- Yeah, I agree that,

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and I teach at the university of Washington

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and that's something that's continuing to improve there.

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But yeah, I agree that's gonna be in a really important area

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moving into the future.

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Well, Glen, I want to thank you for taking the time

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to tell us about your journey

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and share some of your insights and experiences.

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And I look forward to meeting up with you at a event

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in person at some point.

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- Yeah, it'll be great to get back into it.

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It was unfortunate when COVID came out,

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and it was right around CSUN was just about to roll out.

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And so people kept dropping out of that back in 2020.

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So it's great to see conferences.

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Well, I actually, the positive side of that right,

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was so much online meetups and conferences were now online

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and people could participate more economically, right?

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You could just maybe pay your conference fee,

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but you don't have to, you don't have to travel.

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And this pointed out issues in various video,

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like we're using Zoom here.

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What are the accessibility features of Zoom?

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Can I navigate through all the buttons and things

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with a screen reader, and with my keyboard.

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And it was a fantastic thing,

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if you think of the silver lining of COVID

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that because of all the online work that had to be done,

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there was a lot of accessibility gaps

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in online productivity tools.

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And now those things were quickly fixed

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because we were very focused

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we had to have things that worked.

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And so yeah, it will be great to be back in person.

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It's great to have face to face interactions with everybody,

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but we certainly did learn a lot from the pandemic,

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and using all kinds of digital online tools.

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- Well, again, thanks for participating in this,

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and see you soon.

About the Podcast

Show artwork for Digital Accessibility
Digital Accessibility
The People Behind the Progress

About your host

Profile picture for Joe Welinske

Joe Welinske

Serving as Accessibility Director at Blink is Joe's main activity. Blink is devoted to helping ensure that digital products and services can be used by everyone. As Director, Joe is responsible for helping Blink's practitioners to build accessibility into everything they do. He also evangelizes the need for accessibility with Blink's clients and partners.
Joe is a co-organizer of the Seattle Inclusive Design and Accessibility meetup group and he serves as the Secretary of the King County Metro Paratransit Advisory Committee.