Accessibility Spans Across All Different Industries

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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.

Speaker: 00:18:37

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.

Speaker: 00:19:23

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%

Speaker: 00:19:30

of accessibility issues are one or two line changes,

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

Speaker: 00:19:37

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

Speaker: 00:19:42

are that maybe it's the volume

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of issues that you find, right?

Speaker: 00:19:45

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

Speaker: 00:19:47

Well, it's easy to fix,

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change it to an H2 or an H3.

Speaker: 00:19:51

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

Speaker: 00:20:09

as you mentioned Shift Left with the design,

Speaker: 00:20:12

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

Speaker: 00:20:16

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.

Speaker: 00:20:30

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.

Speaker: 00:20:39

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.

Speaker: 00:20:51

- That's an excellent point, yeah fantastic.

Speaker: 00:20:54

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,

Speaker: 00:21:03

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

Speaker: 00:21:07

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

Speaker: 00:21:10

And it certainly is a timeline and kind of a spectrum

Speaker: 00:21:13

on how much you can fix.

Speaker: 00:21:16

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

Speaker: 00:21:19

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

Speaker: 00:21:22

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.

Speaker: 00:21:42

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,

Speaker: 00:21:50

or technologies, or processes

Speaker: 00:21:55

that you're particularly excited with now,

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or looking into the future?

Speaker: 00:22:01

- 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

Speaker: 00:22:20

where they have family members, or friends,

Speaker: 00:22:21

or other people that need accessibility features.

Speaker: 00:22:24

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

Speaker: 00:22:27

And so really accessibility community

Speaker: 00:22:30

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,

Speaker: 00:22:58

or maybe a feature here or there,

Speaker: 00:23:00

or an attribute that I say,

Speaker: 00:23:01

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

Speaker: 00:23:03

And I learned something new

Speaker: 00:23:05

just from other people posting it.

Speaker: 00:23:07

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

Speaker: 00:23:12

whether it's internally at a single company,

Speaker: 00:23:15

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

Speaker: 00:23:18

is this education piece.

Speaker: 00:23:20

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.

Speaker: 00:23:28

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

Speaker: 00:23:30

that I can kind of get that feeling,

Speaker: 00:23:32

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

Speaker: 00:23:36

And so that's what I enjoy doing.

Speaker: 00:23:38

And then I love working because of

Speaker: 00:23:40

my engineering background.

Speaker: 00:23:41

I love working with development teams.

Speaker: 00:23:44

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

Speaker: 00:23:47

I am still an engineer.

Speaker: 00:23:50

And so I love to work with developers.

Speaker: 00:23:52

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

Speaker: 00:23:55

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

Speaker: 00:23:58

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

Speaker: 00:24:02

what are these ARIA attributes and HTML?

Speaker: 00:24:04

Is this another language or what?

Speaker: 00:24:06

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

Speaker: 00:24:09

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

Speaker: 00:24:11

And being able to share that.

Speaker: 00:24:13

So, yeah, my passion right now,

Speaker: 00:24:15

I think is sharing the knowledge,

Speaker: 00:24:17

whether it's through official training type classes,

Speaker: 00:24:20

or informally with online forms or slack channels

Speaker: 00:24:24

is just a great thing.

Speaker: 00:24:25

Especially working with people

Speaker: 00:24:27

who are just getting into accessibility,

Speaker: 00:24:30

'cause we wanna keep this ball rolling

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

Speaker: 00:24:36

and get more and more people involved with it

Speaker: 00:24:38

and excited about it.

Speaker: 00:24:41

- One of the things I like to ask people about

Speaker: 00:24:44

in this series since so many of you have such

Speaker: 00:24:48

a lot of experiences just kind of

Speaker: 00:24:50

reflect on perspective of how far we've come,

Speaker: 00:24:54

how far we still have to go.

Speaker: 00:24:56

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

Speaker: 00:24:59

and when I kinda look back,

Speaker: 00:25:01

in some ways I think there's just been amazing

Speaker: 00:25:04

dramatic shifts assisted by technology.

Speaker: 00:25:08

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

Speaker: 00:25:12

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

Speaker: 00:25:15

than we are today in terms of accessibility

Speaker: 00:25:20

being widely available.

Speaker: 00:25:22

So may I toss it over to you

Speaker: 00:25:25

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

Speaker: 00:25:28

- Yeah, there certainly are.

Speaker: 00:25:29

I mean, you can look at the pros and cons

Speaker: 00:25:31

of where we are today.

Speaker: 00:25:34

I think one of the great things that WebAIM,

Speaker: 00:25:37

which is an accessibility research company,

Speaker: 00:25:40

that they've done over the past couple of years

Speaker: 00:25:42

is the WebAIM Million.

Speaker: 00:25:45

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

Speaker: 00:25:46

but they analyze the top 1 million websites

Speaker: 00:25:50

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

Speaker: 00:25:56

And just analyzing the results there,

Speaker: 00:25:58

and see what kind of accessibility issues are,

Speaker: 00:26:00

just on the homepages of these most popular things,

Speaker: 00:26:03

and most popular companies.

Speaker: 00:26:06

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

Speaker: 00:26:10

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

Speaker: 00:26:12

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

Speaker: 00:26:15

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

Speaker: 00:26:21

there are companies out there always posting all the time

Speaker: 00:26:23

that they want accessibility,

Speaker: 00:26:25

maybe not accessibility experts

Speaker: 00:26:27

because it takes time to learn all this stuff,

Speaker: 00:26:29

but somebody who is interested and has a desire

Speaker: 00:26:32

to learn about accessibility that it's there,

Speaker: 00:26:36

the job aspect out there is fantastic, right?

Speaker: 00:26:39

I mean, you can go to A11yjobs.com,

Speaker: 00:26:43

and there's always job postings out there.

Speaker: 00:26:46

You can go to the Slack channel.

Speaker: 00:26:51

Well, the Slack workspace has a jobs channel

Speaker: 00:26:55

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

Speaker: 00:26:58

And really if you were just interested

Speaker: 00:27:00

in any particular company,

Speaker: 00:27:02

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

Speaker: 00:27:05

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

Speaker: 00:27:07

And you can almost always find something.

Speaker: 00:27:10

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

Speaker: 00:27:14

Because there are some great jobs out there.

Speaker: 00:27:17

That also means that companies are listening

Speaker: 00:27:19

and our interested in accessibility

Speaker: 00:27:21

and so much so that they wanna hire someone

Speaker: 00:27:23

who's full-time job is accessibility.

Speaker: 00:27:26

So in that respect, it's great,

Speaker: 00:27:28

the word is getting out there,

Speaker: 00:27:29

and companies are interested in it.

Speaker: 00:27:33

But as I mentioned before, where we are now,

Speaker: 00:27:35

why we aren't further ahead than we are,

Speaker: 00:27:38

it takes time, but I try not to look at

Speaker: 00:27:44

maybe not how far along we are,

Speaker: 00:27:46

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

Speaker: 00:27:50

but looking at how much progress we have made,

Speaker: 00:27:52

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

Speaker: 00:27:56

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

Speaker: 00:28:00

your positive optimistic reality

Speaker: 00:28:02

that there are so many opportunities for people

Speaker: 00:28:07

to decide to come into this area.

Speaker: 00:28:09

So I'm glad you brought that up,

Speaker: 00:28:11

and mention all those resources.

Speaker: 00:28:14

And I'll put those into the show notes

Speaker: 00:28:17

because it certainly is a great time

Speaker: 00:28:20

to be looking for opportunities

Speaker: 00:28:22

to be a professional in this area.

Speaker: 00:28:25

- Yeah, it really is.

Speaker: 00:28:27

And there's a new group of,

Speaker: 00:28:30

a new generation of accessibility people coming in.

Speaker: 00:28:32

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

Speaker: 00:28:37

in university curriculum, right?

Speaker: 00:28:40

As part of the computer science degree program,

Speaker: 00:28:42

or as part of a digital design degree program

Speaker: 00:28:46

is to have a class, a full semester class,

Speaker: 00:28:49

at least on accessibility.

Speaker: 00:28:52

I think that would be fantastic.

Speaker: 00:28:53

'cause it really is something that all developers

Speaker: 00:28:56

that take a computer science degree should understand about,

Speaker: 00:28:59

and all designers because of the Shift Left,

Speaker: 00:29:00

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

Speaker: 00:29:05

that everyone understands all things.

Speaker: 00:29:06

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

Speaker: 00:29:11

in getting that built into to curriculum.

Speaker: 00:29:14

- Yeah, I agree that,

Speaker: 00:29:16

and I teach at the university of Washington

Speaker: 00:29:19

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

Speaker: 00:29:23

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

Speaker: 00:29:26

moving into the future.

Speaker: 00:29:28

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

Speaker: 00:29:32

to tell us about your journey

Speaker: 00:29:35

and share some of your insights and experiences.

Speaker: 00:29:39

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

Speaker: 00:29:43

in person at some point.

Speaker: 00:29:45

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

Speaker: 00:29:47

It was unfortunate when COVID came out,

Speaker: 00:29:49

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

Speaker: 00:29:53

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

Speaker: 00:29:58

So it's great to see conferences.

Speaker: 00:30:00

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

Speaker: 00:30:02

was so much online meetups and conferences were now online

Speaker: 00:30:07

and people could participate more economically, right?

Speaker: 00:30:10

You could just maybe pay your conference fee,

Speaker: 00:30:12

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

Speaker: 00:30:14

And this pointed out issues in various video,

Speaker: 00:30:18

like we're using Zoom here.

Speaker: 00:30:20

What are the accessibility features of Zoom?

Speaker: 00:30:22

Can I navigate through all the buttons and things

Speaker: 00:30:24

with a screen reader, and with my keyboard.

Speaker: 00:30:26

And it was a fantastic thing,

Speaker: 00:30:29

if you think of the silver lining of COVID

Speaker: 00:30:31

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

Speaker: 00:30:34

there was a lot of accessibility gaps

Speaker: 00:30:38

in online productivity tools.

Speaker: 00:30:40

And now those things were quickly fixed

Speaker: 00:30:42

because we were very focused

Speaker: 00:30:43

we had to have things that worked.

Speaker: 00:30:45

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

Speaker: 00:30:49

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

Speaker: 00:30:52

but we certainly did learn a lot from the pandemic,

Speaker: 00:30:56

and using all kinds of digital online tools.

Speaker: 00:31:00

- Well, again, thanks for participating in this,

Speaker: 00:31:03

and see you soon.