Building Consensus and Explaining How to Improve the Customer Experience

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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 found their way

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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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All right, well, here we go with another episode

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where I get a chance to meet

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another accessibility practitioner,

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and today I'm very pleased to be meeting with Ted Drake.

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Hello, Ted, how are you?

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- I'm doing great, thank you for asking.

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- Well, I'm talking from my home office in Vashon Island

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which is near Blink's headquarters in Seattle,

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where are you talking to us from?

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- I'm in Palm Springs, California,

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just outside of Los Angeles.

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- All right, lovely, well hope.

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I like to get there when things get

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a little too rain intensive here in January,

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but thanks for taking the time to be part of this

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and maybe a first good place to start is

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with what you're currently involved with,

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what you're doing now?

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- Right now, I'm the Global Accessibility Leader at Intuit.

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We make TurboTax, QuickBooks, accounting software,

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and it's been a busy year with the COVID,

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basically everybody being able to work at home,

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it seems like we're doing more and more and more

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and so it's morphed lot.

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We've been, this year's been a lot of coaching

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and a lot of development of other people's careers

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and that's been really satisfying.

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- Well, I imagine having that position in an organization

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as large as Intuit means

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that you keep pretty busy day in, day out.

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- Yeah, and working from home it's a 20 hour workday

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it's no big deal.

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(both laugh)

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- All right, so we get these little benefits from it,

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so that's good.

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Well, one of the main things that I like to do

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with this series is to find out how people made their way

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into what are doing today, what their journey was

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that brought them into accessibility

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and set them on this career path,

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so what would it be for you?

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Is there some place early on where you can remember

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that accessibility became something

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that you became familiar with and were of trusted in?

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- Yeah, I graduated college with a Degree in Fine Art,

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and I was working for the Museum of Fine Art in San Diego

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and I was building websites on the side,

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this would've been around 1999, 2000, 2001.

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The museum needed a new website manager,

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and so I stepped up and said, "Hey, I can do that

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"'cause I've been building sites."

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That's when I learned about accessibility,

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this was Section 508 was starting to be discussed.

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There wasn't really much information

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but I knew that it had to be accessible,

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I didn't know what that meant or how it actually worked

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but that was this goal.

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And fortunately the museum world

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has this amazing organization, it's Museums on the Web,

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I think they're called something new now,

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and it's museum website managers and creatives

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and curators would come together once a year

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and they would talk about

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how they were building their stuff,

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and accessibility was always just really a part of the core.

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And that's where I was learning about how you had

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to make images accessible,

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how you had to create descriptions of the artwork,

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how to create forms and such.

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And it was still the point where I knew how to do it

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but I wasn't really getting the connection to the people.

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- Well, a lot of people have started in web development area

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with accessibility, but most people I talked to

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didn't have any kind of resources or had no idea

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and it was just kind of hunt and peck

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and meeting one person, finding one piece of info,

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it sounded like you had a little bit of a launchpad

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there available for you.

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- Well, what happened was the world, back then,

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it was a Wild West show where everybody was building

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whatever they could to put onto a web browser,

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and we're talking about Netscape Navigator

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and Internet Explorer 4, it was a mess,

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the stuff we were creating was horrendous.

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And it was no surprise that it wasn't accessible,

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and then Jeffrey Zeldman and a bunch of other people

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basically came forward

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and said we have to stop this madness

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and we had to start building websites correctly,

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and that was the start of standards-based web development.

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So I got in a little bit early on that,

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I wouldn't say I was a pioneer

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but I was certain engaged with learning from the pioneers.

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And when we started over again

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that's when we started making things accessible,

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that's when we started using Semantic HTML,

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we separated the look, the CSS, the JavaScript, and HTML,

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that sounds basic today,

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but that was revolutionary 20 years ago.

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That's where I started getting

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into standards-based web development

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and accessibility just being the way you built stuff,

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you built it correctly.

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I left the Museum, worked for a couple other companies

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to transform their sites

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into being standards-based web development,

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and from there, I got a call from Yahoo.

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And what was interesting about Yahoo is that

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they were one of the first companies

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to build a Front-end Engineering Platform,

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engineers that did nothing but worry about the front-end,

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and those engineers hardly any of them

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went to computer school,

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none of them had computer science degrees,

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they were all artists, and writers, and philosophy students,

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and political science students, but we were all self-taught

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and we all understood this

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and you didn't even get in the door

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unless you knew what accessibility was.

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So it was a really great rate environment

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to be around people

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where you would have hour long discussions

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about what is a paragraph versus an odd order list.

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And so I co-founded

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the Accessibility Stakeholders Group at Yahoo,

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which became the Yahoo Accessibility Lab.

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At Yahoo is where I met people

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that actually used assistive technology.

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Watching them use our products

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and where they were having problems,

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that's where it went from theory to reality.

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And when you see what you've build makes things easy

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or makes things difficult

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that's when you start really getting the connection

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and accessibility goes from, something that you do

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to check a box to something that becomes a passion.

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And from Yahoo, I went Intuit.

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- It sounds like then you started

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to get into a research element,

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a kind of a shift left before things got to the code level,

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is that what was going on at the Lab?

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- Yeah, there were some really good examples.

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I remember, I can't remember his name, I'm sorry.

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I can't remember his name, but he came into the Lab

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where we worked with Victor and he's like,

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"I'm working on these charts

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"and I'd like to make the charts accessible."

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And so he was working with Victor

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and what they came up with

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was this concept of this new aria-live attribute.

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And so when you move through the chart,

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the aria-live would start being updated

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and that's how you would find out about

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the value of different elements of the chart.

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Well, that concept of a hidden span

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that had aria-live attributes

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that's an example of what happened

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in the Yahoo Accessibility Lab that just became standard.

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The visibility hidden, where we would take the clip pattern

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and use the clip pattern to hide stuff visually

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but it was still available to screen readers,

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that's another example of some

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that would come out of the Lab

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and it's because you had designers and engineers

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and you had someone that used a screen reader

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and someone that used zoom magnification,

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and you put them in a room with no limitations

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and some amazing things come out of it,

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and that's an example of that.

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- Yeah, and so then did your work at Yahoo

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was that then a kind of a logical move

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to what you're doing now Intuit or were you reframing

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or kind of looking at it as a different kind of opportunity?

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- I don't know how this happened, but most of my career

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has been with financial software, insurance and Yahoo,

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I worked on Yahoo Finance,

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and so moving to Intuit was natural

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'cause I was just used to working on financial software,

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but the other thing that really worked

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with Intuit is it's customer based.

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We really do care about the customer

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and customers are part of everything we do,

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so it was just sort of a moving even more and more

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to the fact that it's not accessibility as a checklist

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or something that you read in a book, but accessibility

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is something where you're meeting with customers,

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you're watching them balance their checkbooks,

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you're watching them start businesses,

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bring on new customers.

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So it's about how can I use my influence in accessibility

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to actually, my goal at Intuit is to reduce

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the unemployment rate for people with disabilities,

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it's not to sell more copies of QuickBooks,

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but what I'm hoping is that enough people can use QuickBooks

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that they can start a new business, hire more people,

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and that's that's my goal,

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is to actually make an improvement in the community.

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- And yeah, well with so many work opportunities

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being in doing the digital work, not having the tools,

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essentially, shuts you out from that whole area,

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so it definitely makes a lot of sense,

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and obviously with the types of products

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that your organization makes that's like front line

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with that kind of thing.

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- Yeah, the other thing I realized at Yahoo

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and when I moved to Intuit is that

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the accessibility team is a hub,

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the accessibility team is the one

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that looks at everybody's product,

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and we look at everybody's code,

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and we look at everybody's experience across the team.

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So I think at Intuit when working in the Accessibility Team,

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their original core group, we were probably the only people,

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at Intuit, that had tried every product,

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and when you do that you start realizing

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where the duplications are,

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where there's 15 different versions of a carousel

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being used within the same product.

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So one of the things we did as the central team at Intuit

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is we started saying,

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"Let's not just focus on accessibility,

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"but let's create the platform

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"that all the front-end engineers

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"can come together and start talking.

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"Let's encourage all the mobile developers

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"to start talking."

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So part of that was building a Front-end Engineering Summit,

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which was basically to get all,

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it was for, by and about front-end engineers,

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and that really helped break down those barriers,

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'cause we had people that sitting three desks away

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and had no idea what each other was working on

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when I first got there,

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and that is now no longer the problem.

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And I think more people need to see their accessibility team

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as an asset for more than just accessibility.

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- Well, the scenario that you just described

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and the hub approach that you mentioned,

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I think of those as being relatively mature representations

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of accessibility support within an organization

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but it takes a lot of work just to get there,

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so you were there certain challenges

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that you had to overcome or certain ways

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that you approach at Yahoo Finance and at Intuit

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that got it to where it ended up being?

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- Yeah, it was actually completely different,

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at Yahoo, engineers were the priority.

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So at Yahoo, we never bothered going to project managers

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and designers, we would just go straight to the engineers.

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That was just the way that it was,

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'cause they were the ones that were making the decisions

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and then those decisions would then go back

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to designers and product managers.

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At Intuit was completely different,

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at Intuit, it's like a communal decision.

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So I wouldn't just go to the engineers,

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I would go to the product managers,

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figure out who was leading their team,

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create a presentation, go to the presentation,

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meet with 20 people, explain how their product work,

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what needed to be done,

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it was about building consensus and explaining

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how to improve the customer experience.

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So it was a slightly different,

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each company is gonna be different.

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If I was working at a company

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where business return on investment

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was the number one priority then I would do it differently.

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But at Intuit,

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the number one priority is customer experience.

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So I would always focus on:

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here's a video of how this works,

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here's a video of a customer using it,

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that was always the emphasis.

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- And so as you've built things out at Intuit

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can you talk a little bit about

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the different elements of your program?

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Is there a centralized group informing

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across the global organization?

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Are there vertical support for accessibility?

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Maybe talk a little bit about that.

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- We've always, it started as a small group,

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Lori Samuels actually started it,

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you mentioned you had already interviewed her

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in a different podcast, and then I came in from Yahoo.

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It started as very core, like one or two people,

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and those one or two people, we worked extremely hard

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but everything we did was archived, published,

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so we started building this mountain of information.

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We created an Accessibility Champion Program

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about three years ago,

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and what that's done is it's allowed us to have

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a really simple way for everyone to become engaged.

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It takes anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes to become a Champion

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we've had over a thousand people complete the process.

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That has transformed the way accessibility

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is discussed at Intuit, so now, because like 5% to 10%

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of the people at Intuit have Champion badges,

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those conversations are happening every day,

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and so it's no longer this central team,

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we've got this big cloud of Champions.

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Now, of that big cloud of Champions,

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some of of them have stepped forward and say,

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"I wanna be become the leader of my product."

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And so they become a Level 2 Champion,

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which includes more intensive customer experience

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and training and then they become part of

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a like a central group and that central group works together

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to promote accessibility and solve problems.

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And then if they wanna become a full-time Champion,

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a full-time Accessibility Leader

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then they can become a Level 3 Champion,

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and that's when they can really focus on how

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they can impact the entire company.

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The Champion Program is volunteer,

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I'm not going to someone and saying,

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"You're gonna become a Champion.

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"You're gonna become a Level 2."

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It's more of let's get everybody to be aware

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and then allow them to build their careers.

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- In addition to the Champions,

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how is accessibility brought into the roles

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for product managers, project managers, researchers,

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interactions designers, developers?

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Do people get training or information

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on their particular role?

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- That's still something that we're working on.

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To be honest, we don't have

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the greatest role declarations yet.

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We have been looking at the roles

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that we're created by Teach Access,

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they're really quite good,

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that helps you define how you're gonna do different roles.

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But it's been,

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the ones that are more full-time accessibility,

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those have been easier to define.

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What's been a little bit harder to define is

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how do you do the rubrics

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so that when someone is doing their midyear

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or of the year projects reviews with their managers

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if they've been spending 10% of their time

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doing passion projects, maybe working on close captioning

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or animations or something like that,

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how does that get pulled into

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their end of the year discussion

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so that they get credit for the work

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that's not part of the core work.

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It's like as a team member

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you need to build your product and you need to ship it,

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and that's what you're mostly being judged upon

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but how do you also get judged upon the work

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you're doing on the side?

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That's been a little bit harder to incorporate.

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And I think that that's part of your monthly meetings

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with managers because doing accessibility

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is about the customer,

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so you should always be able to talk about your manager

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and always be able to talk about the work that's being done,

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but that is a little bit harder to get incorporated.

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- And you mentioned that customer experiences

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is the number one item that your organization

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is attentive to, kind of now looking into the future,

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are there you any initiatives you're able to talk about

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or just thoughts that you have

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about kind of things you'd like to achieve

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or be able to see happening in digital products

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and services like five years from now?

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- There's so much potential for artificial intelligence,

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I just created a pathway, a pathway is a way

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that people can go through like a curated course,

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it's a links and you kind of keep track,

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I just created one

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on artificial intelligence and accessibility.

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I think where we're gonna be seeing a lot of it

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in the future is where you can use artificial intelligence

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to simplify the process, a good example is in TurboTax,

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there might be 30,000 different tax screens,

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but we're using artificial intelligence to say,

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"Hey, this person is filling out their tax form,

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"they only need to see these 10 screens,

Speaker: 00:19:45

"or maybe they need to see these 15 screens."

Speaker: 00:19:48

So it's like simplifying the process

Speaker: 00:19:52

by only showing what's necessary,

Speaker: 00:19:55

that affects, not just accessibility,

Speaker: 00:19:57

but user experience in general.

Speaker: 00:19:59

The more that you can reduce the interactions,

Speaker: 00:20:01

I think, the more accessible it is.

Speaker: 00:20:05

So if it's, instead of showing someone 50 radio buttons

Speaker: 00:20:09

when really only five of them are relevant

Speaker: 00:20:11

then let's only show them the five relevant radio buttons,

Speaker: 00:20:14

and we know that that's true

Speaker: 00:20:15

because of artificial intelligence.

Speaker: 00:20:19

We're also looking at how we can incorporate OCR

Speaker: 00:20:24

for things like I take a picture of my invoice

Speaker: 00:20:26

and it takes all the information outta the invoice

Speaker: 00:20:30

and puts it into the QuickBooks.

Speaker: 00:20:33

If by taking a picture, I can do it

Speaker: 00:20:36

instead of typing in 15 form inputs, that's gonna be great.

Speaker: 00:20:40

One of the things I like is if you use QuickBooks

Speaker: 00:20:45

and you have a phone, just having the phone on you

Speaker: 00:20:47

when you drive from your house to a client,

Speaker: 00:20:51

it can track and it can create a mileage report.

Speaker: 00:20:54

And then that mileage report at the end of the week

Speaker: 00:20:56

you go through this list of mileage and you say,

Speaker: 00:20:58

"Okay, this is business, this is business,

Speaker: 00:21:01

"and this is business."

Speaker: 00:21:02

So in 15 seconds, you're creating your mileage report,

Speaker: 00:21:08

that is so much better than keeping a spreadsheet

Speaker: 00:21:11

of here's when I left the house,

Speaker: 00:21:14

here's when I got to the client,

Speaker: 00:21:15

here's how many miles it took.

Speaker: 00:21:17

And I was working with the business owner who is blind

Speaker: 00:21:21

and he was really excited about this

Speaker: 00:21:23

because you can be the passenger of a car

Speaker: 00:21:25

and you can get his mileage reports.

Speaker: 00:21:28

So as he was taking Lyfts and Ubers

Speaker: 00:21:30

and going to different clients

Speaker: 00:21:32

he was able to create that mileage report

Speaker: 00:21:35

and get deductions that he hadn't had before.

Speaker: 00:21:39

- Yeah, those kinds of examples where you have these

Speaker: 00:21:44

maybe unanticipated serendipitous pieces

Speaker: 00:21:49

for accessibility are always fun to discover

Speaker: 00:21:52

and build into our work.

Speaker: 00:21:55

- Another thing that we're pushing, I'd like to see more,

Speaker: 00:21:57

is that the Accessibility Team we've always been,

Speaker: 00:22:00

and this is not just an Intuit, but across all companies,

Speaker: 00:22:03

we seem to be the team that is most obsessed with customers,

Speaker: 00:22:08

customers who are underrepresented,

Speaker: 00:22:11

customers who don't always have a voice.

Speaker: 00:22:13

So it's normal for the accessibility team to start expanding

Speaker: 00:22:18

into inclusion and diversity and ethics,

Speaker: 00:22:24

and so that's where we're also looking at is

Speaker: 00:22:27

we've expanded our personas, our personas are not just

Speaker: 00:22:31

Joe is a small business owner who's blind,

Speaker: 00:22:34

it's now things like Samantha is a small business owner,

Speaker: 00:22:39

who's blind,

Speaker: 00:22:40

but she's also a single parent of three children,

Speaker: 00:22:43

and she runs two side jobs,

Speaker: 00:22:45

and she didn't graduate high school.

Speaker: 00:22:47

It's like, how can we incorporate more communities

Speaker: 00:22:52

into our personas and how we're looking at stuff

Speaker: 00:22:54

instead of just, it works with a screen reader

Speaker: 00:22:57

so we're good.

Speaker: 00:22:58

- Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up

Speaker: 00:23:01

because sometimes I think people in accessibility

Speaker: 00:23:06

feel siloed, sometimes, in what they're doing

Speaker: 00:23:11

and what you just described broadens its significantly

Speaker: 00:23:16

in terms of how it fits into our overall engagement

Speaker: 00:23:21

with other humans.

Speaker: 00:23:23

- I have another example,

Speaker: 00:23:28

we implemented a bilingual articles and there was a switch

Speaker: 00:23:34

and that switch said English or Spanish.

Speaker: 00:23:37

Now, that seems like a really easy solution

Speaker: 00:23:42

for switching between English and Spanish,

Speaker: 00:23:43

but when I turned on a screen reader,

Speaker: 00:23:46

the screen reader was essentially saying English or off

Speaker: 00:23:51

and that's because switch is set English on, English off,

Speaker: 00:23:54

and that's because switches tend to be on/off.

Speaker: 00:23:57

And that goes back to the ethics position,

Speaker: 00:24:00

it's like content ethics, is a non-English truly off?

Speaker: 00:24:06

So what they did was they switched from a switch to links,

Speaker: 00:24:10

like read this article in English

Speaker: 00:24:13

or read this article in Spanish,

Speaker: 00:24:15

but it would be in that language.

Speaker: 00:24:18

And that's an example where the accessibility team

Speaker: 00:24:19

can also start pulling in some design ethics and saying,

Speaker: 00:24:23

"We shouldn't treat a community as an off or an on."

Speaker: 00:24:30

- Well, I appreciate all these great examples

Speaker: 00:24:33

that you provided of kind of broadening and looking forward.

Speaker: 00:24:37

And thank you so much for spending this time

Speaker: 00:24:41

to chat with me,

Speaker: 00:24:42

I'm sure it will give a lot of people

Speaker: 00:24:45

some additional interest in bringing accessibility

Speaker: 00:24:49

into their work life or possibly

Speaker: 00:24:52

to make it part of our profession.

Speaker: 00:24:55

- Thank you so much for asking me

Speaker: 00:24:57

and for continuing with your series,

Speaker: 00:25:00

there's a great variety of speakers you've engaged with.

Speaker: 00:25:03

- All right, thanks a lot.

Speaker: 00:25:05

Bye, bye, Ted.