How Often Do You Get a Chance to Make That Much of a Difference

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(dramatic music)

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- Hello, this is Digital Accessibility

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with 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

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is how others have 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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- All right, well, here we are again

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with another episode where I have a great opportunity

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to talk to an accessibility practitioner

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and today I'm very pleased to be speaking

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with Rich Schwerdtfeger.

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Hello, Rich.

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How are you today?

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- Good Joe, how are you?

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- Yeah, I'm good.

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I'm as usual in ensconced in my Vatian Island office,

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which is near Blink's Seattle headquarters.

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Where are you located?

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- I'm located near in Kralendijk

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in Bonaire in the Southern Caribbean.

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We retired here back in 2000-

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To here in 2017 and we like scuba diving,

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so that's what we do all the time here, yeah.

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- Well, it sounds like a fabulous place to be.

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And I mentioned before that it's an area I wanna visit.

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So it's great to be talking to you

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and you are retired now, but I definitely was happy

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to be able to have this chat with you

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because you've been involved in so much

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within the accessibility profession

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and helping to grow things for all of us.

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So maybe a good place to start is kind of

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what you've done most recently related to accessibility

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and kind of the final things that you were doing

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as your full-time activity and then we can go from there.

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- Okay, well, as you said, I retired,

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I did that at the end of 2016 and we moved down here.

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I think some of the related to accessibility

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that I've done is I chaired the Board of Nobility

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for about two years after, I continued to chair

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the Board of Nobility two years after I retired from IBM.

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So when I was working at IBM,

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I was the chief technology officer

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for accessibility at IBM when I retired.

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I also chaired the board of this nonprofit,

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which does a lot to educate people on how to make

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the web accessible and other things like that.

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And did a lot in the last few years in training executives

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and also students going to college,

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just so that we would have people who basically

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get ingrained accessibility in their working careers.

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So I did that the last couple years I was here.

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I actually had, in the middle of my retirement,

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we were in Rajampet and I had actually

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had a neat tendon rupture,

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and I got to experience what it's like

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to get around the island when you have a disability.

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So I wrote an article for the local newspaper

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saying how bad things were.

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But so I did do that and not accessibility related,

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but actually chaired the board of a nonprofit here

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that was looking to preserve the monuments

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on the island from development.

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So I did some of those things.

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And beyond that, like I said, I'm into the scuba diving

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so I do a lot of volunteer work.

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We restored the sponges on the famous

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Salt Pier here in Bonaire.

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They were refurbishing the pier and these sponges

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had come off and there it's a big tourist attraction,

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so we put 'em ball back on.

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Clean up dives, we had when an oil spill hit here,

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I was involved with, my wife and I

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were both involved with doing the cleanup.

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So that's what we've done since retirement.

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And I've gone and I've given interviews

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on how we did things back in the day with accessibility

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and how that affected things going forward.

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So that's basically the extent

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of my accessibility work since retirement.

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- Well, it sounds like retirement is kind of

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in quotes for you because it sounds

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like you've been really, keep yourself continually busy.

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- Also, I mean, I have a YouTube channel,

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so I do underwater cinema photography.

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That's my, big passion of mine too.

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Totally unrelated to what I did in the past, but yeah.

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- But I think you said that your last position at IBM

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was chief technology officer for accessibility.

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I imagine that's a considerable amount of activities

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and responsibility there.

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Maybe before we go kind of delving into the past,

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what were you involved with as the CTO of accessibility?

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- Well, okay.

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So let me just backtrack a little bit.

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So I'm actually the very first distinguished engineer

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at IBM on accessibility.

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There had never been one before.

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So, and I think that speaks a lot about what we were able

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to achieve as a group at IBM and that, yes, I led things,

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but big things are never done by one person.

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And I'm, I think I was then also the first

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chief technology officer for accessibility at the company.

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So I dunno if they have one right now,

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but I think a lot of that, I mean,

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I can go into my career things,

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but one of the big things was the ARIA work

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and we can talk about that a little bit later if we-

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Because that also, you know, some of the big things

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that you achieve is when you tie accessibility

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to a business case at the company.

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And that's part of what you really need to do

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as like an accessibility officer is you,

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if you're gonna move, you basically as just as a CTO

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or a distinguished engineer.

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At IBM, that's kind of like the chiefs of the boat,

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like on a submarine.

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These are the guys that are usually, the buck stops here

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when somebody is in hot water, maybe because didn't produce

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something that's accessible, they call you in

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and to clean up the mess, or if there's something

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affecting the business on a big way.

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I mean, the work that I did on ARIA,

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I actually started out with, we had a $20 billion

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software business that was at risk.

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And I could talk about that if we have time.

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The ARIA's has actually helped, not only just helped people

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with disabilities, but also opened up the broader

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open web and IBM software middleware business.

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So all of that, I think, contributed

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to my getting that position at the company.

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But yes, it's a lot of experience,

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a lot of responsibility with that job.

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You really are responsible for your part

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of this $20 billion software business at the company

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at the time and so that included,

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you have to build infrastructure to support your products.

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You have to get tools to support it,

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assist technology support.

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You had to sell the rest of the world

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on the the technology that you were...

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You can't just invent stuff.

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If you can't get other people to use it,

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it's usually a failure.

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So I'm not the type of guy who would go out

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and just, okay, I'm gonna go, here's how you,

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here's all the directions for making a product accessible.

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Yeah, I contribute to that, but the whole infrastructure

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to even make that possible is what I was involved.

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- Well, I definitely wanna dig more into your ARIA work,

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but one of the things I like to do in this series

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is find out how people made their way

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to where they are today.

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Because for each of us, it tends to be

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a winding, circuitous path to where we end up.

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So kind of what would be a milestone for you?

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What were the first glimmers of that.

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- So that's a great way...

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It's this winding path.

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It's a really good way to describe it.

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So I'm gonna take you back to, I wanna say 1990, all right?

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This is about right before I started at IBM.

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So I was working in the oil field business,

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and nothing to do with accessibility,

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had I had developed the technology that basically

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recovered all their RC drilling operations,

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which was the signal process simulated.

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Actually nothing to do with accessibility.

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And anyways, the company was restructuring.

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The oil oil business had kind of tanked a bit.

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And you know, what I was doing

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was the next generation decoding system.

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And it was around OS/2.

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So Jim Thatcher, you may or may not know Jim Thatcher.

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So Jim was looking for someone

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who was an OS/2 internals expert.

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And so I was looking for a job and this thing came up

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at the IBM's Watson Research Lab

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and I said, "I don't know what a screen reader is,

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but this looks kind of interesting."

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I always wanted to work for IBM when I was younger

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and I said, "well, let's go give this a try."

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So anyways, they accepted my resume.

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And so, I still remember my first day

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at IBM seeing Jim Thatcher.

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I mean, this is, you know, he's not with us anymore,

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but I remember, first, he was a lot older than me.

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I think I was well back, this was back in 1990,

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so its a number of years ago.

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And so I come in, I'm waiting in the lobby

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and this guy comes running down this,

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I mean literally running down the stairs with a big grin.

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It's like he just won the lottery.

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Somebody's gonna solve this technical problem he had.

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And what had happened at that time in 1990

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is the world was moving from DOS,

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which is a character-based system, to windows and OS/2.

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So this graphical user interface

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and it was completely inaccessible.

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And so people were concerned

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about losing access to the computer, I mean completely.

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You would not be able to go to school anymore.

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It's a little bit like how ARIA started too

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because we were gonna, everything was going to the rich web

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and we were gonna lose access to the computer.

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So my job at that time was to figure out

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how we could capture what was drawn on the screen

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in real time and make it accessible to a screen reader.

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So that meant I needed to capture text

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when icons were drawn at a very low level.

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And so I kind of leveraged my work in operating systems

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and real time systems I used to work,

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my first job outta school was the F-15 Weapons System,

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which is a real-time system.

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So all of this stuff came, and plus my OS/2 internal work,

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which was kind of rare to have people

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that would have those skills and it all kind of,

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you know, just like you said,

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you just kind of at the right place at the right time,

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you had the right set of skills.

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And so I didn't realize honestly how important this was

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until I started doing the work and in,

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I think it was, it was the summer of 1991,

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an article came out in "BYTE Magazine."

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Now back then, "BYTE Magazine..."

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Do you remember "BYTE Magazine," Joe?

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- Yeah, it was like that thick at one point.

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- Well back then that an article by Joe Lazzaro came out,

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talking about loss of the computer to the blind

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and which highlighted the problems I was just talking about.

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And I actually had managed to get some

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working with the team in the lab.

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So, you're reading this article.

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You could just, you could cut the fear with a knife.

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It was like nothing you've ever experienced before

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that you can potentially make a difference in.

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And so I read this "BYTE" article

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and I contacted Jon Udell at "BYTE" and I said, "Jon,

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we actually have a working prototype of this right now."

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This is before Windows even, we couldn't,

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we actually back then, we couldn't even

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get Microsoft to look at this back then.

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They weren't weren't interested.

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So we were doing this on OS/2 to start.

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And so I wrote this article that,

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it's constantly referenced today,

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it's called, "Making the GUI Talk" in December '91.

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So this was big.

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This, like a seminal article and what really hit me

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is Jim who led the team, he went to Washington

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to discuss loss of access to the computer by the blind.

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And he went to this government building

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on the second floor and outside the room,

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there were tables lining the wall with stacks and stacks,

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like maybe a hundred copies

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of this "BYTE Magazine" article thing.

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And to basically summarize it,

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everybody thought IBM had solved this problem

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and everything was gonna be okay.

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That I really can't tell you how life transformational

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something like that is for someone.

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And to me it was, it was big.

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So anyways, long story short,

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I remember I went to my very first trip

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to CSUN that year and I felt like I was Mick Jagger.

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(Rich laughing)

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'Cause everybody wanted to meet,

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who's the guy who wrote this article?

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And it's not about I did this, or I did that.

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What mattered is we had actually made a difference.

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That to me was more important than anything else.

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And then I was actually the first person,

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I took what I learned there, and I was the first person

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to hear Windows talk for the first time.

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I actually, Jim challenged me to figure out how,

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you're never gonna solve that.

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I hacked the Windows operating system.

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I'm running an OS/2 to the display driver

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and we had it and I got it working.

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And I had undocumented calls into the operating system

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to communicate between OS/2 screener and Windows.

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And you know, it just, to make it fast, fast enough.

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And so we would, I remember back in the day

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we would go into,

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I would go to a customer site

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and they were having a problem.

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Everybody was running Windows except for the one person who

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could not see the screen was running OS/2

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just because of our screen reader.

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And also it was the first one that was programmable,

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it had a programmable interface, user interface.

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We actually, I don't know if it was me.

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I think it were Jim.

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We basically gave our documentation to PAL,

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which is our program access language to Chuck Opperman

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who's working at Headers Choice

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and they used that as the basis

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for their scripting language back then.

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So, 'cause we weren't gonna build a native Window screener,

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so we figured, well, okay, let's get 'em started.

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So anyways, that's how it started.

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And I guess after that, I mean I've done a number

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of other things.

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I've worked on Java accessibility.

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I don't know if you remember Java?

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I worked with Sun on the Java accessibility API.

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We did the first talking screen reader for that.

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We did some magnification software.

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We did work for seniors that got deployed in Tokyo

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because they have a huge aging population in Tokyo

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and with a lot of cognitive impairments

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and sight impairments and a whole range of things

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and these CAS were deployed all over downtown

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so that people could access information,

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which was kind of cool too.

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So we did a lot of that and I think,

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so that's kinda like in the middle before,

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I mean, Java was, at the time it was big,

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but I would not call it transformational.

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But what I found in your career is even though

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you may not use it directly, may not be big,

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what you learn from that is critical

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for the next step that you have to take.

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And so this gets into the whole thing with ARIA.

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- Well, yeah, it's just, if I jump in before that.

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Yeah, I mean, so you were involved

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in some really foundational aspects of,

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in a modern software and digital expression,

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that audiblized information.

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And so you definitely were in a unique situation.

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You know, a lot of people become familiar with accessibility

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because there's been building blocks there already,

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but kind of when you came into it,

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you were really at kind of that origin stage

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of bootstrapping and building it.

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And so, yeah, I think that's kind of

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puts you in a very unique position.

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But to get my question, there must have been something

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in that first period when you're working with it

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where you decided you wanted to continue in that area.

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So maybe talk a little bit about that because you could have

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obviously gone in a different direction.

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You'd done different things before that.

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So what was it that kind of kept you on that track?

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- Well, okay.

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So one of the things yet, I mean,

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understand there's different types of people.

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And there are people that need to have something

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to start with and there are people that can start

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with nothing and have to, and can make something happen.

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I'm kind of that type of a person.

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The other stuff doesn't float my boat that much.

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And the fact that I could use that about me to...

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Well, I mean, one of the things I should tell you is like,

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when we were doing the screener,

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IBM employed a lot of people with were disabled

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and you work with these people

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and they contribute to the design of the user experience

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and when they're successful, you see it on a big scale.

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I found that, working with Sun on Java accessibility

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was also a great thing, you know.

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Here's an example.

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They had a Java accessibility.

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I won't say this company, but we had somebody

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that had an accessibility API infrastructure out there

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that we had, Sun had a meeting with a whole bunch

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of industry leaders and they said,

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"okay, we wanna make this successful."

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And the other company, actually we'll say it,

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it was Microsoft at that time.

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They said, "well, just use our API."

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And I said, "but I knew, you know, from how to..."

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'Cause under the covers to support the screen reader,

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you had an API in what you needed,

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what they needed to get information.

Speaker: 00:20:05

And so they didn't have what you needed.

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They didn't have all of it.

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And it also, it was very tied to it

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as we needed something to be cross platform.

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So I remember, this is the coolest thing.

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So we got in there and with Java, you could do things

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like 10 times faster than low-level operating systems.

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And I remember, so this was like January or February

Speaker: 00:20:34

of, I forget what year it was.

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I wanna say, 1987, something like that,

Speaker: 00:20:37

maybe year 1997, or '96.

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But we anyways, long story short is we basically

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worked together as a team, we created an API

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and we got a working screener all in a matter of,

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and I mean to talk through everything

Speaker: 00:20:53

you can think of, it did it, right?

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It did it in about six months.

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I mean, six months is incredible,

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plus a reusable infrastructure.

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And we went to, what's the conference they have

Speaker: 00:21:07

up in, Closing the Gap?

Speaker: 00:21:09

I think it is up there, they still have that.

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- That still happens.

Speaker: 00:21:15

- Yeah, so we went there

Speaker: 00:21:17

'cause that was the first available conference.

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And I remember 'cause I know Microsoft tried

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to implement their API on two buttons at CSUN,

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just two buttons.

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We had it working list boxes, spreadsheets,

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I mean everything, right?

Speaker: 00:21:33

Rich text editing.

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And he came in and I remember his jaw dropped

Speaker: 00:21:38

and hit the, you know, at that time.

Speaker: 00:21:43

So, but the thing is, you know,

Speaker: 00:21:45

we all kind of, even Microsoft,

Speaker: 00:21:47

we all tend to work together

Speaker: 00:21:50

and I felt that was the most, that to me,

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being able to have the impact,

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I didn't really want to go back.

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I mean, going back to what I did before,

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it's just not the same.

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You can't have an impact like that.

Speaker: 00:22:04

I mean, it's very rare.

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So anyway, that's what it was.

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That's why I stayed there.

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- That's good.

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That's great.

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That's you a good part of the story to hear about.

Speaker: 00:22:16

And then, you know, definitely that next important part

Speaker: 00:22:22

of your career was surrounding the ARIA technology.

Speaker: 00:22:27

For people that aren't familiar with that,

Speaker: 00:22:30

the acronym I'm using is A R I A,

Speaker: 00:22:33

which actually was built on RIA,

Speaker: 00:22:36

which was rich internet applications,

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which going back 20 years ago as there was the .com boom

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and websites exploding, they weren't really as robust as

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people were used to with applications

Speaker: 00:22:55

that they would have on their Windows

Speaker: 00:22:56

as Mac operating systems and so rich internet applications

Speaker: 00:23:00

started to come about,

Speaker: 00:23:02

and then there was accessible rich internet applications,

Speaker: 00:23:07

which is where you came into the picture.

Speaker: 00:23:09

So talk about a little bit about the evolution of that.

Speaker: 00:23:13

- Okay, so right around, this is around 2003.

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So I was working in research

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and the head of emerging technologies,

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so I worked with on Java, comes to me,

Speaker: 00:23:31

he comes and he reaches out to me

Speaker: 00:23:33

and we had a good working relationship

Speaker: 00:23:35

for other reasons, not Java work.

Speaker: 00:23:38

He comes into my office, doesn't tell me why, he says,

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"hey, Rich, you know, I'd like you to come over

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and be the lead architect

Speaker: 00:23:45

for accessibility in our software group."

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Which is, so lead research and then do whatever it is.

Speaker: 00:23:51

So he never told me why.

Speaker: 00:23:55

And I said, "well, that sounds exciting.

Speaker: 00:23:57

I get to do something different."

Speaker: 00:24:01

So I went over there and so I was working at Austin

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and we got a call that we were gonna have

Speaker: 00:24:10

a team meeting in Cambridge, Mass.

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And so we all fly up there and we spend the morning

Speaker: 00:24:19

and we're talking about odds and ends.

Speaker: 00:24:23

And after the meeting's over, he says,

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"I need you to come with me."

Speaker: 00:24:28

So we go into this part of,

Speaker: 00:24:32

I mean, this was really super secret stuff at the time.

Speaker: 00:24:35

We go into this, all the way into the back area

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of the floor in this like hidden cubicle, you know.

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And he brings up, this is before Google Docs,

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the very first working office suite

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running in a web browser.

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I mean, this is like, so you have to understand

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why this would be so important

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from a strategic perspective for the company.

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So if you look back at that time, you had,

Speaker: 00:25:09

Microsoft owned nine over 90% of all the clients apps space.

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And what they had done is they also owned

Speaker: 00:25:19

over 90% of the browser market

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and what they had done is they had moved

Speaker: 00:25:25

their entire Internet Explorer team out to Beijing, China,

Speaker: 00:25:29

and they put it in maintenance mode.

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And so the only thing they're willing to make changes

Speaker: 00:25:34

to that browser was to security fixes,

Speaker: 00:25:41

you know, things like that.

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But, you know, and they had a lot of stuff

Speaker: 00:25:46

with actives back then that they had to deal with,

Speaker: 00:25:48

that was another programming model and they were push,

Speaker: 00:25:50

and so what they wanted to do is they wanted to use this

Speaker: 00:25:53

market position to basically tie the client desktop

Speaker: 00:26:00

to their middle, where you could only use their mode.

Speaker: 00:26:03

And so what they had done is they had said, okay,

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we're gonna basically make the web kind of obsolete

Speaker: 00:26:11

because we're not gonna do anything.

Speaker: 00:26:14

And so for IBM, this for them

Speaker: 00:26:17

was a killer for their software business

Speaker: 00:26:23

because if Microsoft, if people aren't deploying to the web,

Speaker: 00:26:27

that's a big issue because what we had,

Speaker: 00:26:31

what they had come out with in the lab

Speaker: 00:26:34

with the, this came with a company acquisition

Speaker: 00:26:37

from a company called Alpha Blocks.

Speaker: 00:26:40

And they told why they bought this company,

Speaker: 00:26:42

but the real reason they bought the company

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was for this technology.

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And so if we,

Speaker: 00:26:51

the problem was to be able to make this consumable

Speaker: 00:26:56

is we had to get over two big accessibility

Speaker: 00:27:00

law restrictions that were in WIC AG 1.

Speaker: 00:27:05

and the two words you had to run with JavaScript

Speaker: 00:27:08

and CSS turned off because it wasn't accessible.

Speaker: 00:27:13

And the reason that was at that time was

Speaker: 00:27:16

because people that worked on web accessibility

Speaker: 00:27:21

didn't really know software accessibility

Speaker: 00:27:23

from a holistic internals level and having worked on Java

Speaker: 00:27:29

and having worked with, I actually provided feedback

Speaker: 00:27:33

on Microsoft's accessibility work,

Speaker: 00:27:35

we used to go to those meetings and work with their team.

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You know, they didn't have the skillset.

Speaker: 00:27:42

So they looked at this as I don't know how to fix this,

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so the first thing you do is you say, oh, we can't fix it,

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so we're gonna make it inaccessible.

Speaker: 00:27:48

So it's basically, and what happened

Speaker: 00:27:50

is every major government organization

Speaker: 00:27:53

throughout the planet basically said,

Speaker: 00:27:56

you can't use these technologies and be accessible.

Speaker: 00:27:58

So, you know, what this means is companies

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like Oracle, IBM, you know, all the big

Speaker: 00:28:02

middleware companies, they couldn't deploy their software.

Speaker: 00:28:09

So, and he said, do you know what the problem is?

Speaker: 00:28:09

And I said, yeah, you're using JavaScript and CSS

Speaker: 00:28:12

to create these user interfaces and they're not accessible.

Speaker: 00:28:15

Yeah, and this had been not been solved for six years.

Speaker: 00:28:20

He says, yeah.

Speaker: 00:28:21

And the whole $20 billion software business is riding on it.

Speaker: 00:28:24

We need you to figure it out.

Speaker: 00:28:27

So no pressure, Joe.

Speaker: 00:28:29

(Rich laughing)

Speaker: 00:28:31

So I went back to Austin and I started looking

Speaker: 00:28:37

at how these apps were constructed

Speaker: 00:28:39

and they had a document object model, which is like a tree

Speaker: 00:28:44

and the reason they have that model

Speaker: 00:28:46

is because it's modeled after the desktop Window hierarchy,

Speaker: 00:28:51

because that's how they propagate keyboard and mouse events.

Speaker: 00:28:54

So to tie it into the operating system,

Speaker: 00:28:57

they had to use the same infrastructure under the covers.

Speaker: 00:29:01

And so if you look about accessibility APIs on platforms,

Speaker: 00:29:07

they're based on, this object tells you what type

Speaker: 00:29:11

of object it is and what it is and what it's role is,

Speaker: 00:29:15

what's its states are,

Speaker: 00:29:16

and when things change, you get notified.

Speaker: 00:29:18

So if you go from checked to not checked,

Speaker: 00:29:20

a screen reader or some other's, maybe another type

Speaker: 00:29:26

of voice recognition system,

Speaker: 00:29:28

whatever gets notified when something gets changed

Speaker: 00:29:30

and then they respond, so that's how these systems worked.

Speaker: 00:29:34

And on the web, what was happening is,

Speaker: 00:29:36

so they would take these elements that they provided

Speaker: 00:29:40

for an HTML that had no semantics that matched

Speaker: 00:29:44

what you would use in conventional desktop platforms,

Speaker: 00:29:48

like menus and list boxes and all the other stuff.

Speaker: 00:29:51

And I thought, you know, and this only took me

Speaker: 00:29:53

about a month 'cause I just happened to be, like I said,

Speaker: 00:29:56

you're in the right place at the right time.

Speaker: 00:29:58

I had worked with all this stuff on Java,

Speaker: 00:30:00

I'd worked on screen readers,

Speaker: 00:30:02

I could see the whole thing in front of me

Speaker: 00:30:04

like it was clear as a bell.

Speaker: 00:30:08

And so what I, and I said, look, if we could add

Speaker: 00:30:12

these semantics on top of the HTML webpage

Speaker: 00:30:17

and say, well, I know this is what you think it is,

Speaker: 00:30:20

but it's really one of these.

Speaker: 00:30:22

And this is what's being change, is here, changes here,

Speaker: 00:30:24

care about all these things.

Speaker: 00:30:26

And if we could do that, then rich web applications

Speaker: 00:30:32

would behave excessively like desktop applications.

Speaker: 00:30:40

So, and like many things, Joe, in order to,

Speaker: 00:30:45

it solving the technical, the basic technical problem

Speaker: 00:30:49

is actually often the easiest part.

Speaker: 00:30:52

The hard part is making everybody, get 'em to adopt it.

Speaker: 00:30:55

So this means browser manufacturers,

Speaker: 00:30:58

assistant technology vendors and not just Windows,

Speaker: 00:31:02

you need to get a Mac, you need iPhones,

Speaker: 00:31:04

you need all, you know, over time,

Speaker: 00:31:05

all of these things had to get, Linux, right?

Speaker: 00:31:09

And so we had to pull a team together.

Speaker: 00:31:12

We had to put people in the web standards efforts

Speaker: 00:31:15

to create new standards for,

Speaker: 00:31:16

it was called DHTML accessibility early on

Speaker: 00:31:21

and we had to change WIC AG to remove the restrictions,

Speaker: 00:31:24

but you couldn't do it without something

Speaker: 00:31:26

that proved that it worked.

Speaker: 00:31:28

I mean, this literally took eight years

Speaker: 00:31:30

to make all this happen.

Speaker: 00:31:31

So then you have to change government policy, you know.

Speaker: 00:31:35

So these are all the things, and I didn't do this

Speaker: 00:31:37

all myself, I led a team that would do this and you know,

Speaker: 00:31:41

and they're not always direct reports to me.

Speaker: 00:31:43

And anyways, we had to get that done

Speaker: 00:31:45

and we also had to get IBM's

Speaker: 00:31:48

own product teams to support it.

Speaker: 00:31:50

And then we had to actually extend the APIs

Speaker: 00:31:52

on the operating system, so one of the fallouts

Speaker: 00:31:56

is we went Microsoft's UI automation at the time

Speaker: 00:32:00

was too slow and so what we, under the covers,

Speaker: 00:32:04

we have to map each operating system platform.

Speaker: 00:32:06

So we wrote an extension for active accessibility

Speaker: 00:32:10

and it's used today in Google Chrome,

Speaker: 00:32:14

it's used in Firefox, it's used, you know,

Speaker: 00:32:17

it's used in OpenOffice.

Speaker: 00:32:19

So not only was that used,

Speaker: 00:32:22

but also in the infrastructure,

Speaker: 00:32:24

and we also influenced the other platforms.

Speaker: 00:32:27

But more importantly, we got the other platforms

Speaker: 00:32:30

like Apple to join in and provide their side of the point,

Speaker: 00:32:35

how they worked and how we pulled it all together.

Speaker: 00:32:37

But anyways, and I actually didn't come up

Speaker: 00:32:39

with the name ARIA, I think that was Judy Brewer

Speaker: 00:32:42

that came up with that name.

Speaker: 00:32:44

So it kind of stuck.

Speaker: 00:32:46

So Judy, you know Judy.

Speaker: 00:32:49

So that gives you some idea of how I got

Speaker: 00:32:52

to where I am so, where I did.

Speaker: 00:32:55

- Yeah, but you know, going to your point of making sure

Speaker: 00:33:00

that everyone is willing to buy into an invented solution,

Speaker: 00:33:06

You did a lot of work with World Wide Web Consortium

Speaker: 00:33:09

and working group and W3C is all about collaboration

Speaker: 00:33:14

across all kinds of different levels, government,

Speaker: 00:33:17

academic, corporate, different international aspects to it.

Speaker: 00:33:25

So that was a big part of your work as well, wasn't it?

Speaker: 00:33:28

- Yeah, well, that's important points

Speaker: 00:33:32

that you've observed because I remember

Speaker: 00:33:35

having these discussions at IBM and I said,

Speaker: 00:33:39

you know, your first, 'cause I was also

Speaker: 00:33:42

on the patent board too at the time.

Speaker: 00:33:43

I said, they're your first blush is we need to patent this.

Speaker: 00:33:46

And I said, that's the last thing you need to do.

Speaker: 00:33:50

You need to be able to make this freely available

Speaker: 00:33:53

to everybody or else they'll run.

Speaker: 00:33:56

They won't do it.

Speaker: 00:33:57

They don't wanna be locked in.

Speaker: 00:34:00

So we did, everything was open.

Speaker: 00:34:01

We did open standards for W3C,

Speaker: 00:34:07

we did an open accessibility API for, IAccessible2.

Speaker: 00:34:11

I mean, everything was basically free.

Speaker: 00:34:15

And not only that, but if you could imagine

Speaker: 00:34:18

these companies wanted to solve this problem too

Speaker: 00:34:20

and they all got, including Microsoft.

Speaker: 00:34:22

Microsoft got in and they were a really

Speaker: 00:34:24

a huge contributor to ARIA as well.

Speaker: 00:34:27

So, you know, we had a good, really good

Speaker: 00:34:31

experience with all of it and if we had not done that,

Speaker: 00:34:36

then that would probably, then we would

Speaker: 00:34:38

have a different world today, I think, if we hadn't.

Speaker: 00:34:42

But as a result of that, I can tell you

Speaker: 00:34:46

that the proprietary platform of silver light

Speaker: 00:34:50

and their lock in, all that stuff,

Speaker: 00:34:54

you don't hear about it anymore.

Speaker: 00:34:55

You hear about the open web.

Speaker: 00:35:00

So we, but everybody benefited.

Speaker: 00:35:01

I remember that we had gained enough momentum

Speaker: 00:35:08

that we would go to CSUN.

Speaker: 00:35:09

We'd basically populate teams

Speaker: 00:35:11

all throughout the whole conference.

Speaker: 00:35:12

We worked with Missoula and whatnot,

Speaker: 00:35:15

saying about showing people what we were doing.

Speaker: 00:35:17

And I remember Cynthia Shelly coming up to me and asking me,

Speaker: 00:35:22

well, how do we get involved?

Speaker: 00:35:24

Because they're asking why Microsoft

Speaker: 00:35:25

at that time wasn't involved with it?

Speaker: 00:35:27

And I said, Cynthia, it's all open.

Speaker: 00:35:30

You just joined the W3C.

Speaker: 00:35:31

Anybody can use it.

Speaker: 00:35:34

There's no restrictions.

Speaker: 00:35:35

I'll work with your team.

Speaker: 00:35:38

So I think that what I, so this is interesting.

Speaker: 00:35:40

So I remember, so Cynthia went back and she got Microsoft,

Speaker: 00:35:45

'cause every time you join a W3C working group,

Speaker: 00:35:48

you have to get approval by your legal team

Speaker: 00:35:50

because it's, there's intellectual property involved

Speaker: 00:35:55

and all that stuff, so in the meantime,

Speaker: 00:35:58

what I started doing is I started having meetings

Speaker: 00:36:01

every Monday night with Linda Mau from the Microsoft team

Speaker: 00:36:06

working on Internet Explorer and sharing what we did,

Speaker: 00:36:08

getting input, bringing it back to the group while they,

Speaker: 00:36:11

so I was doing this on the back channel.

Speaker: 00:36:13

And the pivotal meeting for me was, 'cause we told you,

Speaker: 00:36:19

they had moved the whole browser team out to Beijing, China.

Speaker: 00:36:23

She said to, usually had these calls at 9:00 at night

Speaker: 00:36:27

and Linda said to me on call,

Speaker: 00:36:29

well, I'm not gonna be able to work with you anymore.

Speaker: 00:36:32

I said, really?

Speaker: 00:36:33

And I said, why is this?

Speaker: 00:36:34

We're moving the whole effort back to rep.

Speaker: 00:36:39

And I says, is it because of accessibility?

Speaker: 00:36:42

And she said, yes.

Speaker: 00:36:44

So people don't realize this, but accessibility

Speaker: 00:36:48

is the thing that basically broke open the web

Speaker: 00:36:52

because at that point, the biggest player

Speaker: 00:36:55

was still Microsoft, they had most of the market

Speaker: 00:36:58

and they got involved with this

Speaker: 00:37:00

and the fact that they got involved and started working

Speaker: 00:37:03

on it, whether they were at the same level or not,

Speaker: 00:37:06

you know, may have taken a while, but it's irrelevant.

Speaker: 00:37:09

I mean, they got involved and it also gave credits

Speaker: 00:37:12

for when Google came out with Chrome, they, you know,

Speaker: 00:37:16

this enabled their browser to take off and Firefox.

Speaker: 00:37:19

And I remember Firefox plus for performance reasons,

Speaker: 00:37:24

it started shooting up in market share,

Speaker: 00:37:27

Chrome took off later on.

Speaker: 00:37:30

So that was the pivotal moment

Speaker: 00:37:31

that people just don't know about.

Speaker: 00:37:33

It was, so you ask why you do this stuff?

Speaker: 00:37:36

How often do you get a chance

Speaker: 00:37:38

to make that much of a difference?

Speaker: 00:37:39

You really...

Speaker: 00:37:43

And yeah, it's for people with, and for me...

Speaker: 00:37:45

Okay, so yes, I did this for business reasons, but for me,

Speaker: 00:37:48

I always did it for the people with disabilities

Speaker: 00:37:50

'cause I always, to me that meant a lot.

Speaker: 00:37:53

When you see somebody...

Speaker: 00:37:54

I mean, I remember when Tom Watkowski,

Speaker: 00:38:00

he used to be a director for accessibility at AOL

Speaker: 00:38:03

and he went to the, company named,

Speaker: 00:38:05

this is getting older now.

Speaker: 00:38:10

One of the big companies or what,

Speaker: 00:38:12

broadcasting companies out of in Pennsylvania.

Speaker: 00:38:19

And so he, I sent him Greg Aaron Leventhal,

Speaker: 00:38:23

who worked on my team, he sent him a code example,

Speaker: 00:38:27

a first talking tree on a webpage.

Speaker: 00:38:32

And so Tom was blind and he literally cried.

Speaker: 00:38:37

When do you do that?

Speaker: 00:38:39

I mean, it's...

Speaker: 00:38:41

- Yeah.

Speaker: 00:38:43

- It's incredible.

Speaker: 00:38:46

So I'm really proud of the work that everybody did

Speaker: 00:38:48

and yes, I had to let a lot of stuff

Speaker: 00:38:51

and I don't make it sound like I did it all 'cause I didn't.

Speaker: 00:38:54

'Cause a lot of people were involved with it.

Speaker: 00:38:56

I mean Andy Weaver and Becky Gibson were working

Speaker: 00:38:59

on WIC AG, changing WIC AG.

Speaker: 00:39:00

Aaron basically wrote all the code in Firefox

Speaker: 00:39:03

that basically got it working in prototype in Firefox.

Speaker: 00:39:09

Then he shared this stuff with the Missoula team for Chrome

Speaker: 00:39:12

and on and on and on.

Speaker: 00:39:13

There's just a lot of, and great feedback from Microsoft,

Speaker: 00:39:17

great feedback from Apple.

Speaker: 00:39:19

And you know, you also get your fights too,

Speaker: 00:39:21

with any standards efforts, you have your technical battle,

Speaker: 00:39:24

but you know, overall it was pretty cool.

Speaker: 00:39:28

So all of that got me eventually got me

Speaker: 00:39:31

to get that position at the company.

Speaker: 00:39:35

So I'm very pleased with what everybody,

Speaker: 00:39:37

what everybody did at the time, so yeah.

Speaker: 00:39:40

- Well that's I think a great place to end it

Speaker: 00:39:43

with your personal reflections on there.

Speaker: 00:39:45

This has been a really interesting,

Speaker: 00:39:49

and illuminating journey through some of these

Speaker: 00:39:52

foundational technical building blocks

Speaker: 00:39:57

to the accessible web that we have today.

Speaker: 00:40:01

So I wanna thank you for taking the time

Speaker: 00:40:03

to share your stories and look forward

Speaker: 00:40:07

to maybe joining you for a dive sometime.

Speaker: 00:40:11

- That'd be great, that would be great.

Speaker: 00:40:12

The water's beautiful here, so yeah.

Speaker: 00:40:15

- All right. - All right.

Speaker: 00:40:16

- Thanks a lot, Rich. - You take care.

Speaker: 00:40:17

All right, thanks for having me.

Speaker: 00:40:20

And it's been an honor, thank you.