Understanding That Accessibility Is Not Just About the WCAG

Speaker: 00:00:00

(bright music)

Speaker: 00:00:06

- Hello, this is "Digital Accessibility:

Speaker: 00:00:09

the People Behind the Progress".

Speaker: 00:00:11

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

Speaker: 00:00:16

And as an accessibility professional myself,

Speaker: 00:00:17

I find it very interesting as to how others

Speaker: 00:00:20

have found their way into this profession.

Speaker: 00:00:23

So let's meet one of those people right now

Speaker: 00:00:25

and hear about their journey.

Speaker: 00:00:34

All right.

Speaker: 00:00:35

Well here we go with another episode

Speaker: 00:00:37

where I have the opportunity to meet

Speaker: 00:00:39

with an accessibility practitioner.

Speaker: 00:00:43

And today I'm very excited to be speaking

Speaker: 00:00:45

with Derek Featherstone.

Speaker: 00:00:46

Hello, Derek, how are you doing today?

Speaker: 00:00:48

- I'm doing well, Joe. How about you?

Speaker: 00:00:51

- Everything's going pretty well, as usual,

Speaker: 00:00:54

I'm in my home office on Vashon Island,

Speaker: 00:00:57

which is near Blink's Seattle headquarters.

Speaker: 00:01:00

Where are you talking to me from?

Speaker: 00:01:02

- I am based here in Ottawa, Canada.

Speaker: 00:01:06

- All right.

Speaker: 00:01:07

Well, it's one of the cities in Canada

Speaker: 00:01:09

I haven't visited yet,

Speaker: 00:01:10

but I definitely wanna get there some time

Speaker: 00:01:12

to check it out.

Speaker: 00:01:15

Well thanks for being part of this.

Speaker: 00:01:17

And I think probably a lot of people

Speaker: 00:01:22

that maybe listening to this are familiar with you already,

Speaker: 00:01:25

but I'm looking forward to learning a little bit

Speaker: 00:01:29

about your background and how you got here.

Speaker: 00:01:33

But always a good place to start is if you could just

Speaker: 00:01:35

talk a little bit about what you're up to right now.

Speaker: 00:01:39

- Yeah, so right now,

Speaker: 00:01:40

I am the VP of Product Accessibility

Speaker: 00:01:44

and Inclusive Design at Salesforce.

Speaker: 00:01:47

I started here in mid-January of this year, of 2022,

Speaker: 00:01:54

and loving it.

Speaker: 00:01:57

It's a wonderful place to work

Speaker: 00:01:59

and have a great team surrounded by a load of people

Speaker: 00:02:04

that care really deeply about accessibility.

Speaker: 00:02:07

So super happy to be here right now.

Speaker: 00:02:12

- But you also,

Speaker: 00:02:15

a lot of people may know you from your contributions

Speaker: 00:02:19

to the community through

Speaker: 00:02:22

quite a lot of training programs and things like that.

Speaker: 00:02:26

Are you still involved in those areas?

Speaker: 00:02:30

- A little bit less frequently now,

Speaker: 00:02:33

mostly because things changed in 2020

Speaker: 00:02:40

and I haven't really traveled all that much,

Speaker: 00:02:42

although I still do quite a bit of

Speaker: 00:02:46

conference speaking or have done over the years

Speaker: 00:02:49

and put together workshops and that sort of thing.

Speaker: 00:02:51

And I still do that,

Speaker: 00:02:55

just definitely not as frequently right now,

Speaker: 00:02:57

although I am getting to the point where I think

Speaker: 00:03:01

I'm kind of ready to begin another wave

Speaker: 00:03:04

of traveling a little bit more

Speaker: 00:03:07

and speaking at conferences again and doing workshops,

Speaker: 00:03:11

I spend a lot of that time or some of that time...

Speaker: 00:03:14

Some of the time that I spend doing that kind of work

Speaker: 00:03:17

I do that internally at Salesforce.

Speaker: 00:03:21

And not really doing a whole lot in terms

Speaker: 00:03:24

of workshops publicly right now,

Speaker: 00:03:26

but that may change over the next little while.

Speaker: 00:03:29

- The pandemic certainly did change the dynamics

Speaker: 00:03:32

for a lot of things.

Speaker: 00:03:34

The CSUN conference this year was the first physical event

Speaker: 00:03:38

I'd been to in probably two years.

Speaker: 00:03:41

So it was nice to get back out there

Speaker: 00:03:46

and participate in that.

Speaker: 00:03:50

I'm sure your activities in Salesforce

Speaker: 00:03:54

keep you busy on a regular basis,

Speaker: 00:03:57

but are you able to talk about maybe any of the things

Speaker: 00:04:01

that kind of make up your kind of

Speaker: 00:04:05

week in the life for Derek there,

Speaker: 00:04:08

or possibly talk a little bit about how accessibility

Speaker: 00:04:13

is structured within your organization?

Speaker: 00:04:15

Are you part of an overarching group

Speaker: 00:04:18

or do you get in with individual divisions

Speaker: 00:04:23

or product groups?

Speaker: 00:04:25

- Yeah, so I'll give you kind of

Speaker: 00:04:27

the brief high level thing.

Speaker: 00:04:29

And I think this is an interesting piece

Speaker: 00:04:32

when it comes to Salesforce.

Speaker: 00:04:35

Our group,

Speaker: 00:04:37

the Product Accessibility and Inclusive Design team,

Speaker: 00:04:39

is actually part of our office of Ethical and Humane Use.

Speaker: 00:04:44

Now that's still part of our product organization,

Speaker: 00:04:48

which is often where accessibility sits

Speaker: 00:04:52

from an organizational perspective,

Speaker: 00:04:54

but our work being so closely tied to ethics

Speaker: 00:05:01

and that sense of responsibility

Speaker: 00:05:03

actually is really quite interesting.

Speaker: 00:05:05

I've never really seen it done

Speaker: 00:05:06

or heard of it being situated within an office such as

Speaker: 00:05:13

an Office of Ethical and Humane Use.

Speaker: 00:05:15

So I won't go into too much details,

Speaker: 00:05:18

but that kind of situates where we are.

Speaker: 00:05:22

The thing that I would say I spend a lot of my week doing

Speaker: 00:05:26

is a lot of work connecting to other executives

Speaker: 00:05:30

and other product people around the organization,

Speaker: 00:05:34

helping them to move forward in terms of accessibility,

Speaker: 00:05:37

because lots of teams don't really have a good plan

Speaker: 00:05:43

or have some of the insights that they need,

Speaker: 00:05:45

or maybe in some cases it's just awareness,

Speaker: 00:05:49

they don't have the same awareness of accessibility

Speaker: 00:05:51

as other teams.

Speaker: 00:05:52

And so we want to move everybody in the same direction.

Speaker: 00:05:56

And so I spend a lot of my time investing

Speaker: 00:06:00

in connecting with other people

Speaker: 00:06:03

and working with them to help them understand

Speaker: 00:06:08

not fine grained requirements,

Speaker: 00:06:11

although sometimes I do get involved with

Speaker: 00:06:15

specific bugs or debates or questions that come up around

Speaker: 00:06:19

something really specific and technical.

Speaker: 00:06:22

Quite often though,

Speaker: 00:06:22

it's really around big picture requirements and

Speaker: 00:06:25

understanding what we need to do as an organization

Speaker: 00:06:27

or as product teams that are working on accessibility

Speaker: 00:06:31

in order for us to succeed.

Speaker: 00:06:33

So a lot of my time is spent working in on those things

Speaker: 00:06:38

and thinking about accessibility strategically

Speaker: 00:06:42

and enacting that strategy

Speaker: 00:06:45

with the help of our partners throughout the organization.

Speaker: 00:06:49

- Well I'd like to talk with you a little bit more about

Speaker: 00:06:55

your current or most recent work,

Speaker: 00:06:57

but one of the things I like to do with this program

Speaker: 00:07:01

is to find out how people made their way

Speaker: 00:07:03

to where they are today.

Speaker: 00:07:05

Accessibility is still one of those areas

Speaker: 00:07:08

where most people don't find their way into it

Speaker: 00:07:11

through a formal education program.

Speaker: 00:07:14

And so it tends to be something from lived life

Speaker: 00:07:17

or a serendipitous event in our work life.

Speaker: 00:07:21

So maybe let's go back into the past for you.

Speaker: 00:07:25

And where did you first start to realize

Speaker: 00:07:28

this might be a profession you you'd be interested in?

Speaker: 00:07:32

- Yeah, I'm happy to happy to dig in a little bit there.

Speaker: 00:07:37

And there's a long story behind it,

Speaker: 00:07:40

and I will kind of go through the abridged version

Speaker: 00:07:43

and then feel free to ask a little bit more

Speaker: 00:07:47

about certain areas.

Speaker: 00:07:48

But for me, there's kind of a confluence of events,

Speaker: 00:07:52

of things that I've been involved

Speaker: 00:07:54

with over the course of my life.

Speaker: 00:07:56

I have a disability myself.

Speaker: 00:07:57

I was born with a club foot,

Speaker: 00:08:02

which now that I am 51,

Speaker: 00:08:05

is actually starting to have more impact on me

Speaker: 00:08:09

than it did in my younger years.

Speaker: 00:08:12

The flexibility in my left ankle is

Speaker: 00:08:16

not really there and that I have some flexibility,

Speaker: 00:08:20

but probably about two thirds

Speaker: 00:08:23

of what I have in my right ankle.

Speaker: 00:08:25

And that has surprising impacts maybe on the way

Speaker: 00:08:29

that I walk or the way that I feel pain up through my leg.

Speaker: 00:08:34

My left leg is actually not the same size as my right leg.

Speaker: 00:08:38

My right leg is significantly stronger

Speaker: 00:08:41

because I think over the course of 51 years,

Speaker: 00:08:46

I was in a cast for quite a bit of time for the first,

Speaker: 00:08:49

I think, I'm gonna say 18 months of my life.

Speaker: 00:08:53

And even later I had surgery at three

Speaker: 00:08:56

to release the club foot,

Speaker: 00:08:58

but being in that cast actually has an impact

Speaker: 00:09:01

on early muscle development and that kind of thing.

Speaker: 00:09:03

And there may be some other reasons,

Speaker: 00:09:06

but my right leg is significantly stronger.

Speaker: 00:09:09

And that actually creates some imbalances

Speaker: 00:09:11

that I notice in the work day and that I actually

Speaker: 00:09:15

even see in the screen right now

Speaker: 00:09:16

that I need to sit up and try

Speaker: 00:09:18

and balance myself out a little bit more because

Speaker: 00:09:22

I'm a little bit imbalanced.

Speaker: 00:09:27

That doesn't have a massive impact on me now,

Speaker: 00:09:29

but I assume that at some point in the future,

Speaker: 00:09:31

I may require accessible parking or something.

Speaker: 00:09:35

I'm not not really sure what that future holds for me.

Speaker: 00:09:38

I do notice it more now,

Speaker: 00:09:40

just in terms of a little bit more pain

Speaker: 00:09:43

than I used to get.

Speaker: 00:09:45

So that's like point one.

Speaker: 00:09:50

I also, as I was growing up,

Speaker: 00:09:52

my grandfather had a stroke in the mid 1980s.

Speaker: 00:09:56

And so I spent quite a bit of time just

Speaker: 00:09:58

seeing the barriers that he experienced.

Speaker: 00:10:03

I spent time living with my grandparents on

Speaker: 00:10:06

I think every summer as I was working in the city

Speaker: 00:10:09

kind of thing,

Speaker: 00:10:10

and always needed to help him with certain things,

Speaker: 00:10:14

making sure that as he was going up the stairs,

Speaker: 00:10:18

that he wasn't getting his toe caught on the stairs

Speaker: 00:10:21

and falling down and that kind of thing

Speaker: 00:10:23

and helping him into the car and out of the car

Speaker: 00:10:25

because they had a low car and

Speaker: 00:10:29

there wasn't really a whole lot

Speaker: 00:10:30

in terms of accessible transportation.

Speaker: 00:10:33

And so there was a lot of things

Speaker: 00:10:35

that I experienced there with him and him trying

Speaker: 00:10:37

to maintain his independence despite having a stroke.

Speaker: 00:10:43

When I was going through school,

Speaker: 00:10:45

I actually wanted to be a teacher.

Speaker: 00:10:47

And I was a teacher for five years.

Speaker: 00:10:50

I started teaching my first classes in 1993,

Speaker: 00:10:53

teaching high school.

Speaker: 00:10:56

And as I was teaching and learning about teaching people,

Speaker: 00:11:01

I started to understand a little bit more

Speaker: 00:11:03

about multiple intelligence theory,

Speaker: 00:11:06

which isn't really a great word for it,

Speaker: 00:11:10

but it does tap into the notion

Speaker: 00:11:13

of people learning in different ways.

Speaker: 00:11:19

That really resonated for me that the messages that I was

Speaker: 00:11:22

trying to teach my students when I was teaching

Speaker: 00:11:25

high school biology, chemistry, and computers,

Speaker: 00:11:27

those messages were for everybody,

Speaker: 00:11:30

not just for the people that were already

Speaker: 00:11:34

sciencey, mathematical,

Speaker: 00:11:37

or already kind of headed in that direction.

Speaker: 00:11:41

If I wanted to teach people and have

Speaker: 00:11:45

young teenagers turn into responsible citizens

Speaker: 00:11:51

that had a background in science

Speaker: 00:11:53

and could think with that science-based lens,

Speaker: 00:11:57

then I needed to make sure that the lessons I was teaching

Speaker: 00:11:59

resonated for everybody.

Speaker: 00:12:01

And so I would do things like

Speaker: 00:12:04

I would get some of the students

Speaker: 00:12:05

that were more focused on the arts,

Speaker: 00:12:07

I would get them to write poetry about science concepts

Speaker: 00:12:12

as a way to demonstrate some of

Speaker: 00:12:14

the ways that they were understanding things.

Speaker: 00:12:17

And I tried to get creative with that

Speaker: 00:12:19

and really tried to make sure that the messages

Speaker: 00:12:22

became a thing that were for everyone.

Speaker: 00:12:25

And so when I started getting into the web,

Speaker: 00:12:28

that relationship to accessibility

Speaker: 00:12:32

about this being for everyone really connected with me.

Speaker: 00:12:37

So I started working on the web when I was teaching.

Speaker: 00:12:41

I actually started creating web based resources

Speaker: 00:12:44

for my students and for my co-teachers

Speaker: 00:12:49

and going through that in the mid 1990s was like,

Speaker: 00:12:52

the heavy browser war era,

Speaker: 00:12:55

where we were using Internet Explorer 3

Speaker: 00:13:01

and Netscape Navigator Gold 3.2

Speaker: 00:13:05

and there was differences between the browsers.

Speaker: 00:13:08

And so when I was creating things

Speaker: 00:13:11

and I couldn't get them to show up

Speaker: 00:13:12

in one browser versus another,

Speaker: 00:13:15

that led me down a path of figuring out why.

Speaker: 00:13:19

And that led me to concepts like validation of HTML,

Speaker: 00:13:24

because that was a good way to ensure that my HTML

Speaker: 00:13:28

that I was writing by hand was nested properly.

Speaker: 00:13:32

Because if you were writing something for,

Speaker: 00:13:35

if you were creating a table, for example,

Speaker: 00:13:37

and you missed a closing table row tag

Speaker: 00:13:41

or a closing table tag,

Speaker: 00:13:42

or you nested something incorrectly,

Speaker: 00:13:46

Netscape 3.2 just showed a blank page.

Speaker: 00:13:48

It didn't render the entire page

Speaker: 00:13:51

because your HTML was not well-formed.

Speaker: 00:13:54

So that was a thing where validation

Speaker: 00:13:57

became a thing right away for me,

Speaker: 00:13:58

and validation led me also to learn about concepts like

Speaker: 00:14:04

missing alt text and form labels

Speaker: 00:14:09

and form labels that were connected

Speaker: 00:14:14

to their form fields by the for attribute and the ID.

Speaker: 00:14:18

So that validation aspect of it became really important.

Speaker: 00:14:21

And it exposed me to some accessibility principles

Speaker: 00:14:25

very early on that actually led me

Speaker: 00:14:27

more into accessibility.

Speaker: 00:14:29

And so as I started to create more web-based resources,

Speaker: 00:14:35

accessibility was just a natural thing.

Speaker: 00:14:37

It felt obvious to me and a thing that

Speaker: 00:14:40

we wanted to make sure that

Speaker: 00:14:43

that was part of everything that we created.

Speaker: 00:14:45

Everything needs to be accessible.

Speaker: 00:14:48

I eventually left teaching and started

Speaker: 00:14:49

my own web company in 1999.

Speaker: 00:14:54

And I was not only building websites.

Speaker: 00:14:56

I was also teaching people how to build websites.

Speaker: 00:14:59

It made sense to me to use

Speaker: 00:15:00

my teaching background to do that.

Speaker: 00:15:03

And so I've been teaching and building websites

Speaker: 00:15:07

since then professionally.

Speaker: 00:15:09

And that was something where

Speaker: 00:15:11

it became really clear to me that

Speaker: 00:15:14

there were not a lot of people that understood

Speaker: 00:15:17

or that were talking about or were encouraging accessibility

Speaker: 00:15:22

as a practice as part of what we do.

Speaker: 00:15:24

And so it was there from kind of the moment that I started,

Speaker: 00:15:27

and it was something that I've just been trying to share

Speaker: 00:15:30

over and over and over again.

Speaker: 00:15:32

And I think in probably around 2005,

Speaker: 00:15:39

about six years into it,

Speaker: 00:15:41

I started to get invited to some conferences.

Speaker: 00:15:45

And people were asking me specifically to speak about

Speaker: 00:15:49

accessibility because they were seeing

Speaker: 00:15:51

that it was becoming increasingly important.

Speaker: 00:15:54

And they wanted people that could guide,

Speaker: 00:15:58

people that could inspire people.

Speaker: 00:16:01

And most importantly,

Speaker: 00:16:03

teach people so that they were learning things

Speaker: 00:16:04

about accessibility.

Speaker: 00:16:05

And so I was all in on that because I wanted

Speaker: 00:16:09

to keep teaching and using my teaching background.

Speaker: 00:16:12

So when you put all of that together,

Speaker: 00:16:14

that ultimately led to in around 2004, 2003, 2004, 2005,

Speaker: 00:16:21

where I just really started to focus on

Speaker: 00:16:23

the accessibility side of things, and gradually over time,

Speaker: 00:16:27

that's what we became.

Speaker: 00:16:29

I created Simply Accessible out of that.

Speaker: 00:16:34

That was my company that we grew

Speaker: 00:16:39

and did lots of varied design-centric accessibility work,

Speaker: 00:16:43

very user-focused accessibility work.

Speaker: 00:16:47

And that led to a point where ultimately

Speaker: 00:16:49

we got acquired by Level Access in 2018.

Speaker: 00:16:53

And I was Chief Experience Officer there for four years.

Speaker: 00:16:57

And then that's kind of how I ended up here over time.

Speaker: 00:17:03

Just kind of that accessibility continued

Speaker: 00:17:05

to grow as my focus.

Speaker: 00:17:07

And that's led me to where I am here.

Speaker: 00:17:09

I said I was gonna give the short version.

Speaker: 00:17:10

I think I gave the long version. So I hope that's all okay.

Speaker: 00:17:17

- Yeah, no, that's great.

Speaker: 00:17:19

But you went through a lot of things.

Speaker: 00:17:22

So let me just check back with some of it,

Speaker: 00:17:26

just with a couple of comments and questions.

Speaker: 00:17:29

First of all,

Speaker: 00:17:30

thanks for sharing the information about

Speaker: 00:17:33

your own physical challenges.

Speaker: 00:17:36

I think that that always helps us have

Speaker: 00:17:40

a broader understanding

Speaker: 00:17:43

of what's involved in this field.

Speaker: 00:17:44

And then I hadn't known about you being a teacher,

Speaker: 00:17:48

but all the online classes and the things

Speaker: 00:17:52

that you do have done at conferences have all been really

Speaker: 00:17:56

very good instructional activities.

Speaker: 00:17:58

So I guess that makes sense that you had that background,

Speaker: 00:18:02

or do you not feel like that that contributed to it?

Speaker: 00:18:06

- Oh, I think it has for sure.

Speaker: 00:18:09

It's at the heart of most of the things that I do

Speaker: 00:18:14

that I want to teach.

Speaker: 00:18:17

And I tend to think about things

Speaker: 00:18:21

in a very specific way

Speaker: 00:18:23

when I'm creating something,

Speaker: 00:18:25

whether it's a conference talk or

Speaker: 00:18:27

one of my courses that's on LinkedIn Learning,

Speaker: 00:18:30

I go through a process where I'm thinking about

Speaker: 00:18:34

the learning outcomes that I'm after,

Speaker: 00:18:36

and I break it down into these four categories.

Speaker: 00:18:39

There's things that I want people to know.

Speaker: 00:18:41

There's things that I want them to do or be able to do.

Speaker: 00:18:45

So that's like the knowledge and awareness,

Speaker: 00:18:47

but there's also skills and behaviors

Speaker: 00:18:50

that we need to encourage.

Speaker: 00:18:53

There's things that I want people to feel.

Speaker: 00:18:56

And then there's things that I want them,

Speaker: 00:18:59

people I want people to be.

Speaker: 00:19:01

So I go through this framework of know, do, feel, be,

Speaker: 00:19:04

and it ultimately lets me create this overall picture

Speaker: 00:19:08

of this is what I'm aiming for here.

Speaker: 00:19:11

And so it's always a combination of things that I just want

Speaker: 00:19:14

people to know, things that I want them to do,

Speaker: 00:19:16

or actions that I want them to take,

Speaker: 00:19:18

things that I want them to feel.

Speaker: 00:19:21

In a lot of ways I might say,

Speaker: 00:19:23

if I'm doing a conference talk,

Speaker: 00:19:25

I might write down that I want people

Speaker: 00:19:28

to feel empowered to take action tomorrow.

Speaker: 00:19:33

I want them to be able to go in and take action

Speaker: 00:19:39

and improve their practice tomorrow using X technique

Speaker: 00:19:43

or something like that.

Speaker: 00:19:44

So there's things I want them to feel empowered.

Speaker: 00:19:47

And then the things that I want them to be tend

Speaker: 00:19:49

to be kind of those aspirational things.

Speaker: 00:19:51

I want them to be a responsible designer,

Speaker: 00:19:53

or I want them to be a more inclusive researcher

Speaker: 00:19:59

that includes more people with disabilities

Speaker: 00:20:01

in the research that they're doing.

Speaker: 00:20:02

So I've got those ideas.

Speaker: 00:20:04

And I think that comes from my teaching background because

Speaker: 00:20:08

that's ultimately how we design

Speaker: 00:20:11

learning activities and curriculum.

Speaker: 00:20:13

It's focused on those kind of facets of learning outcomes.

Speaker: 00:20:19

So I think it's heavily,

Speaker: 00:20:21

heavily influenced by my background as a teacher.

Speaker: 00:20:26

- The other thing that then you got

Speaker: 00:20:28

to the point where you were doing

Speaker: 00:20:31

your website consulting and accessibility work.

Speaker: 00:20:36

So early 2000s, that's kind of when

Speaker: 00:20:40

I think of the time where a lot of the pieces

Speaker: 00:20:43

were in place to start turning this into

Speaker: 00:20:47

a profession or having some momentum where

Speaker: 00:20:50

some real improvements were being made

Speaker: 00:20:53

with the WCAG having been developed by the W3C

Speaker: 00:20:56

and the legislative requirements coming into play.

Speaker: 00:21:02

How did it feel for you at that time?

Speaker: 00:21:04

Were you kind of aware that

Speaker: 00:21:06

there was this practice building,

Speaker: 00:21:10

or were you more or less just reacting to things going on

Speaker: 00:21:13

within your own consulting with your clients?

Speaker: 00:21:18

- I'd say a little bit of both.

Speaker: 00:21:19

You could tell, like it was, it felt,

Speaker: 00:21:23

and that's very kind of vague way of talking about it,

Speaker: 00:21:26

but you could feel a groundswell in

Speaker: 00:21:30

that more and more people, that it was gaining momentum,

Speaker: 00:21:33

that it was going to be more and more important.

Speaker: 00:21:36

And ultimately it was...

Speaker: 00:21:40

There was definitely some reaction

Speaker: 00:21:42

to what was being asked for,

Speaker: 00:21:46

but we got to a point where we were reacting,

Speaker: 00:21:50

like yes, there's more demand for this.

Speaker: 00:21:52

And then we turned that into, okay,

Speaker: 00:21:54

there's no more reacting to this,

Speaker: 00:21:57

let's be proactive about it.

Speaker: 00:21:58

And here's what we're gonna drive and create as a company.

Speaker: 00:22:03

And so it was kind of a combination of both of those things,

Speaker: 00:22:07

but you could definitely tell

Speaker: 00:22:10

that it was going to continue to become important.

Speaker: 00:22:13

I think I wrote an article once about

Speaker: 00:22:18

what steps you need to take

Speaker: 00:22:20

to become an accessibility consultant.

Speaker: 00:22:23

And in the very early days,

Speaker: 00:22:25

it was literally go get a business card

Speaker: 00:22:29

and write your name on it

Speaker: 00:22:31

and accessibility consultant underneath,

Speaker: 00:22:33

because in the beginning,

Speaker: 00:22:34

none of us were trained for this.

Speaker: 00:22:37

There was no curriculum, there were no programs.

Speaker: 00:22:39

There wasn't anything that

Speaker: 00:22:42

obviously led to this as a career path.

Speaker: 00:22:44

And while that is changed over the last 23 years,

Speaker: 00:22:49

it's definitely different now,

Speaker: 00:22:52

there are programs out there,

Speaker: 00:22:54

there is certification programs out there,

Speaker: 00:22:58

there's just a lot more understanding about accessibility

Speaker: 00:23:02

and there's positions at organizations

Speaker: 00:23:05

like Accessibility Product Managers.

Speaker: 00:23:09

And I think LinkedIn posted something about this

Speaker: 00:23:13

just within the last couple of weeks,

Speaker: 00:23:14

they have an entire section

Speaker: 00:23:17

when you are adding your job to your LinkedIn profile,

Speaker: 00:23:21

there are a group of, I think it's maybe 20,

Speaker: 00:23:24

or maybe it's not quite that many,

Speaker: 00:23:25

but there's a list of accessibility- specific jobs

Speaker: 00:23:29

that exist in LinkedIn now.

Speaker: 00:23:31

And that just further goes to show

Speaker: 00:23:34

that this is going to continue to be important

Speaker: 00:23:37

when a platform like LinkedIn adds that

Speaker: 00:23:44

to their product, to their service,

Speaker: 00:23:48

that's saying something,

Speaker: 00:23:50

that's a big recognition

Speaker: 00:23:51

of the importance of accessibility in this space

Speaker: 00:23:55

in which we all work.

Speaker: 00:23:58

So it's definitely very different now

Speaker: 00:23:59

than it was when I first started out.

Speaker: 00:24:02

- Yeah, I've noticed that myself,

Speaker: 00:24:06

I kind of keep up on things along those lines.

Speaker: 00:24:10

I teach at the University of Washington.

Speaker: 00:24:12

So I'm always kind of interested in that in terms of helping

Speaker: 00:24:15

my students understand potential skill opportunities.

Speaker: 00:24:21

Again, back to your journey,

Speaker: 00:24:23

kind of the next part that you mentioned was having

Speaker: 00:24:27

your own business that then was acquired by Level Access.

Speaker: 00:24:31

So like in that period where you're

Speaker: 00:24:35

actively supporting clients,

Speaker: 00:24:38

I'm just curious about how you felt in terms of

Speaker: 00:24:44

where you are making your biggest impact.

Speaker: 00:24:50

Being in the consulting area myself,

Speaker: 00:24:52

sometimes I think that the majority of interest comes from

Speaker: 00:24:57

that desire for compliance

Speaker: 00:25:01

or not to run into legal issues,

Speaker: 00:25:05

the auditing portion.

Speaker: 00:25:06

Whereas I tend to feel that getting involved early

Speaker: 00:25:12

and understanding at the research

Speaker: 00:25:14

and design level can kind of take care of

Speaker: 00:25:16

that if you follow through the process.

Speaker: 00:25:19

But I don't know, maybe just talk a little bit about

Speaker: 00:25:23

what that dynamic was for you and your experiences.

Speaker: 00:25:29

- It changed over time.

Speaker: 00:25:31

And the demand in the beginning or the work

Speaker: 00:25:35

that we were doing in a lot of ways was very much

Speaker: 00:25:39

along the lines of, yes, we'll consult with you.

Speaker: 00:25:43

And yes, we can do an assessment of where you are

Speaker: 00:25:48

and where your product is,

Speaker: 00:25:50

and we can help you fix that.

Speaker: 00:25:54

But what we found was that over time organizations started

Speaker: 00:25:59

to realize that accessibility is not successful

Speaker: 00:26:05

if you're thinking of it as a one time thing.

Speaker: 00:26:08

And so what we started to see was

Speaker: 00:26:11

a little bit of a transformation.

Speaker: 00:26:12

And what we started to see

Speaker: 00:26:14

in terms of that change was organizations understanding,

Speaker: 00:26:19

or us helping them to understand that

Speaker: 00:26:25

they needed to move from project to program,

Speaker: 00:26:28

that they couldn't be just thinking of accessibility

Speaker: 00:26:31

as a project that they're gonna do for a year,

Speaker: 00:26:33

and then they don't need to touch it again for six years.

Speaker: 00:26:36

It just doesn't work that way.

Speaker: 00:26:38

It's not successful that way.

Speaker: 00:26:40

So that was the biggest transformation in mindset.

Speaker: 00:26:44

And that was more focused on

Speaker: 00:26:47

helping our clients understand that

Speaker: 00:26:52

a project focus is fine for that project,

Speaker: 00:26:56

but that it ultimately needs to bubble up

Speaker: 00:26:58

to something bigger.

Speaker: 00:26:59

It needs to be thought of programmatically,

Speaker: 00:27:01

systemically as a big picture thing

Speaker: 00:27:06

that is part of the strategy

Speaker: 00:27:09

of an organization moving forward,

Speaker: 00:27:10

where you need to be strategic about it

Speaker: 00:27:13

and think of it in scaling terms,

Speaker: 00:27:15

think of it in program terms,

Speaker: 00:27:17

and thinking of it in repeatability terms,

Speaker: 00:27:21

that's the only way

Speaker: 00:27:22

that you can be truly successful with it in the long run.

Speaker: 00:27:27

- That philosophy of iteration and always continuing

Speaker: 00:27:32

to move forward I think is really important.

Speaker: 00:27:35

One of the things that I always like to ask in this program

Speaker: 00:27:39

is kind of open ended.

Speaker: 00:27:40

It's kind of maybe you reflecting on

Speaker: 00:27:44

your overall career in this area.

Speaker: 00:27:46

I know when I think back to when I was starting on this,

Speaker: 00:27:50

like around 1998, thinking ahead,

Speaker: 00:27:55

in some ways I think

Speaker: 00:27:57

I would've thought things would've been further along

Speaker: 00:28:00

than they are.

Speaker: 00:28:01

In other ways,

Speaker: 00:28:01

I'm amazed at what technology has been able to do

Speaker: 00:28:06

to support with assistive technologies.

Speaker: 00:28:10

I just wonder maybe if you have any thoughts about

Speaker: 00:28:13

areas where you think there's gaps

Speaker: 00:28:15

or where there's been amazing achievements,

Speaker: 00:28:18

or kind of where you're thinking,

Speaker: 00:28:20

you're hoping things will go to in the future.

Speaker: 00:28:24

- We've done a tremendous job

Speaker: 00:28:27

on the engineering side of things,

Speaker: 00:28:30

on the code side of things.

Speaker: 00:28:32

But I still think there's a gap

Speaker: 00:28:36

with understanding that accessibility

Speaker: 00:28:42

is not just about the web content accessibility guidelines.

Speaker: 00:28:49

The W3C even calls it out,

Speaker: 00:28:51

or the education and outreach working groups,

Speaker: 00:28:56

and the Web Accessibility Initiative itself,

Speaker: 00:28:59

they actually say in their documentation,

Speaker: 00:29:04

this is a great starting point.

Speaker: 00:29:06

I'm super paraphrasing here.

Speaker: 00:29:07

They don't say exactly this,

Speaker: 00:29:09

but they often refer to certain concepts and they'll say,

Speaker: 00:29:13

make sure that you do user research to understand the full

Speaker: 00:29:17

impact of this on people with different disabilities.

Speaker: 00:29:21

There's people with disabilities,

Speaker: 00:29:25

when you think back to WCAG 1.0 or even 2.0,

Speaker: 00:29:31

there are lots of people with different disabilities

Speaker: 00:29:34

that were not well represented

Speaker: 00:29:37

in those early iterations of accessibility.

Speaker: 00:29:40

And so there's lots work going on right now

Speaker: 00:29:43

with 2.1 and with 2.2 and even eventually,

Speaker: 00:29:48

whatever the next version of it is

Speaker: 00:29:51

that is starting to take into account

Speaker: 00:29:53

things like different cognitive function,

Speaker: 00:29:56

different cognitive disabilities that just weren't in there,

Speaker: 00:29:59

we're not even on the radar or, you know,

Speaker: 00:30:04

back in the 90s and the early 2000s,

Speaker: 00:30:06

they might have been on the radar,

Speaker: 00:30:07

but we didn't have good guidance or good ways

Speaker: 00:30:09

of expressing those things or thinking about them,

Speaker: 00:30:13

or maybe objectively testing them.

Speaker: 00:30:16

And so there's a big gap still

Speaker: 00:30:22

when we think about accessibility holistically,

Speaker: 00:30:26

because most organizations tend

Speaker: 00:30:28

to think of it as an engineering function,

Speaker: 00:30:30

as an engineering problem to be solved.

Speaker: 00:30:33

And there's design that is there tangentially,

Speaker: 00:30:36

but there's a lot of work to continue

Speaker: 00:30:40

to do on the design side, on the research side,

Speaker: 00:30:42

that takes us beyond this mode

Speaker: 00:30:45

of compliance versus making things really functional,

Speaker: 00:30:50

really easy to use where we're creating great experiences

Speaker: 00:30:54

so that people with disabilities don't have

Speaker: 00:30:59

a minimally compliant interface where everybody else

Speaker: 00:31:03

that doesn't have a disability gets something

Speaker: 00:31:06

that's seamless and pleasing and a pleasure to use.

Speaker: 00:31:11

Those are the words that we use when we're thinking

Speaker: 00:31:13

of creating great experiences for everybody else.

Speaker: 00:31:16

And yet we're still in a mode where we're barely lucky

Speaker: 00:31:19

to get to minimally compliant.

Speaker: 00:31:21

And I'm talking industry,

Speaker: 00:31:23

I'm not talking

Speaker: 00:31:25

about any specific organizations or companies,

Speaker: 00:31:28

but the average, if you look at the WebAIM Million,

Speaker: 00:31:31

we don't even hit hit compliance for so many websites.

Speaker: 00:31:38

And so that to me is a gap.

Speaker: 00:31:42

And that gap is born from,

Speaker: 00:31:46

I personally think not including

Speaker: 00:31:48

people with disabilities as part of the process.

Speaker: 00:31:51

And so the more that we can do that in the direction

Speaker: 00:31:54

that I think the industry is going to continue to move

Speaker: 00:31:57

is engaging people with disabilities as co-creators,

Speaker: 00:32:00

as insightful contributors

Speaker: 00:32:06

to the design problems that we are trying to solve,

Speaker: 00:32:12

to be collaborators in the ways in which we create.

Speaker: 00:32:16

And that to me is...

Speaker: 00:32:19

That's where I think the industry goes,

Speaker: 00:32:21

despite all the things that we've accomplished,

Speaker: 00:32:23

there's incredible things.

Speaker: 00:32:24

I look at the things that we can do with ARIA right now

Speaker: 00:32:28

that we had to find ways of faking it

Speaker: 00:32:33

in the late 1990s and the early 2000s.

Speaker: 00:32:37

There was no such thing as a live region back then,

Speaker: 00:32:41

as something that would automatically announce

Speaker: 00:32:43

this thing out as a status message.

Speaker: 00:32:45

So we, back in the day,

Speaker: 00:32:46

we had to create things that faked that

Speaker: 00:32:50

and they were actually in some (coughs) excuse me,

Speaker: 00:32:55

and they were actually in some ways disruptive in that

Speaker: 00:32:58

getting that feedback to a user on what was happening

Speaker: 00:33:01

in the interface meant that we needed to take focus away

Speaker: 00:33:03

from the thing that they were doing,

Speaker: 00:33:06

and then hope that we put them back in the right place

Speaker: 00:33:09

after that message came up.

Speaker: 00:33:11

But we don't really need to do that

Speaker: 00:33:14

quite the same way anymore

Speaker: 00:33:15

because we've got accessibility mechanisms that we can use

Speaker: 00:33:19

programmatically that do a pretty good job

Speaker: 00:33:24

of getting us to where we need to be

Speaker: 00:33:26

to represent that interface in a non disruptive way.

Speaker: 00:33:29

So that is incredible in itself.

Speaker: 00:33:32

And I find it amazing that

Speaker: 00:33:35

we have single-page apps that power a lot of the world

Speaker: 00:33:41

and that can be very highly accessible to a lot of people.

Speaker: 00:33:45

We still have a long way to go,

Speaker: 00:33:46

but that's still an accomplishment

Speaker: 00:33:49

worth celebrating that that can be done.

Speaker: 00:33:52

Now it's a matter of getting everybody on board

Speaker: 00:33:56

and increasing the frequency

Speaker: 00:34:00

with which that success happens.

Speaker: 00:34:06

- Well that's a great message that

Speaker: 00:34:10

you had here for us at the end

Speaker: 00:34:12

about just considering quality

Speaker: 00:34:15

and the better inclusion and collaboration

Speaker: 00:34:19

to truly make accessibility continue to move forward.

Speaker: 00:34:24

It's been a pleasure speaking with you.

Speaker: 00:34:27

We covered quite a lot in a relatively short amount of time.

Speaker: 00:34:30

So I wanna thank you for your contribution here

Speaker: 00:34:35

and look forward to hopefully seeing you

Speaker: 00:34:38

in the physical world at some time,

Speaker: 00:34:40

some point in the future.

Speaker: 00:34:41

- That would be wonderful.

Speaker: 00:34:43

And thank you for the invite

Speaker: 00:34:46

and the opportunity to share with people.

Speaker: 00:34:48

I really, really appreciate it.

Speaker: 00:34:50

- All right. Thanks a lot, Derek.