Episode 6
Working Accessibility Into an Organizational Culture
Christopher Land, Oracle, Senior Accessibility Technical Program Manager
Chris started out in web development and was first exposed to accessibility working for the University of Michigan. That led to accessibility consulting work at Deque and Level Access where he learned from a great team of experts and did a lot of training. Now he is Senior Accessibility Technical Program Manager at Oracle.
Mentioned in this episode:
Info about Accessibility at Blink
Transcript
(intense classical music)
Speaker:- Hello.
Speaker:This is "Digital Accessibility:
Speaker:The People Behind the Progress."
Speaker:I'm Joe Welinske the Creator and Host of this series.
Speaker:And as an accessibility professional myself,
Speaker:I find it very interesting as to how others have found
Speaker:their way into this profession.
Speaker:So let's meet one of those people right now
Speaker:and hear about their journey.
Speaker:All right, well, it's time to get started
Speaker:with another episode of this podcast,
Speaker:where I get the chance to meet
Speaker:an accessibility practitioner.
Speaker:And today, I am pleased
Speaker:to be visiting with Christopher Land.
Speaker:Hello, Chris, how are you doing today?
Speaker:- I'm great, how are you, Joe?
Speaker:- It's going pretty well.
Speaker:It's a fairly dry day here in my Vashon Island office,
Speaker:which is near Seattle where Blink has its headquarters.
Speaker:Where are you located?
Speaker:- I'm in San Diego and yeah, it's another lovely day.
Speaker:I moved out here from the Midwest a few years ago
Speaker:and I'm still appreciating
Speaker:the lovely spring-like weather we get in November here.
Speaker:- Well, it's great to get in touch with you again,
Speaker:we had met at the San Diego Accessibility
Speaker:and Inclusive Design meetup group there.
Speaker:So looking forward to being
Speaker:at another one of those meetings again in the future.
Speaker:- Yeah, we'd love to have you come in
Speaker:and do a lightning talk for us sometime soon.
Speaker:- Well, a good place to start is always with
Speaker:what you're doing right now.
Speaker:So maybe tell us a little bit about your current position
Speaker:and then we can go back and look at how you got there.
Speaker:- Yeah, sounds great.
Speaker:So let's see.
Speaker:I think I'm in...
Speaker:I've managed to started my fourth month at Oracle
Speaker:and my title is long.
Speaker:I'm a Senior Accessibility Technical Program Manager
Speaker:with Oracle and I'm focusing on teams
Speaker:that work on all of Oracle's public facing sites.
Speaker:And there's a lot.
Speaker:This includes Java, NetSuite, MySQL,
Speaker:and then within oracle.com, we've got...
Speaker:I'm still getting an inventory of all the portals
Speaker:and frontend facing sites.
Speaker:So I'm working with teams sort of in the short term
Speaker:to find and fix issues that we have on our sites,
Speaker:and make them as accessible as possible,
Speaker:and get that moving forward.
Speaker:But also in the longer term,
Speaker:I'm working on building a program,
Speaker:building training, targeted at UX folks,
Speaker:developers and QA
Speaker:'cause I've kind of got, you know,
Speaker:I've got this bottleneck problem where
Speaker:there's a lot of sites and I'm just one person.
Speaker:So I'm trying to do some formal training.
Speaker:I'm trying to do some on-the-job training
Speaker:where I'm supporting developers in fixing issues,
Speaker:helping designers review their drafts for potential issues
Speaker:and sort of fix things as upstream as possible.
Speaker:And we're working right now on
Speaker:formulating a system to start doing
Speaker:like accessibility annotations in our designs,
Speaker:and really get the UX folks thinking through
Speaker:that accessibility problem solving.
Speaker:So they're doing a fantastic job right now
Speaker:with visual design for our products and services.
Speaker:So we're doing a lot of exercises in like,
Speaker:okay, now that you've designed this cool thing,
Speaker:how are we gonna do it with a keyboard
Speaker:and put yourself in the shoes of a screen or a user?
Speaker:How we're going to make sure
Speaker:all the announcements are clear
Speaker:and everything is conveyed to all users?
Speaker:So yeah, it's a really great role, I'm really enjoying it
Speaker:because I'm getting that variety of working with designers,
Speaker:working with developers and getting my hands into the code.
Speaker:And also using my experience with larger organizations,
Speaker:trying to tackle the big job of
Speaker:how do you get a large organization to start
Speaker:doing more and more accessibility
Speaker:and make that part of our jobs in the culture.
Speaker:So it's going great so far and I'm really happy.
Speaker:- Well, obviously you have a lot of things
Speaker:to keep you busy and we could come back,
Speaker:and there are a couple of things you mentioned there
Speaker:I wanna follow up on,
Speaker:but one of the things that I like to do with this series
Speaker:is to just follow the paths of people,
Speaker:of how they got to where they are in accessibility,
Speaker:for people that are new to the discipline.
Speaker:Sometimes it may not seem like an area that
Speaker:would be one of full time activity.
Speaker:So why don't you just give us an idea
Speaker:of where accessibility first became of interest to you
Speaker:and we kind of move forward in time?
Speaker:- Yeah, sure, sounds good, Joe.
Speaker:So let's see...
Speaker:My background? I guess, I started my career
Speaker:doing graphic design and this is now over 20 years ago.
Speaker:And so I was there and participating
Speaker:in sort of the start of businesses,
Speaker:making websites, we're talking about early 2000s.
Speaker:So I went from graphic design into learning more HTML
Speaker:and CSS, and JavaScript.
Speaker:And I did a lot of work for a good decade or so
Speaker:building websites.
Speaker:And at this point I was really in the dark on accessibility.
Speaker:I did a lot of work in Flash and I'm sure unleashed
Speaker:a lot of inaccessible experiences on the world
Speaker:in my early career, in my ignorance.
Speaker:Sorry about that.
Speaker:From there, I went and took a job
Speaker:as a Frontend Developer and Designer
Speaker:with University of Michigan.
Speaker:And that was a great job,
Speaker:got to work on a lot of really cool projects
Speaker:within the university.
Speaker:And that's where I first got introduced to accessibility.
Speaker:That's where I started getting projects
Speaker:and the specs included, not a whole lotta detail,
Speaker:but build this website,
Speaker:make it do this and that also asterisk,
Speaker:make sure everything is accessible.
Speaker:And when I started asking follow up questions of,
Speaker:"Oh, what does that mean?"
Speaker:I've heard about alt attributes,
Speaker:but never in my training or studies up to that
Speaker:and I really encountered accessibility very much.
Speaker:But the university being publicly funded
Speaker:was committed to accessibility
Speaker:for internal and external websites
Speaker:because of its involvement with federal funding
Speaker:and that stuff.
Speaker:So that sort of was the start of my accessibility journey
Speaker:as they say, I had to go out
Speaker:and basically start teaching myself.
Speaker:And I found very quickly that
Speaker:unlike Java, Vanilla is a JavaScript or HTML,
Speaker:Google is your best friend,
Speaker:or Stack Overflow is your best friend.
Speaker:You can say, "Ah, how do I make a column do this?"
Speaker:And it's pretty good about getting the reply back to you
Speaker:with a good, some good leads to go down.
Speaker:I found this was not true with accessibility.
Speaker:There are a lot of resources out there
Speaker:that are either out of date or inaccurate,
Speaker:so I learned very early on that
Speaker:even when you find code samples and resources
Speaker:that say they're accessible,
Speaker:you have to start testing them thoroughly yourself.
Speaker:So that's where I got into learning to test
Speaker:with a screen reader and use that,
Speaker:and understanding the importance of keyboard navigation,
Speaker:and some of the basics.
Speaker:Once I had started down this path at the university,
Speaker:it didn't take long before
Speaker:I got that reputation as Oh, the accessibility guy.
Speaker:And so that kinda snowballed, they said,
Speaker:"Oh, Chris knows how to make accessible tool tips,
Speaker:he knows how to do accordions."
Speaker:So all of the accessibility related work
Speaker:and bugs started coming my way,
Speaker:which was cool.
Speaker:So at first, and I used this when I'm teaching people
Speaker:that are new to be very honest.
Speaker:At first, I was kinda grumpy about the extra work.
Speaker:I didn't understand the importance of accessibility
Speaker:and I didn't really have
Speaker:coworkers or people in my life with disabilities.
Speaker:So I was really underestimating
Speaker:the impact and importance of it.
Speaker:But once I started down this path,
Speaker:I started going to accessibility conferences,
Speaker:talking with daily native screen reader users,
Speaker:and really starting to see the issue,
Speaker:and build my own personal empathy for user struggles.
Speaker:And also, how important and empowering it is for people
Speaker:when the technology works right.
Speaker:People can really live independent lives
Speaker:with a variety of disabilities in an unprecedented way.
Speaker:just a quick example is,
Speaker:somebody without site can, as long as Uber and Lyft work,
Speaker:they can taxi all around the city independently,
Speaker:for example.
Speaker:So anyway, from there, I just kept building that expertise.
Speaker:I helped write some accessibility guidelines
Speaker:for the university
Speaker:and started disseminating accessibility information.
Speaker:And I'd had some other background
Speaker:in teaching animation and programming at the local college.
Speaker:So I really like working with people and teaching,
Speaker:and stuff like that.
Speaker:So once I built this sort of specialty
Speaker:and sort of going down this path,
Speaker:I really got into it
Speaker:because it's creative, it's technical, it's problem solving.
Speaker:It involves design and UX,
Speaker:but man, it also just feels really good.
Speaker:It's more than just selling a product or building a website
Speaker:when you're really helping connect people
Speaker:and serving principles of equity and justice,
Speaker:that might be getting a little grand,
Speaker:but anyway, I sleep pretty well at night, usually.
Speaker:So from there,
Speaker:I got a job doing accessibility development work
Speaker:and consulting with Deque,
Speaker:and worked with a lot of great people there,
Speaker:learned a lot more, as far as technical stuff like ARIA code
Speaker:and patterns, complex stuff like
Speaker:how you make a date picker accessible, for example.
Speaker:So it's really cool, it was a really great experience
Speaker:to work alongside a great group of experts.
Speaker:And so from there,
Speaker:I went to Level Access continued on the same kind of path.
Speaker:I was a manager at Level Access and worked with a team
Speaker:of really talented senior consultants.
Speaker:We worked for a lot of great big brands
Speaker:and yeah, that was really great.
Speaker:Did a lot of training at both jobs,
Speaker:worked with a lot of clients
Speaker:and that's really rewarding too,
Speaker:when you get done with a training session
Speaker:and you can see people charged up, and enthusiastic,
Speaker:and have had their eyes open to the importance
Speaker:of accessibility.
Speaker:So yeah, that's sort of the short version
Speaker:or maybe the long version.
Speaker:- Yeah, well, and for those that may be knew the space
Speaker:and are familiar with Deque and Level Access,
Speaker:those are both organizations that specialize
Speaker:in assisting companies with their accessibility work.
Speaker:So I assume that...
Speaker:Well, may I should assume that there was a lot different
Speaker:as you moved from that initial university work
Speaker:where essentially you're working within that one domain
Speaker:for that organization.
Speaker:And then, now you're doing consulting work
Speaker:for all kinds of different companies.
Speaker:What was that like?
Speaker:How did it, you know?
Speaker:Was it easy to make that move
Speaker:and just tell me a little bit, maybe about that experience.
Speaker:- Yeah, let's see.
Speaker:It was definitely a culture change.
Speaker:I was a little bit frustrated when I was at the university,
Speaker:just with the sort of slow speed that things got done.
Speaker:Yeah, and I don't wanna be too critical,
Speaker:but everything took a really long time.
Speaker:And I basically heard about an opportunity
Speaker:and I thought it would be a good growth opportunity
Speaker:to further specialize in accessibility.
Speaker:So the change is, I mean, at Deque and Level Access,
Speaker:the pace is faster,
Speaker:everybody needs things done yesterday,
Speaker:everybody needs their testing results next week,
Speaker:everybody needs support.
Speaker:So there are times at both places where
Speaker:it could get overwhelming,
Speaker:but if you have the right amount of work,
Speaker:you can juggle working with a handful of clients.
Speaker:And the variety is really cool.
Speaker:Worked with, I won't drop names,
Speaker:but some really great big prominent global brands
Speaker:and worked with a great variety of teams
Speaker:at different companies.
Speaker:And every once in a while you'd get a client,
Speaker:that's sort of like,
Speaker:Oh, I'm grumpy that I have to work with you,
Speaker:but we had this lawsuit,
Speaker:but I would say 90% of the clients were
Speaker:like a pleasure to work with.
Speaker:And like I said, the big, really big advantage
Speaker:at working in both firms is having a team of
Speaker:a hundred plus talented, creative,
Speaker:experienced accessibility consultants.
Speaker:So in the real world, as you know, Joe,
Speaker:you run into a wide variety of accessibility challenges,
Speaker:things like, wow, that's a new UI element you've creamed up,
Speaker:how the heck are we gonna make that accessible?
Speaker:So really nice to be able to have a team of people
Speaker:in a Slack channel or email to say,
Speaker:"Oh, geez, look at this URL, I'm trying to figure out,
Speaker:should we do it like this, this or this?"
Speaker:And get really thoughtful, intelligent responses for people
Speaker:that was really helpful in building
Speaker:whatever expertise I have now.
Speaker:- And now you're back within one organization,
Speaker:albeit extremely large one,
Speaker:one of the biggest digital companies in the world.
Speaker:So how is it set up there?
Speaker:I know it's in large companies,
Speaker:it can be done in different ways.
Speaker:Sometimes there's accessibility group
Speaker:that supports across the entire enterprise,
Speaker:in other situations, individual groups have to find
Speaker:their way and claw for resources.
Speaker:How is it setup at Oracle?
Speaker:- Yeah, it's growing at Oracle.
Speaker:I think even globally,
Speaker:more and more companies are becoming aware of the need
Speaker:for accessibility.
Speaker:More and more large companies are building
Speaker:and growing their own internal teams
Speaker:'cause they're coming to the realization,
Speaker:Hey, this isn't something I can just work
Speaker:with a consultant on for three months and then it goes away.
Speaker:It's a chunk of specialized knowledge
Speaker:that we need to spread through all the UX, QA dev folks,
Speaker:we need executives and product owners
Speaker:to understand the need.
Speaker:So a big part of it is culture change.
Speaker:So what I'm trying to do at Oracle is
Speaker:keep my consultant hat on, really.
Speaker:And sort of treat the teams I work with basically,
Speaker:do the same role that I've been doing for the past
Speaker:six or so years.
Speaker:And working with teams,
Speaker:finding out where their strengths are,
Speaker:where their weaknesses are, focusing on that.
Speaker:And my strategy that I've sort of come up with
Speaker:over the years, this isn't newer unique to me,
Speaker:but how to gradually work accessibility in.
Speaker:There's a lot to it and if you go to the teams
Speaker:that are already sort of stretched thin,
Speaker:and working into capacity, and you say,
Speaker:"Okay, from now on,
Speaker:you have to do test these 50 checkpoints."
Speaker:It can be a lot.
Speaker:So I'm in the process now of working on building out
Speaker:a program where we're gonna start with,
Speaker:Hey, let's start these 10 checkpoints.
Speaker:Let's understand what the user impact is
Speaker:and why we're doing them.
Speaker:Let's just focus on that for this month or this quarter.
Speaker:And then once that becomes part of our workflow,
Speaker:let's look at the next 10 things.
Speaker:So again, trying to be sensitive to, I don't know,
Speaker:people's organizational psychology, if you will,
Speaker:to work in accessibility,
Speaker:let people know it's meaningful and connect with the work
Speaker:and try to build it gradually over time.
Speaker:So back to your other point,
Speaker:Oracle does have a main accessibility program office,
Speaker:and they're a great group of folks.
Speaker:They serve and consult for all of Oracle's products
Speaker:and so my role is, I work closely with them,
Speaker:but I'm part of the...
Speaker:Technically, I report through the marketing organization.
Speaker:So it's really nice to be able to just focus
Speaker:on a smaller section of all the Oracle properties,
Speaker:which is all our public facing sites.
Speaker:So I call myself sort of the accessibility person
Speaker:for the front of the house,
Speaker:but I work closely and sometimes support developers
Speaker:and our products, and help people figure out
Speaker:challenging UI riddles and how to make 'em accessible.
Speaker:- I think I heard you mention that you developed training
Speaker:as part of your career.
Speaker:I can't remember if you said you were doing that at Oracle,
Speaker:but are there training programs available for people to
Speaker:kinda formally learn about accessibility
Speaker:within your organization?
Speaker:- Yeah, yeah.
Speaker:We've got...
Speaker:So Oracle has an accessibility conference once a year
Speaker:and we do training for different teams
Speaker:in an ad hoc basis, and we record those sessions,
Speaker:and post those for others to review.
Speaker:So I'm focusing on sort of adding
Speaker:to that collective training.
Speaker:Right now, I've done some sessions
Speaker:on sort of intro to accessibility,
Speaker:sort of 101 material for people that are new.
Speaker:Again, really trying to drive the human first, person first,
Speaker:here's what our different user groups look like.
Speaker:Here's what assistive technology is
Speaker:and it's really eye opening to people
Speaker:that have not been exposed to it before.
Speaker:I'm just in the middle now of planning out
Speaker:and designing some sessions for our UX teams.
Speaker:And so focusing on the subset of accessibility stuff
Speaker:that designers most need to be concerned about,
Speaker:color, page structure, I just did a session yesterday
Speaker:on interaction design.
Speaker:So a lot of interactive conversation about,
Speaker:here's what a screen reader sounds like
Speaker:when the page is working well.
Speaker:Notice the great semantic information we're getting,
Speaker:notice that every time there's a visual change on the page,
Speaker:we also hear something in the screen reader.
Speaker:And also getting users used to,
Speaker:or people used to putting their mouse to the side.
Speaker:And can you do all the things with keyboard only?
Speaker:And again, trying to stimulate that UX problem solving.
Speaker:Again, most UX and developers too,
Speaker:once they've understand the purpose or in the right mindset,
Speaker:accessibility thinking is, it's problem solving.
Speaker:It's doing what people presumably like to do
Speaker:in those rules already is just sort of extending
Speaker:the thought process to cover more people
Speaker:and understand some more technical details.
Speaker:- Well, one of the things I always like to ask about is,
Speaker:thoughts about the future, you maybe comment on,
Speaker:maybe where you see certain things going
Speaker:as we move forward as accessibility professionals,
Speaker:maybe areas that you see as gaps that need to be filled in,
Speaker:or possibly, projects you can talk about
Speaker:that you're currently passionate about.
Speaker:I know when I look back on my career in accessibility
Speaker:in a lot of ways, things are amazing compared
Speaker:to how they were 20 years ago
Speaker:and then other ways I'm like,
Speaker:wow, I really thought we'd be farther along
Speaker:than this at this point.
Speaker:So I kind threw a lot of things out there,
Speaker:but just kinda looking ahead,
Speaker:are there any areas you might wanna comment on?
Speaker:- Let's see, that's a pretty broad question, Joe.
Speaker:- You know, just pick one spot in there.
Speaker:- Let's see, I mean, I'm optimistic about the future
Speaker:of accessibility and the trajectory we're on.
Speaker:I hear more and more having people
Speaker:with disabilities included in the social movements
Speaker:for diversity and inclusion, and equity.
Speaker:And so I think that's great.
Speaker:I like to say, when I first got into accessibility,
Speaker:I would go to a party and talk to somebody
Speaker:and they'd ask what I do, and I'd say accessibility,
Speaker:and they'd have no idea what it was.
Speaker:Now, more and more in that same experience,
Speaker:people know more, so it's becoming more mainstream.
Speaker:So I like in here in San Diego, I like to go to say,
Speaker:meetup groups for UX, meetup groups for developers
Speaker:and more, and more of these people
Speaker:know what accessibility is and they're interested.
Speaker:And in these conversations, they'll say,
Speaker:"Oh, I know a little bit about that,
Speaker:Hey, I have this question."
Speaker:So I have some fun conversations around that.
Speaker:I mean, as far as
Speaker:where the future's going for accessibility,
Speaker:that's tricky.
Speaker:One thing I guess I can comment on,
Speaker:I just got back from the Accessing Higher Ground conference
Speaker:and did a talk there on artificial intelligence
Speaker:and accessibility.
Speaker:And that's a fun talk.
Speaker:I got that accepted for CSUN this March,
Speaker:and hope to go and deliver it again there,
Speaker:but it's a fun talk
Speaker:because there's essentially two parts.
Speaker:One is the positive,
Speaker:all the great things AI has done
Speaker:to help people with disabilities.
Speaker:And we're talking about speech recognition,
Speaker:voice control, the ability for AI to scan photos
Speaker:and video content, and provide intelligent descriptions.
Speaker:There's cool developments in possibilities
Speaker:for like robots to be able to help folks.
Speaker:But there's also problems with increased discrimination
Speaker:if AI tools are not deployed carefully,
Speaker:not sure if you've caught this sort of piece of news yet,
Speaker:but more and more companies are using AI
Speaker:in hiring processes, and interviewing processes
Speaker:for things like college or new jobs.
Speaker:And there are cases now
Speaker:where a resume might get screened out,
Speaker:or even somebody's video interview might be analyzed by AI.
Speaker:And so there are some problems
Speaker:that if we're not designing AI inclusively,
Speaker:it can end up having bias involved.
Speaker:So for example, you got, there are video AI's now
Speaker:helping people with say like an interview like this.
Speaker:If we had an AI running,
Speaker:you could literally have a tool that would analyze
Speaker:your and my emotional responses,
Speaker:and eye contact that kinda thing.
Speaker:We don't necessarily know
Speaker:how all those things work behind the scenes
Speaker:'cause they're all owned by private companies
Speaker:and the code base is protected, right?
Speaker:But imagine if you have an AI
Speaker:that is judging our eye contact and using that
Speaker:to influence, say an employability score,
Speaker:well, if somebody has a facial difference
Speaker:or somebody is non-sighted
Speaker:and they're not making eye contact,
Speaker:they might get screened out of the hiring process
Speaker:before they're even considered by a human.
Speaker:So that's just sort of a taste,
Speaker:but I try to highlight the high points
Speaker:of accessibility in AI,
Speaker:but also point out the dangers
Speaker:that we need to be vigilant about.
Speaker:- Well, first of all, I'm really glad you mentioned
Speaker:the two conferences and those be good things
Speaker:to include in the show notes for people to be aware of that.
Speaker:And then this issue that you just brought up
Speaker:is really interesting.
Speaker:One that I hadn't heard about in that way
Speaker:and as it relates to accessibility.
Speaker:So I definitely wanna look into that further.
Speaker:I guess one of the things with AI is,
Speaker:it could also become a positive influence
Speaker:where it could eliminate bias that exists for people
Speaker:with disabilities as they present themselves.
Speaker:So yeah, thanks for contributing that.
Speaker:- Yeah, definitely.
Speaker:There is a lot of good potential there
Speaker:and that the thing that sort of differentiate is
Speaker:the bias or the danger happens,
Speaker:it's just like web accessibility.
Speaker:If people don't know that they need to make sure
Speaker:to build this in,
Speaker:they're gonna accidentally make inaccessible websites.
Speaker:The same applies for AI, if you just let the robots scan
Speaker:the data and come up with algorithms on their own,
Speaker:there's a high chance for bias.
Speaker:But like you said, if we're conscientious
Speaker:and inclusive about it,
Speaker:we can use these tools to help screen out bias,
Speaker:and hopefully make things more equitable,
Speaker:but it's something that has to be on the radar all the time
Speaker:or things are gonna slip into that negative direction.
Speaker:- Well, hopefully, we'll end up in the positive ways.
Speaker:You mentioned looking on the optimistic view,
Speaker:but thanks for taking the time here
Speaker:to share a little bit about your own journey
Speaker:and things going on in your work.
Speaker:And hopefully I'll see you at another event in San Diego
Speaker:again sometime soon.
Speaker:- Yeah, that sounds great.
