- Welcome to the "State of Accessibility" podcast from TPGI on LinkedIn Live. I am Mark Miller, and this is my co-host, Dr. David Sloan, Chief Accessibility Officer for TPGI, co-author of "What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility," a user research specialist, and the keeper of specialist knowledge of inclusive user experience design applied to educational technology. - And Mark is the Sales Director for TPGI, and also a member of the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group on Accessibility Maturity. So great to be back, Mark, after only one month since the last time. - It is, yeah, and kudos on our first ever podcast last month. We got a lot of positive feedback, so thank all of you who listened, and thank you for that feedback, and thanks for being here today. We got a couple things, David, that we wanna cover today. First of all is you and I both attended the M-Enabling Conference in Arlington. That was last week, so we're gonna do a recap of that, it's a very important conference in our industry. We also have a regulations and standards update that we wanna give you all, and then we wanna talk a little bit about what's going on with WordPress. So with that, Dr. David Sloan, why don't you start off with your thoughts on the M-Enabling Conference? - Yeah, so this is the first time I've been to M-Enabling, and M-Enabling's, I had to look it up, it's been going since 2011, so it's a pretty well-established conference in the Accessibility industry conference calendar, but this was the first time I'd had the chance to attend, and I really enjoyed it. I mean, it's definitely got a unique position in the conference calendar. I'd kind of position it somewhere between CSUN and Disability:IN. I mean, it's interesting for a number of things. One is that it's organized by G3 ICT, the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICT, so there's a sort of regular organizer that brings together industry, academia, public sector, organizations that represent people with disabilities, and given that it's based in Arlington, just a stone's throw from Washington, DC, it's obviously got a strong profile and presence from US federal government, so there's a big focus there. One thing that confused me initially, and I've seen other people confused by it, it's not just about mobile Accessibility. I'm not sure, I'd love to hear where the M came from, and M-Enabling, it may have started off as a mobile-focused conference, but it's definitely not now. - Yeah, I believe that's the case. - It covers all sorts of topics. - Yeah, I think they started... and I'm going from memory, so I could be wrong, but I think that's exactly what happened, is that when mobile, this is what, maybe a decade or so ago, when we all started walking around with mobile phones in our pockets, they thought that they needed a specialized conference for that, which they did, and it's just evolved. It's evolved. - Yeah, that makes sense. - [Mark] Yeah. - So, yeah, I was busy with a couple of events, or a couple of sessions that I participated in. One of them was a panel session called Closing the Web Accessibility Gap, Thinking Out of the Box, which was a pretty intimidating title to try and address, but I was part of a great panel session with Preety Kumar from Deque, John Avila from Level Access, and Anil Lewis from the National Federation of the Blind, and we were hosted by Jennison Asuncion from LinkedIn, a very well-known figure in the Accessibility community, and Jennison knows exactly how to handle a panel session. So I really enjoyed being part of that, and I feel like, you know, we did our best to address the challenge of why we're not making sufficient progress with making the digital world more accessible. You know, we talked about a few of the reasons which are probably familiar to most of us who have been working in Accessibility for years. There's so much content to fix and not enough resources with the sufficient skills and the time to fix that content, and when I was talking about this, I quoted Matt May, a long-term Accessibility advocate, who said, we have a few people who know a lot about Accessibility, but what we really need is a lot of people who know a little about Accessibility, and that's where we'd like to get to and where we're not there yet. And he also noted that there's still this perception that Accessibility is too hard and too expensive and conflicts with other business goals, and that's more likely to be the case if organizations are looking at remediating large quantities of existing digital content rather than thinking about embedding Accessibility from the start in the process of creating new digital content. So then we kind of shifted to talking about things that we can do to make more progress, and again, I'm wondering about thinking out of the box, well, depending on who you are, the size of the box might be enormous or very small, so some of the suggestions we have may not necessarily be sort of left-field ideas for addressing the challenge. They may be fairly familiar to some of us, but for others, maybe they're new ways of thinking about addressing Accessibility. So one is to address the implicit ableism that still exists in so much decision-making at organizations at individual levels, and the important role that Accessibility advocates have in trying to lead efforts to reduce ableism just through the way that we act, the language that we use, the way that, for those of us who are non-disabled, include people with disabilities in decision-making and research and all sorts of activities, and also to really connect with younger generations of grown-up in a world where disability discrimination has always been unlawful. Anyone born after 1990 in the US has lived in an era where the ADA was in place, that there was laws to protect people with disabilities from discrimination. So to have that in place, there's no excuse or no reason not to do Accessibility, so looking at that future generation, seeing that as a leader, I think is something that we can really sort of try and pin our hopes to in terms of moving forward. And we talked about education as another thing. - Two things I was gonna say, David. One, I really do like the point of young people. Young people, they do come up, they build off of where the generation before them or generations before them sort of set things, and they have the energy and the influence to come up and make change, and we see that in all sorts of different things. So I really like that point, and I do think that a lot of this rests in the hands of the up and coming generations. The other thing I wanted to do is I just wanted to take a pause, because one of the things that I've learned being in this industry is that we throw around terms like ableism all the time and understand what they mean, because it's part of what we do every day. But just in case there's people newer to the industry listening, and you kind of talked around it a little bit with some kind of examples and everything, but can you give a quick just definition and maybe an example or two of ableism just so that people really understand what we're talking about when we talk about that, particularly in the context of trying to move Accessibility forward from a larger global organizational standpoint? Like, why is something like ableism, you know, why does it make that difficult? So I'll stop and let you talk to that. - Yeah, I mean, I don't have my dictionary in front of me but the way I would define it is, ableism is effectively a kind of bias or discrimination against people on account of the disability through actions or inactions, through language, through other things that are done that effectively preserve existing barriers or introduce new barriers to access by people with disabilities. And often it's language or it's just the way that somebody communicates, you know, a PowerPoint presentation, as you can see on the slide here, well, that immediately discriminates against somebody who can't see the slide. And often it's implicit rather than explicit, you know, people don't necessarily deliberately say or do things that are discriminating, it's more things that we didn't realize were discriminatory. And we're all on a journey, I mean, I've been working in Accessibility for a long time. I'm still on a journey to address internal biases and try and correct and improve behavior. And one of the best ways to do that for those of us, especially for those of us who are non-disabled, is to talk more with people with disabilities and just learn more about diverse perspectives and modify behaviors and assumptions based on just being in a place where people with disabilities are, and being inclusive in decision-making and partnerships. - Great. I think it's perfect, and I agree with you. I'm in the same place you are where I'm always working on it, you always have to be self-aware and willing to listen and have the conversations and adjust. - For sure. And because that's such an underpinning part of the challenge of where we are just now and where we'd like to be, I think acknowledging it and acknowledging the need to make solid progress is an essential kind of foundation for moving forward with digital Accessibility. And we started to talk about younger people related to that is really improving education and Accessibility as early as possible. People in secondary school, even earlier ages, could be learning some basics about Accessibility and really straightforward learning topics around building, learning to code, learning to write digital documents, making sure that Accessibility is part of that so that later on, if people then go to college or university, they're not having to learn about Accessibility at a higher education level and potentially correct things that they had learned in secondary school and high school that were against best practice. So trying to inject Accessibility as early as possible is a really important step forward. We often think about it as a kind of, it's like a university topic, but it should be something everyone's learning. - Well, we wanna build on what's come before us, right? And the only way to really, truly do that is to have that be inclusive in education so that you create this starting point that is so much further ahead. So I think that sounds like a really good sort of concept that came out of this discussion. - Definitely, definitely. And the other thing that we, all the panelists agreed on is something that we really need to continue to invest in and focus on is ways to make it easier and cheaper to build new accessible resources and remediate existing resources, and that means better automation of processes that lend themselves to automation. Using AI, I mean, inevitably artificial intelligence was gonna come up in this conversation and as it did throughout the conference, but using the advantages that AI can bring to do things more quickly and at scale, things that humans find hard to do quickly and consistently and correctly. So testing, remediation, maybe helping us code more effectively to include Accessibility, all that's good stuff. And then the other thing I mentioned was making sure we're using authoring tools that support Accessibility. It's kind of the forgotten part of digital Accessibility design is the tools that we use to create things. And I mentioned the authoring tool Accessibility guidelines that have been published by W3C like nine years ago, and they're really the forgotten part of the Accessibility picture. - Yeah, that's a really good point. And I agree with you, just going back to AI for a moment. If there was two letters that I kept hearing roll off of people's lips in the hallway, wherever you happen to be, it was AI, and that was in a lot of the discussion titles and stuff like that, so it's something we have to pay attention to as an industry. And A, to make sure that we're taking advantage of it in the ways that it can help. But B, being sure that we're very, very careful about the implicit bias that can come with AI as well. Because that's been discovered pretty quickly, and you can probably talk to that more than I can. But just in these large language models, in the data sets that they rely on, particularly if they're sort of using the internet as a whole, there's already an implicit bias out there that AI is currently bringing forward. So you've got to just be a good steward of all of it as we usher it into our industry and into these solutions and this out-of-the-box thinking that you're talking about. And I think that the conference, from what I could see, and we'll get into this a little bit, but I'm sort of in the exhibition hall most of the time and didn't have the same advantage of being in sessions and talking in them or going to them, I had another role there. But that concept of AI and being careful with it and utilizing it and all that was definitely well handled, I think, by everybody at the conference. - Yeah, I would agree. I think there's a general agreement of the opportunities and the threats that AI brings. And in the past, we've suffered from over-enthusiastic marketing about AI-powered solutions that can solve problems that it can't really solve, it's not ready to solve yet, and it may not be possible for certain problems to be solved, ultimately, AI is gonna be a tool that people who know how to use that tool can use effectively rather than something that replaces people. - Sounds like any tool can never come around. - Yes, exactly. In the wrong hands, it can cause problems. - So does that kind of wrap up your thoughts on the roundtable session? - Yeah, that was the panel session. The other cool thing, you were sitting in a big, comfy armchair up on a stage, there was this hypnotic countdown clock. I'd never seen one before, where it's probably something we need for this podcast, where there's this digital countdown clock. - Cement, analog, old-school clock. - That's probably less intimidating than a digital display that's counting down, and it can be hard not to say when you're given an opportunity to speak. Oh, but I've only got 21 minutes and 13 seconds left to say something. - It's like when you're driving and they have that thing that shows you your speed limit as you go by and it tells you to slow down, it's the timing version of that, it's meant to intimidate you, David. - Exactly. It worked. It worked. - Well, so this is very interesting to me, because yours truly, Dr. David Sloan, did another session, and this one was all you. And this was your Accessibility Drives loyalty session. So I would love for you to get into that, because you were the only one presenting. And it's a very interesting topic that comes out of a survey that we did. So can you tell us a little bit about how that session went for you? And just full disclosure before you dive into it, I was an audience member of the session, so I actually saw the session. So I might be able to chime in here a little bit from another perspective. - Yeah, so this was one of, I guess, I think there were five parallel sessions. So it's a smaller attendance, but still really good fun to give the talk, and we were building on some research we at TPGI and Vispero did earlier in the year, where we surveyed over 600 people who were blind or had low vision on their experiences of visiting restaurants, either for sit-down meals or for takeout. And we learned a lot about people's experiences in terms of barriers that they faced when visiting the restaurant and how that impacted their likelihood to return. So that connected us to thinking about Accessibility as a driver for loyalty, and it's an interesting way to think about Accessibility. Often we think about addressing Accessibility from the perspective of we're excluding people with disabilities. We need to break down barriers to grow our audience base to include more people with disabilities as part of that audience. In this case, I kind of flipped it over and said, let's assume that we have customers who may be disabled, may have Accessibility needs. We want to maintain or retain those customers over time. It's a pretty well-established principle of business that it costs a lot less to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. So then thinking about Accessibility is something you wanna achieve and preserve over time so that you don't drive away customers because you're no longer catering to their Accessibility needs. And there are all sorts of things that you can do as an organization, whether it's monitoring digital assets to make sure that they preserve Accessibility if Accessibility drops, fixing it as quickly as possible. And all the other stuff in terms of customer support, helping everybody who's involved in a customer-facing role at the organization to be aware of disability and to provide whatever support is needed. And when you have things like loyalty programs, making sure that people with disabilities can participate in those in an equal basis. I mean, it would really not be good if you had a customer loyalty program intended to reward people who stuck with you, bought your products and services when they could be going somewhere else. But that loyalty program wasn't accessible to people with disabilities. What does that say about how you value their loyalty? So it was an interesting way of thinking about the top Accessibility from preserving access for existing customers, and we got some really cool discussion at the end of it, which I really appreciated. - Yeah, I think so just from being in the audience, David, first of all, I think you're spot on with a point that when you can marry doing the right thing with the business side of things, with a business KPI or initiative or whatever it is. So in this case, you're looking at customer loyalty and all of the positive business things that come out of it. That is coming together with the fact that we should be inclusive. Everybody, regardless of anything, will just say has the right to be included, and those two things come together. I think that's where you really get the inertia that is necessary to do this, I think it's another part of the out of the box thinking. And one of the things that was interesting to me sitting in the audience and listening to the questions from the audience is that a lot of people there were Accessibility professionals that are often thinking about how they evangelize within their organizations for Accessibility, right? Because when we raise Accessibility up to the leadership, they have got all sorts of priorities that they have to balance and it can be very difficult for Accessibility to get the attention that a lot of people feel like it deserves or whatever the case is, right? No judgment there. It's like there's a lot of things that get dropped, there's a lot of competing priorities but a lot of these passionate Accessibility professionals are always thinking about how do I make these cases? And there was some very interesting discussions. I think that first and foremost, they were interested in the topic because of everything that we just said. You know, this loyalty factor is a huge important factor for a business to consider that drives business and the sustainability of the business, it started with that. But then folks were really thinking about how that applied to multiple areas of the business. We had one woman ask about how they could apply that to just sort of help desk. If somebody called up the help desk or sent a request to the help desk, how that could be, the passive sort of, thanks for your feedback, we really appreciate it, we'll get around to it response, which you would get in a standard, like, you know, I found this issue on your site may not come with the necessary sensitivity it should if an Accessibility issue is put into the same bucket because it's really denying people access, it's more than just a bug that affects everybody, it's denying a specific group access. And so there was a fantastic audience discussion, I thought that was sparked from that around how you might take that on as an organization. So those things are handled differently, how you might word a response and then how you might take action on that response. So it was just very interesting, David, to see how it got people's minds turning and thinking about the overall problem. - Yeah, I agree with that. And there was some conversations about how do we track retention of customers with Accessibility needs over time? Obviously, there are data privacy concerns about storing information you don't really need to be storing. But there are other more creative ways to sort of figure out how can you measure retention over time? And just kind of underlining that people change and it's likely with time especially with the aging process, that Accessibility needs will grow. And to any C-suite figure in an organization, don't we wanna retain people as they move into older age? It just makes sense. And when you take steps to retain people with Accessibility needs, you're also creating an accessible space for new customers to come in. So you kind of get two for one almost just by focusing on this kind of preservation of existing or retention of existing customers. - Well, and I think this highlighted how important those KPIs are, how important it is to come up with good ways, ways that don't violate people's personal information or anything like that, to measure that so that the business can see. And by the way, I keep using the term KPI, that means Key Performance Indicator, it's an acronym for those of you who have not heard that before, I know sometimes acronyms can be difficult for some folks, So it's key performance indicators what a business looks at to make sure it's doing the right thing and moving in the right direction. Well, good. Let me just tell you that it was a great presentation. I really appreciate it. And I think anytime you spark a discussion like that occurred in that presentation, David, you've done a good job. So good job. - Yeah, yeah. Thanks. And there's so much more to talk about the conference, but I guess we should shift into, I think, looking at what's going on in the regulatory and standards space. - Yeah, I mean, I do wanna cover just a little bit before we move to that, and I'll do this very quickly, but I had a completely different perspective in the conference from the booth. And the biggest question I get is, what are people talking about? Because we get the general conversations and then things that people are specifically thinking about really walk by us by the booth or in the exhibition hall there. So Accessibility in general, still very important to folks, just getting digital assets audited, monitored, all those kinds of things that will, I guess at this point called traditional activities, still very important, but there's also a shift towards maturity. And when I say maturity, I mean organizational maturity, so maturing the capability around Accessibility. And when I say capability, I mean the capability of outputting accessible assets, right? Whether they're products, public facing websites, mobile applications, whatever it might be, really looking at the organization's ability to do that and how baked in that is the organization, and then looking at the next steps that need to be taken to do that, subject near and dear to my heart at being on the maturity task force for the W3C. I know it's not called maturity task force, but just quickly stating it. And then the other thing that was very apparent is that Accessibility and enclosed systems. And when I say enclosed systems, you can think of probably the most common enclosed system out in public is a kiosk. So if you go to the airport, it's that kiosk that is outputting the tag for your bag. If you go to a restaurant like McDonald's, it is that food ordering kiosk that has now become really popular, particularly since the pandemic. And we're seeing self-checkout, your server is handing you an enclosed device to pay your bill when you're done with dinner. Like all these things are occurring now in these enclosed systems. We were fortunate at our booth to have a kiosk where it was a collaboration with Image Holders. Wonderful gentleman was there from imageHOLDERS named Pete Thompson. It had the Storm interface device, which is a tactical device that allows, it's sort of a directional device so that you can tactfully navigate the screen, and the Storm interface is a very popular device, and Nikki Shaw was there from Storm. And then on that device, we had TPGi us, we had our JAWS for kiosk, which is what makes it talk. So if you're blind, you would plug your headphones into that Storm device and that would tell the kiosk that, hey, this person needs auditory, the content to be spoken, and so on and so forth. So it was really, really great. And the other thing I wanna say is that I attended an event, A1Y DMV, Jaunita George and her team at Navy Federal is really active in this Accessibility group in the DC area in general and it was an amazing, amazing event, it's a newer event, I think it's a couple, a little over two years old, and it was very small in the beginning and they crowded a restaurant at the event. So I just wanna shout out to those folks and say what a wonderful to see a bunch of Accessibility people and they're gonna carry that on month to month, and they opened it up to all the visiting people coming to M-Enabling. So that was really, really great as well. - Yeah, I wish I'd gone. I saw a picture of it LinkedIn and it looked like a great event. - Yeah, can't do everything, I'm gonna tell you that. I mean, there was a lot of people that are near and dear to me that attended that, so I was definitely making do it. But you've got to divide and conquer at an event like that. No worries, David. You know, maybe next time, right? But anyway, so that's my quick wrap up from kind of the exhibition floor. So we can move on to some of the updates that you have. - Yeah, and some of these were kind of emerged from M-Enabling. So there's a few things that worth sharing with people. So firstly, there was a keynote talk from Seth Dobbs, who is the new Chief Executive Officer at W3C, and he happened to mention that WCAG 2.2, the current version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is in process of being adopted as an international standard from ISO WCAG 2.0 is currently an ISO standard. And I checked, you can pay 42 Swiss francs for a copy of that on CD. You could browse the W3C website and look at it for free, But hey, you could always pay for a CD copy. And this is important- - I don't remember getting my first CD from AOL so I could get online in the mid-90s. So, you know- - You have some great CDs still. - If you've got the internet now, you can use it as a Christmas ornament. - Still good as coasters for your coffee mug on your desk. - Perfect. - So this is all important because some organizations, some countries can refer to W3C standards and policy and legislation, but they can refer to formal standards published by ISO. So this is a some organizations to reference WCAG formally. So there are signs that this may happen next year, and that will be an important development in the standards process. Another thing I've been looking at recently is the US Access Board recently released a notice of proposed rulemaking to amend the ADA Accessibility standards to cover electric vehicle charging stations. Obviously, with climate change and other drivers, there's been a major increase in the use of electronic vehicles or electric vehicles around the world. And also, lots of evidence that people with disabilities have significant difficulties using charging stations. So this is an effort to try and address some of those challenges, and it includes some proposed requirements for user interface Accessibility, which would become, as far as I can see, a new section in Chapter 7 of the ADA Accessibility standards. So covering stuff like screen content, alternatives to color, equivalents to audio, captions, there aren't any speech output requirements, which probably reflects the priority of addressing the most significant Accessibility issues that drivers of electric vehicles experience using charging stations. But still, it's an interesting predictor of what might happen in another potential rule that may be coming before the end of the year on self-service terminals or kiosks. So we are expecting to see a rule coming out before the end of the year, or a notice of proposed rulemaking, I should say. So I'll be very interested to see what that covers. And obviously, we'll be keen to provide feedback. Yeah. - And I think it's a great indicator just of the future of stepping forward, moving out of that web, internet-based digital Accessibility kind of that we're all familiar with and seeing how it's stepping out into something different. - For sure. And I think with the electric vehicle charging station, it's kind of often people think Accessibility means providing Accessibility to people who are blind or low vision. But electric vehicles can be real Accessibility enablers for people with other disabilities, whether it's physical mobility disabilities, people who are deaf or hard of hearing. So addressing those challenges with the task of charging your car is a really important part of inclusion. - Well, great. I'm really glad to hear that we're starting to shift our focus into other things as well. So David, anything else in the updates? I know the last thing we really need to get to is this WordPress discussion, I'll call it. Any other updates before we jump into that? Are you ready to talk about? - No, let's jump into the WordPress situation just with the last few minutes we have. And, you know, this is people may be aware of a pretty significant disruption in the WordPress community or ecosystem. In particular, legal action, counter legal action that's taking place between Matt Mullenweg, Co-founder of WordPress and head automatic which owns WordPress.com and WP Engine, a commercial WordPress hosting service plugin provider. I don't wanna go into the legal details of the current actions and counteractions that are taking place. But clearly there are lots of complexities around an open source technology, WordPress, with a commercial industry that provides tools and services to support using that technology. But it is significant for Accessibility, can you guess what percentage of websites are apparently built with WordPress? - Well, when I first wanted to build my very first website, it might have been WordPress, a free version that they had out there, and that was a long time ago. That probably was in the late 90s, early 2000s, thinking back, probably early 2000s. So I don't know. I wanna say somewhere between a third and a half of websites or if you just think about like all the websites in the internet, that would be. - Between a third and a half is almost spot on. The figure that I have is around about 43%, which is a significant proportion of digital content. It's a content management system, a publishing system, it's an authoring tool and it helps people publish and maintain websites without advanced technical knowledge, obviously, you can configure and customize a website built on WordPress to a pretty high level. But it's also an enabler for people who just wanna put a blog up there or put on a small business website. So it's a major player in web content, and therefore, it's really important to Accessibility. You know, there's a thriving WordPress Accessibility community, and our own Ricky Onsman is a big part of that. But if the situation escalates, then some people might decide to migrate to other platforms. When people start to migrate from WordPress somewhere else, then that's gonna have some impact on Accessibility. - [Mark] Yeah. - Could be positive, could be negative, it's hard to know at this point. - Yeah, it's definitely a grass is greener sort of situation. You really know, you know, do you get there and find out that it's not? Does it end up being a better situation? And I would imagine it's not even a singular answer, it's some of those migrations may be a net positive and some of those migrations may be a net negative, but it would be what kind of wins out overall. I think the message here is, let's keep an eye on this, right? - Exactly. - It has implications, I mean, well beyond Accessibility just in terms of the internet and content itself. But it certainly has major implications from an Accessibility standpoint as well. And it's coming in and driving something like that. You know, if you're wondering how important it is, it has got the gravitas to push something like this around. So this is just highlights the importance and how important Accessibility has become for people globally. - Yep. So we'll just watch the space and share any updates that we find and- - See how that goes. - [David] For future podcasts. - Yeah. Well, I think we did it, David. Anything else that you wanna jump in with before we wrap up? - There's enough for another podcast on other things happened at M-Enabling. I better hold off for now and finish up. - Alright. Well, I appreciate you as always, David. Fantastic updates. And now you know the "State of Accessibility". I am Mark Miller, thanking David Sloan and reminding you that the state of Accessibility is always changing. So please help us affect change. - Thanks, Mark. Thanks, everyone.