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(bright music)
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- Hello, this is "Digital Accessibility:
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the People Behind the Progress".
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I'm Joe Welinske, the creator and host of this series.
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And as an accessibility professional myself,
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I find it very interesting as to how others
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have found their way into this profession.
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So let's meet one of those people right now
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and hear about their journey.
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All right.
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Well here we go with another episode
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where I have the opportunity to meet
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with an accessibility practitioner.
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And today I'm very excited to be speaking
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with Derek Featherstone.
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Hello, Derek, how are you doing today?
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- I'm doing well, Joe. How about you?
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- Everything's going pretty well, as usual,
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I'm in my home office on Vashon Island,
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which is near Blink's Seattle headquarters.
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Where are you talking to me from?
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- I am based here in Ottawa, Canada.
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- All right.
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Well, it's one of the cities in Canada
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I haven't visited yet,
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but I definitely wanna get there some time
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to check it out.
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Well thanks for being part of this.
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And I think probably a lot of people
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that maybe listening to this are familiar with you already,
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but I'm looking forward to learning a little bit
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about your background and how you got here.
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But always a good place to start is if you could just
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talk a little bit about what you're up to right now.
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- Yeah, so right now,
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I am the VP of Product Accessibility
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and Inclusive Design at Salesforce.
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I started here in mid-January of this year, of 2022,
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and loving it.
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It's a wonderful place to work
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and have a great team surrounded by a load of people
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that care really deeply about accessibility.
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So super happy to be here right now.
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- But you also,
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a lot of people may know you from your contributions
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to the community through
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quite a lot of training programs and things like that.
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Are you still involved in those areas?
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- A little bit less frequently now,
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mostly because things changed in 2020
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and I haven't really traveled all that much,
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although I still do quite a bit of
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conference speaking or have done over the years
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and put together workshops and that sort of thing.
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And I still do that,
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just definitely not as frequently right now,
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although I am getting to the point where I think
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I'm kind of ready to begin another wave
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of traveling a little bit more
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and speaking at conferences again and doing workshops,
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I spend a lot of that time or some of that time...
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Some of the time that I spend doing that kind of work
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I do that internally at Salesforce.
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And not really doing a whole lot in terms
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of workshops publicly right now,
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but that may change over the next little while.
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- The pandemic certainly did change the dynamics
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for a lot of things.
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The CSUN conference this year was the first physical event
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I'd been to in probably two years.
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So it was nice to get back out there
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and participate in that.
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I'm sure your activities in Salesforce
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keep you busy on a regular basis,
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but are you able to talk about maybe any of the things
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that kind of make up your kind of
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week in the life for Derek there,
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or possibly talk a little bit about how accessibility
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is structured within your organization?
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Are you part of an overarching group
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or do you get in with individual divisions
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or product groups?
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- Yeah, so I'll give you kind of
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the brief high level thing.
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And I think this is an interesting piece
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when it comes to Salesforce.
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Our group,
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the Product Accessibility and Inclusive Design team,
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is actually part of our office of Ethical and Humane Use.
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Now that's still part of our product organization,
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which is often where accessibility sits
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from an organizational perspective,
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but our work being so closely tied to ethics
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and that sense of responsibility
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actually is really quite interesting.
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I've never really seen it done
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or heard of it being situated within an office such as
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an Office of Ethical and Humane Use.
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So I won't go into too much details,
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but that kind of situates where we are.
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The thing that I would say I spend a lot of my week doing
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is a lot of work connecting to other executives
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and other product people around the organization,
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helping them to move forward in terms of accessibility,
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because lots of teams don't really have a good plan
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or have some of the insights that they need,
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or maybe in some cases it's just awareness,
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they don't have the same awareness of accessibility
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as other teams.
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And so we want to move everybody in the same direction.
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And so I spend a lot of my time investing
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in connecting with other people
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and working with them to help them understand
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not fine grained requirements,
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although sometimes I do get involved with
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specific bugs or debates or questions that come up around
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something really specific and technical.
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Quite often though,
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it's really around big picture requirements and
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understanding what we need to do as an organization
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or as product teams that are working on accessibility
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in order for us to succeed.
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So a lot of my time is spent working in on those things
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and thinking about accessibility strategically
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and enacting that strategy
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with the help of our partners throughout the organization.
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- Well I'd like to talk with you a little bit more about
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your current or most recent work,
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but one of the things I like to do with this program
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is to find out how people made their way
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to where they are today.
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Accessibility is still one of those areas
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where most people don't find their way into it
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through a formal education program.
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And so it tends to be something from lived life
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or a serendipitous event in our work life.
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So maybe let's go back into the past for you.
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And where did you first start to realize
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this might be a profession you you'd be interested in?
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- Yeah, I'm happy to happy to dig in a little bit there.
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And there's a long story behind it,
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and I will kind of go through the abridged version
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and then feel free to ask a little bit more
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about certain areas.
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But for me, there's kind of a confluence of events,
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of things that I've been involved
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with over the course of my life.
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I have a disability myself.
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I was born with a club foot,
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which now that I am 51,
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is actually starting to have more impact on me
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than it did in my younger years.
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The flexibility in my left ankle is
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not really there and that I have some flexibility,
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but probably about two thirds
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of what I have in my right ankle.
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And that has surprising impacts maybe on the way
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that I walk or the way that I feel pain up through my leg.
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My left leg is actually not the same size as my right leg.
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My right leg is significantly stronger
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because I think over the course of 51 years,
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I was in a cast for quite a bit of time for the first,
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I think, I'm gonna say 18 months of my life.
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And even later I had surgery at three
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to release the club foot,
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but being in that cast actually has an impact
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on early muscle development and that kind of thing.
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And there may be some other reasons,
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but my right leg is significantly stronger.
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And that actually creates some imbalances
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that I notice in the work day and that I actually
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even see in the screen right now
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that I need to sit up and try
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and balance myself out a little bit more because
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I'm a little bit imbalanced.
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That doesn't have a massive impact on me now,
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but I assume that at some point in the future,
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I may require accessible parking or something.
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I'm not not really sure what that future holds for me.
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I do notice it more now,
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just in terms of a little bit more pain
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than I used to get.
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So that's like point one.
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I also, as I was growing up,
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my grandfather had a stroke in the mid 1980s.
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And so I spent quite a bit of time just
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seeing the barriers that he experienced.
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I spent time living with my grandparents on
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I think every summer as I was working in the city
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kind of thing,
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and always needed to help him with certain things,
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making sure that as he was going up the stairs,
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that he wasn't getting his toe caught on the stairs
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and falling down and that kind of thing
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and helping him into the car and out of the car
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because they had a low car and
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there wasn't really a whole lot
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in terms of accessible transportation.
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And so there was a lot of things
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that I experienced there with him and him trying
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to maintain his independence despite having a stroke.
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When I was going through school,
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I actually wanted to be a teacher.
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And I was a teacher for five years.
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I started teaching my first classes in 1993,
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teaching high school.
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And as I was teaching and learning about teaching people,
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I started to understand a little bit more
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about multiple intelligence theory,
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which isn't really a great word for it,
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but it does tap into the notion
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of people learning in different ways.
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That really resonated for me that the messages that I was
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trying to teach my students when I was teaching
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high school biology, chemistry, and computers,
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those messages were for everybody,
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not just for the people that were already
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sciencey, mathematical,
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or already kind of headed in that direction.
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If I wanted to teach people and have
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young teenagers turn into responsible citizens
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that had a background in science
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and could think with that science-based lens,
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then I needed to make sure that the lessons I was teaching
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resonated for everybody.
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And so I would do things like
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I would get some of the students
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that were more focused on the arts,
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I would get them to write poetry about science concepts
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as a way to demonstrate some of
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the ways that they were understanding things.
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And I tried to get creative with that
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and really tried to make sure that the messages
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became a thing that were for everyone.
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And so when I started getting into the web,
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that relationship to accessibility
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about this being for everyone really connected with me.
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So I started working on the web when I was teaching.
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I actually started creating web based resources
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for my students and for my co-teachers
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and going through that in the mid 1990s was like,
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the heavy browser war era,
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where we were using Internet Explorer 3
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and Netscape Navigator Gold 3.2
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and there was differences between the browsers.
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And so when I was creating things
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and I couldn't get them to show up
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in one browser versus another,
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that led me down a path of figuring out why.
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And that led me to concepts like validation of HTML,
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because that was a good way to ensure that my HTML
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that I was writing by hand was nested properly.
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Because if you were writing something for,
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if you were creating a table, for example,
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and you missed a closing table row tag
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or a closing table tag,
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or you nested something incorrectly,
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Netscape 3.2 just showed a blank page.
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It didn't render the entire page
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because your HTML was not well-formed.
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So that was a thing where validation
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became a thing right away for me,
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and validation led me also to learn about concepts like
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missing alt text and form labels
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and form labels that were connected
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to their form fields by the for attribute and the ID.
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So that validation aspect of it became really important.
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And it exposed me to some accessibility principles
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very early on that actually led me
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more into accessibility.
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And so as I started to create more web-based resources,
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accessibility was just a natural thing.
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It felt obvious to me and a thing that
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we wanted to make sure that
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that was part of everything that we created.
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Everything needs to be accessible.
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I eventually left teaching and started
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my own web company in 1999.
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And I was not only building websites.
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I was also teaching people how to build websites.
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It made sense to me to use
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my teaching background to do that.
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And so I've been teaching and building websites
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since then professionally.
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And that was something where
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it became really clear to me that
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there were not a lot of people that understood
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or that were talking about or were encouraging accessibility
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as a practice as part of what we do.
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And so it was there from kind of the moment that I started,
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and it was something that I've just been trying to share
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over and over and over again.
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And I think in probably around 2005,
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about six years into it,
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I started to get invited to some conferences.
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And people were asking me specifically to speak about
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accessibility because they were seeing
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that it was becoming increasingly important.
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And they wanted people that could guide,
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people that could inspire people.
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And most importantly,
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teach people so that they were learning things
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about accessibility.
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And so I was all in on that because I wanted
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to keep teaching and using my teaching background.
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So when you put all of that together,
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that ultimately led to in around 2004, 2003, 2004, 2005,
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where I just really started to focus on
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the accessibility side of things, and gradually over time,
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that's what we became.
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I created Simply Accessible out of that.
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That was my company that we grew
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and did lots of varied design-centric accessibility work,
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very user-focused accessibility work.
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And that led to a point where ultimately
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we got acquired by Level Access in 2018.
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And I was Chief Experience Officer there for four years.
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And then that's kind of how I ended up here over time.
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Just kind of that accessibility continued
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to grow as my focus.
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And that's led me to where I am here.
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I said I was gonna give the short version.
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I think I gave the long version. So I hope that's all okay.
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- Yeah, no, that's great.
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But you went through a lot of things.
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So let me just check back with some of it,
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just with a couple of comments and questions.
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First of all,
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thanks for sharing the information about
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your own physical challenges.
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I think that that always helps us have
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a broader understanding
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of what's involved in this field.
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And then I hadn't known about you being a teacher,
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but all the online classes and the things
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that you do have done at conferences have all been really
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very good instructional activities.
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So I guess that makes sense that you had that background,
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or do you not feel like that that contributed to it?
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- Oh, I think it has for sure.
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It's at the heart of most of the things that I do
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that I want to teach.
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And I tend to think about things
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in a very specific way
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when I'm creating something,
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whether it's a conference talk or
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one of my courses that's on LinkedIn Learning,
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I go through a process where I'm thinking about
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the learning outcomes that I'm after,
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and I break it down into these four categories.
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There's things that I want people to know.
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There's things that I want them to do or be able to do.
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So that's like the knowledge and awareness,
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but there's also skills and behaviors
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that we need to encourage.
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There's things that I want people to feel.
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And then there's things that I want them,
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people I want people to be.
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So I go through this framework of know, do, feel, be,
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and it ultimately lets me create this overall picture
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of this is what I'm aiming for here.
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And so it's always a combination of things that I just want
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people to know, things that I want them to do,
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00:19:16
or actions that I want them to take,
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00:19:18
things that I want them to feel.
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00:19:21
In a lot of ways I might say,
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00:19:23
if I'm doing a conference talk,
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00:19:25
I might write down that I want people
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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
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00:19:43
or something like that.
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00:19:44
So there's things I want them to feel empowered.
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00:19:47
And then the things that I want them to be tend
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00:19:49
to be kind of those aspirational things.
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00:19:51
I want them to be a responsible designer,
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00:19:53
or I want them to be a more inclusive researcher
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00:19:59
that includes more people with disabilities
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00:20:01
in the research that they're doing.
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00:20:02
So I've got those ideas.
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00:20:04
And I think that comes from my teaching background because
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00:20:08
that's ultimately how we design
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00:20:11
learning activities and curriculum.
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00:20:13
It's focused on those kind of facets of learning outcomes.
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00:20:19
So I think it's heavily,
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00:20:21
heavily influenced by my background as a teacher.
Speaker:
00:20:26
- The other thing that then you got
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00:20:28
to the point where you were doing
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00:20:31
your website consulting and accessibility work.
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00:20:36
So early 2000s, that's kind of when
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00:20:40
I think of the time where a lot of the pieces
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00:20:43
were in place to start turning this into
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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?
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00:21:04
Were you kind of aware that
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00:21:06
there was this practice building,
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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?
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00:21:18
- I'd say a little bit of both.
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00:21:19
You could tell, like it was, it felt,
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00:21:23
and that's very kind of vague way of talking about it,
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00:21:26
but you could feel a groundswell in
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00:21:30
that more and more people, that it was gaining momentum,
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00:21:33
that it was going to be more and more important.
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00:21:36
And ultimately it was...
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00:21:40
There was definitely some reaction
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00:21:42
to what was being asked for,
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00:21:46
but we got to a point where we were reacting,
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00:21:50
like yes, there's more demand for this.
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00:21:52
And then we turned that into, okay,
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00:21:54
there's no more reacting to this,
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00:21:57
let's be proactive about it.
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00:21:58
And here's what we're gonna drive and create as a company.
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00:22:03
And so it was kind of a combination of both of those things,
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00:22:07
but you could definitely tell
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00:22:10
that it was going to continue to become important.
Speaker:
00:22:13
I think I wrote an article once about
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00:22:18
what steps you need to take
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00:22:20
to become an accessibility consultant.
Speaker:
00:22:23
And in the very early days,
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00:22:25
it was literally go get a business card
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00:22:29
and write your name on it
Speaker:
00:22:31
and accessibility consultant underneath,
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00:22:33
because in the beginning,
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00:22:34
none of us were trained for this.
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00:22:37
There was no curriculum, there were no programs.
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00:22:39
There wasn't anything that
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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,
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00:22:49
it's definitely different now,
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00:22:52
there are programs out there,
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00:22:54
there is certification programs out there,
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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.
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00:23:09
And I think LinkedIn posted something about this
Speaker:
00:23:13
just within the last couple of weeks,
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00:23:14
they have an entire section
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00:23:17
when you are adding your job to your LinkedIn profile,
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00:23:21
there are a group of, I think it's maybe 20,
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00:23:24
or maybe it's not quite that many,
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00:23:25
but there's a list of accessibility- specific jobs
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00:23:29
that exist in LinkedIn now.
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00:23:31
And that just further goes to show
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00:23:34
that this is going to continue to be important
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00:23:37
when a platform like LinkedIn adds that
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00:23:44
to their product, to their service,
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00:23:48
that's saying something,
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00:23:50
that's a big recognition
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00:23:51
of the importance of accessibility in this space
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00:23:55
in which we all work.
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00:23:58
So it's definitely very different now
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00:23:59
than it was when I first started out.
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00:24:02
- Yeah, I've noticed that myself,
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00:24:06
I kind of keep up on things along those lines.
Speaker:
00:24:10
I teach at the University of Washington.
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00:24:12
So I'm always kind of interested in that in terms of helping
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00:24:15
my students understand potential skill opportunities.
Speaker:
00:24:21
Again, back to your journey,
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00:24:23
kind of the next part that you mentioned was having
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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
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00:24:35
actively supporting clients,
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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,
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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
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00:25:14
and design level can kind of take care of
Speaker:
00:25:16
that if you follow through the process.
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00:25:19
But I don't know, maybe just talk a little bit about
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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
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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,
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00:25:50
and we can help you fix that.
Speaker:
00:25:54
But what we found was that over time organizations started
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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
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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
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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.
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,
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00:03:57
but are you able to talk about maybe any of the things
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00:04:01
that kind of make up your kind of
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00:04:05
week in the life for Derek there,
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00:04:08
or possibly talk a little bit about how accessibility
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00:04:13
is structured within your organization?
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00:04:15
Are you part of an overarching group
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or do you get in with individual divisions
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00:04:23
or product groups?
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00:04:25
- Yeah, so I'll give you kind of
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00:04:27
the brief high level thing.
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00:04:29
And I think this is an interesting piece
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00:04:32
when it comes to Salesforce.
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00:04:35
Our group,
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00:04:37
the Product Accessibility and Inclusive Design team,
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00:04:39
is actually part of our office of Ethical and Humane Use.
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00:04:44
Now that's still part of our product organization,
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00:04:48
which is often where accessibility sits
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00:04:52
from an organizational perspective,
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00:04:54
but our work being so closely tied to ethics
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00:05:01
and that sense of responsibility
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00:05:03
actually is really quite interesting.
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00:05:05
I've never really seen it done
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00:05:06
or heard of it being situated within an office such as
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00:05:13
an Office of Ethical and Humane Use.
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00:05:15
So I won't go into too much details,
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00:05:18
but that kind of situates where we are.
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00:05:22
The thing that I would say I spend a lot of my week doing
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00:05:26
is a lot of work connecting to other executives
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00:05:30
and other product people around the organization,
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00:05:34
helping them to move forward in terms of accessibility,
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00:05:37
because lots of teams don't really have a good plan
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00:05:43
or have some of the insights that they need,
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00:05:45
or maybe in some cases it's just awareness,
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00:05:49
they don't have the same awareness of accessibility
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00:05:51
as other teams.
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00:05:52
And so we want to move everybody in the same direction.
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00:05:56
And so I spend a lot of my time investing
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00:06:00
in connecting with other people
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00:06:03
and working with them to help them understand
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00:06:08
not fine grained requirements,
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00:06:11
although sometimes I do get involved with
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00:06:15
specific bugs or debates or questions that come up around
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00:06:19
something really specific and technical.
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00:06:22
Quite often though,
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00:06:22
it's really around big picture requirements and
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00:06:25
understanding what we need to do as an organization
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00:06:27
or as product teams that are working on accessibility
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00:06:31
in order for us to succeed.
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00:06:33
So a lot of my time is spent working in on those things
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00:06:38
and thinking about accessibility strategically
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00:06:42
and enacting that strategy
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00:06:45
with the help of our partners throughout the organization.
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00:06:49
- Well I'd like to talk with you a little bit more about
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00:06:55
your current or most recent work,
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00:06:57
but one of the things I like to do with this program
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00:07:01
is to find out how people made their way
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00:07:03
to where they are today.
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00:07:05
Accessibility is still one of those areas
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00:07:08
where most people don't find their way into it
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00:07:11
through a formal education program.
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00:07:14
And so it tends to be something from lived life
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00:07:17
or a serendipitous event in our work life.
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00:07:21
So maybe let's go back into the past for you.
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00:07:25
And where did you first start to realize
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00:07:28
this might be a profession you you'd be interested in?
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00:07:32
- Yeah, I'm happy to happy to dig in a little bit there.
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00:07:37
And there's a long story behind it,
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00:07:40
and I will kind of go through the abridged version
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00:07:43
and then feel free to ask a little bit more
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00:07:47
about certain areas.
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00:07:48
But for me, there's kind of a confluence of events,
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00:07:52
of things that I've been involved
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00:07:54
with over the course of my life.
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00:07:56
I have a disability myself.
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00:07:57
I was born with a club foot,
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00:08:02
which now that I am 51,
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00:08:05
is actually starting to have more impact on me
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00:08:09
than it did in my younger years.
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00:08:12
The flexibility in my left ankle is
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00:08:16
not really there and that I have some flexibility,
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00:08:20
but probably about two thirds
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00:08:23
of what I have in my right ankle.
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00:08:25
And that has surprising impacts maybe on the way
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00:08:29
that I walk or the way that I feel pain up through my leg.
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00:08:34
My left leg is actually not the same size as my right leg.
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00:08:38
My right leg is significantly stronger
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00:08:41
because I think over the course of 51 years,
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00:08:46
I was in a cast for quite a bit of time for the first,
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00:08:49
I think, I'm gonna say 18 months of my life.
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00:08:53
And even later I had surgery at three
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00:08:56
to release the club foot,
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00:08:58
but being in that cast actually has an impact
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00:09:01
on early muscle development and that kind of thing.
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00:09:03
And there may be some other reasons,
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00:09:06
but my right leg is significantly stronger.
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00:09:09
And that actually creates some imbalances
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00:09:11
that I notice in the work day and that I actually
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00:09:15
even see in the screen right now
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00:09:16
that I need to sit up and try
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00:09:18
and balance myself out a little bit more because
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00:09:22
I'm a little bit imbalanced.
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00:09:27
That doesn't have a massive impact on me now,
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00:09:29
but I assume that at some point in the future,
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00:09:31
I may require accessible parking or something.
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00:09:35
I'm not not really sure what that future holds for me.
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00:09:38
I do notice it more now,
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00:09:40
just in terms of a little bit more pain
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00:09:43
than I used to get.
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00:09:45
So that's like point one.
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00:09:50
I also, as I was growing up,
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00:09:52
my grandfather had a stroke in the mid 1980s.
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00:09:56
And so I spent quite a bit of time just
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00:09:58
seeing the barriers that he experienced.
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00:10:03
I spent time living with my grandparents on
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00:10:06
I think every summer as I was working in the city
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00:10:09
kind of thing,
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00:10:10
and always needed to help him with certain things,
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00:10:14
making sure that as he was going up the stairs,
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00:10:18
that he wasn't getting his toe caught on the stairs
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00:10:21
and falling down and that kind of thing
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00:10:23
and helping him into the car and out of the car
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00:10:25
because they had a low car and
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00:10:29
there wasn't really a whole lot
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00:10:30
in terms of accessible transportation.
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00:10:33
And so there was a lot of things
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00:10:35
that I experienced there with him and him trying
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00:10:37
to maintain his independence despite having a stroke.
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00:10:43
When I was going through school,
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00:10:45
I actually wanted to be a teacher.
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00:10:47
And I was a teacher for five years.
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00:10:50
I started teaching my first classes in 1993,
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00:10:53
teaching high school.
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00:10:56
And as I was teaching and learning about teaching people,
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00:11:01
I started to understand a little bit more
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00:11:03
about multiple intelligence theory,
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00:11:06
which isn't really a great word for it,
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00:11:10
but it does tap into the notion
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00:11:13
of people learning in different ways.
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00:11:19
That really resonated for me that the messages that I was
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00:11:22
trying to teach my students when I was teaching
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00:11:25
high school biology, chemistry, and computers,
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00:11:27
those messages were for everybody,
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00:11:30
not just for the people that were already
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00:11:34
sciencey, mathematical,
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00:11:37
or already kind of headed in that direction.
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00:11:41
If I wanted to teach people and have
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00:11:45
young teenagers turn into responsible citizens
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00:11:51
that had a background in science
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00:11:53
and could think with that science-based lens,
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00:11:57
then I needed to make sure that the lessons I was teaching
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00:11:59
resonated for everybody.
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00:12:01
And so I would do things like
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00:12:04
I would get some of the students
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00:12:05
that were more focused on the arts,
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00:12:07
I would get them to write poetry about science concepts
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00:12:12
as a way to demonstrate some of
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00:12:14
the ways that they were understanding things.
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00:12:17
And I tried to get creative with that
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00:12:19
and really tried to make sure that the messages
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00:12:22
became a thing that were for everyone.
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00:12:25
And so when I started getting into the web,
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00:12:28
that relationship to accessibility
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00:12:32
about this being for everyone really connected with me.
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00:12:37
So I started working on the web when I was teaching.
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00:12:41
I actually started creating web based resources
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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,
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00:12:55
where we were using Internet Explorer 3
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00:13:01
and Netscape Navigator Gold 3.2
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00:13:05
and there was differences between the browsers.
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00:13:08
And so when I was creating things
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00:13:11
and I couldn't get them to show up
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00:13:12
in one browser versus another,
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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,
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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.
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00:13:32
Because if you were writing something for,
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00:13:35
if you were creating a table, for example,
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00:13:37
and you missed a closing table row tag
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00:13:41
or a closing table tag,
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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
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00:13:57
became a thing right away for me,
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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
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00:14:27
more into accessibility.
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00:14:29
And so as I started to create more web-based resources,
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00:14:35
accessibility was just a natural thing.
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00:14:37
It felt obvious to me and a thing that
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00:14:40
we wanted to make sure that
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00:14:43
that was part of everything that we created.
Speaker:
00:14:45
Everything needs to be accessible.
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00:14:48
I eventually left teaching and started
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00:14:49
my own web company in 1999.
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00:14:54
And I was not only building websites.
Speaker:
00:14:56
I was also teaching people how to build websites.
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00:14:59
It made sense to me to use
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00:15:00
my teaching background to do that.
Speaker:
00:15:03
And so I've been teaching and building websites
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00:15:07
since then professionally.
Speaker:
00:15:09
And that was something where
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00:15:11
it became really clear to me that
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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,
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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.
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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,
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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
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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
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00:23:02
and there's positions at organizations
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00:23:05
like Accessibility Product Managers.
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00:23:09
And I think LinkedIn posted something about this
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00:23:13
just within the last couple of weeks,
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00:23:14
they have an entire section
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00:23:17
when you are adding your job to your LinkedIn profile,
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00:23:21
there are a group of, I think it's maybe 20,
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00:23:24
or maybe it's not quite that many,
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00:23:25
but there's a list of accessibility- specific jobs
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00:23:29
that exist in LinkedIn now.
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00:23:31
And that just further goes to show
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00:23:34
that this is going to continue to be important
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00:23:37
when a platform like LinkedIn adds that
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00:23:44
to their product, to their service,
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00:23:48
that's saying something,
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00:23:50
that's a big recognition
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00:23:51
of the importance of accessibility in this space
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00:23:55
in which we all work.
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00:23:58
So it's definitely very different now
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00:23:59
than it was when I first started out.
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00:24:02
- Yeah, I've noticed that myself,
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00:24:06
I kind of keep up on things along those lines.
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00:24:10
I teach at the University of Washington.
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00:24:12
So I'm always kind of interested in that in terms of helping
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00:24:15
my students understand potential skill opportunities.
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00:24:21
Again, back to your journey,
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00:24:23
kind of the next part that you mentioned was having
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00:24:27
your own business that then was acquired by Level Access.
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00:24:31
So like in that period where you're
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00:24:35
actively supporting clients,
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00:24:38
I'm just curious about how you felt in terms of
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00:24:44
where you are making your biggest impact.
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00:24:50
Being in the consulting area myself,
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00:24:52
sometimes I think that the majority of interest comes from
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00:24:57
that desire for compliance
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00:25:01
or not to run into legal issues,
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00:25:05
the auditing portion.
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00:25:06
Whereas I tend to feel that getting involved early
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00:25:12
and understanding at the research
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00:25:14
and design level can kind of take care of
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00:25:16
that if you follow through the process.
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00:25:19
But I don't know, maybe just talk a little bit about
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00:25:23
what that dynamic was for you and your experiences.
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00:25:29
- It changed over time.
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00:25:31
And the demand in the beginning or the work
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00:25:35
that we were doing in a lot of ways was very much
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00:25:39
along the lines of, yes, we'll consult with you.
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00:25:43
And yes, we can do an assessment of where you are
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00:25:48
and where your product is,
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00:25:50
and we can help you fix that.
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00:25:54
But what we found was that over time organizations started
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00:25:59
to realize that accessibility is not successful
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00:26:05
if you're thinking of it as a one time thing.
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00:26:08
And so what we started to see was
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00:26:11
a little bit of a transformation.
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00:26:12
And what we started to see
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00:26:14
in terms of that change was organizations understanding,
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00:26:19
or us helping them to understand that
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00:26:25
they needed to move from project to program,
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00:26:28
that they couldn't be just thinking of accessibility
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00:26:31
as a project that they're gonna do for a year,
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00:26:33
and then they don't need to touch it again for six years.
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00:26:36
It just doesn't work that way.
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00:26:38
It's not successful that way.
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00:26:40
So that was the biggest transformation in mindset.
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00:26:44
And that was more focused on
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00:26:47
helping our clients understand that
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00:26:52
a project focus is fine for that project,
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00:26:56
but that it ultimately needs to bubble up
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00:26:58
to something bigger.
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00:26:59
It needs to be thought of programmatically,
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00:27:01
systemically as a big picture thing
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00:27:06
that is part of the strategy
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00:27:09
of an organization moving forward,
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00:27:10
where you need to be strategic about it
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00:27:13
and think of it in scaling terms,
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00:27:15
think of it in program terms,
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00:27:17
and thinking of it in repeatability terms,
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00:27:21
that's the only way
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00:27:22
that you can be truly successful with it in the long run.
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00:27:27
- That philosophy of iteration and always continuing
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00:27:32
to move forward I think is really important.
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00:27:35
One of the things that I always like to ask in this program
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00:27:39
is kind of open ended.
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00:27:40
It's kind of maybe you reflecting on
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00:27:44
your overall career in this area.
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00:27:46
I know when I think back to when I was starting on this,
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00:27:50
like around 1998, thinking ahead,
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00:27:55
in some ways I think
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00:27:57
I would've thought things would've been further along
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00:28:00
than they are.
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00:28:01
In other ways,
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00:28:01
I'm amazed at what technology has been able to do
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00:28:06
to support with assistive technologies.
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00:28:10
I just wonder maybe if you have any thoughts about
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00:28:13
areas where you think there's gaps
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00:28:15
or where there's been amazing achievements,
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00:28:18
or kind of where you're thinking,
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00:28:20
you're hoping things will go to in the future.
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00:28:24
- We've done a tremendous job
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00:28:27
on the engineering side of things,
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00:28:30
on the code side of things.
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00:28:32
But I still think there's a gap
Speaker:
00:28:36
with understanding that accessibility
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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,
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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.
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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.
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00:29:21
There's people with disabilities,
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00:29:25
when you think back to WCAG 1.0 or even 2.0,
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00:29:31
there are lots of people with different disabilities
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00:29:34
that were not well represented
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00:29:37
in those early iterations of accessibility.
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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,
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00:29:48
whatever the next version of it is
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00:29:51
that is starting to take into account
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00:29:53
things like different cognitive function,
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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,
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00:30:04
back in the 90s and the early 2000s,
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00:30:06
they might have been on the radar,
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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,
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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
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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.
