Digital Accessibility
We're joined by Mike Paciello (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-paciello-1231741/), Chief Accessibility Officer at AudioEye (https://audioeye.com) for a conversation about web accessibility standards. We'll talk about upcoming deadlines for local and state governments, foundational principles, and what goes into establishing and updating standards.<br><br>Resources and shoutouts:<br>- Civic Plus (www.civicplus.com)<br>- US Access Board (https://www.access-board.gov/)<br>- ADA Fact Sheet (https://www.ada.gov/resources/2024-03-08-web-rule/)<br><br>##### Music Credit: Tumbleweeds by Monkey Warhol
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- standards 0.005
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- functional performance 0.005
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Transcript
Hello. I'm Ryan Cook, and this is Civic Tech Chat, a show that looks at the way technology, politics, and policy impacts the world around us. The tools we use, the way services are delivered, and how we talk about and set policy all shape our society. We'll gather around and have a chat about these things together and more. Before we get started, I do wanna let you all know that we've started a Discord for the podcast. There will be a link with an invite down in the episode description. Do feel free to go check that out. It's a small community right now, but hoping to grow it. It's a great way to reach out to me and let me know things that you might want us to cover or to just hang out and talk about Civic Tech. Mike, thank you so much for joining us here on Civic Tech Chat. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do? Yeah. Thanks a lot, Ryan. Really appreciate it.
Kind of excited to be on this, show, and and, happy to work with you. My current role is as the chief accessibility officer with, AudioEye. AudioEye is a Nasdaq company, and we focus, in yeah. We focus on, website, accessibility for people with disabilities. And, Mike, what would you say is your personal why? The thing that drives you to get out of bed each morning and do what you do. You know, there's a lot of reasons for getting up out of bed. I wish one of them was getting up and playing golf every day, but I can't. So, my passion really, though, has been, ensuring, users, with with disabilities have accessibility technologies. What I've been doing since 1984 for, you know, so almost forty years, for a little more than forty years now, and, I get up in the morning thinking, Okay, what can I do better today? Who's not getting, you know, the best user experience? And, you know, what kind of technologies out there could we do to better,
you know, their lives? So that that's that's what gets me up and and going every morning. And coffee. Oh, coffee is a very important part of getting up. That is true. For sure. Mike, you've you've been an engineer. You've been a founder. You've been a senior leader at organizations of different sizes. As you reflect back on that career journey, what's something important that you've learned along the way?
This is a great question. I I actually have a couple of answers, to them. First and foremost is a lesson that I learned very on in my entrepreneurial part of my life. So I worked in, you know, a high-tech corporation for a little more than fifteen years when I first started in 'eighty four, and was already doing accessibility, then at a time when people didn't know if the word wasn't even really a word then. I was more like adaptive, or assistive technology, areas. But once I decided to go off and launch my own company, I met with my first set of venture capitalists, and, I got some great advice from from, one of them, from Motorola Ventures, as a matter of fact. And they said, look, you're a great person. People know who you are. You've done good work, but you know nothing about business. Nothing. And what we're going to do is we're going to surround you with a team of lawyers, accountants, technologists. We're gonna build around you. And if you could work with that team, if you just follow with them, you're gonna go places. And we we could take this this company to, you know, to the next level or better. So I've learned that number one is to make sure you surround yourself with a great team. So I've always done that. I think probably, you know, one of the areas where I've been very fortunate, to succeed and where a lot of my quote unquote claim to fame came was from the result of one of my companies called the Paciello Group. Right? Real original TPG. But my goal there was to build the world's leading, accessibility consultancy service. And to do that, I had to hire and bring on the world's leading people in that area, and we succeeded at doing that. So at at the end, when I eventually, you know, exited out through, you know, through, an acquisition, we had the number one brand in the world, back in, you know, the mid to, late two thousands. The second thing that I learned, and this was pretty much, you know, as a result of of working with these folks, and with the community of people with disabilities and even today. What I find fundamentally is that there is a foundation. There are pillars, if you will, that build, you know, a corporation and an organization into something that you can trust, and they build in quality. And so that means you've gotta have great communicators and great communication on that team. You have to have trust. You have to be transparent, and you need to be good, collaborators. So those are the two things I think that I've learned, over the years, you know, in my own career and have served me well as a result.
Today's conversation focuses on digital accessibility, a term I I believe you mentioned as you were talking about lessons you've learned in your career. When you use that term, what exactly are you describing?
Well, I mean, the easiest thing you say the digital world. Right? I mean, that's that's what we work, live, breathe, you know, in today. Everybody's doing everything digitally. Things that we used to do kind of, you know, brick and mortar style, even where people with disabilities are concerned. We're doing it through the, you know, through the digital platforms in digital society. So to me, that's every platform. It's all software to me. Right? There are hardware components to it, but it's analogous to, a curve cut. Right? So curve cut in the street, you'd walk in in, you know, put you down a sidewalk. You walk down it. You walk up it. You don't think twice about it. But those were actually developed and designed for wheelchairs. The digital world has to be the same way, and it has to be in every platform, whether you're you're, the whether it's the Internet, whether it's the web, whether it's an operating system, whether it's application. If it's software, it needs to be usable and accessible to all people with disabilities. So when I talk about digital accessibility, that's the world that I live in, and that's that's what I want in terms of of of of development.
As we consider the state of that of the space of digital accessibility, how would you describe where you see it at today?
Yeah. Another great question. There are days when I think we stink. We're we're we're just not doing a good job. Right? The reality is is that I do have the advantage of looking back to where we were in the eighties. You know, when I was in the eighties, everything was hardware. There was very little software, especially where people with disabilities are concerned, and most of it was very text driven. There was no Internet. There was no well, there was an Internet, but no one used it. It was it was the people of the government, you know, in the military, in some of the high-tech, computer companies like IBM and and the company that I worked for, digital equipment. So we we we had that notion. But the reality of it, it it wasn't there. So when I look at digital accessibility today from where it was then, wow. You know, we have made leaps and bounds in terms of emerging technologies, following along with mainstream technology in in driving accessibility. But if you look at a lot of the studies that are out there, and one of the ones that is often referred to as a study produced by, Utah State, their the WebAIM program that is there led by, Jared Smith, you'll find that to this day, after, what, thirty years of the web, and we had accessibility built into it right for the very for the very start, we were we were working on it. Before Mosaic was a browser, right, the first graphic browser, we were already talking about accessibility then. We should be a lot further along. We should be much, much further, further along than we are today. We're still struggling. The WebAIM study showed that more than 95% of all home pages, never mind the platforms, you know, all of the back channels and the subdomains and what have you, just the home pages, more than 95% of them are not usable or accessible to people with disabilities. So that's to me, that's a sad state of affairs.
That, that does indeed sound like a sad state of affairs to have only well, if 95% aren't at that level, that means only 5% are, which is
not a very Yeah. Those are just home pages. I mean, those are landing. That's where you come in. You know? Sony.com, target.com, you know, whatever you wanna call it. Whitehouse.gov. You know? All those big those big websites that are out there, it's just the home page, and we can't even get that right. So we're gonna have some other discussions. I'll talk about why and what we can do or what we have to do, as we kind of mature. There's a maturity continuum here, that we need to follow, and, hopefully, that'll get us to a better place.
Something we're gonna talk about today is perhaps, like, some effort to make progress in that area area. Many of our listeners may have heard about the Department of Justice in The United States making updates to title two of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And there's some deadlines looming this year and next as they regard to state and local governments. Those with a population greater than 50,000 have a need to comply by this April, and those that are less than that, have another year to do so. Why are these updates to title two so important?
Yeah. Well, they report because they they take in the next real big phase or or part of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And in this case, particularly where, you know, again, the digital economy, the digital society comes in play. So people who are in states or in organizations that are funded by states, including universities and educational systems that are there, they need to accommodate their citizens. Right? Their their users, the people, you know, that come in and register their cars or, you know, pay their taxes or enroll their kids in schools or the education of the K through 12, particularly. Right. There's not as there's I think there are fewer state universities that are private. I don't actually know the exact number. That may not be true. But all of those institutions are tied in not, you know, not at the big state level, not just at the big state level, but worst we're talking about state and local. Right? So all of the municipalities within a within a state that make up that state are vital. So this is an imperative. Would it's second only to the next, which is Title three, which is where we're going next. Right. Which is which is commercial world. Right. The rest of of everything else, that's out there. So, you know, this is a step by step process. We started with federal government, kinda have them there. They're doing their best. Now we move on to the state, local governments, get them up to speed, and then we go to go to the public.
Something that these, updates require, it was choosing a standard. So in this case, it seems that Department of Justice has chosen to mandate the web content accessibility guidelines version 2.1,
which I think for sure I say, like, WCAG. I'm not sure if that's actually, like, the acronym way you say it. Some people will say it that way. I say WCAG, kinda like it's something like it's a real word. The reality is it's a it's a it's an acronym. It's a it's it's an abbreviation, an abbreviation, for what it is. I say WCAG. But, most oftentimes, I hear people say WCAG as well.
Interesting. I'll have to that's another rabbit hole for for me later. But, so it but version 2.1 of that has been chosen as kind of the standard for this. Right. What do you think about that choice, and why is it important to set a a baseline like that one?
Yeah. So so in terms of of of the decision around it, it fundamentally is sound. Why? Well, because it is the international standard that, all organizations, in the EU, the EAA standard, right, the European Accessibility Accident defaults to, WCAG 2.1. In Canada, the Canadian accessibility laws, they also, they everywhere, they do. They more often than that, probably, at least from my perspective, 90% of all governments default to two point, 2.1 in the AA, criteria. I haven't seen anyone state 2.2 or 2.3, which are both out there, in terms of guidelines and standards. But remember now, the the the WCAG, standards are actually guidelines. Right? That's why they're called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So they serve as guidance for what a government may or may want to. Now, if I had my choice, I would have started somewhere else. And we tried to do this with section five eight. I chaired the last committee, co chaired it with, my close, friend, who has since passed away, Jim Tobias. And Jim and I really push for what are called the functional performance criteria as the baseline principles, because that's really what you want. You know, don't be fooled by the guidelines. They are awesome. They are they work well for what they do, but ultimately, they don't achieve full accessibility for all people with disabilities. However, the functional performance criteria, which are principles, which essentially say you need to make whatever you're developing useful and accessible to the blind or to individuals with low vision or people who are hard of hearing or people who have fine motor control, disabilities or people in you know, who are paralyzed or prosthetic. So any disability condition, any disability that you can think about, the functional performance criteria says, you must make it usable and accessible to these persona types. Okay? And that's it. We don't tell them how to do it, which is what WCAG does. Right? WCAG says you must, you know, add alternative text to an image. Okay? And then it goes down into how you could do that. Where where the FPC just say and I I think there are nine, eight or nine of them functional performance criteria principles, this is what you need to do. How you do it, you know, is up to you. You just have to make it happen. Now businesses will look at that from two perspectives. One is they'll say, great. No one's told us how to make our products. That's awesome. That's what we want. But then you're dealing with the other side, and that is, what are the principles, or themes of Section five zero eight that, that entire team of collaboratives put together, focus on harmonization. So you're harmonizing with standards, technical standards throughout the world. There's a lot of them that come in play. We taught we we we focus on interoperability. Right? So interoperability is, can my technology work with a person with a disability's technology? Right? And do they work together? Do they collaborate? Are they interoperable? Right? And we focused on usability. Right? So not only is something accessible, meaning a person with a who uses a person with a disability uses an assistive technology, and their assistive technology will render, we'll say, in this case, for the lack of a better, way of saying it, the web, a website, it will work. They'll talk together, and then they'll they'll they'll work together. It's not just that. That's what accessible means. Usable means not only can I access that website or that application or that social network? Right? That, virtual, reality, interface, whatever it is. But it works for me as a user with a disability. It is usable to me because people with disabilities have different user experience requirements. Does that all make sense? I probably threw a lot at you, in your audience a little bit there, but I I try to break that down in a way that makes sense. Ultimately, what we want is an interface that an interface that is both accessible and accessible to and usable by people with disabilities.
That makes a lot of sense. I I think, maybe I'll say a little bit back to make sure I'm grokking it and, you know, for the sake of the audience. I think what I'm hearing from you is, on the one hand, you have, WCAG, which is kinda almost like a checklist of things you activities you could do that aren't necessarily always clear on, like, what the end result thing is. But you can check the box. Right? Right. And, you may go ahead and check all of those boxes in how you build your piece of software. But even doing that, you could still have situations where there could be a person with a particular user experience need that just isn't fulfilled. So, therefore, they can't actually use the thing you've built, and they're left out
of the of of it. Am I kinda am I following along? No. No. No. That's it. That's exactly right. I mean, a very simple way of explaining if you're on the web, oftentimes, there's a form on the web. Right? If you the form may have the right WCAG coding done correctly so that you ID you put a label on that form label, but if that form is part of a large form where there are a number of different fields and a person can't follow the journey that was designed, fill in your first name, fill in your last name, fill in your social security net, whatever. Right? That order, then it's not usable. In a lot of web environments or digital environments are unfortunately designed that way. They're not designed for optimized user experience. And AT works different for the blind than it does, you know, who are using a screen reader application. Right? Reading what's on the screen, looking at the the order of how it's supposed to be done. It renders and interprets that information different than, say, for example, a a voice, dedicated, voice IO system and how it goes. And it interprets those forms and the fields and things along those lines. That journey is very different.
It sounds like then that if you instead started with something that was more the persona driven, like you described it from the principles, that really instead of telling you what to build, what it would inform you of is how your process for building should go. Like, you you have the persona. So that gives you someone you can do user experience research with as you seek to design it, someone you can show prototypes to. When you build the thing, you can test with the same sorts of tools that for example, like you mentioned, screen readers versus tools that read aloud. You could then because you know the persona, you then know to actually go and test using those very things. Is that a lot of why you would say for organization like, hey. Starting with personas is really
the beneficial thing. Yeah. It's a it's a concept. It's that architecture. It's that design at that level. And there's a whole I mean, every software organization that I know, I mean, maybe some of the smaller businesses might not do this, but they all they're developing agile. Part of the agile is developing requirements, you know, architect, architecting a workflow, you know, that people are supposed to follow what they want you as a company to follow. Right? And then Key and I design that in such a way that it will work for people with disabilities and these technologies that they use when they're rendering your content. Yeah. So it's gotta be. That's what user persona is all about.
One of the terms you used as you were talking about the, WCAG was levels. I believe you mentioned, like, level double a. And I I saw that the, the changes specifically call for that level of success criteria for compliance. Though I gather there's three levels that are mentioned there from a to triple a.
What sort of distinctions are are made kinda hopping from one to the next? It's actually a lot more simple than all of the guidelines that are out there that that, people often get confused by. So a is you must. You must do this. Otherwise, there's absolutely no user experience that is accessible. AA is you should also do these things. This enhances the user experience so that fundamentally what you're designing and developing is certainly more usable by persons with disabilities. Triple a is it would be good if you could do this. Right? Not a wish list. A wish list is different. Right? A wish list is like maybe we could do this kind of stuff. It's it's more like if you can add this to your development, it'll make that, experience, user experience, that much more accessible and usable and then therefore optimized for user. So you got A is must, AA is should, and, AAA is if you can, it'd be good too.
And what's your take on the choice of level double a kind of being the the standard they want the state and local governments and those associated to go for?
Yeah. I I I'm of the collective mind that, like every other organization that I know, double a is a nice happy medium in the middle. Just that your users and businesses and organizations that are listening to this, If you think that by achieving that level of compliance, however you're getting there, that that will ensure that you are building something that is wholly accessible and usable with people with disabilities, you're wrong. It won't. It does not. There's a lot more that needs to be done. And any good software developer knows that user experience to do that, there's a lot of, you know, there are a lot of requirements to achieve. There's a lot to understand about user experience in, you know, in how users are using your application to ensure that it's fully usable and accessible. It goes a lot more than what those guidelines, or what those standards actually state today, which is why I fall back to the functional performance criteria, which which basically are all musts, but they're principles. So they don't tell you how to do it. They just say, you must do this. You must achieve this optimal, goal or standard. That's a better way to say it. Yeah.
For organizations that are looking at these these things and they're go and they're trying to think of how they're going to comply with them or achieve them, what should they be doing as we speak to prepare?
Well, if in The United States, which is all we're really talking about here, title two. Right? Americans with Disabilities Act. In The United States, you've got, what, three and a half months. It's, January, February, March, April. Right? Three months three and a half months to go. If you haven't started, you're way behind, especially if you're over that fifty fifty k, setting. Right? Standard that's in there. You're way behind. The fact of the matter is, to be honest with you, Ryan, most states in fact, the state CIOs and the state CTOs were part of the section five zero eight advisory committee. They're part of it. Their organizations are part of it. They've known about this stuff for since 2008, so almost twenty years. So there's nothing new under the sun. WCAG two had already been developed by that time. It was already out as a a, you know, set of guidelines. So there really is nothing new. If you're behind, it's because, frankly speaking, this wasn't a priority for you. Or possibly, a lot of organizations say, we're just not funded for it. This is an unfunded mandate. Right? So you've got to afford it on your own. So it could be an affordability. I, honestly, I don't I don't think that's a good excuse, but that's just my own personal opinion. There are no absolutes, right, in anything I'd say. That's for sure. So those organization, if you're just getting started, then, you know, you need to go through the life cycle. Right? The developer life cycle process of architecting accessibility in, designing it in, developing for it, QA ing it on the back end, and then releasing it. Right? And in in in all that process, there's usability testing to make sure when I say usability testing, I want to make sure that I'm very clear. Usability testing, user testing with people with disabilities. Fundamentally, they should be a part of that entire lifecycle from design to release. But if you can't accommodate that, try to at least, you know, have some studies to ensure it along the way. That's that's really this, you know, this is a maturity model. I'm sure you've heard of various maturity models that actually say this is how you should go about doing it. So it's an organizational thing, but it's also a technological maturity and maturation process maturation process that you should be following. So that's what you gotta do. There are tools. There are all kinds of tools from a developer level, from a QA level, from a design level that you can use. There's a lot of them that are out there. There are whole platforms dedicated to making things usable and accessible. A lot of companies, my company, AudioEye, there's DQ, there's Level Access, there's a number of different companies that are out there that develop whole platforms because corporations and companies want that. And so you you can use those. But be assured that even then, you're not gonna you're not gonna achieve, you know, full compliance. This is still a a steady work in progress. We're getting better, but we're not we're not there yet. We're definitely not there at optimal accessibility or as I like to call it, OA.
Let's, for a moment, talk to there's I think there's a certain person in the audience that they're, like, in the development cycle with this. It's, like, mid. They're, like, trying to hit the deadline. Maybe they're looking at those platforms and tools and maybe testing utilities. And, to your point, there there's a massive ecosystem. So I'm curious, what what advice would you give someone that's trying to kinda sort out what makes sense for them there?
Yeah. Well, is it a person or an organization?
Oh, I'm thinking a person working at an organization. So for for, like, a local government. Yeah. Excuse me. So,
you gotta get by and you need an expert. You need someone who really understands. Preferably, to be honest with you, that person is a person with a disability. But if they if they aren't then at least then you don't need one person you need biddably two. You need someone who is an engineer and developer that knows how to design well and design and develop for accessibility usability And b, you need a person or persons with disabilities because, you know, disabilities have got a wide level of variant. Right? So what do you do? Or do I get a lot and get a person with, you know, who's deaf and, you know, really is focused on captioning and, you know, text driven things at that level. Or do I go out and get a blind person, right? And then what happens to those with love? So maybe you attach yourself to an organization that could kind of support like the disability, disability rights, consortiums that are out there, that they have a wide variety of the American Association with Persons with Disabilities that have more of a wider variety and reach out and get their help. But at that level, you've got to have an expert who understands what tools are out there that can be used knows how to use them well knows where their weak areas are because there is no tool or platform out there that does it all. There just isn't. And I'll say something that I know a lot of your audience I'm sure knows. There are a lot of accessibility overlays or widgets. They're really widgets. They go back to the 90s, and a lot of people don't realize this. Those accessibility overlays are not new. They've been around for pretty close to thirty years themselves. They started with just increasing the font size on a on a web page. You probably remember them. And everybody had this. Oh, great. Now we can make this. And and they were fundamentally, those widgets, all they do is they replicate what assistive technology already does or browsers already do or what operating systems already can't accommodate. So they're really, really not that beneficial. I think that they're really beneficial and helpful to a whole other set of demographics. For example, the elderly who don't know how to set their browsers or or their operating system settings. They just don't. Right? So you give them a quick tool that they could grab on. Now they can increase their text or change the colors or what have you. Right? Or users who are novice users, who are new users, newbies. Right? At that level, those tools help them at that because, again, they don't understand technologically how to establish, define, configure their browsers or their operating systems or even any technology they may have at their hands. So those little widgets will will help them at least get some get get somewhere get them further than where they were. But, otherwise, they are not what, what what users or developers should be using.
We've, spent a lot of time talking about the current state of things or things folks should be doing to prepare for this deadline coming up. But I'm also a bit curious about how these sorts of updates, either to standards or to regulations, happen mechanically. Your background includes some time on the US Access Board, which I imagine has had a significant influence on the topic we've been discussing. Can you talk a bit about the effort that goes into making an update like this one we've been talking about here today?
Yeah. Everything that we talked about today kind of went into the, section five zero eight, the last section five zero eight. I haven't seen a new one yet. I tend to doubt that we'll see anything soon. But in general, what you want is what the Access Board, the Federal Access Board was able to pull together. They they put a lot of effort, a lot of work to pull together what I thought at that particular time. And a lot of those individuals are still around. An A team. An A team, right? Not just for accessibility, but an A team. People who represented federal government, people who represented international organizations. We had we I think we had five or six countries, Australia, Japan, Canada, folks from Europe. We're we're all there part of of of that of of that committee, that advisory committee. We had several representatives from commercial organizations, Apple, Google, Microsoft for all their IBM were all part of it. Collectively, we had an A team of the world's best organizations who could support the development of a set of standards that could then be rolled out and become what they are today, which are mandatory. However, remember, section five zero eight is a procurement mandate, and it only applies to the federal to federal agencies. Anything outside of that that mimics or imitates it is something that was done, and there are states that did adopted it almost wholesale, you know, adopted the the those standards. So, again, to add to it, so you've got you've got that kind of team. You've got great leadership. So I was very fortunate, to be a part of that leadership team, which was myself and, again, my my, colleague, Jim Tobias. Jim and I worked we've we had known each other for years. We both ran our own little consultancies at the time. I think people were just kinda shocked at why these guys who's paying them? What we got this was totally pro bono. Totally pro bono. We did get our travel covered, you know, that other than other than that, our travel and our accommodations are covered. That was it. But Jim is a was a technical genius. Absolute technical genius. I come back I come from a usability perspective, so a lot of what I do is I think in terms of of workflows and user experience. Jim was a technical genius, and we just complimented, ourselves or that team really well. So you got good leadership, good co chairs, a great set of players. We we thematically focused on, like I said before, interoperability, usability, and harmonization of all the existing standards that are out there along with accessibility. Those are the kind of things that you need. If you're putting together a collective group, I know the effort, the teams that were put together for the EAA, you had a very similar representation. I know the teams that were put together in Japan and their status group or the teams in, in Canada or Australia. Again, that's kind the kind of effort that you typically see, put together. Fundamentally, there's one big problem with all of them. Oh, what's that? It's called time. It takes too long, too long to roll out those standards in a way that you, you know, that become meaningful. Because by the time they get released and and I will use 05/2008 as a perfect example. We completed the work of of section five zero eight, that advisory committee, in 2008. It wasn't released as a formalized standard, a mandate procurement mandate for the federal government until 2018. That's a decade. I mean, you know how much how many things changed in ten years? And so it's already behind. So as much as we tried to do in terms of thinking about forward thinking for standards, we couldn't. And so they're already way out of date. That's why those functional performance criteria are so important. They don't rely on kinds of standards. They rely on principles of foundation stones for developing technologies.
Something that makes me wonder. So you mentioned it took ten years to go from the work to it being useful for the world. Yeah. What is it that kinda makes it well, what makes it take ten years to kinda go through and get it to a a place where it can be useful like that?
Yeah. It's it's it's backlog. It's it's protocol. It's process. It's it's being tied up in all the the the political. Organizations, even the even the World Wide Web Consortium, who are the promoters to me and developers to me of the greatest accessibility standard in the world, which is why everybody works on conformance to it, those guidelines, takes years. The whole student's process is wrong. It's just wrong out of the box. They need to develop a means for doing agile rolling standards, creating requirements and roll with them and release them. Look at the way software is released today. Right? I mean, every other day, I'm getting a release on Google's, you know, on Chrome or or or or Internet Explorer, what you know, or but whatever, I forget, Microsoft's, browser. But, you know, there's an update to the OS. There's an update to the browsers. Every other day, you you get that's the that's the kind of standardization that we need. And because we don't, we end up with obsolescence. I
mean and and as you were involved with that work, something I recall hearing you say in your prior answer is that, many others have taken, say, the work from 05/2008 and then tried to adapt bits of it or maybe even wholesale copies of sections of it to their own standards and guidelines. Is that something that was on your mind while you're in that work? And did that kind of affect anything about how you went about
making these things? Yeah. Remember, I said one of our goals was harmonization, and we were already forward thinking. We already knew that Europe, for example, was very interested in developing their own national standard, right, that they had there. We already knew Canada was in the middle of revision. We knew many local, countries and states are in the middle. So we wanted to create what we hoped would be a model, you know, a template at at at at the very least for organizations to adopt and use and then enhance and promote at every level internationally. So, yeah, that was definitely one of the goals that that we had in mind when we developed that. And the best thing about that is that everybody was on board with it. Everybody there as part of that access board advisory committee were on board with doing it.
The answer before you mentioned that, there's things broken about the process that you'd like to see different. If I could give you that theoretical magic wand and you could wave it and kinda change something about the process in the future, what what would that be?
Yeah. I I struggle with that question too only because there's a lot of things I'd like to do. So, again, I'm gonna do I'm gonna take the easy route here two ways. Alright? I've been using my wand twice. Right? So the first part of that the first wave of my wand would would be to ensure that all developers, engineers, design, everybody that, you know, all the disciplines within what we would typically call the software development environment. Right? From from a concept to release. Every one of them would be committed to developing out of the box usable and accessible what have yous. Widgets, applications, operating systems, interfaces, whatever that they would do that out of the box. Do you know that today, except for a few minor websites, it's a very minor small, distinct, applications. No one does that. No one has done that yet. No one has. There are again, like I said, there are some really refined applications, small widgets that are used, but no one's done it. So that would be one way. Every developer, every company and organization that's developing interface, whatever the next thing, the next big thing is that it'd be and and we thought it was AI. Right? We or we think it's AI, and it's not out of the box usable and accessible with people with disabilities. So that's my first wave. The second wave would be would be to create something that I wrote about thirty years ago in in my own book, web accessibility for people with disabilities, and that is to create a pervasively accessible and ubiquitous web. So, that the interface, the web, or whatever that interface is, adapts to the user rather than the user adapting to the interface. I I love I don't know if you know who Ram Charam is. He's one of my go to guys. He's he's a technology guru, and he talked about developing the the the next generation of the digital economy. And what he said was that we should develop a personalized consumer experience as the key to growth as the next as the next big thing. Right? And then if you read Tim Berners Lee's book, this is for everyone. Right? So Tim is the one who invented the web. He talks about the same notion. It should be a we we should develop something that is usable by all people, serves all individuals regardless of their ability, regardless of where they live, or or otherwise. Those are my those are my two big wands. I get one for each hand.
I I appreciate the the answer on the magic wands. I imagine there's there's folks out there that are listening to this. Maybe, they were already interested in the space and they're getting energized, or maybe it's someone who didn't really understand there's this whole world of accessibility and tech, and now they're like, man, I think this is something I wanna either work on or get involved with. If that person in particular, what kind of advice would you give them as they would say seek to begin that journey?
Yeah. Well, always the first thing is you gotta you gotta learn about what it is that you wanna do. You might hear, hey. Like you said, there are a lot of, folks out there who are you know, who wanna serve others and wanna do do the right, right thing altruistically, right, like yourself. And, what I would tell them is first learn the space. You learn the space by there's a there's a number of different ways, but two key ways. First of all, go immerse yourself in the lives of people with disabilities. Go attend their conferences. Right? Go learn what the blind are going through, those with low vision, those who are deaf and hard of hearing, those who are, you know, physically disabled. Go to their conference, go to their events, go to their they've got localized chapters of these organizations. Go meet with them, become friends with them, befriend them, and understand how they work, how they, you know, what their everydays, what their everyday life is like, first thing. Second thing is, really, all you have to do is, I would say a good start is just go to ww3.org. Right? I think it's I think you could just do that. W3.org. Look up web accessibility. It's right on the home page. You'll see you'll see it. And go learn. There's an awful lot of material there. Or you could just do a quick search on web accessibility, you know, through your your your preferred search engine. Learn it. Then start to participate. Go to the conferences, go to the events, go to user groups. They're all over. It's it's no different than any other techno technology and how they get started.
Mike, thank you so much for joining us here on Civic Tech Chat. I I have no doubt based on what we talked about that there'll be folks out there that'll find a gem in our conversation and be able to take it into their day.
Yeah. Thanks, Ryan. It's, it's been a pleasure to be here. And, again, if anybody, is really interested in, well, you can you can, look up me, go meet a person with a disability, or go to w3.org.
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