Sheri Byrne-Haber and Lori Samuels discuss the power of assistive technology, how WCAG and user research can help development teams improve the user experience, the software development cycle, and implementing accessibility at scale.
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Accessibility at Scale Presentation
Transcript for Accessibility at Scale Presentation
Hi, everybody, and welcome to Accessibility at Scale. I'm Sheri Byrne-Haber. I'm a senior staff accessibility architect with VMware.
And I'm Lori Samuels, am the accessibility director at NBC Universal.
We both work for really, really large organizations, and we're here today to talk to you about some things that you can do to make accessibility work better in those types of environments. In terms of where I'm coming from, I am a wheelchair user. It's not actually the reason why I got into accessibility, I got into accessibility because my middle daughter lost her hearing when she was five years old. I have degrees in computer science, law, and business. And I've been working pretty much exclusively in the disability and accessibility spaces for 17 years.
If you know my name, it's probably because I write a lot. I was named the 2020 UX collective author of the year on medium, and I run the Disability at VMware Employee Resource Group.
And like Sheri I've also been around a little while, most of my career has been spent in the consumer software industry. I came up through the ranks in software engineering also computer science major, did a lot of engineering management, produced a lot of consumer products, did agile coaching, but my first and foremost area of interest and passion is accessibility. I got the opportunity to start into its Global Accessibility program. We worked on QuickBooks to make that accessible to blind customers for the first time. And then prior to coming over to NBC Universal, I spent about four years at Microsoft working in different product organizations there, helping them start up and optimize their accessibility work, so kind of used to doing this at scale. Sheri you want to--
So what we're going to talk about today is we'll do a brief introduction. We're going to talk about some disability and accessibility basics because this may be the first accessibility conference that you've been to and you might need to know some of the really basic things to understand, the complexity that gets introduced when you try to scale accessibility. And we're going to try to talk about some of the enemies of accessibility at scale and how to defeat them is a good word or if you don't like looking at it as a battle, it's anticipating and compensate for them.
That's great, all right. So why don't you go ahead and tell us a little bit about what it's all about.
Sure, so most people when they think about disabilities, they think about visible disabilities. And some of the visible disabilities that are on this slide include things like Stevie Wonder, who we all know is blind, Marlee Matlin, who's an ASL user, Stephen Hawking when he was still alive with his eye gaze keyboard and his synthetic voice. I actually have that barbie in my office right down. That's Madison Del Rosario, she's a famous, I believe Australian paralympian, and Owen Simmons, the Xbox boy from the Super Bowl of 2018.
So accessibility helps these individuals interact with things that they wouldn't otherwise be able to interact with. Next great. And accessibility though, what we may not realize is that many disabilities are not apparent. In fact, maybe even the majority of disabilities 70% as by some reckoning. So in this case, we've got all of the folks on the autism spectrum, folks with dyslexia, folks with ADHD or anxiety disorders. Sheri you might have some other examples here on the slide you want to speak to in terms of the hidden disability.
Sure, so Lil Wayne, Elton John, and Prince all had epilepsy. Selena Lopez has an autoimmune disorder, she's had a kidney transplant, so she's on immune suppressing drugs so that she doesn't reject the kidney. Bono wears these rose colored glasses. It's not a Hollywood rock star affectation, it's because he has glaucoma and it makes it easier for him to see. And the reason why Facebook is blue is because Mark| Zuckerberg is colorblind and that's the only color that he sees really well.
Awesome, all right. So who-- so we've talked about apparent and non apparent disabilities, but is that it? I mean, is that-- are those the only people that are going to ever need accessibility? Maybe not, right? So we've talked about these permanent conditions or permanent disability an example here being a limb difference. A person may be missing part of an arm. But think about broadening that out to consider people who might have temporarily broken a wrist or an arm and therefore only have the use of one for some period of time. And then you can expand that even further to think about situational or contextual disabilities where you might be busy holding a baby or a cat on your lap and trying to type with one hand. So accessibility benefits all of these different conditions and use cases, and so anything else on that Sheri?
Well, when you're looking at just permanent disabilities according to the US census, you're talking about 18% of the population. When you expand it to include temporary and situational, the numbers get a little bit fuzzy but you're probably talking about close to 30% of your users. Even at 18%, people with disabilities are the largest minority on the planet.
Now absolutely, so this is a large customer base, it's a large constituent. And again, if you expand out to consider how accessibility benefits all of these different situations and people, you realize that this is an important area to lean into. OK. So we're going to tee up, we've teed up a-- this is funny, Sheri and I both really like this video because it showcases a variety of different assistive technologies, and it has some surprising twists in it. I don't know if you want to say anything more about that, but let me just switch to that real quickly.
This is the best two minutes you'll ever spend.
Absolutely, sit back and enjoy.
Have seen it 200 times, and I'll smile every time I see it.
Absolutely, let me just make this large, my mouse is not cooperating. There we go, OK.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- In a kitchen we move to an open bedroom door. In the bedroom, Sadie Paulsen is reflected in a mirror. A caregiver brushes her hair then helps her into a blouse.
- People think that having a disability is a barrier.
- Sadie sits at a desk working with an iMac. She moves her head to operate switches on her headrest.
- But that's not the way I see it.
- Now, a young man uses sign language on a FaceTime call.
- You can catch up with friends.
- A young woman signs back, now a family picnics.
- You can capture a moment with your family.
- One face, small face. Focus locked.
- A blind man takes a photo with an iPhone.
- And you can start the day bright and early.
- A woman lies in bed using an iPhone app to open motorized curtains and turn on her lights. She lowers herself into a wheelchair.
- You can take a trip to somewhere new.
- A man hikes with friends. Now a close up of his hearing aid. He stops to select the outdoor setting on his iPhone.
- 3 miles to the summit.
- A boy reads a book on an iPad in class.
- You can concentrate on every word of a story.
- A bird began to sing. Jack opened his eyes.
- An athlete selects outdoor wheelchair workout on her Apple Watch.
- You can take the long way home.
- A beach at sunset. The athlete pushes her wheelchair aggressively down a paved path quickly gaining speed, then the footage rewind revealing that it's being edited in Final Cut Pro.
- Or edit a film like this one.
- We zoom out to reveal Sady editing the film. She uses her head to use switch control navigating an on screen keyboard.
- When technology is designed for everyone--
- She drags the clip, and plays the film.
- --it lets anyone do what they love, including me.
- Sady laughs then a great Apple logo appears on a white background. The logo disappears.
[END PLAYBACK]
Right. You can see why we both love that one?
So assistive technology is how people with disabilities interact.
I'm sorry about that.
And turn something that they can't do or perceive into something that they can do or perceive. So this is really life-changing. You know, you look at the example, and this is one of the reasons why I love that video so much, the young man who had the hearing aids linked to his iPhone.
My daughter, who has a pretty significant level of hearing loss, literally changed her internal ethnic identity when that iPhone feature came out, because she went from not being able to speak Mandarin with the Chinese side of her family, to being able to speak Mandarin again. Do not ever underestimate the power of assistive technology, it's really, really important. And accessibility is about making sure that your stuff, whatever it is, your hardware, your software your websites, work for the people who are using assistive technology.
Great point.
So how does it work?
Following it on. Keep going, Sheri.
You've got your user, OK, your user's got your assistive technology. If you've ever done pinch to zoom, congratulations, you've used assistive technology, because you took something that you couldn't do or perceive on your mobile device, maybe the print was too small, and you turned it into something that you can do or perceive.
Other types of assistive technology can be software, can be hardware, it can even be physical devices. It's anything that does that for you. So it takes your input, gets you to the destination, and then takes what's from the destination and pipes it back through the assistive technology back to the user, and that's pretty much what it's all about.
Right. And where the standards come in to help us here, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for example take into consideration the fact that there are standards to work against that help us make sure that when we design and code a website, that it recognizes that people may be using that content, consuming that content, and interacting with that website in a variety of ways, and then again, using different types of assistive technology to do that.
And then just one more point on this, as we were saying before with the situational permanent temporary disabilities that, an example of a situational disability might be that you're driving a car and you can't use your hands or your eyes to interact with your device but you can use your voice. So that's another example of where designing to keep in mind that you might have a variety of ways to interact with technology, and there are standards to help us get there.
- Speaking of standards, so we just mentioned standards the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or WCAG for short developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C. Sheri, you can tell us more about the history on that and kind of-
Sure. And I've actually use them out of data that's here unfortunately. So 2.0, 2.1, they're out, they've been in use forever. 2.2 has had a couple of delays, it's now scheduled for early 2022 sometime, and then 3.0 is going to come sometime after 2024. So every version of WCAG up to 2.x has three increasing levels of compliance, A, AA, AAA.
A is the strictest in terms of the level that you have to meet. If you're not following an A guideline, you're blocking an entire group of people with disabilities from being able to access whatever it is that's failing to follow that A guideline. Most regulations and courts have settled on AA. The AAA guidelines are fairly restrictive with respect to color, and so designers aren't super keen on doing AAA unless somebody makes them do it.
So count on most of the areas in the world using 2.0 AA, somewhere I should say, the US, Canada, are still on 2.0. Other countries, and sometimes voluntarily entered into settlement agreements, use 2.1. And 2.1 is just incrementally passed 2.0, so there's 12 additional guidelines that you need to follow.
- Great. Thank you. OK. What are we up to now 50, 70, 78?
Well, there's 50 if you're only looking at 2.1.
- So about 50. But what we find as we begin to dig deeper on this, and we start to evaluate our experiences, and test them, and determine what's really going to have the biggest impact on users, and what are the most common problems, we can boil that down a little bit to start prioritizing kind of a subset.
Or if you have video, have you provided captions for those videos? That's really critical. Otherwise you're excluding a whole community of people who are deaf and hard of hearing. Use of color and use of color contrast. If people can't read the text on your website or your app, it's not terribly useful. So those color guidelines are really helpful.
If people are color blind and you're just passing information through this, that is using only color to convey important information, then you're going to really exclude a lot of people. Magnification is a critical one. Language settings, do you want to speak about that a little bit, why that's important, Sheri?
Sure. So people who are blind and also sometimes people with dyslexia or who just have print disabilities in general will occasionally use screen readers to take something that's on the screen that's visual that they can't read and turn it into sound that they can hear. But remember, the world isn't all about English, and so if you have words like voila, or lama and you want them pronounced a particular way, you need to flag those so that the screen reader doesn't butcher it.
The default language for NVDA, which is one of the screen readers, is Australian. So take a Spanish page and announce it with an Australian accent, you're going to get something that sounds like "may llama Joe-say." Really isn't the way people want to perceive that auditory information.
Right, right. I like to emphasize keyboard accessibility, because that opens up a whole category of again that assistive technology. You saw Sady in the video was using a switch. If you make sure that your web and app experiences can be operated with just the keyboard, put away the mouse, not everybody can use a mouse, that's a really critical starting point for accessibility.
Again, one of those A-level standards that's in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines make sure you can interact with everything using just the keyboard. It's a great habit to get into in terms of your testing as well. And then status changes and error messages, Sheri, do you want to?
Sure, you need to describe everything to people who can't see, so that requires alternatives to visuals that contain information. On the flip side, if it's just there to be cute or pretty, you can flag it as decorative, and then the screen reader will skip over it, which allows the blind person to have a faster experience.
If you have one operation that changes three things on the screen, all three of those things have to be relayed to screen reader users. So this list isn't intended to be a be-all or end-all, I don't know about you Lori at NBC Universal. But the deep dive on the WCAG 2.1 AA takes about two hours for developers to go through, and so you may be able to pick that up on other accessibility dotcoms, or you can find information about it online.
Yeah. And to the point of kind of starting up accessibility efforts at a larger scale, you know, we need to start somewhere. And especially if you're in the early stages of your accessibility journey, you can start with a subset of issues and standards and an understanding of these standards. That's going to start to be impactful right away.
You can start to make progress work from where you are and go forward, working more standards to the point where you're kind of getting up to achieving all of them. But understand that you have to start somewhere and you don't need to get everybody overwhelmed with too much information too quickly. So that's why we have kind of a list of very common issues just kind of start getting addressed.
- All right, so we're going to talk a little bit about, how do you even know where your accessibility issues are today and your existing experiences, whether that's an e-commerce website, or a mobile app? How do you even begin to get an understanding? What is the breakdown? And how do we approach the problem of figuring out how to validate what's your current state with accessibility? Sheri, do you want to talk about your approach?
Sure. So accessibility, because it involves assistive technology, is not in any way shape or form 100% automatable. So first of all, there are some accessibility guidelines that you can have a code inspection or a code analysis done. And about 30% of the guidelines, it can tell you definitively, you're doing it right or you're doing it wrong.
VMware, we have implemented a machine learning approach that actually looks at the data and it looks at patterns. And so we've extended the code inspection right now by 4%, and the tool is called Crest. And it's on the VMware GitHub repository. It's free to everybody. And we're hoping to be able to get that to 20% in about another 12 months.
But even at, at the best case, that only gets you to 50% So you've got 50% that's always going to be manual, minimum. And that's where you have to have humans interacting with the assistive technology that people with disabilities use to then take that output and give it either a thumbs up or thumbs down depending on whether or not the experience is equal to somebody without a disability.
Right. Absolutely. And I think that human piece is so critical, and the sooner you can get people with disabilities who use assistive technology and some who don't involved in testing your experiences, the better. It might seem like that's a challenge to do at scale, but it's really the most important thing, to have people with disabilities interacting with your products and giving you feedback, because at the end of the day, what matters is whether people with disabilities can use your product and your services or not. I think that piece is so critical. We can't automate this whole problem away, but we can automate for some efficiency in the process.
I've been known to say many times that getting something accessible is easy, keeping something accessible is hard. So to get something accessible you just put the right bodies in the room, you throw some money at it, because they need resources to buy tools, or to bring in subcontractors, or what-have-you. And at the end of the day, you'll have something that will work for people with disabilities. But if you don't change your processes throughout your design and development organization to make sure that those problems don't get reintroduced, then you're not going to be able to keep it accessible.
And then keeping something that's cloud based, that's SaaS, accessible is the hardest thing to do. Why? Because you're doing releases sometimes a couple hundred times a week. You no longer have a monolithic product schedule where you're doing one major and two minors a year. And so it's much more difficult to keep something accessible, that's changing that rapidly.
Right. And I think it's important to understand for everyone that accessibility is not a project that starts and finishes, accessibility is a process, it's a practice, it's a habit, call it what you will, but it's something that gets baked into your organization culturally. It gets baked into your software development lifecycle processes, and it gets integrated as an ongoing set of requirements and something you can always continuously improve like everything else in the sort of agile framework which is that we're always looking at continuous improvement.
You approach accessibility the same way, we're looking at continuous improvement in something. And that's where the automation is helpful for once you achieve a certain degree of accessibility, some automation and tooling can help you stay there and prevent regression so that can get caught upstream. The critical thing is that we really have to start in the planning, and design, and ideation stages and then work accessibility all the way through.
You can even go so far as to say that a corporate approach to disability inclusion really influences how good your accessibility program is going to be. If you don't have a disability employee resource group, you're going to have problems attracting qualified disabled individuals to come to your company. And that, in turn, will affect your accessibility program.
Yeah we're going to touch on that a little bit more as well. We touched a little bit on the complexity and challenges involved in kind of working this at scale. Do you want to kind of speak to this chart of complexity, volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity?
These are the four horsemen of things that you really, really want to avoid, because if any one of these four things happens, it can really derail your software initiatives, and accessibility is no exemption to that. So volatility, complexity, we've already talked a little bit about complexity. Volatility, how often are you changing the software. Ambiguity, how specific are you in your style guides, or in your instructions to your developers.
You know what ends up happening? It's you have one person doing one product one way and another person doing another product another way, and they're both technically compliant. But it's still a terrible user experience because when you transition from the first product to the second product, the accessibility experience to the disabled user is going to be completely different, and they're going to be unhappy.
Right. To some extent, these are just the facts of existence in a large enterprise with a lot of software and systems at scale. So we can't avoid it, but we can work to kind of bring some of the impact down in certain areas.
So just to quickly go through each of these. If we want to go to the next slide, we can talk about a few ways that you can get around. One is to definitely utilize your DevOps infinite loop to reduce volatility and figure out the places where you need to insert accessibility, where you need to insert it in testing, you need to insert it in monitoring, you need to insert it in planning. And so that will help you make sure that accessibility is thought throughout that infinity loop.
Yeah. And I would include this as well and even just in the larger lifecycle processes like, do you already have design reviews established as part of your development and design process? Well, incorporate accessibility into the design reviews. Do you already have certain release gates for release management, incorporate accessibility requirements into your release gates? You know, we're not going to ship product with certain x number of bugs.
Another one that I love, and I think we touched on this a little bit later, but putting SLAs on the life of a bug, you know. So how long are you going to allow an accessibility bug to sit there unattended? You know, they have a tendency to sit there unattended if you don't do something like that.
Right. And how are you going to train and support your disabled customers is another thing that's really important.
Yeah. Absolutely.
So we want to use established software principles to reduce your uncertainty. So for example, if you're doing user research with your customers, which is very frequent, you need to make sure that you do user research with people with disabilities. So this is somewhat similar to the last slide. But expanding the universe of what you look at with respect to accessibility will help you reduce that accessibility uncertainty because then, you'll actually know what you don't know.
Yeah. Absolutely. So there is good data that we can get out of testing. Again, in that mindset of continuous improvement, what are some areas a team can take up a certain kinds of improvements that they want to make on a sprint by sprint basis? Maybe they're trying to drive down certain categories of accessibility bugs and problems.
So there's really a variety of ways to actually approach the how, but the point is exactly as Sheri said, it has to fit into your existing processes as best you possibly can make that happen. It's not really a new thing, it's an integration of this thing into what you're already doing.
And accessibility style guides are critical, as I mentioned before the example with the blinks where you've got one that's red in one location and one that's green and is somewhere else. That's really going to mess with people when they're using both products together. So making sure that you've got standardized color palettes that are colorblind friendly, making sure that you're using a sans serif font, that's always a strong accessibility recommendation because it benefits readability and it assists people with dyslexia, which are 5% to 7% of the population.
So don't go crazy with the italic and script fonts because that's going to make a lot of people unhappy because you're going to increase the difficulty in readability. Even going down to vocabulary, as Lori, you know, you want to talk about your inclusive language again?
Yeah, no absolutely. I mean just looking at things like, I was going to say to the design systems, as companies start to build out and recognize the benefit of consistency, and consistent branding, and consistent ways of interacting with their branded digital experiences, a lot of companies are getting interested in sort of developing design systems, even design pattern libraries, frameworks. These are all places where you should be, you really need to be considering accessibility as table stakes to kind of all of that.
Yeah. And the topic of inclusive design includes more than just disability, but it's looking at how can we be inclusive in our language, in our use of even gender pronouns, and all these other considerations. So this is all stuff that gets baked into human interface guidelines and design systems
- And then finally, if you are going to scale your accessibility successfully, all levels of the organization have to be on board. If you're making blueberry pancakes, do you smash the blueberries in after you've made the pancakes, or do you mix the blueberries into the batter and then cook them. I like my blueberry pancakes with the blueberries baked in.
I use the chocolate chip cookie analogy but you get the point.
Same idea. Keeping in mind that it means even going after what do you procure. OK. If you're buying inaccessible software, you're not going to be able to keep employees with disabilities, because they're not going to be able to do their jobs without accommodations, it's a huge hassle. And it really sends a non-inclusive message. So you need to look at everything.
You know, I had to request an accommodation to get the napkin holders in the cafeteria removed, just so that I could get them from my wheelchair. There's just things that people don't think about that are disability microaggressions. And what to do is, you need to make sure that you're making your company a place where people with disabilities feel like they belong, because then they will be talking about accessibility when the accessibility team is not in the room.
And that's really important because even if you're doing accessibility at scale, an organization the size of VMware, we have 34,000 employees, we have 20 full time accessibility team members, and we're one of the larger accessibility organizations. So we have other people talking about accessibility when we're not there.
Yeah. And I think that's such an important point to build on. And I think this is maybe one of the key ingredients to making accessibility work at scale, it's to recognize that accessibility is not a silo, accessibility is not the sole domain of even your product or your technology organizations. It's actually equally important for our diversity, equity, and inclusion, professionals, for our human resources, for procurement, again to Sheri's point, to bring in accessible software, or to require suppliers to achieve accessibility conformance and compliance.
I'll give a shout out to Microsoft, one of the last projects I did there was directly involved in their third party suppliers and pushing back on them and Microsoft making it clear to their suppliers that they were going to insist on having accessible software come into their ecosystem. And so when you have a company like Microsoft making that statement and putting that requirement on their suppliers, it actually helps everyone, because that's going to really kind of cause all the other enterprise software companies to start to sit up and pay attention to this.
But it's a really collective effort. It takes a village, it takes multiple different parts of the organization to intentionally hire people with disabilities who again will become part and parcel of making accessibility work within the enterprise as well as dedicated resources that really focus on the product and technology experiences. So we're going to talk a little bit more about that.
As my lead program manager says in her email signature, accessibility is everyone's job. So it does need to be part of every conversation. It has to be in every MVP, it has to be in every definition of done. If people aren't talking about it, it's not going to happen. Accessibility is deliberate, accessibility is never accidental.
Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And minimum viable, really, I know it's used as an excuse. We've got to move fast, we're shipping this now, we don't have time to think about this accessibility thing, we'll do that later. Not the right approach, doesn't work, doesn't scale, needs to be pushed back on. It may take some time to change that mindset, but it's an important one to address and kind of tackle head on.
So what can you do to add accessibility into internal conversations? Well, first of all, it's really helpful if you've got executive support, preferably somebody from the C-level. If it's important to the chief information officer or the chief product officer, it's going to be important to everybody else. The second is to make sure that you at least start with centralized resources. At the end state, the most mature organizations have accessibility built into the entire organization.
But at the beginning, it's really important that you've got a pool of resources that people from other teams can draw from that they do not get charged back for. No chargebacks. You do want a place friction in people being able to access accessibility resources.
Getting more people talking about it usually involves setting up some type of champions programs. And then of course, again, people do what they see benefit from them. What's in it for me? I may not care about people with disabilities if I'm Joe programmer or Jane programmer and I've just graduated from college. But if I'm getting an extra $1,000 a year in my bonus because I keep my accessibility bugs down to a certain number, you better believe I'm going to care.
Yeah, those incentives are important. Celebrating the success stories when you do achieve success, when you get good feedback from disabled users. I mean, I think it's celebrating every success you have along the way because again, this is usually something when organizations are starting out that is unfamiliar, may be a little scary, you know, and seems kind of daunting.
So breaking that down, the centralized resources and subject matter experts are important to help get the program off the ground, but ultimately, as Sheri said, we're trying to kind of bake this in and make it everyone's responsibility, and get everybody good at it too. So it's not just that it's your responsibility, it's your responsibility and you're good at it.
And then, I want to continue, I think that it's so, so critical, having intentional hiring for people with disabilities will be a forcing function in so many positive ways, getting more people with disabilities working for the company, as Sheri said 15 to 18, you could go up on that percentage of people with disabilities, have so much to contribute. Unemployment is too high and face too many barriers to entry here. So if we start to change that equation and we see true representation within our large organizations of employees with disabilities, we will automatically change the accessibility conversation.
And there are way, way, way too many companies that do not include disability as part of their justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives. They look at gender, they look at people of color, they might look at LGBTQ status, but there's only a very minor percentage. The number that the Valuable 500 uses says 94% of companies who have DEI initiatives don't specifically call out disability. I think that's more of an EU centric number, but honestly, I don't think the number is substantially better in the US.
Yeah. I'll give you a real world example, at least from my experience, of where I really saw this play out where hiring people with disabilities began to really change the work being done within a company, and that was also at Microsoft. Microsoft has done a fantastic job and continues to do a great job in having a diverse workforce with people with disabilities included in that. And there were so many people with disabilities working for Microsoft that it became apparent that their kitchens and cafes were kind of inaccessible both to wheelchair users and to people who were blind and low vision.
So I got to work on a whole project that involved trying to transform their cafe experience in Microsoft campus to make that something that people who were blind or low vision could interact with, people who were using a wheelchair could interact with. And I think that just you can see the fact that people with disabilities working within the company made that a priority, whereas if they weren't there, it wouldn't have been a priority for the company. So, real world example.
And it's hard to ask for that stuff when you're quote unquote, the only one.
Right. Yeah. but it does more to, you can go out and hire people with disabilities, but if they're coming into an inaccessible workplace, or an environment where they don't feel heard, and understood, and included, that's not going to be a good experience, is it? So it's really critical to look at what can we do to make sure that employees with disabilities are included and belong. Sheri, any thoughts on that?
It's every step of the process. You have to recruit in a way that's accessible, that makes sure that people aren't looking for again, air quotes, "firm handshake and eye contact." If that's something that's important to you as a hiring manager, guess what? You just excluded everybody with arthritis in their hands like me, or people with autism, who don't necessarily make the same eye contact, or have the same social cue responses as people who are neurotypical.
Yeah. And that's why I think training is so critical in this. Hiring managers can't know what they don't know. But it's very important to get training and disability culture, and etiquette, and awareness, rolled out to anyone who's going to be a people manager certainly but really everyone in the organization.
So again, that's where this accessibility ties back into, have you built the cultural competency within your organization to enable disabled employees to feel included, belonging, and contribute to their best of ability. One of the key ways we want to do this is most large organizations have employee resource groups or affinity groups, disability better be on the table here. So it's really critical to have a disability focused employee resource group.
I pulled some data from an interesting study here, I think they're called Coqual now. But there was a study that showed that at least 30% of the current workforce actually fits the definition of having a disability, but only 39% of them have disclosed their disability to their manager, and even fewer to their teams or HR. So meaning that the issue of disclosing a disability is still fraught with anxiety, especially for those who have non apparent disabilities.
And for those who have apparent disabilities, oftentimes, they get discriminated against right at the get-go, they won't even get the interview, they won't get advanced to the next round of interview. So creating an employee resource group that's focused on disability, or multiple employee resource groups, we might have a neurodiverse or autism one, Microsoft has several, is such an important piece, people have to come in. And again, this is part of kind of creating that culture that's inclusive.
And there's a huge hidden cost, as the third bullet point here points out, that, people who do disclose are happier, they're more engaged. And when you think about the cost of being in a psychologically unsafe organization which is effectively where you are, if you feel like, I have a disability but I can't tell anybody about it because they're going to hold it against me, it's one of those hidden costs, like turnover. That because nobody's actually writing a check for it, they don't realize what the cost is. But this can really bite a company in the rear end.
And the one thing that I told VMware when I started was that there had to be a disability employee resource group. They did not have one yet, and their response was absolutely, would you like to start it? I'm glad that was the response. But if you don't have one, get one.
Yeah, it's just absolutely critical here. We know that now with everything we've been through, pandemic-related, and ongoing, mental health is a bigger topic than ever within the workplace as well and that fits right within this space as well. So if people can't talk about the fact that they've got some anxiety going on or someone in their family member that they have to take care of--
Or long haul COVID.
Yeah. Or long haul COVID. Absolutely.
That's going to be a big one going forward.
Another whole disability category has emerged, exactly. So we know this intuitively that when people are able to kind of be authentic, and bring their whole selves to work, and feel supported, they're going to do their best work. But that is often not the case today in the disability space and in the mental health space. So really advocate for, support your employees with disabilities, you already have them even if you don't know it.
So Lori mentioned earlier, it's important to treat your accessibility bugs as equal to any other bugs. Bugs are bugs. Don't talk about issues, don't talk about problems, they are defects. You're measuring to a regulatory standard and falling short if you're not following the WCAG guidelines.
Absolutely. They can be prioritized--
It's languished in the backlog forever.
Yes, the backlog problem, and you are all aware of that. So yeah, I suggest considering a system, if you already have something like an SLA, for how long a bug can exist before the product team gets puts into bug jail or some such thing then think about doing that with your accessibility bugs too. So kind of wrapping up.
Sure. I mean some of the most important things that we've highlighted, if you've skipped all the way to the end of this conversation, is, if you want to scale accessibility, you need to have executive support, you need to have the willingness to modify your product development processes or you're only going to get it accessible and you're not going to keep it accessible.
You need resources that are available to the entire organization, and when I say entire, I mean entire, including procurement, including your cafeteria, these things are all really important. It's not just about the software. Automate what you can, but recognize that automation isn't going to get you everywhere.
Yeah. And there's a wonderful phrase from the Disability Civil Rights Movement, nothing about us without us. So remember that that applies in the accessibility space as well. Put your experiences in front of people with disabilities. Engage people in testing with disabilities. Get disabled users in front of your products, get in front of your tools, and hire them. It'll work. Right. So that's a wrap.
Some information here about my book, first five chapters are available on the UX collective website, its accessibility.uxdesign.cc. And I blog quite frequently, and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
So you guys likewise, you can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter, and I do want to just give a shout out to Sheri for her book, Giving a Damn About Accessibility.
My publisher describes it as the manifesto part of the book.
I love it. I love it, this is some great stuff in here. We didn't get time to kind of get into all of this today, but go take a look, it's great. And thank you for listening.