Sheri Byrne-Haber discusses the importance of disability and accessibility, how VMware began its accessibility journey, and what all organizations can do to increase disability inclusion.
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Building an Accessibility Team (in-house)
Transcript for Building an Accessibility Team (in-house)
Hi my name is Sheri Byrne Haber, and welcome to my Accessibility Plus Global Conference on how businesses and power accessibility, and why they should session, on how to build an in-house accessibility team. So what we're going to talk about in this session is, what is disability and accessibility, and why everyone should care? If you're already well indoctrinated on this topic you might want to fast forward about 6 minutes until we get into the meat of this conversation.
How did VMware start its accessibility journey? And what all organizations can do to increase disability inclusion and amplify their own accessibility journeys. First of all who Am I? I have a background in computer science law and business.
And I've been working in the accessibility field for, dedicated for nine years, and working in disability and accessibility for a total of about 17 years. I was named the medium 2020 UX Collective Author of the Year.
I founded the VMware accessibility program. And I co-founded and currently lead the disability at VMware employee resource group. I use a wheelchair for walking longer distances because of a congenital disability. I also have glaucoma, and only use keyboard. I don't use a mouse. And I have a deaf daughter so I kind of have a multidimensional perspective on accessibility.
All right, so first of all accessibility is about visible disabilities. These are the types of disabilities that most people think of when they hear the word disabled. They include things like limb differences, my own wheelchair use, people with service animals, people who wear hearing aids is considered a very common disability, although not all people who wear hearing aids consider themselves disabled.
But accessibility is also about hidden disabilities. So diabetes, which I also have, type 1. I have an insulin pump, that's a very common hidden disability. Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things is deaf only in one ear, that's a hidden disability. Bono wears rose tinted glasses because he has glaucoma, not because it's a rock star affectation. Zuckerberg the color of Facebook is largely blue because that's really the only color he sees well. And people with epilepsy that's also considered a hidden disability. People like Elton John and Lil Wayne.
But temporary and situational ability loss also can emulate disabilities. So when you have a limb difference you can't use your right hand because you don't have one for example. But if you've injured your shoulder same issue you can't use your right hand, it's going to be for a longer period of time. But not as long as a permanent disability. And then situational mobility loss would be holding something. So all three of these behave the same way. You can't use your right hand. The only difference is that the length of time that they last.
So when you're looking at the general US population of permanent disabilities 18% of the US population identifies on the census as having one or more disability. We spend a lot of money, people with disabilities spend $8 trillion globally.
And the number of people who will just walk away. And go to an accessible competitor, or roll away and go to an accessible competitor if they can't use your products is 92%. And they don't complain, why? Because I can tell you from personal experience, complaining usually doesn't resolve the problem. It's not until you get into a situation where the government is inspecting things, or litigation has been filed that people go, Oh wait a second I'm supposed to be paying attention to that.
Now 18% already makes us people with disabilities the largest minority in the world. But if you go back and look at temporary and situational disabilities, and add those on top of permanent disabilities, you're looking at 30% of the general population. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, hey, I'm going to tick off one third of my potential customers. But if you're not accessible that's effectively what you're doing.
So there are three reasons to be disability inclusive. One is obviously just being inclusive in general, is a hot topic but also a good thing to do, if you're trying to portray an image of integrity and empathy. Secondly, it makes good business sense because like I said 30% of your customers potentially have a temporary situational or permanent disability.
And then the final one if the first two don't work is Yeah, litigation. There were over 4,000 lawsuits filed in the last year in the US alone, over inaccessible digital websites. And closer to I think 13,000 if you're talking about physical accessibility as well. So why start with inclusion? Even if you don't agree with any of those things. You need to look at where we are today in our workforce.
And currently millennials make up one third of the US workforce. And that number is not going down any time soon. Because more millennials are coming into the workforce. And more baby boomers, and Gen Xers are retiring from the workforce.
Millennials feel very strongly about inclusion with respect to employment. And they feel especially strong about inclusion with respect to how employers treat employees who identify as neurodiverse. Because more millennials identify as neurodiverse than any other population dimension in the United States.
87% of millennials think it's really important for an employer to be diverse. But 20% have said, I decided not to apply for a job because I didn't see any evidence that an employer was neurodiverse inclusive. And 80% said the flip side, they would feel more positive about applying for a job with an employer that did put out public information about their neurodiversity inclusion.
So even if you don't believe it's a good idea people with disabilities spend money, or even following the law. If you need to attract millennials into your workforce, and especially if you're in a market right now that's hard pressed to hire people like the tech market, or the retail market. You need to be inclusive and you need to send a public message of inclusiveness, so that millennials will be more likely to apply for your jobs.
So business and law are really starting to overlap. Accessibility is not really a competitive advantage any more, it's an expectation. There's four European Union countries have banned the public sector from acquiring inaccessible software. And those regulations are only getting stronger in 2025 when the European Accessibility Act takes effect. It will be both public facing, and private companies that come under those laws.
Two US states have accessibility laws, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Israel have accessibility laws. And as I mentioned earlier, private litigation in the United States is through the roof.
So the first thing that you need to do when you're establishing an in-house accessibility program, is you have to choose what standards you're going to follow. We've got several standards, the World Wide Web Consortium, released 2.0 in 2009, 2.1 in June of 2018, 2.2 recently got postponed to Q1 of 2022, and 3.0 also known sometimes as silver is coming sometime in the 2024 time range.
And you've got A, AA, AAA. A is the most basic of the guidelines, AA is the medium layer, AAA is the strictest. AAA has a lot of restrictions with respect to color. So designers aren't really fans of AAA, most regulations and courts have settled on AA so each one of these. With the possible exception of 3.0, the current status of 3.0 is it will no longer have A, AA and AAA, it will have a scoring system based on a mix of those three categories.
But currently the US public sector is working off of 2.0 AA as of about three and a half years ago July of 2018. And the European Union and Metis Settlement Agreements in other countries use 2.1 AA as their standard.
After you've chosen your standard which is kind of step zero. The first thing that you need to look at is whether or not you have or can better leverage a disability employee resource group.
Accessibility programs are strongest when there are a large number of people with disabilities at a company. And when I say a large number, I mean 5% that's actually large for a self-identification rate. 6% is what companies who are really considered leaders in accessibility usually measure at. That's Google and Microsoft, for example. And there's one company that has reached 7%.
So I started the VMware Disability, we call them power of differences or PODs but it's effectively an employee resource group business resource group, there's a lot of different names for the same things. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to encourage all people with any level of ability or disability to self-identify, and ask for things that make them more effective. And right now that also includes neurodiversity and mental wellness, although we're looking at splitting those off into separate resource groups.
When you have a strong resource group disability is discussed more disability is discussed when the accessibility team is not in the room, and that's really important. And you're going to be more likely to hire more employees with disabilities, which again gets you into this positive feedback loop of talking about accessibility at all stages of your product or website development.
The next step is to look at building a digital inventory. You need to figure out exactly where you are, drawing a circle around the scope of your universe to figure out what you need to assess, and then what you need to remediate. Frequently what happens is what you think you have isn't actually what you have. And in previous jobs, I have actually discovered websites that I didn't even know existed, that came out of far flung corners of the organization twice I found out by advertising that I heard on the radio on the morning commute.
So there's always going to be things that you don't know about, especially at large companies, but trying to find out the scope from the get go is a pretty important step otherwise it's continually a moving target.
The next step is to get executive support. What's important to the executives is going to be important to the product managers. It's very difficult to get something like accessibility into the MVP. Product managers tend to be very feature oriented unless somebody higher up says, hey, this is part of the MVP don't even think twice about this.
So having c-suite support, making sure that they're talking about accessibility, making sure that they're helping the accessibility team get adequate financing or budgeting, in order to get their job done is also an important early step OK.
And then as I mentioned that leads to budgeting. So you need money, it is not really feasible to do accessibility on no budget. It is somewhat feasible to do it on a shoestring budget. But doing it entirely based on volunteers and open source is kind of what got Twitter into trouble in 2020, when it was discovered that their entire accessibility effort was volunteer based. And that didn't work out too well for them.
By figuring out the scope, and having executive support you can then take a guess as to how much it's going to cost, in order to assess all the things that need to be assessed. Before you start to get into your remediation steps. Once you have budget then you can look at how your staffing your accessibility effort.
Now this talk is entitled in-house accessibility team. But almost every in-house accessibility team has some form of contract work associated with it. It's not always all 100% employees. And the reason for that is you get surges and valleys and releases. For example, at VMware we always get a huge surge of releases in August because VMworld is in October. And everybody wants to release the new software in August so that people can demonstrate it and talk about it in October.
So if we staffed for the level of effort that we need to put in our worst month which is August for the entire year. We would actually be overstaffed. So what we do is we have an average level of staff. And then we have in our budget surge funding. And the surge funding allows us to go to third party vendors, if there ends up being more software that comes out that needs to be reviewed than we have time for.
Some companies use evergreen contractors, meaning that they have dedicated full-time FTE contractors, but who work for a different organization, working on accessibility testing. Some companies do project based contract work. And some companies do crowdsource contract work. Crowdsourcing is actually a really good way to get feedback largely from people with disabilities.
When you're looking at staff the average according to the most recent web-based survey, is that 30% of employees who work on accessibility teams have disabilities. When you're working with contractors it can be anywhere between 10% and 70%, depending on the contractor that you're working with.
So I've seen both of those lows and highs the range is pretty broad. So when you're evaluating contractors, it's really important to ask how many of your staff have disabilities. And make it clear that you're expecting the answer to be about employees.
I've also seen contract agencies that actually subcontract out some of their work to charities. And the people who work for the charities get paid much, much less than either staff at the agency, or what you're paying the agency. So those are really insightful questions to ask when you're evaluating contract agencies.
Crowdsourcing, you can ask for 100% of the people who are allowed to respond to your crowdsourcing request for evaluation have disabilities. And the other reason why crowdsourcing is really helpful, is because individuals with disabilities, who are not working for accessibility companies tend to have older equipment.
And it's really important to test on older equipment, and not the brightest shiniest iPhone 13 when you're doing accessibility review because people with disabilities tend to be in lower socioeconomic strata. And so they also tend to not upgrade their equipment as quickly.
Plus when you get kind of comfortable with how your assistive technology works. Some people are reluctant to upgrade because they're afraid that they're not going to have as good of experience on the newer equipment, or that their tech stack is just going to completely blow up.
Some companies do all, use all four of these. For larger organizations that's not unheard of. Because accessibility is a hot market right now, with respect to employment and sometimes even if you have the budget, and the executive support to hire staff you might not be able to find them.
The next thing after you figured out how you're going to staff your program is to look at a training program and the Champions program. If you're just getting started with accessibility at your organization chances are people just aren't going to have sufficient knowledge.
And so setting up role specific training, you know you update content you need to learn this. You are in charge of social media, you need to learn that. You're in development you need to take one of these three courses, depending on whether your native iOS, native Android or HTML types of roles or Java.
And then finally, QA is the kitchen sink. QA pretty much needs to know everything because they have to know how all the assistive technology works, and they're testing both what the developers produce and what the content people produce.
So training is essential, make it role based so that you're not requiring people to take things that aren't relevant to their job. And try to do it in small bit-sized chunks, nobody sits down anymore for a week-long or a two week-long training. 5-minute to 15-minute max, interactive videos with quizzes at the end. Maybe even with some gamification built in. So that there's a contest between who gets the best score on a particular quiz, for example, that's probably the most effective training program that you can implement today.
Champions programs again, also important. One of the big goals that most successful accessibility programs are the ones where people outside of the accessibility team are talking about the needs of people with disabilities, and disability inclusion, and accessibility.
So having a Champions program where people from, let's say procurement HR and DEI, and various different development teams, can get extra training because they want to be the go to person in their department for accessibility questions. And then if they can't answer the question then they can come to the accessibility team.
It helps offload some of the work from the accessibility team, makes it a little bit less interrupt driven because you've got that extra layer that might be able to take care of the easy questions for you like, how do I turn on captioning in Zoom? For example. And also because that way you've got more people talking about accessibility when the accessibility team isn't in the room.
Hiring employees with disabilities is really important. But there are six different things that you need to look at before you're going to be truly successful getting your self-identification rate up. You need to look at how you do talent acquisition, where are you looking for employees, do you recruit at Gallaudet for example, which is a great place to hire deaf talent from.
How do you do your interviews, if your interview managers are looking for firm handshake and eye contact. The old fashioned advice that people used to give for interviews before the pandemic. Guess what? You're automatically discriminating against people with disabilities.
I have arthritis OK. I don't give people firm handshakes, and most people in the pandemic these days don't do handshakes at all. And a lot of interviews are digital. But if you're looking at eye contact as an important aspect of employment, you're discriminating against people who are neurodiverse, who don't make what would be considered traditional types of eye contact.
So everybody needs to go through unconscious bias training. Everybody needs to understand that the interview process has to be altered slightly for people with disabilities. To make sure that they have an equal chance at getting the job that non-disabled people have.
Which leads us to accommodations. People with disabilities might need breaks between interviews. You might need to have a different coding assessment for them because HackerRank isn't accessible.
In the US candidates are entitled to get the same accommodations that employees are. And you need to make sure that you offer those up front. And make them see matter of fact, Oh Yeah, we give these to everybody. It's not a problem just let us know what you need. Because otherwise people with disabilities tend to be reluctant to disclose early in the process that they have a disability. Because they're afraid that that's going to be held against them, when the final job hiring decision is made.
You need to make sure that your offer process is accessible, there's lots of third party vendors involved with offers especially with larger companies. And there are literally--
When I got my offer from VMware I think there was 19 PDF files involved. There was one from benefits, there was one from immigration, there was one about life insurance, there was one about the non harassment policy. If those files are accessible, then you're not going to be able to easily get an offer that can be understood by somebody with a disability who uses assistive technology.
Onboarding is the next thing. You need to make sure that you're set up in such a way that somebody can be onboarded easily either through onboarding training, or getting a computer pre-setup for them. Before the pandemic if you went to work for VMware, and couldn't set up your own laptop. You could just walk to the Oasis IT Center, and they could set it up for you. You can't do that anymore. And you can't trust that somebody with a disability is going to have somebody without a disability at their home able to help them.
And then finally, your retention programs any program that you have to try to retain employees, to try to help them grow get promotions, et cetera all of that needs to be accessible as well.
One year after the POD, the employee resource group for disability was launched, and the initial accessibility team was hired. VMware's United States self-identification rate of people with disabilities doubled. And part of it was because Yeah we were doing some targeted hiring. And we were intentionally hiring more people with disabilities.
But a lot of it was because we made the environment more comfortable for people to talk about their disability. Disability was no longer negative, it was no longer a hush hush thing. And so people said, OK you know what in this environment I'm not going to hide the fact that I'm dyslexic, or that I have single sided hearing loss, or that I'm colorblind.
We're all the way through to step 7, or step 8 if you consider the step 0, picking your standard. And we've only gotten to the part about testing tools and strategies. Many people think that testing tools and testing strategies is the first step of starting an accessibility program, it's actually at the end.
What VMware decided to do, there's a lot you could do an entire course just on testing tools and strategies. So I'm only going to talk here about what VMware did. There's tons of stuff that's open source, there's tons of stuff that you can buy, just never, ever, ever buy an overlay that is not a substitute for true accessibility.
We have done a combination of using Wave, and a homegrown tool that we built called Crest. And Crest uses machine learning to look at data and patterns, and not just code. And we believe that we can move from a 30/70 split between automated and manual testing. 30% automated 70% manual to 50/50 probably in about the next 12 months.
We've integrated both wave and test into our continuous integration pipeline. And Crest is downloadable for free from VMware's Git repo. So if you're interested just get the deck and or if for some reason you can't get the deck, email me and I'm happy to point you to where that is.
Then you need to have an internal accessibility policy. This is part of making the environment more comfortable for employees with disabilities. But it's also part of making the employees feel like they're wanted, and that they belong to the organization. So VMware passed an internal accessibility policy because we're a large company, we have a fairly convoluted process for posing, and getting a new policy adopted.
And we're working with vendors to remediate the current tools about 85 ton of the tools that VMware had acquired before the policy was passed were inaccessible. But we're trying not to add to our current accessibility debt.
When you prioritize inclusion through procurement of accessible products. The number of accommodation requests should drop dramatically. Then we started producing product report cards.
So again, a little bit of competition. I would hear things like, Oh you know we're 81% accessible and somebody else's 80%, their score on their report card was 80%. Yay, we're better than that other team. Or the other team would say, Oh what do we do to so that we can pass this other team? It is true this is just a 9% accessible, if that one thing that's inaccessible pertains to the land, guess what? Your product's not usable.
You want to make sure that you don't put such emphasis behind the numbers, because the numbers don't always tell you the whole story. But they can give you a generalization about what's going on with the product. And they can also give you trends. So if you go from 78%, to 81%, to 85%, to 88%, you can tell that the teams are doing better with respect to accessibility.
And then finally, we set up accessibility as the release gate. So think of release gates as a hurdle it's all the things that you have to do, in order to be released into the GA or general availability. Inaccessible stuff stays behind the release gate, it doesn't go out because it's inaccessible and the release gate says, this has to be accessible to go out or this has to be at a particular level of accessibility to go out. So if you get over that release gate hurdle then that you have a certain amount of accessibility in your product.
What are some of the things that you can do now that you've heard about how VMware did it, to build or amplify your own accessibility program? First of all, you have to know where you're starting from. And you have to know not just for the products but for the entire organization. People don't buy products people buy experiences. It's not enough for the product to be accessible, the documentation has to be accessible, the training has to be accessible, support, surveys, email, conventions, even physical accessibility plays in to some of these events.
So there are three different maturity models that exists today, that can help you determine how accessible your organization is, and maybe flag some of your shortcomings. There's the Disability In DEI Index, Business Disability Forum, the Digital Accessibility Maturity Model. And then coming through soon is the W3C Accessibility Maturity Model, which has been in the works for a little bit over a year at this point.
Important thing to do is to be honest you're not going to get actionable information about it if you stretch the truth when you answer the questions. It's not about looking good this is about an internal assessment that you can then act on to improve the accessibility in your organization.
Start with the low hanging fruit. There are things that you can do with captions, and presentation templates, and color choices, and your accommodations process, that if you do it across your entire organization will to visibly send the message to all employees that accessibility matters, and disability inclusion matters at your organization.
The other thing that's nice about these things is they don't necessarily heavily involve the accessibility team. You can do these things while your accessibility team is doing your audits behind the scenes because these things generally involve different groups, and not just developers.
Then more advanced steps would be explicitly calling out disability as a regular dimension of your JEDI program. JEDI stands for justice, equity, diversity, inclusion. Can also be called DIB diversity inclusion and belonging, or DEI lots of different acronyms for it.
Start a disability employee resource group if you have resource groups but you don't have one for disability. Get an executive sponsor, preferably somebody at the c-suite, or connected to the products or IT. Build your training program, hire people. If you're using outside consulting you probably want to build a permanent team to take over some of that work.
The problem with outside consulting especially, when you're talking about enterprise complicated software is that you never know that you're going to get the same consultants the next time you go back and repeat audits or do updates. And the learning curve is tremendous, and you are paying for that learning curve. So figure out what you're going to do that involves consultants, what you're going to do that involves staff. And then make sure you staff the employee positions, which will allow you to reduce some of the consulting costs.
Build your roadmap, and then execute the roadmap, Yeah, that's a little oversimplified. But all of these other things one through five, will help you get to the point where what needs to be on the roadmap. And then once you've got your roadmap then it's a punch list, and you just have to get it done.
Just to recap. Accessibility is part of it should be part of every company's mission. And for companies who've made it part of their mission. It's absolutely part of everybody's job, everybody down to janitors has some role responsibility pertaining to accessibility. Accessibility is a program, it's not a project, you don't just fix things and then you're done. You need to fix things, and then you need to go back and change the processes, so that things don't get broken again.
Accessibility isn't about what you sell, it's about everything connected to what you sell. And so that's why you need to look at accessibility organizationally, and not just focused on the products.
Employees need accessibility just as much as customers do. I'm a big fan of Richard Branson's quote that, "if you take care of the employees, the employees will take care of your customers." That definitely applies here, if you hire people with disabilities, build an environment where they can work and want to stay, then trust me those employees with disabilities are the right people to take care of your customers with disabilities.
Use your influence with whatever influence you have with your vendors to let them know that accessibility is important to your organization. When you push Atlassian for example, to be more accessible, you're not pushing Atlassian just for your organization you're pushing it for all organizations. And thanks for listening to my presentation.
Live Q&A
Transcript for Live Q&A
(Kevin McDaniel) Thank you. Thank you so much, Sheri. That was an incredible presentation, a lot of great information and have a lot of great questions, actually. It's what actually one of my favorite topics is hiring, accessibility, talent and managing that effort.
So thank you again For everyone, I see Sheri was able to join us. Thank you so much. For everyone who was not with us on day one and day two, my name is Kevin McDaniel. I'm a white male wearing a white shirt with a purpleish tie and I'm the Editor in Chief for Accessibility.com.
And I'm so grateful to have with me Sheri Byrne-Haber, who you just heard speak for a question and answer. Thank you so much, Sheri. Thank you for joining us.
(Sheri Byrne-Haber) Hey Kevin. Good to be here.
(Kevin) Good to see you again, have some really great.
That was a great presentation and a lot of the questions were like spot on some of the things that I was kind of jotting down. Because you're talking about something that's very complicated that a lot of folks struggle with.
You know, it's already this field where it's like, What is this? What is accessibility and how do we do it? And then you're you're kind of getting into this area where it's still not 100% clear to everyone who is the best who are the best people to hire?
Which strategy should you implement? And what's the relationship with the community and the population look like? So I really appreciate it. I the first question I want to ask you because this is my favorite this I love to think this way.
The first question I want to ask you is can you elaborate on ways to bring senior management's attention and support to and for accessibility? How do you get buy in? You know?
(Sheri) To get senior management on board, you need to to make it about things that senior management cares about and senior management cares about revenue.
Senior management cares about mitigating risk. Some senior management will resonate with the it's the right thing to do argument, which is what I always start with. But if that doesn't work, and I would say that probably only works maybe 15 or 20% of the time, then you have to go to explaining to them how it's more expensive not to be accessible than it is to be accessible. You have to get with the salespeople. So one of the things that we've done at VMware is in our Salesforce sales tracking system. We track every sale that requires accessibility so we can say with confidence.
X amount of our sales require accessibility that way, senior management knows. If we decide to shortchange accessibility, those sales are potentially at risk.
(Kevin) So go with the data points, make it objective. What what would you say to some of our audience who are in government?
What kind of data points would you say? Because I get that not and I'm not, is I just absolutely love this question is why I'm focusing on it a little bit more. To play devil's advocate, you go to senior management and say, hey, this is the right thing to do, even if we have a mandate, right?
Even when you have a mandate, you're in a settlement agreement and you're still getting resistance. How do you push back? You know, how do you push back to get to that point where you can hire the talent?
(Sheri) Well, there's very few companies who advertise we're not inclusive rate inclusivity, diversity is a is a big part of large companies agendas today. And as I mentioned, I used to do three things which is, you know, right thing to do, better sales, and it's the law.
And now I've added the fourth thing which is recruiting millennials. Millennials are now one third of the workforce, and 80% of them said they will walk away from even applying for a job. Doesn't matter whether or not the millennial identified this as having a disability. If they see something that's not inclusive, that doesn't interest them. That's not where they want to invest. You know, a third of their day every day, day in and day out.
So not only do you have the issues and lost revenue and the risk, you're also going to create an issue with being able to recruit non-disabled millennials into other positions.
(Kevin) I actually really love that because you're like, Hey, I'm going to go the route of this is a sales based thing.
It's a mandate. It's the right thing to do if if it's still not happening, build your ground game, go grassroots. Start hiring people who do.
(Sheri) Exactly. You know, you can't claim you're inclusive if you don't do this. And you know you're going to have an issue with staffing and especially in tech, where staffing is so competitive right now that that's enough to make or break your talent acquisition.
(Kevin) Mm hmm. I love that. I had thought of that myself. So next question here is when I this is from someone. This is a direct quoted question.
When I tried role based training last time, I saw a lot of blame, the blame game for accessibility responsibilities. Isn't it orr is it a good idea to bring everyone onto the same on the same table so that we can define roles precisely. So I think this is this question came in are the time you took a role based.
(Sheri) Right. So, you know, training is migrating away from putting people in a physical room or even in a Zoom room together and training in groups.
And it's going towards video based training, prerecorded small bite sized chunks, preferably with some gamification, you know, make it interesting, have contests, post leaderboards, things of that nature. So when you do that and it's individuals, but individuals aren't receiving the same training based on their role, you don't get into a blame game because they're not in the same room and they can't talk, you know, say to each other, Oh, well, that's your fault because you did x y z, or we can't fix this because of this problem over here.
So that that's definitely, definitely was an issue previously, you know, even three years ago, I was still doing in-person training with, you know, twelve or 15
people in a room together, and we just don't do that anymore.
(Kevin) Mm hmm. OK. I have kind of debated this because we only have so much time, we talked a lot about litigation, so make get back to that one second.
I have one question. This is this, and I think this is for a hiring initiative from someone to direct quote questions it says I work in a nonprofit whose main workforce is not millennials. What statistics do you have on an older workforce and their disabilities?
(Sheri) You know, I don't have a lot of statistics on older workforces, but I would say non-profits typically have higher levels of integrity, not always, but typically because there's a cause that they've circled around. So the it's the right thing to do argument should resonate a little bit higher.
And the other thing is nonprofits are don't have zero risk for litigation. People who are going around filing lawsuits, you know, have sued museums, have sued, want to say the American Cancer Society stores? There was a a accessibility litigation that's tickling the back of my brain.
It might have been physical access, but anyways, they are not immune for suits and they're less likely to have litigation insurance, which means the suits are going to hit them harder.
(Kevin) And that that has does kind of stigma.
It's a good segue into the next one, which is, are you seeing higher litigation rates between employees and employers regarding accessibility to title one accessibility related issues?
(Sheri) So there was a pretty well known case, I want to say about three years ago, Bartleson v. Miami-Dade County, Bartleson I believe and so it was a blunt psychologists suing the school district that she worked for because the software was inaccessible and it was Florida. Miami-Dade County so very conservative courts down there. And the Bartleson case ordered the school district to make the software accessible and to hire a full time assistant for the psychologist until the software was made accessible plus there was damages, plus there was legal fees. So the total cost for that one piece of litigation was probably close to $1,000,000. Now, when an employee is suing an employer first, they have to go through the EEOC and frequently the EEOC will privately if they accept the complaint.
There there's mediation and there are things that resolve those cases so that they that they never come out. But I have heard of. Software licenses not being renewed over an employee complaint that that is definitely a thing that's more anecdotal because, you know, you don't get news stories based on that.
So I believe that there is still some of that. Some of those types of things going on behind the scenes, I just don't they don't always come out to trial decisions, they're much less likely to make the news.
(Kevin) Out of court.
Yeah, I think I remember that that case, I don't know if it's the same one I covered in 2016 in Miami. I went through that and I heard you the other day talk about the ADP case following that.
I thought that was very interesting because it was kind of like I remember reading about it and thinking, and that seems kind of obvious, you know? So it was the dominoes.
(Sheri) It sent a very strong message that the same standards.
It sent a very strong message that the same standards that apply to software you sell also apply to software that you use. You know, it's just two different government entities enforcing the same standards. The Department of Justice enforces it for customers.
And the EEOC enforces it for employees.
(Kevin) There was another question because they keep coming in now, and I want to get to these so I can switch to these as well. The question is, can you talk more about how to go about crowdsourcing?
That was something that came up.
(Sheri) Sure. So there's a couple of crowd sourcing agencies, I'm not endorsing either of them, but what they do is they have pools of people and they know what their disabilities are, they know what assistive technology they use and they know what devices that they have.
So you have to keep in mind, people with disabilities are much less likely to have the latest state of the art Apple iPhone 13. Right. They they've got their AT set up. Upgrading frequently causes significant pain plus because people with disabilities personally are usually in lower socioeconomic strata, they don't have the money to upgrade to the latest and greatest. So this gives you the ability to test with people with disabilities on older versions of operating systems and devices. So the two agencies, actually there's three. Now I'm spacing on the name of the third one, it may be that one.
One of them did change their names. So one agency I know of is called Digivante. And another agency that I know of is Applause. And so they, you know, you tell them how many people you want, what kinds of disabilities you want.
What kinds of devices and operating systems you want. And they pull the people together for you. Get the bug reports. It goes into the program manager. The program manager kind of dedupes the reports and makes sure that all the right information for you to debug the problem is there.
And then they ship that information off to you and then they pay the the testers directly. You don't have to worry about small contracts and you know, I-9s, and NDAs. They take care of all that paperwork for you.
(Kevin) Build do relationships and stuff like that.
One of the questions I had. I did not know that I thought I would. I thought you were going to go to a lighthouse and some other places. one of the questions was how does a person get trained and certified to be ADA now?
And we were able to answer that in the chat and just say we have Rocky Mountain ADA Center here for everyone if you want to go to the exhibitor hall. But the question I'd like to add onto that for you is what kind of certifications would you recommend because it is about building in-house accessibility talent?
(Sheri) Sure. So just to tack on to what you said, you thought I was going to Light House and Perkins and places like that. I don't necessarily consider that crowd sourcing because typically the people there are there for a different reason.
So crowdsourcing is is going out and just getting random people from all over the world and maybe Perkins and that and I have used both Perkins and Lighthouse. So those are good sources for people who are blind as well.
The nice thing about crowdsourcing through an agency is you get people with disabilities other than being blind. OK, so certification. So the best certification out there is probably the Trusted Tester Program. It's free. It's done by the U.S. federal government, but it's a huge time investment.
There's typically a waiting list to get in. It took it takes about 120 hours between 80 and 200 hundred hours to get through it, depending on what skill level you're coming into the program with. And like I said, the nice thing is free.
So especially for people who are just getting started on their own. You don't have to go out and plunk down a huge chunk of money, either for training or for certification. The other. There's a there's an A.D.A. coordinator program, which I got certified with through the University of Missouri Columbia.
That's not 100% digital accessibility, although you can specialize that in your electives. That's more about the ADA in general, which also includes physical access. And then, of course, the professional certification through IAAP is another gold standard certification. There's the CPACC for accessibility managers.
And then there was task for coders, and then there's also an accessible document certification. (Kevin) I didn't know they had an accessible document certification. (Sheri) Yeah, they just rolled out maybe six months ago, and then they've also got some access environment certifications that they've continued to run from the gate program.
(Kevin) OK. OK, so I'll send her a link to those resources. So, OK.
(Sheri) One thing I'll mention, though, is this is you need to separate certifications from classes where you get certificates, so they're not the same thing. Certifications require exams. Certifications have professional code of ethics and standards that have to be met, certifications you have to do continuing education and, you know, renew when your when your ticket expires. You know, having a certificate saying, Hey, I finished this Coursera class. Not the same thing.
(Kevin) Right? Oh, I totally agree with you, Alycia. Do I have time for one more?
Are you going to be back with us later Sheri?
(Sheri) No, I think this is my last one.
(Alycia Anderson - MC) You have time to squeeze in one more.
(Kevin) OK.
(Alycia) 3 minutes. So you can have a minute of it.
(Kevin) OK. OK. It says here regarding building an in-house, and I have I'm so sorry for everyone I wrote down.
I had like ten more questions, but I saw one as it came in here. It says regarding building an in-house accessibility team. What is the difference between SMB teams and larger established companies? And I don't know what that means exactly.
(Sheri) I don't know what SMB means either.
(Kevin) OK. OK. So what did you say? What did you say now?
(Sheri) Small business?
(Kevin) Maybe, yeah. Maybe the follow up, if you guys hear this real quick next one. Are you aware of anyone with a cognitive disability to acquire certification from a trusted tester?
It is not so user friendly, but that is because the success criteria is not written in plain language.
(Sheri) Yeah, so one of the W3C is working on for the silver release of the WCAG 3.0 is to work more on plain language.
Like everything, we write now is going through plain language review to make it easier for people with cognitive disabilities to to pass the program. I do know of one person. Gayatri Keaney runs an organization called The Accessible Accidental Ally, and she has a group of people with cognitive disabilities who do accessibility testing, but I don't know if any of them are certified. It's it's more important to have people with lived experience than it is to have people who are certified, because when you have the it's your experience. Is the test, right? It's what skills have you developed in order to work around or compensate for your disability?
So when when I'm interviewing people or when I'm building teams right now, Webbing says 30% of accessibility testers have disabilities. In my organizations, it's more like 50 to 60%. I think the more people with different disabilities you have in your program, the stronger your programs is going to be.
Now it can't be 100%. Everybody asked, why not 100%? Well, people who are blind, for example, can't test magnification. They can't test color. You're going to have to have a mix of people, and sometimes you're going to have to assign specific tests to specific people based on what disabilities they have.
(Kevin) Gotcha. Wow. Such great information. And like I said, it seems like, you know, the questions keep coming in as we go in the comments. So how if -
(Sheri) We gather, if yeah, if we didn't get to yours, you can either shoot me the question directly on LinkedIn.
Or, you know, Kevin will probably give me a package at the end of the day of all the questions. And usually I respond to questions publicly. If they're generic, I'll strip the, you know, the confidential details so it's not traced back to you.
But that way, everybody can benefit from the question and the answer.
(Kevin) Yeah, I really appreciate it. Sheri and I will. I'll get all of these to you. I will.
(Alycia) I think you're going to be so much answering questions all of next week.
(Sheri) Well, that's pretty much what I do, and my rule of thumb is if I answer the same question more than twice, usually I write an article about it well, after the time when somebody gives me a question, I just point them to an article.
I'm like, Oh, I already talked about this. You know, ask me if you know any, if you need to know anything else after you read this.
(Alycia) Nice.
(Kevin) That's a good rule of thumb.
(Sheri) If you ask me the right question, that might turn into an article.
(Kevin) Well, thank you so much Sheri. I really appreciate it.
(Sheri) Thanks. Thanks, everybody.
(Alycia) Thanks, Sheri.
(Sheri) And I look I look forward to being involved next year.
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