How to Hire Accessibility Talent

Transcript for Hiring Accessibility Talent

Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Accessibility Summit. Thanks for joining today's session, "How to Hire Digital Accessibility Talent. When You Don't Know Anything About It." I'm Meg O'Connell, the CEO of Global Disability Inclusion, and I'm joined today by two world class experts in digital accessibility from Microassist. I have Jack McElaney with me who's VP of sales and marketing. Wave hello, Jack.

Good to see everybody.

And I also have Hiram Kuykendall with me, who is chief technology officer at Microassist. Jack, Hiram, thanks for joining me today.

You're welcome. Pleasure to be here.

Great, well let's just jump right in. First, let's start with the basics. This year we have celebrated 31 years of the ADA, but we still find that everybody is really focused on physical accessibility, ramps to our buildings, automatic manual doors, but less focused still on digital accessibility. So what is digital accessibility and why is it so important to organizations? Jack, I'll start with you.

Well, I think the best way to look at it is through every organization that we talk to. Why are they defining it and what's leading it? Is it a proactive or reactive approach? So digital accessibility pertains to ensuring a web experience that is available to everyone, regardless of their ability and regardless of their age. And the main disability categories are vision, hearing, mobility and cognitive. So those are the key factors that everybody should be looking at when we're talking about anything related to digital. Someone with a disability must be able to experience web-based services and other digital products with the same successful outcome as those without disabilities. And that's something that the GAB website talks about extensively.

And the flip side of this is how many organizations don't have accessible website or content. According to WebAIM, over 98%, so 2% on the flip side, have at least one accessibility issue. The biggest [AUDIO OUT] include low contrast text and missing alt text. So obviously we have a big area that we need to fix across the United States and across the world because only 2% are in what we consider compliance.

Wow, that's a remarkable statistic. It's hard to believe only 2% are compliant. Hiram, what would you like to add and why do you think that number is so low? Well, think of all the digital accessibility you have around you right now. Your mobile phone has all these apps. We're using a technology, Zoom, right now to actually hold this session. So when we think about the products that we sell and the products that we buy, when we don't consider accessibility, we are creating barriers.

And for a hiring manager, there's two key elements to that. So one is minimizing barriers to hiring, and career advancement. So as a hiring manager, if you have technology inside your house, that a person that is an assistive technology user, screen reader user couldn't use, then you can't just hire somebody generically and place them in that position. And as we all know, hiring you can't ask certain questions. You can't ask questions about ability. So when we introduce technology into our environment that's not accessible, we make a complicated hiring environment. But there are two principles that I like to mention, and I think they're especially appealing to this group. So we want to minimize barriers to hiring and career advancements and we want to assure the enjoyment and use of the products that you create for your market.

And now I'll be a little mean, and I'm going to bring this back to law. So minimizing the barriers in hiring and career advancement directly applies to Title I, employment, and Title II, public entity obligations, under the ADA. And so ensuring enjoyment and use your products and services, that directly applies to Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is public accommodations, which is where we are hearing about all of these lawsuit. So bringing in products into your organizations that are accessible, hiring people that will make your products accessible, is a very important task. And when we talk to these people that are trying to acquire talent, they have a lot of questions. So that's really what we want to do in this presentation, is talk about what have we seen that makes a hiring manager to be successful in acquiring the talent they need. I mean just throwing out more statistics, there's 1.3 billion people in the world who have some form of a disability, and that number is expected to grow to 2.2 billion by 2030. So I'm going to stop there, because I got a lot more to say.

No, no that's great. So you pointed out two things. One, you know, Jack I think you summarized the definition really nicely. In its simplest forms, it means, regardless of your disability, you should have the same experience of navigating the web, understanding it, as compared to anybody else. So whether I'm online buying a pair of shoes, I can hear descriptions of what they look like, what size they're in, get it to the cart and make the purchase. And then, Hiram, to your point too, on the job, and all of the digital components of our workplaces have to be accessible to employees. So what types of characteristics? And you brought this up a little bit about the job descriptions for accessibility talent? I know you guys do a lot of hiring accessible talent and talk about accessible requirements. What do you think are some of the basics that folks listening in today need to know when considering hiring accessible talent? Again, assuming we don't know much about it

OK, that's a good question. For the last five years, I've tracked accessibility job openings each week, through Accessibility in the News. And so I see a lot of variety in job titles and responsibilities at different organizations. And the number of job openings, I can tell you are increasing. And just in the beginning of September, the Wall Street Journal had an article about the number of job listings with the title of "accessibility" in the title. That grew 78% in the year ended in July 2021 from the previous 12 months. And then such listings had risen 38% between August 2019 and July 2020, compared to the previous year. So obviously there's a big increase and I think that's why we're talking about this topic today.

And then the question is, back to the job description. How do you develop that? Well we've all probably developed hundreds of job descriptions in our career, and usually if we're developing it, we know what we're talking about because there's somebody that reports to us or it's a new position that we've created and we have a good understanding of it. But that doesn't mean everybody understands accessibility. So when developing job descriptions, the first major challenge is educating your organization on the importance of accessibility to the organization. And what does that mean in the organization? Typically, the job descriptions flow through the human resources department. So the question is, do they really understand exactly what you are trying to fill. If the Department requesting the position does not include accessibility related technical qualifications, key responsibilities, or experience, then the organization's culture most likely does not emphasize it, not truly understand it, which is a common problem across the industry. You just you hand them, this is what we want to hire, and it's really a skeleton of the position.

So one of the simple things a hiring manager can do is review new hiring requests and see if accessibility appears anywhere in the description. If you don't see recognizable accessibility considerations, you can ask the simple question. Does this new hire need to know anything about digital accessibility? And this is a safety net question that protects you and helps start a conversation, which is an important conversation to have. Because there's been so many openings across all industries, job descriptions varied and so having a heart to heart with the internal groups, including HR. What are you going to put out there on Indeed and other websites to pull in the type of person that you want?

Right, so what does that mean? You talked about that safety net question. Does this position need to know anything about digital accessibility? What types of things should people, again that don't know about it, what do they need to be asking themselves to get to that question?

Well, I think it comes down to, clearly one of the job responsibilities. Is this a technical position? Are they going to be working with websites? Are going to be working with mobile apps? Are they going to be working with documents? It's varied. And then in our industry it's consultants. So what type of consultant do you hire and what type of background and years of experience do they need to have? Prior to this recording, you and I were talking about the industry itself. The industry is not that old. I mean, they aren't that old. The internet is basically 32 years old. ADA is 31 years old. And then the roll out of iOS was 2007. We're not what I would consider a mature industry, when you think of something like banking.

And so this has to be built into the organization and everybody truly understand what does accessibility mean? And do you have an accessibility group or is this your first hire? And so, first hire, what I tell people do is go out to Indeed and do a keyword search on accessibility and see what comes up. And see if Indeed's framework can actually help you design a properly written job description. And most likely it will, because there's thousands, I mean thousands of positions out there, that you can actually compare and contrast and hopefully craft what you are actually looking for.

It's such a great point. And I was surprised too when you said that, Jack, and I think many folks joining this call are too. You know, we have been on the web since the early '90s and the ADA was around 31 years ago, so it seems-- at least was a surprise to me, that digital accessibility is still so young in our industry when we all have been online for decades.

Well, working in the technical area, we kind of have a different take on this. So you have to realize that two things happened in the recent past that brought accessibility into the forefront. In 2014, HTML5 and a thing called WAI-ARIA became a recommendation by the W3C. Before that period of time, under the old standards, you could make the argument that you couldn't make an accessible application. And so, when it comes to 2014, we got these standards. And Seyfarth Shaw put out a-- they do a wonderful job of tracking accessibility litigation and you can see that in 2014 is when all of a sudden, we get this bump and it's taken off and exploded since then.

So what does this mean for a hiring manager when coming up with the qualifications that are going to go into a job description. If you ask for somebody with 10 years experience, you are literally asking for somebody that was passionate about it, or was somehow involved with it when it was not a hot topic. So my recommendation is you never ask for somebody with more than five years experience unless there's a real need for that. And as a matter of fact, I would probably say that, one to two years is probably what you're going to get, because, it's not until the litigation really took off that suddenly this became such a hot topic. So I'll stop.

Hiram, sorry to interrupt, but that bears the question, why has the litigation spiked so much over the last several years?

Well, OK. So one of the big things was, we now have a standard that the courts have recognized. Yes, you can make an accessible web application. Once we took that off of the plate, that it was possible to make an accessible web application or mobile app or whatever, that opened the door to Title III lawsuits, which is that second thing that we mentioned at the beginning, enjoyment and use. It's a public accommodation. So once that was cleared out of the way, then people were free to say, hey, I'm trying to use your product and I can't do that and you should be able to do that. I'm incurring an injury. And so the whole thing kind of has snowballed from there.

Yeah, no it's not a bad thing, right. I mean unfortunately, the legislation exists because people aren't naturally complying. So we see that bump in all industries, across all diversity segments, that legislation brings us to the table, but those that are really committed and proactive are going above and beyond the expectations.

And, Meg, on that front. I think the catalysts for the increase in the request for positions really all over the world, but specifically in the United States is, one, the lawsuits. Two, what Hiram mentioned, the aging population. And then, three, COVID, everything was moved online. And so the awareness, for all of us. I mean, here we're doing a conference recording on Zoom, whereas before we would be there speaking. And so everything is online, all education is online, and we all did ordering of food and restaurant delivery, and just you name it, and the deployment of mobile apps. People are using their phone four to six hours a day, which is a significant increase over the pre-pandemic, so just the use of technology. And so if you have a disability, it's more of an inconvenience now, you're starting to realize how many things aren't accessible, and so as a result, companies are being driven by those three factors of aging population, and increasing disabilities, COVID and lawsuits. So as a result, they're trying to comply with the request and that's why you're seeing a significant spike in job openings. And it parallels the lawsuits and the aging. If you could overlay them with each other, and you'd see they matched almost perfectly.

Now, Meg, you asked about job descriptions and Jack and I did put together a succinct list of things that we think should go into a job description. OK here we go. So when possible, we want to integrate accessibility into recognizable job titles. For example, if you're hiring a quality assurance engineer, using a generic term like, we're looking for an accessibility specialist. We see that all the time, accessibility specialist is not something that's recognized. And your good candidates are not going to come in and look at that job posting because they don't recognize it. So what we do see, is we see people using titles like, quality assurance engineer accessibility. They're literally putting the word accessibility on the end to show that there is a particular focus on that. And that we have seen great success using that strategy. But using a generic term like accessibility specialist or overused term like accessibility coordinator when you're not really hiring for an accessibility coordinator. Candidates you need will not apply and you're going to get the wrong candidates and too few applicants.

And then number two, be clear on duty. So Jack went through this, and he's absolutely right. Have that safety net question where every posting that comes into you, you go back to the requester and say, hey, I do not see anything about accessibility. Is it a part of this job description? Now in the beginning, your requesters are not going to probably have a lot to say on that. They're going to go, no, I don't believe I do and you're going to push back just a little bit, but what happens is, when you keep asking the question, it starts becoming part of the culture. People start becoming aware of it and they start thinking about it. And so we've seen just by being very crystal clear on the duties that a person is going to have to do really helps.

The next one would be, understanding the technical requirements. So if you're hiring for a technical position like a programmer, we want to see things in there like-- Get your accessibility policy, you hopefully have this written down. Our accessibility standards are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 Level A. We want to see that in the job description. What frequently we see is, organizations will take a shortcut. They go, ah, we're selling it to federal, we need somebody that is a section 508 specialist. But yet, they're creating products to sell to the federal government. And this is where you have to understand a little bit of the technology behind this.

The important thing, Section 508 points to WCAG by reference. Having somebody that knows the technical standard is more important. If you ask for somebody that's a Section 508 specialist, you're going to get somebody that's an ex-federal employee that knows about purchasing, building, and maintaining applications. Which is handy to have, but not necessarily what you're looking for. So those technical requirements are very important. Jack, do you have anything you want to add to that?

This gets down to the real basics of crafting a job description, and so the audience here today, I'm guessing have created their share of job descriptions. But when you're dealing with platforms like LinkedIn or Indeed, the key is going to be, the SEO side of it so the search engine optimization side of it. What are the key words, which, Hiram, you touched on, what are the key words that you need to be putting in your job descriptions on LinkedIn or on Indeed or any of these other websites? And so having accessibility in the title is critical. And it has to be in the job responsibilities. It has to be there enough that someone who's searching, if they type in those words, it actually pulls up your job description. And so, if it's a really nichey thing, I mean you talk about 508. Get into the real specifics.

So someone, if this is a nichey position, into the specifics that nichey person would be typing in when they're searching for a job they're interested in. And so that is the baseline of any job description, but certainly accessibility. You better make sure you're preaching to the right group. And if you don't have those correct words in there, whatever the words are, because it's going to come down to the actual jobs themselves. But make sure they're in there, and if it's not, if you are the human resource department, go to the hiring manager and say, what are the keywords you want in this. Because we want to make sure we pull as many people in.

Because as I mentioned, it's a competitive environment right now. Colleges and universities are hiring left and right. Corporations are hiring. Government agencies are hiring. So everybody is competing for talent. And we're seeing it at Microassist. We've had people recruited from us to other organizations. And so we have to quickly stand up a job description posted on Indeed. And so we better make sure that it's as current with the specs that we want, and that we're hitting on the hot buttons of the candidates that are out there looking. Because there's a lot of passive candidates who aren't out there broadcasting on LinkedIn that they're looking, but they're paying attention on Indeed and LinkedIn as to what the jobs are. And the way they do it is keyword.

I love the list of suggestions and you're talking about Indeed and LinkedIn, but given the discussion that we've had on the scarcity of finding this talent. Are those the best platforms to find people with accessibility skills and expertise or are there other areas that people should be going, specific sites or technical recruiters in this space. What else should folks be using to find their accessibility talent?

Well it's a multi-pronged question, I'll dissect it. I was a recruiter for many years. And I can tell you, tracking jobs for the last five years. There is not a lot of recruiters in this industry, meaning they're contract recruiters or they're retained or contingency. So what that means is you have to fend for yourself, which is fine, because there's plenty of sites. And so there's the gig economy, which you can post gigs that you're looking for on Upwork and Side Hustle. Those are two that are widely used. It's kind of like the dating sites, there's two sides to it. Companies can pose positions out there and then candidates or people who are contracting can post their skills out there on those two, so again Upwork and Side Hustle, and we can give the information on that. But the most widely used one for sure is Indeed, which anybody who's looked for a job over the last 10 years is using it.

And then LinkedIn, obviously LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, and it's a widely used professional website. But then you get into Inclusively is a website used and obviously in the name, it's related to disabilities. A11Jobs is another one that is used quite extensively. AbilityJobs, again ability, based on inclusivity and disabilities. WiredHire is another one. HigherEdJobs is another one. WorkforceGPS is another one. And then you get into-- DisabledPerson is another one. And then disability jobs, DigitalA11Jobs and then here in Texas, they have Texas HireAbility, so that's a listing of-- wow. And that's extensive, and that would pretty much cover anything from government to state to corporate.

But the question was, how do you handle the scarcity issue? And so Jack said, cast a wide net, which is very good, that's absolutely true. I mean, the only thing better than that is word of mouth. I mean, word of mouth is how we get all of our really top candidates.

It's how most of us get our top candidates. Referrals, word of mouth, so it's the same way for the digital accessibility talent.

85% of all jobs are filled through the network.

Yeah, but I do want to address the scarcity issue and what you have to be realistic with a person who is requesting you to collect candidates, is the skill versus will conversation. We already said there's not a big population of these people. There's not people out there that have six and seven years experience. We have had our best luck on hiring people that were passionate about it and excited about it and perhaps did not have the long history, we would like to have with it, but they had the will to learn it. Our absolute best people have been entry-level people that were just excited about doing it. They've learned quickly. And while they may not be appropriate for filling out the top level, as far as getting people in UX, UI, in application development, in QA testing, these people have been-- we've had our most success out of finding people that were excited about it and then we were able to train them in it.

A little sidebar on that, Hiram happens to be one of the best trainers in the country. And so we have a built-in trainer, which a lot of companies don't have.

That's true, it's very true.

And so from that standpoint, it's really the question of can we deploy that model. And so, if someone's standing up an accessibility group, that they don't have the luxury of having a Hiram Kuykendall on their them. They can certainly hire him to do contracting, but for the most part, most companies don't have that luxury. Now if they have a deeper bench of talent, meaning they might have a few specialists that work for them. Obviously those specialists can cross-train and up-train different individuals. But if you're starting from scratch, getting as much input as possible, and I go back to the job description.

If you really want to see how they are built, go to those different websites that I talked about. See how other companies are building them. And all of the big companies are going to have accessibility positions. So you can pick from Microsoft or Apple or Indeed or Amazon and see how the big boys actually do it. And then determine, where are you going to find those people. Where are you going to post? Well, that brings up an interesting thing. When you mentioned big companies, the size of your organization will influence how you do the job posting and who you hire. If you're under 50 employees, you're going to have very tactical requests. They're going to come in. They're saying, I'm looking for a UX designer. I'm looking for an application developer. I'm looking for quality assurance. You're going to get more of the technical people coming in and asking you for help. If you're a public sector organization or you're a large company, you're a sales force, your needs are greater. So now you're looking for people that have policy experience, subject matter experts, interest in areas of law, and more likely to have an accessibility training program, to be able to handle an accessibility training program.

So to go back to Jack's point, you know that under 50 group, you're not going to probably be able to stand up a full blown accessibility training program. So may have to hire somebody that has more experience, but once again you're going to have a hard time reaching over that five-year threshold, otherwise you're going to be applying to me and Jack, all right, because there's few of us that go over that line. But so, if you're under 50, it's going to be very tactical. And in some ways that's easier, because you can almost take the job description, add accessibility onto it and then move on. But when you start getting into the larger organizations, there where policy and governance and diversity and inclusion start coming in, conversation gets much more complicated and the pool shrinks even further.

It's amazing. It's such a wide spectrum to think about from whether it's accessibility policy or working to create platforms that are technical and digitally accessible. I know we're coming close to time, so I just would like to ask you guys what you would like to add as final thoughts for the folks joining us today.

I think this was covered in the discussion, but if this is your first introduction to accessibility in the hiring process of accessibility people. I'd go back to the initial piece of advice and suggest that you integrate the following question into your process. And this is a repeat. Does this new or need to know anything about digital accessibility? And that has to be answered across the organization, again if it's an organization of 50 people, of 500 people, of 5,000 people, you still need that answer. And you'll get the no answer until the organization achieves a level of maturity where it becomes important. And these are the three factors I think will promote accessibility within the organization, reputation, lawsuits, if you're starting to lose customers. Yes and if you're starting to lose customers it's because that number that Hiram referenced, the 1.2 disabled people in the world, moving to 2.2 by 2030. They're going elsewhere to someone who has an accessible experience and website.

And so if accessibility is entering the job hiring process, then use recognizable titles as I mentioned before and make sure you do the SEO side of it, which is the keywords. And the recognizable titles can come from that research I said to do on Indeed and other websites. Be clear on the duties, and this is true from an accessibility standpoint, and a legal standpoint. What are you expecting your candidates and then ultimately your employees to do. And then understand the technical requirements. And this is going to the human resource people. Truly understand what's being asked of these candidates that you're trying to pull into your organization. And then as Hiram has mentioned a number of times, be realistic on experience. Because, there's experienced people out there, but they're not experienced in different industries where the industry has been around a long, long time. And so training on the job is certainly something that we do and other companies do. But if it's just training on the job, you truly have to be realistic about the experience that you're looking for because there aren't a ton of companies that have deep, deep, deep, knowledge and benches of people that go back decades. That to me is a summary of what I think companies should be doing and asking and looking for.

And, Hiram, you want to bring us home?

I agree with that, the being realistic on what you need. Keeping that question out in the forefront. So your organization may not be embracing accessibility, and you certainly don't have to be the outlier that's shaking the tree. But if you keep asking the question, it will take root, and you'll start getting the answers that you need.

That's great. Thank you both for joining me. I appreciate it, Jack, Hiram, you've given us a lot to think about, and I certainly have learned a lot and I know those listening have as well too. So thank you for joining us. And thank you guys, enjoy the rest of your conference.

Transcript for Live Q&A

(Kevin McDaniel) Thank you very much, Meg and Jack and Hiram, I greatly appreciate it, really great information. And I want to thank you. Thank you all for your time. And I also believe that Hiram and Jack are going to be able to join us for a Q&A here momentarily.

Looking forward to having some have some great questions. Hey, Hiram, how are you?

(Hiram Kuykendall) Doing good. Doing good.

(Kevin) Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. And I think Jack's going to join us as well.

(Hiram) I realize my video editing skills leave a little to be desired.

I was kind of choppy there, and that's because I took very long answers and whacked her down. Oh, sorry about that, folks.

(Kevin) Oh, no worries. No worries. I really appreciate it. That was incredibly incredible information because it's this topic where everyone's trying to solve this problem now.

And I remember going to a conference like 5, 6 years ago, and it was the first enabling conference, and they talked about how the accessibility market was going to mature. And the expectation was at that time that the market would grow for five to seven years and then eventually level out.

And I think in a lot of ways, a right and a lot of ways it's it's just not stopping, you know, but the talent pool isn't really matching the demand right now, so everyone's trying to figure out how to solve this problem.

So you guys, both you and Jack your your presentation was just spot on. You hit so many marks. And I'm really kind of in a way, I'm a little bit bummed, because you have so many questions. I had my own I want to get to, but I guess I'll have to give them to you later.

Well, the first thing I want to say is a comment from someone says, Tell Hiram I love him for how he said hire for passion. I agree, which is a great, great comment. But so first, the first question I have here is and I'm just I'm jotting them down as they were coming in says, how would you suggest? Would you suggest hiring within the organization? So hiring from within? Particularly if someone has a disability and wants to work as an accessibility coordinator and then they they follow it up and say, though, that they have no coding experience, but with a lived experience, is there is there room for that?

If someone in a customer service role is looking to kind of transition to an accessibility specialist in some capacity, how do you view hiring within and that kind of value?

(Hiram) Absolutely. And I will tell you that the route, I would suggest, is looking at the quality assurance role in the beginning by if you want.

So let's say that you're on the phones and you're getting real time experience and you have a disability reporting that back to the company and being a little bit of the squeaky wheel pointing out the things that are not working, those product teams are going to go, Hey, that person is helping us get to where we need to be. They will engage you and I can see I have the best luck we have had. It's taken that person with passion and growing him into the role, and QA is a wonderful area to to start in because you will already have a leg up on the hardest part, which is the assistive the assistive technologies.

And I am not talking. I'm not just talking about vision blind, either a screen reader, user, low vision, people with mobility challenges. QA is a is an area I highly encourage you to look at now. And once you get into QA you can grow into that developer position.

So if you have a passion for programing, but maybe you don't have the background, you know, keep working on your chops, find out what the company is using as their internal development platform. Angular, React. I'll throw a lot of terms at you.

But there is a natural growth path there that can be achieved.

(Kevin) Mm hmm. Jack, do you have anything to add to that piece because I just feel like that's that was certainly how I came up in this trying to manage lawsuits, I went back to school to learn this.

Just for that reason, I started the QA path as well. The.

(Jack McElaney) Yeah, I think the the industry as a whole, we actually had dinner last night with some partners of ours in the accessibility industry, and we were talking about the industry as a whole.

You know, it's it's not a, you know, a seasoned industry like banking just because of the nature of when the internet was introduced and and then accessibility was introduced. And so you don't have deep, deep, deep ventures as far as experience.

And I think people need to get as much training and experience as they can within any organization and seek out their training that they can actually use on any type of job. The problem is schools, those don't have a lot of programs on and when I'm talking colleges and universities, so it's really job training and Hiram's team is is probably the best that I've seen and heard of because Hiram does all the training of the auditors and the Cuban people. And when you have a resource like I or other companies out there tapping their knowledge and building with them and building that structure for training is is probably the best way in.

And unfortunately for the industry, one of the only ways you can actually do it and then conferences like this, other conferences like Access U and see some people really help and getting more training on top of the on the job training to enhance what they're doing.

(Kevin) Mm-Hmm. Now, I completely agree. You guys talked about hiring for passion, and this is just my experience. I'm completely coming from this from someone within the organization. But so but but from your perspective, you guys work with a lot of different companies.

You're more you're working on implementation solutions when you're hiring, though. And for folks who are trying to hire in-house accessibility talent and you're looking for experience in accessibility, and I heard you talk about it being specific. Do you look for the person who just says, Yes, I have these certifications.

That's it. Are you also looking for things like passion? Do they need to have the soft skill sets like the ability to influence? And how much does that weigh in on your decision?

(Hiram) OK, so first of all, everybody I've ever interviewed that says, yes, I have accessibility, I'm a I'm a developer and I know accessibility. When I bring them in. I found a find it, find out that that usually means we had a QA person to check for accessibility. When they found something wrong, they sent it back to me and I fix it. Or, well, you know, we had an automated tool that when we checked in code, if it saw something wrong, it fixed. You know, it would say there's an error or we used wave that is, you know, automated testing is only catches 30 to 50% of errors.

And so when we bring people in, we find out that even the most experienced people when you peel back the layers actually do not have the level of chops to make a truly compliant application. So that hiring for passion and hiring. So let me give you an interview technique that I that I use that I think really is fantastic. So on the first interview, you ask them, what is the WCAG?

And if they come back and they say it's a standard, you know, I explain to them that the WCAG is actually a guideline. It's principle based. It's good for mobile apps and PDFs and web. So it's not prescriptive.

It's more is more principle day. So that's just on the first interview. And if they're catching that and you know, and I'll ask them, you know what WCAG success criteria, do you find most would most affect most people with disabilities?

And you know, I like to see them say, Well, if we if you have a keyboard issue, then a screenreader is affected and people's mobility, you know, challenges are affected. So I like to do that on the first interview.

But now on the second interviews we want, we want them to actually do something. So what I'll do is I'll sit down realizing that they're not going to have the chops to sit down and maybe write code in front of you.

I'll sit down and go over one or two or three accessibility success criteria. And then I'll have them evaluate something else. They explain to me what you're doing and how you're looking at this and what you see. And the person that is excited will hear what you're saying and you'll see the wheels turning and you'll see how quickly they're applying is. If you get that person that is learning in the interview process, you've got a good person that has been our most successful hires.

(Kevin) So I first heard that and there's more questions. Minutes, I'll keep this short.

But just to say that first happened to me years ago in a job interview, someone asked me to define disability. It was the first question, and it completely threw me off. And I found when I asked people that in interviews, the folks who get upset about it typically.

OK, well, we've solved that issue right there, you know.

(Hiram) But that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And you know, it's it's I can't I can't stress it is, you know, and it's been said 1,000,000 times a year. I don't want to repeat, you know, it's not eye contact, it's not how firm the handshake is.

And it's and I'll be, you know, I use your credentials and your history to, you know, queue up the people. I think that are going to be most successful. But in the end, I hire on passion and I hire on people that learn quickly.

And so I try to have a learning event actually inside of the interview process. And let me tell you, that works. You get the right person. That's excited. It's like throwing water water in a weed. I need to change sayings, but I mean, gasoline on a flame.

I don't know if it really will. It really will. You'll have the right person.

(Kevin) Yeah, it works, OK. So I have this this came up with Sheri in her last presentation, but it continues to come up and I think the reason why is because people just want to know what they need to have.

There's a lot of passionate people but they don't know where to go. I have a question here and then there's more that are coming in. I was able to spot them just a little bit. So there's some pretty good ones coming in.

I'm a switch to those in a second. I have a degree in education, technology and special education. What certifications do you recommend I have to work in the accessibility industry? I feel like there's a lot of answers for that.

(Hiram) But if, yeah, boy, the IAAP, the Trusted Tester Program, I mean, those are those are those are the the ones. But I'll be I'll be honest with you. Out of the the only people we hire that have those certifications are auditors.

I have I have and I have hired for all levels of developers, I've had all for all levels of UX UI and the industry doesn't value it yet. I don't know if I'm very old. And so, you know, back when the Project Management Institute came out with the PMI and came out, it was not recognized in the industry and it did not have value. And until the industry said, Oh, you're you're a PMP certified project manager that has value to me until the industry recognizes the value of the certificate. They don't get you, they don't get you quite in yet.

Now it's happening, but I don't know. For me, it sounds like it feels like it's happening a little slower. Did I answer the question you asked? I think you could I answer. Did I answer what I want to answer?

(Kevin) Well, you know, you're 100% right because I I've worked as a project manager and I was going to get my PMP and then, you know, all this stuff. And I've met a lot of project managers who still don't have their PMP and they're working perfectly fine in the project management industry.

And I particularly just found that their practices were incredibly applicable to the accessibility field in managing the implementation of a project that I ultimately did not get mine. But I just there's a lot of folks that want to get into it and have a lot of these questions.

Let me go to. There are some really good questions, some key words I caught here. One of them says here are there are frameworks a detriment to accessibility?

(Hiram) Oh, Lord, no. So the framework's has been painful. I know where this person is coming from.

I feel your pain. This is a therapy session for both of us. React, react and angular have been a rough go, but when it when it starts adopting it and it starts getting included in the frameworks, then then people don't have to work as hard.

I'll give you a slightly off example. We were doing some stuff with Salesforce, and so Salesforce is not. The majority people of Salesforce are not application developers, their component integrators, they say, I need to build something and you take this component, you take this component and you put them together.

And so the component builders need to know accessibility at the DNA level because these other people are going to be taking these elements and adding them together, and then they're worried about the higher level things. Do I have my headings correct how somebody's going to navigate this program?

So that's a good instance of where Salesforce is at a framework level. The component you and you use is going to be accessible. So you got that much going now. You just have to work on these higher level concepts.

That was a long answer, I'm sorry.

(Kevin) No, I was a great answer because there are there are a lot of a lot of we have a lot, we have a lot of folks here today. They have a lot of great questions.

So I think that it's I think it's great. We talked about training and when we talked about passion, and this is kind of another subset of question. When you're looking at hiring people, we talk about the certifications only having so much weight.

I've always felt like and I don't want to I don't want to create any bad water question here, but I've always felt like the developers who actually write code to the specification are already light years ahead. What kind of value do you put on someone who has to write to the specification?

They're out there are loyalists to to the W3, to the code. You know, where does that fall in as far as their their ability to learn and their ability to learn accessibility?

(Hiram) You know, I feel like this is a therapy session for me.

So, you know, so everything HTML5. Has accessibility built into the standards, the worst thing that ever happened to us? I'm going to make a lot of enemies on this is we removed the compiler from the application development process.

It used to be when you wrote a program, you had to compile it and it checked all of the language parts to make sure you adhered to the rules. And with the web, we went the other direction. We said, You know what?

You just slap it on a page and we'll figure it out, and this is going to be great. It's going to be a great environment. So you can write code that is not in compliance with the standard. So I lost track of the question.

I got that off my chest, though I feel a little better. Can you repeat the question?

(Kevin) Oh, it was. You know, where do you rank? You know, developers who come in with no accessibility experience, but they have, you know, let's say they have the resume or their profile or portfolio kind of speaks to their adherence to the specifications.

(Hiram) So I mean, I love that. So so the people that truly understand HTML and are passionate about following the standards are easiest people to get there, to get him to wrap certain parts of accessibility. The mechanical parts they'll get.

I love that. I mean, so yeah.

(Kevin) OK. And so I see Alycia, so I have time for one more. And the problem is, I had so many and this happens every time we have a Q&A, the questions just start coming.

The minute is, I think it's because I want to say to everyone, we're on about a minute or two delay. So if you're putting your questions in right as they come on, I'm only getting to read them two or three minutes-

(Hiram) I know my technical people. Myy technical peeps we're going to start showing up.

(Kevin) Yeah, they do. They do. It says here. Here's one. Gosh, I have this one question, I don't know which one is best, I'm going to read them both - you tell me what you think. Is 90% of digital accessibility, the responsibility of the Fed or QA?

You tell me which one you'd like to take, actually, because there's there's so many good ones. How do we get? How can we make our social media plugins and platforms more easier for content creators to be accessible? You know, what.

(Hiram) Do they do the first one do the first one. I can answer that fast.

(Kevin) Is it is it is. It is 90% isn't 90% of digital accessibility the responsibility of the Fed and QA?

(Hiram) The Fed and QA. The Fed, like the federal government?

(Kevin) Nah. I don't think they're talking about that. I think maybe they're talking about-

(Hiram) Developers? Developers and QA? All right.

Oh my gosh. OK, so let's let's go to the let's go to the agile process in the beginning. You know, you're going to create user stories. You're going to create your style guides. That's where we fail. Let me tell you the number one thing that people mess up.

It can't ever be changed. Picking colors. You know why? Because the president took a trip to Mexico, and he likes red, green and white now. And that became our colors. And even though you, as a developer, take two seconds to change the style guide, we can't do it because it's been blessed by the president.

So the first mistakes happen at the beginning, and even though they're technically easier to fix, they're almost impossible for non technical reasons. Then, yeah, the next step is, OK, it goes to developer. Let's just skip up. So the developer, if the developer is not at least doing automated testing, then you've got a real problem.

And it's hard to get developers to do anything more than automated testing. So that means the next person is the QA person in the line. Your QA person is the linchpin. They and if you're going to talk about changing your organization, giving your QA enough power to prevent the launch of an inaccessible product or update is the best thing you can do and is the most difficult thing to do.

(Kevin) If you clarify that and then we have to go. A front end developer is what he's referring to. FED.

(Hiram) Oh a framework developer. OK?

(Kevin) Yeah, but just to clarify that Alycia. Sorry, because it's like it's so important with so many people here today. If you're a hiring manager and you're trying to implement accessibility initiative at the very beginning, what you talked about, the linchpin, what what's the key position you must start with in your opinion?

(Hiram) Oh, in the organization in general? Or for a hiring manager?

(Kevin) Your HR professional. You've been tasked with putting together an accessibility issue because you're also the A.D.A. coordinator. You need to hire someone in IT to get the project started.

Who would that be?

(Hiram) Oh my gosh, you're making my head explode because of the academic. The academic right thing, say, is the first thing you do is you fix your policy if you don't have your policy. This is not the answer you're expecting, is it?

If you don't have your policy in place, then and that is backed by senior management, then it has no authority. The culture of the organization is broken. And so then the best you can do is a tactical response and you have to hire the best developers you can and the best QA people you can, and you have to grassroots it up the chain. So academically, I would say the most important first hire is the accessibility coordinator. But if you're under 50 people, that's not going to be a position you're ever going to get through. But if you're a larger organization that accessibility coordinators important because they have two tasks to get the policy straight, to get to get monitoring set up in the organization and to give the purchasers sheer hell and make sure that what they purchase is is accessible. Once you have that, the rest actually becomes easier. But that's not the way it works.

You start tactically. I need a developer and you're just going to have to grassroot it back up, and I heard that in several presentations that were really good today.

(Kevin) Yeah. No that was the perfect answer, and I know we're out of time.

Alycia, I'm so sorry, and I really appreciate it. That was the absolute right answer. I completely agree with that. So awesome. You guys are. I really-

(Hiram) I got one!

(Kevin) No, you guys nailed it. I mean, we're getting all kinds of thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. So thank you, guys. I really appreciate it. You're welcome. I have more questions. It's OK if I can send them to you both.

(Jack) Absolutely.

(Kevin) OK. OK. I really appreciate it, guys. Thank you for your time.

(Alycia Anderson - MC) Thank you so much.