United in Accessibility

The presenter is James Thurston, G3ict, who is joined by Chris Misra, University of Massachusetts, Amherts.  SPEAKER: Please welcome James Thurston and Chris Misra.  James is the Vice President for G3ict, where he leads the design and implementation of new worldwide advocacy strategies and programs to scale up G3ict's global impact. G3ict is the global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies promoting the rights of Persons with Disabilities in the Digital Age.   Chris is the Vice Chancellor and CIO at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst.  At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, information technology plays a crucial role in many key areas, including but not limited to student success and engagement, research competitiveness, and multi-modal education.   Today they will be looking at how leveraging accessibility and inclusion can provide an adaptive and accessible multi-modal IT ecosystem to support campuses. Chris will review findings, digital inclusion gaps, next steps for improvements at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst and more!   JAMES: Our goal with this session is to share with all of you some detail about how the U Mass approach to being more accessible, more inclusive through technology. Through its technology assets and deployments and Chris and I over the next hour want to surface and share with you, I think, what are some valuable and actionable experiences from U-mass, that will hopefully apply to your own accessibility journey in your higher education institution. This particular session is the third in the IAAP higher ed series. It's also the first of the next three sessions, which relate to, and are sort of sourced from, G3ict's work with universities and higher education institutions, using our smart university digital inclusion maturity model tool. And I'm just going to briefly give you a little bit of information on that, just so it will make a little bit more sense as Chris and I start to have a conversation about our work with Chris and what Chris has been leading and driving there at the University of Massachusetts model. The smart university digital inclusion maturity model tool, it's an assessment tool and a benchmarking tool. And it's really to help universities better understand how their digital transformation, how they're using technology, how their use of data is either supporting accessibility inclusion of people with disabilities or potentially presenting barriers to the inclusion of people with disabilities, including faculty, staff and students. And even, really, the broader community where the university might sit. So, the tool itself, the assessment tool, it's made up of 28 variables, we call them enablers, and they define what it really means to be an inclusive smart university. They enable accessibility and enable inclusion. These variables, or enablers, contribute to the university's building up the capabilities that we know support greater inclusion in accessibility at a university. And these capabilities, and with the tool we're able to look at the role of things like leadership, the existence of a digital inclusion strategy or not, we look at the accessibility of the university's engagement channels, how it's pushing information out, getting information back, are those accessible, we look at things like the culture of diversity, is the university employing people with disabilities, is it training on disability and accessibility. We look at things like procurement, what systems does the university have in place to make sure that its investments in technology and its deployments of technology are accessible. So, a whole range of issues that we know are pretty critical to a university becoming increasingly accessible, increasingly inclusive. And, of course, we do dig into technology and data, which are the backbone and the life blood of a smart university. And the way that we use these variables, these 28 enablers, these 18 capabilities, is in a three-step process. That is pretty straightforward. We do some analysis of documents, I.T. strategies, digital inclusion strategies, budgets, accessibility statements. We do some analysis of those. We make available to the university an online self-assessment where they sort of write themselves across these variables. And then we actually do an expert site visit where we curate a team of global experts on inclusion and accessibility and bring them in to engage with the university, dig into some of these variables, and hopefully, at the same time, provide some help and assistance on pain points, issues that the university might be experiencing. And then the final step is we deliver a road map, which includes a set of scores for each of these variables and a set of priorities and recommendations for moving forward. So, if you're at a level 2 on a scale of 1 to 5 for procurement, these are the kinds of things you might think about doing to get to levels 3, 4 and 5. So pretty straightforward. The process with U Mass, we'll be talking -- jumping in with Chris in just a minute. We, I think, started that process last spring and sort of did the site visit, I think, in early summer this past year. And in that process, we reviewed probably more than 20 documents, these budgets, these strategies, these org charts, policy statements. We talked with more than 40 U Mass faculty and staff over ten different listening sessions. And then we delivered the road map. And in the road map, U Mass, I think, had real relative strengths in the area of leadership and other areas identified where there's an opportunity to really make some steps to have some improvements in the capabilities and ultimately in the accessibility and inclusion there. So that's a little bit of a background on how G3ict came to be working with U Mass. I thought it might be useful to sort of frame our conversation. And with that, I'm really excited now, and I've been I've been looking forward to this discussion, Chris, for quiet a while, of jumping in with you and hearing a little bit about the U Mass Amherst journey, where you are, where you're headed but maybe we can start, if you can tell us a little bit about the University of Massachusetts Amherst, give us a general sense of the university and how you're deploying technology there. CHRIS: Sure, thanks, James. So, U-Mass Amherst, for those of you who aren't familiar with Massachusetts geography, I grew up in Massachusetts, so I know, we're about 90 minutes west of Boston, 175 miles north northeast of New York City. It's a relatively rural area, but it's a significant institution. We have about 24,000 undergraduate students, about 7,500 graduate students. About 1,500, instructional faculty. Largest state institution in New England, research one, $233 million, $1.3 billion budget, big. 1500-acre campus, which is the biggest thing is trying to find your way around the campus. Our journey of accessibility came about really through just conversations and advocacy within the campus in terms of this has to be a key responsibility for us. Our technology platform is really very traditional, higher education. We migrated many of our services to the Cloud, excessive use of Zoom recently, Google, exchanging out platforms, and the challenge with the campus of this size is really just managing the breadth and depth of both a campus and a highly decentralized institution. JAMES: Great, thanks, Chris. We probably started having conversations about a year ago, actually, just as we were coming into the pandemic and universities, in particular, I think, we're scrambling to try to figure out, okay, how do we fulfill our mission in this environment. Can you talk a little bit about sort of what that looked like as we were coming into the pandemic from a CIO perspective, the kinds of things that you were thinking about and needing to take steps on? CHRIS: Sure. There were sort of two interesting aspects. I mean, aside from it's amongst the longest days of my career in the past and probably ever going forward just in terms of how do you migrate an institution that size to an online education. We made a very early determines, we were one of the early schools who decided to go remote, we thought it would be two weeks, we took a double spring break. We quickly ramped up the technology portfolio. We were fortunate that we already had tools like Zoom, we had pretty good practice of online education, fairly robust online education school, but not a lot of digitally native capacity to teach instructionally remote. So, there's really two principal areas of impact. There's a principal area of impact in academics, and the impact in administration. Since we extended out the spring break for an extra week, we actually had two weeks to figure out how we were going to do these academics. But that meant we had to move the administration into an online world in a very short order of time. From the basic things, how are we going to pick up the mail to how are we going to communicate, how do staff meetings work, and recognizing that institutionally we were a face-to-face campus, our staff meetings were face to face, our one-on-one meetings were face to face and we had to comport all of that. So, the social change was actually significant, and that led quickly to substantial change in the academic side as well. We saw increases of -- astounding increases in Zoom utilization. One of my favorite statistics on Zoom utilization is in the first week of -- I'm sorry -- in the first day of the first week when we brought our academics online, we used more Zoom time the entire month previously. So, each day in April, we used the same number of Zoom hours in the entire month of February. And that pace continued through the balance of the spring semester. JAMES: Chris, I remember that data point as well. And I often use it myself because I think it is a really easy, compelling example of this accelerated digital transformation. Can you talk a little bit about where -- how accessibility fits into I.T. and into the university in general? I know, you've got a really great I.T. strategy, accessibility is embedded in there. I don't think that there's a specific digital inclusion or necessarily accessibility strategy, but maybe a little bit about strategy and organizational structure, just so we understand how accessibility fits in. CHRIS: Absolutely. So, we've actually been fortunate from an I.T. perspective, we've had staff supporting accessibility but a very modest staff. I think when James did the assessment, we had a single staff member, at a high point we had two staff, and we're in the process of transitioning that as well. So, our overall accessibility strategy comes multi fold. My team is responsible for the information technology, and that's across the board. That means we support students' technology use in the classroom, we support faculty's technology use, we provide general technology use for administration. We do not have responsibility for accessibility accommodations per se, we have a disability services team on campus, it's organized in our student affairs area. So, really, it's a key partnership working between student affairs, working with my central I.T. organization. I will say from a maturity perspective, though, we had staff, it was very much more about boutique service, solving discrete individual accommodations, and it hadn't crossed the line of being generalizable to most of our day-to-day normal use of population technology. It was very much targeted at a subset population that had self-disclosed a need for an accommodation. JAMES: And I know as part of this conversation, we'll get into a bit later, a discussion of these issues of silos and coordination and collaboration, which we had a lot of conversation about when we were working with you. So, maybe we can jump in now a little bit into this sort of notion of accelerated accessibility that happened for U Mass for sure but probably for most universities around the world because of the pandemic and what that looks like. And how -- maybe start with a little bit about how does the university deploy technology assets that are accessible and really are working for everyone, and what did it look like to have this sort of intensified effort to include a focus on accessibility as you were becoming more and more -- using technology more and more to do all of your services, both administrative and academic and teaching? CHRIS: Sure. So I'll say the structural change that really occurred was, I think, originally we treated accessibility as meeting the needs of identified individuals who had to have accommodations and making sure our web content was accessible, doing basic accessibility reviews, it was basic, W3CG, not a lot of detailed work and it was not invested across the board in terms of we had a lot of natively accessible tool set but it was really natively delivered accessible tool set, there wasn't a lot of work and push for us to drive an institutional priority around making sure our content was natively accessible, except where there was either liability or like I say, a dedicated accommodation. As we went into the pandemic, that really had to pivot because we realized, we no longer had the mechanism, we couldn't deploy a notetaker for a student in a classroom because there wasn't a classroom. We couldn't make point by point accommodations on either technology or use case basis. So, we had to start generalizing. We were fortunate that we were in the midst of a transition of our strategic plan, so we were actually at a point of making that type of pivoting. Of identify digital inclusion as a core property going forward. And, so, we had a lot of the substrate work, but I'd say the pandemic really drove us to recognize it wasn't solely about a compliance obligation but much more about reaching our community where they're at. JAMES And as you were making that shift, were you -- some of what we had talked about in the past, when you were in the middle of all this, is there some -- much like what you would probably do on the security side of your work, any sort of risk rating system, and trying to make these decisions about where are we going to prioritize and focus first and those types of decisions when it comes to accessibility? CHRIS: Absolutely, yeah. So, one of the things, for me, I consider fortunate is prior to my role as a CIO I've been in a number of roles at U Mass. I came from a very technical background. But I spent many years in a security role. So, I was responsible for information security at the organization. Within the information security field, it's very much a derivative of risk management field that works very heavily on risk and concepts like maturity models play very heavily there. So, when you're assessing implementation of controls to mediate security risk, you have to assess what is the cost of control, what is the value, what is the return. The easiest way to assess that is against a maturity model so I had a lot of familiarity with the concept of maturity models. One of the things that made me very excited about the engagement of G3ict was the application of this discipline-type technology of applying a maturity model to a domain like accessibility because I had not seen that done before, but I had a lot of experience.   What's nice about that, it gives you an abstract way of measuring your progress, although there can be a metric and a rating, it also talks about where you are legitimately relative to your peers but what steps you can take, and gives you a better mechanism to start prioritizing resource allocations. So, as I moved out of information security, into a CIO role, I changed from being responsible for compliance to be responsible for budget, priority and allocation. So being able to have a document like a maturity model that can help guide investment and show return relative to cost was a better framework for us to make ongoing decision making and I felt more at home in that security field, like oh, we know this is a high risk, let's apply a resource here, even if the resource is fairly modest, it's going to get us significant return against that issue. JAMES: Can you -- if you're able, can you talk a little bit about some of those areas where you were making decisions at the time in this accelerated period of focus on accessibility in addition to a lot of other things? Where you are identifying risk and taking some steps specifically around improving the accessibility of your technology assets? CHRIS: Sure. And in some cases, what's interesting with the technology assets is our first task, because we are technologists, is let's just fix the technology.  What it really came down to in many cases it's about the business process as well. So, when we started going through the assessment process, we realized the first and foremost, we have a 24,000 student population moving remote. We had to get in front of the faculty and instructors to explain why this was relevant. So, it wasn't so much about, hey, don't put a poorly scanned PDF up on your website, we'd already been providing those types of instructions, but it really had to pivot to, is your course content accessible natively. And in that case, it is still digital accessibility, but it may be, have you applied alt tags to your PowerPoints, have you made sure you're not doing poorly rendered PDFs, is your content screen reader able. It was these sorts of things that are actually technology related but it was about the business process behind it. What we did, we formed a working group between my team, our university library, our center for teaching and learning, and our instructional designers, we call our ideas group, it's a big long acronym I can never remember, but we put those together as ideas is the support resource, faculty primary interact with. Library is a resource that provides a lot of the supplementary external materials, I.T. is a lot of times the bridging infrastructure. So, it was really about forming a coalition within campus, identifying priorities, it was helped inform by the maturity model where those risk areas are, and providing guidance, which wasn't just apply technology, but help individuals creating content to make the content accessible natively, because the incremental cost to them was much smaller than us throwing lots of money at making the technology do it for them. JAMES: You touched on a really important point that I think would resonate with any university around the world, which is the sort of decentralized structure of universities, we'll dig into that more deeply in a minute. But I'm just wondering, as you were partnering, and leading this accelerated digital transformation during the pandemic and focus on accessibility as part of that, how was that received? I recall in part of our conversations, for example, there was, with the faculty, there may have been some incentives around going digital, maybe even going digital and accessible at the same time. But, in general, how would you say this accelerated accessibility was received? CHRIS: So I would say it was received well. I was actually somewhat surprised at how well it was received. Those of you who have been at universities, especially in large universities, they're very decentralized power structures, recognize that change comes slowly. The ship turns slowly, as we like to say, right? It will get there eventually but it turns slowly. I was tremendously impressed with the empathy and the caring shown by the faculty and the instructors involved in supporting students at a distance, but they recognized an individual obligation. And, really, our role as technologists was to reduce that barrier to them to make their content accessible. So, there was some financial structure incentives, as we went into our subsequent semester that helped faculty teaching online to build hybrid instruction. What we did, we developed a series of standards to make sure as our content went out, it met these standards, that was sort of the condition of the incentivising. So rather than make it a big deal, like hey, you all have to do accessibly, it was really embedded into an existing incentivization structure, but we added the accessibility obligations as additional compliance checks to go to an accessible by default role. I was concerned about the uptake we'd see from faculty, you but I was very surprised. The other thing with decentralized higher education, as much as the ship turns slowly, once everybody gets where you're going, they generally get on board. So, we took this more adapt to the culture of the campus, adapt to the change culture of the campus, and tie into those change mechanisms that are effective, that's what really helped us be more successful, I believe, that and the empathy of the faculty and the instructors. SPEAKER: The International Association of Accessibility Professionals membership consists of individuals and organizations representing various industries including the private sector, government, non-profits, and educational institutions. Membership benefits include products and services that support global systemic change around digital and the built environment. United in Accessibility, join I.A.A.P. and become a part of the global accessibility movement. JAMES: So, maybe take a little bit of a step back, but still thinking about the deployment of accessible, inclusive technology assets. Can you talk a little bit about your thinking, U-Mass' thinking and approach to incident management? How do you remediate issues, how does that happen? And then the other piece that I'd love to hear a little bit more is about testing, when it comes to accessibility, automated user testing? CHRIS: Sure.  So, two-fold. On the testing piece, we've employed students both in our help desk and our accessibility office to do some of the testing. We actually are just launching another program to do more broad usability testing, which includes accessibility testing, working in concert with some faculty in our writing program. They tend to have a good degree of expertise in there. So, the other advantage of a higher education institution is students are fresh, motivated, focused and quite inexpensive labor and they like the work. It's great experience, it's great value to them, it's great value to us institutionally. So, we've really tied into that, this is something we've done for many, many years, tie into a workforce that's motivated, it's interesting. We've definitely seen the awareness of our student body around accessibility issues is much greater in the last five and ten years than it has been previously. I've been asked about making sure content is accessible from a course perspective, I've been -- there's been a shift and the challenge is, that shift isn't necessarily as strongly perceived at the faculty that are instructing them because they tend to be a little bit older. So, using the students to help motivate that work has really helped improve the accessibility piece of it because we've embedded the testing more into the core processes when we role out new applications, whether it's a PeopleSoft application or a new web application, we're commissioning that testing as part of launches of applications, as well as new web properties. JAMES: Chris, Mark Nichols is asking a question. If the standards that you're talking about, before content goes out, or even other standards that you're looking at and testing on really to -- related to accessibility, are they in-house standards or are you using global standards like WCAG? CHRIS: They are in-house standards developed off WCAG. But I will get James and Yulia a link afterwards. We posted up our academic standards and it referred to those suggestions, it was built off of WCAG. One thing, just amongst everybody here, accessibility is not my first language. I'm an info set guy, I was a technologist, I was a Linux assist Admin. I know the acronyms, I know the space, but it's not quite my domain of expertise, I'm fortunate to have well-trained staff who understand this both on my team and the disability services team so we can absolutely share those standards. They're academic standards we posted for the fall semester for 2020. JAMES: So, Chris, I know, as I recall from our previous conversations and work, there were sort of nine legacy platforms that you guys had deployed. And I'm wondering if over the course of the many months since we've worked together, how you're thinking about incident management has changed or evolved or how you're approaching that and dealing with that, how much of an issue -- accessibility issues have become in this accelerated period? CHRIS: I mean, the challenge has been, before -- I believe we started talking about the accessibility review before the pandemic. I had high hopes that we would be able to make significant progress in some of our core administrative systems in the shorter term. And then the pandemic hit and next thing I knew, we were running COVID testing sites for the western part of the state. We were running vaccination programs. We were one of the earliest vaccination programs for first responders. So, unfortunately, a lot of the resources I'd have to help make accessibility improvements to our core applications really got put aside for new application deployment. What I will say, we've been strong about implementing accessibility standards for the new applications as we roll them out. So, at this point my hope is to get us back, likely as we refactor some of our applications to do a more detailed review. It's definitely a goal, it's an asserted goal, it's part of the road map and strategy going forward. It's just with the pandemic, the resource allocation tipped everything so sideways. I'm a little further behind than I hoped to be there. Legacy platforms, we haven't made as much progress as I was hoping to. We've certainly made progress. What we've made significant progress in is in the awareness and the accountability that accessibility is an issue that has to be accommodated at deployment or at refresh for an application. That was a huge improvement that we hadn't been able to make as successfully in the past. JAMES: You've shared, at least with me, what I think are some really interesting facts about how you as a CIO had to evolve into using technology to support a dramatically increased public health role of the university for the state during the pandemic, which is pretty amazing. There's another question from Peter, who decides the threshold for compliance? It's never 100%. CHRIS: And, so, again, this is where I'm going to go a little bit on my information security soap box, right? The definition of compliance is just bending the wheel to another. So, yeah, it's never 100%. It's not going to be 100%. Really what we do is use a risk-based model, understanding where the risk is. Usually that started historically, with either liability of the institution or legal accommodation requirements. That's a barrier to cross, that's a legal obligation to cross, but it's really not meeting this notion of digital inclusion as a core value of the campus. So, the threshold is really handled generally on a case-by-case basis. There isn't an arbitrary threshold. What we focus on, these are the recommendations to make your course content accessible, to make your web property accessible. These are the standards. From a web property perspective, we do actually have a compliance check less, we actually have a team inside our university relations group that will run through both automated testing and some hand-based testing to look at, does the content render in a screen reader, does it provide appropriate alt image tags and things like that. My goal with compliance is always making sure that we're investing the right amount of resource to ensure that we meet the largest degree of population as effectively as we can. Information security is a risk management game. Accessibility and compliance become a risk management game. And it's hard sometimes to think of it in those terms, but one of the challenges, I think, that I've seen working with some of my staff is, staff come with a tremendous degree of accessibility concern are passionate, profound and focused. The challenge is also balancing those resources against the other resource needs of campus, right? How much time can I spend on ensuring my web properties are accessible if, at the same time, I have to take those same resources to allocate them to make sure we're setting up a COVID vaccination clinic. It's really a continuum of resource allocations. For me, thinking about how can I make sure there's always a guarantee of resource allocation towards accessibility, recognizing that that might not be core to our mission. What can be core to our mission is deploying accessible applications on an going forward basis. But our core mission is instructing students, performing research, being a land grant institution. We always have to balance that resource allocation to make sure we're moving the ball forward in these different fronts, but serving, first and foremost, what is it we're core here to do, instruct students. Accessibility is a component of that, but it can't be the dominating component. It has to be an absolutely key component, but the dominating is us delivering students with a path to their future. JAMES: Thanks, Chris. Before we go on to the next topic, briefly, if you can talk about thinking about your staff, the technology staff at the university even more broadly, perhaps, the skill and training on accessibility and how you think about that and approach that. CHRIS: Yeah, I think there's three aspects of that. So, the first aspect was, we've had some staff transition, in our accessibility staff. Making sure we have the appropriate professional training for folks who are doing the accommodation work or engagement and consultation work. That's always been a fairly straightforward, that's an institutional investment. That makes good sense. Where the real value we've seen, both from a leadership perspective, raising accessibility as a topic of concern at senior levels at the institution. So, raising this concept, our provost is fluid with the concept of accessibility, right? He's not going to go out and do a WCAG review, but he gets the concept that he can instruct his Deans that this is going to have to be a key component of the content their faculty deliver on a go forward basis. From a training perspective, there's a lot of low-cost effort that we can put in place to raise accessibility on the radar from a leadership perspective, discuss it with a broad team of not just executive but operational, manager and cross-functional teams, we've also been very successful in engaging our students about accessibility conversations, what does that mean to you. Because my concept of accessibility is how big is the font is, a student's concept of accessibility may be how does it render on a cell phone. That's a very different problem set, depending on what technology you apply to that. It doesn't have to be, but we need to collect those voices in terms of understanding what that means and a lot of that does not involve a lot of out-of-pocket cost. JAMES: And just one more question, then we'll move on to one of my favorite topics, which is sort of collaboration across departments. From Kathy, how do you decide what to test? Do you do spot checks of certain course websites and more checking of applications used by larger populations? CHRIS: Sure. So let me break up the administrative from the academic side of things. So, from the administrative side of things, we actually have a review process for our web properties in conjunction between our I.T. team and our university relations team that's responsible for our web properties. So, there's actually a checkoff evaluative process for our core web properties. I'm fully confident there's probably some research lab websites or some individual P.I. websites that were created by word press that probably don't meet the testing. We focus on the high-visibility targets to make sure the information that's most relevant to a large population gets out there. From a course perspective, we do have a couple of very large enrollment courses. We tend to focus most of our resources on ensuring the platform is accessible natively. There is always compliance issues, right? There's always some faculty member that wants to take their PDF from 1982, turned it 10 degrees and scan it and hope it will work. We do spot checks, especially on the large enrollment course, but generally we focus on ensuring the platforms are natively compliant, and then providing strong guidance to the faculty to ensure they have the guidance and parameters of what are those steps that they can take that's relatively die minimums, relatively incremental burden for them but provides a more inclusive experience natively. JAMES: Thanks so much. Now let's shift gears a little bit, Chris, and get into the issues of collaboration, coordination, working across departments at a big university on a big campus. One of the things -- one of the other things that stuck in my mind that you said early on when we started working together was how at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, there are some really amazing, I give you full credit for this term, these pockets of heroic effort. Which I think will resonate with anyone who's doing work in the accessibility field, any kind of organization, that there are really good practices happening in parts of the university. And I think some of the ones that had come up, U Mass were around UDL, instructional design, and some other areas that the Assistive Technology Center, some really good resources and practices. But siloed and not scaled because they are siloed in departments. And even some departments, I think, that may have been a little ahead of others in terms of academic departments in terms of their approach to inclusion and accessibility. I know that since we last worked together, and during this -- these last several months, the accelerated accessibility period, that you've done some work on greater collaboration and coordination. Can you talk a little bit about that, including maybe some description of what it felt like before taking some improving steps? CHRIS: Sure. I mean, for those of you who have spent time, and this is true of both large and small higher education, but higher education tends to be a very siloing structure, at least in my experience. There's a couple of exceptions but there tends to be a lot of belief that faculty are experts in their domain, by virtue of experts in their domain, that there's a lot of notions of self-rule, self governance and that sometimes extends out to administration. I will avoid pining too deeply on that. But there are some challenges that come from that. There's communication, there's logistical challenges. What you end up seeing is subcultural development about, this is important. And what I've observed, and I've seen this both in technology fields as well as accessibility is and let me take it out of the accessibility domain, my email team for many years thought they delivered the best email application out there. They understood how it worked, nobody else understood how it worked but it made a lot of sense to them, and they thought they were doing great. And, so, within their minds, they were providing heroic effort but the impact from a user perspective was not the heroic effort they thought it was going to be. I've observed similar challenges within accessibility at the campus as well. There are these pockets of brilliance, pockets of heroes that are out there working with good empathy this. The challenge is, they don't always have, or they have not been provided the degree of leadership to have these conversations more broadly. So, why is it that one of the very small questions that came up had to do with a resource allocation around providing captioning for course materials for students that had defined accessibilities -- defined accommodations and it became this substantial issue that the costs were decentralized out to each of the departments? And many of our departments, by virtue of being academic, tend to run on very thin budgets. So, when we stopped this conversation, we went into the pandemic, said, what is the net budget impact can here? I can't remember what the number was. Let's say it was $40,000 across the campus. You know, when I brought it up to the right degrees of leadership, they're, like, we're arguing over this? $1.3 billion budget. Don't get me wrong, $40,000 is real money but that's not the thing we should be arguing. By virtue of us decentralizing decision making to that being 40 decisions of $1,000 each, it became much more difficult to get the resource allocation. So the key observation I'd say is, clearly articulating why this is important, clearly articulating that when we marshal our resources collectively, we can make changes that don't seem so big when you're working in a larger context and it really involves that collaboration between and amongst groups and I've actually been very pleased, I think, going through the review with G3ict, certainly delivered us a road map, it certainly delivered us a maturity model, it gave us a sense of where we sat, but it actually opened up conversations amongst teams that have worked and sat together for many, many years but those conversations weren't as effective. You know, we always joke, my background, like I said, is information security with auditors. If the audit doesn't tell you what you want to know, you did something wrong, right? I will say, I have been very pleased with James, had a very objective, and the team he brought in was excellent, but it told us what we wanted to hear, you've got some pockets of brilliance but there's some coordination, there's some logistics, alignment you need to do. Having a third party assert that brought more credibility to this notion of accessibility than any empathetic call from staff on campus could have. JAMES: Thank you for that, Chris. And I think to your credits, and we've done a good number of these reviews of universities and of smart cities as well, I think one of the things that you did was pretty courageous, I think, you involved an enormous number of people from both the academic side of the university and the administrative side in a large number of conversations. I think over these ten conversations that our expert team had with your university community, there were 200 participants, 40 unique individuals, I think, but they were heavily attended, some of the discussions were quite passionate, I will say, because the passion was there. Can you talk a little bit about where -- recognizing and wanting to make even more progress on collaboration and breaking down some of these silos and amplifying some of these heroic efforts. Either where some of these -- what are some of these pockets that you would love to see replicated and I'd also be curious to hear a little bit about what are some of the groups that can help promote this kind of collaboration? We had talked, in particular, in our conversations with U Mass, the faculty Senate actually had been pretty engaged on these issues of accessibility. There is an academic advisory committee, I think, on accessibility. Are there any sort of areas that or groups that can help you as the CIO promote this collaboration? CHRIS: Yeah, you know, that's a great question, James. One of the key things, and one of the things that I found sort of helpful to me in my career, both in the CIO role I'm in, and previously in the information security role, is identifying those governance structures and where they have efficacy. That's one of the things that I've observed at least in some of the accessibility staff I've worked with. They have passion, they have technical focus, they have deep empathy and deep caring, but they don't have the experience with how universities govern themselves or what the governance structures are, where decision authority really rests. It's great to think, you know, I've had staff that think I have all sorts of decision authority, I have responsibility for my $30 odd million of budget, but sort of the extent of the responsibility I have, I have responsibility for standards, as we get into decision making, I have to tie into bodies like our faculty Senate, I have the information technology advisory council, some of these academic advisory councils. We have other both faculty and administration, leadership groups, task forces that are focused on the shared governance structure of universities, we have administrative focus units. So working with accessibility teams to identify where those power structures exist, how change occurs in an institution, and how you can be effective at making this case amongst all the other many cases, that was one of the key things, which again, I was fortunate to have a lot of this experience in information security, I observed many of my peers in information security, other institutions, come in and try to win the day of information security solely on technical merit. Like, well, we're going to go to this, we're going to spend another $100,000 on this new antivirus thing, because it's incrementally better than this other thing. And quite honestly, when you're making that case to a CFO or to a Chancellor or Provost, that's $100,000 for a technical thing I don't understand. Whereas, if you can turn it into a conversation about, either mediating institutional risk, delivering institutional benefit, understanding how change actually occurs on a campus, when you make that case in business terms, it becomes more rational and plausible amongst the thousand other things the Provost or the Chancellor or the CFO has been asked in the last day. So that's the key transition for me, how do you find those power structures, how do you identify those governance structures, how do you make it a business value proposition, not solely a technical or empathetic proposition. JAMES: That's actually a perfect segue, Chris, into a topic that I know you feel passionately about and that we recognize as well in our assessment tool, the maturity model is really pretty critical to an increasing commitment and capability on accessibility, inclusion. And that is what we call, you know, the business case for accessibility. Moving beyond, particularly here in the United States, every university has a legal requirement to be accessible and inclusive, in other countries as well, but you and I are sitting or standing here in the U.S. today. But we'd like to sort of move the conversation beyond risk avoidance and legal compliance to what is the business case? As you say, the why or the value proposition, of accessibility. Based on your experience, either over the past year as a result of or as part of this assessment, or just in general, can you talk a little bit more about that, that key issue of how you are trying to tap into the why and the value proposition at U Mass? CHRIS: Absolutely. So, one of the key value conversations we have on a regular basis, and this is not a conversation unique to U Mass, it's not a conversation even unique to the northeastern United States, but within the United States, there is a significant decline coming in college-age students in the coming years based off of just changes in birth rates, patterns like that. What you're seeing is increasing competition within the field for high-qualified students, you've seen this manifest through, U Mass was deeply involved in the closure of mount IDO, we actually took over parts of the campus, we inherited some of the students from there, you know, recently, I know Becker college in Worcester announced that it is intending to close as well. One of the key things that drives university budgets is attracting, retaining strong students to maintain competitiveness. And if the population is shrinking, one way from a business value perspective is to make sure that you're delivering a natively accessible education to appeal to as broad a population of students as possible. If we are, by virtue of not providing accessible content, unintentionally excluding some arbitrary percentage, say, even 5% or 10% of our students. That's 10% of a student population that will not become paying students, high-quality students. We're excluding a portion of our population that could engage. And that's based on a conjecture of 10%. If the conjecture is much higher, we could be unintentionally avoiding potential population when we know there's going to be restrictions in that. So from a very raw perspective, if budgets are driven at institutions through a combination of both undergraduate, graduate tuition, and research education, if we're not strongly positioned, meeting the market demand, and that can either be meeting market demand because there's a growth or being more competitive and approachable to a larger population, if there's a reduction in that student -- potential student population. We are not tied into the strategic mission of the institution to provide our role as a land grant, to provide instruction to residents of the commonwealth and to create a workforce for the commonwealth. We have over 250,000 living alumni from U Mass, vast majority of them stay in Massachusetts. At U Mass, we graduate more students than the top eight private institutions from the state of Massachusetts combined. That means we're tied deeply to the workforce. So, if we cannot find a way to make our content accessible and approach that, we're not only risking our own potential economic future, but we're actually risking issues of workforce development and long-term competitiveness of the state potentially. JAMES: Yeah. A couple thing in there that I would love to follow up on. One is, you've talked about the role of students, the diversity of students as a driver for the competitiveness of U Mass in fulfilling your many roles as a land grant state university. As you're thinking about the why and the value proposition, are you having discussions or thinking about, we certainly discussed this as part of our engagement, the technology assets you're deploying, the accessibility of them, it also impacts faculty and staff, is that part of the calculus as well? CHRIS: It absolutely is. Because, again, that same, you know, rubric holds, as we remain a competitive institution, we have to be competitive in our hiring practices. And that means approaching as broad a population of the available talent pool out there. If we are not delivering natively accessible experiences, whether that is directly instructional or it's, you know, pedantic as H.R. forms, right, everybody's got to do an H.R. form somewhere, but if we're delivering, and we've had our challenges in the institution of three copy, carbon forms that, you know, our vice Chancellor of human resources loves to say, he shut off the last -- he got rid of the last typewriter not that many years ago, right? There's clearly some substantial issues that we've had. If we're not competitive with the potential workforce, both at the highly skilled faculty level, at the highly skilled technical level, but at all levels of the organization, we're going to potentially compromise the available resource pool as well. So, again, if it comes back to business case, I see a compelling business case to make sure accessibility is core to our digital transformation because it allows our long-term access to a larger candidate pool. With the move to remote work, we're having very serious conversations, what does that mean, long term, right? We've had staff working remotely, we're going to struggle, like every other public and private institution is now, what does it mean for workforces returning, if the pandemic slows as we're hoping? Would we accept this notion of more broad remote work? Does that increase our potential labor pool? Those are all interesting questions that are going to have to be worked out. But if we cannot position our institution to be natively digitally inclusive, we're excluding a portion of our population that may have accessibility accommodations that we're just turning our back to from the get-go. And that's a challenge. That's a loss both to us and it's a loss of potentially high talented, high-skill individuals that could make this university stronger. JAMES: So, Chris, I would imagine that with your expertise and experience in the information security space, you've sort of tackled this issue of the value proposition, the why of security. How is the starting conversations, advancing conversations about the business case, the why and the value proposition, of accessibility, how is that being received? Where is it being received well, where is it a bit more of a struggle? CHRIS: I'd say it's being received well at the high level when I talk about this notion of making sure we're finding the most accessible pool, we're making -- ensuring we're going to remain competitive, tying to workforce. I think the value proposition, executive level, is very strong there. We've always been very successful at the value proposition at a very operational level, for our students and our staff that are providing accessibility accommodations, who are working with students on a one-to-one basis, for our help desk who are taking calls. Where the challenge is, and I think we've had a path to move forward, is for people who do not have either the high-level strategy, do not have the day-to-day blocking and tackling is trying to make the value proposition of why is this one more thing they should do, why should you take ten more minutes to ensure accessibility, alt image tags, why should you take two more minutes to turn on the captioning features in Zoom or PowerPoint? So, I ended up teaching again this fall, I taught for many years at U Mass, I took a number of years off. When I taught this fall, I taught entirely remotely, I taught entirely by Zoom. Zoom's native captioning feature wasn't there. So, I elected to use PowerPoint, use Office 365, turn on the captioning when I lectured. I use Zoom to record the lecture. And it put the captions into it. It's not perfect. It wasn't great.  But the cost to me was thinking to do it, clicking a check box on Office 365 on PowerPoint and making sure I hit play and record. So, the incremental burden to me of applying captioning to course content, and I've taught this course material for 20 years, this is the first year I did that. So, there is two minutes of clicking, it took me about ten minutes going through each of my slide decks to apply alt image tags. That investment of my time as an instructor is absolutely worth it to make sure that content is more accessible. And that's the value proposition I think we have to hit that middle portion of the population, if we can move that population, the impact is going to be tremendous. SPEAKER: With the adoption of WCAG 2.1 in many countries, there is an increased demand for web developers, designers and other professionals with knowledge of web accessibility standards and guidelines. With this growth comes the need for an objectively verified level of expertise. The Web Accessibility Specialist exam will provide individuals and employers with the ability to assess web accessibility competence. Complete the WAS and CPACC exam to earn the special designation of Certified Professional in Web Accessibility! 

Presenters: Anatoliy Popko, INTEGRATSIYA, Moscow, and Daniel Frank, Wells Fargo Accessible by default. When planning and gathering resources for an accessibility program, we need to examine what sort of resources we need, where they should be located in the organization, and what function they should or should not serve. In this wide-ranging Q&A session, Anatoliy and Daniel will offer a practical approach to resource analysis, allocation, and treatment derived from financial sector background.    Strategic Leader in Accessibility Series, Session 4: Resource Engagement Speaker: Please welcome Anatoliy Popko and Daniel Frank. Anatoliy leads “Dialogue in the Dark” Moscow team and consults the Bank of Russia and other prominent financial, cultural, and government institutions. He is a co-author of the Russian national standard on digital accessibility based on WCAG2.1.      Daniel is a Compliance Officer with Wells Fargo. He is responsible for Enterprise ADA Title III Policy and related major compliance requirements and leads the ADA Title III compliance Community of Practice.     Today they will be discussing a practical approach to resource analysis, allocation, and treatment derived from a financial sector background. They will touch on what sort of resources are needed, where they should be located in the organization, what function they should or should not serve, and more!    ANATOLIY: My name is Anatoliy Popko, and I'm from Moscow, Russian Federation. And Daniel, what's your name, by the way? DANIEL: I'm Daniel Frank and I'm in Florida, in the United States. ANATOLIY: Okay, great. Thanks a lot for agreeing to answer the questions and to participate in that session. Well, I'm actually, I have to admit that I'm relatively new to the big and interesting world of high-tech accessibility, so to say, and I call myself a disability or accessibility enthusiast. I'm totally blind so I am, you know, very much fond of accessibility and enjoy its result. If there are any in Russian Federation, I wouldn't say there is a lot of that so there is a way to go. But I work with Sberbank, it's main Russian bank, Russian financial institution, and thankfully, since about, like, maybe four years, they started to treat accessibility very seriously and so there is a little bit to share in that respect but basically my role today is to torture you, Daniel, with the questions, and so I beg your pardon in advance. And from what I know, you've been in the  accessibility field a lot so can you share a little bit about that? DANIEL: Yeah, it feels like a lifetime. So, I'm currently a compliance officer with Wells Fargo Bank in the United States, and my responsibility is primarily ADA Title III, and to some extent also some other customer accessibility regulations compliance. My background is kind of varied. I think, like a lot of people in accessibility, I came to this through other occupations, largely product management, and I was for many years in product management which was very much about customer experience which I think is a good preparation for this. And my education is both computer science degree as well as a business degree, and I definitely use both of those skills all the time in this role. And I would add -- and I think it's relevant to our discussion, during my misspent youth, when I was in computer science graduate school, I found that the computer science department was not as interested in some of my research interests as I was, and I ended up spending about a semester in the industrial engineering department. And at that point was exposed to the work of W. Edward Deming and total quality management and I had almost forgotten about that in a lot of ways until the last year or two and really came to realize how -- with how influential that was on my approach to accessibility, as well as how much it has to offer us in terms of perspective around accessibility. ANATOLIY: And you actually promised to start our session today with a short story, TQM related. DANIEL: I don't know how many people in the call are familiar with Deming, he was very well known, I think, in the '70s and '80s, but probably is not as well known now. And Deming began his career I think as an academic in -- and his specialty was quality, and he was concerned about how you produce quality products. And he went to U.S. companies, large U.S. manufacturing companies and none of them were really very interested. This was a time when, you know, automobiles were kind of built to be disposable and that, you know, kind of breaking down quickly was a feature, not a bug. And so, he kind of took his show on the road and ended up working with Japanese manufacturing companies. And I think people believed that sort of the origin of quality in Japanese manufacturing is in Japanese culture and it certainly has a very strong influence but, really, the actual execution came from this American academic who went to work with Japanese auto companies and other manufacturing companies, and this idea of continuous quality improvement really originated with his work in total quality management. So, the Japanese car companies began importing cars to the United States and those surprisingly didn't break down right away, and so the American car companies began seeing effects on their sales and became very concerned that they had better get on this total quality management band wagon in order to maintain their position in the market. So, they hired Deming to come in as a consultant. And there is a story, I don't know if it is true or not, but it definitely has made the rounds, that Deming was invited to speak before a group of executives at Ford Motor Company, and standing up in front of the room, he gave his talk on quality and he opened the floor for questions. The first question, the gentleman in the front row stood up and he said, “Dr. Deming, I'm the newly appointed vice president for quality at Ford Motor Corporation. What is the first thing that I need to do? “And Deming looked at him and said, "Resign." And of course, he didn't really mean that there shouldn't be anybody doing quality at the top at Ford Motor Company, but his point was, that's -- W. Edwards Deming is the name of the scholar, and -- but his point was that you don't do quality from the top down. You do quality from the bottom up, and that is the whole idea behind total quality management, is that -- is that quality really is done, you know, from the lowest levels up to the top. That doesn't mean you don't need guidance at the top, but it means you don't get quality by putting someone at the top, whether it's your vice president of quality or whether it is your chief accessibility officer. And then saying, problem solved, now we have an executive in charge, and now we'll get accessibility or quality or whatever it is. And I think they're very similar in that way. We'll talk more, like, you know, during the discussion about what that really means. ANATOLIY: That sounds like, you know, quite a sound step. So, if a large corporation wants to become accessible, then it's a logical sort of point, to appoint a vice president or that all the products from now on will be accessible. So, you are saying it doesn't work that way. But is that more or less, you know, enough for the first step, or not really? DANIEL: I think that -- and kind of -- you know, we'll talk about what I think the steps should be, and you need leadership for that. You do need leadership, you need leadership, you need executive support. But you really need to integrate accessibility in a way that in many ways is, I think, similar to the path of industrialization and mass production. That is, I think -- my sense is that looking at the history of particularly digital accessibility in the industry it really starts as kind of a craft enterprise, right? So, in the old days, you had a shoemaker, the shoemaker in the village made shoes. You needed a pair of shoes, you went to the shoemaker, they measured you, they made the shoes. Our colleagues in the U.K. would call them bespoke shoes. Every pair of shoes was made by the Shoemaker. The shoemaker was incredibly talented and gifted. They probably had apprenticed with their father, who had apprenticed with their grandfather. They had probably been a family of shoemakers for generations, and they knew everything there was about making a shoe. In many ways, what we started with in accessibility is that our resources -- and this is a talk on resources, our resources have primarily been skilled crafts people. They've been people who knew WCAG, they knew every single success criterion, they knew all the -- all the different ways you had to implement the success criteria and how to test for those. They knew how to go into a website and determine whether it was accessible, to do an audit, right, to do -- and then to know how to do the remediation. And so, they were almost like the people, you know, like the journeyman masons who built the cathedrals in medieval Europe, where if your town needed a cathedral, you didn't call the shoemaker and the baker to build the cathedral, you called the masons and you got on their schedule, and they showed up in your town and started building the cathedral. And that's kind of how we've done accessibility in -- we've had that sort of craft model in accessibility where we have very skilled people and we try to get enough of them and we try to scatter them through the organization, and then they run from place to place like the masons building the cathedrals and try to build accessibility into people's products. And I think that similar to industrialization, to be -- to really scale and to really be sustainable, we need to move from that craft model to a model in which people who know less than those skilled crafts people are performing part of the task, just as, you know, we -- very few cars are handmade anymore and those are status symbols now but if you buy a car, typically, it was made on an assembly line and it was made in stages and people working at each stage, and now the robots who work at each stage, are doing their part of building that car. In order to produce the final product. And so, my belief from a resource standpoint is that we need to organize resources and accessibility in order to move to a kind of division of labor, assembly line sort of approach as opposed to this sort of crafts person approach. Because there just aren't enough crafts people in the world. ANATOLIY: That's the first point. And the second one is that when you were talking about, you know, buildings and this kind of stuff, building can actually be completed while, if we're talking about digital product and accessibility in general, that's not, you know, a process that can be actually finished. So that is kind of a building that grows, you know, with every single day and it develops and there is, you know, layer after layer, functional additions and, you know, various interface additions and those also need to be taken care of and to be accessible, so that's kind of like, you know, also an important point here. DANIEL: Absolutely. And I think the buildings never really completed and I think if you stop working on it, it falls down. ANATOLIY: Yeah, good point, too. Okay. Well, people, people, is the main resource, is that correct? Is that your idea? DANIEL: I believe that people are a key resource but I actually believe that for sustainability, you need a lot more resources than people. You really need process. Process artifacts, tools. And the reason that's so important is because there aren't enough crafts people, right? We can't turn everybody in the shoe factory into a craft Shoemaker, into a bespoke Shoemaker. They have to know their part well, but that person may not know how to make a whole shoe and they shouldn't know how to make a whole shoe. People have other jobs to do, and so what we need to look at -- and we look at this in manufacturing, is this balance between individual skill and training, and training always plays -- I think looms large in people's minds about well, we have to train people. Well, training is one approach, right? But training assumes that what you need do is you need to incorporate all of the knowledge into the person, and that's really, in many ways, a craft model, right? That says, you know, you're a programmer, or you're a product manager, or you're a visual designer. And in addition to those skills that you've taken years to acquire and that occupy a big part of your brain, I'm now going to give you some training and you're going to have to learn all this other stuff in order to now incorporate -- you have to figure out how to incorporate that into how you do your job and that's cognitively challenging and often very impractical to do. So, what you need to do is you need to look at how could I -- how could I use other ways of incorporating accessibility, knowledge and practice into people's jobs that doesn't involve taking up a lot more space in their head? And we kind of know what those are, right? At the simplest level, it might be checklists, things like checklists, it might be artifacts that have to be filled out, right? As opposed to teaching every designer that they have to be concerned about tab order, you can simply have an artifact that says, here's a tab order spec. You have to fill this out when you do your interaction design, right? And that's pretty straightforward. Another thing is incorporation into standards of various sorts, like design standards. So I was a very interesting -- really great talk at Walmart digital a few months ago -- well, I guess a year ago now before we all couldn't get together in person and they put up a slide that for me was really, really interesting because on that slide was a set of color combinations. And they said -- they said, you know, we tried for years to get people to do color contrast and we could never get -- we could never get the designers to understand color contrast, which as we know, that's a success criterion in WCAG. And then we just stuck in the design guide, these color combinations and said you can only use these, and now we have no problems with color contrast, right? Because we didn't try to teach them a new skill or ask them to use a new tool. What we did is we incorporated the accessibility requirements into their existing artifacts and their existing practice in terms that they can understand. And I'll just give one more illustration of that. I was talking to a group of product managers recently and -- and we were talking about a particular kind of -- a group with a particular set of profile around disability and capabilities and I said to them, you know, really what this, like, where we're running into here is you're missing a persona. Being -- you know, having been a product manager, I know product managers often will use personas which are essentially kind of -- they're kind of cardboard cut-outs of people in a sense where you have a profile of that person. So, the persona might be 45 years old and they work in the controller's office and they, you know, have a couple kids and they have moderate computer skills, right, so that's a persona, right? And since accessibility is really just user experience, right, I mean, bottom line accessibility is user experience. It's the user experience of users who may have disabilities. And so, the -- and so what you need in user experience is to have a persona for someone who uses a screen reader. A persona for someone who maybe can't get in a car and drive somewhere in order to receive a service, right? You need those personas included into the ones that you look at as you're servicing your interaction design, all the parts of that process of building a new product. As opposed to, you know, teaching someone and giving them training, to make them sensitive to disability which I think is important, right? But in terms of how they do their job, it's a lot more useful to bring in a subject matter expert long enough to create the proper personas and then that person leaves and the normal product management process takes over. Now those people become your human resources, but they don't really know they're your human resources for accessibility, they're just doing the job the way they always did their job, they just have some additional things that guide that job in kind of the normal channels. And I'll just -- just one more story which I was working with someone who was working on design standards, and they asked me to take a look at their design standards. They were very proud of the fact that there was a whole section in their designed standards for accessibility. And I said -- I looked at it and they said, “Well, what do you think?” I said, “Well, you really need to remove that section”. They said, “Well, what do you mean, I need to remove the section?” I said, “If you have a section for accessibility, first of all, it's a new topic, right? Second of all, what's the message to the designers?” The message to the designers, it's usually at the end, like after everything else, at the end is the accessibility section. And what does that say? I'm busy, I have a lot of demands on my time, I'm under pressure for time and budget and everything else. Oh, here's the stuff at the end, I won't do that this time. And the psychological effect is really important. You have to think about the psychology of how people respond to these things. And what you need do is you need to take that section; you need to break that up into multiple sections. And they said, “what about reading order and tab order?” I said, “have a section called "Considerations for keyboard interaction."” Not accessibility, not disability, considerations for keyboard interaction. Now keyboard interaction is one of the requirements in the design and here's how you think about it. And by the way, that would include having a visible focus indicator, right, so you can see where you are, and it would include, you know, the fact that you can navigate through a reasonable -- all the things, right, that we think about as required but they're just another part of the job. And I think until we reach that point, we can't properly marshal those resources. SPEAKER: Do you want to continue the discussion from this podcast?  Members can access the Strategic Leader in Accessibility community of practice in our connection's platform. If you are not a member, please check our website for all IAAP Membership benefits or email us at info@accessibilityassociation.org and we will be happy to talk about membership and help get you engaged. ANATOLIY:  Well, you've actually mentioned a lot of sort of brave ideas, that's what I would call those. The first one is to teach personnel as little about accessibility as you possibly can. DANIEL: Yeah. Actually, yes. Now, I actually think it's really important from a training standpoint that we teach people about disability. As a diversity dimension, I actually think the most important training we can do, honestly, is to teach people about disability. And the reason for that is that when we then go to people and we talk to people about, well, we have to make things -- these things accessible for people with disabilities, we now are talking about something that they have some relationship to. I find that, you know, there is a great -- a great -- I think it was a Far Side cartoon which was, what we say and what dogs hear. And it's just a two-panel cartoon. The first panel, there is a guy yelling at his dog and he's going, you know, Ginger, bad dog, don't eat the food off the table, don't make a mess, Ginger. Just yelling at poor Ginger, the golden retriever. And the next panel is what dogs here. There's blah, blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah, blah, blah Ginger, blah, Ginger. And in a lot of ways, if you go to people and say, well, we absolutely have to, you know, include and meet the needs of people with disabilities, it's blah, blah, blah. It's like what's a person with a disability. Almost -- you know, most people you will encounter in companies now are no older than 35 years old. They have been using technology since they were three. You know, computer is completely -- who wouldn't use a computer, right? They're in the prime of their life, right. They can't imagine ever having to wear reading glasses or not being able to run and jump and do all sorts of things that they do now. And so, in a lot of ways, the first thing you have to do is harness their imagination so that they understand the terms you're using. And understand why that would matter. Because, you know -- I mean, a lot of young people don't deal with people who are elderly very much. I'm really finding, right, you know, I've been asked at various times, you know, well, isn't not using a computer just a preference? ANATOLIY: Like going to the office. DANIEL: Literally -- right? And so, you -- if there's any training that's valuable, the most valuable training is, first of all, to define your terms and create a picture in their imagination of why it is you're asking them to do these things, and who the audience is. Who the user base is? And -- but then -- so separate from -- so that's really understanding disability but understanding accessibility is something that we can -- we can make a less -- again, less of a, you know, body of skill for most people, and more simply a body of practice that's incorporated into the jobs they already have. And returning to total quality management, right, this is really kind of the idea behind total quality management. If you think of quality control, first thing people think about with quality control is we're going to do an inspection. This is what Deming called quality by inspection and that's basically your site audit, right? So, you build a website or you author an electronic documenting or you build a building or you -- you know, you set up a servicing facility, whatever, and you completely finish it and then you -- the accessibility inspector comes in. And, you know, that's what most people's ideas of quality control is. I'll come in, see if you made it accessible or not. We don't build buildings that way for accessibility, right. In U.S., we have the 2010 standard for accessible design. We have local building codes. Architects and designers are trained in this. There's a plan that incorporates those, the plan is reviewed for accessibility, then the building work is started, the architect comes on site, there are regular inspections to make sure the plans are being followed and then by the time the city building inspector shows up to measure the width of your doorways and the height of your ramps and the accessibility of the bathrooms, you're probably 90, 95 to 99% of the way there. Most of the time, you know -- anyway, had a building inspector come and they found one thing and you're happy because they found the one thing. But if you didn't start at the beginning and you're only doing this by inspection at the end, you're not going to get accessibility. And quality and accessibility are much the same that way. You don't get quality by building the cars however the heck you want and then there's somebody who sits at the end of the line and sees if they're broken. ANATOLIY:  No. DANIEL: That's called a low yield problem, right? And so, what you want is incorporating -- you know, we incorporate quality into manufacturing by looking, for example, at sources of quality breakdowns and looking, do we need to add automation? Do we need to improve automation? Do we need to change practices? Do we need to adjust how people do their jobs? We engineer the jobs and the automation and workplace and all those things in order to improve quality and we need to do that the same way with accessibility. It is really a business process, engineering problem. In a lot of ways that needs to be informed by all the brilliant craft expertise and all the subject matter expertise that we have but it is ultimately -- it is ultimately a question of an integration with process, not of, you know, totally changing hearts and minds and getting everybody to want to be an accessibility expert. Or inspecting all the time. Inspections are important. You should also have checkpoint, processes break down, processes may have problems, but the inspections are to tell whether your process is working. The inspections are not to produce quality. Or accessibility. ANATOLIY: Okay. So, what you're saying is that not every person who actually adds value to the accessibility needs to know how to spell the word "Accessibility," so he just needs to, you know, do his or her job properly and in accordance with the rules, you know, that includes accessibility by default. How about dedicated accessibility team? Is that supposed to include craftsmen and, you know, those accessible geniuses or is it necessary? DANIEL:  I think it's absolutely necessary. ANATOLIY: Okay. We found the place for them. DANIEL:  It's really what they do, right? Today, those people are primarily testers, so they're primarily doing evaluations because nobody knows how to do an evaluation, so we need an expert to do an evaluation. There are people who are-and who are consulting, right so, they come in and they try to teach people how to do accessibility as part of that consulting engagement. So, they're being deployed as a kind of patch, right? They're kind of the team that sort of runs around and, you know, tries to cover all the bases but always seems to never have enough capacity and never have enough time. I think the best use of subject matter experts is to -- is to use them to bake their knowledge and experience into artifact, process, automation potentially, such that what their purpose is, is not so much to constantly do testing and audits and consulting but to do -- but to really drive that integration process in the first place. Now, if you have TQM in your company and you're doing quality management, you have you still have QA testers, you still are doing testing, right? You always do testing. You need audits, you need governance, you need, you know, to be able to have a dashboard and have testing that can drive data into a dashboard so that your management can see how the company is doing, and to monitor kind of back-sliding because back-sliding can occur either in process or process observation. Back-sliding can occur because the underlying platforms that are software and systems run on change, right? Apple in IOS13 actually broke accessibility in voiceover and a lot of people were -- who had not changed their software suddenly found there were accessibility challenges. And TCM -- that's TQM, total quality management is the acronym I'm using, had a question about that, and so you still need people to do audits, you need people to do testing you need people to work on process integration. You need a subject matter expert to review your design standards because you have to make sure, number one, that they're comprehensive for WCAG considerations, right, if you're doing digital. So, you need to make sure they're comprehensive and that they include, for example, the requirements for keyboard interaction. You need to make sure that they are specifying colors, and that those colors have all been checked to make sure they have that 4.5 to one contrast ratio, right? And so, you need -- you always need a team of SMEs and craftsmen but their orientation, I believe, and the most effective use of their time is to leverage their abilities by building them into process and artifact. And tools, picking the right tools, setting them into the right processes, making sure the processes are stood up and integrated. That's where the real value comes because now you can leverage your expertise. And in many ways, you know, it's what we're doing today, right? We're having these webinars and creating the body of knowledge for a certification because each of us knows things and everybody on the team working on the certification comes from a particular body of experience and knowledge and has particular skills. Skills I don't have, other people have. Experience I have some other people might not have. But what we're doing is we're pooling our experience and we're turning that into something that other people can learn from and to help them do in their jobs and that leverages our knowledge a lot more than if I just went and, you know, sat down and went through someone's website and told them what was broken. Not that that isn't important, right, but it means, I get -- that's at retail. So, I get one website out of that. We do this work, and we do the work we do in the IAAP in terms of professional improvement, we are leveraging our knowledge and experience across hundreds or thousands of people. And it's similar in terms of how, I think, we have to approach the way that we use resources for accessibility in our organizations. ANATOLIY: So, what I'm saying is that the dedicated accessibility team basically, needs to place a lot more emphasis on the documents, rather than on people. So, you don't just go around asking people to provide, to create accessible design. Rather you just improve the documents, so, the prestigious, the documents themselves are full of implicit accessibility practices. DANIEL:  Yes. That's a great way to put it, actually, that's a really great summary. ANATOLIY: Okay. So, documents, when you're talking about artifacts, can you tell a little bit more about that, like, specifically, what do you mean? DANIEL:  So, when I talk about artifacts, I really talk about, you know, sort of concrete actual kind of physical things, and either that or digital things that mimic physical things, right? So, an example of an artifact might be a design specification, right, or a visual design specification, or an interaction specification or interaction plan or a content specification. And those are typically where design is done in a formal way, right, and part of -- part of our challenge often is that we come into processes where these things have -- and around websites, for example, historically, websites have been built by geniuses, too, so the business goes I need a website to do X, often in smaller companies, right? I need a website to do X and here's my vision and here's -- you'll get on the white board for a few minutes and then the programmer is this, like, genius who is sort of a designer, too. They're not quite a designer but they kind of know how to lay out a screen and do that stuff and so nobody ever writes down a formal design spec, right? And that's just a maturity issue for organizations in general, anyway, right? Ultimately that doesn't yield consistent design and, you know, organizations go through a maturity curve in terms of their websites, as well. But let's assume an organization that has gone through that kind of maturing process, and they do have a requirement for actual professional designers who are creating the visual interaction and content specifications, and those may take different forms in different organizations, right? We can't prescribe and say every organization needs these three documents. But there is information in those documents that every organization ultimately needs their programmers, their developers to have, not just for accessibility, right, so let's forget accessibility for a moment and say, just for website design, right? A sort of mature process will have those three elements that are presented in some form, right, to the person who ultimately writes the code, in that organization. And that form may be different in different organizations, roles may be structured or laid out differently in the design and development process in different organizations but, ultimately, that's the information you need to have a good website design. What color are things going to be? How are they going to be laid out? Do we have standards for things, right? How does the user interact? What are the interaction patterns, right, and these are the things that designers know about in their job. And so, the art -- those design specifications are kind of artifact. And so, when I use the word "Artifact," that's really what I'm referring to. So, when the SMEs come in and they look at the artifact, they say I'm a WCAG SME, I know what information the developer is going to need in order to make something accessible. I know what additional kind of information we have to make sure we have proper hygiene around in these things. That's things like colors, right, what colors is the programmer going to code into those – you know, hex codes for the colors, right? What is the keyboard navigation order, right, for keyboard operability? What are the interaction patterns and how do those patterns work? What about alt text? What about descriptions, right? There's all this content that even an accessibility aware developer needs that needs to be included in those artifacts, and so that's a kind of -- that's a kind of artifact I'm talking about. Also, a design standard is an artifact and coding standards, and coding checklists are artifacts, and you need to look at the balance -- again, it's -- in many ways it's an industrial engineering problem. What is the balance between giving people checklists or incorporating more into software? There is a -- for example, just in WCAG testing, right, people who want to do testing or can audit or test for WCAG conformance in a website often, you know, like step A, right, they're the Shoemaker and they work from their head, right? I did this, my father did this, my grandfather did this before me, I know all the steps for making a shoe, I've never written it down, I learned it from my father, right? Step 2, I have a checklist of all the things I need to put in the shoe. Oops, needs a sole on the bottom, otherwise people's feet get hurt, right? You have the checklist, right? Third stage is maybe I have software and we're starting to see these software packages now which are so welcome that walks someone through the process of doing testing, right? And so now you get into the question of -- again, these are really business process and automation process. Industrial engineering questions, if you have. Is where does the knowledge reside? And what's the best place for the knowledge to reside in terms of my efficient use of resources? Should I be putting a lot of people on this, or should I buy a computer program? You know, should I have a row both building part of the car instead of assembly line workers and what are my trade-offs there, right? So, it really is that sort of -- that sort of issue. And so, I think that -- and I think what we're really in some ways trying to do with this certification for this strategic leader in accessibility, I think we're also starting to lay out a lot of those organizational considerations by talking about the leadership role who is responsible for those considerations. So, I hope that we'll see an increasing body of knowledge about how to do this. SPEAKER: The IAAP Accessible Document Specialist (ADS) credential is intended for accessibility professionals who create and remediate accessible electronic documents and their related policies. The ADS credential represents an ability to express an intermediate level of experience designing, evaluating, and remediating accessible documents. The ADS credential is beneficial for people in or aspiring to be a User Experience Designer or Tester, Web Content Manager and Administrators, Project, Program, and ICT Managers and more!  Check out the IAAP ADS certification webpage to learn more!       

This episode features a conversation with Neil Eustice, Diversity & Knowledge Manager, KPMG UK, and Jodie Greer, Be #PeopleSmart​ Ltd. Enabling your organisation to succeed. Neil and Jodie will be sharing their own experiences in both the built environment and in the world of technology, to enable organisations to provide reasonable adjustments or accommodations, meet their legal accountabilities and ensure all those responsible for delivery have the required skills, understand the value and have the ability to deliver accessibility best practice. Hear about how accessibility is acting as a driver for the global economy, how to set your organisation up for long term success and why settling for ‘good enough' does not add value Sponsor and monitor the implementation and continuity of an organizational workplace adjustments process Ensure organizational accessibility standards, requirements, policies, and procedures are developed, communicated, and maintained for the digital and built environments and people interactions Provide awareness, education, and training on how to apply the accessibility standards, requirements, policies, and procedures for the digital and built environments and people interactions Educate the organization on accessibility legislation and regulations in all operating countries.    SPEAKER: Please welcome Neil Eustice and Jodie Greer.  Neil is the Diversity and Knowledge Manager at K.P.M.G. for their I.T. department. He works as the Content Manager for their internal web presence and ServiceNow knowledge base, ensuring proactive delivery to the end user.  As well as ensuring inclusion and diversity is front and centre within their IT department, to ensure their disabled colleagues get the assistive technologies they need to perform at their best.     Jodie is the Managing Director at Be PeopleSmart, where she shares her knowledge, successes and how to overcome barriers, with organisations across multiple industries in the interest of simply putting human factors back into business. Be PeopleSmart works to make disability inclusion and accessibility achievable and aligned with other strategies.      Today they will be discussing how to enable your organisation to succeed.  They will touch on how accessibility is acting as a driver for the global economy, how to meet legal accountabilities, how to educate an organization on accessibility legislation and regulations in all operating countries, and more!    JODIE GREER: So one of the key domains in our body of knowledge for Strategic Leaders in Accessibility, our SLiA, is of course, which I say of course but it seems obvious - accessibility expertise. To really influence you need to know your stuff. We talk about this and we talk about it a lot. I guess it is just important, quite literally, that you do know your subject matter. Neil, what are your thoughts on that and how we capture it in our body of knowledge? NEIL EUSTICE: It does appear that there is a lack of accreditations across the globe in relation to this topic. That is one area where the IAAP really step up to enable development, and competency assurance. If you see that somebody has a CPACC or WAS, or IAAP accreditations, or what we are currently working on, the Strategic Leader in Accessibility, then at least you know they have proven knowledge that has been tested and certified to recognize standards. JODIE GREER: Absolutely! For me, it is about people being able to develop. It gives them opportunities to understand where to go and what knowledge to broader. It is proven competence. So those of us who are already leading in this space. It is really nice to demonstrate to yourself and your stakeholders that you are an SLiA. That would be a brilliant addition to the different accreditations that we see at the IAAP. NEIL EUSTICE: And unlike the other accreditations we have looked at previously in IAAP, this is quite a broad ranging topic, the SLiA, the Strategic Leader in Accessibility, has to not just have knowledge of the technical IT workings of things but also the build side of things. How accessible the building, and things like that. And a bit of a people knowledge as well around HR, legislation. You have got to be able to influence a lot of people to make sure your business is truly accessible. You can't have one without the other. It is no good having a great team of accessibility experts in IT if the rest of the business is ignoring accessibility. Your business just won't cut it. It has got to happen right across the board. JODIE GREER: I completely agree with you. I think for me one of the really nice things is that here in the taskforce of the SLiA is the wide range and holistic knowledge of accessibility that we have got within the team. I think the community of practice calls we have had already and the interaction we have had from accessibility professionals has been quite powerful. We have learned a lot from people. It is enabling us to therefore put that forward as part of our body of knowledge. So obviously we are planning this certification and absolutely hope to see it all go live. This is going to really traction people's development. But also, we need to be practical about this. There is a reason behind needing accessibility. Of course, there is people. But there's also legal obligation. So why would you say, Neil, companies should really be concerned about making sure they are meeting accessibility requirements? NEIL EUSTICE: There's so many countries around the world at the moment that are making it clear that discrimination against disabled persons is not only wrong but illegal in their jurisdiction. Across Europe they have mandated on the requirements for public procurement of products and services. The UK have the Equality Act and the public sector bodies accessibility regulations. You have the US with Section 508, Australia with a Disability Discrimination Act, a National Strategy for Web Accessibility. Canada, their government has web standards and within Canada itself, Ontario got the Accessibility of Ontarians. Right across the world there are legislations coming out. The point is, there are over 40 legislations and growing around the world. It is not just the fear of legal disputes that should be driving your business to act on this topic. If you just concentrate on meeting the legal requirements, then you might be in a position where you just do the legal minimum to safeguard your self from lawsuits. But, your reputation could be tarnished and even trashed without ever going anywhere near a court case. When it comes to the level of accessibility you should apply to your business, our colleague Subhash put it rather nicely recently. He said “Would you rather your child passes a test or pass with distinction? Why would you want less for your business, your staff or your customers?” JODIE GREER: I really like that point that he made. I think this is kind of the point as well. Sometimes what is seen as good enough really doesn't add value. It is important that we don't have tick box exercises as well. Some additional planning, it can really set you up for long-term success as well. Because of course the world changes. Your staff change. Peoples' individual needs change. It is so important that you don't lose talent, but you also of course don't lose productivity. But legislation aside, its really about doing the right thing, isn't it? It is Be PeopleSmart but it is about putting a bit of human centricity back into the workplace. NEIL EUSTICE: I like the idea that people are at the centre of all of this. I know that you were going to talk about the difference between universal design and design with reasonable adjustments. It is not just the technical side of things you need to look at. It is what is best for people, and organizations often attempt to make accommodations. However, they often fall short in meeting their requirements, and enabling people to complete their roles. Or they use products or services, for example, accessible toilets actually meet the needs of many employees. Accessibility is not a one-time affair. It is an ongoing process which has to be maintained for its lifetime. JODIE GREER: Absolutely. I completely agree with you. One of my new favorite sayings which I actually borrowed, I won't say stole, from someone at a recent event is that it is about having enabled staff and customers. It is not about disabled staff and customers, it is enabling every body. I think that is a really nice way of looking at it. It is good for your people and certainly good for your business. But ya, you reference the whole universal design versus accessibility adjustments or accommodations. It is something I am really keen to talk about because for me, absolutely, reasonable accommodations; I mean, we can get a bit fixed on the word reasonable to be honest, so accessibility accommodations or adjustments for individuals are absolutely essential. We are all different. People have different ways of working and preferences and things. We need to make sure people can do what they need to do. But also, universal design is really important. That proactive focus to enable everyone in the first place can actually make life just so much easier for literally everyone about. And then, for those who still need an adjustment or accommodation, that comes thereafter. I think sometimes what I do not see so much, obviously there are building regulations, but when it comes to physical workplace, the built environment, and also the digital workplace. The proactive thing can be a bit lacking sometimes. And I think for me that is somewhere I would love to see a lot more attention put. It is not just about good practice. I think the other thing as well, we often see a bit of hesitance around making accommodations and adjustments, but actually so often they are free, they are low-cost, but ultimately the productivity of someone who is enabled is kind of priceless. So, what are your thoughts there? NEIL EUSTICE: Ya, you are right there is an awful lot of stuff that is free now. Accommodations that are built into a lot of products that we use now, and supplies and manufacturers are getting better and better at building stuff in so you can make changes for individuals.  Also, you say about making somebody enabled and giving them the adjustments that they need, makes them more worthwhile to the business. They get the business done. If you give a level playing field across the board, then everyone has an equal chance of performing their job role, their task. So, to get the most out of somebody you need to give them what they need to do the job of work and whether that is assistive technology in the form of additional software or hardware or whether it is just putting rules and processes in place to help them makes them A more productive but B more loyal to you as well. They tend to, if they feel comfortable, they have the adjustments they need and then they tend to fit in better. They stay longer, you just get more out of them. JODIE GREER: Absolutely! I think sometimes we don't even realize that most if not all of us have an adjustment. I choose to use a one ear cordless headset because it works better for me. I can get up and move around if I choose and so on. Yours is different than mine. Even irrespective of any disability impairment or specific need this works better for me and I feel I work better with certain equipment. NEIL EUSTICE: Ya, and it really is a case of supplying what works for the individuals. It is not a case of well, there are lots of things that can do this for somebody let's choose one because it's more cost-effective and I've seen a lot of people trying to do that. You can't have one-size-fits-all especially when it comes to accessibility because let's face it every disability is unique to the individual and everyone shows or reacts to their disability in a different way and needs slightly different adjustment to somebody who might have what in medical terms is the same disability.  You have to be flexible. You have to be able to provide what they need then to do the job of work. But it doesn't have to cost the earth. If you plan things properly and if you have the right partners in place and get the right knowledge within your business, then you can find out that actually adjustments is just a simple process, really low cost and you get more for your money if you plan these things. Because you get more out of your people by making sure the adjustments are properly in place. JODIE GREER: Absolutely, and I think a big thing with that, going back to the kind of design versus accommodations piece is if you actually design with accessibility in mind its actually a cost saver often. You don't pay for retrofit, you don't pay for alternatives as well as, because it didn't actually meet all the needs. You have a solution that works for everyone. I think sometimes people fall short of recognizing that because everyone gets so busy with their projects and things. With a bit of knowledge and a bit of foresight you get a superior product or service that actually works for your employees and customers. And did it actually cost anymore or is it actually also a cost savings? But also then you get that ongoing retention and also attracting new talent because they can recognize that actually you are inclusive. NEIL EUSTICE: Yeah, everyone who works in technology knows it is a lot more expensive to build in accessibility as an afterthought. If you had only done it at the beginning it would have saved you a huge amount of time and money. It's just not sensible to not think about accessibility when you are designing something right from the offset. JODIE GREER: Absolutely. I think that's why we have been talking a lot when we have been looking at the body of knowledge for the SLiA around the fact that of course to actually be a Strategic Leader in Accessibility, really you need to take that, whether it be ownership or that overarching ownership and the monitoring of the design and implementation of accommodations or adjustment process, the organization. There needs to be a proper end to end process. It can't just be a written document. It has to work and that really is what is going to drive individual's success but certainly business success. NEIL EUSTICE: That is the internal collaboration piece, isn't it? Making sure you've joined all the dots. That every person in your business understands what accessibility is about. They don't have to be a technical person. They don't have to be a legal expert. They just need to understand this is what accessibility means to individuals. This is why we do it. This is how you can play your part irrespective of what your role is in the business, everyone has a role to play in making our business successful. So you need to make sure that communication channel goes right across the board. JODIE GREER: Definitely. And you talk about the partnering piece and that is another one of the domains in the body of knowledge. That partnering is of the internal, there are so many teams that need to be embraced to make sure that everybody can play their part, and everybody understands what that looks like and what is expected and what is needed from them but also they have the knowledge needed. Then you have the external partners. Suppliers, agencies, and consultants you work with and also especially larger organizations there are so many different agencies that may be doing segments for different areas of the organization. It can be quite difficult to make sure you're reaching everyone, so it needs to be part of that strategic plan to make sure you have a method to reach out to everyone and maybe that is through your contracts and procurement team. What are your thoughts on that? NEIL EUSTICE: You need to have an overarching plan for the whole business that says all of these teams have input into the accessibility of our business. So if we are buying something, we need to make sure what we buy is accessible to the people who are going to use it. We need to make sure the procurement team have the processes and policies in place but also have the understanding from an individual level as to why they are having these conversations and how they can talk to the people that they are buying stuff from. The HR people need to understand accessibility and how the well-being of people is affected right down to every individual on the shop floor, be it the receptionist at the front door, they need to understand how do I greet people with different disabilities. Have I got the information to hand? Have I been trained in how to do this because I am the face of the business? So, everyone needs to understand accessibility including your suppliers and why you are doing and it's good to have an accessibility statement that you can show and show off to say look we are doing what we can to be as successful as possible. And ask for feedback as well. JODIE GREER: I really like that, the show off bit. For me it really is something to celebrate. You are inclusive. You actually care about the people that come to your business. In whatever ways that they are coming in, the fact that you care, surely that is a win right from the off. Especially from people's interpretation and their first impression and things. NEIL EUSTICE: It must not just be a merit badge that you wear and show off if there's no action behind it. It is no good to have something stamped on your external website to prove its accessible if as soon as I get to talk to somebody, suddenly they find that the rest of the accessibility of your business falls over. You have to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. JODIE GREER: I was just checking on the Q and A. I noticed that there are some comments in the chat. A couple things good to pick up on, we were talking about retrofitting etc. Someone said “Absolutely, even more expensive in the built environment if accessibility is not addressed in the design. Moving stairs or elevators is certainly expensive. More so than adapting colour contrast.” Absolutely, I was in property for two decades and ya, retrofitting is never ever the preferred method. So, thank you for that. Someone else asked a really interesting question. More about not the world of adults. Any good practice or thought regarding teaching children in school about accessibility and universal design? Studying for grades five or six. I might need someone in the US to tell me the age of grades five or six. NEIL EUSTICE: That is a really good one. The schools, I can only speak from a UK education point but the schools in the UK are a lot more accommodating now than they ever were to children with disabilities. You will find there are teachers assistants in now to make sure we can keep children in the standard education streams without having them go to special schools as much as possible. There are integrations there. Children without disabilities mixed with children with disabilities. It is seen as just normal. That is the way of the world. We are all in the same boat together. So, classrooms have to become more accessible to kids who use walking frames and things like that. Teachers need to understand accessibility because they are talking to children with cochlear implants or maybe need a little extra help sitting near the front because of visual disabilities. All sorts of things. It is becoming a lot more common now. I think the big secret is really just talk about it more. A bit like you talk about your kids about internet security now. When they are all on their phones and doing TikTok and all the rest of it. You wouldn't not talk to your kids about staying safe online and I think we should do the same when it comes to disability and accessibility. Talk to kids about it and say look, there's so many different people in the world and we need to accommodate all of them. SPEAKER: With the adoption of WCAG 2.1 in many countries, there is an increased demand for web developers, designers and other professionals with knowledge of web accessibility standards and guidelines. With this growth comes the need for an objectively verified level of expertise. The Web Accessibility Specialist exam will provide individuals and employers with the ability to assess web accessibility competence. Complete the WAS and CPACC exam to earn the special designation of Certified Professional in Web Accessibility!  JODIE GREER: The integration is fantastic. I do however feel, even in the UK as well, that it is important that we have more real explicit focus on disability inclusion and on accessibility. Because I think that is part of the thing, we almost now get a little bit complacent. That there is integration and therefor it is kind of sorted, it is done. I think there needs to be more active discussion on these things. So, the point about educating children. The adult minds hardly ready to change, but what about children? I think it is easier to get into children because their minds are so open, and they are always learning. I mean we are all always learning, but of course that is actually what they are in school for. I think it would be fantastic to have a proper intention in schools to get people to understand what accessibility is. When you leave education and go into the workplace for the first time, of course you want to prove yourself and demonstrate how good you are. You want to show you where the best choice and all of those things. You've got an awful lot going on. Then you also have some of this extracurricular stuff being thrown towards you. Do you want to get involved in networks? We have twelve, which one do you fancy? You could do them all! You have to really try to find this balance. And then someone is telling you “Oh, we also need you to know about accessibility and things”. Of course, it can start in the workplace. We have done it lots of times. It is certainly making a massive change in the world. But it is kind of too late. If people grow up understanding what it really looks like and understanding how to make it happen and the fact that it is just normality, it is just part of life day to day, then that is amazing. That is when you see proper cultural shift. It just becomes business as usual. You stop needing a lot of this networking stuff dedicated because it is just standard practice. I would love to see it in schools, I guess is what I am saying, and I have had conversations myself with teachers in the UK about channeling it in. But if you do see this happening and other countries, share it on social media and tag me please. I would love to see more about what we do. Someone told me grades five to six is same as year 5 to 6 in the UK. A person with no children, I think that is like 10 years old. I think. TRACEY SHIPMAN: Jodie, somebody posted in the Q and A that it is 11 and 12. (Laughs) JODIE GREER: OK. No kids. (Laughs) So yeah, some of these points and questions that are coming in, are pretty good. So, I just want to make sure we don't miss anything. So certain devices that require a patent. Oh, sorry. Certain devices that PWD require are patented which prevents at times mass production, making it expensive. Open hardware and open source must be looked into. Yes. (Laughs) Yes. NEIL EUSTICE: There is a lot of open-source stuff when it comes to software around accessibility. Things like various fonts. You have the open dyslexic font and things like that. They are sharing a lot of information now. It is a lot easier to find open-source stuff with software. Hardware, I don't know about it. I think certainly there's a lot of competition opening up when it comes to hardware because you will see that somebody comes up with a bright idea. I saw something recently were somebody had invented a glove where somebody could sign with an electronic glove and it would translate it onto a screen. Other people say, "That's a good idea, we can do something like that." It starts to spread. And of course, as it spreads it gets cheaper. But these things always take time. I think the more it becomes mainstream for accessibility and disability to be spoken about in every walk of life than the more people start saying there is business here, I can build something to help with this, and you get a lot of entrepreneurs actually trying to improve things as well and build something that is cheaper or even free sometimes. It takes time. JODIE GREER: I will be honest; I still find it frustrating sometimes that the market is so slow to catch up with the real world. But there is movement. Definitely. We do need to see more in the hardware space. There needs to be a lot more leverage. It shouldn't be difficult, and it shouldn't be more costly because people have some sort of niche market. There is another question, actually, but this is from Christopher. Specifically, about the SLiA, so talking about a Strategic Leadership in Accessibility. Where should they be placed in an organization and we have had a lot of talk about this in the taskforce haven't we? NEIL EUSTICE: Ya. JODIE GREER: My view is that it really depends on the size of an organization, the structure. For instance, if you are in a small or medium-sized company it may well be that it is one of the directors. It may well be your HR lead. It might be very different. But in a large organization I would love to see all large organizations with a dedicated accessibility lead, or potentially that could be your diversity and inclusion lead. Because of course the two certainly have clear synergies. What are your thoughts on that Neil, as we have talked about this a lot? NEIL EUSTICE: And there was a lot of conversation about does it have to be someone in the C-suite? Does it have to be a partner or director of a business that takes on this role? I think we decided that it needs to be somebody who has the ability to influence. So at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what grade they are, what position they have in the company as far as partner, director, manager, whatever. So long as they have the ability to influence the people that make the decisions. So, it is choosing the right person for the job and the right position. And often, as you say, that does depend on the size of the business. The important thing about the strategic leader in accessibility is they have to make sure they can influence all the different component parts of your business, the HR, the facilities, the IT people. The top of the tree that have the finance in their pockets. They have to be able to talk to all these people in their own language and get them to understand why these things need to be done and get them to develop a plan for getting these things done. So, I don't think at the end of the day you should get too hung up about what grade or position in the company should there be, or a case of is this the right person for the job. Have they got the knowledge and have they got the personality to get into all the different parts of our business and talk to people? JODIE GREER: Yeah, definitely. And of course, influence is really key. It is interesting, you mentioned finance. We are talking about influence. I will quickly mention Martin's comment about open source, because it is in the Q and A and I think it is a good point. So, open sourcing can be tricky to implement in bigger companies because big companies like to have responsible contact in case something doesn't work. That is true when it comes to making sure you actually have a clear route of communication, however sometimes it is also about what they have been used to working, ways of working. Sometimes there can be changes that are a bit scary but ultimately still prove beneficial. But thank you, Martin, that is a good point. But you did mention finance, Neil. I wanted to come to that. Because another thing, it is a bit of a term I use, is the unconverted. We have lots and lots of different people, especially leaders in different companies, who may not be so people centric. However, those people are usually commercially centric. You know, dollars and cents certainly ring a bell. So, I would like to just get your views as well on so thinking, not just of course on legislation (can have a financial impact), but not just from a legislative perspective. When we are looking at the bottom line when it comes to the commercial impact, why would you influence organizations, those unconverted, as I say, to make the change and make sure they are being inclusive, and they are accessible? NEIL EUSTICE: So we can't forget about the commercial impacts,  accessibility is an economic driver on the organizational level. It is also a driver on the global economy level. Think about accessibility needs often don't visit countries purely because they don't see them as accessible. Not only tourism, but also medical tourism. There is money that could come into the country if it was more accessible. However, of course organizations also benefit directly from being accessible. Employee retention, we mentioned it slightly earlier, but employee retention, you save a fortune in induction and in training costs if you can retain your staff. Lots of studies have shown that employees with disabilities tend to be more loyal to a company, providing their needs are met. Disabled customers are more likely to come through your door if they don't experience barriers. Anybody who produces technology, websites, apps, applications, will tell you it is much more expensive to fix something retrospectively, as we said before, than it is to build it accessibly in the first instance. So, there's lots of financial aspects to this. Again, the guy who stands, or the person who stands in for the SLiA in your business would be able to talk to all these different areas of your business, explaining the economic impact that accessibility or a lack of can have on that particular area of the business. Be there as a whole or as a component part of your business. It does affect everything. JODIE GREER: I completely agree. I do honestly feel that when it comes to influences, you do need to use both tools in a sense. You have the people impact, which is my real love, and I just think that should do itself, but people love a statistic! Everybody wants to know what the bottom line is. So, for me, definitely also making sure that when it comes to that influential message you get it bound for the fact that it is literally a financial win. NEIL EUSTICE: Also, we have got to think about how organizations can implement these effective ways of working to meet these accessibility objectives. So, what do you think a business needs to put in place to make sure they do meet the objectives of being an accessible business? JODIE GREER: So obviously you have got to start somewhere. Different organizations are at different points in this journey. But for me you need really clear and robust standards. I am not talking about having a really pretty documents on your internet somewhere. That is good, make it pretty. As long as it is accessible. But for me, it is the end-to-end piece. It is so important. I mentioned earlier about not having tick box exercises. That is so essential. If you have a true intent to be inclusive and to enable your staff and customers, that whole piece needs to start with your strategic plan. You need to have those standards and policies in place to enable the implementation of that. It needs to be clearly and explicitly communicated because often these things are a bit hidden. If you know where to find it, you can source the info yourself. But also, about learning. It is not just about saying, "Please do this, this is essential, and we need this new way of working." What does that actually mean? How will I know if I am getting it right? Where is my source of information? Where is my champion? Where do I go for some support? It is that whole structural piece of course. You have got to get there. You have to start. That is why the strategic plan, for me, is so important, so you do understand how you are going to get to your end goals. Then it goes way beyond the point of measuring success, which can be tricky with accessibility because you went in and you have done your design and done your testing for instance if it is for digital. But it is also about feedback. It is not just about waiting for feedback and seeing if you don't get any then it must be good news. It is about actively seeking that feedback, demonstrating your care for people. It really is important that it is end to end. That is the biggest thing. It has to be a proper, and it has to be able to bring, it doesn't kind of happen today and you completed at the end of April and you are done, and no one needs to look at it again. That is why someone has to have ownership. How do you keep it fresh and in line with the world today, tomorrow, and so on? What about your thoughts? NEIL EUSTICE: Communication is so very important when it comes to this education piece and continued communication. So, providing awareness, education and training on how to apply accessibility requirements or the policies for the digital and built environments and the people interactions is really essential. You've got to try to get all the people to bite this apple. You have to show it to them in such a way that interests them. Depending on the role of the individual in the business, they might need to understand different aspects of accessibility and why they need to do something. You can't just point them at a piece of training and say there you go, do that, tic box, as you say. Yeah, you need to understand they have done it. You need to see they have done it in someway. You need them to evidence that they have done it. But the best way to evidence that they have done it is, well, are we improving? Have we got a matrix that we are filling in where we can say when it comes to this part of our business, where were we before and where are we now? Have we improved in our accessibility in this area? Do our people understand what we are doing, how we are doing it, and have they improved in their knowledge of accessibility as far as their role is concerned? So, you really need to keep communicating, two way communication. You need to be getting that feedback, as you said, from people internally in your business, making sure that all the signposts are there as to what they need to do, how they need to do it, and when they need to do it by. Also, the feedback from your customers is so, so important. Not just, oh well e-mail us and we might do something about it.  But e-mail us and we will contact you and we will show that we have acted upon it and that we have done something about your feedback. And show off your feedback. If somebody has left you feedback on a website, show that feedback. Show what you have done about it so you can show action. JODIE GREER: I think they kind of, you said we did typed messaged, are really, really important as they do show real care. It's not to be embarrassed that you weren't perfect in the first instance. Improvement is improvement. Care is care. I think that is the thing, a lot of organizations can be really hesitant to admit any kind of improvement space as in there wasn't one before yesterday. And I think just because you do need to improve doesn't mean you wasn't wonderful, you probably was in an awful lot of ways but there was a gap and there were challenges for someone. But as soon as you are aware, you listened. And, as soon as practically possible you made the change. That is huge. That is progress. That is what we really need to see. NEIL EUSTICE: Loads of businesses are doing really good stuff but if you ask them to demonstrate it, to prove what they'd done, sometimes they find that a bit difficult because we just done stuff. If you have a proper plan and you have a proper matrix of where are we, where are we going and where are we heading for, then it's easier to prove. We have an exercise in the business disability forum in the UK where everyone fills in a matrix every year, to say, a maturity model, to say this is where we are and this is where we are heading for and we found very early on that if everybody is absolutely honest about this and we all were honest about our scores and said actually you know what we are not very good on that bit and I think we are pretty low on that bit. More people stepped up and said actually, yes us too. And then we found there was a common theme, and you don't get anyone who is absolutely brilliant and expert in every single aspect of accessibility in your business. It is something that is moving all the time. It is like a slow-moving escalator. So long as you are moving, so long as you are going up, that is great and where you want to be. And sharing information with each other is often a great way to learn. JODIE GREER: Definitely. And of course, the biggest learning point are the people. So that feedback metric but also having some way, not necessarily feedback on existing services or solutions but having somewhere to actively seek those kind of improvement points. I think that is also really important. So, it is not hidden and you are proactive with engaging people. I think that is also really important. SPEAKER: The International Association of Accessibility Professionals membership consists of individuals and organizations representing various industries including the private sectors, governments, non-profits, and educational institutions. Membership benefits include products and services that support global systemic change around the digital and built environment. United in Accessibility, join IAAP and become a part of the global accessibility movement.      

Kate Nash from Purple Space and David Caldwell from UK Home Office explore the role of disability staff networks in building partnership excellence within an organization. As part of this conversation, they touch on how accessibility leaders can support the development of disability staff networks, the role disability staff networks play in developing a culture of accessibility awareness, and how disability network leaders can be vital support and allies for accessibility leaders.  HOST: Please welcome Kate Nash and David Caldwell.  Kate is the Head of Purple Space, the world's networking and professional development hub for disabled employees, network, and resource group leaders.     David is the Head of Accessibility and Digital Inclusion at U.K. Home Office, a UK government department. His main focuses at the Home Office are accessibility strategy, policy, and assurance.      Today they will be discussing the role of disability staff networks in building partnership excellence within an organisation.  They will touch on how accessible leaders can support the development of disability staff networks, the role disability staff networks play in developing a culture of accessibility awareness, and more!    DAVID: My name is David. I'm -- I currently work at the Home Office in the UK as the head of accessibility and digital inclusion and I'm really pleased to be part of the strategic leader in accessibility working group, and today we'll be focusing on one of the domains that is inside the book of knowledge and as part of the work that we've been doing. The domain we are looking at is partnership excellence and we are focusing specifically on disability staff networks, and I can think of nobody else in the world better qualified to talk about disability staff networks than Kate Nash. So, Kate, hello. Welcome. Give us a bit of an introduction. KATE: Thank you, David. A really great pleasure to be able to join you today. I was thoroughly excited to be able to join David in any conversation, but this of course is a subject so dear to my heart. I have the great pleasure of heading up Purple Space. It's a small social business and we set up in 2015 as a result of a book that I wrote some years ago, Secrets and Big News. And now we have a growing membership and what we do is support organizations, employers to set up and or to improve the effectiveness of their employee resource groups or networks and there is such cross over in terms of the wonderful work the access champions and access professionals are doing. So, delighted to be here David. I think my picture, my photo is short hair. I think COVID has now meant we cannot go to hairdresser, but it is me and it is lovely to be with you. I am looking forward to this conversation. DAVID: We wanted to start today's session setting a bit of context about networks in the world that we live in right now and Kate, I know that Purple Space just before Christmas around the International day of Persons with Disabilities launched their impact report that looked at networks in the world of COVID. I wonder what are your thoughts about that and what are you seeing from networks around COVID in particular around accessibility and accessing company systems remotely. KATE: Yeah, thank you. So, a few things, a few things. I mean in terms of the context of ERGs and networks, we're seeing massive growth, so organizations, whether they're global business or a local business within a specific jurisdiction, we're increasingly seeing that they're becoming vehicles to accelerate the pace of change when it comes to disability confidence, so as we know, most businesses or businesses of a certain size will have a diversity and inclusion professional specialist, and they often work across really large brief in order to build a more inclusive workplace, and resource groups and networks are really used to augment and supplement and to really hasten the pace of change, so that's happening per se. In terms of COVID and some of the things that came out of the impact working group. Two things really struck me. One is that disability networks, ERGs, have meant that they are a really good focal point in raising issues and surfacing challenges and spotting trends when it comes to access issues. So, they are a really natural vehicle for surfacing those pre-existing challenges. And what COVID has done, and of course we've proven in an instant how easy it is for many of us to work remotely and from home and this is something that many disabled employees have been calling for for many years. We've now almost proven the point that it's relatively easy to be able to work extensively from home. Of course, that brings challenges so that's the first thing that really struck me is how COVID has accelerated the surfacing of pre-existing challenges when it comes to the access requirements not just for disabled people but anyone who wants to become more proficient in using tech and more productive and more efficient in their work. So that is the first thing. I think the second thing is they're often -- and it really came through in the impact report, David. I know you were part of the working group, but often networks and resource groups provide a very strong role in noticing the solutions, you know, so lots of chat between and across disabled people some who have the same impairments, some who have different impairments, but they're often a rich source of advice and support as to how you can switch on certain features when it comes to access tech. And what we're seeing through COVID is often they were the go-to agent for organizations who wanted to really start to think about how you automate certain features within tech. So those are the first two things that struck me.  What about you? What did you see from the impact report? DAVID: Yeah, I think it's probably similar to you. I think the way I summarized it when I was talking to some colleagues about the report and we were discussing it was, I think the thing that comes through a lot is that the impossible was made possible in an instant, and I think actually it's shown that the reluctance to do some adjustments and -- was there -- has been there for a long time but in some ways unjustifiably. And I think that sometimes it just takes these big events to happen to shake things up a little bit, and what I like in what you were saying about how networks are like a conduit for those issues bubbling up, and I suppose I wonder -- I wonder what you see in that – in that kind of being that conduit about the role of network leaders in speaking that truth to power and being the voice for those that they represent in the organization. What's your thoughts there in terms of how networks can do that? KATE: I think one of the strongest roles that they play is in clustering the common themes that come out in terms of inaccessible tech as well as inaccessible environment as well as inaccessible ways in which we work. The reality is most people with a disability are individuals who acquire that health condition or disability through the course of their working life. We know that some 83 or 84 percent of all disabled people are those who acquire their disability from the age of 16 and 65. What that means is people are often grappling with a change of identity as well as often a change in the way in which they have to work and a change in the way in which they interface with their working environment as well as the people who work around them and it can be incredibly hard to accommodate and feel good and to feel good about yourself within that change of identity. And therefore it becomes very complex and harder and longer for individuals to articulate what their needs are. One of the things that we saw, for example, in the book that we wrote years ago is it can take on average someone two to three years to even ask for a workplace adjustment because they feel that there are favors. We know on the one hand that these things are not favors. They're enshrined in law, but it's altogether different. So, to come back to your question I think what networks and ERG do so powerfully is that they provide what I call an advocate type role. They start to surface the themes and the constant truths around inaccessible tech or environments, and they start to depersonalize the needs to provide solutions for groups of people who might share the same impairment so whether that's individuals with a vision impairment or people who maybe have a hearing condition, they are theming those things rather than an individual having to ask for a particular workplace adjustment and it's just accelerated that. DAVID: Absolutely. There's some interesting comments from Ray around people being taught to be grateful for what you do have and not to ask for too much, and I think I've definitely seen that. I've definitely seen disabled staff go, well, you know, I got this bit of -- I got one of the ten things that I needed, and I kind of felt bad for asking for more. So yeah, I've seen that. I also, just on Tracey's point, so ERG is Employee Resource Group so we tend to talk about employee networks and employee resource groups. There's a whole plethora of different ways of saying the same thing, isn't there, Kate? KATE: Yes, absolutely. Different organizations will use different language to describe often the same thing. As David says, the most common used languages are networks or employee resource groups, but we equally see some organizations use the term business resource groups, sometimes special interest groups, sometimes affinity groups. Particularly when it comes to this subject you often have accessibility networks or user testing groups as well. So, it's really vehicles of individuals who don't have a dedicated role in mainstreaming disability within the workplace but individuals who want to support the business to do differently and better. DAVID: I want to pick up a little bit on one of the things you just mentioned there about the informal role of networks in as much as, you know, most network leaders and most networks are volunteer led. There are very few examples where it's a formal part of somebody's job. And what challenges do you see with that in terms of those network leader's role when it comes to this topic of accessibility, digital accessibility, workplace accessibility in general, what impact does that have, these people have a big remit but they are volunteers? KATE: Yeah, and there lies the rub (laughs). And one of the great things that ERG leaders and network                leaders have in abundance we say is passion, energy, commitment, dedication, and a real desire to support their organization to do differently and better. They're very often individuals who have experienced disability themselves in one way or another. Often that's direct experience, but it equally can be somebody who may be a parent of a child with a disability or indeed someone whose parents had a disability. It may be individuals who are line managers, exceptions but you're absolutely right. They also have a day job and the day job comes first. So, I suppose the great -- the greatest role, the greatest benefits that networks can play is in clustering some of the themes and the common features of inaccessibility for disabled people. But their roles are naturally very broad. They're often involved in supporting an organization to improve workplace adjustment policy. They're often involved in delivering storytelling campaigns, which you know so much about yourself, David. And they also can be involved in user testing groups, but their roles are very, very broad, and I think where some of the networks that are led by some of the accessibility leaders and the unique role that accessibility leaders can play is a real focus on the access issues because they're slightly different. You know, disability is a complex human experience, and for some it's about leveling the playing field when it comes to kit and gizmos, technical terms. But sometimes it's not about that. Sometimes it's about noticing the self-limiting untruths that we have of ourselves and the things that we need to do to improve our confidence, so, yeah, but to answer your question, ERG leaders are busy bunnies. They have a very broad remit.  Some of that is about access but if that can be augmented by great leadership when it comes to access champions, then that's fantastic. That's when the magic happens. DAVID: Yeah. HOST: IAAP membership consists of individuals and organizations representing various industries including the private sectors, governments, non-profits, and educational institutions. Membership benefits include products and services that support global systemic change around digital and the build environment. United in Accessibility, join IAAP and become a part of the global accessibility movement. DAVID: How do we encourage people to tell us about their disabilities and then how do we encourage them to ask for adjustments to make sure that they are best supported in the workplace, and I've got some thoughts, but I'd love to hear yours first. KATE: Yeah, well, I think some of the more common ways in which you can support people I suppose to hasten the process by which they ask for a workplace adjustment is to really give good, consistent, and easily visible information about how you can access the workplace adjustment. Those employers that really start to motor on this are those that tend to have, you know, a one-stop portal of information that's very visible. It can be available as you on-board an organization. Senior business leaders know where it is and tend to socialize that information with their own teams, with human resources and the DNI departments will routinely get information about where you can get that access adjustment, so that's really, really important. I think the other thing that networks can do to support people to know that a business is really serious in wanting to deliver adjustments is some of the storytelling campaigns. Many organizations whether they're very small public sector organizations in a locale or whether large global multinationals, one of the most powerful instruments of change is to get individuals to share information about their disability, and not just for its sake. It's not a cathartic exercise. It's about saying this is me. This is my impairment. This is what I do for the business. This is how I deliver well for the business. And by the way, I have bipolar and mine is a good news story because as soon as I asked, I was able to get a soft adjustment in terms of how I work. And those little micro stories have the most powerful impact in helping people to notice, wow, the business is really serious about this. We know from our membership how hard it is often for individuals to share information about their disability with an organization. It can take a very long time, and it can take a wee bit of courage. And when the wonderful John Armichi talks about trust and how organization need to earn that trust. So, yes, of course individuals can do differently and better and learn as they go along about how to be who they are – how can they preserve and protect their brand as a high-performing employee with a disability at the same time as being who they are. But it's often the case that people will need a bit of courage to share that information formally, and as you call out when you've done that, you at least expect I suppose the business to say, okay, so what do you need and how can we help and when do you need it, yeah. DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we talked about before we jumped and looked at some questions is about how networks can help to I suppose provide a sense of themes and a general helping to scope those areas. I wonder, one of the things I've been thinking about recently is about what's the role of an accessibility leader to help disability network leaders almost focus a bit to provide some of that time to be a sounding board and to be I suppose a confidante rather than having to do it themselves, almost helping, go well look, this is what we've got, you know, we've got this side of the table when it comes to accessibility. What we need some help on is this stuff. So almost helping for us some of the shaping around the role of disability networks in this conversation about accessibility in the workplace. KATE: Yeah, agree. I mean a number of thoughts strike me when you offer that up, David. I think the first is -- of course, we talk about access in the round and that can mean different things. It can mean access to tech as well as access to the built environment. As well as access to flexible and agile working policies. Access is a broad term. But that said there's often what I would call an occupational psychology that sits behind some of the exceptionally gifted access leaders and champions. What I mean by that is they tend to be -- dare I say without stereotyping access leaders is they tend to be very systematic in the way that they work. They tend to be those individuals who can do root and branch analysis. They tend to be those that really hone down on what the problem is and therefore surface what the range of solutions are and therefore for the business can understand what the best solution is. So, the interplay I think between access professionals and leaders and champions as well as the ERGs of work on a broader level is, one, to be able to get the bit between their teeth and really hone down on solutions. They can unblock what I call the consistent themes, the challenges that go round and round and never get resolved. Maybe surface one year and then three years later, guess what the big problem is, it's the same thing that surfaced six years ago or three years ago. And some of the greatest access leaders and champions are those who chose to table thump and say this is not good enough or not in my name or leave that with me and I'll go back. So they set the bar high and as you say, can often counsel and mentor ERG leaders. Does that make sense? DAVID: It does. It makes absolute sense, and I think what I've seen and certainly what I've learned from other folks in this working group and in the IAAP and similar groups in places like the business disability forum in the UK, and the ILO, the international labor organization groups is as much as you get accessibility leaders who maybe come in have a focus on say digital accessibility, we end up -- because we're such a passionate bunch of people, we end up getting involved in areas like build environment and might not be part of our official remit to look at workplace adjustments because that's traditionally an HR thing but we're going to get stuck in, and I think it comes down to the fact that we live in this sort of ecosystem of things and it's no good to just make the digital things accessible if our stuff can't get workplace adjustment so they can't get into a building. So, I think it's increasingly -- like I say, whilst people are coming with this digital angle and this tech angle. I'm increasingly seeing and feeling that access, is not workable, doesn't stack up like that because you end up kind of doing half the job really, which is difficult because you end up with network -- with accessibility leaders who are spinning multiple plates. But I think that's the role of networks comes in and helps accessibility leaders to say I've got all these things, I need you to help me understand what's going on, on the ground to be able to then go, right, that plate, it's about to fall off, but it is not actually going to cause anybody any problems. Let's deal with this plate that is still spinning and it's going to spin on for a bit longer but the second it drops it's going to break, it's going to smash. KATE: Absolutely. DAVID: I wonder as well. One of the things that I've been thinking about as well is about that kind of useful tension that can exist between networks and accessibility leaders and thinking about it from the perspective of very often I've seen and I know colleagues see is that networks and individuals in networks will perhaps raise an issue that they think affects a lot of people, but actually when you dig under it, it's a lack of understanding, it's a challenge that individuals because of a specific reason but that's not been surfaced. So, I wonder whether you think there is a useful tension in having them as the separate groups and separate entities and the accessibility not leading the disability network or not being on the steering committee, for example. KATE: Yeah, real pros and cons, and I think like you say, David, I think I'm more inclined to notice the benefits of the creative tension that comes with those two groups and those two issues. We -- I mean, as we know, in the disability inclusion, building more inclusive workplaces is about coming at the topic of disability and mental health from different dimensions and different perspectives, and inclusion can mean a number of things, and part of it is about access to kit, access to buildings, access to technology, access to policies, access to know-how, access to people. We know that. But inclusion is also about encouraging in this case non-disabled allies to be part of our world and notice the benefits of recruiting and retaining and developing employees with disabilities. So, you know, I think there's a lot of benefits in disaggregating the responsibilities between the access leader and the ERG leader, but the reality is both are allies of each other, and so the reality is all organizations will do it differently, all organizations. We see, for example, subnetworks of user testing, mystery shopping, individuals, very patient people who want to be genuinely used to test out kits and to test out technologies, etc., and others don't want to do that at all. They're busy with their day job, and they are like “Thank you very much”. So yeah, we're challenged there but a good challenge I think. DAVID: Lets turn, Maybe spend five or ten minutes talking about the culture around accessibility and the role of networks. You talked a little bit about storytelling, and I wonder what your thoughts are about how that can be used and the telling of lived experience stories to kind of bring to life the reasons why organizations need to be accessible not just, you know, in their systems but in their workplace environment and the simple things like their communications and the videos from the CEO and those sorts of things. So be interested to hear your thoughts on that. KATE: Yeah, really powerful, really, really powerful. Telling gritty stories about actual individuals within an organization can be one of the most powerful drivers to sustain motivation and direction and ambition and standards when it comes to accessibility. So, there's nothing quite like -- and of course, it takes a little bit of practice. Not everybody wants to share their story, and the majority of individuals are continually perfecting the way in which they describe their story of disability or difference. It is never once and done, it's a story of continued practice. But where we see real power is where you can hone down somebody sharing a bit about themselves, a bit about blocks they have had, the challenges, the obstacles, the barriers, the inaccessible ways in which the business has interfered in them being productive, the solutions that then came about, particularly the individuals that helped unlock those solutions, our champions, our allies that can unblock that and then as a result of that how either productivity went up or efficiency went up and/or one's level of, you know, motivation goes up because of course we want to work with organizations who want us to do well. So, I think storytelling can be an incredibly powerful vehicle and a technique for accelerating the process of accessibility change within an organization, really, really powerful. DAVID: Yeah, and from my experience I hear it quite a lot when we get asked about how do you help people to see beyond compliance and beyond box checking, and it's very often that the thing that changes people, people's perceptions and people's approach to accessibility regardless of what version of accessibility that is, is watching somebody or being involved with somebody with a disability trying to complete a task, for example, trying to, you know, have a look at their pay slip, for example, or watch that really important video that lays out the next thing that their CEO wants to do or simply getting into the building, getting up to their desk, using that new fangled touch screen lift system that nobody thought about how somebody in a wheelchair was going to use or someone who is blind was going to use. I think that is really impactful. That's another type of storytelling, but it has to be, we have to be careful how we do those things and so that we don't -- so we don't overuse the -- certain individuals and we don't overplay somebody's ability or inability to do some things. So, it doesn't, we're not, so people understand that we are not going this people can't do their job, it is actually we're putting barriers in this person's way because I think it is very easy and a fine line between those things. KATE: Yeah, absolutely. It's about reframing, I think. DAVID: Absolutely. We talked a little bit; you mentioned a couple of times and I know that a lot of people use disability networks as a way of finding people to do testing and to get them to do user testing of their systems or of their buildings. I think the one thing I've kind of realized come to over the last couple of years particularly in this role that I have now actually is that I think they are, there's definitely a use -- there's definitely a way we can leverage disabled staff to do that. But I think we have to do two things. Firstly, we have to make sure that those individuals who are involved in that are trained and skilled in their assistive technology and in the types of things that they need to be talking to people about, and very often what I've seen is unfortunately where the individual is using a very sophisticated piece of assistive technology, but they don't understand it and therefore they come up with all these problems that aren't really accessibility issues. It's an issue with their setup or with their knowledge of their system. So, I think we need to make sure that the people we get involved in user testing like that are suitably supported in that way. And I also think we need to find ways to say thank you and rewarding them because it is an extra thing. As much as it's good to involve staff that don't have disabilities in that type of work, it doesn't happen very often because we roll things out, we just give people stuff. So that extra and the extra thank-you, the extra little reward and generally can't pay them in the way you might pay somebody externally, but I think there's ways we should reward people who volunteer and take part in that type of activity, and lastly it shouldn't be the only thing. We should definitely be encouraging organizations to have people doing this as part of their jobs and making sure we do it in a way that doesn't rely on the goodness and the kindness of volunteers. KATE: Great tips there, David. I really enjoyed hearing all of those. I mean picking up on your point on thanking people, it can be one of the simplest easiest things to do but it's the most commonly missed. You know, we see for example in our membership -- we do see some fantastic practice. I just saw the other day and if you're listening, Sodexo, well done. We saw an amazing thank you going out from senior business leaders to those who are doing a good job in terms of leading ERG networks, and I think when it comes to user testing and mystery shopping and using your own people to surface where there's constant challenges, a simple thank-you is really powerful. Doesn't do it, not everyone wants to be part of that user testing, but for those that do, they are investing their time in the organization in terms of how we could be doing things differently and better. So, a simple thank-you is very powerful. DAVID: Kate, I want to say a big thank you to you for generously giving us some of your time and talking to us about the world of networks and about that useful opportunity that accessibility leaders have to be closer to their disability networks. HOST: The IAAP Accessible Document Specialist (ADS) credential is intended for accessibility professionals who create and remediate accessible electronic documents and their related policies. The ADS credential represents an ability to express an intermediate level of experience designing, evaluating, and remediating accessible documents. The ADS credential is beneficial for people in or aspiring to be a User Experience Designer or Tester, Web Content Manager and Administrators, Project, Program, and ICT Managers and more! Check out the IAAP ADS certification webpage to learn more!     

This episode features a conversation with Caroline Casey and Neil Milliken. Caroline is the founder of the Valuable 500, which is a Leadership Initiative to make sure CEOs buy into disability inclusion and that disability and accessibility is part of the global agenda. Neil is the Global Head of accessibility at Atos. His role is to deliver better technology for customers and employees embedding inclusive practice into the processes of the organization. Neil delivers strategy and services working with a wide range of clients helping them to develop policies, processes, and technology solutions to meet the needs of their staff and customers. In this episode, they discuss how to engage the C-Suite to drive accessibility, how to influence board and senior executives to recognize the business value of accessibility, the role of top management in defining and managing the organizational strategic accessibility plan for all aspects of the employee and customer experience, why KPIs matter, and more. Transcript:  HOST: Please welcome Caroline Casey and Neil Milliken.  Caroline is the founder of The Valuable 500 which is a leadership initiative to make sure CEOs buy into disability inclusion and that disability and accessibility is part of the global agenda. Neil is the Global Head of Accessibility at Atos.  His role is to deliver better technology for customers and employees, embedding inclusive practice into the processes of the organization. Neil delivers strategy and services working with a wide range of clients helping them to develop policies, processes, and technology solutions to meet the needs of their staff and customers. Today they will be discussing How to engage the C-suite to drive accessibility. They will touch on how to influence board and senior executives to recognize the business value of accessibility, the role of top management in defining and managing the organizational strategic accessibility plan for all aspects of the employee and customer experience, why KPIs matter and more! NEIL: Caroline, welcome, and thank you for joining us. Diving straight in, Valuable 500 does require this CEO commitment, but you make it easy for organisations to engage because you are not actually asking for too much to begin with, because you want to set the barriers to entry relatively low.  You are talking about board reporting and a single commitment, and ideally, most of the companies have at least one of these things that they are already doing.  That approach has attracted some of the world's largest organisations to join, which is fantastic, but what do we now need to do to raise the bar? CAROLINE: A few things with that one, as of this afternoon, just before I came on, we are at 394 companies around the globe, and that's companies that employ over 1,000 people, and we represent 31 countries, 56 sectors, and I think it's just under 14 million employees.  It is incredibly powerful.  So, the question is: What do we do with that power, right?  So, the Valuable 500 was originally established to get the attention and intention of the CEOs.  It's like the missing piece so that we could scale some of the great accessibility initiatives, leadership, and actually disability business inclusion that exist in a business, and the reason we're not seeing accelerated change, or the joining of the dots or the scaling is because the leadership wasn't necessarily aware. And you know, we had a stat that said that 54 percent of our leadership and our C-suite, around the globe had never had a discussion about disability. So, our job was to originally break that circuit with a critical mass of 500.  Now, we are nearly there.  So, our job now which we will announce in about a month will be how do we activate this community led unsupported by the CEOs and what we provided for them is a transformational change program and that change program will look at three internal aspects of the business that we want the CEOs to ensure there is movement on. One is around leadership itself, the second is about culture and the third is brand and then we are going to ask the community of the 500 to really use their collective influence to change the appalling situation around the lack of research and data, representation particular business and disability representation and lastly reporting because it is a dastardly state of affairs. So that is the transformational program. Do not think that now they are in the community and we've got them in, that the CEO no longer becomes accountable, they do, they must stand above the program of work each company will do. So, the CEOs often have absolutely no idea, or the leadership have no idea, what this, what really good looks like. And I would never push a CEO, with the exception of maybe a few, onto a stage. People like Christopher Panowyk, I'd ask you and who are you referring to and who are your partners.  And it is one of the reasons, the IAAP, are very much one of our partners in phase 2.  The businesses are looking to each other to know who you are working with.  And it is the right experience, it is the right people, and it is the right partnerships that we need to start highlighting, because then we will see the work being done correctly. NEIL: Like you already highlighted there are very few people in positions like myself, or Daniel A. Flurry, or with direct access to the CEO. That does need to change because the complexity of the programs that we are going to have to run if we will be successful is immense and requires this kind of really serious amount of corporate oversight and influence and power within an organization for it to work because it is great to give someone a title but if that is the title without real power and influence and ability to make stuff happen then the programs will fail. So, I think its… CAROLINE:   And the right financial investment. I cannot name – we've had three requests, in the last, since last Monday and I mean really big organizations and one is about the biggest event in the world. They came to us saying we really want to be the most inclusive and most successful event and Company, where do we go? The very first thing that we will push back on and say, “well number one are you prepared to invest in this? Number two, are you prepared to have the person to whom will run the program have direct access to the leadership? Because, if you are not prepared for those two things do not bother.” We must absolutely invest in visibility with the leadership, and you must invest financially, and you must develop your team right through the organization and that pipeline of expertise and you need to bring that talent into your business and that is where we make the link between employment and the intelligence in the business. Do you have that intelligence in your business, do you have people with different lived experience, who have skills around accessibility to help formulate the strategy and deliver for you? So, they are quite surprised and come back and say “OH!” You're like, “Ya, this is big move stuff, this is really different to the conversation we had before COVID”.  NEIL: A CEO sponsored initiative, where you've got someone that's appointed, who needs to be accountable and, therefore, an expectation to have some kind of measure of success and be able to demonstrate that success, so this is something that the SLiA program has been actively engaged in and what KPIs should we have internally for our programs, how do we measure these things. I think this is work that some of us has done within our own organizations, but we wanted to look at how we can harmonize this and there will always be sector by sector stuff that will differ.  What works in a tech business might not work in a manufacturing organization, but what are the KPIs. Also, not just how do we as accessibility professionals look at KPIs because we want to look at much greater granularity than the CEOs. What do you think are the things the CEOs are wanting to see and also, what can we educate them as to things that are important to see, rather than, because sometimes they might be interested in the wrong things? CAROLINE: You as a community the first most important piece for me, is you are the only people because you're the people the expertise needs to set one standard, honestly, and I understand we need to have the differentiation between industry, I get that, but it really is you guys coming together and you telling us how and what are the things that we need to see. I cannot tell you because it's not my area of expertise, but we can help bring you is this community, this enormous, very unique community, first time built in the world, is that will you tell us what it is, you know better. So, that is the first piece. The second piece from our side of the house is we have to really help business understand and this is where the leadership are listening. This is really about risk proofing our business. This is taking it from niche to normal. The horse is bolted, we are off, right now. What the CEO and board need to understand is the delivery or the effect, direct and indirectly, on the shareholder value of their organization and on their brand and on the CEOs personal brand if they do not get this right. Now, what we also explained to CEOs and leadership, we do not expect you to know it all. We expect you to admit you do not know it and go out and get the help and go out and invest in the advice. Like you have done in other issues. When that lands, Neil, that is the biggest barrier right now because there is still is competing agendas that a business has but the issue of accessible and inclusive design touches every aspect of every agenda and every function and every part of the value change and that is the piece the CEO needs to understand and what I am saying is the opportunity with this, in this community right now, is you are the most powerful people because of COVID and businesses now are wanting to avoid what happened with Domino, for an example. Before COVID and now with COVID they are like, well and that is what we need them to understand. The measurables, the KPIs you need to deliver to us. We need to open your head and you tell us what to measure.  NEIL: I want to talk a little bit about transparency as well. I think this is important to talk about, as you said, our successes, our failures. We are really proud within my own organization of our corporate social responsibility programs. We report on CSR, sustainability, decarbonization, and we do this in a way that is combined reporting. So that means, we do not just report our financial results we include all of these extra financial measures in our annual report, and that has a material effect on our share value. The stuff that we are doing, actually, really does influence the value of our company.  As a company that grows through acquisition, the stuff out in public now, talking about who we are buying next. The impact of these programs on our share value impacts our ability to grow. However, for the most part, all of these metrics and all of these indices, GRI, CDP, all of these major Dow Jones sustainability index. They have a little section about disabilities which should effectively, doesn't give you any metrics, just says “tell us some nice stories”.  CAROLINE:  This is one of my passion points. And you know this. This adage, what we do not measure does not get done or Paul Polman, who is the Chair of the Valuable 500, “what we measure we treasure” he says. I am absolutely incensed when people say, “oh but it's just so complex" and “it's just so difficult”. Internally we talk about representation of employees who have a direct connection to disability. We use the legislation as a reason not to. And, when we've seen companies like Channel 4, Microsoft, and MNS actually get around that with anonymous census. This is about intention and it's one of the tools that we will be bringing to the Valuable 500 community and asking them all to do is an anonymous census around this. We can hack this problem. The second one that absolutely drives me mad is how can we say we believe in sustainability if we don't believe in inclusion and how can you say you believe in inclusion if you do not do disability. The staff that are always buying around with, with the Valuable 500 is 90% of our companies claim that they are committed to inclusion and diversity but only 4% consider disability. And maybe that is a very low figure, but how do we know otherwise because we are not seeing any reporting and if you look at diversity and inclusion indexes, in 2018 Makenzie did the Global Report on Diversity and Inclusion. Was disability there? No. When you can touch with them you asked “why, why was it not there?” and they said disability is not a driver of business. Wow! That stuff really bothers me. When we did the Tortoise Index which was founded by James Harding, it was really hard but they put five metrics to begin with and that makes me excited because if we can get these metrics in, if we can start and I'm not saying they're all right, but if we do not put them in because it's too hard to get them all right, we are going to self perpetuate the problem. If you look at what the fortune companies are doing now with move to measure around racial representation we need to do that and we need to do and we need to do, and we need to do, so it is one of the big passion projects of phase 2 of Valuable 500 is there will never be a sustainability index, a responsibility index or a diversity and inclusion index that it is acceptable anymore, not to have disability metrics.  NEIL: And you know I'm fully behind this too because it is one of my passions is sort of the economic of accessibility and sustainability. They are intertwined. These are really important things. The examples set by the Tortoise Index is important. We need to continue to work on getting our influence as users and contributors to these other indices to make them understand the importance of reporting on these things and then that helps us benchmark and helps CEOs benchmark as well so not only does it actually give power to us as the strategic leaders in accessibility because suddenly the measure of what we are doing impacts on value of the organization, but we can measure ourselves against other organizations and then you can objectively say when someone asks you “who are doing this well”, you can say, "By these measures X company is doing it well, Y company is doing it well in this aspect." So on and so forth and at the moment, all we are doing is giving people anecdotes and I think we need to move well beyond anecdotes to evidence based stuff. HOST: The International Association of Accessibility Professionals currently offers six certifications. IAAP Certifications are indicators of your commitment to the accessibility profession, industry, and community. View the certification overview page on our website to learn more!  NEIL: We have a question which says we got the buy in at CEO level, but the rest of the C-suite wants to take a more measured approach, they are sceptical of business benefit, this is reflecting what we just talked about. So, how can we as the accessibility leaders help broker that and approach that bureaucracy and unblock the C-suite blockers? And I understand why there are these blockers and I have addressed them myself and there are an awful lot of initiatives going on in an organization, at any one time. Someone in the C-suite position is going to have lots of plates spinning, so it is really making, I think, make them clear of the benefit to them and shaping what their contribution can be that fits in with what their trying to do in the business so that we are not loading them up again or working counter to what else they are trying to do in the business. I think those are some of the things we can proactively do, but are there other things that you have seen that also work to melt what one would call the permafrost of middle management? CAROLINE: Firstly, in the shadow and the light of the leader, and of, leaders make choices, and those choices create cultures. It's not my quote, but I steal it every time. If the leader and this is why the Valuable 500 exists, one of the reasons, if the leader does not say I care about this then, the rest of his or her C-Suite is not going to give a hoot about it because they want to shine in the shadow, and the light of the leader, that, or in the light of a leader. So, the first part from our perspective for phase II, it is not the CEO, it is the CEOs responsibility but under each of those buckets of reporting, leadership, and culture, and brand, the CEO needs to give us access to the CMO, the CHRO, the CTO, everybody. The CEO is making sure his C-suite team, his leadership team will deliver for her or for him to make sure that the work gets done because you are absolutely right whoever is just said that. But the CEO goes yeah and then it goes to the CHRO it gets shoved under the table. So, the next phase of the Valuable 500 is trying to crack that, for the CEO, for her team, to make sure she has the support and backing of her C-suite. And I think that is really, really important because I have unfortunately seen when a CEO leaves office and you think you have this Valuable 500 company and then suddenly it's gone. And that is discretionary and that is what bothers me because discretionary is not strategic. The last piece I would say, once again for your skill area and for the strategic level which you operate, accessibility is not about disability. It is about everyone, and I think that is starting to land now so when we take it just out of the box where it has been tagged with for quite some time, disability and maybe stretched to age, it is now about everyone. It just has to happen, like health and safety has to happen in a business. It is that simple. NEIL:  I think there was a comment about McKenzie previously where they have not done disability as diversity, but they've done a lot on age. And there this both crossover and disconnect between how businesses and analysts view the aging society and disability. If we live long enough, we will all become disabled (Laughs).  CAROLINE:  That is true!  NEIL:  And we are all, for the most part, COVID aside, living longer so this will happen to everyone. When we have discussions at my organization with the public sector and governments, they are understanding this and understanding that they need to do stuff and plan for this. As service providers, as companies providing stuff, consumers, who are the people that have the money? It's older people, they are much more likely to be disabled, therefore yes, it is a business driver. What we do need to do is make that mental connection for businesses between age and disability and business opportunity. I think that there is some work to do there, but I think that is progressing somewhat. I think the work that you are doing and that the work with the ratings agencies and a lot of the marketing work, it feels very different now to how it felt two years ago. There is engagement, there is an understanding that it has to be done, and it is almost like watching people that hadn't engaged before suddenly roll their sleeves up is enormously gratifying. I think, it's not just happening in my organization or in the Microsoft's, or the Salesforces, but there are more and more organizations taking those steps, recognizing that it is something that they can no longer pay lip service to and ignore. There is legislative reasons for doing it, there is profitability reasons for doing it, there is organization, cultural reasons, lots and lots of reasons but it has become compelling and they have realized that.  On the other side of that, that is actually driving a different issue which is a skills gap. It is something that IAAP is here to help address but there is a real shortage of skills in the people that can run the organizational programs. A bit like we had the real shortage of skills in people that could run sustainability programs 10 years ago and actually finding people that have the right balance of both technical skills and the ability to navigate complex organizations. These big organizations that are your members, are very complex. It is difficult and even at a lower level finding the technical skills to get the people to do the technical expert work, is a challenge. How can we engage with the wider community both in education, and vocational training to start bringing up the skills? Some of them will require specialists but we also need to do it in the wider education field. Is that something that CEOs can influence? Or is that something that we need to go to our government partners?  CAROLINE:  Of course it is, did we not see this happen before? When we started seeing the digital revolution happened and you saw companies like the big Googles in this world and the big Microsoft in the world, invest in the skills of countries and their education systems. I'm living in a small country, we have some of the biggest tech giants in the world (Laughs) And have very, very big premises and very big offices here for lots of reasons. Therefore, that is the way in which they were able to say that this is a pool of talent, do they have the skills and training that we will need to give them jobs? So yes absolutely! This is my point. Who are the most powerful leaders of the planet right now? It is not politicians, right? We know that. The most powerful leaders on this planet are business leaders, let's be honest, when they come together, they can actually make anything happen.  We know the technology is there and we certainly know the intelligence is there, the desire is there for so much of this. The biggest opportunity and the biggest barrier to any of this is the 6 inches between our ears. That is about accessibility. It is the intention and the will to do this and to see it as a long game, to see the full pipeline, Neil, you are absolutely right. If every business, right now said “OK, this is it, front and centre, we're going to invest in it”. Do they have the people to fill the positions? Do they have people coming up to fill the positions? I do not imagine they would. It really is the influence and powers in the hands of business, and they do affect policy, they do affect the UN, look at UN Global Compact and you think about that. They do have the chance to affect the education system, and the pipeline coming up and they should be investing in that pipeline and that should be where their philanthropy is and many of them do that.  NEIL:  The question from Rob as well which is saying he is four rungs away from a CEO but what approach would you take to getting involved, to be able to advocate?  First of all, the stuff that we just talked about but maybe you go and find the person that you know influences them. Do you think you have a better chance of having a conversation with their number 2 or their direct management team that can influence them and start building that relationship? I know I had to go through multiple tiers of relationship building in my organization to be able to get to the point where I could go and directly talk with the CEO. And now we directly report to the board. And that did take time.  CAROLINE:  And not look like a threat to someone else.  NEIL:  Absolutely, you have to frame it in a positive way. This is of mutual benefit; it always has to be about mutual benefit. Risk reduction. You can talk about the penalties and risk but it is about doing this reduces the risk, it is a benefit to us as an organizations, it also can be profitable, it will make us more usable, blah, blah, blah but framed it in a language and wrap it in the topic that is important to that individual and that might be different from the person in the leadership team that reports to the CEO than the CEO but once you start having the conversation with that person they can tell you what floats the boat of the CEO and that's how you start progressing those conversations. It is definitely a long game, and you have to be prepared for a few knock backs along the road. That said, as Caroline previously stated we are in a far, far better position at the beginning of 2021 than we were even midway through 2020. Things have changed, there is a recognition amongst leadership of humanity of their workforce, of vulnerability of their colleagues. The understanding of the need for flexibility so businesses are having to invest in changes and infrastructure. Now is the time to strike and say, "While you are doing this make it accessible. We can help you be more effective; we can help you engage your employees remotely." Listen to the language talked and play it back to them with an accessibility message.   CAROLINE: The other thing I would say is don't underestimate the leaders of all these businesses trying to do the simple thing of going on these platforms whether they have a visual impairment, a hearing impairment, a dexterity impairment, which most of them don't, they are struggling, and for the first time they are going oh, ask them to take off their glasses and do it you have a whole other thing. There is kind of an experience our leaders maybe not have had to have before and that is where you can fill that gap, that is the sweet spot. Go in with the confidence. You have something to offer and not just as a quick fix but strategically to offer this business and it has been proven because the businesses that had already invested in this were the businesses that thrived throughout COVID.  NEIL:  Can board members also influence CEOs?  CAROLINE:  What I would say, is board members are probably in one of the most unique positions. If you are a board member, sitting on a board saying “Where do we stand on accessibility? Have we done an accessibility audit? What is our performance around disability business inclusion?” No CEO can tell you that they are not going to give you that information. That is a board member's right. So, yes, use it well.  NEIL:  I can absolutely tell you that our board do influence our CEO. It gets back to me that they have been asking questions, so if you happen to have a relationship, by all means develop relationships with board members too, find your path, it will be different for each business but absolutely, yes, if the board is interested in this topic make use of it because they absolutely will influence your CEO.  CAROLINE:  Can I take that from you, because having sat on boards if I ever get an email from anyone in the company as a board member, I have to bring that to the CEO and I would, so that is very good play, thank you.  NEIL:  I think it has been great fun chatting and I hope everyone in the audience has found this useful. I hope that you will join us on our journey towards strategic leadership.  HOST:  The International Association of Accessibility Professionals understands how important it is to have reliable resources to turn to when developing your skills as an accessibility professional. We provide several resources in a variety of formats to both members and non-members. View the Resource tab on our website to find out more about Educational Webinars, the IAAP Career Center, the Educational Training Database and Speakers Bureau, and more!