Podcasts about wcag

In this episode of NASCIO Voices, hosts Amy Glasscock and Alex Whitaker sit down with NASCIO policy analyst Kalea Young-Gibson to discuss her article Digital Accessibility Compliance Thoughts From a Public Sector Attorney, which is based on a conversation with Max Heinz, supervising attorney with New York State Information Technology Services. The conversation covers the recently extended DOJ Title II final rule compliance deadline, explaining that while states now have more time, the urgency has not diminished — digital accessibility lawsuits have surpassed 5,000 per year and are now considered mainstream civil rights enforcement. Kalea breaks down what "reasonable effort" really means for state agencies (hint: it's context-driven, not a checklist), how states should structure vendor contracts using WCAG-tied language as a model, and why documentation is the single hardest — and most critical — thing states must get right to defend themselves in litigation. The episode closes with a lightning round featuring emoji habits, lessons from new cat ownership, and a passionate endorsement of Cook Out, North Carolina's beloved fast food chain.

Accessibility at work is easy to talk about and hard to deliver, especially when your “office” includes fulfillment centers, delivery stations, corporate teams, and cutting-edge tech roles spread across the globe. We sit down with Megan Smith, Global Accommodations and People Accessibility Lead within Amazonian Experiences and Technology, to unpack what it really takes to run accommodations and workplace accessibility programs at serious scale and with real speed. Megan shares her own path into disability inclusion as a legally blind leader, and why self-advocacy plus operational rigor is a powerful combination.We walk through the full accommodations flywheel: intake, evaluation, decisioning with managers and sites, and making sure the accommodation is implemented. Megan explains why much of the volume comes from temporary injuries that need fast, consistent handling, how pregnancy-related accommodations require dedicated expertise, and why complex disabilities benefit from high-touch support that adapts to different job environments. We also explore how people accessibility focuses on preventing barriers in the first place by setting standards, offering tooling, and influencing what the company builds and buys for employees.Then we look forward. AI is already blurring the line between assistive technology and personalization, with big implications for screen readers, captions, and the idea of a “one console” work experience. Megan breaks down what must remain true today (solid accessibility fundamentals and WCAG principles) and what might change tomorrow, including trust, privacy, and how we filter signal from AI-generated noise. If you care about disability inclusion, HR accommodations, accessible technology, or the future of AI accessibility, this conversation gives you practical mental models and sharp questions to take back to your team. Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review so more people can find the show.Send us Fan MailSupport the showFollow axschat on social media.Bluesky:Antonio https://bsky.app/profile/akwyz.comDebra https://bsky.app/profile/debraruh.bsky.socialNeil https://bsky.app/profile/neilmilliken.bsky.socialaxschat https://bsky.app/profile/axschat.bsky.socialLinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/antoniovieirasantos/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/axschat/https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilmilliken/Vimeohttps://vimeo.com/akwyzhttps://twitter.com/axschathttps://twitter.com/AkwyZhttps://twitter.com/neilmillikenhttps://twitter.com/debraruh

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/y6Jck3rU5FI  On this episode of Disability Deep Dive, hosts Jodi and Keith interview Mark Miller, founder and CEO of Inclusion Impact Accessibility and a contributor to the W3C Accessibility Maturity Model, about what it means for state and local governments to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA and the implications of the DOJ Title II rule with an (now extended) April 24, 2027, deadline for entities serving 50,000+ people. Mark explains WCAG, common barriers across websites, documents, apps, videos, and kiosks; the inefficiency of retrofitting versus building accessibility into design, development, QA, and governance; and why overlays don't deliver "full compliance." The episode also discusses media representation, including CODA, Bridgerton, The Pitt, and a Deep Cut analysis of Todd Browning's 1932 film Freaks, weighing its historical visibility of disabled performers against harmful language, exploitation, and horror framing. Inclusion Impact Accessibility: https://inclusionimpact.co/ Mark Miller: https://inclusionimpact.co/mark-miller/

Żaneta Sochoń, frontend developerka i specjalistka ds. dostępności cyfrowej, opowiada o tym, dlaczego użyteczność w sieci to szansa na lepszy produkt i dodatkowy zysk, a nie tylko uciążliwy przymus. [more] Rozmawiamy m.in. o tym, jak projektować technologie stawiając człowieka na pierwszym miejscu, dlaczego nie tylko frontend odpowiada za dostępność oraz co przyniesie branży Europejski Akt o Dostępności (EAA). Pełen opis odcinka, polecane materiały i linki oraz transkrypcję znajdziesz na: https://devmentor.pl/?p=16626 || devmentor.pl/rozmowa ⬅ Chcesz przebranżowić się do IT i poznać rozwiązania, które innym pozwoliły skutecznie znaleźć pracę? Jestem doświadczonym developerem oraz mentorem programowania – chętnie odpowiem na Twoje pytania o naukę programowania oraz świat IT. Umów się na bezpłatną, niezobowiązującą rozmowę! ~ Mateusz Bogolubow, twórca podcastu Pierwsze kroki w IT || devmentor.pl/podcast ⬅ Oficjalna strona podcastu

On Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2026, Alycia and Marty host Shawn Jordison (“The Accessibility Guy”) to discuss why digital accessibility is not just compliance but innovation and human impact. Shawn shares his path from an 18-year-old student worker creating braille and alternate media at a community college to leading accessibility roles across California's 116 community colleges, then launching his YouTube channel and accessibility business. He describes living with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease and recounts a pivotal experience helping a student with a learning disability use text-to-speech to succeed in college. They address common organizational barriers—time, money, overwhelm, and inaccessible tools—and recommend starting with accessible authoring tools, using built-in features like headings and alt text, testing with NVDA, and inventorying content before tackling legacy work. Shawn also explores AI's growing role in access and ends with “be an accessibility champion” and “accessibility equals usability,” alongside plugs for Own It Mastery Collective and The Accessibility Check. The Takeaways That Make Inclusion Usable

Blaise Bryant, as stated on LinkedIn, is a communicator, podcaster, advocate, voiceover artist, digital accessibility consultant, and Dad. Blaise joins Disability in the Public Square on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, WCAG 2.1 and what more we can do on accessibility.

On this episode, we are diving deeper into the recent ADA Title II ruling. This ruling impacts your experience when visiting websites, apps, and other digital content.Paul Schroeder, American Printing House for the Blind, Vice President Impact and OutreachSarah Malaier, American Foundation for the Blind Senior Advisor of Public Policy and Research InstituteCynthia Curry, Director of the National Center on Accessible Digital Educational Materials & Instruction at the Institute for Disability Research, Policy & Practice (IDRPP) at Utah State University.Jan McSorley, Accessibility consultant for KnowbilityAdditional LinksADA websiteAmerican Foundation for the BlindNCADEMI (pronounced "N-cademy") websiteA Primer on ADA Title II and WCAG for State Educational Agencies and School DistrictsMeeting the ADA Title II Web and Mobile Accessibility: A Roadmap for State and Local Educational AgenciesQuality Indicators for the Provision and Use of Accessible Materials in PreK-12 SystemsIncluding Accessibility in All Components of Procurement: A Guide for State Educational Agencies and School DistrictsEdTech Accessibility Directory

GLOW stands for Guided Layout & Output Workflow — a guided, confidence-building accessibility experience built for real publishing workflows. The GLOW Accessibility Toolkit helps authors, publishers, and organizations produce documents that comply with the American Council of the Blind Large Print Guidelines and WCAG 2.2 Level AA. The toolkit audits, fixes, and templates Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Markdown, PDF, and ePub documents for accessibility. Presenter Contact Info Email: jeff@jeffbishop.com GLOW website: https://glow.bits-acb.org/about/

Episode 29:  In this episode, Jim Ray sits down with digital marketing expert Bill Reynolds to break down the growing importance of ADA website compliance and the WCAG 2.1 guidelines. They discuss how new regulations impact businesses, especially those receiving government funding, and outline key deadlines for 2026 and 2027. Bill explains how accessibility goes beyond basic features, requiring structural and technical adjustments to ensure all users can navigate a website. The conversation highlights common compliance gaps, including PDFs, images, and user interface elements. They also explore the risks of non-compliance, including potential fines and legal exposure. Bill shares practical solutions, including ongoing monitoring and third-party validation tools to maintain compliance. Jim emphasizes the importance of proactive action rather than waiting until deadlines approach. The episode ultimately encourages business owners to treat accessibility as both a legal requirement and an opportunity to better serve their audiences. Jim Ray: Welcome to Grow for It. It's a podcast for small business owners, managers, and professionals. The goal is to give me a chance to work with the space between your ears on your mindset to help you focus on the things that really matter to your success. I want to enable you to concentrate on pursuing your vision, setting meaningful goals, and engaging in the day-to-day activities that will have the biggest impact.  Thanks for tuning in. I want to go ahead and introduce a friend of mine. This is Bill Reynolds. He is the founder and president of Element502. They're a digital marketing agency here in Louisville, although they work with clients all across the country, including several of mine and my website as well. Bill, thanks for coming in. Bill Reynolds: Hey, thanks for having me. Jim Ray: Well, I tell you what, a while back I got a flyer or saw some kind of information about a new ADA compliance issue that popped up that I knew was going to affect my clients, and you're kind of my go-to guy on this kind of stuff. So I asked you to come in and we wanted to talk about this. Back in 2024, the DOJ really kind of finalized though the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 2.0, and this is Level AA, so it was like double secret probation stuff we're dealing with. Anyway, the biggest issue is right now a lot of people are exposed due to ADA non-compliance issues that potentially can lead to some serious fines coming up. But there are two different timeframes that we're going to be worrying about right now, the 2026 version, and then we'll talk a little bit more about the 2027, which is going to bring in people like me as a consultant, more service-based type professions in particular, a lot of law firms are eligible for this issue. So Bill, why don't we back up a little bit and kind of just talk about what is this Web Content Accessibility Guideline issue? Why is it here? Bill Reynolds: Sure. And the acronym is WCAG, so if you hear me say it, that's the very short term. Basically what the government came out with their guidelines was that your website needs to be ADA compliant and accessible just like your brick and mortar. So when you go to a new building, it's got ramps, it's got handicap accessible bathrooms, it's got counter height. There's all kinds of things about width of different doorways of aisleways, all these things. That's the accessibility so that everyone can access your building. Now, in older buildings, there's always a grandfather and there's some rules around it because again, it's not saying it's okay to make it inaccessible, but there's also a burden of cost, a burden of things. And so the government did the same thing for websites, and so they said, Hey, your website needs to be compliant. And you mentioned it, the 2026, it's April of 2026 is the deadline for anybody who basically, the simplest way is if you get money from the government, you need to be compliant. So that's going to be a lot of your healthcare, especially whenever you get Medicare, Medicaid, any of these government assistance programs that are in there. If you're housing and you get government assistance for housing and authority, if you are a school, municipality, public parks, any of these things, those all are supposed to be because they want to make sure that your website is accessible and easy to use just like your brick and mortar would be for any of your customers. Jim Ray: When you and I go to a website, I mean obviously we can see what's on the screen. We can dink around, we can click different things. We can fill out forms, but somebody that has some disabilities has some other challenges, may not be able to read it, may not be able to hear different things that are on there. So again, the ADA compliance issue is a great thing. I mean, it's really going to open up the web to a lot of people who up to now have struggled to some point. The good news is this is just one more layer that allows us to make sure that even structurally, it's not just the overlays that you have to worry about. This is something that actually gets into the coding and the structure, which is again, why I always use you as my go-to guide and say, Hey Bill, what are we dealing with here? Bill Reynolds: Yes. And because a lot of times you'll see, you'll go to a website and people just think like, oh, well it's for sight-impaired people, so they're going to use a screen reader. Well, that's just one of a whole litany of different disabilities as defined by the Department of Justice, as defined in this WCAG. One of them I always point out is even ADHD is covered in this WCAG. And so focus banners, all these things have to be in there. And it's not just the website itself, it's any content that you make available. So if you have PDF downloads, those have to be accessible by a screen reader and different things. And a lot of times the built-in print to PDF function, that's in a lot of our computers, whether it's on MAC or PC, where you can print as a PDF, it technically creates a PDF, but that PDF is not ADA compliant. It has too much extra information on it. There's some cleanup that has to happen in there for it to truly be compliant. And any piece of content that you serve from your website is covered just as much as the website. As far as this WCAG 2.0 compliance issue. Jim Ray: As I was reading through some of this, they were even talking about the images on the website. From an SEO standpoint, for years we've used data that kind of tells the internet, Hey, this is what this picture is. But a lot of people don't do that. So that alt image text, a lot of people still don't do that, but that is now being enforced under this compliance issue. So these are not simple fixes. I mean, they're not, oh my gosh, my website is completely wrong, but there are some things now that we need to as a society move forward to. And now the DOJ is going to be coming in saying, yeah, we're going to help you with that compliance issue and we're going to back it up with some fines. Bill Reynolds: Well, yeah, and I mean it goes to color contrast, layout, any kind of movement that's on your website or sound, those have to be able to be turned off, especially whenever we look for any kind of flashing or anything like that that turns into some of our compliance over flashing images, those kinds of things. All of these things are covered. And like you said, it's nothing that means that you usually, you don't have to tear the site down completely and rebuild depends on how old the technology is because some of these things we can go in behind it.  It's just kind of like digging a basement in the house. It's already there. You can do it. Jim Ray: Okay, it's doable, but it's probably not something you as an individual want to take on yourself. There are so many different layers and aspects to this.  Bill, you have a service. And that's another reason when I called you up to say, Hey, we share some clients together. And I said, are any of our clients going to be affected? And most importantly, it's my website going to be affected. And you said, actually, we already have a plan together for this. And that's where you explained to me what your capabilities are and I wanted to share that with the audience today. Would you walk us through what that is? Bill Reynolds: Sure. And I tell everybody the service we use is accessiBe. And if you want to try to go and do it yourself, you're welcome to. I don't hide any of it. What accessiBe does is it puts a script on your website. If you go to my website or any of the websites we protected, it's a little button down in the bottom right-hand corner. It's a little accessiBe guy. It's like a little stick figure guy. You can click on it. Inside of there, there's a whole lot of options on the website to be able to change it to where it's accessible for you. But the biggest thing that's important in there is the statement. It's the security statement at the top. Every month accessiBe scans the website and gives us a compliance statement that says that this website has been marked compliant, WCAG 2.1, it's a third party that does that verification for us, and they give you a certificate that's valid for every month. Now we scan it twice a month so that if there's any changes, and so this helps with any kind of content changes, new pages, new posts, maybe you're even putting up new PDFs, those kinds of things, it will catch those and flag those. It doesn't put that on the front of the website where it says, Hey, our website's compliant except for this. That's not what we put out there. But it does allow us to be able to be notified to be able to go in and make updates or changes to your site. Because once we put the script on, it runs for a couple of days on a new install, it runs for about five days. It's crawling through all the site. It's watching user interaction. It's doing all these things. At the end of that week, we log back in, it tells us, okay, here's what I can fix on my own, and this is it being the AI. Here's what it can fix on its own. Here's where it's going to need people, and then here's our verification that we have to have. So when we do that, now you're getting compliance 24/7. You've got a third party that's going to put their seal of approval on it and go. Now I've ran into, just as a heads up, and I tell you, accessiBe, because accessiBe is a company that we're partnered with. I use them all the time. I would highly recommend them, especially even if you're another company that's going to go out and do the exact same service, please use theirs because there are a lot of plugins or different add-ons that you can get off the web that will say they're "accessible." It is for accessibility for this. Well, that's just like me building my own ramp to get into my house and say, yeah, I'm accessible now. Well, that's not how that works. There's code. There's all these different rules to it. It's not just is there a ramp, it's how long, what's the rise? All these different things come into there, and that's just for a handicap ramp and you're supposed to get another certificate of inspection to be able to say that it was built correctly. So I can do it myself, but that doesn't make me compliant. And so I warned that because, and we did this the other day. I had a friend that had their website redone and she was talking to me and I was talking about this very thing. She said, oh, no, no, no, I remember you talking about that before. So I had my new company make sure that my site was compliant. And I said, well, let's just run it through my check. And so I ran it through the check. Big red X site is not compliant because their widget, they had just had very basic things on it. But it's almost like saying that you speak Spanish, but really all is how to say, my name is Jim and have a good day. Well, you're not a Spanish speaker or just running it through Google Translate. That's not a true experience. And so the same kind of thing whenever we're talking about a compliance, it's black and white. The judge is not, there's not a judge here to go, well, you tried really hard, Jim. It's a pass fail. That's it. And so there is no gray, there's nothing there. Jim Ray: Well, and Bill, I'm glad you said that because there are a lot of us who actually contribute content to client websites. So if you've got a vendor who's actually uploading something to your website, you don't know if they suddenly have caused an issue for you that you're not even aware of. Because again, every new piece that goes up has to pass this inspection, if you will, this compliance-proofing to make sure that hey, it qualifies that it meets the standards. So if you're someone like me, I want to go to my clients first of all and say, Hey, let's run a check. Let's see where we are and what we need to deal with. And I'm assuming it's going to flag individual issues that we might need to address. Or does it just say, no, the website's not compliant. Good luck. Bill Reynolds: It does. It does give individual. Now, full transparency, because I'm a partner vendor, my report has more detail on it than just, if you go to their site, you get the report, but it still tells you, here are all the different pieces that are there. And the other reason I recommend accessiBe is because I've seen this too. If you scan your website and your website is not compliant, accessiBe is going to send you a note and say, Hey, you should probably get this compliant. And here's our stuff. Honestly, when I first got into this several years ago, we did a search, found a vendor ran the site that had asked us for help with through their check. I get a phone call from their salesperson. I'm expecting to.  I said, I'm not really sure. We're still looking this out. And Jim, the guy, actually, this is a paraphrase, but it's really close. Wow. So you're not going to go with us. It sure would be a shame if somebody was to report your website as being noncompliant. And I said, well, hold on just a second. I asked him. I'm like, are you actually telling me you're trying to do a shakedown? If I don't sign your contract today, you're going to report us? Oh, no, no. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying it sure would be a shame if that was to happen. That's not these accessiBe people. They are truly a diverse population of folks with all kinds of different abilities across the board that believe in making the internet accessible for everybody. So it's a mission and a passion for them, not just a check and a compliance. Jim Ray: Fantastic. Well, Bill, let me ask you this. If somebody's watching this or listening to this, if they're listening to the audio version, what is the best way for them to engage with Element502 and have you all at least run this screen? Bill Reynolds: Oh, sure. So the PDFs that are on the table here that we have, we'll make those available through the podcast. You'll be able to get ahold of those. It's got our contact information on there. Reach out to me at Element502.com. There's a Contact Us. Just tell us that you need to have an ADA compliance check. There's no cost to that. I'll run it, I'll put it through. Or you can go to accessiBe and go through theirs. They will gate all that content and make sure that you sign up to be able to get an email and some other emails from them. But that's their first part. And then from that, then we can say, okay, here's where you're looking at and where you're going. Our costing on this, it's pretty affordable, Jim. We start at $500 just to do the install of the widget… Jim Ray: But the scan's free? Bill Reynolds: The scan is free, correct. But if you say, Hey, I want to use you. It's $500 for us to install the widget to get it on there, we run it through. Barring anything that's major that would require a big rebuild of part of the site will give you that list back. That's usually covered under the $500 that's in there because a lot of it, the widget's going to be able to do. And in an ongoing basis, we're going to be able to quickly go in because we build websites all day. That's something that we can do better. And then we do $50 a month for the monitoring. And with that $50, that's us keeping your license alive with accessiBe. It's running the compliance. We're watching for the reports coming out because it tells us if anything falls out of compliance and then be able to alert you and say, Hey, here's something that we can do or we need to charge for this. But all that's agreed upon upfront. We don't like surprise bills, anything like that. And this is not a shakedown from us to try to get more money or to back channel anything. It's just simply as the rules change, as this compliance changes, as all these things are there and more and more content shows up, we're just trying to keep you safe. Jim Ray: And guys, I've worked with Bill for many years. Again, he does my website, but I've brought in numerous clients that I've worked with over the years. I've been doing this for about 20 years, and Bill's team is very easy to work with. I'm not saying he's the only one out there that can do it, but I mean, I trust Bill because I've used him over and over and over, and he already had a program like this up and going when I just barely learned about the idea and said, Hey Bill, should we have a conversation for our clients? And they were already on it. I mean very, very professionally run organization. Bill, congratulations. And it's just one of those things that it's not just a nice to do. This is a need to do. Again, the DOJ is putting fines and they are going to be putting some other enforcement behind this. So you really want to be careful. So again, we are talking about the WCAG 2.1, Level AA issue that's out there in 2026, right now there's already an issue. But 2027, that's when the law firms, consultants and some others are really going to need to have this done. And it's not something you want to do right at the deadline because again, it may take a little time to get you in that green zone, if you will. So the sooner the better to have this conversation. Bill Reynolds: Yeah, the April 2027 deadline, that's really going to be more of a spotlight than a deadline. Technically right now everybody's supposed to be compliant. There's still just a lot of grace to be able to work through and to be ready. So that April of 2027 though, that's kind of where the government said, Hey, you've had a year and a half. Jim Ray: We've gone far enough. Bill Reynolds: Yeah, we gave you a year and a half to figure this out. So your poor planning is not our problem now. Jim Ray: Exactly. Exactly. And again, this is something that a lot of us aren't necessarily thinking about. Maybe we've paid somebody to build a website, we assume, hey, everything's working fine, not having an issue. But because we don't maybe necessarily deal with these disability issues and these compliance issues because maybe we don't have a visual problem or maybe we don't have a hearing problem, other people are not the same as us. And so, we want to be really careful to make sure that they can take full advantage of not only the internet, but also the services that we may offer. So again, this is a really good opportunity and I want to thank you, Bill. I want to thank you for your time and your company's attention to this. Again, you guys are always right on that edge leading the way, and I really enjoy partnering with you. So, thanks for your time. Bill Reynolds: Thanks Jim. Appreciate it. Jim Ray: Friends, if you have any other questions or you need some follow up, feel free to check my website out at JimRayConsultingServices.com. And I look forward to talking to you soon. Thanks for your time.

BONUS: From 3,000 Scripts to 3 Tools - Building AI-Last Software With Conversational AI Pioneer Peter Swimm In this special BONUS episode, Peter Swimm—conversational AI veteran, creator of BotKit (the open-source chatbot framework that powered Slack and Teams bots), and former Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Copilot Studio—shares what 25+ years in tech taught him about working with AI. From his brutal experiment of running an entire business on voice-based AI for a week, to why he treats AI more like R2-D2 than C-3PO, Peter offers a grounded, practical perspective on where AI fits in software development teams. From BotKit to Copilot Studio: A Front-Row Seat to the AI Evolution "We had the number one bot in the Slack app store, because there were only 8 bots, and ours used regex. To show you how far we've come."   Peter's journey into conversational AI started with a newspaper ad and a creative writing background. When Slack launched its API, Peter and BotKit co-creator Ben Brown immediately saw that building bots wasn't just a technical challenge—it was a social and creative one, like writing scripts for plays that interface with people in their daily lives. That insight powered BotKit into becoming the backbone of Slack and Teams bots, and eventually led to Microsoft acquiring the company. Peter spent years inside Microsoft shaping Copilot Studio, working on connectors that bridge the gap between APIs and real-world work. But the experience also gave him a healthy dose of perspective: he can show you slide decks from 2016 that promise the same things today's AI pitches promise, always saying "within 5 years." That pattern recognition shapes his practical, no-hype approach. The 3,000 Scripts Experiment: Why AI-Last Beats AI-First "At the end of the day, if I've been prompting all day, I should have a computer program that works offline, that works without a subscription. Otherwise, I didn't really make anything."   Peter ran a week-long experiment trying to run his entire business using only voice-based conversational AI. The result: 3,000 generated scripts. After static code analysis, he discovered it was really only 5 programs made thousands of times—and those 5 programs were really just 2 or 3 core abilities. He deleted 36 gigabytes of generated code and kept 50 megabytes of what actually worked. This brutal compression led him to an "AI-last" philosophy: build reliable runtime software that works confidently in one click, then use AI only for exploration, connection-making, and creative riffing. The payoff is striking—within 3 weeks of a given application, his team sees a 90% reduction in AI usage in the first week, dropping to 0% within 13 days, because once a computer program does everything you need, you don't need AI anymore. R2-D2, Not C-3PO: How to Think About AI on Your Team "I think of our AI use more like R2-D2 than C-3PO. R2-D2 doesn't talk—bonus points. He doesn't interject his fear. He saves your butt. He's silent until you need him, and visible when you need him."   Peter's Star Wars analogy captures his team's philosophy on AI integration. AI should be like a smarter linter—a quiet, capable tool that handles the boring, repetitive tasks so humans can focus on creativity and shipping. His team treats AI as a "super junior" with infinite time: set it up as if it invented Python, have it write buy-the-book code with unit tests, and then a human reviews and accepts (or rejects) the output. The tooling isn't consistent enough to ship autonomously or commit directly into the codebase—even frontier providers don't fully understand what their models do. The practical benefit is enormous for setup and configuration: what used to be a painful, arcane process of tracking down dozens of AWS or Azure docs becomes a 20-minute "hello world" that's actually a working proof of concept. Your job isn't to become an expert at cloud services—it's to ship product. The Biggest Mistake: Automating Broken Processes at AI Speed "All it does is automate all the mistakes you made, all the way, at AI speed."   When asked about the most common mistake organizations make with AI, Peter is blunt: they port their existing infrastructure into AI-governed systems instead of rebuilding from the ground up. Companies with a self-inflated opinion of their processes think AI is just a million-person force multiplier—so they'll ship faster. But if your process was broken before AI, you'll just generate broken output at unprecedented scale. That 3,000-script experiment proved this firsthand. Peter's recommendation: rebuild from the bolts up. Start with AI-last architecture where reliable, offline-capable software handles the core, and AI is reserved for the edges—filling gaps, translating between systems, and making connections that don't exist yet. SaaS Is Bloated: The Case for AI Transformation Layers "The one thing AI is good at is transforming between boundaries."   Peter's team has been divesting from SaaS providers, replacing the patchwork of middleware subscription plans that forced everyone to copy and paste between CMS, Excel, meeting notes, and email. His approach: product people use Notion, developers use GitHub, and the two cross-sync without needing Jira as an arbitration layer. Everyone tracks work in the tool they already live in. AI's real superpower here is translation—between APIs, between languages, between formats. Peter sees a future where small translation layers between CRUD operations replace the bloated, one-size-fits-all SaaS tools that are "built for 99% of users with generalized features nobody uses." His team also freed themselves from tools like Figma: the designer works in their preferred graphics program, the developer in their preferred IDE, and AI arbitrates the differences. Teams, Velocity, and Reinvesting the AI Dividend "5 to 7 people is still good, because you need a diverse set of people who are intensely focused on certain areas. But they should be allotted that savings in time to ship all the things that get cut."   Peter pushes back on the idea that AI changes the ideal team size. The 5-to-7 person team still works—what should change is what those people do with the time they save. Instead of loading teams onto more projects or increasing portfolio velocity, reinvest the AI productivity dividend into quality: ship with unit tests from day one, ship WCAG-compliant from day one, and stop cutting features to hit deadlines. Version 1.0 should no longer need an immediate 1.1 follow-up. Peter also challenges the notion that AI eliminates the need for experienced practitioners—velocity metrics become meaningless when a 6-week coding plan finishes in 25 minutes. What matters is using the saved time to make software genuinely better. The Future: Demo-First Development and Solid Releases "I can show you a working demo of the thing at the first meeting, and you can pay for it. And then we can make it better than your dreams."   Peter sees AI transforming the consulting and product development lifecycle from "launch, listen, and learn" to "listen, iterate, and launch." As a consultant, he now brings working demos to first meetings instead of $20,000 six-week proposals. Clients see the product in motion and immediately identify improvements—before money changes hands. This shifts the power dynamic: products iterate toward quality before launch, not after. Peter envisions a future where we ship solid releases that iterate in quality, with interfaces that show users only what's relevant to them instead of "90,000 buttons that don't apply to me."   About Peter Swimm   Peter Swimm is a conversational AI veteran with 25+ years in tech — from managing data centers to building Botkit (the open-source chatbot framework that powered Slack and Teams bots), to serving as Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Copilot Studio. He's the founder of Toilville, a consultancy helping businesses build conversational AI solutions.   You can link with Peter Swimm on LinkedIn and visit his website at peterswimm.com.

AI Agents nutzen ARIA-Attribute. Heißt das, du musst jetzt alles damit auszeichnen? Spoiler: Nein! Falsch oder zu viel eingesetzt macht ARIA alles komplizierter und verwirrt. Richtig angewendet verbessern ARIA-Attribute jedoch die Zugänglichkeit und Verständlichkeit deiner Website. Dort, wo ChatGPT und Co. bisher auf deiner Website gegen Wände rennen, öffnen die richtigen ARIA-Attribute Türen, sodass Agenten und ihre Nutzer besser ans Ziel gelangen. Wie kriegst du also die optimale Auszeichnung für Agenten mit den gesetzlichen Vorgaben des BFSG und der WCAG überein? Wie kannst du ARIA nutzen, um Mensch und Maschine optimal zu unterstützen? In diesem Webinar erkläret dir Sandra Radtke praxisnah, wann der Einsatz von ARIA wirklich sinnvoll ist, welche Alternativen es gibt, wenn ARIA nicht die passende Lösung ist, und welche Best Practices für die Implementierung existieren. Außerdem zeigt sie, wie du testen kannst, ob deine Website korrekt interpretiert wird – sowohl von Menschen mit unterschiedlichen Assistenztechnologien als auch von KI-Agenten. Folgendes hast Du nach dem Webinar gelernt: - Wann ARIA wirklich Sinn macht - Welche Alternativen es gibt, wenn ARIA nicht passt - Best Practices für die Umsetzung - Wie du testen kannst, dass deine Website korrekt interpretiert wird – von Menschen mit verschiedenen Assistenztechnologien und von KI-Agenten Zielgruppe: Professionals, die für die Erstellung, Optimierung und gesetzliche Konformität von Websites verantwortlich sind und diese gleichzeitig für die neue Ära der KI-Bots rüsten wollen.

Andrea breaks down what's changing (without panic) - why WCAG 2.1 AA is becoming the standard for all school digital content (including social media), plus the key compliance timelines (April 2026/April 2027).Alt text becomes a daily habit, not an optional extra. You'll learn what “good” alt text sounds like, what to avoid when describing students, and how to edit alt text on Facebook/Instagram (even after posting).Video accessibility is more than auto-captions. The episode explains when captions matter most, how to handle “vibes-only” videos, and why accurate captions can help both accessibility and discoverability.Email: andrea@socialschool4edu.com Follow Andrea on X: @andreagribble Website: https://socialschool4edu.com  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/socialschool4edu  USEFUL INFORMATIONVideo Tip - How to add alternative text to Facebook imagesVideo Tip - How to auto caption your videos in Instagram ReelsSocial Media for Schools Retreat - Register here!Order your copy of my book Social Media for Schools: Proven Storytelling Strategies & Ideas to Celebrate Your Students & Staff - While Keeping Your Sanity now!Interested in our membership program? Learn more here: https://socialschool4edu.com/MORE RESOURCESFree Video Training: Learn the simple secrets behind social media for K12 schools!Sign up for our free e-newsletter - click herewww.SocialSchool4EDU.com

Brent Peterson interviews Michael Bervell, CEO and founder of Test Party. They discuss the importance of accessibility in digital products, the challenges of compliance with legal standards, and the innovations in accessibility testing that Test Party is bringing to the market. Michael shares his journey into product inclusion, the significance of understanding global business perspectives, and the future of e-commerce innovations driven by AI.TakeawaysMichael Bervell is the CEO and founder of Test Party.Product inclusion is crucial for digital products.Accessibility is not just about websites but all digital products.Compliance with ADA and WCAG is essential for businesses.Test Party automates accessibility testing and fixes issues.Accessibility tools can help developers create compliant websites.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Michael Bervell and His Passions02:59 The Importance of Product Inclusion and Accessibility10:14 Navigating Compliance and Legal Standards13:30 Innovations in Accessibility Testing with Test Party16:41 Exploring Global Business Perspectives20:49 Future Innovations in E-commerce and AI

#200 When WCAG standards change, are graphic and web designers suddenly liable? Could past work be noncompliant? Learn how to protect yourself.

Send a textPriyank Chodisetti is the Co-founder and CEO of Workback.ai, an AI-powered platform helping edtech organizations achieve accessibility compliance faster and at scale. A repeat founder and former engineering leader at Coursera, Priyank brings firsthand experience navigating the complexity of WCAG standards and ADA requirements.

W tym odcinku sporo miejsca poświęcamy nowościom w świecie dostępności i narzędzi, z których korzystają osoby niewidome. Sprawdzamy, co oferuje aplikacja Wiki Trips jako mobilny przewodnik po okolicy, omawiamy niedostępność nowej wersji aplikacji Polskiego Radia na iOS oraz przyglądamy się kolejnym dodatkom do NVDA i pierwszej becie NVDA 2026.1. Pojawia się także Blind Cube – aplikacja dla miłośników kostki Rubika, zmiany w nawigacji klawiaturą w Microsoft Wordzie oraz informacje o przyspieszeniu syntezy mowy w systemach Apple. Mówimy również o zwiększonym limicie rozmów grupowych w Signalu, kontroli wieku w Discordzie, webowej wersji Pandoca oraz różnych zmianach w Safari na macOS. Nie brakuje tematów związanych z komunikatorami, przeglądarkami, WCAG, monitorami brajlowskimi i syntezatorami mowy, a także wielu głosów słuchaczy dotyczących sprzętu, aplikacji i codziennych wyzwań dostępnościowych. Audycja dostępna jest również w wygenerowanej automatycznie wersji tekstowej

In deze aflevering bespreken we de lang verwachte resultaten van de UX Survey 2024, stipt Michele ons mobiele breakpoint gebruik aan, bespreekt Rick nieuwe CSS features zoals corner-shape en leer je wat wel en geen WCAG afkeur is met betrekking tot headings. 00:58 - Te snel naar mobiele breakpoints - https://ishadeed.com/article/too-early-breakpoint/ 06:23 - Headings skippen is geen WCAG failure - https://www.tpgi.com/heading-off-confusion-when-do-headings-fail-wcag/ 11:31 - Chrome WebMCP - https://x.com/firt/status/2020903127428313461 13:16 - OpenAI's privacy nightmare browser - https://www.anildash.com//2025/10/22/atlas-anti-web-browser/?ref=sidebar 22:01 - CSS Corner-shape - https://css-tip.com/corner-shape/ 26:48 - De Nederlandse banken willen van Amerikaanse hosting af - https://tweakers.net/nieuws/244574/rabobank-ing-en-abn-amro-zoeken-europese-uitweg-uit-amerikaanse-techgreep.html 29:09 - Verschil tussen tussen enter en spatie bij buttons - https://adrianroselli.com/2022/04/brief-note-on-buttons-enter-and-space.html 31:20 - UX Survey 2024 resultaten (Ja, eindelijk!) 48:10 - Tips en tricks voor animaties - https://www.userinterface.wiki/ 49:49 - Tip van Sander: Flowtunes - https://www.flowtunes.app/ 51:41 - Camp Waes - https://npo.nl/start/serie/kamp-waes/afleveringen/seizoen-2

María Jesús Bonafonte Alario es una diseñadora UX y especialista en accesibilidad y se dedica a la comunicación clara. Hablamos de accesibilidad, de un proyecto de comunicación clara para el gobierno y de cómo asegurarnos que el mensaje y la resolución visual sean entendidos. Esta entrevista es parte de las listas: diseño inclusivo, diseño ético, España y diseño, Salud y diseño, Diseño UX, Gobierno y diseño, Educación en diseño y Adultos mayores y diseño.Ella nos recomiendaGuía de comunicación clara Guía para una comunicación más inclusivaHerramienta ClaraEscuela y comunidad de tribUXWeAAAre, cursos y talleres de accesibilidadLa Fundación de Dalat que tienen también charlas, cursos y mucha información valiosaAccesibilidad Web. WCAG 2.2 de forma sencilla de Olga Carreras y Olga Revilla: Usable y Accesible, el blog de Olga Carreras 

Maps shouldn't say “graphic, clickable, blank” when what we really need is orientation. We sit down with Brandon Biggs, CEO of XR Navigation, to unpack why traditional map interfaces exclude blind, low-vision, and neurodiverse users—and how cross-sensory design transforms static visuals into reliable spatial understanding. Brandon makes a clear case that maps are not just about mobility; they're about building mental models of names, distances, directions, shapes, and relationships. Without accessible orientation tools, people lose access to critical public data and even entire careers that rely on geographic information.We dive into the promises and pitfalls of AI for mapping. Street imagery descriptions are improving, but 70% accuracy is not enough when a misread road or building can derail someone's route and safety. Audium offers an alternative grounded in authoritative data: a visual mode with readable contrast and scalable interfaces, and a nonvisual mode that feels like a game, using spatial audio and sound textures to convey features without adding cognitive overload. Every element remains text-exposed for screen readers and Braille, ensuring WCAG compliance and human verification. It's not AI versus accessibility—it's AI partnered with verifiable, inclusive design.Policy and practice are shifting. ADA Title II rules in the US begin to mandate accessible geographic maps for state and local agencies, while Europe and the UK still exclude many maps unless used for navigation, unintentionally limiting access to fields like epidemiology, planning, and environmental science. Brandon explains how Audium's Esri partnership enables agencies to convert entire map libraries in Experience Builder, drawing on ArcGIS Living Atlas, OpenStreetMap, and local datasets. From wildfire layers to zoning overlays and event wayfinding, this is a blueprint for making public spatial data usable by everyone.If accessible orientation resonates with you, join us: subscribe, share this conversation with a colleague in government or GIS, and leave a review with one change you want to see in public maps. Your feedback helps push inclusive mapping from a nice-to-have to a new standard.Send us a textSupport the showFollow axschat on social media.Bluesky:Antonio https://bsky.app/profile/akwyz.com Debra https://bsky.app/profile/debraruh.bsky.social Neil https://bsky.app/profile/neilmilliken.bsky.social axschat https://bsky.app/profile/axschat.bsky.social LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/antoniovieirasantos/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/axschat/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilmilliken/Vimeohttps://vimeo.com/akwyzhttps://twitter.com/axschathttps://twitter.com/AkwyZhttps://twitter.com/neilmillikenhttps://twitter.com/debraruh

Does accessibility really mean ugly charts, boring colors, and pattern fills everywhere? In this episode, Chad Chelius and Dax Castro tackle accessible color head-on: what color contrast actually means, when it applies (and when it doesn't), and how to handle charts, graphs, heat maps, and logos without trashing your brand. They break down the key WCAG contrast ratios, talk about the logo exemption, and share practical strategies like smarter legends, labels, and selective use of patterns instead of "pattern fill everything." Learn how building an accessible brand palette up front can save hours of rework, and how thoughtful body text and alt text work together for complex graphics. If you've ever been told "accessibility makes our visuals look terrible," this episode will help you push back with solid reasoning and better design.

How can organizations turn accessibility from a “checkbox” task into a priority that drives better user experiences and compliance? Join guest-host Nick Goodrum and Christina Adams, Senior Manager of Digital Accessibility at Siteimprove, as they explore web accessibility trends, WCAG guidelines, and strategies for digital inclusivity. Join us for Part 2 - Coming Soon This podcast is brought to you by Americaneagle.com Studios. Follow this podcast wherever you listen to them! Connect with: Lessons for Tomorrow: Website // Twitter // Instagram // Facebook // YouTube Tim Ahlenius: LinkedIn // Twitter Nick Goodrum: LinkedIn Christina Adams: LinkedIn Resources: Siteimprove's Website | Ready for Title II? - Webinar

Fredrik snackar tillgänglighet på nätet med Martin Lexelius. Är webbtjänsten du bygger olaglig? Har du i så fall koll på vad du behöver göra för att lösa det? Martin har bakgrund och tips på vägen för dig! Vi diskuterar också nyttan med att kunna ren och skär HTML och CSS, organisationers medvetenhet om krav på tillgänglighet, och sist men inte minst att man helt enkelt borde ha mer empati. Funkar allt på din sajt utan mus? Då har du kommit långt! Uppföljning efter inspelning: man kan få betala upp till 1,9 miljoner om man inte uppfyller lagkraven, och ingen sajt som fått tillsyn av DIGG har uppfyllt lagkraven. Ett stort tack till Cloudnet som sponsrar vår VPS! Har du kommentarer, frågor eller tips? Vi är @kodsnack, @thieta, @krig, och @bjoreman på Mastodon, har en sida på Facebook och epostas på info@kodsnack.se om du vill skriva längre. Vi läser allt som skickas. Gillar du Kodsnack får du hemskt gärna recensera oss i iTunes! Du kan också stödja podden genom att ge oss en kaffe (eller två!) på Ko-fi, eller handla något i vår butik. Länkar Martin Tillgänglighet Lag om vissa produkters och tjänsters tillgänglighet Tillsynsmyndigheter för lagen How the web works - en översikt från Mozilla Semantisk HTML Aside Tailwind Vue Rollup Bun UX lägenhetsbyte.se WCAG - web content accessibility guidelines Inkluderande design Microsoft inclusive design - en hel metodik kring att jobba inkluderande ARIA En introduktion till ARIA Writing for web accessibility - en guide för att börja skapa tillgängligt material Stöd Kodsnack på Ko-fi! Digg - myndigheten för digital förvaltning Mikroföretag - företag med färre än tio anställda och mindre än 20 miljoner i årsomsättning Klarspråk - skriv vårdat, enkelt, begripligt, och anpassat efter mottagarens behov Titlar Jag älskar HTML Ska det här vara en aside? Alltid närmast användarna Det är inte av och på Sjuttio kryssrutor Tråkiga gubben Vi har redan en knapp Tillgänglighetstomtar Reflexen att slippa Vad är en elektronisk kommunikationstjänst? Är ett formulär en kommunikationstjänst? Vad är bra design för dig? Visuellt borta En olaglig hemsida

#196 Do logos need to be accessible and meet the WCAG accessibility requirements? The answer will surprise you! Find out how to make your logo designs more accessible and reach a wider audience and how that helps your branding work.

Watch out for creepers, as Shell Little takes us on a journey to the blocky world of Minecraft. They progressed from vanilla gameplay to modded Minecraft, drawn to the game's complete transparency—where the mechanics are fully documented—which satisfies their need for efficiency and deep knowledge. The game serves multiple roles in Shell's life: a source of min-maxing satisfaction, a social connector for building relationships with geographically dispersed friends, a therapeutic outlet for burnout, and a reliable comfort activity they can return to whether seeking stimulation or social connection. Shell is excited to see where the modding community takes the game next, viewing it as essential for keeping the game fresh, accessible, and educational for new generations of players.Guest BioShell Little (she/they) is a Senior Accessibility Specialist, Inclusive Design Leader, and International Keynote Speaker. With over 10 years of experience in the accessibility field, Shell is known for her contributions to cognitive accessibility in both digital & gaming spaces. She is dedicated to integrating accessibility into the beginning of the product lifecycle by partnering with & educating design teams. Her current venture is creating classes aimed at teaching designers how to use and understand the accessibility standard called the Web Content Accessibility Guideline or WCAG. Her other passions are speaking about disability rights & disability inclusion in the workplace. Outside the office, Shell is a cat parent, gamer, and overall Neurodivergent dork.LinksShell's website: https://shellelittle.com/Shell on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/shellelittle.bsky.socialShell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shellelittle/CreditsCover design by Raquel Breternitz.

"These tools rely on automation that only catches 30% of issues. And for blind users with screen readers? The overlays often conflict with their assistive tech—making the site harder to use."Bet Hannon runs AccessiCart, an agency that fixes accessibility problems for e-commerce stores—usually right after they've been sued. We talked about why "quick fix" overlay plugins are making the problem worse, the four accessibility issues you can fix right now, and what the European Accessibility Act's €100K fines mean for US-based stores.SPONSORSSwym - Wishlists, Back in Stock alerts, & moregetswym.com/kurtCleverific - Smart order editing for Shopifycleverific.comZipify - Build high-converting sales funnelszipify.com/KURTLINKSAccessiCart: https://accessicart.comBet on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/bethannonWAVE Accessibility Tool: https://wave.webaim.orgOverlay Fact Sheet: https://overlayfactsheet.comWORK WITH KURTApply for Shopify Helpethercycle.com/applySee Our Resultsethercycle.com/workFree Newsletterkurtelster.comThe Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

In this episode of The Blind Drive, Jeff Thompson and Tim Schwartz dig into the heart of something far bigger than a news headline—it's about access, equity, and the right to fully participate in life. A recent class action lawsuit filed against DraftKings for failing to make its sports betting platform accessible to blind users sparks a deeper conversation. This isn't a show about gambling—it's a show about accountability. Jeff and Tim explore the critical difference between accessibility and usability, calling out how too many companies chase legal compliance while ignoring real human experience. Accessibility laws like the ADA, Section 508, and WCAG 2.1 create a baseline—but people who are blind live beyond baselines. They demand tools that actually work in real life. The hosts also share trusted resources—from tech newsletters to accessibility podcasts—built by people who walk the talk. This episode challenges listeners to push past compliance and fight for true usability. No waiting. Do it today. Links from the show: Draft Kings lawsuit Top Tech Tidbits Freedom Scientific Training Podcast iBug Buzz Podcast Blind Level tech Unnute Podcast Network   Give feedback at 612-367-6093, love to hear from you! Thanks for listening!

Show DescriptionTodd Libby is on the show to talk with us about deceptive patterns on the web, what WCAG is and who it's for, and 5 deceptive patterns in use on the web today. Listen on WebsiteWatch on YouTubeGuestsTodd LibbyGuest's Main URL • Guest's SocialWeb developer and developer advocate from Portland, Maine now living in Phoenix, Arizona. I had been a developer for most of my 25 years professionally in tech before moving to accessibility. Links Front End Nerdery Trump used dark patterns to trick supporters into donating millions more than intended | The Verge Death to Bullshit | Brad Frost Deceptive Patterns (aka Dark Patterns) - spreading awareness since 2010 The Architecture of Anxiety and Shame, Part One

Dr. Alaina Beaver, ServiceNow's Global Head of Accessibility, is our guest on the podcast to discuss the latest developments in accessibility. Dr. Beaver explains that the world of accessibility is constantly evolving, and it's not a one-time task, but rather an ongoing process. She highlights that ServiceNow has made significant progress in accessibility, particularly with regards to conformance standards. Publicly, ServiceNow has committed to aligning with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA, the most stringent guidelines globally for accessibility conformance. This is an upgrade from the previous standard, WCAG 2.1 AA, which is still adhered to by many legislations worldwide. Dr. Beaver notes that the new standard, WCAG 2.2 AA, was released recently, and it will take time for legislation to catch up. More about accessibility at ServiceNow – https://www.servicenow.com/accessibility-statement.html To see ServiceNow’s Accessibility Tools in action -https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCOmiTb5WX3q5qCG_QqYip2IZrvao7Bwp Guest – Dr. Alaina Beaver, Global Head of Accessibility at ServiceNow Host – Bobby Brill 00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome00:21 Understanding the Importance of Accessibility00:55 What's New in Accessibility Standards02:16 ServiceNow's Commitment to WCAG 2.204:11 Navigating the Transition to WCAG 2.209:12 Legislation and Global Standards13:13 AI and Voice Input for Accessibility16:01 Text Adjust: Enhancing Readability19:31 AI Model Accessibility Checker22:15 Wrap UpSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr. Alaina Beaver, ServiceNow's Global Head of Accessibility, is our guest on the podcast to discuss the latest developments in accessibility. Dr. Beaver explains that the world of accessibility is constantly evolving, and it's not a one-time task, but rather an ongoing process. She highlights that ServiceNow has made significant progress in accessibility, particularly with regards to conformance standards. Publicly, ServiceNow has committed to aligning with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA, the most stringent guidelines globally for accessibility conformance. This is an upgrade from the previous standard, WCAG 2.1 AA, which is still adhered to by many legislations worldwide. Dr. Beaver notes that the new standard, WCAG 2.2 AA, was released recently, and it will take time for legislation to catch up. More about accessibility at ServiceNow – https://www.servicenow.com/accessibility-statement.html To see ServiceNow’s Accessibility Tools in action -https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCOmiTb5WX3q5qCG_QqYip2IZrvao7Bwp Guest – Dr. Alaina Beaver, Global Head of Accessibility at ServiceNow Host – Bobby Brill 00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome00:21 Understanding the Importance of Accessibility00:55 What's New in Accessibility Standards02:16 ServiceNow's Commitment to WCAG 2.204:11 Navigating the Transition to WCAG 2.209:12 Legislation and Global Standards13:13 AI and Voice Input for Accessibility16:01 Text Adjust: Enhancing Readability19:31 AI Model Accessibility Checker22:15 Wrap UpSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today we are talking about Drupal Canvas, What it is, and when we can use it with guest Lauri Timmanee. We'll also cover Starshot Demo Design System as our module of the week. For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/518 Topics What is Drupal Canvas The Evolution and Future of Drupal Canvas Building with Drupal Canvas: Components and Templates User Experience and Flexibility in Drupal Canvas Collaboration and Extensibility in Drupal Canvas Default Components in Drupal Canvas Introduction to Modular Components Drupal CMS and Site Templates Acquia Source and Drupal Canvas Integration Pricing and Use Cases for Acquia Source Canvas Beta and Stability Migration and Upgrade Paths AI Integration in Drupal Canvas Future of Drupal Canvas Resources Civictheme storybook Acquia Source Guests Lauri Timmanee - lauriii Hosts Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi MOTW Correspondent Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu Brief description: Have you ever wanted to try out Canvas (previously known as Experience Builder) with a fully built-out design system? There's a Drupal theme for that. Module name/project name: Starshot Demo Design System Brief history How old: created in July 2024 by longtime Drupalist Kristen Pol of Salsa Digital Versions available: 1.0.6, which supports Drupal 10 and 11 Maintainership Actively maintained Security coverage Test coverage Documentation - Multipage writeup of SDDS, including contribution and development guides Number of open issues: 34 open issues, 3 of which are active bugs Usage stats: 79 sites Module features and usage Some of our users may have already tried out the pre-release demo of Canvas that phenaproxima posted on Github. That actually has the Starshot Demo Design System, or SDDS, baked in. So, even if you watched a demo video of Canvas, you've probably seen SDDS in action SDDS is itself built on CivicTheme, a Drupal theme built to act as a component-based atomic design system. As such, CivicTheme includes a rich component library, built from published Figma and Storybook UI Kits. And because some of the early builds for SDDS were for GovCMS, the Australian whole-of-government CMS project, it is accessible, with WCAG 2.2 compliance out-of-the-box While the official purpose of SDDS is providing a platform to use for demos in Driesnotes and other presentations to illustrate the progress being made on Canvas, I think it's also safe to say that testing the latest features of Canvas with a fully-realized design system has also helped to identify issues in Canvas itself. That means the products of all the work that has gone into SDDS will include a more production-ready stable release when that gets tagged (hopefully in time for Vienna)

Welcome to Feedback Friday Live! We're diving into a highly requested topic this week: email accessibility. With new laws like the European Accessibility Act coming into effect, accessibility isn't just nice to have. It's a must.Join Matt Helbig (Really Good Emails & Beefree) and email expert Kelsey Yen as they teardown real emails submitted by brands. You'll learn how to spot accessibility issues, write better alt text, use live text effectively, and design with inclusion in mind without sacrificing style.Transcript https://reallygoodemails.com/school/accessible-email-makeoversYou'll learn:What accessibility really means in an inboxHow to test contrast, alt text, and dark mode performanceWhy live text matters more than ever

In January, 2022 today's guest, Mike Paciello, made his first appearance on Unstoppable Mindset in Episode 19. It is not often that most of us have the opportunity and honor to meet a real trendsetter and pioneer much less for a second time. However, today, we get to spend more time with Mike, and we get to talk about not only the concepts around web accessibility, but we also discuss the whole concept of inclusion and how much progress we have made much less how much more work needs to be done.   Mike Paciello has been a fixture in the assistive technology world for some thirty years. I have known of him for most of that time, but our paths never crossed until September of 2021 when we worked together to help create some meetings and sessions around the topic of website accessibility in Washington D.C.   As you will hear, Mike began his career as a technical writer for Digital Equipment Corporation, an early leader in the computer manufacturing industry. I won't tell you Mike's story here. What I will say is that although Mike is fully sighted and thus does not use much of the technology blind and low vision persons use, he really gets it. He fully understands what Inclusion is all about and he has worked and continues to work to promote inclusion and access for all throughout the world. As Mike and I discuss, making technology more inclusive will not only help persons with disabilities be more involved in society, but people will discover that much of the technology we use can make everyone's life better. We talk about a lot of the technologies being used today to make websites more inclusive including the use of AI and how AI can and does enhance inclusion efforts.   It is no accident that this episode is being released now. This episode is being released on July 25 to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the signing of the Americans With Disabilities Act which was signed on July 26, 1990. HAPPY BIRTHDAY ADA!   After you experience our podcast with Mike, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please feel free to email me at michaelhi@accessibe.com to tell me of your observations. Thanks.     About the Guest:   Mike Paciello is the Chief Accessibility Officer at AudioEye, Inc., a digital accessibility company. Prior to joining AudioEye, Mike founded WebABLE/WebABLE.TV, which delivers news about the disability and accessibility technology market. Mike authored the first book on web accessibility and usability, “Web Accessibility for People with Disabilities” and, in 1997, Mr. Paciello received recognition from President Bill Clinton for his work in the creation of World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). He has served as an advisor to the US Access Board and other federal agencies since 1992.   Mike has served as an international leader, technologist, and authority in emerging technology, accessibility, usability, and electronic publishing. Mike is the former Founder of The Paciello Group (TPG), a world-renowned software accessibility consultancy acquired in 2017 by Vispero. Ways to connect with Mike:   mpaciello@webable.com Michael.paciello@audioeye.com Mikepaciello@gmail.com     About the Host:   Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes:   Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Well, hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset where inclusion diversity and the unexpected meet. Normally, our guests deal with the unexpected, which is anything that doesn't have to do with inclusion or diversity. Today, however, we get to sort of deal with both. We have a guest who actually was a guest on our podcast before he was in show 19 that goes all the way back to January of 2022, his name is Mike Paciello. He's been very involved in the whole internet and accessibility movement and so on for more than 30 years, and I think we're going to have a lot of fun chatting about what's going on in the world of accessibility and the Internet and and, you know, and but we won't probably get into whether God is a man or a woman, but that's okay, God is actually both, so we don't have to worry about that. But anyway, Mike, welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Mike Paciello ** 02:21 Yeah, Hey, Mike, thanks a lot. I can't believe has it really been already since today, six years since the last time I came on this? No, three, 320, 22 Oh, 2022, I for whatever I 2019 Okay, three years sounds a little bit more realistic, but still, it's been a long time. Thank you for having me. It's, it's, it's great to be here. And obviously, as you know, a lot of things have changed in my life since then. But, yeah, very   Michael Hingson ** 02:46 cool. Well, you were in show number 19. And I'm not sure what number this is going to be, but it's going to be above 360 so it's been a while. Amazing, amazing, unstoppable, unstoppable. That's it. We got to keep it going. And Mike and I have been involved in a few things together, in, in later, in, I guess it was in 20 when we do the M enabling Summit, that was 2021 wasn't it? Yeah, I think it was, I think it was the year before we did the podcast, yeah, podcast, 2021 right? So we were in DC, and we both worked because there was a group that wanted to completely condemn the kinds of technologies that accessibe and other companies use. Some people call it overlays. I'm not sure that that's totally accurate today, but we we worked to get them to not do what they originally intended to do, but rather to explore it in a little bit more detail, which I think was a lot more reasonable to do. So we've, we've had some fun over the years, and we see each other every so often, and here we are again today. So yeah, I'm glad you're here. Well, tell us a little about well, and I guess what we'll do is do some stuff that we did in 2022 tell us about kind of the early Mike, growing up and all that and what eventually got you into dealing with all this business of web accessibility and such. Yeah, thank you.   Mike Paciello ** 04:08 You know, I've tried to short this, shorten this story 100 times. Oh, don't worry. See if I get let's see if I can keep it succinct and and for the folks out there who understand verbosity and it's in its finest way for screen reader users, I'll try not to be verbose. I already am being   Michael Hingson ** 04:28 intermediate levels fine.   Mike Paciello ** 04:30 I came into this entire field as a technical writer trying to solve a problem that I kind of stumbled into doing some volunteer work for the debt the company that I then then worked for, a Digital Equipment Corporation, a software company, DEC software hardware company, back then, right back in the early 80s. And as a technical writer, I started learning at that time what was called Gen code. Eventually that morphed in. To what Goldfarb, Charles Goldfarb at IBM, called SGML, or standard, Generalized Markup Language, and that really became the predecessor, really gave birth to what we see on the web today, to HTML and the web markup languages. That's what they were, except back then, they were markup languages for print publications. So we're myself and a lot of colleagues and friends, people probably here, I'm sure, at bare minimum, recognized named George Kercher. George and I really paired together, worked together, ended up creating an international steer with a group of other colleagues and friends called the icad 22 which is 22 stands for the amount of elements in that markup language. And it became the adopted standard accessibility standard for the American Association of Publishers, and they published that became official. Eventually it morphed into what we today call, you know, accessible web development. It was the first instance by that was integrated into the HTML specification, I think officially, was HTML 3.1 3.2 somewhere in there when it was formally adopted and then announced in 1997 and at the World Wide Web Conference. That's really where my activity in the web began. So I was working at DEC, but I was doing a lot of volunteer work at MIT, which is where the W 3c was located at that particular time. And Tim Bursley, who a lot of people i Sir, I'm sure, know, the inventor of the web, led the effort at that time, and a few other folks that I work with, and.da Jim Miller, a few other folks. And we were, well, I wasn't specifically approached. Tim was approached by Vice President Gore and eventually President Clinton at that time to see if we could come up with some sort of technical standard for accessibility. And Tim asked if I'd like to work on it myself. Danielle, Jim, a few others, we did, and we came up that first initial specification and launched it as part of the Web Accessibility Initiative, which we created in 1997 from there, my career just took off. I went off did a couple of small companies that I launched, you know, my namesake company, the Paciello Group, or TPG, now called TPG IGI, yeah, yeah, which was acquired by vector capital, or this bureau back in 2017 so it's hard to believe that's already almost 10 years ago. No, yeah. And I've been walking in, working in the software, web accessibility field, usability field, writing fields, you know, for some pretty close to 45 years. It's 2025 40 years, I mean, and I started around 1984 I think it was 8384 when all this first   Michael Hingson ** 07:59 started. Wow, so clearly, you've been doing it for a while and understand a lot of the history of it. So how overall has the whole concept of web accessibility changed over the years, not only from a from a coding standpoint, but how do you think it's really changed when it comes to being addressed by the public and companies and so on.   Mike Paciello ** 08:26 That's a great question. I'd certainly like to be more proactive and more positive about it, but, but let me be fair, if you compare today and where web accessibility resides, you know, in the in the business value proposition, so to speak, and list the priorities of companies and corporations. You know, fortune 1000 fortune 5000 call whatever you whatever you want. Accessibility. Is there people? You could say section five way you could say the Web Accessibility Initiative, WCAG, compliance, and by and large, particularly technology driven, digital economy driven businesses, they know what it is. They don't know how to do it. Very rarely do they know how to do it. And even the ones that know how to do it don't really do it very well. So it kind of comes down to the 8020, rule, right? You're a business. Whatever kind of business you are, you're probably in more online presence than ever before, and so a lot of your digital properties will come under you know the laws that mandate usability and accessibility for people with disabilities today that having been said and more and more people know about it than ever before, certainly from the time that I started back in the you know, again, in the early, mid 80s, to where we are today. It's night and day. But in terms of prioritization, I don't know. I think what happens quite often is business value proposition. Decisions get in the way. Priorities get in the way of what a business in, what its core business are, what they're trying to accomplish, who they're trying to sell, sell to. They still view the disability market, never mind the blind and low vision, you know, market alone as a niche market. So they don't make the kind of investors that I, I believe that they could, you know, there's certainly, there are great companies like like Microsoft and and Google, Amazon, Apple, you know, a lot of these companies, you know, have done some Yeoman work at that level, but it's nowhere near where it should be. It just absolutely isn't. And so from that standpoint, in where I envision things, when I started this career was when I was in my 20 somethings, and now I'm over now I'm over 60. Well over 60. Yeah, I expected a lot more in, you know, in an internet age, much, much more.   Michael Hingson ** 11:00 Yeah, yeah. Well, it's it's really strange that so much has happened and yet so much hasn't happened. And I agree with you, there's been a lot of visibility for the concept of accessibility and inclusion and making the the internet a better place, but it is so unfortunate that most people don't know how to how to do anything with it. Schools aren't really teaching it. And more important than even teaching the coding, from from my perspective, looking at it more philosophically, what we don't tend to see are people really recognizing the value of disabilities, and the value that the market that people with disabilities bring to the to the world is significant. I mean, the Center for Disease Control talks about the fact that they're like up to 25% of all Americans have some sort of disability. Now I take a different approach. Actually. I don't know whether you've read my article on it, but I believe everyone on the in the in the world has a disability, and the reality is, most people are light dependent, but that's as much a disability as blindness. Except that since 1878 when Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. We have focused nothing short of trying to do everything we can to improve light on demand for the last 147 years. And so the disability is mostly covered up, but it's still there.   Mike Paciello ** 12:37 You know, yeah, and I did read that article, and I couldn't agree with you more. In fact, I personally think, and I actually have my own blog coming out, and probably later this month might be early, early July, where I talk about the fact that accessibility okay and technology really has been all along. And I love the fact that you call, you know, you identified the, you know, the late 1800s there, when Edison did the the light bulb, Alexander Graham Bell came up with, you know, the telephone. All of those adventures were coming about. But accessibility to people with disabilities, regardless of what their disability is, has always been a catalyst for innovation. That was actually supposed to be the last one I was going to make tonight. Now it's my first point because, because I think it is exactly as you said, Mike, I think that people are not aware. And when I say people, I mean the entire human population, I don't think that we are aware of the history of how, how, because of, I'm not sure if this is the best word, but accommodating users, accommodating people with disabilities, in whatever way, the science that goes behind that design architectural to the point of development and release, oftentimes, things that were done behalf of people with disabilities, or for People with disabilities, resulted in a fundamental, how's this for? For an interesting term, a fundamental alteration right to any other you know, common, and I apologize for the tech, tech, tech language, user interface, right, right? Anything that we interact with has been enhanced because of accessibility, because of people saying, hey, if we made this grip a little bit larger or stickier, we'll call it so I can hold on to it or softer for a person that's got fine motor dexterity disabilities, right? Or if we made a, you know, a web browser, which, of course, we have such that a blind individual, a low vision individual, can adjust the size of this, of the images and the fonts and things like that on a web page, they could do that unknown. Well, these things now. As we well know, help individuals without disabilities. Well, I'm not much, right, and I, again, I'm not speaking as a person beyond your characterization that, hey, look, we are all imperfect. We all have disabilities. And that is, that is absolutely true. But beyond that, I wear glasses. That's it. I do have a little hearing loss too. But you know, I'm finding myself more and more, for example, increasing the size of text. In fact, my note, yes, I increase them to, I don't know they're like, 18 point, just so that it's easier to see. But that is a common thing for every human being, just like you said.   Michael Hingson ** 15:36 Well, the reality is that so many tools that we use today come about. And came about because of people with disabilities. Peggy Chung Curtis Chung's wife, known as the blind history lady, and one of the stories that she told on her first visit to unstoppable mindset, which, by the way, is episode number five. I remember that Peggy tells the story of the invention of the typewriter, which was invented for a blind countist, because she wanted to be able to communicate with her lover without her husband knowing about it, and she didn't want to dictate things and so on. She wanted to be able to create a document and seal it, and that way it could be delivered to the lever directly. And the typewriter was the result of   Mike Paciello ** 16:20 that? I didn't know that. I will definitely go back. I just wrote it down. I wrote down a note that was episode number five, yeah, before with Curtis a couple of times, but obviously a good friend of ours, yeah, but I yeah, that's, that's, that's awesome.   Michael Hingson ** 16:37 Well, and look at, I'll tell you one of the things that really surprises me. So Apple was going to get sued because they weren't making any of their products accessible. And before the lawsuit was filed, they came along and they said, we'll fix it. And they did make and it all started to a degree with iTunes U but also was the iPhone and the iPod and so on. But they they, they did the work. Mostly. They embedded a screen reader called Voiceover in all of their operating systems. They did make iTunes you available. What really surprises me, though is that I don't tend to see perhaps some things that they could do to make voiceover more attractive to drivers so they don't have to look at the screen when a phone call comes in or whatever. And that they could be doing some things with VoiceOver to make it more usable for sighted people in a lot of instances. And I just don't, I don't see any emphasis on that, which is really surprising to me.   Mike Paciello ** 17:38 Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, there are a lot of use cases there that you go for. I think Mark Rico would certainly agree with you in terms of autonomous driving for the blind, right? Sure that too. But yeah, I definitely agree and, and I know the guy that the architect voiceover and develop voiceover for Apple and, boy, why can I think of his last name? I know his first name. First name is Mike. Is with Be My Eyes now and in doing things at that level. But I will just say one thing, not to correct you, but Apple had been in the accessibility business long before voice over Alan Brightman and Gary mulcher were instrumental towards convincing, you know, jobs of the importance of accessibility to people with disabilities,   Michael Hingson ** 18:31 right? But they weren't doing anything to make products accessible for blind people who needed screen readers until that lawsuit came along. Was   Mike Paciello ** 18:40 before screen readers? Yeah, that was before,   Michael Hingson ** 18:43 but they did it. Yeah. The only thing I wish Apple would do in that regard, that they haven't done yet, is Apple has mandates and requirements if you're going to put an app in the App Store. And I don't know whether it's quite still true, but it used to be that if your app had a desktop or it looked like a Windows desktop, they wouldn't accept it in the app store. And one of the things that surprises me is that they don't require that app developers make sure that their products are usable with with VoiceOver. And the reality is that's a it doesn't need to be a really significantly moving target. For example, let's say you have an app that is dealing with displaying star charts or maps. I can't see the map. I understand that, but at least voiceover ought to give me the ability to control what goes on the screen, so that I can have somebody describe it, and I don't have to spend 15 or 20 minutes describing my thought process, but rather, I can just move things around on the screen to get to where we need to go. And I wish Apple would do a little bit more in that regard.   Mike Paciello ** 19:52 Yeah, I think that's a great a great thought and a great challenge, if, between me and you. Yeah, I think it goes back to what I said before, even though we both see how accessibility or accommodating users with disabilities has led to some of the most incredible innovations. I mean, the Department of Defense, for years, would integrate people with disabilities in their user testing, they could better help, you know, military soldiers, things like that, assimilate situations where there was no hearing, there was they were immobile, they couldn't see all, you know, all of these things that were natural. You know, user environments or personas for people with disabilities. So they led to these kind of, you know, incredible innovations, I would tell you, Mike, I think you know this, it's because the business value proposition dictates otherwise.   Michael Hingson ** 20:55 Yeah, and, well, I guess I would change that slightly and say that people think that the business proposition does but it may very well be that they would find that there's a lot more value in doing it if they would really open up their minds to looking at it differently. It's   Mike Paciello ** 21:10 kind of, it's kind of like, it's tough. It's kind of like, if I could use this illustration, so to speak, for those who may not be religiously inclined, but you know, it's, it's like prophecy. Most people, you don't know whether or not prophecy is valid until years beyond, you know, years after. And then you could look back at time and say, See, it was all along. These things, you know, resulted in a, me, a major paradigm shift in the way that we do or don't do things. And I think that's exactly what you're saying. You know, if, if people would really look at the potential of what technologies like, you know, a voice over or, as you know, a good friend of mine said, Look, we it should be screen readers. It should be voice IO interfaces, right? That every human can use and interact with regardless. That's what we're really talking about. There's   Michael Hingson ** 22:10 a big discussion going on some of the lists now about the meta, Ray Ban, glasses, and some of the things that it doesn't do or that they don't do well, that they should like. It's really difficult to get the meta glasses to read completely a full page. I think there are ways that people have now found to get it to do that, but there are things like that that it that that don't happen. And again, I think it gets back to what you're saying is the attitude is, well, most people aren't going to need that. Well, the reality is, how do you know and how do you know what they'll need until you offer options. So one of my favorite stories is when I worked for Kurzweil a long time ago, some people called one day and they wanted to come and see a new talking computer terminal that that Ray and I and others developed, and they came up, and it turns out, they were with one of those initial organizations out of Langley, Virginia, the CIA. And what they wanted to do was to use the map the the terminal connected to their computers to allow them to move pointers on a map and not have to watch the map or the all of the map while they were doing it, but rather, the computer would verbalize where the pointer was, and then they could they could move it around and pin a spot without having to actually look at the screen, because the way their machine was designed, it was difficult to do that. You know, the reality is that most of the technologies that we need and that we use and can use could be used by so much, so many more people, if people would just really look at it and think about it, but, but you're right, they don't.   Mike Paciello ** 24:04 You know, it's, of course, raise a raise another good friend of mine. We both having in common. I work with him. I been down his office a few, more than few times, although his Boston office, anyway, I think he's, I'm not sure he's in Newton. He's in Newton. Yeah. Is he still in Newton? Okay. But anyway, it reminded me of something that happened in a similar vein, and that was several years ago. I was at a fast forward forward conference, future forward conference, and a company, EMC, who absorbed by Dell, I think, right, yes, where they all are. So there I was surprised that when that happened. But hey, yeah, yeah, I was surprised that compact bought depth, so that's okay, yeah, right. That HP bought count, right? That whole thing happened. But um, their chief science, chief scientist, I think he was a their CSO chief scientist, Doc. Came up and made this presentation. And basically the presentation was using voice recognition. They had been hired by the NSA. So it was a NSA right to use voice recognition in a way where they would recognize voices and then record those voices into it, out the output the transcript of that right text, text files, and feed them back to, you know, the NSA agents, right? So here's the funny part of that story goes up i i waited he gave his presentation. This is amazing technology, and what could it was like, 99% accurate in terms of not just recognizing American, English speaking people, but a number of different other languages, in dialects. And the guy who gave the presentation, I actually knew, because he had been a dec for many years. So in the Q and A Part I raised by hand. I got up there. He didn't recognize it a few years had gone by. And I said, you know, this is amazing technology. We could really use this in the field that I work in. And he said, Well, how's that? And I said, you know, voice recognition and outputting text would allow us to do now this is probably 2008 2009 somewhere in that area, would allow us to do real time, automated transcription for the Deaf, Captioning. And he looks at me and he he says, Do I know you? This is through a live audience. I said. I said, Yeah, Mark is it was. Mark said, So Mike gas yellow. He said, you're the only guy in town that I know that could turn a advanced, emerging technology into something for people with disabilities. I can't believe it. So that was, that was, but there was kind of the opposite. It was a technology they were focused on making this, you know, this technology available for, you know, government, obviously covert reasons that if they were using it and applying it in a good way for people with disabilities, man, we'd have been much faster, much further along or even today, right? I mean, it's being done, still not as good, not as good as that, as I saw. But that just goes to show you what, what commercial and government funding can do when it's applied properly?   Michael Hingson ** 27:41 Well, Dragon, naturally speaking, has certainly come a long way since the original Dragon Dictate. But there's still errors, there's still things, but it does get better, but I hear exactly what you're saying, and the reality is that we don't tend to think in broad enough strokes for a lot of the things that we do, which is so unfortunate,   Mike Paciello ** 28:03 yeah? I mean, I've had an old saying that I've walked around for a long time. I should have, I should make a baseball cap, whether something or T shirt. And it simply was, think accessibility, yeah, period. If, if, if we, organizations, people, designers, developers, architects, usability, people, QA, people. If everybody in the, you know, in the development life cycle was thinking about accessibility, or accessibility was integrated, when we say accessibility, we're talking about again, for users with disabilities, if that became part of, if not the functional catalyst, for technology. Man, we'd have been a lot further along in the quote, unquote value chains than we are today.   Michael Hingson ** 28:46 One of the big things at least, that Apple did do was they built voiceover into their operating system, so anybody who buys any Apple device today automatically has redundancy here, but access to accessibility, right? Which, which is really the way it ought to be. No offense to vispero and jaws, because they're they're able to fill the gap. But still, if Microsoft had truly devoted the time that they should have to narrate her at the beginning. We might see a different kind of an architecture today.   Mike Paciello ** 29:26 You know, I so I want to, by the way, the person that invented that wrote that code is Mike shabanik. That's his name I was thinking about. So Mike, if you're listening to this guy, just hi from two others. And if he's not, he should be, yeah, yeah, exactly right from two other mics. But so let me ask you this question, because I legitimately can't remember this, and have had a number of discussions with Mike about this. So VoiceOver is native to the US, right?   Michael Hingson ** 29:56 But no, well, no to to the to the to the. Products, but not just the US. No,   Mike Paciello ** 30:02 no, I said, OS, yes, it's native to OS, yeah, right. It's native that way, right? But doesn't it still use an off screen model for producing or, you know, translate the transformation of, you know, on screen to voice.   Michael Hingson ** 30:27 I'm not sure that's totally true. Go a little bit deeper into that for me.   Mike Paciello ** 30:34 Well, I mean, so NVDA and jaws use this off screen model, right, which is functionally, they grab, will they grab some content, or whatever it is, push it to this, you know, little black box, do all those translations, you know, do all the transformation, and then push it back so it's renderable to a screen reader. Okay, so that's this off screen model that is transparent to the users, although now you know you can get into it and and tweak it and work with it right, right? I recall when Mike was working on the original design of of nary, excuse me, a voiceover, and he had called me, and I said, Are you going to continue with the notion of an off screen model? And he said, Yeah, we are. And I said, Well, when you can build something that's more like what TV Raman has built into Emacs, and it works integral to the actual OS, purely native. Call me because then I'm interested in, but now that was, you know, 1520, years ago, right? I mean, how long has voiceover been around,   Michael Hingson ** 31:51 since 2007   Mike Paciello ** 31:54 right? So, yeah, 20 years ago, right? Just shy of 20 years, 18 years. So I don't know. I honestly don't know. I'm   Michael Hingson ** 32:02 not totally sure, but I believe that it is, but I can, you know, we'll have to, we'll have to look into that.   Mike Paciello ** 32:08 If anyone in the audience is out there looking at you, get to us before we find out. Let us we'll find out at the NFB   Michael Hingson ** 32:12 convention, because they're going to be a number of Apple people there. We can certainly ask, there   Mike Paciello ** 32:17 you go. That's right, for sure. James Craig is bound to be there. I can ask him and talk to him about that for sure. Yep, so anyway,   Michael Hingson ** 32:23 but I think, I think it's a very it's a valid point. And you know, the the issue is that, again, if done right and app developers are doing things right there, there needs to, there ought to be a way that every app has some level of accessibility that makes it more available. And the reality is, people, other than blind people use some of these technologies as well. So we're talking about voice input. You know, quadriplegics, for example, who can't operate a keyboard will use or a mouse can use, like a puff and zip stick to and and Dragon to interact with a computer and are successful at doing it. The reality is, there's a whole lot more opportunities out there than people think. Don't   Mike Paciello ** 33:11 I agree with that. I'm shaking my head up and down Mike and I'm telling you, there is, I mean, voice recognition alone. I can remember having a conversation with Tony vitality, one of the CO inventors of the deck talk. And that goes all the way back into the, you know, into the early 90s, about voice recognition and linguistics and what you know, and I know Kurzweil did a lot of working with Terry right on voice utterances and things like that. Yeah, yeah. There's, there's a wide open window of opportunity there for study and research that could easily be improved. And as you said, and this is the point, it doesn't just improve the lives of the blind or low vision. It improves the lives of a number of different types of Persona, disability persona types, but it would certainly create a pathway, a very wide path, for individuals, users without disabilities, in a number of different life scenarios.   Michael Hingson ** 34:10 Yeah, and it's amazing how little sometimes that's done. I had the pleasure a few years ago of driving a Tesla down Interstate 15 out here in California. Glad I wasn't there. You bigot, you know, the co pilot system worked. Yeah, you know, I just kept my hands on the wheel so I didn't very much, right? Not have any accidents. Back off now it worked out really well, but, but here's what's really interesting in that same vehicle, and it's something that that I find all too often is is the case if I were a passenger sitting in the front seat, there's so much that I as a passenger don't have access to that other passenger. Do radios now are mostly touchscreen right, which means and they don't build in the features that would make the touchscreen system, which they could do, accessible. The Tesla vehicle is incredibly inaccessible. And there's for a guy who's so innovative, there's no reason for that to be that way. And again, I submit that if they truly make the product so a blind person could use it. Think of how much more a sighted person who doesn't have to take their eyes off the road could use the same technologies.   Mike Paciello ** 35:35 You know, Mike, again, you and I are on the same page. I mean, imagine these guys are supposed to be creative and imaginative and forward thinking, right? Could you? Can you imagine a better tagline than something along the lines of Tesla, so user friendly that a blind person can drive it? Yeah? I mean this is, have you heard or seen, you know, metaphorically speaking, or that's okay, a an advertisement or PR done by any, any company, because they're all, all the way across the board, that hasn't featured what it can do to enhance lives of people with disabilities. Where it wasn't a hit. I mean, literally, it was, yeah, you see these commercials played over and over to Apple, Microsoft, Emma, I see McDonald's, Walmart. I mean, I could just name, name the one after another. Really, really outstanding. Salesforce has done it. Just incredible. They would do it, yeah. I mean, there is there any more human centric message than saying, Look what we've built and designed we're releasing to the masses and everyone, anyone, regardless of ability, can use it. Yeah, that, to me, is that's, I agree that's a good route, right for marketing and PR, good,   Michael Hingson ** 37:03 yeah. And yet they don't, you know, I see commercials like about one of the one of the eye injections, or whatever Bobby is, Mo or whatever it is. And at the beginning, the woman says, I think I'm losing sight of the world around me. You know that's all about, right? It's eyesight and nothing else. And I appreciate, I'm all for people keeping their eyesight and doing what's necessary. But unfortunately, all too often, we do that at the detriment of of other people, which is so unfortunate.   Mike Paciello ** 37:39 Yeah, you know again, not to, not to get off the subject, but one of my favorite books is rethinking competitive advantage, by Ram Sharon. I don't know if you know know him, but the guy is one of my heroes in terms of just vision and Business and Technology. And in this, this book, he wrote this a couple of years ago. He said this one this is his first rule of competition in the digital age. The number one rule was simply this, a personalized consumer experience, key to exponential growth. That's exactly you and I are talking about personally. I want to see interfaces adapt to users, rather than what we have today, which is users having to adapt to the interface.   Michael Hingson ** 38:32 Yeah, and it would make so much sense to do so. I hope somebody out there is listening and will maybe take some of this to heart, because if they do it right, they can have a huge market in no time at all, just because they show they care. You know, Nielsen Company did a survey back in 2016 where they looked at a variety of companies and consumers and so on. And if I recall the numbers right, they decided that people with disabilities are 35% more likely to continue to work with and shop, for example, at companies that really do what they can to make their websites and access to their products accessible, as opposed to not. And that's that's telling. It's so very telling. But we don't see people talking about that nearly like we should   Mike Paciello ** 39:20 you talk about a business value proposition. There is bullet proof that where you are leaving money on the table, yep, and a lot of it, yeah, exactly. We're not talking about 1000s or hundreds of 1000s. We're talking about billions and trillions, in some instances, not an exaggeration by any stretch of the imagination, very, very simple math. I had this conversation a couple years ago with the CEO of Pearson. At that time, he's retired, but, you know, I told him, if you spent $1 for every person that it was in the world with. Disability, you're, you're, you're talking about 1/4 of the population, right? It's simple math, simple math,   Michael Hingson ** 40:08 but people still won't do it. I mean, we taught you to mention section 508, before with the whole issue of web access, how much of the government has really made their websites accessible, even though it's the law?   Mike Paciello ** 40:19 Yeah, three years, three or four years ago, they did a study, and they found out that the good that every federal agency, most of the federal agencies, were not even keeping up thinking with reporting of the status, of where they were, and yet that was written right into the five way law. They were mandated to do it, and they still did do   Michael Hingson ** 40:37 it. We haven't, you know, the whole Americans with Disabilities Act. Finally, the Department of Justice said that the internet is a place of business, but still, it's not written in the law. And of course, we only see about 3% of all websites that tend to have any level of access. And there's no reason for that. It's not that magical. And again, I go back to what do we do to get schools and those who teach people how to code to understand the value of putting in accessibility right from the outset?   Mike Paciello ** 41:10 Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. I think this is what Kate sanka is trying to do with with Teach access. In fact, you know, again, my company, TPG was one of the founding companies have teach access back again, 10 years ago, when it first started. But that's where it starts. I mean, they're, they're pretty much focused on post secondary, university education, but I could tell you on a personal level, I was speaking at my kids grade school, elementary school, because they were already using laptops and computers back then it starts. Then you've got to build a mindset. You've got to build it we you've heard about the accessibility, maturity models coming out of the W, 3c, and in I, double AP. What that speaks to fundamentally, is building a culture within your corporate organization that is think accessibility as a think accessibility mindset, that it is woven into the fiber of every business line, in every technology, software development life cycle, all of the contributors at that level, from A to Z. But if you don't build it into the culture, it's not going to happen. So I would love to see a lot more being done at that level. But yeah, it's, it's, it's a, it's a hero. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 42:34 we're, we're left out of the conversation so much. Yeah, yeah, totally. So you, you sold TPG, and you then formed, or you had web able and then able Docs.   Mike Paciello ** 42:48 So what web able came out was a carve out, one of two carve outs that I had from when I sold TPG. The other was open access technologies, which which eventually was sold to another accessibility company primarily focused on making documentation accessible to meet the WCAG and other standards requirements and web able I carved out. It's been a kind of a hobby of mine now, for since I sold TPG, I'm still working on the back end, ironically, from the get go, so we're talking, you know, again, eight years ago, I had built machine learning and AI into it. From then back then, I did so that what it does is it very simply, goes out and collects 1000s and 1000s of articles as it relates to technology, people with disabilities, and then cleans them up and post them to web able.com I've got a lot more playing for it, but that's in a nutshell. That's what it does. And I don't we do some we do some QA review to make sure that the cleanup in terms of accessibility and the articles are are properly formatted and are accessible. We use the web aim API, but yeah, works like magic. Works like clockwork, and that's got aI uses IBM Watson AI built into it. Yeah, enable docs was abledocs was, how should I say this in a nice way, abledocs was a slight excursion off of my main route. It can work out. I wish it had. It had a lot of potential, much like open access technologies, but they both suffered from owners who really, really not including myself, who just didn't have good vision and in lack humility,   Michael Hingson ** 44:43 yeah. How's that? There you go. Well, so not to go political or anything, but AI in general is interesting, and I know that there have been a lot of debates over the last few years about artificial. Intelligence and helping to make websites accessible. There are several companies like AudioEye, user way, accessibe and so on that to one degree or another, use AI. What? What? So in general, what do you think about AI and how it's going to help deal with or not, the whole issue of disabilities and web access,   Mike Paciello ** 45:22 yeah, and we're going to set aside Neil Jacobs thoughts on how he sees it in the future, right? Although I have to tell you, he gave me some things to think about, so we'll just set that to to the side. So I think what AI offers today is something that I thought right away when it started to see the, you know, the accessibes, the user ways, the audio, eyes, and all the other companies kind of delving into it, I always saw potential to how's this remediate a fundamental problem or challenge, let's not call it a problem, a challenge that we were otherwise seeing in the professional services side of that equation around web accessibility, right? So you get experts who use validation tools and other tools, who know about code. Could go in and they know and they use usability, they use user testing, and they go in and they can tell you what you need to do to make your digital properties right, usable and accessible. People with disabilities, all well and good. That's great. And believe me, I had some of the best people, if not the best people in the world, work for me at one time. However, there are a couple of things it could not do in it's never going to do. Number one, first and foremost, from my perspective, it can't scale. It cannot scale. You can do some things at, you know, in a large way. For example, if, if a company is using some sort of, you know, CMS content management system in which their entire sites, you know, all their sites, all their digital properties, you know, are woven into templates, and those templates are remediated. So that cuts down a little bit on the work. But if you go into companies now, it's not like they're limited to two or three templates. Now they've got, you know, department upon department upon department, everybody's got a different template. So even those are becoming very vos, very verbose and very plentiful. So accessibility as a manual effort doesn't really scale well. And if it does, even if it could, it's not fast enough, right? So that's what AI does, AI, coupled with automation, speeds up that process and delivers a much wider enterprise level solution. Now again, AI automation is not, is not a whole, is not a holistic science. You know, it's not a silver bullet. David Marathi likes to use the term, what is he? He likes the gold standard. Well, from his perspective, and by the way, David Marathi is CEO of audio. Eye is a combination of automation AI in expert analysis, along with the use of the integration of user testing and by user testing, it's not just personas, but it's also compatibility with the assistive technologies that people with disabilities use. Now, when you do that, you've got something that you could pattern after a standard software development life cycle, environment in which you integrate all of these things. So if you got a tool, you integrate it there. If you've got, you know, a digital accessibility platform which does all this automation, AI, right, which, again, this is the this is a forester foresters take on the the the daps, as they calls it. And not really crazy about that, but that's what they are. Digital Accessibility platforms. It allows us to scale and scale at costs that are much lower, at speeds that are much faster, and it's just a matter of like any QA, you've got to check your work, and you've got it, you can't count on that automation being absolute. We know for a fact that right now, at best, we're going to be able to get 35 to 40% accuracy, some claim, larger different areas. I'm still not convinced of that, but the fact of the matter is, it's like anything else. Technology gets better as it goes, and we'll see improvements over time periods.   Michael Hingson ** 49:49 So here's here's my thought, yeah, let's say you use AI in one of the products that's out there. And I. You go to a website and you include it, and it reasonably well makes the website 50% more usable and accessible than it was before. I'm just, I just threw out that number. I know it's random. Go ahead, Yep, yeah, but let's say it does that. The reality is that means that it's 50% that the web developers, the web coders, don't have to do because something else is dealing with it. But unfortunately, their mentality is not to want to deal with that because they also fear it. But, you know, I remember back in the mid 1980s I started a company because I went off and tried to find a job and couldn't find one. So I started a company with a couple of other people, where we sold early PC based CAD systems to architects, right? And we had AutoCAD versus CAD. Another one called point line, which was a three dimensional system using a y cap solid modeling board that took up two slots in your PC. So it didn't work with all PCs because we didn't have enough slots. But anyway, right, right, right. But anyway, when I brought architects in and we talked about what it did and we showed them, many of them said, I'll never use that. And I said, why? Well, it does work, and that's not the question. But the issue is, we charge by the time, and so we take months to sometimes create designs and projects, right? And so we can't lose that revenue. I said, you're looking at it all wrong. Think about it this way, somebody gives you a job, you come back and you put it in the CAD system. You go through all the iterations it takes, let's just say, two weeks. Then you call your customer in. You use point line, and you can do a three dimensional walk through and fly through. You can even let them look out the window and see what there is and all that they want to make changes. They tell you the changes. You go off and you make the changes. And two weeks later, now it's a month, you give them their finished product, all the designs, all the plots and all that, all done, and you charge them exactly the same price you were going to charge them before. Now you're not charging for your time, you're charging for your expertise, right? And I think that same model still holds true that the technology, I think most people will agree that it is not perfect, but there are a lot of things that it can do. Because the reality is, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, are all things that can be defined with computer code, whether it necessarily does it all well with AI or not, is another story. But if it does it to a decent fraction, it makes all the difference in terms of what you're able to do and how quickly you can do   Mike Paciello ** 52:52 it. Yeah, I can argue with that at all. I think any time that we can make our jobs a little bit easier so that we can focus where we should be focused. In this case, as you said, the expertise side of it, right to fix those complicated scenarios or situations that require a hands on surgical like Right? Expertise, you can do that now. You've got more hours more time because it's been saved. The only thing I would say, Mike, about what, what you just said, is that there with that, with that mindset, okay, comes responsibility. Oh, yeah, in this is where I think in everybody that knows anything about this environment, you and I have an intimate understanding of this. The whole overlay discussion is the biggest problem with what happened was less about the technology and more about what claims are being made. Yeah, the technology could do which you could not do in, in some cases, could never do, or would never, would never do, well, right? So if you create, and I would submit this is true in as a fundamental principle, if you create a technology of any kind, you must, in truth, inform your clients of of what it can and cannot do so they understand the absolute value to them, because the last thing you want, because, again, we live in a, unfortunately, a very litigious world. Right soon as there's   Michael Hingson ** 54:49 a mistake couldn't happen,   Mike Paciello ** 54:51 they'll go right after you. So now you know, and again, I don't I'm not necessarily just blaming the ambulance chasers of the world. World. I was talking to an NFP lawyer today. He referred to them in a different name, and I can't remember well, I never heard the expression before, but that's what he meant, right? Yeah, it's the salesman and the product managers and the marketing people themselves, who are were not themselves, to your point, properly trained, properly educated, right? It can't be done, what clearly could not be said, what should or should not be said, right? And then you got lawyers writing things all over the place. So, yeah, yeah. So, so I look people knew when I made the decision to come to audio eye that it was a make or break scenario for me, or at least that's what they thought in my mindset. It always, has always been, that I see incredible possibilities as you do or technology, it just has to be handled responsibly.   Michael Hingson ** 55:56 Do you think that the companies are getting better and smarter about what they portray about their products than they than they were three and four and five years ago.   Mike Paciello ** 56:08 Okay, look, I sat in and chaired a meeting with the NFB on this whole thing. And without a doubt, they're getting smarter. But it took not just a stick, you know, but, but these large lawsuits to get them to change their thinking, to see, you know, where they where they were wrong, and, yeah, things are much better. There's still some issues out there. I both know it that's going to happen, that happens in every industry,   Michael Hingson ** 56:42 but there are improvements. It is getting better, and people are getting smarter, and that's where an organization like the NFB really does need to become more involved than in a sense, they are. They took some pretty drastic steps with some of the companies, and I think that they cut off their nose, despite their face as well, and that didn't help. So I think there are things that need to be done all the way around, but I do see that progress is being made too. I totally   Mike Paciello ** 57:11 agree, and in fact, I'm working with them right now. We're going to start working on the California Accessibility Act again. I'm really looking forward to working with the NFB, the DRC and Imperato over there and his team in the disability rights consortium, consortium with disability rights. What DRC coalition, coalition in in California. I can't wait to do that. We tried last year. We got stopped short. It got tabled, but I feel very good about where we're going this year. So that's, that's my that's, that is my focus right now. And I'm glad I'm going to be able to work with the NFB to be able to do that. Yeah, well, I, I really do hope that it passes. We've seen other states. We've seen some states pass some good legislation, and hopefully we will continue to see some of that go on. Yeah, Colorado has done a great job. Colorado sent a great job. I think they've done it. I really like what's being done with the EAA, even though it's in Europe, and some of the things that are going there, Susanna, Lauren and I had some great discussions. I think she is has been a leader of a Yeoman effort at that level. So we'll see. Let's, let's, I mean, there's still time out here. I guess I really would like to retire,   Michael Hingson ** 58:28 but I know the feeling well, but I can't afford to yet, so I'll just keep speaking and all that well, Mike, this has been wonderful. I really appreciate you taking an hour and coming on, and at least neither of us is putting up with any kind of snow right now, but later in the year we'll see more of that.   Mike Paciello ** 58:45 Yeah, well, maybe you will. We don't get snow down. I have. We've gotten maybe 25 flakes in North Carolina since I've been here.   Michael Hingson ** 58:53 Yeah, you don't get a lot of snow. We don't hear we don't really get it here, around us, up in the mountains, the ski resorts get it, but I'm out in a valley, so we don't, yeah,   Mike Paciello ** 59:02 yeah, no. I love it. I love this is golfing weather.   Michael Hingson ** 59:05 There you go. If people want to reach out to you, how do they do that?   Mike Paciello ** 59:11 There's a couple of ways. Certainly get in touch with me at AudioEye. It's michael.paciello@audioeye.com   Michael Hingson ** 59:17 B, A, C, I, E, L, L, O,   Mike Paciello ** 59:18 that's correct. Thank you for that. You could send me personal email at Mike paciello@gmail.com and or you can send me email at web able. It's m passielo at web able.com, any one of those ways. And please feel free you get on all the social networks. So feel free to link, connect to me. Anyway, I try to respond. I don't think there's anyone I I've not responded to one form or another.   Michael Hingson ** 59:46 Yeah, I'm I'm the same way. If I get an email, I want to respond to it. Yeah, well, thanks again for being here, and I want to thank all of you for listening. We really appreciate it. Love to hear your thoughts about this episode. Please feel free to email. Me, you can get me the email address I generally use is Michael h i at accessibe, A, C, C, E, S, S, i, b, e.com, or you can go to our podcast page, which is Michael hingson.com/podcast, and there's a contact form there. But love to hear from you. Love to hear your thoughts, and most of all, please give us a five star rating wherever you're listening. We value your ratings and your reviews a whole lot, so we really appreciate you doing that. And if any of you, and Mike, including you, can think of other people that you think ought to be guests on the podcast, we are always looking for more people, so fill us up, help us find more folks. And we would appreciate that a great deal. So again, Mike, thanks very much. This has been a lot of fun, and we'll have to do it again.   Mike Paciello ** 1:00:44 Thanks for the invitation. Mike, I really appreciate it. Don't forget to add 10 Nakata to your list,   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:49 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com . AccessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for Listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.

In this special episode of the Cherryleaf Podcast, we're doing something a little different - a curated roundup of recent news, tools, research, and resources especially relevant to technical communicators.

Accessibility checkers are helpful, but they don't tell the whole story. In this episode, Dax and Chad break down what really makes a document accessible, from heading structure and reading order to alt text, lists, and color contrast. With plenty of real-world examples (and a few accessibility wizard jokes), this episode is a practical guide to building better documents from the start!   Interested in a resource mentioned in this episode? Send us an email at solutions@chaxtc.com and we'll get it right to you!

In this episode of Chax Chat, hosts Chad Chelius and Dax Castro tackle real-world challenges in document accessibility, focusing on tools like Microsoft Word, Excel, and Adobe Acrobat. They explore common issues with tables and cells, such as merged headers and layout complexities, and share practical tips for ensuring accessibility across different formats. The conversation includes strategies for managing accessibility in spreadsheets and PDFs, highlighting the nuances of remediation. Plus we are introduced to Chad's cat, more Koi talk, and how to snag a Chax freebie.

Anlässlich des Global Accessibility Awareness Day sprechen wir mit Ediz Kiratli, UX-Experte und Leiter des Arbeitskreises Barrierefreiheit bei der German UPA, über die Auswirkungen des Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetzes (BFSG), das ab dem 28. Juni 2025 in Kraft tritt. Im Zentrum steht, welche Verantwortung UX-Professionals bei der Umsetzung digitaler Barrierefreiheit tragen – konzeptionell, strategisch und operativ. Es geht um häufige Missverständnisse, rechtliche Anforderungen, branchenspezifische Implikationen und konkrete Handlungsempfehlungen für UX-Teams. Ergänzt wird das Gespräch durch einen Ausblick auf KI-gestützte Unterstützung, Tipps für inklusive Usability-Tests sowie persönliche Erfahrungen aus der Praxis. Ein unverzichtbarer Deep Dive für alle, die Barrierefreiheit nicht nur als Pflicht, sondern als UX-Kernkompetenz verstehen.   |   ZEITSTEMPEL [00:00] Einführung & Vorstellung von Ediz Kiratli   |   [01:45] Bedeutung des Global Accessibility Awareness Day   |   [03:00] Entwicklung digitaler Barrierefreiheit   |   [04:30] Häufige Missverständnisse und Irrtümer   |   [06:00] Was regelt das Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz (BFSG)?   |   [08:30] Branchen & Produkte, die besonders betroffen sind   |   [12:00] Die Rolle von UX bei der Umsetzung des BFSG   |   [14:45] Interface-Gestaltung: Herausforderungen & Perspektiven   |   [16:30] Von Anfang an mitdenken: Accessibility im Projektprozess   |   [19:30] Tools & Methoden zur Prüfung auf Barrierefreiheit   |   [21:00] Inklusive Usability-Tests mit Menschen mit Behinderungen   |   [23:00] Einfluss von Designsystemen und Komponentenbibliotheken   |   [25:00] Wie Developer & Teams motiviert werden können   |   [27:45] Kritische Reflexion zu Übergangsfristen   |   [30:30] Wirtschaftliche Hürden & Lösungsstrategien   |   [34:00] Argumentationshilfe für Entscheider   |   [37:00] Gesetz als Mindeststandard – was jetzt zählt   |   [40:30] Wünsche für die UX-Community   |   [41:30] KI & Automatisierung als Unterstützer   |   [44:00] Erste Schritte für Accessibility-Einsteiger   |   [45:45] Strukturelle Veränderungen in Organisationen   |   [48:00] Mitwirken im AK Barrierefreiheit   |     |   INFORMATIONEN ZUM GAST Ediz Kiratli ist seit über 15 Jahren in der UX-Branche tätig und aktuell als Referent für Usability bei der VBG aktiv. Zudem leitet er seit zwei Jahren den Arbeitskreis Barrierefreiheit der German UPA. Er steht für praxisnahe Aufklärung, strategische UX-Integration und die Weiterentwicklung barrierefreier Standards. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ediz-kiratli-42000b5/ German UPA Arbeitskreis Barrierefreiheit: https://germanupa.de/arbeitskreise/arbeitskreis-barrierefreiheit   |   LINKS UND RESSOURCEN Gesetzestext BFSG: bmas.de/DE/Service/Gesetze/barrierefreiheitsstaerkungsgesetz.html   |   Color Contrast Analyzer: https://developer.paciellogroup.com/color-contrast-checker/  |   WCAG 2.1 Standards: w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/   |   BITV-Test: bitv-test.de   |   Frontally-Artikel zum GAAD: germanupa.de/magazin/frontally   |     |   DANKE FÜR DEIN FEEDBACK UND SUPPORT Wenn dir diese Episode gefallen hat, freuen wir uns über dein Feedback! Abonniere unseren Podcast, teile die Folge mit deinem Team und hinterlasse uns gerne eine Bewertung auf deiner Plattform. Du willst selbst aktiv werden? Dann werde Teil des Arbeitskreises Barrierefreiheit – wir freuen uns über neue Perspektiven und engagierte Mitstreiterinnen und Mitstreiter. www.germanupa.de   |

In this episode of ChaxChat, hosts Chad Chelius and Dax Castro delve into document accessibility with a focus on real-world challenges and professional development. This episode highlights tools and strategies that bridge the gap between aesthetics and functionality. Working in MS Word, Powerpoint and Adobe Acrobat. Using the Microsoft accessibility checker. Qualitative VS quantitative. And of course Koi Talk.

Today's episode is a little different.  I'm sharing a recording from one of our monthly live Automation Guild member trainings, and trust me, it's a session every software tester should hear. Get instant access to Automation Guild: https://testguild.me/youtubeGuild  ** Use code youtube30 to get 30% off. We'll discuss an essential topic for anyone involved in software development: accessibility and the upcoming European Accessibility Act. Listen in as accessibility advocate and testing expert Laveena Ramchandani unpacks what's coming with the new legislation and why building inclusive digital products can't wait for the law to catch up. Discover: How to think more accessibly – Spot potential barriers and adopt an inclusive mindset. How to test for accessibility – Use keyboard navigation, browser extensions, automated tests, and assistive tech. How to help teams create accessible content – Apply the social model of accessibility, annotate designs, and follow WCAG guidelines.  Whether you develop, design, test, or lead software teams, especially if you serve European customers, this episode will get you up to speed on the what, why, and how of making your products accessible to all, and help you get ahead of compliance before June 2025 arrives.

What really drives accessibility—compliance, inclusion, or brand trust? Chad and Dax unpack an IAAP white paper on motivations, share how automation needs a human touch, and highlight why certifications like IAAP's ADS matter. They also dive into creating truly accessible documents with a focus on meeting PDF/UA standards. Perfect for anyone ready to level up their accessibility game.

In Episode 131 of White Canes Connect, host David Goldstein shares highlights from a powerful panel on digital accessibility and the expanded scope of ADA Title II, which now includes websites, mobile apps, and digital documents of publicly funded institutions. Moderated by Thomas DiAgostino and facilitated by JEME Agency and Accessible Pharmacy Services for the Blind, the panel features four experts from diverse backgrounds: Jamie Ray-Leonetti (Institute on Disabilities at Temple University), Adrienne Moore (Office for People with Disabilities, Philadelphia), architect Ricardo J. Rodríguez De Santiago, and Goldstein himself. The discussion centers on the DOJ's 2024 Title II update, requiring compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA standards. Panelists explore implementation challenges, legal obligations, and the critical role of inclusive design. Moore outlines Philadelphia's proactive strategies, while Rodríguez emphasizes human-centered design and breaking common accessibility misconceptions. Goldstein draws from lived experience, highlighting real-world digital barriers and the need to involve disabled users directly. Ray-Leonetti underscores the urgency of embedding accessibility into policy and organizational culture—not just for compliance, but as a moral imperative. This episode is both a rallying cry and a practical guide for anyone building digital spaces. Accessibility isn't extra—it's essential. Show notes at https://www.whitecanesconnect.com/131      Links Mentioned Have you checked out Federation Focus yet? https://www.youtube.com/@nfbofpa/  JEME Agency: https://www.jeme.agency  Accessible Pharmacy Services for the Blind: https://www.accessiblepharmacy.com  Sip. Savor. Support. Keystone Chapter fundraiser at Landmark Americana: https://nfbofpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Sip-Savor-Support-FINAL-TROY.pdf  Attend PA Association of Blind Merchants Spring Fling Blind Vendor Showcase: https://www.pablindmerchants.org/fling/  Exhibit at PA Association of Blind Merchants Spring Fling!: https://www.pablindmerchants.org/exhibit/  Be a sponsor of PA Association of Blind Merchants: https://www.pablindmerchants.org/sponsor/  An Easy Way to Help the NFB of PA Support the NFB of PA with every purchase at White Cane Coffee Company by going to https://www.whitecanecoffee.com/ref/nfbp. When you use that link to purchase from White Cane Coffee, the NFB of PA earns a 10% commission! Share the link with your family and friends! Listen to Erin and Bob Willman from White Cane Coffee on episode 072 of White Canes Connect. Donate to the NFB of PA Like what you hear on White Canes Connect? Support us and donate to the National Federation of the Blind of Pennsylvania, visit https://www.NFBofPA.org/give/. We Want to Hear Your Story Reach out with questions and comments, or share ideas! We want to hear from you. Call us at (267) 338-4495 or at whitecanesconnect@gmail.com. Follow White Canes Connect Find out why White Canes Connect is currently ranked at #13 of the 100 Best Visually Impaired Podcast. Find the show on: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/white-canes-connect/id1592248709  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1YDQSJqpoteGb1UMPwRSuI  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@pablindpodcast 

In this episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, Jenny breaks down HHS's new accessibility rule and what it means for healthcare organizations. With compliance deadlines approaching in 2026 and 2027, it's essential to understand who's affected, what WCAG 2.0 AA standards require, and how to assess your website, kiosks, and mobile apps for compliance.Jenny shares steps for getting started, including a free accessibility scan and ways to approach necessary updates. While enforcement remains uncertain, prioritizing accessibility will result in a better experience for all patients and showcase your brand's commitment to inclusivity.Resources & NotesHHS Accessibility Rule Fact SheetADA Web Accessibility RuleFree Accessibility ScanSite Audit ToolColor Contrast ComplianceDesign Guide Based on WCAG PrinciplesFigma plug-ins are also available for additional accessibility checkpoints. However, automated tools only go so far. Having a designer and developer who understand accessibility best practices is the most reliable way to ensure compliance.Connect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

The above title does not do Dan Swift justice. Dan also has his own podcast, successful Youtube channel and he has released seven music albums. Talk about being unstoppable! I met Dan when I appeared as a guest on his podcast, Time We Discuss and I knew he would contribute to a fascinating story here.   Dan grew up with an interest in music. For a time he thought he wanted to write music for video games. Along the way he left that idea behind and after graduating from college he began working at designing websites. He has made that into his fulltime career.   As he grew as a website designer and later as a supervisor for a school system coordinating and creating the school sites Dan took an interest in accessibility of the web. We talk quite a bit about that during our time together. His observations are fascinating and right on where web access for persons with disabilities is concerned.   We also talk about Dan's podcast including some stories of guests and what inspires Dan from his interviews. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I.       About the Guest:   Originally wanting to write music for video games or become an audio engineer, Dan Swift graduated from a small Liberal Arts college with a degree in Music Composition (Bachelor of Arts) and Music Recording Technology (Bachelor of Music).  Dan went on to release seven EP albums between 2003 and 2024. Most recently, "Parallels" dropped on Leap Day, 2024.  Dan has always had a passion for shaking up genres between Eps writing classical, electronic, and modern rock music.   While creating music has always been a passion, Dan took a more traditional professional path as a web developer. While on this path, Dan had a lot of experience with accessibility standards as it relates to the web and he values accessibility and equity for everyone both inside and outside the digital workspace. Having received his MBA during COVID, Dan went on to a leadership position where he continues to make a difference leading a team of tech-savvy web professionals.   In early 2024, I created a podcast and YouTube channel called "Time We Discuss" which focuses on career exploration and discovery. The channel and podcast are meant for anyone that is feeling lost professionally and unsure of what is out there for them. Dan feels that it is important for people to discover their professional passion, whatever it is that lights them up on the inside, and chase it. So many people are unfulfilled in their careers, yet it doesn't have to be this way.   When not working, Dan enjoys spending time with his wife and three kids. They are a very active family often going to various extracurricular events over the years including flag football, soccer, gymnastics, and school concerts.  Dan's wife is very active with several nonprofit organizations including those for the betterment of children and homelessness.  Dan enjoys playing the piano, listening to podcasts, and listening to music.  Dan is very naturally curious and is a slave to a train of never-ending thoughts.   Ways to connect with Dan:   Time We Discuss on YouTube Time We Discuss on Spotify Time We Discuss on Twitter/X Time We Discuss on Instagram Time We Discuss on BlueSky   Time We Discuss Website Dan Swift Music Website   About the Host:   Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/   https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes:   Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:20 Well, hi everybody. Welcome once again. Wherever you may be, to unstoppable mindset, I am your host, Mike hingson, sometimes I say Michael hingson, and people have said, Well, is it Mike or Michael? And the answer is, it doesn't really matter. It took a master's degree in physics and 10 years in sales for me to realize that if I said Mike Hingson on the phone, people kept calling me Mr. Kingston, and I couldn't figure out why, so I started saying Michael Hingson, and they got the hinckson part right, but it doesn't matter to me. So anyway, Mike hingson, or Michael hingson, glad you're with us, wherever you are, and our guest today is Dan Swift, who has his own pine podcast, and it was actually through that podcast that we met, and I told him, but I wouldn't do it with him and be on his podcast unless he would be on unstoppable mindset. And here he is. Dan is a person who writes music, he's an engineer. He does a lot of work with web design and so on, and we're going to get into all that. So Dan, I want to welcome you to unstoppable mindset. We're really glad you're here.   Dan Swift ** 02:25 Michael, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. I am. I'm super excited.   Michael Hingson ** 02:30 Well, looking forward to getting to spend more time with you. We did yours time to discuss, and now we get this one. So it's always kind of fun. So, and Dan is in Pennsylvania, so we're talking across the continent, which is fine. It's amazing what we can do with electronics these days, telling us not like the good old days of the covered wagon. What can I say? So, So Dan, why don't you tell us a little bit about kind of the early Dan, growing up and all that.   Dan Swift ** 02:57 Oh, geez. How far   Michael Hingson ** 02:58 back to go? Oh, as far as you want to go,   Dan Swift ** 03:02 Well, okay, so I am, I am the youngest of five. Grew up just outside of Philadelphia as being the youngest. You know, there are certain perks that go along with that. I get to experience things that my parents would have previous said no to the older siblings. And you know how it is with with, you know, if you have more than one kid, technically, you get a little more relaxed as you have more but then I also had the other benefit of, you know, hearing the expression, there are young ears in the room, I will tell you later. So I kind of got some of that too. But I grew up outside of Philadelphia, had a passion for music. Pretty early on. I was never good at any sports. Tried a number of things. And when I landed on music, I thought, you know, this is this is something that I can do. I seem to have a natural talent for it. And I started, I tried playing the piano when I was maybe eight or nine years old. That didn't pan out. Moved on to the trumpet when I was nine or 10. Eventually ended up picking up guitar, bass, guitar, double bass revisited piano later in life, but that's the musical side of things. Also, when I was young, you know, I had a passion for role playing games, Dungeons and Dragons, was really big when I was a teenager, so I was super excited for that. Yeah, that's, that's kind of those, those memories kind of forced me, or kind of shaped me into the person that I am today. I'm very light hearted, very easy going, and I just try to enjoy life.   Michael Hingson ** 04:30 I played some computer games when computers came along and I started fiddling with them, the games I usually played were text based games. I've never really played Dungeons and Dragons and some of those. And I I'm sure that there are accessible versions of of some of that, but I remember playing games like adventure. You remember? Have you heard of adventure? I have, yeah. So that was, that was fun. Info con made. Well, they had Zork, which was really the same as adventure, but they. At a whole bunch of games. And those are, those are fun. And I think all of those games, I know a lot of adults would probably say kids spend too much time on some of them, but some of these games, like the the text based games, I thought really were very good at expanding one's mind, and they made you think, which is really what was important to me? Yeah, I   Dan Swift ** 05:21 completely agree with that too. Because you'd be put in these situations where, you know true, you're trying to solve some kind of puzzle, and you're trying to think, Okay, well, that didn't work, or that didn't work, and you try all these different things, then you decide to leave and come back to and you realize later, like you didn't have something that you needed to progress forward, or something like that. But, but it really gets the brain going, trying to create with these, uh, come up with these creative solutions to progress the game forward. Yeah, which   Michael Hingson ** 05:43 and the creative people who made them in the first place? What did they? Yeah, they, I don't know where they, where they spent their whole time that they had nothing to do but to create these games. But hey, it worked. It sure. Did you know you do it well. So you went off to college. Where'd you go? Sure,   Dan Swift ** 06:02 I went to a small liberal arts college, Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania. It's near, it's near Hershey. It was, it was weird in that my the entire school was about half the size of my entire high school. So that was very, very weird. And then you talk to these other people. And it's like, my high school was, you know, very large by comparison. But for me, it was like, well, high school, that's what I knew. But yeah, it was I went to, I went to 11 Valley College near Hershey. I studied, I was a double major. I studied music composition and music recording,   Michael Hingson ** 06:35 okay, and, oh, I've got to go back and ask before we continue that. So what were some of the real perks you got as a kid that your your older siblings didn't get?   Dan Swift ** 06:45 Oh, geez, okay. I mean,   Michael Hingson ** 06:49 couldn't resist, yeah, probably, probably   Dan Swift ** 06:51 some of the more cliche things. I probably got to spend the night at a friend's house earlier than my oldest brother. For instance, I know my parents were a little more concerned about finances. So I know my oldest brother didn't get a chance to go away to college. He did community college instead. And then, kind of, my sister was a very similar thing. And then once we got, like, about halfway down, you know, me and my two other brothers, we all had the opportunity to go away to college. So I think that was, that was definitely one of the perks. If I was the oldest, I was the oldest, I probably wouldn't have had that opportunity with my family. Got   Michael Hingson ** 07:24 it well, so you went off and you got a matt a bachelor's in music, composition and music recording. So that brought you to what you were interested in, part, which was the engineering aspect of it. But that certainly gave you a pretty well rounded education. Why those two why composition and recording? Sure.   Dan Swift ** 07:43 So if we talk about the music first at that time, so this is like the the late 90s, early 2000s any kind of digital music that was out there really was, was MIDI based, and anyone that was around that time and paying attention, it was like these very like, like that music kind of sound to it. So there wasn't a whole lot going on with MIDI. I'm sorry, with music as far as how great it sounded, or I shouldn't say, how great it sounded, the the instruments that are triggered by MIDI, they didn't sound all that great. But around that time, there was this game that came out, Final Fantasy seven, and I remember hearing the music for that, and it was all, it was all electronic, and it was just blown away by how fantastic it sounded. And And around that time, I thought, you know, it'd be really cool to get into writing music for video games. And that was something I really kind of toyed with. So that was kind of in the back of my head. But also, at the time, I was in a band, like a rock band, and I thought, you know, I'm going to school. They have this opportunity to work as a music engineer, which is something I really wanted to do at the time. And I thought, free studio time. My band will be here. This will be awesome. And it wasn't until I got there that I discovered that they also had the music composition program. It was a I was only there maybe a week or two, and once I discovered that, I was like, Well, this is gonna be great, you know, I'll learn to write. Know, I'll learn to write music. I can write for video games. I'll get engineering to go with it. This is gonna be fantastic. Speaking   Michael Hingson ** 09:07 of electronic music, did you ever see a science fiction movie called The Forbidden Planet? I did not. Oh, it's music. It's, it's not really music in the sense of what what we call, but it's all electronic. You gotta, you gotta find it. I'm sure you can find it somewhere. It's called the Forbidden Planet. Walter pigeon is in it. But the music and the sounds fit the movie, although it's all electronic, and electronic sounding pretty interesting.   Dan Swift ** 09:37 Now, is that from, I know, like in the 50s, 60s, there was a lot of experiments. Okay, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 09:45 yeah, and, but again, it fit the movie, which was the important part. So it certainly wasn't music like John Williams today and and in the 80s and all that. But again, for the movie, it fit. Very well, which is kind of cool. Yeah,   Dan Swift ** 10:02 I'll definitely have to check that out. I remember when I was in school, we talked about like that, that avant garde kind of style of the the 50s, 60s. And there was a lot of weird stuff going on with electronics, electronic music. Um, so I'm very curious to see, uh, to check this out, yeah, yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 10:14 You have to let me know what, what you find, what you think about it, when you get to chance to watch it, absolutely or actually, I I may have a copy. If I do, I'll put it in a dropbox folder and send you a link. Fantastic. So you graduated. Now, when did you graduate?   Dan Swift ** 10:32 Sure, so I graduated in 2003 okay,   Michael Hingson ** 10:35 so you graduated, and then what did you do? So,   Dan Swift ** 10:41 backing up about maybe 612, months prior to that, I decided I did not want to be a I didn't want to write music for video games. I also did not want to work in a recording studio. And the reason for this was for music. It was, I didn't it was, it was something I really, really enjoyed, and I didn't want to be put in a position where I had to produce music on demand. I didn't want to I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to lose my hobby, lose my passion in that way. So I decided that was out. And then also, when it came to working in a studio, if I wanted to be the engineer that I really wanted to be, I would have to be in a place where the music scene was really happening. So I'd have to be in like Philadelphia or Los Angeles or Nashville or deep in Philly or something like that. And I do not like the cities. I don't feel comfortable in the city. So I was like, that's not really for me either. I could work in like a suburb studio. But I was like, not, not for me. I don't, not for me. So when I graduated college, I ended up doing freelance web work. I had met through, through a mutual friend I was I was introduced to by a mutual friend, to a person that was looking for a new web designer, developer. They lost their person, and they were looking for someone to take over with that. And at the time, I did a little bit of experience doing that, from when I was in high school, kind of picked it up on the side, just kind of like as a hobby. But I was like, Ah, I'll give this a shot. So I started actually doing that freelance for a number of years after graduation. I also worked other jobs that was, like, kind of like nowhere, like dead end kind of jobs. I did customer service work for a little bit. I was a teacher with the American Cross for a little bit, a little bit of this and that, just trying to find my way. But at the same time, I was doing freelance stuff, and nothing related to music and nothing related to technology,   Michael Hingson ** 12:29 well, so you learned HTML coding and all that other stuff that goes along with all that. I gather, I   Dan Swift ** 12:35 sure did, I sure didn't. At the time, CSS was just kind of popular, yeah, so that. And then I learned, I learned JavaScript a little bit. And, you know, I had a very healthy attitude when it when it came to accepting new clients and projects, I always tried to learn something new. Anytime someone gave me a new a new request came in, it was like, Okay, well, I already know how to do this by doing it this way. But how can I make this better? And that was really the way that I really propelled myself forward in the in the digital, I should say, when it comes to development or design.   Michael Hingson ** 13:05 Okay, so you ended up really seriously going into website development and so on.   Dan Swift ** 13:15 I did. So I continued doing freelance. And then about five years after I graduated, I started working as an audio visual technician, and also was doing computer tech stuff as part of the role as well. And while I was there, I ended up developing some web applications for myself to use that I could use to interact with our like projectors and stuff like that. Because they were on, they were all in the network, so I could interact with them using my wait for it, iPod Touch, there you go. So that was, you know, I kind of like started to blend those two together. I was really interested in the web at the time, you know, because I was still doing the freelance, I really wanted to move forward and kind of find a full time position doing that. So I ended up pursuing that more and just trying to refine those skills. And it wasn't until about about five years later, I ended up working as a full time web developer, and then kind of moved forward from   Michael Hingson ** 14:09 there, iPod Touch, what memories? And there are probably bunches of people who don't even know what that is today. That   Dan Swift ** 14:16 is so true, and at the time that was cutting edge technology,   Michael Hingson ** 14:21 yeah, it was not accessible. So I didn't get to own one, because was later than that that Steve Jobs was finally kind of pushed with the threat of a lawsuit into making things accessible. And then they did make the iPhone, the iPod, the Mac and so on, and iTunes U and other things like that, accessible. And of course, what Steve Jobs did, what Apple did, which is what Microsoft eventually sort of has done as well, but he built accessibility into the operating system. So anybody who has an Apple device today. Troy actually has a device that can be made accessible by simply turning on the accessibility mode. Of course, if you're going to turn it on, you better learn how to use it, because the gestures are different. But it took a while, but, but that did happen. But by that time, I, you know, I had other things going on, and so I never did get an iPod and and wasn't able to make it work, but that's okay. But it's like the CD has gone away and the iPod has gone away, and so many things and DVDs have gone away.   Dan Swift ** 15:31 Yes, so true. So true. You know, just as soon as we start to get used to them   Michael Hingson ** 15:35 gone. I think there is, well, maybe it's close. There was a blockbuster open up in Oregon. But again, Blockbuster Video, another one, and I think somebody's trying to bring them back, but I do see that vinyl records are still being sold in various places by various people. Michael Buble just put out a new album, The Best of Buble, and it's available, among other things, in vinyl. So the old turntables, the old record players, and you can actually buy his album as a record and play it, which is kind of cool. Yeah, they've been   Dan Swift ** 16:07 very big with marketing, too. It's been kind of a marketing, I don't want to say gimmick, but in that realm, you kind of like, hey, you know, this is also available in vinyl, and you try to get the people that are like the audio files to really check it out. I never really took the vinyl personally, but I know plenty of people that have sworn by it. Well,   Michael Hingson ** 16:25 I've heard a number of people say that the audio actually is better on vinyl than typical MP three or other similar file formats. Yep,   Dan Swift ** 16:35 yep. I had a friend growing up, and actually, I shouldn't say growing up, so I was already, like, in college or post college, but a buddy of mine, Craig, he was all about vinyl, and he had, he had the nice, the amplifier, and the nice, I think even, like, a certain kind of needle that you would get for the record player. And you know, you'd have to sit in the sweet spot to really enjoy it, and and I respect that, but um, for me, it was like, I didn't, I didn't hear that much of a difference between a CD and vinyl. Um, not very. Didn't have the opportunity to AB test them. But now I will say comparing a CD to like an mp three file, for instance, even a high quality mp three file, I can tell the difference on that Sure. I would never, you know, I'd use the MP threes for convenience. But if I were to have it my way, man, I'd have the uncompressed audio, no doubt about it, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 17:27 wave forms, yep, yep, yeah. Obviously that's that's going to give you the real quality. Of course, it takes a lot more memory, but nevertheless, if you've got the space it, it really makes a lot of sense to do because mp three isn't going to be nearly as high a level quality.   Dan Swift ** 17:43 Absolutely, absolutely true. And that the way I rationalize it to myself. It's like, well, if I'm going to be though in the car or probably walking around and listening to music, I'm going to be getting all kinds of sounds from outside. Anyway, it kind of offsets the poor quality of the MP justify it.   Michael Hingson ** 17:56 That's true. Well, you know when and mp three is convenient if you want to put a bunch of stuff in a well on a memory card and be able to play it all, because if you have uncompressed audio, it does take a lot more space, and you can't put as much on a card, or you got to get a much bigger card. And now we're getting pretty good sized memory cards. But still, the reality is that that for most purposes, not all mp three will suffice.   Dan Swift ** 18:26 That is true. That is true. And I think too, you have a that the next battle is going to be mp three or a streaming,   Michael Hingson ** 18:33 yeah, yeah, that's going to be fun, isn't it? Yeah? Boy. What a world well. So one of the things I noticed in reading your bio and so on is that you got involved to a great degree in dealing with accessibility on the web. Tell me about that.   Dan Swift ** 18:55 Absolutely. Michael, so I've very strong opinions of accessibility. And this really comes back to, you know, I was, I was at my job, and I was only there as a full time developer. I wasn't there all that long, maybe a year, maybe two, and my supervisor came over to me and she said, you know, we want to start to make things more accessible. And this is like, this is like, 1012, years ago at this point, and I was like, okay, you know, and I did my little bit of research, and there wasn't a whole lot going on at the time. I don't think WCAG was a thing back then. It may have been. I can't remember if 508 was a thing at the in the Bible. It was okay, yeah. So I was doing my research, and, you know, you learn about the alt tags, and it's like, okay, well, we're doing that, okay. Then you learn about forms, and it's like, okay, well, they need to have labels, okay, but, but the turning point was this, Michael, we had a person on staff that was blind, and I was put in touch with this person, and I asked them to review like, different, different web applications. Applications we made, or forms or web pages. And the one day, I can't remember if he volunteered or if I asked, but essentially the request was, can this person come into our physical space and review stuff for us in person? And that experience was life changing for me, just watching him navigate our different web pages or web applications or forms, and seeing how he could go through it, see what was a problem, what was not a problem, was just an incredible experience. And I said this before, when given the opportunity to talk about this, I say to other developers and designers, if you ever have even the slightest opportunity to interact with someone, if they if, if you meet someone and they are using, let me, let me rephrase that, if you have the opportunity to watch someone that is blind using a navigate through the web, take, take that opportunity. Is just an amazing, amazing experience, and you draw so much from it. As a developer or designer, so very strong opinions about it, I'm all about inclusivity and making things equal for everyone on the web, and that was just my introductory experience about a dozen years ago.   Michael Hingson ** 21:07 And so what have you done with it all since? Sure, so   Dan Swift ** 21:11 with our website, we went from having about a million success criterion failures, and we've gotten it all the way down to, I think my last check, I think was maybe about 10,000 so it was huge, huge change. It's hard to get everything as because as content changes and newspaper, as new pages come online, it's hard to keep everything 100% accessible, but we know what to look for. You know, we're looking for the right contrast. We're looking for, you know, the all tags. We're looking for hierarchy with the headers. We're making sure our forms are accessible. We're making sure there aren't any keyboard traps, you know, things that most people, most web visitors, don't even think about, you know, or developers even thinking about, until you know, you need to think about them   Michael Hingson ** 22:00 well and other things as well, such as with other kinds of disabilities. If you're a person with epilepsy, for example, you don't want to go to a website and find blinking elements, or at least, you need to have a way to turn them off, yeah.   Dan Swift ** 22:13 Or or audio that starts automatically, or videos that start automatically, yeah, yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 22:19 So many different things, or video that starts automatically, and there's music, but there's no audio, so you so a blind person doesn't even know what the video is, yes, which, which happens all too often. But the the reality is that with the Americans with Disabilities Act, it's it's been interesting, because some lawyers have tried to fight the courts and say, well, but the ADA came out long before the internet, so we didn't know anything about the internet, so it doesn't apply. And finally, the Department of Justice is taking some stands to say, yes, it does, because the internet is a place of business, but it's going to have to be codified, I think, to really bring it home. But some courts have sided with that argument and said, Well, yeah, the ADA is too old, so it doesn't, doesn't matter. And so we still see so many challenges with the whole idea of access. And people listening to this podcast know that, among other things I work with a company called accessibe. Are you familiar with them? I am, Yep, yeah, and, and so that's been an interesting challenge. But what makes access to be interesting is that, because it has an artificial intelligent widget that can monitor a website, and at the at the low end of of costs. It's like $490 a year. And it may not pick up everything that a body needs, but it will, will do a lot. And going back to what you said earlier, as websites change, as they evolve, because people are doing things on their website, which they should be doing, if you've got a static website, you never do anything with it. That's not going to do you very much good. But if it's changing constantly, the widget, at least, can look at it and make a lot of the changes to keep the website accessible. The other part of it is that it can tell you what it can't do, which is cool,   Dan Swift ** 24:16 yeah, that's a really good point. You know, there's a lot of tools that are out there. They do monitor the stuff for you, you know, like we on our on our site, we have something that runs every night and it gives us a report every day. But then there are things that it doesn't always check, or it might, it might get a false positive, because it sees that like, you know, this element has a particular color background and the text is a particular color as well. But there's, you know, maybe a gradient image that lies between them, or an image that lies between them. So it's actually okay, even though the tool says it's not, or something like that. So, yeah, those automated tools, but you gotta also look at it. You know, a human has to look at those as well.   Michael Hingson ** 24:52 Yeah, it's a challenge. But the thing that I think is important with, well, say, use accessibe. An example is that I think every web developer should use accessibe. And the reason I think that is not that accessibe will necessarily do a perfect job with with the access widget, but what it will do is give you something that is constantly monitored, and even if it only makes about 50% of the website more usable because there are complex graphics and other things that it can't do, the reality is, why work harder than you have to, and if accessibility can do a lot of the work for you without you having to do it, it doesn't mean that you need to charge less or you need to do things any different, other than the fact that you save a lot of time on doing part of it because the widget does it for you. Absolutely, absolutely.   Dan Swift ** 25:47 That's that's a really, really good point too, having that tool, that tool in your tool belt, you know, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 25:55 yeah. And it makes a lot of sense to do. And there are, there are people who complain about products like accessibe, saying artificial intelligence can't do it. It's too new. You gotta start somewhere. And the reality is that accessibe, in of itself, does a lot, and it really makes websites a lot better than they otherwise were. And some people say, Well, we've gone to websites and accessibe doesn't really seem to make a difference on the site. Maybe not. But even if your website is pretty good up front and you use accessibe, it's that time that you change something that you don't notice and suddenly accessibe fixes it. That makes it better. It's an interesting discussion all the way around, but to to deny the reality of what an AI oriented system can do is, is really just putting your head in the sand and not really being realistic about life as we go forward. I think that is   Dan Swift ** 26:52 so true. That is so true, and there's so many implications with AI and where it's going to go and what it will be able to do. You know, it's just in its infancy, and the amount of things that that the possibilities of what the future is going to be like, but they're just going to be very, very interesting.   Michael Hingson ** 27:05 I interviewed someone, well, I can't say interview, because it's conversation. Well, I had a conversation with someone earlier on, unstoppable mindset, and he said something very interesting. He's a coach, and specifically, he does a lot of work with AI, and he had one customer that he really encouraged to start using chat GPT. And what this customer did, he called his senior staff into a meeting one day, and he said, Okay, I want you to take the rest of the day and just work with chat, G, P, T, and create ideas that will enhance our business, and then let's get together tomorrow to discuss them. And he did that because he wanted people to realize the value already that exists using some of this technology. Well, these people came back with incredible ideas because they took the time to focus on them, and again, they interacted with chat, GPT. So it was a symbiotic, is probably the wrong word, but synergistic, kind of relationship, where they and the AI system worked together and created, apparently, what became really clever ideas that enhanced this customer's business. And the guy, when he first started working with this coach, was totally down on AI, but after that day of interaction with his staff, he recognized the value of it. And I think the really important key of AI is AI will not replace anyone. And that's what this gentleman said to me. He said, AI won't do it. People may replace other people, which really means they're not using AI properly, because if they were, when they find that they can use artificial intelligence to do the job that someone else is doing, you don't get rid of that person. You find something else for them to do. And the conversation that we had was about truck drivers who are involved in transporting freight from one place to another. If you get to the point where you have an autonomous vehicle, who can really do that, you still keep a driver behind the wheel, but that driver is now doing other things for the company, while the AI system does the driving, once it gets dependable enough to do that. So he said, there's no reason for AI to eliminate, and it won't. It's people that do it eliminate any job at all, which I think is a very clever and appropriate response. And I completely agree   Dan Swift ** 29:29 with that, you know, you think of other other technologies that are out there and how it disrupted, disrupted different industries. And the one example I like to use is the traffic light, you know. And I wonder, and I have no way of knowing this. I haven't researched this at all, but I wonder if there was any kind of pushback when they started putting in traffic lights. Because at that point in time, maybe you didn't have people directing traffic or something like that. Or maybe that was the event of the stop sign, it took it took away the jobs of people that were directing traffic or something like that. Maybe there was some kind of uproar over that. Maybe not, I don't know, but I like to think that things like that, you know. It disrupts the industry. But then people move on, and there are other other opportunities for them, and it progresses. It makes society progress forward.   Michael Hingson ** 30:06 And one would note that we still do use school crossing guards at a lot of schools.   Dan Swift ** 30:11 That is so true, that is true. Yeah, yeah. And especially, too, like talking about idea generation. I was talking to ginger. I forgot her last name, but she's the the president of pinstripe marketing, and she was saying that her team sometimes does the same thing that they they use chat GBT for idea generation. And I think, let's say Ashley, I think Ashley Mason, I think was her name, from Dasha social. The same thing they use, they use a chat GPT for idea generation, not not necessarily for creating the content, but for idea generation and the ideas it comes up with. It could be it can save you a lot of time. Well,   Michael Hingson ** 30:48 it can. And you know, I've heard over the last year plus how a lot of school teachers are very concerned that kids will just go off and get chat GPT to write their papers. And every time I started hearing that, I made the comment, why not let it do that? You're not thinking about it in the right way. If a kid goes off and just uses chat GPT to write their paper, they do that and they turn it into you. The question is, then, what are you as the teacher, going to do? And I submit that what the teachers ought to do is, when they assign a paper and the class all turns in their papers, then what you do is you take one period, and you give each student a minute to come up and defend without having the paper in front of them their paper. You'll find out very quickly who knows what. And it's, I think it's a potentially great teaching tool that   Dan Swift ** 31:48 is fascinating, that perspective is awesome. I love that.   Speaker 1 ** 31:52 Well, it makes sense. It   Dan Swift ** 31:55 certainly does. It certainly does. And that made me think of this too. You know, there's a lot of pushback from from artists about how that, you know, their their art was being used, or art is being used by AI to generate, you know, new art, essentially. And and musicians are saying the same thing that they're taking our stuff, it's getting fed into chat, GPT or whatever, and they're using it to train these different models. And I read this, this article. I don't even know where it was, but it's probably a couple months ago at this point. And the person made this comparison, and the person said, you know, it's really no different than a person learning how to paint in school by studying other people's art. You know, it's the same idea. It's just at a much, much much accelerated pace. And I thought, you know what that's that's kind of interesting. It's an interesting   Michael Hingson ** 32:45 perspective. It is. I do agree that we need to be concerned, that the human element is important. And there are a lot of things that people are are doing already to misuse some of this, this AI stuff, these AI tools, but we already have the dark web. We've had that for a while, too. I've never been to the dark web. I don't know how to get to it. That's fine. I don't need to go to the dark web. Besides that, I'll bet it's not accessible anyway. But the we've had the dark web, and people have accepted the fact that it's there, and there are people who monitor it and and all that. But the reality is, people are going to misuse things. They're going to be people who will misuse and, yeah, we have to be clever enough to try to ferret that out. But the fact of the matter is, AI offers so much already. One of the things that I heard, oh, gosh, I don't whether it was this year or late last year, was that, using artificial intelligence, Pfizer and other organizations actually created in only a couple of days? Or moderna, I guess, is the other one, the COVID vaccines that we have. If people had to do it alone, it would have taken them years that that we didn't have. And the reality is that using artificial intelligence, it was only a few days, and they had the beginnings of those solutions because they they created a really neat application and put the system to work. Why wouldn't we want to do that?   Dan Swift ** 34:23 I completely agree. I completely agree. And that's, again, that's how you move society forward. You know, it's similar to the idea of, you know, testing medicine on or testing medications on animals. For instance, you know, I love animals. You know, I love dogs, bunnies. I mean, the whole, the whole gamut, you know, love animals, but I understand the importance of, you know, well, do we test on them, or do we press on people, you know, you gotta, or do you not test? Or do just not you like you gotta. You gotta weigh out the pros and cons. And they're, they're definitely, definitely those with AI as well.   Michael Hingson ** 34:56 Well, I agree, and I. With animals and people. Now, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, we ought to be doing tests on politicians. You know, they're not people. Anyway. So I think when you decide to become a politician, you take a special pill that nobody seems to be able to prove, but they take dumb pills, so they're all there. But anyway, I'm with Mark Twain. Congress is at Grand Ole benevolent asylum for the helpless. So I'm an equal opportunity abuser, which is why we don't do politics on unstoppable mindset. We can have a lot of fun with it, I'm sure, but we sure could. It would be great talk about artificial intelligence. You got politicians. But the reality is that it's, it's really something that that brings so much opportunity, and I'm and it's going to continue to do that, and every day, as we see advances in what AI is doing, we will continue to see advances and what is open for us to be able to utilize it to accomplish, which is cool. I   Dan Swift ** 36:04 completely agree. Completely agree. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 36:06 so it'll be fun to see you know kind of how it goes. So are you, do you work for a company now that makes websites? Or what is your company that you work for? Do, sure.   Dan Swift ** 36:16 So I'm still in the education space, so I'm still, I'm like, in a state school managing a team of web professionals.   Michael Hingson ** 36:23 Okay, well, that's cool. So you keep the school sites and all the things that go along with it up at all that   Dan Swift ** 36:31 is correct. And we have lots of fun challenges when we start to integrate with third parties and got to make sure they're accessible too. And sometimes there's dialog that goes back and forth that people aren't happy with but, but it's my job to make sure, that's one of the things that we make sure happens, especially since I'm sure you've been following this. There's the Department of Justice ruling back in April, but I think it's anyone that's receiving state funding, they have to be. They have to follow the WCAG. Two point, I think, 2.1 double A compliance by April of 26 if you are a certain size, and my my institution, falls into that category. So we need to make sure that we were on the right path   Michael Hingson ** 37:06 well. And the reality is that has been around since 2010 but it took the the DOJ 12 years to finally come up with rules and regulations to implement section 508. Yep, but it's it's high time they did and they do need to do it for the rest of the internet, and that's coming, but people are just being slow. And for me personally, I think it's just amazing that it's taking so long. It's not like you have to redesign a box, that you have to go off and retool hardware. This is all code. Why should it be that difficult to do? But people throw roadblocks in your way, and so it becomes tough. Yeah, it's   Dan Swift ** 37:47 interesting, too. I remember reading this article, oh, gosh, this is probably, this is probably about a dozen years ago, and it said that, you know, the original web was 100% accessible, that it was just, you know, just text on a page pretty much. And you could do very, very simple layouts, you know, and then it got more convoluted. People would start doing tables for layouts, and tables within tables within tables, and so on and so forth. Like the original web it was, it was completely accessible. And now with, with all the the interactions we do with with client side scripting and everything like that, is just, it's a mess. If   Michael Hingson ** 38:19 you really want to hear an interesting thing, I like to look and I've done it for a long time, long before accessibe. I like to explore different sites and see how accessible they are. And one day I visited nsa.gov, the National Security Agency, which, of course, doesn't really exist. So I could tell you stories, but I went to nsa.gov, and I found that that was the most accessible website I had ever encountered. If you arrow down to a picture, for example, when you arrowed into it, suddenly you got on your screen reader a complete verbal description of what the picture was, and everything about that site was totally usable and totally accessible. I'd never seen a website that was so good contrast that with and it's changed. I want to be upfront about it, Martha Stewart Living. The first time I went to that website because I was selling products that Martha Stewart was interested. So I went to look at the website. It was totally inaccessible. The screen reader wouldn't talk at all. Now, I've been to Martha Stewart since, and it's and it's much more accessible, but, but I was just amazed@nsa.gov was so accessible. It was amazing, which I thought was really pretty cool. Of all places. You   Dan Swift ** 39:41 know, it's interesting. Before I started my my YouTube channel and podcast, I actually thought about creating a channel and or podcast about websites that are inaccessible, and I thought about calling companies out. And the more I thought about it, I was like, I don't know if I want to make that many people angry. I don't know if that's a   Michael Hingson ** 39:58 good idea. I'm. Would suggest going the other way, and maybe, you know, maybe we can work together on it. But I would rather feature websites that are accessible and tell the story of how they got there, how their people got there. I would think that would be, I hear what you're saying about making people angry. So I would think, rather than doing that, feature the places that are and why they are and and their stories, and that might help motivate more people to make their websites accessible. What do you think about that as an idea?   Dan Swift ** 40:28 I actually thought about that as well, and I was going backwards between that and and the other the negative side, because I thought, you know, bring that to light. Might actually force them to like by shedding light on it, might force them to make their site more accessible, whether what or not or not, no, but I definitely thought about those two sites.   Michael Hingson ** 40:45 Yeah, it's, it's, it's a challenge all the way around. Well, what was the very first thing you did, the first experience that you ever had dealing with accessibility that got you started down that road.   Dan Swift ** 40:58 I think it was like I said, when I work with that, that blind person, when I, when I first had that opportunity to see how he used the different web applications, we had the different web pages, and he was using a Mac. So he was using VoiceOver, he was using the, I think it's called the rotor menu, or roto something like that. Yeah, yep. So then after that happened, it was like, whoa. I need to get them back so I can, like, learn to use this as well and do my own testing. So the IT department had an old I asked them. I said, Hey guys, do you have any any old MacBooks that I can use? I was like, it can be old. I just need to test it. I need to, I need it to test for accessibility on the web. They hooked me up with an old machine, you know, it wasn't super old, you know, but it was. It worked for me. It gave me an opportunity to do my testing, and then I kind of became like the person in the department to do that. Everyone else, they didn't have the interest as much as I did. They recognized the importance of it, but they, they didn't have the same fire on the inside that I had, so I kind of took that on, and then like that. Now that I'm in the position of leadership, now it's more of a delegating that and making sure it still gets done. But I'm kind of like the resident expert in our in our area, so I'm still kind of the person that dives in a little bit by trying to make my team aware and do the things they need to do to make sure we're continuing, continuing to create accessible projects. You   Michael Hingson ** 42:20 mentioned earlier about the whole idea of third party products and so on and and dealing with them. What do you do? And how do you deal with a company? Let's say you you need to use somebody else's product and some of the things that the school system has to do, and you find they're not accessible. What do you do?   Dan Swift ** 42:42 So a lot of times, what will happen, I shouldn't say a lot of times. It's not uncommon for a department to make a purchase from a third party, and this is strictly, I'm talking in the web space. They might, they might make a purchase with a third party, and then they want us to integrate it. And this is a great example I had. It was actually in the spring the this, they had essentially a widget that would be on the on their particular set of pages, and there was a pop up that would appear. And don't get me started on pop ups, because I got very strong opinion about those. Me too, like I said, growing up, you know, late 90s, early 2000s very, very strong opinions about pop ups. So, but, but I encountered this, and it wasn't accessible. And I'm glad that in the position I'm in, I could say this unit, you need to talk to the company, and they need to fix this, or I'm taking it down. And I'm glad that I had the backing from, you know, from leadership, essentially, that I could do, I can make that claim and then do that, and the company ended up fixing it. So that was good. Another example was another department was getting ready to buy something. Actually, no, they had already purchased it, but they hadn't implemented it yet. The first example that was already implemented, that was I discovered that after the fact. So in the second example, they were getting ready to implement it, and they showed us another school that used it also a pop up. And I looked at it on the on the other school site, and I said, this isn't accessible. We cannot use this. No. And they said, Well, yes, it is. And I said, No, it isn't. And I explained to them, and I showed them how it was not accessible, and they ended up taking it back to their developers. Apparently there was a bug that they then fixed and they made it accessible, and then we could implement it. So it's nice that like that. I have the support from from leadership, that if there is something that is inaccessible, I have the power to kind of wheel my fist and take that down, take it off of our site. Do   Michael Hingson ** 44:31 you ever find that when some of this comes up within the school system, that departments push back, or have they caught on and recognize the value of accessibility, so they'll be supportive.   Dan Swift ** 44:45 I think the frustration with them becomes more of we bought this tool. We wish we had known this was an issue before we bought I think it's more of a like like that. We just wasted our time and money, possibly. But generally speaking, they do see the. Value of it, and they've recognized the importance of it. It's just more of a when others, there's more hoops everyone has to go through.   Michael Hingson ** 45:05 Yeah, and as you mentioned with pop ups, especially, it's a real challenge, because you could be on a website, and a lot of times A pop up will come up and it messes up the website for people with screen readers and so on. And part of the problem is we don't even always find the place to close or take down the pop up, which is really very frustrating   Dan Swift ** 45:30 Exactly, exactly the tab index could be off, or you could still be on the page somewhere, and it doesn't allow you to get into it and remove it, or, yeah, and extra bonus points if they also have an audio playing or a video playing inside of that.   Michael Hingson ** 45:44 Yeah, it really does make life a big challenge, which is very, very frustrating all the way around. Yeah, pop ups are definitely a big pain in the butt, and I know with accessibility, we're we're all very concerned about that, but still, pop ups do occur. And the neat thing about a product like accessibe, and one of the reasons I really support it, is it's scalable, and that is that as the people who develop the product at accessibe improve it, those improvements filter down to everybody using the widget, which is really cool, and that's important, because with individual websites where somebody has to code it in and keep monitoring it, as you pointed out, the problem is, if that's all you have, then you've got to keep paying people to to monitor everything, to make sure everything stays accessible and coded properly, whereas there are ways to be able to take advantage of something like accessibe, where what you're able to do is let it, monitor it, and as accessibe learns, and I've got some great examples where people contacted me because they had things like a shopping cart on a website that didn't work, but when accessibe fixed it, because it turns out there was something that needed to be addressed that got fixed for anybody using the product. Which is really cool.   Dan Swift ** 47:07 Yeah, that's really neat. I definitely appreciate things like that where, you know, you essentially fix something for one person, it's fixed for everyone, or a new feature gets added for someone, or, you know, a group of people, for instance, and then everyone is able to benefit from that. That's really, really awesome. I love that type of stuff.   Michael Hingson ** 47:22 Yeah, I think it's really so cool. How has all this business with accessibility and so on affected you in terms of your YouTube channel and podcasting and so on? How do you bring that into the process? That's that's   Dan Swift ** 47:37 really, really good question. I am very proud to say that I take the time to create transcripts of all my recordings, and then I go through them, and I check them for for accuracy, to make sure that things aren't correct, things are incorrect. Make sure things are correct, that they are not incorrect. So I'll make sure that those are there when the when the videos go live, those are available. Spotify creates them automatically for you. I don't know that you that I have the ability to modify them. I'm assuming I probably do, but honestly, I haven't checked into that. But so that's that's all accessible. When it comes to my web page, I make sure that all my images have the appropriate, you know, alt tags associated with them, that the the descriptions are there so people understand what the pictures are. I don't have a whole lot of pictures. Usually it's just the thumbnail for the videos, so just indicating what it is. And then I just try to be, you know, kind of, kind of text heavy. I try to make sure that my, you know, my links are not, you know, click here, learn more stuff like that. I make sure or they're not actual web addresses. I try to make sure that they're actual actionable. So when someone's using a screen reader and they go over a link, it actually is meaningful. And color contrast is another big one. I try to make sure my color contrast is meeting the appropriate level for WCAG, 2.1 double A which I can't remember what actual contrast is, but there's a contrast checker for it, which is really, really helpful   Michael Hingson ** 49:00 well. And the other, the other part about it is when somebody goes to your website again, of course, accessibility is different for different people, so when you're dealing with things like contrast or whatever, do people who come to the website have the ability to monitor or not monitor, but modify some of those settings so that they get maybe a higher contrast or change colors. Or do they have that ability?   Dan Swift ** 49:28 I They do not have that ability. I remember looking into a tool a while ago, and it was and actually, you know, at the school, we thought about developing a tool. It would be like a widget on the side that you could adjust on different things like that. You could do, you could remove images, you could remove animation, you could change color, contrast, that sort of thing. And it just be like a very predefined kind of kind of settings. But in my research, I found that a lot of times that causes other problems for people, and it kind of falls into the the arena of. Um, separate but equal. And there's a lot of issues with that right now in the accessibility space when it comes to the web. So for instance, there was a company, I forget what the company name was, but they had one of their things that they did was they would create text only versions of your pages. So you'd contract with them. They would they would scrape the content of your site. They would create a text version, text only version of your pages. So if people were using a screen reader, they could just follow that link and then browse the text only version. And there was litigation, and the company got sued, and the the person suing was successful, because it was essentially creating a separate argument.   Michael Hingson ** 50:34 And that's not necessarily separate, but equal is the problem, because if you only got the text, pictures are put on websites, graphs are put on websites. All of those other kinds of materials are put on websites for reasons. And so what really needs to happen is that those other things need to be made accessible, which is doable, and the whole web con excessive content. Accessibility Guidelines do offer the the information as to how to do that and what to do, but it is important that that other information be made available, because otherwise it really is separate, but not totally equal at   Dan Swift ** 51:11 all. That's absolutely true. Absolutely true. Yeah. So it   Michael Hingson ** 51:15 is a, it is something to, you know, to look at well, you've been doing a podcast and so on for a while. What are some challenges that someone might face that you advise people about if they're going to create their own podcast or a really productive YouTube channel,   Dan Swift ** 51:31 be real with yourself with the amount of time you have to dedicate to it, because what I found is that it takes a lot more time than I originally anticipated I thought going in, I thought, you know, so I typically try to record one or two people a week. When I first started out, I was only recording one person. And usually I would do, you know, record one day, edit the next day, you know, do the web page stuff. I would go with it, you know, I can knock it out in like an hour or two. But I wasn't anticipating the social media stuff that goes with it, the search engine optimization that goes with it, the research that goes with it, trying to so if I'm if I'm producing a video that's going to go on YouTube, what's hot at the moment? What are people actually searching for? What's going to grab people's attention? What kind of thumbnail do I have to create to grab someone's attention, where it's not clickbait, but it also represents what I'm actually talking to the person about, and still interesting. So it's a lot of a lot of that research, a lot of that sort of thing. It just eats up a lot a lot of time when it comes to like the transcripts, for instance, that was those super easy on their number of services out there that created automatically for you, and they just have to read through it and make sure it's okay. I know YouTube will do it as well. I found that YouTube isn't as good as some of the other services that are out there, but in a bind, you can at least rely on YouTube and then go and edit from that point. But yet, time is definitely a big one. I would say, if anyone is starting to do it, make sure you have some serious time to dedicate several, several hours a week, I would say, upwards, you know, probably a good, you know, four to 10 hours a week is what I would estimate in the moment. If you're looking to produce a 30 minute segment once or twice a week, I would estimate about that time.   Michael Hingson ** 53:11 Yeah, one of the things I've been hearing about videos is that that the trend is is clearly not to have long videos, but only 32nd videos, and put them vertical as opposed to horizontal. And anything over 30 seconds is is not good, which seems to me to really not challenge people to deal with having enough content to make something relevant, because you can't do everything in 30 seconds exactly,   Dan Swift ** 53:41 and what I found too. So this was very this was a little bit of a learning curve for me. So with, with the YouTube shorts that you have, they have to be a minute or less. I mean, now they're actually in the process of changing it to three minutes or less. I do not have that access yet, but it has Go ahead, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so. But what I'm finding Michael is that the people that so I might create this a great example. So I was interviewing a comedian in New York City, Meredith Dietz, awesome, awesome episode. But I was talking to her about becoming a comedian, and I made about four different shorts for her from her video, and I was doing a new one each week to kind of promote it. And the videos, for me, they were getting a lot I was getting anywhere between maybe 315 100 views on the short for me, that was awesome. For other people, you know, that might be nothing, but for me, that was awesome. But what I found was that the people that watch the shorts aren't necessarily the same people that watch the long form videos. So I'm or, or I might get subscribers from people that watch the shorts, but then they're not actually watching the video. And in the end, that kind of hurts your channel, because it's showing, it's telling the YouTube I'm gonna use air quotes, YouTube algorithm that my subscribers aren't interested in my content, and it ends up hurting me more. So anyone that's trying to play that game. And be aware of that. You know, you can't get more subscribers through shorts, but if you're not converting them, it's going to hurt you.   Michael Hingson ** 55:05 I can accept three minutes, but 30 seconds just seems to be really strange. And I was asked once to produce a demonstration of accessibe on a website. They said you got to do it in 30 seconds, or no more than a minute, but preferably 30 seconds. Well, you can't do that if, in part, you're also trying to explain what a screen reader is and everything else. The reality is, there's got to be some tolerance. And I think that the potential is there to do that. But it isn't all about eyesight, which is, of course, the real issue from my perspective. Anyway.   Dan Swift ** 55:41 Yeah, I completely agree. I think what YouTube is trying to do, and I believe in getting this from Tiktok, I think Tiktok has three up to three minutes. Actually, there might be 10 minutes now that I think about it, but, but I think they're trying to follow the trend, and it's like, let's make videos slightly longer and see how that goes. So be very curious to see how that all pans out.   Michael Hingson ** 55:58 Well. And I think that makes sense. I think there's some value in that, but 30 seconds is not enough time to get real content, and if people dumb down to that point, then that's pretty scary. So I'm glad to hear that the trend seems to be going a little bit longer, which is, which is a good thing, which is pretty important to be able to do. Yeah, I completely   Dan Swift ** 56:21 agree. Because like that, the trend right now, it's, you know, people, they want stuff immediately, and if you don't catch them in 10 seconds, they're swiping onto something else, which is which is very challenging, at least, especially for me and what I do. Who's   Michael Hingson ** 56:32 the most inspiring guest that you've ever had on your podcast?   Dan Swift ** 56:37 Michael, this is a good one. This is a good one. So the video for Ashley Mason. She is a social media marketing she created a social medi

In this episode of the Post Status Happiness Hour, host Michelle Frechette interviews Gen Herres from Easy A11y Guide to discuss web accessibility. Jen shares her background as a developer and her journey in understanding and implementing accessibility standards. She emphasizes the importance of simplifying complex accessibility concepts for clients and offers strategies for agencies to sell accessibility services. Jen introduces a five-day challenge to help agencies qualify potential clients and sell their first accessibility package. The conversation highlights the significance of making websites accessible to a broader audience and the various reasons why accessibility is essential for businesses.Top Takeaways:Accessibility Doesn't Have to Be Scary:  Many people find web accessibility intimidating, but experts like Gen Herres help simplify the process. There are resources available to make accessibility more approachable.Planning for Accessibility Takes Time: Implementing accessibility properly requires time for strategy, testing, and client approvals. Starting now helps businesses integrate it seamlessly into their workflow instead of rushing later.Accessibility Can Help Generate More Revenue: Learning how to sell accessibility services effectively can help web professionals increase their income by offering more value to clients.Mentioned In The Show:Easy A11y GuideWCAGMozilla17 HatsEqualize DigitalWacomNew York E-Z Pass Apple VoiceOverDequeJAWSCloudflareWPAccessibility.dayCami MacNamara5-Day Accessibility Selling ChallengeAgency Accessibility SystemGuidebook for Accessibility at Your Agency

Patrick Escarcega is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Meserow Design, a company known for its excellence in developing and maintaining custom software solutions. His background is in software engineering and has been leading software teams for many years. His technical focus has been on Microsoft development and cloud technologies.    Topics of Discussion: [3:30] Patrick recalls the moment he transitioned from individual software developer to leading teams, highlighting the importance of understanding how software adds business value beyond just code. [5:00] Patrick describes the joy he rediscovered in coding when starting his own company, emphasizing the delicate balance between hands-on coding and leadership responsibilities. [7:50] The head chef and food scientist analogy. [9:26] The importance of creating a safe environment, a “pit of success,” so developers can naturally follow best practices without feeling constrained. [10:36] Why readable, maintainable code is crucial, especially for senior leaders whose time is spent reading code more than writing it. [13:27] Comparing software engineering creativity to building an engine from “invisible Lego bricks," emphasizes the hidden creativity involved in engineering solutions. [15:08] The importance of leaders giving developers space and freedom to craft innovative solutions, rather than overly prescribing methodologies. [17:00] Running integration tests. [20:41] Accessibility and WCAG compliance explained: Why accessibility should be an integral part of software development and testing workflows. [23:14] EqualWeb accessibility checker and Chrome browser extension. [25:02] Practical everyday use of AI in software development, especially GitHub Copilot, and why developers should embrace AI tools regularly to remain productive and competitive. [31:10] Patrick encourages developers to embrace AI and keep learning, emphasizing that continuous adaptation will keep careers vibrant over the next decade.   Mentioned in this Episode: Clear Measure Way Architect Forum Software Engineer Forum Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us at programming@palermo.net. Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo Patrick Escarcega Meserow Design Engineering Practices for LLM Application Development     Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

More healthcare organizations are rethinking their websites, but should you opt for a refresh or a full rebuild? In this episode, Jenny explores this growing trend and breaks down the key differences. She covers when a refresh is the right choice—especially for improving accessibility, mobile responsiveness, and privacy compliance, including the impact of HHS Section 504 and WCAG 2.1. She also explains when a rebuild is necessary, such as enhancing the patient experience, rebranding, or integrating new technologies. Understanding these distinctions can help your organization align its website strategy with its goals, timeline, and budget.ResourcesHHS Accessibility GuideConnect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/If you enjoyed this episode we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

For our 200th episode of the WCAG podcast, we are celebrating with a Listener Questions special! (This is part 2, please listen to the previous episode to catch part 1 of our Listener Questions Special!) In this format, the Water Colors team blindly answers listener-submitted questions read off by the editor. We have some incredible listeners with a broad range of experience levels and varying interests. As a result, we always end up with some fun, thought-provoking, and sometimes controversial questions! These ‘Listener Questions’ episodes are recorded live, with a free stream available on YouTube for your enjoyment. All other episodes are also recorded live, but the livestreams are typically only accessible to our YouTube members. If you enjoy this content, consider joining our membership! Join the discussion on the Water Colors Aquarium Gallery Podcast Listeners Facebook group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/788428861825086/ Enjoying the show? Support the gallery by shopping aquarium plants, merch, equipment, and more! https://watercolorsaquariumgallery.com/ Looking for more content? Become a YouTube member for exclusive access to behind the scenes livestreams! https://www.youtube.com/@watercolorsaquariumgallery

For our 200th episode of the WCAG podcast, we are celebrating with a Listener Questions special! In this format, the Water Colors team blindly answers listener-submitted questions read off by the editor. We have some incredible listeners with a broad range of experience levels and varying interests. As a result, we always end up with some fun, thought-provoking, and sometimes controversial questions! These ‘Listener Questions’ episodes are recorded live, with a free stream available on YouTube for your enjoyment. All other episodes are also recorded live, but the livestreams are typically only accessible to our YouTube members. If you enjoy this content, consider joining our membership! Join the discussion on the Water Colors Aquarium Gallery Podcast Listeners Facebook group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/788428861825086/ Enjoying the show? Support the gallery by shopping aquarium plants, merch, equipment, and more! https://watercolorsaquariumgallery.com/ Looking for more content? Become a YouTube member for exclusive access to behind the scenes livestreams! https://www.youtube.com/@watercolorsaquariumgallery

FEATURING:* Michal Perlstein, Senior Manager of Digital Engagement, City of Seattle IT* Michelle Ringgold, User Experience Team Lead, City of Seattle IT* Dennis McCoy, Product Management Team Supervisor, City of Seattle IT* Jeff Beckstrom, Development Team Manager for Digital Engagement, City of Seattle ITIN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN:* How Seattle's digital engagement team manages web content, blogs, and newsletters while overseeing digital policies and design requirements* Why user testing and feedback were crucial in developing the city's major event pages for winter weather, heat, smoke, and flooding* The importance of "evergreen" content in emergency preparedness communications* How Seattle IT has prepared for WCAG 2.1 accessibility compliance over the past 6-7 years* The challenges and opportunities of implementing AI and cloud solutions in government digital servicesTIMESTAMPS: * (00:00) Show Introduction* (00:52) Team Introductions and Roles* (03:45) Building the Digital Engagement Team* (05:48) Implementing UX in Government* (09:10) Major Event Pages Development* (14:15) User Testing and Feedback* (19:20) Public Sector Product Management* (23:42) Cross-Department Collaboration* (28:15) Digital Accessibility Implementation* (31:00) Future Challenges and AI OpportunitiesLINKS MENTIONED:* Seattle.gov* WCAG 2.1 Standards* City of Seattle Major Event PagesWhenever you're ready, there are 4 ways you can connect with TechTables:1. The TechTables Newsletter: Join our thriving community of senior technology leaders by subscribing to the TechTables Newsletter. Gain early access to the latest episodes, industry insights, and exclusive event updates.2.

Learn how Seattle IT's digital team revolutionized emergency communications through human-centered design, accessibility compliance, and innovative major event pages.The TechTables Newsletter is proudly brought to you by our national partner, SentinelOneWant to see AI-powered security in action? Check out how the State of Montana revolutionized their cybersecurity using SentinelOne - they're now protecting over 15,000 endpoints across 25 state agencies. Click here to see their success story.FEATURING:* Michal Perlstein, Senior Manager of Digital Engagement, City of Seattle IT* Michelle Ringgold, User Experience Team Lead, City of Seattle IT* Dennis McCoy, Product Management Team Supervisor, City of Seattle IT* Jeff Beckstrom, Development Team Manager for Digital Engagement, City of Seattle ITIN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN:* How Seattle's digital engagement team manages web content, blogs, and newsletters while overseeing digital policies and design requirements* Why user testing and feedback were crucial in developing the city's major event pages for winter weather, heat, smoke, and flooding* The importance of "evergreen" content in emergency preparedness communications* How Seattle IT has prepared for WCAG 2.1 accessibility compliance over the past 6-7 years* The challenges and opportunities of implementing AI and cloud solutions in government digital servicesLINKS MENTIONED:* WCAG 2.1 Standards* Seattle Digital Properties* Winter Weather* Earthquake Safety* Summer Heat Safety* Wildfire Smoke Safety* Flooding Safety

Understanding the New Regulations: Learn about the latest federal regulations on digital accessibility and how they impact schools, including a clear breakdown of what "WCAG 2.1 level AA" really means and why it matters.The Four Key Principles of Accessibility: Discover the four core principles—perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust—and how these apply specifically to school communication and social media.Practical Tips for Social Media Compliance: Get actionable tips to ensure your social media content meets accessibility standards, from alt text for images to handling emojis and using AI for support.The Importance of Accessible Content: Hear why accessible content isn't just about compliance but also about making sure your message reaches everyone—and how this aligns with your communication goals.SPECIAL GUESTEmily F. Popek, APRVice President, Strategic CommunicationsNichols Strategies, CaliforniaEmail: emily@nicholsstrategies.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-f-popek/ Twitter/X: @EmilyPopekWebsite: https://nicholsstrategies.com/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/nicholsstrat   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nichols-strategies/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAgfCvRLmrIIDXiFPw2Jl1A USEFUL INFORMATIONOverview of the new federal rule on accessibility. This page spells out the standards, the timeline, and the exceptions.Go-to resource for understanding the WCAG standards - w3.orgFollow this page for tips on creating accessible content - https://www.facebook.com/a11yawareness and join this private Facebook group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/110948031049165 Order your copy of my book Social Media for Schools: Proven Storytelling Strategies & Ideas to Celebrate Your Students & Staff - While Keeping Your Sanity now!Interested in our membership program? Learn more here: https://socialschool4edu.com/MORE RESOURCESFree Video Training: Learn the simple secrets behind social media for K12 schools!Sign up for our free e-newsletter - click herewww.SocialSchool4EDU.com