Thank you everyone for joining us today.
We have Sheri Byrne-Haber, who is a
very well-known person in the
accessibility industry. Sheri do you
want to tell us a little bit about yourself?
Sure. So, I am a senior staff
accessibility architect with VMware,
where I founded the accessibility
program and started the disability
employee resource group three years ago.
I like to call VMware "the largest
software company you've never heard of."
We used to be a division of Dell, but
we got divorced last fall, so we're
now a standalone company with
37 thousand employees, and we do software that
makes the cloud a thing.
- Excellent. So what got you started in
accessibility?
So, I started off originally with--
I had a degree in computer science. I
really loved doing software testing. I
like finding problems and solving
problems, and so I did that for about 10 years,
and then I got asked to do some expert
witness testimony. You know, the U.S. is
very litigious.
There's lawsuits about just about
anything you can think of over here.
But this particular case had to do with
whether or not a piece of custom
software had been adequately tested.
And so I was the expert testifying as to what was
considered the norm for software testing.
And I realized that the lawyers didn't
understand technology, that the
technology people didn't understand law,
and I was getting a little bit bored with my
software testing career, and I thought,
"Ah, I'll go to law school."
- [Gian] (laughs)
I'll be that great, highly paid
translator between those two worlds.
Went to law school thinking I was going to
go into intellectual property and
software patents and all that good stuff.
My third year of law school we discovered that
my daughter, her hearing loss was progressive,
and she was going to need surgery and she was
potentially going to need cochlear implants.
And so I spent a lot of time fighting the insurers
in the U.S. because, of course, it's for-profit so they
never want to spend money on you. That's another
thing that's weird and silly about the U.S.
And also fighting the school system,
and when I finished that work
accessibility was just starting to take off.
And so I ended up pivoting from that
into accessibility. So, people see me in a
wheelchair or they hear me talking about
the fact that I have glaucoma or my
insulin pump. Actually, none of those
reasons were why I got into
accessibility. I got into accessibility
for a reason that many parents do things.
I did it for my daughter.
- [Gian] Yeah, that's an excellent reason.
So, what do you love about accessibility?
I think the thing that I love the most
about accessibility is I recognize that
I've lived a reasonably privileged life
despite having some of these health
challenges and having to have, at this
point, 24 surgeries to keep things
functioning. I am white so,
you know, in the U.S. that's an advantage.
I grew up in Silicon Valley. I went to the same high
school that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs went to,
and I had parents who treated me just
like any other kid. There were
expectations. There was never any slack
cut for me versus my sister just because I
happened to be born with a congenital
disability and she wasn't, and I realize that a
lot of people don't have those things and so it's
always been a big deal for me to
try to get involved in in things that
allow people with disabilities to get
jobs, because if you don't have a job, it's very
difficult to get a lot of the treatment that you
need in the U.S., because that means you
don't have good health insurance, for example.
- [Gian] Yep.
So that's the thing that I love the most
about accessibility is I'm helping to
create something that makes it so that people
with disabilities possibly can have an
equal existence.
- [Gian] Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And so what do you wish people would know about
accessibility? What do you think that
people, I suppose, always tend to get wrong about
accessibility?
I think the thing that most people
who are new to accessibility get wrong
is they think accessibility is about
complying with WCAG,
and I always say that WCAG, or the Web
Content Accessibility Guidelines if
you're new to all these acronyms, is a floor. It's not
a goal, because you can do much much better than
that. You can actually make the software more
usable. You can go above and beyond. You can do
things like personalization so people
with dyslexia can pick whatever font
happens to suit their learning styles the best.
That's not required under WCAG. A lot of
people just stop there. I don't run
programs that stop there. If
I'm ever talking to somebody about a consulting
job or a potential change in careers, if I
start to get a whiff that WCAG is
where things stop, that's where I pass.
- [Gian] Yeah, yeah, completely.
And so what do you wish people would do more when
it comes to accessibility? So I suppose other
than just doing more than WCAG? (laughs)
- Yeah, so one thing that a lot of people
don't do in accessibility is they
don't do user research with people with
disabilities. If you don't give your
personas disabilities and if you don't
research with people with disabilities,
you're just going to be guessing.
- [Gian] Yeah.
And that doesn't usually turn out to
be a very good outcome.
So, the Americans with
Disabilities Act, the big theme
almost 32 years ago-- it'll be 32 years
this July when it passed-- is "nothing
about us without us."
- [Gian] Yeah.
So I think that if you look at some of these
"feel good" stories that you see on the
news, like yet another college
team making sign language gloves or
something like that, it's something that
happened in a vacuum without getting input from
people with disabilities, because if you had
talked to people who could sign,
you would realize "Well, you know what, there's a lot
more to signing than just finger shapes."
There's facial gestures, there's
positioning, there's speed and I'm
probably missing half of the things
because I'm not a particularly fluent signer
myself. But that's what I hate. I hate when
things are done for us instead of with us.
- [Gian] Yeah, and one of my pet peeves is that
when I say "Oh, is it accessible?", they say
"Oh yes! We tested with a screen reader
user, so it's accessible," and it's like no, no!
- Yeah.
- Accessibility is much bigger than that,
and that just says to me that-- you know.
Yeah, so there are 50 guidelines in
the WCAG 2.1, which is the standard
version that people refer to these days,
and more than half of them
refer to people who are blind, and
it's not because blindness is the
largest disability. It's because
blindness is the most difficult
disability to take something that's
inherently visual and turn it into
something that's equivalent that's
non-visual. You know, magnification has
one or, if you're being generous, two of
the 50 guidelines, but there are five
times as many magnification users as
screen reader users.
- [Gian] Yeah.
So, if you miss that one, or both of those,
you're hurting five times as many people. And I'm
not saying to make that choice, but I'm just
saying that to point out that
you're 100% correct that too much
focus is put on screen reader users. Not
enough-- for example in
the U.S., we have this big survey that's
done every year by this outfit called
Stack Overflow, and they say that 9.3%
of people in IT identify as
neurodiverse. Okay? That's a darn sight
larger than the number of people who use
screen readers or who
use magnification. So you need to
think about in terms of who your population is,
and that's really critical.
- And also a huge group of people with
disabilities have mental health
disabilities, and that's not covered in
WCAG at all.
- That is correct.
- So WCAG being the baseline is great because you
actually really do need to think about
these other users.
There's a little bit of coverage
for people with the anxiety issues in
terms of countdown clocks and timeouts
and things like that, but you're right
that for the most part we're only
getting to the point now in WCAG which
will be in the next version, which is 2.2,
where we're even covering cognitive
disabilities in a major way at all,
and I suspect after that then perhaps
mental health will be included.
- Yeah. So, what do you think the future holds for
accessibility? So, I mean, you've been in
the industry a really long time, as have
I, and I have seen kind of this continual
kind of cycle where people go "Oh,
accessibility, it's the next big thing!", and
people are certainly doing that around COVID.
"Accessibility, we really need to take
notice of it." And there's been a
consolidation of accessibility companies.
And then I just sort of see it kind of
slowly fall down the totem pole
until five years later, the next
cycle where people go "Oh my god,
accessibility!" So yeah, I suppose where do
you see it going? Do you see that people will--
- Well there's where do I hope it goes and
where do I fear it's going to go.
- Yeah, yeah. Well, let's start with hoping and then
let's go to going. (laughs)
- Yeah. Okay.
So I wrote an article not that long
ago, within the last couple of months,
talking about the three things that, if
businesses did these three things that
accessibility wouldn't be
really that big of an issue anymore.
And one of the three things and I think
the most important of the three things
is get accessibility into college design
and IT curriculums. It's just not covered
pretty much anywhere, to be honest with you.
There's a couple of bright spots here and there.
University of Washington has a nice program.
University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana
has a good program. Syracuse University has a
good program. But the top computer science
programs and human computer interface
programs for the most part do not
require people learn anything about
accessibility at all, and so what ends up
happening is you get some person who's just
graduated and they go straight to work
and if they go to work for
Google or Apple or VMware
or Adobe, they'll get a good
indoctrination in how to integrate
accessibility into their practices at those
jobs. But they go somewhere else--
- [Gian] Yeah.
--and then try to go to one of those places,
they're going to be "Accessibility? What's that?"
- [Gian] Yeah.
So, where do I wish it would go?
I wish that colleges taught it.
I wish that venture capitalists said
"We're going to invest only in programs
that are accessible."
I wish that people took disability more
seriously as part of the United Nations'
sustainability development goals because
more than half of the goals are either
directly about or indirectly impact
people with disabilities more, and if we
don't create an equal environment where
people with disabilities can thrive,
we're never going to be a sustainable society.
- [Gian] Yeah.
Where do I think it's going to go? We do have WCAG 3.0
under development, so that's a big
thing that's going to be coming sometime
in the next, let's say three years, plus or minus.
About the same time we have the
European Accessibility Act coming and
that's going to be a really big deal,
because Germany has already passed a
national law saying that they can recall
things that don't meet the European
Accessibility Act, and the European
Accessibility Act requires accessibility.
So, you want to sell in Germany,
you're going to have to make sure
that your stuff is accessible, and for
some people that's not a consideration because
they're making pinecone jewelry in
the backwoods somewhere.
- [Gian] (laughs)
But for some people that's actually a really big
deal, and I don't think enough people are
talking about that.
My biggest fear is, we look at
things like VR and XR and we look at
things-- we're just starting to talk
about Web3 now. So we've got all these
things that are evolving in the
technology, but nobody's talking about
accessibility for those things. Right?
- [Gian] Yeah.
VR and XR. Surprise! You need
captions because it's got sound. This
is not rocket science. This is
something that anybody with common sense,
if they've had any exposure to the
deaf or hard of hearing community, would
understand. But you'd be astonished
how few VR and XR authoring
products are accessible yet.
- Yeah, and people really think that
deaf people are not going to use these
products, and that's just not the case.
It's amazing.
- Are you kidding me? Yeah, or they
think that blind people don't want to
play video games, right?
- Yeah!
- I do not understand for the life of me where
these misnomers come from and I
presume it's because people don't really
understand that people with disabilities
want to live lives just like everybody else.
- Like everybody else.
- The only thing is we got to do it a
little bit differently to work around
our disabilities.
I came back from Utah today and I
had a special thing that allowed me
to grab my luggage off the luggage rack.
I didn't ask somebody to get my luggage
for me. I got it for myself because people,
especially with long-standing disabilities,
we get really tired of asking for help.
- Yeah, yeah. There's really this concept that
people with disabilities are
just very like-- just not like other
people, that they're not going
to do the normal things that other
people do like read novels or watch TV
or go to concerts or go have coffee.
- Blind people watch movies. Deaf people
listen to music. This is a thing.
- I actually think that if there's more
representation in media, TVs and
movie shows of people with disabilities
just living their lives as part
of the-- not the punchline or the
main part of the story but
just people with disabilities who just
also happen to be a detective or
whatever, then we might actually see that
change. But we continually get
these kind of stories about people
with disabilities overcoming
things or this kind of idea that
people with disabilities can't do
certain things or if they do it's
amazing that they've done it, as
opposed to they're just like everyone else.
Yeah, so representation in media is
getting better. You know, we had the
Oscars last night and a deaf actor won,
so that's something that hasn't happened
for 35 years, and that was a splendid movie.
But yeah, you're right, until somebody
with a visible disability is part of something,
but the disability isn't the storyline--
- [Gian] Yeah.
That's when you declare success, right?
But you have to keep that into the context of
70% of disabilities are invisible.
- [Gian] Yes.
So, there are people who are
autistic that you cannot tell from their
behavior necessarily are autistic if
they're successful at masking or
covering up their autism. But,
we had a TV show that played for
a long time. God, I'm spacing on the name, but it was
about a doctor who was autistic and it
was played by a non-autistic person
or, you know--
- Do you mean "The Good Doctor"?
- "The Good Doctor," yeah, right.
- I really disliked that because it was like he
was like a special doctor because he had autism,
like this kind of idiot savant kind of theory,
"Rain Man" movie. If you have autism or
something like that, you're sort of
magical as opposed to just like everybody else.
There are enough actors out there
who are blind, who are deaf, who have
autism that if you have a character
written with those and you don't cast
somebody who genuinely experiences that issue,
you're not doing your job because
it's not that hard to do.
- Yeah, exactly. Okay so,
what would be your advice for someone starting
in accessibility. So they've just come across
this accessibility thing and they don't really
know what to do, where to start,
who to talk to. What do you recommend?
So the most important thing I think for
a good accessibility professional if
they don't have a disability is to
understand how people with disabilities,
or with different disabilities, process data.
So it's really easy to go onto
YouTube and find videos of people
using what we call "assistive technology."
Assistive technology is how people
with disabilities work around whatever
the limitations of their disability is.
So, for a blind person it would be a
screen reader. For a deaf person it would
be captions. For me it happens to be
magnification combined with a keyboard.
So there's plenty of good information
out there, and I always try to point people to
free resources first because if you're just
getting started, you might not be in a position
yet where you've got an employer who
will pay you to learn these things, to go to
a big accessibility conference or to spend a
week in a special accessibility boot camp.
When I was getting first started in
accessibility, I was a single mom and I
was unemployed so it was
important to find low-cost options
to learn these types of things. But I
think learning how to use assistive
technology is important. I think
making use of the nonprofit resources
that are available to you, for example
there's a nonprofit in the U.S. called
Knowbility, which is spelled with a K, so
it's K-N-O-W-B-I-L-I-T-Y,
and they run an accessible internet
rally every year. So they put together
teams of people and they pair
them with nonprofits. So the nonprofits
need help but can't afford to pay for it,
and the people want experience,
so they pair them together and they
work on a multi-week project to help
the nonprofit make their websites more
accessible. So there's stuff like that out there.
Of course I always recommend reading
my blog. I think that's a really good source.
- And you have so many articles.
- Yeah, so there's two ways you can go
about doing that. If you have a Medium
subscription and you don't need
assistive technology, I would ask you to
read it there because then I get
a couple pennies every time
somebody reads an article.
But Medium is not particularly
accessible, and it does require a
$5 a month subscription,
so I carry all of my articles over
to my own personal website which is
built on an accessible WordPress template,
and it's just sheribyrnehaber.com with no
hyphen in the last name.
- Excellent. And so if someone instead
is not particularly interested in
accessibility, but they're working in a
company and they've basically been tasked
with this whole accessibility thing, what
would your advice be to them?
Well, I've got kind of a
10-step thing that I outlined in one of
my articles which tells people how to
go about doing that, which is how to
start an accessibility program where
there isn't one, and I think the first
thing that's really important to do is
to identify the universe of what is it
that your company makes that has to be
accessible, and chances are it's not what
you're being told to do. So there's
usually a mismatch there right off the
bat. But people, in the U.S. especially, really
focus on external customer-facing
accessibility because they're afraid of
litigation and the people that are most
likely to sue you are people who don't
know you. Strangers, right? Because there's
no emotional attachment associated with
the lawsuit. In reality, I actually
subscribe to the Richard Branson school
of management which is if you take care
of your employees, your employees will
take care of your customers. And so I
think that good accessibility programs
actually start there. More often than not though,
people are told to focus on the external
accessibility and then internal
accessibility comes on later. I
actually prefer to do the reverse.
But inventory your software,
look at your software procurement practices,
look at your HR system. If it's one of those HR
systems that automatically rejects anybody
who's got more than a three-month gap in their
resume: surprise! You're discriminating against
women and people with disabilities, because
they're more likely to have been off for chunks of
time because of their identities.
Making sure that all your
managers are trained on how to interview
people with disabilities.
If you're interviewing somebody with autism
chances are you may not get eye contact
and a firm handshake, which has been the
old story for the last 50 years of what
you want to see in somebody that you want to hire,
and that's not the case at all but you have to
become comfortable with difference
and not be judgmental about it and
not make assumptions about what people can or
can't do based on what their disabilities are. So,
I think those are a few ideas of things that you
can look at for starting a program like that
without spending an entire hour discussing it,
but if you ever want to do a breakdown
of those ten things, by all means
reach back out to me. Otherwise, you can
find it on my website. Search
for the word "kondo," K-O-N-D-O,
because I liken it to Marie Kondo
and her cleaning thing and if it doesn't
spark joy get rid of it. Same thing with
accessibility. If it doesn't spark joy
eliminate it so you don't have to make
it accessible. Just really focus on the core
of what your valuable offerings are
rather than getting entirely overwhelmed
by boiling the ocean and trying to make
everything accessible.
- Yeah, exactly.
Well thank you very much for your
time today. We'll make sure that we
post in the website references to everything
you talked about. And you are so prolific when it
comes to articles. I mean you must be
hitting the thousand article mark by
now. Have you been counting them?
- Not quite. I think I'm at about 300.
- Well that's still a lot because I swear my
little Medium thing, I get it every morning,
and I swear every morning there's a new
article by you. (laughs)
- Twice a week every year for three
years. I mean all you have to do to get
prolific at something is to make
a practice of it, and when I started
doing this I decided to make the practice of it.
- Yeah, it's an excellent idea.
Lastly, what is your favorite
WCAG success criteria and why?
Oh, that's a question that I like. That's one
of my stealth questions for interviews
because people can regurgitate
"1.4.3 is about color" or "4.1.2 is about
role state and value," but asking
somebody what their favorite or what
their least favorite is kind of
requires a level of understanding that
doesn't really show up on the
accessibility certification tests.
- [Gian] Yes, well, I know you have that level of
understanding. (laughs)
- I do.
I think my favorite is probably 1.4.7,
which is the color contrast for the
keyboard focus indicator.
- [Gian] Yes!
Because I have a combination of glaucoma,
and keyboard use-- if somebody's using one
of those dashed keyboard focus outlines
and it's not of good contrast, I can
quite easily miss it. So, for my
personal favorite, that's one
that's really important to me.
Obviously on behalf of my daughter,
caption everything, damn it!
It's a dollar a minute, and if you
can't afford that you can do it
on your own. There's just no
reason not to caption.
- Yeah, yeah. 1.4.7 was a great addition with
WCAG 2.1. I'm really glad that they
kind of definitely started looking
at the keyboard focus indicator because
some of the testing that we used to do,
it's like you didn't have any keyboard
focus indicator at all let alone a
highly visible one, and so we'd say this
is a AA issue but treat it as a
Level A issue because it means that
there are people who can't use the site at all.
So, I'm glad that kind of fixed it.
- Well, the other thing is it takes a lot longer
to solve color problems than you would think
because it can't be solved by code.
People have to agree, right? And
it's a style thing and it's a branding thing.
And when you start getting those levels
of decision makers involved, it's a very
very very slow process. It's a two-character
sometimes fix but it might take you 12 weeks
to get the buy-in from all the people to make that
two-character change. So I always
recommend all the color guidelines
should be treated as A because of that.
- [Gian] Yeah.
- Don't talk to me about how long it
took me to convince people not to use
french fry yellow on white,
because that was clearly an issue at
McDonald's, and it took me a long
time to convince people that that was a
really bad idea and they shouldn't do it.
- Yeah, my bugbear is light gray on
white. I don't know why it still happens.
Those designers that seem to think--
- In six-point font in the footer, right?
- Yeah! And I'm just like, "No one can read this. No one."
And every time I see it, I'm like,
"What is going on?" So, yeah, that's my
little bugbear. Well anyway, thank you
very much for your time today. It's been
great talking to you, and we'll
see if there's any interest for your
explanation of the ten steps, but
I'm pretty sure you've written an
article about it, so people will--
- I have.
- (laughs) Excellent, thank you very much Sheri.
- Okay, thanks Gian.