Well, thank you everyone for joining us
for another Accessibility Voices interview,
and today I have Chris Law, who
I've known for over 20 years, I think.
And he is an incredibly busy person
who has been responsible for developing
Trusted Tester and, more recently, he's
been involved in running and organizing
the Digital Accessibility Legal Summit
and the very well-known ICT Accessibility
Testing Symposium. So if you're an accessibility
tester, you need to get yourself to that testing
symposium. And even more recently - because I don't
think Chris actually ever sleeps - he is
developing the Standard Accessibility
Reporting. So maybe we can start off, Chris, with
talking about that.
Sure, sure. Yeah, just a point of clarification
there: I was part of a team working on Trusted
Tester. There was already a bunch of things
that had been put in place on Trusted
Tester before I came along, but I did
help with creating the courses and the
evaluations that they started off with. That was
when I was working as a contractor, and then I
started my own company and started the ICT
Accessibility Testing Symposium soon after.
And the Testing Symposium really came out of
the need to gather people together
to talk about all the different types of
approaches to testing that were in place.
Now we're six years into the Testing Symposium
and it's only gotten bigger, the number of
organizations that are working in this area,
the number of people who are interested in it
and the number of test processes. And part of
what many of us have come to realize in going
through this process of learning about
everybody's different approaches to testing
is that everybody's got a different approach to
reporting their testing. There's no standard way
to report. So we -- myself and a number of
colleagues in the field -- spent a good year
discussing the idea of forming an
organization in order to create what
would be sort of the equivalent of
a nutrition label, you know on a box
of crackers that tells you how many
calories are inside that you can compare
two boxes of crackers. That's a standardized
label. Well, what we want to have is some sort of
standardized way to report test results so that
a reader can look at three different test
reports of three different products and
choose between the products based on
what their needs are. Right now, you can
sort of do that, but it's using non-standard
reports. One might say it's 98% accessible, and one
might say it's good accessibility, and one might
say it's conformant.
- [Gian] And one might say it's 64% accessible, because--
- Sure, yeah.
- It's completely-- it's like the wild west out there,
and I think it's really interesting that you
worked on Trusted Tester, tried to find a
consistent testing process, which of course
we did, and we can talk about later about the
Mobile Accessibility Testing Guidelines, but
then you went a step further and went
"Okay, well it doesn't matter if everyone
tests the same if the reporting doesn't work."
- Even consumer products are reviewed,
consumer technology products like
microwave ovens and dishwashers
that are not necessarily required by law to be
accessible. What we want is the companies that
provide reviews to include accessibility as a
review criteria and give them the means
and the methods to do that. So, that's
what Standard Accessibility Reporting is
all about. It's a new organization that's really
just starting up right now. and
- And you've also developed the Accessibility
Switchboard, which is a fantastic series
of resources. You have a really good ability to
bring people within the industry together to
kind of share their resources.
- Yeah, the switchboard is a project-- it's own by the
National Federation of the Blind. It stems from
a conversation that I was having with
them following my PhD work. My PhD work
was on how organizations respond to
accessibility concerns. And what we realized is
that we needed information -- again the
information was being put out by lots of
different vendors -- to say "This is what you need to
do about accessibility." It was hard for people to
know, as consumers of accessibility support,
who to go to and what to expect and that type of
thing. And so what we did was we gathered all of
them together and formed this community of
practice, and got together to create a set of
guides that everybody in the community of
practice could go and review and read
and say, "Okay, we need to mention this, this and this."
So what we've ended up with is a series of guides
that were vetted by lots of different
organizations, lots of different vendors,
and supported by the National Federation of the
Blind. And it provides anybody who's coming into
this area a sort of good starting point of like,
"Well, here's the big issues."
- So, what got you started in accessibility?
- I started in accessibility around about 1991, 92.
It was a time when the Americans with
Disabilties Act accessibility guidelines
were being created. So the Americans with
Disabilities Act came out in 1990 -- was
signed in 1990 -- and then a committee was
formed to create a set of guidelines, and
I was working at the time as a student.
I was doing an ergonomics degree in the UK.
And I was working as a student at that
time, and you could work for a year as an intern,
and I worked for a company that made ATMs.
And the ADA required in the draft guidelines
that ATMs be of certain height and have certain
features. And, really, this was completely new to
the people who worked there at the time.
Disability was not on their radar before. And so
I started thinking about it, it's like,
"Well, actually, what is it that you could
do about making these devices accessible?"
And you'll probably remember that, if you were
around in the 90s, there were no talking ATMs in
the 90s. - [Gian] (Laughs) No.
- The law and the guidelines required them to talk,
effectively, but the companies didn't do it until
the year 2000, 2001, and only then after a lawsuit.
And so that whole decade I spent-- from '95, when I
came to the United States and I was working at the
University of Wisconsin on interfaces for
kiosks and ATMs and things like this. We were
trying to promote those things to industry.
We would go to ATM conferences, kiosk
conferences, and present our work and say,
"Hey, this is how you make a kiosk accessible
according to the needs that are stated in this
law. Have at it." And we couldn't get anybody to do it,
really, until somebody sued. So that was just the
situation back then. And now, pretty much every
ATM wherever you go has a little headphone jack,
and you can put in and get an audio prompt.
- [Gian] Yeah.
- But yeah, that's kind of how I accidentally got
started, because I was working at an ATM
manufacturer and they said "Well what do we do?"
- [Gian] (Laughs)
- I go, "I don't know, but let's go find out."
- That was kind of how I got started, too. We had to
build the first website for the Vision
Australia Foundation, and the client was like,
"Okay, we need to make sure that our clients
can use this," and we're like, "Blind people don't use
computers." And they're like, "Ha ha! That's where
you're wrong!" (laughs)
- The more people that work in the accessibility
field or who end up working in the accessibility
field, who had that sort of common starting point
of realizing that the people around you didn't
know about this stuff, and you didn't know about it.
So, it's really the education system that has
failed in accessibility. I say to people that you
can go through a four-year degree in Computing
and never hear the word "disability,"
let alone your user-interface design.
- So tell me, what do you love about accessibility?
- Well, I love the challenge. You're never going to
get bored, really. There's so much to do. And I love
coming up with new ideas and then trying to
execute based off of those ideas. You know, I am
a consultant, I set up a consulting company, but
really my direct customers have been people
who work in the industry -- accessibility
professionals and organizations who work in
the industry. They're the ones that come to the
conferences that I've run, and they are the
audience for the Accessibility Switchboard,
for example, and they are the audience for the new
member organization on standardized reporting.
So yeah, I've got a long list of ideas of things that
I can't even get to because I just wouldn't
have the time.
- Well, that leads into our next question quite
nicely, which is what do you hate about
accessibility? It sounds like lack of time. (laughs)
- The lack of time is not something that I
personally hate. I think the thing that I hate
about accessibility is the what I would
consider slow progress. So, what was promised
in the 90s for internet accessibility,
for example, what was written into the
guidelines, what was written into the standards,
what was taught and espoused, was of a world where
everybody could have equal access, right?
And the reality is, if you look at the
WebAIM Million reports that come out each year,
it's like 2% of websites -- of the main websites that
people go to -- 2% of them are accessible.
So, the lack of progress there. You can pretty much
look at a whole raft of areas where there was so
much promise at one stage and so much
research money, and so much has been done
and still we've got these problems. And so they're
systemic problems, you know, and I'm reminded of
of the recent MeToo movement, right? The MeToo
movement, and things to do with race and religion
and sexuality. Everything's becoming more
inclusive, right? And there's this this company
that has produced this t-shirt that says along
the lines of "If you're trying to be inclusive and
you ignore disability then you're doing it wrong."
- [Gian] Yeah.
- And it's true because even when I was
interviewing people during my PhD, I was talking
to people that said, "I work in the accessibility
department, and I go to the meetings of the
human resources department that's supposed to
do with inclusion, and accessibility is always
listed last." And the reason it's listed last is
because it's the one that really requires a lot of
changes, a lot of physical changes, programming
changes, interface changes that type of thing.
- The W3C just released their diversity
statistics, and I thought "Oh, this will be
interesting. I'd really like to see what
the percentage of people with disabilities
who work at the W3C are."
What the stats are that they show are
gender and location of employment.
So Europe, Asia, Australia.
- That's their whole diversity?
- That's their diversity statistics! And I was like,
"Um, you're missing a few."
- All right, well, it's a start. But come on.
The message has to get to the CEO, right?
Because the CEO and the board are the
ones who can really change the way
organizations work.
What has still been missing, though, and what
we tried to do with the Switchboard was to say,
okay, you can't just stop at them agreeing that
this is a good thing to do, because if you don't
give them the tools and resources to counter the
inevitable wave of objections that are going
to happen -- if you don't have those tools and
resources, they're not going to succeed.
because they haven't done this before. And the
objections will come because people
perceive that doing accessibility stuff
is doing extra work, right? And I try to remind
people it's not doing extra work. It's doing the
work you should have been doing all along but you
never actually did. And so you've got to look at it
a different way. So when people say, "Well, give us
some extra money to do accessibility. We don't
have the budget to do accessibility." Like, you
have the budget to do a website, and the website
is to be used by people, and if you say that a
certain proportion of people have disabilities --
that's where you find the money in your budget.
You don't find it by saying, "Oh, there's a this whole
group of extra people that suddenly appeared
that we need extra money for.
No, you just need to use the money you have now.
- So, what do you with people would know?
- Making a start can be the hardest thing. So, just
make the start and learn it as you go and do the
best job you can.
So, for example, let me give you a clear example
of this. You can fill in a survey to say "We're an
inclusive company." And you can even say "We're
inclusive on disability." And you say "Well, we've
got a thing on our job applications that says
'We do not discriminate based on disability.'"
Okay. So, just just ask yourself this question:
if somebody who's blind -- maybe they come in with
a guide dog into an interview, or you go online now
for an interview and it's over Zoom, and they've got
dark glasses on and it may be visually obvious
that they're blind. And if you don't know whether
your products and your tools and your software
are accessible, how can you put that on your form,
or on your job application? "We don't discriminate
against people with disabilities." Sure, you don't
actively go out and discriminate, purposely.
But it's passive discrimination to not know
whether you can employ this person or
not, because you don't know whether your
software is accessible.
- [Gian] Yeah.
- So, in terms of what people should know:
it should be that you can. There's a solution to
almost every technological problem
that's out there.
- What do you wish people would do what do?
- What do I want people to do?
You know, the-- For a lot of my career I've said
if someone else was running this conference --
the ICT Accessibility Testing Conference --
it would be great because then I could go off and
do something else. I'd do the next thing off of my
long list of things that I would like to do.
So, sure, I'd love people to sort of step up and be
able to take over some of these things.
But, yeah, there needs to be a sea change in the way
that people act around accessibility.
I'm talking about industry now, I'm not talking
about the accessibility professionals, because
people are trying very hard every day to do
the very best they can here.
But the point of change I think is still within
the much bigger sphere of the way society is.
- [Gian] I agree.
- Yeah, I think-- I mean, this is why I'm doing the
Standard Accessibility Reporting thing. It's
really because if you have that standard that
everyone can use and you can put that
label on. You've had these conversations with
people about labeling for accessibility. You've
probably had these over the last 25 years.
- [Gian] Mm hmm.
The conversation keeps coming up and it keeps
getting squashed.
- [Gian] Yeah.
- Enough, enough, stop squashing it. Let's just go,
get together, we'll do it, industry consensus.
We get together, we develop something, we propose
it, and the members vote on it.
- [Gian] Yeah.
- Yeah, that's how we do it.
- And I also think it's interesting -- accessibility
has a real history of the industry itself
getting together and saying, "Okay, no one's doing
this. Let's develop a set of guidelines." So, WCAG1
was actually developed by industry before the
W3C. You've got the HTML standards, you've got the
mobile accessibility standards that we put
together through the ICT Accessibility Testing
Symposium, because the industry or the policy
groups just weren't doing it. So we had to go "Okay,
come on, we just have to do it ourselves."
So do you think accessibility, the industry,
lends itself specifically to that, or do you
think it's because there's a lack of policy around
it that we always seem to be developing our
own guidelines before government does?
- I think the problem goes back to what we were
just talking about, that not only do people see
accessibility as something that you need an
extra bit of budget for in order to do this extra
bit of work. I think that the whole concept of
having the accessibility testing field or the
accessibility product development field and
things like this, is this acceptance of "This is
a group that won't go off and solve those problems."
So, it's no surprise that people in the disability
fields get together and say "We'll create
something new." You wanted to create the
mobile testing guidelines--
- You were very instrumental in convincing me of
that, though. (laughs)
- Sure, sure. I convinced you that it was a great idea.
But then you took it and ran with it.
This year, as part of the Testing Symposium, one of
the things that we focused on was driverless
cars. And so we had a keynote from Mark Riccobono
from the National Federation of the Blind, and it
was about this-- it starts with this sort of
concept of if you create a fully autonomous
vehicle, and you say that they are for sale at your
local car dealership, and whether that's
two, three, five or ten or twenty years from now,
whenever that day is -- I think it's more like two or
three years from now -- and somebody who's blind
goes up to that dealership on that very first day
and says "Well, I'm ready to buy a car." And they say
"You would never be able to work this. You need
to be able to see the interface just to
get the thing going.
- [Gian] Yeah.
- Or to get into the door. And it's like, why--
- [Gian] Why?
- Why would you do that?
- [Gian] Yeah. (laughs)
- And so, as a group, I tried to gather people
together and say "Let's create something." We're
going to produce a white paper as a result of this,
of what we talked about at the symposium this
year, and list those issues out and say, "Look, for
the people that are working in this area, please
do this." But it's not necessarily on their radar
right now. It's seen as a-- It doesn't naturally fall
onto people's desks as "This is something you need
to do. It's something you need to be aware of."
- It is amazing to me--
- Huh?
- --that so many people, so many large companies
don't address accessibility when it would be in
their financial interest to do so.
20% of the population -- I know I'm preaching to the
converted -- have a disability. And there's this
study where they basically made the website
accessible and the hit rate increased by 38%.
They had 1.6 million extra hits. Can you imagine
what a major company-- that was a small government
website. Can you imagine what a major company
would pay for that kind of hit rate?
- I tell you though, it's part of the problem.
Again, to go back to what I said before, it's part of
this problem of "What are the best tools and
resources to convince somebody that this is
a good idea?" And so, one of the problems that we have
with instances like this -- this is a good example
to have, but it gives a false sense to CEOs and
other executives that, somehow, if you do this,
you will make more money. And so you say,
"Well okay, if I do make my washing machine
accessible, does that mean that I will get
10% more sales?" Well, you'd have to think then that
there were millions of people with
disabilities sitting around at home, because
they're mostly not employed, and they are just
waiting for the day when you make that
accessible washing machine. And they will run
out to the shops and they'll buy it straight away.
It doesn't work like that. The same happened with
the ATMs. When the first talking ATMs came out,
they were hardly used by people who were blind,
because they weren't sitting at home waiting for
the day when finally-- It had to happen over time,
and people like to get used to the idea.
So, I say-- for my take on it, the key driver of the
conversation has to be inclusion. You say,
"Well okay, do you want to be an inclusive
organization?" "Well, yes, we want to be."
Okay, just do that then, okay? But it requires doing
these types of things to make your things
accessible, right?
- [Gian] Yeah.
- And thinking about your budget in a different way.
- What do you think the future holds
for accessibility?
- I would like to think that things are going to
get better. (laughs) Okay.
The whole thing with the 2%, it's not good enough.
- Yeah.
- Here we are, we're 25 years in, and we're at 2%.
But the future?
It's very hard to predict the future.
Ask Arthur C. Clarke, he'll tell you that.
But it's worth trying, right? I think that
there's two possible main divergent paths. The
one that I don't want to see is "more of the same."
Right? What I'd like to see is this big sea change
in the way that accessibility is thought of in
terms of design and consumption of consumer
products. I did a part of a National Federation
of the Blind project -- we did a study and focus
groups-- survey and focus group of their members.
And 100% of the responders could use a cell phone,
either an iPhone or an Android phone. 100% could
use them. And 5% could use the consumer products
that were around their houses --
their thermostats and their coffee makers
and their ovens. And so they would either put on
labels or they would use just a tiny fraction of
the features. So you might have a washing machine
that has 20 different cycles -- you use one cycle
for everything. Because you're not getting the
same-- you're paying the same price and you're not
getting the same functionality as everybody
else. So, a world in which everybody says, "Okay, we
can make every device talk. We can make every
device accessible to people with arthritis or
people who have hearing loss or profound
hearing loss or even deafness. That's what I would
like to see, that we go in that direction, please.
- We did it with mobile phones, and I think the
reason why we did it with mobile phones is
because there was a monopoly, really, which was
Apple when they developed the first iPhone, and
they really cared about accessibility. And
everyone who followed -- i.e., Google -- went
"Oh, well we better match that."
- That departmental thinking of like "You're the
department that does accessibility."
There's still a lot of that thinking. "You should get
an accessibility evangelist in your company
to go and tell everybody--". No. (laughs)
- [Gian] Yeah.
Even in the Switchboard, we basically say
don't do that. (laughs) - [Gian] Yeah.
Don't do that. Make it a part of everybody's job.
Make it a natural part of everybody's work.
So that's really what I would hope to see in the
future. But if we don't all start thinking and
acting that way, we will end up more of the same.
- So, what would be your advice for someone
starting in the accessibility industry?
- Choose something that not a lot of people are
doing, if you can. I mean, it's good to get experience
at the beginning of all different kinds of
things. A lot of the accessibility companies
that are out there -- business is good right now,
and there's a lot of hiring out there. So to get a job,
do it being an accessibility tester or auditor
or something like that, it's relatively easy to
get those kinds of jobs. But at the ICT conference,
when we're talking about the automated vehicles,
my message to people was like "This is an area
where you don't have enough people focusing on
this. And it's an area that is growing massively.
There's so much money involved--
- [Gian] Yeah.
- --that they are gangbusters in terms of the money
that they're throwing at this. But the people with
the accessibility skills are not going into
those fields. They're not being recruited maybe
at the rate that they should be.
And we need to start thinking about changing that.
- What would be your advice for someone starting
accessibility within an existing company?
There's a time investment thing in human factors
in psychology where it's fairly well known if
somebody is starting out on a task for which they
haven't got the background, they have to make a
choice. And the choice is: will the time that it
would take me to learn all this stuff from
existing information -- will that likely lead me
to the results that I need? The information that
I need? Or do I just start out because I feel like
I don't have time to real all that sort of stuff, and
I've got to go solve the problems now and show
that I'm doing something. So, it's a real problem in
the design of manuals and information and
that sort of thing. And it's still one that,
like I said, the human factors and the psychology
fields struggle with -- information design.
So, in terms of starting out, it's well worth the
investment time to spend two weeks, three weeks,
even four weeks, just reading about all these
things. Read Jeff Kline's book,
read Jonathan Hassell's book,
read my PhD, it's up on the web.
There's a wealth of-- go look at the Switchboard,
find out all these things and get well grounded
first in what it is you can do
before you even talk to anybody.
- Well, thank you very much for your time
this afternoon.
- Pleasure.
- And I look forward to catching up with you when I'm
next in Washington.
- Be great to see you back here.
- Yeah, it'll be fantastic.
Excellent.