Sheri Byrne-Haber

Episode 32
Brave UX

Giving a Damn About Accessibility

In this episode of Brave UX, Sheri Byrne-Haber brings the fire on ableism, talks accessibility practicalities, and makes a clear and compelling case for why we all need to give a damn about accessibility.

Highlights include:

What is disability and how has our thinking about it evolved?
What is accessibility and why does it matter?
How do you ensure that your design system is accessible?
What do you say to people who ask for a business case for accessibility?
What's important when doing UX research with people with disabilities?

July 20, 202101:14:29

Listen on:

Who is Sheri Byrne-Haber?

Sheri is a world-leading expert in, and evangelist and advocate for making the world a more accessible place for people with disabilities, best known for launching digital accessibility programmes at multiple Fortune 200 companies, including McDonald’s, Albertsons, and VMware.

A prolific writer on disability and accessibility, Sheri has published over 120 articles on Medium, reaching over half-a-million readers. Her effort, talent, and impact was recently recognised by Medium, with them naming Sheri their 2020 UX Author of the Year.

Through her work, Sheri has positively impacted millions of the more than 1 billion people around the world living with disabilities.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween the home of New Zealand's only evaluative research practice and world class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Sheri Byrne-Haber. Sheri is a world leading expert in an evangelist and advocate for making the world a more accessible place for people with disabilities. She is best known for launching digital accessibility programs at multiple Fortune 200 companies, including McDonald's, Albertsons, and VMware. Sheri has also consulted to the US government and as an active member of several accessibility communities and nonprofits helping to drive and communicate the evolution of accessibility standards globally.
A prolific writer on disability and accessibility, Sheri has published over 120 articles on Medium, reaching over half a million people. Her effort, talent, and impact was recently recognized by Medium with them naming Sheri, their 2020 UX author of the year in collaboration with UX Collective. Earlier this year, Sheri published Giving a Damn About Accessibility, a candid and practical handbook for designers. Sheri's extensive career in accessibility has been supported by a comprehensive multidisciplinary educational background, including a Bachelor of Science and Management Information Systems, and a Juris doctor from the University of San Francisco. She also holds an MBA from the George Washington University. Through her work, Sheri has positively impacted millions of the more than 1 billion people around the world living with disabilities. I can't think of anyone more qualified to speak about digital accessibility on Brave UX and in her own words, bring the fire on ableism. Sheri, welcome to the show.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Oh, kia ora. Hopefully I said that correctly. That's pretty good. Thanks. Okay, that's the first time I've ever said it. I've, I've never been to New Zealand, although my husband has a cousin who lives in Christchurch, so Wow. Hope to get there someday.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, please do. Please come over. It would be great to have you here. I understand that just before the pandemic you did something pretty interesting and you picked up the bow and started archery. What was it that inspired you to do that?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
I'm a very competitive person and it's frustrating sometimes as a wheelchair user that I can't do the same things that everybody else can do. Even in adaptive formats, you're still only competing with other wheelchair users. You're not necessarily competing against people without disabilities. And I always really enjoyed archery. When I was in adaptive PE growing up, my disability is congenital. My best friend was blind. We used to aim him and he did archery with the rest of us, and typically he would win cause he was getting a lot of good input from different people and somehow managing to get that all to fit inside his head. So November 20, I think I've kind of lost track of the years, but November before the pandemic, we did a corporate event, our department, and the only rule was it couldn't involve food because we had budget issues.
And so we decided to make it accessible to go do archery. And I thought at the end of it, I finished in third, which made me feel pretty good. I mean, out of 20 people, the rest of whom were, who were standing, and I'm like, I should really start doing this again. Started at a dribs and drabs here and there pandemic came. I am much more pessimistic than probably most of my friends. I thought we were in for four months. My doctor said, nah, it's gonna be a couple weeks, you'll be fine, [laugh]. And because I also have type one diabetes, I didn't leave the house for a very long time. The death rate in the US for people in my age group who were type one diabetics was something like 14%. And I'm like, no, I'm not risking it. So I ended up just staying home and doing an archery archery practice 90 minutes a day every day, just like some people do meditation or yoga, and I'm actually getting fairly decent. I did my first competition about a month ago, competed with the people who were standing and finished fourth out of six, but the winner was a former Olympic gold medalist, so she doesn't count. So really I finished, I like to say third out of five, like smack in the middle, which made me feel really good.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, that is awesome. It's a bit of a shame actually. Well, I suppose not for the woman that won, but that someone who with that kind of Olympic qualification was able to compete.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
She's retired, so it's, nobody really cares. It's all mostly just about fun and exercise and competing against yourself really, which is what I was doing.
Brendan Jarvis:
Do you have a competitive streak in any ambitions to go to the Paralympics?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
I do [laugh]. The next Paralympics after Tokyo will be in Paris in 2024. So my score right now, my highest score out of seven 20 was 6 27. So seven 20 is if you hit every single one in the dead center. So I've still got some room to improve, but I am not terrible.
Brendan Jarvis:
No, sounds, sounds like you're rather formidable to be honest.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
People are known for getting run over if they get in my way at work in terms of getting me getting something done for accessibility. But I'm not quite that competitive at archery.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, hopefully I don't get run over during this podcast. I suppose we're about to find out. So Sheri, you are a person with disabilities and you have been very active in the community in terms of promoting awareness around disability and accessibility. You've openly spoken about your use of a wheelchair for most of your life, including when you were a child, and I understand from my research for today that recently you'd been involved with the Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo rebuild. What have you been helping them with and why is it something that is so close to you and important to you?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
So anybody under the age of 35 in the US, even with a congenital disability does not remember life before the ada, the ada, the Americans with Disabilities Act is turning 31 at the end of July. And I do remember life before the ada. I remember not being able to go on field trips because things like that zoo weren't accessible. I remember having to be carried up the stairs by a member of the football team to get my diploma because there wasn't a ramp to the stage for wheelchairs. Every kid, this one still kills me. Every kid in eighth grade got to go on a graduation trip to Yosemite, which is of course a great big gorgeous park in California in the state I live in. I couldn't go. So to me, it's not just about making things accessible for the kids, it's about the adults.
Seeing the kids with the disabilities there and seeing the kids with disabilities interacting with the apps, for example, or with the exhibits around them, just as if they were any other child with no barriers whatsoever. And that helps the children, but it also sends a message to the adults that's actually gonna be reopening quite soon. So I'm excited about that. It was planned to be closed for about a year and a half, and then of course the year and a half trickled into the pandemic and all the construction projects stopped for a long time. So they're just getting ready to reopen
Brendan Jarvis:
Shortly. [affirmative], you spoke about not being able to go there when it was time for a field trip when you were a child. How has your experiences before the ada, before these environments were made accessible, how has that experience of effectively being excluded through the built environment, from participating in things that are what most people just expect as a given during their childhood, how has that shaped your passion and advocacy for accessibility and disability? What role has that played?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Well, I've been very lucky that I was raised by parents who just basically said, you're any other kid, we expect you to do anything that any we would've expected of any of our children. So there was never any question about, well, is Sheri going to college or is Sheri gonna have a job? It was a given. And so they really helped me learn to advocate for myself. But once the ADA was passed, it was kind of a line in the sand where it's like, we're not going back there. We finally came out from the darkness with respect to disability and for at least a lot of things, there's still some things that are not super optimal, but those are more around the edges of disability and not the core people who are 18 to 20 to 65 trying to get a job with a disability.
So I've always been, like you said, a little bit competitive, a little bit on the argumentative side. Got my degree in CS first, as you mentioned, did software testing for about 10 years. It was something that I really enjoyed doing. And then I got involved the US is very litigious and I got involved in a lawsuit over whether or not some software had been adequately tested, and I was asked to be an expert in that case. And the legal people didn't understand technology, the technology people didn't understand the law. And I'm like, aha, there should be a good career here for somebody who understands both. So I went to law school thinking that I was gonna do intellectual property, which is just about the cleanest legal field there is. And then my third year of law school, that's when we discovered that my daughter was losing her hearing.
And so I ended up never accepting, I never went to the job that I was offered. I ended up going into advocacy for the deaf for about eight years. We have to fight insurance companies all the time in the US for coverage, for medical treatments because they're all for profit. We don't have socialized medicine even like we did in Canada, which is where I was born. So did that for a while and then got most of the insurers in the US to start providing better coverage for people with hearing loss and then ended up going into accessibility from there. And that was about nine
Brendan Jarvis:
Years. Yeah. Well, let's go back actually to your legal career because you kind of glossed over that, but it has, you have an outstanding record, and I don't want to underweight the massive achievement that achievements that you had during that time. Now I understand while you were working as a lawyer in that field, you were literally making the case for accessibility and you did it very well, winning over 2000 cases in those seven years and only losing 12. How did you achieve such a spectacular rate of success?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Good interns,
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
No, no, seriously, I started off as just doing everything myself and clearly that wasn't scalable. And so I ended up convincing a nonprofit to fund some administrative costs so that I could get other people to do the data intake and some of the stuff that didn't really require any legal training. And then all I did was focused on processing those cases. I wasn't gonna go into too much detail on it because I'm not sure your audience, if they're mostly outside of the us, really understand what a headache the US medical system can be in terms of forcing to cover something that they've just decided they're not gonna pay for whatever reason. And I had won at one point 72 class A, sorry, 72 cases in a row against one particular insurer in one particular state. So I'd gone up against them 72 times. I'd won every single case, and there was absolutely nothing that was gonna stop them from making me do another 72 cases and delay treatment for the children that the parents wanted to have.
So I ended up filing a class action lawsuit instead against Blue Cross, which is the largest, I think one of the largest, anyways, insurers in the US and I won. And once I won, basically all the other insurers said, oh, okay, well if Blue Cross can't win against her, we're not even gonna try anymore. And all my cases started afterwards settling quite quickly and quite quietly, and it was just about at that time where accessibility was really starting to take off. And so I thought, well, look, I need a new career. I can use my CS degree, I can use my law degree. Certainly I have a passion for captions for my daughter, but also general accessibility for myself and other people. So that's how I ended up going into that area.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I definitely wanna dive into accessibility with you, but before we do that, I just wanna set the context for people listening and help to frame up for our audience disability first, and it might seem like a really simple and potentially a silly question, but what is disability?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Well, okay, so we'll start with disability. So my definition of disability is a mismatch between somebody's abilities and society. There's a lot of different models of disabilities. If you look at developing nations, people with disabilities are frequently beggars. The unemployment rate for people with disabilities in Armenia is 92%. They're not able to participate in the workforce. So that's the charitable model. Then we went to the medical model, which is, oh, you've got something wrong with you and you need it fixed. And now we've evolved from that into the social model, which is okay, if you put a ramp there, I don't have a disability anymore because I can get my wheelchair up that ramp. And it includes basically anything that interferes with your ability to liver work. So that's the official US government definition. So it also includes things like neurodiverse statuses and mental health conditions if you consider them disabling.
Now, the ironic thing is you can have two different people with the exact same level of hearing loss. For example, my daughter who was born with a congenital hearing loss or somebody who woke up one morning and couldn't hear because they had a virus, she doesn't consider herself disabled, but somebody who had perfectly normal hearing and then woke up one morning and was gone. It's exact same medical diagnosis, exact same issue, but have you developed the coping mechanisms? Do you know how to work around this? Are you an advanced assistive technology user? And we'll talk more in a few minutes about what assistive technology is in terms of explaining what accessibility is. I usually tell people, well, I can give you a really long boring lecture about the 50 web content accessibility guidelines and how to implement them and what they all mean. Or I could say Steven Hawking needed to be able to use your software. That pretty much Steven Hawking globally is considered, was considered one of the most disabled people anybody knew. Yet he could still communicate with the world through his computer. If that computer didn't work with the software that he was trying to use, he would've been hosed. I always like to create a good mental image because I think that helps better than the long lecture on regulations that not even lawyers find. Interesting.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, a hundred percent. And it's interesting story or example that you shared there with Steven Hawking. I mean, he's obviously someone who is visibly disabled. But I also was listening to one of your other talks where you talked about the the non-obvious disabilities that people have. I think you gave an example of the famous singer from u2 his red tinted glasses, I think you said actually to help him with his glaucoma rather than some sort of fashion statement. Although he has turned that into one by virtue of wearing them.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
But he won, he wanted to hide the fact that he had glaucoma. He didn't want anybody to know. He was afraid that there was gonna be an A problem insuring him for concerts that if he couldn't see the edge of the stage, he might fall off and hurt himself and there would be some huge claim. So he let people assume that it was just this Hollywood a affect rockstar affectation of his. And then it wasn't until he did get into a cycling crash about, I don't know, 15 years later in New York where he owned up to the fact that he didn't see particularly well because he'd had glaucoma for a long time, which is so something that I commiserate with because I've developed a glaucoma as well, although the tinted glasses don't work quite as well for me,
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh] [affirmative]. Oh, that's a shame. But you did raise something that's really interesting there, which is this hiding of the disability, this fear that some people with disabilities live with to try and hide their disabilities. What has created this that context for them that they feel that they can't actually openly express that?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Well, the unemployment rate in the United States for people with disabilities before the pandemic was two and a half times higher than people without disabilities. And I think it's about three times higher right now. So we typically are the first to be let go the last to be brought back on. And it really starts with the education system. Unless you're in a school system that's got really progressive, solid special education for children, you get into this pipeline problem where we have one state in particular, we get a lot of regional differences where the high school dropout rate for children in special education programs is 80% eight zero. So they don't graduate from high school, so they don't go to college. So they don't graduate from college. So they don't go to grad school. So they don't go into tech because lots of high-end tech jobs require graduate degrees.
It's just kind of this chain reaction. And so when people with disabilities finally do get a job that they like, and keep in mind us, right? Jobs are linked to health insurance. If you don't have a job, chances of having good health insurance are well, until five years ago it was zero. And then since Obamacare, well, I guess it's been a bit more than five years, but since Obamacare passed, you can get insurance on the exchange. You're guaranteed some level of insurance, it's just not gonna be great insurance. So they're really quite motivated to keep that job. And so they think that the best way of keeping that job is hiding the fact that they have a disability and not going to the manager and going to HR and saying, look, I have this disability, but if you buy me this $40 gadget, I'm gonna be just as good as anybody else, which is really what I try to encourage people to
Brendan Jarvis:
Do. So I suppose that's a good example that you've given there of what sounds like to me, structural or systemic ableism as in the discrimination against people with disabilities, that is just inherent in the way in which we've set up our institutions, bringing it down to the personal level. As someone myself with no, no, and disabilities, what are some of the biases that people like me likely to have about people with disabilities?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
So there's a really famous comedian who unfortunately passed away in Australia named Stella Young, I believe her name was. And she did this TED Talk. She had brittle bone disease, and her TED talk was called, I'm not your inspiration, thank you very much. So there's this whole category of things called inspiration porn that our article click bait type articles about the football player that asks the girl what down syndrome to the prom or the guy who did his wheelchair marathon to us, we don't feel like we are here to make people without disabilities feel better about themselves. So that's something that's very, very common to occur if people don't have a strong connection to disability themselves. There's some things around use of language, which tends to be somewhat regional. When my daughter was born what was considered the correct term to use was hearing impaired.
Now it's evolved to person with hearing loss or death depending on how they identify, but that tends to be a little bit more regional. We tend to use person first language in the US more, and it's not used so much outside the us. We are trying to get rid of really ableist terms. So gonna use trigger warning right now, I'm gonna use some words that some people listening might find offensive. You've got five seconds to turn this off. Retarded is ableist term, lame is ableist term. SPA is ableist term. Even crazy to a certain extent is ableist term. And so especially with the first three, but I'm starting to push more with the term crazy or insane. Also, those are medical terms with very, very specific meanings to them. And when you use them to mean things like nuts or klutzy or some other meaning, you're really devaluing the people who have those medical conditions.
Brendan Jarvis:
So other than not use terms, you've just said, what can people that aren't living with disability, what should we do a better job of? How do we not use our ability and the way that we see the world to negatively impact those people that are living with disabilities?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
So for example, I went to the VMware campus today for the first time since the pandemic started. It's been more than 15 months since I've been there. And one of the things that I noted noticed was in the kitchens, in the break rooms, they had no food out and they had little cards out with QR codes on them saying, well, if you wanted to order, they had an account set up with this place and all you had to do was snap a shot of the QR code to order your lunch. So if you're blind, how do you order? Okay, it's printed flat on cards. If now blind, that's not to say blind people can't use QR codes. They can but they have to know that a QR code is there and then they can use their screen reader to tell them whether or not the QR code is in focus, and then it will open up the website and then they can use the screen reader to order their lunch.
But what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get every person at where when they've made a decision about something, step back and say, okay, now how is somebody who's blind gonna be able to use this? How is somebody who's deaf going to be able to use this? How is somebody who can't use their hands gonna be able to use this, who has dyslexia? Just kind of walk through some of the more common disabilities? And if the answer is yes, they can all participate equally, then you're good to go. And if the answer is no, then you need to go back and rethink, well, how can I alter this to make this work for that group? So my first email going back to work was to the cafeteria contractor going, Hey guys, we gotta talk about this.
Brendan Jarvis:
Have they responded?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
What? I haven't checked, it was a busy day. Usually when you send in an accessibility query to an unknown organization, it takes them a while to even figure out who it's supposed to go to. So the fact that they haven't responded same day is, to me is nothing significant.
Brendan Jarvis:
I imagine that getting an email from you might scare a few people given your record in the courtroom as well. They have to figure out who to reply.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
They have to Google my name to figure that out. [laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. What you are talking about though, with this sort of lack of thought around how to make experiences more accessible in the workplace to people with disabilities is making me think of something else that I heard you say recently. And I'm gonna quote you now. You said traditionally disability has not been part of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Most corporate initiatives have focused on gender, people of color, and L g BT Q I A. Why is that?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
I think one of the things is the spectrum of disability is really broad. You've got five major categories and each category needs something different than the other categories. What works for somebody who's blind obviously is not gonna work for somebody who's deaf and vice versa. I think we haven't been around as long in terms of a single organized group arguing for our rights in the US it's been, I don't know, maybe 50, 60 years. The disability rights really movement really only started here when a bunch of disabled veterans started to come home from World War ii. And I know this seems paradoxical, but as medical care has gotten better, there have been more and more people with disabilities. Why? Because we're not dying. So somebody who may have gotten shot in the head in World War II and died now is coming back from subsequent wars with a traumatic brain injury.
So that's been an interesting but strange side effect that people don't see frequently until it's pointed out to them. So the number of people with disabilities is getting larger, partly because the medical care is better, partly because we're living longer. Pandemic aside, I know that the life expectancy rate in the US dropped two years in 2020 just because of the pandemic and collateral damage from the pandemic, like the increase in suicides and the increase in overdose deaths. So all of those things end up meaning more disabled people, and we're getting better at organizing campaigns to try to make sure that we're not forgotten of. I think the best campaign I've seen so far is Carolyn Casey's group from the World Economic Forum called the valuable 500, which VMware just recently joined. And it is a group and they did a study and said that if you look at the top 2000, I think it was, companies in the world, 94% of them don't include disability as part of their DEI agenda, like 6% do. And so their thing is to get people to commit to including disability on board agendas. And as part of DEI programs, even at VMware, and we're doing fairly well now. The disability employee resource group was the last one of 27 to start. So some disability resource group, some employee resource groups had been around for 10, 15 years before they ever got around to thinking about starting one for disability.
Brendan Jarvis:
I can't help but think when I hear statistics like that, that there's just not the will in the corporate community to do something like this until there's a considerable social or economic cost imposed.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Well, that's one of the things the litigation in the US is doing. So under the Americans with Disabilities Act and through different states that have implemented it, if you are putting out an inaccessible website and you're using it to sell products, you know could get sued. And so there were 3,500 such lawsuits last year, like 2,800 the year before. I think. I mean, it's been a large number for the last four or five years and it's not going down. So it's enough. People haven't gotten the message yet. I don't know why people in business don't realize what a purchasing power. We have this thing in the uk, which you may have heard of in New Zealand called the Purple Pound. So the purple pound in the UK is all the money spent by people with disabilities. And they have Purple Tuesday, which is a big shopping day where they ask stores to focus on access for people with disabilities and things like that. I think it's the last Tuesday in November maybe, right? Leading up to Christmas is the point. Cuz that's when a lot of shopping happens. And if you know can't get around in a store in a wheelchair, chances are you're gonna go do your shopping elsewhere.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Well, let's talk about getting around online stores. You recently gave a great talk called How to Lose a Customer in Eight Seconds, the Cost of Uninclusive products and Services. You said in there that 97% of the web is inaccessible to people who use assistive technology, which we touched on before. And it takes them about eight seconds as per the title of your talk to make up their minds as to whether or not they're going to continue or abandon. What are the things that people who are using assistive technology are looking for? What are those cues when they arrive on a website or an app or a digital experience to decide whether to push on or whether it's just not worth it?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
So different people look for different things depending on their own disability needs. The thing that my daughter always looks for is, or the videos captioned, she doesn't wanna hang out on a web, although even that's starting to get a bit better Now with auto captioning, the number of caption videos is improving over time. People like me, we look for colors, we look for font usage. We look for whether or not the screen will magnify. Have you ever done pinch to zoom right on a mobile device? Congratulations. You've used assistive technology. So assistive technology just means that something, it sits in between you and the technology and it helps you take something that you can't do or perceive and turn it into something that you can do or perceive. So magnifying something is one example of that. Switching over to a dyslexia friendly font is an example of that.
People with attention deficit disorder hate automatic motion because it just continually distracts them from their purpose of being there. So if you have a continuously moving slide carousel or something like that, they might took one look at that and say, Nope, not gonna work for me. Now, on the flip side, if you have that, but you have the ability to turn it off, you've put the power in the hands of the user to correct their own situation. So being accessible is not about dumbing down the website to the least common denominator. It's about giving the user options that they can select so that they can set up an environment that works with their particular disabilities. And I say disabilities because I ran into this yesterday where you get companies that just assume that people only have one type of disability. I went to a website and it's like, oh look, we've got a high contrast mode and we have a motion reduction mode.
And I'm like, great, I have glaucoma and I get motion sick. I go to turn the second one on. It turns the first one off. So they tried to do a great thing, which is make a more flexible website. What they didn't do is they didn't involve people with disabilities in constructing it. Because we could have told you, once you get one disability, you're a whole lot more likely to get more than one. And they're all intersectional. You can't just say, well look here for a second, Sheri, we're gonna take care of the Sheri with the glaucoma and the Sheri with the motion sickness. No, no, no, we're not taking care of you. It doesn't
Brendan Jarvis:
Turn that one off.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
It's all one Sheri, right? [laugh],
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative], [affirmative]. Yeah. And I know it's quite common for some organizations, particularly larger ones to use widgets like accessibility and there are others, but I understand that even those widgets,
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Well, I try not to name names because if I name company names, I inherently get a nasty gram from one of them. I'm not a fan of any of the overlay slash plugin slash widgets cuz remember I was talking about the assistive technology that we use. So what those things purport to do is they take my assistive technology that I know how to use, that I've set up for me away from me, and they put their assistive technology in its place, and even then they don't do it particularly well. So you're automatically setting up a barrier because you're saying no. All that assistive technology you have customized, you don't get to use that. You have to go learn this new widget over here. And then, like I said, if you look at the small print on the overlay company's contracts, there's just a list of things that are excluded, a mile long of things that they say, we can't do this.
The problem is people who are buying those solutions think it's gonna solve everything because that's what the overlay companies have sold them on. The exclusions are in the six point print that nobody can read and just, it's not a good situation for anybody. And somebody that I really respect, Casey Nidek mentioned that he thinks, oh, hopefully I attributed it to the right person, that it actually hangs out a target sign for lawsuits in the US because as soon as you log in and you see one of their blue vitruvian man, cuz everybody seems to be using variations on the same symbol to indicate that a plugin is present, that just sends a message, Hey, this company doesn't really care about people with disabilities so we should sue them because they're clearly not gonna pass the W C A G 2.0 standard.
Brendan Jarvis:
So tell us a little bit about that standard and then let's talk about what companies, organizations, designers of which listen to this podcast. What can they practically do to meet those standards or even exceed those standards?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Sure. So first of all, I'll mention that in the US again, 10% of the lawsuits that are being filed today are being filed against companies who are using those plugins even though they thought the plugin was gonna bulletproof them from the lawsuit. So clearly that is not the situation. And the reason why it's not the situation is because there are these 50 guidelines under 2.1 aa. So AA is the medium level of the standards or the deal breakers. If you're violating a guideline, you're making it impossible for somebody with a particular disability to use that whatever's on that website. So for my daughter, it would be captions. If you're lacking captions, she's done. She can't be able to do anything to make up for it. AA are the, you're making it hard, but not impossible rules. And then AAA are kind of the extreme rules with respect to color and contrast.
Most people don't do aaa. AA is pretty much the agreed to standard. It's an international standard. Anybody in the world who has adopted a standard in their laws has adopted this standard. When I get on the calls on the W3C committees, because I'm one of the members of the committee, we have people from Japan, we have people from Sweden, we have people, lots of people from Canada, lots of people from the us, people from South America. So it's a really international standard. So 50, that's a lot, but not all 50 apply to each job. So if you're a social media person, probably like six of the guidelines apply to you. If you're a designer, probably if 23, 25 maybe of the guidelines apply to you. If you're a developer, it's a little bit more if you're auditing for accessibility, it's all of them. But it's really only the auditors that have to understand every single one.
So I, first thing I always do is set up training programs, but what I try to do is I try to break them down into making sure that people only need to learn in detail what they need to know to do their job. If you wanna learn more than that on your own, great. We're not blocking you from taking the extra training. But we also don't wanna be one of the companies that says, well, let's just stop r and d. We won't code for two weeks. We'll just send everybody to classes. That's not practical either. Learning about those standards, learning about there's a lot of materials out there while you're just getting started before it gets kind of baked into the way your brain operates. So there's design checklists that you can go through one by one and check the items. There's developer checklists, there's QA checklists, there's a lot of material that's out there that can tell you what to do and how to
Brendan Jarvis:
Do it. Well, let's speak about some great new material that has just been released that's out there on this, and that's your book Giving a DAM about accessibility. What is the premise of this book? How can people use it and where can they get it?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Sure. So my publisher calls it per manifesto, perk Cookbook and the manifesto was what got published on Global Accessibility Awareness Day in conjunction with the UX Collective. And it is to help people convince the nonbelievers amongst them that accessibility is the right decision. So I talk about the different types of objections, all of which are ableist that you need to overcome. If you're the only one saying, Hey, why isn't this accessible? Hey, why aren't we including people with disabilities and how to overcome them? Because I've kind of developed some strategies for doing that over time. Then once you convince people, then the rest of the book, which will be coming out later, discusses, okay, the very tactical brass tack of how to go about implementing this kind of program. You know what you need to do, how you need to do it, what's the most important stuff to get done first and how to grow momentum over time.
Brendan Jarvis:
And we'll definitely be linking to the book and the show notes so that everyone can find out where to get that. It sounds like a fantastic resource and very, very helpful in opening up that conversation and helping to make some positive change. You touched on some people objecting to making the web a more accessible place, and I have no doubt that there are people in our industry that may ask questions like, why should we do this for such a small group? And I'm using coms. If you're listening to this of people and they'll wanna see a business case for it, what's your message for those people?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Well, my first message is ask, asking for a business case for something that says civil, civil right is ableist. So I usually start there and that usually takes them aback because then they're like, oh no, I'm not ableist, cuz that sounds bad. Anything ends in is or ism is bad. I do occasionally put together the business cases only to speed things along, especially if the business case is overwhelming. So I just put together a business case at work where I'm like, okay, if we spend $60,000 on this, we're gonna save $700,000 a year. Okay, that's an easy to win business case because both numbers are not high in the sky. They're very objective and I rolled them up from the bottom. Sometimes you have to put together the business case anyways, even though the request itself is ableist just until you've got everybody converted over to thinking more inclusively. But you gotta start somewhere.
Brendan Jarvis:
I can't help but think though, that you would be fired for suggesting a business case to open up an experience to people of color, for example.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
So I call that the ableism test, pull out disability substitute in something else. Okay, so this is New Zealand, and I'm being facetious here. Would you be fired if you said, Hey, I wanna launch this great product, but Maori can't use
Brendan Jarvis:
It? Yeah, well most likely you would. You'd pay a huge social price, very least.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
So that is the disability equivalent of ableism. Take out disability, plug in some other identifiable group, be it gender, be it people of color or particular ethnicity or particular religion. If it doesn't work for those more commonly understood cases, it's ableist. So the big frustration point which I'm trying to work on right now is that business people, and especially people in tech, because that's where I am right now, are rewarded for releasing software. They're not rewarded for releasing accessible software. If you change the reward system, the behavior will change because people do what they get rewarded to do. If they get rewarded for delivering a feature and they wanna move on to the next feature right away because they're gonna get rewarded for that too. Guess what they're gonna do? They're gonna cut every corner that they can to collect the reward and move on to the activities that get them to the next reward. So
Brendan Jarvis:
By, yeah, this is really reminding me of a conversation I had with Marty Kagan, who you may know. He is sort of big in the product management space and his whole thing, and it's not an uncommon drum to be banging on as outcomes over outputs. And I think that you're right in terms of people being driven by incentive, if you change the incentives and get them to focus on the outcome more than just shipping features, you should by virtue end up with a better result.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
One would hope so but really accessibility at that level is not any different than privacy or security. They're all different forms of regulatory compliance and companies like Clubhouse, like Uber, all of these unicorn startups that just, they're like, I don't care about any of this stuff. I just need to get something out there. We are not punishing them enough for that behavior because what they're doing is they're sending the message, Hey, this is okay, just get it out fast and then fix it later.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. I was gonna ask you, I mean, what does this say about engineering design and product leadership
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
That there aren't enough people with disabilities in those roles?
Brendan Jarvis:
Is there a lack of empathy, lack of lived experience? Why is this not on people's agenda? Yeah,
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
I would say that those are two very different common reasons for it. If you look at so again, I'll reference VMware are employment rate for people with disabilities is 3.2% right now, not where we wanted to be, but vastly better than we were two years ago. But then if you look at the management level as opposed to just the overall company, the number drops significantly. So we do not have people with disabilities in either in those roles or comfortable disclosing that they have hidden disabilities in those roles because 70% of disabilities are a hundred percent invisible.
Brendan Jarvis:
What would be an example of a completely invisible disability?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Like dyslexia, colorblindness, right? Yeah, most of the neurodiverse statuses and most of the mental health conditions are completely invisible.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, let's talk about companies, and we just talked about design and product and engineering leadership. What responsibility do big tech companies like the Googles, the Facebooks, the Apples, the Microsofts, you even mentioned some of the unicorns in there. What responsibility do they have to people with disabilities to ensure and promote standards that mean that those people are able to access and enjoy the rest of the web like everybody else can?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Well, I think anybody who's running any type of tech for good initiative, and I think every company that you just named is running one of some form or another is obligated to make sure that whatever they're doing that's good for the nonprofit that they're working for is also accessible. I mean, we even found in countries that are relatively good at accessibility, they were releasing covid apps that weren't accessible because it was an emergency, it was scramble and get it done fast. And then it was like, oh, whoops. People with disabilities can't use this. People with disabilities are twice as likely to die from covid as people without disabilities in the us. And so it, it's really looking at it backwards. You need to be designing for the people who need it the most, not the people who need it the least.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now, this might be a overly simple question, but is accessibility synonymous with good design?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
So we can get into some deep conversations about accessibility versus usability and accessibility versus inclusive slash universal design. They're actually all different things, but the distinctions become narrow or a narrower. For example, if you're somebody who uses a screen reader and the screen reader is what is the assistive technology that people who are blind largely use? It takes you about three to five times as long to fill out a form and submit it for a registration process. For example for a newsletter, let's just say not even a financial transaction. So if you do some usability research and fix a couple of things that are making things more complicated, make your error messages a little bit cleaner, add an icon to go with your text, things like that, you're gonna benefit people without disabilities, but you're going to vastly benefit people with disabilities because it takes them so much longer to fill out the forms. So they're less likely to commit errors and they're more likely to be able to fill out the form at close to the same speed as somebody without a disability. Usability. Accessibility requires usability. Usability doesn't, al doesn't always take accessibility into consideration as same thing for inclusive and universal design. So inclusive and universal design don't look at disabilities, they just look at making it work for the entire audience. Whereas accessibility is really focused on the experience of the users who are using assistive technology or who can't consume the content or the website the same way.
Brendan Jarvis:
No, I was thinking about the word accessibility when I was preparing for today, and I couldn't help but think. It sounds like the first floor, it sounds like something that hopefully in the not too distant future should just be a given, but it almost sounds like table stakes. I mean, if you were to say to a person who doesn't have disability or disabilities that this is a really great accessible experience, it doesn't really inspire a lot of love for whatever that experience may be. Is it just the beginning? Can we hope to achieve eat a quality of experience?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Yeah, I hope it is. So there's so many things that you can do above and beyond the 50 W C A G guidelines. You can look at usage patterns, for example, and make suggest different suggestions to people based on their usage patterns. You can allow people to store settings in their login profile. So they can say, well, I want a dyslexia friendly font. I want this color. I want captions turned on all the time, and I want no motion. Right? You don't have to explain what your disabilities are, you just have to explain the behavior that you want and don't want. So that's what W three C and W C A G focus on as they focus on the want and don't, there's not a single disability that's mentioned anywhere in the 50 guidelines.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's fascinating. So it sounds like it's more viewed through a lens of preference.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
It's viewed through a lens of desired behavior and undesired behavior I think is probably the right way to characterize it, because even users with disabilities preferences change over time. I prefer to use a keyboard for navigation. I've got pretty bad arthritis in my hands but I will occasionally, if I'm in a hurry, I'll use a mouse so I'm not even internally consistent with the way I interact with assistive technology. Just one more thing I wanna mention because it is one of the main topics I've heard from your webinars of the past is doing user research with people with disabilities. It's a very important thing to do. You need to both understand the disability status of the people that you're doing general research with because the disabilities might be coloring their responses and you don't know that unless you ask. And then the other thing is to do disability specific research.
So for example, if I'm selling rose tinted glasses, I might want a whole room of people with glaucoma [laugh] like bono, so I can figure out who benefits from them and who doesn't. And I might want their advice on what they wanna see with screen magnification, for example, since that's the most common assistive technology used by somebody with glaucoma, there's a lot of different things that you have to do with respect to when you've got an entire research cohort on disability. I actually have a talk that I gave on the learners website. If you go to join learners.com there's about a 45 minute talk I did on UX research with people with disabilities completely free. I rarely charge for anything that I do, and if I'm talking at a conference that's charging, it's because I really believe in what that conference is doing.
Brendan Jarvis:
I've watched the talk, it's really good at race. So many questions, particularly for UX research specifically, which is a big part of the audience that listens to the podcast. You mentioned that earlier on in the conversation, that the range of disabilities that people have is incredibly broad. What is the most effective way for UX researchers to determine which people with disabilities they need to invite to participate in their studies?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
So it is easier if you group your people by disability when you're doing the study. You don't wanna mix in results from people who are neurodiverse and people with glaucoma cuz it's just gonna be all over the place. You're not gonna be able to find any trends or patterns there at all. The first thing that I always recommend people do is think about your demographic and what you do know about them. So if your demographic is, for example, older men, hearing loss is gonna be the number one thing you wanna look at because older men have really high rates of hearing loss, partly because of the aging process, partly because they're more likely to have been in the military and had noise exposure and things that chainsaws. My husband was using a chainsaw yesterday to cut up a tree that fell down, and I'm like, did you put your ear plugs in [laugh]? So did he. Yes, he's,
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, good. Yeah.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
So
Brendan Jarvis:
My wife's an eye doctor and she would've asked also, did he have his eye protection
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
On, he had goggles on, he had his chaps on, but I couldn't see the plugs. So the other stuff I could see [laugh]. So yeah, look at your demographic. If your demographic is children, you're gonna be dealing with congenital disabilities and children that perhaps are learning to read more slowly than their age match counterparts. We studied some of this at McDonald's with respect to the Happy Meal games because children with cerebral palsy are not a big part of the overall population, but they're a big part of the population of kids who wanna play games. Think about who your users are and then try to extrapolate again if tech, okay, so tech is 80% male, plus or minus the development community right Now, if you're targeting that group, you wanna target things that impact men. Okay, hearing loss was one example. Colorblindness, okay, 4% of the general population is colorblind, but six and a half percent of tech is colorblind. So that is a pretty large number of people. Men are also more likely to have autism, more likely to have dyslexia, more likely to have a potential deficit disorder. So look at those things first in terms of your user research, because you're gonna get the biggest amount of impact for your users.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I understand at VM where you have empowered your researchers to more effectively run research with people with disabilities by getting them to look at the personas and the way in which they view their personas differently. What has been that different approach that you've encouraged them to take?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
So as I'm sure you're aware from previous discussions, people can get pretty attached to their personas, and the personas had already been formed by the time I got to VMware three years ago. So what we did was we made a set of disabilities that we made orthogonal to the personas so that we could give any disability or any common combination of disabilities to any of the personas. So we might take the persona named Shauna and we might give her migraines and a rotator cuff injury. So she's got her arm in a sling, for example. And then we tell Shauna with those two disabilities stories throughout our end to end storytelling process about how she interacts with the system differently because she's got those two issues. You don't get them all that way, but you get a good representation.
Brendan Jarvis:
So it sounds like people can extend their existing artifacts and ways of thinking about their audience and layer in what the experience might be for some of the common disabilities, those types of people that they're seeking to serve may experience.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, you can't tell where the migraine part of Shauna ends and the single mom part of Shauna begins, right? It's all one great big package, just like I have both glaucoma and motion sickness. So having the flexibility to give any of your personas any disabilities is a really good way to get an introspective view on what it is that those types of people might experience when they're using your product. I was gonna say, and in particular, what they might wanna see work differently. Maybe Shauna's more sensitive to screen time. So she wants a keyboard shortcut so that she can get to something more quickly in case she's in the middle of a migraine.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, a hundred percent. Very hard to separate the parts from the sum. You were talking about personas, and that sort of made me realize that personas are really useful and they're definitely a helpful tool in helping to shape thinking around user experience, but they're also an abstraction. This isn't the actual person that you are sitting there thinking about. This is some sort of combination of attributes or environmental factors or whatever it is that you've used to inform the development of the persona, that research that's gone into it. But let's talk about actual face to face
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Research. I'm just right. I'm just laughing because I've had conversations at VMware where I've said Shauna's, not real [laugh], where people are talking about, well, Shauna would do this and Shauna wouldn't do that. One of our personas is actually named Shauna. I don't know if she was named after a real person or not. I don't. But yes you're right. They are an amalgamation and there's only so much that you can learn from them.
Brendan Jarvis:
So when we are face to face in a research setting, whether we're doing a usability test is probably a good place to start. That's one of the more common ones that we'll be face to face with a participant. What changes do we have to make to the way in which we conduct research with people who don't have disabilities? So that research is a great experience and also an effective experience for people that have disabilities.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
So I spend 45 minutes talking about that on the learner's episode. So this is just gonna skim the top of that particular conversation. So rule number one is don't do research with people with disabilities until you've done your basic user, your usability research with people without disabilities and got all that stuff knocked out of the way. Cause if it's a problem for users without disabilities, it's gonna be a huge problem for users with disabilities. Then the second thing is people with disabilities really do have their devices fine tuned to how it is that they best interact with the system. If you hand them a device when they walk into the room and say, here, this is what we're using today, you've automatically created a barrier just like those overlays and plugins do, because they're not gonna be able to use those tools. They're not gonna be able to interact the same way that they always do.
So that will literally completely invalidate your results. You definitely need to allow for more time because as I mentioned, even if the flows go swimmingly and people don't get lost, and that almost never happens the first time around, you're, it's still gonna take more time for them to submit the registration form to submit the order. And then I always say, be open to the question, the answer to the question that you didn't know to ask. So we had one user research study that we did once where people were getting groceries delivered to their house. That was what we were studying, and we're the end. We have our throwaway, is there anything else you'd like to tell us? Question? And the answer was that they wanted to play monopoly. So every year, this grocery store chain was famous for its monopoly game and giving away multimillion dollar prizes and the price, and that wasn't accessible.
They were like, great, I can buy groceries. This is good. This is useful. I can use this. I wanna play Monopoly. That was literally our number one finding for that particular research study. So yeah, those are just a few hints. And like I said, go to join learners.org. I think you'll put the, yeah, we'll URL in the resources section and I'm gonna be releasing quite a bit more stuff. I'm working on doing some recordings right now with the learners folks who are fabulous to work with, by the way, and they are responsible for running the UX, the UX Anywhere conference.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Great. No, we will definitely link to learners and the resources there and the show notes so people can find it. It is a great talk and really well worth the time if you're listening. For sure. Just before we move off this into a couple of scenario based questions, Sheri, what are some of the ethical considerations that UX researchers need to have in mind when they're conducting research with people with disabilities?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Sure. So I'll start with one that I kind of walked into myself. Most disabilities aren't congenital. Most disabilities are acquired through accidents, what have you, and occasionally the events leading to the disability were quite traumatic. So you always wanna be careful about how you approach the topic of where the disability derived from. Some people are more willing to talk about it than others usually having to do with the length of time they've had the disability. So that's really important. Just how you retain the data is really important because you now have access to people's private health information. So it's even more critical that data be protected, encrypted, not associated with a human. They may have come to you because they have dyslexia and you'd opened up a dyslexia study, but they might not be open to their spouse or to their boss, or even to their children about the fact that they have that disability.
Brendan Jarvis:
Really important considerations for people to bear in mind. Now, Sheri, as I mentioned, I was keen to do a couple of scenario based questions with you. These are hypothetical situations that draw on your experience and expertise that people may be experiencing or willing to experience, a situation that that's relevant to. Are you up for those?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Of
Brendan Jarvis:
Course. Okay. Here's the first one. You're a senior designer working on a new design system for your company. You recently listened to a great episode of Brave UX with Brendan Jarvis, where he interviewed Sheri Burn Haber, and you want to make sure that your design system is accessible as a result of listening to that episode. What do you need to consider to ensure that it will be
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
So, the important thing to understand with design system accessibility is there's only so far that you can take it. You can style the link, you can style the button, but in the end, you don't know how the user's gonna implement it. There are, I wanna say right now, maybe 20 accessible open source design systems. So they're accessible, they're public, they're free. Usually what I recommend is to look at some of those first, and I'll just rattle off a few names here, and if you need help finding them for your resources, let me know. Obviously, the first one is Clarity. That's the design system that VMware uses. We have I believe, 4 million users outside of VMware as well. So we used to be very Angular specific, and now we have a framework agnostic version. So that's something. So Clarity from VMware Carbon from IBM material, from Google Spectrum, from Adobe Lightning, from Salesforce.
Those are the first five that pop into my head. So look at how they've done it. For example, Salesforce has done any, anytime anybody wants to know how to do accessible drag drop, I always tell them to go look at Lightning because they've done a bang up job on it, and DMR doesn't do a lot of Dragon Drop. So we haven't had a need to implement that in our own design system. We might get to it eventually, but we got a lot of stuff on our list right now. So yeah, there, there's, look at how other people are doing it. Maybe even look at whether you can take one of those and then make it your own, brand it and color it and do all the things that make it work for your internal purposes, but use the base accessible design system from somebody else.
It is hard to make an design system accessible. It is not easy because you have to think about all the different things that can be done with the object and then make sure that all of what we call Aria properties are exposed for that. Then the user of that design system can make use of so that the end product is accessible. But I can tell you one thing that I know for sure, if the design system is not accessible, there is no way in hell the end product is gonna be accessible. So if you're a senior designer and you're having trouble convincing somebody to make your design system accessible, that's your number one
Brendan Jarvis:
Argument. Yeah, I think that's huge, and it's great to hear that so much of the heavy lifting is already being done. I mean, why invent the wheel on this if you don't need to,
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Or just look at the way other people have done it? Because some of these design systems clarity's, I wanna say six years old at this point, so it's been through a lot of rounds of user feedback and learn from how it is that we did things in terms of open source. Most people who've released stuff in the open source are always willing to answer questions if you file tickets on GitHub. So if you wanna say, well, why did you do blah, blah, blah, you know, may get back an entire novel on how well we looked at this. We looked at that. These two things were in conflict, but we knew that W C A G was gonna do X, Y, and Z down the road. So we went with this decision here, you know, don't get that experience on your first attempt to make a design system accessible on your
Brendan Jarvis:
Own. Yeah, definitely make use of the community people. It's really important. Sheri, are you ready for another one?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Did I do okay on the first one?
Brendan Jarvis:
I think it was great. I mean, I learned something, I'm sure other people did as well. It was really, really good.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
All right. We did not practice these. I did not know this was coming, but I'm sure my boss will be happy that I managed to plug clarity in this
Brendan Jarvis:
Talk and plug it first.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Okay, next
Brendan Jarvis:
Question. All right. The next one is the next scenario. You're a senior design leader and you want to create a more inclusive experience for all of your company's users. You are considering building an access accessibility program that you don't have any previous experience to draw from. How should you get started?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Well, if you need to get started quickly, let's say you're in the US or you're outside of the us, but you've been threatened with a lawsuit in the US because you have American customers. My answer is usually start with contract resources while you're building a team, because accessibility people are in pretty high demand right now. Accessibility traditionally is not taught in college. So you're gonna find people who've taught themselves accessibility along the way, and there's only like 8,000 of us globally that are certified, for example between the two major certification programs. So you always need to have at least a couple of those people involved with the top level of certification because they're the ones who really know what the future is. They're not gonna make a decision for the short term, and then 18 months later you're like, oh, whoops, we didn't think about that.
So there's that. But even let's say you've got a decent size budget and a mandate from the C-suite, which is always important, you're still not gonna be able to do the best job unless other people are talking about accessibility other than the accessibility team. So VMware's got, I think 33,000 employees right now, and I tell people, we've got 16 people on our accessibility team, and they're like, wow, that's a lot. But 33,000 employees, that's like one accessibility person for every 2000 employees. So you need people to talk about accessibility when the accessibility team is not in the room. Okay, how do you do that? You increase the number of employees with disabilities you have. How do you do that? Some of it involves doing training on unconscious bias related to disability, how to interview somebody who's neurodiverse, for example, is a really important thing to understand, especially in tech.
Do auditing your internal tools. It's not just about what you sell. So when I started at VMware, 85% of our tools were inaccessible, and that was just because of a lack of decision making and a lack of understanding of the needs of employees with disabilities over time. And I subscribe to the Richard Branson School of Business, which is if you take care of your employees, your employees will take care of your customers. So there's a lot of things that the senior leader will have to work in a cross-functional manner to be successful, not because the senior design leader cares about HR or cares about DEI or cares about procurement, but because if things don't get paid attention to that, that's gonna really hamstring his ability to produce that inclusive product that he really, I said they really, really want. At the end of the day, my design leader is male. So I was mentally thinking of George when I said that.
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. And are there natural allies that you've found in your experience working in these Fortune 200 companies that may not be people with disabilities, but people that just inherently get the value and the purpose of making an experience accessible for all people
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
There? Some companies are more open about how they go about their accessibility day to day operations than other companies. VMware happens to be fairly open about it. They haven't really put too many restrictions on what I can say publicly. Other companies are very hush hush about it. They treat it as if it was a trade secret. I think that the best thing to do is to look at the companies who've been doing it well and been doing it for a long time, like Google, Microsoft, apple, those are the three that I usually start with and see what they're doing. Microsoft is very big in an organization called Disability in, so it's Disability Colon in, and they recently, Microsoft recently released a maturity model for disability, which is actually based on the digital accessibility maturity model that I wrote when I was at Level Access. So that looks at accessibility from that more holistic corporate perspective, like I gave in the last answer about what you have to change in procurement, what you have to change in hr, what you have to change with your
Brendan Jarvis:
Training, [affirmative]. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Really good advice.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
One thing to wrap up though, when you do that, guess what? You're gonna get disabled customers. You have to be able to support them. So it's not just about the product, it's about the experience. The documentation has to be accessible, the training has to be accessible, the support, surveys, conferences, it all has to be
Brendan Jarvis:
Accessible. So this isn't just ST ticking the box exercise.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Correct.
Brendan Jarvis:
So you are an internationally recognized expert in digital accessibility. You are someone that has your finger on the pulse of this, quite literally, this is what you have done for a long time and you're still doing it. What's not happening that needs to happen to ensure that there is equivalency of experience for people with disabilities in the digital world.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Nobody should be allowed to graduate with a computer science degree without having taken an accessibility course. There are no almost no accessibility courses in the US at least, and what there is isn't mandatory. So it's really a problem if people were coming in. So what we saw at VMware when I was first getting started was the people who came to VMware from Google, Microsoft, and Apple, were going, Hey, where's the accessibility? Because that was the environment that they came from, but the people coming straight out of college and grad school, they didn't know any better because they didn't learn it. And we had more people coming outta college in grad school than we had Google, Microsoft, and Apple. So that if I could just wave my magic wand and get anything that I wanted, that would be it.
Brendan Jarvis:
And what can the people who are listening to this episode, the UXs, the designers, the people that are managing and leading product, what could they do today that would make a difference in accessibility for people with disabilities?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
So I mean, many people in UX and design do conferences, do alumni events, do mentoring and recruiting. I think including accessibility in all of those things is really valuable. We have Design for America in the us. They take a very strong view that everything that comes out of their program should be accessible. And so those are some things that design people can do to help bolster the request for accessibility coming from other
Brendan Jarvis:
People. Yeah, really important, really important, really practical. Sheri, thank you. This has been a really important and a great conversation. It's been packed full of great stories, important stories, practical insights for people to take away and apply. Thank you for so generously sharing those with us today.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
Well, thanks for inviting me, Brendan. And as people can see with my husband in the background, we're living in a 20 foot trailer right now while my house is being made wheelchair accessible. Sorry for the Zoom walkthrough, but at least he didn't
Brendan Jarvis:
Have it to Amazon. [laugh]. All good. No problem. It's been great having you on the show and really just wanna say thank you for making the time and it's such an important message and I'm really glad that you could be here to share it with us today.
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
I'm happy to come back. Wch 2.2 will be final in September. I can come do a discussion on the nine new guidelines. 3.0 will be out hopefully by the end of 2023. So lots of good accessibility accessible VR and XR is something else that I'm working on right now.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, we'll definitely make that happen. I've got so many questions I didn't get around to asking you, so we will definitely make that happen. Sheri, if
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
People, well, let's make this a regular thing
Brendan Jarvis:
A hundred percent. If people wanna find out more about you and your work and what you've been up to, your writing, which is prolific, what's the best way for them to do that?
Sheri Byrne-Haber:
The best way is to connect with me on LinkedIn. I've really focused on that as my one primary channel for doing work related stuff. I don't do a whole lot on Twitter. You can read all of my old articles, and by old, I mean anything more than a month old is at sheribyrnehaber.com without the hyphen, just run all three words together. And Medium obviously is if you have a Medium subscription already. Then if you follow me there, you'll get first notice of anything that I
Brendan Jarvis:
Write. Perfect. We'll definitely link to all of those great resources in the show notes. Thanks, Sheri, and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you listen as well. Everything that we've covered, as I've just mentioned, will be in the show notes, including where you can find Sheri plus her book that's just been released. If you enjoyed the show and you wanna hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in design, UX, and product, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, keep being brave.

Sheri Byrne-Haber

Giving a Damn About Accessibility

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Who is Sheri Byrne-Haber?

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