Episode 11 features our final guest for Season One: Jennison Ascuncion. Co-founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) and Head of Accessibility Engineering Evangelism at LinkedIn, Jennison, he talks to Nikki and Sam about how GAAD came to be, navigating the accessibility myths that continue to haunt product design, hiring people with disabilities, and more.

References

• Global Accessibility Awareness Day
• Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act
• Teach Access
• GAAD Foundation
• A11Y jobs on Twitter
• Jennison on Twitter
• Jennison Asuncion on LinkedIn

Transcript:

[00:00:05] Sam Proulx: Welcome to season one of Disability Bandwidth.

[00:00:12] Nikki Nolan: A show where we talk with disability leaders each week about career, life and technology.

[00:00:17] I’m Nikki Nolan.

[00:00:18] Sam Proulx: And I’m Sam Proulx.

[00:00:19] Let’s get started.

[00:00:20] Nikki Nolan: Can you please introduce yourself?

[00:00:22] Jennison Asuncion: So my name is Jennison Asuncion. Pronouns he/him. I am a Filipino, black hair, dark eyes. and I’m right now wearing, I’m over-dressed for a Sunday. I’m wearing a button down, striped, short-sleeve shirt collar.

[00:00:39] I am Head of Accessibility, Engineering Evangelism at LinkedIn. but I am also co-founder and vice chair of the GAAD foundation.

[00:00:49] Nikki Nolan: Tell us a little bit about GAAD. What is GAAD?

[00:00:51] Jennison Asuncion: So GAAD is Global Accessibility Awareness Day and it’s something that, honestly, it just happened by fluke. I had been doing a lot of outreach and advocacy. This is back in 2010/2011. And, just trying to figure out different ways to make accessibility interesting and quote unquote accessible to mainstream designers and developers.

[00:01:17] So I started something called Accessibility Camp in Toronto, where I spent a lot of years. I consider that my hometown. It was some random November Saturday in November of 2011, that I just happened to be trolling Twitter. I happened to be home and I was on Twitter and I saw an automatically generated tweet by someone who I didn’t know at the time named Joe Devin. Who was at that time, a developer in Los Angeles, also Canadian by the way.

[00:01:52] But anyway, long story short, he wrote a blog post that essentially, he threw down the gauntlet and said, we need a global accessibility day for developers so that they can at least understand the fundamentals. And where this all came from was his dad, who was getting older and his sight was deteriorating. And so is his hearing.

[00:02:14] So using the phone to contact his bank was impossible. And Joe thought that maybe using the website would be easier, but that also was problematic. So as most people in tech do, when they get a bee in their bonnet, Joe Devin, took to his blog, and wrote this blog post.

[00:02:30] Which I subsequently read. And remember I mentioned that I was already doing things and thinking about ways to get accessibility more out front in the mainstream. So I contacted him and I said, hey, if you’re interested in this, let’s see if we can do it. And on May 9th, 2012, we launched the first Global Accessibility Awareness Day and we celebrated our 10th anniversary this past year.

[00:02:56] Yeah, it was one of those weird things, like you just never expect those things to happen. I mean, you couldn’t find two people who shouldn’t have organized such a massive event, just because we’re too busy for our own good. But the fact that people actually took to it and owned it and kind of, well we’re 10 years.

[00:03:17] We just did our 10th. And we just, Joe and I, just step back every year and go, oh my goodness. Like, look, look at all of this.

[00:03:24] Sam Proulx: It’s always nice to hear a story about grassroots activism and empowerment and the good things that can come out of these things. Because too often, all we hear is,some of the less gripping things out of social media and grassroots organizing.

[00:03:41] Jennison Asuncion: Just back to your point. One of the things that I love most about my job is being here in Silicon valley is one thing. But just the fact that I ended up working with some amazing folks who end up going to do amazing things outside of LinkedIn.

[00:04:02] And I stay in touch with them. And, you know, even this past week, I got a message from someone who I worked with like three, four years ago. And, they approached me because they are starting to kick up accessibility and wanted me to chat with their company. Obviously my first and foremost, objective intent, all that good stuff is the work that I do at LinkedIn.

[00:04:28] But the fact that I’ve had the opportunity to meet and stay in touch with engineers and designers who’ve moved on and who still understand the importance of accessibility. I think that’s what makes my job so important. And, it obviously comes with a great level of responsibility, in terms of how I position accessibility to people who have never dealt with it before, like who are dealing with it for the first time.

[00:04:56] So I just wanted to shout out to Vivian. She’s one of my favorite people. As a design person most of the biggest issues and challenges that come up happen in design. So if we’re able to get designers like Vivian and others to think about accessibility, then we’re shifting left.

[00:05:15] Sam Proulx: Absolutely. I mean, I speak at so many design conferences. I think I am at more design conferences than I am at accessibility conferences, which are super interesting because if we can get the designers to include it, the developers will build it. But if accessibility isn’t in the design, the developers aren’t gonna think of adding it after the work.

[00:05:33] Jennison Asuncion: And it’s great Sam, I mean, props to you, cause I’m seeing you all over the place and the fact that you are speaking to designers in their own conferences. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I live and breathe accessibility and it’s important for us to attend and be part of those quote unquote accessibility centric events.

[00:05:50] I run one, so I know the value. We also need to be presenting at design specific conferences, engineering specific conferences. Otherwise we end up preaching to the choir. We need to be speaking to people who this might be a new topic for them, or it might be a topic that they’re not comfortable with.

[00:06:10] Sam Proulx: I think one of the things that I don’t want to say, you know, is it’s bothersome, but maybe you find the same thing sometimes where you’re speaking to a crowd and you suddenly realize, this might be the only contact they have with someone with a disability this year.

[00:06:25] Jennison Asuncion: Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:06:28] Nikki Nolan: So I’m a designer. Tell me sort of about what you see as being the downstream impacts of accessibility, not being a part of the process and just being an engineering part?

[00:06:40] Jennison Asuncion: Well, you don’t want engineers to be interpreting everything on their own. And that’s why, and you folks probably do this Nikki or know about this. It’s something as simple as annotating your designs so that engineers aren’t left guessing. What is this UI element supposed to be or what it should be called?

[00:07:05] Or what is the keyboard interaction supposed to be on this particular screen? Don’t get me wrong, engineers are amazingly smart individuals, but there’s a reason why there’s designers. Our designers own the user experience. Designers understand, and they kind of are the architects behind what a person should be doing when they’re interacting with a screen or with a process.

[00:07:33] And so the downstream effect for all of this being left up to engineers is just that. You are leaving engineers up to guessing what the real intent was there.

[00:07:45] Sam Proulx: I mean, I don’t know if it’s a thing, but working at LinkedIn, you have probably noticed that when designers do include accessibility annotations, and keyboard designs and things like this, does it then lead to better management of accessibility? Because too often we have this thing we’re trying to battle, right?

[00:08:07] Where, well, it’s not accessible yet, but we gotta release it on September 19th. And so we’re releasing anyway accessible or not. We can fix it later. if the accessibility requirements are built in from the beginning, do you find that more often it’s built into the product management timeline?

[00:08:22] Jennison Asuncion: Absolutely. Yeah. So, when you have the annotations in the spec, an engineer, for example, can at least factor in any additional estimates in terms of any extra things that they need to do to create the accessibility. Now don’t get me wrong, obviously we want them to be thinking about accessibility upfront, but not every engineer has received accessibility training, but at least if they’ve gotten the annotations and some notes, they have something to start with.

[00:08:52] They’re not having to guess what they need to do and how long it might take them. So, absolutely having accessibility in the user requirements will then at the beginning, turn the light on for the designer to say, oh yeah. So this is a requirement. So then I will add the annotations. And then similarly, when they hand over the annotated spec to the engineer, the engineer goes, okay, there’s accessibility stuff in here, which I need to tend to,and to consider when I’m making my estimates and when I’m actually doing development.

[00:09:22] Sam Proulx: I was just going to say, and then it turns that into from the project management perspective, instead of not doing a thing you already saw as an extra, it turns it into a conscious decision of we are not going to meet the specified requirement.

[00:09:34] So that’s sort of like a perfect world where people actually have knowledge about these things. If you are at the very beginning or your company isn’t doing accessibility, or they’re not including people with disabilities into their thought process or the system, what are some things both of you have sort of seen to like build this system?

[00:09:54] Jennison Asuncion: Well for me, in my role- so part of my role is owning training across our engineering for our web iOS and Android engineers, that’s one piece of it. The other, are monthly trainings that we offer all that kind of stuff, but then there’s also the day-to-day stuff.

[00:10:15] So we have office hours every day where engineers and designers can bring their mocks they’ve built in to me with someone who works for me, who will be able to spot some of the big blocking items and such. It is required because unfortunately we’re not at a point yet where folks who are studying computer science, engineering, and design are not getting accessibility training, whether it’s in bootcamps or at their college or university. It’s happening like in small pockets here and there, but it’s not happening to the point where you are graduating computer science, engineering, and design students, having any level of accessibility knowledge. It’s always just by luck that that happens. And certainly at LinkedIn, you know, I asked the question when people enrolled in training, have you taken training before?

[00:11:08] And you can imagine that the balance of people have never taken accessibility training ever before, they come to us. So that’s great on the one hand, but then that just means, you know, you can train someone, but how much of that’s going to stick and all of that kind of stuff.

[00:11:24] And how much do we train them? Cause we’re not going to be able to train them on everything. That’s just impossible. I’m not sure Sam, in your role, how much you get to do in terms of the training with companies and stuff.

[00:11:36] Sam Proulx: I do some. But a lot of what I do is focused on getting buy-in and, and getting people to get it. I find that the individual designers, developers, engineers, all want to do the right thing. Right? But one thing that I struggled with and I wonder how you feel about, is whether or not grassroots accessibility activism in a company works well? Because if the CEO and the CTO and the CFO and the higher ups and the directors and the VPs are on board with accessibility, they will offer their folks training. They’ll put it in requirements. They’ll budget for it. They’ll resource it. They’ll do all this stuff, right?

[00:12:16] Jennison Asuncion: I think you just hit the nail on the head with the budgeting. I mean, at the end of the day, you need leadership support in order to invest in accessibility and that’s all a bunch of different things. It could be test automation. It could be basic.

[00:12:31] It could be something as fundamental as bodies dedicated to accessibility. You can’t do accessibility successfully if you have one person with 40% of their time is spent on accessibility. That’s going to be impossible to do. You need at least one person who’s doing this full time and someone who understands how to navigate around. Someone who is comfortable talking to an engineer, but as equally as comfortable talking to an executive. And those are different skill sets. I mean, I see all kinds of job descriptions because I share them through A11Y jobs, the Twitter account that I run. I’ve been doing that since 2012 and the last couple of years has seen such an increase in opportunities. But I look at some of the job descriptions and I shake my head because what I see are companies, many of whom are starting their journey on accessibility. And they’re looking for this superstar who can not only code and figure out what’s wrong with a JavaScript instance, who can also make a presentation to an executive.

[00:13:46] I think those are two totally different skills. I mean, you’re not going to find someone who has all of that. So I worry that in fact, despite everyone wanting to do the right thing, you’re almost setting people up for failure if you’re expecting them to have all this stuff. And don’t even get me started about recruiting and how recruiters are not trained on how to hire accessibility people. I just hear this, I hear stories from people who’ve asked me before and after they’ve done interviews, they’ve relayed stories to me. And so we still have a lot of work to do there as well.

[00:14:24] Sam Proulx: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s at Fable and what I do, it’s very interesting to me how you and I, I mean, my day job title is, is also Accessibility Evangelists kind of share that title, and are approaching it kind of from the two different sides of the same table and meeting somewhere in the middle. Because too often, I hear from individual designers and developers that “I want to build accessible products. And I wish my company was building accessible products, but the higher ups in the company have not bought in yet.” And so it kind of hurts, but sometimes I have to tell them, well, we’ve got to work on executive engagement because you can’t do this by yourself.

[00:14:58] Jennison Asuncion: Honestly, I’ll say this as diplomatically as I can, but sometimes when you do get pushback, you need someone upstairs to help with that conversation and to help those who are pushing back, understand the commitment and understand things.

[00:15:18] I’m definitely not one who lives off of titles or anything, but sometimes it does make a difference. You know, particularly if you have a VP or if you have someone at that level who is a champion of accessibility or who is a sponsor. I just don’t know any other way.

[00:15:34] I mean, grassroots is great, but then at the end of the day, if you only have grassroots, then you have more likelihood of accessibility becoming deprioritized, unfortunately.

[00:15:45] Sam Proulx: Yeah. And I mean, it’s supposed to be a sincere engagement, not just sort of checking the boxes. I mean, sometimes, the paranoid in me looks at some of these jobs and I think, are they being intentionally set up to fail? Does a company want to say, oh, we tried to do accessibility and we couldn’t so therefore we don’t have to do it anymore.

[00:16:02] Nikki Nolan: What are some tactics that you take to engage people that are higher up in the company? Are there things that you’ve seen work?

[00:16:09] Jennison Asuncion: Honestly, for me, call me ballsy or whatnot, but for me, ‘ll just reach out directly and engage in a conversation. Maybe part of it’s because I’ve been at LinkedIn as long as I have and I’ve known a number of folks who have risen through the ranks since I’ve been there.

[00:16:27] So from that perspective, that’s actually been interesting I have to say. Because, when I first came to LinkedIn, I probably spent the first couple of years just getting to know people and gaining the trust and also building the relationships. That’s so important to have those relationships. And those were with engineers and designers.

[00:16:46] Who you know, a few years later, are climbing up the ranks and before you know it, they’re senior managers, they’re engineering managers, they might be directors or whatever. But they are involved in conversations that I’m certainly not involved with, but then I can go to them and go, hey, what’s happening with accessibility here?

[00:17:06] And so for those of us who work in accessibility to be able to build that trust and those relationships. It’s one of those things that it’s not taught in accessibility 101 and the importance, not only of that, but also of negotiation and things like that. Because as much as we want to make everything accessible all the time, everyday, it’s unfortunate we’re not there yet.

[00:17:31] And so there’s always going to be some times where you’re going to have to negotiate or this thing, we’ll get it out in two weeks. You’re going to have to weigh the pros and cons of picking up at battle.

[00:17:47] Sam Proulx: And even more so in the industry now, and I wonder if you’ve noticed it in how you handle it. We are having to tell people things that they don’t necessarily want to hear or that they wish weren’t true. Like that a $50 subscription to something that you put on your website won’t solve all of your accessibility problems. Or that you’re not exempt from a certain compliance thing, even though, you know, like there’s so many various types of false information floating around as the industry grows.

[00:18:13] Jennison Asuncion: The other myth is, well, you know, here, we made this thing accessible and we’re done. It’s not a one and done thing. There’s also maintenance. And there’s what if, my biggest fear is always whenever I see messages about we’re unraveling our new design or a new thing. I’m like, oh gosh, like they invested so much in the previous design. I’m worried to see if my might’ve happened, like with this new thing or the new version, because they might not have necessarily thought about accessibility.

[00:18:42] Now there’s a lot more accessibility minded companies out there, but then we all know the statistics from the web team survey, what is it? 97% of websites out there still have like egregious accessibility errors.

[00:18:57] Sam Proulx: Yeah. It’s the trust that is so important, isn’t it?

[00:19:00] Jennison Asuncion: As if that’s all right. Yeah.

[00:19:02] Sam Proulx: Hey, as we approach the midpoint of this amazing episode, let’s take a quick break to hear from our sponsor.

[00:19:08] Ted: Hello. My name is Ted. I am a full-time screen reader and switch input or alternative navigation user.

[00:19:17] I am a member of Fable’s community of accessibility testers. If you’re listening to this podcast, you know just how important it is to integrate the voices of people with disabilities into every aspect of your accessibility journey.

[00:19:34] Fable can help you do that. From improving your accessibility training with Fable Up-skill, to working directly with assistive technology users, with Fable Engage, we can help you take the next step in your accessibility journey. For more information, visit our website at, www.makeitfable.com.

[00:19:57] Sam Proulx: Now that we’ve heard from our sponsor, let’s continue the interview.

[00:19:59] Nikki Nolan: So both of you are Canadian. Both of you work in between Canada and the United States. In terms of accessibility, what are sort of the differences that you’ve seen and similarities?

[00:20:08] Jennison Asuncion: We’ll start with the positive. The similarities, you know, there is a transporter care and wanting to make things accessible. So we’ll get that out of the way. I would say the biggest difference that I’ve seen is despite the AODA, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act and other legislation in Canada and all that stuff.

[00:20:29] It’s still rare for me to see and to be able to promote a job description for someone working on accessibility in Canada at a major company. It is so rare. And when I do, it’s typically the usual folks. So I come from banking. So I’ll say it’s the banking or Telco, like highly regulated places.

[00:20:50] Canada is known for its tech. It’s very innovative. We’ve got Waterloo. We’ve got Toronto, we’ve got Vancouver and Montreal, really big tech centers and yes, there are others, but those are the big ones that come to mind right away. But show me the jobs. Show me people who are working in finance and accessibility in these places.

[00:21:15] And show me where the hiring is? Where is it happening? Is it all happening in this dark underbelly of where people just find out about jobs? To me that is pretty telling of the difference between Canada and the US is the number of folks who are engaged full time at companies on accessibility in accessibility roles. It is changing slowly. I’m seeing a few more jobs, but certainly not as many as I would have expected, particularly with AODA and, and all the other talk that we hear in Canada about how much inclusion of people with disabilities matters.

[00:21:54] Well, if it matters so much, where is this all happening? Cause I’m not seeing it…

[00:21:59] Sam Proulx: Why, why is that? Do you think?

[00:22:02] Jennison Asuncion: I don’t know, man. The only thing I could think of is either it’s not on the radar enough or the people with disabilities, like Canadians with disabilities, you know, is it that stereotype that we’re too polite to do anything or to say anything?

[00:22:21] Sam Proulx: Yeah. I mean, I’ve heard theories that it’s because lawsuits in Canada are not as viable.

[00:22:25] Jennison Asuncion: Right. And they take forever. Right? If you file a Canadian human rights complaint, you could be doing that forever.

[00:22:31] Sam Proulx: Right, but in a lawsuit, right? Like when lose it doesn’t necessarily pay legal costs.

[00:22:37] Jennison Asuncion: Right.

[00:22:38] Sam Proulx: So, you know, that makes that less viable. But I mean, in my heart, I wonder if the litigious strong legal framework in the United States has gotten accessibility done, but it’s come with some side effects.

[00:22:49] Jennison Asuncion: Oh, there’s definitely unintended consequences, but, you know, without it there would have been nothing. But I look at like the AODA and to be honest, I’m too far away from it to know how everything’s working now, but I’m not sure how punitive the AODA is and whether it is easy enough for a Joe or Joanne in Sudbury to complain about the website not being accessible for a large company. And I’m not sure what the regulations are. I haven’t heard anything about someone filing an AODA claim or something. And like I said, for me, it’s not easy to see that. And then again, not to see that many jobs at all in accessibility, I think that’s telling me that corporate Canada doesn’t see this as a priority. That’s the only thing I can think of as to why that’s the case. They just don’t see it as a priority.

[00:23:46] Nikki Nolan: I’m going to transition into a new question, which I feel like is in the similar line, but maybe totally off in left field. What has been your biggest frustration in your career? And is it still happening?

[00:23:57] Jennison Asuncion: My biggest frustration in my career?

[00:24:00] Sam Proulx: I’m glad you’re not just saying Canada.

[00:24:04] Jennison Asuncion: I guess the biggest frustration is what I mentioned before. The fact that as much progress as we’ve made, we haven’t. We are still at 97% of all websites, still having accessibility issues. Even as many people we have getting involved in Global Accessibility Awareness Day and working in accessibility and even despite all the lawsuits and everything that’s gone on, we still have this depressing number.

[00:24:29] That’s still a frustration because why is it that we have not been able to make more progress? And I mean, I have ideas and I have thoughts around why. But it just seems like we make a little bit of progress every year. Now, all that said, it’s all important and impactful progress but it’s still not enough. And like, how do we go from 97% to maybe like 70% and then 50%? And like, how do we bring that number down? So I think that that to me is a frustration in my career.

[00:25:09] Sam Proulx: It’s telling us that 75% of websites inaccessible would be a win.

[00:25:12] Jennison Asuncion: Well, we gotta go down. Right? I’m not, I’m not going to be unrealistic and say we’re going to go from 97% to 0%.

[00:25:17] Sam Proulx: You can’t say you have some ideas and drop a teaser like that. Come on now.

Jennison Asuncion: We still need to create tools, author tools because let’s face it the balance of websites out there are all owned by or done by people who probably don’t know anything about web development and web design. They’re small mom and pop shops who are using website building tools or they just get the cheapest designer or developing agency that they can and say put something up. They’re not thinking about accessibility or anything like that, they just want to get their stuff out there.

[00:25:54] So we need to do a better job and better work in getting some of those web in a box tools and the mobile tools. That’s the other, that’s another frustration I have. We spend so much time talking about web accessibility. We’ve kind of moved on and we need to obviously care about web accessibility, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t see enough focus on mobile and mobile is such a big thing already. We’re years behind I think in terms of the amount of focus. But getting back to the first thing-

[00:26:28] We need more tools, more mainstream tools that have accessibility built in. We need to make it easy for the average Joe or Joanne to develop an accessible site. Right now there’s a limited number of themes. For example, if you use WordPress or any of those other things, the number of themes is low.

[00:26:47] So if you want to be creative or whatnot you are kind of left with only a certain number of themes to use. So we need to get better at that. So the authoring of tools. We need to come from a holistic perspective thinking about it from a broader strategic way, we need to be teaching students. There’s an organization called Teach Access, which I’m involved with.

[00:27:12] And we have a mission by 2030 to have 1 million college, university and bootcamp students be exposed to accessibility. Things like that are just so important because it also normalizes accessibility in the conversation. You know, if everyone graduates from school with some level of knowledge about accessibility, that also means they understand that there are actually people with disabilities out there and visible and non-visible disabilities.

[00:27:42] The full spectrum of things. So, those are some of the areas where I think accessibility could be interlaced in it and the stuff we’re planning with the GAAD foundation, we’re hoping will also help to that end as well.

[00:27:59] Sam Proulx: Yeah. I mean, awareness is so critical. It’s surprising to me as a screen reader user, how often to this day, despite screen readers having been around since 1978. I get the oh, blind people can use computers?

[00:28:11] Jennison Asuncion: Yeah.

[00:28:11] Sam Proulx: Yeah. It’s not just me. You get that too.

[00:28:15] Jennison Asuncion: Oh, yeah. And the fact that web accessibility guidelines have been around since 1998.

[00:28:20] People still go oh, there’s guidelines? So yeah. There’s a whole set of things. But I also worry, there’s all kinds of technology out there that I see today- I mean, there’s a lot of amazing work now being done at the grassroots level with mixed reality and AR, all of those things. VR, XR access is a great resource for people to check out on that front. But there’s stuff just as simple as this might sound trivial, but I love going to Vegas for the food, but it’s sad to say that I can no longer really use most slot machines in casinos because they’re all touch screens.

[00:29:01] Nikki Nolan: Really. Wow.

[00:29:03] Jennison Asuncion: And even if they have the handle, you still have to set up like how many coins you want in each pull. And those are all through the touchscreen.

[00:29:13] Nikki Nolan: Wow.

[00:29:16] Jennison Asuncion: We’re getting to this point and I know there’s a lot more touch screens everywhere in elevators.

[00:29:21] I just had an interesting experience at an unnamed hotel last weekend, where I checked out early because they had touch screens inside the elevator for the floor buttons to be pressed. I know the other elevators where you push something outside, those have accessibility features, but this type of thing, these had a telephone style keypad on the right-hand side. And I only found that by accident.

[00:29:46] So on the left and right there were touch screens. But then, the telephone keypad did not work consistently in each elevator. So I either had a choice between having to wait to figure out which elevator would work or calling the front desk and asking someone to give me a hand just to get to my floor.

[00:30:06] And in my years of travel, that was the first time that I’d been confronted by that level of inaccessibility. And all they had to do was check keypads once a month to see if they actually worked.

[00:30:22] Sam Proulx: I mean, I never forgot the elevator I rode in that was the touch screen, all the buttons were touch screen and they had put braille on the touch screen. I don’t quite know the thought process there.

[00:30:35] Jennison Asuncion: But did it work?

[00:30:35] Sam Proulx: Well, no, because every time we tried to read the braille, you’d be touching the touchscreen.

[00:30:39] Jennison Asuncion: Oh, okay.

[00:30:40] Nikki Nolan: God. That’s wild.

[00:30:42] You know something that’s interesting. So we interviewed Sherry as well, and she was noting that things used to be more accessible back in the day, technology actually used to be more accessible. And as we’re migrating into some of these digital interfaces it’s becoming more inaccessible and more unusable. And that’s something I want to ask because I’m super curious, what was your first piece of technology that you remember using and what did you use it for?

[00:31:10] Jennison Asuncion: The first piece of technology that I can vividly remember was using a computer without a screen reader. And basically having family members, my cousins, and my sister being my screen reader.

[00:31:22] This was way back in the day, but learning, creating games in basic and just having people to read the screen to me to tell me what was going on, or if I was getting errors. Because I think at the time I was just trying to play music, musical sounds and stuff, but I always had errors that would pop up since I didn’t have a screen reader. I would have to ask for help.

[00:31:45] Sam Proulx: Something about basic. Sherry mentioned it, I’ve mentioned it.

[00:31:48] Jennison Asuncion: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:49] Sam Proulx: I don’t know.

[00:31:50] Jennison Asuncion: Yeah. But then there’s fun stuff like a braille compass and like a braille watch, things like that I also remember. But I remember my first screen reader was on an Apple TC, and they’re the worst sounding, robotic screen reading voice. But, it opened up a world of stuff.

[00:32:12] Nikki Nolan: I think that people just don’t realize that when things are inaccessible, they really prevent people from just living independent lives.

[00:32:20] Jennison Asuncion: I’ll say that slot machine example, as trivial as that may sound, I mean, people go to Vegas to gamble. And so like why wouldn’t someone with a disability also want to gamble?

[00:32:32] Nikki Nolan: Yeah.

[00:32:32] Jennison Asuncion: It’s silly.

[00:32:33] Sam Proulx: Yeah. I don’t understand the design thinking behind it, a touch screen slot machine. I mean, the gears were half the fun.

[00:32:41] Jennison Asuncion: Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely.

[00:32:43] Nikki Nolan: It’s probably a data capture thing. I don’t know. I’m just going into deep, dirty thoughts of what would be the point.

[00:32:49] Jennison Asuncion: Yeah.

[00:32:50] Sam Proulx: Well, it’s not what it was in that they were all mechanical. And so it was very, very difficult for the casinos to control the exact payout rate.

[00:32:56] Nikki Nolan: Yeah.

[00:32:56] Sam Proulx: Now they can change it depending on the time of day and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:33:00] Jennison Asuncion: Yeah. No, it’s interesting. I’m surprised. No one is actually taking the casino on a litigious route for that.

[00:33:07] Sam Proulx: I’m also surprised nobody has just built an old school casino. There must be one somewhere, like just with all the old slot machines from like the forties and fifties.

[00:33:13] Jennison Asuncion: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:33:14] Sam Proulx: The kind like they have those for like arcades.

[00:33:16] Jennison Asuncion: Yeah, but then my pushback on that would be, some of the more bougie casinos, why couldn’t, why shouldn’t we be able to go and play in those ones as well?

[00:33:31] Sam Proulx: I don’t know. Maybe it’s my own biases, but it’s bringing me back to the thing I always say, which is that accessible things are better things for the user. In this case, an accessible slot machine is better because it’s more fun and the casino can’t control the parts too.

[00:33:45] Jennison Asuncion: Yeah. And why wouldn’t they want my money?

[00:33:49] Sam Proulx: Yep. Exactly.

[00:33:50] Nikki Nolan: That seems like a really good trend. Like I’ve heard, I’ve seen this all over Twitter. I’ve seen this all over the place, when you make things inaccessible, you’re losing out on a market. You’re losing out on money. I know a lot of the time, people try to argue that you should make things accessible as like a feel-good because you’re not excluding people, but also like you’re missing a major demographic of people that your product can no longer cannot serve, you can’t get their money. I know this is gross…

[00:34:18] Jennison Asuncion: But I mean, you make a great point. The hotel lost $280 last weekend, because I didn’t stay that extra night. Again, it might be a little thing, but there actually is another major hotel chain that I don’t stay at because I can’t even book on their website.

[00:34:43] Sam Proulx: Another thing we don’t talk about right? How many of our friends and family members are we taking along with us? Right? We don’t go to casinos and hotels alone.

[00:34:52] Jennison Asuncion: Yeah.

[00:34:52] Sam Proulx: And restaurants and all this stuff.

[00:34:54] Nikki Nolan: So we went into your biggest frustrations within your career, what do you feel like has been your biggest successes?

[00:35:00] I brought it up before, but I love talking about it. It’s the longer term investment that’s paying off in terms of the engineers and designers that I’m working with at Linkedin. Who, like I say, move on to bigger things. I’m not going to say they’re better, but they’re bigger maybe, to other companies and they still take their curiosity or their passion for accessibility that they might have only gotten at LinkedIn.

[00:35:25] And exposure to it and then they’re bringing it to other companies. And I think to me, that has been and continues to be something that I’m most proud of in my career. You know, because the other stuff is a given. There’s always great pleasure out of launching stuff that’s accessible and all of that stuff, but it’s these other intangibles. The out of the blue message that I’ll get like I said, from engineer X or designer Y who is now established at their company and they want to take forward accessibility, or they found out that accessibility is a thing at their company and they’re raising their hand and they just want to know, like some tips and tricks.

[00:36:06] Nikki Nolan: What are some myths around disability that you really would love to bust?

[00:36:10] Jennison Asuncion: There’s so many. Let’s see if we’re just talking about accessibility types of myths, that one of them is that only people who are blind use screen reading software. Which is a myth. There’s people with a variety of different cognitive and learning disabilities who also use different screen reading technology. So that’s one, one big myth. Let’s see, Sam, what’s one of your favorite myths?

[00:36:36] Sam Proulx: Oh boy, there are so many.

[00:36:40] Nikki Nolan: And it doesn’t have to be around accessibility. It could just be around disability as well. I want to make sure that it’s open enough to explore that possibility of the world too.

[00:36:49] Sam Proulx: I mean, one of the things about myths, do you ever get this feeling where they are so pervasive that it feels like you’re doing a whack-a-mole thing?

[00:36:57] We talk about it or we hear some major organization talk about it every year. And every year there’s a seen on person touches with someone’s face.

[00:37:05] Jennison Asuncion: Yes.

[00:37:06] Sam Proulx: And we talk about it. And we usually mention the specific program every year, but like next year, this one’s coming around again.

[00:37:12] Jennison Asuncion: Absolutely.

[00:37:13] Sam Proulx: What’s the strategy? How should we be busting these myths?

[00:37:19] Jennison Asuncion: Well, another one is that every blind person reads braille. There’s a myth.

[00:37:24] Sam Proulx: Oh, it shouldn’t be true. Well, no, let me say if possible it would be good.

[00:37:30] Jennison Asuncion: Oh, no, absolutely. I’m a big braille evangelist myself, but the reality is, unfortunately not everyone has been exposed to it. But you always get, like when I fly, sometimes a flight attendant will come by and go, oh, would you like the braille this and that? And I’ll usually take it just to take it because I think that it needs to be dusted off once in a while.

[00:37:53] So it’s never been pulled out of it it’s bin so let’s take it out. But I worry because not every blind person can read braille so it’s only going to be helpful to a certain segment.

[00:38:05] Sam Proulx: Reminds me of the waitress I got once who asked me if I wanted the embroidered menu.

[00:38:09] Jennison Asuncion: Hello.

[00:38:11] Sam Proulx: It’s a pretty good.

[00:38:13] Nikki Nolan: I’ve also heard similar things, like not everybody who is deaf, you know, does sign language.

[00:38:21] Jennison Asuncion: Another good one.

[00:38:22] Nikki Nolan: There’s so many things that people just assume and have been trained into us through ableist media or things like that.

[00:38:31] Jennison Asuncion: Well, yeah, one of my favorites, I fly fairly frequently. There’s a tongue twister and there’s this moment. And Sam, you’ve probably experienced this too, when you either walk off an airplane or get to the ticket counter. I asked for assistance because I’m not going to figure out how to get around an airport in the brief amount of time that I want to be there, but typically someone shows up with a wheelchair.

[00:38:56] Nikki Nolan: What?

[00:38:56] Jennison Asuncion: And there’s this uncomfortable 30 second conversation that happens, which is that I don’t use a wheelchair. And you hope 9 times out of 10 people will get it and they’ll be like, okay. And they’ll put the wheelchair on the side and you’ll go off on your merry way.

[00:39:11] But there’s that one time out of that 9 times out of 10, where it could become like this heated discussion and all kinds of stuff where they’re like, get in the wheelchair or you should use a wheelchair, or it will be easier in the wheelchair.

[00:39:27] Sam Proulx: What really bugs me is when there’s an enormous terminal and you have about four minutes to make your transfer.

[00:39:33] Jennison Asuncion: Yes.

[00:39:33] Sam Proulx: And you’ve got your suitcase and you’ve got your cane and you’ve got your this and you’ve got your that. And sometimes you just don’t have time to argue about the wheelchair and you just get in it

[00:39:40] Jennison Asuncion: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, people need to understand that a wheelchair is a personal piece of equipment that people who cannot, or who have trouble walking use. Sam and I can’t see. We can walk. I don’t know if that’s more of a myth or if that’s just more ignorance. So I went on a bit of a side thing.

[00:40:04] Nikki Nolan: No, it makes sense that people confuse a lot of the disabilities. And I have been working with a coach who is a person who’s blind. I know people have different ways that they even want to be identified.

[00:40:17] Jennison Asuncion: Yes.

[00:40:17] Nikki Nolan: I like to be identified with a disability first. So I’m a neuro-diverse person or neuro divergent person, but I know that everybody is different.

[00:40:27] Jennison Asuncion: Right.

[00:40:27] Nikki Nolan: So we have about a few minutes left, is there anything we didn’t cover that you would like to talk about?

[00:40:33] Jennison Asuncion: Absolutely real quick. I’d like to talk about the GAAD foundation, and if people want to learn more about it, you can go to https://gaad.foundation/. And essentially what this is, Joe and I kept hearing every year, we need to have some sort of like, there has to be something more sustaining after the actual day of GAAD and stuff like that.

[00:40:54] So we’d been thinking about starting up a foundation for a while. But we figured we’d wait for our 10th anniversary to do it. And so here we are, and our mission really is to disrupt the culture of the process of digital product design and technology design in general, in such a way that accessibility becomes a first class citizen, or it becomes an automatic book requirement. How we’re doing that, we have different programs that we’re going to be doing. We already have something called the GAAD pledge, which is an opportunity, typically it’s an open source coding project. So, React Native took the GAAD pledge in 2020, and this past year before we launched the foundation.

[00:41:39] But this past year the Ember JavaScript project took the GAAD pledge. It’s an opportunity. These open source libraries power a lot of technologies out there, React Native for mobile. And Ember JSS is web, but they power a lot of the websites out there.

[00:42:00] So we can get a lot of these open source frameworks to integrate accessibility into their widgets, but not only that, but to create documentation on how to use their widgets accessibly. We’re going to help move that 97% of the needles. So that’s one of the programs. Another program, which I’ll highlight here is something called the GAAD Speakers Fund.

[00:42:26] And that’s going to be something we’re going to launch. We’re not launching it today, but it’s going to be launched in the coming years. It’s going to be an opportunity to further the conversation between accessibility folks and mainstream, everyday tech folks. And insofar as if you’re an everyday engineer or designer and you get a speaking gig at an accessibility conference.

[00:42:55] In the days when we’ll be traveling back in person, not everyone can afford to do that. And so we’re going to be providing, essentially it’s almost like a scholarship for that to happen. Then also for accessibility folks, say that you get accepted at a large conference or event like a South by Southwest.

[00:43:14] It’s not cheap to go to those types of events, so we will make it possible financially for people to do that. And why we want to do that is because we want cross pollination. We want your everyday engineer or designer to be able to attend an accessibility specific event so that they can not only get exposed to the topic and have the conversation and give their talk at that event. Not only that, but they can also meet people, including people with disabilities and vice-versa. And you know, those of us who work in accessibility kind of live in our own little echo chamber sometimes. And we only present to and talk to our friends and people who we know we’ll be receptive to or who might know a little bit or care about accessibility. But what this fund will allow is for us to be able to present at events that might not be accessibility specific. But again, it’s about furthering the conversation, which is what GAAD is about. It’s about furthering that conversation.

[00:44:10] So, look forward to that in the next year and a half we’ll launch. If you want to, again https://gaad.foundation/ if you want to learn about all the kinds of stuff that we’re hoping to endeavor on.

[00:44:22] Sam Proulx: This has been a great conversation, so much covered in so much that we could cover if only we had another hour. But unfortunately we don’t. So speaking of continuing the conversation and furthering the conversation, if folks want to find you, and get in touch or follow your work and keep up with what you’re doing, where can they find you?

[00:44:40] Jennison Asuncion: They can find me on Twitter and I have an easy one @Jennison. So that’s J E N N I S O N. I also tweet jobs with A11Y jobs and A11Y events for accessibility related events. If you’re so inclined, you can also follow me on LinkedIn. You can just search for me under Jennison Asuncion, see the spelling in the podcast notes. Go.

[00:45:09] Thank you so much. This has been great.

[00:45:11] Nikki Nolan: Thank you so much.

[00:45:12] Sam Proulx: Thanks for listening to Disability Bandwidth. If you liked this episode of Disability Bandwidth, please subscribe and share it with friends and family. Today’s episode was hosted by Sam Proulx and Nikki Nolan. Edited and produced by Nikki Nolan. Transcripts are written by Emma Klauber. Theme music is created by Efe Akmen.

[00:45:30] Special thanks to everyone at Fable who without their support. This show would not be possible.

You can find out more about Disability Bandwidth on Twitter, @disability_band and Instagram, @disabilitybandwidth, or on our website https://disabilitybandwidth.com/.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download