Episode 2 of Disability Bandwidth features guest Sheri Byrne-Haber,  a prominent global subject matter expert in the fields of disability and accessibility. Nikki, Sam, and Sheri discuss her career path, how to push for accessible tool procurement in your workplace, and reflections on parenting, STEM, and more.

Currently the Senior Staff Architect of Accessibility for VMware, Sheri is best known for launching digital accessibility programs at multiple Fortune 200 companies, including McDonald’s, Albertsons, as well as consulting on government and education accessibility Sheri’s award-winning Medium blog summarizes legal cases and issues facing people implementing accessibility programs, with over 300,000 readers since its launch. 

References

Transcript

[00:00:00] (Music)

[00:00:05] Nikki Nolan: Welcome to season one of Disability Bandwidth.

[00:00:11] Sam Proulx: A show where we talk with disability leaders each week about career, life, and technology.

[00:00:17] I’m Sam Proulx.

[00:00:17] Nikki Nolan: And I’m Nikki Nolan

[00:00:19] Sam Proulx: Let’s get started.

[00:00:20] Nikki Nolan: Would you mind introducing yourself?

[00:00:22] Sheri Byrne-Haber: I am Sheri Byrne-Haber. My pronouns are she /her. All the Byrne-Habers on the planet are either me or people I’ve given birth to. I am a six-foot-tall, female wheelchair user, who also has hearing loss and glaucoma. And for a bonus, I’m also a type one diabetic. So I’ve got kind of this conglomerate of disconnected disabilities.

[00:00:42] Some of which are congenital. Some of which are genetic. And some of which I acquired over the years. I am a senior staff, which is, VMware engineering speak for a director-level position. My official title is Accessibility Architect. And pretty much I eat live, sleep, and breathe digital accessibility when I’m at work and physical accessibility for everything else.

[00:01:05] I’m also a Paralympic Archer. I’m hoping, as my score creeps up, that in three years I might have a shot at the Paralympics. So, that’s what I do when I’m not busy working with people on making their products more accessible.

[00:01:19] So my disabled noun is disabled. I am not a person with a disability. I am good with disabled.

[00:01:24] Nikki Nolan: Oh, I love that. Yeah, that’s something that’s really interesting. It’s like the people first versus the disability first, and I know there’s a wide range of conversation that’s happening in that space. I prefer disabled first as well.

[00:01:36] Sheri Byrne-Haber: I definitely subscribed to the identity first model of language, more so than the people first. I use people first in my writing, only because until you know that somebody uses that as part of their identity, you don’t want to use identity-first language in an article where you don’t know who your readers are.

[00:01:55] Sam Proulx: Yeah, absolutely. In my experience, nobody who uses identity-first language is upset by person-first language, whereas it happens the other way around. People who prefer person-first are upset by identity first. It gets compromised. That’s how compromise works.

[00:02:11] Sheri Byrne-Haber: They taught us in law school that in a compromise is nobody’s happy with the result, but everybody can live with it.

[00:02:17] Sam Proulx: Yeah, I mean law school, right? Cool.

[00:02:20] That’s not where a lot of the digital accessibility folks that I speak to come from, right. It’s UX design, it’s research. It’s programming.

[00:02:29] Sheri Byrne-Haber: There’s Lainey Feingold, Ken Nakata, Chris Law. There’s a handful, maybe a dozen.

[00:02:34] Sam Proulx: There are, but I mean, a lot of folks like Lainey Feingold are digital accessibility lawyers. Right? I mean, I think I would have heard if you practiced law or maybe I’m oblivious, you don’t, do you?

Sheri Byrne-Haber: No, I haven’t practiced law for a long time, but I definitely use what I learned in law school in my digital accessibility software practice multiple times a day, every day.

[00:02:57] Nikki Nolan: How does law relate to digital accessibility in your practice?

[00:03:01] Sheri Byrne-Haber: So the W3C guidelines are very much written in regulatory language. And that creates a couple of issues. First of all, two different people can interpret them differently. And they can both still be compliant. But if they’re either working in the same software program or if they’re working in different software programs, it’s going to make for a pretty jarring experience, consistency-wise for the individual with a disability who’s using it.

[00:03:29] So we will take the regulatory language and break it down into English. We’re like, okay, yes, we know W3C says a mechanism for pause, stop and hide at VMware. Here is what we mean by mechanism. And we laid down the size of the button and the color of the button and the alt text of the button and all the things that go with it.

[00:03:52] So that as you move from product to product, you’re still getting the same consistent experience across all the products and not have it be every which way. And we’ve just started on that journey. So it’s gonna be a while before that completely shows up in all of our products, but, I’m pretty excited. That’s taking a lot of my effort right now is coordinating work around those efforts.

[00:04:16] Nikki Nolan: Tell us a little bit about yourself from, where you started through where you are now.

[00:04:21] Sheri Byrne-Haber: So my family moved from Canada to California when I was eight.

[00:04:25] Sam Proulx: Why would you move from this nice, cool, cold country up here? I’m a Canadian.

[00:04:30] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Yeah, I know. I’m from down east, New Brunswick. Socialized medicine is great until you get one of those one in 50,000 things. And then all of a sudden it’s really hard to find specialists who know what to do with you. And so my family came to California because Children’s Hospital at Stanford, which was what it was called back then, was really the only place that they could go to get surgical treatment for my situation.

[00:04:57] So, I’ve had a mobility problem since I was born. I was entirely in a wheelchair for about four years from the time I was 12, until I was 16. Then I was good until my late twenties. Then I started using a cane and then have gradually drifted back into more and more wheelchair usage.

[00:05:17] Cause I’ve got side effects 40 years later from the surgery that I had when we moved out to California.

[00:05:24] I spend a lot of time at home. I was the original pandemic kid. Right? I didn’t leave my house for 18 months. And you know, it was before fiberglass casts. It was before the Americans with Disabilities Act.

[00:05:36] There was no elevator at my high school. I couldn’t go outside when it rained or the casts would melt in the rain and I would have to go back and get them redone. So my dad one day brought home a computer and dropped it on my lap and said, here, learn how to use this with, you know, a three inch thick manual. And that was kind of my introduction to computers. And, you know, Sheri secret fun fact, I was actually the first girl to get a Girl Scout badge in computer science. I actually designed the requirements for the badge. I designed the badge, the Boy Scouts wouldn’t take me. So I did that in the Girl Scouts instead. And then, I went to Cal, finished my degree in computer science. Did software testing for about 10 years. So that was testing and taking things apart and fixing things has always been the core theme, throughout my different career changes.

[00:06:27] And I got asked to do expert witness work in a case that involved whether software had been adequately tested. And the lawyers didn’t understand the software; the software people didn’t understand the law.

[00:06:39] I was getting a little bit bored in my software testing career, and I thought, oh, I should go to law school and I could do all this cool, you know, intellectual property stuff and patents and work in that area. And then in the final year of law school, my job fell through and then we discovered my daughter was losing her hearing.

[00:06:59] And so I actually got into accessibility because of her. Because I saw the pain through her worldview of being excluded from things and having issues at school and what have you. And I thought, there’s gotta be a better way than this. And, so I went into, I did litigate for a while, suing insurance companies who had fraudulently denied hearing treatment for children. Won, most of my cases, which was great. I was doing that through a nonprofit. And, then I won a really big class-action lawsuit against Blue Cross and all the insurance companies caved in.

[00:07:38] Nikki Nolan: Wow.

[00:07:38] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Kind of put myself out of business with that.

[00:07:40] And then I thought, okay, now what do I do? Right? And then I realized that was right when this was 12, 13 years ago. When digital accessibility was first starting to really get traction. And I thought that looks good because I can use my computer science degree. I can use my law degree. I can use my MBA, which I also got along the way. And I can use my personal lived experience as a person with a disability.

[00:08:06] Sam Proulx: Yeah, it’s super interesting to me that you sort of said you got into accessibility more from the experiences that your daughter was having than necessarily your own experiences.

[00:08:17] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Everybody sees the wheelchair and they just make assumptions. That must be why she’s inaccessibility and it isn’t.

[00:08:23] Sam Proulx: Right. And I think there’s almost a moral imperative if you’re a person with a disability trying to happily be an accountant. I mean, you should be willing to go over to the IT department and help out with accessibility whenever, right?

[00:08:34] Sheri Byrne-Haber: I actually have an article in my blog backlog about how people with disabilities can do stuff other than accessibility or DEI.

[00:08:42] Sam Proulx: Yeah. absolutely. I rarely talk to someone with a disability. When I say, why did you get into accessibility to say, oh, it’s because I have a disability. Right? That’s rarely the reason people give. Also, what else would you do if it wasn’t that, and it seems like you’ve done a ton of other things that led you to accessibility. Accessibility wasn’t in any way where your career started. Talking about your origin story for those of us who have computer nostalgia, what was that first computer? Do you remember?

[00:09:11] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Yeah, of course it was a PET Commodore 2001 with a Chiclet keyboard. I had the bonus 32K of Ram.

[00:09:20] Sam Proulx: The finger-breaking keyboard. Yeah.

[00:09:23] Sheri Byrne-Haber: And the cassette tape to record the programs on. Yes.

[00:09:28] I took my kids to the computer history museum about 10 years ago. And in the modern room, the sixties to the nineties, I could point to half of the computers in the room and say, I used that one.

[00:09:41] And I used that one. And that, that, that VAX, I use that Kaypro, that Osborne, you know, I used to type term papers on that. So yeah, growing up in Silicon Valley turned out to be a real advantage from that perspective, because I got a very deep exposure to tech exactly at the right time.

[00:10:01] And, had a father who had two daughters. But somebody was going to be the fourth generation engineer in the family and it ended up being me.

[00:10:12] Sam Proulx: There you go, sometimes in the accessibility discussions, when we talk about the old computers and we talk about DOS and we talk about basic, there’s a kind of nostalgia, like things were more accessible back then. What do you think about that? Were things more accessible back then or have the APIs (Application Programming Interface) and the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and the standards are things more accessible now?

[00:10:34] Sheri Byrne-Haber: No things were definitely more accessible then, to be honest with you, I think. You know, there’s nothing more accessible than a command-line interface. Stephen Hawking could use a CLI (command line interface), right? Through his eye-gaze keyboard. Now we’ve got all these, these fancy GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces), and we’ve removed the command line interface, and API (Application Programing Interface) approach frequently from the users, even if they, you know, had the tech skills to use it.

[00:10:59] I mean, how many people with dyslexia do you know have custom CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) pages? They all could benefit from it. But probably only 1% of them actually use it. So I think we’ve overcomplicated things and as is normal for human beings, that ethics have not kept up with the technological improvements.

[00:11:19] Nikki Nolan: That’s so fascinating. I love product design. So everything I’m designing is like these GUI sorts of interfaces. And I’m fascinated by the fact that that statement you just made that we’ve gone backwards, that in trying to make things more democratized, so more people can use it, we’ve actually made things less accessible.

[00:11:39] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Yeah. I actually believe that.

[00:11:41] Nikki Nolan: Wow.

[00:11:42] Sam Proulx: I mean, surely you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t say the solution is going back to the command line.

[00:11:45] Sheri Byrne-Haber: No, the solution is not going back to the command line. The solution is taking, you know, what we do today and making it more accessible. And opening it up to assistive technology that didn’t exist 30 years ago. Like switches and like screen readers. You know, I don’t remember when the first screen reader came out, but certainly, the PET Commodore 2001 did not have one.

[00:12:07] Sam Proulx: It was the Apple II and the C64 both did.

[00:12:11] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Okay. So a little bit later, maybe.

[00:12:14] Sam Proulx: Not much. I remember the Apple II fondly. Adventures whiling away the time that I should have been studying.

[00:12:22] Sheri Byrne-Haber: I used to play, oh God, what was Night of Diamonds on the, on an Apple II?

[00:12:28] Sam Proulx: Yeah. And all the good old Infocom games, which you know, have more accessible discriminator users because they were all text, but not everyone’s interested or able to do all that reading. Rogue was the text game that I used to play on the VAX.

[00:12:43] Nikki Nolan: That’s amazing. Let’s roll into our next question, which is you have a really, really wonderful and strong voice. What sort of informed your public voice around disability?

[00:12:54] Sheri Byrne-Haber: That’s a good question. I mean, part of it is just, I’ve always been a no-nonsense, very direct, this is fixable, why the hell isn’t anybody fixing it? That I’ve been very lucky as has my daughter, that we were in an environment where even though we both had disabilities, we had everything that we needed.

[00:13:16] I fought for my daughter’s health care. I fought for my daughter’s special education plan. My parents fought for me. Back when there was no idea and there were no IEP (Individualized Education Plan) to make sure that I didn’t get shunted off into the special needs school, that I was mainstreamed, even though it was the early seventies. And I just feel like everybody should have those opportunities.

[00:13:38] I shouldn’t have those opportunities just because I’m lucky that I had educated parents who spoke English and I grew up in Silicon Valley. Everybody should have the same opportunities. So that’s kind of why I went into the litigation area to try to get children the same opportunities, in getting their hearing or getting their interpretation needs taken care of so that they could have equal access at school. And to me, disability rights and accessibility are civil rights and a lot of people need to be reminded of that, unfortunately.

[00:14:13] Sam Proulx: I mean, the thing you hear in the disability space, as a and maybe even, especially as a person with a disability, I know I’ve heard it. You’ve probably heard it right? Is the well you attract more flies with honey and you shouldn’t be confrontational and…

[00:14:28] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Oh, I’m way past being nice about this.

[00:14:31] Sam Proulx: But like there must have been a time or a strategic decision that you made and you said no. Like, did that come out of your law career or intentional decision you made and how do you respond to that criticism? Because it comes up a lot for all of us. I know it does.

[00:14:48] Sheri Byrne-Haber: If you know, ableism, right? How do you define ableism? Okay. So I’m going to take a slightly different approach to your question here. I define ableism as any statement that if you take out the disability and substitute a person of color, instead, if that statement is racist, then the statement as applied to a person of a disability, with a disability is ablest. Because sometimes people don’t know what ableism is. I mean, I think if you ask most people what’s racism, they know, but they don’t know what’s ableism, and so that’s the test that I urge people to do to determine whether or not something is acceptable. And if it wouldn’t be acceptable to apply that to a person of color. You know, I’m going to write this software program, but people from Mexico won’t be able to use it. All right. That’s not cool. That will get you fired. So why is it okay to say I’m going to write this software that blind people can’t use? That’s equally not acceptable.

[00:15:49] Sam Proulx: But it’s fine if we can give them their own separate interface right now? Sorry.

[00:15:54] Nikki Nolan: Oh, man. I’m not touching that.

[00:15:57] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Yeah. Listeners, he’s being sarcastic.

[00:16:00] Sam Proulx: Very, yes.

[00:16:01] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Separate, but equal is always separate and never equal. And search for my last name and the word Scandinavian Airlines if you need any convincing that an independent interface is not an acceptable way to go. Google my name and overlay. If you believe that overlays are an acceptable way to go or go to overlayfactsheet.com. And lots of people who are way more famous inaccessibility than I am will tell you the same thing about how overlays are the worst thing in the world.

[00:16:31] And they are.

[00:16:32] Nikki Nolan: Yeah.

[00:16:34] Sam Proulx: And I think the great thing about that discussion is that we as accessibility professionals don’t have to say too much because the users have spoken. Right there, there are so many letters from users that you can point to. And there are sort of so many experiences that people are having in the real world that you can point to and that you can center.

[00:16:53] Nikki Nolan: I want to call out that I’m not an accessibility specialist. I wouldn’t consider myself an accessibility specialist. I’m trying more to go towards inclusion and not so much accessibility.

[00:17:03] I really struggle with this. because I do feel as a person with a disability being pushed into accessibility or inclusion. And I have to educate a lot of people that designing for inclusion is different from designing for accessibility. And for me, it’s like making sure that people with disabilities have a seat at the table and are included in the decision-making. There are plenty of companies I’ve worked for that have accessibility teams and nobody has a disability on them.

[00:17:28] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Yeah. So the most recent WebAIM survey said 30% of accessibility professionals who answered their survey had a disability. And while I don’t think having a disability is mandatory, I think you need to build your teams in such a way that you are diverse. That you’re representing both intellectual processing types of issues, hearing loss, low vision, blind. We try to pair the blind team members with me when I go to meetings to make sure that it’s not all, you know, this happens so often and I’m sure Sam you’ll agree with me, but it’s all screen reader, screen reader, screen reader.

[00:18:07] And it’s like, no, but you know what? There are all us, low vision people, too. And we don’t use screen readers necessarily. Some low vision people do, most don’t. so trying to get adequate representation. And if you’ve got a really small team and you can’t do that, knowing where you can go to ask for advice, on those areas where they can’t be represented on your team is pretty critical.

[00:18:30] Sam Proulx: Absolutely. And we also lose the diversity in that when you build a team full of screen reader specialists, I, as someone who cannot see a screen the way that I may want to do something not always necessarily the best way, because I just don’t have all the data.

[00:18:50] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Right. So, I know how to use six different screen readers, but I don’t use any of them the same way Sam does. Right? So having native users of assistive technology is critically important on accessibility teams and end-user research as well.

[00:19:07] Sam Proulx: I wonder going back to that discussion of accessibility versus an inclusive design. I wonder if sometimes the accessibility team becomes another kind of separation, right? You have the designers and then you have the accessibility people off to the side.

[00:19:27] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Right. So there are different levels of accessibility maturity within organizations and I’m actually the head of the maturity modeling subcommittee on the W3C. And so we’ve been looking at putting out a maturity model that can be used either with, you know, WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.X or, also, that would work for silver, WCAG 3.0.

[00:19:48] Nikki Nolan: Okay.

[00:19:48] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Web content accessibility guidelines, which is a little bit of a misnomer because it’s not just for web content. It’s also for mobile. It’s also for documents. but that’s what it’s called for now.

[00:20:01] So, you know, level one is we don’t do anything. Level two is, we do stuff, but it’s here and there and we don’t really have a centralized team. Level three is what Sam is referring to. We have a centralized team, you know, we have policies, but the group is still really centralized, right?

[00:20:22] It’s a model where the people who need the help go to the team and then the most mature companies, everybody is educated on accessibility. And so the accessibility team actually is less important. Now, in order to get to that most mature level, you need to have people talking about accessibility when the accessibility team isn’t in the room. So, how do you do that? Well, that means you have to hire more employees with disabilities because if everybody in the room is non-disabled, it’s tough to have those conversations about the importance of accessibility. While hiring people with disabilities, you need to do the right recruiting.

[00:21:00] You need to train people in unconscious bias. You need to make sure that your onboarding process is accessible. You need to make sure that your retention programs all take disabled individuals into account. you need to make sure that you procure accessible products.

[00:21:15] Nothing pisses off an employee with a disability, more than being handed a stack full of products to use that they can’t use.

[00:21:23] Right? So what’s the first thing you do on day one, you have to put in an accommodations request. Nobody likes doing that. So to get to that final level, accessibility has to be immersed into everything. down to where the napkins are in the cafeteria, that was literally the first request I made on day one was I couldn’t reach the napkins because they had it, you know, on a stand that was four feet off the ground.

[00:21:51] That makes you feel like you don’t belong. And when you feel like you don’t belong, you’re less likely to stay. So then that ends up being a retention issue. So things as small as napkin placement can still be important in sending the message we actually care about our disabled employees.

[00:22:06] Sam Proulx: And a lot of organizations get caught in a vicious circle. And, I wonder what your opinion is on how you break the vicious circle of none of our tools are accessible, so we can’t hire people with disabilities. But we don’t employ anyone with a disability, so there’s no pressure to make our tools accessible.

[00:22:24] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Yeah, So we have taken the approach of passing a VMware and internal accessibility policy, which took effect April 1st. Not a great day for a policy to take effect, but that’s when it took effect. Then we highlighted the top 40 vendors that we work with at VMware, where literally everybody at VMware has to use those products. And the ones that were not accessible, we started having conversations with. The conversations have gotten quite serious and it’s like, we will help you become accessible, but if you are not accessible, we may consider not renewing the contract.

[00:23:04] And we’re using our procurement leverage to influence companies to make their products more accessible. And it’s not like go spend $2,000 and hand me a JAWS script. It’s no, make it accessible so it benefits everybody. It’s not just for us. It’s not a VMware thing. Anybody who buys those products is going to get a more accessible product.

[00:23:27] Nikki Nolan: Can you tell us a little bit about that? Like if somebody was listening and their company doesn’t procure accessible products, like what are some things that people can do or push their HR, push their procurement to use that leverage of their company not renewing the contract?

[00:23:44] Sheri Byrne-Haber: So we have taught our procurement team how to read the VPAT – voluntary product accessibility templates. For those of you who are not immersed in the acronyms. So that when they’re taking bids, they’re not actually comparing based on price and features anymore. They’re comparing price features and accessibility.

[00:24:07] And then if they want to sign a contract with somebody who’s not yet accessible, then they reach out to me and I start a conversation with the company and say, hey, look, these are the things you’re going to have to do to make your product accessible, to go from more of just a small stage pilot phase into this goes everywhere in our company.

[00:24:28] And I was really lucky that our chief information officer Jason Conyard, who has publicly identified as both color blind and dyslexic, has been the sponsor of the plan, the policy, at VMware. And so that’s made it much, much easier to get people to take it seriously when you get C-suite support on something like that.

[00:24:48] Nikki Nolan: That’s amazing.

[00:24:49] Sam Proulx: So one thing that I always wonder when I look at the VPATs before using a demo of a product or getting a look at a demo or anything, how useful in kind of actual reality, do you and your team find the VPATs to be in figuring out whether a product is going to be accessible?

[00:25:07] Sheri Byrne-Haber: So it depends how thorough the VPAT is. I’ve seen VPATS where only 5% of the code got covered in the testing. What we usually do is we ask for international VPATs and then we jump straight to the functional needs section. So the functional needs section is much easier for people without accessibility backgrounds to digest, than the individual WCAG requirements.

[00:25:33] Yes we tell them, okay, check for the captions, check for keyboard access, check for status updates. Those are like the three we look at first usually. But then we also jumped to this functional needs section and say, okay, you know, can it be used by somebody with limited vision?

[00:25:49] Can it be used by somebody with limited or no hearing? Can it be used by somebody with limited or no hand dexterity? And that is kind of what we focus on to determine, how accessible a product is, when we’re assessing it, at the company that, you know, it’s somebody else’s product that’s outside. Was just going to say with WCAG 3.0 there is a discussion about boiling it down to a score. And so then you would be able to just look at the cover page of the VPAT and go, oh, look, they’ve got a 4.2. They’ve got a 2.7. Guess what? I know what products are more accessible. The problem is that doesn’t really tell you, can somebody without hearing use this product.

[00:26:31] Okay. It only tells you that. Yeah, they miss some stuff, but they’ve got a better score.

[00:26:36] Nikki Nolan: Let’s move to the next question, which is, what do you feel your biggest success has been?

[00:26:40] Sheri Byrne-Haber: I would say my biggest success as an individual. I was just talking to somebody about this a couple of days ago. I said my biggest success wasn’t my deaf daughter getting a PhD. My biggest success was about six years before that, when she came to me and told me how she self advocated when she was getting repeatedly subjected to crappy captions. And that made me cry. I was so excited that I raised a child with a disability who feels comfortable rocking the boat, standing up and making a fuss, not just for herself, but for others as well. So I would say that, personally, was my biggest success. From a business perspective, You know, I’m really excited that the VMware design system is accessible.

[00:27:28] You know, there’s probably about a thousand plus or minus, open-source design systems out there, but only about 20 of them are accessible enough that they can be easily implemented in an accessible manner. And I believe we’ve had something like 4 million downloads of our design system. So there’s a lot of people using it, hopefully in an accessible manner, to implement their own sites.

[00:27:52] Nikki Nolan: That’s amazing.

[00:27:54] Sam Proulx: Absolutely. Both of those successes. My father is also completely blind. So, the challenges of being a parent with a disability and a child with a disability, they certainly keep life interesting and keep you on your toes.

[00:28:08] Sheri Byrne-Haber: I wrote about that just a couple of days ago, because I was like, when you have the same disability as your child it’s easier, but then you can get into a kind of a guilt spiral. And sometimes when it’s a different disability, it’s still hard because you have to deal with your own accessibility needs and then, deal with your child’s needs.

[00:28:29]It makes it a little bit more complicated when they’re different though, because you don’t have the same lived experience that your child does.

[00:28:34] Sam Proulx: Yeah, absolutely. There are certainly advantages and disadvantages, both ways. But congratulations on very obviously doing a great job and, you know, we need more advocates in the world.

[00:28:45] Before we get to our next question, let’s take a quick break to talk about our sponsor.

[00:28:48] Shane: Hi, I’m Shane the Platform Coordinator at Fable.

[00:28:51] I’m a full-time screen magnification user. And before becoming the platform coordinator, I started out as a member of our community of accessibility testers.

[00:29:01] Now I help support Fable’s customers as they work with us to best engage people with disabilities in every part of their research, testing and development.

[00:29:11] If you’re listening to this podcast, you probably know just how important it is to integrate the voices of people with disabilities into every aspect of your accessibility journey.

[00:29:23] Fable can help you do that.

[00:29:24] From improving your team’s accessibility training with Fable up-skill to working directly with assistive technology users with fable engagement. We can help you take the next step on your accessibility journey. To learn more, check out our website www.makeitfable.com.

[00:29:41] Sam Proulx: Now that we’ve heard from our sponsor, let’s continue the interview.

[00:29:43] Nikki Nolan: What do you feel is your biggest frustration in your career and is it still happening?

[00:29:48] Sheri Byrne-Haber: I would say my biggest frustration is when I started in computer science, which was in the late seventies and early eighties, you know, it was kind of a 10 to 1 ratio between men and women in most of my classes. Then we got more female participation and now we’re dropping off again. So I think my biggest frustration is that we’re not seeing as many women in computer science programs, as we used to. And we’re seeing women drop out of computer science as a career. They will finish the program but then change, to something completely outside of technology. And, I would say it’s not related to disability.

[00:30:27] I don’t know if that’s the answer you wanted or not, but that’s actually my biggest frustration.

[00:30:32] Sam Proulx: Yeah, I mean, to say it’s not related to disability is perhaps selling it short a little bit because, if we can’t get and hold gender diversity, how on earth are we going to hold other types of diversity? Right?

[00:30:45] I often think about accessibility and inclusion as a kind of a circle.

[00:30:50] It starts in the middle and it’s really small and it expands step-by-step, which is kind of unfortunate. I wish everyone was included in everything all the time. But the expansion has to happen. I’m curious if you had to guess like the number of women in computer science did go up for a while.

[00:31:08] Sheri Byrne-Haber: It went up for a while, but then it dropped.

[00:31:10] Sam Proulx: It dropped again. What would you guess are the causes of that drop? It’s like a regression, right? Which is very frustrating.

[00:31:15] Sheri Byrne-Haber: You know, there is a penalty for being a mother. I’m not saying that pertains to my company. I think it doesn’t there, but there is that thing in general, where if you take off several years and then come back, there’s the assumption that, oh, well you’ve been gone for years, so you don’t know anything about this, you know, brand new technology that’s just come out.

[00:31:36] So that, you know, there’s just stagnation of the level that people are at. They have trouble getting back into the workforce when they’ve left it and find it easier to move into areas, where the underlying subject matter doesn’t change so quickly.

[00:31:51] Sam Proulx: I mean, maybe there’s also some ageism at play there.

[00:31:54] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Yeah, probably I wouldn’t be surprised.

[00:31:57] Nikki Nolan: You know, something interesting. My master’s degree is in interactive media and it was very code heavy and the language they taught us was action script three. And then that language got completely destroyed by Apple. It was at that moment I decided not to be a developer too, because I also was like, I need to go into something where the ground isn’t constantly changing from underneath me.

[00:32:21] And so now I’m a designer, but my first jobs, my first two or three jobs were as a developer. Then I transitioned into design because, because the floor, once I get the design principles, yes, the world changes, the software changes, things don’t necessarily completely die underneath me.

[00:32:42] Sam Proulx: Part of it, it’s just super interesting when you have a conversation and you see it and you notice the callbacks, you know, we were talking about the command line and remember how easy it was when your computer had basic built-in and you were programming things for a command-line anyway. have we made programming too inaccessible?

[00:32:57] Sheri Byrne-Haber: The programming tools that I see today are really, really color heavy. and so that makes me wonder, you know, where it’s like, it’ll highlight certain types of calls and certain colors. and there’s nothing besides the color that tells people what that is. So, you know, anything that is an authoring system, I think it’s too complicated. Because then both the authoring system has to be accessible and the code that it outputs has to be accessible. And there are very few companies that do both well.

[00:33:32] Nikki Nolan: What sort of authorings?

[00:33:33] Sheri Byrne-Haber: An authoring system would be like a WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get, where maybe you drag a button from a panel and drop it in the picture. And then you click a button that says generate HTML and the code comes out.

[00:33:50] Nikki Nolan: Interesting. Okay.

[00:33:51] Sam Proulx: We’re also just a long way from opening a thing and writing a program. Now you’ve got to download the ID and you’ve got to download the libraries and you’ve got to download the other thing. And then you’ve got to start the template.

[00:34:01] Sheri Byrne-Haber: You have to download the SDKs (Software Development Kit) and you have to look at the open API (Application Programming Interface) documentation. Yeah. It’s a lot more convoluted than just opening up VI (Speakers note: VI is a word processing system which is actually pronounced “six” according to the author) and cranking out hello world.

[00:34:14] Nikki Nolan: Oh my God. Oh my God. You’re taking me back all of a sudden I’m getting all of these flashbacks of when I first started and how much it shifted, like throughout like the three or four years that I did it. I remember what really broke me was like trying to make an Android app and like, just like being like, oh my God, I have to download so much stuff.

[00:34:36] And this is like back in 2009, 2010. And I was like, oh my God.

[00:34:44] Sam Proulx: It’s 16 gigs of memory to compile it.

[00:34:47] Nikki Nolan: Yeah.

[00:34:48] Sam Proulx: About Android. That’s everything. I mean, you know, I remember the days of my little hello world script, I was trying an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) the other day to see how accessible it was and compiled my little, hello world program into a two-megabyte executable, which was bigger than the floppies I used own.

[00:35:04] Sheri Byrne-Haber: I’m just doing the math in my head about how much more that is than the 32K of Ram I had on my Commodore 2001. 60,000 times the size? If I didn’t misplace a zero.

[00:35:19] Sam Proulx: Well, I mean a few zeros among friends, it doesn’t matter. We all have 64 now anyway right? But I think this is an important digression because accessibility is not only more than just screen readers and more than just, you know, screen magnification and people with physical challenges and cognitive challenges.

[00:35:39] Accessibility is about access. It’s about everyone. It’s about disenfranchised folks. It’s about all folks. And when you make something that’s more screen accessible, you make it better for them too.

[00:35:50] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Yeah people with disabilities are so much more likely to be in lower socioeconomic groups. They’re more likely to have bad internet access, you know, all of these things, for lack of a better term in the healthcare industry, we call it co-morbid.

[00:36:05] I hate that term, but it just means that they’re, that they’re all tightly associated together.

[00:36:10] Sam Proulx: Yeah. Not saying anything about cause and effect. It just is.

[00:36:14] Nikki Nolan: What are the downstream impacts of not making things accessible?

[00:36:17] Sheri Byrne-Haber: So this is actually the book that I’m working on right now,

[00:36:21] Which is we will never be sustainable as a society until we deal with our disability discrimination and inclusion issues. You look at the United Nations sustainable development goals, I think there are 17 of them. Nine of them either directly or indirectly are related to disability.

[00:36:42] You can’t exclude 20% of the population and have any hope of the population improving down the road, you just can’t do that. And we’re getting more people with disabilities, not less. I mean, as our healthcare is improving people who used to die now survive with disabilities, just like, you know, veterans with traumatic brain injuries.

[00:37:06] Sheri Byrne-Haber: The reason you look at the World War II statistics for that versus the Iraq War statistics. And there were like 10 times more people with brain injuries. Why? Because they didn’t die. We improved the neurological surgery techniques and the emergency field treatment. but we haven’t dealt with, well, what happens once you save the person’s life?

[00:37:26] Nikki Nolan: Wow. Yeah.

[00:37:27] Sam: We’re living longer of course.

[00:37:29] Sheri Byrne-Haber: We are. And even in-vitro fertilization for a while ended up resulting in more children being born with disabilities because of more multiple births. So that’s been an issue.

[00:37:40] Sam Proulx: Yeah. I mean, there are always waves of different types of disability. Right? But that doesn’t mean that that one particular type of disability is going to go away. A couple of generations before mine, there were a lot of completely blind people, who were just premature babies who were given

[00:37:58] Sheri Byrne-Haber: From the oxygen.

[00:37:59] Sam Proulx: Yeah. Like Stevie Wonder.

[00:38:03] I mean, it doesn’t happen anymore. And yet disability is still with us. Right? I think there’s this unfortunate idea in people’s minds that someday there will be no disability.

[00:38:15] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Well, there will always be accidents. And as much as I hate to say it, there will always be wars. But we’re actually seeing, and I wrote another article on this, the number of people who are having children with down syndrome has dropped substantially. The number of children born with cystic fibrosis in Canada is down by 75%.

[00:38:35] And it’s because people are using genetic information to terminate their pregnancies. So, you know, that’s a personal choice, but that’s a situation where you can trace a potential future disability to a single gene and make a decision not to have that child. And so that’s also something that we’re starting to see.

[00:38:57] Nikki Nolan: Hmm. That’s so interesting. And thinking that a person with a disability doesn’t have a right to live, in my mind, devaluing a person with a disability, it’s an interesting slippery slope in a lot of different directions.

[00:39:09] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Yeah, I’m seriously concerned about what’s going on in Alaska and Idaho right now, because they’ve implemented official rationing. We’re in an emergency rationing situation of healthcare. How are they going to decide who gets the ventilators? At the beginning of the pandemic, they actually had to go to court in Alabama because Alabama came out with some guidelines that said you can use disability when you’re determining rationing.

[00:39:37] And I’m like, who gives somebody the right to determine what my quality of life is?

[00:39:43] Nikki Nolan: Yeah.

[00:39:44] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Yeah, I’ve got hearing aids. Yeah. I’ve got glaucoma. Yeah. I’ve got a wheelchair. My quality of life is still pretty damn good. And nobody should be using those to say, no, you’re not entitled to a ventilator.

[00:39:57] Sam Proulx: I mean, it’s one of the problems of socialized healthcare, that we won’t get into that, that political.

[00:40:03] Nikki Nolan: We’ll come back to that. When we have a series, we’re going to do this seasonally. So this first season is about technology and disability, we will have a season about, society and disability or culture and disability, or like that sort of space. So another time we’ll, we’ll get more into that aspect.

[00:40:22] Sam Proulx: Absolutely. Absolutely because these are discussions that are extremely difficult and the more difficult that discussion is, I think the more it matters.

[00:40:31] Nikki Nolan: Yeah, so coming really close to the end. And so I would love to know what advice you have for a person with a disability starting out their career.

[00:40:41] Sheri Byrne-Haber: So, first of all, you don’t have to be in DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) or accessibility. I mean, if a person with a disability is starting a career and wants to be an accountant or wants to be a program manager, they should totally go for that. I think the important thing is to understand what you need to make yourself, the best you that you can be, right?

[00:41:04] Do you need 15-minute breaks between meetings? Do you need, Grammarly? So that you don’t have to think about typos and verb tenses and things like that in your emails. Just figure out what makes you better. And then, you know, make sure that you ask for those things so that you are the best person that you can be. You’re considered equal when it’s time to decide who gets promoted.

[00:41:32] I think if you have a disability and you want to go into accessibility, it’s a great place to be because it’s the one place where having a disability is an advantage. That’s probably not true and in most of the other areas that you can work in. The same thing, you still need to know what it is that makes you the best you, but it’s not somewhere where everybody is where somebody’s gonna look at you strangely and wonder why you’re there.

[00:42:00] That doesn’t happen so much. There’s a lot of free stuff out there. I always tell people who are on a limited budget to start with the trusted tester program, because it’s a commitment of time, but it’s absolutely 100% free. So you can develop your accessibility street cred, without having to spend a bunch of money on a Bootcamp or, you know, training programs.

[00:42:24] You can really get the expertise you need, for free. And then start by working with nonprofits. You know, find a nonprofit in your area and say, Hey, I’d like to help you make your website more accessible to people with disabilities. Are you interested?

[00:42:38] Sam Proulx: That is wonderful. You taught me some things. That’s great. Although careful with that last one, that’s a con and sometimes in some cases, if you’re a non-profit too small, be a great way to become the webmaster for the nonprofit. I’ve been there a couple of times.

[00:42:52] Sheri Byrne-Haber: That’s true. It depends.

[00:42:54] Sam Proulx: If that’s what you want to do.

[00:42:56] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Yeah. Another good way to develop your accessibility portfolio is the Knobility AIR, rally, the accessibility internet rally. They actually pair teams of people with non-profits and then they work on making. So it’s nonprofits who have indicated a desire to make things more accessible, paired up with teams of people who help them make it more accessible.

[00:43:16] And then you can put that into your portfolio and you can say, hey, look, I know I don’t have a lot of paid experience, but I worked on this. I think having a portfolio is always really important.

[00:43:27] Sam Proulx: One question that I get from every single person with a disability that I talked to-

[00:43:36] Sheri Byrne-Haber: I think, I know what this is.

[00:43:37] Sam Proulx: I’m going into this, how and when to disclose? I’d love to hear your opinion on that because everyone’s opinion is different.

[00:43:44] And I think they all have value and do what’s right for you. But it’s worth hearing other people’s opinions and trains of thought on it.

[00:43:52] Sheri Byrne-Haber: So my thought is it depends on whether you have a visible disability or an invisible disability. If you have a visible disability, you know, I roll into my interviews in a wheelchair. You need to get upfront about it. So, this is what I do. You know, this is how it impacts me. This is how I work around it, so that you get it off the table.

[00:44:14] And it’s not a consideration for any of the discussion going forward. That the person has forgotten that you’re in a wheelchair by the end of the conversation. I think if you’ve got an invisible disability, you need to think about it from the perspective of, is it gonna make me potentially worse in my interview?

[00:44:30] So if you have anxiety, for example, if it shows up in your interview, it could be a problem. Or if you have Tourette’s and it shows up in your interview. So if you think it’s going to impact your interview, I would err on the side of disclosing. because otherwise you’re being compared to somebody else who doesn’t have a disability and that might actually hurt your chances.

[00:44:53] If you still, if you don’t fall into either of those groups, look at the company and its reputation with respect to disability. Look you know, do your homework, look at the people you’re interviewing with. Look at what they’re posting. See if they’re ever posting anything on disability inclusion.

[00:45:10] For example, if you’re interviewing with Apple, really having a disability isn’t an issue at Apple. If you’re interviewing with a small startup and maybe the startup doesn’t have a good reputation with respect to making things accessible, then you might consider not disclosing because it might work against you.

[00:45:27] Nikki Nolan: Yeah. But do you even want to work for those companies that you can’t show up as yourself?, Everybody’s situation is different and sometimes we have to take jobs that are not ideal because of where we are or what we’d need, but it is hard. The company I work for is the first company that I’ve disclosed. It’s important to feel you can disclose and still feel safe. Psychological safety is super important.

[00:45:49] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Well, disclosing during the interview process and disclosing afterwards is a little bit different. I would also say somebody’s always got to go first. I’ve never had a problem being that somebody. So I went first with the Girl Scouts, getting the computer science badge. I was the first woman in a wheelchair at VMware that I’m aware of.

[00:46:09] At least I was only the second wheelchair user on campus. You know, if you want to change the world and some of us do, sometimes going somewhere where you’re not represented is the right place for you to be, because then you can change that world.

[00:46:27] Nikki Nolan: Well, we’ve come to the end. Is there anything that you want to promote?

[00:46:31] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Sure. So, I wrote a bit of, what’s referred to as a manifesto on accessibility called Giving a Damn About Accessibility, and you can download that for free accessibility.uxdesign.cc

[00:46:47] Nikki Nolan: And what’s amazing about it is there’s an audio version, which is really helpful for people like me who are dyslexic.

[00:46:53] Thank you.

[00:46:54] Sheri Byrne-Haber: And Dax Castro. Who’s the premier genius on PDF files helped, make sure that the PDF file was completely accessible.

[00:47:02] Sam Proulx: Yes, absolutely. It’s a great book. So I’ll second that one.

[00:47:06] Sheri Byrne-Haber: Well, thank you, Sam. That means a lot to me coming from you.

[00:47:08] Sam Proulx: Thanks.

[00:47:09] Nikki Nolan: Thank you so much for being here. It was a pleasure getting to know you a little bit better.

[00:47:14] Sheri Byrne-Haber: I appreciate the invitation and you know, as I said, somebody always has to go first and this is your first podcast. So, I didn’t have any qualms about going first.

[00:47:24] Nikki Nolan: 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. Feed music is created by Efe Akmen.

[00:47:40] 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/.

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