During our engaging conversation, we had the privilege of speaking with Joe Devon, a co-founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). Our discussion centered around Joe’s perspective on the convergence of AI and accessibility, recognizing its potential to enhance inclusivity while acknowledging the inherent risks involved. We also delved into the origins of GAAD, exploring Joe’s invaluable insights gleaned from the initiative, as well as his ongoing endeavors. Furthermore, he emphasized the importance of expanding the definition of accessibility to foster inclusivity beyond the disabled community, as it brings benefits to a broader range of individuals.

References:

• Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)
• CSUN Assistive Technology Conference
• Stevie Wonder performs at Apple for Accessibility Awareness Day
• Joe Devon’s Blog post that started GAAD

 

Transcript

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

[00:00:12] Nikki Nolan: A show where we talk with experts in disability about their journey, life, and inspiration.

[00:00:17] Sam Proulx: I’m Sam Proulx.

[00:00:18] Nikki Nolan: And I’m Nikki Nolan.

[00:00:20] Sam Proulx: Let’s get started.

[00:00:21] Nikki Nolan: Do you mind introducing yourself?

[00:00:22] Joe Devon: Sure. My name is Joe Devon. I’m white, 55 years old, and I’m wearing a gray and black sweater on top of a white and blue polo shirt. And my hair is gray, betraying my age. And I’m in my office so there’s some white doors behind me.

[00:00:43] Nikki Nolan: Awesome. And do you mind telling us what your role is?

[00:00:47] Joe Devon: Sure. So I’m head of accessibility for TheoremOne, and we are an innovation and engineering firm, and I’m also the chair of the GAAD Foundation, which since it is GAAD now, you know exactly what that is.

[00:01:01] Sam Proulx: Absolutely happy GAAD. Do you, do you often call it GD or do you always say Global Accessibility Awareness Day for those who may not know it. It’s G-A-A-D, Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Are you happy that it’s become one of those acronyms where people say GAD or would you prefer that people spell it out?

[00:01:23] Joe Devon: Oh God, no. I like that it’s like that.

[00:01:25] Sam Proulx: There are so many GAAD puns you can make.

[00:01:29] Joe Devon: Yeah. When you’re explaining it to new people and you have to keep repeating the whole thing, you want to go Global Accessibility Awareness Day, but GAAD for short. Or you know how lawyers put it in between parentheses when they’re doing an acronym and that means henceforth known as, I wish I could do that in speech.

[00:01:53] Sam Proulx: Yeah, absolutely. It’s also great that when you’re dictating to Siri or any of the software, it will sometimes hear GAAD as God.

[00:02:02] Nikki Nolan: That happened to you because you copied over the things.

[00:02:04] Sam Proulx: Yes, I did.

[00:02:06] Nikki Nolan: And it rechanged all the questions to like, what were the key moments that led you to God? Like go finding God.

[00:02:13] So to bring us back a little bit, we always love to know sort of what lights a fire in you? What gets you out of bed in the morning?

[00:02:21] Joe Devon: I say innovation and lately I’ve been excited about AI, artificial intelligence, and a lot of people have been bugging me about like, well, why are you talking about this so much instead of accessibility? And I think people don’t realize, at least in my mind, innovation and AI included and accessibility are all one package.

[00:02:43] So many of the research reports that are coming out are related to accessibility. So much of the really cool, interesting stuff that’s been done is related to accessibility. The Karpathy who headed up Tesla. One of the big things he did, I think, was image recognition and I think speech recognition.

[00:03:04] I don’t remember, but I was looking at this the other day and I was like, wow, he did some really big seminal work there. And what is Tesla, if not visual recognition? And then turning that into meaning. It really is super connected and I’m just amazed at what percentage of these research papers are touching our field.

[00:03:25] So I love it and I think it’s gonna also create assistive technology for us, because there’s something new coming out every day and now there are tools that make it so much easier and very cheap to take a podcast and create a transcript out of it. You can do it from the command line within like three minutes.

[00:03:42] Sam Proulx: Yeah, absolutely. And some things that I think maybe you would agree with this, that people, I think, define assistive technology too narrowly sometimes, right? Like for me as someone who is a completely blind screen reader user, these new search engines, there’s a few of them out now that you can just type in a question and get the answer.

[00:04:02] Simple things are such a time saver for me. Right? If it’s just some statistical question about the ratio of men to women in a given field. Or whether this kind of elephant is an endangered species. I’m just trying to think through all of the random questions that I can now ask as a screen reader user where before the answer wouldn’t have been worth it to me to go to some website and figure out the layout and scroll through the headings and find the thing.

[00:04:32] It’s just so much faster. And I know, Nikki, you’re finding some of these writing tools really helpful as well.

[00:04:38] Nikki Nolan: Yeah, being dyslexic, Sam and I actually talked about this in our first episode, just like ChatGPT really helps me overcome some of my dyslexics hurdles. Where I’m able to write something out and then have it mirrored back, and then I’m able to rewrite it and then run it through Grammarly or something like that. These AIs, I always have seen myself as someone who really struggles to write, and I know that’s like an internal thing for me, but ChatGPT is giving me so much. The AIs are giving me much more confidence to be able to actually express what I mean, which is really nice.

[00:05:14] Sam Proulx: Yeah, so Joe, as someone else who’s involved in innovation and engineering and in thinking about these things and reading this research, I think there are so many great wins to be had integrating this technology into assistive technology. Thinking of this technology as assistive technology, getting into the hands of more people with disabilities.

[00:05:34] But is there anything that worries you about AI in assistive technology or AI as assistive technology going forward? And what do you think are some of the things we need to avoid or some of the hurdles we need to overcome that worry you or that you think about?

[00:05:48] Joe Devon: Wow, I’m not especially as worried about assistive technology as I am for everybody. The other day, I thought of a way, and I’m not, you’re gonna hate this, I’m not gonna share what- I came up with a way of putting together, what’s out there today that is just so dystopian.

[00:06:12] And I’m sure I’m not the only one that thought of it and it just freaked me out, completely freaked me out and it’s coming in a bad way. There’s gonna be a lot of bad things as a result of AI. And in the 90s when the web came out, we were so hopeful. This was the great equalizer, the small businesses would be able to exist and proliferate.

[00:06:35] And then it turned out that we wound up with even bigger concentration of power and so much power removed from the individual. And as exciting as a technologist, as exciting as AI is, it’s gonna cause a lot of harm. I just don’t know that it’s necessarily going to be focused on our community.

[00:06:56] I think it’s just gonna be on everyone and it’s gonna be about concentrating the power. I personally, I don’t care if, you know, if there’s large companies and they do really well. I’m happy for Sergey and Larry. Wherever they are, for whatever they’ve achieved.

[00:07:14] But when it’s turned against the individual, that’s the problem. And the monopolies, it feels like the large businesses have taken every piece of margin out of every single business and not serve the consumer well. And that’s gonna get a lot worse.

[00:07:33] Sam Proulx: So what do you think? How do we strike the balance? How do we get the wins that can come from AI into the hands of people with disabilities? While limiting the harm that AI conducted to society, how do we set that balance? One example that I think about often is that they are getting better and better at image description and will still not describe any image that they detect as containing adult material.

[00:08:04] Right? And they’re valid and legitimate harm reduction reasons to not let AI write and describe adult material. And yet there are accessibility reasons for it to do that. And have you thought about how we strike this balance? Where do we sit?

[00:08:21] Joe Devon: I love that you brought that up. I’ve spoken about that. You know, I think I have a pretty clean image, because I just try to do good stuff, but when it comes to this, I’m sorry. It just pisses me off. Like, you should not be using a tool that’s creating captions and you can’t say, can I curse on this podcast?

[00:08:42] Sam Proulx: Go for it.

[00:08:43] Joe Devon: Yeah. Yeah, if you say shit, like the caption should say shit. It shouldn’t say s-*-*-*, I mean, you know, come on. I mean, I can understand. I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of the people coding it. And I understand from their perspective that you wanna have a very high confidence because if somebody said sit and they wrote shit, then they’re gonna look pretty bad.

[00:09:07] So you do have to respect that. But maybe you could hike up the confidence level a bit and say, well, it has to be above this amount, but we’re gonna be faithful to the actual word. Why can’t people with disabilities access adult content? You know who should govern that.

[00:09:27] Sam Proulx: I mean, maybe some of it is about getting AI models in a place where they can be run and hosted locally, and I, as a person with a disability, can turn the knobs, right?

[00:09:37] Joe Devon: Yes.

[00:09:38] Nikki Nolan: Mm-hmm. Sam, you were talking about how you have had your own sort of, like AI, to help you describe things and you run it locally, and I think that’s really very interesting.

[00:09:50] Sam Proulx: Yeah, I run a bunch of AI stuff locally, largely because, well first of all, a former crypto minor since 2012, so you get left with extra GPUs, right? But, secondly, just because I have that privilege and the technical knowledge to install some Jupyter Notebooks and get Python up and running and TensorFlow and play with these things. That said, we’ve gone down a bit of a rabbit hole, but I think it’s an interesting rabbit hole and an important rabbit hole.

[00:10:17] However, it is GAAD, Global Accessibility Awareness Day. We’ve talked a little bit about it. I know you probably get asked this question a hundred times and you’re probably sick of answering it. But for folks who are maybe less familiar with Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Could you give a little quick, short intro to it and I think more interestingly and more importantly, what were the key moments that led you to co-founding, Global Accessibility Awareness Day, or GAAD?

[00:10:46] Joe Devon: I don’t mind being asked that question again. Because maybe one day I’ll have the perfect answer. I’ll just get better and better at it. Sorry, stupid joke. The real thing, I’d say the preamble to it, that first let me understand that accessibility even exists was a blog post by Mark Pilgrim.

[00:11:09] He had a blog called Dive Into Mark. That was really fantastic though I heard there was some controversy about his accessibility posts, but still that’s what introduced me to it. Then I saw a screen reader demo by Victor Tsaran. Who was working at Yahoo at the time, and he showed with a screen reader how he would look at the homepage of Yahoo.

[00:11:29] And again, it’s that innovative thing. As a technologist, I was blown away by this, but also in the back of my mind I was like, wait, I’m usually on the bleeding edge of tech. And if I never heard of a screen reader, the average web developer hasn’t either. And it kind of percolated in my mind until one day my dad, who was in his mid-eighties and just, my dad was amazing.

[00:11:51] He spoke 10 languages. 11. If you include, Aramaic, and he just commanded respect when he’d walk in a room and he couldn’t bank because the bank was inaccessible. He had gotten phished. The bank sent him an email. He couldn’t read the email because the colors were off.

[00:12:15] And I just felt, you know, it’s funny, I actually thought the right thing legally. I was like, this is a human right, a civil right. If you can’t bank independently now, you’re not independent anymore and my dad should be allowed to bank. So I wrote a blog post proposing that we create a Global Accessibility Awareness Day and the rest is history.

[00:12:38] Nikki Nolan: How did you meet up with Jenison? I’m really curious, since you are both co-founders of this.

[00:12:44] Joe Devon: Yeah, so I wrote the blog post on mysqltalk.com, which had gotten maybe 10 viewers ever, and I wasn’t even smart enough to tweet it out, but WordPress did it automatically and he saw the tweet. He comes on to the blog and you can see the whole history right on the page to this day where he’s like, hey, this is a great idea.

[00:13:06] Let’s make it happen. And then he got me on a Skype call and then he said, hey, I’m gonna be at the CSUN Disability Conference, which is not far from you. Why don’t you come out and meet me there? And he was already a legend. I was in Starbucks and he called in line there in the hotel.

[00:13:25] And he calls me up and I say, hi, Jenison. And then people in the line there were like, oh, you know Jenison.

[00:13:31] Sam Proulx: Yeah, it’s that feeling. Everyone knows Jenison, some people are the connectors, aren’t they?

[00:13:36] Joe Devon: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:13:38] Nikki Nolan: Jenison is Kevin Bacon.

[00:13:40] Joe Devon: Yes.

[00:13:41] Nikki Nolan: So I would really love to know what outcomes have you experienced in creating GAAD over the last 12 years?

[00:13:47] Joe Devon: When we started and I got to learn about the community, everybody was depressed. They were like, we’ve been doing this for decades, and nothing’s ever gonna change. Nothing changes, and the enthusiasm is completely different. Today, people actually believe that change is going to happen, that things are gonna get better.

[00:14:14] Are they all there? I mean, it felt like 10 years of it getting better and better and better. I’d say that this year has been a little bit more challenging because there were a lot of layoffs and a lot of layoffs in the accessibility community. But the growth had been really, really big until then, and I believe we’re gonna come back from that.

[00:14:32] So I’d say that’s in terms of outcome. There are lots of, I mean, more than I can even begin to say in terms of events that happened that were cool. So one of them is Sir Tim Burners Lee co-keynoting with Jenison. I thought that was pretty awesome since he invented the worldwide web. Then we’ve got Stevie Wonder giving a concert on the Apple campus, that was amazing.

[00:14:55] Mike Shebanek, who’s really the force behind voiceover in this industry. And, I hit him up and I said, hey, I have this idea for a GAAD pledge to make open source projects accessible. And he instantly said, all right, Facebook, as Facebook, we’re gonna take the pledge to make React Native accessible.

[00:15:17] We’re gonna commit, make a commitment. And then I’d say the last but not least, and there’s plenty more, was the Xbox Adaptive Controller was released, on the day of GAAD, and they later turned that into an amazing Super Bowl commercial. So that was a great one.

[00:15:33] Nikki Nolan: And now a really quick break to hear from our sponsor.

[00:15:37] Sam: Hello, my name’s Sam. I’m a full-time magnification user and a member of Fable’s community of accessibility testers. If you’re listening to this podcast, you already know just how important it is to integrate the voices of people with disabilities into every aspect of your product development journey.

[00:15:54] Fable can help you do that from improving your team’s accessibility training with Fable Upskill, to working directly with assistive technology users with Fable. If we can help you take the next step in building amazing websites and apps that are accessible and easy to use for everyone to learn more, check out what we do at www.makeitfable.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

[00:16:19] Nikki Nolan: And we’re back. Let’s get into this.

[00:16:21] How do you feel the community has evolved and did you discover it or did you create one? Tell me about that journey.

[00:16:28] Joe Devon: You know, when you go viral, I think it can be hard sometimes to pinpoint why. And obviously Jennison had a lot to do with it. Without Jennison, this would never have gone the way it did. I think he had the ear of the community. And I think the other side of it is that I was a web developer. I think the community thought that web developers, cause it was much more web then, than mobile.

[00:16:54] The web developers didn’t care. I think that was really the impression. And here you have a web developer proposing this, and it was really realizing that we were ignorant and didn’t have malice, we just didn’t understand it. And the community saw that, and I think that that’s what really helped.

[00:17:15] That combination of me and Jennison kind of helped tap into a vein. To me, virality is not about what you create, it’s about tapping into a vein of what’s going on in the culture. And that’s all that really happened. And the community is the reason for GAAD. Without the community, there is no GAAD. And I always just say it’s like that, it’s a bullet train and Jenison and I are just trying to hold onto the train.

[00:17:42] That’s it. You know, we’re trying to drive it to some degree in the sense that a lot of folks like to take the popularity of it and put in their own pet cause behind it and say, you know, GAAD would be great if only you did my idea. So we do have to make sure to kind of steer that direction on digital accessibility.

[00:18:05] But other than that, it’s really the community. It’s the grassroots.

[00:18:08] Sam Proulx: How do you do that? Because GAAD has been very successful and very popular and very large and now it has a foundation and it’s been going on for over a decade now. And I think we’ve all seen, without naming names, we can probably come up with examples of days and of things that maybe weren’t what they used to be or that maybe have been co-opted into becoming something else.

[00:18:35] So how do you think about steering something and keeping it going in the right direction without being restrictive or controlling and leaving global accessibility open for everyone who wants to participate?

[00:18:51] Joe Devon: I learned a lot. I’ll be very honest. Jennison understood this. He understood what it had to be all the way. He had a very, he was very opinionated on it, and I really have been following his lead. And it taught me how important it is to understand what your vision is and stick to it, and don’t let anybody pull you aside.

[00:19:15] And there’s a lot of people that want to do that and you have to really stick to your guns. So I have to give that credit all the way to Jenison. I would’ve made a lot of mistakes, frankly.

[00:19:28] Nikki Nolan: Well, I feel like we do learn from our mistakes and it has been very interesting. You know, you start with an idea and it evolves and grows. So now you have this foundation. Was there anything like sort of along this journey that really surprised you?

[00:19:42] Joe Devon: The whole thing, the way I try to just distill it, like what happened here and it’s really, if you combine a vision with the community, you can do anything but you have to have the vision and you have to tap into the vein of the community. And then it’s just incredible. And there’s lots of problems that we’ve got in society today.

[00:20:09] If we define the vision correctly and tap into that community, I feel like we can solve a lot of these things. Just to give you an example, I keep wanting to sort of do something about this, maybe write a book or something, but we were talking earlier about how the web was supposed to be something that worked well for the small business and we lost it down the road.

[00:20:33] I think that somebody can come out and say, hey, why don’t we start to do grassroots and bring back small business. We’re never gonna do that on the federal level. We’re not even gonna do it on the state level. But on a local level, if we as a community come in and say, we’re gonna run for local office, we’re gonna push laws to allow for just, let’s say, pick a street.

[00:20:57] This street is gonna be for small businesses only, right? And you get a lot of people, you make this viral, popular, you write a book or something like that and the whole community goes behind it. You can start to see that grassroots and then eventually it can turn into a lot more. But you’ve gotta start that on the local level and you gotta get the people behind it.

[00:21:18] So that’s an example of a vision where I always thought, you know what? That, that could be something, you know, as a follow up to GAAD. But, I’m sharing that because it doesn’t matter. That’s my idea. Every one of us has lots of ideas and vision, and this is a formula. Take whatever you care about that you think is important to the world and bring it to the community because maybe you’ll create the next GAAD and it’ll be on some other topic.

[00:21:46] And, I hate to say this cause I used to make fun of the developers that said, I want to change the world. And then they’ll join a company that just, you know, stamps out the small business. Right? But you can change the world if you get that vision right and tap into the community.

[00:22:03] Sam Proulx: So I think that’s valuable to dive into a little bit more and it kind of dovetails next into kind of one of the next questions. Because there is this pushback, right? Against whether it’s the developer or anyone who comes in and says, I want to change everything. I wanna build a big thing and we’re gonna change the world.

[00:22:25] And there is kind of that feeling, oh yeah, sure, right? But global accessibility, we’re gonna stay in a real way. And so for people who want to change the world, for people who do want to do this, what advice would you have for them if they maybe haven’t started the thing yet and it’s still in the ideation stage?

[00:22:48] What would be the advice you’d give to these people who are passionate about how they should take their passion from a great idea to a thing that will actually be effective in doing the thing that they want to do?

[00:23:00] Joe Devon: Ego. Ego makes a huge difference because if you’re coming in with this and you feel like it’s yours as opposed to creating something for the community, you’re never gonna succeed if you come out and you say, I’m gonna change the world. Like there’s a lot of ego in that. Whereas instead you’re just saying, hey, here’s an idea, and then maybe do some work.

[00:23:23] It wasn’t the blog post that 10 people read that turned into GAAD. Jennison just knew the community. We did a lot of outreach to inform people about the day, and it was really necessary in the first year. We did it in the second year and after that we were just trying to keep up.

[00:23:44] So there was a lot of work, but it was also presented to serve and I always feel very funny and shy when people are thanking me for GAAD for example, because it’s the community that did it at the end of the day. I don’t know how to explain it, but it just doesn’t feel right to me.

[00:24:06] I feel very awkward when people thank me for it. I don’t know how to explain it, but you have to approach it with humility, or it’s just not gonna work because people know when it’s fake, you know?

[00:24:21] Sam Proulx: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you don’t identify as a person with a disability, correct?

[00:24:27] Joe Devon: Correct, though my, you know, I’m 55, so I have clouds in front of my eyes that are like waves. So when I’m turning my face, I have to let the clouds kind of go by. It’s really hard to see. The color contrast is really difficult for me. Need to up the font size and then the hearing is just not what it was in my twenties, especially in a crowded restaurant.

[00:24:54] So I, you know, I won’t say I have a disability, but, I think that we should, we should change the way we define disability. Because-

[00:25:05] Or let’s put it differently. Accessibility impacts lots of people that don’t fit the definition of having a disability. Right? So there might be a reason to define disability the way the WHO has done.

[00:25:22] But for accessibility, we need to go wider than that.

[00:25:26] Sam Proulx: And there’s also something important to say about how people with disabilities are ultimately all people, at some time in their lives, whether in the past or the future.

[00:25:35] Nikki Nolan: No, no. We’re people all the time, Sam.

[00:25:38] Sam Proulx: Yes, all people…

[00:25:40] No, what I’m getting at is that all people will experience disability.

[00:25:44] Nikki Nolan: Potentially in the past or, oh, that makes more sense. I thought you were saying disabled people are sometimes…

[00:25:49] Sam Proulx: I mean, personally, I am not a person yet. No, I’m kidding.

[00:25:53] Nikki Nolan: It happens.

We had Christopher Patnoe last season. And I feel, you two got into it, we talked about it on the episode about a disagreement in the numbers in like data and stuff like that.

[00:26:07] That was really interesting. Have you come to some resolution since last year, sort of in conversation online?

[00:26:14] Joe Devon: I don’t know that we wound up super disagreeing. I think, you know, I was going with a larger number than a return on disability came up with. And he felt that the numbers that the WHO did were more real. And he said, we’re doing a disservice if we aren’t exact with the numbers.

[00:26:33] If it isn’t real and we’re trying to sell something by going with bigger numbers, we’re doing a disservice to everyone. And I agree with that. Where I think we need to look at it differently is just defining accessibility differently than disability and I’m doing some work on this actually.

[00:26:56] And I don’t want to talk about it until it’s done.

[00:27:00] Nikki Nolan: People can look out for it.

[00:27:02] Joe Devon: Yeah, absolutely. But hopefully we’ll be able to separate it out a little better soon. I’m glad you asked this question because it brings up another point. I’ve noticed that we get less engagement from the deaf community, in terms of GAAD and it took me a while to understand why.

[00:27:25] But, I do have friends that I’ve made as a result of GAAD who have participated. But I’ve noticed that in the deaf community there isn’t a discussion of disability. It’s much more about differently abled. And it also took me a while to understand why this was, and what my friends would keep saying is the hearing community always wants us to come to them. They don’t want to come to us and understand us. And what it really is there, there are benefits with deafness. If you’re signing and you don’t have a verbal language, it’s completely different. You have a visual language, and when you’re signing, it’s much quicker across the room.

[00:28:08] You don’t have the cross chatter and your brain develops differently. And maybe what it is, is that people don’t want to give that up. You know, there was a whole development. Your brain has maybe room for more things, because there isn’t that hearing element. I don’t know if it’s that, let’s say, the blind community and the deaf community, I don’t know if they diverge for a cultural reason or if they diverged because, it’s just a different kind of, I don’t even wanna say disability, but a different kind of sense.

[00:28:41] I’m not trying to say this as an answer. I’m more asking the question and I’d love to hear other people come in and educate me.

[00:28:51] Sam Proulx: I mean, there’s also a different kind of communication, right? Blind people, I think you could probably notice this having probably met a number of different blind folks over the course of your life, Joe, Nikki, I certainly can. Blind people have very specific ways of communicating at some times, and the way that blind folks communicate is how do I say this?

[00:29:15] It’s like, you don’t need to, it’s not like a different language. It’s not like signing, right? Like it still fits within so-called able-bodied society, whereas the way that deaf folks communicate doesn’t, I think, fit into, quote unquote fit into that as, as easily, right? You need interpretation or you need to learn sign language.

[00:29:36] And B, there is something to be said for any culture that has its own language, right? Look at, for example, here in Canada, if you look at all of the laws and things that we have in place to protect the French language here in Canada, because folks realize that if French people lose their language, they will lose their culture.

[00:29:57] And so it seems to me from the deaf folks that I know, and from the signing folks that I know, a very different kind of culture that comes with having their own language. And we see that not just in the disability community. We see that not just in the deaf, hard of hearing community. We see that in any community that develops its own language, those are at least my thoughts on the matter.

[00:30:18] Nikki Nolan: Interesting. When you were talking about how, you’ve seen people in the deaf community say that like people don’t go to, you know, the bridge isn’t created there. I also feel that I’m neurodiverse or neuro spicy as I’ve been calling myself lately, even though Sam is like, I dunno about that.

[00:30:41] I feel like we get excluded a lot from a lot of things because I communicate differently. I’m also dyslexic and like all these different things, I feel very, like, it’s harder for me to like to come into the community because I don’t know how I like, have different methods of communication that I feel like aren’t in alignment with mainstream.

[00:31:03] Like I didn’t learn to read until 11th grade and nobody noticed. Nobody noticed because I was memorizing the words visually. It was just very fascinating to me. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I do think that each community has variations and I do think we do a disservice not figuring out how to work together,

[00:31:24] That’s sort of why Sam and I created Disability Bandwidth. We have very different disabilities. We wanted to talk about the broad bandwidth, throwing that word out there, of people, who have all these different lived experiences and really learn and like I’m open to learning.

[00:31:45] We’re all open to learning.

[00:31:46] Sam Proulx: We also get the privilege as people who are blind, that very few other folks get, other than perhaps folks who are using stuff like Dragon and voice access technology or in digital accessibility for blind folks. Does it work with a screen reader? Does it not work with a screen reader?

[00:32:03] Is it easier for people to get their hands around and to test? Now of course, automated testing doesn’t solve the problems. It doesn’t account for the experience, but there is a way in which it’s easy to rationalize, oh, we can just run automated unit tests in our dev cycle and everything will be perfect and fine.

[00:32:21] Whereas like, what would be the automated test to make sure that something is accessible to someone with autism? Right? Like what would, I don’t know, Joe, you’re a developer. What’s the unit test? Right?

[00:32:32] Nikki Nolan: No, no. We’ve had this conversation. You and I, Sam, in like, you know, there’s a lot of assistive technology testing things just like Fable who is our sponsor, but there’s not a lot of neurodiverse because we are all so different. I mean, every single disabled person is their own unique experience and you can’t generalize that.

[00:32:52] But how do you test for the wide range of dyslexia, the wide range and the spectrum of autism? How do you make principles and test things?

[00:33:04] Joe Devon: I think-

[00:33:05] Nikki Nolan: Scalable, sorry, sorry.

[00:33:06] Joe Devon: No. No. I think AI might, I mean, I hope that AI is gonna provide the answer for that, to individualize it and to solve for it. But I also wanted to comment, Sam, that was great, what you were describing in terms of the culture. That’s such a good point. I totally missed that.

[00:33:23] And thank you. I’ve learned a lot just from hearing that. But I want to point out two other things. So one is if you are in the deaf community and you’re viewing yourself as differently abled, and then you have the WHO defining you as disabled, you’ll be kind of offended. Right? And I think that that’s a problem with the statistics as well, because it’s like, well, you’re not meeting me where I am.

[00:33:50] This is your definition. I don’t know what the answer to that is. I just wanted to point that out since we’re talking about statistics. But then I have a question for you because I have some blind friends who tell me that they would not take it if they would be able to get an operation tomorrow and get the eyesight back.

[00:34:12] No, they wouldn’t take it. And the reason for it is also about the brain, the neuroplasticity that okay, now I’ve got different senses that I use, and I don’t wanna lose that. My brain has just evolved differently and I wonder if there’s some piece of it as just identity and some piece of it is not wanting to lose the brain power that is different.

[00:34:40] Sam Proulx: Some piece of it, some bits of better identity. Some bits of it are just like, I mean, I’m in my mid thirties, I’m not interested in going back to kindergarten tomorrow and learning to point at something blue, right? It’s just not, it would feel like a lot of learning and then like, oh, well my sight was restored, so I’m not disabled anymore, so I’m not gonna get any more support.

[00:35:02] Because I haven’t been doing this for 35 years. But I think it’s also cultural in that we have built a world that I think prioritizes vision above hearing in a great many ways. So, for example, if you are someone who is blind, you can’t drive a car. You probably can’t follow a lot of TV shows unless they have audio descriptions.

[00:35:30] You can’t make eye contact with folks. You can’t do all of these things. Whereas if you are deaf or hard of hearing, you could still drive, you could still travel easily. All you need for the TV is like captions maybe, but like if you’re watching a picture without captions, it’s probably easier to follow sometimes than.

[00:35:50] Like listening to something where there’s no dialogue, right? We have a society that prioritizes vision in a way that if you can’t see society in some ways has disabled you more or perhaps differently than society has disabled folks who cannot hear. And so I think that’s a lot too where the differences in nomenclature come, right?

[00:36:18] Because if you can think about just one thing, for example, if you can drive, think about how much easier it is for you to get a job. Think about how much more jobs are open to you, right? Like Lyft in the United States, there are many deaf and hard of hearing folks who drive for Lyft. It’s not open to you if you’re blind, right?

[00:36:35] And so I think deaf folks don’t feel sometimes disabled in the same ways. That blind folks do or can, and like that is entirely an artifact of society, right? If you look at Europe, they’re not a car culture. Everybody walks to the store anyway, or you know, there are definitely cultural aspects to it, but also there’s, in not wanting to have heavier sight restored or I think heavier hearing restored, how much of me is wrapped up in not being able to see and how much of me is external to that, right?

[00:37:09] Like if I had grown up seeing, would I be playing soccer, right? I don’t, because I wasn’t really interested in adapted soccer and I couldn’t play with the other kids. So I read and play with ii models in my spare time, right? But like, who would I have been? The answer is unknowable, right?

[00:37:30] So I think there’s some fear there too. Anyway, this is a fun rabbit hole that we can wrap.

[00:37:33] Nikki Nolan: No, no, no. It was really interesting, and it also triggered a lot for me, and now I’m gonna talk about myself, for just for a hot second. But like, there were a few things that came up like that idea of disabled versus differently abled and how a lot of the community has been trying to get, like disability is not a bad word and like define yourself as disabled. But I have come across a lot of people who prefer the differently abled.

[00:37:55] And I know that is like, in contradiction to what I’ve heard broadly as a community, as like the preferred definition of it. But then I also really wanted to touch upon this like curing culture. Like we have this, I even went through this, so being dyslexic, they thought I was DD, it’s not ADD.

[00:38:16] And autism, ADHD and autism can manifest very similarly, but they constantly were trying to cure me as a child, and I was very resistant to that. I like the way my brain thinks. I’m fine with the way that I think. I don’t think I am the problem. I think the way that society forces me to fit within their system is the problem.

[00:38:38] And I think a lot of my identity is like, this system doesn’t work, let’s burn it to the ground. But because I’ve just come from, I went to seven schools by eighth grade because like I just kept failing out of school. When we, you know, prioritize a generalized experience of how people are supposed to go through the world or show up in the world, we get to this thing where other people say, how you are is not okay and let’s try and fix it.

[00:39:07] Let’s try and cure it. Let’s try and create these assistive technologies that are more cure oriented and less like assistive oriented. We actually had a really great conversation with Elsa Sjunneson last season about that. About this cure culture, that happens. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I just wanted to throw out those two things, the describing of disability versus differently abled and like cure culture and how that is just incessant in our society.

[00:39:38] Joe Devon: Well, if you notice everything you described is how you would speak about any artist of note. Everything you said that’s an artist, an artist will not fit in, will see the world differently. And it’s the artist that can inspire like no one else can. I have chills just talking about it because you know if you are an artist and you view the world in a different way and you can bring that to the world, you are, you’re giving a gift that no one else can that is just fitting in.

[00:40:11] So treasure it and we all have to respect that. I just love it.

[00:40:23] Nikki Nolan: It’s interesting. I am an artist, so, I don’t know if I’m an artist because of my disability or if I am a or if, like, you never know. It’s all intertwined in there, but we are getting really close to the end. And Sam, do you have anything that you look like you might have wanted to add something to before we get to the end?

[00:40:39] Sam Proulx: So I think, I think as we draw to a close, it is important and useful to bring this back to Global Accessibility Awareness Day because I think Joe, for you, that is where all of these learnings kind of came from. And so how has it changed? And I think it has changed the way you maybe even described yourself as an ally or think about allyship or think about yourself as an ally?

[00:41:07] How has that changed over the years and what advice would you give to new folks who are just starting out kind of on the journey of learning about disability and of allyship and of being part of this community?

[00:41:22] Joe Devon: Yes, it’s completely changed. I’ve just learned so much from this community and it’s, you know, my life’s work. The best thing that I’ve ever done is most certainly GAAD. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I mean, it has just shaped my thinking and I’ve always felt that it’s about perspective.

[00:41:42] You have to put yourself in someone else’s shoes to understand and be very liberal about that. I really try to put myself in anybody’s shoes. When you think about prison, what is it like to be in prison? If you don’t do that, you can’t go beyond what you are thinking. You’re just living inside your own world.

[00:42:04] And then in terms of what other people can do, just on a very practical basis, especially on GAAD, is to check your website for accessibility. Navigate without a mouse. Check your website. If you’re hiring a developer, talk to them about accessibility and ask them to make sure that your site or your mobile app is accessible.

[00:42:25] Captioning your videos. That’s not hard to do today. Alt text in your social media if you’re gonna post a picture. That’s something almost everybody’s doing. Social media. And a lot of people are forgetting that. Alt text, add that. And then if you want to go a little bit further and you want to take courses and, and learn if you’re a programmer, for example, I think DQ University is one of the, the better ones for developers.

[00:42:52] Web AIM also has a great course. Nobility does training and W3C does as well. So I think those are some good resources that are appropriate for global accessibility.

[00:43:03] Nikki Nolan: Amazing. Thank you so much. As we come to a close, this has been a wonderful conversation. If people wanna keep the conversation going, wanna follow you, where might they find you?

[00:43:13] Joe Devon: So I’m @Joe Devon, J-o-e D-e-v-o-n, on pretty much all social media that I’m on. That’s the username, and if you’ve got any AI accessibility related projects, would love to talk to you work-wise. And that email is Joe dot Devon, Joe dot D-e-v-o-n at theoremone.com, t-h-e-o-r-e-m-o-n-e- dot com. Love to hear what you’re working on.

[00:43:41] I’m playing with some concepts too, so, just want to know what’s going on out there.

[00:43:46] Nikki Nolan: Amazing. Thank you so much for being here. This was so awesome.

[00:43:51] Sam Proulx: Yes. Thanks so much for being here today. It’s really great to keep the connection between this podcast and global accessibility. To have the second co-founder on for our second season of the podcast. So, you will need to get a third co-founder for us for next season.

[00:44:09] No, I’m joking.

[00:44:10] Joe Devon : You can ask Mindy. She designed the logo.

[00:44:14] Sam Proulx: There we go.

[00:44:14] Nikki Nolan: Ooh.

[00:44:15] Joe Devon : Yeah, she was a front end developer, never, not really a designer at all, and designed the logo and it’s, you know, a famous logo right now. So she’d be a good one.

[00:44:27] Nikki Nolan: Well, happy GAAD. Happy GAAD, everybody.

[00:44:30] Joe Devon : Thank you. Happy GAAD.

[00:44:32] Nikki Nolan: TThanks 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. Music is created by Efe Akeman.

[00:44:49] 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 and Instagram @disabilitybandwidth, or on our website at www.disabilitybandwidth.com.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download