In this week’s episode of Disability Bandwidth, we have an exceptional guest, Meryl Evans, CPACC, who joins Nikki and Sam to discuss the importance of respecting people’s communication preferences. We talk about how not all deaf individuals use sign language and that everyone’s experience with disability is unique. We also discussed how companies miss out on a significant opportunity, estimated at 13 trillion dollars, which could be unlocked by being accessible. We will delve into the crucial role of high-quality audio captions and share other valuable insights. Be sure to take advantage of this informative conversation!

References:

 

Transcript

[00:00:00] (Music)

[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: Hi, would you mind introducing yourself?

[00:00:24]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Howdy, I am Meryl Evans, a native of Plano, Texas. I have shoulder length brown hair and a bluish sweatshirt that says “progress over perfection” with the accessibility icon in the air. I am a staff employee, speaker, trainer, and marketing consultant who educates companies and employees about disability and accessibility.

[00:00:49]I was born profoundly deaf and that came with this accent. It’s not a British accent, I wish. Anyway, I grew up learning how to speak and lip read. The most common assumption people make about me is that I know sign language. I don’t. That’s not a good or bad thing. It’s what works in my life and I respect everyone’s communication choices.

[00:01:16]Nikki Nolan: We would love to know what lights a fire in you? What gets you up in the morning?

[00:01:21]Meryl Evans, CPACC : What lights a fire in me is educating people in a kind way. That’s what progress over perfection is about. Accessibility supporters are passionate. They can get a little overzealous. I can’t tell you how many times people have jumped on me for something because I accidentally forgot to add an image description or I used language they didn’t like. This really happened.

[00:01:54]When we talk about hearing disabilities, we usually say deaf, hard of hearing. Hearing impaired has kind of fallen out of favor because people don’t like the term impaired. Well, some folks identify as hearing impaired. When I mentioned someone was hearing impaired, others got upset. I gently educated them and said, this is how the person self identifies.

[00:02:23]In another scenario, someone wrote a speech and I got a copy of that speech that mentioned me and referred to me as a deaf person. But when they gave the speech, they changed it to hearing impaired, as if they were afraid to say the word deaf.

[00:02:45]Disabled, disability, and deaf are not bad words to avoid. Though I am trying to create a mindset of listening and educating rather than lecturing or berating. A lot of us disabled people don’t like the term special needs. When I did a post on that, a couple of people with disabilities said that they prefer that, so we have to respect their position.

[00:03:17]So next time someone says something we don’t like, let’s chat about it. With education in mind, progress over perfection helps people move towards flexibility. They feel overwhelmed. I tell them not to worry about it. Don’t worry about getting it done or perfect. Every step helps no matter how small.

[00:03:41]Sam Proulx: So communicating in ways that respect everyone can be a real struggle, and it’s something we think about at Fable, especially on social media. You do a lot of work on social media. How do you balance being impactful and yet communicating with nuance?

[00:04:00]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Wonderful question, Sam. Thank you. That’s why I take an approach like I am a student teaching what I’m learning. I like to think of myself as a student rather than a teacher because I’m always learning something every day and I don’t know what I would never know at all. I still get flustered at times, even though I’ve been working in space for a while.

[00:04:27]I learn something all the time and language changes so quickly, so I try to be transparent. And as people will say, I’m sharing this because, or I hear this. I don’t know if that’s actually what’s happening, what you all think? Well, the other day I wrote a post about neuro divergence and I just finished the project that was an accessibility guide.

[00:04:58]So it mentioned hearing disability, physical disability, mobility disability. And then I’m like, what do I do for that last category? Not speech disability, but the things that affect us, like autism, ADHD, those things. I needed one word for those and I felt like no matter what I do, I’m going to offend somebody.

[00:05:30]So, thank you. Thanks for the consultation we had. It was great. Nobody was pointing fingers, nobody was yelling, nobody was being nasty. It was the kind of conversation we should be having as humans, just respectful. So in the end, I used “people who identify as”, and that’s how I worked the way around it.

[00:05:54]Nikki Nolan: What are some of the key moments that led you here?

[00:05:58]Meryl Evans, CPACC : I’ve been self-employed in 2005, around 2018 business slowed down for a long time. A client had been encouraging me to jump to video. I am a marketing professional and I know the value of video. I wasn’t shy about speaking or appearing in videos. However, one thing I want is to be realistic. I knew I had an accent that hailed from nowhere accessible by travel.

[00:06:35]I wasn’t sure how people would respond to my accent. I did a 20 second video asking a question, that’s it. I captioned it. The response was tremendous. So I started making videos, mostly about marketing. Then marketing with my core business and making videos and learned how to caption them. So I have been using captions for many decades now.

[00:07:06]But doing the actual captioning was a different story. So in learning how to capture my own videos, I started making videos of why adding a caption is only part of the equation for a high quality accessible caption. Fast forward to 2019, the team at Knowability invited me to present on captions at an accessibility conference.

[00:07:37]When I got there, I felt like I had finally found my passion. The thing that lights my fire. My ikigai which means life’s purpose in Japanese. So I’m sure I’m not saying that right through. I apologize to Japanese speakers. I knew I wanted a career in accessibility, but I wasn’t sure how or what. The founder of an accessibility consultancy somehow found my LinkedIn and brought me on as a marketer as that was the big step to accessibility.

[00:08:14]Then someone who saw me speak at AccessU, invited me to speak at her meetup. The speaking invitation snowballed from there to TEDx as well as paid speaking engagements. Her invitation to me to speak, followed by many others, told me that my accent did not matter. It was about what I shared.

[00:08:46]As I began my work in accessibility I decided to study for the Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies, CPACC for short thankfully. Certified accessibility and access competencies, CPACC for short. So IAAP certification and CPACC and then by some miracle, I passed. It was important to me to earn the certification to show I have knowledge that goes beyond my own disability.

[00:09:27]I care about equal access for everyone.

[00:09:30]Sam Proulx: So as a person with a disability, what was the CPACC process like for you? Did you find it tricky? Was the content useful?

[00:09:40]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Oh my goodness, it was long, many months. It took me many months to study for, I think about eight months. And it was over. It was overwhelming. I am not the greatest test taker in the world. Far from it. I have a very embarrassing SAT score unfortunately.

[00:10:04]Anyway, I struggled with standardized type tests and actually I took multiple courses. I studied, wrote about it. I talked about it, and I got so bad that days before I took the test, I started dreaming about it. Anyway, yes, the content was very useful. One of the bigger things I have come to understand are the different types of disability models, like social model disability, the medical model.

[00:10:45]When I first started studying for it, I didn’t understand what it meant. I don’t understand why it matters. I mean, life happened. Why do we need this model? It helped me understand things like that a lot better.

[00:11:01]And what was frustrating was I wanted to know this material I wasn’t studying for just a certification. I wanted to know it and I just was not doing homework, but anyway, it paid off.

[00:11:16]Nikki Nolan: How long did you work in accessibility before taking the test? Because I went to one of their informational things and I just didn’t completely understand. How long do you have to work in accessibility? Like tell me a little bit about that.

[00:11:33]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Okay, so IAAP offers multiple certifications and there’s another one called WAS- web accessibility specialist and it is a technical certification, I don’t think I’ll ever go for. Because I don’t get along with form, I can’t make sense of ARIA which should make form more accessible.

[00:12:03]And I’m like, so that certification requires you to work in accessibility for at least three years. The CPACC does not. There’s no time requirement that I can recall it. It is general, which is what I like. I wanna be on the education side of things, not the web development side of things.

[00:12:26]Nikki Nolan: What experiences shaped your perspective around disability?

[00:12:31]Meryl Evans, CPACC : My writing and speaking about disabilities has led to paid speaking opportunities at companies and organizations. After every speech, I get a message from at least one attendee who said, the speech compelled them to act, to make a change, to make progress. Though when I speak, I have three goals of mine and that are, and those are educate, entertain, and encourage action. So far so good, it’s working.

[00:13:09]Nikki Nolan: Yes. You inspired me around captions and I shared that with someone who was working on captions at my company.

[00:13:20]Sam Proulx: I wanted to follow up, when we’re talking about your work in the accessibility space, I think we both hear from a lot of people who are people with disabilities, who want to get into this work and who want to do what we do. And I’m interested, what advice would you give to people with disabilities who want to do this?

[00:13:53]Meryl Evans, CPACC : I just hosted a meetup that was talking about breaking into a digital accessibility career with A11Y New York City, and it was part one of two by the way. So in part one, it was with Louise Clark. And I commend her. She came up with a nice plan. So one of the first things I recommend is studying material. Like watching movies, reading books, watching TV shows, with people with disabilities, about people with disabilities. The famous one is Crip Camp on Netflix. That’s an excellent one to watch because it’s about trying to make change with the law and what the people with disabilities did to affect that change. Though it was really amazing and inspiring, but in a good way, not inspiration porn. We know we don’t like inspiration porn.

[00:14:59]The other thing is books, of course. Because you wanna get outside of your own disability. I mean, I can only share my own experience as we all have said at one point or another. When you’ve met one person with their disability, you’ve met one person with their disability, not all of us. Same thing with the deaf or with the blind, even with the same category. So I started reading and reading articles.

[00:15:29]Online we have great articles. Get out in the community. You can do that in your favor, social networking. If you love LinkedIn, start following the people who talk about the topics on LinkedIn. If you like Slack, if you like Facebook, there are Facebook groups. That’s where I started.

[00:15:57]Nikki Nolan: Can you explain, you use this word inspiration porn, and we hear it a lot, and I don’t know if everybody understands what inspiration porn is. Can you just explain what that is?

[00:16:06]Meryl Evans, CPACC : You bet. So the most famous one on inspiration porn is Stella Young’s TED Talk. Stella Young is a woman who was in a wheelchair and her famous TED Talk, I’ll never forget, the title is brilliant: I Am Not Your Inspiration. So you could look that up. It’s very easy to find. I’m afraid she’s not with us anymore and we all talk about her all this time later.

[00:16:37]Her point was that she was sharing a story about how she got an award for doing nothing. Just for being in a wheelchair. It took me a while to understand what it is because there are people with disabilities who’ve done amazing things that are definitely inspiring. But the trick is for the inspirational story to make the reader feel good about themselves or that make the person with disability rather than the person reading it.

[00:17:18]So for example, a lot of people say he’s in a wheelchair. He managed to run a marathon. What’s your excuse? So though using him to empower somebody who doesn’t have a disability to achieve it. So that is the inspiration porn. But if you say he loves to run, he works so hard with the trainer. He did therapy.

[00:17:44]He did that and he had realized the goal of completing a marathon, the focus is on the disabled person, that’s not inspiration porn.

[00:17:56]Nikki Nolan: Thank you.

[00:17:57]Sam Proulx: So you and I often find ourselves speaking to organizations, but sometimes, as people with disabilities, organizations can pressure us to speak for the disabled community. Do you ever have to push against that? And if so, how? Because we need to support each other and work together as people with disabilities, but we shouldn’t ever speak for one another.

[00:18:22]And sometimes that can be a tricky balance.

[00:18:26]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Absolutely. That’s an important thing we all need to talk about, and thank you for bringing that up. So I’ve been fortunate that nobody ever came to me and said, oh, we want you to be the representative of the disabled. But I’ve never had that happen with a thing I am representing all of us but daunting to think about.

[00:18:50]But if that were to happen, you know, I would use my same spiel. You meet one deaf person, you’ve met one deaf person. If you meet one disabled person, you’ve met one disabled person. In every disability category, you will rarely find two people who are exactly the same.

[00:19:16]The deaf alone, you may be doing that. You may become late in life deaf or you may be born hard of hearing. The bigger the hearing loss than the hard of hearing. You may have had hearing aids from the day you were a toddler, or maybe you got them later, or maybe you got a cochlear implant.

[00:19:38]You might have learned sign language, or you may not have. Or you might have learned sign language younger or later . There’s so many possibilities. That’s why I encourage when organizations bring on speakers, it depends on the purpose of course.

[00:20:03]So if they’re trying to write about disability and disability awareness, then you want to find a qualified speaker, not just, unfortunately, there are people with disabilities making lots of money, sharing wrong information. It’s a real problem. I mean, the thing they’ve said about, deaf people, that hard of hearing people can hear.

[00:20:35]They don’t need captions. I’m not capturing this right though. But it’s misinformation. And so that is why companies need to do the research before they bring on the speaker. The speakers usually have clips and you can ask the community, you can usually find it under #accessibility and #A11y. Which is short… a numeronym. There are 11 letters between A and y. That’s where A11y comes from.

[00:21:23]Nikki Nolan: So I’m really curious. I hear you say frequently when you meet one deaf person, you’ve met one deaf person, or when you meet a person with a disability, you met one person with a disability. So I’m curious, where did that come from?

[00:21:38]Meryl Evans, CPACC : It comes up a lot. I mean, I see people in the disability community say it all the time. In fact, I caught a TED talk, they said the same thing. I sat through many talks. I heard friends say it, so I don’t know who came up with it. You know, it’s just one of those things that a lot of us in accessibility know. It’s our own experience because we have a tendency to somehow meet other people with disabilities similar to ours. When I was growing up, my mom knew another family in the city with a deaf daughter who was like a year older than me, so they introduced her. I mean, we didn’t become friends or anything. Our lives were pretty different, but that’s my point.

[00:22:35]There are a lot of situations that’ll bring you together. For example, my deaf BFF saw an article about me in the newspaper. She lived in my city and she sent me a message out of the blue and she said, I hope you don’t think I’m bananas or something. Or a stalker. She was drawn to me because of my deaf background as we’re both deaf.

[00:23:04]And of course we have very different backgrounds even though we’re both oral deaf people. So when you meet other deaf people, you have a common thing. But you don’t have in common based on experience. Experiences are not all gonna be the same.

[00:23:29]I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone the same exact way I have. I mean, I’ve met other people who had hearing aids growing up as well, and were born deaf. But the one person I’m thinking of right now, when she was in her late twenties, I think she went back to school and she started learning sign language. And she, so she became fluent in ASL. I haven’t done that yet. So those are different.

[00:24:01]Sam Proulx: I mean, what you just said there about differences is so interesting and something that people really don’t understand. I mean, you probably get a lot of pressure to go and learn sign language. The same way everyone else thinks I should have a guide dog, which I should not have a dog. There’s there’s reasons for that, but do you sometimes find yourself resistant to things that maybe would be helpful because you don’t want to conform to the stereotype? It’s something that I struggle with. It’s why I don’t play music, because there’s this stereotype that all blind people are musical, and so I kind of limited myself in that way. Do you find that ever happens to you?

[00:24:45]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Very intriguing. I’ve gotten to the point where if somebody starts signing to me, I start to feel bad because I feel like they’re excited. They’ve met a deaf person and they’re hoping that I would do sign language back with them. So I feel like I’m disappointing people. Yeah.

[00:25:05]ASL is a full language, just like Spanish and French. It has its own syntax. It is not English on the hands, as so many people don’t realize. And I have over the years gotten pressure. Why can’t you learn American Sign Language? It’s our language, which you should know. They ignore me because I’m a speaker who wore hearing aids but I don’t see that as much anymore.

[00:25:38]But when I was younger, they treated me differently- like I was not a good person. And that’s really hard. And that’s why at the beginning of our conversation I said that I respect people’s communication choices. Everybody should do what works for them. And guess what people think deaf people don’t like music as well.

[00:26:04]Well, I love musicals very much. I grew up with musicals. I’m passionate about musicals and before I could see a musical, I’ll read up and try to learn the songs. That’s why I’m never gonna see Hamilton in person unless there are captions, because I cannot memorize that show.

[00:26:25]Sam Proulx: I have to ask, what’s your favorite musical?

[00:26:27]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Oh gosh. I would say Company by Stephen Sondheim.

[00:26:33]Sam Proulx: Hmm.

[00:26:33]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Yeah, that and Chorus Line, I think.

[00:26:36]Sam Proulx: Is it because of the subject matter? Or is it the dance or what? What draws you to a musical? I’m interested. I also like musicals and have a very different answer.

[00:26:47]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Okay. I would love to know your answer.

[00:26:49]Sam Proulx: my favorite musical is probably a tie between either Annie or Les Mis.

[00:27:00]Nikki Nolan: Oh.

[00:27:01]Sam Proulx: I like the subject matter of both of them so much, and I like some of the songs. The way the melody and the lyrics interact are so powerful to me, but I have no idea what any of the dancing or cross streaming is like, and I don’t care.

[00:27:19]Nikki Nolan: Interesting. My favorite is Cabaret.

[00:27:22]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Oh, awesome.

[00:27:24]So Sam, while you were throwing out what you liked, my hands were making drum motions and drum rolls. So what was the other one?

[00:27:39]Sam Proulx: Annie.

[00:27:39]Yeah. Tomorrow is one of the most optimistic songs ever, ever written, and maybe is probably one of the saddest in kind of its simplicity.

[00:27:54]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Yes, yes. I wasn’t, I wasn’t picking at the fact that you like Annie, it was just so different from Les Miserable.

[00:28:03]Sam Proulx: Yes.

[00:28:05]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Confusion. I’m like Annie, that doesn’t sound right.

[00:28:09]Nikki Nolan: It’s about struggle though, if you think about it. They’re both about struggle and overcoming and empowerment.

[00:28:17]Sam Proulx: And they’re both embodiments of a very particular emotion, right? They take one emotion, and that’s really the central piece of the show. I don’t like shows that want me to feel nine different ways at once in a musical.

[00:28:34]Nikki Nolan: Hmm.

[00:28:35]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Yes. Yeah. Well, you and my spouse share that in common. He loves Les Miserable. He listens to it over and over and over in the car and I was just like, I’m tired of this. It’s just too much for me. It’s a show for you because there’s not a lot of activities to watch. They don’t do any dancing at all. Maybe a little bit, the innkeeper does a little bit, and that’s my favorite because he makes me laugh. Yeah, but it took really long and there were a lot of lyrics. Not as bad as Hamilton, but a lot of lyrics. In Company, the songs are so good. The main song company is wonderful and I love Stephen Sondheim. I also like Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, which sounds really dark and I usually don’t like dark, but it’s brilliant because the songs are so good.

[00:29:46]What he does is, for all presidential murders, the song reflects the time period when John Wilks Booth killed Lincoln. The music from there was, the ballad style was the common style back then and in the 70s/80s with Squeaky Fromm. And John Hinkley who shot Reagan.

[00:30:17]It was hippies, 70s/80s music. Yeah, so they reflected the period and it was just really, really good. Though I appreciate songs that are easy to learn, that’s why I love Anything Goes and Sound of Music. They are simple, easy to follow. And of course Chorus Line for the dancing is amazing.

[00:30:44]Sam Proulx: Do they do live captions in musicals? And if so, does it work? I ask because audio descriptions in a musical. Sometimes it doesn’t work, right? Because they want to describe what’s happening and you just wanna listen to the music. And so I just wondered, have you watched caption musicals and do captions work well in that art form?

[00:31:09]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Okay, so I am going to New York next month, and it’s my hope I will finally experience the musical with captions, which I have not.

[00:31:18]And in fact, I have done a lot of reading on it. I know some people who have, and one had a good experience, one did not. The caption just kept getting out of sync.

[00:31:32]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Or dropping.

[00:31:35]And then another person went to see a musical in New York City with the caption, and the actor stopped and called her out. Actually I had that fear of that happening because it looks like you’re recording or taking pictures when you’re holding the device in your hand and watching.

[00:31:59]It looks like you’re filming. That was a heartbreaking video that person made showing her experience of how the actor called her out. I could feel her pain because I could see that happening. So it’s my hope I’ll go to one and I will be proactive in asking the staff.

[00:32:25]Sam Proulx: Yeah, well, let me know how it goes. I hope it works out well for you. Wow, now this is the musicals and disability podcast. I better give it back to Nikki to bring us back on track.

[00:32:38]Nikki Nolan: And now a really quick break to hear from our sponsor.

[00:32:41]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.

[00:32:57]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.

[00:33:22]Nikki Nolan: And we’re back. Let’s get into this.

[00:33:24]Sam Proulx: You’ve been doing this for quite some time now. And you’ve been doing an incredible job, if I say so. But what are some of the things that you’ve learned or experienced that have surprised you?

[00:33:38]Meryl Evans, CPACC : So, I have a mental health disability. I was never shy in talking about it with friends and family, but I never talked about it in a public forum like LinkedIn. Why? Because it was hard enough being a disabled, self-employed business owner. Add mental health on top of that.

[00:34:07]That sounds like a recipe for going out of business. So, when people started posting their mental health story on LinkedIn, I would thank them for sharing and for chipping away at the stigma. That should not be a stigma. I realize that if I want to see change, then I have to do my part, so I share my mental health story and people were wonderful about it.

[00:34:41]Now I’m talking about it more. My disability definitely plays a big role in my mental health disability. That’s an example of why intersectionality matters. Deafness and mental health do not exist in vacuums. They affect each other, of course. Plays a big part of it for other people. I mean, a person who is deaf and black is going to have a whole different experience than me as a white person will.

[00:35:17]Nikki Nolan: So it sounds like you were surprised that when you started opening up about that, that your business didn’t go away?

[00:35:27]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Yeah, I was scared and worried about that, but one thing I did was, I completed a leadership program that was just amazing for me. And being a leader, I think means, being transparent, being compassionate, being vulnerable. And so that was what pushed me into talking about it. Being in that leadership program is partly why I do that.

[00:35:57]Finally, talk about it publicly.

[00:36:01]Nikki Nolan: Yeah. What kind of community have you sort of created and discovered during this journey?

[00:36:12]Meryl Evans, CPACC : I have a community in many places, including social media, virtual meetups, and nonprofits. I’m working with the community focused on accessibility and disability advocacy, and growing leaders who are intentional about inclusion. Too many companies only focus on diversity and not inclusion. They bring in people with disabilities to their company like a checkbox, but they don’t give them the tools to thrive or have a voice at the table.

[00:36:56]That’s not inclusion. Picking diversity and checking off a box. I would get messages all the time from people who share those stories saying, I got this job, I was excited. I have a disability, but I feel alone. I don’t have what I need to feel supported. Those are the kind of stories I’m still getting from people.

[00:37:21]I guess they saw me on LinkedIn and they wanted to share those stories. So there is a lot of work and education to be done and I’m doing my best to help that.

[00:37:34]Sam Proulx: For people who maybe aren’t on board yet with inclusion and accessibility, what do you find is the most effective way to inspire people and to educate people and to get people actually interested in doing accessibility? And it’s so interesting because everyone’s answer to this is different.

[00:37:59]Meryl Evans, CPACC : I use the closed caption explanation. That one seems to be the most powerful because, for example, 80% of the people who use captions are not deaf or hard of hearing. And I try to tell the people to think about the time, how many times I’ve gone on the elevator, how many times they’ve gone on a ramp instead of stairs.

[00:38:25]I mean, I tell the story of how when my kids were little, I would put them in a stroller and sometimes there was not a ramp. So what do I have to do? I don’t wanna go down the steps and my baby falls and slaps their face. I would feel like a bad parent, right? So what do I do? I turned the stroller around, put my back to the street and carefully stepped down the curb while pulling my child down.

[00:38:54]That way, leaning into the stroller and not falling out of the stroller. There’s not a parent who cannot relate to that or executive. So hopefully stories like that. Shopping. Shopping carts, same thing. So the curb effect seemed to be one of the most powerful ways.

[00:39:25]Another way I try to encourage companies to invest in accessibility is to tell them that people with disabilities are big as China, and that is the largest country. and we, together with our friends and family, we have $13 trillion in disposable income. We are ready to spend it on businesses that are accessible.

[00:39:58]Now, $13 trillion dollars! How much is $13 trillion? A lot of us can’t fathom just how much that is, that is huge. I can barely envision a million, much less a billion. How can I even think what a trillion is, though? I did a little research because I wanted to find an analogy for 13 trillion dollars, okay. So, I found one if every single American in the United States had enough money to buy 13,000 boxes of cookies. So, Nikki, you will have enough money to buy 13,000 cookies. Sam, you have enough money to buy 13,000 thousand boxes of cookies. I would too. That’s what $13 trillion means if every single person living in the United States would have enough money to buy 13,000 boxes of cookies.

[00:40:58]That’s how big the disability market is.

[00:41:01]Nikki Nolan: Wow. Where did this number come from? This $13 trillion.

[00:41:06]Meryl Evans, CPACC : The Return on Disability Report.

[00:41:11]Sam Proulx: Cool. We’ll link that in the show notes. Because that’s an important statistic and I hope people listening to this podcast are inspired to get involved if they aren’t already. I love that. Earlier you mentioned getting people to act as one of your major goals as a speaker, so what is one thing that people can do right now after listening to this episode to get started on access?

[00:41:46]Meryl Evans, CPACC : It’s a tricky question because it depends on who the person is, you know? I would say start adding image descriptions. Those are so easy to do. Just write one line.

[00:42:09]Sam Proulx: Yeah, it’s, it’s a way to start, and that’s what matters, right?

[00:42:13]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Right, just start. It can be a very small step. That’s the target of a perfectionist. If you don’t know where to start, there’s always someone you can ask. Heck, ask me.

[00:42:30]Nikki Nolan: Ooh, I have a question. I have been told that if an image is just decorative, it shouldn’t be described. How do you both feel about that? Let’s say that there’s an educational thing and there’s an image and then there’s some words. I’m curious. That’s something that I’ve always been torn about because I try to describe all my pictures, even if they are considered decorative.

[00:42:54]Sam Proulx: The question I always ask people when they’re talking about alt text is what are you trying to communicate? And sometimes if it’s a decorative image, the answer is, so if you’re not trying to communicate anything specific with the image and you describe it, all you’re doing is making another thing that I have to listen to.

[00:43:18]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Exactly. So it is possible to have an image that is not related to the content and you’re doing it to add color. Make the page more easier to read so you’re not staring at a whole lot of text on the page. It’s possible to do decorative images and I would make sure the web development team has the proper programming for decorative images because it’s tricky. It depends on the platform you’re using, but when it comes to social media, I have a different answer.

[00:43:55]Nikki Nolan: Tell me.

[00:43:55]Meryl Evans, CPACC : So I posted a photo of me on Facebook and Instagram. I did not add alt text, but that was on purpose. That’s why I put in the post, ignore the accessibility texts, because I didn’t want people to yell at me for not having an image description, so what happened was they both added automatic.

[00:44:23]And they were wrong. Basically it said there were two people in an outdoor body of water. It was one person, it was me and a kayak. I was obviously on water with my hand in the air above my head, holding my paddle in victory.

[00:44:50]Sam Proulx: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:51]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Isn’t that quite a different picture that I paint than a picture of two people on a body of water outdoors?

[00:44:57]Sam Proulx: Blind people are having the same struggles that the deaf community had four (4) years ago with automatic captions, and now it’s automatic image descriptions. We’re doing the same thing, like it sometimes feels like we didn’t learn anything from the automatic captions.

[00:45:12]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Exactly, exactly. So if you leave a blank, it is going to read, because it is decorative, for whatever reason, it is going to ask stuff anyway. So you might as well add something decorative, something really short so as not to waste people’s time.

[00:45:31]Nikki Nolan: Yeah.

[00:45:32]Sam Proulx: If we’re just asking personal questions that make us curious because I think maybe other people struggle with this. So I’ll ask you, Meryl, maybe you don’t know, but as someone who is blind, I would like to caption my videos and audio. But none of the existing tools are screen reader accessible. Have you heard of anyone working on that problem?

[00:45:58]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Oh my goodness. I have not, I have not heard about any tool that is screen reader accessible. Hey, Sam, have you tried Youtube? I’m curious.

[00:46:08]Sam Proulx: Yeah, and it won’t work with my screen reader, it won’t let me line the captions up so they show at the right time. I can type in the box. But I can’t change the timecode on the caption.

[00:46:23]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Yeah, the timeline shifts. When you drag and drop the mouse. Yes. That makes sense now. Thank you. Yeah, and I happened to be captioning a video just before the call. I should have thought of that.

[00:46:40]Sam Proulx: Yeah, it’s just something that I wish, I don’t know, maybe you and I should work together and get some movement, because right now I just have someone else do it, right? And that’s not great. Or don’t do it and feel like I have an excuse, but that’s also not good.

[00:46:58]Meryl Evans, CPACC : I agree. Yeah, Sam, we should talk about that. Maybe I’ll do a LinkedIn post. We need captioning to be accessible. Yes even to blind people, they want to create videos then caption themselves because they don’t want automatic caption destroying the hard work.

[00:47:17]Sam Proulx: Yeah.

[00:47:18]Nikki Nolan: Yeah. Ooh, that’s so cool. So we’re getting kind of close to the end. and I’d like to know, if people wanna continue to follow this conversation, continue to see what you’re doing, like where can people find you and is there anything you wanna promote?

[00:47:31]Meryl Evans, CPACC : Sure. So the best places to find me are onmeryl.net m-e-r-y-l dot net and LinkedIn. And then anyone who wants to work with me can reach out to me. My website has my past and upcoming speaking engagements. I am available to speak on topics related to disability and accessibility awareness, and if you like to catch the TEDx Talk, they are available with subtitles for English, Spanish, Arabic, Polish and Portuguese. You can catch it at mery.net/TEDx.

[00:48:15]Nikki Nolan: Thank you so much for being here. This was fantastic. I learned a whole lot and I’m gonna try and do one thing to like educate myself a little bit more.

[00:48:25]Meryl Evans, CPACC : I love it. Thank you so much for having me, Sam and Nikki.

[00:48:29]Sam Proulx: Thanks for taking the time, for being here, and I’m looking forward to working together with you some more going forward. It’s been too long.

[00:48:38]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. Music is created by Efe Akeman.

[00:48:59]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.

[00:49:12]Music

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Comments are closed.