Jun 5, 2021
Speaker: Please welcome Anatoliy Popko and Daniel Frank. Anatoliy leads “Dialogue in the Dark” Moscow team and consults the Bank of Russia and other prominent financial, cultural, and government institutions. He is a co-author of the Russian national standard on digital accessibility based on WCAG2.1.
Daniel is a Compliance Officer with Wells Fargo. He is responsible for Enterprise ADA Title III Policy and related major compliance requirements and leads the ADA Title III compliance Community of Practice.
Today they will be discussing a practical approach to resource analysis, allocation, and treatment derived from a financial sector background. They will touch on what sort of resources are needed, where they should be located in the organization, what function they should or should not serve, and more!
ANATOLIY: My name is Anatoliy Popko, and I'm from Moscow, Russian Federation. And Daniel, what's your name, by the way?
DANIEL: I'm Daniel Frank and I'm in Florida, in the United States.
ANATOLIY: Okay, great. Thanks a lot for agreeing to answer the questions and to participate in that session. Well, I'm actually, I have to admit that I'm relatively new to the big and interesting world of high-tech accessibility, so to say, and I call myself a disability or accessibility enthusiast.
I'm totally blind so I am, you know, very much fond of accessibility and enjoy its result. If there are any in Russian Federation, I wouldn't say there is a lot of that so there is a way to go. But I work with Sberbank, it's main Russian bank, Russian financial institution, and thankfully, since about, like, maybe four years, they started to treat accessibility very seriously and so there is a little bit to share in that respect but basically my role today is to torture you, Daniel, with the questions, and so I beg your pardon in advance. And from what I know, you've been in the accessibility field a lot so can you share a little bit about that?
DANIEL: Yeah, it feels like a lifetime. So, I'm currently a compliance officer with Wells Fargo Bank in the United States, and my responsibility is primarily ADA Title III, and to some extent also some other customer accessibility regulations compliance.
My background is kind of varied. I think, like a lot of people in accessibility, I came to this through other occupations, largely product management, and I was for many years in product management which was very much about customer experience which I think is a good preparation for this. And my education is both computer science degree as well as a business degree, and I definitely use both of those skills all the time in this role. And I would add -- and I think it's relevant to our discussion, during my misspent youth, when I was in computer science graduate school, I found that the computer science department was not as interested in some of my research interests as I was, and I ended up spending about a semester in the industrial engineering department. And at that point was exposed to the work of W. Edward Deming and total quality management and I had almost forgotten about that in a lot of ways until the last year or two and really came to realize how -- with how influential that was on my approach to accessibility, as well as how much it has to offer us in terms of perspective around accessibility.
ANATOLIY: And you actually promised to start our session today with a short story, TQM related.
DANIEL: I don't know how many people in the call are familiar with Deming, he was very well known, I think, in the '70s and '80s, but probably is not as well known now. And Deming began his career I think as an academic in -- and his specialty was quality, and he was concerned about how you produce quality products. And he went to U.S. companies, large U.S. manufacturing companies and none of them were really very interested.
This was a time when, you know, automobiles were kind of built to be disposable and that, you know, kind of breaking down quickly was a feature, not a bug. And so, he kind of took his show on the road and ended up working with Japanese manufacturing companies.
And I think people believed that sort of the origin of quality in Japanese manufacturing is in Japanese culture and it certainly has a very strong influence but, really, the actual execution came from this American academic who went to work with Japanese auto companies and other manufacturing companies, and this idea of continuous quality improvement really originated with his work in total quality management.
So, the Japanese car companies began importing cars to the United States and those surprisingly didn't break down right away, and so the American car companies began seeing effects on their sales and became very concerned that they had better get on this total quality management band wagon in order to maintain their position in the market. So, they hired Deming to come in as a consultant.
And there is a story, I don’t know if it is true or not, but it definitely has made the rounds, that Deming was invited to speak before a group of executives at Ford Motor Company, and standing up in front of the room, he gave his talk on quality and he opened the floor for questions.
The first question, the gentleman in the front row stood up and he said, “Dr. Deming, I'm the newly appointed vice president for quality at Ford Motor Corporation. What is the first thing that I need to do? “And Deming looked at him and said, "Resign." And of course, he didn't really mean that there shouldn’t be anybody doing quality at the top at Ford Motor Company, but his point was, that's -- W. Edwards Deming is the name of the scholar, and -- but his point was that you don't do quality from the top down. You do quality from the bottom up, and that is the whole idea behind total quality management, is that -- is that quality really is done, you know, from the lowest levels up to the top. That doesn't mean you don't need guidance at the top, but it means you don't get quality by putting someone at the top, whether it's your vice president of quality or whether it is your chief accessibility officer. And then saying, problem solved, now we have an executive in charge, and now we'll get accessibility or quality or whatever it is.
And I think they're very similar in that way. We'll talk more, like, you know, during the discussion about what that really means.
ANATOLIY: That sounds like, you know, quite a sound step. So, if a large corporation wants to become accessible, then it's a logical sort of point, to appoint a vice president or that all the products from now on will be accessible. So, you are saying it doesn’t work that way. But is that more or less, you know, enough for the first step, or not really?
DANIEL: I think that -- and kind of -- you know, we'll talk about what I think the steps should be, and you need leadership for that. You do need leadership, you need leadership, you need executive support.
But you really need to integrate accessibility in a way that in many ways is, I think, similar to the path of industrialization and mass production. That is, I think -- my sense is that looking at the history of particularly digital accessibility in the industry it really starts as kind of a craft enterprise, right?
So, in the old days, you had a shoemaker, the shoemaker in the village made shoes. You needed a pair of shoes, you went to the shoemaker, they measured you, they made the shoes. Our colleagues in the U.K. would call them bespoke shoes. Every pair of shoes was made by the Shoemaker. The shoemaker was incredibly talented and gifted. They probably had apprenticed with their father, who had apprenticed with their grandfather. They had probably been a family of shoemakers for generations, and they knew everything there was about making a shoe.
In many ways, what we started with in accessibility is that our resources -- and this is a talk on resources, our resources have primarily been skilled crafts people. They’ve been people who knew WCAG, they knew every single success criterion, they knew all the -- all the different ways you had to implement the success criteria and how to test for those. They knew how to go into a website and determine whether it was accessible, to do an audit, right, to do -- and then to know how to do the remediation.
And so, they were almost like the people, you know, like the journeyman masons who built the cathedrals in medieval Europe, where if your town needed a cathedral, you didn't call the shoemaker and the baker to build the cathedral, you called the masons and you got on their schedule, and they showed up in your town and started building the cathedral.
And that's kind of how we've done accessibility in -- we've had that sort of craft model in accessibility where we have very skilled people and we try to get enough of them and we try to scatter them through the organization, and then they run from place to place like the masons building the cathedrals and try to build accessibility into people's products.
And I think that similar to industrialization, to be -- to really scale and to really be sustainable, we need to move from that craft model to a model in which people who know less than those skilled crafts people are performing part of the task, just as, you know, we -- very few cars are handmade anymore and those are status symbols now but if you buy a car, typically, it was made on an assembly line and it was made in stages and people working at each stage, and now the robots who work at each stage, are doing their part of building that car. In order to produce the final product.
And so, my belief from a resource standpoint is that we need to organize resources and accessibility in order to move to a kind of division of labor, assembly line sort of approach as opposed to this sort of crafts person approach.
Because there just aren't enough crafts people in the world.
ANATOLIY: That's the first point. And the second one is that when you were talking about, you know, buildings and this kind of stuff, building can actually be completed while, if we're talking about digital product and accessibility in general, that's not, you know, a process that can be actually finished.
So that is kind of a building that grows, you know, with every single day and it develops and there is, you know, layer after layer, functional additions and, you know, various interface additions and those also need to be taken care of and to be accessible, so that's kind of like, you know, also an important point here.
DANIEL: Absolutely. And I think the buildings never really completed and I think if you stop working on it, it falls down.
ANATOLIY: Yeah, good point, too. Okay. Well, people, people, is the main resource, is that correct? Is that your idea?
DANIEL: I believe that people are a key resource but I actually believe that for sustainability, you need a lot more resources than people. You really need process. Process artifacts, tools. And the reason that's so important is because there aren't enough crafts people, right? We can't turn everybody in the shoe factory into a craft Shoemaker, into a bespoke Shoemaker. They have to know their part well, but that person may not know how to make a whole shoe and they shouldn't know how to make a whole shoe.
People have other jobs to do, and so what we need to look at -- and we look at this in manufacturing, is this balance between individual skill and training, and training always plays -- I think looms large in people's minds about well, we have to train people.
Well, training is one approach, right? But training assumes that what you need do is you need to incorporate all of the knowledge into the person, and that's really, in many ways, a craft model, right? That says, you know, you're a programmer, or you're a product manager, or you're a visual designer. And in addition to those skills that you've taken years to acquire and that occupy a big part of your brain, I'm now going to give you some training and you're going to have to learn all this other stuff in order to now incorporate -- you have to figure out how to incorporate that into how you do your job and that's cognitively challenging and often very impractical to do.
So, what you need to do is you need to look at how could I -- how could I use other ways of incorporating accessibility, knowledge and practice into people's jobs that doesn't involve taking up a lot more space in their head?
And we kind of know what those are, right? At the simplest level, it might be checklists, things like checklists, it might be artifacts that have to be filled out, right? As opposed to teaching every designer that they have to be concerned about tab order, you can simply have an artifact that says, here's a tab order spec. You have to fill this out when you do your interaction design, right? And that's pretty straightforward.
Another thing is incorporation into standards of various sorts, like design standards. So I was a very interesting -- really great talk at Walmart digital a few months ago -- well, I guess a year ago now before we all couldn't get together in person and they put up a slide that for me was really, really interesting because on that slide was a set of color combinations. And they said -- they said, you know, we tried for years to get people to do color contrast and we could never get -- we could never get the designers to understand color contrast, which as we know, that's a success criterion in WCAG. And then we just stuck in the design guide, these color combinations and said you can only use these, and now we have no problems with color contrast, right? Because we didn't try to teach them a new skill or ask them to use a new tool. What we did is we incorporated the accessibility requirements into their existing artifacts and their existing practice in terms that they can understand.
And I'll just give one more illustration of that. I was talking to a group of product managers recently and -- and we were talking about a particular kind of -- a group with a particular set of profile around disability and capabilities and I said to them, you know, really what this, like, where we're running into here is you're missing a persona. Being -- you know, having been a product manager, I know product managers often will use personas which are essentially kind of -- they're kind of cardboard cut-outs of people in a sense where you have a profile of that person. So, the persona might be 45 years old and they work in the controller's office and they, you know, have a couple kids and they have moderate computer skills, right, so that's a persona, right?
And since accessibility is really just user experience, right, I mean, bottom line accessibility is user experience. It’s the user experience of users who may have disabilities. And so, the -- and so what you need in user experience is to have a persona for someone who uses a screen reader. A persona for someone who maybe can't get in a car and drive somewhere in order to receive a service, right? You need those personas included into the ones that you look at as you're servicing your interaction design, all the parts of that process of building a new product.
As opposed to, you know, teaching someone and giving them training, to make them sensitive to disability which I think is important, right? But in terms of how they do their job, it's a lot more useful to bring in a subject matter expert long enough to create the proper personas and then that person leaves and the normal product management process takes over.
Now those people become your human resources, but they don't really know they're your human resources for accessibility, they're just doing the job the way they always did their job, they just have some additional things that guide that job in kind of the normal channels.
And I'll just -- just one more story which I was working with someone who was working on design standards, and they asked me to take a look at their design standards. They were very proud of the fact that there was a whole section in their designed standards for accessibility. And I said -- I looked at it and they said, “Well, what do you think?” I said, “Well, you really need to remove that section”. They said, “Well, what do you mean, I need to remove the section?” I said, “If you have a section for accessibility, first of all, it's a new topic, right? Second of all, what's the message to the designers?” The message to the designers, it's usually at the end, like after everything else, at the end is the accessibility section. And what does that say? I'm busy, I have a lot of demands on my time, I'm under pressure for time and budget and everything else. Oh, here's the stuff at the end, I won't do that this time.
And the psychological effect is really important. You have to think about the psychology of how people respond to these things. And what you need do is you need to take that section; you need to break that up into multiple sections. And they said, “what about reading order and tab order?” I said, “have a section called "Considerations for keyboard interaction."” Not accessibility, not disability, considerations for keyboard interaction. Now keyboard interaction is one of the requirements in the design and here's how you think about it. And by the way, that would include having a visible focus indicator, right, so you can see where you are, and it would include, you know, the fact that you can navigate through a reasonable -- all the things, right, that we think about as required but they're just another part of the job. And I think until we reach that point, we can't properly marshal those resources.
SPEAKER: Do you want to continue the discussion from this podcast? Members can access the Strategic Leader in Accessibility community of practice in our connection’s platform. If you are not a member, please check our website for all IAAP Membership benefits or email us at info@accessibilityassociation.org and we will be happy to talk about membership and help get you engaged.
ANATOLIY: Well, you've actually mentioned a lot of sort of brave ideas, that's what I would call those. The first one is to teach personnel as little about accessibility as you possibly can.
DANIEL: Yeah. Actually, yes. Now, I actually think it's really important from a training standpoint that we teach people about disability. As a diversity dimension, I actually think the most important training we can do, honestly, is to teach people about disability.
And the reason for that is that when we then go to people and we talk to people about, well, we have to make things -- these things accessible for people with disabilities, we now are talking about something that they have some relationship to.
I find that, you know, there is a great -- a great -- I think it was a Far Side cartoon which was, what we say and what dogs hear. And it's just a two-panel cartoon. The first panel, there is a guy yelling at his dog and he's going, you know, Ginger, bad dog, don't eat the food off the table, don't make a mess, Ginger. Just yelling at poor Ginger, the golden retriever. And the next panel is what dogs here. There's blah, blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah, blah, blah Ginger, blah, Ginger.
And in a lot of ways, if you go to people and say, well, we absolutely have to, you know, include and meet the needs of people with disabilities, it's blah, blah, blah. It's like what's a person with a disability. Almost -- you know, most people you will encounter in companies now are no older than 35 years old. They have been using technology since they were three. You know, computer is completely -- who wouldn't use a computer, right? They're in the prime of their life, right. They can't imagine ever having to wear reading glasses or not being able to run and jump and do all sorts of things that they do now.
And so, in a lot of ways, the first thing you have to do is harness their imagination so that they understand the terms you're using. And understand why that would matter. Because, you know -- I mean, a lot of young people don't deal with people who are elderly very much. I'm really finding, right, you know, I've been asked at various times, you know, well, isn't not using a computer just a preference?
ANATOLIY: Like going to the office.
DANIEL: Literally -- right? And so, you -- if there's any training that's valuable, the most valuable training is, first of all, to define your terms and create a picture in their imagination of why it is you're asking them to do these things, and who the audience is. Who the user base is?
And -- but then -- so separate from -- so that's really understanding disability but understanding accessibility is something that we can -- we can make a less -- again, less of a, you know, body of skill for most people, and more simply a body of practice that's incorporated into the jobs they already have.
And returning to total quality management, right, this is really kind of the idea behind total quality management. If you think of quality control, first thing people think about with quality control is we're going to do an inspection. This is what Deming called quality by inspection and that's basically your site audit, right?
So, you build a website or you author an electronic documenting or you build a building or you -- you know, you set up a servicing facility, whatever, and you completely finish it and then you -- the accessibility inspector comes in.
And, you know, that's what most people's ideas of quality control is. I'll come in, see if you made it accessible or not. We don't build buildings that way for accessibility, right. In U.S., we have the 2010 standard for accessible design. We have local building codes. Architects and designers are trained in this. There's a plan that incorporates those, the plan is reviewed for accessibility, then the building work is started, the architect comes on site, there are regular inspections to make sure the plans are being followed and then by the time the city building inspector shows up to measure the width of your doorways and the height of your ramps and the accessibility of the bathrooms, you're probably 90, 95 to 99% of the way there.
Most of the time, you know -- anyway, had a building inspector come and they found one thing and you're happy because they found the one thing. But if you didn't start at the beginning and you're only doing this by inspection at the end, you're not going to get accessibility. And quality and accessibility are much the same that way. You don't get quality by building the cars however the heck you want and then there's somebody who sits at the end of the line and sees if they're broken.
ANATOLIY: No.
DANIEL: That's called a low yield problem, right? And so, what you want is incorporating -- you know, we incorporate quality into manufacturing by looking, for example, at sources of quality breakdowns and looking, do we need to add automation? Do we need to improve automation? Do we need to change practices? Do we need to adjust how people do their jobs?
We engineer the jobs and the automation and workplace and all those things in order to improve quality and we need to do that the same way with accessibility. It is really a business process, engineering problem. In a lot of ways that needs to be informed by all the brilliant craft expertise and all the subject matter expertise that we have but it is ultimately -- it is ultimately a question of an integration with process, not of, you know, totally changing hearts and minds and getting everybody to want to be an accessibility expert. Or inspecting all the time.
Inspections are important. You should also have checkpoint, processes break down, processes may have problems, but the inspections are to tell whether your process is working. The inspections are not to produce quality. Or accessibility.
ANATOLIY: Okay. So, what you're saying is that not every person who actually adds value to the accessibility needs to know how to spell the word "Accessibility," so he just needs to, you know, do his or her job properly and in accordance with the rules, you know, that includes accessibility by default.
How about dedicated accessibility team? Is that supposed to include craftsmen and, you know, those accessible geniuses or is it necessary?
DANIEL: I think it's absolutely necessary.
ANATOLIY: Okay. We found the place for them.
DANIEL: It's really what they do, right? Today, those people are primarily testers, so they're primarily doing evaluations because nobody knows how to do an evaluation, so we need an expert to do an evaluation.
There are people who are-and who are consulting, right so, they come in and they try to teach people how to do accessibility as part of that consulting engagement. So, they're being deployed as a kind of patch, right? They're kind of the team that sort of runs around and, you know, tries to cover all the bases but always seems to never have enough capacity and never have enough time.
I think the best use of subject matter experts is to -- is to use them to bake their knowledge and experience into artifact, process, automation potentially, such that what their purpose is, is not so much to constantly do testing and audits and consulting but to do -- but to really drive that integration process in the first place.
Now, if you have TQM in your company and you're doing quality management, you have you still have QA testers, you still are doing testing, right? You always do testing. You need audits, you need governance, you need, you know, to be able to have a dashboard and have testing that can drive data into a dashboard so that your management can see how the company is doing, and to monitor kind of back-sliding because back-sliding can occur either in process or process observation. Back-sliding can occur because the underlying platforms that are software and systems run on change, right?
Apple in IOS13 actually broke accessibility in voiceover and a lot of people were -- who had not changed their software suddenly found there were accessibility challenges.
And TCM -- that's TQM, total quality management is the acronym I'm using, had a question about that, and so you still need people to do audits, you need people to do testing you need people to work on process integration. You need a subject matter expert to review your design standards because you have to make sure, number one, that they're comprehensive for WCAG considerations, right, if you're doing digital. So, you need to make sure they're comprehensive and that they include, for example, the requirements for keyboard interaction. You need to make sure that they are specifying colors, and that those colors have all been checked to make sure they have that 4.5 to one contrast ratio, right? And so, you need -- you always need a team of SMEs and craftsmen but their orientation, I believe, and the most effective use of their time is to leverage their abilities by building them into process and artifact. And tools, picking the right tools, setting them into the right processes, making sure the processes are stood up and integrated.
That's where the real value comes because now you can leverage your expertise. And in many ways, you know, it's what we're doing today, right? We're having these webinars and creating the body of knowledge for a certification because each of us knows things and everybody on the team working on the certification comes from a particular body of experience and knowledge and has particular skills. Skills I don’t have, other people have. Experience I have some other people might not have. But what we're doing is we're pooling our experience and we're turning that into something that other people can learn from and to help them do in their jobs and that leverages our knowledge a lot more than if I just went and, you know, sat down and went through someone's website and told them what was broken. Not that that isn't important, right, but it means, I get -- that's at retail. So, I get one website out of that.
We do this work, and we do the work we do in the IAAP in terms of professional improvement, we are leveraging our knowledge and experience across hundreds or thousands of people. And it's similar in terms of how, I think, we have to approach the way that we use resources for accessibility in our organizations.
ANATOLIY: So, what I’m saying is that the dedicated accessibility team basically, needs to place a lot more emphasis on the documents, rather than on people. So, you don’t just go around asking people to provide, to create accessible design. Rather you just improve the documents, so, the prestigious, the documents themselves are full of implicit accessibility practices.
DANIEL: Yes. That's a great way to put it, actually, that's a really great summary.
ANATOLIY: Okay. So, documents, when you're talking about artifacts, can you tell a little bit more about that, like, specifically, what do you mean?
DANIEL: So, when I talk about artifacts, I really talk about, you know, sort of concrete actual kind of physical things, and either that or digital things that mimic physical things, right? So, an example of an artifact might be a design specification, right, or a visual design specification, or an interaction specification or interaction plan or a content specification. And those are typically where design is done in a formal way, right, and part of -- part of our challenge often is that we come into processes where these things have -- and around websites, for example, historically, websites have been built by geniuses, too, so the business goes I need a website to do X, often in smaller companies, right? I need a website to do X and here's my vision and here's -- you'll get on the white board for a few minutes and then the programmer is this, like, genius who is sort of a designer, too. They're not quite a designer but they kind of know how to lay out a screen and do that stuff and so nobody ever writes down a formal design spec, right? And that's just a maturity issue for organizations in general, anyway, right? Ultimately that doesn't yield consistent design and, you know, organizations go through a maturity curve in terms of their websites, as well.
But let's assume an organization that has gone through that kind of maturing process, and they do have a requirement for actual professional designers who are creating the visual interaction and content specifications, and those may take different forms in different organizations, right? We can't prescribe and say every organization needs these three documents. But there is information in those documents that every organization ultimately needs their programmers, their developers to have, not just for accessibility, right, so let's forget accessibility for a moment and say, just for website design, right? A sort of mature process will have those three elements that are presented in some form, right, to the person who ultimately writes the code, in that organization. And that form may be different in different organizations, roles may be structured or laid out differently in the design and development process in different organizations but, ultimately, that's the information you need to have a good website design. What color are things going to be? How are they going to be laid out? Do we have standards for things, right? How does the user interact? What are the interaction patterns, right, and these are the things that designers know about in their job. And so, the art -- those design specifications are kind of artifact. And so, when I use the word "Artifact," that's really what I'm referring to.
So, when the SMEs come in and they look at the artifact, they say I'm a WCAG SME, I know what information the developer is going to need in order to make something accessible. I know what additional kind of information we have to make sure we have proper hygiene around in these things. That's things like colors, right, what colors is the programmer going to code into those – you know, hex codes for the colors, right? What is the keyboard navigation order, right, for keyboard operability? What are the interaction patterns and how do those patterns work? What about alt text? What about descriptions, right? There's all this content that even an accessibility aware developer needs that needs to be included in those artifacts, and so that's a kind of -- that's a kind of artifact I'm talking about.
Also, a design standard is an artifact and coding standards, and coding checklists are artifacts, and you need to look at the balance -- again, it's -- in many ways it's an industrial engineering problem. What is the balance between giving people checklists or incorporating more into software? There is a -- for example, just in WCAG testing, right, people who want to do testing or can audit or test for WCAG conformance in a website often, you know, like step A, right, they're the Shoemaker and they work from their head, right? I did this, my father did this, my grandfather did this before me, I know all the steps for making a shoe, I've never written it down, I learned it from my father, right?
Step 2, I have a checklist of all the things I need to put in the shoe. Oops, needs a sole on the bottom, otherwise people's feet get hurt, right? You have the checklist, right?
Third stage is maybe I have software and we're starting to see these software packages now which are so welcome that walks someone through the process of doing testing, right? And so now you get into the question of -- again, these are really business process and automation process. Industrial engineering questions, if you have. Is where does the knowledge reside? And what's the best place for the knowledge to reside in terms of my efficient use of resources? Should I be putting a lot of people on this, or should I buy a computer program? You know, should I have a row both building part of the car instead of assembly line workers and what are my trade-offs there, right? So, it really is that sort of -- that sort of issue.
And so, I think that -- and I think what we're really in some ways trying to do with this certification for this strategic leader in accessibility, I think we're also starting to lay out a lot of those organizational considerations by talking about the leadership role who is responsible for those considerations.
So, I hope that we'll see an increasing body of knowledge about how to do this.
SPEAKER: The IAAP Accessible Document Specialist (ADS) credential is intended for accessibility professionals who create and remediate accessible electronic documents and their related policies. The ADS credential represents an ability to express an intermediate level of experience designing, evaluating, and remediating accessible documents. The ADS credential is beneficial for people in or aspiring to be a User Experience Designer or Tester, Web Content Manager and Administrators, Project, Program, and ICT Managers and more! Check out the IAAP ADS certification webpage to learn more!
After centuries of people with disabilities not having equal access to digital and built environments a new United in Accessibility (A11y) movement was formed. In 2014 professionals and individuals with disabilities started to rally to form the first International Association for Accessibility Professionals (IAAP), organization. The “United in Accessibility” podcast offers shared experience, solutions and barriers faced that impact diversity and inclusion in organizations in the lives of people with disabilities and their circle of support.