Ep 132 - Workology Podcast: The Future of Accessible Workplace Technology

Episode 132: The Future of Work:
Developing Talent to Make Workplace
Technology Accessible
Episode Link: http://workolo.gy/ep132-wp

Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Workology podcast a podcast for the disruptive
workplace leader. Join host Jessica Miller-Merrell, founder of Workology.com as she
sits down and gets to the bottom of trends tools and case studies for the business
leader HR and recruiting professional who is tired of the status quo. Now here's
Jessica with this episode of Workology.

Jessica: [00:00:25] Welcome to a new series on the Workology podcast that we're
kicking off that focuses on the future of work. This series is in collaboration with the
partnership on Employment and Accessible Technology or PEAT. You can learn more
about PEAT at peatworks.org.

Jessica: [00:00:44] If the subject of accessibility isn't on your radar it's time for it to be
there. As technology becomes an even more important part of our lives and in our
workplaces it's important that tech is accessible to everyone. But it's not just
technologies and tools that need to be accessible the hiring selection and entire
employment lifecycle should be dealt with accessibility inclusiveness reclusiveness in
mind. It's not just the responsibility of the employer but it's also the responsibility of the
university and college and the teaching institutions that were a part of. Throughout our
lives so we are going to be talking about making our future technology accessible at
the university or even earlier than that today in the Workology Podcast

Jessica: [00:01:32] Today joined by Larry Goldberg and Kate Sonka who are part of
the Teach Access collaborative. Teach Access is a partnership of technology
companies dedicated to preparing designers, engineers, and researchers to think and
Workology Podcast | www.workologypodcast.com | @workology

build future technologies inclusively. Teach Access works with academic programs and
design engineering and HCI that are seeking ways to better prepare students to
address the needs of diverse populations. Larry Goldberg is the senior director of
accessible media with Oath, formerly Yahoo. And Kate Sonka is assistant director of
academic technology for the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University.
Larry and Kate welcome to the work Alty podcast.

Larry: [00:02:13] Glad to be here. Thank you for having us.

Jessica: [00:02:16] So we're going to be talking about how we can make our future
technology accessible. And let's talk a little bit about your guys background. I'll start
with you first Larry. Tell us about your background and how you came to where you are
today.

Larry: [00:02:29] Well I've been involved in the field of making technology and media
accessible for more than 30 years. Most of my career was with WGBH public
broadcasting in Boston where closed captioning was invented. Video description for
the blind and we created a research and development arm called the National Center
for Accessible Media which advocated for making technology more accessible to all
standards of all legislation and consulted with many major companies. One of the
companies we consulted with was Yahoo. And after a few years of a wonderful
relationship there the folks at Yahoo offered me a job to implement some of the
standards and regulations that I helped develop while I was at WGBH.

Jessica: [00:03:17] Awesome. What about you Kate? Tell us a little bit about your
background.

Kate: [00:03:21] Sure. When I came back to Michigan State as part of my work in
academic technology one of the projects that I was assigned was accessibility and this
is about four years ago so at the time it was kind of familiar to me but really in the last
four years I've really kind of gone down that path quite a bit. So I do a variety of things
to support accessibility on campus so I'm working with faculty working with students

ensuring that course content and Web sites are accessible to anyone who's trying to
access those.

Jessica: [00:04:06] Well let's talk a little bit about how you both got involved in teach
access and what your roles are within the organization. So first I will start with Larry
again.

Larry: [00:04:18] Great. So once I joined Yahoo which has become Oath after our
acquisition by Verizon last summer I was talking with a lot of my colleagues in the field
of technology and accessibility. And we all realize that we spend a tremendous amount
of time training our colleagues developers and designers on what does it really mean to
make a mobile app or a website accessible and as much as that was a very engaging
and rewarding series of trainings. We realized we would be served a lot better our
companies would and our end users would if our new employees actually came to us
with some of the basic knowledge about accessible design and development. And in
talking with Facebook and Google and Microsoft and Adobe and many others it was
pretty clear we needed to focus on our friends in the higher education field. If the
students would learn some of these basics while they're in school when they came to
us they'd hit the ground running we would be able to serve our users a lot better. We
could create better and faster technologies and really start working on the higher order
issues of innovation around the field of accessible technology.

Jessica: [00:05:39] What about you, Kate?

Kate: [00:05:41] Sure. So it actually a colleague of mine was attending CS conference
which is the California State University Northridge conference. And he went into a
presentation that Larry was leading on Teach Access. It was a new initiative getting
started ended up through a series of events. I was able to go out and attend the kickoff
meeting and it really supports a lot of what I do for our college experiential learning is
one of the things that I'm passionate about professionally and also look to create
opportunities for our students to really engage in learning in various ways and teach
access is really one of those things where I saw a lot of overlap between supporting
our faculty so that they are helping students be prepared so that when they leave

whether they're hired by a company like Oath or any other company they're prepared
to tackle whatever is coming their way. So I found that each access was a really great
way to kind of bring together student experience as well as faculty helping them in their
classrooms being able to teach this content. So there's been some interesting
overlaps.

Jessica: [00:06:50] I love this and I love that employers are coming together with
colleges and universities and academia to help drive the conversation and the training
and the support around accessibility at the University and student level before like
Larry was saying they go out to start their careers at various organizations. Larry can
you can it kind of run through a little bit maybe some of the organizations again that are
involved with access because there are some very notable and exciting and innovative
technology companies that are part of this.

Larry: [00:07:30] There sure are. And I think a lot of the power of our ability to make
some change in this field is the fact that we've gathered together across companies
that sometimes are competitive but in the field of accessibility are always holding
hands and trying to advance each of our initiatives so it's started right off the bat with
Yahoo and Facebook sitting out on the patio at the seats on conference and coming
up with this notion of how can we band together to make change right away. And
immediately we have friends across the industry Google jumped right in. Microsoft's
Chief Accessibility Officer said I am violently supporting this and she really jumped
right in and dedicated Microsoft resources.

Adobe as the leading company for supplying design tools clearly saw it in their interest
and their involvement in accessible design that has been long standing and we have.
It's a it's a great community in terms of Silicon Valley and Redmon and the Midwest
and New York Boston. We know each other pretty well. So it was pretty quick that we
then brought in it and PayPal and Dropbox and then some other interesting companies
that were struggling with the same interest and issues in the banking field because
they too need to work on making sure what they're offering is accessible so Capital
One T.D. Bank was interested.


Now Wal-Mart just joined all of us lining up around the same issue of we need to be
able to create technologies that are born accessible and that's the term we like to use.
No fixing broken inaccessible stuff Boerner accessible right off the bat. Luckily all of us
also had some great relationships with universities Michigan State University of
Michigan Georgia Tech the whole Cal State system Olin College in Massachusetts
throughout the country. There were champions within all of these universities and we
turned to them first and said This is the initiative we're trying to launch we think we
have some power. Speaking from these incredible companies can you help us reach
the faculty at your institutions and talk about how we can incentivize the professors to
begin building this into the courses that they were already teaching.

Kate: [00:10:14] I really love that this is a groundswell effort and you're involving all the
right players and innovators and educators in a kind of helping to drive the change
within the schools.

Kate: [00:10:27] And then also in your respective organizations.

Larry: [00:10:31] Yeah and the next thing we really need to do as we're growing this
within our companies and then working with universities is to take it to the next level.
We've already put language in our job descriptions for relevant positions that
knowledge of accessible design and develop preferred or even required. And our HR
teams are talent acquisition or recruiters. We want them to begin actually implementing
this in career fairs and job fairs on campus and first line interviews to ask the question
well what do you know about accessible design. Have you ever heard of the web
content accessibility guidelines and for any applicants who can answer those
questions. Well they're definitely going to have a leg up on where you are hiring.

Kate: [00:11:22] Can you talk a little bit about the organizations again that are that are
part of a teach access. Is it just it doesn't sound like it's just technology companies it's
financial institutions. Are there any specific technology types or restrictions for
membership. Maybe somebody listening here was like this sounds great. I'd like to get
involved kind of whatever the requirements and how do we make that happen.


Larry: [00:11:45] For companies we're interested in companies that are in the tech
field. So that helps or use technology to serve their customers so that's pretty much
anyone. We ask that if they're coming to us there's a small contribution we ask so far
it's been very modest. We ask for a time of dedicated employee to participate in our
task force work where we're having six or more major initiatives we're looking for
volunteer help on that important issue. We've seen this for a lot of companies who first
hear about the access they immediately come to us to think that this is where they can
learn how to make technology accessible.

And even though we have quite a few experts involved with teach access there are
other resources where companies can go to learn the basics about what the 3C has
done and what the section 508 mean if you want to get involved with us. It means
you're looking to help drive this issue and to support faculty and that's really what our
focus is we're trying to stay very focused on that to begin infusing these principles into
mainstream courses. And if a company wants to get involved they should go to the
teach access Web site teachaccess.org and there's information there about
membership how to get in touch. What our initiatives are and what we ask of
companies who are getting involved.

Jessica: [00:13:18] Kate can you talk a little bit about training and resources that
students teachers and professors have access to as a result of Teach Access.

Kate: [00:13:28] Absolutely. One of the great things that that's come out of Teach
Access are our faculty boot camps that we've done a few of them in different parts of
the country. But this is where faculty who teach about accessibility or already or faculty
who want to teach about accessibility but could benefit from some additional support
and are able to sign up to have some really targeted one on one instructional time
essentially with our Teach Access. Industry partners there's been a variety of
universities involved in this and a variety of industry. But the idea here is that over the
course of a day or a half day faculty and instructors really get to understand what is
accessibility. How do I teach this in my classroom.?What are the and things that
students should take away from it? So you camps have really been a wonderful aspect
of teacher access. Another one is that many of the industry partners have agreed to be

available if you will for an hour of their time or whatever makes sense for them and the
faculty to essentially kind of do a video guest lecture. So if I'm teaching a class and I
have time and one of my days I can I can ask someone ask Larry.

Kate: [00:14:46] Larry would you be able to spare an hour of your time to come and
talk virtually with my students about accessibility on whatever topic it is that we're
trying to address that day. So from those two there's really some great resources and
assistance from that. One of the initiatives that we're about to pilot at the end of May
this year is a study away. So the study away program is similar in concept to a study
abroad students just remain in the United States. But in this case we at Michigan State
along with three other Teach access institutional partners through other universities are
taking out about 30 students to Silicon Valley at the end of May over one week. They
will visit five different teach access industry partners to learn about the accessibility
landscape specifically in those companies and then also start to gain or continue to
understand the accessibility landscape kind of in general in that region and through
some of our partners. The idea here is that students will really come away with an
understanding of what does it mean to be an accessibility professional what are people
doing. What are the projects that are that are in front of a lot of the companies that
they'll be visiting with. So as an institution there's there's quite a few ways that we can
partner with our teach access industry partners that we can work with or teach access
industry partners to really benefit from their knowledge and help strengthen what we're
doing in our own classrooms.

Jessica: [00:16:16] I love that you're having the students go out to to their respective
teach access organizations partners and and they get to see firsthand and they get to
build real professional relationships and ask real world questions. And I would think as
a member there is a great opportunity to engage with some really great talent that is
going to be looking for work shortly and graduating from the University and Colleges.
Absolutely.

Jessica: [00:16:48] Let's take a bit of a reset. This is Jessica Miller-Merrell and you're
listening to the Workology Podcast in partnership with PEAT. Today we're talking
about teacher access and accessibility training for university colleges and even high

school and elementary. We're talking with Kate Sonka and Larry Goldberg. You can
connect with Kate on Twitter. It's @Kate_Sonka.

Sponsor : [00:17:21] The Workology Podcast Future of Work series is supported by
PEAT. The partnership on employment and accessible technology pizza initiative is to
foster collaboration and action around accessible technology in the workplace. Pitas
funded by the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Disability Employment Policy.
Learn more about PEAT and PEATworks.org that's PEAT w o r k s dot org

Jessica: [00:17:50] As we dive more into our Future of Work series with PEAT, I am
becoming more and more aware as I hope you are as you've been listening to this
conversation that we've had about how much of the world isn't accessible to everyone
especially people with disabilities and this includes. And Larry alluded to this a little bit
earlier what might seem like a small area to some but the hiring process including job
descriptions. Larry talked a little bit about the commitment to including into jobs
descriptions experience on the subject of accessibility.

Jessica: [00:18:29] I will include a link to some of more resources but I want to I want
to kind of talk a little bit more about this Larry.

Jessica: [00:18:39] Do you have any learnings from this maybe personally at Oath or
maybe of some of the other partner organizations about how maybe this has impacted
hires or maybe improved or changed the type of candidates that are coming to your or
other partners organizations?

Larry: [00:18:55] Well I think we're looking at a long term result out of both what teach
access is doing and and all of the companies who are involved knowing that to create
better more accessible technologies we really need a workforce that is directly familiar
with what does it mean to have a disability and to use technology and to design
technology. There's a saying in the disability advocacy community nothing about us
without us. And that really strikes home for us if you are a developer and you've never
met a blind person you have no familiarity with what it's like to not be able to hear or to
use your your hands with full dexterity. It's going to be a little abstract to you.

But as we can and ratchet up our own hiring practices and make our and help our
managers really understand more about what does it mean to work with a deaf
employee. It's really going to help us do a better job recruiting to really understand
what kind of accommodations we can make that are most of the time fairly simple and
straightforward and then we can improve the nature and the driver city of our own
workforces. So that development team who might have someone with a temporary or
permanent disability can really contribute much better to the improvement of our
products.

Jessica: [00:20:28] I will say again that I work with PEAT has really opened my eyes
and something as simple as a PowerPoint presentation. There are additional steps that
you need to go to to make something like that fully accessible or a webinar where
people are able to participate or be a part of the conversation and hear and see and
feel what what you're saying. So for me it's been really eye opening and I've been in
human resources and recruiting a long time and have worked with a lot of different
kinds of people and hired a lot of different kinds of people but there are just some
things that I think we take for granted.

Larry: [00:21:09] Yeah I think most of the people in my company that I talk to about
this are really good hearted people and I think that's true across the board. They just
don't have the awareness. And when their eyes are open to the nature of how people
with disabilities use technology they embrace it wholeheartedly. But our job really is to
find ways to really raise awareness make people feel more comfortable around the
issue. I didn't really meet deaf or a blind person until I was probably in my late 30s mid
30s and I went through all the early learning processes the discomfort and I'm very
sympathetic with people who this is new to them really once they understand that
people with disabilities are just like everyone else or they're different in every way that
everyone else is. Things flow a lot better but it's those early encounters certainly in the
interview process and the onboarding process and the daily workload. It's not hard to
do. It's just something people need to learn.


Jessica: [00:22:16] I love that you're a part of this conversation and that you're
participating in this podcast because we're helping to drive that awareness about the
subject of accessibility and talking about how as a child recruiting leaders we can push
our organizations forward to making that hiring selection and interview process or the
workplace more more accessible. I love that you guys are doing that with job
descriptions and certainly all the conversations and trainings and learnings that are
happening in the workplace as a of your guys is work.

Larry: [00:22:52] Yeah I would like to add that the issues of diverse work places in the
tech sector has been quite a hot one over the past few years but the inclusion of
people with disabilities as part of that diversity discussion is actually unfortunately
relatively new. We've been talking about women and people of color in the tech world
and now we're finally making sure that we are including people with disabilities as part
of this broader discussion of having a diverse work force having people bring their
whole self to work. And luckily in our organization at Oath we are like a startup after the
merger with AOL. So we're able to introduce all these new concepts as we shape our
diversity initiatives and it's working quite well.

Jessica: [00:23:43] Kate, I wondered how I mean you talked a little bit about the boot
camps and the kind of study away programs. What are some other ways that the
accessibility training or teaching is being worked into the university and college level
classes and programs.

Kate: [00:24:04] Sure. So we have as part of kind of the first generation of teach
access. We all kind of divided ourselves into task forces and we had a variety of task
forces looking at different things. So I went into the driving Academic Engagement
Task Force but we had some other some others that were looking at creating
resources. So helping to create teaching resources that could be adopted or used by
faculty. And to that end kind of as it's evolved we will be doing some faculty grants to
help create further resources that could be used.

Kate: [00:24:40] We also had a group that was working on introducing language or
working with governing bodies like a bat or some of the other organizations that set

standards for certain majors or certain programs so in engineering for example or
computer science for certain programs there's an outside entity that saying in order for
a student to be qualified to say that they are whatever they are as a graduate of this
program we know that they have met these certain qualifications. So there is a group
that was working on talking to some of these organizations to introduce language to
encourage faculty to adopt more accessibility teaching into their curriculum. Moving
forward. You know there's some other potential ideas swirling out there but really as an
organization or as a collaboration I guess everyone is finding where they fit and finding
ways that they can have an impact in what ways makes sense to them.

Jessica: [00:25:38] How long has Teach Access then in an entity or or an organization?

Larry: [00:25:43] Well it started as a wonderful idea that no one could avoid. Everyone
embraced it. I think our kickstart meeting that Kate mentioned was in April of 2016 if
I'm recalling correctly so we're about 2 years old now and our early days really was
trying to shape our initiatives what's the best way we can have an impact at scale.
We're always talking about how we can have an impact to large numbers of students
to all the faculty are who were really hungry for this information

Larry: [00:26:19] And in our first two years we have accomplished quite a bit. We've
gotten a word from the FCC and nobility organization out of Austin and everyone we
talked to about this is just fully engaged and it's great now to have support from the
project and the U.S. Department of Labor to help us actually implement some of the
great ambitious ideas we have.

Jessica: [00:26:42] Well I just want to reiterate to folks if they want to get involved the
best place to go is teach access dot org and you can find out how to become a part of
the organization and and help further these great programs and training and
collaboration that's happening between the university and colleges and then the tech
companies and employers. So I think I think it's a great cause and I hope that some of
you choose to become a part of it. Larry and Kate thank you for joining us today.
Where can people go to learn more about you guys. So let's say they want to connect

maybe with each of you. We talked about teacher access but where can they go to
connect with you specifically.

Larry: [00:27:25] Well I'm kind of an old timer I love it. Yes I have a Twitter account my
Facebook page is for private purposes. But yes people can write to me. Larry G at o'th
dot com.

Kate: [00:27:38] And I'm happy to connect with anyone on Twitter my handle is at Kate
underscore Sonka and that's Katie underscore US and Kate are happy to connect on
then as well. And you can find me Kate Sonka.

Jessica: [00:27:52] Awesome. And we'll have access and on the transcript here. Links
to all their twitters and their links and send also e-mail addresses and things so thank
you so much again for for taking time to join and talk with us today.

Larry: [00:28:07] Thanks for having us.

Jessica: [00:28:08] Yes thank you teach access is a great organization and I love the
partnership and collaboration that is happening. It makes my heart happy to know that
companies are working to make their tech as well as their employment processes more
accessible. I hope that you'll think more about accessibility in your own workplaces
and also reach out to teach access and consider being a part of their mission to drive
change. Thank you for joining the Workology Podcast a podcast for the disruptive
workplace leader who's tired of the status quo. This is Jessica Miller-Merrell.

Exit: [00:28:38] Until next time you can visit work G dot com to listen to all our previous
podcast episodes reduction services where the work ology podcast what Jessica Miller
Merrell provided by Total Picture.com.

Episode Link: http://workolo.gy/ep132-wp


Ep 132 - Workology Podcast: The Future of Accessible Workplace Technology

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Ep 132 - Workology Podcast: The Future of Accessible Workplace Technology