Accessible Web Podcast: Blaise Liffick

Peter Jewett
Alright, looks like we’re live. Welcome everyone to episode five of the accessible web Podcast. Today we’re lucky to have Blaze Liffick from Pennsylvania. I’m not sure where to even start with, with saying, you know who you work for or where you’re at, but, um, I guess we’ll highlight sounds like you’ve been recently named the professor emeritus of computer science at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, and sounds like. I’ll let George do the bio but you’ve been, you’ve been around the block. So, thanks for joining us today. Around one or two times.

George Heake
Yeah, yeah, I’m really happy when we first discuss the series, Blaze was definitely on the top of my list. We’ve known each other for quite a while back during the days when I worked at the Institute. I’m really happy that we’re able to carve out some time and he’s joining us. Blaze with a BS in computer science from Purdue University, entered the computing field during the Age of Dinosaurs when computers were room size monsters costing millions of dollars, working for IBM and Eastman Kodak, when the age of desktop computers finally arrived, he became senior editor of Byte magazine. The small systems journal before finally file. The small systems journal, before finally pursuing his Master’s and PhD in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh. And yes Temple University, respectively, is switched academic academia, resulted in some for decades as professor at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. Finally retiring in 2020 is chair of the computer science. It was recently named Professor Emeritus of computer science at Millersville over those 40 years he has been awarded numerous grants and published, dozens of papers, books, and presentations in his primary areas of research, the ethics of computing and human computer interaction with a special interest in assistive technologies. And I will verify. He has written quite a bit. I’ve had the privilege of reading his CV, it’s extensive, and I got to know blaze at the institute, there was a summer empowerment program for parents and users of assistive technology and blaze was the technical coordinator of that program and the program allowed students. Users of assistive technology to come to campus with their parents or caretaker and live on campus for I think a week, week or two. And the whole idea was to set up work with him and show him how to effectively use their assistive technology device, it was a watershed moment for me, I had no idea how extensive the use of assistive technology and what it allowed people to do so. Welcome Blace thanks George. I go ahead. I’m pleased to be here. Oh good. Could you do me a favor, just thinking back going that program. Why, because I thought about this a couple months ago, like Why aren’t there other programs like that, Because I find that there are 80 programs in all the states and they do a really good job, but sometimes outreach doesn’t reach everybody. What was impressive about the program at Temple was it really allowed people to get low instructor to student ratio and really to understand, and some of the people that attended went on to college, etc because they developed the expertise of 80 Do you, do you think that we should have similar capacities and that model of working with assistive technology and trying to support that.

Blaze Liffick
I think the immersive nature of that workshop was really an important factor in success. The fact that they came and lived on campus and I don’t, yeah I don’t remember it was one or two weeks either seemed like we were there the whole summer. But, you know the being on campus, number one, but, but also being interacting with the instructors, the whole time they’re there is, is a really good model. Anytime you’ve got an immersive environment like that you’re just gonna learn more than if you’re trying to do it, you know, one or two hours a day for, let’s say six months even. It just doesn’t quite hammer everything home the way an immersive experience like that does. So yeah, I think that that’s a really good model.

George Heake
Now, with assistive technology and the prevalence of accessibility compliance which Peter and I are heavily working with, with accessible web. Do you feel that with WCAG guidelines, being folded into ADA most likely within the next few years. How important do you think accessibility law, and assistive technology will support each other or more so will the law, the guy, accessibility, having a little bit more punch with the backing of the ADA. How do you think that will affect with accessibility and people that work with assistive technology to get what they want, or get what they need for employment or school or just their daily lives.

Blaze Liffick
Yeah, unfortunately, I’d like to think everybody would just do the right thing all the time, and they don’t. They do what’s expedient. So, you know, wrapping it into the the ADA law I think is going to move things forward in a way that we haven’t seen before. It’s, as you say the extra bite, to some extent, it’s just, you know, the fact that now you really have to do it. That is going to matter. And we saw that with the introduction of the ADA in the first place, you know, there, there were curb cuts before there were ramps before, things of that nature to assist people in wheelchairs for instance, but nothing changed wholesale on a large scale until the ADA was passed, and you know that happened in 1990, and within a very short period of time, you had just massive changes in architectural requirements, and that has, you know, made a world of difference. Now, it hasn’t solved all the problems even still today. You know I walking around my own campus. I was constantly complaining to facilities, about sidewalks or curb cuts that had, you know, been damaged in some way made it difficult for somebody with a wheelchair to get actual passage, you know, along a certain path. And it was a constant battle to remind everybody, you know, this has got to get fixed, or, you know, we’ve, we’ve got we’re switching a facility from, from this building to that building well that building doesn’t have quite all the features that the previous one here, upgrade some, you know, and things of that nature and, you know, we started utilizing a lot of the houses that were contiguous with the buildings. And, well, you know, students with, with disabilities can’t access those houses because they aren’t adapted. So you know, it’s still a constant battle, but it’s clearly better when there’s some teeth to this, to having it as part of, of the legal code itself.

Peter Jewett
Looking back when is the first time that you remember hearing or when, you know, has, has accessibility always been something on your mind you know and I assumed that it certainly became a more prevalent issue as we move from room sized, you know card punching computers to personal computers, but like backup Byte magazine did accessibility come up with something on people’s radar.

Blaze Liffick
You know it didn’t. And I’m kind of surprised it didn’t, that early. It was about that time though that I was getting interested in, in a field that became known as human computer interaction. And my sort of ultimate introduction to that was when ATMs were first installed, and they were talking, you know, late 70s And I still got a guy who was trying to enter the amount on his paycheck that he was trying to deposit, and he couldn’t figure out how to, how to make it work. All the buttons, seem to be there and all the number buttons, but what was missing was a period button, so you couldn’t couldn’t, how do you put in cents on, you know for $1 amount if there’s no period button. Well they rigged up the display so every time you punched a button it shifted the number. And eventually, if you keep punching the numbers in it’ll shift over to the right place. Well he couldn’t. He couldn’t see that because he couldn’t understand that at first, because he, there was nothing in his experience. Up to that point in time where he had been exposed to any kind of a shift system like that. And I stood and watched him for a while longer than I probably should have before I offered assistance because I knew what was going on, because there was a computer trick. You know shifts in computing was, you know, real common thing that we did. But, you know, for, for everyday people, they wouldn’t have noticed that I did eventually, you know, tell them look, I have to stop punching number and don’t even look at the display until you’re done, and it’ll be right. And he finally did it. And of course, once I show it to him. From then on, he doesn’t have to be shown ever again. But that was, you know, a really cold concrete example of what I came to learn about in graduate school with, with my major advisor Tom Dwyer, and he called the solo, learning method that had to do with, he was a pilot. And he was a pilot instructor. And the idea behind piloting learning to pilot is that you have to learn to fly the plane. Sitting next to an expert. The job of the expert isn’t to fly the plane it’s to help you understand the mental model you need to build to fly the plane. And so, the, the whole task is to transfer your expert mental model in such a way that those novices can understand, and build their own mental block. And that became a sort of a touchstone exemplar for me in terms of everything I had ended up doing in my career. And I think it is a good way of trying to be careful with the way we design things so that we’re not designing for ourselves. Because that’s what programmers do they write code for themselves. And it takes a lot of work to train them to think about writing code for the next person that has to use this.

And

that I think is is stood me in good stead in terms of a philosophy, and that I have taught all my students

Peter Jewett
did did accessibility ever come up I mean, do you ever recall it being in the pages of Byte magazine to, you know where their early Braille keyboards or, you know, like screen readers. In early computers or is this something that they came much later, and I mean I always, I guess I don’t always, You know, learned early on in this web accessibility journey and my own education about the advent of digital text, and how revolutionary it was to have a newspaper be digitized and delivered via the web, because now a computer could read that digitized version whereas before it was, you know, if you were a person that’s blind you had to get the braille version of the newspaper that was thick and expensive, or you had to hop on the NFB Newsline and, you know, spend your time listening to news you didn’t necessarily you weren’t necessarily interested in, But, you know, that was the only version then all of a sudden digitized text came over, along with the internet and. And now we could make these computers that could read this text aloud at your own pace, based on what you were interested in. So, I mean,

Blaze Liffick
I know that eventually did a years there was a little early in the development of the technologies that we were still trying to figure out how to draw with a machine, how to do any kind of all, all the diagrams that we published it during my years at byte or handdrawn. Yeah, even the text, was, was handset. As late as 1980. The technology had advanced quite that far. Yeah, I remember when the first voice synthesizers came out in the early 80s, one of the first things I did when I got older, blonde, was used it to dial up our local pizza shop to order a pizza.

And

it was an interesting experiment in, in trying to get somebody on the other end of the phone to take it seriously, I mean we were seriously trying to order a pizza, it wasn’t, you know, we

George Heake
weren’t going to, you know, not show up,

Blaze Liffick
not, not by one we eat pizza but I did want to see whether or not somebody on the other end of the phone could understand the voice well enough, because it was, you know, obviously, artificial, the inflections weren’t there. It was hard to anticipate what questions they might ask, and so have an answer that we could easily, you know, type in and have said by the the synthesizer. And it took a couple of attempts before we can get them to actually pay attention to what we were doing with it. So, again, it was just about the time I left but when those things were happening.

Peter Jewett
So I guess it’s safe to say that, through the history of computers, the same way, maybe it’s happening with the web right now that web accessibility is lagging way behind where it should be. And maybe it’s never been a forefront, it’s always been kind of an afterthought that you let’s get these technologies in place and then you know make it work for everybody and then we backfill for the people with disabilities.

Blaze Liffick
Well, and that’s, that’s the unfortunate part is that it is always an add on. You know, I’ve worked for a lot of years to try and convince my colleagues put into their courses. Particularly graphics courses and human computer interaction courses, as, as part of the standard have, you’re not done developing until you accommodate everybody you can accommodate and build it in from, from the beginning, not try and tack it on at the cause anytime you do a bolt on of that sort, it’s inferior to what you could have done if you develop the system to include that from the beginning.

George Heake
Now, With that said, with all the progress we’ve made in technology, in a AI. Why, why do you think accessibility is not baked in to the development process, because if you use the argument, oh we don’t have enough time. We’re not gonna get our return on investment for accessibility. But when you pick it in the process, you really don’t lose any time when you lose time and money is when you have to go back and re engineer it. And with society’s efforts of trying to bring disabilities mainstream, whether it’s advertising or, you know people are, especially with the latest push for diversity in to include people with disabilities. It’s almost like window washing Winder not really putting the effort, all this money to spend on advertising. Why isn’t the funds put in making on a universal design aspect, why, why isn’t society just making this stuff, accessible, why do we have to respond to people like get a letter of notification from Department of Justice, etc. Why did, what, What do you think,

Blaze Liffick
well, not to. How do I want to put it. It’s not that accessibility itself is de emphasized, shall we say. It’s an I’ve been fighting this again for almost 40 years in my field, it’s that the whole area of human computer interaction, the way we interact is always the last part to get developed. It really ought to be the first and convincing them to flip that around and view interactions as the key to the system is like pulling teeth, sometimes they want to get in and solve the technical problem, write, write the code that solves the equation. Okay, that’s what they do, they tend to focus on and not how are we going to deliver this to somebody. One of the phrases that I’ve adopted as again, one of my philosophies is the interface is the application that yeah, it’s how we interact with the system that matters. I really don’t care what goes on behind the scenes. I don’t care how easy or hard a calculation is behind the scenes. What I care about, as the user is how easy or hard it is for me to access that information to make use of the tools that they’re purportedly making available to me. But if they’re not accessible, they’re not making them available to me so, you know, that’s the part that’s hard to get across. And it really is a mindset for developers, that you have to teach them. You’re not developing for yourself. You’ve got to think about the people you’re developing for and create a mental model in your head, of those people that, here’s how I’m writing the code for them. Not for me, time pressures are certainly part of the Mifos of the computing field. It is a classic problem in our field that impossible deadlines are set. And we’re expected to to meet those deadlines, come hell or high water. And if we don’t the company, ends up losing money. Why because they’re trying to satisfy shareholders. So there’s this constant push to get things out the door because if they’re not out the door, they’re not making money. If we miss deadlines, the investors are going to complain. So anything that they can do to try and shorten the development cycle, they’re going to try and do well that generally means they’re not going to spend the time it takes to develop a good interface, which also means they’re not going to do, universal design. That is not the to crack.

George Heake
Yeah,

Peter Jewett
definitely. Investors be damned. It’s all about the customer, is what I’m here. Well, the user,

Blaze Liffick
that’s, that’s what, to me, that’s the right is. Yeah, you know, I don’t care if I miss a deadline by a month or six months, if what I end up giving the user a better system for them. Now, ultimately, of course you got to get the product out the door, and make money or, you know you’re not going to have customers anyway. But, you know, there has to be a balance between those competing needs. And unfortunately the balance right now is all toward rapid development, as opposed to, careful development. You universal development. Now that’s not to say there aren’t. I mean, there are a lot more professionals like me. Now, there were even just 10 years ago 20 years ago there was a handful of. Now, you know there’s a special interest group for the ACM the Association for Computing Machinery called assets. And those folks are dedicated to making this stuff work. They are adopting curricula that emphasize universal development, universal access. And so it is getting more into the mainstream.

But

major corporations. I won’t say they don’t pay attention to that sort of thing, very much,

it.

It seems to me more ground up pressure of people who end up in industry, who already know about universal design, and are comfortable implementing it is what’s needed that much more grassroots, I guess, than trying to oppose it from top down, but, you know, you sort of have to do it from both ends and hope to meet in the middle. And, and, you know any legislation that enforces it is certainly from top down.

Peter Jewett
I just found this conference I was not aware of assets but apparently they have an annual conference and everything,

Blaze Liffick
absolutely they do. Cool. Bunch of people. I’ve enjoyed working with them over the years.

Yeah, and

they bring in yours.

Peter Jewett
Yeah, we just did a round of hiring, and, you know, across a few different positions and, you know, hired a couple engineers that are coming on board in the next couple of weeks and hired a UI, UX designer, and I guess I was surprised by how many of these recent graduates that we ended up interviewing are studying human computer interaction as it seems like, You know it caught me as like a new buzzword, you know, like this new thing I’d never really heard being said that much.

Blaze Liffick
One of the reasons that that’s happening is, there, there are two pressures within our field that drive that. One is a curriculum developed by the ACM, and the IEEE. That includes exposure to HCI as a foundational knowledge base and the accreditation aspect from the computing. Accreditation Commission of a bet, which is the accreditation board for engineering and technology, which also incorporates HCI as a key knowledge unit that should be within their curriculum. And so, any, any, a bit accredited, computer science program probably does that. I say, probably because you know how it is, it gets a little bit here and there, but it will be done more and more. And, you know, there’s no question that the HCI field has has grown in stature and respect. Over the last 20 years 2025 years ago when I was working on my doctorate at Temple. I couldn’t get anybody in the computer science department to take me seriously when I said I wanted to do a dissertation related to assistive technology. They, they thought I was nuts and didn’t want anything to do with it. It’s not hardcore computer science. And today you can find computer science programs where you can do that now. Yeah. So, it has changed a lot in the last 25 years,

George Heake
but with. I think with groups like Resona and that are pushing that and have it included. Do you think. Do you think there’s any chance of adopting accessibility as a requirement for UX, or web development programs.

Blaze Liffick
It certainly ought to be, you know, I can’t imagine a UX program that doesn’t incorporate accessibility as a key feature not say they’re not there, I, you know it, it unfortunately all depends on who the faculty are are teaching the program, if they’ve had exposure, they’re going to include it, if they’ve not if they’ve come up through a traditional computer science program, they probably haven’t seen it in most schools HCI is still an elective. I know at my own university it is. If I wasn’t teaching the class during a given semester when a particular student wanted or would benefit from that exposure to that, you know, I can only offer the class once every two years. That means there are a lot of my students who are going to get through the program and not seen it.

George Heake
Yeah and that’s the feedback we’ve gotten from people that we’ve interviewed that have gone through a comp side programs and they might have part of one class, but not a full class or course on accessibility and to follow that up. How do you maintain it or there’s no instruction on, you know maintenance or auditing and how do you keep it part of the policy and everything else. We’ve recently engaged with the DAISY Consortium, and I’m on one of the workgroups for a pub, and most of the group is for higher ed, At least the work group that we’re supporting and. And these are, there’s some representatives from Kurzweil and a bunch of the big vendors and there’s still problems of convincing. You know why the benefits of let’s say accessible e pub where accessibility. What has been your biggest challenge managing other professors on a college level, just about accessibility in general because, you know, we interviewed Karl Horvath, who was the head of technology at Temple for a very long time. And what is like fighting, no I use the term of fighting the windmills, talking about accessibility. What has been your challenge or how have you been able to convince professors. No, why, why content needs to be accessible, especially when they say, Well, I have no students with disabilities, especially with the basic policy within higher ed. Education general instructor can’t really do anything unless it’s self identified. And yeah, you might notice that someone might have a disability but you’re almost restricted to approach them. How do you win that discussion that I don’t have anybody that has a disability. Oh boy,

Blaze Liffick
that is a hard one to crack. I don’t know that the tools are there yet. Today,

almost painless. And that’s unfortunately what it’s got to be, because I know my faculty. While I was chair. I know how damn hard they work and how hard they work to keep their courses up to date. To do the research that they’re that they’re demanded to do, and do the committee work that they’re required to do, and publishing and publishing and in everything that they’re required to do. And then you say on top of that, well, you got to make all your stuff, but you’re gonna have to learn how to do it on your own. We don’t have anybody can train you, we don’t have any

knows how to do it. You’re, but, but you’re gonna have to do it anyway. And

that’s a no win scenario for any because they don’t have the time, it’s not in their strength area, and the amount of time it takes them to to do it is out of proportion with the other things they’ve got to do. There has to be commitment on the part of the university in particular, to make it a priority. And again, this is sort of where you know the top down versus bottom up stuff comes from, from the top down the university has to say. It will be done, but they also have to say. And here are the people we have on campus who will help you do it. Here are the tools. We’ll buy the tools. Here we’ll send you off to, you know, one week class to learn how to do this effectively. Yeah, I know you can learn it on your own over, you know, a number of months. And, you know, we computer scientists are used to picking up a manual and learning how to do something, but there are limits to that. And most of the computer science faculty have reached their limits, to some extent. But there needs to be more concerted efforts to make these things available in painless ways that faculty can it’s turnkey, it becomes turnkey, and there, they just can do it without thinking about

Peter Jewett
this gets into one of our previous I forget which one of our guests talked about it but maybe, maybe Dan Goldstein, but the idea that the real tipping point with web accessibility is in the hands of the authoring tools when Adobe doesn’t let you make a PDF that’s not accessible anymore when you, you know, when they do everything they can to keep you from hitting save or the software has the features to require an alt tag when you upload an image into your document, or you can’t put the headings out of order just because you want to. That’s, that’s kind of when it’s really going to become easy and painless, because it’s just using the tool, but as long as this is a thing that people need to know. I guess as long as it’s a bolt on to use your previous example, and it’s not a ground up type of thing it’s going to be hard to get people to universally adopt this extra requirement because it’s always going to be seen as just that an extra requirement. When really, all these different publishing tools, whether it’s a, you know, Adobe making a PDF Google Making a Word document with Google Docs or, you know, WordPress allowing you to make a blog post once we can bake this into authoring tools, and people don’t have to be trained about it they don’t have to be really consciously thinking about it every step of the way. That’s that’s going to be the moment when it really starts to catch on and be done universally. Yeah,

Blaze Liffick
I think you’re absolutely right in the heart of it, it permeates the industry itself, and academia. It isn’t just industry it’s, it’s, you know, academia as well. And I’ve seen this in academia and in computer science, already in other ways. You know I, one of the other areas. That’s been an interest of mine and I’ve worked in for decades, is the issue of computing ethics

ethical use of development. And,

you know, for years and years and years, it was tilting at windmills, it was, you know, convincing my colleagues that ethics has a place in the computer science curriculum that just because it doesn’t have algorithms to it, doesn’t mean it’s not computer science or or that it’s not important to computer scientists understand. And it’s only since accreditation as forced the hands of computer science programs that that ethics has been taught in computer science programs. Same sort of thing is going to happen here, you got to get them into it somehow. And I don’t know if you know I do know that those, you know, the folks in the Assets special interest group at the ACM are doing everything they can think of to encourage their colleagues, but it’s also going to take, I think folks who are more on the engineering side to and more on the disabilities support side to go to their conferences and interact with them there. Yeah, carry the message to them at their conferences like the. SIG chi conferences special interest group for computer human interaction. The ACM has every year. The assets conferences important, but those are sort of the choir, people, right, they’re the ones who are already converted, you need to get the others, sort of, LinkedIn, and build the grassroots, in that patient.

Peter Jewett
Yeah I mean from my own perspective I never knew this was a thing until 2016 I you know I, I just didn’t wasn’t aware of it and as soon as I was it was immediately like a light bulb and, you know wow this is something we really need to be doing when we’re building websites you know this is the same as a car manufacturer or selling seat or selling cars with seat belts and safety features you know you just do it because it’s the right thing to do and,

Blaze Liffick
well I didn’t start putting seatbelts needed to do so, I mean Right, right. I’m a thing that was common. Elsewhere available but not many cars had a lot of cars. in my early years, that didn’t have seatbelts. Yeah, well,

George Heake
I was at a session at a conference a couple months ago, and the session was one of the people in the session was from Michigan State, and they did a thing called. They had accessibility champions, on, on campus, and what they were were people that were in each department or college. that was the champion of accessibility to kind of promote that first tier of accessibility awareness, the find out what was needed between educational technologists to the faculty, to staff, etc. And it, it went really really well, And I’ve been thinking about it for a while, of, of, especially my passion, my interest of Strategic Outreach is that I think it’s really powerful to take people that are already on your side, and run with it by example and then not put much effort and I’ve mentioned this before, not put too much effort in converting someone that’s just doesn’t want to have anything to do with it eventually there’ll be some kind of peer pressure or pressure from the other departments that are doing it well, and I in the feedback that I got from the Michigan State project, it was interesting because they just got together and had a work group and supplied information and there was a really solid network of and getting questions answered about accessibility, and eventually that policy was changed and was funding along the way. But when it started, was pretty much by the seat of their pants with no funding, which, you know I have a reputation of starting stuff with no funding and and getting results which tend to anger a lot of people when I was in academia, but do you think something like that would work on a higher ed campus, in addition to trying to have accessibility built into programs when we teach our future developers.

Blaze Liffick
Well I think that it’s a good model. There’s no question that having an advocate at the table. Anytime anything is being discussed, is, is important, and academia is, unfortunately, also a matter of how the faculty can leverage that knowledge base into something that they can get promoted by.

George Heake
Yeah. Yeah, good point.

Blaze Liffick
I hate to say it that way. But the driving force behind what most faculty do is can I get tenure, can I get promoted.

And

you got to break through that. And, and help them understand that these that anything that you do that promotes accessibility will be respected within their discipline

George Heake
as good point.

Blaze Liffick
And, and, you know that’s where I’ve fought battles for a very long time, both in terms of the accessibility stuff but also in terms of the ethics stuff. You know I had colleagues for years, not want to count. A number of my publications, because they had to do with ethics or accessibility.

They weren’t computer science. And it took a long time to get to get around them.

Now, thankfully within my department, those people are gone. Finally, and to some extent it’s, you know, old timers that were very set in their ways and didn’t want to see how things were changing. But it’s, it is a matter of sometimes convincing people in academia that there is something to be gained for them, as well as for everybody else. Because altruism is fine, but at the end of the day, that’s not going to pay their bills.

Peter Jewett
And that’s the challenge was selling accessibility to any organization is, you know it’s they helping them to understand the scope of universal design and how this is going to make everything better for everybody, and getting them out of this mindset that we’re doing it for the one person they see in their head you know they visualize the blind person with, you know, the the dog walking down the street and they think we’re just doing it for that one out of 1000 people that they see. And, you know, helping them to understand that this is, this is a big issue. This is a big segment of the population and. And there are real benefits,

Blaze Liffick
but it’s there, the unintended consequences are sometimes called far outweighed sometimes the intended consequences. It’s the old curb cut argument, curb cuts were put in place for people in wheelchairs Well Guess how many people use those curb cuts who aren’t in wheelchairs. Every time you got a wheeled cart of some sort that you got to get across the street. Every time you got a basket of some sort, you know that we use them all the time. And the number of people who find that useful is vastly more than the number of people in wheelchairs, so helping them understand that is hard. Again, it’s that get out of your own mindset, you know, that, that base of, here’s what’s going to help me. Or here’s what I’m developing for myself. It’s helping them understand, You know, that’s not how you design stuff. If you’re designing just for yourself. That’s the worst possible way to design.

Peter Jewett
I mean I guess you’re gonna have people in the world that have a sense of empathy that consciously try to be empathetic and you know like it’s it’s not always easy and it’s, it’s something you know I think you do have to train, you know like you have to have them next to you in the pilot seat getting them in that mindset. And yet, certainly some people maybe never going to develop that sense of empathy.

Blaze Liffick
I can’t tell you how many my students haven’t gone through my HCI class, come back years later after working at a company, and they, wow, I, it, it took me a while to really understand what you were telling me about getting out and developing things, not for myself, but thinking about how others are going to interact with this thing. And boy, were you right. You know, that’s always. That’s the ultimate moment for for a teacher, right, is for a student to come back and say You are right. But it, it happens a lot, but it does take a special student, a special person to really understand that

not. And it’s not everybody that’s going to get that message.

Peter Jewett
Yeah. GEORGE I mean, to your point, I like the idea of just, it’s certainly I think how we approach, expanding our network, finding customers finding employees, it’s like, let’s find the like minded people that are going to agree and are going to want to get on this and help them to think like this, and, you know, to hell with the people that don’t want to, you know, if they don’t want to, when I’m on the call and you know somebody’s like, oh I got this demand letter No way in hell I’m paying a lawyer for this or you know like this is, this is BS yada yada. It should be illegal and, you know, we try to make them realize, hey, you know, maybe the ADA demand letters are an unfortunate thing but generally it’s a good thing you’re doing and you know, I’d say that probably 10% of my sales calls it’s, it’s very clear that it’s not a good fit, it’s maybe someone just trying to do it for the wrong reason. And, you know, I don’t, I don’t have the time or the energy to, to convince somebody I’ll certainly take the first pass at it but if they want to, if they want to be a contrarian, on the topic, it’s just like, let’s, there’s plenty of people that are open to this and are willing to help us push this forward and, you know, at some point if we can find enough of those people, We’re gonna just out number and overrun the people that don’t have any interest in this, and they’re just going to have to deal with it, and, you know, it’s a matter of finding your natural allies, yep, yep. Yeah. Well awesome plays, I’m gonna wrap this up and it’s been awesome, awesome talking to you do it today this is, this is really cool. Thank you. I’ve enjoyed it. I think we should you know we should maybe get another one of these if you’re willing on the schedule and we, we’ve kind of talked about accessibility and, you know, academia, but I’d love to out I don’t think we’ve really talked much about assistive technology and it sounds like that’s a, that’s a huge part of what you’ve done in your career so if you’re if you’re willing, I’d love to set up a second one of these and maybe dive more into your work on assistive technology and what that all look like. I’d love to cool. I’ve got to do one bit of housekeeping George and then I’ll give it way t shirt. Then I’ll have you, I guess doing do an outro if you want but looks like the winner this week on LinkedIn, you can follow us, just look up accessible web on LinkedIn, we’d love to have you join anyone out there and follow us we’re trying to hit 500 subscribers so we can live streaming this on LinkedIn as well as on Facebook and kind of expand our audience to to the business people out there that we’re really trying to get on board with with web accessibility, but the winner today from LinkedIn is Eli GE, so if you’re listening Eli drop us a line and if you’re not, we will track you down and in mail you a t shirt. George you have any closing thoughts so

George Heake
yeah. Blaze up. I’m glad we were able to connect It’s been too long. And I hope we can work together moving forward and getting another podcast and maybe doing some other work together, but always great talking with you. Brings back really good memories and stuff that I’ve learned from you, back during the day has held me strong. For my pursuit of what I’m doing now. And,

Blaze Liffick
thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much for the invitation. I’ve had a wonderful time.

Peter Jewett
All right, all right later everyone we’ll talk soon.