Accessible Web Podcast: Heather Berg

Peter Jewett
Welcome, everyone to Episode 10 of the accessible web podcast. We’re here today with a member of our team Heather Berg, where we’re switching things up a little bit. Give people a little context, give a little audio descriptions. I am Peter Jewett. I’m located here in my house in the in the country with some trees behind me in Huntington, Vermont. And I’ve got my blue shirt on. I’m a moustache, Caucasian male with a blue shirt and accessible web hat. Heather, Heather’s sitting in a modern, modern kitchen, it looks like today virtual background she’s got going. Yeah, I wish that was my kitchen. Um, so Heather’s a Caucasian blonde woman with with a accessible web. Sure. And then we’ve also got Paige on today. Paige is doing ASL translations for us that she does every podcast and she’s a blonde, Caucasian woman with a black shirt on. So we’re all streaming today remotely via a Google meet. So all checking in from our respective corners of the planet here, I guess the state really the country. But anyway, we can do a little garlow intro for Heather. So and jump right into this. Heather Berg is a third generation vermonter born and raised in the Rutland region. She has a congenital condition resulting in significantly limited functional vision. Heather attended the University of Vermont where she earned a degree in physical therapy and joy and a 21 year career working in that field. Several years ago, a further decline in her vision provided her an opportunity to reevaluate her career options and led her to accept a position with the Vermont division for the blind and visually impaired. She worked for six years as an employment consultant, supporting fellow blind and visually impaired Vermonters in their search for employment. It was in this job while networking with local employers that she met Peter Jewett and became familiar with accessible web. In 2019. She was helped. She was asked to help a web developer accessibility usability testing practices for the WCAG 2.1 double a certification clients. Following a year of contract testing work, Heather was invited to join a web permanently as accessibility UX testing coordinator in April of 2021. When Heather is not working, she’s pursuing a graduate degree in accessibility studies from Central Washington University, taking long walks in nature, and spending time with her family. So welcome, Heather. Glad we could finally coordinate and get you on the podcast here.

Heather Berg
Ooh, that was a lot. It didn’t sound that long when I got the intro. Sorry about that. Yeah,

Peter Jewett
no worries. It’s great. I never realized that you were a physical therapist. I know. I think we may have a connection there. Yeah. My my wife is a is a PT. In my mother, actually. So Oh, really? Wow. I guess I just naturally gravitate to physical therapists

Heather Berg
to talk about being steeped in the medical model of disability for a good long time.

Peter Jewett
Yep. Yeah. So today, we’re gonna talk UX testing. That’s that’s kind of what you’re spearheading and accessible web. So I guess, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what we’re up to. And in terms of building our accessibility team, UX testing team and services?

Heather Berg
Sure. Well, thanks for inviting me to be on the podcast. I’m a big podcast fan, I certainly enjoy listening to them. So it’s kind of fun to get to participate this time. So I thought maybe it would make sense to talk a little bit about kind of why we’re even doing us testing with users of access technology. You know, we talk a lot about compliance and conformance and principles and guidelines and success criteria and all that when we talk about web accessibility. And that’s all super important technical components to help provide, like structure and consistency and help developers and designers kind of get it right on their end as far as developing and building accessible content for the web and web applications. But then, everybody works really hard on that. But if we don’t test it with folks who actually belong On the access technology that leverages a lot of that sort of behind the scenes work, we could be missing some really important components of web accessibility. And the other piece is an I probably should have led with this actually, is that the the UX or usability, user experience testing when it comes to accessibility, how it really brings home, the human component of this work, right? Like, it’s easy to get really bogged down in success criteria, checkboxes and conformance and legal concerns and every other thing that we hear about on the regular now in this space, but I think what kind of sometimes doesn’t make it to the forefront of the discussion is that this is something that’s real people, these are people who have families and lives and aspirations and careers and want to seek education and employment and, and equal opportunity, basically, you know, an equitable life experience. And so I think, sometimes that connects a little better with folks when when you just really that’s the most basic element to UX testing. Right? Is it affects people? These are human beings? You know, I don’t know, I know, certainly, you know, here, you’re more on the on the technical side, would you say that that’s true? Sometimes we overlook the sort of human component to things.

Peter Jewett
Absolutely. I mean, that’s, that, I think why we’ve seen in the broader industry of web design, UX, and UI becoming such a, a field in and of itself, profession, whereas before, there was a lot of just, I’m a graphic designer. And, you know, now we’re talking about, you know, with computers with the internet phones, kind of human, I’ve heard it put a couple of ways, but as a lot of it’s like, human computer interaction design, there’s different courses, but certainly, yeah, it’s a it’s a big thing that was overlooked for a long time. And it’s, it’s something that it’s easy to just say this website’s good and put it online, and it looks good for your one set of eyes, and you’re one, you know, you’re you’re launching a website and celebrate. But there’s just always, always always improvements you can make for pretty much every user, if you just start watching multiple people use the website, and it’s really beneficial, it’s beneficial for the users, and it’s beneficial for the, for the business, from just ROI perspective.

Heather Berg
I think it’s important that you, you brought that up, you know, sort of the whole, maybe a practice or a discipline within itself. I mean, accessibility usability testing is really, you know, just one component of that piece. But it can can contribute, you know, greatly to the overall, you know, user experience with any particular product when it comes to like the efficiency and the

you know, it’s it’s, it’s part of the big picture. And just for a long time, it’s it’s sort of been overlooked. particularly as it relates as usability relates to individuals who use access technology. And I have to apologize, I don’t know whether whether you’ve covered I said technology on previous previous podcast episodes, do we need to talk just a little bit about kind of what some of the primary areas of access technology are just to give people? Yeah, let’s have background.

Peter Jewett
Yeah, for sure. Let’s talk about it.

Heather Berg
Okay. So, in particular, you know, we think about a few different areas when it comes to, you know, usability testing, and that is individuals who, you typically it’ll be individuals with disabilities who leverage this technology, but we don’t want to we don’t want to make any assumptions. So assistive technology can be things like a screen reader, for example, which now gets a lot of airtime in the accessible accessibility space because it can be one of the, you know, more challenging technologies to design. You know, to work with a screen reader is something that typically someone with a visual impairment or blindness in or some individuals or certain types of cognitive and learning disabilities might leverage to help them access digital content. So it basically reads content from a screen, whether that’s on a laptop or a mobile phone, wherever your device of choice is. We’ll read that content back to you. And we’ll try to make sense of it in a way

that

helps the user understand, you know what’s on the screen and sort of sort of where it’s located. And also, in addition to the sort of element where it’s reading into you improvise an interaction interface, either with a keyboard or on a touchscreen, again, depending on the device that you’re using. So a screen reader is one screen magnification can be another one. And that was kind of self explanatory in that it enlarges test images, graphics, whatever else you might be looking at. And typically someone with low vision might be using that type of application, there are other applications where you can adjust the size, alignment, color contrast of the of the text on a screen, which someone with a learning disability. And our cognitive impairment might also be using. There are other devices to give input to the computer. So we talked a lot about keyboard navigation, right? Because that usually pairs with a screen reader, but there are also switch devices. You know, adaptive mice, there are systems that use voice input, sometimes that’s software, sometimes it’s hardware. So it’s really it’s a variety of tools that allow access for individuals with a variety of disabilities, to basically to access the internet. Any others? Peter, you want to add to that list? I mean, there obviously there are that is not an exhaustive list. They’re just kind of the ones that came to mind. I guess we could also mention multimedia, right? We’re providing captioning. And ASL here. Peter did a little audio described. intro. So you know, that’s another that’s another type of although, well, the the captioning is a technology for sure. And itself. What do you think we missed any?

Peter Jewett
Yeah, I mean, I would just point people to back a couple podcast episodes, I think to back now. We talked to the Vermont assistive technology tryouts center and or tryout program who run they run tryout centers. So there’s, there’s a variety, almost a countless amount of assistive technologies, there’s a lot that are kind of home grown DIY solutions based on what somebody, you know, what helps somebody and just day to day life or to interact with technology. So, you know, it’s it’s kind of an infinite list of assistive technology. But what we’re trying to do is, ideally, by following, you know, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, that’s the first layer, I would say, doing the coding, right. So that it meets WCAG, which should mean that the various assistive technologies are able to communicate, and then the whole thing today is, is verifying that that is actually the case. Because just because it does work, or just because, you know, it’s it can get someone through, it’s still UX testing, it’s still all about the user all about the person. And the same way you can make optimizations to improve the experience of somebody that might not use assistive technology. We’re also trying to make improvements for people that do use various assistive technology. So it’s, it’s kind of an endless, endless amount of testing, watching, talking to your customers talking to users, and and making improvements to give them a better experience on the on your website or web application, or, you know, pretty much any aspect of your interaction with them.

Heather Berg
Yeah, and you know, to kind of you’re away from getting too much into the weeds with the assistive technology, I think the take home message is that a, these are real people leveraging this technology, right? Always remember, there’s a human at the center of this process. And then the second piece is for many, many, pretty probably pretty much all assistive technology users or access technology users, the tech that technology is essential. Right? So that’s one of the reasons why, you know, we Peter started kind of having this conversation around that we want to, you know, think about using access technology versus assistive technology. So I’ll just use myself as an example. I’m a screen reader user. And my screen reader doesn’t assist me to use the internet. Like, it allows me to use the internet, no screen reader, no internet. So I think it’s really important for people to understand that this is non negotiable, this is necessary. This is essential. And, you know, we talk a lot about, and I think you kind of alluded to it, Peter is how often making improvements and accessibility usability for your products, you know, often carries over to general usability improvements. And I think that that’s really, you know, that’s an important point to make. But I try not to lead with that, because I don’t in any way want to invalidate the unique and specific needs of access technology users. So yeah, I mean, a simple analogy would be like, you know, if I don’t have a screen reader, my screen reader is not working, or that content can be accessed by my screen reader, it’d be like going to your favorite restaurant and like, the door’s locked, they’re letting everybody else in. But when you get there, no, you’re not going in. Right. You know, that’s a that’s a really sort of simple analogy, but I mean, house. That’s the reality.

Peter Jewett
Yeah, I mean, right, before we met had there, and probably part of the catalyst for reaching out, you know, we saw I saw accessible web web accessibility is kind of an opportunity. And you know, and it also was something that was a real kind of feel good opportunity, a place where we could really have a mission. So we spun accessible web out of our agency. And the agency does great work. And there’s a lot of economic benefits that we have, and we help our clients sell more stuff. But, you know, when we saw when, you know, I first encountered web accessibility, it was this moment of like, Oh, God, how did I not know about this? How, how have I been building websites for 15 years at this point, and, and I’d never thought of this, and it was, you know, semi, that was probably one of the, you know, first kind of embarrassing professional like, oh, man, this is this is an area that I genuinely want to get into, and I want to learn and, and there’s, there’s an opportunity to kind of really change the web, on a fundamental level, and, and train a lot of other people in this space on how to do this, and how to be aware of this and how to test for it, and really raise the empathy and so we kind of dove in headfirst, and we put up, you know, bought the domain accessible web.com and we put up our first website and started learning WCAG and having our developers take, you know, various courses and whatnot. And we got to the point where we were pretty confident and, you know, in our ability to make accessible websites. And we, we had this engagement with a company that was paying us to make their web application accessible, so that they could sell it into a bigger organization that was requiring full accessibility. And we worked, you know, did I did the best we could do, you know, did it, you know, in our mind a great job and turned over our findings, and worked with the client to upgrade their web app. And then the client called us and they said, Hey, can you talk? Can you hop on a phone call with our, with our customer, that require accessibility, we want to work through a couple things. And so we hop on again, we’re feeling really good about this project. And the company was like, Well, did you test this at all, because it’s got a lot of accessibility features, but the screen reader breaks every time the screen reader cannot get past the navigation on this website. And so it was just this like, Oh, shit moment that we realized we can’t do this, just as developers, we can’t do this. Just as coders, you know, dissecting a website going through checklist, that the most important piece of this is is making sure people can use the the final product and and, you know, from there, we will, you know, immediately kind of started putting out feelers in saying, All right, how do we how do we start to look into this and get together a group that is interested in helping us test technically proficient enough to provide good feedback. And so even today, I would, I would look at our company, and we’re doing great work, and I’m really proud of everything we’re doing, but even today, it’s one of the big holes that we’re really eager to improve on is getting more users Looking at websites and showing the value to our customers on why this is important, and and really building out the biggest testing team we can, and providing also on the flip side of that providing, you know, good wages basically like a good job to people that want to test with us. Because if we can, if we can figure this out, right, we can have a team of access technology users, that is our testing our clients website, providing awesome feedback, doing it in the scientific UX testing manner. And, and really making meaningful improvements. So it’s, it was something that was just it was like, the worst moment of probably my professional career being on that call and realizing we’ve neglected this piece and something, you know, we’re really trying to figure out how to put put this side of the business together.

Heather Berg
Yeah, well, I mean, the cool thing about that, is that, you know, you were willing to just step up and be like, yep, we didn’t think about this. Let’s, let’s get it right. I mean, you know, we mentioned my previous work with a division for the blind or visually impaired as an employment consultant, I met with a lot of employers, then, you know, when I met with you, I think you’ve told me that story. And I thought, jeez, these people maybe actually really want to get it right. Like, not only are they in the business, because, you know, accessibility is starting to become the cool and trendy thing to do. They actually care about the end users. And you know, that that state stayed with me, you know, after just initially meeting you. And then also, you know, certainly with my employment background, the fact that that a web wanted to, you know, generate some some good, productive, sustainable employment opportunities for folks who, who use access technology as well. You know, that that really, really resonated with me, because there are we know, right, there are plenty of folks in the accessibility business right now who, you know, maybe got the technical end, right, but are still, you know, pretty, pretty much overlooking the end user. So, so we talked a little bit about, you know, some access technology and the human component, and why why you accessing, is important, and certainly, it also contributes to the overall like, business case, right, for accessibility. You know, US testing with users who use access technology can identify, you know, usability issues that don’t get picked up on automated scans, don’t get picked up on checklists for success criteria, and all that. So you know, if you’re a business and you’re going to invest in getting accessibility, right, like, it just makes sense to, to do the usability testing, just like you would with any other product product, and, you know, you get basically, you know, ROI return on investment is the business term. But, you know, you just, you want to get, get as much as you can out of the time and resources and energy that you’ve put into a building out accessibility for your product. So you don’t need for that reason it makes sense, as well. And we know that companies who invest in accessibility, and in particular, you know, usability, they they see improved, you know, they generate more revenue, they are seen as socially responsible, you know, the just a variety of benefits, you know, that they see, as well. And so, you know, when I’m doing testing work in particular, you know, I’m thinking about not only my experience, but you know, I’m thinking about the client, I’m thinking about, like, how can I test this product and provide feedback, that’s not only going to make it better experience for me and maybe other screenreader users, but what’s just gonna be overall, make a better product, right? Because I mean, I don’t know any business who doesn’t want to either sell more product or have more, you know, hits on their website, or, you know, there’s no business model that doesn’t ultimately want a bigger market share. So, when you take those things into consideration, you know, I mean, it’s a clear reason to do usability testing, as well. So maybe we could talk a little bit about, you know, sort of what we do and accessible web. Yeah, testing, testing wise. So, you know, the caveat I’ll give before we started, this is a work in progress, right? We’re just starting to build out our testing team. We’re super invested in it and in in getting it getting it right And at this point, what we’re doing is looking to build a core team of testers, maybe five or six, maybe a couple more individuals who we know are proficient expert users of their access technology of choice, whatever they use, whether that’s screen magnification, screen reader, voice input, switch control doesn’t matter. We really looking for folks who are skilled, highly skilled in that area. And as we put that team together, and the other thing that we are looking to do is, is make sure that we have a diverse group of individuals so that we are using different types of access technology, as well as folks who use different operating systems, and different browsers, user agents. So because we know, right, and the more scenarios you test for, the more potential issues you’re going to pick up on and can’t resolve, before someone comes back to your site and says, Hey, this doesn’t work. So you know, we want a diverse group of testers. And then typically, what we do is, is, when a client is at, I think it’s when they complete their third round of audits. And they’re at near the end of their certification process, the accessibility specialists will write up a testing plan with specific areas of a particular website or product that they want tested. It’s always a little bit of a balancing act, because they want to provide the tester with enough information to know what you need to do, but not really guide them. Because theoretically, we want this to be like a first encounter with a product. So once that testing plan is is written up against passed along to the testers, the testers then go ahead and execute each one of those steps in the testing task. And just as an example, the task might be can you use the primary navigation? Can you make selections from the drop down menus in the primary navigation? You know, there might be interactive elements on the page, like, can you fill out the contact us for? Can you search, or locate content within the site in more than one way? You know, those sorts of things. So the tester goes through and executes each one of those tests. While they’re doing that they are recording their screen, as well as audio. So if there’s a screen reader in play, or if someone’s using voice control, you’ll be able to hear exactly what keystrokes and commands they’re using, and at the same time to be able to capture on the screen where their keyboard focus is what’s happening. And it’ll become pretty clear pretty quickly if something’s not working. And the feedback I have had, from the folks who work directly with clients, once we’re able to provide those recordings has been pretty, pretty positive. I think there have been some folks that have had your same aha moment here. Yeah. When they when they got a chance to look at those those videos. So we complete the test, we record everything, we provide brief written notes, as well. Beyond, I mean, I particularly You know, when I’m testing, and I certainly always share this with my fellow testers, in addition, you know, it’s easy to come up with things that don’t go right, or things that don’t work, right. We’re always looking for those things. And that’s super important, but also like to really amplify things that aren’t going well, like, wow, that worked really well that that, you know, navigation from page to page within the site was so consistent and predictable. I never got lost, I really understood exactly what was going on. I was getting consistent screen reader feedback, I really tried to amplify those things. Because, you know, we don’t want to be clients over the head with everything that’s going wrong, right? We want to be like, man, when you get it, right, this works so well. It just makes life a little bit better in that moment, where people are using the product. So I always try to, you know, emphasize that piece as well. We return those video and written files back to the web accessibility specialists or the auditors. They review them and then, you know, interact with clients with them as they see fit where there are areas, you know, to celebrate or areas that need to, you know, be tweaked a little bit more. You know, Peter, you and I’ve talked about down the road. We know that testing is most effective when it’s implemented early and often I know our business model right now, or the workflow at least is to, you know, kind of bring it in more towards the end of the process. That makes sense sort of what we’re doing right now. But you want to talk a little bit about, you know, sort of the big picture vision, the, the US testing marketplace.

Peter Jewett
Now, I don’t know, if we want to get into that we don’t want our competitors that are giving too much away. But I think broadly, we’re hoping to match people up with, with access, technology users that are that fit, I mean, there’s such a wide variety of skill levels, it’s, it’s the same as his computer users, you know, you’ve got your grandmother that doesn’t know how to do anything, or maybe she’s very technically savvy, and she’s the one all their friends turn to. And then you might have your buddy that, you know, I’ve got a buddy that works in the trades, and he doesn’t use Facebook, and he doesn’t want to use it, he’ll use a computer for email, but you know, having tried to write an excel formula, and is never going to do it. So, you know, access technology users, anyone, it’s just people, right? There’s all sorts of different nuance variations on how they interact with their computer or their phone. And, and what we’re trying to do is, is get a big spectrum of people. And especially screen readers, you know, screen readers are kind of notoriously The, the hardest nut to crack in this in this situation. At least from what I’ve seen, and and there’s users, you know, there’s people that have been using screen readers since they started using computers. And if you’ve ever listened to them, it’s it’s borderline hard to keep up because they have the screen reader turned up to such a high speed and they are interacting with web pages almost faster, or at least as fast as someone that’s just scanning visually through a page. And then you’ve got other people that are maybe learning and they’re they’re not aware of all the shortcuts, they’re not aware of maybe all the features. And you know, it’s a little bit slower process, but they can get through the page as well. So so how do we get a bunch of access technology users in a place where we can match them up so that when customers want to have this testing available, we’ve we’ve got the pool of, of interested and trained, you know, that’s the other piece is how do we create the process? So it’s not just an ad hoc, you know, do this, do this, do this, but UX is a science, it’s, you know, it’s people are majoring in this in school, and getting college degrees getting, you know, Masters PhDs around this. So how do we really make our offering as high level as possible and create the most most value for our customers as possible. I mean, obviously, we want if you if you’re interested in UX testing, for your app, or your website, get in touch with us. And you know, it’s most likely something we should roll into a broader project, I guess I kind of skipped over part of what you just brought up how they’re why we do it at the end, we just found that when customers are paying for it, there’s a lot more as part of a broader accessibility project, it’s a lot more cost effective to do it at the end to, to fix all the barriers that we know exist. If we’re looking at a web page that has no alt tags on images, we know a screen reader users not going to have any context there. If we see a website without a skip to content link, we know that that’s an improvement that we can implement. So so you know, given the fact that people are paying us money to do this work, we found pretty early on. We used to do what before testing and after test to show improvement. But, you know, I think most people come to us with an understanding that if they haven’t been thoughtful about making a proper accessible website, there’s plenty of room for improvement, you know, accessibility doesn’t happen accidentally. It’s something you need to be thoughtful about implementing. And really be diligent, and, you know, get it into play. So it’s why we tend to do UX testing as a final step to kind of prove our results and add a layer of usability and on some level confirmation that we’ve done our job correctly. But that being said, we always uncover stuff. There’s always more to be done. And that’s probably the case for any round of UX testing. It’s it’s probably not ever going to happen that someone just says Yep, that was perfect. You know, let’s move on and go to a different site. Yeah. So

Heather Berg
actually, to that point, Peter, I can say, you know, as good as everybody is along the, you know, throughout the audit and remediation process, I haven’t done a test for client or for accessible web internally, that hasn’t resulted in some even minor usability issues. Yeah. So you know, yeah, yeah, I mean, you bet we basically just sold off after usability testing, because even though it’s then, you know, worked on and looked at and gone through and studied by folks who really know what they’re doing, we typically still identify usability issues, even if they’re not, like straight up full on accessibility.

Peter Jewett
So let me ask you this, how do you know not everyone has the budget to engage with accessible web and do a full comprehensive audit and certification and UX testing and everything? Do you have any thoughts or advice for small business owners, people that are trying to make some incremental improvements? And, you know, no members of their community that that are potentially willing to help? Is there? How would you suggest kind of business owner reach out to the broader community and, and maybe get some people to provide feedback on on how their website works?

Heather Berg
Yeah, that’s a really good question. Um, you know, I think a thoughtful way to do that is through perhaps, like, nonprofit agencies in your area, or state agencies. So you know, we’re in Vermont, I’ll just use for example, I think at one point, actually, back in the day, and you did this, Peter was just to reach out to here in the division for the blind and visually impaired, it’s part of our State Health and Human Services, programming. And, and, you know, just sort of talk with someone there, I was in the employment role at that time. And so, you know, we connected you let me know what you were looking for. And, you know, then we were in a position to help you, you know, disseminate information, you know, into the community, I think going with a trusted source like that can be really helpful. It gives you a little bit of credibility within the disability community, you could you could reach out to your every state has Center for Independent Living, you know, that those can be good ways to get in touch with folks. And, you know, likely there are individuals out there who, who might be interested in doing that type of work. And, you know, I know you mentioned in your question, like, a small business, maybe doesn’t have a big budget for a full project, please, hey, anyone who does testing for you? Unfortunately, although I’m certain it’s been unintentional, there’s a history within this community web accessibility in particular, businesses, you know, maybe when they first started out thinking like, Oh, yeah, we got to get a bunch of blind people to test this out. And, you know, they would do a project and have folks do testing, and then they, they’d be like, oh, here’s an Amazon gift card, you know, this, what you’re asking for from people is really a very highly specialized skill set. And people deserve to be compensated. So please, if you don’t take anything else away from this, remember to value and respect those testers. But yeah, you know, going with a local agency, I think, like I said, to unknown source, can be really helpful. So get your foot in the door.

Peter Jewett
I think, dude, just, yeah, yeah. And I guess I’d add on to it. If you have a website, make sure you put an accessibility policy on it, give people a means to get in touch, if they’re having trouble using your website, to both report issues and to just have a number to call and email address to get in touch with to bring it to your attention. And ideally, you know, when when you get those emails, when you get those phone calls, do your best to provide kind of that that product or service. You know, because no website. Go ahead. I would say even on a more fundamental level, answer that email. Yeah, right, right. The phone call Yeah,

Heather Berg
I just can’t tell you how many times I’ve just I just don’t bother because I know. Now the burden is on me, the user, right? And it’s going to take my time away from work or school or whatever else. I’m engaged in. And I’m just not going to do it yet. Because Because I know so you know, we be the could be the business that answers the phone or replies to the email, not everybody’s going to sue you not everybody’s gonna, you know, be confrontational about it, they may just simply want to alert you to an issue.

Peter Jewett
Yep. And I mean, to your to your waffle house example earlier, you know, this is, this is fundamentally what we’re doing with our clients is making it so that when someone walks up to your business virtually, and they land on your website, and they start navigating, it just works. And I guess, you know, the coolest thing for me was, was how they’re kind of seeing one of the first times we were doing testing with you, and like it worked, and you were like, oh, wow, this is, you know, this is awesome, that this website’s actually working properly. You know, for the most part, there’s obviously improvements and bugs. But that’s that’s fundamentally, our goal is that you, we’re not just letting people into the Waffle House, because the doors not locked, you know, we want full access that anyone else has. And that’s really the beauty of the web is there’s no, there’s no physical limitations, we can build it however, we want to build it. And it is possible to build websites, web applications, that people can really be on an equal playing field and have access to all the features and information and interactivity that anyone can have access to. Yeah, I mean, it’s the very most basic principle of inclusive design, right? equitable use. Let’s talk for a second to about, we can close this out with kind of a hit on hit on overlay technologies. And I think it’s fair to really kind of call them out on this on this call. But can you speak to like, why overlay technologies, you know, these companies that well call them out by name, but these companies that say, you can install a piece of JavaScript on our website and our AI capabilities will make your website accessible or will provide will automatically provide these tools so that people can get the access technologies they need to use the site? Why? Why doesn’t that really work? in practice?

Heather Berg
Well, I mean, there’s a few reasons. So it’s interesting that you brought that up, I literally encountered this, just the other day, I won’t mention the brand by name, but I needed to buy a new pair of sneakers, and I went online. And on my mobile device, I landed on their website, and my keyboard focus got trapped in the notification, it was like, hey, download this special software, here’s our accessibility statement, it’s gonna be great.

I couldn’t, I couldn’t get out.

So I mean, there’s just a straight up example of why it doesn’t work. I don’t want to know about your special software, I don’t want to know what you’ve done to make my screen reader experience extraordinary. I want to go to your website, and I want to buy my darn sneakers. And I don’t want it to take all day. So there’s that from the user side of things. But then, you know, I know my specific technology, and I’m very efficient with it. Why on earth would I want to download your special I’m doing air quotes where anybody can see me your special software, just to get access to your website? Oh, don’t get me going on this. Is this get my blood pressure up every time? So you know, and I mean, the other thing, just, you know, you’ll get a screen reader notification that says This site has been optimized for screen reader use. Click here for the screen reader accessible content whenever

I’m

automatically suspicious. Like what have you what part of the typical user experience Am I missing out on by being redirected to this equal that separate door to your building or you know, access point to your website? It’s just bad practice. People with disabilities don’t like it. It doesn’t work. Don’t do it. Can I be anywhere?

Peter Jewett
No. I mean, that’s it’s it’s the hardest part. For me in my role doing sales and business development is getting this across that you can’t that these companies out there while they may be big players, and you may see them everywhere. They’re they’re disingenuously advertising their software as a solution. And it’s

Heather Berg
right. I mean, that just means they’ve got a good marketing team because you see them everywhere. Yeah, doesn’t mean that their product is any good.

Peter Jewett
Absolutely. It’s just a veneer of accessibility for people that don’t know any better. And, you know, it’s it’s not right. It’s not fundamentally solving the problem. So I guess one of them in any frequently makes it worse. Right, right. Yeah,

Heather Berg
I couldn’t I couldn’t get out of there. Damon. alerting me to all the grand things they had done to make their website accessible yet somewhere else. I mean, I still bought their stupid shoes because they needed that brand. somewhere else.

Peter Jewett
Yep. Yeah. So I mean, yeah, thanks, Heather for you know, joining today and, you know, thanks for all the work we’ve done. You’re doing and you know, we’re continuing to do to kind of grow out the team and, and really focus on you know, we’re committed to doing this the right way it accessible web and it’s, you know, it’s gonna be there’s, there’s no shortcuts, really, I guess, is what we’re finding. It’s it’s a matter of being diligent and doing it correctly, because the web should be equitable. And it’s, it’s an achievable thing. It’s just a matter of kind of putting in the work, I guess. So.

Heather Berg
Yeah. Well, and I mean, the fact that you and I are still sitting here and nearly the end of 2021 talking about this tells us that we all have a lot of work left to do.

Peter Jewett
Absolutely, absolutely. So. Yep. Well, um, yeah. Thanks for joining today, Heather. It’s been awesome. We’ll, we’ll have to get you on another episode. I’d love to talk. Have a conversation about your DB vi experience too. And kind of the challenges of, you know, placing people employing people that may have disabilities, breaking down stereotypes with employers. So there’s, there’s a whole nother podcast that we could do there that we should. There’s

Heather Berg
a whole employment podcast series. Yes. I’m George and I got some good stuff coming up for you. I’m always happy to beat the employment drum.

So

Peter Jewett
Okay, awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks, Heather. Thank you, Paige for providing the ASL today. And thanks, everyone for watching and tune in next week. Later, all