Tim Berners-Lee 00:00 | Today, 30 years from my original proposal for an information management system, half the world is online. It's a moment to celebrate how far we've come, but also an opportunity to reflect on how far we have yet to go. The web has become a public square, a library, a doctor's office, a shop, a school, a design studio, an office, a cinema, a bank, and so much more. Of course, with every new feature, every new website, the divide between those who are online, and those who are not increases, making it all the more imperative to make the web available for everyone.

Sam Proulx 00:46 | Hello, everyone. Welcome to InclusionHub Podcast. I'm Sam Proulx, Accessibility Evangelist at Fable, a leading accessibility testing platform powered by people with disabilities. I'm also blind. Consequently, I know all too well, the challenges posed by an inaccessible and non-inclusive web, barriers affecting more than 1 billion people worldwide, whose voices are not adequately heard, whose rights are too often ignored, and whose daily lives are impeded due to its flawed design. I also know that it doesn't have to be this way. As you learn, it never had to.

InclusionHub[dot]com, an online community and crowd-sourced resource directory dedicated to improving digital accessibility and inclusion for all, launched this podcast to illuminate the ongoing struggle for equality faced by so many people living with disabilities around the globe. Together, we hope to amplify the voices of our community, discuss obstacles and important improvements, and just maybe, help change things for the better. We're sponsored by InclusionHub's founding partners, a leading customer relationship management software provider, Salesforce, HubSpot diamond partner agency Morey Creative Studios, Fable, and BeMyEyes, a free app connecting blind-and low-vision people with sighted volunteers, which I myself use.

Sam Proulx 02:30 | The voice you heard at the top was Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a digital community that develops web standards. In March 2019, Berners-Lee released that recording to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. His remarks also served as an acknowledgment that his dreams of a fully accessible web had yet to materialize. For millions across the globe, navigating the digital world can be painstaking, if not altogether impossible. And that's because for years, the people behind popular tech platforms failed to incorporate web accessibility. Consider this, an estimated 15% of people on this planet experience a disability. And it's critically important to stress, right here at the beginning of this podcast, that having a disability is not the exception, nor a curse. Disabilities know not race, sex, age, nationality, nor socioeconomic status. Disabilities do not discriminate. They are not relegated to one country. They do not judge. Disabilities, rather, are fundamental components of the human experience.

The fact is, the majority of people on this planet will at one or more points during their lives experience a disability. The coronavirus pandemic underscores this. And as it shuttered businesses and schools across the globe, essentially forcing the world online, it also highlighted the inherent disparities regarding digital accessibility. Digital accessibility and inclusion, ensuring that the web and all of its offerings is available to everyone, everywhere, is not a quick fix. It will not be remedied by an overlay, nor an app to fully ensure full accessibility. And inclusion demands a seismic shift in not only how developers approach the design of a site from inception, but of how society perceives those living with disabilities. There is reason for optimism. As you learn in this podcast series, web accessibility is improving, at least in part, because of the threat of noncompliance-based lawsuits, but more importantly, due to an ever-growing understanding that the digital divide must be fully closed if we're ever to achieve a more equitable society.

In this first episode, you'll hear from experts with combined decades of web accessibility experience, including Mike Hess, founder of the nonprofit Blind Institute of Technology, Jutta Treviranus, director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre at Toronto's OCAD University, and an inspiration to me personally, and Laura Kalbag, co-founder of the nonprofit Small Technology Foundation, and author of the book 'Accessibility For Everyone.' Let's get started. Providing some often overlooked, yet oh-so-critical perspective on the original intent and design of the World Wide Web is Mike Hess.

Mike Hess 06:03 | The community of people with disabilities is actually only about 100 years old, just over 100 years old. And what does that mean? Obviously, there were blind people and people who are deaf way before 100 years ago, but 101 years ago, the end of World War I happened and there was this huge influx throughout all the industrialized countries, globally, for this group called 'people with disabilities.' And even though they didn't call it post-traumatic stress, that absolutely, you know, those invisible disabilities that absolutely was taken place to. Well, then, these industrialized countries, what they did to support them was they created a whole bunch of legislation, which is, well, if you're disabled, you can stay home, and here's your government check. Right? And that happened for, call it the next 75 years. And so this community of people with disabilities, quite honestly, have not been active in our economy globally. And it's only been through legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act and that sort of thing that started saying like, no, no, we have equal rights to opportunities, employment opportunities, as well.

So kind of the initial web, kind of the Web 1.0, when everything was just HTML, quite honestly, was an amazingly accessible platform. The text-to-voice technologies worked super, super well. And actually, some historical context amongst the deaf community: email was to support universal communication between those two communities, both the hearing-abled and the non-hearing-abled community. So early on technology was absolutely useful for both blind and deaf communities. It was absolutely, call it Web 2.0, when everything started going object-oriented, that you started to break some of those capabilities, those innate capabilities.

Sam Proulx 07:44 | So how did we arrive at this point, as Hess explains, there was hope for equitable participation in the early days of the internet. Jutta Treviranus echoes that sentiment but explains how decades later, we're still struggling to achieve that goal. You're going to hear extensively from Treviranus, a global expert on inclusive design, whose research has been used to inform everything from government policy to an international treaty on disability rights. She is quite literally one of the foremost experts on web accessibility. Here's Treviranus.

Jutta Treviranus 08:23 | Tim Berners-Lee intended the web to be something very different than what it ended up being. And I was definitely party to that early optimism. We thought that here was an opportunity to publish once and then—that it would allow for diversity, that it would allow for open participation, equitable participation. And also the original intent was that it was intended to be a two-way system, but quickly it became a broadcast system as well, because we apply the same sorts of ideas and notions that we had prior to an innovation to that innovation. So it was supposed to be read, write. It was supposed to be everybody could communicate with each other. Very quickly, because of the way that the web—W3C was structured, and because of membership from corporate private interests, and of course corporate private interests want to lock up IP, have competitive advantage, and at the same time, there was this narrative about entrepreneurship, of breaking things, of quick wins and quick profit, addressing the largest customer base.

And so the optimistic and beneficial parts of the vision of the web as this place that was equally accessible to everyone and where everyone could participate were taken over by ways of protecting IP, whether it was—CSS initially the language that is used or the markup that's used to determine how something is going to be represented, or how you see it in a web browser, was intended to be a system whereby you could have one set of the meaning of what you wanted to communicate, and then many ways of presenting it. But because of the participation and pressure from companies, it became a sort of proprietary system with fonts, which were not allowed unless you had purchased a certain thing. So everything became commercialized, it became monetized.

Sam Proulx 10:51 | At this point, I think we can all grasp the notion of the internet. Well, the digital world as a whole, as a playground of sorts for people to enrich themselves. After all, some of the largest firms in the world can trace their success to the web. Treviranus laments what she calls the hijacking of a system that had the potential of being accessible from the very beginning, and how the disability community has had to resort to laws and regulations to pick up the pieces. In the United States, there's no single law that dictates web accessibility. However, portions of the federal Americans With Disabilities Act (more on that later) apply to the digital world, as do sections of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In the absence of a web equivalent to the ADA, thousands of lawsuits have been filed over non-compliance, and a cottage industry of sorts has developed to fill the void. Here again, is Treviranus.

Jutta Treviranus 11:54 | A system that had every possibility of being accessible by design was to some extent hijacked by corporate interest and flawed by design and by carelessness. It was more important to make things proprietary than to allow open access. To monetize every interaction than to make it universally usable. To corner the market share than to allow people to use diverse, affordable devices. Because of this abject failure of design, the disability community had to resort to regulations and laws. Laws are needed to prevent harm. And because we seem not to know what is good for us, laws are also ill-suited to this task of making sure that the web works for our human diversity. They require static, simple, testable criteria for compliance. And many aspects of good design and accessibility are not static, and they're not testable things. Simple rules mean that the most diverse group of people, which is people with disabilities, need to agree upon a simple set of criteria, which denies the diversity that's there. And the nature of the web is that it isn't static.

Legislation is like these boulders in a raging river, it is counter to the flow. But because we didn't set the course the right way at the beginning, we are stuck now with these boulders. And if I'm brutally, brutally candid, which I'm at this point right now, the reason the web accessibility legislation gets any attention is because it has sprouted an industry. The fact that the web design is broken means there are companies that can make money out of fixing it. The fact that there are now laws, means that these companies can scare and threaten you with the legal risk of non-compliance, backed up by lawyers who can also profit from this. The companies also have a built-in, unassailable PR story: They're helping people with disabilities. This means there are now powerful advocates at the standard stables, whose interest is to strengthen the web content legislation, but not fix the overall problem by making the web accessible by default, through things like the authoring tools, the browsers, the markup, the code, because that would end the burgeoning web accessibility industry.

Sam Proulx 14:26 | Hess and Treviranus have done a great job laying out how we ended up where we are today. With that understanding in mind, it's important to hone in on some of the basic elements of web accessibility. Helping us better comprehend these standards is Laura Kalbag, co-founder of the Small Technology Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for social justice in the digital age. She is also the author of the book 'Accessibility For Everyone.' Here's Kalbag.

Laura Kalbag 14:57 | It's incredibly important to build accessible websites, apps, platforms, anything on the web because by not designing and making things accessible, we're excluding disabled people. And this is a really key thing about accessibility. A lot of people will talk about how accessibility—and the name of my book is ‘Accessibility for Everyone’—makes the web available to everyone. And it does. But the key thing is that when we don't consider accessibility, when we don't consider people's accessibility needs when they're using the web, we actually exclude people from being able to access what we're building. So when we're looking at trying to make our technology accessible, we're trying to do sort of four essential things: We want to make it easy to see, easy to hear, easy to understand, and easy to interact.

And so there are a huge variety of disabilities that might affect the way you access the web and those different things. So you might perhaps be blind and maybe use a screen reader, maybe you use a Braille input. And so these will mean that if the website isn't designed in a way that makes it easy for your screen reader to understand or for your Braille input to be used, then it will be very difficult for you to be able to access that technology. And the same for if you're deaf, if your site has a lot of videos on it, and you don't have captions, or you don't have a transcript, well, then you're making it impossible for people who are deaf to access your content. One of the examples I like to give about web accessibility is comparing it to the accessibility of a building. When you build a building, a modern building nowadays, you wouldn't put steps out the front, you will put a ramp up the front if the building was raised from the ground, or you would try to put the building on the ground so that you didn't need any steps or need any ramp in the first place. You would put up railings so that people could have something to rest on or to use as a guide for going up the stairs or a ramp, you would put lifts in, you wouldn't make everything stairs, that doesn't just help the people who want to visit your building, it helps the people employed within your building as well. It helps everyone.

And so I think that building accessibility is a really good comparison for the accessibility of technology. And also because we tend to think automatically about the accessibility of buildings, it's something that people building them tend to care about. But it's also something we notice, we notice if it's hard to get into a building, we don't really have the same kind of awareness around technology and the accessibility of technology. It's not as ingrained in us. It's not something that we, as an industry, have been caring about for as long.

Sam Proulx 17:47 | Let's pick up where Kalbag left off. And that's her contrast of the physical and digital world. In the United States, for instance, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 is the crown jewel of disability rights legislation. Not only does it outlaw discrimination based on someone's disability, but it also sets the standards for how public spaces must operate. While there is no digital equivalent, the W3C accessibility guidelines provide critical advice and information about how to improve digital accessibility across the internet, for all.

Unfortunately, not every website or company adheres to these key standards. And this is where lawsuits for breaches of the ADA have stepped in to play a formidable role in enforcing such crucial change, as Kalbag notes. Accessibility lawsuits are especially common in the United States. And one of the more infamous cases targeted internationally recognized singer-songwriter superstar Beyonce, whose website, according to a 2019 suit was inaccessible to blind people. Specifically, images on the site didn't include alt text, which is commonly used to help those of us using screen readers understand what an image depicts. Here's Kalbag again.

Laura Kalbag 19:15 | So particularly in the US lawsuits have been used to make certain websites more accessible. I think one of the most famous ones is that Beyonce was sued about the accessibility of her website. Now these are, I'd like to see it as a carrot and stick approach. So the idea is that with the carrot and stick analogy that you have a donkey and you can offer to hurt it with the stick in order to make it go faster. Or you can dangle a carrot in front of its nose to make it want to walk further forward. And then of course you give it a carrot at the end of the journey. And so if you actually want to punish people for doing harm and for not caring about accessibility, then fair enough, you have the stick, you have the opportunity to do lawsuits and things like that. But I think it's far better for us to go for the carrot approach.

We've got to try to do this, encourage people to understand and care about accessibility, to realize that really, it is what we should be doing by default. As a part of design and development. It is a part of our role in the jobs that we do. Now we each have the different areas of accessibility that are particularly relevant to our particular role. So if you're a developer, you might want to have a good understanding of HTML and how that affects accessibility, because that's incredibly important. Even as a designer or a content writer, it's actually quite useful to have that knowledge. And then if you're a designer, then you might be focusing more on things like typography, and color, and perhaps not using a color as a sole indicator. So for example, not just having your error message text in red, but having it with a big box. And a big note that says ‘Error,’ because some people can't distinguish red from other colors as easily.

I think the key thing with accessibility within our organizations, we can't really expect it to appear organically, but we each have to take individual responsibility for it within our role. We can't see accessibility as an additional line item, or something extra to bill for. I think that that is a way that people will always consider it: too expensive and unnecessary. And I just think that's a bad way of doing it. For example, we wouldn't do that with performance, we wouldn't say 'Oh, performance is an added extra, your website's gonna be really slow unless you pay us more money for it.' We wouldn't do that. So we shouldn't do that with accessibility. What we should be doing is considering it as part of our best practices. And if we want to be good designers, good developers, good members of the community, we should be doing accessibility by default.

Sam Proulx 21:56 | As crucial as ADA non-compliance lawsuits are in instigating really important changes to improve accessibility, Hess and Treviranus stress that due to the aforementioned issues with the original code and inaccessibility of the web from the outset, even such seemingly positive legal and enforcement actions, such as suing entities into compliance, in and of itself, feeds the overarching vicious cycle and cottage industry of companies profiting from the current state of affairs. They argue it's all actually making the problem even worse. Here, again, are Mike Hess and Treviranus.

Mike Hess 22:39 | All you got to do is Google the lawsuits when it comes to the accessibility mishaps that have happened out there. There are numerous, they are public, and they are large. I believe one of the challenges with this approach, though, of compliance is actually almost exacerbating the accessibility journey. Because, you know, again, there are very, very large firms within the accessibility space, that they just have a whole bunch of attorneys on retainer, and they're, you know, two, three times a day, they're looking at all the current lawsuits both at the federal level and at the state level, organizations that are literally hiring blind people, screenreader users, paying them $12 an hour to go out there and if you've got a public website, and it's not something to be done, they send out a letter to them, and for the low, low price of $45,000, it will go away.

So again, I think this whole compliance ecosystem that's being created is making it worse for the accessibility journey. There's so much information that's out there, like there's no real IP when it comes to accessibility. It's like saying you own HTML5, when HTML5 literally has all this amazing accessibility just completely built into it. And realizing that, you know, again, from organizations like Salesforce, like Adobe that absolutely make it so easy for this to do. So I believe that the compliance space, yes, there's a lot of great information on there. But I also think it's being used in a way that is truly making the accessibility journey more complicated than it needs to be for organizations.

Jutta Treviranus 24:13 | So where does this leave people with disabilities? It means that all the attention and effort that should be going into making sure the next technology is accessible, and all the other inequities that disability brings go instead into worrying about trivial things like whether the pop-up ad has the valid alternative text. In the meantime, we have AI decisions that are fundamentally biased against people with disabilities. We don't have the time and energy to design virtual and mixed reality systems that work for people with disabilities. Our social media is only powered by popularity and disability issues are not popular and it goes is on and on and on.

This is where we are right now. I would rather be advocating that people demand that the tools used to create web apps and content make it accessible by default, and provide support for the things that require human effort, like the descriptions. Because we've created a web that is broken by design and carelessness. Everybody creating content for the web has to help fix it. We have a moral responsibility to do this, and to comply with the necessary stick because we ignored the carrot and good design. I'm hoping we don't make the same mistake in the next emerging technology.

Sam Proulx 25:38 | Wow, thank you for listening to this inaugural episode of the InclusionHub Podcast. As our guests have said, there is much much work to be done to make the internet and its countless websites truly accessible. Yet this journey begins, as so many others do, with education, understanding and identifying the true root of the larger, ever-spreading issue of inaccessibility. It's only then that we can even begin to attempt to remedy it and implement true lasting solutions. Please, if you take anything from these extraordinary conversations, know in your hearts of hearts, that you are all fundamental components of this. You are all forces of change. You are the future, not just of the internet, but the bearers of a vision of truth, wherein everything, whether websites or physical buildings, or even virtual realities, must be accessible for all. Your personal journey begins now.

Head to InclusionHub[dot]com and check out our founding partners who sponsor this pod. HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency Morey Creative Studios at Moreycreative[dot]com, cloud-based customer relationship management platform Salesforce at Salesforce[dot]com, Fable, where I work, and BeMyEyes, a free app connecting blind-and low-vision people with sighted volunteers for visual assistance at BeMyEyes[dot]com. Of course, be sure to also check out InclusionHub [dot] com for all things digital accessibility, from insightful blogs, to our directory of companies dedicated to trying to make this world a better place for those with disabilities. Recommend others that are trying to make a difference to. Join our online community. Become involved. Tell your friends and loved ones about this podcast. Subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts and rate and review us. It's all free.

Once again, this is Sam Proulx host of InclusionHub Podcast. As I mentioned at the top, I'm also Accessibility Evangelist at the accessibility testing platform Fable, which is powered by folks with disabilities. Learn more about me and Fable at MakeItFable[dot]com. Please join us for the next episode in which we continue this important conversation about the historical and ongoing struggle for accessibility and inclusion. We can get there. Goodbye for now. And remember: that a more accessible and inclusive world is a better world.