Accelerating Corporate Accessibility — Building Bridges for Inclusive Innovation & Universal Design

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VOICEOVER: Accelerating Corporate Accessibility, Building Bridges for Inclusive Innovation and Universal Design. Mark Pound, CEO of CurbCut OS. Jonathan Thurston, CEO of Infinite Access. Jacqueline Hall, Senior Vice President of User Experience, Ipsos. Jeremy Grandstaff, VP Business Development, CurbCut OS.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: Well, first of all, I am so excited like all the other panelists today to be teaming up with Karae and Ross and Sight Tech Global and even the Vista Center. And we just really appreciate the leadership that you guys-five, four, three, two, one. We just really appreciate the leadership that your organization and this conference is bringing. And so we’re very excited to be able to talk to you today. We’re going to talk about digital accessibility. Now let’s take a step back. Did you know that there are over 1 billion people in the world who have a disability? And when we really take a step back and we start thinking about the amount of money that people with disabilities leave in a shopping cart because they cannot complete a buying process as a customer is way above 10 billion or 10 trillion a year. Now that’s an astronomical number. So before I introduce our panelists, I want to make that real for each of our listeners. And I want to tell you that over my lifetime as a blind person who has been buying things for 30 years, I estimate that I have abandoned $256,000 over my lifetime in shopping carts. And there are some of you that you’re running charities, charities, nonprofits, and might think to yourself, well, that’s about corporate, right? But let me make this real for you. Over the past six years, I’ve also left $5,000 in donations that I was trying to make to a nonprofit in a shopping cart and went and gave my money to someone else. Why? Because I couldn’t complete that process. Now, this particular panel is really trying to figure out how do we accelerate that accessibility and the care for accessibility? If you think about this, it’s how do we take people from, yeah, we should probably do something more about that, to yes, let’s prioritize this and let’s make that something that we want to be focusing on, digital accessibility, including people with disabilities, but more so also making sure that we’re not leaving money on the table and that people, when they come to buy from our corporation or our organization, that they can do that. Now, our panelists today, I like to think about them as the champions of digital equity. And really, what we’re talking about is a process that you have to become that internal advocate. We’re going to teach you how to do that. Really, it’s about making sure that you’ve got a collective effort and leading that group influence to get there. It demands a team-driven equity approach in how you’re looking at accessibility, but also leveraging your external networks and community advocates that can really help take your digital accessibility game to the next level. And so we’re going to go through some questions with our panelists today. But before we dive into those questions, I’m going to ask each of our panelists to tell us first, in 30 to 45 seconds or less, who are you? What do you do? And why do you care about and prioritize digital accessibility in your world? So Mark, why don’t you kick us off?

MARK POUND: Hi, everybody. Mark Pound, I’m CEO of CurbCut OS. To answer Jeremy’s question is, my passion behind this, I live with invisible disabilities. I’ll tell this very short story version of after several traumatic accidents in my life, I have multiple spine damage, and I have multiple nerve damage throughout my body. It’s something that I’ve lived with for over 15, close to 20 years of my life. I never realized the struggle involved until I started living it. And that’s where my passion comes from, because we all deserve to be able to enjoy life equally. And that’s what everybody wants. And I’ll leave you with this. KirkCutOS, the name itself implies what we’re setting out to achieve, just like the KirkCut phenomenon, where today, many people without disabilities use those KirkCuts as people with disabilities. We want to be able to achieve the same thing in the digital world.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: Awesome, Mark, and we’re so glad to have you here. I’m going to bounce over to you next, Jonathan, and then we’ll go to Jacqueline to introduce yourselves as well. So, Jonathan?

JONATHAN THURSTON: Sounds good. Thanks, Jeremy. Hi, everyone. I’m Jonathan. I have ADHD. I’m the CEO of a new company called Infinite Access, where we’re transforming communication to make it fully customizable and personalizable for every different user to centralize different experiences for everyone. Awesome, Mark. And the other thing I know is accessibility is in large part about opportunity. There’s massive opportunity here. And that makes it a very, very exciting space. And I’m looking forward to digging into this further. Formerly, I was head of accessibility at Pearson, also at Atlassian, and ran digital accessibility at Walmart. So I have a lot of different sort of perspective on how to be successful with these programs.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: And Jacqueline, take a moment to introduce yourself to everybody and help us understand. And why digital accessibility is important to you.

JACQUELINE HULL: Thanks, Jeremy. Very excited to be here. I’m Jacqueline Hall. I’m a senior vice president at Ipsos. I lead a team of researchers and designers who address various needs across tech, financial services, and government. And I also oversee most of our accessibility work across all of the verticals at our team, on the user experience team at Ipsos. And why do I think it’s important? I think maybe by nature of what I spend most of my time thinking about, financial services and government services, it feels like digital accessibility is just crucial because it ensures equal access for everyone to products and services essential to modern human life. Like, just to live life, you have to be able to access so many things digitally. And that’s kind of my swim lane these days at Ipsos. So excited to be having this conversation.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: Well, as VP in business development and partnerships for CurbCode OS, I’m excited to be facilitating and talking with each of you, really helping you bring your wisdom that each of you bring to this conversation in a variety of ways. So let’s go ahead and dive right in. Mark, I want to start with you. What are the biggest challenges that you feel companies are facing right now when it comes to prioritizing digital accessibility? And how can you, you know, what advice do you have for them as they’re looking to turn those opportunities? I’m sorry, let me try that. Three, two, one. Mark, I want to start with you. And let’s kick off the questions with better understanding what are the biggest challenges that companies are facing when it comes to prioritizing digital accessibility? You know, what are the challenges that marketers are facing when they’re prioritizing digital accessibility and how can they take those challenges and turn them into opportunities?

MARK POUND: Yeah, that’s a very loaded question or a very loaded response. But, you know, I’ll try to keep it concise. You know, I think the challenges are, you know, for the most part confusion. I have no idea what to do, where to go, and how to get things done. And I’m set up to fail in many cases because of that, you know, and I think the other part too is change is scary, you know, but it doesn’t have to be, you know, this doesn’t have to be overwhelming, and it’s possible to turn those obstacles into opportunities. Yeah, you know, absolutely. This is a compliance element. However, why not achieve and capture the opportunity, which is what you said earlier, Jeremy, is there are almost two billion people in this world, and it’s not going to go anywhere but up, that have some form of disability, and they’ve all indicated, it’s like, look, let’s be able to enjoy, we want to participate, we want to do everything we can do, don’t put us or don’t disadvantage us, right? So, being able to overcome this obstacle, checking the compliance box, for lack of a better phrase, but then also looking at this from a user experience, and being able to then deliver an optimized user experience, and being able to deliver and capture that opportunity with the market, and grow your company at the same time.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: I want to go over to Jacqueline first, then to Jonathan, anything to add in this particular question before we move on to our next one. Jacqueline, it’s okay for you to pass. But I’ll check in with you first, and then we’ll go to Jonathan.

JACQUELINE HULL: I’m inclined to pass. I just want to be like, plus one to all these things, because I’ll speak to it a bit more in a later question. But it’s so true that, like, there is a great amount of confusion that causes paralysis of choice and decision making. And so much of it is just clarifying what it is that you don’t know. So I think Mark put it well.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: And Jonathan, I’m sure you’ve seen that in your work as well. Give us a little bit more insight from you, and then we’ll move to our next question.

JONATHAN THURSTON: So it’s a great point about the sort of fear factor. A lot of folks, when they’re learning about accessibility and inclusion, they have a lot of information to digest and take in. There’s really dense, complex sort of standards called WCAG that you have to interpret and understand and learn, and it can be very overwhelming. I would say the best way to get involved with accessibility is to start. It’s part of everyone’s role in a different way. And the best way to get involved in the community and in this sort of space is to start. And the best way to start is to engage with other folks in the disability community. Yeah. heart and soul of any good accessibility program is partnership, and that specifically means not only partnering with the community but everyone else as well. One point I wanted to make about certain numbers of disability: the population globally – well, the reality is if you don’t have a disability now, you will at some point because we’re all getting older every day. If you don’t have one now, you will, so this is we’re all in this together, right? And it’s really important um for for entities and companies to start to understand this. It’s a quality metric that should be measured equally with things like security, privacy, and performance, and we can definitely dig into that more as well. Um, but again, the heart and soul of accessibility is, in fact, partnership.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: You can’t do it alone, and Jonathan, we’re definitely going to dive into the partnering piece uh, in just a little bit, but before I do, I want to ask a a a little bit of a leading question, but I’m hoping that you’ll take it to the next level for me which is you know we talk about wcag or wcag compliance right like that’s a big thing am i compliant um we’re seeing this in the e uh the eu passage of the european accessibility act where it’s all about are you compliant it’s driving these questions of oh my gosh what i have to do to be compliant is wicca compliance enough or what should companies be aiming for instead that is a really brilliant question and it’s something that all of us talk about all the time right you can be wicca aligned and not accessible that said wicca standards are very helpful for us they allow us to start to measure and set

JONATHAN THURSTON: Baselines around our, our performance and our and our growth around accessibility, but again you can be 100% WICCA compliant and not be accessible as well. This is why it’s paramount that beyond just aligning with the standards, you work with folks with disabilities to do user testing on the actual sort of user paths through your experience because without that, you can only catch the the sort of bugs and the sort of tagging and structure right, but you don’t capture the experience of folks with disabilities. So WICCA is super important because it gives us a standard to measure against, but it’s not the end-all be.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: All by any means now one of the things that I’m going to do is I’m coming to you next Jacqueline, especially to dig into some of that user experience and partnership pieces before I do though Mark, I want to ask: Is there anything you wanted to add on this particular question before I go into uh the question on partnering?

MARK POUND: I think I think Jonathan covered it well; I think the other part to this though is, you know, not just WICCA compliance but let’s look at that from a holistic standpoint. You can run an automated scan, but that’s not going to do it – those run page by page and like Jonathan mentioned, that is not focused. On user experience, you can check that box however you’re still going to be ended up with no users’ experience and no engagement so really what’s the point right? Um, in addition to that, you should address it from a manual standpoint where experts are involved and then also user flow testing. And really, that holistic approach from your audit sets the proper tone, having that proper tone where you capture an excess of over 90 percent of issues then your remediation is set. Right? Then you can address; we can get compliance, but you’re also addressing user experience now at the same time which then opens up that market opportunity.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: Jacqueline, I’m coming to you next and as I start down this path for my next question, I’m actually reminded of sitting in a room, probably eight nine years ago, as a consultant, and someone coming up to me and saying, ‘Well, you’re a blind person. Tell us how to get blind people here.’ And it would be really helpful if you could just give us a little bit more detail on that because it was wow different for me right then to be like all of a sudden I’m the guy who’s going to speak for all blind people and how we’re going to get them to the strategic planning event. Right, but it really got me thinking as I’m reflecting on this-Jacqueline, why is

JACQUELINE HULL: collaboration across industries like why is that critical or crucial for advancing digital accessibility objectives and what role does that broader network of people that you can tap into um playing for the work that you know ipsos and curb cut have teamed up to do in these spaces yeah that’s a great question um i think jeremy and the example that you gave it’s evident that you know we we think we can talk to a few people and get some insights and go fix the things we heard but then as you continue to have these conversations every interview I have is different every disability shows up differently every person’s lived Experience is different; they’re, they’re, I mean, like the overlap of our lives and our life experiences and our upbringing and our access to education and our place in the world impacts how people with disabilities actually live with those disabilities so there isn’t a one-size-fits-all and that’s why collaboration is so key because no one has this quite perfectly figured out. I would say collaboration across industries and companies is so critical because this is a shared challenge and I think that’s what you’ve heard in this entire conversation-no one has truly figured this out, this is newer territory even for. More sophisticated or technologically advanced companies, there are few standards, yes, there’s WCAG, but as we just acknowledged that doesn’t even take care of everything. That doesn’t mean that you’re actually accessible, so there’s no right way of doing something, no one is doing it to the gold standard like what is the gold standard right? For everyone to be able to access an experience or a product for sure, but we haven’t really figured that out. And so I think because of this, to answer your question Jeremy, we have to pool you our resources and we have to come together to knowledge share. I think simply put, it takes a village. as Jonathan said at the beginning at the sort of heart and soul of accessibility is partnership it’s collaboration often when we say this we’re actually talking about involving the disability community in the research but this also means talking to your competitor talking to other agencies and other brands and non-profits and other companies and other companies and other efforts and experts in the field and resource gathering and information gathering to figure out how we can make industry-wide and scalable change and and the last thing I’ll shout is that I’ve actually seen this in practice and it’s been really really cool! So, last year I came across this group called the Accessible Insights Consortium. Now it’s sort of led or overseen by the Insights Association, but it started with a few groups of people who were really interested in the accessibility of the product and they were like, ‘Wait, accessibility is not a nice to have; it is a need to have.’ But where do we start? How do we get buy-in? What resources are out there? And then they were like, ‘There have to be other people asking this question in the research industry.’ So that was the dawn of this consortium and they were basically just having conversations with different People at different places and they were like, ‘Well, I’m going to do this’ ‘I’m going to do that’ ‘I’m saying, do you want to join this group?’ We basically just get together and try to problem solve. And a bunch of us don’t know the answers, but at least collectively we’re trying to figure it out. So we have people working on platforms. We have people who conduct interviews for a living. We have people who are just like quant nerds and data analysis and visualization all discussing how do we make research more accessible? And there are other agencies right, like I’m Ipsos agency side. There are other agencies in this conversation. and I’m like wait understandarks right now and start really doing the day -day, if you know what I want to do and I’ve literally said that once a week and again until now, you know we really don’t even know what we’re الش we can’t even think about, we’ve never really tried to understandôiль that we’re ever really used to being that. So like we all just have to do more.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: So funded organizations look for people to look at and say hey, this,” how do you solve this problem something we always plan on doing,” to round out this particular area of our conversation. Mark, additional thoughts that you’re having around partnering and collaborating with other organizations in order to go into this? And then Jonathan will come to you for the final word.

MARK POUND: Yeah, I was going to say, between what Jacqueline just said and Jonathan has stated, this is where I can’t add anything to that because it’s a collaboration on the company’s side. And, you know, we also look at this kind of a dual path, okay? But it all stems from collaboration. And that path is, we recognize the end-user market, but what we also recognize are companies and the stakeholders in companies, and how they’re set up in a manner to where they can achieve something and get progress going. So we want to get them engaged in a fashion to where this isn’t fearful. This isn’t something that’s overwhelming. This is, hey, let’s just start one step at a time because we get you to start working on solutions that actually optimize that user experience, and who ends up benefiting from that? The end-users do. And all of us really do, because there’s so much crossover appeal because this isn’t just something special. This is something that actually, actually benefits everybody. And I hate to say it, but I’ve got to reference curb cuts. I mean, or closed captioning. Or when you go to your mobile screen and you enlarge the screen for someone who has low vision or vision issues. All those are technologies that were created for people with disabilities initially, but they benefit everyone. So I think that’s the heart of the collaboration.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: Jonathan, final thoughts on partnering, collaboration. And how to make this holistic in your approach.

JONATHAN THURSTON: What we’re talking about here is inclusive design. Inclusive design involves people with disabilities when you’re developing an idea. So it’s involving people with disabilities at the very beginning of the process, not after you’re done at the very beginning. And this is very closely related to design thinking, which is all about listening and observing before you go out and do a bunch of stuff. Right? So it’s really important to have folks with disabilities involved with the whole product creation lifecycle. Without this, it’s not a healthy development process. You’re missing a large segment of your user base without involving them in this development process. So inclusive design, design thinking are essential to practice inclusion.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: You know, just a couple of things as I’m listening to the three of you really talk about this, and then we’re going to go to each of you for your final thoughts. But some things that stick out to me, asking the question, right? If we’re talking about how to partner with people, ask them, how can we partner with you to make this better? Go into it with an intentionality that it’s not just about you. It’s about building a more collaborative relationship with someone that’s going to bring you that design thinking, to Jonathan’s point, to Jacqueline and Mark’s point. We used to call them back in my consulting days, design teams, right? If I’m going to do a design an event, the best way for me to get the people that I want to that event is to put a design team together that represents that whole, and to ask them the question, right? What can we do to make this engaging for you?

JONATHAN THURSTON: Jeremy, can I add another point as well? It’s important to remember you’re not in this alone. And there’s really other, there’s great other organizations that are looking for you to partner with them. To help move, you know, around accessibility and inclusion. For example, the IAAP, the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. They will offer you training and certification around accessibility. You can partner with them to run maturity models to sort of ascertain, where is your organization as far as accessibility? And what can they do to improve their experiences. Disability In is another great organization. They run different initiatives, like one that I’m involved with is called Procure Access, and this is really important because it sets up a protocol for companies to not be buying things that are inaccessible. So you embed accessibility into your procurement process so everything that company buys would be quote accessible, right? You just have a plan to become accessible. These are sort of the different facets, you know, accessibility is part of everyone’s job. And we really need to look at it holistically. It’s not just fixing a mouse; it’s fixing a mountain of bugs, which is, that’s part of it. You’ve got to fix your bugs, but you need to be proactive and get in front of it. Unless you update your product creation life cycle to consider accessibility with inclusive design throughout the whole process, you’re just going to keep feeding that mountain. It’ll get taller than Everest. But you need to be proactive, but also remediate and fix the past.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: And we’re going to move into our last question. I cannot believe that this time has gone so fast. With all of you. But again, I’m just so honored to be on stage with you and to be having this conversation. As we check out of today’s conversation, the question that I’m going to ask each of you is, what would you like to reinforce or leave participants who have come and spent time with us today, what would you like to leave them with? And we’ll start with you, Jonathan, and we’ll go to Jacqueline and Mark. So, Jonathan?

JONATHAN THURSTON: All right. So I’m going to leave us with two points. One is that I encourage everyone with a disability to self-disclose whenever possible. This is something that I’ve been doing, and it’s powerful. It’s powerful to self-disclose. Like, I have ADHD at work and, you know, talking with different people in the community as well. We want to remove stigma around disability. And this is a great proactive way to start to do this. As I’ve started to embrace disability, I’ve started to do this. So if I deem more and more, what I’ve discovered is more people come to me. More people want to talk about it. More people want to have open discussions about it. This is what we need to do to remove the stigma. Okay? And then the final thought is we’re all in this together. And accessibility is part of everyone’s job, no matter where you are. It’s part of, it’s on all of us to help move the needle around accessibility and inclusion. So I encourage everyone to help out in this space. And do what you can. Be yourself. Be authentic. And let’s work together to move that needle.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: Awesome. Jacqueline, your final thoughts. What do you want to leave panelists with? What are you hoping they take out of this dialogue?

JACQUELINE HULL: Yeah. I love, well, both of Jonathan’s points, but specifically the second one because it stole some of my thoughts. But I’ll come up with new ones. I’ll come up with new ones. No. I think what. I would love to have people chewing on as they leave, it’s like, what’s one thing that you could do differently or think about differently or have a conversation about? Like, where’s the friction and like, what’s one decision you could make to ease the friction a little bit? Maybe it’s just finding someone who thinks like you within your organization or within your team or within a broader professional network or personal network, and like, don’t be afraid to get started. Like Jonathan said, we’re all in this together and it’s quite a journey. It’s a rewarding one. But it does take just taking that first step.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: Mark, some final thoughts from you and then I’m going to wrap us up, yeah.

MARK POUND: So, so Jeremy, you put me out last, and then Jonathan took everything that Jacqueline wanted to talk about. Jacqueline then took everything that I wanted to talk about. And then I took everything that I wanted to talk about. So I think I’ll just kind of reiterate, but you know, to Jonathan’s point on self-disclosing, I can’t speak to that even more because I didn’t disclose my own invisible disabilities for almost 40 years of my life because I was ashamed. I was, didn’t want to be perceived as weak until I met somebody and he said, ‘What are you doing? You need to tell people that.’ And once I started, just like what Jonathan said, things started changing for the better. And I felt like I felt like I took a mountain off my back. And so again, I’ll just reiterate the importance of that, you know, and to a point Jacqueline said that I want to reinforce is just it’s time to just get started and look; get started in a manner to where you get the proper guidance, we focus on progress and let’s reduce the amount of errors over time. Yeah. Because not only do we take an existing digital landscape from a legacy, the term that I give it, but we also have that design thinking and really they kind of go hand in hand, isn’t only are we fixing these legacy issues, but while we’re fixing those, we’re learning, which is also applicable into that design thinking, and then really coming together. And this is where I encourage anyone with a visible or invisible disability. Let’s come together. There’s power in numbers. And that’s how things change.

JEREMY GRANDSTAFF: So I want to try to bring us in for a close. And I’m, I’m first of all going to say thank you to all three of you – Mark, Jonathan and Jacqueline, the ability that I have to work alongside each of you and to be in partnership with you on this panel is amazing. And so I’m listening to us talk. There’s a story that I love to share, and I’ll, I’ll start by saying, and just Karray’s going to get a little nervous that I’m going to go over time, but I think this is going to help. So one, always remember that people get things differently. When I was in college, we used to grade papers as TAs and we used to be told to write our papers so that someone could verbally, visually, and viscerally get what you were saying in your paper. And it’s just a good reminder that some people learn by watching, not me as a blind person, but some people do. Some people learn by listening and some people, they need you to take it to a whole new level so that they can get it here before they’re going to get it. I was pointing by the way, at my heart before they’re going to get it in their head or anywhere else in their body, keeping that in mind. One story that I love to tell, and this goes back to what each of you said about the concept, of the curb cut effect. My partner and I love to watch television. And one of the things that we were doing is watching The Crown three or four years ago. And he said, I cannot watch any more episodes with you. I said, why? It’s such a great show. He said, there is just too much happening in the background. You’re a blind person and we don’t have audio description on. And so I agreed to turn on the audio description. My point in telling you this story is now three or four years later, audio description is still on in my house, not just so Jeremy as a blind person can watch it, but it’s so my partner can look down at his phone and not have to watch the TV and still know what’s happening on the screen while he’s scrolling through Instagram. In other words, we do things for people with disabilities that then have an impact on people without disabilities, a positive impact. And that’s something that I want to keep in mind as we’re wrapping up today. The changes that you’re leading within your company, people with disabilities are counting on you to do that. But those changes, those collaborations, those partnering with new people, that changing the world philosophy that you’re doing, that’s going to have an impact on people with seen and unseen disabilities. But it’s also going to impact people with disabilities. It’s going to impact the rest of the world. So it’s not just me as a blind person who’s counting on you. But it’s you that’s counting on you to be that advocate, to be that internal advocate, and to really help your organization embrace designing and developing with an accessibility lens. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it is also the thing that your company can do. And that’s what we’re going to do in order to make sure that people are not leaving money out of your equation, and that you are able to tap into the people who want to buy from you. And all of the people on this panel are here to help you. We welcome you to contact us and have a conversation. A big, huge thanks to PsychTep Global, to Karray, to Ross, to the production team, and especially to Mark, Jacqueline, and Jonathan. Thank you, and for serving with me on this panel today. We really hope you’ve taken away some good ideas and some next steps and clear direction on ways that you can partner with other people at your company to transcend those barriers to a digital accessibility mantra. Or put a different way, increasing the access of everyone to your digital access. Not just so they can be included, but so you can best serve them. And this concludes today’s panel. Thanks, everybody.

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