- Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. My name's Anthony Priore, I'm the digital marketing manager at TPGi. We're gonna give it one minute as people sign in and we'll get started briefly. We see a few people trickling in. So we're just gonna give it one more minute and we will get started momentarily. All right, thank you everyone for joining us today for our webinar, Client-Driven Success: Unpacking Cvent's Accessibility Journey. Before we get started, I have a few housekeeping items I'd like to get to. So, firstly, this session is being recorded and we will email everyone the recording after the event. Secondly, we have captions available, so feel free to turn those on and use them as needed. Next, I want you to know that we will have time for a live Q and A later in the webinar. So please use the Q and A box if you can and we'll answer as many of the questions as we can at the end of the presentation. And again, I encourage you to please use the Q and A box. Sometimes if you send them to chat, they can get lost and we may not see them right away. So it is a little easier for us if we can see them in the Q and A box. And lastly, if anyone needs any accessibility support, training, or usability testing, we will send out an email with a link to schedule time to speak with one of our experts. So with that, I'll pass it off to our presenters and we can get started. Take it away, everyone. - Thank you, Anthony. And thank all of you for joining us today. I know I'm personally super excited to talk to Stephen today. We have myself, Mark Miller, Jennifer Law, and Stephen Cutchins here to talk to you today. We'll all introduce ourselves in just a minute, but before we do that, I wanna cover real quick our agenda. So we're gonna talk about how Cvent's client-driven approach helps uncover and solve accessibility challenges. We're also going to look at the impact of setting clear definition, a clear definition of done to ensure products meet accessibility standards. Why accessibility improvements lead to higher retention and more engaged audience. And then of course the importance of partnerships. So Stephen, let's start with you. You wanna go ahead and introduce yourself to the group? - Yeah, thanks Mark. And hey, everybody. So Stephen Cutchins, I work for a company called Cvent, C-V-E-N-T. We're do software for events. So from small little, you wanna do a one-off little marketing campaign in a mall somewhere to giant, you've been to like a CSUN Conference or a National Federation of the Blind, a giant conference with, you know, 10,000 attendees, they use us. I've been doing accessibility now over 20 years. Nothing but it started as probably a lot of you have, it's kind of off the side of your desk. We have to figure out this ADA, 508, WCAG thing. We don't know what it is, figure it out. I was in quality at the time. That's probably 25 years ago, I guess. And within a couple of years got very lucky and got to move into it full time, and I've been doing it ever since. And yeah, I can go into my kind of a family history of people with disabilities. So I have a, start with me first, I have a neurological disorder called Tourette syndrome, kind of more on the moderate scale. You'll notice my ticks and twitches, those are, you know, those are just part of who I am. My mother was an amputee, she died when I was seven. When I was around five or six, she had to take one of her legs off at the hip. She got cancer metastasized into her bone. So, you know, this is the early mid '60s or '70s I mean. So I remember, you know, pushing doors open for her at the grocery store that kind of thing, because she was, you know, they didn't have the ADA laws back then that did things like mandating auto open doors. So to give me kind of a normal childhood, I spent summers with my aunt and uncle. They had two kids in with cerebral palsy, Pammy and David. Pammy was older, could speak, but very difficult to understand her. She was immobile though, she was in a wheelchair. She was not able to walk, not able to crawl. David who was a little bit younger was nonverbal, so could not speak. Could crawl though a little bit, but mostly in wheelchair. So I spent every summer with them helping out with them and you know, swimming in their pool 'cause they got a pool for rehab and such, and a physical therapy. And we would go to Disney and that was the only place you could go in the late '70s, early '80s, because it was the only place that was accessible to kids. So yeah, for those reasons and a lot more, I mean, it's been my career now for, you know, 20, 21, 22 years, and loved every minute of it. - Thank you, Stephen. Appreciate that. We appreciate the story particularly. Excited to dive in with you, but before we do that, Jen, can you introduce yourself? - Hi, I'm Jennifer Law. I am a project manager and have had the privilege of working with Mark and Stephen over the last three years. And happy to be here today. - Thank you, Jen. And I am Mark Miller. I'm the sales director here at TPGi. I've been with TPGi for about 12 years now. Much of that time, I've known Stephen and had a chance to work with him in a few different areas. I'm also a member of W3C's WAI Accessibility Platform Architecture Working Group Accessibility Maturity Model Task Force. I'm trying to get them to lengthen that title, but they aren't listening me just yet. So I'm super happy to be here. Jen and Stephen have been doing a lot of great work together. It's through that great work and working with Stephen every day that Jen decided that we should share, that Stephen should share his story with all of you all. And of course it's also a forum for Jen and I to learn more about Stephen and what he's been doing with Cvent. And we're excited for that deeper dive. So given that, I'm gonna turn this over to Stephen just to talk a little bit about his work at Cvent. - I mean, you can, so we are, like I mentioned, you can read the boring slide. We don't really need to talk about Cvent. If you guys Google event management software, it's probably gonna come up with us. But we make sure that, well, actually, I'll talk about just Cvent from the absolute, I think I want to give you a hypothetical. I want to do a conference in Morocco. I need to find locations. I need to do tours of the facility, including in 3D, I need to do room layouts, I need to block rooms, I need to have my conference there, print badges, allow people to register, all of that stuff, and the social, the event app, the networking, all of that is us. We have a few dozen products. All of the ones, I tend to work on the ones really, oh, and by the way, we cover both the event side, which is, you know, that when we go to a conference, as attendees, they cover that, and all the setup of the websites and the badges and everything. And we also cover the hospitality side. I tend to really focus more on the event side, on the attendee facing, we call it a cloud on the attendee cloud, event cloud. Just because that has a larger impact than the hospitality side. But my job is to make sure that people with disabilities can attend these really amazing events that, you know, that you guys probably do events also, with everybody like CSUN Conference, National Federation of Blind, you know, University of Michigan, all their conferences are accessible, that I can register for it, I can attend, I can, you know, I can use the mobile app with a screen reader, with a keyboard, everything works for people with disabilities. And that's my job. - Stephen, you became the voice of the customer at Cvent. Can you walk us through your approach to that? - Yeah, this was a fun one. So I started just about 3 1/2 years ago here. But my big thing was, and this was a term of an old VP I used to report to, said organizational transformation. I never see small. I always like, you know, I'd start especially with, you know, some of the amazing companies I worked with. I'd start on a project and I'm like immediately, okay, you know, I was, how can we make this entire company that I worked for accessible while I'm on this little teeny project? And some of these large consulting firms had, you know, tens of thousands of projects and you know, or thousands in their federal practice. But I still thought, we're gonna make all of our federal projects accessible. So when I first started here, you know, the software engineers, quality engineers, we need checklists, we need unit test steps, we need to know how to make our products accessible. And I said, we're not gonna do that. And at the time they were like, no, this is, you know, we have to have unit test steps, we have to have guidelines, we have to have our, you know, our quality has to have checks of the 75 or 80 test steps that we check, I think it's 126. But anyway, I said, no. We're gonna get VPATs right away. We're gonna find out where we stand. We're not gonna do internal testing. I'm gonna go to you guys. I'm gonna go to a trusted place that is, you know, gonna audit us and find out the good, the bad, and the ugly of where our products stand. And then I'm gonna show that to clients because we have, me, Stephen, I'm very lucky that I work for a company that has, you know, like I mentioned the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference and National Federation of Blind. We have amazing clients that very much appreciate the work that I do. I have been in prior work where it's like, we have to do this checklist, we have to be ADA, we have to be 508, we don't even know what that means, but, you know, figure it out and get us as close as you can to pass. Our clients really take it to heart, which is what I do so I love it. So I went to you guys, I got our VPATs and I said, clients, here you go, here are VPATs. We're not perfect, but it's honest, it's accurate. And then I went to the kind of top down and said, okay, you know, to the VPs in technology and the product owners, our clients, this sells because you have to know. You know, you go to a software engineer to sell accessibility, it's a little bit different than you sell it to the VP, where he's the one or she's the one who has to spend the money on it. So you say clients want this, then you'll want them to spend the money, now we have to get stuff fixed. And then, you can create the unit test steps. And you know, then you can really deep dive. And I'm lucky now I have somebody on my team that she does that more often. So I can do more of like working with the clients and the higher level stuff. And it worked out very, very well. One of the software engineers in particular, hopefully Tim, loved the guy to death. He unfortunately left Cvent, but great guy. But he had said later on like, I was wrong, your approach was right. Go into the top because it's very easy. And I've had this happen more times than I wanna mention. The old grassroots, and I know a lot of people on this call feel like that this is a grassroots thing. We're, you know, I'm the one who's passionate or these 10 people in my company are passionate about accessibility. We are trying to push it, if it hits the VP, it has to spend money, it's dead, it stops. And I bypass that and said, this is already selling. They wanna buy accessible products. In some places we're there, in some places we're not. Let's start spending the money here because the return on investment is a lot more than it's gonna cost you to make it accessible. And it's been, you know, to date, pretty effective. - So Stephen, talk about the end user of your customer. So the people who are actually using your customer's product through Cvent. - Yeah, so like Stevie Wonder, when he goes to check in at CSUN. And you know, somebody who's in a physical disability and can't use, you know, they have their mouse, I'm sorry, they have their phone mounted on their keyboard and they have to use a mouth stick, those are the clients of our clients. So our client is, you know, California State University, right? They're our client, but their attendees are the ones that we have to care about. And it is every type of person you can imagine, from a conference that's, excuse me, that the registration just opened up. What's the date? Opened up this week, opened up Monday. It's for children. Well, it's really for the parents of children with disabilities, but the children can go. So it's kids with disabilities. It's, you know, kids with who are hard of hearing, visual impairments. And it is absolutely, if you can think of a human condition, there's somebody that wants to go to a conference or somebody that does go to a conference that has that. So we really have to, we have to cover everything and it's, you know, it's kind of a beautiful thing. - So what would you say the number one thing, bottom line, what do your customers want throwing an event? - Yeah, so they want everybody to go and have a good time, to, you know, be able to go. I said this once I was on a call, I said, planners are, I'm so glad, I love the industry I'm in, they want everybody to go and have a good time. And I say have a good time because, John Deere, I'm gonna make that up, I don't know if they're a client of ours. John Deere wants to have a conference, they probably don't have planners. So they wanna sell tractors, right? So they want, you know, farmers to come in or homeowners or whatever and buy their tractors. The people who plan their events more than likely don't work for John Deere. They're planners, that's what they do, and they're our client. They don't know about tractors. They just want people to go to this John Deere conference and have a blast, you know. If the end result is that John Deere sells tractors, that's amazing, but they want people to be included. And really without exception, when I talk about accessibility with every planner out there, they're like, oh my, if they get it, they're like, yeah, we totally get it, we're on board. That's why, you know, that's why they come to us, that's why they work with us. If they don't get it, you can see them like, oh, my God, somebody's at my conference and not having a good time. Or even worse, they're not going to my conference because I'm not enabling them. And just as bad, I probably am enabling them, I think I am, the software's accessible, I think I'm asking the right questions of registration, but they probably don't know if they'll be enabled so they don't go. And all three of those are bad. Whether they, you know And this is one of my big pushes is we have to start asking a lot of questions, a more detailed probing questions of our attendees so they'll feel comfortable to go. Because again, talking to planners, they'll always accept more people at their conference, they'll always open up a user base. And the spending habits of people with disabilities, it's pretty staggering. It's about $25 billion a year on travel. And if you let a planner know that of, you know, if just for purely financial reasons, of course they wanna open their events up to that market. - You know what's interesting, - That's incredible. - Stephen? Yeah, what's really interesting here, I think, you know this and I know I'm behind on slides, so I should probably catch up on them, but you know, the real purpose of this talk is to talk about kind of partnerships, right? And how working with other folks is so helpful when it comes to accessibility. In that story that you just told, it starts to, for me, it starts to paint this picture of accessibility that's holistic. So what I mean by that is, in my job and your job and Jen's job, we can think a lot about digital accessibility. Is the mobile application, is the website, is the platform accessible? And what you're saying is that's important, but it's also important to communicate out, right? Are you working with, - Yeah. - and I'm like reading between the lines here, but once you've got that kind of squared away, or is the marketing department in your organization, in your customer's organization, are they now engaged to let people know that those platforms are accessible? Are they now inviting people with disabilities to come to the events, to understand that they're not only can they, but they're welcome and encouraged to come to those events so that it becomes a lot more than just allowing the access, it becomes really partnering with the customer, partnering with the end user, partnering with everyone in order to create a holistic experience from the top down for everyone including people with disabilities. And I think that that's a, for as long as I've been in this business, like that is a really unique perspective. I don't know that other people don't think about it, but I think that you've been able to pull all those pieces together. It's very impressive. - Yeah, planners, when you talk to them, they're you know, do you ask registration questions about accommodations? And they're like, yeah, you know, I say, you know, do you require ADA, Americans with Disabilities Act in case you're not US, but do you require ADA accommodations or do you require accommodations, or just ADA with a yes or no radio button? If I'm a person in a wheelchair who's blind with a service animal and accompanied by a personal care assistant, there's a lot you have to do to accommodate me. Now, when I say a lot, it's not overwhelming, it's little teeny things. But for example, I mentioned that I'm in a wheelchair, so reserve a space where there's no chair, and put reserve, you know, for wheelchair users, mobility device users. But also I said a service animal. So it'd be really nice if you have two spaces empty, so my dog is not in the hallway, But I said personal care assistant, so that third space next to the two empty ones, reserve it from my personal care assistant. But also, this is where software gets in, don't charge them a registration fee. They don't care about John Deere tractors. They're there to make sure I am medically safe and I'm taken care of. So how long did that take, right? And when you ask questions, we were talking about once Mark, where as people, do you ask registration questions about accommodations? Oh, yes, I do. Do you ask them more than one? Do you ask two or more? Normally it's like, crap. No. - Right. - And if my entire reality has to go into one check text box, you know, where I enter, what accommodations do you need? I'm not going to your event. And I am the perfect, I could have been the perfect attendee for your event. Heh, I could have been the perfect speaker at your event, you know? But I'm not gonna go because you've now said, I'm gonna reduce your entire reality, your entire existence into a text box, and you have to type it in, or even worse, a yes no radio button. It's the only time I've seen it done well and I loved it, I don't remember what it was for but it was, it had a statement where do you require accommodations? If so, we will contact you within, I think they said like within seven days to clarify what accommodations you need. And I love that - Yeah. - because that's them saying. Sorry, that's them saying, we don't know what to ask, but we wanna get it right. And they even time boxed it with it was like seven days. We will get back to you within seven days to clarify what you need. I thought that was great. I think it's better if they. - That's pretty amazing. - Yeah, I think it's better if they know these are the 20 questions or whatever to ask, but at least they said, it's not just a yes or no. We're gonna get back, give us a week. And when they do these registrations, mind you, it's three, four, five months in advance. So it's not like a day before the, you know, the conference. So they had plenty of time to get it right. - So you've created this continuous feedback loop in your process. Can you talk to us how you integrated best practices into the product development? Because I feel like, I mean, over the last three years, if you don't mind my giving your numbers, we've done 20 manual audits for Cvent, we've audited over close to 800 components for accessibility, and we've issued VPATs. So I know that it goes from the VPAT, we return that, remediation, retest. But also you're, taking these VPATs back to the client. So there's this continuous loop. Can you talk about how you are moving the needle to have things baked in as it's rolled out? - Yeah, so I mean, everybody talks about the shift left. And I know we're so sick of hearing shift left, but we, I was again pretty lucky when I, you know, Cvent, they needed this even probably more so than they realized that now with you European Accessibility Act, ADA Title II updates. We needed it, again, probably even more than we realized. But we had amazing people doing awesome pockets of work, in UX, in quality engineering, and software engineering. But we needed to kind of rally the troops and now we have an Accessibility guild. So it's somebody from, well, people, I shouldn't say from, you know, user research and user experience. So we have the designers in it, we have software engineers who write the products, we have quality engineers outside of that, but it's a little more kind of high level and let's share best practices. And let's, I have a question about this design, I'm not sure which way to go, are there any accessibility issues that you see that could come out of this? We also, outside of accessibility have accessibility task force in quality. They're more let's deep dive on best practices for screen readers and you know, and all that. And outside of all of this, I mean, we still make mistakes, but hopefully we catch them all as part of the normal day-to-day software engineering. And if we don't, and that's where you guys come in with the VPAT and then we. And our VPATs by the way, you guys, like for registration let's say, you write our VPAT, you create our defects in Excel spreadsheet, we upload them as written into, we use Jira defect tracking, so it's as written by you guys. And then we just kind of get to work and we have clients ask, not just show me your VPAT, but okay, show me your list of defects, now show me your burndown rate. So I've had that. I've literally had a client say burndown rate, so they knew what they were talking about. Meaning if we found 94 defects when you did the VPAT six months ago, we better not still show 94 defects 'cause then we're just blowing smoke. So it'd better be, you know, oh, and they also wanna know our SLAs or service level agreements, if, you know, that's critical as three days. high as I don't know, a month, whatever, something like that. But it says, hey, if there's a critical, it has to be completed within three days. And if there's a critical, and you had your VPAT done two months ago, then again you're just blowing smoke. You're not fixing them meeting up to your SLAs and they wanna see all that stuff. So it's not just, here's a VPAT, get it done. It's here's a VPAT and might require designer work or might require somebody from quality to do testing. They do that from the accessibility guild. And yeah, it's hopefully answered that. - You did. Stephen, also, can you talk a little bit about how, I know that you guys have built quite a robust internal system, a body of knowledge for people to refer to. Can you expand on that a little bit? - Yeah, so we, pretty early on, we have our own internal training that was just kind of accessibility in general, but it's broken out by kind of by SDLC. So you're a product owner, you take this testing, it might be eight hours. You're a software engineer, you're up for 24 hours or whatever the training is. And that was just kind of general within, I'm in technology, so I work with all the like software engineers. We create the products. We also have client services and sales, and they have to know about accessibility, but to a different extent. Client services, if you want use a, if you wanna purchase Cvent products, I mentioned before like, was it John Deere? John Deere will buy it, could pay for a third party planner to go in and plan their whole event to include creating their website. Let's say John Deere wants to do this themselves, but they don't know how to do websites or they don't know how to create their registration sites, their mobile apps. We have people in client services that can do all that. So they need to know how to make something accessible. I mean imagine creating an event for National Federation of Blind and making it not accessible. That would be bad. So we have dedicated training on how to use our products to make an accessible, you know, website. Or on arrival, check-in through iPad or mobile app, whatever. And we do have stuff for sales, but that's kind of more how to sell. But we have accessibility training - Right. - for sales also. - But you have, all of this is available to the people who are doing the work and they can access this anytime. And is there a channel, a Slack channel, something that you use for to help each other, - Yeah, a bunch. - throughout your process? - Yeah, we have an accessibility Slack channel that's internal, that's very, very active. And that could be client needs a VPAT, when you fill it out, technically it's an ACR accessibility performance report, but people just still say, give me your VPAT. But they, it could just be, hey, somebody wants to buy a product called Passkey, right? And we wanna buy Passkey, that's like for hotel booking and such. We wanna buy that, send me the VPAT. Or it could be, I'm a software engineer, I'm working on this button. And when it was coded, it was a div, and it works with mouse but it's not working with keyboard. I don't really understand how to fix that. Can you help me? And then somebody from Accessibility Guild who's way more technical than me gets on and says, yeah, do this, up to including let's do a call and I'll show you how to do the code. And that works out, it works out pretty well. - Stephen, how did you find us? Do you mind telling the story? - So initially I've been working with TPGi, oh, I'm sure 10 years, probably more. It was with, so I worked for, it was American Management Systems. When I first, like '99 when I started there, that's where first, there was a lady wanted to start, it was actually wasn't even a boss of mine, she wanted to start a human factors practice. And I was enthusiastic about accessibility. She and I did it for a couple years, built it up, it became CGI Federal and HealthCare.gov. So we needed to bring in experts, more software engineering, but also for some quality support. Did our due diligence, you know, checked a lot of companies. You guys, we thought you were the best. So when I came to Cvent, we had to do the same thing and started over, did the due diligence, and you guys again seemed to be the best. So for, again, it's probably, I'm sure it's been 10 years, 10, 11, 12 years that I've been working with you guys on and off through, you know, through a couple of different companies. - Talk about the VPATs. You've mentioned those multiple times. And how those benefit you in your process and your client's process? - So sometimes clients are, it's mandatory for this new ADA Title II. So now in the US federal government state and local with a certain number of, what is it called? Citizens, I guess. I think it's, I don't know, towns of 10,000 or something like that. But also agencies or organizations that receive state and local funds by law, I think it's what, 2026 mark that ADA Title II kicks in, but by law have to have accessible electronic content. So some of them are, I work for North Dakota, I'm doing a conference, you know, I have to be accessible, send me your VPAT. And then they normally have an accessibility office or a director of accessibility or something that reviews it and says, you know, hey, this is good. I see you have some defects, but no critical, no, you know, you seem to have a good timeline, show me your defect, burndown rate, whatever, that's good. Some of them are, it's absolute I will not do business with you or any other event software company unless you can prove that you have a VPAT and it's reputable. And by that I mean there's, I've heard a lot of numbers thrown around, but there's about 800 event software companies. I can find three that have VPATs and we're the only one that's independently audited. The other two are, they write themselves I'm assuming, you know. So ours is might not be perfect. I mean, we're not, you know, we have no products that, oh, yeah, 100% we meet all WCAG guidelines, we're flawless. None are there yet, but I can guarantee that our VPATs are accurate because they're written by you guys. And you have no dog in that fight. You just wanna do an accurate VPAT, which is why we picked you. - That's a, I think that's a really good point about VPATs Stephen too, because that's one of the things as experts, when we look at VPATs, I mean having a reputable third-party obviously adds a lot of credibility to it. But it's also the fact that if the VPAT's not perfect, right? Like one of the tell tell signs of a VPAT that maybe was filled out by not by a third party but the entity themselves or one that's not, wasn't done properly, is the fact that it says that the organization is perfect. It's so difficult to reach that stage that really the story that you're looking for is, we're doing a really good job, we're not perfect, and here's our process for continuing to improve and maintain and all of that kind of stuff. So in that kind of same spirit, the VPAT's great because it's this document that says, hey, here's what our effort looks like, here's where we are technically against the guidelines, but we all know that particularly in the way that you think about accessibility, Stephen, that what really matters is, is that end user having a good experience, right? So can you just talk about the full, that full loop, right? Where you start with technical conformance, you produce something like a VPAT and then you actually have human beings using your software and you know, with real needs and like the possible feedback and how that then feeds back into your process? - Yeah, and that's our next. So we, for probably a year, year and a half, we are very diligently looking into bringing on a company that will test our products, you know, with people with disabilities. I'm not gonna lie, we couldn't get it to work out. I think we can still have it in the future, but for, you know, for some reasons we couldn't make it work out. I'd prefer to have employees with disabilities. I had that in other company and it was fantastic. But with that said, we have a beta program and we have a pretty robust user research department that, you know, picks users and sometimes it's clients, sometimes it's just random attendees that will pay to say, let's use our product. And through either research or, I really like the idea now beta, because a lot of them, beta tends to be clients and they know our products, so they're not, they kind of know the expectation of it to bring on people that actually have disabilities. Outside of that, things like I mentioned, the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference, they're a client of ours. And people with disabilities pretty much without exception, working with them is wonderful. Because they don't, they just want to live, they want to go to this conference and have things work. So they're very good about, they say the squeaky rule gets the grease, they don't really complain and they're not really squeaky wheeling it. They're like, hey, I noticed on your website or on your mobile app, there was an issue, I couldn't get this to work. I did find a workaround, but it took 15 clicks, this would be better. Versus, hey, your app sucks, you know? And all of that, we take it. So we have a CLS, customer listening system where even if it's not a, you know, doing ARIA codes defect, it's not a defect, it just the usability just kind of sucks. And more than likely, let's say somebody who can see it can figure their way through. And, okay, that was when I say 20 clicks, that was horrible. Somebody who's blind takes way, way longer if they're using a screen reader, way. So we wanna make it better for really everybody, it happens to come through the channel of a client had an issue with this. It might not have been broken, it just wasn't a very good experience. And we log those and we work on those too. And actually those are my, and again, I like the higher ed, the nonprofs, the state and local government, they're my best friends now because they think of things like, I would've never thought of that. One of them, a quick example was, somebody who was blind said that there was an issue with, on the mobile app with it loading, that it wouldn't always load. We do that lazy loading where you, you know, if you go to a giant conference, it could have a thousand sessions. So instead of loading a thousand sessions would take minutes, you know. Especially on low Wi-Fi, we lazy load. So when you get to the end, it takes a second and it loads again. At this conference, the Wi-Fi was bad, so they thought it was broken. And visibly, when I go to the bottom, I don't remember what it was, it was dots or something. We weren't relaying that to users. So we should have had, - Ah, yeah. - or we allowed for it to say, you know, additional sessions loading, sessions loading, page loading, whatever. We didn't think about that. That actually came from user feedback. It's not really, is it a defect? I don't know, but it's something that could make it better. - Right. - So they don't think, well now I have to leave and go back and maybe my search was wrong. I don't know. When really the sighted person's like, oh, I see the dots. - That's fascinating. And I think that that's a really important distinction. And sometimes it's difficult to really see and understand the difference between like, hey, we technically conform to the guidelines and this is really useful to, you know, different types of users, you know, whatever the situation may be. Stephen, you know, I think just as you were talking, kind of putting myself in the seat of the audience here. And I think that there's like a ton of like really interesting stuff. And you've come a long way. You said you've been working with us alone for 12 years and your journey is a lot longer than that. But if you're somebody who is thinking like, I need to get into this, I need to get my organization into this, we have a requirement. Like what would be your advice to that person that's really embarking on accessibility? They're either new to it or they're brand new to it. Like what are the things that they should be thinking about right now? - Yeah, a little bit, a little bit market depends on the organization. So when I first started this, we were contractors, we were a federal contracting company. And I remember the lady who started that human factors practice said something like, this isn't going away. And you know, it was a federal contract, federal, you know, we had to make this product accessible. Next contract, same thing happened, we have to make this accessible and it was up to the individual teams. So you, it wasn't going away. With me, as a software company, we have to, well, our clients have to purchase accessible products. If we wanna sell to those clients, we have to create accessible products. - Right. - But I am huge on, go as high as you can to the VP or the, you know, the VP of technology, or in my case the highest is the client 'cause they really ultimately make all the decisions. Go as high as you can. - Right. - And for me, it's worked very well because you go to clients and I'm talking like I've been in clients, we'd sit in the office with like a CTO of a very large federal agency. And he's like, I don't even know what I don't know. And those are the clients you wanna have because, - Yeah. - I can help you, this is what you need to know. And it's very easy to go back to the VP who has to cut a very fat check to make our product accessible. Like the CTO of this federal agency, he just didn't know what to ask. And that's why our products aren't accessible yet. Now he does, after I had a conversation with him and his eyes are open like, now I get it, well, guess what? Now we have to do it. And it's not just that CTO, it's the CTO of every other federal agency out there. Especially the ones that don't even know what they don't know. - I think one of the most unique parts of your story is the fact that the first time you were handed an audit, instead of running to the developer saying, fix this immediately like everybody else does, you climb the ladder to the top of the organization and said, look at this, this is what we face. And we need to think about this in a much bigger way than just giving it to a bunch of developers to fix. We need to figure out how to tackle this ongoing. And I think it's just, it's such a, and not that there's anything wrong with the other way, like, you know, the other way is good too, but it's a very interesting strategy and approach. And for you, and for many people out there I think it could, but for you it really worked out just fantastically. So what I wanna get into, we're starting to get towards the end of the hour here, and what I wanna kind of wrap up with Stephen is that we've talked a lot about the current partnership, our partnership with you, your partnership, your personal partnership with your organization, and the different roles within your organization, and then you and your organization's partnership with your clients and with your clients' clients, right, aka, the end users. So the real theme here has been this, how all those partnerships come together to really bring accessibility and inclusion, right? That's what I hear when I hear you talk is inclusion. It's not just about can people do this, it's are people included? And that means that things aren't just being made accessible, but those people are being invited into the entire process, to the event, to everything, right? It's a huge, huge story of inclusion. What do you see for the future? Like if somebody's listening to this and maybe like, oh, you know, this guy's got it all figured out, look at him, he did it right? But we all know on this call that you're not done and that you probably never will be done, right? That it's an ongoing journey. So where do you see the next, you know, six months, year, five years, 10 years, you know, whatever you have in your head as a vision for the future. - I'll say I'll be retired on beach one day still going, you know, I could've done that a little differently. You know, let's be honest. I'd love to say, I'm just thinking about. - Umbrella drink in your hand? - The mojito, yes. - Yeah. - Yes, exactly, but. - [Mark] Yeah, I got you. - I really think it's, I mean, and everybody on this call knows it, I think I posted those on LinkedIn that it's always pushing a boulder up a hill. - Yeah. - It always feels like that. It's not like, I don't know, GDPR, if you guys remember what was GDPR, 12, whatever, 15 years ago, it was you had to do it, it's a requirement or you can't do business. It was still pushing a boulder up a hill. It was a scramble. This accessibility, even with the European Accessibility Act, it still feels like, and I'm not talking about Cvent or any you know, planners, just the accessibility space it still feels like we're always pushing a boulder up a hill. And I think, depending on the audience, accessibility is about people. It's enabling us as humans to, you know, say go to these cool events, to participate, to socialize, to learn things, to share our knowledge and learn knowledge from other people. You talk to a UX person that resonates with them. Because they want everybody, their job, their, you know, the thing that they focus on is making people included through design. Then when you let them know, well, there are also people who need to be included, who can't see your design, they can only hear your design, or they can only through a braille display, touch your design, they get it. For some people, it's we need to talk about money, about dollar figures. And there are people that, like I mentioned, planners, they will always open up their market to a larger audience. And if there is, I wish I remember the name of the organization, it was a Chicago-based nonprofit, but they did a study. Over two years, people with disability spent $50 billion on travel. And go to a large conference, you know, we know we're about 20, about one in four, about 26% of adults in the US have a disability, if you don't see, now some aren't visible so mind you. But let's say I think it's 8% have a mobility issue. If you go to a conference with a thousand people and you don't see 80 people with mobility issues, then that conference is not being as inclusive as you should. Because there's somebody out there, let's say a wheelchair who said, I'm not comfortable going to XYZ conference because they didn't mention wheelchair ramps. They didn't mention captions if I'm deaf of or harder hearing. They didn't mention that I can get a, you know, check in using a screen reader if I'm blind. They didn't mention that, I'm not going. So if you see nobody in a wheelchair at a conference with 5,000 people, it's the planner's fault. Period, end of story. And I'm willing to bet if you know that planner for all you had to do is kind of some minor things and you would've opened up your conference to a staggering number of people, they would've done it, they just didn't know. And that's probably the big thing that I'm trying to break those walls down now. And amazingly enough, not amazingly enough, kind of as I expected, planners are all in. Like I had no idea. I could make more money? I could include more people? I'm all in. Especially the piddly things that you're talking, these are easy things, you know? For what a planner has to do to plan a conference for 5,000 people, and it is nothing to make it inclusive. It's fractions of a percentage point. They just need to know to do it. - Yeah. And maybe that's the future. I think that that's a really good point. And it's been similar to my experience is that a lot of, you know, you talk about the boulder being pushed up the hill, right? And a lot of people do and think that when they embark on accessibility, however we're looking at it, right? Digital products, including what you need for people attending conferences, like whatever your personal scenario is, they're imagining that they're always gonna get sort of this pushback, right? That it's gonna be difficult, that it's something that has to include, and sometimes that's the case, right? Sometimes you do have to evangelize in the right way to get past those, just like with anything, right? If you're in business, you have come up against something that you've got to evangelize for and move along. It's no difference. It's no different. However, what I really find is those moments that are surprising and probably shouldn't be, where awareness is king, right? You just make somebody aware that, by way of your example, Stephen, that there is people with disabilities who want to attend their conferences. That all they need in order to feel comfortable doing that are these type of accommodations or this type of interaction, or to be heard, right, to be included, to be listened to, that you can include those people. And sometimes that's because people want everybody to be part of it. Sometimes there's an ROI. Oftentimes there's an ROI associated with it. So there's even multiple points by which people will go, you know what, this just makes total sense. So it's an encouraging, I think it's an encouraging thing for the future of accessibility. And if I were new to accessibility listening to this, I think that that might be one of those things that I hear that goes like, hey, you know what? I am gonna tackle this because I wanna look for those positive moments where I'm gonna run into people who go, you know what, you're right, I didn't realize it, it's not something I had thought about, and move forward, you know? So we have- - So, a lot of the things Mark is, planners are already doing it or it's already being done for them and they don't even know. I mentioned one, we have a big annual conference called Cvent Connect. There's one in the US, there's one in Europe. And a person came up and I was doing, you know, JAWS demos and screen reader demos and all this. And they said, you know, how much extra is that? And I said, it's built into the product. And there was a lady, she's like, well you know, how do I, okay, well that's great, how do I enable it from my website? Like it's already there. She was, that's BS, no way. - Yeah. - So we pulled up her live registration site. And you know, tab and skip nav shows up and you know, went ARIA handling and set focus to the first field with an ARIA and it read through ARIA label, it read the description of the ARIA and everything. She was blown away. And I'm like, this is already there, you just don't know about it. And you don't have to advertise like, our website is accessible. But you do have to say things like, you know, if you're using like our mobile app or even the website, you can have captions. By default, you can do AI-generated captions. I mean you have to, if you want them like a human caption, you have to pay that, or you know, a transcription service. But if all captions are like this call you say, hey, we're gonna have captions. It's already there, it's already free. But if you don't let people know about it, they might think, wait a minute, I'm hard of hearing, they didn't say they're gonna have captions, I'm not gonna attend 'cause I don't wanna waste my time 'cause I'm not gonna understand what anybody's saying. So sometimes it's like markets, you've already made the investment in it. You have the software that works. You know, you're gonna have captions. You've chosen a hotel, we're lucky in the US that already is accessible has to be by law. Let people know about those things. Sometimes it's as simple as there is zero cost to this other than a little, I have to put a sentence or two to say, this is what we've done to make our site and our you know, our website, our location, our sessions accessible. That was it. Then you can go on plan the rest of your event. - Yeah, I think it's another brilliant bit of messaging that I've sort of hear in your story is that it's a lot of people particularly because this is often approached from a technical standpoint, right? We need our public-facing website to be accessible because there's requirements around it. You know, fill in the blank in terms of the requirement. Or our customer is asking about a VPAT and we know we need to make our product accessible because of that. But oftentimes that extra step's not taken where you're talking about it, right? And it doesn't have to be like, oh, look at our website, it's accessible. It could simply be, hey, you know, to your point earlier like it could simply be just asking the right questions to people with disabilities, letting them know through that inclusive language and inquiring that, hey, we want you to be a part of this. And if one, they then try to use the product, it's accessible. You don't have to say it's accessible. You don't have to go our website or our registration form is accessible. If you say, hey, come register, and they get there and they're successful, nobody even thinks about it, right? It just is great. I'm glad I was included. We're rounding the end of the hour. This was a great conversation. We were all over the place with the slides. We talked about this beforehand. We're like we feel like we should have some slides up there, but we know we're gonna be, you know, jumping around this conversation. So hopefully if you're listening to this and you were looking at the slides, you were able to kind of draw the lines. Anything last minute, Stephen, that you would like to say before we completely wrap up for these folks? - I was thinking real quick when you were talking. And let's get this out there, spread the word. It is not a HIPAA violation to ask about accommodations. Somebody thinks HIPAA is a health privacy. - That was a good point. - If I mean, HIPAA only applies - Option to privacy act. - to medical providers. So even a medical conference, now wouldn't it be right could say are you blind? You wouldn't wanna do that. But you could say, well, okay, are you deaf? Do you require captions? Do you require sign language interpreters? Do you require audio description? That's perfectly fine and actually preferred. So planners think I can't ask somebody anything related to a disability because it's HIPAA. No, it's not. And actually people prefer it. So please ask away. And again, you can't, you know, it's not proper to say, are you deaf? But you can't ask, do you require captions? Do you require silent interpreter? Do you have a personal care assistant? Do you have a mobility device? All those questions. 'Cause guess what? They're gonna come to your event. Hopefully, you know. - Stephen, your passion for accessibility, you're such a champion. I wish we could, it's just infectious. I wish we could bottle it and share it. Because it's, we love working with you. It's great. - I genuinely think about everybody on this call is the same. I'm probably just a little more vocal about it, but inside, I bet everybody's just the same. - Well, you know what, I really appreciate you and appreciate talking to you for exactly what Jen said. Like, as much as we can get, you know, buried down on our workday like everybody else, when we are working with somebody like you, it reminds us of why we've chosen this as a profession and why we care. And it's just, it's really one of the rewarding parts of this job is to interact with folks like you who are passionate and who do care. And I mean that to both of you. Jen, I put you in that category as well. So thank you both. I really appreciate your time for this. Thanks to everybody who attended. Any last words, Jen, before we wrap up? - I have none. Did we have any questions that came in? - I think people were just wrapped up and absorbed and listening. We had a lot of really positive comments from people. - Oh, nice. - Yeah, coming in saying, excellent, thank you, great presentation, and thanking Stephen in particular, but all of us for this. So we're glad that you enjoyed it. This was selfish on our part. We really wanted to talk to Stephen. And we're glad that we had a forum to share it with other folks as well. It's recorded, so if you really enjoyed this and you wanna share it with somebody down the road, that'll be an opportunity for that as well. But thank you and thank you Stephen and Jen. - No, thanks, Mark. Thanks, Jen. Always a pleasure. - Talk to you soon.