- [Mike] Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We'll begin momentarily. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mike Mooney. I'm the digital marketing manager at TPGi, I just wanna thank everyone for joining us for this special session, You Don't Know What You Don't Know with Jonny James. I have a few housekeeping items I wanna go over before getting started. First off, the session is being recorded and we'll send everyone an email after the session with the recording after the event. We do have captions available, feel free to use those. And lastly, hopefully, there'll be time at the end of the session for Q&A. Please use the Q&A box provided by Zoom to submit your questions. And if there's time, again, Jonny will answer those at the end of the session. And with that, I will let Jonny get started, Jonny.

- Hello, hello. Hi, folks. Welcome and thank you for tuning in on this 11th GAAD. I guess it's technically not Global Accessibility Awareness Day yet. This is like the eve, eve of the day, but thank you for joining. There's a bunch of awesome stuff over the next couple days. And Mike and I were chatting before this session, just saying how we foresee this becoming a larger thing, not just a day, but a week and maybe longer just 'cause of the just the breadth and depth of quality content. So hopefully, I can provide some of that today. So again, I thank you for joining and welcome. And during the talk, I'll do my best to describe any images I've included in my talk here. So you don't know what you don't know. So this is my long and winding road to web accessibility. So we'll start at the beginning, which is the early days. I'm born and raised in a town called Guelph. And if you haven't been, I promise it's nicer than it sounds. That's Guelph, spelled G-U-E-L-P-H. Lots of famous people come from Guelph, like Neve Campbell and that's about it. In terms of skills, growing up as a kid, there's a picture of me on the right. I'm wearing green terry cloth shorts and a blue terry cloth t-shirt. I've got a squirt gun down my, oh, just lost my talk there, one sec. There we go. I have a squirt gun down the front of my shorts and I've got my hands on my hips, probably telling a story, wearing some rubber cowboy boots in my mother's garden. So back when I was a kid, I was really good at taking things apart, not great at putting them back together. And I was always looking for the needle in the haystack, which probably primed me for a career in web accessibility. Also, I look remarkably like Woody from "Toy Story." I was like a little kid here. But this is obviously 15 years before Woody was a thing. So I should get credit for inspiring that character. So things that were on the receiving end of me, taking them apart were like my neighbor's Volkswagen Beetle, taking it apart and placing all the pieces out neatly on the driveway, which he came home to. And I got a looking for that. So two of my favorite people growing up are my Grandma James and my Uncle Paul. On the left is my Grandma James. She's wearing a blue and green floral blouse. She's sitting in a chair that's upholstered probably sometime in the '60s. And she's got a nice gentle smile on her face, Irish Canadian smile. She's got short silver hair and little spectacles. And sitting next to her on her left is my Uncle Paul, who has a shock of black hair. He's got a nice smile on his face, always very friendly and he's wearing a blue sweater and some jeans and he's looking very happy sitting next to her. So the reason I'm showing this slides for a few reasons. So this photo was taken in 2014. This was around the time that I started a coding bootcamp. I had been laid off the previous year and had been laid off from a hospital job that I'd worked in for many years due to budget cuts, go figure. And so I was looking for something, like a change in my career, something to do, something that combined my love of science and design and art and things like that and also just helping people. And that, I think, came from this relationship that I grew up with seeing my grandma who raised five boys on her own. And my Uncle Paul who's pictured here was born with cerebral palsy and an intellectual disability. And their relationship was quite sweet. So she raised him to be a part of the community and she taught him how to walk and talk and do all these things. And he loved nothing more than WWF, which is wrestling back then not pandas and country music. So he still worked in the community and yeah, he was embraced by the small town that they lived in. So it was really quite sweet to see this. So this would actually be the last time I would see my Grandma James because I started a coding bootcamp, which would take up all the time for the next nine weeks after that. That was Monday to Friday and weekends and evenings, so it was quite intensive. So let's jump into what a coding bootcamp actually is. So coding bootcamps, they're intensive training programs designed to quickly prepare you for a career in tech. This could be something like software engineering, data science, cybersecurity, and other tech careers. Most of these bootcamps last around three to four months. There's some part-time ones that last longer, sometimes six months or longer, but that allows the students to attend without quitting their jobs. These appeal to people like me who want to start a new career quickly. They also appeal to people who already may have a degree or wanna improve skills or gain new skills in order to advance their careers. I already had some coding experience prior to this. I was a musician from a young age and here I am, I'm sitting here on a railing with the Hollywood sign in the background when I was in Los Angeles, trying to look cooler than I was. And what we've got here is the hero image on the front-facing page of my website, and this is back in 2001. I have a code snippet below to show that it was all built using tables, nested in tables, nested in tables. But I will note that there is an image and it does have alt attribute with some text. So at least I got that right. But what it is, is there's some black text navigational links down the left side for bio, news, shows, photos, media, links, contact, things like that. And it's black scribbled images of text that are on a dark kind of red oxblood colored background. I can barely read this, just looking at it now, which might explain why no one came to my shows back in 2001. Maybe they couldn't actually see the dates listed. So but yeah. So before anyone asked the color contrast on that, those images of text on the background is 1.6 to one. So it fails miserably. So had I known that, maybe things would've been different with my music career, but yeah, so that was short lived career of the band Jonny James, not a very original name, but I can't take credit for it 'cause I didn't come up with the name, my parents did. So that's kind of where my coding experience started and stopped. So I definitely needed to update my skills at that time. So my bootcamp story starts like this. Well, so I went in for an interview. They accepted my application to join and the things they were teaching were HTML5, CSS, responsive design, design theory, JavaScript, jQuery, WordPress. And at the end of this program, what you'd have is your own website, personal website. And they would prepare you for either a career as a freelance web developer or a front-end web developer, and career development assistance was provided, meaning they would help you find a job. There was something kind of like speed dating, but for finding jobs where you go through 30 interviews in 30 minutes. So each interview with a prospective company would last one minute. You'd go around. It was fun. But my focus was on becoming a freelance developer. I thought I had the hustle in me. So anyway, it was thrilling to be a part of this nine-week bootcamp. I met a lot of great people from all walks of life. Many librarians, surprisingly. And I got called grandpa a lot because I was 36 years old at the time, which I guess qualified me for being a grandpa. So I didn't mind though. So when did I first hear about web accessibility? Well, the exact date, because it's etched into my hippocampus, was Thursday, June 5th, 2014, to be exact. So this was actually at the eight-week mark into a nine-week coding bootcamp. So eight weeks in, that's when I'd hear about web accessibility for the first time, this is in 2014. So this is very early on the sort of development of web accessibility or web development bootcamps. So nine weeks in and I heard it from this gentleman here, Billy Gregory, also known as The Lumberjack. So he came in during our lunch and did a lunch and learn and spoke about web accessibility for 40 minutes while everyone in the class eat their sushi and burgers and fries and stuff. And Billy told me months later that when he looked around the class, there was only about two people that were paying attention. I was one of them and everyone else was kind of just focused on their food. So web accessibility got relegated to this 40-minute infomercial in the eighth week of this bootcamp, but it had a huge impact on me. And the first gap that I noticed in my learning was that here I was, getting this hands-on, intensive experience learning web development. And no one mentioned anything about simple things like just using semantic HTML to provide accessible websites. So this wasn't even something on their radar at the time. And you also learned a bunch of other stuff around, you know, they taught us about carousels. So you learned like quite a few bad habits, stuff like forms. They didn't really tell you to programmatically label them. So there's just sort of a lot of bad habits that were developed, I think, in that program. The current bootcamp curriculum, and this is the one that I went to, now list web accessibility requirements as it listed as one of the, well, part of the curriculum. So I reached out to them and asked them what that actually entailed and I didn't receive a response. So I'm gonna reserve my suspicions as to why I didn't get a response as an alumni, but I'll chalk that up to maybe the pandemic or maybe the popularity of the bootcamps, which I'll touch on in this next slide. So coding bootcamps. So the good thing is that coding bootcamps do actually work and bootcamp grads see a median salary increase of $22,000 over their pre-bootcamp salary. So considering that the average bootcamp now costs about $14,000, that's a pretty good return on investment. And year after year, these bootcamps are actually continuing to grow. So since 2013, I went to mine in 2014, early 2014, so this is early on, the industry has grown 1047%. So from just over 2,000 graduates in 2013 to upwards of 24, 25,000 graduates in 2020. So there's been an explosion in these bootcamps for learning web development, yeah. And the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that this is only gonna continue to grow. So this decade from 2020 to 2030, they see a 13% increase in this employment. And then for things like software development and security analyst jobs, they're gonna grow by 22 and 33% respectively. So there's a high demand that makes these coding bootcamps a valuable opportunity for people that want to jumpstart a new career. So after Billy's talk on that Thursday, the following week, I graduated from the bootcamp and I was unleashed onto the world. I graduated with a personal website, a small portfolio with a bunch of accessibility issues. But what did I know about web accessibility other than what I had been told in that 40-minute talk from Billy Gregory, well, Ygritte from "Game of Thrones," I think, says its best. She said, "You know nothing, Jon Snow." She looks at him in disgust. And that's pretty much when I look back now how little I actually knew. So after graduating, I decided to do some freelance stuff, as I'd mentioned. Again, worked for some friends and stuff, not always a great idea, but eventually, I decided to apply to an agency job and work as a front-end developer. So I went to this interview and I sat there with the chief technical officer and the lead developer. And so I went through the interview. They're cool guys. And at the end of the interview, they asked me what I was passionate about. And I just said I'm passionate about web accessibility. And they looked at each other kinda just glanced, like, huh? Or it was huh, I don't know, I'm not sure which one it was. But anyway, the point is a couple days later, I received a call from them and they told me I had the job. So my first day at this agency, we were doing stuff like medical tech stuff for US companies. Pretty cool stuff, actually. And so my first day at the job, that same CTO who asked me what I was passionate about, came over to my desk and welcomed me. And he told me, "The thing that set you apart from all the other interviewees was the fact that you mentioned web accessibility." He said, "We had never heard anyone mention that before." And I was like, "Cool, so when do we start on web accessibility?" Thinking it was just a thing that you start on. And he said, "Oh yeah, we don't have the time or the budget for that." So that was kind of my first foray into what it's like working in an agency where web accessibility isn't at the forefront or at the beginning of projects. It's not in the planning or design phase. It's not even on the radar, so to speak. So yeah, after working at this agency, and after a year I was bugging Billy Gregory who came and gave that talk at that bootcamp, I was bugging him saying, I wanna do what you do. It sounds really cool. So after about a year of bugging him and working at this agency, he finally said, "Okay, fine, send me your resume." I had bugged him enough at that point that he finally acquiesced. So I sent him my resume. And about four months later, my first interview was set up. So to anyone listening out there, who's wondering how to get into the industry, I guess you just have to be persistent and bug people, but I hope it's easier than that now. So while working at the agency, I would rush home from work during the day, during my lunch hour or whenever I could schedule it to do interviews. I did three interviews. First one was with Leonie Watson, who was a hero of mine. The other one was with Karl Groves, who grilled me about JavaScript. And the third one was with Mike Paciello, the man himself. And in that interview, Mike told me three things. He told me that I didn't know anything about web accessibility, but that's okay, because anything I didn't know, they could teach me on the job. And he also said that also meant that I hadn't developed any bad habits yet. So the second thing he told me is you can't teach passion. And the third thing he said to me is that he'd take the weekend, and he might possibly make me an offer I couldn't refuse. I don't think he said I couldn't refuse. I think he just said he might make me an offer. So it was up in the air. So anyway, I rushed home, had this interview, went back to my job and sat down at my desk. And that same CTO that came over and welcomed me on my first day, came over and said, "Yeah, so after this project wraps up today, we won't be needing you anymore." So that's the life of a contract front-end web developer. They just let me go. And so I was fired when I came back from lunch for my job, pretty much. My contract was over, but within an hour, I received an email from Mike saying, "You know what? Made up our mind, we would love to have you on." So I was fired and hired all within the same hour. And I would like to know if anyone in the chat has been fired and hired within the same day or within the same hour. So that was pretty exciting. So a couple weeks later, I started my first day at The Paciello Group, which was one of the greatest days of my life. And one of the things Billy told me when I first started was you can forget all the things you learned in that coding bootcamp because you're not gonna be using any of that here, which was met with some relief and a bit of disappointment. But I think it's important to mention that because there is a bit of a fork in the road and a bit of a diversions between people that wanna be web accessibility professionals and people that wanna be coders or web developers. So there's a bit of a split that happens there, a fork in the road. So this fork in the road up on the screen, I have a picture of Fozzie and Kermit the Frog and they're making a hard left turn in the Studebaker Commander, I believe, it's the model. They're making a left turn on their way to Hollywood from "The Muppet Movie." And there is actually a fork, a giant fork stuck in the road where the road splits off. So they're taking a left turn. So at this point, I had to decide, you know, did I want to move into this role of an accessibility engineer or be a front-end web developer, which I had obviously invested a lot of blood, sweat and tears. I had coding bootcamp back in 2014 cost $6,500 Canadian. And for those people that don't know the Canadian currency, that's a lot of maple syrup. So yeah, it was quite an investment, but now obviously, they're much more expensive. They're 14, $15,000 in some cases. But again, they're popular because they have a good return on investment. So that divergence in roles of web accessibility versus front-end developer was something that I had to decide. But obviously, I'm still here working at TPG five years later. So I've stuck with this decision and I'm happy for it, and I haven't looked back since. But in that time between working at the agency and starting at TPG, I was learning about web accessibility, but I was learning about it in ways that were quite informal. So for example, the Web Accessibility course by Google, which is led by Alice Boxhall and Rob Dodson. It's a great course, free course on Udacity. They go through from the bottom up. I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested. WebAIM as well. And then I was just attending a lot of in-person meetups as well, like the a11yTO Meetups, where I would see Karl Groves and Billy Gregory, like The Viking and The Lumberjack. I would see people like Marco Zehe, I would see Adrian Roselli give talks. And then there was also the a11yTO Camp here in Toronto that I would also attend, which was awesome to see some of my accessibility heroes, speaking at and get to meet them. So we always talk about accessibility starting upstream, and that train leaving the station but it's usually related to the context of client work and design teams not designing accessibility into their products or including it in the beginning. I think the education of for web accessibility has to occur upstream as well. It has to happen when people are actually learning these skills such as web development. It shouldn't be like an additional course on the side or some extra curriculum. It should be just baked in. So where I learned web accessibility is where most people learned web accessibility. Here are the WebAIM survey, web accessibility practitioner results. So it's a bar graph, and the four biggest bars with about 75%, 80%, 83% and 90% are things like training workshops through your peers and colleagues, through meetups and camps, and the other one is online resources. Things like formal schooling, so that would be like universities, that's only 12%. And so I'm not sure where bootcamps necessarily fit on this graph or if at all. But what this tells us is a few things that people are learning web accessibility in informal ways, and people are using various methodologies. And this is because there isn't necessarily one single satisfactory way of learning about web accessibility or maybe it's also just this is how people learn best through going to camps and having a social environment, but also being able to access these resources online at their own pace. And we have organizations that are working to improve web accessibility training and education. For example, you have Teach Access, which is an excellent organization, which is going after higher education. But again, from that last slide, if you recall, formal schooling accounts for about only 12.5% of where response are learning about web accessibility. So it's a fraction of where most are learning. And if anyone's been to a university or college or postsecondary institution, you'll know that they're notoriously bureaucratic and they are a bit slow to adapt, even though in recent years, they've started to introduce bootcamp style programs for front-end development, UX and UI design and FinTech, just to name a few of the courses a lot of these postsecondary schools now provide in a bootcamp style. Again, when I was looking like bootcamp versus university or continuing education at a college, I really just wanted to do it. I wanted a quick and dirty way to start a new career. I didn't wanna have to do HTML1 for the fall and then do HTML2 in the spring and so forth and take years to finish learning this sort of career pivot, so to speak. So again, Teach Access focuses on solutions that can be applied broadly in higher education. And then we've got the IAAP, which is they're providing like, they're less concerned with education per se and more focused on sort of a certification process. So the first badge, they have these different badges that align with your experience and your career path. So for example, the Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competency badge requires about three to five years of experience. So people upstream say without three to five years of web experience, web accessibility experience aren't necessarily benefiting from this sort of approach, 'cause you already need to be a web accessibility professional to be able to access those sort of testing and to garner a badge. But again, I've heard sort of anecdotally that some people are able to get around that and get these badges, which also presents a problem as well. If people are getting badges, claiming that they have web accessibility jobs and they don't. So that makes it difficult for people hiring in the industry if they take that badge at face value, thinking that someone has the proper knowledge and skills and only to find out that they don't. So there is a gap between the education system and the IAAP as well. And it creates a bit of a gatekeeping between the industry and job seekers. So as one colleague said, it's the education for the many. So we wanna make sure that as many people are learning about web accessibility and focus less on necessarily certification. And there's also fees involved as well. So I think the danger there is like web accessibility shouldn't be like wearing a concert t-shirt, you know? There's a photo on the screen of a little baby, wearing a Nirvana t-shirt with the smiley face, with the eyes crossed out. And I believe that's Nirvana's "Bleach" album. So again, there's people that will wear a concert t-shirt and they'll know every song and every lyric and have been to all the shows. And then there's people that wear a concert t-shirt and they might know the greatest hits album. Then there's people that just wear it for fashion. So I would be wary of having some sort of indication that someone's certified as a web accessibility professional. I think it's difficult to make those claims and possibly misleading in some ways. So we have to find a reliable means of ensuring that people actually have these skills when they enter the workforce because the industry is begging for it. The industry needs people with these skills, but it's not being met. And that's because the education system is failing those people that are getting a web development education over nine weeks or half a year or whatever. And then getting out only to find out that the places where they wanna work won't hire them because they don't have the necessary skills and web accessibility, which is obviously in demand. So the benefit of bootcamps, again, is that they're agile and they can change their curriculum on a dime. Again, what I said about postsecondary institutions are a bit slower to adapt, but again, they're making changes by adopting a bootcamp-like structure in their continuing education streams. The cool thing about coding bootcamps as well is that often the grads, the people who have graduated from the course come back to become instructors or paid mentors. So that's kind of cool to see that you're being taught by someone who just learned web development the year before or something. So they've gone out into the world. Maybe they come back and do some mentoring or some instruction. So that's pretty cool. Another thing about the coding bootcamps is that often they make these promises, whether they're valid or not, of an 80 to 95% hiring rate within the first six months of graduation. And I know in the bootcamp that I did, there was a lot of people that were hired within weeks. So definitely, there's some leverage there with the industry and these bootcamps where you could say, you know, if you're promising people that they're going to be hired within six months, but industry's looking for web accessibility skills, then you really need to be honest about the skills, the actual skills they need to perform their roles as a front-end developer. And hopefully, it won't be like the scenario that I was in, where you show up on the first day of work and get told that there's no money or time for web accessibility. Again, as someone who has been on the other side of the industry as a web accessibility engineer and not as a front-end developer. I mean, I think I can make a pretty good assumption just based on what I'm seeing on the web that things aren't getting better. But I would like to think that that isn't the case when a front-end developer starts a new job that they're told that web accessibility is not a thing. And I wonder too, if Billy Gregory hadn't come into that bootcamp that day, how long it would've taken before I heard about web accessibility, because I didn't wanna just build flashy, fun, cool things. I wanted to actually do something that was hopefully useful and usable and had some meaning to it. And that's where this crisis is occurring right now. Here's an article from Cindy Rowland from just January of 2022, so just within the past six months. And she's discussing the crisis is real, where are the web accessibility professionals? And she details a few calls to action and three things that we can all do right now. These things, I'm not totally in agreement with all of them. She says that it's important to evangelize and share the importance of web accessibility skills with our peers. I think we do that already. And then advocate with HR departments to include web accessibility in job titles and descriptions. Yes, but again, it doesn't matter if you're putting those in your job descriptions in your HR department. The issue is that people are graduating from these bootcamps and continuing education programs without the necessary skills. And then again, she gets into some things around competing for talent, maybe providing a higher salary, but we already know that web accessibility is a specialized and highly desired skill, so those salaries tend to be a little higher. She discusses work/life integration or balance and talks about commuting and which I think maybe doesn't really align with where things are since we've been in sort of this pandemic for the past 2 1/2 years. And so I think work/life balance is very important, definitely. And it's definitely been at the forefront of a lot of discussions around work and life, but I think that is already a conversation that's happening now. And then this last thing too, where meaningful work, she says that the ability to engage in social justice every day for many is the definition of a meaningful job. So she sees web accessibility as selling itself in that degree, which is true, but I also think a lot of people still just want to make flashy, cool stuff, and aren't really concerned. So I wouldn't necessarily say that everyone's definition of what meaningful work involves social justice. I think you have to be an empathetic and compassionate person probably to begin with or have some awareness at least around that and not just be in it to build the latest, coolest thing, because hopefully, the latest, coolest thing does actually integrate web accessibility into it. So there are some serious gaps, the gaps between Teach Access, focusing on higher education, which can be slow to evolve and notoriously bureaucratic. The IAAP has a bar that's set where you need three to five years of experience. So that cuts out a lot of people that are just getting into the field. And then we've got bootcamps, which are churning out grads in high numbers every year but web accessibility is given like the 40-minute infomercial in the eighth week of a nine-week bootcamp. So those are where the education is failing in terms of web accessibility and it's not aligning with what the industry is demanding, but then there's also our hiring practices as well. I think as people that are passionate about web accessibility or web accessibility professionals, we have impact on who can get hired at our companies. And I think it's really important that we champion that and put pressure on our HR departments to look for those skills and not only the skills, but just look for people that are actually genuinely passionate. Like, again, me starting on the first day of TPGi, I knew nothing. I had no skills whatsoever. And so I learned from the ground up and I feel like I learned from the best people out there. So I was honing my skills on the job. So I think we also need to be aware of the fact that there's a lot of people out there that would be excellent for these kind of roles but we can't necessarily be gatekeepers and say, well, you don't have a computer science degree, or you don't have three to five years of web accessibility experience 'cause there's a lot of people that we're actually missing out on. So are we acting as gatekeepers is a good question. And there's the great thinker and futurist and architect and inventor, Buckminster Fuller. He was expelled from Harvard twice and never completed his formal education, but he was tasked with finding a way to steer large battleships during World War II. Their engines didn't have the power to actually turn them fast enough. So he developed this thing called the trim tab, which is a little six-inch piece of metal that goes on the rudder or the back of a ship. And what it does is it has that little six-inch piece of metal, makes a minor adjustment. It actually creates some opposition in the flow of water and creates a change in pressure, which then allows the large rudder, which it's attached to, to then swing around because if the ship's moving in a direction and there's that pressure on both sides, it has trouble swinging either after starboard left or right. So he used this same technology to describe his own sort of approach to life, so much so that he actually had the phrase, call me trim tab, engraved on his tombstone. That's how passionate he was about this. But he just realized that if you make small, little changes, but they're high leverage actions, they can point you in a new direction. And so he used the idea of using the trim tab, being a trim tab in society, and by making these small adjustments in the way you approach things can have a big impact downstream. And obviously, he saw these ships as kind of symbolizing society. So if you can navigate the way society evolves in our approach towards disability rights and towards web accessibility and things like usable tech for people, for all, we can just make these minor adjustments in the way we approach things. So it's just a change in mentality. And he actually developed this sort of connection between this technology he developed and a life approach during a very low point in his life when he was just like, I'm gonna focus on this one thing and he saw that was making big changes in his life. That could be as simple as going for a walk. That could be as simple as firing up a web accessibility webinar, or even just a Global Accessibility Awareness Day talk, little things like this. Every moment has an opportunity to have a big impact on your life and hopefully others around you. So how do we spread the word? Well, if we wanna change the culture in companies and in society, we need to start hiring differently. So we need to start, again, hiring people that are passionate about this. They don't necessarily need to have a computer science degree because let's face it, I think many people that I know that I work with would not be hired by the standards that we put out there in our HR departments for job descriptions. Many of us wouldn't even be able to meet those minimum requirements, yet here we are working every day to make the web more accessible. So again, we need to recognize that something, even as small as like a 40-minute lunch and learn can have a major impact on a person's life. And so there's an image here on the left side. It's a wall and written scrolled on it in indelible green marker is the words JAWS dongle. So just before the pandemic canceled all travel plans, I was working for a client in Manhattan. And on my last day there, I had to remember that I had my little JAWS dongle that was plugged into the back of the computer. I had to remember it and bring it home with me. So I was in one of those cool downtown Manhattan offices where I'd walk by these glassed-in offices and I'd see someone writing on the walls in Sharpie and everyone sitting around kind of brainstorming. I thought, oh, that looks so cool. And obviously, working from home, I didn't have that same experience. So I took a green Sharpie and scrolled on the wall, JAWS dongle. And it was someone that later came by and told me that that wasn't one of those white walls. So now somewhere in Manhattan, there's the words JAWS dongle written on the wall. I'm not sure if that's the best approach to spreading the word, but maybe someone looked at that and thought, what is a JAWS dongle? And Googled it and learned about screen readers. So there's lots of ways that we can make improvements or we can get involved in web accessibility. It doesn't have to be a certain track. It doesn't have to be through certification, but I think it's important that we each make concerted effort to include this no matter where we work or what we do. And just make an effort in hiring differently. The other day, I heard someone say that we hire people because they're different, but then we let them go because they're not the same. And I think that's very true. And I think we do need to hire people, more diverse group of people, and we need to include people with disabilities in that hiring process and who are being hired as well. So I think the takeaway from my talk today is that let's be gatecrashers, not gatekeepers. So by being a gatecrasher, I'm not saying like, you know, if you're at the airport and they haven't called you're section yet, or you're at a Black Friday sale. I mean, we need to start breaking down the barriers that are preventing people from getting into this because if it wasn't for someone like Billy Gregory, if it wasn't someone like Mike Paciello, who gave me an opportunity just because I had the passion but not the skills, then I think we're missing out on a lot of talented people out there that could really benefit us and also benefit the world as well. And I'm just gonna leave with a quote from the Dalai Lama who says, "If you think you're too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito." And that is my talk. And yeah, we got some time for some questions, if anyone has any or comments or yeah, whatever you got for me.

- [Mike] Good stuff. Awesome, thanks, Jonny. No questions so far, but there's a couple comments in the chat that I feel like you might wanna comment on. The first one is, it's like you're talking directly to me. I'm the guy annoying the whole company to implement accessibility and inclusion culture and changing things up. I'm assuming that you've kind been that person. And you've tried to shift change at organizations you've worked at previously. Do you have anything you wanna add to that?

- Yeah, I mean, I remember when I first started web accessibility, they're like, we have to be the loudest voice in the room, but since the only place where I worked in web accessibility was at TPG, being the loudest voice in the room doesn't really help because, well, everyone's, you know, you're kind of just in the choir, right? So yeah, I think in those situations, I would recommend watching Mike Paciello's talk on web accessibility as advantageous business approach as well, not just something that, you know, it's more work that you're lumping on the web developers or designers, but just from a business point of view, right? Like, who doesn't want more people using their products? Whether that's a banking app or it's a streaming app or whatever. When it's more usable, it's just better for business. More people are gonna say, hey, you know what? I use this product and it's really accessible. I find it easy to use. And you're gonna find probably an increase in your usership. So I think that's like kind of, that's one approach you might have to take with companies that maybe are a little resistant to kind of dipping their toes in. And I also think it helps to have those people on the team. When we talk about a cultural shift in companies, I think it's important that it doesn't have to be everyone on the team. There can be people that are those voices, that pump the brakes and ensure that their designers are using color contrast analyzers and paying attention to stuff like fonts and font sizes and things like that. So I think there's a lot of opportunities there and yeah, you know what? Be like that mosquito, right? Be that annoying thing, you know? So as the Dalai Lama said.

- [Mike] Awesome.

- [Jonny] Yeah.

- [Mike] Go ahead. There was a couple questions that came in. Do you want me read 'em off for you?

- Yeah, if you don't mind, that'd be great, thanks.

- [Mike] Yeah, sure. So the first question is why isn't web accessibility protected under the ADA?

- Ugh, I think you're asking the wrong guy. I'm not even sure if I can answer that question. That's a good question. I would say reach, if you want to, reach out to me, you can have my email and we can discuss this, but again, I wouldn't even know where to start with that. I'll put my email address in the chat here. The other thing too, I would say, is being Canadian, yeah, it's my awareness and experience with the ADA is probably not as good as some people that I work with. But that's a good question, but yeah, if you wanna take that up, I'll definitely try and help you out with that unless you have the answer and you're just like testing me, then I would love to hear from you.

- [Mike] There's a couple more questions. Before I read those off, I just wanted to read off one of the other comments in the chat. I'm an enterprise SEO, and I'd like to share that accessibility totally enhances SEO practitioner's skill set, and aligns beautifully with the goals of SEO and content development. And I don't know if you have anything to comment on that, but just overall enhancement of user experience. Is there a correlation with SEO and accessibility?

- Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think when you just use semantic HTML and you provide things, you know, the first, you know, we always say get your accessibility for free, right? Or just use proper semantic HTML and you're gonna improve the SEO of your sites rather than trying to make custom fandangled things that people can't use. So yeah, I think there is definitely a correlation and they do align. So that is true. Again, not being an SEO expert, but that's, again, something, that's also a potentially a great talk to get into and just talking about the importance of web accessibility on SEO for users and for companies.

- [Mike] Yeah, and just like better user experiences are gonna lead to a higher on-page time, lower bounce rates. So just making more usable products and websites easier to use that people across the board is helpful.

- Yeah, exactly.

- [Mike] All right, so next question. What suggestions do you have for public sector industries? It's a struggle because they aren't driven by sales.

- Well, I think, yeah, I think you have to be driven by, at that point, it's really just morals and compassion. And I think that's really what a lot of the people here, they might not think about it on a daily basis at TPG or that work in web accessibility, but I think there is a moral obligation to make things accessible. And I know that in public sector, there is that sort of maybe more of an awareness around that than, say, just the bottom line or making profits. So there's actually another really great Dalai Lama quote. I didn't include it here, but basically, it's something in the effect of like, empathy should be at the corner or they should be the cornerstone of all business, not just profit and it's something of that effect, but really, like, I think the public sector, that's probably where you might have some leverage, 'cause I think people that work in the public sector, I would hope have the best interest of the society and public in mind. So there's that element too. And really this is the issue, I think, when we talk about web accessibility, it's not that it should be separate. It actually is already ingrained into it. So if you wanna teach someone how to create websites, accessibility is kind of baked in, it's just that the people that are teaching it don't know that. And so they'll say, oh yeah, I just, I don't have a, you know, write first name above this form field and write last name above this form field. Like, they don't understand that there's a need to programmatically associate that label with that form control. So it's just these minor little tweaks. It's not this huge undertaking. So it's not this mountain that people imagine, right? And I think it's really just using, again, I go back to this all the time, it's just using proper semantic HTML and ensuring that things are marked up properly. And I think most web developers would like to know that when they're learning about web development for a future career, that they are learning the most up-to-date sort of solid foundation for a possible career and then for further learning. But really, I think that's why people with web accessibility knowledge need to be upstream and catching these programs before the courses even begin. And I think that will also give them a bit of an advantage, where you can say, listen, we actually, it's not just something where it's like a bullet point, saying web accessibility requirements, and when someone like me inquires about that, I don't get an answer. I think it should be something where it's like, yeah, this is important. This is what the industry is demanding. And if you're not providing that, then you're actually like people shouldn't be paying $15,000 to join your bootcamp or your continuing education course in web development. I don't know if I answered your question, probably not, but I think just really, for public sector, it's probably, you know, because there isn't that same focus on profit, I think it really does come down to just changing the culture and that also has to do with hiring practices as well, just ensuring that you're hiring people that are diverse, whether it's socioeconomically or whether it's people with disabilities, like, you need to hire the people, like in the public sector need to reflect the greater society. It can't just be white men. Sorry.

- [Mike] Awesome. Got a couple more questions here. Do you know sites or similar where people can discuss practical accessibility strategies to make their site accessible? Sometimes it's difficult to know what to do when the code/situations that needs to be accessible is more complicated than the standard ones, example, WCAG.

- Yeah, I mean, it's tough because for me coming into a role as a web accessibility engineer, where I've seen those sort of conversations happening, I think you have to be careful of sites like Stack Overflow, because I think there's a lot of misinformation there. I think there's a lot of voices that get amplified that maybe don't have an understanding of proper web accessibility. I think it's good to use, oh, I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but Twitter. People, I don't use it as much, but I find that people can get a lot of feedback from using Twitter. Obviously, you know, there's the W3C. There's some mailing list that you can join. But I really think that it's just probably reaching out to people in your community and that would involve things like going to meetups if you have them nearby or you can join them remotely. A lot of them are going remote now, obviously. I joined one in New York just a couple weeks ago. It was awesome, great talks. So yeah, I think you can access that community. And trust me, people in web accessibility are more than happy to offer up their guidance and information. So but really, if what you're talking about is needing to have someone come in and say, audit your site, then that's obviously different. But if you're looking just for some sort of advice or guidance, then it is out there. I would just say, try to look using the a11y hashtag or try to find accessibility meetups or camps in your locale. And there should be people there that have the necessary skills and to help you out.

- [Mike] Awesome. Another question here, I'm a trusted tester web and work for US EPA federal gov, and we have mandates to create new and evaluate/remediate for 508 compliant web/apps, but also ensure all public facing EDOCS is conformant. So I'm trying to figure out the most robust EDOC related trainings and certifications, which is harder to get in web, which seems more standardized. Do you have any ideas on where to lead someone looking for or achieve EDOC performance or training?

- Yeah, you know what? Yeah, you know what I would say, if you wanna reach out to me, again, I put my email on the chat there, but I can say it's just jjames. So James is J-A-M-E-S. So it's jjames@tpgi.com. If you wanna email me and just let me know or just repeat that question, I can maybe look into that and help you out. I think that I don't know enough about EDOC accessibility to do that but definitely, I know some people. So definitely, if you wanna reach out to me, I can try and help you out with that if that's something you're interested in.

- [Mike] Awesome. Well, we're almost at the top of the hour here. I just wanted to thank everyone for starting to kick off this week and then this session with Jonny. If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out to us. You can email Jonny directly with his email, or you can email ida@tpgi.com, and I'll add that to the chat as well. But I really appreciate the time, Jonny. And if anyone has any questions, well, I'll forward them along or they can reach out to you directly.

- Excellent, yeah. And thank you to all those who came out and joined. Yeah, and of course, tune into all the other great stuff that's gonna be happening over the next couple days with Global Accessibility Awareness Day. And yeah.

- [Mike] Yeah, we have a couple more sessions this week. One tomorrow on making accessible kiosks and a conversation on Thursday with a few enterprise accessibility leaders and someone at a federal bank as well. So it should be a good conversation about different accessibility leaders at different accessibility maturity stages at their program. So we're hoping to kinda learn and glean on how they operate, how they kinda step into the accessibility field and how they're doing things at their organization. So it should be a good conversation. Awesome, thanks a lot, everyone. Talk to you later, bye.

- Excellent, thank you, bye.