Accessibility Research at ServiceNow by Jaime Young

Speaker 1:  Okay. 

Speaker 2:  Okay, now I am ready for you. Thank you, thank you. It’s a little after seven. This technical setup is interesting, is the polite way to say it. We’re also trying to stream the event, but I wasn’t even going to try to hook up to these cameras based on just getting this going. 

Speaker 2:  But, what’s that? Thanks, Jamie. Good evening everybody. Welcome to the October session of accessibility. San Diego Accessibility and Inclusive Design Meetup Group. Thank you for coming. Appreciate you making it out. 

Speaker 2:  I’m Chris Land, your host for the evening. Harris, some of you asked where Harris is. We set this meetup up and he’s on a soccer league and he said, there is no way we’re getting into the playoffs. Put the playoffs for tonight and they got in and so that’s where he’s at this evening. 

Speaker 2:  So let me see. Tonight we’ve got talks on how to get accessibility moving and going in your organization, intersectional benefits of accessibility and inclusive design, and accessibility UX research. 

Speaker 2:  So a couple of news bits to cover before we get started. We’re always looking for speakers. We’ve got, it’s the range of topics, anything even distantly related to accessibility will be interested to the folks that come out. 

Speaker 2:  We’ve had a really great range of talks. We’ll do developer stuff, UX stuff, beginner stuff, advanced stuff. But also we’ve had great talks from someone who worked in a summer camp for kids with limb differences and shared some of their insights and things learned there. 

Speaker 2:  We had a speaker who was once an assistant to Stephen Hawking and went through some of the systems and assistive technology that he used. So just interesting stuff. And then also we’ve got time after the meetup to get back to having a drink or water and networking. 

Speaker 2:  So we’ve got a little extra time tonight, hopefully. But anyway, speakers, let me know. I want to thank ServiceNow and Michael. You’ve been awesome with hooking up the space. This is really awesome. So thank you. 

Speaker 2:  We have a couple other sponsors, DQ. They provide accessibility consulting services and products, and they are pretty much always hiring. So if you’re looking for a job, I worked at DQ for a while. It’s a great place to work and a great place to learn from tons of great professionals. 

Speaker 2:  We also are sponsored by events, and they make accessibility testing tools as well. I believe they’ve got a very strong product specifically for mobile accessibility testing. Either of these organizations would be more than happy to connect with you, give you a demo, more information. 

Speaker 2:  So it’s dq .com and events .com. Not Dairy Queen. Not Dairy Queen. D -E -Q -U -E. Broad D -Buy. Right screen. Okay. It’s not going to work. No, it’s not. It’s currently active. No, I don’t want to exit. 

Speaker 1:  Okay, let’s try this again. 

Speaker 2:  Alright sponsors, TQ! 

Speaker 1:  Yeah. 

Speaker 2:  Okay, thank you. So, just take a couple minutes now. You guys have been chatting and that’s awesome. But to specifically want to just take a minute, if anybody is either working at an organization that has any jobs related to accessibility and is looking for people, or if we have any job seekers out there looking for jobs, don’t be shy, we can take just a couple minutes to share if anybody has a show in town. 

Speaker 2:  They’ll be on a comfortable pause till someone speaks. I don’t want to pressure anybody into creating a job either. 

Speaker 3:  It might be a product manager role. Yes. 

Speaker 4:  We’ll be proud to manager. 

Speaker 2:  Switching the webcam here for the… Okay, so, well, the job seekers job availability portion of our meetup is concluded. Let’s get to the evening’s talks. Our first speaker is David Martin. He works officially in cybersecurity and privacy, but his passion is DEIA, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility. 

Speaker 2:  Anybody who tried it, whenever you see DEI, you know, try to tack Aeon at the end, because it’s sometimes getting forgotten. He currently manages the technical compliance and audit team for Intuit’s small business unit, where he owns the security, privacy, and now accessibility controls for their SaaS offerings. 

Speaker 2:  He’s also a member of the product accessibility team and heads up the San Diego chapter of Intuit’s Abilities Network, advocating for better inclusion of persons with disabilities, for both customers and the Intuit workforce. 

Speaker 2:  His presentation, after you allow me to queue it up, will be elevating disability, engaging with allies to get accessibility the attention it deserves. So, somehow jacked up the camera. Oh, no, there’s the camera. 

Speaker 2:  Sorry. There’s a lot to juggle. 

Speaker 5:  I love the live stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Get it. All right. 

Speaker 2:  My AV team called in sick. Okay, and this is always a fun move too, though, navigating a different screen. 

Speaker 5:  and with this interview. 

Speaker 6:  So we’ll have some prayer of me actually. 

Speaker 5:  Oh, it will. 

Speaker 6:  There we are. I just wanted to call this one out. Nobody was aware that Challenge Athletes Foundation is based here in San Diego. I assume they’ll figure out how to work this out. They’re based here in San Diego. 

Speaker 6:  They’re coming from Toronto, close to it. And their biggest event of the year is this weekend. It’s the San Diego Triathlon Challenge. And they’re going to be in Ventura Cove on Sunday, October 22. They have one of their hats. 

Speaker 6:  No, I am not doing the challenge. I am too old and too fat and too out of shape. But I highly recommend going. A lot of our Olympic athletes will be there from the Paralympics. And just a fantastic group. 

Speaker 6:  It does a whole bunch of wonderful work for getting people with disabilities out in the field again, doing the sports and activities that they love. So I’m plugging for the home team as it works. And hopefully I will remember this, but it’s irritating as heck to have them plan. 

Speaker 6:  Okay, so the talk here is titled, Elevating Disability and Engaging with Allies to Give Accessibility the Attention It Deserves. You can subtitle that as how to get other people to do things so you can get shipped on when you have no budget and no headcount. 

Speaker 6:  Okay, that’s obviously a friendly comment. So my name is David Martin. I cannot see my notes, but that’s okay. I fidget when I talk. This is not going to work well. I work for Intuit, pronouns. I’ll take any of them. 

Speaker 6:  It doesn’t matter. For those of you who don’t see well, I am a 60 -something year old Caucasian dude with pale skin, a lot of tattoos that are visible wearing the blue polo shirt jeans. I’ve got some really bitchin’ teal -sway sneakers on. 

Speaker 6:  And I’m rocking a wheelchair with bright yellow spokes and anodized highlights. Thank you. You’re welcome. 

Speaker 7:  I totally didn’t have that in my head. I’m sorry? I totally didn’t have that in my head. Yeah, so there you go. 

Speaker 6:  And this also means that I’m relatively short, so those of you in the back are going to spend most of this time staring at the back and the head of the person in front of you instead of me. But I can’t help that. 

Speaker 6:  Now the reality is I am what’s called an ambulatory paraplegic. I can stand up, but if I try to move it, it doesn’t end well. Let’s just leave it at that. So let’s get going here. When I got hired on it in Tewan, what they hired me for was managing a cybersecurity program. 

Speaker 6:  I do not work in accessibility full -time. Real quick, hands up, how many of you do accessibility as a sideline because it’s not your primary role? Oh, come on. Be proud. Be proud. Let’s see. OK. Believe it or not, you all are probably the people who can get more done than the accessibility team a lot of the time. 

Speaker 6:  And much of my time is going to be how you can do that. It is manipulating your peers to get them to do stuff for you. Because that’s the only way accessibility gets done. Second question. I’m a wheelchair, so it’s an easy pass. 

Speaker 6:  I’m obviously somebody who has disability. How many people here are open about disabilities in the workplace? For themselves. Some ask, some can. So I asked that question, and we’ll circle back around this. 

Speaker 6:  I haven’t always been in a wheelchair. Actually, a year ago, I was still riding centuries for fun on the weekends, and I was training for the PCT -50, which is a back country run here off Sunrise Highway. 

Speaker 6:  However, I have autoimmune issues, and I have not been able to walk from the bed to the bathroom since about January 10. Now I’m in a wheelchair. It’s come and gone for 20 years. This time, evidently, it’s staying. 

Speaker 6:  Disability can be transient. It can stay put. For years and years and years, I’m at disabilities. That changed a couple years ago, but not because of the wheelchair. But anyway, we’ll talk more about that. 

Speaker 6:  And by the way, this is part of a journey that I’m taking on this talk. Chris made a mistake in telling me I didn’t have to stick to 15 minutes. I’m also ADHD. That’s a dangerous thing to say. Oh, no. 

Speaker 6:  Disclosure. We’re honest here. You’re welcome to tell me to shut up. So my official job at Intuit is I manage a team or part of the product development cybersecurity team. So we’re engineers and we’re auditors and we’re security people and we argue with a legal team. 

Speaker 6:  We have a lot of fun and we sit together at lunch. No one wants to stand for us. That’s just the way it is. Except for the attorneys. We love our ethics team. They’re so much fun. I’m also part of the privacy team. 

Speaker 6:  I also am part of the D -Span’s security subcommittee. I basically do consulting with the government and then I’ll spell it in their tax office for writing security frameworks. And then they put up with me doing my personal interest stuff around accessibility. 

Speaker 6:  Reality is I’ve been doing accessibility work add into it the entire time I’ve been there. We’re just going on eight years. Okay. The last three years I’ve had a really good traction and have gotten a crap time done. 

Speaker 6:  The last year and why maybe it’s worth 15 or maybe 25 minutes of your time. I’ve done all these things plus more. These are just the big ones. Okay. I’ve actually managed to change corporate policy and gotten our accessibility metrics published out with our security and privacy metrics. 

Speaker 6:  I’ve tripled the membership of the San Diego accessibility community and of them I’ve gotten over 50 of them actively engaged by taking an eight hour training course on mental health first aid. Which actually by the way if anyone wants to know about that and until all of America does that for free if you can get more than 15 people to say they’ll come. 

Speaker 6:  We can talk more about that afterwards. I can spend the entire time talking about that class. But established community for people with autoimmune disorders. So they have someone to talk to and they say, my God my rheumatologist did yada yada yada. 

Speaker 6:  And they’ll have somebody’s like, oh God, yeah that sucks instead of giving them the standard pletidive. Oh I’m so sorry. It’s typically not what people want to hear. What’s he? I am now partnered with Talent Development. 

Speaker 6:  We are changing our tooling for our accommodations process. We’re changing our tooling for how we keep metrics on people internally because of my feedback to them. Because I’ve been open about what I go through. 

Speaker 6:  We’re making changes to fiscal plan, which is one of the few areas where I actually use myself as an example. More on that. And I’m now part of a couple different Tiger teams for DEI. Hiring and development, both with town acquisition and also a separate group of performance acceleration where we are trying to bring more people into and to it who have disabilities. 

Speaker 6:  Not a bad year. No. And I have budget. 

Speaker 1:  Mmm. 

Speaker 6:  At the vice president level. Yes. At the vice president level, which is really nice. So, this is how I do my role in it too. Okay? I actually do myself as an EIA leader first. The most important thing I do is I work with disability and I’m part of Project Pity for enhancing their ERG -BRG tool kits that they publish out. 

Speaker 6:  So there will be a new version coming out in January. I’m part of the Living Spinal Advocacy Group. 

Speaker 1:  Thank you. 

Speaker 6:  for accessibility. I’m part of the Intuit Accessibility Team as an Accelerate member, so it’s kind of a part -time job. I am targeted for our DEI hiring team, and I’m with the ERG lead here in San Diego. 

Speaker 6:  And I now actually have a partner in crime on that, which is great, which means I have more free time to come up with more stuff to do with my ERG, my accessibility stuff. I do also get around to managing my team, but I’ve been successful enough at that, that I’ve gone in seven years from an individual contributor and a department of one, me, who had to do everything. 

Speaker 6:  Two, I have six full -time employees as direct reports, and I have over a dozen contract workers. And at times I have over 48 headcount depending upon where we are in our season. 

Speaker 8:  Thank you. 

Speaker 6:  I’ve done well. Yeah. That’s actually one of the keys, is do really, really well. Because they listen to you, because they want to see that. And then I also show up for these fans all the time. But I prioritize this work, and I get away with it because I’m hired an amazing team. 

Speaker 6:  And it was my ability to hire people and engage with non -traditional candidates and bring them through our average time to close, or I’m not supposed to share this. This is why you don’t get to see my speaking notes. 

Speaker 6:  It’s about nine months for a wreck. OK. I closed four in five months. Every single one of them got exceeds in their first year. I did well. And I hired non -traditional candidates who would have been passed over by other people, and in many cases had been. 

Speaker 6:  So we’re engaging. And I started a conversation. If you are a people manager, you use that talk with your talent acquisition team and say, where are the candidates with disabilities? And they’re going to look at you and say, I don’t know. 

Speaker 6:  And then you need to tell them that disability and has a resume pool of candidates with disabilities that they can log into if your organization is a sponsor and partner of disability and which most of them are. 

Speaker 6:  Problem is, your TA reps don’t know. And so you have to bring that information to them and serve it on a platter, complete with the login ID and password. 

Speaker 8:  Thank you. 

Speaker 4:  Step ,lier and 

Speaker 6:  Disagility in. 

Speaker 4:  What was the specific program? 

Speaker 8:  program. 

Speaker 6:  Oh, they have a resume pool. Oh, they have a resume pool. Yep. So, all right, I’m already off track with my notes, and that’s fine. So, ground rules. This talk will be a success if we walk away with a better understanding of, and this is key, how normalizing disability. 

Speaker 6:  And then we can talk about the rest later on, which is recruiting allies into your accessibility program. I’m a wheelchair. You notice I live with that. I have ADHD. I’m pretty open about that. I’m only about everyone in this room, because of the way I voice these things, would be comfortable asking me a question about it. 

Speaker 6:  You got to know me, you’d be comfortable cracking jokes about it, and that’s okay. Unfortunately, I’m in the position of having to be the first person to crack the joke. And the reason is, most people who are fully able to or do not identify as having disabilities have been told their entire lives, don’t look at them like that, it’s rude to stare. 

Speaker 6:  They’ve been told, don’t talk about that. It’s not right. It’s been treated as something that’s toxic and contagious. I was in New York last week. How many of y ‘all been to New York before? Okay, the stereotype fits walking down the sidewalk, doesn’t it? 

Speaker 6:  Let me tell you something. As the dude in the wheelchair, I can go down a 20 foot wide sidewalk in New York, in the middle of Manhattan, which is where I was. I was in East Village. And the New Yorkers, it’s like I’m on the spenced side of the sidewalk. 

Speaker 6:  The New Yorkers are like trying to do a tightrope walk down the curb to give me space. Like dude, it’s a frickin’ wheelchair, it’s not contagious. You don’t catch this. You buy it. But that’s how people are taught. 

Speaker 6:  And so as unfortunate as it is that we have to be volunteers to advocate for ourselves. And the beginning of that advocacy starts with normalizing the conversation. Disability is not a bad word. It’s a statement of fact. 

Speaker 6:  Nothing more, nothing less. And until your allies, your able -bodied majority, can get over that, you’re never gonna have a good conversation about it, and you’re never gonna make traction. So much of tonight is taking y ‘all on a journey on doing that. 

Speaker 6:  And you’re starting to see somehow I do it already. I’m not a quiet person. So, you and I might have a little bit about my role in experience with disability. What was my goal this year? Cause I’m gonna break down one of my goals specifically and tell you what I did and then who I manipulated to get things done. 

Speaker 6:  And then how the allies themselves were brought in because I take them on a journey. And then the outcome. Most of my coworkers will tell you that I’m always looking like I’m hopelessly busy and disorganized. 

Speaker 6:  The reality is much of it is an act. I’m extremely organized and very time sensitive and I manipulate people on purpose. So, I am a minority of one. At it too. I am the only openly disabled people manager. 

Speaker 6:  17 ,000 employees. You’re talking to it. I kind of like the sound of that. But anyway, I’m also a minority in a couple other ways. I have a disability. Okay? It’s only 26% of the US adult population. 

Speaker 6:  I have a job and I have a disability. Now, because only about a third of us have jobs, I’m in the top 8 .5%. I have a good job. That puts me at least in the top 2%, if not above. Just by being fricking employed, that’s wrong. 

Speaker 6:  Okay? Know those statistics. They’re useful leperons. And know how to present them just like that. Never go to people with the, it’s the right thing to do because. No, you want to get them incensed, you want to get them a little pissed off. 

Speaker 6:  That would be nice. So, I say here I have two visible disabilities. Has anybody spotted the other one yet? No, you haven’t yet. You will. What is it? Your license. No, I don’t consider that a disability. 

Speaker 6:  I’ve been blind my entire life. It’s just my existence. But it could be. I actually am blind enough, well, I’m not blind. I see very poorly. But I’m not poorly sighted enough for it to actually be a disability. 

Speaker 6:  It’s just annoying sometimes. But no, that’s not it. We’ll get to it. Because I actually have one that I made visible before I had to use the wheelchair because I used to mask my mobility issues. And I just like work from home when I was needing to use the crutches. 

Speaker 6:  I have more crutches in King’s than anybody you know. I’ve got a collection of walkers and everything else. The chair is just the last step. I also have a whole bunch of non -visible disabilities. And we’ll talk about those. 

Speaker 6:  So, forced unmasking I have up here. Because I chose to unmask when the other now visible disability happened. That’s my Zoom background. And what it is, is a set of broken up letters. So you only see part of the letters. 

Speaker 6:  So you can’t read it easily. Because in May to June of 2020, I went from better hearing than my dogs. And they could literally identify species of owls here in San Diego by the sound of their wing flaps. 

Speaker 6:  To severe hearing loss in about six weeks. I can’t hear it for shit. So I had hearing aids. And at the beginning of quarantine, we were all going to Zoom. And nobody turned on their closed captions. And I put this up as my Zoom background to remind people to turn on the freaking captions. 

Speaker 6:  Would you please? Because I’m tired of having to ask you every single meeting. Eight hours a day, ten hours a day, twelve hours a day. So I made something, hearing aids, that people don’t usually see up front. 

Speaker 6:  Something they see every single time they get on a conference call with me. Made it that way. And by the way, I’m happy to talk about it if you want to understand what the experience is like. And how what y ‘all are doing makes things hard or easy for me. 

Speaker 6:  Because a lot of people think you’re hard of hearing. Oh, if we just talk louder, it solves the problem. That does not solve the problem. What solves the problem is speaking clearly and enunciating your words. 

Speaker 6:  Because what I can’t hear are consonants in the English language. I can hear all the vowels just fine. It’s the consonants. I can’t tell the difference between T, P, B, and K. They all sound the same. 

Speaker 6:  So just like this diagram that’s missing parts of letters, I’m missing part of every word that someone speaks. Once I learn their speech habits, I can predict what a word was. But it’s a massive undertaking in terms of cognitive processing on my part. 

Speaker 6:  So turn the damn closed options on. Now Zoom has changed their settings. It used to be that the setting for closed captions in the lifetime description was bound to the ability to download a copy of it. 

Speaker 6:  And it was a security risk. So corporations were blocking that in the settings unless it was intentionally enabled. I actually worked with Zoom to get that changed. I also gave them hours and hours of curated recordings of all the different dialects from our Indian workers because it kept mistranslating things. 

Speaker 6:  And you don’t want to know what reverse D -ness or DNS got translated as. It was Venus, the planet. So I made it conversational. I made it obvious. People come to me and ask questions. Hey, does this work? 

Speaker 6:  And they do. because they stick it in their face, but in an obvious, yet somewhat humorous way. I don’t get upset about it. I just turn the damn things on. I don’t care. So my disabilities, because we’re all here, we’re all friends now, I divided these up into two categories. 

Speaker 6:  Intrinsic causes are things that biology messed me over on. OK, the deaf, hard of hearing thing is kind of happening. It’s probably related to the autoimmune stuff, which is what’s making me not be able to walk. 

Speaker 6:  We don’t know for sure, though. I’m on my fourth neurologist. Someday we’ll get an answer. But I’m only 20 years into a 30 -year diagnosis, so I don’t know that. I have dyslexia. I have dysgraphia. Thank God for typing. 

Speaker 6:  And ADHD, as I’ve already shared. I also have dyssociative identity disorders. Anybody here know what that means? OK, yeah, suck, stoned. I wouldn’t know, but I’ve had a little bit. Yeah, for those of you who don’t know, it used to be called multiple personality disorder. 

Speaker 6:  Basically, I was significantly, repetitively abused when I was a young child between the ages of four and nine by my parents. Short story, I was sexually trafficked, not to mention physically abused and sexually abused in my home. 

Speaker 6:  And it changes how you develop internally in your mind. And you literally no longer have a singular sense of self. So we are a community and hero. I say any pronouns, there is a reason for it. I openly discuss this at work. 

Speaker 6:  Not a common thing. And because of the trauma that brings its four ugly siblings, substance use disorder, that’s why I’m drinking water, self harm, eating disorders, suicide ideation, somehow depression managed to skip me by. 

Speaker 6:  And I’m not really too bummed about that. No problem. I have open conversations about these things at work. It’s about all I say if I vote somebody wants to know more, I’m happy to discuss it. But when I brought in the mental health first aid, this was one of the reasons why. 

Speaker 6:  But it was also something that we’ll talk about later, because it gave people who were fully able to have it gone through trauma, who haven’t dealt with disability in their own personal life, a total hold in how to have an awkward conversation that they’ve been told don’t talk about forever and ever and ever. 

Speaker 6:  You want to create those moments. So nothing is ever fixed in silence. If we can’t talk about something, we cannot fix it. When you’re in accessibility, you go to people. You say, we got to fix this for the people who can’t see, because most of us are probably doing web content stuff. 

Speaker 6:  And everyone’s like, yeah, we know. It’s a social justice. That doesn’t get you traction, because they’re not engaged in the conversation before you ask them for something. You need to get them engaged in the conversation before you ask them for things. 

Speaker 6:  And then it’s easy. Nothing’s ever fixed in silence. The other awkward part of this for a lot of folks is to understand that somebody has to go first. Obviously, I’m willing to be that person in my organization. 

Speaker 6:  I will talk about things most people are uncomfortable talking about. Probably a little bit honest spectrum. We haven’t done the diagnosis on that, but I just don’t respond to social norms the same way as a lot of people do. 

Speaker 6:  I’m OK with that. I’ve gotten to a point where I know how to work with it in my own life. So what have I set out to do? I set out to formally include accessibility work in my job role, because I’m a security guy. 

Speaker 6:  My god, no. What am I doing in this? I also wanted to increase transparency. One of my goals has been to increase transparency around our corporate activities in the security role. And I wanted to extend that to accessibility. 

Speaker 6:  And the obvious way is to make your v -pads available to folks. How many of y ‘all publish your v -pads online for your customers to see? We do now. That’s a hand, it worked. Good on you for doing it. 

Speaker 6:  And the other one was, the same way I work with security controls, get our WCAG 2 .1 stuff in place so that we can monitor it and track it and open jara tickets easily. And I didn’t have to make it a manual effort. 

Speaker 6:  And Ted didn’t have to make it a manual effort. And we didn’t have to keep going to teams over and over and over again and say, do you have an accessibility ticket when it’s not coming to them the way they normally do stuff? 

Speaker 6:  The whole reason for this is to get the accessibility work into the same pipeline that they’re used to working from. If you communicate with people in their native tools, they’re more likely to do the work. 

Speaker 6:  This is their native tool. But the control didn’t exist yet. So, I’m going to go ahead and do this. Challenges, no budget, no engineers, all Ally driven. Because I’m a dude in security, I’m not in the accessibility team, I’m not in accessibility engineering. 

Speaker 6:  My director doesn’t have budget for it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All my security work did get done, by the way. Gotta lay that out there with no findings. So now I’m going to circle back a little bit. 

Speaker 6:  Allies. We talk about allies a lot in the ERG -BRG space. So you may hear involved in an ERG of these form, WaveSorter, do you know what I mean by ERG or a BRG? It’s an employee resource group or a business resource group. 

Speaker 6:  And it’s basically, you’ll get a group of people with a set of common interests. We have the Asian Pacific Islanders. We have the African Ancestry Network. We have what we call the Abilities Network, which I frickin’ hate, we’re disabled, let’s use the word. 

Speaker 6:  But anyway, it’s affinity groups within an organization. Sometimes they’re sponsored by the company, then it’s a BRG, a business resource group. Sometimes they’re employee -driven, and then it’s an ERG or employee resource group. 

Speaker 6:  But it’s the same concept. We talk about allies, right? The LGBTQ plus community talks about allies, people who are friendly to people who are in, I’m old, I call myself the queer community, who are friendly but are not members. 

Speaker 6:  They understand the challenges, they’re empathetic to the challenges of that existence, but they themselves are not members. So an ally for the disability group would be somebody who themselves does not have any kind of disability, but is sensitive to the issues and willing to support us in solving the issues that people with disability live with. 

Speaker 6:  They’re just not members, as it were. I divide them up into four buckets. We have caretakers, you see, people who make their living or have chosen to live taking care of somebody with a disability. Okay, they may be family, they may be paid, they may be both. 

Speaker 6:  We have families and friends. Oftentimes this falls out to parents or spouses of somebody with disability. We have sympathetic supporters who don’t have any direct connection, but they’re empathetic. 

Speaker 6:  And then we have peers and executives and other people in your business life who you work with on a regular basis, day in and day out. Of all three or all four buckets, the only one where I’ve ever gotten meaningful work done with this one right here. 

Speaker 6:  Use your business connections. And that’s why I say those of you who don’t do accessibility for a living are probably gonna have an easier time getting stuff done. Because you’ve got business connections that are used to doing things for you and with you on a day in and day out basis. 

Speaker 6:  Caretakers, friends and family, awesome people. If what you’re trying to solve for aligns with the disability they are used to taking care of. Right? But if you’ve got a parent of a kid with Down syndrome, you’re gonna have a really hard time getting them to help you, even for an initiative around hiring people with autism. 

Speaker 6:  Okay? It’s different from their agenda. So it isn’t that they don’t do work, it’s that they have such a strong belief structure, they’re gonna spend as much time recruiting you as you spend recruiting them. 

Speaker 6:  No traction is made. Sympathetic supporters. I hate to say this, they are the princes and queens of the new shows. They always say, oh yeah, absolutely, count me in and something always comes up last night. 

Speaker 6:  Also I would say I’m not quite 100%, but I’m very close to every single one of them who comes to me as a symphonic supporter, eventually identifying to me what their disability is, they just weren’t comfortable disclosing it to the company. 

Speaker 6:  We’ve probably done the low single digits of people who I’m confident aren’t actually numbers of the community. So, here’s an executives, colleagues, workplace leaders who wanna make a positive impact on disability inclusion, I didn’t put this in there, or their career. 

Speaker 6:  They want to win. Executives are the most competitive professional athletes you will ever meet in your life. They just do it directly for money instead of playing sports for money. If you can get them something that’s a nice sound bite in the board meeting, you have them in the palm of your hand for as long as that sound bite lasts. 

Speaker 6:  That’s where you get approvals and budget. Know that. A question for you. I’m just saying, I’ve talked about some uncomfortable disabilities. How comfortable or uncomfortable is that now? 

Speaker 4:  I’m sorry? How do we show you? 

Speaker 8:  I say that. 

Speaker 6:  How many of you routinely talk to people with disabilities? I do it mirror everyday. That’s right. About disabilities. It’s a topic that we need to detoxify. My goal here is, I talk very candidly about it, very openly about it, but I don’t get overly emotional about it. 

Speaker 6:  I just, you know, statement of facts. One, two, three, four, five. This is how it is. And I try to make that accessible to people who don’t have accessibility. People with disabilities understand this kind of intuitively. 

Speaker 6:  So yeah, we get it. People without, because they’ve been taught so much that it’s a bad evil thing, we need to take them on a journey and make it a conversational topic. This is why I do it work. All the dang time. 

Speaker 6:  The Zoom background helps a lot, but if they see me in person in the wheelchair, it’s like, yeah, look for me in the cafeteria in the wheelchair. You can’t miss it. And surprisingly, people do. I haven’t quite figured that one out. 

Speaker 6:  The tattoos work better. So engaging with allies. Things you can do. Once you get them talking about it, once you get people to ask those first questions about disability, it’s actually useful to use your disability in conversation. 

Speaker 6:  I do it all the time. You can host lunch and lunch. You can host ask me anything. You can host office hours. I’m actually in the cafe every single Thursday from 11 .30 to 1 .30, doing nothing more than being there for people who have questions about disability. 

Speaker 6:  That is, on my calendar, it is blocked every single week of the year, unless I’m trapped. It wasn’t there last week. I was in New York. Because people need to be able to drop in casually and have that first awkward ask, and hey, do you mind if I… 

Speaker 6:  Never mind that I’ve said a thousand times, I don’t mind. Please come and ask your awkward questions. You will not offend me. I can say that to one. Blue in the face. They’re always going to be awkward the first time they ask. 

Speaker 6:  And the second time, and the third time. But eventually they get over it. And I know I’ve won when I just got this chair a month ago. I had one that I got in eBay, but people noticed. Nice chair, you got the new one finally. 

Speaker 6:  Okay, when you can say that to me and talk about my wheelchair, the way you talk about someone’s bitching shoes, I know we are having a good conversation. We’ve normalized the fact that I’m in a wheelchair, and we’re now talking at a very different level than we were when I first got it, and you were avoiding it, or you were like, oh my God, what happened? 

Speaker 6:  Or, we’ve made a normal conversation with no emotional content. Now we can start doing meaningful stuff. Lunch and learns. Our accessibility service, when every single Wednesday, and the entire company is welcome to come. 

Speaker 6:  Sometimes it’s technical. Sometimes it’s somebody with MS talking about their experience and their diagnosis. Range is everything, right? Ask me anything. I just have an open call. I didn’t even want to talk about it on office hours. 

Speaker 6:  Other things we can do. Resources and guidelines. You want to publish out websites and articles. Make sure that they’re attainable. We’ve all heard the expression, nothing about us without us, right? 

Speaker 6:  That works both ways. People with disabilities talk about disability differently than people who don’t have disability. You need to talk with them and make sure things resonate, and include them in the design of the articles and materials that you publish. 

Speaker 6:  Otherwise, you’re going to write things for the people. If you’re disabled, you’re going to write for people with disability, and it will resonate with 26% of the population, not the other 74%. Or you’re going to write from the position of the 74%, you’re going to piss off the people with disabilities and say, oh, that sucks, you can’t say that. 

Speaker 6:  No communication is happening here. This is not a dialogue. Involve them from the get -go. Ask them if things resonate. And that’s where your sympathetic supporters, by the way, are fantastic. Feedback in the moment. 

Speaker 6:  Right? They will look, hey, can you take a look at this? I want to see if it makes sense to you. Right? Does this make sense to you? And if Nate’s one of my sympathetic supporters does not have disability, he’ll be like, oh, yeah, no problem. 

Speaker 6:  Because it gives him something to do that’s meaningful to him, that takes 10 minutes at his time when he knows he has a lunch meeting so he won’t be able to make it to the office hours. Involve them, get their feedback. 

Speaker 6:  It’s actually meaningful feedback. He’s like, I don’t understand what you mean by this. Change it. Right? You’re not, if you have disability and you’re writing about disability, you’re actually not writing for other people with disability. 

Speaker 6:  You’re writing for people who don’t have it. And you need their feedback to make sure that what you’re saying makes sense. And then we did challenges and events. That’s about first day of training. We did a whole bunch of stuff on. 

Speaker 6:  Fix all your heat maps that are using red and green, because gosh, I think there’s some color blindness around those things, right? Things like that. I threw out a challenge when I first lost my hearing across the entire company. 

Speaker 6:  It was like, I challenge y ‘all to spend a day living off closed captions like I do. I challenge you to make it through an hour. I got lots of good feedback from that one. So, once you’ve got people doing these spot checks with you and engaging with you, then you can start using your job and leverage your allies. 

Speaker 6:  Now, key thing here, and I don’t think I ever have this on the slide, but I’ll say that in words. I use my job to get things done in accessibility. The obvious thing is now I’m the dude in the wheelchair and previously I was the guy who couldn’t hear, now I’m both. 

Speaker 6:  I never ask for things that benefit me directly. Never, never, never. If you ask for something that benefits you, okay, what do companies run on? They run on money, right? Where does the money come from? 

Speaker 6:  Customers. What’s the other big expense they have? New recruits, right? I’m a hiring manager. If I wanna fix something on a physical plan, I can’t say, hey, Jerry, you gotta fix that thing. I can’t get up that curb or down that curb. 

Speaker 6:  I’m gonna be saying that for the rest of the time I’m in the dude, right? If I go in and say, hey, I’m a hiring manager and the way this is set up, I can’t hire the best candidate who may be in a wheelchair because they’re gonna take one look at that and realize they are not valued here in the United States. 

Speaker 6:  This is something you’ve ever come to the Intuit buildings. You will notice that the power doors are on the backs of the buildings. In the United States, we have a very bad history about making one group of people use the back door, right? 

Speaker 6:  It sends a shitty message. Don’t do it, we do it, and it pisses me off. I don’t say it pisses me off every time. I say, I can’t bring a candidate or a guest on this campus if they are requiring a power chair because we are going to insult them the minute they set foot. 

Speaker 6:  That gets things fixed. But I can’t ask for myself. If I ask for myself, it’s seen as selfish, hey, they already got me working there. They’re not trying to do that dancing. There’s no benefit to them. 

Speaker 6:  The benefit comes from customers who may come, or the benefit comes from investors who may come, the benefit comes from candidates who may come, and you want to make sure that you express your concerns in those contexts. 

Speaker 6:  So use your job to get things done. I’m hiring manager. I want fiscal plan changes, I do it. Meaningful recognition, but until we have this thing called Spotlights, it’s a cash value reward given for doing something out of the norm. 

Speaker 6:  Send the norm things. My God, we only spend like 10% of our budget because no one’s going to go to the steps to send them. I send those things all the dang time. And the nice thing about them is that feedback thing goes to the person’s manager, so it shows up in their year -end review as a positive, which means I can make every single person who helps me part of the accessibility team because not only are they getting more money for doing it, but they’re getting positive feedback on their year -end reviews. 

Speaker 6:  Play the political system. And then start getting to advocate. Sometimes advocacy for a ally is as simple as inviting you to come talk to a group. No one else that didn’t do it is going to talk about me being in a wheelchair, but I can do it and detoxify that for a whole new group of people if they invite you to their team meeting. 

Speaker 6:  Invite me. All the advocacy I need is, hey, y ‘all should listen to them. You got some good stuff to say. I know I’m talking too much. You’re just checking his watch, I can tell you. So other things you want to make sure you do is prepackage your programs and KPIs, keep performance indicators, right? 

Speaker 6:  Serve this stuff up on a silver platter. Don’t ask people to think, people are lazy. They got too much to do already. You know it, so go ahead and construct it. And when I go to ask somebody for something, I go into their year -end goals because I can see them. 

Speaker 6:  And we can see anybody’s goals. And I look at their managers’ year -end goals. I make sure that everything I ask somebody to do aligns with both they and or their managers’ year -end goals. So they get a complete line item of success for spending 15 minutes out of their day doing engineering for accessibility. 

Speaker 6:  Give it to them on a silver platter. Set the bar super low so everything’s green. Certifications, everybody needs CPEs. There’s some really good easy ones to get in the accessibility world. And sometimes those actually will apply to other certifications that people have. 

Speaker 6:  Show them that. Everyone’s always looking for certification courses to take for CPEs. And it’s a nightmare to find sometimes after a while. I’ve been doing this a while. I’ve taken all the courses. Champion programs, this is an internal thing we do it into it, where we have accessibility champions. 

Speaker 6:  And it shows up on our internet and you get a badge next to your name, rubbing completely the training work. Kudos to that, a lot of teams really value that. And this is where I use my day job, is I tie things back to risk and productivity. 

Speaker 6:  Anything I can do to monetize the achievements and the accomplishments that we get through the programs I ask people to add on to their daily work, I do. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did we save? 

Speaker 6:  What’s the brand name, reputational risk if somebody sues us for violation of like -hagging standards and accessibility? So, my corporate goals that I set out to do that I shared with you earlier, still don’t have accessibility in my job title. 

Speaker 6:  Follow my face, we’ll get that fixed. We actually have our V -pads published online. You can see them. To do this, I built a business case. And it’s the same business case I would have sent every single person in this room knows, except I knew who to bring it to, right? 

Speaker 6:  Last year there were 3 ,500 lawsuits for violation of accessibility and webcam. Some had merit, some didn’t. But the brand name, reputational risk is significant. My job is in security, my job is to protect the company from harm, from risk. 

Speaker 6:  So I went to my manager and said, hey, do you mind if I do this? And she said, no, go ahead. She’s used to me, I was gonna do stuff and she’s just tired, she just always says yes because I’m not gonna argue with you. 

Speaker 6:  I also then took the numbers to the director of GRC. Same thing. And by the way, she’s also sick of arguing with me, so she said yes too. So I got it done. The only thing that I had to do was go to the legal team and ask them for permission to do it. 

Speaker 6:  And the legal team and I work hand in hand all the time because I am in security and I’m also in compliance and I also do all the reviews of all their contracts and their MSAs for the security concerns. 

Speaker 6:  So they owe me a few. And they said yes. If you go on to Intuit’s Compliance page, VPATS, that’s a downloady thing I trimmed, are right next to our ISO 27001 certification, right next to our service organization controls, our SOC2 reports, right next to the download for our PCI. 

Speaker 6:  Our customer facing accessibility. for VPATs at least, is right there with all of our other compliance documents. I call that a win. And then because I did this, and by the way, I did the next one I managed to pull off before AB 1757, I used that same argument, oh man, I see I got him. 

Speaker 6:  I used that same argument to get the engineering team that handles all of my security controls to build a brand new category of control in our internal dashboards. Got the engineering team that owns the operational data lake to port all of our lighthouse metrics in, set up a bunch of standards with Ted Drake, who I’m many of you know, for how we were gonna be the automated ticketing in JIRA, and stood this sucker all the way up and I was told by legal I had to pull the slide down, but it is in production. 

Speaker 6:  Internally, I actually had a slide, I was gonna show you the thing that it shows in line, but it actually shows you and you get a complete history of any service that is onboarded to this. We have paved road now for teams to onboard in production. 

Speaker 6:  It is now part of our CICD build pipeline. You cannot compile a job without running it through lighthouse if you’ve got a consumable endpoint. And it’s automated. I don’t have to lift a finger. It issues JIRA tickets to development teams just like a security on our belly. 

Speaker 6:  And guess what? They do those. Ha ha ha ha. But I got them because I’m the loudmouth dude in the wheelchair who has a Zoom background that says I can’t understand you. Turn on your closed captions. The only reason I got that is because the engineering teams who I work with in security understand my connection with disability, understand that they can come to me with questions about it and many of them have for family members in the light. 

Speaker 6:  And we’ve got an open conversation about accessibility and the needs of persons with disability. So when I go to them and ask them something, they understand where I’m coming from. They understand I’m not doing it selfishly for myself to meet my year -end goal. 

Speaker 6:  They understand that we have 26% of the working age population in the US needing many of these things because we’ve talked about. And I know their line of business well enough because I work with them every single day that when I make the ask, it’s framed the same as all my other asks that I gave them that week. 

Speaker 6:  And sometimes it’s just like the sitcom rubber stamp approval where someone slips an extra piece of paper in and they stamp it or sign it, right? But the key to getting stuff done is to first off get people talking to you. 

Speaker 6:  Not about getting stuff done, but about disability and how their actions create barriers and how different choices on their behalf can take those barriers down. And when you’re asking for these changes, all you’re asking is, but I’m gonna make a different choice. 

Speaker 6:  Once they understand that, you don’t have to tell them that’s a social model of disability, but once they understand that, it’s an easy conversation, it’s an easy ask and you get the approvals. That’s simple. 

Speaker 6:  Yeah, it’s that simple. Oh, I guess they didn’t have a conclusion slide. Oh, well, that’s pretty much what I just said. I forgot. You know, I knew I had to take the slide out with the thing and I was just like, oh yeah, I took the last slide out and I did not. 

Speaker 6:  So, at a disability, you can get a lot done, but you need to recruit and engage with the allies that you’re working with. Okay, and I say that because you’re a disability, 26% of the population, but not a significant part of the workforce. 

Speaker 6:  So, you need to engage with the able -bodied people and create kind of like a reverse culture of inclusion. Get people who are able -bodied, comfortable talking to you about disability so that they feel included in that. 

Speaker 6:  And then you can engage and get meaningful work done. Now it goes to this one. All right, hopefully that was useful. I know I went on a long, long time. 

Speaker 2:  So give me about five minutes to change over to our next speaker. Feel free to grab a snack or a drink. Go to any questions to David and we’ll be right back with you. 

Speaker 6:  So this is loudly shut down 

Speaker 1:  Just let me sing in quiet. Like how you’re going to stand for delegate, soon. But like, I don’t know, I think it’s all been smashed. No, no, no. Okay, sorry. No, no, no. I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go. 

Speaker 1:  I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go. I’mma go. Don’t go right. Let me go. I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go. 

Speaker 5:  Thank you very much. 

Speaker 1:  I think this is the right time to speak. We’re mostly talking about what I’m saying. Yeah, so everybody, look at me. I’m trying to speak. I’m trying to speak. I’m trying to speak. I’m trying to speak. 

Speaker 1:  I’m trying to speak. I care. I’m trying to speak. I’m trying to speak. I’m trying to speak. I’m trying to speak. I’m trying to speak. I’m trying to speak. You positive people, whether you guys support the band, we’re here I kind out of over. 

Speaker 2:  I’m not a fan of things like that. I’m not a fan of things like that. I’m not a fan of things like that. 

Speaker 1:  Thank you. And then we, we’re totally in the process of putting up the video. We’re actually doing a whole bunch of stuff. Oh, we’re in that context. Yeah. Okay, we’re working, oh, yeah. That’s great. 

Speaker 1:  You know, um, I’m so excited to hear what this is about. What, what really helped to, you know, the technical part of the, you know, the 

Speaker 2:  That’s fine. You’re on camera here, I don’t care if you wander outside of the camera if you like walking. This clicker should be set up to work for you. I’m going to show you. 

Speaker 9:  This is my clicker? Yep. Order, order. 

Speaker 2:  May I please have your attention? It is time to resume the speaking portion of the meeting. You could kindly take your seats. Kindly. 

Speaker 1:  Thank you, thank you. We have. 

Speaker 2:  our next speaker, Posi is an innovative product leader with a passion for building inclusive communities in the tech industry. With a background in product management, process mining, community engagement, and UX design, Posi leads with empathy and effectively transforms organizations. 

Speaker 2:  As a digital nomad, Posi can be found traveling and meeting dogs in a city near you. Her talk tonight is intersectional benefits of accessibility and inclusive design. Thank you Posi. 

Speaker 9:  Thank you very much. 

Speaker 2:  Thank you. 

Speaker 9:  Thank you. Thank you. Hello. Yes. Posey, single name. My first name is actually Patricia. Patricia Posey. But you will find me in everyday life. I go by Posey. My last name is now basically my first name. 

Speaker 9:  And has been for the last maybe 15 years. Although upon talking to David, I’ve been staying 15 years for things for so long. I don’t realize that it’s actually now 20 years. I’m gone older. You know, the COVID lost years. 

Speaker 8:  Thank you. 

Speaker 9:  But yes, so we’ll be talking about inclusive design and how that wends with intersectionality. A bit about me, my digital nomad, the dog obsession. When I’m not being a product consultant, I can be found usually chasing down strangers dogs, visiting my friends dogs, or cuddling my god dogs. 

Speaker 9:  And I do have a photo of them. I wasn’t going to add it, but I have it at the end. They are everything. My best friend’s dogs, who are in Portland. And because I’m a digital nomad, I don’t have a home base. 

Speaker 9:  I’m traveling constantly. I just came back from Portland, and before that, I was in Hawaii. And so anytime I can get a piece of home and cuddle up with some fur babies, that’s what I need. And yes, I have eight years in product and 15 years in community building. 

Speaker 9:  And my approach to product management is community building. And people and innovation are at the heart of my strategies. I paused there because of how many communities that I have been involved in. And now looking at that again, 15 years has been the sting you reference, and now it’s actually been 20, because we’ve aged. 

Speaker 9:  But those communities include Women Who Code, both the Portland and San Diego chapters, and also the global community, and then Tech by Superwoman as well. And those are some of the communities that really have been at my heart. 

Speaker 9:  Few reminders as we get started. I wanna make sure that we create a safe space for everyone here. And these are just a few of the things that I find helpful, and that I will be referencing internally. 

Speaker 9:  I will be mindful and open to discussion. I will assume good intent, and be open to learning and being taught. And then there’s a Q &A at the end, and that’s open to the floor for questions, and also sharing your experiences. 

Speaker 9:  So what to expect and what we will touch on. Accessibility, intersectionality, temporary disabilities, intersectional experiences, the business case for inclusive design, and of course that Q &A that I referenced. 

Speaker 9:  And so overall this presentation is about the unexpected ways that accessibility is part of your everyday life, and how you have to take that into your design thinking. And when I talk about the intersectional experiences, and how we often think of accessibility and people with disabilities as a very almost static existence, and how it’s actually much more intersectional than that. 

Speaker 9:  So what is accessibility, intersectionality? Intersectional accessibility design, considerations start with understanding the subject. With accessibility, recognizing and valuing the diversity of individuals. 

Speaker 9:  Accessibility is the concept of ensuring that products, services, environments, and information are designed and developed in a way that can be accessed and used by as many people as possible, regardless of their abilities, disabilities, or characteristics. 

Speaker 9:  Now for intersectionality. Coined over 30 years ago by Kimberly Crenshaw, Civil Rights Advocate and Professor, she says that intersectionality is a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that often are not understood among conventional ways of thinking. 

Speaker 9:  So intersection of experiences, and what does this look like? A few ways. Location and disability. So we’ll see this often with different types of features that are introduced. Location and disability, larger cities offer more accommodations. 

Speaker 9:  Those who live in smaller communities suffer intersectional design gaps. Now we know with Uber and Lyft, Uber specifically, introduced the wave rides, the wheelchair access. The list of cities that that is actually available in are just the largest cities in the US. 

Speaker 9:  nowhere else. And even in those cities, what’s actually available, like a handful of cars. So even though they did this great thing in 2016 to introduce this feature and are speaking to accessibility a bit late in the game, what does that actually look like? 

Speaker 9:  And when you have people who exist at the intersections, who live in these other places, who also experience disabilities, they’re not included. They’re not being counted. They’re being overlooked. And even those in the cities where the feature is active are also not actually getting access to this great feature. 

Speaker 9:  We also have invisible disabilities. When people cannot perceive someone’s disability, they’re often overlooked, discounted, or not included. And this may also touch on something that David had said as well. 

Speaker 9:  Not everyone identifies as someone who has a disability. So people who are walking around every day who do have different disabilities, who may not know it or may not identify with it. Also intersectional households. 

Speaker 9:  So households range in size, race, socioeconomics, and identities, and abilities. So you might have a combination within a single person, but also someone who perhaps is able -bodied, who doesn’t identify someone with a disability, three or four of their family members, one may. 

Speaker 9:  And if one person in a household does, that affects everyone in the household, that changes the data a bit. So temporary disabilities. And this one is interesting to me, because it’s not often thought about the same way. 

Speaker 9:  But temporary disabilities include injuries, surgeries, or illnesses, conditions, or impairments that affect an individual’s mobility, vision, hearing, or cognitive functions for a limited amount of time. 

Speaker 9:  And I mentioned the range on this. So it could be, this includes someone who is pregnant, and that changes their ability over time, how they interact with the world, and whether or not the world was actually designed for their experience. 

Speaker 9:  Often find out pretty quickly it wasn’t. This also includes someone for personal experience, not that long ago, a friend of mine, a bit of a bro, if you will, puffing his chest at a bar somewhere on the coast and gets into a bar fight, breaks hand. 

Speaker 9:  All of a sudden, he can’t walk his dog. He needs help navigating his computer, getting laundry done, just out of left field, if you will, finds himself in a situation interacting with the world that was not built for his limited mobility, the situation that he has found himself in. 

Speaker 9:  So the range on what we deem disability and not, and whether or not someone identifies with that, might see how this is a much larger population than maybe even people know who are experiencing it, and those who are designing for people also do not know. 

Speaker 9:  So accessibility in everyday life. Some very high level points that we’ll hit on are public transportation, you see ramps and audio announcements, smartphone and apps, voice assistants and assistive touch, web and social media, captions and alt text, and these are all features that have become the norm. 

Speaker 9:  And not always are they appreciated or recognized in the ways that they, 

Speaker 1:  Thank you. 

Speaker 9:  benefit those who are not experiencing disabilities. So smartphones and apps. How many Apple iPhone users do we have? Quite a few. So if you’ve been using the iPhone for some time, do you remember when there was that button and maybe you still have that phone, button at the bottom of your screen, that would always break or get cracked and then you were left without being able to navigate your phone? 

Speaker 9:  Well, thankful for assistive touch, which is meant for people with disabilities. You’re all of a sudden being able to use your phone even with a broken button because of this assistive touch. 

Speaker 4:  Absolutely. 

Speaker 9:  So everywhere that we see or interact with on the daily, there are features that benefit everyone and design considerations that benefit everyone, both able -bodied and disabled people. So what we do know from this is that when we design for intersectional accessibility, everyone benefits. 

Speaker 9:  This is often referred to as the curb cut effect, and the curb cut effect being the actual cuts of the curb that allows you to navigate up onto a nice slope from the sidewalk to the cement, to the street to the sidewalk. 

Speaker 9:  And how when you are designing that and you’re thinking we need to be able to help people navigate from who are using a wheelchair to be able to get onto the sidewalk, and how that had far reaching effects for people who have mobility, hip issues, who are aging, for people who are using strollers, luggage, bicycles, it became this practice, this norm that benefited everyone. 

Speaker 9:  And sadly, it wasn’t introduced until what, the 60s, and really implemented in the 70s. We’re not talking for very long, but this is a game changer that we see and interact with every day. Thank you. 

Speaker 9:  So how do we fight for more implementations of intersectional design? Well, one of the statistics that often gets brought up is this 20% number. Often brought up in executive rooms, getting buy -in. But how accurate is this number? 

Speaker 9:  The number is 20%. 20% of people in your community, your customer base, have a disability. It’s the go -to statistic I have used it myself. It has great impact, one in five. I believe the newer data had shown one in four. 

Speaker 9:  It’s impactful, but the percentage is most likely much larger than this because of intersectional experiences and how people identify. So taking a closer look at the 80%. So people live, as we’ve touched on, of our changing and dynamic lives. 

Speaker 9:  Now if we were to play around with the numbers, we could look at 25% of the people in this 80% that supposedly do not have or don’t identify as having a disability. Say 25% of them actually fit into that. 

Speaker 9:  The other 25% here on the other end. We’re looking at late -onset disability. Not something that was foreseen. Sometimes with aging, sometimes just with time. Aging parents into your home. That changes the way that you live. 

Speaker 9:  That changes the way that you interact with the world and all the considerations that go along with that, including the devices that are used in your home. And also temporary disabilities. Just like we’re talking about pregnancy or breaking your hand in a bar fight. 

Speaker 9:  So when we talk about that 20% number, we can see how it actually breaks down that 80% that we’re saying isn’t included. We know that they’re included with the… who are benefiting from these design changes. 

Speaker 9:  And we also know that it’s much more complicated and they actually are included in what would be 20% but it’s much larger. So yes, at any given moment someone’s life as they know it can change. And when we consider the changing and intersectional experiences, we can see that we are designing for everyone. 

Speaker 9:  Making the business case for accessibility. Which is a frustrating statement because it shouldn’t have to be made. But it does. I myself have found myself in situations where you’re pleading with executives to make the right decision. 

Speaker 9:  You’re bringing up every moral reason. Even reasons that impact their bottom line and it’s still out of scope. Then you watch them pay the price in some of the biggest ways from trying to retrofit accessibility in their design. 

Speaker 9:  It’s a very expensive process. So making the business case. expanded user bases. Of course by accommodating a broader spectrum of users, businesses can tap into a new customer, excuse me, segments, and markets they may have previously overlooked. 

Speaker 9:  Compliance with regulations. Like I was saying, it’s very expensive to retrofit. And many countries have enacted accessibility laws making it mandatory for businesses to ensure accessibility in their digital and physical environments. 

Speaker 9:  That was always a trickier piece of the ADA because it was created before everything went down with the internet. So people saying that the ADA did not apply to the internet even though it is a public sphere, it very much applies. 

Speaker 9:  And thankful to these other countries, it’s pushed the envelope and made us have to step up in more ways. Not that it should be the reason. Also a competitive advantage in UX. When users find your products and services more accessible and user friendly, they’re likely to become loyal customers and recommend you your offerings to others. 

Speaker 9:  Excuse me. It pays off to be the go to. As people in communities talk about what products and what services serve them best. If you’re at the top of that, you’re going to have some very loyal customers. 

Speaker 9:  Policy. As referenced with the ADA mentioned, the policy is usually playing catch up. And so it is up to us. And we have a moral obligation to ourselves, our families and each other to design inclusive experiences. 

Speaker 9:  And we’ve touched on how it’s for everyone. How might we make this change? So listen and talk to intersectional people. Meetups, like the one you’re attending today. And social media are great resources. 

Speaker 9:  There are so many incredible creators out there who are spending the time, not that it should be their job to do, but to educate people and making really creative and funny content about their experiences. 

Speaker 9:  And it’s eye opening. Even if you are someone who may have your own experiences or have a lot of family members with their own experiences with disabilities, there’s still so much more to learn and so many perspectives to hear from. 

Speaker 9:  Educating social media, employee resource groups. And if it’s missing from your company, you can create it. Find other people, be the person who starts that resource group and see how that changes things and how they operate at your company. 

Speaker 9:  And also, I do do community consultant work. So if you need help with that, you can also call me. Also committing to a greater purpose. So taking a stand and committing to advocating for a better and more inclusive world and holding on to that as the great hope will help you push forward. 

Speaker 9:  Because you will need hope in that type of a fight. I know you know. I think a lot of us do. Yes. I didn’t know for all. These are the babies I promised. Thank you all for being here. These are my babies. 

Speaker 9:  My God babies. A little summer photo shoot their mom had with them. Ken is at the top. Sadie is at the bottom. She’s a great dame and a Malamute mix. And I love them. That is my LinkedIn QR code. And if you have any questions or experiences you’d like to share, please speak up. 

Speaker 9:  If not, that concludes it. 

Speaker 2:  Thank you, Posey. We will jump right in, I think. Because we’re getting a little late. So just give me a quick second to switch over. It’s coming. Look at that quick switch. 

Speaker 3:  Let’s push the button. 

Speaker 2:  Yep, this one goes forward, and it goes backwards. And your introduction minute. 

Speaker 8:  Okay. 

Speaker 2:  Jamie Young is a seasoned researcher with over 10 years of experience in researching and designing for the human experience. At ServiceNow, she manages a global team and leads research initiatives across the platform, such as Accessibility. 

Speaker 2:  She’s passionate about ensuring that ServiceNow provides exceptional platform experiences for all users and to drive innovation and continuous improvement. Tonight, Jamie will be talking to us about Accessibility Research at ServiceNow. 

Speaker 2:  Thank you, Jamie. 

Speaker 3:  It’s been a long day, so can you hear me? Yes. Okay, cool. Per service now, you usuals. We always have this safe harbor notice. You guys might not be familiar with it, but we have to. We’re obligated to say this. 

Speaker 3:  But this basically states that anything I share with you today should not be shared or used for purchasing decisions. Like you’re going to, yes, just to be formal. So this is me. So just so you know who’s talking to you, so I’m Jamie. 

Speaker 3:  I’m a manager within UXR &I, which is user experience research and insights team at ServiceNow. And I lead a platform foundations team, which specifically covers accessibility, globalization, design system, and platform analytics. 

Speaker 3:  So a lot of our platform -wide capabilities. Specifically in my particular career, I spent a good decade in dentistry. So I was in the medical field for a while, and then I did a 360. And I was like, I don’t really want to do this. 

Speaker 3:  So I went into user experience. I did a huge focus around product design and user experience and did obviously now research and previous started in research. Huge background in psychology, interaction design, information architecture, product management. 

Speaker 3:  I have these weird certifications around scrum mastering and all these other random things. But also working a lot of different industries around like governments and startup companies and agencies. And then also went to enterprise. 

Speaker 3:  So I have a very, very background. Specifically in accessibility, I actually got my first official introduction into it in my graduate school through my linguistics director. We were working on our voting, US voting batting systems. 

Speaker 3:  So we’re doing a lot of research regarding aging and disabilities on the physical voting systems, which all of you guys, I hope, will vote, right? Yeah. We also do the digital battling systems as well. 

Speaker 3:  So that was an interesting analysis. Also was a caregiver at another point too. So a lot of that kind of spurred on a lot of my passion for this area and also a lot of curiosity and did a lot of product design and branding and all these other different areas that supported accessibility started different COE teams within past companies. 

Speaker 3:  Around accessibility. That’s me in a nutshell a little bit. I actually stole this slide from Michael. So if you’ve ever seen his slides, this is exactly it. But you’ve seen these statistical numbers before, which is like 1 .3 billion people. 

Speaker 3:  But basically in general, what I’m basically trying to convey is that individuals with disabilities need better support. Obviously you guys know that. That’s why you’re here. And ServiceNow really understands this and values this in terms of being inclusive. 

Speaker 3:  And this is kind of where ServiceNow has recognized the impact of having accessible software on our customers and partners. I’m not sick, I promise. I’ve coughed a couple of times today and it got a little bad looks today. 

Speaker 3:  And I was like, I’m not sick, I promise. It’s just lingering. But in terms of ServiceNow, we value equally both accessibility, leading best practices and usability. So I know a lot of in accessibility we talk about compliance and WCAG. 

Speaker 3:  But it goes a lot further than that. We talk about usability and making sure that per person has just general access. And that is an equal weight for us. So basically we’re trying to say is accessibility guidelines or WCAG and legal ease is a starting point for us. 

Speaker 3:  But then we go beyond that or we’re striving to go beyond that in terms of creating a great user experience. I’m not selling ServiceNow to you guys by the way. But in terms of like, You know, making an accessible product, like it does take a village sometimes. 

Speaker 3:  For us, it does. So we have a lot of collaboration, a lot of teamwork to make this, like, coordination work within our organizations. We do a lot of heavy lifting for our customers. So that’s a little box of us, but then like there’s a lot of everybody else in terms of what makes this come to life, which is like engineering, QE, and design. 

Speaker 3:  And we have the philosophy of shifting left, meaning like we want to bring it early on and test with people, along with making sure that we integrate it within our designs, within, and not just kind of like doing defect management. 

Speaker 3:  So in terms of research, are you guys familiar with research? I know you are. Yeah, kind of. No? OK. So specifically research, like what we do, we cover all sorts of different types of research. We do UX research, product research, marketing type of research. 

Speaker 3:  We cover all sorts of research. Exactly what we do is we build. So we build a comprehensive understanding of our problem space, of our users, to really kind of understand what’s the needs, the pain points, the problem space. 

Speaker 3:  That we are basically trying to achieve and also making sure that we’re building the right solutions for our businesses. And also we study how people interact with our products. We identify any key areas that we need improvements in order to increase adoption and generate value for our business. 

Speaker 3:  At the same time, we also partner very closely, very similar to the other slide that I showed you. We partner very closely with all of our cross partnerships and cross organizations from design, product, engineering just to make sure that we are prioritizing learnings and influencing our roadmaps and OKRs and KPIs and all of those things. 

Speaker 3:  Too much jargon? I’m getting little blank faces a little bit. Too late. OK. Everyone’s like, I’m done with work. I don’t want to do all this. Oh, sorry. But basically, research can come in at any time of the life cycle. 

Speaker 3:  What is being shown right here is basically it looks like a DNA. But basically, it’s the ebbs and flows of what a typical design process or software development life cycle would maybe look like at some companies. 

Speaker 3:  For us, for research, we really scan across all of these things. We have these two different major buckets with this generative research, which is more of understanding the big scope of the problem and bringing in people to understand and aligning in that problem space. 

Speaker 3:  And then we have what you might be more familiar with, which is usability testing, making sure your products, you put it in front of a person and say, what’s wrong with this? That’s more of the evaluative type of research, building the right solution, and validating some of the design work. 

Speaker 3:  So we span across all of these things. And in terms of how we connect with users, there’s a whole group. There’s just a lot of different types of methodologies for research. These are just the common ways that we engage with people. 

Speaker 3:  So we do interviews. We do workshops. We do a lot of different surveys. We do fancy word contextual inquiry. Basically means we shadow you. And then there’s also multi -day company visits and workshops, all different types of different types of methodologies, essentially. 

Speaker 3:  But how we approach it is very more focused around the problem space. So if, say, Michael came up to me and said, Jamie, I have this problem. I want to figure out an answer for x, y, and z. Then I basically choose and pick what methodologies makes the most sense in order to answer that particular question or to get him the answers to make a business decision or whatever he needs to do. 

Speaker 3:  Yeah. Funny you on the spot. OK. In terms of specifically their assessor research approach, assessor research, we have three major buckets that we kind of approach it in, meaning that there’s company -wide strategy. 

Speaker 3:  So I mean, it’s agnostic to any sort of product. So big, large questions around how well are we doing as a company around servicing people with disabilities? How do we gauge that? How do we measure that internally? 

Speaker 3:  How do we track this? How do we know how well our products are doing and establishing some sort of point of view as to how do we track this in terms of metrics or dashboards and things like that? And then there’s also ideas around business unit execution, basically meaning product execution. 

Speaker 3:  So if we have a product and we want to test that particular, and we want to run some research around that particular area, we do engage directly with people with disabilities to make sure that we get that feedback and then really kind of understand where are we gapping in? 

Speaker 3:  Where are you missing? Like, what are the best opportunities for our products so we can better them, essentially? And then, because accessibility is not really of a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, It’s a special beast in itself, right? 

Speaker 3:  Like you kind of know this, where it has a lot of different considerations. So like scaling and doing recruitment and getting participants to participate is like a whole scale in its own thing. So that requires basically its own operations and scaling and also research enablement and different toolings. 

Speaker 3:  Like any sort of like say, if I give you guys a survey, like you guys have to be able to access it. But if you’re not engaging with people without disabilities, that’s usually not a concern, right? So we have to kind of take a lot of these considerations in practice. 

Speaker 3:  So there’s, in terms of disabilities, we do focus in on the full range. So there are five major disability categories. Obviously you guys are well familiar with these probably. So visual, auditory, speech, cognitive and physical. 

Speaker 3:  And then there’s also permit, temporary and situational. So three different types of groups that we do also recruit from and engage with. And then there’s also 17 functional limitations which we’ve categorized in terms of a digital solution and digital interaction. 

Speaker 3:  Yeah. 

Speaker 4:  I’m going to read some of them for non -visual books. Yeah, sure. 

Speaker 3:  I think the situational one is really interesting. The situational ones? Yeah, there’s like the situational examples for visual would be like there’s a bright sunlight and like you can’t see your screen, maybe it’s a mobile device and maybe you’re a, I don’t know, a technician or something and you’re working on your laptop and you can’t see it. 

Speaker 3:  Like that could be a temporary, or that could be a situational where you can’t see the screen and you have to interact with it. Same thing with like auditory, you’re in a party in the lab music. I’m hoping that you’re not working on servers now in a party. 

Speaker 3:  But if ever that was the case and someone, something was on fire and you had to write, I don’t know, answer someone, answer a ticket while you’re partying, that could be, that could hypothetically be a situation, right? 

Speaker 3:  And then there’s like heavy accents or being distracted while driving or, you know, being in parents, being pregnant. So like what you said earlier, right? So those are some of the situationals. And then just as an example, since it sounds like not a lot of you guys have seen research in action, we do test directly with people with disabilities. 

Speaker 3:  And what that means is that we include them in every site, every basically type of research that we can involve in. And as an example of a study that I try to white label it as much as possible, there was one person who I wanted to highlight which had an alternative, had mouse switch and navigation and also physical impairment. 

Speaker 3:  So complete total paralysis. And we interviewed that person against our products. And I could see some of the facts that I had. 

Speaker 9:  getting, um, sizes around child spaces, and such. This is like a little harder to get on. 

Speaker 8:  Do a hole. As you’re dragging it down, then when you see it, you might like it. 

Speaker 9:  We invite an’t knowing ass yes 

Speaker 8:  Steady, steady, steady, steady, click. 

Speaker 3:  That was really loud. But there’s also another one. It’s a screen reader navigation, so visual impairment severity, which was legally and totally blind. So we also interview them as well. So for researchers who are not familiar with screen readers, like the verbossis, very fast. 

Speaker 3:  So but we also sometimes ask them, can you slow it down for us so that we can hear, record, and listen and understand? Hopefully this is not as loud. 

Speaker 5:  Fight, fight, fight, fight, yeah man. 

Speaker 1:  I would never guess what it is. Is that okay? CSM, but I do not see it. CSM, but it is not good at all. They all have CSM. CSM, but it is not good at all. I am sorry, we are perspective. This is, uh, 

Speaker 5:  not a good system. Because I will be able to use this tool, to get to the link that I want. 

Speaker 4:  Okay. Were they saying that all the links started with CSM, so it wasn’t very helpful? 

Speaker 3:  Yeah, yep. It’s like, it’s just all said CSM, so they couldn’t find exactly where they needed to go. So all this feedback basically moves back into our product space for individuals like Michael, to basically say like, hey, we are seeing this issue across our products, like let’s go fix this. 

Speaker 3:  And then, how many of you guys are planning on doing research? Oh wow, actually, okay, yay. Okay, cool. 

Speaker 4:  Thank you. 

Speaker 3:  Yeah, okay, so I have some very high level six tips and tricks for conducting assessed study research. So the very first one is educate yourself around what to say, what not to say, and like, you know, just educate yourself around assistive technologies in general, just get familiar with them, and be comfortable with them. 

Speaker 3:  And then if you don’t know, then educate yourself. You can Google it, you can just talk to someone about it. Any way that you can get a little bit more familiar with it. Research methods don’t necessarily change. 

Speaker 3:  The multi -faceted considerations is what actually changes. So what I mean by that is like, you know, usability testing is usability testing. Surveys is surveys, like they’re different methodologies. 

Speaker 3:  The whole book of research methodologies in general doesn’t change, it’s just that there’s just a lot of considerations around the fact in order to make it work, and make it work for what you need to get to. 

Speaker 3:  So a lot of it forces you to be creative. So like, for instance, we were testing on a Figma prototype. So a prototype that isn’t on the dot com, isn’t coded or whatever. And then we were testing on someone who had a screen reader. 

Speaker 3:  They obviously could not interact with it. So you have to find a different way to basically serve this up in order for them to interact and get the answers that you need. Number three is for evaluated type of research, start with audits and or heuristic evaluations beforehand to roll up obvious issues. 

Speaker 3:  So meaning like, do a WCAG like audit. Just kind of rush through and then do a heuristic evaluation. Are you guys familiar with heuristic evaluations? I always forget what that means. Oh, okay. Maybe that’s a session for next time. 

Speaker 3:  But heuristic evaluations is basically, like if you speak to a designer, they should be relatively familiar with it. Where there are best practices of things and like what to stay away from and how best to design an inert like a UI. 

Speaker 3:  Like there’s just best practices. And then basically you kind of run through all of them evaluate that and then what we also call expert review and see like if you can kind of catch some of these big chunks of issues before putting whatever you’re trying to test in front of someone and having them catch it. 

Speaker 3:  And then that kind of loses a lot of the value that you’re interacting with a person. So you want to kind of get all those big chunks and big issues, the obvious ones that you can identify out of the way, solve for those first. 

Speaker 3:  And then put it in front of a person. You want to make sure that the time is valuable. Like time is valuable. So you want to make sure it’s worth it for you and worth it for them. Every touch point needs to be accessible, including the research tools. 

Speaker 3:  So you also don’t want systematic dropout. So what this means is that if they’re engaging with you in any way, say for instance, a survey, the survey tool itself needs to be accessible. Because if they’re not, if they’re engaging with it and they say, oh shoot, I can’t even access it. 

Speaker 3:  Like they’re automatically just gonna drop out and then you’re gonna ask yourself, well, why did 90% of them drop out? Why didn’t 90% of them didn’t take my survey? And then recruitment can be a challenge. 

Speaker 3:  So you definitely want to start with who you already know. When talking to a user, don’t hesitate to ask to slow down their assistive technologies, like screen readers or to explain something. There are no such things as dumb questions. 

Speaker 3:  So you definitely want to make sure that you are thorough and ask whatever questions you have on your mind. Mind’s quick and easy, so thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Any questions? Yeah. 

Speaker 8:  How do you know how many people, I know for regular research, based on experience, based on the product, but do you want to test it accessibility? How do you know how many people can run the test? 

Speaker 3:  Yeah, that’s a good question. Are you, well, okay, so that depends on the method. So there’s what we call qualitative research and there’s quantitative research. If you’re talking about qualitative research, qualitative meaning like in -person interviews, like that type of, like very much in terms of like quality instead of numbers. 

Speaker 3:  If you’re focused on that, usually the best practice is around like eight to 10 individuals per what we call segmentation. So meaning like if you’re focusing on one disability and you wanna compare it to another, those are considered two segmentations. 

Speaker 3:  So it’s two groups that you’re comparing against. So then you would wanna go eight to 10, eight to 10 total. So equates to like 16 to 20. Yeah, but. So you’re talking very hard. Fun. Yeah. Actual. The amount, yeah. 

Speaker 3:  But then if you don’t care about that, you don’t care about like comparing between and you just wanna recruit like all sorts of people and it doesn’t matter, then you can just stick to like the eight to 10 and just get a sweep at the first round. 

Speaker 3:  And then if you’re talking about numbers, that’s a whole different ball game because usually in terms of the segmentation, the comparison, you’re talking around at least 100 per group. 

Speaker 5:  Oh, hi. 

Speaker 3:  It’s hard. Yeah. We do offer incentives. We’re a challenging company because our people are very specialized enterprise solutions, right? So we do incentivize because we are taking time away from their working day, right? 

Speaker 3:  So we incentivize in terms of like, depending on where they come from, it could be swag. It could be money. It could be gift cards. If they’re a government, there’s a whole different bracket under that because if they’re a government, like you can’t incentivize, it’s illegal. 

Speaker 3:  Don’t do that. Just certain amounts. But yeah, highly encourage if you can, if you have the budget. But if it’s something like what I’ve seen in the past where it was just easily accessible, it’s a Amazon .com or something, right? 

Speaker 3:  Like everyone has used it. Then you probably can get more people without incentivizing. Yeah. Are you having trouble with incentivizing? 

Speaker 5:  I’m working for a spinal profit and I’m wondering if I should ask, maybe we should offer something for the user testing. 

Speaker 3:  Yeah. It doesn’t hurt to ask. Yeah, it never hurts to ask for budget. So like, especially for people with disabilities, like individual disabilities, most of them aren’t working. So incentivizing definitely helps and it incentivizes them to come and collaborate with you. 

Speaker 3:  So it’s a very strong incentive. 

Speaker 4:  I might be the one who liked the case, but these are people who are already typically overextending themselves by educating people when it’s not really their job. Yeah. So, I don’t know, if you have some of the sympathetic to that argument, it might help. 

Speaker 6:  and employment statistics for people with disabilities are not particularly good in that realm. How do you instruct your recruitment process for investors to prevent bias in the tax population? 

Speaker 3:  Yeah, that’s a long -winded conversation that we can have. But… We’ll talk. Yeah, it’s a lot… Yeah, Enterprise is like a whole bogging. Like it’s a whole… Yeah, you know. So, in a series, I mean, you can have what basically what me and my team have set up is, we’ve done internal employee panels, so we leverage our own employees and their knowledge. 

Speaker 3:  We’ve also have different levels of knowledge that we can pull from. So, we outside, we have a customer panel as well, which we funnel through and we also make sure that they sign up and basically self -identify. 

Speaker 3:  Then I also go through vendor help and everything in order to recruit very specific and very targeted difference. Like, for example, we want a field agent that has screen readers and has used our product and are active within the last year. 

Speaker 3:  Plus, on top of that, has like so -and -so -and -so, whatever requirements, right? So we have to go through very specific requirements and that in itself is… We can talk more about that. But yeah, different levels of feedback. 

Speaker 3:  And then there’s also like general population. So like, if you’re just starting out in research, general what we call general population, meaning like they’re not ServiceNow users. Like, they are the general user. 

Speaker 3:  You just want usability feedback. You just want an impression on your products. Like, the easiest feedback realm you can get into. And probably the easiest in terms of like recruitment. But if you’re talking about your customers, that can get a little hairy. 

Speaker 9:  experience an enterprise that perhaps was more of a product that was sitting on. But working to find out who was disgruntled or who had a lot of custom things that everyone had done, those were really great customers to have because they are eager and motivated and they want to be heard. 

Speaker 9:  They’re upset and they can also work as a way to help. 

Speaker 3:  Yep, we have very close partnerships with our quality QA team and family to basically kind of funnel and see which customers are complaining, like which ones we’ve established relationship ongoing relationships with certain customers because of that. 

Speaker 3:  And then like, you know, we funneled them through like, you know, we want to do a workshop with us. You want to collaborate with us. Do you want to give us feedback? So there’s like multi routes of getting access. 

Speaker 3:  And then there’s also like relationships within internally that we have. 

Speaker 7:  Sorry, is it me? Yes. I think it’s important to have accessible channels through which people can provide feedback. The amount of emails I get from organizations, just asking for general feedback on their products and it’s an accessible service. 

Speaker 7:  Can’t let them know, so just having that process where people can make sure that’s tested in a feedback process or maybe like an accessible accessibility statement on your website, so you have apps where you can provide that. 

Speaker 7:  At the very least, if you can have that dialogue and conversation with people that are struggling, then that’s a start, at least you know there’s something that needs to be raised. Completely agree. 

Speaker 2:  Cool, well that is the end of our regularly scheduled program. Thank you to all the speakers. Thanks everybody for attending. I think it was a great meeting. Do we have a couple minutes? It’s up to this guy. 

Speaker 5:  We have a few minutes. 

Speaker 2:  Okay, so hang out for a few minutes when this guy says it’s time to go we’ll clear out But feel free to have a chat and thanks everybody for coming out 

Speaker 1:  Thank you. 

Speaker 6:  Yeah, yeah 

Speaker 5:  I’m part of the Community Development and Partnership Committee. And so what we’re working to partner with the organizations is to make up. Oh, hell yeah. This is perfect. And part of that is, you know, not so much using the volunteer features. 

Speaker 1:  I really want to bring this into that share as well. So I’ve got a really awesome video since then with Stadia. This is perfect. Yeah, awesome. 

Speaker 2:  big road in th 

Speaker 5:  I don’t really have a bunch of specifics. 

Speaker 1:  That’s it. 

Speaker 6:  I’m happy to see you guys. I’m really glad you’re here. I’m happy to tell you this is a good project. Awesome. 

Speaker 2:  Yeah, perfect. That would be great, mate. Yeah, let me decompress, hopefully. This one done, but we’ll probably, what, October, November, December? So probably early, mid -December, before people get in vacation mode, would be the time for our next one. 

Speaker 2:  But I’ll hit you up this week or maybe next week to start the conversation. That’d be great. I gotta start. Anybody else that year would be interested in talking to us. And you can ask around. 

Speaker 1:  That’s awesome. 

Speaker 6:  and do it b put people on the technical side just because the only other please 

Speaker 2:  Yeah. No, that’s fine. This one went a little like UX or… You’ve been to an after the night. We like doing a haul after that for the race. 

Speaker 1:  I think we’re going to have to do that. 

Speaker 6:  Cool