Sheri Byrn-Haber, CPACC, author and advocate for accessibility, talks about the importance of digital accessibility. She discusses her work in teaching the ‘why’ not just the ‘how’ of digital access and shares about her experiences of being a wheelchair user and an archer. Full transcript available.
In the world, one of every 15 people are color blind. Furthermore, about 6% of those involved in technology are also unable to distinguish colors. Yet, when we think about accessibility, the digital world experience is not something that comes to mind easily.
Thankfully, there are committed individuals who are making a difference. In conversation with Clandestino Radio, our guest shares her experience making the lives of people with disabilities easier, as well as some tips for increasing accessibility in the digital world.
Transcript:
Sheri
When I move back east for the summer, I tend to screw up zone changes a little bit for the first couple of weeks because I’m 4 hours off from where I normally am.
CR
Okay. Yeah. I was going to ask you, where are you?
Sheri
Well, normally, I’m in California, Silicon Valley, but the summers I spend in eastern Canada, where my family’s originally from. So I am northeast of Maine right now in a province called New Brunswick.
CR
Hopefully you’re away from the fires.
Sheri
Yeah, no, we’re not we’re not impacted by the fires. It’s about 300 miles from here. The fires in California, those can be a problem. Last summer we were like five miles from the evacuation zone. So that was suboptimal. That was I guess I was too sick to go now. I should talk to your son about wheelchair archery. I’m one of the nationally ranked female wheelchair archers in the U.S..
CR
Oh, that’s awesome!
Sheri
And it is the best sport ever for people in wheelchairs, because we can do it just as well, if not better than people who are standing. So I have an arrangement with a Berkeley nonprofit that specializes in getting disabled people doing outdoor sports and then also the range. And they let me use the range once a month to teach that. Yeah, to teach. We’ve taught groups of blind people. We’ve taught groups of people who are quadriplegics. We teach them how to shoot with their mouths. One of the best archers disabled archers in the world (actually, he’s one of the best archers in the world, period) has no arms. He shoots with his feet. So, archery is very, very, very, very adaptable. It’s a lot of fun. It’s very addictive.
CR
So nice to hear that. So you’re a traveler as well.
Sheri
I do. I travel both for archery and for my job, So I’m on planes by myself in a wheelchair a lot. I fly Southwest all the time and they’re so Southwest, the company. I mean, the people are bad, right? People shouldn’t be doing it. But Southwest is also bad at dealing with it. I had a Southwest airline attendant last summer, so just about 12 months ago, threatened to have me arrested, was going to call the air marshals because they hadn’t brought up my wheelchair yet and I wouldn’t get off the plane. And they were already loading. You know, Southwest is known for doing these little short flights and with really tight turnarounds. And they were already they’d already given up on finding my chair and they were already loading the next flight’s luggage. And I’m like, I’m not getting off until you give me my chair. And so the flight attendant and I are yelling at each other. And then the pilot for the next flight came on and he actually went down and screamed at the baggage handlers and made them find my wheelchair and also, Southwest has the highest rate of wheelchair breakage. It’s like three times higher than the other airlines. So you’ve got to be pretty careful with them. Sometimes they’re unavoidable. But if it’s just a matter of like $50 difference or an hour’s difference or something like that, I don’t fly them anymore. And I used to be a loyal Southwest customer, but not anymore. Yeah. No it’s it’s always complicated and everybody’s all excited about the new wheelchair where you can get your chair on the plane and then they strap your chair into the seat that just got dumped by Delta and I’m like, okay, people, you have to realize A) it’s only Delta that’s doing this. B) It’s going to be ten years before the FAA approves it, minimum.C) you gotta get all of the other airlines to buy on and wait for new airplanes because they’re going to have to be retrofitted for this. And then D) it’s not going to cover you for international flights. It’ll only cover you for flights that both take off and land in the U.S. So, I agree, it’s a good step, but people are treating like this, like it’s the holy grail of wheelchair travel. And I’m like, not so fast. We got a lot of hoops to jump through before this turns into reality. I like your Prince wall hanging.
CR
Thank you. Yeah, it’s from a local artist.
Sheri
It’s nice. When I was a lawyer. I did a case for Prince once.
CR
And what was that like?
Sheri
Um, it was about … 28 years ago, I want to say. It’s somewhere between 25 and 30 years ago. And it was back when the Internet was just getting started. And it was kind of the wild, wild West and people were uploading bootleg copies of his concerts up on to websites. And it wasn’t the bootleg. He didn’t like the bootleg concerts up there, mostly because he was upset about the sound quality and he didn’t think it was a good representation of his skills. But um, but also the thing that really upset him was the sites were using ads for porn to fund the cost of the downloads. Yeah so so he authorized us to go after these people and force them to take down the sites so that he wasn’t associated with this advertisement and that bad, you know, bad audio quality of his music wasn’t getting distributed. He didn’t really care about the money. He cared about the other two things.
CR
That’s amazing. I mean, he was such an amazing musician.
Sheri
I was really sorry when he passed. That was not a good situation.
CR
Same here. Did you did you get to talk to him personally?
Sheri
Once He didn’t talk much. I mean, we were just on a conference call together with his, you know, because I was an Internet lawyer. So that’s what I specialized in. And there were very few Internet lawyers at that point in time. And then he had his local attorney in Minneapolis with him. Obviously. So I’ve been working in the space called Digital Accessibility for about the last 15 years. I have a degree in computer science. I’m a lawyer and I have an MBA. Plus I have the lived experience of somebody who’s used a wheelchair, you know, continually for the last eight years and off and on for 50 years before that. And I also have a daughter who’s deaf. And so I actually got into digital accessibility because of my deaf daughter, because lack of captions really impacted her. And I think sometimes it’s easier to advocate for our children than it is to advocate for ourselves, because no parent ever wants to accept their child being discriminated against. So, that’s the space I’ve been working in for about the last 15 years. And basically I work on things so that websites and software and documents, electronic documentation, can be used by people who use assistive technology; so they can be used by screen reader users or people with dyslexia who are using various different tools. I myself use magnification to read things because I have glaucoma, so there’s a lot of different types of assistive technology that need to be accounted for. And if you’re following the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) then your digital stuff is probably going to be pretty good. But if you don’t know what they are, chances are it’s going to be pretty bad because we always say Digital Accessibility: you don’t get there unintentionally. It’s not an accident. It has to be deliberate, it has to be planned, it has to be integrated into everything that you do. And so that’s what I do. I help companies plan for it, integrate it into everything that they do. We do training for design teams and developer teams and QA [Quality Assurance] teams to teach, to teach them how to do it as efficiently and easily as possible. I really love my job because I can look at things and say, well, you know what? That used to not be accessible and now it is so, you know, I made the, you know, lives of other people with disabilities easier. It just makes me happy.
CR
What are some of the examples, that you can share about works like that?
Sheri
So there’s several the one that’s probably the easiest one to understand is using color. So 6% of people in technology are colorblind. It’s 4.25 % of the general population, but it’s actually 6% of I.T. because I.T. is 80% male. So if you’re doing a product that’s specifically intended for a technology audience, if you’re not careful about how you use color and how you use red and green in particular, you’re going to make it very difficult for a large chunk of your users to be able to use your product. So that’s that’s always an easy one for people to understand. Almost everybody knows somebody who’s colorblind. And if you don’t, you probably know somebody who’s colorblind, but they haven’t told you the color because it’s hard. You know, if you know more than 15 people, one of them is colorblind.
CR
That’s a high number.
Sheri
Yeah, it is. So that is one of the 50 guidelines in WCAG. There are other guidelines around things like, well, don’t embed text in pictures because when you magnify the picture, the text becomes unreadable. So there’s guidelines around the verb that we use is announcing. So if you have somebody who’s completely blind or who is using a screen reader for other reasons, screen readers takes the visual and turns it into sound. But let’s say you’re on … You’re ordering groceries from a grocery store website and you put something into your cart, you want a bag of Oreos, let’s say. Well, a whole ton of things change on the screen, right? Your subtotal changes, maybe the delivery, the amount that you need to buy, to make the delivery minimum, changes. Maybe it tells you that there’s a coupon that you can use. So you do one action, but multiple things happen, all of those things need to be conveyed to the person who can’t see the screen, who’s using the screen reader. So that’s another super important guideline that a lot of people just really don’t understand. If you don’t understand how people who use screen readers, how they consume data, you’re not going to understand how or what they require in order to have an equal experience. So I always tell people who are just getting started on their accessibility journey that the “why” is much more important than the “how”. If you understand the why, the how is easy. If all you’re doing is memorizing the how you’re going to you’re going to miss something for sure. The one thing I always warn people about this is this is what really good example: people are taught “you have to describe everything, every picture has to have alt text”. And that’s not actually the case. Informative pictures have to have alt text. If there’s something in the picture that’s not in the accompanying text, then it requires all text. If the text covers everything in the picture, then you’re helping somebody who’s blind by marking that picture is decorative because then they’re going to be able to get through it faster because their screen reader will just skip over the image and pretend it doesn’t exist. There’s that’s another accessibility myth that accessibility is expensive and we have to hire all these specialists and we have to we have to make our website boring and bland and vanilla, totally not true. So there’s really only three parts to the color guidelines. One is don’t mix red and green together. However, because people who are colorblind won’t be able to distinguish between the red and the green. It looks the same to them for the most common form of colorblindness. The second one is don’t use pastels on a light background because if you have pastels on a light background, there’s not enough contrast for people with vision loss to be able to read, especially if that’s text. And then the third one is always use something with color. So don’t just have a red circle and a green circle. Have a green with a checkmark and a red with a stop sign or a circle and a slash. Have an icon or some other type of what we call a visual indicator to show which one is the red and which one is the green. And what does it mean? If you follow those three rules, you’re actually probably going to be in pretty good shape with respect to color. And it doesn’t take long to internalize those three rules. And you don’t need to hire a psychologist or a market research person in order to figure that out.
CR
That’s that’s really good to know. So I appreciate those as well. And I’m sure the audience will like that as well.
Sheri
Yeah. You know, some people, especially before, not so much now, but when they were hiding what we call the fine print, they’d have little light gray print on the bottom of the footer so that hopefully you didn’t see it. That kind of stuff is illegal because there’s not enough contrast and people won’t be able to read it. And especially if your audience is elderly, let’s say over 65, over 65, we humans just in general start to lose the ability to see light blues and light yellows. And we the older we get, the more we need that contrast in order to be able to read.
CR
That makes so much sense, you know, and I see it everywhere. You know, when you get those promotional mail with the little tiny fine print and talk about.
Sheri
What’s with the expiration date, it’s like.
CR
Six point font.
Sheri
Yeah, that’s not it’s not a good situation for anybody especially people was vision loss.
CR
Mhm. So traveling between Canada and the United States and having the legal background, what’s the actual legal aspect in terms of requirements for businesses to offer accessibility.
Sheri
So that’s complicated. Shocker. Because of the state of the United States Supreme Court right now. I live in California and in California, we have state laws governing accessibility that are probably the strictest laws in the country. So if you want to, if you are based in California or you want to do business with people in California, the California laws are really what you need to follow. So the problem is the Americans with Disabilities Act requires equality, right? Equal access. But it didn’t specify the standard that needed to be met. And so that that’s been causing a lot of litigation churn over the last, probably ten years ago was when the litigation really started to take off. And there are people who go around doing nothing but suing companies over having inaccessible websites, inaccessible hotel descriptions is a popular right now, inaccessible retail. And it’s it’s just that we’re relying heavily right now on case law where the courts are coming out and saying this is accessible or this isn’t accessible enough, rather than having an actual law that we can point to and relying on the courts to tell us is very slow and very expensive. So I’m hoping that eventually the the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, will actually have a standard written into it for digital accessibility. But right now it doesn’t. Generally speaking, if you’re following the WKAG 2.1, version 2.1, the middle level of the standards are not the strictest standard, but not the lowest. But the middle tier, which is called level AA, you’re probably going to be able to avoid most litigation. Or if you do get litigated against, you’ll have a good defense that is kind of the de facto standard, but it’s not actually written into a law anywhere
CR
what would be the mechanisms to have those incorporated? Do we need to talk to our representatives? What needs to happen?
Sheri
So there are the Department of Justice is back on trying to establish standards for the entire country. There’s a law pending right now in the California legislature trying to establish a standard for everybody who does business in California. It’s just a slow process. And the problem is because it takes more than four years sometimes to get this stuff done. If the next set of politicians didn’t agree with what the first set did, they just cancel it. Which is what happened when there were some laws pending in under the Obama administration that they did not get finished before. Trump took over and Trump just canceled them all, when he took effect. And then when Biden took over, they canceled the cancellation. Right? But you can see because the process is so slow and because we keep on flip flopping back and forth between parties that are pro accessibility and anti accessibility, that’s why we haven’t made a whole lot of progress from the legal side of things in the US for the last decade. And that’s why the litigation has taken over as the primary form of guidance. Now, that’s not a Canadian thing at all, but right in Canada, the Accessible Canada Act passed, I believe it was four years ago, and then it got stuck in implementation because of the pandemic. The Canadian government just had more important things to focus on. And so that delayed some of the implementation, but it’s getting it’s getting back on track now. And Canadians tend not to be as litigious as Americans are. So it’s less likely that litigation will be a main driver in Canada, but it’s a huge driver in the U.S. We’ve had between 4000 to 4500 lawsuits that have actually gone been filed. You know, for every lawsuit that’s been filed, there’s probably ten more letters, demand letters that have been sent out that haven’t resulted in litigation. So, you know, probably between 40 and 50,000 complaints a year in the U.S. regarding digital accessibility, just digital accessibility. And hat doesn’t include the physical accessibility stuff. Like, you know, there are cities that have well, let me give you an example. New York City in their subway system. 75% of the New York City subway system does not have elevators.
CR
Wow.
Sheri
So they just entered into a consent decree, which means it’s kind of a form of a settlement between the disabled parties that are suing and the transit authority in New York saying that by 2055, there will that 90%, I think it is, of the subway systems will have elevators. So that means I’m going to be dead before because I’ll be 90 in 2055. I don’t think I’m going to be looking for a subway in New York. You know? that’s a problem. It takes forever to get infrastructure changed because, you know, you have to jackhammer concrete and you have to remodel things. It’s just so much better to build things to be accessible from the outset. And then you don’t have to spend all this time and money and energy retrofitting things. And the same is true for software. It’s just the only difference is software can be fixed by rewriting code. You don’t have to jackhammer concrete.
CR
Right? It just takes a little bit of time, that’s it. In Bolivia, my experience going last year for the first time with the wheelchair was that there’s been an improvement. There’s been I see more sidewalks, more businesses that have wheelchair access. But, you know, it’s a small percentage, obviously. So what’s your perspective?
Sheri
So I have been to Ecuador in a wheelchair. It was pretty doable. One of the nice things is the advent of things like, you know, various different delivery services. You don’t have to worry about whether there’s a curb cut at the taco place you want to go to because you can get the tacos to come to you. But obviously that requires some pretty substantial financial resources that local people might not have the same level of availability. I do think that things are getting better, there’s a lot of countries have now accessibility laws. There’s a lawyer by the name of Lainey Feingold. Her website is LFLegal.com, I believe. And she just updated her global review of various different accessibility laws. And there is something like 30 countries, I think, at least, if not more, that that actually have accessibility laws. The Middle East is particularly good. The EU [European Union] is obviously outstanding, Australia is good, the UK is good, Canada is good. Certain countries in Asia are good. Singapore is one of the best in the world in terms of access, physical access anyways, so there are more and more countries getting on board with both physical and digital accessibility. Now you might ask yourself, Well, why is it that they’re doing that now? Well, there’s a real focus globally now on sustainability. And if you look at the United Nations sustainability development goals, there’s 17 of them, about how we’re going to become a sustainable society, 8 of them, so almost half, either directly relate to disabilities or indirectly relate to disabilities. And so people and governments are realizing that unless we treat the, you know, 15 to 18% of our population who are disabled, if we provide them equal access, those people will be able to contribute to being a more sustainable society. And I think that’s what a lot of the motivation is now. Not necessarily to be nice to people with disabilities, I wish that was it (it probably isn’t), but it’s more about we can’t have 18% of the population sitting on the sidelines. We can’t have 18% of the population not able to work, even though they could work if we made these few changes so that they could get up the ramp into a school room or get or, you know, get into an office building or you know, use a screen reader to to read a web page. So it’s more about creating a sustainable society than it is specifically about helping people with disabilities. At the end of the day, I actually don’t care what it is. It doesn’t matter what the motivation is, it matters that change is happening.
CR
Yeah, yeah, I agree 100%.
Sheri
It’s the thing that makes me bananas is when I’m traveling by myself and people assume that I can’t take care of myself. I’ve literally had people grab my wheelchair, start pushing when I’m in the airport and I’m like, what the hell are you doing? Did I ask for help? Do I look like I’m in trouble? No! get your hands off my damn wheelchair. And that that’s actually the biggest problem I face. You know, just the really snarky comments from people, and they don’t even realize that they’re being ableist. You know, I’ll go through TSA and they’ll say, Oh, are you traveling by yourself today? And I’ll say, yes. And more than one occasion I’ve had somebody reply, Oh, good for you. Like, like somehow I’m special because I can travel in a wheelchair. You know what? I travel the same way everybody else does. I get to the airport, I get on the plane, I get off the plane. I may get on the plane and get off the plane differently than everybody, but other than that, there’s nothing special about somebody in a wheelchair traveling by themselves. So I would say I’ve never had anybody assume that I was mentally deficient or talk to my husband instead of talking to me if we’re traveling together. But I have had many, many, many occasions where I was assumed that I just wasn’t capable and that is truly annoying. Those are what we refer to in the DEI [Diversity, Equity & Inclusion] community as teachable moments. Sometimes I have the energy for a teachable moment, sometimes I don’t. It just depends if I’m at the beginning of my trip or at the end. But yeah, those those situations are it can be truly exasperating.
CR
What about the good experiences?
Sheri
Good experiences? You know, I have this famous saying, which is “it’s hard for me to remember specific instances where I’ve been included, but I can tell you all the times that I’ve been excluded”. Sometimes the good experiences don’t stick with you because everybody should have good experiences. Good experiences don’t be special. If I get from one end of the country to another and my wheelchair is not damaged and I get a hotel and nothing bad has happened,
Sheri
I haven’t had a taxi pass me by because I’m in a wheelchair, because that happens all the time too. You know? those are definitely the better experiences where I can say, Hey, look, I did this trip that lots of other people do, and I actually didn’t have any problems. But unfortunately, the trips where I have zero problems are few and far between.
CR
Well, as an avid traveler, I can relate to that.
Sheri
Yeah, understood. I think many people who have experiences with wheelchairs and traveling tell that same story or some variation of it.
CR
So what’s going on with your life right now?
Sheri
So I am trying to qualify for the I’m not sure a probably the Canadian Olympic team at this point for archery. Um, I’m a dual citizen, so I kind of have a choice. So archery is my sport. I have work in archery and very little else because archery, when you’re competing at the level I am, is kind of a part time job really. I probably spend an average of about 20 hours a week on it. I’m working on some pretty cool stuff with respect to generative AI and accessibility right now, so that’s something I can’t go into too much detail on a podcast, but I’m hoping in the next few months there will be some things that maybe my company will be releasing into the open source that people can use to improve their accessibility by using. It won’t be using chatGPT, but it will be using something like chatGPT. But I’m working on a localized LLM related to accessibility. That’s probably the most that I can say at this point, but it’s really exciting. Some of the things that we’re that we’re realizing that we might be able to accomplish that will take a lot of the more mundane work off of our plates and allow us to focus more on the things that really require a human, a human neural network, you know, and a human brain to analyze and interact with the assistive technology.
CR
That is very exciting. Please let us know when you’re able to in the future., if you can.
Sheri
Definitely.
CR
Well, that’s that’s amazing. I’m very honored to meet you and to learn a little bit about your path and what you’re doing. Is there anything else you wanted to share?
Sheri
So I do have a book out that I released two years ago that’s free, and it’s called Giving a Damn About Accessibility. It was published through the UX Collective. So it’s at accessibility.UXdesign.cc. I think you might have to double check that your URL because it’s been a while, since I’ve gone and looked at it and then I’m going to be having some training coming out so it’s going to be a ten week course on how to make events and documents and software and websites and training just more accessible, written for the person that knows nothing about accessibility but may be working for a company running events, running conferences, developing documentation, developing web pages, and teaching them the why. And mostly the why, and a little bit of the how about how to make their digital properties more accessible.
CR
And where can people contact you?
Sheri
So the website that we’re going to be using for that is called AccessibilityBlueprint.com. So they’ll be able to contact me at info@accessibilityblueprint.com. Just run those words together.
I plan on working in this field for the foreseeable future. So and because I’ve got a computer science degree, it really allows me to jump into the new technologies very quickly. There’s not a lot of people in accessibility with the background that I have. So it really does give me a unique perspective on how can we utilize these new innovations to improve the accessibility experience.
CR
I agree. I agree. You’re an asset and you’re shining so much and I appreciate that.
Sheri
Well, thanks for inviting me to come talk to you.
CR
Take care, Sheri!
Sheri
Say bye bye.
CR
Bye.
