HubSpot Community Developer Show | Accessibility with Samuel Proulx and Jon Sasala | S02E01

So feel free to speak your mind. I am the boss, so I'll just edit it out later on, you know, you'll feel good about your.

Go.

Yeah, I also cry really easily, so, you know, just like, keep that in mind.

All right.

Hello, world. Welcome to another episode of the HubSpot community developer show. I am your host, Dennis Edson. I'm community manager at HubSpot. My pronouns are he and him, and for anyone who is visually impaired. I'm a white male. What hair I have remaining is brown and I'm wearing a HubSpot developer hoodie in an effort to look like a developer because I am always afraid that I have a problem. I really do. All right, this is. We haven't done this in a bit, been at a little bit of hiatus, so I'm calling this the second season of our podcast. So congratulations to the folks here who are on the show with me. If you guys remember, if you've been following along, if you follow the wiki on us, you'll know that. Season one, Episode one. I also had a few of these people on here where we talked about accessibility. I think accessibility is a very important topic and I think we need to talk about it often. And by often, for me, I guess right now it means yearly. But I think, you know, as much as we can actually talk about it, we should be talking about it. So I invited a couple of people back from before and another person, a special guest that I will allow them all to introduce themselves. John McLaren from HubSpot, Tanya Scales. We have John Cesala and Samuel Prue. I'll allow you guys to go and introduce yourselves, starting with jma. Go for it.

Hi. I'm a senior developer advocate at HubSpot on our developer relations team and I internally contribute to making HubSpot more accessible as well as encouraging and teaching developers in our community to make their products more accessible as well. I'm a white male. He him and I have short black hair, black glasses covering some handsome brown eyes, and I'm sporting a shirt that says digital equality is my jam that I got by answering a question at a Dequeu event.

Very good. Following the order of my zoom here I am going to John Tassala. Hello. How you doing?

Hi there. Thanks to. Thanks for having me back on again, Dennis. I appreciate it. Happy to see everybody again. My name is John Cesala. He him. I am a middle aged white male with an unnecessarily silly haircut, shaved on the sides, wearing a rust colored fleece, sitting in my office. Last time we connected, I was set up at home as we were all kind of working remotely. I have returned to the office, so I'm in my. My formal working environment. But, yeah, grateful to be here. I'm the president of Maury Creative Studios, a HubSpot Solutions partner. We're an agency that help companies with their digital marketing and also the co founder, a founding member of the Inclusion Hub platform, which is a digital inclusion resource guide finding different businesses and service providers who can help make businesses more accessible.

John, the most important question I have for you right now is last time we spoke, the first podcast was about your attire and you said you're going to bring the. The casual look to the office. Tell me, did it. Did. Are you.

It has. I actually did get a little bit fancied up here today. I recently purchased the most comfortable fleece lined gray hoodie and I've been wearing it every day this week. And it's. It was more out of concern that my coworkers would be like, he's wearing it again. So I did wear something a little different.

Yeah, super comfy. All right, next, on my window, I see Tanya. Tanya, how you doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on again. Hi, everybody. I'm Tanya Scales. She. Her pronouns. I am a technical lead at HubSpot. I primarily work on the default assets that are in the HubSpot CMS themes modules, things like that that developers are familiar with. And I am a certified professional in web accessibility and I generally have a passion for making HubSpot more accessible as a platform. I am a white female with extra long brown hair, wearing dark room glasses, and I'm sporting a DQ shirt that says, friends don't let friends ship inaccessible code. Um, I got that for going through the DQ Dev Tools beta back in the day, so.

And what. When does extra long.

What's the.

What's the. When does it go from long to extra long?

I feel like if you're on a zoom and your hair is just flowing past the window, you probably call it extra long.

Yeah. Wonderful. And last, but definitely not least, Sam. How's it going?

Hey, great to be here for the first time, everyone. I'm Sam Prue. I am the accessibility evangelist here at Fable. So I spend a lot of time talking to folks about the importance of accessibility and of testing your accessibility with real users who have lived experience with assistive technology, things like that. Before doing that, I was Fable's community manager, building the community of assistive technology users that we work with to test Our customers products. I am a white male. Pronouns, he, him. I'm wearing kind of a corduroy shirt and I've got ravenclaw kind of crest and some other stuff on a desk here to my left. Big, big Harry Potter fan. Because I grew up right in that era where the books were coming out on my birthday every year and age matches Harry's. So there we go.

That's actually a very important question I have about Harry Potter because my daughter is now seven years old and I feel like we're almost to that point where we can bring Harry Potter into the mix. What do you say about that?

I mean, it depends if you're going to go one book a year maybe, but the books, as they get longer and deeper into the series, the real intention, I think, was that you grow up with the characters. I'm not sure I'd give, you know, Order of the Phoenix or the Deathly Hallows to a nine year old, I.

Guess is what I'm saying.

Gotcha. Now this is the actual podcast. It's going to be all about Harry Potter and we're selfish.

Oh, I'm for it.

Let's do this. Cool. Yeah. As I said, I assembled these people because I am selfish and I get to talk to the smart people around me about things that I am not so smart about. So, yeah, I'm happy to have all of you guys here to talk about this. To get started. I think let's just start with just if anyone wants to just define accessibility. Just so we just have that baseline and we're on the same page and everyone listening to this or watching this is also on the same page. Sam, I'm going to go with you on this one. Just would you define that?

So accessibility is interesting and I think maybe a little bit controversial the way we keep choose to define it. There is sort of one frame of thought that accessibility centers around the ability of people with disabilities who use various assistive technologies or who perhaps have other differences. It's their ability to access a product. And so a lot of people think of it as involving things like WCAG and checklists and guidelines, which are great and which are important. But I like to define accessibility a little bit wider than that because when we talk about accessibility, it's not enough to be merely usable. We want products that are equally functional and effective and efficient for everyone. Right. Because you can say that, oh well, at least you can access something. But if it takes me nine times longer to perform an action on some piece of software, then it perhaps takes one of my co workers, and that's not necessarily viable for me. So I like to kind of expand the way we think about accessibility out a little bit further beyond just the ability to access something to the ability to have the same kind of efficient, of enjoyable experience that anyone else would have with a product or service.

Oh, that totally makes sense. And does anyone else have anything to add to that? Cause I'm also curious about how the evolution of accessibility. I think, John Susal, you're about ready to say something. I'll let you speak before I interrupt again.

Yeah, I wanted to jump in just because I think Sam's right in that accessibility can be intimidating and confusing and feel like there's so many components to it. And it's not just about can somebody, can everybody eventually get to an outcome? But to simplify it, accessibility is just user experience, and it's accounting for the full scope of user experience. And as you know, people in the accessibility space often like to cite, there are innovations that come from addressing accessibility that everybody gets to enjoy. I just read an article about the new AirPods or AirPods in general, and how they have these accessibility features that everybody uses and appreciates. Specifically a lot of, like Bluetooth speakers, When you take them off, if you're listening to something, they'll keep playing in the speakers. So, okay, maybe you're listening to music and the music continues to roll, but with the AirPods, when you take them out, they stop. And why is that an accessibility feature? If you're using a screen reader on your phone, if you're using Voiceover and you're reading an article, as soon as you take your earbud, if it continues to read through and then you put them back in, you're what, nine paragraphs later? How, like, it's such a. That's, that's an accessibility benefit that then the rest of the world gets to like, oh, cool, I took them out and it stopped playing the music. So just kind of an example. This is user experience in general.

Absolutely. I do think there is some importance to the term accessibility, though, and a reason to talk about it beyond just user experience. Because what can sometimes happen is if we aren't thinking about these Edge cases, then we can, we can sometimes lose the, the, the people with disabilities get locked out, if that makes sense. Like, if we don't specifically talk about.

Can you go a little bit deeper into that? I've actually not.

I'd love to dive into that, because this is something that a coworker of mine, somebody else who's involved in inclusion Hub brought to my attention was a Twitter post, somebody saying people develop these curb cuts to make sure that people with wheelchairs could easily get up and down and everybody else benefits from it. And then there's another accessibility thing. That's the bumps that they put on the edge of a curb cut to make sure that somebody using a walking stick or a cane can know whenever they're approaching it. But if those bumps are angled in the wrong direction, a wheelchair can be kind of forced into oncoming traffic. So there are things that are accidentally making things inaccessible that were intended to be accessible. And another great example, I'm involved in this next gen accessibility program. And when I brought that up, somebody else made the example of, yeah, you've got these buttons on doors for opening them up automatically. And yes, that's to let somebody in a wheelchair in. But other people are like, hey, I'm being super Covid safe, let me just use this button. But I'm not going to touch that with my hands. So they use their foot, they karate kick this button with their shoe. That might have just walked in some, you know, whatever, and. And now you're reclaiming this or taking it away from the intended original use case.

Yeah, I absolutely. About that. Go ahead, Sam.

I mean, I know we're going on a little bit of a tangent, but I think it's also important to talk a little bit about the way that I think we are slowly beginning to change the way that we think about accessibility and accommodation and such. There used to be this idea that if you need an accommodation, you should prove that you need it. And I think we're getting past that. Right. If you need to take an elevator, maybe you have arthritis, maybe you're in a wheelchair, maybe you're not visibly disabled. I think that we are slowly coming to the point where we're saying, hey, accessibility accommodations are better. Whether it's text to speech, whether it's an elevator, whether it's an escalator, they should be available to everyone. And you shouldn't have to prove that, hey, I have a person with a disability and I need this.

Yeah, I agree with that. Which brings me back to the whole. The difference between user experience and accessibility. I feel like sometimes from a, from a developer's perspective, I think of user experience and I don't think about accessibility. But if I, if I know I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I feel like if it was just like the top level, if it wasn't kind of a, like Underneath this umbrella of user experience, I would actually consider it more. And I, I, I'm wording this terribly, but I, hopefully you guys get what I'm, I'm talking about here. I, I, I just feel like as a developer I'm looking at making it pretty, you know, that's the user experience. But if you say if, when, immediately when you say accessibility, I feel like I have a definition of what I should be looking at where, please, someone saved me here.

Yeah, what I'm trying to say is like ux, you know, might not, people don't think of that maybe encompassing accessibility, but when you think of accessibility, that raises the UX up, like it, it'll bring the whole product up or whatever digital asset you might be looking at.

So yeah, I guess what I was trying to say possibly here is that as I've been thinking about this episode, I've been thinking about what accessibility is and then I just kept on coming back to user experience and I was like, I don't know, what's the difference? I feel like accessibility, like that is user experience, that's like everything about it. And correct me if I'm wrong, I know you want to maybe flag it to make sure we're not missing out on any group, but I feel like it's a top level topic and it shouldn't be like a smaller, you know, so I feel like maybe people shrug it off just because it isn't user experience, you know, it's like the subset and we can think about that later on, you know, like, let's get that, let's get the visual down right now and then in a couple years we'll talk about, you know, accessibility.

There's a quote that I heard at a recent conference and it was, it was on a slide and I don't know who originally said it, so I apologize, maybe somebody else on the podcast knows. But the quote was that if you design for the edge, you get the middle for free. And I think that really talks about how as UX designers and as developers, if we decide we're going to start with these so called Edge cases with assistive technology, with people who, you know, who have accessibility requirements, we will then naturally create a product that is great and that is usable to everyone. Whereas if we sort of start in the middle and then extend out, that perhaps doesn't work as well.

Yeah, this is similar to like how the whole responsive design revolution kind of came up. Like there's, there's this set of people who believes design for mobile and then build upon that, I think JMAC actually disagreed with me when I said that on a different episode. But that's, that's definitely a way people think about it. And now that I've called him out, I'll ask for Jmax. And I, I say JMac because for everyone listening, there are two Johns on this spelled exactly the same. So JMac is the John McLaren.

Yeah. Trying to remember what I, what I previously said probably like eight months ago about responsive design. But yeah, I, I would say when it comes to responsive design, a lot of people will design mobile first and then as the site is, is as the device and screen size is bigger, they'll make it work in a bigger format. There are different philosophies around how you should actually go about it, whether you should actually code everything to be mobile first, et cetera. And a lot of that deals with performance more than say accessibility or UX in general. But the whole idea of responsive design is absolutely both an accessibility and a UX issue.

One of the things that fascinates me about the kind of parallel between mobile design and accessible design is that we also sort of went through, remember back in the day, every website had a desktop website and it had a mobile website and those two things were completely separate websites. And we went through the same transition back in the day where you had like a text only version or you had the accessible version and then you had the regular version and people discover it. I think for the same reasons that that approach doesn't work and is not workable. It's just sort of fascinating sometimes to watch the way history repeats itself in different areas.

That is so true. You called out the like making like an accessible version of your site versus the normal version. And I've seen companies try and do that and it's like they set out with good intentions, but it usually ends up meaning that the accessible version of the platform is either like lacking a lot of the newer features and so it's not as usable, or they kind of forget about it when they're improving the rest of the product. And so I think as the web has evolved, everyone started to kind of.

Realize like these are process change, right? You need your marketing people to be producing accessible marketing resources. You need the developers to be developing accessible code, you need the designers to be creating accessible designs. And so it's about process change. One thing that we've seen recently is companies starting to integrate accessibility into their okrs. And if you're going to do that, you do need somebody who's figuring out what Are our accessibility targets? How are we measuring them? And are the accessibility processes that have been created throughout the organization getting the right inputs and producing the outputs that we want. But it feels to me like that's more of a managerial position, a product management position that is ensuring that our organization is making the process changes organization wide and of course the culture changes, as was mentioned just a minute ago, that result in accessibility.

Encourage our external guests here, John and Sam to argue this if necessary.

Oh boy, pressure. I guess I, I can start. We're, we're thinking about accessibility on a whole bunch of different fronts. So we, we kind of like we're all about culture at home spot. That is not any surprise, but one of our favorite acronyms is heart and the E in heart stands for empathy and we think that accessibility fits into that. And so one of the things that we're doing is recently this is an internal award, but a team was given an internal award for a heart award for making a more accessible experience in a part of the app. And so what we're trying to do is encourage teams to be encouraged to do more accessible work versus it being feeling kind of like a dictatorship slap on the wrist every time something's bad. We want to create a culture where everyone's growing together and learning together to do better overall because it's generally better if there are a lot of individuals who know at least a little something about accessibility than having just a couple of really big experts and that are not trying to create for what like I know there's this term means something externally but like a accessibility advocate. Like has a very specific term but I'm meaning more just in the sense of like someone who is aware of the problems and is aware of potential solutions may not know the, the like nitty gritty how to solve things completely but if you have a lot of those people it's really effective for solving problems because each person's going to share their knowledge with each other upskill the people around them that may not even have any ideas about accessibility or know anything yet. So we've, we've got a few different ways that we're tackling that. Like I mentioned, we're encouraging it through the internal award. We've got our events internally. We've had for example Judith Heumann who spoke at Inbound 2021 also spoke internally for us too.

John, may I stop really quickly? I'm going to ask more specifically about because I believe John and Sam had a conversation about accessibility teams and I think John, I, I, you know, totally peeked on your video that you recorded. Thank you very much. John said that, you know, talked about possibly, you know, it should HubSpot have a team specific to accessibility. And Sam, the smart guy that he is, fought back on that and I think has more of the. The JMac type approach. I'm. I'm curious to know and this is obviously just opinions because I know J. Mac and Tanya aren't senior, they don't have budget to get a team. But do you guys think there should be an accessibility team in addition to the individual just ownership?

Yeah, I'll own that conversation real quick. The chat that Sam and I had, I pointed out that I was surprised there wasn't a dedicated accessibility team. And Sam pushed back and said it's not one person's job. It's not one team's job. And John, John Mack. J. Mack, what you describe is more aligned with what Samuel was describing saying if we spread the responsibility around and if we don't make people feel intimidated by or punished when something isn't, isn't done properly, then there's a greater chance of adoption. So I think Sam, you were completely right in saying it's not a team that needs to be dedicated. It's something like this. Culture change.

Absolutely. I will say that I think there is a place for somebody who is responsible for overseeing accessibility. But what I mean by that is I think very different, a different kind of job description than we have seen in a lot of organizations who sort of have an accessibility team or an accessibility subject matter expert. Because the way to do accessibility really requires process change. Right. You need your marketing people to be producing accessible marketing resources. You need the developers to be, to be developing accessible code. You need the designers to be creating accessible designs. And so it's about process change. One thing that we've seen recently is companies starting to integrate accessibility into their okrs. And if you're going to do that, you do need somebody who's figuring out what are our accessibility targets, how are we measuring them and are the accessibility processes that have been created throughout the organization getting the right inputs and producing the outputs that we want. But it feels to me like that's more of a managerial position, a project management position that is ensuring that our organization is making the process changes, organization wide. And of course the culture changes, as was mentioned just a minute ago, that result in accessibility.

Yeah. Also I always want to throw in there that Sam has some construction going in the background. So if you guys hear that, that's what's happening. Just so Everyone knows on, on the internal side we do have some like on, on Slack we have some very active channels with people from various teams speaking specifically about accessibility. We also have a support channel for accessibility. So for people who are fielding questions from customers, you know, they can go to this channel and get advice. And lastly we have the developer Slack accessibility channel as well, which is I, I encourage everyone to use, I am getting a, an action item here. So I don't think we actually have anything on that on the community forums. I think I will take responsibility being that I am the community manager. So check done. Okay. I think we can go. J man, I, I, I cut you off. Continue.

Well first, since you also mentioned the renovations, I also have my dog in the room and so I apologize if he makes any silly sounds. It sometimes happens. But he hates being on the other side of that door when I'm in a meeting. So anyhow. But I 100% in agreement with what Sam was saying. I can't comment on like how our teams operate internally, but I can say that that is like how I personally feel about it. Is that like it's very, it's a, it makes more sense to have a someone be kind of like the leadership when it comes to accessibility and help help encourage teams and help them set up tooling and things like that so that the individual teams can be stronger and do do the work better.

Yeah. And I want to add to that. Once again, I apologize if I'm talking too much here, yell at me if I am. But I want to say that informally. I think Tanya and John have kind of become internal almost leaders. And I mean there's more people and I'm just going to point these two people out right now. So I applaud their, you know, they really are encouraging to the entire HubSpot team. And I think it's important just to express how much we actually do take accessibility seriously. And these two are really pushing hard on everyone to make sure that we are moving that direction. Always moving that direction. Again jmac, I apologize I cut you off after your first point on Continue.

Yeah, yeah. So this one, we had started doing this but we've continued to make the CMS theme boilerplate more and more accessible over time time. And it is open source, so if you catch us making a mistake, call us out so we can fix it. We want to, we want to make it so that it's easy for developers to build accessible websites on our cms. That's, that's a huge goal. So, and then I also wanted to say, well, I guess I already, I. I'm looking at some notes, so I apologize if I stumble over some things I said already. But we're also working on education for internal employees. The Judith Human talk was one example. But we have other internal talks that are happening to educate everyone as well as we have some content that's coming out for everyone outside of HubSpot too, both involving developers and non developers. So be on the lookout for that. I'm not sure I'm allowed to say specifics just yet because timelines can shift. But also we're doing things like. Oh, sorry Sam, did you have a question?

I mean, I just, I love the talk about education and the talk about making the boilerplate theme accessible. And that brings up to me something that I sort of challenge companies on a technique that I find that is working and that is perhaps a useful way to think about accessibility, and that is through accessibility checkers and accessibility warnings. A lot of larger companies are now starting to give people not only the opportunity to check that what they have done with the tool is accessible, but to give them warnings when it's not. And I think that's a really interesting rethink about accessibility. I sort of compare it to security, right? If you try to turn off your antivirus in Windows, Windows is going to say, hey, are you sure that's what you want to do? That's like a not a good thing to do. Are you really sure? And I think that it would be really great if the industry is moving towards kind of a place where accessibility is treated the same way as security. It's a default. And if you're going to do something that would break it, you get a warning. And so first of all, I'd love to know what everyone else thinks about that. And second of all, has there been any thinking and discussion about that at HubSpot as kind of a CMS and as a builder that lets other people do things with the tool?

I have thoughts, but I saw Tanya, so I agree there are some things already that we're doing. So we've started with some of the easier things. Like for example, we're, we're making it so that we have an SEO recommendations tool, but it's really kind of like a tool that encompasses a whole lot of different areas and accessibility is one of them. And so in that tool it'll catch pages that have missing alt text. I think it also looks for links that don't have descriptive text. And there some of these warnings will also show up inside the Page editor in the Optimizations tab. But we're also thinking about what can we do beyond that to catch things that are harder, harder to catch than that. And as well as like the alt text thing. Like, one of the things that we are being careful about is like, when we produce a warning or an error like this, we want to make sure that folks understand the actual, like, problem area around it so that they're not just going like, say you have like a, a random picture of a daisy on a tech website and that daisy has nothing to do with the content. Like, that's a presentational image and you should be treating it as a presentational image and not, not as the, like, focus of the content. So we're trying to create educational stuff within those tools.

I could just jump in.

Sorry, just, just two seconds.

This is the beauty of doing another accessibility episode here, Dennis, because last time we got together, these were things we were talking about, like, wouldn't it be great, Wouldn't it be great if the SEO recommendations also caught things like missing alt text or headings out of order, whatever. So we get together now a year later, and there are these announcements, there are these things that are changing. So that was just my observation there.

That's a great call out. Yeah, I love that we're able to identify that, you know, HubSpot is moving forward in areas. And I think some of the topics that, that JMAC was mentioning was more about like our, our customers. Customer, the, the. The folks who are like, maybe like, taking in that content, a website content, and how we can help our content creators make an accessible website. You know, there is also the broad topic of the product itself and somebody who is using HubSpot, you know, to do sales, marketing, you know, service or build a website, you know, via CMS Hub. How can we make that more accessible? And I think, you know, going back to the, the broad topic of like education within a company and changing a process. I feel like since we talked last time, over the past year we've really seen like this influx of appreciation for accessibility, interest in exploring the topic more. We've gotten more questions internally flying around. I can just see this starting to happen and that excites me from a cultural standpoint and a process standpoint of, you know, thinking about how we can educate, how we can help other people who work at HubSpot become educated about the topic. Because there's, there's more interest on the impressions from teams just on how to maybe implement something in a more accessible way, maybe to point them to Some resources. So I really feel like where as a company, like, there's a lot of, like, grassroots, like, interest in. In really starting to improve that across the app. Obviously, I, I can't speak to specifics, but I think there's. The interest is there and like, the, the passion is starting to grow within HubSpotters across the board.

And Tanya, you might have to ask, do you. Do you think this is exclusive to HubSpot, or you think this is more of like a, a larger cultural shift? And to follow up on that, do you think that it was naturally happening, or do you think the pandemic, for example, made people think about accessibility and starting to have to deal with it? And also I believe Sam probably, I can tell right now he's thinking about that and has some thoughts. So I, I will start with Tanya because I asked directly to her. But Sam, please follow up.

Yeah, I guess right now, since we talked a year ago, I do feel like, you know, we're. We're kind of like on this upward trend where accessibility is just becoming across companies. Definitely something to be focused on. I, I think Sam's probably going to have a better idea, especially, you know, working with multiple companies, like how that is actually occurring, since I only have insight into HubSpot at the moment. And then in terms of the pandemic, I definitely, you know, the pandemic created a lot of opportunity for small businesses to basically go digital in some way and serve customers in that regard. So I definitely think that it had influence or has influence over digital accessibility and how more people are thinking about it. And, and again, you know, going back to the very, very initial point of UX and accessibility and all of this. So I do think it's. It's created this focus in the area. But I'd be interested to hear from Sam about companies and how companies are thinking about accessibility over the past year or throughout the pandemic.

So I think one of the big changes that Covid has accelerated is the change in how we think about the Internet and how we think about digital experiences. Because, of course, when the Internet was new, it was new technology. It was kind of a luxury, right? But over the past 20 years, without a lot of people realizing it, the Internet has moved from being a luxury to almost being an essential service, right? There was this idea that, oh, well, if the website's not accessible, someone can call or someone can go into the store or someone can xyz, right? The Internet's not essential. But what Covid really brought home to people is that Whoa. Actually, the Internet is just totally essential to everything that we do. And that has had wide implications for the way that people think about accessibility. Right? Because people are now coming to realize that, hey, we can't, we can't require people to do all of these workarounds. And it's not okay for the 1 in 5 people with a disability to be completely locked out of certain digital experiences. And the second way that that has impacted people's thinking is that small businesses have been forced to prioritize their online experiences more than ever before. Right? The mom and pop pizza shop on the corner might have had a little website, but it might not have been integral to their business. And now it's become integral. And what that has really brought home to people is that tools like CMSs, like, you know, ordering and e commerce tools need to be accessible by default. Because there are all of these small businesses that are coming online as their primary mode of engagement that like, if a family business with three employees has to hire an accessibility expert in order to become accessible, their tools have failed them. And I think we are coming to realize the responsibility that tooling companies have to create accessible experiences and to give great accessibility education to the businesses down the line that rely on them to serve their customers.

Do you think people have come like, since, and I'll give an example of why I'm thinking of this, but have come to embrace digital just because it's cheaper, easier than having to deal with people, you know, in person. And my, my, my example on this one right now is a very Covid specific one where a, an elderly lady was going in to get a, a booster shot. She had not had a, she had not filled out any forms or anything like that. And it's only, she went to the counter and they said, you need to go on your phone, fill out, you know, this form to reserve a spot to do this. And she said, I don't have, you know, the Internet on my phone, so we have to go home, the whole thing. And it seems like we, something like that, specifically, something like that should have options. You know, like there should be like you shouldn't just rely solely on the digital, digital experience.

I, I agree with you, but I think even the options that we have are coming to rely on the digital experience. For example, a lot of stores or restaurants, hey, you can, you can pay with your phone or you can use the self serve payment kiosk. And I think that the, the mistake that we are sometimes making is we're saying, oh well, if you go to A fast food restaurant, you can just pre order with your phone and pick up your food. So we don't need to worry about making the self serve ordering kiosk in the restaurant accessible because you should just do that on your phone. Right? And I think that's absolutely not the case. What you're saying is important. We've got to have options. People who do not have the access to technology that I'm sure all of us do should not be locked out of things. And part of what that involves is making in person kiosks and options and touchscreens and payment pads and all of this stuff, making those experiences equally accessible as the app experience and as the web experience. But I think digital, because it is easier for everyone, it's not going to go away, right? It's going to continue. And so we need to figure out ways to make experiences that rely on digital accessible to those who don't have the technology access, as well as making the technology more accessible and easier to use so that more and more people have that technology access. Of course, those two things go hand in hand hand.

Just to kind of piggyback on the concept here of maybe a kiosk being introduced as a, as a byproduct of COVID or the ability to pay with your phone, or you know, just the evolutions and the innovations that we've seen. Covid microwaved the situation. It fast tracked a lot of evolution that was going to happen over the next five, 10, 15, 20 years. It just made it happen much faster in a good way and potentially in a slightly bad way, but always progressing towards something in the future. For example, Zoom was fully adopted by a lot of businesses, but the accessibility improvements that they made because they were forced to in a short period of time have made it possible now for maybe people that didn't have a lot of employment opportunities to have a voice and to now present on things and be involved in some of the conversation because of these accessibility improvements. And if these kiosks now are introduced that are inaccessible, okay, that's phase one. Phase two is people are going to be frustrated and people and the businesses are going to have to make those improvements. But to jumping back to Sam's incredible point about the tooling companies need to be the ones who are making things accessible, making it not possible for you to make an inaccessible pizza website. That's where HubSpot can kind of step in and say, yeah, we agree and this is why we're doing what we're doing. Before we jumped on Tanya, you said that you're. You cry easily. I cried the other day when I saw a Slack conversation. Somebody's pointing out some inaccessible things to the HubSpot forms specific to field groups. And John, you responded and said we're addressing it. We actually have a totally new form experience that you can even preview with that preview version. But you know, you can't force it to just be rolled out. It's coming. That is such a pain point for the tooling platform that you're fixing. That's right there. And when I say I almost cried at that, it's because that is the biggest thing that's going to prevent a barrier for someone interacting with your company. Is this form engagement, Reading content on a page? Yes, that's important. But if I can't actually purchase, if I can't actually speak to you and engage with you, the form is so important to address. So that's why I got a little.

Emotional on that one.

The impact of that is so important and so wide reaching. I don't think people often realize just how wide reaching it is. Speaking from my own sort of personal lived experience, the incredible upswing in efficiency and ability for me to do my job that came when the HubSpot meeting system made its book a meeting date controls a little bit more accessible was enormous because Whether I use HubSpot or not, you need to book meetings with folks and if they're using HubSpot, that is the tool that you now need to use or you need to go through all kinds of workarounds and maybe it doesn't happen. And so I think there's also this idea that oh, when HubSpot makes a change, it's only going to impact our users or some small subset. But it has, it has tremendous, almost more than exponential knock on impacts throughout everything.

Yeah, I want to chime on that a bit because this also ties into what John mentioned about the balance of responsibility and kind of some trade offs too. So for example, let me explain first what the forms thing that we're talking about is right now. So our forms team is working on updates to make our forms more accessible. And what we have right now is if you use the iframe version of the, of the forms, that version will be vastly improved compared to the version that directly renders HTML into the webpage. And the reason is because anything we render into a page, a developer can target with CSS, target with JavaScript. And so if we change any of that HTML or we change how functionality works, we could break thousands of websites. So for Us, it's a huge burden of, we don't want to break things that are even at least partially working in the sense that like there's also some people I know in the community who have, for example, made some of their HubSpot forms that are embedded that way more accessible themselves. And so if we roll out this change, ironically we make the forms then inaccessible. So it's like this catch 22 of like darn. But the way that we're also thinking about this, so the reason why the iframe approach and also we have these things called form share pages. So what that is is it's basically just a direct link to fill out the form. The developers do not have the ability to modify that page. But here's why this matters. So the iframe and that page, we can completely control all of the code that's affecting that and we can continuously iterate quickly to improve accessibility. The other part where it's directly embedded in the page, this is where developers are going to care a lot, is the fact that like, obviously you want to be able to style up that form, make it look how you want, make it do special things. So what we're able to do by doing this kind of like hybrid approach is that the iframe method, we can fix problems fast and test things in real world scenarios, whereas if we change the embed codes, it breaks things. So this gets into, we can then release a new version of the embed code eventually that does render the HTML, does change how the JavaScript, et cetera works, but doesn't interfere with existing forms. So the responsibility for a platform is really hard for us because we have to think about, okay, for one customer, yes, on an individual level we can be like, yes, for sure this change is going to solve all of their problems. But then if we look at the thousands of other websites, we can't confidently know that we're going to make the right decision for every individual site. So if they, we have to think about how can we do this in a way that will scale and in a way that is going to have the best impact.

Yeah, yeah, it's a tough subject. Sometimes I feel like, you know, they're using more of a rip the band aid off type approach because have you ever heard those stories about at NASA in the basement somewhere there is a computer from 1973 that they can't get rid of because it is running this one set of code. You know, like sometimes I feel like we just need to torch it and start over. But I, I am I don't run HubSpot by any means. And that's my, my approach is probably not the best.

I wonder and I'm going to get into the, the weeds here and I, I apologize if it's, if I'm. If I'm getting too deep in and maybe being too controversial. But there is an interesting thing that I've noticed a lot of companies beginning to do where when you have an embed, they will link directly to the same thing that is on their website in a way that they control. So the example of that, for example, if you look at a YouTube embed, you can watch it right in the embed or you can Click watch on YouTube.com and if something strange has been done to the embed that's making it not work for you, you can now go to the website that is, that is fully controlled by that company. I wonder if there's something to a like fill out this form on HubSpot that would like take you out of the embed and take you to an experience that's fully controlled by HubSpot for accessibility reasons that could then be changed and modified a little bit quicker. That in some ways feels like creating a separate sort of accessibility only experience that I am hesitant about. But it's something that I am seeing happening around the web and I wonder how folks feel about it.

That's an awesome question. I kind of want to challenge John here a little bit because what I think knowing from my experience in the, in the agency world and everything is businesses tend to be a little bit leery about like if you have an embed code, like having that branding of another business effectively in there in their site. And so the challenge is if we were to say roll that out with every type of embed that we have, how many agencies are going to go, I'm just going to hide that or I'm going to disable that feature. And it's yeah, you can give them the option.

I mean if there is a toggle on the form that says here's the embed code. Check this on if you want to remove the direct link to a HubSpot hosted form. But I think that the reason that Sam, you say this might be controversial. There are concepts around delivering different content for different people, making them raise their hand and say I have a problem and I need to go somewhere else. That's not inclusive design. Ideally everybody gets to experience in the same place in the same way. And your suggestion is a great solution, Sam, because it is sending them to a Place that HubSpot knows is without a doubt accessible. As far as like people not wanting you to leave the, you know, their domain environment, like that's opting for something pretty selfish and they need to be aware as soon as they check on that I am not concerned about the accessibility. Do not let them leave the site. But we did this recently for Typeform. There was a Typeform embed that I had on a client's website that wasn't rendering properly in old versions of Internet Explorer. And because of the nature of their specific audience that was often using Internet Explorer, we had to put a little link saying this is not rendering properly. Click here to fill out Teach you directly to Typeform. Solved. So I do think it's a really, really great suggestion. I just don't know if it's othering people or making them feel like you're making me leave. Like, why do I have to do this differently?

That's exactly where, where I'm coming from. It's, it's a great suggestion that, that I want to discuss, I guess is where I'm at.

I feel honestly that it takes away a little bit of the ownership, like, you know, like, it's like an easy out for, you know, whoever owns that website. It also kind of reminds me somewhat of how like, you know, what amp's all about. Basically, like, you know, you, you go to a site, it has all these ads on it and it's terrible. So they made an AMP version of it, you know, and it allows basically instead of fixing your site to not have all the crap on it, you know, you'll send it somewhere else. Basically. That's my concern. I totally appreciate the answer as like a kind of like a backdoor workaround, but I feel like too many people take advantage of it and would be lazy about actually dealing with their own site.

I mean, I think what we're talking about is the tension amongst people with disabilities in our community. And that I feel myself, which is that on one hand I want everything done right, done correctly, done properly. And on the other hand there's a form that I have to fill out tomorrow. So there is that tension, right between wanting it done now and wanting it done well sometimes.

Yeah. I was just going to say something similar to that, which is basically the idea is great in the sense that it provides an avenue right now that is not there and we can continue down the path of creating an accessible forms all the way across the board. But for the moment it could help folks who are trying to access that form. I Wrote it down as a note just to bring up somewhere. I don't know if the forms seem to have thought about that or anything. So I jotted it down. I was like, oh, that sounds great.

It's brilliant. It really is brilliant.

HubSpot system. One podcast at a time, right?

Right.

I'm curious though, you know, John, going back to, you know, you've, you've identified the issues with forms and you fixed it for the embed version or the standalone page. But we can't roll it out for the, the forms module inside of all existing sites. But new portals that get set up today, new portals that are coming down the line, will they have the fully accessible version of the module or. No, we really can't roll out the accessible module. It will always kind of will be stuck in this place.

So I can't go too deep into specifics, but what I can say is that eventually, eventually the goal is that the old embeds will not be something that people are using period. Except for pre existing websites that already have it. Because we don't want to just suddenly like strip away your prospect lead generation. But like for example, the default embed code that you generate would be the new embed code that we would be using and so you would not have those older issues.

Yeah. The example of something similar is going on with the forms presently and it actually just released today I believe is that follow up emails will no longer be done by, you know, when you go to form, you can do a follow up email. They're getting rid of that. We, they, we, we're getting rid of that and, and changing it to a simple workflow that is going to be specific. Like right now, if you have a site you are grandfathered into the old way, the only thing you can do with that follow up email right now is delete it. You can't change it. But I have a feeling I can see this approach being done with other features within the forms.

I just think it's really interesting to go back to something we were talking about a little while ago is that this is the same tension that we have when we talk about security. Right. It's just fascinating to me kind of the similarities that there are here. Right. There's a thing that's maybe less secure but you can't get rid of it because people are using it, but you don't want new people to use it and you wish they wouldn't keep using it. It's just really kind of interesting.

Indeed. It kind of like shows the, or showcases the fragility of the system. Right. Moving along. Wow. You know, I had all these questions put together because I'm always worried that we're not going to be able to talk. And we've been going for a while on some amazing stuff. I do want to get into what your company actually does, Sam. Hopefully you guys are cool with transitioning over to more of the usability accessibility testing. So, Sam, I'll put you on the spot right now and you can talk for however long you want.

Well, I mean, don't give me that kind of invitation. We could be here for a while, but no, I will keep it brief and punchy and interesting. So at Fable, what we're really focused on is getting the voices of people with disabilities involved in the product development, the product design, the product release, kind of every aspect and cycle of the product development process. Because in order to do accessibility right, you need to build accessible foundations. And that means getting the voices of people with disabilities involved in prototyping, in research, in ideation, and then you need to make sure that you're taking those accessible ideas and building them in an accessible way. And that means getting folks involved in the alpha testing, in the beta testing, in kind of the development process. And then you need to maintain, and you need to make sure that when you're releasing upgrades and when you're releasing new features that you're not breaking accessibility in some way. And the best way to make that accessibility happen is, is to get those voices of people who use assistive technology involved in what you're doing and to hear and to understand the experiences that people are actually having. Because automated testing is great and it is important, but what automated testing really does is it gives you a list of, like, These are the 74 errors that exist in the code that are accessibility errors. But it doesn't give you any insight into what is the impact of these things on the experience that a person with a disability or who's using an assistive technology is actually having on the website. And of course, a little earlier, we talked about kind of widening accessibility to be about efficiency and equality. And it is perfectly possible to make a product that is fully and completely compliant with all of the guidelines, but that is still an inefficient, difficult, and ultimately inaccessible experience. I know, sort of maybe you've seen there's that Reddit meme about, like the worst volume control, where there's a volume slider and you press the button, and every time you press the button, it sets the slider to a random volume which is, you know, you could build an experience that passes all automated tests and that passes all of the kind of, kind of guidelines and is therefore fully accessible. But it's sure not a great experience. And I mean, I want to say the way you'd find that out is by user testing. I mean, hopefully we all know that that's not a great experience, but it's an example of how it's possible to create experiences that are frankly impossible to viably use that pass all the automated tests and how.

So.

What size companies are you working with? I'm thinking about the mom and pop shop down the street that, you know, bought their theme off of WordPress, whatever it is, and it's totally inaccessible.

So we work with, we are, we really focus on, on, on B2B, on kind of the, the, the larger companies on the platforms. So you know, on, on for example, the, the, the Shopify and you know, those, those kind of bigger companies. We are also kind of mission driven and impact driven. And so one of the first things of course that we do is that all of the people that test our products are people with disabilities who use assistive technology to test products. And so it's kind of, there's an employment side. We make sure that all of our community is compensated a fair wage for the skill work that they do. And then we also, as we do this testing and as we help companies move towards more accessible, you know, websites, we want to make sure that we're having that exponential impact in magnitude that, you know, when a company like a Slack or becomes more accessible, the impact that that is happening really ripples out. And so we kind of don't work with the smaller mom and pop shops.

Right.

We're focused on the tools, we're focused on the big companies. We're focused on getting them to a place where accessible experiences on the Internet become a default.

And how long have you been doing this? When did you guys start?

We started a while back. I was actually one of the first employees of the company. We've been doing this for coming up on four years now.

Nice. What's the question?

Yeah, if I could jump in. Just because I think it's important for people to recognize when it's appropriate to bring in user testing. You don't want to set up the, you know, have, have an environment where maybe things are completely inaccessible and you, you haven't done any of the automated testing you haven't done and you bring somebody in and I don't want to say waste their time, but you're better off doing some level of attempting to remediate things before engaging with a fable. Sam, is that true or do you feel like there's also early stage involvement that fable should be provided?

So the early stage involvement that fable should be providing is really in the research and in the design and in the ideation and in the prototyping. Right. Because if you work with folks with disabilities to learn what works well for us and what doesn't, you can make sure that your designs are accessible and that the early building that you're doing is fully accessible. But you're right when it comes to remediation. If you sort of sit me down in front of a product where all of the buttons, links and conform controls are completely unlabeled, I can't give you any useful feedback because I don't even know what the intent of the experience is. And so you need to start kind of with some automated testing. And there's this idea that low hanging fruit is low impact and it's not true. Like putting in alt text and button labels and getting everything labeled is an incredible first step that is very high impact and that is a great place to start if you're remediating something that exists.

And just out of curiosity while we're here, and I know we brought this up in our first podcast, but I think it's important to kind of discuss your options for those automated tools. Can you guys list out or any recommendations for people? As I said last time the podcast, there are a lot of people out there like me who honestly just don't know and get overwhelmed with all the information out there. I don't know where to start. And yeah, if anyone wants to talk, go please.

I'm going to pass this to Tanya because you got your T shirt from the Axe DevTools beta, so why don't we maybe start there?

Yeah, I was just going to say I like it. Two of us here are wearing DQ T shirts. I think that's kind of a first option that I think is common in the development community. There's certainly a lot of tools out there. I've worked with many different automated testing tools. Obviously Wave is a, is one that is also very common to use. And then I guess if I could point out another one is Google Lighthouse. They might not be as, I feel like as comprehensive of a tool, but it's definitely like a good, I think it's a good like automated test to kind of see like an overview of things. Those are the couple I'd point out.

I think there's also a, A.

An.

Element of the best tool is the tool that your team will use because, you know, like unit testing for accessibility and automated retesting and testing your deploys is a thing that you can do and that you should do because catching some of these simple regressions is so easy and it's so easy to have a thing that sort of says, well, we're not going to, you know, ship to release until our sort of bare minimum of automated accessibility tests pass. And so whatever tool works best in your, in your own pipelines and in your own techniques and will do that for you, it is a great tool, you know.

Yeah, that's a good point. I think. Browser, you know, when you mentioned that, Dennis, I immediately thought of a browser automated testing tool that I use personally kind of on my day to day. But really there's a lot of tools out there that could be integrated into your development workflow that are not, you know, necessarily those couple tools that I mentioned. So yeah, to the Sam's point, like, whatever works for you to find those accessibility issues and you know, early on, as early as possible, it is the best tool.

So, yeah, speaking about the early on part, bud, I feel like we're kind of, you know, jumping over some important steps within the process of actually building the site, which is the design process, the wireframing, all of that. Are there automated tools that can help you out with that process or is that just more of a. You got to think it through.

There's a bit of it that involves thinking it through. There is a lot of it that really does get involved getting the experiences of real users. But there are great things like stark and like, there are plugins for a lot of design systems that take accessibility into account. And there's two important things that you need to be thinking about in design. The most important really is how are you communicating accessibility information in your design system? Because so often people have a design system that is just entirely visual and so there is nowhere for them to put, oh, well, this is what this button should be labeled. This is how a screen reader should read out the states of this form control. You know, this is what the alt text for this image should actually be. And so that leads to this feeling that like, oh, I'm going to make a design and it's the developer's responsibility to make my design in an accessible way, even though they may not be entirely familiar with even maybe what the intent of some of the imagery in the design necessarily is. And so the important thing to think about is making sure that your design system allows you not only to check for accessibility issues like color contrast, but, but allows you to communicate about accessibility. And that also kind of leads into the importance of user testing. Because if you're doing all of this research with people with disabilities and your design tool doesn't support kind of communicating the results of that, you're going to have trouble. And of course, lastly, this gets into the importance of a good design system, right? Because if you create a design system that is accessible, you now get components that are, that are reusable and you now get a design language that has accessibility built in as opposed to having to do it for every single new sort of button that you want to create.

On that. Is there, is there? I'm just curious. Once you make something, let's say I have a component and I have made it 100% accessible. I'm not even sure if that's actually the thing. Can A, can something be a hundred percent accessible? And B, is it a set it and forget it type of situation? Or is this something I need to, on a periodic basis review?

So accessibility is always a moving target, of course, because there are browser upgrades, there are assistive technology upgrades, there are operating system upgrades, there are new paradigms. For example, something that worked well with a keyboard. When touchscreens came out, people found, hey, this isn't a great design for a touchscreen from just sort of a user experience landmark, nevermind an accessibility landmark. So it is a moving target. It is something that needs to be rethought about. And that's why I talk so much about accessibility as a process and as something that's ongoing. Because some organizations fall into this trap of thinking, okay, accessibility is something we're going to do every five years and we're going to spend three months doing accessibility and then it's done. Accessibility is done. We've reached the end of the Internet. We don't have to think about it anymore. Right. And that's just not the case. It's just not workable. I'm sure some of the other folks here can perhaps speak to that a little bit more.

I love how you explain that. One thing I wanted to kind of say is the question itself is sort of flawed in a way. Is there such a thing as a 100% accessible website? Kind of implies that you're done with the website. And like at least at HubSpot, we, we, we're always talking about how like your, your website is never truly done. You should be continually adding content that, that Makes it more useful for. For your. Your customers and visitors. You should be blogging and doing things like that. And so as a result of doing all of those different things, you should be continually making sure you're following your accessibility practices and making sure. Testing your site, testing your blog posts, testing everything. Making sure that you're. You're keeping yourself accessible. Um, yeah.

Yeah. So, John, first of all, I just want to say real quickly that what I took away from that was the question is flawed. That was my question, and that means I will be editing out everything you've said. So you are in the penalty box. Sam, when people come to you, are they. What would you say?

They're more.

You're pulling teeth type of situation where like, okay, we have to deal with it now, or do you think people are more excited and are thinking more holistically now than they used to?

I think there's a bit of both. But what we are seeing more and more is folks come into fable because they understand that their existing accessibility processes or techniques or tools or whatever they're doing is not working. There are a lot of companies who know that this is something they need to do and understand that this is something that they need to do. And either they're trying to do it and it's. It's just not working in the way that they had hoped, or they are so overwhelmed that they just like, it's very easy to sort of stare at accessibility and be like, I don't know where to start. This looks too big to me. And often the thing that you are afraid of is the thing that you won't do. Right. And so we actually have our, you know, we have our fable Upscale, which. Which focuses on accessibility training, and again, accessibility training that centers the voices of people with disabilities in the training because a lot of companies really want help breaking this down so that it's not overwhelming anymore.

Indeed. Can you speak or can anyone speak to just the international flavor of accessibility? I mean, is it just universal or are there things you need to think about when you're just thinking from different regions?

I guess I can chime a little bit, but Sam may have better context and better info than me. I know that something that browsers try to do for you is they will, for example, like ARIA labels, they will try to translate them. I. Because machine translation is not always the best. I'm personally a little bit leery about how good the translations might always be, but it's at least better than doing nothing is. Yeah, yeah. I'm just.

I'm actually curious like, so you know, we have our. At HubSpot, you know, you can have a, a page in multiple languages. So like for the alt text, for example, for any of those images, I guess you need to go through and just update per. Right. Is there, is it, is it obvious that you need to do that or is it just. I haven't done this in a long time so you know, please speak and save me again.

I guess on the localization front, I think that it's similar to like, I would say like general like accessibility in that people don't always think about it. You know, you're an English speaking person and so your content's in English and even though you might have consumers of that that are speak Spanish or French, you don't. Because you personally don't, you know, speak French or Spanish, you don't think to present your content in different languages. So I feel like it's something that gets left behind a lot of the times when people make content for their website.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing. I just think about like, just cultural context of like, you know, how you are, you know, something that we in the United States might think of in one way. If you did the exact same thing in Japan, you know, they'll, they'll understand it totally differently. I'm just something I'm thinking about. So it's in my mind.

I mean there's also cultural differences around, around symbols and around symbology. Right. Like pointing. That means one thing to us. Right. This is sort of the classic example of the Disney point where they teach all Disney employees in a way to sort of point to things that is not culturally offensive to anyone. And so I think there's a lot of that that is sort of cultural inclusion and diversity that's a little bit outside of accessibility because sort of from a technical role, right. When you've made something that's usable, it's largely going to be usable for anyone using that assistive technology. The big differences of course are different countries may have different levels of access to technology. Right. It's one of the reasons that there's such a focus on sort of gracefully degrading because you know, when a certain feature is not available, making sure that things will still work because not everyone across the world has technology access. And in some occasions there is say a piece of locally developed assistive technology that works better. For example, you know, a voice recognition technology that works particularly for one language that is then popular in countries that speak that language. But for the most part accessibility technology is pretty global.

That's what I kind of figured. I know. I apologize you guys, for a long time. So I promise I'll wrap this up very quickly. Well, not very quickly, somewhat quickly. I'm curious to know how prepared are we? I mean, the population overall is aging and accessibility is going to be more and more important, I believe. And I think that the pandemic kind of helped. As John said, it was a microwave for some of this stuff. But are we prepared for the aging population, generally speaking? And because no one is answering my question, I'll say, first of all, it's a brilliant question. And then I will default. I'm gonna have Tanya, Tanya, tell. Tell me everything.

I just. I just think the question's really spicy in that, like, are we prepared? I don't think I. This is my. My personal opinion, you know, I think we're as prepared as we're going to be. Like, the aging population, to me, you know, is just going to end up being a louder voice to, you know, push for accessibility and improvements to be made if we have a larger population that is trending in that way. So I think when that happens there, it's definitely possible that the rest of the community takes that into account and kind of moves in a direction just like we have with like, you know, legal action being taken, kind of pushing a lot of companies to do things. I think the voice will be louder. So whether or not we're prepared for that, I think it's going to be what I can see that generally happens. I think it might be reactive when that voice gets louder. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, and I also accept that you call my question spicy. I'll take that over flawed any day of the week.

You know, I think a sign of optimism and something that excites me as someone who has grown up blind. I've been sort of in this space and watching it and involved in it for all of my life. And you see sometimes, as I've mentioned, history repeating itself, but sometimes you see changes and sort of. In 1993-1995, when the Internet was becoming a thing and started sort of, you know, taking over the world, we were not having conversations about accessibility. Like it just. Who was talking about accessibility in 1994? Right. Like it wasn't on the tech companies radars, but now as we are beginning to see things like AI and virtual reality and augmented reality and all of these new technologies and new ways of interacting, we are having the accessibility conversations. There are people who talking about these things and doing this research. And so I think that, for me, is a sign of optimism, because as we're rolling out these technologies right now, the people who are listening to this podcast have the opportunity to make sure that we are building accessible foundations for all of these new technologies to grow from and to build on. I hope that the conversations do result in that, and I hope that we do. And I think we are starting to build those accessible foundations now for the new technology in the future in a way that we didn't in 1994 and then had to sort of retrofit everything to add accessibility, like in the late 90s.

Yeah, I think that kind of puts a bow on it right there, folks. I mean, I think we could probably end with that. Sam, you're welcome to come visit anytime you want. And as I said, I want to do this as a yearly thing at least, and I think we'll be talking more about VR and all the other avenues that technology is going in the future. This is something new I've not done. I want to give you guys a little opportunity just to, like, how can we find you, Sam? Where can we follow you? Where can we find out more about you so people know?

Hey, absolutely. I mean, the best thing that you can do if this conversation interests you and you would like to keep having it and you would like to learn more, is visit us over@makeitfable.com, follow our LinkedIn, follow our Twitter. There's some really exciting events coming up and some real exciting articles and resources and learning there that you can engage with and participate in and have a look at. And what I do here at Fable is all about that conversation. So absolutely follow us and stay in touch. I, I would love to, you know, this podcast has been the start of an amazing conversation. Love to, you know, keep up with anyone who's interested.

Indeed.

See? See, Dennis? I told you he'd be great.

I know, John. I, I, I want, I wanted to give you all kinds of credit, Sam. I, I think we'll probably in conversation shortly because I really want to talk about the community manager part of it and your history and, like, that's what I do and make sure that I'm doing my part here.

Left.

John. Sorry. John, this is, this is the part of Zoom that I don't like. It's very, like, it's hard to interrupt properly. You know, I can insert things. Aaron. John Tassala, how can we follow you? Where can we find you?

Well, I'm not all that interesting. I don't know that I'm worth a follow. You can find me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best place. You know, I have Facebook and a Twitter, but it's not all that helpful. LinkedIn is probably where I'm most active. More importantly, though, I think it's important to follow the organizations involved in Inclusion Hub or Inclusion Hub itself. So Please look into inclusionhub.com find inclusion hub. There's a Facebook group that just started growing there. Follow on social and you can actually go to inclusionhub.com events and subscribe to be notified of all of these different digital inclusion events, from diversity equity inclusion to digital accessibility workshops.

Amazing.

You know, seminars. Yeah. So really great stuff. All the stuff that Fable has going on is in that feed. I also want to point out that Fable is one of the founding partners of Inclusion Hub. Came on within the last two months here. So really grateful for that partnership. Really grateful for, you know, them being involved. Go and check out Fable. Upskill. Upskill, like we're looking for resources to get better at what we do. Upscale is one of these great things that they also just rolled out that sends you in the right direction.

Amazing.

Another. Another one of our founding. Another one of our founding partners is Be My Eyes. Be My Eyes. John, when you mentioned all the different things you're doing internally, Be My Eyes, if you're not familiar with it, is this massive network. It's an app. It's a. It's basically FaceTime that connects volunteers who are sighted to help other people navigating the world who maybe can't see and need help getting around. It's free. It's this beautiful, brilliant platform. But on the corporate side, they do corporate volunteering events. Well, they'll come in and they'll speak to the HubSpot community, show you how to get involved. They do like a massive live event participation where I think it was the One World Together concert. When that was going on, Be My Eyes was like involved with describing everything that was happening on stage for all of these different musicians. So another great founding partner and then the other last founding partner is Salesforce. Salesforce also is supporting our Inclusion Hub efforts. They've got some really, really great stuff going on. They're partnering right now with a podcast called access chat, AXS chat, which has been around for like almost 10 years now. And they just get some incredible guests over there. So all founding partners that I'm grateful to be working with as far as like, pushing the Inclusion Hub efforts forward.

Unfortunately, John, now that you've mentioned Salesforce, I Think we will probably have to part ways and so not only are.

You going to cut that out, you're.

Just going to cut everything that I said. Exactly. Tanya, Tanya, tell me everything. How can we follow you? What should we do?

You really, you really can't. I'm like off the grid, I think. I only have LinkedIn. I don't have any other social media, so it's going to be either LinkedIn or you can try to come find me at my, my underground bunker. But yeah, so LinkedIn's probably the best avenue.

Cool. And John, JMac, as we're calling you, I know you've been doing quite a bit on LinkedIn, so if you want to plug that or tell me where we can find you.

Yeah, I would say first, definitely connecting with me on LinkedIn. Happy to, happy to talk to you. Happy to keep sharing. I've been sharing a lot of developer tips and accessibility tips are included in that as well as I'm in our developer Slack, so feel free to hit me up there. And I'm also in our community forums. I'm often there whenever we have AMA events around the cms.

Indeed. Yeah. And I will add links to all this into the show. Notes YouTube. Tell me just real quickly. I know it's beyond time now, but how accessible is it? So if I put things in the show, there's two different features I want to talk about real quickly and I apologize, I apologize, I'll let you guys go. But one, if you're watching a YouTube video, you'll see a little pop up at the top of it that says like, you know, you should check out this, you know, other video that we're. Is that, can that be seen or can that be like, is that translated in any other way?

First of all, yes, but the pro. The trouble with it is those pop ups do go away. And so if you are a person, you know, using eye tracking or a head mouse or a switch system, you may not get there before the little pop up goes away. And so you don't get a chance.

To click on it.

And of course similar with the screen reader. Right. I hear the thing and now I got. Okay, time to race to the top of the website, see if I can get it before. But I mean, you know, that's why the YouTube, the video description is also great. So if things were in both places, you know, that's customizability and user choice I think is kind of one of the key factors in accessibility. So there you go, real world example.

Perfect.

Thank you so much. All right, guys, thank you again. I'll be releasing this soon, so, you know, check us out for the next episode. All kinds of things I should say at the end of the show, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Have a great day, guys.