In anticipation of the 11th Annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), we interview Beth Somerfield and Andrew Skinner of Anthro-Tech about increasing digital engagement through accessibility and the benefits of human-centered design.

Accessibility 101:
Beth Somerfield & Andrew Skinner of Anthro-Tech

Introduction

[Juan] Welcome to accessibility one-on-one. Today, I would like to introduce you to both Beth Somerfield and Andrew Skinner from Antro-Tech. They will be presenting at our Global Accessibility Awareness Day event on May 19th, from 10am to 2pm Eastern Standard Time. Their topic is the presentation of how accessibility and usability work together to make things better. Andrew and Beth, welcome. So, just to get started, can you tell us a little bit more about you? 

[Beth] Sure, but we should have coordinated to it first. [laughs] My name is Beth Somerfield and I am an accessibility specialist at Anthro-Tech. While my focus is on accessibility. I look at it with the whole picture of the lifecycle of development, whether it’s an application or a website or a gadget. We look at the whole picture of development and insert accessibility in throughout the process and do it from a user centred approach. 

[Juan] Thank you so much. Andrew? 

[Andrew] Hello, my name is Andrew Skinner and I’m also an accessibility specialist with Anthro-Tech. Similarly, I sort of come from a large user experience background. So, doing a lot of things around user research, and prior to that, I was working a lot in training development and instructional design. So, I’ve always been sort of in this line of trying to help people be successful at doing things either from like a training perspective, or from like just making the thing that they’re trying to use easier and like sort of all along that trip, I’ve worked on accessibility in sort of a lot of different domains. So, I’ve kind of done a little bit of like,  document accessibility, a little bit of like making, like technical training, accessible. And then like more recently, more of the UX and accessibility and like the digital space, accessible. So, it’s kind of just one of those things like trying to bring people into the process that are actually using it and making sure that it’s accessible and you know usable by people, regardless of what their situation is it’s always been a great interest and passion of mine. 

About Anthro-Tech

[Juan] So then, actually, you guys said something I really like, how to introduce accessibility early on within Development Lifecycle across multiple disciplines. That’s, that’s great, I love hearing that. Maybe Beth, can you tell us little bit more about your organization and what you do? 

[Beth] Yeah, so Anthro-Tech is this user centred design firm and we focus primarily on government agencies and non-profits and businesses that have social impact mission. So, we work really closely with usually larger organizations in bringing user centred design into the process of how they look at serving their whether its customers or, or residents, if it’s a government agency. And out of that user centred design focus, we also realized that couldn’t be separated from accessibility. So, we were bringing together accessibility and human centred design and often managing the process like organizational change management to just really focus on public, non-profit and social impact clients on making looking at their  whole lifecycle and making changes with their customers in mind. 

[Juan] Thank you Beth. Andrew, would you like to add anything to it? 

[Andrew] It really is about that holistic experience, right, and bringing people along for the process that like in traditional development of a lot of products and services, it’s always been very closed off from the user. It’s like, oh, we have subject matter experts. They know what people, are they, often think that they know what people need to be successful in using a product, but they focus more on the technical capability requirements, and then they release it, and then people struggle with it and then they fix it afterwards. But we really tried to promote having people along the whole way to be providing feedback during the design process during the development process during testing and making sure that we’re including people that are actually going to be the ones using the product because they should have a part in in the design and development making sure it’s meeting their needs and adjusting along the way. 

[Beth] Andrew reminded that a big part of that is training and sharing knowledge so that our customers walk with the toolbox of human centred design and can continue doing it even after we’ve finished our part of a project. 

[Juan] Yeah, I believe training is super important. One of our mantras in here is to train and properly educate our clients because once they are educated, they can make informed decisions. That’s great. Okay, so maybe a question for the both of you. What are some of the challenges you face when starting to work in a project and the team hasn’t had much experience working with us, user centred design? 

[Andrew] I think the thing that I’ve seen most commonly, and a lot of the projects that I’ve worked on historically is sort of breaking out of the old habit of especially working in a large enterprise that that has engineering practices that they’ve been doing for decades, decades long of always having the same type of way that they design and develop things. then, you know, human centred design and UX and accessibility focus is really becoming something that is becoming a lot more common that people re starting to see a lot more, it’s a little bit I mean, compared to like, engineering that happened, you know, 30, 40 years ago, especially in like high tech like in other industries, it’s like moving that focus away from the  behind closed doors, you know, a high level of VP’s talking to each other engineers talking to each other, and, you know, working on it that way, vs like, including the actual people along the way and not waiting until it’s until it’s ready. I think that’s probably another big thing I see a lot of is oh, we don’t want to show it to people, we don’t even want to have people like,  you know, do like a feedback  session, because that’s not ready yet Right? But a big thing with human centred design is throughout that iterative and incremental approach of  having that persistent feedback throughout the process and adjust as you’re going to make sure that you are staying in line with the actual needs of who’s going to use it And I think there’s a lot of hesitation that people don’t like to show unfinished things ahead of time, so that’s one of the things it’s really challenging for a lot of people that have never done that as a regular basis for their product development before.  

[Beth] Yeah, I could add to that, that, that when we’re working with governments, and sometimes with non-profit it, there’s a hesitancy, and we’re introducing new concepts that they have a requirement to make something accessible, but they don’t understand what that means. Or they know that they’re expected to try  a different kind of design but they’ve never tried any sort of user centred or human centred approach. And so, we’re introducing new ideas to agencies that have a lot of built-in processes And so we have to step back and say this is about people. And it’s about people being able to learn things that are going to make their processes easier. And about getting that buy in and getting people excited and leaving them with something that makes their work lives easier. And more effective. And gets, gives them energy again until doing work. So, it’s really about connecting with people when we’re talking about projects and organizations. 

User-First Focus

[Juan] I think that’s such a great work connecting with people, especially more you’re working with organizations. My experience has taught me that a lot of times people who are actually managing a specific project, they could be very detached of the regular users. So, what are some techniques that you’re actually tried to use with our organization to say, this is why we need to be  focused into the user first? And then how can you help them understand why is a specific process just going to regular road? 

[Beth] Yeah, there’s a bunch of different things that we find with that. One is really centering our usability studies and bringing some of our especially the most reticent participants of a team into to want to be involved in what the questions are and what the research is. And then watching people try to use their products and realizing what the challenges and the and the strengths are of the work that they’ve done that really gets a lot of different people, whether it’s management  or developers sort of realizing the value of really bringing their users into the conversation. Another part is we’ve had a lot more work with change management on our team. And looking at that big picture of sort of who are all of the actors in the in a change process? And what is it they particularly need to understand in order to connect personally with what change looks like and how that benefits them and what change looks like for them in their job and also what change look like for the people that they’re working with and the people that they’re serving? If it’s a if it’s a government agency.  

[Juan] It’s interesting, whenever you’re working with organizations to they also ask you out for a specific matrix and knowing that human centered design could be something that it could be can be generalized, and sometimes it will be difficult to try  to understand specific matrix is it something you can bring to the table for them to help them understand this is this is ah, some specific things that you’re going to be able to gain right off the bat when we start utilizing this specific process? 

[Beth] Yeah, so, chime in if you want to Andrew, but one thing I think of, is that because we’re doing research, and we’re bringing research in through every phase of the process, we’re doing research before something is built to find out what people need, we’re bringing research and to see how a product needs to change, we’re able to bring data to the table. And, and help decision makers make decisions based on, you know, discoveries and  data that we found, rather than assumptions of the people that are building or the people that are internally thinking about what the products need. So, it’s a very powerful tool to change minds to use user centered design, because you’re bringing people into the process. But also, it’s there’s numbers that you can send up to leadership and be able to say,  no, we really do need to do accessibility, because this percentage of your customers said  that they need these things it’s that kind of being able to bring the numbers that really bring leadership on board, especially.  

[Andrew] So, I think that, yeah, like exactly as Beth was saying, bringing the data informed piece to it  but not only bringing that data but also helping the management understand what’s actually important to measure as part of developing those metrics and like because there,  a lot of the a lot of the higher level and management level people they want to have, they want to have a number for something they want to be have numbers they can point to in a dashboard and have measurements for things. But it’s not just about providing the numbers to them. But it’s like if the reason we’re providing this number and why it’s important is because you were looking to make a change, like for like an example is like if they were doing like a redesign. We could do like a baseline study of the old system and get sort of some metrics on like, what was like success rate, like how did what was like user satisfaction, like and then when we go into the redesign, we test again, doing iterative testing and testing the redesign And, then we’re able to do sort of a comparative study between the two of, Oh, like, was it actually valuable to do that redesign, we actually saw an increase in success rates, we saw a decrease in how long it took people to complete tasks. And,  you know, being able to see that we you know, like, the thing that we’ll always get is like, for redesign is, was it worth, was it worth the time and effort to do that redesign? Well, if you do that comparative benchmarking before, and then validate the changes afterwards. And with accessibility, we do this as well a lot of will do usability testing with people with disabilities. For you know, if we’re doing like an audit of a system, and we’re finding accessibility issues. And we have we send those over to get  corrected by the development team and get fixed in the system. We then bring people in who have disabilities and who use assistive technologies to see not only were those issues actually fixed, but as the as is that accessibility also usable for people in the in the way that they implemented those accessibility changes to the system as well. And so having those metrics along the way, it’s like, we have multiple ways that we can measure users that says how long people are taking, you know, like general satisfaction that people what’s their perception of the system. And then also even thinking of things like how what’s like the timeline of view making adjustments to the accessibility scope, we might come in with an audit and it’s like, oh, you had  x 100 amount of issues then you build a timeline for you know remediating issues and you’re, kind of you know, have that burn down rate of oh, we now only have 100 issues. Now, we only have fifty issues, and you have that incremental improvement over time, of your improving and your accessibility. And when we come back and do like, if we were to evaluate accessibility later, oh, last time we checked this, you had five hundred issues, and now you only have twenty issues and they might be more minor issues. And that’s a very, like, that’s a very strong, a strong thing to build to say that you’ve made that big of an improvement over the time. And you actually put that effort in to correct those issues. 

[Juan] I think that’s such a great work connecting with people, especially more you’re working with organizations. My experience has taught me that a lot of times people who are actually managing a specific project, they could be very detached of the regular users. So, what are some techniques that you’re actually tried to use with our organization to say, this is why we need to be  focused into the user first? And then how can you help them understand why is a specific process just going to regular road? 

[Beth] Yeah, there’s a bunch of different things that we find with that. One is really centering our usability studies and bringing some of our especially the most reticent participants of a team into to want to be involved in what the questions are and what the research is. And then watching people try to use their products and realizing what the challenges and the and the strengths are of the work that they’ve done that really gets a lot of different people, whether it’s management  or developers sort of realizing the value of really bringing their users into the conversation. Another part is we’ve had a lot more work with change management on our team. And looking at that big picture of sort of who are all of the actors in the in a change process? And what is it they particularly need to understand in order to connect personally with what change looks like and how that benefits them and what change looks like for them in their job and also what change look like for the people that they’re working with and the people that they’re serving? If it’s a if it’s a government agency.  

[Juan] It’s interesting, whenever you’re working with organizations to they also ask you out for a specific matrix and knowing that human centered design could be something that it could be can be generalized, and sometimes it will be difficult to try  to understand specific matrix is it something you can bring to the table for them to help them understand this is this is ah, some specific things that you’re going to be able to gain right off the bat when we start utilizing this specific process? 

[Beth] Yeah, so, chime in if you want to Andrew, but one thing I think of, is that because we’re doing research, and we’re bringing research in through every phase of the process, we’re doing research before something is built to find out what people need, we’re bringing research and to see how a product needs to change, we’re able to bring data to the table. And, and help decision makers make decisions based on, you know, discoveries and  data that we found, rather than assumptions of the people that are building or the people that are internally thinking about what the products need. So, it’s a very powerful tool to change minds to use user centered design, because you’re bringing people into the process. But also, it’s there’s numbers that you can send up to leadership and be able to say,  no, we really do need to do accessibility, because this percentage of your customers said  that they need these things it’s that kind of being able to bring the numbers that really bring leadership on board, especially.  

[Andrew] So, I think that, yeah, like exactly as Beth was saying, bringing the data informed piece to it  but not only bringing that data but also helping the management understand what’s actually important to measure as part of developing those metrics and like because there,  a lot of the a lot of the higher level and management level people they want to have, they want to have a number for something they want to be have numbers they can point to in a dashboard and have measurements for things. But it’s not just about providing the numbers to them. But it’s like if the reason we’re providing this number and why it’s important is because you were looking to make a change, like for like an example is like if they were doing like a redesign. We could do like a baseline study of the old system and get sort of some metrics on like, what was like success rate, like how did what was like user satisfaction, like and then when we go into the redesign, we test again, doing iterative testing and testing the redesign And, then we’re able to do sort of a comparative study between the two of, Oh, like, was it actually valuable to do that redesign, we actually saw an increase in success rates, we saw a decrease in how long it took people to complete tasks. And,  you know, being able to see that we you know, like, the thing that we’ll always get is like, for redesign is, was it worth, was it worth the time and effort to do that redesign? Well, if you do that comparative benchmarking before, and then validate the changes afterwards. And with accessibility, we do this as well a lot of will do usability testing with people with disabilities. For you know, if we’re doing like an audit of a system, and we’re finding accessibility issues. And we have we send those over to get  corrected by the development team and get fixed in the system. We then bring people in who have disabilities and who use assistive technologies to see not only were those issues actually fixed, but as the as is that accessibility also usable for people in the in the way that they implemented those accessibility changes to the system as well. And so having those metrics along the way, it’s like, we have multiple ways that we can measure users that says how long people are taking, you know, like general satisfaction that people what’s their perception of the system. And then also even thinking of things like how what’s like the timeline of view making adjustments to the accessibility scope, we might come in with an audit and it’s like, oh, you had  x 100 amount of issues then you build a timeline for you know remediating issues and you’re, kind of you know, have that burn down rate of oh, we now only have 100 issues. Now, we only have fifty issues, and you have that incremental improvement over time, of your improving and your accessibility. And when we come back and do like, if we were to evaluate accessibility later, oh, last time we checked this, you had five hundred issues, and now you only have twenty issues and they might be more minor issues. And that’s a very, like, that’s a very strong, a strong thing to build to say that you’ve made that big of an improvement over the time. And you actually put that effort in to correct those issues. 

[Juan] I think that’s such a great work connecting with people, especially more you’re working with organizations. My experience has taught me that a lot of times people who are actually managing a specific project, they could be very detached of the regular users. So, what are some techniques that you’re actually tried to use with our organization to say, this is why we need to be  focused into the user first? And then how can you help them understand why is a specific process just going to regular road? 

[Beth] Yeah, there’s a bunch of different things that we find with that. One is really centering our usability studies and bringing some of our especially the most reticent participants of a team into to want to be involved in what the questions are and what the research is. And then watching people try to use their products and realizing what the challenges and the and the strengths are of the work that they’ve done that really gets a lot of different people, whether it’s management  or developers sort of realizing the value of really bringing their users into the conversation. Another part is we’ve had a lot more work with change management on our team. And looking at that big picture of sort of who are all of the actors in the in a change process? And what is it they particularly need to understand in order to connect personally with what change looks like and how that benefits them and what change looks like for them in their job and also what change look like for the people that they’re working with and the people that they’re serving? If it’s a if it’s a government agency.  

[Juan] It’s interesting, whenever you’re working with organizations to they also ask you out for a specific matrix and knowing that human centered design could be something that it could be can be generalized, and sometimes it will be difficult to try  to understand specific matrix is it something you can bring to the table for them to help them understand this is this is ah, some specific things that you’re going to be able to gain right off the bat when we start utilizing this specific process? 

[Beth] Yeah, so, chime in if you want to Andrew, but one thing I think of, is that because we’re doing research, and we’re bringing research in through every phase of the process, we’re doing research before something is built to find out what people need, we’re bringing research and to see how a product needs to change, we’re able to bring data to the table. And, and help decision makers make decisions based on, you know, discoveries and  data that we found, rather than assumptions of the people that are building or the people that are internally thinking about what the products need. So, it’s a very powerful tool to change minds to use user centered design, because you’re bringing people into the process. But also, it’s there’s numbers that you can send up to leadership and be able to say,  no, we really do need to do accessibility, because this percentage of your customers said  that they need these things it’s that kind of being able to bring the numbers that really bring leadership on board, especially.  

[Andrew] So, I think that, yeah, like exactly as Beth was saying, bringing the data informed piece to it  but not only bringing that data but also helping the management understand what’s actually important to measure as part of developing those metrics and like because there,  a lot of the a lot of the higher level and management level people they want to have, they want to have a number for something they want to be have numbers they can point to in a dashboard and have measurements for things. But it’s not just about providing the numbers to them. But it’s like if the reason we’re providing this number and why it’s important is because you were looking to make a change, like for like an example is like if they were doing like a redesign. We could do like a baseline study of the old system and get sort of some metrics on like, what was like success rate, like how did what was like user satisfaction, like and then when we go into the redesign, we test again, doing iterative testing and testing the redesign And, then we’re able to do sort of a comparative study between the two of, Oh, like, was it actually valuable to do that redesign, we actually saw an increase in success rates, we saw a decrease in how long it took people to complete tasks. And,  you know, being able to see that we you know, like, the thing that we’ll always get is like, for redesign is, was it worth, was it worth the time and effort to do that redesign? Well, if you do that comparative benchmarking before, and then validate the changes afterwards. And with accessibility, we do this as well a lot of will do usability testing with people with disabilities. For you know, if we’re doing like an audit of a system, and we’re finding accessibility issues. And we have we send those over to get  corrected by the development team and get fixed in the system. We then bring people in who have disabilities and who use assistive technologies to see not only were those issues actually fixed, but as the as is that accessibility also usable for people in the in the way that they implemented those accessibility changes to the system as well. And so having those metrics along the way, it’s like, we have multiple ways that we can measure users that says how long people are taking, you know, like general satisfaction that people what’s their perception of the system. And then also even thinking of things like how what’s like the timeline of view making adjustments to the accessibility scope, we might come in with an audit and it’s like, oh, you had  x 100 amount of issues then you build a timeline for you know remediating issues and you’re, kind of you know, have that burn down rate of oh, we now only have 100 issues. Now, we only have fifty issues, and you have that incremental improvement over time, of your improving and your accessibility. And when we come back and do like, if we were to evaluate accessibility later, oh, last time we checked this, you had five hundred issues, and now you only have twenty issues and they might be more minor issues. And that’s a very, like, that’s a very strong, a strong thing to build to say that you’ve made that big of an improvement over the time. And you actually put that effort in to correct those issues. 

Useable AND Accessible

[Juan] That’s actually fascinating. Oftentimes I see how there is a difference between usability and accessibility. I mean both of them overlap but you can have something that’s accessible, but not usable. So, at that point, when, obviously with accessibility, and you’re going to be dealing with the WCAG success criteria, how do you guys separate the two activities, knowing that both of them are equally important, but one of them is more subjective in terms of best practices, as it relates to usability versus the actual black and white will be WCAG success criteria for accessibility? 

[Beth] We tend in our process to bring WCAG in as a tool to check accessibility on systems before we do a usability study, but also use those as guidance to help designers and developers understand what some of the issues or some of the techniques that they need to build a more accessible environment. So, it’s a really useful tool for like communicating to stakeholders, but also for doing that that pre-study, making sure that the system is accessible as it can be before we bring people with assistive technology into it so that they’re not stuck at the beginning of the study in some sort of loop or something that keeps them from being able to give good feedback. And then the study is that the lived experience part of it, right, where you get to see how long it takes someone to use something, because something can be compliant, but unpleasant, challenging, or confusing. And some of those criteria around  or some of the things around like, how confusing is the language? How, how, um how much does it align with the language that people are using to do the tasks they’re trying to do those things we want to bring into the study because WCAG can’t answer some of those questions that are more based on the particulars of the product or the particulars of people using them, it’s a partnership between compliance done and then getting the actual user experience to validate that it is usable. 

[Juan] So in that case, how do you get stakeholders in the team with different backgrounds to really understand why usability and accessibility are separate, but both of them are needed especially when it comes to accessibility. Oftentimes, what I see is that they think of accessibility later in the game, perhaps at a testing thing at the testing portion of it because of legislation. But obviously, since you’re doing the research early on how you can actually do that sell to say we need accessibility and this is why we also need to test with people with disabilities. 

[Beth] There’s a lot of different ways of doing that. And one is that we that we that we find champions and we support them, and we help them, umm what’s the word I’m looking for to amplify the work that they’re doing so that, you know, if there’s that that one passionate person in an organization that  that recognizes the importance of accessibility, we were often brought in by that person, right? But by supporting that person, we’re able to help them build the momentum that they need and give them the knowledge and the background to be able to amplify that message through their organization. So that’s a really powerful tool. Um, another is, again, to do that training and bring people in throughout the process. we just finished a series of training with one organization where it was really basics, accessibility training for the content folks that are going to be creating content for a website. And so, it was bringing people in really early in the process to understand why the process to understand why the things that they’re getting compliance complaints about all the way at the end of their process or something that if they create their original content inaccessible in the beginning they’re not going to be stuck with a whole bunch of remediation at the end. So, it’s finding those connections of helping people understand how their work is going to be more successful. So, get their own self interest in as well. So, it’s really tapping into what people are excited about, and really amplifying those people that are that are doing the hard work. 

User Personas

[Juan] Very interesting. I do have one more question. When you’re doing, and, again because I find it so fascinating when you’re working in terms of wireframes do you provide specific feedback towards accessibility, especially as you’re working with those user personas? And do you do you try to provide information in terms of like, oh, this wild premise here, there are some potential issues that you’re going to find for a specific type of user? And if so, do you break it down into multiple types of disabilities, or just look at it as a general type of issue? 

[Beth] I feel like I’ve been talking too much. Andrew, do you want to grab this one?  

[Andrew] Yeah, I think that one of the things that I like to promote and this is kind of building on what we were  talking about where one of the ways that we really help support teams is by building that knowledge within the team and particularly if we’re working with designers on another team is helping them develop doing things like accessibility annotations on design documents early on, and partnering with them to understand like even if they are not coming from a background where they have where they know every WCAG success criteria you know, and they don’t have that deep knowledge of accessibility is providing them with that knowledge of here’s some things you can start to think about. And really like setting the stage of, you’re not going to, even if you don’t go necessarily from going from zero compliance to full compliance like moving in the direction of improving Like, Oh, maybe you just make sure you check for like colour contrast on your on your lockups, and then oh, as you’re building their knowledge base, you can, you can start bringing in start adding more things that they should be considering as  part of the process of Oh, like you’re putting buttons on here, like you should like make a note  that oh that button has should have a certain descriptive label. And that should be consistent with another component in your design system. And I think that a lot of design teams that have designs to system design systems in particular are really well aware of like the value of things like reusable components and starting to build an accessibility within the design system itself. And not only having the components in there that are accessible, but also having guidance in their design system about this is why we have the accessibility guidance in here. This is how you would test this to make sure that this button is accessible Like if you were to run a screen reader it should read out the descriptive label. So, we definitely like trying to catch and build that skill set of like people that are developing the wireframes, people that are that are developing mock ups of including those pieces at that design stage before anything’s even built. And then when they’re able to hand it off to the developer, the developer has those requirements, right on the designs back to go, oh, yeah, this button, I need to make sure this button has a descriptive label associated, I need to make sure this picture has an old tag associated. And it’s really something that like regardless of the position that you’re in, and part of the team, everyone sort of has a  something they can do to support the whole overall accessibility process. You know, the designers can help by annotating wireframes developers can help by ensuring that they’re implementing and in their technical environment in a way that supports those different set of technologies, and that they’re adding those labels appropriately. And using, you know, proper markup and things like that. And having those developer requirements as just the standard and not waiting until afterwards. I find it’s not hard to convince developers do it earlier on because they are definitely many that’s I’ve worked with when we’re evaluating it afterwards. And there’s like, oh, we have to now go back and adjust all of this code that we already went through. And we already did testing, we already did design. And we now have to change it because we didn’t include those accessibility requirements, as we were developing, you know, building it into their process from the beginning, once you add that as a requirement, and it really is about making it a requirement in a lot of case it’s not that they don’t know from a technical perspective how to do it, it’s just they were not, that was not a requirement that was that when they were building that system. So  just making that like, this is the way that this is just the way we develop is we develop with accessible HTML semantics and things like that, you know, that they can get on board with that as long as it’s they’re doing it from the beginning? And are you know, you know, building that as part  of their general development culture. 

Conclusion

[Juan] Awesome. Now, I do have two more questions. Our first one is, for each one of you, what does accessibility mean to you? 

[Beth] Oh, that’s a big question. [laughs] And for me, I’ve really been looking at it in that that civil rights framework in in the last, of late in that, because we spend a lot of time in in sort of basic accessibility presentation saying why should you do this? Why should you be excited about this? Why should you be interested in this? How does it impact your bottom line? All of those why questions? And after having said that a bunch of times, in presentations, and then in, in working with clients, my inside says, because it’s the right thing to do. It’s, it’s a civil right, everyone should have access to, whether it’s a building or an app, or whatever, that so I think having those wide conversations is really valuable for, you know, bringing people on board and having really interesting and complex conversations about the challenges and the barriers. But at the root of it, my, I’m, I’m in that. because it because it’s what you do camp. 

[Juan] Andrew? 

[Andrew] Yeah, I feel like I have very much the same, the same feeling as Beth I think it’s I think is like the W3C, they have like a piece of like their definition about  equivalent user experience. talk a lot about like equitable and equivalent user experiences between different people. And one of the things we look at, especially when we start getting into things like inclusive  design is in so much historical development and product development is very focused on a very kind of specific generic kind of group of, you know, neutral, perfect users that don’t really represent most of humanity. There’s a lot of people that end up excluded from that sort of process of design and development and when you start looking at who, who is not being included in this process, and how are you making? How is this it’s an equivalent user experience as long as you know you don’t have a disability or you don’t have some other intersectional identity that is affecting how you how that product may or may not have been designed for your lived experience and what makes you a person compared to someone compared to other people what your experience is, like compared to other people, really just having that And you’ll hear people products need to be usable. And  at that global experience regardless at that global experience, regardless of what your specific situation might be, what the specific intersectional identities of what makes you who you are it should only be it’s only work for one very specific group, or one very specific kind  of profile of a person. It’s like, regardless of who you are, you should be able to use it just as easily as everybody else. And I think especially in in accessibility, that’s part that there’s a lot of there’s a lot of especially in digital places,  and then in physical places that there’s plenty of plenty of room for improvement in a lot of areas of really making that how do we make this more equitable and equal for everyone to use, because everyone should be able to have that same equitable experience. 

[Juan] Great answers. Thank you so much,  Andrew and Beth. Thank you for being part of our event and for doing the presentation. We really are looking forward to it.  

[Beth and Andrew] Thank you for having us. Thank you.