Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2020 Special
Global Awareness Accessibility Day 2020! This is the third year I'm having a special episode for this event. I started with panel discussions for the day - and was planning on keeping that up. However, technical issues limited our ability to come together and have an actual discussion. So I got my guests to record their answers and this is the show. Thanks to Donna Vitan, Alicia Jarvis, Katriel Paige, and Matt May! Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is a special episode for the Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2020. The idea was to have a panel discussion like I presented in the last few years. However, despite planning this for the last three months, a series of technical difficulties arose including congestion on the internet pipes. Thank you COVID, and particularly internet providers that aren't up to delivering service they should. Talk about a lack of accessibility. Anyway, I asked my guests to record their answers, and this is what I'm presenting to you today. Obviously it doesn't have the same dynamics that an actual discussion would have had, but the answers are fantastic and thought-provoking. My guests are, Donna Vitan, Katriel Page, Matt May, and Alicia Jarvis. Nic: Donna is a user experience interaction and visual designers committed to inclusive design. She's currently working on the TELUS design system for TELUS digital. Katriel or Kit is a non-binary professional with chronic illnesses who works in digital accessibility as well as in tabletop gaming spaces. Matt is head of inclusive design at Adobe, and Alicia is the inclusive design practice lead within the RBC digital design team. My first topic is about non-disabled allies working in digital accessibility and doing consultation. Is it good or bad? And why? Donna says... Donna: I'm a non-disabled ally working in digital accessibility. So I am mindful and aware to make sure that I don't overstep good common sense when you try to speak for someone else. I do cringe at the idea that there are people who take advantage of the accessibility industry that they give bad advice and can potentially harm a lot more people. I often reach out to the accessibility leaders in my organization, Beth Sullivan and Oscar Western, to get their feedback on what I'm thinking, what I'm considering as recommendations because I don't want to give that level of bad advice. Nic: Matt says... Matt: So, I think that there's no guarantee that we're going to be able to do all of this ourselves. And I think that there are lots of people that are interested in accessibility because they find a way to help. And actually that was how I was before I really understood my ADHD as disability. I had already been diagnosed, but I worked for a good long while in accessibility before I actually connected it to what I had gone through school and in life before. All of those things started to come together and I started to understand that the role of my life in being a decent advocate for accessibility. So I think there's always room for people who are willing to listen in communities like accessibility and that we always know that we're going to need abled people to partner with us, whether they're engineers or product managers, or any other kind of role that we're working with. So it has to be a symbiotic relationship between the disability community and outside of it. Matt: There's one part of this that I want to caution people about, which is that there are more people like me, people that don't identify as being disabled but still have a disability that shapes their worldview. And when we get into these conversations, it's very easy to erase those people. And I've had it happened to me for one, I was giving a talk at Adobe for global accessibility awareness day. And I saw a comment, I think it was on Twitter, where somebody just posted... No, it was a Slack that I was a member of. It was, "here's an abled white guy, that's talking about