Accessing Innovation | Accessibility NYC Meetup Recap

CAT: Accessing innovation. Very vague. But I'll... Yeah.

I'll dive right in. So I think generally speaking, we talk a lot about all of this innovation that we're kicking out into the world. Reusable rockets. Preventative health.

There's a spectrum of things that I can list out, and generally speaking, all of the innovation is great. No matter what with the field is. But in most of those cases, the access to that innovation on a global scale is still extremely limited. So in an effort to really establish a solid benchmark and always deliver an A game, an A quality experience or product or service or whatever it is we're working on, the question becomes: Not can we innovate.

By definition, humans... That is what enabled us to survive. Our ability to innovate. So it's not can we innovate.

But rather: In what ways can we increase the chances for a majority of people in the world to access that innovation that we're kicking out, as early as possible? And so one example of that is prosthetics. Prosthetics have come a very long way. And I can geek out on the history of that.

But I will spare you all. With prosthetics, that innovation is fantastic. We see everything from... Just the stereotypical prosthetic we all have come to know, to an exoskeleton.

And while that's great, 3D printing in particular is one of the ways the hurdle of access is removed. Because it's more affordable. It's because the material itself is more affordable. And the same holds true for software.

And that, for me in particular, is something that I've come to focus deeply on. You know, we know that you generally speaking around the world wouldn't construct a building without having a wheelchair ramp. Why are we building software, digital products, without accounting for who can or cannot access them? Oh my mouse is not clicking.

Let's see. Did that turn? Yes? Did that turn for everyone?

To the second slide?

CAMERON: We're at humanity is innovating.

CAT: So humanity is innovating faster and more than ever before. In the tech industry, again, we build some of the world's most groundbreaking technology, but is it relevant if we haven't enabled individuals to access it simply because they don't fit this physical or gender or race or socio-economic profile that we had originally mapped out when we did our fancy sprint kickoff? And if there's one thing that I want everyone, no matter the designer, engineer, product manager, stakeholder -- someone just generally interested in the topic -- if there is one thing I want you to get out of this talk, it's that accessibility is not a feature to be added or this daunting pitch to stakeholders.

It may very well be at one point a daunting pitch to stakeholders. But that is not what accessibility is. Accessibility is a by-product. It's a by-product of inclusive design.

And for that matter, development. It's part of the product development process. And though in some organizations you may need to have a discussion about resource allocation and the like, there are a number of quick wins, quick hits, that can be baked in right now, with little to no bottlenecks. Just to have those really nice ah-ha moments.

For your team. And not need to necessarily worry about a number of extra resources. And let's start simply by educating ourselves as individuals. And learning how to apply it in our everyday work.

But I think the one thing I've come to realize is that it starts first and foremost by being able to acknowledge the existence of individuals. By being able to see people first. One thing that I don't think a lot of people realize is that only 59% of individuals have access to the internet. And when we think internet, for me, I grew up at one point having the internet in my house, but it wasn't a default.

My daughter doesn't know what it looks like to get onto the internet or sign onto the internet. Because by default, you're just on. But what actually is the internet? The internet is preventative health.

It's education. It's business building, to help your family go from one income level to the next. And so when I think about 59%... I mean, generally speaking, anything more than 51% is a majority.

But I always like to understand what that secondary number is. The related number. 59% in a world of how many billion people are we at now? Is very low.

Ultimately, we need to make the world's software accessible. We need to make it so that we're not just thinking by default. The stereotypical images that come to mind when we hear accessibility. There's so much more that comes to it.

Just for some background, at Stark our mission is to make the world's digital products more accessible. For everyone. We help teams build compliance software products more efficiently. Sorry.

So by integrating with the tools that designers and engineers and product managers already use, Stark ends up meeting people where they are. And we optimize their workflow through intelligent automation. The result is a significant reduction in cost and decrease in time to compliance. And financial and legal risk.

Which realistically is an arguing point for stakeholders. But most importantly for us as a company, you get to push out a product into the world, that can be used by everyone. Our goal is to be this gold standard. You know, removing the stigmas that come with this work and changing the framework of how it's approached by teams.

And making this work human-approachable. Education was always the pillar. But one thing we've come to realize is that one of the biggest hurdles for us in tech is an education hurdle. That is an access hurdle for us.

I remember when we first started building Stark, and we were running through certain documentation, and we were like... This is next level irony. The fact that the material to understand this work is inherently inaccessible... It's not human-readable.

I can't... It's blocking me from being able to ensure what I'm doing is compliant. What I'm doing isn't excluding individuals by default out of the gate. Right?

I can't talk about how I designed and built a product that had this phenomenal experience. By default, it excludes a number of individuals. Again, accessibility is a by-product of inclusive design. I think the one thing that...

One of the many things we've come to find is that... When you're having these conversations with stakeholders, or we're in conversations with Fortune 500 board members, the word compliance scares the shit out of people. And... It's because it's directly correlated to things like lawsuit and profit loss and customer loss.

And... Very well. It should be. But we've come to find that the conversation can be made so much more streamlined when we get to the root of what's happening.

When we get to the root of making clear that your product is accessible because it meets these guidelines. Much like other guidelines you have to meet. You have to meet certain guidelines on iOS if you want to actually ship it to the app store. Right?

You have to create a usable product that doesn't exclude if you want to ensure it's accessible. And that's, I think, a general... That can be a topic for a talk all on its own. But I think that gets to the root.

Understanding that in an effort to be accessible, you need to do what is necessary to ensure you're not excluding, based on these general profiles. And I'm gonna cover a multitude of ways that you can ensure that. So I think we talk a lot about how... Especially...

I'm guilty of this. When talking to investors, for instance, we push things like cross-platform. We're gonna design and ship something that's cross-platform. And that's exciting.

That's increased market reach. Right? But products need to succeed, more so across abilities. Not just across platforms.

And one can argue certain platforms are more accessible than others. But you reach more on an individual platform when you don't exclude... Than shipping a really shitty product that isn't accessible to anybody on multiple platforms. Right?

Do one thing really well and nail that. The same applies here. But what does it mean to succeed across abilities? Understanding that there are things like...

When it comes to accessibility, there's the physical side, there's a cognitive side, and I think cognitive accessibility isn't just relevant for autistic individuals or individuals with traumatic brain injuries. It's for everyone like the neophytes who struggle to use the latest technology. Or software that hasn't been translated into an individual's native language. So you can have someone come to the States, for instance, and use a product and have their device in a particular language.

But if an app actually isn't built with those languages, then the individual is going to struggle. What happens? Because it wasn't usable, it wasn't accessible, and someone was excluded based on a certain profile. What happens when that individual can't access their financial services?

They can't access their money? They can't access being able to order their next prescription? Because the software wasn't translated in their native language. Temporary, situational, permanent.

This, in conversations, has caused... Let's call it... Interesting debate. For those of you who are not familiar, Microsoft has spearheaded this for individuals at Microsoft, which built up the inclusive...

You know, the inclusive toolkit. Which is now owned by Microsoft. But in there, they spoke about temporary, situational, and permanent disabilities. So a good way to think about that is your situational inability to access your device easily is happening because you only have access to one arm, because your newborn child is in your other arm.

Situational -- I'd call it inability. And for some, it may be a disability. But in this case, it's an inability. It's not disabling you.

And that same arm may be broken. You have a temporary disability. Or it may be permanent. You have a limb difference and you use a prosthetic or you don't.

And that is a permanent disability. And so the way we talk about this and frame this in conversations with board members, stakeholders, design teams, engineering teams, is understanding that while you may think your product only has, say, 2000 individuals out of 2 billion or whatever it is... 2,000 individuals with a permanent limb difference, you see just how quickly that notches up to a 10x or 100x multiple for a temporary disability. Or impairment.

And how that multiplies significantly more when we count for the parents that have only access to one arm, because they have a newborn in the other. So you see how quickly that multiplied to a drastically high number. I don't have to run off the numbers for you to know that there are babies being born to this world second by second. At astronomical rates.

And so you see just how that downplaying of whether or not this was something worth paying attention to became a very high multiple that is problematic, if you don't address it. Not only, again, are you excluding individuals. Realistically, the moves that companies make are always strategic. When pitching those stakeholders, you have to talk about numbers.

I wish we lived in a world where it could only be from the perspective of... This is just the right thing to do. But they're looking to see that they're getting a return on their investment. And so when you don't account for the mass multiples that are happening with just using this framework in your process, you realize how much return on investment is actually...

How much return is actually lost from the lack of investment that's happening. Accessibility maximizes the bottom line. And that touches on a little bit of what we were just talking about. What's the bottom line?

The bottom line is increased market reach. It's minimizing your financial and legal risk. It's maximizing your brand value. These are the things when you're having these conversations with stakeholders, or your VP or whatever the fancy title is that is the key decision maker in your company, your organization.

These are the things that you want to be talking about. Now, granted, there are some organizations where the CEO, the leaders, have made a conscious decision to account for accessibility. So you have the CEOs like Microsoft. And Adobe.

At Adobe, the CEO of Adobe, I think it was like 2018 or 2019 -- I forget what it was. Went out on stage and made a very pointed statement to say this was important and this would be a core focus. And so... In those cases, you have a few things that come together.

One is... You know, executives that are making a conscious decision to make this a core focus. Then you also have the question of... Well, how the hell do you allocate resources for this?

Right? Because it becomes a topic of resource allocation and load balancing. And figuring out how much do you invest now and how much of the return is going to come from that? And over what time horizon.

That's that formula that Stark is working on for organizations. Because when you control the currency, you have a very different conversation. And that ultimately is the way any conversation is lifted to a boardroom level. You know, these publicly traded companies -- unfortunately they can't make these random decisions and just suddenly publicly announce them.

It's just not how the world works and it's not how it's going to work. So having an awareness of what these efforts help you achieve is already a push forward. A lean into action. For you.

It helps your job... If you are an individual who's a designer, engineer, you're not in a stakeholder or executive position, this helps navigate that conversation. But realistically, there are, like I said, quick wins to implement now. Realistically, colors matter, and so does contrast.

Evaluating your design systems is a great way to start. If you don't have a design system, evaluating how you can get one in place. Because that already mitigates a ton of risk. Pick colors that contrast.

It's good to look at colors on these fancy devices that we get from work and say this looks good. But, you know, do that traditional testing. Look at it on devices that don't look so fancy. Look at it outside in the sun.

These are... Turn your brightness down to 40, 50%. These are all part of the testing process, where you can determine whether those colors actually have an impact. Look at it from a blur simulation.

The map is not the territory, but it gives you a really solid idea of what that experience could potentially be like, for some individuals. But realistically, when it comes to blurred vision, the odds are likely that a lot of you... Much like myself... Experience that.

And if you're young, and have absolutely perfect vision, well... Enjoy it while you can. So... The other thing is write good alt text.

Educating yourself on screen readers and how different individuals navigate a product... The alternate ways that... Or the various ways, rather, that you can navigate a product... Software, for instance.

Be it tabbing through... You know, not everybody uses the swipe or the standard click to navigate a product. But when it comes to things like alt text, I would like to say "write good alt text", but I think in general, just write good text. Text that is clear.

But for alt text, alt text goes on... And I don't want to speak at anyone. If you know this, this is really for individuals that aren't aware. Sorry.

My eye is terrible right now. Whether an individual simply is unable to see an image, or internet connection, data connection is not great... Images won't load. And individuals deserve to know what the context of that image is, even though they can't physically see it at the time.

That's part of the experience. And writing really good alt text ensures they can experience it, despite that individual not being there. Layouts should be consistent and clear. For individuals that are tabbing through...

That focus order for them needs to take them through this navigation, in the same way that we always try to pay attention to whether or not headers and type scale and where we want individuals to go when they click on that fancy button, the call to action button. This same process is part of ensuring your product is accessible. Making it so that those layouts are consistent and clear. Sorry.

Include a diverse group of people in user testing. At this point, there's absolutely no excuse why this shouldn't be the case. I understand that there are a number of organizations that we've worked with, that simply don't have a testing process. Which is...

I would argue a much easier segue into establishing one, versus a company that has a testing process and that completely excludes a diverse group of individuals, because you're having a very different conversation at that point. But by including a diverse group of individuals in user testing, it achieves the same goal as you ensuring your team is diverse. By doing so, you don't hinder innovation. There are certain things for you as a team, if you fall into this...

What we call the male pale Yale category. That you can't anticipate. That you can't account for. Like, even myself, as a white woman, I cannot understand...

Or rather, I can be compassionate to, but I can't empathize with the struggles with certain software or the bias in technology that a Black woman experiences. And so... How the hell am I supposed to solve the problem, if I don't truly understand the problem? And I can't account for these things in testing.

Right? Having a diverse group... And that's across the spectrum... Ensures that your product is not excluding anybody.

And having your team diverse ensures that you have a product that is reflective of the people that use it. Right? Our goal is to create a product that has opinion. And because it has opinion it has character, and because it has character, it has soul.

It feels human. People can fall in love with it. You can't do that if your product is a reflection of your team and your team is not even remotely diverse. And diverse is not white men and white women.

That's not diverse. Again, all of the innovation is great. But... We need to make sure that the products that we're designing and shipping into this world put people first.

And account for the individuals that have too long been forgotten. The individuals that generally weren't invited to that lunch table to sit and eat. And if they were invited, were not encouraged to participate in the conversation. And I think we're at a point now where social media is an absolute megaphone.

And your customers will make clear their discontent. We're designing software now for the prosumer. There is no enterprise first experience. Gen Z and Gen alpha have very different expectations of what quality software is.

And if we're going to be designers, be engineers, our jobs can't be to just... You know... Push around squares or push pixels. That's not our fucking job.

Your job is to solve the problem. Your job is to service the business. Your job is to make sure it's a quality experience for everyone. That has access to it.

And so... I think ultimately... What we say is... Make a stark difference.

Do your job. Do what's responsible. What you signed up to, with your craft. And of course, there's a ton of help out there.

At the risk of self-plugging, the Stark community is phenomenal. There's so much help readily available. To you. You can ignore the entire Stark team and the entire Stark product, if you want to.

And still get a ton of educational material and benefit from the amazing individuals that participate in that community on a regular basis. So if there are any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me, either on Twitter, @imcatnoone, or email [email protected]. And I'm happy to point you in the right direction of resources or people that have been doing this for equally as long... Or much longer than I have.

And are the giants that I stand on the backs of. Let me know, and thanks for having me.

CAMERON: Awesome. Thank you, Cat. This is Cameron speaking again. I have a couple questions.

Myself. And others... Please post questions in the chat. If that's all right with you, Cat.

CAT: Let's do it! I can't promise I'll have an answer to all of them, but we can try this out.

CAMERON: So... I love this idea of like... New generations having different expectations. Can you dig into that a little bit more?

What do you see software becoming, ten years from now? Is it fundamentally different from a design standpoint? From a consumer standpoint? What do you mean...

What do you mean by that? What do you mean that Gen Z and Gen Alpha have different expectations?

CAT: I've come to realize that... Full context, some months ago, I had to... Or maybe it was a month ago... What is even time right now?

But... In stepping back, a CEO from the day-to-day design, I had to take a much broader approach to building Stark. And doing that... I had to pay attention to understand what technology looks like.

Or will look like. Five, ten, and so on... X amount of years out. And the ways in which the consumption of that software, the use of that software is evolving.

And so... Because of that, we made a very pointed strategic decision to build Stark -- and this is purely contextual, but I hope it kind of... It sheds light and gives you our theories, so you can apply it to you. I never really necessarily like to give a direct answer.

Because nobody learns that way. With Stark, we made a very conscious decision to take a B2B bottom up approach. And we said: We need to develop a model for this community-driven consumer-grade and enterprise-ready company. By doing so, we pressed emphasis on the prosumer.

Like I said before, regarding Gen Z, and Gen Alpha, by 2025, 70% of the available workforce will be people who grew up with the internet. I don't know how many of you in here have kids. But it almost feels like my kid came out of the womb knowing how to navigate an iPhone. And it's the most bizarre thing.

To the point where when you ask her to call someone, we had to condition it to put her hand like... In that stereotypical phone position with your hand by your ear and mouth. But the default is that the kids today lift their phone and put it in front of their face. It's Facetime.

It's video calls. So we said... Okay. If this is how they're using it, what is Gen Z doing now?

What is it that they're looking for? You pay attention to Gen Z. They're the advocates. They're...

They will fight tooth and nail for anything they feel they deserve. And they are very much so community driven. They want... Yeah.

They want to save the world. And they will.

CAMERON: So it's kind of from both sides. From what I'm hearing. Is that there's this idea that... Younger people who are sort of digital natives, I guess, if you can say that, expect a certain level of quality, regardless of what their disability status is, or otherwise.

And these are the people who are gonna be moving into positions as designers.

CAT: Yeah. In the workforce. Yeah.

CAMERON: So they themselves will need products that... I don't know. Allow them to build that way. There was a question from...

CAT: At a much younger age, too, keep in mind. At a much younger age.

CAMERON: Aurelia asks about... Flagging color contrasts in... Like, within an application. So the question is: Some software will flag an out of gamut color when converting from RGB to CMYK.

When will we see major programs shipping with color contrast checkers?

CAT: I think you'll start to see that very soon. And I say this as someone who knows that that would directly compete with what we started doing. Not with where we're going. In our flagship product.

But I would also argue a contrast checker needs to exist natively in the software that we use. It's one of those no-brainers. It's literally the core reason that Stark was conceptualized. Was...

Like, that was the catalyst. Why doesn't this exist? Why is this out of my workflow? So selfishly I think, in order for Stark to do as well as it possibly can, we need to push to have that.

It's one of those trade-offs. I know that needs to be in there, and I know it'll directly compete, but it being defaulted in the software that we use sends a very clear signal to individuals that are using the software. And then Stark will pick up the rest. It's not a big deal.

But that's super important to what we're doing. And helps with those really quick hits that... In one of those quick hits that I was talking about before...

CAMERON: Awesome. I'm gonna cue up a question from Marcelo. I think you can see the question there. But it says: How do you see the design industry accelerating to bring inclusion to the level of maturity required to output truly accessible experiences?

I think this is kind of hinting at the tension between interest or actual outcomes.

CAT: Um... I'm not sure I follow.

CAMERON: How do you see the design industry accelerating to bring inclusion... Can you see in the chat? Maybe you can... Dig into that.

And Marcelo...

CAT: I'll see what you put. How do you see the design industry accelerating to bring inclusion to the level of maturity required to output truly accessible experiences? So I guess... How does the industry as a whole move toward ensuring this is not just a random conversation anymore?

Or... Accessibility by compliance versus accessibility by design. So I think like... Designers still aren't sitting at a board level.

They're just not. By default, designers are not in a boardroom. And... Though this conversation around accessibility in a lot of Fortune 500 companies is happening, who are the individuals responsible for implementing that?

For kicking off those initiatives? Design. Right? So I think it's like one of those things where...

We've not yet nailed down that accessibility is a by-product. And once we understand that the start of that is design, and anything else is ass-backwards, then we get to a point where we start to invoke true change. Otherwise, it's gonna be... You know, there's either -- there's a couple of things that are either gonna happen...

One, we start to see more designers hit the boardroom first. But what I think is gonna happen is... First and foremost, accessibility enters the boardroom as a conversation, and there's a trickle-down effect, and you start to see the big silicon six start to bake this in, and road map this out. To have accessible products.

But... You know, to a certain degree, you have individual companies, organizations, like Microsoft, for instance, that... You know, this was about a five-year process so far. And they're not done yet.

But what they started was creating an entire company-wide design system, to at least kickstart that project. And then what needs to happen is they need to account for 10, 20, whatever... How many decades of legacy tech debt that they have to rectify. This is a multimillion dollar project.

But they invest in it, because they know what the time horizon, the return on the investment far supersedes that. So... You know, for me, I think design definitely accelerates it. Even if it's not immediately in the spotlight right away, for this billboard that says...

You know, design is spearheading accessibility... We know for a fact that I think it was like 67% of accessibility errors happen in the design phase. So anything else is ass-backwards. Why wouldn't you start with design?

So yeah. That's my thought on it. But I saw that Jessica asked: Why aren't designers in a --

CAMERON: Cat, sorry to interrupt. Mark actually had a question.

CAT: Oh, hey, Mark.

CAMERON: Go ahead.

Okay. I can see you. I'm curious... I'm curious.

How can... Is everybody frozen?

CAT: I think Mark froze.

INTERPRETER: Mark, you're frozen. If you can see us, you are frozen. Okay. Yes.

Try again.

Okay. I'm curious. With designers... How can designers process?

INTERPRETER: You froze in the middle of your question. Sorry. You're asking how can designers process what? I'm gonna type it.

He's not having a good connection. Sorry.

CAMERON: Yeah. Hold that thought.

CAT: Yeah. Let's wait.

CAMERON: Do you want to read that question out?

CAT: Yes. So the question is... Mark asked... How can designers remove bias in their design process?

A few ways. One, they can accept that the majority of the time, they are biased. Actually accepting that bias... The other is having a design team that doesn't fit into that male pale Yale category that predominantly...

In that male pale Yale category that I mentioned. And testing with individuals that don't look like that entire category. Right? Just...

White male pale Yale able bodied quote-unquote... Like fitting into these stereotypical Silicon Valley categories that we've all come to know. Right? That is the reason why...

That's how we got here in the first place. And that is not to say that that started with Silicon Valley. I think this started way before. Right?

And I shared an article out... I think it was last week. Where I talked about bias in technology. And in there, I talked about how tools are a product of their environment.

They reflect their creator's world view, and subjective lens, and... For quite some time now, even before tech, these same groups of people have been overseeing these faulty data systems. It's this closed loop where underlying biases are perpetuated. And groups are already invisible or, let's say, forgotten.

Continue to remain unseen. And forgotten. And as data progresses, that loop ends up snowballing. In the same way that innovation snowballs.

We're dealing with machine learning models. That we're designing and building. And if they're taught long enough, not being like A, B, C, white, able bodied, cisgender, means not being normal, they're building on that foundation, and that starts in the design process. That starts by designers determining who it is we choose to recognize in our design.

Thank you.

CAT: Thank you.

CAMERON: And then... Sorry. I jumped over Jessica. Jessica asked...

Why aren't designers in the boardroom? You started to hint at this when you talked about leadership, Cat. Why do you think that is?

CAT: So the question was... Why aren't designers in a boardroom? Can you elaborate on why you think that is? I don't think it.

I know it. They're not in the boardroom. It's just by default. You go to...

The Microsofts and whoever else, these Fortune 500 companies... Microsoft doesn't have a chief design officer that sits on a board. Microsoft has VPs and design partners, but there's no designer sitting on the board. You go to SAP.

My partner sits as a chief design officer at SAP. He doesn't sit on a board. You have all of these... And he fucking falls into the male pale Yale category.

And he's still not sitting on the board. Because he's got a designer... He's got the "design" label attached to his name. Right?

It's just not seen as a direct correlation to a return on investment. It's... And it really depends on the organization. Right?

The Oracles, the SAPs, the Microsofts, these are all engineer or data driven organizations. Now, go find an organization that's design driven. Let's see. Cameron?

CAMERON: Yep. I'm here.

CAT: There's a chief design officer at Adobe. Does he sit on the board?

CAMERON: Um... I actually don't know.

CAT: I would be interested in knowing that. Because then you have a design driven organization. But unfortunately we're not at a point where the majority of the organizations, the Fortune 500 or whatever tier you want to categorize it as, are design driven or community driven organizations. Right?

And we're at a point where data is currency. We're gonna do everything we can to ensure we still collect that data. We still move those things through. It's just not...

I think we talked about this a little bit at Claudio's event last week? The week before that? Again, time is a blur. Two weeks ago.

Two weeks ago, he's signaling. Thank you. And in there, we talked about how accessibility is getting to the point where it's considered on par with capitalism. Meaning both have to be there to make things work in the long run.

Design is not there yet, because it's not seen as the one that spearheads the accessibility initiative. Engineering is seen as the discipline spearheading that initiative. We are much further than we were before. Small steps to the big goal.

Right? We're getting there. And it may be that accessibility... Once we realize that accessibility is...

We're changing that conversation and making clear that accessibility and user experience and usability sit in the same space... Right? That they're all essentially different ways of saying it. Maybe when we get to that point, there's a direct correlation to design.

But we need to keep having these conversations. We need to be in the boardrooms with these... Companies to talk about these things and to educate them. That's what it comes down to.

There's just a lack of education. There was once a point where design wasn't even considered in engineering organizations. They were just purely engineering-driven. And yeah.

So it takes... A number of companies showing that accessibility is not at odds with beauty. And you can design beautiful experiences and this all-encompassing world. I think we're getting there.

It certainly feels like the conversations that we're having with organizations at the top and at the bottom, these stereotypical top-down hierarchy orgs... The conversation is changing. So I'm not worried anymore. I was at one point.

I'm not anymore.

CAMERON: Cat, I think we'll do one more question. Claudio asked that: In organizations that are not specifically dedicated to accessibility, would you ever see an accessibility professional above associate VP? I assume that's associate VP level. AVP level.

CAT: Would you ever see... An accessibility professional above AVP? I don't think I've seen it yet. Having said that...

Worth noting that there's also organizations that have chiefs of diversity and inclusion, and they completely shaft that role, because it's just for show and it doesn't do it justice. So... It really does come down to the organization. What their intent is.

But... In an organization that isn't specifically dedicated... Is any organization specifically dedicated to accessibility except accessibility organizations? You know?

I don't think we're there yet.

CAMERON: Meryl made a very good point that Jenny Lay-Flurrie at Microsoft is C-level.

CAT: Yeah. But at this point, I would consider... The way I would flip that is that I would not... Yes, to Jenny, very much so.

So much yes to Jenny. So aside from putting Jenny on a throne... I also think that Microsoft doesn't count, because they have dedicated themselves as an inclusive first organization. That's the only reason why I wouldn't...

Like, I wouldn't bucket it there. But I may be wrong for doing that. What do you think, Meryl? Okay.

Claudio, do you feel the same? It looked like you disagreed. And this is why I love talking to you.

CAMERON: I might posit that... Unfortunately... We are at 8:00 pm.

CAT: That's fine. Claudio and I will take this offline, as they say.

CAMERON: I will allow everyone to continue the conversation. Please go to meetup.com/a11ynyc. We have the recordings posted there. We have a bunch of recordings on YouTube for pretty much every event we've ever had.

And yeah. Cat, I think you at Stark have some community groups. Where can people go to find those things? Throw in chat.

Perfect. Yeah. Slack. Right on.