The Essentials of Document Remediation
Article 19 discusses accessible PDF formatting with our specialist
This episode of the Article 19 podcast welcomes Liza Grant, Tamman’s PDF specialist. She is in charge of guarding Tamman’s high standards on document accessibility. Often, screen reader users receive PDF’s that are inaccessible due to the lack of proper formatting. Liza makes sure that all of our client PDF that will be delivered to web pages are formatted and tagged properly in order for them to be accessible and inclusive to all users. Tune in to listen to Liza’s journey in the accessibility world and her passion about user-centric design and advocacy.
Listen to more Article 19 Podcast Episodes
This knowledge sharing podcast is one part of a series of content we have produced on digital document remediation. In addition to this podcast, we also offer:
- The Importance of Heading Levels and Alt Text – a video of Tamman team members highlighting the importance of accessible PDFs for people with disabilities and how to make them more inclusive
- Top 8 Crucial Remediation Mistakes To Avoid – a blog post about 8 common issues we often see when trying to make existing documents more accessible
- Introducing Our New Partners, Chax – a podcast episode with the founders of Chax Training and Consulting about mergers, partnerships, and the future of accessible digital documents.
- Different Types of Digital Assets – a blog post describing and explaining the different types of digital documents that should be optimized for digital accessibility
- Transforming Digital Spaces with Document Remediation – a podcast detailing our team members’ lived experience of interacting with inaccessible digital documents
- Chax Chat: Our Favorite Accessibility Podcasts – a resource sheet of podcasts we’ve listened to on digital document information from the Chax Chat podcast
- The Essentials of Document Remediation – Tamman’s PDF specialist discusses the importance of accessible PDFs and ensuring they meet high standards for screen reader users
Full Transcript
Voiceover:
Expression is one of the most powerful tools we have. A voice, a pen, a keyboard.
The real change, which must give to people throughout the world their human rights, must come about in the hearts of people. We must want our fellow human beings to have rights and freedoms, which give them dignity.
Article 19 is the voice in the room.
Marty:
Hello, and welcome to Article 19. My name is Marty Molloy, Chief of Staff, and Catalyst at Tamman. I am our host for our conversation today. We will be talking with Liza Grant, High Priestess, and Guardian of Accessible Documents for Tamman. We also have with me, as always, Amanda Roper. Program manager of Tamman’s accessibility initiatives. Hi, Amanda.
Amanda:
Hey, Marty.
Marty:
And we are joined as always by our head honcho, Michael Mangos, CEO and co-founder of Tamman. Hey, Mike.
Mike:
Hello.
Marty:
Before we begin, I’d like to set the stage for our listeners. Our conversation is born from a decision at Tamman to state clearly and plainly that accessed information is a human right. The developers and designers at Tamman work hard to make sure that no matter what use constraint a user may have, be it due to a temporary, situational, or permanent condition or disability, that they are able to access the information designed and built by Tamman. This podcast is a call for others to join in a bigger conversation with us. We want to build the inclusive web. In fact, we do build the inclusive web. We do that by bringing all of us together. Working together and learning together. I want to thank everyone for listening. Let’s get this conversation started. Let me bring Mike and Amanda in. Hey there, friends, and Miss Liza Grant. How are you?
Liza:
I’m doing very well. How are you?
Marty:
I am great. Thank you so much for asking. You sound fantastic. That mic is working for me.
Liza:
Thank you. So am I.
Marty:
I want to start off with an easy question. Winter storms have been bearing down upon us recently, and I’m very curious, Miss Liza. Can you tell us, what is your strategy for hunkering down? What’s your favorite thing to do? What do you really like to do when the storm is raging outside?
Liza:
That’s a good question, Marty. Let me tell you exactly what I like to do when it’s storming outside, and it is what I did last weekend, and it was make soup. And it was a big ol’ pot of lentil soup. I gave some to my parents because I used their kitchen, and they were left to clean up after me. But I saved a lot of it for myself, and I’m still eating it right now.
Marty:
I cannot wait until we’re all together again and you can share some of your awesome lentil soup. Storm or no storm. Miss Amanda: What’s your hunkering down strategy? What do you do when the storms are raging outside?
Amanda:
My favorite thing to do is cozy up on the couch and read a nice book, and just not do anything else for the day.
Marty:
Classic. Very classic. Mr. Mangos: How about you?
Mike:
My wife and two kids, we set a fire in the fireplace, and we set up board games or card games on a little table in front of the fire. We’ll do that from 10 in the morning until we go to bed at 10:00 at night. [laughter] It’s a lot of fun in our house.
Marty:
I think we need to combine all of these. Where we’re cozying up reading, hanging by the fire, eating lentil soup. I am down with it. I’ll take a piece of everybody’s. So, Liza. I am so excited that you’re here and our guest for today. I’d like to start off by giving you a second to orient listeners to who you are. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do?
Liza:
My name is Liza Grant. What I do is take our client PDFs, send them to a vendor to be tagged, which is what makes them accessible to people with disabilities. I then receive those documents from the vendor, remediate them if they have not been fully remediated already. Because sometimes are better than others, and then check them with a screen reader to make sure that they sound similar enough to the way that they look to be compliant with the ADA. Then deliver them to the client. Then it’s just that over and over again.
Mike:
Hello, Liza. This is Mike. To be fair to you and everybody else, you do a lot more than that too. I happen to know. I have inside information.
Liza:
There’s some other – Yeah.
Mike:
There’s also a big aspect to what you do that’s educational. Right?
Liza:
Yes, there is a lot of the tagging process itself that only goes smoothly if you are formatting things a certain way to begin with. There’s a lot of feedback, and there’s some training, instructional stuff happening as well in terms of “This is good, but let’s make this better.” Or “Here’s something that we haven’t been doing and we really need to. Because –”
Mike:
Liza, if I could prime you a little bit, there are three things that I think about when I talk about what you do. I tell people, one, you’re coordinating these documents back and forth between the vendor, but you’re ensuring quality, so you are the last line that determines this meets our standards, and we have very high standards. Right? Although somebody else is doing the bulk of the remediation up front, you’re there to make sure that those standards are being kept. That’s a big responsibility. So that puts a lot of pressure on you, and you execute beautifully on it.
Liza:
Certainly, yes.
Mike:
Then there’s this educational component where you’re teaching others. Right? About how to do things up front. Then the third thing that I think of that you do is you’re also taking documents and making them accessible by yourself from a whole cloth, without really using a vendor. That’s a big part of what you’ve been transitioning into in recent weeks and months.
Liza:
Yes, that is very true. I did go through a lovely training session with our tagging software that we use, and that our vendor uses. And so, for the odd job, or the quick one, I can go ahead and tag it, and remediate and test it myself. That’s been really great. That’s what we’re kind of trying to coach our clients to get in that space as well. Just because it can turn into a process that’s pretty efficient, and gets everybody involved, and I’m kind of on my way there with the training as well.
Marty:
I love it. Tell me more about document remediation. What’s it all about? Then as you’re thinking about that education and that training component, what are the main principals that you make sure that designers and others that you might be working with really know about setting up those documents?
Liza:
Well, it basically involves a tagging function. This exists in Adobe Acrobat, for some people. It is basically a computer program that goes through and tries to identify different pieces of content, and their function within a document. Just based on how it looks, but also how the formatting is. There are different types of tags. It will assign a tag to a certain piece of content to kind of play that part in the tag tree. Which is the order of the document content, but not necessarily in a visual order. It’s how it would be read out to someone audibly. So basically, you want all your links to be formatted as links before you try to tag it. You want to make sure your headings are all the appropriate level, kind of how you would lay them out in an overview of the document, and you want to make sure all of your images or even text that’s formatted as an image is given alt text, or alternative text, which is what someone would hear if they couldn’t see that image or if sometimes even if that image doesn’t load properly you’ll see the alt text behind it. Those are three very major things that are important to an exist-ability of a document, and so we make sure to really focus on those when we’re formatting before we tag. Your second question?
Marty:
Well, just thinking about the main pieces, when you’re educating and you’re talking to designers. I think you talked a little bit about this in terms of heading things. But are there other things that the designers really need to think about that you see as common mistakes that they’re making with their documents initially?
Liza:
There are a lot of things that are common practice that aren’t really good for accessibility. One of the ones that I find often is folks will use tables to help their layout when we really only want to be using tables when we have tabular data that we need to display to present to people. It’s not really to make sure that you have things all in the correct vertical distance away from each other, and in the same column or what have you. You definitely want to use the in-design tools for that. Not just a table. The screen reader detects that it’s a table, and it gives it a table tag. Then it lets you navigate it like you would through a table. But none of that information is tabular, so it wouldn’t really help you. That’s a big one that we try to get people to only use a table when they have tabular data. We also see a lot of links in a document – you may see this in your online travels as well – that just say, “click here,” and you may not be sure exactly where that’s going. You might hover over it with your mouse for a second to see what the URL is. Maybe you’re not trying to go there. But in accessibility we really want the link and the text of the link specifically to say where it’s going. That is because when a lot of people who use a screen reader are going to navigate through a document they use a little bit of kind of a carousel at the top where they can look at every link in the document in a list, and they can choose to navigate to those links if they want. If a bunch of those say, “click here” or “next” it’s not really clear. We want to be clear for folks. So, we make much more sense when you’re creating a document and you want someone to click somewhere to have the destination itself be a link. You might say, like, “The local creek preserve website,” and you would make that whole thing a link. Because you want all of those words to pop up in the link list, so no one has to be hesitant about where they want to go. If they want to actually “click here” or not.
Marty:
Your listeners wouldn’t know this automatically, but as all of us talking today are, you’re a fully sighted person. Several of the things that you’ve mentioned so far, I think, really speak to how someone will go through a document if they’re not fully sighted. The “click here” link, I think, is an unbelievable example and it’s not something that I naturally think for. When did it click for you? When did you walk through this process, and all of a sudden you started thinking and looking at documents in a way that you were hearing or feeling, or in some other way perceiving the document as a fully sighted individual? But then now thinking about it from an accessibility standpoint where, you know, someone who isn’t fully sighted is going to be interacting with this. How did that magic happen?
Liza:
That’s a good question. I don’t feel like it was a specific point in time that I could point to. But it’s definitely over probably a couple months, just to be using the screen reader all the time. There are a few things that you get used to. Even if I only use it a few hours a day. There are a lot of times when I’m not using it. Walking around the office there are some signs that I’ll see, and I will read through it and skip some of the things that I know a screen reader would skip. Or there are some documents that we get that look – they have a pretty similar structure, I guess. So, you go through them, and you expect a certain thing. When something different happens, it’s automatically that someone has made a mistake. Or like, we do deal with your work being audited, because you do want to uphold a certain standard of accessibility, and it’s good if someone else holds you to that standard. But there are some things that I do find where even in an auditor place sometimes there’s a lot of visual bias that gets used in making the decisions about what is accessible and what’s not. You want to use what you have, obviously. But a lot of times there are better tagging practices that go counter to what someone who is fully sighted would choose. So, you do kind of have to put yourself in a little chair of someone who perceives a different way and make sure it still makes sense.
Mike:
It’s funny, Liza, that you’re bringing that up. Because a couple weeks ago we were on another podcast we were talking about sort of how has it changed us. It’s funny to hear you talk about it as you’re walking through the office and you read a door sign, or a label on a package, and you’re still in that QA mode where you’re still reading it for those things in that way. I do the same thing. I feel like my whole perception of reality has changed through this journey. It sounds like you’re kind of experiencing the same thing.
Liza:
I totally agree, and I’m finding that I’m definitely in the digital world it feels like, almost as much as I’m in the physical world. But even like walking around my neighborhood over the summer there were so many, so many intersections without a curb cut at all. I was just thinking like, especially – I’ll be weird and say I was riding a unicycle around – so I’m kind of paying attention to the curb cuts. Anyone who has a baby, or someone if they’re in a wheelchair it’s bumpy if you don’t have that. You’re kind of just like, “I used to go on a walk and only get a certain amount of angry at little things that I didn’t have a whole lot of control over. Now I’ve added a lot to that.”
Marty:
Accessibility advice, and tip and trick number one is: Learn to ride a unicycle. I got it. I like it. [laughter]
Liza:
They don’t seem very accessible. I will say that.
Marty:
I am really struck by something you just said, and it was a phrase that is unfamiliar to me. I want to unpack it a little bit. You said, “auditor bias.” Can you elaborate a little bit about “auditor bias”?
Liza:
A lot of times when dealing with your work being audited it’s going to be things that you have missed. Sometimes it’s going to be things that you have just been doing wrong because you didn’t know any better. Some things are things that you’re doing really well because you took a number of training courses, and you just try to make yourself have a certain level of knowledge about something and you do. But it doesn’t quite make sense all the time. There was an example that I could use recently with a table of contents link that we had. Like a 20 page document, and you put a table of contents link at the bottom of each page, just as people are going through, whenever they end they always have that option there to get back up to the table of contents. We were not placing that table of contents tag in the same place in the tag tree. Usually you want, for best practice, you want to finish the sentence you’re on on the previous page, the list you’re on. A lot of times you have a heading, every so often you’ll finish that heading section because it’s kind of dangerous to put a link to the table of contents somewhere where you’re not at the end of any natural point in the document. You might think that you are done with this section on the introduction or what have you. But no, it’s just the end of where the page was. If you’re just listening, a lot of people will have the page numbers turned off for their screen reader since they’re kind of going through a linear experience and they’re using the links to get to the page they want. There is, when things are being audited, a back and forth where sometimes you’re fixing things and sometimes you’re also explaining your reasoning to the auditing team. They might be using a little bit of visual bias there when they’re doing the audits that would lead to a more confusing, or like a less refined listening experience. Part of working in accessibility, you have a lot of your own biases to overcome if you want to make sure that you’re actually thinking about every single possible person, and every single perception thing.
Marty:
There’s something else that you just said there, Liza, which is interesting, we haven’t really unpacked before which is: What are things in the visual experience maybe that have no utility in the auditory experience? Right? Or the audible experience. That’s one of them. Page numbers. Right? Unless things are organized by page, which they usually aren’t. Usually there’s a section to a book. Pages are just a way to get a certain number of words to fit on a printed document, or to fit on a screen. But if you don’t have a visual experience pages don’t really matter. Right? It’s like, only sections matter. It’s just interesting that there’s these objects, or these conventions, that we just take for granted as necessary and required. Do you have any other examples, Liza, that you can think of besides something like pages for visual experience? That don’t have an analogue or have no utility in some other different experience.
Liza:
That is a very good question.
Marty:
I just thought it was really interesting.
Liza:
There are a lot of like – Because when footer and header pagination comes into everything we end up – a lot of documents will have like a company logo on the bottom of every page. If there’s 45 pages, you really only kind of want to artifact. Which is a way you hide something from a screen reader. You end up artifacting a lot of those things just because you see it on every page when you read it, but you have the choice to kind of skim right over it. Whereas someone listening to a screen reader you can give them choices some places, but something like that where they kind of have to hear it isn’t really ideal.
Marty:
Yeah, I would imagine even something like the copyright, if there’s a copyright on the bottom of every page important for a page that might get taken out of a book and live independently of the rest of the book or could get lost. Because it’s in a loose-leaf. Right? But you don’t want to force somebody to listen to the copyright 45 times. It’s irrelevant. You just need it once. Right?
Liza:
Right. Especially with legal information. Then you have to think about it extra hard because it’s legal information. You want to be able to make sure you’re providing it to everyone who needs it. But yeah, there are so many things. Map codes, and things just at the bottom that mean something to someone. It’s not necessarily the reader. But make your judgement calls about what to tag as what in those situations.
Marty:
I want to take a step back for a moment if we could. Because when you first came to Tamman – and correct me if I’m wrong – you did not have any formal experience with accessibility or digital accessibility. Did you?
Liza:
You are correct. No experience.
Marty:
Can you walk us through your own accessibility journey a little bit from a little bit more of a personal angle of why this created such a passion for you?
Liza:
Definitely. I had just gotten away from a previous job just kind of working in web in general. Nothing to do with accessibility or disability. Then I was lucky enough to start working for Tamman. I do try to get into my work a little bit. This was something that I had only thought about kind of in passing. I do have a close friend who is a sign language interpreter. So, there’re always jokes and things that we’re learning from her. But it was very eye opening. I realized I loved just thinking about how other people perceive things, and how the world can be so different depending on who you’re asking and depending on what abilities they have will change that answer a whole lot. So, I sort of started learning a little bit. I had to learn a lot for the actual job which I did. But then I had a lovely coworker David who knew a lot and helped show me some resources, and I also realized that in learning about accessibility myself I didn’t have a lot of diversity in my personal media diet. You can blame big Hollywood, and whoever you want for not being able to see movie stars starring people who have a limb difference, or mainstream music. A lot of places. But also, the internet you can kind of find your own things out, seek them out, follow them, and that really helped me. I ended up following a lot of people who were on social media because that’s kind of what I was looking through, in my non-social way that I do things. It was really helpful just to have almost even one or two people. It just shows you how their every day is, and it shows you the things that they are really caring about, and a lot of it is just very supportive of each other. The community, I guess. It just has a lot of support, and it’s very uplifting. A lot of it, it sort of ends up being anti-bullying and pro-acceptance. Just because that’s – you can tell people have had to grow up and deal with really hard things. Mainly how other people treat them. But yeah, I got really into it. I find myself a little bit of an advocate, normally. Whether it’s like animals, or it’s like children. You’re always kind of thinking that things need to be better, or people deserve things that they’re not getting. That kind of helped switch it up a little bit, where you feel a sense of urgency because there’s things happening online, and in the real world. But especially with digital, everything is in the palm of your hand wherever you are. But depending on how the palm of your hand functions you might need – The internet doesn’t work for you, you’re missing out on a lot, and it’s a lot easier to fix than like getting some cinder blocks or some bricks and building an actual ramp. Which is something that’s not a video podcast, but I have tiny little arms and they would not be able to be super helpful in building a ramp. But with digital accessibility it was like, “Woah. I don’t know how to give someone their sight back.” But for accessibility you can follow all of these things, and when you listen to it you’re not missing much from whatever document you’re looking at. So, it just seemed like you could be really helpful even with skinny little baby arms, and that there were a lot of people who really deserved it and are there fighting for themselves and that’s the civil rights part of it is very inspiring. So, it was kind of a mash of things that all came together. But I’m really glad it happened. It feels like a purpose I’ve been waiting for, and it’s great. It makes you want to get better at it. Which I feel like is how you know you’re in the right profession.
Marty:
You know, I was inspired by you a couple months back, Liza. You gave a talk on deaf space to the rest of us. One of our public lightning talks. It was a thing I hadn’t really thought about. You kind of opened up a bit of my world. I know that doesn’t have a direct analogue to your digital accessibility work, but I think it shows how committed you are to this. Can you just tell our listeners just a little bit about what deaf space is? Because I think it’s a fascinating topic.
Liza:
Sure, I would love to. I hate public speaking, but that was the best topic that I was really happy to talk about it. It’s basically a design concept at Gallaudet University, which is the premiere higher learning school for folks who hare deaf and hard of hearing. They got together with an architect and built parts of Gallaudet to be friendly to those who are deaf and hard of hearing. There are a lot of different aspects they think about when they’re building it in terms of how much you can see in front of you. They try to use mirrors and clear doors, or walls so that you can see people approaching and you’re not going to be startled just because someone comes around a hallway and you might bump into each other. They widen the walls and the walking spaces so that people can talk to each other with their hands and have enough space in their signing spaces while not bumping into a bench, or a water fountain, or something like that. There are so many things. They use materials that reverberate less when they move around from like the wind and the – It’s just, they put a lot of thought into it. As someone who is not very hard of hearing myself, it’s just things that I would never think about because of the abilities that I have. There’s all certain ways that you can design specifically for certain disabilities just to try to make life easier for people.
Marty:
I think it’s really interesting that it’s not just about giving access, but sometimes it’s about creating a space that’s inviting, and comfortable, and disarming. There’s more to this conversation than just access to information. It’s a lot about what we’re about at Tamman, and it’s sort of our part of it in making an accessible or an inclusive web. But just the fact that there are analogues all over the place, and there’s more than just giving access to a thing. There’s welcoming. I think that’s just a message that I can get behind. You know? It’s great.
Mike:
Everything that you just described, that sounded like it’d be a wonderful space for anybody to be in. Especially if you’re deaf or hard of hearing. But I’m thinking, yeah, I know that reverberation for example, and I don’t like it. I don’t have necessarily that specific disability. So, I think that like so many things when you build the right way, with more of a universal scope, it probably benefits more people than just maybe some smaller targets that might have a direct impact. So, I appreciate you bringing that. You mentioned something about social media, and I’m curious if you have any recommendations of influencers, or other people on social media that you particularly like to follow that you think others should as well. Or maybe it’s other authors. I’m just curious about who you think you’d like other listeners of Article 19 to also follow on social media.
Liza:
Sure. I will say that I did write a blog post on this topic if you feel like checking out our blog. Some of these are repeats from there. But pretty much anyone you can find who’s sharing the content about their life and their ability is a great follow. If they speak to you, go for it. But here are some people to get you started if you don’t know where to go for it. A lot of the people that I am focusing on, there’s obviously a variety of different types of entertainment to follow, but all of these people they produce content that is about their disability or accessibility in some way. One that is newer that I have found is someone who has a similar name than what you used in this podcast. I think. But we’ll let it slide. Higher Priestess. She creates a lot of Instagram posts. But they are informative about how to design your content, be Instagram posts or anything else, and she uses a lot of – I think her pronouns are she – she uses a lot of examples to show the good and the bad right in the content. Which is something that I really like. So, for anyone who’s putting content out or who colors themselves a designer, that’s someone who I would definitely suggest. There’s another gentleman who’s a little bit newer, and he’s Augustus Mourning. He actually is from West Philly, I believe, enjoying him normally on Instagram. He has a disability, and he will make a lot of videos about it. He also is Greek. He does some funny things, but he mainly does informative things. Sometimes it’s just about what he’s watching, or parts of his life. But a lot of times it is about his disability, and the things he went through with COVID. Some people are getting their COVID vaccines who have certain disabilities. So, they’re able to actually show that on their social media as well, and the process of things that are a little bit different sometimes depending on what your medical needs are. So that’s been very interesting. Augustusmorning, all one word. The third person is definitely someone that I’ve mentioned, and I’ve been following her for almost the entirety of my work in accessibility is, wheelchairrapunzel, and it is a young woman named Alex. She is very outspoken; she is a very big advocate for all kinds of civil rights. There are a lot of things folks with disabilities are kind of fighting against in terms of mainstream conceptions or misconceptions. She’s a big believer in the “disabled bodies are sexy” movement. There are a lot of other people that I’m following from that movement where you may not have a body that looks like it is in a fashion magazine. Which is a whole lot of people, and anyone who’s listening – I’ll count myself here too – you can start to feel like maybe people whose bodies look like you aren’t supposed to be on magazines. Or that’s not supposed to be the thing that’s fantasized about when people are looking at Victoria’s Secret. It’s like, tell me the reason why. Here I am, looking real sexy on Instagram. You tell me that I can’t be whatever I can be just because of my ability or my disability. It’s really strong, just it helps me just as a young woman trying to find my own place, and it’s just you kind of find that a lot of people who are sharing this content they’ve learned a lot and they’ve maybe learned a little more than they would’ve if they didn’t have struggles from society. Trying to grow up, and just trying to get where they would like to be and where they have the right to be. Then there’s one more who I think I talked about before as well. But thejourneyofabravewoman is a woman who is a wheelchair user, and she – I think right shortly after I started following her she climbed a very large mountain that not a whole lot of people have climbed, and she did it with the help of a lot of the local people who help people get up the mountain if they’re in a wheelchair. But she goes on many amazing trips, and she’s educational, informative about how she does things with her wheelchair. And also, just how she does things when she’s out travelling. Which is very cool too. So those are some good ones to get you started.
Marty:
You’re right. That was a bit of a setup question because I have definitely followed some of those folks. Especially wheelchairrapunzel is, I think –
Liza:
She’s great.
Marty:
Amazing in every way. So, I want to move to our final segment. This is a segment that we ask the same questions to all of our guests. Are you ready?
Liza:
I’m ready.
Marty:
What is one personal accommodation you make for yourself?
Liza:
That’s a good question. Tell me if you can hear someone dragging their garbage can outside. It’s rather loud. But that is a very good question. One thing I do almost as soon as I claim a desk space is I will change all of my programs to run in dark mode. That’s cool, having some dark text on the white background is OK. But as soon as I’m supposed to get anything done on that workstation I’m going to change it to my preference. Or else I’ll just be feeling bad throughout the day. It’s because it’s not ideal for how I work. That’s a big one for me.
Marty:
Second question. What is something about the world that keeps you up at night?
Liza:
I don’t want to be super on brand with this. But it’s definitely just people being marginalized by ableds. I’ll use the A word. There is a lot of ableism that it mainly hurts people who have disabilities, but it also hurts me a little bit when I’m trying to teach some people about inclusive design and how a lot of people perceive things in a different way and what changes we can make to make that happen. There is a lot of just not understanding, which is fine. But then there’s some resistance where you just kind of wish that there were more integration to begin with. Growing up in schools, or there were more representation when you watch TV. Just to show you that different kinds of people are everywhere. A lot of just things that you’ve learned over the years, and just vices you’ve developed by living your own abled life you might be missing out on a lot of things that are really important to help give other people access just to some of the same things that you have. I do have a lot of trouble getting work off my mind, and that’s not just because there’s a lot of work to do. It’s just because it feels like it’s very important work, and it’s so glaringly obvious what the right thing to do is. I just gotta figure out how to get people to think about it in the right way. So, that keeps me up.
Marty:
Michael?
Mike:
I just wanted to ask: Talking about media and so forth, this is a very, very small example of not using the ideal form of people in media. But have you seen the Pixar shorts series?
Liza:
No.
Mike:
Well, they have one, their sixth one was called Loop. It’s about a non-verbal autistic girl, and this like really sort of chatty or sort of talkative young man or boy. They’re part of a school trip, and they’re doing a thing. It’s really a – If you haven’t seen it, and for any of our listeners, I’d highly encourage you to go watch it or listen to it. It was one of those points that was like, they could really mess this up if they do this wrong. I was prepared to be offended, and actually I thought it was quite lovely. I would encourage you to look at it. We just need more of those kind of examples.
Liza:
No, that’s great. Now, I didn’t think I was going to come to this podcast recording with something to take away on my own personal list, so I’ll definitely check that out. It’s very easy to just look around you and make that into your cartoon or kids’ show. But yeah, it has to be kind of a big effort.
Marty:
Our final question is: What is one recommendation for a game, book, movie, TV show – wherever you want to take this – what’s one recommendation you have for us right now?
Liza:
Also, a good question. This was a difficult question. I recently started playing a game called Space Team. I’ll tell you, it started out as a phone app, and it was very interesting. It’s kind of a fun perception game that you’ll like, get on the same Wi-fi as people, and you’re like in front of a spaceship. You’re in charge of making it go in space, and not crash, and everyone else is too. Everything on the spaceship is named something very wacky. Sometimes you have to do certain tasks with them. Like you’ll have to flip the bongulator switch, or something. Sometimes. But you also have to tell your friends to do something weird on their thing. They don’t have a bongulator switch, they have something else. So, you’re all just yelling very crazy things to each other trying not to crash a ship. They made it into a card game. So, I did a tiny little card game of that, and it’s very fun. It’s like, it feels collaborative, and you get to kind of yell. It’s a good time for quarantine when you’re kind of stuck inside and going a little mad, maybe.
Marty:
That is the first time I’ve done a recommendation and I’ve been able to get right on my phone and do it. I really appreciate that.
Liza:
There you go.
Marty:
I am so excited to play Space Team.
Liza:
There’s access, baby.
Marty:
It is so great. Liza, I love working with you every day. I feel so fortunate for that. I am especially appreciative that you came on and shared with us. Thank you, just, so much for the work that you do every day and spending a little bit of extra time with us here on Article 19.
Liza:
Certainly. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity, and it has been a blast for me as well.
Voiceover:
If you like what you heard today, and want to explore more about digital accessibility, inclusivity, or to schedule a time to talk with us you can find the whole Tamman team at tammaninc.com. That’s T-A-M-M-A-N-I-N-C.com. Or follow us on social media at Tamman, Inc. on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. We’ll talk to you again next time.
Up Next
Podcasts
Episode 6: Software Engineering with A11Y
