Episode 14: A Conversation with WeCo President Lynn Wehrman
Article 19 co-host and Tamman co-founder, Michael Mangos interviews Lynn Wehrman, President of WeCo. WeCo is made up of accessibility experts who live with disabilities. Mike’s conversation with Lynn spans the breadth of the ADA, technical accessibility, legal compliance, and business use cases for accessibility.
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Transcript
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.
Michael:
Hello, and welcome to Article 19. My name is Michael Mangos, CEO and cofounder of Tamman, and I’m filling in for Marty Molloy today as the host for our conversation. This podcast is a call for others to join us in a bigger conversation around the ADA, digital accessibility, and access to information. At Tamman we’re working to build the inclusive web every day, but to do that we need all of us—working together and learning together. Thanks for listening to Article 19. I’m delighted today to welcome our guest, Lynn Wehrman, founder and president of WeCo Accessibility Services, a mission-based consulting group founded and staffed entirely by digital technologists who live with disabilities. Lynn began her career working in digital accessibility as one of the first government digital accessibility specialists in 2008, with an education in communications and professional background in federal program coordination. Her work in the Minnesota Department of Transportations’ Americans with Disabilities Act transition plan resulted in groundbreaking work in government digital accessibility. Lynn founded WeCo Accessibility Services after living with a lifelong cognitive disability, and seeing firsthand the power of people living with disabilities working as subject matter experts. Fake fact about Lynn: before she started on a path toward accessibility, she was the primary backup singer and dancer for several tours with Prince. Let me formally bring in our guest Lynn—it’s so great to have you on the show.
Lynn:
Thanks, Mike. It’s great to be here.
Michael:
We generally open up with one easy question for everybody: What is one personal accommodation that you use or make for yourself while you’re working?
Lynn:
You know, it’s interesting, because I am probably the last person I ever think about accommodating. I’m concerned about everyone else. My disability—I live with lifelong diagnosis of clinical depression, and I can tell when it’s creeping up on me because I often say that it feels like I have cobwebs all over me. It’s anxiety, and the one thing that I have to do, is I have to take time off. Which is really, really hard for somebody that has a German work ethic like I do, but that is—
Michael:
Well, and well and—as an entrepreneur, I mean we’re both entrepreneurs, it can be really hard to pull away.
Lynn:
It is. It is. And we love our work, so it is hard to walk away from it.
Michael:
Yeah, absolutely. I know—when you’re passionate about something, especially. Do you find success in doing that? I know it’s hard, but do you actually find that you’re successful at taking that time when you need it?
Lynn:
Absolutely.
Michael:
Good.
Lynn:
And if I don’t feel like I should do it, I remind myself that I am modeling—particularly to our other leaders in the company who have the same problem I do in not walking away—that it’s really important to model self-care and the ability to keep your life balanced.
Michael:
Let’s start with a little bit of background. I mean, I gave sort of a bio of you at the start here. Is there anything else that you want to tell listeners about yourself before we get into other questions?
Lynn:
Well, I think that the first thing that comes to mind when people meet me if they don’t really know my background is that I’m not disabled. They assume I’m not disabled. And I remember an early business advisor asking me what it was like to be the only person in my company who didn’t live with disability. So I think that it’s important to know that disabilities come in all shapes and sizes, and there are lots and lots of disabilities that are not apparent. And making assumptions about people is never a good thing.
Michael:
I’ve heard you describe in the past a “professional perfect storm” leading you to making information accessible to the public. Can you talk about that in the context of founding WeCo?
Lynn:
Yeah. In that description I often use of my own career, I started out—really, in my young career, not being able to work. From the time I was in my early 30s to my early 40s, I was really sidelined because of profound depression and an undiagnosed disorder called borderline personality disorder traits. And so I really wasn’t able to begin working, and realizing my potential, until I was in my later 30s or early 40s. And so I had a communications degree, I also had a lot of sale skills, and I kind of got onto the sales treadmill through the banking industry, and I decided that I really wanted to be able to use my writing. So I applied for a job with a quasi-transportation agency with downtown Minneapolis called the Downtown Minneapolis Transportation Demand Management Organization, which is a mouthful—
Michael:
I was gonna say, if that’s not hard enough to say. Sure.
Lynn:
But it worked with the City of Minneapolis Public Works office to encourage employers and companies to get employees into bus programs, encourage employees to bike into downtown Minneapolis to try to mitigate air quality issues in downtown Minneapolis. And I really loved it. And after that, I found myself at—as a federal program coordinator at the Minnesota Department of Transportation running something called a Rural Transit Assistance program. I really loved that, because I got to work with small town bus drivers, and it was my job to see to it that they had training so that they understood how the Americans with Disabilities Act worked for them, how to secure wheelchairs in their small transit buses—it was a really, really rewarding job. But I did not fit well in state government. I was a little bit too productive, and I kinda got sidelined, and as a result, a friend of mine, Kristie Billiar, who is still the Americans with Disabilities Act transition coordinator, asked me to do communications work for the ADA Transition Plan. And my web development skills were there, and I met stakeholders who lived with disabilities who were trying to help the state inventory an entire infrastructure of inaccessible curb ramps, sidewalks, and get them upgraded, and it was my job to make sure that how we communicated that to the public was accessible. So I went into the homes of these stakeholders who lived with disabilities and asked them to show me how they were using our website so I could figure out how to build accessibly for them. And this is back in 2008, when nobody really knows what this means, and I wound up doing accessible meeting agendas, and we worked together and became friends, and eventually they came to me and said, “You can be so much more effective for us if you start your own business, and we can create a job for people as subject matter experts with disabilities, doing this work that you’re doing. So that’s what I mean by “perfect storm,” is it was a lot of different things that just came together, and that I had no idea that I would wind up here some day.
Michael:
That’s really interesting. I mean, going into the homes of people and interviewing them, I mean a lot of that is doing some of the contextual inquiry, or like UX research of sorts? It’s sort of related, or at least reminds me of that kind of activity.
Lynn:
I had no idea what a screen reader was, and sat next to native screen reader users, people who used speech recognition software, modified mouses, and I really had a crash course. Yeah. But it was a wonderful way to learn.
Michael:
It sounds like you have—one that’s started from a place where you got this like, rapid crash course with all this deep immersion in all the different types of assistive technologies. It kind of like leads me to my next question, which is, why do people with similar disabilities often require different assistive technologies or accommodations?
Lynn:
Think about you, and think about your friends. You have different preferences. You may do the same things, but have different ways of doing them. And you may both be really good at video games, but you might be good at them in different ways, or approach how you use them in different ways. People living with disabilities are no different. And I think that one of the assumptions that’s made is that when someone has cerebral palsy, every person that we meet with cerebral palsy is supposed to have cerebral palsy in the same way. That disabilities are very, very different in how they manifest themselves, and how someone interacts with them, and how they live their life with their disability depends on what they prefer. A really good example is that one of our early accessibility specialists was a young man with cerebral palsy. And he had a speech impediment, and he didn’t have full use of his hands. Now, we had other individuals on our team who lived with CP who decided that they would use speech recognition software because typing was so hard. Or they might use, for instance, a stylus. But this individual really just didn’t want to use a device, and he just typed slowly with his finger. And I always think it’s a great example of how you can take people with the same disabilities, and have them manifest themselves differently according to what they prefer and how they interact.
Michael:
As you’re talking, it’s reminding me that in my own travels, I’ve kind of had the same experience talking to clients, or colleagues, or people in the business, just around everybody has their own lived experience, their own education level, and that, to your point, everybody is an individual. And instead of us trying to force everyone with the same perceived disability, they don’t all need to be treated the same. Or, not everybody’s gonna want to, or be able to use the same things. That’s great. So, Lynn, you and I have talked briefly in the past about sort of making the case for digital accessibility to businesses. And I’d like to unpack that a little bit here with you again, if we can. I have often taken sort of the moral argument around doing digital accessibility as being the right thing to do, to include people, but I know that you have expressed that, one, you may not even like my view, or even hate my view, and that you really believe in the economic argument for it. So I’d love for you to take a moment and just make the economic case for us. And then maybe tell us why you maybe don’t like my moral argument.
Lynn:
OK. And I didn’t even really know that the moral argument bugged me so much until we started talking about it, but I actually went over and talked to our operations director about it this morning, and she— OK. Everybody does this. “It’s the right thing to do.” And it is. There’s no argument. Being accessible and inclusive is the right thing to do. But my counterargument is that people who live with disabilities are very capable people. They also are the largest unrecognized minority group in the United States and in the world, and they have buying power.
Michael:
Yeah.
Lynn:
So why— Well, in the United States, we’re coming up on 26, 27% of us that live with disabilities—as a business person, why would you want to exclude that much of the market share? So while I appreciate very much that people think it’s the right thing to do, it is by no means the only reason. And I think that what bothers me about that is that there’s this sense that people with disabilities are poor little things that need to be catered to, because we know we will never make money, but we’re going to do this anyway. And you know what, we just don’t need a handout.
Michael:
Yeah.
Lynn:
We’re capable.
Michael:
Sure.
Lynn:
You can make money off of us, we’re just like everyone else.
Michael:
Yeah, I certainly don’t want to be in the position of pitying anyone. I’ve worked with enough people with disabilities— I’ve had the fortune of having met a lot of different people—having employed a lot of different people, many of them with moderate to severe disabilities, and seeing how people can really like, work past that. Oftentimes, despite the lack of digital accessibility. But seeing that it can also be frustrating.
Lynn:
I think what you’re saying is that people with disabilities persevere.
Michael:
Yes. That’s the word I’m looking for. Thank you.
Lynn:
But when you think about it, OK, what if this were you? And what if you had a choice to get through life with less, with more challenge, or sit at home totally bored. What would you choose? But I think that’s it, is that people with disabilities, why do they persevere? And that’s kind of the other assumption, is that every person living with a disability is a great employee who’s super motivated—that’s another assumption. And true, a lot of us who live with disabilities are much more dedicated than employees who don’t live with disabilities, but why? Because our opportunities are so limited. Not because we’re just exceptionally grateful or good people, but because the opportunities are limited, and so—Michael, I really encourage people to get down to, “What are you saying and what do you mean by it?”
Michael:
So Lynn, I have struggled making the economic argument with businesses in the past, because oftentimes they have said, “Well, if I’m going to make an investment, you know, I get a bigger return on my investment for going for somebody who’s in the middle of the bell curve.” And oftentimes they don’t want to shoot for power users, because they need a lot of features and tricks, and they just won’t sell as many copies of their software, or their product, or whatever it is. So, sort of that end of the bell curve. Another end of the bell curve of people who need additional accommodations or additional accessibility, they say, “I’m gonna have an equally poor return on investment there. Do I really want to serve the ends of the bell curve?” Have you encountered any good arguments for businesses that are maybe in that product design space where they’re saying, “I don’t really want to shoot for the tips of the curve, I just want that middle two thirds”?
Lynn:
Well, you know the argument that we hate to use, but that is the fact, is that it’s the law. And you’re not going to get around that. And that the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to all information that is out there to the public, and it has a very, very strong legal precedence of being applied to websites, software; things like that. But the other thing, too, is that, there again, we’re back into assumption land. Where we are assuming that none of our real customers live with disabilities. Do you know that?
Michael:
Right.
Lynn:
Do you really know that? I don’t think you do. You know if—you can look at me and think that I have no disabilities at all, and when my disability is active, I can have a very difficult time reading, for instance, so.
Michael:
Interesting. When that happens, with the reading, is it just a matter of giving yourself space? Or do you have an additional accommodation you give to yourself for that?
Lynn:
Well—and I often say that I’m—some days I’m more disabled than others, and I think that there are a lot of us that applies to. But when it impacts my cognition, I have to rest. I just have to rest. And there is no magic timeline of knowing when that cognition is gonna come back. I have pretty good indication of when it’s sneaking up on me, so I can get ahead of it.
Michael:
Yeah. That makes perfect sense. What do you say to an employer who thinks that it’s too expensive or too complicated to hire people with disabilities?
Lynn:
Well, I would say that they don’t have the facts. Because we just received word this week that we have once again been designated as a National Organization on Disability: Leading Disability Employer, and we are tiny. We have 10 people on staff supporting the work of about 15 to 20 certified test consultants in the field, and we were founded accessibly. And, on average, the cost of—on accessible accommodation for an employee in the United States is $500. And there’s a lot of research that supports that. I often say that the biggest, most consistent accommodation that I make at our company is simply pulling a chair out from a table so someone with a wheelchair can slide in.
Michael:
Yeah.
Lynn:
Many of our staff came to us knowing exactly what they needed. Many of them had their own software already and preferred to use it. Fact, we just went through a large equipment purchase a couple weeks ago, and we had some accessibility specialists that just filed their notification that, “I’m using my own equipment, it’s easier.” So it really isn’t as expensive as people think it is, and if you have a robust, reasonable accommodation process, it will guide you through it. And we do. I can recommend that if an organization does not, they can contact JAN—Job Access Network—and those people are paid for with your tax dollars, they work for you, and they’re wonderful and they’re very helpful.
Michael:
That’s great. You know, as you’re talking it’s also making me think that—to add to the economic argument, for digital accessibility in particular—you know, a lot of companies to even reduce their cost for accommodation are going to buy other people’s software. You know, whether it’s a SaaS product, or whether it’s an on-prem software title, businesses will end up buying software from other businesses when it is accessible so that they don’t have to worry about these kinds of potentially more expensive accommodations, or even exceptions to their security policies around allowing certain types of software on the network that may not be already preapproved by their security department. I think that’s really, to me, the most exciting turn I think we’re seeing in the last two years, is companies demanding this from other companies.
Lynn:
Oh?
Michael:
So, if you want to make software, you want to provide services, not just consumer-facing, but like—businesses are going to demand it, and then when they do, that’s when I think we’re gonna see this big economic shift into digital accessibility. I think we’re already seeing it. I’ve—at least I’m feeling it and seeing it, the customers that I serve in the B2B space. I think this is what I’ve always hoped would happen, for the last five, six, seven years that I’ve been doing this. And now we’re seeing it on an economic level. I think it’s very exciting.
Lynn:
Yeah, we have so many clients that are using, like, third party applications or different mechanisms on their websites, and when we do a manual audit and we find out that their—the booking system they purchased is, for instance, isn’t accessible, and they just say, “What do we do?” and we say, “Vote with your feet.”
Michael:
Yeah.
Lynn:
“You know, there are vendors out there that are happy to create accessible booking systems for you,” and it is, it is really turning. It is changing things.
Michael:
You know, it’s funny too—I mean, gosh, I’ve had all these thoughts floating into my head during this conversation now around like, the consumerization of commercial software. You know, where businesses have a lot of bring-your-own-device, sometimes bring-your-own-software—like, you even mentioned that for your own staff—because of opening up the business toolkit that we provide to our employees to include things that they might want to bring in the door. So, there’s this blurred line between what is a consumer product and what’s a business product.
Lynn:
Oh yeah.
Michael:
And I—I think that’s also gonna drive more of this, too. I think—all of these things are coalescing here to make it a good time for digital accessibility, and the advancement there, so.
Lynn:
Absolutely.
Michael:
So, my last question around digital accessibility and economics is really around, you know, the ADA—to be candid, at least—I think we all kind of agree on this, or generally this is the sense, that the ADA has kind of failed in the space of employment for people with disabilities. You know, being 31 years old, made some gains there, but has not really made the gains I think that it was intended to make. Why do you think it’s been so hard to move the needle as far as probably the authors of the ADA really wanted it to?
Lynn:
Well first of all, the ADA, in my humble opinion, is one of the only laws on the US books where ignorance of the law means that you have to be warned before you have to comply.
Michael:
Interesting.
Lynn:
And honestly, I think that is because that law applies to people who live with disabilities, and as much as we are in this woke moment, people with disabilities still are considered to be second-class citizens in many respects. Now, I know that most people do not wish it to be that way, but it is a societal norm that we don’t think about that we are complicit in. And when we have rulings that say “You have to warn a business owner before you bring action against them for an inaccessible building, or an inaccessible website under the ADA,” what other law in the United States do people get warning before you can bring legal action?
Michael:
Sort of enshrined in the process of it. I mean, there are warnings, but they’re kind of at the discretion of an officer or something, whereas this is really baked into the plan, right?
Lynn:
Yes. There are states that are passing laws that say that the ADA is only applicable if somebody gets warned before they get sued. So, when you take a civil rights law, like the ADA, and you start creating supporting legislation that degrades it like that, how effective is that gonna be?
Michael:
Absolutely, no, I love that answer. That’s fantastic. It’s fantastic. So, I’ve got a question leading up here regarding the definitions of neurodiversity and cognition. We’ve not had an expert like you on who can speak to both neurodiversity and cognitive disabilities quite in the same way that I think you can before here on the podcast. Can you talk to, like, the designers, builders, managers that are listeners of the podcast, about what they should be thinking about first when they are creating a web property?
Lynn:
Well first of all, making an assumption that because someone is neurodiverse, or lives with some form of a cognitive disability, that there really is no accessibility consideration for that person because they’re not using a device, for instance. That is really off-base. I often tell developers and designers, “The principles that you learned when you were being trained are really the ones that you need to apply as an accommodation for people with cognitive disabilities.” Because the design consideration, the accessible design consideration, is the accommodation. And it can be as simple as taking a website and making sure that there’s adequate white space. That information isn’t overwhelming. You’re not using—and having come from government, I can say I saw lots of websites where they were used as file cabinets. Like every back edition of the department’s newsletter is on the newsletter page instead of, you know, maybe you just need the latest three editions, then you’ve got an archive somewhere else. But it’s not overwhelming people. Also, graphics are important to people who live with cognitive disabilities, so having those graphics, but making sure that if you’re using a carousel, and you’ve got rotating graphics, that there are properly marked on and off switches for that. Our website, our very first website, had a picture carousel, and people are always shocked to hear that. But people with cognitive disabilities—the general population tends to be visual learners anyway. But I know for me, with my disability, I appreciate having meaningful graphics. I’m a geek anyway, but I like charts and graph— I think that not making assumptions that people don’t need accommodation, and then sticking to those basics are the important things.
Michael:
So I’d like to talk a little bit about neurodiverse or cognitive impairment for a sec. You know, generally in the industry, is something like sensitivity to motion or color, or brightness on screen—maybe due to a traumatic brain injury—is that considered a cognitive impairment, or a perceptual impairment?
Lynn:
That’s interesting. I’m not sure I can answer that for you. I know that the US Department of Human Services has a disability classification called Cognitive Disabilities, and that’s a huge umbrella that covers everything from—things people don’t think are cognitive disabilities, like clinical depression. Never occurs to people. Attention-deficit disorder, intellectual disabilities, dyslexia, traumatic brain injury; so it’s a wide umbrella. I know that we have individuals on our team that we have a—basically an internal mandate to staff up our usability team with enough individuals in all four classifications, so that at any point in time if our clients need a tester who is blind or low vision—we also try to keep somebody on staff who’s colorblind—then someone with hearing disability—very, very excited that we’re bringing on our first ASL-fluent tester—and then mobility disabilities that impact computer use, and then cognitive disabilities. So we have some individuals on our team right now that live with autism, and they have been exceptionally helpful—I don’t know if you wanted me to go into this yet, but we had a very interesting project this winter. We were approached by a whiskey distillery here in Minneapolis that was creating a cocktail room. And this was during COVID, which is a shame, because we really wanted to be able to go into the build-out and talk with them, but what they did, is that we brought in a tester who represented one for each major disability classification—cognitive, hearing, mobility, sight—and they walked us through. They had computer graphics of what the space was gonna look like, we verbally described them to our tester who was blind, and we gave feedback. And I think that one of the most interesting parts of that project was that our tester who was autistic was able to really talk about how sound and light impacted him, and what would make him comfortable to be able to be in that space. Could there be a part of that room where he could get away from the noise, and regenerate? And actually, the article was just released in Bar & Restaurant Magazine last week, so if your listeners would like to go and learn more about that project, it’s out there.
Michael:
Yeah, that sounds amazing. You know, what you’ve brought up is something that I often talk about—I have lots of different examples that I use—that’s a great example, in fact a fantastic example of, when you bring people with a variety of different abilities, or living at different points in the spectrum of ability in a variety of categories, you’re gonna end up with a space that’s really much more inclusive. You know, I often talk about the Twitter example, creating like, a racist AI bot to crop photos. But you know, when you have essentially a team of younger to middle-aged white male software developers, they’re gonna make software that looks for white faces in pictures. And having diversity on a team, it doesn’t have to be just disability diversity, right? Just—any amount of diversity on the team ends up making products that are inherently more inclusive, and the broader you can, you know, grow your team to include people with different abilities, or different traits, or different lived experiences, the better your products become. That’s such a great story. So, generally in the industry, or even just within WeCo, do you consider this motion sensitivity or brightness sensitivity that we talked about in an earlier question, and autism, part of a single neurodiverse category, or do you actually separate it at WeCo?
Lynn:
Well, it’s really more about what our clients are asking us for.
Michael:
Sure.
Lynn:
You know, we do live with labels. There’s no other way around it. But it’s more about the skill set that the client needs, and sometimes that skill set fits under a title called autism. Sometimes it fits under a title called “I live with a cognitive disability” and the client needs a tester that lives with some type of a cognitive disability, which we qualify in the report with the feedback so that they know how to frame the feedback they’re getting from the tester. But for us it’s less about labeling people and—it’s always a challenge for me, because we’re in our WeCo bubble. We talk about this a lot, because there’s only one of us on the team that doesn’t live with a disability, that we don’t really look at labels that same way other people do. Does that make sense?
Michael:
Yeah, absolutely. Look, we talked about this at the top of the hour, right? Like, that everybody has their own disability, their own lived experience, their own reactions, their own perseverance, right? And so everybody’s different, and once you recognize that, the labels kind of disappear, and it’s not as important, right?
Lynn:
Yeah. It becomes so natural in our environment. And I always remember when we were in one of our early test cases—and I was managing the testers, I was doing a lot—and we had a tester with a cognitive disability that dropped out of a test case, and I called another tester who lived with a mobility impairment, and I said, “Do you have a cognitive disability? I really need someone with a cognitive disability,” and she said, “No, but I could go out and get injured if you’d like me to.” For us, it’s such a skill set.
Michael:
Yeah.
Lynn:
It’s a skill set. It’s not a terrible, horrible thing that happened to us, it’s—we need somebody that has some sort of a cognitive impairment of some type to give us that feedback.
Michael:
Yeah.
Lynn:
And we depend upon that.
Michael:
Lynn, I’m gonna draw us to a close here. I’ve got three final questions for you that we generally ask of everyone. First question is, which living person do you most admire?
Lynn:
That is really a tough one, because I think that when I consider that question, I look at so many people who work for our company. So, I’m gonna name a few. The first is one of our lead certified testers, Maureen[ph], and her husband Paul. And Maureen is blind, and is in a wheelchair. Paul was born without arms and with only one leg. And they’re a wonderful couple, and they live independently, and if you ever need an attitude adjustment, go hang out at their house. They don’t complain about anything, they live a full life, and those two people made me so much less afraid of ever becoming physically disabled. The other person is our communication specialist, Toni Grundstrom, who was diagnosed with MS as a young mother in her late 20s, and has lived with that diagnosis, and has slowly transitioned from being able to walk, to walking with crutches, to being in a wheelchair, and she is a stained glass artist. And she works on our communications team. And it’s people like that—they have taken so much fear out of my life. Because there is joy and fulfillment to be had even if your body doesn’t cooperate. So—
Michael:
Yeah. Yeah. As you’re saying that story, the title of this podcast is going to be Getting Comfortable with Discomfort. We got that phrase from you, that’s yours. So I give you full credit. As you tell that story, both those people and their families that you admire, I think that really embodies sort of that title, you know, which is, hey, like put yourself in this position of being uncomfortable—getting comfortable with that—and then suddenly everything sort of opens up, and attitudes change, and the world gets a little more possible, a little brighter; you know, I think it’s wonderful.
Lynn:
Yeah, and really, I’d just like to say, Michael, get over your discomfort. Because your discomfort is excluding people. Go sit down next to somebody and talk to them if they’re in a wheelchair, or if they can’t see. Because you’re missing that person because you might not know what to say; they’ll teach you what to say, they’ll cut you a break.
Michael:
I spent a lot of time living abroad, and in multiple countries where I didn’t speak the language—or, hardly at all—and I gotta tell you, it felt very disabling. And I felt very alone, and people were afraid to come up to me because I looked a little different. One, I mean physically, I looked different, and people—I’m also dressed differently—
Lynn:
Yep.
Michael:
—and then once they hear me start to speak, they can tell, “That guy’s different.” Like, very different.
Lynn:
Yep.
Michael:
And I spent a lot of lonely days in foreign countries. Sometimes I was able to get past it, but it was all on me to sort of break down the wall. And I feel like there’s something relatable there, if not identical, you know, at least there’s a little bit of acknowledgment that I got very comfortable with discomfort in my own way there.
Lynn:
Yeah.
Michael:
And then professionally, same thing as you have, you know, like meeting a lot of people with disabilities in my work has made me a lot more comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Lynn:
There are some things that are far more important than your discomfort, and that’s acknowledging people—
Michael:
Yeah.
Lynn:
—far more important.
Michael:
All right, second question: Who’s you favorite hero or heroine from fiction?
Lynn:
OK, without a question, it is Anne Elliot from Persuasion, written by Jane Austen. Basically had a lot of focus on British literature in college, and what I love about this heroine is her ability to persevere even when everyone around her tells her she can’t.
Michael:
What’s one recommendation for either a game, a book, movie, podcast, TV show, that you think people should go out and listen to, or read, or consume right now?
Lynn:
Well, for fun I’m reading The Duke and I by Julia Quinn, which is what they based Bridgerton—that Netflix thing—on. Which is no surprise, because I’m a Jane Austen fan, and Julia Quinn’s a Jane Austen of our time. But my educational reading that I’m reading right now is The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabella[sic] Wilkerson. And talk about getting comfortable with discomfort, that’s all I’m gonna say.
Michael:
Oh, great. I can’t wait to go out and get a copy. Well Lynn, I really appreciate you spending time with us today, sharing your insights, your experience, your opinions, challenging me on some of my own prior assumptions and/or beliefs. I’d like to do it again sometime, we’ll keep the conversation going.
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 at on social media at Tamman Inc, on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. We’ll talk to you again next time.
