 I'm Dr. Josh Lobner, Global Head of Inclusion at Wonderman Thompson, and I lead the Inclusive Experience Practice. I'm fully blind in my left eye and legally blind in my right. My name is Catherine Chavez, and on my social medias, I go by Katie Zeiss. I am a wife and a mommy who just happens to be blind. My name is Scarlett May. My name is Alexa Heinrich. I'm the social media manager for St. Petersburg College in Florida, as well as the director of the website Accessible Social. I feel like growing up, my fear was always, people are gonna see me and know that I'm blind and not want to interact with me because I'm weird or needy or incapable of anything. I wish people just view disability as, hey, that's part of who she is, but that's not who she is as a person. I think the number one thing I wish people knew is that being disabled is not knowing how to accommodate and handle people with disabilities. That's what makes it hard. Social media channels that brands own or are part of connects to something larger in the digital space and sometimes offline. And so we wanna make sure that that impact, that accessibility is there in the social media, is there on the website, is there an email marketing or physical brand experiences in ways that are meaningful and connective and continue to move consumers down that funnel. Everyone is going to become disabled at some point in their life, so we should be prioritizing that. We the 15 is an initiative by Paralympics, the Invictus Games along with other organizations to be able to showcase that 15% of the global population has some type of disability. For a brand to potentially overlook that as niche is really just a misstep in navigating who their consumer base is and the size of the disability community that wants to be brand loyal. I would love to see more on-screen signing. And if not, close captioning is always gonna be my number one. All text, that's the one that I really harp of a lot of different accounts for. All text is making your image accessible for people who are using assistive technology like a screen reader. When it comes to a screen reader, it's basically picking up written content, so words, tweets, posts, stuff like that. The iPhone has something called voiceover with a talk, whatever I'm tapping. And to select something, all I gotta do is double tap. For example, my TikTok. Alt tags, audio descriptions for video, captioning for video. Those are things that sometimes we as brands look to as the last thing to do. But I would hope in this conversation we can start to reframe what accessibility means. Accessibility can be creative. We can look at what Netflix Stranger Things did with their captioning that got worldwide attention because of the eloquent words that they incorporated into their captioning. We can look at Mastercard and what they did with their Touchcard commercial and how they incorporated audio descriptions in a way that was directly in line with the creative. She taps a terminal and takes her latte. Thank you. In the disability communities, there are a variety of different tools and aspects of how we try to equitably and accessibly engage media that's out there. Sometimes it's accessible, other times there can be barriers. When a piece of content isn't accessible for me, especially specific features on apps or even like social media platforms, it is frustrating and it is annoying. I definitely feel frustrated that I don't get to feel included. I feel like everyone loves to, you know, scroll through social media on their downtime and throughout the day and to not be able to have access to everything that we enjoy that like the hearing community has is really frustrating. Social platforms now are recognizing people with disabilities as content creators. LinkedIn has created and recognized talk disabled voices on their platform. TikTok has done the same thing where they've recognized a number of different content creators. So the platform that's easiest for me to use YouTube and TikTok just because a lot of the content is verbal, like where people are having conversations and it's not so much just visual, which obviously I can't see. So a platform that is mostly visual isn't really helpful for me. I would definitely say TikTok. That's my favorite app to use. I think now, especially since I have automatic closed captioning, it makes it really easy for me to use it and I have access to all the videos and I'm able to enjoy myself while other apps don't have that inclusivity. I've had like brands reach out to me that they want me to advertise certain apps or games and there's been a couple of times where it's not accessible at all. I feel like a lot of ads don't include closed captioning and I don't see any deaf people being included in ads, maybe one or two, like including myself. So my experience with advertisement now on social media, a lot of it is like any movies or TV show. So when it comes to ads like that on YouTube, they're a little bit harder because it'll show the commercial, but it won't say like verbally what the name of the movie or the show is. I think my favorite this year is definitely the NFL in relation to Justina and how she was able to sign with Rihanna. And I just really love the fact that I could be included in the Super Bowl. And I love Rihanna, so for me to be able to understand her music and be included was really amazing. And that's definitely my favorite. I feel like they did it really well with inclusivity. There was a Jeep ad that had closed captions that were really creative because the entire video was animal noises playing out a very dramatic song while Jeep tumbled through the wilderness. I thought it was really clever, very well done ad and the captions were really good because it really added to the creativity. We should recognize that there are many different paths to accessibility and transparent dialogue, a strategic plan and just starting to act on that plan and allowing disabled consumers and others to be able to have a voice in the conversation in a way that they can be a part of that movement forward. When I talk about accessibility for marketers, I always stress that it's really important to step outside of your own lived experience when you create content because your audience doesn't necessarily look like you or act like you or live like you. Whether it's content creators, whether it's AI, supporting accessibility across social platforms, there are a number of different initiatives that I feel like social media is continuing to progress in this space. I am very conflicted about AI tools like chat, GBT. We can use AI for good, for describing images, for captioning, but so far I'm not really that impressed. YouTube has an auto-generating caption feature which is decent, but again, it still has a long way to go. There's some ways that AI is supporting accessibility and disability inclusion, but in particular, if we're talking about diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, those all at their fundamental core are about humans. AI can be a part of it, it will be and it already is, but there needs to be some type of human consideration to navigate that path forward.