 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this panel on cloud native perspectives, understanding and advocating for accessibility in tech. And today, we're going to deep dive into what accessibility means in the realm of tech and all of our panelists and myself each live with different disabilities and challenges. Felly yw'r gweithio bod nhw, r oeddaeth hynny'n amlwgr, y barnyddaeth ymlaen nhw, ac y byddwyr. Mae'r felly'n credu am y eu hwnnw i gilydd mewn cael y profiadau i gael eu gwneudol ar wahanol. mae'n bwysig a'r hynny'n blaen i gaelhyfnol yn gwahanol ac yn ddarchodai. Dwi'n fawr i'n gweithio eu mynd i ac y pannolist. Mae'n amser James Spurin. Mae'n cael ei wneud i'r company neu'r cymdeithasio'r cyfnod a'r cyfnod Cwbeneddau'r cyfrannu. Mae'r cyfrannu yn ymdweithio'r cyfrannu yn ymdweithio'r cyfrannu mae'r ysgol ymdweith yn ymdweithio'r cyfrannu ac mae'n cael ei gweithio'r cyfrannu ac mae'n cael ei gweithio'r cyfrannu yn ymdweithio. Ryn. Hi, I'm Ryn Mancuso, they then pronounce. I work at Honeycomb IO as a developer community manager and I'm one of the maintainers for the open telemetry and user fig. I have a chronic illness that affects the connection between my brain and heart which means that if I stand for too long I might get lightheaded or pass out. So navigating the conference centre can be pretty tricky. Oh, Devon, you have your own mic. You guys hear me? Oh, yep, okay. So my name is Devon Nant. I'm a solution architect at VMware by Broadcom now. Since Broadcom just bought VMware, some people probably know. I am blind, totally blind, I went blind from several accidents when I was a kid and had just worked in the IT field. I went to college and got a degree in computers and worked at IBM for 10 or 15 years and then did some other consulting work and then got to VMware and now I'm at VMware by Broadcom. Hello, my name is Purvi Kanal. I'm a software engineer and I work at Honeycomb IO. I'm also involved in the open telemetry community project, namely in the JavaScript space focused on web browsers. And I identify, I've been diagnosed with ADHD and autism later in life. And I care very deeply about web accessibility. I've been working in the space of web and web accessibility for about 10 years. And, yeah, I was just really thinking about moving through the world with a disability justice lens and viewing disability as a way to ask for your accommodations more than something that might disqualify you from participating in things. And I'll hand it over to Emmanuel. Thank you, Purvi. Hi, my name is Emmanuel. I am a dashboard. So I use a app to follow you to understand you. So my eye is on my phone. I am a developer to show you in Paris I'm French, of course. And I'm involved in group CNCF deaf and hard of hearing group to explain about accessibility for deaf people. And I fight every day for accessibility and the web is very important to us to a website which will be accessible for all. Beautiful. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Purvi, I'm going to actually start with you. You mentioned there the autism and ADHD. These are two areas in particular. They're very close to me. I've got children. I've got autism. My wife has ADHD. It's something I actually see in all manners of life as a challenge. It's these areas are often overlooked. They're not given the support and recognition that they actually deserve and would love to know more about how this has actually been a factor for you, your own experiences and some of your strategies for this. I came to these diagnoses later in life so I wasn't diagnosed as a child. It started with discovering my ADHD and getting that diagnosis and it was such a different experience than when I got my autism diagnosis as well. There's still, I find, quite a stigma around autism as compared to ADHD. One nice thing about that I found working in tech was that I found generally neurodivergence can be overrepresented compared to other industries that I'd worked in previously and so it was nice to be around in spaces that felt much more comfortable for me because there were more accommodations. Some of the challenges are accommodations for neurodivergence and I want to stress that this shows up differently for everybody with neurodivergence. This is just my personal experience. Big conferences can be really overwhelming. There's a lot of people really grateful to be able to have badges that can indicate the level of interaction. Also, just at work, longer meetings are really, really difficult. I'm sure they're difficult for everybody but especially the level of autistic burnout that I experienced after hours and hours of long meetings. There's all sorts of different ways that it shows up for me from everything from sensory issues with lights and sounds to just everyday social interactions. Being able to indicate to people that interact with me often, my teammates almost give them a read me of, hey, if I'm not making eye contact with you or if I show up to a meeting and I'm knitting and doing something with my hands, I'm actually paying more attention than if I'm here making eye contact with you and masking because it takes all of my concentration to mask rather than just show up as I am. And just for the audience's benefit, for those who haven't heard of that term, masking, how would you quickly summarise that? Yes, so masking is something that, arguably, we all do, which is putting on a social appearance, so that might mean as an autistic person I find it quite uncomfortable to make eye contact or smile or not at the right time. So, to seem engaged with you in conversation, I might do those activities, but I'm almost going through the motions as this is how I'm supposed to show up, so that takes a lot of extra effort and a lot of cognitive resources to do that. Brilliant, and that area of masking now is something which positively, a little bit of a change I've actually seen, they're trying to promote now from a younger age not to actually mask it, whereas historically it's always been I need to actually hide this and fall into a mantra, which is completely wrong. Brilliant, thanks so much for that, Pervie. Emanuel, I'm going to move on to you next, and something which I found really interesting when looking into the background on your area was that there's 466 million people, so 5% of the world are hard of hearing or deaf, and if this was a country by itself it would be the third biggest country in the world. So, I'd love to have you share your experience as a deaf developer. Yes, thank you. As I'm deaf, I need an option a lot and an option is a great challenge because with artificial intelligence we see a lot of automatic options and when we use it in meetings, sometimes options are not very great there are a lot of errors, sometimes it depends on the person to speak with accent. For example, I have an accent deaf and a rich accent and when I speak here I don't understand that at all and if I solve this up I see that it doesn't work very much. We must work a lot because I'm sorry, I'm just nervous. One person has an accent because there are a lot of errors and we are forced to make a mental substitution to understand the errors. Automatically, an accent is quite exhausting especially in real time. If you put a video in the web you have an automatic option but you must write it it's very important, you have time you write it with an option and write it in 4 meters. We have a lot of deaf people who don't use sign language sign language is not universal each country has its own sign language French sign language, American sign language British sign language, etc. There's even an Indian sign language as well. Yes, native sign language and native sign language. We have a lot of study about Avatar Treaty and we are just beginning and it's a very important opportunity to make Avatar Treaty accessible for deaf people who use sign language but for now they are not very open because they act like robots so we need to express our power That's really kind. Thank you, thanks for sharing that. Ryn, I'm going to move on to you and your challenges are ones that I personally relate to in a lot of ways and myself, I limit myself to CubeCon and DockerCon as my conferences only but I know with you as a developer advocate you do many of these conferences with many different challenges and what's your insights and experiences in these areas? Sure, I'm a developer advocate and the good thing about my particular role is that my team enjoys a diversity of tactics so I could not go to conferences for six months if I wanted to. Having said that, it puts me at a disadvantage in my field because so many people are out there speaking publicly at conferences so I do try to attend many of them. There's lots of different challenges that people with disabilities face. You've heard Emanuel talk about the challenge with having interpreters as well as the fatigue of trying to switch visually between looking at captions that are maybe on your phone and looking at the speaker's lips. You've heard Pervie talk about being overwhelmed in the space because there's so much noise, so much stimuli or distracted and I'm sure when it comes to Devin's turn he might talk about the challenges navigating a space when you can't see. But personally, it's difficult to move around the conference centre if you think about how crowded it is here with 13,000 people. It's very easy when you have a mobility aid because your profile is a little different than others for people to run into you, to run into your aid, for people to stop in front of you and get out their phone because they're trying to check where they're going but haven't bothered to realise that people are walking around them. It's a process of constant vigilance that you don't run into anyone or hit anyone and it's extra exhausting and takes more time to get anywhere. I'll always plan out my CubeCon schedule and then have to scratch half the things or reorganise so that I'm in a very small area depending on what the map actually looks like, depending on how navigable the conference centre turns out to be and you can't usually tell this from maps in advance. Most conference centres don't put it on their website. The information that disabled people need to navigate the space is just not out there. And then just like Emanuel, I deal with a lot of fatigue from both having to do all this and having an illness that causes fatigue, frankly, and I have to very much ration my time. People with chronic illness sometimes call this spoons. Once you're out of spoons for the day, you're done and most people have relatively infinite spoons. They might get a little worn down, but it's okay. And if you have chronic illness, you have just a few and you have to really think about it. That's really kind. Thanks for sharing that, Ren. Devon, we had the pleasure of catching up yesterday and your experience and your background absolutely has blown me away with all of the different careers that you've actually done, the different areas that you've worked in. And I was absolutely blown away by how much of a champion you are in this area with everything that you're doing and no challenge seems to faze you. And what I would like to know from a disability perspective, what has your experience been like? Are there particular types of jobs that you would actually go for and are there ones that you would flat out avoid? Yeah, so we kind of talked about that a little bit and it's changed over time. So I use a tool called a screenwriter, and the one I use is called JAWS and it's an acronym for Job Access with Speech. And it evolves. It's gotten better over time as technology changes. It has to keep up with technology as well. And so it reads the information on the screen, it reads the controls and things like that and to get to your question. So in the past, it doesn't always work with everything really well. There may be some office software that it just doesn't work with because they haven't tested the office software to work with that. Maybe there's not keyboard navigation and that's actually the biggest one really is the keyboard navigation or the labeling of some of the controls, right? And so it doesn't read it. So I don't know what the control does. So things like that are, you know, so I would avoid jobs that, you know, the tools I could, I knew I couldn't use the tools, right? Because you want to be as independent as possible when you're doing your job. But then some of the other jobs I would avoid were, you know, when I started out in my career, I was a developer and obviously there's the presentation layer and there's the back-end pieces of software. So I would try to avoid the presentation layer just to be honest, trying to, you know, create something that's visually appealing and you can't see it is not the easiest thing to do, right? You may know how to set up all the keyboard navigation. You might make sure everything works, you know, functions correctly, but making sure something's visually. So I tend to avoid those jobs and just work on developing on the back-end. But then as my career, you know, as I've gotten, I did some architecture work and it's, you know, I've been a team lead presenting to other folks was always a little bit of a challenge. So I would try to avoid work where I had to present something where I was describing something visually. Or even, you know, PowerPoint itself was not the easiest tool to use. I'm glad to say that PowerPoint has certainly improved and with JAWS it's improved so I can, you know, I can create a basic presentation now. You know, it's probably not the, you know, most glamorous or anim, you know, with Lola animation and whatnot, but it's a really good presentation. So I can even do that now and I feel comfortable doing it. So technology's really evolved and it's given me a lot of freedom to try lots of different jobs. As I was telling James yesterday, I love to learn new things and try new things and technology's given me that ability to go on the internet and get whatever information I want to learn about, whether it's in my field at work or it's something outside of work I want to learn, whether it's, you know, type stuff or hobbies or things like that. The technology and the ability to gain information is so phenomenal these days. It's, you know, it's still, you know, it could use some improvement. There's still obstacles that, you know, I come out and encounter with, you know, keyboard navigation not working or things like that, but there's just so many things that have improved and gotten so much better and the awareness that other companies and if we, you know, if we just continue down that road making sure everyone has access to information, whether you would like it from, you know, keyboard input and output on the screen or you want it through a hearing-impaired device or you want it through your voice, you know, your smart device, there's so many ways now that you can gain information and that's really the key is to, that interface between the, well I call the, and we use the term, I didn't come up with this term, but the virtual world and the physical world, right? And that interface between those two or you can gain the information and the awareness of what's going on is really so important. So, yeah, that's about all I got. Yeah, that's amazing. And I think one of the bits which really jumped out when we bumped into each other yesterday was where you was explaining where, in your current role, where you're working in pre-sales and you're actually going through, you're setting things up, you have people on the call often and you're doing this and you could be going through for quite a while and then you get that question, oh, but what's that on the screen? And they haven't actually even realised this whole time, which is, yeah, that's quite an incredible feat. It's amazing, very inspiring. What we're going to do with this point of the, this point of the panel is we're going to move on to some, some questions in some different areas and essentially anyone can actually then pick these up as we go through. So the first question is, where do you think we actually stand in terms of accessibility in technology and what key areas really need to be addressed and prioritised in the next five years? Is there anyone in particular? Devin, go for it. Now, I kind of mentioned this a little bit and it's just that awareness. So what I would really like to see, and this has been a topic that we talk about quite a bit from a blind person's point of view and other accessibility, if you get the, when you're doing the development, if you make sure in the early stages of the development you consider accessibility, it's when you get too far along and something's not working, that becomes a major problem, because you can't go back and rework everything or it's too cost prohibitive. So if you make sure in the early stages when you're designing things or working through your iterative processes, you have accessibility in there as a foundation just like security or just like the infrastructure or one of those pillars that you have in your framework that you're saying I want this to be a pillar in my development process. So as long as accessibility is one of those pillars, I think we can really gain a lot of ground going forward in the next five years. Brilliant. And just to add to that with a bit of a person on insight on my view with this, I see a lot of things with accessibility in different areas and whilst you actually see many striving towards accessibility, it's kind of treated like a bit of a tick box exercise in many different areas, so there may be a requirement to actually do something and that requirement will be fulfilled, but has that requirement actually been done well? Unless you're actually on the receiving end of seeing this and depending on it, you don't actually realise how impactful and useless this is and someone actually came to me with one of my courses and said when are you going to have the captions done and I was like oh, okay, you need the captions and it's like, yes, I am fully deaf, I cannot actually consume your course without the captions and look down the route of auto-generated captions and it's an abysmal experience and even with work helping with KubeCon, there's going to be some videos on Friday which helped out with and actually did the captions for these and it was awful. Envoy was constantly android and what was even more confusing was Envoy were actually talking about android so it was android talking about android and another favourite was it's not sick docs, it's sick docs. So that's one of my areas in five years and I do hope that there's some laws passed which actually says it's not just about having accessibility it's about that accessibility being to a high standard whether it's manoeuvrability around the building whether it's captions whether it's supporting software for screen readers it really needs to improve. The next question I've got here is how well does AI represent and address disability challenges and especially after the keynote today we all saw that AI was a very hot topic how do people feel about AI with their disabilities do you see it as beneficial where do you see some improvements anyone in particular like to take that? Thanks Maria. As we know artificial artificial is a reflection of society and what society sees about disability is applied to the artificial dangers first time when I asked to meet your name to draw on this person is always someone is a wheelchair disability is not only a wheelchair we have so many under disabilities we are like a dangerous visual impairment autism which are invisible disabilities and I don't get that the first time I asked to meet your name to draw me a deaf woman and he generated a very, very old woman do I do old because I don't I'm not this woman I'm young Deafnet is just affected so I don't get about Deafnet is last time AI is a opportunity to create a product to make everyday easier for people with disabilities automatic action we talk about our CI for blind people to never see and AI is very much determined is but is very important to work with disability people to hear them and train them to have a better presentation to create a product accessible product to help people disabled people is very important but there is a lack of reputation of disabled people there is a lot of stewardship around disability to improve that we need to be inclusive is very important when you design product to make everyday life easier for disabled people to eat with disabled people 19 without us we don't do it we create more necessities and product is accessible amazing thank you so much for sharing I think at this point it's probably a good time to move on to some Q&A just quickly before we do a lot of us with disabilities and challenges we rely on a lot of people for help behind the scenes I just wanted to give a quick shout out because I know that Catherine is going to be leaving but Catherine did a lot of work behind the scenes on actually putting this together so you have brilliant coming over sir hello my name is Cadeir thank you so much for sharing your experience I design workshops and I want to also design a workshop for accessibility and inclusion in the work space but particularly for tech communities and I did some research and usually these topics they have some training content or like workshop content but they are actually quite basic and obviously we need a lot of perspective and everybody have their own angle to this topic so my question is like is there any organisation or some individuals that you can recommend so we learn more from them in order to properly design a workshop so it would be more impactful in our work area thank you very much again I can give a suggestion I don't have a particular organisation to point to but it's definitely helpful to do the work to find folks with different accessibility needs because at some point I assume you're going to test your workshop out so it would be like one of the best things to do is just find folks with varying disability needs for however your workshop is presented and make sure that you're testing it out with them and centering their experiences in it did somebody else have a maybe an organisation I believe inclusively is doing training and I'm hearing that there is an accommodation platform out there although I don't remember the name I personally feel that this is the biggest place that we need to grow in cloud native both making contribution opportunities accessible things like making sure that captions are turned on in video meetings that we engage interpreters for project meetings and that for jobs you'll notice three of you work for yourselves and two of us work for the same company that is exceptionally inclusive employment rates for people with disabilities in general are pretty low like 10% and we need desperately to empower people to understand that accommodations don't have to be expensive that disabled people can be good employees and reliable employees and they can make those accommodations and just quickly to add to that any way that you can actually put yourself into the perspective of various different personas would be really helpful and you hit the nail on the head I pretty much switched careers because I didn't want to be doing this commute any longer with the challenges with the sticks etc so looking around at different things how accessible is a venue can you actually get to it easily what's the access like what's the internals like would all be super helpful Hello I don't have really a question but I would like to share I would like to share a personal experience I'm visually impaired so sorry if I don't see you on the high and I had in the past the occasion to take to make a presentation into a conference and when I come on the scene on front of the computer that the computer was provided by the venue I was just not able to read my own slide and see absolutely nothing and I just had to guess my slide in Provis for the world presentation and in addition I'm pretty glad to see today that the venue had made many accommodation from many disability but unfortunately for visually impaired people we really rely on the presentator definitely from many people I just can't read or see the slides many venues don't provide the slide in advance also and I think we have many things to do for visually impaired people in adaptation and in conference thank you so much for sharing and was there any other questions from the crowd brilliant thank you thank you for your speech sorry if I'm reading my notes I wanted to ask if you have any suggestions for tools or best practice that can help activities like hackathons or sharing ideas between colleagues in our company we usually use tools like MIRO it's like pinning post-its on the wall and we think it's not very accessible so we are looking for alternatives so we ask if you know any tool or best practice for these activities thank you amazing thank you Ryn not having people stay up all night for hackathons considering that folks might not be healthy enough to do that kind of work is an important accommodation you can offer people with disabilities so I use all sorts of tools but I think you mentioned MIRO MIRO is very challenging from a blind person's perspective but visually impaired I've actually been come up with all kinds of solutions with white boards I took an actual physical white board and shared it through the zoom link and then I had my son actually create a 3D print I took the images that we were going to use in the different white boarding session and he printed out with his 3D printer so I could feel a tactilely on the board and then we would magnet slap them on the board where that way I could feel them and then once I've got my once I felt them so that's probably a little bit more outside of the scope of what you're asking being creative but it was a way that I could use a white board and it's more an in-person type of white boarding session is making sure that the different constructs are tactile so I can touch them and feel them and figure out which ones are which in this case it was a routing architecture design for some NSXT stuff so we were doing routers and switches and things like that but things like that where you actually put your hands on it was something I used there used to be some tools for UML diagramming and I'm trying to think of the names that I used that were fairly accessible Eclipse is fairly accessible for coding and various things like I mentioned PowerPoint it's pretty accessible now for basic things but white boarding is still a challenge for visually impaired folks so I don't have a better answer than that in terms of captions and subtitles if any of you are actually in that space where you're creating videos the personal workflow I have myself and one that I'm actively sharing at the moment Descript is the best tool I've actually found for this in terms of getting that initial base of captions and subtitles that will get you 95% of the way just with dropping a video or an audio file it is still important that you actually go through that process at the end of it and fix up the mistakes the various ones that I actually mentioned earlier but that does a really good job and something in particular I like about that tool the cost is negligible it's $12 also to actually use it and the export options export to all of the industry standard so if you're actually putting anything out there and it needs to actually be consumed internally or if you're actually putting out to a wider audience that's a real nice way of getting things done quite quickly and to a high standard and outside of that when you're actually working on anything from a slide perspective you always want to be looking at a minimum of 14 pointers as your font and I say that as a minimum if you can actually go up as a base higher from the start that will really help and when especially in tech where you're actually doing screen sharing and you're showing these different things on Zoom calls just make it your habit actually switch and you bring up that terminal hold that command key hit plus multiple times and use it regularly so adjust it to the content so run a command have it fill the screen and if you run something and you've occupied a bit too much resize and go back down and then resize and go back up and it will make your content more in general anyway but it will also appeal to a much larger audience and we have also a white line for accessibility we see and she we have accessibility we are a lot of criteria to make a website accessibility so for the aton or design product we have we see a white line any other questions yep hello thank you so much hello thank you very much for sharing your experience I find it very valuable and I have a question you mentioned already the employment rate for people with disabilities as a part of the team as a part of the company I want more people with disabilities working together with me so my question to you is what is your requirement when you are considering the job switch when you are thinking about your dream job what you will pay attention when thinking if you want to work in this company or maybe not and maybe that's something that team also can do that I can do from my side thank you because a formation are very few accessible for disabled people you must form them and form them with management for accessibility management is very important for example for deaf people provide a interpreter option for other disability accessible for screen reader with screen reader light so accessible is very important to take needs of each disability to train them I would say I'll just say quickly that it's similar to what Emmanuel said it's really about understanding that there's no blanket experience and centring the experience of different disabilities is really important and making sure that things are all of the tools that you use are accessible at a very base need but also have those vetted by people with those disabilities who work in the industry and then from a neurodivergence perspective there's a lot of accommodations that are it would be hard for me to imagine working with that and also one of the biggest ones is the ability to be an inconsistent person which means that I might show up one day very differently than another day making sure that there's adequate policies in place to protect disabled people and their employment like disability leave people also might become disabled as they're an employee so you might start out not disabled and you might become disabled so it's important to have those protections in place I just want to add to that because I think you raised a brilliant point and in answer to your question I would actually say the most important thing from my viewpoint would be the empathy, the kindness and the respect and consideration because it can vary so so much and this was one of the put-offs for me was that kind of lack of understanding I'll give a prime example you could get a really cold day for me for example and whilst I've got the challenges walking on a really cold day I'm kind of like tin man and it's you're in so much more danger when you're there you're trying to actually commute you're trying to do these things and sadly more often than not you will hit this 1980s mentalities oh you know we'll just put a coat on and it's like well really we're coding we're doing these great things here we're working with complex technologies do you think we did not actually think of that and that's the I think when you actually look at that big perspective it's very very challenging and you actually mentioned a really good point there that sometimes people actually do become disabled and this was the case for me I I wasn't disabled my whole life it hit me when I was in my 30s and people go through really bad times they go through depression they go through having to get help and support from other people and you actually said it there with the masking the masking can take very different different forms and there's many great organizations I think a lot of the organizations which are the top ones the well-known they do this really really well and speaking to some of my friends the support which is actually there for people who are disabled is brilliant in a lot of the organizations which are the big players in this area but it's it's a minefield elsewhere and anything that you can actually do to promote and really drive that home that hey you know this this person's probably doing their best you they might be having a a bad day and especially in all of these different areas each one of us here I have no doubt that we all have these bad days in various different ways and we might just need to sack off that day but we're still working hard the rest of the week or we will catch up in our own time and any kind of understanding and drive of that would be a huge win for all of us and I think we're out of time everyone thank you