 So, hello everyone. I'm Todd Libby. First, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the organizers for putting this together and allowing me to present this talk today. The speakers for their presentations, and I'll be attendees for attending. Again, thank everybody. And GAD day. So let's go into this. But first off, I am 100% an accessibility advocate. It's part of my job. It's been part of my job for 22 years now. And the moment that I started my accessibility journey that has been educational and now I get to educate people during my job as well. There are still many barriers for entry, accessible entry. And if this picture shows a wall and it has a sign on it, which says accessible entry, and the handicap disabled symbol on the sign as well. I find many things still that are inaccessible during my job and doing auditing during the day. Get to find these things and for the companies that I work, do a work for. I get to point these out and assist them in implementing changes for the better, for inclusive design as well. So 1 billion people is the figure that I have. With the advent of new technologies and the rapid advancements of platforms and frameworks and libraries. 15% of the world's audience has a disability of some form. And this number is from the link on the bottom from the World Health Organization, which I don't know if I can share that right now, but I can share that later as well during the Q&A. Because we all know cognitive disabilities can be one form of disability. So in this picture, I have a man with his son or family member who appears to have a cognitive disability. I don't know what that could be, but they are touching foreheads and having a nice family moment together. There's also visual disabilities. In the next slide, it shows someone who is standing in what appears to be an alleyway pulling up a pair of eye glasses, and everything is pretty blurry in the picture. I know of many people, including family members who have visual disabilities as well. Motor skill disability. And in this slide, there is an individual in a wheelchair, and next to that individual is an able body individual standing next to them. They appear to be at some sort of sporting event, maybe, or some event in their not close to where other people are where there's a fence because of the barrier of it appears there's a lawn or some sort of grassy area that they can't access with the wheelchair. Down there are also disabilities that aren't seen, situational and invisible. Situational being, just take for instance, a broken arm or a child sitting in your lap. Those can be situational, invisible. Disabilities can be migraine headaches. I suffer from migraine headaches myself. And when I do, I can't focus well. Sometimes things get blurry, so there's a lot of contrast problems, issues that I have when if I have to work through a migraine headache. So here you see in this frame, in this slide, a father holding his child, which brings me back to that, when you have a child, that's a situational disability. I've had, I have two children and they're much older now, but when they were younger, I had situational disability as far as a child in my arms that was kicking around. They wanted to get down, they wanted to do whatever they wanted to go off and play. And I was trying to do work, answer emails or so, you know, so on and so forth. So that's a situational one that I haven't count. So there are strides underway to address more newer and hidden disabilities with the advent of the first working public draft of the web content accessibility guidelines, so I wanted to share some tips to start your accessibility journey or to bring accessibility to the workplace and advocate for the people who I borrow this from a friend for the people on the other side of the class or the people that don't have a voice. And we as accessibility advocates can speak on behalf of those people and advocate for accessibility in the projects and the workflows that we do. So the first one, as you see here, buy-in, it shows a man straightening his tie, his picture is cut off at the chin. But buy-in and support starting from the top of the organization will continuously be successful across the organization. Keeping executives engaged and meeting with them regularly will ensure success with your accessibility initiative. It will also provide support from when new accessibility initiatives need to be implemented or when there are disagreements among teams on the implementation of prioritization, you have the support of executives. Once you have buy-in from executives, and that, you know, it goes back to coordinating efforts across departments may be difficult and time consuming at first. So that support from the top will help alleviate the pressure and the burnout that can happen when taking on the task of creating and implementing an accessibility strategy. If the pushback is more than you can handle, you can, which I have done on occasion, I've said something like, well, you can save the company a lot of money and time and headaches that will be saved in the development and the design phases to get a better product out to everyone and you won't be losing potential revenue. So once you have that buy, as I said, from those executives, having a person or ideally a team focused on accessibility throughout each department can help. It can help answer questions and you can work with others and you can help others in those departments practice those guidelines. Become the expert in that department regarding accessibility and or become the expert in your department when it comes to accessibility. So a set up documentation and tooling helps and serve as an intermediary between departments and their accessibility liaison if there is one. Assess the products and the expertise within the company. So gauging the point where the product or products are as far as how inclusive and accessible they are is a key priority. That will only help the team or individual in their efforts to make the product better. What's the current state of accessibility as far as products? What's the current state of accessibility with the website or the mobile app? Getting the general idea of the level of knowledge that the teams and the people in the company currently have is also important going forward. How diverse are they in the accessibility guidelines and practices? Do they know anything about the web content accessibility guidelines? How much training will you need to have? And I will say I will add this. The web content accessibility guidelines are difficult to read. From the standpoint of I get a lot of questions from people on Twitter and through email about what a certain success criteria does. And it's a very technical and as far as the 3.0 guidelines that are being worked on. Hopefully that technical jargon and that technical wording will become easier for people to understand. Establish guidelines for the company is the next stress. Consistent product implementation greatly benefit the organization. It reduces the amount of work which in turn can reduce the number or it reduced the amount of stress teams can be under. Design systems should not be used to only ensure branding and consistency but accessibility also. Accessible design systems make a world of difference. Accessible components can help for obvious reasons and reduces the time it will take to start over from scratch and try to invent something that has already been done. Testing procedures should be implemented to help departments such as QA and help developers do their jobs well and efficiently. This is the important one I think as well is getting colleagues to buy in and care. More buy in from the people that you would work with and see every day during the day. In this landscape again of frameworks and libraries going fast and breaking things and overlooking and undervaluing accessibility. Some people need to be educated and those that do not have voices like I said people on the other side of the class need you to be their voice. Pitching to those not already in the know that accessibility means less time. Less headaches less stress and can sway a developer I have found faster than anything else. It's also important that we share. So in my case it would be the American Disabilities Act in the United States. I'm not going to be talking Canada the accessible Canada act or in the EU it's the end 301 549 but share the importance of your country's accessibility standards if there are standards. The US government for instance uses section 508 and that may differ that obviously does differ from country to country. So the importance of these guidelines that your country hopefully has can be crucial to getting the company and departments on board. So in this slide. It shows the different laws for different companies. So you have the USA has the American Disabilities Act. The ADA Canada the accessible Canada act the ACT and in the EU it's EN 301 549. When WCAG two is released. It will be considered for inclusion in the EU standard England has the equality act of 2010 combined with several equal access acts and regulations including the disability discrimination act of 1995. Called the DDA the BSI 8878 standard. And to find out more. There is a link right there. I will have a link to the slides that I keep online. So that you can have these links handy lived experiences. Pick examples from the outside world every day as use case. Test and tape or video cases where disabled users trying to use an inaccessible website or application. A form, for instance, or a piece of assistive technology they use in everyday life. It's easy to find such cases if you know someone in your family or your circle of friends. Maybe you'll need to go to a source that tests with disabled folks outside of the company. There's a company for instance that I know of there's actually a few that do accessibility testing with disabled folks. One is called applause and showing these cases to colleagues can turn some people around to embracing accessibility at the workplace and in the workflow. And in this picture. I have a sign with the men's and women's restroom handicap accessible restroom disabled. Excuse me, the restroom changing station for children in an arrow pointing to train platform. We've evolved since I can remember where there were no signs for these things other than the men's and women's restroom accessibility does not end after hand off. So websites and applications are ever evolving medium that we work with even designs and testing. They're cognizant of those changes and make it paramount that accessibility be practiced well after hand off to the client to the client or upon completion of project or an everyday workplace situations. Which brings me to the next point of employing disabled folks. These are the people with lived experiences. They can benefit your company and team by having them aboard. You can use folks to test with that have those live experiences and you can also hire folks that have those live experiences. If you don't run a company then you need to look back and get executives on board as I was making the first point with getting executives on board with bringing on one or two folks to help test at the company. They can help with the accessibility of the website. They benefit you as much as you've been helping them and benefiting them. Understanding the guidelines. Yes, it can be very daunting to look at the WCAG web content accessibility guidelines and read it. It's very daunting to look at. So it's writing that will make even the most seasoned accessibility's head explode. Accessibility experts head explodes. Even mine. I've read it recently and there are places still in the WCAG guidelines that even confuse me. Those who have been working in the W3C have heard the people that want to be able to read WCAG guidelines and understand those guidelines. So as I said before 3.0 makes conscious effort to make that possible with more clearer language. For now I do suggest to people that they read through and make an effort to understand something in the meantime that they mean that will benefit them going forward. Ask all the questions. I tell this to people all the time whether it's on Twitter or your Slack groups or Discord servers, email, whatever form of communication you're using. Ask questions, ask them all. No question that you have shouldn't be asked. I can be found online. I'm on Twitter a lot and through email or whatnot. I'm on the Ally Slack channel as well. And you can find me and ask me the questions. And if I don't know I can find somebody who does know or source for you that will answer those questions. And the accessibility community is very gracious and happy. It's made up of a lot of people. It's made up of a diverse group of folks that are more than happy to share their experiences and their knowledge with you. It's not a closed group of people. And we love to answer all the questions. We do have a few questions for you. So the first being, what was your motivation behind advocating web accessibility? How did you get started with it? Well, I have family members like I mentioned that have accessibility needs that have disabilities, motor skill disabilities and visual disabilities as well. So when I would see these people, friends even and family members struggling with something that got me to want to learn more about accessibility because I heard about accessibility through my contacts at the time online. And that was basically how everything started. Yeah, I mean that's great when you see people around you and you tend to understand them. That's a great insight. I hope it motivates a lot others to go in the same direction. The next one, like how would you encourage people, especially teams or organizations to start considering web accessibility as an important aspect for product and especially for websites. So the key for me has been when I do, when I talk to companies or businesses. He is getting the stakeholders and the executives on board. The person or people at the top. Like I mentioned in the talk, when you get those people at the top on board. That makes your job of advocating easier. And they will have hopefully they will have your back and you will have their 100% support. I don't know if that answers the question or not, but that's the major step. Yeah, I think it's great. I think for every initiative with the first step that counts you need to take that first step forward and things to things will fall into place. One last question for you. And then we'll wrap up your session. As an advocate, do you see designers having some additional knowledge around accessibility, because nowadays designers are more obsessed with the design looking aesthetically pleasing, but they don't consider the accessibility as something that they should stress on. So on the designer front, what do you take? I see a small increase in designers wanting to get wanting to learn about accessibility more. There's a long way to go. The same. I see the same with developers as well. Out of the two groups, I think designers are a little more, they don't know, or they don't, they haven't learned about accessibility like developers do. Because when I talk to a developer and say, well, this doesn't meet WCAG AA standards. They usually, if accessibility is something that they're focusing on, that usually gets fixed fast. As far as designers go, I've had more conversations about color contrast with designers and who weren't aware that they were color contrast guidelines. So steadily more and more as I talk to more and more designers in the communities that I belong to, I get the word out and that's where a part of my advocating comes in. Yeah, I think that answers the question. Thank you so much for such a wonderful session. I hope this really motivates a lot of people to start taking up accessibility very seriously while their development process, their designing process and their overall product development process. So thank you so much. It was wonderful having you here.