 What led you to become a lifelong advocate for accessibility to ICTs for persons with disabilities? Well, first we didn't have ICTs, but I had deaf parents from the start. I am what is called a coda, a child of deaf adults. So it was a natural progression in my life to continue their work, and it became my work. So they started the deaf telephone, which is a text phone in the United States in the 1960s. And it went on from there to go into other countries, specifically England and other places. So it began the liberation of deaf people to be able to communicate in real time over the telephone. What brought you to ITU to become an advocate for accessibility? Well, the problem was everybody suffered from the not invented here syndrome, which we call NIH. Everybody wanted to do it their own way. Even though my mother was educated in England and all her friends wanted to have the same liberty that deaf people in the United States had begun to enjoy, and we took everything over and set them up. They dismantled it because they wanted to move to a different, what they thought, more modern technique. And Great Britain was just introducing telecom gold, which was an early email form. We didn't have email in those days. We didn't have the internet. We didn't have voiceover IP. We had just the phone and telex. So the thing was, we had a compatible setup. We could talk to two English-speaking countries, could speak together. So transatlantic communication was a possibility for deaf people, with the exception of course of the cost. What happened was England changed. Other countries had other protocols, so the text phones could not work back to back. We needed standardization. So in 1991, the father of V.18, though he wasn't that then, a man named Dick Brandt, who was vice chair of the then CCITT, study group 17, found me and brought me to the ITU. Then we started to work on the first accessible standard. What are the major milestones in accessible technology that you have witnessed over your career in the push for mainstreaming accessibility for persons with disabilities? Well, discounting the text phone, which liberated everybody to start with. One of the most amazing things was SMS on the mobile phone. Deaf people could just have a mobile phone and like everybody else, they could communicate not only with themselves but with hearing people. That really made a big impact. And then of course email. And then later, we had the ability with things like Skype and other forms of video communication, the ability to talk because talking with hands and sign language and speaking with each other. Not all deaf people sign, which is a big myth. People get deaf and later in life. And in the early days, there was a division of the two camps. There was the people who signed and they generally came from lower income groups and the people who had the means to train their children to speak and lip-read. So when the TTY came, the biggest thing was is that. A TTY is short, it's telegraphic code, but the deaf adopted it to call the text phone. All these people worked together. Nobody did it for them. AT&T didn't do it. And the other thing was it was a very much a self-help kind of program across the United States. Those two groups for the first time worked together. So there was already cohesion in the deaf community, which later filtered down to other different organizations who had different forms of disabilities. So SMS was absolutely a milestone because it was portable. And email was great because you could work in the normal world. So I think those are the biggest things I've seen. And then of course later video over the net for sign language. Do you think the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has helped bring about a change or caused confusion? It has caused confusion. Yes, is the answer to the first part. It definitely has made people aware. And people who have signed and then ratified it, which means they are bound by it to a degree where they have to report to the UN. We've seen a lot of change in how they approach persons with disabilities and their access to ICTs. But a lot of people who work in industry are frightened of it. They don't want to be bound by something that's going to cost them a lot of money. And one of the key problems is what is universal design? Universal design is really simple. When you make something, make it so it fits as many people as possible, that as many people as possible can use it. And it's been fractured by people wanting to use different terminologies like accessible design, design for all, which is an impossibility. How can you design for all? Or different kinds of expressions to say, well, we can't do universal design, but we will do accessible design. It's all the same thing. You have to think outside the box. And in ITU, a lovely man named Gunnar Helstrom, who worked with us, who is in fact very responsible for relay and emergency services for people with disabilities, including deafblind people, created something called the Accessibility Checklist, which enables standard writers to take a look and think outside the box, put themselves in other people's shoes to be able to think, now, can a person who does not have mobility be able to use what I'm making for industry and things like that? The next problem, of course, is up to industry. They are the ones that have to implement because all international standards are voluntary. What still needs to be done to make the world more accessible, enabling us to have a truly integrated society? I love utopian ideas. We have better rights now. We have more awareness due to better communication. But what we don't have is the fact that we're still fractured by different countries, different beliefs and structures. This is all down to the regulators and the people who make the laws in our countries to enable manufacturers to actually implement international standards and make them global. An example is that because I come from a deaf background, I use the background I know the best, relay services will still always be necessary to communicate with people who are not deaf or for people who are voiceless to be able to communicate with people who don't have that problem. It's an intermediary with a human being, not a machine, that is the invisible translator between the two camps, the two people, so that a person who's hearing can call directly a person who is not hearing to be able to have a regular phone call. Now, we want that to be global. And other forms of technologies like screen readers and everything else should be international, like the facts. The facts was standardized by ITU and is still one of the most successful global international standards. Now, if industry and the ITU and other standards bodies throughout the world put that kind of concept together to go straight for that concept for accessible standardization and also mainstreamed accessibility features within normal regular standards, we have a chance of becoming globally accessible with ICTs for persons with disabilities.