Key Takeaways
- Accessibility should be approached with a product management mindset, focusing on user needs and integrating it throughout the product lifecycle
- Organizational placement of accessibility teams significantly impacts how companies perceive and prioritize accessibility efforts
- AI and emerging technologies present major opportunities to revolutionize accessibility, bypassing traditional interface challenges
- Connecting directly with users with disabilities is crucial for staying motivated and understanding real-world impact
I'm talking with Mike Shebanek to spread the good word about National Disability Employment Awareness Month. Mike is a product marketing strategist at Be My Eyes, and former head of accessibility at Meta. He built Yahoo!’s Accessibility Lab and is largely credited with being a key driver behind the Voiceover screen reader being integrated natively into the Apple operating system.
Can you tell me a little bit about how you first became aware of and decided to focus on accessibility?
Simple questions always start simple and get complicated quick, so I'll try and keep this one simple.
There were two parts: I didn't know anything about accessibility. Like I really hadn't met someone I would say was forthcoming about being blind or being physically disabled. As a kid in school I might have run across a person or student, but it was something that came out of the blue.
In the back of my mind I had always wondered what it’d be like to be blind or how people get along and it wasn't until I was at Apple that I was presented with a “you need to solve this” problem for people who are blind and want to use a Mac computer. It really hit me like wow, there's a whole world I completely hadn’t been thinking about. So I had to do a lot of learning.
As I've talked to people, the two things that sort of stick out in my mind are being curious and being a good listener - those two things are invaluable to me, because I really had to run and find somebody who understood and represented this community and ask a lot of questions and do a lot of listening and really get up to speed and really start to empathize and understand.
I'm not blind, so I can't really understand what it's like to be blind, but I can ask people. I can ask what their experiences are. And if you ask enough and listen long enough pretty soon you start to understand a little bit.
So that's what kind of got me started. I think the second part was - well, it’s become my career and I had no intention of it becoming my career when I started. I didn't even know there was a career to be had. So that was a kind of a surprise and a shock to me, honestly. But it was fun because since I was tasked with that at Apple, that was my job to sort of figure out a solution and that resulted in me proposing to do the voiceover screen reader. Like, could we build on? Could we give it away for free? Could we put it in OS? And thankfully that pitch went well and all of a sudden it was like, okay, well, you pitched it, you go do it. And like, wait, what? And now here I am.
Go back to a younger Mike, getting handed this challenge to solve a screen reader. What was that experience like for you?
It was really incredible because I think if I had known what I know now, I would have run for the hills. I'd be like, I don't know how to do this. I don't understand this community. How am I supposed to do this?
But when I sort of didn't know enough to know that I didn't, it was just - solve the problem.
And so I took all the skills that I had kind of built up over time as a product manager and said, all right, settle down. What do you need to know? What you need to do? What's the right solution? How do do we solve this problem?
So it just became sort of like, let's be super methodical and really think through it. It was really exciting because it hadn't really been done before. I mean screen readers existed, but never as part of the OS. It was exciting because since we owned the operating system and we owned the hardware and we owned the apps, we could sort of make it happen. Like, a lot of times you run into a bump and say, I don't control that, so I just have to live with it.
But in our case at Apple, we own most of that ecosystem, so we could just knock on the door of the engineer to that department or team and say, we need you to fix this or we need you to make this. We didn't really have excuses. So it was kind of cool. It was exciting that we didn't have excuses, but it was a little pressure on ourselves because we didn't have excuses. We had to get it done.
So that was actually quite a lot of fun. And of course, we ended up creating the voiceover on the Mac and then eventually voiceover for the phone.
Could you talk about some of bumps and pivotal moments along the way?
Oh my gosh, there's a bunch of them. I'll just highlight a few of them. I think the first one was when we first made voiceover and finally released it. We spent a lot of time with the public beta, we got lots of feedback, we worked with the disability organizations, we finally released it as part of the operating system. Now we’re on a cadence of every year, new OS, every year, new voiceover, like let's get this out. But this was year one, it was the first one, and we sent it out there and the reviews were horrible.
Even though all the feedback we got up to that point was fantastic and our heads exploded like, wait, what? Wait, I thought we were getting good feedback and everybody loved it, but the first review was actually quite horrible. And I remember my vice president coming to me saying, “Did we do the wrong thing here?” So it was a little scary, a little nervous.
And I said, “You know what?” And this is where it was really useful to have been so deeply ingrained in the community and to have heard from and talked to and written to and answered questions from so many people around the world that were in the “spoken interface beta. I knew like I didn't have to wonder. I didn't have to take a chance as I knew people were invested in this and wanted to be successful and were appreciative of what we were doing and did find it really useful and functional.
So I remember being pretty bold with him I said, “You know what? Hang in there. We're on the right track. This is going to come around we're going to make it.” And it wasn't I think maybe six months or eight months later we ended up getting an award from the American Foundation of The Blind (AFB) and it was an access award that acknowledged the work we had done and the effort we had gone to to work with the community.
My VP came back and he goes I'm glad we kept on this. That was a nervous moment so I was super happy that we made it through that bump because it could have been a kind of a cold reception that turned us off and then think of all the things that have happened since then: no voiceover on the phone, no Braille input, no touch screen, like all these things that could have never happened that did come to happen because of that.
Had you seen products that Apple killed in situations like that?
Oh yeah. Like I was in product marketing and management so I had friends that worked on products that lived and died like left, right and center. So it wasn't an idle threat. It was real. It was absolutely real. And that's what made it little bit anxious for me. I thought, wow, this really could disappear in a heartbeat.
It's actually, I'll give you little side story, but it's actually one of Apple's super strengths is killing products without people realizing they're dead. Like introducing something and going away and I could name products that kind of came and went that nobody remembers. But if you look back, they'd be “Oh, did they make that?” They were excellent at like getting rid of mistakes and moving forward.
So I knew that that could happen here. And I absolutely did not want it to because I knew this was really important work. It was going to make a difference in so many people's lives. And that the future, like we could do some amazing things going forward, which we ultimately did. That's just one. There's a whole bunch of them along the way.
It sounds like you did an open beta, which was new, right?
This is what almost 20 years ago now, it's like 2005. And if you look back now, it's like, I don't think they've made maybe one or two. Maybe I didn't know if they've done one or two. But I remember even proposing to do this. And I said, you know, we're going to have to have some things we've never done before.
The first one was we have to announce that we're doing another version of the operating system and what it's going to be called. We were a year away, like we had never done that before. And so that was the first thing I kind of asked my VP and we can't start on this unless we do this and I remember thinking he's going to fire me. I'm asking for things that had never happened! This is under the Steve regime and he was pretty direct about what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go.
The second one is we need to do a public beta. I said, “We have to make this public. There's not enough of us in the company to be able to figure this out and get this right.” I got the yes on that.
The third one was - I need to give it away like it needs to be out, like let people have the code and the code has to be built on the next generation operating system foundation, not the last foundation, which means we were pre-releasing the next OS. And I remember I was thinking how I can't even ask this I asked for all three and I remember our VP just went, ‘If that's what you need, okay.” I was like great, and I ran out of there - I'm taking my yes and going home and we got it and of course it all worked out.
So again three things that had never really happened and certainly haven't happened in combination since but was pretty hard to ask for but I knew that that's what we needed to be successful and of course it turned out okay.
I think the other one too that many people don't know, and it's hard to share, honestly, because it was painful personally, but it was also painful as a company. When we first came out with it and it was good and we got the award people started liking it. But I would go and visit disability organizations and they would take their entire time telling me about how much they did not like our company. Cause there was a feeling that the company had left them behind, even though it was going broke and I was there when it literally was 90 days away from not making payroll.
Like we were that broke. The first order business was to save the company. And accessibility, honestly, kind of had to wait a little bit.
But people were like, you left us behind. Even though we were doing great work, the company was just not going to commit to it. And I took that pretty hard, because I was the only one representing the company. All the criticism came to me. It was really hard. It was not a warm welcome in that sort of corporate sense.
But again, I think the question was, would we stick with it? Would there actually be a version two? Would we just sort of hit and run? And as you know now, I mean, look back 20 years more than committed along the way. But eventually, people warmed up and thought, okay, you guys are serious and you're really gonna not just do it, but improve it and make it better over time and give it the quality and love it deserves. So that part was really satisfying to say, like, I knew we were, but you couldn't prove that until you did it.
I have to say - I don't think people who complained to us were wrong. I mean, effectively, Apple had to move on and do other things and wasn't doing well as a company, it was doing good at a lot of things, including accessibility at the time. So that was the harder part is that they were right. And we just had to take it and take our lumps and go, you're right, and we're sorry, and then do better, right? So we did better.
I think internally, as I was working on the project, I knew I was committed to it, my engineering team was committed to it, the design team, there was no doubt within our own small team, like we were there. It was really just making sure that we got enough runway from our company to say, hey, hang in there with us because we've got something here that we can do that we think is not just token work, but really meaningful work, like building it in at the same time, at the same quality for no extra cost as worldwide and global and compatible with all the apps on the platform and just have all of the qualities and attention to the details as the rest of Apple's well-known products. That in itself a huge statement for the accessibility world and as a demonstration to that industry and to the commitment to the users.
We knew that it was the right thing. The question was can we do it well and will people give us the ability to deliver on this? And that was both the community but also our own company leadership. I think as that started to play out, that small success became a medium success, became a big success, then became pretty extraordinary.
I've been gone from Apple now more than 10 years and I'm still absolutely delighted and amazed and just over the moon at how much they've continued that work and gone even way farther than I could have imagined in so many ways.
It must be pretty fulfilling to be part of this early stage thing that it didn't fade away when you left Apple. It’s really became like a core of the way that many folks see Apple in the world.
And I think it's hard to get some perspective on that. That was the intention. Like even when I knew I was going to transition, I'm like, I want to make sure it's in good hands. And for those of you who know who's running the accessibility work there, amazing people. And the baton handoff was clean and great. And the relationships were solid. So it was a really amicable kind of transition. And they've just run with it. I knew they would, you always kind of want to see what happens because I knew they were going to come up against some of the same pressures. And they didn't have that confidence in themselves at all times. So it's really cool that they got that as they went.
I think looking back on it, it's pretty astounding to me still. When people will talk to me and say, you know, I use voiceover every day and it's changed the way I work or communicate or do things and make me independent. It’s a great feeling. I can’t believe I got to do that.
Could you talk a little bit about how we ended up with the name voiceover for this tool?
So every Monday, Steve would have a meeting to do what's called the design review. He'd go into a special place on campus, and it would be a small room, and there'd be about, you know, 10 people in it. The really trusted design team and people. And it was really secret. Everybody knew it was happening, but nobody could get in that room. And it was a two-edged sword, because if you're in that room, you can't hide. And if you're in that room, you better contribute. So you kind of really had to be on your game.
I remember at one point, we were coming out with voiceover, and it was like, time to show Steve. And Steve famously did not like product managers. That's me, my role. And I knew that and everybody knew that. He's like, I want to talk to engineers, people who really build the product because he was the best product manager in the world, for sure. And we granted him that. And he's like, you're not going to tell me something I don't know about product management. But I had done all this homework and then there's only, effectively, the lead engineer and me. There's a small group that helped on some of the other pieces at that point, it was really young. We hadn't even shipped it yet.
So we had to go to this meeting. It’s kind of unsaid, but pretty clear. I needed to sit in the back of the room and not say a word and just be there in case, but like, you know, stay quiet. And so my engineer’s in the front and, you know, it's probably like six people crowded around. Steve is kind of leaning in to this computer where he's showing voiceover and the engineer’s doing a fantastic job. Absolutely amazing.
And Steve at some point kind of leans back in the chair and goes, so what are we going to call this thing? Well, no one in that room had any idea about any of this work or where it came from, but they all had an idea about what they should be called. And all of a sudden they started throwing out ideas. And the idea started as kind of funny things, and then it was kind of interesting things, and pretty soon it got to be things that were like, oh, they don't understand this community. That's a pejorative. Like, that's going to really be a negative. We're going to undo any goodwill we have just created.
And I'm kind of just thinking, well, this will just die out and we'll go on and we'll name it later. But no, Steve's like, and I could tell his attention turned to one of the suggestions he started to latch in. If you know Steve or heard of Steve, once he latches on something, it's a rock. You're never moving it. Like, that's it. And I'm thinking to myself, you've done this work, you've figured this out, and you just haven't presented it yet. But are you going to stick your neck out and get fired? Are you going to get blasted by Steve? Are you going to get, you know humiliated in front of these elite people in the company?
And finally, I just couldn't take it. And this is all happening in, like, seconds. right? Like thousands of things are happening. And so I finally, the first time in the entire meeting, I go, “We’ve have a name!” And everybody just stopped, like dead silence. And I said, “And it's a great name. It's a great name. You're going to love this.”
All of a sudden, I realized Steve has leaned back, and rolled back, and then he spun, you know, 180 in his chair. And what I didn't realize was by the time he had done that and turned around, he's literally nose to nose with me. There's like four inches in between us. And he's looking at me with the death look like this better be great, because I don't even know who you are. (He of course he knew I was, but the look was like, I don't know who you are or why you're talking to me.)
He said, “What do you got?” And I said, “We're going to call it voiceover, just like an ad when you see this really cool car and this voice is telling you how great it is and what's going on and what's in the picture and what you can do. The aspirational call to action.”
He took a beat and he goes, “I love it. That's what we're calling it.” And it was done, like the gavel came down, the meeting closed that was it and the rest of the room was just their jaws were on the floor like I can't believe you just took that chance.
But it worked and I mean we even thought through like what the initials would be - VO - and how people abbreviate it and nickname it and and it just felt right because it didn't speak to a disability particularly it just told you what it did and it could be used for whatever it wanted to be and it's turned out to be incredibly well used, well loved and well-liked and so that's how it came to be. And of course as soon as that happened - I've learned my lesson from the previous VP: you take your yes and you get out of the room as fast as you can.
That’s a great story, thank you. So one thing that I have from that story is that when you were approaching accessibility, you were approaching it with the hat of a product marketer and a product manager. And I think that's done you a ton of service during your career. Can you talk a little bit about what sort of product manager and product marketer skills that you apply all the time when you're trying to advance accessibility?
For people who don't know, my career trajectory, I was a computer science major, I was in technical sales for a long time, working at the university and the technical side of house, administrative computing and academic computing support.
And then came to Apple. I was the server product manager and I ended up becoming a product manager worldwide for the original iMac, like THE computer that kind of launched the personal computers on the internet thing. I ended up becoming the USB product manager. We're still using USB today, but launching that and getting that right. I was the product manager for Bootcamp for Rosetta, the transition to Intel processors way back when…Dashboard, like a whole series of things. So that was my mode. That's what I was doing. And then all of a sudden - accessibility.
As a product manager, I kind of thought, wow, it doesn't seem like accessibility products get the same sort of attention and quality and detail that these other things get that I've been working on for years at this company. That was exciting to me to see if I couldn't figure out a way to bring that level of scrutiny and quality and love and care to a field that really hadn't had it before.
So that was the first thing.
Then, you know, after voiceover kind of got going, I had to make a decision: am I going to stick with this or go back and do other kind of generic product things? And I thought really hard, you know, what's the one thing that I can bring to this space uniquely? What am I bringing to this?
And I think you hit it on the head, which is up until that point, there had sort of been…and I'm not saying this is completely everywhere, just generally, people who did products that were assistive technology products and people who did mass market commercial products, but they weren't ever crossing the lines. And I was in that weird spot where I could literally have a foot in both worlds. And I thought, that's my personal value add to this, because I come to the assistive technology space with curiosity, listening skills, and then bringing the things I learned about being a great product manager at a company that was making some of the world's greatest products at that time.
And so I was product manager, iPad product manager, like it kind of went on, but just taking those things. I think the skills on that were just always being user centered, you know, really don't ask people necessarily what they want, find out what their issues are, and understand their work and who they are and what they want to do, and then apply the knowledge they don't have, which is how technology works and what's coming in two and three and five years that they’d never heard about, and then see if that solves problem. When you find that perfect junction of that thing can solve this problem in a really new and elegant way, then you have some magic.
And that's what technologists and product managers should be doing. They should be looking down the road a few years, not thinking about what's here now, but really thinking about what's here in a couple of years and trying to line things up when they're all in the right space at right time, we get magic.
I was just talking to somebody about this this morning. Why don't we have the iPhone and voice over years earlier? Well, because we only had 2G networks. We didn't have internet that could sustain anything more than like text messaging. We had physical keyboards that so small. You could put one thumb across five or six keys. Like it took time to get a touch screen and to get the 3G network and then now 4G and 5G. It took time to miniaturize it. All the things had to come together.
Then someone had to say, how do you make a new recipe out of this? I’ve got all the ingredients. Now how do you mix it? And Apple is famous for being able to sort of time that and get it just right at the right time. And I think we landed at the right time for things like voiceover for iPhone where it all just kind of came together at the right moment. And that's what product managers should be doing is looking down the road. One of those things going to line up and what's the next one? So we can talk later about, you know, AI and wearables and glasses and that sort of thing.
I feel like folks who are outside of product don't necessarily know how to influence product. So I think one thing that product is quite good at is getting resources like in advocating for what they want to get done, like a good product manager can be quite good at that. There are some skills that you took from that product management experience to champion accessibility inside of Apple or other organizations to do.
I'm glad you said it the way you did because we used to have a saying internally, like if you can't be the the best advocate in the world for your own product, your product's doomed, like you should be the biggest advocate.
So you should understand who you're designing for, what the problem set is, what technologies come to bear, why your company at that time has the resources and the capabilities to deliver on it in a way that no other company can, right, it has to be unique and solve the problem. You have to understand how much it's going to cost people, how you support that.
I think one of the things that was a real big lesson from the iMac that I learned was to think through the entire journey of the customer. That's pretty common now, but back then that was a really radical idea. You like put a product in a box and send it out and somebody else's problem that they called for support or had a question or had a sales issue, like that’s somebody else's problem. And our kind of training there at that time when Steve came back was you own the whole thing. Like I'm coming to one person and it's you, and you’ve got to answer the question.
So we thought fiercely about if someone blind were to buy a Mac and have it delivered like mail order online, which is still new at that point (it was like 2000), could they take it out of the box? Could they set it up? And so we went backward and said, we need to create this thing called Mac Buddy at the time, which was when you power on the machine, it would sort of start up and do something. Before it didn't used to like that's how computers work before that. And so we had to really think that a whole customer journey and say like, how would we help people set it up and put in their configuration get online?
Today if you turn on a Mac for the first time and take it out of the box and just let it sit for 60 seconds, it will automatically start voiceover and ask, would you like assistance getting set up and walk you through the entire onboarding. How to use the keyboard, how to navigate and press keys, etc. Most people don't know that's true because they get somebody else to set up their computer. But like thinking all the way through it and then all the way to customer care - if someone had a question, do we have a topical section in apple care for those kinds of questions.
As a product manager, you end up having to work with the sales and marketing people. How are you going to talk about this? The training people - how are you going to write the documentation - The welcome, the software set up, the new user experience people, obviously the engineering design people, and of course the customer care at the end.
Then of course you want to feed all that back into the next generation of the product. So as product manager, you're now listening and collecting all of these things people, you know, and saying how do we make the next one better and address all these new things. It’s a lifecycle thing, it's a life, it's not a job. I think you probably know this, like being a product manager is not a job, it's a lifestyle. You have to just live for caring about every aspect of a thing and wanting to make it better and wanting to just get it right. It's all encompassing.
You’re a good storyteller. I imagine you also use that skill when influencing others.
Yeah and it was interesting. I don't think this is true at many companies, but it was certainly true at Apple is the product manager was the product marketing manager. One person was in charge of both.
So we would work with the engineering team and software development team and all those people. And then the day it was launched, we would turn around and suddenly become the marketing people and we would go out and talk to resellers or talk to the training team or talk to whoever we needed to for the marketing and how we did banners and websites and messaging and tell the story because we were there to make it, we had inside knowledge on how to tell the story and what we were after and trying to achieve and how this little thing does that and solves this problem, we had thought about that.
(Here's your second Steve story. I can't believe we're telling two of these in the same presentation. These are rare.)
So being able to tell the story turned out to be critical. There was always this sort of inside story which was whenever you get in an elevator at Apple, pray you're not getting in an elevator with Steve because you've got 30 seconds when this is moving from floor to floor and he's gonna ask you a question and you better have an answer.
And the question is not difficult, but it's not easy. It's like, who are you and what do you do here?
And if you didn't have a great answer by the time that door opened, you were fired. Like I'm taking your badge. Like if you don't even know what you do or why you do it, what do you doin in my company? And that's sort of mythological but sort of true at the same time.
So as a product manager, we always thought, okay, and this was the mental exercise. If you got in that elevator or on a plane or whatever small room you might have been in, could you tell them in 30 seconds or less why this was important and what was critical and how this was gonna be great?
And it couldn't be okay or good. It had to be great. So we just kept taking ourselves through that process and even kind of quizzing each other. Like, what would you say if, how would you explain that and who's this audience? So we got these skills built where we could tell that story quickly and hit your high points and nail it and get it right. And being able to tell the story is a really critical factor for internal like getting alignment and resourcing, but also building up that excitement about the product.
Let me be super open here: I was terrible at it when I got there. I mean, obviously I got the job and so I wasn’t too terrible, but I look back on it and I think, man, this was maybe the biggest struggle that I had when I got my first role.
And I remember my own manager and his manager really pulling me aside saying like this is your life survival skill at this company. If you want to make it like you're gonna have to hone this for people who are listening who like I'm not good at this Like yeah, nobody's good at this. You just have to practice. You got to just keep doing it and if you fumble and you screw it up then you get up again and you go again and you try again until over time you just get good at it.
People ask me all the time like you must have just been great at this and I'm like, no. I had to grind it out and figure it out and make mistakes and get embarrassed and screw it up. And you try and do that before the big moment because you don't want to do it in a big moment. But we would practice for each other we'd practice with other people, we'd do a presentation on some things.
I remember one time I was giving a really big presentation and I was in the room checking the room out making sure it's right. Pacing the floor and literally like out loud like walking through this and one of my product manager friends walked in and he kind of was like wait what and he goes I'm out because I know what you're doing and like let me alone, let me get my warm-up reel, I get it right. And if I had a question, would have just said, be my audience, he would have been there. But he was like, I get it. This is what you've got to do behind the scenes. It's like, if you're a baseball player, you don't just show up on the field. You've got to go through spring training and practice and weight lifting and coaching and all that stuff.
So it's the same if you want to be great at accessibility or as a product manager.
You've got to think of the same way. You really got to practice some skills and then put the skills to use so that when the moment comes, it all gels and you're there with what you need, or you miss the moment.
There's another kind of a fun story, since you're on this topic for people who are listening, I can remember vividly, I was working at the University. I was like running the computer lab when we had centralized computing back in the old old days. And I remember thinking to myself, I've missed it. Like vividly thinking to myself, Apple's off and running, Steve left the company at that point and I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to get a career start. Like, I think there's nothing left to do. Everything's been done. Everybody's an expert at something and I'm not an expert at anything.
I remember one of the old, wily veteran like person at the competing center came in and was asking me how things were and I said, yeah, I'm feeling down today. So I just feel like everything's been done. And that person said, “It's not all been done. Trust me, there's gonna be plenty more and you're gonna be there to do it.”
And I just remember, this has been 30, 40 years now. I just still remember that moment literally like 30 seconds of that conversation where he's like, you know what? There's so much new coming and things I hadn't been around long enough to realize that everything turns over and changes and moves on. That encouraged me a lot to go, Hey, you know what? And so to kind of wrap the story, who knew I didn't years later, I would literally be working for Apple, who I thought had passed me by on an iMac where I thought they weren't going to make Mac anymore.
They just going to make, you know, other stuff. and here I just found myself in the spot I always wanted to be having no idea that was even possible when I was leaving college.
The trick is if you build the skill set and you invest in yourself and you keep putting yourself in places, people will find you if you're good at what you do. They will find you and you will find the opportunities, what you do with those opportunities is up to you. But you got to be ready for your moment when it happens.
Was it hard get that accessibility vision into retail?
I'm going to use the term inoculation. Like you can get inoculated so you don't get sick, right? How do they do that usually? They give you a small dose. Your body's like, oh, small dose, I can beat that. Okay, now I'm good.
When you talk about retail back then, and you mentioned accessibility, they were inoculated by thinking, oh, it's an ADA requirement. All I need to do is make sure I have like push handles on doors and maybe the counter height is good enough for wheelchair and bathrooms are right and I'm good. And so they thought they knew about accessibility, but they didn't know anything about accessibility. All they knew is regulation. And so effectively they got inoculated.
So the trick of it was, how do I get them sick in a good way, right? How do I give them a cold like they need to understand this. And I hope everybody gets my illustration here, obviously in times of COVID and pandemics we want to be careful with that. But the trick was to sort of introduce like how do I come in there and say like there's another side of this that is important.
What was so cool at Apple was it was always about the customer experience. And so I could lean on the cultural values of the company and link that to how that affects access or disability or inclusion. And I could say if someone came that was blind or low vision or someone came in a wheelchair, yeah, they might be able to use the restroom, but could they get in the door. Is there a ramp? Do we actually train anyone at the store to understand this culture? Have we hired someone with a disability that could speak to this
By putting this in the products like iOS and OS10 and, you know, iPhones, iPods, whatever there was a product reason for them to learn it. And so we kind of got in the door that way, which was literally, you got to learn the product and the product has accessibility. So let's talk about that.
Then pretty soon it started to catch on and people were like, wow, I've got this knowledge.
Now, who do I share it with? They were looking for targets. And they were like waiting for someone to come to store and ask about accessibility. And that once they had those interactions, and of course everybody who's worked with someone with disability knows, for the most part, almost every case, it's an amazing interaction. And they would say that was amazing, and they would tell their manager, wow, that was awesome. Could we have a night where we invite people to come and talk specifically about this and then invite their friends and family?
Then I started getting emails and letters and phone calls and people saying, Mike, this is the first time I've ever been able to go to a store and just shop with my family as a person with disability and actually be able to do stuff in the store while they were shopping. I still get goosebumps thinking about it.
And so it was a slow start while we kind of got rolling and then eventually it sort of gained its own momentum and then eventually we got champions and again for those who don't know one of those people that was in the store that was doing this was so great at this and so compelling at this that I remember meeting them: I flew out to their city halfway across the country to meet them because that reputation had followed them to Cupertino and I remember and visiting and just hanging out with them for couple hours I came back I'm like that person's amazing.
They ended up becoming part of the engineering product team - from retail. That had never really happened. They're still there. They're still working on stuff and they're amazing.
But it started to attract attention and draw people and give people career opportunities and I think the thing that was really cool about this is it sort of raised the level of visibility and awareness of this where it became normal. Like you can walk in an Apple store now and ask about acces and they're like, yeah, okay, not a big deal. Like, alarms don’t ring. It's like a normal thing. And that's what we want. We wanted it to just be another normal thing. Of course.
Yeah. So it was a long process, but we got there.
Yeah, I can imagine just like trying to get that training ramped up and get that across all of the stores and all the retail that was not something that's going to happen quickly.
Not overnight. You’ve got to find a couple champions, you got to invest in some training, then you got to give them opportunities and moments and you got to find ways to communicate with customers, say it's okay to ask question.
We had the genius bar at the time so people could come and ask. And then we had what was called the family room, which was sort of the learning area of the Apple store as we could say, “I just want to spend an hour with somebody to learn how this works.”
And then eventually started all that to like the sales side where they could walk in and go, do you have something for me? Yeah, we have something, let me show you how this works.
But you start small, right? You look for small focus things where you can get a win and get some traction and get a success story. And I think this is part goes back to what talking about telling a story. But the thing that got it rolling was small successes. And we skip over them really quickly. Like our knee jerk reaction is so there’s much more than I need to do and everything else is wrong. And you kind of like, yeah, was nice. That was great. But there's more.
No, no, When you happen across that win, if it's small, if it's a success and a win, tell that story. And that story, people love the success. And they want to build on that and add to it and see if they can take it further. And it starts to generate its own momentum. But we skip over those little victories and those little wins way too fast because we're overwhelmed by all the things we still haven't done yet.
So maybe that's a good bit of advice for people - it’s like boiling the ocean, you can't. But you can boil a cup of water no problem. And then you're like, Hey, tea, coffee, this is great.
What could I do? I could make spaghetti. I could boil the whole thing up fast then pretty soon you got this whole thing rolling.
Yeah, I had this one example. When I was at Yahoo we were working on Yahoo mail and Yahoo mail was the predominant vault and like the product at that company at that time, the mail app.
And it wasn't accessible at time. And I kept trying to do all the normal product manager things. Write memos, write emails, set up meetings, you know, fire off messages like we got to do this is important, regulatory, legal. It just wasn't happening.
And so finally I went to the VP again because I thought I to get this going. So I met to the VP and I said, look, I know there's important other things there's a lot going on. I said, can you just give me one engineer for like six months, just one and I'll go away after that. If we can't get this out and get it right, I'll go away. But I will literally commit myself head of accessibility at this company to sit with them and get this right.
We got an engineer who hadn't done accessibility before. Great mobile app engineer, but hadn't done accessibility. He came over he went to that accessibility lab you were referencing and he learned about how it's supposed to work in a good environment where it's all right, and he's like wow I never experienced this before I didn't even know this stuff existed but now that I see what it's supposed to do I kind of get it.
And so he started working on this and kind of went over shot little bit, we brought him back back. The long and short of this is after six weeks not six months - six weeks he had nailed it. It was amazing. I remember going through their app review and we're we always find little things that we missed or little, you know links that aren't labeled right or headings are missing or a tab order that was wrong. It was perfect. I couldn't believe it.
So it's like okay we got to unveil this like of course we're gonna talk to customers and users about it. But I said oh we're gonna do it on all hands meeting - every month all the engineering team the entire team like 500 people got together - I said we're pointing YOU on stage. I'm not even attending. I don't want to be anywhere near this I don't want people to think it was me because you did the work. We're putting you on stage to tell your story about how you learned about accessibility and built this app. And then I can say, yeah, and it's a great example.
And so he did that and he became really well known. It was a huge success for him personally, but then every other team was like, well, I can't do this. They're like, well, he did it. Go ask him. He knows how to do it. And they're like, oh, yeah, he does. And this was great and it helped me. And team number two, got it. And then team number three went to team number one and two.
But by him being able to tell that story and get that credit and demonstrating that it could be done, it opened up the entire mobile app division of that company and then fantasy sports and news and weather and everything suddenly started becoming accessible because they proved they could do it on the hardest example.
It was a really cool for that person. I was so happy that they got that credit. Of course, you can imagine they became a manager and then a director and then it kind of got them their reputation and suddenly they had a whole career, not in accessibility necessarily, but just as an engineer, which was really, really cool.
I want to go back to one moment from that story, which is when you walked in to the VP's office to ask for that resource. Tell me, what were the tactics you used to ask for that resource?
So most of them don't work. I did the typical product management things and said, OK, let me go to the designer. Let me go to the engineer who's in charge of this product and say, we need to fix this. This is why. And they're like, OK, but I don't have time for this. I have other priorities. I don't have enough people at the moment. I don't know what good looks like. I don't know what a working one is. You don't have an example, like, show me how it’s supposed to work.
So you go back and try and find third-party examples. You say, I want you to depriorize this, but they have a different manager, so they're not listening to me. Then you go up, skip a level. Say, go to their manager, Hey, I've been talking to your engineer or your designer. This is really important. And they're like, yeah, I've got a whole bunch of problems. And I'm going to defer to them because they own their own calendar and their own priority list, you know, fail again.
And then was like, hey, we're getting some requests from outside. Hey, there's a long laundry list of bugs in our bug tracking system. Yeah, but we don't know which ones are current and which ones have already been closed because we've updated the app since then, and now they're kind of out of date.
And you just keep cycling through all these things. And so as I say, like, you do have to go through those steps because sometimes they go, yeah, OK, I’ll fix it. Great. But in our case, it just couldn't climb the ladder fast enough. At some point, time had gone on, and the problems weren't getting fixed. So I always go to the person who owns it, and then I always go after three times, so to speak, go to their manager. If we haven't got it from their manager, it's time to skip up a level.
This is the culture of the company thing. Some cultures will say, go to the next manager. Other cultures will say, go talk to the CEO, like it just depends on the company. In my case, the VP was accessible and high enough level to make that decision. So I was able to sort of, in a comfortable moment, at a comfortable time, like we were having an all hands meeting and it breaks up and everybody's kind of standing around talking about what's happening and just going to lunch. I was like Hey, can I talk to you about this? Yeah, okay, and it was comfortable. I said, do we need to set up some time to really go into it or is this, can we just share it here? Sometimes I'll just say, tell me what you got, 30 second roll, tell my story, make it quick. And other times like set up a half hour, talk to my admin and we'll go have a discussion.
And maybe I come and I demonstrate.
And here's the thing I've learned, 100%. I can talk all day long. But if I walk up with an app and say, do this and it doesn't work, it's obvious and it's subjective. There's nobody trying to twist someone's arm. And so the winning formula that I consistently use is, put the thing in front of them and let them use it and say you try and send a message without a screen reader. You try and change the contrast without a contrast adjustment support. You can't read that.
And so a lot of times we would actually build a slide deck that had video or photos that would show the problems in app like the real thing. And when you put like one or two is not going to move the needle but if you put three, four, five, six, we had 10. And by six, the VP was like, just go do it.
I love these stories.These are the way that people get things done. So thank you, you giving us the inside scoop here. So you've done a couple of these career transitions. How do you know when it's time to go?
That's a hard one. I mean, it's like you kind of know it's like when you see art, you go, that's beautiful, I get it, I see it, like you just know. I think there's probably some other things that are a little bit more metric oriented, you know, it's like, are you getting opportunities to do things you want to do?
I'll take it back to my own situation, which is if there are things that are interesting to me that are opportunities and my skill set can help solve the problem, that's a perfect match. You stay like, Hey, this is satisfying me. It’s interesting. I'm learning something and I'm being useful and it's making a difference.
But when those things start to not be true, you can still stay and still solve one of those or two of those, but when three or four is not working anymore, I like to call it like the…scale starts to change. So if it's like high level, everything's great. I love it. It's like, I like most things and I'm sort of useful and it's not as interesting to me anymore. And I'm not really learning much and pretty soon people don't seem to really respond to what my…you start to realize like you're not satisfying the kind of primary reasons you wanted to be there. And then you kind of know, okay, it's probably time to look for a new role in the company or change the things I'm working on or eventually you need to move the company.
But the thing that most people miss is they weigh that once. I'm going to go for a job or go for a project and I got it. Great. And they never think again to measure during the next six months or next year or two years - Does that scale still balance?
I was at Apple 19 years. That scale moved a lot. There were times I loved everything, times I hated everything and it's like times that were just great. But you always got to re-evaluate is this where I want to be and is what I want to be doing.
And I would exchange a lot of times, you know, career progression for opportunities to learn. And I can remember it was like, do you want to go be a manager of this or would you rather stay on this next new cool project? And at the time, I'm like, I'd rather work with those people in that project than progress my career to manager because then I'm removed from the technology and I'm managing people not things and I was still wanting to learn technology. And so I kind of was able to measure that and go, yeah, that's not what I'm after right now.
As I got more to the end of my career, I had done so many technological things I was like, actually, I kind of need the people skills now and the resourcing skills and the budgeting skills and the scheduling skills. So opportunities to do that were increasing and so I would kind of slide over.
But the thing to keep in mind is once you leave, you don't go back. So while you're in that job, in that role, suck the life out of it. Do everything you can to learn everything, meet every person, try every opportunity, like do everything you can. Because when you progress to another role, it's really difficult to go back and try and pick up that skill you should have had before.
You joined Meta as head of accessibility. When you go into a role like that, how do you think about overall impact? Do you have to report up KPIs? What's the macro for a role like that?
It's a big one because I think you're trying to do a couple of things all at once. You're trying to show up and show people that you were the right choice and we could get something done here. But you're also trying to respect that people will put their lives into this work many years before you got there. And so you're trying to understand where they are and how they got there and why. And then you're also trying to figure out where are we missing? Why did they hire you? There must be some shortcoming somewhere you're trying to address.
So it's really hard to get that big picture while you're also making progress. And accessibility is its own unique beast because the metrics are difficult. It's hard to get metrics around some of these qualitative things. So you can say how many bugs have we closed and how many have we written and how many WCAG guidelines did we fail and things like that.
And that's going to get you some distance. But then there's sort of the qualitative - does the app feel accessible, do people like it, is it fun, is it easy, are they recommending it to people? Are they able to do something they couldn’t do before? Is it breaking new ground and showing a technique that hasn’t been in place like Voiceover with touch screen - a completely new technique that people had never used to navigate.
So as head of accessibility you’re kind of having to look at where are we today, where do we need to be like right now, and in the next six months, and then the really interesting thing is where do we need to be in two years? Like what’s coming and how do I get us set up for that?
At Meta a lot of the work was we didn’t have a measurement system. So there was no consistency across this giant company. And so someone would say is that accessible? And it’s either yes, no, or this GIANT thing in the middle. So a lot of our work that doesn’t get seen by the outside world is how do we create an evaluation tool and then system and ranking that's meaningful and accurate that would help us not only describe if it’s accessible, but to whom is it accessible? Which cohort - blindness or physical? Hearing loss or speech? And we started to really dial in and this was kind of the magic that was going on behind the scenes for a long time.
I was there is dialing in how precise we could be about which problems affected which cohort.
Because things like a missing label, if it's on an object that's trivial and just cosmetic, it doesn't matter. But if it's on the button that says delete, it matters a lot. And so knowing that the same label application in different places could have profoundly different effects, being able to measure that and tag that and know, ignore that, but this one's critical, even though it's the same bug, if you will, was really important. So meta was really developing a lot of the tooling to do that. And that allows them to become more efficient and more effective and save money and turn out better product and scale it up in a big way.
So head of accessibility is thinking about the tools, the metrics, the people, thinking about the products that we're working on, the technology you want to incorporate. A whole bunch of pieces there, how we communicate externally, the partnerships we add, it's a lot.
Across the companies you’ve worked for, where does accessibility sit within those organizations? I’m sure it’s top of mind for you right now at Meta.
100% because I actually helped organize the company to where the accessibility team sits. This was was a big effort, coming in and figuring out whether it’s in the right place, organizationally, does it have the right leadership, the right funding, the right mission. We moved it because it wasn't set up right and we got it in a really good place, so I was pretty happy with that.
I've been in places where accessibility was part of legal team. It's like, this is regulatory. This is compliance. There's rules and laws and regulations in various countries and regions and places that require a certain level of accessibility generally principled on the WCAG guidelines.
And so the company culture around accessibility, like if a new person came to that company said, I’ve got to do accessibility who do I talk to. “Legal.” Ohhhhh, so this is a legal thing. Oh, this is a requirement. Oh, I have to make sure the law is okay because there's risk here.
There's all these implications of it being from legal.
I've been in another company like an Apple where I’ve been in product development and they said, oh, the product person is coming to talk to you about accessibility. Really? Why? Oh, because we're making new products, we're making new experiences, we're trying to innovate.
The perception of accessibility was completely different within that company and that culture because of the role and the area of the company that accessibility was getting addressed.
And so it's very, very different.
So where accessibility lives in the company, it says a lot about how the company thinks about it, values it, resources it, and kind of what the obligations are around it.
At Yahoo! it was in the product side. And so we were looked at as how to make the user experience accessible. We helped with user research to understand this community and then we helped with product development like Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Fantasy to aptly implement it and then test it. And then of course we ran the accessibility labs. So we were the liaison between the outside world and our own developer community in the company and the product. That was a place to go explore did it or didn't work and how will it work and how to compare to other products.
When it sits inside product, where does it set? Like is it like CPO or a VP and then it reports into the VP or does it like sit in an operations group?
A lot of times it will sit underneath the design lead. So it might be VP or head of design because we're thinking about like the user experience and interface to that product, which lot where the accessibility stuff lives. On occasion, it could live inside the software engineering vice president. I've seen it in some cases be under the chief technical officer, depending on which company it is.
In a rare case, like at Verizon proper - we were in Verizon media, which is a subsidiary - but Verizon proper actually has a chief accessibility officer. Microsoft has a similar thing.
IBM in the old days had one. And so there was literally a C level staff executive reporting to the CEO talking about how are we integrating all of this.
What's your favorite way to organize?
My favorite is one that works. So depending on which company you're at they can all work and they can all be effective and they can all fail and be ineffective. A lot of times what you're trying to do is match the culture of the company with the organizational structure and then make sure that you have accountability and opportunity. It has to be resourced, you got to be able to tell that story and invest in it and make it better.
You and I know this that it brings back brand value, it brings back that social good that everybody's looking for. It makes you proud of your company. It clearly helps you with innovation as you move forward. Like there's a bunch of really non-traditional metrics that you benefit from and that's part of the key of being the head of accessibility is sort of helping tell the story of all the ways we're benefiting from this without people looking at the traditional metrics like, do we have more users, we have more engagement to get more ad dollars.
I think that you mentioned something that is worth highlighting - matching the culture to where it sits at the organization.
Yeah, if I tried to cookie cutter what I did at Apple, because I did all this work at Apple and now I'm leaving and I'm thinking to myself, can I just cookie cutter and take the same thing and go with this other company? And I'm like, not a chance. The culture is totally different.
I would say something about accessibility and they would say, yeah, we don't care about that.
But that was the only thing Apple cared about. So it took me a while to learn the culture of the new company. So I had to do that for Yahoo and then Verizon Media when it got bought was a different culture. Then Meta was a different culture.
So what does this culture value? How do things get decided? Is it about the customer experience? Is it about being efficient with ad dollars? Is it about scale and automation? Is it about craftsmanship? Like, what's the thing? And once you can figure that out, the faster you figure that out, the more you can go, okay, now how does accessibility link to that or apply to that? Or how do I leverage that to get the accessibility message going?
A good example: at Apple was about the craftsmanship, the artistry, the design, the experience.
So we created these unbelievable, cool, accessible experiences. When I got to Meta, they're like, we're all about automation scale and tools. So what did I work on? The measurement system, the tool system, generating metrics, data. And they're like, Oh, we get this. And I go okay, good.
It was a totally different way of approaching the problem. Same problem, same issue, but just the way we framed it and the way we presented it was in a way that they were ready to receive it. And so when we finally got to that place, it started to unlock a bunch of things. And that takes some time. That’s not like a walk in and learn it in a week. That could take, you know, up to a year or two to figure that piece out.
Yeah, it's such an absolutely key learning for folks that are leading accessibility organizations within a corporate structure. What are what are your techniques for combating burnout and staying energized all the time?
It’s a thing, 100% I think that the short answer is whenever I would finally get out of the office and stop talking to my own company and go to a conference or an event or an activity, or an organization, a disability organization and just sit and talk with people who are disabled, energy off the chart. There was just something invigorating about going back and getting to the roots of the thing and just going, this community is amazing. They're inspiring, they're funny, they're hilarious.
You just can't help but be excited and energized and go, I got to remember who I talked to, got to remember what they asked about and bring that back into the office. Because when you're in these technology companies, it gets really hard to remember that you're actually not working with machines, you're working with people at the end of the machine. People use this stuff and we're thinking, we're just going to make like the software work and the bugs go away and the launch time is faster.
Then you talk to a person like, I need to get a car so I can get to the hospital. I need to go visit my wife, I got to take my kids, pick them up from school, I got to get groceries and you're like, that's real life. So it's like, right, exactly, let's not forget that. So whenever I get into that place where I'm feeling burned out and tired and I can't, it's too much work and it's so hard and no one's listening and I can't get anything done. And I go back and do that, I come back and go, yes, it’s totally worth it. And I get re-energized again, like, okay, let's go again, we can do this. I can find a small win.
I’ve heard people say that accessibility slows down innovation. What do you say to those people?
I usually start laughing because it's so preposterous - I'm like wait what but then I have to remember that if you're not in this field and you haven't done this homework you have no idea. There's like hours of this but first of all what I say is actually it's quite the opposite.
I literally had this conversation with many people at the beginning of my time at Apple accessibility because they were really frightened. They're like I got to show this to Steve and if it's like all gray or it's just all black and white and there's like five buttons and there's nothing else he's gonna go ballistic. I'm gonna lose my job.
So I remember being very vocal about this there and also at other companies where I said and… I remember meeting with design teams and engineering teams and I said I want you to go as crazy as you can go in designing the most innovative thing you can think of. That's your job. My job as accessibility person is to figure out how to make that accessible with you. It's a partnership. You're not throwing it over the fence to me, but we're going to work together. I'll work with you to figure that out. So you go crazy and make it great. And if you make it great, we can make it accessible.
What I also found was true is if you don't make it great, no amount of accessibility will make it better. And I can remember projects where the user experience was bad. It was clunky. It was not logical. And they're like, make it accessible. I'm like, I can make this thing unbelievably accessible. And what it's going to do is tell people how bad your experience is. Because everything's going to be out of order. The flow is going to be wrong. The cursor's in wrong place.
Missing labels, headings that don't make sense. it's just going to shine a spotlight on how bad this experience is.
I had an experience with a design engineer who was awesome, but didn't know any accessibility. He had this app he was designing, but it scrolled a lot and at the top of each heading there was this toolbar. And he had like 15 objects in this toolbar. And every time you had to move the voiceover cursor, you had to listen to every single one over and over and over and over again to get to the content. And he couldn't figure out why the app wasn't popular. And I said, dude, it's just too complicated. It's like, it's not complicated, it's just content.
He was like what's the big deal? I said, have you seen the toolbar? Nobody gets over it. And I said, let me teach you Voiceover. And he learned the screen reader. I said, I want you to listen to your app. And he came back up few days later and he goes, oh man. He goes, I listened to it. And he goes, that was so complicated. There's like so many things in the way. And it clicked that visually and cognitively, that's still happening, even though he wasn't listening to the voice. And he goes, “I totally ripped it apart. I totally simplified it. Now people are telling me they love it. I will never forget this as a designer how, by listening to my app and using a different sense, I was able to perceive my work in a completely different way. And it changed the visual aspect even though I was listening to it.”
So that was a really cool moment for me to know that accessibility thinking got into him and changed the way he thought about design and designing for users. That was a really cool lesson.
We had an engineering lead one time we did, like - teams get these little meetings together and they say, we’ve got to have a guest speaker and they invite people all over the company. They invited us to come one time, we gave like a 30 minute level presentation about disability and just showed basic stuff. Things that for an assistive technology person were like normal things, but for these engineers, they had no idea this stuff existed. It was in their pocket and their phone.
About six months later, this engineering manager who came back and said, hey, could you come do that again? I said, what? He goes, yeah, I'm in a new division. I have a new team. And he said, I'd love to have you come do it. I said, what was it about that was really helpful so we can repeat that? He goes, you're not gonna believe this, he said, but I've been working for years to try and get my team to pay attention to detail and care about quality and really focus on the user. And he goes, I tried everything. I can imagine. I just couldn't get them there. And he goes, and then you guys came and talked about accessibility and talked about the detail of these things and how the way we build shows through the product, not just the way it looks, right? Because the accessibility tools use these keys inside the code. And he goes, after that, he goes, our quality was crazy. The care, the detail and attention they gave the app, he goes, it was the best thing I've ever used to get my team cohesive around this.
He goes, could you do that again? I'm like, I don't know if I can deliver that, but I can tell you all about accessibility. So we did it again, and he says it happened again! I'm like, man, that's a lesson to me about the impact of what we do, thinking on telling them about accessibility, and what we're actually making is better engineers and designers.
And he goes, I could spend years trying to get that but this thing, for whatever reason, caught fire with them. They care because it's a social good. And they felt good about it. They're like, this is amazing. I can do this for all these people. So it just can on so many different levels and it just started to generate this kind of whole, you know, benefits of accessibility that you just never imagined.
What is your perspective on the role of AI and augmented reality to make an impact for folks with disabilities?
I've been at this long enough to see the trends and see things that last. Because you do things you think, oh, that's going to be gone in three years. It's going to be overtaken by the next technology and it's over and out.
And other things you think are never going to be around last super long. Like I mentioned the example earlier: I was the guy who introduced USB on the iMac and USB at Apple and like that's now everybody has USB everywhere. You can't imagine where we don't have a USB port or a charger in your car at the airport or somewhere. I could have bet money as I was launching it that this will be a three year thing because up until that point, the connectors would change - like they just kept changing and rotating and the fact that the thing's still there is amazing to me. And it still works great, right? It's gotten better and faster.
So AI, so I'm looking for these trends. I'm looking to see like what lasts. And so voiceover obviously on iPhone, super durable long lasting. iPhone itself obviously has a lot of life left in it.
But I'm always looking for the next thing and AI for sure is that next paradigm shift. It is the game changer. It doesn't mean the old stuff goes away like we have phones, we didn't give up our computers. We still use them both - laptops, whatever. And we'll still use phones, computers and things.
AI is truly the game changer and it's really critical we get this right for the general population, but the opportunities it presents for people with disabilities is, I think maybe even multiple times more. Some just real quick examples. We could spend years trying to figure out how to make the Photoshop photo editing accessible because there's a thousand menu buttons and items and tools and toolbars and it gets just so complicated. And there are professionals that do this every day that are amazing at it. Or I could just use AI and say, hey, make me a picture.
Literally just by saying it, like with words, make me a picture of and then describe it and boom, there's a picture. I don't have to go through the trouble of learning and pulling buttons and tools. I have a completely new way to get that work done.
AI bypasses all of the inaccessible aspects of that, the training, the experience, the skill involved and says, now anybody can make an image, or now make music, or make a recording, or make a video, or who knows what, ask a question get an answer, generate documents - in ways that completely skip over the sort of make the accessible tools and menus and buttons and links that we effectively, that's the industry we're in, right?
And so it is completely going to change the game for people with disabilities, the simplicity of being able to do that, but it's going to require a new skill set. And it's not one we're good at. We're not really good at communicating. We're not really good at describing things.
We're not always good at asking questions. And so we're going to have to develop a different skill set to be able to use these new tools.
That's exciting, but it's a challenge. But it's going to change the accessibility game in a really big way. That's why I'm working at Be My Eyes and why I'm working on things like being able to have hands-free access to an AI in a pair of Ray-Ban glasses with a camera and a microphone in it where wherever your head is already pointing, you can ask it, what am I seeing and it can describe it to you, which is, again, kind of a game-changing moment.
And that's the beginning of the cycle, not the end, that's just where we're starting. And so what it can do over time will be absolutely amazing. And so that presents new opportunities for everybody listening and watching, new skill sets for training, new opportunities for people with disabilities, of what they're going to be able to do in the near future. It's going to be incredible. And so it's been really fun to hang out long enough in the industry to see that next generation change and make sure it gets off on a good footing.