Key Takeaways
- Accessibility has been a thread throughout Framil's career, from making music accessible to implementing digital accessibility at Merck
- Implementing accessibility in a large organization requires entrepreneurial spirit, persistence, and a people-focused approach
- Framil sees accessibility becoming seamlessly integrated into design and development processes in the future, aided by AI
Today I’m talking to Stephen Framil, Head of Global Accessibility at Merck, for National Disability Employment Awareness Month. Stephen is also a music director, a conductor, a cellist, and has been doing professional music for over 30 years.
Steven, how did you get into accessibility with this career music?
It’s one that I'd actually ask myself, and when I look back on my career in music, as you mentioned in teaching for over 30 years, one of the things that I've noticed was this thread of access - breaking down barriers. Anexample of that would be the work that I did in West Philadelphia. It was probably about 20 years ago, and it was at a inner city Catholic high school. I tend to be an entrepreneur if I'm kind of given a latitude that's what I'm naturally going to do.
This was an opportunity to provide free lessons, free music lessons, private instruction, and orchestra to the at-risk youth in the neighborhood - students who are not even attending the Catholic high school. This was just the idea of breaking down barriers. This is inner city. And so breaking down those barriers, making great music accessible to everyone.
So, go forward a few years, also with a performing arts organization that I started, Camerata Philadelphia. Since day one, all of our concerts have been free admission and open to the public. Again, breaking down those barriers, creating access, making great music accessible to everyone.
I took that same model, and when I started the Port City Music Festival 17 years ago, in Wilmington, North Carolina (I'm the music director of that as well), again, every concert has been free and open to the public, and making great music accessible to everyone.
So the notion, the idea of accessibility has kind of been in my ways of working, you know, for the last 20 years. I think even if I go back even further, you know, having been involved as a youth in various mission trips where you're building greenhouses for Indigenous Native Americans in Southwest or building schools in the Caribbean. It's kind of that whole notion of giving back and creating access.
So when digital accessibility presented itself at Merck, it was initially within the context of larger digital governance. When you have a large multinational company, with every digital asset having its own business owner or job owner, you can imagine there can be some challenges with maintaining basic digital governance. With roles and responsibilities changing so frequently within a large company, these responsibilities can easily be overlooked or dropped altogether.
We were building that framework for digital governance, which accessibility was a piece of that. And it wasn't too long before realized that the accessibility piece was something that really needed much more attention. So this is where we first went to see how can we make this the law of the land, so to speak, a corporate policy, which we did after a couple of visits to various leadership, executive leadership teams. And we got it passed as a global policy, applicable company-wide, every country that the company operates, region, every business unit division, both internal and external. I often say it's one of our most far-reaching policies, touching practically everything that we do from research to manufacturing to commercial. Because we’re a digitally enabled company like so many companies are today.
This has been the approach that we take. So I kind of see that accessibility narrative, as it were, throughout different types of career opportunities that I've had throughout my life, and I anticipate fully that's going to continue.
You mentioned being an entrepreneur. How do you sort of bring that entrepreneurial energy into a large global international?
Entrepreneurs naturally have a nose, as it were, for those sorts of opportunities. Most often, it's a blank slate when you're starting. There's nothing there, you have to start from scratch.
What I have found about accessibility in a large company is first of all, large companies, people naturally work in their silos. We all love our silos. We just go stay in your lane, it's your job. And when something new comes along, not everyone's raising their hand because they're staying in their lane. So, if you are willing to lead the charge on something that is new, they are more than happy to cheer you on.
That was the case for me, and really what I have found with accessibility is that because it's so closely linked to diversity, equity, inclusion - in fact, when you think about designing for accessibility and for people with disabilities, that is the epitome of DE&I values because it intersects across all types of people, regardless of who you are. If you are a human being, then disability inclusion is something that if not in the past, certainly in the future, or your family and friends around you, is relatable.
So the thought leadership around accessibility was probably the easiest part of all of this, because it aligned with our company values, our DE&I program, our chief diversity officer, and it was already very much impactful for our company. In fact, our policy owner or our individual accessibility policy is our chief diversity officer. So, it starts with a lead at thought leadership.
But you can't expect our chief diversity officer to go around and check in websites. And so that's where it is from the IT organization, they really enabled the thought leadership and thereby empowering the business to advance accessibility within their portfolio. Because business primarily owns the digital assets.
That was really kind of the beginning of the early years, a few years back, where getting this message down, executive leadership very much on board. But then this is where the real entrepreneurial spirit and the stick to it, the determination, keep going comes in place with getting accessibility controls and activities into the system and get it in systemically because this is where you're ultimately going to make change.
What do I mean by that? I mean, for example, our systems development lifecycle, getting it into where there's an actual control, getting it into procurement. So whatever you're buying in terms of digital products and services, those meet accessibility standards.
Of course, in other areas, you have to make sure that you have the appropriate training available to your workforce so that they get the skills - you have role-based training. If you're a designer this is the type of training you would take. If you're a developer, you're a content author, if you're in legal, this is the type of training that you should have. And we'll continue to curate that out.
Also the communication, getting into our regular cadence of communicating globally, or if it's regionally, or in a particular business unit. And also getting it into not just the externally facing websites, the commercial side of the business, but in all parts of the business, at least for a pharma company, starting with what happens in research and laboratories and clinical trials, and then, of course, in manufacturing as well.
We're not all there yet, but we are definitely making some good progress. You kind of have to go the long game. I think with any startup, I think the metric is if it clicks after five years years, then you're there. And that has actually been my experience with my music startups with Camerata Philadelphia and the Port City Music Festival. It literally did click right at five years and then that's where you know.
I think we're closing in on that, and I think in terms of systemically getting it into the ways of working in a multinational company, we're making a lot of good progress and it's very exciting to see.
And it's not only our people attuned to the thought leadership that's driving it, that's the easy part. It's like, okay, how does this really impact what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis in the work that I'm doing with various digital assets.
I can imagine this being incredibly challenging role with so many priorities with so many reporting structures to deal with. What are some of the tools that you use in order to help get accessibility prioritized across this organization?
The approach that I've taken is with people. Clearly, you mentioned reporting structures, but it's putting that governance in place where you're tapping into individuals across the organization in every country that have some sort of alignment with their day-to-day job with digital and accessibility.
What does that actually mean? We've got a leadership forum, cross-organizational representatives from the IT organization, obviously, but also representatives from various other global support functions when it comes to legal, compliance, as well as the commercial side of the business, as well as the manufacturing and research side of the business. Really providing that guidance as we continue to curate our policy, our underlying SOPs, we have an array of job aids specific for channels because we need to provide specific instruction, but you can't all put into a policy, it has to be lowered down.
That's our leadership forum. What we also have is an accessibility steward network that is global, so we have at least one accessibility steward in every country that we operate, and they are the champions, they are the ones driving this locally on the ground. They don't report to me. They have their own reporting structures, but there's a natural alignment with what their job already is and they're the ones who are working with the local job owners and business owners of digital assets to make accessibility progress.
We also have, from working with our internal audit group, to be able to just help encourage accountability. And part of that audit roadmap year over year. But it's people. It's people and getting them all on the same page, singing the same tune, singing ini tune and marching to the same beat.
Do you use those metaphors often inside the org? Because I can imagine them resonating pretty well.
I don't but it's no secret that everyone knows that I'm not an engineer, I'm not a scientist - I'm a cello player, a chamber musician, a conductor.
You think about it a conductor doesn't necessarily play the oboe - I think that because that's one of the most instruments. But they can tell the oboe player when to play and how to play when to start and when to stop and when there's that mutual respect because an orchestra - if they don't like the conductor they'll sabotage them. That mutual respect, then, there's so much that you can do together. And so it's that very fine balance of working with our leadership one, working with our accessibility stewards globally and to be able to advance accessibility.
Of course, this takes time. Last year, I spent with about 60 stewards, I would meet with each of them once a month for half an hour to really build that relationship. And then we have a steward summit, where we all come together and they actually learn from each other. They all have the same issues and everything and the working building off of each other.
So I would say it's people. In order to make, any initiative work, regardless of the directive or what it is that you're trying to do, it's got to be the people. Regardless of the tool or the platform that you're using to test accessibility, this and that - that's all good. Having clear processes, yes, so the people process technology, but it's starts with people.
You know the stewards, there's a whole range of ability when it comes to the digital space. Some have very little experience and some can write code. So it varies. And so our description of the accessibility steward is to be that local champion. You're not supposed to be the project manager for all the accessibility initiatives in your country. That may be your job, which is fine, but the role of the steward, as we've defined it, is being that guide at the country level.
It’s the people and giving them clear processes that can be scaled globally, and, of course communication, and giving them the right tools that they can all use. Not just tools that are good for engineers, because those are very technical versus ones that are more appropriate for the business. That's really kind of one of my guiding principles in determining the types of tools is - does it fit for someone who's more on the business side, rather than the engineering side.
When you when you came into this role, how much of this was already established?
Nothing. In fact, I do a lot of speaking at conferences and one of my first slides I start with a blank screen and I give some mock surprise. “Oh, how do we have a blank screen here?” And then I say, well, that's actually what you have when you're starting accessibility program at a large company. You're starting from nothing.
So yeah none of it was put in place at all. You can certainly look across your organization and say, okay, there's that model that works over there and see what's working over there and, and kind of adapt to various things. But it's also, you first have to understand where the ownership lies for your digital assets. And that's going to be different in every company. Who is ultimately the responsible one? And the way we've written our policy is that it's the business owner of the digital asset, who is ultimately responsible for ensuring accessibility and responsible for the cost of doing business with that asset. So it's all part of that.
So understanding where the ownership lies of the digital assets. That's going to vary I would imagine from company to company. And having an understanding of the business relationship to those digital assets and some of the challenges. Certainly the work that I did with digital governance prior to pulling it out and centralizing it was very informative on some of the challenges that the business had with maintaining best practice ownership of their digital assets, so you learn things. And those are, I would imagine, are particular to every company.
I think that is one of the most important initial steps, understanding how ownership actually works of digital assets in your company.
So when you had all these business owners who owned their digital assets - I imagine like one step was probably convincing them that they own their digital assets, or do they already believe that they own their digital assets?
There can be nuances to that. you could have a business owner, but then you could have a job owner who's actually more of the project manager kind of making things happen. The business owner, the one in charge of the budget or holding the budget is more removed. So that dynamic can vary.
This is where—when you're making the case to the business—you really then need to lean into the thought leadership. Where is this coming? This comes from your company values. It's not just someone saying, hey, you've got to do this. You've got to have a solid, why are we doing this?
In fact, in my conference talks, I start with a why. Why are we doing this? You can not only bring in aspects of DE and I, but also disability inclusion and the types of disabilities. And if you think about it in pharma, and this is for Merck, our slogan, our values as patients, are our purpose. And so when you think about pharma, we're really creating medicines for patients. Patients, just by the very nature of being a patient, you have comorbidities, you have frailties, and you have disabilities, and various disease states are going to come with disabilities. Even therapies can cause disabilities even if they're temporary or situational.
For example, last year I had cancer and the chemotherapy would give me neuropathy in the fingertips and the toes, which is not so good for a chelist if you think about it. So that was a real concern. Fortunately I’m about 98.5% there. I kept playing throughout my treartment and it was fine and everything. But that's a real thing, especially so for any cancer patients who are taking chemotherapy. There are, you know, temporary disabilities and sometimes neuropathy doesn't go away, it becomes a permanent disability.
So just by the nature of the business that pharma does for patients who have various disease states and then the therapies causing situational or temporary disabilities at the very least, it makes sense with how we approach our business.
When, for example, you have a clinical trial study—perhaps it's for some hypertention—one of the types of disabilities that can come with patients who have advanced hypertension or the medicines that they're taking. What's that going to cause? Or diabetes and the loss of vision that can come with diabetes. If you have that in mind, OK, when we're creating these studies and we have these various digital touch points, then the technology that we're using, make sure it's designed so that maybe, yes, there's a good possibility that we'll have a lot of patients who are visually impaired.
That’s the kind of unique position that pharma has with digital accessibility because patients, by the very virtue of being a patient, and we're all patients, are going to have those comorbidities, frailties, and disabilities.
So what I heard basically is you have this strong sense of mission and values at Merck around centering the work around patients. And then from that, you were able to help educate the team and the organization about what sort of disabilities our patients' experience and use that as a strong motivating factor tied to that mission to get work done.
Yes. It's extremely relatable. I’ve heard so many stories from co-workers where you had no idea, but it's very relatable, either for themselves or for their family members. It’s part of everyone's lived experience in one way or the other.
Given that strong, company mission, values, relatability, customer need - what do you think slows (accessibility) down?
What can slow it down is what actually I've been working on for several years now. Because it's getting it into the DNA of the ways of working. How we operate as a business.
When I mentioned the system development lifecycle, which for technology, that's what everything should be following, whatever that is. When you can establish specific accessibility controls throughout the SDLC, such as design evaluation before anything is coded, make sure testing is done throughout the design and build phase, and the testing phase. And then after it's launched, if there's anything that's changed or updates, make sure those are tested so that you maintain accessibility throughout the lifecycle - having those specific activities so that they're not forgotten. Because you can imagine in any build of technology there's always a deadline and folks get there and they just about to go live and like oh, we didn't test accessibility.
Then you got to go back and fix it and then of course and what's the metric - four times the cost to fix something rather than do it like the first time. So it's really getting it into the DNA. Getting it into the design systems at the component level so that anything downstream is accessible. Getting it into the master brands the style guides the color palettes, so that anything downstream at least has a fighting chance for accessibility. That's the focus that we've been doing. As well as any digital products and services.
Getting it into our procurement and supplier management and of course with such a large company, large multinational company, it's hard, there's always a new business unit that you never heard about, accessibility. It’s kind of nice in a way because when they first hear about it, they're all excited, know, it's like the greatest thing since sliced bread, which is about 1928, early July (I looked that up actually). But it's so new and fresh to them, you know, they're all excited about it. It kind of goes to teaching - I’ve been a teacher for over 30 years - when exposing a class to a new concept, it's kind of like that too. So the teacher hat goes on a lot.
It's a lot of teaching, a lot of working with people with different levels of understanding. I've learned in all my presentations that upfront we define what digital accessibility is because that can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people depending on who you're talking to.
If you talk to cybersecurity, it's going to meet one thing. If you talk to market access and pharma, that's going to meet something completely different. So make sure that we define it upfront.
Having done this for a bit, what was one thing that surprised you going into this role?
One thing that surprised me. All the other things I've talked about, that’s just been a lot of persistence. I guess, because we all kind of live in our own shell, I guess what was a nice surprise was how relatable this was. And then folks begin to - if they're comfortable, they share their experience. And this really empowers thought leadership, how relatable this is to everyone. Because we don't know another person's story, unless they tell us. But if this is something that they find meaning in, and I think most people on this planet can - to disability inclusion, whether themselves or their loved ones or their family, friends - then this is a human race thing. That was a very nice surprise.
One thing that I've heard before is accessibility and slow down innovation. What do you say to someone who tells you that?
We had our second annual accessibility design summit internally and we were working with various design teams from various brands, product brands, and it occurred to me, there's so many rules. So many rules. It caused me to kind of reflect on one of my college courses on 16th century Renaissance Counterpoint—I'm putting on my music hat here.
There are so many rules when you think about the Renaissance choral music of Palestrina and Josquin des Prez - there are so many rules to 16th century Renaissance counterpoint. But that was the point of the course, was learning them all and then putting a piece of music together. You have the masters of this and that's what made them true masters at this because they knew all the rules and they did it.
Then that’s what I think about the art of design, especially with accessibility. There are many rules but the rules are there, the accessibility criteria are there to ensure that everyone can effectively consume the digital content. So what can you do to design, how innovative can you be with these rules and it's going to take a lot of diligence, a lot of sweat, blood and tears. It's going to take some talent to really do it well. So I think that's where as an art form of design, really calling on innovation, ingenuity, it's not just, oh, I'm gonna just design something.
It's like when I get asked the question, “Oh you’re a musician? How many instruments do you play?” I play one really well. It's the only thing I’m really qualified to do in this life. Play with the cello and teach it. Like, “How long have you been playing?” I've been playing for over 50 years.
So that's expertise. This is where I would call on the design community. True expertise in what you're doing. Yes, there are rules. There are always rules, and the rules are going to change.
But true inspiration, true expertise is what's going to really, and true ingenuity is going to drive the drive the innovation. It's not for the faint of heart. It's not. Just like any highly evolved art form, it's not for the faint of heart. It's not for the tourists. It's for citizens of that discipline.
As someone who thinks about products and thinks about process and thinks about this global impact of accessibility, how do you think about AI's role in this?
Especially with the productivity tools, this is really opening up the possibilities of disability inclusion. In fact, this has been a subject that for our own internal productivity tools that we're looking at. Because we have our own AI, Merck has its own AI and continues to develop.
This is really making a difference the disability community, particularly those who identify with neurodivergence. It’s just expanding beyond the constraints of the physical world. You mentioned Microsoft, their abilities summit last March, I very much appreciated their demonstrating for people with disabilities how this really kind of leveled the playing field for them in terms of being productive.
I think there's a lot more to come on this. I think, of course, we have to make sure the data sets are exclusionary. And when it comes to testing tools for accessibility, I think AI is really going to evolve that. We kind of have two classes of testing when it comes to automated testing and what that capable of versus manual testing, what I like to call disability user manual testing. People with disabilities using screen readers and other assistive technologies to test out user flows for any barriers. It's interesting to see where AI is able to take automated testing and where that goes.
For those engineers out there, it's seeing how they'll evolve. It's impacting everything that we do, quite honestly so I think the accessibility will be no different.
One of the things I recall a few years back, like in the 2010s was that responsive design that was like “the thing” in terms of, oh, businesses had to make a decision. Oh, are we going to make this responsive? And they'd have to budget and blah, blah, blah. We don't even think about it today, we? We have automatically different viewport sizes. That's the way it's designed, period.
My hope is that accessibility becomes that way as well. It's just part of what we do. It's part of the process and with the help of AI, the implementation of that even further, and it's just part of what we do.
When you think about industry 4.0, this is what we're kind of on the cusp of various types of AI-driven machine learning, things of that nature. And before that, we had industry 3.0 of just basic computers. Industry 2.0 was just manufacturing. Industry 1.0, way back in the 1790s. Of course that all moved very fast. Very fast, which kind of begs another question, perhaps another talk, is the narrative around people feeling left behind. Because industry 4.0 has moved so fast, since 2011, that people got left behind, because it's moved so fast.
But industry 5.0, this is where resiliency and sustainability and human simplicity is, the focus is. My hope is that accessibility looks so wrapped into what we do, part of that industry 5.0, that human centricity, that this will be what everything is. And of course, there'll be something new to come along. Meanwhile, I'll go back and continue playing cello.
I’ll end with a question about what you're most excited about for accessibility, but I think you already gave me that answer.
That’s the answer. Because it's so relatable, it's part of our human lived experience that building accessibility will be part of everything that we do. And we won't even be having this type of conversation because it's where we've come as a human race.
As you’ve mentioned, industry 5.0, industry 6.0, whatever that is, and I think this is where, as technology evolves, we're able to break down those barriers of the physical space for those who have disabilities. I think it's very exciting.