148: From Advocacy to Action: Sharron Rush on 25+ Years of Digital Inclusion, Poppi “Naughty or Nice” Duo

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In this episode, we interview Sharron Rush, Executive Director of Knowbility, about her 25+ years of work in the digital accessibility space. Knowbility is one of the most widely recognized nonprofit organizations focused on digital inclusion globally, and Sharron did us the honor of sharing an exclusive announcement about the organization’s future on the podcast. Listen (or read) to find out!

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Chris: Welcome to the Accessibility Craft Podcast, where we explore the art of creating accessible websites while trying out interesting craft beverages. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility company, and the proud creators of the Accessibility Checker plugin.

And now onto the show.

Steve: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Accessibility Craft Podcast. I’m Steve, and today with us we have Chris.

Chris: Hey everybody.

Introducing Special Guest Sharron Rush

Chris: And we have a special guest today, Sharron Rush from Knowbility. Sharron, would you like to introduce yourself for our audience?

Sharron: Sure. I am Sharron Rush, I’m the Founder and Executive Director of Knowbility.

We’re a small nonprofit organization based in Austin, Texas, and for all those years we’ve been advocating and teaching people about digital accessibility, why it matters, and how to do it.

Steve: Awesome. We’re glad to have you here on episode 148 of Accessibility Craft for everybody tuning in. If you want to find show notes and a full transcript, those are available if you go to AccessibilityCraft.com/148.

Today’s Beverage

Steve: Of course, we start every episode with a beverage. What are we drinking today, Chris?

Chris: I’m excited. We’ve got a two for one deal here today. So Poppi Sodas is doing their seasonal Naughty or Nice Duo. So we have a Cranberry Fizz, and then we also have a Ginger Fizz. And Sharron, if you have both, you’re welcome to try both.

I have both. Or if you have just one, you can try just one.

Sharron: I do have both here, but I’m gonna drink the Cranberry Fizz.

Chris: Alright, and then in, in perhaps the most representative and true adherence to holiday themes, Steve’s shipment was delayed due to inclement weather. So Steve has no beverage.

Steve: Yep. It’s the first time in many episodes with no beverage. But yeah, I think we’ve had a lot of snow up here in the Midwest and looks like things are delayed. So I will rely on your guys’ feedback on how good this is. ‘Cause I will get it eventually.

Chris: Yeah, it’ll show up eventually.

Sharron: I tell you, I did try the ginger one without y’all. I just couldn’t wait and that was excellent. So today I’m gonna try this one.

Chris: Yeah. I’m particularly excited. So I’m gonna go ahead and crack both of these open. But they, it has some nice art on the can. It’s got some cranberry illustrations and the words “Be Merry” on there and “Pop” and “Fizz.”

But the nice thing about the Poppi’s is they’re kind of, they’re that, that prebiotic soda thing. And I think we’ve tried Poppi on here before a different flavor. And so they’ve got lower sugar, natural non-sugar sweeteners and some juice and plant derived flavorings. So. I’m debating. I think I want to go cranberry first because I’m guessing the ginger’s gonna be stronger, but…

Steve: So the cranberry it says, would even be the holidays without the return of this fan favorite festive flavor. Refreshing, bubbly, and utterly cran-tastic. It’s the best gift. It’s the best gift you could possibly share with your loved ones this winter. Happy Holidays from your friends at Poppi.

Sharron: I put mine in a very colorful…

Steve: Oh, there you go.

Chris: Yep.

Sharron: Festive glass. So that, and with plenty of ice, so cheers.

Chris: That’s interesting. I’m glad you poured it in a clear glass. ’cause I would’ve expected like, some red coloring, but it doesn’t have any in there. Which is gonna now cause me to read the ingredients. So…

Sharron: How did they get the red outta the cranberries?

Chris: Yeah, no kidding. I mean, cranberry juice is in there. But, it’s further down the ingredient list about halfway down. But it’s nice. It’s tart, it’s sweet. You do get the cranberry. What do you think Sharron?

Sharron: You get a little bit of fizz, but not, it’s not the overwhelming fizz that you sometimes get with carbonated beverages. Yeah. I like it.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. It’s really nice, easy drinking. Definitely gets me in that holiday vibe. I’m gonna try the ginger. I’m excited for this one. ‘Cause I love ginger beers and ginger sodas, and you said this was good?

Sharron: Yeah. I thought it was very good.

Chris: Yeah. Ooh, okay. Yeah, it’s got a little bit of the ginger heat and it’s, they’re not shy with the ginger. That’s good.

Sharron: They were not shy. They’re more shy with the cranberry, I think, than they were with the ginger. The ginger flavor came through really strongly.

Chris: Yeah. These are both great.

I think due to their simplicity, it’s hard to really speak about them at length, at least for me. But I feel like they’re, they are solid entries in that health forward soda category. So I’m giving this a thumbs up.

Sharron: Yep, me too.

Chris: Yep. And then Steve, you’ll have to let us know your rating, but I’m guessing you have the Diet Coke, which is honestly…

Steve: I’ll give the Diet Coke thumbs up.

What is Knowbility?

Chris: Yep, always. That’s awesome. I mean obviously we’re having you on the podcast, Sharron, to talk about the organization that you work with and your background in the accessibility space. So today’s topic is from Advocacy to Action, Sharron Rush on 25 Plus Years of Digital Inclusion.

So, we know that you do a lot of work with Knowbility in that organization. So maybe you can just start by for those of us who are not familiar, you know, what is Knowbility and what do they do?

Sharron: Knowbility is a nonprofit organization. As I said, we’re based in Austin, but we work globally pretty much.

You know, we work on internet accessibility, so digital accessibility is a global issue. So we work worldwide, but we are pretty, pretty centered in Austin because of the way our roots, where we started. And, we have a number of community, what we call community programs, things that really reach out into the community and try to help people understand: What is digital accessibility and why does it even matter?

So we’ve got the awareness efforts, and then advocacy. Of course, we serve with many other volunteers from around the world at the W3C on the boards that develop and popularize the web accessibility standards. And then we also do quite a bit of education.

We have a conference that we call AccessU. Every year in May, we bring people to Austin. And we also, it’s hybrid since the pandemic we’ve learned to, to teach these courses again, globally. But we teach people about, and this is really a root cause thing where you address the root causes of digital accessibility by talking to the people who make, who create digital properties, right?

And so we educate project managers, school teachers, people in higher ed, in industry, in other nonprofit places, government agencies especially lately, come to AccessU and we teach, it’s a very much of a teaching conference. And I guess our most popular community program is the AIR competition.

We do a global, contest every year where we teach people the basics of accessibility and have them design a website for other nonprofit organizations. It’s a really great community building exercise. And then we also offer fee for service kind of consultations to, to… But we came to that later. We did this community work for about 10 years, and then people started saying could you just help us, meet our goals and so, so we do some fee for service consulting work as well.

How did Sharron get into accessibility?

Steve: Cool. Sticking with our kind of holiday theme here, we can take a trip back to the past of the ghost of accessibility past, and you’ve been doing digital accessibility work for over 25 years and are a founding member of Knowbility, and we appreciate the rundown on Knowbility and what you guys do. What initially motivated you to focus on accessibility on the internet, and what has kept you committed and engaged in accessibility over all this time?

Sharron: Steve, it’s really, you know, it’s interesting, we’re talking about 25 years of this, ’cause I didn’t expect it, but I did come by these gray hairs very honestly. In the mid nineties I was working for Easterseals, Easterseals Central Texas is a rehabilitation agency. We, you know, we serve everybody, people of all ages with all kinds of disabilities, with rehabilitation and a lot of counseling and even employment services. And my job at Easterseals, I had a technology background. My job at Easterseals was in employment program development. So I was to develop programs that would lead to employment for the adults in our community that we were serving with disabilities.

I don’t know how much you know about Austin, Texas, but in the mid nineties we were transforming ourselves from a little college town. We wanted to be a tech center. So there’s Dell Computer, IBM’s Accessibility Center came here. We started having a lot more initiatives around technology and my own opinion was.

What a great job for someone with a disability, right? The technology is such an enabling factor. The internet can connect you to employment and other communities. Let’s go. And of course, what I didn’t anticipate were the barriers for people with disabilities. And as I started, you know, really looking into how can we build out an employment program for people with disabilities in these tech companies that were starting or growing in Austin?

We just kept hitting barriers to use, oh, my constituents, my stakeholders can’t use this technology, can’t use it the way everybody else does. There are assistive technologies, but they often don’t sync up with internet technologies. And so to me that became just, you know, it was like a revelation, but not of a good kind.

And so I started talking and as I said, lots of activity in Austin around then. So I started talking to people at IBM’s Accessibility Center. Jim Thatcher was one. There was a blind professor of English at UT, University of Texas named John Slaton. There was a very proactive webmaster for the Texas School, for the Texas School for the Blind. His name was Jim Allen.

I, you know, I just started these conversations and then there was a another nonprofit called Austin Freenet, and they were looking at the digital divide in, in the traditional ways of poverty, racial disparities, those kinds of ways. And I started talking to them too about what about disability?

And so this collaborative sense was very much at the heart of how Knowbility came to be because as we talked, we also started talking to some of these tech entrepreneurs and said what do we do about this? You guys are these smart tech inventors, what do you what can we do? And some of the people who were also, you know, maybe they had family members with disabilities, they understood and were were really interested in that problem.

And one of them, Steve Ginrich, was a very committed community member as well as a tech entrepreneur. And he said, you know, Sharron, we in the tech sector are very competitive. If you want us to pay attention, think of something that’s competitive. So we brainstormed and came up with this idea of the Accessibility Internet Rally or AIR. And that was really, we did that as a loose community coalition of Goodwill, Easterseals, the Austin Freenet, and a bunch of volunteers.

We did the AIR contest where we invited tech professionals to learn about Accessibility, what it was, how to do it. And think about it, this is like 1998, 1999. This is when the WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines first edition was just coming out. So we were just seeing global standards coming into being and we use those to build a judging form and a training program.

We train people to understand the challenges and what was needed. And then at that time, most nonprofit organizations didn’t have any presence on the web, much, much less an accessible one. And so we thought this is also a way to connect these new tech entrepreneurs to Austin’s community groups.

Things like Keep Austin Beautiful, or a tech animal shelter. So we’ve matched these teams together with nonprofits, taught them how to make accessible websites. So we did the first several, we did in a day. It was a one day hackathon, build an accessible website, then we judged them, we had a big party, we gave awards. And what I see looking back is that it introduced people to accessibility as a creative challenge rather than as a legal or government mandate. And it really, I think that really has had a difference in the way people embrace or understand accessibility. If you think of it as a creative challenge, then that’s a little different than thinking you have to do this or I’m gonna sue you, right?

So, we did it that way for a couple of years. By that time we had this pretty active volunteer coalition and it was Start Up Austin. And so people said let’s just start a nonprofit organization. And so we did, and we called it Knowbility, and we were off. We weren’t, you know, I said I said at the very beginning, I didn’t expect to still be doing it 25 years later. Because I thought that it’s it’s such a clear, it’s such a clear need that I really expected that the tech sector would get invested.

And I didn’t think they’d need so much convincing ’cause it’s, think people think about a billion people in the world with disabilities. But here we still are.

How has digital accessibility evolved over the last 25 years?

Chris: Yeah. And that actually leads perfectly in the into the next thing that I wanted to ask, which is, you know, kinda like what you alluded to, it’s really easy to get discouraged when we see that the advocacy’s been going on for this long, and we have studies coming out like the WebAIM Million, which says that, you know, depending on the year you look at it, 94, 96 percent of websites have clear accessibility problems. And it’s been like 30 years since WCAG has come out in those intervening years.

We will get to the challenge side for sure in this conversation, but on the positive side are have there been any like positive transformations or improvements that you would like to highlight for our audience?

Sharron: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, when we first started talking to people about accessibility, digital accessibility, web accessibility. It would be complete fog. Like, what are you even talking about? There was no real awareness of the fact, you know, they would say blind people can’t use the web. It’s visual. You know, like, you know, just it’s just the way it is. It’s too bad. That has completely changed. I think people now absolutely recognize, I mean, when you think about how we live.

You can’t expect someone simply because they have a disability to be locked out of all the education, employment, social, civic, engagement, entertainment, all the things that we do online. So I think people do now at least understand the issue. And the most joyful thing to me is the community of practice that is built up, that there are so many people.

Who not only understand it, but are working toward it, supporting each other. I think this community is just phenomenal in that way, that in the very competitive tech sector you have the people who are practicing accessibility, who collaborate and help each other and support each other. I mean, the W3C is…

it’s problematic in so many ways because consensus and trying to get that many people from different cultures and languages and everything to agree, but the fact that it is a global effort and that it, it has just made tremendous progress. I mean, some of the resources that are available on the W3C Web Accessibility In itiative, the WAI site are great. They’ll help you plan for an accessibility project. They’ll you know, you’ve got testing things, you’ve got things to help you develop policy. So, absolutely I think and the community itself is just such a phenomenally supportive and and collaborative group.

What would you think, Chris? I mean, you’ve been in it for a while too. Don’t, do you, don’t you agree that we have some progress?

Chris: My perspective on Accessibility is certainly narrower than someone who’s been in it and doing it at your level for as long as you have. Because I’ve, my earliest exposure to it was around like 2015, 2016. So definitely a while, right? Almost 10 years.

Sharron: Yeah.

Chris: But, in that timeframe, what I have observed just as a digital professional and someone who scopes and sells digital projects, right? Equalize Digital used to be an agency. The main shift I’ve seen from my perspective in the business world is that , I see it come up way more often as a requirement on projects.

Oh yeah. I see people overtly asking about it and I see, a lot of solutions mentioning it as one of their selling points to potential audiences, right? And these are usually like software.

Sharron: Sure.

Chris: Now whether or not it’s as accessible as they represent, that’s sometimes debatable because these software solutions aren’t always fully accurate. But, those are some of the trend lines I’ve seen at least over the last few years.

Steve: Yeah, I mean, I think I would agree too and I’ll speak for kind of the tech side of it a little bit, that I think over the last 10 years that we’ve been pretty heavily into accessibility, that there has been a kind of a paradigm shift of sorts with accessibility when it comes to the people on the tech side. When they’re developing new solutions or when things inside of, you know, we work a lot in WordPress, so like when things in core are being added to WordPress, there’s a lot more attention given to accessibility, and to considering it.

In the end, it doesn’t always flesh out a hundred percent is accessible, but it’s definitely nice that it’s part of the conversation these days and that it’s not just completely dismissed. ‘Cause there was a time on the tech side where it felt like it was completely dismissed and like you said you know, it’s like, oh, you’re just giving me more rules that I have to follow.

And now I think people can actually see the positive in, investing in some sort of accessibility in their digital products.

Sharron: You know, that’s a good point, Steve, because I think all these studies have shown that as you make your products more accessible, they become more usable for everyone.

Steve: Yeah. I mean, especially on the web, right? Which, you know, a lot of the web is scanned and by bots. And bots are machine learning and they’re machines. And if you format it in a semantic way, it’s so much easier for the machines to digest. So maybe we should speak to the converse, you know, the other end of the spectrum. What challenges to building a fully accessible internet do you see persisting to this day?

Sharron: It’s one thing in the physical world when you build a wheelchair ramp, it tends to just stay there. If you build a curb cut, it’s in cement, it’s there, it’s gonna stay there. The fact that technology changes as quickly as it does, I think makes it a real challenge for accessibility to keep up.

Sometimes, you know, things are built and then they look back and say, oh yeah, we gotta go put that accessibility stuff in. And I think anyone who’s done this for any amount of time knows that doesn’t really work that well. You can’t go back and stick it in there. It really has to be planned in from the beginning.

So I think the challenge is getting the culture of the product makers and the, or the, you know, who’s ever making, maintaining and sustaining the technology product or platform. That it has to be completely submerged into the way security is. You know, the like, you have to, it has to be a consideration at every stage of all the parts.

And that is challenging because it’s a cultural change. And and that’s, you know, that’s just hard. And I think one of the, one of the problems that we have as advocates, is that all or nothing kind of idea that, oh you know, you haven’t been able to check off every single box of the WCAG standard.

And even, I think the, you mentioned earlier, Chris, the the WebAIM Million. Is it the million?

So they have homepages and they say, you know, only 96% meet WCAG. But some of them have pretty minor problems too. It’s not, so you can’t just say it has one problem and when you read the analysis of it, they are pretty good about drilling down into the fact that yes, these are violations of the WCAG code, but they may not be so, so difficult to navigate for most people with disabilities.

And so I think that’s also a challenge that we can’t have it be all or nothing. We have to celebrate the progress that people are making, the commitments. One of the things that happened to us as an organization, you know, we have this conference that I told you about.

We have registration systems that we’ve gone through and tried, you know, things like Eventbrite or, you know, I don’t wanna name a bunch of names, but. We worked with one vendor for a while, for several years and they were making accessibility progress, but then they got some new investors and put a new development team, and when their next iteration, they had wiped out everything that we’d done with that for the last like three years.

And that’s discouraging, you know, you’re like, okay, I guess we look for a new, we look for a new vendor and, we’re encouraged by some of the things where people, as you mentioned they use accessibility as a selling point. I think Karl Groves in our community, he’s building one called Eventably, and when that is, is fully built out, he has committed to the accessibility and, you know, because of who’s building it in his past commitment that it will be fully accessible.

Um, and I think that kind of commitment is what we’re looking for as a, to, to sort of meet those challenging things of how quickly it changes and the fact that you can’t always control the culture in which things are developed

Chris: Well, the culture and the rate of change, right? I absolutely loved that you mentioned the fact that the internet is in a near constant state of flux. The content, the underlying technology is constantly changing, and I remember one time, for a presentation I did for a bunch of agency owners and freelancers just to drive the point home.

I took a screenshot of like Amazon.com from 2005, and then I took a screenshot from it, like that day in 2024, and I put em side by side and people were like, whoa, you know? So wow. You go from this simple menu to this thing, this crazy toolbar with a bunch of nested dropdowns and just being absolutely bombarded with contextual information that’s dynamically put in. It’s, it is wild.

Brought to you by Accessibility Checker

Chris: And I want to get into more like the misconceptions that organizations have around accessibility still today and what you are often hearing. But before we get into that, we’re gonna take a short commercial break. We’ll be right back.

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Clearing up accessibility misconceptions!

Chris: And we are back. So Sharron, in your experience, and I’m sure Steve and I can comment from conversations we’ve had with customers too what are some of the big misconceptions you’re still hearing going into 2026 about accessibility?

Sharron: I think one we already mentioned is that you can go back and put accessibility in at the end of a process.

I think that’s a pretty big one. And, and then also I think that the idea of accessibility as a checkbox that you can just check these things off. You’ve got the WCAG conformance. I think user studies have pretty much shown that you can be you can be pretty much WCAG conformant and yet still have accessibility barriers for different accessibility categories.

I think that’s another misconception. And and then I think the idea that one person can be the accessibility person is another very common failing. That you’ve got one person who’s supposed to be, have all the hats and how profoundly that cannot work in an organization of any size and scope.

But I’d love to hear your, what you’ve heard from your clients.

Chris: Yeah, I mean one of the, one of the major ones that I hear pretty often is just the, this idea that Accessibility can be one and done, which I think kind of ties into the checkbox thing, right? They’re like, okay, we’re accessible now. We don’t have to think about it anymore.

It just, it’s like the event platform you mentioned, right? It’s they might’ve been getting there and then the dev team swaps out and then they completely erase three years of progress.

Sharron: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah, I mean, I think on the technical side, I think it would be that, you know, a lot of times with technology and a lot of times the companies that are trying to make their stuff accessible, like you said, it’s sometimes an afterthought and they’re so, they go looking for a one click solution.

That is a big misconception to take the, you know, what’s the saying? The shortest path is usually the longest road, right? Like, so if you put a, an overlay on your website and you click that one button, you may be in for a lot of trouble. You may be in for some legal problems and you may not have actually achieved what the particular solution is claiming to achieve.

I think from, a little bit from the technology side too. Like, there’s a lot of kind of passing of responsibilities. I’ve, I’ve seen a lot like you know, like accessibility is the operating system’s responsibility or accessibility is the browser’s responsibility, right? So it’s not, I don’t have to make my application accessible because it really should be handled by these, you know, these higher level systems. And that AI’s gonna fix it all, right? Like that’s the new thing.

Sharron: Oh yeah. That’s the new thing.

Chris: So the one thing that comes up pretty often for me in sales conversations is I will give someone an estimate or, you know, they’ll come to me with a particular set of needs around accessibility, and I will give them, you know, the cost for a full audit remediation, like monitoring all the resources they need.

And because they can’t afford that estimate, they decide to do nothing for accessibility. Whereas they really could have done some hybrid approach or a more limited engagement, and they could have made a lot of really good progress. Like even if they had just done their header and footer right? That would’ve been a huge impact if they had a big site, but they choose to do nothing.

Sharron: That’s a good point. Yeah.

Chris: That’s always really challenging.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Progress over perfection, I think. And you know, with accessibility and just like with anything, I think a lot of education helps go a long way in that, you know, you don’t have to, you don’t have to like be a hundred percent to that be 80%, right?

Which is 80 is a lot better than zero. So, focus on progress.

Sharron: You know, then I come back too to the community again, because I think sometimes a company might have somebody whose job is, it’s somewhere in the development team or in the product management lifecycle, or QA, or usability.

You know, somebody who has learned a little bit and starts advocating internally. In that sense, sometimes it can be really non-threatening too, because this is your colleague and they’re saying, hey, you know, if you learn this and this about accessibility, and we just start with these little parts and really pay some attention to the things that, that will make a big difference.

The, what was it? The low hanging fruit.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

Sharron: That’s always a really effective way to, I think to address that one and done fear too, that if, oh, I can’t do everything, I can’t do anything at all. But if you’ve got that internal advocate, I always look for that person.

Chris: And they’re out there and they’re doing really good work, those advocates.

How can teams go further with accessibility?

Steve: Yeah. So we’ve talked a little bit about the pain of trying to retrofit accessibility after the fact. And Sharron, you’ve mentioned a lot about having Accessibility at the beginning of things. And we call that shifting left a lot in the accessibility space.

Sharron: That’s right.

Steve: And so for, you know, designers, developers, founders of new companies, of new software. What do you think is the things that can make the biggest difference early in the journey? So if you’re starting out with accessibility in mind.

Sharron: I think you absolutely have to start thinking about one of the biggest problems in the WebAIM Million, is contrast issues.

So if you’re talking to a designer, give them the quick ABCs of contrast, the importance of contrast on everything. Not just text, but, you know, and that has an impact on so many different cognitive disabilities. Low vision, I think, I think that’s one. And then any time you have, as you’re doing your mockups, your wire frames, when you start talking about controls, things that are going to be interactive.

You have to start thinking also about how are you going to access them? Are they gonna be activated through the keyboard? Making sure that everything’s in the keyboard in the keyboard pathway. And I don’t know I it’s so complicated now between are you on the desktop or are you in mobile?

And sometimes I think the mobile first idea is not a bad idea. Because of the fact that you do start thinking about those kinds of things like controls and colors and because we use our phones in bright places where the colors might get washed out and so I don’t know. Those are some of my ideas.

I haven’t been a practitioner for about 15 years. So. I have to trust to people who are using the development tools now to answer that. So you might have some better answers for that than, but that’s what occurs to me.

Steve: Great. Yeah, I mean, from a founder standpoint, you know, some of the considerations that I probably would start thinking about early on this governance, like, how are you gonna implement accessibility into your organization and what’s that structure look like?

Sharron: That’s such a much better answer than mine.

Steve: But like, yeah, like who’s responsible for accessibility and who’s going to be that advocate and what are the checks and balances to ensure that what your company is putting out to the world is accessible to as many people as possible.

Chris: Yeah, and identifying those instead of Accessibility champion, right? Accessibility champions.

Steve: Yeah.

Sharron: Yeah.

Chris: Ideally one in every team, right? Depending on the size of your organization. So like, I know I, I hear a lot about universities doing this and kind of taking a lead there. Which is like they have someone from their student affairs and they have someone from every department and their web services team and their marketing team all coming together and advocating within their departments, but also coming together into a committee to collaborate on accessibility.

And kind of, they’re the vectors for disseminating that out. And I could see the same thing happening in a more traditional company structure where your accounting department, your marketing department, your sales department, right, your software team, your design team, whatever your teams are like, having someone there who is generally overseeing the accessibility of that domain and is kind of the go-to person for it.

I think having those domain specific people who also get accessibility is how we’re gonna get, how we’re gonna get further.

Sharron: That means training, right? Yes.

Chris: And that’s exactly right. It means training. But the funny thing is, like you mentioned, like things like color contrast and making sure that you’re planning properly for your interfaces.

Those things are still issues today too. We see them all the time in audits. So it’s it’s one of those things where like, the fundamentals are the fundamentals, right?

Sharron: It’s funny though to me that I immediately honed in on the particulars.

Thinking about, okay, what are you doing as you’re building a product and y’all visionarily, founders think about that big picture thing, which really is the most important. That’s the that’s, that is the foundational, you know, you build that foundation and then those other things will follow because the foundation has been well built. So…

Chris: And that dissemination of knowledge is so critical. Which leads me to my next question, which is you all do a lot of teaching and you do a lot of training, and I’m wondering if you can share anything related to or just how you’ve seen the way you teach accessibility evolve over time. Has it really changed? And what what would you recommend like developers or accessibility specialists do if they’re trying to like teach their clients or others at their organizations about accessibility?

Sharron: Of course, in a very self-centered way I would say come to AccessU in May because we have seven tracks of specialization around whatever your expertise is. Because the responsibility for accessibility has to be distributed across an organization.

I would say in order to train internally, you have to have that big picture. You have to understand the interactions of you know, product development, management, sustainability, all of those things have to be in place in order to keep accessibility moving forward.

Almost like it sounds more complicated than it is because once you accept the idea that accessibility is a foundational part of whatever we’re gonna build digitally, then your training of whatever it is, whether you’re a project manager, developer, designer, coder is going to include that.

And so making sure that, whatever kinds of technical training you’re doing for people includes, at least some mention of how accessibility is gonna have an impact on that particular discipline. If that day ever comes, then really we can all retire.

Chris: It’s almost like accessibility shouldn’t be siloed with one department or one person.

Steve: Yes.

Sharron: Absolutely, absolutely.

More About Accessible Internet Rally (AIR)

Steve: So you’ve mentioned the AIR program a few times. But I wanna expand on that a little bit. If you wanna share anything else about the AIR program.

I know the competition is coming up in January, and how can listeners, get involved in this year’s event?

Sharron: Actually they’ve missed the boat on this year’s event. The awards are coming up in January.

Steve: Oh!

Sharron: The sites have been developed. They’re all turned in. The judges are now going over them with a fine tooth comb and they’re gonna, you know, have their judging confabs and compare notes and come to a conclusion.

So when the judges make their decision, we’ll have the award ceremony on January 15th, which will be streamed and free for anyone to come and see who won. But I think the fun part of the awards party is most of the teams make these little videos where they say:

Here’s what we tried to do. Here’s what we were able to do. Here’s what we learned. And here’s what it was like working with our nonprofit organization. So you get that sense of how common interest in accessibility really builds community and builds you know, understanding across all kinds of disciplines, whether you’re a tech professional or nonprofit or a volunteer.

So just to give a little more, I told you when we started, it was one day. It was a one day hackathon. And as the web grew and got more complicated, nonprofit organizations weren’t quite as satisfied with just kind of a brochure site, and they wanted things with a little more, you know, just a little more functionality.

So we extended it and gave the teams more time. In fact, they have eight weeks now. And that happened even before the pandemic. We started recruiting people in teams. One of my favorites was we had a team with a Googler who lived in New York, a couple of IBMers who lived somewhere in Europe, and maybe just a volunteer in Australia.

And the four of them made a website for a nonprofit public radio station in Kenya.

Chris: Wow. So

Sharron: I know that was really so cool. And so we have those kinds of mix ups, lots of people from all over the world. They end up on teams together and they make a website for a nonprofit organization. So there’s a lot of collaboration over the web.

And each team is assigned an experienced mentor. Because when we did it live, we used to have the judges right there on site, and you could talk to the judges during the day and say, oh, we’re having this problem with this. Can you help us solve it? And the judges were allowed to guide them without solving their problem to say look at this resource, or look over here.

Because the whole idea is that you’re learning and you’re teaching people how to do it. And one time this guy comes running into the judge’s room where the judges were sitting and they said, oh, we need to report that someone’s cheating. And we said, what? And they said, yeah, the teams is cheating.

And we said how? How are they cheating? And they said they have a blind guy on their team.

And they did just what you did. They started laughing. They said hey, that’s not cheating. That’s called being smart.

Chris: That’s a competitive advantage, is what that is.

Steve: Yeah. They brought their own user tester. Yeah.

Sharron: I think engaging, you know, that’s another really important lesson for anyone who wants to make progress in their own accessibility practices.

Make sure you’re listening to your users and you’re including people with disabilities and all that. So now in this virtual contest, we also have a database of people with disabilities that we, recruit for user testing for different companies. It’s called Access Works. And so when we do AIR, each team can recruit a couple of people at different times during that eight weeks if they wanna do some usability testing and get user input, direct user input.

So it’s really a quite a lot of juggling in the AIR of all these different elements. But we hope we give people a sense of. This is what it takes from the very beginning in planning, you’re including disabilities and and the idea of accessibility in your plans, and it’s always so much fun to see what people come up with.

So that’s January 15th. Anybody can join and there’s information on our website about it.

Chris: That’s so exciting. And I love the anecdote about the team being accused of cheating. I it makes me think like the tagline for like, user testing and encouraging people to like, bring in user testers on their teams and just have people with disabilities be part of the team and part of the conversation. It’s like that is your accessibility cheat code. It’s not overlays, it’s not quick fix solutions. The real cheat code is including people with disabilities. I love it.

Knowbility’s Access Works Database + Support Opportunities

Chris: So speaking of moving things forward, progressing and accessibility what are some other things that Knowbility is doing right now that you wanna make sure our audience knows about?

Sharron: I just mentioned the Access Works database, ’cause I don’t think I mentioned that before, but that’s a really great way for people to sometimes people say I would include people with disabilities and user testing, but I don’t know where to find them. You know? Which always surprises me because it’s like look around, we’re everywhere.

But but for those who do have trouble connecting, we have the Access Works database, we can help you recruit for that. So that’s one thing. It’s the end of the year, as all nonprofits do, we’re in the middle of our fundraising drive, so anyone who wants to support this work or participate, we welcome volunteers and certainly donors any size.

Really makes a difference. One of the things that I think people don’t often think about is that when we go out for grant funding for some of these community programs, they, the funders wanna know, are you supported by your community? Are people giving to you? Are individual donors supporting you?

So even if you can’t give a lot, if you can give something, it really does make a difference for us. So that’s…

Chris: I’m gonna highlight the show notes link. Again, not to interrupt, I’m just highlighting the show notes link. ’cause we’re gonna make sure that at the link on the video there is a link out to Knowbility ‘s donation options so that people who want to take advantage of that can get to that through the show notes very quickly.

Sharron: Oh, lovely. Yeah. It’s Knowbility.org. K-N-O-W-B-I-L-I-T-Y dot O-R-G. And our banner leads to all the donation information right now, because yes, it’s the end of the year.

Sharron makes a major public announcement!

Sharron: And then I’m gonna make a public announcement that I’ve not made yet.

Steve: Ooh.

Sharron: And that is that I’m gonna retire at the end of May.

Chris: Oh.

Sharron: After AccessU this year. So that is another big thing we are doing is that we’re transitioning to a new Executive Director. We’re gonna have someone in place we hope by the end of January, and then we will work together through the end of May.

And then I will go off and find another thing to try, you know, I think. World peace is probably the next thing I’m gonna work on.

Chris: I mean, the classic accessibility joke would be, you know, world peace might be easier than accessibility. Just kidding.

Sharron: Yeah. I know!

Chris: Sometimes it feels that way.

Sharron: It does. And you know, I’ve been hearing so much lately from different people about burnout and I worry about that in our community of people who just. They just get frustrated and it’s wearying to keep hearing no, we can’t do that, we’re not gonna do that, it’s not important to us.

And so I think, you know, if I can leave any legacy, it’s that I’ve done this for 25 years and it’s a joyful and I still feel so much joy in it that I I hope there’s an antidote to burnout. ‘Cause we need everybody working so hard, and I’m not retiring because of that. I expect to stay involved with Knowbility in some ways as a volunteer or whatever, because the work is so important to me.

But I think it’s time, you know, for the next generation of people who maybe have a better vision of the future of technology than I, I mean, I learned to code Cobalt machine language.

So, you know, when the internet came along, it was like, woo, this is fun. Because it, it seemed HTML seemed…

Steve: Yeah.

Sharron: So straightforward. But now it’s all layered with, you know, a lot more things and the frameworks and those things that I’m not I’m just not. I don’t want, I just wanna give the next guy a chance. Right? Because I think a new younger vision is a pretty good idea right now.

Chris: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. Sharron I just wanna say thank you for joining us on the podcast. I wanna say thank you for. 25 plus years of your dedication to accessibility.

Chris: No kidding!

Steve: And the legacy that you have left behind, I’m sure will affect , those that will come in your place and take this torch and carry it on. So that is our podcast. We’re signing off.

Sharron: Thank you, Steve, for having me.

Steve: I’d say cheers, but…

Sharron: It was so great to talk to you guys.

Steve: Yeah, I’d say cheers, but I don’t have…

Chris: I’ll do double cheers for Steve, but…

Steve: There we go.

Sharron: Cheers.

Steve: Thank you.

Sharron: Thank you. Bye-Bye.

Chris: Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe in your podcast app to get notified when future episodes release. You can find Accessibility Craft on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. And if building Accessibility awareness is important to you, please consider rating Accessibility Craft five stars on Apple Podcasts.

Accessibility Craft is produced by Equalize Digital and hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds and Steve Jones. Steve Jones composed our theme music. Learn how we help make thousands of WordPress websites more accessible at EqualizeDigital.Com.