Ted Drake, Intuit, Global Accessibility Leader

Ted talks about his early work in web development and how that led to building a program of Accessibility for engineers at Yahoo Finance. That led to his current position at Intuit where he brings accessibility into the customer experience across all their products and services. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

(upbeat music)

- Hello, this is "Digital Accessibility,

"The People Behind The Progress".

I'm Joe Welinske, the creator and host of this series,

and as an accessibility professional myself

I find it very interesting as to how others found their way

into this profession.

So let's meet one of those people right now

and hear about their journey.

All right, well, here we go with another episode

where I get a chance to meet

another accessibility practitioner,

and today I'm very pleased to be meeting with Ted Drake.

Hello, Ted, how are you?

- I'm doing great, thank you for asking.

- Well, I'm talking from my home office in Vashon Island

which is near Blink's headquarters in Seattle,

where are you talking to us from?

- I'm in Palm Springs, California,

just outside of Los Angeles.

- All right, lovely, well hope.

I like to get there when things get

a little too rain intensive here in January,

but thanks for taking the time to be part of this

and maybe a first good place to start is

with what you're currently involved with,

what you're doing now?

- Right now, I'm the Global Accessibility Leader at Intuit.

We make TurboTax, QuickBooks, accounting software,

and it's been a busy year with the COVID,

basically everybody being able to work at home,

it seems like we're doing more and more and more

and so it's morphed lot.

We've been, this year's been a lot of coaching

and a lot of development of other people's careers

and that's been really satisfying.

- Well, I imagine having that position in an organization

as large as Intuit means

that you keep pretty busy day in, day out.

- Yeah, and working from home it's a 20 hour workday

it's no big deal.

(both laugh)

- All right, so we get these little benefits from it,

so that's good.

Well, one of the main things that I like to do

with this series is to find out how people made their way

into what are doing today, what their journey was

that brought them into accessibility

and set them on this career path,

so what would it be for you?

Is there some place early on where you can remember

that accessibility became something

that you became familiar with and were of trusted in?

- Yeah, I graduated college with a Degree in Fine Art,

and I was working for the Museum of Fine Art in San Diego

and I was building websites on the side,

this would've been around 1999, 2000, 2001.

The museum needed a new website manager,

and so I stepped up and said, "Hey, I can do that

"'cause I've been building sites."

That's when I learned about accessibility,

this was Section 508 was starting to be discussed.

There wasn't really much information

but I knew that it had to be accessible,

I didn't know what that meant or how it actually worked

but that was this goal.

And fortunately the museum world

has this amazing organization, it's Museums on the Web,

I think they're called something new now,

and it's museum website managers and creatives

and curators would come together once a year

and they would talk about

how they were building their stuff,

and accessibility was always just really a part of the core.

And that's where I was learning about how you had

to make images accessible,

how you had to create descriptions of the artwork,

how to create forms and such.

And it was still the point where I knew how to do it

but I wasn't really getting the connection to the people.

- Well, a lot of people have started in web development area

with accessibility, but most people I talked to

didn't have any kind of resources or had no idea

and it was just kind of hunt and peck

and meeting one person, finding one piece of info,

it sounded like you had a little bit of a launchpad

there available for you.

- Well, what happened was the world, back then,

it was a Wild West show where everybody was building

whatever they could to put onto a web browser,

and we're talking about Netscape Navigator

and Internet Explorer 4, it was a mess,

the stuff we were creating was horrendous.

And it was no surprise that it wasn't accessible,

and then Jeffrey Zeldman and a bunch of other people

basically came forward

and said we have to stop this madness

and we had to start building websites correctly,

and that was the start of standards-based web development.

So I got in a little bit early on that,

I wouldn't say I was a pioneer

but I was certain engaged with learning from the pioneers.

And when we started over again

that's when we started making things accessible,

that's when we started using Semantic HTML,

we separated the look, the CSS, the JavaScript, and HTML,

that sounds basic today,

but that was revolutionary 20 years ago.

That's where I started getting

into standards-based web development

and accessibility just being the way you built stuff,

you built it correctly.

I left the Museum, worked for a couple other companies

to transform their sites

into being standards-based web development,

and from there, I got a call from Yahoo.

And what was interesting about Yahoo is that

they were one of the first companies

to build a Front-end Engineering Platform,

engineers that did nothing but worry about the front-end,

and those engineers hardly any of them

went to computer school,

none of them had computer science degrees,

they were all artists, and writers, and philosophy students,

and political science students, but we were all self-taught

and we all understood this

and you didn't even get in the door

unless you knew what accessibility was.

So it was a really great rate environment

to be around people

where you would have hour long discussions

about what is a paragraph versus an odd order list.

And so I co-founded

the Accessibility Stakeholders Group at Yahoo,

which became the Yahoo Accessibility Lab.

At Yahoo is where I met people

that actually used assistive technology.

Watching them use our products

and where they were having problems,

that's where it went from theory to reality.

And when you see what you've build makes things easy

or makes things difficult

that's when you start really getting the connection

and accessibility goes from, something that you do

to check a box to something that becomes a passion.

And from Yahoo, I went Intuit.

- It sounds like then you started

to get into a research element,

a kind of a shift left before things got to the code level,

is that what was going on at the Lab?

- Yeah, there were some really good examples.

I remember, I can't remember his name, I'm sorry.

I can't remember his name, but he came into the Lab

where we worked with Victor and he's like,

"I'm working on these charts

"and I'd like to make the charts accessible."

And so he was working with Victor

and what they came up with

was this concept of this new aria-live attribute.

And so when you move through the chart,

the aria-live would start being updated

and that's how you would find out about

the value of different elements of the chart.

Well, that concept of a hidden span

that had aria-live attributes

that's an example of what happened

in the Yahoo Accessibility Lab that just became standard.

The visibility hidden, where we would take the clip pattern

and use the clip pattern to hide stuff visually

but it was still available to screen readers,

that's another example of some

that would come out of the Lab

and it's because you had designers and engineers

and you had someone that used a screen reader

and someone that used zoom magnification,

and you put them in a room with no limitations

and some amazing things come out of it,

and that's an example of that.

- Yeah, and so then did your work at Yahoo

was that then a kind of a logical move

to what you're doing now Intuit or were you reframing

or kind of looking at it as a different kind of opportunity?

- I don't know how this happened, but most of my career

has been with financial software, insurance and Yahoo,

I worked on Yahoo Finance,

and so moving to Intuit was natural

'cause I was just used to working on financial software,

but the other thing that really worked

with Intuit is it's customer based.

We really do care about the customer

and customers are part of everything we do,

so it was just sort of a moving even more and more

to the fact that it's not accessibility as a checklist

or something that you read in a book, but accessibility

is something where you're meeting with customers,

you're watching them balance their checkbooks,

you're watching them start businesses,

bring on new customers.

So it's about how can I use my influence in accessibility

to actually, my goal at Intuit is to reduce

the unemployment rate for people with disabilities,

it's not to sell more copies of QuickBooks,

but what I'm hoping is that enough people can use QuickBooks

that they can start a new business, hire more people,

and that's that's my goal,

is to actually make an improvement in the community.

- And yeah, well with so many work opportunities

being in doing the digital work, not having the tools,

essentially, shuts you out from that whole area,

so it definitely makes a lot of sense,

and obviously with the types of products

that your organization makes that's like front line

with that kind of thing.

- Yeah, the other thing I realized at Yahoo

and when I moved to Intuit is that

the accessibility team is a hub,

the accessibility team is the one

that looks at everybody's product,

and we look at everybody's code,

and we look at everybody's experience across the team.

So I think at Intuit when working in the Accessibility Team,

their original core group, we were probably the only people,

at Intuit, that had tried every product,

and when you do that you start realizing

where the duplications are,

where there's 15 different versions of a carousel

being used within the same product.

So one of the things we did as the central team at Intuit

is we started saying,

"Let's not just focus on accessibility,

"but let's create the platform

"that all the front-end engineers

"can come together and start talking.

"Let's encourage all the mobile developers

"to start talking."

So part of that was building a Front-end Engineering Summit,

which was basically to get all,

it was for, by and about front-end engineers,

and that really helped break down those barriers,

'cause we had people that sitting three desks away

and had no idea what each other was working on

when I first got there,

and that is now no longer the problem.

And I think more people need to see their accessibility team

as an asset for more than just accessibility.

- Well, the scenario that you just described

and the hub approach that you mentioned,

I think of those as being relatively mature representations

of accessibility support within an organization

but it takes a lot of work just to get there,

so you were there certain challenges

that you had to overcome or certain ways

that you approach at Yahoo Finance and at Intuit

that got it to where it ended up being?

- Yeah, it was actually completely different,

at Yahoo, engineers were the priority.

So at Yahoo, we never bothered going to project managers

and designers, we would just go straight to the engineers.

That was just the way that it was,

'cause they were the ones that were making the decisions

and then those decisions would then go back

to designers and product managers.

At Intuit was completely different,

at Intuit, it's like a communal decision.

So I wouldn't just go to the engineers,

I would go to the product managers,

figure out who was leading their team,

create a presentation, go to the presentation,

meet with 20 people, explain how their product work,

what needed to be done,

it was about building consensus and explaining

how to improve the customer experience.

So it was a slightly different,

each company is gonna be different.

If I was working at a company

where business return on investment

was the number one priority then I would do it differently.

But at Intuit,

the number one priority is customer experience.

So I would always focus on:

here's a video of how this works,

here's a video of a customer using it,

that was always the emphasis.

- And so as you've built things out at Intuit

can you talk a little bit about

the different elements of your program?

Is there a centralized group informing

across the global organization?

Are there vertical support for accessibility?

Maybe talk a little bit about that.

- We've always, it started as a small group,

Lori Samuels actually started it,

you mentioned you had already interviewed her

in a different podcast, and then I came in from Yahoo.

It started as very core, like one or two people,

and those one or two people, we worked extremely hard

but everything we did was archived, published,

so we started building this mountain of information.

We created an Accessibility Champion Program

about three years ago,

and what that's done is it's allowed us to have

a really simple way for everyone to become engaged.

It takes anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes to become a Champion

we've had over a thousand people complete the process.

That has transformed the way accessibility

is discussed at Intuit, so now, because like 5% to 10%

of the people at Intuit have Champion badges,

those conversations are happening every day,

and so it's no longer this central team,

we've got this big cloud of Champions.

Now, of that big cloud of Champions,

some of of them have stepped forward and say,

"I wanna be become the leader of my product."

And so they become a Level 2 Champion,

which includes more intensive customer experience

and training and then they become part of

a like a central group and that central group works together

to promote accessibility and solve problems.

And then if they wanna become a full-time Champion,

a full-time Accessibility Leader

then they can become a Level 3 Champion,

and that's when they can really focus on how

they can impact the entire company.

The Champion Program is volunteer,

I'm not going to someone and saying,

"You're gonna become a Champion.

"You're gonna become a Level 2."

It's more of let's get everybody to be aware

and then allow them to build their careers.

- In addition to the Champions,

how is accessibility brought into the roles

for product managers, project managers, researchers,

interactions designers, developers?

Do people get training or information

on their particular role?

- That's still something that we're working on.

To be honest, we don't have

the greatest role declarations yet.

We have been looking at the roles

that we're created by Teach Access,

they're really quite good,

that helps you define how you're gonna do different roles.

But it's been,

the ones that are more full-time accessibility,

those have been easier to define.

What's been a little bit harder to define is

how do you do the rubrics

so that when someone is doing their midyear

or of the year projects reviews with their managers

if they've been spending 10% of their time

doing passion projects, maybe working on close captioning

or animations or something like that,

how does that get pulled into

their end of the year discussion

so that they get credit for the work

that's not part of the core work.

It's like as a team member

you need to build your product and you need to ship it,

and that's what you're mostly being judged upon

but how do you also get judged upon the work

you're doing on the side?

That's been a little bit harder to incorporate.

And I think that that's part of your monthly meetings

with managers because doing accessibility

is about the customer,

so you should always be able to talk about your manager

and always be able to talk about the work that's being done,

but that is a little bit harder to get incorporated.

- And you mentioned that customer experiences

is the number one item that your organization

is attentive to, kind of now looking into the future,

are there you any initiatives you're able to talk about

or just thoughts that you have

about kind of things you'd like to achieve

or be able to see happening in digital products

and services like five years from now?

- There's so much potential for artificial intelligence,

I just created a pathway, a pathway is a way

that people can go through like a curated course,

it's a links and you kind of keep track,

I just created one

on artificial intelligence and accessibility.

I think where we're gonna be seeing a lot of it

in the future is where you can use artificial intelligence

to simplify the process, a good example is in TurboTax,

there might be 30,000 different tax screens,

but we're using artificial intelligence to say,

"Hey, this person is filling out their tax form,

"they only need to see these 10 screens,

"or maybe they need to see these 15 screens."

So it's like simplifying the process

by only showing what's necessary,

that affects, not just accessibility,

but user experience in general.

The more that you can reduce the interactions,

I think, the more accessible it is.

So if it's, instead of showing someone 50 radio buttons

when really only five of them are relevant

then let's only show them the five relevant radio buttons,

and we know that that's true

because of artificial intelligence.

We're also looking at how we can incorporate OCR

for things like I take a picture of my invoice

and it takes all the information outta the invoice

and puts it into the QuickBooks.

If by taking a picture, I can do it

instead of typing in 15 form inputs, that's gonna be great.

One of the things I like is if you use QuickBooks

and you have a phone, just having the phone on you

when you drive from your house to a client,

it can track and it can create a mileage report.

And then that mileage report at the end of the week

you go through this list of mileage and you say,

"Okay, this is business, this is business,

"and this is business."

So in 15 seconds, you're creating your mileage report,

that is so much better than keeping a spreadsheet

of here's when I left the house,

here's when I got to the client,

here's how many miles it took.

And I was working with the business owner who is blind

and he was really excited about this

because you can be the passenger of a car

and you can get his mileage reports.

So as he was taking Lyfts and Ubers

and going to different clients

he was able to create that mileage report

and get deductions that he hadn't had before.

- Yeah, those kinds of examples where you have these

maybe unanticipated serendipitous pieces

for accessibility are always fun to discover

and build into our work.

- Another thing that we're pushing, I'd like to see more,

is that the Accessibility Team we've always been,

and this is not just an Intuit, but across all companies,

we seem to be the team that is most obsessed with customers,

customers who are underrepresented,

customers who don't always have a voice.

So it's normal for the accessibility team to start expanding

into inclusion and diversity and ethics,

and so that's where we're also looking at is

we've expanded our personas, our personas are not just

Joe is a small business owner who's blind,

it's now things like Samantha is a small business owner,

who's blind,

but she's also a single parent of three children,

and she runs two side jobs,

and she didn't graduate high school.

It's like, how can we incorporate more communities

into our personas and how we're looking at stuff

instead of just, it works with a screen reader

so we're good.

- Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up

because sometimes I think people in accessibility

feel siloed, sometimes, in what they're doing

and what you just described broadens its significantly

in terms of how it fits into our overall engagement

with other humans.

- I have another example,

we implemented a bilingual articles and there was a switch

and that switch said English or Spanish.

Now, that seems like a really easy solution

for switching between English and Spanish,

but when I turned on a screen reader,

the screen reader was essentially saying English or off

and that's because switch is set English on, English off,

and that's because switches tend to be on/off.

And that goes back to the ethics position,

it's like content ethics, is a non-English truly off?

So what they did was they switched from a switch to links,

like read this article in English

or read this article in Spanish,

but it would be in that language.

And that's an example where the accessibility team

can also start pulling in some design ethics and saying,

"We shouldn't treat a community as an off or an on."

- Well, I appreciate all these great examples

that you provided of kind of broadening and looking forward.

And thank you so much for spending this time

to chat with me,

I'm sure it will give a lot of people

some additional interest in bringing accessibility

into their work life or possibly

to make it part of our profession.

- Thank you so much for asking me

and for continuing with your series,

there's a great variety of speakers you've engaged with.

- All right, thanks a lot.

Bye, bye, Ted.