Mike Paciello, Pearson, Director of Accessibility Implementation

Mike Paciello is one of the pioneers is helping accessibility become an organized discipline for improving products and services. He began his career as a technical writer and that brought him to voluteering with the publishing of braille documents. From there, Mike formed The Paciello Group which brought usability methods into accessibility design. Mike continues his work with braille standards, the IAAP, and immersive interfaces.

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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

is to how others have found their way into this profession.

So let's meet one of those people right now

and hear about their journey.

All right, well, I'm Joe Welinske

and ready for another episode,

where I have the great opportunity

to talk with another accessibility professional.

And today I'm very pleased to be speaking

with Mike Paciello.

Hello, Mike, how are you today?

- Hey, Joe, great, good to be with you.

- Well, I'm speaking from my home office on Vashon Island,

which is near Blinks Seattle Washington headquarters.

Where are you talking to us from?

- I'm just outside of Asheville, North Carolina.

I'm in a little town called Brevard.

About, well, it's about four hours,

four or five hours away from Raleigh Durham

for those people that know that area,

the triangular area, technology triangular area.

Literally just moved here about a month ago.

- All right, well, I've been in that area.

It's really beautiful area to visit.

And, I've known of you for a long time and of your work,

but this is the first time

that I think we've had the chance to meet face to face.

So this is great for me as well.

But for people that may not be familiar

with you and your work,

maybe you could talk about some of the things

that you're currently involved in,

and then we could go back

and look at some of the other stuff.

- Yeah, thank you.

So right now I work with Pearson,

who's a UK based company

that focuses primarily on education in publishing.

They're well known in the industry.

I came here literally about three months ago,

three or four months ago, in July.

And my focus right now is building

in the accessibility area,

building a stronger leadership presence for Pearson

in disabilities and technology.

- And so, you know for, what is kind of a day in the life

or a week in the life

for the things that you're involved with now?

Are there any common themes

or it's just a lot of different things all the time?

- Yeah, well, really, I've been very blessed if you will,

to be involved right out of the box

with some very cool technologies.

Most of my work is primarily from the advocacy

and business side of the business.

But right now I'm working in three key areas,

at least three that I could think of.

One is on the new electronic braille standards

that are actually being devised and authored

by the DAISY Consortium,

the American Printing House of the Blind,

and a number of partners, National Braille Press,

the National Federation for the Blind

here in the United States.

Who are focused on building

this new electronic braille standard.

And I have been working with the standards team there

on that activity.

So that's pretty cool stuff.

In fact, I just came out of a meeting with some reps

from BANA, the Braille Authority

for the National Braille Authority for the Blind.

So I'm looking forward to getting involved there.

Electronic brailles a brand new thing, right?

So it's an interesting type technology.

I've also been involved in,

or with the International Association

for Accessibility Professionals, or IAAP

and specifically working with them on establishing

in creating maturity models.

So I know that you recently, I had talked with Sarah Horton

and Sarah and I go back a long way.

And my first introduction to maturity models

was with Sarah and David Sloan.

And so this gives me an opportunity now to work along

or in behalf of Pearson in creating maturity models,

business maturity models that embrace a holistic approach

to disabilities and accessibilities.

Where across the board accommodations are concerned

and building a culture that is inclusive, right?

So we've got the whole DE&I movement

that's very popular amongst corporations today.

Maturity models will be the strategies to execute on

in making DE&I, I think

the value add that companies envision.

So that's a second area that I'm on.

The third area is actually a very cool area,

and I kinda fell into this by accident,

but it involves immersive interfaces or the metaverse

and extended reality

in looking at how we can develop applications.

We, being Pearson can develop applications

geared towards students and education

and people with disabilities,

and using immersive environments for that.

So those are the three key projects

I'm working on right now, very excited about it

and have gotten nothing but support and good stuff

from the folks at Pearson and management there.

- Well, it looks like you're certainly have your hands full

and plenty of things to be busy about.

And I also have, I think I have a couple of follow ups

about some of those items you mentioned.

But one of the things I like to do with this program

is to, you know, find out how people found their way

into this space.

And it's not necessarily something that many people take on

as maybe foundational university education,

although that's changing now.

But what was it for you

where you first became aware of accessibility

in your lived life or work life,

and then you know, how did that start to evolve

into a professional interest?

- Yeah, thank you.

It's, unfortunately, it's longer, a long ago and far away,

and so longer than I wanna talk about,

but close to 40 years now.

I was introduced,

I was actually working as a technical writer

for a computer company that no longer exists today,

Digital Equipment Corporation.

But at that time, they were the second or third largest

computer company in the world behind IBM.

And I was working as a technical writer for Digital.

A manager happened to have this project

where apparently Digital had a relationship

with the National Braille Press out of Boston.

Where they would request now and then

some of our computer documentation,

and we would just bring the hard copy publications

to their offices,

and then they would convert that to braille.

I went down there after volunteering

to take part in this project,

and I met the director then who was Bill Reader.

And Bill said, "Hey, let me give you a tour.

"Let me show you what we're doing."

So I literally watched what I thought was,

and I still think it is today,

the painstaking process of building braille

from a print document.

And I had already been working

in the electronic documentation field

using markup languages,

which at that time were invented by Charles Goldfarb

when he was at IBM.

The first versions of it came out

and something he called GenCode.

Then it became the standard generalized markup language,

which as we all know today is the precursor to HTML,

and now we have the web, right?

But it was markup languages in publishing

that really drew me into trying to look for a solution

to make the braille publishing process easier

from a single source file.

So I took that, went back and said, "Hey,

"well if we could convert electronic documents

"for various printer types and postscript,

"why not try to create it in braille or large text

"or voice ready files?"

So long story short, started to do some research,

reached out, attended a few conferences,

aligned myself with some great people like George Kerscher,

who's now with the DAISY Consortium.

And we formed an international working group

that created the first document type definition

for creating files, electronic files

that could be converted to braille,

large texts and voice ready files.

And became an American Association of Publisher standard

for producing braille.

That was back in the early to mid 80s

when I first get started.

- Well, yeah, it's very interesting

to hear your story about that.

And in fact, I did some technical writing

for Digital Equipment back in the early mid 80s as well,

and did some consulting work in the Boston area.

But yeah, it was interesting to hear about that

and also that where you got involved

was working with this technology aspect early on.

Most of the people I talk to

tends to come more from having done web development work

or something like that and then accessibility was an issue.

But, you know, coming in from that technology area

and specifically with braille,

then kinda what was the next step after that in your journey

into, well, you probably weren't even thinking about it

as accessibility at the time.

- Oh, no, we were, we absolutely were.

You know, I really quickly graduated

from being a technical writer

to moving into the usability profession.

And so I saw a marriage right there, a very strong marriage

between usability and making things accessible

to people with disabilities, right?

So we talked about making them documentation accessible

to people with print disabilities.

That's really how the way we described it

because we found out very early on,

it wasn't just the blind

or individuals with visual impairments

that could not have easy access, right, to documentation.

But it included individuals, for example,

who were wheelchair bound, right?

Quads and perhaps paralytics individuals born without limbs

or without limbs,

so they couldn't turn pages or easily read.

There was just no easy reading mechanism for them

or individuals with LD and dyslexic.

So, the term accessibility, I wouldn't,

yeah, I don't remember exactly when we coined that phrase

or when that became popular

but it was certainly around that time.

But, you know, again, working in a computer company,

a large computer company

that had more than one area of expertise,

hardware and software,

I really decided I wanted to move into the software field.

And a lot of that was because of the usability studies

that I was part of.

One of the first usability studies that I participated in

is with an icon in the usability world, Chauncey Wilson.

And we were doing user studies

around the first instances of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

So voice IO interfaces.

So I really thought that was very cool,

but it led me to looking at software and how usable

and accessible it was to individuals with disabilities.

Now we're talking about all disabilities.

We're not just talking about the blind and low vision,

we're talking about the deaf,

we're talking about individuals with cognitive disabilities

and mobility disabilities, all the way across the board.

Because anyone that interacts with a computer interface

and has a disability, it was going to be challenging.

So I moved from technical writing

to usability and accessibility, started dabbling with that,

leading some efforts at Digital.

Eventually that led to working with MIT as a volunteer

when the World Wide Web Consortium had just been formed.

And they moved its base, Tim Berners-Lee came over to MIT

with a number of well-known internet folks and web folks

that, that particular time.

And I just started doing some volunteer work there

to kind of promote the notion of how important,

and how critical it was to make this "thing"

we called the web, which was then primarily text on a page,

easy to render

until the Mosaic browser got developed, right?

Shortly followed after that

by the Netscape browser from there.

So now we've got graphics,

we're already working with X Windows,

which was a graphical user interface.

So that whole thing just created this snowball,

an avalanche of opportunity to increase awareness

around accessibility for people with disabilities.

So I dove into that, eventually that led

to me having the privilege of working with folks at MIT

and we created the Web Accessibility Initiative.

Which as you know, is functionally

where all the world is today,

where accessibility in the web is concerned and centered

right there at the WAI.

- And so this is another area where we probably would,

we could have possibly crossed paths in accessibility,

because I was a member of the W3C in the late 90s.

And as a member, you get assigned to working groups.

And I happened to get assigned to work on that

Web Accessibility Initiative

doing some technical writing work.

- Yep. - On some of the documentation

and kinda had some guidance from Judy Brewer.

But that was my first experience with that at all.

So it was kinda serendipitous

and I found that I enjoyed it a lot

and continued on from there.

So yeah, it's interesting to hear about that.

And so what then did the work with the W3C

lead into other things for you,

or were you already pursuing other aspects of business

with accessibility?

- Yeah, once we got the WAI launched,

that was really my charter at that particular time

was actually the director of a foundation,

the Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation.

So the way it was created and now I'm thinking,

okay, we've got web and that sorted out,

we've got some good leadership there,

and the guidelines, the first version of it

would already pretty much getting close to being published.

I wanna go into software period.

I wanna go into web apps and web software

'cause I figured that's where the opportunity would be

from there.

So I created the TPG, The Paciello Group in 2002,

and my goal there was to create

a world class professional services organization,

built upon a foundation

of some of the best people in the world that I already knew,

that were already colleagues, that I was, you know,

that I was working with sub contractually

and certainly within circles.

And to build that company, which was exactly what we did.

We launched it in 2002 and long story short

brought on, you know, some of the great folks

like Steve Faulkner and Leonie Watson, and Gez Lemon

and Sarah Horton and David Sloan.

I mean, there's a Hans Hillen, there's just.

We just had, I always tell people

they don't necessarily believe me,

but I got really lucky that I was able to create

the start of a company that just happened to have my name.

And that was accidental too.

It wasn't supposed to be called TPG,

it was supposed to be called something else.

But in the end it just didn't work out

so we went with the only thing we had was my name.

But to bring in all of these great people,

Ian Pouncey, right?

Karl Groves working with me, Adrian Roselli worked for us.

I mean, we just had all these great people,

they were all just friends of mine.

And said, "Hey, you wanna come and join us, we can work

"and help us let's make the world better, right?

"And let's do it."

And we did, we did.

I think to this day, it'll be really hard pressed for me

to ever be involved with an organization of people

and colleagues and friends,

and to create something I think was, you know,

just an absolute joy of mine today that I have.

So there sort of was, I created TPG, created that agent,

we sold it to Vispero, you know,

who now of course they've got the Freedom Scientific

and Ai Squared, and Optelec

and a few other acquisitions that they made.

And so TPGi

is a key core component of that organization now.

- Well, I'm definitely not gonna let it go

with digging in more to TPG 'cause that's probably where,

you know, a phrase a lot of people in accessibility

aware of even if they hadn't had a chance

to connect it with you individually.

But I mean, it's great to, you know, hear about what a,

you know, a good experience that was for you

in terms of your team.

It also, I think was a time

where a lot of other contemporary organizations

were starting to form for that same kind of purpose.

Which to me always becomes an inflection point

when there's enough going on

that then businesses like yours can be formed

that can then kind of move things

to a more professional level.

So, I imagine there were a lot of fits and starts

to building something like that up,

but it was probably also exciting and innovative time

to be doing that.

- Yeah, there's no doubt about that.

I mean, we had, like any company, we had our ups and downs,

but as a start and as a startup.

But we manage ourselves really well.

In the entire history of that company,

we only had one month where we weren't sure

we were gonna make payroll

and we figured our way out of that, and that was it.

But that was because the folks that were around me,

you know, the Debra Rapsis' of the world.

And she'll probably be mad for she hears me say her name.

But, and the other managers around me were very smart,

we were very focused on sales and how we made that happen.

We just, we managed our growth and that kept us,

put us in a good position to make a difference

and accomplish the good that I think that we did

as a company, and they still are today.

- Well, I imagine that as it evolved,

you were also identifying that

there's a consultancy portion,

but then there's the maybe opportunity

and need to come up with tools and processes

that can be part of that

and that you bring to organizations.

So what was that evolution like,

kind of identifying what things were gonna be useful

to your clients as you moved along?

- Yeah, well, so we created maturity models

and usability testing models

where accessibility was integrated into that.

That part of the professional services

actually came naturally for all of us.

We had the best consultants in the world,

everyone on our team knew exactly what they were doing,

how to help our clients, you know, make their products,

their software web or otherwise,

regardless of the platform usable and accessible.

However, you did hit on a point that we,

around 2016, 2015, 2016, we knew that we wanted to grow.

We wanted to grow and turn what we were doing

into some products that, in tools.

It was interesting because when I started TPG,

we started out as a professional services organization.

But the other companies are, you know, competitors,

I kinda call them, you know, colleagues of the field.

The high software back then, you know, Level Access,

which you know, was,

oh, I forget, I already forgot what their name was

before they were Level Access.

But Level Access and Tim Springer and his company,

Mary Smith was there at that particular time.

DQ (indistinct) was there.

So those companies actually started with products, right?

They were part of the age of building

automated validation tools.

Which was pretty interesting

because people really were not sure

those automated tools

were as good as their founders wanted them to be, you know.

And to this day, that's still a challenge,

what they can actually do in terms of providing,

you know, real full wholehearted validation around,

you know, a digital asset.

But that having been said.

They started with the products.

TPG really was a services organization,

so we were kind of, you know, (mumbling).

Eventually all of those organizations

adopted a professional services model too,

because you just got,

it's really hard to work one without the other.

So around 2015, 2016, we started thinking,

well, maybe it's time that we started developing some tools.

You know, we used a lot that were out there.

We had already developed our Color Contrast in Analyzer

really which was developed by Gez Lemon.

And that eventually became, you know, known as a TPG tool.

We had a couple of other things that we were using,

but that takes money, takes investment.

And so that's what led to some discussions

with some of our other partners in the field.

And long story short,

that ended us having discussions with Vispero,

who at that time was being led by their venture capital,

our private investor firm.

And we thought here's an opportunity to take the best,

what we thought, okay,

the best professional services organization

and marry it with the company

that had the largest selling screen reader in the world,

JAWS, right? Through Freedom.

The largest selling screen magnifier with Ai Squareds

ZoomText product.

One of the largest, if not the largest CCTV manufacturers

in Optelec, pull all of that together,

now you've got not just a services engine

that's got brand name recognition,

but you've got some of the bestest technologies in the world

and you could build around that and support it

and then bridge it from there.

And so it really seemed like at that time

the best of both worlds, and that's why we went there.

And from there then we could grow

and build our own validation services, which TPG has done.

And they've built some of the JAWS add-ons

that have gone there to make testing for screen readers

and JAWS and the kiosks software that they've got there.

So yeah, it seemed like a natural fit

and that's where we went.

- Well, you've certainly had this extensive experience

as you mentioned, you know, it's some 40 years

of being involved in this.

For me, it's not as long,

but you know, it's been like 24 years for me.

And if I think back to where I was in 1998,

I kind of would've thought

that we would've been a little further along

in terms of broadly based accessibility in digital products

and services at the time looking forward.

But then again, as I look backward

and I've mentioned this many times,

I'm also amazed at what technologies have done

to be able to facilitate some enormous changes.

So I was wondering if you have any thoughts

along those lines of maybe things

where there's maybe an opportunity missed,

or one that we haven't embraced enough,

or things that you might, you know, think that we have to

as a profession, be thinking about moving into the future?

- Yeah, well, so first of all,

I couldn't agree with you more.

I thought things would happen a lot faster

than they are, right?

I have been privileged to be involved

in an awful lot of international

and national standard bodies,

international and national government policy organizations.

You know, I had the privilege of working along

with my good friend who just passed away

earlier this year, Jim Debias

in co-chairing the Section 5 WAI committee

over here in the United States.

And we really, I thought made great progress there.

But here's the fundamental truth.

And a friend of mine always told me this,

if you want to create a great business

and be an earth mover, so to speak, right?

You gotta do, you need one of two things.

You either need laws that enforce it,

that you could create business around it,

or you need to come up with just this outstanding invention

of some sort that just, right?

So the internet, you know, thank Vint Cerf

and then the web for Tim Berners-Lee

for coming up with those kind of groundbreaking inventions,

if you will, that have changed our lives, right?

One of the things that I really am still disappointed in

is that in the 40 years I thought by now,

organizations for profit or nonprofit

would have adopted cultures that would create, you know,

what I often used to call the accessibility mindset.

And that is they designed to develop things

that are all out of the box,

usable and accessible to people with disabilities.

That we shouldn't have to use sticks and laws

to force them to do things anymore.

Laws are always a great way to kind of get people going

and, you know, get things,

you know, the springboard type of effect.

But they're there just to get things started.

In the long run, you operate by principles, right?

And when you design and develop user-centered design

and you design and develop inclusively

with those embraced principles?

Those just say, what do I need to do to enhance

what I'm developing so that is usable and accessible

to the blind, to the deaf,

to those with mobility disabilities,

to those with cognitive disabilities,

to those with fine motor control disabilities.

How do I do that? What do I do?

And that gets built into the lifecycle,

the engineering lifecycle.

I do tend to talk more in technology terms

'cause that's just my life.

But the reality is you can apply that across the board

regardless of what you invent or what you develop, right?

And I had hoped by now that this would be integral,

it would be cultural to every organization, and it's not.

You know, we still, you know, in this country here,

we live by lawsuits and litigation, right?

And that moves the proverbial elephants to get going.

Well, that's just not right.

We shouldn't have to sue a company, right?

To force them to do something that they could and should

and have the ability to do on their own.

So that's one thing I think I'm disappointed in.

I'm not saying that it's, you know, there are no absolutes.

So there are some organizations, there are some companies

that are setting good examples in leadership at that level.

But it's definitely not something

that is embraced holistically.

So at my age, at this point, 40 years of the business,

I feel like the one thing that I could still push and do

is push that mindset and get.

This is why I was talking about earlier

working with the IAAP

in working on building maturity models.

Because these maturity models

are something that companies get

that they embrace in other areas of their business, okay.

That they use, that they execute and strategize on.

But building an accessibility maturity model,

well that takes it to a whole new level, right?

If companies would live by those maturity models,

if they would operate and work by and adopt them,

then I believe within a couple of years

those companies would be thinking,

oh, accessibility, yeah, that's what we, we just do it.

I don't have to think about it, it's just done

because it's a part of our processes

all the way across the board.

The engineering life cycle, it's that marketing and concept,

and it's out to sales and everybody knows about it.

So I'm gonna spend the last few years,

whatever part of my life I have, pushing that model,

pushing that, and then pushing that

into some of the emerging technologies.

I still don't understand why after all these years

of working first with operating systems,

then with application layers like the web, right?

That we still have to talk to people about,

hey, you gotta think about disabilities and accessibility

when you develop an immersive environment,

or you're building your gaming environment.

But we do, we do, we have to, we have to keep.

There's so many friends and colleagues out there,

you see them and they're spending, you know,

oodles of time teaching, building awareness,

call conferences and all events to do that.

But sometimes you feel like you're pushing a rope.

- No, I appreciate all your thoughtful comments and insights

on that and I couldn't agree more.

I've experienced a lot of the same

in my career along these lines.

And then you also, you started to allude to the future.

I was gonna ask a little bit about the IAAP,

but you mentioned some things about that.

But what are the things, you know, looking forward for you

that you're, any things you're excited about

getting involved in or new activities or goals

for this part of your career?

- Yeah, well, I actually am seriously thinking,

it'll be already 25 years since I wrote my first book,

"Web Accessibility for People with Disabilities."

And I'm actually thinking about writing a second version.

So there's one kind of aspiration.

I also wanna write a novel,

but, you know, that's just a side, that's a side goal.

So that's one thing I'm thinking about doing.

Being with Pearson as a publishing company

gives me, you know, maybe a leg up on doing that.

So, we'll see.

I really am very excited

about being part of the three projects

that I already to told you about upfront.

I'm enamored with the electronic braille standard

and what that has the potential to become in the future

for blind users.

So being part of that and looking at how that works,

and you know, where that takes us into the device

into digital world.

Really, really interesting.

Tactile graphics, another big part of that

and turning that into a mature area of technology.

Which right now, today it's still,

it's, you know, it really is still something

that needs to be worked with.

So there's one area.

I'm really excited about the work

in immersive environments, right?

So whether it's augmentative reality

or mixed reality or virtual reality.

And integrating those

into the lives of people with disabilities,

we've seen some applications, especially around devices

that have been very useful, even in the medical field.

But I really want to integrate,

I really wanna find some solutions

that will allow us to integrate into the education space.

How can we get young people to use these devices,

young kids with disabilities,

and let them become learning tools

as well as the, you know, the instructors, the professors,

the teachers, et cetera.

And so, I see the whole XR community

being very, very exciting future.

One of my favorite experiences

is I had the opportunity to work with Jared Lanier

several years ago, when he was first,

you know, he ran and started VPL.

And you know, everybody and their mother wanted to meet him.

Well, he had an employee that had MS

and he was really concerned about his ability

to be able to use virtual reality.

And so I got to work with him,

some others at the National Institute of Standards

that were working on that.

Sandy Ressler, I'm thinking about Sandy.

So I just think that there's a huge area out there

that we could work with.

And I want to get accessibility built into that now

before it becomes what we're looking back at,

you know, operating systems, still having to work on them,

web, still having to work on them.

Let's get it out the door and get it usable and accessible

without any hitches.

- Well, I'm excited about the opportunities there as well.

And I'm keeping up on developments there.

But Mike, it's been a pleasure to have this opportunity

to meet you for the first time like this,

and to have this engaging chat.

And hopefully we can meet at some physical event

sometime in the future.

- That would be great, Joe, thanks very much,

I really appreciate having me on your show.

- All right, thanks a lot, bye-bye.

- Take care.

- Hey, we did it.

- Yeah, I'm now watching. - Perfect.