Sheri Byrne-Haber,  Vmware, All around evangelist

Sheri and her daughter have disabilities and that provided a launching point for advocacy for accessibility. She brought that interest into her work as a software tester and now building out the comprehensive internal and external accessibility programs at VMWARE. 

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

have found their way into this profession.

So let's meet one of those people right now

and hear about their journey.

(upbeat music)

All right well, welcome.

And I have pleasure today of talking with

Sheri Byrne-Haber.

Hello Sheri, how are you?

- Hey Joe, I'm doing really well thanks.

- So glad to have you in this conversation.

We've met in person before,

but it's good to have a chance to talk to you

in this online format.

Where are you talking to us from?

- I live at the top of Table Mountain,

which is, the post office calls us Cupertino.

But if you ask anybody who works at Apple,

they wouldn't know that we existed.

So just outside of Silicon Valley on the mountain

that makes Silicon Valley a valley.

- And is that been a place that you've been

for a long time?

- I've been here since 1993

was when I moved back here from Canada.

So I'm originally from the province of New Brunswick,

in Northeastern Canada, the main side of Canada.

- I've always wanted to visit

that areas, tour around and check out

some of the natural beauty of that area.

- It's a great place in the summer.

It's the lobster capital of the world,

so hopefully you're not a kosher

or allergic to shellfish 'cause that would just be sad.

- (laughs) Well, I wanna kind of cover different parts,

so you know, where you get to where you're at today,

but like why don't we kind of start at that today part,

you know, what are you involved in right now?

- So I've got my fingers in a number of

different pies right now.

I am an accessibility architect at VMware.

I've been with VMware for going on three years now.

I founded the accessibility program,

and then it grew big enough

that one person couldn't run it anymore.

So I had to choose this piece of the baby I wanted,

I could either run the remediation programs

and have all the people reporting to me,

or I could go into innovation and outreach,

was what they were calling it at the time

and be a senior individual contributor

at the architect level.

And I had just won the pitches on,

which was an internal contest.

And my idea was to build a better

accessibility testing tool using machine learning

and I was really excited about that concept

because accessibility testing is notoriously bad

for automation, and I thought that

I could make a difference.

And so I decided to pick the architect side of things.

We rolled out our tool,

which is called Crest about two months ago,

and we're looking at...

So when we started a year ago,

it was about a 30, 70 split.

So 30% of accessibility could be tested

in an automated manner, but 70% is manual.

We've got it to 34, 66 in our proof of concept.

So we took five things that could not be tested manually.

Sorry could not be tested in an automated manner previously,

and we automated them with a very high level of

reliability using machine learning.

And we think we can get that to 50, 50

in the next couple of months.

And it's open source.

So just go to GitHub and look for VMware Crest

and you'll be able to find it.

- Well yeah then that's something

I'll definitely put a link into

and in the notes associated with this.

And I know you're involved with a lot of other things

right now as well, and we can come around to that,

but I was thinking now maybe you kind of

push back into the past,

and I think we all have, you know different reasons

and situations that brought us into the accessibility area,

but kind of where did you start with your career

and how did it sort of move to where you're at today?

- So definitely been a long and windy path.

I am wheelchair user.

I have a congenital orthopedic issue

and people just automatically assume

when they see me in my wheelchair,

and they hear me talking about accessibility that,

oh yeah, that's your connection.

I didn't actually get into accessibility because of that.

I got into accessibility because my middle daughter is deaf

and I happened to have a computer science degree

and was a lawyer at the time

that we discovered that she was,

she had a progressive form of hearing loss.

And so I went into advocacy for the deaf at first

suing insurance companies and school districts

for refusing to cover things

that deaf children need to be successful.

And won a class action lawsuit against Blue Cross

kind of put myself out of business.

Once you went against Blue Cross,

everybody just basically gives in.

They realize that there's no point in continuing to fight.

And I thought, well, let me see,

I've got this computer science degree,

I've got this law degree, what can I do with this?

And that was just about the time

that accessibility was really starting to take off.

So that was about nine years ago.

And I've been doing that solid ever since.

- Yeah, and just to stop there for a minute,

I mean, you have this situation with your child, you know,

certainly that's a motivator.

It is kind of a much bigger step for a lot of people

to take it to the point where you're

going into, you know, legal battles

and being a you know, an upfront advocate.

Was that just something you were always comfortable with

or did it all kind of stem from this

and you realized that was,

it was just something that you had

an affinity to be able to take things that way?

- So anybody under the age of probably let's say 35, 36

doesn't remember life before

the Americans With Disabilities Act.

No, I do, I was the eighth grader

who didn't get to go on the graduation trip

because Yosemite wasn't accessible

and they couldn't take a wheelchair on the school bus.

You know I was the kid who couldn't take

you know British literature class because it was upstairs

and I was at a high school with no elevator.

So my parents always did a really good job

advocating for me.

There was no lowered expectations.

It was always expected that I would go to college.

It was always expected that I was gonna do

everything that everybody else did.

And so I think I got a lot of it from them,

but, you know, I had the good fortune.

My family moved here from Canada when I was eight.

And yeah I was the first Girl Scout

to get a badge in computer science.

So, you know, I've always been around computers.

I've always been around tech.

I went to the (indistinct)

in the computer club that we belonged to

together many years ago.

So it's always been great for me to have

an activity where despite my disabilities,

I could still be on an equal playing field

with everybody else and that's what tech means to me.

- And then so was it that your...

How was your career moving along,

like in what areas was that going on

at the same time that you were focused on

getting equitable service for your child?

- So for the first 10 years after I went to Cal,

I did primarily just generic software testing,

taking the parts of vacuum cleaner

and figuring out how it works,

that was the kind of kid I was.

And so I bring that with me into accessibility

because I think to a certain extent,

accessibility is just a specialized form of QA.

I mean, we all have our reasons for being in it,

but at an abstract level, it's regulatory compliance.

It's not that much different from, you know,

security or privacy or any of the other laws

that you have to test

and make sure that you're compliant with.

You know, yes, you want it to be usable.

Yes, there's a really good reason, you know,

that you don't wanna exclude people with disabilities.

But a lot of the principles

that we've learned over the years in QA,

like trying to shift the bug discovery earlier

in the process that also works very well for accessibility.

And so that's something that I've really been focused on

the last couple of years at VMware,

as we've made this massive migration

from doing monolithic large software releases,

maybe two or three a year, you know,

like one major and a couple of minors,

to releasing you know,

sometimes a couple of hundred times a week.

- And where was the point where

the technical part of your career started

to move into actively being involved

in accessibility as part of that career?

- Yeah, so I did software testing.

Then I decided to go to law school.

It was my last year of law school

that we discovered that my daughter had

a progressive hearing loss.

So I did advocacy for the deaf for about eight years

and then went into accessibility after that.

So I'm kind of on my third career at this point,

but I'm planning on sticking around in this one for awhile.

- Well, it was interesting the way that you mentioned about

kind of the world before the ADA legislation, you know,

initially changed things so dramatically,

but then it was still a long time

before digital products and services

became supported by legal issues and so on.

I imagined that that was something

that may have affected your daughter's ability

to consume things, and yet impossibly you're on as well.

- That is true.

So the ADA's gonna be 31 in a couple of months,

and 15 years ago was when the target case was decided.

So that was the first big accessibility case

that actually went through to a written court decision.

So, yeah, it took about 15 years before the first

digital accessibility case was decided.

And in their infinite wisdom,

the government decided not to adopt

WCAG 2.0 into the Americans With Disabilities Act.

So the Americans With Disabilities Act

is actually written to be a very open updatable document.

The internet didn't exist when the ADA was passed

yet courts have decided

that the ADA does apply to technology,

does apply to the internet.

Isn't necessarily limited just to places

and stores that people go to.

And this has been really important during the pandemic,

because you think about the situation

as somebody who's blind, you know,

you're bubbling at your house.

You're not supposed to be interacting with other people.

If you go to a store, you need help.

You can't read the soup can signs

or, you know, see what's are green and which bananas aren't.

So you wanna go and order online,

but if it's not accessible you can't do that either.

So people with disabilities really have struggled

during the pandemic from that perspective.

And 97.4% of the web is still inaccessible to them.

It's a really depressingly high figure.

- Well, you know, you live that with your self

and your daughter on having such a,

where you have a kind of a long view so far

of how things have progressed.

To me I'm kind of interested in knowing like,

how far do you feel we've really come

because now you're actively involved in accessibility.

I think to some extent,

we have a greater awareness of it

in professional circles and in the technical areas.

But sometimes you know, I look...

I started to get involved in it around 1998, 1999,

doing some work with the W3C

when they were first coming out with

the web accessibility initiative.

And in some ways I feel like there's been

really dramatically interesting, valuable things,

and then on a day-to-day basis,

sometimes I get frustrated and I'm like,

it never seems like really moving the needle that much.

So I'm interested in kind of

how your perceptions of that evolution.

- You know I kind of feel the same way sometimes.

There are days where you feel like

you're smacking your head against the brick wall

and stuff never moved as quickly as you want it to.

I think one thing I find over and over

is that we as a society tend to be somewhat

ethically challenged in that technology always

evolves faster than the ethics behind using that technology.

And I think until we solve that root problem,

access at things like accessibility

are always gonna be playing catch up

because the technology just moves so quickly

and the standards and the ethics

behind how to use it don't keep up.

We have AI, right?

Are we using our AI in an ethical manner?

Are we making sure that people of color

and women and people with disabilities,

that there's no bias in the coding,

that there's no bias in the data sets?

Heck no.

We see that all the time,

but that doesn't stop us from moving on

to the next evolution of AI.

So sometimes the regulations take care of that,

sometimes they don't.

But the nice thing about the ADA

is you don't have to go back to Congress

to get it to change.

The ADA was written so that

when new things are adopted through

the technical access manuals,

they automatically get incorporated into the law.

So it is an easier process to update it.

So things today, like a hotel,

swimming pools, and movie theater accessibility,

which was really never contemplated

when the ADA was originally passed 30 years ago,

those are now part of it.

- Well, I mean you're actively involved

in accessibility on a regular basis

and have for many years now.

You get the opportunity to work at some

fairly large organizations

and being involved in accessibility.

Are there any things you can talk about

with respect to your experiences there

and kind of, you know, how that moved your career forward?

- So I think I've determined over the years

that the number one factor in determining

whether or not an accessibility program

is gonna be successful is the presence

of an employee resource group dedicated to disability.

When you don't have that, it's a much bigger struggle,

and, you know, people think of those two things

and then they're like,

well, wow, how were those connected?

No matter how big your accessibility program is,

you're never gonna have an accessibility person

in the room all the time when the decisions are being made.

But if you have enough employees

with disabilities in the room

and they're willing to talk about it

because they feel psychologically safe

to discuss their hidden disabilities

or to discuss a relative with a disability,

or a child with a disability,

then the right decisions get made

because it's being discussed even when

a member of the accessibility team isn't in the room.

So that was something that I was really happy

to be able to start at VMware.

And we just held a psychological safety event yesterday.

It was our kickoff to Pride Month.

So we did it in conjunction between

the women's employee resource group,

the pride employee resource group,

and the disability employee resource group,

and we had 600 people attend.

- Wow. Yeah, that's really amazing.

And so how do you...

What type of, if we look at your current situation,

VMware kind of what's the overall corporate philosophy

around supporting accessibility, you know,

both internally for your employees

as well as the things that you're doing

with the products and services that you produce.

- So VMware has always been committed

to making sure that people with disabilities

can use our products.

We tend to grow by acquisition which has presented

a sort of a unique challenge

in that we've acquired, I think,

18 company in the three years that I've worked for VMware.

So that means you're getting, you know,

every few months you're getting hit

into the whole new suite of products

and maybe they're accessible and maybe they're not.

But we've gone from 92 products to 140 products

in the three years that I've been there.

So that's been an interesting challenge.

We just recently passed

an equal of internal accessibility policies,

so our employee facing policy is now identical

to our customer facing policy.

And we're going through our tools and, you know,

prioritizing the ones that everybody uses first

and many of our vendors who may be listening

to this are going, oh yeah, we know Sheri.

Because I, you know,

meet with several of them frequently

to get them on the right path to accessibility.

And it's one of the great things about working for VMware,

because we believe in using our leverage, you know,

to create a better environment for everybody.

So we're not asking Slack or Atlassian,

or any of the companies that we worked at with

to fix it just for us,

we're really trying to get them to fix it for everybody.

And we're willing to help them on our dime,

the VMware, you know, dime to do that.

- VMware is such a large organization,

probably so many different departments

and so many projects going on at any given time.

How are things organized to support accessibility?

Is there sort of a central group

that assists with supporting that,

or are individual departments

do they have their own people

that become advocates in those areas?

- So if you look at any of the six accessibility

maturity models that exist out there in the world,

you can never get past the middle tier

without having a centralized accessibility system

and a centralized accessibility budget.

When you allow each business unit

or each department or each product

to handle accessibility differently,

that's where you get into inconsistencies.

And that's where you get into,

okay, this department is financially challenged.

So they're just gonna do the minimum

to get by on accessibility, where that department,

maybe the department has a child with a disability

and so he's really committed to doing it right,

or she's really committed to doing it right.

So the whole mindset behind the way we do it at VMware

is it is centralized.

There is one approach.

Because we have so many products

what we found as we are remediating products,

we're getting into a situation where you transition

from one VMware product to another VMware product,

and maybe things don't work exactly the same way.

Like they're both accessible,

but they're accessible in different ways.

So let me give you an example.

W3C is not particularly prescriptive in the WCAG guidelines.

So if you've got a slide to yourself

that moves around WC3 doesn't say you have to have a button.

It doesn't says you have to have a mechanism.

And maybe one business unit wants to do it

with green buttons in the lower left corner

and another business unit wants to do it

with a toggle in the upper right.

Okay. Well, yeah, those are compliant,

but that's not the best user experience

because you didn't care when they transitioned

from one product to the next product,

they just want it for it.

So we realized that,

and when we got to a certain level

in our accessibility maturity,

we said, okay, wait,

we wanna create an accessibility style guide

so that all the product teams

are drawing from the same design patterns

and the same resources,

so that they're all implementing

magnification in the same manner.

And, you know, slides telescope

in the same manner and motion and haptics and all that.

So that's something we're actually

putting quite a bit of effort into right now.

- And then for the individual practitioners,

let's say a product manager

or a interaction designer,

or a developer, you know,

how are they able to acquire the skills

or know what part they play

in that overall accessibility plan

that you mentioned that might be set by

the centralized authority.

- So many opportunities.

So we have training programs

that the employee resource group has deployed

on our centralized training platform.

We have a deep dive on accessibility that's role-based.

We have a program manager course,

a content manager course,

a developer course, a QA course,

so that everybody only has to learn

what they need to know

in order to do their particular job.

We have webinars, we have a champions program,

we have slack channels, we have office hours.

We have every communications.

We have accessibility week,

the first week in every February,

which is the beginning of VMware's fiscal year.

Where we do an accessibility summit

and we talk to customers

and we do accessibility research,

and we've got an accessibility hack-a-thon

scheduled for this November coming up

because WCAG 2.2 should be coming out this fall

and we wanna get a headstart on that.

So we're all gonna do the WCAG 2.2 updates together

so that we can kind of crowdsource the opportunities

and make sure it's done consistently across the product.

- Well, there are apparently most definitely be

you know, support from the top levels of the organizations

because obviously there's a significant commitment

of resources for people, you know,

to set up those activities

and then give people the time

to be able to embrace them

and get involved in do that training.

- Yeah, we have had a little bit of turnover,

and our upper levels originally our big product champion

was Reggie from (indistinct)

And he unfortunately left to go to a competitor in February,

but his role was taken over by Ragu.

And then when top left Ragu became a CEO.

So we definitely have an accessibility champion

with respect to a CEO.

I get a lot of support from HR.

We're working on new reasonable

accommodations processes for example.

And obviously the DEI team is a big part

of what the accessibility resource group

is able to accomplish as well.

- Well, you know, just talking a little bit more

about the things you're doing right now,

you're always visible in the various communities,

you know, writing things to share about your ideas

about accessibility and you've also been working

on a new book, do you wanna talk about that a little bit?

- Yeah. So I was named the UX Collective

Medium Author of the year, last year

and early this year the UX Collective came to me and said,

we wanna publish a book on global accessibility.

What you gonna say, will you write it with us?

Well, I love writing.

And I like to think that that's one of my takeaways

from law school as I'm actually a decent,

but probably more importantly a staff writer,

it only usually takes me an hour to 90 minutes

for one of my blog articles.

And I hate logistics(laughs)

I'm terrible at it.

And I can't draw a straight line with ruler,

so graphics are not my thing.

And they had designers and graphic designers

and they're like, oh yeah,

we're gonna make this into an audio book.

And they had all that stuff locked down.

So it was just absolutely a fabulous partnership.

And so that came out on Global Accessibility Awareness page

and the whole book is almost finished,

and I'm talking to a couple of

different publishers right now.

But we had 27,000 downloads

in the first, like 10 days when the book was out.

It's just been a crazy popular

beyond my wildest dreams.

You know, when I was writing it I'm like,

is anybody but my dad gonna read this?

And it turns out yeah,

a lot of people apart from my dad are gonna read it.

- Were there any parts of it that,

I mean, obviously you made the whole thing happen,

but were there any parts that you are particularly

passionate about as you put it together?

- No, I think my things right now

is giving people who are just getting started the tools

that they can turn back and take to their organizations

who are maybe recalcitrant

or don't even know what accessibility is,

or kind of locked into

some of the myths around accessibility ,

and giving them the knowledge that they need

that does not come from accessibility boot camps

on how to change there mindset.

I'm all about changing hearts and minds.

If you wanna read a book on how to implement aria,

you know, there's stuff,

there's plenty of material out there already on that.

I try to stick to the more abstract stuff,

and, you know, I tell people

if I have to answer a question twice,

I usually start an article on it

because they I figure, okay if I write an article on it,

then I can just point people to the article in the future.

- Well, I haven't had a chance

to get into the book yet,

but I'm looking forward to reading it.

And I wanna thank you for just taking this time

to chat with me and let people know

a little bit about your story and you know,

what accessibility is all about

from the perspective of Sheri Byrne-Haber.

- Well, thank you very much Joe.

And I just wanna remind your audience

that if you are interested in accessibility,

there are all kinds of volunteer opportunities.

So I work with the W3C on the silver,

which is the WCAG 3.0 which will be coming

kind of towards the end of 2023,

or maybe the beginning of 2024.

There's always volunteer opportunities there.

There's volunteer opportunities with IWAP

with Lighthouse for the Blind,

with Center for Independent Living.

I recently worked on the

Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo rebuild.

So the place that I couldn't visit

when I was a kid is now gonna be fully accessible,

that I'm really excited to try that out

in a couple of weekends.

And, you know, just look through

places that you can help,

because accessibility does not require a college degree

all it requires is some knowledge

and a whole lot of caring.

- A lot of what we do are little steps,

iterative pieces, and hopefully, you know,

we just keep moving forward.

- That's how I ended the book.

It's just keep moving that accessibility needle forward

backwards is not an acceptable direction.

- Well, thanks again Sheri and I look forward to seeing you,

hopefully at a physical event sometime soon.