Cam Beaudoin, CIBC, Senior Manager of Accessibility

Cam Beaudoin is the Senior Manager of Accessibility for a financial institution in Canada. He started as a developer at a consulting company and was immediately charged with understanding the WCAG. That led to his current position as well as consulting, speaking engagements, and his own accessibility podcast. Cam describes a bit about regulatory compliance in Canada. He also talks about the importance of melding our work with business goals, design systems, and metrics.

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

(upbeat music playing)

- Hello, this is Digital Accessibility,

The people Behind the Progress.

I'm Joe Welnske, 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.

(upbeat music playing)

All right.

Well, here we go with another episode

where I have the fun time

to talk with another accessibility practitioner.

And today I'm speaking with Cam Beaudoin.

Hello, Cam. How are you today?

- Fantastic, Joe, how are you?

- Oh, it's good.

As usual, I'm in my home office on Vashon island, Washington

which is near Blink's, Seattle headquarters.

Where are you talking to me from?

- Yeah, I'm in Toronto, Canada, and I just came back

from a week of vacation myself, camping in the outback.

So I'm nice and relaxed for you here.

It's great.

- That sounds like a lot of fun.

It's good to have the opportunity to chat with you.

And certainly a lot of things that you've done,

that we could talk about.

A good place to start is if you tell us a little bit

about what your current work is all about.

- Sure, sure.

I've got this nice dual opportunity right now.

I am currently senior manager of accessibility

at one of the largest financial institutions in Canada,

where I lead a team to help make sure that the organization

as a whole follows accessibility guidelines,

and is trained up to really think of that shift left

mentality.

On the other side, on the flip side of the coin,

I'm also a speaker, I'm a professional speaker

for digital accessibility and disability inclusion.

And that's what I do.

I also run a weekly live show as well on LinkedIn too.

- Well, so obviously you're really busy all the time.

For the work that you're doing

with the financial institution.

What's that like kind of a day in the life or a work week

in the life for you in that activity?

- Yeah, that's a really good question.

And I'm going to answer that in a way of,

it's not what I expected and I'll tell you why,

because it's a really important lesson

that I think that a lot of us accessibility practitioners

don't get to see a lot of,

which is a management or leadership role

who really cares about accessibility.

And the reason I'm saying it's an interesting type

of role is because I now have to tie accessibility

in with business priorities

and goals and a key performance indicators

which I don't think is part of a lot of organizations,

the fabric of their being just yet.

So it's a really interesting role.

I get to help out the entire organization

really set those metrics and set those goals,

bring in tools and policies and decisions

around the entire organization,

and make sure that they follow those rules

that they've said themselves that they would follow.

- And you mentioned the show that you do,

in your speaking engagements, what does that consist of?

- Yeah, so I've got a weekly LinkedIn live show where I try,

and bring on just this diverse guests and groups

of people who have lived experiences with disabilities.

I really find finding people who have those lived

experiences, the voices,

probably a key to our industry,

really making sure that understanding and hearing

about how people live with disabilities

is a really good way to understand

and appreciate how I can cater to them,

and how I can help out this group of individuals.

And beside that,

I'm also pretty actively going after events,

keynote talks, other organizations

whoever's looking to make that transformational change

in their organization to start caring about accessibility

or continue on their journey, or even get their staff

of accessibility professionals trained up on how to speak

about accessibility properly,

those are the types of markets

that I'm really getting heavily

into and speaking at those organizations as well.

- Well, we'll make sure we get notes

about those activities in the show notes.

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

is find out how people made their way

to where they are today and live life and work life.

And so why don't you just pick a spot

where you'd like to start and let us know

about how your journey progressed

to what you're doing today?

- Sure, sure.

It's always an interesting answer.

Isn't it?

When you ask somebody,

especially some of us advocates where did you start?

We all have this little bit different story

but it always relates in some kind of thing

where I cared about a group of people.

This is important to me, the better good of the world.

And I started off as a developer

and I just wanted to make good code.

And we were waiting for,

a project that we were working on,

I was waiting for logins, banks sometimes are hesitant

about giving logins to people of before a six week kind

of introduction and onboarding session, things like that.

So at the consulting firm I worked at,

we were waiting those six weeks

and I was a good developer, still a junior.

And they threw the web content accessibility guidelines

at me and they said Cam, go learn this.

You're going to be the accessibility guy.

And I read them as a junior,

and looking forward to this, and I read them top to bottom

which is one kind of a lot of people in our industry do.

And realized that after 1.1.1 context content,

and you move to the next one,

and you're like 1.2.1,

well I have already description here.

What do I need this for?

So I started to realize

that maybe wasn't the best way to approach it.

We had a list of defects that need to be fixed.

I burned those down.

I finished those off.

And,

after that I became the accessibility subject matter expert.

And one of the interesting stories that came out

of that was we were in a conversation to try and.

Remember when mobile check deposit came out,

do you remember that?

Like when you could take a picture

with the check with your phone?

And they were trying to decide is,

do we need to integrate this to the iPhone 4?

Or do we just go forward with the iPhone 6?

And the decision was,

well let's just continue forward with the iPhone 6

because let's not write code for an older model.

And I thought that was kind of odd because I was thinking

about the groups of individuals who maybe the only way

they get paid is through a check.

That's kind of unfortunate

that they're not going to be able to afford

or purchase a new telephone.

Like you telling me I got to buy a new smartphone

just to be able to have a convenience of depositing a check.

So I thought that was kind of wrong.

And I started to just learn a little bit more

about the industry and I became the subject

matter expert for the organization in Canada.

About that, I went to CSUN,

the conference around accessibility.

I spoke at CSUN in 2018, sent there by the company.

And since then, I've just started to speak more

openly about digital and professional advocacy,

and how that kind of relates to this whole world.

And how do we get others to care about this subject too

which is a really big focus of what I do now.

- And the organization that you mentioned there early on,

is that the one that you're still working with?

- No, I actually left them.

I had a manager from that organization tell me.

And when I used to tell the story

people used to think it was bad or negative.

Now, I used to think so as well

but it's changed a little bit over time.

He said that Cam you know that this company

will never care about accessibility.

And I had to take a step back

because I thought that was very obtuse.

I thought that was very confrontational

of him to say that.

A little later on I learned that he used to do work

on airport kiosks, also a very heavily regulated industry,

kiosks and airlines and stuff like that.

And his job was,

overturned.

He had no more job after working

on these kiosks when everything was made remote,

and you could edit and change these kiosks remotely

whereas before you had to go in and plug a stick in,

and do a bunch of stuff.

So he came from the regulatory industry

and when he told me that I thought he was being,

like I said, quite confrontational in saying Cam,

get out to here.

You need something else.

It wasn't until much later that, like I said,

I realized that maybe he just wanted to test me and say,

if you really care about accessibility,

this company is not the one you should choose.

You got to either go and find one who really does,

and continue that passion that way or change roles

within because they'll never find or be able to sell

projects of accessibility in this organization.

So I left and I went to a pure accessibility

consulting firm and I was a technical lead there.

And then I started my own company after that,

and started speaking.

- But with the work that you do with your,

you still work with the financial company?

- Yep. Financial institution, yep.

- And so how is that set up?

Are you part of an overarching accessibility support

for different parts of the organization?

Or do you work with individual departments

or groups or how is that set up?

- Yeah, really interesting question because and I'm quite

fortunate to be able to define

what we're doing as we kind of do it.

Recently what happened was the organization had to change

from a model where there's just an accessibility team

to let's go out and build an enterprise wide accessibility

like team or center of excellence, or what have you.

With large organizations usually have different names

for different things, or there's a center of excellence

over here for policies.

And now do we create a second center of excellence

or do we call it something different?

So to answer your question,

anything that has to do with digital.

So this means websites or the mobile app itself

or things like documents or PDFs

and stuff that all kind of falls under what me and my team

consult on and how we create the policies

and procedures and decisions on how do we take this forward

for the next six months, one year, and make decisions

on these for that period of time to carry

on as a permanent structure within the organization.

- Well,

one of the things that you mentioned was your early work

looking at the WCAG,

and kind of being overwhelmed by that,

which happens to a lot of people.

Coming to accessibility,

fortunately, we have a ton of great information

but in some ways it can be overwhelming

to see all that.

I like to, when people come in new,

I like to just give them pieces that maybe are relevant

small chunks that they can grab on to.

But one of the things that a lot

of large enterprise or organizations

like financial institutions have to deal

with are government regulations.

For me as a citizen in the United States,

in working on projects,

we're always involved with the section 508

legalities which stem from WCAG.

What's it like in Canada in terms

of the standards that you may need to comply with there?

- Yeah, so recently, AODA,

which stands for the Accessibility

for Ontarians with Disabilities Act came into effect.

There was a deadline in 2020, excuse me, 2021.

It was pushed six months, 2022.

And then they said,

comply with WCAG 2.0 level AA.

And that came into effect.

And unfortunately,

that AODA did not have teeth into the rules.

What was going to happen if someone did not comply?

Well, they threatened for things

up to $10,000 a day or something like that.

And then that never really happened.

So, lot of larger organizations

or institutions did comply because the rule was,

if you did business in the province of Ontario

you needed to follow the Accessibility

for Ontario Disabilities Act,

then people who were in other provinces,

Quebec, British Columbia,

the two other most populous provinces said,

well I don't need to comply,

I don't do business in Ontario.

Or my headquarters is in Quebec.

That means I don't need to follow these guidelines.

So, recently what's happened is it's moved up

to the federal level.

The Accessible Canada Act is being now worked

on and they have a target deadline of 2040,

which is a long term.

So, right now we're working on.

We're trying to figure out ways of, how do we start

to communicate the reasons

for working on ACA now to larger organization.

So the larger, excuse me to the organization at large,

and that presents its own challenges.

Government moves slow, as we both know.

And the more regulated you get, the more difficult

it is to actually enact those changes

in a reasonable amount of time.

And I love this challenge.

This is something really interesting

because what you said earlier about breaking it down

to smaller chunks is something I talk about a lot.

Simplification is something we need to focus

on in our industry

because it can get really really complex and convoluted.

How can I really describe the whole human condition

in a few sentences on a website?

You just can't do it.

So that's why I don't even really say WCAG anymore.

I say accessibility guidelines

because it's a lot easier for people to understand

or even better, the accessibility rules

or rule set or things like that.

Breaking things down into a really easily digestible,

understandable piece of information is a lot easier

than saying what WCAG 2.0 level AA, success criteria 1.1.1.

People just don't accept that as part of what,

they don't know what they're supposed to do with that.

They say, okay,

what do I do?

How is this practical?

How do I make this work?

So, yeah, it's really important

to make sure that we simplify and characterize

what we're supposed to do in these really nice digestible

chunks.

- Well, you've been working in this area for quite a while.

Do you have any thoughts looking to the future

of things where you see opportunities that you're excited

about on the other side of that,

are there some areas where you're concerned

that maybe there's not enough investment

or progress being made?

- Yeah, definitely.

I see the biggest gap in our industry

is the fact that we don't put as individuals,

and professionals enough focus on business reasons

or speaking to business.

One thing that I'm doing more and more now is tying

in business goals with accessibility guidelines or rules.

Now, what I mean by that,

is that there is companies out there who will post publicly

on their blogs or on their diversity, equity,

and inclusion pages on their websites.

They say, we care about a diverse workforce.

And yet we go in there as professionals,

and start to talk about,

well this is how you put all the text into an image,

and we lose that tie between the business goals,

and disability inclusion.

So that's where I see our biggest focus should be,

is really talking to organizations.

When we speak to organizations

I bring up their blog page on, Hey,

we just posted last month about pride month, for example.

Look at this post. It was great.

This is a diverse,

or here's a post that we just did on including non-gender

bias in our hiring practices.

Why aren't we talking about disability inclusion

in that as well?

And I think we need to get comfortable with that.

Because once we can start to tie business goals,

business reasons into accessibility targets

and things like that, we're going to have a lot easier way

of communicating with people who think in terms

of key performance indicators and quarterly targets.

And I was just speaking to somebody

who wants to bring a design system,

an accessible design system into his business.

And he said,

well what are some ways that I can talk about this?

And so just do that, go look at the company's

DEI goals and say, well, look,

we care about bringing on new immigrants to our organization

well, people with a second language really do benefit

from language simplification

or left alignment when they're reading text

because that's easier for how we consume information.

Well, now all of a sudden I've tied

in a business goal with accessibility reasons,

and that means metrics can be put onto that.

You can actually put a dollar figure

on what's the value of that too.

So I think our ability to communicate those business goals,

and becoming fluent with business language

is something that we all need to work on.

I see that as a huge opportunity

for us to move this forward in the next three to five years.

- Well, one of the areas you mentioned briefly

that you were involved with was in accessibility or working

for an organization as an accessibility consultant

before you started your own work,

for a lot of accessibility consulting,

often it stems out of a company's fear of litigation,

and is often kind of the remediation, post development

part where you're really just trying to fix,

and put band aids on what could be more significant

problems.

Have you noticed much progress

in organizations doing work shift left and starting

at the research and design level before things are coded?

I kind of see it as a mixed bag

where there's still quite there.

There's not as much investment early on.

And it tends to be just trying to patch things

at the end but I was interested in your experiences

with that.

- Well, sure.

And I agree with you.

I mean, that is left till the end.

And a lot of consulting firms will feed into that.

There's some organizations out there who actively put ads

out there saying avoid accessibility litigation,

call us now.

But here's where I see that we fit in.

It doesn't matter

if you are a junior developer who cares a little bit

of accessibility or someone who has been an advocate

for years, we have to realize that it's all

of our responsibility to educate clients and customers

and companies and organizations on that shift left.

So I think that we need to get comfortable.

Like I said, having those business conversations.

Yes, I agree with you that shift left is important

but if I just go tell a UX research team

you should be interviewing people with disabilities.

And then I walk out of the room

or end the conversation without enabling

them with the tools or the resources to be able to do that.

Well, then I'm not doing a very good job

helping them shift left either.

There's some great companies out there who have access

to a pool of people who have lived experiences

with disabilities and who are willing and able,

and getting paid to offer feedback on products and services.

But we're not teaching about that.

We're not going to talk to these teams and saying, Hey,

you can call this company.

You can meet with their sales team and you can do that.

Instead, a lot of consulting firms

they sit right in that tech level.

They sit in that tech space in that tech team and say,

well, just be that, pick up the phone

and call me when you have a tech question

but we're not doing a lot of that work on,

let's be the driving force before the shift left.

It's not up to the business owners to shift left.

It's up to us to drive that change,

and we need to be in front of that.

- Well, we've covered a lot of things.

I do want to ask you a little bit more

about the show that you put on.

How often is that?

Where can people find it?

And we'll put that information in the show notes

but maybe you could tell us a little bit

about what that's all about.

- Sure, absolutely.

So the name of the show is called Normalize it,

where I talk about the things

which a lot of people feel uncomfortable to talk about.

I mean, no one wants to talk

about neuro diversity in the workplace.

What does it mean to go to work if you are autistic

or you have ADHD and what does that mean?

So that's where that show name comes from.

It's at noon Eastern every Friday.

Like lots of guests coming on.

I've got Mike Gifford coming on next week,

and it's going to be a great show.

That's going to be a more technical show,

but this show really is for anybody who is curious,

and wants to know answers to some of those questions

that are uncomfortable to ask in the workplace,

how do you approach somebody who is deaf?

How do you approach them when you walk

up to them in the office?

Do you go and shake their chair?

Is that an appropriate way to reach out to them?

Or you just lightly tap their shoulder?

By the way, it's lightly tapped their shoulder.

Don't go and shake anybody's chair.

Nobody likes that.

So I've got that every Friday.

And now that I have a good 20 or 30 episodes,

I'm going to start posting that on YouTube,

and also creating a podcast out of those episodes as well.

I wanted a little bit of a backlog there before I did it,

but join us live.

I'm very interactive when I do the show,

I answer comments and questions as I go,

if it's to the guest or to me.

I also do a solo ask me anything episode once in a while

that I'm driving as well.

So yeah, come and join me on LinkedIn.

You just have to follow me there and you just reach out,

and I can let you know where the next one is.

- Well, great.

Well, thanks for letting us know about that.

Definitely, it's a great thing to check out,

and thank you so much for taking the time to share,

your background and your own journey with us.

It was a pleasure to chat with you about this.

- Yeah, thanks for having me on Joe.

I really appreciate it, appreciate the work you do as well.

- Thanks a lot bye bye.