Mary Jo Mueller, IBM, Worldwide Accessibility Standards Program Manager

Mary Jo talks about her long career with accessibility at IBM. She talks about the challenges in supporting digital accessibility in a large, global organization. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

(dramatic 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.

All right, well, let's get started with another episode

where I get the opportunity to talk

with an accessibility practitioner.

And today I am talking with Mary Jo Mueller.

How are you today, Mary Jo?

- I'm really well, thank you.

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

which is near Seattle, which is where

Blink's headquarters office is.

Where are you talking to us from?

- I'm on the opposite end of the country from you.

I'm in Satellite Beach, Florida over near NASA.

- All right, well, yeah, NASA's one of our clients,

so I have the opportunity to

work with them quite a bit,

but it's great to have you as part of

this program and looking forward to hearing about

your work with accessibility,

but always a good place to start is

if you could just describe what things

you're currently involved with.

- Well, currently I work for,

actually my entire career, I've been at IBM.

I am the Accessibility Standards Program Manager

and kind of what that means is

I lead the worldwide team working on

accessibility standards,

and I also work on accessibility policy around the world

so just kind of coordinating those efforts

and making sure that

we have an influence over standards in policy worldwide.

- And so, you mentioned worldwide, so,

so your position is one where you're communicating

with all the different

parts of IBM, different departments, divisions, and so on?

- Yeah, we communicate with different,

yeah, IBM's a global company (laughs),

so the group that I'm in is the accessibility team,

IBM Accessibility,

and we do provide all the guidance.

We basically distill all of the standards information

and the policy information and distill it into guidance

that we give to IBM developers,

management, everybody around the world,

on how to make IBM products accessible,

how to report that they're accessible and so on.

- Well, I want to, you know, get in a little bit more detail

about your work, but we also like to find out, you know,

kind of what the journey was

for people as they found their way into accessibility, so

maybe if you could think back, what were some of

the earliest things that you found that either prepared you

for accessibility or where you became aware of it?

- Well, my journey into accessibility was actually

rather serendipitous.

I

had my first child and went on a leave of absence

for a year, and then when I came back, my manager had moved.

I used to be working in, like, communications subsystems.

I worked on AS/400 and,

you know, I'm electrical engineer by education, so

I was working in a completely different area,

but when I came back

to IBM working full time,

my manager had moved to the accessibility team.

And so I was plunged into this accessibility team.

I had awareness of disabilities

and people with disabilities,

'cause my dad had had a stroke when I was in high school,

and he was left disabled and unable to work.

And so I had an awareness and a background and, you know,

feelings about that.

And so when I wound (laughs) up in this team,

it was like, aha, you could actually do technology work

for people with disabilities.

I was like, wow, this is awesome, and so,

I worked initially on products for,

SpeechViewer, which was a product

for speech therapists to help

their patients learn how to pronounce phonemes more clearly

and be understood better when they're speaking,

and so that was my first plunge into that.

So there was a lot of learning to do and,

but I was kind of excited to do it because I felt like

it was making a difference.

- [Joe] Well, it sounds like, though,

you, at least, there was some infrastructure there,

people already working on this where you were brought

into a place where you had some peers

to be able to lean on to get going.

- Yeah, there was a lot of, there was a,

an established group.

It was called, in IBM, it was called Special Needs Systems

at the time, but it, you know, it eventually became

IBM Accessibility,

which is the current name of the organization.

And yes, there were people that were already established

in that field, and there was actually,

IBM was making various products

for people with disabilities.

And so, they had a lot of knowledge to impart on me,

and that was really helpful.

- [Joe] And then you said you had to do a lot of learning.

And so, was that just investigating,

you know, what resources available

through the community or had

your company built up a library of things to work on

or how did your education in that area move forward?

- At that point, that, I mean, this was

really kind of early on.

This was before,

before Section 508.

- Mm, okay. - This was before, I mean,

this was, I've been in my career a long, long time.

So yeah, there was none of that kind of thing.

It was more of, this is a,

like a philanthropic effort for IBM.

We wanna make a difference for people with disabilities.

What are the disabilities?

What can we do?

Is there any assistive technology we can help with?

And this was back in the days when,

you know, Jim Thatcher was working on the first, you know,

screen readers and all that kind of thing.

I don't know if you're familiar with him,

but I worked with him at some point,

and he was a great mentor for me.

He was a great, fun person to be around, and

I eventually wound up working on screen readers myself.

I worked on the screen reader for OS/2

with Jim and Rick Schwerdtfeger, and some other names that

a lot of people who've been in accessibility a while

know all these names, I got to work with them.

It was a really a privilege.

I learned a lot,

and it was a great environment for learning.

Not like, not saying that today

isn't also a good learning environment (laughs), but

coming on board with zero knowledge of, you know,

making technology accessible,

it was a great place to get started, and I got to learn

a lot about user needs.

We ran beta programs with the users and

got to get direct user feedback and

hear their user needs and hear the struggles

that they had with their technologies, so

for me, I think that was one of the best lessons

that I learned was working with people with disabilities

and learning from them and understanding

where they're coming from and the things that

they're trying to do and where they're meeting roadblocks

and then trying to come up with solutions for that.

- [Joe] Well, with IBM being such a large organization

and so influential, at that time, then,

were you,

was IBM involved in helping to

contribute to the standards that were being developed

by the World Wide Web Consortium, and

that type of thing? - Yeah, so I mean, in that

really early time, there was no standards yet

because there was no 508, there, I mean, there,

the web, when I first started working accessibility,

the web wasn't even a thing. (laughs)

Like, it was in its infancy,

if so, and then as my career progressed,

yes, the web started coming into play.

Some of my peers,

I wasn't directly working on standards at the time,

but there were some of my peers like Jim and

Phil and others who were working on standards.

And then I had a break in my career.

So that was kind of an interesting thing.

I had my second child, and I left.

I left work for nine years,

and then I came back.

So when I came back, I was hired back into accessibility,

and it was because of my

already prior knowledge, and, you know,

they didn't have to bring me up to speed

on what is accessibility and what does that mean,

and what does that mean for users,

and what does that mean for IBM?

I already kind of was already there.

So it was a very easy in for me to get right back into

the accessibility field, which was awesome

because technology had completely marched on.

You know, the programming was completely different.

I was totally not familiar with, you know,

all of the, beyond HTML, plain HTML, I wasn't,

I wasn't familiar with any of the programming

of web technologies.

So I thought I was gonna have a difficult time

getting back into work

after being gone for nine years,

but it actually turned out it wasn't that difficult.

- [Joe] And so, sometimes when there's a gap like that,

we find that things have changed a lot.

And then in other areas we think

doesn't seem like anything moved forward at all (laughs).

(Mary Jo laughs) Well, I think a lot of us find

that it's been a theme that's come up a lot in this program.

How was it for you? - You know,

that is very, very true.

So, I was not used to working remote with a lot of people.

That had changed a lot,

and I wasn't used to that.

I was used to being with the in-person group

because at the time I had left,

we were all co-located in the same spot.

And so, you know, you need to talk to so-and-so

about whatever, walk down the hall,

have a conversation, get it over with.

It was a little bit of an adjustment (laughs)

for me to work with a team that was coast to coast

and that kind of thing, and not face to face.

And it was a little bit of an adjustment there.

Of course, the technology had changed and, you know,

standards were actually a thing.

When I joined,

WCAG was working on WCAG 2.0.

You know, W3C?

And, you know, 508 obviously was there,

and the 508 refresh was getting underway.

So, (laughs) so I got involved in those things

because, you know, I still have my knowledge about

people with disabilities and their user needs,

and I could still contribute to all of that.

And so I just kind of jumped in

and started working on that and,

and

wrote a white paper with a couple other people,

and it was a really good

way to get back into the working world.

And I'm, (laughs) I'm really glad I had

my accessibility background because it really was helpful

to me getting back into things.

I did find that there was a lot of

problems that seemed to repeat themselves

in the technologies (laughs) and

the web content was no different,

and it just seemed like,

you know, you take two steps forward and one step back

when you wind up with new technologies.

It's like, oh yeah, accessibility.

We forgot about that kind of thing.

And, and it's like, well, how can you forget about that?

We've known about that for years, so (laughs)

in those regards, it seemed

some things didn't change as much as I had hoped,

but there's still a community out there

of accessibility experts who care very much,

you know, people with disabilities who care very much.

And this is all like a partnership

that we have to continue

to ensure that accessibility is not forgotten.

That is, it is incorporated as early as possible

because redesign is way (laughs) too costly.

- [Joe] Well, I wanna talk about your community involvement

before we're finished, but just

continuing on, kind of from where we are here,

what are the types of things that,

how are things done within your organization to educate

people about accessibility and what their role is in that?

It sounds like you do a lot of work,

you know, across the organization.

How does that end up

propagating or

happening within individual divisions, departments,

and so on?

- Well, you know, IBM, being a large organization,

we're somewhat process driven, so that kinda helps

because we created accessibility processes

and education and then we have, you know,

web content and tooling that we've created

to help the organization to learn,

you know, consume, learn, do, and test, right?

So those

are all important aspects of

completing accessibility process.

We have created a website

that does a lot of the, kind of role based

or where you are in your process-based accessibility

that kinda gives you ideas on

what you should be doing at what stage of your project.

And we get a lot of user feedback from IBMers

of what they need, what they don't understand,

and we try to, you know, have that feedback loop also

with the consumers of what we do our tooling

and try to keep up with the standards changes as well,

I mean, so everything kinda rolls in,

and we just keep iterating on both the processes,

the tooling, the guidance, all that,

just to keep it all current,

you know, and also we have to be able to report

how well we're doing

in our product accessibility conformance reports.

So we use the VPAT.

We're involved in industry associations

that helped develop the VPAT (laughs),

and that's how you found out about me with IAAP

presentation that I did with Michelle Van Duzer, and

we were involved in the development of the VPAT,

so we can report

accessibility and how well our products are meeting

those standards and requirements from,

to whoever's looking to purchase IBM products.

- [Joe] Well, let's talk about that a little bit

as you brought that up.

So the International Association

of Accessibility Professionals,

a great organization with lots of resources to help people.

I'm a member of that as well, and,

they have

webinars that they provide as well as

other resources, and one of those is,

was one that you mentioned I'd attended

that you were involved with with the VPAT.

Why don't you talk a little bit, you know,

specifically about the VPAT?

I don't think we've covered that in this episode series.

If you'd give a brief description

- Okay. - of that and, yeah,

some people might be interested in what that's all about.

- [Mary Jo] Okay, so VPAT, let's talk about

the acronym itself first (laughs),

because we tend to use a lot of acronyms,

and then people don't know what that means.

So a VPAT is a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template,

and it's a template that contains

the requirements for accessibility.

Currently, it has three standards,

worldwide standards, that are used:

WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

It has

508,

the revised 508

standards

as well as the European EN 301 549,

which is used in several different

regulations in Europe, the European Union,

as well as beyond, because other countries, like Australia,

are adopting it, and Canada, are adopting the EN 301 549.

So those are all accessibility standards.

And the VPAT

contains all those requirements just as a list,

just, it doesn't have all the details

that are in the standards, but as a list

so that you can report how well you meet

each of those requirements and give explanations.

If you don't meet something, if it's just, you know,

you forgot alt text on, you know,

a certain screen, but it's not gonna affect users

because it's not, you know, an image that is

really all that meaningful,

that kind of thing, you can report all of that,

and then people who buy your products,

you can provide them with that information,

and then they can make informed decisions

when they're purchasing products.

- One of the common things that

software organizations seem to always be looking for is

they're always looking for certification or something

that has the blue ribbon that this is

quote unquote, officially approved.

That's really not what,

you know, VPAT's all about.

- Mm-hm. - What, maybe talk about

kind of, you know, that difference there

where we really don't have, there's not an,

a certification

authority that-- - Yeah, there is no

certification authority, yeah.

The VPAT is really meant for self-report,

for products to self-report their accessibility, right?

So that, you know, you have to, hopefully (laughs)

hopefully, they are doing all of the things

that they should be doing that leads up to this report.

I mean, you have to test.

You have to develop and test

to the accessibility standards,

and then you can reliably report on that.

You can't just go and say,

check, check, check, check, check.

You know, I meet all these requirements,

and you have nothing to back it.

- Mm-hm. - That is not a good scenario

because then you're not being very truthful

about the accessibility status of your product,

and it's not giving your buyers any information

that's helpful to them to compare products.

- Yeah. - As well, it becomes,

it can become part of the legal documentation on a bid.

So you really do wanna be truthful

because you can be held liable for what's in there.

So you wanna make sure that

it's up to date and

correct as much as possible. - And then on the positive

side, it is very helpful to an organization

because it represents that accessibility is

something that you're being proactive about.

- Exactly. - And I think it's important

for a lot of organizations to understand that,

that lawsuits and and legal actions tend to occur

in the areas where there's just been,

you know, let it be lax. - No action. (laughs)

No action, yeah. - Yeah, you have no action,

and just the, you know, doing this, you know,

shows that you've been proactive about it.

- Yeah, and that you're actually trying.

It's really hard to be 100%, you know,

accessible in 100%

of everything, but as long as you're truthful about that

and are still striving to improve

release after release and,

you know, prove that you care, you address user concerns,

that kind of thing, kinda shows

that you care and that you're willing to,

you know, work towards a more accessible world.

- [Joe] Yeah, well, I'll include some links to the

IAAP training related to that

in the show notes for this.

Getting back to the types of things that

you're involved with at IBM, are,

you know, are there any particular initiatives

that you're excited about now

or are there things looking forward

that you're, you think might become part of

the activities at IBM moving into the future?

- Let me think about that for a second.

I think that

I'm,

to,

from my view, I'm looking forward

to

new technologies.

They do kinda have their own challenges for accessibility.

You know, when you talk about virtual worlds

and virtual reality, and this and that,

I am excited about

where that could go 'cause actually it could also open up

some new opportunities.

And though I'm not directly involved in that,

I don't think IBM currently has any

VR

AR type

of

products at this point

that

still there's, there is some

interesting things going on with data visualization

and that's something that IBM does a lot, and

I'm really interested to see where things go

in making that accessible.

There's a lot of challenges with that as well, and

but, you know, personally for our team,

because we are involved in standards and policy,

we're always on the lookout for what's happening worldwide,

picking up standards,

what are they doing new regulations?

Because the United Nations'

Convention on the Rights of Persons

with Disabilities is getting,

it has been ratified by a lot of countries,

and that means that they're going to be putting in place

regulations for accessibility

and that includes accessible technology.

And so part of what I do (laughs) is just make sure that

the standards that they require

and the things that they require

can allow for a global market (laughs).

You want them to harmonize between countries

- Mm-hm. - and not have unique

accessibility requirements per country

because then you'll lose your economy of scale

and you'd have to produce a specific product

for a specific country because they've modified

the regulations so much in the standards.

New Horizons for people with cognitive disabilities,

I think that's very interesting as well.

The next generation of

the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines,

you know, or,

so version three

of WCAG, which is being worked on,

we're hoping to include more

requirements for, that address

people with cognitive disabilities and improve upon

the usability of the standard itself

and the understandability of the standard itself.

So I think that's,

you know, for a standards person, that's pretty interesting.

I don't know if it's interesting to everybody, but (laughs).

- [Joe] It's definitely interesting to me

because I've worked with people who have had

traumatic brain injury accidents

- Yes. - and things like that, and

it's probably the area of accessibility that I think

organizations have worked on the least relative to,

you know, other types of physical challenges.

And it, I think a lot of it is because it's really hard.

- [Mary Jo] It is hard and different users' needs

are, can be different and conflicting.

And so coming up with a standard

that can address everybody is very challenging.

But as somebody who's of an engineering mind,

you know, challenges are kind of fun. (laughs)

- [Joe] Well, I, Mary Jo, I wanted to thank you

for taking the time here to talk a little bit

about your background and share your thoughts

about today and the future.

And hopefully, we'll get together at a,

an in-person conference sometime again soon.

- Yeah, and I don't know if you've looked at it,

but IBM does have resources and a website that,

that can help people learn about accessibility

and web accessibility

as well as free tooling available, so

check it out. - Yeah, I'll make sure

I get the proper link from you.

- Okay. - And we'll include that

in the show notes here as well.

So thank you very much. - Excellent.

Thanks.

- Hey, we did it. - Yay. (laughs)

- Great, let me turn the-- - That wasn't so,