Julie Romanowski, State Farm, Senior Digital Accessibility Specialist

Starting out as a web developer, Julie is now supports a wide range of accessibility activities with State Farm. She takes about the efforts to help executive leadership understand the need for a digital accessibility team. Her team provides training and individual teams work on accessibility for their own roles. That include a focus on communication documents and video media. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

(dramatic cello 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, here we go.

Starting on another episode

where I get to talk with an accessibility practitioner.

And today I'm speaking with Julie Romanowski.

Hello, Julie, how are you doing today?

- Oh, I'm well, thank you.

How are you doing Joe?

- Oh, I'm pretty good.

It's pouring rain outside

of my home office in Vashon Island

which is near Blink's headquarters in Seattle, Washington.

Where are you talking to us from?

- I am in central Illinois, a little town called Mahomet.

It's not too far from Champaign Urbana

where the University of Illinois is located.

- I've been to Mahomet

'cause I went to the University of Illinois

in Champaign Urbana. - Oh, did you?

- Yeah.

So yeah, definitely familiar with that.

Yeah, so long time ago,

but actually I was just there recently

so still fun to be able to reconnect with that.

Well, it's great to be able

to have this chance to chat with you about your work.

One of the best places to start

would be if you just kind of describe

what you're up to right now,

what your job consists of,

and then we can kind of go back in time after that.

- Okay, currently

I am the senior digital accessibility specialist

at State Farm.

Have a team of about 12 State Farm employees

and about 10 contract employees who help us with testing.

I am in charge of the accessibility training

for the entire enterprise.

I act as a kind of a mentor/supervisor for my team members.

I help train them and then I work to train

as many of people as we can at State Farm.

I also work in the assistive technology field

where I help our associates who have disabilities,

help them with getting either assistive technology

or setting up their work station or work areas,

desks, things like that.

My specialty for assistive technology

is for vision disabilities and cognitive disabilities.

- Well, it sounds like you have a lot on your plate

and I'd like to check in with you

about some more of the details on that,

but one of the things I like to do with this series

is you look the journey that people have taken

as they find their way into the accessibility profession.

So maybe kind of go back in time and what was,

where did accessibility first kinda enter into your life?

- Yeah, all right.

Many, many years ago, I can't even remember the year,

but I was a lead for a Java,

we called it Java enablement team.

We were helping projects get their Java applications set up,

their environments, things like that.

I have been a Java developer for many, many, many years so.

But we had this framework that was used by the enterprise

and some people who have disabilities at State Farm

had reached out to our team saying,

there are issues, we can't do certain things, we can't,

maybe some fields, form fields didn't work as expected

or other things.

So we have had this assistive technology

services and support team at State Farm for the past,

I believe 26 years, it may have been a little longer.

And I went to that team and was just talking to them

and asking them if they could work with us

and help us to first identify what the issues are

and then to fix the problems.

And one of the team members was actually a blind employee.

He no longer works for State Farm,

he went to work for another company,

but he was one who helped me quite a bit

and helped my team to address issues

so that the framework that was being used

by the entire enterprise

would not be preventing people with disabilities

from using it.

And after I did that,

another person on the assistive technology team

decided to go to another team

and he recommended that they asked me if I was interested

because they didn't really have anyone

with a development background

and they thought it would be good

to bring someone in who had the development background.

And I may not have known much

about accessibility at the time,

but I was a quick learner

and I was already starting to understand

some of the things that they needed,

the knowledge they needed to have to do their jobs.

So they asked me and I jumped at the chance.

I was interested in learning something new

and I really got to know the guys on the team

and we became good friends.

So I thought this would be great.

And started working with them focusing on,

two of us were focusing on the digital content at State Farm

and testing for accessibility

and working with the project teams to fix issues.

The other two were specifically focused on

our associates with disabilities and helping them.

However, all of the funding went to assistive technologies.

So for the digital accessibility side of things,

we had no funding at all.

And we were trying to get this started,

get it where people would understand

why digital content needed to be made accessible,

they would be on board with it,

they would be willing and able

to fix any accessibility issues with their content.

But without funding, it's hard to get things done so,

so I'm rather I guess persistent

or some people all me bullheaded so, but I would-

- If I could just jump in there for a sec.

- [Julie] Yeah.

- I think it's kind of important to highlight or underline

that the work that you're doing was for,

supporting internal needs of State Farm employees.

A lot of us in the accessibility profession

do a lot of work on the customer side

with the making sure that people are able

to process webpages and applications with assistive devices,

yet, then in so many organizations,

there's not the infrastructure in place

for everyone across the spectrum to adequately participate

as employees in the organization.

So it sounds like State Farm

was really progressive about that.

You mentioned I think 26 years it had been going on.

- Well, they were progressive about that.

However, they didn't quite understand

that we could provide associates with disabilities

the best most state of the art

assistive technology available,

but if the web application or webpage or something like that

has not been designed with accessibility in mind,

it's not going to make any difference at all.

So that was something it took a while

to get executive leadership to understand.

And as I mentioned, I'm rather bullheaded and I'm not shy.

So I had no issue with tracking leadership down

and giving them my two minute elevator speech

about why we needed a digital accessibility team.

- Well as with so many things,

getting the buy in from the C-suite

has a lot to do with how we move forward.

So what was the next chapter

as you developed your career with accessibility?

- Finally, I mean, it takes a lot of work

and a lot of fighting

to finally get executive leadership to listen.

And I was fortunate enough

that they actually thought

we were already doing these things

and they didn't realize how bad

the accessibility was of our digital content,

but I got leadership on board

and they assigned various directors to work with my team

to start building a digital accessibility team.

And the first thing we did was,

if you're familiar with Ontario

when they had the accessibility,

they passed the Accessibility

for Ontarians with Disabilities Act,

first thing we did where we were able to bring

an accessibility vendor in

to test our State Farm Canada site.

And as expected, there were so many issues

which really got leadership's attention

and they saw that in the thinking the,

wow, we have all these problems, we could end up,

the litigation, the fines, things like that,

that really got their attention.

So we were able to get more funding for

to start a project that then worked

with the different areas at State Farm

who were responsible for the State Farm Canada content

so that we could at least get it up to

the web content accessibility guidelines,

WCAG 2.0 Level A requirement at the time.

And that I think Ontario and AOTA

were probably the the main reason

why we were able to start

our new digital accessibility team

and we were able to get the funding we needed.

But after that,

because for so long, it was just leadership was thinking,

oh, we don't wanna get sued.

What do we need to do?

And at the time it was like,

what do we need to do to get by?

And that can be very frustrating

because just doing enough to get by

is still really leaving out

a whole bunch of people with disabilities.

- You mentioned,

then you had this digital accessibility team,

so can you talk a little bit more about that?

I mean, different organizations

have accessibility set up in different ways.

Some are broadly across the enterprise,

others are people within departments and divisions

that are passionate about it

and kind of make it happen in their area.

How does it work at State Farm?

- We're kind of a hub and spoke organization.

We have our main core accessibility team, the experts,

and we have been working for several years

to train all of the different areas,

all the different departments, teams throughout State Farm

to learn how to address accessibility

for whatever their product is that they support.

So we've created,

helped develop little kind of mini accessibility teams

throughout the enterprise,

and we provide a lot of help, information, things like that.

But now, we expect these teams

to take a greater role now in accessibility.

So they're doing pretty good.

There's some that are a little further advanced than others

that have built up their accessibility teams

and have met like WCAG 2.0 AA requirements.

There are others that are still trying

to fix level A requirements.

We don't have any

that aren't doing anything for accessibility.

All of them understand that this is what we need to do.

And State Farm actually made it a enterprise standard

that our products must meet,

right now, we are focused on meeting WCAG 2.0 AA,

and then starting next year, we will be focused

on WCAG 2.1 AA.

- And then within individual product groups

or project groups, is it the project manager

or the product manager responsible for making sure

that everything is in place for accessibility

or are individuals responsible

for making sure that they understand their role

in the accessibility process?

- Yeah, the product or project manager,

they're responsible for making sure

just overall accessibility is being addressed

and providing the information

that their team members may need,

which they would come to us and we could help with training,

guiding them on providing suggestions on coding,

things like that.

But the project manager would handle it overall.

And then the individuals like the design team

would be focused on accessible design.

Content creators would be focused on making sure

that the content is accessible, developers, the code,

testers, all that, they're all involved.

And recently, it's been the past year now

where we're not just focused on,

when I hear a lot of accessibility people talking,

they're focused on like webpages, web applications,

mobile maybe,

so many of 'em aren't really focused on the,

for us, the huge amount of communications

that are all electronic documents,

emails, Word documents, PowerPoints, spreadsheets,

PDFs, all that stuff.

There's so much of that.

They're not focused on that.

They're not focused on accessible video.

So that's something in the past couple of years

we've really gotten the enterprise to understand

this is important and we do have,

gotten to the point I think

where everyone understands that they play a role.

So if you're just creating a word document to share,

you're creating an executive report to share,

you have a role in accessibility.

If you're someone else that is planning a webinar,

something like that, you have a role as well.

And it seems to be working good.

- Something you were just talking about,

this part of correspondence,

and then I'm thinking about my own interaction

with insurance companies and,

I'm moving my content to the insurance provider

as much as they're sending me information.

I never really thought about

like from your customers sending information

into your system,

I imagine that probably a lot of that isn't accessible.

And so is that something that comes into the analysis

of how to be able to deal with the things that are incoming?

- Yeah, we're trying to figure that out.

We really can't control how they share the information.

Sometimes I know I have received PDF documents

that a customer sent to an agent or agent staff

and we have several agents and staff members

who have vision disabilities.

There are some who are legally blind,

there are others who have light sensitivity issues,

others who maybe, one man, macular degeneration

so he's not able to see certain things,

and they'll use, most of them use a screen reader.

Most of them use what,

if you're aware of is zoom text.

We have ZoomText and JAWS,

and they'll use ZoomText

because unless they're legally blinded or can't see it all,

they won't be using JAWS,

but we need to make sure

that the they can get the information

from the customer document using ZoomText.

And there are times when they can send the information

to me or one of my team members

and we can do some quick fixes and then send it back

and then they're able to get all the information.

There are other times

where there's just really nothing you can do,

there is no way you can make it accessible,

and then we would have to talk with the agent

or whoever it is, and provide the information

and help them understand a little more

of what the customer's sharing.

- Well, with all of your many years

specializing in this area,

you've probably seen a lot of,

well you've certainly seen a lot of technology developments

over the years and the evolution

of the web accessibility initiative information,

but kind of as you look back or look forward,

are there areas that you think maybe haven't moved

as quickly as you you thought they would've years ago?

Are there any certain areas that are,

like particular initiatives that State Farm is looking

at trying to accomplish moving into the future?

- Well, one of ours is that it's so slow,

but when you've got huge systems,

it takes a long time to get things addressed,

but we have something that our claims people use

and the developers have made great strides

where the vast majority of it is accessible.

There are still legacy portions that they're working on.

There's still some other areas that they're working on

when you're talking about this program for

like the claim specialists.

And there may be,

like I think there are at least 150 applications

that are used for that.

And it takes a long time

to be able to fix the issues in there,

especially when a lot of 'em

hadn't been updated for so long,

it requires a complete overhaul.

And that is something that,

I tell our folks

and when I talk to others in the accessibility community

is you can't expect everything to happen overnight.

You may think it's easy,

but there can be so many factors

that make it so it is not an easy fix.

Something for example, would be color contrast.

People would think, oh yeah,

you just go in and make a change and it's fixed,

but when you're talking like financial documentation,

certain insurance documentation, things like that,

visual changes like that for like color contrast

has to be approved

by either the insurance board of the state

or other government agencies.

That takes a long time.

There are other things that maybe the legacy application

was developed in such a way that to make those,

what people would think are simple changes

would mean to just start over and rebuild it.

- Well, in all the time that you've been doing this work,

I'm sure you've had to lean into a lot of resources

to educate yourself and your team and others.

What are some of the things that you you do today to

help others learn about accessibility

and how it fits in with what they do?

Are there onboarding programs or kind of how is it set up

at your organization?

- Onboarding, I know they were going to add some things.

I haven't seen recently how it's been updated,

but we do have training.

There are some simple accessibility information

within like developer training when they first start.

We have a whole lot of training available

that we've been providing as webinars online.

We're able to reach a whole lot of people that way.

We used to try bringing in vendors to do the training,

but it was very expensive and you could only reach

maybe 25, 30 people at a time for this.

Doing it online, we're able to reach

200, 300 people per session.

We get a lot of people joining that way.

We've created training modules,

I've created a lot of 'em just as PowerPoint

but have added detailed speaker notes and other things

so that I can just pass these over

to these accessibility teams in each area

and they can use those and basically read the script

and help train their people that way.

We have video on demand that people can use.

We have, let me think, all the other things.

We haven't gotten to the point yet where

just some kind of high level accessibility knowledge

would be required like other compliance training

but that is one thing I'm working towards,

where people would at least have a general understanding

of disabilities, people with disabilities

and the importance of accessibility.

- Well, it certainly sounds like

you have a robust accessibility team

and activities going on where you work

so that's great to hear.

I want to thank you for taking the time

to share your journey into the profession

and help inspire others to get involved as well.

- Well, thank you very much for inviting me, Joe.

- All right, thanks a lot.

Bye bye, Julie.