Rich Schwerdtfeger, Retired, IBM, Former Chief Technology Officer for Accessibility

Rich began his work in accessibility with the early development of a screen reader for Windows. He was a key member of the world-wide team that brought technologies like ARIA into mainstream use for accessibility. Rich chaired the board of Knowbility and currently is President and Creator at A Diver's Life YouTube Channel.

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

(dramatic music)

- Hello, this is Digital Accessibility

with 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 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 are again

with another episode where I have a great opportunity

to talk to an accessibility practitioner

and today I'm very pleased to be speaking

with Rich Schwerdtfeger.

Hello, Rich.

How are you today?

- Good Joe, how are you?

- Yeah, I'm good.

I'm as usual in ensconced in my Vatian Island office,

which is near Blink's Seattle headquarters.

Where are you located?

- I'm located near in Kralendijk

in Bonaire in the Southern Caribbean.

We retired here back in 2000-

To here in 2017 and we like scuba diving,

so that's what we do all the time here, yeah.

- Well, it sounds like a fabulous place to be.

And I mentioned before that it's an area I wanna visit.

So it's great to be talking to you

and you are retired now, but I definitely was happy

to be able to have this chat with you

because you've been involved in so much

within the accessibility profession

and helping to grow things for all of us.

So maybe a good place to start is kind of

what you've done most recently related to accessibility

and kind of the final things that you were doing

as your full-time activity and then we can go from there.

- Okay, well, as you said, I retired,

I did that at the end of 2016 and we moved down here.

I think some of the related to accessibility

that I've done is I chaired the Board of Nobility

for about two years after, I continued to chair

the Board of Nobility two years after I retired from IBM.

So when I was working at IBM,

I was the chief technology officer

for accessibility at IBM when I retired.

I also chaired the board of this nonprofit,

which does a lot to educate people on how to make

the web accessible and other things like that.

And did a lot in the last few years in training executives

and also students going to college,

just so that we would have people who basically

get ingrained accessibility in their working careers.

So I did that the last couple years I was here.

I actually had, in the middle of my retirement,

we were in Rajampet and I had actually

had a neat tendon rupture,

and I got to experience what it's like

to get around the island when you have a disability.

So I wrote an article for the local newspaper

saying how bad things were.

But so I did do that and not accessibility related,

but actually chaired the board of a nonprofit here

that was looking to preserve the monuments

on the island from development.

So I did some of those things.

And beyond that, like I said, I'm into the scuba diving

so I do a lot of volunteer work.

We restored the sponges on the famous

Salt Pier here in Bonaire.

They were refurbishing the pier and these sponges

had come off and there it's a big tourist attraction,

so we put 'em ball back on.

Clean up dives, we had when an oil spill hit here,

I was involved with, my wife and I

were both involved with doing the cleanup.

So that's what we've done since retirement.

And I've gone and I've given interviews

on how we did things back in the day with accessibility

and how that affected things going forward.

So that's basically the extent

of my accessibility work since retirement.

- Well, it sounds like retirement is kind of

in quotes for you because it sounds

like you've been really, keep yourself continually busy.

- Also, I mean, I have a YouTube channel,

so I do underwater cinema photography.

That's my, big passion of mine too.

Totally unrelated to what I did in the past, but yeah.

- But I think you said that your last position at IBM

was chief technology officer for accessibility.

I imagine that's a considerable amount of activities

and responsibility there.

Maybe before we go kind of delving into the past,

what were you involved with as the CTO of accessibility?

- Well, okay.

So let me just backtrack a little bit.

So I'm actually the very first distinguished engineer

at IBM on accessibility.

There had never been one before.

So, and I think that speaks a lot about what we were able

to achieve as a group at IBM and that, yes, I led things,

but big things are never done by one person.

And I'm, I think I was then also the first

chief technology officer for accessibility at the company.

So I dunno if they have one right now,

but I think a lot of that, I mean,

I can go into my career things,

but one of the big things was the ARIA work

and we can talk about that a little bit later if we-

Because that also, you know, some of the big things

that you achieve is when you tie accessibility

to a business case at the company.

And that's part of what you really need to do

as like an accessibility officer is you,

if you're gonna move, you basically as just as a CTO

or a distinguished engineer.

At IBM, that's kind of like the chiefs of the boat,

like on a submarine.

These are the guys that are usually, the buck stops here

when somebody is in hot water, maybe because didn't produce

something that's accessible, they call you in

and to clean up the mess, or if there's something

affecting the business on a big way.

I mean, the work that I did on ARIA,

I actually started out with, we had a $20 billion

software business that was at risk.

And I could talk about that if we have time.

The ARIA's has actually helped, not only just helped people

with disabilities, but also opened up the broader

open web and IBM software middleware business.

So all of that, I think, contributed

to my getting that position at the company.

But yes, it's a lot of experience,

a lot of responsibility with that job.

You really are responsible for your part

of this $20 billion software business at the company

at the time and so that included,

you have to build infrastructure to support your products.

You have to get tools to support it,

assist technology support.

You had to sell the rest of the world

on the the technology that you were...

You can't just invent stuff.

If you can't get other people to use it,

it's usually a failure.

So I'm not the type of guy who would go out

and just, okay, I'm gonna go, here's how you,

here's all the directions for making a product accessible.

Yeah, I contribute to that, but the whole infrastructure

to even make that possible is what I was involved.

- Well, I definitely wanna dig more into your ARIA work,

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

is find out how people made their way

to where they are today.

Because for each of us, it tends to be

a winding, circuitous path to where we end up.

So kind of what would be a milestone for you?

What were the first glimmers of that.

- So that's a great way...

It's this winding path.

It's a really good way to describe it.

So I'm gonna take you back to, I wanna say 1990, all right?

This is about right before I started at IBM.

So I was working in the oil field business,

and nothing to do with accessibility,

had I had developed the technology that basically

recovered all their RC drilling operations,

which was the signal process simulated.

Actually nothing to do with accessibility.

And anyways, the company was restructuring.

The oil oil business had kind of tanked a bit.

And you know, what I was doing

was the next generation decoding system.

And it was around OS/2.

So Jim Thatcher, you may or may not know Jim Thatcher.

So Jim was looking for someone

who was an OS/2 internals expert.

And so I was looking for a job and this thing came up

at the IBM's Watson Research Lab

and I said, "I don't know what a screen reader is,

but this looks kind of interesting."

I always wanted to work for IBM when I was younger

and I said, "well, let's go give this a try."

So anyways, they accepted my resume.

And so, I still remember my first day

at IBM seeing Jim Thatcher.

I mean, this is, you know, he's not with us anymore,

but I remember, first, he was a lot older than me.

I think I was well back, this was back in 1990,

so its a number of years ago.

And so I come in, I'm waiting in the lobby

and this guy comes running down this,

I mean literally running down the stairs with a big grin.

It's like he just won the lottery.

Somebody's gonna solve this technical problem he had.

And what had happened at that time in 1990

is the world was moving from DOS,

which is a character-based system, to windows and OS/2.

So this graphical user interface

and it was completely inaccessible.

And so people were concerned

about losing access to the computer, I mean completely.

You would not be able to go to school anymore.

It's a little bit like how ARIA started too

because we were gonna, everything was going to the rich web

and we were gonna lose access to the computer.

So my job at that time was to figure out

how we could capture what was drawn on the screen

in real time and make it accessible to a screen reader.

So that meant I needed to capture text

when icons were drawn at a very low level.

And so I kind of leveraged my work in operating systems

and real time systems I used to work,

my first job outta school was the F-15 Weapons System,

which is a real-time system.

So all of this stuff came, and plus my OS/2 internal work,

which was kind of rare to have people

that would have those skills and it all kind of,

you know, just like you said,

you just kind of at the right place at the right time,

you had the right set of skills.

And so I didn't realize honestly how important this was

until I started doing the work and in,

I think it was, it was the summer of 1991,

an article came out in "BYTE Magazine."

Now back then, "BYTE Magazine..."

Do you remember "BYTE Magazine," Joe?

- Yeah, it was like that thick at one point.

- Well back then that an article by Joe Lazzaro came out,

talking about loss of the computer to the blind

and which highlighted the problems I was just talking about.

And I actually had managed to get some

working with the team in the lab.

So, you're reading this article.

You could just, you could cut the fear with a knife.

It was like nothing you've ever experienced before

that you can potentially make a difference in.

And so I read this "BYTE" article

and I contacted Jon Udell at "BYTE" and I said, "Jon,

we actually have a working prototype of this right now."

This is before Windows even, we couldn't,

we actually back then, we couldn't even

get Microsoft to look at this back then.

They weren't weren't interested.

So we were doing this on OS/2 to start.

And so I wrote this article that,

it's constantly referenced today,

it's called, "Making the GUI Talk" in December '91.

So this was big.

This, like a seminal article and what really hit me

is Jim who led the team, he went to Washington

to discuss loss of access to the computer by the blind.

And he went to this government building

on the second floor and outside the room,

there were tables lining the wall with stacks and stacks,

like maybe a hundred copies

of this "BYTE Magazine" article thing.

And to basically summarize it,

everybody thought IBM had solved this problem

and everything was gonna be okay.

That I really can't tell you how life transformational

something like that is for someone.

And to me it was, it was big.

So anyways, long story short,

I remember I went to my very first trip

to CSUN that year and I felt like I was Mick Jagger.

(Rich laughing)

'Cause everybody wanted to meet,

who's the guy who wrote this article?

And it's not about I did this, or I did that.

What mattered is we had actually made a difference.

That to me was more important than anything else.

And then I was actually the first person,

I took what I learned there, and I was the first person

to hear Windows talk for the first time.

I actually, Jim challenged me to figure out how,

you're never gonna solve that.

I hacked the Windows operating system.

I'm running an OS/2 to the display driver

and we had it and I got it working.

And I had undocumented calls into the operating system

to communicate between OS/2 screener and Windows.

And you know, it just, to make it fast, fast enough.

And so we would, I remember back in the day

we would go into,

I would go to a customer site

and they were having a problem.

Everybody was running Windows except for the one person who

could not see the screen was running OS/2

just because of our screen reader.

And also it was the first one that was programmable,

it had a programmable interface, user interface.

We actually, I don't know if it was me.

I think it were Jim.

We basically gave our documentation to PAL,

which is our program access language to Chuck Opperman

who's working at Headers Choice

and they used that as the basis

for their scripting language back then.

So, 'cause we weren't gonna build a native Window screener,

so we figured, well, okay, let's get 'em started.

So anyways, that's how it started.

And I guess after that, I mean I've done a number

of other things.

I've worked on Java accessibility.

I don't know if you remember Java?

I worked with Sun on the Java accessibility API.

We did the first talking screen reader for that.

We did some magnification software.

We did work for seniors that got deployed in Tokyo

because they have a huge aging population in Tokyo

and with a lot of cognitive impairments

and sight impairments and a whole range of things

and these CAS were deployed all over downtown

so that people could access information,

which was kind of cool too.

So we did a lot of that and I think,

so that's kinda like in the middle before,

I mean, Java was, at the time it was big,

but I would not call it transformational.

But what I found in your career is even though

you may not use it directly, may not be big,

what you learn from that is critical

for the next step that you have to take.

And so this gets into the whole thing with ARIA.

- Well, yeah, it's just, if I jump in before that.

Yeah, I mean, so you were involved

in some really foundational aspects of,

in a modern software and digital expression,

that audiblized information.

And so you definitely were in a unique situation.

You know, a lot of people become familiar with accessibility

because there's been building blocks there already,

but kind of when you came into it,

you were really at kind of that origin stage

of bootstrapping and building it.

And so, yeah, I think that's kind of

puts you in a very unique position.

But to get my question, there must have been something

in that first period when you're working with it

where you decided you wanted to continue in that area.

So maybe talk a little bit about that because you could have

obviously gone in a different direction.

You'd done different things before that.

So what was it that kind of kept you on that track?

- Well, okay.

So one of the things yet, I mean,

understand there's different types of people.

And there are people that need to have something

to start with and there are people that can start

with nothing and have to, and can make something happen.

I'm kind of that type of a person.

The other stuff doesn't float my boat that much.

And the fact that I could use that about me to...

Well, I mean, one of the things I should tell you is like,

when we were doing the screener,

IBM employed a lot of people with were disabled

and you work with these people

and they contribute to the design of the user experience

and when they're successful, you see it on a big scale.

I found that, working with Sun on Java accessibility

was also a great thing, you know.

Here's an example.

They had a Java accessibility.

I won't say this company, but we had somebody

that had an accessibility API infrastructure out there

that we had, Sun had a meeting with a whole bunch

of industry leaders and they said,

"okay, we wanna make this successful."

And the other company, actually we'll say it,

it was Microsoft at that time.

They said, "well, just use our API."

And I said, "but I knew, you know, from how to..."

'Cause under the covers to support the screen reader,

you had an API in what you needed,

what they needed to get information.

And so they didn't have what you needed.

They didn't have all of it.

And it also, it was very tied to it

as we needed something to be cross platform.

So I remember, this is the coolest thing.

So we got in there and with Java, you could do things

like 10 times faster than low-level operating systems.

And I remember, so this was like January or February

of, I forget what year it was.

I wanna say, 1987, something like that,

maybe year 1997, or '96.

But we anyways, long story short is we basically

worked together as a team, we created an API

and we got a working screener all in a matter of,

and I mean to talk through everything

you can think of, it did it, right?

It did it in about six months.

I mean, six months is incredible,

plus a reusable infrastructure.

And we went to, what's the conference they have

up in, Closing the Gap?

I think it is up there, they still have that.

- That still happens.

- Yeah, so we went there

'cause that was the first available conference.

And I remember 'cause I know Microsoft tried

to implement their API on two buttons at CSUN,

just two buttons.

We had it working list boxes, spreadsheets,

I mean everything, right?

Rich text editing.

And he came in and I remember his jaw dropped

and hit the, you know, at that time.

So, but the thing is, you know,

we all kind of, even Microsoft,

we all tend to work together

and I felt that was the most, that to me,

being able to have the impact,

I didn't really want to go back.

I mean, going back to what I did before,

it's just not the same.

You can't have an impact like that.

I mean, it's very rare.

So anyway, that's what it was.

That's why I stayed there.

- That's good.

That's great.

That's you a good part of the story to hear about.

And then, you know, definitely that next important part

of your career was surrounding the ARIA technology.

For people that aren't familiar with that,

the acronym I'm using is A R I A,

which actually was built on RIA,

which was rich internet applications,

which going back 20 years ago as there was the .com boom

and websites exploding, they weren't really as robust as

people were used to with applications

that they would have on their Windows

as Mac operating systems and so rich internet applications

started to come about,

and then there was accessible rich internet applications,

which is where you came into the picture.

So talk about a little bit about the evolution of that.

- Okay, so right around, this is around 2003.

So I was working in research

and the head of emerging technologies,

so I worked with on Java, comes to me,

he comes and he reaches out to me

and we had a good working relationship

for other reasons, not Java work.

He comes into my office, doesn't tell me why, he says,

"hey, Rich, you know, I'd like you to come over

and be the lead architect

for accessibility in our software group."

Which is, so lead research and then do whatever it is.

So he never told me why.

And I said, "well, that sounds exciting.

I get to do something different."

So I went over there and so I was working at Austin

and we got a call that we were gonna have

a team meeting in Cambridge, Mass.

And so we all fly up there and we spend the morning

and we're talking about odds and ends.

And after the meeting's over, he says,

"I need you to come with me."

So we go into this part of,

I mean, this was really super secret stuff at the time.

We go into this, all the way into the back area

of the floor in this like hidden cubicle, you know.

And he brings up, this is before Google Docs,

the very first working office suite

running in a web browser.

I mean, this is like, so you have to understand

why this would be so important

from a strategic perspective for the company.

So if you look back at that time, you had,

Microsoft owned nine over 90% of all the clients apps space.

And what they had done is they also owned

over 90% of the browser market

and what they had done is they had moved

their entire Internet Explorer team out to Beijing, China,

and they put it in maintenance mode.

And so the only thing they're willing to make changes

to that browser was to security fixes,

you know, things like that.

But, you know, and they had a lot of stuff

with actives back then that they had to deal with,

that was another programming model and they were push,

and so what they wanted to do is they wanted to use this

market position to basically tie the client desktop

to their middle, where you could only use their mode.

And so what they had done is they had said, okay,

we're gonna basically make the web kind of obsolete

because we're not gonna do anything.

And so for IBM, this for them

was a killer for their software business

because if Microsoft, if people aren't deploying to the web,

that's a big issue because what we had,

what they had come out with in the lab

with the, this came with a company acquisition

from a company called Alpha Blocks.

And they told why they bought this company,

but the real reason they bought the company

was for this technology.

And so if we,

the problem was to be able to make this consumable

is we had to get over two big accessibility

law restrictions that were in WIC AG 1.

and the two words you had to run with JavaScript

and CSS turned off because it wasn't accessible.

And the reason that was at that time was

because people that worked on web accessibility

didn't really know software accessibility

from a holistic internals level and having worked on Java

and having worked with, I actually provided feedback

on Microsoft's accessibility work,

we used to go to those meetings and work with their team.

You know, they didn't have the skillset.

So they looked at this as I don't know how to fix this,

so the first thing you do is you say, oh, we can't fix it,

so we're gonna make it inaccessible.

So it's basically, and what happened

is every major government organization

throughout the planet basically said,

you can't use these technologies and be accessible.

So, you know, what this means is companies

like Oracle, IBM, you know, all the big

middleware companies, they couldn't deploy their software.

So, and he said, do you know what the problem is?

And I said, yeah, you're using JavaScript and CSS

to create these user interfaces and they're not accessible.

Yeah, and this had been not been solved for six years.

He says, yeah.

And the whole $20 billion software business is riding on it.

We need you to figure it out.

So no pressure, Joe.

(Rich laughing)

So I went back to Austin and I started looking

at how these apps were constructed

and they had a document object model, which is like a tree

and the reason they have that model

is because it's modeled after the desktop Window hierarchy,

because that's how they propagate keyboard and mouse events.

So to tie it into the operating system,

they had to use the same infrastructure under the covers.

And so if you look about accessibility APIs on platforms,

they're based on, this object tells you what type

of object it is and what it is and what it's role is,

what's its states are,

and when things change, you get notified.

So if you go from checked to not checked,

a screen reader or some other's, maybe another type

of voice recognition system,

whatever gets notified when something gets changed

and then they respond, so that's how these systems worked.

And on the web, what was happening is,

so they would take these elements that they provided

for an HTML that had no semantics that matched

what you would use in conventional desktop platforms,

like menus and list boxes and all the other stuff.

And I thought, you know, and this only took me

about a month 'cause I just happened to be, like I said,

you're in the right place at the right time.

I had worked with all this stuff on Java,

I'd worked on screen readers,

I could see the whole thing in front of me

like it was clear as a bell.

And so what I, and I said, look, if we could add

these semantics on top of the HTML webpage

and say, well, I know this is what you think it is,

but it's really one of these.

And this is what's being change, is here, changes here,

care about all these things.

And if we could do that, then rich web applications

would behave excessively like desktop applications.

So, and like many things, Joe, in order to,

it solving the technical, the basic technical problem

is actually often the easiest part.

The hard part is making everybody, get 'em to adopt it.

So this means browser manufacturers,

assistant technology vendors and not just Windows,

you need to get a Mac, you need iPhones,

you need all, you know, over time,

all of these things had to get, Linux, right?

And so we had to pull a team together.

We had to put people in the web standards efforts

to create new standards for,

it was called DHTML accessibility early on

and we had to change WIC AG to remove the restrictions,

but you couldn't do it without something

that proved that it worked.

I mean, this literally took eight years

to make all this happen.

So then you have to change government policy, you know.

So these are all the things, and I didn't do this

all myself, I led a team that would do this and you know,

and they're not always direct reports to me.

And anyways, we had to get that done

and we also had to get IBM's

own product teams to support it.

And then we had to actually extend the APIs

on the operating system, so one of the fallouts

is we went Microsoft's UI automation at the time

was too slow and so what we, under the covers,

we have to map each operating system platform.

So we wrote an extension for active accessibility

and it's used today in Google Chrome,

it's used in Firefox, it's used, you know,

it's used in OpenOffice.

So not only was that used,

but also in the infrastructure,

and we also influenced the other platforms.

But more importantly, we got the other platforms

like Apple to join in and provide their side of the point,

how they worked and how we pulled it all together.

But anyways, and I actually didn't come up

with the name ARIA, I think that was Judy Brewer

that came up with that name.

So it kind of stuck.

So Judy, you know Judy.

So that gives you some idea of how I got

to where I am so, where I did.

- Yeah, but you know, going to your point of making sure

that everyone is willing to buy into an invented solution,

You did a lot of work with World Wide Web Consortium

and working group and W3C is all about collaboration

across all kinds of different levels, government,

academic, corporate, different international aspects to it.

So that was a big part of your work as well, wasn't it?

- Yeah, well, that's important points

that you've observed because I remember

having these discussions at IBM and I said,

you know, your first, 'cause I was also

on the patent board too at the time.

I said, they're your first blush is we need to patent this.

And I said, that's the last thing you need to do.

You need to be able to make this freely available

to everybody or else they'll run.

They won't do it.

They don't wanna be locked in.

So we did, everything was open.

We did open standards for W3C,

we did an open accessibility API for, IAccessible2.

I mean, everything was basically free.

And not only that, but if you could imagine

these companies wanted to solve this problem too

and they all got, including Microsoft.

Microsoft got in and they were a really

a huge contributor to ARIA as well.

So, you know, we had a good, really good

experience with all of it and if we had not done that,

then that would probably, then we would

have a different world today, I think, if we hadn't.

But as a result of that, I can tell you

that the proprietary platform of silver light

and their lock in, all that stuff,

you don't hear about it anymore.

You hear about the open web.

So we, but everybody benefited.

I remember that we had gained enough momentum

that we would go to CSUN.

We'd basically populate teams

all throughout the whole conference.

We worked with Missoula and whatnot,

saying about showing people what we were doing.

And I remember Cynthia Shelly coming up to me and asking me,

well, how do we get involved?

Because they're asking why Microsoft

at that time wasn't involved with it?

And I said, Cynthia, it's all open.

You just joined the W3C.

Anybody can use it.

There's no restrictions.

I'll work with your team.

So I think that what I, so this is interesting.

So I remember, so Cynthia went back and she got Microsoft,

'cause every time you join a W3C working group,

you have to get approval by your legal team

because it's, there's intellectual property involved

and all that stuff, so in the meantime,

what I started doing is I started having meetings

every Monday night with Linda Mau from the Microsoft team

working on Internet Explorer and sharing what we did,

getting input, bringing it back to the group while they,

so I was doing this on the back channel.

And the pivotal meeting for me was, 'cause we told you,

they had moved the whole browser team out to Beijing, China.

She said to, usually had these calls at 9:00 at night

and Linda said to me on call,

well, I'm not gonna be able to work with you anymore.

I said, really?

And I said, why is this?

We're moving the whole effort back to rep.

And I says, is it because of accessibility?

And she said, yes.

So people don't realize this, but accessibility

is the thing that basically broke open the web

because at that point, the biggest player

was still Microsoft, they had most of the market

and they got involved with this

and the fact that they got involved and started working

on it, whether they were at the same level or not,

you know, may have taken a while, but it's irrelevant.

I mean, they got involved and it also gave credits

for when Google came out with Chrome, they, you know,

this enabled their browser to take off and Firefox.

And I remember Firefox plus for performance reasons,

it started shooting up in market share,

Chrome took off later on.

So that was the pivotal moment

that people just don't know about.

It was, so you ask why you do this stuff?

How often do you get a chance

to make that much of a difference?

You really...

And yeah, it's for people with, and for me...

Okay, so yes, I did this for business reasons, but for me,

I always did it for the people with disabilities

'cause I always, to me that meant a lot.

When you see somebody...

I mean, I remember when Tom Watkowski,

he used to be a director for accessibility at AOL

and he went to the, company named,

this is getting older now.

One of the big companies or what,

broadcasting companies out of in Pennsylvania.

And so he, I sent him Greg Aaron Leventhal,

who worked on my team, he sent him a code example,

a first talking tree on a webpage.

And so Tom was blind and he literally cried.

When do you do that?

I mean, it's...

- Yeah.

- It's incredible.

So I'm really proud of the work that everybody did

and yes, I had to let a lot of stuff

and I don't make it sound like I did it all 'cause I didn't.

'Cause a lot of people were involved with it.

I mean Andy Weaver and Becky Gibson were working

on WIC AG, changing WIC AG.

Aaron basically wrote all the code in Firefox

that basically got it working in prototype in Firefox.

Then he shared this stuff with the Missoula team for Chrome

and on and on and on.

There's just a lot of, and great feedback from Microsoft,

great feedback from Apple.

And you know, you also get your fights too,

with any standards efforts, you have your technical battle,

but you know, overall it was pretty cool.

So all of that got me eventually got me

to get that position at the company.

So I'm very pleased with what everybody,

what everybody did at the time, so yeah.

- Well that's I think a great place to end it

with your personal reflections on there.

This has been a really interesting,

and illuminating journey through some of these

foundational technical building blocks

to the accessible web that we have today.

So I wanna thank you for taking the time

to share your stories and look forward

to maybe joining you for a dive sometime.

- That'd be great, that would be great.

The water's beautiful here, so yeah.

- All right. - All right.

- Thanks a lot, Rich. - You take care.

All right, thanks for having me.

And it's been an honor, thank you.