Rachael Bradley Montgomery, Library of Congress, Digital Accessibility Specialist

Rachael talk about her work as the co-chair of the W3C's Accessibility Guidelines Working Group and her charity work in supporting accessibility for small community organizations. In her work at the Library of Congress, she help create accessible experiences for employees and patrons. She talks about her own challenge with having a chemical sensitivity disability.

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

(upbeat orchestral music)

- Hello.

This is Digital Accessibility:

The People Behind the Progress.

I'm Joe Welinske, the creator and host of this series.

And as an accessibility professional myself,

I find it very interesting as to how others

have found their way into this profession.

So let's meet one of those people right now

and hear about their journey.

(upbeat orchestral music)

- All right. Well, here we are

with another episode of this podcast

where I have the great opportunity

to talk to accessibility practitioners.

And today I am pleased to be chatting

with Rachael Bradley Montgomery.

Hello, Rachael. How are you today?

- Hello. I'm well.

How are you today?

- Everything's going pretty good.

It's pretty nice day here in my home office area

in Vashon, Washington,

which is near Blink's Seattle headquarters.

Where are you talking to me from?

- I am talking to you from just outside Leesburg, Virginia,

which is near Washington,

and it is a rainy, rainy day here.

- Well, I appreciate you taking the time

to chat with me

about your experience in accessibility

and probably the best place to start

is if you could tell us a little bit about

your current position and what you're involved with today?

- Sure. So I am very fortunate to be doing

a couple different things in accessibility today.

I am a co-chair

of the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group.

So that is the group that helps set the standards for WCAG.

I am in a library,

at the Library of Congress,

I am a digital accessibility specialist.

And I am also the director of a charity

called Accessible Community.

And all three are just a fantastic balance

of getting to work in different areas

and with different sized organizations

across the accessibility field.

- Well, it's okay.

So right off the bat,

it looks like you're pretty busy

with a lot of things that you're involved with,

but on the library of Congress part,

I mean, I think most people are familiar

with what that part of the government is about,

but maybe talk a little bit about

what your position consists of at the Library of Congress?

- Sure. And so I can't speak officially for them right now,

but for my position, it's really around

helping create accessible experiences for employees

and for patrons at the Library.

It's very similar to kind of comparable positions

in organizations anywhere where you're working to try

to improve the accessibility of applications, of content,

of all of that digital experience of kiosks

to make sure that experience really is good for people

with all sorts of different types of disabilities.

- Well, we can come back and talk about

more of the current things that you're working on,

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

is explore the paths that people found

that take them to what they're doing in accessibility.

So where does it start out for you?

Are there any certain milestones

that started to put you on that path?

- I have a funny story

in that I started really young

in kinda disability education and accessibility.

I started actually in middle school

with a local puppeteering troop

that would go around and teach about disability

at different schools in our area.

And I did that for probably six or seven years.

It was a fantastic opportunity at the time.

It was really pre the digital age.

And so it was one of the greatest ways of

connecting with kids in particular

and teaching about people who were different

and just that different abilities didn't mean,

it wasn't scary,

it wasn't something that they had to worry about.

It was something they really could treat as normal.

And it was such a foundational education.

To be able to participate,

you had to pick

a couple different areas of disability studies

and really master them,

you do research and then keep up with everything

because you had to be able to answer questions on all of it.

And so that really started a passion.

I kind of moved away from it for a little bit,

but then really got into usability engineering

and working in libraries

and then ended up right back kind of in the same space,

working in the usability space,

which overlapped a lot with accessibility.

So that's how I got started.

From there I really kind of mixed.

And it was kind of like...

I worked at The MITRE Corporation for a number of years

and got that opportunity to do usability,

but then kind of touch in accessibility

and then it kind of changed over time.

So I started early on with a lot of usability work

and a little bit of accessibility work

and then kept going until I was doing

a lot of accessibility work and less usability work,

which is really where I am now.

- And so, it sounds like what you're saying is that your

educational foundation was library science,

that was an area that you studied and decided to pursue?

- It was. Actually my bachelor's

was in art history and historic preservation.

And we can talk about (laughs) how that ties in,

'cause it does really, really well.

But then when I went back from my master's degree,

I went in information science at University of Illinois

and got to study with some fantastic people there,

both in emerging technology and in usability

and particularly in information systems.

And then transitioned while working,

to go to University of Maryland

and got to study with Jennifer Price and Ben Schneiderman

among other fantastic professors in both fields.

So I was really, really fortunate

to have some amazing people who were inspiring

and exciting to work with throughout that education.

- Yeah. That's great.

Yeah. I had the opportunity to meet

Ben Schneiderman a long time ago

and that was a great conversation.

Also, I went to the University of Illinois.

So I have a connection there,

but was it when you were

doing your art history or master's program

that you discovered the opportunities to volunteer

with the program that you mentioned

with, what was it? Puppet...

- With the puppeteering? That was actually,

I did that all through high school and earlier.

I kind of stepped away from it when I went to college

'cause I went away to college

and couldn't continue doing it.

In college,

I was doing a little less

of the accessibility and usability work

until I kind of came back in.

Where I was kind of getting involved in that

was really around the historic preservation area

because I was studying

how do you take buildings and update them

and still really retain the historic essence of them

and convey that in a neighborhood,

but at the same time, accessibility of physical spaces

was a really big part of that

because if you're gonna update a building,

you have to think about all the ADA applications to it.

And really, a lot of the studies were around,

"Okay, if you take a community

"and you're helping to revitalize it,

"how do you think about all the pieces

"you need to put together?"

And that ended up forming a foundation

of a lot of what I do now with the charity I run

where it's thinking about,

how do you think about disability inclusion

from a community point of view?

And so, I think one of the things I've learned

in looking back over the arc of my career

is that each little piece,

even though it doesn't sometimes seem relevant,

long term, it really becomes critical and foundational

and you end up leaning on it

in a way you didn't quite expect to.

- And so then as you moved forward,

what was kind of the next stage

that aligned with your accessibility interests?

- Yeah. So I guess after my bachelor's degree,

it was really around going to Illinois,

Champaign-Urbana High School

and studying technology and how to engage in technology.

I had worked at Emory University's library down in Atlanta

and I was working in technology space there

and really got interested in how do you create

a library user experience that was good for every patron,

which is what led me to go to University of Illinois

and really study that in more depth.

And so getting to really understand user studies

and how you think about technology in new ways,

it was exciting and kind of fun time to learn.

And then I was able to take that back to my job at MITRE

after I had moved to that

and really start working in that area

in greater detail and depth.

- And then did that work,

did that offer you the opportunity for some type of training

or knowledge acquisition about accessibility?

Or how did you come around

to filling out your,

what you knew about it?

- Yeah. That's a great question.

So I'd studied accessibility some in my master's program,

but not at the depth.

I really needed to be fantastic at it,

like to really grow.

And so I love your question,

just in that I feel like

we get a kind of base knowledge of accessibility,

but until you're really hands-on day in and day out,

it's hard to know,

it's hard to really feel confident about it.

And even when I went to teaching,

I had done a decent amount of it,

but again, gaining that confidence to teach,

that's really where I feel like

my background and the depth of my background

became really extensive.

Because in teaching accessibility

and teaching usability together,

and then very particularly teaching accessibility,

people start asking questions.

And when you get a huge diversity of questions,

you have to learn how to answer.

You end up building your expertise, a great deal.

So that's part of it.

I had also, I got an opportunity to go study

at the accessibility program at Utah WebAIM.

It was interesting.

I had been really working in depth in it for a while,

but just the ability to go

and talk with people who had been doing it for a longer time

and get that comparison

and just double check that I actually understand

some of the subtleties that I wasn't sure about,

in some ways,

and I'm finding this in a mentoring program I run too,

it's like you get started,

you learn a certain amount,

and then you kind of get to a point

where the ability to check in with someone senior

and double check yourself,

gives you the confidence to kind of continue to learn.

And I think some of that is just because accessibility

is a field with such a huge depth of knowledge to it.

And there's so many specialties and subtleties to it.

Again, that ability to connect with other professionals,

I would say is really when I feel like I went from,

"Yes, I do accessibility."

To, "Yes, I really know accessibility

"and I feel very, very confident in it."

So it was that.

Then conferences,

especially when I was learning,

I think conferences were a huge way of learning

beyond just trying to follow the specs

or read what people were publishing about it.

And so that was another great opportunity.

- And you were just

doing some work at the recent CSUN conference.

I saw you there you were working on the escape room.

Was it that you designed that activity with a colleague?

- Yeah. So one of my principles is that,

especially in teaching accessibility,

the more hands-on and the more fun you can make it,

more you can cover

all the different ways of learning the better.

And so the Accessible Escape Room came out about

because Matt Ater and I were having lunch one day

and we're co-teaching

and he said,

"Wow, this weekend I spent $20 to sit and take a nap

"while my daughter and her friends did an escape room

because none of it was accessible."

And I was like, "Wow, we should make

"an accessible escape room."

(laughs)

And we joked about that probably for a year

where we'd go back and forth

and whenever we'd see each other we'd go,

"Wow, are we gonna make the Accessible Escape Room?"

"I dunno."

And after a year it was like,

"You know, we've been talking about this for a while.

"We should just go ahead and do it."

So it's very much a labor of love.

It's done by Vispero and Accessible Community

and The MITRE Corporation.

We went to a local escape room,

it's called Escape Room LoCo and said,

"Hey, we really wanna do this.

"Can you help us?"

And they walked us through how to do it.

And then we built it and we rolled it out and COVID hit.

(laughs)

And so it wasn't quite the CSUN rollout

we were hoping for that year.

We have a virtual version of the first one

and the physical one

that'll be going to different conferences.

But I have so enjoyed that activity

because it is a chance to think about accessibility

on so many levels when we're creating it,

but then the joy of watching

people learn accessibility through that,

or people who have never had a chance to do an escape room,

get to do an escape room because it's accessible,

It's just fantastic.

It's one of my favorite activities to do every year.

- Well, yeah, there are a lot of other things

I wanted to ask you about.

So you've had the opportunity,

you work with advocacy organizations.

You've also worked with

the W3C in continuing to grow

our recommendations and best practices in that area.

And then you've done a lot of work in the government.

And so, those are a lot of different things,

a lot of work going on there. (Rachael laughing)

Is there any one that, you know,

that, you know, you feel particularly,

you know, has moved things forward?

Are there some areas that you've enjoyed more,

maybe some other things less so?

You know, what's it been like

working in all those different areas?

- Yeah. I am so fortunate

in the diversity I've been able to achieve in my career.

Like, it's just been a fabulous

chance to work in a lot of places.

If I had to pick, I think I would talk about

how honored and how fantastically educational

the opportunity to work on,

and then eventually co-facilitate

the COGA Task Force was in the W3C.

So I did that for, I think two years,

before I moved on to co-chair

the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group.

And it is an amazing group of people tackling,

I think one of the harder challenges in accessibility.

The cognitive space is really,

it's hard to make measurable and repeatable

and get into standards.

And so, while WCAG provides support

for cognitive disabilities,

it is not at the depth of other disability areas.

And so, they had already created a great deal of content

for a document that came out,

I guess, about a year ago now

called, "Making Content Usable

for People With Cognitive and Learning Disabilities."

And the process of getting that document to publication.

And again, just working with

such an amazingly talented group of people on that topic

was a really neat experience.

Standards work is definitely not for everybody.

It is a very detailed (laughs)

and very nitpicky in some ways work,

but I think that document

really provides a foundation

for cognitive accessibility and what we can do.

And with my background in usability and accessibility,

the cognitive space kind of fits in between the two

really, really well.

And so I think that was probably

one of the neatest experiences I've had to date.

- Well, I enjoyed my work

quite a while back with the Worldwide Web Consortium.

I enjoyed it and found it very interesting.

I think from the outside

people may think kind of things happen slowly

and to an extent that they do,

but also, I'm not sure people understand

what an amazing collaboration you have between,

not just corporate interest, but the academic, government,

different nation states around the world, NGOs,

advocacy organizations of all types,

and you look at all the things that the W3C has put out

with their recommendations and essentially

the modern web in a way has been built around

those things that have been established.

And the WCAG is certainly one important part of that.

- Yeah.

I think you're right.

I think there is a bit of a black box

into what standards work looks like.

And I agree with you that that balance between industry

and individual disabilities and academia and government,

it really is an interesting conversation that goes on

to make sure that everyone's needs are met

to the best ability possible

when you put out a standard.

And again, that process is neat to look at,

if you have kind of

the desire to go through this (laughs) dangerous process.

- Well, kind of, I think,

does that bring us more or less up to date

with what you're currently involved in?

- If you don't mind,

I'll talk a little about Accessible Community

just because-- - Oh, yeah. Definitely.

- I think that's been at least a personal passion.

I worked in big organizations

and government for a number of years, as you mentioned.

And then, gosh, I guess it's about five years now.

Everything with COVID time has started to feel a little off,

but I came down with chemical sensitivity.

So I hadn't had a disability myself.

I'd been working in the space,

but was not myself disabled.

And chemical sensitivity is a really,

it's an odd disability.

In that, COVID actually helped me a great deal.

I'm working from home.

I'm not exposed to chemicals.

If I'm not exposed to chemicals, I'm not sick.

But if I get near somebody who has perfume

or I get in an elevator (laughs) with somebody unexpectedly,

or I walk into a bathroom that's been cleaned,

I can be sick for a number of days

and not really able to work.

And it kind of changed my life.

Really, I'd been looking a lot at the digital space.

And when that happened,

all of a sudden I couldn't go shopping anymore.

I can't shop for clothes

'cause almost every dressing room,

at least women's dressing room,

has scented products in it.

So I just shift all of my kind of consumer behaviors

to function and work.

And it made me realize

just how much of our community isn't accessible.

And it's kind of one of those things I knew,

but didn't know at a personal and deep level.

And it also really made me realize that

a lot of the accessibility work is going on

with the really big organizations,

not the small ones.

And the ones I needed to interact with

are the mom and pop shops, the restaurants,

the clothing stores in my neighborhood,

the churches, I want to go to.

Whatever those small organizations are,

my kids clubs, my PTO, right?

And there's just not a lot of support for that.

And the end result of talking with a lot of people

was to found this particular charity,

which the goal is to figure out ways

that we can build bridges to help communities,

not necessarily the big organizations,

but the small organizations and communities

that can't afford the work.

And so, it's very much,

again, labor of love.

It's something that happens at the pace it happens,

but we just put out a tool

that really will facilitate crowdsourcing,

accessibility reviews,

or long term, will let people share their experiences.

Like, when I go to a store,

my kids go in first and come out,

"Yeah, mom. You can go in/you can't."

To be able to share that

or to be able to learn from somebody else

who has chemical sensitivity,

which store I can go in

where I'm going to be successful

before I spend the time driving there,

that's huge for me.

And that's not something that digital accessibility

will help me with one bit,

other than this crowdsourcing approach,

but talking with a number of other people with disabilities,

that ability to share information,

that bridge has not really been built yet.

And so, trying to provide that,

and at the same time,

we've stood up a mentoring program.

So people who are stuck in

that quasi place that I've learned about accessibility,

but I don't really feel confident in my knowledge,

or I haven't gotten a lot of hands-on experience,

can go help one of these organizations that can't afford it.

At the same time, they're getting work with,

getting an opportunity to work with someone more senior.

And so it creates a win, win, win.

And I love win, win, win situations.

And so, just trying to set up as many of those as possible

and facilitate that

has absolutely become my mission going forward.

- And is the work that you're doing there something that

others can can learn about?

If we add a link to the show notes,

is that something that's open for others

to get involved with?

- It absolutely is.

We take volunteers.

We have the mentoring program

if people want to sign up to learn,

but we would love as much help as anyone wants to.

It is completely volunteer organization.

So we are reliant on people

and we would love people to join us.

- All right. Well, yeah. Excellent.

And, you know, let's see,

tying into one of the things that you mentioned.

Well, I think you might have a similar experience with me

where, you know, I've been involved in this area

for about 20 some years.

And when I look at kind of where we are with things,

in some ways it's kind of amazing

looking at how technology has transformed things.

And even now I feel like the accessibility profession

is growing with more and more people getting involved.

You know, If I think back 20 years ago,

I still remember thinking we would've been farther along

by now and there's always more that you can do,

but I was just kind of wondering

what your ideas were in that,

if there are some areas

that you wish we could have made more progress

or ones that you're particularly interested in pursuing,

in addition to the community activity you mentioned?

- I do think,

and this drives

some of what we're doing with Accessible Community as well,

I do think creating carrots for accessibility

and not just sticks.

I think, somehow finding

good ways to have people be able to market accessibility

and know the value of being able to reach out

to the disability community.

When I go talk with small organizations,

that is the number one thing I hear,

they're like, "We're happy to do the accessibility work,

"but how do we actually tell people we've done it?"

So finding that sweet spot of marketing,

I think is a big driver

that our community has to figure out.

But yeah, like you,

I would like to be further along.

I feel like there's this amazing

dichotomy between extreme innovation in coming up with

assistive technology of different types,

but then maybe not as much innovation

and how do we use technology

that isn't quite so exciting,

or how do we fund people in thinking about technology

that isn't so exciting

to really help improve accessibility as a whole.

So that funding and that focus on

what feels a little more every day

but could make a big difference,

I feel like that's something

that we haven't quite figured out.

Another pattern I've really seen is

you get some commitment to accessibility

and you start to make a lot of momentum

And then it almost feels like

it's tied to certain individuals

and then things kind of ebb and flow

based on how individuals move in and out of organizations

and figuring out ways to better systematically

fix accessibility in the mindset of organizations.

And some places are very successful with that

and some people aren't,

but really having good strategy around that,

I think is the other big area I'd love to see.

- Well, I enjoyed all of your great comments

and your perspectives from all the time

that you've been involved in that.

So Rachael, thank you very much

for taking this time to share that with us.

And hopefully I'll see you again soon at another event.

- Thank you. I really look forward to seeing you again.

And thank you for the opportunity to talk with you.

- Thank you. Bye-bye.