Sam Ogami, HP, Accessibility Program Manager

Sam shares his early personal experience having a learning disability that was helped with assistive technology. That coupled with his interest in technology sparked his lifelong work with accessibility. This included assisting university students with assistive technology and with accessible procurement of products for the institutions. Now at HP as an Accessibility Program Manager, Sam describes how HP supports accessibility across a wide variety of groups within the organization. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

(stirring 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 with another one of our interviews,

and today I'm pleased to be visiting with Sam Ogami.

Hello, Sam, how are you?

- Hello.

Doing good.

- It's nice to have you involved

to talk about your work in accessibility.

I'm at my home office on Vashon Island, Washington,

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

Where are you talking to us from?

- So I'm also at my home office.

I'm located in Fremont, California, so in the Bay Area.

- All right, well, great.

Well, welcome to this activity.

It's great to hear about what you're involved with.

And I know I've benefited from some of the work

that you've done in sharing knowledge,

which we can talk about later,

but probably the best place to start

is for you to talk about what you're doing right now.

- Okay.

So I work for HP's Office of Aging and Accessibility.

I wear many hats in that role,

as I think is similar to lots of people

in the accessibility industry.

Primarily I work with designers and developers

and product managers to make sure our products

are inclusive to people with disabilities.

And anything around getting that done, right?

- And in obviously a really large organization,

kinda what's a day in life or a week in the life

for you in managing the activity at HP?

- So I think that it breaks down to,

you know, it ebbs and flows with different areas,

but there's definitely where I work with designers

and developers trying to make sure that our products,

you know, getting into technical specifications,

making sure we're doing user testing

with people with disabilities,

seeing what the future products are gonna be like,

and giving and informing the important decision makers

when there are accessibility enhancements

or possibly accessibility regressions, right,

things that are less accessible,

so that they can make the right decisions.

So I'd say that's a good part of my job.

The other part is really keeping up as an expert

because I think there's a lot of great work

in accessibility.

And part of that is learning from users,

learning from other experts in the field.

So I will go and do research, look at different products.

When I go pick up my groceries or, you know,

go to Target or go to Costco or an electronics store,

more so when it was COVID,

look at what our competitors are doing around accessibility.

And then the other part is working

with my other industry partners.

So I'm chair of the ITIC accessibility group,

so the Information Technology Industry Council

accessibility group.

So seeing about laws, legislation,

standards that are coming in,

and providing industry perspective to them.

So I think those are the kind of three big areas.

And depending on the day,

maybe I'll spend the majority doing one,

some days, you know, I'll be doing all three

till in the evening time.

But it ebbs and flows in those ways.

- You're obviously a really busy person.

You have a lot going on.

And I'd like to dig into those areas

in a little bit more detail

as we get further along in this chat.

But, you know, one of the things I like to do

is always find out what path people took

to where they are today, you know,

how they became aware of accessibility

and decided to make it part of their professional practice.

So where does it start with you?

You know, take me back a little bit

and what was something that first got you thinking

about being involved in this area?

- Oh, sure.

So I think that for me...

All the way back to when I was getting my, you know,

middle school, elementary education,

I had a learning disability,

and access to text was really difficult for me,

textbooks, reading.

I did not read for leisure.

It was always a pain to do these things.

So around high school,

I discovered this organization called

Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic,

and they offer tons of audio cassettes.

I think they're called Learning Ally now.

But really my interest in just the revolutionary change.

And this was very old school kind of technology,

but cassette tapes, right?

So you could get textbooks on cassette tapes.

So I was very interested in that.

And then through my college work, you know,

I was very interested in technology in just general,

but I wanted to do technology to help others, right?

So I think it first came out as something that

from some of the frustrations and experiences

I personally had,

and it's kind of evolved over my years to be something

that I think is just a very rewarding career.

And also to broaden, you know, you can start

with the personal perspective,

but that's just kind of a spark to a fire.

And then, you know, you look and you say,

"Okay, other people are experiencing things, other things.

How can I make sure that technology is helping people

and not hindering them?"

So that's kind of where I started.

It was definitely very much an interest

in digital talking books,

and they were doing this thing called Daisy.

I met this incredible man, George Kerscher,

who is just a force in that whole field.

And they were moving from cassette tapes to CDs,

real fancy, you know, advanced technology.

And it was just really interesting.

So I studied computer science,

and then I went to go work for the community colleges,

worked in higher ed for a while.

And that was also very rewarding

because that was a lot of work with not just the people

who kind of designed curriculum and trainings,

but also working with students, right?

So there was points in that where I got to work

with students or provide assistive technology

to students with disabilities.

So I always thought that was just a lot of fun.

And it was something that I decided very quickly,

like, I wanna do this, you know,

keep on doing this type of work.

So that's really what did it for me.

- Well, it sounds like, you know, first of all,

you were fortunate to be at a time

when that technology first started coming out,

and have that available to you as a learner,

you know, needing and benefiting from that.

And then working it in the university level

and supporting others is a path we've heard

from a lot of others.

So it sounds like it's kind of, the timing was right

to be able to, you know, move you naturally into this area.

- Absolutely, yeah.

You know, I think that accessibility

has a lot of rewarding aspects to it.

So to be clear, there is frustrations in this field,

but there's also just a lot of reward.

And, you know, with a little bit of distance and experience,

I think the pluses definitely outweigh

a lot of the frustrations

and things that can happen in the field.

- And at the time when you were working at university,

were you involved in setting up technologies

for students to work,

or what types of activities did that consist of?

- Yeah, so I think one of the things

I was very proud of that I did,

I worked for the California Community College system.

And I think the other part of it is,

I was just working with incredible people,

had the opportunity to work with people

who had a lot of experience already.

But it was helping to build better services...

kind of system-wide.

So there's 152 at the last time,

it might be a little bit more than that,

but there's a ton of community colleges

throughout the state of California.

And it was building a kind of like centralized service

to produce higher quality digital talking books for students

or accessible texts for students with disabilities.

So I mean, it was just something of,

I had a technical background,

you know, and to kind of apply that and have such a scale,

just being straight out of college

with an undergraduate degree was just, you know,

it was just a really great opportunity.

And just learning from the people

who had just a lot of experience in the field,

you know, kind of mentor me, but also work with me.

You know, I didn't have to go out.

So I think I was lucky in that way that, you know,

I get to go in every day and work with individuals

who just had a lot of experience,

and kind of could help guide me

in my enthusiasm in certain ways.

- You mentioned your technical background.

I think you said it was computer science that you studied.

Were there any specific parts of that background

that helped you at that stage in your career,

or was it just mostly that you were comfortable

with technology?

- I think it was just a basic understanding.

You know, more than just like a user understanding

about technology,

having some field about understanding, you know,

take the basic system classes like compilers and databases

and operating systems.

So having that background,

I don't think I was doing something directly,

but having that background and understanding,

I think gave me a little bit more perspective

to putting technologies together

and identifying kind of opportunities.

But again, I don't think that's essential for everyone.

I think the more important thing

is to kind of have the right mindset

and try to work problems to solve accessibility.

And not, you know, the perfect, right?

Finding good solutions,

looking at different opportunities.

Because just like any other job,

you're gonna be told no a lot,

or you're gonna run into a lot of roadblocks.

So it's trying to find out how can we do this, right?

In my first job

it was how can I deliver these digital talking books

like large libraries and services

who had whole staffs and things,

for colleges that maybe had one alternate media specialist,

or, you know, one or two people who were producing a lot,

it's how can I engage them and their existing technology?

So I think that that's the more important thing

is kind of being creative.

I've seen people who come from different parts of the field,

but it's having that kind of mindset

of how can I get what I want to do done?

And that's what led to it.

- Well, so there you are doing the work

within this community college system,

what was the next area that you delved into?

- Sure.

So I think one of the things right away

is working for an academic institution

is there's a, and rightfully so,

a high value on credentials and educational experience,

and I just had an undergraduate degree

so there was limits to what I could do

and move forward in the organization.

And I also really was interested in figuring out more

about how people learn and things.

So I went back to graduate school for a while

and got a degree in learning design technology,

and I focused more on the learning and design part of it

since I had the technology background.

But then I kind of moved

out of assistive technology at the time

to doing technical training, right?

Because I wanted to do more about learning.

But it became very apparent to me very quickly

within a few months of that job

that I wanted to get back into assistive technology.

And I think that that's also a good thing,

is, you know, to learn from the opportunities

that you have and find out what you want to do,

and try to work how you can keep on doing that

in your career.

So worked for Yahoo, doing technical training for engineers.

And then, you know,

I was really being called to accessibility.

I was working all my free time

with the accessibility group at Yahoo,

'cause, you know, I was like,

I really wanna get back into that.

And then I went to work for another large university system,

the California State University system.

And that was very different

because it was a lot of administration,

it was working on accessible procurement.

And what I mean by that is helping procurement officers,

CIOs at universities decide

how to pick the most accessible technology, right?

So from things like mass spectrometers

to conferencing systems,

to something that would be used on,

you know, an individual's desktop,

making sure that we had practices in there.

And this was new when, you know, Section 508 was out there.

So it was adapting a federal kind of procurement law

and process into a state university system.

- And that's an area that you continue to talk about today.

I know you have the webinars

where you talk about organizations documenting

their accessibility work so that others,

so there's transparency for procurement

and people to know what organizations have been doing

with accessibility for their products.

- Right. I think that's very important, right,

is to, as much as possible, is to be.

I think accessibility, it's important to be open, right?

It's like, how are people going to use the product?

The accessibility, for the most part in my perspective,

it's not the secret sauce that makes your product.

You know, it's not the very secret thing

that you need to guard.

You know, it's the product,

but it's kind of like the additive.

It's like the sprinkles.

It's something that's essential,

but isn't secret because, you know,

even if you have great assistive technology,

great features of your product,

if you don't document how to use them,

or that they're available,

or how you determined that it provided better access,

then no one finds out about it, right?

Or it's just the procurement person.

And then they're done

and they're working on their next big purchase or something.

And then the end user, the student,

the person who's actually using the device,

they also need to know, right?

And that's really where I think the success is.

And sometimes it's very difficult to get

from that convincing, you know, in large purchases,

the person who purchases the device,

all the way to the person who uses the device.

And all those people are important

to understand accessibility.

You know, it's frustrating to me when I hear,

"I didn't know the machine could do that,"

or, "I didn't know that your product could do X, Y and Z."

And that's something that, you know,

I personally try to work on more.

And then how do we test it?

How do we do those things?

Anyone can use the testing procedures and things.

The real hard work,

the real kind of value is actually doing the work

to make it accessible.

It's doing that user testing.

Not that you need to do the user testing

or that you need to measure for these values

and do certain things, it's did you do that?

Did you change the product?

So that's where the real work is.

And so if I can share back to the community

of saying, "Here's how HP tests their hardware

or their products.

Here's how HP does certain things."

I think that that's all the better,

and that nets better for everyone in the industry

and users also.

So, you know, it's always trying to give back, right?

But also find the boundaries of working in a company.

Because there are things that are secret.

There are things that need to be guarded close.

But when it comes to accessibility,

I think there's a lot more that can kind of be shared out.

- Mm hmm.

Well, the fact that there are best practices

for organizations to let others know

how their products are accessible or not,

I think is fabulous.

But I think for a lot of people in organizations

that do procurement,

they may not necessarily be aware

that those types of things exist.

Like, obviously university procurement

has a long history of knowing what to look for,

and of course, the federal government, you know,

with the regulations requiring that.

With a lot of organizations,

if they wanna know if a certain tool is accessible,

I don't think it's really widely known

that there are best practices for doing that.

I know I vet products that our organization uses,

and I know where to look for that kind of information.

And if I contact an organization,

when I get the reply back,

I know right away

what level of accessibility is there by their response.

And so I think that's one of the areas

that hopefully we get more exposure

so that people can start prioritizing products

and services that are accessible.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And I think, you know,

there are those accessible conformance reports also,

you know, it used to be known as VPATs.

But there's more work to be done with that.

In addition with new standards and regulatory work, right,

it's to not only just meet these standards,

but one of the kind of trends

is to have documentation,

provide information about what accessibility

is available in your training manuals

or your documentation, and then how to use them.

And I think that's also very critical.

So that's something at HP

that we're working on doing more of,

exposing those things so there is something there,

you know, in the manuals,

in the things that people get,

in the tutorials that also expose

that there's accessibility options.

You know, I think that Microsoft and Apple

have done an excellent job, right?

That it speaks to you the moment

that you've initiated your computer

so you can make the decision

if you need that assistive technology or not.

And then for people who don't, it's like a,

just a two second thing and they move forward, right?

And for people who do need it it's critical, right?

'Cause that gives the autonomy and access for them

to go through the completion process

of setting up their new computer.

So I think that that's good to see these things,

you know, like, it's an evolution.

Just like when I did digital talking books

it was cassette tapes, and now it was CDs,

and now it's just kind of digital, and download,

and you can just like put them on all devices.

And I'm proud to see the evolution,

and I'm excited to see what we can do better, right?

So it's always something that, yes, right,

I think everyone realizes we can do better in accessibility.

It's just like, how can we do better

with the constraints that we have, right?

'Cause I think in your organization and my organization,

there's always constraints.

There's always things that are competing.

And it's trying to follow the best path forward in doing it.

- Well, I do want to ask you a little bit more

about your HP work,

but I don't wanna skip over anything.

Were there any things bridging your work

with the California State system before HP

that you think you'd like to share?

- Oh, no.

So, I mean, the other thing is,

since working for kind of more purchaser,

higher education side, where, you know,

one of my last jobs in higher ed

was sitting in on some of the procurement evaluations

and doing things, and then moving over to industry,

that was incredibly informative to me.

You know, this was like over 10 years ago now,

which I know a lot of things have changed,

but, you know, I still channel, right?

I still channel my experience working

with procurement officers,

working with people who have incredibly,

you know, tons of requirements, small business, veteran,

you know, they're trying to do all sorts of things

to make the best decision for their organization,

and accessibility is just one in there.

So now on the other side, when we're working on products,

making those decisions, I try to channel back to say,

"Hey, can we make our conformance reports more clear?

How can we be more descriptive?

What can we do to understand that?"

'Cause on the other side of that,

I definitely had areas of opportunity that I saw

and I was like, "Oh, this could be better,"

or, "This is a little ambiguous."

So trying to channel that,

I think that that was good to have both sides of it,

and I definitely go back to those days.

I also talk to people that I've worked with in those fields

again, to hear.

I think that's also important, to hear their voice,

hear what they're having trouble with.

So definitely individual customers,

but also procurement people and others

to make sure that they understand

or have people there to help them understand

what is the accessibility, you know,

when they're comparing things.

I think it's very easy to say, "Yes, we're accessible."

Everyone can say this or fill out a report,

but it's the contents of the report,

it's what's in there that's so important

when you're making that decision.

- Well, you're working at HP,

it's obviously a large organization,

and accessibility probably has a lot

of different elements to it.

But one of the things I'm interested in

is kind of how accessibility's built

into an organization like that.

Is there a overriding department or division

that helps lead accessibility across the enterprise?

Are there evangelists within individual divisions

and training of a vertical nature

within different parts of HP?

Maybe tell me a little bit

about how things are set up there.

- Sure. So there is a centralized office, right?

So I'm part of that team, part of the central team.

So I work across both our organization.

You know, it's like HP is a big company

with lots of medium sized companies within it,

so I work across that.

So there's definitely that approach.

And that's where a lot of my work

in understanding legislation, understanding new standards,

that comes in and that gets pushed back down

to the businesses.

And then I would say that there are individuals

in different areas within those sub businesses.

So kind of just to break it down,

there's personal systems, right,

and then there's print and imaging.

So there are people in those different organizations

that also take care of accessibility,

and those are my colleagues.

So they don't need to become Section 508 experts,

or they don't need to become WCAG experts,

but they need to know,

hey, these are the things that need to apply to you.

These are some things that you need to consider

when creating your types of products.

So it's a mix of both, right?

And it is that kind of approach of centralized things.

We work in the central office,

and then individual products.

Now, sometimes we get pulled in

when there are new products

or areas where there needs to be better discovery

or things that are unknown.

Because I think in accessibility, there are things, right?

There's still questions to be asked.

There might not be a best practice,

or that best practice might have changed.

So I will work with the business teams,

helping them discover that.

And again, that's another area

where if we can share some of that information back,

especially the things not to do,

I think that's all the better, right?

Maybe we found a good way to do certain things

or something.

But we've also found, probably through user testing

and standards or analysis review,

these are not great ways to do things.

And if I can share that out

and get the okays from the business and legal.

That's another thing that I've tried to do in my career,

is say, "Here are some things to avoid,

'cause we tried this.

So here's a better direction to go in."

And again, I think that that's a way to find

that balance of making accessibility inclusive

and a team sport across the industry,

and then also still respecting the privacy

and hard work that the organization has done.

- Mm hmm.

And I know in a lot of larger organizations,

if, say, a researcher, a designer, a product manager,

a developer gets really activated and interested

in accessibility, that often they're able

to carve out a larger role

where they can help bring that to other teams.

Is there anything like that at HP

where people can kind of make accessibility

an important part of the activities

that they're professionally involved with?

- Yes. Yeah.

So there's definitely part of that.

There are people who it's just part of their role,

and then there's people

who have found very much a passion in it.

And there is a way to kind of cut out more space

to that of what you wanna do

and make it part of your professional development

or growth in the organization.

So yeah, it's both ways.

And that's definitely good

because as a large organization, at a centralized office,

you can't know everything that's happening, right?

You're not in every meeting.

So it's good to have those people.

And that's another thing that I've tried to do

in my career is set up a good cadence of meeting

with individuals.

And sometimes they come to me and sometimes they forget,

but just, you know, what's going on?

What are the new things?

What are some things that you're thinking about,

or your group is thinking about with these products?

And I think that's important because,

I'm sure you've heard it from other experts,

accessibly needs to be interwoven in all the steps

in the business process.

And that's even at the level of just discovery, right?

Oh, we're experimenting with a new interface,

or we're experimenting with using, I don't know,

push buttons or whatever.

So I think that that's really important

to have those types of considerations

of accessibility in there.

Of course, at the end, and, you know,

through the development and all those other parts,

but even at that early, early stage

of accessibility in products.

- Well, yeah, as I look back on my time in accessibility,

I think it started around 1998 for me,

so about 22 years.

Yeah, I look back and there's things

where I'm really impressed

with where we've come in that time with accessibility,

and then there's other things I kind of look back

and I'm like, I really thought we would've been farther

along than we are now in certain areas.

Are there, you know, any areas

where you're particularly excited

about the new developments,

or the other side of that,

maybe some areas where you would hope

there would be more work or more improvement going on?

- I guess an area that I'm just impressed with

is kind of the maturity level of digital talking books.

And just, that is awesome.

And just when you talk to users, right,

it's just like an expectation.

You know, they're like,

"What, you used cassettes and you had to listen to the.

You'd you hit the fast forward button

and listen to these low tone beeps to count the pages?"

And that's crazy, right?

Like, it's just assumed now.

Go to a certain page,

go to a certain chapter in an accessible.

And that's just commonplace now.

And you can download books on your phone, right?

It's like a snap now.

And that evolution, it's happened a long time ago,

but I'm very happy that now it's just like,

it's just an expectation.

It's the way it should be.

It's the things that are there.

I would say that also with, you know,

web accessibility and software,

that's really done a lot better, right?

Of course there are areas

that need more work in those.

But I think the maturity,

the work with WCAG,

it's just gotten so much better and it's improved.

So those are the areas I'm definitely impressed with.

I think that there's some more attention,

areas that I wish or feel like there needs to be,

that are sometimes considered is,

as we're focusing on the digital,

the kind of software, the web,

it's the physical that also still needs to be important.

And I think that that area, you know,

can still have more improvements,

can still have an evolution there.

Because if you can't get to the device,

if you can't access the device,

if the user can't put their intentions

or interpret what's on that physical piece of hardware,

the keyboard, the touchscreen, the whatever,

it doesn't matter how accessible that webpage is,

or that piece of software, or the operating system,

because, you know, that physical to digital,

there's a problem there.

And that kind of stops everything else in the flow, right?

So I think that there's work to be done.

I'm not saying that there's frustration,

but I think that's exciting too, right?

There's work to be done there,

and that's fun, right?

There's the fun way to do things.

And I think that with the VR and XR,

and the organization that Larry Goldberg kind of set up

with the XR access group, right,

of looking at virtual reality and augmented reality

and saying, "Hey let's consider accessibility

at more of the infancy of this type of technology."

You know, those are great signs, right?

It's being done.

Where, unfortunately, a lot of things in accessibility,

especially for users, they kind of,

you adopt a bunch of technology.

Like, "Oh, we're gonna put tablets.

We're gonna give every student tablets."

And then it's the consideration of

what about users with disabilities?

And it shouldn't be that way.

And that's frustrating, that causes a lot of worry

and headaches for users

that if the consideration was done before.

So seeing that things are considered more earlier on

with adoption in doing things,

I think that that's also very, very good and very exciting,

and it makes me happy to see.

- Well, and I know you've been involved

in a lot of volunteerism and sharing knowledge,

we talked about that briefly before.

Are there any organizations or resources

that you're involved with

that you'd particularly like to call out

that you think might be interesting

for others to explore?

Any webinars or any of that type of thing?

- I mean, I think the meetups, the local meetups.

You know, there's a accessibility Bay Area meetup.

Those are great places to go.

And I've seen people who have had some passing interest,

or they said, "This has been part of my job,"

or, "I'm interested in this,"

and now they're full-time accessibility experts.

I think that that's a real great way.

And it's just, it's such a welcoming community.

I think that ego

or, you know, elitism might be there,

but I've never experienced it.

People just are willing to share.

And I would recommend those.

There's a great one in the Bay Area.

And now currently with COVID, all of them are remote.

So if you're on the East Coast and want to,

you know, there's a New York one,

and you wanna stay up till later

and go to the Bay Area one,

the West Coast one, you can do that.

So the meetups with accessibility

are a really great way to kind of start.

You know, I think that a lot of people start

where they're an expert in a certain technology,

and then they kind of bring in accessibility,

and I would say reach out to people.

I definitely have reached out to people

who I've been very impressed with,

or like, "Oh, you know, these people

are doing such great things,

should I even bother them with my time?"

And I would say yes.

And some people are gonna be too busy,

but most people are gonna be willing to kind of talk to you,

share with you, at the technical or even career path level,

of what they should do or how they got started.

And you don't have to mold your career to that,

but that gives you ideas, advice, an opportunity.

You know, internships are great, too.

We had interns.

I tried to do an intern with accessibility,

and it's not necessarily always a technical person, right,

it's someone in marketing or someone,

to show how accessibility works in industry,

how this is a great career to be in.

And, you know, we've had business majors come in

and work in accessibility and do great things.

So if you have the opportunity to do those types of programs

and are also in the field, I would say that, you know,

take some time to help give back.

Give people opportunities.

Do some recruiting, if you can, right?

Even people who might not necessarily be interested

in accessibility, but are really good at something,

you know, that's your opportunity.

If you're privileged enough to be hiring

or setting up an intern program, to get people in there

and say, "Hey, this is a great field.

This is a rewarding field to be in.

We need good people, smart people to work in it."

- Well, yeah, you had so many great ideas

in this last segment, I really appreciate that.

And we'll probably include some links

to some of those items in the show notes.

But, Sam, thanks so much for taking the time

to share your journey through accessibility,

and it was really enjoyable chatting with you.

- Oh, thank you very much.

Yeah.

I really appreciate it.

It's fun talking and thinking

about some of the past things that I've done.

- All right, thanks a lot.

Bye-bye Sam.