Lucy Greco, U. California - Berkeley, Electronic accessibility expert 

Lucy Greco talks about always being a technology nerd and early adopter who is totally blind. Her first computer - an Apple IIe - transformed her ability to be successful with schoolwork. She started helping others during her college years, into consulting, and now back in the academic environment. She describes her work at UC Berkeley making sure the wide variety digital assets are accessible to all. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

(spirited hip-hop 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.

(spirited hip-hop music continues)

All right, well, we are ready to get going

with another podcast episode

with accessibility professionals.

And today, I'm pleased to be talking with Lucy Greco.

Hello, Lucy. How are you today?

- Good, thanks. How about you?

- Well, it's pouring down rain in the Seattle area

where I'm at with my home office.

Where are you talking to us from?

- I'm talking to you from sunny,

beautiful, sunny California,

and we're sitting here at 21 degrees Celsius today.

(Joe chuckles)

- All right.

Well, you definitely have a little bit of better weather

than I do right now, but it's great to have you,

to chat with you about your experiences with accessibility.

But why don't we just start with you talking

about what you're involved with right now,

your position and the type of work that you do?

- Sounds great.

So I am the accessibility evangelist for UC Berkeley.

What that means...

It's actually electronic accessibility evangelist.

What that means is I help people on campus try

and find ways to make any of our digital assets

as accessible as possible.

Everything from websites, applications.

We look at the photocopiers.

We'll look at all kinds of devices

that people might need to interact with

and I help make recommendations

to make those things more accessible

for people with disabilities.

- Well, I definitely wanna check in

and get more details about some of the things

that you're working on at the university.

But one of the main objectives of this series

is to find out how people ended up

in the professional area of accessibility,

where they are today.

So maybe you could take me back

and let me know about your own experiences,

kind of step through things to where you are today.

- So it's a really natural fit for me in accessibility.

I am a extreme technology nerd.

I love technology. I love tech in general.

I'm an early adopter of early tech,

of new toys and new tools.

And I'm totally blind myself.

So that early adopterness ends up paying off

maybe only 5% of the time.

So the rest of the time, I'm having to work to try

and find accommodations, workarounds,

and accessibility fixes.

But technology has really been a huge asset

to me in general.

So when I was in junior high, I didn't have any technology.

And I was having to do my papers

by writing them up in Braille,

then sitting down at a typewriter

with a sighted person behind me to see how it was going.

And that sighted person would tell me if I made a mistake

and read off what I was typing

just to make sure I was typing the right thing.

And we had a rule that if I made three mistakes

that were fixed with liquid paper,

we'd have to tear it up and start the sheet over again.

So needless to say, my papers were terribly short

when I was in junior high,

and it took a lot longer to write them than everyone else.

So everybody else might get three papers

between September and December.

I got maybe one done,

and it was always the most dreadful thing.

I hated having to write something up

for someone more than anything else.

And then they gave me a computer.

And it was an old Apple IIe.

And at that time, it was even old.

And oh, my God, it just liberate me completely.

I went from taking three to four months to write something

because I had to wait for the person to show up

to help me proofread it

to being able to do it in the same amount of time

as everybody else.

So where it would take me two, three months

to do a five, 10-page paper,

I could now do a five, 10-page paper in a month,

like everyone else.

So it was really exciting.

I became addicted to that whole idea of having a computer.

It was something that helped me do things independently

and let me get around on my own through things

that I always had to depend on someone else for.

So I was the first person I knew who had a cell phone.

I was the first person I knew who started buying robots

to do different types of activities in my house.

I am a complete technology hoarder and a technology nerd.

- Well, it's interesting to hear your story about that.

And certainly, technology has made a lot of advances

in accessibility possible over the past 20 years or so.

But as you were getting involved in it,

you mentioned that you are a nerd, as you said,

and so you had an affinity for that type of thing.

I imagine that

that maybe put you a little bit ahead early on

before tools were widely accessible

where you're able to figure things out

and maybe that just wasn't as possible

for others that didn't have the same technical know-how.

- Exactly.

So when I was in college,

I would help all the other disabled students figure out

how to use a computer so they could get the same advantages.

And then I naturally fell into doing consulting work

where I was hired to train people

on computers for several years.

And then naturally, I got hired by the university

to help disabled students learn how to use computers.

I did skills assessments for them,

and helped them find the right technology

for them as people with disabilities.

And a lot of my work was helping them figure out

how to use the tools that weren't accessible on campus.

So a natural progression was changing to being the person

who systemically changed those tools

so students didn't have to have accommodations

and remediations.

So going from each student having to be taught

how to accommodate themselves

to having a tool that was accessible from the start

was a huge change.

And that's where I've been for the past,

well, nine years now.

- Well, let's go back to where you mentioned,

in college, you were the person helping others

to be able to use their computers and things like that.

Was that where you first started to think

about accessibility as being a career

beyond just you using those tools for your own purposes?

- I think it was more I was doing it from friend to friend,

so I wasn't thinking of it as a career.

But when I got offered my first contract,

which was maybe a year or two before I graduated,

to actually teach someone,

that's when I realized, hey, somebody's gonna pay me

to teach somebody how to use a computer.

And it was a really fun contract.

And I had a lot of...

I really enjoyed doing it.

Was a woman who had an acquired brain injury,

and I was teaching her how to use Microsoft Word.

It was a natural fit.

- Mm-hmm.

And so then you mentioned you

were doing some consulting work.

So what was the nature of that?

Were you doing projects

to help organizations upgrade their software?

Or what was involved with that?

- I was mostly working on new product reviews

for accessibility.

So I would be called in by a company

who was trying to create a new call center software for,

that they would be selling.

So I had to review the call center software

and make sure it worked with a screen reader,

or I would review webpages

to make sure that they were accessible.

Just different things like that, that kind of consulting.

But mostly, the kind of work I was doing

before I started at the university was teaching,

working with a person with one disability or another

and getting them up and running with the computer

and teaching them the skills they needed

to get, be independent.

- Well, you mentioned some of the things

that you do at the university now,

and you mentioned that most of the focus

is on the electronic side of things.

That's still a big area

to be able to support at universities.

So what are some of the areas

that you have to be responsible for at the university?

- Everything from HR applications

to student learning systems

to library databases and resources.

One of my favorite projects that I've worked on

in the past couple years was getting scanners

in the library to replace the photocopiers

and making sure that those scanners could be used

by people with disabilities,

everything from making sure that a person with a wheelchair

could actually reach the controls on the device

and that a blind person had a screen reader

on the device automatically

so that they could use it to scan documents

so that they could read them.

- Well, I've taught at the University of Washington

on a part-time and a full-time basis

at times for a long time, and so I'm familiar

with how they do support accessibility there.

And I know that there are a lot of issues

with funding for adequate equipment,

and also, just the procurement process

for a bureaucracy can be kind of stifling.

How have you been able to find your way

through those minefields?

- It's brutal.

I mean, let's not hold back any punches here.

It's absolutely brutal to be in an academic situation

for a public university that has no funding.

It's an uphill battle convincing people

that the work needs to be done

and the time needs to be spent,

and most of all, the money needs to be spent.

So I am the only person doing what I do

in the entire University of California system.

There's a couple of other people

who don't have anywhere near the same skill set

that are doing it slightly at different campuses,

but they're not doing it full time

and none of them have a disability.

And frankly, it needs to have somebody with a disability

to understand how people with disabilities work with things

and understand the pain

and help people find the right sweet point

for using technology.

- Well, it definitely sounds like there's a lot

of obstacles in the way there.

Are there some places where you feel you've been able

to make some progress or some wins

or things that you're encouraged about moving forward?

- I love seeing people become excited about accessibility

and kinda blossoming.

I mean, my title is evangelist because, number one,

the priority thing for me to do

is to have other people become passionate

about accessibility and think about it in their work.

So taking somebody who's working on a website

and bringing them to the point

where they're the ones initiating the accessibility

and thinking about it.

I've been working with somebody

who works on our phone system.

And the guy keeps coming to me over and over again,

going, "Does this look accessible to you?

Does this look accessible to you?"

And he's working on all kinds of different things

that I would never have even dreamed of,

like making sure that the call center phones,

a person can actually read the caller ID on it

and things like that.

And it's just, it's beautiful.

I mean, that, to me, getting somebody inspired

to be accessible is the really promising thing.

The funding, the budget,

all that stuff definitely gets me down.

- Are there any things you're working on right now

or coming up in the future

that you're particularly excited about

or looking forward to working on?

- I am doing some data mining right now

of our automated testing tool software.

So I'm working on looking at ways to discover

what the things people are doing wrong the most are,

and then coming up with trainings on how to fix that.

So we're actually going through

and looking at our automated accessibility testing tool

and we're creating an application

that kinda goes through the 4,000 websites

that are enrolled in that tool,

and to see what is it that everyone's doing wrong

so that I can start creating a training regimen

for people that covers those things

that everyone's getting wrong.

And I don't know, that's kind of boring,

but it really is exciting to know

that I'm gonna have a huge impact

just by using a little bit of data.

- Yeah, no, it's really great hearing about that.

Well, one of the questions I pose or kind of a comment

that I've done in other episodes of this series

is just mention that I've been working

with accessibility for about 22, 23 years now.

And when I look back on when I first started doing that,

if I was back at that time 20-some years ago,

I would've thought we would've come farther

than we have at this point.

On the other hand, there's been an amazing amount

of things that have changed over the past years.

From your perspective, what does it feel like?

Does it feel like we've moved along at a reasonable pace?

Or are we ahead or behind?

Or kinda where do you feel about that?

- I think we still have a lot of education to do.

I think we're getting closer to actually being at a point

where we can say we've made some progress.

But the problem is, is people will create things

because we are a very artistic, creative...

We think, we build, we invent.

But if we don't teach those people

who have those tendencies to be the builders,

and the inventors, and the creators about disability,

and it's not about accessibility we have to teach them,

it's about disability we have to teach them,

we are going to continue to stay behind that eight ball.

I mean, I can look at my cell phone

and find at least one unlabeled button

in every single app I'm using.

We're still got a long, long way to go.

Yes, we're able to do a lot more today

than we were 22 years ago and 35 years ago

when I started working in this industry, most definitely.

But in other ways,

we're still really blocking people with disabilities.

I mean, let's look at the whole pandemic

that we've had to just come through.

There are still very few databases of COVID information

and visualizations that are inaccesible to people.

I don't know from day to day what the numbers are

in the United States because all the pages

that give me that information

have completely neglected to do that accessibly.

There are ways to do it accessibly,

but the people who are creating them didn't think

about disability, and they just wanted

to get this information up as quickly as possible.

And now the information is out there and it's too late.

I mean, we can't go back and fix it.

We could, but there's no initiative or willpower to do that.

- One of the things that I find it's kinda difficult for me

as I try to evangelize it with some of the clients

that are interested in designing new projects

aren't always ready to invest in accessibility.

And when it happens, often, it's about compliance issues.

And I think it's not well-understood that there potentially

is a huge return on investment

by making our products available to everyone-

- Exactly. - So they can participate

in that market.

- Exactly.

I'm recording a review of a product today

that actually did a really good job of accessibility,

except the one thing that they missed was the store.

So in the store

where you can actually buy different components

for the tool and upgrade your device,

they neglected to put the names of the items in there.

It's just a list of numbers.

And I can't figure out what cost $19 versus what cost $250.

And then that's a huge, huge opportunity

that they've missed.

I mean, world statistics say 21 million people.

Other statistics say 50 million people.

There is a bold fact that we use in the industry

that one in five people will have a temporary

or permanent disability in the next 10 years.

That's huge.

I mean, that's a massive number of people

that if you don't make things accessible,

they can't use your product and you won't get their money.

I mean, let's look at the baby boomers that are aging.

The more they age, the less they're able to contribute

to the economy because we're blocking them

from contributing by not making things accessible.

- Well, Lucy, I really appreciate you taking the time

to share your insights

and your frank assessments of where things are.

And hopefully, we can move forward.

But I appreciate you taking the time

to be with me on this conversation today.

- Not a problem. I really enjoyed it.