Meryl Evans, independent, Professional Speaker and Trainer

Meryl Evans is an accessibility evangelist who works as a trainer, speaker, and consultant. Her early career was with business writing and digital marketing. She then became involved with making and instructing how to make high-quality captions for video. Meryl stresses the importance of going beyond digital accessibility and considering the touchpoints with the physical world. That includes offering multiple formats for interacting with a product or service.

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

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- Hello, this is Digital Accessibility:

The People Behind the Progress.

I'm Joe Welinkske, 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 are

with another episode where I get the opportunity to chat

with an accessibility practitioner,

and today I am pleased to be visiting with Meryl Evans.

Hello Meryl, how are you today?

- Hi Joe.

I'm doing great.

Thank you for having me.

How are you today?

- Everything is off to a pretty good start,

and I am in my home office of Vashon Island,

which is near blink's Seattle headquarters office.

Where are you talking to us from?

- Well, I am talking to everyone from Plano, Texas,

which is right by Dallas.

We're having beautiful weather right now,

so it's fall and it's a busy time of the year

for so many people.

- Well, you certainly have a long resume

of activities within the accessibility community

and with your work, but you're probably the best person

to introduce yourself maybe to people

that have not met you yet,

so tell us a little bit

about the work that you're involved with.

- So I'm self-employed

at Meryl.net, where I'm a professional speaker,

trainer, and accessibility marketing consultant

who is a Certified Professional in Accessibility

Core Competencies, CPACC for short.

As a speaker I talk about diversity, equity

and inclusion with the focus

on people with disabilities and accessibility.

On the consulting side, I work

with marketing and communication leaders

to ensure their departments create accessible content,

and I work with companies

to help them improve their accessibility

and disability inclusion efforts.

So I was born hearing free, well,

in medical terms, profoundly deaf.

It came with this accent,

so I grew up learning how to speak and lip read.

Many people assume I know sign language, and I don't,

but it's not a good thing or a bad thing.

It just is.

It's what works for me.

- Well, we'll definitely make some links

to your TEDx talk that you've done,

and you're very visible online,

but all of this had to start somewhere,

so why don't you take me back

in time and talk about

how accessibility first was something

that you became aware of in your lived life or work life,

and then we can kind of move forward

and see how you found your way into this profession.

- I've known about accessibility for years,

and I wish I had gotten into it sooner.

We know how we all wish we could change something

in the past.

The reality is if we could do that the outcome could be

very different.

We're going to stop playing the what if game here.

Anyway, in 2018 and 2019, I started making videos

about high quality caption.

They caught the attention

of the organizers at an accessibility conference.

They invited me to speak and that was that.

That was that.

I felt like I finally found my place,

and decided I wanted to work in accessibility.

I wasn't sure how, but I was on a mission

to figure it out.

Meanwhile, as a result of appearing at the conference,

I got another speaking opportunity,

and it snowballed into many more speaking opportunities,

including TEDx.

I never dreamed of being a speaker or a trainer,

because I was realistic.

I knew I had an accent, and it could be a problem.

All these invitations proved otherwise.

Anyway, eventually the owner

of an accessibility consulting firm,

he saw my writing on LinkedIn.

I originally started out doing marketing

for them and I also studied

and passed the exam to get my accessibility certification.

So now I do client project as an accessibility consultant.

- Well, you're certainly very busy and visible today

in this work.

Had this been a career change for you?

What were you involved

with before you got into your most recent work?

- I've been self employed since 2005,

and my focus was writing and digital marketing,

so I was able to use the digital marketing

to help me break into accessibility,

and so pretty soon I was doing both

and I still do both,

but I'm hoping to do more on the accessibility side

because that's what I love.

That's my passion, advocating for people with disability

and accessibility keeps me going every single day.

- And how did it move forward

for you to educate yourself about the various parts

of accessibility that we use on a professional basis?

Were there certain communities that you got involved with

or certain places that you looked for information?

How did that work for you?

- Well, when I share content on LinkedIn,

I consider myself a student, simply sharing what I learned.

So I learn every day from other accessibility leaders

and influencers, so that can be on Twitter.

That could be on LinkedIn.

That could be just reading articles online

that I find through various resources.

I always want to be learning,

and applying that, and sharing that with others

because we can't expect to know it all.

There is so much in accessibility to learn.

That's why I wear this shirt, Progress Over Perfection

with the accessibility icon in the O,

because people get so overwhelmed

at the thought of, "Where do I start",

that kind of kind of thing.

They just don't know.

I'm like, "Just take that first step."

It doesn't hard to be big,

and sometimes you take two steps back, and that's okay.

You just keep moving forward and keep learning.

I mean, it takes a lot to build completely a culture

of inclusion that thinks about accessibility for everyone.

Don't forget your own employee, not just your customers

and your vendors, but your own employees.

So, it's progress over perfection.

- Well yeah, I'm glad you brought up the part

about our own employees because I think sometimes,

in digital accessibility, we're focused

on supporting our customers and clients and external facing

yet within a lot of our own organizations,

we don't provide the tools and technologies and processes

and culture, as you mentioned,

for everyone to be able to participate regardless

of their physical challenge.

- That's very true.

I have heard three people reach

out to me and they shared their stories

that they have a disability,

but they don't feel supported in their company,

almost like they hired them to check off a box.

"We hired someone with a disability,

but we didn't give them the support they need.

We didn't give them the tools they need to thrive

in their role and the tools they need to grow

in the career,"

so they just put them in their desk, and that's that,

and you can't do that.

That's just not fair to anyone.

People with disabilities have so much to offer

if you would just give them a chance.

Get to know them.

See, because we've been excluded so long,

and for so much of our lives,

it's that exclusion that had given us the lived experience

to come up with creative solutions, innovative solutions,

work arounds, and that kind of thinking you just can't get

with someone who hasn't had that adversity in their lives.

- Well, now that you've been working as a consultant

in accessibility, what are some of the areas that you find

that you most often have to address?

Are there any particular issues or challenges

that come up regularly that you have to solve

for your clients?

- Actually no.

It seems like pretty spread out.

I mean it could be, in some situations,

it can be making sure you have accessibility

for your own people.

That's a big one.

Oh, another big one is so many people,

when they think about accessibility,

they're thinking about digital accessibility,

but accessibility is also physical, in person, non-digital,

and that's why I just wrote an article called,

"360 Degree Accessibility",

and too often companies,

the way they have their organization chart,

the tech team was siloed and so they don't think

about the physical side of things,

and the physical side of things, that customers support,

customer service, is siloed away from the digital side,

so it's got to find a way to bring it all together

and think about the full circle.

I love to tell the story.

I've told it so many times,

people probably start reciting it with me.

When I had to get my first COVID test,

I was able to make the appointment online no problem,

but I'm sighted, so I don't have those barriers,

but it was not until I got to the pharmacy

that I've lived by for more than 20 years

that I ran into a barrier.

You had to go through drive-through for testing,

and there were so many things wrong with that.

First of all, there was a window

and it was reflecting the outside, so you couldn't see in,

and then they were talking

to me through a speaker and with a mask on,

so every barrier possible, so meanwhile, I heard a story

from someone else who wanted

to use the drive through testing,

but they told her she had to come in.

She had a mobility disability,

and she wanted drive through.

Then a third person with another disability, he's blind,

and he could not make his own appointment online.

So we have three people

with three different disabilities,

all having a different barrier in one process,

and that's to get COVID testing.

- Well I like your term

that you used about 360 degrees accessibility.

That's a very interesting way to think about it,

and most of the people that I interview

on this program, their focus is

on the digital accessibility,

but we have had several people

where their products also are distributed

in physical environments

and they're also responsible for internal accessibility,

and so I think your idea about the 360 degrees is good

for all of us to just look around our own world,

and see what we may be missing that we can contribute to.

- Yeah, the little things make a huge difference.

There was a time when I went online for tech support,

for online chat,

and the first thing they asked me was,

"Can you give us a call back number

in case we get disconnected?"

I'm like, "I would prefer to do that,

because that's not the best way to contact me",

and I submitted a suggestion

to the company to add a second option,

so that's the other thing I'm trying to push

for is always offer

at least two modern communication options

or in person route,

so the next time I contacted tech support,

they asked me, "Could we get a call back phone number

or email address?"

Problem solved, so that was great.

So we need to offer multiple options,

because not everybody wants to default

to the most common one.

- Well you have already mentioned a lot

of things that we can look to improve,

but I always like to check in to see

if there are any particular issues that you feel need

to be addressed by accessibility professionals,

maybe things that we haven't paid enough attention to

or possibly just things that you're particularly excited

to work on looking into the future,

so any and all of those that you would like to comment on?

- Well I like to start small because I think

when you show

how the smallest things make the biggest difference,

it gets people excited because a simple solution,

so that two communication was a big one.

So often when we fill out forms,

they ask for a phone number,

but they don't give us the opportunity to say,

"Hey text me, and don't call me."

And I can't tell you how many times I put my phone number

in and I get a phone call, which is what I don't want,

so it's okay to make the contact field required,

just give us choices.

One airline made me so happy

when getting my ticket and they gave me a choice

of email, text, or automated phone call.

That was wonderful because the littlest things,

it felt like I didn't have to stress at all

that they could possibly call me.

My poor spouse, I give out his phone number far more

than my own because they kept calling me.

So I'm a big girl.

I would like to handle my own communication,

so it's very empowering when you make those small changes.

- And looking forward to the future for you,

I assume you'll do more consulting work,

but are there any other special activities

that you might be getting involved with in the future?

- Well actually I just joined the board

in my local community.

I'm very excited about that,

and we have a good diversity advocacy committee.

It's a mouthful, isn't it,

and I'm really excited about that because I

and one other person were the first people

with disabilities in their program,

at least that they know about,

because we know a lot

of disabilities are not apparent, right.

So because of that,

they established the committee to make sure

that all underrepresented group are thought about,

and that we make our experiences inclusive,

so it's a volunteer thing,

so it's very exciting to see my local organization thinking

about this, and wanting to make change for the better,

so it makes me happy to know

that they care and it makes it possible

for other organizations to adopt this same thinking.

It doesn't mean you have to go out and spend lots of money.

That not the case.

A lot of things that can be done

to create an inclusive organization don't cost anything

or very little, and it's worth it,

so that's the thing I'm most excited about,

because I'm making change outside

of my professional career.

- Well, as a speaker, I mean everyone who is a speaker

on topics, the pandemic's certainly changed a lot

of things,

and so maybe those of us that had mainly spoke

in person got used to being online.

For others being online was the first time

that we were able to get out there.

How has it been for you?

Do you find there are more challenges, or that you enjoy one

or the other, virtual experience versus physical experience?

- I love that question.

So my very first conference that I mentioned earlier,

that was in person in 2019.

So when I started getting invitations to speak it was

after the pandemic hit,

so it just broke down the wall.

I've always been comfortable with public speaking;

however, I like to script out my presentation,

because it makes me a better speaker.

It helps me focus on speaking clearly

like I am right now,

rather than thinking of the next thing I'm going to say.

So it was perfect,

so I could get the hang of it, get the hang of speaking,

and then January 20, wait January, 2022, this year,

I went to a big, big event,

and got to speak in person there,

but I had been speaking

for so long before that point that it was an easy change.

I like both actually.

I enjoy in-person events.

I do get overwhelmed with all the noise.

It's makes it harder to listen

and listening's so important to me,

because I know what I know.

I want to learn from other people.

So that's why I love online meeting and online events,

because it's quieter.

People are less likely to talk over each other,

and you don't have the noises from the network setting

or the restaurant,

I can hardly go to restaurants anymore,

because it's taking away the joy of somebody else's company.

- Well, that's very useful

and interesting perspectives on your experience with that.

And Meryl, it's been a pleasure to have a chance to chat

with you for a short time here.

Hopefully we can meet in the physical world

at some point, but we'll definitely include information

about your activities in the show notes for this program.

- Thank you so much for having me, Joe.

It was a joy to have a conversation with you.

- All right, well thanks a lot.

Bye-bye Meryl.