Michele A. Williams, M.A.W. Consulting, owner

Michele talks about her wide variety of experiences in accessibility. Much of her work aligned with user experience activities. This included graduate research and study, working as a researcher, and accessibility consulting. Michele has written many papers and articles and has a patent for a wearable device.

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

(dramatic 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 music)

All right, well, here we go with another episode

where I have the great opportunity to talk

with another accessibility practitioner.

And today I'm pleased to be speaking

with Dr. Michele A. Williams.

Hello, Michele, how are you today?

- I'm wonderful, how are you?

- Oh, it's pretty good.

And it's another day in my office on Vashon Island,

which is near Blink's headquarters in Seattle.

Where are you talking to us from?

- Currently in Charlotte, North Carolina,

but for only for the next few days (laughing).

- Alright, and where are you usually located?

- Well, yes, so Charlotte area,

but I'm taking a brief detour to come back, so,

we're moving houses, fun times.

- Alright, well, it's great to have you

as part of the program and usually the best place to start

is if you'd tell us a little bit about

what you're currently up to now.

- Awesome, so I am currently owner of M.A.W. Consulting,

LLC, Making Accessibility Work.

So as of 2020, right before the world events,

I decided to branch out onto my own and provide my services

in the form of independent consulting.

So I've been able to do that, thank goodness, since then.

And so I help with establishing accessibility programs,

giving guided consulting, accessibility audits,

and also training and workshops.

- Well, it's always a big leap to start doing that

on your own.

What have been some of the challenges besides starting it

during pandemic and that type of thing?

- Oh, just that, you know, besides, you know,

starting it during a global pandemic, you know,

I think also when you're a business owner,

particularly starting with just yourself,

you are everything,

you wear all the hats and so you may know your practice,

but you don't necessarily know all the other ins-and-outs

of running a business,

particularly since I didn't necessarily go

to business school before I did this,

so a lot of learning and even introspection of myself

as I go but it's been wonderful.

And I also meant to mention,

I can't forget mentioning research, to use the research too,

which is pretty much my other career.

Some sort of both UX research

as well as accessibility consultant.

- Well, I definitely wanna get a little bit more detail

about that later in our discussion,

but one of the areas I always like to find out about

is how you became familiar with the concept of accessibility

and then how you decided to make that

part of your regular work life?

- Yeah, funny enough, I gave a talk not too long ago

with a colleague called,

"How do I know you know accessibility?"`

Because we know that unfortunately

it's not yet the mainstream thing, right?

So everyone has a story.

So my story is firstly that I,

when I was coming out of high school,

decided to get a computer science degree.

I didn't even know quite what that was.

I just knew, to date myself, I came outta high school in

'99, so obviously Y2K, all of that,

I knew I was good at math, let's do this computer thing.

And so I really enjoyed that, really enjoyed programming,

but of course learned nothing about accessibility

or even user experience, even though I was doing that.

I didn't realize at the time

when I was making my outputs of my C program, you know,

spaced well and aligned and all of that,

I was trying to make it easier for my professors

to grade my homework.

I thought I just wanted an A,

but really I was doing user experience.

But as I decided to go to grad school after my Bachelor's,

which isn't always typical of folks

who had those kind of computer degrees,

they wanted to just start working.

But I decided to get a Masters of Software Engineering

at Auburn University under Dr. Juan Gilbert,

who's now at University of Florida.

And somewhere along that path of him

being our professor for a lot of our classes

and our advisor,

I just remember this moment of him asking,

"How would a person with a disability use

what you all are making in terms of the assignment

we were working on?"

And I'd never heard that question.

At that point I had at least heard about user experience

and HCC and HCI, but hadn't heard about accessibility.

And that just struck a chord with me.

It made technology make more sense to me.

It made what I was doing have more purpose.

And as soon as that started to resonate,

I knew that that's what I wanted to do.

Now, I didn't go do it right away,

but it always stuck with me that there's this idea

that we could be making technology accessible

to a group that we don't even often know about.

And so that was somewhat the start of the journey,

although fast forward five years

before I actually got into it.

- Well, and so then what was the next milestone

that brought you into actively working with it?

- So when I graduated with my Masters,

one of the things I was uniquely qualified to do

was voice user interface design.

Now, at the time, we didn't have the cool Alexa and Siri

and all of that.

That was more so those 800 numbers where you call,

like the Post Office or whomever and talk to a computer.

And so I had a friend who had, that was her passion,

that was her dream job, and they were hiring.

So I went and it was in the area in Maryland where I'm from.

So I was hired to do that, and I did that.

I thought that would be my career.

I was good at it, you know, we were running along,

but something happened, maybe the economy shifted,

I shifted, you know, things just fell into place

where I just remembered that passion I had

for accessibility when I first learned about it.

Again, I didn't even know where to start,

where to go, what to do,

but something just in me just said, you're not doing,

you're doing a job you're in

and that could be your career,

but it's not the career you wanted to do.

It's not the career you told people you wanted to do even.

I even remembered conversations with some mentors

where I said, "I'm gonna do that disability work,"

but I didn't pursue it.

And so I finally got to a point where I just said,

"No, I'm gonna look into it."

I realized I could not stay in that field

without that passion.

And so I just started looking up jobs

and I found one at a company

that's now known as Level Access.

At the time it was called SSB BART Group.

And the biggest thing is they said, "We'll train you,

we'll train you to learn how to test against,

at the time was more so Section 508, but WCAG."

And it was something that was kind of entry level,

but I didn't care.

I just wanted to learn more about this.

And that was the moment, getting that job,

working alongside people with disabilities,

learning the standards,

learning what I was supposed to be doing,

what we were all supposed to be doing.

And then eventually about a year into that,

I decided to go back to school one more time

to finish out my doctorate.

And so that's when my doctorate

focuses on human-centered computing.

So UX research with a lens on accessible technology

and disabled participants in research.

- Well, that's always a tough spot

is when you're first learning about it,

how do you do that?

And I guess you couldn't have ended up in a better spot

than with a bunch of people that were willing

to help guide you into that space.

And so, you know, during that time, were you participating

in their work with clients to solve problems?

- Exactly, so at the time, they've since expanded,

but we were still a small but mighty group at that time.

So it was primarily, particularly in the Virginia office,

we were working, so if you know anything about working

in DC, Maryland, Virginia,

a lot of things swirl around being government contractors.

So everything comes from the government

and then you branch out to contractors.

And part of Section 508 says

that the federal government,

who is the number one procurer of IT,

has to pick the most accessible software

of whatever they're trying to procure.

So that is the catalyst for companies to try and be

as accessible as possible.

And so we were one of the firms that could check that,

that could authenticate that your hardware, software,

or your web services were accessible against the standards.

And so each day it was checking these different systems

against that so that's how you got to know it.

You got to understand it, you got to understand the habits

developers tended to have and how to correct that.

And so that repetitive nature really ingrained me

in what does, what is at least the standard

for defining accessibility.

And then I was able to couple that eventually

with doing research with participants

who had various disabilities and learn the human side of it,

right, learn the usability side of it,

not just the standards,

and then start to learn the lived experience.

So all of that started to come together for me

in over the years.

It was great.

- Well, it must have been then a big difference

to suddenly be back in a academic setting

for the next stage.

What was that like and and how did that contribute?

- Whoo, you may know a few things.

And so yes, it's very difficult to go back to school,

particularly for a doctorate,

particularly in an environment that's a traditional,

not necessarily like an executive doctorate.

So I did have to leave Level Access at some point

because my program, which was at UMBC,

University of Maryland Baltimore County,

was more traditional.

We had to do, you know, meetings during the day,

travel to conferences, et cetera.

So it was a shift,

but thankfully things worked out

to where I was able to do that, able to go back full-time.

And I'm so grateful I did because it gave me some great

experiences and some great connections that, you know,

I still have to this day

and it let me be immersed in this world.

You know, when you're in that academic environment,

it's all about that subject area

and you don't get that when you're working

so appreciate that time for sure.

And was able to even, I always think about that movie,

oh, where the two men are interns at Google

when they're grown, you know,

I was at that point a more mature adult

but I still had some internships.

And so that was an interesting experience as well.

So I was sort of the elder statesman of our lab

and things like that, but I didn't mind,

it was helpful to be able to mentor

even in the capacity as a student.

And also I was very clear on why I had gone back to school,

which made the process probably go a little smoother.

'Cause I was very clear what I was there to do

and accomplish and was able to accomplish it.

- Well, pursuing graduate studies at the doctoral level

usually includes doing a lot of useful research

and work that can be utilized by other people.

What were some of the subjects that you pursued

in that part of your career?

- Awesome, so I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do

so I fell into sort of two areas

that ended up suiting me very well

and some of them were like full circle moments.

So the first was Fashion For The Blind

and so that started as a class project.

I was in an Assistive Technology class and we were,

you know, asked to come up with a problem set.

And I say that came full circle

because when I was very little,

what I wanted to be when I grew up was a fashion designer,

and that fell off around middle school

when we got the channel Bravo and I saw a real fashion show

and I was like, you know,

I'm not quite at that level if that's what it takes

so I backed off of that,

but I always loved clothes and fashion and so it struck me

that's such a visual medium,

how does that work if you can't see?

And so that began a two-year journey

into a lot of interviews and even prototyping

some various technologies around

how we can make that more accessible.

And then particularly it came to me

that there's objective information about clothing,

like color, size, what it is,

and then there's subjective

and that takes more of a human touch to understand

the fashion of the time and what goes together

and what coordinates and all of that.

So we explored different technologies,

so a crowdsourcing app called VizWiz that came out of,

oh boy, Carnegie Mellon,

and then a RFID kind of tagging system

for the objective side and explore some prototypes

and publish some papers around that.

So that was one, then it came down to some money

and my advisors put in a request for proposals

with Toyota Robotics at the time for navigation.

And that's something that comes up a lot,

blind navigation, particularly,

how do we improve on pedestrian navigation

for particularly those either using a cane or a guide dog,

but that particularly that last hundred feet, you know,

GPS does a great job of getting you near, say the door,

or near the building,

but how do you get to your actual destination?

So then my last three years were exploring,

creating a technology around that, but very much

doing it from a human-centered point of view.

- And during that time, did you have the opportunity

to share your work at conferences or,

I know when I'd go to events

I enjoy seeing a lot of that originating research

and to see what might be possibilities for the future?

- Absolutely, so all of my papers are on my LinkedIn,

you know, it's publish or perish,

you're required to go to at least

maybe three or four conferences for us every year.

So the biggest one for me was the ACM Assets Conference.

So the Association of Computing Machinery Assets Conference

was sort of my home.

Another big one, I never published a paper there,

but another big one is CHI,

the Computer Human Interaction Conference under ACM.

And then there were a few others scattered,

which also helped me to travel

and have these other experiences as well,

going and presenting to the conferences

or publishing for journals.

I've done that as well.

So definitely published everything,

it's all freely available if any of it interests you.

And we did have some really good,

I would say kind of almost seminal, kind of findings,

particularly from both the fashion work

and the navigation work,

because we took a different lens of not just starting

with what we thought the problem was,

but starting with the folks who are engaging

in those activities and talking with them first

about what they saw as sort of the gaps

in the current technology landscape.

- Well, so that brought you through another level

of your academic work and then back into the work world

after that, what was the next step?

- Yeah, back in the work world.

So to review my resume from there, so funny,

first stop was Intel for a little while,

working in wearables.

So again, another full circle moment of working

in somewhat fashion, but from a technology lens

so that was really fun.

They were doing a lot of kind of R&D-type work there,

but unfortunately I kind of caught them

at the tail end of that work.

And then Intel decided to move in different direction.

And so not long after that, I ended up at Pearson,

the learning company,

and that is where I spent about three years

as a senior UX researcher focused on accessibility.

And so my main gig was to run research

with disabled participants to start to glean

some of the insights about the education products,

particularly our college education products at Pearson.

However, we know that when you work in industry

and in a digital space,

the digital ecosystem is largely inaccessible.

And so when you are the accessibility specialist

at a company, you don't just do one job,

you really are trying to advocate and evangelize

accessibility throughout the company in that role.

And so that's a lot of what I did too,

because you can only do so much research

with an inaccessible product.

So first, sometimes we have to address

the basic accessibility of say,

the product we want to research in order to then do

the main gig that I was hired to do.

And can I say one thing as well,

just in case folks are listening,

they may hear me toggle between people with disabilities

and disabled identity first and people first,

just know that I'm aware that there are opinions on both.

And so that's almost why I go between both in terms of

whether it's people first or identity first.

I try to honor the viewpoints of anyone's way of addressing

themselves, and I hope that using one or the other

is not necessarily offensive,

but rather trying to acknowledge that there are,

at least right now, currently two ways to do that,

that are equally valid in their intentions

and in their implementations

and in people's feelings about them

so that's why I tend to toggle between the two.

- Well, thanks for that clarification.

I think we tend to be in a community that is very receptive

to anyone involved in moving things forward.

And I think that's always the, you know,

the biggest banner or emblem we can have is that

we're showing in our work that we're actively contributing

to having a more inclusive world for our products

and services.

- Yeah, that's the thing.

It's not even the language,

the language wouldn't matter if we actually had the access.

So yeah, that's the most important.

- So that brought you into, you mentioned your work

with Intel and Pearson providing accessibility expertise

in those areas.

How did that differ from the work that you'd done earlier on

a consulting basis?

Were there some similarities or new challenges

in taking that on?

- Interesting, so when working, for instance,

at what's again now known as Level Access,

in some ways people are coming to you

to ask about accessibility

so you don't have to make as much of a case.

However, they're not still always concerned

about accessibility.

Sometimes they just want to be able to sell, you know,

this is a box they have to check to sell

versus if you're coming in as an accessibility specialist

to a company that doesn't focus on accessibility,

sometimes you end up having to start to make the case first

and then you are able to really implement the work

that you do so different skill sets,

but all of it is still,

and the word that I always am mindful to bring up

is ableism.

All of it still goes back to the unfortunate fact

that in society we have this devaluing

of disabled bodies, right, or disabled minds

and so we don't see disability, you know,

there's Alice Wong's book, "Disability Invisibility."

And so this idea of invisibility of disability

still creeps in no matter whether you're at a firm

that's doing accessibility work or not,

you still come up against these challenges of making people

even see disability, see accessibility,

and then implementing the work and educating around that.

So different but very similar still.

- Well, so we've come through a lot of different parts

of your career and now you have

your own consulting organization, you know,

what are some of the things,

looking back that you maybe you've seen

where you'd wish possibly the accessibility community

had made larger strides or maybe there are things

you're exceptionally proud and excited about.

Or maybe just things in your own work that you're looking

forward to, what's the future thoughts look like for you?

- Awesome, so I'll toggle between all of those.

So what I see is, at least for now,

finally at least a more talk about the,

even the word accessibility, you know,

was a mystery up until a few years ago.

So even though WCAG came out 20 years ago,

we're finally at a point where people even know the name,

the word, and they understand that it doesn't just mean,

you know, I can access this on the train or on a tablet,

right, they know it has to do with disability.

So I'm excited about more people knowing more.

I think it was Matt May had a thought that I had as well,

which is we need a lot of people knowing

at least a little bit.

And I think we're close to a lot of people

knowing just a little bit.

My concern has always been that accessibility specialists

sometimes talk amongst themselves a little too much

and talk in a lingo amongst themselves

that doesn't always invite other people in.

So there's a lot of people that, for instance,

are critical of how people program,

how people are engaging in technology.

But then sometimes we have a habit of, you know,

being so upset that we don't then reach out.

And so that's part of what I try to do

when I say making accessibility work,

I wanna make it such that it's not just

that accessibility specialists are these knighted, you know,

like special group, it's more like everyone knows the basics

and then specialists do the hard stuff 'cause

we have a hard time getting to the hard stuff

because we're still teaching everyone the basics.

So I wanna make sure that it's clear even if you make a

mistake, we're not gonna blast you.

You know, we wanna just continue to encourage you

so that everyone can just ingrain the basics into it.

Then we can start getting to solving

some of these other problems.

But that's because everyone else's brain power will be in it

too and we can collectively get there.

So I'm both encouraged but also I still hope

that we're allowing people to join us in this journey.

Those of us that have been focused on it,

I hope that we're able to bring more people on board.

And so I see, and I also am encouraged by, the group

that's doing XR access,

the trying to establish accessibility

at the beginning of AR and VR, these new technologies

because we know that's where it starts.

The standards and the creation of the foundation

of these technologies,

they often start without accessibility built in

and then we're always adding accessibility later.

So it'll be wonderful if a new technology

started accessible for once and that could be the way

that we just do things going forward.

- I'm sure there that you keep busy on a regular basis,

but are there any particular new projects or technologies

or techniques that you're personally entrusted

in exploring and learning more about?

- It's funny, I almost need to narrow down my focus,

I realize,

because it sounds like accessibility is a specialty,

but then there's specialties within the specialty

and I do find that sometimes you can't,

you can't learn it all.

So I think that I've at least decided

to somewhat lean more industry because I feel like,

again, there's a opportunity to make sure

that the technology people are using even right now is,

you know, we need that right now to be accessible

because technology's too pervasive not to.

So I'm encouraged by just anything that, any kind of tools,

and I'm not talking about overlays like accessiBe,

but any other tools that will help make accessibility

part of the design and development process

for the tools that we create now.

I'm also still very passionate about research

because we say, for instance, bring in disabled users,

you know, and get their opinions

but there's something to doing that correctly, right?

Again, if you're not familiar with disability,

if you're not familiar with assistive technology,

I've seen people come in and not even understand

what was going on.

Like you did all this to recruit someone,

they sit down to use, say magnification or screen reader

or voice control

and the person's just sitting there like, you know,

they're just amazed at the computer

is talking in a different way,

let alone understanding what's going on.

So I still think there's a lot of education to come,

but I'm excited about the opportunities to do that.

Online courses, all these other mechanisms we have

to do that so and I'm gonna be putting my,

I'll just say that I'll be putting my perspective

into some of those resources soon and very soon.

- Well, Michele, it's been a pleasure speaking to you today.

I appreciate you taking the time to contribute to this

and hopefully we'll meet up in the future

at a physical conference.

- Yeah, that'd be great.

Thank you so much for the opportunity

and I hope this was insightful and encouraging

and helpful to your viewers.

- Thank you very much.

Hey, we did it.