Jack Nicolai, Adobe, Senior Product Manager, Accessibility

Jack Nicolai talks about his experience working as a web developer in eLearning and then with accessibility at Starbucks. Now at Adobe, he describes how the compnay continues to build accessibility into their tools so that customers of all abilities are able to have an equitable experience. 

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Info about Accessibility at Blink

(compelling string music)

- Hello, this is Digital Accessibility:

The People Behind the Progress.

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

And and accessibility professional myself.

I find it very interesting as to how others

found their way into this profession.

So let's meet one of those people right now

and hear about their journey.

(compelling string music)

All right, well, let's get started.

And today I am meeting with Jack Nicolai from Adobe.

Hello, Jack, how are you doing today?

- Doing great.

Doing great, thank you.

- Well, I'm at my home office on Vashon Island near Seattle.

Where are you talking to us from?

- Also from Seattle itself.

- All right, well, yeah, it's been a difficult year

the past year, but it it's good to be able to see you.

We've talked by email and LinkedIn

and things like that before.

And I believe we've met at your facility (chuckles)

when facilities were open.

You were located at, it was the Fremont facility in Seattle,

is that correct?

- Yeah, that's right.

- Yeah, it's a great location right by the Fremont bridge.

Yeah, it's really (indistinct).

- Yeah, it's really nice.

Well, I thought we'd just start off

with you talking a little bit

about what your position is right now

and what you're involved with at Adobe.

- Yeah, so I'm a senior product manager of accessibility.

A lot of my focus is

on some of our Creative Cloud products,

as well as our web products or web properties

like adobe.com.

And so, how I engage with different teams

kind of can vary depending upon where a product is

in its life cycle, whether it's something brand new

that we're building.

And so I'm working closely with the product manager

and let's say the designers to help craft new features

with accessibility first in mind,

and then often acting as an educator

to help drive accessibility into that early work,

as well as then supporting engineering and test,

so that as they're building and validating the work

that they're also keeping accessibility in mind,

so really helping to drive accessibility

into all the different steps

of a software development life cycle.

And in some cases, myself and my teammates are working

with products that have been around a while.

And so really getting in

and evaluating what's the current state of that application

from an accessibility standpoint, providing feedback,

and helping to drive roadmaps to remediate those products

and raise the bar in terms of their accessibility.

- Well, I wanted to definitely talk with you a little bit

about some of the details of that work.

But one of the things that I like to do

in this series is just get a little bit of idea

of what people's backgrounds were

and how they ended up into accessibility.

It seems like in this area,

everybody has a different story that brought them here.

So, tell us a little bit about what your journey was like.

- Yeah, I think my first exposure to accessibility

was really early in my career.

I started getting into web development

near the year 2000.

And so in 2000 was actually the first time

that I got a job with really a technology related company,

which was an e-learning company

based out of the Minneapolis area.

And in working, of course, with an e-learning company,

they had a focus on accessibility

and everything that we were building.

And so I was really exposed to the need

and the value of accessibility early in my career.

I sort of diverged from it for a number of years

as I ended up doing a lot of Flash development,

which was never really accessible platform at the time.

And a lot of advertising,

I would say sort of myself in the woods for a while

when it to accessibility, but fast forward several years,

I ended up moving to Seattle

and pursuing a job with Starbucks

at their corporate location,

working as a front end development lead for starbucks.com.

And as a company, Starbucks really has a clear focus

on the customer.

And as a part of that focus on the customer

really includes ensuring access for those customers

really showed up first in their physical spaces

in making sure that their physical spaces are accessible,

and then more and more was growing into,

how do we make sure that all the digital touch points

are accessible as well,

whether that's the website or the mobile apps

or touch screens in the stores, different things like that?

And so really in that time,

my exposure and my interest in accessibility

really grew quite a lot.

And as you meet customers

who have a variety of different needs really helps,

I think, to open your eyes

about the kinds of gaps that exist, the kinds of needs

that people have, ways that you can support them.

Ultimately there's also a business interest as well,

which is we want customers to be able to buy our products

And so, I think those those things just align really well

in terms of their corporate mission.

So in that time at Starbucks,

really worked hard at actually starting to build up

a more concrete like accessibility program.

And during my time at Starbucks

actually had my own experience with temporary disability.

There's a sort of very rare neurological disorder

called mal de debarquement syndrome,

which most people experience after exposure

to some kind to passive motion.

You'll often hear about people who go on a cruise

for a week or something like that.

And they get back and they never really feel

like they've gotten off the boat.

They experience a continuous rocking sensation.

It causes problems with equilibrium, focus, fatigue,

a whole variety of symptoms,

but as a collection, they make it very hard to concentrate,

very hard to function.

And so I had my own experience with that

and ended up on temporary disability for a month.

Even beyond that, it was several months

in recovery, finding it very difficult to work.

And so, really helped to also personalize accessibility work

from my own perspective.

And so, sort of a number of things

in that experience working at Starbucks really

for me helped to crystallize both my desire

and my passion around accessibility.

And then I just really happened upon an opportunity

with Adobe, happened to see a job posting

for the work that I'm doing now.

And for myself, I grew up on Adobe and Macromedia products.

They were the things that allowed me

to drive my career forward, really to help...

I mean, it was being an expert at those as products

was really my career.

And so I really felt

and continued to feel a real responsibility

for helping to make Adobe's products accessible,

so that a young developer or designer, UX designer,

if you have a passion and you wanna work in the industry,

Adobe products are some of the premier products to use.

You need to be to able to use them to really,

I think, measure up in the workforce.

And so to be to enable more and more people

the ability to unlock their won creativity

really has been my call.

- Well, you're just going back a little bit.

You mentioned that you you'd done some early work

with accessibility and then there was a break,

and then you'd had that substantive work

with Starbucks and now into Adobe.

And so you've had kinda a long time spectrum for that,

but just from your own experiences

do you have any feelings of what has changed in the area

of accessibility for digital products and services

from the earlier times to now?

I know when I reflect on it,

I started working on it around 1998, '99.

There's some things I could talk to you about

where I'm kind of amazed at how much progress has been made.

And then there's other things where it's like,

wow, I really thought we'd be at a different place

when I was thinking about it 20 years ago.

Has anything come to mind along those lines?

- Well, certainly I think that

because of the web content accessibility guidelines

developing over time and those coming more robust

and people's awareness in the industry,

I think that has been a real benefit,

because people have a roadmap to some degree to follow

about ways to make their content more accessible,

whether they choose to follow that or not.

Tooling has gotten better, right?

Products like AX or other automated test tooling,

so that it enables people to have more insight

into the level of accessibility of their products.

I mean, those kinds of things just didn't exist before.

And so I think those are ways

that things have gotten better and grown over time.

I think there's always going to be a need for education.

And I'm trying to remember the program

with the colleges, Access...

Forget the name of it now,

but there's a program with universities

to help drive accessibility into curriculum.

And so things like that I think are really good signs

that accessibility and inclusive design continue

to become more and more included, I guess,

in the work that people are doing.

I talk to more and more product designers

and inclusive designers or UX designers

that are really excited about accessibility.

I think one of the the bigger challenges right now

is just barriers that we often find

within organizations often from people

who don't necessarily understand accessibility at the time.

And so they're often with that lack of understanding

often prioritize other things

in the business over accessibility.

And so it can be hard for someone like a product designer

who really wants to do the right thing

and is really trying to drive accessibility work

for their customers, driving up against problems

with product management not prioritizing that kinda work.

And so I think some things never change really,

but we still need to continue,

I think, that process of education.

- Yeah, well, hopefully we'll continue

to have more and more people paying attention to it.

And I know I feel as well that a lot of new people

that I see coming into it through my work

at the University of Washington will have some knowledge

or wanna talk about it,

and that's something that's different

than five, eight years ago.

Go ahead.

- I was just gonna say even recently,

we, in the last year or so,

hired one of our UX researchers

specifically for researching accessibility

within our organization,

which is just a position that didn't exist before.

And so, we really made the commitment

to center accessibility within our research group as well.

- Yeah, well, that's great.

There's definitely a progressive step

to get that going so early

in the product development process.

You mentioned your own experiences with what I guess is

the illness that you had, I guess would sort of be

like a cognitive physical challenge.

I'm not familiar with that one exactly,

but when I think about your different physical categories

like sight and sound and mobility,

and then there there's cognitive issues,

that to me is always the one that is the one

that digital products and services really don't dig into

or necessarily have the greatest solutions in my experience.

I've helped in volunteer situations with people

who've had accidents, traumatic brain injury,

and things like that.

When you're trying to help them,

even something as simply as setting up a Gmail account,

creating a right mental model for people

with cognitive issues can be really different.

So, yeah, I don't know what your experiences were,

but like, how does cognitive...

What were your experiences with that

and how does that fit into the work that you do today?

- Well, at the time, my experience,

because I was experiencing

in some respects kinda a sensory overload,

because of this constant rocking sensation,

it was taking up so much of my conscious energy.

It made it hard to concentrate

to actually sit down and get work done.

I couldn't focus.

And it created just a lot of like mental fatigue as well.

And I think that the cognitive piece is challenging.

It's hard, because I think that

because there are so many different forms

of cognitive disability,

you can try to move one solution forward,

but it only maybe helps three outta five people.

And in some cases you might actually have solutions

that are like in competition with one another.

I think that there can be a number of different

kinds of solutions to your point,

whether it's providing a Gmail account in some situation,

but I don't know.

I think that even WCCC struggles

with cognitive as well, the W3C.

I mean, I think that in conversations that I've had

that are people involved with the W3C

like it's a challenge to try to actually create standards,

actual standards around cognitive issues.

I mean, I think the best that we try to do

is to provide clear, simple interface

that doesn't do things like play animations

that are distracting.

I mean, it can be little things like that

using clear labeling,

using language that's going to be understandable

at lower grade levels just to make things simpler.

And I think ultimately in the end,

it comes down to user testing, right?

You've just gotta get it in front users

to find out whether or not it's challenging

for one audience or another.

So I don't know if that answers your question.

- No, that's great.

I mean, it's like I mentioned

at the very start of my comment.

I think the most difficult area

of the different physical challenges.

Maybe we could talk a little bit

about what you have going on right now.

Are there any, you know, highlights

from recent work things that Adobe has out there

that people may be familiar with or could look to

to kinda see the manifestations of what you've done?

I think people are always looking for examples

of what others are doing and finding success with.

- Yeah.

I'm sort of speaking for one of my colleagues,

but there is something called liquid mode for PDFs,

and it is a relatively new product release

for Acrobat and PDF that actually allows PDF content

to reflow to mobile devices

without actually originally being formatted for mobile.

There's a lot of like machine learning and AI

behind it that actually allows all that content

to be reflowed automatically,

which then makes that content accessible

in a lot of different form factors essentially.

We had released in the last, I believe, year support,

a level of support for voice control

in our product Adobe XD,

so that on Mac using voice control,

you can actually drive features of the XD application itself

like interacting with the menus and the canvas

and other things like that.

So for people who may have, let's say,

a motor disability,

typically unable to use the mouse,

they can use voice control.

And I think, we've made a lot of improvements for adobe.com

over the last few years.

For me, adobe.com is really the entry point

for most of customers to buy, subscribe, to learn,

to modify things about their account.

And so I think that really making sure

that the adobe.com experience is an accessible one

has been really important to me.

And then more recently,

because of the pandemic,

we've driven all of our events

to be completely online events.

And so I've worked very closely with the Adobe Max team,

which was last fall, and then our Adobe Summit conference,

which was just here in April

and really working to ensure

that we are delivering an accessible conference experience.

Adobe Max before the pandemic we had about,

I think our our last conference in person

was about 14,000 people.

There were over 250,000 registrations, yeah,

for the most recent Adobe Max. - Wow.

- And so that's a lot of exposure for that content

in a very short amount of time.

And so, helping to support features like captioning

for all the sessions, both recorded and live,

to make sure that it's an inclusive experience for everyone.

- Yeah, that's amazing, those numbers grew like that.

Well, there's one other thing I wanna ask you about,

which I ask a lot of people about,

'cause it's an interest area of mine

is kind of like how an organization

has its its overall accessibility process baked in.

So some organizations, especially larger ones,

may have a kind of a centralized accessibility group

that then informs individual divisions and departments

and provide resources and guidance

and things like that,

and others may be more laissez faire.

It may even just be about a certain evangelist

in one area and then that percolates to others,

and they try to string together a complete solution.

There's everything in between.

So I was kind of wondering how things are set up in Adobe.

- Yeah.

Well, more like you described at the beginning,

we do have a centralized team.

We do have a governance program

that we basically plug accessibility

into a larger Adobe governance program

that also manages other topics

like security and internationalization.

And so we leverage that

to help drive accessibility requirements

throughout the company

and to make clear what the expectations are

and to set milestones for teams

to actually meet around accessibility goals.

And as a part of that structure,

we also identify accessibility champions per product.

And actually depending upon the size of a product,

we may actually identify multiple champions,

just because to scale across the product.

So yeah, centralized team governance program and champions.

And then as you were saying earlier,

our centralized team then acts often on a consulting basis

to help drive accessibility requirements,

to help educate, and essentially be that centralized hub

for accessibility excellence.

- All right, great.

Well, yeah, I appreciate all of these insights

and also for you taking the time to chat with me today.

And good luck with all of your continued efforts

and accessibility at Adobe.