Jeremy Katherman, USAA, Lead Accessibility Advisor

Jeremy talks about his early work with accessibility through tech support at his university. After that he has enjoyed a lengthy career at USAA where he helped build an accessibility team that supports activities throughout the organization. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

(upbeat music)

- Hello, this is Digital Accessibility,

the People Behind the Progress.

I'm Joe Wilinski, 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, here we go with another podcast episode

where I have the fortunate opportunity to talk

with an accessibility practitioner,

and today I am meeting with Jeremy Katherman.

Hello, Jeremy, how are you today?

- Hello, Joe, great.

It's good to talk with you.

- Well, I'm in my Vashon Island home office,

which is near Blink's headquarters office in Seattle.

Where are you located?

- I'm in San Antonio, Texas

in my office.

- Oh, all right.

A home office there?

- Yep.

- Well, it's good to have you, to chat with you

about your journey in accessibility.

Good place to start is always what you're involved

with right now.

- What I'm involved with right now, boy.

So I work for a company called USAA,

and I'm their lead accessibility advisor,

and I'm continuing to build up

the accessibility office there, and we've got a good team.

We're continuing to grow.

And I work to help our members

with disabilities be able to access

the USAA's goods and services.

- Well, it's a big organization.

I'm sure that's a really big job,

and I definitely wanna talk about it

in a little bit more detail, but why don't we start

by just kind of going back in time,

and maybe if you can pick out some of the early areas,

or earlier times in your career where you,

life or career that you started to think

about accessibility.

- Sure, so way back when, I had a kind of tech support job

at the university, and one of the tech support jobs was

to take care of the disabilities lab.

So I got a lot of practice with screen reader software

like JAWS, and it was kind of a opportunity for me

to make a niche.

And I just, yeah, I've always wanted to help people,

and it was a good opportunity from there.

I continued to develop my career,

and I wanted to be a web programmer.

Actually joined USAA as a network engineer,

and then moved over to web programming,

where accessibility came back,

and I had an opportunity to work on with some great folks

on some accessibility, digital accessibility work,

and just kind felt like I had found something

that really motivated me,

and it's something that I enjoyed doing,

and I've been sticking with it,

and enjoying the opportunities to help

make the world a better place through accessibility.

- Well, yeah, let's just kinda stop at the point

where you mentioned your work at the university level.

Where was that at, what school?

- I was at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

They had a, I'm not sure I remember what it was called

anymore, Center for Disabilities,

but I worked with the folks there, got to know

some great folks just helping 'em to do research,

and get their software fixed,

'cause that was my job at the time.

Interestingly, I met, a few years later back in San Antonio,

I met another person that I had helped there,

and it was great to connect again.

- And so at the university, that's an area

where quite a lot of accessibility practitioners get

their start in supporting a university department like that,

so I imagine you had some decent resources,

and mentors, and guidance to start informing you

about what accessibility was all about.

- My, at the university, it was mostly

about the tech support, and I learned kind of as I could,

and the leader there of the Center for Disabilities was able

to help me a little bit, but most of my passion

around accessibility came when I started working at USAA.

I had a great mentor in Rob O'Connell,

who helped me to kinda hone my my craft a little bit,

and get my feet under me,

and together, we've built a team at USAA.

- Well, you've been doing that for quite a while now.

I imagine that's been a big effort.

How have things evolved at USAA over the time

that you've been involved with accessibility there?

- Oh, it's changed a lot.

So initially, it was very much design-focused,

and they were just, Rob was doing it by himself

for a long time, and I joined him,

and slowly, we continued to grow the team.

Of course, organizational changes, and leadership changes,

we moved around quite a bit within the organization

as you do at big organizations, but over time,

we continue to grow and mature,

and from each organizational change, learn a little bit,

bring in some of the strengths from that organization.

We worked in the document space for quite a while,

and that was great to establish some relationships there

with the folks working on making digital documents

accessible, and we developed new tools to help understand

what our members' preferences are as far as communications,

and built out our team with experts from different areas

of accessibility, including facilities,

and a lot of digital accessibility of course,

and documents, and yeah, ups and downs,

but it's been a great ride.

- Well, how is it organizationally set up now?

Is accessibility sort of like a top level that supports

all parts of the organization, or do individual departments

or divisions take responsibility for accessibility

for whatever product they're working on?

- Good question.

So we kind of had a hybrid model for quite a while,

where accessibility testing was centralized,

and the different areas of the business would request

accessibility testing to be done,

but ultimately, they were responsible

for their own accessibility.

Since then, we've kind of evolved, and the responsibility

for even doing the testing has been moved out

to the areas of the business, and that's required

a lot of training, and it's been kind of a bumpy ride,

but I think it's the right model,

just at least for us, because we just couldn't scale

to the degree to be able to adequately serve our members,

and provide the accessibility testing that we needed.

- You mentioned your team a couple of times.

How is your team configured with types

of roles do you have within your accessibility organization?

- We have some folks that came from accessibility testing.

Some folks that came from accessibility design,

accessible design, and some folks that came

more from a digital standpoint.

We've got folks that are responsible

for managing the accessibility

of our third party relationships and procurement.

And then we've got our leader,

Mary Gates is certified in ergonomics,

and we've got a lot of really great skill and expertise

on the team in diverse areas that we all kind of bring

together to lead, and guide, and train, and push

the enterprise in the direction that we wanna go.

- And you mentioned, I believe you mentioned

that it's digital services,

and also facilities that you have to address.

That's definitely, there are definitely

a lot of different things

between those two different parts of accessibility.

Now, how is that balanced,

and what types of things do you do on the facility side?

- That's a good question.

So with the COVID pandemic, our facilities have been

largely closed, which has allowed us to be able to focus

on some of our digital maturity, and policies,

and standards, but we had a member of our team

who's a master architect, and familiar with the laws,

and then we also worked with various third parties

to be able to do assessments,

and kind of understand what our state was,

and work on policies and procedures to ensure

that the facilities are being maintained

in an accessible way, and adhere to applicable laws,

and that we manage that appropriately

so that things don't get out of control.

- On the digital accessibility side,

do you work with designers to educate them

on how to bring accessibility into their role

if they're not familiar with it?

Or is it more of consulting

where your team gets actively involved

with the design of new products?

- It's a little bit of both.

So of course, we work very hard to bring folks,

to train folks in accessibility awareness for disabilities

and design.

We've some really great trainings on designing

accessible products that help to expand

thinking outside the box as far as accessibility.

One of the major values that USAA is innovation.

We've done innovation challenges centered

around accessibility, and that gets them to

reinforce that through trainings, and awareness,

and campaigns, and such with designers, and developers,

and whomever, but then corollary to your question,

of course, is the other part of that,

which is the consulting part, and it's not all

about just helping people become committed

and care about accessibility.

It's also getting down and solving difficult problems.

And so that may mean that we spend time working

directly with the development team,

or with a design team to solve difficult problems

to be able to serve our members with disabilities.

- I imagine with probably so many projects going on there

that you have solutions in some cases that can be applied

across different projects, and other things that are unique.

Is there a knowledge base, how do you track what you've done

and what's available moving forward to help

in new development efforts?

- I'm not sure.

Rephrase your question.

- Well, I'm sure that you're always coming up

with a lot of solutions for new design issues

that may come up, accessibility solutions,

and then that has some development component.

Is there some format that you use for making sure

that you keep track of the solutions that you've come up

with so that you can bring those

into other situations in the future?

- Yeah, of course.

So there are two major ways that we do that.

We have a component library in which we try to bake in

accessibility into those components.

So as we learn patterns and things that work,

we'll bake those into the components,

make them easier for designers and developers to use.

And then in addition, we track on a internal website

kind of some of our governance decisions

and patterns that we've established

for reference by our accessibility advisors.

- There's probably a lot of things

that you've been really satisfied with over the years.

Looking forward, are there any areas,

maybe not specifically USAA, but just generally that you see

as areas for accessibility practitioners

to be paying attention to in the coming years,

maybe areas that you feel still need a lot more effort?

- Boy, there's a lot of work that needs to be done.

I think that the technical problems will get solved.

For me, the thing that really is the difficult problem

to solve is changing people's minds

about accessibility and about disabilities.

There's so much bias and counter motivations

to have to overcome, and I think that's, to me,

that's the greatest challenge is to get into people's,

to tap into their motivations,

and help them to change their minds about accessibility,

whether it be a business leader,

or a developer, or designer.

I've been very fortunate in that accessibility aligns

very closely with USAA's mission,

and I have not had a whole lot of pushback,

although it happens.

But I've thought a lot about this, and I think of it

in terms of a continuum for motivation.

I call it the commitment compliance continuum,

and on one side, and you wanna tap into what drives people,

and try and move them along that continuum

towards being committed to accessibility.

But somewhere along that line, they're gonna,

they're doing accessibility for, either because

they're committed to it and they want to do it,

or because they're checking the box,

and they want to be compliant.

And knowing what motivates people, I think, is

so important to being able to get accessibility done

so that everyone is able to have an equal experience,

and the accessible experience that they deserve,

and sometimes that means pulling compliance kind of levers.

Sometimes that means pushing them

to be committed to accessibility,

but they're gonna be somewhere in between there.

And hopefully over time, you can change people's minds,

and push them along from doing it because they have to,

to doing it because they want to,

and I think that would be the biggest challenge is to help

people want do accessibility, because they want to help

everyone, help folks with disabilities, help themselves

later in life when everyone gets a disability,

and yeah, I think that's the biggest challenge.

- Well, Jeremy, it's been great to have the opportunity

to hear a little bit about your journey,

and how things are are going at your organization,

so thank you for taking the time to share

your expertise in this area.

- Oh, my pleasure.

Thanks for having me, Joe.

- Thanks a lot.

Bye bye.