Words of inspiration, a great presentation. I'm sure we all learned something today that we may
not have known previously. When you slow down... I see we have another interpreter up. Hello, Miss
RK. All right, um, and again, there's probably something you learned today that you didn't know
before. You may or may not have known, uh, there's going to be a lot of new acronyms. DIA, again, the
executive order on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce. You're
going to hear that a lot today. Just know that again, that it was the executive order
by President Biden, E.O. 13985. And one of the takeaways from the last presentation,
I think, was very important. Is always remember, accessibility must be a priority.
Ms. Bale, coming from the CRCL, the Civil Rights, Civil Liberties office... Excuse me,
it always makes me think about the law, right? So again, it's more than just 508, it's a law,
it is a humanistic approach, civil rights, providing equal access to information for all.
All right, so I'll get off of my... my sandbox, as they always say,
because I'm always a full advocate for everything accessible. All right, next... uh,
our next speaker who's going to provide us with our keynote remarks is going to be Andy Imparato,
Executive Director of Disability Rights California, DRC. Andy, are you available?
Let's make sure that we have Andy come in. >> Yeah, I'm here. Can you hear me okay? >>I can see you,
and I can hear you loud and clear. Can you do the same for me? Yes, I'm great,
yeah. All right, excellent, excellent. So one more time,
I'm just going to introduce you. So now we have Andy Imparato, Executive Director of
Disability Rights in California, DRC. He's going to provide us with keynote remarks.
How are you today, Andy? Everything as well? I'm good. I'm... I'm fighting a cold,
and the cold is winning, so you can hear it in my voice and I apologize, but I'm gonna do my best.
It is absolutely fine. I think we've all had to deal with that these last couple of years,
but we are very excited and very happy to have you come and present for us today.
I'm very sorry that you don't feel too well today, you're a little bit under the weather,
but I know you're going to do the best that you can. Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having
me. All right, first, let me just thank, uh, Aunika Johnson who's been, uh, working very
hard on this event and Vince and everybody in the Office of the Chief Information Officer,
and also, uh, the folks from the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
I remember when the Department of Homeland Security was created
initially. I was working in Washington DC at the time for the American Association
of People with Disabilities, and I remember Secretary Terry Tom Ridge,
who was the first Secretary. He called in a meeting of disability leaders and told
us that he wanted the Department of Homeland Security to be the best cabinet level agency
as an employer of people with disabilities and in its interactions with the public,
with people with disabilities in the public. So, I think you all had a great start with Tom Ridge.
As you may know, after he left the department, he chaired the board of the National Organization
on Disability for many years. He had a hearing disability himself, he was a disabled veteran,
and just had a very strong commitment. So, I just wanted to honor that history today.
Um, just to fill in a little bit of my background, I've been at Disability
Rights California for about three years. I started a month before the pandemic,
so it's been an interesting journey. We have about 340 employees, 26 offices across California,
and most of us have been working remotely for the last three years.
Um, I also am a former Fed. I have worked for all three branches of the federal government,
including a stint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when Paul Miller was a
commissioner there. He was a disabled lawyer who was appointed by President Clinton.
Um, and I was Senator Harkin's Disability Policy Director when he was the chair of the
Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. And after I give this talk, I'm headed
to Rochester for a Deaf Employment Summit that's being hosted by the National Technical Institute
for the Deaf, and Senator Harkin is going to be there, so I'm excited to get to see him.
Um, so I want to just start by thinking about accessibility as being connected to the mission
of the Department of Homeland Security. The mission statement on your website says,
"With honor and integrity, we will safeguard the American people, our homeland, and our
values." And I think one of our values as Americans is that we are a country that
tries to provide equal opportunity to everyone who comes here. Everybody has an equal chance,
or we want everybody to have an equal chance to succeed, to achieve their goals,
to participate fully in the American dream. And I think that's hard to do if you don't
have accessibility. So, I think it's directly connected to your mission.
One of your guiding principles is to uphold privacy, transparency,
civil rights, and civil liberties. So again, accessibility helps you uphold
civil rights and is connected to one of your guiding principles. And then it says
that DHS will implement safeguards for civil rights and civil liberties
when developing and adopting policies and throughout the performance of its mission.
So one way to think about that is, you want to have accessibility baked in to anything you're
doing, a new policy that you're developing, a new program that you're developing, a new building or
new technology that you're purchasing. You want to be thinking about accessibility from the get-go.
So what I was going to do today, and I'm going to be brief, is just touch on some different
ways to think about accessibility. Sometimes when we have conversations about accessibility,
it can be very technical and the technical stuff is important. It's important that the
technology work for people who are using screen readers. It's important that the building,
you know, the design of the built environment, meet the standards for
wheelchair accessibility and other forms of accessibility. But I think there's a way of
thinking about accessibility as more of a philosophy or a culture, and not just kind
of technical compliance, and that's really what I wanted to focus on in my keynote.
Um, so, you know, first thing to me is, accessibility is a reflection of
our values. When Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, they established
four goals for public policy for people with disabilities, and accessibility advances all
four of these goals. The first one was equality of opportunity, second was independent living,
third was economic self-sufficiency, and fourth was full participation. And those
goals were repeated in multiple statutes that passed through the United States Congress after
the Americas with Disabilities Act, and they really reflect our national
commitment that is grounded in the equal protection clause in the Constitution,
that everybody has a right to be a full and equal participant in American society. So I think it's
important to kind of connect accessibility to values. We're not doing it just because the
government has regulations that require it, we're doing it because it's consistent with our values.
The second one, there's a t-shirt that I love that just says "Access
equals," and then it has a heart sign. So, "Access equals love." And the older I get,
I feel like love is one of the most powerful ways to advance civil and human rights.
Cornell West said that, um, justice is what love looks like in public.
So if you think about that and you connect it to the mission of the Department of Homeland
Security, think about after a disaster when FEMA shows up, and people with disabilities and elderly
folks are really scared, and the people showing up for FEMA are well-trained and know how to provide
full access. They have sign language interpreters for Deaf folks who are recovering from a disaster,
they know how to provide information in accessible formats, they have a sign language interpreter
standing next to the FEMA leader when they're giving updates after the disaster. The shelter
is wheelchair accessible and has a quiet room for people who might be autistic and need a place to
go where they're not going to be as stimulated. All of that, to me, is a reflection of love.
You know, the Department of Homeland Security can decide that when we're responding to a disaster,
or when we're helping people go through security at an airport, we want a culture of love and
respect for the people who are coming through. And I think there's a way to do that and still
do what you need to do to be vigilant to protect safety. You can have those two things together,
but I think it's good to think about it as promoting the idea of love.
The next one is something that we just heard about in the last two speakers,
and that accessibility can lead to innovation. There are lots of things that we take for
granted that were initially developed as an application to figure out a problem that a person
with a disability was having. An example is the typewriter or the keyboard that was developed as
a way to make written communication accessible for somebody with a visual disability. The telephone
was developed as a way to make oral communication accessible for somebody with a hearing disability.
And if you think about all the new technologies that are coming down the pike,
and again, we heard about this from some other speakers, the new technologies
can advance accessibility or they can create new barriers.
A good example is artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence can be used by employers
to screen out people that they think are going to be problematic employees, and that screening can
end up screening out people who are neurodiverse. People with autism and other types of disabilities
may get screened out by the way that they answer questions, but the artificial intelligence could
also account for that and screen in people with disabilities. Artificial intelligence
can make things more accessible. So it's a good example of a technology that can go either way,
and if we have a clear set of values, we can do everything in our power to make sure that
the technology promotes those values and doesn't create new barriers for people with disabilities.
Another form of accessibility that doesn't always get a lot of attention is clear communication. And
again, think about this in the context of telling people what they need to know when
you have a hurricane that is about to arrive, or you're trying to figure out how to escape safely
from the path of the hurricane. It's important to be able to communicate that information in a
way where everybody who's affected and needs that information is able to understand it.
So, for people with intellectual disabilities, it's really important to use plain language,
simple language. That also helps for people with limited English proficiency.
Sometimes when we're communicating, we use technical terminology in order to be precise,
but that technical terminology sometimes is not accessible to lots of people. So I think
if you think about plain language as a form of accessibility, the Department of Homeland Security
will communicate better with everyone, and that's going to be particularly important in a disaster.
Another way of thinking about accessibility is that it's a way to promote employee engagement.
By employee engagement, I mean employers that have a high level of employee engagement tend to have
less turnover. People tend to feel better about their jobs, feel better about their employer.
If you commit to accessibility, you will get more employee engagement, not just from your
employees with disabilities who are using the accessibility, but from other employees who
see that commitment from the department. It makes them feel better about working for the Department.
A good example is putting Braille on your business cards. Lots of people now are putting Braille on
their business cards. Most people who get the business card are not going to read the Braille,
but lots of people will notice that the Department of Homeland Security employee
has Braille on their business card, and it's a sign that they're committed to accessibility.
I think a good example of this was Walgreens. They had a commitment to hiring people with
disabilities in one of their distribution centers because they had the senior vice president, Randy
Lewis, who was overseeing all their distribution centers, had a child on the autism spectrum. That
distribution center ended up outperforming all the other distribution centers. It was also a
hub for innovation, but when I asked Randy what was the biggest win for Walgreens from doing this,
he said employee engagement. He said, across the enterprise, people who worked for Walgreens felt
better about their jobs and were more likely to refer other people to apply for jobs at Walgreens.
Accessibility also can lead to lifelong learning.
I think one of the interesting things about accessibility is there's always more we can do.
It's not an on-off switch, it's a spectrum, and we always learn new ways to be accessible. A good
example is the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network. When they have their Gala in DC,
on their badges they give people the ability to put a green button or a green ribbon,
a red ribbon, or a yellow ribbon. That's a sign. If somebody has a green button showing, it's a
sign that they're open to social interaction and networking at the Gala. If they have a red button,
they don't want to have that social interaction and that's an accommodation for their disability.
I didn't see a lot of people doing that before the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network did it,
but now I'm seeing more and more people doing it, and it's being adopted for COVID purposes too.
Some people don't want to hug people because it's not
COVID safe. Some people are desperate for human connection and want to hug people,
and you can signal on your name badge whether you're open to that kind of
human interaction or not. So again, that's an example of how accessibility is evolving.
Another way of thinking about accessibility is workplace flexibility.
Sometimes when we think about accessibility, we miss all the big things that we do to make work
accessible for everyone. So a good example is working from home. We had a dramatic change in
how people work from home during COVID. That is making the entire workforce more accessible for
a lot of people with disabilities and a lot of people that have other reasons why working from
home is better for them. Like maybe it helps them spend more time with their children, it
may help them deal with an aging relative or with pets, whatever it is that they need to do at home.
But all of that is also making the workplace more accessible and it's making work more accessible,
and the labor force participation rates for people with disabilities have gone up since COVID,
in part because work is now more accessible for a lot of folks with disabilities.
So flexibility, to me, is good for all employees, and a lot of things that we do in the name of
workplace flexibility are going to end up making work more accessible for people with disabilities.
Um, I, I noticed that those Beaker, uh, from the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties,
talked about the centralized budget for accommodations. So,
accessibility is also about dollars and budgets, you know, and having strategic
budgeting so that you're prepared for whatever the accessibility needs of your employees are,
and you have a way to centralize it so that a small part of the Department of Homeland
Security doesn't have to bear the brunt of what might be an expensive accommodation.
Um, another thing about accessibility, I have two more. It's another thing: way of thinking
about accessibility is listening. Being a good listener will make you more accessible. The
people who are the experts on what we need as people with disabilities are the people with
disabilities themselves. So, if you listen to your own employees with disabilities, if you listen to
customers with disabilities, if you listen to your many advisory committees that advise you on these
things, you will be more accessible. And listening also helps you individualize the accessibility.
What I have: bipolar disorder. I have certain things that that make me feel more welcomed
in a work environment, but I'm not the same as somebody else with bipolar disorder. So,
it's important to listen to people and try to meet their individual needs.
And then another thing, my last one that I wanted to say is, accessibility is Universal Design. And
the concept of Universal Design is that when we design anything, we should try hard to think
about all the different ways that human beings are going to interact with that environment, or that
process, or that technology, and try to build in accessibility so nobody has to ask for it.
You know, if you, if you use a wheelchair and you roll up to a building and there's
an automatic door opener and you can get into the restrooms, and the restrooms are accessible, it,
you don't have to ask for anything. It's, it's baked in, it's built in. If you're
on a website and it's intuitively designed, and whether you use a screen reader or not,
you can fully navigate the website, and you don't have to any have any kind of
special assistive technology, that that's another way to kind of bake in accessibility.
So, you know, I'm, I'm open to taking a couple questions.
I know we have another speaker starting at the hour mark at 10 o'clock Eastern time, but,
um, I just want to close with a quote from Martin Luther King, uh, and I,
I feel very connected to him. I was born on August 28th, uh, which was the date that he
gave the I Have a Dream speech. He gave that in 1963. I was born in 1965. He also had depression,
so I feel connected to him through my experience with depression.
But, Dr. King said, human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable.
Every step toward the goal of Justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle,
the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. And I wanted to close with
that quote because I think we can't assume that the Department of Homeland Security
is on a journey that will always get better around accessibility. There will come times
where bad decisions get made, and you have a step backwards, and it's important to be
vigilant and recognize that accessibility doesn't happen automatically, it happens intentionally.
And I think, you know, the Office of the Chief Information Officer, the Office of
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, those are two important places where you can be vigilant,
and you can be champions for accessibility, so that the progress does continue. So,
again, I'm happy to take one or two questions if there's time, but thank you so much for having me.
>> Thank you, Andy. Um, I did put in the chat, please ask questions if you have any.
Um, I think this gives us an opportunity to be a
little bit more interactive so it's not just one-sided for the presentations.
One thing I would say is that, you know,
I was making notes as you were speaking because I was listening to everything you were saying.
Um, baked in, in the beginning, I think that's one of the mantras that we within our office,
we try to tell people all the time that are going through these software development life cycle. As
you're in the early stages of trying to figure out what you want to create for an application,
always think about not just the functionality and the security side but the accessibility
side of that application. And if you do that, at the end of the day, you're going to have
an application that will be inclusive for the humanistic, you know, experience of all people.
So I thought that was great when you touched upon that. The other thing that, you know, as a trainer
for DHS, one thing that, um, I thought about when you mentioned the
conference where you had individuals with the red and green badges. So of course,
first thing that came to my mind was wait a minute, did the green badges, are they fully
accessible or is it just, are they just using color. But then I thought about I was like okay,
wait a minute, they're a badge so that means of course they're gonna have their name on there too.
Did you want to touch on that a little bit more for those folks? Yeah, no,
you don't know about that. I think it's interesting that you're right that if I'm
wearing a badge that has a red dot on it, yeah, and I'm talking to somebody who's colorblind,
yeah, that red dot is not going to be that helpful. And if they're blind,
none of it's going to be that helpful. So I, I don't, I didn't lift that up as a perfect,
perfect example of Universal Design. You're right that there are some challenges with it.
But it is an example of thinking about a form of accessibility that doesn't always get thought
about. And I think where there's a, where there's a will, there's a way to make that also accessible
for blind people. I mean, in general, name badges are not very accessible for, that's right,
for blind people. And sometimes it is hard to get accessibility right for every population,
but that's where it's important to talk to them, get their ideas for how to make it easy for them
to network at an event. It may be that they have somebody with them that's walking around with
them and helping them meet people or helping them meet the person who they want to meet.
Exactly, exactly. Thank you. Um, let me see, what else, oh, the other point was when you
talked about accessibility is a reflection of our values. I think that was very profound. Did
you want to touch on that anymore? I mean when you're talking about from a value standpoint.
Well, I think sometimes there's a backlash against kind of, uh, really,
um, rigid requirements. Sometimes, uh, designers like architects don't like to be told how to
design something. Sometimes, software engineers don't like to be told how to design something.
I think there are people who work in the federal government that get annoyed that they can't do
certain things on their website because it's not accessible. And I think if it's about lawyers
and laws and regulations, sometimes people miss the point like why do we have the law.
So I just think it's important to start with what are our core values,
what do we believe in. That's why I started with your mission which I think is actually
a very poetic mission statement. What do we believe in and how does this advance and res
and reflect what we believe in, and what we would we do this even if there was no
law requiring. I mean to me that's where you want to be, you don't want to be have to be
forced to be accessible, you're doing it because it's the right thing to do.
>> Exactly, exactly. Well, you've had, I'm looking in the chat, it looks like there weren't a lot
of questions but there were comments. Not a question, this came from Lisa Butcher,
not a question just many thanks to Mr. Imparato for the, this, how make sure I don't brutalize it,
basically taking mental illness and making it not something that's stigmatized. Um, so I
think a lot of people in the chat are very happy that you were very open about mental illness.
I think it's because I think it was it, May was Mental Illness Month. So I think it's great that
you did bring that up. Also, a lot of people are just saying also excellent presentation to you,
Andy. Um, it looks like Mr. Tim Green want to say hello to you again. Tim is a person with a hearing
disability. Yes, it is one of the people who educated me about accessibility for people with
hearing loss. Okay, yep, I know him very well. He's a great, great guy, great guy for sure.
Well, it doesn't look like we have,
uh, so barely do you think mine hasn't been required. I'm trying to look to see if we can
find a, and most people are saying excellent discussion, excellent discussion. So again,
guys, you have about two minutes left if you have any questions. I would like to
have a question directed to Mr. Imparato, but if not, uh, we will close out here in a moment.
But again, I think this was a great presentation. Um, again, I think these type of presentations
really need to be, um, interactive, conversational, allowing people to speak,
um, and to just kind of relay whatever questions they may have and talk about things that are
important to them. Other people, one more person that says, uh, looks like the green,
yellow, red badges use both color, text, and icon as indicators. There you go, very good, very good.
All right, well, Mr. Imparato, thank you again very much. Uh,
this is my first time meeting you, and I just want to say this was a great presentation.
Um, full disclosure, I also have been with the Department of Homeland Security, uh,
for a long time. Um, I was around during the early stages that you talked about with Mr.
Secretary Tom Ridge. So I do remember that time, uh, and also with Steve Cooper was the original,
um, CIO, or for this, the first Department of Homeland Security's Chief Information officer.
So, I remember, I've been around for a while. So thank you again,
we really appreciate it. I hope to have you present again,
if not next year, the year after that. And definitely look forward to speaking to you later.
>> Sounds good, I hope you have a great rest of your event. Take care, thank you so much.
All right, see you later, bye-bye, thank you.
All right, next up, um, we are going to have remarks
by Mr. Nicshan Floyd, again, the Executive Director for Accessibility & Usability.
Uh, acting director, but I'll take the promotion. Well, you know, Nick.