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. Him 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, Nic, I'm a type of guy who likes to give kudos when I can, so, you know, and it did
say that, or somewhere, I think I saw "executive," but again, the Director of Accessibility &
Usability, aka Office of Accessibility and Systems and Technology, which we no longer OAST,
but we are AU, so again, we have now ready to do this presentation, Mr. Nicshan Floyd.
>> Alright, thank you once again, Vince. I want everyone to think about how to start out,
maybe not just their morning, but maybe their week. Maybe you woke up
this morning and you had a routine set up on your special device that told you the weather,
uh, what things are in your calendar. Maybe it adjusts the blinds in your room,
maybe it turned your television to your favorite station as you prepared for the day.
Then maybe you drove to work or you teleworked, but regardless,
you may have had your phone nearby, and you may have it set up to where if you get a text message,
it reads it out loud to you, and that you can respond to that text message within your voice.
A lot of us are into reading, um, so maybe we're listening to an audiobook,
um, and enjoying that and taking notes verbally or using some type of highlight
to highlight those notes so that we can quickly get that information later on.
What I'm getting at is that all of these types of technologies that we see as a part
of everyday life, I also have an accessible component. That routine that you set up in
the morning allows someone who may have a mobility impairment or can't reach high,
they have now the ability to control their lights, their blinds, switch their televisions,
and interact in various other ways with various appliances within their home, right?
Um, it used to be books on tape that would get mailed to people, and now you
have an endless library of audiobooks that people who have equal access to.
So, individuals who are blind or low vision
are no longer disproportionately treated wrongly due to not having access to that information.
As we can see, as time passes by, technology becomes more and more a part of our life. I kind
of feel like I'm reading hieroglyphics sometimes when I get a text message,
and it's all emojis or stickers or some type of action, and then I have to turn on my
text-to-speech thing and click on it just to see exactly what that emoji was supposed to be, right?
So, we can also see that in the way that we communicate, it's also being highly
impacted through the technology that we use. And as it was stated before,
technology can be good or can be bad; it's all in how we treat that technology.
So, with that in mind, I want people to take a more personal responsibility when
we're looking at developing products and services and making it available.
Are we being responsible over that mindset? Are we thinking about the various ways that
technology could possibly be utilized, and then making sure we're building in the functionality
and feasibility that it can be used in the most personable manner and not become a barrier but
become a way that it exposes individuals to a greater world that's available to them.
So, let me, um, share my screen briefly.
So, here we have on the screen, a graphic, and the first graphic has a whiteboard. It
has an individual of normal regular height, an individual who utilizes a wheelchair,
and another person who is slightly shorter in stature. They all have, quote-unquote,
equal access to this whiteboard, the same writing utensils. However, it's difficult for the person
who is of shorter stature and utilizes the wheelchair to interact with the whiteboard.
So we can see that you give someone equal, but they don't have an equal experience.
Here at DHS, we're trying to move away from the idea of equality to equity,
and we're hoping that all private industry
and all other state agencies and federal agencies also move from equal to equity.
So, now let's look at our second image, where now we've provided an accommodation.
We've given a pedestal to the person who's shorter in stature, and we've provided a ramp for the
wheelchair user, and now they can all equally access the chalkboard and write on it. But we
can see this is not the most ideal situation, and a lot of times in the work environment,
we look at Section 5 conformance and we look at our products, and we will work hard to
validate the code and then remediate the code to assure that regardless of what type of assistive
technology a person is using, they can then be able to interact with that product effectively.
And whenever that falls short, we will then provide a reasonable accommodation. It could
be a screen reader, it could be text-to-speech input, it could be a special type of keyboard,
it could be a mouth stick, it could be a tracking device, but we will provide various types of
accommodations to help the person be able to take advantage of that product or service.
And some of the things could even be low-tech, right? Just large print.
However, that's still not the optimum way. It's what I like to call maybe a Band-Aid on a scratch.
So, let's look at the last situation. Now we have a larger whiteboard,
everyone has equal access to that whiteboard, but they also have the ability to freely interact
with that whiteboard in a more effective manner. Right? They're all comfortable in
their way of working with that whiteboard. So this is where we're trying to get to. As
I stated in my opening remarks, being Section 5 conformant is the low bar. Looking at how we
design our products and building smarter, more capable products, that's where we want to be.
So, here at Accessibility Usability, we offer numerous services, and I'm not really going
to touch on all the key services, but I do want to talk about a few of them.
The first one being our Accessibility Help Desk, because this is the conduit anytime
anyone needs to understand not just what the law is, but how they can build better,
smaller products. They can leverage our Accessibility Help Desk. From there,
they can be connected to a subject matter expert. They can either direct them to
the appropriate resources, direct them to training that we provide, or open a discussion.
There's a lot of times where someone is running into a problem,
and that problem could be caused by various reasons. I'll give you an example. A person
was really frustrated one day, and they're like, "I think I want to file a complaint against DHS
because I have to use this human resource system, and it's just not accessible. It used to take me
two to three minutes to go through it, now it takes me 45 minutes to interact with it." So, I
said, "Okay, that's a huge difference. So, we know we've updated our HR System, and I have reports
saying that our HR System is Section 508 conformant. So let me understand what's going on."
So, I call the person up, I said, "What's your situation like? Are
you using assistive technology?" So, they say, "Yes, I'm using Jaws, but for 12 years,
I used to have an assistant that worked with me, and they kind of walked me through the system,
and now I have to use it all by myself." Okay, how long have you been using Jaws, and they told
me that they've had it for a long time, but they weren't the most proficient with Jaws itself. So,
for people who don't know Jaws, it's just a text-to-speech tool, so anything that's on the
screen, it will actually read it out loud to the user. It also provides support, so whatever person
needs to navigate through the site, um, it kind of helps them understand what they're navigating to,
so it gives them verbal cues to match what the visual cues might be on the screen.
So, from that situation, I understood a few things. Number one,
the product itself is Section 508 conformant. The person's situation changed because they
no longer have that assistant working with them. So, my recommendation was, how about
we take training to improve your ability to use your assistive technology?
The other thing I want to do is go back and look at the process
from a user perspective. Are there ways that we can enhance this user interface? So,
instead of tabbing 15 times to get to a place, you're tapping two to three times. And,
is there a life cycle behind that product? So, as you begin using it or even actually
take you to the next spot that you need to be, are there more hoops that you need to drive through?
So, there's a larger vision when we're looking at products,
in the right perspective that we need to consider, right? It's how is the user
going to interact with it? What are the tools that your user may use to interact with it?
Does it have the proper layout? Does it have a good design? Because a lot of times, people say,
"I need it to look pretty. If it doesn't look pretty, people aren't going to use it."
And then it's often designed with the person who has good dexterity and good vision in mind, right?
But are we also thinking about people who may have various types of cognitive disorders?
So, these are things that we want to think about, not just those that are blind, low vision, deaf,
hard of hearing, but those who may have those hidden disabilities, because if you have a
cognitive disability and let's say that you're using justified text where everything's justified,
now you have the text kind of stretched out because you want things in clean little blocks.
When all the clean little blocks look very pretty, it also makes it a lot more challenging to read.
So the person who's using a screen reader will be able to read the content with no issue,
but the person who may have various types of Dyslexia will now struggle.
So, these are things that we often want to consider so we're building our products.
So, that's our accessibility help desk, that's the conduit. Next, we provide about
21 trainings currently, and that catalog is always expanding, but we want to empower each and every
person to be able to take ownership of building accessible products. So, these online trainings
are self-guided and they are free to industry people, the public, and federal government. You
simply just need to log into the platform, select the litany of courses that you can take, and a
few of those key courses that we'd like to focus on is the Trusted Tester Certification Course.
So, this course allows individuals, who may be developers or testers, to go in and learn,
how do you effectively evaluate web applications for Section 508 conformance?
And at the end of the course, you're given a test, and if you pass the final exam with 90 or above,
you're now granted the privilege of being a certified Trusted Tester. This piece has
become so important that, oftentimes, you looked on LinkedIn and Glassdoor and some of these other
places that are advertising for jobs, they're often looking for certified Trusted Testers.
And just this week, I met with OMB, and they were looking for improving their policies to encourage
individuals to follow the trust tester Pro program guidance when testing and evaluating products for
Section 508 conformance. Along with that, we find that electronic content is also critical.
So, how do we make sure that email communications, our forms, our PowerPoint presentations,
Word documents, etc, are also accessible? So, we offer those self-guided courses online as well,
and then once a month, we provide in-person courses for those that are internal to DHS
to be able to attend, and occasionally, we let some of our sister agencies participate
in those in-person classes. They're virtual, but they're delivered by a speaking person,
so we feel like a combination between the Trusted Tester and the electronic documents
courses helps people get a very strong foundation. And then, from that foundation,
we're looking to introduce people to the usability services. So, that's something
that we recently had last year that we've been working diligently to expand because we
want people to understand how their products will have a greater impact on the end user.
So, by taking advantage of usability studies, looking at those various groups
that have typically had challenges when working with various products and services,
calling them in, having their voice, having a usability study done so that
we can account for those challenges, now we can build smarter, better products.
A long time ago, I learned that I was no longer teaching Section 508 conformance, I was teaching
people how to utilize the tools to create smarter and better products, and now we want to expand
that vision. So, no matter if it's an application that's going to sit on a mobile device, or it's
a web application that you'll access through a browser, or if it's going to be something
physical like a kiosk, if you will interact with at the airport, we want to make sure that everyone
has a seamless, interactive experience that is not limiting just because of their disability.
So, here at DHS, we've been looking at our life cycle. There's tons and tons of life
cycles out there, but this is the one that I've started sharing with a lot of different agencies
because it changes the way that we think. I remember working with one development group,
and they were releasing products out, and we would find problems with those products,
and they would just tell us, tell us what's wrong and we'll fix it,
and each time they built a new product, there was always something that was wrong,
and we would tell them what was wrong, and they would go out and fix it. I said, wait a minute,
you're using a tool that someone can drag and drop various widgets and form fields and things
for in the studio tool to build their products, correct? I'm like, yes. I said, so
how about we look at the studio tool that people are using, so that the elements that
they're dragging and dropping to build their own product, consequently, is accessible because the
widgets and the form fills and the other little tools they are going to be dragging and utilizing,
or already made accessible? So, it's a different way of thinking, right?
Um, because the reality is, you're not going to teach everybody how to build accessible products,
but if you can build the products that are then utilized to create other products,
and you can make that product accessible, then the developer or designer, without even thinking
about it, will inherit the ability to create accessible products. So, we want to remove
those barriers. So, when you're looking at your studio tools, think about that. So,
this brings me back to this image. Step one in your planning phase, you want to think about,
what am I building, what are the capabilities that I'm building, and what are the usability concerns
I should have, and what are the accessibility concerns that I had? Think about your customer.
Your customer could be the person who's utilizing the product
by physically holding and entering data information, or your customer could be the person
who's providing information to be entered into the tool. So, you can have various types of customers,
and they could be utilizing a tool from two different perspectives. So, think about those
things, and then do your research. What is it that I need to build, and how can I assure
that it's going to be accessible and usable? The next goes down to the procurement phase.
We want to make sure that the vendors take on some of the responsibility of delivering accessible and
usable products. So, within your statement of works or within your contracts, you establish,
make sure that you have language in there to say that whatever you're going to deliver to us,
you're going to guarantee that it is as accessible as possible, and that it's going to be
usable. Now, we know that we have the Section 508 standards, W3C, A and AA, that we can hold people
and say that you must comply to these standards. Usability is a little bit different, right,
but we could still start investigating how do we write contract language
that we can at least show that someone puts some thought and some effort into usability.
Then we move away from the procurement phase, and we go into the design. Ideally,
you just want to make sure that those tools can be designed in such a manner that they
can be fully accessible. There's a lot of times when we say, oh wow, that's an amazing feature,
if I just had this killer feature, everyone's going to want to use my product, so you implement
it. But in implementing that killer feature, you may alienate a particular group of people.
Give you an idea, uh, virtual meeting rooms. I was looking at a product that was developed
a while back, and it was an amazing product. Ideally, it was a virtual Convention Center,
and you could walk within the convention center, walk up to a booth, and then virtually, you could
interact with an avatar, and they would provide you information. When you're done, you would just
walk to the next booth. Great idea! However, when the product was first thought about, it was not
the most accessible product. But the vendor that was developing that knew accessibility was a key
focal point, so they diligently worked to make that virtual event accessible. So now, if someone
wants to be able to hold a virtual convention, now there's a tool out there that supports that.
It wouldn't have happened if they were not thinking about accessibility in the design phase.
Now that you move away from the design phase, you want to start thinking about the development
piece. And in the development piece, we are now away from the waterfall process, and now we are
within the agile process. A lot of times, one of the biggest barriers to accessibility is the fact
that it's bolted on at the end, and it becomes a barrier because now you have to invest more
money to fix the product, or the product is being delayed, and then people are frustrated. However,
if we look at building accessibility and usability into the design process, utilizing agile,
whenever the product is ready to release, it's already vetted for security, it's already vetted
for accessibility, it's already evaluated for usability, it's already gone through any other
boards it needs to go through. Therefore, your products can be ready to go to market right,
internal market or external market. So, take your Trusted Tester, have them embedded as various
elements of their tools are being built out, have them evaluate them for Section 508 conformance.
As you are building elements, do usability testing. Make sure that the user stories that
you created, that you're building your product on, are inclusive user stories, that you had
a wider swatch of individuals who have various different backgrounds, various different needs.
So, that you could say, is this meeting DC, these key individuals' needs, okay? And you want to make
sure that you have representation from various groups that can participate in those usability
studies and testing. That way, you can tweak the tools necessary, and then when you're done, now
you have a product that's usable and accessible. But now, wait, we get to the deployment phase,
and this is where the wheels can quickly fall off the car. We want to make sure that when we are
building our products and we've carefully designed them properly, that we deploy them in a format
that's going to also be accessible. Think about if you were to develop this incredible interactive
training, the painstakingly made sure that it met the needs of all of your possible users,
and in there is a player that your training is going to run on. But the player itself is not
accessible. It doesn't matter how wonderful your training product was developed if the
player is not accessible, then your training is not accessible. Or think about if you were to
build a kiosk, and now you place the kiosk in a location where individuals can easily access it.
Are you building cameras into your kiosk so it can moderate other person, help guide them
through certain phases based upon eye gaze or take pictures, etc? But now the camera itself
is not adjustable, so if someone is shorter of stature, their light and frame. So, we want to
think about every aspect of that product, not just building it, but where we also deploy it. So, this
is where my program and the customer experience program is going to become in handy because we're
going to be tag-teaming together to help address these types of concerns that we need to consider.
When we look here, we have pretty much like a Venn diagram, and it talks about accessibility
and usability and then the user's experience or otherwise, the customer's experience.
In times of emergency, it's very critical that we get out information in a reasonable manner, right?
And that that information is provided in a way that's easily accessed by those who need it most.
So, how do we go about doing this? Well, we put the user first, and that's the human-centric
approach. We think about in that time, what is that customer going to need,
and then we begin looking at how do we best deliver that product or that service to that
customer. So, we look at usability best practices, we look at accessibility best practices,
we look at who our customer is, and how do we build a support service for those customers.
Also, what is often missed is the feedback loop, right? Because that's how we learn,
that's how we grow, that's how we enhance what we do. So, in that feedback loop,
if someone had a negative experience, we take that negative experience, we don't personalize it,
we say okay, what could we've done differently? We get a positive experience, okay, we see that we're
on the right trail, how do we build upon this sort of thing? So these are, and then we reach
back out to the customer, say, we hear you, we understand your concerns, this is what we can do,
and let's be honest about our limitations, because honestly, no product will ever be perfect.
The products were perfect, we wouldn't have version one, two, three, four, etc., right?
But everything is an evolution, and as technology evolves, this creates new opportunity for failures
but also greater opportunities for success. So, let's leverage what we can to improve what we do,
and now I'd like to yield and open this up for discussion.
Well presentation, Nic.
All right, guys, it's your opportunity to ask questions. Let's not be shy. I'm sure there are
things that you heard in Nic's presentation that you may not have known before. Um,
so we would definitely like for you guys to, uh, present us with any questions, um, as possible.
You think it was great, Nic, when you touched upon like the software development life cycle.
I'm sure everybody does not know about those five major points of planning, procurement,
design, development, and implementation. I think that was great to be able to point that out to
folks and know how usability and accessibility will fit into those different kind of areas.
Um, the other thing I thought was really great was when you went over CX because I think it is
one of those new terms for some folks. So a lot of people don't really know what CX really is,
the kind of the buzzword knowing that his user experience, accessibility, and usability.
I don't know, can you touch on that a little bit more? Um, just making it more, I guess,
easier for people to kind of understand how all those pieces will work together in
Tangent? I know you did already, but just for those who may not understand fully.
So here's the thing. Uh, what we take for granted is that when people go off
to college or trade schools or whatnot, they learn how to code,
but a lot of times, they don't learn what good design is. And when you go off to take
usability, sorry, um, user interface design training, UI, and you're looking at that sort
of stuff, you're taught: how do I make this to be a beautiful interface because I want to
get the eyeballs on my product? And some of those things that you're taught are counter-intuitive to
accessibility and also to counter-intuitive to overall good customer experience.
So when we think about a customer's experience, we are thinking about the
human being themselves. We're looking at: how do you build a product that allows someone to
quickly get the information they want, ignore the information that they don't want, and
get eyeballs onto the product and then off of the product, right? Some of these groups
out there make a lot of money by holding your attention for a long period of time,
so they may have purposely a bad user interface or bad way of of getting you on and off the product.
Here at DHS, we're very mindful because, as they say, time is money,
and I don't want to be broke, right? So, we want to make sure that we put a good
focus that allows people to quickly get what they want and then move on with the
rest of their day. And that's what the entire customer experience approach is.
Excellent, thank you very much for that response.
I do have a question from Patty, um, and I'm not sure if you're going to be able to answer
this one or not. What is the starting point for human resources creating or accessing funding of
reasonable accommodations? I guess for reasonable accommodations, which of course we provide,
so that really often depends on what component you're with or with agency you're with. Some of
them will start with, you go to your supervisor, you explain to them that you are requesting a
reasonable accommodation. At that point in time, a reasonable accommodation request can be completed
on your behalf or created on your behalf, and then depending on what you need, right? It could be a
high-tech or low-tech solution, or maybe it's an accommodation of being work from home. That
information of what that accessibility is going to be will then be made with you in mind. How it gets
covered, sometimes it could be within a global fund depending on the agency, sometimes it's
paid for directly by the office, but a lot of that you need to really rely on whoever is the person
who's supporting your reasonable accommodations because they all have the best answer for that.
Excellent, we have another question from Eric Smith, um. Hi, Nicshan, thank you for outlining
the course availability. Other courses you listed, which would apply to SharePoint?
Thank you, Eric. So at this point in time, we don't have anything just directly for SharePoint,
but what I will say is that if you go through the electronic content document courses,
you'll see that a lot of the techniques that you would apply, for instance,
understanding what good alternative text is and how to create good alternative text directly,
plus to any kind of platform. We know that people are utilizing SharePoint, but they're also using
Google Docs and various other platforms as well. So some of these things you take in generality,
in generality, and then you figure out, okay, what does my particular tool that I'm using
support, and then how do I build in that accessibility using my tool's functionality?
Very good, very good. Let me see, we're starting to get the question
starting to come in here, and we have like one minute left,
um. Will there be modifications to the Trusted Tester certification? Um.
So, great question. We are actually in the process of revamping the entire Trusted
Tester certification course now. We wanted to make it more user friendly and make it where
it's less time to go through it and it's more comprehensible. So my team tells me that we're
going to be doing a soft launch in about two months, two to three months, and have it fully
available to everyone, I believe by February is our targeted goal. And what, what we mean by
soft launch is that we restrict it to two to three hundred people per month and then we spanned out.
I think at this time we have almost 4,500, uh, certified level 5.0 Trusted Testers,
and the course that's being revamped is going to be considered Trusted Tester 5.1.1 because it's
going to be predicated on new guidance from the access board or clarifications of those standards.
Very good. I have one last question for you, um, because we're running out of time here,
but this comes from Sandra McMurray. I have read and heard over and over the websites must meet
all A and AA WCAG requirements. It is "all or nothing", if one thing fails testing then this
site is not compliant. As someone who has been in the I.T. field since 1982, I know there simply is
not a way possible to be 100% bug free. I'm a 508 tester with my DHS Trusted Tester certification. I
love to be able to test a website and have it to be 100% compliant, but I know that is impossible
with the level of complication in websites in this day and age. What are your thoughts on this?
So, I don't like the words impossible. What I like to say is that things can be challenging
because where there's a well, there's a way. If I created a web page that was just text,
block text or white background, I just created something that's 100% accessible. Now, what I like
to look at that? Absolutely not. So what you want to be able to do as a Trusted Testers, first off,
make sure they, you have a full understanding of the test conditions and you're testing accurately
because sometimes there's interpretations, right? Also, look at your tool that you're utilizing. So
when we do automated testing, that's going to capture about 20% or 30%, but there's still
that visual verification that has to happen. So you want to confirm like, is this truly a
failure or not? And then if it's something is a failure, what is the overall impact?
Sometimes it's like, you fall, fell, fell because you may have tiny little ellipsis in the bottom of
the screen, and it's gonna say the color contrast is not great. Now, are those tiny little ellipses
that convey absolutely no information, it may not even have full functionality for you?
Gonna keep someone for me to get the main information off your site?
Absolutely not. But should that sort of thing be addressed, it could, it easily be addressed,
absolutely. So you want to make sure that you have a full understanding of what those failures are,
focus on fixing those critical failures that will prevent someone from being fully interact with
that site, and then look at some of those more minor things, and then make a note on the site,
um, so if someone does run into a challenge, they have someone they can reach out to and get help.
Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you, thank you again, Nic. We really appreciate your presentation
and answering those questions. I know that those questions were coming in hot and heavy
towards the end. We definitely will do our best to provide you guys with all love with your responses
to your questions. At this time, we are going to take a break, um, so we're going to take about a
15-minute break, and then we're going to come back with our next presentation, um. Please continue
to put your questions or comments or concerns in the chat with any technical issues, and we'll try
to get back and fix those as soon as possible. All right, guys, we'll be back soon. Thank you.