Title:
Stop Being Afraid of Accessibility

Subtitle:
Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) 2026 | Digital Access Is Everyone’s Business

Transcript:

Alycia Anderson: Welcome to Pushing Forward with Alycia, a podcast that gives disability a voice. Each week, we will explore topics like confidence, ambition, resilience, and finding success against all odds. We are creating a collective community that believes that all things are possible for all people. Open hearts, clear paths, let’s go.

Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day. This is an exciting part of our advocacy. It’s a conversation I’m so excited to have, because accessibility is one of the most powerful, creative, and innovative forces in our world.

Today, we’re gonna talk about digital accessibility, and I know for a lot of the listeners out there, that might sound technical. But if you’ve ever used Siri, if you’ve ever used closed captions, if you’ve ever listened to audiobooks, voice-to-text, and beyond, accessibility is affecting each and every one of our lives every single day.

There is so much magic in it, and it’s not just compliance, it’s innovation. And it brings us these amazing technologies and tools that we are elevating in our world today. So I’m so excited to have this conversation. Our guest today, Marty found on YouTube when we were stumbling around trying to find solutions for digital accessibility and PDFs specifically, and we found this amazing person.

My guest, Shawn Jordison, The Accessibility Guy, makes digital accessibility feel practical, approachable, honest, and more importantly, what really pulled Marty and I in, is he’s fun. He makes this conversation interesting. His content pulls you in, and it’s so useful.

Marty’s also sitting on our podcast today because he’s the digital accessibility for our website, for our platform as well, and I feel like the three of us will have a really powerful conversation. Shawn, thank you so much for taking time to be on the podcast today. I know this is “go time” for you today during GAAD, and we’re so excited to have you on. Welcome.

Shawn Jordison: Thank you so much for having me. I am excited to be here. It was nice poking around your site and kinda seeing what you do as well. I feel like with accessibility there’s so much to this little universe we have of accessibility. I appreciate the avenues that you guys are pushing, accessibility, advocacy, in somewhat of a different way. But at the end of the rainbow, we’re all kinda doing it together, right?

Of trying to bring awareness, bring information, and make the world a more accessible place how it should be. So thank you for having me and Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

Alycia Anderson: I love it.

Marty Anderson: 100% Shawn, and we’re so thankful that you’re joining us from the John Slatin AccessU & Knowbility Conference out there in Texas. Way to go, staying on top of the curve and learning all things new, accessibility. And just a shout-out to everyone out there, Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day. It’s not just about digital accessibility, it’s about accessibility everywhere in all of our lives. I’d like to just say I’m so excited to be a part of this, and let’s talk accessibility.

Alycia Anderson: Okay. So Shawn, before we get too technical.

Shawn Jordison: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: I want to have listeners learn about you, your background, your why. How did you become The Accessibility Guy?

Shawn Jordison: Yeah. That’s a good question. I’ll try to keep it somewhat brief, ’cause, it’s just my entire life story. Just kidding. Yeah, I started in accessibility when I was pretty young, at 18 years old. At my local community college, I wanted to make video games, so I was in computer science. At my college, you could get placed into a student worker position. I got placed into the Students with Disabilities Department as a student worker, and started learning how to make braille, large print, audio files. We would make basically accommodations for students with disabilities. Unfortunately, the person that taught me a lot of the stuff I learned early on in my career, he passed away unexpectedly.

He had a lot of health issues, unfortunately, and passed away. At the same time, California was in a hiring freeze, so I, as a student worker, got to kinda run what we call the Alternate Media Department, for my local college as a student worker. A year goes past, I end up getting the full-time position, which was just amazing at 19, as alternate media access specialist. I got to learn really in-depth how to do these complex digital things. Fast-forward to today, there’s been a long journey. I ended up getting my master’s degree in assistive technology and human services. I left that position to go teach students with disabilities at Santa Monica College, where I was a full-time tenured faculty professor, which is crazy ’cause I was 26 when that happened. I ended up leaving that role to work in a lead role for the California Community College System, where I gave guidance and support to all 116 California community colleges in the area of assistive technology, alternate media, and just working with people with disabilities. Then I learned I was an entrepreneur, and I started doing side contract work here and there for accessibility. And that ultimately led to The Accessibility Guy. There was about 10 other names before that. I did Access Guild. I was just ShawnJordison.com for a long time. I had all these stupid logos. I believe it was an ex-girlfriend of mine actually recommended the name and the acronym. I’ve never looked back since. So becoming The Accessibility Guy, I feel like I found my voice, and I found who I was, my identity, if that makes sense. Once I had that, it was much easier to push forward and do what I do now. And so what I do today. For one, I make YouTube content. It’s funny because, to me, it’s the least important thing that I do. I do it to bring knowledge and information, but really it started because I got tired of answering the same questions over and over throughout my career. And I was like, “All right. How do you set the reading order of PowerPoint? I’m gonna make a video on it.” It kinda just became this thing that I would do it for every item that would come up in my professional universe.Now we have six or 700 videos and 40,000 subscribers as of this recording, which is just kinda unreal to me. I’m very thankful and very lucky. I’ve never changed careers, so I’m turning 36 this year and I’ve only done accessibility. That and I was a prep cook for a while. That’s my background story in a few minutes.

Marty Anderson: We should thank you for those videos, Shawn. They are so informative. And everyone out there, please go check them out. Learn accessibility. Do what you can to make this world a better place. Thank you, Shawn.

Shawn Jordison: Yeah. Thank you.

Alycia Anderson: I love your story. I don’t wanna say bumping into accessibility, but you’ve had breadcrumbs that led you down the path. Was there a moment where you realized this isn’t just compliance, this is human work and real impact there?

Shawn Jordison: Yeah. I have a pretty good story for that. I also do have a disability, a neurological disability called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, and it runs in my family. My daughter has it. I mention that to just share that I have been around people with disabilities my entire life.

Most people have, right? My dad is a double amputee from the disease. Multiple family members use wheelchairs pretty frequently. So it’s definitely in my life, and it has been. I don’t know that it influenced me. Maybe, in hindsight, it did a little bit. But let me answer your question.

Alycia Anderson: Before you go there, though, ’cause I love that you just shared that, and paints the point of how we can all connect to disability in one way or the other. I should have asked you that question ’cause I always do. “What’s your relationship with disability?” Can you briefly describe what that disability is? Because that is a new one for the show, and I think that’s really interesting.

Shawn Jordison: Yeah, of course. It’s called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. Those are the three doctors that discovered it, and it’s a neurological disorder that affects the lower body parts. I should also preface I don’t know the medical terms with it too much, but, essentially, our muscles degenerate very quickly. In my forearms, my hands, my calves, and my feet. And we have super arched feet, short Achilles tendons. And what happens, we tend to distribute our weight much differently when we walk. As a young 35-year-old man, I have a lot of hip pain in my day-to-day life. It sucks, so I do a lot of stretching. And it affects our grip strength.

So growing up, I could never understand why I struggled with pull-ups so badly. I just didn’t have the strength to do it. I learned later on that it was because of my grip strength. And with the disease, it prevents me from building muscle in a traditional way. I’ve always told myself like, “I have to work twice as hard in the gym for half the results.” So it’s a little challenging.

Alycia Anderson: Oh, that’s a bummer.

Shawn Jordison: Yeah, it sucks, but I think this brings up a good point. My daughter also has it, but my son does not. It’s a hereditary disease, and 50% passes through. So my son did not get it, my daughter did. I didn’t know I had it until later in life. So with my daughter, I’m able to educate her, which is super powerful.

For me, when I go to the gym, I now use straps. I use equipment that helps me activate the muscles in a meaningful way. The best thing I learned about having a physical disability is do not compare yourself to anyone else, because comparison’s the thief of joy. It happens in business, it happens in life. But sometimes with my body, it affects my mental state more.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah.

Shawn Jordison: ‘Cause in business, I’m like I could just grind harder.” In the gym, it’s like, “This is my body. I need to learn to love it, and nurture it, and give it what it needs, and that’s it. When I focus on that, it allows me to think about my daughter, where I can teach her, now, as a nine-year-old girl. I can teach her like, “Hey, our bodies are a little bit different. Doesn’t mean anything. It just is. And this is what I would do. Roundhouse kicks in karate are gonna be a little more challenging for you, right? But keep practicing. Why not? Let’s try it.”

Alycia Anderson: I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. I appreciate it.

Shawn Jordison: By the way, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever publicly said that out loud.

Alycia Anderson: Ooh, we’re having a breakthrough moment.

Marty Anderson: Any breakthrough, yeah.

Shawn Jordison: Yeah. My friends know.

Alycia Anderson: That’s good. We’re a community. Let’s share.

Marty Anderson: Yeah, we gotta watch out too. You like to dive deep into it. I can tell you’re definitely on the analysis side and have all the details ready to go.

Shawn Jordison: Yeah. Yeah.

Marty Anderson: Awesome, Shawn.

Shawn Jordison: I do wanna answer your question. You had asked me what was like a story that maybe connected me with disability that kept me going. Early on in my career, I didn’t know that I was gonna be doing this. I didn’t know I was gonna be The Accessibility Guy.

I was just building knowledge. The job paid well, but I had this amazing experience. I don’t remember his name. I’m about five foot seven, maybe on the smaller side, right? So I had met this student, he was like 6’3″ or 6’4″, grew up in the wilderness. Ended up dropping out of high school, I think, had kids early on. This guy was probably like 35 at the time, and he wanted to become a firefighter to make some real money. Because where I grew up, a lot of blue collar work, people tend to cut trees, or intense manual labor as a position. At the time I’m 19 years old, and this behemoth of a man came in. He had a slight learning disability, and I was able to work with him for a few weeks. Every day we had a lab. He would come in, bring his homework, and I basically just taught him how to use, not the computer, but assistive technology.

At the time, we used this product called Kurzweil, and it was a tool that would allow your computer to read the text out loud. It was a text-to-speech reader. That’s what we call it, TTS. And you could adjust the speed, you could adjust the volume, and you can adjust the voice. It would visually track the words as it read out loud So we would load the textbooks in there, and you could play the reader back. So after a few weeks of working with this guy, he had never touched a computer. I should preface that, right? Logging into email was a challenge. So I got to work with this guy, and we just hit it off right away.

I’d never met a stranger before. So working with this guy over and over. Weeks go by. And he comes into my office, and he’s crying. This big behemoth of a man, blubbering, and he just gives me a hug. And he passed his certificate.

He wasn’t yet becoming a firefighter, but he got his very first certificate from the college for passing his classes. He’s like, “Man, I just couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you.” ‘Cause we had spent hours and hours. I preface the size thing because, I don’t know, as a man, we don’t necessarily cry a whole lot or whatever. Especially in front of other men, right? And especially at school. He was just so real with me, and it was awesome, and I loved it. It really connected me to the purpose of this. I think if people can try to find stories like that for themselves, it will help motivate them to continue to progress in this field Today, in 2026, what I hear a lot of is people just meeting compliance. And that is okay, but it’s really just a safeguard to keep us on track for what we should be doing anyways, which is bringing access, right? Anyone listening to this, you have an experience where you can change someone’s life by helping them learn how to read, pass their class, read the menu, or order the thing, it’s just a really powerful experience.

Alycia Anderson: That story also reminds me of the power of accessibility in the workforce, too. You were able to assist this person to have the career he wanted, too. That is so powerful, and that’s the work, too. I think that’s what companies aren’t understanding from this compliance check-off-the-box piece like, “Oh, we have to do this.”

But what’s the why, and how much further can you go with it? Talk about the power there. I want companies out there listening to this to understand why the investment is so important, what the need is. Why do we need to hire Shawn? Because the major tools that we’re using, I’m gonna just call it out, Canva’s, X, this, that, they’re not accessible. They don’t work. Talk about that, please.

Shawn Jordison: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s challenging. I can understand a little bit from some company’s perspective. Where they maybe get tasked with doing this thing, but it’s not an excuse not to do it. I’ve seen work with larger organizations and smaller ones of all sizes. For those of you who don’t know, I have worked with companies that have 1,000 employees and companies that have 10 or less, right? What we see works is a dedication from the company, from the people, from the top to the bottom, of just making forward progress. This stuff does take one of two things, and usually both, and that is time or money. To get your organization accessible, to do these things, you need time or money, and we can’t just expect our staff to pick up this new task without proper training.

That’s the time aspect, right? And we haven’t even got technical, right? I can get technical if we want. To make a table accessible in a PDF is very complicated. It can be very complicated, especially if you don’t have the right software. How do I get the right software?

We have to learn. That’s our time, right? And then software costs money. And what else costs money? Time. Not only if you learn this stuff, right? Let’s take that one-page document just for fun, and you have to make it accessible. Let’s say you know how to do it, it still takes time.

It could still take a half an hour to two hours, depending on how complex it is. Organizations really need to shift the mindset of, “This costs too much or it takes too much time,” and instead bake it in the process. Thanksgiving dinner, I love it. I often go somewhere else, and then I’ll come home and cook it myself, because I want the leftovers and it costs time and money. And I know it’s gonna cost time and money, but I do it anyways because it’s something that makes me happy and I like doing it.

And if we can shift our mindset in the organization to understand that this is important, and it’s real, and it affects people, it doesn’t feel so burdensome to make accessibility happen. It becomes more of a mindset, “this is what we do.” The Accessibility Guy, I’m not perfect. I did a webinar the other day. Turns out my system, Riverside, I have no problem calling out companies. There’s no closed captioning. And that’s my fault. I didn’t do enough due diligence, and people called me out on it. It is what it is. I’m gonna do everything I can to own that mistake and try to get it implemented next time, even if it costs me time or money.

My best advice is just do it anyways because it’s the right thing to do, and you’re gonna save yourself time and money in the future, whether it’s avoiding litigation or avoiding a bad reputation. I personally, I can own those mistakes. The best way I can protect my reputation is being like, “My bad. I made a mistake.” And I think organizations need to do that more because the community listens, right? If you break a lamp, “Hey I’m sorry that happened. I’m gonna replace it. We’re gonna fix it and try to prevent that from happening.” Take that same idea and apply it to accessibility, and your organization will reap the benefits in money, reputation, time, and joy.

Marty Anderson: Shawn, I love the way that we started this conversation. Because at the end of the day, we’re all humans, right? We’re trying to create things that humans need to use, and disabled people are humans, too. Newsflash, right? But not only that, the innovations that have come out of accessibility have not only benefited people with disabilities, but they’ve benefited our entire world. It’s this humanity. I love the way that you shared with us that you rose from 19 and got all these positions, and found your way into this community, unbeknownst to you, possibly influenced by your own parents and family that was living with disabilities. And you live with disabilities yourself.

The facts are one in four of us, right? The beauty of this is we’re having a conversation about GAAD. Not only is it a conversation, but it’s actually out of necessity that we’ve come together. Let me just preface that with my own experience in accessibility as a web developer since the ’90s, and building all kinds of applications, and touching thousands of websites, and seeing over and over again how accessibility is a mandatory thing.

And yes, we have to talk about compliance, but the humanity of it is the reason why we have those compliance laws. That’s where we’re going with that. It’s because we need to take care of everyone in our society. And especially when we’re talking about online accessibility, when more and more people are shopping from home, they’re working from home, they’re remote, like Shawn said. We need to make sure that the tools that we’re using are accessible, not only on the front end for the customers, but also on the back end for the people that are working in these environments and using the tools to build the solutions, and products, and services that people are digesting. Because if we don’t create that accessibility on the back end as well, we’re not allowing for those people that need those types of things to come in and share with companies, and build the next innovation that we have no idea is coming. But it will be coming. That’s just the nature of accessibility. So while we have you here, and we can talk a little bit of technical.

I think that it would benefit our audiences a tremendous amount. Like you said, you have thousands of videos that you’ve already answered so many questions. And literally, I could probably ask you everything you’ve already answered and is already there for us to digest.

I’d love to start off with a quick little question like, “If you had 10 items of importance, what would those 10 digital items be that you need? You don’t need to go 10. Give us a handful or something.

Shawn Jordison: Like top tips for maintaining accessibility?

Marty Anderson: Yeah.

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Marty Anderson: What are the biggest challenges that, over your career, you’ve noticed people struggling with in accessibility, especially digital?

Shawn Jordison: I would encourage anyone listening to this to not be afraid of accessibility. I think something that really helped me, personally, was trying to break it. There’s this philosophy of, “To build it, you have to break it.” Download the screen reader. They’re not gonna bite you, okay? They talk a lot, but you have volume, turn it down. For those of you who wanna test your stuff with a screen reader, download NVDA, Nancy, Victor, David, Alpha. It’s free on Windows PC, and the first thing you learn when you start a screen reader is to get it to shut up, and you can just spam your Control key.

There’s other settings you can set to make sure it doesn’t take over your PC. That’s actually not even one of the tips. So one of the tips is don’t be afraid of accessibility. That’s my number one tip. It’s not gonna bite you. Just go for it. Start learning. There’s a lot to consider when we think about creating stuff that is accessible, whether it’s from instructional material, video content, media. My advice is to find a tool that can create accessible content. A lot of people don’t know this, but Adobe Illustrator, it’s a very popular authoring program. It has no accessibility options on export. So if you create something in Illustrator, which is a pretty professional program, and you go to export it to any type, it does not retain any structure. My advice is to find a program that can create structure. Now, you don’t have to do that. If you wanna use Adobe Illustrator, export to PDF. My next advice would be like, “All right now you’re gonna need to learn accessibility in PDF, which is expert level.” I do not recommend people start on expert level.

We have to baby step it, right? Start with an accessible authoring program. Microsoft Word is a great example. You can build your content in Word. I guess my next tip would be to use the authoring tools the way they were intended. So, a lot of accessibility is really just using what already exists.

For example, most of the styles we apply to a document, that’s what’s communicated to technology. So when you hear, “There’s no headings on this page,” what does that mean? Why do I care? As a screen reader user, you can pull up a list of headings using a shortcut, using your screen reader and navigate this content. And a lot of times with accessibility, if you amplify the problem times a thousand, you can see it more clearly. So imagine trying to navigate a thousand-page textbook that had no structure. And I’m like, “All right, Marty, Alycia, I need you to jump to page a hundred and four and read paragraph two.” It creates a really inaccessible problem very quickly. If we had a heading structure in there, the user would be able to navigate to that area much more quickly. That tip is to use the accessibility options within the authoring tool. Apply your heading styles. Ensure your list items are semantically correct, which just means using the list feature in Word. Make sure your images have alternate text. Don’t overthink it. People who are blind don’t care that– or in my opinion, they don’t care that I’m a white male with no hair wearing a black hoodie, right? They don’t care. They instead care that The Accessibility Guy, Shawn Jordison, is having a great conversation with Alycia and Marty.

So my alt text should matter on the context, right? Unless The Accessibility Guy’s selling black hoodies on his store, and I want you all to know that, which I’m not. All this information helps write your alternate text. So if you have a picture of your cat in your document I don’t care unless you make me care, right?

What’s your cat’s name? Why does it have an impact in your life? These are things that I like to think about. And one final note on alternate text is, does this image add any additional value? That’s a great question to ask yourself. If it does, you should provide alternate text. If it does not, maybe mark it decorative. And all these tools have different ways to accomplish these these accessibility elements I’m saying. So if you’re feeling a little confused what does that mean? Digital accessibility, there are a lot of criteria in order to make something accessible. So check out my channel if you’re confused a little bit about what I’m saying.

But these principles of accessibility kinda exist in no matter the application you’re in. You have basic stuff. The WCAG, or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Everything can be boiled down into their acronym, POUR Perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. The POUR principle. So all accessibility, really what it does is it boils down into this criteria of can someone understand it in an alternate way? Like us talking right now, right? What if someone was listening and they were deaf or hard of hearing? They would probably need another way to consume it.

That’s gonna be text on the screen and what if I was holding up a sign that was really important, but I’m not gonna verbally say it, okay? This is what we call audio description. And so for those of you who are just listening in, I’m holding up something really important to me on the screen right now, and you’re never gonna know what it is unless I tell you, right?

And I’ll tell you, it’s just an accessibility guide beanie. But if I don’t tell you that information, you’re never going to know. Similarly with charts and graphs. You ever try to read a graph with your eyes closed? Just try it. This is why we need to ensure we have alternate text and a data table with our data.

So I digress. I could keep going, Marty, but my tips are use an accessible authoring tool, look up some of the basics of what accessibility is, and use the built-in tools. Those are the best starting point I can give you. Oh, and one other. Do not panic about all this legacy content, okay? There is probably a million documents on your website that need to be addressed right now. It’s okay. I want you to start with new content that you’re developing today and get a hang for it, and then maybe start to work backwards. But don’t allow yourself to be overwhelmed by the amount of work in front of you, because it can be daunting and we often see our clients like a deer in the headlights because there’s just an avalanche of content that needs to be touched.

That’s the end of my reponse.

Alycia Anderson: And I think that’s probably one of the biggest barriers, and maybe you can talk about that ’cause we see that with our clients too. It’s an overwhelming… When these clients are they’re bought in, they understand that they’re missing market share, they’re missing employees that they can hire because their tools, their products, their website, their…

All of it is not accessible. Okay, we’re bought in. We see the value. There’s return on investment. There’s– It’s the right thing to do, all that stuff. Oh my God, there’s this mountain, like we don’t even know where to begin. And I think giving people that permission to go, “Let’s just start. It’s fine. Let’s stop being afraid of this.”

And that whole idea of being afraid of accessibility is, I think, one of the biggest barriers in moving forward and progressing this. What have you seen? What is the number one question or fear that people are running into?,

Shawn Jordison: It’s the time or money debate. Shawn, this is gonna take forever. We couldn’t possibly do that.

Is gonna cost so much money. We couldn’t possibly do that. And, typically, like when litigation occurs, they look at your entire organization’s budget. So I’ve been involved with a college that has been sued for not being accessible in some component, and what they look at is the entire district budget for the year. And they say, ” Your college received X amount of millions of dollars, and you’re telling us that you can’t make this one course accessible for this one student. So I get it. I get that it takes time or money. My best advice is, again, just to start today. And so there are lots of companies like mine and others out there that can help you understand what you don’t know. And that would be my advice. I do free calls. Anyone can have a free call with me. I don’t know if you guys do links under the show. I’ll put my my free fifteen minute link.

Talk to people, right? And my advice is to follow the structure that there was a House bill that went out in Colorado that gave so much information, House Bill 21, and it really helped provide a framework for what organizations can do.

And the first step is to build an inventory. So we can’t panic about anything until we know what we’re dealing with, right? There’s no use worrying about the boogeyman until we see him. And so build an inventory. Every website, every document, just put it in a spreadsheet and get it in there. Once you have that, then we can start making decisions. I’m gonna outsource the documents to The Accessibility Guy. We’re gonna get some training for the key staff that are developing this stuff, and then we’re gonna, as an organization, make a push to do better on content we’re putting up today. And so you can tackle all ends of it, but there is some action that must occur.

If I’m trying to lose weight, I gotta do something to make it happen. And that’s the same with accessibility. If you want your organization to progress in accessibility, you gotta do something. And so my advice is to start small, check out free resources first, and start to understand what you’re actually dealing with before deep diving and buying Acrobat and being like, “Ah, what do we do?” Yeah. Did I answer your question Alycia? I think I went off on a little tangent there.

Marty Anderson: And if I might add, it’s just there’s so many golden nuggets in accessibility. And just like Shawn said, it’s about starting somewhere. It’s about getting your foot in the door. It’s about that first question of saying, “You know what? This is gonna be important to me.” And it starts with the free tools. Getting an audit of your resources and your services and seeing where the holes lie. And there’s free tools, like Shawn said. We have on the website side of things, we have WebAIM, which is a great tool that you can download and put an extension in your Chrome. In fact, if you’re using Chrome, you have the inspect button with Lighthouse already giving you a report on your accessibility. And then you could go down the hole of Axe and all these other free tools that have professional upgraded subscriptions, but they give you that, “Hey, here’s a free tool to start seeing what’s happening out there.” And it’s Shawn said with the screen reader, download NVDA or even try to use your native operating systems with Narrator or Voice on Apple. And you just wanna… and we automatically default to blind when we start talking about digital accessibility. But the beauty of it, too, is as Shawn touched on is that it’s not just the blind that need digital accessibility, it’s the deaf as well and this audio description stuff. And even when you’re considering mobility people that don’t have full use of their fingers or their hands and they need to be able to navigate. Oftentimes we’re using keyboards to do so or other adaptive devices that tap into all of the things. We’re gonna have to have you on again, Shawn. We’re gonna have to have another conversation on this. But I wanna continue right now on some of the other hot topics like, because we have this tool, it’s called AI, right? And it helps us do so many things. And I noticed that at the conference that you’re attending here that’s a hot topic. And not only that, I’d like to also throw in if you know anything about cybersecurity and the the battle between accessibility and cybersecurity?

Shawn Jordison: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a great, it’s a great question. So I always, I guess it’s not funny to say this, but for me personally, I feel like, the almighty internet gods have all my data already. So I don’t allow myself to get hung up on that when it comes to access, just as a personal, as a Shawn Jordison thing. And I say this because I throw stuff into AI all the time. They probably know everything about me, and we could have another, maybe another conversation about what that means with privacy and data, and it is an important topic. I’m not suggesting to ignore it. However, I will say I feel like there’s an inordinate amount of worry about it, where it doesn’t… In my opinion it doesn’t matter because in some way, AI can provide access that we have never seen. And, I think in a lot of ways my future is it’s uncertain in, in digital accessibility. The primary thing I do to put food on the table is document remediation. Okay? I make content accessible for businesses, PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, whatever. The writing is on the wall, and I couldn’t be happier about it, right? Personally okay, maybe I’ll have to find something else to do. I’m sure it’ll be in accessibility. I’m not worried from that regard. But the AI is so powerful, so I met several individuals who are blind. I have several friends who are blind just throughout my career, right?

And when I was at CSUN this last year a large amount of people that I talked to forget making a PDF accessible, forget Acrobat, this nonsense, what tool is better? There’s 50 authoring tools. You know what this person did? They throw their PDF into ChatGPT and chat with it. And if that’s not what accessible– accessibility should be, I don’t know what is. The ease of use, the access of it it’s accessible to most screen reader technology, but the data’s all there. I don’t care about heading structure. I don’t need to know what’s on page four. I can ask it, “What’s on page four?” You could even voice to voice-to-text it. And so with AI, I think the writing is on the wall.

I think there is still a tech curve. Government is gonna take 5,000 years to catch up and write some law that’s gonna prevent it from happening. But the real-life users out there that I’m talking to, users that rely on, can I read this menu to order my food?” They’re using AI already in ways that is not in mainstream media, in my opinion. Now with that said, let’s just like kinda table that component of the conversation. There are so many tools available to us now to help with accessibility. There is automation software that can help make your PDFs accessible. I work with another company called DocAccess, which can mass convert all of your PDFs to accessible HTML, and it’s so good.

The, the– could– What that product can do in one second is better than what I could do in 10 hours on a PDF. And if you amplify that towards thousands of documents, it’s just a no-brainer, but Shawn, what about this? What about that? Don’t know. I just don’t care. I think if we’re providing access to people with disabilities in a blink of a second, I’ll be the first to say I don’t really care about the other stuff because the laws are gonna catch up. I– It just doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather have that person feel like they can be independent. why do they need Shawn? They don’t need Shawn, right? They need technology that supports their needs, no matter the disability type. And to your point about, we often gear our work towards people who are blind, it’s funny you say that because I picked that up because it was the disability type I was most afraid of as a professional. I was afraid that someone who was blind was gonna walk in and my job was gonna be on the line because I didn’t know how to support them. I took this like burden on myself to always have an answer. If someone who’s blind walks into my office and they need something, I need to be able to make it happen. And with that, what I learned is you do cover a lot of other disability types along that way because people who are blind They, in my opinion, and this with all due respect, I feel like they have it the most difficult when it comes to education and learning. That’s just my personal opinion, and I do not mean to offend anyone in saying that.

I know there are other intense disability types, but as a working professional, that was always the disability type I was most afraid of. And so circling back to AI, there are so many tools. The screen readers are adopting AI. I believe NVDA now has a plugin you can put on that has AI built in to read– to generate alt text on the fly. How cool is that?

Marty Anderson: Yes.

Shawn Jordison: I could see myself as being like you didn’t write your alternate text accurately enough, right? I don’t wanna be that guy. It’s is it important? Did I describe it? Cool. And our AI tools can now support us in a way we have never seen. By the time this even comes out, we’re like a week recording in advance, there’s gonna be something else. There’s gonna be another AI tool. We’ll be like, “Shawn, did you hear about that?” I tend to ride the wave versus trying to protect myself from it. It’s here. AI’s already here, and if you’re not getting on that wave, I would encourage you to do some learning, do some research, try it out on your own and don’t be afraid.

Alycia Anderson: You know what I love about that though too, is that it’s also a way to train the AI right now to be inclusive, and that’s a big conversation in the disability community is are they building it to understand disability and accessibility and all those things? So I think the training of it is really important.

And I love what you just said about the alt text because for me, in years past of creating content, it was one of the most frustrating things to me that you have all these tools that support everybody else, but then disabled creators or people that are doing accessibility, that care about this stuff are taking all this extra time to write all of these things manually, it seems so frankly unfair that it takes this long, double the time to get content out because the tools aren’t supporting disabled people.

They’re not supporting humanity, frankly.

Shawn Jordison: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: I think all of those things that you– Such an important question that you brought up, Marty, ’cause that’s so where we’re at right now. You’re right, it’s here. How do we leverage it, advance it, advance our own businesses using it and move forward the movement at the same time I think is really powerful.

Marty Anderson: Yeah.

It’s amazing. We are literally living in “The Jetsons” right now. For those of you who are not old enough to know the cartoon “The Jetsons,” go check it out. I’m sure it’s out there wherever you can stream something. But

I grew up listening to this cartoon where people were talking to their computer all day long and telling them to, coffee, make my food.

Will you laundry? Will you…” It’s we are seriously there. And I’m kinda with you, Shawn, on the fact that, hey, when it comes to privacy and to the cybersecurity side of things and talking from a personal standpoint you, yeah, you’re giving this computer all your information, but at the same time you– if everybody else is using these tools to monitor you, you might as well be using some of these tools to help yourself to do the things you need to do too, right? And then we need to be aware of, yes, there are proprietary implications when you throw a PDF into chat, and maybe it’s some big secret that your company is working on, and all of a sudden, oh no, I’ve given it to chat, now everybody knows. And so those are things that we need to st- you know, that’s a policy-level decision.

Those are things that we need to be working out in our governments and in our structures to say, “Hey, these are the things that are off-limits. These are the things that, stick with the people that are actually creating it.” And I read a beautiful article last night about the second axial something or another, but it was saying that there was a time in our country or our world when we went from the Bronze Age into this new age of thinking and you have this explosion of people realizing self and all of the things that came along with this.

And here we are at the second axial moment in our timeline in this world where it’s this re-recognizing and that now with AI and us creating content and all of these models that are running, how if you give AI its own AI models, it falls apart quickly. But what needs to happen is for us to be creative and to be feeding AI with all of the sense and the emotion and the feel of what these objects mean. And so that’s where our whole community is struggling right now, and that is where disability entering the conversation is amazing because empathy for one another, caring enough for your neighbor, caring enough for the other person that doesn’t have the same abilities that you may, to think of them and the ability for them to do things and create access is just a huge positive circle that comes around because you never know when you’re gonna need that technology yourself and just amazing conversation.

Alycia Anderson: Okay. So.

Marty Anderson: What else do you have for us, Alycia?

Alycia Anderson: This is a whole ‘nother conversation for AI for sure. Okay, Shawn did we miss anything very important? We’re gonna leave all of your information in the show notes to click, to work with you, to follow your YouTube, to hire you for trainings, to do all the amazing things that you do that we’re actually hiring you for too.

Marty Anderson: And we’re also gonna list a lot of free resources and links for downloads on all these free resources for you to start your journey on accessibility.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. Did we miss anything?

Shawn Jordison: I got some resources to share. No I don’t think you missed anything. This was a great conversation and I maybe should have told you guys, I can talk all day, and I love it, and I’m here for it, and I’d love to be on again. I feel like I had some questions for you guys, but let’s maybe save it for another conversation.

Alycia Anderson: Okay.

Okay, Shawn. I warned you when we started that we end the show with a pushing forward moment, a little mantra, something that you live by, work you do, or just personally. So can you gift away anything to our community today?

Shawn Jordison: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve got two lines,

Alycia Anderson: Great.

Shawn Jordison: And one of them like I like to embody, and again, it’s one of those things, once you learn it about yourself it’s easier to do, and that one is to be an accessibility champion. In a lot of my content, I I’m a professional wrestling fan, and I’ve brought in stuff.

A lot of my demo documents, like I ha– I talk about Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart and their feuds and Stone Cold Steve Austin. And then we have this language in our industry of being a champion. And my advice to anyone listening to this is I want you to become an accessibility champion. Again, do not be afraid of this industry. It’s not gonna bite you. And part of being a champion is sharing knowledge, it’s taking a stand, it’s doing the right thing, and it’s trying to progress forward, as a society. And so I like to be an accessibility champion. Anytime I can help somebody, I always do it free of charge.

If anyone out there needs help, I will help you free of charge. I don’t want money to be a barrier. Now, of course, there are some limitations to that, right? I’m not gonna do your thousand-page textbook for free, but if you want me to show you how to get unstuck I can do that for you. And then there’s one other line, and this is something that a colleague had shared with me years ago, and I put it in every presentation I do. It’s just a simple slide, and it says, “Accessibility equals usability.” And the theory is closed captions help everybody, people who are ESL, those that are on the bus, trying to get to their job. Curb cuts originally designed for wheelchairs, they help people pu-pushing strollers.

They help skateboarders. It just helps everything. And so the more accessible you can make your content, the more usable it will be for everyone. Those are easy examples, but applying a heading structure as an example, it provides a white space. It provides visual tracking information for our eyes.

It helps reduce tension in our mind when we’re learning. So those little things that you can do really make an impact. And yeah, be an accessibility champion. Accessibility equals usability. Those are my bumper sticker statements. And yeah, that’s what I would like to leave you with.

Alycia Anderson: I love it. Thank you so much, Shawn, for all the work that you’re doing in our world. It’s so important. It’s so useful.

Shawn Jordison: Same to you.

Alycia Anderson: I’m so happy that our paths have crossed. This is just the beginning of our friendship, and I’m just really grateful to you for your time, especially today.

Shawn Jordison: Thanks to Marty for sitting on and giving us website and digital accessibility collab as well.

Marty Anderson: Before you wrap up, Alycia, I just wanna throw in there for our listeners, we have a little bit of a spoiler alert. Shawn’s been helping us. We’re getting ready to release The Accessibility Check. It’s going to cross all kinds of different topics. We wanna provide just a quick start, get into the game of accessibility from leaders all the way down to the workers that are doing the hard stuff.

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Alycia Anderson: Big news! We are launching The Accessibility Check.

Are your products accessible? Your services, your website, your meetings, your marketing, your workplace culture? Not sure? You better check. The Accessibility Check is your quick start for spotting barriers, strengthening inclusion, and for making accessibility part of the way that you work. You can find more at learn.alyciaanderson.com.

There you will find The Accessibility Check.

Don’t guess. Don’t wait. Go check.

The Accessibility Check™

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Marty Anderson: And so check it out. We’ll have links in all of this stuff. And just like Alycia said, this has been Pushing Forward with Alycia. This is Alycia, Marty, and Shawn, and that is how we roll on this podcast.

Alycia Anderson: We’ll see you next time. Thank you, Shawn, for your time.