Title:
Deafness, Captions & Accessibility with Meryl Evans

Subtitle:
Progress Over Perfection: Lived Experience, Inclusive Design and What Good Accessibility Really Looks Like

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.

Welcome back to Pushing Forward with Alycia. I’m Alycia Anderson, your host, and I am so incredibly excited. We have the “Queen Bee” of advocacy in the house today, my friend Meryl Evans.

She is so respected in the space. I have respected, followed used her work as a guidepost for my own for such a long time, years, probably all of the six years that I’ve been in business. And she takes up space in a really powerful, special way. She brings so much clarity, consistency lived experience, and heart to a conversation around accessibility, disability inclusion, being deaf, and so much more. And her voice is powerful. It matters in the space. She is well-known. And the strategy that she brings is immense. And so when she said yes, we ran into each other at Disability:IN conference in the hall a few weeks ago, and we were gushing all over each other because we haven’t met in person yet. And of course I said, “You have to come on my show.” And here she is. Meryl, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for your time today.

Meryl Evans: It’s such a pleasure to be here with you, Alycia. I am super excited. And so glad we’re finally doing this. And other words you just said about me, minus the deaf part, I agree about you too.

Alycia Anderson: That means a lot coming from you, honestly. So thank you so much. We have a lot to talk about, before we get into all the accessibility, logistics, and all the advocacy, what I wanna hear about is something personal. You growing up when did you start to realize that you communicated differently than others? What did growing up with deafness look like, feel like? Was it, is this a lifelong journey for you? Can you give us a little bit of history on little Meryl, the coming of age of who you’ve become?

Meryl Evans: So I was born profoundly deaf, so it came with the accent. I like to say this is not a geographical accent, it’s just one I was born with. Anyways, I remember growing up, elementary school was the best part of my life as a kid, because by the time you get to middle school and high school, you get the teen stuff.

No fun. But it was almost like a blissful ignorance, blissfully ignorant, not aware of how people saw me yet. But I knew I was different because I can remember when I was really young, I was in my parents’ bedroom looking in my mom’s mirror and talking to myself in the mirror, and I knew something was different about the way I speak, because even though I enunciate well, because I’m a lip reader, so I know how to enunciate well for lip readers.

But I knew something was off, and I also knew and understood I wore a hearing aid, and I remember my mom coming to my kindergarten class, doing show and tell about my hearing aids and all that. I don’t remember how my classmates reacted or anything like that. I also grew up playing a lot of sports, so I am super competitive for two reasons.

One, I love sports. I was good at it. And so naturally, that comes with competition. Two, being a person with a disability also made me competitive, because I never wanted people to see me as less than or incapable. I always felt like I had to prove I was just as good or better than others in the same boat.

So that, being competitive is good and bad. It led to some frustrating moments in my life, but it also has me always trying to strive to do my best.

Alycia Anderson: What I love about that? We have that in common. I grew up playing sports and very competitive, too, and one of the things that I always teach parents with disabilities is how important activity is, whether even if it’s sports or not, some type of social activity for children with disabilities to get involved with their peers and find something that they’re really good at to build that confidence and that competitiveness to…

I think it’s like a protective layer that you can build around yourself when you have those traits developed in as a young disabled kid. Then you’re a little bit, maybe a little braver to speak up or advocate for yourself or go after something, in your life that the world is telling you that you can’t do.

So I love… What was your sport?

Meryl Evans: I played softball was probably my best sport. I also did basketball, soccer, and volleyball.

Alycia Anderson: And yeah, exactly what you said, the bravery, the confidence, I think was responsible for all that. It really helped there because, so many sports leaders become motivational coaches because of, they accomplish these things.

Meryl Evans: I’ve done half-marathons, three of ‘ em. I’m done, though. My body’s like, “No more.” It pushes you. And I didn’t realize this until I was much older, how lucky I was to have the coaches I had, the teammates I had. They never treated me like an outsider. I was always part of the team. And I was probably lucky.

I was good at the sport, so that probably helped. But my best friend, one of my best friend’s dad was our coach, and I was just amazed. He treated me like one of the kids. He did. One time he got mad at me that I missed a play that was unusual for me, and I said what if I hit a home run, does that make up for it?”

And sure enough, I hit a home run. Yeah. So I just appreciate it. He just did not … Nobody treated me like a fragile kid. Only my parents got a little nervous when I was a catcher because they were afraid. I had a hearing aid on my chest at the time. They were just worried about the hearing aid, not about my ability.

But anyway, I wasn’t catcher. I was first base. That was my best thing.

Alycia Anderson: While you’re talking about your hearing aid, before we get any further can you talk about your communication styles and… ‘Cause you’ve got several, right? You do lip reading, you’ve got hearing aids, you use captions. Can you just enlighten our community on your communication methodology and how it works for you?

And how do you communicate with people in the world that might not know that you are deaf, and how do you articulate your needs? Can you talk about that a little bit?

Meryl Evans: Sure. First of all so my parents found out I was deaf about nine months, so I had my first hearing aid by the time I was almost a year old. Of course, I was thrown into speech therapy, lots of speech therapy, where I learned to speak, lip-read. And even though I had very powerful hearing aids, which were the old case, the old-fashioned ones nobody sees anymore, but they were like in a little box about the size of a deck of cards with four AA batteries.

Yeah, that’s how much I remember. And cord. And I had that kind of hearing aid till I was about nine. Thankfully, the behind-the-ear got strong enough for me, because, oh my goodness, I would not wanna turn 13 wearing that kind of hearing aid. Oh my gosh, right? So being female and all.

And then the hearing aid doesn’t help me hear. This is where there’s a lot of confusion. A lot of people think when you wear hearing aids you can hear like hearing people, but that’s not true. It’s different for everyone, so I can only speak for myself. But it just helps me be a better lip-reader.

It helps me be aware of my surroundings better. Without it, I hear nothing. You could scream right behind me, and I would not flinch. So communication is challenging. While I am a good lip-reader, not everybody’s a good enunciator. And of course some people learn to speak English a little differently than Americans do, and that can make it harder to lip-read because they do things, movements different.

So that feels awful, because it feels like a bias, but in reality it’s just lip-reading the American way of speaking English. It’s different than somebody in Australia or in India or anywhere. Anyway, so I am not fluent in some language. It’s not a good or a bad thing. It’s just how my life worked out.

I took Spanish every day for three years, and I did not become fluent. By that same token, there is no one in my life who’s fluent in ASL to help me learn it and retain it. I have taken a couple classes, but it wasn’t long before I forgot what I learned.

I know some words. I know the finger alphabet. That’s the only thing I know all these years. Since first grade, the finger alphabet. That’s really easy, and it comes in handy. But ASL it’s just not enough people know it, and I need to be able to navigate the world So when somebody who speaks a different language comes to Texas or the United States, if they want to navigate, they’re gonna have to learn English.

It’s the same way. Even if I were fluent in ASL, I need to be fluent in English too, because this is where I live. So it’s just a survival thing, and just who’s in my life

Alycia Anderson: Let’s talk about entrance of technology that has enabled captions to be in front of you and in front of all of us. Do you remember the moment that kind of started to unveil itself? w-

Meryl Evans: Absolutely.

Alycia Anderson: I’m sure you do. And what was that like for you? ‘Cause I would assume that it was a big deal.

Meryl Evans: Oh, it was. It was. So when I was 13 years old, my parents gave me a present, and it was a box about this big. So bigger than your cable boxes are, your DVD boxes. Probably the size of two of ’em stacked on top of each other, about that big. And so it was called the closed caption decoder. Back then, captions were not built into the TV yet.

That came later, around 1990, if I remember right. And but the thing was, you had to go find that caption symbol. I had to hunt it down. It was like finding a unicorn, looking in the TV Guide, looking for that square symbol with the little triangle or the CC, depending, and it was like finding a unicorn.

And one of my first favorite shows ever was Dynasty. So yeah, this is the ’80s, big hair, big clothes, big dresses, wealthy, all that stuff. And it was the first time I couldn’t wait to get to school in eighth grade and talk about Dynasty ’cause I had some other friends who were Dynasty fans too. So that was the first time I experienced that water cooler talk about the last night’s TV show.

So slowly but surely, captioning kept getting more and more, but I remember I’m a big fan of musicals. Explain that. I don’t know how to explain why, but I was hunting down video stores, hunting down for musicals, movie musicals and captions, because that’s how I learned the songs and all that.

Anyway, I could spend hours on captions, but yeah, it was life-changing, and it still is. I mean, so many things were captioned by 2020, right? But the pandemic supercharged captioning again because a lot of the video platforms did not have captions, but they do now. So it just keeps getting bigger more and more available.

Phones are getting them, that kind of thing.

Alycia Anderson: It’s pretty incredible a tool it’s become for everybody. And it’s really fun to hear you talk about your journey with the birth of it way back when you’re thumbing through the TV Guide trying to find which shows have the symbol that will offer you captions. And what a cool lived experience for you, and I’m, totally putting words into your mouth.

But to experience that progression, of adoption of something that’s become one of the most powerful pieces of technology around the world for everybody, I can just imagine how freeing it was for you. And I love that you love musicals. And, that breaks down so many other biases that would probably come with being deaf, that you wouldn’t, or something like that.

So I love that you shared that, too. It’s amazing.

Meryl Evans: Yeah. I’m sure people have heard about deaf people loving music. In some cases they’ll have the volume turned way up and they listen against the speakers. That … Or feel it, that kind of thing. Or they’ll show videos of ASL interpreters at concerts, but really they should not be going viral, but that’s a whole other issue.

I would not, … And that’s also from friends who prefer ASL. Think about it this way. Someone who speaks another language, like Chinese, Mandarin, Spanish, when they interpret music, they don’t go viral. Only the sign language goes viral, and, they’re doing a job. Yes, it’s entertaining, it’s cool how they do it, but they’re doing a job.

So that’s an accessibility tool, not an entertainment tool. Anyway one of the best things about captioning is a study in the UK has found that 80% of the people who use captions are not deaf or hard of hearing, and that is a statistic I love sharing because it shows the value, as you and I know, curb cut effect, and we found that very cliché, right?

But that is really one of the best ways to educate people on the value of accessibility. You reach more people. It’s that simple. Because so many people have the sound off, or their headphones are not working, or they have a sleeping family member, that kind of thing. So captioning just has so many users beyond the deaf and hard of hearing now.

But if you’re ever testing your captioning or want feedback, you need to work with those who depend on it, like typically deaf and hard of hearing people, not people who love to use captioning because they like to.

Alycia Anderson: Okay, so let’s talk about that a little bit. I like that you just led into that. Opportunity to innovate more when you’re hiring people with the lived experience. Talk about that a little bit.

Meryl Evans: So w- I’ve seen enough bad captions to know a lot of people don’t know what good captions are. And I am pr- appreciative that people are adding captions, but when you add captions that are showing up one word at a time you’re making me sick because I’m a fast reader, but one word at a time is ridiculous, and it’s a cognitive overload because you’re getting one word at a time.

You’re not getting that whole thought. You’re just getting split thoughts, right? When you want feedback, you need to work with those who depend on it, and if the captions are not good quality, they may not be able to understand what’s going on. Now, it’s impossible to make 100% of your caption viewers happy because, for example standard is the black with the white.

That’s pretty standard. But I know a few people who prefer yellow over white, but a lot of people hate yellow captions. The best way, closed captioning allow you to adjust them, the settings. That’s the advantage of closed caption. But open captions, you can’t change them. They are what you get.

You can’t change them. And there are so many people who are doing colorful, dynamic, moving captions, and it turns captioning into an entertainment tool instead of a information tool. So captions are for information, not entertainment, as my friend from LinkedIn Jeff Rook. He put my words into beautiful way of saying that captions are for information, not entertainment. Unfortunately, there are some marketing influencers who are promoting entertaining captions because they claim it adds more viewing, it increases your viewership, blah, blah, blah.

I don’t know if that’s really true or not. Maybe it is. I don’t know. But I’m just not getting understanding your video, and I’m going to watch something else instead because I don’t wanna get sick in the process.

Alycia Anderson: You know what? That is so interesting. I think that’s a huge education moment right now, especially in social media and the influencer space where captions are literally, they look like entertainment. That is such a perfect way to articulate that they’re putting them in place of art on the images instead of like you’re saying. And you’re advocating with this information in your platform, but I am so glad that you even said that to me because that connects the dots with me with further education on, the reminders of what these tools are actually made for. So that’s really interesting. I like it a lot. So what’s thing that made you decide to go straight into advocacy? Let’s talk about your work a little bit, but what was the thing that drove you to go, “You know what? I’m gonna be one of the loudest, most respected, most educated people in the space”? Like, how did that happen for you? There’s a lot of our community that follows this show that dream of becoming an advocate in the space, of being on stages, of helping educate the movement. Like, how did you get here? Was there a moment? Can you give us a little background on that?

Meryl Evans: My advocacy kind of grew over time. I’ve always been an advocate. After watching my parents advocate for me, learning how to be a advocate for them, and advocating for my own three kids as well. So I remember in the ’90s, I was a big advocate for captions because they weren’t everywhere yet. And I remember working in Virginia with Stuart Gopin, who put together a book of all the captioned movies you could buy on video.

Of course, that book is obsolete because there’s no way to make a book of captioned stuff now. Amazing. Yay. So I remember being involved in that, I don’t remember exactly what I all did. And then in the early 2000s, I remember advocating for accessible websites. And so my career’s been, I’ve always been advocating for something, but the real big change came in 2018, 2019.

I started making videos. Actually, let me back up a little bit. Someone encouraged me to make videos, and I said, “No, I’m not sure. I do know that, but I do have an accent. I’m not sure how people are going to respond to that.” And I’ve always been good at public speaking. I don’t know why. It just came naturally to me.

So I made a very short video, and it did very well, and I found myself doing something different. Instead of being the viewer of captions, I was being the creator of captions. So I was learning how to caption my own videos, and I made a lot of mistakes in those early days, even though I knew what good captions look like, but I just didn’t think about the rules until I started making those videos and things.

Anyways, after about a year of that, I got invited to speak at AccessU, just in Austin about captions. And people saw me there, and they started inviting me to speak at their events. So it grew from that. So the people at AccessU, I am forever indebted to Knowbility with a K because they started my speaking career.

People told me my voice is okay. They understand me enough. They’re willing to bring me in as a speaker, and it just grew from there. So that’s what the path was, and then I became a certified professional accessibility pro because I met the organization that does the certification at AccessU.

And three years, two years later, I became a certified professional accessibility, yeah

Alycia Anderson: Okay. And so talk about some of the work that you do in companies today. Talk about what you bring to the table

Meryl Evans: Oh gosh. Oh my goodness. I am just a general of all trades. I’ve done so much. I never wanted to go into business for myself, but I ventured out on my own in 2005 because I had gotten enough business to be able to go out on my own. It was not planned. It was not on purpose, just word of mouth.

And my business was writing and marketing pretty much in those early days. Still is. And then in 2020 and after that, I started doing accessibility. It was more accessible marketing, creating accessible content. It eventually morphed into creating accessibility training, workshops, speaking engagements, that kind of thing.

I don’t consider myself the technical aspect. I don’t want to be designing websites, I just don’t have patience for design. I tried web development way back and discovered that wasn’t for me, and neither was programming, so.

Alycia Anderson: I think you and I met around 2021 or something like that,

Meryl Evans: Ya

Alycia Anderson: it, can’t remember if it was just through if we were at an event. My husband keeps saying we were at an event, some online conference or something.

Meryl Evans: Accessibility.com

Alycia Anderson: Oh, okay. You know what? That’s what he said, accessibility.com. What was it? And you and I got connected, and then I started following you, and your content creation, like, for any companies, anybody that’s listening to this right now, you need to go find Meryl on her social media, especially LinkedIn.

You’ve got such… Your following just went like this. It was just an upshoot, and videos are so strong and educational and useful that I can see why companies hire you for your expertise to come in and speak and workshop and all these things. And just to follow your work is an ongoing education, and it’s powerful, not only for companies but for other advocates and whoever else is out there that, that needs to consume this type of information to start to understand it.

So well done. My growth on social media has been this slow, g- and you just, I watched yours just go up, and it’s because you’re willing to get on and have videos and to talk about the tough stuff and give really useful solutions and education, and you’re really good at it.

Everybody who’s out there listening to this go follow Meryl. We’re gonna leave all of her information in the show notes, as well as hire her to come in and speak and train your teams and workshop and consult and do all the things ’cause she’s really good at what she does. Yeah.

Okay. So thank you for giving us a little who are you, what do you do right now.

Meryl Evans: Yeah. And I also do a lot of user experience testing, not just for the deaf, and hard of hearing, but the cognitive side as well. So … when companies work with me, they get a lot in one package. The only thing they don’t get is the screen reader stuff. That’s the one thing I’m lacking, and you don’t wanna work with me on that.

But anyway I love that part. That’s one of my favorite parts, is going through a process, through a digital app or a website, and just talking through the tasks and telling them what makes the experience good and not so good. And one of the biggest, easiest problems to solve is reading friction.

The little things like formatting, font choices, size choices, make a huge difference in the reading experience. It seems like no big deal, but everything’s hard enough out there. Reading should be the easiest thing, and you wanna make it as frictionless as possible.

Alycia Anderson: An example of making it frictionless? What is an example of that?

Meryl Evans: Some people have … Okay a lot of times they’ll use all caps or they’ll center the text, and there are studies that have shown it makes it harder to read. It’s weird. When it … With centered text, the starting point changes, right? It’s like there’s going like there. So it’s making your eyes move.

Even the … But when the ending point is not the same, that’s okay, because your eyes know it’s the end. But when you go back to the beginning, your eyes are having to find the next line. It’s just a weird way of how we read, and it makes such a difference to use left alignment. And some people try to work around that with justified, which is that squared.

Yeah. But the problem is it creates rivers of space that are inconsistent, and it bothers some people especially some people with some cognitive and reading disabilities. So those little things do add up, and I think I’ve developed an empathy so much that they bother me now. They may not have bothered me 10 years ago, but they bother me now because I empathize with their frustration that now I feel.

Alycia Anderson: You know what? That is so funny with this work, and I think we, find those little nuances, too, in, mine and my husband’s life, too. We were talking in the beginning, I was just in the hospital a couple times recently, and we were talking before we got on about language and words, and you said how wheelchair-bound is this trigger, which it is a trigger word.

Wheelchair-bound isn’t a nice way to say somebody is, uses a wheelchair. And when I was in the hospital, on the whiteboard in my room, they write in big words, “Wheelchair-bound.” And so when the nurse comes in, Marty, my husband, is like, immediately goes up, erases it, and gives them the education on how wheelchair-bound is a limiting term.

It’s wheelchair user. We’re not bound. We’re free in wheelchairs, whatever. And so to your point I think that as we learn and get better at our own advocacy and it becomes more, of a very, like, fluid lived experience…

I like that you’re pointing that out with all of these other pieces that, you work on, train on, because you do. You develop empathy over other people’s lived experience when you are embedded in it. You learn the value of thinking and seeing differently, so what gives you hope in this space right now?

Meryl Evans: Generation Z, they love accessibility. They love multitasking. They love caring. And I’m also hearing they value work-life balance. It’s my hope that companies will adapt because, it’s just thinking bigger picture, being more flexible and adaptable.

Alycia Anderson: I like it. I like that a lot. we’re gonna leave all of your information in the show notes. Did we miss anything that’s monumentally important and imperative before we go into our pushing forward moment?

Meryl Evans: I don’t think, not monumentally imperative, but I do say yes, there’s so much to learn. And for our friends who are disabled too, I know it’s hard when people use terms you don’t like. So do I. When Alycia said wheelchair-bound, I am so not a fan of that phrase either, even though I don’t use a wheelchair.

I just feel like it gives you vision of the wrong thing. And yeah, it’s true.

But people are just not educated. They don’t think about these things because they don’t live it. We live it. We think about it all the time. And even people with disabilities use terms that are not popular among our community, and we need to give them a little, grace. Because I mean, they have their reasons for their choices, and it’s about them and not about us. So all we can do is educate, and just keep educating, and remember, nothing will start in a day. So that’s why I talk about progress over perfection a lot.

Alycia Anderson: Okay, so I, you need to talk about progress over perfection before we wrap up, because this is your tagline, this is your thing. Talk about what progress over perfection means. I think that’s a great way to wrap up.

Meryl Evans: So not my invention. Not at all. That’s been around.

Alycia Anderson: For me, like that’s all you, girl.

Meryl Evans: Yeah. I think what I did, and Christopher Patnoe from Google, my friend from Google, we both started talking about it a lot in terms of accessibility and disability inclusion because so many people don’t know what to do, where to start. And I am a Enneagram one. That means I’m a perfectionist, and I can’t take a break until I’ve gotten everything done.

So I’m that type. It’s an amazing mindset, especially for perfectionists like me, to remind us to remember work on making progress, don’t worry so much about perfection. Because if you wait for perfection, it’ll never get, it’ll never get out there. It’ll never make progress. Some of our fellow advocates get frustrated with large companies because they feel like they’re not making progress.

But the thing is, they are so big.

I once had a client who was the accessibility director of a huge company, and there was a Dallas office. I met somebody from the Dallas office, and she was asking about accessibility for her company. She had no idea about this person or this office. So I use that example of how sometimes companies are so big that certain departments and locations are not- up to speed on what the company does.

So it’s very hard to make an entire company understand one concept when there’s so many concepts to learn.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. I love that. Okay. This has been a fantastic conversation. I love it. This is gonna be one of my favorite episodes of all time, for sure. Warned you in the beginning, we end the show with a pushing forward moment, a little motivation to gift away to our community to go out and find their path they’re dreaming of as well, just like you.

So can you give a little pushing forward moment to sign us off?

Meryl Evans: I just always remember to take care of yourself. That, there’s a reason why airlines always say, “Put your mask on first before you help someone else.” Because if you’re helping someone else without the mask, you’re going to pass out, and then you do no one any good. So take care of yourself.

Sometimes life is frustrating, and you just need to take a break, and that’s okay. It’s just about knowing your energy levels and what you can do. There’s a difference between taking a break and quitting. So keep at it, and take a break as you need to.

Alycia Anderson: That’s a powerful statement right there. There’s a difference between taking a break and quitting. I think that’s a powerful reminder, too. thank you so much for everything that you are giving to our world. You are just absolutely amazing and incredible at what you do, and I’m so happy and honored to call you a friend, andI just, I really love and respect everything that you do, and just thank you so much for coming on the show.

It’s a big deal for me, so thank you so much, Meryl.

Meryl Evans: Thank you, Alycia. It’s been my pleasure.

Alycia Anderson: Oh, okay. And thank you to our community for showing up again and for the show, sharing it. Definitely share out this episode. So many takeaways for the world. And we will be back next week with another episode. This has been Pushing Forward with Alycia and Meryl, and that is how we roll on this podcast. We will see you next week.