What the Pandemic Taught Us About Accessibility, and What Comes Next

Speaker 1: For many, many years, people with disabilities have kind of been like chanting, like let us, you know, work in an environment that's best suited for us. [00:00:30] You, if you eliminate those potential problems that can exist by, um, just, you know, trying to get from point a to point B, I didn't have to worry anymore if the elevator's working on the Metro because I wasn't having to make my community more. I eliminated that problem right there. Speaker 2: [00:01:00] Put such a huge population of such a huge focus at once. Um, that I think that the schools and the workplaces that have their people with disabilities, they all asked zoom and other platforms like, you know, [00:01:30] teams and meet, um, they all, all of a sudden, within a month or two got automated captions. And this is clearly a result of a massive need for, uh, for affordances, for people with disabilities. Speaker 3: You can't just say, yeah, everybody comes in [00:02:00] and then, you know, yeah, we're, we're keeping in mind, but people with disabilities want, they wanna meet together. And then a couple of people will be going, um, I'm over here saying it's kind of a struggle for me. It'll take me two and half hours to get into the office and be much more productive on a zoom meeting or meeting virtually. [00:02:30] Those are all great tools. But again, you know, if you're not, um, understanding who your audience is, there's still gonna be limitations because that's, you know, that caters to kind of only a certain kind of demographic, if you will, Speaker 4: [00:03:00] Unless you integrate accessibility and accessibility testing into your entire software development life cycle, as you are building those components, as you're designing those components, as you're putting your application together, then you'll see that it's really important to, Speaker 5: [00:03:30] Because we're a couple years into the pandemic, more and more people just aren't on the camera, they're choosing to stay offline. And that makes it very difficult because for me, I rely on lip reading and even just expression to fully understand what someone's saying Speaker 6: [00:04:00] In this zoom meeting right now, we literally can have captioning, um, auto transcript there's services that can provide on demand ASL interpreters. In, in about 40 seconds, we could bring online an ASL interpreter and things like that. These are all the things that we had to learn on the, on the, on the spur of the moment. [00:04:30] Think about all the people with disabilities that have to adapt to situations all of our lives on a daily basis in a world that's not accessible to all. What I'm really hopeful is that through this, the things that we've learned [00:05:00] are that through post COVID, there'll be wider recognition that individuals with disabilities have been doing this for a long time. Speaker 1: I think on the digital space, we see a lot of movement, whereas in our physical spaces, we're starting to like [00:05:30] shift to people being out again. I think we've seen like this stall and how do we re-energize that feeling that let's all get back into the community, but let's do so in a way that we're continuing to have our eyes on, um, you know, the physical elements to make sure everyone can get around [00:06:00] The conversation is coming up more. I think that, um, especially employers are becoming more mindful that people work well in, in different ways, but things need to be set up appropriately so that that can happen. And, um, also, you know, just [00:06:30] acknowledging that there's still remain barriers and let's work towards correcting and improving those.