Absolutely. My pleasure.

Yeah, accessibility is developing technology, digital products that work for people with disabilities. It's, I guess, become cliché at this point to mention, but it's the task that I think people are able to understand very quickly is using screen readers. So that's where if you're blind, you cannot see a mouse pointer. You can use the keyboard, but you can't use the mouse. And so You also cannot read the screen, so you have a screen reader that just speaks the words on the screen, and you control it with your keyboard. And if you do all kinds of funky stuff, like try and redo the scroll bar, which JavaScript has redone everything from time to time, that makes it inaccessible and makes things not work with a screen reader. Also, A lot of the frameworks have replaced semantic HTML. There's a lot of web developers that don't know semantic HTML, which is unfortunate. And semantic HTML builds in all kinds of features for free, including accessibility. So if you don't pay attention to it, you're not aware of it, you're going to lock out people with disabilities.

Yeah. So you have, you have like different parts of your, different parts of the screen when you're surfing a website. So you have main and you have nav, you have different elements. And if you don't— what's happened with a lot of frameworks is they replace it with divs. So you can have, let's say, a button, but instead of using the word button, you have an image and then you don't specify the role as button, then the screen reader doesn't understand what that image is. And ideally, if you just use the actual like form tag, the button tag, all of the different tags, then it's semantic. And by being semantic, the screen reader and other assistive technology understands it.

Yeah.

Um, and it's a shame. There's no need for it. That doesn't really help. All it does is remove what's been built into the web and the standards.

Yeah.

So yeah, it's unfortunate. A lot of people like want to put craft into what they do and they, you know, everybody— a lot of people are upset by constraints and very often designers love to do something original. But the constraint is actually important because it makes a difference for the user experience for a lot of people that you're never going to have the money to test for. Right, right.

Yeah, exactly right. Yeah.

Yeah. Back in 2011, my dad was in his mid-80s and was just an incredible man who spoke 11 languages. He went through the concentration camps and just commanded respect when he walked in a room. I don't even know how to explain it to you, but I worshiped my dad. And at a certain point, he had gotten phished by a bank. It took him a day to get to the bank because he had to use something in California called Access Paratransit, which meant you had to say it in advance in a day. You could wait for 2 hours. So it was very difficult to do banking. And And, you know, I'd been doing work for American Idol at the time. We had a blind contestant, and I was always wondering, did we do a good enough job in order, you know, for him to be able to access the website? And then my dad just couldn't bank because they changed the colors, and the color contrast made it impossible for my dad to see the screen. And I thought, ah, you know, if you can't bank, You can't be independent. There's no reason that somebody like my dad should be unable to access their bank. So I got upset, but I had always kind of in the back of my mind, because I'd always been on the bleeding edge of tech, and I had barely heard of screen readers at the time. So I thought if I was unaware of it, most people weren't either. So I just, I had a blog called mysqletalk.com. which had maybe 10 people that ever looked at it, and I wrote a blog post proposing a day of awareness, Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which is now known as GAAD for short, and wrote a blog post proposing this day, and to my utter shock, in the very first year, we had such an uptake of this that it was covered in a bunch of media, it was syndicated all through Canada, my hometown, Montreal. We were in 16 cities across the world. India did a governmental event and it's just like from the beginning, it was like, oh my God. And then by the second year, I'd say a lot of it happened on old Twitter. We started to hit like tweet a minute on the hashtag. We started to track how many people were talking about this and We stopped counting when we hit 220 million people. We're like, all right, this is country-level engagement. And this, I mean, I could go on and on with the events that happened, but I would say the culmination was in 2024, the Biden White House did an event and called me up with like 2 weeks' notice. Would you come out and speak about the importance of accessibility? So that's a bit of a history on the event, but the more important thing Because it doesn't matter how much media attention you get. What matters is, is this reaching the audience it's intended for, which is builders, people that are creating technology, and are they aware of the issues with building incorrectly? And that's who we really wanted to reach out to. And I think we've done pretty well in that respect because any company that has an accessibility team tends to do something on that event and uses it in order to educate their employees internally, like their developers, designers, and project managers. Yeah.

Makes sense?

Okay. So I would say if you're involved in a company, you know, what we typically will say is try and surf the web without a mouse. Take a look at the accessibility of if you have your personal site or your company site, Bring attention to it internally at your company, write a blog post about it, mention it to a journalist. Really, in the original blog post, the entire— I hate everything I write an hour later. This is the only thing I came back to it after years that actually was well-written and really lays out the playbook of getting the awareness out there. And I would say if you just Google like MySQL Talk Gad or something like that, or my name and Gad, you'll, you'll, that will pop up for you.

Yeah, great. I hope it's still up there. There's some craziness with, with the WordPress stuff. So I don't think I can even get into the, to the admin anymore. But anyway, for now, yeah, some weird, weird stuff happened. But And then there's also the foundation's website. We started about 5 years ago, gaad.foundation, G-A-A-D dot foundation, and then accessibility.day. And I don't know if you want me to spell that out because accessibility is a mouthful.

Yep. Yeah.

I mean, we're a pretty scrappy organization. Most of us take no salary, so we're able to operate really lean. So we're doing okay. Money never hurts, and you can definitely find a donation link on there. But at the end of the day, you know, the mission is the most important thing for us, which is to really get the word out about making accessibility a core value in software development. So if you're doing software development, what would help us the most— and it's not about helping us, it's more about helping the community and building more accessible products— is to make that a value in your organization. That's what we care about more than anything else.

Of course.

Yeah, that brings up a great point. And what I like to tell people is, you know, the laws go up and down, things change, culture changes, but culture is the center of all of this. And if you're a designer and you're designing, for example, a chat app where you need an online/offline indicator and you use red for offline and green for online, you should know as part of your craft, you should know that folks that are colorblind, the most common form of colorblindness, they both look gray and gray. And you need to just include some textual information, not to use color alone to convey that information. And I love that example because if you have a culture that says, oh, you're a designer and you didn't know this, right? Then it doesn't matter if the CFO has money for this or not. It won't even reach their radar because you're sitting there and you're going to put that word online, offline next to that image, right? And it didn't cost a penny. And in fact, you saved money for the organization and made a more usable product because culturally, you know, you cared about your craft enough to understand that not doing accessibility right is technical debt, right? And now all of a sudden, okay, we've brought it into the culture. So you are 100% aligned with, you know, our mission, which is changing the culture of digital product development.

No, just to the foundation website. If you want to reach out to me on any platform I'm on, I'm @JoeDevon, J-O-E-D-E-V-O-N. Um, and, uh, we have Global Accessibility Awareness Day coming up, so, uh, please check out the GAAD hashtag, G-A-A-D, and, uh, we'll catch you online.