Delivering Episode 7: Why is digital accessibility so important?

In this episode of Delivering, host Jason Rodriguez sits down with The Paciello Group‘s Larry L. Lewis, Jr. to chat about the importance of digital accessibility, why every business should invest in accessibility, and how it feels to use email with a screen reader.

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Episode Transcript

[Intro]
While a lot of email marketers claim that accessibility is a priority, not all of them have the resources and buy-in to create better, more accessible email campaigns. The lucky ones are required by law to create accessible campaigns. But there are a lot of reasons outside of just compliance to focus on accessibility. In this episode of Delivering, I sit down with digital accessibility expert Larry L. Lewis, JR. from The Paciello Group to answer the question, “Why is digital accessibility important?”

Welcome to Delivering, a podcast about email marketing strategy, design, development, and the broader email industry. Delivering is brought to you by Litmus, the creative platform used by over 600,000 email professionals to design, test, analyze, and collaborate on better email campaigns for happier subscribers. Learn more and try Litmus free for seven days at litmus.com.

[00:00:00.360] – Jason Rodriguez
My guest today is Larry L. Lewis, JR. Larry is the director of government sales and strategic partnerships at The Paciello Group and is founder of Flying Blind, LLC. Over the last 15 years, Larry has worked on digital accessibility and using adaptive technology to empower people with disabilities to become independent, productive, and efficient. Welcome the podcast, Larry, thanks for joining me today.

[00:00:21.250] – Larry Lewis
Yeah. Thanks, Jason, it’s great to be here. I appreciate the opportunity.

[00:00:25.110] – Jason Rodriguez
So, let’s let’s get started. I want to talk about a couple of different things. Most importantly around why digital accessibility is so important, but I want to start with a little bit of your history and some of the work you do. So you work with The Paciello Group. Could you explain a little bit about what The Paciello Group is and what kind of work you do there?

[00:00:41.550] – Larry Lewis
So, The Paciello Group is the digital accessibility arm for a larger company called Vispero. That’s V I S P E R O . Vispero is a group of companies that predominantly makes assistive technologies for people primarily with visual impairments, be it low vision or some residual vision or no vision at all. And a couple of years ago this organization got more interested in not just developing assistive technologies for persons who have disabilities but also creating an accessibility wing to to make sure that the content that others might be developing would work with the products that they were making.

[00:01:26.250] – Larry Lewis
So they did some things on the forefront to begin to build that and then part of that involves acquiring a group called The Paciello Group which was an independent company that ran by itself. Mike Paciello is the founder. It was an autonomous company that was bought by the Vispero organization who also bought a company called Interactive Accessibility, merged them together into The Paciello Group. So we, for all intents and purposes, we are the digital accessibility group of a much larger group. That gives us the strategic advantage of being really the only accessibility firm that has a direct connection to the products that are used by its customers. A lot of folks, among a lot of groups out there, there’s only one group that is that is part of a bigger umbrella of companies that actually influences the direction of the assistive technologies that many, many consumers choose.

[00:02:26.880] – Jason Rodriguez
That’s interesting. So I know The Paciello Group, so you guys do some consulting and you do a lot of training and then you also have a couple of products as well. I know the most recently released was the ARC Toolkit. The ARC is the, and correct me if I’m wrong, the Assistive Resources Center or Accessibility Resources Center. Do you mind going in a little bit about the tool kit and some of the products that you guys have released recently and how they’re used by people doing, you know, accessibility audits or researching their own digital accessibility?

[00:02:56.700] – Larry Lewis
So, from a big picture standpoint, Paciello, what really drew me to them is that their work really parallels my own personal beliefs about accessibility. Accessibility is all about being compliant with laws and managing your risk but it’s also about usability and making content that matters to the end user. It’s easy to use that allows them to perform tasks that that anybody else would perform. Being a visually impaired assistive technology user myself, that’s a big deal to me because at the end of the day we all want to do the same things: we want to shop, we want to pay our bills, we want to do all the types of things that you can imagine. And so usability has to be a part of accessibility as does compliance from a risk management standpoint. So we divide our approach to dealing with accessibility into products and services.

We have a couple of accessibility software-as- a-service type products that are out there. The one you mentioned is a tool called ARC. ARC is a monitoring service that also has some e-learning considerations, knowledge base considerations, and helpdesk services built into it, so that it’s really ARC is more or less our web-based portal for interacting with our customers from a monitoring standpoint. We have a tool that’s part of ARC called the ARC Toolkit and that is a standalone, free tool that we used to only provide to our customers but now we provide it to everybody for free.

And it’s more or less a Chrome extension that allows you to scan individual web pages using rulesets to ensure that your code is compliant. We have another tool out there called JAWS Inspect which is one of the big draws that brought me to The Paciello Group last year. JAWS Inspect is a tool that visually represents the screen reader user’s experience for sighted testers and sited developers. I’ve been a JAWS user all the way back to DOS for those old enough to remember DOS and JAWS is a great product, it’s made a huge difference in my life. Being able to work in a lot of competitive employment capacities, JAWS is not altogether easy for a sighted tester, QA tester, or a sighted developer to use. So we created a tool that basically creates transcripts of what the JAWS user hears—makes visual transcripts—associates them with the code on the page screenshots, allows you to test reading order, allows you to do some live testing, and that would come down on the side of our usability approach to accessibility. So ARC is more for your compliance and your monitoring and managing your overall program.

The ARC Toolkit is a little freebie that we offer to everybody hopefully as a means to drive them to more of an enterprise engagement with ARC and then we have JAWS Inspect, which is a one of a kind tool that there’s really nothing quite like JAWS Inspect.

I mean it is a wildly successful product for the Vispero Group as a whole and I’m really happy to be, one of my roles aside from managing our government business and in some of our reseller efforts, is to drive that JAWS Inspect sales efforts. So it’s super fun to be on the front end of something brand new.

[00:06:27.980] – Jason Rodriguez
So you mentioned you yourself are visually impaired so I think, that’s one of the things, like I’m a sighted user. I’ve run into that issue where I’d use like some like NCDA or VoiceOver to check things out and it’s definitely not a tool I use everyday, so I’m not used to that experience or navigating through pages or documents. So I’m kind of curious to hear more about your experience as someone who’s visually impaired using the web and email and what are some of the most common problems that you’ve encountered over the last however many years through using JAWS or just using any other assistive technology.

[00:07:05.110] – Larry Lewis
So, I always tell people that the main things that they need to check for in testing, or the main problems that I run into, and the first and foremost as is: is parts of a complex screen—are those parts reachable by using the keyboard.? So I don’t have the luxury and I’ve been able to pick up a mouse, point and click, and things magically happen. I have to be able to use tab key, arrow keys, combination of screen reader keys to to navigate to specific areas and your tab key is huge. So, I tell people as a starting point, like you have an assistant technology testing tool if you have a keyboard. Even if you don’t have JAWS or NVDA, tab and check out how the focus moves around a particular site. Are you able to get to all areas by tabbing or shift tabbing.

The second thing that I like to direct people to is: is what you’re interacting with is it is it operable? So, if I’m if I’m logging onto a website and I tab to a radio button, a group of radio buttons, are you a new user or existing user? Am I going to be able to up and down arrow through those radio buttons and press my space and enter key or enter key to select that radio button? That is what operability is. If I can do that with the assistive technology enabled or disabled it needs to be tested disabled first and then you would enable JAWS or NVDA or whatever and you would you would test that.

And then the third is: so, we’ve got navigability, operability, and then is what is what I’m reading makes sense? OK. So can I start in a particular part of a page, move through a form in sequential order, move through a media player in a sequential order, is my captions button before my play button? OK. Because it may look a certain way to you, how is a screen reader rendering the tab order? It has to logically make sense, so it has to be navigable, operable, and logical is really my top three go-tos when I’m working with somebody brand new just to get them to understand how to interact with digital content.

There are rules out there, much like there are rules for building a building, for legal access there are rules out there specifically for developing digital content both in desktop and in mobile settings. We provide consulting aside from the products we offer. We provide front-end consulting to set priorities for organizations. We do complete—we used to call them audits—we’re now calling them accessibility reviews. We provide remediation guidance. We’ll even sell you a bucket of hours to use as you see fit to fix things to remediate things. We don’t like to get into the practice of coding for people. We’ve done it. We’d like to give them direction on coding and test it. And that’s just partly because there is a responsibility for handling folks code and you’ve got contractors involved in who owns what and everything else it gets a little bit complex and there’s a lot of tools involved with that.

[00:10:29.000] – Jason Rodriguez
Well,, I feel like that’s good too because then it’s not just you doing the work for them to be compliant. It’s kind of forcing them to learn what’s needed to be compliant and how to code things effectively. And I feel like that’s a great way to kind of force that education on them so that they know how to build more accessible interfaces in the long run. I like that.

[00:10:49.920] – Larry Lewis
Oh, I’m a big fan of lessons learned, right? What’s the lesson that you’ve learned? And now let’s put what we’ve learned into action for the next time.

[00:10:58.300] – Jason Rodriguez
Yeah absolutely. Obviously I work at Litmus, this is a podcast about email and email marketing, are there any major problems you’ve encountered with marketing emails in particular as a visually impaired user?

[00:11:12.710] – Larry Lewis
So there’s a couple. The first that comes to mind is this has nothing to do with Litmus it’s basically how it goes right?

So, when I get a marketing email a lot of times, I’ll hear something when I open it up and it will say image shape blah blah blah. Yeah. So JAWS or whatever I’m using, if I’m on my phone using VoiceOver and open it up, it’ll be the same thing they’ll be image shape. And then the list of numbers, maybe a .jpg, that is a simple fix because that this simply means that that image doesn’t have ALT text associated with it and it’s just reading the file name. So what I tell people to explain what this is and we use JAWS Inspect a lot for this I’ll take him to a graphic and I’ll show them how JAWS Inspect would speak their graphic. And I would ask them, “So this is all the information that you got reading and you couldn’t see the picture. What would this mean to you?”

And a light goes on it’s like, “Wow, I have no idea!” Yeah, that’s because there’s no there’s not a little 140 character blurb as to what that shape blah blah blah is, right? So, that’s the first thing a lot of things and you open up an email you’ll be hit automatically and it could be a decorative logo, right? It could be something really important. It could be a promotion Litmus is running and all it has to say is something like, “A Litmus promotion.” If there was a long description maybe you want to have a long description where the screen reader user could press enter to hear a long description.

There are things that you can do. You don’t want to have ALT text that’s too long and I often use the Twitter mantra. Keep it to 140 characters. Otherwise you’re going to lose it. We all in this day and age have a short attention span. You’re gonna lose the message if it’s longer than that. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing that might happen is that, you know, I might not, like links might be disabled—or not disabled—but links might not be labeled properly so if you’re telling me to go to such and such a link I might just hear something like a click here link and yeah know that that’s for more details or whatever. So the link has to be appropriately labeled if you want to take me somewhere else. Otherwise I’m just going to hear link I might hear a click link and I’m not going to know exactly where that link takes me.

Probably the third and most frustrating thing is, if there is—and every marketing email has a changing your preferences subscribe or unsubscribe or forward to a friend—that process can get a little dicey. Just in my own Paciello work business, I am not going to mention them, but I’ve used a customer service system that doesn’t make that the most easiest when you’re trying to unsubscribe, subscribe, maybe there’s a CAPTCHA involved that’s not the most accessible, and so that whole setting your email preferences or even forwarding that email to a friend can be a little dicey from time to time.

[00:14:25.340] – Jason Rodriguez
Yeah, I feel like some of that’s unintended but I feel like unfortunately email marketers a lot of the time, or kind of traditionally, it’s just that kind of spammy thing where they don’t want you don’t subscribe so they make you jump through all those hurdles to actually get that which is not a great experience for anybody, regardless of their abilities. That’s definitely interesting. I think that alternative text is one of the key things we talk about both from people that are visually impaired but that there’s a lot of email clients that will disable those images by default. They’re not displayed. And if you’re using you know all image-based emails you’re not going to see that anyway. Using that alternative text to provide that additional context is a really, really great way to make your emails more accessible. I’m kind of curious, I know you work with government agencies a lot, which are obviously I know they are legislated by Section 508, they need to be Section 508 compliant. I feel like a lot of times, when people think about accessibility that’s like the main thing they think about is Section 508 compliancy, are there other industries that have different legislation that they’re governed by? Are there other, you know there’s the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which aren’t really you know legislation in and of itself but it’s a set of guidelines that people should be following, what are some of the other things that people need to worry about outside of just being Section 508 compliant or what industries need to really focus in on accessibility that traditionally haven’t?

[00:15:50.070] – Larry Lewis
So, private industry needs to also be worried because as time passes there are more and more court cases on the books that set precedents for problem for problem areas. So we do a lot of business with banks. People will get a little funny when they can’t access their money.

I’m one of them I had a dust up with my own bank a couple of years ago before I joined The Paciello Group. So banks are a big one and you know when you have when you have litigation like what happened down in Florida with Winn-Dixie a couple of years ago, you had an online situation where they were unwilling to make some changes and the courts had to get involved to make the online process of shopping much easier for their clients. Well, I’m working with a with an unnamed County right now who is has been sued because some of the documents that, while they’re not government in there they’re basically state, they’re under a lot of the same legal expectations that if you have documents like house deeds and different types of documentation up there and you can’t read that particular documentation then there is a serious risk there.

So yeah know what transpired there was the commissioner’s office of a particular county got sued but then all the other parties all the other offices around the county found out about it and they’re like we don’t we don’t want this to happen to us. And so it became sort of a bigger engagement. It’s become more of a big engagement where we can help the entire larger group set priorities. We do a lot with universities. Again many state universities are loosely governed by some of the laws that you reference but more importantly you get into reasonable accommodation type situations where a student, you know, who’s taking any learning course, who can’t take an e-learning course there’s a reasonable accommodation issue for that for that university. They have to provide a means for that e-learning, distance learning, course which it’s happening a lot more these days, to be accessible.

And so, we work across verticals. I work very much with our federal groups. I also work with some of our reseller opportunities, resellers of our tools primarily. And then I have my own contacts and folks who come to me just from other walks of life where I’ve worked who often need help.

So I would say we’re fairly strong and in the banking and education-type industry. We’re becoming stronger in the federal business, the federal business, you know, everybody goes gravitates to it. So, I think that the distinction that we offer is we also provide JAWS for Windows to most of these government clients and can offer them some services that others cannot because we are directly connected to the folks who manufacturer JAWS.

[00:19:00.030] – Jason Rodriguez
Yeah, I feel like finance and higher education are like two of the big ones that I was here about and that’s one of those things I didn’t think about that much until a couple of years ago. I did a workshop at what was called HigherEdEeb which is a conference for web developers at higher education institutions. And I had talked to about six different people that all of their universities got sued for accessibility issues and that’s become such a strong focus for them over the last couple of years. And I’m coming from, you know, kind of the agency world and B2C type stuff and that’s never been an issue. So, it’s I feel like it’s good that more of these things are coming out and there are more of those legal issues that are you know it’s it’s kind of bad that we have to force people to think about accessibility but it’s good that it’s actually happening.

[00:19:49.360] – Larry Lewis
Well, I tell people there are three reasons why—I’m sure you’re going to want to get to that—three reasons why accessibility. Well, accessibility first and foremost is a civil right. Secondly it’s all about risk management. If you don’t do it you have a higher risk. If you don’t attempt to do it, that’s even worse, and if you push back after you’ve been called out on and don’t do it it’s even worse. And then the third reason is it makes good business sense. So I mean there is a lot of, at the risk of sounding irreverent, a lot of disabled dollars on the table.

I mean, I have a house. I have a car, I don’t drive my car but I have a car.

There are a lot there a lot of buying opportunities that I feel like a lot of people, a lot of organizations, miss. I worked with a mortgage company about a year and a half ago and walk them through how all of the obstacles for me applying for a line of equity, just going through the process, and they were just amazed that there were so many difficulties as it, again, relates to navigability and operability primarily.

So, not only is it a civil right. Not only is it about smart risk management but it’s also from a commercial standpoint it’s a smart thing to do.

And I’m just talking about people who are visually impaired and there are people in wheelchairs, people who are hard of hearing, people who are missing limbs, who can’t use a keyboard and maybe use speech dictation.

All of those folks have needs. All those folks spend money somehow. And so accessibility, it just makes good sense all the way around.

[00:21:33.510] – Jason Rodriguez
Yeah. If you’re not thinking about it, it’s just leaving. like when it gets down to it, you’re leaving money on the table and I don’t know that’s something any business wants to do. We commonly talk about people with disability is like you know they might be in a wheelchair, they might have low vision things, that are permanent but I know Microsoft’s done a lot of work around inclusive design. They have this idea of like the ability persona spectrum where there’s those permanent disabilities but then there’s also a lot of temporary or situational disabilities. So, even people without some permanent disability they might be busy with something, they might have a broken arm, they might you know have just had their eyes dilated. It’s something as simple as that. And if an application or an email is not accessible then they’re going to have issues using that thing.

So, I like that idea of like—I forget who says it—but somebody said, you know we’re all only temporarily able-bodied,. So those like we’re all gonna encounter some sort of disability that we need to use this technology. But a lot of times we can’t.

So, one of the things I did want to ask you was—in speaking to lot of people I email conferences and I know through Twitter and all kinds of different mediums— it seems like people that are on the ground floor, that are building websites, that are building email campaigns, they’re aware of accessibility and they’re aware of the importance of creating accessible digital products. But a lot of times they can’t really get the buy-in from stakeholders, they can’t get the investment of time, money, or resources to build out these really accessible digital products. What do you say to people that are in that situation that need, you know, the evidence or the data to get the higher ups, get the company and the team to buy in to investing in accessibility?

[00:23:27.000] – Larry Lewis
Yeah, so I I can’t recall where I’ve seen this statistic but I have seen is that if accessibility is built in on the front-end it’s roughly about a 3 percent additional level of effort. Accessibility is not rocket science, it’s like ninety nine percent good coding. So there’s that. It’s a minimal level of effort if you embrace it on the front end.

It’s a maximum pain if you don’t do it and you get things later. It’s kind of like if you don’t follow a building code for making a big building wheelchair accessible or ready to put ramps and you don’t make doors wider you’re going to have to knock down and destroy a whole lot of stuff. The same is true with digital.

So, it’s a minimal level of effort up front—minuscule level of effort—when you think in terms of 3 percent. It’s a horrific, crippling in a sense way, to redo something that you may ultimately have to do because of legal consequences that maybe happened. It’s easier to deal with this on the front-end. Now again, you know accessibility at times can be about risk management. And so there are occasions where if, maybe there’s a website with house deeds from the 1920s. or There are lots and lots and lots of them. You’ll have to make decisions. Do you want to go through the process of making all of those house deeds accessible or do you want to maybe put them somewhere that’s not so outward facing? There does come a point where there are some gray areas and you have to figure out where are you going to apply the most effort to minimize your risk. Does somebody, how many people do you think sighted, blind, hearing impaired, or whatever care about a house deed from 1918?

Maybe the emphasis could be applied somewhere else. I don’t say to anyone that you will be 100 percent accessible all the time because things happen, like things get posted even with the most strictest of web governance out there. People sometimes do what they’re going to do and say you’re never going to be 100 percent accessible 100 percent of the time but if you have policies in place and you have a way of monitoring your trends, that’s why we that’s why we push a product like ARC because we we scan your content every month and we make sure that you’re going in the right direction as an organization. And that’s why monitoring services are so important, it gives you an idea: are you going in the right direction, are certain parts of your organization navigating away from what they should be doing to be on an accessible path?

[00:26:33.590] – Jason Rodriguez
Yeah that makes sense. I like I feel like I don’t always think about accessibility as risk management by it that does seem to be.

[00:26:43.150] – Larry Lewis
It’s an ugly part of it but it’s just it has to be said.

Especially with the government, what drives accessibility is the thought, there have been some unnamed federal groups out there who have gotten the legal would put to them because they haven’t done the right. And unfortunately, that’s how sometimes the right thing gets done. I’m not personally a litigious guy at all but this is just what happens.

[00:27:09.750] – Jason Rodriguez
For a lot of companies, that might not be, you know, they’re not part of the government they don’t need that Section 508 compliancy but it’s still a driving factor for them.

[00:27:21.390] – Larry Lewis
Yeah it’s becoming more and more because more court cases are being won. I mean, you’ll get a Target and Amazon and Winn-Dixie. And if they can if it can happen to them it can happen to a lot of organizations.

[00:27:37.910] – Jason Rodriguez
Yeah totally. Absolutely. So I’m kind of curious. We talked a little bit about ARC Toolkit and JAWS Inspect and some of the tools that The Paciello Group has built out. What are some other tools that you traditionally suggest to people that are looking to improve their digital accessibility whether that’s testing tools, development tools, you know, specific screenwriters they might be able to access and use?

[00:28:01.820] – Larry Lewis
So, I’m a big fan of aside from caring very much about JAWS Inspect and desktop productivity, there’s a mobile component to what excites me.

So, prior to my joining The Paciello Group I spent a lot of time in the mobile space doing some work with educators teaching them how to use the different types of assistive technologies with disabled kids. And part of that involved how do we how do we test for mobile accessibility? And there are simulators out there and things like that but I like to tell people the best way to get after it on the mobile front with iOS and Android is to enable the assistive technologies and use a lot of the alternative gestures that are out there that would simulate my fingers swiping right and left with with a product like VoiceOver enable is going to be like using my tab and the keyboard.

My double tapping the screen is going to be like mouse clicking or using my enter key. Being able to understand focus where the screen reader is speaking on the screen is very easy to learn when you’re using something like, you know, an iOS device or even Android is beginning to mature. And so they have their own set of tools. They have a tool called TalkBack and Zoom and some other things that you can enable to test. You have to test to make sure that, again, can you navigate with your finger to all key areas of an app? Can you action those key areas and do they make sense to you or are they logically set up in order? So, those are all free. Mobile tools are freely built into all your iOS devices and all your Android devices that are out there and so forth.

We do in the interest of transparency, while we are very much a JAWS company, NVDA is a nice free testing option. What I would say about NVDA is, it’s a very clean testing option, but when you’re testing for usability in corporate or government environments I would have a direct focus obviously back to the idea of JAWS. There are a number of free things out there. I mean Microsoft has, the name escapes me, but Microsoft has a free tool and I’m drawing a complete blank on it, that they have a tool that they’re promoting these these days and it’s going to bother me all day to get it. I was just chatting with Microsoft a few weeks ago about it too. I mean I can’t remember it. And so you know there are a number of free things out there. We actually have a color contrast organizer that’s free that allows you to use—or color contrast check not organizer—where you know you’re able to check. Color contrast is a big deal.

I think I read a stat that of every 12 adult men, one has some degree of colorblindness and you throw color contrast into the issue making sure that you have a 4.5 to 1 ratio with your color contrast. So, lots of lots of free things out there for self testing. I would direct people back to third-party validation when they don’t necessarily want to own the accessibility risk themselves. And what I mean by that is you can say something is accessible that you’ve tested it but if you do that and you get called out by somebody who says you’re not you better be ready to show your methodology to show how you tested it and when and where. We do that. We we provide basically test plans to our customers to show them what we’re going to be doing and how we’re going to be referencing what we test because we are fully prepared.

If somebody says that what we’ve tested, that we’ve deemed accessible, is not accessible we’re ready to point out why it is accessible.

So, that gets tricky because people who like, you know disabled or able bodied right, who might have an old computer using IE 8 or Windows XP still. Right. And so where does the responsibility of the content provider stop? It’s up to you the code compliance and usability but it’s not necessarily your job to build an accessible bathroom in a house from 1920. It’s the same thing with digital accessibility.

[00:32:48.130] – Jason Rodriguez
That’s interesting. I feel especially in the government world I can imagine you guys encounter some pretty old devices, pretty old browsers, pretty old operating systems that make it hard.

[00:32:58.310] – Larry Lewis
And as much as I’d like for us to get away from Internet Explorer, a lot of people still use it.

[00:33:09.140] – Jason Rodriguez
It’s the same thing in the email world where, you know, Litmus allows you to test in almost a hundred different email clients and a lot of those are outdated, their older versions of Outlook or Lotus Notes or whatever but they’re still in pretty wide use which is, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising after this many years of seeing that kind of data, but it’s definitely something a lot of people, especially that are newer to the industry, don’t really take an account and think about but you need to, you know, make sure you understand and code defensively against that to make sure that your or your emails your websites or whatever work on those devices. So, before we wrap up I wanted to ask one more question and get your list of your favorite resources—whether it’s like things like books, blogs, podcasts, or people—that are doing really good work on accessibility. Who are some of the people what are some of the resources that anybody interested in accessibility should reference and learn more about?

[00:34:05.270] – Larry Lewis
We have a blog on our TPG website. We also, on our interactive accessibility section of the website, have podcasts where we’re often interviewing folks much like you’re doing now, folks throughout the industry. You know those are the top two that come to mind. There are all sorts of things out there.

I mean, I do a lot of things, things on LinkedIn I belong to, digital accessibility groups on LinkedIn, different things like that. So, I think there’s such a wide variety of things out there that it’s hard for me to narrow down. I know from the government’s standpoint, for sure, the access board has redone Section508.gov. That’s a pretty good site that the access board has played a pretty good role in revamping. There’s so much out there that it’s hard for me to really point you to what I would say is my favorite.

[00:35:09.970] – Jason Rodriguez
Are there any particular books that you’ve read recently that have kind of shaped how you thought about accessibility?

[00:35:16.350] – Larry Lewis
I haven’t really read too many books. I mean I read plenty of articles. Usually that’s part of my LinkedIn groups but I haven’t read too many like cover-to-cover type books that address it.

[00:35:27.060] – Jason Rodriguez
Maybe I’ll have to hunt around and find some and if I do I’ll send them your way too. So, Larry thanks for joining us. Where can people find you online or what’s the best way to get in touch with you or the posseThe Paciello Group?

[00:35:42.750] – Larry Lewis
So you can always go to www.paciellogroup.com. My email is llewis@paciellogroup.com. You can also reach me at my extension (727) 803-8000 ext. 1909.

[00:36:07.830] – Jason Rodriguez
Awesome. Thanks Larry I appreciate this. I know everybody that listens to podcast is gonna love it too because accessibility, I love that it’s becoming more of a topic of discussion in the email world. It seems like it’s been that way for a long time in the web world. But I love that we’ve gotten your insights and your perspective on digital accessibility and helped answer the question why is digital accessibility important, so hopefully everyone listening checks out some of those resources. Definitely check out the ARC Toolkit. I have a installed in Chrome right now, it’s awesome, I’ve been playing around with it.

Thanks so much for joining us and hopefully we’ll talk to you again and keep up the good work.

[00:36:45.180] – Larry Lewis
Thanks for having me.

[Outro]
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Jason Rodriguez

Jason Rodriguez was the Community & Product Evangelist at Litmus