Season 02 | Episode 06: Crafting User-Centric Digital Experiences with Kevin Shaw

David: Welcome to Practical Accessibility Insights. I’m David Best, and in this episode, we are bringing you more tips and tricks for small businesses to gain a competitive advantage and enlarge the marketplace. And of course with me as usual is my trusty co-host, Sandi Gauder. Hi Sandi.

Sandi: Hi David. How are you today?

David: Okay, I’m good and looking forward to our conversation today because I’m always interested in learning about the end user lived experiences. So Sandi, why don’t you go ahead and introduce our guest for today.

Sandi: So today I’d like to welcome Kevin Shaw to the podcast. Kevin is an entrepreneur, he’s a broadcast media professional, a digital accessibility specialist, and if that’s not enough, he’s also a musician.

So welcome, Kevin.

Kevin: Thanks for having me, Sandi. Really great to speak with you and David today.

Sandi: So before we get started with all the questions we have lined up for you, maybe you can tell us and our audience a little bit about yourself, your background, what your experience is in the accessibility field, all those good things.

Kevin: My story begins when I was young. I actually grew up with low vision. And was a bit of a computer nerd and a broadcast nerd in high school, and I took that and turned that into time at university, at what was then called Ryerson University, which is now Toronto Metropolitan University in the Radio and Television Arts Program.

And I split my specialty there between audio production and technical producing for television and really learned kind of systems thinking around how do you put together a broadcast? How do you put together an album? How do you put together a group of people that are all shooting for a common goal?

And so that gave me a lot of transferable skills. At the time I, I was going to Toronto Met and or Ryerson, I was in the process of losing the remaining vision that I had. That was, uh, kind of a quick transition for me to go from having low vision to having no vision. I had a couple of, uh uncles in my family who, who were blind and they really helped kind of ease the transition into using a screen reader full time and, and that sort of thing.

And that was kind of my first exposure to understanding a little bit about software accessibility and why certain software didn’t work with JAWS, which is what I was using at the time. Fast forward the four-ish years that I was at school and I left and was looking for a job in the industry, either in audio production or television, and was at a loss. It was not a good time to be, you know, looking around for work.

This was right after 9/11 and I said, well, since nobody’s hiring me, I may as well hire myself. At the time, I was a, a mobile DJ. I was DJing parties and, and weddings and that sort of thing, and eventually landed a gig in radio. I worked in radio for about eight years or so. While I was there, I, I went back to grad school again at Ryerson, and there I actually split my focus between accessibility and media production. So it was a master’s in media production.

I went in with the idea of, you know, let’s, let’s put together a thesis on whether media production software is actually accessible. Can somebody who is blind use the software that’s out there to make something of, you know, beyond hobbyist quality, something of a major label quality?

Left radio. Got bitten by the entrepreneurship bug. Launched a startup called Tell Me TV, which was a video on demand platform for described video. Worked on that for a number of years, and made a quiet exit out of that. The market matured around us and started to see more and more described video on a lot of different platforms. I guess I’d successed myself out of a, out of a job.

Worked at CNIB for a couple of years running an entrepreneurship program for them. Meeting people from all across the country with site loss and entrepreneurs doing everything from, you know, brick and mortar retail, to bakeries, to jewelry making, to industrial products and software, just, just all kinds of things, and it was a, a really, really fun time.

And left that had an idea for another startup, which was an app and website to push restaurant menus to your mobile phone. And I did that until the pandemic. Of course, all the restaurants closed and then just started freelancing in the accessibility space.

Now I’m working at, uh, Tangerine as their Digital Accessibility Lead. And concurrent to all of that, ’cause I guess I’m not busy enough, I hosted a show on, uh, AMI TV called Mind Your Own Business, and that was a show where we featured entrepreneurs with a disability and uh, they would come in and, uh, meet with us myself as the host and, and some mentors talk about a business challenge that they were going through, and we would give them a 60 day challenge to change one aspect of their business.

Sandi: So when you were starting that first business, and I suppose even the DJing would’ve been a business, what were the kinds of challenges that you experienced? Or did you experience any challenges because of your vision loss?

Kevin: Well, we’ll take ’em one by one. You know, nobody taught me how to DJ. It’s not something you could go to school for.

A lot of the DJs that I knew growing up were you know, guys and girls that just started at their bedrooms, which is basically how I started, and they just figured it out. And the technical side of, of doing the DJ stuff was not difficult with sight loss. I learned the workarounds as to, you know, how to work the equipment and find all my music and all that stuff.

The big challenge, of course, is when you walk into a bar or restaurant to talk to, you know, somebody who’s hiring you for to do a wedding. They see you walk in with a white cane and automatically they make some assumptions about you. You’ve gotta prove that you are as professional, if not more so than somebody who can see.

And so, you know, you learn pretty quickly to approach everything with a level of professionalism and care that exceeds the expectation of not only your client, but everybody you’re working with. When I was doing Tell Me TV, the challenges were a lot of business challenges, so I actually found folks that were really receptive to understanding my story and why I started the business.

You know, I tell everybody the same story of being home one day and wanting to watch a, a movie on DVD with described video. DVDs for the younger folks listening are flat round discs with movies on them. And I have a, a bunch of these and I realized I didn’t want to, you know, go through the difficulty of finding the menu and turning on the audio description, I thought that, you know, there’s gotta be an easier way to do this online.

And so when I was meeting with, you know, other professionals in the industry and, you know, talking to folks at Sony and MGM and Warner and, you know, all these, these movie studios talking about licensing their content, they understood that I was trying to fulfill a need.

And I didn’t face a lot of challenges that way. The challenges I faced were business challenges. They weren’t accessibility challenges or challenges related to my site loss. The one thing that I found that I had to do with developers was communicate a lot with how I wanted our software to behave

David: From the perspective of an entrepreneur, I believe there’s probably some differences in challenges for somebody with a physical disability, as someone with a visual disability. In your case, can you describe what kind of challenges you had as an entrepreneur in trying to manage your own accounting, your own marketing, your own sales, your own contracts, and dealing with, particularly angel investors?

Kevin: Yeah, that’s a great question. So when you’re an entrepreneur, especially if you are a solo entrepreneur, you’re at the point where you’re building a team and you’ve got some folks who are maybe contracted as a developer, you might have somebody contracted as a bookkeeper.

You wear a lot of hats. You are the finance person, you are the accounting person, you’re the marketing person, you’re the product manager. So I think the challenge here is understanding you’ve got a set of tools at your disposal. So I’m a unapologetic Apple fan boy. I drive a Mac full-time, uh, you know, drive an iPhone full-time.

So a lot of that accessibility, you know, for doing things like spreadsheets and documents and interacting with websites and, and that sort of thing, I actually found it necessary to really know your tools. I’d say that it’s really important to really know your screen reader, really know all the keyboard shortcuts, know how to do things like a workaround so that you can work with, you know, maybe a website or a web app that is not really accessible.

When I started, there was no such thing as IRA. There was no such thing as AI, Be My Eyes. All, all of those things, they that didn’t exist, and now it does. When I was doing it, it was really important for me to know how to use all of the tools at my disposal.

In terms of talking to angel investors and speaking to the investment community, for me, it was very important to communicate the idea that I was solving a problem. And I think that’s what a lot of investors want to hear. What’s the problem? How big is the problem? What’s the solution? Why are you the right person to offer this solution? And, ultimately, investors want to know what’s in it for them.

So for me to learn how to pitch and to learn how to talk to angel investors, and, you know, we could do it one of two ways. So the first way is to say, I’m blind. A lot of other people are blind. We wanna watch movies and TV shows, or we, you know, we have this problem of, you know, going into restaurants and the menu’s not accessible and so forth.

It’s already tough enough for us, and the evil entertainment industry is trying to shut us out. And you can come at it from a, an antagonistic point of view, which is not helpful. Or you can say to an investor, I have a problem, and it turns out that x number of, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, or a million people or whatever it is, also have this problem.

And the problem is, you know, maybe it’s inaccessible movies and TV shows, or it’s inaccessible restaurant menus, and here’s how I plan to solve this problem. And at a certain price, people are willing to pay to have this problem solved. And is this something that you think you could help us out with?

And that frames it in a different way because now the investor’s coming alongside you and helping you solve those problems in a, a tangible way, obviously with funds and so forth, but also by making introductions and saying, Hey, I might not be able to help you with this, but it sounds to me like you might need help with marketing or finance or staffing, or you might need a really great board member. Here’s somebody that I can refer you to.

And so navigating that space is multifaceted and you have to approach it with the attitude of that you are in business and that you are the person to solve that problem because it, it basically irks you so much that you had no choice but to go out and solve that yourself.

David: When you look at statistics in Canada, the failure rate of entrepreneurs is very high.

But among people with disabilities, less than 1% have an entrepreneur venture. And I’m wondering with your experience, what kind of support resources are out there? Because I can see for someone with a vision loss trying to relate to angel investors and to communicate that it is a profitable business.

Kevin: Well, I started up a resource at CNIB. It was called the Venture Zone. It was an entrepreneurship program for folks with site loss right across Canada. You know, I think one of the issues when you are an entrepreneur, especially if you’re somebody who is a solopreneur. So maybe you’re the hacker, but you’re also the hustler and you are the one that is coming up with the idea for the software.

You’ve got a product or you know something where you are basically just doing it yourself. Or maybe you’re starting up some kind of consultancy and you’ve gotta work with clients. The most important lesson that I learned as an entrepreneur is that you can’t do it all by yourself. And so the most important resource that you have is other people.

And, that would be the first thing that I would say before, you know, you run to a CNIB and a program to help you with the challenges of being an entrepreneur and so on and so forth. Start networking amongst the people that you already know. Do you know somebody who knows somebody else? Do you know somebody who might be an expert in, maybe it’s digital marketing or maybe it’s something in manufacturing that that you need to do?

Start making some of those phone calls and that networking right away so that that folks know who you are and know that you’re working on solving a particular problem.

There were two organizations that helped me out. One was Business Development Bank of Canada, and I had a, a pretty good relationship with them.

A Canada Youth Business Foundation, another called FuturePreneur. So those were two organizations that offered some mentorship. You know, I’m, I’m still actually in touch with my mentor, who was just a fantastic mentor to me. Came and saw me at my business location, jumped into the problem with me. Really offered, you know, really sound business advice.

I think especially when we are in that accessibility space, when we’re in that space of, Hey, I know what the solution is because i’m the one solving the problem for myself, or maybe I’m solving it for somebody that I’m, you know, that I’m close to. Those mentors really offered the business advice in terms of, you know, coming up with a really good pitch deck.

You know, mentorship around how to do your financing. Mentorship around how to structure agreements. And I think that the kind of mentorship that makes or breaks your business. So it’s not necessarily that like, hey, I’m looking for somebody who understands what it means to, you know, to be blind or, you know, have a disability.

Like I already know all that stuff. I don’t know how to get my product into a store. I don’t know how to get my product onto, you know, the export list for, uh, Export Development Canada and get, get into like a foreign market. I need mentorship to know how to do that.

It’s staggering how much people will wanna help you succeed as an entrepreneur. Folks out there want to root for the underdog. I think that there’s a lot to be said for just jumping in and picking up the phone and calling somebody outta the blue and explaining your situation to them and saying, can you help me with this?

David: I think you’re right. I think from my experience, there’s a lot of people out there that really do wanna help.

The challenge is finding them.

Kevin: It’s getting better. There’s a great organization called Access to Success that I’ve been involved with, and it’s a bunch of companies that are doing work in the accessibility space, in the disability space. Not all the founders have disabilities, but they decided to make their own network to create something because it wasn’t there.

I know Canada has a Chief Accessibility Officer who I’ve met. But if we’re waiting, you know, if we’re waiting on the government, we’re gonna be waiting, you know, quite a long time. So I think government can help, but I think it’s probably a good thing to, you know, just to kind of go out on your own. I think things that BIAs and Chambers of Commerce.

You know, just showing up at some of these things and saying like, Hey, I’m here. Now you’ve gotta figure out how to, you know, how to deal with me as somebody with a disability. And so there’s a lot of self advocacy work that you do there. I can say that because that’s worked for me. You know, I tend to be a fairly confident person, you know, very forthright and you know, it’s one way to sort of gum up the works and, you know, just show up one day and say, Hey, like, I’m here, this is what I want to do, and you find allies and people who are willing to help you.

Sandi: So when you were going through school, did you have an idea that you were going to end up being an entrepreneur? Was that ever something that was in the back of your head?

Kevin: My goal in life while I was in school, both undergrad and graduate school, was I wanted to be a recording engineer and, you know, mix albums and win a Grammy award and be in the music industry and that kind of thing.

And I realized that that’s a very hard lifestyle. You know, just being in the studio like 14 hours a day. Like five, six days a week, something like that. You know, that I was working on this project and just being there at 10 o’clock at night and, uh, you know, hadn’t seen my family in a while, hadn’t seen my friends in a while.

I was like, Hmm, I think this is gonna be an expensive hobby. You know, there’s a place for this. I was working in radio at the time and was really waiting on, on the next move. So I didn’t know then that I was going to be an entrepreneur and I, I had a little bit of experience with, you know, running a DJ business and that sort of thing, but jumping into the world of tech was something that really came outta left field for me, outta the blue.

And that was a whole experiment in just start somewhere. And I actually knew somebody who had started a software company that made software that I used in high school. And, uh, I just called him up and said, Hey, can we have a chat one day? And, he gave me a lot of great advice and uh, and that’s how it started.

For me, that was sort of a baptism by fire, if you will, into the, you know, into the world of entrepreneurship. I didn’t take business courses in high school. In hindsight, I wish I had. You know, business was far off my radar. I was being, uh, you know, more of a creative artist type.

Sandi: So you now work at Tangerine, the Digital Accessibility Lead there. I suppose there’s entrepreneurship involved in working for a large organization, but I would imagine that the experience you had running your own businesses versus the experience in now of running an accessibility program, it must be a bit different, but I imagine there’s some overlap.

So are you experiencing different challenges working inside an organization in kind of an entrepreneurial capacity, or are they the same kind of challenges that you experienced running your businesses?

Kevin: That’s a very insightful question. If you’d asked me in high school like, Hey, do you wanna work for a bank one day? And I’d be like, what bank? That sounds boring. No, now I’m working for a bank. So what changed?

Would say that when you’re running a business, we talked about this earlier, of like you having to wear a lot of hats, to jump into a world where a lot of that stuff is done by other people and where you are just doing accessibility and you gotta kind of stay in your lane, there’s an adjustment there for sure.

I would say that the overlap comes in understanding what makes a good product. I sit on the design team at Tangerine and we touch product all day long, and so taking a product centered approach, this is what helped me understand that the client’s needs or the customer’s needs come first.

You can have great ideas all day long. You think you know the best solution, and you, you go out and you find some customers and you show them your app or the, you know, the, the product or the thing that you’re working on, and you’re like, isn’t this great? It does these five things. And your customers or your test group will go, yeah, but does it do this?

Because we’ve got this problem and your product doesn’t do that, and then you go, wow, you are the first person that’s actually told me about this is actually a really good idea. I’m lucky in a way that Tangerine is a very agile organization. It’s small enough that it’s not a big bank, but it’s not so small that it’s a startup.

And so if you’ve got a good idea, people are willing to help you put that idea into practice. And I think for me, I didn’t go to school for accessibility. I didn’t do a computer science degree or a, you know, certificate in accessibility. You know, I lived this and I just picked it up by osmosis, talking to developers and working with people and going to conferences and, you know, learning on my own and doing my own thing and figuring, trying to answer the question as to, you know, why does my screen reader keep saying button, button button when I’m on this webpage.

And learning about the software side and learning how interfaces are built and, and so forth. That’s what I bring back to the team and saying like, Hey, not only should we be fixing this from the accessibility side, but as a user, this is something that I want to do. And I would really love it if the, you know, if the product could do this. And that you’ve got a team of people that says, Hey, you know what, that’s actually a really good idea. We’re gonna take this and work with this. And that’s actually gonna solve both problems at once.

Sandi: So that raises an interesting question for me because, uh, I know David and I have talked about this, um, had many conversations about it, about an accessible website is not necessarily usable website.

So when you’re working with this team, do you prioritize one over the other? Now I understand that if you can’t access the site, then it’s clearly not usable. But assuming that it’s generally, the product is generally accessible for most people, Where do you put your focus more on fixing the remaining accessibility issues or spending a bit more time making it more usable for the end user?

Kevin: That’s a great question. We have these two silos. And so the one silo is the accessibility silo where you might look at, let’s say the the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG, you run the sites through some software and the software comes back and it says, well, there are no accessibility errors.

So all the buttons and the links and all that stuff, they are labeled properly and they work fine. And then you’ve got the usability side. You know, it takes you five steps to do something that should really only take two. And these two worlds are often separate. And this happens in software a lot, where a designer or the engineer or the software developer will say, I’m gonna map out this software experience.

You know, let’s say it’s e-commerce as a typical example. So get on a website, search for a product, find the product, read about the product, add the product to your basket, go to the basket, figure out how much you owe, and then check the product out. Sounds straightforward. But on the usability side, the person designing that experience is not always thinking about accessibility.

If you approach it with an accessibility first mindset, I think that you’ve solved two problems at once, but only if you’re not looking at accessibility as a bunch of rules to follow. I think you can build a really great product and a really great experience if you start thinking from the user’s perspective in terms of accessibility, and I heard this at a conference where they said accessibility equals killer usability.

If I can talk to the software, type to the software, use a switch control with the software, use a braille display, use a screen reader, use a mouse, use a touch screen, and all of that stuff works really, really well, i’ve made something that’s not only really accessible, but also really usable.

And you know, just to get back to the entrepreneurship thing and to tie that in, you know, the company that does really well with usability and accessibility is going to put themselves in a far better position in the market than somebody who just made something that looks pretty.

And I think we’ve seen this over and over and over again, where somebody might make, you know, a website or a platform even just like a physical product, like a hardware product that looks great, but they’re not thinking in terms of design and what makes a great user experience. That’s something that I’m sort of learning on the job, you know, hanging out with, with designers all day, which is, you know, what makes a really great, not just product, but product experience. How do you get people really excited so that they tell their friend, who tells their friend, who tells their friend that, Hey, you’ve gotta use this thing. It’s so easy to use.

One of the companies I’ve, I’ve seen start up is a company called Innosearch. And they make an AI powered shopping platform specifically for folks with site loss. I checked out the site and I was like, oh, this is interesting. It’s not just Amazon without pictures. There are pictures on the site, but it’s an actual AI powered shopping platform that will pull in search results from hundreds of thousands of web retailers for the, you know, particular product that you’re looking for.

And, the checkout experience is so easy. Going through that, I was like, somebody actually got this right. And uh, I remember talking with the CEO, there are three blind software engineers on their team, and so they’re building with an accessibility first mindset. And I was like, this is actually kind of disruptive because Amazon isn’t doing this.

You know, a lot of other e-commerce is not doing this. And, um, you know, I think they’re in a, in a really good position to get themselves embedded in the minds of, you know, folks within our community.

David: I heard it once said that the stirrups, the saddle and the reins is the accessibility, but actually getting to ride the horse is the usability experience. And, the challenge, I think, between those two is that everybody today is an expert. We have web development tools such as WordPress, where anybody can now set up a company and say, I’m a website developer.

And a lot of small businesses are very dependent on third party providers, whether it’s providing legal advice, accounting, but website is probably one of the biggest expenses they have in communicating with the market.

And, I find that a lot of times they really don’t know what they want for a website, so they’re totally dependent on the website developer to tell them what they want and what they need. I just wondering, how can we get around this problem of these third party providers misleading a lot of small business owners?

Kevin: Yeah. That’s gonna change in the next five years with AI for sure. WordPress is 23 years old now. You know, it’s pretty long in the tooth. You’re right. And so you get these small business websites that aren’t very accessible. You know, everything’s custom. And you know, we end up with a lot of accessibility issues and a lot of rework that needs to be done where let’s say the company grows from one person to 500 people and the website is not accessible.

And now they’ve gotta go back and, you know, redo their shopping carts and label graphics and buttons and so forth. I think all of that’s gonna change with AI because AI is now at the point where you can say, make me a website that shows my portfolio of products, ties into Shopify, has a really simple checkout process, integrate this with, you know, Stripe or, you know, whatever.

And now you can tell the AI this has to pass an ADA Section 508 audit. This has to pass a, an Accessible Canada Act audit. Make sure that the website has alt texts for graphics. Make sure that the website, you know, has, you know, proper labeling for all the buttons and all the form fields are labeled and so forth.

And I’ve seen AI go out and do that, and it’s like, oh wow. Like this. You understand? I think a, a lot of that’s gonna change in the next five years and the small shops that are doing basic bread and butter web development, I think they’re gonna need to adapt to this changing world for sure.

Sandi: It begs the question about usability though, because I, I don’t disagree with you.

I’ve, I’ve gone down this road myself and yes, you can say, build me an accessible website that complies with whatever standard you want it to comply with, and it, it, it will spit out to the stirrups, the reins and the, and the saddle, but will the user be able to ride it? Do you think AI will be able to even consider usability and the elegance of the process of checking out, or is it just gonna be accessible in checks and boxes?

Kevin: Yeah, I think that’s gonna be the challenge, right? Do these AI models understand human factors and even, you know, things that are not quite strictly software driven, like apps, for example, that may require things like haptic feedback or using accelerometer in the phone.

I think that’s going to be the challenge where we’re gonna go beyond accessibility. Where, where we now need to look at usability. Sometimes that usability means that we need to put speed bumps in for us. In banking, it would be great for you to go into your banking app and do you know, paying a bill in a couple of steps.

Not always a good idea because you want to put in some confirmation to say, are you sure you want to do this? Here’s a summary. This is what you put in, like you, this amount from this account. And so you gotta put some of those speed bumps in. And so these are usability things and, and the most streamlined, easy interface is not always the solution.

So I think that AI’s going to get there eventually, but the opposite is true. I always say that when someone makes something idiot proof, the universe just goes out and makes a better idiot.

David: So accessibility is a journey, it’s a learning experience, and it should be the core feature of any business. So a small business owner doesn’t wanna have to become an expert in accessibility, and they have to trust third party providers.

So are there any services that you know of that small businesses can rely on to help close that gap for them?

Sandi: Because it is one of those things we, we do the automated testing, we might do some manual testing, but actually getting end users to do proper testing is, is often the, the piece of the puzzle that gets missed in the process.

Kevin: I, I think there’d be a really interesting business opportunity for, you know, somebody who’s looking for some gig work. Absolutely. This is one of the things that AI can’t do yet, which is do the manual testing.

David: Kevin, I wanna thank you so much for joining us and giving us your lived experiences as an entrepreneur and now a banker.

Do you have any resources or contacts you would like to leave with our listeners in case they’d like to reach out to you?

Kevin: So my website is Kevin-Shaw.com. I’m on Twitter at KevinShawPro. It’s X now. And I’m, I’m happy to connect with, and you know, I really love to help entrepreneurs solve problems and try to figure out how to get their businesses off to the next level.

Sandi: So our last question, Kevin. What tip do you have simple things that an entrepreneur or startup can do to incorporate accessibility or think about people with disabilities into their business?

Kevin: Build it in, don’t bolt it on. Nothing about us without us. So make sure that you’re involving people with disabilities at the planning stage, not at the, you know, right before the product ships.

And make sure that you’re building in killer usability, user story. You know, make sure that the story of the user reflects people with disabilities.

Sandi: Good advice. And I would agree with all of them. Thank you so much, Kevin, for taking some time to chat with David and I. It has been wonderful. We’ll be sure to put your contact information in the podcast so people can get in touch if they’d like.

And again, thanks for taking the time.

Kevin: Thank you, Sandi. Thank you David.

David: The views, thoughts and opinions expressed on this podcast.

Are the speakers own and do not necessarily represent those of the podcast team and partners. This podcast is for information and learning purposes only. The Practical Accessibility Insights podcast is hosted by CMS Web Solutions. The intent of this podcast is to raise awareness for practical advice and strategies for making digital and physical environments more accessible to everyone.

Thank you for joining us in this time of discovery and sharing for a more inclusive society. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at info, I N F O, at david dot best or Sandi, S A N D I, at CMS Web Solutions dot com. For more information and resources, go to www.CMSWebSolutions.com or www.BestAccessibility.consulting.