IAAF 2023: Digital Accessibility in the Federal Workplace

Narrator

Annual Interagency Accessibility Forum. Day two general session.

Clare Martorana

Good morning, everyone. I hope you'll indulge me for a moment. I'm going to try and learn today. So, I'm Clare Martorana, the Federal Chief Information Officer. I am about five foot eight. I have gray hair. I'm wearing a neon pink blazer, kind of like Barbie.

And I am honored to be here. I would, ask if you would indulge me if I could take a picture of the room, because I would like to bring this back to my colleagues at the White House and share with them what this huge crowd is. What an important event this is. So, if that's okay with y'all, I would love to just take a quick picture.

Thank you. You'll all get credit. I will take everybody soon. So, as I said, I'm Clare Martorana, Federal Chief Information Officer, and my role at the White House is to lead, the policy team, for cybersecurity and IT modernization. So, I want to thank both Sylvia for hosting us. My other colleagues, that will be, on a panel shortly.

And I really want to, stress the fact that this is the 10th Annual Interagency Accessibility Forum, and that is just outstanding. So congratulations, for continuing this really important work. And before I introduce our guests in the panel, I'd like to share with you a few thoughts. So, all members of the public and federal employees should have equal access to government, regardless of ability.

Sixty-one million adults in the United States have a disability, and an estimated 15 million or more people have a temporary disability. And an estimated 40 million people are caregivers who provide support to a person with different abilities. So, the 400 million people that are counting on us delivering services as a federal government, are not only the American public, but they are also constituents of Congress.

They deserve better, and we are up for the challenge and are working hard to deliver better for the American people. Building and sustaining an accessible federal technology environment is an operational imperative, which is why my office is developing policy, which will cultivate an accessible, inclusive work environment. The policy, we've been working on for over a year. I'd like to point, just, give a shout out to my colleague, Cassie Winters.

Cassie, if you could say hi. Cassie has tirelessly been advocating fighting for this policy, working with colleagues across government to make sure that we are writing. We're trying to do something called human centered policy design, which is, we have to hear from our colleagues in order to create the right policies, rather than standing on the mountaintop and shouting down anybody to do things.

So, Cassie inspires me every day. Along with my other colleagues, Allison is here as well. So, the policy, the policy is in development will tell you a little bit more about it, as we get closer to releasing it. But we must ensure that all electronic information and digital services conform to Section 508 standards issued by the US Access Board.

Building these considerations in from the beginning are necessary to foster a culture of inclusion and respect. It's 2023. This is an expectation for our government to be able to deliver a digital experience that is on par with consumer brands. For instance, I'm in the middle of a transaction of selling a house and buying a house. I can do that all online, on my phone, multitasking in a meeting.

Those are the expectations of the American public. Not that I'm multitasking in a meeting. But that, that you should be able to do, simple, as well as complex transactions, utilizing digital tools that we have available for us. And we are laser focused additionally on measurement. You can't manage what you can't measure. So, in order to ensure we're meeting those standards and providing equal opportunities for all users to interact with digital content in a meaningful way, we must test and measure our work.

Testing digital accessibility involves awareness and training to use various techniques and tools to help us determine how well digital content conforms to accessibility standards and guidelines. And these standards are not just for websites, but for software, for hardware and services, both public facing and within our own organizations. In 2022, the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, chaired by Bob Casey, published a report titled, Unlocking the Virtual Front Door An Examination of Federal Technology's Ability for People with Disabilities, Older adults, and Veterans.

The report provided an overview of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which mandates that federal technology must be accessible for individuals with disabilities. It also outlined the bipartisan push for accessible federal technology, and discussed the changing landscape of federal technology. And as many of you were aware, at the end of FY 22, Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023.

Which mandated new requirements for OMB, GSA, and the U.S. Access Board to collect and report on federal agency data on Section 508 compliance. That effort, called the Government Wide Section 508 Assessment, is well underway, and the assessment will be submitted to Congress and made public, no later than December 29th, 2023. I cannot stress enough how big a step this is.

This is assessment is holding our federal government accountable for providing and accessible, technology to the public and to our federal employees. The results of the assessment will be a baseline for how agencies are implementing Section 508 and prioritizing digital accessibility, and will enable agencies to demonstrate their progress and advocate for additional resources dedicated to improving accessibility.

So, there's one other thing I would like to mention. Our agency, at OMB, we've put out a lot of guidance recently. I know we're annoying everybody by putting out a ton of guidance. We're trying to make much of it available for public comment, but we recently, published the digital experience guidance. So, if you go on whitehouse.gov and you search digital, you will find, the guidance outlined with both a fact sheet, the long form of the actual guidance.

And we built it so it is mobile optimized, accessible. The first time that we have published, this way on whitehouse.gov. So, we're really proud of trying to meet the moment and work with all of you, based on the incredible progress that has been made over the last several years. So, with that, thank you for having me.

I would like to introduce our first panel. Martha Orr - Deputy Chief Information Officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs. If you would come up and join me. David Shive - the Chief Information Officer at the General Services Administration. And Sylvia Burns, who you've heard from, Chief Information Officer and Chief Privacy Officer at, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

And I look forward to a wonderful conversation with my colleagues.

Clare Martorana

Hi. Can you hear me? I have never emceed a panel. I have been on so many panels and I've never emceed one, so please bear with me if, I am not 1,000% the best moderator. So, so happy to be with you all. These are colleagues. I worked previously at VA, for a couple of years, and it is a real honor to be with this esteemed group.

So, I'm going to start off with us, Martha, for you. So, we recently issued the Delivering a Digital First Public Experience guidance, which outlines a ten-year digital transformation with more than 100 actions and standards for all federal agencies to design, develop and deliver modern websites and digital services. Ensuring websites and digital services are accessible for all individuals is a requirement of the guidance. So, I wanted to ask how are you incorporating this in the work that you're doing at VA?

Martha Orr

Well, thank you for the question. And I thought your remarks were spot on, on several of the issues that actually this, addresses. I think that as we modernize our websites and, and make sure that our documents, and our pages, and our applications, and all of those things are, you know, be able to be used by everyone.

We also need to keep in mind the experience of the user, whether it be someone in the public or with us, a veteran or our staff, and make sure that we are giving them the best user digital experience that we can. And we do a lot of work in that regard by working with people that are actual just their users of our, of our, you know, websites, and our applications, and our pages, and all of that sort of thing.

And as we work through to make sure that all those things are accessible, we're also working with the development teams to make sure that, you know, we've all had a bad digital user experience. If I'm the only one, then there's something wrong with me.

But there's nothing more frustrating really. And I often think, you know, they're they want me to pay my bills online, for example.

I think it takes me longer to do that than to write a check. So, that's why I'm a little passionate about this and a little, and I want to make sure that when we are creating these opportunities digitally for people to come in and interact with the VA or with any, entity in the federal government that we keep in mind, that we have people that are using these and we want to be, you know, we just want to be, mindful of that.

So that, kind of talks about how we're the, I guess the steps we're taking to modernize our websites and our web pages and that sort of thing. Another couple things that I'd like to highlight, though, for the VA is our telehealth program. It is amazing to me that our telehealth program has expanded so much.

And it was sort of expected during the pandemic, but we have expanded 1,000% over the telehealth users that we had pre-pandemic, and it's still going up. So that tells me A, it's a good user experience, and B, it's something that our veterans in this case are taking full advantage of. And so, we want to continue to make that the best experience and the most accessible experience possible for them.

We also can't forget people who need to use the telephone to get information, like, like, what? And, so I just called over this last weekend. I was chatting on. I thought I was chatting with the real person. Apparently, it was a computer that couldn't answer any of my questions. So again, goes back to the user experience.

But we also have, instituted an 800. Let's see, what is it? My VA 411 one stop shop for all questions that people, veterans might have in terms of how to fill out their forms, where to find their forms, where to get information on their mobile device, that sort of thing. And so, I think it's important that we keep that in mind as we think about, you know, mobile applications and the digital experience.

That's not going to be something that we, we still have to have a way for people to talk to other people on the other end of the line with maybe more complicated questions, or maybe not. Mine wasn't that complicated. The chat bot couldn't answer it. So, we also think in terms of secure data. We, I don't know if you all know this, but we do a lot of, referrals out into the community for our veteran care.

And we want to make sure that as we're moving to a digital experience, and information sharing in that regard, that it's secure. The data is secure, in the various community providers that are out there in our network. And then finally, you know, I think it's no secret we're putting, new electronic health record in place in the Department of Veterans Affairs.

We're working really hard to make sure that, that is accessible to all of our employees that need to use it, as well as any veteran facing or otherwise public facing components of that. It's at the very beginning stages of implementation. There are still a lot of challenges that we have in that regard, but I'm happy to say that we've been auditing, we've been testing, we are aware and we're working through the issues.

So, I think at the end of the day, it's all about the experience. It's all about making sure that it is designed with the end user in mind and that we have various modalities for communication.

Clare Martorana

Thank you so much for that. I spent a few years working at the VA, and one of my favorites, pictures is, the VA invented telemedicine, and there's a photograph, I believe, from the 60s, maybe, and it was a bunch of people sitting around in a semicircle with very large TVs and antennas behind it, and they were like, literally doing the first telemedicine visits, and test at the technology.

It was really inspiring to see how far VA has come in being able to deliver those telemedicine services to veterans. Yeah, it's really impressive.

Martha Orr

And, and, the other interesting thing is, as well, I just learned a couple of weeks ago that we just retired a system that we implemented at the Philadelphia Insurance Center in 1959. It was just retired a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, so, that we've been in the business for a long time. Right. We're trying to modernize everyone, really.

Clare Martorana

That is fantastic. Thank you, Martha. So, David Shive, great to see you. David and I and Sylvia have, the pleasure of serving on the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) board together so we don't get to spend as much in-person time, but a lot of Zoom time, with each other. So great to see you. How is, GSA thinking about measurement and, support of these digital activities across the federal ecosystem since you're providing so many key shared services to federal agencies.

David Shive

Great thanks. Am I on?

Mic audible. So, before I get started, for those of you in the room, that are unsighted, I am a middle aged white dude, kind of tall, wearing a dark suit and a blue shirt. And I'm super happy to be here. So good morning to everybody. Good morning and good afternoon to anybody who's dialed in, from Europe or Asia.

I've been looking forward to this conversation all week.

So, you know, Claire, what gets measured gets done. And we have an obligation to understand where we are so that we can develop strategies to know where we need to go when it comes to accessibility and usability and digital experience. And at GSA, we take that obligation very seriously.

We have three overarching, goals that we operate against, and then a couple of overarching strategies that, help us drive visibility, transparency, and change into, into those goals and objectives. The first of those, goals is we, we take a look at digital experience. A frank, honest look at the digital experience that any of our consumers, customers, partners, operate against.

Whether they're internal employees using our, using our tools, external shared services that our partner agencies use or downstream to the citizens that they use. And we’re always looking to improve our product and service with that digital first, digital experience mindset.

Because frankly, that's what the citizens of the United States know and expect of their government right now. The other is we, look at it through a customer experience lens. Not just how easy is it to use a thing, but what are you trying to do? What are you trying to accomplish? And are, is the transaction or the thing that you're doing, made easier or harder by the enabling technology, by the business process that undergirds that?

So, we take a strong customer experience, lens there. But there it is, employee experience. We’re the biggest employer in the United States, 2.2 million employees. And we have an obligation to make sure that their jobs are made easier, not harder, by the technology and business process they use to prosecute the business of the U.S. Federal Government.

So how do we do this? A few different ways. We survey the heck out of people. You know, we are the government and here comes your survey. And so and so, we ask people on an annual basis or a quarterly basis, what do you think about this? And that's a great way to holistically generate feedback and information, so that all voices can be heard.

You know, we, we are not shy about being a representative government. Part of being a representative government, government is listening to what your stakeholders, the people who use your things, what they think and feel about what you're doing. But yearly or quarterly surveys are not a very elegant way to have that conversation. That's just one way, communication coming back to you.

So increasingly, we've expanded our portfolio of transactional surveys. So, when you interact, an agency interacts with GSA products or services, or a citizen interacts, we ask them right then and there. How was that for you? What did you think of that? What how was your experience? Where can we do better? And it's amazing how that does two things.

One, it gives you actionable information, and it promotes that more of, that dialog way of measuring. But also, it increases trust and confidence in government, because the people who are consuming your service are like, they actually cared enough to ask - as a in real time. And then the third thing is, you know, we use metrics, so we, we measure everything.

Some of those are very traditional governmental metrics. Like we measure how our portfolio of digital assets conforms to the US Web Design Standard. We measure 508 Compliance. We measure how we are, complying with the 21st Century Idea Act. But measures for the sake of measures don't matter a whole lot. We also take a hard look at what are those measures? What are those compliance activities? What are they trying to actually get at?

And that's an important distinction because, you know, we've received from the white House, really appreciative of that, that point in time, guidance that comes from, in authority. But what we found is when we take an honest look at the dialog that's taking place in, say, 508 Compliance, those conversations right now are very different than they were five years ago. Very different than when that was penned in 1974, whenever that was.

And so we have to have an honest, conversation with ourselves, that understanding about what compliance to good digital practice. What good accessibility practice that, that's not a singular thing. It's changing over time as we as communities, gain more insight as enabling technology changes. And so, we're looking at the measures, but we're also looking at what the stories that those measures tell us about how people think and feel about how they're using our systems and our business process, and how we should be changing and iterating that in real time based on the information that we have available to us.

Clare Martorana

Thanks so much for that. I think, I think this one's hot. You have a new mic. So, Sylvia, I, wondering if you could tell us a little bit about some of the challenges and opportunities here at FDIC, to continue to advance human centered design and Agile delivery across your portfolio.

Sylvia Burns

Thanks for that question, Claire. I love talking about that. So, you can ask my staff that. I am like a huge proponent of Agile and human centered design, all this kind of stuff, because, you know, we have a big, job here at the FDIC to modernize our IT environment.

But to do it the right way, we have to modernize our practices. So, it's like how, how we do it as much as what we do. And, to the point that, Martha was making, like, we want to develop modern, usable technology for the people who we serve. But the best way to do it is, is to do it with them, do it with the users, so that it serves them in the end when they, when they get it delivered.

And that's a huge difference then I would say the traditional way that, you know, agencies like this agency and others have done development because we were all trained the old way, right? We were all trained in waterfall and, you know, following the Systems Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and blah, blah, blah, right?

Well, so, there's a better way of doing it that respects all the best practices.

And those things are human centered design and Agile. So, you know, just, just to say that the user centered design, it starts with doing user research, right? You have to understand who the users are. And then actually sitting down with whoever, however you going to slice and dice the, the analysis to your, your segmentation of the of the users, right?

It's ideally having an opportunity to sit down with them and actually have somebody with you, with the developer as they're developing it, so that the testing it's all like integrated right there and then.

I mean, that's part of all the practices that we're talking about. So, the challenges and the barriers, Claire asked about, it's a change. It's a huge change from the way things have been done for decades. You know, your system from 1959 was probably developed the old way, you know. And here we are in 2023, and we're trying to do a complete refresh in how we look as a government to, the constituents that we serve. And so, it's a gigantic change, but necessary.

So part of that is understanding that, that, that it's a big change. We don't, maybe don't have people who have the knowledge, skills and abilities to just pick up and start running. You have to break that down. And so like, I would just tell you that, I've hired somebody who is specifically focused on change management, on my team.

And I think, you know, I'm hoping that, that's the beginning of expanding, you know, change management, a change management program, kind of at the agency. The other thing is I, spun off an Agile working group that has really embraced this. And, we have hired people who have the newer skills that we're looking for. And there are people in our workforce who want to learn the new skills.

So, I think the Agile working group is kind of like a, you know, it's a it's a place where we can strategize and plan and actually make these things happen, within my organization. So that includes training, right? Getting people more access, training. We have a corporate university here. And, you know, I want to engage with them so that we actually are offering, good training on, on user centered design.

I think they, they do offer, but then it's encouraging people on my work in my workforce to partake of it. We're also building this into our contracts. So all these things are part of how we're trying to overcome the barriers. Some of the hardest barriers are related to culture, right? It's just, you know, you're used to doing something a certain way.

And I think to approach things differently with a user centered design approach and Agile, you it's, it requires you to be completely open and collaborative and, being willing to be vulnerable. That is hard for people. So you have to create, I think, in order to make the culture move, you have to create safety in the environment so that people understand that it's okay to make mistakes.

We're learning this. You know, you don't see a baby just standing up and running around right away, right? They fall down. Toddlers fall down all the time. We're going to make mistakes and it's okay. So, it's just like guiding people through the process. But I'm like really committed to it. I've actually been thinking because I, I'm one of the tri chairs of the Enterprise Operations Committee that's part of the council.

And, we're doing our strategy session next week. And something I am thinking of, well, you know, can we put together a community of practice, you know, for the whole federal community around Agile, DevSecOps and some of these more modern practices, because I know my, my agency could benefit from it.

And I know Dave and actually Martha, your organizations have made a lot of progress in those areas, and I know that I can certainly learn from you and we could benefit. So, what I love about the community is that we help each other.

Clare Martorana

Thank you so much for that, Sylvia. You reminded me of a story from my private sector life. We bought, I worked at a health, care company called WebMD, and we bought, a nurse triage tool, and we were trying to think about what else could we do with this tool to, like, actually put it online because it was a telephonic service.

And we decided that, we looked at our search results and people were kept searching on symptoms. So we're like, let's do a symptom checker that, like, would allow you to put symptoms in. And you could get an, you know, not a clinical diagnosis, but a directional diagnosis. So, we went ahead and got the engineers and product folks, and we built this symptom checker.

And at the very end, we decided to test with some users. So, we brought people in and we're like, could you tell us what you think a symptom checker is? And, and, the first five people told us exactly the opposite of what we built. They're like, oh, I would put in cholera, and you would give me all the symptoms of cholera.

And we're like, oh, well, we designed it, so you put in like, runny nose, headache, cough, and you get cold. We built it exactly the opposite of what every user, and that was in the early 2000s. And it was my best example of holy smokes, you don't do user research at the end of your project. You do user research in the very beginning because we were completely misaligned, and I wasted a lot of money.

I'm sorry to those people, but, but it was a real experience, and it has stuck with me. So, thank you for that, Sylvia. So, Martha, I wanted to ask you about, digital accessibility is a legal requirement under Section 508 and making sure that, your, being able to deliver those services appropriately to, the people that you're serving.

And agency leadership is a critical part of us driving, towards, you know, making sure that the whole organization is aligned behind whatever your objectives are. So, in this case, accessibility. Can you tell us a little bit about, how VA thinks about this, how your agency, is leading in many of these areas? I think it would be interesting for the audience.

Martha Orr

Sure. And, Clare your symptom checker example really brought back some bad memories. But I have been remiss. My apologies to the group. I did not formally introduce myself in the correct way, so I want to tell everyone I am Martha Orr. I am on the shortish side. Five four. I have on a spice-colored jacket and a skirt, which is a mixture of spice, teal and purple with some beige throw in and all swirled together. I call this my fall festive look.

So very nice to meet all of you. And, and to your, your point in the question at hand. You know, leadership in this area is just, just so, so important. I would almost say passionate leadership. Really, you really want to have a passion for anything in leadership. But this this is an area I haven't been involved in.

In it from a managing the accessibility, compliance process for all that long. And I still have a whole lot to learn. In fact, I just took my first sort of class on, you know, how to make documents more accessible, making sure that the things that I'm sending out as a leader are being, are able to be, you know, used by everyone.

And it's, it's quite interesting. But, but you have to show that passion and that leadership, I think, in anything that you do. This is an area, that I'll just speak candidly as something that we haven't highlighted a lot at the VA in the past, particularly, I think, putting more visibility to the program in the last year has been extremely helpful.

It has been an educational experience, I would say, for a lot of our leadership and our staff. Just kind of thinking about things a little differently in terms of, you know, is my email accessible to everyone? I don't want to exclude anyone on my documents, you know, accessible. Have I, it's real simple. If I click the review accessibility thing in Microsoft, you know, to make sure that things are labeled appropriately and that sort of thing.

And that's just a mind change. It's a cultural change. I think someone mentioned that earlier as well, that it's really speaks to building a culture of awareness, in this area. And then, of course, making sure that we're doing proper testing and evaluation and that's all leadership as well. You know, we have a commitment in, VA and in the Office of Information and Technology because that's where the 508 Accessibility Program resides, that we want to make sure that we are addressing all accessibility issues.

And, we are not, all of our documents are not, accessible right now. Our websites are not, our applications, many of you probably know certainly are not. But we're working on that. And we've got a plan and, in mind and we know it's an important thing that we need to do. And we want to attack the, you know, the, the, most used documents or the most accessed websites or the most used applications and make sure that we're doing it in a thoughtful, process.

I talked ad nauseum about making sure that the user is in mind when we're doing a lot of this, and that seems like kind of a sea change that's happening as well. And cannot emphasize enough, training and awareness in this area. All of my staff have taken 508 awareness training as part of their normal curriculum of, of training that they do on a yearly basis for their awareness. It's not so much that we have the program, but I don't know if I would have thought to do that if I hadn't. I mean, to be perfectly honest.

And so, we're hoping that we can, be forward leaning in some best practices that we can share with other leadership in the organization as we move forward. And, we do have, I will say, and I'm very proud of this, a tight collaboration with our colleagues in Veterans Health Administration, Benefits Administration, Cemetery Administration, and some of the others, all of the other staff offices, actually, as we kind of marched through, how are we going to, you know, make sure that all of the documents we're putting out, all of the websites, all of those sorts of things are accessible and do not exclude anyone.

In fact, we recently are, are working we are now, with our, executive secretary, office to make sure that when our, congressionally mandated reports are published that they go through our accessibility review to make sure that everything is accessible and good to go.

So those are just sort of things that we're, you know, kind of, you know, putting out there, leaning forward a bit, we'll get better at it as we go. We'll get more, support as we go. We have the employee stand down next Friday where we're going to be reviewing documents. We're all going to get trained, and we're all going to review documents for, whether or not they're accessible because we don't even know, really, if all of our documents are accessible or not. So, we want to, we want to take those steps and really build upon our successes in that regard.

Clare Martorana

That's terrific. Thank you for that. And, Sylvia, I want to turn to you, to ask about training in general, for overarching digital awareness. And just if you could tell us a little bit about what you all are doing.

Sylvia Burns

Well, I would just say that, we, we have actually a chief digital officer in our Office of Communications, and we have a very tight collaboration with her.

And, so, she runs the websites as it through our Office of Communications. But we, we work really well together and closely together. So, I think that that is, that's important.

We're doing a campaign right now, actually about, it's about keeping your money safe. So, that it's kind of cool, but so I just I just would say that check us out on our website. I would say for Section 508, Brooke's team does a fantastic job working throughout the corporation, in ensuring that everybody it has the ability to get training on making accessible documents, whether they're, you know, Word documents, Excel, PowerPoint, what have you.

So, every month, she offers that training. She's on a, on a crusade to basically get, work with her communications office to ensure all of their web pages are accessible, 508 compliant. So that's, that's really helpful to us. And, there's also people can do training upon request, just generally about, Section 508 training. She does briefings to executives. We work, she, her, her team work very closely with our disability program manager and reasonable accommodations program, program manager.

So there's that kind of training that's going on all the time. I would say above and beyond that last week, we, we do regularly in my organization these things called Ask Me Anything. We hold these big sessions and I think that we stole that from GSA because Bob DeLuca came over to FDIC and he brought that to us. So we do these, Ask Me Anything and Brooke hosted an Ask Me Anything session last week. And, it was really great because, she has, she has people on her team who have impairments, physical impairments, hearing or visual impairments.

And I would just say that, that session, because what we do is we invite my whole organization and there may be like, you know, between 200 and 300 people who come virtually to the session. What I thought that it did for, so it's not necessarily formal training, but I think that we have learning happening in various venues.

So, that was an important learning experience for me. And I think for the others who participated. And I think what it did was, it raised empathy and awareness of what the situations that people who have impairments go through when they're trying to do their work. And made us more aware of a term. I'm sure you guys are all aware of this term called ableism, right?

It's, it's discrimination in favor of able bodied people. So, like we were talking about it, I was actually at a Gartner conference in Phoenix. Where, Haben Girma? Are you guys familiar with her? An extraordinary, I mean, she is visually impaired, I think. Also, is she hearing impaired as well? Yes. And she has not let that hold her back from living her life to the fullest.

It's a true inspiration. So, I mean, to me, just even for my own education to learn about this and even learn the term ableism, to know that this is an issue, right? I think, just those kinds of experiences that we had with Brooke’s team to just really get a personal view of that, was really just, like, enlightening and also helps you to progress in terms of thinking, what am I going to do to help with this?

I want to say during that session, we actually also helped one of her staff because, you know, he talks about, well, you know, I have my laptop that you provision me with, and he was visually impaired. And it's, it's, it's not the greatest tool for me, in all honesty. Like, if I was able to get a Mac, which you don't offer here, I would be much more able to work.

Well, so, we're on Teams, right? So, I got somebody chatting me on the side, obviously. And, he says to me, Sylvia, he's like, we offer Macs to, for people who need them. So, I was like, oh, so I'm good. How about we speak up and tell him that? So, we actually got to have that conversation right there and then and, hook up these two people to help him.

So, it's just like, again, whether formal training and awareness or just these other kind of opportunities that we have to learn about things that we don't know about, learn about other people's experience, experiences. I think that's something that's also part of what we're trying to do in my organization, to just promote awareness.

Clare Martorana

Thank you for that. And, I've always found that, actually having somebody sit down and try and use assistive technology, having somebody sit down, one of the things we're in the middle of, moving our offices and, we are going to commit several workstations so that we can bring other leaders of the organization into our space and have them, try to, utilize either, high impact service providers across government or our own properties, to make sure that they're aware of how assistive technology works and what opportunities are.

I know GSA has always been, kind of on the forefront of measurement and, you know, overarching accessibility. I wonder, Dave, if you might tell us a little bit about some of the efforts at GSA along the lines.

David Shive

Yeah. So, we're pretty proud of our accessibility work within the agency. But we noticed adoption was lagging a bit. So, the law's been on the books. 508, it's been on the books since 1974. It's been a long time. And when I became CIO, we did, honest assessment and of where we were and we're 24 point something percent compliant with 508. That, that was not good.

And, and we took a look at the why’s that was happening. And one of the main reasons was because our 508 compliance team, well-meaning, hard working, small, but powerful team, was standing in isolation trying to affect a large enterprise. And so, one of the very first things we did is we actually joined them with our Customer Experience (CX) and digital experience teams so that we could no longer look at 508 compliance as a standalone thing, as a compliance exercise.

We said this is going to be fully integrated into how we view customer experience and digital experience. It's just one of the key, main factors for something like that. Another thing that we did is, we had, we're honest with ourselves when we looked at the people who are trying to move the ball down the field in this space, and we saw a bunch of able bodied, neurotypical people on the teams, well-meaning, but that was not the best outcome.

So, we introduced, you know, people with sight impairments and hearing impairment and neuro, diverse people and, people with mobility impairments onto the teams to have a positive impact. And then that fundamentally changed the dialog we're having in the agency about, about how we were doing and what the forcing agents were to keep us at the status quo, or the potential forcing agents for positive change were. And then we said, okay, now that we've kind of formalized a lot of this and, got a lot of useful feedback, we said, what do we need to do to change this?

And we said, we're going to test like crazy. There are tools out on the market that will assess accessibility. We have a large enterprise, 8 or 900 enterprise applications running, in the enterprise. There are not enough people to be able to do fundamental testing to say, how are we doing here? So, we automated the process.

We went out and spent government money to automate that process. So, that those people who were passionate about this had skill in this area. They're doing exception processing. They're becoming analysts saying, okay, what is automated tool telling us? Where should we improve? And then we had smart people saying, okay, here's the bodies of work we're going to do to increase that.

And then we started training people, and not just people whose primary job was to, was to, make our all of our toolsets and business process accessible. But, we started training the people, the users of our systems and our tools and said, here's what accessibility looks like.

And so, we deputized basically the entire agency and said, we need you to be our eyes and ears here to help us, let us know the places where we're falling short, or more importantly, places where we weren't falling short before, but understanding about what accessibility means is pivoted out from under that understanding so that we could course correct with the more modern, increasing, ever changing understanding of what accessibility is in today's day and age. I'm so passionate about this.

I took notes. Then the last couple of things is, we've promised ourselves to dig into the data. There's so much data out there that tells us about usability patterns and effective use of technology and effective use of digital assets and the prosecution of government, business. It's hard to dig into that data, but we've made a promise to ourselves to do that and, and to look at things like, when we see users behaviors changing in response to a change we make on the system, are those behavioral changes, showing and demonstrating good outcomes, or are they showing poor outcomes?

And the reason we do this is we find that people are very passionate about accessibility. People say what they want, their behavior sometimes shows something slightly different. And that's because there's unknown unknowns. People can always express what they want. They just know something's not right. But they can't always well express what they want. But their behavior is actually a really good indication if they shy away from systems, if they're naturally drawn to systems, and then we come together and have frank and honest conversations about, you said you wanted this, but your behavior says you really want this.

They're like, yeah, I just wasn't able to articulate that. So, we build ways to have increasingly valuable conversations. And that's the root of all of this is having an open door, being fully transparent, having conversations because that safeguards you against, people being profoundly unhappy with how they're using the digital assets that they do to do their job.

But it also helps safeguard and, improve the enterprise with the fact that what we understand about what accessibility is, is an ever changing thing, and it drives agility into that process, which is deeply needed.

Clare Martorana

Well, I know we're going to open the floor up to some questions from the audience. You have these incredible thought leaders here. Would love to hear from you all, to, to see if you have any questions. And as, mics are available, I'm not sure exactly how we're going to run this. I see your hand up over there.

Another hand up. We probably stole the only to hand mics so sorry about that.

Michael Horton

Yes, so, this is Mike. I'll be running around the room, and we do have some questions in chat, so I'll try and mix them up a little bit.

Mark Urban

Hi, great panel. Appreciate all of the thought, and the kind of different approaches to all of this. I'm Mark Urban, from, CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And obviously our role, like the VA's, in health care has become preeminent. And we've changed a lot from people who talk to scientists, to people who talk to people. And I know because I'm a scientist.

The question I have is, all of you kind of brought up the overlap of user experience and user centered design as the entry point, for thinking about accessibility and how to really design, a system that meets that need.

I want to talk a little bit, or if can you speak a little bit to the other side of the coin, which is identifying, managing risk for accessibility, because accessibility and the CIO of, GSA talked about it really well, which is it's a quality not a quantity.

So, when you look at accessibility, it's not like, oh hey, we're accessible capital A, but rather are we more accessible or less accessible? How have we improved? How will we move that ball forward? It's never a spike the ball kind of thing. So, how do you manage that risk in the in, in what the FDIC, CIO was talking about, which is building into the Agile model of rapid development, rapid evaluation, and rapid readjustment as you, you know, find out what you're doing isn't right.

That's the great part of that. How do you maintain risk, regarding accessibility and not get so far off the rails that you literally have to lift the train back?

David Shive

You want me to start?

Sylvia Burns

Yeah, I kind of think it was what you were saying just a minute ago.

David Shive

So. So, I'm a CIO. I live and die by the numbers. I'll give you some stats. I mentioned where 24% compliance with 508 compliance when I took over. So, I had the team run the numbers right before this so I could say oh, I can give them the latest numbers. So, as of about a week ago, we're at 89.4% compliance across the entire enterprise.

Yeah, that's great. But also last week, one of my executives was at, in court, working with one of our employees who was completely dissatisfied with our response to their accessibility needs. So, there is actual risk there. So, so what we've chosen to do is to say, yeah, from an executive’s standpoint, there's some risk there for sure. But what is that communicating to us that one of our employees, that has accessibility needs, was unsatisfied with the fact that they were working on 508 compliant systems, but their accessibility needs were not still met.

So, what we found the only real way to manage that risk, and I hate calling it that, I would say is, I would probably rephrase it is, the only way to really be responsive to the needs of the people who are using our systems is to make sure you're keeping that open and honest dialog.

Back when my executive was in court and they were having their negotiation with this employee, the entirety of the conversation was, we did all of these things, and it still didn't meet your needs.

What else do we need to do to meet your needs? Because if we are truly going to be a representative government, we are going to represent, support and enable all the workers of this federal government. All the citizens that we serve. So, I would pivot the risk conversation to, what is if you see outliers, what is that communicating to you, and how are you then resourcing those outliers so that we can say we are actually fully responsive to 100% of our people.

Clare Martorana

And I think a comment I would add is not necessarily a risk answer to your question. It's about omnichannel, right? While we do focus a lot on digital, and digital is a great opportunity for us to deliver, we have a responsibility to be omnichannel, and to make sure that we're meeting people where they are, that we are not trying to force people through the chutes and ladders that we've designed that are perfect.

That we are, constantly evaluating, what the needs are, and, you know, measuring ourselves against that delta that isn't met. And that is one of the things I think, that really good leaders, my colleagues, focus on. So.

Louise Clark

Hi, my name is Louise Clark. I'm with the U.S Digital Service, and one of the things we love to partner, and bring human centered design practices, and accessible design, and trauma informed design practices.

I'm wondering if any of you can speak to how you are getting around the issue of, recruitments so that we can do research early, and often and with, people. Have, Do you have any strategies in place that we can, bring to our agency partners as we're working with them, to help them navigate this new way of working?

Like you were saying, Sylvia, but just bringing in research opportunities early.

Clare Martorana

As a USDS alumni, I will like to take that. We can test with users across our government. We can recruit users of all abilities across our government. We are not legally limited to usability testing in any way, shape or form. And if anyone tells you otherwise, you need to escalate that both within your leadership, within the agency leadership, or you can get in touch with my office and we will be the champions of that, because there is absolutely no reason, legal reason, that we cannot and should not be testing with our users.

Sometimes recruitment is challenging, right? And that's a little bit of a nuance there. But it is really important. One of, the things, I won't volunteer, my colleagues at the VA, but we always, will reach out to the, Barbara Morton's office in...

Martha Orr

The Veterans experience office.

Clare Martorana

The veterans experience office, because they have such a diverse, pool of people, that they have done research with. So, homeless veterans, disabled veterans of all types and abilities. So, we will often if we find somebody stalled, we will reach out to our colleagues across government and say, who is able to, you know, help field this study, that a group of people are trying to meet with people in person, etc., to do card sorts or whatever the usability testing is. So, I hope that's helpful.

Martha Orr

So oh, go ahead. I was just going to say our Veterans Experience office is quite, they do really, really good work in terms of research and users and different categories and that sort of thing. And they're always willing to help what Barbara calls her federal family partners. So, yeah.

David Shive

So very tactically and specifically, it's amazing how, you know, as the CIO of a federal agency, when we're recruiting and me and the other hiring managers in the agency will start an interview by describing yourself, or by saying, you can, potential candidates you can turn your screen off because some in the autistic community struggle with, you know, presentation on screen and, and, oh, do you, you know, we can have an ASL interpreter available for this. When you make that just a normal part of how you recruit, talent, it's amazing the response back from not only the commute, those communities, but the entire community, and they all start talking.

So, which is a great outcome because we want people in those communities to come be public servants and to carry their passions into what they're doing. So, a lot of it is kind of, lead from the front, live by example, and word starts to get out. That's been the experience of GSA.

Sylvia Burns

Dave, the GSA, I want to say, I thought I got a briefing last year. Do you have something called U.S Digital Corps?

David Shive

We do. Yes.

Sylvia Burns

Yes, and so I'm sure you're familiar with that, at USDS. But I found that a very like, I was excited about that because it was a way of getting new talent into our agencies. Using kind of it was it's almost like the Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) program. Right. So anyway, big plug for that.

You have some questions here?

Bill Edwards

Yes, Bill Edwards, Veterans Administration, Veteran’s Legacy Memorial (VLM) and VA pars. And I am the 508 guy. One of the issues that we often run into is when we are using external tools, this could be, SharePoint, React, MIUI, Kendo tools, and I'm thinking, reCAPTCHA even, in some of these things give us headaches as far as, compliance with 508. Is there any movement in the governor, government not to force obviously private industry to be more compliant, but to encourage it?

And this includes OCONUS, like the Kendo tools comes from Germany. Any way to help them partner with us in private industry to make our jobs easier?

Clare Martorana

I'll jump in there.

We have enormous buying power as a United States government. We buy a lot of technology from a lot of different companies. I think, we are actually working, out of, my office in, with my, federal CIO colleagues on some interoperability, issues, that we are continuing to find across much of our technology.

But we have to unify and define our business requirements, to make sure that we are driving the change that we want from those technology vendors. So, we've, this has been an effort that's gone on, you know, over many years, fits and starts. The particular, software that you were mentioning, I'm not familiar with, I'm unfortunately familiar with SharePoint and some of the other tools that are challenging every day to use.

But we are really focusing on getting those business requirements, getting our technical requirements, and entering into those conversations with vendors in order to represent all of government. Because we're all trying to solve the exact same problems in all of our agencies, but we're not doing it utilizing that enormous buying power that we have to actually change the market.

So, we're in our, I'd say, early teen years in this effort and we're trying to accelerate that, actively.

David Shive

So, you have the advantage of the chair of the Federal CIO Council, Clare, up here and the vice chair of the Federal CIO Council, me up here. And neither of us are hard to find. We are actually really easy to get a hold of. So, the Federal CIO Council is constantly looking for places where we can lean in as a community of CIO’s into problem areas.

If what we're hearing is, the Federal CIO Council could provide some benefit by leaning in and pinging some of these vendors, some of these providers let us know. You got the full weight of the federal government standing behind you.

Martha Orr

And I would just say from, you know, VA's perspective in our own little way, in areas that we know we're struggling and we have been very forward leaning into vendor discussions as well, because we do use a lot of the technology and, in lots of different areas. So, I think there's a lot of different areas that are actually recognizing that this is, it's a challenge.

And we are, recognizing that and trying to, we're trying to work collaboratively in, integrating in with them or vendor partners.

Sylvia Burns

I just would add, like from an agency perspective, in this agency that I'm at now, FDIC, and also in the last agency I was at, the Department of the Interior, I, as I recall, I think we had standard language around Section 508 compliance in our contracts. And you would think that that would help us move along. But there are cases where the vendors won't sign the contract with that language.

And then, they kind of hold you over a barrel. So, it's, it's a situation I'm personally, like, still not happy about that because it's the law. And, it's our duty to, to, to respond to that. But I just want to say that, that's, that's a real experience that I have had.

More questions in the middle here. Oh, back there too.

Michael Horton

We're just going to finish. I'm sorry. We can't get all of these questions are wonderful. We do want to take a question, from one of the almost 300, virtual attendees who are joining us here for this conversation. But they want to ask about, in light of the heightened focus on privacy, data privacy and cyber security can you guys discuss the strategies that are in place to ensure the digital accessibility for users and employees with disabilities remains a priority without being compromised by, or conflicting with any measures taken for cyber security and privacy going forwards?

David Shive

So, can I start? So, at GSA we have added people's ability or disability as one of the key elements of Personal Identifiable Information (PII). So, you know, people self-select into expressing ability or disability. And in all of our systems, we flagged that as a PII element so that it has all the same cybersecurity and privacy controls that any other, descriptive of thing, your, you know, your address or your Social Security number or whatever, so that, that designation is closely, closely guarded and safeguarded through the same cybersecurity, cybersecurity and privacy controls that exist elsewhere in the agency.

Sylvia Burns

I just want to say that, you know, I think the security and privacy folks can get a, they can get labeled as being, the just say no crowd. I have had that experience before, right? And I think part of it is like, for the Chief Information Officer (CIO) working with the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) to basically say, we can't be to just say no people because we're here to serve the mission.

So, it's about finding the, finding the way to yes, right? Securely and safely, where we're not compromising anything. So, I think the answer to that, is really about some of it is about the attitude that you're CISO office has and making them see that they are part of the team. You know, we can't, we can't do this without them because they do play an important role.

But their role isn't to stop the mission from happening, which includes, you know, being cognizant of Section 508 and enabling, people, who have impairments to be able to be part of our workforce. Or for our citizens, you know, the people that we serve, to be able to partake of our services. It's all part of it, all has to just be included in, delivery.

Clare Martorana

Great. Thank you all so much. We appreciate your time and hope you have a wonderful, rest of, the event. Thanks, everyone. [Applause]