Key takeaways
- Accessibility and Productivity: Thurston emphasizes that accessibility should not be seen as merely providing accommodations, but as essential for enhancing workplace productivity, ensuring all employees can thrive with the tools they need.
- Building Business Cases: Throughout his career, Thurston has successfully used business cases to drive accessibility initiatives by highlighting risks and opportunities, helping organizations see accessibility as a competitive advantage
- Inclusive Innovation: He praises advancements in accessibility technology, especially in using AI to improve user experiences and testing, enabling organizations to address accessibility earlier in the development stages.
For National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM), I’m talking to thought leaders in the tech accessibility space to elevate the conversation around improving access to good jobs for all. In this conversation, I’m talking to Johnathan Thurston.
From an employee standpoint, what was the initiative that you championed that you're the most proud of from your long history?
It's a great question, Ben. Of course, there's so much to do on the sort of associate employee side. Normally, in my experience, companies focus most of their attention on the customers for lots of obvious reasons. Mhmm. But sometimes their employees get sort of forgotten.
A good example might be if you're building a new platform, you might focus just on the end user, but not make sure that the user of that platform, is accounted for So there's always lots of interesting work to be done in this space. There's still a lot to do.
I think one of the coolest things I got to work on was updating an employee store. Not only to make the experience of shopping in that employee store accessible and by employee store, I mean, this is where you would go to procure software for your laptop or a new laptop or a screen or new chair or something like that. The store was not accessible, and it was not friendly to folks with disabilities. Also, it didn't have assistive technology available in the store. There was an inaccessible experience and full tools that would help with productivity within the workspace were not available.
I was able to work on a sort of two pronged strategy in partnership with this team to not only, you know, audit the experience around the store and update it around accessibility, recode it so it was friendly for assistive technology, but also make assistive technology and hardware available upon demand.
Traditionally, in an employee space, if you want to get an accommodation, if you want to get access to something like jobs, you have to go through the accommodation route, which can be very cumbersome and it's not always successful.
I was able to make the argument internally that this is not about accommodations. This is about productivity. This is about giving everyone the tools they need to be successful in the workplace, Not only making it accessible so that they could go and choose the right tools and software, but also make sure that that software was available for the different types of people.
For example, I have ADHD, and a tool that's really helpful for me is Grammarly. Instead of having to go through an accommodations process, I could just procure it directly through the store.
That that's such a powerful that's such a powerful point that accessibility and productivity are kind of hand in hand, and that there's so much reframing to be done out there away from, “this is an accommodation” to “I just want everyone to be as productive as they possibly can.”
And isn't that not what you want from your employees for them to be as productive and happy in the workplace as possible? If you look at it that way, it's very logical.
Was that an easy message to deliver? Or were there some challenges in that reframing?
There's always challenges with spending more money and getting more resources to do different things. Often in corporate America, you need a business case. So it's about building a business case around it. Improving productivity, lowering costs, better ratings as a workplace, happier employees, etc.
If you put all that together and package it into a business case, then you can get leadership to invest money in accessibility instead of replacing the windows, for example.
Do you have other examples throughout your career where you've leveraged that business acumen to influence executives?
Every job I've had with accessibility, a large part has been around building business cases and then building buy-in to create consensus so that you can actually go and execute on this step, which again is not often budgeted for or accounted for or thought of. A business case helps you elevate it as a priority and also potentially helps you get a budget for it and funding for it and attention to it.
The first business case I built was at Pearson. When I joined Pearson, it was just me working on accessibility for the higher ed division. Five thousand products, tremendous amount of emails from customers concerned about accessibility. It was a big deal, but we had no real plan for this division of the company.
So I spent my time there listening to the customers, absorbing that customer voice to help me build a business case to get buy in from the executives. I remember one time, an executive said, “Well, you know, we're not getting sued for this, so why do we care?” My response was, “Well, your customers are getting sued for it.” Multiple customers were getting sued for it increasingly and if you were the president of the university, would you let professors use courseware that was getting sued? Probably not.
That was the beginning of the business case, leveraging the customer voice and building a sort of rationale around a very significant investment that would be needed to update those five thousand different courseware products, Ira.
I started by taking a map of the US and figuring out a way to quantify the risk state by state based on government interest, state interest, local hot spot, etc. Spots like Texas and Florida, which are hot spots for accessibility education. I used that to create a valuation of the risk and also opportunity because with business cases, you don't want to just go in with risk. It's not about scaring everyone. These people also want to learn about opportunity.
With accessibility, the risk and opportunity discussion is really powerful. The risk, if you don't do accessibility, you can lose business. You or your customers get sued. Lots of big problems. If you embrace accessibility, you can point out the market. You can grow your business. You become a leader in the space and other people are trying to catch up with you.
So we built the hot spot map of the US, we put a big business case behind it and presented a request for thirty million dollars over three years, and they said yes.
My boss was like, “You know, this never happened at Pearson.” But it was that important the leadership saw the need for it, and we built out a strategy and plan for it. So they got into it, and they did it and now Pearson is a leader in the space.
That's such a compelling story for all the folks who can never get the resources to focus on accessibility. You're kinda giving people that road map, which is which is really important.
It's going to be different at every place that you work for or with but think the key is understanding what's important to that leadership. If it's revenue, you focus on that. If it's brand, you focus on that. If it's litigation, you focus on that. But you can often use all three. But understanding, you know, where your leadership is coming from is super important when you're building a business case.
Do you have questions that you ask leadership to help you assess that?
Questions are great, but also listening first can help inform the questions that you want to ask. This is where design thinking comes in, which is often a huge part of design thinking is active listening. That's how you figure out where they're coming from and how they're what perspective they're looking at this through.
If you listen to them, you can key in fairly quick. Are they concerned about the revenue? Do they want to grow the business? Are they concerned about competition and and the impact accessibility is having on that business growth? Are they concerned about they just got sued? Or is it about brand? Like, oh, our competition looks so good. Like, I want to look better. If you listen, then you then you can sort of figure out what questions to ask.
That's really powerful. I want to go back to something mentioned to me in the past, which is Walmart rolling out sensory friendly days. Can you talk more about that?
I love sensory day sensory hours because they're super inclusive. I think it's a great example of how doing something for a certain part of the accessibility community really benefits everyone
What are sensory hours? You turn down the lights. You turn off the music. You pause all the TV screens. It just becomes a sort of quieter environment. An environment really initially designed for folks with neurodiversity. For someone like me, I have ADHD, but aside from that, I enjoy shopping when it's quiet. Not everything's blaring. For me, it's actually an more enjoyable experience.
It’s a great example of a couple different things. First trying to understand your customers and what they want. It's also understanding that there are different types of shoppers. You can't fit all your shoppers into one mold. You can't fit anyone into a mold. It’s a great idea and it’s been very well received, and I believe it's being emulated by other their competition as well.
It's really powerful, when people move past the idea that something is just a benefit for a small subset of folks
One thing I'm curious about, based on your history experience in higher education, there's a new final rule on accessibility that came from the DOJ in April this year. How do you think that will impact businesses that are more involved in the in the public sector?
Legislation is going to increase the rigor around ensuring education is accessible and inclusive. That means a few things: it means unless those educational institutions and entities have a plan around accessibility and inclusion, they're probably gonna get some friction. It will also increasingly become more of a competitive advantage. Can one institution become more inclusive than the others.
Accessibility in educational space has been increasing and increasing in importance. It’s ramping up, and this legislation is just a sort of signal sign of that as well. This is not the end - it'll continue to increase - and it means educational entities will have to embrace accessibility even more.
And it’s not just the campuses' physical space accessibility, but also their all their digital infrastructure. Applying to become a student at the college, that process needs to be accessible. Looking on the website, getting information from there, using their mobile apps that they increasingly have. Taking classes, using digital courseware as part of these classes. If they're not accessible and inclusive, that's gonna be a big problem. Bigger problem now than it has been in the past.
Part of the challenge was publishers would often release courseware that wasn't accessible. So the schools would take this and try to remediate it and fix it in house in the school, which is very clunky and very challenging. I think because of this, we'll increasingly see more and more, attention around procurement.
For example, when I was a college professor, I could teach and use anything I wanted to. Choose my textbooks, write the syllabus. That's dangerous, though. What if I had chosen course work that was inaccessible? I mean, there's no sort of governance around saying you can't do that.
So I think we're gonna see more guidelines around procurement from the colleges and the institutions should because, again, why would the allow instructors to buy stuff that's could get them sued? Or why would they buy stuff that they're gonna have to invest a ton of money to fix? Imagine hiring a bunch of people at your school to fix a bunch of PDFs when they could actually be helping the students.
It pushes everything sort of further up the pipeline. It means there's more governance at a high level. It means there's more people paying attention. How do you think that sense of urgency will impact resourcing inside of higher ed?
We'll likely see over the next couple years an uptick in chief accessibility officer roles or more accessibility resources in schools. Maybe even more accessibility specialists in the procurement space.
Because it's easy to say, “Oh, we won't buy anything unless it's accessible.” Well, how do you know it's accessible? How do you validate it? How do you test it? How do you build confidence around that? Do you just take what the vendor tells you? That could become a whole that could become a whole job or a whole group!
So speaking of opportunity and innovation, what are you excited about in accessibility space right now?
I'm excited about the the new companies that are blazing new trails, developing new technology, new ideas that we haven't seen before, new ways to test and validate content, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to help you with that.
There's so much potential, and a lot of it has been fragmented, frankly so I'm excited by the potential convergence of all of this. I also think there's a lot of work we can do through technology and innovation to bring everyone together by listening and accounting for everybody, not just fragmented subsets.
I’m encouraged by the innovation in testing. Traditionally you've had sort of these automated tools where you can run automated scans, and you can get metrics out of your site and on and on and on. But automation doesn’t always take the user into account. There is still a big manual testing component of real good accessibility testing. The innovation sort of leveraging AI to be able to emulate assistive technology going through specific user flows and helping to inform the developers and things like that, that's new stuff. It's much deeper and more in-depth than simply scanning the page against WCAG. And to be able to do that at scale.
And these are tools we cna use to test before release so you can push accessibility up the development stream and truly consider accessibility from the very beginning.
So some people say that accessibility is it slows down innovation. What do you say to those people?
It depends on your perspective. It's gonna slow down innovation if you want to create something that's inaccessible and not inclusive. If you want to develop something that's not inclusive, then, yeah, it it will slow you down.
But that's not a realistic scenario increasingly, it's not the right thing to do and it's a very bad business decision because the reality is you're gonna have to fix it later. And to fix something later after you've developed it and to try to bolt accessibility onto all the different parts and pieces of this thing that you built for your MVP without considering accessibility is gonna be so painful and so expensive.
It’s really important again to to think about accessibility as equal to things like security, performance, and privacy. If we can elevate this up like a top metric then you can fold accessibility into all the other factors with the development process.
Where should accessibility sit in the org structure?
Every job I've had with accessibility has sat in a different part of the org structure. Often, it will sit in either UX, design, or engineering. Sometimes it'll sit in IT, or sometimes it'll sit in HR, the people organization.
Let's take a step back and think about that. You have an accessibility team whose remit should be to ensure that a holistic approach to accessibility is being embraced by the whole company. But if you're in the design team, it’s a challenge to reach out of your section so everyone can embrace accessibility.
It's possible, and it happens every day, and I've thankfully been somewhat successful doing that in these different organizations, But that's part of the challenge. So it often will sit in one of these sort of orgs. At Atlassian for example accessibility say in design, but the majority of the company was engineers. So you have to figure out the dynamics and then how to bring those sort of different parts of the company together over accessibility.
Similar how they do it with security and privacy and performance. And sort of attaching yourself to the four in the box structures and things like that is super helpful.
But it has to sit somewhere and depending where you sit, can influence the impact you can make. If the accessibility team sits in engineering, they'll probably have a a much better opportunity to heavily influence those engineers, and it might be hard to reach over to the design department.
If if you're in HR, you may be tied to other sort of initiatives that are happening within the company and it may be harder to get the attention of engineers. You have to find a way to build that relationship.
Ultimately it comes down to how you integrate with those teams in a positive productive way, and overcoming the fear around accessibility, which is really the fear of not knowing something, or the fear of having to do more work.
What are some strategies to achieve cross org buy in?
There are lots of different ways to approach this. I think the most effective way is by leveraging the voice of the customer and associate employee whenever possible. If you can interview customers with disabilities that are talking about their experience shopping with you; if you can, collect internal surveys around how inclusive their experience is at work; these are the tools that that you can then use to amplify that internally.
If you can collect that qualitative input and show that a huge part of your customer segment is basically demanding accessibility - why would a company ignore that?
Again, you often have to overcome a fear of the unknown. It's not an area where everyone's an expert, and eople don't want to make a mistake or say the wrong thing. So part of the strategy is building trust and enabling people to have safe conversations where they can be themselves.
That comes back to active listening. It's always helpful to just go in and listen first. What's going on? Who are you? That will help you build that trust because ultimately you can't do accessibility without partnership. You can't you can't do it all by yourself.
When I first started with accessibility, I was thinking about it as evangelizing. But I learned quickly it's not evangelizing - it's recruiting. People don't want to be evangelized all day, especially at work. It's much more effective to figure out how can I get them on our side. Mix that with the voice of the customer and you’ve got something very effective.