A Digital Accessibility Deep Dive with Tanner Gers

Tanner gers 0:00
Overnight, everything changed, not just business professionals, not just medical professionals, not just society at large treated me differently, but even my own family treated me differently. And I became really aware, intimately of the systemic discrimination, the embedded mindset of discrimination that's unconscious that unconscious bias of our society as it relates to people with disabilities.

Mai Ling 0:32
You're listening to the Exceptional Leaders podcast. Each week we give you a front row seat to our conversations with new and successful exceptional entrepreneurs and thought leaders making an impact. They share their intimate experiences so you can start grow and expand your impact. I'm Mai Ling. You can find me at Mai Ling Chan dot com.

James Berges 0:50
And I'm James Berges of SLP transitions dot com. And today we have an exciting interview with Tanner Gers. Tanner founded Access Ability Officer which provides deep dive review and support for digital accessibility, which is where we spend most of our time online these days. So it's so important and he's creating the first ever screen reading certification for the blind. From there He also builds staffing agency, pairing these trained individuals with companies in dire need of digital accessibility. So this is a win-win Mai Ling for the companies who need to make their products accessible. But also for the people who would normally be supported by entitlement benefits, they go from that to making significant living, doing something that's right in their wheelhouse, which is making the web more accessible. So I love this area.

Mai Ling 1:42 
Yeah, this is really great and I love Tanner is perfect. His personality is perfect for being the leader in this space. He is very attention to detail, obviously, has lived experience and he has vision and he is doing the deep dive work. He's actually supported us so much for the exceptional Alliances event because we did our website on Squarespace, which I don't love. So hopefully, we never have them as a sponsor or guest. But there's so many things that you can't change, you know, it, you're, you're really restricted to the ways that they do things. And I've learned so much from Tanner and then also David D'Archangelo, they are both presenters at the upcoming event and they are really giving me such a a personal understanding, you know, like showing me, look Mai when you hear or listen, may when you hear the screen reader, this is what it's sounds like. And there's so many things that is information that you don't need. And then there's things that there's information that you do need. even like, do you choose the, the word title? Do you choose that for the type of font or do you choose paragraph actually makes a difference to the screen reader and to our people who are using screen readers. So I'm learning so, so much. And then another thing is, you know, how we get defensive about things we create James.

James Berges 2:59
Mm-hmm, that's my baby.

Mai Ling 3:01
Exactly. And so Tanner said, you know, I feel bad sometimes because I go in and, you know, it's an amazing creation and I'm sure it looks wonderful, literally looks wonderful. But, you know, these are all the things that you can do to make it accessible. And that brings me right into why we are doing the Exceptional Alliances conference. Can I talk about that a little bit now? 

James Berges 3:20
Yes, I'm so excited for this conference. You're hosting Mai Ling Exceptional Alliances. It's gonna be over 40 speakers, but not in that boring dry lecture format We're used to, it's going to be virtual, it's going to be accessible for everyone. And what I love about it is that it doesn't have that boring format of lecture.  It's going to be round tables and panels and quick moving and Q and A. Do I have that righ, Mai Ling?

Mai Ling 3:47
Exactly. Thank you so much. It's October 20. Please sign up and help to show your support for accessibility. We just need you to sign up and of course we want you to attend. That's the second step. But signing up really helps you to cast your vote because then later we'll be able to show other event coordinators and sponsors that we want virtual. So please sign up Exception alliances dot com.

James Berges 4:10
Yeah, it's gonna be, I've seen the speakers on LinkedIn that you've been putting up and I'm just like, wow, you got that person and this person, it's just amazing that it's like I call it the Avengers of the disability or the exceptional space, exceptional ability space. So I'm really looking forward to this and dear listener, if you can't make it to the conference, which you can because it's virtual, but you want to do something else that's immediate right now. Well, I have good news. You can go to Spotify or Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to your podcast and leave a review for this podcast, Xceptional leaders because every review helps other people. It's like a lighthouse, casting the light into a dark ocean where we don't have enough conversations about accessibility and the disability space and all these amazing conversations we need to be having and Tanner alludes to this too. Like we're right in these beginning stages where we need to set the foundation by having more conversations. So your review and your, your rating helps people find these. So we really appreciate it if you could take two seconds and do that. And anything else we should say Mai Ling?

Mai Ling 5:19
No, I think that's it. Let's get to our conversation with Tanner.

James Berges 5:22
Love it.

Mai Ling 5:27
I'm here today with another amazing founder from my backyard of Phoenix Arizona. We have Tanner Gears here and I was referred to him by Peter Fischer who is another amazing disability expert and leader over at ASU and he has really done a lot in the space of digital accessibility. And I'm very, very excited to share his story about founding accessibility officer, launching a certification program, which a lot of companies want to start some type of certification program. But Tanner has actually done it and that actually is something that people can use to build on and move into their next, you know, step. And then I'm really excited to share where they're going next. So welcome Tanner.

Tanner Gers 6:12
Mai thank you so much for having me. I love that Pete connected us, tremendous, tremendous resource for the community here locally. I am excited to be here.

Mai Ling 6:20
Thank you. So when I left you last time and we said, yes, we're going to have you on the podcast You were in the middle of going through a change, you know, in where you're going with things and what you're offering. But before we get there, can you share with our listeners a little bit about your journey to creating accessibility officer?

Tanner Gers 6:38
Yeah, absolutely. And they really, it requires me to go back just a little bit because today I do have a disability and, and yes, I am an entrepreneur, founder of accessibility officer But, you know, I have always been an entrepreneur I was the kid that was, you know, selling candy bars and soda at the public golf club, washing the cars, mowing the lawns, trading the cards, doing all the things that young entrepreneurs just find themselves doing. And so I, you know, I was diagnosed ADD in fourth grade and hard of hearing with, as a sophomore in high school, I had like the headphones on and the sound booth and, and the whole thing. But I never really considered myself as having a disability even though I had multiple invisible disabilities per se. And then when I was 21 I was in a terrible auto accident where a tree came through my windshield, it impaled me in the face and there was a lot of, you know, physiological damage, a lot of other things that happened, broken back, bone sticking on my face, a brain infection. I ended up losing my left eye as a result of a different infection. I have, a lot of plastic surgery and nuts and bolts holding my face together. I cannot open my mouth, wide enough to stick a finger between my teeth and all of that was second to the fact that I had woken up in the hospital totally blind. So with the traumatic brain injury, I lost sight of the left eye immediately and then, due to the optic nerve atrophying, I lost sight out of the right eye as well so now I just see black, there is no light perception. And overnight I realized unfortunately, the hard way, while I had thought I had empathy and was incredibly inclusive and volunteered at Easterseals and done all the things that one should do, I didn't really understand the difficulties, the discrimination, the systemic oppression and just, you know what that means for someone who is totally blind. As a sighted person in their quo without an apparent physical disability. I never had a problem with anything. I'm very blessed that I'm white and I'm male in the United States and that I have cognitive faculties that allow me to articulate myself in ways that get things done. And I really benefited from, from that luxury. But overnight, everything changed. Not just business professionals, not just medical professionals, not just society at large, treated me differently, but even my own family treated me differently. And I became really aware, intimately of the systemic discrimination, the embedded mindset of discrimination that's unconscious that unconscious bias of our society as it relates to people with disabilities. I mean, we've heard saying death, dumb, or blind. So that means we're below dumb and deaf. And you know, many people, I can't tell you how many people have come up to me on the streets and said, I'm so sorry, it must be so difficult if I were you, I'd kill myself to go on and over years and years. It's just like it's, it builds up. And so, you know, getting into the work environment, I never had a problem getting a job and then all of a sudden I did and thank God for technology because, you know, fast forward a ton is that for the first time ever, a screen reader, screen reader skills are competitive advantage in a technology field also in the workplace. What do I mean by that? People who are blind like myself, use a system of technology like a screen reader which actually reads text on the screen for someone who can't see it uses screen readers to access digital environments, websites and emails even be on the zoom call right now. So it reads the text on the screen so I can access that information. But for digital accessibility, compliance and ADA compliance, the law in the United States, all public websites, public-facing websites are now considered public accommodations and regardless of company size thereby if you have a website, you are subject to the ad a compliance of that website and you need to have that public accommodation, your website accessible for people with disabilities. So just like there's ramps and wide door frames, we do the same thing digitally, we programmatically code websites to be accessible.

Mai Ling 11:17
OK, I love that you're saying that we are required and just for our listener, can I ask you, have you seen this publicly shared where companies like need to know this, you know, I, I have a couple of websites and I haven't seen that in squarespace or on, you know, all of these different website development platforms. So, you know, how are they sharing that?

Tanner Gers 11:40
Yeah, I'll, I can share with you a link too but ad a dot gov, ADA dot gov is a great place to find out information about ADA compliance and who's subject to the law. One common misconception is and, and we can thank SHRM and other human resources in institutions for perpetuating this myth that the ad A and disability inclusion does not apply to you if you don't have a certain number of employees or make a certain amount of revenue, et cetera. That is not true on ad A dot gov, it's clearly stated that websites are public accommodation and therefore must be made accessible. So one of the problems and what you're speaking to is that a lot of people just don't know about the law. Fortunately in our country, ignorance is not a valid excuse. I can't murder somebody and say I didn't know that that was wrong. Same thing like, Same thing with clients, I can't build a website that's inaccessible and not be held accountable because I didn't know that that was illegal. So, you know, but screen readers coming back to it, why we started a certification program is because for the first time, screen readers is what announces what allows sighted people to understand programmatically what's coded behind the website without having to know coding language or HTML. So whether you're sighted or you're blind people use screen readers to test the programmatic accessibility of a website. But you have to have sight to test for accessibility, things like closed captioning, flashing content color contrast as alternative text attribute actually convey in an alternative format what's being communicated visually. So you have to have sight to do that. And that's why no one has put together a skill based functional accessibility testing certification. There are accessibility certifications in air quoting that exist, but they're all knowledge based. So it's real easy to talk about the law. It's really easy to talk about the the impacts and what it means and who's liable and who's not and what are the best practices we can do that all day. But actually developing the skills, knowledge and ability to demonstrate one's functional capacity to test report and guide the remediation effort, how do we bring you into compliance with a screen reader for people with disabilities? It doesn't exist. And so for a knowledge based certification, that's great. If you have a computer science degree, a technical degree, you're working already. And your boss says, hey, you have to figure out digital accessibility now. The knowledge based certifications are great for those people because they already have the formal education, they already have the on the job work experience. They understand whether they can articulate it or not. They understand the business case of their role within the company. I do this technical thing. I have a new task. I'm going to learn it and I'll do it for people with disabilities though, like screen reader users, myself or other assisted technology users or people without formalized education and technical degrees. What are we going to do? So I saw this nexus of opportunity where for the first time ever, a screen reading skill is a competitive advantage in the workplace and can earn you a high-paying role. Why no one has built a certification for people who are blind or visually impaired like myself is because it's freaking hard. It is so flipping hard. Like how do you help someone who's totally blind understand if the closed captions are accurate. How do you help someone who's totally blind understand if they're slashing content on the screen or like I said, a color contrast or if an alternative text attribute is actually correct. So it's incredibly hard, but we've worked hard on this. We figured it out. We've done it. We're in our fourth cohort right now. And the best thing about this certification is is that people who sit and come through our program and graduate successfully are also qualified to sit for the, the only other skill based certification in the industry, which is the DHS Department of Homeland Security Trusted Tester E Five Certification, which if you're performing digital accessibility in the federal space, any federal agency or for a federal contractor doing digital accessibility for a federal agency. If you're in either of those two spaces, you have to have your DH S trusted tester, it is a requirement. So the DHS trusted tester is the only other skill based certification. And it makes me feel really good knowing the quality of our program, the integrity of our program and the strength of our program. Because not only are we able to get totally blind screen reader users who have even been blind since birth. Not only can we get them to be certified for our certification, but they can then sit for the DHS trusted tester certification and earn that which whether you're cited or not, even if you have all the other knowledge based certifications, people can't get it because it's hard and it's technical and it requires you to apply knowledge, skill and ability in a dynamic way and people can't do it.

Mai Ling 17:08
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17:42 India Ochs
Hello, I am India Ochs and we are inviting you to join dynamic conversations with a community of people who are working together to make the world accessible for everyone at all times.

Mai Ling 17:54
And I'm Mai Ling Chan and we're so excited to share the Exceptional Alliance's epic accessibility event to talk about all of the ways we can optimize how the world is experienced.

India Ochs 18:03
That's right, Mai Ling, accessibility isn't just about entry and curves. It's about vocabulary policy, innovation, research, how we access the world electronically and so much more, join exceptional alliances on October 20th and interact with intimate roundtable discussions about advancements in accessibility and lived experiences.

Mai Ling 18:29
Registration is free. And it's important to remember that just by registering, you are actively supporting virtual event access, which demonstrates the value and continued interest in virtual events and supports accessibility. So grab your free spot at exceptional alliances dot com and we look forward to chatting with you during the event.

Mai Ling 18:46
Now let's get back to our amazing interview. So let me ask you who is taking your certification program.

Tanner Gers 18:53
Historically, it's been for vocational rehabilitation clients, vocational rehabilitation is a federally funded program administered at the state level that is designed to help people with disabilities, focus more on the more severe disabilities. People like who have blindness or spinal cord injury or maybe autistic get the training and vocational rehabilitation support so that they can come off of entitlement programs and actually join a competitive work opportunity. So we sell this vocational rehabilitation program to vocational rehab counselors who share it with their students. And those students are who people with disabilities come through the program. But you know, since we first originally talked and due to responses in the market, market demand is that we've opened this up to people without disabilities, specifically more enterprise corporate level programs who were getting attention like, oh my gosh, like you guys are getting totally blind, totally disabled people earning their 2.1 certification and their DHS trusted tester, How do we do this? 

Mai Ling 20:04
Yeah, I want in, yeah.

Tanner Gers 20:07
So we responded to the marketplace and, and that's what, that's how we've developed all the different programs that we have, the different certifications that we have now the different opportunities for people with and without disabilities to work with us. And that is all led up to the staff, a recruiting agency that we're now helping companies who want talent, who want that vetted qualified talent. Instead of paying a recruiting company who doesn't really understand digital accessibility, they can come to us and get certified, vetted experts qualified for their roles, quickly, more easily and at a better price.

Mai Ling 20:44
I love that. So you're building on your current audience, you know, your clients and now you're kind of matchmaking and helping them to make that next step before we go there. I just want to take a step back and congratulate you and just really admire what you've done in this space and to share that this is what makes you the perfect panel representative for our upcoming conference, Exceptional Alliances. I want to thank you right now for saying yes to being on that conversation of designing and researching assistive technologies specifically in digital and web accessibility. This is perfect. So I'm looking forward to you sharing with us on October 20th. So thank you.

Tanner Gers 21:23
Thank you for everything that you do. I mean that's why I was so excited when we first met because what we're doing right now now creating awareness and spreading knowledge throughout the space is like is the hard work that has to be done right now because that's just where we're at and it's work like this, that's gonna pave the way for the trailblazers behind us to really make the impacts that they were destined to make.

Mai Ling 21:45
Absolutely. OK. So tell me about now this matchmaking that you're doing. it sounds like staffing and a very specific vertical.

Tanner Gers 21:53
Yeah. So this again derived from market demand. So we have our digital accessibility consultancy and we have our certification program. Well, we hire, you know, I'm really big on hiring ability inclusive, you know, hiring blind, hiring people with disabilities is super important to me. So we have these people, they're trained, they're qualified, we put them through the certification, we know what they're capable of doing. So instead of us going out into the marketplace, we can literally hire our certified testers into our position. So what does that mean? That means that they are front, they're client facing for a lot of the projects that we're working on. So when we're working with enterprise government agencies, when we're working with mid market online retailers, and they see these people with disabilities jump on calls, demonstrate their expertise, guide the remediation effort, explain what's happening at a technical level in a way that's understandable. They want those people on their team. They realize like, oh my gosh, what if instead of paying accessibility officer to do this work for us, why don't we just hire the people to do the work internally? So that was the birth of us. Oh duh. Like we can totally place and staff and recruit the right people for you. We have the chops and expertise technically to validate whether or not they can support you and your business and your and your needs. And so it really just kind of organically happened on its own.

Mai Ling 23:24
And do you also feel that you are very integral in setting the standards, the requirements, the salary settings, you know, things like that because you are helping to bring that conversation forward?

Tanner Gers 23:38
Yes and no. I mean, I think that the market is really what drives you know, it's supply and demand and right now, digital accessibility sme S are in super high demand. So someone you know, with about a year of experience without a technical degree and a certification can expect to make 60 to $70,000 per year. Now, 60 to $70,000 per year may not sound like a lot to people listening to this call, but to most Americans that's significant. And for people who are living on entitlement programs who are on social security disability or social security income, 60 to $70,000 is life changing. You know, here as you know, may in Arizona, you know, Mai, the poverty level is much, much lower than that. I don't know how families live on $25,000 a year, but they do it. So someone who's totally blind or completely disabled starting to bring home 50 60 $70,000 in an entry level role, I mean, that value is based on market demand.

Mai Ling 24:44
Absolutely. And then it's also remote and virtual work. Correct?

Tanner Gers 24:48
How else, what better work environment for a person with your visibility within the system of technology need?

Mai Ling 24:55
Oh, this is all fantastic.

Mai Ling 24:57
Let me ask you, what do you do in your spare time?

Tanner Gers 24:59
I'm an athlete. I'm not a sports fan at all. I just love to compete. I'm preparing what feels like constantly for the next sport, the next competition, the next thing I'm a pretty competitive person. I love to do that. I'm a dancer and I love to, to go out and dance. And there's this really cool place here locally that I'll go to occasionally to either sing karaoke or play Giant Jenga. Yeah, I am the Giant Jenga champion.

Mai Ling 25:29
Really? I didn't know that that was a skill.

Tanner Gers 25:33
It is now.

Mai Ling 25:35
I think you should put that on your LinkedIn.

Tanner Gers 25:39
It is, it is going up when this podcast drops. Please come connect request with me on linkedin and, and you will see Giant Jenga a champion on there.

Mai Ling 25:46
I love that. Excellent. OK. Well, what are ways that we can stay in touch with you and support you?

Tanner Gers 25:53
Yeah, the the best way to follow me and see the content that we're producing is on linkedin. Accessibility Officer and our gears ge is spelled G-E-R-S. You can follow everything we're doing there and of course at accessibility officer dot com and just for those access ability A-C-C-E-S-S A-B-I-L-I-T-Y access ability officer dot com.

Mai Ling 26:19
Thank you. Thanks so much Tanner for everything that you are doing for our community. I'm so excited and I'm looking forward to listening to you at the conference on October 20th.

Tanner Gers 26:28
Can't wait to see everybody in October.

Mai Ling 26:31
We hope you enjoyed this episode and invite you to leave us a review on Apple podcasts and Spotify and share the show with people you think will find value from it. This helps the show a lot or have a great guest referral. Reach out to us at xleaders at gmail dot com.

James Berges 26:47
And if you want exclusive tips on becoming an exceptional leader, deliver straight to your inbox, just go to exceptional leaders dot com and sign up for our mailing list. Thanks for listening.