Uniquely Abled: Recent Episodes
Mellissa Green
Introductory Episode, 09/08/2022
In this introductory episode of the ‘Uniquely Abled’ Podcast, host Mellissa Green introduces herself. Melissa is a Digital Accessibility Consultant, she teaches digital content and makes it accessible for people with disabilities. The objective of this podcast is to deal with accessibility and disability as well as to change the stigma of the term disabled and upgrade it to the term ‘Uniquely Abled’.
Episode Highlights: · Mellissa reveals that she is blind and often wears hearing aids. She writes dark interconnected culinary thrillers, fiction, and nonfiction dealing with accessibility. · Melissa’s hashtag on Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest is #livinguniquelyabled. · Melissa will be soon reviewing the book ‘3 Word Rebellion’, and has also scheduled to interview the author of the book in this podcast. · Melissa is always on Audible getting business books and she also has an E-group on groups.io which is called the ‘Creative Tea Pot’.
Resources Mentioned: · Uniquely Abled Podcast: Podcast Website · Mellissa Green: Twitter Pinterest Website · Podcast Editing
The Trailer Episode, 06/16/2022
This is a Trailer Episode of the ‘Uniquely Abled’ Podcast, where host Mellissa Green introduces the podcast. She says that the objective of this podcast is to deal with accessibility and disability.
Episode Highlights: · Mellissa introduces the ‘Uniquely Abled’ podcast, and this is a trailer episode. · ‘Uniquely Abled’ podcast is about accessibility, inclusivity, sensibility, and disability. · Mellissa plans to record this podcast as often as she can. · Melissa suggests listening to this podcast through any of the podcast applications available to you.
Resources Mentioned: · Uniquely Abled Podcast: Podcast Website · Mellissa Green: Twitter · Podcast Editing
Interview with Amber Hines on Equalize Digital and Web Accessibility
In today’s episode of the ‘Uniquely Abled’ podcast, Mellissa Green, an Entrepreneur, interviews guest Amber Hines, the Founder of Equalized Digital, a company devoted to web accessibility. They discuss Equalize Digital and Web Accessibility.
Episode Highlights • 01:00 – Amber shares about Equalized Digital, what that was, and how it started. • 03:20 – Mellissa enquires, how did Amber become a disability-related entrepreneur. • 05:55 – “What in the disability field makes you angry”, Mellissa asks Amber. • 06:10 – Amber states that working on the web and doing accessibility audits is one of the things that is most frustrating for her, there's a lot of false advertising out there. • 08:11 – Amber mentions that one of the things that she has enjoyed is that when she got deeper into the community she realized how open and supportive everyone is. • 09:31 – Mellissa questions Amber if she could have coffee with a celebrity in the disability field, who would that be. • 12:17 – Amber runs a virtual meetup on web accessibility that meets twice per month. She has used some of the relationships that she has grown through Twitter or LinkedIn to ask people to speak and that has furthered some of her networks and reach. • 14:11 – Amber answers about the three other podcasts that she would recommend to Melissa’s audience and why? • 16:58 – Mellissa asks Amber, “Who influenced you to get into this field? • 17:45 – Amber says, she doesn’t know if there was one specific person that inspired her to get into this field, it was just an amalgamation of some of the work experience she had and then some different users that she has had the ability to engage with. • 19:00 – Amber highlights some blogs that she thinks are worth following. • 21:53 - One of the benefits of the lawsuits is that it draws more attention to them. It may be motivating more changes in the laws to be stricter and to require businesses to make their things accessible, says Amber. • 26:57 – One can't do automated stuff; it has to have a human involved in it. • 28:08 – Amber says, there is definitely a greater awareness of web accessibility now.
Three Key Points 1. One of the things that she wishes is that the website owners or business owners understood is that accessibility is not just for a small number of people. She thinks sometimes business owners are like, I don't want to pay money to do an extra accessibility audit of my website, it's not worth it because I have one or two customers, but out of everyone they serve, she doesn’t think they realize how much it touches on so many people that could potentially be patronizing their business or using their website. She wishes that they understood that accessibility. 2. The number of lawsuits in the United States related to website accessibility has been going up every year, and they were over 4000 last year. She feels like she sees it more in mainstream news. So, there was a lot that she saw post-COVID about the vaccination websites not being accessible to screen reader users and that's something that has definitely changed. She feels within the last 12 months, among other Web Developers or Marketing Agencies that build websites, most of them are saying, accessibility is a thing that they need to think about. Amber is seeing a lot more of that which is positive. 3. Amber’s biggest project right now is their source software. They consider a paid MVP, it's only about a year old. It's being used on about 800 different websites and their big goal for 2022 is to try, promote it and grow the use of accessibility checker, and within the WordPress community. So that's one of her biggest focuses and then working on trying to educate other developers and agencies on what they need to do to build accessibility into their services so that they're catching more problems rather than having to go back and remediate at the end of a project.
Tweetable Quotes • “Pay us $49 A month to install this line of JavaScript and your whole website will be accessible in 24 hours, which is just completely unrealistic and untrue.” - Amber Hines • “Anyone who's interested can join and they don't have to invest a ton of money in order to learn and start doing better with making their websites accessible.” - Amber Hines • “I learned at every meetup I learned something from our speakers.” - Amber Hines • “That podcast has really opened my eyes to different challenges that different people face. And as someone who is planning websites” - Amber Hines • “Speeds up your website. It can help you with your search engine ranking.” - Amber Hines • “DQ is a really great place to go if you want to learn specifically about web accessibility.” - Amber Hines • “You do have to have manual tests or have a human being look at things because there are things that scanning tools won't check.” - Amber Hines • “It's not just a machine or a computer; you need to have actual people looking.” - Amber Hines
Resources Mentioned Uniquely Abled Podcast: Podcast Website Mellissa Green: Twitter Amber Hines: Website Facebook Podcast Editing