Kelvin Crosby: 0:06

Welcome to Investing in Accessibility, a Samaritan Partners podcast. We're not waiting for change, we're investing in it. Join us as we speak with entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are focused on creating a more accessible world.

Kelvin Crosby: 0:32

Hey, it's good to see you, even though I can't see you. It's another beautiful day in the neighborhood and I'm so excited that you're here at Investing in Accessibility. I'm your host, Kelvin Crosby, and I got my host, Chris Maher. How you doing, man?

Chris Maher: 0:43

Good, my friend. It's good to see you and to be with you. You're looking good today. You got a haircut.

Kelvin Crosby: 0:47

Hey, I got my haircut, I got myself beautified and the good thing is you guys can't see me. So, whether it's true or not, you never know.

Chris Maher: 0:58

It's true. It's true, you are a handsome fellow buddy.

Kelvin Crosby: 1:07

Well, so I I tell you what's going to be interesting about today. As we go into this. We're going to be talking about design and what does it look like for an investment opportunities and for us moving forward and looking for access for all, and I think today's guest guest really can help us with that. So kind of tell us a little bit more who our guest is and kind of where we're going.

Chris Maher: 1:29

You got it. Thanks, my friend. But I'm super excited about this conversation today and we'll get into how I met this wonderful gentleman after I make the introduction. But let's introduce to the podcast Ben Ogilvie, head of accessibility at ArcTouch and also a board member of the GAAD Foundation. Ben, welcome.

Ben Ogilvie: 1:48

Thanks a lot, Chris Kelvin. Really happy to be here with you guys.

Chris Maher: 1:51

So what's really interesting about how you and I met is like there's this there's this thread where I met, early on, a number of wonderful people, including yourself, but also Jennison, Joe Devon, and the thread is the Perkins School for the Blind and Sandy Lacey at the how Innovation Center. And so I met Jennison at a dinner that they were hosting and then I met you and Joe at another dinner at CES in Vegas, and that would have been January of 2024, right, so we've got Sandy and the folks at Perkins and Howe to Thank so it's but so great to have you here, my friend, and really excited to get into this conversation. I think a great place to start would be for you just to talk a little bit about kind of pre-ArcTouch and kind of GAAD Foundation, about your work and personal background and connection to disability and really how you came to be heading up accessibility at ArcTouch. It would be great.

Ben Ogilvie: 2:49

Yeah, absolutely. And just to quickly touch on our meeting, you know it turned out we had to fly across the country, but it turns out we lived down the road from each other which was a great way to.

Ben Ogilvie: 3:01

Now. We kind of hold down the fort on the East Coast and it's great to have other folks in the area in Connecticut that focus on disability inclusion. My path into this work, as many people's is. It starts with a personal connection. I, while I was in college, I started working for Apple and then continued on that trajectory for a number of years after that and in 2009, I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area working with Apple when my dad, who lived in Texas, was training for a bicycling race for his 60th birthday and came around a corner in the neighborhood where I grew up and collided with a delivery truck and became quadriplegic. And I flew home from California to Houston to retrofit his computer so that he could keep his job. And it was way harder than it should have been and I kind of strapped together some duct tape and bailing wire version of custom software that I built on top of some of the operating system capabilities and then a bunch of custom stuff combined with some off-the-shelf things so that he could keep his job. But it was just way harder than it should have been, and I thought what do people do if they don't have a computer nerd in the family? Something that's already life-changing shouldn't also have to be career ending. But it almost was for him, and so that was kind of my getting thrown into the deep end of learning about accessibility. And so I stayed at Apple for a few years after that, but I was kind of more on the retail operations and IT support side of the house and I decided I wanted to be closer to actually building product and not just supporting it.

Ben Ogilvie: 4:48

So I came over to ArcTouch in the beginning of 2013. At the time, we were about a 20, 25-ish person, primarily iOS and Android engineering shop, and had started to grow into kind of upstream, into design and strategy, and so I came in as a product manager where our job is to make sure things are delivered on time, on budget and kind of targeting that lean startup version of a minimum viable product for our clients and getting things out the door and start getting feedback. Our founders had this concept of not targeting a minimum viable product, but targeting a minimum lovable product, and what that meant to them was something that is both useful but also delightfully designed. And so those were the two pillars of what ArcTouch termed a lovable product. And so in my product management role, I continued to do kind of stealth accessibility around the edges for a while, as long as nobody had questions about timeline or budget. How could I kind of sneak things in to make things a little better along the way? And you know, we build products for a broad range of companies in basically every industry, from, you know, innovative startups through Fortune 500s and everything in between. B2B, B2C, you name it. But I did. I continued to do kind of low-key accessibility for a number of years while I built up the skill set myself.

Ben Ogilvie: 6:26

And then, in 2019, my wife and I had our first son and came to find out he was born with a brain injury and epilepsy. And spent a few months in the ICU and came back to my management and said, hey, I can't be doing this work on the side anymore. This is the work I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life in some capacity, and I don't know if there's space for me to do that here. And the founders of the company said, basically, we'll make space. And they pulled me off of all my other projects and gave me a runway and a team to build a program around how do we, how do we add a third pillar to that concept of a lovable product and how do we build products that are accessibility first? So, so the three legs of the stool now are useful, delightful and accessible, and so we've gotten now to to kind of continue doing that work with those same kinds of clients that we've always worked with, from strategy design development across multiple technology stacks. We don't just do mobile now. We do lots of different technologies, web and IoT and wearables but now doing a lot of client education and process development around how do we help those clients also prioritize accessibility in the work that they're doing and that we're building for them?

Kelvin Crosby: 7:50

I mean, I think, as you tell your story, like it's kind of moving because you had to go through one life journey to get to the next. You had to go through another. I mean I call them, I call them traumas. You had to go through those experiences which then made you stronger and made you wiser. It made you, like, realize. This is where my vision is, this is where my focus is, this is where I'm gonna go, and because of that passion and and you're realizing, we're creating a product not only helping people with disabilities, but other people, and you're realizing others. And I kind of want to dive in a little bit into the three tiers a little bit, because I think that's one thing that people don't really realize. You got to design a product, right. You got to then think through the accessibility components and then how are you going to get people to love the product? Can you kind of share, just shortly, about what is that like? Like, when you guys get a project, what does that look like?

Ben Ogilvie: 9:00

Yeah, I mean we, we work the, the variety of clients we work with and the projects we work on is rivaled only by the different kinds of ways we engage, depending on where clients need us to kind of jump in.

Ben Ogilvie: 9:12

So we can start at the very beginning with, I have a blank whiteboard behind me right now, and that's often where we start with clients is.

Ben Ogilvie: 9:22

You know, they have a concept of a product they want to build, but maybe not a clear understanding so we start at the very beginning of bluesky what could be and then go through a series of work shops with them and take them through the ideation and refine the idea and help them think through what could be but then dial into what must be and take them through that kind of lean startup approach and serve as kind of an outboard accelerator for building that product and getting it to market. Other clients we work with are much further along, they're much more mature, they have an existing product and they need additional hands or an additional type of expertise to jump in and help them get to a milestone by a certain deadline. And so we do a combination of kind of fully managed projects and staff augmentation, depending on what clients need. But in all cases, when and where we can we bring in how do we include disability communities from that early strategy stage? How do we have conversations about how do we increase the reach of this by making sure we're making it maximally useful and accessible for the broadest possible audience. And we really do try to infuse that accessibility-first thinking into each stage of the product development life cycle, from requirements all the way through delivery and launch monitoring and everything else.

Chris Maher: 10:52

So a couple quick comments. First of all, thank you for sharing your personal story about your dad and your son and your family. And not uncommon in our part of the market and certainly on this podcast that we come in touch with people who have had lived experience which really drives what they're doing with their work and their career. I mean, all of us are examples of that, so thank you for sharing that. What is quite remarkable is that you went to your bosses and said, hey, I can't be doing this on the side and kind of undercover anymore. This has to be front and center in my work. And so one the courage and really leadership you took there is fantastic. And then the fact that they have the courage and leadership to say no, no, no, let's do it. And we need, we need more of that.

Chris Maher: 11:40

Like, I think part of why accessibility and inclusive design has not accelerated more than it has is a lack of leadership. But let's put that aside for right now. But what's really exciting is you're an agency that is working with some of the largest companies in the world and you're leading with that sort of vision and with that accessibility and really, and you're pushing that direction. It's really great to see that that it's not just startups that are trying to, you know, bring this innovation, but large partners and vendors of the largest companies in the world are pushing them in that direction and showing them that, hey, it's not as hard as you think it is, it doesn't have to be as expensive as you think it is and oh, by the way, it helps your bottom line, right, and so that's fantastic the work that you guys do at ArcTouch.

Chris Maher: 12:28

Can you talk a little bit, there's a broad range of clients you have, from early stage startups to Fortune 100 companies. Can you talk a little bit about the difference in working with those two types of clients?

Ben Ogilvie: 12:48

Yeah, absolutely, and you know I, when we work with startups, it's obviously a different, a different type of prioritization and a different type of, you know, if you're working with someone who's, you know, trying to go from zero to one, it's a different conversation than if you're working with a large organization that has funding and it's just a matter of figuring out the resourcing and prioritization and getting the stakeholders aligned. There are certainly commonalities in the types of conversations we have. Fortunately, over the last five or six years really, I have a lot less of the conversation about why and a lot more of the conversation of how, which I see as progress.

Ben Ogilvie: 13:34

That doesn't mean that all of our clients are are you know as far along in their in their journey, but there's more conversations about, oh yeah, that we know that's something that we should be doing. We just don't know how to do it.

Chris Maher: 13:51

That's super encouraging.

Ben Ogilvie: 13:53

Yeah, you know, nothing moves as quickly as we would all in this space like it to, but the fact that it is moving and that there are things, even given kind of headwinds in one region or another, that there are things like the European Accessibility Act that are helping to encourage progress and moving the needle in the right direction. All of those things are coming together in a way that I think still feels like the arc of history is bending in the right direction, slowly but surely. When we work with startups, if they come to us, one thing that I found really encouraging is that more, more founders, I think, come to us now willing to have the conversation about accessibility and and there's always a trade-off in prioritization, and sometimes they're like we absolutely want to do that, we want to figure out how to prioritize it, but you know we can't do it right now because of these reasons, and I will remind them or give them data around how the cost increases as the further you put it off. But we act as an advisor. We can't force clients to take a certain approach. But we do have a lot of clients who have come to us kind of getting something out the door and then do follow up and say, okay, we're ready to tackle accessibility now. It's not perfect but given the various priorities that folks have to work with, at least it is part of the conversation from the beginning and that they do tend to come back to it.

Ben Ogilvie: 15:32

When we're working with large organizations, multinationals, I find that our greatest success is always in getting their existing products in front of users with disabilities and showing those clients the impact of inaccessibility. You know I can talk all day long about the implications of legislation and potential risk and all those things, and those do have to be part of the conversation a lot of times, but five minutes of seeing someone unable to use their product has so much more weight than 30 slides on risk assessment. And often what I find with the large organizations is that the teams that we are working with when we're starting are often smaller teams within the larger organization and we'll have folks who are bought in at that stage on a small team, on a small project where we're starting. And one thing that's been really encouraging is that once we can show that success within a small product team, we get to start having conversations about how to approach accessibility more broadly within that organization and start getting connected with other teams and people saying, oh, how did you do that?

Ben Ogilvie: 16:58

And then we can kind of showcase those smaller success stories and it starts to build and in some cases we get to be kind of the accessibility champion within their org and in other cases they've taken on the mantle and start to build out that culture internally and we kind of step back over time, which is ultimately the goal because we want to drive that culture change. And that's part of also why I'm leading into the conversation around my participation on the GAAD Foundation. The goal of the GAAD Foundation is to change the culture of software development and create accessibility as a first-class citizen. So I get to kind of wear those combined hats, both in my role at ArcTouch and more broadly as champion and on the board of GAAD Foundation.

Chris Maher: 17:53

I think what's really, again, encouraging about your work with the large corporations is that, and it's a credit to you and your organization, is you've helped them understand the value of investing in accessibility. Right, there is a hard and a soft return on investing in accessibility for them. It can impact their bottom line and I love the fact that you folks, I'm not surprised by it, that you truly are walking the walk, or what is it Walking the walk? Walking the talk about including the community when you're designing for your clients, and not surprised at how powerful that is when you provide that feedback to your corporate clients.

Chris Maher: 18:39

So that is just so encouraging that the large corporates are shifting from hey we need an insurance policy against litigation, we want to check the box for ADA compliance to now where they're like, oh no, this is good for business, which is fantastic to hear from someone who's working with these large corporations day to day. I know you've done some other work on the startup side of things and specifically a project that you're involved in down in Pittsburgh, and so you know I think a lot of the listeners that we have for the podcast are in the startup world. People who work at startups, people who are founders and CEOs of startups and can you talk a little bit about the work you're doing there and maybe just some thoughts or tips or takeaways on what you believe startups need to be thinking about as they are building their products, trying to figure out product market fit and scale.

Ben Ogilvie: 19:33

Yeah, the program we're working on with University of Pittsburgh is called The Inclusive App Accelerator. It's a grant-funded five-year program led by University of Pittsburgh but with a constellation of fantastic partners, including ArcTouch serving as kind of primary design and development partner, and then Nidlers Impact Center and World Institute on Disabilities and some folks from Perkins, and the list goes on and on. Fable and Alliant are also along with us. And the goal of the program is to, over the course of five years, help entrepreneurs with an idea that is specifically focused around an app, a mobile app designed for use by members of disability communities, driving positive outcomes in employment, community participation, and health and function. And so each year of the five-year program will bring in four founders or entrepreneurs with an idea in that space and take them through an accelerator program to help them flesh out the product idea, design it, develop it and bring it to market. And and help them think about the sustainability of how do we make sure that that both is positively impacting their core target demographic for the product. But also think about how do we "yes and that and think about the additional beyond their primary user group. How do they expand the reach beyond that group through ensuring that it's fully accessible or as accessible as it can be made.

Ben Ogilvie: 21:40

It's a really great opportunity to get exposure to lots of different pockets of need and lots of different pockets of entrepreneurial thinking, specifically within the disability tech space.

Ben Ogilvie: 21:49

And when we are working with those founders in particular, they're already mission-driven, they're already there because they've got an idea that often is connected to either personal lived experience or folks in their life, loved ones, who have that need, folks in their life.

Ben Ogilvie: 22:17

So when we're working with them to think about the product market fit and the maximal addressable market, the total addressable market of the product beyond kind of their personal experience. This is the same thing I experienced when I was going through things with my dad. I saw the impact directly on him, but it took a while for me to understand how I could think about things more broadly and how they could reach a wider audience. So that's one of the things that I'm really excited about working on this program with University of Pittsburgh. We're partway into our first cohort first year, so we should have some of those first round of apps coming out in the next six months or so and just really great concepts and ideas from a wide range of different spaces. It's a really, really great program.

Chris Maher: 23:09

That's awesome and, by the way, what an all-star team you've put together, all those organizations and companies, that are involved in that. That's amazing. Is there a vision to potentially scale that and expand it over time? If things go well?

Ben Ogilvie: 23:41

Within the scope of the grant itself it's a fairly fixed scope. However, one of the ways that we thought about how do we scale beyond the reach of the grant by itself is that we're actually at Arctouch. We work across lots of different technology stacks. We work in lots of different ways depending on our clients, but for this grant program in particular, we are doing the design and development using a cross-platform mobile app development framework called Flutter Flow. Flutter Flow is not currently accessible. We're working directly with the Flutter Flow team to both conduct an audit and remediation of the apps that we're building that come out of the platform, so that what we build is accessible, and we're providing that feedback of what we had to manually remediate back to the Flutter Flow product team so that they can improve the outputs from the platform. But at the same time, we're also conducting audits and providing feedback on the usability of the platform itself.

Ben Ogilvie: 24:29

The goal, ideally, is to have at least one of the cross-platform development platforms out in the market be accessible, to spark some competition in that space. And effectively, you know, lots of entrepreneurs don't have the funding to come hire an agency like ArcTouch to do the full design and development for them. But if they have the idea, if they don't happen to have the design or development expertise, but they can use a low code platform like Flutter Flow and it works with their assistive technology to build it and launch it themselves, without having to rely on a custom design and development agency, there's more space for more people to bring ideas to market.

Chris Maher: 25:15

So can we dig into that for a little bit? So a couple of things that, because you're a part of your work is like, you're there at that early stage and probably seen a lot of cutting edge stuff and like, and you've, you've been in the accessibility space for, you're a veteran. What are you seeing that is getting you excited about the future? So like, low code platforms, AI, of course, but you can speak to those anything else what else is getting you excited about us being able to create a more accessible and inclusive world moving forward?

Ben Ogilvie: 25:49

I mean, there's plenty. There's plenty to be excited about, there's plenty to be cautiously optimistic about. You know, we all know the risks of AI run amok when is comes to exclusion and continuing to compound existing biases and widen the divide. But things like, Joe Devon one of the of the founders of GAAD recently released, under the GAD Foundation, released the AI model accessibility checker. T he goal is to provide feedback to the foundation model developers themselves to improve the accessibility of code generated by those models using AMAC baseline measurements to test that and then feed it back so that those models get better over time. Additionally, GitHub, which is what many, I would say probably most, developers use as the foundation for building their code repositories at this point, especially startups. I think GitHub is the most widely adopted platform for startups.

Ben Ogilvie: 26:58

Ed Summers, the head of accessibility at GitHub, has taken the GAD pledge for this year to continue to improve the accessibility of the GitHub platform itself and, working with Microsoft and Copilot, they also are working to improve the accessibility recommendations of code that developers commit on the platform.

Ben Ogilvie: 27:24

So things like that, where it's the points of leverage in the development stack and finding the right places to inject AI to maximize reach and impact. I'm really excited that the right people are having those conversations and are involved in those those discussions. Microsoft has done an incredible job of building Copilot, building accessibility into Copilot, and they've got Jenny Lay-Flurrie and other amazing champions all the way up to their CEO that have a strong personal commitment to accessibility, and the fact that those global organizations are in the chat, as it were, when it comes to AI gives me hope that AI is going to ultimately drive towards more accessible products. And even for people who don't have the expertise, who don't have the experience and don't have the time, that there are tools by default becoming available for more designers and developers to at least take accessibility into account and consider it from the beginning, even if it's not something that's on their radar already.

Chris Maher: 28:32

Yeah, and that's that's really exciting that large players like that are making the commitment, because my sense is you get a couple, a few of those large players to commit to it. Hopefully it creates the domino effect, right. The others will follow. But what's interesting about those two organizations? And tell me if I'm wrong, but Ed Summers is blind, correct.

Ben Ogilvie: 28:54

Yes,

Chris Maher: 28:55

I think I think you or Joe introduced me to him at CSUN a couple of years ago. and Jenny Lay- Flurris has a disability. Satya Nadella son had a disability before he unfortunately passed, and so again, it gets back to leadership, but also it's it's not just leadership, but it's also lived experience that infuses that leadership. And so, that also gets back to making sure that everyone has a seat at the table. And so, super exciting, you're involved in a number of so many cool projects. So we're kind of getting towards the end of our time here. How can people connect with you, learn more about the work you're doing at ArcTouch, learn more about the work that you folks are doing at the GAAD Foundation? If you can share that with us, we'll make sure we post that also in the show notes.

Ben Ogilvie: 29:38

Yeah, absolutely. Folks can follow the work we're doing at ArcTouch just ARCTOUCH. com A-R-C-T-O-U-C-H. com. One other plug there is we recently released our State of Mobile App Accessibility Report where we looked at top 50 apps across five different industries and measured the accessibility, not from a web content accessibility guidelines, technical conformance standpoint, but from a usability standpoint across user journeys, and gathered user feedback and provided that report. So, folks can check that report out. It's free at arctouch. com, slash somaa, s-o-m-a-a. One thing we found was that 72% of user journeys still are inaccessible in the apps we tested. So lots of room for improvement in mobile apps. And then, as far as the work we're doing at GAD Foundation, folks can go to gaad. foundation and check that out. Lots of great stuff going on there.

Ben Ogilvie: 30:35

If anybody's in the New York area, I I'm one of the co-organizers for the Accessibility New York City MeetUp every month so we bring in great speakers. Folks can find out about that at meetup. com slash a11y nyc. And then, lastly, people can find me on LinkedIn. I always am very happy to have conversations with anybody that's interested in inclusive design, whatever stage of your career you're at or whatever stage your company is at. I just love talking about this because the more these conversations happen and the more we share best practices, the sooner we get to the world, that selfishly, I need my son to grow up in.

Chris Maher: 31:14

I hear you, brother. You're a busy man. I don't know how you find the time to squeeze all that stuff in, but very grateful that you do, and we're going to have to have you back on the show again to dig deeper into a few of these things. I think we just kind of hit the tip of the iceberg on this one. I know you're super busy. Thank you for spending the time with us and having this conversation, and you are the best, my friend. We really appreciate it.

Ben Ogilvie: 31:38

Truly appreciate it, guys. Great to be on.

Kelvin Crosby: 31:42

Well, that wraps up Investing in Accessibility and go live beyond your challenges and we'll see you in two weeks.

Kelvin Crosby: 31:54

Thank you for listening to Investing in Accessibility, a Samaritan Partners podcast, where we invest in change for accessibility, not wait for change. If you want to follow us, you can find us on YouTube or LinkedIn at @Samaritan Partners. If you would like to invest in Samaritan Partners, email Chris at chris@samaritanpartners. com. If you'd like to learn more about us, go to www. samaritanpartners. com. You can take the first step in investing in change by giving us five stars and sharing this podcast with everybody that you know, so we can spread the word, so that we can give access to all by Investing in Accessibility.