Steve Kelley
Steve Sawczyn, Digital Accessibility Lead at HealthPartners, is no stranger to accessibility. Steve played a critical role in helping retail giant Target make its way to web accessibility after a lawsuit brought their attention to the inaccessibility of their website. And before that, in a grassroots effort in his home state of Maine, Sawczyn was at the forefront of negotiating with Apple on restoring a workable screen reader to their Mac computer before they were distributed throughout Maine schools as the computer of choice. In addition to Target and Apple, Steve's resume also includes Deque, and United Healthcare, before his recent leadership role at HealthPartners.
What intrigued me about his journey, since Target, was when he explained why he moved from retail to healthcare, in his most recent role at Health Partners.
Like many people, Steve found himself managing a family medical crisis, and spending an inordinate amount of time trying to navigate his way through inaccessible healthcare documents and websites.
Imagine for a moment you have a family member requiring medical care and you are trying to make your way through all the healthcare and insurance documentation, which in itself is a challenging read. You call on the phone and get redirected to their website for expedited service, only to discover that both the documentation and the website is inaccessible to screen readers. So now, instead of spending time with your family member, you are instead spending your time trying to reengineer the website and documents into something usable, or waiting on hold for an answers to questions contained on your healthcare provider's website unreadable for anyone using a screen reader.
This is the situation Steve Sawczyn found himself in, and made a promise to do something to correct when he had the opportunity. Today, as Digital Accessibility Lead at HealthPartners, Steve fulfills this promise to himself.
"During the medical crisis I was dealing with very inaccessible insurance information and needing to find ways to make that accessible, and that was time I should have been spending with my child. It made me angry that I had to spend so much time that I didn't want to spend doing something that needed to be done."
It was this experience, Steve went on to say, that made him seek out a position in healthcare, where he might be in a position to prevent someone else from going through a similar experience.
Where does Accessibility Begin?
Sawczyn takes a long view on how accessibility gets baked into development. In a recent interview with app developers Degen Valley, he reported that accessibility begins with 'awareness.' "I think the biggest piece is awareness, right? Just knowing it's a problem or a thing to think about or to consider."
As Steve elaborated on awareness as the starting point, it became clear that he was talking not only about the developer's or decision-maker's awareness about accessibility, but also the advocates awareness of how to communicate about accessibility.
Sawczyn distilled accessibility awareness into the following points.
- Awareness that accessibility is something to think about or consider in the development process.
- Awareness that the decision-makers at the company will have many priorities that they are trying to manage, such as deadlines, return on investment, etc., so that what might first appear as indifference to accessibility, is often a matter of fitting it into a long list of other priorities they are managing simultaneously. "Just because I'm passionate about this," he said," doesn't mean everyone else is. Other people have priorities that may not have anything to do with accessibility."
- Awareness that we all need to be talking about the same thing—project details and specifications. "Understanding something may help me shape up my own perspective," Steve said, "maybe I'm not seeing something or some bigger piece. Understanding the other perspective shapes my own perspective."
The Reality Check
When accessibility hasn't been a consideration, and the project is well underway, how do you shift gears? "You have to be very careful," Steve said with a laugh. "Look, you are where you are and this has to become a learning opportunity. Let's figure out a way to move forward from here with a timeline and some actionable steps. That can move us from where we are (and where we should never have been) to where we want to be (if you had listened to me). If you are able to not say the things you want to say, suddenly you become an ally."
Secondly, Sawczyn recommends enlisting the naysayers as allies, if you can, to help promote the change in priorities. "I can talk about accessibility until next Sunday, but you're the one that just went through this—your peers are going to listen to you, before they listen to me…People have been very willing to do this because they can talk it up in a positive way."
Steve then recounted an experience with a decision-maker in which ignoring advice about accessibility development ended up costing the company a lot of money and time as the project progressed. The decision-maker then went on to call the experience a learning opportunity, developed a PowerPoint presentation on how this experience could save others money and time, and transformed himself into the grand advocate for accessibility planning and advocacy! "If you let other people have the win sometimes, you get a lot more traction—you can't let ego get in the way."
Accessibility Starting Points
Steve suggested several resources for the developer or decision-maker looking for more information. These include:
- WebAIM Web Accessibility In Mind. A resource which contains a lot of free, easy to understand resources.
- Deque University features some freebies, but most of the courses require a nominal fee. "What's interesting about Deque U is that they have things organized in a curriculum format, for accessibility, developers, and other different roles. This makes it a lot easier for people to figure out what they need to know for their role."
- W3C World Wide Web Consortium. Very comprehensive resource with guidelines, drafts, examples. "There's a lot of stuff…everything you ever wanted to know. "And the problem with that is that there's a lot of stuff, a lot of it is technical, and a lot of it can be overwhelming. It's definitely on my list, but it might not be the first place I go."
Editor's Note: In addition to the resources listed above, be aware that we wanted to inform you that all of the curriculum resources we use for training our Talent Lab interns and apprentices on accessibility including information on accessibility testing and implementation, are freely available to the public.
Sawczyn also mentioned checking out the blogs on other accessibility vendor sites for more information. He mentioned blog posts from accessibility vendors like TPGI can be great resources, as well as conferences such as Deque's AxCon, a free conference that is recorded and CSUN, the largest annual conference on accessibility.
Really, Anyone Can Do This…
Here are a couple of Steve's suggestions for first steps, to take a quick look at what might need to be done on a website to make it more accessible.
- Park the mouse and try to navigate the site using only the keyboard, the tab and arrow keys to move around, and spacebar to activate buttons and check boxes. "What is the experience like if I can't use my mouse? You're simulating a bunch of disabilities by doing that--not just screen readers. Doing a keyboard test, I think, is a great place to start."
- Use free browser-based tools to check the site. Steve suggests choosing any of the following:
- Axe Accessibility Tools
- Accessibility Insights by Microsoft
- WAVE by WebAIM
- Microsoft Office Accessibility Checker
Steve points out that both the Microsoft tools above don't assume the user is a power user and will walk you through the solutions. WAVE too, is an automated tool that will guide users through accessibility improvements without assuming a great deal of accessibility knowledge, so they are great tools for beginners, as well as more experienced users.
Next Steps
For those who discover a real passion for accessibility and want to take it to the next level, Steve suggests checking out the courses mentioned above at Deque University and checking out the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) certifications. "Some employers are looking for these certifications," Steve said, "but the true value is that it forces you to learn, to open your mind to stuff you may not have thought about, and you have to get continuing education credits to maintain those certifications, you have to spend time keeping current."
Steve's Contact Info
To reach out to Steve, he suggests sending him an email to Steve@Sawczyn.com or going to his website at Steves.life.
