EASI'S PODCAST SERIES
INTERVIEW: JENNISON ASUNCION
NORM COOMBS: Before turning to the interview with Jennison Asuncion about social media, I want to let you know about a really exciting webinar series EASI has coming up starting on January 25. Four webinars in a series running for four weeks.
The first one will be on Second Life and 3D computing. The second one will be on Twitter especially the Interface Builder’s http://www.accessibletwitter.com. Third one on Facebook with some people from Bookshare talking about their uses of it, and we think and hope we'll have a guest from Facebook Company. And the last one will be on YouTube.
Social media is really becoming a hot issue these days being used politically, fundraising, keeping in touch with your friends. All kinds of things. So it's a thing that we need to learn more about. It's going to be used more and more in education. So I hope you'll really consider tuning in. It's a fee based series worth $195 and I'm sure you'll find it worth all of that and more. You can read more about it and register online by going to EASI's homepage http://easi.cc and clicking on webinar.
Hi, this is Norm Coombs of EASI with another one of our podcasts. And I'm talking today with a friend of mine for gee 15 or 20 years, I guess now.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Almost.
NORM COOMBS: He's in Canada and I'm an ex‑Canadian. So I'm glad to keep in touch with my home country. So I want to say hello to Jennison Asuncion. Hello Jennison.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Hey Norm.
NORM COOMBS: Tell us a little about who you are and what you do.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Sure. So I work in accessibility. I codirect the Adaptech Research Network which looks at the accessibility of information and communication technologies specifically in the college and university sector for students with disabilities here in Canada. So I do that in my night job. In my day job I work for one of Canada's financial institutions doing IT accessibility consulting by day. So it's accessibility all around and I'm also a consumer of accessibility. I happen to be someone who is blind. So I certainly understand the importance of accessibility and have for all of my life.
NORM COOMBS: Okay. So it's part of your life as it is for me.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Yeah.
NORM COOMBS: And we've been exchanging mail off and on for a few months probably now. It has become to my interest that you are hard active and eager on social networking. And I've been dragging my feet kicking and screaming.
JENNISON ASUNCION: We'll get you on there.
NORM COOMBS: And coming on gradually. I was intrigued this week. I don't know when people will listen to this. But just last week was this last week was the giant earthquake in Haiti and I gather social networks have been a tremendous source of fundraising.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Absolutely. So I'm an active user of Twitter, of LinkedIn for my kind of accessibility work. And on a personal level with friends and such I am an avid Facebook user. I also still use the e‑mail discussion list. That's where I started from. And have been an active networker. And I think that's key. Being a person who likes to network, I kind of migrated to social media pretty easily and as someone who likes all the new technologies and all that kind of stuff. As inaccessible as some of them are, I kind of jump into it with both feet. But to your point around disasters, no certainly, on Twitter I've been seeing so many tweets from people just organizing. That's the key, the power of Twitter that impressed me.
I wasn't an early adopter of Twitter. I kind of kept believing what I heard on the TV about, you know, you can learn about what Britney Spears had for breakfast and that's all that Twitter's value was. It was a bit of a tough sale but I decided to just observe. So I got myself a subscription to Twitter, which I needed help with because the main Twitter site to register, you have to use one of those captions which are the screens where you need to look at numbers and letters. It's to keep spambots from registering. But screen readers can't read those. So I had to get assistance to get there to register to Twitter. But once I got on there I was able to start just observe. And I was pleasantly surprised to see the amount of accessibility related conversations that were happening in real time. And I was seeing stuff that I wasn't seeing on the e‑mail discussion lists. So I then became much more actively involved there.
But of late, as you were saying, going back to the whole natural disaster, certainly it's been a place where you've seen a lot of community building. Also protests in Iran, there's been a lot of tweets going on with that, etcetera, etcetera. So I think social media as a means of getting the news out for natural disasters as it is with accessibility is an important channel.
NORM COOMBS: Well I think everybody's heard of Twitter by now. Certainly if you ever put television on they're talking about it. All the newscasters have their own tweets and twits and everything of that kind and usually Facebook. The one thing you mentioned that I think a lot of people don't know about is LinkedIn. Can you talk about that a little bit?
JENNISON ASUNCION: Sure. So if you think of Facebook as kind of the place for you to get in touch with your friends and your classmates and exchange funny pictures and just kind of be more casual. LinkedIn is built as a professional networking tool. So you get in touch with your old colleagues, people you meet at conferences, people you've done business with before. It's a lot more plain and it's deliberately done that way because it is a much more serious place. So people use it. So for example, I joined LinkedIn ‑‑ well actually I was invited to LinkedIn and didn't quite understand what to do with it right away. But certainly when I decided to work in the field of accessibility full time I saw it as a good platform to have a place to kind of describe who I was. So what you have on the page is you have your experience. So you could show your different jobs that you've worked at and where you're currently working. Your expertise. Any affiliations you've had. Any honors you've received. Any of your websites. And it's all on a page. So that's the kind of the static piece of it, of LinkedIn. And then you go out and find connections. People you've worked with, like I mentioned before and such.
But there are other pieces of LinkedIn that bring the power of what LinkedIn is. There are things called LinkedIn groups. Those are exactly, they're web based kind of discussion forums, if you will. They have two primary sections. There's a discussion section with threads. And then you have what's called a news section. So it's not, you know, it doesn't have a place where you can share videos, necessarily. Although you can certainly do that through the news section.
NORM COOMBS: You mean you don't have a farm?
JENNISON ASUNCION: No. No, like on Facebook? No. No farms. But yeah. So you have groups. And in fact I created a number of a few accessibility groups on LinkedIn. And then the other piece of LinkedIn that harnesses its powers has an area called questions and answers. So you can ask a question and it can go out to all of the people that are in what's called your network. So there's all this lingo with Facebook, with all the social medias. So when you're talking about LinkedIn, you're talking about your connections and your connections make up your network. And there's different degrees of connections. So your first degree are the people you're directly connected with. But then you also have access with the second degree. So friends of friends or connections of connections, if you will, and then third degree. So you can ask questions within the networks.
So that's much more, like I said, that's a much more professional and orderly social networking tool. A lot of people use it when they're looking for jobs because recruiters are on there as well. And so they can source candidates by looking at their profiles and things like that. LinkedIn has become a little bit like Twitter and like Facebook. They've adopted some of the same characteristics. For example, status updates and things like that. And I would say LinkedIn is, well depending who you speak to, I would say it's more accessible than some of the other social networking sites out there. Although, you know, there's complications with every social networking site or accessibility kind of hiccups with all of them.
It really depends on, you know, what adaptive technology someone might be using or whether they need it or not. They could be only keyboard only users. And it also depends on their comfort level and experience using some of this Web 2.0 technology because you have partial screens might only partially refresh. And things are moving around and things like that. And if you're not used to that type of environment then, you know, if you're a person with a disability, some of that stuff can cause barriers. But that's not limited to one social media platform, that's all of them. Some are better than others.
NORM COOMBS: Okay. Well you've talked with the Web 2.0 and the partial refresher pages that are one of accessibility issues. Are there other general issues you can talk about?
JENNISON ASUNCION: Sure. I mean one of the other big ones is keyboard accessibility particularly in Facebook I've heard. So people automatically, you know, and the people think, and you know this, Norm, right, when people think accessibility, a lot of people will immediately think of folks who are blind using screen readers. But if you think about the broad group of people who either require the use of keyboards or others who use adaptive technologies that mimic a keyboard like Dragon. Like that kind of functionality. So keyboard accessibility is big. So I know in Facebook and in Twitter there are aspects in functionality that you can only operate with the mouse. Fortunately, for example, with Twitter, we have a number of different clients and I know that you have or will be talking to Dennis Lembree who created accessible Twitter. There are a number of other accessible Twitter clients. And I know I Facebook, there's work going on to improve the level of accessibility there.
But certainly keyboard accessibility is a big one. So if you can't have around and use the enter key on activate functionality, there's an issue. The other big thing particularly with YouTube, which is another social media tool, is captioning. So captioning of videos. Everyone is putting up videos. And all of this stuff, so whether it's keyboard accessibility, alt text on images, things like that, and again, kind of figuring out what to do with all the partial page refreshing and how to make that as accessible as possible. You know, all that stuff is going to become a lot more, I think, in the spotlight as much more, many more organizations start adopting platforms like Facebook to communicate.
You may or may not have heard of Government 2.0 but that's this whole idea of kind of making the government much more "accessible" to the general population. And a lot of government agencies in the U.S. are using Facebook fan pages in order to do that. So something is going to need to be done about those clearly. And then YouTube. You know, videos that go up that are being prepared by large organizations. Large or small, whether they want to reach the largest population are going to need to be captioned. And I know YouTube is working on that.
NORM COOMBS: Yeah, I gather they've got some ways of captioning this stuff out. I haven't looked at it but my impression it works fairly well and without too much trouble. The problem is people don't do it.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Well the good news, Norm, I have to say and this is just purely anecdotal, but the word is slowly getting out. Actually using the social media tools themselves, getting the word out to the developers and to the champions and all those people, you know, it's not going to happen overnight and it may take some legislative encouragement to get some of the stuff moving. But I'm hopeful that, you know, people are listening and as much as people can, they're making stuff accessible. But that's where I see the power of these tools such as Twitter to get the word out about accessibility. I mean, that's one of the main reasons I use Twitter is to help promote accessibility to a broader community. One of the things with e‑mail discussion lists is, you know, they're kingdoms on themselves. And you have to elect to join those e‑mail discussion boards. Whereas with Twitter, if you put out a message and you use, for example, what are called hashtags, you can end up reaching audiences that wouldn't ordinarily get your message. Same with if you post to LinkedIn groups mainstream, say for example, usability professional. So I log into usability professionals LinkedIn group that may have 2,000 members. I post information about, for example, one of your webinars. You know, maybe only like 10-12 people will take the opportunity, hopefully more, but maybe only 10‑12 people may click on it. But that's 10‑12 people that we can reach. So the power with these tools, I'm amazed by it all the time.
NORM COOMBS: Well for us outsiders, you used a little lingo hashtags. What's hashtag? I know what hash is but I don't know what hashtag is.
JENNISON ASUNCION: So a hashtag, and I'm glad you asked. You got me there. I was deliberately planting that there so you'd ask me. So essentially what a hashtag is it's a way to mark a tweet, if you will. So something that I've tweeted. It's a way to mark it so that it can be either searched or tracked. So let me give you an example. So say I'm sending a tweet about an EASI’s workshop. If I put a hashtag, which is the pound sign or the number sign and the word accessibility after it. So it's going to be the number sign accessibility. Anyone who either searches for that hashtag, accessibility, or anyone who's tracking that hashtag accessibility. So it's kind of a way of classifying tweet. So there's a bunch of them out there. So there are specific ones in the web development community. Forget accessibility. But there are some hashtags for web developers, mainstream web developers, for Flash developers, for Ajax, for Government 2.0, all of those. So what I try to do is strategically tweet messages with different hashtags just in the hope that people in those audiences or those who are following those will pick them up. So I try to be as strategic as I can. Because you want to be careful that you don't over tweet.
NORM COOMBS: Oh yeah. Same with LISTSERV and e‑mails.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Yeah. You don't want to spam.
NORM COOMBS: Yeah.
JENNISON ASUNCION: But you know what it seems to be an effective way to reach more people and I've just listen living, kind of living Twitter and just really ‑‑ I've only been on Twitter it's a year this year. But the number of people I've met through Twitter and conversations and relationships I've been able to build between Twitter and LinkedIn I couldn't have expected it.
NORM COOMBS: Oh. Well that's impressive.
JENNISON ASUNCION: I couldn't have expected it. And I think for people with disabilities there is that opportunity. You know, we always talk about this. There's an opportunity and there's also a danger. The opportunity being to have a voice within the broader community to promote accessibility and all that good stuff. The danger is for those folks who either cannot afford to get the latest assistive technologies to kind of be able to use some of this stuff because some of it requires that in order to kind of harness the Web 2.0 technology. And for people who aren't as experienced with technology.
I often think about, you know, we're the vocal minority who are tweeting and on LinkedIn among the people with disabilities. There's that whole, you know, larger group of people that I know of, you know, who just get online to do shopping or to do their bills and know what's happening. So there's so much information being provided on there. I always worry that, you know, oh gosh, you know, this would be useful information for Joanna in Little Rock to know about or Peter in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia to know about but they're not on Twitter. But as people with disabilities they might be able to benefit from that information. So how do we reach them? And it's a little easier in main stream community, you know, people without disabilities to kind of get them to adopt social media because all you have to do is walk into a library or walk into an Internet cafe and use tools. But I'm seeing promise.
I mean, there are tools out there now such as WebAnywhere. And some of the other tools. Mike Calvo has some tools that provide either free or inexpensive screen readers that can operate through the browser. There's a bunch of innovations but I think much more needs to be done. I think some of the bigger players in the adaptive technology field need to kind of step up to the plate and kind of catch up and kind of work more closely with the people who are making these innovations so that they understand what's coming down the pipe in 2‑3 years. It doesn't matter whether it's social media or Web 2.0. But, you know, adaptive technology companies are going to need to start looking ahead and building for the ahead so that people aren't left behind. And I think that's kind of, we always talk about that, right, in the accessibility space about not leaving anyone behind. But with everything that's happening so quickly now.
NORM COOMBS: Oh it's faster all the time.
JENNISON ASUNCION: It's going to be so much more important.
NORM COOMBS: We've been talking about you using this as a way of networking and sharing information which one of the things you and I are into a lot. But I know in terms of the non‑disabled people that use Facebook in particular, a lot of it is for social purposes.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Absolutely.
NORM COOMBS: And I wonder to what extent do you think some of these tools would be a kind of support group for people with disabilities.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Sure. I know for example ‑‑ so a couple of things. So I do use Facebook for exactly that reason, you know, catching up with friends, posting statuses, putting photos up, etcetera, etcetera. But for people with disabilities, I know that there's a movement of folks who use Second Life and other virtual world technologies to provide support. So that definitely is happening from that end.
One of the things I'm doing right now with the Adaptech Research Network, we just finished up a research study or collecting data that's looking at the use and accessibility of social media tools by college and university students with disabilities. And part of that research, Norm, is to actually answer that question. What are college and university students with disabilities using these social media tools for? So it was a pretty extensive questionnaire which we'll be presenting preliminary findings at CSUN. But that's one of the questions we're asking, what are they using these tools for?. But certainly Katherine Mancuso and some other folks are using Second Life to provide a support network for people with disabilities.
And Facebook, the challenge with Facebook until it's made much more accessible, I don't think you're going to get as many people. There are certainly people with disabilities on there. There's certainly a large number of tech savvy blind folks on there and people with other disabilities on there. So, yeah, I really do believe that that can be used. There's also already social networking sites that are accessible that are specifically dedicated for people with disabilities. There's one called Disaboom. And there's another site out there that I don't know very much about called Klango. And Klango is dedicated for folks who are blind whereas Disaboom is cross disability. So they are springing up.
My preference would be to have people use the mainstream tools because that allows for the kind of cross meeting because you may have then people without disabilities might stumble into one of these groups and join and be interested.
NORM COOMBS: I've been doing distance teaching for years and one of the things that I noticed that some other teachers who teach online have noticed too is students in a computer situation oftentimes will share very personal things that they'd never dream of doing in class.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Absolutely.
NORM COOMBS: It seems to me it has potential.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Yeah. There's something about that. And of course, you always have to temper that, right. People with disabilities are like any other people. You have to be prudent online. A lot of people, I can tell you, very, very preliminary because I did peek of course. I've been peeking at the data although it still needs to be scrubbed. One of the chief concerns, because one of the questions we asked our sample was what are some of the problems that you encounter when using, trying to use social media and what are some of the issues why you wouldn't use social media. And one of the key issues that came up is privacy. So like anyone else, you know, people with disabilities, you know, they worry about privacy and that kind of thing.
One other thing I wanted to bring up, though, Norm, is these social platforms allow people with disabilities to choose to identify themselves as people with disabilities or not.
NORM COOMBS: Yes. Yes.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Which, you know, you can certainly do in e‑mail as well but that's another powerful thing. And they have; for example, on Twitter you can have an avatar which is basically a photo or some sort of image, representation of who you want to be. People can choose to put up an avatar that shows them as having a disability or not. So there are all kinds of nuances there. And one other thing that I'll add to the mix is when you combine social media with all of this mobile technology, the smartphones, you're getting quite an interesting mix of things happening. And fortunately you have companies like apple who have come out with the accessible iPhone and the Android phone which has some level of accessibility in it. So there's some leveling of the playing field there but you're seeing people much more now using, you know, mobile technologies to connect to social media tools in order to communicate with their friends or tweets or contacts. You know, depending on which social network, you know, pick your poison, right.
And again there with these mobile technologies, you know, there's work that needs to be done there.
NORM COOMBS: The big issue for people without disabilities is using your cell phone while you're driving.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Yes.
NORM COOMBS: I was at a mall here in Southern California and you wouldn't think of California and ice skating. It's an outdoor mall and they have a big ice skating ring outdoors. And in the middle of it the guy came on in the PA and he said, "No using your cell phone while you're skating."
JENNISON ASUNCION: And it's interesting because they're marketing, you see now a little bit of marketing, at least with the Android phones is they're calling it eyes free. So they're marketing the screen reading technology as an opportunity for being eyes free now to the extent that hearing a synthesized voice might distract a driver. You know, it can run into the same issue.
I'm wondering if I could just get back quickly to Facebook
NORM COOMBS: Yes.
JENNISON ASUNCION: One of the big challenges that Facebook well it has less to do with Facebook and more to do with the third party applications that can be run using the Facebook platform. So there are, you know, games and a bunch of different applications that people who use Facebook can have access to. Things, for example, where you can show your network or your friends that you're traveling to different destinations. So you can have like a map and things like that or a horoscope application. A bunch of different applications. It's those applications, because those can be created by anyone. They can be created by you or me. And some of them are more popular than others. I don't know how much those applications or the developers of those applications have even thought about accessibility.
So you have another layer of complexity with Facebook. Because you have the Facebook platform itself and the folks at Facebook, like I said, I know that they have been improving their work and making the platform accessible. But these third party applications. If, for example, a college/university decided to adopt one of these third party applications to interact with their students, they're going to have to make sure that those third party applications are accessible. And that's where the complications, you know, with the technologies that we have there in line.
NORM COOMBS: Well this has been educational for me and I hope interesting to our listeners. And you can keep in touch with me and bit by bit I'll break down my prejudices and join you.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Sure. I welcome people to, if they want to just get a feel for what's happening in accessibility and they are on Twitter, they're more than welcome to follow me. My Twitter name is Jennison. J‑E‑N‑N‑I‑S‑O‑N. So that's easy enough to find. So I look forward to meeting people on Twitter. I'm also on LinkedIn so you can find me there too.
NORM COOMBS: Well thank you very much, Jennison.
JENNISON ASUNCION: Thanks, Norm.
NORM COOMBS: Okay. I just wanted to pause so I could stop the recording.
