Dave Dame is Director of Accessibility at Microsoft. He has extensive experience in design thinking, product management, and agile delivery. Dave joins Melissa on this week’s Product Thinking podcast show to discuss how making the workplace accessible and inclusive to employees with disabilities is a crucial first step in making truly accessible products.
Show Notes
Dave Dame is Director of Accessibility at Microsoft. He has extensive experience in design thinking, product management, and agile delivery. Dave joins Melissa Perri on this week’s Product Thinking podcast show to discuss how making the workplace accessible and inclusive to employees with disabilities is a crucial first step in making truly accessible products.
Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Dave talk about in this episode:
Dave's role at Microsoft, and how he got involved in product.
Dave helps product managers understand the diversity of their users, to ensure that they're creating products that are accessible. Product managers and designers should not be designing for people with disabilities, but with people with disabilities. "There's a difference between meeting the standard and having incredible experiences. We don't want to just meet their needs, we want to give them phenomenal experiences where they become champions of our product," Dave tells Melissa.
Designing with persons with disabilities demands that product managers educate themselves on multiple uses of disabilities, and the multiple types of disabilities. It also means learning what tools are being used by persons with disabilities to manipulate your product, and understanding what your competitors are doing.
The first step to making sure you're being inclusive to everybody is to hire people with disabilities.
Everyone is going to experience some form of disability at some point in their life, so product managers need to build products that can be used by many different inputs, and in many different ways, or else they're going to limit who can use their product.
Focus on the usability life cycle instead of the product life cycle. If product managers don't start thinking about that now, they're going to lose long term loyalty and won't be able to support the modern places that use their product. Product managers have to think about it as the inevitable use case for everybody instead of a single unique use case.
Any company that is using its accessibility capability as a marketing edge, is a company that's doing it right.
No two people with the same disability are the same.
Product leaders and managers need to be mindful of individuals with invisible disabilities, and need to be better at being proactive. They need to make sure that no one is being left behind. Different thinking is needed to push towards the future. The only way this can happen is through equitable platforms that allow for diverse thought to exist.
When you speak up for your particular needs it becomes relevant for other people in different situations. Disabled people should not have to suffer in silence.
Resources Dave Dame | LinkedIn | Twitter
Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: What do you suggest for companies to start? Making sure that they're actually welcome place so that they can recruit a diverse set of talents, right? What should people who are founders or leaders and companies be doing to make sure that they are welcoming? How should they be thinking through
Speaker 2: that to invest and it to learn right to go? What is it needed to make this an accessible workplace? Because how are your products going to be accessible if your workplace? Isn't so think about it from. I'm an employee and think about it throughout the whole life cycle that employee's career all the way into the product, do the learning talk to people with disabilities run, tours of your building to say, what are we missing?
What is good because it doesn't begin and end the product Melissa, it begins and ends as your company. Because if your company doesn't have a culture of success, Building inclusiveness. You have no hope in your product being able to. So it starts from, I'm an employee before, it becomes on the user, and I'm a customer
Speaker 1: creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole, the system's the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. Customers with the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions.
We'll dive into this system from every angle and help. You think like a great product leader. This is the product Thinking podcast. Here's your host Melissa Perry. Hello and welcome to the product Thinking podcast, today we have a special guest. Dave, Dane who is a director of accessibility at Microsoft.
So we're going to talk about what product people can learn about accessibility. And how do you make sure that their products are inclusive for everyone? So welcome to the podcast. Dave,
Speaker 2: thank you Melissa for having me on huge fan of
Speaker 1: yours. Great. So can you tell everybody what is the director of accessibility? And also, how did you what's your story? How did you get into Tech house? You start doing this for Microsoft, where did it all
Speaker 2: begin? Wow, that's a lot of questions right off the bat. So the director of accessibility when my role is the director of accessibility on surface is to ensure that I'm working alongside with the product makers to ensure we build our devices that are accessible for people of all different abilities as well as working with my other accessibility peers in Windows.
And office to ensure. We have a really good extensive experience for people with disabilities. That don't only simply just Empower them but also make it in a way that's on brand and on design to make sure that they don't stand out by using those features. So how did I get into Tak? I remember trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up and for the people in the Coaster.
Don't know, I was born with Cerebral Palsy and I use a power wheelchair. And in 1971, there wasn't really much somebody with a disability could do.
But luckily, my parents were stubborn and resilient got me into school, and it was time to go to university. And I didn't know if I wanted to go into computer science, because I really enjoyed technology because it allowed me to build a world that was Isabel and inclusive through technology or business, which I had a lot of passion for that was way before product existed. So went to school for engineering and I learned two things, one that I wasn't the greatest production engineer that was ever.
And to, I really had a passion for the bigger picture of what technology can do to enable and solve problems in the business aspect of it, of, Do we make it viable and all those kind of things so that got me into product and I started working before it was called Product.
I think it was a project manager before it became a product manager. But I always loved Building Products that solve user problems in a way that helped make them be a better version of themselves. So, I was doing that when I did, like, about product was we had to do all our analysis and design up front.
Frank and hope the world went change over the next two years while we quickly built it, and put it into people's hands and came agile. I gave us a way where as a product person, I could be wrong and the beauty of it was because I get iterate among quicker. I didn't have to do all my learning up front.
I could do the learning as a deepen, the relationship in the problem, space and build better relationships. The user base. So that's what got me into agile and I was so good at it.
I was doing agile for a number of years up until the last few years where I returned back to product, which was my first love,
Speaker 1: that's great. And then at Microsoft, you're running this team, that is making sure that you have accessibility requirements in different things. How do you work across the different product managers to make sure that they're considering the Bility requirements making sure that it gets on the backlog, seeing that, they actually see the importance in it.
Speaker 2: Well, we're not spoon feeding them, the requirements per se, we're really trying to get them to understand a diverse set of users to have that empathy and understanding that, not all users, might be like the ones around them. So what we do is to part of our group, does a lot of user research, we run inclusive design, Sprints, where we get People with disabilities sitting alongside will product makers and subject matter experts. Were we really try to help the team's gain valuable insights so that they take their insights and formulate their own requirements.
To make sure we build products that meet the need, the importance of doing. This Melissa is we believe in designing with people with disabilities, we're not designing for people.
People with disabilities because we want to make sure we're making sure they're part of the design process. So we make sure that we don't miss things, or put our own biases in because sometimes, if we just leave it to meeting accessibility standards that are out there. There's a difference between meeting the standard and having incredible experiences and just like any user base. We don't want to just If their needs, we want to give them phenomenal experiences where they become champions of our
Speaker 1: product. Yeah. To get up to speed on all these different disabilities and you know different ways that people have to interact with stuff. How do you suggest people design with people disabilities, right? You said make sure that your design with instead of design for like what practices are across the seas? Are you doing on a day-to-day basis to make sure you're doing that?
Speaker 2: Well, you need to To understand inclusive design, write and understand, like mismatches and stuff. So you need to get well experience. And what does it mean to design inclusively? And it's weird as a product person? Like, you know, Melissa. When you start a new company, you try to learn the product, you try to learn the user base, you try to learn the market space, and when you're early on, it's just an upfront, learning curve, the whole way, the And I've had is not only, did I have to learn that, but you're also trying to learn about multiple uses of disabilities.
So you're educating yourself on that and that's what product people can do as well as learn all the different types of disabilities. Not in a deep sense, but in a wide range sense and then to learn what assistive technologies that are out there that are independent of your product but are the tools in which People use to manipulate your product, whether its jaws screen reader, or other screen readers, where it's voice to text or voice navigation.
Learn how they interact with your product. And then, thirdly try to understand what are the space is going for assistive Technologies and where your competitors are doing, awesome.
Speaker 1: So you're the team that really researches all the disabilities. Brings it to the product managers and also the products makers so that they can start to incorporate it into the rest of their backlogs
Speaker 2: that is correct. And we might also run inclusive design, Sprints bringing subject matter experts, people of all abilities in the product makers together to really bring out insights, that can be used in designing the product weight from the beginning,
Speaker 1: amazing. Okay? So, when you do those This design Sprint's to who do you kind of recruit for it? What's that kind of look like you do it on the kickoff for the Project's? How would you run?
Speaker 2: Well really, you know, in a perfect world. We can do them for all projects but in reality, not every projects the same. It's if it's a brand new product that's where you have the most impact will do some research to see what type of things we want to build in to see what different types of people with.
Should we bring in? And not only just disabilities? Like, are they office workers? Are they artists are they creative? And really make sure we have the right balance of of users in the right context as well as the right disabilities and sometimes bring subject matter experts from the medical field or the occupational therapy field and actual product.
Makers themselves says we're synthesizing. The different insights and ideas that we can really look at things in a very holistic way, before diverging on what we're going to
Speaker 1: build. That's really cool. I love that. You have this available to for you at Microsoft. Well, it's
Speaker 2: not easy, right? We got it. We got a canvas or self host people and and those kind of things which is part of the job. But then part of making sure we do it, right? Because the last thing we want is Somebody without that disability to try to push what they should be using instead of working alongside with that person with a disability
Speaker 1: and I should be running that a lot more people may be kind of empathize or put themselves in your shoes or somebody else's shoes. But they don't really know that bias probably is pretty apparent a lot of different places,
Speaker 2: right? World human in that bias, right? And that's where Designing with people with disabilities, helps remove that bias because I even have a bias, right? Two people with the same disability aren't going to be alike. So that's why you need to make sure you have a wide diverse range of disability to under understand it because we all become habitual, right? So this is why I think when you're a product maker whether you've been considered for accessibility or not, look for users. With the extreme abilities and it really helps you build a product that will be resilient across many different environments.
Speaker 1: It's great advice so you are part of this team right at Microsoft that provides the services and helps. But what about the product manager is that smaller companies or companies that don't have someone there to think about accessibility all the time. What would you advise those product people do so that they can make sure that they're being inclusive and Building for everybody.
Speaker 2: Over the first step you can do Melissa start hiring people with disabilities, right? Like, there's nothing better than you can do, because before accessibility was the thing. I was on product teams, right? And I used to think it was weird as an engineer, when the product manager would say, no, no will build the accessibility and 2.0 of the product, and I'm like, yeah, what?
I got cerebral. Palsy my money doesn't. So if you want me to buy, The product. You better build a product I can use, but if I didn't happen to be on the team to raise that voice, how would you have that in your conscience? So, I think the first step is higher with people with disabilities and as you're doing that, because you're not gonna, you know, you know, it's a magical hiring process as opportunities come available.
When you're looking for test users, make sure you're getting a relative sample of people of all abilities. In your design process, right? Just don't get standard users off. Discreet look for diverse users. So when you're designing it, you're thinking about it in mind and it's hard, right? Because a lot of it is where do we find them? You know you can hang out in the distance disabled parking spots at the mall, that's usually a good spot to find them but you know, you just got to be creative and recruit for it and then nurture that user Community to have them available.
Speaker 1: Are you? Yeah, I think you're touching on something to that. We talked about a little bit earlier, in another podcast, episode about product ethics. We got into these debates to updates, but I think one of the things are pointing out in the episode was, you can still have your persona Target person, right?
Like your, your persona could be a salesperson at Salesforce or whatever, right? But that doesn't mean that that person doesn't have a disability. I feel like sometimes when we think about accessibility 80 people tie it into personas, right? But a lot of our personas in the way that we build things are not necessarily like is this person disabled or not?
They're more General. They're like, is this a mom with two kids? That doesn't mean that person doesn't, you know, have a disability or not?
Speaker 2: I think you're hitting on a good point, Melissa. People think the user Persona is as the seeing impaired person as a hearing impaired person, and really We need to incorporate many different ability, attributes to any normal person Sona. We have like a salesperson right to really make sure because we're all going to get a temporary disability.
At one point, like, I always loved working with the one of my colleagues on the skiing accident and they'll be like, wow. Now we get when you got to go through and it's like everybody's going to experience that disability. So if we don't build A product that can be used by many different inputs or many different ways of using the product, you're really going to limit to who can use that product.
So, in every Persona, you should go.
What if the person seeing impaired? What if they're hearing impaired? What if they have it? Get in xiety with a lot of notifications, like there's so many things we should factor in building. Personas that are just more than what do they do? Without, it's got to go beyond. What is the job to be done? It should be. What is the job to be done under many different circumstances?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I really like that. That's a great. Great way to think about it. Did you know I have a course for product managers that you could take it's called Product Institute over the past seven years. I've been working with individuals teams and companies to upskill their product shops. Through my fully online school, we have an ever-growing list of courses to help you work through your current product.
Dilemma visit product Institute.com, and learn to think like a great product manager. Use code thinking to save $200 at checkout on our Premier course product management. Ins. Yeah, that was a jerk to me. I feel like you know, you probably hear this coming from the agile world as well. We're so obsessed with, you know, building MVPs or using agile to go fast, which is not the point.
We sometimes get dismissive about building in the things that we should be building in from version one just like you said, where people go. Oh and accessibility, I'm going to put it in a 2.0, you've done a bunch of work and agile helping companies. You know, adopt these methods move towards this type of learning, when an organization tells you, oh, we can't think about accessibility or something like that because it might slow us down. What do you say to them, right? What's the response? And how do you get them to start thinking about this from day
Speaker 2: one? I always like to say, well, gonna be disabled one day, just some of us beat you to it. So, I might be disabled from birth, but as we age out, we're I'm going to slowly lose our ability and none of us can predict when that can happen. But when that does happen, is our product ready to be able to still support.
That user has become a loyal user through all aspects of their life. Like, we all want to build the product that's going to live forever. And in order to do that, we always think about the product life cycle. I think we got to start focusing on the users. Ability of life cycle because we're all headed in the same path.
So if we don't start thinking about and now we're not going to build that long-term loyalty, we're not going to be able to support the modern places that use our product, which is more of a diverse set of users than it's ever been no more is accessibility and compliance to standards for legal purposes is to really ensure your product is going to get The right user reach to be sustainable and viable to keep going.
So we can't think about it as a unique. Use case, we got to think about it, as it's going to be the inevitable, use case of everybody. So why not start inspecting and adapting and building and learning and modifying now, especially in a digital environment where it's just time and money when it's Hardware, we got to factor in many different other elements. Like building materials cost and things like that, but if we don't start doing it now, we're going to be behind when our user Market changes and they can no longer use our product.
Speaker 1: Yeah and I imagine she for the people like you said in a with a temporary disability or you break your arm or something not being able to use the thing that you've just been able to use for. So long must be really frustrating kind of heartbreaking to when you're like oh I guess they do not sign this for everybody.
Speaker 2: Plus, let's look at other things, right? Let's look at closed captioning on TVs. You might not be hard of hearing but let's say that same TVs at a bar. You see a lot of bars, doing their sportscast would close caption because their environment around them is so loud. Now, they're kind of death to the TV and that situation.
So closed-captioning helps level set the environment and not the So there's been a lot of assistive technologies that were designed originally for people with disabilities that got a broader, use to really accommodate the environment under extreme situations where those mismatches exist that a may not be a disability but it's a mismatch in the ability to
Speaker 1: hear as a fantastic example. Yeah, I was just actually out of place the other day where I was mad because closed captionings weren't on for the Olympics. And I'm trying to watch it and I couldn't understand anything that they were saying, but they had it on for the football game right next door. So yeah, that's a really good point. It's not just about, you know, the person and the environment that the person is in and what they're able to do
Speaker 2: in that environment or not, we recruit cut effect. We always hear about right like curb Cuts were originally made for people in wheelchairs. But if you're if you have a baby carriage, now you have the same accessibility requirements. As someone in a
Speaker 1: wheelchair. Oh yeah, that's really been one to. That's great. Are there any companies that you think are doing X or products that you think really nail it in the way that they think through accessibility?
Speaker 2: Well, I would be shooting myself in the foot if I didn't say Microsoft does a great job. But I think every tech company in general is doing a good job of really ensuring, where were considering those aspects More. Because that was the first field that people with disabilities were drawn to because it moved from physical labor, to more intellectual and conceptual skills being used.
But I think more and more, and more places are getting a good job of building with accessibility in mind, with just, the way you products are being built or thought of like Google Glasses and stuff. Able to navigate things with your eyes that were originally done by, you know, I readers to be able to do I think any product that that is any company that is using their accessibility capability as a marketing Edge.
Our companies are doing it, right, organizations, that are hiring people with disabilities and that for the sake of equality of winning humanitarian Awards. Let's put that aside. It's to get that cognitive diversity. Where Innovation comes from from having people of different experiences, gender sexuality. And ability to be a reflection of the product. They build are a reflection of the people who use those products. So making sure you're making them with those diverse people, ensures that they can be used by those Cooper's people so companies like that are doing it. Are really building it in the fabric, in the DNA of the organization.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense and you were just touching to about how you know people with disabilities turn to tap because you don't have to do more of the manual work and I loved your story from the tedx talk about how you kind of stumbled upon Tack and then became a big expert in it. Can you tell you tell our audience a little bit about you know, your first job and When technology was introduced, how it? Really changed your life
Speaker 2: for sure. Well, when I graduated, it was like, 1995. So even though it was finally, like, I could go to university, a lot of the workplace is weren't accessible. So it took me like nine months to find my first job and when I got my first job, it was like a logistics training coordinator for a major automotive company and it was a lot of paperwork and my head.
With Ruble, palsy are very arthritic. So these hands were made for paperwork on my first day. You know they took me around and then I went to use the bathroom to find out. I couldn't fit in the bathroom, my wheelchair can get in and I didn't feel safe enough to ask for an accessible bathroom. So what I had to end up doing was holding going to the bathroom every day for 12 hours for three years.
Ears. And the reason why I told that story is, since the job was mostly paperwork and physical, it was taken me 12 hours when my peers could do in eight hours.
And I didn't mind working 12 hours, but imagine restricting, your water and been very careful to make sure that you wouldn't have to go to the bathroom for 12 hours. That's crazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, ramanujan
Speaker 2: that like, oh, I'd like some water but not going to do. Yeah. And so what I did was on the weekends, I was the first one in my office to get a computer in 1995 because they knew I used it extensively and those this new thing coming out called the internet and I built a website where people could sign up for training themselves and the places where we're hosting the training could sign up the venue's they wanted.
So what was taken me? 12 hours now. Has taken me three hours. So I made the status quo, really, the outlier that everybody else could utilize that technology could get their job done in three hours. So, it wasn't like, I was smarter than anyone else, but it was my diverse difference of being a person with a disability that made it a problem for me so bad, that I was compelled to solve it first because to everyone, Out.
Eight hours seemed to be normal compared to their peers. They weren't under any pressure to get it done sooner. They didn't have to worry about going to the bathroom. So that room, that was the way people always did it. And it wasn't to me that had to solve for a mismatch that really made. My extreme a problem worth solving that made them the outlier and me that desired outcome
Speaker 1: as pretty powerful story. I only love that too. And I think that's a great story for companies to hear about, you know, why you should hire people with disabilities to or or people who are maybe just not exactly a carbon copy of what you already have because you put somebody in a situation where they have different problems or things to be solved, you're going to try harder.
We're going to get more creative about how they do things and I love your story for that right thinking outside the box because you wanted to figure out how do I make this better for me? That that I think it's a lot of good products, you know, product thinking and good product driven technology usage there,
Speaker 2: right? Because we sold for the extreme situation benefits everybody. Yeah, we're told that is product people that man. When you live in its deep down him, by no means. Does that mean you don't lower the bar of a product person you want? But if you can get the product skills and say and as in An added benefit. They're different than the rest of us. That's when the creative thinking and The Innovation comes from is people seem different mismatches. To what others? See is just the way we've always
Speaker 1: done it. Yeah, yeah. That's a really good tip there. So when you're studying the different disabilities to and you know, you mentioned, you got to get up to speed on things that were different than your disability. Was there, anything kind of eye-opening that you saw in there? Or something you went in there, that didn't expect that. You know, some product people can be on the lookout for if they never even thought to think about those
Speaker 2: things, there was two things and I should have known this but it was until I started doing deeper dive. No, two people with the same disability on the same and that seems to make sense, right? But you always want to group people as product people. I think we're naturally inclined. Oh, you're seeing impaired.
You're seeing impaired, you must be alike. Is the varying degrees with the same disability can have a wide range of severity and impacts. So that was kind of the one thing that I learned and, secondly, you know, it seems to be invisible disabilities or were physical disabilities were in the 70s and 80s where they're not, well, understood and nobody's being proactive leading, think about them into.
Look at them, because As I remember being a senior VP in one of my previous jobs, open concept really bothered one of our employees because they didn't have the ability to focus or concentrate and my peers were like, well, they just got to get over it and I'm like, wait a minute. If I needed a ramp to get in the building. None of you would have the courage to say, well then you better jump on your chair and call up them stairs, you just got to get over it.
So I think I think we need to be more mindful to people with invisible disabilities and try to be better at really being proactive and how we handle them because we really need to make sure we're not leaving anybody behind in this world where we need different thinking than we did the last 20 years to get us to the next 20 years.
And the only way we're going to be able to do that is really Deb the quotable. Terms that allowed the power of diverse thought exist. So we can get ahead of these things.
Speaker 1: I think that's really smart. Looking did good
Speaker 2: and we got to be proactive in it, right? Because one of my concerns is nobody celebrates disability day as they do women in Tech as they do, you know, BLM and lgtbq which are all important aspects to Make those demographics feel. Welcome in the workplace. So do people with disabilities so often I hear is, well, we don't have an accessible bathroom or ramp but the minute we hire one. Then we'll make sure we have it afterwards and that kind of legging and thinking prevents people from wanting to work there. Can you imagine Melissa? They said, well, we'll build a woman's bathroom when we hire one like what? Feel compelled to apply. They're
Speaker 1: probably not not know and he said that this was something that you actually went through, though, right? When you were searching for your first job,
Speaker 2: right? And I didn't feel safe to ask for it because I've always been in my environment. And in my settings, I tended to be the first one in, right? In the first one, going through the changing of the thought process and the status quo. But even me Me. I never felt safe to ask for things until I feel. I proven myself like when I reduce the time from 8 hours to 3 hours, they were willing to give me bigger product teams. That were willing to give me bigger groups. All I wanted them to do was build an accessible bathroom, but it wasn't until I felt comfortable. That I belong that I could ask for
Speaker 1: that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: right. And I face that then. Even as I move in my career, my last place the meeting schedule would get shifted all the time, and it would move meetings to after hours, that was back when we went into the office, those good old days and I couldn't always aligned my support care worker to adjust their times.
And even though I've already been through this to travel through travel policies and procedures that every company I Worked at. I still didn't feel safe to bring up. I can't be at the meeting because I can't rearrange my my support. So instead I would miss the meeting, and it wasn't until I finally spoke up and said something like, hey, when we move the meetings outside hours, I can accommodate my care.
That not only did my boss, go absolutely will fix that.
I had one of my other co-workers. She emailed me and said, thank you. I was having trouble reshuffling my childcare every time to. So sometimes when you speak up for your particular needs, it actually is relevant to other people in different situations that causes the same kind of problem. So and I don't know if I'll ever get over that probably because of my past way through my career, but I'm hoping someday the future generations of people with different abilities don't Feel they get it just kind of suffer in silence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's disappointing that those companies don't think through that first and also, you know, in your position coming in, maybe being the first person there, the disability. But also doing what you do in agile change. Like, we all know that people don't really like change, right? Like they don't like change makers and there's this attitude of.
Well, that's different, right? That's uncomfortable. And if you are the person who's making other people uncomfortable, Your bowl because of their job, right? Making them pushing them to learn a job. Pushing them to change the way they work, right? It probably doesn't feel like a safe space advocate for yourself.
Either without on top of it, I like problem
Speaker 2: with that because because I'm empathetic to feeling vulnerable, right? So, I can always meet them where they're at and going, what are you struggling with moving to? This new way of working? What is it? You think you're losing or what is it? Les causing you the inside you need. I always tried to approach to it. What's in, a way from using it. So we can work together on it. So I think being empathetic to having to feel vulnerable and misplays, really helped me be the change agent to line with everybody. That feels that way I say move them into a new way of working or moving in a new way of creating the right
Speaker 1: product. Yeah and that's an Important skill, I think for anybody who wants to be a change maker, is that empathy? I've seen people try to take the bulldozing approach instead and it never works and never works. But for these companies to you know, who might not be thinking about the needs right, you know we're not going to build the bathroom until we get you know, somebody who needs it.
What do you suggest for companies to start making sure that they're actually welcome place so that they can recruit a diverse set of talent, right? What should people who are founders or leaders and companies be doing to make sure that they are welcoming, how should they be thinking through
Speaker 2: that to invest and it to learn right to go? What is it needed to make this an accessible workplace? Because how are your products going to be accessible if your workplace is? And so think about it from, I'm an employee and think about it throughout the whole life cycle that employee's career all the way into the product.
Group of learning talk to people with disabilities run. Tours of your building to say, what are we missing? What is good because it doesn't begin and end the product Melissa, it begins and ends as your company. Because if your company doesn't have a culture of accessibility and inclusiveness, you have no hope in your product being able to.
So it starts from, I'm an employee before, it becomes on the User. And I'm a customer.
Speaker 1: I think that's some really powerful advice for all the companies out there who want to build better products. So, thank you so much, Dave, for being on the podcast. If people want to learn a little bit more about you where can they go to read up on your work and hear your
Speaker 2: talks or Goose Twitter ID day, my tend to post stuff. I'm on LinkedIn as David Dame but I share a bunch of videos because it's easier for me to record a video then to type. So I tend to To do video more these days, even though I got a face made for radio, but you can go on LinkedIn and Twitter and see if there and just reach out and ask as, you know, you've reached out a couple times. I'm more than happy to answer
Speaker 1: great and I encourage everybody to go there, check out dates work on Twitter and on LinkedIn and thank you again, so much for being on the podcast. We'll see you next
