Dr. Alan J. Brightman is known as many things: a pioneer in assistive technology who has provided thought leadership in this important area since the seventies; an insightful, pragmatic, and tireless advocate for people with disabilities; the author of numerous books; and the producer of both an award-winning TV series and a stage play.

One of his most important professional challenges came when he founded Apple Computer’s Worldwide Disability Solutions Group in the mid-'80s. Building on his previous work with special-needs children and other people with disabilities, at Apple Dr. Brightman was responsible for ensuring that the company’s engineers designed accessibility into each of the company’s product lines. He has served on the Board of Directors of Steven Spielberg’s Starbright Foundation serving chronically ill children, as well as on Microsoft’s Accessibility Advisory Panel.

Time to rest on his laurels, right? Not a chance. Because today Alan Brightman is engaged in one of his most important roles: Senior Policy Director for Special Communities at Yahoo!, Inc.
Recently Disaboom had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Brightman about the work he’s doing with Yahoo!, and how the company “walks its talk” when it comes to disability and accessibility.

Building Curb Cuts into the Ether

Disaboom:  After such a great job with Apple, why did you decide to move to Yahoo!?
Dr. Brightman:  It was kind of easy in a way. I’d been at Apple a lot of years, and during that time we’d created the whole accessibility movement within Apple. Over time “accessibility” became part of the DNA of what an Apple computer was, so that no one who was designing a product anymore had to be forced into thinking about accessibility because it was simply part of the regular process.

So after doing that work with a great team of people for about 14 years, I thought of it like this: we had spent a lot of years building, if you will, electronic curb cuts into a box, and we got pretty good at it – you can’t buy a Macintosh that doesn’t have all kinds of accessibility features in it as part of the mainstream machine. So we had become really good at building electronic curb cuts into a box.

The interesting challenge for me then was, how do you now build electronic curb cuts into the ether?
For the web, you know, it’s a very different kind of challenge. Because when we saw that computers were fundamentally changing people’s lives – actually changing the experience of being disabled – we had to ask the obvious question: Now that you can access the computer, what are you going to do with it? And part of what you’re going to do with it was get on the web and do things you used to do before you got in your accident.

For example, a woman I was talking to just the other day said “You know, before the accident I used to do all my own shopping, all my own banking, all my own telephoning, etc. etc. Until I found Yahoo! (it could have been other companies but in this case it was Yahoo!) after the accident, I had to have other people do that for me. Now I can do it myself, so I can do my own shopping, I can do just about my own everything, even though the only way I can use a computer is with a headstick.”

And of course the key phrase in what she said was: “I can do it myself.” That’s so much of what the web makes possible.

So we need to make sure – particularly with a network like Yahoo! that’s just so extensive – that every single part of it can be used by everyone. And in our case at Yahoo!, “everyone” refers to roughly half a billion people who visit us every month. That’s an awful lot of visitors.  And how many of them have a disability? We don’t know because we simply don’t ask. We just want to make sure that everyone—disabled and non-disabled alike—can enjoy their visit.

Focusing Assistive Technologies on Practical Solutions

Disaboom:  So accessibility becomes a matter of enabling connections between users with disabilities and the online resources?
Dr. Brightman:  If I had Yahoo!, Amazon, and a couple of other sites and I was in a wheelchair or I was blind, I could stay busy with those sites and just use them for the rest of the day, and get something done and be productive and have fun and all that kind of stuff, which a packaged piece of software doesn’t get you.

That’s why I’m so in awe of the web. As I just mentioned, 500 million people around the world come to Yahoo! every month. So what that says to me is “scale.” When I went from the nonprofit sector to Apple, I thought, wow, the scale of this is hard to get my head around. Imagine how many lives we might be able to affect. Now I go from Apple to the web, and it’s half a billion people every month hitting the site. All I have to do is make a little bit of a difference in a tiny percentage of those lives and I’ve just affected a ton of folks.

We hear about a lot of the impact that Yahoo! has on people’s lives just like we did at Apple, but there are so many stories in the world that we haven’t heard from people because they’re doing hugely dramatic mundane things, do you know what I mean? For example, you can now cook, you can now find directions from point A to point B and draw a map and get yourself there – well that doesn’t sound all that dramatic unless you were in a position where you weren’t able to do anything like that by yourself before.

And so, in a way, the dramatic is all about the ordinary. And I love hearing those stories. It’s not about “I climbed a mountain even though I was blind” – I love those heroic stories, too, but most people’s lives aren’t like that – most people’s lives are more like, “I wanted to climb my shopping list” or whatever it might be. Even though we don’t hear about a lot of those, we hear about enough of them to keep us going.

Creating the Accessibility Mindset at Yahoo!

Disaboom:  So what is the role of the Senior Policy Director for Special Communities at Yahoo!?
Dr. Brightman:  I have four main roles. The first one is that I and my team work horizontally across Yahoo!’s huge network of properties and products – from mail and messaging, to selling cars and selling real estate, to movies and photos and finance…and so on…,it’s unbelievable how many different products and properties Yahoo! has in its network!  Within all those verticals, my team and I work horizontally to make sure that even if you’re the product manager or you’re the engineer for Yahoo! Autos, you’re making sure that your product is accessible, for example, to people who are blind.

And then the product guys will say, “I don’t mean to sound uncaring, but why would a blind person come to Yahoo! Autos anyway?” And I love those questions, because it’s honest, you know, “I don’t get it!” So then we work with them, we grab them by the lapels, we show them why it matters, and then if we need to, we’ll take a couple of their engineers who are designers for that property, and we’ll work with them on how to implement accessibility so that it works for their site.

So we’re involved in awareness, and site development and design, and we’re working to get it into the DNA at Yahoo!, just like we did at Apple.

And then my second area of responsibility is to ensure that all Yahoo! employees get into the accessibility mindset from day one – basically, general awareness. And one of the ways we’re doing that – it’s a small gesture but it really seems to be making a difference – is through the orientations that every new hire must attend before they begin working at Yahoo!.

Like most companies, our orientation was usually about “let’s review your benefits package, and let me tell you about the policies of the company, and the rules and regulations and the do’s and don’ts, and okay, have a good time.”

Unlike most companies, I believe, we went to the people in HR and said “we want to have 15 minutes in this day-long agenda to just talk about who people with disabilities are and why they matter to Yahoo!. And so what happened was that we had these new hires coming in—60 to 70 every week--and they were listening to all this stuff that really affected their lives, and then we come on and say “We have one action item for you. We don’t care if you work in engineering, we don’t care if you work in the mail room, but in every meeting you’re in, you have to be the one that carries the question ‘Is it accessible?’ That’s all you have to do.”

We sort of lead up to that, we explain to them why it matters, that we can’t be everywhere, but they can – so wherever you are, be the one who owns the question, “Is it accessible?” And if you get in a situation where people ask ‘well, what does that mean,’ and you don’t know how to answer it, that’s fine, we can answer it, we just need to make sure it’s part of the regular process.

So we’ve been doing this 15-minute presentation for our new hires for the last 2 years, and that amounts to an awful lot of people around the company for whom the word “accessibility” is no longer new or strange.

Disaboom: Sounds like a combination of consciousness-raising and radicalizing the troops!
Dr. Brightman: Exactly. And what I like the most is that this way, they get it from day one. You are not a full-fledged Yahoo! employee until you’ve been through this, and part of the “this” is 15 minutes on who people with disabilities are, why they matter to Yahoo!, and what you, specifically, need to be doing about that.

So we still have lots of work to do, lots of problems to solve, all that kind of stuff, but boy, has that made a difference. In addition, we also do a lot of traveling around the country to do workshops, to do presentations, to do videos, just to keep it alive, to keep awareness of people with disabilities alive.

The third thing we do is continue to build our Accessibility Labs. We’re now developing several of these around the world—our most recent one is in Bangalore--which is great, because we can bring people in and have them experience what it’s like to be blind and try to use this website or to be paralyzed from the neck down and try to get this done. This has had a dramatic effect on our engineers, our designers, and even our executive staff.

Disaboom: This is pretty high-impact stuff, and impressive that Yahoo! has this level of commitment.
Dr. Brightman:  Well, I think it’s impressive, but more importantly so do so many members of the disabled community around the world.

And that’s the fourth category of my work which is best described as advocacy. It’s either advocacy or evangelism or one of those things, and in particular with HR… making sure that there’s an onboarding procedure for people with disabilities, making sure that when recruiters visit colleges and universities they recruit at the disabled students’ service center just like they would at any other part of the university.  And I think we’re getting there. But like most companies, there’s still more we want to do in that area as well.

Disaboom: So, as with other companies, by having more people with disabilities working within Yahoo!, it changes perceptions about people with disabilities…people think of Joe, who happens to use a wheelchair, as the engineer in the next office, rather than seeing him as someone different, someone with a disability.
Dr. Brightman: OR, they see that the differences are terrific. Do you know what I mean? We talk to people who say, “Oh, now I get it, they’re just like you and me.”

No, they’re not! There are huge differences, and some of those differences are fascinating. For example, one guy said to me once, “one of the nice things about being in a wheelchair is that when I go into a fine art museum, I can roll back, steadily, and I get a whole different perspective on this piece of art, while a person who’s walking has a herky-jerky motion and can’t have a smooth visual transition like I do.”

That may not be an earth-changer, but the fact is, I think we should notice the differences. The person who suddenly sits next to someone with a disability – the really big change happens in that person, because not only did he have  little or no direct experience with disabled others, but like most people, he’s probably  built up all these misconceptions and stereotypes that just can’t get broken in a week. That’s why working side-by-side every day is so important.

Just have someone go out and have a drink with somebody in a wheelchair, and they realize, “hey, I can do that!” I know, for example, that when we go out to places and introduce people with disabilities, I can just tell that when the people we’ve met with go home that night to their spouses, one of the things they’re going to talk about is “I shook hands with this guy, and he was blind, and I talked to him for about seven minutes, and he had a great sense of humor,” you know, because that will be the thing that was really different for that person that day. And the day after that, maybe it’ll be a little more ordinary.

I talked to one guy who told me the toughest thing about being disabled is that you’re never perceived as being just plain ordinary, and it’s a real luxury, a real luxury, to be able to just melt in with the crowd, not be noticed. Sometimes you just want to be invisible, and that’s hard to do if you in a wheelchair or have a cane or are using a service dog.

Disaboom: Because your disability has made an announcement about you based on everyone’s perceptions.
Dr. Brightman: Yep, ordinariness is not a bad thing to shoot for because you’ve got ordinary people doing ordinary tasks 95 percent of the day; that’s what is going on. So even if you’re living a wonderfully exciting life, most of it is kind of ordinary: you get up, you brush your teeth, you get dressed, and I just think that people with disabilities think “that’s not bad to aim for, just being regarded as a little less special, a little more ordinary.”

Yahoo!’s Commitment to Disability
Yahoo! clearly picked the right man for assistive technology smarts and disability advocacy. But it’s also a testament to Yahoo!’s business sense that they recognized the importance of people with disabilities as both consumers and potential employees.

We’re hoping it’s a trend. And we’re spending a lot more time on Yahoo! these days….