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In this candid episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA welcomes Brian Moore, a blind digital accessibility leader at TD Bank whom she has known for many years, for a conversation that runs from an eleven-year-old taking the bus alone in Montreal to a senior role auditing a national bank’s apps and websites. Brian traces a career that began in 1994 at a small Calgary assistive technology organization in the DOS era, moved through close to twenty years of tech support at Frontier Computing in Toronto, and became a self-taught specialty in web and document accessibility once AODA compliance started bringing people to his door. Along the way he is unusually frank about what he learned from the other end of the support line, about tokenism in earlier jobs, about automated scanners catching only thirty to forty percent of accessibility issues, and about the day he had to ask his eleven-year-old son to sign his own employment background check because the form was inaccessible.
The heart of the episode is a barrier Donna and Brian hit roughly two decades apart. Both were blocked from a professional certification not by the subject matter but by diagrams no human reader could neutrally describe, and both walked away with the knowledge and without the paper. Brian argues the fix is structural rather than personal: standardized alternative descriptions supplied by the test provider, delivered to a computer rather than read aloud by a person. They close on the discipline of picking your battles, the ones Brian has lost, and his conviction that advocacy has to leave room for actually living a life.
TRANSCRIPT
Podcast Commentator: Greetings. Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, and MBA invites you to listen to her bi-weekly podcast, Remarkable World Commentary. Here, Donna shares some of her innermost thoughts, insights, perspectives, and more with her listeners. Donna focuses on topics that directly affect the future of kids, especially kids with disabilities. Donna is a blind advocate, author, sight loss coach, dinner mystery producer, writer, entrepreneur, law graduate, and podcast commentator. She has decades of lived experiences, knowledge, skills, and expertise in access, technology, and information. As someone who has been internationally recognized for her work and roles, she just wants to make things better than possible.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Remarkable World Commentary. I’m Donna Jodhan, a lifelong disability advocate and one who sees the world mainly through sound, touch and stubborn optimism. I am a law graduate, an accessibility consultant, author, lifelong barrier buster who also happens to be blind.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You may know me from a few headline moments, as in November of 2010, I won the landmark Charter case that forced the Canadian government to make its website accessible to every Canadian, not just to sighted ones. And in July of 2019, I co-led the Accessible Canada Act with more than two dozen disability groups to turn equal access into federal law. And most recently, on June 3rd, 2022, I was greatly humbled by Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee Award for tireless commitment to removing barriers.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: When I’m not in a courtroom or in a committee room or in a pottery studio, you’ll find me coaching kids with vision loss, producing audio mysteries, or helping tech companies to make their gadgets talk back in plain language. Everything I do circles one goal: to turn accessibility from an afterthought into everyday practice. I invite you to think of this show as our shared workbench where policy meets lived experience, and lived experience sparks fresh ideas.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Now, before we jump into today’s conversation, let me shine a spotlight on today’s guest, a changemaker whose work is every bit as remarkable as the world that we are trying to build. Brian Moore, I’d like to welcome you to our Remarkable World Commentary podcast. You and I go back many years. I won’t tell our listeners how many years, but it is a pleasure and a privilege to have you. I’ve watched you grow. I’m really, really proud of what you’ve done and the way you stick up for something whenever it matters to you. Welcome to my show.
Brian Moore: Thanks, Donna. I appreciate you inviting me.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Anytime. So, Brian, most people meet accessibility as a rule they have to follow. You have spent more than 30 years meeting it as a way of life. Tell our listeners who you are and what you actually do on an ordinary Tuesday at the bank.
Brian Moore: Okay. So I am a blind person first. So that’s the lens that I bring to everything, because it’s unavoidable, right? I can’t turn that piece off. I mean, so what I do impacts my real life every day, and the lives of many people I know.
Brian Moore: So my job is actually sort of leading a digital accessibility program. So things like, we should ensure that our apps and our websites and basically as many of our processes as we can get to and dig into are accessible to everyone. And that involves all kinds of things. So, like you said in the introduction, I’ve been in the accessibility space for almost my entire adult life. In everything ranging from tech support to helping with website design, like where you’re actually in the code, to sort of now more of a manager role where I don’t get to be a geek quite as often. I still get to do some of it because it’s fun, but now it’s a bit more of an oversight role, and audit, and providing training, and sort of trying to influence policy decisions and that type of thing.
Brian Moore: So my typical day will involve maybe coaching on code, maybe meeting with the vendor to push them to make sure that the things that we’re buying that we’re going to use to expose to customers are accessible, to meeting with senior leadership to say, hey, this is why you should do what we do, and this is why you should not push back against this executive order from the government that says that DEI and accessibility, which was included, are bad and against the will of whatever flavor God you believe in. So it’s a whole range of things.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So basically, Brian, you’re all over the place, right?
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Enjoy it.
Brian Moore: I do, I love it. I still love it even after 30 years. Means change, but I still love it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Now you have said that you started out at a school for the blind and then moved into mainstream school while you were still living in the school’s residence. That is a very particular kind of childhood, in that it is one foot in each world. What did living in both of them at once teach you that you still carry with you today?
Brian Moore: So I’ve heard a lot of people who sort of were in mainstream education and had a terrible time, like didn’t have any friends and didn’t have good interactions with their peers and stuff. And that simply was not my experience. I think part of that, which was an unheard of concept when I went, was people get educational aids now, like a full time adult to trail them about. No wonder they don’t have friends.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right?
Brian Moore: I had none of that. When I was 11 years old, I took public transit to school and that was just normal. Like I took the STM, or whatever they’re calling it now, in Montreal. And that was just expected, right? That was part of integration.
Brian Moore: I think we spend a lot of time now, particularly in education, but I’ve seen it in other areas, where we shelter people too much, like try and insulate them from the real world, and consequently they don’t adjust to it well. And the downside of that, I mean, there’s a few downsides, but one of them is that you don’t develop the friendships and the social interactions that are typical of a kid in school. And that I did develop, because I didn’t have an adult shadow, because I went places by myself. I don’t know, I could go on.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: But it’s true. I mean, I grew up a bit ahead of, you know, of your era here. And it was the same thing for us. You know, we did this. We didn’t have an adult chaperones as such. And today it’s so much more sheltered for these poor guys. Right.
Brian Moore: Yeah. Like the concept of an 11 year old kid taking public transit to school. They just wouldn’t do it now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, no.
Brian Moore: But, I mean, look at the bright side. I haven’t had an O and M lesson since I was 12, and I’m almost 60, because they did a really good job of teaching me the basics. They covered it well. They did what they call structured discovery before it was called structured discovery.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Boy, things have changed a lot.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Gosh. Now take me back to 1993 and that small organization in Calgary where all of this began for you. What did assistive technology even look like back then? And what was it that made you decide, this is the work I want?
Brian Moore: So it was actually an organization. So in, well, 1994, actually, that was Calgary, the TRC. So I would have been 27. And it was an organization that did assistive technology for various disabilities. Actually, blind wasn’t one of them.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, okay.
Brian Moore: It was mostly people with physical issues. So it was things like Dragon and what very limited alternative keyboards there were at the time. So it was all DOS.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, gosh. Okay.
Brian Moore: Yeah. There was no Windows yet. Really? Well, there was 3.1, but it wasn’t super widely adopted. And I mean, it was a lot harder to get working than it is today. It was a lot more geeky and technical and fiddly, and, gee, I have to install this board to make my speech work. I gotta find an IRQ and a free COM port. And like, nobody even remembers what I’m talking about nowadays.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: But it was work. It was life changing for people. Right. For some people, you know, you could use a computer and they couldn’t otherwise. And I sort of broadened the scope, just because I was there, to let’s talk about screen reader stuff. And I used a thing. What did I use? Oh, TinyTalk, I think it was.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh my Lord. And yeah.
Brian Moore: You had to have a hardware synthesizer. Yeah. And it was interesting because it was only a contract, but at the time, I actually went there to volunteer because I thought, oh, it’d be neat to learn this stuff. But the executive director said, hey, I have some money from the Alberta government to employ some people. Are you interested? And it wasn’t much money at all. But it was a whole lot more than I was getting on welfare, because Alberta wouldn’t give me disability because I wasn’t disabled enough.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Well, I don’t get it.
Brian Moore: No. They said being blind is not sufficient to get the what they call the Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, God. Oh, my God, I’m blown out of my chair. Okay. Hold on.
Brian Moore: So, you know, working any kind of low wage job was better than that, right? And I wanted to work. So I did that for close to a year. And then the funding ran out and he said, I’d really like to keep you, but I can’t afford it. And then, to make a very long story short, I ended up coming to Toronto and working at a place that no longer exists called Frontier Computing.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right, right.
Brian Moore: That was an adaptive tech dealer. And even that was, I went because they were offering an internet course which I didn’t really need, but I thought it would be a cool way to meet people in this new city. Well, the next time they ran the internet course, I was the teacher.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Are you going?
Brian Moore: Well, and then I stayed there for years. Like it was on and off. But I was there sort of doing adaptive technology tech support until 2015.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Wow. Okay. So for close to 20 years. Right? Yeah. You were, in your own words, an entire technical support department of a Toronto access technology company.
Brian Moore: Well, one of them. There were a few at the time. Yeah. I don’t think any of them are left, but.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No. Tell me about that company and those years, and tell me what being the voice on the other end of that phone taught you about our community.
Brian Moore: So it taught me so many things. I mean, it was a company started by two blind guys, which was a novelty at that point. And they made it successful, like regardless of what ended up happening. These were these two blind guys that wanted to start, and they made it successful.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Brian Moore: Like whatever else happens, I’ll give them that. They made it successful. Yeah, I agree. And I mean, it was a good place to work. Like I liked the people.
Brian Moore: Tech support, you know, and I was basically self-taught. Right. Like I never went through any training really. Later, I did like, you know, a few years later, for example, in 2008, maybe I took like the JAWS scripting course, for example. But essentially, I started out as completely self-taught. Because I was a nerd and I liked to play with this stuff.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And you still are.
Brian Moore: And I still am. Absolutely, yes. I wear that badge proudly. Even when I don’t have to do it at work, I still do it on my own.
Brian Moore: So it was a great place to work and it taught me a ton about our community. It taught me a lot about myself too. First of all, you can only do it for so long because quite honestly, intellectually, it’s not that challenging. Doing tech support. So I stayed longer than I should have.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, okay.
Brian Moore: Because I got burnt out. But, you know, I gotta eat, right? And my kid thinks I should support him.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: That’s right.
Brian Moore: But I learned a ton about our community. First of all, one of the biggest lessons I think I learned was that there are so many people that aren’t as privileged or something as me. And I don’t know what that something is. Because in my experience, I knew lots of blind people and people with disabilities, but a lot of them were like me. Right. They managed, they lived on their own. A lot of them had employment. Sometimes we didn’t. But a lot of times we did and some didn’t. But we were functioning adults.
Brian Moore: And what I encountered during this job was a lot of people who, because they never had the opportunity, I think mostly just didn’t have the skills to sort of live independently and stuff, with things I took for granted. Right. I didn’t know that was not a thing. But I remember having to train somebody once, and they lived somewhere and I called them up and I said, hey, you know, I have the address and stuff. I have no idea where that is. How do I get there? And they said, I don’t have a clue. I don’t ever go out on my own. And I did a double take, right? What?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: That’s far more common than I thought, actually. Or people who live with family because they don’t believe they have the skills to live independently. And I think that is because no one’s ever expected it, right? If you’ve always been given the message, you can’t, you can’t, or you need protecting, or you need somebody to take care of you, eventually you will internalize that and believe it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, that’s very true. I mean, yeah, I agree. I think I’m very sad though, you know, like.
Brian Moore: It really is.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. Because, you know, I consider myself to be very privileged in many, many ways like yourself, but there’s too many of our community that they’re not in the same position. Right?
Brian Moore: No, no. I mean, I have lots of stories of things that happened related. And I would never share anybody’s personal info. But I think just an anecdote, one of the ones that really stuck out was I remember going to train somebody at their home one time and they said, oh, don’t let your guide dog go in the kitchen because I dropped the jar of pickles. And I said, well, okay, are you going to clean it? Oh no, I don’t know how. But my home care worker is coming in three days and they’ll be able to sort of pick up the glass and stuff. And I’m thinking, wait, what? So you’re going to be stuck out of your own kitchen for three? I said, like, do you have a broom and dustpan? Yeah. Can you get it for me? But it really made me think, right? Like, I guess I’m privileged or something. I don’t know what it is.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I’ve heard similar stories. And, you know, like you. What is it? What is it? And how have things changed?
Brian Moore: Well, and I really think it’s, if no one’s ever expected it of you, they won’t get it. Right. If no one’s ever told you you could. And in fact, often the opposite. That’s what you’ll get as an end result.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Somewhere around 2015, you started teaching yourself web and document accessibility because people kept coming to you asking how to comply with AODA. Nobody trained you. So how do you teach yourself an entirely new discipline when so much of what is written about it is not accessible to you in the first place?
Brian Moore: So a lot of it actually is. I mean, yes, there is some that’s not.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Brian Moore: But a lot of it is. And basically the internet. So by then we had Twitter, which, there was a real, before it turned into the mess it is now, it was actually a pretty thriving community with a quite active accessibility community where we all shared tips and tricks and hey, how do you do this? And how do you do that? And I had a mentor kind of. He didn’t know he was my mentor, but he was. So there was a guy who was part of the W3C working group who started up a business. It was not a blind guy. He had other disabilities. But he ran a business conducting workshops on this stuff, and he asked me to come to one of them and do a screen reader demo.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Brian Moore: And obviously paid me to do it. But I went to this three day workshop. And I thought, this stuff is really cool. I want to learn more. So I started reading and reading and reading and absorbing everything I could, and going to any free webinar thing that was happening, and trying things like writing code and, okay, this works for me, this doesn’t work for me.
Brian Moore: And back to the, this impacts my real life. I would encounter barriers all the time, right, when I tried to do things online. And I thought, how much better would it be if I could explain the barrier, and if we’re real lucky, how to fix the barrier. And sometimes that’s useful. Sometimes it’s not. Like if you, for example, encounter it with a big company and you call sort of the call center, there’s not much point having that discussion with a call center agent. They’re likely not going to have a clue what you’re on about. Right. And they’re not in a position to do anything about it anyway.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Frustrating me.
Brian Moore: Yeah. And that still happens today. I mean, so the building I live in has a portal where you can submit maintenance tickets, pay fees, etc. And I actually use it in my sort of teaching web accessibility stuff in my job as an example of how to make a site completely terrible. I have a few of those sites I use as examples of how not to do this. One of the others is actually our rail company, who put some effort into it. But like they got somebody who thought, hey, accessibility means more ARIA. Let’s put lots and lots of ARIA on everything. And it’s a mess.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. You were somebody’s first hire at TD Bank. What did it feel like to walk into one of the largest banks in this country as a blind man and be told, in effect, we need you to tell us the truth about our own products?
Brian Moore: Well, it was pretty encouraging. I mean, so the guy who hired me actually left not that long after.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Brian Moore: But I mean, it was great. He was a great manager. I learned a lot from him, because that was the first time in my life I worked at a big, huge organization, right, where they had things like very formal performance reviews and evaluations and stuff. I never did that because I was either working in a small business of seven or eight or 10 people, or I was a contractor. Like when I worked for the provincial government, I was always a contractor.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right, right, right. Okay.
Brian Moore: And kind of their token disabled person that didn’t have any real work to do.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Don’t say that. It’s kind of true, though. But, you know.
Brian Moore: Oh, it was true.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah, yeah.
Brian Moore: I’m too old to have filters now. I don’t have much filters.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, but it’s the truth, you know? I mean, I experience the same thing when I work at Bank of Montreal. Same tokenism. Oh.
Brian Moore: Yeah. And it’s demoralizing. Among other things.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes it is. Yeah. It’s demoralizing. It’s discouraging. And you’re saying, what the hell am I doing here?
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Am I here? What am I going to gain out of that? Right. But anyway, continue on. Tell us.
Brian Moore: But so when this guy hired me, and I’m deliberately not naming because he may not want me to. He might. But I don’t. It was pretty much out of the gate. Like he gave me real work to do. And I thought, oh, this is kind of refreshing. Like I’m actually contributing.
Brian Moore: And I did raise things that people hadn’t thought of, or knew, like didn’t even know about, that they should have known about as far as I’m concerned. I think the best example was one of the things you can do with a banking app is deposit checks. Well, not if you’re blind.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You can’t, unless I’m missing something myself. I don’t.
Brian Moore: No, it’s all of them. I’ve done a lot of investigating since. And you have to essentially line up a check to get it right. Well, there’s actually one new U.S. bank and one UK bank that kind of have nailed this. But I wish I had an account. I don’t have an account either, because I’d love to actually see the experience.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: But when I came, I said, for example, that I can’t do this. I can go deposit in the machine, but that means I have to go to the branch. Right. But I can’t do it in the app.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No.
Brian Moore: Well, once or twice I was successful, but it was a fluke. And they said, oh, we never thought of that. And there were many other things. Right. Like so I would, for example, go on our mortgage stuff and say, you know, here’s a barrier, here’s a barrier. Here’s, because the people that were testing aren’t actually users, right? They’re people who have been told, okay, well, you have to test for this, but they don’t use it. So they don’t know what it’s supposed to do. And my argument is, if you don’t know what it’s supposed to do, you can’t know if it’s wrong.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Well that’s true. I mean, if I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, how the hell can I test it?
Brian Moore: Right.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: And, I mean, then there were other issues, like with real estate and stuff. Like with our building, for example, we have what they call destination dispatch elevators, which are the ones where there’s a touch screen and you tell it which floor you want and it tells you which elevator to take.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Brian Moore: And it had a quote unquote accessibility mode, very much in quotes, that I don’t think anyone’s ever tried until I showed up. And I said, hey, this is crap. It doesn’t work properly. And here’s what’s wrong. Here’s what it’s doing. Here’s what it’s not doing. And I have to use this thing many, many times a day because I have meetings on all different floors of our building. I mean, we’ve moved since then, but our new building has that system too.
Brian Moore: But people, I mean, now that I’ve been there eight years, what I hear is that, you know, people respect me. They say, you know what you’re doing. You give good counsel. You can convey information to different audiences. So apparently I’m respected. At least that’s what they said in my performance review. I don’t know if it’s true.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Of course it’s true. But you know, that’s, I think that’s a great compliment for people, especially to us folks who are vision impaired. Right. You are respected because you know what you’re saying. I mean, yeah, I kind of wonder sometimes if people really think of us as being. Do you know what I’m saying?
Brian Moore: Yeah. Oh, that’s absolutely a thing still. And I think the truth is we’re going to have to work a lot harder to prove ourselves than other people will. That’s just the reality. Yeah. But it’s not impossible.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, there’s a lot of hard.
Brian Moore: It’s hard. And it continues to be hard. Like, I again, I’m too old to have filters. Every day there are barriers I encounter, and sometimes they’re still demoralizing and I get exhausted and think, how long can I keep doing this? For example, as a people manager, I encountered things where, okay, I have to do forms for people that report to me and those forms aren’t accessible. Well, now I have a problem, right? They have a right to expect that that stuff will be confidential. So I can’t ask a teammate to help me.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, no you can’t. Wow. So what?
Brian Moore: So there’s workarounds. Engage people in different, higher up, not specifically for that. But so, one of the things I had to do when I started, they did use this third party company to do a pretty in-depth background check.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Brian Moore: Including fact checking, like the standard stuff. Criminal record check. Most vulnerable sector. Although I don’t know why they did vulnerable sector, but they did it. But they also fact checked your resume, which they didn’t do very well. Because they didn’t know what half the stuff was, like some of the certifications I had and stuff. And they just said, oh, we don’t know how to find that. And you could have found it in a two minute search.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: To verify it. But it was completely inaccessible. And I called the company and they said, we don’t care. Reach out to your employer, talk to them about it. So I got my, at the time, 11 year old kid to fill out and sign my background check.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh my lord.
Brian Moore: And I’ve told my employer this many times since, right? That technically I never signed the background check. My 11 year old kid did. He did it at my direction.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Of course, but still, he was 11 years old. I mean, I wonder what was going through Graham’s mind.
Brian Moore: It’s not like he can enter into a contract at 11 years old.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I wonder what he was thinking. Did he ever share his thoughts?
Brian Moore: No, I don’t think he cared. It’s just like, okay, dad needs me to help him with this thing.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes, I’ll help him out.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Fine. There is a real difference between reading an audit that somebody else wrote, and putting your own hands on a product with your own screen reader. What do you catch that an automated scan would never catch, and that a sighted tester would never catch either?
Brian Moore: So there are several things. First of all, automated scanning certainly has value. But it can’t catch everything. And it doesn’t even pretend to catch everything. Like, short of the companies claiming AI magic. Automated. Sorry.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You okay?
Brian Moore: Yeah. I made it. Scans typically can catch about 30% to 40% of accessibility issues. Things like code mistakes. Color contrast, because that’s easy, right? It’s a binary for the most part, with a machine can do it. But there are many things that a machine will never be able to tell. Like, okay, a machine can tell you, for example, if an image has an alternative text, right? But it can’t tell you if it’s any good.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right? Right. Yeah.
Brian Moore: I mean, it could just be a space character and that will pass an automated check with a machine because there’s something there. It can’t tell you, does your heading structure make sense? You know, are your headings logical on a page?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right. Right.
Brian Moore: It can tell you if your form fields have labels, but it can’t tell you if they’re the right labels.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right, right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Understood.
Brian Moore: It can’t tell you, is it easy for someone to go through this process? Those are things that you need a human. And it helps, like I said before, if that human has some idea what’s the expected behavior. So has actually had some experience using the tools that they’re supposed to test with. So for example, a machine can never tell you that if someone is zooming their screen, this piece of text is going to get cut off. Only human can do that. Now, I can’t do that. I can make guesses. Or for example, things like colors. I can’t tell you if the colors are accessible, like passing or not, because even the tools to check it aren’t actually accessible. But that’s, you can use automation to a point for that.
Brian Moore: So automation has a place and a good place, like particularly because on something large, like a bank site, a lot of your issues will be in what they call templates. Right. So it’ll be on a thousand pages that are based off that template. So if you fix it once, you’ll fix a thousand pages.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right? Okay. Brian, you and I share something very painful. I sat a certification exam with every one of my accommodations approved. And I still could not finish it, because nobody in that room could describe the diagrams to me. You have told me that your experience was almost identical, roughly two decades earlier. Would you walk our listeners through what happened to you that day, and tell us whether anyone ever acknowledged it afterwards?
Brian Moore: So yes, I will. So in 2010, I started taking Cisco courses because I wanted to get the Cisco Certified Network Architect designation, which is really nerdy.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Brian Moore: But it’s in my love hobby area that I love, which is networks and network security and that sort of thing. At the time, there was a project out of the University of Perth in Western Australia called the Cisco Academy for the Visually Impaired.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh okay.
Brian Moore: And they did a really good job of sort of teaching some of the beginning level courses and giving you accessible material, which was all great. And a lot of work, and they did a really good job. Thanks, Doctor Iain Murray. I don’t know what ever happened to him, but he was sort of the guy that led that project.
Brian Moore: But then you get to the exam. And you could get a reader for the exam. But the problem is that much of those exams are based on diagrams, and context in those diagrams is everything. It’s critical that whoever’s trying to convey that information has some clue what they’re on about. And what you suggested in your articles is absolutely the solution, that the descriptive text for those diagrams should be standardized and come from the provider. It should not be up to the reader. Because it’s impossible for a reader to neutrally convey that information, right? If they know too much about the subject matter, they’re probably going to slant their description to give you a more correct answer, because they can’t help it, right? Because they know what they’re reading and they understand it. But if they don’t know, they won’t know enough to describe it.
Brian Moore: And that’s a blocker when it comes to these exams. You can’t complete them without being able to read and interpret those diagrams. And while it’s the exam paper taker’s job to glean the correct information out of those diagrams, they’re very complicated. You need to ask a ton of questions that someone who isn’t familiar with the material will probably really struggle to answer.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: And what I discovered was that as you get further, even if you pass that hurdle, then you get into virtualized lab exams, which were on simulators. And that was also completely inaccessible. So even had I got past that hurdle, if I wanted to proceed any further, I would have been stuck again with another system with no alternatives. I mean, the people in Australia acknowledged this was a thing. The only other actual acknowledgement I got was actually from a lawyer from the NFB in the States.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Brian Moore: I forget her name, but they were trying to sort of push this issue forward. And I was sort of keen to participate, but then at that point in my life, lots of life was happening. So I kind of got sidetracked. But yeah, I mean, when I read your series of articles, it’s like, well, we really haven’t progressed, have we?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No. What do we do about this? And this is my final question to you, because my clock was winding down. What can we do?
Brian Moore: Well, I think we need to, I mean, it’s always going to be a problem, right? Getting certifications is really tough. Like, I mean, more recently I tried to get project management certification because I thought that would actually be somewhat useful in my day to day work, which it would. And I ran into very similar barriers. I got to a certain point in the course material and then I started hitting the, you need to create these color coded charts and various things.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: So I don’t know what the answer is. I mean, I think the answer for a lot of it is, if we’re going to offer certifications, things like alternative descriptions for diagrams must be provided by the test provider. There’s no way around that.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, no.
Brian Moore: And ideally not use a reader, use a computer. Because a reader, it’s too hard with a reader.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. Because everybody interprets things differently.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Picture’s worth a thousand words.
Brian Moore: Yeah. And I can go faster with a computer and I can query. I can query back. Oh, what did it say three sentences ago? That’s not so easy with the reader.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, because they get tired.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: They get frustrated. Yeah. And, you know, when they say the second time, it may not be the same as the first time.
Brian Moore: Yeah. It’s not, I mean, I don’t know if many of the tests for any certifications are accessible. And I’m not sure about, for example, the certification actual exam, because I never finished the course material because I ran into too many barriers. I mean, I learned a lot of good stuff that I actually use, but I don’t have the paper.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Well, that’s the same for me. I mean, I learned a lot in my cybersecurity course, but I don’t have the paper. Where am I going to go? I have nowhere to go.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Kind of a down note to end this really, really interesting.
Brian Moore: Yeah. I mean, in a way it’s good. So I can put a positive spin on it this way. It’s a good problem to have, because more of us are getting to the position where we care about that stuff.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah, right.
Brian Moore: Where we want professional certifications in, you know, whatever discipline.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So will the caring be enough for us to come together to push these providers?
Brian Moore: I don’t know if there’s enough of us yet, but we’re getting there.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Brian Moore: Now, in some ways, I think we’ve regressed over the past few years. Because there is quite a, you know, a real push against marginalized groups. Like, I mean, it started as a sort of anti-DEI push, but accessibility got caught up in that. Right. And it’s not just the US government. Right. That gave a lot of people permission to say the quiet bits out loud that they wouldn’t say before. But I still think we’re progressing. It’s just not as quickly as I’d like. I think we’ve regressed a bit in the last couple of years, but I think we’ll get back. And I mean, I’m far closer to the end of my career than the beginning.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So am I.
Brian Moore: But you know, I’ll never stop sort of pushing for this stuff, even if I’m not working. It’s just too ingrained in who I am as a person. And some fights are worth having. I mean, sometimes, I always say to people, you pick your battles, right? Some things are just not worth the struggle. Not worth the effort.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I agree. You pick your battles and like you like.
Brian Moore: I just don’t take Uber because I get sick of being refused.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: So I’ll just keep my money. And I mean, occasionally that’s a battle worth having, but mostly not. I don’t care. Just take transit. Which maybe is conceding, but ultimately, I just want to live my life. And that has to be the end goal. You know, I’m all about being an advocate. I love doing it. I don’t mind doing it, but I also just get on with life.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. There comes a point when you say, you know, I got to enjoy the rest of my life.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And you pick your battles and you go on and.
Brian Moore: And some battles you don’t win. Like, I had a years long battle with Toronto District School Board to try and get an accessible report card.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Brian Moore: Which was ultimately not successful. And now it doesn’t matter anymore. They won.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I mean, you know.
Brian Moore: Now I don’t have a stake in that game.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No. Because your son is finished. He’s done.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It takes a lot for someone to admit you didn’t get what you wanted. And I haven’t gotten what I wanted in many instances.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: But you got to draw the line and move on, you know?
Brian Moore: Yeah. I mean, advocacy is great, and it’s good and worth doing. Absolutely. But ultimately, we have to be able to live life and hopefully enjoy some of it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I hope so. Yeah, you still have to be able to go enjoy a nice meal, enjoy some drinks, you know what I mean? Yeah. Some travel. You cannot, it burns you out.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And it comes to a point where you say, I’ve had enough here. I’m gone, you know. But I want to thank you, Brian. I think I said, you know, we go back many years and I’ve watched you grow. I’ve watched you do a lot of things. I’ve admired your technical skills. You put me to shame sometimes, but, you know, keep on going. Don’t give up.
Brian Moore: Oh, I won’t.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, I know you won’t. Pick your battles. And you know, every now and then we would get together and talk about what’s going on. Especially when Richard comes to town. I don’t know when he’s coming to town again, but you know, we should have some sort of a get together sometime in the fall.
Brian Moore: Yeah. Sounds good.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, maybe Melanie, or I shouldn’t be naming names here, but we’ll work on it. How about that?
Brian Moore: Yeah. Sounds good.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you so much, Brian, for taking the time. I know you’re an awfully busy guy. Say hello to Graham. I don’t know if he remembers me. I used to call him Little Prince.
Brian Moore: I don’t think he probably does, but.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. But let’s work on getting together some time, and we’ll go from there.
Brian Moore: Okay.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: All right.
Brian Moore: All right.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you so much. Hey.
Brian Moore: Thanks. Take care.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Take care, Brian.
Brian Moore: Bye.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Bye bye.
Podcast Commentator: Donna wants to hear from you and invites you to write to her at donnajodhan@gmail.com. Until next time.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA
Global Leader In Disability Rights, Digital Accessibility, And Inclusive Policy Reform
Turning policy into progress for people with disabilities.
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Related
Remarkable World Commentary Episode #112: Interview with Brian Moore, Senior Accessibility Specialist, TD
🎙️ Listen to this Podcast.
In this candid episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA welcomes Brian Moore, a blind digital accessibility leader at TD Bank whom she has known for many years, for a conversation that runs from an eleven-year-old taking the bus alone in Montreal to a senior role auditing a national bank’s apps and websites. Brian traces a career that began in 1994 at a small Calgary assistive technology organization in the DOS era, moved through close to twenty years of tech support at Frontier Computing in Toronto, and became a self-taught specialty in web and document accessibility once AODA compliance started bringing people to his door. Along the way he is unusually frank about what he learned from the other end of the support line, about tokenism in earlier jobs, about automated scanners catching only thirty to forty percent of accessibility issues, and about the day he had to ask his eleven-year-old son to sign his own employment background check because the form was inaccessible.
The heart of the episode is a barrier Donna and Brian hit roughly two decades apart. Both were blocked from a professional certification not by the subject matter but by diagrams no human reader could neutrally describe, and both walked away with the knowledge and without the paper. Brian argues the fix is structural rather than personal: standardized alternative descriptions supplied by the test provider, delivered to a computer rather than read aloud by a person. They close on the discipline of picking your battles, the ones Brian has lost, and his conviction that advocacy has to leave room for actually living a life.
TRANSCRIPT
Podcast Commentator: Greetings. Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, and MBA invites you to listen to her bi-weekly podcast, Remarkable World Commentary. Here, Donna shares some of her innermost thoughts, insights, perspectives, and more with her listeners. Donna focuses on topics that directly affect the future of kids, especially kids with disabilities. Donna is a blind advocate, author, sight loss coach, dinner mystery producer, writer, entrepreneur, law graduate, and podcast commentator. She has decades of lived experiences, knowledge, skills, and expertise in access, technology, and information. As someone who has been internationally recognized for her work and roles, she just wants to make things better than possible.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Remarkable World Commentary. I’m Donna Jodhan, a lifelong disability advocate and one who sees the world mainly through sound, touch and stubborn optimism. I am a law graduate, an accessibility consultant, author, lifelong barrier buster who also happens to be blind.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You may know me from a few headline moments, as in November of 2010, I won the landmark Charter case that forced the Canadian government to make its website accessible to every Canadian, not just to sighted ones. And in July of 2019, I co-led the Accessible Canada Act with more than two dozen disability groups to turn equal access into federal law. And most recently, on June 3rd, 2022, I was greatly humbled by Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee Award for tireless commitment to removing barriers.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: When I’m not in a courtroom or in a committee room or in a pottery studio, you’ll find me coaching kids with vision loss, producing audio mysteries, or helping tech companies to make their gadgets talk back in plain language. Everything I do circles one goal: to turn accessibility from an afterthought into everyday practice. I invite you to think of this show as our shared workbench where policy meets lived experience, and lived experience sparks fresh ideas.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Now, before we jump into today’s conversation, let me shine a spotlight on today’s guest, a changemaker whose work is every bit as remarkable as the world that we are trying to build. Brian Moore, I’d like to welcome you to our Remarkable World Commentary podcast. You and I go back many years. I won’t tell our listeners how many years, but it is a pleasure and a privilege to have you. I’ve watched you grow. I’m really, really proud of what you’ve done and the way you stick up for something whenever it matters to you. Welcome to my show.
Brian Moore: Thanks, Donna. I appreciate you inviting me.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Anytime. So, Brian, most people meet accessibility as a rule they have to follow. You have spent more than 30 years meeting it as a way of life. Tell our listeners who you are and what you actually do on an ordinary Tuesday at the bank.
Brian Moore: Okay. So I am a blind person first. So that’s the lens that I bring to everything, because it’s unavoidable, right? I can’t turn that piece off. I mean, so what I do impacts my real life every day, and the lives of many people I know.
Brian Moore: So my job is actually sort of leading a digital accessibility program. So things like, we should ensure that our apps and our websites and basically as many of our processes as we can get to and dig into are accessible to everyone. And that involves all kinds of things. So, like you said in the introduction, I’ve been in the accessibility space for almost my entire adult life. In everything ranging from tech support to helping with website design, like where you’re actually in the code, to sort of now more of a manager role where I don’t get to be a geek quite as often. I still get to do some of it because it’s fun, but now it’s a bit more of an oversight role, and audit, and providing training, and sort of trying to influence policy decisions and that type of thing.
Brian Moore: So my typical day will involve maybe coaching on code, maybe meeting with the vendor to push them to make sure that the things that we’re buying that we’re going to use to expose to customers are accessible, to meeting with senior leadership to say, hey, this is why you should do what we do, and this is why you should not push back against this executive order from the government that says that DEI and accessibility, which was included, are bad and against the will of whatever flavor God you believe in. So it’s a whole range of things.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So basically, Brian, you’re all over the place, right?
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Enjoy it.
Brian Moore: I do, I love it. I still love it even after 30 years. Means change, but I still love it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Now you have said that you started out at a school for the blind and then moved into mainstream school while you were still living in the school’s residence. That is a very particular kind of childhood, in that it is one foot in each world. What did living in both of them at once teach you that you still carry with you today?
Brian Moore: So I’ve heard a lot of people who sort of were in mainstream education and had a terrible time, like didn’t have any friends and didn’t have good interactions with their peers and stuff. And that simply was not my experience. I think part of that, which was an unheard of concept when I went, was people get educational aids now, like a full time adult to trail them about. No wonder they don’t have friends.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right?
Brian Moore: I had none of that. When I was 11 years old, I took public transit to school and that was just normal. Like I took the STM, or whatever they’re calling it now, in Montreal. And that was just expected, right? That was part of integration.
Brian Moore: I think we spend a lot of time now, particularly in education, but I’ve seen it in other areas, where we shelter people too much, like try and insulate them from the real world, and consequently they don’t adjust to it well. And the downside of that, I mean, there’s a few downsides, but one of them is that you don’t develop the friendships and the social interactions that are typical of a kid in school. And that I did develop, because I didn’t have an adult shadow, because I went places by myself. I don’t know, I could go on.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: But it’s true. I mean, I grew up a bit ahead of, you know, of your era here. And it was the same thing for us. You know, we did this. We didn’t have an adult chaperones as such. And today it’s so much more sheltered for these poor guys. Right.
Brian Moore: Yeah. Like the concept of an 11 year old kid taking public transit to school. They just wouldn’t do it now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, no.
Brian Moore: But, I mean, look at the bright side. I haven’t had an O and M lesson since I was 12, and I’m almost 60, because they did a really good job of teaching me the basics. They covered it well. They did what they call structured discovery before it was called structured discovery.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Boy, things have changed a lot.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Gosh. Now take me back to 1993 and that small organization in Calgary where all of this began for you. What did assistive technology even look like back then? And what was it that made you decide, this is the work I want?
Brian Moore: So it was actually an organization. So in, well, 1994, actually, that was Calgary, the TRC. So I would have been 27. And it was an organization that did assistive technology for various disabilities. Actually, blind wasn’t one of them.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, okay.
Brian Moore: It was mostly people with physical issues. So it was things like Dragon and what very limited alternative keyboards there were at the time. So it was all DOS.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, gosh. Okay.
Brian Moore: Yeah. There was no Windows yet. Really? Well, there was 3.1, but it wasn’t super widely adopted. And I mean, it was a lot harder to get working than it is today. It was a lot more geeky and technical and fiddly, and, gee, I have to install this board to make my speech work. I gotta find an IRQ and a free COM port. And like, nobody even remembers what I’m talking about nowadays.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: But it was work. It was life changing for people. Right. For some people, you know, you could use a computer and they couldn’t otherwise. And I sort of broadened the scope, just because I was there, to let’s talk about screen reader stuff. And I used a thing. What did I use? Oh, TinyTalk, I think it was.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh my Lord. And yeah.
Brian Moore: You had to have a hardware synthesizer. Yeah. And it was interesting because it was only a contract, but at the time, I actually went there to volunteer because I thought, oh, it’d be neat to learn this stuff. But the executive director said, hey, I have some money from the Alberta government to employ some people. Are you interested? And it wasn’t much money at all. But it was a whole lot more than I was getting on welfare, because Alberta wouldn’t give me disability because I wasn’t disabled enough.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Well, I don’t get it.
Brian Moore: No. They said being blind is not sufficient to get the what they call the Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, God. Oh, my God, I’m blown out of my chair. Okay. Hold on.
Brian Moore: So, you know, working any kind of low wage job was better than that, right? And I wanted to work. So I did that for close to a year. And then the funding ran out and he said, I’d really like to keep you, but I can’t afford it. And then, to make a very long story short, I ended up coming to Toronto and working at a place that no longer exists called Frontier Computing.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right, right.
Brian Moore: That was an adaptive tech dealer. And even that was, I went because they were offering an internet course which I didn’t really need, but I thought it would be a cool way to meet people in this new city. Well, the next time they ran the internet course, I was the teacher.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Are you going?
Brian Moore: Well, and then I stayed there for years. Like it was on and off. But I was there sort of doing adaptive technology tech support until 2015.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Wow. Okay. So for close to 20 years. Right? Yeah. You were, in your own words, an entire technical support department of a Toronto access technology company.
Brian Moore: Well, one of them. There were a few at the time. Yeah. I don’t think any of them are left, but.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No. Tell me about that company and those years, and tell me what being the voice on the other end of that phone taught you about our community.
Brian Moore: So it taught me so many things. I mean, it was a company started by two blind guys, which was a novelty at that point. And they made it successful, like regardless of what ended up happening. These were these two blind guys that wanted to start, and they made it successful.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Brian Moore: Like whatever else happens, I’ll give them that. They made it successful. Yeah, I agree. And I mean, it was a good place to work. Like I liked the people.
Brian Moore: Tech support, you know, and I was basically self-taught. Right. Like I never went through any training really. Later, I did like, you know, a few years later, for example, in 2008, maybe I took like the JAWS scripting course, for example. But essentially, I started out as completely self-taught. Because I was a nerd and I liked to play with this stuff.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And you still are.
Brian Moore: And I still am. Absolutely, yes. I wear that badge proudly. Even when I don’t have to do it at work, I still do it on my own.
Brian Moore: So it was a great place to work and it taught me a ton about our community. It taught me a lot about myself too. First of all, you can only do it for so long because quite honestly, intellectually, it’s not that challenging. Doing tech support. So I stayed longer than I should have.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, okay.
Brian Moore: Because I got burnt out. But, you know, I gotta eat, right? And my kid thinks I should support him.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: That’s right.
Brian Moore: But I learned a ton about our community. First of all, one of the biggest lessons I think I learned was that there are so many people that aren’t as privileged or something as me. And I don’t know what that something is. Because in my experience, I knew lots of blind people and people with disabilities, but a lot of them were like me. Right. They managed, they lived on their own. A lot of them had employment. Sometimes we didn’t. But a lot of times we did and some didn’t. But we were functioning adults.
Brian Moore: And what I encountered during this job was a lot of people who, because they never had the opportunity, I think mostly just didn’t have the skills to sort of live independently and stuff, with things I took for granted. Right. I didn’t know that was not a thing. But I remember having to train somebody once, and they lived somewhere and I called them up and I said, hey, you know, I have the address and stuff. I have no idea where that is. How do I get there? And they said, I don’t have a clue. I don’t ever go out on my own. And I did a double take, right? What?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: That’s far more common than I thought, actually. Or people who live with family because they don’t believe they have the skills to live independently. And I think that is because no one’s ever expected it, right? If you’ve always been given the message, you can’t, you can’t, or you need protecting, or you need somebody to take care of you, eventually you will internalize that and believe it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, that’s very true. I mean, yeah, I agree. I think I’m very sad though, you know, like.
Brian Moore: It really is.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. Because, you know, I consider myself to be very privileged in many, many ways like yourself, but there’s too many of our community that they’re not in the same position. Right?
Brian Moore: No, no. I mean, I have lots of stories of things that happened related. And I would never share anybody’s personal info. But I think just an anecdote, one of the ones that really stuck out was I remember going to train somebody at their home one time and they said, oh, don’t let your guide dog go in the kitchen because I dropped the jar of pickles. And I said, well, okay, are you going to clean it? Oh no, I don’t know how. But my home care worker is coming in three days and they’ll be able to sort of pick up the glass and stuff. And I’m thinking, wait, what? So you’re going to be stuck out of your own kitchen for three? I said, like, do you have a broom and dustpan? Yeah. Can you get it for me? But it really made me think, right? Like, I guess I’m privileged or something. I don’t know what it is.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I’ve heard similar stories. And, you know, like you. What is it? What is it? And how have things changed?
Brian Moore: Well, and I really think it’s, if no one’s ever expected it of you, they won’t get it. Right. If no one’s ever told you you could. And in fact, often the opposite. That’s what you’ll get as an end result.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Somewhere around 2015, you started teaching yourself web and document accessibility because people kept coming to you asking how to comply with AODA. Nobody trained you. So how do you teach yourself an entirely new discipline when so much of what is written about it is not accessible to you in the first place?
Brian Moore: So a lot of it actually is. I mean, yes, there is some that’s not.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Brian Moore: But a lot of it is. And basically the internet. So by then we had Twitter, which, there was a real, before it turned into the mess it is now, it was actually a pretty thriving community with a quite active accessibility community where we all shared tips and tricks and hey, how do you do this? And how do you do that? And I had a mentor kind of. He didn’t know he was my mentor, but he was. So there was a guy who was part of the W3C working group who started up a business. It was not a blind guy. He had other disabilities. But he ran a business conducting workshops on this stuff, and he asked me to come to one of them and do a screen reader demo.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Brian Moore: And obviously paid me to do it. But I went to this three day workshop. And I thought, this stuff is really cool. I want to learn more. So I started reading and reading and reading and absorbing everything I could, and going to any free webinar thing that was happening, and trying things like writing code and, okay, this works for me, this doesn’t work for me.
Brian Moore: And back to the, this impacts my real life. I would encounter barriers all the time, right, when I tried to do things online. And I thought, how much better would it be if I could explain the barrier, and if we’re real lucky, how to fix the barrier. And sometimes that’s useful. Sometimes it’s not. Like if you, for example, encounter it with a big company and you call sort of the call center, there’s not much point having that discussion with a call center agent. They’re likely not going to have a clue what you’re on about. Right. And they’re not in a position to do anything about it anyway.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Frustrating me.
Brian Moore: Yeah. And that still happens today. I mean, so the building I live in has a portal where you can submit maintenance tickets, pay fees, etc. And I actually use it in my sort of teaching web accessibility stuff in my job as an example of how to make a site completely terrible. I have a few of those sites I use as examples of how not to do this. One of the others is actually our rail company, who put some effort into it. But like they got somebody who thought, hey, accessibility means more ARIA. Let’s put lots and lots of ARIA on everything. And it’s a mess.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. You were somebody’s first hire at TD Bank. What did it feel like to walk into one of the largest banks in this country as a blind man and be told, in effect, we need you to tell us the truth about our own products?
Brian Moore: Well, it was pretty encouraging. I mean, so the guy who hired me actually left not that long after.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Brian Moore: But I mean, it was great. He was a great manager. I learned a lot from him, because that was the first time in my life I worked at a big, huge organization, right, where they had things like very formal performance reviews and evaluations and stuff. I never did that because I was either working in a small business of seven or eight or 10 people, or I was a contractor. Like when I worked for the provincial government, I was always a contractor.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right, right, right. Okay.
Brian Moore: And kind of their token disabled person that didn’t have any real work to do.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Don’t say that. It’s kind of true, though. But, you know.
Brian Moore: Oh, it was true.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah, yeah.
Brian Moore: I’m too old to have filters now. I don’t have much filters.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, but it’s the truth, you know? I mean, I experience the same thing when I work at Bank of Montreal. Same tokenism. Oh.
Brian Moore: Yeah. And it’s demoralizing. Among other things.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes it is. Yeah. It’s demoralizing. It’s discouraging. And you’re saying, what the hell am I doing here?
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Am I here? What am I going to gain out of that? Right. But anyway, continue on. Tell us.
Brian Moore: But so when this guy hired me, and I’m deliberately not naming because he may not want me to. He might. But I don’t. It was pretty much out of the gate. Like he gave me real work to do. And I thought, oh, this is kind of refreshing. Like I’m actually contributing.
Brian Moore: And I did raise things that people hadn’t thought of, or knew, like didn’t even know about, that they should have known about as far as I’m concerned. I think the best example was one of the things you can do with a banking app is deposit checks. Well, not if you’re blind.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You can’t, unless I’m missing something myself. I don’t.
Brian Moore: No, it’s all of them. I’ve done a lot of investigating since. And you have to essentially line up a check to get it right. Well, there’s actually one new U.S. bank and one UK bank that kind of have nailed this. But I wish I had an account. I don’t have an account either, because I’d love to actually see the experience.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: But when I came, I said, for example, that I can’t do this. I can go deposit in the machine, but that means I have to go to the branch. Right. But I can’t do it in the app.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No.
Brian Moore: Well, once or twice I was successful, but it was a fluke. And they said, oh, we never thought of that. And there were many other things. Right. Like so I would, for example, go on our mortgage stuff and say, you know, here’s a barrier, here’s a barrier. Here’s, because the people that were testing aren’t actually users, right? They’re people who have been told, okay, well, you have to test for this, but they don’t use it. So they don’t know what it’s supposed to do. And my argument is, if you don’t know what it’s supposed to do, you can’t know if it’s wrong.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Well that’s true. I mean, if I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, how the hell can I test it?
Brian Moore: Right.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: And, I mean, then there were other issues, like with real estate and stuff. Like with our building, for example, we have what they call destination dispatch elevators, which are the ones where there’s a touch screen and you tell it which floor you want and it tells you which elevator to take.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Brian Moore: And it had a quote unquote accessibility mode, very much in quotes, that I don’t think anyone’s ever tried until I showed up. And I said, hey, this is crap. It doesn’t work properly. And here’s what’s wrong. Here’s what it’s doing. Here’s what it’s not doing. And I have to use this thing many, many times a day because I have meetings on all different floors of our building. I mean, we’ve moved since then, but our new building has that system too.
Brian Moore: But people, I mean, now that I’ve been there eight years, what I hear is that, you know, people respect me. They say, you know what you’re doing. You give good counsel. You can convey information to different audiences. So apparently I’m respected. At least that’s what they said in my performance review. I don’t know if it’s true.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Of course it’s true. But you know, that’s, I think that’s a great compliment for people, especially to us folks who are vision impaired. Right. You are respected because you know what you’re saying. I mean, yeah, I kind of wonder sometimes if people really think of us as being. Do you know what I’m saying?
Brian Moore: Yeah. Oh, that’s absolutely a thing still. And I think the truth is we’re going to have to work a lot harder to prove ourselves than other people will. That’s just the reality. Yeah. But it’s not impossible.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, there’s a lot of hard.
Brian Moore: It’s hard. And it continues to be hard. Like, I again, I’m too old to have filters. Every day there are barriers I encounter, and sometimes they’re still demoralizing and I get exhausted and think, how long can I keep doing this? For example, as a people manager, I encountered things where, okay, I have to do forms for people that report to me and those forms aren’t accessible. Well, now I have a problem, right? They have a right to expect that that stuff will be confidential. So I can’t ask a teammate to help me.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, no you can’t. Wow. So what?
Brian Moore: So there’s workarounds. Engage people in different, higher up, not specifically for that. But so, one of the things I had to do when I started, they did use this third party company to do a pretty in-depth background check.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Brian Moore: Including fact checking, like the standard stuff. Criminal record check. Most vulnerable sector. Although I don’t know why they did vulnerable sector, but they did it. But they also fact checked your resume, which they didn’t do very well. Because they didn’t know what half the stuff was, like some of the certifications I had and stuff. And they just said, oh, we don’t know how to find that. And you could have found it in a two minute search.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: To verify it. But it was completely inaccessible. And I called the company and they said, we don’t care. Reach out to your employer, talk to them about it. So I got my, at the time, 11 year old kid to fill out and sign my background check.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh my lord.
Brian Moore: And I’ve told my employer this many times since, right? That technically I never signed the background check. My 11 year old kid did. He did it at my direction.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Of course, but still, he was 11 years old. I mean, I wonder what was going through Graham’s mind.
Brian Moore: It’s not like he can enter into a contract at 11 years old.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I wonder what he was thinking. Did he ever share his thoughts?
Brian Moore: No, I don’t think he cared. It’s just like, okay, dad needs me to help him with this thing.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes, I’ll help him out.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Fine. There is a real difference between reading an audit that somebody else wrote, and putting your own hands on a product with your own screen reader. What do you catch that an automated scan would never catch, and that a sighted tester would never catch either?
Brian Moore: So there are several things. First of all, automated scanning certainly has value. But it can’t catch everything. And it doesn’t even pretend to catch everything. Like, short of the companies claiming AI magic. Automated. Sorry.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You okay?
Brian Moore: Yeah. I made it. Scans typically can catch about 30% to 40% of accessibility issues. Things like code mistakes. Color contrast, because that’s easy, right? It’s a binary for the most part, with a machine can do it. But there are many things that a machine will never be able to tell. Like, okay, a machine can tell you, for example, if an image has an alternative text, right? But it can’t tell you if it’s any good.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right? Right. Yeah.
Brian Moore: I mean, it could just be a space character and that will pass an automated check with a machine because there’s something there. It can’t tell you, does your heading structure make sense? You know, are your headings logical on a page?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right. Right.
Brian Moore: It can tell you if your form fields have labels, but it can’t tell you if they’re the right labels.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right, right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Understood.
Brian Moore: It can’t tell you, is it easy for someone to go through this process? Those are things that you need a human. And it helps, like I said before, if that human has some idea what’s the expected behavior. So has actually had some experience using the tools that they’re supposed to test with. So for example, a machine can never tell you that if someone is zooming their screen, this piece of text is going to get cut off. Only human can do that. Now, I can’t do that. I can make guesses. Or for example, things like colors. I can’t tell you if the colors are accessible, like passing or not, because even the tools to check it aren’t actually accessible. But that’s, you can use automation to a point for that.
Brian Moore: So automation has a place and a good place, like particularly because on something large, like a bank site, a lot of your issues will be in what they call templates. Right. So it’ll be on a thousand pages that are based off that template. So if you fix it once, you’ll fix a thousand pages.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right? Okay. Brian, you and I share something very painful. I sat a certification exam with every one of my accommodations approved. And I still could not finish it, because nobody in that room could describe the diagrams to me. You have told me that your experience was almost identical, roughly two decades earlier. Would you walk our listeners through what happened to you that day, and tell us whether anyone ever acknowledged it afterwards?
Brian Moore: So yes, I will. So in 2010, I started taking Cisco courses because I wanted to get the Cisco Certified Network Architect designation, which is really nerdy.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Brian Moore: But it’s in my love hobby area that I love, which is networks and network security and that sort of thing. At the time, there was a project out of the University of Perth in Western Australia called the Cisco Academy for the Visually Impaired.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh okay.
Brian Moore: And they did a really good job of sort of teaching some of the beginning level courses and giving you accessible material, which was all great. And a lot of work, and they did a really good job. Thanks, Doctor Iain Murray. I don’t know what ever happened to him, but he was sort of the guy that led that project.
Brian Moore: But then you get to the exam. And you could get a reader for the exam. But the problem is that much of those exams are based on diagrams, and context in those diagrams is everything. It’s critical that whoever’s trying to convey that information has some clue what they’re on about. And what you suggested in your articles is absolutely the solution, that the descriptive text for those diagrams should be standardized and come from the provider. It should not be up to the reader. Because it’s impossible for a reader to neutrally convey that information, right? If they know too much about the subject matter, they’re probably going to slant their description to give you a more correct answer, because they can’t help it, right? Because they know what they’re reading and they understand it. But if they don’t know, they won’t know enough to describe it.
Brian Moore: And that’s a blocker when it comes to these exams. You can’t complete them without being able to read and interpret those diagrams. And while it’s the exam paper taker’s job to glean the correct information out of those diagrams, they’re very complicated. You need to ask a ton of questions that someone who isn’t familiar with the material will probably really struggle to answer.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: And what I discovered was that as you get further, even if you pass that hurdle, then you get into virtualized lab exams, which were on simulators. And that was also completely inaccessible. So even had I got past that hurdle, if I wanted to proceed any further, I would have been stuck again with another system with no alternatives. I mean, the people in Australia acknowledged this was a thing. The only other actual acknowledgement I got was actually from a lawyer from the NFB in the States.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Brian Moore: I forget her name, but they were trying to sort of push this issue forward. And I was sort of keen to participate, but then at that point in my life, lots of life was happening. So I kind of got sidetracked. But yeah, I mean, when I read your series of articles, it’s like, well, we really haven’t progressed, have we?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No. What do we do about this? And this is my final question to you, because my clock was winding down. What can we do?
Brian Moore: Well, I think we need to, I mean, it’s always going to be a problem, right? Getting certifications is really tough. Like, I mean, more recently I tried to get project management certification because I thought that would actually be somewhat useful in my day to day work, which it would. And I ran into very similar barriers. I got to a certain point in the course material and then I started hitting the, you need to create these color coded charts and various things.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: So I don’t know what the answer is. I mean, I think the answer for a lot of it is, if we’re going to offer certifications, things like alternative descriptions for diagrams must be provided by the test provider. There’s no way around that.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, no.
Brian Moore: And ideally not use a reader, use a computer. Because a reader, it’s too hard with a reader.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. Because everybody interprets things differently.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Picture’s worth a thousand words.
Brian Moore: Yeah. And I can go faster with a computer and I can query. I can query back. Oh, what did it say three sentences ago? That’s not so easy with the reader.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, because they get tired.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: They get frustrated. Yeah. And, you know, when they say the second time, it may not be the same as the first time.
Brian Moore: Yeah. It’s not, I mean, I don’t know if many of the tests for any certifications are accessible. And I’m not sure about, for example, the certification actual exam, because I never finished the course material because I ran into too many barriers. I mean, I learned a lot of good stuff that I actually use, but I don’t have the paper.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Well, that’s the same for me. I mean, I learned a lot in my cybersecurity course, but I don’t have the paper. Where am I going to go? I have nowhere to go.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Kind of a down note to end this really, really interesting.
Brian Moore: Yeah. I mean, in a way it’s good. So I can put a positive spin on it this way. It’s a good problem to have, because more of us are getting to the position where we care about that stuff.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah, right.
Brian Moore: Where we want professional certifications in, you know, whatever discipline.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So will the caring be enough for us to come together to push these providers?
Brian Moore: I don’t know if there’s enough of us yet, but we’re getting there.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Brian Moore: Now, in some ways, I think we’ve regressed over the past few years. Because there is quite a, you know, a real push against marginalized groups. Like, I mean, it started as a sort of anti-DEI push, but accessibility got caught up in that. Right. And it’s not just the US government. Right. That gave a lot of people permission to say the quiet bits out loud that they wouldn’t say before. But I still think we’re progressing. It’s just not as quickly as I’d like. I think we’ve regressed a bit in the last couple of years, but I think we’ll get back. And I mean, I’m far closer to the end of my career than the beginning.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So am I.
Brian Moore: But you know, I’ll never stop sort of pushing for this stuff, even if I’m not working. It’s just too ingrained in who I am as a person. And some fights are worth having. I mean, sometimes, I always say to people, you pick your battles, right? Some things are just not worth the struggle. Not worth the effort.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I agree. You pick your battles and like you like.
Brian Moore: I just don’t take Uber because I get sick of being refused.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah.
Brian Moore: So I’ll just keep my money. And I mean, occasionally that’s a battle worth having, but mostly not. I don’t care. Just take transit. Which maybe is conceding, but ultimately, I just want to live my life. And that has to be the end goal. You know, I’m all about being an advocate. I love doing it. I don’t mind doing it, but I also just get on with life.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. There comes a point when you say, you know, I got to enjoy the rest of my life.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And you pick your battles and you go on and.
Brian Moore: And some battles you don’t win. Like, I had a years long battle with Toronto District School Board to try and get an accessible report card.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Brian Moore: Which was ultimately not successful. And now it doesn’t matter anymore. They won.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I mean, you know.
Brian Moore: Now I don’t have a stake in that game.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No. Because your son is finished. He’s done.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It takes a lot for someone to admit you didn’t get what you wanted. And I haven’t gotten what I wanted in many instances.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: But you got to draw the line and move on, you know?
Brian Moore: Yeah. I mean, advocacy is great, and it’s good and worth doing. Absolutely. But ultimately, we have to be able to live life and hopefully enjoy some of it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I hope so. Yeah, you still have to be able to go enjoy a nice meal, enjoy some drinks, you know what I mean? Yeah. Some travel. You cannot, it burns you out.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And it comes to a point where you say, I’ve had enough here. I’m gone, you know. But I want to thank you, Brian. I think I said, you know, we go back many years and I’ve watched you grow. I’ve watched you do a lot of things. I’ve admired your technical skills. You put me to shame sometimes, but, you know, keep on going. Don’t give up.
Brian Moore: Oh, I won’t.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, I know you won’t. Pick your battles. And you know, every now and then we would get together and talk about what’s going on. Especially when Richard comes to town. I don’t know when he’s coming to town again, but you know, we should have some sort of a get together sometime in the fall.
Brian Moore: Yeah. Sounds good.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, maybe Melanie, or I shouldn’t be naming names here, but we’ll work on it. How about that?
Brian Moore: Yeah. Sounds good.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Brian Moore: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you so much, Brian, for taking the time. I know you’re an awfully busy guy. Say hello to Graham. I don’t know if he remembers me. I used to call him Little Prince.
Brian Moore: I don’t think he probably does, but.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. But let’s work on getting together some time, and we’ll go from there.
Brian Moore: Okay.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: All right.
Brian Moore: All right.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you so much. Hey.
Brian Moore: Thanks. Take care.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Take care, Brian.
Brian Moore: Bye.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Bye bye.
Podcast Commentator: Donna wants to hear from you and invites you to write to her at donnajodhan@gmail.com. Until next time.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA
Global Leader In Disability Rights, Digital Accessibility, And Inclusive Policy Reform
Turning policy into progress for people with disabilities.
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Published in Remarkable World Commentary