GitHub Accessibility: Bridging the Disability Divide through Code Collaboration - axe-con 2023

so I am Ed I'm a blind developer and I'm head of accessibility at GitHub my preferred program pronouns are he and him I'm a white male with short brown hair and I'm wearing sunglasses because I have difficulty controlling my eyes so when I'm presenting I like to have my sunglasses on so it doesn't distract you my preferred social is LinkedIn if you search LinkedIn for Ed Summers GitHub I should be the first one and uh please connect with me there I'd appreciate it let's go to the next slide [Music] so the roadmap of the talk is first a micro my perspective on accessibility but then of course we'll talk about GitHub and accessibility and then I'd like to introduce you to a developer with a disability who's working on some pretty cool technology let's go to the next slide doing accessibility at scale requires organizational change there are many challenges that are present uh common to all organizational change initiatives including accessibility uh not the least of which is establishing accountability and dealing with all of the conflicting priorities for all the initiatives within the organization which include accessibility one of the things I've learned after building and leading accessibility programs for the last 13 years is that discovering principles for yourself as an accessibility professional can really help manage the you know the inevitable tension and conflict that you experience as you build an accessibility program so I'll share these five principles that I use and um you know these principles they keep me grounded and they just help me make better decisions so let's go to the next slide my first three principles are grounded in the United Nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities Article 5 of The Preamble includes a definition of disability and I'll read it for you here disability results in the interaction between persons with impairments and attitudinal or environmental barriers that hinders their full and equal participation in society on an equal basis with others so that one sentence has had such a profound impact on me both as a person with a disability and as an accessibility professional and let's just unpack it here let's go to the next slide principle one everyone deserves the opportunity to participate participate in what everything everyone deserves the opportunity to learn to play to express themselves to create to contribute and to realize their full potential accessibility is the means to the end and that end that end goal is participation I've found that when I get obsessed with the technical implementation of accessibility or the optimizing the programs and the systems within the organization I can lose sight of the fact that the end goal is participation by people with disabilities and as a result of that sometimes uh the the problem can be dehumanized but it is a human problem let's go to the next slide principle two disabilities are not inherent to people so we use the terms persons with a disability person with a disability or people with disabilities and they're widely used and and I use those terms as well but according to the definition here in this Preamble they are misnomers and I'll paraphrase the Preamble it says that disability results from the interaction between persons with impairments and barriers so people have impairments potentially but they don't necessarily have disabilities the disabilities arise when they try to do something they try to read content or access something and they encounter barriers and at that point that is the origin of a disability as an example if you were to hand me a piece of paper with printed characters on it with with printing information on it because I'm blind that would that would disable me I would not be able to read the content but on the other hand if you were to send me an accessible digital document that I could read with my ear and my screen reader or read with my fingers and a refreshable display or people who have a visual impairment can change the size of the font the color of the font the contrast right then we are enabled as opposed to disable let's go to the next slide principle three we all have the power to prevent disabilities how do we do that well we've removed barriers the Preamble mentions two types of barriers the environmental barriers and there are there are a lot of great talks here at the conference about removing those those Technical and those environmental barriers I want to speak briefly about the attitudinal barriers though now one would think that removing attitudinal barriers would be easy because all we have to do is to change how people think well it turns out that changing how people think is probably one of the hardest problems known to known to human beings it's just difficult to do because we get ingrained thoughts and it's really hard to dislodge them and I want to give you an example of this several years ago my wife had to have major surgery and I was going to be I was her caretaker after the surgery while she was recovering I got her from the hospital and I recovered and helped her recover and took care of her so we went to the surgeon for the initial visit and we walked in and I had my glasses on and I had my cni dog and he looked at me says oh you want he says do you work do you work and that was that that question just stunned me into silence because I was that kid who would hustle around the neighborhood and walk dogs and clean bathrooms for the Neighbors on weekends and when I was at the legal age not to work but to get the workers permit that allowed you to work before you were legally able to work I think it was 14 years old it's hard to remember but whatever that time was I got the workers permit and I got a part-time job and I haven't been unemployed for more than a few weeks since since that time for my entire life and um and that that educated professional Physicians the surgeon his question just this floored me just think about the assumptions um that are the biases that are carried along with that question let's go to the next slide this is the accessibility equation in parents multiplied by barriers equals disabilities I was a math nerd when I was a kid I was one of those kids I didn't learn math it was just the revelation of the obvious the math is just just so obvious to me I love thinking about problems in terms of equations it helps me see the relationships it helps me boil problems down to their Essence and so I can wrap my mind around them so the equation was impairments multiplied by barriers equals disabilities now we all know that when we multiply any number by zero the result is zero so as we drive barriers to zero then disabilities go to zero and it doesn't matter how many impairments there are it doesn't matter that human beings experience a full range of abilities and that is a natural and good thing we can Empower people by removing barriers that's our job let's go to the next slide this is another primary source several years ago the World Bank published a paper called Bridging the disability divide through digital Technologies it also had a profound impact on me and I encourage you to find it and read it and we'll go to the next slide this is the the origin of principle number four technology is a disruptive force force for both inclusion and exclusion so it's a double-edged sword and there's critical regions in history those critical regions are during the big shifts in technology that are going to impact Society I'll give you an example back in the 80s and 90s before the 890s we had text-based interfaces you know dos computers and things like that graphical user interfaces were created and that became a problem for some people particularly people who are blind think about the birth of the World Wide Web during the 90s and think about what if people with disabilities could not access the web think about when we changed from what I call dumb phones with the tactile buttons on them to the smartphones with the the Slick glass front touch screens think about that as a blind person when those iPhones first came out and I said oh my goodness I will never be able to access this but within a year or so Apple came up with the voiceover screen reader and it has I mean now for me as a blind person my Apple phone is indispensable it's an indispensable access tool think about the birth of social media just imagine that people with this 1.3 billion people couldn't access social media but I remember in the beginning that so many social media sites they were not accessible and now we Face another Revolution there's a tectonic shift going on right now and it's generative AI over the next year or two generative AI will be incorporated into almost everything we do almost all of our digital Tools in every industry and I'm sure those of you out there from different Industries you're hearing how generative is going to be incorporated into your products and your services that's your organization so I want to encourage all of you to get out in front of that wave and make sure that we can include people with disabilities in the the new productivity we will experience because of generative AI let's go to the next slide principal file progress Trump's perfection if you take away one thing from this talk just one thing I want it to be this progress Trump's perfection and I know it's hard to ship because we all have fear of criticism but if you can fix one accessibility bug that removes a barrier then ship it and then find an element ship it right now don't I encourage you don't wait till it's all perfect it's okay you can remember you can fix some of the wiki criteria without fixing all of them and ship it because when you ship you enable more and more participation and it creates momentum positive movement for access I want to refer you to a gentleman named Seth Godin public pronunciation right g-o-d-i-n he was a keynote speaker last year he has written he has written very well and extensively on this idea of shipping overcoming our fear of criticism or fear of it not being ready and shipping especially his recent work over the last couple years I encourage you to pick up some of his work so here's a summary on the next slide here the next summary of the five principles these are all the principles but these are the ones that just seem poignant and uh most relevant for this diverse group of global accessibility professionals so uh grab the slide deck or take a screenshot if some one of these principles really resonated with you then uh connect me on LinkedIn and let me know I'd love to hear about that and if if on the other hand you disagree with something I said or you have a completely different experience or perspective I'd like to hear about that too because I'm continually learning I'm gonna do a quick time check I think we're doing good let's go to the next slide okay GitHub and accessibility so I get the question a lot what is the attack especially when I joined GitHub last year from you know friends and family who aren't necessarily in the tech field and apparently other covers get back questions about so we created a video that in three minutes uh explains what is GitHub this video is captioned and it's described and when we hit uh go to the next slide it's your auto play so let's go man staring at camera what do you mean what is GitHub man staring at camera it's the largest most complete development platform in the world Ducks staring at camera man shifting eyes millions of developers use it and it's not just developers these days every company is a software company close-up of duck staring man rolls eyes I thought you might say that come on let me show you lift stuck into air it starts to float away GitHub is an Enterprise transforming startup launching Community Driven super secure open source championing cloud-based platform it's where the world builds software we created algorithms and Global businesses we even went to Mars or at least our code dead man juggling oh yes with GitHub Anything is Possible but how say this is enough a senior software engineer and this is a team's project on GitHub so now on a team can create their own branches of code to work together in parallel this is my Branch an alternate timeline where I can build squash bugs and safely experiment there are communication and task delegation tools right next to my code so when we're ready to merge we merge instantly it works with thousands of branches a million projects and with built-in project planning automation CI CD and AI enhanced code editing at every step you can move fast and get your ducks in a row but we've gotta be safe about it GitHub has advanced security with automatic vulnerability detection secret scanning and more you can build and ship safely securely [Music] so now you know what GitHub is you might wonder who GitHub is graphic transition it's a student learning to code it's disruptors revolutionizing music it's a CEO transforming a global company it's 21 000 strangers working together to take the first picture of a black hole it's a place for anyone from anywhere to build a [Music] anything you think the world needs let's build from here [Music] GitHub logo [Music] was that you already knew that well I didn't say anything I was talking for ages back there it's embarrassing all right let's go to the next slide so what can you build on GitHub well you can build a solution to a problem and share it with other people you can build a community of like-minded creators you can build a career you build a personal brand there are a bunch of rock star developers on GitHub and more importantly you can build a contribution to humanity let's get to the next slide the prime directive of the GitHub accessibility program is to empower people with disabilities to build cool technology well you know when I was first getting started as a developer I got bit by the bug of creating things that just delighted me and delighted other people that I shared it with us and it's that that feeling that that Joy of creation that got me hooked and I think it's true for a lot of creators and it is it is that that feeling and that camaraderie of building cool things with other people that's what I personally want everyone to be able to experience if they so choose that's what drives accessibility at GitHub let's get to the next slide so we've created some pillars for our accessibility program we'll just go through them really fast pillar number one is our workplace so the work here is to empower what we call hovers so GitHub employees we call ourselves helpers hubbers with disabilities to be able to contribute to GitHub and to build the company and that that equal representation of people with disabilities within GitHub that's an important part of the strategy uh because we move so fast we build GitHub on GitHub and it's important that people like me people with disabilities people with all types of disabilities are part of that and as a result of that what we ship will be accessible pillow number two is our offerings so our offerings include the total developer experience everything the products the website the doc the support the events the social channels all of it it's all we're all working to make it all accessible it turns out though that in order to contribute to development teams there are other barriers beyond the technical barriers there's the attitudinal barriers now this the social there's the barriers to attaining the skills in order to do this kind of work and that's pillow number four pillar number three I'm sorry um which is our impact and luckily we have a wonderful social impact team at GitHub uh and we partner with the social impact team in order to make this this broader impact and remove some of those non-technical barriers from participation and finally our promise uh we will ship to learn will be transparent and we'll listen let's get to the next slide okay so back to the generative AI wave GitHub co-pop GitHub co-pilot is is an AI pair program so and what it does is well one of the things it does it suggests code for you to consider and we know we're starting to see some research that that that says that it can improve improve developer productivity and developer happiness and the thing I like about it most because I use it and the thing I like about it most is it never gets tired and it never passes judgment uh on my code and you know I'm I'm a little rusty when it comes to writing code I was full-time developer many years ago but I haven't written code full time for oh that's my 13 years now um so uh you know I'm I'm Rusty and my code is frankly not that good you know so it helps the um well my anxiety about my code of course I check it into GitHub and everybody can see it so let's go to the next slide so as I said we're working on some research and I won't quote this slide but basically um we know that GitHub co-pilot is increasing productivity of developers and as a result of that and it's going to get better from here as a result of that though um it's particularly important that we ensure that everyone can participate in githubot and realize the benefits of those of those improvements let's go to the next slide there is a developer with cerebral palsy uh his name is Anton and he's been working with GitHub co-pilot and chat GPT uh he has uh impairments that make it difficult for him to speak and it's difficult for him to type with his hands so there's a quote on the side here that I'll just paraphrase Anton is basically developed some strategies that allow him to use um his own kind of shorthand language to express himself in very few keystrokes and these generative AI tools are getting better and better about um understanding what he's trying to express and offering suggestions for him that he can choose from and refine and this is a much more efficient workflow so I'm really excited to see as this technology unfolds uh how it can continue to improve access for people with disabilities like Anton in addition to that I use copot as I said and I recorded a little video as a blind developer using Code Pilot I recorded this video it's using my screen reader um Nvidia and it's pretty slow I slowed it down so you know people who don't listen to things really fast can can understand so it's it's a little slow um especially for sighted people you know I go through all the code in the video all the code on the screen so that those who can't see the screen uh can perceive what I'm doing so this is three minutes long let's go to the next slide and take a look at this demo hi this is Ed Summers from GitHub in this video I'll show you how I use copilot with vs code and the nbda screen reader on Windows I've opened a file named numbers.js within vs code in that file I've written a comment block that describes a function I've also written the signature for the function but I haven't written the implementation yet let's take a look I'll read the code from top to bottom star star compute the sum of the numbers in an array Dot star at param left brace object left bracket right bracket right race numbers an array that contains numbers dot start returns left brace number right brace the sum of all numbers in the array dot star slash function some left parent numbers right parent I'll ask copilot to suggest implementations for the function by pressing Ctrl enter [Music] comma preview comma editor group 2 editor has auto complete multi-line synthesizing 0-10 Solutions synthesizing 10 10 Solutions left parent duplicates hidden right parent great let's take a look at the first suggestion last seven equal suggestion one land function some left parent numbers right parent left brace bar total equals zero semi for left parent Vari equals zero semi eye less numbers dot length semi I plus plus right parent left brace total plus equals numbers left bracket I right bracket semi right race return total semi right brace looks good I'll accept the suggestion by pressing Ctrl slash numbers.js editor as autocomplete multi-line function some left parent number right parent left brace copilot inserts the suggestion directly into my code let's take a look I'll read the file from top to bottom leg slash star star star computes the sum of the numbers and then array dot star at param left brace object left bracket right bracket right race numbers in a rate that contains numbers dot start returns left brace number right brace the sum of all numbers in the array dot star slash function some left parent number right parent left brace bar total equals zero semi for left parent Vari equals zero semi eye less numbers dot length semi I plus plus right parent left brace total plus equals numbers left bracket I right bracket semi right brace return total semi right brace okay let's go to the next slide oh there's one thing I want to mention there there is one keystroke in that demo that is still in preview um the one that accepts the code and actually puts it into the um into uh the the source code uh and the workaround for that that I use if you go try that right now the workaround that I use um if that's not in place if you don't have access to that yet but you won't right now it'll be out soon um is to copy and paste code from the uh GitHub panel uh the code pod panel into your source code that's that's the Workman but look for that fixing okay hey GitHub uh Hey GitHub is a voice enabled version essentially of GitHub co-pilot it's currently in technical preview it's an experiment if you have difficulty typing with your hands or in your developer or you know somebody who does and you want to try it and give us some feedback on it then uh go to the URL of the screen and I'll read it out githubnext.com projects slash hey hyphen GitHub and there's some videos there and you can sign up for the technical preview let's go to the next slide okay one of the best parts of my job is being able to talk to developers with disabilities learn what they're doing um and amplify their voices and celebrate their successes I recently had the opportunity to meet and talk with a young developer named Becky Tyler and we created a little video to just to show what she's doing and uh and to celebrate her successes so this will auto play when we go to the next side and let's go the town of Dundee Scotland sunny and Lush field and Hill outside of Becky's home trees blow in the Wind Awards and signs decorate Becky's room [Music] my name is Becky I live in Dundee in Scotland I started playing video games when I was three I am a teen artist and I use outrage and rebuild professional art packages to paint pictures using my eyes I also have a YouTube channel called Dad Gay's girl hi guys this is our Gay's girl also known as Becky I would like to show you my world this is how I build things I love it today I am going to show you my saddle into the woods made in greater I use adaptive technology practically all of the timers it is the door to my Independence Becky Smiles as she codes on her computer using an eye tracking device we still have the majority of designers and programmers as young perfect non-disabled men and in order to produce more in clusive technology we need people here and understanding of the diversity of what it means to be human Becky and annalou drive through a hallway in wheelchairs main title coding accessibility Becky several barges moored on an English Channel a swan swim slowly passed Kirsty developer rides her bike to work when I was growing up my family fostered one of the things we did was off the dress bike care so I was aware that there was a community of people who could be better represented and better supported by all of the advances in technology Dr Mick Donegan the first time I became interested in gaze tracking was when I was a teacher and a deputy of a special school and several of the children had cerebral palsy basically they couldn't speak they were non-speaking but they spoke through their eyes Becky looks at her computer as she uses eye tracking to code eye gaze technology allows me to control the software interfaces and it means that this is one of the few things I can do totally independently Becky speaks to camera I first learned about accessible technology for gaming from special effects Stone buildings in the distance special effects offices outside of Oxford especially thanks to charity that started because is my background is in education and Technology the young people I was working with were asking if I could help them to be able to play video games I decided to set up a charity that had therapists and had technical Specialists and we were able to do our best to actually carry out an assessment and help those individuals that's why we started and the idea was to spread what we learned around the world Sunny exterior makespace Oxford where Kirsty is working at her computer I was working for a startup and getting a little bit bored so I was looking at Assist Technology how to help people with disabilities to solve everyday problems I got in touch with special effect to find out if they might have things that they wanted a volunteer programmer to work on they told me they'd wanted for a long time to work on a better interface for Minecraft for a lot of their players Christie and miktok I'm on special features mean that I can combine Mouse movements and keep presses on a keyboard at the same time I tested these versions of the eye mine in the place that Herman gave close to you my feedback Percy starts a video call with Becky okay Becky how's it going this week uh what have you been working on since last week I am working on excluding fruit that is bad to eat it is taking me a long time to find the right IDs as I have to print them out is there a better way to get the ideas okay um do you want to show me how you're getting it books in a 3D printer are in Christy's office my mind was built as a fork of the optical project which is writtenberg I called Julia Sweetland published to you GitHub GitHub UI I initially started building something from scratch but it was a very long way from what Tiki already offered it was a no-brainer to jump on and build on top of that excellent work can we work on choosing a weapon today okay so this is the attacking mod can you get us to that new function choose weapon and then we can make some changes to it together how about you write the next line of code and so we'll want a ID for the crossbow they continue their call Becky Smiles it's really important for children adults teenagers to be part of the culture that is around them you can explore you can be creative you can socialize a lot of people just go into Minecraft to hang out with their friends so it's really a window into a world in which you can do all of the things that your friends are doing monitor over Chrissy's shoulder we're not going to return anything so that's a void okay are you happy with what's happening in this method now good brilliant let's make this commit here and then we'll push it to GitHub okay GitHub UI video call ends update thank you and I will see you next week thank you Becky in a wheelchair talks to camera outside is sunny we started working more closely together and Kirsty staff and she's trying me to become a nightmare developer I am now quoting some new mods myself to be incorporated into the imine interface in the future I am loving it it makes me feel valued and respected car drives by in Old Dundee exteriors of University of Dundee Professor Anna Lou Waller speaks I've had many rows in keeping head of competing at the University of Tennessee School of computing Queen Mother building sign it's a teaching team we invited Becky to our undergrad students [Music] I then asked Becky what did she want to do when she grew up and Becky said she would like to do competing and I said well have you thought about doing the competing degree at Andy blue skies above an old building analum assurance that it is possible to overcome the barriers of disability and achieve it the top levels of Academia it helped me to realize what I could potentially achieve in a workplace and it gave me a way to give something back to the disabled Gaming Community it has been amazing and it has allowed me to show the world just what someone with severe disabilities can achieve I hope to open up many more opportunities for disabled people in the world of gaming and communication Becky and Honolulu enjoy time in an outdoor Garden near Sunset it's Technologies don't think about the diversity of the inducer we are going to have a bigger gap between what people could achieve in what they can achieve we wanted our mind to be an example to the games industry to developers to show this is how you can make a mainstream game more accessible so that it was at the same time as giving a lot of people hopefully a lot of pleasure it was also giving a lot of developers some food for thought and an example that they that they might be able to bear in mind the next time that they develop a game it's been really rewarding to see the value that can be added from not just a single piece of assistive technology about the potential that you can then unlock in an individual to add value back to their community and to build on that and take it further Becky has an expressive laugh I hope that people considered with emerging Technologies and a willingness of attitude from those in positions of authority that so much could be possible in the future and they're truly inclusive world could be a reality for disabled people like me from far away we see Becky in the outdoor Garden GitHub logo credits roll [Music] foreign [Music] so what we found is that that video just leaves you wanting to know more and uh so we thank you so so what we did is after shooting the video and and working on it internally uh we decided to go a little deeper with Becky and we recorded a podcast that knives deeper and and has a more interactive conversation between Becky Kirsty and Dr Waller and that led to the creation of a feature story on readme so if you go to github.com readme

that's the readme project and that's where we showcase and interact with uh developers and what's going on in the GitHub community github.com readme and on that page you'll find the feature article that just published this week which embeds that video and as well as a link to the readme podcast the latest episode of the reading podcast we also went ahead and cut out a few of the short segments from the podcast um interview for you all here because I knew you might have additional questions specifically about how Becky works so let's roll this no this next video here at the bottom of my monitor I have an eye tracker that is Cali braided to my eyes and it can tell exactly where on my screen I am looking my eyes become like my computer mouse so wherever I look on the screen the cursor goes then I can do a mouse click on the screen by staring in one place for a short time it's not easy and it takes a bit of practice there is nothing about eye gaze access that is effortless a user who is just starting out with our guys needs to learn how to control their eyes and use their eye muscles in a different way than when they are just looking at things so it takes a lot of practice when she's coding most of the time Becca is using an interface that I built for her based on optikey but with some extra hacks in it for coding and with some custom keyboards specifically for vs code that she's using and I can make some reasonable guesses about what will be necessary to make a piece of software more accessible um based on my experience of working with people with eye gaze but in reality it's never exactly as I picture because that's not what I'm doing every day so we would get on to get onto Zoom together Becky would have a request of what she wanted to work on next um there was one one bug in particular that took me a long time to pin down because whenever it happened with Becky I would say oh yes I need to Lug that bug and whenever I went to log it I'd go oh it doesn't seem to be happening for me and it was a very specific order of keyboard and mouse workflow that always hit Becky because of the way that she was using her eye control system um and I didn't even realize that at a crucial point in the process I switched to you know jumping on the keyboard or jumping on the mouse or something uh but yeah so I think it was certainly really valuable for me to iterate on the interfaces and the the kind of workflow tooling that Becky was using and I hope it was also useful for Becky in terms of uh practice encoding how did you find it Becky I find our precoding sessions very useful you taught me how to split problems up into manageable components to solve I also learned how eugeo coding so I picked up some good tips from you that I wouldn't otherwise have thoughts about the uh interesting thing about pair coding with Becky over Zoom is that she has it set up so that I can see where she's looking so her eye tracker will show a little circle on the screen which means that if I ask her a question like oh you know how do you think we'll solve this problem I see where her eyes go and it's like a secret window and her brain as she kind of looks to read the comments or look through the API docs and I'm like yep I know what you're about to say and we actually end up not even having to communicate with words all that much and I think for me it's about enabling more people with complex disabilities to get into the field of competing as a career people like Becky even people like me find the technology can provide them more labor playing field when Becky plays Minecraft people don't necessarily need to know their teeth easy I guess a lot of my research and demonstrated that the even the basic can support the natural development in children with complex disabilities and so I am sure that anything we develop would have applications I am always excited to see new accessibility features in software and new hardware that enables me to do new things that I have never been able to do before when I can be involved in such development projects it makes me feel so proud to be helping other disabled people like me great let's go to the next slide there's a few links here um there you go learn more slide um github.blog slash tag tag accessibility that'll take you to the all of our blog posts from the accessibility team of which there's one yesterday that has just a summary of all the assets um the the feature article the video that you saw and the podcast and links to those quick easy links to those and then of course there's accessibility on github.com which we are in the process of building out that contains lots of information about the accessibility program at GitHub and the next slide is our wrap and we're coming in just a couple minutes over but I look forward to some questions Patrick are you there I'm here great presentation Ed we've got some great questions for you let's kick it off with uh this first one how do you see AI improving or affecting things for accessibility oh yeah it's going to be overwhelming I think I think there's going to be so many opportunities uh the the generative AI um the GPT models uh they are doing some amazing things uh that are just you know just coming to light and as they continue to evolve rapidly over the next uh well it's happening right now gpt4 just came out um and I haven't tried it yet but I heard that you can have a conversation with with shot GPT about an image and ask it questions about what's in an image and I've been so busy frankly preparing for this presentation that I've had a chance to try it yet but I can't wait to try that one in particular and you know and the the great thing about uh generative Ai and the maturity of AI now is that there's so much of this that's behind apis and and if you look at the um just what's going on in the Venture Capital world and the startups that are being funded right now it's just there's just a flourishing of ideas and applications of AI in different Industries and I think that's going to happen and obviously in the accessibility field as well and I just can't wait to see what this community can do because I'm sure all of you out there have ideas about how you could use AI to improve access I just can't wait to see what you all do with it I can't wait either to see what the next new innovation is going to be for us moving on to our next question how did you get into GitHub accessibility a good question um I got talked for the for a job posting on LinkedIn and I was you know it was it was time it was it was about that time when I was you know considering other opportunities I opened the job posting and I read it and I was like well well geez that's a really good fit and I sent it to my wife and she read it she says wow did they write that job for you I mean it's like they she said you know it's like they wrote the job description specifically for you before the time I hadn't applied for a job in 12 years you know I've been I've been very happy in my role for a long time and I on a Sunday night I put together my resume for a couple hours I you know took 30 minutes and wrote out a cover letter and I sent it off and I was like oh you know it's worth a try and uh two months later uh I was hired for the position great story we have time for one more question and the question is um are there plans to bring automated accessibility testing into GitHub like there is for security yeah yeah that's a great idea obviously I can't talk about concrete plans but but clearly that's something we discussed and there's a lot of opportunity there as well um could what we'll uh we'll take one more question could GitHub standardize the way bugs are entered into the system could GitHub standardize the way that bugs are introduced so what you can do that issue is into issues yeah right but you could do that with issue templates if you haven't had a chance to look at issue templates that's what we use internally but GitHub and on the accessibility team and you can do a lot of um you know great front end work in making sure that you get the information that you need about each bug and also uh you know putting tags on each bug that meet the needs you know of that particular issue you know give that a try if you haven't that's already great that's all the questions we can take Ed thank you very much for your presentation it's very uh moving and I'm glad I'm about to meet you and hopefully we'll connect and have a continued conversation I want to thank everyone who's joined x-con and have been watching these presentations and everyone have a great day thank you [Music]

2024-08-22 03:18

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