Revolutionizing Digital Accessibility – ep.157

In this episode of The Jali Podcast, host Melyssa Barrett sits down with Michael Paciello, a pioneer in digital accessibility and the Chief Accessibility Officer at AudioEye, Inc. With over four decades of experience, Mike has played a transformative role in making the digital world more inclusive. From receiving recognition by President Bill Clinton for his work with the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative to founding The Paciello Group and authoring the first book on web accessibility, Mike’s contributions have shaped the accessibility landscape.

Join us as we discuss his journey into accessibility, the challenges and opportunities in inclusive design, and how emerging technologies like AI are revolutionizing the field. Learn about his vision for a fully accessible digital world and how organizations can embed accessibility into their core practices. Whether you’re an advocate, a business leader, or simply curious about creating an equitable digital space, this episode will inspire and educate.

Tune in to learn how Michael Paciello is leading the way in digital accessibility and making a lasting impact on communities worldwide.

Paciello is the Chief Accessibility Officer at AudioEye, Inc., a digital accessibility company. Prior to joining AudioEye, Mike founded WebABLE/WebABLE.TV, which delivers news about the disability and accessibility technology market. Mike authored the first book on web accessibility and usability, “Web Accessibility for People with Disabilities” and, in 1997, Mr. Paciello received recognition from President Bill Clinton for his work in the creation of World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web

Accessibility Initiative (WAI). He has served as an advisor to the US Access Board and other federal agencies since 1992. Mike has served as an international leader, technologist, and authority in emerging technology, accessibility, usability, and electronic publishing. Mike is the former

Founder of The Paciello Group (TPG), a world-renowned software accessibility consultancy acquired in 2017 by Vispero.

Melyssa Barrett:  Welcome to the Jali Podcast. I’m your host, Melyssa Barrett. This podcast is for those who are interested in the conversation around equity, diversity, and inclusion. Each week I’ll be interviewing a guest who has something special to share or is actively part of building solutions in the space.

Let’s get started. Michael Paciello is the Chief Accessibility Officer at Audio Eye Incorporated, where he drives advancements in digital accessibility. He previously founded WebAble tv, delivering insights on disability and accessibility technology, and authored the pioneering book Web Accessibility for People with Disabilities. Recognized by President Bill Clinton in 1997 for his role in the W three C’S web accessibility initiative. Mike has advised the US Access Board and other federal agencies since 1992, an international leader in accessibility and usability. He also founded the Paciello Group, TPGA, leading software accessibility consultancy acquired by Sparrow in 2017.

 All right. I’m excited to have you here today,Michael Paciello , and I know you have done such amazing work in the industry. You’re influencing policy and people that probably don’t even know what you’re doing in the background, so I absolutely love celebrating people who, whether you have received recognition or not, and I know you have for the work you do, I just want to thank you for all of the work that you’re doing in the space.

Michael Paciello:  Thank you. You’re too kind and you’re very kind. Same.

Melyssa Barrett:  I just want to kick off just by asking you, where did your journey start? How did you decide that you wanted to pursue a career in digital accessibility, or how did this journey begin?

Michael Paciello:  It’s a great question. Lots of folks know it, but many folks do not. So I have literally been in this profession of digital accessibility since the, literally, this is my 40th year, since 1984, and that stumbled into it really, and I think oftentimes for individuals in the community of people with disabilities or in the profession, usually it comes from one or two angles. Most of the time it’s because they’ve got a family member with a disability and something comes up, something clicks, they’re searching for an answer, a solution, what have you. That was not my case. That didn’t happen. The reality of it was that I stumbled into it. I was working for a company that doesn’t even exist today, but at the time, in the mid eighties, digital Equipment Corporation was the second largest computer corporation on the earth next to IBM. And I had taken a job as a technical writer.

I always wanted to be a writer. I’d always had aspirations towards writing, and that’s just the way my career path went. I ended up with this technical writing job, not exactly my idea of a writer, but it was interesting. About a year into my career, so to speak, one of my managers came up to me and said, Hey, Mike, I’ve got this little project on the side and just wondered if maybe you could take this off by plate. And basically what the project involved was taking the computer documentation that we there at digital in delivering the hard copy volumes. And when I say volumes, for anyone that’s out there that wants to get a description, we’re talking seven 800 page books. These are books that are about operating systems back then, which were very complex for the computer systems then. But we’re not talking about a little 20 page booklet here. We’re talking large volumes. And then at that, oftentimes volumes of volumes,

And we would take them, the job was to just take the printed version down to Boston, Massachusetts. I worked up in Southern New Hampshire at the time and deliver them to the National Braille Press in Boston. My boss said, I get one or two requests a year for these things, so it’s not a big deal. I would really appreciate it. And I’m thinking, Hey, this is a nice little piece to add to my resume. Maybe I’ll get a bonus out of it, or something along those lines. Selfishly centered. The next day I got a request from the MBP and I said, huh, great. Let go about see what this is all about. So I grabbed a few volumes of these books that they wanted, drove down to Boston, ended up being introduced to the then director Bill Reeder of the National Braille Press. And so they were very thankful for the publications, and he said, Hey, let me give you a tour.

Let me show you how we produce braille from the printed page. And I thought, sure, why not? And long story short, he showed me the painstaking process of what it took. Now, this is the mid eighties. Back then, basically there were no electronic versions of files per se. They existed, but per se, they didn’t. They just took a printed page and a person with a braille typewriter, so to speak, hand type this all in, and then they would create a master copy, and then they would put it on their braille presses. It would take them months, sometimes a year or longer to produce one braille book,

Because three pages of braille printed braille are the equivalent of one regular printed page that a cited person typically thumbs through. And I’m thinking, this is ridiculous. It’s crazy because I’m back in my office and we’re producing documentation in minutes in seconds. Even then, it was all text based, not a whole lot of graphics, but we were still producing them. Not only that, but at that particular time, I was working with a very early version of a markup language for electronic documents. This was all invented by Charles Goldfarb at IBM. But basically it was the parallel of a publishing editor who would go through a document markup that document a printed page and say, here’s a paragraph. This is a header. This is a bold, this needs to be bolded, this needs to be indented, things like that. So structure on a page. Now, that task was being meaning into an electronic format.

That’s how markup languages, which are basically the foundation of the web today came about. So I thought, if I can create an electronic document page for a printer, and back then we were playing with different types of printers, including the very early versions of Postscript, which was the predecessor of PDF. So we all know PDF and Adobe and Acrobat. So this gives you an idea of the timeline there, right? Yeah, I’d like to produce them for those printers. Why could I produce them for a Braille printer? Try to make a long story short, I did some research, reached out to some colleagues, not colleagues, but new friends in the field, said, Hey, have you ever done this? Have you tried this? And we ended up creating a working group in international working group made up of folks from Japan, Europe, the us, Australia, and I think we end in Canada. We got together, launched it to this day, it’s the largest conference on people with disabilities in California, and we created the International Standard Publishing Standard for producing accessible documentation. So that stumbling in to making documentation accessible to the blind was how my career started. Because at the time, I was really not, I was young. I was in my twenties, wasn’t really sure what I was going to do, what I was going to be when I grew up. This caught my eye. This became my passion. Here I am for years later.

Melyssa Barrett:  That’s awesome. What a great story. Thank you. So then in terms of, because I know even pulling together a global like that, what were some of the initial challenges that you guys faced when you were beginning that in Denver and to really advocate for

Michael Paciello:  Accessibility? Yeah, so that’s another great question. Ironically, the one challenge that we didn’t have was language, languages, right? Internationalization that everyone had a common English. We all could speak English, even the folks from Europe and Japan particularly. So that worked out well, so we could communicate. We all had, even though this is the eighties, so there’s no web, then there was a notion of the internet. The internet was out there, different forms of communicating electronic email that we could use. So we closed the gap, so to speak, at that level. The challenges were, there really weren’t any predecessors for us. We had some inklings of Braille itself was already being formed in an electronic format. So one of our committee members at that time was Joe Sullivan, who created and invented the Duxbury Braille translator. So we had an expert there. One of my colleagues that helped me form this group was George Kerscher.

George at that particular time, owned a little company called Computerized Books for the Blind, and so he was already trying to produce books for the blind on disks. Back then, they were the big floppy disks that we had, so he would produce that. So we had that, how we’re going to produce this. But beyond the fact that Goldfarb had this, what he called standard generalized markup language. Beyond that, we didn’t have a whole lot to work with. So we had to come up with what do the blind need or what do individuals who perhaps have visual disabilities other than blindness, what would they need, say for example, screen magnification, larger text pictures or something that was voice ready, what do they need? So it really came down to defining those critical needs of users collectively, asking users, asking publishers what kind of requests that they were getting from, again, from the blind and low vision community. Those are some of the bigger challenges. Then I think the other thing was two, one of the things was how do we communicate on a regular basis? How do we meet? Travel wasn’t nearly as easy as it is today. We certainly didn’t have social networking video calls or anything like that at that particular time. So that became a challenge. So we just decided that we would meet at conferences that we all attended anyway, so now we had a common ground, and those became three or four times a year our meeting places for doing that.

And finally it was to get a standards body to back us up because we were producing a standard, right? A publishing. And between the SGML organization and the American Association of Publishers, we got their backing. We were able to produce what’s called the ICAD 22, and that’s an official publishing standard you could still look up today.

Melyssa Barrett:  Wow, that’s pretty awesome. In this day and age of data standards, bodies are critical in helping people understand how to exchange data, not only among for business purposes, but for every purpose. And so I think it’s awesome that you had some foresight with all of the people that you have from around the world. That’s pretty cool.

Michael Paciello:  Yeah, I’ll tell you, a lot of it really is people ask me that question, there’s a little bit of luck involved there. Sometimes you just stumble into things, and this is something I stumbled into. And then the next thing you know, you’re talking to Vince Surf guy that helped invent the web, or you’re talking to Tim Burnley or Surf was the invented of the internet, Burnley, the web and gohar, the SGML language, and just all of the Yuri Binky who created the first graphical user authoring tool that we’re using for SGML and then later for HTM l, and I just started to, at that time, we’re meeting all these heroes of the technology field. Mark Anderson, I knew when he was in college and stumbled in with the Mosaic browser. You just say, how in the world did I get here? And why me? I still think that to this day, but it’s a wonderful thing. It’s a wonderful

Melyssa Barrett:  Thing. It’s a wonderful thing. So then I know you just wrote your book, a book on web accessibility for people with disabilities, and I know it focuses on WebEx, accessibility and usability. So how did you start decide that you wanted to write this book, and how has it influenced the industry?

Michael Paciello:  Yeah, it’s another great question. First of all, you should know that book will be 25 years old in next year. So I didn’t just write it. It does hold the distinction of being, it was the first book ever written on that topic. Now, many other books, my friends and colleagues in the field have come out year after year, some that I consider much better than what I put together. But I’ll tell you a little bit something about me. I keep whiteboard lists of things that I’ve always wanted to accomplish, and one of the things that I always wanted to accomplish was to actually write a book. And long story short, I came up with this idea of writing a book about web accessibility. I was literally in between jobs At that particular time. I was working as a volunteer at the Worldwide Web Consortium on web accessibility, and I had time and I thought, this is a little window. How about if I write a book? So I approached a few friends in the publishing field, got picked up by a publisher, came up with the title, pulled the book together. I wrote that book in three months.

Melyssa Barrett:  Wow.

Michael Paciello:  I had all the notes. I had everything but collecting all theirs. It was just a matter of organizing the notes, putting ’em all together, having a good, great editor, which I did to work with me in terms of the outline instruction, how things worked out, and I pulled the whole thing at the suffrage of my wife then and my kids, well, four of them, I had to take the summer off, and I wrote that in the summer of 1998. I went to publishing in 99, and I think it was officially produced and released in 2000 by CMP publishers.

Melyssa Barrett:  That’s awesome. What an awesome experience. So then you went on to do all sorts of things with respect to the web accessibility initiative and W three C and all of those things. And I don’t have a lot of experience that I know when I was working in payments technology, there was a lot of focus when we were developing products to make sure that they were appropriately created, and we had a group within our company that specifically focused on W three C and all of the accessibility requirements, which was really helpful for us because you are responsible for bringing products to market, but we didn’t know everything we’re supposed to know. So it was great that we actually had a resource we could go to, and they were very familiar with what needed to be done and what the requirements for those would be. So what I can imagine, and you were recognized by President Clinton for your influence on the industry, so I know you’re being humble, but what has some of that influence looked like?

Michael Paciello:  Let me give you just a little bit of background if I could, about the way the web accessibility, how that all came about, because I think that’s an important part of the story, and of course of my story, my biography, if you will. It was at that particular time I was working, like I said, as a volunteer at MIT, I was half working, but most of my focus was trying to look at what the web and accessibility would be about. There were a number of us that were involved at that particular time, but again, there were no standards. Tim Birdley, the venture of the web, and who was the director of the W three C at that time, they had obviously close connections to the US Federal government and to Europe, and they were able to secure funding that allowed us to create an office that would be a central office.

I worked with folks at the W three C, including Jim Miller, Tim Dier particularly, and we came up with this office. We wrote a business plan for what we would eventually call the web accessibility initiative, and it was through that office that had a couple of key charters. One was just to build awareness. One was get the word out. Here’s what needs to be done to make information usable and accessible on the worldwide web today. So that became part of the charter. The other charter that we had was for all intents and purposes, the W three C is a standards body. It’s not like ISO the way that we typically understand iso, but it’s certainly a body that produces standards. And so now we were going to produce an official standard and a series of guidelines, and so we had already in place guidelines and standards that were being produced by WGBH and their National Center for Accessible Media out of Boston, the Trace Research Center out of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, some work that myself, that International Committee of accessible document design we were working on.

So we had some of these things. It was a matter now of bringing them, putting them into a home, the web accessible initiative office became the home and then turning them into an official standard. So that’s how that all became part parcel of what we see today. As it carries forth through, we’re working on those guidelines are called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and we’re now already working on version three of them. So in 25 years, we’ve gone through three full versions. So as that thing happened, my life followed. So it wrote the book, created the initiative office with full support from President Clinton and others there that were there to get the funding that we would need to get that office off the ground. Then from there, I decided, okay, I know what’s next. It’s not just web but software. So I want to create a company that would be basically a company of experts and professionals that would help other companies and other organizations build and deliver accessible web and accessible software application.

So that led me to creating what my own company called TPG or, right. Yeah. And we did that for 15, 16 years, and it became the model because of all of the team, all of the folks that worked with me, worked for me, but really worked with me, we’re all colleagues and friends who just built this massive group of just incredible humans, incredible friends, many with disabilities themselves, others not, but many had family members with disabilities. But the thing was, we had the same common passion, and that was to make the web and make software usable and accessible for people with disabilities. The underserved, one of the underserved populations and TPG became a market name, a market brand till I sold it.

Melyssa Barrett:  No doubt, no doubt. And now I know you are doing all sorts of wonderful things as the Chief accessibility Officer at Audio Eye. So how is audio eye making strides in digital accessibility? And tell me what excites you about your work there.

Michael Paciello:  Yeah, thank you for asking that question, because it was a massive and really challenging job. I’ve actually been retired for several years and just playing off the background, doing little things, making myself available, acting more as a mentor more than anything to friends. But there’s a big challenge out there today in accessibility. And as you are aware, more than 250,000 websites are being built every day and over 95% of them are not accessible. They don’t meet those accessibility guidelines. This is a result of data that has been collected and then distributed by an organization called Web A, and they’ve been producing these reports year after year that basically say that the whole pages, I remind the web or the web applications of the 1 million websites that they analyze and survey each year, 96% of them are not accessible.

Melyssa Barrett:  Oh, wow.

Michael Paciello:  And yet, I know that there are thousands, we maybe reaching tens of thousands now of professionals in the field who are working really hard with the tools that they have and the expertise that they have to try to help these companies in these organizations make their sites accessible. Here’s the problem, and this is one of the reasons why I decided to make this leap. We can’t scale.

We cannot keep up with that mass production as it were of those web entities. And yet the digital society that we live in today is now the new brick and mortar. It’s replaced it for all intents and purposes. This is where people shop. This is where people do their government services, file their taxes, everything and anything that you could think of at any level has been digitized in one form or another. This show, right? We’re not doing radio anymore. We’re not doing standard television anymore. Everything is through video streaming and whatnot. So it’s a very different world, and for accessibility, we can’t scale. There’s a lot of thoughts about how do we make this happen. One way that we tried to tackle was from the top down, try to get the C-level folks to invest in into their credit. Companies like a Microsoft or Adobe and Amazon, companies like that. They have made those kind of investments, but their products today still by and large, have issues with accessibility. And they’re just a few, right? We’re not even talking about the Fortune 100, right? We’re talking about the Fortune five maybe.

Melyssa Barrett:  Yeah.

Michael Paciello:  Scale.

Melyssa Barrett:  And I guess the first thing that comes to mind when you talk about scale is now you throw in artificial intelligence. The speed at which we are maximizing the capacity. I think there is a statistic out there that says artificial intelligence is doubling in content capacity every two months right now.

Michael Paciello:  I’m surprised it’s that long. Frankly, I’m watching things being produced, mass produced again by ai. Yeah, but I’m glad you talked about, because you asked me what was it that brought me to audio? I, so audio, I are experts in AI and automation.

That was what, that was the cue for me. Now, there’s some other reasons why I got involved that have more to do with the industry itself, but the fact of the matter was I saw we needed to scale. I saw their advances of what they were working on in ai. I saw what they were doing already with automation, realizing that this is all the work in progress, so you never get it right the first time. To quote the quote a Billy Joel raise, right? But I knew there’s a lot of work I knew were dedicated people, so let’s get the ai, let’s get the automation, and then we integrate that into getting experts testing, still doing the testing, providing the consultation that clients need. And most importantly, because this is a real critical aspect of making sure is this thing usable and accessible, was involving individuals with disabilities as part of that development process, that remediation process that we’re doing.

So that’s what we do. We do automated remediation, and we’re experts at it. We’re good at it. The company’s got 126,000 clients right now to speak to, and we’ve got a lot more work to do. I think all of us will admit that slowly but surely, we’re getting better. But that’s the way things happen with technology. You break it out. AI itself has been around for 30, 40 years as far I know, probably more than that as far as I know, but it’s only been the last year or so that we’re starting to figure out how do we use it and how does it make life better for us in a lot of different ways.

Melyssa Barrett:  And you bring up such great points because I think when you think about AI and how it’s changing the landscape, we all know that the work that you’re talking about with respect to accessibility doesn’t just focus on people with different abilities. It helps everyone. And so when you think about the changing landscape of data, and you referenced it, whether we’re talking about video or other aspects, how do you think AI has changing the landscape when it comes to digital accessibility?

Michael Paciello:  Yeah, aside from the

Melyssa Barrett:  Scale.

Michael Paciello:  Exactly right. Aside from the scale. So for one, we can produce information faster. We can produce data faster. Can we view quantified and qualified data though? What is the trustfulness or trustworthiness of that data? So that’s a big thing. Okay. It’s a big thing for people with disabilities because they have already are behind the eight ball, so to speak, in terms of how they even can get that information to themselves rendered through whatever technology that they may be using. So AI has the potential of tri it, right? That’s a dev edge training. It’s, I think it’s still more machine learning than it is really true artificial intelligence. But at that, I pretty

Melyssa Barrett:  Lucky, and I agree with you,

Michael Paciello:  And it gets better. It will get better with time. So I believe that is one way that AI will help advance. It’ll get information that is trustworthy, quicker and more on a wide scale to people with disabilities. Here’s another way that AI is being used. There is an application out there. This is just a for instance called Be My Eyes. So AI is being used to act as an interpreter, a visual interpreter in this case for the blind with the aid of other humans. So you still have human assistance, but AI is making it possible for more blind people to have a new type of assistive technology or adaptive technology. I believe ultimately that where this all will go, and I’m writing a couple of blogs on this right now as a matter of fact, is that we will be able to achieve something that I did write in my book 25 years ago, and that is this notion of pervasive accessibility.

So what do I mean by that? Pervasive meaning widespread. Everyone everywhere has it. But here’s the thing, today a person with a disability has to use assistive or adaptive technology in order to interact with their computer system and then the browser and then the web, and then you see how layer goes just like that. They need that. They shouldn’t have to. I want to create a system, and I believe AI will be able to help us do that where the system or the interface adapts to the user, you don’t need ATT anymore because on the other side that artificial intelligence is providing you what you need in the same time that you get it.

Melyssa Barrett:  Wow.

Michael Paciello:  That’s the time of accessibility.

Melyssa Barrett:  Yeah. That’s awesome. So then with that in mind, knowing that there is this wonderful opportunity that exists, maybe you can tell me, are there ways that businesses and governments can collaborate to ensure digital accessibility? Because one of the things, my background is all about data exchange. That’s where I lived in information products. But the work that I’m doing specifically for the Data Institute today really focuses on public private people partnerships and really making sure that when it could be something as simple as a municipality is throwing up a sensor on a traffic light and nobody really knows what data is being collected, where it’s going, who has access to it. There’s a whole lot of other information guidelines that need to go into it. But specifically as we talk about digital accessibility, I would love to hear your thoughts on how business and government can collaborate.

Michael Paciello:  So there are efforts already in place. There have been a number of different things that have been going on. One of those is something that I worked on and I felt like this was, let’s be fair. The W three C through its Office of WebEx facility Initiative is really a combination of international governments and private public organizations that are involved. So you’ve got all the Fortune 1000 companies that are all there all over the world, and you’ve got government that’s heavily evolved. So there’s a collaboration that is working and they build working groups and they work around it. There’s also other organizations like the G three ICT, which is a rooted started organization that also has a focus of bringing government and private sector businesses together. So some of these things actually already exist. The fact is when I co-chaired the last federal advisory committee back in the mid, early to mid two thousands, the Section 5 0 8 committee, it was actually, we took it to government standard section five eight, which is the information communication and accessibility standard for procurement in the federal government along with the Telecommunications Act, which is section 2 55 of the Rehab Act.

That was a collection of US federal, US state international governments in businesses together working together, and they were the ones that ultimately produced that new theater, which is the high watermark for where state governments in the US, for example, now model their efforts. So this is a very long way of saying those organizations, those collaborations do exist, but there aren’t enough of them. There are not enough of them. I’d love to see what the Data Institute is doing, for example, to make things happen at that level. Let me give you a good reason why I think this is so important. I recently just came out of a series of conversations with the state of California this past end of summer, going into their new fiscal year, and we were working on a new state mandate for accessibility called Cal 1757. And long story short, it didn’t pass, didn’t get to the governor’s desk because they just felt like there was more work that needed to be done and we couldn’t get regularly speaking state government and private sector companies on the same page to get those mandates together, to talk things through.

And so really was disappointed because it had the opportunity. It still does to be the first of its kind in turn of a state standard and state mandate. But again, that’s where the collaboration has to work. I see a lot of this, frankly, people being somewhat in organizations, being self-serving. So what’s in it for me instead of really what the principle of let’s do the right thing for others, let’s make this happen. Why shouldn’t an individual with a disability be able to have the same digital access rights that a person like myself without a disability has? So there are more opportunities for that to happen. There are a number of organizations worldwide, national, international, that are trying to work in that vein. Let’s see what happens. Let’s see what the next few years brings about.

Melyssa Barrett:  Awesome. And I think it’s great that they exist. I think there’s, to your point, there’s probably not enough of ’em, which is why we see so many different gaps that exist today, whether it come to internet accessibility itself or otherwise. So can you talk a little bit about what’s your thought process when it comes to this whole conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we see a lot of companies stepping back and not focusing there and all of those things. How do you think that’s going to impact where we are when it comes to digital accessibility, or do you have any advice, thoughts, guidance as we move forward?

Michael Paciello:  Yeah, I wish I had the silver bullet for how this is going to happen. It’s funny, I’ve been seeing this coming, to be honest with you. I was working for a company a couple of years ago and was hired by their chief de and I officer to come in and eventually take on a role similar to what I have here with audio. This was a very large Fortune 500 company that asked me to come in and do that, and they killed that role. They decided, and I saw the handwriting on the wall. This is coming. I really wanted to go in that direction. Now we’re starting to see everybody, right? Walmart just made their big announcement a couple of days ago, and I keep wondering who’s next? Melissa, this is a great question. A couple of colleagues of mine just literally had this kind of closed door discussion.

What are we going to do? How are we going to do this? This was supposed to be the new path for embracing disability, nevermind diversity and equity and inclusion, right? This was a big thing. In fact, the US federal government called it D-E-I-N-A to make sure that they included the accessibility part of it. Where are we going to go at heart at ru? I’m a technologist and so are my friends. We have decided whether this will work or not, I don’t know. But we have decided that technology is the path by which we will attack this kind of new wall, new barrier that we have. I don’t typically get involved in the government and the politics and the social aspects of things like that because even though I am working in the field of disabilities, I am a technologist and I feel like we could solve this problem by feeding into the very heart of why these offices, as I see it, these organizations are going away.

Disability and digital accessibility particularly has always been around compliance. Compliance has always been viewed by organizations for profit and nonprofit as a cost of doing business. So we got to tackle that problem, take away the cost factor and the way that we take away that cost factor. That conversation is by making the technology better than where it’s at today. And I think we could do that to what you were saying before. I think AI and I think automation can be big differentiators in this world. So if we tackle those things, make them work and make them work well, not just good to again, tackle Jim Collins notion, I want to be good. I want to be great. Now, me personally, I want this solution to be great, and I want it to do, and I want it to accomplish that pervasive accessibility that I talked about, and I think it can be done, and there are already hints in the industry of seeing things like this already take place. So that’s my approach. A few of my friends, I think that’s how we’re going to solve it. Others much smarter than me and much younger probably. I hope

Melyssa Barrett:  You strike is having quite a bit of energy. So I don’t know, you said you were retired, but I don’t know. So then how do you think individuals can contribute to advancing accessibility within their own spheres of influence? Because I think as companies may step back and as you focus on technological advances, which there are lots going on, and especially when we think about connectivity and the internet of things and all of those things, what can individuals do to contribute?

Michael Paciello:  Yeah. You talked earlier about leadership and being someone who folks follow. So first and foremost, it’s got to be passion. Anything worth working on and working hard for starts at the heart, and you got to have that passion for it. So if there are individuals who are working in a large organization or a small organization, if you’ve got that passion, then after that, it’s a matter of dedicating yourself. Start talking about it. Start getting involved, start volunteering. Go to events and conferences. They’re all over the world. It doesn’t matter whether you’re here in the us, in Europe, Asia, Australia, south America, anywhere, Canada, they’re everywhere. Get involved with some of those organizations. Start talking about it. Ask questions. If you’re not sure what the answers are, ask questions. Get involved with people with disabilities in the constituency, organizations that support them and figure out how you could get involved, how you can help.

That’s how I got started. To be honest with you, we’ll go back to that first story. It was because I saw something amongst the blind and I thought, Hey, how do I do this? I just started emailing. I started looking up. I started at attend conferences. I started speaking at conferences, and my talks back then were more questions than they were answers. Right now, today it’s a little bit of 50 50. That’s how you do it. Get involved. Any great venture starts with first getting involved, get involved with the constituency. People with disabilities, they are an amazing, amazing community. I’ve never met an individual, no matter how profound that disability might be, that wasn’t passionate about making things work and work, not just for themselves, but for others. So that’s what I would embrace. That’s what I would embrace.

Melyssa Barrett:  Wow, that’s great. I think, and looking back on all of the efforts that you’ve been putting into it for decades now, are there, maybe you can talk about some, maybe a particular success that you felt achieved. I know one of my friends, Gail Bergos, I’ll give her a shout out. She’s always talking about the head, heart, and hands and how they connect. Because once you have a heart, you can actually use your hands to do all sorts of things and get involved. So I appreciate the fact that you’re like, Hey, get in here, ask questions, do some things. Are there particular successes that you look back on and are particularly proud of or maybe one that you see in the future that you want to achieve?

Michael Paciello:  Yeah, I’ve been, like I said, I’ve been very fortunate writing the first book on the topic, creating this international committee for achieving a very small standard. Those are feathers of my caps, the WebEx IL initiative. I created the first ever industry commercialized version of A DVD and CD ROM that was fully accessible. So I’ve got all these little things around TPG, the company itself, I would bet anyone for all the money in the world, no one could build a company with the great kind of people that, and friends and colleagues that I had on that team against. I put them up against anyone. They were that great. They are that great. They’re still out there working. Most of ’em are working for other companies now. So I consider those things great. But I will tell you what I think is my greatest accomplishment. It’s probably one that most people wouldn’t think about, and the two people that I’m about to mention probably won’t even think about it, aren’t even thinking about it.

There’s that old notion of Stephen Covey to learn to live, to love, to leave a legacy, and I have two sons, two sons that work for competitors of Audio Eye, but are in this industry in our wholly devoted Shane, my oldest son, works for Level Access, a big accessibility company based in, I think they’re actually headquartered down in California. And then my youngest son, Kyle, works for dq, which is another one of these, another one of the large accessibility companies. But I’ve reached that point in my life now where I could say I could pass off my legacy to them, and they’re carrying on some of the work that I’ve done, and I hope that they’ll do bigger and better things than I have. But I think I see that as my greatest accomplishment that I could give that gift to my friends and colleagues in the world.

Melyssa Barrett:  Oh, that’s awesome. What a way to end this podcast. I can’t even think. You’re not going to bring me to tears. How awesome is that when you see your legacy already in place, and like I said, you still have a lot of energy, so I don’t get the impression that you’re going to stop anytime soon, but it’s wonderful to know that you have you kids that are really taking the flag in continuing to move it forward. Congratulations to you. I know there’s a lot of parents out there that don’t have that story, and so it’s awesome that when you see that kind of influence, continue generationally congratulations to you and your family.

Michael Paciello:  Thanks very much. Appreciate it.

Melyssa Barrett:  With that, I cannot wait to have some additional conversations with you in the future, and I look forward to it. And thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Jolly Podcast, and hopefully we will, we can circle back and maybe have another one in the future.

Michael Paciello:  It was my privilege and my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on. Melyssa,

Melyssa Barrett:  Thanks for joining me on the Jali Podcast. Please subscribe so you won’t miss an episode. See you next week.