Digital accessibility isn't just about meeting requirements -- it's about building better human experiences for everyone. Join Sheri and Linh on this episode to hear more about what it means to not have accessible digital experience, and true stories behind real people. Learn from Sheri's expertise to tackle digital accessibility regulations, how AI agents don't understand the why in accessibility and vibe coding presents a massive challenge without accessibility in mind. About Sheri Byrne-Haber: Sheri Byrne-Haber is a global thought leader and award-winner advocate for digital accessibility. Sheri has built and scaled global accessibility programs at Fortune Global companies such as McDonald's, Kaiser Permanente, Albertson's, VMWare. She has a unique background spanning computer science, law and business and holds many ADA certifications. She serves on multiple IAAP Global council and committees.
About Podcast Host:
Linh Ho leads global corporate marketing at Siteimprove where she is responsible for communications, customer innovation program, and thought leadership. With more than 20 years in technology marketing, she has played a critical role in helping organizations through some of the industry’s most significant transformations, including the rise of agentic AI. Linh previously held leadership roles at ServiceNow, SAP Concur, Compuware Dynatrace among others.
The Accessible Brand podcast
Episode One: The realities of inaccessible digital experience
Sheri Bryne Haber in conversation with Linh Ho
Linh (00:00)
As we celebrate International Women’s Week, I’m honored to be joined by Sheri Byrne-Haber, a global thought leader and advocate in the accessibility world.
Sheri is an accessibility strategist and innovation architect who has built and scaled global accessibility programs within Fortune 200 companies such as McDonald’s, Kaiser, Albertsons, and VMware, among others. With a unique background spanning computer science, law, and business — along with multiple certifications in ADA coordination and accessibility professional core competencies — Sheri truly brings a 360-degree perspective to accessibility strategy.
Sheri also serves on the IAAP Global Leadership Council and Certification Committee, the Information Technology Industry Council’s VPAT Subcommittee, and W3C committees.
She is also a recognized industry publisher, with more than half a million readers across 180 articles on topics such as diversity, design, accessibility, and equity.
Congratulations, Sheri, on all that you’ve accomplished, and thank you for being here. What an honor. You bring such a powerful and critical lens to International Women’s Day, particularly in the accessibility space. Thank you for joining us and for making the time to be on this podcast.
Sheri (01:01)
Well, I thank anybody who’s listening to this, and thanks to Siteimprove for reaching out to me to participate.
Linh (01:25)
First, let’s kick it off with: tell us more about yourself — who you are, your background, and your journey.
Sheri (01:32)
So, I am a middle-aged white woman with shoulder-length brown hair. I wear bifocals. I was born with spina bifida, so I am a wheelchair user more full-time than not these days. I can walk, but I’m not supposed to walk.
I got into the accessibility space actually not because of my own needs, but because of my daughter’s. We’ll frequently do things for our kids that we won’t necessarily do for ourselves.
When I saw the struggles with the U.S. school system that she was having when we moved back to the States from Canada, I realized that there needed to be more advocacy out there for the Deaf community. After I won a number of lawsuits against insurance companies improving access for the Deaf, I ended up going into digital accessibility after that because it let me use all of my background — my computer science background, my business background, my law background, and my lived experience as somebody with a disability.
Linh (02:39)
That’s amazing. I can’t wait to dig into this because your story is so powerful. Tell me more about the moments that most shaped who you are today.
Sheri (02:53)
The moments that shape you most are frequently negative, so I’m trying to dredge my head for something positive.
The biggest moment that shaped me probably happened when I was a child, and I didn’t have anything to do with it when it actually happened. It was Ed Roberts and his guerrilla accessibility crew that went around building curb cuts at Cal.
Because without that having happened, I may not have been able to go to college. He predated me by, I don’t know, maybe 10 years. But colleges weren’t accessible. Schools weren’t accessible. The ADA passed in between when I graduated with my first degree and before I went to law school. So when I went to law school and did my MBA, I had great access through Section 504 and the Americans with Disabilities Act, but I had nothing before that, and it was a pretty big struggle.
Linh (03:56)
Was there ever a time when you almost gave up? And what kept you going?
Sheri (04:02)
I think the thing that kept me going most was probably my parents’ belief in me. I literally, by one year, missed the cutoff where I would have been sent to a school for disabled kids instead of being mainstreamed. So I was in one of the very first mainstream classes in elementary school in Silicon Valley.
Teachers just didn’t know what to do with kids with disabilities. It’s like they flipped the switch, but there was no plan.
My parents kept saying, “No, you should be there. You can do this. You’re just as good as, if not better than, everybody else there.” If I used to get down, that would be something I’d go back to. I also had a really strong core group of friends, some of whom were in the same mainstream situation with me, and some of whom were non-disabled.
Here we are, more than 50 years later, and we’re still friends.
Linh (05:01)
Love it. That support system and those allies are such an important thing to have around you. What has that taught you about resilience and strategy? And I’m sure it’s also taught you more empathy in leadership.
Sheri (05:15)
People talk about us being brave and strong and resilient. When I say “us,” I mean the disability community in general. My thought is: well, this is my life. I have to live it, right? It’s not like we have much of an alternative unless we never want to leave the house ever again.
So I don’t see it so much as resilience as maybe just having really, really good problem-solving skills. And I think that’s one thing employers miss out on when they think, “Well, I don’t want to hire that guy because he’s dyslexic.” It’s like, he has spent his entire life overcoming his dyslexia and will have better problem-solving skills than most of the people on the team.
So instead of looking at disability as a negative, I really believe that workforces should look at it as a positive.
Linh (06:09)
How would you describe your leadership style today? And on the other hand, how do you think people on your team would describe it? Any surprises?
Sheri (06:20)
I would hope that people would describe my leadership style as blunt but fair. I am very direct. I do not believe in sugarcoating really anything. I think that delays getting problems fixed rather than contributing to solutions.
I used to follow a strategy when I was doing generic software testing management called MBWA, which was management by walking around. I wasn’t using a wheelchair at that point, so I would spend at least an hour every day walking the floor where my team worked, going from cube to cube saying, “How are you doing? Is there anything you need? Can I help you? What are you stuck on?”
These days, it’s more along the lines of: I believe that I should be able to do everything my team members can do. Because if you can’t, then you’re going to be in a situation where you don’t know what they’re doing and you don’t know how to help them, and that does not make you an effective leader.
So I’m still very hands-on. I don’t assign tasks unless I know how to do them, because then I also know how to estimate them. If I think something’s going to take two hours and somebody comes back with two weeks, there’s a disconnect there that needs to be addressed. Maybe I have a different way or know of a different resource this other person doesn’t know about that I can point them to so they can learn from it and get things done faster.
Linh (08:07)
Yeah, 100%. I’m the same way. My sweet spot in company size is where you can carry that balance between the company vision and also the execution down to the tactics. I love what you just said.
And the directness and bluntness — that’s my style too. I like to be direct and blunt because otherwise it’s hard to drive clarity with your teams. You don’t want to leave too much gray space, because otherwise people are left wondering, “Does she mean this, or does she mean that?”
Sheri (08:39)
Exactly. I never want two people I’m having a conversation with to walk away with two different understandings of what I said. That’s just begging for a meeting or an email chain that really didn’t need to happen.
Linh (08:51)
Exactly. Love it.
I’m going to shift over to digital accessibility. What does digital accessibility mean to you? Back to basics.
Sheri (09:00)
I remember recording something for GAAD a couple of years ago where I talked about how digital accessibility is literally everything.
With digital accessibility, I can pay bills online. I don’t have to get somebody to take me down to an office to write a check and pay for a bill in person. There’s this concept of a disability tax, and the disability tax is the energy, money, and time — three things that people with disabilities have to pay just to live that people without disabilities don’t have to pay.
When you’ve got good accessibility, that disability tax will never get to zero, but it won’t be so big that it becomes this overwhelming load sitting on your shoulder every day, where you’re losing opportunities because you’re spending so much time trying to figure out workarounds to things everybody else can do.
Linh (09:56)
There are things that we probably take for granted — a simple online transaction like paying your bill or booking a flight.
Sheri (10:04)
Or buying a pair of jeans. Making a doctor’s appointment. So much of what we do has moved online that if online isn’t accessible, and online is the only way of doing something, you’ve just left behind a whole portion of your audience — potentially illegally.
Linh (10:23)
Absolutely.
And speaking of illegally, there are a number of regulations and compliance requirements, both in Europe with the European Accessibility Act last June, and also in the U.S. with the ADA. You mentioned earlier Title II and Section 504, and we’ve got another deadline coming up in April 2026.
Tell me more about regulations. Plus, you also have a background in law. How are you approaching this, and is this something you’re having your teams stay ahead of in order to avoid costly potential lawsuits?
Sheri (10:59)
The traditional legal disclaimer: nothing that I say should be interpreted as legal advice. I am not your lawyer. And when I say “you,” I mean the audience.
So, the Title II deadlines you’re talking about: the end of April — April 24 of this year — applies to larger cities, meaning cities with more than 50,000 people. Smaller cities get an extra year.
The standard they’re being measured against is WCAG 2.1 AA, which has been out for at least six years at this point, maybe longer. So this is not a new standard. This is not some big surprise or some big change. Courts have been using 2.1 AA for a while.
There are also regulations within states like Colorado and California that specifically call out 2.1 AA.
The biggest issue I’m seeing with municipalities is that they are super tied into third-party vendors. No municipality does its own website anymore. No municipality accepts payments on its own anymore. They’re using third-party services for all these things, and those third-party services aren’t always accessible.
So municipalities didn’t start the conversations early enough with their vendors, and their vendors are most definitely behind. That would be my biggest concern: municipalities now have to find accessible ways of providing these services, files, or whatever it is until their vendors get caught up.
It’s just one of those situations where municipalities didn’t realize the vendors were going to be part of the equation. The vendors thought, “This is Title II. This doesn’t apply to us,” not realizing that it was effectively imputed to them through their relationship with the entities that had to follow the law.
That’s been the most interesting challenge in this particular aspect of legal change related to accessibility: getting everybody on the same page on who has to do what.
Linh (13:21)
What advice do you have for the audience, whether they’re working under the European Accessibility Act in Europe or under U.S. regulations, when it comes to meeting these deadlines?
Sheri (13:35)
The first thing I tell people to do is an inventory — a digital asset inventory — so they know what the scope is that they need to deal with.
Then I jokingly refer to this as “Marie Kondo-ing” your website. Pick up every file, every dialog box, every form. If it does not spark joy, if you haven’t used it for three years, if the PDF file is from some city Halloween event from 10 years ago — dump it.
Linh (14:11)
You know, at my last company, we literally had a marketing project called Marie Kondo, and that was exactly it. We had to go through a full inventory of content because suddenly we had so much content out there — PDFs, non-PDFs, you name it — and really take the Marie Kondo approach to scrutinize every piece of content.
Sheri (14:31)
That’s definitely a challenge because people don’t like to let things go.
Then once you’ve done that, you need to stop producing inaccessible content. Because if you continue to produce inaccessible content while you’re fixing your old stuff, all you’re doing is accelerating your accessibility debt. You’re never going to get that paid off.
So stop the bleeding. Put down guidelines, put down a review process, make sure that everything you produce going forward is accessible while you’re remediating the old stuff that you’ve decided to keep. Then eventually you’ll meet in the middle.
Linh (15:11)
Can you share a story where accessibility shifted from being a compliance requirement to more of a strategic advantage? We’ve touched on this a little bit already, but in my opinion, when it’s about people, it’s good business.
Sheri (15:25)
When I teach accessibility classes, I focus very little on the how and what, and the intro class always focuses almost entirely on the why. Because when you understand the why — when you understand how people with disabilities use assistive technology — the what and the how almost become an outcome. It becomes a whole lot easier to understand.
There have been situations where I’ve helped companies get better scores on disability maturity indexes, where not just the digital stuff has become better, but the whole company has become better.
Because one of the things that makes you better at digital accessibility is hiring more employees with disabilities. Well, to do that, you’ve got to get HR together. You have to have accessible recruiting, accessible job ads, accessible onboarding, accessible review processes. There are all these things that you think might not touch whether your website is accessible, but they actually do.
I find that companies that do have a high rate of employees with disabilities — and when I was at VMware, I was very proud that the rate of employees with disabilities almost tripled in the five years I was there — really get the best outcomes. Because you get people who are willing to raise their hand in the room because it’s psychologically safe.
They don’t feel like they’re going to be punished, and they’ll say, “Hey, when you wrote that ad copy, were you thinking about people with dyslexia? You used all those italics. You center-justified it. Why did you do that?” And that just makes a better outcome for everybody.
Linh (17:11)
That makes sense.
Speaking of VMware and tech companies, and as we move into this AI era and a new era of innovation, how do you feel technology advancements play a role in accessibility?
Sheri (17:25)
I’ve been using machine learning to start with, and then LLMs with accessibility, for coming up on four years now. So I’d like to think I have a fair amount of experience with it. I’m not just hopping on the ChatGPT train. I’ve actually built my own LLMs.
A lot of accessibility is about context. AI does not understand context. I cannot say it more clearly than that.
AI doesn’t understand the why. It can regurgitate the why based on patterns it sees online, but the data online is very biased.
When ChatGPT first came out, every time you asked for a picture of somebody with autism, you would get a sad boy in a school setting with his head down on the desk. Always male, always white — because that’s what it learned online. That was predominantly the story being carried online, even though if you look at the demographics, that’s not the case.
The data is biased, so you need to be able to write prompts to get around that bias and ensure it doesn’t creep into your results.
I’m actually working on a blog series that should be out by the time this video is seen that covers some of those techniques.
I do not believe agentic AI is even close to ready for accessibility. Joe Devon, who is one of the founders of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, has this great study he puts out about how accessible the code is that these tools are producing. And while it’s changing rapidly, even the best tool still isn’t doing a very good job unless you give it super, super, super specific prompts.
You can’t just say, “Give me a dialog box,” and hope what you get is accessible, because it won’t be. That’s not what these tools do by default.
Linh (19:43)
One hundred percent. I’m with you.
Several years ago, I was working at another company where we were very focused on responsible AI, and you’re speaking the language of responsible AI. As you were talking, I was thinking about how, if you don’t have the right representation at the table at the onset of designing a system or creating content, you’ll miss the representation.
I remember doing a separate radio talk in New York, and they were asking me what parallels I could draw between what we’re facing now with these potential unintentional biases creeping into algorithms and doing more harm to society than good.
Sheri (20:28)
I don’t think agentic AI is ready for accessibility, or the other way around — accessibility isn’t ready for agentic AI.
That being said, AI is here. It’s not going anywhere. So we need to figure out how to use it in a way that helps accessibility and minimizes those biases creeping in.
One of the things I think AI is good for in accessibility is communications: writing reports, taking a really long, gory, complicated nine-month JIRA ticket and summarizing it into two sentences for paperwork that says, “This is the bug, and this is the impact it has on people with disabilities.” Writing test plans. You can ask an AI, to start with, “Give me a generic test plan for a shopping cart,” and then customize that to work for your particular situation.
But you always have to have a human in the loop. Taking the human out of the loop means you’re headed for a disaster — you just haven’t had one yet.
Communications are where I’m focusing my AI use right now.
Linh (21:43)
That makes sense. And I think you touched a little earlier on the biases creeping in. Especially when systems are supposed to take actions on your behalf, it’s absolutely critical that the right representation is at the table during the design phase of the system or the content production lifecycle — right up front.
Sheri (22:08)
A funny parallel: I work with a number of people who are blind, and I talk to them about self-driving cars. The split between who would take a self-driving car and who wouldn’t goes cleanly down the line of congenitally blind versus acquired blindness.
People who are congenitally blind think self-driving cars are the best thing since sliced bread. People with acquired blindness know how hard it is to drive because they’ve done it before, and they can’t imagine how software can do it correctly.
So much of this comes from what am I bringing with me into the situation that makes the outcome different depending on my point of view.
Linh (22:58)
Is responsible AI a program or governance practice that has been part of any of the roles you’ve played, especially in recent years?
Sheri (23:10)
Sometimes accessibility can be part of ESG — environment, sustainability, and governance practices. Certainly disability has a role to play in the United Nations CRPD and the Sustainable Development Goals. If you look at the Sustainable Development Goals in particular, almost half of them are either related to disability or disproportionately impact somebody with a disability.
I think the bigger companies understand that, and so they’ve integrated that into their overall worldview. I think the smaller companies haven’t.
The term “responsible AI” is a little broad for me because from the disability perspective, it breaks down into so many things. Was the data responsibly gathered? If it was responsibly gathered, is the user interface accessible? If the user interface is accessible, is the output accessible?
So there are different stages of responsible AI. And then you also have to look at things like all the energy and all the water being used. There’s that aspect of responsible AI as well. And that’s even before you get into the intellectual property issues, which are a whole different can of worms.
Linh (24:38)
You made a comment earlier too about the human in the loop. Absolutely, in the world of digital accessibility, we still need humans in the loop rather than humans out of the loop.
Because you said agents still don’t understand the context or the why, can you give an example of the why that is missing today in this agentic era for digital accessibility?
Sheri (25:05)
Disability is really intersectional, and that’s something that factors into the why that probably isn’t really obvious in the LLMs we currently have today.
People with disabilities are, first of all, more likely to have more than one disability. That’s not something the tools are good at dealing with — people being both Deaf and blind, or having hearing loss and Parkinson’s. They may handle one reasonably well and the other reasonably well because those are more siloed answers. But as soon as you get into the intersection, the tools just don’t know what to do with it.
People with disabilities are also more likely to be in lower socioeconomic circumstances. That’s going to drive a whole set of decisions, such as not upgrading devices.
People with disabilities are famous for being on older devices, A, because some of us can’t afford to upgrade them, and B, even those of us who can afford it don’t want to upgrade them. I’m sitting here with my trusty iPhone 12, which runs all the assistive technology I need to get my day-to-day jobs done. Could I upgrade? Sure. Financially, yes. But I like this phone. I know how to use this phone. I know what’s good about it and what’s bad about it. Changing to a phone that’s five versions newer might cause me all kinds of pain.
So those are some examples. The intersectionality of race, gender, and socioeconomic status — AI just absolutely does not get that.
Linh (27:01)
At Siteimprove, we’ve been on this journey to release a number of agent capabilities, very much with a human in the loop, that can take on mundane tasks so that users can be more productive and spend more time on higher-value work.
It can also make things easier for teams by helping with tasks like scanning PDFs and content and identifying areas that need remediation before anything is automatically remediated through the system.
So I’m 100% with you that even if it’s agent-led, you absolutely still need to have a human in the loop for digital accessibility.
Sheri (27:48)
Five or six years ago, I wrote an open-source tool — I think it’s still on GitHub — to test keyboard use because I was the only manual tester at my job at that point. I was getting the program built from scratch, and I was tired of sitting there hitting Tab and Shift+Tab over and over and over trying to test that aspect of the job. So I wrote a tool to do it for me.
What that did was allow me to move on to things that actually required brainpower: thinking about what kind of user research programs we wanted to run, what changes we should make to our design system to promote accessibility — things a Python file couldn’t do for me.
The super-important message I want to make sure every budgeting person understands here is that this doesn’t mean you can get rid of the accessibility team. The accessibility team can move on to more important things, or to things that have been skipped in the past when they now have more free time because of AI.
But AI is in no place to replace hands-on accessibility testers with lived experience at this point. Because even if AI were perfect, it’s still not lived experience. It’s simulated lived experience. And it’s still not assistive technology use. It is simulated assistive technology use.
AI is never going to be in pain. AI is never going to be tired. AI is never going to be frustrated because it just came back from a store where the elevator was broken and they couldn’t get upstairs. These are the things that make good accessibility testers with lived experience essential to developing an accessible product.
Linh (29:42)
I love what you just said, and I 100% agree with you. This is where the why is missing — to your earlier point that AI does not understand the why. But it is there to do the mundane tasks so the team can go do more important things and focus on what matters most.
Sheri (30:02)
Exactly. Too many people are just seeing it as a budget-cutting exercise. “We’re just going to replace our people with vibe coders or vibe testers.” In accessibility, that’s not going to work.
Linh (30:13)
So, vibe coding — let’s pin that for a second because I want to come back to it. But you’ve been a customer of Siteimprove in the past. Share a little bit about what you know of Siteimprove. What does digital accessibility leadership look like in the era that we live in?
Sheri (30:31)
The thing I liked about the Siteimprove tool was that it looked at the website holistically. Yes, accessibility was part of the information it was giving you, but it was giving you information on a whole lot more things besides whether or not it met WCAG requirements for a particular corner of the site.
It looked at things like typos. It looked at things like dead links. It looked at things that might subconsciously influence your user’s experience even if they didn’t have accessibility needs. It treated little problems as cumulative. It understood that it’s not just about, “Do I have any A-level bugs that are deal breakers?” If I’ve got 20 AA bugs on a page, is that also a deal breaker?
Linh (31:31)
So Siteimprove, while rooted in digital accessibility, has been committed to helping customers keep an accessibility-first mindset while also evolving into more of the content lifecycle.
As you said, there’s web content, but also other content types like PDFs. We just launched yesterday, in fact, our ability to scan PDFs as well as images. So more content types, and across channels too — not just websites, but also mobile — to ensure that accessibility is addressed and compliant, but also that the content is performing.
And in the world of search engine optimization, and answer engine optimization, accessibility is and can be a growth driver to help brands stay relevant and discoverable in the world that we live in.
In your opinion, there are a number of vendors out there who claim to do digital accessibility really, really well. But I’d love to hear your perspective: what does digital accessibility leadership look like in the world we live in?
Sheri (32:44)
Digital accessibility leadership within an organization that’s not selling accessibility services — to me, the most successful digital accessibility leaders are the ones who can tie themselves into regulatory compliance overall on one side, but also user experience on the other side.
Most companies have fairly robust privacy and security practices, but they don’t look at accessibility at the same level of regulatory compliance as those other two. I think that’s something a lot of companies miss out on. When people are able to make that connection, it makes the program stronger and more likely to be better resourced.
Because you’re never going to have all the resources you need to do everything you want to do. The real question is: are you getting enough to do at least a good job? And then hopefully, by doing that good job, you can get more resources going forward.
So I would say regulatory compliance on one side and user experience on the other. And if you have a user experience department and you’re not doing research specifically on disabled users, the only thing I have to say is: shame on you.
You have disabled users. You just don’t know it. And you don’t know what they need or want in order to remain users of your site.
People with disabilities over-index on loyalty. When we find a site or product that works well for us, we stick with it and we tell all of our friends. And those are things you won’t know unless you research your customers with disabilities.
Linh (34:42)
Let’s circle back to vibe coding for a second. We touched on it earlier. What’s your take on vibe coding?
Sheri (34:49)
Ninety-seven percent of the web today is not WCAG compliant. And that is before you take on the concept that now people can vibe code, generate code, and put it into production without actually knowing how to code. That number is going to skyrocket.
We were actually finally making some improvements over the years, as documented in the WebAIM survey. But frankly, I see it going in the other direction because people are just going to be spewing stuff out.
If you don’t know to ask for it to be accessible, it won’t make it accessible. And even if you do ask for it to be accessible, it might still get it wrong. So I am not a huge fan of vibe coding unless, again, there’s a human in the loop and it’s being reviewed by somebody who knows how to make proper use of ARIA properties, for example, to get that shopping cart announcement to work correctly for people with disabilities.
Because if you’re just pulling it out of Claude or Gemini, chances are it’s not going to be WCAG compliant.
Linh (36:07)
Yeah, definitely. Vibe coding seems to have become such a big thing.
Sheri (36:13)
It’s because it’s cheap and easily available. It’s 20 bucks a month. That’s three cups of coffee in California. People just don’t realize the harm they’re doing both to people with disabilities and potentially to their employers by using these vibe coding tools without reviewing the code afterward.
Linh (36:44)
And it’s going to be a problem. This is why I think accessibility has to be there right up front. If this is going to multiply the amount of content and websites we see without accessibility built in from the start, it’s also going to multiply the problems and the challenges, as you just called out.
Sheri (37:06)
If anybody who comes under accessibility regulations takes vibe-coded generated code and just puts it out there with no review, in the legal community we call those people defendants, because you are pretty much guaranteed to be sued.
Linh (37:27)
As we head toward our last couple of questions: what do people most often misunderstand when it comes to digital accessibility?
Sheri (37:36)
I think most people don’t even understand that digital accessibility exists. When you talk about “most people” — the 320 million people who live in the U.S., or people globally — accessibility is not taught in college. It’s not taught in design programs. It’s not taught in coding programs.
There are literally only something like nine postgraduate degrees in all of the United States that even have a single accessibility class requirement.
I’ve often said that the first thing we need to do to solve the accessibility problem is make it required in computer science programs and make it required in design programs, so people get exposed to it early. Because when you’re working at a startup, and you’re working with a bunch of people who came out of schools where this wasn’t really a thing, then all of a sudden somebody from Apple comes into your company and you realize all the things you should have been doing but weren’t doing, because they’re bringing that experience and accessibility knowledge from practical work somewhere else.
But it’s rare to meet somebody who’s a new grad and actually knows anything about accessibility. You can do all the band-aids and all the code rewrites in the world, but until we start training people earlier — shifting left, in computer science terms — so we prevent problems from occurring instead of fixing them after they happen, it’s really going to hinder the timeline to success.
Linh (39:26)
I’m right there with you. I love that you mentioned shifting left, especially for the community we also serve.
It’s International Women’s Week — a time to celebrate women’s achievements and support women’s empowerment worldwide. Sheri, you’ve got such a powerful story with multiple lenses and a critical lens. Is there a leader who has shaped how you think, work, and lead — a female leader you can tell us a little story about?
Sheri (39:58)
I would say the leader I most emulate in terms of how I do things is probably Grace Hopper. She was a great believer in being blunt, being direct, and being problem-solving oriented. I like to think we’re aligned there.
She was famous for saying that people are allergic to change, and people quote that pretty much every month, because getting people to change the way they’re doing things is a basic principle of being successful in accessibility.
Linh (40:30)
Love it. Thank you for sharing that.
My last question for you is: with your tremendous career and journey that speak to your leadership strength, what leadership advice would you give your 20-year-old self?
Sheri (40:42)
My 20-year-old self probably had a bit of rose-colored glasses going on in terms of what the real world was going to be like.
I would tell my 20-year-old self that sometimes you’re going to be the only person like you in the room, and that is going to be very intimidating. You need to get over that and speak up anyway, because if you don’t speak up for your community, don’t expect other people in the room to speak up for you.
Linh (41:15)
I will take that with me as well.
Well, Sheri, it’s been such a pleasure to have you on this podcast. Thank you so much for making the time.
Sheri (41:24)
Well, thanks again for the invitation.