Episode 7 – The HHS Extension and the Markdown Breakdown

Episode Summary

In this episode, Mark and Justin discuss three main topics:

1. HHS and Title II Deadline Extensions

• HHS (Health and Human Services) Section 504 accessibility requirements have been extended by one year
• This follows similar extensions for Title II of the ADA affecting state and local entities
• Large entities (50,000+ employees) received a one-year extension
• Smaller entities (under 50,000) received a two-year extension
• Key Concern: Both hosts expressed frustration that these requirements aren’t new – accessibility has been required for years, and WCAG 2.1 AA standards have been established
• Business Advice: Organizations should NOT pause their accessibility efforts despite extensions, as there’s significant ROI in accessibility and the requirements remain legally enforceable

2. PDF to Accessible Markdown: Introducing an Open Source AI Tool

• Dylan Isaac and Blake Bertuccelli-Booth presented an open-source AI tool at the A11Y New York meetup (run by Thomas Logan/Equal Entry)
• The tool converts PDFs to Markdown format, making content more web-friendly and accessible
• Markdown uses simple characters (like # for headings) instead of HTML tags, making it easier to write and read
• PDFs were designed in the 1990s to represent physical documents, not digital content
• The tool (part of Quality Reflow from University of Illinois Chicago) helps organizations convert PDF backlogs to more accessible formats

3. Craft is Untouchable – AI and Accessibility

• Discussion of Christopher Butler’s article about how AI doesn’t replace craft
• AI is compared to the synthesizer in the 1980s – a tool that enhances rather than replaces human expertise
• Accessibility craft involves the human expertise of making technology usable for people with disabilities
• Story shared about Todd Waits (Crawford Technologies), who continued his keyboard passion after losing his right arm by using synthesizer technology
• Emphasis that AI can be an assistive technology that makes things possible for people with disabilities

Key Takeaways

• Don’t delay accessibility work due to regulatory extensions – the ROI is significant
• Consider converting legacy PDFs to Markdown for better accessibility
• AI is a tool that enhances accessibility work rather than replacing human expertise
• Accessibility has strong business benefits, including customer loyalty, retention, and expanded market reach

Resources Mentioned

• Equal Entry blog and A11Y New York meetup
• Quality Reflow tool (University of Illinois Chicago)
• Crawford Technologies

Go to all episodes

Transcript

Announcer: The Accessibility Breakdown by Inclusion Impact Accessibility.

Mark: Hey, welcome to the Accessibility Breakdown. I am Mark and this is

Justin: Justin.

Mark: That was close. Every week we pay tribute to those who stand out to us as leading by accessibility by picking three topics that strike us in some way. This week, we’re going to talk about The big one, the HHS extension. So this is Health and Human Services extension. It’s part of Section 504. And similar to Title II, there is a deadline that was nowish. And now those deadlines have been extended by a year. So we’ll get into that, probably into the deadline extension in general. And then we’re going to talk about PDF to Markdown. This is… So there’s a bunch of things going on here, but there’s a new open source tool that was created by a buddy of mine, Dylan Isaac. Blake Bertuccelli-Booth.

Justin: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. That’s my tough one for the week. And then, And it was, we’re pulling that off of a blog. Again, we’ll get into it, but a blog by Equal Entry, who’s run by Thomas Logan, who is part of this A11Y New York meetup where Blake and Dylan presented this and the blog is a part of that. So anyways, the cool thing here is that this is a unique approach to handling PDFs. It’s not a great way to say that, but that’s kind of what we’re looking at here. And we know these Title II and HHS, these things that have been extended, we know that one of the big components is PDFs. Now that there’s more time, this may be the kind of thing that you might want to think about as you’re considering how to handle a whole bunch of PDFs. And then this one right here, you know, I’m going to count on you, Justin, a little bit here. This is Craft is Untouchable by Christopher Butler. And this is an AI article, right? An article about AI’s influence over Craft.

Justin: Yep.

Mark: And, I’m curious to hear your take on this, Justin, because I know that you have some sort of a line you’re drawing to accessibility here. I just don’t know what it is. So I’m excited to hear you talk about that one. So you want to start off by talking about this HHS extension and I can reset this a little bit. I think the important things here, Justin, are that one, it came on the heels of the Title II extension. Okay. If this is the first, You’re hearing about this. Title II of the ADA, which affects state and local entities, was in April, had a due date in April, and then that was for large entities, 50,000 entities with 50,000 or more folks. And that was extended by a year later. The under 50,000 had a year anyways, that’s been extended by two years. And then based on that extension and a whole bunch of other things, HHS, which is part of Section 504, came out again right before this stuff was due. This all happens right before this stuff is due by the original dates and said, we’re extending everything related to this. And this is 15… Employees are less two years now and it was the 15 employees or more. I didn’t say that right. It’s 15 employers or more or less than 15. But anyways, the 15 employers or more, that’s what was coming due. Right now, basically. And that’s been extended by a year. So Let me, hopefully that was a good reset. If. If there’s anything I missed there, Justin, help me out, I’m going to toss it over to you. To just talk about What all? What all this means? Like, what does it mean to people with disabilities, to organizations? Like, what’s the impact of waiting till the last minute and then extending these things?

Justin: Wow. There’s… Again. I’m trying to channel my inner, like, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. Is It’s really, no.

Mark: That what people want on a podcast?

Justin: It’s…

Mark: It is kind of…

Justin: No, it’s… I mean, honestly, we shouldn’t be surprised that it happened, given the Title II, given the current administration in the United States, all of those things that I think the writing was… Pretty clear on the wall. It sucks. Crap. It’s dumb. It hurts more people.

Mark: You went from if I have nothing nice to say to off.

Justin: Just ripping the gloves I still feel like I’m holding back. I have not dropped an F-bomb on the podcast yet.

Mark: Yeah. Don’t do that. I don’t want to have to go find it in pre-production and bleep it Explicit box.

Justin: Out. I know. Then we have to check the little explicit box.

Mark: That’s probably what I would do because that sounds easier than bleeping it out.

Justin: Yeah. But it’s… It really is ridiculous that especially given the justifications that were in the notice that people don’t know enough about the specification, about WCAG, that they don’t understand. Like these things have been out there. For literally There’s nothing new here.

Mark: A long time. Yep. Yep.

Justin: It’s just that, hey, we need you to build these things to be accessible.

Mark: Not only is there nothing new But the requirement’s not new. So this is what. This is what’s kind of driving me. Nuts about it. So first of all, with HHS, OCR has been able to and has been governing this for a while. The requirement from HHS to be accessible has been around for a long time and it’s been enforced for a long time. What the new rule basically said, if we’re going to boil it down, right? The rule was great because it was like, hey, we’re going to give you guys a bunch of specificity around it so that you have some like clear guidance in terms of what to do. So essentially, that means that They very specifically said WCAG 2.1 AA. And they kind of were like, now that we’ve told you that, that’s what we’re going to hold you against. So you got a clear thing, right? Pace precedent already. Dictated that. If you were getting in trouble for not being accessible because of HHS. Fire, same thing with Title II in my opinion. All the precedent was around WCAG. This was just, this is why they chose it. This was just clarifying it. So it, it’s so fuzzy in terms of what it does and what it changes. Right. And this is where I think one of the ways that businesses can get in trouble is that it’s already a requirement. So them going like, let’s extend it. Now the risk is that people go like, okay, well let’s hold off then. Right. And not to mention… 508 if you’re federally funded, not to mention Title III of the ADA for anything public facing, which all these things everything has something public facing. So my thing is, if you’re a business listening to this, Why would you wait? Until the archer notches the third arrow to take cover. You should be. Long done and have a system in place, build your organization to maintain the accessibility of your digital assets. You should, I know you’re not, And I get it because there’s so many things that you have to try to conform to. So it’s not a judgment that you haven’t made it there yet. But from a regulatory standpoint, all this stuff’s been out there for a long time. The way to do it and the need to do it and the requirement to do it has been out there for a while. So I just think that it’s very misleading to then, you know, say like, hey, You got a year, you don’t have a year further. I’m going to keep going. I’m going to take a breath. Take a breath. Because you might want to jump in. Because I have another further point.

Justin: No. I don’t know. I still, I really believe that, The extension, both of these extensions are more politically motivated rather than a new burden upon these organizations.

Mark: Yeah. And even if they’re not, even if the justifications within them are sincere. It’s got to be coming from people who don’t understand the industry right there because they’re Correct, in my view. And here’s the thing, because one of them was in the HHS was basic. I’m not reading this verbatim, but it was basically like there’s a financial or there’s no financial benefit. That people are uncertain, like you said, about what to do. And then there’s no benefit once they do it from a financial or return on investment standpoint. In both of these cases, there is significant financial benefit and return on investment, full stop. Yeah. And I’m going to tell you Right now, first of all, People with disabilities are loyal to places who accommodate them. They account for one quarter of the world’s population. The amount of disposable income people with disabilities have is incredible. And that is not even considering their sphere of influence, right? That 250 people that everybody knows based on the number of people that show up to a wedding, that sphere of influence, because you know that. That when… Mom finds out that somebody’s accommodating well for her son with disability, that mom is now loyal. And so is that person’s close friends. And they’re close friends and that’s hitting social whatever like all of it like the influence And what, you know, flip it around. If they have a frustrating experience, it’s even Like going to spread more like wildfire.

Justin: So a lot of those people are advocates in their daily lives, people they care about their allies, and they’re really good about, Like holding on to something and not letting it go until they get what it is that they want. So if your website or, you know, whatever service you’re offering isn’t accessible, they’re going to remember that. And they’re going to let everybody know. They’re.

Mark: Going to let everybody know. And then when they have a choice to make, they’re going to make the choice. Points. The thing that’s accessible, right? That’s always going to be the case. So what you see is you see these organizations, like if you were retail, The… Retail organizations that were first in with accessibility huge advantage over the other folks in multiple ways, right? The colleges. There’s not a lot of correlative data here, but there is… A lot of data otherwise. And the reason why there’s not a lot of correlative data is because one, it’s really People with disabilities have a right not to disclose, right? They have a right to privacy and medical privacy and all that kind of stuff. So it’s difficult to get this data, but there’s very strong data that, and this is a Title II point, that colleges, The more accessible that higher education institutions are, And this is physical, digital. So think about how easy somebody with a disability has navigating all the environments. In higher education. The retention. Goes way up. And right now, the big discussion amongst these colleges is retention. Why? Because enrollment’s down. We know this across the board enrollment higher education is down. So higher education is doing anything and everything they can to retain the people who do enroll. And one of the big things you can do is make everything accessible. But that’s not realized and when you have this language and these extensions that implies the opposite of that, it’s incredibly misleading, right? So. Extend that out i mean that’s just a very direct example for colleges but extend that out to anything. Dead. You want to. And we can go on. Forever. Around the ROI and there’s a couple different pieces of the ROI too. The other piece of the ROI is that once you decide to do accessibility, there’s an ROI and then baking accessibility into your organization, shifting left, you know, which means, building things to be accessible versus fixing them later on. That’s a quick down and dirty way to describe ship left for non-tech folks. Has its own ROI. So when you look at the cost of doing accessibility, you can then dive deeper and reduce that cost of doing accessibility and thereby increase the ROI even further, right? So if you get yourself involved with a good accessibility professional, All these things are possible. So it’s just difficult. I’m not mad, Justin. I’m just disappointed. It’s disappointing to see this kind of language out there that’s misleading organizations and essentially costing them money.

Justin: Yeah. Well, that’s… So i keep pointing back to the political piece about it so That’s for me, that’s easier.

Mark: Well.

Justin: Maybe it’s easier for me to believe that that’s the reason why this is happening. It still sucks. Still sucks. Crap, but. It’s… It at least lines up. A little bit better than some of the justifications that were given.

Mark: Yeah. And, We’re talking about business.

Justin: I did go to something last week, to the Boulder Startup Week last week, and during the presentation, someone stopped the speaker and asked what semantic HTML was. I’m already kind of on…

Mark: Like there’s absolutely a lot of Yeah.

Justin: Disbelief bubble right now.

Mark: Yeah. No, there’s, and I think that is like, Let’s not. Gloss past that point. Yes, there’s people who a lot of folks who still need to learn about accessibility, but I think your earlier point is that information is easily obtainable. So once you know who you’ve got to do it, there’s consultants like us out there that can help you all over the place. Right. I mean, we just talked about Thomas Logan, who does the New York accessibility thing that we’re going to talk about in a minute. He’s one. You and I are one. There are two. We’ve got friends that do what we do in this industry all over. It’s not hard to find. And Aside from that, just the general knowledge. I mean, the W3C does a fantastic job. There’s incredible thought leadership out there from all these folks that we’re talking about that you can take advantage of. And it’s been around for years and years. In fact, we talked about James Edwards, who recently passed away on episode six. And he’s been, I mean, he, the reason why not tearing up a song.

Justin: During episode six.

Mark: He did not pass away on episode six. Sorry about that. Everyone not to laugh at the subject, but I had my mistake. Yes. Episode six was an homage, a tribute to James Edwards. But the reason why we did a tribute and why he was so well-respected is because of what a great thought leader he was for you. Or years. So, That’s where I think, That’s where that frustration… Really? Comes from but we’re gonna you know we’re gonna do some writing on this and everything but there’s Don’t let that fool you. If you’re a business listening to this, ROI around accessibility, as soon as you zoom out and you realize that there is more than regulatory compliance to accessibility, the more likely you are to sustain it. Here’s what I’m going to say, though. If you’re a business and you’re wondering what the heck now. The worst thing you can do is take your foot off the gas. Particularly if it goes over and it’s the break, right? You continue what you’re doing and take this year as a opportunity to take a deep breath and Sort of take control of this process instead of being in such a panic and build accessibility into your organization. Find a good consultant. And work with them and build accessibility. Into your organization. Like I said, There’s us. There’s a lot out there. There’s fantastic. You just do it. Don’t. Don’t, say, okay, we’re going to take a pause financially and time-wise because you’re going to end up in the same scenario a year from now as you were in and you’re going to end all the money you spent this year is going to be down the drain. And then you’re going to go into a panic rush mode and spend more money than you have to again next year.

Justin: And if you didn’t, maybe you still have budget, like you aligned for it. Like you set everything up so that your budget is still there. Like don’t reallocate that money. Yeah.

Mark: You’re ready to like slap that hand. Like don’t touch my budget. Right. Or like you do, like when you’re, I’ve had a, eaten a meal with you. I know how you’re, you’ve got that fork ready. So if somebody crosses your plate to steal food off your plate, you’re like, You’re ready with a fork. – Yeah, seriously, don’t let people touch your budget. Go. And if you need help explaining to them why it’s a good idea, let us know because you really will save time, money, and a lot of heartache by spending this year, baking it in, using that budget, all of those kind of things. And you’ll keep yourself out of risk. Hopefully. So. I don’t know. Do we need to talk any more about that? There’s a lot of… We’re just talking about the subject. We don’t have a specific thing to point to. We’ve got a lot of content. There’s a lot of content out there. People are talking about this. They’re talking about Title II. They’re talking about HHS. So the details are out there if you need them, and we’ll try to. Linked to some of the instead of that. Extensions. In the notes, the show notes.

Justin: Should we do it?

Mark: We did it. Should we move on?

Justin: Let’s move And then we have to start like drinking and then we have to, it’s just, there’s nowhere to go.

Mark: On. Yeah. Otherwise, we’ll just stay in that spiral. Okay.

Justin: You’re not going to go up. You’re not going to. You know, go to a happy place talking about that. You just got to. Accepted and kind of move on and.

Mark: So we should do is we should help people find their happy place. Yeah. After all this. All right. You guys find your happy place. Let us know. PDF to accessible markdown. And then, so this is, first of all, this is an interesting concept. Article on just that. Subject PDFs to Excel Markdown and then. Dylan and Blake are actually introducing an open source AI tool that they’ve created, which I feel really good about talking about because it is an open source AI tool, meaning you can go use it. And it doesn’t cost you anything. Not that there’s anything wrong with paying for these kind of things, but it’s… They You know, I know Dylan really well, and he is, he runs on our philosophy, this value first philosophy. What can I put out into the accessibility community of value? Let me start there. And then, you know, but hopefully that leads to business. So I really appreciate that So talk to us a little bit about, so you’ve, This is actually taking Markdown. Which sounds like a…

Justin: – So it’s taking a PDF. Well, and what.

Mark: Yes. Go ahead. No, you go. I’m going to stop. Well, I was going to say, this is taking Markdown and using it to solve this PDF problem. But Markdown is interesting. Like, I don’t know that everybody knows what Markdown is. Right. Right? It sounds like something… From the 80s, you know, that was happening in Brooklyn.

Justin: –

Mark: Like, we’re going to solve our problems. We’re going to get two turntables and we’re going to start spinning

Justin: And a microphone?

Mark: And everybody, we’re going to hit the Markdown. We’re going to hit the Markdown. Yeah. So it sounds cool, I guess, is my point. It is cool. What is Markdown? How is it different than mark up? That’s the flip. It’s the.

Justin: So yeah, so it’s actually a play on markup, which is a way of marking up your text documents using typically using HTML to identify the semantic nature of your document. So you would mark up a text document to describe a heading using h1 tags or paragraph tags and you know, all the various tags that are in the HTML specification. Markdown removes I know.

Mark: The text. Are you talking about semantic HTML now?

Justin: Look at So Markdown removes the tags and replaces the tags with a character-based structure that’s still gives you that same information.

Mark: That.

Justin: So instead of a tag that’s an H1, you would use a pound symbol. To indicate that the text that follows this pound symbol has a level one heading. For a level two heading, you would use two pounds. For a level three heading, three pounds. That’s the little crosshatch, I know different. Different languages, different cultures refer to it as different things.

Mark: So let me… Let me try this from the ignorant. Non-technical standpoint here, because I think you just gave a really good explanation. I think I have it in my head. And the way I see it is that Markup. So. Traditional HTML semantic markup creates a structure in which your content goes. So it kind of goes inside of it. And that structure gives that content, which could be Pictures, words, videos, whatever. It gives it its semantic. It gives it its semantic structure. So this group of words is a heading. This group of words is a paragraph. Etc. Way deeper than that. But that’s, but you’re sort of, sticking the text inside of the markup. Correct. Markdown. Actually uses More of the characters that you’re going to kind of find right at your fingertips on your. Keyboard so that instead of you sort of putting the content inside of this markup, you’re adding the markdown to the content. And I know it’s very sort of semantic because it’s really just adding characters up, but you’re sort of like adding stuff to the content to give it that versus sort of sticking it inside. Does that? Yeah. So But why both?

Justin: You don’t end up with – – Why both?

Mark: – Okay, los dos, yeah.

Justin: Why both?.. So I think Markdown is easier to write. It’s easier to write up a document or to write up content in Markdown, it’s faster. You’re not having to remember which tags to use. You know, well now it needs Tim and the HTML five or the, you know, the, the green, you know, the greenfield version of HTML. Like you don’t have to have ending tags in some places, but it’s, yeah, it’s just easier to kind of write. It’s easier to read rather than seeing, They’ve with a heading probably not so much but think of like an like a bulleted list an unordered list and an unordered list it’s just rather than having a ul tag and then within that ul tag each list item has opening and closing ally tags it kind of it starts to obfuscate the content Whereas, With Markdown, it’s just a dash. So I use a dash space and then here’s my list item. And so it looks like an actual bulleted list. Like I might write it in Microsoft Word or, you know, a Google Doc or something. So it’s looking more akin to the actual… Document format that we kind of all know and love, but it’s just using text-based characters to convey that semantic nature.

Mark: $50 for the use of the word obfuscate. So, and then the other cool thing, just so we should probably get to… The PDF part of this too. One of the cool things that the articles just kind of points out about Markdown is that it’s easily translatable back and forth to HTML. So if you have something in Markdown, you can pretty much at the click of a button go like make this html and something’s going to make it html where with a very easy you can’t really do that so And then the other point that the article made, so this is where it got me, is that If I can remember back in the. 90s. Early 90s, I published a magazine, a buddy of mine and I, it was the first time that technology was in a place where two people could Decided they wanted to publish a magazine and we put this little network infrastructure together and we could output directly from our software to film and then it could go to press and blah. But PDFs, like that’s when PDFs came out and they were like, What does PDF stand for? You know what I mean? Like this was this. And it really was meant, the article points out, it was meant to represent a physical document. So it was kind of like, this is the file version of this flyer. That you would. You know put. By the door, you know, or that you would tape on the window. Right. Cause that’s where we’re still in that mindset. And, So Here in 2026, we’re still You using that right. And I think that that’s the biggest point. One of the biggest points I made here is like, take that stuff and convert it. To something that’s really intended to live. In the digital world. And by doing that, you’re going to be able to make it accessible more easily because the process of making a PDF accessible, it’s not terrible, but it’s definitely an afterthought of a process.

Justin: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Justin: Fine. Well, there’s things that are done in PDFs that don’t necessarily transcribe to the web or specifically to Markdown, really. So there are things that can be done in PDFs. It’s – Yeah. If you’re just publishing out documents and PDFs, essentially so that you can create a read-only version of your document, which is what a lot of people do. They don’t want to pass around a Word document that someone can go in and edit. That’s one of the benefits of a PDF is that it locks it down. That’s a great case for Markdown for a web-based document. Get that information out there in a way that makes it easy, that’s still read-only. But gives them the ability to navigate it in an accessible way.

Mark: – Makes total sense. And of course, it’s marked on a semantic. Semantic is what makes it accessible if you’re gonna be very one sentence basic about how this all works and then so the open source tool that they created And I don’t know if they’ve got a name for it introduced. Do you remember if there was a name for it.

Justin: In the– It’s part of their– They worked through the University of Illinois, Champagne. I always pronounce it wrong. This is one of my mispronouncements. But it’s part of their qualify. Product that they’ve been working on. But it’s so it’s a quality reflow is the name. A I’m sorry, they’re actually University of Illinois Chicago.

Mark: Quality reflow. – But this is– – Okay.

Justin: My bad.

Mark: I see it right here. Quality reflow. So what this does, this uses AI to go. So the problem is everything we’ve said sounds wonderful, except for the fact that everybody’s been using PDFs forever. So it’s unlikely you’re not sitting on a ton of PDFs, particularly if you’re a large institution. And your answer, maybe, by the way, to make those PDFs accessible. There’s great solutions, stuff kind of stuff we do all day long out there. You can go do that if you want to, no problem, right? What this says is, hey, There’s a different way. If you want to approach it differently, if you want to kind of take out a little bit of the difficulty and their tool will take that backlog of PDFs using AI will convert it to Markdown. Disclaimer, we have not tested the tool. We have tons of faith in particularly in Dylan because I know him and I’m sure if he’s hanging out with Blake. We’re at a celly booth to get this done, that he’s hanging out with somebody. Great. I don’t know if I’ve met you before, Blake, but my apologies if I have and don’t remember who you are. The And so that’s what this tool does is it gives you a way to kind of convert that backlog so that you can go forward with. Markdown if that’s what you want to do.

Justin: Fair. Yeah, I mean, I do have I’m kind of curious, and I kind of poked around on the reflow website just looking for kind of information because… One of the things I didn’t mention earlier is that Markdown currently has a subset. Of HTML tags so you can appear graph painter. Headings, those sorts of things. And you can always include mark up in a markdown document. So if you’re looking at let’s say, like an embed if you wanted to embed a video within your markdown document. There’s no like in but really like an embeddable Markdown equivalent, but you can just drop the embed tag directly into it and it works like it’ll any Markdown parser is going to take that information and be like, okay, we’ll just pass that along as HTML. But it does make me wonder get up and get down.

Mark: Like- – So you gotta mark up to Markdown? Listen, so Yeah.

Justin: I know where you went with it.

Mark: So listen, like timeout, total timeout right here. If you’re listening. And you think that you can create the markdown rap? Please send that to us. Do it, record it, write it, whatever you want to do. I would love to get Markdown rap submissions because that’s all I can think of with Markup and Markdown is that there’s some hip hop… But mark that could be what My accessible hip hop stage name.

Justin: That could be your hip hop stagehand. Stage name It can be your hip hop stage name.

Mark: Markup. Markup. Mark up, Markdown. See, now I’m confused. My dyslexia is kicking in. Which one’s which? Which one’s markup? Which one’s markdown? All right, maybe it will be. Hey, this is.

Justin: Markdown. But yeah, how are they going to handle things like footnotes? How are they going to handle, you know, there’s some things that you can do with links that you’re not going to be able to necessarily transcribe. So are they going to embed links? In their format, do they just embed HTML in those places where there’s not a one-to-one conversion? So kind of curious to see how the tool is going to handle some of the more niche cases that you can do in formatting a document in a PDF.

Mark: Well, that sounds like… What is it? Your couch research time when you sit on the couch and do research sounds like a couch research time activity for fun.

Justin: You. We’re talking about like an unboxing events and stuff like that. So that would be kind of.

Mark: Yeah, actually it’s a good idea. Maybe we’ll get in and check this thing out and record some video and share that out so people can see how it works. But yeah, so check it out. This is, so the article is on the equal entry website. That is, Thomas. Logan’s business. Thomas Logan runs this a one, why New York meetup where, Dylan and Blake, talked about this. So at the bottom of this article, there’s about a 50 minute long presentation that these guys did. So we’ll put the links in there, but definitely something worth checking out and, Something to think about if you’re thinking about PDFs. All right. Now that we’ve marked up to Markdown, let’s talk about craft is untouchable. And this is a, article blog post by Christopher Butler. – Yep. In I’m going to, I know you love to hear me talk, Justin.

Justin: I do, but you do. I hear it in my sleep.

Mark: You hear it. I bet you do. But I’m gonna kick it right over to you, man, because, I just, I really want to hear your take on this and its relationship to accessibility and All that.

Justin: Yeah, I actually pulled this. So this, One of the places where I get kind of inspirations and I always check like a reading list. Ricky Onsman had this in his… List last week and I was reading it and I don’t know why he necessarily included this one in the list, at least initially, but I got it. It’s, I mean, it’s AI. Everyone’s talking about AI these days. AI this, AI that. But what I really liked about this was there is an aspect of accessibility that There’s a lot of it that is very technical or can be very technical. There’s a lot of it that can be… Like a lot of like there’s a lot of thought that’s put into things. But there is in some cases there is a craft to this. And that craft, I think, really shines itself, particularly in the places where you’re making. You’re not really making something that is accessible, but you’re making something that is usable by someone that is utilizing assistive technology to navigate. So it’s that, I feel like the craft really comes in when You’re really kind of dealing with the people. You’re really trying to make something that is going to be accessible to everyone and usable by everyone. And so as I was reading through this, and I think I’m putting words in Ricky’s mouth, but I think that’s why he may have included this in his list. What I liked about this is he kind of really talks about how AI doesn’t take away the craft. AI is a tool in much the same way. And I’m going to steal this guy’s analogy. The same way that the synthesizer in the 80s it didn’t take away, like it didn’t change anything. It didn’t take away piano players. It didn’t take away the music. It instead gave you another tool that you can use to create music. And that’s the way that I look at AI and my AI usage, like, I still have to know all the things that I want it to do. But does it help me do more things consistently, and to do things faster and to do things in a way that makes me More productive? Absolutely. But it doesn’t take away that the expertise that I have developed over, you know, a lot of years. And so that’s what I… It just kind of reiterated to me the importance of knowledge, of understanding, of how we approach accessibility and that all that information is a craft that AI Isn’t going to take away from us. But if you have that background knowledge, you can utilize AI to do even bigger, better, greater things, as long as you understand what the tools do, what the tools don’t do.

Mark: Yeah, and I think that As technology progresses. Technology by nature is more inclusive and accessible. And that’s why we, Or always on the soapbox that we’re on because… It’s inclusive and accessible. If you write it that way. It’s, you know, so really our whole job, our whole industry is like, hey, pay attention. More people can use this. And so, you know, I think people who are blind are much more employed now than if you go back before. Computers and stuff, right? I don’t know that for a fact, but that’s the impression I have. Because when interacting with technology, particularly technology that’s accessible, there’s an equivalent experience. And this made me think like that analogy of the, I really loved it, right? One, because I grew up in the 80s and listened to a lot of synthesized music and a huge Nine Inch Nails fan, right? Which is… Trent. Just that’s all the dude did was sat there with a synthesizer and said, let me make some really cool music. Right. And still doing that to this day. But it makes me think of your friend and mine, Todd Waits.

Justin: Yeah.

Mark: Todd Waits. And I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing a story. I know he doesn’t because I’ve heard him speak publicly about it, but I’m going to he if you want to hear a story, you got to hear Todd Waits tell it is a student. He’s an amazing. Speaker. And it’s really cool to hear him talk. So I’m going to do this quickly. Go listen to Todd Waits tell a story. But essentially, long story short, teenager developing a passion for the keyboards, playing cancer and he ended up having to have his right arm amputated due to the cancer. So as a young man woke up in the hospital missing his right arm. So All sorts of stuff rough about that, right? Age, that it happened, what happened, all that. But Todd Waits is not the kind of person that can be held down in any, you know, stretch of the word. So he did eventually, you know, I think it was hard, but, you know, he pulled himself out of it. And one of the things that he did is that he continued with his passion for keyboards. And the way that he did that, the way he was able to do that is through a synthesizer. I was asking about this one day and he just talked about how he could program the synthesizer and use that technological aspect of the synthesizer to sort of accomplish because when you play the keyboard it’s like you know, what left-hand bass, right-hand treble kind of ish. I’m not a keyboard guy, something like that. But the two hands can be important because they play two different parts at the same time of the music. And he’s able he was saying, yeah, that’s how, you know, I was able to use technology to be able to do that myself. Incredible keyboard is played with a lot of famous people. A link to some of Todd’s stuff. He works for Crawford Technologies, which is full circle. They’re a huge PDF accessibility group, one of the best out there. So shout out to those guys as well. But… My whole point for that is I love that analogy because I think AI is very much The same way that in as much as it’s a technology that we’re all using, it is an assistive technology. So it may be making things possible. And I say maybe because I don’t have a specific example of this, but in my mind, it’s probably making things possible faster. For people with disabilities who are makers as well as everything that you said.-

Justin: – Yeah.

Mark: That was a long way to get there.

Justin: But we successfully mentioned No, it was, this was a, this was, One of those ones that I like articles and I like talking about articles that are and gentle But have that overlap with more of the softer skills of, accessibility, technology, that sort of thing.

Mark: P.E.S. I’m a big Todd Waite fan, so I had to talk about him a little bit. Yeah.

Justin: And that make you think about Like, how do… How do I apply everything that I’ve learned? Take that. If technology went away tomorrow, Like, how might I continue to leverage my skills? Like what, you know, what are some of the ways that we think about technology and the ways that we interact with people. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about those types of things because AI is, you know, it’s not coming for everybody’s jobs tomorrow. But It’s, you know, it is coming, it is here. And we’re already seeing cuts all over the board. Was it Coinbase cut 14% of their… Of their staff specifically saying that they’re going to replace those people with AI agents within their organization. We’re seeing the cuts, we’re seeing this thing. Like, thinking about how the craft, how the thing that we do at its most basic nature. How do we take that and we leverage it in a world where AI is going to be driving more and more of the technological advances from here on? I read an article over the weekend. That was saying, and I forget who it was that said it, but says that, you know, we are not far away from AI developing the next generation of AI. Of AI. Yeah. Yeah. And there may have been Dario, but I don’t think that was who said that. That’s some pretty scary stuff like that’s self like you know that’s self-propagating ai essentially and we would have very little insight into how it works why it works the way it does what kind of advances and like that’s some scary stuff especially if you read a lot of sci-fi like i do..

Mark: If you read a lot of sci-fi, you’ve got to be terrified right now with AI. But yeah, I mean, I have kind of an optimistic, cautiously optimistic view to where… When the train was invented, there was a lot of talk around it would be the downfall of society because of how would suddenly disappear. People were as afraid of that if not more afraid of that than we are of AI. Saying similar sort of things. And, what we find is that the landscape changes. So yes, AI agents are taking people’s jobs, but what jobs might AI create? I don’t have an answer. I don’t have an answer, but what I do know, and that’s why everybody said, like, you know, AI coming in and it’s going to, you know, Take the place of manual editing, which it hasn’t. Not even close. That’s not the That’s not what I thought about that. How is AI going to shift and what are we going to have to be concerned with from an accessibility standpoint as it shifts? Maybe we won’t be auditing websites at some point. But. There will be something where we have to make sure it’s accessible. You know, everything’s going to ship from underneath this. So the question is what does that look like in my mind? And I’m nobody like, you know. It could be. I could be completely wrong about that. All right. What do you think? Good. Anything else you want to add Before we wrap up?

Justin: Nope

Mark: Great. Well, this was a good one. Listen. Keep your foot on the gas if you’re, if you were doing Title II HHS stuff. In fact, Figure out your next steps. Don’t even like, Don’t take your foot off the gas and set your GPS for a year from now. Keep going. That’s it. Now, that we’ve broken down accessibility for you, We hope you go forth and keep it accessible.

Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Accessibility Breakdown by Inclusion Impact Accessibility.