Steve Tyler's Vision for Global Disability Leadership

Chapters

• 0:00 Steve Tyler's New Leadership Role
• 4:02 The Stagnation Problem in Disability Rights
• 6:27 The Failures of Current Accessibility Approaches
• 10:42 The Power of Convening Organizations
• 19:00 BillionStrong's Global Mission
• 26:30 Closing and Call to Action

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi and welcome to Access Chat. We have a frequent returner in Steve Tyler today, but Steve comes with news, so we thought it was important to share the news because Steve has recently accepted a very important position at BillionStrong. So, steve, we've had you on Access Chat multiple times, but we and Deborah as the founder of BillionStrong we've talked about Bill Access Chat multiple times, but we and Deborah as the founder of BillionStrong, we've talked about BillionStrong before, but we've not brought the two together. Congratulations on becoming and taking the leadership role as CEO of BillionStrong. Tell us why. Why did you do this to yourself?

Speaker 2: 0:41

Why did I do this to myself and thank you for inviting me to tell you about it. Um, in some of the previous podcasts and appearances that I've made and some of the work that I do in my my, my regular role, which I'm still doing at leonard cheshire, so the ceo um role at billion strong leadership position, but it but it's a voluntary position, but I've been working with Deborah and Richard and some of the wider team both at Billion Strong and Roo Global for some time and I guess my agenda and what I've become acutely aware of is, if I call it the state of the nation, the state of the world according to people with disabilities. And you know, I I feel, like many, that the numbers tell a story. The data tells us a story. There are multiple organizations that are in play, that are, for better or worse, doing greater or smaller things, but one thing is for sure, which is that I guess the data tells us that there are many benefits, there have been some wins, but for me we're not moving fast enough. And I'll give you one data point that sticks in my mind and really made me want to work with BillionStrong more closely, which is the report.

Speaker 2: 2:24

I think I mentioned it last time I was on, in fact, a report published by somebody in UK government but isn't an official government document, but it starts with the immortal words the employment rate in the UK in the disability community and the rate of educational attainment has not changed in six decades and my interpretation of that is, despite the legislation, by. In fact, if it wasn't for the work we've done around, for example, making technology more accessible and so on, we could have been going backwards and that's a horrific idea. And there are differences, there are different figures in differing sub-areas of the disability community, but the story is pretty conclusive. Sub-areas of the disability community, but the story is pretty conclusive and I think we need a new way of doing something about it, not least of all having proper representation, bringing to life the nothing about us without us idea, not replicating, not reinventing wheels, but embracing and unifying and then delivering locally but working globally. That's broadly what's drawn me to it.

Speaker 1: 3:56

So we have plenty of regulation.

Speaker 2: 4:01

Some of that regulation has decades or even more, but where we lack the leadership for the action, I think I would answer that by saying there are examples that I've led on or that I've been part of, or that I've been invited to, where we've made real change, real progress, genuinely delivered, real solutions for real people. Definitely, in the political sphere there is a level of unification, of collaboration et cetera, but often the distance between what those organizations are doing or people are doing and the translation of that work into real and genuine deliverables on the ground for people is vast. Quite often people are not seeing the links. It seems to me and I can give you examples of that in a second the bit that for me is missing most of all is international collaboration, unified strategies, unified approaches, where we actually deliver real product, real solutions for people to live their lives. It may not be the best right now, but there is a stepping stone to what will be the best tomorrow.

Speaker 2: 5:36

At the moment, it seems to me, there are some ludicrous situations, if I put aside the choices that people have in the disability community at the moment and I'm going to focus particularly on the West when I use these examples just because we purport to be the richest nations, the wealthiest nations, the most forward-thinking nations, nations, the most forward-thinking nations, and yet I believe we're letting people down with disabilities significantly, and so good examples of what I'm talking about are, you know, try buying everyday accessible kitchen equipment that you know you can use, or indeed any equipment. Try accessing 95 of the web that isn't accessible to you. Try, you know, taking advantage of navigation or orientation systems and service or solutions if you're blind or partially sighted, or or accessing wheelchairs at reasonable prices or any other specialist product. Look at what's happening in the screen reader market. There are things that we predicted, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, and I don't shy away from any of the support I've given and worked relentlessly, actually throughout my career, to make the world an accessible place, build accessibility in to everything that we do as far as possible.

Speaker 2: 7:13

But one of the notes of caution that we talked about 15 years ago was let's just be a little bit circumspect about this, because in delivering mainstream accessibility, there are two things at least that you're beginning to change quite considerably from the old order. One is you're handing off accessibility to mainstream organizations, which is great if they stick to it, if they the kool-aid and if they genuinely maintain that as part of their strategy. We know that sometimes that doesn't work. Or you know, with a change of leadership, with a change of ceo can change very quickly. But secondly, we've got to maintain the knowledge around accessibility one way or the other. And what's beginning to happen even in the mainstream in the screen reader sector? So if you look at the big changes in screen reader pricing for JAWS and ZoomText and things like that becoming more prohibitive, more tricky, less choice I worry about those things and they're not being driven necessarily by the needs of the people. They're being driven by the needs of corporate commercial entities.

Speaker 3: 8:38

Yes, and Steve, of course, we've had a lot of things happen that have impacted us. I know, here in my beautiful United States, we've made some decisions about, you know, words and making certain words illegal DEI, and it's just really interesting times and times when not only was these things happening in the United States and some other countries, we were also seeing a breakdown of leadership in the disability world anyway, in a lot of different ways, and you know, I've been working on Billion Strong since 2022. Of course, my husband was dying during that time. I got slowed down a little bit by life.

Speaker 3: 9:18

One thing that always really and, steve, you're the one that made me see this in a different way, and I'm going to use that word convene, but you and I have been, you know, conspiring in the background to try to help our community in a way that we just don't see happening, but it's, you know. For example, one thing you gave me so many wonderful examples, but an example that you would give me was oh, by the way, debra, and this was last year Did you know that this year is the 200th anniversary of Braille? I was like, oh, really, I don't see any of the blind organizations speaking about it. I mean there was some initial announcements in January, and then even the things when all of a sudden the organizations that support say you know, blind people and vision loss, they do not hire people that are blind and have vision loss in their executive roles. Often I mean and that's hire people that are blind and have vision loss in their executive roles.

Speaker 3: 10:11

Often I mean and that's not just that part of the community, that's all of the community. So I was just wondering if you could just speak to a little bit about what does convening really mean? And what we don't want so much we don't want is just to build this organization because, yay, we're blah. No, if this organization isn't going to really make a difference to humans, we don't even want to do it. So why do you think convening is so important, in a different way than we have been in the past?

Speaker 2: 10:41

I think if you look at how mainstream organizations, commercial entities, they're caught by the same kind of challenges and they use all sorts of made up words or phraseologies to try to describe where they are. Frenemies Frenemies was one that used to be used a lot Friends and enemies. So we compete, but there are times when we need to work. So good example you know how does anything work? How does the mobile network work? The GSM standards had to be agreed. You know, electricity standards have to be agreed. A whole host of legislation. Unification has to be agreed in order to enable individual countries to do what they want to do and, believe it or not, that's true in the disability sector. So I'll give you some very clear examples. In the, in the work that I've been working or leading in um, you know, we developed a thing called the daisy consortium global organization, because what we wanted to do was to make books, academic materials and so on accessible to people. Whatever way you wanted to read, you had the same kinds of requirements. You might read and understand things differently, but nonetheless you wanted to access the same stuff as everybody else, and you might ingest it in a different way, you might utilize it in a different way. But we wanted standards that would deliver on that, or digital TV accessibility. We needed to engage at a standards level. We needed to get Europe on board and the US if we had half a chance of influencing the TV industry. And there we are tiny organizations with little or no money to go around and certainly little or no influence. Little or no money to go around and certainly little or no influence. How do you do it? Well, you do it by unifying. You do it by agreeing with each other that these are important things that we want to fit. Talking of braille, you know there was a braille project where what we recognized was, you know, braille display technology. The big question, you know for those that don't know, without boring everybody to death, there is an electronic technology, piezoelectronic switches, which are very widely used in Braille display technology. Now they've been around for 60 years. Why? Because they're very robust, very resilient, very fast and do exactly what Braille display technology needs them to do. But they're very expensive and the question endlessly has been well, could we reduce the cost? Braille displays are very expensive, you know. I don't know. Stepping back 20, 15, 20 years, a Braille display, one of the kind of smaller variety might cost $3,500, $4,000 and more to buy. Well, that's beyond the ability of the majority of everyday people to do that, along with the screen reader that you need to power it, the training that you need to utilize it, etc. Etc. Is there a way of reducing the cost of Braille displays? We know it's a major issue around literacy. Braille enables literacy. It enables access to lots of stuff.

Speaker 2: 14:23

Interestingly, we knew that Braille display technology might be useful in graphics and graphical interpretation. Anyway, when we looked at what was going on I can't remember the exact number, it was either 56 or 58 individual projects around the world were taking place, millions and millions of dollars. Nobody was talking to each other, nobody was collaborating, no one was focusing on. What they were doing was trying to make their particular proposition work, which is fine if you've got more than enough money to go around this competitive process, et cetera, et cetera. What we did was took all of those projects engaged with. Everybody made an assessment from an engineering perspective. So we commissioned some engineers that were respected by all to check out what had most chance of working and we narrowed it down to three and we built a consortium across agencies across the world who represented visually impaired people and got them to agree that we were going to give this a shot if we're serious about reducing the costs of display technology.

Speaker 2: 15:37

Here are the three that we've identified. Three technologies that we've identified and the only way of knowing, finding out whether or not which ones would have an effect, and the ones that we'd identified we believe are the most likely. But there's no guarantee of anything. But unless we tested it out, we're never going to find out. And so we needed money on the table and we shared the expense and we shared the resource, and the end result was we did get technologies out there and it had a major effect on mainstream pricing of even existing technologies. So convening works. Who's doing it now?

Speaker 3: 16:16

though there's a good question.

Speaker 1: 16:18

So who is? But also, I just want to come in on your point about the. There's so many people trying to solve the same problem, because this is something that we see repeated not just in the Braille space, but right across the disability space. I work with Zero Project and other organizations and they are, you know, inundated with people proposing their solutions, and every year we have the tech forum, and even in the tech forum you go there there's three very similar solutions, and one of my big bugbears is no one does any kind of desk-based research beforehand, because and I think that some of this is due to the fact that they're solving the problems of the ones that they love, and so you and we've seen it. We've seen it in the 11 years on Access Chat as well, because we've interviewed people that are doing similar things. We had, you know, people doing online sports and everything else multiple times, and they're all doing great work.

Speaker 1: 17:18

But, as you say, there's limited money to go around, and what we need is that convening and that bringing together so that we're not wasting the limited money by competing with each other, and we're seeing it repeated right now in the signing space, right? So so many different sign language avatars being created. Ai is going to solve this. I've got my AI sign language or I've got my avatar, or whatever, and so well. Can we have some common standards? Can we find a way to bring people together to make this work?

Speaker 2: 17:53

Absolutely. And again, from the disability sector, it seems to me you've got almost the other end of the spectrum too, where there are really very good propositions out there, that they may not be perfect but they're pretty damn good. But to make them really work, unification would be ideal. So I'm thinking I mean, it's a pet one of mine and you know, forgive me for using it as an example this may not be the one, but until we test it out, we don't know. But I've investigated and been watching ira for a long time. So for those that don't know, ira available in the us, but well, built in the us and it's a it's a system that was put together to enable navigation in the visually impaired community and you would have a trained person that you press the Aira button on your smartphone and there they are online, so if you're out and about, they can guide you to places. If you need other kinds of support, if you need to look at something, read something, understand something you need to look at something, read something, understand something, whatever they can help you with that. But the navigation issue, you know they come into their own then. But the obvious question is well, if it's available in the US? Why isn't it available everywhere else? And the short answer to that is either coordination isn't available or people won't collaborate.

Speaker 2: 19:29

What I've noticed is that there's a shrinking of international activity within the organizations that represent the needs of people with disabilities, so they focus in on very local issues. We get money to support, I don't know, know, the deaf people of the united kingdom or the blind people of the united states, or whatever it is, and that's what they do, and there's a good argument for that. The problem is, it means that you end up not benefiting and not collaborating, and so our is that what we're trying to do is build an organization that where several things happen. Firstly, people with disabilities genuinely have a voice. If you want to know what people with disabilities want in their lives, what they would prioritize, well I tell you what. Let's ask them and let's action that request. Or, more to the point, let's enable people with disabilities to action that request or, more to the point, let's enable people with disabilities to action that request. Secondly, let's convene people that will make this happen. Let's insist, the organizations that represent us convene in order to solve particular problems and make that happen. And then, thirdly, let's engage with the infrastructures that already exist and reinvent stuff.

Speaker 2: 20:50

So the way we describe it, leonard Cheshire, I think is a good description Think global, act local. And what I mean by that is, you know, we've talked to many organizations prior to this. We did some research over the past few months, informal and a bit more formal. We've talked to sister organizations to kind of test the waters, I suppose. How do they see the world? I mean, are we, are we talking a language, reading the world in a way that for them simply doesn't exist? They don't see it like that at all and the short answer is they do see it in the way we're talking about, but also they can't seem to do anything about it, or they'll focus in on their very specific issue. So they'll say now hold on. Yeah, if you want to talk about standards around area x, now we're in. Yeah, we'll be happy to engage with that. Well, okay, that's fine for your specific interest area, but what about everything else? Ah, well, that's not really our thing, we don't do that, but we recognize it's an issue.

Speaker 2: 22:14

So what we're trying to create is to bring about an organization that mobilizes the faith that people have in Billy and Strong and I say that because they've actually joined it. There were more than 100 countries represented in it, big and small, more active and less active. But there is a reality to this and my instinct was really is an opportunity Countries represented around the world at very local level. You can imagine an organization being built that will have, if I call them chapters for a moment, or interest groups that represent at local level the specific needs and wants of people with disabilities, but bring in the partners or, as partners, those that would like to be partners. So again, if I stick to a uk example, there are a number of self-help groups in the uk that already exist. They do their thing at local level and they're quite happy to do it. That's why they exist. Rather than reinventing that, let's fold them into the wider thing, because now you can do your local thing but be part of the global movement for change, part of the global movement that says, yes, there are self-help groups, yes, there are well-meaning people around that want to do so, but we need to step up and own this area and begin to force changes, such as the employment issue, such as the education issue, such as products where we don't have to talk about or think about whether or not they may or may not be accessible.

Speaker 2: 24:05

Connectivity standards are a good example. I touched on that earlier with GSM. I remember many, many years ago leading the development, the first mobile phone technology working with Nokia back in 2001, 2002, didn't be in operating systems and things like that and working with an amazing chap, torsten Brandt, and so on, getting corporate support from Vodafone and other entities, and we managed to get the product moving and the big driver of that was yes, of course we recognize we want accessibility to mobile devices in and of themselves. I want to read the text message that Neil sends me, but really what it was was the ambition that said we don't know in 10 or 20 or 30 years' time what the device is that people will be carrying around in their pocket, but what we do know is there's half a chance of the world being more accessible if those devices are accessible and the connectivity between those devices and whatever it is they control in the environment around you. Because that, as sure as eggs is eggs, is going to happen. How and when we don't know, but it will well 20 years down the track.

Speaker 2: 25:38

Yes, accessibility is present on the platforms that control the devices in your pocket do. Are there standards in connectivity that enable you to build controllers for washing machines and kitchen devices, coffee machines, whatever air-con units, heating systems? Well, there are accessible solutions, but there is by no means anything universal. There is no way of easily delivering on that. Why not?

Speaker 3: 26:13

yes, and we need to solve that. We are going to solve that at billion strong, and I know we're out of time, but I also know, because steve has sat on a lot of the large technology, you know advisory boards, and so we do want corporations to get in and be part of this and allow our community, once and for all, to really, you know, honor nothing about us without us, in a way we haven't seen. Also, we are finding some really beautiful surprises. I know we're out of time. We'll come back and talk about it before but, at this.

Speaker 3: 26:48

You know, next time we talk, but we're finding these accidental surprises of accessibility that are delighting us, and so we're going to be talking about that as well. So this has just begun, but we I know we need to close, so I will say BillionStrong is billion-strongorg. Please join us. You'll be able to talk to Steve. We're going to be able to do so much together. But also thank you to Amazon for supporting us and being there for us. We are so grateful for you and, of course, mycleartext, which has been with us from the very beginning. We love MyClearText, highly recommend them, and we really are so glad that they are still supporting us here at Access Chat. So, neil and Antonio, I hope you all have a great week. And Steve, thank you. Thank you for everything you're doing to move us all forward. Let us give you the last words.

Speaker 2: 27:38

Just thanks everybody and looking forward to working closely with everybody at BillionStrong and hoping that you know if I can make you know 10% of the difference that's happened to date with the you know and add to the leadership that's gone before you know I'm doing all right.

Speaker 3: 27:59

I agree. I agree, we got this. Thanks everybody.

Speaker 1: 28:02

Thank you Until next time.