Breaking Barriers in Blindness and Business with Tom Babinski

When Tom Babinski, a beacon in the world of accessibility, recounts his ascent from navigating life as a blind individual in Hungary to becoming an influential force in the industry, you can't help but be captivated. Our latest episode takes you on a journey through Tom's extraordinary experiences, from his days of training the first cohort of accessibility consultants in Southeast Asia to making significant strides at IBM. It's a narrative that not only celebrates the progressive shift in employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for the visually impaired but also spotlights the catalytic role of pivotal legislation like Section 508 and the European Accessibility Act.

This conversation is a treasure trove of insights where technology meets empathy, and where communication transcends traditional barriers. We tackle the nitty-gritty of how online tools are revolutionizing connections, enabling entrepreneurs with disabilities to flourish from the sanctuary of their homes. Our dialogue with Tom Babinski unfolds to reveal the empowering potential of AI in education and supporting an aging population. It's a testament to the power of inclusivity and the unyielding spirit of innovation that is driving today's society towards an environment where everyone is truly welcome.

Chapters

• 0:01 Accessibility and Entrepreneurship for People With Disabilities
• 17:34 Technology, Inclusion, and Communication
• 32:57 Holistic Accessibility Consulting With Even Grounds

Transcript

0:00

AXSCHAT Tom Babinski

NEIL: 0:01

Hello and welcome to Axschat. I'm delighted that we are joined today by Tom Babinski, Tom has a long and storied career in accessibility and Debra describes Tom as one of her earliest mentors. So Tom we are delighted to have you with us, really keen to hear more about your story and your work in accessibility. So maybe you could just give us a little bit of an introduction about yourself and your background in accessibility and we'll take it from there.

TOM: 0:34

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. It's been a long story; it is as old as I am. I've been in the accessibility industry officially for 25 years. But it started much earlier. I was born completely blind in Hungary and very early on I had to learn to advocate for myself and one of the first things my parents heard in the village when I was born that they shouldn't take me out on the street because it's embarrassing. So my parents decided no, no, no, it's not going to be that way. They are going to give me all the opportunities which everybody else has, which is, you know, communist Hungary back in the 70s/80s, so as much as we had. But they made sure that I got through school and early on, I learned to advocate for myself to a certain extent but it came to a point where I was able to finish school, got a master's degree but nobody really wanted to employ me other than in the traditional, so to say, blind jobs. You could be a phone operator; you could make brushes and brooms and if you had a college degree maybe you could teach at the school for the blind those days. It is of course different, and I don't want to portray Hungary that it's like that in the European Union now, things have changed drastically. But since I was learning US history and I learned English while I was there. I was back and forth to the US; I just came here to finish my education and I received a job offer. So I ended up staying in this country I think it has been for 25 years now, that I'm here. And I started working at different smaller consulting companies and in different programs. I taught the first accessibility consultants in Southeast Asia, who were blind. That was almost 20 years ago. So that was a big thing those days. And then I joined IBM as a mobile accessibility advisor and soon I started taking over the IBM corporate accessibility training programme. And I built a centre for entrepreneurship at the Hadley School for the Blind, so that people who in particular, didn't have access to the regular nine to five job could work remotely, which was far ahead of its days, when COVID came. Those people were already working remotely and starting or doing their entrepreneurship. So that's mostly it in a nutshell.

NEIL: 3:24

So that's it. Long and storied history. And you know, we know that IBM was an early mover. Section Five Way has had a powerful effect on also the work you are doing with Section Five Way has had a powerful effect on moving industries to do more. I think we're seeing more movement again with the European Union moving in with legislation, the European Accessibility Act coming into force. So we are seeing another wave of accessibility, which I'm excited about. But if I may ask the question that, the thing that excites me is you are talking about entrepreneurship. So you said you wanted to escape the basic jobs that people had expectations that people with no vision would be able to do. And so you went into Tech and then you were teaching entrepreneurship. What were the sort of things you were doing to enable entrepreneurship this because this is an area of passion for me also. So how were you equipping young people or older people with the skills that they needed to be able to set up in business? Were there any specific things that you did, particularly?

TOM: 4:52

Yes. So first we had to make it accessible. So where the whole thing was coming from was that generally blind people, 70% of blind people, tend to be unemployed or underemployed. And partly because maybe they didn't have too many opportunities to find a job. Maybe they are older and when they were young, they didn't have access to education just like everybody else. Maybe it's because they live in an area where there is no transportation, therefore they cannot go to work location. So that was the whole idea about entrepreneurship that let's give people accessible courses, so they can learn how to start a business if they want, out of the comfort of their home. And that started in 2010. And I had probably more than 500 students in the first three years. And many people started small businesses, you know, creating courses, doing consulting, selling one bay and many of them were online. So we wanted to make sure that we want to provide them with accessible curriculum and two, show them tools which are accessible that they can use to start their business.

DEBRA: 6:15

Tom, I have I guess, first of all welcome to the show. I'm really excited to have you here. You should have been on the show, a long time ago because you really did teach me so much when we were working on projects with the patented trade operations over there. It seems like a different lifetime. But I, like Neil, am very interested in the entrepreneurship for people with disabilities as well and I know that's something we want to partner with others on, at Billion Strong. I also know that Zero Project is trying to work on scaling up how they're supporting entrepreneurs with disability with their IT and everything and maybe you can talk a little bit more about that. But one thing that I wonder, well, there's a few things that we need to get done and one thing I want to take on at Billion Strong there is a few things I know Billion Strong is we want to take on some kind of verification and certification, in every single country working with our country partners so that we can certify entrepreneurs with disabilities. I know that we have one in the United States that I helped create. But sometimes these programmes are so fluffy, so they add o value to the entrepreneurs, so we really wanted to do one, that we're because I have a lot of corporate brands coming to me, saying we want to include vendors that are entrepreneurs with disabilities, but there seems to be a disconnect. So there is a lot of efforts being made but I was curious, in your journey and in the work that you are doing as well, are you optimistic about where we are going. You know, there are a lot of efforts being made but are you optimistic about the directions?

TOM: 8:02

Generally, yes. I think there's much more awareness. I think there is much more talk about accessibility. There is much more talk about inclusion. For example, now we concentrate on more disabilities than what we did 20 or 30 years' ago. So it's not the number of people with disabilities that's growing, it's that we are recognising more disabilities. We are getting to a point from talking about accessibility, to talking about inclusion. Because accessibility is not everything. Sometimes people have needs who don't have a disability or maybe they have a temporary disability. They just have human needs and I just feel the inclusion is going to take that into consideration. The downside is that things are happening so fast. New applications are popping up. New services are emerging. There is no technology and then we really need to reinvent what accessibility and inclusion will mean in that particular stage. For example, you know you have the different realities, like virtual realities and how do you exist in that? Or how are you going to be inclusive? What are you going to do when you don't have actual devices, but you have to look at certain things or touch non-existent things that you can see to start interaction with your device. We are communicating through our glasses. What happens if you cannot see through those glasses? What happens if you cannot put on those glasses? We just need to reinvent, and I think the only way to do this well is when we start everything with accessibility and inclusion in mind at the very beginning.

DEBRA: 10:15

Wow.[Claps] Sorry, just had to clap for that. Neil, I think you wanted to come in here.

NEIL: 10:21

I think Antonio had a question.

DEBRA: 10:23

Okay cool. All right.

TOM: 10:26

Just because you know, just let me add one thing. Through my consulting practice, I've worked I would say 90/95% of the cases trying to fix something up that had no consideration about accessibility. And I feel that is changing. I think we are getting there now. And so yes, I'm optimistic but it's not going to be easy.

DEBRA: 10:50

Love it.

ANTONIO: 10:52

I want to bring up a topic that I was discussing on the other day about the Web, how it is today, you know, we know all the issues that we have with fake news and with false information. And we know that can be a problem, for many people. How do you feel that we, you know, considering all of the problems that we have with part of the web not being accessible. How can we improve it but at the same time make sure that people who need access to trusted sources that are able to trust in the Web and not be somehow end up in the situations where the Internet can put some tricks and end up reading fake information. How we can make it better for people; what is your view on that?

TOM: 11:42

Well look, I don't think I'm going to be popular with my answer, but I'll tell you anyhow.

ANTONIO: 11:46

Yes?

TOM: 11:47

Here is the problem, there is such a huge information overload. You know, when I started my consultancy, many, many years ago, I was able to have interaction on social media. Now everybody is just pushing their junk and they are putting it in your face, and you don't know what to read. You have Chat CBT which is making up stuff or not. You have the search engines that put up the information on the first page that could be doctored to be placed on the first page or somebody had enough money to get it there. So where I feel I'm not going to be popular is that we need to use information and the Internet and online sources for what they are worth. But I think it's about time to go back to working with real people. And have real networking and as you said, trusted sources.

DEBRA: 12:41

Bravo.

TOM: 12:42

I don't want to worry about what comes up first on Google. I want to know who are the people that I trust, if this is the information you're going to put out, if I'm going to read your newsletter, if I'm going to take your services, I want to understand that you are behind it. Do you know what, I want to go there with you, I want to meet with you, and I want to eat dinner with you, and I want to shake your hand. I think that's what we need to get back to and use information and digital technology for what it is because it's a great thing but it's not everything.

DEBRA: 13:14

Well, said and our audience will totally agree with you on most of that.

NEIL: 13:19

Yes. Go on Antonio, you follow.

ANTONIO: 13:23

No, no I think it's a very important topic. As we all know, even experts can fall into traps around the Web. So if we are you know, considering that the Web, most part of the Web is not accessible, and we have all these lines of workloads I think this is a very important topic.

DEBRA: 13:43

Yes.

NEIL: 13:44

Yes. So I think, absolutely we have seen the dilution of truth on the Internet and the diminution of quality of information that is on there. We have an explosion of junk info. You know, the content has multiplied rapidly, and you can create loads and loads of content, but the utility of that content is less now than it was even a decade ago.

TOM: 14:18

You know, we spend more time selecting and going through information instead of consuming the right information.

NEIL: 14:31

Yes, I think that's fair.

DEBRA: 14:33

That's good. I like that.

NEIL: 14:36

And that's because we've put wrappers and opinions around information. When the Internet was young, it was an index of facts and books and repositories of stuff. Not all of them were facts right. But there was less information, less opinion. And less sort of automatically generated stuff and less advertising. So I think it was much more useful, you could get to that information and learn stuff and to a certain extent, rely on it, more than you can today.

TOM: 15:14

I think it's going to shake out itself because it's not sustainable. And I think we'll start to realise that we need to learn to use it, now that we have it. I'm not too worries about it. I think we are just at the day and age when things are happening so fast. Two years ago we didn't have an idea about Chat GBT, most people didn't have. And today, this is a tool that we are using, everybody is using and well or not too well and we need to figure out what to do with it. I think the generations of technology are going faster, happening much faster than the generations of humankind.

NEIL: 15:55

Yes.

DEBRA: 15:57

Yes. You know what I do want to say I almost agree with almost everything you said, Neil as well. But you know what, I wonder you know, I did watch Matrix Remastered, but I wonder if I agree with what you're saying, we got to go back to people, we got to go back to engaging. I 100% agree with that but I also there is a problem with that too, in that we can't always engage flesh to flesh with people and so we, so many people were left out and when we had those answers earlier, a lot of those answers, I realise now, but I'm sorry but I've been lied to about so much. I accepted so much that was told to me in school. I accepted what was being told to me by other adults. I accepted so much that I now know weren't true because it was maybe that group of people's truth. So I just want to say I know we are all in agreement here but I think, how do we, how do we go back to the human touch, even if we have to do it digitally like we are all doing now because I feel like, even though I am virtually not with any of you, I still feel connected to you, I feel like you know, but I just want to say that, I think the way it was before didn't work for so many people that we actually have to go through this mess. So that more humans can be meaningfully included. Also, just want to say Tom, what you said, I love something that you have said, and we have all said it at times, I love what you said about accessibility, we have gotten better with accessibility. We know how to make things accessible whether or not we choose to blah blah blah. But what we what accessibility has not solved is the inclusion problem. What it hasn't solved, identity and all that stuff we are doing will help. But I just want to say that the way it used to work though, it didn't work for a whole lot of people and that's why we got to be walking this mess that we are talk walking right now. This information overload. I love I love Chat GBT. What I don't use it for is for facts and figures. I don't. But I love to ask it questions and it come back at me, and I love that way but, I've also even since I started using it, changed the way I'm using it. So anyway, I just want to make those points. Neil, did you want to come in earlier I just want to make sure earlier I didn't accidentally cut you off.

NEIL: 18:43

It's fine, I'm still here. I have all my fingers. So yes, look we started this whole thing through online tools but there is a difference between the communication tools that we are using such as this, where we are able to see each other and you know, so far we haven't replicated that and got a realistic Neil bot, that we know of, that is talking to you. So we had almost the virtual face to face, right and we didn't actually famously all meet in person for three years. So we were doing this Podcast for three years before we met. I think there is a difference with that and the more informal stuff on the Internet.

DEBRA: 19:33

Agree.

NEIL: 19:34

That said, I think all of us, when we did finally meet up in person, got a lot out of the real face to face physical contact as well.

DEBRA: 19:48

I agree.

NEIL: 19:49

And so Tom I'm with you on the it's really nice to meet people in person. I think you also form, you know, sometimes deeper connections, when you're doing that sort of have that opportunity to spend time in the company of people. It's not always possible though; right?

DEBRA: 20:14

It's a blessing.

TOM: 20:15

Yes, I want to state that you know, technology gave us the ability to meet people that otherwise we wouldn't. Look, I have somebody I call a friend today. I never met him. We have been corresponding for 15 years ago. I have a friend; I would call him my best friend. We have been corresponding more than ten years, I met him twice. So it's so interesting, can somebody be your best friend, just because you don't hang out every day. So yes, technology does something which I think is really important, but we have to talk with the people and not just shout into the Internet and see if someone is going to hear us and sure, it has its functions too. That's how you can get messages across that's fine. But you don't have the ability to control who is going to listen to it. But if you have a one-on-one conversation or you get together with a group of people then we are involved.

DEBRA: 21:14

I agree.

TOM: 21:15

That's technology helping us to get closer and not farther.

NEIL: 21:20

I think that's -- so we wanted to create a sense of community. So aside from sort of having guests on and learning from people, from these three to one conversations on Axschat, we also wanted to bring people together and allow people to communicate and that was the purposes of us having Twitter chats and the Q&A, on social media. But it was that dialogue. It wasn't the broadcast. You know because social media used to be more social than it is now, and we have gotten.

TOM: 21:58

Right.

DEBRA: 21:59

That's so true, wow.

TOM: 22:02

That's a good concept.

DEBRA: 22:03

That's a quote.

NEIL: 22:05

Yes. I mean it's pretty antisocial right now.

DEBRA: 22:10

Yes.

NEIL: 22:11

We see a lot of people exhibiting quite antisocial behaviours on what are supposed to be social media platforms. So I understand why people shy away from it. We have definitely seen a drop off from the levels of engagement because people don't want the toxicity of some of the stuff on the platforms. I have been going to as you say Tom, it's going to find its way and eventually something will level out. But we are going through definitely a bumpy patch.

DEBRA: 22:47

I would be really interested, Tom and anybody on here, you know, what are you excited about, you know about the technology and where we could go with AI? I know that something I think about a lot, and I am working on is, you know, how do you know the aging. I am at a certain age now. I wasn't saying this, I am 65-year-old and I'm very healthy and I don't see any reason why I can't live to 120. I'm very healthy. I take good care of myself. But regardless, I'm also thinking of it from the lens of my community, my community now that I'm 65 years old. And so how do we make sure that use this technology in a way that people can be more included. Antonio had said in a message window, also it is all about education and so I wanted to incorporate too because how do we do this differently, I mean once again, we are all taking all this information overload. How do we take this and do it so that we really more meaningfully include people in ways that we haven't even thought about doing it, maybe.

TOM: 23:59

Education is interesting because it's no longer what it used to be. When you start a four-year course, by the time you finished it, certain things may be outdated. If you study ancient history, well, you're lucky though you might have new discoveries, in reality people need just in time education. That is what I discovered at IBM, for example, when I put together the hour-long courses nobody cared about it. They wanted the five-minute courses. They had one question, they needed one answer and they wanted to run with it. And by the time one person listened to my one-hour educational session. The second person listened to my five minute one and was already solving the problem. And I think that it’s what is changing in education, and we need to embrace. And in the meantime, we need to raise educated children because it is not just about finding information but the ability of understanding where information belongs. What is true? What isn't? What is useful for me and how two pieces of information connect?

DEBRA: 25:08

Bravo.

TOM: 25:09

But answering your question about how technology is going to help us. I feel that we have lots of platforms where I can take the accessibility issues out of the equation. I'll give you an example. If I'm looking for something and the website is not accessible for me, I am simply not going to be able to get to this information but if I can chat, have a voice chat with the technology, that is able to harvest this information from the website and get it to me, then I really don't need to worry about how I'm going to get there. I just ask my question and that is going to help people who are visually not able to access information. It will help people who physically are not able to navigate certain information and I'm not saying that is right. That information, that functionality should still be accessible for all. But now we have a different approach.

DEBRA: 26:12

I love that example.

NEIL: 26:14

Can I come in on this one because I've -- so I've also been using Chat GBT and other similar AI tools to query documents. So being ADHD, really long documents have important information in, but I struggle with a mixture of dyslexia and a lack of concentration to be able to read these really dull but important documents all the way through. But if I can use you know, a large language model, to be able to have a conversation with a document or a website because websites are just documents in many ways.

TOM: 27:06

Absolutely.

NEIL: 27:07

Then it enables me to do stuff that I found really difficult before. So it's an assistive tech in that way.

TOM: 27:16

Yes, absolutely but having said that, I think it's still important that we continue to understand how to write using a language that's understood by more and more people. Especially legal documentation. It is not only fair to somebody but it's not even useful sometimes and I understand the validity of that, but we need to start thinking about talking to people and not just to the check list and the legislation.

NEIL: 27:46

No. Fully agree. I was part of the cognitive accessibility task force and language was always one of the hot test topics. You know, understandability and language, was something that you know, we know benefit so many people and yet, there is still, I was going to use a long word, I was going to say propensity. But people still like to use complex language to make themselves sound clever or particular professional groups use the language of their profession, which actually excludes people, it doesn't matter whether you have a disability or not. The profession excludes people because it keeps the mystique about their profession and what was interesting that in the UK at least, they started communicating in common language. So instead of saying we need a urine sample, we are talking, we need you to wee into this thing because it's the language that people understand. So changing that language has actual impacts on people's health outcomes, removing that barrier has a positive impact on society. So I am fully with you.

DEBRA: 29:08

Love that.

NEIL: 29:10

Yes. So another question for you, sorry to hog the questions. So have you been having conversations with AI? And you talked about educating children because I think there is a thing to link up here to verify the AI telling you the truth or how to you teach your kids or the younger generation, to question the response they get?

TOM: 29:41

I think that is really not my table. I don't necessarily teach kids other than my own kids. Looks have conversations. I don't know, I'm not the right person to answer that at a large scale. At a small scale, you teach kids to ask questions and not just believe everything, to verify sources, to understand what it means when you can find a piece of information at several places and how do you compare? What kind of information are you even trying to get? Is it useful to you or is it just wasting your time. But I don't know. Honestly, I am struggling with this because I need to teach it much faster than I could even learn it myself.

DEBRA: 30:41

Go ahead Antonio.

ANTONIO: 30:43

Following that. How do you see AI, Chat GBT, and even other solutions that are outcomes of AI, disrupting the way we have done digital accessibility, let's say in the last ten years?

TOM: 31:05

I'm glad that you mentioned other sources and not just Chat GBT, because we tend to concentrate on Chat GBT too much, but that's just one tool. How it's going to disrupt accessibility, it's interesting, I feel we'll be able to detect more issues and find a solution to issues. You know, there was this thing about how 25% to 30% of accessibility issues on websites can be detected by automation. And now the percentage is irrelevant I heard anywhere from 20 to 60, right, but so the bottom line is we could not detect everything automatically before. I think what AI is giving us that we will be able to analyse concepts and content in a way that is not just a code level but may be take a human approach understanding how a human would view it and what kind of information or functionality it would deliver to a human. I still don't believe it's possible to make everything accessible to a 100%. But I think we can drastically increase this number and we can quickly look at things that we were not able to do before.

ANTONIO: 32:40

And do you see it as disrupting the existing standards that we have?

TOM: 32:48

Don't know yet. I don't know. I think it's too early to tell.

NEIL: 32:54

Yes. Thank you. So Tom, it has been fascinating chatting with you. I'm really glad that we went down some interesting topics that we don't often cover. I really look forward to continuing the conversation on social media. I need to thank Amazon and My ClearText for supporting us and keeping us On Air and keeping us accessible with the captions. So thank you very much.

DEBRA: 33:23

Before we go Off Air, really quick, Tom, just because I don't remember if we did this, can you please tell the audience before we go Off Air, what the name of your company is and how they can contact you?

TOM: 33:35

Yes. My company is Even Grounds, and you can find me on EvenGrounds.com and I primarily work with holistic accessibility consulting. So I don't just take one or two things from your organisation, but I try to help you how to become fully accessible and fully inclusive to all people.

DEBRA: 33:59

Cool, cool. A little tiny commercial about who you are.

TOM: 34:02

Thank you.

NEIL: 34:03

Thank you. All right. Thank you very much.