Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Localization Today where we explore how language, technology and community converge to unlock ideas for everyone everywhere. I'm Eddie Arrieta, CEO here at Multilingual Media. And today's conversation focuses on a topic that is becoming increasingly important as organizations expand globally. Accessibility.
For many companies, accessibility has traditionally been viewed as a compliance requirement, a box to check to meet regulations. But as digital experiences become more multilingual, multimodal and AI driven, accessibility is evolving into something much larger, is becoming a strategic component of how organizations design products, create content and engage with customers around the world. Our guest is Viviana Vernave who leads interpreting and accessibility at WeLocalize.
With more than 16 years of experience across localization, interpretation, accessibility and AI enabled workflows, Viviana is helping organizations rethink accessibility not only as a technical challenge, but as a question of linguistic, cognitive and cultural inclusion. Viviana, welcome to the show.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Thank you, Eddie. Happy to be here. Thanks for including me today.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Of course, and it's great to see you. I know many who are in the industry and have been the industry for quite some time will probably recognize you, recognize who you are and what you do. And today we'll have a great opportunity to dig deeper into that conversation of accessibility.
Before we get into it, why don't you tell us a little bit of like, why were you attracted to accessibility? So many paths in life, what got you to work with accessibility?
[00:02:00] Speaker B: I think a lot of us at some point have worked with, especially if we were in regulatory spaces working with ADA compliance as part of localization deliverables.
For me that is true, but also in the interpreting and event space there's a lot of overlap naturally with cart captions, with live captions in general, sign language interpreters, as well as multimedia accommodations like audio descriptions and subtitles. So it was a natural overlap where I accidentally became the in house expert and they said, go ahead and just learn everything else.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: And here we are, Here we are, as we said in the description 16 years later.
And you know, I shouldn't say it as if it's a lot of time because it's the same for me. Time flies when you're having fun, you could say, and we're very glad to have you here. And a lot of people, when they hear the word accessibility, they often think about compliance standards or accommodations for disabilities.
I'm one of those. How should organizations redefine accessibility in a global multilingual context?
[00:03:17] Speaker B: Yeah, in multilingual context, the simple answer is it just means making sure that every person can actually use and understand a product or content regardless of language, culture or whatever device they're using, whether that's a laptop, a smartphone or assistive technology to facilitate their use of a device.
For the language industry, that means breaking down the silos between accessibility and localization teams and then treating language and cultural nuance and real world technology access as part of the accessibility conversation.
As you mentioned, most people think of websites, apps, documents, templates, and that is the primary focus of a lot of accessibility teams.
But it also means communicating in a way that your audience understands. And I know the language industry resonates with this message because that's been what we've argued right, with a lot of our customers and within the industry. But that can be anything from sign language, spoken language interpretation for meetings or events, or picture in picture of sign language in a webinar or recorded video, or as I mentioned earlier, multilingual subtitles and audio descriptions.
[00:04:41] Speaker A: Vivi, if you don't mind, I love what you mentioned about cultural nuance. It seems like the conversation on cultural nuance has taken no place in the past three years that we've seen AI around. It's like, oh no, AI can do all these things. And it seems like we're not talking about cultural nuance. How can we understand cultural nuance in the context of accessibility? How, how, how is it related?
[00:05:04] Speaker B: Sure, let's take a look at something. As we just had the World cup. If we would have had this interview a month ago, Eddie, I would have had my Mexico jersey on.
But we, we think about, just, let's focus on that.
Latin America is fast, how we communicate something as simple as I made an accidental slip up when I was in Spain last year during our kickoff and I, I called the, that means something inappropriate in Spain, but in Mexico it's fine. That's how you call that thing we know as language professionals. One slight variation means something completely else, something different.
That's also true for how people treat people with disabilities at home. Whether that's part of the cultural, that region's culture.
I think about how I grew up. We don't put our elders in nursing homes, right? They stay with us throughout their life. That's multi generational living. That means there's always support a lot of us who are children of immigrants. We're also interpreters and translators as children and a lot of that stuff, if we carry that over to accessibility, it's how are we getting help? How are we receiving the content?
A lot of us in the language industry are familiar with different uses of Captions and subtitles versus dubbing. Right? We know some cultures prefer the dubbing, some cultures prefer the captions.
It might be an individual preference, but it is also an overall cultural preference. If we look at something like sign language, what is the access, the educational access in that region for someone to learn sign language? For someone who is born deaf or hard of hearing, do they have the facilities to go to school and learn their whole curriculum in sign language, or is it something they pick up later?
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Yes. And of course what this generates is a huge gap between the understanding. Well, if we don't understand what accessibility truly is, can we actually provide accessibility?
And of course this is related to that question. What's the biggest gap that we have today between what companies think they are delivering and what others are experiencing? There's huge dissonance. And what do you see from your experience and perspective?
[00:07:40] Speaker B: I'm still considered a newbie in this space, but there's one consistent theme I hear on the over reliance of automated tools and overlays.
If we look at the US has the most lawsuits across the board. I think Europe is starting to it's still a little behind on implementation with EAA, but if we look at the US about 20% of the lawsuits filed under the ADA non compliance are against companies that had widgets or overlays installed on their websites.
Because that was how they said we're meeting compliance. We have a widget installed on our page so it'll just keep crawling and finding things. But we know that's not true.
We look at the impact to the users.
We know that one of the most commonly missed items with widgets and overlays is unclear link text. So if you see something on the website that says read more.
If you are blind and using a screen reader, read more of what link to read more to where? Where am I going? Am I going to an article? Am I going to a video? Am I going to a third party site?
But if you didn't make that link accessible to where it says something like Click here to read more about our localization podcast today featuring Viviana for accessibility. If someone can't see that link, how do they know where they're going?
Another thing that gets missed often is just no alt text tools can catch that.
But if you cannot see the image, you're missing a lot of information, right? If you added pictures to your website or to your post, it's because you think it gives more to the message, right?
But not to someone who can't see that you're missing A whole your audience is missing a lot of information in that experience.
We know staying on the topic of compliance and lawsuits for the U.S. we know that claims specifically targeting digital and website accessibility have increased over 25% year over year. So it's safe to say there's plenty of room for improvement.
[00:10:05] Speaker A: Yeah, and of course a lot of accessibility comes because of the regulatory requirements and not the spirit of why the regulatory requirements exist in the first place.
So from what you've experienced, why is there the regulation around accessibility? Why do we want accessibility in the first place? Because that's probably what makes organizations fall short when they approach accessibility primarily as a regulatory requirement.
So can you tell us what the difference is in approach when you think about it as a regulatory requirement versus something we ought to do? Because it's what society needs.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: So a lot of it is a lot of the accessibility progress is due to thanks to the advocacy. It's a very advocacy heavy sector and we look at if we stay within the US this is fairly recent that we've had the American Disabilities act and the section 508 and all the other regulations that are tied to accessibility within the U.S.
european Accessibility Act.
That directive just went out a few years ago and last year was the first year of enforcement. So all of this is fairly recent and a lot of people just don't know how to apply it. There's just so much information and it's not very well centralized or it's very technical. So it's not as accessible, I guess, to people who need a simplified version of it.
But if we're looking at practicality, a lot of us are using accessible features.
Since I injured my hand from scrolling too much and taking too many notes, I've started using more speech to text tools for literally everything. I've turned on everything that doesn't require me to manually text on my phone so I can spare my thumb.
That's an accessibility feature that was built for people who had mobility needs.
We look at captions and subtitles when we're watching Netflix, right? Audio Description so we can do multiple things and multitask. That exists because of people advocating for accessibility.
And I think until we see the rest of the world getting penalized like it's kind of being done in the US we'll see more people catching on. Did that answer your question or I can.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: Yes, yes, of course. Of course.
And it's a huge conversation that has so many different sides to it to it. You also often talk about expanding accessibility beyond physical and technical barriers to include linguistic and cognitive access. That's very interesting.
What is that?
What does that look like in practice? What is it?
[00:13:11] Speaker B: So if we're looking at some of the guidelines and standards, we look at wcag, which is kind of like the default for anything accessibility, it lists a success criterion for what makes something accessible, and there's different levels to it. But one thing that resonates or fits well with the language piece, I guess, is it WCAG or WCAG mentions. All content must provide the same information and functionality in the same human language of that page, whether that could be written, spoken, sign language, same human language.
When I speak to accessibility providers, either vetting for ourselves or just conversations within a network, at conferences. And there's a lot of the language QA doesn't exist for digital accessibility.
Everyone is testing in the source language, if they're testing at all.
We know if we're looking at something we're doing now is making sure that our linguistic testers know how to use screen readers. So when we are doing a linguistic validation, whether it's for accessibility or just regular linguistic testing, that we can validate that someone in a different language can also use the same technology for the website or for the product that we're testing, making sure that the language codes are applied, the proper language code for the target region, which we know with just regular translation workflows, are using the right variant for target locales.
Are all the hidden elements localized?
So a screen reader is getting the information in their language, and it's not a screen reader for a user in Colombia that all of the code is still in English, So it pronounces stuff in English with a Spanish accent.
Is the alt text localized? We know that in those lawsuits a good chunk, I want to say about 70% of those lawsuits identify that there's no alt text at all. So obviously it wasn't localized because there was no source for it.
And ultimately it's making sure that everything that's included, if you included all these images, you included these videos, you included all this content, is because you think it's giving necessary information to your user. And when you exclude the language pieces, you are now making that content inaccessible to your target audience, which is roughly 20% of the population who has some kind of disability.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: That's right. And of course, things have changed significantly in the past three years. It's not, I wouldn't say the elephant in the room accessibility is a different type of conversation. But artificial intelligence have come in some places to help. In others, to make things even more confusing, how do you think accessibility and the conversation around accessibility has evolved and changed because of AI? And on top of of that, what is the role of the human? How have the humans adapted to these changes in accessibility because of AI?
[00:16:36] Speaker B: So I mentioned the overlays and the widgets and we know that accessibility has a lot of automated tools available. There's free tools like Wave, there's a DQ axe tool, and there's hundreds of others that are available at little to no cost.
But because it's only catching 40% of known errors, mostly code based errors, we're not going to be able to duplicate the experience of people who can rely on assistive tech. And you know, a lot of that manual testing is done with people with that lived experience who are potentially users of that system.
So, you know, like I mentioned the missing alt text, there's also empty buttons.
We mentioned the cognitive load, right? The cognitive issues is if you forgot to fill something out on the form, is it telling you where you need to go back to? Is the form clear enough for you to understand what you need to do in a plain, easy to understand language? Or I'm sure you've used websites or forms where it just has a little light up, but if you don't know what you need to fix, you just kind of give up, right?
So it's ultimately making sure that everything is usable, not just the code, that all the information is being relayed accurately.
Going back to alt text, if you just localize using Google Translate, you know, are you getting the information?
Is the alt text that is now provided meaningful and accurate in relaying the information to that user?
Or was maybe someone overly using the alt text to fill with SEO keywords which is not usable for source or target because we know SEO is region specific or market specific. So if you just use alt text to fill for SEO in one area, that's not going to necessarily relate well to a localized version of wherever you're localizing to. But from a business perspective, it's market opportunity that people are missing by not giving all of the users all of the information they need to use your tool or system or learn about your organization.
[00:19:10] Speaker A: And of course the humans are critical in our ability, we are critical in our ability to pinpoint the opportunities, pinpoint the places where we have to evolve the conversation.
How is the WeLocalize team looking into these opportunities and tapping into the potential?
[00:19:28] Speaker B: I won't go into too many specifics, but the short version is a lot of US, especially multifunctional LSPs, are already doing Similar kind of work.
A lot of us have DTP and multimedia services we're delivering and a lot of those overlap like DTP and PDF remediation and multilingual PDF remediation. I mentioned the audio descriptions, the sign language picture in picture overlays for and localizing those sign languages into whatever other market. There's no universal sign language. Technically there is, but it's not applied. The international Sign Language is not really widely used by the global, global markets.
Making sure, you know, we've incorporated it into all of our service offerings.
I mentioned how it overlapped really naturally for a lot of the interpreting work we do, specifically the conference interpreting. There's a lot of natural overlaps with sign language, with live captions, with a lot of the post production for on demand consumption.
One of the newer services that was a natural fit where we were already servicing a lot of different components for conferences. Someone said, I have a blind attendee who needs help navigating the venue. And we're like, yeah, okay, I've seen that. Hold on. There's not readily available information. I had a Google go into forums called every blind association across the country. I'm like, if I have someone who needs navigation, they're like, ah, you need this and this. Okay, where do I find those?
And that was a lot of what the conversation was. We got to that. We've actually supported the service across the country now and we offer it globally across all of our interpreting customers as well.
But little things like that where there are already natural overlaps. A lot of us are already doing accessibility adjacent services and we just don't know it's part of accessibility because we're just so focused on websites and the testing aspect of it.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: Right, right. And of course it's very easy to not make those connections. And I'm really glad you're bringing up those examples in a lot of cases because these are checklists and requirements. You really don't look at the experience. And like you said, it's really hard to capture a terrible experience. It's really hard to capture disappoint.
What are the risks that you think that organizations might be running into if they ignore having a look into accessibility in the way you are presenting it today?
[00:22:23] Speaker B: The two easy answers are missed market revenue because you're not accessible to everyone in that market.
There's the obvious compliance and financial penalties that will come.
We already have seen in the us we know that the EU is also updating kind of how their oversight committees are going to be implementing a lot of the directives and the individual regional regulations.
And then we know brand impact.
If you're just not compliant.
Social media is very effective these days.
It only takes a couple of people to say a few bad things. And your brand takes an impact. We know now more than ever it's so easy for the world to see what you have or haven't done.
And now we're at a place where people are very into advocate. We're in a better place with global advocacy where especially the younger generations are very cognizant of that kind of brand impact and making sure that people are people who are marginalized, aren't being marginalized and or unifying for or against the brand to make their voices heard.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: And this is so important. I think you referred to the World cup and it was very clear in this World cup what how certain players made people feel, how certain teams made people feel. And there is a great quote and I forget the name of this lady expert from the United States, but said it's not even about what you did, but about how you made people feel. People will forget what you did, but they will not forget how you made them feel.
And when it comes to accessibility and experiences without accessibility, I think a lot of us are missing the mark. And I'm pretty multilingual in that conversation, Conversation as well.
And I think having these conversations is very important. We are making progress as a society. I know there are some policy challenges that we've experienced in countries like the United States, some advancements in Europe. Latin America is definitely far behind, far behind, let alone other continents. But from your perspective on the progress that you're seeing, how do you see things are going to evolve within the next five years to 10 years? What things do you think are going to happen or even what things do you think need to happen?
[00:25:11] Speaker B: So I'll start with one of the overarching themes in accessibility is it's progress, not perfection.
So I think if I go back to my own personal journey and in my seeking of my certification as an accessibility professional, there is a lot of time investment.
But I know within the localization sector we've always been in a constant state of continuous learning and evolution. So I feel it's an easy pivot for anyone who is motivated to invest the time.
There's such a big skill overlap with what we do in language services or the language sector and what the skill set is required. Language professionals are very diligent, we're very detail oriented and that is exactly what accessibility is. It's putting yourself in other People's shoes and how will they consume the content? That's just localization in the different, I mean different experiences. Of course I'm oversimplifying, but there's a lot of skill overlap with just that knowledge investment. To close the laps between the gaps between the two sectors, there's already a small community of language professionals who've sought similar certifications and we have, we present together, we meet together, we discuss from time to time.
But there's not enough people to advocate for accessibility at a global organizations. A lot of accessibility teams are, even at the largest multinational organizations, one or two people. And to do the overhaul for all of that, to get buy in from stakeholders, from leadership, from marketing teams, from developers, development and product teams, it's a big overhaul. So there's a lot of opportunity for us to come in. Even if we still just focus on merging accessibility with internationalization workflows, doing the QA of the localization content, even after the source content's already been tested for accessibility.
There's so many little pieces where we can fit in. Plus all of the other non digital things that we talked about, the multimedia content, the sign languages and all the other orientation mobility and so much more. We haven't even touched the physical accessibility of buildings and venues and making sure that there's access for people with mobility devices and wheelchairs.
It's so vast. There's so many areas for people to get very niche or to be generalists and actual actually execute some of the
[00:28:12] Speaker A: stuff like qa and you know, as always some of these things when there's regulation behind, people might forget that there is a business incentive to this, that there is a business opportunity around this. And the way in which I see accessibility is almost like the those activities are the gatekeepers to value to other localization opportunities.
I felt left out and I don't have any disabilities myself. I felt left out of content and consumption of content because it's not culturally relevant to me in a way. So it immediately generates some sort of barrier. From your experience and the organizations you've worked with, have you seen this sort of benefit, let's call it business benefit, coming from working with accessibility?
[00:29:06] Speaker B: Yeah, so we work with a lot of clients, internal accessibility teams and a lot of it is a little custom. So this requires some learning on if I'm speaking to lsps, it does require you to learn the basics and the regulations and, and understanding the different standards and regulations applicable by region.
But a lot of it is custom to where maybe a client wants you to do Full end to end.
If we're looking at documents, maybe they say, here's a document, you know, our internal team can't do the remediation for this. Take care of that part and then as a pre flight for localization and then make sure that the target content is also accessible. All right, what standard are you targeting? What am I, what? Okay, let's go through what your targets are. Is your accessibility team available? Can I talk to them? And then they usually have parameters already, like share your parameters. So we align to both the specific standards you're targeting and what you've already set as a standard for your personal brand. If we look at testing, same thing. Maybe we're only doing accessibility testing of hidden elements. Are all the ARIA labels localized?
I mentioned earlier the language code for the page, are there multiple languages on that page?
Are those sections coded properly for that language? So if someone's using a screen reader or a braille display that it's, you know, giving them reading in that language for them, or if it's someone, a screen reader trying to read content in the language it was programmed for, for that page in a, in an accent. It gets really funky once you actually play around with the tools. And there's, it's exciting. We have. I know I won't get into too many details, but I know when we were training some of our testers, there were just so much like there's so many things that can go wrong.
And that's true. Just like when we do linguistic qa, right. We find so many things are like, how did this break? It just wasn't prepped for localization at the front end.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: Right. And Viviana, of course, from the perspective of we localize, there are companies that might be interested in saying, okay, how does any company, even if they are already running accessibility programs, how do they get, let's say, started with the way in which you approach things? What are the things that they should be thinking about or doing or who should they be contacting? How do they get in this flow with you?
[00:31:43] Speaker B: I think a good place to start is working with someone, either someone or an organization that can help consult on where your baseline is and where to build a strategy for your own accessibility. There's a lot of templates out there.
What I found when I was studying for CPAC was while I did follow specific courses, there were two courses I that were pre established and outlined very well. But most of the deep dive information I had to research on my own.
I built like a YouTube playlist that was a couple hundred hours plus whatever else I read on my own. There's just so much information out there. So I think starting with some kind of consultant to just understand what you need to start with understanding what the requirements are, whether you're looking to build accessibility just for your organization or if it's something you're going to incorporate into your service offerings and making sure that depending on what your target regions look like, your target markets, if it's just in house, where are your offices based? Do you need to. If you're just in the US only supporting US customers, maybe only ADA is sufficient. And then aligning yourself to all the ADA requirements if you're selling into Europe, whether you're. If you're going into public sector, making sure you're aligned to the WAD directive, if you're a private sector, making sure you're aligned to EAA directives.
But how do you even know where to start? So I guess yes, team up with, with a consultant. There's a lot of resources.
AXCON is a free virtual conference that is available that a lot of people can just sign up to. It's in February every year.
The iaap, which is one of the governing associations for a lot of the accessibility certificate programs, have a lot of good resources, a lot of it is free, a lot of it is paid for.
And then there's a lot of us within industry that are also speaking at. I've spoken at Loke World, I've spoken at gala about this topic and I think it's just making sure that those of us who are knowledgeable are sharing out as much information as possible. We're not trying to gatekeepers but make sure you're following accessibility professionals, including people with lived experiences on your socials. I follow a lot of deaf influencers on social media. It's fun. It's a lot of fun to see how people navigate that world around the world.
But it's also good to see how people really experience how being able to communicate or not being able to communicate affects their life. But yeah, start with finding resources to follow and then, you know, reach out to us. None of us are know how much, how much went into it. So we're happy to share our resources so no one has to start from scratch.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: Fantastic. Fantastic. And of course you've already shared some of your tips, some of your insights. Before we go, is there anything else you'd like to mention? Any call to actions to our audience who have. Have been wonderful by listening to this conversation?
[00:35:20] Speaker B: Just. Yeah, just start small but get started get started. Follow.
I'll shamelessly plug myself. Follow me on LinkedIn. If I'm not posting, I'm resharing. There's so much good content out there.
Happy to keep resharing. All of the other accessibility professionals that have been doing this for 20, 30 years and just keep making progress. It's little by little. No one's asking that you be perfect and your, your website be perfect by, you know, next month. And as long as you're demonstrating that you're working towards it, that's all we can ask for.
[00:35:57] Speaker A: That is wonderful. Start small, keep making progress. Vivi, thank you so much for your time today.
[00:36:03] Speaker B: Appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: That is wonderful. To everyone who has been listening to our conversation, thank you once again for being part of localization today. Again, big thank you to Viviana Vernave for helping us rethink accessibility, not as a checklist, but as a fundamental component of global communication and user experience. As AI reshapes how content is created and delivered, the challenge isn't simply making information available. It's ensuring that people can truly access, understand and engage with it across languages, cultures and communication styles. Remember, you can catch new episodes of localization today on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. Subscribe, rate and share so that others can find the show. I'm Eddie Arrieta with Multilingual Media. Thanks for listening and see you next time. Goodbye, Bibi.
