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Welcome to The Podcast to be Named Later, where we explore the world a conversation at a time.  Sit back and enjoy.  Here are your hosts, Chris and Kelly.


Kelly:	Hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of The Podcast To Be Named Later. My co-host Chris is off today visiting Las Vegas for a little bit of NCAA March Madness and time with college buddies. In his replacement, I have someone who's giant in the accessibility industry and an all around nice individual, fun to talk with. Looking forward to sharing some time with her. That's Lainey Feingold, who many people know from the web accessibility and all of her work in the law. Welcome to the podcast, Lainey.
Lainey Feingold:	Thanks, Kelly. I'm happy to chat with you.
Kelly:	Great. Well, Lainey, I know that you've been around web accessibility for a while and things like that, but I'd like to jump back way before that. Would you mind sharing a little bit about where you grew up, your childhood, and just your formative years?
Lainey Feingold:	Sure. Interesting to think of whether they were formative, but I think they were. I grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. I went to public schools there. My whole life I'm Jewish and my family was pretty active in the Jewish community and volunteers. I grew up with, my parents, I wouldn't say they were progressive, but they were kind of volunteer oriented people and generous and kind and nice. So that's where I grew up with a sister and a brother. And I didn't know, people always ask, "Well, you must have had someone in your family who is disabled. How did you get into this?" But in fact, no, I didn't. I went to college for two years in Massachusetts and then the college I went to, I chose because it didn't have any grades and it didn't require SAT scores, and I was very big in those years on alternative education. So the college I went to encouraged people to take time off, which I did. I drove out here to Berkeley, California, where I am right now recording this podcast. When I was 20, drove out here in a car with two friends and never went back, except to visit of course.
Kelly:	Wow, really?
Lainey Feingold:	It's true. I did. Now that I have kids of my own, they're all grown. I'm like, oh my goodness. I'd be so nervous if they got in a car and drove across country, which I think my mother probably was. But yeah, I came out here in 1976.
Kelly:	So when you landed in Berkeley-
Lainey Feingold:	It's almost 45 years.
Kelly:	When you landed in Berkeley, did you have a plan or were you just going to visit and take that time off?
Lainey Feingold:	I was planning to stay for six months and to show kind of the person I was. First of all, I always wanted to be a lawyer. And it's clear in my high school yearbook, people would write, "You'll be a great lawyer," or "See you in the courtroom," things like that. When I came out here, I wanted to volunteer for a legal nonprofit. So I wrote letters to, this is back when I was in college in Massachusetts and I wrote letters to women's rights organizations and the National Lawyers Guild, which is a progressive alternative to the American Bar Association and the ACLU. And I wrote these letters saying, "I'm a college student. Can I volunteer for you when I'm in California for these six months?" And it turned out that I ended up knowing some of those people. I'm a person who saves things so I have those letters. It shows me the through line through my life, my career. And then in January, I decided I should take a course at UC Berkeley, because here I was. And that was back in the day when it wasn't so hard to get into college. I went to the admissions office saying, "Can I take a class?" They said, "Well, why don't you just enroll and finish here?" So that's what I did.
Kelly:	Wow. What was your undergraduate area of study?
Lainey Feingold:	I studied American History. I went to Hampshire College, that was a Massachusetts college. It was very alternative, like I said, in terms of education. I kind of had my mind blown on a lot of American history that I wasn't aware of and have long been American history, American studies. I went to college in 1974, so the women's movement was burgeoning. I sort of missed the '60s, but caught the '70s. I was the oldest in my family, so I didn't really have any older siblings to be part of the '60s in any way.
Kelly:	It's interesting when you talk about-
Lainey Feingold:	Yeah. So that was it.
Kelly:	It's interesting, Lainey, when I hear you talk about being a student of history. As I've gotten older, I've come to recognize that wow, the way that we're taught history is there's so many things that I didn't know about when I went through school that I've learned as an adult that I'm like, wow, they really don't teach us a lot of things.
Lainey Feingold:	Well, that's been especially true in the last three or four years since Black Lives Matter and George Floyd killing. One of my favorite things to read now are books by Black academics, Black historians, Black novelists. Because even being a history major in the '70s, so, so much that I didn't know. I read The 1619 Project and just things that were not taught. Now we're in a scary time and culture where people in certain governments, in certain states don't want people to learn things.
Kelly:	And I think, I don't know, I find history fascinating, especially because right... Again, as I've gotten older, you really can see, and I don't know that there's a grand plan always, but I think just how much what you learn can shape what you think. And if that learning isn't very broad, I think it requires you to go further out of your way to expand your horizon.
Lainey Feingold:	Well, I'm just thinking it's great, Kelly, that you asked me about, what'd you major in in college? I don't usually think about that, but fast-forward to now, I do think of myself as an elder in the accessibility space. And nowadays, most places I go, I'm among a handful of the oldest people in it. So I really feel part of my role right now is to preserve our history of accessibility. I was at CSUN, which is where I met and became friends and learned from Joseph O'Connor who went by accessible, Joe. And most of the young people I talked to, they had never heard of him. And I was so happy that I had written about him on my website when he died, and his wife is preserving his website so you can read a lot about him. But I think we're, especially the way media is so fast now, we're really at risk of losing our history.
Kelly:	I think that what you said is really salient. And I think what's really interesting to me is another leader in the accessibility movement. Judy Heumann passed away recently and there's been a lot of attention paid to the effort that she founded or was part of there in Berkeley. Sometimes I wonder if people really truly understand the level of struggle that people had to exert to make some of these things happen. The foundations of some of the legal things that we think of today, the Rehab Act, the ADA and everything else. And really, I was born in 1967, so I know a little bit of this and I've seen the evolution. I was fortunate that I had a pretty open childhood as far as education and stuff, but it's just blows me away things that you hear about and the struggles. And I think that it's important to remember that not in the sense of I had to walk 15 miles uphill to school both ways, but to understand what the things you enjoy today are built on and what those foundations are.
Lainey Feingold:	I really agree with you, especially in law people and especially, I mean, honestly in accessibility, when we're kind of in a period where people think of it as, too many people still think of it as just a legal requirement, oh, there's some law and we have to comply with it. I like to start my legal updates when I do them with a picture of the Capitol Crawl, which as your listeners probably know, was a activist's action leading up to passage of the ADA where people using wheelchairs left them at the bottom of the Capitol Steps and crawled up to demonstrate why we needed a law that had protection for access.
Kelly:	Which is staggering.
Lainey Feingold:	So these are not requirements out of nowhere. These are things that people fought for.
Kelly:	And I think that's just one of the things that's always striking to me in that I am very happy we are where we are, but this didn't just happen. A few years ago I visited Washington D.C. for the first time as a tourist. I'd been there I think one or two times work, but really didn't go around. Just walking up things like the Capitol Steps and other areas and just thinking of those foundational things that happened a while ago. I'd like to jump back to foundation for a minute, Lainey. So after you graduated from Berkeley, you obviously went to law school. Did you go right to law school out of college or did you take some time off?
Lainey Feingold:	It turned out that I was able to graduate just in four quarters from Berkeley. So I ended up graduating in December of 1977, and then I started law school the following September. So I had about six months off. My boyfriend at the time, who is now my husband, he also graduated at the same time. We worked half that time and then we went traveling half that time.
Kelly:	What law school did you go to?
Lainey Feingold:	I went to a law school that was called Hastings College of the Law until about a month ago when they changed the name to University of California San Francisco Law School. It was a public law school named after a guy who was a bad actor. And so they changed the name of the school, just effective, well, I guess it was January 2023. It's right in downtown San Francisco.
Kelly:	Lainey, you said that when you were growing up, you knew you wanted to be a lawyer and talked about your high school yearbook. When you got into law school itself, did you have an idea of what type of lawyer you wanted to be?
Lainey Feingold:	Very soon after I started, I focused in on being a Union-Side labor lawyer, and that is what I wanted to do. I had jobs throughout law school working for Union-Side labor firms. We had a group called the Women's Labor Project, which was women law students, some had graduated recently. We were all interested in representing labor unions, and in particular, making sure women's rights were protected in the workplace. We actually wrote a book called Bargaining for Equality. When I got out, I couldn't get a job with a private labor firm, but I went to work for the state, Public Employee Relations Board like the NLRB for public employees in California.
Kelly:	How was that? Did that start to fulfill your dreams of what you thought you wanted to do?
Lainey Feingold:	Yeah. Well, I wasn't so thrilled about working for the state agency. I lived in Berkeley and they were in Sacramento. It was a pretty long commute. I had a little apartment I share with people up there. Yeah, it was good. It was the start of being a lawyer. After about a year and a half, I did get a job with a Union-Side labor firm, and I did that for about five years. And then kind of woke up one day and wasn't all that satisfied with the work. So then I switched to a traditional civil rights firm doing race and gender discrimination lawsuits. And then cliffhanger, I got fired from that firm, which turned out to be the best thing ever happened to me because then I fell into disability rights.
Kelly:	I mean, obviously there's some similarities, but how did you go from civil rights law firm to getting fired to disability? What led you there versus something else?
Lainey Feingold:	Luck. I would say good fortune. I am in Berkeley, and as you mentioned, it is considered the birthplace of the disability rights movement. There's a legal organization here called DREDF, the Disability Rights Education Defense Fund, one of the first, if not, the first disability rights legal nonprofits. They had a four month opening while someone was on sabbatical. I needed a job. I had two kids at the time and my husband. We had a house. So I took that four month job at DREDF. And while there, I think it's fair to say, I met my first blind person who was Harry Cordellos. I don't know if you ever ran into him. He was a marathon runner. We did a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco transit agency for not announcing stops.
Kelly:	Was Harry into bowling?
Lainey Feingold:	He could have been. He was really a sports guy.
Kelly:	I lived in San Francisco for a little while at my life and there was a guy named Harry, I don't remember his last name. But he organized some blind bowling league in San Francisco. Might have been him, might not.
Lainey Feingold:	Well, he taught me a good lesson, which I sometimes refer back to and sometimes quote. We were riding the buses to gather evidence where the bus driver is calling the stops because it was before, it was all automatic. And Harry said to me, "Lainey, you have to stop thinking of blind people as sighted people with a paper bag over their head." It was just the first of, well, that was in 1992, two years after the ADA passed. So that's like 30 plus years of learning from friends and colleagues and clients about what it means to be blind and what is access and what are civil rights. Yeah, that's how it started.
Kelly:	It's kind of funny that you talk about announcing bus stops. I lived in Madison, Wisconsin at the time, that was one of my big things here was Trump working on advocating for the city to get the drivers to announce stops. Because it's a real drag if you get let off in the wrong stop in the middle of winter, you got to walk further in the cold and stuff. But I still have over in a folder, it's probably an inch thick of the complaints I had filed with the city transit agency. Didn't have a lawyer to help me or anything. But it's interesting, and I wonder how many cities had people trying to do that and advocate for the announcing of bus stops and things like that.
Lainey Feingold:	I'm sure everywhere, because it was frustrating. We also had a big file folder. We ended up getting a settlement. During that time, that was when a couple blind people called DREDF, the nonprofit I was working for, and asked about whether we thought the ADA, which was brand new, could be used to get talking ATMs. And that's how I started my digital journey, my journey into digital equity, digital rights.
Kelly:	And the talking ATM one is really interesting to me because, I won't say everywhere, but it sure became ubiquitous over the time. And it is one of those things that, yes, I know you had to bring a pair of headphones, but wow, I'm not going to lie. I mean, it was just nice to be able to go anywhere and pretty much know that you'd be able to use an ATM.
Lainey Feingold:	Yeah. I mean, it was just a wonderful initiative. So I was working at the nonprofit, which had expanded from that four month sabbatical. I ended up staying four years there. That's when the talking ATM work really started. We had a great group of blind customers. We wrote letters to Wells Fargo, Citibank, and Bank of America and said, "The ATMs don't work for blind people, but rather than sue you, can we sit down and talk about it?" Which morphed into the first Structured Negotiation before that had a name, and it just really showed me the power of relationships. I found an email recently that one of the bankers wrote when they left the job at the bank, and it was like, "This has been the highlight of my career," because they had never gotten to meet any blind customers. And when they did and saw that people couldn't take their own money out of their own account without sharing their pin with a stranger, it was like light bulbs going off. I mean, you could practically see it in these meetings that we had. And then towards the end of that, a couple of our clients, one is Roger Peterson. I don't know, do you know Roger, Kelly?
Kelly:	He worked at Telecentre, I think, right?
Lainey Feingold:	I think so, yeah. He's such a nice guy. He had this, I don't even know what to call it, but this kind of jerry-rigged system that he would communicate with his bank and he'd dial a number and it would go to a modem. He'd get the information back and it would print out braille. So he was really an early technology adopter, and he's one of a few people that came to us while we were working with the banks on the ATM that said, "You know Lainey, there's going to be this new thing online banking. We better make that accessible or else we're back to square one." And that's how I got involved in the whole world of web accessibility, just because the blind, we had a process, a system where we could really listen to blind people and learn from them and share their expertise with the companies. Unlike a typical lawsuit where the person doesn't really have a chance to show their expertise.
Kelly:	I'm sure that you've answered this next question countless times, but I guess I'll make it countless plus one. You talked about Structured Negotiation and obviously that's something that's really closely attached to your name and you've had some excellent results with it. Could you give us a little bit of a definition of what that means and the process and just put some substance behind those terms?
Lainey Feingold:	Yes. The first thing I'll say is after those first bank cases, we went to Bank of America with Roger Peterson's wisdom and said, "We better work on your website." And because we had a relationship with them and we weren't in a court where judge had to give a stamp of approval, the bank said yes. We got the first web agreement in the country in 2000. And after that, we said, was that just luck that we got the talking ATMs and the accessible website? We also did braille bank statements. Or was it a thing that we could replicate? And we decided to try and see if it's something we could replicate. And then part of that, we had to give it a name. So had I known fast-forward, it would work in other contexts, I would write a book about it. I didn't know all that so it has a clunky name of Structured Negotiation, which we named that way to mean this isn't just a casual request. Oh, we need an accessible website, will you chat with us about it?
	But rather, there was a structure because these were real legal claims and we wanted the same results as if we had filed the lawsuit without the fighting, without the contention, without the cost, and with the opportunity to build relationships. So Structured Negotiation, the first part of the structure is everyone getting on the same page to be collaborative because you have to have a mindset that you're willing. I know you know this, Kelly, that you're willing to work together, which requires a lot of patience and requires a certain attitude of cooperation. And instead of filing a complaint in the court, we write a letter, which sometimes I call invitation letter. We explain the problem, we say that it's a legal violation, but we don't hit it with a hammer at the beginning. We start with a story of you have a blind customer or a blind employee or a deaf... 
	My work has all been with blind people, but other people have used process with people with other disabilities or even outside the disability world. You explain the story of the impact of the legal violation and try to get a dialogue going. From then on, you do it in a certain way. That's why I wrote the book. It's all about curiosity, bridging understanding, and creating sustainable change. Not just give us some money or sign an agreement and then we'll walk away, but really, how do we make this stuff accessible so it's going to stick? I'm not saying it always works, but that's the goal.
Kelly:	I'd like to come back to accessibility, but I just want to jump forward, just get your impression because you've done something that not a lot of us have done. I mean, you wrote a book. What was that process like? Again, what started you on that part of your journey? What was that like? Just the whole from, Hey, I know all this stuff to, I'm going to put it into a book, and now here's my book. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Lainey Feingold:	It was hard. If this is the last thing I could say, I could say it's very hard. It was hard for me to write a book. It took me about five years. One of the secrets I think to being an author of a book is having confidence. I knew this was a process at work, and I also believe in lawsuits. I never wanted to be the poster child for anybody saying, oh, lawsuits aren't good. So I had to be extremely careful at what I wrote. I interviewed almost all the people I had worked with in the blind community. I interviewed as many of the company lawyers, the government lawyers who had worked on the so-called other side. I like to say Structured Negotiation creates a round table. And I had all that information and I wrote a book that was really story-based.
	The American Bar Association published the first edition in 2016. I turned it in. The editor who was my champion who really encouraged me to write this book, he was like, "You have to do it all over again." Because he thought the most useful thing would be to share the stories in the context of explaining how the process works. So rather than have the stories organized around talking ATMs, talking prescription labels, accessible pedestrian signals, all the issues we worked on, websites, mobile app, he thought it would be better, and I ended up agreeing with him to say, first, we write a letter. And when we write a letter, just one little example, in a lawsuit, you never want to say anything nice about the person you're suing. But if you want a relationship with someone to make changes, it's a good idea to try to find something nice to say about the company or the organization.
	So in the chapter where I wrote about how to write the opening letter, I had examples from all the different stories. Like a financial company we worked with has a reputation for being very generous financially to disability organizations. Usually you'd shy away from that in a lawsuit, but in our letter we could say, you're very generous to organizations. Or retail companies who provide good customer service, yet have terrible technology. We could say, you know, you have great customer service and your need for accessible technology is just further down the path of where you already are, to try to get companies to see that what we're asking for is not that different than how they see themselves. So that was the book process. I appreciate the American Bar Association for publishing it. They charged too much for the book.
	I think they were used to all their books were going to be sold to lawyers with a lot of money. But my book, one of the reason it took so long is I really wanted it to be for everyone in the community, for accessibility people, for tech people. So they charge too much. So when the print run ran out and it was time for second edition, I self-published that in 2021. I could cut the price in half so I was happy.
Kelly:	You're always opening up new doors, Lainey. What was that process like of self-publishing? What did you learn from that? How did that differ from working with a traditional publisher?
Lainey Feingold:	Okay, let me just say, first of all, I've said this before, it shouldn't be called self-publishing. I could never have done it myself. One of the things I love about the accessibility community is how generous people are with sharing what they know and who they know. So I knew I wanted to have the digital version of my book be accessible, of course. And I called one person, then I called another person, and that all led me to Laura Brady, who is an accessible book expert in Canada. This is what she does for a living. And she, I don't want to say saved my life, but she made it possible for me to self-publish the book. Because not only did she make a fully accessible digital version, but what she called aired out the print version. I got a new cover. I hired someone to make the cover design, it matches my website. I got new quotes for the cover and it looks so much better, I have to say.
	And Laura also knew how to navigate the whole online publishing thing, so it's available on Amazon, but I didn't want it only to be available on Amazon. So it's available everywhere where digital books are sold. And in certain bookstores you can get it, they have arrangements so you can get the paper copy. And Kelly, I'm here to tell you, it's print-on-demand, which sounds so cheesy, but the book looks really good. The page color is nice, it's easy to read. The spacing is good. So yeah, it wasn't self, I had Laura Brady do all that work, and my web developer helped me with the new webpage about the book. I wrote about 50 new pages of content. I interviewed more people who I hadn't known when I wrote the first edition. I had two forewords, Haben Girma, who I'm sure your audience all know. She wrote me a foreword to the book. The book is trying to get translated into Spanish. That's been an ongoing project. And so one of the women in Spain wrote a foreword. Well, let me say one other thing is the book is called, Structured Negotiation: A Winning Alternative to Lawsuits, because that's how I've used it as an alternative.
	But in writing the second edition and talking to lawyers, I heard stories where people filed the lawsuit but then pivoted to Structured Negotiation to make it easier to collaborate within the lawsuit. That was one thing. And then I heard from non-lawyers without legal claims, somebody, Josh Kim, who's a web designer, Sassy Outwater, who's executive director of a nonprofit who said they are using the stories in the book to help them with their advocacy separate from a legal claim. So I didn't change the title, it's still, A Winning Alternative to Lawsuits, but in writing the second edition, I learned a lot about how people were using the strategy.
Kelly:	You talked about the American Bar Association being involved with the first edition. To your knowledge, and I honestly don't know the answer to this question, but I'm curious, has the concept of Structured Negotiation filtered into legal education or anything like that?
Lainey Feingold:	Let's see, well, Structured Negotiation is an example of collaborative law. Collaborative law is usually the term they use when this kind of non-adversarial relationship building strategy is used in family law, divorces, things like that. And almost every type of law has this kind of thing with different types of names. Contract law, environmental law. There is a global community run by a woman named Kim Wright sort of collecting all of us to say there's a lot of different ways to practice law. I got a really nice email from a law professor I had met. Just two weeks ago, and she had asked her students to do a reflection on what they thought of her negotiation class. And one of her students wrote, "Before I started law school, I read a book called Structured Negotiation: A Winning Alternative to Lawsuits." And she said, "That book gave me hope and confidence that there would be a place in law for someone like me." So meaningful. And the law professor asked her permission, could she send it to me? And she did. Now I've corresponded with this young woman and we're in the process of setting up a call.
	So I wouldn't exactly say it's filtered into, but I've spoken at a lot of law schools and I've spoken with a lot of law students. And yeah, it's hard to kind of break into that because I'm not a law school academic, but I feel like I'm doing what I can to get the word out there. I'll leave it at that.
Kelly:	No, that's great. I'm curious, Lainey, obviously Structured Negotiation in your process has had some great successes. It requires a lot of commitment. And I guess you may not be able to answer this question, but I'll just say it this way. Why is it still in 2023, and I guess we could say this for more than just accessibility, but it sure seems like it's still too much of a struggle too often to get equality.
Lainey Feingold:	When I first started in this field, I used to say, my goal is to put myself out of business. And I think I maybe thought that could happen that we just spread the word and people would understand. The effort today, the number of people in accessibility, the fact that the top, you called it accessibility industry, which it now is. When I started, you'd never saw corporate accessibility people, you'd never saw leadership like we have in a lot of big companies now, but it's still too hard. It's still too hard. I mean, just last month I joined the board of Teach Access, which for your listeners who don't know is a nonprofit whose goal and mission is to get accessibility education into the hands of students, primarily higher ed students.
Kelly:	There definitely, I mean, there has been, again, talked about know your history. I mean, my first job out of college was with a small organization created by a gentleman by the name of Dr. Greg VanDerHeyden. We had a product that was called Access DOS, and then the Access Pack for Windows as examples. As you know, I worked at Microsoft for a long time in some of those accessibility settings that are in Windows, like sticky keys and all that. I always had to chuckle when people talked about them because I'm like, yeah, I was around and worked on this stuff when it was a third party product that wasn't built into the operating system. And so there is that history.
Lainey Feingold:	I do think we've made tremendous progress. It's just it's not enough. It's not enough.
Kelly:	I think both things can be true. I think they're both true along a lot of efforts. But we can acknowledge the progress but still say it's not enough. I mean, again, anybody could cite examples of both. I think about just this week. I mean, I was doing some financial transactions with some accounts in one place. They had a website where they're like, "Okay, you have to sign this document, so go draw your signature." Let alone, I couldn't get keyboard focused into the box. Well, what alternatives do I have? This was a major company. I won't mention the name here, but they're like, "Well, have somebody who can see help you." Another place, they had a similar challenge, but they're like, "Oh, that's not going to work for you. You know what? We can go and create a DocuSign document and you can sign the stuff that way." So in one regard, and then I think back to when I bought my first house and signed two inches of paper that I couldn't read at all.
	I know I tend to be a little bit outspoken sometimes about accessibility because I'm passionate about it in the sense of it just, I grew up in a really big family. My parents had 11 children. One thing that we were all raised with was, don't expect more than your share, but don't expect less. That's really always been kind of my guiding philosophy on accessibility is I don't want all the special, but I don't want to be shortchanged either.
Lainey Feingold:	I like that. Don't expect more, don't expect less. Well, I mean, some of the difference like you just described with those two financial institutions, some of that is culture and the limits of the laws that the law can't instill culture. It could be a jumping off point, it could be a floor, but how do you get it? So the frontline person knows to say, "Oh, sure, I understand you're a blind person, you can't do this. Here's the alternative. Do that." Available at the same time, available independently, available with privacy. So I mean, is that training? What is a secret sauce of that? That's what we have to be going for.
Kelly:	And I think it is a complicated topic at some level. I don't want to make it sound like it's just super simple. I think some of it is also a philosophy in that some people would say, whether it's law or something else, I think some people would say the law tells you exactly what you can or have to do. Other people would say the law is a guide that tells you when you're coming to the edge, so you can do anything you want as long as it doesn't cross these lines. And I think that sometimes the reactions we see to accessibility are a reflection of those two attitudes, if that makes sense.
Lainey Feingold:	Yeah, I think that's interesting. I think that one problem we have right now is we don't have enough. I mean, people want more specificity than right now the law is offering. Although on the other hand, the law is saying, don't exclude disabled people. What more do you need to know? That's been part of the ADA for the last 33 years, almost 33 years. So I think that's our strongest legal argument. But it would be nice for people to be able to turn to a regulation like Chancey Fleet who's a blind activist. She says, "We got to get accessibility code. Not the whole process, but just the code, like the plumbing code." You hire a licensed plumber, they're going to meet the code. They know it, they learn it, they do it.
Kelly:	I mean, you go hire anybody to do something on your house. I've thought about this, I guess I'll do a little cross promotion. As you know and some of my podcast listeners know, I also have a blog that I write some things on. I wrote about this whole thing a little bit not too long ago, something that I called ethical accessibility. And really, I think some of this comes into play because what are the behaviors that we would expect and things like that, and what knowledge and what assumptions can we make about everything in the industry? And because you're mentioning about plumber, right? I mean, generally speaking, when you go hire a plumber, you expect that the plumber through licensure education and everything else is going, you just assume they're going to have the requisite skills and knowledge to do the job. You're not asking to see the license necessarily. Hopefully, you're making sure that they're licensed and have nothing bad against them in a enforcement, but you're assuming they know the rules. And I think the challenge we have in accessibility sometimes is those assumptions are much less certain.
Lainey Feingold:	There are a lot more people in accessibility jobs, which is really good. LinkedIn right now I think is doing a great job of allowing people to put in their job descriptions or what they're looking for. Accessibility is getting to be a standard thing. And there are a lot of people who say they can do accessibility and they really can't. So the education, the training is just very, very crucial because we can't make the assumption. I agree with you, we can't make the assumption we can make when we hire a plumber, especially smaller companies or individuals who want a website. I mean, people call me all the time, even progressive nonprofits, like, "Well, our developer says he can learn accessibility, or he ask me what standard he should use." I'm thinking, don't hire this developer, because if he's asking those kinds of questions, just assuming he's going to do it, he's probably not going to get it right.
Kelly:	Well, it's funny that you had mentioned that Lainey. Again, I'm curious if you're comfortable answering a question like this because, or just your reaction. This is something I think about a lot. I'm going to play out this scenario. I'm a restaurant owner, okay? I've had family members that own restaurants. So let me tell you, that's a pretty tough business to be in. Now I go down to my local web design shop and I say, "Hey, I need a website and I need to get my menu online." Half of the time, what the website developer does is, hey, they throw up a picture of the menu, right? Which clearly isn't accessible. Now the website for the restaurant isn't accessible. I mean, the key piece of information. But now here's the thing I wonder about sometimes. What expectation should I have of the restaurant owner to even conceptually understand this or know about it? This is where it's a little bit complicated at times because sometimes I'm of two minds.
	On one hand I'm like, well, if that was food safety, you'd be held accountable for those regulations. You know what I mean? Or a labor law. So should you be held accountable for this accessibility law if you're going to run the business? And then I say, well, if we're going to do that, where are these people supposed to learn this? If I have never heard of web accessibility and I run a restaurant, where would I know to ask those questions and where would I get the answers? And we're talking about when you're outside of the accessibility ecosystem, if you will. I just like to cook and I just run my little local cafe down here down the street. So I don't know. Do you have any thoughts or reactions to that whole scenario?
Lainey Feingold:	It's interesting. Well, it's reminding me of the overlays, which I'm sure your listeners know, or one line of code that claim to make websites successful when in fact they do not. And I typically say that I don't really blame the site owners who are licensing the overlay software. I blame the overlay companies and I blame their investors because many of them are heavily venture funded for advertising and putting out a product that doesn't work as advertised. I usually say I don't blame the site owner because I mean, I had a conversation with a reputable national nonprofit not too long ago who asked me, "Well, how do we know which consultants are good and which aren't?" Thinking of the overlay companies as consultants. But you're asking a different question. Should they be legally responsible? Should the restaurant owner be legally responsible?
	And the way the ADA is structured, if you're owning a business open to the public, you have to make it accessible. So that's where the whole education piece comes in. There's also a law that legislation was introduced last fall that I'm not sure if it's been reintroduced in the new Congress, but to expand the ADA in digital so it would cover directly the website developers, not just the public facing organization.
Kelly:	This is where I think the industry and everybody for this to be successful and to really resolve my scenario, everybody throughout this whole industry needs to provide better tooling education and awareness. I'm just thinking about people that I know that own restaurants. If they didn't know me, I guarantee you they would not in the resources that are readily available to them in their towns, the small little web design shops, those shops do not know accessibility.
Lainey Feingold:	Yeah. No, I know. You don't have to step too far out of our little ecosystem to encounter people who don't know. That's what's kind of scary. You don't have to go to the far reaches. Like I say, we have disability rights, nonprofits. We have other progressive nonprofits, small businesses who just they don't know. There's a lot to unpack here. But because many people see accessibility just through the lens of, oh, I'll get a lawsuit. I'm afraid. They don't really think that it means including customers, making it easy for people to buy their products. And that's where we run into trouble, when people look for a quick fix, or even if they know accessibility, they don't want to invest in it because they don't see a value. They see it only as a response to some law that they don't understand. I guess Kelly, the bottom line is, as you and I know, we have a lot of work still left to do. A lot of work.
Kelly:	Lainey, you've done a lot of work. You may not be able to answer this, and maybe that's all of them. But I'm really curious from all the different successes you've had, you're out just reflecting on your career, is there an experience that just instantly could be small, big, just brings a smile to your face of, wow, that just was so rewarding?
Lainey Feingold:	Well, the rewarding thing for me is the relationships, like a relationship with you and with so many blind people who appreciate the work and recognize the work that went into doing the work. Talking about restaurants reminds me that we did a structured negotiation with Denny's about this very issue. They had nutrition information on their website, and it was just a picture. And there's been so many learnings for me throughout, and the Denny's thing was the learning. I started dealing with financial accessibility. So the privacy issues there are so clear, like you have to give your pin to get your own money. Working on accessible prescription information, privacy issues. So clear, having to share private health information just because it's not accessible, healthcare websites. But I don't know if it's a smile or just an aha moment of all the kinds of cases I worked on that just really drove home for me that it's all privacy, it's all independence.
	The woman who came to, she actually came to Jim Thatcher, who has since passed. Just a great friend of mine and a wonderful accessibility champion. Because she couldn't get the nutrition information, that was important to her health. And when I first called the Denny's lawyer, who ended up being a great partner and we settled, he was like, "Oh, our website, we just give it to an advertising agency." They didn't think about it as an inclusion issue. But when I was able to introduce this woman's story, they were like, "Oh, yeah, we should fix that." And same with when I did worked on major league baseball accessibility. At first, I was like, "Well, is that important? It's not healthcare, it's not pedestrian safety, it's not financial safety." But Kelly, I think of all the things I've done, the major league baseball work has been the most, I don't want to say applauded, but a lot of blind people, like a lot of sighted people want to have independent access to baseball information, want to listen to the games with the home announcer. So it's just been a wonderful, I can't believe how lucky I got getting fired from that job. We'll just leave it at that.
Kelly:	Well, that's great. Look, I know in life, everybody's always trying to prioritize things and I get that and things like that. But my overarching philosophy is I don't want to be the gatekeeper of whatever it is. If what you really want to do is read about the latest whatever, pop music trends, if that's what you enjoy, like I said, don't expect more, don't expect less. I don't think people in the accessibility business should be the gatekeeper of which things are more important.
Lainey Feingold:	Exactly. That's what I learned when thinking about baseball. Even the pedestrian signals, when we got involved with negotiating with San Francisco about accessible pedestrian signals. I wasn't sure this process would work with a city or work with accessible pedestrian signals. Something that makes me smile on that is that still today, you can go to the city of San Francisco's website and they have the same... We had very intense policies and procedures and how do you request them. And APS isn't just buy it off the shelf and put it on the street. We had blind people involved in the process who had tremendous expertise. Gene Lozano, Anita Aaron, other people. I can still see that today 15 years later on the San Francisco website. So yeah, it brings a smile when things are sustained. I could honestly say that they're not always. Sometimes we have to go back and do it again. But yeah, I feel very, very lucky that I fell into accessibility.
Kelly:	Well, it's quite a journey, Lainey, from Massachusetts to Berkeley and all the things that you've accomplished and will still accomplish. Before I let you go, Lainey, I always like to ask whether it's a podcast. I know when I used to do job interviews, one of my favorite questions was always something around this. I like to toss it into some of my podcast guests as well. I know I reached out to you and asked you to come on my podcast. Maybe at some point in your mind you're like, oh, maybe it'll be interesting, maybe it won't. But wow, I sure hope Kelly asks me about this because I really want to get this out there into the universe. I know we didn't cover everything we could have covered, but Lainey, is there something that you'd like to add before we close our conversation that I haven't asked you about?
Lainey Feingold:	I think you did a very good job, Kelly. I've been on a lot of podcasts and I like how you pulled out some through lines that I hadn't really focused on back to high school. Yeah, I did a talk, and I'll just throw this out to your audience, you can reach me through my website, which is lflegal.com. They were asking me, I did a keynote, then I did a fireside chat. And the fireside chat question, the first one was like, "Well, you did this, that, or the other thing, what's next?" And I said to this audience, most of whom were younger than my kids, "What do you think is next?" That's what I'm trying to figure out at this stage of the career. I feel like I have certain experiences. I feel parts of them can be useful to advancing accessibility. And it's not really something you should have asked me, but it's more like what I'm thinking about right now is how best to use all this, all the know-how and all the know who that I've accumulated over all these years.
	I'll be 67 on Sunday. I'm very lucky to be healthy and active and I have no plans of stopping. There's got to be an end at some point. So that's what I'm like, I don't want to say struggling, but that's what I think about. That's what I think about when people ask me to do something. Am I going to say yes to that or am I going to say no to it and why? What's my goal for this stage? I don't feel I have to prove anything anymore. It's more, what is the best use of all of this at this point?
Kelly:	Well, that's great. Let me wish you happy birthday in advance. Lainey, I have to ask you one more question because if I don't, I'll regret it because it's something I've always wondered about ever since I first started looking at your website. Because if there's other examples of it out there, I've not experienced them. There is a web accessibility criteria that talks about, I might get the exact terms wrong, but the simplified summary. I mean, you have that frequently, what's that process and how did you start doing that? Could you talk about that a little bit?
Lainey Feingold:	I love talking about that and I will. So I got my website, first website in 2008, which was the year WCAG 2.0 came out. The way the web content accessibility guideline process works is that for the new guidelines, they have to have at least two websites for every level to show that the guidelines will work and are achievable. So two for level A, two for AA, two for AAA. So I have a very simple site and they asked me would I be willing to have it be the AAA site in the implementation report. Part of that was that I had to do these simplified summaries for all my posts, which means I had to summarize the content at a ninth grade reading level. So I used to have the simplified summary at the bottom. At the top, I'd say, this webpage has a simplified summary for section blah, blah, blah. I don't even remember what it is of the web content accessibility guidelines. And then you jump to the bottom, you could jump back to the top. Honestly, I felt, who's looking at this? This is one of these requirements that nobody cares about. So I put it on Twitter at some point to say, does anybody care about this? Many people, one of whom was Jamie Knight who's in London and is autistic and a accessibility leader. I've learned so much from him.
	He's like, "I love the summaries because they tell me whether I should want to read the whole article or not." And I think I started in 08, but now in 2023, the web is more like that. People want it short. People want it quick. People want to know if they should dive in. So I did the refresh and I've done a couple refreshes, but the most recent one, I put the summary on the top. I took out the reference to WCAG because who cares about that? It's just something people want. I don't call it a simplified summary because maybe that has connotations. I just integrated it and it says on this page, and there it is. So I want to give a shout-out to my developer named Natalie MacLees, who's just phenomenal. She has a company called Digit. It's Digitally, sounds like Digit A-L-L-Y but I think it's A-L-Y. But her name is Natalie MacLees. She did that for me. I get so many compliments on that. People have no idea it's a WCAG requirement. Long answer to your short question.
Kelly:	No, that's great because... And we didn't plan it, Lainey, but really that's what we want. We want accessibility to be there. The other thing I like to say is, you know when something's really accessible, when it just works for somebody.
Lainey Feingold:	Absolutely. And people often, lawyers tell me, "Oh, I really like your website." And they're like, "This is what it means to have an accessible website. It's easy to navigate." And so anyways, WCAG 2.2 is going to come out next month, hopefully. Again, my site will be in the implementation report for the third time. It was again in 2018 for 2.1. So yeah, I'm happy to do it to showcase that, yeah, lawyers don't know from accessible websites. So I'm glad I have the opportunity to do it, and I'm glad people like those summaries. I'm sure AI and ChatGPT can now write them for me. I haven't tried that. I should think about that.
Kelly:	I don't know. That's a whole different podcast.
Lainey Feingold:	That's a different podcast. Kelly, you're great. Thank you for inviting me.
Kelly:	Lainey, I want to thank you immensely for spending time with me. I've really enjoyed our conversation. I've learned a lot. Just thanks to you. And I hope again, I want to wish you a happy birthday. And to all of our listeners of The Podcast To Be Named Later, thanks for listening to another episode.
Lainey Feingold:	Thank you.