Could accessibility accelerate your marketing career? A deep dive into accessibility with Dr Alaina Beaver, Global Head of Accessibility Customer Engagement, and Aileen Hackett, Director of Accessibility Product Management at ServiceNow. 

Alaina Beaver (00:00): 

We really see compliance as the floor, but at ServiceNow, we’re on the rocket ship going up through the ceiling. We want to aim for that beautiful user experience. 

Aileen Hackett (00:11): 

At ServiceNow, our mission is simple. Make enterprise software work for everyone. By breaking down digital barriers, we’re opening doors to meaningful employment for people with disabilities, not just within our own teams, but across every customer site we touch with ServiceNow software. I truly believe AI is the ultimate equalizer. We’re already seeing this transformation with our new voice input for Now Assist. The feedback has been incredible and it’s just the beginning of how we’ll use Voice AI to empower every individual to lead and succeed. 

Barrie Seppings (00:48): 

Welcome back to Plugged In, Switched On, the podcast that takes you inside the conversations that matter in B2B tech marketing. I’m your host, Barrie Seppings. I’m the executive creative director here at Splendid Group, and we definitely have a conversation that matters in B2B tech marketing for you on today’s episode. We are taking a little deep dive into the world of accessibility. We’ve been lucky enough to be working with a couple of our larger clients right across the region, specifically in EMEA and beyond on the issue of accessibility. And we thought we would take the time to have a chat with a couple of those experts from within that world, talk about how accessibility works within products, but particularly within marketing. The fascinating part about this conversation for B2B tech marketers is what it can do for your career. 

(01:40): 

I was lucky enough to chat with Aileen Hackett. She’s the director of Accessibility Product Management at ServiceNow, with her colleague, Alaina Beaver, she’s a global head of Accessibility Customer Engagement, also at ServiceNow. Both of theseprofessionals have had years working in the accessibility and marketing spaces. And what they told me about how it developed their careers was particularly fascinating. So if you’re at a little bit of a crossroads or wondering where your career in B2B tech marketing might take you, I do encourage you to sit back and have a listen as we chat with Aileen and Alaina from ServiceNow about accessibility, why it matters, why it’s good for customers, and particularly why it could be awesome for your career in B2B tech marketing. 

Aileen Hackett (02:27): 

My name is Aileen Hackett. I’m director of Product Management for Accessibility at ServiceNow. And what I do in that role is I work with all our platform teams and product teams who produce software to make sure that it’s conformant, but also usability features, things that are useful for people who have disabilities. And I’ve been in this role about four years. Previous to that, I was working on the design system at ServiceNow with some remit for accessibility, but very happy to be in this role. 

Barrie Seppings (03:00): 

So you’ve come from a more generalized design background and now more specifically about accessibility? 

Aileen Hackett (03:06): 

That’s right. And there’s a lot of synergy there because when you’re building a design system, and one of the important things you do is make sure that the components that people build the user interfaces with are accessible in themselves so that you can build accessible experiences. And it’s also looking at usability and making sure that things are usable. 

Alaina Beaver (03:27): 

My name is Alaina Beaver and I am the global head of Accessibility Customer Engagement at ServiceNow in the real world. That is just sort of a fancy way of saying that I lead all of our more outbound product engagement for accessibility product at ServiceNow. And I have the tremendous privilege of operating our Product Advisory Council for Accessibility. This is a robust group of customers, 70 different customers globally and counting, pretty even split between public and private sectors. And they’re a tremendous source of feedback on the product that we ship, how to improve our product. And so I get to interface a lot with our research team. That’s one of the areas in my background that is a strength. I was previously a researcher prior to eventually making my way into this role. 

And I also get to evangelize accessibility and work more closely with our outbound and go to-market teams at ServiceNow and ensure that they are well-educated about all of the excellent things to know about the accessibility of our products so that they can represent us accurately as a leader in accessibility for the enterprise software market. We are thrilled to be here and thrilled to talk with you more about all of the things that we do to make our products usable for everyone. 

Barrie Seppings (04:54): 

What is ServiceNow doing? What is it selling? It keeps getting bigger. Give me your version of what is it that ServiceNow does? 

Alaina Beaver (05:00): 

I find that a lot of our customers still think of ServiceNow as their ticketing software, just a cloud software where they can run their IT service management or any other kind of backend ticketing capability. But that was our bread and butter, that was in the old days. And now ServiceNow has evolved to being a completely customizable, highly robust, fully accessible enterprise software platform for whatever people want to build to make their business or their organization do the work that they need to do. 

(05:36): 

And so I know our leadership, our CEO, Bill McDermott, likes to talk about ServiceNow as though it’s an iPhone. The iPhone itself is the platform in which you put all of your applications and all of those things. And once those apps are in there, you expect them all to just seamlessly work and communicate with each other as they need to and to be operable by you as the user. And ServiceNow is the same way. We know that you’re probably already using all sorts of other applications or other softwares and we’re not trying to convince you to end those relationships and come over to ServiceNow. We’re trying to say, “Look, we can help maximize what you are already using in your organization and connect it all so that you can mine that information and create better workflows that can help you [00:06:30] do the work of your business or your organization more seamlessly and more effectively.” 

 (06:35): 

We have entered the era of AI and we’re doing some great things for AI and accessibility. And so whether a customer decides to use AI or not, our goal is to help everybody’s technology work better for them. That is our ultimate end goal. 

Aileen Hackett (06:53): 

The beautiful thing about ServiceNow is that it is a platform and we’ve been in the AI space for quite some time. So we can help businesses transform their business using this single platform, which is robust with AI to help people be more efficient and be more productive, making sure that the workflows that they’re doing are as efficient as possible. And that translates to also what people with disabilities. We want to make sure that the world of work includes people with disabilities and makes their life easier so that they can perform and do the work as efficiently as possible. 

Barrie Seppings (07:38): 

It strikes me that ServiceNow’s mission is trying to make things in general more accessible, but you’re more focused on accessibility at scale. That’s a phrase that I’ve heard mentioned and something that you’re responsible for. What is accessibility atscale? Why does it matter? 

Aileen Hackett (07:53): 

For me, accessibility at scale means that it’s embedded in every part of the product development lifecycle. We started a project, which we call Project Wayfinder, which was looking at our current product development lifecycle and finding any gaps. We think that accessibility should be treated the same as security or performance. You wouldn’t release something that had security leaks or you wouldn’t release something that wasn’t performing. So the same way we wanted to make sure accessory wasconsidered throughout the product development lifecycle. What I mean by that is not waiting until the testing phase and seeing, “Oh, do we have any accessibility defects we need to fix?” But making sure that at the planning phase, that as you’rethinking about software, that you’re including people with accessibilities to get input on your early designs and all the way through that you’re considering accessibility through all the life cycle. 

(08:52): 

Alaina mentioned research earlier. We have a great research team at ServiceNow who help us do research and all our products at ServiceNow have access to something we call the employee panel. And these are volunteers from ServiceNow employees who’ve said, “I have a disability or have a family member who has a disability and I want to help as you’re developing products give you my insights or be involved.” And so it’s totally confidential, but we run it through our research program and it’s been a great help. 

(09:29): 

And I think that’s one of the things is some people think about accessibility during the testing phase, but it’s really during your research, during your design, all the way through, that gets you to what we call accessibility at scale. I think there’s a little bit, sometimes there’s a misconception that I find or misperception that people think making something accessible will make it less usable for everyone or that you’re pigeonholing some UI that it’s constrained. And in general, that hasn’t been my experience. If you’re making something more accessible, you’re usually making it more usable. 

(10:08): 

And one of the things that we did at ServiceNow was we introduced keyboard shortcuts. 40 plus keyboard shortcuts, primarily to help people who rely on a keyboard, like screen reader users or other users who rely on a keyboard to do their work, but of course it helps everybody and having keyboard shortcuts can make anybody more efficient. And we also introduce the ability to customize those keyboard shortcuts. So I think look at it with that mindset from a design perspective, challenge yourself to think of it as, “I’m making this experience more usable for everybody.” And I think that’s a great mindset to have. 

Host: Barrie Seppings (10:53): 

Where are we on the journey of that awareness that accessibility matters? Is this a constant battle or a constant education process or do you feel we’ve entered a new era where there is generally at the corporate level much more understanding and acceptance of it? 

Alaina Beaver (11:07): 

In general, I think there are different levels of maturity based on the organization that we’re working with. And so some of our customers are already very large organizations. A lot of governments, of course, government customers or public sector customers are very aware of accessibility and they themselves are at different levels of maturity and preparedness to execute their own accessibility missions. For the most part, we find that there are counterparts at a lot of these organizations like us who are running accessibility at their respective organizations, and those are the folks that we welcome into our product advisory council. These are the people at their different organizations who are already doing the work of accessibility within their teams and trying to evangelize from their corner of the organization to ensure that for anyone that they employ, that they have access to the proper information to equip employees with any accessibility or accommodation information. 

(12:13): 

One of our biggest goals is to ensure that our software can help people self accommodate and customize their experience as much as possible. So our accessibility settings are located primarily within user preferences. And so as you are utilizing the software, you can change what you need and have it set up so that it is to your preference every single time you open up your software and get started for the day, open up your browser, log into the system and get going and it will already be preset to maximize what works for you. 

(12:50): 

Accessibility is the kind of thing where you might have an accessibility need that changes over time. And so being able to fully customize that software is very important. And we find that our customers are in various places of awareness when it comes to how well they’re already utilizing those features, if they’re evangelizing the features likewise across their organizations, or if they’re still just getting started or really looking into it more fully for the first time. 

(13:25): 

We have a lot of partners who are in that space, for example, organizations that maybe previously weren’t focused on accessibility, but now under new legislation and new rules that have come out, the provider of services is also liable, not just the end provider of a service, but everybody up the ecosystem is responsible for accessibility. We find that we get to work with people who are in many different phases of that journey of accessibility and scale. And so we likewise prepare a variety of materials to help support customers and partners as they are engaging in the work of accessibility at scale. 

(14:12): 

Sometimes that looks like education materials and things to help evangelize awareness and build empathy among teams to understand why accessibility is so important. And sometimes that looks like more advanced materials and things that support people who are actually hands on keyboard, implementing accessibility in their daily lives, and things to that extent. It runs the gamut still, but it’s incredibly important. 

(14:41): 

And I find that whenever we start to engage customers and show them what we’re working on and how seriously we take accessibility at ServiceNow, they get really excited and they want to know more. They want to really dig in and engage with us on this topic. That’s one of the things that’s so exciting about getting to sort of meet our customers or partners wherever they’re at on this journey. 

Barrie Seppings (15:07): 

Yeah. It sounds a little bit like it may start with a bit of stick and then end up with Carrot, starting with the legislation and- 

Alaina Beaver (15:07): 

Exactly. 

Barrie Seppings (15:13): 

… here’s the rule. 

Alaina Beaver (15:16): 

That’s the best kind of shift to make. 

Aileen Hackett (15:19): 

That’s a great thing to call out because I was presenting earlier this year at our ServiceNow London World Forum, and there’s a lot of interest in Europe and in the UK as well. But with Europe, with the European Accessibility Act, there’s a lot more customers from Europe who are reaching out to Alaina and myself who have a lot more questions around accessibility. And they’re delighted to hear that ServiceNow treats accessibility very seriously and that we’re ready for the EAA. But I do think that sometimes customers come in with that kind of legislation, panic or whatever, but Alaina’s built this really nice community in her product advisory council for accessibility, and it really is a sharing space. So you might come in and think you’re on your own, but you’re not. We’re all there helping each other. So we don’t only just want to make ServiceNow software work better for everything. Obviously that’s our job and that’s what we’re focused on, but we want to help our customers too, and we share a lot. 

(16:24): 

In fact, we’re sharing, we have a very successful accessibility training program that shares introduction to accessibility and awareness that we mandate for all of our employees, 20,000 plus employees at ServiceNow take that training annually, but recently we’ve also made it available to our customers and partners for their use so they can also benefit from it. So it’s a very sharing community, I think. Yeah, that’s one of the things I really like about working in this area. 

Barrie Seppings (16:56): 

I assume you’re doing a fair bit of training and education almost at the developer or even the low-code developer community when they’re building on the platform, they need to think like a designer. What does that work look like? 

Aileen Hackett (17:09): 

Yeah. Well, it’s a bit of both. I mean, we have out of the box products as well, and our platform, you can use out of the box if you want to. But like you were saying, there’s a lot of customers who want to customize and build on top of the platform. And so within, we do two things. I think one thing is that we’re adding what we call accessibility checkers into our developer and builder tooling. 

(17:35): 

Say for example, Theme Builder, we have something we call Theme Builder. So customers want to put their own branding, their own look and feeling and colors on their workspace that they’ve made. And within Theme Builder, we have a color contrast checker. So we’re checking that the WCAG accessibility guidelines are being met as you’re building your theme. And likewise, in UI Builder, we have something similar where as people are building it, they don’t have to wait until the end and then find out, “Oh, this isn’t accessible.” As you’re building, we have checkers that we’re adding into our tools. So that’s one way that we’re doing it. 

(18:17): 

Another way is we’re also looking at AI. So there’s opportunities with AI to help as well with some of the things we’re doing there and to remediate as you’re going along too. Not only warning you that you have a problem, but, well, what’s the code that I need to be able to remediate? So we’re looking at into agents that can help developers and builders with that as well. 

Barrie Seppings (18:44): 

Alaina, could you talk to us about how users who may not necessarily have a disability or a need that they’re aware of are benefiting even though they’re using design that has accessibility built in? 

Alaina Beaver (18:54): 

There are lots of examples. The design of many of the applications that people utilize [00:19:00] on a daily basis that they maybe have been taking for granted and not realizing that the very functionality that they have become accustomed to or are enjoying just in their workflows was actually designed for people with disabilities. 

(19:19): 

I’ll give a few classic examples and then I’m going to bring it around to AI and pick up on something that Aileen was mentioning with our focus on accessible AI. We recently released a feature that we are quite proud of and that has actually won two different awards within the accessibility community. We’ve won a GAADY award and a Netty award for voice input for analysis. And so this is a way of being able to just enable your microphone so that you can speak to an AI agent on our platform and be engaging with it in real time conversation and to be speaking with it. And if you’re a screen reader user, that means you only have your focus within the AI feature and chat sidebar area. So the idea is that it’s a time saver. 

(20:18): 

The practical application of this, of course, is that people are used to speaking to their technology. People are used to their Alexa or their Siri at home, and people are used to being able to even just dictate into their chat applications on their cell phones and to be able to just dictate a text and then send it. All of that functionality benefits people, whether they’re just not wanting to type something out on their small little screen or they have their hands full or it’s just faster and easier for them. But that functionality was designed for people, of course, who are visually impaired, for people who are potentially low dexterity and don’t have the capacity to be typing on small screens, et cetera. So things that are designed for one population end up benefiting a much broader population. 

(21:13): 

And so that’s why when we say we’ve been doing accessibility and accessibility has been impacting the usability of products and services for a long time, that’s exactly what we mean, that predictive text and captions and all of these things become very mainstream and very normalized in terms of everyone’s digital experience, but they were specifically designed for the disabled community and without that community forcing us to think outside the box, it potentially would have limited our creativity and the design of how our technology has evolved. So we all benefit from accessibility. 

Barrie Seppings (21:57): 

These are great stories. How do you evangelize the benefits, productivity or otherwise to leadership or businesses or customers that may be starting off with that compliance mindset, how do you shift them into a, “Well, no, this is worth doing for everyone.” In fact, even if you’re only focused on maximizing shareholder value or something as prosaic as that, how do you sell to those people, that sort of mindset and get them to understand the benefits as well? 

Alaina Beaver (22:30): 

I think first and foremost, you have to check the box for people. If they are there and they’ve come into the room wanting to know that yes, it’s accessible and we’re not going to be violating any laws or putting ourselves in any kind of legislative risk by purchasing your software, then of course we are there to reassure them that yes, we are upholding the International Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. We now adhere actually to the highest version of that standard, which is WCAG 2.2AA.  And I think when people hear that and start to understand that and unpack what that means, and we’re able to back up our claim with all of our publicly available information about the accessibility of our products, we ensure that we publish accessibility conformance reports, which are a required part of the procurement process for a lot of companies who are engaging in a procurement review and want to make sure that the products that they are purchasing are accessible. We make all of that information publicly available on our website. 

(23:38): 

So whenever you fill out a voluntary product accessibility template, which we are using the most recent version of that template now, that accessibility conformance report is the document that is produced by filling out the template. And all of ours are available, organized by product and by release family. And so we want to be as transparent as possible about how we create those documents and having them all available for customers because we have nothing to hide. And if anything, we welcome conversations with customers who are looking at that documentation and if they have any questions, we’re happy to get that out in front of them. Once we get that out of the way, then we’re able to tell more human stories. 

(24:28): 

And so part of what I do is I try to understand what are some of the more human stories or human concerns, things that are challenging for these organizations. And sometimes it’s thinking a little bit outside the box and really looking for the pain points in certain organizations. For example, a lot of government employees and many governments around the world are starting to enter into an age category where they’re wanting to retire sometime in the next 10 years. And so for example, we had an international customer who said, “We’re looking at a retirement cliff of potentially losing 40% of our employee base in the next 10 years. We also are trying to modernize and put more of our processes online and move away from some latent paper pushing types of processes and how we do our work and to really look at transforming our government and becoming more modernized and more capable heading into the future.” 

(25:33): 

And so they want to modernize, but they also need to think about how to become an employer of choice for the newer generation of workers who are entering the working world and how do you convince somebody who has all of the opportunities before them that they should become a government employee, right? 

(25:58): 

And so this is like a hidden pain point that if we don’t specifically choose to speak about that and confront it head on, then people might not realize that, “Oh, actually, there are a lot of things that ServiceNow is doing to make it easier for individuals who are neurodivergent to utilize our software and to self-accommodate.” And being able to customize and choose your own adventure and self-accommodate is a huge benefit for the younger generation of individuals. There’s some reliable research from Ernst & Young that has said that up to 52% of Gen Z self-identify as neurodivergent in some fashion, which is an amazing statistic and just really speaks to the ways that our technology needs to serve all of us and needs to be designed flexibly. 

(26:53): 

And so, as you share this with customers and reflect their own concerns and anxieties back to them and kind of package it with, but we have the solution. We have anticipated these needs. We’re thinking about them at ServiceNow already. And as we design our software, we want to provide you with a wraparound solution that you can showcase at a job fair and say, “Look, when you come work for the government, you get to choose your own adventure and be your true self. Nobody’s going to make you feel like you should be nervous about disclosing any kind of learning need or accessibility need because the software is already built in and designed for you and it’s something you don’t have to worry about when you come and work with us here.” 

Barrie Seppings (27:54): 

We hear a lot about AI in its raw form, having a lot of biases, having a lot of areas, because it started as a machine of averages, finding the average, and people with needs tend to be on the margins. What was the work that had to go in there to make sure that when AI starts to enter the fray, it doesn’t suddenly undo some of that good accessibility work? 

Aileen Hackett (28:14): 

One of the really important things for us at ServiceNow is that we want people to trust AI. I personally think AI is going to be a big game changer for people with disabilities, much like the mobile phone was. I think that there’s going to be a lot of opportunity, but the community is a little bit nervous because what you were saying, how can we make sure they have been included in these models? And so we built something with Joe Devon who works for the Global Accessibility Awareness Day Foundation, and it’s called AI Mac. And what it’s doing is it will check your large language models for accessibility. 

(28:59): 

And so that’s one thing we’ve done, but we’re also making really sure that we also are transparent. For example, when something is being recommended with AI, that we tell our end user that this is a recommendation from AI. And so we’re building that trust and that transparency and making sure that we include in our models examples of accessible code, for example, accessible to people with a range of disabilities, as well as we build these new AI features. 

Alaina mentioned one of the features we rolled out was voice AI. And what’s interesting about voice AI as well, I think, is how great voice AI has come along. I met someone recently who had Down syndrome, and he was telling me that years ago when he was first using some of these voice products that it was really hard for them to understand because he has a slight speech impediment and that it was very hard for them to understand, whereas now it’s advanced so much more. So we’re seeing that with the testing and research we’re doing with voice AI, that it’s becoming a lot better understanding a range of accents, a range of different voices. And so I’m really excited about that. 

(30:31): 

And I think AI and Voice AI is going to be exploding and helping with the world of work. I think summarizations are really helpful in regards to just tell me what I want to know. I don’t want to dig in to find something. Tell me, serve it up to me. Same way with onboarding. What do I need to know? Where do I need to get to be able to be efficient and as fast as possible? 

Barrie Seppings (30:58): 

Have you found a role or a strong use for the accessibility message in broader marketing, particularly your B2B clients? Do you have the marketing team, for example, coming to you saying, “I’d love some of these stories. I want to make more of the features and benefits that come from the accessibility work that you’re doing?” 

Aileen Hackett (31:17): 

We think marketing is so important because we want to get out that external awareness, that ServiceNow is invested in accessibility and that we want to become a leader for accessibility in the enterprise software world, but also getting out that message to the world that you should include people with disabilities. We have a wonderful marketing specialist, Erica, who focuses full-time on accessibility. We had some videos that we put out. We had people who were signing in the video. 

(31:50): 

We also had a more recent one where it also was interesting, I think, to talk about this, which is a lot of us have temporary disabilities. Like a product manager I work with, she was maybe not as aware of why keyboard and navigation was so important to make sure that you could operate instead of without a mouse until she broke her arms snowboarding. And then she was like, “Oh my gosh, Aileen, I think this is great. I can’t believe that anybody wouldn’t make it this way.” 

(32:29): 

And so our latest video has a lady who broke her arm and who’s using Voice AI. But I think also the human story that Alaina was talking about earlier, like connecting people because after all, I think everybody wants to do the right thing, don’t we? I think everybody really wants to do the right thing. Sometimes they get pushback because of ROI or different reasons, but once you have that human connection and that customer story, it can be really powerful. 

Alaina Beaver (32:56): 

Yeah. You can’t underestimate the power of the human story and the human connection. We have a slide that we like to put up and it’s our most photographed slide. People will whip out their phones and take photos of this slide to utilize it for themselves. And we say, “That’s great. Please take this because it’s a great way of talking about accessibility and demystifying this idea that accessibility is somehow equivalent with disability.” That’s not true. Accessibility is equivalent with good usability for all people regardless of your access need. 

And so, certainly designing for people with a permanent disability like blindness or being a member of the deaf community is absolutely important. And those are our number one customers and we love their input because it helps push us to think outside the box. But being able to adjust the brightness on your laptop is something that is helping you if you find that you suddenly have low vision because you walked outside on a bright sunny day and you need to be able to see your screen. Or you’re in a noisy area and you’re utilizing the captions that are available on a screen, but you’re a hearing individual, right? 

(34:11): 

Having those personal stories, I often challenge people, I challenge you to think of a time when you haven’t benefited from accessibility. There is something for everyone here. Everyone has been put in a situation at some point in time, whether through an injury or a disability or a situation where they’ve had an accessibility need that we’ve been able to meet through technology. And so as we move forward to that bend, keeping that in mind as a hook, that these are important storytelling hooks that help round out characters. They can signal to the robustness of a product or the software in really powerful ways and become just powerful modes of storytelling and making your content memorable. 

(35:05): 

Apple is great at doing this with their commercials. And I always am so impressed whenever I see a new Super Bowl Apple commercial come on. The recent one that they did with using ear pods with the robust capacity for hearing aids, just remarkable. Wonderful innovation in utilizing hardware and software for people with the disabled community, but also just for everyone. Other people, when it touches them and helps them realize like, “Wow, this really solved a true problem that somebody had.” And I can imagine its solving problems that I might encounter or I know somebody who I love who has the same problem and I wonder if it could solve that problem for them too. Suddenly that is what good marketing is all about. It’s about how do we solve problems and if we’re making purchases, to be smart about those purchases so they help solve for the maximum number of people. 

Aileen Hackett (36:03): 

Another good idea is showing through the eyes or through the experience of someone with disabilities. I recently was giving a presentation with a customer who is legally blind and he has tunnel vision. So to kick off our accessibility presentation, what he did was wonderful. He showed what the experience was like on the big screen of what he sees. So everyone sees this huge screen. He has tunnel vision, so he just saw this small portion and we were explaining how ServiceNow software is helping him by allowing things like Zoom or Force Colors or some of the screen reader abilities, all of that, which helps him to get his job done. But just seeing it, I think the room, we just shut off the lights and then we just showed the whole screen of what most people in the room could see and then show his experience. It was a really powerful moment. 

Barrie Seppings (37:08): 

When you’re going into an organization, maybe you start to interface with their accessibility team and they say, “Look, we need some help getting broader understanding, broader acceptance.” Where do you start? Who are the roles or the people that you find most effective straight to the top or do you build a coalition the next level down or does it vary? What’s your tactic? 

Aileen Hackett (37:28): 

We’ve had accessibility at ServiceNow for a long time, but we were being more reactive than proactive in the past. And so to switch it around and have the ability to do that and invest in accessibility was a great testament to our leadership. From our CEO down who helped, first of all, they recognized that it should be treated with more importance. And we hired in our VP of Accessibility and Internet and Globalization, Eamon McErlean. And so they said, “This requires that role. It’s not something that somebody’s doing part-time or as part of another role. This is important and we want to do that.” 

Alaina Beaver (38:16): 

I think it’s exactly right to look for who’s the key decision maker and what do they care about most? And then we have a version of why accessibility speaks to that that we can bring out. And so we can speak to the CIO, we can speak to the CEO, we can speak to the CHRO at an organization, all of these key leaders, wherever accessibility sits in their organization and whatever their goal is, their mission of what they’re facing and couple that with, what are some hidden pain points? What are they using ServiceNow for already if they’re already a customer and what are they hoping to expand on in the coming years? What are they hoping to do next as an organization? How can we help them maximize what they’re doing and how accessibility and the features that we’re uniquely building in are part of that story? 

(39:14): 

That is all what I look at when I think about how to be most persuasive in equipping our teams to really tell that good story and hook them and get them where they really are going to sit up and pay attention. And hopefully leave those conversations inspired if they’re somebody who’s brand new to the ServiceNow ecosystem or with a renewed sense of, “I made the right choice. We’re on this good journey with this excellent partner who is helping to lead the way.” We want to reassure our customers that when they’re with us, that they’re in good hands. 

Barrie Seppings (39:57): 

We also do a ton of accessibility work with the Microsoft team, which leads me to ask you, who else do you admire out there in the software world or perhaps even the hardware world, the business world that’s up there with ServiceNow, taking accessibility seriously and delivering good stuff? Who would you give a shout-out to? 

Aileen Hackett (40:17): 

I guess I have to start with Microsoft. They’ve been a great partner for us, to be honest. Like what we’re talking about going from reactive to proactive, being fully transparent, we did have some issues. Microsoft, being a great leader in accessibility, came to us and said, “How can we resolve these issues?” And I believe we’ve really turned that around and so much so that our Microsoft partners are great allies with us now and we learn from each other as well. I think that’s what’s great about the community is everybody we learn from each other, but it’s also exciting, smaller companies out there too, who are looking to do things. 

Alaina Beaver (41:00): 

Certainly Apple, Microsoft, I think to Aileen’s point, there are a lot of companies out there who are investing in accessibility and really see it as a trajectory, a journey. It’s not just a checkbox. It’s not just a one and done. You need accessibility built into your entire organization. There’s a lot of great accessibility industry companies who are providing accessibility solutions. And these are vendors that we work with as well at ServiceNow. 

Barrie Seppings (41:32): 

From a personal and professional level, what has it brought to you to be working, as you say, long-term now in this role and in this community? And what advice would you give to somebody perhaps they’re in marketing or perhaps they’re in another part of a tech organization that sees as an opportunity to move into a more accessibility focused role? What should they consider and what would be the benefits for them to do that? 

Alaina Beaver (41:57): 

I consider myself tremendously lucky and privileged that I’ve been able to focus my career on accessibility for as long as I have. Everybody has their own sort of story or journey into what led them into being an accessibility evangelist and to want to seek out this kind of role where they are specifically focused on accessibility as the niche area of expertise within whatever larger role that they sit in. And so for us as product managers, an enterprise software company, to be able to focus on accessibility means that we truly do feel like we’re helping the world of work work better for everyone. It sounds cheesy, but it equates to feeling that you really do get to live your mission and that it feels deeply purposeful and meaningful when you are successful at your job because it means that you are helping the lived experience of so many other people who might otherwise go in and have a miserable day at work. 

(43:03): 

That’s why usability is so important to us. And we really see compliance as the floor, but at ServiceNow we’re on the rocket ship going up through the ceiling. We want to aim for that beautiful user experience. And so when we get to take that feedback back to our teams and help design more beautiful and usable experiences, it’s just immensely gratifying that you really feel like you’re actually helping people in your day to day life. 

(43:33): 

I would say, if you are a mission driven person, if you want to feel that you are having an outsized impact and that you are standing for something that’s larger than yourself, then get involved in accessibility and look into how accessibility can really enrich your career trajectory. There’s a wonderful amount of resources out there to help people learn more and become more, I would say, involved in their accessibility expertise. 

(44:05): 

And so yeah, come to the conferences, come to free events. There are a lot of meetups that are local to different cities that focus on accessibility. I run one for the Denver Boulder area. We have colleagues who help engage with those meetups in California. Most of us I think are very generous in wanting to welcome people in if they’re truly interested in this field. And so reach out and get involved, connect with us on LinkedIn and see how you can become an evangelist and a champion for accessibility in your own role and just start small, start with where you are. And it might be that a pivot into an accessibility focused role is in your near future. 

Barrie Seppings (44:53): 

What advice would you offer somebody who had maybe never even considered that you could build a real career around this kind of work? 

Aileen Hackett (45:01): 

Gosh, I’m sorry I didn’t do this sooner in my career. I started off as a software engineer and I was all about solving problems. I still love solving problems. And I think if you love solving problems or working on something that’s innovative and something that you can push yourself to complex to figure it out, I think this is a great area because we do have some scenarios that are complex and situations that we want to find the best UI solution for. And so if you’re a problem solver, this is a great area for you. 

(45:45): 

I was a software engineer for many years and then I got into product management. And like I said, I was on design systems and I have to credit a junior engineer on my team who was passionate about accessibility and she wanted us to do more. And she pulled me along to a Bay Area camp. I originally said, “I can’t. My son has baseball that weekend. I can’t go.” Because that was my life at one point, I was on the bleachers at baseball games every weekend, but I went and it was eye-opening in a shocking way really. There was a lady who was showing her experience as someone who was blind and doing a screen reader on a badly designed site where she was trying to go through a carousel and it was awful. And I came away from that. I go, “Oh my gosh, we need to do a lot more.” 

(46:43): 

And this was at a previous company I was at, and that’s how I put my hand up. But I think if you’re in an organization, I think put your hand up, be that person to say, “I want to help out. I want to do more for accessibility.” And you can make a business case with your employers to open up that opportunity. And that’s what we did a little bit in the previous company and we’re able to do that. 

(47:11): 

And yeah, I think it’s really rewarding, like Alaina said, to be able to make a difference in people’s work lives really matters. And I saw some awful statistic the other day where there’s really high unemployment rate for people with disabilities. And to beable to make enterprise software work for people with disabilities, to be able to have them employed and be part of great companies like ServiceNow is a great motivator. And I love what I do and of course we have challenges like anywhere else, but being able to do this role is really rewarding. So I would recommend it for anybody. 

Alaina Beaver (48:01): 

One of the great things about being on an accessibility product team versus being housed somewhere else in a complex organization is that you do get to innovate and you get to think about how you can provide solutions to your customers in thefastest way possible. And one of the examples of us doing this is one of our neurodivergent solutions that we’ve created here at ServiceNow. And we knew that it was going to take some time to get this set of functionality into the main platform and into our accessibility preferences, just given the time that it was developed within our sort of life cycle of how we plan and release our software. But it’s a really elegant little solution and it’s a way of being able to adjust text within a UI in dynamic ways to support people who are dyslexic or people who have any kind of reading challenge. And so there are broad range of people who might self-identify as neurodivergent who would benefit from being able to modify the UI. 

(49:14): 

And so our fastest go-to-market strategy with just getting this functionality out there was to just package it up and give it away for free. And so we are delighted to be able to provide this little set of features as a Chromium based extension. So it’ll work in Chrome and in Edge. And we call it Text Adjust and it’s for free and it’s available on our community site. And so right now we have it just located in a post with instructions on how to download it and then re-upload it into your browser of choice. And some of the benefits of it and provide little videos and things to see it in action, but it’s just a great way for people to, again, customize the UI, use whatever works for you to make reading and doing what you need to do your work in ServiceNow more usable we want you to have it. 

Don’t wait and if you don’t use ServiceNow, you don’t have to. It’s free. We want everybody to use it. If it’s benefiting your life or would be helpful for somebody you know, it’s small enough to just email it as a little zip file in an email. It’s being able to do nice little things like that then gives us sort of the after effect, the downstream benefit of being able to say things like 26,000 school children now have this installed on their Chromebooks and are using it every day if they need it, things of that nature. We’ve been able to really partner with some of our customers who have used this little extension for their own benefit of accessibility more broadly in their organization, translating it into different languages, for example, to be made available to all companies in a multilingual organization, things of that nature. 

(51:16): 

So it’s being able to witness some of these wins for our customers and wins for people who use the technology just because we’ve been able to be a little bit more nimble and release technology and give it away for free here and there. So very proud and lucky to do the work that we do. 

Barrie Seppings (51:41): 

Well, that was a very special episode of Plugged-In, Switched-On podcast that takes you inside the conversations that matter, B2B tech marketing. And I’m sure you’ll agree that accessibility is absolutely one of those conversations that matter. I was chatting with Aileen Hackett. She was the director of Accessibility Product Management and her colleague, Alaina Beaver, global head of Accessibility for Customer Engagement at ServiceNow. But before I let them go, I asked each of them what movie they would take with them if they could only watch one movie on a desert island? 

Alaina Beaver (52:16): 

One of my forever favorite films for a multitude of reasons is the movie White Christmas. I am sentimental about that film. I know every single word and I can recite it from heart. I love the music. I love the dancing. I love the costumes. I know all the things about the actors and their stories. And for me, watching that film just feels like that’s a comfort place for me. 

Aileen Hackett (52:39): 

At a desert island, you want something a little uplifting and you’re going to be watching it repeatedly and that has to be, for me, The Wizard of Oz. I just love that movie and it’s like I watch it like it’s new. Every time I watch it’s like I’m watching it again as a new movie and I just love it. I love the message and yeah, it brings me joy. So I would have to say The Wizard of Oz. 

Barrie Seppings (53:10): 

Well, I do hope you’ve enjoyed that episode of Plugged In, Switched On. We produce episodes every month about the state of B2B tech marketing. We do one-to-one interviews with our infamous 20 questions episodes with some of the leading lights within B2B tech marketing. We also take a deep dive into specific areas of the business, such as today’s episode about accessibility and marketing. And then we do also take a little behind the scenes look at how high performance marketing teams, particularly remote and hybrid teams are operating in today’s world. 

(53:45): 

Quick side note, Splendid Group are in growth mode. If you work in marketing or in advertising or agency land and would like to consider doing some of the best work of your career on some of the best brands with some of the best colleagues in not an office. You can do all of that work from wherever it is that you like to call home, get in touch. We are currently looking for talent. Maybe that’s you. 

(54:10): 

In the meantime, I want to thank you again if you got to this point. I think that means you like us and you like our podcast. So why don’t you hit like and subscribe in your podcast platform of choice and we’ll appear in your earphones again automatically next month. 

(54:27): 

I’ve been your host, Barrie Seppings, executive creative director at Splendid Group. Thanks for listening. Plugged In, Switched On is a product of Splendid Group. Thanks to our executive producers, Ruth Holt and Ana Isabelle Canta.