E59 – Interview with John Tubbs

John Tubbs is an educator working for about thirty years in the area of high tech, digital education, online learning. He discusses accessibility and accomodations for students with disabilities - a topic we don't hear enough about. He points out that his team is working towards universal accessible documents that can later be customized, rather than wait students to request accommodations and then scramble to make it happen. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. You’re listening to episode 59. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS and video at Twilio.com. So today I’m speaking with John Tubbs. John, thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility. John: My pleasure. Nic: So, as you may know by now I like to let guests introduce themselves. So, in a brief intro, whose John Tubbs? John: Well, John Tubbs is an educator working for about thirty years in the area of high tech, digital education, online learning. It has a variety of names depending on what area you’re talking from but I did start pre-internet so I have some different insights than the people who are working more in today. I’m at the University of Illinois for the last twenty years. Working first in the agriculture school for fourteen years. Then I worked in central IT in the online learning unit there. And then for the last years, I’ve been in the Gies College of Business and where we have been a big focus on large MOOC programmes that lead into graduate degree programmes. And those two degree programmes are MBA programme and our MSA. Masters of Science and Accountancy. Nic: Right John: Both of those are collaborations with Coursera for part of the course and then the high engagement part, the high touch part is done on a different platform here on campus. Nic: Right. So that seems to be keeping you busy. Twenty years at the University of Illinois. Has there been a lot of change to how things are done? Obviously going from pre-internet, pre-high tech to today. What kind of massive changes have you seen? John: Well if we want to look specifically at, sort of, accessibility topics within that … in 1987 there was no such thing, really as software that was accessible, for the most part. Or was there an internet or any communication short of very crude BBS systems. Bulletin board systems. But going back there, there's a funny story. The first thing that exposed me to dealing with assistive technology. I was at a CESA office. That’s Cooperative Ed Service Agency and those are dotted all around Wisconsin where I was working at that point. And this dairy farmer came up and he was blind. And he came up and said, “I’m going to demonstrate today how I do my books”. And he was working on an Apple 2e running VisiCalc. The first spreadsheet to run on personal computers. And he had the orange speech synthesis card in that Apple 2e and he ran down his numbers for his dairy operation and he said, “Tell me what month you want to hear final statistics on and final sales on” and he let that orange speech synthesizer run and I could not and nor could anyone else in the room understand a darn thing it was saying. And yet with the tap of an arrow key, he landed exactly on November of 1986 and told us exactly what he sold that month. And my jaw was on the floor. I was amazed. And that stuck with me for the next t