Full Transcript
Tom Wlodkowski:
You need to become comfortable with technology, and you need to be open to change and realize that it might not be instantaneous that you’re comfortable with the newest, greatest technology.
Jeff Thompson:
Introducing Tom Wlodkowski, Vice President of Accessibility at Comcast.
Tom Wlodkowski:
I’d say the time you put in, in the beginning is well worth it in the end.
Jeff Thompson:
Bringing inclusion, independence and empowerment to the X1 Xfinity box and remote control from Comcast.
Tom Wlodkowski:
Comcast brings the internet, TV, my love of broadcast and media, all under one roof, so this seemed and continues to feel like a great home for me to drive accessibility forward.
Jeff Thompson:
Blind Abilities Teen correspondent, Simon Bonenfant, meets up with Tom at the Accessibility Labs at Comcast.
Simon Bonenfant:
Growing up, the technology, there wasn’t any iPhone or anything like that.
Jeff Thompson:
Talks about dealing with the changing technology.
Tom Wlodkowski:
Think about how has Aira changed things?
Simon Bonenfant:
Yep.
Tom Wlodkowski:
I’m a big user of Aira , Aira. We make available as an employee accommodation here at Comcast if you need it at work to read mail or whatever.
Jeff Thompson:
And from a blindness perspective, Tom gives advice that we can all use.
Tom Wlodkowski:
Ask, build a network of resources that can help you along the way. If I get stuck, I have a network of people that I can contact and you recommend, and I say just go for it after that.
Jeff Thompson:
And now please welcome Simon Bonenfant and Tom Wlodkowski. We hope you enjoy.
Tom Wlodkowski:
I was born blind, the youngest of four brothers, all of whom can see. So you can imagine what that was like. That was a fun childhood.
Simon Bonenfant:
Hello everyone on Blind Abilities. This is Simon Bonenfant here and I’m at the Comcast building today in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and I’m here at the Accessibility Lab with Tom Wlodkowski. How you doing, Tom?
Tom Wlodkowski:
Okay, Simon. What’s up?
Simon Bonenfant:
I’m doing good.
Tom Wlodkowski:
Excellent.
Simon Bonenfant:
So Tom, what is your role at Comcast?
Tom Wlodkowski:
So my role is Vice President of Accessibility at Comcast and I lead a team that looks across all of our products and services to make sure that we’re delivering as inclusive an experience as possible for all of our customers. And that includes customers with disabilities.
Simon Bonenfant:
And you were blind as well?
Tom Wlodkowski:
Yes.
Simon Bonenfant:
Can you touch on your journey and how you came into the tech market and how you came into Comcast.
Tom Wlodkowski:
Sure. So I was born blind, the youngest of four brothers, all of whom can see, so you can imagine what that was like. That was a fun childhood. And went off to Boston College and was mainstreamed through public school. Thought I was going to do communications, going to get into radio and TV. Ended up wanting to stay in Boston. This is back several years ago now and went to the public TV and radio station there on WGBH. And was looking for work and learned about their media access group in this relatively new service at the time called Descriptive Video Service or DVS. It turns out that the director at the time of DVS happened to be a Boston College alum and so set up a 30-minute informational interview and that turned into an hour and a half conversation. And I ended up at that point taking a job with DVS in their Outreach Team and really haven’t looked back since.
Tom Wlodkowski:
I spent 10 years at WGBH. Went through DVS, then worked at the National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH, which was an R&D research and development organization that ironically one of the projects I managed was creating guidelines on how to make cables set top boxes accessible to people with disabilities. Who knew that several years later I’d be doing that. And NCAM or the National Center for Accessible Media also had a corporate partnership program where companies would hire us to work as consultants. And the funding that we would make off of that would fuel additional research into multimedia and other areas of media accessibility.
Tom Wlodkowski:
As part of that, AOL, America Online at the time became one of our corporate partners and I was fortunate to be able to be asked to manage that project, and so I helped them. They were sued by the National Federation of the Blind at one point or then the first case under the ADA under Title III, applying to the internet. It was settled. But as part of that, they created an office of accessibility at AOL and I got to work with that director for a while and then when she decided to move on, they hired me to run Accessibility at AOL. So I left WGBH, moved down to Northern Virginia, ran Accessibility for 10 years at AOL.
Tom Wlodkowski:
And now we’re at 2012 and Comcast was looking to create an accessibility office. And someone that I know, a friend of mine in the industry, heard about it. She called me up, said, “What do you think about moving to Philadelphia? Would you be interested in interviewing for the role?” And she gave me their contact information. Lo and behold, I interviewed, got the job, and now I’m coming up on seven years as the Vice President of Accessibility at Comcast.
Simon Bonenfant:
Well, that’s great. That’s terrific. So when you were growing up, what was technology like and did you always have the vision to make the TV accessible? Or when did that first come to you that this is something that you wanted to do and this is something that was realistic for Comcast to do?
Tom Wlodkowski:
So growing up technology, there wasn’t any iPhone or anything like that when I was growing up. So when I first learned to take notes, you take one of those APH tape recorders to class and you’d record your class and depending on what type of class it was, you go back home and sometimes you would transcribe your notes on a braille writer. Right? That’s the old, old school way of doing things. Right? And then technology really started to take off. Right? That’s right around the time when, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Versa-Braille.
Simon Bonenfant:
I think I’ve heard of that.
Tom Wlodkowski:
Yeah. The Versa-Braille was a self-contained system that had a refreshable braille display on it. And so I started using that to take notes and now I didn’t have to record anymore. Right? I could just bring the Versa-Braille with me everywhere I went.
Tom Wlodkowski:
So I would say once I hit high school and college is when technology really started to take hold. But it was really more in the assistive technology space. There weren’t talking HTMS, things like that, that we take for granted today. And so, I was always thinking about our career in communications and being a musician, being a drummer in a band and things like that, I wasn’t really thinking about technology. I think it really started to take shape for me once I was at WGBH and having the opportunity to work with a bunch of different technologies and really finding that to be very rewarding. And then certainly at AOL and having been at WGBH and authored guidelines on how to make set top boxes accessible.
Tom Wlodkowski:
When Comcast called me up and I interviewed for the role and was fortunate enough to be given the role and be hired here, it seemed like it brought everything full circle. Comcast brings the Internet, TV, my love of broadcast and media through our Comcast, NBC Universal, all under one roof. So this seemed and continues to feel like a great home for me to drive accessibility forward.
Simon Bonenfant:
So when you came into Comcast, is that something you thought over? They said to you, “We want to bring you in to make these accessible talking guides and things.”
Tom Wlodkowski:
Well, they knew that there was going to be an increased focus on accessibility and so they had the forethought to say, “Look, we want to bring a subject matter expert into the company and into our product organization to help us figure out what we need to do from an accessibility perspective.” So I think that’s why they created the group. And then once you come in, I started working with the product groups and obviously I already had personal experience with the challenges of trying to find programs with video description or trying to turn on the SAP channel to get that video description to hear it. And so it just seemed like the right place to start to focus on a talking guide and making it easier to turn on closed captioning and video description and the features that we demoed earlier.
Simon Bonenfant:
In the process of the excellent box being designed and the talking guide, how did your experience with being blind come into play? And did things evolve as time went on as you were designing or did you already from the start have, “We want this rate control to be in there and we want it to work like this and the control…” You know, did you have it all mapped out or did it kind of come out as the process was going, things kind of evolved?
Tom Wlodkowski:
Certain tables stake components of an accessible interface that screen readers support. And so we went into the project being fully aware of those needs and requirements, but certainly it evolved as we got feedback. And you can put 10 people who are blind in front of a product and get 10 different opinions on what it should do. And that’s no different than putting 10 sighted people in front of a product and you might have 10 different opinions on what the experience should be.
Tom Wlodkowski:
So yeah, it definitely involves with usability testing, getting feedback from customers. You go through customer trials when we put the box in people’s homes with the talking guide enabled. And we would do conference calls with the trial participants. They’d give us feedback and we’ve adjusted a lot of things as a result. And we didn’t get everything in the first shot either. Right? We call it minimal viable product. What could we go out of the gate with that would represent a credible experience and then you start to put a list of items together to incrementally evolve the product as you move forward.
Simon Bonenfant:
And what was the one thing that you wanted to make sure that you had from your own experience?
Tom Wlodkowski:
The big thing for me is I don’t want to have customers with disabilities have to work two or three times as hard as anybody else to get access to the same experience. We work pretty hard in school or at work to make sure that our screen readers or whatever assistive technology you’re running, depending on your disability, and we spend a lot of time running to get up to the starting line in some cases.
Tom Wlodkowski:
When you’re at home chilling on the couch, you’re not going to spend that energy. You don’t have the energy to spend anyway. So we got to make it easy. And so for me it just felt like we win when the accessibility is just fairly apparent and relatively easy to navigate. It’s really kind of the North Star for me.
Simon Bonenfant:
And what tools do you use now in technology for your computer and phone? You have the iPhone, correct?
Tom Wlodkowski:
I have both an iPhone and a pixel device. So we test across both iOS and Android. We have Xfinity apps on both platforms. And so-
Simon Bonenfant:
But you have an app as well? And does the voice guidance work through the app or does it rely on the screen reader on the phone?
Tom Wlodkowski:
We actually rely on the native support of the operating system. So VoiceOver for iPhone, TalkBack for Android, and whatever other accessibility features those two operating systems offer. Same thing with the web. We work with JAWS, with NVDA, latest web browsers we test as well.
Simon Bonenfant:
So what computer do you use and what screen readers do you have on there?
Tom Wlodkowski:
So right now I have a Surface Pro running JAWS 2019 and the latest version of NVDA.
Simon Bonenfant:
Good.
Tom Wlodkowski:
I have a Mac at home running VoiceOver.
Simon Bonenfant:
Well, it’s good to keep up with all that stuff.
Tom Wlodkowski:
Yeah, I do have a refresher braille, 18 cell braille display. I don’t use it really right now as much as I should. Still trying to find a braille display that I really feel fits into how I like to work.
Simon Bonenfant:
So last question here is what advice would you give to a transition student transitioning to college, high school, college, or the workplace or someone who’s newly blinded? What advice would you give from your experience being blind?
Tom Wlodkowski:
Boy. What advice would I give? I would say that you need to become comfortable with technology and you need to be open to change and realize that it might not be instantaneous that you’re comfortable with the newest, greatest technology. Right? So it does take a little work, but I’d say the time you put in, in the beginning is well worth it in the end. And embrace new products and support organizations that have a strong commitment to accessibility. That’s why when you were asking me about what I use, I don’t really like to say what I use because I want to support all good work in this space. And so it’s hard for me to say, “Well, I just decided on this one technology,” or whatever. I have different technologies for different needs. Right?
Tom Wlodkowski:
As a community, support the companies that really put an effort in the space because they are working hard. A lot of companies are working hard to address accessibility, to advance employment of people with disabilities. And I think we need to recognize that we want to support that. And so I think the advice is be open, get comfortable with new technologies, be open to change and ask. Build a network of resources that can help you along the way. If I get stuck, I have a network of people that I can contact and say, “Geez, you know, you guys are tracking this stuff closer than I am. What should I be using? What do you recommend?” And I say just go for it after that.
Simon Bonenfant:
And you mentioned change. I mean, I remember when the iPhone came out and it started coming out with VoiceOver. That was big in the blind community. A lot of people thought that that was just off the limit and there’s probably going to be more change coming down the pipe in the next five to 10 years. I mean, accessibility and technology in general is changing so rapidly. I remember just a few years ago with the Face ID, how was [inaudible] without a home button, or no headphone jack? It was just stuff that I never thought about.
Tom Wlodkowski:
Yeah. Doing the user research as we are and think about how has Aira changed things.
Simon Bonenfant:
Yeah, exactly.
Tom Wlodkowski:
I’m a big user of Aira airports. Aira we make available as an employee accommodation here at Comcast. So if you need it at work to read mail or whatever, you’re not being-
Simon Bonenfant:
So you use the glasses [crosstalk]?
Tom Wlodkowski:
Mostly I use the phone but I do have the glasses.
Simon Bonenfant:
Good. And is there any contact information that someone who is blind and vision impaired or anyone with disability could get in touch with the Accessibility Department of Comcast.
Tom Wlodkowski:
So we have a dedicated support team for customers with disabilities. You can reach us by phone at 855-270-0379 between 8:00 AM and midnight, seven days a week. You can send an email to accessibility@comcast.com. You can also go to comcast.com/accessibility page and learn more about our efforts. And there you’ll be able to link off to our support area where you can do accessible chat as well with our accessibility agents. Multiple ways you can contact us.
Simon Bonenfant:
Well, that’s great. Well, Tom, thank you for talking with me and I want to just say that your company has a very, very strong commitment to accessibility and I know it is very important to you as it is to me.
Tom Wlodkowski:
Perfect.
Simon Bonenfant:
And thank you for making everything very accessible for the blind and disabled community in general. You doing a good job with that.
Tom Wlodkowski:
Thank you, Simon, for getting the word out through Blind Abilities and have you come back another time and we’ll talk about smart home and stuff like that.
Simon Bonenfant:
Cool. Very good.
Jeff Thompson:
Such a great conversation with Tom Wlodkowski. Stay tuned to our next podcast where Simon and Tom go over the X1 Xfinity box and remote control from Comcast. And I must say, such a great job by our team correspondent, Simon Bonenfant. Simon’s back in school, but he’s going to be back on to talk about his experience at Colorado Center for the Blind that he had this summer.
Jeff Thompson:
And for more podcasts with the Blindness Perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @BlindAbilities and download the free Blind Abilities app from the App Store and the Google Play Store. That’s two words, Blind Abilities.
Jeff Thompson:
Enable the Blind Abilities skill on your Amazon device just by saying, enable blind abilities. A big shout out to Chee Chau for his beautiful music. You can follow Chee Chau on Twitter @LCheeChau. Most importantly, I want to thank you, the listener. Thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed, and until next time, bye-bye.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Jeff Thompson:
For more podcasts with a blindness perspective:
Check us out on the web at www.BlindAbilities.com On Twitter @BlindAbilities
Download our app from the App store:
‘Blind Abilities’; that’s two words.
Or send us an e-mail at:
Thanks for listening.
*****
Contact Your State Services
If you reside in Minnesota, and you would like to know more about Transition Services from State Services contact Transition Coordinator Sheila Koenig by email or contact her via phone at 651-539-2361.
To find your State Services in your State you can go to www.AFB.org and search the directory for your agency.
Contact:
Thank you for listening!
You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities
On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com
Send us an email
Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Storeand Google Play Store.
Check out the Blind Abilities Communityon Facebook, the Blind Abilities Page, the Career Resources for the Blind and Visually Impairedand the Assistive Technology Community for the Blind and Visually Impaired.