Episode 7
Bringing Accessibility Into the Due Diligence Conversation
Mary Roemmele, Senior Director for Product Accessibility at Workday, discusses leading accessibility across a global software organization. Drawing on a background in banking technology and mergers and acquisitions, along with a lifetime of personal connections to disability through her family, she explains how she found her way into accessibility leadership. Mary describes integrating accessibility throughout the product lifecycle, including acquisition due diligence, and closes by exploring how organizations can scale accessibility by understanding technical debt, educating partners, and making accessibility part of long-term business strategy.
Transcript
Well, hello. I'm Joe Welinske, and I am the host of the Digital Accessibility
Speaker:Podcast,"The People Behind the Progress," and today
Speaker:I am happy to be speaking with Mary Roemmele.
Speaker:Hello, Mary. How are you today? Hi, Joe.
Speaker:I'm great. Nice to be here.
Speaker:And I'm talking from my home office in Bellingham, Washington, about
Speaker:80 miles north of Seattle. Where are you talking to us from?
Speaker:I'm speaking to us all from Pleasanton, in California.
Speaker:Well, thanks for being part of this activity.
Speaker:It's good to have this chance to chat with you.
Speaker:A good place to start is if you could tell us
Speaker:a little bit about the work that you're involved in.
Speaker:Sure. Yeah. I'm Senior Director for Product Accessibility at Workday.
Speaker:Workday is a Fortune 500 company that provides software for your people,
Speaker:your finances, and now your agents.
Speaker:So we're a fairly large global company, and we work on
Speaker:the accessibility of the product so that anybody that uses our product,
Speaker:however they are interacting with our product, has equal access to it.
Speaker:Well, it's certainly a fairly large organization.
Speaker:I'm just wondering, like, how is accessibility organized within
Speaker:Workday? Are you part of an overarching
Speaker:department, or do individual product groups have their own
Speaker:accessibility initiatives?
Speaker:Yeah, it's a great question, and I think it's one where
Speaker:sort of we've been on a journey ourselves here at Workday.
Speaker:So what I like to do is distinguish our work to
Speaker:other work that's going on within Workday.
Speaker:So, like I said, we work on product accessibility. So if you can think of
Speaker:all of the digital assets that we produce and sell,
Speaker:that's what my team works on.
Speaker:And we sit within a product and technology space.
Speaker:And then we have a sister organization called Disability Inclusion who works on
Speaker:accessibility for what we call the buildings or the built environment,
Speaker:and the people are our workmates using our work environment.
Speaker:And so that's the buildings and people are worked on by another team called
Speaker:Disability Inclusion, and then we work on the software itself.
Speaker:And like I said, we sit in product and technology, and we've sort of
Speaker:sat in a few different organizations along our journey,
Speaker:but we're sort of coming back to product and technology.
Speaker:We sit in a product and technology operations group, which
Speaker:I believe is the right space for us.
Speaker:That's a group that has a lot of horizontal service
Speaker:offerings, and we are definitely one of those.
Speaker:So it's a great space for us to be.
Speaker:Well, it'd be good to hear a little bit about your background and
Speaker:work life and/or live life of how you started out and found your way into
Speaker:accessibility. Sure. Well, I definitely didn't start in accessibility.
Speaker:But thinking back on it, you know, my lived experience in this space, you know,
Speaker:if I think if I go way back in the way back machine,
Speaker:my mom was a special education teacher, and so she was working in this space
Speaker:before I even was able to put sort of words to it.
Speaker:And she had us from the very beginning volunteering.
Speaker:It's a big part of her life and our life.
Speaker:And so we used to volunteer at her school.
Speaker:We used to volunteer at Special Olympics.
Speaker:My dad was in the British Navy, and he became fairly
Speaker:deaf through the service that he did there.
Speaker:And so, you know, as I think back on my environment and the people that I were
Speaker:interacting with, accessibility was certainly a big part of it.
Speaker:But again, I don't think I really had the words or labels at that time.
Speaker:It was just, you know, my family.
Speaker:And my husband and kids here in America definitely navigate things like dyslexia.
Speaker:So it's definitely been in or around what I've been doing for most of my life.
Speaker:I think that, you know, so as I was growing up, I was seeing how important it was to
Speaker:have people have the independence and the tools that they needed.
Speaker:And at the time, that was, you know, a lot about closed captioning
Speaker:or, you know, access to services.
Speaker:But, you know, as I come into the professional world, I certainly didn't
Speaker:start in this space. I actually worked in banking for many, many years
Speaker:in mergers and acquisitions, always in technology.
Speaker:And it wasn't until I had an opportunity to come and do some people
Speaker:team leadership over here in Workday that I really sort of started to
Speaker:merge those worlds, both my sort of personal world in and around, excuse me,
Speaker:accessibility, and then obviously be able to lean in from a professional
Speaker:perspective into accessibility.
Speaker:Well, thanks for sharing some of that about the accessibility challenges
Speaker:within your own family. I think that's certainly common for a lot of people
Speaker:that get involved in accessibility.
Speaker:And then you mentioned your financial background in that earlier part of your
Speaker:career. You know, what was the transition like?
Speaker:Were there certain pivots that brought you into what
Speaker:you're doing today, and were there things that you had to do to feel like you were
Speaker:prepared to move into the accessibility area?
Speaker:I think that, you know, when I first came into this current
Speaker:role, it was really about managing a team and being a people manager.
Speaker:And I was looking at it more as coming in to be it was a relatively small
Speaker:product accessibility team at that time.
Speaker:And so I was approaching it more from sort of a small business unit perspective and
Speaker:trying to get it up and running from that angle.
Speaker:And so my preparation really was just sort of pulling on how I had done team
Speaker:management and people management.
Speaker:And the accessibility technical side of things, I knew technology.
Speaker:I wasn't well-versed necessarily.
Speaker:I didn't have experts for that. You know, my team that I manage are accessibility
Speaker:experts. And, you know, over time, of course, I got to learn
Speaker:and experience many more elements of this that I just simply wasn't aware of.
Speaker:And that's been the greatest gift as part of this journey is really to sort of get
Speaker:into the technical details there.
Speaker:And I'm sure there was a lot in terms of getting your team together
Speaker:and the technical details that you just alluded to.
Speaker:Were there any particular challenges or
Speaker:certain things that you found maybe were the more difficult ones or
Speaker:the other side of that, some things that went developed or evolved
Speaker:relatively smoothly compared to how you thought that might happen?
Speaker:Yeah, it's a great question. And I think if I think back to sort of
Speaker:when the team started, which was in earnest in 2018, I joined
Speaker:in 2019. It was actually right before the pandemic.
Speaker:And so the beginning of the journey was really about, as I say, sort of building the
Speaker:team, bringing the component pieces together around
Speaker:really thinking about us as a business unit and how we wanted to evolve within the
Speaker:company, how we needed to evolve within the company.
Speaker:And then I think about the impact of immediately going virtual for
Speaker:a number of months and how that impacted the team.
Speaker:A lot of our early work was sort of reactive,
Speaker:really trying to stand things up.
Speaker:And then as we matured and were able to get more
Speaker:focused on what the team was going to be working on and get more resourcing around
Speaker:it, we were able to scale more and definitely become a lot more strategic in
Speaker:how we created ourselves, what we did, what our service offerings were, and how we
Speaker:interacted with the rest of the business.
Speaker:So for me, while it is an accessibility team and that's absolutely the focus,
Speaker:I tended to lean in more on my skills around people and team management
Speaker:and actually sort of running it like a small business within a larger company.
Speaker:And how do you see things happening as you move forward?
Speaker:Are there any aspects of the work looking ahead that maybe
Speaker:you're concerned about or on the other side of that, things that
Speaker:you're excited about in terms of new developments within your organization or
Speaker:possibly broader within the accessibility profession?
Speaker:Yeah, I think it's an interesting question.
Speaker:I mean, there's obviously a lot going on in the AI space, which we
Speaker:can certainly talk about. But as I think about the team and what the team's needs
Speaker:are, you know, we're not a traditional team in the sense that we don't
Speaker:naturally fit into just by the way that we operate, a horizontal
Speaker:organization as a small business unit.
Speaker:We don't naturally fit into how an organization
Speaker:treats a product area or a group.
Speaker:We're not that round peg or we're kind of a square peg for a round hole.
Speaker:And so a lot of what I do is just figuring out how
Speaker:our organization fits into the bigger organization chart, how we can
Speaker:operate, how we can connect. But that's also actually what makes us unique and
Speaker:allows us some flexibility into how we would actually
Speaker:do things. And so what I mean by that, I mean that we are as far
Speaker:left in the life cycle, if you will, in the mergers and acquisitions space.
Speaker:And what I mean by that is when we're looking as a company to buy another company,
Speaker:and we've done quite a lot of that recently,
Speaker:we are in the due diligence checklist conversation space as a topic.
Speaker:So we make sure that we as a company are thinking about
Speaker:the product or the company that we're looking to buy,
Speaker:asking questions about accessibility, not necessarily to stop
Speaker:a sale or influence a sale, but very simply so that we understand
Speaker:what sort of technical debt might be coming in with that company so that we can plan
Speaker:and strategize. And then as that company comes in or as we come into the life cycle,
Speaker:you know, we have a lot of the traditional components of
Speaker:the software development life cycle that we're in, whether that's research, design,
Speaker:through engineering. And then we are in as far right as customer support.
Speaker:And we often say that we want to be in those
Speaker:prospect or sales conversations so that we can have the journey from
Speaker:prospect to trusted partner or customer all the way through.
Speaker:And so not many teams within a company can say that they're that broad,
Speaker:that they're doing that many things.
Speaker:And so often people think about product accessibility,
Speaker:and they just purely think about the engineering slice of it.
Speaker:I don't manage my team that way.
Speaker:I manage my team in a sort of full-service horizontal perspective.
Speaker:And so therefore, that's why I say we're not sort of a natural
Speaker:round peg for a round hole. And so the benefit that that gives us is that we
Speaker:can really find those nooks and crannies or crevices to sort of push ourselves into
Speaker:and be part of process that's already underway.
Speaker:And so I'm always looking with the team
Speaker:for those opportunities to make sure that it's really sticky and people
Speaker:are thinking about accessibility in every element of the process, not just
Speaker:in the moment of building the product.
Speaker:A lot of what our work does is set the engineers up for success
Speaker:early in the life cycle for that building piece of it.
Speaker:And so I think about the challenges there because often we're not always
Speaker:you know, we're quite often always the first person
Speaker:having those types of conversations with some of these groups.
Speaker:They may not have thought about product accessibility.
Speaker:They may not think that product accessibility sort of relates to them.
Speaker:So we spend time talking to them about their influence, our influence,
Speaker:and we often find some really rich partnerships there.
Speaker:And then I think about, you know, as our landscape is evolving,
Speaker:as our user interface is evolving, whatever that might become, especially in our new
Speaker:AI space, how else can we infuse accessibility into things, not just the
Speaker:UI, but how we're building things into a model layer, into instructional layer, into
Speaker:guide rails. So there's lots of work there that I think is challenging.
Speaker:We're all learning AI together, and we're doing it fast.
Speaker:And so a lot of the challenge ahead is really to
Speaker:continue to identify those opportunities so that
Speaker:we make sure that we're infusing accessibility or continuing to infuse accessibility
Speaker:into anything that we're producing, but also that we are working to make sure that
Speaker:accessibility isn't sort of left on the sideline as we're developing all of these
Speaker:new models and as AI becomes a bigger part of our life.
Speaker:Well, AI is certainly something that's been brought up
Speaker:in many of the conversations I've had for this podcast.
Speaker:But I wanted to go back to the part that you mentioned about being involved
Speaker:at mergers and acquisitions. And I've been doing this a long time,
Speaker:and I'll have to say that it's not something that I ever really thought about.
Speaker:I think I should have been in my role, but it just
Speaker:wasn't something that I ever did think about.
Speaker:And it makes total sense. And maybe I assume it had something to do with you
Speaker:having experience in that area that made you think about it.
Speaker:But I find that part a fascinating thing that I want to think more about.
Speaker:And I'm glad that you were able to bring that up.
Speaker:Yeah, definitely. I mean, it definitely was on my radar from previous work,
Speaker:especially in the banking space.
Speaker:But I think one of the things that really highlighted it when I first joined
Speaker:the company was that, you know, frankly, we were struggling with
Speaker:being able to scale. And one of the things that we noticed was
Speaker:that not only do we need to spend some time and effort thinking about
Speaker:our VPATs and the coverage of our VPATs,
Speaker:but as we do that, we also have to, if you will, kind of stop the
Speaker:bleeding with anything coming in, right?
Speaker:We really need to understand what's coming in.
Speaker:And again, it may or may not stop the conversation around that company
Speaker:or product. It's unlikely to stop it because there's many business
Speaker:priorities that the company is thinking about.
Speaker:But we really need to have awareness and just ask the question.
Speaker:And often, I mean, it's very binary.
Speaker:Often, companies are definitely thinking about it and have thought about it and can
Speaker:roll out a VPAT or be able to talk about it, or they simply haven't.
Speaker:And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Speaker:Many companies are startups, and unless you've got somebody in there that has
Speaker:lived experience or perhaps has done this before, quite often it's just simply not
Speaker:on their radar. So not only are we thinking about it from our perspective,
Speaker:but we're also thinking about it from an educational sort of let's educate them
Speaker:also as part of the process, whether we purchase them or not.
Speaker:Well, thanks for bringing that up.
Speaker:It gave me something new to reflect on.
Speaker:And thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me about your experience and
Speaker:finding your way into accessibility.
Speaker:And I look forward to possibly meeting you in person sometime.
Speaker:Yeah, sounds great. Thanks for the conversation, Joe.
Speaker:All right. Thanks a lot, Mary. Bye.
