Championing Accessibility: Rob Koch on Building an Inclusive Open Source Community – Techstrong Unplugged EP41

Welcome back to Text or Unplugged. My name is Cassandra Chin, and today we're here with Rob Koch. And can you introduce yourself?

Sure. So I'm Rob Koch. I am from Seattle, Washington.

I work for Slalom. I was born and raised deaf, uh, born deaf, and I use a sign language interpreter, uh, who's off camera. So if you see me looking this direction, I'm looking at the interpreter.

Sometimes I will look at the host, but I'll be looking back and forth. It's really nice to meet you. Uh, thanks for bringing me on.

What's the, the deaf and hard of hearing working group and what's your role? So we have a deaf and hard of hearing working group. The reason we have that is, uh, we wanted to recognize, uh, cube Con, uh, or, uh, the open source community really, uh, to have very, uh, kind of targeted groups for accessibility minority groups.

Included from, uh, New Zealand. We decided to set up this working group in, uh, the OR source community. And we were inspired by that idea to create the deaf and hard of hearing working group.

So we've got, um, we've grown to over 20 plus members right now, and it's, so I'm the co-chair of that group with Destiny O'Connor. The two of us share the responsibility of running and managing the group, uh, as well as, uh, our goal being with the open source community, uh, ex making it accessible, open to all. And, uh, we would hope that we can inspire other groups to be set up.

Uh, there's one, uh, you know, poten, there's one that's great to see that's a blind related working group. So it's nice to see these marginalized groups get together and educate the community as well as making things just better for all. What are the goals of the working group and why is it in pro?

So the goals are, we have a few, um, right now we've got one, uh, major goal that we've been working on this year is coming up with a thought of Kubernetes glossary. And so with that, we've got a glossary on, you know, the CNCF page that explains words and, you know, what is an autoscaler, you know, what is Kubernetes? What is, uh, ingress, what is all of these different terminology that we use?

And they do have, you know, that in English and Spanish and Turk, Spanish and Turkish, but you know, there, so there's a few languages that the glossary has with that, but there wasn't any inside language. So we reached out, uh, to the group members and we said, Hey, should we add sign glossary, uh, to it? So everybody got really excited about that idea and so that we're working in progress, but it's coming soon, so you should be able to see that.

And then another goal is, is one that making conference, uh, conferences, uh, providing them doc documentation for best practices for different conferences that happen around putting that together all in one place and open source it so that, that way other conferences that are hosted, um, you know, C NCF F uses it, Linux Foundation uses it. Any other conference that is maybe small and getting bigger all the way up to the, the biggest size conferences, they would be able to access a checklist to make sure that they have the right accessibility needs met or the services ready to go if anybody asks for accommodations. And so we've got this document that can tell folks what to expect, what you need to do, and so on and so forth.

And that makes the community, you know, more collaborative, more open to everyone. And there's another few other goals that we've got, you know, so we're very, we're a very busy group. And how can the community help create a more accessible and inclusive cloud native world, cloud native?

The community has been great to us so far. We are amazed by the general support from the group. We have the tank team folks coming up and saying, Hey, how's it going?

Do you need anything? They, you know, they're very, uh, collaborative with us, the ambassadors as well. We see them a lot.

We interact and socialize and network with all of them. And so it's really great. And we just got our first AMBA deaf ambassador, uh, in the CNCF group.

Uh, her name is Anastasia, uh, kapuka. And so her sign name is this. And so we're really excited to see the deaf and hard of hearing working group make a bigger impact to the Kubernetes and CNCF community already.

I mean, we've, we've given them advice on how to, how the captioning should be in place. Some captioning out there, like different vendors or whatever, putting the captioning on the bottom of the screen where, you know, like, like for example, this morning, like in a keynote, having the caption on the bottom, they can sit in the front so they can see, you know, the, they can't see the captions 'cause they're blocked by certain things. So if you like, sit or stand in front of the screen as a presenter, then it's not the best, uh, for us to access.

Whereas if it were at the top of the screen, it might be different. So, you know, it's things like that, that what we're trying to do in our group. Uh, we're just basically going out and advocating as much as we can.

This is the only conference where I've seen sun language in the keynotes. I really wish that more conferences would have this. Oh yeah, definitely.

So CubeCon, we've seen more increased sign usage on the screen within the screen. In the past, people would get bothered by it. Uh, I'm pretty sure today some people will still be bothered by the, but that number I feel like is diminishing.

So I think that the point is, is it helps really sort of gravitate us to meeting the needs of many different, uh, varieties of people. Some people who are deaf, um, that don't sign, that's also a thing that they rely on captions. Some of them, um, if they're reading the captions, uh, sometimes there's tech words or there's con, there's concepts that aren't very clear that sign language can help with, with that being that it's a spatial language.

So I think really we just have everything to fit everyone's needs. And with how fast AI is growing today, has that helped or hurt the accessibility? I would say both help and hurt hurts in a way that some AI now comes up with tools where you can speak to it and then, you know, it'll come up with something on the other end, uh, intelligent, I guess.

And then I did notice that some AI now starts with text input. So that's where you can type something in instead of speak to it. So that's great.

And then, uh, in some ways AI has helped, uh, I would say maybe if you wanna ask it, what do I need to provide for a best possible experience for a deaf attendee at a conference? Because our document is open source, it's out in the community. AI would be able to read that document and then that would help them advise, make recommendations to et cetera, whatever the use of the LLM or the AI is using and for that purpose.

So, you know, I'm, I'm hoping that, you know, that that gets more widespread. Other things where AI has maybe not been beneficial, I'm trying to think. Um, there's some bias, right?

AI always has bias in it. So some perspectives there, you'd ask it maybe, uh, it's related to, you know, deafness. Should I grow up signing?

Maybe AI would say, no, you shouldn't. Um, but you know why that is. What's the rationale behind that?

So there's, there's different things where AI bias could hurt the answer to that particular parent or a coworker or, you know, their friend's needs, because every deaf person is very different. So AI doesn't know that. So yeah, so I think those things, I have seen AI technology demos where they have you hold up your hand and make different poses.

Does that help with signing? It's not very practical because if the hand, like if you're finger spelling for example, and you're continuously doing that, it'll get way behind and still getting caught up while other people are speaking, right? So that's why we sign, you know, it's really a perfect language.

Why? The reason is because a picture's worth a thousand words, right? So if I sign and I'm interacting with that, it's over a thousand words.

Whereas like, if you, uh, spoke a few words in your sentence, right? I can, because like I said, it's a spatial language, right? So the language, uh, is using this space in front of me that makes it a picture.

And so it's very visual. You can kind of imagine what a deaf person is, you know, trying to communicate to you. So it's really nice.

And for someone watching this interview, like what can they do to help the deaf and hard of hearing community what they know, honest, just honestly just be a great ally. Ask us if we need anything. Ask us if, if anything's missing.

Um, anything missing the mark, uh, what else would I say? And be open, you know, if we make a request or ask for accommodations, there might be sometimes where it might be frustrating, maybe that's a time where we can, you know, uh, you, you might feel completely lost or, um, not aware of what's going on. And the context might be right or wrong, who knows?

But I think that that's where accommodations and accessibility can help us to get involved and engaged and add value to the community. So the community is not something where you'd want to have like-minded folks. You know, we, we don't want that.

So we want diversity. We want different, uh, perspective and thoughts and where people would say, oh, I didn't think of that. Whereas like a deaf person or a blind person or a somebody with a physical disability, uh, you bring them into the picture and the open source community, they will maybe develop some tools that benefit.

But also, you know, a deaf person might say, do you have accessible videos? Do you have captions? That way, you know, the wider community can understand what's happening in the video.

Sometimes a person with a very thick accent, for example, which is pretty common in tech, right? Uh, having captions on the video can even help the lay person understand what that person's saying, right? So there's uh, many different things out there.

We're trying to make accessibility into a more universal design where they can have, uh, you know, accessibility becomes more like common practice. Something that should be just a given, right? I like the point you make about putting captions.

'cause personally I actually enjoy reading the captions more than listening to people sometimes. Absolutely. Yeah.

Some people prefer to read rather than, you know, taking in the video I with a video, you know, if it's going on for like 30 minutes, let's say. And sometimes I will, if they're not showing anything on the screen, like, you know, here the podcast we're, you know, you could look at the transcript, read through it much quicker than maybe watching the whole video. Um, 'cause some people read faster, uh, than, you know, consuming the video.

So that's one thing that's kind of, uh, where I see captions as an example there to help make your content searchable as well. Captions with the transcript and everything that that's there. If you, if somebody searches for a particular keyword, then it will, might refer them to the video, right?

So that provides, uh, the metadata that it needs, uh, for, for the search engine. And it's a dual benefit, mutual benefit for everyone involved. Thank you for sharing your perspective today.

I really learned a lot today, rod. Thank you.