Good evening and welcome to episode 335 of the Private Property Podcast. I'm your host, Uzamantungwa Kumalo. It's the Tuesday edition of the Private Property Podcast, if you're one of us for the first time, welcome to the family. You are tuned into the only daily property podcast in South Africa, and we help you on all your property needs. Doesn't matter where you are on your property journey, whether you're looking to buy, to sell, to build, or of course, you're still a tenant and want to get a bit of sense of how you can move from being a tenant to being a home owner. This is where you can get all of your property questions answered. And to all our regular viewers on Facebook, on Instagram, as well as on YouTube, welcome back. You know how we do, every single weekday you and I have an appointment, we're always in conversation with a property expert who helps us navigate our property journey. And of course, it's always a great one to also share our own experiences, because property is one of those things that's a team sport. If you want to go very, very far, you want to work with people, you want to make sure that you are in the know and certainly engaging with as many people as you can. And talking about engaging, I can already see the great engagement that we're getting on our Facebook page. And of course, many of you are watching on our Facebook page, do show us some love down there below. And of course, you know that on our Facebook page, we're running an incredible competition that started off with us setting the ambitious goal of wanting to reach 1 million followers on our Facebook page, which we have done thanks to you at home. And of course, we also set out to have 10,000 comments and shares in the post that we've pinned on our Facebook page, we've also exceeded that. And we're now taking it up and not want to have 20,000 comments. I don't know we can do this, right? If there are million of us, now it's over a million of us in this family, we know that we can certainly reach and exceed that 20k target that we have set out for ourselves. And using a chance at home of walking away with 500 grand in cash when you participate. And all you have to do to claim the money is to be watching us live every single day. Halfway through the show, we're going to announce who the lucky winner is. And you have until the end of the show to raise your hand in order to claim the prize. If the person doesn't claim the prize while we're still on, then it rolls over into the money bag for the following day. Now, yesterday we had two winners, unfortunately, only one semi-malatze whose birthday it also was claimed the prize. So this evening we've got a thousand rands in the money bag. So if you know you've entered, you want to wait to see if we are going to call out your name. That's some of the, so certainly some of what you can look forward to later on on the show. And of course, later on this evening, what you can look forward to as it is a Tuesday in Balinuago, bringing you the farming podcast at 8pm. And you can also catch it every single Thursdays with the same show where she always takes us through all things agriculture. You know, it is now spring, spring is sprung. I'm also doing quite a bit of gardening and growing my own veggie patch, as you've seen on my social media platforms. You can follow me there at zamandonga underscore K. So also getting great tips from Mbali's show about how I can do a better job at it, especially because I want to be able to eat some of the food that I grow. So that certainly is a great show that I'm always plugged into. And of course, every Wednesdays, Estie Klassen takes us through the first time homebuyers show, which is always in conversation with people who've not only walked that first time homebuying but have gone on to grow their property portfolios from strength to strength. And Mondays and Fridays, Chad hits us with an amazing, amazing preview of incredible properties that you can find on www.privateproperty.co.za. And they're so exquisite. Now, often say that I wish I could do one of my shows in some of those properties. And I think we'll see. I think we must arrange maybe episode 350, you know, have a small little dunyana in one of the great properties that Chad gets to see. But those are the great shows that you can find every single weekday at 8 p.m. across private property social media pages. And of course, do follow us across our social media pages. We're on Twitter and Facebook. We're linked in. We're on Instagram. We're on TikTok. If there's a social media platform, we are certainly there and catering to all of your property needs. And talking about those property needs that actually leads us to our conversation this evening, which I am very excited about because this is one of those things that I follow very closely. Part of my portfolio is some of the businesses I run have an interest in this particular topic. So I always love talking about it. And this evening, we're looking at why you should consider investing in student accommodation. And if you're in the student accommodation market, I want to find out from you, you know, are you an investor that's got whether one or more units in student accommodation? And if you don't, is it something that you're interested in? You know, what is it that you're still unclear about or wary of when it comes to student accommodation as part of your property portfolio? But to help us better get a good sense of, you know, what we should look out for and even the state of student accommodation right now. I'm joined this evening by Liesl Brits, who's the head of Broken at Mid-City Property Group. Liesl, good evening, and thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much. Good evening. Liesl, I think one of the big things before we even look at, you know, do's and don'ts and tips for people who are looking to explore getting into student accommodation and some of the great reasons that I know that you're going to share, I think let's just look at an overview of, you know, the state of student accommodation, the state of student accommodation market in South Africa, especially in 2021, given that we're in a pandemic year. I mean, I was even saying to you off air that I've spoken to quite a number of different landlords who have student accommodation units from last year, you know, even this year, and obviously they're all sharing their experience of how they've navigated lockdowns and having to, you know, students leaving. So currently, when we're looking at student accommodation markets, certainly from the area that I know that you're primarily in Pretoria, what would you say the state of, you know, the market is this year? Yeah, it's true that last year actually was really bad, and I think the biggest thing, the major damage that were caused to the market was the uncertainty. We were so uncertain on when, and as fast as we could be paying, we were so uncertain on when students would be returning, so that besides the financial damage that a lot of landlords have incurred due to that. But there are also some of the landlords that actually benefited from that, especially if you had a NIS, if you have a NIS-facilitated building with your Fundi system installed. Most of those landlords actually collected those Fundi cards from the students, and they were actually swiping while sitting, watching Netflix. So, and they had empty buildings, and they actually took the opportunity to upgrade their buildings and to actually take the time to make sure that the buildings are ready for the next intake. And I think what has happened with the academic year that was stretched up until end of March this year, if you didn't have the cash flow at the end of last year, it would have been very difficult for you. But this year, the academic year started in April, and it's obviously ending in November.  But it is through that a lot of the landlords that have huge cash flow setbacks. But still, you know, for you to consider to get back into the market, we are still not very certain on what's going to happen next year. But what we do know is that the psychological damage for students and not only even just students, but any employee that are actually working from home now, the psychological damage that are caused are actually long term, so bad, and all the institutions actually realize that it's impossible for a student to actually study from home without support, without fellow students around them. And if we just look at the circumstances that we have in institutions like TUT, those students are actually from rural backgrounds, they do not have electricity, they don't have Wi-Fi, it's not safe for them to actually sit with the laptop that they've been given granted from government. So they have to return back to campus, they have to come to the off campus accommodation, where they have Wi-Fi, where they have suitable accommodation with furniture and, you know, the support with transport to classes and that. So student accommodation will, I think, forever be very, very popular and in the month. And you know, Lisa, I think one of the big things that, and I love that you've highlighted is that in as much as a lot of the universities have moved to, you know, online learning because of COVID, we also know that students need an environment where they're able to learn. So, you know, the fact that they're no longer going on campus doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't going to be a demand for student accommodation, it may be slightly different. And if anything, perhaps there might even be an instance where with certain universities, I mean, we haven't seen that yet, we might perhaps see that in the future where, you know, student enrollment figures increases because now it's no longer about, you know, having students physically come into class because capacity was often not only from a staff perspective but also from a lecture theater has, you know, 500 seats, therefore you cannot suddenly enroll, for example, 1500 students for a particular program. And I think with certain universities, I know they're even exploring, you know, some kind of hybrid model for the future where they can also increase the staff complement so that they're able to, you know, deal with the bigger volume of students who are potentially going to access their courses, meaning that we're still going to have a demand for beds because one of the things that we knew pre-COVID was that there simply weren't enough university beds in South Africa to cater for the number of students who needed them. And this was even with the, you know, residences, the university residences and, of course, the private residences. So there was still this huge gap that needed to be filled. And I know that, for example, the Department of Higher Education, you know, always emphasizes those specific numbers when we would have enrollment at the beginning of the year. So it really is one of those pressure issues that was a ticking time bomb in many ways because we always used to see the long queues with students requiring, you know, student accommodation. And it really is a crisis. I think if anything, what COVID has now allowed us to do is to also just get clear on the kinds of services we need to be providing to students, as you're saying that, you know, it's about the environment, but it's also making sure that they have the right amenities for them to be able to work in the student accommodation versus, for example, if they are at home. I want to find out from you at home, if you are in, you know, student accommodation, how was your student accommodation unit or units affected during COVID? And how did you recover? Because I think one of the great things is, of course, learning from each other and seeing what other people were doing. I know that there's some landlords who, when students went out, they, you know, started taking in young professionals for a shorter period because students, you know, said, look, we're going home, we don't know what's happening. And with some university school was suspended for a little bit. And as Liesl already pointed out, the academic calendar kept being stretched and stretched and stretched. But we're also now getting used to, I'll say, life in COVID and having to adapt to it. And so making the decision around going into student accommodation becomes so crucial. So Liesl, for people who are considering going into student accommodation because they're seeing the potential, they can see that, look, there's a shortage and there are properties on the market that are close to universities or in university towns, as we call it. And then what would first just be the key thing that they need to bear in mind when it comes to student accommodation? That would be different from if they were just doing a normal rental, let's say, to a young family or even a young professional. So I think on a smaller scale, and I always Bruce Tumbo Waiu's video for the chicken farm, where he actually coaches people that come to get funding is to start small. And I see that often when potential investors approach us that they actually want to jump over really big buildings immediately. And it's actually very dangerous to start off with a massive building and try and besides the fact that you the possibility for you to get funding on a massive building, a commercial building, it's actually good to start with a single residential flat and in a good building close to a university. And just rent that out just to get into the industry to start learning about the behavior of students, the, you know, their needs, your, you know, the big time tables, the fact that you only going to get income for 11 months, what do you do in your 12 month and some of the university only pays for 10 months. And there's often the uncertainty about, you know, why do we get 11 months versus 10 months? Like you'd be normally students come in in fit and they live in November. So that's a 10 month cycle. Whereas with TUT, they always come in in January because they come from rural areas. So they need time. So this bus actually also pays them on a 11 month cycle. So that's actually very beneficial for any investor to be paid over 11 months. So you've just got to like sacrifice that one month and then for the next year's intake. But like, I've got my own properties as well. And you've got the choice to either furnish your properties for your students. The good thing about your single residential flat and taking on students on a small scale is you don't have to adhere to all the red tape that a larger building, let's say a hundred students or beds minimum, the minute you get your building accredited for this bus, then obviously you've got to adhere to all the red tape. You've got to go through the accreditation process. You've got to pay all those fees. You've got to get wifi in your building. You've got to get security on each floor and you have to have laundry, transport, all of that. So I've got clients that actually invest in three bedroom units and they place students like six ladies in a flat. They do pay the body corporate a little bit more for the extra water consumption, which I respect a lot. Because in a sense we see six adults or students occupying a three bedroom flat as overcrowding. So some of these investors are actually very good in terms of collecting an extra hundred grand for the water and pay that for it and pay that over to the body corporate and then they furnish the properties. They put a washing machine apparently that's a big draw card for the lady, the female students and they collect two and a half thousand grand per bed. So that's pushing the income. You're getting double what's normal in like my properties. I'll get six and a half where if you put four students then or six students you get triple that amount which is actually good. So starting on a small scale to just learn about students and how they behave and then specific needs are actually what I would advise people to do and I think banks also like to see a portfolio with students that you can prove yourself as a very responsible investor instead of coming in trying to buy a building a housing 50 students or 100 students and taking a chance because this is not a Tatama chance type of industry. You've got to be very risk free to the banks to consider you as an investor. Why would the bank take the chance on you if they can maybe finance an investor with a lot of experience with specifically student accommodation because it is a risky industry. Just as the investor himself would be a risk but also with NASFAs and everything that has happened with COVID is an extreme risk to the banks now because they have their fingers with certain investors that could not carry themselves throughout this period. So it's as if most investors are actually we are yearning to get our buildings accredited with NASFAs because it's less risky but we see now especially with your UP students that that was not the case that they've left the buildings we fled as landlords and you know the banks do not want to take that risk. So with commercial properties we used to be getting finance on a 70% loan to value. Now we are backing to get a 50% to loan to value. I'm this evening in conversation with Liesl Britz was the head of Broking at Mid-City Property Group and we're looking at why you should consider investing in student accommodation. I want to find out from you at home if you're investing in student accommodation how was it particularly or rather how is it particularly now during COVID and I mean it's the second year of us living in COVID would have had an opportunity to somehow plan for more lockdowns and you know adjust the way that you're running your business relative to last year when of course hit us without you know any warning whatsoever. We're going to go for a quick break and see who the potential lucky winner of that 1,000 rounds this evening for our competition is. I hope they're watching so they can claim their prize and when we come back we'll certainly get to the questions comments. I see all the love that you're showing us on our Facebook page. We'll get to those in just a moment and the winner this evening goes to Vyasha Naidu. If you are watching I hope you're watching drop us a message down here below to claim your money a thousand rands is in the money bag so you send a chance of walking away with that 1,000 rands that's Vyasha Naidu. If you are tuned in then do make sure that you drop us a message in order to claim your prize. Now I saw a few new names that Dave Asimilov on our Facebook page earlier on Adeline Blum-Pelé is watching Megan from Skalvik is also watching Doomsa Asimanyi is watching and of course showing us love on our Facebook page Refuelue Malibana. I see you there on Facebook and of course they're regulars who is a the Rainsha Pedici as well as Colin Janssen, Fatima Simji and Dawaz Mbele also watching Keep The Love Coming there on our Facebook page. We absolutely love seeing it and of course if you are in student accommodation I want to hear your experience with the student accommodation market especially this year have there been any adjustments that you needed to make to be able to essentially plan for the reality of operating in COVID and knowing that perhaps you may not have as much demand because there are still some students who potentially didn't want to come live in student accommodation places or parents who didn't want their kids to live in student accommodation places or were you one of those landlords because I've also heard landlords saying look my place stayed 100% occupied and if anything even after you know full occupancy I still had students wanting a place and you know contacting us and wanting to you know get a bed so if you're one of those what are you doing right I think do share with the rest of us so that we can get those notes. Now I think when we then look at and I love that you've highlighted this and I want to bring it up that if you're going or when you go into student accommodation similarly really to any other kind of property you know class that you'll go for you do want to start small you don't want to start with the building that's suddenly going to have 50 beds and you're thinking oh I'm going to gross you know 200k if I have 50 beds and I'll maybe net 180 these numbers look amazing in a year I'll definitely be you know nearly a million because it doesn't work like that I think anybody who's managed even one unit understands the value of learning from that one unit and it can be something as pedantic as putting in systems in place for that one unit maintenance for that one unit managing that one unit and so on so you don't want to bite off more than you can chew and I think the fact that Lisa has even put out that banks are also now even more wary so by the time you're wanting to look at 50 units they do want to get a sense of have you done this before you know they're not going to to extend that line of credit to somebody who hasn't even managed you know two students for for instance so you really do want to make sure that as you're navigating wanting to add student accommodation or perhaps start off with student accommodation you you start off in small sizes because you don't want to bite off more than you can chew and now Lisa when we even look at biting off more than you can chew I think one of the big things of course there is around finances and and I think people sometimes don't have a sense of how student accommodation can sometimes cost you slightly more in certain areas than perhaps you know a normal apartment that you might rent out to or even a normal house that you might rent out to a family or a professional perhaps just take us through what you should be budgeting for and how you should look at budgeting around when you have student accommodation units sure um yeah I mean expenses on the one side is um something where we just have to bite the bullet because with student accommodation you've got the red tape and you've got all the list of requirements especially if you're going to go um specifically and um I'm having a lot on QUT specifically I'm not I'm even looking at UP at this stage because they have a lot of student rates available in Hatfield specifically in Pretoria so I wouldn't say I wouldn't recommend to any newcomer to the industry to specifically go for Hatfield because Hatfield is actually saturated and we've seen a lot of the students or landlords bleeding there because of the fact that only 25 percent of the students at UP are actually funded by NASPAS so that gives you an idea of 75 percent of those students actually went home and they're studying from home now so we're not too sure if they're going to return next year we can't have that guarantee however due to the psychological damage we hope that they do return but one thing that we do know is that 98 percent of the students of QUT are actually on NASPAS accreditation or they get the NASPAS grant so they have to come back to the student accommodation and the rest of campus here in Pretoria and we're talking about the areas Arcadia, Sunnyside, Central, Pretoria West so we are quite certain that they definitely will return so as I mentioned you have to prove to the bank that you can actually you can sustain the student accommodation and that you will be able to recover and pay your bond so expenses on the one side is something that we will have to do so at QUT it's expected from you as a landlord to provide transport expected to provide Wi-Fi uncapped at a certain speed it's you have to finish your apartments and you have to maintain that as well it's not like you're buying a microwave and it's now there and you don't have to replace it students actually break things and students actually use things and they sleep on the beds and you'll have to replace beds you'll have to pay your insurance you'll have to as I mentioned the transport so if you're not close to a bus rapid transit route or you can't piggyback on an existing route system you'll have to get your own buses you'll have to get insurance on those buses so it actually accumulates and we've done the calculation on these expenses you've got to pay yourself for a minimum of 40 percent on that income so at the moment the income is 4100 per student for 11 months and you have to budget for a minimum of 40 percent on that you have to provide electricity you've got to provide water you have to provide the laundry services so we normally put measurements into our own buildings to prevent you know obviously students that are often abused the system where they put in too many you know their friends come over for a shower they cook there they sleep there so you've got to have a proper system where you control the access to your building it's also a nice local system for the university so if a student is not flocking in at university they will come back to you as a landlord to check if the student they've actually been to the building what have they worn lost so you've got to have a CCTV system at your building as well for the safety of the students as well so you've got a budget for at least a 40 percent so your expenses on the one side is one thing but you can't afford to have vacancies in your building so we often walk with investors through our own buildings to show them and we actually tell them exactly what mistakes we've made so we try and teach investors to not make the same mistakes and what to expect more or less in certain buildings especially if you've got a mixture of students between different universities like your UP students don't want to mix with TUT students whereas your TUT students wouldn't mind mixing with any other institution students so you've got to prepare yourself for things like that as well but just back to the vacancies you cannot afford to have vacancies in your building and with any business like if you think how many second hand called dealerships we've got if you look at all the salons we actually the market will never be saturated with salons but if there's a salon with a better offering of specials or a new product or a new service or whatever we go for it I think student accommodation is very sensitive in terms of location so you'll funny enough find students that don't want to be close to the main TUT campus they actually want to be in the bus in sunny side closer to the clubs and that so you know so you wouldn't I would think that I would want to be close to the main campus where I study however the students actually prefer both you'll have some students that prefer to go into a building with a lot of rules and regulations and other students actually want buildings where there are no rules and regulations but you'll also have a failure rate in that specific building but I think if you think about the needs of a student and I mean I've I studied at TUT as well a long time ago and I was fortunate to study on campus we had a house committee in our building we had like a house mother and father like a caretaker in the building and we were close on campus and we had sport activities we had beauty pageants we had socials we had church outreach now if you look at a student accommodation raised off campus the private accommodations they actually don't provide that and if you want to stand out as a landlord a very successful landlord without any vacancies you have to look at what the students on campus are being offered and try and present that into in your off campus building so if we just look at the connection with on campus activities like your sports activities you can maybe partner with other off campus building landlords and say let's let's form a soccer team amongst our buildings and we provide transport for those boys to go and compete with the on campus race soccer teams let's create a sobriety feeling in our buildings where we create we create this opportunity for them to actually have their art displayed on the walls let's provide a wall for them to take pictures of their social activities so that they create their own alumni so that they can come back in a few years times and say this is what we had there's my picture I belong to this family you can actually be so creative because how I see the buildings you have a building full of clients let's say you've got a building with 400 students those are actually clients that are in they are potential car buyers they are potential first time bank account clients for a bank they are potentially opening taking out a cell phone contract so you can actually invite the service providers to your building give them a nice space and a spot when the students are coming in with their Kazebo they can present their products and services but you want something as a landlord back from them you're getting them that advertisement so they can maybe for all our graduating students give us free cell phone or open a bank account with a 5000 rand savings account for the bank that is an amazing opportunity to catch that student at a young age I still got my standard bank account that I opened at university I can clearly remember I went to a Kazebo and I opened my bank account there so it's a massive opportunity for service providers to benefit but it's also for you as a landlord to benefit let's say you get Vodacom in they can sponsor your your students t-shirts and caps with your building's name printed on the back of the shirt and that's your work walking advertisement on campus to ensure that the students are actually coming back and they feel that they belong they've got this pride that they're in a building with a nice name so that's the first advice I would give as well if you've got a big student accommodation building is change the name because some of these buildings have the most boring building names and you can actually give them a nice name like mother booker or Majuba or something like that that's completely more relevant and painting different colors for you to stand out and if you are planning on buying more than one building give it a signature change your signage and make it your signature like city property all their buildings have the same signature outside but cities buildings all have the name the edge so we'll have flowers edge and festival edge and campus edge so that makes you stand out as the landlord and you're actually attracting students to want to come and stay in your building and I think you know one of the things is definitely clear Lisa is that we're going to have you back on the show to look at student accommodation best practices and and even to share some of the mistakes and learnings I think as you know mixed city that you've picked up you're saying earlier that this is something that you you know even do for investors who are keen on getting in the market because one of the things that we also know about property is we we want to all succeed right you want the different buildings in the block to also be fully occupied you run well as opposed to being vacant and potentially end up being run down and so really it is in everybody's best interests when especially if you look at university towns when as different landlords we are running our respective you know buildings or certainly accommodation units well and servicing our students well and I want to share a quick comment here coming through from saying on Facebook saying I'm one of those running private student accommodation and last year and this year it has been tough for us but with the little number of students we are having it is better to keep our expenses covered till we can go back to normal life but with the number of COVID-19 declining and people getting vaccinated we have hope for the next year even though some TV colleges already saying they will only have two trimest semesters that is only putting us in a very bad condition and I think you know it is one of those things as I said before that a lot of the landlords are also just wanting to at the very least cover their faces I think student accommodation it was one of those areas of property where you enjoy very high yields and I think for many years landlords typically have you know enjoyed higher yields and now you're having to say okay let me at the very least cover my expenses just so I can stay afloat and weather essentially this COVID storm. Liesl before I let you go this evening because I know that we've already run out of time what what final you know tip would you give to somebody who's still considering potentially getting a student accommodation unit particularly now so they're probably obviously going to purchase it for we'll say for the next year because it will probably only register of course later on in the year so they've got their eyes set on you know owning that first student accommodation unit for the new year what tip can you give to somebody who is still eyeing so they're not in yet but they're still considering getting into the student accommodation market. So I think if you if you if you want to go for the big buildings if you've got the capacity to go for the big buildings I think you definitely have to put in a lot of effort in your marketing because in the end the student can still choose where they want to go and stay and the intake is normally and we're expecting it to be in Fed next year as well so you have already got to start now with your marketing campaigns to get your building out there so if you're going to go for a missed us accreditation you the the TUT is actually starting they're opening up for accreditation now in October so you must be prepared to have your building ready and to have your apartment your mock-up apartment furnished so that when those accreditation can come out to do the accreditation and the inspection you've got to be ready for that you can't be caught with your pants on your knees and be too late because if you miss it this year you've got to wait until the next year so but marketing is the major thing you've got to be out there you've got to make sure that your gazebos are ready for January when you when they sit there at TUT you've got to have your online exposure but that's with anything like that if you're not if you don't have an online presence on social media platforms and that you can't expect students to actually know about you because your building once it's accredited will go on the they've got a new website t-r-e-s and then there's the t-tech raise website as well but t-r-e-s this is a platform where students can actually comment on your building they can complain about your building and they can actually also compliment you as a landlord so getting your building ready for um that that website and your social media platform to get the word of mouth out there that's certainly one tip that I can give to all landlords out there when you start to get that fixed from the start and network with people network with the src network with the different companies out there if you're going to start in the industry learn from whoever has done it learn from their mistakes not to burn your fingers because student accommodation is actually so risky that you can wipe out your complete portfolio if you make mistakes because if you've got a big building and your building is not on the t-r-e-s website or something like that you've got a hundred percent vacancy and that can flaw you as an investor start small and do your marketing and I think that's such a great notion to leave it on start small learn rather pay your school fees with one or two units than you know buy two more than you can chew and and then paying you know the kind of tuition you absolutely might probably not even be able to recover from uh Lisa we're going to leave it there this evening I'm already you know calling it with definitely going to bring it back on the show later on this year because we want to be able to get a sense later on in the year on what people already are in student accommodation should be doing I mean we've already highlighted one is that you want to start marketing early and I know already towards the tail end of the year it's already a good place to start marketing as early as then because there's still students who want to confirm their accommodation before they actually you know go back home over the December period and so not everybody is going to be searching for accommodation in January some actually want to have already viewed and decided before leaving so later on in the year we're definitely going to bring you back to get a sense of what we should be doing in the event where we have student accommodation units to get ready for the new financial year what should we have in place and if we don't have it in place now what are some of the systems that we need to put in place but for now we're going to leave it there Lisa thank you so much for joining us on the show thank you Zoma thanks for the opportunity good night and that is Lisa Brits who's the head of Broken at Mid City Property Group uh bringing us to the end of this evening's private property podcast with myself now the team has let me know that unfortunately the Asia 9U has not claimed the price so it will be rolling over tomorrow to 1500 rands remember if you know you've entered you want to make sure that you're watching us live because if you call your name you have to drop us a text in order to claim that price well I've overstayed my welcome uh you can of course look forward to Mbalinoa go on the farming podcast at 8 p.m i'll be back on your screens tomorrow at 7 p.m until then hoping you're staying home and staying safe


For 12 years, the Lake Bemidji Dragon Boat Festival has brought together community members and businesses for one common goal. Josh Peterson takes us to the Dragons Den, where a long-time tradition has found a partnership with the Dragon Boat Festival. The boats are in the water, and the teams have already been practicing since Monday evening, but the real festivities didn't officially kick off until today. Recently, the Samford Fry Bread Taco meal has been the kickoff of the Dragon Boat Festival's Dragon's Den, bringing community members together to support a community need. They've had some record numbers here in the last couple years, and so their event keeps growing and makes our event better too, and we know where all the money is going. The Fry Bread Taco meal has only been a part of the festival for the past five years. However, the meal has a 21-year history. This year, the money raised through the meal goes to the Samford Heart Center. The partnership with Dragon Boat not only raises funds, but awareness as well. Number one, it helps us bring in some dollars for the project, but then the awareness too of just what's going on and letting people know that we have all these great services. Over the years, community has always been at the heart of the festival, which is why organizers say they have seen continued growth each year. It's a big community event, not just for community members to come and have fun, but raise a lot of funds for some great organizations that, you know, work for the common good day in and day out. Dragon Boat continues to draw new interest. Families that have never even been to the festival before found themselves today in the Dragons Den enjoying the festivities. My kids have all been married, and our grandchildren, that we were able to get together like this and do something, and it's been wonderful. It'll be wonderful memories all of our life. With race day on Saturday, the fun and excitement is only expected to build. In Bemidji, Josh Peterson, Lakeland News. Fifty-four teams will be racing this year. The parade of teams will be held Friday night beginning at six, followed by the sprint races. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


Welcome to theCUBE live coverage from Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. This is Google Next 23. I'm here with my co-host, Rob Streche, and we've got two wonderful guests, Gaga Nreen and Blair Stewart from Wipro, and they're going to tell us a bit about the Wipro Google Cloud Alliance. First, for those that may not be familiar with Wipro's services, tell us a little bit about the business and how that works with Google. Absolutely, thanks, Rob. So obviously, you know, Google, Wipro is a professional services company, and we've been down the block for the last 30 or so years, you know, making a lot of advances in software services. Of late, you know, we've gone into this full stride cloud growth, which is all about cloud services provider, and Google Business Unit that I lead is sort of the newest kid on the block, and over the last, I would say, couple of years, it has quadrupled in our revenue, in our traction, you know, with customer adoption. At present, you know, we have close to 50 plus client engagements that we're doing in the Business Unit. We've got over 5,000 people certified. We've got tons of specializations, you know, over 100 specializations. We just won the partner of the year award yesterday from Google. Congratulations. You know, and having been at Google prior to my Wipro stint, you know, I kind of feel really good that, you know, they're starting to embrace the Googliness and the Google culture, and that's being sort of reflected as part of my organization as well. So in terms of growth, you know, I would say we are now at the top six GSI's that support Google in terms of, you know, delivery, in terms of adoption, new areas like innovation, like Generative AI, where we were one of the launch partners, and we signed a trusted tester agreement that Google socialized three months ago, and we were the early adopters there as well. Yeah, and I think it's interesting that you have a Business Unit dedicated to Google. It would seem like, again, you're making investments in that. It has to be significant. It definitely is, and I would say, Wipro's investment into full stride cloud is the catalyst of the birth of the Google Business Unit, because three years ago, it did not exist, but, you know, with our CEO theory del party going very big on the cloud growth, and thinking about the next five to 10 billion coming from cloud and AI, that's really what helped us to kind of achieve, and a lot of us folks, you know, Blair and me and others, we're all new. We've all sort of been here just a year or so, you know, so we've come from different companies and bringing our experience from the ecosystem to launch the Business Unit, and then eventually go into the areas like AI, you know, most recently we invested a billion dollars, and we, in an initiative on AI, we call it AI 360, and the whole idea over there is to bring the best of, you know, some of our advances in AI that have been going on over the last 10 years within the workforce of Wipro, and eventually reaching our clients. And as an output of that, we now have 250,000 employees at Wipro that are AI centric, that are leveraging AI processes, and 50,000 of them are trained on gen AI. And out of those 50,000, if you go towards the Google Business Unit, we have 600 level three certified gen AI practitioners as part of the business unit, all across the globe. So yes. Blair, maybe you can talk a little bit about the, what's special about Google Cloud here with respect to AI, and how your clients are perceiving, you know, the Wipro and Google working together. So along with the investment in AI 360 and sort of bringing that forward, the real value we have is that we've been in this game for the last 10 years doing AI work and activity, actually from a cloud sort of migration perspective and part of what we actually won the wonderful award this year. Our clients are looking us now to actually bring that value forward and actually drive the value-based conversations for the migrations and modernizations, the rollouts of the gen AI use cases, et cetera. And I think you were talking about, there were some customers in certain industries that were really experiencing how they can leverage this and really you're helping them early on with that. 100% and we're early partners in the ramp program that Google are doing for that rapid migration. So unsticking the stuck cloud migrations, the new way of moving forward, thinking around monetizing data as the way of actually helping self-fund that migration program and taking it through. We've been very fortunate that Google has leaned in with us and actually bought their cloud value team and sort of customer value team and to help us drive that case for change, that case for value and take it forward from there. Where do you see some of the adoption challenges? Maybe pitfalls, friction, headwinds from your clients and how do you help them pass that in terms of adopting AI and... A great question. I would say with all the elements of fear of missing out on the gen AI wave that's been ongoing in the last year or so. And I would also say Google was a little late to the party in the sense, when I was working at Google, they were very impressive with the Transformer models, large language models back in 2016, 17. But the go-to-market side was still not there. And it was all inherent within the brain team. So now, with that advent of launching BARD and some of the frameworks back in February where Google's a little late, but then they signed GSIs like Wipro, what we are capitalizing is the use cases. Okay, you guys give us the framework. Your framework is one of the most cutting edge on the planet. But how do we apply that to let's say call center optimization? How do we make sure there's a cost reduction impact that applies to a particular customer? And we've actually cranked a few deals with Google together. It's sort of completely joint place, partnering with them and customers starting to see that value. In the same sense, Google launched the Kodi APIs. Now here we are talking about DevOps optimization that you're doing in leveraging the language models within the stack. Now again, clients don't even know what it means. What it means is you're actually going down within the stack, building your Python code, optimizing your Terraform scripts and making sure your migration ready. Things like that that are very simple to achieve that took like hours and sometimes months to do that for developers, right? But there's an interesting part there as well about what's net new? What's driving a different change in the actual market here? The data comment I made before was a healthcare client that's actually looking at that different way of doing things, driving it forward. Some of the advances in what Google has achieved over the last couple of years have actually helped us move and to save for an automotive client. Modernization around PCF. The tooling that's there, what we've created with our cloud studio, the abilities that we've brought on as part of that growth and the capability ourselves, that's giving us a bit of a paradigm change and a different conversation with the clients we've got. Yeah, what's the driver there? Is it efficiency? Is it new lines of revenue? Is it adoption of innovation and better productivity? End of life for some things or I don't want to be pacing for that extra piece of licensing, apologies. Or it is the cost and efficiency play. That's a risk playing and it's absolutely sort of enlabeling some form of cash flow or capability to do the new GNI stuff. Yeah, and I think you hit on a good point there which is risk and security and how do you deal with those concerns when you're, because that's all the, we've been asking everybody from the Google side, hey, how do you handle security? How do you keep it separate? How do you keep the models from having data leakage? If I may take this on the way through, for a financial services client, one of the things we're actually doing with them is we're actually coming in and saying, right, to do what you want to do, you need to make sure that data foundation is secure. The governance around that is actually secure. The responsible AI component on the way through. So we're helping clients actually go back and reset that for the models they need to tow forward. I think one more thing to add to Blair's point is, Google's obviously taken the lead in responsible AI. That's embedded within the stack. They put a lot of guardrails, checks and balances and you take it down to your ITGC controls, you know, within the stack. And that's important because when a customer gets audited, you need to have those, you know, and I've been in the big four worlds, so I kind of understand the control side of the pond really good. I would say they have literally gone deep into areas like sovereign cloud, where they are offering a cloud very distinct to a customer. The security is embedded within the landscape. Data cannot leak out. They don't care. It's all customers' private data. And then they have those APIs enabled within the stack. So when you think about the stack, you've got something known as model garden, which has out of the box model and some of those achieve responsible AI embedment. And then you obviously can talk to the customer's models because those models are all open source and it's a very open stack. And that's always been Google's policy is, make the stack open, be a little different than the other CSPs and let partners and ISVs kind of work on top of that. And eventually helps them achieve more consumption. As well. So the advances with mandium, with Chronocore, with the way that we've actually pulled that into our DevSecOps for the abilities that we've been doing for the decades of outsourcing that we've got experience of bringing on board. We're seeing a new change in that. That means that we're actually putting some good value based sort of services for things that people don't tend to think about. They just want to get in there and get the data going and get it moving. Now there's a broad spectrum of technologies that Wipro is working on. No 5G is near and dear to your hearts. There's relation there to the cloud, certainly to Edge. Certainly AI plays now. With models and inferences at the Edge. Bring that all together for us. So we've actually recently launched a 5G innovation center in Austin. Which we've been working on through the year. The best town. The best town. And part of what's driving that is the data story. So we've had the fortune of actually partnering with some of our telco clients and actually building out the broader story around what Google can offer in the space and what we can actually help in as the wrapped around services too. It is a data play. It is the, you know, there's a lot of use cases that are driving there forward. And it's another sort of expansion of what that new platform is or the new way of the broader cloud capability is that's coming to market. It's a data play. You're speaking Rob's love language. I don't know how I'm gonna dig into that. I was going to say that it is about the data and the scalability, where the data lives, how do I keep it secure. How are you helping your customers through that whole process?  I can elaborate quite a lot of that. So, you know, a couple of things on the data side. So when you think of a GCP cloud provider, right, it's very different than the other two because they lead with data. They lead with a transformation story around data. And that's always been Google's motto. You know, and many times it's a combination of on-premise, other CSPs, other SaaS companies because companies like Databricks, No Flakes, all these, you know. And this is where I compliment Google, especially Kevony Sperani, who runs the corporate channels. The strategy that he has in opening up the stack with all the partners. So you can actually run a GCP engagement with a Databricks.  Then you had BigQuery to do a lot of the BI work. And then you obviously had data coming from different source systems embedded to both of them streaming into BigQuery. Right, so this kind of model is very easy to achieve. Now to your point about privacy and security, that's always a big play, you know. And again, Google has a lot of inherent capabilities, you know, and now with Mandiant, they're starting to make sure there's a threat wear and all the ports are properly cyber secured and whatnot, which was not there like three years ago. And they're constantly advancing that and making sure customers are very secure. So a combination of security, data, and then business intelligence, you know, which is now part of Looker within the stack. And even there, you could have a Tableau running on top of BigQuery. You could have business objects or SAP doing that. The stack is very open. But it makes our life as consultants much easier to build a topology for a customer because Google's giving us all the tools to do that. I just been surprised that they hadn't talked much about that part of it today. It's almost like they're assuming. It's the GNI way. Yeah, I know, it's the GNI AI. But you got to talk about the nuts and bolts, which is why we're here now. Yes, 100%. I think one of the things that gives us the one Wipro perspective of what we can do, we've been in that conversation around security. We've been in that data conversation and it may have been Google related, but with all of the advances we've done, with all the leaning in we're doing with them to actually kind of bring to market the likes of the manual expectations, the managed services we want to build around that, we wrapped that into the 5G conversation as well with our network provider friends and build out something that is actually a cross Wipro, cross us and our partners offering. But I can't reinforce more that secure data foundation if you haven't done that, that's one thing you absolutely have to do. Well, I think that's super interesting. Tell me a little bit about your approach. I'm assuming there's probably a proactive aspect of designing security, shifting left, doing that early and often, but also responsive, right? The threat's never in. Yeah. So I think the best way we go to market is the way we are architected at Wipro. It's a very good model. We've got a cloud consulting which talks more about strategy, talks more about going to customers, looking at a landscape, doing assessments, and we bring together an arsenal of solutions that are embedded within a product that we launch called Cloud Studio. It's very centric to Wipro. It's got all the security checks and balances within there. You can scan a customer's landscape. You can have a good depiction of what threat wear and how secure it is, customized by the cloud provider. And that is something we can spin out very easily with a few weeks assessment or maybe a workshop to kick off things. And our client has a good sense about how secure the landscape is. Now we get into designing workloads that we can optimize and start to migrate. And that's again, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. As Blair said, so like clouds, we are doing the RAM program. The tool already does a lot of this for you. What we need to do is educate our customers on how it actually works. And we've spent like six years in evolving this whole product. Then it comes to okay, now you kind of have that sense, what is the Phenops view? What is the consumption view? How much cost you are looking at, right? And then eventually in the last three or six months we've added Genai wrappers to it. So now it's a company, okay fine. Can we use leverage based in a call center model? Can we actually do prompt design, prompt engineering on top of this tool? And again, Google's leaning on us because they don't have the tools to do it. They're giving us a framework and saying, okay, embed that with cloud studio, with Wipro's cloud studio and that gives you the Wipro differentiation. And then the next six months or so you will see a lot about Wipro kind of taking the lead especially with a billion dollar investment. And a lot of that is sort of targeted towards cloud providers and Google is sort of taking the lead in that right. And that's where we are in. I think the partnership with Google as well, we've worked closely with their team to develop effectively packs that can be like reference architectures that come out. So for the financial services plan I was talking about where they have a sort of a structure that needs repairing, we have reference architectures, we have the cloud studio sort of capability to come back in there and rapidly go, here's a gap you can plug. Have that agreement that it's actually something that means something to the CISO as well. Maybe I might put a duet AI into that to have some kind of conversation there. But we can do that directly. And one more thing to add to Blair's point, you know now in the last year or so there's a lot of new faces, you know you'll see. We all came from the outside world where we are actually talking to the CFOs, the CISOs, you know we've traditionally been targeting the CIO in Wipro, right? But now it's okay getting towards the CFO, getting towards the CEO, getting them to understand the transformation impact when it comes to building out a ESG story. And what's the genia and the embedment over there when you're building out your environment reports, you know you have different kind of landscape, different kind of rules, different contracts, you know around things, how do you embed all of that in just that, within the APIs and spin out some offerings. We don't go to a client with an empty slate. We give them a solutions catalog, catalog of use cases to choose from so they can start getting into their design thinking mode. And then get them going. These are, this is the way genia, this is the way traditional AI works, here's the differences, you know, things like that. And this is all a new way of thinking that was probably not there a couple of years ago, you know, and you'll see more of this. So thank you. Switching gears just for a second for our last question. I think we understand Wipro is a very much mission driven company and culture. I think you wanted to tell us a little bit about, you know how Wipro fits into the greater global community. Absolutely, it's a topic very near and dear to me and one of the reasons what drew me to Wipro last year was, you know we have something known as the Aziz Premji Foundation, who was a founder of Wipro and it's all about, you know, giving back to the community. And at present, you know, over 66% of a profitability goes into a foundation that gives back to the community in areas like poverty stricken areas, like a school, in a remote area of India. And this is very near and dear to Aziz Premji and even to our CEO and our chairman at Wipro.  You know, and then it's all about getting philanthropy going and making sure people really get a sense of, you know, the impact that Wipro is making to the society and then eventually also making sure that we have a net zero story by 2040. And that's- So we love ESG. We actually have it as- Every day. I was going to say that we could do an entire topic on that and go through your scope one, two, and three, but that would take an entire hour probably. But I would love that in another time to go into that to the ESG portion of it. Absolutely. I mean, that's just fascinating and I'm sure you get tremendous response from your clients and customers. We do, and a lot of credit goes to our founders, you know, and the board members and folks that have, you know, the principles that Wipro has stood for in the last 30 years, you know, when I was a kid growing up in India, everybody knew Wipro, you know, but the way Wipro has been growing now, especially in cloud, AI, some of the new areas, it's an exciting time to be here. An exciting time in the next three to five years, you will see our growth as we propel momentum. Absolutely amazing. All right, with that, this has been theCUBE live coverage at Moscone Center in San Francisco for Google Cloud 23. On behalf of myself, Dustin Kirkland, Rob Streche, our other hosts, John Furrier and Lisa Martin, stay tuned. We've got another half day of interviews coming up. Thanks for having us.


This is a video on one sample hypothesis testing, finding the critical value. Now, you are performing a right-tailed Z test. So we're dealing with the standard normal distribution. If alpha equals 0.025, that would be my level of significance here, find the critical value. One thing I want to make clear here is in hypothesis testing, any time you want to find the p-value, it uses the test statistic. p-value is an area under the curve whereas the test statistic is an x-axis data value. Now, any time you want to find a critical value, it is actually associated with alpha or your level of significance. Alpha is area under the curve whereas the critical value is the x-axis value. So in this case, I'm finding a critical value, so I'm going to have to need to use alpha here. So first thing you do is look at what type of test you have. You have a right-tailed test, which means you'll have a tail over here in the right side of your bell curve. And your critical value is going to be the value separating the tail from the rest of the graph. So it's a right-tailed test. Once again, that's why my tail is over here on the right-hand side. Alpha is the area of the tail. Alpha is the area of the tail. In this case, that would be 0.025. Alpha is the area of this tail. So what I have to do now is I actually need to find this critical value z. Well, to find x-axis values, I need to know the area to the left. So area to the left equals what? Well, if the area to the right is 0.025, area to the left is 1 minus 0.025, which is 0.975. We need this for Google Sheets. We always need the area to the left to only find data values. So 0.975. And Google Sheets, you know that your mean is going to be zero. Standard deviation is one because you're dealing with z, the standard normal distribution. And you know, area to the left is equal to 0.975. So let's go to Google Sheets and let's find this critical value. And Google Sheets, make sure you're in the compute tab and you're gonna go to the normal area. Zero is mu, sigma is one. And since I'm looking for data value, I need left-held area, which is 0.975. And lookie here, to two decimal places, we get a critical value of 1.96. Our critical value in this case is 1.96. So critical value is 1.96. And that is the answer. Thanks for watching.


We're going to be talking about accessibility. I'm here to discuss a little bit, surrounding it, or at least most things surrounding accessibility as we can optimize it for the web. You may have also heard it called Ally. This stands for the 11 missing characters in accessibility in the word Ally. So you may wonder what is accessibility? So we may not be fully sure what we're talking about here. Accessibility is being inclusive. It's creating accessible websites, and that means having it understood by all audiences regardless of adaptive technologies or browsers. It's usability, but usability is not to be confused with accessibility. Usability is the ability of average users with average technologies and the standard equipment and browsers, and that is their ability to navigate the site well. But accessibility is adding an additional layer. So you may wonder why? Why do we care about accessibility? Why should we care? As software developers, we build software for people. We empathize with people. We get frustrated when we can't use websites well. So what happens when we add an additional layer of tools onto this? We build complexity into this. So who are we talking about here? What types of people? Who should we think about? Everyone thinks of screen readers when they think of accessibility. We think of visually impaired. We think of people who are blind. But we really need to consider a lot of other things here. Cognitive and neurological disabilities or abilities. There are so many impairments that we need to consider. Who in here knows someone with one of these impairments or has a friend? Yeah, so maybe half of you guys. So think about how that friend uses the web or if they run into any issues. Another question we all may ask is how do people with disabilities or impairments use the web? What special tools do they use? So we call these assistive technologies. They can include a combination of these things or they can include one of these things. Like I said, most people think about screen readers but there are many, many more. This is a great quote by Tim Berger Lee. He's the creator of the World Wide Web. He wanted us all to think about accessibility. So what do you think? Are we doing a good job of upholding these values that he tried to instill in us early on? So let's think about that as we navigate through. So let me pause for a moment. Why, I get asked so often, why do I care about this subject? What is my investment in this? This is a picture of me and my mom. We're both developers. She started in the era of Fortran, Provol and Focus and something we don't have in common is a visual impairment. She's blind. She's been blind her whole life. So she uses many adaptive technologies and she's also the reason why I'm aware that there are so many more disabilities out there than just visual impairment, but let's kick it off with visual impairment. There are four categories that we generally think of. Two of the adaptive technologies include Braille displays.  They provide a small mouse movement that you can navigate with your hands and they also allow you to use the keyboard at the same time while displaying all the text on the website in Braille for a blind user. Another technology is a screen reader. These come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Apple comes accessible out of the box. We may have all accidentally turned on our screen reader and gotten very frustrated or very confused. Windows comes with, actually doesn't come with any of these. You can install window eyes. It's free for people with Microsoft Office 10 and above or 2010 and above, excuse me. And Chrome is actually an operating service. Chromium OS powers Chromebooks and Chromium has Chromebooks on it. So you can also test in all of these environments if you have the ability to. Screen readers traverse the DOM or the document object model. We may be familiar with this. They look for focusable events. So this is our normal HTML layout and it's important to keep this structured. We want to keep the standard HTML flow so that screen readers can use it properly. We want the screen readers to be able to look for things like headers and footers and tell the user that there's a navigation bar coming up. Screen readers are not able to read by default divs and spans. So we want to try and avoid using those for very important elements of our HTML. Aria is an assistive, rich internet applications. They're a set of accessibility attributes which can be added to our HTML markup. Any markup, ideally for HTML, and they aid the screen reader. They add role attributes which define the general type of object, article, alert, or slider that might be coming up or that might be active. They can also delineate states and properties of values. So we can add a description to a block of text or a chunk of form to tell the screen reader what we're filling out, what section we're approaching. We can have it live update a progress bar, for instance. So let's take a look at the New York Times. Does the New York Times allow for accessibility well with the screen reader? I must think of, in terms of user stories, about user stories. I want to log in as a user. I want to search. I want to browse categories. I want to read more content. So up here in the corner, this is how our eye may travel. I want to search. Great, there's a search button. I want to log in. There's a login button. I want to know where I am in the New York Times. Cool. There's a nav bar. I want to navigate the site. I might want to skip to the main content. That's wonderful. These are all great things for visual users. How does the screen reader try this? Let's see. This may not, let's see how the audio works. Hopefully you guys can all hear it. But a screen reader will show us what is selected in bold here around the New York Times. And at the bottom, it will read to us what is being displayed. So I want to invite you all to close your eyes if you're interested, if you can hear this well enough. And let's see. As someone who's visually impaired, I want to log in again. I want to search. I want to browse categories and I want to possibly skip to the main content to read. Great, our search is done. We have search. That's one of our stories gone. That's great. We can skip around if we need. We can log in. That's another one of our stories that's done. This next one is a little bit longer. So feel free to keep your eyes closed.  The angle will now be two terminals on each side. Link, health, link, sports, link, arts, link, the song, link, food, link, travel, link, magazine. So that was a little bit painful, right? It's a little bit long, but if it is your first time in a site, you may want to hear all of the categories. There's our map art. That's wonderful. What's next? You can see up here in the audience, that's hidden, but it's a great cue for a screen reader. It will say, here, we're gonna, so a little depressing, but. You can see that The New York Times, oh, I'm sorry, The New York Times does it fairly well. Let's recap. We can skip to the navigation, skip to the content easily with those two hidden links up top. The top stories have a heading and it announced those things very well in a clear manner. Let's check out Home Depot. Does Home Depot do this well? I wanna log in again, I wanna search, I wanna browse categories, maybe I wanna find a store, and I wanna read the main content. As a visual user, these things are pretty good. We can search, we can log in. Let's try it out on a screen reader again. This one may be a little bit more painful for you. I don't wanna ruin anything, but. So this is pretty good, this top part, but something that we'll see that happens when we get a little bit further into the site is one of these. And it's a little bit slow, you can't skip around. On this demo, where are we? We can't see what's going on. Does anyone know where we are? We're stuck inside of this search all box. It's displaying everything again that we just went through. So we're gonna listen to these 17 items once again. And if we wanna find something that we don't know what category it's in, like wheels, who knows what wheels are in. We really wanna get to this search box over here, but it's been a little bit hard so far. This says button, what does button mean as a screen reader user? I'm not really sure. Do I click it, where do I go when I click it? Who knows what happens? So this is something we really wanna consider. The button should be, this is detrimental. Last screener demo, sorry, about this. This is really what a visually impaired person goes through every time they visit a site, like I said. We're trying to log in. Where are we? We're not in the signer. So these are small issues that we're running into as a screen reader user. Was this one successful? We can't skip to the main content. We have a lot of repetition, can't log in. The navigation's pushed down, search button gets lost. Let's move on to something like low contrast. This can be a very big issue for low vision users. I really wanna see links clearly as a low vision user. I want a less eye strain, because if we're looking at a white window, that's letting a lot of light into our eyes and that can cause me a lot of eye strain. We all darken our text editors. So this is one of the main reasons of eye strain. Let's visit hacker news, hacker news, lightens all of their visited links, and this can be not great when we turn up our contrast. Where did they go? If we switch into high contrast mode in Burman, they're also not great. So things we all need to consider and what contrast settings we have and trying them as a user like this. Apple has a great way to deal with this. They use high contrast. Let's continue with low contrast and something like color blindness. We don't really think about it a lot. We don't think of being color blind as a visually impaired person, but statistically, we have to have at least a few color blind people in this room. So let's try out this little demo here. This is the Barclays Premier League and these are red and green colors to denote losses and wins and that is the only delineation we have. This is what it looks like to a color blind user. They're essentially the same. If you are color blind, you probably won't see a difference between these two. So let's give a week of mobility improvement. What do people with mobility impairment use in order to navigate the web? They may use foot pedals. They may use something like a single hand and keyboard. Can you imagine using this and how your experience would change on the web? We've all thought about what if we break our hands as developers? What would happen? You could, if you lost your arm, you could probably use this after maybe months of painful adjustment. A voice control or a site control machine is often used for people with mobility impairments. What does voice control do? Voice control utilizes the DOM in a similar way to a screen reader but it doesn't read out what you're going to see. You're going to be able to speak. If I'm visiting the New York Times again, I want to say click world in order to visit the world page. And our background HTML elements need to match. Our background image HTML attributes need to match what the image actually says so that we are not confusing our readers. If world said home or something underneath in the HTML markup, we would not be able to click world. Let's take a look at cognitive impairment. Cognitive impairments affect people in such a way that they have greater difficulty with one or more types of mental tasks than the average person. So this can be very confusing as someone who's cognitively impaired to visit a cluttered website. We have to take a look at our content on the screen. We want to aim for about a sixth grade reading level but that really improves the content of our page for average users as well. And this also eases our memory. We want to take a look at forms and redesign and not use placeholders which we'll get into in a little bit. If we think about neurological impairment, it can be sometimes related to cognitive impairment or there can be crossovers in here. But we want to make sure we're not creating a bad experience for someone with vertigo, for instance. Everyone's very familiar with this new hot trend that is video in our websites and on our main page. But can you imagine what this experience is like for someone with vertigo? They're going to experience extreme pain and be confused and probably dizzy afterwards. And that is not a great user experience although it is very calming when you are expecting it and you are an average user likely. Let's take a look at hearing impairment. Often we will dig into closed captioning and videos on YouTube are very well closed captions now. But what is the experience for a website like this for someone who is hearing impaired? Are they expecting again for there to be sound or do they think they're missing something in this video? It turns out they're not. They're not missing an experience but you can imagine that they are keyed in to think that they're missing an experience on a video. So how can we improve this as developers? We wanna look for good things for screen readers like section descriptions. We want to denote our links and buttons correctly so that we aren't just saying image everywhere if we have images all over this New York Times site. We wanna fill in our alt tags, most people don't which is not necessarily a horrible thing because I think people with screen readers expect it but adding a short description can be hugely beneficial. For low vision users, we wanna make sure things scale well on our website. We want to make sure that things don't readjust when we're increasing the size of our screen. You can see New York Times does this well. You can zoom in very, very easily and still be able to see everything and scroll across the page. We want to make sure that there's good underlying code in our background images like I talked about for hearing impaired users. If this New York Times background image had a different link underneath that said hold for instance, we would not be able to navigate back to the New York Times if we said click New York Times. The voice over control or the voice control would not know what we're talking about. Let's take a look at Kickstarter. Hi guys. They did a wonderful, wonderful thing recently for closed captioning. Everyone's familiar with Kickstarter. You created a video. You try and raise money in order to promote your cause or sorry not promote your cause but for a creator. They just recently added a huge feature that allows you to go in and add your own closed captions and add your own descriptions which is a great, wonderful thing. They did not necessarily need to do it. They felt as though it was a necessary addition. Here's another way you can go in and add. You just click the little add track button here. Let's take a look at Netflix. They just recently added audio description. The visual impaired community has been asking about this for years and they have unfortunately not done it until now but I think this was a great launching point. Daredevil was just released which is about a blind superhero and they did not release it with audio description which frustrated many people but they recently did and you can just go into your options here and click audio description, sample it out. It will explain everything that's happening in the moving pictures and it's wonderful. I grew up watching all my movies this way, The Beauty and the Beast was all audio described and it's a lot of fun to listen to so try it out. Another thing we can look at is typography. Are we using clear readable type? Are we training ourselves to choose fonts that are well received and are readable on a screen specifically? We want to look at size of the browser average which is about 16 pixels. It seems a little big for people who are used to 12 point font on print but often your computer screen is farther away than a book would be. So we want to look at this size comparison and make sure that we're using no smaller than 16 which is about one E.M. if you're using relative. We want to make sure that readability is great. We want to make sure that things aren't jumbled. If we think back to the New York Times this probably isn't an ideal site for readability because it's so text oriented and it's a little clutter but it does mimic a newspaper very well and I think that's what we expect when we go to the New York Times but for your average developer site it may not be a great thing. Let's also consider layout. Do things make sense? Do they flow in a great way? We'll talk about fonts here. Here's a form I found that is a little bit, it doesn't have great flow let's say. So if we go here, create an account, we type in our email and we're scrolling over expecting maybe another side of the form but there isn't anything so we're creating a behavior that you can just continue on scrolling down. So here I fill out my first name. This is company but I start filling it out and I might get a call or I might have a memory issue and so I continue filling out my last name thinking that perhaps that's what I was filling out. And then we continue with this form and if you remember there was a different part of the form but we've just created a behavior for a little vision user for someone with memory loss, things like that that there is only one column here. So we'll continue filling this out and we don't see state so maybe state goes in the city, we're not really sure. Let's try it at, we also are expecting the next button to be right below since we created that behavior but it doesn't appear to be there so where is it? Once we find it, we hit next and nothing happens. There's no alert. We don't get a screen reader alert, we don't get an alert visually saying you haven't filled out certain sections. Turns out that like we saw at the beginning there were all these sections, that's where state was, that's where last name was so we filled out last name incorrectly. Here's the cleaned up version. Think about mobile users in this case. It's creating a bad experience for them, it's creating a bad experience for it like I said it's memory loss. Someone who has to increase their size on their screen. So let's think about all these things as a developer. Looking at click targets. We want to keep things larger and spread apart. Vitz's law tells us that speed accuracy trade-off characteristics, the speed accuracy trade-off characteristics of human movement are huge so we want to look at this and see that our click targets are small and pretty close and I get a little bit lost, I over click sometimes I need to readjust. If we look at this one, they're bigger and farther apart and we can see that my accuracy is much, much higher. I go straight to the element and I'm able to click. So think about these things when you're creating your buttons. Like I said, it makes a great experience for a mobile user as well or someone with a small screen. We want to make sure the size can be scaled well. We want to look at relative versus fixed. There are a lot of arguments either way as you all know but as long as you're doing it in such a way that things are still readable, things still maintain the same layout and they are still well presented. So how can we integrate all these things as developers in our very busy lives? Because often the business you will approach you and want a shipment, right? They want you to get a feature out of the door. So we can look at things like linters. If you're already using some, why not just integrate a few more into your process? Maybe one. Try out one at first for screen reader usability. We can look at checklists. There are plenty of checklists out there. There are many hundreds of checklists that involve usability and accessibility. We can look at our workflow integration and just really try to work it in. We can be advocates. When the business team comes to us and says we want this feature out of the door, we can say we would really like an extra day or an extra hour to consider usability and accessibility. So can we have that time? We really wanna advocate for this. We can try it out. We can put ourselves in someone else's shoes. We can use our screen reader. We can try out a voiceover. And another great thing is user trials. Try and find someone with a friend with a cognitive impairment or a friend who is visually impaired and see how they use their site. As we all know, we find a lot of unexpected behaviors with user testing.


Hi there and welcome to Esmeralcom 2021. We're so happy to have you with us. This is just a brief video to give you some information about how to engage with the conference. This link right here takes you to the evidence synthesis hackathon website where you can find more information about the hackathon and its series of events along with information about how you can engage with all of the different aspects of the conference in detail. This link is a link to the YouTube channel for Esmeralcom 2021. We'll be live streaming every session, but we'll also be releasing individual talks as and when the session happens along with automatic closed captioning. You can choose to watch any video you want, skip through the content and find exactly what you wanna watch. You can also join in via Slack if you've registered. There's still time to register if not, and you can find out how to register by visiting the Evidence Synthesis Hackathon website. On Slack, you can engage with us and the speakers by asking the presenters questions. You can collaborate by setting up a code jam. You can learn by attending some of the workshops and you can contact some of the other participants and presenters by sending a direct message. Finally, please do vote for your favorite presentation by following this link down here. Thanks very much and we really hope you enjoy the conference.