Thank you, everyone, for coming. I'm really excited and very honored to be presenting this here. I am going to be focusing on, as the slides say, prioritizing accessibility in custom things in Drupal 8. There has been an amazing amount of progress made in Drupal 8 for accessibility, especially for tools. And this presentation will be pointing out the different ways that you can use the tool, specifically in your custom themes, to take what's available in Drupal 8 and really push it forward in terms of accessibility. That's me. I had brown hair. I guess you can still see most of it, but now it's a funny color. I am a technical architect at MyPlanet in Canada. I've been doing Drupal work since 6. I've really enjoyed it. One of the areas that I focus in is accessible front-end development. So we look at developing sites and applications for users that use assistive technology and organizations that have requirements for accessibility. That is my Twitter handle. This presentation goes about an hour, so we may not have time for questions. If you have any questions, please hit me up there. And as I mentioned before, if you can see the URL at the top, these slides are live, so you can follow along with the links. There are a lot of links and resources in here. But if you cannot see it, it's https://emarchac.github.io slash closing-the-slash-gaps. Cool. And as I mentioned before, I work at MyPlanet out of Toronto. What MyPlanet focuses on is building, engaging web and mobile products for the enterprise. So what we're trying to do is to take the UX and the usability that you normally see in consumer-level applications and bring that into enterprise applications and workplace environments. So taking things that people don't expect to be beautiful and usable and making it beautiful and usable. We're at MyPlanet HQ. If you're ever in Toronto, come visit us. We can see a J's game. So for the purposes of this presentation, I'm going to be using a, not an acronym, but a shortening, a term, A11Y or ALI. This is a normal acronym or a phrase to reference accessibility. It's because there are 11 letters between the A and the Y and accessibility. So it makes sense, and it's also pretty cute. I like it. So if you're ever confused about that, that's what it is. What am I going to cover? Why am I here? Not in the philosophical sense, but in the why am I giving this talk sense? And it's going to be a case study and a reasoning behind where we came to these discussions. I'm going to give an overview of accessibility in and of itself, especially in terms of web and mobile products. I'm going to give you an overview of accessibility and Drupal 8, so within that context. For anybody who's not already well versed in it, that's going to be really useful. I'm then going to show you how to identify accessibility gaps in your applications. So I'm going to give you developers, designers, project managers, QA, some tools about how to identify areas that you need to improve. And then I'm going to go through some real world examples on how you can actually fix that in your application as a developer, or help fix that and help address the design gaps that you need to address. And finally, I'm going to give some further resources. So there's a lot. And I'm going to try to talk slow, even though there's a lot to cover. So why am I here? Take a study. So on this slide, we have the title AMI, which is the Accessible Media Inc. And we have a screenshot of their fully accessible website that we've created with them. AMI is a company out of Canada. And what they do is they focus on accessible media. And they're something similar to Rogers, or Warner, or Sky Media that you would have here. But what they do is their role is to focus on bringing media to individuals that require assistive technology. One of their main targets is blind and low vision users. And the idea is, if they're successful at this, they'll go out of business, because they need to be the business case for the larger players to demonstrate that you can have a profitable and accessible media platform. So they're just amazing, amazing, amazing people. And what my planet did is we engaged with them to help build their new media platform. So it was on, it is, on Drupal 8. It's fully accessible and compliant for level two. It is multi-lingual because it is Canada and we have to support the two official languages. And it's entirely accessible, which I said. So users can go in. They can see a schedule of descriptive video. So similar to TV Guide, but they can go through and find content that's specifically available for them in their area with their cable provider. They can watch videos online. They can listen to radio shows online. And it has closed captioning and descriptive video and an accessible media player within there. So it's really focused on catering to that community. And there's also targeted content there. So it was a really, really big build. But the nice thing about it is that the mission for the site was it's really, really easy to get on board with that idea. And us at my planet, we worked with the design team and we went through the whole design audits, design processes. We did the entire build. And at each point, we were more and more aligned with what AMI was trying to do because it's such a great and such an important mission. On this slide, we have our product owner Si in front of a board that shows the different designs and how we broke them out. And then we have a screenshot of my PHP storm with some Drupal 8 code. With what my planet did here is we did a specific user experience testing, which we normally do for any enterprise application. But this was specifically targeted toward accessibility. And engaging those communities. So I'm going to further on, I'll show you what that actually means. We did design audits of the designs in terms of creating the comps and creating the wireframes out of the designs. They were intended to be accessible from the start. And we just went through with a fine tooth comb and confirmed that and verified that. We worked with David McDonald, who is an accessibility expert in Canada and does work with the WC3 a lot. And he did accessibility audits of the designs and just general reviews at each stage of the project. We were also really lucky to have Everett Zufeldt, who was the accessibility maintainer of Drupal 7 and a co-worker of mine and just a really nice friend there as a technical consultant and make sure that there was lots of eyes on the project working around. Thank you. Finally, something that isn't focused on accessibility, but we're also really proud of is we had headless or decoupled components using React.js on top of Drupal to have that really nice dynamic experience. And we were able to do it entirely accessibly. So there was a lot of stuff going on. So this slide has a gift of, oh man, RuPaul in a large wig with the text, put your money where your mug is. So this is what we did. And so the intent of this presentation is we did this. We have all this information, and I would like to share it with you. So this demonstrates in the same way that AMI demonstrates to the large media players that you can have an accessible site. You can have a beautiful aesthetically pleasing site and can have a usable site. You don't have to compromise on any of those. And I really think that it's important as technologists that we understand that we can be our best. Because we're told so many times that we have to compromise this for that and cut this there and keep scope in. But when you build things out initially, whether it's you're focusing on accessibility, security, forward compatibility, you're able to bake these things in if you already have the base knowledge. So that's why I think this presentation is really important. Cool. So that's the background. That's why I'm here. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about accessibility in Drupal 8. And to know about accessibility in Drupal 8, you kind of need to know about accessibility. Makes sense. So it's a little bit, the color is very light on this screen. I'm sorry. But on the slide is the quote by Tim Berners-Lee, who was largely attributed to be the founder of the internet. And a cool dude is, the power of the web is in its universality. And that can mean a lot of things. But for me, that means that it's universally accessible. Whether we're talking about needing to use assistive technology or needing to accommodate for different screen profiles or data types or just usages. The fact that we have this tool here, that we have the power to build and can distribute applications and documents to others, literally around the world, and maybe Mars in 2016, that's its real power. And to have that as something that motivates you and brings you forward to really inspire you to push things forward is great. I like it. I'm going to get Terry. Sorry. So things that will prevent users from actually accessing your content are different barriers there. And when thinking about accessibility on the web, we normally think about a very narrow kind of example. Some of the barriers here that we don't talk about are, I'm just going to go through a bunch. Well, some of the type of barriers are physical, motor, or mobile. So this could be that the user is unable to use a mouse. It could be. A mouse would engage in with your device. That could be because they are unable to physically move the mouse. It could be because the mouse is broken. Being able to have understanding that there are different ways to engage with your device is really, really important. Visual. So the standard example of a visual barrier is somebody who is blind or low vision. And we see that a lot in terms of usage of examples. But visual might also be colorblind. And that's a demographic that I really think is largely ignored for no good reason, is that not being able to understand or parse the colors on your page can be a great barrier, whether or not it is because you are colorblind or because your device's screen just can't render the color properly. Auditory. So if you're deaf or hard of hearing, again, is a dramatic example. On the other scale, an example of a barrier could be for auditory information, is the barrier could be you don't have speakers, or you're in a cafe and you don't have your headphones, or perhaps you don't want to actually you're listening to good music and you don't want to turn on this music. These are barriers that we implement ourselves, but barriers that exist to engaging with your mobile content or your web application. Learning barrier. So this example is a very easy one of that, is dyslexia. So how people are able to learn and interpret your technology and your information and making sure that people are able to take the time that they need to actually go through and consume and understand your application in a good pace. Speech or language. We talk a lot about having verbal interfaces, so Alexa or Siri with your application. And if you are unable to communicate with that, whether you have a difficulty with speech or your accent isn't the one that the device is expecting, that is a barrier. Whether or not you understand the language that the interface is in is another barrier. So in Canada, the example is a French user going to an English site that isn't able to understand the English words. It's a really good example of a barrier. And normally we don't think about these as barriers, because we're so focused on our target market, but you don't know who's coming to your application because the web is universal. And then finally, whether it's a mental intellectual or developmental barrier. So whether or not they're able to properly understand and comprehend in a higher level your content, whether they're in a good mind space to even deal with your content if it's a mental health concern. These are type of barriers that we find we're starting to get into, but there's no large discussion regarding it.  Here are some types of solutions that we can actually use. So for mobility, being able to have redundant ways to engage with your application besides just a mouse, like this is a very basic thing. So I can use keyboard or mouse or touch navigation, and my application works across all of these. Screen reader compatibility and descriptive video for people who don't have the aural, not oral, aural, whatever, sound, sound capabilities within there. And I really want to emphasize that I use descriptive video and captioning so much because I don't like to turn my audio on. And you can see that Facebook has standardized this now. When you go through the feed, they actually have the captioning on by default. So captioning is another thing. With different content, being able to actually caption properly and descriptively capture what's going on is so, so important. Legibility of design and information architectures and clear information architectures are a great way to get around the learning barrier. So people have legible text. There's this awesome example of how the lowercase l and the uppercase i in sans-serif fonts look exactly the same. And it's not only an issue for people with dyslexia, but it's real confusing for technologists because I need to know what that character is because I'm one of those control freaks. But legible design and clear information architecture allows people to properly parse your information at their own pace. For speech, translatable content, where Drupal is great and multi-linear all, and I'm sure a lot of people here works directly with multi-lingual content. But to have the even if your content isn't multi-lingual at release, to have that capability baked in and to have an awareness as a technologist to say there could be potentially in the future, my app goes big and I have to translate it into 30 different languages. Building that in is so, so important. And then in terms of the mental intellectual or developmental barriers, trigger warnings for content. If you have content that is particularly strong in a direction, sometimes it's nice to just give people a heads up. We talk about, I've seen a lot of people say like, ah, it's safe spaces, they're just too safe. Which sounds weird, but having trigger warnings and having discussion and context for your content is really important because you don't know what kind of person is accessing this. I am the biggest wuss and now on Facebook there are auto-playing trailers for horror movies and it just, I can't. I wish that there was a way that I could turn that off but I can't because they've assumed that I just want to engage with it and there's no kind of preparation for like, oh scroll past this, because Erin, you're gonna get scared and cry again. So on this slide, there is a image of three people watching a baseball game. I don't think they're the Toronto Blue Jays but it's a baseball game. And on one side of the image, they're trying to look over a fence and each of them has a box. There's a person who's very tall that can see over the fence. The person who's middle tall that can see over the fence and then a shorter person who cannot see over the fence. On the other side of the image, and sorry, and that side is captioned equality so everyone has equal access to the technology which is a box to stand on. On the opposite side of the image, it shows that the taller, it's the same image, the taller person is able to look over the fence without a box. The middle height person uses one box to look over the fence and then the shorter person uses two boxes and they're able to look over the fence and it's captioned justice. And I think that this is what we need to be aware of as technologists that are building applications is that some people need and use more of our technology than others to access it. They deeply use any semantic HTML which I'll talk about and any kind of proper translation or language and they use that more to access the content. There are people who don't use that at all and they're able to access our content and to understand the differences and to make sure that we are able for everyone to have a great time at the old ball game is important. Cool. So that's Erin's high level. Who here has heard of the W3C?  Oh, okay, cool. Okay, I should have asked that to begin with. The W3C has the accessibility guidelines. They have not changed since 2008. The guidelines haven't. And this is the general recommendation of the guidelines. I'm gonna be going through these slides fairly quickly since a lot of people raise their hands, but if you need to access this and if you need more information on it, please go to the slides, all the links are there. There are multiple levels of the web content accessibility guidelines or WCAG. Level A is essential. This means that people will be entirely unable to access your site without this. This is the first box that they're standing on in the image before. Level Two is preferred. So this means that the majority of users will be able to access the majority of your content without significant barriers. And finally, the levels that the guidelines provide. Level Three is optimal. It means that there are no significant barriers for anybody to access your content and it's largely universal. When we were working on AMI, the general discussion and the general comments were that level AAA, so level three, is designed as a goal. It's designed as inherently inachievable. This would be ideal perfection. So not to say that the guidelines, when you can hit some of the requirements for AAA, that's ideal, but when building a site, what you need to focus on is making sure that the entire site is actually just AA compliant. And the key points of the interactions to really make the experience beautiful, let's say your main functionality of it, is AAA. So you're not able to, the general discussion that we had with David, with Everett, and with AMI, is that AAA is just, it's an ideal. It's the platonic ideal of entire accessibility. And for you to reach that, it's generally inachievable. But the act of trying is important. So making sure that your application or document is AA is perfect. It's AA certified. You've hit all the AA points and then you really stretch yourself for the few key points for AAA. This is for the recording and anybody that can hear. An audience member said, the act of trying is important, which I think my mom said that to me too. But it is, it is. And it's not trying that gets us in trouble. And it's not pushing the boundaries. And we're at DrupalCon, and we're here pushing the boundaries of technology. We're pushing the boundaries of what our technology can do. Let's push the boundaries of who can use it also. AAA. So on this slide, I have links to the accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, or AOTA, which requires all of the Canadian government sites and all of the Ontario public and large private companies to have accessible content. As an example of what's required in Canada. In the US, they have Section 508, the Accessibility Program, which is targeted towards government companies, not government companies. Poof. Government organizations required to provide accessible content to their end users. And the European Union does have basic accessibility requirements for any of the governmental websites on there. So there are legal requirements for accessibility that we have to be aware of as technologists. And understanding where your client is coming from, who they're serving, being aware of what's legally required is also important. So if you can't motivate yourself or motivate others from a deeply inspirational speech, you can motivate them through legal means. Which is good but sad, but sometimes that's how we move forward. It's the carrot and the stick. Cool. How am I doing for time? Uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay, so accessibility in Drupal 8. Could you raise your hand if you've built a Drupal 8 site with some accessibility improvements? Okay, cool, so about 50-50. Just as an overview, the Drupal 8 has a initiative called the Drupal 8 Accessibility Experience, date acts, I don't know. But the Drupal 8 Accessibility Experience has largely been a follow-through from the Drupal 7 Accessibility Experience. And we've taken what we've learned and what we've developed in Drupal 7 and really pushed the boundaries in it. But if you want to get involved or participate in the Drupal 8 Accessibility Initiative, you can go onto Drupal.org and Drupal. So some of the benefits that we've, accessibility benefits that we've rolled into Drupal 8 is Y-Aria. So that's the web accessibility initiatives, accessible, rich internet application guidelines. I've also linked two articles in these slides. A lot of them are by Mike Gifford out of Open Concept out of Ottawa, who is the Drupal 8 Accessibility Maintainer and has largely pushed for these changes and been a really, really, really great inspiration and motivation for this whole process. But Aria is a specifically targeted markup designed for accessibility and connected semantics within your documents and allowing you to have accessible, rich internet applications, Aria. And a lot of that has been rolled into HTML5 specification. So Aria exists outside the HTML specification. HTML5 has consumed some of that and has used that to help us with improved semantics on our websites. But it also means that the improved semantics connect to improved accessibility. Because if you're not using, if you're using a device that needs to parse and interpret a webpage, whether you're using a web crawler to go through a page, the semantics help the web crawler understand it. And also if you are using an accessibility device or accessibility tool, the improved semantics help explain it to the user. And I'm gonna be demonstrating this. But using these improved semantics are actually great accessibility improvements. I have more links here. You can read about it on the slides. Again, highly recommend you take a look at the slides. But within there we have a great amount of ability to just out of the box, we already have a more descriptive website. We have an improved content authoring experience and ATEG compliance. And ATEG is authoring tools accessibility guidelines. I hope I remembered that. Anyway, yes, thank you. So what is awesome is that we can, with Drupal 8, it's very easy to build accessible front end websites. But if you have somebody that needs to use an assistive device or assistive technology to add the content in Drupal 7, it was like impossible. God forbid you try to use views with a keyboard in Drupal 7. But with ATEG, we actually have the ability, the views UI is now accessible. People can engage with it. And the improved content authoring experience within there helps guide, shoot my boob, helps guide content authors in creating accessible content. So you can create a beautiful front end, but if the content authors don't follow guidelines or accessibility or they're not trained, they'll break that. An example of this is now alternative text on images is required in Drupal Core in the image field by default. And you need to have those descriptive images or the alt tags in the images as descriptions. Tab control, there is so many, one of the big difficulties of creating a dynamic and rich internet application is that there's gonna be a lot of complex interactions with it. And if you're using a mouse, it's one thing. If you're using a keyboard where you have to control where your keyboard is going and where your tab control is going, it becomes more difficult. There is a tab control library in Drupal 8 now that you can use to constrain tabbing and to control where the keyboard user is going. So if you have, let's say, a really complicated menu or a game or an interactive modal, you can release and control tabbing to allow users to have a greater experience. Finally, there are aural alerts and this is why is it always clicking? Don't be clicking. Within here, this is the same thing. I'll zoom the screen a little bit up. There's now Drupal announced in JavaScript. So frequently when you're engaging with rich internet applications, there are messages that pop up or you get a notification that something is happening. Before, we would have to roll our own version of that. So you would have 15 different versions of this, which you would do with the aria live role. But Drupal 8 gives us a nice standard way to pass translatable strings to Drupal and else that reads it out for the user. So if you have a, the easiest one is a chat screen. If you're using Drupal for your front end and you have chatting going on, you have the ability to announce to the user that there's a new message. If they're not able to take the visual indication as information. So yeah. One of the examples is you look beautiful today and I think everyone looks beautiful here. Cool. So if you're interested in more about the history and about the development of accessibility in Drupal 8, Mike Gifford did an amazing, amazing talk at DrupalCon New Orleans that talks about the history of development somewhere we're going and some of the difficulties we have with it. I really recommend that if you're looking for more context regarding it. And it is available online. So this slide has, oh man, Taylor the creator in the video and it's captioned with I think I'm wasting my damn time. So if you already know all this information, you're like, so I know this. I am excellent, Aaron. Great. Given all of this information, why do we need to know the whole history of it to the whole understanding the different kinds of barriers to actually build internet applications when there are guidelines out there and there are check boxes that we can just go through and check? The reason why I talked about all of this is that for AMI remember, we didn't want a technically accessible site. We didn't wanna go through and check all the check boxes and make sure people can use it. We wanted a really engaging, rich experience for users on the site. On this slide, they have that quote that I just said and there's a picture of me talking to Hoyen, one of our product strategists and us testing on multiple devices. The reason why it's important to understand the tools and understand the barriers and the solutions for people to engage with your website is that if you wanna take something that is okay, it's accessible, it's the emotional equivalent of just checking a box when you pass the guidelines, you need to understand and you need to deeply empathize with what the user is going through. And to do that, you need to be able to put yourself in their shoes to have representation and to have discussion within there. And by understanding the tools available in Drupal 8 by understanding the guidelines, you're able to take what's Drupal 8 which is already fairly accessible and push it and make it beautifully accessible. So it's not only just university accessible, it's universally usable. And that's gonna be the difference when you're talking and catering to the users of your application is whether or not they can use it versus whether or not they want to use it. And that's what I feel is very important. So I have built my application, it's on Drupal 8, I've used all of these technologies. How do I actually start identifying where we can take something that's okay accessible and really push it to be awesomely accessible? So I'm gonna go through different kinds of testing that you can do. With visual testing, this is testing the designs going through the design audits. What you can do to identify areas that you can improve is making sure that the designers plan the heading structure early. For search engine optimization, it's not really required to have semantic, SEO experts are gonna argue about this in both directions, so whatever. That's my two cents. Planning the heading structure early because accessible technology really uses the semantic H1, H2, H3, H4, and to understand what the different headings level mean and what they're communicating on the page. So this is again just visual. But as a designer you need to have visual pattern and visual indicators of what's going on on the page so people can understand that. And to directly map that to understand this is the first heading that I want them to see, then we're gonna follow the page. You create the user journey very clearly on the document. And the second one I have that I suggest is prioritize function over form.  Look at the functionality of it before you start adjusting the form or the visuals of it. It's nice to have some of these dynamic, some of the more frilly parts of the web. We've always had issues with drop shadows. But I think that that's gone now from design. But prioritizing how people are going to be using the site and how they're able to use it over the sparkle and the visual flair, sorry, flair of the page. So look at functionality, communicate clearly about what's going on on the page, communicate the function before you communicate the form.  These are visually, these are icons, colors, shapes, allow redundant indicator, so even text versions of it. So if something happens on the page they can potentially get a sound, a visual indicator, a textual indicator, and a verbal indicator that it's actually happening. And to communicate that something has changed on the page to communicate state properly as a designer is gonna be really, really, really helpful in terms of usability and accessibility. If there's a form error make sure that the error state is clearly designed is a basic example of that. Automated functional testing. So great, you've developed your website. You've passed the designs onto the team. They now have built it and they're like, I guess we should see if it's accessible. There are, I have two examples here and there are others you can get. The Wave toolbar by WebAIM is, oh I have it preloaded with the DrupalCon. You can go into webaim.org and Generator Report for any website that's online and it'll give you a breakdown of the errors, the features, the structure elements and its general understanding of the page. You can also do this on your local. So here I have an example of a local site that I've built in Drupal 8. This site is using the stable theme with the Bootstrap, like Twitter Bootstrap CSS applied because I don't like that font. And I have the WebAIM toolbar installed. I can click the toolbar on top of my screen and it gives me an assessment of just a local page and you can see clearly that I have an empty heading element. I have an empty H1 on the page that I should probably fix. And as you go through the WebAIM toolbar, or sorry, WebAIM Accessibility Evaluation Tool, whatever, gives you context and ways to understand the different errors. So it's a really good way to kind of start guiding yourself through best practices and yeah, the different guidelines of what it is that you need. And it gives you feedback on features, so positive little checkboxes and general discussion of it. The other thing that you can do and use is tenon.io, which is an automated testing tool that you can use to plug in with your continuous integration to test generated pages. So I'm going to, yeah, let's take Drupal.org and pass it to Tenon. We'll see if it works. This is live, this isn't a video. So please forgive me. Ba-da-ba-da, ba-da-ba-da, sweet. So we found some issues, we found some benefits, they generally go through and describe what's happening on the page. And you can, as I said before, plug this into travis.ci to have automated testing on your site. Other things that you can do is manual functional testing. So beyond automation, really go in and try and understand how the user's testing it. Who here has an accessibility device on their phone? An accessibility tool. Who here uses an iPhone? All of you should have had your hands up for the first question. There's voiceover, and also I cheated because it's on the slide. There's voiceover for Mac OS and IOS, it comes with it. Siri is another accessibility tool, but you can turn it on on your phone. And on the Mac, I'm going to show it later. I'll show you voiceover later, it's really easy. TalkBack comes by default with most Android applications. So you can test on Android there. NVDA is an open source and free screen reader for Windows. So you can test on that. And JAWS is a non-open source proprietary one for Windows. It is one of the most popular ones out there. So if you are getting serious about screen reader testing, you may need to look into investing in a JAWS. License, the JAWS license I believe is over $1,000. So it's a great barrier for people to stay upgraded and stay with the up-to-date version. So a lot of accessibility testing is making sure that you're backwards compatible, at least for accessibility in terms of that functionality. User experience testing, so I touched on this before. The final point of this is to really understand how people are using and experiencing your application. So how we do this is we get pairs of researchers. So one person creates a script where they're asking users what they're expecting when they're using the site. And the other person is taking notes. And they go through the script and they ask, what do you expect from this page of my application or this page of the site? And then they get users to actually use the site and go through. And what we do is we're looking for behaviors and attitudes. So is this something pleasurable to the user? Do they get frustrated or lost? Or is this, do I expect them, is the thing that I expect them to engage with, the button that I'm expecting them to click, actually the button that they're using? So you're really able to test called action, verbiage, design, and visual indicators for it. Great, so we now have found all the problems with our application. How do I fix it? Ah, functional solution. So here's to, if there's a problem with your site, here's how you can fix it. And I went through and I pulled some of the most standard ones that we found and stuff that we repeated ourselves and I dropped it into my theme. So landmark labels. So this, I have the, all my slides are on GitHub. And if you go to this URL, which is emarchek slash closing the gaps, this theme is actually available there as a Drupal 8 theme that you can use and base off of. So all the code there is what I'm gonna be demoing today. This is a live demo. Be nice. We'll see how far we get. So step one was landmark labels. So I mentioned before that we have ARIA landmarks and ARIA tags in HTML5. Here I have an example of the main tag. So that's an HTML5 main tag, sure. With the ARIA role of main. So that's kind of redundant, but you understand what's happening here. I'm indicating that this is the main part of my page. There are other landmarks within there and I'll be showing you the different ones. Largely these come with a core and I'll be tweeting and posting the links afterwards. So we're good. I also have the ARIA attribute ARIA label and that label is the translatable verbal text that labels the element. And what we found is that you have to be very aware of what your label is and include a label when designing it. So this is how you turn voiceover on in OSX.  So we're gonna be getting a lot of information here, but it's fine. Welcome to OSX. Voiceover is on. System preferences. Chrome closing the gaps. Vertical help documentation. Select tab. So I'm here. Visited internal link. Skip to main content. Visited internal link. You can see that I have the visual indicator at the bottom and the voiceover is reading through it. If I go to my landmarks tab, I have here, I have the brand banner. I have main navigation navigation. User account menu navigation. And what I had before, which was content main. So it's reading the ARIA role of main and it's appending the ARIA label to how it's reading it out. Content main right there. And you can see here, role, content main here. I'm just gonna mute that for a bit. And I'll show you what it is on there. But this indicates and this shows you where are we at, Drupal? Where are we at, Drupal? I'll just find it. Oh. Yeah, you can totally turn it on. Here's another one. So I had the banner. And again, this is available on the repo so you can take a look at it. Sorry that this is so small. But I have the banner, the header of a role banner and headers have a banner role. This is just right out as banner in OSX and the ARIA label brand. And if I go back to my landmark navigation, the brand banner is there. So you can see that there's, that's how you can connect and that's one way accessibility users engage with the site. The other way I'll get into. But one of the problems that we have is that you need semantic names of your elements. So here I have a nav element that is a nav role and it's taking the name of the ARIA label main navigation. So it's read out main navigation navigation which isn't an ideal experience to the user. Here I would need to change the default Drupal menu to say main menu and that would be corrected. I also have, so you can see here, this is the theme that I was again referencing in GitHub. Page here, this is the element that I was referencing before if you can see it there. So it was reading main content within that. Right, I had mentioned before this is not an accessible presentation. Cool, another one that we noticed, a lot of pagination when you're doing your custom themes. There are custom pagination elements. The requirement there that we ran into a lot is the verbal or sorry, the visual tools to indicate what the button does. So here I have next and then just a little like chevron arrow on the side. It's not enough to describe really what's going on to the user. So the ideal thing that we did is have two text elements on there. One that says next with a little fancy arrow, little chevron for visual users. And we've tagged that with aria hidden. So it's hidden from the screen reader, but we give a more verbal description of what's going on using the Drupal core class visually hidden. So there's indicators for visual users if you just have a button or if you're using a font icon and then indicators for keyboard users that are engaging with it. And I have that here within a pager. Another one that I would recommend in general, this file pager stable I don't have in the repo but this is the one that comes out of core and I'm gonna be submitting a patch to this. One pattern that we've seen that is actually not great is including a title on a link. So this is the link, it's a anchor tag, a ref with text that says last page and last. And then the title says go to last page. The majority of screen readers don't read out titles on links. You have to actually enable that manually. So this is entirely lost. If you have a question, you can tweet me or we'll go afterwards. So that's a general indicator of what's going on there. And you can see here as I turn on voiceover. So I'll go to my pagination navigation. You can't see it. And I engage with that. So it says press link current page one. Oh, I pressed the link. So I'm within there. Oh, no, this is the live demo. You're welcome guys. Let's get back to it, perfect. So end of navigation, end of list, visited link next page, last page. So you can see an example here that it's reading out last page which is the aria hidden tag that I've written there and then next. And then I have a text in the same pattern that says go to page two which is a clear indication of the link. Another way that users engage with your site and through testing we found this there's a lot of different ways. Sometimes they just go through the links to find what they want. So having descriptive anchor tag elements, having descriptive links within there really helps if this is how they're engaging the site. So I really should have here, I should have said go to last page. That's a mistake on mine. But just to be aware of. Another thing we found with accessibility is that there's an issue with NVDA screen readers in Firefox. This is not something that I think that I should be committing to core but to get around that NVDA Firefox users cannot access HTML required attributes on fields properly. So what we found is if they have required and they start typing text in it just gives them an immediate error. To solve this we actually enable inline form errors. That experimental module. So, and I'll show you how it engages with it when it's enabled. No, that's my Drupal console patch I'm working on. Here we go. I'm enabling voiceover. I'm gonna go to user login on this page. I'm gonna create an account. So I'm gonna create an account here. A valid email address is required. I'm choosing not to include that. I'm just gonna submit the form. Create a new account. There it is. I submit the form. Excuse me. There we go. Ah, what's going on here? And again this is unstyled so it's a little bit hard to see. Two errors have been found. Email address and username. The benefit and the reason why inline form errors is so important is that when I go there as a keyboard user I get content info error. I have just because they're using the title within there the error messages are quite clear to me. Heading level error message is two. I have two items. Two errors have been found. I'm able to go into the list. The email address. I enter that. And I'm able to enter my email address directly. So it's a really nice experience for accessibility users. And that's what in general we recommend is we remove the HTML5 required attributes and just handle that through inline form validation. Another one is we found that the picture element, so the responsive image element, sometimes in some browsers it's not able to actually read the alternative text of the image inserted in it. So what we ended up doing to get around that, and this is the responsive image template within the theme, we insert the image as a fallback so that that's the actual image tag within your HTML5 picture element. Some screen readers can't pick that up if you're using a browser that understands the picture element. So we just inserted the text visually hidden. So this is using the Drupal accessibility class to hide it from visual users. But we just put a paragraph in there that actually adds the alternative text. So it's read out. Google's able to still use the alt text in there to categorize and to crawl the images. But in addition to that, we just have the descriptive text. Given the time, I'm not gonna go into this. But with skip to main content, what we found is that the skip to main content link in Drupal 8, and I can use, I don't actually need to turn voice over on for this. I can use just the keyboard navigation, skip to main content. We find that having JavaScript to handle that scroll allows you to visually create a nice scroll on the page for users who are using the keyboard and still visual users. If you don't have that JavaScript scroll element, it just jumps. And it also manually handles anything that a browser's not able to properly handle. Again, we had issues with Firefox properly passing the focus. So we just did that with JavaScript. And I have an example of the code that actually handles the JavaScript to scroll down in that theme. Finally, this is one that I really like to talk about. Relating block and title labels. What I talked about right now is a lot of stuff that's in HTML5 that you may have experienced as a sighted user. But one of the things that's really important is being able to relate, when you have a block on the page, being able to relate the call to action that's associated with the content and the title. So if I go back to my theme on the front end, where did my block go? Oh, well the classes aren't loading properly, that's fine. But here I have a custom block at the bottom. I have the text within the block and I have a read more button that's connected to my custom block, or my custom title. So this would be a CTA, this would be a call out that you have what you can use here. And this is the ARIA tribute labeled by. You have the ability to create complex associations within your page using this for IDs. So on the template block, I have my heading ID, which is the ID of the heading element, that's H2. So if I was to go here and inspect it, my custom block heading, that's my ID. And then on the call to action link at the bottom, I say it's labeled by itself. I'll show you the code here. The button, I call to action button. It's labeled by itself and it's labeled by the heading. And we do this instead of just writing the text as a title or text as an alt text or a hidden, because we wanna give semantic reasoning and semantic connections between the header of the call to action and the actual call to action. So I mentioned before, some screen reader users just go through and read all the links on the page. I'll show you what this actually looks like for a user. So I go here, I go through the links. There it is, I'm going through all my generic code. And you can see here it's now focused on the read more block. And it says read more, which is the text of my button, which is the first of the ARIA label IDs. Custom block, which is the second of the ARIA label IDs and it's the text of the title. So you're able to have a context in relation between the blocks. And it means that if I'm an accessibility user that only uses, this is an actual way that people just go through the site. Some people wait for the page to read entirely. Some people just go through the links. Some people just go through the headings. There's all different ways that people engage with the site. But this is one of the things that you can do. I told you this would take a long time, I apologize. I talked about technical solutions. Now I'm going to talk about experiential solutions. So how can you solve the non-technical problems? Visual design best practices, what I mentioned before.  There are other things that you can use to functionally test your designs while you're designing them. If you use Sketch, which a lot of our designers do, there's a color contrast analyzer. And one of the issues is to make sure that you have a lot of contrast on the page so people can read it properly. An example of that is I didn't have enough contrast on my Tim Berners-Lee slide here, so it was hard to read. Checking it there is great. WebAIM, that does the toolbar that I was showing you before, also has a checklist that you can print off and go through. And there's a lot of really good information there that illustrates different things that you have to be aware of. So contrast, content, using true text as opposed to other Elf font alternatives, that's an ideal setup. User testing best practices. And what we did with this was, when we did our user testing with accessibility in mind on AIM, we did a mix of in-person and remote. So when you're in-person, the user testers are sitting in the same room as the other person and you're going through and you're engaging with them. You get a lot more information from being able to read their attitude and their tone. With that, and we did also remote, which means that you're able to, we set up a phone call with the tester and they verbally described what they were going through on the page. Normally, when we do this for non-accessibility, non-accessible user testing, we actually do a screen share, but because of the content of this and because the users normally don't use the visuals of the screen, we just did this over the phone. The benefit of remote is two things. One, you gain access to people that aren't able to come in physically to your spaces and when you're talking about accessibility, there's a lot of groups that have difficulty with mobility and so you're able to engage them in a much easier and more comfortable environment. The second one specifically for testing with blind and low vision users is having somebody describe something that they're going through over the phone verbally puts you in the same situation as them. I was doing a, we did testing and one user clicked a link and they said the menu was gone and then they said the page was gone and they couldn't find out how to go back and they said the website must have been down and we thought the whole site went down and the whole site tanked and they were upset, we were upset and it turns out that they clicked a link that we didn't catch that opened up a tab in a new browser and they couldn't go back and that was it, that was the solution but as a visual user, I can clearly see oh, I'm in a new tab, oh, I just closed the tab and you move back and you're fine but understanding what they went through and understanding how frustrating it is when just a site breaks for no reason really, really, really brings your, was really, really empathetic and a really powerful experience to me. It definitely made me check by a little bit of my privilege. Bring your own device. So we had, on all of our testing we asked the users to bring their own devices so they had the accessibility tools that they were used to using and we could see which different devices they used to engage with. In the in-person testing, a lot of them brought laptops. Some of them brought phones or iPads. One fellow brought a laptop, stopped halfway through, didn't like it and he said, can I just switch to my phone? I use that anyway. So even he assumed that we were expecting a full laptop, a desktop experience when really they're just on their mobile devices and frankly with a lot of users that we found preferred their mobile devices because they have more control about how close it is, how big it is, the accessibility tools are just easier there. And finally, emphasize depth of a breath. Really go into and ask how you want to feature, how you want to focus on how people want to use the small components of your site. Don't get a large broad strokes of it. Go through for each user and really target on something that you want to understand with them because they'll be able to give you a better experience. And I really want to emphasize that user testing with actual users that you're targeting is so, so important here. There's this phrase, nothing with us without us or nothing for us without us and here it's engaging the community to actually be interested in and have an investment in your product and it's making sure that they understand how to use it. It's making sure that you're listening to them. It's really important. This one is an image of RuPaul in a big blonde wig saying I don't want to hear any goddamn excuses. So this is it. This is how easy and difficult it can be to build a really beautiful, engaging web application that is accessible. It's not hard to take the first steps. As you said before, trying is the most important part. Pushing yourself, pushing the boundaries and seeing where your application is going to go is really, really, really critical here. For further resources, I would like to emphasize links are contained within the slide deck. There's so many stuff out there. It's amazing. Tomorrow there is another accessibility talk called Future Directions for Accessibility. Today, Empathy and Future about Accessibility was sadly canceled. I would love to see that again and there is an accessibility buff, I believe, tomorrow. If you want to come join us, check it out on the board. Yeah, I'm just going to tweet the details. It's not on the application or the website because it was when we scrolled into one of the free slots. I'll just tweet the details, but it's at 1545. So people working with accessibility can meet each other. Yeah. Today, great. Or you can tweet me or engage there. Yeah, finally, I just wanted to say thank you so, so much for all of your time and attention.


So in this video we're going to talk about staying in your area of expertise. This is such an important topic for two reasons or for two people, you could say. The first group of people that this is very relevant to are people like Mr. Jazz pianist, which I'm making this video for, who want to make videos or content or start kind of promoting themselves, not necessarily even to sell, but just getting themselves out there, exposing themselves.  I hope I never will. But they feel like they're not where they want to be. Like maybe they want you want to be a millionaire, so you're like, oh, I can't coach people.  But this goes very, very deep. Like I said, I coach people on business. And I'm not like a multimillionaire. I'm not even what's considered a rich guy. But by the way, not because they didn't make enough money, it's because I blew and or destroyed or or lost so much of it. If I wouldn't, I would probably been very, very well on my way to a millionaire.  I'm not like the, the God or something. But I'm asking myself, okay, what's what is what is my expertise? And Graham Cardone puts it puts it very well, make a list of things that personally, you're you should be noted for and business wise, you should be noted for. So personally, just a bunch of examples for for example, overcame bipolar disorder, almost killed myself multiple times. And I'm now like a happy awesome dude.  I'm a master of consistency. I've traveled the world alone. I took many, many risks. I had very deep relationships that I had and then I lost. I lost many friends in my life. I and then rebuilt myself. Um, what else? That's just off the top of my mind, but I have like a big list with these kinds of things. And professionally, well, that's nice.  And nobody knowing me prior to that. Having my longest lecture was 16 hours long. And people said it was the most amazing thing they've ever experienced. So, you know, I made a lot of money in stocks and again, it's another point of the video, but you basically take these things in the list and that's your areas of expertise. So who's this also good for is not only people who want to kind of promote themselves and content wise, but also for people who want to coach people. So I have a friend who's a deal maker. So the guy has a company, his own company that is an investment group. And he has come Merza on his board. If you know it, this guy is worth like $300 million. And a lot of other people. Now my friend, he's not like a rich guy. He's a regular guy. And he basically managed to get multimillionaires and a hectomillionaire, which means over a hundred million units, to join his company and were presented. And he also his ideas to buy businesses, basically using a loan, which is what Dan Pena teaches. You finance a purchase of big business. It's a leveraged deal. So somebody might buy, let's say there's an apartment, it's a rental multifamily rental apartment. You know, it makes a certain amount of cash flow. It's worth a certain amount of money. Then the guy sells it to you and you finance it. And the bank, it doesn't really care how much of the money you have necessarily, because it knows that the business will finance the loan. So it's like paying a mortgage with rent. So you can basically buy a business and the business might be worth $100 million. And the cash flow of the business is so big that it actually covers the loan.   Granted, it's on the loan, but after the loan is done, you now own $100 million business. So what Dan Pena teaches, how to basically become that rich in three to 10 years. Now, I know it sounds awesome. Trust me, I've been to the castle, but it's maybe for 0.01% of the population.  No, probably not. 19 out of 20 people that come to the seminar, it's every few months, maybe one guy really gets ahead and maybe one guy out of like three seminars actually completes a deal. So no, and takes many years and never mind. So this guy who built a board basically got multimillionaires in his company and is currently contacting businesses and actually getting them very interested in selling their businesses to him. He's, by the way, negotiating currently a $30 million deal. Like the guy is literally like, okay, should I sell it to him or should I sell it to the big Japanese company? It was like, you know, it's more, they're going to pay more upfront, but they're going to like dismantle my business. Whereas this guy, he maybe doesn't pay upfront, but at least he's, he's a lot more genuine. So I can still run the business and sorry that I'm out of breath. Sorry that I'm a bit confused, but you know, it's a cool story. So he wants to help people. He tells me, look at that, I want to, you know, coach some people on the side, you know, both to create crash flow and to help people. And I'm scared because I'm not, I haven't like done the deals yet, just small deals I did, but not like the big, big deals. So how do I do it? And then I asked him, okay, so trace back. Can you coach them how to build a board of multimillionaires? Yes, because you did it. Can you, which by the way, I did as well. But I didn't get to the next part. Can you coach people how to contact businesses and actually get them interested in selling you their business? Yes. Can you coach them on negotiations? Yes. So you have what to teach and just, just present yourself in, sorry for that. It's dark, by the way.   What hurdles did I come over?   But what about the things that you did do that used to be so incredible and now they're normal to you? That's the thing, you know, you can help people with that.    It's very simple. Like there's some to each his own. So just because somebody is more quote unquote advanced than you, it doesn't mean that he's what they should pick. Now, if you compare him on his standard, then yes, he is. So if you try to teach what he teaches, that's a big no, no, because he's obviously much better than that. But you're not teaching what he teaches. For example, regarding sales, if you noticed, I don't touch sales. I talk a bit about sales and I talk about, especially about inbound sales, people calling you, people contacting you because that's an area of expertise of mine.  How do you deal with objections? You know, I could help because I do have experience with that. But if he's like, dude, I want to go look to the max level. I'll just tell him like, look, go, you know, I can recommend books by Grand Codon because it's not my area of expertise. Or maybe I'll even get getting back to my area of expertise and I'll just say, come on, man, you know, why do you need to make all these outbound sales calls?  Why do you need them to, to go through the rejections and all that? You don't want to have it like more relaxed, fun, less salesy, less rejection, you know, or maybe I'll tell them to hire sales sales staff or something. But anyway, I either give it, getting back to my expertise zone, or I just honestly tell, like, say like, Hey, dude, go check this guy out. You know, like, if you guys ask me like, Hey, Robbie, how do you edit your videos? Which is a joke, by the way, because it's pretty evident that I don't. I'm not going to be like, Oh yeah, I'm the master of editing. I'm going to say, Hey, look, check out Robert Cislow. I have an interview with him on my YouTube channel and, you know, he's Grant Cardone's production manager. He's the best on the planet, maybe. So, and there are better videos by, you know, Nike and shit like that, but the best one man, like Michelangelo, I called him the Han Solo of video. So, so again, the point of this video is to basically tell you, look, you are valuable. You are valuable.  Sorry. Be, be, be like, be respectful of who you are, what you accomplished, and talk about your areas of expertise. So if you want to start making videos, just ask yourself, what do I know that most people don't? What am I good at that most people don't? What, what did I overcome that most people want to overcome? And then you can see what you can talk about. And, you know, don't wait until you're the master because it's not going to happen that way.  I just say, no. Can you teach me, like, can you teach me how to become a millionaire? No, I haven't, you know, become a millionaire, so I can't. But then I don't just say that, I say, but what I can teach you is how to build your own online business. And start making a couple of thousand dollars in just a month or two, while you can basically travel, you can do whatever, and it only worked like 10, 20 hours a week. And then they're like, oh, and it's funny, the guys who are like, how can you teach me how to become a millionaire? They don't want to become a millionaire. They just want to make some cash. So, so the same guys who are like that, they'll just tell me like, oh, wow, you know, can you teach me? It's like, oh, what happened? You said you wanted to be a millionaire. Yeah, yeah, but this sounds good. Sounds good, dude. So, so don't worry about it. Really, really don't worry about it.  There's an audience for everybody. Just make sure you're clear about who you are. Make sure you're clear about your strengths.  And that way you keep improving. And you know, it's going to be good. It's going to be awesome.  Don't, don't wait. Just like I said in the previous video about being coachable. You know, taking action, dude. Don't just do the things that are comfortable. Like, oh, Robbie tells you to meditate, meditate. No, just, I also say make, do a video every day. I don't care who you are. I don't care if you have a product. Make a video every day. Everybody should do it. Should be mandatory because it's going to help you build your integrity. It's going to get you known. It's going to get you attention.  So, so you don't start with nothing.   And it's kind of like I said, in many, many weeks ago about the guy called that follows me. That's called 365 days of no fap. Like the guy has a nice awesome following. Like he has, now he has less subscribers than me, but he has like 20 comments on every video because he makes like one video every couple of days. And it's also like a lot more personal topic than self development. So, so he can be like, you know, hey guys, I'm making a video about no fap. Sorry, a book about not fapping.  He got the attention.  No. Did he actually perform something that most people don't? Yes. Is this something that most people want to learn how to do? No. But are there some people that really want to know? Yeah. So he's an expert on that. He's an expert on not fapping for a year. He can make a book about it and already start making sales. He doesn't need to wait because he has the audience because he's got the attention on something. Again, no disrespect.  Yeah. I'm using this as an exaggeration. No judgment on not fapping. I don't know what it does because I've never done it, never needed. Cool. So I'm sorry for ranting a bit, but this is a very important topic for a very dear person that follows me for a while for a pretty long time and actively comments. So you get the VAP treatment. And I hope you started making videos, man.  You've built up the skill. You can teach people. You know what?  People need your knowledge. You know, oh, what are you going to think about me? They're going to think good things.   Teach people. Help them and you'll be good. Cheers, my brother.


So what is lesson study? Well, lesson study really is an investigation into teaching. A collaborative investigation by teachers. So if you turn the words around, it's always studying a lesson. And it's framed by two things. A topic that teachers want to teach to. A student question, students are going to answer. And then a teacher question that they were about, what I mean by that is a research question. Another name for lesson study is research lesson. And so what do you want to learn about teaching through this lesson that you're going to teach? And so through that question, teachers gather evidence, which can be student talks, student work, student writing. And then they use the evidence to kind of answer the question. So an example may be that you may want to teach a lesson about Nat Turner. And the question might be for students, was Nat Turner a hero? Or was Nat Turner's revolt a success? If your question is Nat Turner a hero, you might want to think about, well, to answer that question, what kind of criteria do kids have for measuring or judging a hero? So how do you help kids develop a criteria? How do kids use criteria? You might investigate that question through the work on Nat Turner. And then ideally that lesson, what you learn from that lesson, spills over into the whole practice. So they might think, oh, whenever I ask them a valuable question, I need to make sure kids have it a criteria they're writing from. So is a form of professional development through which teachers not only develop effective lessons, but really develop their own content knowledge and they develop their pedagogies and really there's the central values of teaching? So unlike other kinds of professional development, which are driven by kind of answers, here's what a researcher found or here's what we found. If you do this in a classroom, it's going to excel happen, right? Lesson study is a little messier, but lesson study, because it's research, it's driven by questions and not answers. And so it's teachers generating knowledge about teaching through their context and their practice. So it kind of takes professional development turns on its head, right? It's teachers can be producers of knowledge about instruction, not just consumers of knowledge. Lesson study takes place very much within a context, within an historical subject focus, within a particular student focus and within the framework of a professional practice. So it's highly collaborative and highly democratic and this of course is what makes it very messy, but also very exciting. It draws teachers in. It asks them to be thoughtful professionals. And I've had teachers say to me, particularly people who teach at the elementary level in Oakland where we have high number of students who have low literacy skills with schools that are under threat of sanction because their test scores are low, where they have histories we kind of pushed out of the curriculum because of that. And they're given scripted programs to use and measured by how the fidelity, which they implement that program to teachers say to me, you know, when I work with colleagues and we do lesson study, I kind of remember, I can be thoughtful about my practice, right? I can remember that that's why I go into teaching. Now, that's a lot to say about one particular practice and I'm not saying that happens all the time, but at the bottom lesson study is this notion for teachers that they can contribute to the knowledge base about teaching and I think that's a really powerful democratic idea. And Stan, you said that it asks them to be thoughtful professionals and it's really, it also provides the context and it honors their professionalism and it honors their craft. And I think they, it's very validating. And at the same time that it honors teachers, it's not about teachers. It's not about what any individual teacher does in the classroom. It's about teaching the subject well and keeping the students in mind. And so by that I mean is essentially trying to understand what and how the students are learning.


All right, so hello, my name is Bilal. I think half of you guys probably already know me, and that's not saying much because we're in a very intimate setting. Actually, I'm probably gonna rush through the slides because most of the people here already know a little bit about my background and some of the work that I've done, and I'm gonna go through the slides for the benefit of the people streaming and of the new friendly faces, hello. And after that, I hope that we can begin a conversation about this topic, about good is hard. Show of hands on the internet, how many people here want to use their lives and their work to do something they consider good? One, two, well, most people. Okay, yeah, me too. Because I guess when I was younger, I get a lot of the motivation and drive was to be successful, and the success was externally motivated and designed as an image of success that didn't really appeal to me. And so as I was growing up, I was trying to figure out who am I and what do I have to offer? And so this is gonna be a brief set of shots about some of those questions that I've asked. Oh yeah, also, somebody told me if I was gonna talk about good is hard, I had to talk about Eek the Cat. And to be honest, I don't know Eek the Cat, but who here does? Anybody? Yeah, okay, the camera guy knows he's Eek the Cat, and I bet you a lot of the people streaming know Eek the Cat because Eek the Cat is a television superstar. And one of his lines, one of his quotes is, it can't hurt to help. And he apparently goes out to try to help, and then over and over repeatedly gets hurt trying to help. And so I didn't know I had a mascot, but I was really glad to be talking with some of the Uber nerds here, and they're like, well, he's like totally Eek the Cat, man. I'm like, what are you talking about, Eek the Cat? And so I looked it up and apparently, hi, my name is Eek. I have a problem. I'd like to help. And so this happened in 2012 when I had been doing hackers based stuff from the States trying to think about, I guess, when the economy collapsed in my last year of college, I was wondering, what do we do now, guys? Like, we're gonna take a job, but there's no jobs. And then hackers based at the same time started elbowing, basically going from a couple dozen to hundreds and more just in the States. Mostly because of the situation that we were in, there was no jobs, but there was a lot of tools in the market and there was a lot of empty space. So space plus tools plus board people equals potential for hackers based breeding ground. It's like a Petri dish. And so America set a blossoming, blooming, all sorts of multicolored dyed haired weirdos gathering together in the abandoned warehouses. And so I got really excited about this and I did a little documentary tour. And then when the Arab Spring happened a couple of years later, I was like, oh, this is perfect. It's like the same sort of thing. A bunch of unemployed young people and maybe it's gonna be that same sort of breeding ground now for the Middle East. And so this is me in Baghdad doing a workshop with a bunch of LED throwies because the power kept cutting out. And that was the beginning of me trying to share something that I thought was beneficial. And of course people were like, oh, you're bringing tools. Well, guess what? We have problems. And I was like, oh wait, you can use tools to solve problems. And that was kind of the beginning of this because before this I was really just a curious nerd who liked art and making stuff. I was making laser cutters so I could do graffiti. That was mostly what I was doing. But once I started going to the Middle East and I was like, I got tools. And they were like, oh, great, because we got problems.  It was awesome. And so they were like, okay, so in the hospitals there's no power, so how about you just do something to help us keep track of people's hearts while they're in hospitals. And I was like, you know what? Because I was terrified of Baghdad I only booked a three day ticket. This is not a three day problem. So how about I give you the tools and then point you to Instructables or another website on the internet and you figure it out. And I kind of did that. I gave him some stuff and then I posted something on Instructables being like, I did this thing. I took a bunch of arduinos into Baghdad and they got problems. And then amazingly enough, this is where something cool happened. This is why you need to share. My friend Mortaba steps in on the comments section. I didn't know him back then. And he was like, hey, I'm probably the only guy in Iraq who knows about arduinos. Like connect them with me. So I connected them with a bunch of doctors that had this problem with the power cutting out. And he made this rapidly prototyped sensor that they would take around in the hospitals. And then I was like, okay, I was kind of on a roll. And I was like, oh yeah. Well, let me continue to move further into this thing. I was inspired because people kept encouraging this sort of work, being like, hey, you're like an activist now. Congratulations.  I'm like, oh cool, I'm an activist now. I'm not just a geek who likes art. I was like, why don't you like your 3D printing is the next cool thing that everyone wants to do cool stuff with solve problems with it. And I was like, oh, great idea. And so I started thinking about how to use 3D printing to be good and to help. And one of my first ideas was my cousin who recently passed away has an amputated leg because of sanctions and because of not being able to get good diabetes medication or healthy food or because Iraq sucks, diabetics often die. And so he did, but before he did, he lost his leg. And I thought maybe we can make him a more comfortable prosthetic socket because he was not moving a lot. And I thought if we can help him move with less pain, it would move his blood around and he could keep more of his toes on his other leg and so on and so forth. I was just trying to make the guy mobile. And so we made a scan of his leg and we kept on going. And I was using it to help build up the hackerspace community. Cause back then in my head, I was thinking, oh, you know what, in the West, a lot of the tools that people are using are to make like flame throwing unicorns and they take it out into the playa. This is sort of my experience in San Francisco and like Burning Man culture mixed with maker culture, hacker culture in the Bay. And I thought, you know, maybe if we like started with projects that weren't blinky lights, started with people looking at open source and DIY tools as a way to adjust problems, it would begin this path, this culture. And you know, now that I think about it, this is totally, I'm thinking about it right now. It's like my own personal trajectory was because of curiosity and interest and play. And it wasn't about like go out and solve problems. But what I started doing was inspiring people to address an issue instead of inspiring people to think about what matters to them, at least back then.  And it was really great. And we helped people connect with each other. That's Salah Zayn over there, who is one of the co-founders of the Hacker Space in Baghdad. 16 at the time, he's wearing a noise bridge shirt. It was my noise bridge shirt, by the way, it's not his noise bridge shirt. I want it back. Salah, looking at you. And so that was my experience in Baghdad. And I just kept doing these kinds of things. This is a quick project that I did in the south of Iraq with Geiger counters, because one day, after doing this work for some time, people started inviting me, being like, oh, you're like one of those technical people that is interested in NGO stuff. I'm like, I guess, yeah, sure. And so I came to this talk and they're like, here's some NGO people, here are their problems. And see what you can do. And I just literally just happened to have passed through the media lab and picked up one of these Geiger counters, because I thought it was another interesting open source tool that could address challenges and could be an inspiration. So I brought it as just inspiration. And then somebody was like, yeah, so in the country, in the part of the country where I'm from, there's a lot of depleted uranium and people are dying and kids are sick. And that's my problem. That's like what I want to use my NGO to address. And so I thought, hey, let's go to Basra and see if we can use these tools to identify if there's higher concentration of radiation because currently nobody is admitting that depleted uranium is a problem. It's still used in modern warfare. It's still considered a legal type of ammo.  But it is. At least that's what it seems from some of the research. Okay. And then as I've been doing this for some time, more and more of these organizations that are popping up, like the Global Humanitarian Lab, which is in Geneva. And some point, basically there was a turning point in my life when I started doing prosthetics for amputees because 3D printing can make custom size shapes and it was really a good application for prosthetics. And so I started getting interested in this and somebody invited me to LA to help work on some hands with him. But when I got there, this is when I started thinking about intentionality in a totally different way. Up until this point, I was just super excited and jazzed and trying to go from like one project to the next, just trying to get people excited about making, building and creating these community spaces together. And then at that point when I went to his house and there was four television cameras and then me as like the sole engineer and my friend that I just happened to bring with me and I realized that it was a giant TV show and that I was getting swept up in like this image creation thing. And that's when I started thinking about this quote basically from Foucault, which is people know what they know. They frequently know why they do what they do, but you can never really know what the impacts of what you do is going to be. So a really quick story. A couple of days ago, I was in Cairo with my dad and my dad bought a piece of bread and he gave some homeless persons a beggar basically a piece of bread because they looked hungry and they were really appreciative and that inspired my dad to buy a stack of bread and to pass it out and basically he started a riot where people were like ripping bread out of each other's hands and there was a fight in the street and so my dad in his kindness and his good-hearted nature thought that he was doing something that was going to be helpful and beneficial but in the end had some unintended consequences. And so basically this is the graph of the world and why people do things. This is a guiding star for many people in corporations. Does this or does this not increase shareholder value? And I'm wondering what my guiding star was. So after a lot of these situations as I was growing up as I was going through these experiences as I was pursuing my curiosity, as I was pursuing what I thought felt good and right to do and then started getting uneasy about it, I started wondering like what it like, I want to at least get the two bullet points from Foucault down like what I'm doing, right? Like I want to know and why, right? And so I tried to start understanding my own guiding star and one of the two examples actually after I was in this state and the person who actually gave me these two examples sitting right over here, hello, Quinn. I came up to Quinn one day and was like, oh my God, Quinn, I don't really know what's going on. I don't even know like good or bad or, you know, sometimes I'm wondering about if I'm kind of pursuing external validation or accolades. And Quinn was like, just one second, I got two amazing stories for you. And so she gave me these really two great stories about people who succeeded at doing something good with their lives. And you know that because they got one of the most prized achievements that a human can get, which is, I don't know if you can tell that's, that's Alfred Noble on a coin and that's Noble Prize. So who here's won a Nobel Prize? But if you did, it would probably be pretty sweet, right? I would be really impressed. I'd want to talk to you. Okay, so Fritz Haber, if anybody knows him, he won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking research in nitrogen fixing. And the reason why Fritz Haber needed nitrogen fixing is because there was a blockade from South America of Guano coming into Germany because Germany was taking all that bat crap and turning it into bat boom. They were turning poop into bombs because that's where you get nitrogen from and nitrogen is an important component in bombs. Fritz Haber's genius was to say, oh my God, the air is mostly nitrogen. And if we can fix the nitrogen from the air and turn it into something that we can use in explosives, we could basically turn, create explosives from thin air. And he did that. And you'd think that wouldn't have earned him a Nobel Prize, but because of the third point of Foucault's quote, which is you never really know what the outcome of what you're gonna do is, he happened to feed a hungry planet. World War II, industrialization was happening. Polio was eradicated basically. Tons of more people were surviving the first five years of their life and we had an explosion in population that we couldn't really feed unless Fritz Haber fixed nitrogen and was able to create a lot of fertilizer for our plants to feed a hungry planet. So he won the Nobel Prize and I'm sure if he was here, it would be really exciting to talk to him even though he has a really twisted and dark life, including making chemical warfare and one of the stories that I know about him is his wife shot herself because she was so disappointed in him, she couldn't bring it to herself to shoot him so she shot herself and he was like, oh man, my wife is bleeding to death but I really need to go see if the chemical weapons that I made are working. So he went out to the front lines that same day as his wife was bleeding to death basically and he was like, yep, chemical weapons work real good. Look at him struggling to breathe. Anyway, so Fritz Haber is one messed up dude. He still won a Nobel Prize after doing that. After, yes, people knew and they gave him that gold little coin thing. I couldn't believe it. Anyway, so now we got to this guy. Look at the sweet cutie face. His name is Antonio Igas Moniz. I'm sure I'm mispronouncing his name but he was a sweetheart and we know this because of his journals. His journals were full of little descriptions about how much he cared about his patients and how much he was really sad to see them struggling.  And so he figured out this one simple trick to help really deranged and mentally disturbed patients actually have a life of sanity or partial sanity. And it was supposed to be used in the most extreme of cases because you literally had to remove a portion of the skull. His protege basically figures out this thing where if you put your fingers right over here, you'll feel a tear duct.  And he's like, oh my God, we don't need to cut the skull open anymore. We can just shove an ice pick through people's eyeballs. Right? And this is so much simpler. Yeah, yeah, you can feel it. If you shove an ice pick over there, it's one step closer to your DIY at home lobotomy. Please do not try this at home. But he tried it all over the country. World War II ended and it's just a matter of the timing of it that a bunch of people were coming home from the trenches, totally disturbed because of the toxic gases that Haber made. And so these stories are kind of like intertwined. It's pretty crazy.  I can't believe this Haber guy, his wife shot herself. And then he still went out to the trenches. And so they're really, really upset and traumatized. So it's post-traumatic stress, right? And so I think this guy's name was William something or another. Anyway, Monance's protege goes around with ice picks and then does a road show. There are pictures of him doing two lobotomies simultaneously left and right handed through people's tear ducts because their children were not paying attention in class. It's like the early Ritalin was an ice pick through the face. And so this guy, guess what else he got? Monance got the Nobel Prize too. And it's all about that third clause in Foucault's statement. You never know what you're gonna do is going to do. And so if we're gonna talk about Fritz Haber real quick and see how this cookie continues to crumble, all that nitrogen that he fixed is now running into the Gulf of Mexico and creating giant plumes of life or death. I'll leave it up to you to Wikipedia later. Okay, sorry guys. Thank you for being such a great audience. I wanted to go from there to talk about how these questions are still coming up for me in my work. And after that time, I started really questioning what is the purpose of all this open source and all this hacker stuff that I've been doing? What do I really want to do? And initially I thought I wanted to continue down the line of trying to address global challenges with these approaches. And so I participated in Poc. I went to Egypt, sorry, this is Lebanon where there was a trash crisis and I started trying to figure out how to address some of the problems with trash, with DIY solutions. And that's unintended consequence. And then the last thing that I did was my most recent experiment, which is I decided that I didn't really understand my own intentions because I was coming in from afar. I was kind of dropping in and being like, oh man, global challenges are a problem. Let's use some of these tools that I know about and that I have in my circles to try to address them. And then I thought, no, it doesn't really make sense. In order for me to feel authentic about my creativity and about my generosity, I need to make friends with people. So this is a bunch of, I think this is all Syrian refugees, but this is a bunch of Syrian refugees at an organization and we were doing a design thinking workshop. Okay, so design thinking, if anybody knows, is part of this whole line of research into human-centered design, trying to talk to people about their lives to derive the solutions that you create. Rather than sitting there being like, oh, I got an Arduino, what can I make? It's talking to people and then deciding from there what to produce.  And they thought that the best way to do it is to encourage projects from the youth that don't have jobs and to fund them and to teach them design processes. And I did that, I did that for a year. And at some point, I just started not really seeing returns, I guess. I felt like we were using so much resources and the outputs were so limited and that the most that we were doing was actually creating a safe space for them to make friends with each other and that was actually, first of all, that's really cool, okay? That in and of itself is a really awesome thing to do. And at the end, I just started wondering what I was doing with all of my work and I decided that I missed what brought me to this place to begin with, which is my own personal creativity and excitement and energy. And so, although I went first from that to, hey, I have to share this idea of a sense of agency and capacity to the tools, creating solutions, to me directly doing this sort of research and sharing to finally being like, wait, you know what, maybe I should just go back and start making stuff that is really fun. So I started working on some natural language processing projects and also I think I found one clever trick to combine these two. So I started a small project with my friend called Pitchworthy, where I get to do the designing and the programming of the developments and manage a team and it's really fun, but the outputs of it are connected to this sort of mindset and process of encouraging people to continue to start projects. And that's kind of where I'm at. I actually wanted to, hopefully I did that quickly and that we still have, yeah, it's like 17 minutes, shoot, son.  I want to get feedback first on some of the things that I just shared and some of the challenges that I talked about and some of the ways that I've went about resolving those and see also where people are in their lives and some of the ways that they've tried to do good and maybe some of their doubts if you'd be willing to share. We can even turn off the microphone. I'm sorry, streamers, it's going to get personal. So you got to look away, all right. Man, I'm weird. Okay, so if anybody is willing, I'm going to say that we'll get into this little circle and have a discussion on some of these topics. First of all, like quick intros, like where do you come from? What have you been up to? What colors do you like? Okay.


Welcome to the WISIS 2023 forum and I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by one of the key drivers of this forum and of course that's the ITU and I have with me the new Secretary General of the ITU. Good to see you. Thank you. Good to see you. Great to be here. What will be your fingerprints on this forum for the future? It is indeed a forum for the future but it's actually one that has existed for 20 years. And so for me I think it's important to look back at what the international community committed to back in 2003 when the first phase of the World Summit was held here in Geneva and it resulted in a declaration and a plan of action that included many connectivity targets that we did not achieve. So what I would like to see this week and beyond is that we make some efforts to kind of double down and re-energize the process because we do need to achieve those targets that we agreed to back in 2003. And what are you hoping from the stakeholders, the vast different? Well there are many different stakeholders gathered here for the WISIS forum from governments, private sector, academia, civil society and they bring different experiences, best practices and case studies. We have an incredible little exhibition that is showcasing some great solutions in the space of e-health, in the space of agriculture, in the space of sustainability and so my hope is that we can foster this exchange of experiences and actually help scale up some of these digital solutions. Okay Doreen, the new ITU Secretary General, thank you very much for your time. Thank you.


What's up everyone today is Monday February 3rd at 8.09 a.m. Today's free video watch this day So if this is your first time watching the video or you're new to my see what I like to do Is I like to do a free video watch list for everyone on YouTube and then usually every day or every other day I do this for my C members usually if there's a lot of stocks in play I like to do this, but if it's a slow day, you know, I like to kind of keep it a lot simpler So today's the day after Super Bowl I'm sure that a lot of people are either hung over or they didn't show up to work today So I anticipate that's gonna be like a less of a volume day, but before I get started I just want to let you guys know about a free mentorship course that me and Bob put together for the brand-new trader is Available at my investing club.co. I'll have the link in the description as well There's a free two-hour webinar for the brand-new trader if you're an M. I see you already see all this stuff before so don't need to watch but Let's get started so NNVC this is the head of the snake. So if you've been living under a rock lately You must not know that the corona virus is kind of the talk of the town talk of the street A lot of stocks are going crazy because of it So that means that there's a lot of opportunity for us to capitalize I've made a ton of videos on sympathy plays the sector plays for the members So just go into the library and watch it if you have any questions or if you need some more detailed mentorship hit me up So NNVC is kind of in the main stock and play I woke up this morning and there was a massive gap down I don't really see any news yet If there is news, I probably missed it, but this kind of went down a bunch.  I think it's more the news is becoming more and more accepted Anyway, that means that there's an opportunity for us So what I'm looking for in the morning is you see how this support is gonna act as resistance So it's right in the between. So I want to kind of guesstimate it up to 15 So in the morning, I'm looking to short bounce towards 15 and 17 17 is the red to green mark that I'm looking to short. So 15 to 17 is gonna be my main areas to watch this kind of area B.i.m. I This is kind of like a similar type of thing kind of waiting for this It kind of pushed up in the morning and just gave it all back Which tells me that there really isn't much interest in the stock So in the morning, I'm looking for a push towards five and five twenty two short This is kind of like 530. So actually let me adjust my plan 30 Looking for that and basically what I always recommend is everyone draw out their lines because if you eyeball it like I do You might mess up sometimes. So that's that for B.i.m. I see BLI Again similar types of setups here. All the stocks are broken down So we're basically looking for a push in the morning again previous support becomes resistance. So three eighties I'm looking at I'm looking at four in the morning and I'm looking at four twenty in the morning And again, I eyeball it because I've been doing it for so long I highly recommend that everyone draw out their lines. So looking for CBLI towards that level LLIT I caught a short on this in the morning very quick short actually looking to short some again right now See if I can guess For Anyway So basically what I'm looking for on something like this is I'm looking for a pop towards this red to green level I'm looking to add around this 310 area. So that's kind of what I'm looking for and this is a late print misprint So it didn't actually fill What else is there CPS age again all these stocks today are low hanging fruit I don't really see any hot chicks hot plays a day yet That might change later on throughout the morning But it's kind of what I'm looking for CPS age 160 170 in the morning morning pop Last a lot least codecs again very similar setups. They try to push pre-market and they gave back So I'm looking to short the pop here ideally towards this red to green level and then if we get 350 that'd be ideal If you're a member of MIC what I do is I post some of the videos of the week Some of the most recent videos of the week here I don't post it all because I assume that most people watch it as soon as it comes out So these are kind of the videos on the weekend that I'm sure people miss so that's that What else is there So what I like to do at the end of these videos is I like to give you guys a secret word So you could comment and let me know that you guys are watching to the end of the video a lot of people are lazy They don't like to watch so this is kind of my way to check in and see who's actually watching So today's secret word is gonna be Super Bowl the reason why is cuz when I went to Super Bowl with bow last year I want to get like a souvenir so that I could always remember the day and this is kind of the souvenir that I got and I Always keep it like next to my desk. So Just some history So yeah guys if you have any questions, let me know and good luck today.


Okay, so let's solve another problem, right? So, x squared minus 6 equals to 0. And if this thing was on the other side, all you would do is bring it over to this side, right? The whole point with the first thing that you have to do when it comes to solving these types of equations is bringing all the x's to one side of the equation, right? So, right now we've got negative 4x squared 16x. What we want to do is bring the 16x over to this side. Now, yeah, we'll discuss another way we can do this, but what happens if you do it the other way, you're going to lose a solution. So what happens is you grab this guy, break it over, so that's negative 4x squared minus 16x is equal to 0, right? And you're looking for the greatest common factor that you can take out of this, right? For the numbers, you have a 4 here and a 16 there. So that means you can take 4 out of both of them, right? So you're going to take a 4 out. If you want, put your brackets in so that way you know you're going to fill in the terms here, right? You're going to take a negative 4, or you're just going to take a 4 out, and this has an x squared and that has an x, so you can take out an x. What's left here is that's negative 4, so you need negative 1 here, and you have an x squared, you've got an x, so negative x, okay? Over here, what do I multiply 4x by to give me negative 16x? Well, all I need is negative 4. And again, you solve for this, you set each one equal to 0. So 4x is equal to 0, so x is equal to 0. Over here, you've got negative x minus 4 is equal to 0. That's a negative x, so I'm just going to bring that over instead of bringing the negative 4 over. So it's going to be x is equal to negative 4, and those are our solutions, right? Simple as that, all you do is take out a GCF. Now, I mentioned that there's another way to solve for this, but what happens is you're not eliminating a solution and you don't want to do that. You don't want to eliminate any solutions in mathematics, in general anyway. So let's solve this equation in another way, and I've seen people do this and it only gives you half the answer. And most people would look at this and say, okay, we have an x squared and an x, I can't combine those. Or some people would look at this and get a genius idea, hey, there's an x squared and an x here. So why don't I divide both sides of the equation by x? And that would get rid of one of my x's. Again, you can do anything to an equation as long as you do it to both sides. So I could do anything to this, as long as I do the same thing to this, right? So I want to get rid of that x, so I'm going to divide by x. I want to, you know, if I'm dividing that by x, this side by x, I have to divide this side by x, right? So this kills this, and this reduces this down to x to the power of 1. So you've got negative 4, x is equal to 16, and then divide by negative 4, divide by negative 4, so x is equal to negative 4. And that's your solution, right? Well, that's only half your solution. I'll take this question, and we had the other answer where x equals 0 was a solution, but because we divide it by an x, we eliminate a solution, and that's one of the, one places where I've seen people make a lot of mistakes, and they eliminate part of the answer to their equations, and basically when you take it to functions, their functions are not complete, right? You don't, you don't have the second answer. So in general, never divide by an x to get rid of an x, because you don't get the full answer, you only get half the picture, and that's not a good thing. So don't do this. Bad.