I'm starting right away because, again, we got a lot of ground to cover. Hi, everybody. Welcome to my talk. My name is Liz. I work at Vitals. That's my Twitter handle. If there are warning, it's a lot of Star Trek and Dungeons and Dragons. If you choose to follow me, but if you do, great. Today, we're going to talk about why we never get to Web Accessibility 102. Now, before I start, I have a couple of disclaimers that I need to cover. For one, I do not identify as disabled. I am coming at this from the perspective of an able-bodied person who works a lot in accessible development. There's a lot of great disabled developers and internet users who have said a lot of the things I'm going to say today. I'm going to give you some resources at the end of this talk so you can go find them yourselves and read what they have to say. Disclaimer number two. I'm going to touch very briefly on some legal stuff here. But in case it's not obvious, I am not a lawyer. And even if I were, I am not your lawyer. So you should not be taking legal advice from me. Disclaimer number three. This is going to be a very US-focused talk on cognizance. There's people here from other countries, but I'm not as familiar with other countries as I am with the Americans with Disabilities Act. So although I hope there's still some things I'll be talking about today that apply pretty widely. And then finally, there's currently a debate in the disabled community over the terminology, specifically disabled people versus people with disabilities. I'm going to be using both interchangeably because I've met people who feel strongly both one way and the other. I'm not here to pick a side on that issue. But if I say a term that's not your preferred term, then if you identify as disabled, I apologize. OK, so let's start with why I'm here. Like many of you, I saw this tweet back in December, opening the RailsConf call for proposals. And I thought, OK, am I working on anything cool that I think the Rails community might want to see? And over the past year and a half, about I've been really ramping up into accessible development at my company. So I thought, OK, how about I talk about that? In fact, how about I give a presentation I've already given at my company to various teams in various settings? And that presentation goes like this. Welcome to Accessibility 101. Disabled people use your website. Some use screen readers. Some are colorblind. Try out your website using just the keyboard. You get the idea. But before I was in software development, my background was in academia. And one of the cardinal rules of academia is try not to say things that other people have already said. And while this is an important topic, and I'm sure there's people here who could learn something from it, this is definitely already been said. And not just in general at this conference. You can see it in 2017, 2015, 2014, all the way back to 2006. Now I'm not trying to imply that these are needlessly repetitive. I watched all of these in prep for this talk. Just the different perspectives alone that the different developers came with towards this topic makes it worth your while to check them out. Also, it's not necessarily a bad thing to say the same thing at a conference. I mean, Heaven knows we get to talk like this about once a year. How Docker improve my Rails app, cure my acne, save my marriage, broken world peace. But here's the thing. Take Docker as an example. Yes, we get to talk like this pretty frequently. But it's complemented by talks like this. Deep dive into Docker containers for Rails developers. Notice the words one, deep dive. And two, four, Rails developers. So something that's very specific that requires your own a lot of expertise into a subject. And also something tailored to our particular audience. And when we just teach one over again, over and over again, we don't seem to get talks like this that are catered to our audiences and that go into sort of deep divey things. And what kinds of talks am I talking about? How about accessible syntax? Where it lives, what it looks like. Did you know that if you have a strike, if you need a strike through somewhere on your website, if you put that strike, make that strike through happen through DEL tags or make that strike through happen through text decoration line through in your CSS, it can impact how certain screen reader browser combinations read it, which is important if you've got anything like this on your website where it's really important that the screen reader says what's got a line through in it, what's the real price of whatever it is you're working on. Okay, but Liz, this is RailsConf. How about a Rails specific talk? Okay, how I hacked NVDA into loving Rails and Rails into loving NVDA. NVDA is the only widely used open source screen reader. So you can crack it open, get an idea of both how NVDA works and how your average screen reader works too. So you can totally submit a pull request. Let's say you happen to have a lot of specialized knowledge about a certain extremely popular framework. You can submit a PR to NVDA to make it work better with your framework or a PR to Rails to make it work better with NVDA or screen readers in general. But we don't seem to get specific talks like this. And, you know, when I, I'm sorry. So my first idea of this talk was to say, oh well, it's time to throw off 101 and start getting into 102. And then I sat down with Tim Springer. Tim Springer is the CEO of a company called Level Access. They do a lot of stuff. They will audit your company website for accessibility. They have great training programs, educational materials. They're great. You should check them out after this talk.  And for starters, he pointed out for one, it's not important for everybody to have 102-level knowledge, which is fair.  But also, when you go into a website, the top 10 out of the 100 most prevalent accessibility-related bugs that an organization has, usually 80% of the excess, are gonna be 80% of the accessibility issues in total. And it's the stuff you know about providing labels for form fields, providing image alt attributes. So clearly, we keep giving these 101 talks, but we're not implementing that 101 knowledge. So this is where the liberal arts part of my brain sort of kicks into overdrive, because my background was in English and also education. And if we're trying to pass on knowledge and we're not doing it successfully, it's like, you know, why? Why is this happening? And I found a fairly simple answer to this, which is that we develop expertise in the things we work on. And we're just not sort of putting in the work into accessible development. Okay, now we got to the bottom of that. Thank you so much for coming to my talk. Oh man, oh darn, I've got 32 minutes left. Well, I guess we can go into the second question this led me to. Why aren't we doing the work to get better at accessible development? And this turned out to be a bit of a complicated question, with a lot of different factors coming into it. And I'm gonna start with the least comfortable one so it gets better from here on out. And that is ableism. Every single person in this room, without exception, and anybody watching this video later, is grew up in an ableist society. None of us chose to do that, but we can have a say in how ableist our society is going forward, but we can get to that later. One of the most pernicious ways that ableism impacts all of us is that it erases disabled people.  And we're gonna do a quick experiment. The 2010 census asked the people who took it if they identified as having a disability. Now, to be clear, this is just people who self-identify as having a disability and are comfortable writing that on a census, which is of itself a bit problematic, which we'll also get to in a second. And we're gonna do an experiment. I want you to raise your hand if the number that I say to you sounds too low and then put it down if you think it sounds too high. Ready? Let's start with one in 100. Does that sound too low? Raise your hand. Okay, one in 50. One in 10. One in five. If your hands down now, you're finally right. 19% of people in America identify as having a disability and that's probably an undercount. So for one, of course, there's people who just don't feel comfortable disclosing on a form that they have a disability. Certain disabilities are chronically undercounted in certain communities. For instance, autism is very, very undercounted in girls and women. And there's also just people who say, yes, it's hard to get out of bed every day because my pain is so bad, but I'm not like disabled. Also, I'm sure there's people at this conference, possibly in this room who are colorblind and might not consider themselves disabled even though that's considered a disability that we have to work on in accessible development. But we're gonna stick with 19% because that's a nice hard meeting number that we can hold on to for later. Bearing that in mind, I'm just gonna go through two aspects of the society that we went into and they're very formative aspects, that stuff that we grew up with to give you an idea of how ableism works. So let's start with entertainment. In the 2017, 2018 primetime television season of the regular recurring characters, 1.8% had a disability. Furthermore, according to the Washington Post, of the characters that we see in television and in movies who have a disability, I think it was 95% are played by actors who don't have a disability. Let's also talk a bit about education. I am sure many of us here learned about Helen Keller in school and you probably learned that FDR used a wheelchair. Did you know that Harriet Tubman had a seizure disorder? Did you know that if you learned in science class about, oh, a star's color corresponds to its age and we have different kinds of stars that are different colors. Also, we can tell how far away stars are. You've got two awesome women scientists to thank for that. Henrietta Swan Levitt and Annie Jump Cannon, both awesome women of STEM in our history, also both deaf. I could go on and on about disabled histories. There's so much incredible stuff that disabled people have done and contributed to the history of the United States, but we don't seem to be learning it in school. And again, these are just two aspects of our society. I could go on about our sports, our news, our politics, but we'll just stick with that. What about tech? So I tried hard to find some hard numbers on what percent of tech workers identify as having a disability. And they're very hard to find. I did find one major tech company that did ask its employees if they identified as having a disability, and that was Slack. And before I go forward, thank you Slack for doing this. Now, because you asked this question of your employees, we can have a conversation like this and use these numbers to move forward. 1.7% of Slack's workers identify as having a disability. Again, compare that to 19% as we see in the census. I'm not saying 19% is necessarily what we have to shoot for because many people who are disabled are very old and retired. Some of them have disabilities that won't let them work, but surely we can do better than under 2% in all of these situations. Given that disabled people are so erased from our culture, is it really so surprising that they get erased from the work that we do? Is it really so surprising that they get erased from what our companies and teams prioritize? Now, I'm gonna move on from this, though, because I don't think this problem is quite as simple as if you're not doing accessible development, then it's because of ableism. There's some other reasons, too. When I sat down, again, with Tim Springer, he said that a lot of the companies that he audits tend to have this sort of fix-break mindset for accessible development. I've also seen some companies that sort of have a feature mindset where it's like, okay, on Monday we're gonna make the home page screen reader readable and then on Tuesday we're gonna work on something else or in a fix-break mindset, okay, this link isn't coming up, we'll fix it, and then we'll move on with our lives. I've got Tim to thank for this analogy. Accessibility is really more like security, which is that at no point do you reach, do you get to the point where you're like, okay. Site's secure, time to move on with our lives. It's something you've got to integrate into your workflow and it's always changing, you've got to keep thinking about it. But instead, when we have this sort of short burst mindset where we deal with it and then we move on, you get situations where, for instance, about once every three years you go, oh shoot, our site's not accessible, let's outsource it to a third party. Thank you, third party, for taking care of this, let's go on with our lives. I've also seen some companies do an accessibility hackathon. Hackathons are great if you've got like some kind of hair-brained idea and you just want to see if it can work. Hackathons aren't super great if you're trying to make your site accessible for people with disabilities and do that kind of long-term work that requires changing your workflow. Even accessibility hackathons where you're trying to make a new, existing technology is not super great because, again, from the first place, only 1.7% of people working in tech if we take Slack's numbers as an average, which is the best we can really do for now, then you're not going to be consulting very much with people with disabilities on what they need. And I know this because about, so a few years ago I started learning sign language and one of the side effects I found out from learning ASL is that once a year, someone sends you an article about somebody inventing sign language reading gloves. You could set your calendar to it, to be honest. Once a year, someone's gonna send me this article about someone inventing this. And they always wanna know what I think. And I can always point out to what deaf people have already said on the subject, which is that it's cool technology, it's a neat trick, it can't do anything that a piece of paper and a pen can do much faster, much more accurately, and much cheaper. And, again, stakeholders tend to have this same sort of short brisk mindset, too. If your stakeholders only come to you once a year saying, by the way, is everything accessible? Then suddenly, oh shoot, it's important, we have to work on it. If they're not coming, they're usually not gonna come to you every week and say, cool new feature, is it accessible? Cool new feature, is it accessible? So this is just sort of a structural thing that's in place that's keeping us from working on this stuff. There's also what we prioritize as developers. So I know I have some say in the tickets I can take on in my company, I imagine that's a common thing where, you know, for implementing some kind of new technology, I might volunteer and say like, oh yeah, let me work on that so I can get familiar with it. And I got a lot of say in the stuff I do in my personal projects. And usually the things I work on, before I work on it, it fits one of these three categories. One, it personally makes my life easier. It's so much fun to come to Sprint Review and be like, hey everybody, remember how we used to have to push to three different refos and wait for two different employees and then we would see if what we're working on is working at all in the first place. Well, guess what? Now we can just test it locally. It's always great because the stakeholders are like, oh yeah, that's cool, you can work faster. And all your teammates are like, whoa, yes! All the high fives! Second, does it have a big impact?  And last, does it look cool? Hey, I implemented a new dropdown. It's got a smooth animation. It fits in with the aesthetic of our website. And this is also, this is I found is the reverse of what I said before. Your teammates go, oh yeah, that's pretty cool. Good job, Liz. And all the stakeholders go, whoa! Awesome! Unfortunately, accessible development doesn't really take any of these boxes. Does it personally make our lives easier if only 1.7% of us identify as having a disability? Usually it's not going to be making our lives easier. Does it have a big impact? Even though that we have disabled users for the internet and our site, we often don't because, again, ableism tends to erase the perspectives of disabled people. We tend to not feel that kind of impact. And does it look cool? If anything, it unticks this box sometimes. I had to have a conversation with my team last year where I said, listen, sorry, I know we were really excited about this new tooltip feature that we wanted to implement, but it doesn't work with a screen reader, so unfortunately we have to keep using our old clunky tooltips. And then finally, there's some structural problems in the way that we work that I wanna address. For starters, there's front end versus back end nonsense. If you are new enough to this industry to have avoided this, I am sorry for the nonsense I'm about to introduce into your life, but there is a perception in some corners of programming that unless you are personally building your code with ones and zeros, you're not doing real code. All that silly stuff we do in the front end with the HTML and the CSS, anybody can do that. It's super easy. Oh my God, do I wish that were true? I say this as a front end dev, because if this were true, every site on the internet would be 100% accessible. But you know, when you look at front end as like the easy stuff that we don't think about and that you know, the less talented developers deal with, then you're less likely to prioritize it and that is where a lot of accessible development lives. There's also one last thing that I wanna note that's just an interesting trend I found while I was researching this talk. We're gonna do a quick experiment. Everybody close your eyes. Now I want you to raise your hand if sometime during your career you have ever copied and pasted a snippet of code from a tutorial or Stack Overflow into whatever it is you're working on. Just to build off it even. Keep your hand raised if you've done this in the past month. Okay, everybody look around. You're in good company. It's something we all do, it's something we've all done. But, and this, I've got an example up here of how an each do loop works in the ER Bay that's an example of something when you're learning something you might copy and paste it into your code. But if you look at that, you'll notice the HTML tags that get used to it are ULLI. And that's about as complicated as it usually gets in tutorials and Stack Overflow answers. Good semantic HTML is absolutely critical to having a good accessible website. And yet when all of the examples that we're looking at and that we're copy and pasting and building off of are at their most complicated ULLs and LIs, then you're not gonna have good semantic HTML on your website. And you're not gonna internalize in your mind that good code looks like proper semantic HTML. Okay, enough of that. Let's go into how we fix this. How do we move forward? And coming to this question, my first thought is, okay, well, who does this well? What industries are very good at accommodating people with disabilities? The unfortunate answer to that is pretty much nobody. So it's like, okay, well, who does this okay? And I could think of two major industries. One of them was architecture. The other one was education. There's a reason why public buildings that have been made after 1990 have hallways that are wide enough for wheelchairs to go through. There's a reason why, if your child has a disability, you can go to their public school and say I need this disability accommodated and you should be able to get that disability properly accommodated. Again, there's a difference between how things should be and the reality of how things are, but at least there's the expectation in both fields that it should happen this way. What do these two fields have in common? Well, for architecture, it's the Americans with Disabilities Act for education. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Big regulations that got passed that said this is the way things have to be done in this industry or there can be consequences, which leads to my first suggestion. Lobby for laws and policies that apply the ADA consistently across the internet. I understand there might be a conception here that I'm wading into controversial territory since laws and policies and regulations people tend to have strong feelings about how many is too many, but believe it or not, this is actually something that people from all corners of the political spectrum have been begging for for a long time and yet haven't gotten. Let me back up and explain why. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act passes and about a couple years later, the internet starts taking off in a big way. And since then, we really haven't been sure how to apply the ADA to the internet. Let me just give you one taste of some of the complications that arise. One of the big key features of the Americans with Disabilities Act is that places of public accommodation, that's the quote, must be made accessible for people with disabilities. Well, where is the physical place when we talk about the internet? So let's say I'm a disabled person on vacation in France and I'm gonna use RailsConf as my example. I don't know if their website is accessible or not. I didn't check. RailsConf says, our tickets are on sale, go buy them. And I try to buy them, but because the site's inaccessible, I can't and all the tickets sell out. Because I was in France, does the ADA still apply to me? Okay, if it's not the physical location of the computer, is it where the servers are located? If I am on my phone, scrolling through it and walking down the street, does the place of public accommodation move with me? We're really not sure. So industry leaders went to, first they went to Congress and said, please, just tell us, pass a law that tells us how the ADA should apply to the internet. And you'll be shocked to hear Congress did not succeed in doing that. So they went to the DOJ and said, just give us your best guess about how the ADA should be applied to the internet. And the Obama administration DOJ said, okay, yeah, we'll do that, but then they didn't. I think a couple of things happened. For one, the DOJ found that, oh wow, this is very technical stuff, it's hard to write. Oh wow, the internet changes a lot every couple of years, so it's hard to write consistent regulations and also it just got put on the back burner. Anyway, an administration change happened and for a while they were still committed to doing this, but last year they said, we're giving up, we're not really sure how the ADA applies to the internet, you're on your own. So please, after this talk, call your member of Congress or possibly the DOJ and say, give us some guidelines for how the ADA should apply to the internet because right now we don't really know. Also, while you're at it, ask your representatives to have literally any policy whatsoever on disabled people on their website. In the 2016 election of the four major candidates in the final election, only one had a section on their website about their policies for people with disabilities. I'm not gonna say who, cause that's not important. The importance is you had three major candidates who had nothing on their website about 19% laws that would impact 19% of America. And again, to put that number in perspective, our best guesses as far as we can tell for the number of people in America who are undocumented is three to 4%. And yet every candidate has something to say about what should be done about undocumented immigrants. This is again, across country, across county, oh goodness, cross party and also multi-country problem. So your representative almost certainly doesn't have a section on their website about people with disabilities. Call them and ask for it because having something, anything gives reporters something to ask questions about. It gives activists something to hold them accountable to, even if it's not a very good thing. Maybe then, once we have these in place, we can start being an industry that's more like architecture or education where there's the expectation that of course we're going to be building accessible stuff. Okay, at the company level, it can be difficult to convince your bosses that we need to work on accessibility related work. So let's start with the first one, which is a carrot. Accessibility will almost always improve your SEO. Google's box do not have eyes. They do not have hands to use a mouse. All they can do is parse through your HTML, CSS, possibly your JavaScript that comes up on your website and make their best guesses as to what's there. And if none of your images have alt attributes, they don't know what's in them. So if you do this work, you will almost certainly see it bump up in your SEO. You can also use a mission statement. Almost every company has a mission statement with the words everybody or our users in it. So if you come to them and say, do we really mean everybody or do we mean 81% of everybody? Also, this is another tip from Tim. He said reference a real user experience. When you say, oh, our homepage is in screen reader accessible, that kind of feels sterile. If you say, we have users out there who use assistive technology and they can't access our homepage. There's no reason this should be a thing. We can do something about it. It feels a lot more real. Use a real user story. And then finally, we're gonna talk about the legal Boogeyman. We've exhausted carrots. Let's go to sticks. About five years ago, a surf by lawsuit, as I heard a lawyer call it once, for accessibility was pretty rare. They are picking up in frequency, which is where someone sends an automated screen reader through your site. It gets caught in a keyboard trap or something.   You can preempt that. And again, these are becoming more and more common if you have an accessible website to begin with. Also, let's talk a little bit about the Unruh Act. I don't have as much time as I want to to go into this in depth, but California passed a law called the Unruh Act that does a lot of things. But one of the big things that does is, it says anything touching commerce in the state of California cannot discriminate against people with disabilities. So let me ask you, your company, its website, does it get used by people in the state of California? If the answer is yes, and it's not accessible, you might be liable for problems under the Unruh Act. And what makes the Unruh Act unique is it allows for monetary damages per infraction. So let me ask you something. Could you afford, it's up to $5,000. Could you afford to pay $5,000 to everybody in California who can't use your website? The answer is no, you might wanna look into stuff. Just as a side note, pretty much any example you've ever heard of a company getting in trouble for not having an accessible website, they weren't in trouble with the ADA, they were in trouble with the Unruh Act. That's what happened to Target, it's a really cool story but I don't have time to go into it. At the team level, Keyboard Only Tuesday is an absolute must, or Wednesday or whenever it works for you. If you can make these problems personally inconvenient to you, you will find that they get prioritized a lot more. To the managers in the room, praise and incentivize accessibility related work. It kinda stinks when you're at Sprint Review and someone's like, I made a cool new dropdown. I shaved a half second off the site time and you're like, a screen reader can now get through our homepage and read it intelligibly. I can't tell you what it's meant to me when I've had managers say, Liz, that is so awesome and I know it's really hard work, I'm so glad you did it. If you do that, you're more likely to see this work continue to happen. Put seniors in charge of teaching A11y to juniors. Anybody here who has ever volunteered at a boot camp will tell you one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. If you can do this on your team, if you put your seniors, if you make your seniors responsible for when your juniors submit a pull request that's not up to snuff in accessibility, then I think you will find that the whole team's knowledge goes up. And then finally, go to, I'm sorry, not finally, go to an A11y conference. This is the part of the talk where I admit I've been a little sneaky. Remember those talks I said at the start of this talk ages and ages ago? Accessible syntax where it lives, what it looks like, how I hacked NVIDIA into Loving Rails? Well, I know these are good talks because I saw versions of them at a conference I went to last year called Accessing Higher Ground. Now this conference has a very heavy education bent because again, education is one of the fields where accessibility gets taken more seriously. But you can totally, they're still talking about a ton of things that are pertinent to the stuff we do. You know that great feeling when you go to a conference and your brain's just spilling out of your ears because you learned so much? That's totally how I felt last year. If you send somebody to this conference, I think you will find that they learn a lot and it's very useful. Also look into automated testing and linting. It's easy to do accessibility related work if a machine's doing it for you. If you just say the stuff that goes on our website, if it has an image, it needs to have an alt attribute and it just gets caught in the linter before you can put a pull request, you will find that images with alt attributes go way up. Okay, last I want to talk about at the personal level, expand by Twitter. Like I said, one of the most pernicious ways that ableism impacts all of us is that it erases disabled people. Well guess what? There's things that you can do to undo some of that damage. All of these are organizations that deal a lot with disability rights or accessible development. There's also a lot of activists out there, individual activists who work for rights for disabled people. I didn't want to put them up here in case this talk ends up on some of the less pleasant places of the internet and I didn't want them harassed, but they're easy to find if you look for them. Also get out into meat space out here with the rest of us. Anybody here ever been to an ASL poetry slam? They're amazing. They are just the coolest thing you can possibly imagine. And they're usually interpreted so you probably won't feel as left out as you think. Just bring again, a piece of paper and a pencil and you'll find you can communicate with people next to you if you want to. A11 Y meetups are also great. We have them in New York City. I imagine that's probably true of other major metropolitan areas. Even if it's something that's not related to what you do like, hey I invented a new Braille reader. Go learn something. It's really neat. By the way, everything that I'm talking about right now does not just apply to people with disabilities.  And I think you will find that you are a better person and also a better developer. You'll start catching things like, for example, oh, our company only has fire sales that start and end on the same day on Saturdays. You know what? None of my Orthodox Jewish friends are ever gonna be able to take advantage of these sales. Maybe we should vary the day. Or hey, we've got all these avatars for people to use on our website. But you know what? Not one of them wears hijab or a hearing aid. Maybe we can add a few more so that everybody can see themselves.  Okay, finally, I'm cognizant that I am at RailsConf. And so I am probably talking to some of the foremost Rails podcasters, Rails bloggers, Rails vloggers out there. So let me ask you something. Accessible development starts at home. If you run a podcast, do you post a transcript of that podcast after the fact so that dev developers can take advantage of it? Do, if you run a, put videos on YouTube of coding, do you put captions on those videos or do you rely on the automatic generated ones of YouTube that are commonly called craptions by the dev community to give you an idea of how good they are? If you run a blog, once the last time you did an accessibility, check on your site. Even if you, oh, and also the examples that you used, like I said before, do they use different kinds of semantic HTML or is it all divs and spans? Even if you just tweet about code. I can't tell you the number of times I've been working. I'm super frustrated.  And it's like, oh man, somebody else is having same problems I have. In this case, oh, those merge, those get merge feels. I think we all know those get merge feels. You push to a base branch, but when you're cleaning a merge conflict, but somebody else pushed to it too and now you got a second merge conflict, that's like, huh. Anyway, you can totally, so I, okay, getting ahead of myself.  I still belong in this industry.  Disabled developers want to feel that same kind of inclusion too. And did you know Twitter has image descriptions? They're not turned on by default. You have to go into settings to turn them on, but you can totally write an image description on anything you tweet about and make the internet a more accessible place in your home backyard. Okay, I'm gonna end with some quick resources. I thought about doing a gigantic resources slide, but really, you only need these three. One is Google.com. Anything I am talking about, you can find on Google. And I know this because I use Google to find a lot of the things I'm talking about today. So like I said, there is no legal consensus on what an ADA compliant internet should be, but the guideline that's commonly accepted by our industry is the WCAG 2.0 guidelines. They've recently put out the WCAG 2.1, but it's probably gonna be about a year before that's adopted as a standard. And this has a lot more documentation to it. So that's at www.w3.org slash tr slash WCAG 2.0. And then finally, this last resource is a monster list of every single kind of accessible development related topic you can think of. The topic of this talk that I'm giving today is actually a little deceptive because in reality, there are some people doing accessibility 102 because there are people who are programming the screen readers and making sure Chrome doesn't break when you hit a keyboard button. And a lot of them have blogs and Twitters where they talk about the work they do. Again, this is a gigantic last list. It's pauljadam.com slash resources.html. You can spend days getting lost in here. I know this because I have. Check it out and see some of the amazing work people are doing. Okay, that actually is the end of my talk. Thank you so much. I'll be up here afterwards if anybody has any questions, but thank you for coming.


What a great morning. How cool is this? Let me just stop and say how cool is this? To be able to take a moment and recognize this. I remember the first part of the month for me in a scheduling meeting with our flight scheduler, so I was like, hey, we're not doing an AAPI flight. I don't know what happened after that, but here we are today. Also, I'll tell you, I think it's because we have some pretty talented lieutenants and airmen who just grabbed the bull by the horns with initiative and just wanted to to make this happen and put it all together. And I hope that's what you guys know. You have a wing that supports you and wants to recognize your rich heritage. I know we have Jeff Nakayama and Major Albano, Lieutenant Wolfe, and Santos, Seaman Freire, and Kim Ramirez were the names that were given to me, but I'm sure more came together to put this all to make this flight happen. And I thank you all for doing this. If you look at the history of the AAPI, the Asian American Pacific Islanders, there was a congressional resolution that was passed back in 1978 on May 4th, which is the date that coincided with the first Japanese immigrants to the United States. They asked for the president's assignment to declare a week from the 4th of the 11th to be Asian American Pacific Islander week. Later on in 1999, in May of 1999, they extended that to celebrate the month. And every year, the president has provided a proclamation for Asian American Pacific Islander month. And if you look at that, this month, the president, Biden calls out his vice president, Kamala Harris, as the vice president to recognize Asian Pacific Islanders. Anyway, I hope that signifies for you that that's where we are as a nation. This isn't about anything beyond talent and opportunity, and our country and our nation and our wing here provides that for you to support you. You bring with you a rich culture, rich heritage, and a diversity of thought that I think brings us together and strengthens us as the world's most dominant air force to create air power competition for our enemies that helps us to maintain leverage against them. And that diversity of thought and the rich culture and heritage that you provide also brings a unique dynamic within our wing to make us a well-balanced people group collectively. And while that's great, I think this flight is even greater, and I'm excited to see all the faces young, and I won't say older. And, you know, I made the joke earlier. There's nothing more significant and more rewarding and more symbolic than being able to have Olympia and Starbucks in the same morning. Somebody offered the chance for me to go fly with you. I wish you had said that yesterday, Jessica.  But I do thank you for what you do. I do thank you for who you are, specifically for the culture and the heritage that you bring. I hope you're proud of that and know that that is the strength of who we are as a nation and as an air force. So I just wanted to say that. Awesome. Great words. Let me just add on like a couple quick things real quick. So thanks to the team for putting this together. I think this is truly phenomenal. I met with them last week. I had the easy part, which is really just to say yes to take a good briefing and see what you're all doing. So I think this is a fantastic example of our air force. You know, we have a, you know, there's many cultures right in America in our air force and our wing, but we really have one voice when it comes to diversity to think about it, right? And so many cultures, one voice. We ought to be celebrating diversity and that's what this is today, right? This is not anything other than American air power, having a sorority of all Asian American Pacific Islanders because we want to and because we can, right? And I think that says a lot in and of itself. So go out there today, have some fun, celebrate your culture as part of the larger melting project is the United States Air Force and I look forward to hearing how it went when you all get back. Awesome. Thanks. My name is Erica Santos and I am a Lieutenant for the 964th ACS Phoenix. Well, the significance of this flight is to acknowledge the diversity of the air force since 1947. We can see an improvement until now of the growth of all the minorities in our air force, specifically with the Asian American Pacific Islanders. This is our first time ever having a flight with an entire crew, being Asian American Pacific Islanders. So this is, you can see the growth of what's been happening and diversity. Sorry. Okay, cool. You know what I was trying to say though, right? Yes, please. How to say it without repeating myself. The significance of this flight is to acknowledge the growth that the air force has grown into. Before then, there was the lack of minorities, the lack of Asian American representation and now we're able to fill an entire flight full of Asian American Pacific Islanders, acknowledging the diversity of the air force. For the 960th Airborne Air Control Swatting. The significance of this flight is to demonstrate and show that the 552 ACW has a very diverse Asian American Pacific Islander group and we're here today to show that we can get the mission done. Yep, so the training story, the purpose of it is to make sure that our members get the proper training and make sure that we're mission capable of being able to go at any moment at any time and as well as America. So diversity is nothing new to me. What I've learned over the years is that it doesn't matter exactly what your color, your skin is or your cultural background. In the end, we're all American and we're here to serve our country. As that said, as much as I'm proud to be American, there's nothing wrong with embracing your cultural heritage. Be proud of who you are. Now smoking on the bus or the flight line, we shouldn't need reflective belts, but if it's planning a flight deckers on this jet, we'll maximize clearing by reducing our workload with autopilot. We'll be using the weather radar T-casts and our visual fundamentals of every ship we've got the plan. We've proofed the plan.


Welcome back to another upload and you're wondering, why am I standing? I don't know if you're wondering, but I am ready to don the suit again. This is part three for the Rokoko suit.  It's going to be awesome. Let's put this on first. And I've had this suit for a while. Still kind of snug, but a lot has happened since COVID happened, which changed a bunch of stuff to schedule, but also work, which was the biggest change, new responsibilities, totally different schedule. And I just focused on different things. So the suit lay kind of dormant. But then Rokoko studio beta came out. So of course I had to try it because it's a revamp has new options. The UI is totally different. So of course I'm going to try it and kind of compare what's going on. And this is one to make this new update for part three. There is more to come to because I got the gloves and that's going to be sweet. An update process is really straightforward. You just go to the website. Of course, link in description. You download the beta version and you can go through all those pages and it will show you what's new. One of the things that I did too is I wanted to explore better measurements because you can start with the default measurements. But I also wanted to do setups where I have the default measurement that is my height and 184 centimeters, but you can also measure your legs, the wingspan as in like your arm, wingspan, your back, the hips, everything to make it a bit more precise. So as you create your actor, you can name it. Of course, you can sign the colors. I put in my height in centimeters and not an inches. And this is with my custom measurements, but I'm going to do one more with the default actor. So I'm going to create a new actor, call this JDH default and I'm just going to put in only the actual height values like that and leaving like that. Of course, got to take the battery and plug in my suit and get started. And then I'm going to default position. There you go. Calibration complete. Pops into place. Here I am. It's not too bad. Again, the calibration. All that. Look at that suit is fairly green in places. So not bad by default. Like one arm is a bit lower there, but it tracks all of this. You got a little bit of shoulder boom. It definitely tracks my hips. And big test is always how are the hands? That's pretty good. This is a bit of a problem on my custom one. So when I do this, it almost goes through. And when I do this, there's still a gap here, but it kind of changes. I do this every nine hours, almost like a test. You can see how things change a little bit, but on the custom one, I'm about here.  But anyway, that seems pretty solid. And I'm going to go and record. I did some switching here. You'll see. I'll edit that and explain what happened here. So through the calibration, that's all good to go. This is actually a recording of when I did it. So this is what I did. I walked through. I did a couple of tests here, sit down and so on. I did a couple more. This continues on and so on into the editing process. So why am I showing you this? There are two things that I learned. So when you're in here and you have a bunch of your recordings, right? You can see the other actors here that you can turn off. What happened was that I went back into this and I wanted to add another wall.  And what I did was, well, I didn't want to see all of these other actors in there. And instead of going ghost or visibility on off, I thought once you record this, you can just go right click, remove from scene. Just because I wanted it to be clean. But the thing is, when you have something like this, I'm not going to do it now, and you actually remove the actor, your take that you just recorded is gone. So when you're done recording, this recording is not baked as in that's the data, that's the recording. You're good to go. Whatever you're doing with your measurements, whatever you're doing with your actor has no influence. That is not the case. So I had a fantastic trust me bro type of recording that was great and it all went away. So that is one thing something else that happens that seems to be a bug with the studio beta is that I have it recorded. This is what happens. You're done and you say we just hit end right and it's processing recording and it stays and it stays and it stays and there's nothing you can do. You basically have to quit out. So I would recommend that when you have a good take go back here. I would just go in here new project for YouTube and then in here, you're saying you've seen I say example and then that's that. That creates a whole new scene. You got to go back in there and create an actor. You do all that good stuff here. I am 184 leave it at that. And you can of course do your your custom measurements and I'm now sitting. This is post the recording. So my suit is not on. I think that would be the safer way to go about this. So next up I want to show you how to edit this. So let's pause this and let me take off the suit. There you go. Back to the old spot. So here we are and you can press play. You can also scrub and you can see the whole thing. Now the cool thing about this is that you have a bunch of options here to adjust just the way you see it.  But I would also go control minus and plus to change this so you can see the feet because sometimes you want to record and then you're too close to it and you can't see what the feet are doing. In this case, it's okay. In case you have something where it's really close, I guess pretend it's something like this. Again, they're hotkeys where you can change things to top and front and side and a bunch of stuff. And if you go to just the front version, it actually defaults pretty well. Of course with the proper UI selection there. If you select your character shift. You can do this if you want to rotate around. You can zoom in and out like this. I have this on my walking tablet on my ring. So I can just go in and out like that. Well, let's switch back. Let me show you a scene that I thought would be really interesting in terms of a stress test because generally I think the recording is pretty cool on a big scale. Now in terms of detail, there's some stuff that I need to figure out or maybe it's something that needs to be fixed. I'm not quite sure. So I'm in here and I can adjust this already just to see the feet here. This is me walking. Now one of the first things you can see is that there is a drop in the root. Now some of these hiccups because I was recording at the same time. So I feel like if I do a screen recording and a mocap recording, then I get glitches. So I have the best recordings when I don't have any of this on in terms of the screen recording that I'm doing right now. And I just record the data. So every now and then you see like here when it goes back and it kind of stutters a little bit. That's because of that. Now the bigger root drops, that is something I need to figure out. I'm slightly confused as to why that is happening. At the same time, you can see though that the foot plans are pretty solid. This is pretty good. But the general thing is that I feel like I'm leaning backwards a lot. Maybe that's just me. Maybe that's something in the calibration. I'm not quite sure there. Well, let's continue on. And this is me going out. So what you can do here, I'm going to zoom out of this. I'm going outside the office around the corner downstairs. So the downstairs doesn't work because it's an inertia-based suit and the second Rococo suit that are going to release has of course elevation fix, which is really cool. But I'm now downstairs and you can see that it's totally fine. So I can go back here and this is me going through the hallway past the kitchen and I'm going through different rooms. There are walls. Now there are some issues now in crossing legs. Now this is the laundry room. And again, this is all separate room, separate walls. This is downstairs. I'm opening up the garage door with a slight step down. Let's go over there. And now I'm going through the garage past the ping-pong table into the garage where I work out. So obviously there's some issues with the legs, but the fact that this is still recording and you can see I'm going to scrub through this here. Look at the feet. They are rock solid. There is no drift. This is bananas to me. This is the garage with concrete walls downstairs. And I'm going over to the wall. I'm going to touch the wall here. That's the outside door goes to the garden part. So I still have the root problem, but I have the same problem in my office and downstairs. So that is to me, this must be a measurement thing with the length or some inertia problem where if the leg is in the air, there's something when you lift up the leg that the root might drop down. I have that sometimes when I lift just one leg up. So I think that is something I need to fix there. But again, I'm going through the laundry room again. I mean, this to me is really impressive. Look at the feet. And the thing is you can go in here and I can there's a slider here. So you can scrub that or scrub. You can pull that in. So I can pull that in here as well. So you can see what's going on here. Bring that in the middle. And so the green and the blue shows you where the footsteps are. And you can show it like this as well. So if I go through there, you can see when it's solid, this is what happens. Now, if I want to go in there and say, well, I can delete this. I can take this whole thing and shift it just in case. So it's going to plant that foot sooner and hold it longer and then let go. So again, this is for you to shift around. Now, if I want to make this even bigger, I can. So this is something where I wish I could go in furthest. I would like to zoom in here, but that seems to be a limitation that when you record something for too long, I could be wrong. Of course, comments if there if you have better knowledge about all this, but I would love to tweak some things and see more in here. So let's go back to the full thing. I'm kitchen. I'm going back upstairs. This is the upstairs part. So obviously locomotion is still there, but the elevations not there, but still the tracking on the body and the arms. That's still pretty good. Turn around the corner. Now I am back into my office. So let's zoom back in here. So we got some potential leg issues there before a little bit. Yeah, some crossover problems, but this is me back in the office. So after all of this being downstairs, doing all my shenanigans, look at the feet. I mean, there's no drift. They're pretty solid. Okay.  The root kind of goes down. So I think generally when you have your feet up, there's a bit of a problem with the suit. So there's some stretching here. Okay. So around the legs kind of pushing the tracking a bit more. So me leaning back, that seems to be something I always have regardless of whatever custom measurements I have. I did some on force. Definitely some issues there with the hands. Now any mocap take always needs cleanup. But there you go. That's at the end going crazy here. But I think that would be even without going downstairs. It does track this, which is pretty cool. If you do this here and I can take toe bent off, you can see how there is a difference there. Let me go back and then you can turn this on and you can see how the toes are bending. So that's pretty cool. And you can do all of this if I take locomotion off here. Then you get that very steady roots. Of course, when you jump, it looks kind of funky. But if you're walking around, this is what you would have. So you can definitely decide how you want to go about this where you want this with or without locomotion. Let's go back. But that is that recording here. I did the crazy one where I actually went outside the house just because I was really impressed with that I can go downstairs and it still tracks everything. Nothing exploded. Thought that that's pretty impressive in terms of the distance. And I think again, generally it's pretty impressive in terms of what it can do on a bigger scale. This is going downstairs, same issue. That's normal. That's the elevation issue of suit number one. So now I'm going to go out still tracking pretty well. Okay. So actually hold on. So again, I want to go here. If you look at this, go here and I'm going to zoom in. This is me downstairs. Look at the feet. That is pretty solid. I have to say because in the legacy software, the feet were drifting. Look at this. I mean, you know, there's some things you need to clean up in terms of what are the toes doing? What are the heels doing? See that foot needs to be a little bit lower. But to me, these are also really normal mocap cleanup issues. But the fact that I'm downstairs and this is without any type of drifting here is really impressive. Now going out, there's a slope that goes down here. There you go. Now on the sidewalk, looking right, looking left. That's still somewhat okay. And then you got that lean back from which I always have though. And then as I'm crossing the street here, it's going to start to break. Wait for it. Yeah, that's not going to work. And then it falls really apart. But as I'm walking here, you can see this is two blocks apart. It took a while to recalibrate. So here, when it looks better, this is me actually going back into the office. There you go. Waving in, coming back in. And that's back to the beginning. So I just wanted to show you that despite some aggressive testing, it's doing really well. So for this one, this is my general calisthenics test. Again, you can see really solid foot planting. There's not too much that happens when I'm on one leg. This is me sitting on a very soft couch. Also not too bad. This is sitting way down. Now when you lift your legs, that's when it goes haywire. So anytime feet are off the ground when you lay flat on your back on the ground, you lift the legs, then it gets pretty bananas. But even after all of this, let's go back here, look at the foot placement. I don't see any drift. I mean, that to me is pretty bananas. I'm going to zoom out and scroll a bit faster. So this is me going through the office and then go out the office room. This is the door right there. Go into my little one's room and then into bedroom and then back into the office. So again, I have the lean back, which is something I need to figure out how to fix and the sudden root drops, which are pretty severe. This would be, you know, some poppy stuff you need to fix cleanup mode. Other than that, again, I'm doing a one-legged swing here. So let's go back and get a bit closer into this timeline. So let's turn this on so you can see which one is which. So blue one gets on the ground right here. So if I want this to be sooner, I can move this over and it's going to pop over and hold this. Just in case you need to do some fixes or you want it to be later, but if you do this later, see, then you have some drift in this leg because that's not what the actual plan timing was. Control Z is undo. If you make any changes, that's always handy there. But again, I mean, I'm looking at this and you get pretty solid planting of the feet. You know, that's my ankle moving. But after all of this, there are some shifts here. So you still have to have some cleanup, but all of this to me seems really, really solid. Look at this. Because that's my major concern or was my major concern were the feet. So if I look at Studio Beta and all those tests, look at that, how it tracks my hips, all pretty good. I'm really not worried about any type of tracking of the feet. I'm more worried about the root plops and me leaning back. Now, this could be something where in the initial recording, I lean back to compensate already. That could be something, but I'm curious why the root is dropping so harshly. So that's something you definitely need to fix. So generally the cleanup options in within Studio Beta are, okay, you can change the planting of the feet. I wish there was something more in terms of maybe the root or some corrective. So if you have your T-pose or whatever you start recording and if you're like, there's a constant drift, it would be great to have like a skeleton view and maybe adjust the skeleton in this versus exporting this and adjusting that later in Maya, whatever software you use. So I think a few more tools within that would be cool. At the same time, when I compare this to the legacy version, the drift and the root and the feet is much more severe. And in here, I basically see no drift and I can go outside the office. I can go downstairs, which blows my mind. I can go through rooms into the garage with concrete walls. There are, there's no drift on the feet. So whatever quirks you have in the Studio Beta and it's beta for a reason, they're going to improve on it. They're going to fix it. But weighing the pros and cons, I will definitely stick to the beta because, A, I prefer the UI. It's cleaner and having no drift is huge because adjusting drift in Maya, all that is just extra work is a huge pain. So for me, my next step is going to be how can I make sure that the root is not dropping when I take steps and making sure that the posture is okay, so I don't constantly lean back. I don't lean that far back when I walk in real life. This is not a verification of how I really am, hopefully, but I definitely want to figure out how to fix that.  So next step is to take all of that and put that into Maya. So how does that translate from this data onto a rig? What kind of rig? Can you transfer that to a cartoony rig and so on? So I want to see how that works and do some couple more tests in terms of the recording style for speed and how you can use that as rough blocking for your cartoony shot, for instance. So stay tuned. If you're still watching, thank you. Always very patient. This is a longer clip, but I want to go in depth and show you really ins and outs and have an honest walkthrough, no pun intended, of the suit with the limitations and the pros, of course. And that's it from me. So thank you for watching. Hopefully I'll see you in my next upload. Subscribe if you don't miss any of those and I'll see you then.


What's up everybody Jason for jaskiescasebase.com this fills up prism three box break pick your team number 18 With the T wolves kings warriors and more given away in a team random so actually everybody pays the same price guys and Again, you're guaranteed a team 15 total spots or take the 15 customer names and randomize them only and whatever you match up With is what team you guess so the T was will go to number one all the way down to the paces at number 15 So here we go guys. Good luck dice roller and it is a five into five ten times. Good luck one two three four five six seven eight nine and 10th the final time guys boom ten times Cody at the top down a mat and here you go match up with what you get Right there so Cody you got the T wolves Matthew with the wars Monty with the Kings David with the Celtics Sean last bottle of wizards Sean maddock you have grizzlies Braden with the Hawks dealing with the cows brine with the heat Martin with the nets all over with the bucks Rob with the Suns Jay with the Clippers dealing with the jazz and Matt Arnold with the Pacers So there you go guys so coming up next guys is the break itself Appreciate it. Jaskiescasebreak.com


So now we're going to learn about how to handle glassware in the lab. So these are some of the common glassware that you'll encounter when working in the laboratory. This is a beaker, this is an Erlenmeyer flask, and this is a graduated cylinder. So it's very important to handle these with care because if they fall to the ground they could shatter, they could break and then they could cause you to get cut. So before you use your glassware make sure you examine it for any cracks or any stars that would indicate that it could break while you're using it. So make sure you examine all these and if you notice they are free from cracks. So these are okay to be used. And when you're using your glassware make sure for example if you're boiling your some water in a beaker that you don't drastically change the temperature because this could cause the glass to crack. Also when working with the thermometer this is also a glass instrument. Make sure that you do not shake it and make sure that you don't put it toward the edge here where it can roll off onto the ground. Some thermometers contain mercury so if they fall to the ground then you have a mercury spill and then the instructor would have to clean up the mercury spill. So you want to be very careful when handling thermometers that have mercury. One important rule to follow when working with glassware is to make sure you keep them towards the center of your bench away from the edge of the table or out of the reach of anybody who could indirectly not knowing but not the equipment over and as a result cause a breakage. So if you use your glassware, this is an example of one, a cover slip. So this one I've used already. You need to dispose of it in the right container. Don't dispose of it in the regular trash. Dispose of it in this glass container here. If you notice it's a square box, it has glass at the sides. It's very important that you do not put it in the regular trash because the person designated to dispose of the garbage could get accidentally caught not knowing that there was glass in there. So let's keep ourselves safe and others safe.


Let's begin with the seeming paradox. The deeper one goes, the more one opens. I have found this true as an anatomist while teaching anatomy, particularly cell function from cell to cytoskeleton, to proteins, to nuclear proteins, to chemistry, to physics. Boom, the cosmological. I found this true as a lifetime meditator, as a structural integrator and movement therapist and with somatospiritual practices. These and other activities calm the active mind and clarify its perceptions and allow for our intuitive skills to ripen. It is a time to be, not a time to do, even while doing as in Zen. These practices can lead to a deepening and an opening to the universal, to insight and to compassion. We find this in science, philosophy and theology, where from chaos, conjecture and concept, one deepens into facts, functional truths and the spiritual, which open up to practices, treatments, ways of being and beliefs. And of course, we find this in the float experience. As one withdraws from the sensory milieu, one often moves from consternation to relaxation to exploration of the self, a deepening, leading to an opening via an immersion in the Theta state, the Buddhist plenum void, the nothing. We are part of an ever-growing and morphing field. This is a business, a technology, a science, a therapeutic, a clinical approach, a creative act, and occasionally an ecological and spiritual awakening. And all of this based on a singular, private, subjective experience. We go into the tank, our brain waves slow down, and we enter what has been called the spellbound state, where possibly the stuff of the world is in a potential or flux state and we are not separate. We are interconnected. We are of, and we can create anything. And this makes all the difference. The research we've heard about and its methodology are vital and it forms the bedrock of this field as the substrate is to the state. So let's speculate. I would like to start our speculation with panpsychism. In philosophy, this is the view that consciousness, mind, or soul is a universal feature of all things and the primordial feature from which they all derive. Early forms were in shintoism, daoism, and shamanism. It leads to the idea of a world soul or an anima mundi, which led to the Gaia hypothesis, which then has led to ecological research and eco-spirituality. It proposes very much related to quantum physics that matter or physical energy all the way down to subatomic particles is sentient. This leads to the belief that the universe is composed of mind or consciousness. Consciousness as something we live, not something we have. And our self-consciousness is an aspect of this greater consciousness, a neuro-complexification leading to reflection. And that maybe, just maybe. But we experience in the tank through the doorway of theta is a subtler neural activity, which opens to this universal mind or consciousness. Let's continue our speculations with the four different aspects of the float experience, the four L's, levity, liminality, luminosity, and language. Levity, lightness of mind and body, a state of ease, buoyancy in gravity, whimsy, humor, a state of superficiality which reflects a deeper seriousness. This obviously happens in the tank by floating in an appropriately quiescent state. Floating is one of a number of practices which increase mental, physical, and emotional levity. They loosen and activate kinetic, energetic, and emotional pathways. They increase one's mindful and easeful response to experience and increase structural and physiological efficiency. In the tank, this happens concurrently by being out of gravity, out of an external sensory milieu, and in a temporary state which is more relaxed, creative, and open-ended. We are in part biostensegrity structures that stabilize their shape and function by a tensional integrity. This tensional network is created by our fossil network, and this allows us to be suspended within gravity and have a buoyancy and a levity which increases the efficiency of our bioprocesses, our movement, and our perception. The cell structure also is a biotensegrity structure. It creates an information pathway and this information pathway globalizes in the Living Matrix concept. In brief, this system is a liquid lattice of adhesed proteins structuring water into a liquid crystalline state. It is a quantum coherent vibratory continuum. That's what you are. And it is through the levity and suspension created by this that the world often speaks to us bypassing the brain. To enter into the tank, to be in a state of levity, to quiet the mind creates a bridge between the inner and the outer. Shall we call this the quiet bridge? And it is this bridge which leads to liminality. There is a sense for many that we are not merely losing places and species, we are losing our place in the world. The fabric of the world is torn and can a newfound spirit or awareness re-knit the rupture. A spirit, a sensibility reformed in the liminal space which leads to stillness and opening a path. Are we not hoping to recover a sense that the act of paying attention and letting go can open a space in the soul? A space in which the world may live and move in us? Is this not the space experienced in the tank? The space between inner and outer worlds? A place where the healing can begin? The theta state as doorway? The light we sometimes see in the darkness. Could this be the inner light that illuminates? In the spiritual literature there is a thought that luminosity can only be found discovered within the darkness in a darkening time. Never has the fate of humanity and the fate of the world been more intertwined. Our soul and the soul of the world are not separate. In the float experience, in essence, we relearn the art of witnessing. Within the dark we sense the inner light. Leonard Cohen once said, there is a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in. That is the theta state, the crack in consciousness between inner and outer. It is this inner light that gives outer life its meaning, language. In this field with so many aspects and with so many languages describing these aspects, what of the language of the subjective experience undergone in the tank? I will suggest the poetic, not necessarily a poem, the poetic as a way of thinking and expressing where is an equal emphasis on silence, sound, word and context. Where the emphasis is on surprise, oddity, relationality and metaphor. A poetics like this highlights the plasticity and adaptability of thought and expression. As poesis, the Greek, to make an action and expression that transforms and continues the world. A few brief examples of this poetic from the community. To sense the ocean as source to the wave of the self. My mind was a blossom. Your wild flight of mind unleashed. And to quote our next speaker in his wonderful book, Blue Mind, when he came out of the tank, he entered a mindful mindfulness. From the Kabbalah, the depth of primordial being is called boundless. It is also called nothingness. If one asks what is it, the answer is nothing. Meaning no one can understand anything about it. It is negated of every conception. No one can know anything about it except the belief that it exists. Its existence cannot be grasped by anyone other than it. Therefore, its name is I am becoming. It is important to know that nothingness is real. It is a powerful dimension. It hasn't become embodied in form yet. It is pre-definition, pre-manifest in a fluid state of possibility. In nothingness, there is great freedom because there is no restriction. And even a thought form is restrictive. Through our attention and intention, through the nothing state, we become a pathway for creativity and relationality. From the Sufi, nothingness helps us be attentive. With one foot in nothingness, with one ear attuned to the silence, we are in form. With one foot in nothingness, with one foot in nothingness, with one ear attuned to the silence, we are infinitely watchful and undisturbed. In the nothing state, the theta state, the liminal state, we continually begin again. We are out of struggle in a state of becoming, and it is here where we can develop grace. And the world needs grace now more than ever. So please, go in grace and thank you.


Hello, everyone. Good to be with you to talk about Rook Enterprise Storage for Kubernetes. I'm Travis Nielsen I'm one of the original maintainers of the Rook project and I work for Red Hat. Let's get going Well, first I have a question for you. Who needs storage for Kubernetes? Anyway, no matter how much you think your applications are stateless You will need storage at some point. You have a database. You have other data needs So you need storage in your own data center. You may need storage and cloud providers You may need to overcome the shortcomings of cloud storage But ultimately what you need is consistent storage across wherever you run your Kubernetes clusters So that's where we set out with our goals for Rook storage First of all, we wanted the storage to be made available natively to your Kubernetes cluster just like any other Storage platform. You can consume it with storage classes and pvcs and all those standard storage mechanisms and Second and most importantly, you can really manage Rook your storage platform as any other application in Kubernetes You don't need to install it separately. It's just part of your Kubernetes cluster with operators and CRDs and Deploy it and configured Upgraded with the same ways that you upgrade your other applications But storage is very important. You want to trust it. You'd need it to be hardened and tested It really should be a system that's in production for years before you can trust the storage platform So that's where Ceph is important. Ceph has been around for years and years as a stable software defined storage solution And what Rook did is we said we're going to bring Ceph into Kubernetes Rook will manage Ceph for you and hide all the complexities of Ceph and make it simple to deploy But Ceph itself will provide the same stable data platform and that data path that's so critical to your applications So what does Ceph provide? There are basically three types of storage. So block storage for read-write-once applications or shared file system Ceph FS for read-write many applications that need to share Share storage across their pods or object storage, which will let you put and get objects to an S3 endpoint So what environments can Rook run in? Well, really wherever Kubernetes deployed You can install Rook and this storage platform So it can run bare metal where you can consume raw devices or local PVs to create the storage platform or in cloud environments you can also consume cloud provider PVs and Create this platform on top of the the cloud provider where you can overcome the limitations of cloud provider storage for example, the number of PVs may be limited by the cloud provider or the the IOPS may be limited or aggregating storage across AZs can be limited But Rook overcomes all of that and more So Rook is really production ready. We've have many deployments both upstream and downstream There are clusters with hundreds of nodes and many petabytes of data So there it really has been proven in production There are products downstream that have been built around Rook. It is production ready and has been proven for years that way The project itself is recognized by the cloud native computing foundation that CNCF has a graduated project since 2020 And that's really a testament to say hey, we put the community first. We're open source and we have Good project hygiene. We have regular releases whether it's the quarterly minor releases or regular patch releases and We have a good collection of maintainers from across different companies From Clotical, Sybosu, Red Hat, Upbound. We're just proud of the community involvement and support we have there There's lots more to learn. Go to our website. Check out the docs. Join our Slack GitHub and and see you on Twitter and we'll have lots more of these videos coming on how to use Rook. Have a good one. Bye


Thank you very much. I want to thank Nancy, I want to thank my former boss, Steve Hadley, Ambassador Taylor, USIP for everything that you do to try to make the world a better place, and in particular for all the very hard, difficult work you do in Iraq. And I associate myself very much with Nancy's remarks. We're determined, as everybody knows, to do all we can to defeat ISIL or Daesh, and we will defeat them. I can talk a little bit about where we are in this campaign, but we're also not just focused on defeating Daesh, we're focused on what comes after Daesh. So before introducing Foreign Minister Joffrey, I'd like to just kind of put in context of why the Foreign Minister is here in Washington, and we're very honored to have him here in our capital city, about what's happening this week. We are bringing together over 40 members of our international coalition in a campaign to defeat Daesh, but look ahead over the next six months. And in many ways, our campaign is now ahead of where we thought it would be at this time. We do check-ins within the coalition every couple months, and we thought, you know, Mosul is going to be a very, very difficult challenge. Mosul, of course, is where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his phony caliphate two years ago this month. It is where we will put one of the nails into the coffin of that phony caliphate, and we knew we have to get Mosul back. But Mosul is one of the most complex challenges ahead of us. There's about a million people still in Mosul. It's a very diverse city. We have issues of local governance. We have a number of issues of resources to make sure that what comes after Daesh, that the people can return to their homes and have a, and restore life to their streets. This will be one of the most complex challenges imaginable. I'm encouraged because the military side of this campaign is now coming together. The Iraqis just completed a very impressive offensive move. We've got 100 kilometers to capture and liberate. It's called Qiyar airbase, a major airbase just south of Mosul, which is now a major staging area in the process of isolating Daesh inside Mosul. The Iraqi security forces from two years ago this summer, in which they were losing battles, have not lost a battle in over a year. They are showing increasing confidence, increasing professionalism, increasing capacity, and they're liberating towns in Anbar province through the Euphrates Valley, and now moving up the Tigris River Valley and setting the stage for the Mosul campaign. But every time we work with the Iraqis to launch a military offensive, we ask all the very hard questions, a process that goes on for months. What's going to come after the military operation? Who is going to hold the ground? What will the resources be for the humanitarian response? What is the program for stabilization to get people back into their homes? Through the coalition we've established a really innovative program of post-conflict stabilization. We have two funding mechanisms. The first one is called the Funding Facility for Immediate Stabilization, getting people back into their homes as soon as possible, and a second funding facility for expanded enhanced stabilization for the kind of longer term reconstruction. And we've had some real success, and we've had success because of the government that Foreign Minister Joffrey is here representing. The government led by Prime Minister Badi has a governing philosophy of more decentralization, of more empowering local people at the grassroots to take hold of their affairs. So in Tikrit, Tikrit was a city that two years ago, this month, was a scene of massive atrocities. Thousands of young Iraqi military recruits were slaughtered. It was put on YouTube. I was in Iraq at the time speaking with the foreign minister and other Iraqi leaders as they were undergoing this incredibly difficult, horrible, horrific advance of Daesh towards Baghdad. Tikrit was liberated by Iraqi security forces. The entire population had almost been, had almost left the city. And through the work of the Iraqi government, empowering local leaders, getting local Tikritis back into the streets, local police back into the streets, and through the global coalition which contributed tens of millions of dollars for stabilization projects, almost the entire population, 95% of the population returned to the streets of Tikrit. If you look historically of returning populations to their homes after a conflict like this, that is totally unprecedented. We've now had total in Iraq, over 700,000 Iraqis have returned to their homes and areas that had been controlled by Daesh. And the Iraqi security forces have now liberated about 50% of the territory that Daesh had once controlled. The success we're having in Anbar Province in Ramadi, all the way out to Al-Hit, all the way down to Rutba in the Baghdad-Aman corridor, is attributable to the Iraqi security forces which are showing tremendous proficiency, but also organizing and mobilizing local tribal fighters. In Anbar Province, we have about 20,000 local tribal fighters working with Iraqi security forces being paid by the government of Iraq because of the policy of the government of Iraq to empower local people at the grassroots. So Mosul's now upon us, and we're not going to put a timeline on the Mosul campaign, but we will pursue it deliberately and we will check every box to make sure we're doing all we possibly can to prepare. Not everything will go right. This is one of the most complex, difficult things imaginable. But the reason we were all here in Washington this week with over 40 members of the coalition is to make sure we do all we can to support Iraqi partners to get this right. So tomorrow we'll have a pledging conference in which we hope to raise a significant amount of funds to help with the humanitarian response and the stabilization plan. And then on Thursday at the State Department, we'll have a joint ministerial of foreign ministers and defense ministers to come together to talk about the next six months of the campaign. And of course it's not just Iraq. It's a very important work we're doing in Syria. It's the important work we're doing in Libya. And it's the global campaign against Daesh to dry up their foreign fighter networks, their financing networks, and their propaganda networks. But without a strong partner in Iraq, it really is a centerpiece of the campaign. And that is why I want to introduce my good friend, Foreign Minister Joffrey. Again, Foreign Minister Joffrey has been there at every single moment of the last 10 years at very difficult times in which Iraq has gone through. And I saw him this morning and I expressed my deepest condolences, of course, to the horrific attack that Iraq faced in Baghdad in Karadah just about 10 days ago, where 300 very young Iraqis, kind of the spirit of the future of Iraq, was wiped out in this horrible crime by Daesh terrorists. It was a horrible crime, I think it shocked all of us. But having gone back and forth to Iraq now, but every two weeks over the last year or so, we tend to forget what happened just a few months ago where terrorists, the suicide bomber, came into Iraq and blew himself up in a soccer game, a children's soccer game where young kids were getting trophies after winning a soccer game. And not only do they do that, it's on YouTube, everybody can see it, the most horrific, horrible crimes imaginable. In Iraq for month to month, we have sometimes 50 suicide bombers coming into Iraq to blow themselves up and to commit acts of mass murder. And we've, of course, faced Daesh-inspired terrorism here in the United States. We've seen the horrific crimes recently in Istanbul, in Nice. So I think we all have to empathize a little bit with what the Iraqis are going through, these horrible crimes. And you have to imagine if suicide bombers from around the world were coming in to blow up our playgrounds, our churches, our supermarkets, our mosques, because that's what is happening in Iraq. And it's been happening now for years, frankly. But the number of suicide bombers has really began to kick up in 2013 and reached a peak some months ago. So we have to do all we can to support our Iraqi partners, our Iraqi friends, not just to defeat Daesh, but to do the very hard work of what comes after Daesh. Not just the restoration of this, of electricity and getting police back in the streets, but the psychological trauma that the society has gone through, they're really going to need all of our help. And so that I want to welcome Foreign Minister Joffrey. I want to say what a terrific job he's doing as Foreign Minister. As with all of the members of our coalition, we don't always agree on everything. We had a very good meeting this morning to talk about some very difficult issues. But we are a very strong partner of Iraq. We have a strategic framework agreement, a permanent agreement with Iraq, and that will continue. And we couldn't do it without the leadership of people like Foreign Minister Joffrey. So again, I want to welcome you and look forward to your remarks.