One of my favorite things that happens as a result of this podcast is when a listener or fan says, “You know what, Pat? I noticed that you haven't really talked about [topic] much, but it's so, so important. Is there anything you can do about it?” We get a lot of feedback like that, and we appreciate it. We're always trying to improve, and how would we know how to improve if it weren't for the people in our community who speak up?
Today, I wanted to highlight one of those community members. His name is Dustin Bakkie. Dustin started his online journey focused on effective teaching and course design. He's helped a lot of teachers, especially through his YouTube channel. He has a lot of really popular videos that have helped teachers, especially during COVID, with how to effectively use Zoom, and how to create really good curriculums online, something that obviously bleeds over into entrepreneurship.
But Dustin recently had an epiphany that he could serve his audience even better by helping creators like us create accessible online content.
What does that mean? It refers to the ability of all people, regardless of ability or disability, to access what we create. Dustin is really focused on helping foster and normalize inclusive digital communities. I love that, and I'm so glad he's here today to talk about what that means and how you can start to implement it in your own business. I think a lot of us creators know how important accessibility should be, but we're worried that it's really complicated. Well, Dustin is here to break things down and show us that it's not as complicated as we might think. So sit back and listen in, because we're going to be learning something very important today that you may not have heard anywhere else.
Today's Guest
Dustin Bakkie
Dustin Bakkie is a teaching and learning expert, a father of two boys, a husband, and a general nerd. He teaches at Chico State in Chico, CA, where he is known for developing innovative and inclusive classes. Beyond teaching, he works as a Faculty Development Fellow helping other professors improve their courses, and was recently named the Inclusive Educator of the year for the 2020/2021 school year. Dustin founded the High Impact Teaching Lab to bring his expertise in effective, accessible, and inclusive teaching to digital course creators and entrepreneurs. His mission is to improve the online teaching & learning landscape by helping course creators develop high-impact courses that are effective and accessible!
You'll Learn
- How the arrival of Dustin's second child set him down his current path
- The important difference between accessibility and universal or inclusive design
- Why Dustin founded the High Impact Teaching Lab, and how it's helping bring accessible content to digital course creation
- Why you need to be aware of your audience members' diverse learning styles
- The easy steps you can take to improve the accessibility of your online courses
- How to create more accessible content using a couple of awesome free tools
- The crucial role of transcripts in helping people access your content (and why it's okay when they're not perfect)
Resources
Descript transcription platform
SPI 515: This Is Not Being Talked About! How to Create Accessible Content
Pat Flynn:
One of my favorite things that happens as a result of this podcast is a podcast listener or a fan of the show or a member of SPI Pro or somebody who's within our community, who says, "You know what, Pat? I noticed that you haven't really talked about this much, but it's so, so important. Can you at least think about it a little bit more and talk to your team about it and see if there's anything we can do about it?" I love that because obviously that sounds very general, and the reason why that sounds very general is because it happens a lot, and we appreciate it. We're always trying to improve, and how do we know what to do or how to improve if it wasn't for those who are within our community, who speaks up?
Today, I wanted to highlight one of those community members. His name is Dustin Bakkie, B-A-K-K-I-E. He's @dustinbakkie on Twitter. He's talking about some really important stuff. He started his online journey talking about creating effective teaching and course design. He's helped a lot of teachers, especially through his YouTube channel. You can find it at DustinBakkie1 on YouTube. He has a lot of really popular videos that have helped teachers, especially during COVID with how to effectively use Zoom, how to create really good curriculums online, and that obviously bleeds over into entrepreneurship as well. But one thing that he's now focusing on, he's had a pivot or an epiphany, if you will, to serve more by doing the following: By helping creators like us create accessible online content.
Well, what does that mean? Well, it refers to the accessibility of content, our content to all people, regardless of disability type or the severity of a particular impairment, for example, right? He fosters and wants to normalize inclusive digital communities. I love that and I think that's so important, especially because if you've heard this show for a while, that we've been very, very much focused on inclusivity, we've been very much focused on building community, and of course, we want those things to be together. We want accessibility. We want people who have no matter what condition they might have, the ability to still absorb this content to benefit from it and use it.
Today we're talking with Dustin because I think a lot of us creators, we know that, yeah, it should be like that, but A, how, and B, sounds complicated, but it's not as complicated as it has to be, or we make it out to be. So sit back because we're going to learn something very important today that likely you haven't heard anywhere else. These are my favorite types of shows, ones that bring new things to light, so let's cue the intro. Here we go.
Announcer:
Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it's all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. Now, your host, he's the podcaster with the most random facts shared about him: Pat Flynn.
Pat:
What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here. Welcome to session 315 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast. Today, like I said, we're speaking with Dustin Bakkie. You can find him on Twitter at @dustinbakkie, B-A-K-K-I-E, his YouTube channel, DustinBakkie1 on YouTube, and TheHitLab.co, which is where he teaches teachers and now is also focusing on creating accessible online content. Let's get into it right now. Here he is.
Dustin, welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Dustin Bakkie:
I'm happy to be here, Pat.
Pat:
I think everybody who's listening to this already has an idea of what this episode is about. If you could give people who are listening a one- or two-liner teaser about what we're about to talk about and why it's so important, why don't we start there, and then we'll go into your story?
Dustin:
What this episode is really about is bringing a little bit of awareness and education on the accessibility of digital content, specifically digital courses and the steps that we can easily take to improve the accessibility of our courses.
Pat:
What does "accessibility" actually mean? What happens if we don't take care of this, for example?
Dustin:
What accessibility is, I have a really great example that I'm hoping to draw a little bit on your architecture background here to help me out with. But we think of accessibility, one of the biggest examples that comes to mind is a wheelchair ramp, right? You build this big, beautiful building, and then all of a sudden, you go, "Oh, shoot. There's some people who can't access this," so what do we do? We put a wheelchair ramp in. But Pat, if you were going to design a building that from the start didn't need one, what would it look like?
Pat:
It wouldn't have those ramps. It would be accessible to everybody.
Dustin:
You might have everything on the ground floor, you may have wide doors, all the main services ground floor level, right, so it's universal. Does anyone not benefit from that? Does that hinder anyone?
Pat:
No, no. Everybody benefits, but the funny thing is nobody really talks about it. They're like, "It just works."
Dustin:
It just works, and it works for everyone. That's the difference between in our field we have this term "accessibility" versus "universal design." Accessibility is like adding the ramp afterwards. It's good, right? It's good. We're giving access to a certain group of people, but if we can design from the start for everyone, everyone is served and everyone benefits, not just a small group.
Pat:
See, this is interesting because now it's like, okay, well we use all these platforms that we can't control the design of, so it almost feels like we have to find ramps to put everywhere, and we're going to dive into all this today. That's a little bit of a teaser. Thank you for setting that up, Dustin. But why don't we go back into your story a little bit and how you got so passionate about this? You had reached out to me on Instagram, as I had mentioned in the intro for everybody, and really inspired me to have you come on and talk about this, but I know this didn't come out of nowhere. Tell us a little bit about the origin story of Dustin and this whole thing here.
Dustin:
I teach at Chico State, which is a California State System here in Chico, California. I've been there for about a decade and got really started to be known for innovative and my inclusive classes. It started with the passion for wanting to teach well. I actually was very blessed, and I got my teaching offer straight out of grad school, so I was really fresh on what goes into good teaching and being frustrated with certain instructors and looking up to others, and so I wanted to do as great of a job as I could. That took me down this road of effective teaching.
In June of 2019, we were actually expecting our second son and everything was great. Clean bill of health on all the doctor's appointments. Everything looked wonderful. He was due July 1st. Pat, I know you have two kiddos, and you probably remember the days that they were born and your wife saying, "This is it. All right, they're coming." It's amazing how they know. We're about a month ahead of time. I had just finished taking a day, we're like, "Let's get the baby room ready." We moved our older son to his first big boy bed, a twin bed. I had built it on the floor, Montessori style. My wife's like, "He's coming," and it's a month early, and so we're like, "Uh-oh," but the birth went great. It went really smooth.
There's this moment where they take the baby and they hand them to mom and we see this look that the nurses give each other. My wife and I, Caelum, look at each other and we're like, "Okay, well, what's going on here?" They just give her Bowden, our little boy, and they leave and no one's there for like five minutes and we're like, "What is going on?" Then the nurse comes in and asked her to stop breastfeeding and leaves again, so we're like, "Okay, something is going on." And so what it turns out is Bowden was actually born with Down syndrome and had some medical complications going on with that that within about four hours, we were in a helicopter going to Sacramento for immediate surgery, and over the next year, Bowden was hospitalized nine different times. He had five different surgeries, so you can imagine what that looked like just in terms of holding down a job and providing for our family.
But we got thrust into this world of diverse learning, and over the last year-and-a-half, I was like, "Okay, I need a way that's going to support Bowden and his needs going forward. What's that going to look like?" and so I started thinking, "How can I take my teaching expertise outside of higher ed?" and I started learning and learning and learning and trying to support higher-ed teachers. As I was learning, I was like, "Where is all of the effective teaching, accessible teaching, and inclusive teaching discussion?" There's a good amount of inclusive teaching, but effective and accessible in the entrepreneurial realm isn't talked about a lot.
In higher ed, we have whole departments and suites of tools and everything on how to do this and training, and so I started asking people. I was like, "Hey, what accessibility considerations are you taking?" and they're like, "None. We don't know where to start. What do we even do?" or, “It seems like it's insurmountable.” Those are the two things I hear, "It's so much work and I'm bootstrapping this as it is," or, "I don't even know where to start." And that's where I realized there was a severe lack of discussion around effective teaching and accessible content design in this digital course realm, and I founded the HIT Lab, the High Impact Teaching Lab, to really make a change there and bring accessible content to digital course creation.
Pat:
Wow. What a story? Dustin, where can people go check out The Hit Lab if they want to go and check it out right now while they're listening or get more information?
Dustin:
Yeah, it's just thehitlab.co.
Pat:
Thehitlab.co? Cool.
Dustin:
Yeah, H-I-T lab dot co. I just kept thinking, Pat, over the last two years of raising Bowden with Down syndrome, he is so smart. We get told all these limitations that he's going to face and yet the intelligence that is there, it just looks different. His learning looks different. It takes a bit more time, it takes a bit more repetition, it takes a bit more simplicity, but the understanding is there, the learning is there. And so it's all about the approach of how do we go about making this content available and not just assuming that everyone needs the exact same thing.
Pat:
Yeah, so let's talk about this. Actually, my first question relates to, because as an architect, I appreciate the architecture analogy earlier, it does feel like it is because there's a whole mess of laws and titles that we need to abide by. Are there anything like that? Is there anything like that online right now for people building websites, creating podcasts, or whatever content, medium, or platform?
Dustin:
There's a couple of different approaches here. There is that legal approach. I am not the expert on the legality of running a business and selling it there, and so I just want to be clear on that in terms of there is a lot that goes into it, but my understanding of platforms like Podia and Thinkific and that kind of stuff is they have to meet a lot of those accessibility guidelines legally as it is, so if you're hosting a course within them, you're meeting a lot of the legal guidelines. My expertise is you, as the content creator, Pat, what could you do to better serve a wider audience? Even your current audience in the form of effective teaching and accessible design, there are small things that we can do to improve just the general accessibility of our content.
Pat:
Okay, let's go through them. Where do we start?
Dustin:
Where I'd like to start is, again, thinking about how we like to learn. I wanted to ask you, what's your best way to learn, or how do you like to engage in your content that you're learning?
Pat:
I learn by seeing somebody actually do the thing that's being taught. I'm not a textbook person; I'm more of a science lab, get my hands dirty kind of person.
Dustin:
Yeah, absolutely. What about Keoni?
Pat:
He's very much the same way. He likes to take things apart to understand them and then sometimes he's able to put them back together, sometimes not, but that's how Keoni likes to learn. Kai is more of a storyteller and story listener. She loves to hear stories and understands characters and how they progress. She can empathize with those who are within certain scenarios, and she learns really well that way, too. All of it's visual, however, which then obviously begs the question, well, what about the visually impaired? I'm sure we're going to get into those kinds of things, but those are how my kids best learn and educate themselves.
Dustin:
Yeah, and so the point that I'm trying to make is even our typical learners, your typical audience learns in a really diverse way, so if you are offering them this course or this service, and you're trying to deliver on a promise, you got to understand that everyone, not just the margins, learn differently. A couple of things that are really easy ways to at least take steps towards accessible content, and it's a deep well, right? You can go down that rabbit hole for a really long time, and I really believe in what's something you can start doing today that's going to better serve a wider audience.
We'd like to think about content needs to be beautiful, right? As I've been going through establishing my business, they say, "Hey, make a lead magnet. Make it your brand colors," and all these like beautiful things that are great, but really, that doesn't matter to a screen reader, so if you're trying to have your document read, none of that matters. And so the idea of a content and where you can start with the content is simply a nice, clean, plain Google Doc. What you'll want to do is you'll want to use one title, one heading, and then nest headings appropriately, put all text for images, and set your heading rows for tables. This is like the Pareto principle: doing those small things are going to take you like 80% of the way to serving a really diverse audience.
What this does is it creates a nice, plain, easy-to-use PDF, and what you can actually do, there's a free tool for Google Chrome. I'm going to be really advocating the Google suite here because they've done a lot of stuff. The free Read&Write for Google Chrome; it's free, it's an add-in, and you can listen to it, so make a plain PDF, install free Read&Write, and listen to the screen reader. Close your eyes and say, "Okay, could I understand that?" If so, that is just a huge step towards a more accessible content. Then now that you've got your content polished and ready to go, stylize it. Make that beautiful free lead magnet, and when someone signs up for it, send them both. Send them the accessible version and the stylized version. It didn't take that much. When you start with that universal design, you start by making something that everyone can access and then polishing it, it goes a really, really long way.
Pat:
I love that. This is written content that, number one, is going to be a lot easier to read, just in general for everybody. I think I love this because it kind of structures things the way we should be writing and typing and publishing online. But then this is so easy, it seems, that it's like, well, why isn't this something? Why don't you think people do this? Is it just awareness? Or how do we reduce the friction as much as possible so we do actually do this?
Dustin:
I think a lot of it is awareness, Pat. We have this content wave that's happened with the pandemic that the idea of accessibility is starting to come to light because, in the last year, we've had a flood of content, people taking businesses online and we have Zoom meetings and more documents and all sorts of stuff, and so it's really highlighting the inaccessibility of a lot of this. Like you said, if you just start with the small things, like a nice outline, you're planning out your content, you're flushing it out, which is good practice for you delivering good content, anyway. But what happens is people never share that. They say, "Oh, this is the behind-the-scenes Google Doc outline." Export it, file save as PDF, and just make that piece accessible. I think a lot of it is awareness and education.
When thinking about my company on how I want to serve this area, I really tried to identify that there's really three needs. There's education, there's the need for education, so what is inclusive and accessible design and why is it important? That's what we're doing here, what I'm doing on my Instagram and YouTube, so getting just the idea of education out there, and then there's the training, so how do we do it? Training and service and even service as in content remediation. There's actually one company in the world right now that does content remediation for outside sources and they charge $15 a page, so what I just told you in those simple things that you could do on your Google Doc, they charge you $15 per page.
Pat:
I mean, there's a business opportunity right there.
Dustin:
There's a business opportunity, but this is stuff that I think a lot of people trying to start businesses, and I mean, you're more the expert here on this, but it's a lot. It's learning a new skill set, it's learning these business techniques, it's these huge checklists, and we get focused on this final product, this beautiful digital course, or this beautiful PDF download, and so that's where we're working towards. No one is saying, "Flush it all out in a nice, clear outline, and then save that outline as your accessible version." It can have all the same information.
Pat:
Yeah, I think as long as you put it into your systems, right, it just becomes a part of the way you do what you do, and that makes complete sense to me.
Dustin:
There's another service that I wanted to let people know about, Pat, actually with these Google Docs is it's called Grackle, like the bird, grackledocs.com. This is a G Suite add-on, completely free to use as well. This will actually do accessibility checks for your Google Docs, your Google Slides, and your Google Sheets. And so what you can do is if you want to take it one step further than the suggestions I mentioned earlier, you could install Grackle Docs and just do a run and it will tell you exactly. It's going to check about 22 different things for a Google Doc and it'll say you met it or you didn't, and if you didn't, it'll tell you how to meet it, and it could even do some automatic rearranging for you. This might take you five minutes once you're done with something. The biggest argument here is, "I don't have the time to make a copy that works for everyone." If you start there and use tools like Grackle and Google Docs, it's really easy to do that.
Pat:
That's awesome. Wow. Thank you for sharing that with us. We'll put all the links to all of this in the show notes, of course. This helps us on the blog and text front. There's other kinds of content, obviously, that people prefer to consume, and especially recently with the rise of podcasting and such, why don't we talk about audio? Do you focus on audio and help audio podcasters out in terms of accessibility as well?
Dustin:
Yeah, absolutely. I was hoping you were going to ask that, and if not, I was going to bring it in, but audio is another one that, again, it's all about your systems, it's all about how you approach it, and if you approach it with the right idea in mind from the start, it's actually pretty darn easy. I would actually say that depending on the tool you're using, video and audio content is perhaps even easier to make accessible than a PDF or a doc. What I encourage people to do is you can film and edit your videos and your podcasts like you would normally. If you're making a video, every video editor out there offers an export audio. Export the audio, and in your digital course, put it right next to the video.
Just an example of how this is beneficial, even me, what I do is I've been taking this course and I download the audio versions and listen to them while I'm at the gym. Then when I come back home to actually work on the content, I go through the pieces that I need, but I digested the content while I was at the gym, audio, then I use the video as a support piece going through it, so it's, again, giving different avenues for your learners to really engage with your content and get the most out of it, so you have this audio file now to go along with your video file. Transcripts are the next question. That's where it gets tougher, but it all depends on your price range and your tool. Rev.io [Editor's note: Rev.com is the correct link], you've probably mentioned, or you probably know, or your listeners probably have heard of, it's done for you, it's fast, it's professional, it's accurate, but it does cost money. I think it's like a dollar per minute or a $1.25 per minute the last time I checked.
Pat:
Yeah, it's pretty pricey. We use it, but it's very accurate. It's done by humans on the other end, but I'm sure you're going to mention some of the more automated tools that one could use, right?
Dustin:
Yeah. One of the more automated user-friendly tools that I personally really like is descript.com. They just released a big one. You can do full video and audio recording, editing, and processing all within their tool. They do have a nice free tier that is, I think, about three hours per month for free. Don't quote me on that because I don't remember it off the top of my head, but it's right around there, and so if you're building a digital course, three hours of content may get you a good module or two, depending on the depth of your course.
What it does is it actually brings up your transcript. You just load your audio or video file in, it brings up your transcript like a Word or a text file, and so you can read through it and make edits on it like you're editing a Google Doc or a Microsoft Word doc, which is one, amazing, but two, you get these nice, clear, beautiful transcripts that are accurate. It does take a little bit of legwork on your end, but these tools are getting more and more sophisticated and stronger, so I really love Descript because you get your audio, your video, and your transcript from it, and it's relatively pretty quick in terms of the effort that you, the creator, are putting in.
Pat:
I use Descript. I love it and the team uses it as well and it's getting more and more sophisticated. They have some other crazy things like the voice recognition tool and the ability for you to type out what you're saying after it learns your voice. It's a little scary, actually, but that's beyond what we're talking about today. But yeah, transcripts, it can be made easy, it can be using tools like Descript added into just the workflow that you've already have got for yourself. I like-
Dustin:
I even have one more, Pat, if you...
Pat:
... Yeah, please. Go.
Dustin:
Actually, this is breaking news as of today. We're recording behind the scenes here May 11th, but YouTube just an hour or two ago announced a new feature that they are going to allow you to edit your subtitles and captions like a doc very similar to Descript before you publish. YouTube does get some flak for whether or not those closed captions are accurate or not, but now you can see it as a full doc, do a quick readthrough, make the edits that you need to, and export it. I was just looking at this about an hour ago.
Pat:
That's huge because for a while, you could create a transcript or have a script and then upload it so it matched, or you could go in line by line and edit it, but it would take forever. But the fact that you can go in probably now pre-upload is what you're saying after it processes?
Dustin:
Pre-upload.
Pat:
Wow, and you can download it, so you can, essentially, if I'm reading this correctly, you could essentially use YouTube's AI to be your transcript platform for potentially even a podcast for free.
Dustin:
Yeah, there's cool tools. We are at the front of a wave of this kind of stuff. You're probably familiar with the company MasterClass. They just hired John Scott. He just created in higher ed realm for a learning management system called Blackboard a tool called Ally, which kind of does similar to what I mentioned Grackle Docs does, where it scans all of a teacher's content and lets them know how accessible or inaccessible it is and gives them guidelines on how to fix it and that sort of thing. About a year ago, he just moved from Blackboard doing that to MasterClass, and so MasterClass is clearly behind the scenes working on something big in the accessibility realm for digital courses. They're one of the first ones that I've heard.
Pat:
I love that because they have the resources to find all the right tools and such to be able to hopefully pave the way for us to be able to follow suit, I hope, which is really nice, so I'll definitely be paying closer attention to them and what they're doing. That's really great. Do we have to worry about, or does Apple, for example, for podcasts and Spotify already provide the things that one would need? I guess it's all kind of built-in and it helps that it's already audio-only and the transcript would help for those who perhaps are auditorially-impaired.
Dustin:
Yeah, and the transcript, Pat, I know you run two different YouTube channels. I have a small one, right? I'm closing in on 1,000. I have gotten questions saying, "Is there a transcript available for this video?" Multiple times, before I even started this, this journey, and so people are looking for it. People want to, even just with YouTube videos, and whether or not they have some sort of documented disability, which is estimated anywhere between one in five and one in 10 US adults, so you can imagine how many of your customers have a need for something like that, but they are asking for it.
In terms of, I know you can link files and stuff for podcast notes, and even on your site, you can let your listeners know that, "Hey, I really went over to the site to get all the transcripts for any of these," right? You can host those PDF downloads somewhere on your site on a dedicated page or within the page of each episode. I'm not sure if there's anything built-in specifically to the apps themselves as like you could see a text version of it, but you can certainly host them outside of that in a number of different ways.
The last piece of content that we haven't hit is live video and what we can do for that. Again, Google coming to the rescue, Google recently enabled live captioning for anything in Chrome. Any video. Google will live caption any video or audio playing in Google Chrome, so if you have Google Chrome, you can go into your settings and just enable it, so that is something that if you are having trouble or you have customers who want this, you could let them know how to enable that. There's lots of YouTube videos. It will take 30 seconds to do. But there's also tools like Otter.ai, which is the one that powers the Zoom closed captioning.
The biggest pushback I hear when I talk about auto transcription is that it's not accurate. We are moving in the right direction. The more it's used, the smarter it gets, and the better it gets, and some subtitles are better than none. That's my approach and philosophy here is, if we take steps towards those, you don't expect the first podcaster to blow your SPI Podcast out of the water, right? You don't say, "Hey, you're a new podcast. I expect you to overtake me on your first launch." We start somewhere, right? We have to work towards those gold standards, and so a lot of these things, aren't perfect, but they're better than nothing.
Pat:
Yeah. For those who are worried about how it may come across, if your transcript, for example, is not perfect, I always say before the transcript is shown, whether you are using tools like Fusebox.fm, which we've done a really good job on making sure that the tools within that are accessible for those who are online, watching, or listening on your website, you can always say, if it is going to be more auto-generated stuff, right before you add that transcript, you can say, "Hey, this was automatically created using [name of tool here] for your convenience. Apologize for any errors, but we provided this here to help out in case you need it." Then it comes from a place of service versus, "Hey, here's our transcript." “Hey, why isn't this perfect?”
I know a lot of us maybe move toward the more automated tools because they're a lot cheaper, they're a lot faster, and that's how you can get around the worry of, "Well, this isn't perfect." And I hope everybody listening by now can realize that, well, if you just try to be perfect the whole time nothing's going to get done. I think, like you said, better to have something than nothing.
Dustin:
Yeah, I love that suggestion of a little, "Hey, this was auto-generated." Maybe one day down the road we'll have the funds to get Rev.io [Rev.com], but until then... It goes a long way. I like to think that the people who really give it a lot of flak are being a little overly critical, right? We all know that information comes in a context of a conversation, and so if you're like, "Oh, Hogwarts isn't supposed to be in that conversation," you know they're not referencing Hogwarts. It was probably a mistake, right? Yeah, Hogwarts came to mind. I recently did a test with Zoom's auto-captioning where I yelled random words at it and saw how well it did, and it was a fun little one.
Pat:
To finish up here, again, thank you, Dustin, for this. What can we all do to help spread the word for you and for everybody else out there who needs this? I'd love to see who we might be able to get some help from within the audience, whether it's super proactive or just sharing among others. When you meet others who have websites, for example, how do you best recommend we share this so that this becomes worldly adopted and we give access to our tools, to our websites, to our software, to our courses, to everybody?
Dustin:
One of the first things that I think would really go a long way, and it's simple, it's that we need to move away from this accessibility mindset to inclusivity mindset. Like I mentioned earlier, inclusive design benefits everyone, right? When you design for the margins, everyone benefits, whereas accessible design, certain people benefit. So first off, moving that way and realizing when you think "inclusive design," that includes accessible design, so there's that one. Two, just start learning about it. Try some of those steps, try starting an outline in your process, like I mentioned, and maybe try out Grackle Docs and just see how easy it is to actually do this.
There is one big piece that is a huge need in the community that, I'm not equipped to do this, so here's a free business idea that I would love someone to take. But if you're a SAS developer or software developer, we have these great tools like Descript that I just promoted as something to help content creators create accessible content. It's really not accessible to people who need those measures. People who need these content services, these things like Descript or Rev.io [Rev.com], these services that out there, while those services help typical learners and typical people create inclusive content. They are not accessible to people who need those accessibility steps. There's very few things that are out there, so that is a huge, huge need for that. That is a way that it can go.
But I just encourage people to, I mean, personally, I'd love it. If you followed me and my stuff and that's all what I'm talking about, but the thing is, follow a diverse group of people. Follow diverse learners. Consult A Blind Guy was one of your regular Income Stream guests; go follow his YouTube channel, see what he's talking about, and just expose yourself to the different ways that people learn, the different needs they have, and give some of these tips that I've given you a try because they're easier to implement than you might think.
Pat:
Thank you so much, Dustin. This is hugely important. I hope more people listen to this and spread the word for you, but where can people go to follow your work? I think everybody should. I know it's TheHitLab.co. Are there any other places?
Dustin:
The other place that I would send you to is The Hit Lab's YouTube channel, which is just youtube.com/dustinbakkie1. I had to throw the "1" in there, so that's B-A-K-K-I-E-1. Yeah, that is the YouTube channel. On there, I've got little tutorials on how to enable auto-captioning and do a lot of the things that we've mentioned here.
Pat:
Awesome. Dude, thank you so much for the work that you're doing. Thank you for sharing your story with us. It's very inspirational. I think it's going to help a lot of people. I mean, it is helping a lot of people.
Dustin:
Thank you, Pat. I really appreciate that.
Pat:
All right, I hope you enjoyed that realization, perhaps something new that you haven't heard of before, or a new focus that perhaps you should have in your business, especially if it starts to become something that we might be leaving people out who shouldn't be left out, so I'd highly recommend you check out Dustin. There's likely, depending on the impairment and the condition, a number of people out there in this world right now. I'd love for you to tell me who they are. If you'd like to share on Twitter a person who's helping others with disability, with digital accessibility, with content consumption with inclusivity here, I'd love for you to hit me up at @patflynn and use the hashtag #session515; again, session515, that'll be the hashtag so we can all share and learn more.
I want to thank Dustin for coming on. He brought this to my attention as far as, "You know what, Pat? You haven't talked about this ever, and no one else does. Might I be able to spread the word and actually start a conversation?" Right? Dustin didn't give us all the solutions and there's a lot more questions. However, this at least starts the conversation. That's really important, right? We want everybody to be included. Thank you so much, Dustin. I appreciate you. We'll link to everything on the show notes. SmartPassiveIncome.com/session 515, and again, #session515 on Twitter so we can continue the conversation there.
Appreciate you. Thank you so much. I look forward to serving you on this follow-up Friday episode. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss that and all the other great content coming your way. Thanks so much. Take care. Appreciate you. As always, Team Flynn for the win. Peace.
Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I'm your host, Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sara Jane Hess, our series producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media. We'll catch you in the next session.