Never thought I'd be that guy raving about how great his company is, but...
Just got out of a nearly hour-long work meeting with the folks we're contracting with about audio describing the visual aspects of our town halls. Demos, presentations, I'll have my own personal audio describer in a shared Slack channel and huddle describing things out loud and answering my questions. We're also going to hash out presentation guidelines so folks doing demos do a few things to make everyone's lives easier, including watchers on phones where they can't see commands or screenshares.
Mind absolutely blown. Do FAAMG-scale companies do this for their employees, or just mine? This was a unique situation for everyone in the meeting, including the multiple companies contracting and subcontracting on this, so I suspect I just hit the jackpot and no one else does this.
I'm truly spoiled. Fly.io set the "cares about employees" bar pretty high and if I ever lose this job I'm going to be hard-pressed working for anyone else.
@nolan@matt Well, as a datapoint, I worked for Google
and got none of that. In fact, it took them weeks to get me help with learning
to find my way around campus.
My first few days there, someone saw me get off the bus every morning
and try ineffectively to find my building. She decided that she was going
to figure out the route from my bus stop to my cubical and teach me
how to at least find my desk. She used her campus map and then walked
with me every day until I knew the route. This was a really cool Indian
chick named Jilmil. And man, women tend to be excellent problem solvers.
A couple months later, they moved me to a building on the other side of campus
and I had to learn it all over again.
I think I have some PTSD from working there. Not a good place for you if
you're blind. Maybe things have gotten better.
FWIW, Google put $15000 coffee machines in the Android building when I
was there. I drank coffee from it once. Nothing to write home about.
@matt@chris That's so wild. We do many of our meetings on Gather, this...let's just say less-than-accessible meeting space platform where you walk around between rooms, move in and out of conversations based on proximity, etc. I noticed the chat wasn't accessible at the time (they may have fixed this since) so after a week of me being there they just moved all our meeting chats to Slack. I figured there'd be some pushback or complaining, but no. Everyone just changed direction last June and all of our town hall chats are in Slack. We still use Gather for some things, but any larger meetings for my own team or that I'm distinctly interested in are on Zoom now, and no one has done anything to make me feel the slightest bit bad about having to change things, even implicitly.
I'm simultaneously surprised and not surprised that bigger companies don't do better.
@matt@chris Oh yeah, and we talked about using asciinema for some of our demos, our CEO even set up our own internal server so nothing sensitive has to leave our networks, but I don't think that got a lot of traction. I feel like that's probably due to just not pushing it more, though, since that's a change every presenter would have to make. Still though, I bet folks would do it if I asked, and we may start doing it where possible so the poor audio describer isn't having to read all the things. 😀
@nolan@chris How accessible is asciinema in practice? Do you have to pause the playback frequently to catch up? Does it help if you use a Braille display?
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