Reflecting on 2021 and Hopes for 2022
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabish, and welcome to the final episode of the podcast for 2021, which to say the least has been a challenging year, but I hope you will have some time. I'll help you have the luxury of being able to spend
00:00:29
Speaker
this holiday season with friends and family and loved ones and I hope you will stay healthy and I hope you'll be happy and be able to spend a little bit of time relaxing before we get into 2022 which I hope for all of us is a better year and of course I hope that we will get to see each other in person here or there or elsewhere.
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Speaker
Now onto the show.
Data Visualization Accessibility with Frank Olavsky
00:00:49
Speaker
On this final episode of 2021, I'm very excited to have Frank Olavsky join me on the program. Frank spends a lot of his time working in the area of data and data visualization accessibility. Now I spent a good chunk of my 2021 thinking about, talking about, writing about racial equity when it comes to data visualization. How do we talk about it?
00:01:11
Speaker
and to and represent the people and communities that we are focusing on or that we are trying to communicate with. But one of the areas that we all need to be doing a better job with is how we make our content accessible to people who might have vision impairments, physical impairments, intellectual impairments,
00:01:30
Speaker
All the ways in which we might take for granted how we perceive and use information and use data is not necessarily the same experience for everybody. So Frank has been doing a lot of research and a lot of writing, a lot of work in this area. And so we're going to talk about in this episode pretty much the entire landscape of what the field of data visualization accessibility looks like and the work that he's doing in his graduate program.
00:01:53
Speaker
There's a lot of resources here that I've put in the show notes, especially linking back to the GitHub page that Frank co-hosts with a few others. And I hope you'll check that out. And I hope you'll think hard, especially as we go into the new year, about how you can make your data visualizations, your data products, everything that you communicate more accessible to more people. Because the more we think about everybody and how everybody can use our materials and our information,
00:02:19
Speaker
the better off we'll all be and the better off we'll be able to make our arguments and tell our stories. So again, happy holidays. Happy new year. I hope you'll enjoy this final episode of the policy of his podcast for 2021. And here's my conversation with Frank.
00:02:35
Speaker
Good morning, Frank. How are you? Good to see you. Good morning, John. I'm good. It's good to see you too. Like great to see me too virtually. Yeah. First time. Yeah. Like trading emails and Twitter tweets are not like the same as like, actually. Yeah. This is a little different. It's just like level two, level three would be in person, but right. Right. Level three would be person. Yeah. Maybe even without masks at some point, which would be, which would be very nice.
Inclusion in Data Experiences
00:02:58
Speaker
So I'm excited to have you on the show. You have been doing a lot of work on issues in and around accessibility for people using data, reading data visualizations, and of course creating those. And so I want to talk about all the things that you've been working on and the stuff that you're doing now. So I thought maybe we would just start by.
00:03:16
Speaker
maybe you could just talk about the problem that you and a lot of you, you have a lot of collaborators all over the world. So like you and your collaborators and also people are just sort of in those different areas. Like what's the problem you're trying to solve? What are like the biggest challenges that you think content creators have when thinking about accessibility?
00:03:36
Speaker
Yeah, great. So there's a big problem and a little problem. And the little one I focus on specifically. But the big problem is it's obviously just inclusion, including people in, you know, what what I think has been a pretty significant shift into the information age. So.
00:03:54
Speaker
We've gone from not just having a lot of information, but now we're starting to build products. We're starting to use it.
Challenges in Visual Impairment Accessibility
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Speaker
Information's making its way, dense information, is making its way into news articles, into personal applications on our phones, on our computers, all over the place. So it's becoming ubiquitous, these data experiences that we have. And we're using them to make decisions about our lives. And we also see this kind of rise of use in policy.
00:04:22
Speaker
Not that policy wasn't data driven, but it's more and more so we see a lot of data being used to solve big world problems. The big P issue here is including people in learning, in jobs, in decision making, in their own lives for the sake of the world. 26% of Americans
00:04:45
Speaker
report having some kind of disability. That means there's going to be a lot of inclusion efforts to hit a broad spectrum of different kinds of people. Globally, low vision or uncorrected visual impairment affects almost 30% of people. It's 28%. It's one of the biggest global health inclusion efforts worldwide is vision more broadly. As you can guess, data visualization
00:05:15
Speaker
It's in a tricky situation, so that's the big P problem. The little P problem, I think you already hit the nail on the head, which is we're producing this stuff at scale, and by we, I mean practitioners, researchers, people who do this stuff and make this stuff.
00:05:33
Speaker
We're producing things at scale, but we don't really have the tools to make things accessible at scale. It's like we have a fire hose of awesome ways to get data out there. I guess sometimes we may think our own workflows are too slow and we're always trying to improve how fast things work.
00:05:53
Speaker
But with Tableau or the rise, the advent of visually driven user interfaces for building data experiences, it's a lot easier than it was. And it's getting even better. But we haven't really made the same strides for making these things accessible.
00:06:11
Speaker
And there's a huge gap that we're beginning to form. And it's only going to get worse if we don't address it soon. And that gap is, you know, users and also practitioners with disabilities are being left out with this process. So I want to focus on vision for just a second, because my
00:06:30
Speaker
feeling, not data measured, but my feeling is that the data vis field focuses very heavily on color, what most people call color blindness, but color vision issues. So with that statement, I have two questions. First, perhaps more importantly, can you lay out some other vision difficulties or disabilities that people have that are not color related to color? Because I get a feeling that maybe not a lot of people know
00:06:57
Speaker
or familiar with what other vision challenges people might have. And then secondly, do you agree with that statement that like far too much of the focus is on color and not on other forms of disabilities?
00:07:09
Speaker
Okay, great question. This is something I've spoken about in the past, so, you know, secret. I'm teeing it up for you, I'm teeing it up. Exactly, thank you. Really set me up there. Yeah, right. So, yeah, you know, there's
Introducing Chartability
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Speaker
layers to, I think, unlearning ableism. The work of making something accessible actually begins with unlearning your own kind of ableist assumptions about
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Speaker
what we need to fix or address in a given thing that we're making. Visual impairment has a pretty broad spectrum. Even just low vision,
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Speaker
which is a way that we refer to kind of a large collection of things that are not just, you don't just need glasses, like low vision is like the next level. But it's not blindness, which is also like kind of a category and blindness is also a spectrum, by the way, right? I think here blindness, they think it's just darkness. Actually, blindness is a spectrum of acuity.
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Speaker
You know, one of the most common low vision impairments is caused by diabetes, diabetic retinopathy. And so this is like you have like large splotches of areas in your site where you can't see. And so actually like you have decent acuity outside of that. But there are a lot of like issues in how you focus, how you move your eyes through content.
00:08:40
Speaker
et cetera, et cetera. So that's just one example. And then when it comes to your question about color vision deficiency, also known as color blindness, we actually have a really rich history in research and practice dating back from late 80s, early 90s about how do we design
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Speaker
and make tools for and research this particular issue. It largely affects between four and eight percent of XY chromosome individuals of European descent, and then it's a much lower percentage
00:09:19
Speaker
from people of a different ancestry and it's about maybe 1% for people of an XX chromosome makeup. It largely affects men and mostly white men. If you think about it, I'm not going to dig in too much to why this is the thing we've focused on a lot. I actually don't want to say that we shouldn't focus on it because it's still an inclusion effort. We still should.
00:09:48
Speaker
We have a lot of great tools for making colorblind safe palettes, for analyzing different types of color vision deficiency. We have great simulators and all kinds of things. Actually, I think it's a good example of... CVD is a good example of, hey, there are a lot of other things we should have the same amount of tools and research for. Can we set this as a minimum goalpost for a lot of other areas? I think that'd be great. I don't really want to
00:10:18
Speaker
put it down, like, oh, we focused on it too much. But I do want to say, like, let's take this fervor that we've, you know, we've really worked hard to include people with CVD and DataViz. Let's just, like, keep doing that. Like, the quest doesn't end there. Let's keep going.
00:10:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. So now you've helped built your own tool about accessibility, chartability. And so I just want to give you a chance to just like, I was going to say like, just talk about it, but actually maybe I'll help structure the question a little bit.
00:10:50
Speaker
So talking about accessibility tools and writing about them as sort of blog posts and books and what have you and articles is one thing, but actually building a tool, a functional tool that people can use is a totally different thing. So can you talk a little bit about where that originated and then how you built it? And then, and then for folks who don't know about it, and of course put the link in the show notes, but for folks who don't know about it, you know, what it is and what it helps them do. Yeah. Okay. Great. So.
00:11:20
Speaker
Let's see if I can do that in order. Sorry, what's the very first thing you asked? Okay, so first one was origins. Right. And then sort of how that process of building it went. Okay, yeah. So if we think back to my little P problem, that people are not able to address accessibility at the same scale that we are able to produce experiences driven by data. It's like we're making way more databases than we can
00:11:45
Speaker
then we're making them accessible. I think that to me the first step is people just need to be able to evaluate whether or not something is or is not accessible according to a robust set of criteria, right?
Screen Readers and Tool Accessibility
00:12:01
Speaker
That's step one for me. So that is where chartability comes in. That's kind of like the origin for it. It's a synthesis of quite a lot of things. Took WCAG, which is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It's a global standard. It affects like 56 percent of the world's population in some form of governance or policy. So like it's the big standard for technology that we have.
00:12:30
Speaker
I took WCAG standards, which are pretty broad in their application and focused them specifically on what I call data experiences, but it's mostly data visualizations or data-driven interfaces. I took that set of standards, made them relevant
00:12:47
Speaker
technically speaking, for a specific line of work. Then I also brought in research. There's a lot of great research in the data-vis space, including related to accessibility that just has never made it to global standards for probably because it's so specific, I'm assuming, but global standards also move slow. Don't hate me. Okay, people, I love you all.
00:13:11
Speaker
But, you know, it's a very slow moving process. And so I've also brought that stuff in and synthesized it. So at its base, it's a set of heuristics. It's a set of tests, right? Like test this thing, do this thing. And at the heart of it, that's what it is. That's its origin story. And so for those who haven't
00:13:38
Speaker
gone to the chartability site. How do you hope that they will use the tool? Yeah, it takes bravery because you're going to be embarking into uncharted space when you start using it. It's a much, much, much lower learning curve than like international accessibility standards like WCAG. WCAG is very hard to start getting into to start learning. So it's easier there.
00:14:04
Speaker
but it's still difficult. You're going to have to practice using a screen reader. That's just one of the 50 tests in chartability. The current release has 45, but the next release will have 50. It's like you're going to have to use a tool you've never used before. You're going to have to learn how to do a contrast ratio test. These are things a lot of people haven't really done.
00:14:27
Speaker
It'll take some guts to give it a shot. Your first time doing it might take you like, if you do the whole thing, it could take you like four hours. It'll take you a while. But from your perspective, is it kind of like getting the machines up and running? Like once you sort of get the machines going, then it's four hours the first time, but the next time it's going to take you, I mean, fraction of that time. Oh, yeah. I can just tell by looking at things most of the time now. And because I'm so...
00:14:55
Speaker
Like I've seen so many of the same issues. I usually know, like right away, like the three or four things I should just check first and, you know, good chance there's going to be some failures there. So, yeah, it's supposed to help people audit. And one of the things I think that people don't realize about auditing is that a good audit, if you measure an audit in terms of its effectiveness, it caught failures. Right. So you're not supposed to use it to kind of like, say,
00:15:24
Speaker
Oh, I did a good job. I only had 10 things wrong. No, no, no. You put on your auditor hat. You take off your data viz person hat and you say like, OK, my job right now is to see how many things I can catch. And that's it. That's your only goal is just to catch things that were not accessible or inaccessible about your work. Right. So, yeah. Can you talk real briefly about screen readers for maybe for folks who don't know how they work in particular?
00:15:52
Speaker
I mean, we could talk about the basics of how it, you know, reads a document out loud, but, but with data vis in particular, cause that's, that's our focus. Like, I don't really know what my question is here to be honest, but like, maybe like, you know, do you have a particular screen reader that you like to use, especially for testing and it's, you know.
00:16:08
Speaker
I find some of them are kind of hard to like the even the built in one on the Mac is sort of hard to get up and running. It should just be like a click of a button. Like on my Xbox, you literally click a button and you turn on the accessibility features and it reads it aloud. Like, I don't know why it's so hard on the Mac. But anyways, and then like, are there tools out there and we don't need to like, you know, hammer people, but like, are there ones that you think are good or let me not say it, let me not say good, better?
00:16:36
Speaker
at some of these tasks.
00:16:38
Speaker
Okay. All right. I keep giving you like 400 questions in one time, but I've got so much I want to learn from you, Frank. Just like, just feed me all the information. All right. So screen readers. My favorite is NVDA for a few reasons. One, it's free to its community contributed. So like there's a lot of advantages and disadvantages to that model, right? But the fact that it's free is great and only is for PCs. So yeah, that's a disadvantage.
00:17:07
Speaker
If I'm only going to test minimally, I do on the PC and VDA and then on a Mac voiceover. Those two cover a pretty broad spectrum, but really JAWS is the most used screen reader. If anybody does this work professionally,
00:17:29
Speaker
You should get a license for your org. It's like a thousand bucks or so because it's actually the one that most people use.
Future of Accessible Data Visualization
00:17:37
Speaker
It's still the most popular. VoiceOver is really intelligent and it's so good at certain things that you have to test stuff with it because it will have a different experience than other screen readers. Interesting.
00:17:52
Speaker
Yeah, folks at Apple, I mean, you know, I work with some of them, so I'm not trying to butter them up, but like, you know, CMU has a lot of like Apple connections in the HDMI. So like, yeah, voiceover is pretty smart. And I don't want to say that other screen readers aren't, but they're like, they very much follow the API for assistive technologies of their class. So they're just trying to just
00:18:17
Speaker
you know, fit that standard. Um, yeah. And so you're going to get a little different experience across all of them, honestly, and in different browsers and whatever. So, but JAWS, but you would say JAWS is the, what's sort of the enterprise level, professional level screen reader. Okay. It's the pro tool. It's like, yeah, it's the oldest. It's the most established. It's also the most used. Right. Yeah. It's, it's, I mean, I don't want to say it's the best because they all have pros and cons, but yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great.
00:18:47
Speaker
Yeah. And, you know, for folks who aren't familiar with like what's like why screen readers, there's like there's a whole world on this. But I think Leonie Watson, a good friend of mine, she's a accessibility subject matter expert, but also, you know, dabbles and data visualization. She's a native screen reader user. And that's how we refer to somebody who uses it and part of their daily life.
00:19:14
Speaker
And she wrote an article on voice modulation and synthetic speech and basically explaining why screen readers still use this kind of like robotic voice. Yeah. And it's because screen reader users are very fast. Like you first turn on a screen reader, it reads super slow. It's like if you watched all your videos on YouTube at quarter speed, like it's just
00:19:40
Speaker
painfully slow for somebody who uses this tool daily. And like experts, screen reader users will listen at a speed of like 400 words per minute, which is way faster than we would ever talk. Yeah, wow. But it's because it's how they get their information and they're very used to it and very efficient. And so the main advantage of the screen reader is it's like its speed, its efficiency. Yeah, they're pretty well established standards in certain environments also.
00:20:06
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So then what about on the on the date of his tools? Have you found that some tools are better at accessibility? I mean, I know the folks over at Power BI have spent a lot of time thinking about accessibility.
Graduate Studies and Information-Rich Systems
00:20:22
Speaker
And from what I've heard, like Tableau may not be as sort of, I don't want to say bad again. I don't want to say as advanced. Um, if we're, what are their true? Yeah. If we're wearing our chart ability hat, they're all bad because they all have failures. Yeah. Right. Okay. So which one that has the fewest like audit check marks. If you go through chartability.
00:20:43
Speaker
It's it's very tough because as Christy Martini has shown in his like Tableau accessibility journey, you can act Tableau to do like pretty wild things like have keyboard navigation on chart elements. That's something that Power BI has that Tableau does not.
00:21:02
Speaker
but you can hack Tableau to do it, right? So if we just compare the tool, it's like, okay, you could technically pass if you spend like 40 hours on this one issue and you're a Tableau Zen master, right? So like the real thing that I measure is not that you can
00:21:19
Speaker
like create a perfect test case that does really good because a lot of these tools actually can be pretty competitive in that if you set it up like that, right? Yeah. But it's like, can an everyday database person kind of put something together that like really works? And yeah, actually, I mean, I don't want to say Power BI is good, because like, there's so many things, you know, that they know me, they all know me. So like, yeah, there are a lot of things I think that
00:21:45
Speaker
They could improve on, they are improving on, but thinking in terms of labor is a very good way to frame accessibility. You want to pick a tool that makes the least amount of work for you, the practitioner, and also the least amount of work for your user.
00:22:06
Speaker
Christy Martini also in his accessibility journey with Tableau measured how many keystrokes he had to press when using a screen reader to get the information he needed out of a visualization. And it was like 130 or something, 130 keystrokes to just get like basic info. And the cognitive load was so heavy because it's like, how can you even store this information in your head as you're going through it? There's so much.
00:22:29
Speaker
But when he added like a keyboard navigable thing and the data is like right there, right in the visual, you're like just going through it. He was immediately able to jump in and start getting, you know, information much, much faster. Right. Right. And so, yeah, there's like all kinds of trade offs. I will say, though, the absolute best stuff is like, you know, you're coding at a low level in JavaScript, like that's the best stuff. So we're talking like high charts, Visa chart components. I'm biased because that's the library I contributed to when I was at Visa.
00:22:59
Speaker
But yeah, there's some really good ones out there that I think high charts is definitely the one that it's like.
00:23:05
Speaker
They set the standard for everyone else. They have sonification. They have tools to export for tactile graphics. I mean, they're really kicking butt. They really care about it. That's great. That's great. That's good to know. Okay, so I'll list all these in the show notes for people. Chris's work and links to some of these other articles that you've mentioned. So before I let you go, I want to talk about your
00:23:29
Speaker
what you're doing right now. So you're back in grad school. Um, so I'm excited to hear about the program. Uh, once you get through this first year, the dreaded first year of grad school, then you get to do the fun part, which is the research. So like, I'm sure you have like this big binder of things that you want to write about, but like, yeah, I would tell folks about like the whole, the whole situation. Okay. So I don't know what it's like elsewhere, but I'm expected to do research right now. Oh, right away. Okay.
00:23:56
Speaker
It's going. Econ, you just like do math. There's like, I used to call it math with no numbers. You just do math theory for like the first year. And these big exams and then you can start and then you can finally start to do it. Well, honestly, that would be nice to have a year just to kind of prepare. Yeah. But no, I'm going. We're going already. All right.
00:24:16
Speaker
Obviously, I'm hoping to focus on what I'm calling information-rich systems. I'm not specifically talking about data visualization because I want to also anticipate future interfaces, future ways of working with data.
00:24:33
Speaker
And really the core problem to me is the richness and density and complexity that we use information and how do we make kind of that stuff accessible. Data visualization is obviously to me the first step. And accessibility then, like what in accessibility this broad, broad world, what am I going to focus on?
Global Impact and Market Potential of Accessibility
00:24:53
Speaker
And obviously I said my little problem is helping practitioners do stuff. So I'm going to try and really focus kind of on a computer sciences end of things, making tools that help people do this work. But also I'm really interested in motor impairment and animation. There's a lot of things that really have been understudied and under focused in terms of accessibility, motor impairment.
00:25:23
Speaker
is like data visualization still largely lives in a mouse point click drag kind of paradigm. And not only is that not even suited to the times we live in, but also it's not very accessible.
00:25:39
Speaker
Yeah. And so I'm kind of curious, you know, what are other interaction modalities that we can look at and how do we adapt a system to suit the user's needs? So if I can do one thing that's kind of academic, it's just to emphasize when you think about accessibility, try not to expect the user to adapt to the system. Try not to augment the user so that they fit the system's expectations. And instead, try and design your system to have like
00:26:09
Speaker
a breadth of a robust set of adaptations that can suit different user input. Just mouse input is going to have a lot of what's called ability assumptions about your users. But if you have keyboard accessibility that actually suits a lot of assistive technologies, a lot of AT, use the keyboard interface,
00:26:31
Speaker
So you're going to immediately make your visualization a lot more accessible to a lot of other people just by keyboard and then touch and then other inputs also you can really explore. But I would say at least keyboard and mouse and touch are like kind of the holy trinity. But yeah, there's also a lot of other ways to think about adapting your system to suit user needs that I think don't just apply to accessibility.
00:26:57
Speaker
I've talked about this a lot too. Data visualization has this problem where we kind of design stuff with the assumption that it's static, but we don't live in a static world anymore. We have these digital tools. Why not allow users to self-advocate, to set preferences, to even adjust the visualization space itself to suit their needs?
00:27:19
Speaker
And I think that there's a lot of room for that. I would say data-driven journalism explores this more than anywhere else at scale. I think they do a really good job at this, but I think that the business space, building analytical tools, there's a huge potential there as well also.
00:27:37
Speaker
Yeah, and if there's 26% of Americans reporting some type of disability, that's a huge market that's going untapped.
Rethinking Accessibility Assumptions
00:27:46
Speaker
I heard somebody talk about how they proposed a model to Google or something, and it was only 93% effective, and Google was like, I don't care. Get better. You need to get much, much higher before we're even going to be interested in you.
00:27:59
Speaker
And then I'm thinking, okay, data visualization at most, you know, especially like these complex, but flimsy things that we build. They're very, they're very fragile experiences, right? They're at most 75% effective. Right. And so, okay. How's that? You know, we got, we got to really improve our, our, uh, you know, market and, uh, effectiveness here. So yeah, absolutely. I want to let you go, but you mentioned, um, motor impairments. And so I wanted to ask one last question because one of the things that I find.
00:28:29
Speaker
in talking about accessibility is that there's sort of limited, and this echoes back to our earlier conversation with color, sort of a limited, somewhat limited perspective on what accessibility means, right? There's sort of like a big focus on color. And that might be because especially for people just starting out, it's easy to say, hey, you know, like you said, there's a lot of a ton of tools. So you could do a quick test and you can sort of fix that. But there's motor impairments, there's physical impairments, there's intellectual impairments. And I also wanted to ask you specifically about
00:28:59
Speaker
Access just just access to a lot of these like we make a lot of things that are like require a lot of bandwidth but like we know that not everybody has access just generally to like a Good like broadband access. So I guess my question is
00:29:17
Speaker
I don't know what my question is. I guess just like the broader thought about accessibility, just like, okay, so maybe I'll try to crystallize this into a question. As you can see, when I do these podcasts, it's just kind of like off the cuff, right? And you've alluded to this already many times, but like, what's the thing that people should keep in mind when they think about accessibility in their work?
00:29:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's definitely, and this is why data visualization is a beautiful place for doing accessibility.
Accessibility in Data Storytelling
00:29:45
Speaker
And I think there's a rich potential to like.
00:29:47
Speaker
just get tons of practitioners excited about accessibility is because accessibility is about thinking about your audience. It's about recognizing, is this experience painful? Is it difficult for some people? And then making it better. And if you think about it, the heart of visualization is looking at data and saying, this is terrible. This is bad. Let's see if we can visualize this and make it easier.
00:30:13
Speaker
Right? So like we're already doing the core activity of providing assistance, right? Is what we do with visualization and like, let's keep going. It doesn't stop there. And so yeah, it's about what are called ability assumptions. That's like the thing you should think about. What are the assumptions I have
00:30:33
Speaker
about my audience's ability and how can I reach more people. And ability, I'm glad that you talked about bandwidth because data visualization is actually a really great way to transfer, we're talking actual bytes of data in a small package.
00:30:54
Speaker
Because images could be much smaller than entire databases, right? But data visualization has a tendency to actually really bloat the space, right? So that you have really high graphics requirements, connection requirements, et cetera. And there's a global access issue that I think a lot of people are really not considering. I do know some folks that are. I would say that 538, the folks I've talked to there, this is one of their core things they're focusing on.
00:31:22
Speaker
I think it's beautiful. And so, yeah, just really trying to be as inclusive as possible in your work by questioning your ability assumptions. It's undoing ableism, right? We're all this way. We all have internal ableism. It's not like it's bad to
Closing Remarks and Gratitude
00:31:39
Speaker
say that you do. I do. And it's just part of the work. It's just undoing your assumptions. Yeah.
00:31:44
Speaker
That's great. Frank, thanks so much for coming on the show. I mean, I have learned a ton. I've got a lot of more reading to do. Thanks so much. Good luck in grad school. I'm excited to see all the stuff that comes out. And yeah, thanks again for coming on the show. Great. Thank you so much.
00:32:00
Speaker
And thanks everyone for tuning in to this week's episode of the show and all the shows in 2021. Hopefully you'll get a little bit of a break, maybe go back and check out a few of the great episodes that we've put up over this past year. And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't thank all the people who helped me with the show. Of course, all the guests who have come on the show taking time out of their schedule to answer my questions and to put up with me as I veer off the questions that I said I would ask them and to ask other questions.
00:32:28
Speaker
Big thank you to the folks who helped me with the transcription. Big thank you to Ken Skaggs for helping with the audio editing. And a big thank you to Sharon Satsuki Ramirez for all the editing and the advertising and all the things that go together in making this podcast a success. If you would like to help see the podcast continue into 2022, please consider making a financial contribution over at Patreon or on my PayPal channel.
00:32:52
Speaker
or just spread the word. Put a review up on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast provider. But whatever it is, have a healthy, happy holidays and a happy and healthy new year. And I will talk to you in 2022. So until next time, this has been the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.