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Bruce A. Howell
Bruce A. Howell
Title: Accessibility Services Manager, The Carroll Center for the Blind
Age: 62
Experience: 15 years in banking; 5 years in web accessibility
Bruce Howell knew from a young age that he would eventually go blind. At 11, he was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease for which there is no cure. He retained most of his vision through high school and college and enjoyed a 15-year career in retail banking. But then the community bank in Needham where he’d worked was shuttered by the FDIC during the commercial real estate collapse of the ’90s. Around that time, Howell also became legally blind. The Carroll Center’s independent living program gave him back his sense of agency, he said, and today he works on web accessibility issues at the center, helping businesses make sure their digital assets are accessible to all of their customers.
Q: Please tell B&T’s readers about the work you’re doing at the Carroll Center with web accessibility issues.
A: We’re teaching people to use these technologies to the best of their abilities. But [sometimes] the website owner, whether it’s a bank or any other company, may not be coding it in a way that works correctly with these assistive technologies. We recognized that was an opportunity for us to start working on the other side of things, so they can better understand what they need to do to make sure that people with all types of disabilities can work with them.
We did a consumer forum about two and a half years ago now and asked blind consumers from this area, “What do you most want to be able to do independently? What things are important to you?” They identified three areas. Health – because who wants to have somebody looking over your shoulder while you’re looking at your medical records? They also wanted to be able to shop, in particular on e-commerce sites, but most specifically grocery shopping.
Thirdly, and equally important, is to be able to do their banking and their finances. It really is very similar to the whole concern about privacy of information we talked about with the health industry. Who wants their friend to be able to look over their shoulder and see all their account information? When you explain it like this, it all makes sense, but it’s not naturally intuitive to companies to recognize they’ve got this community of people with disabilities, and if they can’t do it independently then they’re giving up something the rest of us just take for granted.
Because of that, we began reaching out to banks and talking about the way they’re building their websites and the way their mobile applications are being constructed. Generally, when we can demonstrate to them how we interact with their sites and some of the pitfalls that we run into, it is very easy for them to understand that there is a problem here that needs to be resolved.
Q: How has awareness of the issue shifted in the banking industry in recent years?
A: I’ve been in this business for about four and a half years and initially whenever I reached out to a bank or any other type of business, there was a lot of advocacy and very little awareness on the other end. I have to say now when I have conversations, it’s largely because they’re already aware that there is a need here, they need to do something, but they’re just not sure what yet.
Part of this is driven by the fact that there have been many lawsuits filed, but it’s also because there’s been an increasing awareness that they need to serve all of their customers and welcome new potential customers, too. This is another point I make to them: if somebody gets initially turned off by their home page, before they’re even a customer, because they can’t find information or do something, they’re turning away business. People who are blind or visually impaired kind of have a history of being used to websites not working well. So what happens is, after they do their Google search to find what they need to find, if the first website they come to doesn’t work for them, they just keep going down the line until they find one that does work.
This is a heavily banked region and most towns have multiple banks in them, so if I’ve new to town and I’m trying to find out where I want to do my banking, if I start looking at their websites and immediately can’t find something or do something that I feel I should be able to do, then I will move onto the next one, until I find one where I can. It really should be business driven.
Q: Are there any common challenges or misconceptions that you frequently see in the banking industry when you’re working on web accessibility?
A: The biggest challenge for banks – and this is true for other companies, but particularly in banking – is that most banks don’t build their entire website themselves. They purchase some of the functionality from a third-party provider. Very few banks build their own online banking portal; they buy that from another provider. So the biggest challenges that banks are presented with is, whose responsibility is it to make all that functionality accessible? They know that they have to deal with the stuff that they built. That’s clearly and absolutely their responsibility, but once somebody logs in and goes off into this online banking portal, that the bank didn’t build, whose responsibility is that?
My answer is that it’s still the bank’s responsibility, because I’m your customer and you’re the one I’m going to complain to because I can’t pay a bill online. We also tell banks that it’s important to understand, you fix what you can fix, and you have to learn to advocate to get the things that are out of your control corrected and fixed. Part of the way you do that is by building procurement language into your contract so that when you contract with one of these third-party providers for certain functionality, you state right in that contract that you expect it to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 AA standards for accessibility. And if it doesn’t, then what are you going to do to make those changes and over what timeframe is that going to take place so that we can provide an entirely access experience for our clients?
This is not something that’s necessarily intuitive. People don’t think to put that language into their RFPs. They have to be taught what kind of language is appropriate, how you do that, what level of expectation, how do I even investigate to see what the company is doing about accessibility?
Howell’s Top Five Sports To Play:
- Competitive sailing
- Downhill skiing
- Cross-country skiing
- Rock climbing
- Kayaking
For a video of Bruce Howell demonstrating how he uses a screen reader to navigate the websites he can’t see, click here.
