Sam Proulx 00:00 | Hello, everybody, this is Sam Proulx. I'm the Accessibility Evangelist at leading accessibility testing platform Fable, powered by people with disabilities. I'm also the InclusionHub Podcast's humble host. A huge welcome to you all. And thanks so much for tuning in.

Sam Proulx 00:18 | I'm super excited to be here with you as we continue our critical discussion about accessibility and inclusion, the disability rights movement, and the ongoing fight for true equality. So in our last episode, I introduced you to my father Rej, who worked more than three decades at IBM. He shared some of his experiences growing up as someone living with blindness in Canada, from his time attending a distant school for blind students and later university, to a transformative job as a small town fire department dispatcher, and ultimately, his position at IBM, developing mainframe programs for some of the nation's biggest banks, and premiering accessibility solutions to enable blind people to become programmers.

Sam Proulx 01:02 | He also spoke about some of the discrimination he faced, and the importance of fighting back. I thought our conversation especially prescient, given both segments of it are being published in October, which globally is recognized as Disability Employment Awareness Month, or DEAM. Across the world, people living with disabilities are disproportionately underemployed. According to the United Nations, in developing countries, 80% to 90% of persons with disabilities of working age are unemployed. And in industrialized countries, those figures are not much better, with between 50% and 70% unemployed. In most developed countries, the official unemployment rate for persons with disabilities of working age is at least twice that for those who have no disability. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 19.1% of persons with a disability were employed in 2021, while more than three times as many folks without a disability were employed last year, 63.7%. So, no matter where you live, we've got a long way to go.

Sam Proulx 02:15 | Now, the theme for DEAM 2022—National Disability Employment Awareness Month in the United States, or NDEAM—is 'Disability: Part of the Equity Equation.' And I'm honored, once again, to share the second half of my special conversation between my father and I with you to emphasize the importance of this critical mission. In our household, fighting for accessibility and inclusion is a family affair.

Sam Proulx 02:45 | I would also like to tell you about a related program we've initiated at Fable called Fable Pathways. It's a training program created by people with disabilities for people with disabilities. We believe that the best gateway to employment, especially in the tech sector, is access to skills. And this month, we're launching a brand new training course with former InclusionHub Podcast guest and lifelong, internationally recognized disability rights advocate, Judy Heumann. All of our courses are free and available to anyone with a disability. Find out more at FablePathways[dot]com. So here we go. Picking up where my father and I left off last episode. I truly hope you enjoy this second part of our special conversation.

Sam Proulx 03:35 | How do you get a job at IBM?

Rej Proulx 03:36 | I'm not sure. I was thinking about that. I should because I knew that question would come up. And let me answer it this way. I had roommates after I moved out of residence. One of them had a girlfriend and his girlfriend worked in the IBM branch office. Also, I guess some people are familiar with opticons. I was the first Canadian ever trained on an opticon in Canada. And that was sponsored by IBM. So they had a lot of press conferences and that—like I was 20 years old and I was doing these national press things with IBM, and I met the president of IBM and all that stuff. And so I had that connection there.

Rej Proulx 04:23 | But I think what got me my job, it wasn't that. It could have been, but it wasn't. What happened was the IBM branch office [was] looking for systems engineers, which are really technical sales, technical salespeople. They were looking for four and this girl got me an interview. She said look, 'I'll talk to a manager and see what they think,' and [the] manager [said] 'Well, sure, bring him in.' And I went in there and I didn't hear anything, so finally the girl came to me and she said, 'Well, they were gonna hire you,' she said, 'but IBM cut the hiring.' They didn't hire any SEs for London that year. So that was disappointing. But it was encouraging too, because I knew that I could, you know, I can hold my own, like it wasn't always gonna work out.

Rej Proulx 05:22 | Well, I guess IBM was in the photocopying business, and they had machines, and they did a lot of photocopying. And so all these files ended up in Toronto somehow. You know, they would interview and they would copy all this stuff and send—like, I don't know how the bureaucracy works, but a year and a half later, something reappeared in somebody's hands in Toronto. Now, in the hundreds of thousands of pages of files, why my file reappeared? Like, there's no Google to do searches on 'blind.' Like, how do you—you can't search on this thing, but it reappeared. And so then I got more interviews. And then eventually, I got a job. And the only thing that I can think of, is, I have a benefactor who does not want me to know who that is. And it's probably a good thing, because, you know, sometimes you—there are some kindnesses that you can be shown that you can never repay. You know, I can't prove it, but that's one of them. But anyway, that's what happened. And I got in there. So, you know, that was kind of encouraging, in some ways. But in other ways, it wasn't. Because I didn't want the job.

Sam Proulx 06:50 | Well, you were still unemployed, right? For two years, though—

Rej Proulx 06:53 | No, eight months. Because I finished school during that length of time. So I finished school. I was unemployed for eight months. So I got this job offer. And it was going to be in Toronto. And I don't like cities. I don't like Toronto. I don't—I didn't want to live there. But then I had this job offer. And I had 15 cents in my pocket. Are you gonna take it? You know, 15 cents in those days? It bought a pop or a cup of coffee.

Sam Proulx 07:28 | Yeah, So you got to do it. And then we live there for 33 years—Toronto. And I was born there, but did you stay there for the full 33 years out of a sense of loyalty from that initial hiring? Because how many of your colleagues still work there?

Rej Proulx 07:45 | Well, a lot of them had quit. But first of all, I stayed there, because, well, I was given, you know, a lot of responsibility, probably more than I deserved. And, you know, when somebody has faith in you, I had a number of very good managers who looked out for my well-being. I remember I worked for this one jerk—

Sam Proulx 08:15 | [Laughs]

Rej Proulx 08:16 | But anyway, I'd been in IBM for maybe two or three years. And so I was in there, you know, you have these one-on-one sessions with them, and I said, well, so how long [will it] take to get promoted? And what do I have to do to make the next level? And so he says, 'A blind person can never make the next level here.' Just like that. And so, okay. I knew his boss very well. And there was an open-door policy. So I went in there and explained the situation. And I said, 'Well, is there, can I apply for jobs in other departments?' Maybe, you know, try to get away from this. Wow. Jim blew—I wasn't expecting that. He just blew his stack. And he said, 'Get over here, you're not going anywhere.' And I, I left. I mean, you're in there for—so, well, I left having explained that. And the next day, my job was transferred to another manager. I mean, simple as that. They called it a 'reorg.'

Sam Proulx 09:23 | I mean, why was that though? Because you don't think about IBM as an organization that goes out of its way to do inclusive thinking and inclusive design. And back then I don't think any organizations did.

Rej Proulx 09:33 | Oh, they did. You're not talking about the same IBM. It was a very caring organization. They had a lot of people who really took an interest in you. They were interested in your education. We had our own education departments and we were forced to take three weeks worth of education a year, which I thought was horrible because it interfered with my projects. But it was actually wonderful because it allowed you to, well, they call it reinventing yourself, right? Well, it is. Keeping up with the times and learning something new and, you know, broadening your horizons. And so it was actually a very good place to work. And I really didn't want to leave. There was only one time when I thought of leaving, it was 2005. I was given a job offer in Montreal. Well, it was just east of Montreal, but we couldn't agree on salary. And so I didn't take that job. Well, a couple of months later, that company lost the contract. So it's a good thing I didn't.

Sam Proulx 10:46 | Sometimes it's luck. Sometimes, yeah—

Rej Proulx 10:50 | And it was only like the first 25 years or so at IBM were absolutely wonderful. It's just what happened was that revenue went down. And so in order to continue to make the same profit, they had to let go of people, and they were a little bit less caring about the education and things that they provided. And if you got sick, they would find ways of making sure that, you know, a lot of people were disappeared. In fact, I was on the Diversity Council then at IBM. And I knew one of the vice presidents of HR very well. And we were having a few drinks one time—more than we should, I admit. And he said to me, he said, listen, he said, that bloody company, he says, 'If you're not sick, they'll make you sick.' And they disappeared him two weeks later. Now, I didn't tell them. I didn't do that. But obviously, you know, he had caught on. And, you know, a lot of people were stressed and they got sick, and it just wasn't caring anymore.

Sam Proulx 12:01 | So I mean, is that part of it? When the recession hits, people with disabilities are the first taken down, maybe?

Rej Proulx 12:08 | I don't think so. We had people with disabilities that were let go. And they were given absolutely wonderful separation packages. Now, I tried to get one. And they wouldn't give it to me. So somebody liked me somewhere, like I knew a lot of people. They wouldn't give me a package. And well, I had to retire on my own.

Sam Proulx 12:34 | But it's also interesting, I think, today, there's often a feeling that like, people with disabilities work in assistive technology and inclusion and do the sorts of things that I do at Fable, which are important and valuable things to do, and somebody had better be doing them because they need to get done, but you never worked in accessibility, really.

Rej Proulx 12:57 | No, no. And I refused.

Sam Proulx 13:00 | How come?

Rej Proulx 13:01 | Because it's not what I want to do. I went to a school for the blind and I got away from blind people. And I didn't really want to have that much to do with it anymore. And plus, remember, when I came up through the ranks, voice technology was being developed. And there was an awful lot of equipment that was hush, hush. And basically, I was told, they said, look, they said, 'We can legitimately make you work in a locked room because we don't want people to find out about these products.' But they said, ‘these aren't products, they're an assemblage of equipment.' And so they said, 'We won't lock you up.' But they said, 'You better make sure that nobody finds out about this.’ Well, you keep your mouth shut, right? It kind of hurt a little bit, you know, I thought well, gee, it would be so nice if others could take advantage of this and all that. But you know, it had to run its course—like eventually, you know, it got into society and people have talking computers, but it wasn't time. It was too expensive.

Like, a talking terminal at IBM, say in 1983, was $12,000 in 1983 dollars. That's just not economically—the only thing that happened was the big corporations like the banks and the Bell Canada's often—well, part of what I did as a favor to the sales area was, for instance, Bell would ask them, 'Well, we got this guy who's losing his sight' or 'We got this guy who's blind that we'd kind of like to hire. Can you help them?' And the sales guy, Yeah, I got this guy's and we'll go out for lunch and talk about it.' And so I would get these lunches. And I would talk to these customers. And I would ask them about the job and—because obviously, you have to be very careful, you can't put somebody in a job that they can't do most of it. That's horrible. So I would find out about the job.

And it was actually very easy to tell because everything was text-based. So yeah, you can do the work or you can't, and I would figure it out. And a lot of these kind of placements, they were all very, very successful. But I, again, I couldn't talk about that, that was HR stuff. You just got to keep your mouth shut. But I found it extremely rewarding. I enjoyed those parts in my job, like those were kind of accessibility, you know, making sure—like, I didn't want to work with other blind people. But I found that absolutely wonderful if they can get a job elsewhere. That's what we need. Like we don't want a nucleus of blind people working together. We want them to work in society.

Sam Proulx 16:03 | Yeah, be distributed. But it seems like the early days of digital accessibility, because of the expensive cost and complication, is different, right? Most advocacy, like the advocacy that got the Civil Rights movement passed was bottom up, or it was people going to marches and people protesting or even with perhaps some of the indigenous experience in Canada, right? It was people going to marches and people pushing and shouting, and because of the complexity of digital accessibility, right, it had to be top-down in a way. Like, how could you advocate yourself and get yourself a talking terminal if you didn't have $12,000?

Rej Proulx 16:39 | Well, I did. Okay. When I first joined IBM, IBM said, ‘We'll hire you.’ But he says, 'You know, as a gesture of goodwill, the government has to pay for the first terminal.' And that was really difficult because that one was a braille printer. It was an LED 120 for triformations. That was like $12,000 or $15[,000]—huge!—American dollars too, and those would be in 1977 dollars. That's a vast amount. But I would not be denied. And so I went to politicians, and I played politics. I got the money approved. I went to MPs. I went to a cabinet minister. And I got to a secretary, actually, and it got approved. Like I was on my way up. Because my father knew the man as well. Yeah, we played politics, but I just wouldn't be denied. I didn't want to be brash about it or do like a bull in a china shop. You can't do that. But you still got to sell yourself, you got to show people that you're determined. And so that got approved. And two years later, IBM bought me another terminal.

Sam Proulx 17:59 | And history would repeat itself around playing politics, right? Years later, when I was in what, Grade Five and getting me access to computers at school and such, you had to do the whole thing again.

Rej Proulx 18:11 | Well, that principal wishes that I didn't exist.

Sam Proulx 18:15 | [Laughs] Yeah, but did that feel disheartening? Like, oh, now it's a blind son, and here we are doing the same thing 20 years later.

Rej Proulx 18:23 | No, because the rewards were guaranteed. Like, I would do these things. And nobody really knew whether it was going to work. I mean, we were starting out, right? But today, when you have to advocate, which you shouldn't have to do at all, but we did. Not only that, today, the prices have come down so much that like a parent could buy an iPad or think about it. If you're in Grade Five or Six, could you do your stuff on an iPad?

Sam Proulx 19:00 | Yeah, probably things keep changing and getting cheaper. And yet, you still have to fight the principals and advocate for it.

Rej Proulx 19:07 | Well, you can fight principals. I would in this day and age, just buy one myself.

Sam Proulx 19:14 | Yeah. Because now you can afford to do it. And its technologies in our hands.

Rej Proulx 19:19 | And even so, if they saw that I did that, like the schools have a bunch of them now that the school board would give me one. I don't know that the approval processes would be as difficult—like, look at during COVID a lot of kids needed iPads to go to school at home and they got them.

Sam Proulx 19:38 | One of the biggest changes—I mean, you're talking about power and economic power around discrimination—but it seems like the other lever is, it's easier and cheaper to not discriminate today.

Rej Proulx 19:50 | Yes, and because everything is more affordable, people with disabilities have more power because they can get this stuff themselves.

Sam Proulx 20:02 | And a lot of that, again, has come by through, interestingly, big corporations, right? The work of Apple putting voiceover on things. I mean, everyone credits them with the first to build a screen reader. But it was OS2, and screen reader that you used to use and worked on, I mean, how did that happen in the '80s, for IBM to decide that an operating system should have a screen reader?

Rej Proulx 20:26 | Well, there was a whole bunch of us blind people in IBM, who knew Jim Thatcher, and he worked at, in the lab in New York, in upstate New York. And he was a brilliant man. And he was worse than I am. He decided that OS2 should have, you know, hooks into it. Well, he took a sleeping bag and laid across this guy's door for two days. I mean, you know, like, some people just go the extra mile, right? Like he didn't do any damage, he just made himself felt. So it brought attention to the thing. And it was affordable, too, because they were working from the ground up. So at the time, they could afford to do that. And unfortunately, what happened was OS2 was out-marketed. And it had to get withdrawn from the market. And that set accessibility back, way back. I mean, you went from OS2 to Windows 95.

Sam Proulx 21:45 | And there was no Jim Thatcher at Microsoft.

Rej Proulx 21:48 | No. In fact, I own the license for, well, it's not up to date. But my JAWS serial number, when I got JAWS was 4027. So I was right there at the outset of JAWS because we could see what was happening, and I wanted to see how good it was. But oh, it didn't come close to what we had in OS2. Like, if that would have worked, OS2—and obviously would have been updated to the latest, like to USB and all that stuff, you know, obviously, they'd have kept it up to date. But if that would have worked, I think we lost 10 years, even more with that, because, you know, Microsoft wasn't that committed to it. And because of JAWS, well scuttlebutt has it that Microsoft I think gets sued, so they were a little bit reluctant to do much with narrator. But that's just scuttlebutt, but I'm pretty sure it's true, though.

Sam Proulx 22:52 | Yeah, and so much of it is about having the right person at the right time, right visionaries. I mean, Steve Jobs pushed, pushed voiceover through. And Jim Thatcher pushed OS2 through and then made accessibility the rest of his career before passing on a couple of years ago. So there's new things coming up, right? There's virtual reality and augmented reality, and how do we make sure that we don't lose 10 years again in the upcoming technology transition? We can't guarantee having the right people in place.

Rej Proulx 23:21 | No, you can't. Like Jim Thatcher, he was just incredible. And he, a lot of us probably owe him more than we can repay. But I tried to tell him that once and it was a bad thing to do. He was not a happy camper. But it was true. He was one of those guys that didn't want to be told that. He, in fact, he would work in his office and you'd phone him up and you could hear the voice synthesizer going on in the background. One time, 'What are you doing, Jim? He says, 'I always use that thing. How am I supposed to know if it's gonna work if I don't use it?' I mean, he was that kind of man. Which sighted person is gonna sit there using a screen reader all day, everywhere all the time? He did.

Sam Proulx 24:11 | Yeah, there's a sighted person that—it took that to do it and to do it properly. I mean, the advantage today is that we do have educated blind professionals who are using this and doing this and can do this, hopefully.

Rej Proulx 24:24 | Well, that's true. But wouldn't it be better if the guy designing it used it?

Sam Proulx 24:29 | Well, I mean, that's why NVDA was so successful, right?

Rej Proulx 24:33 | The people who design it, if they use it, then it works. And you're right, we need testing and we need verification and we need—but if we can get it right at the beginning, then we still need verification and all that, but at least the right hooks can be put in at the right time, the right place.

Sam Proulx 24:52 | Yeah. Which is why the kind of theme of the conversation, distributing people with disabilities throughout society, is important because 'Nothing about us, without us,' but for that to happen, we have to be there.

Rej Proulx 25:05 | Well, I thought about that, this business of, you know, doing things, you can't do it without us and that. You can do something to somebody, like the indigenous people, we did lots to them. And they didn't have the power to do anything about it. So we continue to do stuff to them. And that, but that's not very productive, is it? You know, or if somebody's unconscious, you keep them alive by doing stuff to them. Now, you can do something for somebody. And that's a little better. And I had a lot of that, like, in early IBM filling in forms and stuff, like, obviously, you can't fill in forms. And so you get people who do stuff for you because you can't, but that's a little better in that, because if they do it often enough, then you get creative enough, and you figure out how to do more of it yourself, right? So that's a lot better.

Now, if you can do something with somebody, then it may not be an equal partnership. Like, you could be the junior guy because you can do less, but it's still a lot better. Because you're interacting and you're trying to improve, you're trying to improve how you work. Like, if you look at somebody on a job, they're often good at 90% of the job. And then the other 10%, while they can do 5% of it, but they hate it, and then the other 5% they avoid. Well, if you're a person with disabilities, and if you're friendly, like if you make lots of friends and everything, sighted people see that, what is difficult for you. And so one of them may say, 'Well, gee, I'll help you with that, but you got to organize the next department meeting because I hate it.' Yeah. Well, I hate it too. You know, I hated that too. But you know, you're gonna have to give and take with people because there is stuff that you can't do. And so if somebody is helping you, you’ve got to pull your own weight. And like, by the way, organizing department meetings was not trivial. You had to walk around, ask everybody in the department when their favorite time was because there's no email—email came out in '84.

Sam Proulx 27:31 | You were the first to get it, right?

Rej Proulx 27:32 | Yeah, that was something else. So you talk to all these guys, and you find out a date, then you got to find the guest speaker. Well, you can't send them a note. You have to walk to his office and talk to his secretary or you can phone. But that's not as effective. So you walk there, and anyway you put it all together and you arrange the food, it takes forever—it takes you for half a day. I mean today, you just send out a couple of notes, boom, boom, boom, it's all done. But not that. I mean, that was a major thing. And we hated it. Because it was so meaningless. But anyway, yeah, I was the first employee in my area to get email, all the managers had it. So I was on email with all the managers. But they discovered something. If they wanted something done, they didn't have to work and come out of their office. They could just send the note. So who organized all the meetings? Yeah, there was no—I couldn't send email to organize stuff. Unless it was a manager. You know, so that year before the rest of them got it, I did a huge amount of extra work. And that doesn't count toward anything. You still got to do your projects. I mean, that was painful.

Sam Proulx 28:58 | Yeah, but I mean, an example of how accessibility makes things more convenient for everyone, perhaps.

Rej Proulx 29:06 | I would think so. And, you know, you can prove yourself, but it's not entirely painless. And like, you just gotta roll with it. Like, it's not a picnic by any stretch of the imagination. To work in a corporation like that is extremely stressful. So you have to have the right psychological makeup for that. Like I was on call at night. And while there was none of this work-at-home stuff, if you got called out in the middle of the night, you better put your suit on. Because you might be there the next morning, you're supposed to wear a suit. And there's nobody that's gonna take you to the office. Now IBM was very generous and I like, I had cab chips and stuff, you know, so they were quite good about that. But still, nobody's gonna bring you, you gotta go in there and get it open and get the lights on.

Sam Proulx 30:04 | Yeah, I guess we should draw this to a close. But before we do, I want to ask—I mean the world is a different place today. And everything is changing very quickly. I mean, we have iPhones now, which brought us even more than personal computers. And so what's coming that you think is the most exciting, and is going to revolutionize things, the way the internet revolutionized things 10 years ago?

Rej Proulx 30:32 | Well, it's all part of an evolution. If you go way back to the early days, IBM came up with these banking terminals. And we all knew that they could be made to be accessible, but they refused to do it, because of cost. And because they would have had the use of VO tracks. And so they would have to use training cassettes so that you can get used to the voice on that stupid stuff, you couldn't understand it, but things get better and clearer. And they get faster. So I think that in time, we're going to have less or no cashiers. I'm not even sure that we're gonna have payment terminals, like Apple doesn't, you know, so, I'm not—I mean, these cashier-less, cash register things, whatever you call them, those are just a step. They're not gonna survive. And so, they're inaccessible anyway, I hate them, you can't use those. Fortunately, they have people there to help you.

But I think these things are going to be overtaken by a phone. And so, you know, as long as—if the app is accessible, then you don't have to worry about all that nonsense, you know, cashiers or anything. Like, you just go in and, you know, find what you need and buy it. And not only that, it'll get to a point where you put in the product that you want, and it'll tell you where it is and it'll take you there, that's coming, I have no doubt. I don't know when, maybe I won't see it, or I'll be too old, but that's coming. And so you'll be able to walk down the rows of shelves, and it'll take you to the product. And you'll be able to point your phone at it. And you'll be able to find out all the information, and so you'll be a lot more independent.

Rej Proulx 32:34 | Now there's gonna be bumps on the road. There's always bumps, and there's always things that frustrate you. But just remember one thing, it isn't what you can't do, it's what you can do. And if you can't do it, then figure out what you can do. And maybe you can do something enough for somebody else, that they'll help you or what. Like, we're not islands. Accessibility and independence doesn't make you an island. You don't have to be self-sufficient and be independent. I mean, nobody is. I mean, sighted people do task sharing, because they don't like it. So, I mean, I used to think that independence and non-discrimination, I got to do everything myself. Well, that's not true. But I think about it now, well, I can do it myself, but if it's not economical, then I know how to get it done so that I can do other stuff myself.

Because I mean, we human beings are, we're social animals. We're meant to interact, you know. We're meant to be comrades. So you got to make friends with people, you got to cut them some slack. Because if you cut people some slack and answer their stupid questions, and you know, and if you offer to do things too, then you're not going to have a problem, because it's kind of power. Power is—can be doing things for somebody else, that's part of power. And it's a good power because the person that you're doing something for is gonna feel good, and he's gonna want to help you. And I think that's what you got to do. And so then it's like power sharing with somebody else. That's how I think about it. Like, I don't like this discrimination nonsense and everything. I mean, I've had some, and I've dealt with it, I bit hard, but it's not necessary anymore, I hope.

Sam Proulx 34:47 | I mean, that said, things started off much more accessible when they were line commands just because they were simpler. And then got drastically less accessible and now we're regaining those 15 years that we lost along the way. So what do you worry about going forward in the next, you know, 15-20 years? I mean, there's lots to worry about, right? But from an accessibility perspective.

Rej Proulx 35:13 | I'm not a great worrier. I should be. But I'm not that smart. It's hard to, you know, it's hard to identify problems. But I think what I am most worried about is the ability for people with disabilities to get where they need to be on time. You know, this whole traveling thing. It's getting worse, the streetlights are horrible. The lanes are wide. You know, there's a lot of injuries. I used to travel all over Toronto everywhere. I wouldn't do it today. You know, like the street cars, often you have to cross the lane of traffic before getting on a streetcar. That's what I'm worried about. I'm worried about the safety of individuals because if they can't get to where they need to be, then that is going to destroy their quality of life.

Sam Proulx 36:16 | And electric cars don't make any noise.

Rej Proulx 36:18 | Well, they're supposed to now. But sighted people, what they're going to do is they're gonna download all these weird sounds. And so they're gonna have to, not only are electric cars gonna have to make noise, but they'll have to be selected noise, like you can't download a noise to your car. Because if you hear a baby crying coming down the road, that's not very good is it? That's what a lot of them will do. They will record their kid crying, or laughing or something. And that's what I'm worried about. Like, we're gonna make mistakes before we learn. And it's the mistakes that scare me and I don't know how to avoid that. How do you avoid mistakes that are obvious?

Sam Proulx 37:04 | Yeah, it's because they're only obvious to us. Maybe it's having the right person at the right time.

Sam Proulx 37:13 | Wow, there you have it, folks. Thank you so much for listening. I want to thank my father for not just creating me, but also continuing to guide me and love me in this crazy, crazy world. Dad, I love you with all my heart. You know this. And once again, yes, I will take out the trash tonight for the umpteenth time. Sheesh. I also want to thank the InclusionHub Podcast's incredible, incredible sponsors, InclusionHub[dot]com's Founding Partners, leading CRM platform provider Salesforce, HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency Morey Creative Studios, Fable, and Be My Eyes, a free app for the blind and low-vision community connecting users with sighted volunteers, which my father and I both of us and absolutely love.

Check them all out at Salesforce[dot]com, MoreyCreative[dot]com, MakeItFable[dot]com and BeMyEyes[dot]com. Also, be sure to head to InclusionHub[dot]com for every episode of this spectacular podcast, our ever-growing directory of businesses committed to improving digital accessibility and inclusion for all, and much, much more. To learn more about DEAM and access free resources to help spread the word about its mission, visit the US Department of Labor's Office of Disability Employment Policy at Dol[dot]gov. One final note once again to also visit FablePathways[dot]com and learn more about those amazing courses I mentioned at the top of the show. Until next time, dear friends, remember: A more accessible and inclusive world is a better world.