Welcome to the Accidental Trainer, a podcast where you'll hear firsthand stories and tips on how to start and grow your training career. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of ATD Accidental Trainer Podcast. I'm your host. Alexandria Clapp. And today we have with us Sarah Mercier. She is the CEO of Build Capable and the editor of the newly released Design for All Learners book. Welcome, Sarah. Thanks, Alexandria. This is exciting. We've worked on this for so long.
It's so exciting. Well, I'll share a little of my side of the story in a little bit. I'm so excited to talk about this book and to celebrate this book with you today. And I don't want to short change, which is I think one of the favorite components of this podcast for our listeners. I hear this all the time is when our. Speakers share a teeny tiny bit of their story of how they came to be in their role and something accidental in their journey.
So tell us your something accidental and then we'll start chatting about your book. So this is really hard for me to pick because I feel like there have been a lot of little accidental things that have happened along the way in my career, but I'll start with. Once upon a time, long, long ago, I was working in an organization called Cumberland Heights. This was in Nashville, Tennessee, and I was working in accounts receivable full time while I was also in college.
I was just in school for business. I never knew there was such a thing as instructional design. You know, I knew there was training and I knew that. There were college professors and I always wanted to teach, but I didn't really want to teach in a school system, but I love teaching. And so when I was working at Cumberland Heights, we had a couple of processes that weren't, they seemed to not be working quite right.
And one example is it was some insurance billing and a lot of people were, their bills weren't getting paid. Processed correctly because there were some folks at an outpatient location that were putting a code on wrong. And so I asked for leadership. I said, can I go teach them how to do it right? So that way these get processed correctly and they're like, sure. So that was the first time that I ever started training.
And when I moved to my next job, I had found a job that was teaching people in call centers. And I was like, that's cool. You can actually be a teacher in a call center. So I could do a thing that I already knew how to do and teach people how to do it. And so that's where I kind of started my whole journey and training. I love it. I feel like so many folks have stories about call centers and that is sort of their entryway into the L& D field.
Call center trainers are really typically, I can't, you know, you can't speak in absolutes, but typically really, really good trainers. And I say that because in a call center environment, you end up working off of a lot of data. So you see people's call times, you see their customer service scores. When they tell you that calls are recorded, they mean it. We listen to calls. Get folks together, you know, trainers, supervisors, dialer team, you know, quality team.
We would all literally sit in a conference room and listen to people's phone calls to decide Okay, what's a coaching problem? What needs to be fixed with systems? What is a training issue? That kind of thing. And it was that, that set me down the road into more of the digital world, because that was when I started to realize that people probably needed to practice things in the systems. And we didn't have a ton of test accounts.
So that was when I started creating simulations in a tool called Robo demo in the olden days, which is now Adobe Captivate. Oh, that's interesting. And funny that you said when people think of quality assurance, they might think of that as they've heard right before they're talking to a customer service rep. This call is being recorded for quality assurance purposes. And I forget if I told you my old role, that was part of our titles, quality assurance.
I know quality comes up in this book designed for all learners. So let's just. Talk about it. Let's get into it. I'm looking at it. I'm holding it. It's so big and beautiful. And this is a surprise to me, Sarah, because I went out on maternity leave in September last year. So when I got my copy and I opened it up, I know this was like a conversation, but I didn't know what the outcome was. There's all these colored pages in it. Yes. You know, color printing is expensive.
Yes. And I had a conversation with Jack about this, who's one of the editors on the book, and you know, we had a lot of conversations about it because the majority of the book does not need to be in color. But the stuff that needs to be in color needs to be in color. So there were parts of the book on color use, color blindness, that it's really, really hard to get those concepts if you haven't experienced them yourself.
If you have the ability to experience that visually, It's a huge opportunity to really get a better understanding to the best you can of why that's important. I was so happy that the, that ATD did decide to go ahead and print it in color. That was not cheap. And that was a big business decision, right? To do the right thing. And I think it's a huge value add to everybody who reads it.
So I'm super happy and as this is classic me and I apologize to our amazing community and listeners because I cannot help but jump into a conversation with you for those who are like, wait, let's level set a bit. So I will share the quick break. version of my story, which is I started ATD in 2020, and we had talked internally about wanting to do an accessibility book. What does that mean? What does that look like?
So I reached out to Brian Dusablon, which of course I didn't know him, but Justin Brucino, my amazing manager, did. And a conversation started there. Brian would be working on something and send me recommendations of people. I would reach out to him and say, I want to do like an accessibility video or magazine article. And he'd say, check out Haley shoes, talk to Diane Elkins.
And so lots of learning on my part to understand what accessibility was from Brian and these recommendations of people where he was like, I'm busy, but talk to Diane. I'm busy, but Haley will write this article. And they taught me so much. We eventually came to the point where like, okay, we need to do this book, even if like Jack and I are the editors, which would have not been the same product because we're not deep experts. We're not practitioners in this field.
And so luckily, so, so luckily Diane recommended that we talk to you. And as soon as we talked to you, you were like. Oh, yes, that's how I'm remembering it. Yes, I will do this, but I'll pass it over to you for you to say why this book and just give us a little bit of a high level like background to you what this book is about. Okay, so here's the other side of the story. Originally, I had connected Brian with y'all.
to write the book because I had gone to Brian's keynote back in, and this is actually in the book, my story. Um, I'd gone to his keynote back, I think it was like 2013 or something, but I had gone to his keynote and it changed the way that I thought about inclusive design and accessibility. And so originally I had sent Brian, I said, you should go write about this. And then Haley. We had hired her.
So at the time Brian was actually founded learning ninjas, which was the previous name of my company. And Haley came to work for us. And so Haley loves, she's such a huge advocate for accessibility. And so we were like, y'all go, go write about this. Somebody needs to write about it. So it was funny when you reached out to me and you said, will you do this? I knew the backstory and I talked to all these people pretty regularly.
So when you reached out to me, I was like, okay, fine, because at that point it had been so many years and Justin Brazino will be probably one of the first ones to tell you that I don't really particularly love writing. I find that it's a lot of work to really say what I want to say. So when I write about something, I have to really, really care about it or really want to get it out there to take the time to write. Unfortunately, I'm a perfectionist.
And so I. Overthink everything and I research everything because I want to make sure that anything that goes out with my name on it. I've researched it as best I can. It is the best that I know about that thing at the time. When I talked to you all about the book, I had already thought about if I'm going to do this. This is how I want to do it. And so that conversation was like, yes, I absolutely will do it because this has to exist. Somebody has to do it, but it was a huge, scary project.
And I said, you know, if I'm going to do it, then I want to make sure that it's not just Sarah talking about accessibility. You need to be able to learn from a lot of different people, because that's how I learned, and it's also how you learned, right? And so the way that you can understand accessibility and inclusive design Is to be able to hear that message and the stories from lots of different people because it's not a checklist, but you can't just say, Oh, do this, this, and this.
There are things you can do and their checklist you should have, but to really understand how to make better design decisions, you have to better understand people and that requires listening and it requires listening to different people, right? Ultimately, that's the thing that. Brought this book together. That's what made this book what it is. It was a lot of hard work. I care very deeply about this.
So when I talk about it being hard work, it was a lot of work to make sure that this was done as best as we possibly could. And fortunately, I got to work with a team of people who cared about it like I did. This book would not exist the way it is if it weren't for a whole lot of people.
The success of this book really is at its core getting to Learn from all of these different people directly and not through my lens and not through my filters I think we worked really hard to ensure that Everyone's individual voices were maintained in the writing that we didn't edit that out and that was really challenging From an editing perspective, but I think that was really interesting learning process to go through that. Oh my gosh, it was so fun to be behind the scenes.
And it's funny as I look back and laugh at sort of, I mean, things were really messy. From the ATD side, we wanted to do this topic justice. And one fear of mine was wanting to make sure that you're covering, like, everything and anything. You don't want to leave anyone or any type of thing out. Like, how do you reach literally all learners and all of the things? That's where it can start to be really overwhelming.
And then it was like, okay, if we're going to do even just bringing up the topic of neurodiversity, does that get covered or not in this book? Does that need to be? It's. own whole book now because you could do your own whole book. So it was this like cyclical and maybe people are like seeing how my brain works where I just get overwhelmed with like, how are we possibly going to pull this off? And you take a look at this book and it's not overwhelming at all. It is so accessible.
It's all of these small short stories. And that is not what it looked like in like the table of contents version, when you're first building out, like all of these different topics and subtopics that we want to make sure are addressed. So it just, it's amazing to see like how it progressed.
From scary and overwhelming to something that someone can hold and suddenly be like, Oh my gosh, I'm doing that right now in my work setting and I didn't realize that that might not be accessible for everyone and I can change it right away by. doing the recommendations at the very end of this page. I just love it so much. I agree. And, you know, I think about the process and I remember talking to you and Jack and be like, just trust me, just trust me.
And it was, it was like, well, what about this? And what about this? And cause we had the outline. So my role was the content editor, right? So I put together the outline. It's like, these are all the topics I want to make sure we cover. And here are the people that I think should be talking about them.
People that I'd heard stories from that I thought were, had a very unique perspective, people who represented the diversity and the different types of things that we were trying to help people understand that had deep experience in those areas, sometimes. And often lived experiences in those areas. And so when we were putting together the outline for the book, I remember you all saying, how are we going to do this?
Well, I'll say that when I looked at how this might come together, I thought about it from a design perspective. How would I design a thing? We put together personas. Right? Do you remember this? So, we put together personas for the, I actually use my own persona template that I use when I'm designing training. We use the personas. We actually sat down and wrote objectives for what we wanted to get out of this book. I approached designing this book like I would approach designing anything.
And then I brought in people, think about subject matter experts. Okay, I'm about to get like instructional design nerdy here, but bringing in people that could. Speak to those different areas, and I think when we talk about another design approach, which is storytelling, I can teach you so much more about a thing by telling you a story about it than describing everything to you about Neurodivergence.
As a matter of fact, so Judy Katz has her chapters kind of sprinkled throughout the different parts of the book on different ways to think about neurodivergence and different topic areas. And all of them are incredibly short. They're just really short stories that help you kind of round out how you think about that particular topic area. All of the contributors wrote these really succinct stories and that helps you get it. And then they said, okay, here's how this works in your work.
And then here's one thing you can start doing right now to like actually implement this. That part was Jack's idea. The one, what's one thing you can take away from this right now. And so when we think about the structure of the book and how you use it, you get a lot of information in a very short period of time. This is a good time to give a shout out to Hadiyah, who also was one of the early reviewers on the book and her.
Book on using story when we think about teaching stories are a powerful tool to do that because it really helps give you context without having to over explain everything you just kind of can get it as an editor. I had to read this book probably 25 times and it's 600 pages, so that's a lot. I enjoyed reading it every single time I read it. And I was like, this book is really good. I mean, I know I'm supposed to say that or whatever, but this book is really good because I never got tired of it.
Every time I read it, I was like, I get something else out of it. It takes a topic that, I mean, it starts off with how do you create an inclusive mindset? A lot of this is about like changing your mindset and expanding it. And even just how someone might think about going about. Packaging this book and packaging this information and maybe doing it by the standards and making sure, like, it is that checklist mentality. It makes sense why people think of it that way.
It goes to show that this book isn't even packaged that way. So you won't be thinking of it that way. It would be really hard to walk away after you've been exposed to all of these different various different stories. But no way we're going to be able to cover all of the things that are covered in this book. But we do have some big picture buckets of how you've organized it. So I was thinking maybe you can tell us a little bit about that and then maybe we can tease out a story or two.
Okay, so the way that the book is structured is it's meant to think about Training and performance support design at a very big picture level. So, yes, it applies to instructional designers, developers, trainers, facilitators. But think about it a level up from that. As anybody who leads a team of folks, HR, IT, vendors. In this space, folks that are working with folks in this space. So I think communications teams and marketing teams.
So all of the folks that are involved with any kind of learning and development function, whether it's in a company or in higher ed or in K through 12, it's focused towards teaching people. And the reality is that all of us at some point in time in our lives are teaching people something. Even if it's in a social media post or if it's in a PowerPoint or an email to someone.
So when I put this book together, I was thinking about structuring it from what are the big things that we actually need to know about teaching people. And so one, it's starting with mindset. Like, let's just think about the first part of the book as Framing for what design for all means, because you could look at accessibility and disabilities. You could look at making accommodations. You could look at diversity, equity, and inclusion. D E I B I D E A J E D I. Right.
So there are all of these different acronyms where people are desperately trying to explain this need for us to think about people in our design. So that first part of the book is really. Trying to set up some framing for teaching about what all these things actually mean. Because, you know, DEI is not a program. It gets implemented in organizations as programs sometimes, sure. That's not what it's about, right? Accessibility does not equal disability. Accessibility equals access.
But in order to provide access, you do have to understand that people have different disabilities. A lot of people have disabilities we don't even know about. You'll never know about because they're never going to share with you. That first part of the book is setting up some framing and having really honest, genuine discussions about what this actually means. And how this plays a role in all of our work. So that's the first part of the book.
It's just stories to help understand what we actually mean by all this stuff in real life, in a practical way. The next parts of the book are getting into, okay, what does that look like in a digital environment? So, you know, any kind of digital content, e learning, that kind of stuff, where it's more asynchronous, and I'm creating PDFs, and I'm creating images, and how do I Write alt text and do image descriptions, that kind of thing.
So that's the second part of the book, which happens to be the biggest part, because in 2025, all of us are creating some sort of digital content for the most part. I believe the next part is the classroom, thinking about facilitating in the classroom, but not just training, but also events. Right, putting together a conference or a team event for your team at work. And then you get into the next part, which is virtual learning.
And that is definitely much more prevalent now than it ever has been because, you know, after 2020, a lot of folks started to look at virtual methods and I know people are bringing folks back to work, but we all use virtual networking tools and virtual meeting tools. regularly at work now. Zoom, Teams, Slack, that kind of thing. The next chapter gets into just a short primer on standards and laws. And that's really important.
And I intentionally put it where I put it in the book because I wanted folks to kind of get a sense of the environment and then talk about, okay, Here are some of the laws that exist around this, not just in the US, but globally, and what that looks like. And Haley did a beautiful job of summarizing that. And Susie Miller did a wonderful job of summarizing, like, what do web content accessibility guidelines mean for our work? That chapter is really getting into how do laws play a role in this.
And standards and guidelines and that kind of thing. And I think the way that they wrote about those two chapters was so eloquent and helps make so much more sense. So everybody stops calling everything 508. Addressing that section as that can be intimidating and confusing because it's not typically written for our community. Right. We're not software developers designing a website and thinking about accessibility in that way. And it can be really overwhelming to try and translate it yourself.
So big shout out to Susie Miller's book, whose, uh, second edition just was released. And she takes the entire web content accessibility guidelines and translates that for what we do in maybe an e learning space. Right.
So the book, the section on standards, if, if all of that stuff either confuses you, if it's something that is that you don't quite understand, or you think it's just for federal government employees, and you're like, we don't do 508 or nobody with a disability is in my organization or whatever, that section will blow your mind. Because that's not what the point is at all. So I really love that section, especially the Marrakesh Treaty, which a lot of folks don't know about.
People, if they were blind, couldn't basically have access to books unless somebody read it to them until 2013. It was not a requirement that books be made in e book, in a digital format. Could you imagine not being able to read book, like not having access to books? That's so wild to me that it took till 2013 for that to be a thing, that books are required to have a digital format also, so that folks can read them. If they are blind, they can use assistive technology.
I mean, it's just, there's a lot of stuff that goes on in policy that I think is really Interesting. And also in some ways it's disheartening because it took so long for it to happen. And in other ways, it's encouraging because it means that we're making progress in some of those areas. So that section is great. And those contributors that added to that section. We're fantastic. They did a great job. And then the last section of the book is about the organization.
And how do you operationalize this stuff across an organization? Because guess what? If you think one person is going to do this by themselves, you are sorely mistaken. You can't. Everyone has to understand how accessibility and inclusion Everybody has to learn something about how to do this in their own work, and I don't mean every person in training.
I mean, every person on the planet needs to understand how accessibility plays a role in your work, understand how inclusion plays a role in your work. And the benefit of this is not a political statement or anything else. This is about being good at your job. And if you want to be a really good designer. You have to understand this stuff. I think that was probably the big lesson learned for me back when I listened to Brian's keynote originally, looping back around to where we started.
I didn't realize there was a whole part of my job I wasn't doing. Once I did, I was like, Oh, I got excited about it. I can start adding captions. I can start adding alt text. I can check my color contrast. And what ended up happening. is that it made that better for everybody. The benefit was for everybody. It wasn't just someone who may have used a, you know, a keyboard to navigate through that course because of a mobility disability.
It was because Anybody who wanted to tab to the next field could do that. It was just a better, more cohesive design, which is the whole point of design for all. It's just being a good designer. The things in this book help you uncover stuff that you just probably never even knew existed. I certainly wasn't walking around like. I want to do a bad job or, you know, I don't want to do this stuff.
I think through learning about this, it was exciting to me to see opportunities, to make sure that more people had access to the stuff I was making, make sure that people had. a better experience when they were using something that I created. I didn't want to make stuff that was no good. I wanted to make good stuff. And so I think that it was just taking little pieces of things and implementing them over time and you get better and you learn more.
And now I do this to, I don't even think about it. I do it without thinking. It's just part of my work. It doesn't take me this huge amount of extra time to do because it's just part of my process. But you know, when you're first getting started, you get acclimated to those changes. And so it can take a minute to figure out what you're doing and you'll forget stuff and that's okay, but it's just trying to make that effort.
And so I think as a whole, when we think about the last chapter of that book, it's like, how can you advocate for this stuff in your organization? And how can you get other people on board and help them have the tools that they need? Because this stuff doesn't just happen. You can really, really care about something. You can really care about people and you can really care about being inclusive and still not know that you're not doing it. Right?
You could, you could not know that you are doing something that is preventing someone from being able to access something. I think people recognize that it's not intentional. And so I think that's the exciting thing about this book is that. It's like a secret book. It's like a secret key to learning about this stuff. It's like if you could peek inside all these different folks brains to say, What is the stuff that's actually happening?
I wish that there was an easy way to just say, Oh, it's just this. But it's more of an experience going through the process of reading this book and learning about these things. So a couple things I was thinking about. First, I've heard you say, If it's not accessible, it's not done yet. When you're talking about the design. And. I just had never heard anyone say that before. And I don't know if that's just someone else's line that you heard and adopted as well.
Yeah, I think I told you about that. Like I read that on Twitter and I tried to find who did it originally. I don't even have Twitter anymore, but like originally there was somebody that was a user experience. Experience designer that originally posted this. It was somebody in the UX design world had posted this on Twitter a long time ago.
We're talking maybe it was 2015 or 16 and if anybody ever can find it, I retweeted someone else and then people started crediting it to me and I was like, hold on, no, is that other person? I never could find it. So I did not originally say this and other people I've seen say it too. It's true. If you haven't added closed captions to your video, you're not done with it. If you haven't added alt text to an image, you're not done with it.
I think that when we talk about accessibility and talk about all of the practical things we have to do to implement it, we use things like alt text and color contrast and that kind of thing. And yes, those are all important and those are easy things you can start doing right away. And I think that's the reason why people talk about them first. It is also thinking about, was this the right format in the first place? Was this the best thing for these folks? Did I give people an option?
There's a, kind of a broader picture about are you even making a good design decision in the first place? And so I think there's like a bigger concept in the book about making better design decisions along the way when you start to think about people. So yes, there are a lot of practical steps you can take to the things you are creating.
Yvonne, one of her chapters in the book is on tables, complex tables, because a question that we get a lot is how do I make a complex table accessible, get a PDF or a Word document or whatever. And she did a beautiful job of explaining. Here's fundamentally how you do that. And at the end, she shows an alternative example. She said, or you could just do it this way. And she sets it up as like a structured list. And it's so much cleaner and so much easier to follow.
And I'm sorry, I just spoiled that chapter for you. But I love how she sets that up because it's like, are you even making the right design decision in the first place? One of my rules is that if something's taking me a really long time to make accessible, I start to sit and think, was this the right format for this? Like, was this even the right way to do this in the first place? Is this overly complicated to even do anyway? Like who's getting value from this?
You start to kind of question your design decisions in the first place too. Yeah. There's a lot of things that are really empowering. Part of it is making sure that it's. built into your quality management process. And that can be systemic and operational. And there's more than just you as an individual designer involved in that. And that could feel overwhelming or that you don't have enough influencer power to be able to make certain changes, accessible and inclusive changes.
to how you're doing all of your courses and all of your products and all of the offerings that you offer in your, your organization and bringing up Haley again, her story, she's not like the chief learning officer of her organization, but she was still able to be an advocate and have influence and be a champion for accessibility where she was.
In her role and even how her role evolved and I'm trying not to share her whole chapter, one of her chapters of that story, but I think it's a cool example that you don't have to be a senior leader to be it. an advocate to be a champion and to make some of these changes in your organization. Yes, that is correct. There is a lot that a person can do in an organization that is supportive of those efforts.
Haley happened to work in an organization that was like Salesforce is very supportive of accessibility efforts and they have it built into They're operations. They have teams that work on it. They organize around it. They are as an organization. They advocate for making sure that their stuff is accessible. I think that can be very challenging if you work in an organization that is not supportive of that. So depending on where you are, you could have more work cut out for you in some cases.
It can feel a little thankless when you're doing some of this work, which is why I like Meryl Evans chapter on progress over perfection and how to approach some of these things in a way that it's like thinking about little wins and how you can advocate and support things along the way. We do have a lot of reasons to advocate for this. And I tell people this sometimes when I started in accessibility, I didn't have an altruistic reason for it. Meaning that yes, I care about people.
Yes. I want things to be inclusive. I have personally, I have altruistic motivations, right? Internally and morals that make me care about these things. But even let's just say that you don't care. Let's say that you don't think that any of this should be a thing, and that it's too much of a waste of your time to build things that are accessible, you know, nobody's going to use it, nobody's going to need it, whatever. Let's say that that's how you feel about this right now.
If that is how you feel, one of the things that I'll share is that, and this is, I talked about early on about usability and about the business case for it. So let's say that you are like, you know what, I have a company. My company is here to do this thing and make money. Well, up to 26 percent of the U. S. has a disability. If you want to maybe make 26 percent more than your bottom line, you know, you're excluding 26 percent of your audience.
When you are not building things that are accessible to people. And that number is much higher than 26 because people have temporary disability. Meaning that, think about things where I can't, Do something because my hands are full. Maybe you're in a situation where you need closed captions. You can't listen to them at the time. Maybe you need to download this transcript because you need to use something from it for notes later.
Like there are a lot of other purposes for this, and there's a really good study. I have a podcast that I think of, this is also mentioned in the book of a podcast that all they started doing was adding transcripts, downloadable transcripts. to the podcast and their viewership shot through the roof. They got so many more viewers just from having that available. And so when you start to do things and make them more accessible, you're reaching a broader audience.
This is something that I don't like to share. I like, I like to share it because it's important, but from a competitive advantage, maybe it's, you know, I don't know from a business perspective, but whenever you add Alt text to your website when you add alt text to the images and describe your images on your website, it improves your SEO, your search engine optimization. So if you want your website to show up in search results, make sure you're adding alt text to your website.
The more accessible your website is, the more it pops up your search results. So there are so many business reasons to do this that I think even if you are looking at it from just Taking the I care about people part out of it. Do you want people to be able to access this stuff? Do you want people to be able to do the thing you're trying to teach them how to do? Do you want to, you know, make more money in your business? Like all of, there are so many reasons to do this.
It's weird to me that you wouldn't. And it's really not that much more work to think about this stuff, and I'm hoping that that's what people can take away from this book is, you know, as a business owner, a small business owner. Recently, we went through the process of launching a new software application, and I don't run an accessibility company. I run a learning technology company.
And when we launched the software application, one of the things that I cared about from the beginning was making sure it was accessible, not only because it aligned with my values, but also from a business perspective. And we checked that all along the way. I hired a UX designer that had deep experience in accessibility. My developer, my CTO. Deep accessibility experience. I mean, they worked on augmented reality stuff before building this application when we were building it all along the way.
We were checking with screen readers. We were checking to make sure it was accessible. Now, remember, small company. We're very small, but I invested in that from the beginning. Well, we just recently started going through our VPAP. process. And a VPAT is a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, and you set up a VPAT so that way when people are buying your tools, that you have something to show how accessible your tool is.
And it's required for government organizations, at least it was, um, required for government organizations in order to ensure that you pass 508 requirements. for procurement, but it also a lot of organizations will ask you for a VPAT because they want to make sure it's accessible for their company. And this is information that is described in more detail in the book. We were going through that VPAT process. It was very validating for us because we had almost no issues on our VPAT.
We went through that process and the things that we had to fix took about three minutes. And then got our VPAT. All set. If you go through the process of building something and you don't think about it from the beginning, getting that VPAT would be exhausting and expensive. Because you're probably going to uncover tons of stuff that you have to go back and fix and retrofit because you didn't design it that way in the first place.
And so I think about that story and how much it cost us to do that. The answer is almost nothing. We just thought about it from the beginning. The VPAT to get that process and get that done, it's a few thousand dollars. So when I think about companies that say, Oh, it's too expensive, or we can't do that, or it's cost prohibitive. I'm like, we're a small business and we did it.
It really is about understanding how to do it and having the skill set, because if you know how to do it upfront, it doesn't cost a lot of money to fix later. I love that story. I love that your own personal experience that you're sharing. We're running out of time. So I wanted to kind of end on the take action note, all the resources, the positive note before we put a pin on that conversation and go back to focusing on you and closing out. What are your thoughts and recommendations?
There's a lot here, I think, for a topic that is overwhelming. I know it has been for myself. You have witnessed me cry over mistakes made. I believe this is a very empowering book and I'm so excited for the community to finally have their hands on it and be able to just plug and play. But what are your thoughts?
I think that this book is not about I love that you talk about it being empowering because we spent a lot of time making sure that this book was set up in a way that it's like acknowledging the fact that none of us know this stuff until we know it. Some of the people that are in this book, I handpicked them to tell stories about where they messed up. There are people in this book that are not quote unquote accessibility experts at all.
They shared their stories about something that they messed up big time and then what they did differently to fix it. These are people that you know, that you recognize if you're in this industry and you go to conferences or whatever, they have their own books, right? And they talk about their own stuff. And I love the fact that they were part of this book because it really reinforces the fact that you don't know it till you know it.
And then once you know it, it's like this whole world opens up and you think about all these really cool things that you can do. And so I hope that this book serves as a way to empower people to think about how they design and think about it a little bit differently and feel like they can actually do something about it. I read this book and I get excited and I feel like I'm ready to, you know, do all these really cool things. That is the big takeaway. It's, you can do this stuff.
There's a lot of really cool stuff you can do. You just have to get in on the, on the secret, I guess. And you know, you have to, you have to be, have the opportunity to hear from people. And I think this book does a good job of that. Absolutely. Okay, so everyone is rushing to order it. Tell us your learning goals. What are you working on right now to get out of your comfort zone? Oh my goodness, that application I was telling you about. So it's a whole new world.
of working in the product space. So I've always worked in the world of training and facilitation and e learning and instructional design and, you know, implementing platforms and data strategy and XAPI and all this super nerdy stuff. And now I'm working on the product side of things and it has been extremely scary and uncomfortable. And so it's really interesting to get to work on things like patents and innovation and, you know, talking about how these tools can help people.
So I think my comfort zone right now is kind of thinking about things on supporting people in a very different way than I have in the past. It's exciting. It's also very intimidating, especially when you start to learn about something where there's not a lot of public information, you have to learn from other people. This is a big recommendation I have for anybody is talking to people. We spend a lot of time Googling and using chat GPT and all this stuff right now.
I think there's a lot to benefit from talking to real people and their experiences. And that is where I'm learning right now is setting up meetings with folks that have had these experiences and gone through this before and done certain things that I don't have firsthand experience in. I have book experience and research experience or knowledge, not experience. And I think that is great. That's a good starting point.
But being able to learn from others, I think, is something that we can't ever lose in this field. We have to be able to learn from each other from real people. I love that. Ties back to the book. I feel like you're going to be having conversations with all of our contributors listening to their stories. So we're going to share your LinkedIn and the book website and your Build Capable website. Is there anything else that we should share for folks who want to get in touch with you? For sure.
Designforallbook. com because that's where you can learn about all of the contributors in one place. And that site is actually run by all of us. We are posting things like resources and extra things that didn't make it into the book, mainly just because we're already at 600 pages and we ran out of room. So we're starting to post some resources and things. There's a page about the different authors in the book so that you can learn about them too and connect with them directly. Awesome.
Well, thank you so, so much, Sarah, for making time. Congratulations. Thank you for your hard work for the industry. We're better for it. I don't want to say you didn't want to write a book, but it needed to be worth it. And I'm glad that this was the thing that was worth it for you. And I really appreciate the opportunity. And I, I hope that eventually.
That ATD talks about the ATD side of this experience and what that was like for you all because it was really incredible to watch all the folks at ATD adjust things and processes as you all learned to the publishing process and how you work with authors and that whole Thank you. Transition programming and ATD has done a ton of work to say we need to update our websites, our platforms, our everything. And so it's been really exciting to watch that evolve.
It's one thing to just say you're going to do it. And it's another thing to actually learn from it and implement it. And it's good to see ATD doing that as an organization and not just a couple of people. Definitely. I think that'll have to be a future lessons learned session or webinar or something sharing both the experiences from the intensive conference planning and designing that and this book. I mean, there's always lessons learned.
We're still learning, but luckily we have people who are patient and willing to help us. Everyone needs to be very kind to themselves because even for somebody like me who's now written a book and done a CPAC and which is a certification through IAP, I've worked so hard at this and I still mess up. You're just going to mess up. People aren't perfect, but it's the trying to do better. It makes us all better.
So I really appreciate all of the folks that have joined me in this journey along the way. It's just really exciting to see. Well, hopefully our listeners are joining you in this journey and we'll reach out to you and all the design for all contributors on the site and through socials and just keep chatting about the accessibility and inclusion work that they're doing. So thank you again, Sarah. Thanks for listening to this podcast from the Association for Talent Development.
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