Addteq VP of Marketing, Jaclyn Mazzarella discusses with Atlassian Sales Director, Sean O'Sullivan, how Atlassian helps agencies comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.
Roberto Musso: Welcome to the Atlassian Advantage podcast series. Here's their second episode, Federal 508 Compliance with Atlassian.
Sean O'Sullivan: Hello everyone and thanks for joining us again today for our latest podcast entry discussing Section 508 compliance with that Atlassian. My name is Sean O'Sullivan, the sales director of the Atlassian team at Carahsoft and I'm joined today by Jacqueline Mazzerella. Jacqueline serves as the VP of Marketing at Addteq and Atlassian platinum solution partner. Welcome Jacqueline. Thanks for joining us today.
Jaclyn Mazzarella: Hey Sean, thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.
Sean O'Sullivan: Great. We're happy to have you here as well. We know that as a solution partner, Addteq serves as an expert with all things Atlassian, and Addteq especially has some indispensable knowledge when it comes to government mandates like 508 compliance, which we are often receiving questions about from users, especially as we see them continue to develop their DevOps strategy with Atlassian solutions. Let's get started today discussing this, Jacqueline, I'll start by asking you our first question. Most of us by now have heard of 508 Compliance. It first popped up back in 1973 but just to level set the reason why we're discussing this today. In your words, why is 508 Compliance important?
Jaclyn Mazzarella: Of course there's always the government side of things, and what they decide is important when talking about compliance and other standards. But to me, I really feel it's the inclusion aspect without having the need for a government mandate. With that being said, I really think that things like equal opportunity and other opportunities for inclusion doesn't really stop at things that we're used to like diversity. I really feel that every single person out there with any type of disability has the right and deserves to live in a modern society that we do live in and surrounded by technology. We live on the internet today and I truly feel that in order to be included, it really needs to define our internet usage. So that's really where 508 Compliance and things like WCAG Standards come into play.
Sean O'Sullivan: That's very well said. So then with that understanding now of why we know why 508 Compliance is so important, what do you think right now is your take on the state of that compliance? Are agencies generally aware of what they need to do? Are they ahead of it or maybe behind the curve a bit here when it comes to a meeting that compliance standard?
Jaclyn Mazzarella: Well, I'll start with your first question. The state of 508 Compliance I think is getting more and more serious. Like you said who is brought around a long time ago, way before the technology that we have today even existed. So with the changes, ever ending changes of technology today, I think the things like 508 Compliance is becoming more and more front and center to organizations, both on the government side and on the public sector side.
On the other side of things, I really don't think that agencies are necessarily behind the curve. I believe that they're just really not putting it on the front of their agendas. Of course there are millions of other things on our agency's agenda day in and day out. So I think that this sort of falls to the wayside. And I also feel that they don't necessarily know how to act on it first. They know they have to do it of course, because it's getting mandated and fine they're coming their way, but I don't necessarily think they know how to get started. So that's really what I think agencies are at right now with 508 Compliance.
Sean O'Sullivan: Got you. Carahsoft and Addteq, we both service the same customer, that being the public sector. So I'm curious, what do you hear from government customers when it comes to 508 Compliance? I mean do they have concerns about it? Are they facing serious hurdles, challenges, that kind of thing?
Jaclyn Mazzarella: Yeah, so we hear a lot about it. First and foremost is we have to do it. They have that really big urgency that we have to be compliant. We have to figure this out. And then the second thing we hear is, but how do we do that with everything that again, all the pieces of technology, all the changes in websites and the changes in code itself, how do we stay on top of this compliance? So I think their major hurdles are trying to understand what they need to do first, how they have to do it and what tools or outside I guess help or references they need to get started.
Sean O'Sullivan: Got you now. You've mentioned the websites a couple of times at this point. In terms of their accessibility, how does this mandate then affects, we'll say the non-federal websites?
Jaclyn Mazzarella: I like to use one big example that just started I guess getting limelight in the public eye. Domino's has recently had a lawsuit happening where a visually impaired user was trying to order pizza through their website, and Domino's recently over the last year changed a lot of things with their website and their user interface. And this person, this visually impaired person was not able to order pizza at the end of the day. It just didn't work with his screen reader and the other pieces of technology that aided him to navigate a website. I like to use that example because it's something so simple and something that we take advantage of almost every day. Being able to easily order a pizza or order any type of food nowadays straight through an app or a website.
I really think the changes that are being mandated and the standards that companies both public and private and federal and government and everything else really have to understand that it's more than just something that is going to be mandated. It's not just a fine that you might get if you don't comply. It's the day in and day out life of somebody trying to use your service.
Sean O'Sullivan: Right. Right. So now when I think about some of the agencies that you and I work with, the government folks, because obviously we all don't. I wish we could work with pizza all day, but we don't, do you have any good examples, some of the best practices that some of these agencies are starting to implement in order to achieve the compliance?
Jaclyn Mazzarella: So I'd say the first one is definitely hiring some sort of compliancy expert. They feel that that is the best way to take a step back and understand not only their tools or their products, but also things like their website or their apps and a bunch of other things that they might be servicing to their customers and really understand what first needs to be done. From there I think the next best practice is understanding their users and understanding how to better their experiences and things that are changing on the government side with 508 Compliance and WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 or the different things that you do need to do as a company in order to comply. So I think as those things change, they're going to have to seek new experts and seek outside references where they can get help and understanding.
And the next best practice is really where we as experts come in when they start diving into their individual toolsets. So on the DevOps side, we have developers working day in and day out on all these different products and apps and services, but they're the ones that are going to have to change everything to be able to comply. So being able to teach and show these organizations that it's not just hire individuals to help you, but also understand what needs to be done and how you can keep it on the forefront of your changes and the things that you do as an organization.
Sean O'Sullivan: Sure. That now makes sense. The first one you gave us, you mentioned hiring an expert. With compliancy, would you say that's where agencies just start on their journey or, I mean is it varied or are there any recommendations you can give when it comes to just getting started with this kind of thing?
Jaclyn Mazzarella: I guess that's a two fold. I see people more coming to us saying they don't know how to get started. They access different tools and they decided which tools they needed to fix first and then they reach out to people like us. But then on the best practices and me giving advice side, I would definitely say get an expert that looks at everything. Don't necessarily dive into things that you think are servicing just your customers. Think of your organization as a whole and hiring that expert would do that. A lot of organizations decide, let's look at Atlassian tools and then let's look at our internal tools like HR tools and an email even and things like that. But I think hiring an expert to look at your organization as a whole and seeing what can be done is definitely a best practice to get started with.
Sean O'Sullivan: Sure. So then when I'm thinking about the solution side of things, which is obviously where we're already segueing here, the big one of the room, technology and how technology is going to help us fix everything in the world. What would you say from a technology perspective is helping agencies comply with the Section 508 stuff?
Jaclyn Mazzarella: So things like screen readers, which have been around for a while and really helped our visually impaired users understand a website or understand an app or a tool or any of their cell phones even. Those have evolved as the compliance standards have evolved. So that in itself has been very interesting to see. The problem is that these screen readers serve no value if a website app or anything else is not compliant on that end. So things like downloading a simple PDF off of a website, some visually impaired users cannot do if the website is not compliant.
So technology really can serve as a big help when these organizations understand how they can change to be compliant, because things like voice assistance technologies can all help them make their changes, if that makes sense. So using things like Google or Alexa or any of those other items that we use as regular users, visually impaired users can rely on that so much more. There's really no need for a desktop anymore, desktop monitor. They could just use something like an Alexa or something like a Google home. So with the changes of technology, I really feel that that's going to open the doors to many other things, of course, but specifically on this topic of 508 Compliance.
Sean O'Sullivan: Sure. Now, if I take it one step further with technology, obviously I work here at Carahsoft on the Atlassian team, you know Atlassians got a whole suite of products. We're thinking JIRA, we're talking Confluence here and obviously Addteq, the reason why we're talking today as a platinum solution partner for Atlassian. You guys know Atlassian at the back of your hands. How does Addteq right now utilize Atlassian, I would say uniquely to help agencies comply with the 508 mandate.
Jaclyn Mazzarella: So we saw a real opportunity when one of our large clients, financial clients had reached out to us and mentioned that they needed to be compliant as a whole, but they also felt that original point that we started this conversation off, the need of inclusion. So their problem mainly was that they could not help their visually impaired customers in certain aspects on the newly developed apps for their organization. So they reached out to us because they used all of the Atlassian tools and that was their main point of DevOps in their development.
So we teamed up with them to try to understand first and foremost how to do that. But then we saw the opportunity to work with these tools and realize how many different types of organizations are using Atlassian suite. And those organizations range from financial to government to even some mom and pop shops. I know a few people who use JIRA on a personal level to organize some of their own finances and things like that. So when you think about that and their large customer base that Atlassian has, we really realized that there was an opportunity for, gosh, how many users were visually impaired out there. So we took that and we developed Unstoppable, which is our 508 compliant app that works with JAWS screen reader and basically helps a user navigate JIRA Confluence and JIRA Service Desk.
Now a lot of the time people use JIRA Service Desk for their outside customer support or help desk portals or things like that. So that opens a whole another door to not only Atlassian customers, but the customers of their customers using their own tools and being able to use them clearly and without any troubles. So that was a real opportunity that we chose to use the amazing Atlassian suite, uniquely when it came to this specific sector of 508 Compliance. And that was, I want to say about five or six years ago when we originally began our partnership with the Atlassian. So even in those five or six years, the mandates for 508 and the standards have changed significantly. So we're always trying to stay on top of what those users need and how to consistently stay compliant.
Sean O'Sullivan: Awesome. Okay. There's going to be obviously a lot more that you can dive into a lot with this. Right? But just for the sake of today's conversation, where do you suggest our listeners are going to go now to learn more about what Addteq is doing with JAWS screen reader, and the rest of the things that you guys are doing in support of these government agencies.
Jaclyn Mazzarella: So of course visit our website, www.addteq.com but you can also reach out to have an individual conversation about specific needs or questions that you might have or even if you just want to dive into some of those best practices that we've mentioned earlier, you could just simply reach out to sales@addteq.com. Of course we're on all of our social media channels as well, so you can DM us, tweet at us, Facebook message us, whatever you need to do to reach out to us, but we are here to answer any of those almost very hard questions to answer sometimes.
Sean O'Sullivan: Right. No, lack of contact avenues these days. Those are great suggestions, Jacqueline. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time today. The valuable insights, the information, really, really helpful stuff on a topic that I think isn't discussed enough really. For our listeners, please check out Jacqueline suggestions. We're going to have the resources on the bottom of our podcast landing page, or you can also contact Carahsoft who we, like I said, work with Addteq frequently here atlassian@carahsoft.com or you can always contact us at 833-547-2468. Appreciate everyone's time today and we'll see you next time. Thanks.