Interview with Bob Regan, Senior PM of Accessibility, Macromedia

Bob Regan is the Senior Product Manager for accessibility at Macromedia. In that role, he works with designers, developers and engineers from around the world to communicate existing strategies for accessibility as well as develop new strategies. He works with engineers and designers within Macromedia to develop new techniques and improve the accessibility of Macromedia tools. Bob spent six years as a teacher and technology leader in Chicago and New York City. Working with teachers and students across a range of ages and subject matter, he has extensive knowledge of elementary and secondary education. Bob spent two years teaching web design and accessibility at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

DMXzone's Bruce Lawson caught up with him in London on 4^th September 2003

You're senior PM for Accessibility at Macromedia. Are you the first post-holder of that job? Why is MM taking Accessibility so seriously?

I am the first in title, but certainly not in practice. There were a few before me who took this job and made it there own without the benefit of title (or commensurate salary). These are folks like Susan Morrow who helped push the first innovations into Dreamweaver, before it was a government mandate. Susan, like others at Macromedia, learned about the issue the many of us do, from friends, family or visitors to our sites and decided she needed to do something about it. Since then, Section 508 and other policies in the UK, Canada and Australia have changed the landscape of software development. Building accessible products makes great business sense. It has helped to cement Macromedia's position in the government space as the leading vendor for design products.

The public sector is typically most interested in accessibility. Does this means that the lion's share of MM customers are education/ government rather than corporate - or is that a sector you're trying to grow?

It typically starts with the folks most directly affected by a new policy. In the United States, this was most often seen in the federal government after Section 508 was implemented. Since then however, we have seen tremendous growth in interest about accessibility across all sectors. While implementation continues to grow in the government markets, I am seeing a tremendous expansion of accessibility policies at the state and local levels, in education and even in the private sector. This trend also bears out around the world. As designers and project managers learn about accessibility, they are trying to get out in front of the issue rather than waiting to play catch up later.

What does your job actually entail? How do you know if you're successful or not?

Any given day brings me a range of issues from answering simple design questions on my blog, reviewing a build of a product, writing some content or participating in a discussion with partners outside of Macromedia. The simple variety of issues I might work on in any given day is one of the best parts of my job. It rarely gets dull. My responsibilities are to not only write about techniques important to accessibility, but to collect these techniques and create a set of feature requests for product teams. Then, once features are actually built, we try to look at the potential impact these features have on accessibility in both a positive and negative sense and communicate those issues to customers.

I try to measure success in terms of accessibility in three different ways. First, I try to look at the short term. Macromedia has made a commitment to show improvement in each successive release of their products. In each release, we can evaluate how well we have improved on the previous release both in terms of the features but also the techniques and documentation that encourage designers to take advantage of those features.

Second, I try to look at the longer term issues of access and design. This is a field that is constantly changing, whether it is a new draft of W3 standards, to new API specifications in Windows or other platforms to new developments in assistive technology. Macromedia needs to keep in tune with those changes if they are to continue to release adjustments within their products. Third and finally, success has to be measured in financial terms. We try not to look at accessibility in terms of the number of people with disabilities who buy of use our tools. Instead, we frame the issue in terms of the size of the markets where accessibility is a priority. As I mentioned earlier, this is more than just our public sector sales. Understanding how policy is growing and changing helps us understand the opportunity, not just the risks, represented by accessibility.

Bruce Lawson

I'm the brand manager of glasshaus, a publishing company specialising in books for web professionals. We've a series for dreamweaver professionals - the dreamweaver pro series.

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