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We are pleased to share Episode 30 of the official IAAP podcast, featuring OHAC’s Managing Director, Eoin O’Herlihy.
In this episode, Eoin joins Christopher M. Lee, PhD (VP & Managing Director at G3ict/IAAP) to explore key topics such as Universal Design, accessibility in the built environment, and inclusive policy development.
You can listen to the full episode using the audio player provided on this page, or scroll down to read the transcript.
Transcript
00:03 Speaker
Welcome to the IAAP United in Accessibility Podcast, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of inclusion and accessibility. We’re very honored to welcome our today’s guest Eoin O’Herlihy. Eoin is a trailblazer in the realm of accessibility with a remarkable career spanning over two decades. Eoin is a chartered engineer and chairperson for the National Standards Authority of Ireland’s Working Group on Access to the Built Environment. As founder of O’Herlihy consultancy he focuses on making buildings and services accessible for all. With expertise in accessibility, Universal Design, and as an expert witness Eoin’s insights shape national policies and global initiatives. Join us as we explore Eoin’s extraordinary journey, gain insights from his experiences and delve into the future of inclusive design and accessibility on the United in Accessibility podcast.
01:02 Christopher Michael Lee
Welcome to the IAAP United in Accessibility podcast. Eoin it’s great to have you here today. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
01:09 Eoin O’Herlihy
Thanks very much, Christopher. It’s great to be here. Yeah, so my name is Eoin O’Herlihy and I am I suppose the managing director of a company called O’Herlihy Access Consultancy, I’ve been involved in accessibility for over 20 years now. And when it all started off, the kind of was a bit of an accident totally fell into the whole area of accessibility. So, I was in my final year in college, and my mom had a stroke. So, she acquired a disability. So, at the time my tutor in my final year of college had got some funding to look at making schools accessible for people with disabilities. So, he asked me, would I be interested in participating in some research in that area. So, I spent two years researching on how to make schools more accessible for people with disabilities. And after that, I was lucky to get a job in the National Disability Authority in Ireland. So, I worked with the NDA, or the National Disability Authority for about four and a half years and typically what we did, we were working on a project called excellence to accessibility. And the idea of that project was to advise government departments, local authorities and the public sector about how they could, I suppose, invade accessibility and what they did. So, we’ve looked at customer services, it looked at the built environment, and it looked at information and communication technology. So, we were lucky to there was a team and we went around, and we worked with like local libraries or government departments, our sports facilities that were run by various local authorities, and we tried to enhance their accessibility. And there was also lucky enough to get involved in cross borders, national and international standards as well. So, I started working on some of the ISO standards today through the National Standards Authority of Ireland and being on various committees. So, I’ve got a lot of exposure to national international standards. And then in 2007, I set up an O’Herlihy Access Consultancy. So, the idea of the consultancy company is we focus in on I suppose consultancy and training we also focusing on in the area of design and construction. The company has kind of grown organically and we now have a team of 20 people working in the area of accessibility. And most recently, I suppose we’ve set up a design and construction department and we always had that. And then we did consultancy and training. We did a lot of awareness raising around accessibility, but we now officially have a consultancy and training department and we’re rolling up department within the company. So yeah, so started the company in the middle of a recession and it’s growing since then which have been really great.
03:27 Christopher Michael Lee
Yeah, that says a lot about you as an entrepreneur, and a social entrepreneur. And in addition to that, so hats off, that’s not easy.
03:37 Eoin O’Herlihy
It was an interesting journey along the way, you know?
03:40 Christopher Michael Lee
Yes, I can only imagine. So, tell us a little bit about the construction component of that. I hear about the training, you got 20 people that you’re working with, but what do you do in that work in regard to probably Universal Design I would imagine?
03:56 Eoin O’Herlihy
Yeah, so in the design and construction area, so I suppose it’s quite regulated, you know, you’ve got building codes and building regulations. In Ireland 2010, they kind of introduced a protocol disability access certificate. So, this was a kind of a statutory document, you had to apply forward with the local authorities for any new kind of larger projects, whether it was a school or whether it was a healthcare facility, or whether it was in an office environment or student accommodation, and so on. That was one kind of changes for regulations, which meant accessibility was much more on the agenda for people. Then in 2014, the government introduced that mandatory inspections would be carried out during construction stages of a project to make sure that the building regulations were being addressed. We were position that we were working in the accessibility prior to that, and we understood the regulations and we understood the process. So, we were keeping ahead of everyone else, and we were trying to learn more and stuff like that. So that’s really back to your question, I suppose about Universal Design is that you know. We know that there’s mandatory compliance and in most jurisdictions that is minimum compliance, but we want to strive towards Universal Design. So, in the company itself, we kind of advocate for Universal Design at all stages of the of the project or a Universal Design approach. And as part of that we’ve kind of developed in house Universal Design checklists around how to make the perfect environment accessible. And we base them around seven areas of Universal Design, not the seven principles of Universal Design, but seven areas of making the built environment accessible. So, things like the external environment and approach, entrances, circulation, key facilities within the building, and sanitary facilities, it’s communication, like signage, and wayfinding. And then we look at evacuation, that’s kind of design criteria that we would look at and we, you know, with a 45-point checklist, where we can get into more detail of all the built environment aspects, like, you know, dogs, finding areas or quiet rooms and things like that. But we recognize that it’s not just about design, it’s about the process as well. And if you don’t get the process, right, you won’t be able to implement the Universal Design criteria within the in the project. So, we’re very much about kind of collaboration with the design team awareness amongst the design team around accessibility and Universal Design criteria, but also looking at engagement with people with disabilities. So, one client that we’re working with at the moment, they’re in existing workplace, for example, they’re building a custom designed new office. So, we’re learning from the people disabilities, were all people, including people with disabilities, within the existing workplace, what are the challenges? What are the barriers? What are things that are going wrong in the current workplace, and we’re making sure that when we’re when we’re doing the design, or construction of the new offices, that those elements are being implemented. We can get into more detail, but it’s about the design, it’s about the process, but it’s also about the operations after the buildings open. So how do we maintain the accessibility and usability of the space like putting information upon your website around to you know, for someone coming to for an interview, and pre visitor information to allow people to plan their journeys are, you know, a little bit newer to diversity, allowing people to understand the spaces before they go into them and be able to get an idea of what the space is going to look like, or what the look and feel is like of the building and stuff like that.
07:14 Christopher Michael Lee
So, I have lots of questions. I was moving down the direction with my next question around how you incorporate kind of smart buildings into it. You mentioned wayfinding, pipelining. And I think that’s very important. But I’m going to back up a little bit and ask, so the 20 individuals that you have working with you what kind of expertise do they have? Because what you’re looking at, Eoin is a holistic approach of what you’re doing, not just the built environment, but also the digital aspect of it.
07:43 Eoin O’Herlihy
Yeah, so we have, we have a mix of team members, we have architects, we have engineers, we can tear, or architects and we have most recently hired an occupational therapist as well. So, we’ve a range of backgrounds of people. But I suppose what we’re trying to do is what we’re keen on doing I suppose is constantly learning and constantly evolving. But I suppose one thing to do that, as we run a lot of our own in house CPDs, or our own training sessions. So, for example, the construction team are currently we’re doing a six week, every Friday morning, we do a session from half eight to half nine. And we discuss how we can, you know, improve our processes or look at different areas that we didn’t look at and stuff like that. I suppose we’re thirsty for knowledge as well, in that we’re looking to see well, you know, neurodiversity in the workplace is an example of a massive area where we’re everyone’s learning about how to improve that. So, we want to make sure that we have a good understanding of what are the challenges are the barriers that people are going to face. And then we want to incorporate that into the system or into our processes that we use. But as he said, it’s not just about the built environment, we can move over to the consultancy side of things and say, well, look, we want to embed accessibility in everything that your company does. So that large office environment that I mentioned previously, we’re advising their diversity and inclusion team about how they can enhance all aspects of accessibility. So, working with human resource department are working with communications and marketing team to make sure that the key elements of your columns are fully accessible, that your websites are fully accessible, that if you’re going create an app, and yeah, it’s going to allow people to book meeting rooms and things like that. So, the app needs to be fully accessible in accordance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So, it wasn’t about the strategy as well. What kind of strategies are in place are all aspects of accessibility and one of the key things we’re finding in our work is that a lot of people are now looking for how do we make sure that every aspect of what we do addresses accessibility and you’re talking about Learning and Development, you’re talking about Human Resources, the ICT, the Information Communication Technology, the products, the services, we have the European Accessibility Act where you know, people are saying we now need to make our services and our products successful. And I suppose just thinking about recent the kind of thing is that like leadership is a massive area to drive that change in the agenda. But I also think education and awareness is key. So, if we, don’t focus on education and awareness or leadership, then we’re never going to embed accessibility into what we do. So, I’m just, I’m curious, I almost want to be like a fly on the wall, when you come in with your checklist, and you walk into a construction site, and you’re like, okay, this is, this is what we’re all about. And this is what we’ll be looking at. So, what kind of feedback do you get? Do you get pushback? You get pushback in the regulation compliance piece sometimes. So, it can be challenging, but I think you have to get in early on a project. So, you have to get in at feasibility or planning or design stage, if you come in a construction stage, it’s, it’s already too late, because you’re not going to have required spaces for example, for changing places, toilets are for putting in a quiet room or reflection spaces and things like that. So, you have to get in really early, and you have to get the buy in from the client. So, the projects that are really successful is where the client is really driving, they’re interested in diversity and inclusion, their interest, they want their workplace to be best in class, they want the workplace to be, you know, accessible and usable for everyone. So, they are the projects that will really okay, it’s not all it’s not as easy as saying, once we have the client on board, everything is going to be fine, because the landscape architect, for example, might say, well, this is why we’ve done it for the last 20 years. Why are you coming in telling me that it needs to be different are you know, the lift supplier might say, well, we’re meeting certain regulations, and now you’re asking for X, Y, and Z. You have to get in early and you have to make sure that you can educate people, it is not going to have massive cost implications for your project and it’s the benefits of Universal Design or accessibility fire away the Not, the reason for not doing it and stuff, so but you will get pushed back and when we get pushed back every day on design and construction projects. because checking at the end, accessibility always comes at the end of a project, you know, for example, you’re putting up your manifestations on the glass on the doors, so that people with vision impairments don’t walk into them, you’re doing the landscaping towards the end, you’re lining out your airparks. And contractors are rushing, they’re trying to get the job finished to date, tight deadlines and stuff. So you have to make sure you hopefully you get the information to them in a timely manner and stuff that it’s not last minute and so on. It can be challenging, but it’s also I suppose, the benefit if you can get the benefits to people initially and work with them. It’s a collaboration. So it’s not just a, you know, it has to be there’s a balance between accessibility and for example, fire safety, there’s a balance between accessibility and sustainability for older buildings and conservation and stuff. So, it’s working with the team, hopefully that’s the easiest way.
12:40 Christopher Michael Lee
Wow. And just thinking about just the expertise that you have to bring to the table in so many areas that you just mentioned. The landscape architecture, the way that you put glass, and you know, it’s very fascinating. One of the things I’m curious about is, you talked a little bit about emergency prep, in a sense. How do you address that with people with disabilities? And how do you factor that into that holistic approach?
13:08 Eoin O’Herlihy
There are a few things there I suppose, there’s the design elements of the building and again, one of the challenging areas, there will be things like evacuation lifts within buildings. So, for example, if you don’t have evacuation lifts, then people could be left in refuge areas on the fourth floor or fifth floor of a building and stuff like that. So, you want to avoid that where possible. There are design implications that you need to build in, for example, visual and audible fire alarms, there’s operational issues. So, you know, working with the health and safety team who are going to be operating the building, making sure that the building manuals address health and safety and accessibility, both things like safety statements, things like Egress evacuation plans. So not just a generic plan, but a plan that accommodates people with disabilities. And then then you’re down to the detail of things like personal emergency evacuation plans. So, if you recognize that, you know, you can build a process. So, the health and safety officer could build the process that when all staff are being adopted within the company, you ask questions around, do they have any accessibility requirements in relation to safe evacuation? Do they have any accessibility needs and stuff like that. So, you’re building it into different processes as well, so the induction process, you know. You might have an induction training course. Health and safety is going to be covered under that anyway, because it’s the law in the majority of countries. So, you’re enhancing that health and safety module by including the needs of people with disabilities and so you’re getting it in from the start, and then you’re creating that awareness. So, you might, for example, do a town hall within your company and that town hall could be about the you know, say Egress, you’re sending all kinds of communications to it. So, the role of the Health and Safety Officer is key in this one, but also in the in the area of design is is getting it in from minority point of view. So that can be down to standards as well like you know, national and international standards. So, if we can enhance our standards around these areas, then we can you know, that will drive change as well. And then lots of countries will have national guidelines around setting evacuation for people disabilities. But in some ways, the problem is people don’t know where to get those documents or those guidelines. There’s lots of them there, but people aren’t aware that they might be there and stuff like that as well.
15:14 Christopher Michael Lee
So, you help them locate those documents, I mean, that’s part of the training.
15:18 Eoin O’Herlihy
Yeah. So what we would do is like, say, for example, we were doing a session here at a workshop, and we were talking to a project with the Health and Safety Officer would say, look, there’s guidelines available for preparing personal emergency response, there’s guidelines available for developing your safety statement and you know, we’d say the Irish Health and Safety Authority has guidelines for meeting the needs of employees with disabilities and straightaway after the meeting, we share the links to those guidelines to the delegates who attended the workshop and stuff like that. They call it their own online library here. So, we’ve built up a library and every time we find a new document, we put it into the library, and the library grows. So, like we might have, say, UK regulations, we may have a neurodiversity in the workplace, and then we might have some guidelines on, you know, accessible landscaping, or making heritage buildings accessible or, you know, working in customer services or environment. So, we’ve built up that Bank of the library as we’ve gone along and we try and like we would, we would kind of normally send out a newsletter every six weeks, and the newsletter would include, here’s a release of the new guidelines around employment and meeting the needs of employees with disabilities in the workplace. But a key thing is like, we’re about sharing knowledge, you don’t want to keep all the knowledge to yourself. So that could be I didn’t say at the start, I originally qualified as a teacher. So, I think, you know, the education awareness piece is kind of important. And I think it’s about sharing that knowledge. Because at the end of the day, our goal is to make society more accessible for people with disabilities. So, it’s not just to, you know, be a company is to make life accessible for people with disabilities. And to do that, like, we work with a lot of like, for example, local or national disability organizations, and we do try and work with a local authority and, you know, some of the issues might have been about car parking or dropped curbs or pedestrian crossings and things we were trying to say to the local group, okay, well, you can contact your local government or local authority and you can, you can say you can you can say, Look, we need to fix the drop curb over on that street or whatever it is, but what you really need to do is when and talk to the guys who are designing the roads and streets and give them training around accessibility, so you can change their mindset and get them thinking differently about how to enhance accessibility within the entire town or village or city and stuff like that, because you never make a difference if we just look at one pedestrian crossing at a time and stuff. So, I think it’s kind of thinking differently about how we can make changes is important. The IAAP Accessible Document Specialist (ADS) credential is intended for accessibility professionals who create and remediate accessible electronic documents and their related policies. The ADS credential represents an ability to express an intermediate level of experience designing, evaluating, and remediating accessible documents. The ADS credential is beneficial for people in or aspiring to be a User Experience Designer or Tester, Web Content Manager and Administrators, Project, Program and ICT managers and more. Check out the IAAP ADS certification webpage to learn more.
18:24 Christopher Michael Lee
Yeah, I mean, the whole idea of City Planning, and getting into that mix, I can only imagine. Very interesting and I think training would be very important. There’s obviously, you know, in the States, North America, there’s a lot of politics in that area, like everywhere else. But yeah, so that’s fascinating. I’m glad you brought that’s up, that’s my next point. You know, how do you incorporate people with disabilities? And it sounds like you work with some of the advocacy groups within Ireland to do that. Can you speak a little bit more of how you actually clicked? Do they come in with you when you walk into the, to the actual site and have that checklist?
19:02 Eoin O’Herlihy
Well, we have actually, I suppose we have a number of staff members who have disabilities themselves, but I think yeah, so we were hearing a lot about for design and, you know, designing programs with people with disabilities. I suppose we’re strong advocates. So, the call I had before this, we were doing an access audit of a large building. And one of the key messages we gave is, look, we need to find out what the barriers are within this building from the people with disabilities who actually used the building. We will do like things like workshops, or town halls and questionnaires and surveys and stuff. So, any of the projects where we’re looking at kind of the larger projects where we’re going to develop an action plan, or we’re going to develop a policy for the organization, we will be saying that you have to have the consultation and stakeholder engagement, and that has to be on an ongoing basis. So, we would start that process Vardan and we would host a number of workshops or we would send out questionnaires So for example, I recently completed work with two universities. And part of the process was, we did workshops with both the staff with the university, but also, we gain feedback from students with disabilities within the universities as well. You get firsthand the challenges that people disabilities face and we kind of do that in a way where we’re trying to, we only ask for five questions. We don’t like ask 100 questions, we have four or five questions, but they’re all leading down the way of, you know, enhancing accessibility, but the universal design approach where you’re saying, Okay, we know there’s challenges on the built environment, you know, there might be a broken lift, or there might be a broken thing., but how can we get to people changing curriculum development or their approach to teaching learning? Or how can we get the real estate office to think differently about the accessibility on the campus for the 50 buildings that they may have and stuff like that? How do we get the human resource department to enhance the policies and practices and stuff? So, we start off by simple question, what are the barriers faced by people with disabilities at the university? And then we move into saying, well, okay, are we aware of the real challenges on accessibility in broad note the context and stuff like that. So when we kind of get into the meat of that, then it is oh, well, we didn’t think about information provision, or we didn’t think about work on the customer services, or we didn’t think about health and safety and so that’s a good way of doing it, I think, anyway, but we, again, we’re strong advocates are involved in people with disabilities. And we did one local area worked with, we work with a disability network, and we were all able to train the trainer program with them. So, they became disability awareness trainers within their own community. And they were people with disabilities themselves. But at the start of that, they were thinking about their posture, you know, maybe if someone had a vision pyramid, they might have been just thinking about vision impairment. But at the end of it, they were thinking about how to make changes within the organizations, but also identify that it’s so much more than just disability, it’s access for everyone, and so on. Well, you know, universities, just to drill down on that for a moment, I mean, they’re like their own cities, campus or multiple campuses across a large region or smaller region. I’m sure, that’s a very different approach that you’re taking, than just walking into a building and a sense. It is so you’re right. So, you know, again, in the States, they might be bigger universities, but you could have a university with 20,000 people and as you’ve said, it could be over multiple campuses and you’re dealing with, you know, so many different, like, you know, you’re dealing with the real estate team, you’re dealing with the marketing and comms, you’re dealing with the admissions office, you’re dealing with the examinations offices, you’re dealing with the lecturers, you know, you’re trying to change the mindset of an OP Oh, people have done things for 10, 15 years and stuff like that, but we kind of we look at that at the project university, and we say, Okay, well, let’s identify 10 pillars, and the pillars are consultation and stakeholder engagement, learning and development, information and communication, technology, human resources, leadership, and, you know, frame strategies, health and safety, the built environment, and so on. So, you’re, you’re broadening it out, like the maturity model is kind of looking at a kind of a holistic approach and then you have to involve everyone in the process. So typically, what we would do is we’d set up a steering group, the steering group would be representative of the various pillars that I just mentioned, you know, in one project, we were very lucky, we got the president of the university to sit in and chair the working group. And then we went through a 16-to-20-week process with that university. We tailored questionnaires for the different departments, and then we develop a policy. So, they have a policy that’s available on the website, which is highlighting their commitment to all of those 10, or 9 areas that we mentioned. And then we developed an action plan. So, a three-year action plan about how they could enhance accessibility in all those areas. And they’ve taken that away, they’ve involved students and staff members with disabilities as part of the consultation process. So, the documentary, like your employee resource group, in a larger company, so they have an adaptive disability stakeholder group, and then they have the kind of the university design working group as well. And they’re all reporting into equality and diversity on you know, every three months on hold, they’re making changes and stuff like that. So, it’s a much larger process, but I suppose, as you said, it’s making a difference to a much wider audience and stuff in relation to your larger university and so on.
24:24 Christopher Michael Lee
Yeah, so what I’m hearing is, you know, the discovery kind of maturity model phase, you go through over a period of time, and that changes based on the customer. So, you see the gaps, you see where the areas that could be filled in, you do some training on that, and that deals with more the operation side about the implementation of the gaps with the maturity model. Can you speak from that jump of where you’re out with the maturity aspect of the discovery phase to that implementation phase? Or what you’re calling the operational phase of it.
24:54 Eoin O’Herlihy
So again, we will try and part of the process who we say to people we come back, so you’ve got the benchmarking pieces you mentioned, which is the 16 week process, and then you have your, you know, you develop your policy and your action plan, it’s in draft format, and you get it signed off by the university. Another example that we did it with a council and you know, you’re so you’re not looking at teaching and learning, you’re looking at participating, so you can you tailor your pillars and stuff like that, so then the next phase would be going in getting those organizations to report to management on an annual basis. So, they have to report to senior management on how successful the action plan is, style will be built in as part of the process. And we were trying to, you know, go back into those companies a year later, are 18 months later to reassess and see where they’re at. So, we’ve one organization, for example, which is looking at us come back in and reassess where they are in relation to the implementation of the action plan that they’ve created. So that’s going to be important, but in each of the 10, kind of sections of your action plan, reporting, and monitoring is a key element in all of those areas. So, they have to report back into the Universal Design steering group, but they also have to report to management, because the idea is they need to probably we need to get a budget to make approve. And so, if it’s a budget for training, if it’s a budget for developing accessible publications, or if it’s, you know, the big budget is for making improvements to buildings and campuses and stuff like that. So, we’re trying to make sure that they’re reporting back in but also trying to ascertain more money to make improvements to accessibility and stuff like that. Just curious, you know, you have 10 clients out there for 2024, out of those 10 clients, how many of those clients do you get resistance from versus how many moves forward? We are very lucky, and most of our clients come back to us and they’re looking to, you know, we get a lot of repeat business and stuff like that we’re currently operating a website, because we haven’t had time to do it, but we’re doing it now to make it, you know, bring it up to standard. But I think the clients that we have, most of them are definitely open to making improvements enhancing accessibility, I think they’re, in some ways they might be coming to us because they want to make improvements to accessibility, it’s the customers that we don’t have are probably the ones that are resisting accessibility, if that makes sense. But I think it’s in the area of the consultancy and training, the customers that come to us really want to make improvements and make a difference in the area of accessibility. In the private sector, we’re finding the private sectors companies are coming to us because they want to enhance their diversity and inclusion. And they’re looking at the area of disability as one of their, you know, the 9 grounds or 10 grounds around diversity and inclusion. They’re finding it challenging, because they don’t have the knowledge about how to make changes to that area. So that, you know, they find that look, we’re doing really well on ethnicity, or LGBTQ+ and stuff like that, but they’re finding that they don’t know what to hope to address accessibility. Or they’re at the very early stages of that, again, as we can see, Christopher, you know, we work in there for a long time, you can see there’s lots of changes happening in those areas, but still the companies that are coming to us, they really want to learn more, and they want to, you know, under their knowledge, they find when, after the first session, you’re going okay, well, I never really thought about the customer service element, or I never really thought about the inclusive HR or you know, all the elements that comes with it and stuff like that. So, we’re lucky that way that they want to make changes.
28:27 Christopher Michael Lee
I’m amazed by the amount of expertise that you’ve got within your organization, as a small, a flexible organization, relatively, I’m really impressed with the work that you’re doing on teaching and transferring knowledge through training. It’s huge. So, I’m curious. You’re a level 3 CPA, regards to Professional Certification in the Built Environment. Can you talk to us just a little bit about the importance of having a certification or education within this realm? And how did that benefit you within your own organization that you’ve been able to build?
29:04 Eoin O’Herlihy
Yeah, I think it’s been really important for a number of reasons really, one I suppose is the consistency in approach so you know, you when you can say you’re in the IAAP or you have certification. You can stand over that you’re you’ve reached you reach a certain level of knowledge around the whole area of accessibility, I think that’s definitely important for our industry is that we have that level of accreditation for people so we you know, we want to you want to make sure to those who are everybody’s in on accessibility and universal design, not a profession, just like any other profession. I think some of the benefits of being a member of the IAAP and getting certification is, you know, the sharing of knowledge, you know, so we go into the country rep meetings and stuff like that, and you’re finding out what’s going on in the industry. You’re sharing knowledge between people, people are coming on and saying, you know, I have an issue in certain in a certain area and be People are saying, Look, drop me a line after the meeting, and I’ll be able to share that information which is so that was an example of a of a recent meeting that I was at, we were able to share knowledge between each other, I think there’s lots of benefits to that, I think, you know, you have access to resources. So you know, you have access to, you know, the, the Body of Knowledge, the documents that you get pointing you in the direction of you might find something you might think you’re, you know, a Level 3 expert in the built environment, but you still learning every day, and you’re still trying to gain that extra piece of knowledge. And you get that. So, it also gives you opportunities to work with our member organizations. So, collaboration is going to be key there as well. So, I think it’s, you know, it’s really important to the industry, that we have this accreditation scheme in place for our own company, like we’re all members of IAAP, I think at the moment, and we’re currently doing our internal pilot program on that, for a number of team members are going to get accreditation in CPACC, as well. And we’d be looking at the, you know, the level one and level two for some of our team members, but I think it’s really important. But it’s also important for our team, and, you know, they’re saying, well, we want to get accreditation, we want to be seen as the people, you know, as the experts in the area. So, it’s a motivation for our team members as well, which, which is really great. You know, and we think one thing I’d say about our team is we’re also passionate about accessibility. It’s, you know, it’s one thing we look for the kind of the need at an interview stage, we say, look, well, tell us a bit about your, how you got into this area, what’s your driver towards accessibility in software. And I think all our team members want to, you know, go to the next level, which is wait and kind of thirst for learning as well.
30:30 Christopher Michael Lee
You know, I appreciate your saying that, because I totally agree, obviously, because IAAP and the work that we’re doing regarding spreading the accessible professionals is so important, and having Subject Matter Experts like you, and others around the globe, to help us do that is something that is so rewarding to me. So, first of all, thank you for that. I have just another question for you. And it’s not on our question list, but can you think about some quick wins of the work that you’ve been doing within your organization over the last several years. Or days that you walked away, and you’re like, wow, that was a quick win that was positive impacted the organization, and I’m adding to the checklist.
32:27 Eoin O’Herlihy
You probably have quick wins every day, you know, there’s I think some of the quick wins will be just working with the smallest local disability organization, and just getting them thinking differently about access and taking, okay, as I mentioned, there, you know, we’re looking at the pedestrian crossing, but we should really be working with the local authorities, trying to challenge them around enhancing accessibility or finding out how there rolling up training for our staff, or trying to see what action plans they have in place and things like that. So, you know, that can be a quick win and you know, for me, the quick wins are when you go down to a local disability group, and you do roll up training with them, and you give someone a certificate, and it’s the best thing that they’ve ever got, you know. So, it’s that that experience, but the quick wins are going into companies or into organizations, and you walk out the door and you say, I’ve gotten thinking differently about what is accessibility? And what are the challenges faced by people with disabilities. And I’ve gotten moved away from taking this is all about the built environment, it’s all about a ramp, it’s all about tracks, this is all about a toilet and they’re saying, actually, it’s about making sure that we enhance accessibility for everyone. I think that’s the biggest quick win you can have.
33:37 Christopher Michael Lee
I agree. You see that shift in the mind where they’re looking at the lowest level?
33:42 Eoin O’Herlihy
Yeah, the light bulb goes on.
33:43 Christopher Michael Lee
Yeah, I want to thank you for spending time with us. I’m really impressed with the work that you’re doing, how holistic it is. I’m so glad you’ve got it knowledge transfer built into your organization, and you’re hiring people with disabilities, you’re engaging disability advocacy groups. So, thank you for joining us.
34:08 Eoin O’Herlihy
Thank you very much, lovely to talk to you.
34:12 Speaker
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