Bryan Lindenberger

Best day at work ever isn’t what you think, and it didn’t take a day. It took several months. Or as we called it, a season.

And I didn’t have a job yet either. I was 12 years old and working on the family farm.

We had a retail nursery and 90% of the plants we sold were purchased wholesale. But my parents had a few acres and grew stock on those. So not quite a proper “farm” either, but my dad would sometimes take some hours away from the shop while my mom minded the store and till the fields. That meant jumping onto the old cub tractor and lowering the plough to pull up the weeds, but mostly to loosen the soil so that rain wouldn’t spill off. I followed up with a hoe, by hand.

So 12-year-old-Bryan went out to the field with his hoe after the tilling and noticed that some of our stock, young arbor vitae just under 3-feet tall, had been pulled up. It wasn’t due to distraction and turning the tractor poorly on my dad’s part – they’d been pulled because the roots were near the surface and spread outward rather than down.

Just a few trees out of hundreds – they’d been left to die, days had passed and they were seemingly beyond salvation – so I went to my dad with an offer.

“Let me ball and bag them” – that’s the term for how they are dug with roots and earth contained in burlap for inventory, “Let me ball and bag them to save them, I’ll water and care for them, but please let me sell them at half the cost of the others on the sales lot, but I get to keep 80% of the money.”

Not sure he knew what I was up to, but he always liked when I took interest. Maybe he was distracted. Maybe my 12-year-old mind picked the just right time that he’d say yes. Point is, I knew he kept his promises and he went for it.

So I rescued those four or five trees. I dug them, packed the earth with sod in burlap, and put them out back behind our house. I watered them daily, and what seemed dead came back to life. I watered them daily. Over the course of the summer, what seemed dead came back to life. They grew, and I trimmed them back harder than I would the normal inventory.

After the summer, by September, they looked better than what remained of the normal inventory. Deeper green. More full. Not quite as big as the others, but I want to say even more healthy. I sold them with a little sign I made for them with a marker, twine, and cardboard.

They sold immediately.

I don’t know how I spent the money I made at age 12. Maybe a video game, and I loved the Commodore 64 at the time. I could program on it, but it was an early console too. I might have bought a gift, or shown up at school with flowers for a girl I liked. Not sure. But I did bring those trees back to life, and strong. I did profit from it. I did save something.

This is how I approach work. Whether I am working with a client, as staff at university, or more recently as a true “worker” in a company, I’m always trying to find ways to profit from things people either people have missed, forgotten, or simply left for dead.

It’s not always the best approach I admit. There is a definite vibe of “show up, do as, cash check, get by” out there. I’m terrible at that. I’m the 12-year-old who hates waste and sees opportunity.

Web accessibility for persons with disabilities is a major issue for colleges and universities. There have been lawsuits where materials were not accessible to – for instance – visually-impaired students using audio readers. Many small colleges or university departments do not have a department or staff dedicated to working with students with disabilities and thus did not have an understanding of the problems faced or even the technologies used. They bring in web development staff, part of the marketing department, and the word that always comes up is “COMPLIANCE.”

But compliance is fraught with legal issues. Going to your marketing team to figure out ADA and Section 508 compliance is like hiring lawyers for your next banner or brochure.  A better approach for your marketing team is one of usability. That is,accessibility, across the board for all audiences.

"We take a holistic approach to learning, offering many degrees and certificates in education. Here is a picture of a professor in a red jacket assisting a student in glasses...."

One example is alt text, used to tag images, which audio readers read back to the visually impaired. In an attempt to comply with ADA or Section 508 regulations, a higher up at the college buys some software, scans the site, and finds to his or her horror that nearly every image is flagged as “non-compliant.” Your web person then spends the next 3 days writing alt text for every photo.

No harm done, right? Good deed done, compliant, and it may even help SEO!

But this is what your next visually-impaired student prospect hears from his or her audio reader:

“We take a holistic approach to learning, offering many degrees and certificates in education. Here is a picture of a professor in a red jacket assisting a student in glasses. Among our degree programs, we offer….”

Amusing, but also potentially baffling to the person you thought you just went out of your way to help. From a marketing perspective, you just announced that you care more about complying with regulations than actually understanding and assisting your students with disabilities.

Everything in a website that you find somewhat confusing, cluttered, distracting, unclear, or annoying goes tenfold for someone with a disability to the point where he or she shuts down and clicks off-site.

If there is one takeaway for everyone on your marketing team – web development, writing, and graphic design – I hope it is this: everything in a website that you find somewhat confusing, cluttered, distracting, unclear, or annoying goes tenfold for someone with a disability to the point where he or she shuts down and clicks off-site.

So what do you watch for to make your media more accessible? For starters:

Broken links – jarring to most users, it can feel like being thrown into strange, dark room for someone lacking sight

Complex and confusing graphics or text – does it take you more than one glance to understand the material? For someone with a cognitive disability, it’s a scramble of words, letters, and colors, so keep it clear, concise, and simple

Flashing, spinning, moving – how are carousels still a thing? If you find them slightly distracting, or that half of them rotate too slow and the others too fast – imagine someone easily distracted or who is simply a slow reader

Overuse of dropdowns– unless you have the hand of an eye surgeon, you have probably become frustrated many times trying to navigate dropdown menus with a mouse at your desktop or stylus on your mobile device. Imagine someone with Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, ADD/ADHD, or simply in a hurry!

Scan to image file? Really?! – What if I told you after all this discussion, the vast majority of “web issues” related to lawsuits take place on White Board, Black Board, library resources, etc.? Every student has had a professor scan required reading material to an image file and post it. While annoying to most of us, it's a blank document for the visually impaired whose participation (learning and graduation) depends on it.

By addressing these and similar issues first, you’ve not only become accessible for the few, you’ve become more accessible for everyone! Disability is not a binary. It’s a spectrum. For every blind person, there is an army of visually impaired; for every person with Down’s, there is a room full of persons with reading disabilities. Don’t think of it as compliance: think of reaching the most people in the simplest and effective means possible. Think of it as good marketing.

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