Hello again, I hope your week is getting off to a good start.
Today, I'm writing to share the latest interview for my podcast The Accessibility Advantage.
This time I had the pleasure of speaking with Lee-Anne Reuber the CEO and Founder of The Sekond Skin Society which is the first truly accessible fitness app on the market.
It also brings together able bodied people and their differently abled friends, family members, and coworkers to exercise together and come together to overcome the missconceptions people have about the disabled.
This is also another of my episodes sponsored by Audio Eye.
AudioEye provides everything you need to solve digital accessibility. They combine automation with experts for monitoring, testing, and fixing issues, plus legal protection you can count on. Check your website’s accessibility for free at audioeye.com
This was my third time to speak with Lee-Anne, and I think you can tell just how much of a bond we have built talking about universal design and discussing answers to some of the challenges she still faces.
Our Conversation
Today, we started by talking about her upbringing and how that taught her that people with different physical, mental, or emotional challenges are still human beings who should be appreciated and supported.
She shared about how a job at 13 would lead to a lifetime of working with people who have disabilities. And how that lead her to becoming a yoga teacher. And how the pandemic lead to her realizing that she was the perfect person to build an accessible fitness community and app.
We talked about her business challenges. Her answers spoke to my own heart because like me she had to implement creative problem solving, she had to accept help when offered, and she decided there would be no excuses for her not making this thing a reality.
She talked about building a fitness app with no skills, talent, or money. And raising her own bar by deciding that her app would debut on the Apple App Store and The Google Play Store at the same time.
Then we discussed existing challenges such as the inaccessibility of the fitness or yoga instructor certification process and trying to find an accessible affiliate sales software.
Thinking Of Others
Even here, she isn't just wanting to do this to build her business.
She wants to help more disabled people get certified as instructors because more instructors with disabilities out there will expose more people to our potential and break down misconceptions.
And finding an accessible affiliates option is because she has made the decision for her business and her community that she Will Not Use any products or services in her business that aren't accessible. Because that would be a betrayal of everything she has become through working with people like me.
Everyone Will Become Disabled
Our final exchanges had to do with the conversation around differently abled and disabled.
While she didn't use the words initially, I could hear my friend Missy Sue Mastel in my head as Lee-Anne talked about how at at any time in our lives each of us could become disabled.
She talked about aging and the issues around vision loss, hearing loss, and decreased motor control that come with getting older.
And she asked why would people wait until they need services like hers to start building them.
No More Accessibility Excuses
After I gave her credit for being able to build a fully accessible website in spite of her small team, I gave a shout out for my friend and mentor Alex Sanfilippo the owner of Podmatch
Who also has a very small team yet is able to master making his site fully accessible.
Lee-Anne closed with a passionate, compelling, challenge to business owners to overcome the excuses and start making their products, services, website, apps, and content accessible.
Show Notes
1: We recorded this on StreamYard again. I had some issues going live with the event I ha...