Article 19 is back! After a hibernation, we're ready to bloom again. Listen to Katie and Kristen interview longtime listener, first time caller, Raquella Freeman, as she shares her disability journey with us. While ableism and sexism tried to keep her down, Raquella leaned hard on the voices that lifted her up and is now an advocate for those who follow. At the end of the episode, Katie gives Raquella a unique gift, and Raquella undergoes a surprise metamorphosis. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about web accessibility at Tammaninc.com and document accessibility, and accessibility training and consulting at ChaxTC.com. 00:00:00,171 Article 19 Intro Recording: Expression is one of the most powerful tools we have. A voice, a pen, a keyboard. Eleanor Roosevelt Recording: “The real change which must give to people throughout the world their human rights must come about in the hearts of people. We must want our fellow human beings to have rights and freedoms which give them dignity.” Article 19 Recording: Article 19 is the voice in the room. (tech Music bed) 00:00:25 Walt Zielinski: So for me, the moment that I realized digital accessibility was something I wanted to learn more about was when it dawned on me that the same sort of fight for gay rights and being visibly queer was sort of the same exact fight being fought for people with disabilities. Accessibility is all about championing people whose voices are inherently, by society, stifled or shut down because they exist outside of the typical space. And when I realized that it was all part of the same fight, that my fight for religious freedom, for queer liberation, was the same as the fight for disability rights, it became very obvious that it was something that I had to pursue in some way. 00:01:23 Rose Bliesner: I was drawn into digital accessibility when I first met people who worked in this space. When I learned that digital accessibility was something that people had careers in and something that people dedicated their lives to, I was intrigued. I met several accessibility professionals and learned that they are the most empathetic, most passionate people, and that they really, really love what they do. And so their enthusiasm for their craft really motivated me to educate myself on how to make the world more accessible. And I have loved every minute of it. 00:01:55 Rob Underwood: When I got hired by Chax to remediate InDesign documents for assistive technologies it was the very first time I realized that digital accessibility was something that I wanted to learn more about. I've been teaching InDesign for 20 years, but I never knew how to make an accessible document. When I was hired, I was taught the process of document remediation in small, incremental steps at first. I learned about the importance of headings and document structure. Once we got into color contrast, tables, and the pack checker, I understood the importance of the job we were performing, and how accessibility wasn't a nice-to-have, it was a must. The real aha moment for me was the first time DAX showed us what the documents we created sounded like with a screen reader. For the first time, I could finally grasp how people interact with assistive technology. It was then that I realized that my skillset could provide value to the team and that I wanted to learn everything I could about document remediation. Being part of a team that is at the forefront of accessibility makes me feel good about the work I'm doing. For the first time in my life, I feel like I'm working at a job that gives me purpose. 00:03:07 Taylor Kellar: When I first started working for Chax, I had a very vague understanding as to what digital accessibility meant. I thought that because technology was ever evolving, that accessibility was something that was already being automatically considered. It wasn't until I realized that programs that I use as an able-bodied individual, like Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat, have barriers that my coworkers who don't utilize technology in the same way have trouble accessing. What inspires me to learn more about digital accessibility is my co-workers. I feel very lucky that I get a first-hand experience learning tips and tricks on how to make my own content more accessible, and as a world that's primarily online, I think we owe it to ourselves to make content accessible for everyone. 00:03:51 Katie Samson, (cohost): Hello, everyone, and welcome to Article 19. What's up, Kristen? Kristen Witucki, (cohost): Oh, it's been a minute, Katie. We're, you know, we've taken a little break, and it's really great to be back with you again and with our producer, Markus Goldman. 00:04:06 KS: Yes, we got the band back together. KW: Yeah, we did. KS: We're going to have some great music, some awesome topics coming up in 2026. And we figured we'd start a little bit easy, starting internal to Tammann and Chax. 00:04:20 KW: with our most ardent listener, our loyalist fan, perhaps our only downloader, but nevertheless, she's been there through it all and a lot more. KS: So let's bring her in. Welcome everyone to the kickoff of 2026. Article 19. Raquella Freeman. Hello. Raquella Freeman: Hi, everyone. KS: So glad to have you with us. RF: Long time listener, First time caller. Thank you. So excited to be here and be a part of this for sure. 00:04:53 KS: Raquella, can you tell our listeners where you are situated right now? RF: So I am in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It is the heat of winter, which means it's about negative something out there right now. And I think we're about to have a snowstorm beginning tonight and into tomorrow. 00:05:11 KW: So you mean another snowstorm, right? Another snowstorm. Not the first snowstorm. RF: Correct. We had our first snowstorm last week, so this will be our second snowstorm, and it's only the second week of December, so we're doing great. 00:05:26 KS: Wow. Those Wisconsinners, you guys really earn your seasons, I gotta say. RF: Yes. We spend most of our time in winter, and we really look forward to those three months of summer. 00:05:38 KS: Well, it's so great to have you with us and to kick off what I think is going to be, you know, an exciting year for us. We've got a little bit more flexibility to explore some topics. You know, you're one of our faves. So we had to do the call out first. Kristen, you want to kick us off with a softball question? KW: Yeah, yeah. Well, Maybe not the softballs, I don't know. Softballs are hard, though. I've been hit with one. So let's just start at the beginning. If you think about your family, Raquella, and your beginnings, because this is going to sound sort of random, but it all leads to the great pinnacle of you being with us now. When you think back to your, you know, your birth and your early childhood, how do you think your parents would have described those early years and how did they discover or diagnose your disability needs? 00:06:33 RF: That's a fun question. My early years were really complicated. I had health conditions right away. I was born about a month, almost two months early, and this was in the early nineties. So medical practice wasn't what it is today. And I had health complications, spent over a month in the hospital, and they weren't sure you know, what would happen after having a brain bleed. You know, they had no way of knowing what my life would be like until I grew up a little bit. And then as the years went on, my parents tell me that I was a very precocious child, like I was talking circles around them even starting as early as three years old. I could tell you about everything that ever happened and I wanted to tell you everything that I had in my head, but I couldn't sit up. So you had a child who could talk your ear off, but physically I was barely crawling, had limited mobility and couldn't sit up without a lot of support. So they knew something was going on, but the local doctors in my small town that I grew up in didn't know what it was. And they said, Oh, she'll catch up. Don't worry about it. She'll catch up. You know, we were getting older and my parents were like, this doesn't feel like a she'll catch up thing. So they took me to a more advanced doctor in Milwaukee, which is one of the bigger cities in Wisconsin. And they have a great children's hospital there where I met my doctor, Dr. Schwab, who diagnosed me within like a second of meeting me. They said they barely even walked into the exam room and he was like, Oh, so she has cerebral palsy. Like, let's get working on how we can support her and get her the support she needs. And it was him who, you know, helped my parents figure out what my diagnosis meant, started helping me get the medical equipment I needed to get support, get physical therapy and kind of get that process started in my life. And he was also the guy who did all of my surgeries for all of my young years, the surgeries that I've had. And he was great. Like he, he really did change my life. and like help my family and me figure out what the next steps were, but never held me back from anything I wanted to do. Just made sure that I had everything I needed to be successful. 00:08:53 KS: We've talked a lot, Raquella, about just the physical barriers that we have to face as wheelchair users, navigating winter, navigating a lot of things. How did you learn in those early years and in your own life about all of the barriers, I guess, and then, you know, the ableism that comes with it? Did you start to see signs of that when you were a child, when you were trying to get involved in certain activities, or did it start to kind of creep in, yeah, over time? RF: It w
