Alex and Amy talk with Jay Wyant, who serves as chief information accessibility officer for the state of Minnesota. We talk with Jay about how state organizations can improve accessibility in technology and procurement as well as best practices within the state to be more inclusive.
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Episode 102 -- Jay Wyant

Mon, Aug 21, 2023 12:50PM • 16:08

SPEAKERS

Alex Whitaker, Jay Wyant, Amy Glasscock

Amy Glasscock 00:05

Hi, and welcome to NASCIO voices where we talk all things state IT. I'm Amy Glasscock, in Lexington, Kentucky.

Alex Whitaker 00:12

And I'm Alex Whitaker in Washington, DC. Today we're talking with Jay Wyatt, who serves as Chief Information Accessibility Officer for the State of Minnesota.

Amy Glasscock 00:20

About a dozen or so states have a role like this, but it's still somewhat unique. So today we're talking with Jay about what he does and what other state IT agencies can do to be more accessible. Jay, welcome to NASCIO voices, and thanks so much for joining us.

Jay Wyant 00:34

Thank you for having me here. I really appreciate the opportunity to have a chat with you all this morning.

Alex Whitaker 00:39

Yeah, Jay, welcome. So tell us about your role as Chief Information Accessibility Officer and what you do.

Jay Wyant 00:46

Well, I was lucky, first of all when I was hired to do the job, it was my opportunity to build a job they had not had before, so it was like, here's your job, you figure it out. And basically, my role is to work with agencies and employees to embed accessibility into the culture of the state. One of the ways we did that was by seeding agencies with digital accessibility coordinators throughout all the agencies and the IT partners and to empower them with effective sustainable policies, processes, tools and procedures to basically get everybody to own accessibility in one way or another.

Alex Whitaker 01:29

Got it? Yeah, that's, that's really fascinating. And so, you know, based on our sort of basic research on you, we've seen that you have a long history of working in accessibility and technology, can you tell us a little bit about your professional background, and kind of how you came to the role?

Jay Wyant 01:44

Sure. My career had been a very winding path, which is actually not uncommon for people with disabilities. So, after being a very passionate, but not a great teacher in high school history, I fell into creating on-demand technology training for the telecommunications industries. That was in the 1980s, the 1990s, so really, you know, the ground floor of how the internet had been developed, but I was providing training on how the building blocks of the Internet work.

Then, after that, I became a marketing manager for a software startup that was kind of the precursor to cloud-based computing. Which was a lot of fun--it didn't go anywhere, but it was a lot of fun. I also became the marketing director for one of the nation's largest captioning companies. And the way I got into that was that on the side, as a volunteer I served on boards of non-profits, both local and national boards and part of my role is that I wrote a column and articles for magazines on how to make technology work, how to basically hack technology for accessibility, to kind of build my accessibility credentials by what I did on my own in addition to the work that we were doing.

So, combining my technology work, and working with people to figure out how to hack things to make things work for people who are deaf, or otherwise, kind of led to where I am today.

Alex Whitaker 03:25

Yeah, that's, that's really fascinating and further proof that