Welcome to episode 33 of the Technology in Human Services podcast. In this episode I speak with Miyuki Fukuma of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI). Miyuki has worked for over 20 years as a web User Interface (UI)/User Experience (UX) Designer, focused on Human Centred Design, Digital Accessibility, and open source projects. Since 2018 Miyuki has brought her expertise to the Immigrant and Refugee-serving sector at OCASI. In this conversation we cover a lot of interesting ground related to sector technology development, the need for tech human resources in our sector and how we can actually afford those positions, technology sustainability that impacts how technology is funded, digital communication, and a good chunk of time on accessibility. The discussion about accessibility is an important one for us in the Immigrant and Refugee-serving sector. In part because there are provincial and emerging federal laws related to digital accessibility. In part because making our services more accessible, more broadly defined, should be something we’re all committed to, but may not know as much or be doing as much as we should be in this area. For example, we understand language and cultural accessibility, but don’t seem to apply that lens to other types of accessibility. We can do more work there. And, as Miyuki outlines, much accessibility testing needs to happen manually. The online and digital accessibility testing and assessment tools can only get us about 25% of the way there. That’s a huge revelation to me. I admittedly have much to learn here as well. Here are some of the initial questions we used to guide our conversation: * Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, and what brought you to the sector?* You’re a UI/UX designer who practices principles of human-centred design and you wrote that ” I find that the sector often talks too much about a very limited and sometimes outdated list of specific technologies, without talking first about the specific problem that needs to be solved and exploring what currently exists in terms of possible solutions. First, not every problem needs a technical solution, and I myself am always more than willing to suggest such solutions if necessary. Second, if the problem does need a technical solution, we are actually long past the days where one needs to be locked into one specific technology, build a tool from scratch, etc. In my experience, part of the issue is that those writing the funding proposals for projects with potential technical implications know very little about the current global technical and digital landscape, so they aren’t always proposing the most effective solutions nor asking for the most realistic amounts of funds. It would be great to see more people in the sector consulting technical or digital experts from outside the sector when putting together such funding proposals, instead of trying to do everything internally.”* What’s your sense of the state of tech in the sector?* What should be be thinking about as foundation technology in our sector?* What tech are we not talking about that we should?* What’s happening in the sector that is interesting and we can learn from?* Who can we learn from outside the sector?* What does tech leadership in the sector need to look like, across the country? Some useful resources Accessibility * a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.deque.com/blog/not-a-checklist-building-accessibility-compliance-into-your-business-...