Kevin Shaw

Build. Lead. Inspire.

BLOG

My Current Startup: MenuVox

Imagine that you’re like me, and live with sight loss. Picture yourself at the table in a busy cafe or restaurant. How do you read the menu?

You don’t read braille. Your server is too busy to read the menu to you. Your OCR apps aren’t cutting it. Scanning a QR code takes you to an inaccessible photo of the menu and the restaurant’s website is a mess. You feel uncomfortable asking for help and so you get “the special” without knowing your favourite meal is available.

My latest startup, Menuvox, solves these problems with a location-based app and service that pushes an accessible restaurant menu right to a diner’s smart phone. 

I got the idea for MenuVox after I found myself alone in a chain restaurant—trying very hard to navigate the restaurant’s website on my mobile phone. It was a mess. I thought, “there has to be a better way to do this.”

MenuVox solves a number of problems with the dine-in experience for those with and without sight:

  • Eliminates the need for braille menus. Braille is expensive to produce and fewer than 1 in 4 in the sight loss community read braille regularly. 
  • Increases dignity and independence for people with sight loss.
  • Improves hygiene and reduces viral and bacterial transmission. Since the menu is on the user’s phone, no need to share menus or print disposable paper menus.
  • Improves the efficiency of serving staff. Less time spent reading the menu aloud to a customer with sight loss is more time spent serving others.
  • Reduces app clutter. One app works in every location that supports MenuVox. No need for multiple restaurant apps on your phone.

Unlike other apps that focus on delivery, discovery, reviews or reservations, MenuVox is focused on the experience of being at the table. The app lets the  user adjust the display settings of their phone to make the text more legible or have their screen reader read the menu aloud. Since the app is location-based, there’s no need to scan QR codes or scroll through a list of nearby restaurants. MenuVox will even work in underground malls and food courts.

MenuVox is poised to launch in 2022.

How Toronto Spawned the Best Mix DJs in the World

I absolutely love a great DJ mix, especially one that seamlessly blends disparate genres into a cohesive mix the creates a vibe. Growing up in Toronto and hearing DJs spin at events and on the radio, it’s my opinion that Toronto DJs are the best in the world when it comes to mixing with diversity and skill—driving a party vibe in the club, at events and on the air.

Toronto’s global status as a DJ powerhouse didn’t happen by chance. The city, a vibrant mix of cultures and histories, mirrors both New York and England in its eclecticism and influence from colonial and cultural tides. Like New York, Toronto has long embraced diversity in music; like England, it has remained a cultural melting pot, with a sound shaped by Caribbean, European, African, and South Asian roots. This mix gave birth to an exceptional set of DJs who could blend genres in a way that transcends typical radio format boundaries and resonates across communities.

Defining the Best: Juggling and Selecting

What sets Toronto’s DJs apart from others is a balanced mastery of both juggling and selecting.

Juggling is the technical prowess—the skill of effortlessly cutting, scratching, beat matching, and transitioning from song to song. Today, this is accomplished with sophisticated DJ software running on a laptop holding thousands of songs. Back in the day however, DJs built their skills with two variable speed record turntables, a DJ mixer and hundreds of records carried around in milk crates..

Selecting is the artistic side of knowing exactly which song to play to get the crowd to feel and respond, whether that’s filling a dance floor or lighting up radio station phone lines. A stellar DJ was skilled at both.

Graph titled 'Ideal DJ Skillset' showing a 2x2 grid with labeled axes. The X-axis is labeled 'Juggling' with a positive sign (+) on the right and a negative sign (-) on the left. The Y-axis is labeled 'Selecting' with a positive sign (+) at the top and a negative sign (-) at the bottom. A green checkmark is placed in the upper right quadrant, representing DJs who excel in both juggling and selecting. The graph has a slight 3D effect with soft shadows, thin black grid lines, and a subtle gradient background.

In a city that values a great party vibe over technical wizardry alone, Toronto leans towards DJs who can mix as well as they can cut.

In this context, mixing is when a DJ beat matches two songs and creates a flowing, smooth transition between them. This is often done over 4 or 8 bars where both songs are playing simultaneously until the crossfade is complete. Sometimes, this overlap can create a remix where the vocals of one song are heard over the instrumental of another.

Cutting is when a DJ will sometimes beat match two songs and rapidly transition from one to the other without an overlap.

While global DJ icons like DJ Jazzy Jeff represent the “cut” style of DJing, Toronto’s party DJs have long emphasized a mixing style that flows from song to song, creating a show that’s inventive, cohesive and immersive.  Unlike pure scratch DJs, who focus on the intricacies of sound manipulation, Toronto DJs blend various genres and beats to keep crowds moving.

The Spirit of Toronto Radio

Toronto’s radio scene in the 80s and 90s played a pivotal role in creating the fertile ground for its DJ scene to emerge. The city’s AM and FM dials were among the most diverse in North America, offering top 100 hits, jazz, dance, community, rock, country, oldies and easy-listening stations. Community radio stations like CHRY, CKLN and CIUT were essential in amplifying styles like hip-hop, reggae, soca, bhangra, Bollywood, jungle, and other genres not heard on their commercial counterparts. Ethnic stations like CHIN FM and CIAO broadened musical and cultural awareness to the average Torontonian in the home of a friend or getting into a cab. The music from these radio shows became cultural threads that wove through neighbourhoods, parties, and public spaces, connecting the city’s diverse groups and building recognition.

The influence of radio brought Toronto’s culturally diverse neighbourhoods together in a way that was rare in North America. Areas like Jane-Finch, North Scarborough, Flemingdon, Malvern, Brampton, Mississauga and Eglinton West became vibrant communities where cultures and music mixed freely at school dances, house parties, family weddings, and festivals. This is where many DJs began their craft, often using home equipment—sometimes building their own speaker boxes. This gave rise to the first mobile sound systems. Basement and rent parties for extended families in various diasporas also allowed DJs to hone their craft. The children of first generation immigrants would often sleep in the coat room as adults played and mixed music in the basement or backyard late into the night.

These children grew up, learning DJ skills at home. This new generation of young DJs pooled their record collections, often made of rare records bought out of town in US cities like Detroit, NYC and Buffalo. This established the first “sound crews” and cross-cultural playlists that shaped Toronto’s unique DJ sound.

Experimentation and Innovation

Club DJs provided the hits and high-energy rhythms that defined nights out. Radio stations often broadcasted these DJ sets live from the clubs, exposing the listener to these club bangers. During the day however, Toronto radio became a playground for innovation. Daytime radio DJs mixed genres that weren’t heard in clubs or mixed together on radio. A lunch time radio set might include genres as disparate as Motown, disco, funk, yacht rock, AM classics, Bollywood, reggae, hip-hop, and soca. DJs like DJ Starting from Scratch, The Juiceman Jonathan Shaw, Jester and DJ Clymaxxx emerged, spinning genre-crossing sets that defined the unique sound of Toronto mix DJs—placing many of them in high esteem among others in their craft.

New Formats, New Audiences

Toronto’s DJ culture went beyond being heard in clubs and on-air. It evolved into a DJ community marked by innovation, with new outlets for new business models and methods of engagement.

This included Scratch Lab—one of Canada’s first DJ schools, Raina Music—an environmental music service providing mixed music for the hospitality sector and Xtendamix—a video remixing service for DJs.

Toronto DJs developed unique business models, and the profession became a mainstay in Toronto’s entertainment sector, branching out into streaming on platforms like Twitch and performing in new spaces. As Toronto DJ culture continues to evolve, the DJs are connecting audiences in fresh and inventive ways. One example is Grocery Store Hits, a Saturday morning mix show on Twitch featuring DJ Jay Online, who dons a Walmart vest to mix and remix soft rock and pop classics that are the staple in grocery stores. Another is Mista Jiggz who has crafted unique remixes for charity fundraisers and other events in the city.

Toronto remains a DJ powerhouse, giving rise to talent who can both juggle and select with remarkable skill, capturing the city’s unique pulse and channeling it into a blend that’s as rich and diverse as the city itself. With each performance, Toronto DJs continue to set a high standard, representing the unique power of music to bring people together across backgrounds, preferences, and generations.

GR

If Screen Readers Were Airlines

Based on an old Internet post from 1995 comparing operating systems to airlines, I revived the analogy to screen readers.

 

JAWS Air

 When you get to the airport, you’re given extra bags to bring with you whether you want them or not. The planes are old, clunky and way bigger than last year’s planes, but at least there’s leg room. You can fly to all of the popular spots, but by bringing your own avionics engineer, you can   get your plane to fly almost anywhere. 
You’re constantly told that turbulence and crashing into the ground in a giant fireball can be avoided if you fly a plane with a faster engine.

Instead of windows, passengers look at screens that show the outside world

 

Window-Eyes Air

Just like JAWS Air, however you must board the plane from the rear. All of the seats face backward. Everyone who flew with them fondly reminisces about how much better Window-eyes Air is when compared to JAWS Air.

 

NVDA Airlines:

A few passengers who were fed up with JAWS Air decide to start their own airline. The planes look like JaWS planes, only smaller. Passengers are generally treated well and the planes fly to lots of great places. The only catch is that it’s recommended you bring your own flight attendant as the one provided has their jaw wired shut after a brawl in the JAWS Air lounge.

After a quick tutorial, yOu install your own flight attendant and the flight is very efficient and comfortable. When you tell your friends about your  great NVDA airlines experience, they ask “You have to do what with the flight attendant?”

 

Narrator Airlines

You see the planes all the time, but don’t know anyone who has flown on one for longer than an hour.
When a JAWS Air plane stalls, you parachute out of your plane, run to the nearest airport, hop on  Narrator Airlines, circle the airport and wait until you see a JAWS Air plane appear on the runway.

 

VoiceOver Airways

The futuristic, spaceship-like  planes are everywhere. Unlike JAWS or NVDA Airlines, VoiceOver Airways flies out of a totally separate, sleek, state-of-the-art airport. The all white planes fly to tons of destinations, but each one must build special all white runways and terminals for VoiceOver Airways planes.
Check-in, boarding, flying, disembarking and baggage claim all go effortlessly and the flight is smooth and comfortable. the in-flight meal is tasty, the flight attendants are all very friendly and the entertainment system is out of this world. You find yourself relaxing and enjoying your flight. For no reason whatsoever, your plane explodes mid-flight. As you fall towards the ground, another airplane suddenly materializes around you and you continue flying as if nothing happened.

 

Talkback Airlines

Passengers run onto the runway, form a giant square around the plane and then hop on. For some reason, the plane flies straight, then right, straight then right until you reach your destination.

 

System access Airlines

Passengers push the airplane, hop on and fly until the airplane stops. They all get out, push the plane again and repeat the process until they get to their destination.

 

ChromeVox Airlines

Like narrator Airlines, you don’t know anyone who has flown with them, but their TV advertising looks cool. The flight attendants all seem very nice, but they ask lots of prying questions about your personal life. While your flight is okay, you can’t help but feel as if you’re being stared at.

Career Trek: Mind Your Own Business

History and concept

During my time working for CNIB as the program manager for entrepreneurship and innovation, I was approached by Accessible Media Inc.. This is a national cable broadcaster in Canada with mandatory carriage on both cable and satellite. AMI TV carries TV shows, movies and original programming with both captioning and described video.

 

AMI asked me whether I’d be interested in hosting a show focused on entrepreneurs with disabilities. I said yes and then, as is typical in television production, nothing happened. In the fall of 2021, I finally got the call that I’d been matched with a production company to produce a pilot episode. This is an episode that often never makes it to air, but gives the network an overall idea of the structure , tone and look of the show. AMI approved the pilot and we began production on season 1. 

 

The concept of the show is quite simple; entrepreneurs with disabilities share their story along with a particular business challenge they’re facing. A panel of mentors advises the entrepreneur and we then follow up to see whether they have taken on the challenge. 

 

We began shooting in early 2022 with 8 entrepreneurs from a wide variety of backgrounds and in every stage of business. Along with hosting, I played a role in casting, writing and structuring the show. My cohost, Purdeep Sangha, shot the follow-up episodes with each entrepreneur. After months of shooting and editing, season 1 went on the air in the summer of 2022 and received positive reviews.

 

The show was renewed for a second season in 2023 and a third season in the same year. Season 4 is scheduled to air in the fall of 2024 on  AMI TV.

 

How I Adapted

I have a background in radio and television production having attended Toronto Metropolitan University and working at CHRY for nearly 8 years, so working in front of TV cameras was not a big adjustment for me. The hardest part of live-to-tape production is knowing your script lines and waiting around for the technical aspects of the production to be taken care of. Our production company has been fantastic to work with and I’ve had the privilege of working with top-tier makeup artists, sound technicians and directors who are all consummate professionals.

I memorized many of my opening and closing scripts, something challenging even for sighted actors to do for 8 episodes at a time. It’s a good idea to use the down time on set to work on your scripts, your vocal warm-ups and your delivery.

 

You can watch this season and prior seasons of Mind Your Own Business on the AMI website and through the fully accessible AMI TV app for both iPhone and Android.

 

Kevin on the Set of Mind Your Own Business in front of a logo for the show.

4 Ways I’d Change the Way Radio is Taught in College

I worked in radio for nearly 8 years at CHRY Radio (now Vibe 105) in Toronto. During that time, I worked with many interns from the local college radio program. Many of them were bright, serious and engaged students who worked hard at mastering the nuances of the medium. Many still work in broadcasting currently and I consider it a privilege to have mentored and worked alongside many of these people.

 

As I spent more time at CHRY, I noticed that our younger interns enjoyed working at the radio station, but didn’t engage with the medium outside of their job. It wasn’t their fault; by the end of the first decade of this century, podcasting, satellite radio, Internet radio and on-demand music streaming had displaced terrestrial radio. It had become the media your parents consumed in the car. The result of this shift was a group of students that were checked out of what they ere at school to study. Students suffered, the industry suffered and the medium suffered because schools hadn’t caught up to the new reality.

 

College radio courses need an overhaul. Here are 4 ways I’d change the way radio is taught in schools to yield more engaged college radio grads that are smarter and more competitive. 

 

1. Teach Musicology and Music Appreciation

In preparing this post, I did some research on four large college radio programs around the Greater Toronto Area. Not a single college teaches basic musicology as part of its media programs. I began realizing this was a problem when I was teaching interns how to edit bars and beats to cut music tracks. Many college students couldn’t identify the downbeat, the backbeat or the post in a song to line up a VoiceOver track. I couldn’t really blame the students; this was a generation that grew up with gutted music programs in public schools, the ubiquity of software like Garage Band and no collective experience of having to learn an instrument in junior high whether they had an aptitude for it or not.

 

Graduate better students by providing one mandatory course in popular musicology where students are trained to recognize and identify basic musical concepts such as tempo, meter, key, rhythm, pitch, dynamics, timbre, texture and form. Students should also know how to recognize and identify the studio techniques that accompany pop music production including: reverb, echo, delay, compression, gating, EQ and so on. Students should be able to apply this musical knowledge to any genre and understand how these elements can be programmed on air to create musical flow. 

 

2. Teach Music History

Out of the four colleges I researched in or near the GTA—Humber College, Seneca College, Durham College and Fanshawe College—only one, Fanshawe, had a music history course for its radio students.

Students today are taught to front sell and back sell their announcing with the ubiquitous music scheduler that serves up a station’s tracks for the day based on rules. Many of the students I worked with were not invested in the music they played out in the commercial world, but came alive when they were the ones responsible for selecting the music for a show at CHRY.

Radio schools can make better graduates by teaching the history of pop music starting with the blues and working their way forward through rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, pop and all of the other genres that exploded onto the airwaves over the past 70 years—including international genres. In addition to the music, students should be exposed to the role of—and advances in—technology, social, commercial and economic factors as well as political factors that affected and changed music  history. Radio itself played an important role in shaping the sounds that were the backdrop to generations of people. Students should complete the course and be able to apply this knowledge to music programming and on air delivery. 

 

3. Teach Entrepreneurship

Today’s media landscape is very different from the one I entered after I left high school in the 90s. While terrestrial radio struggles to stay relevant amidst audience segmentation and a variety of offerings, there are unprecedented opportunities for innovation, growth and new ideas for programming both mainstream and alternative content.

Colleges like Fanshawe College teach students how to generate new programming ideas, but I propose going further by developing techniques for pitching sustainable ideas including content for syndication, monetized Internet content, audio architecture and branded content as well as other types of audio programming. Each of these can have a terrestrial broadcast component or blaze new trails. Tied into this, students should be taught how to pitch and the role of sales beyond filling avails with 30s and adjacencies.

 

4. Graduate Smaller Classes

I was shocked to hear radio colleges graduated classes of around 50 to 60 students, depending on the college. Multiply this by the number of colleges offering radio programs across Canada and the US. Then, look at the current job openings in radio.

 

Today’s music radio station can run with less than 10 staff, not including salespeople who are usually out hustling up leads. Combine this reality with diminishing revenues, automation and local management arrangements (LMAs) and a lack of opportunity will make perfect sense. Reducing class size is one way to ensure only the best make it out of radio college and that there are opportunities in the industry. 

 

Having said this, there are opportunities as mentioned in the third point. Students who leave college with the ability to do new things with new media are the ones who will be rewarded in the future while legacy media looks on and wonders how they did it.

Career Trek: Digital Accessibility

Digital accessibility touched my life soon after I lost the low vision I’d been using since birth.

I learned JAWS for Windows rather quickly after switching from a Mac to using a Windows-based PC full time. I could use the productivity apps that mattered for university—Word, Excel, e-mail, web-browsing and a calendar.

The real accessibility struggle started when I tried using JAWS with Software Audio Workshop Plus (SAW)—a PC-based multitrack audio editor we used at university. SAW was far from accessible as its controls were not seen by JAWS in its off-screen model (a database of all of the on-screen elements such as buttons and text fields).

JAWS had a powerful scripting language built into it. I attempted teaching myself how to script JAWS to work with SAW, but my high school level programming knowledge made this much more difficult. I did however learn about window classes, control types and functions—all useful building blocks to understanding digital accessibilitY. 

 

Accessibility for  Protools

After using JAWS to successfully start my radio career at CHRY, I went back to Ryerson to focus on digital accessibility in a Master of Arts program for media production. At the time, the coveted holy grail of accessibility in the sight loss community was ProTools—a Mac-based digital audio workstation (DAW)—the gold medal industry standard for working in audio production.

In late 2009, ProTools was totally unusable by a screen reader user with the only accessible buttons being Close, Minimize and Zoom. Blind audio engineer Slau Halatyn started “the ProTools Petition” which received over 1200 signatures. Slau  presented this to Avid on behalf of blind engineers, educators and enthusiasts around the world who saw ProTools as an  equalizer that could give blind people employment opportunities in the audio and music industries.

I was one of the first to test the new accessible ProTools in an academic setting. My thesis—VoiceOver in the Control Room: Usability of ProTools recording software by the blind using a screen reader—focused on examining whether a blind engineer could completely use the program in its entirety without sighted assistance to not only produce audio, but produce something of major label quality that would stand up against a modern pop or rock recording.

My thesis involved recording, editing and mixing a five-piece Toronto rock band, all while keeping notes on the accessibility of each of the main activities within ProTools. During my thesis, I learned even more about accessibility and usability as a whole as well as user experience and software design. 

 

Accessibility for  VOD

After leaving school, I had a sneaking suspicion my future was going to involve digital accessibility a fair bit. I took another basic programming course through iTunes U and picked up even more fundamentals of how computer programs were constructed from the ground up. This gave me enough knowledge to venture into the startup world where I could speak to the accessibility of video-on-demand (VOD) platforms like the one I was building. Building TellMe TV required me to communicate the ideas about accessibility to engineers. Through this process, I developed more familiarity  with concepts like HTML 5, ARIA, mobile accessibility and the world of accessible media players.

 

My work for TellMe TV got the attention of the Ryerson DMZ. Startups there wanted to know how to make their digital offerings and products accessible to the widest variety of users. This led me to develop a TEDx Talk called Design the Inclusive experience which I delivered for Ryerson in 2014 at the Royal Ontario Museum.

 

 

Accessibility for Ontario

My unique knowledge and experience caught the attention of the  Government of Ontario. In 2016, I was invited to sit on a committee to review the information and communications standards for the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). This is legislation enacted in 2005 that mandated a fully accessible Ontario by 2025 in key sectors such as customer service, information, communications and education. Standards written in the early 2000s hadn’t caught up with the explosion of mobile technology as well as new types of information systems that were now on the market such as touch-screen kiosks, SMART devices such as thermostats and innovations in web technology. After much consultation and debate, we agreed to an updated standard in 2018. 

Amidst all of this, I was being tapped to review the accessibility of websites, mobile apps and other digital products by various companies, usually after I complained about not being able to use their service. Some of the changes I requested made their way into business planning software, a popular dating site and a local cable provider’s set-top box.

By the time TellMe TV and my work with the Government of Ontario was winding down, I joined CNIB and found myself wearing my accessibility advocacy hat once again as we built Venture Zone Game and CNIB Market. I was also taking an accessibility-first approach to building MenuVox—my latest startup.

 

Accessible Education

My latest accessibility work has been with Edsby—a K-12 learning platform. Edsby needed help in ensuring its web-based app was accessible to students, parents and teachers. Much of this work involved testing and reporting on the operability and perception of web components such as radio buttons, text fields and links. Often, the fixes involved simple changes to making web code more robust. I took a task-based approach to Edsby, mapping out the user journey through various activities and ensuring users could interact with the necessary components along the way. This culminated in a demo video Edsby has running on their site—showing off the accessibility of the platform.

 

Developing My Skill

Today, I work as the digital accessibility lead at Tangerine—one of Canada’s leading digital banks. I work with designers, developers, business analysts and other accessibility professionals to ensure the Tangerine app and website are fully accessible. A part of this work involves improving my knowledge about digital accessibility. Since starting at Tangerine, I’ve enrolled in the excellent digital accessibility courses from Deque (pronounced ‘Dq’) University. I am steadily working towards a certified professional accessibility core competency (CPACC) designation, having completed 3 exams and nearly 3 dozen courses in everything from document accessibility to customer service for people with disabilities. After this, the goal is to receive a designation as an international accessibility professional.

 

How I Adapted

Not every screen reader user can be an accessibility expert. Most screen reader users use their assistive tech to accomplish some other goal such as writing documents or tracking expenses in a spreadsheet. Others, like myself, want to know how the machine works and how we can make better software usable by more people. 

I learned the basics of programming in languages like Python, Java and Swift and understand how the building blocks of programs such as variables, arrays, strings, objects, functions, libraries and so on, fit together to make an application. In addition, I learned the fundamentals of how HTML works as well as how to speak to engineers about the type of behaviour I want specific websites to exhibit.

I also became familiar with the role accessibility plays in agile methodology. This is how most programming shops are set up today. Accessibility is best when it is thought of in the concept and design stage of a program or feature, not bolted on at the end to appease a tiny customer segment and avoid a law suit.

One of the most important things I did was become familiar with my assistive technology. Today’s off-the-shelf software builders often include accessibility as part of their packages, but it’s up to the screen reader user to know how to use this powerful tool at their fingertips. In addition to navigating efficiently and quickly with VoiceOver, I learned how to use its additional features such as hotspots, web spots, activities and custom gestures. In the case of desktop software, I made a point to teach myself the keyboard shortcuts in each program so I spent less time hunting around the screen and more time getting work done.

Career Trek: The CNIB Years

Something from Nothing… All Over Again

After sitting down with the CEO of CNIB in the fall of 2017, I explained my decision to wind down TellMe TV. Instead of being disappointed, he got excited as he laid out the opportunity for me to join Canada’s largest blindness charity as the program manager for entrepreneurship and innovation.

There was just one problem. There was no entrepreneurship program to speak of. I’d have to create it from scratch—a task I was all too familiar with after building the production department at CHRY  and starting TellMe TV.

CNIB is hyper focused on getting Canadians with sight loss into the work force. The employment rate among those with sight loss hovers around 28% in Canada. Blind people are extremely capable of holding jobs of all kinds and many have chosen to work for themselves as entrepreneurs. 

The Venture Zone

I went to work right away on developing what was dubbed “the Venture Zone”. It was an online portal featuring tips, tricks, hacks and other useful information for 

  entrepreneurs with sight loss. Articles on the portal included everything from how to network with sight loss, to useful and accessible apps for the iPhone that could help you run your business more efficiently. We even began highlighting local entrepreneurs with sight loss who were paving the way for a new generation of trailblazers. 

In my first year, I logged nearly 40,000 kilometres in flights traveling across Canada, meeting entrepreneurs from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences. All of the entrepreneurs were bright, enthusiastic and loved to talk about their journeys. We began featuring many of these stories on our portal as well. 

Shane Cashin

Shane is a DJ in St. John’s, Newfoundland. My team put together a video feature on Shane that highlighted his skill as a DJ and his motivational storytelling.

The Entrepreneurs

In my travels across Canada, I met entrepreneurs doing the most impressive and amazing things from building sophisticated software for the military, to running massage clinics, to making greeting cards. Here are just some of the amazing people I met. 

  • Denise Justin is a Toronto-based entrepreneur who runs a fashion line called Say Hello 2 Blindness. Her clothing features the words “Say Hello” in both print and braille. Denise was featured in season 1 of Mind Your Own Business. Click here to watch Denise’s episode.
  • Hillary Scanlon found herself unable to differentiate which waste receptacle was garbage, recycling and organics. She invented WasteFinders—a tactile floor mat that lets anyone know which container is which. 
  • Jenna White is the founder of Jenna’s Nut-Free Dessertery—one of the only 2  certified nut-free bakeries in all of Atlantic Canada.
  • Kim Holdbrook is the founder of Hands That See—a massage clinic run entirely by massage therapists with sight loss in Montreal.

In addition to coaching, motivating and developing a shared set of resources for our entrepreneurs, we also began sponsoring students who wanted to learn what it took to run a business. 

Venture Zone Game

With articles, videos, podcasts and virtual courses, along with in-person meet-ups at CNIB hubs and offices across Canada, we thought we could do a better job of engaging potential entrepreneurs. While some people like the setting of a virtual class with lectures and quizzes, some people learn best by trial and error. What better way to do that than with a game? Games could be fun and be vehicles for learning.

We connected with a company that specialized in learning games out of the UK called Totem Learning. Working with Totem over the course of nine months, we conceptualized and built a fully accessible iPhone game that taught players how to run a production-based company.

Players chose a product, a price point and received some startup cash to get going. In the life of the game, players had to produce their product, market it, brand their company, hire staff and make sales all while keeping an eye on their brand strength, their profit and their spending.

A screen shot from Venture Zone Game

During testing, we noticed players were getting stuck in the early stages of the game. Some players didn’t know where to begin and swiping around the screen was causing players to close the game out of frustration. What we needed were a set of training wheels so the player could get comfortable with the layout of the screen. Then, they could be left on their own to play and replay the game.

I developed the concept of two characters, Jack and Liz, who would be coaches in the game. Jack would be part of a trial mode that got players up and running, while Liz hung around in the game and explained all of the screens and business terms. I found myself wearing my producer’s hat again as I directed our two stellar voice talents to get the right delivery for the game. 

Screen shot of the production screen from Venture Zone Game

After months of hard work, we launched the game on Global accessibility awareness Day, 2019 in Canada and around the world. We not only reached our download goals for the game, we exceeded them with high praise from the sight loss community and a nomination for a Golden Apple from AppleVis—a website for blind users of Apple products.

CNIB Market

At all of my meet-ups across Canada, one or two entrepreneurs would stand up and tell the group  that they were an artist, a painter, a sculptor, a crafter or someone who made hand-made goods. They all wanted to sell their products online, but feared getting lost on sites like Etsy. 

I saw an opportunity to create a philanthropic shopping destination where CNIB donors could support our entrepreneurs with sight loss by purchasing high-quality hand-made goods with the proceeds being divided up between CNIB and the entrepreneur. CNIB would handle the marketing side while the entrepreneur would focus on crafting.

With a  modest budget, we built an accessible and  fully featured e-commerce platform on Shopify in less than 3 months. CNIB Market had a soft launch in 2020, but the COVID19 pandemic forced the site to be placed on pause. There is still incredible potential for CNIB to fully flesh out this idea and see it through to completion.

My Exit

2020 was also the year I was laid off from one of the most enjoyable  and fulfilling jobs I ever had. I met amazing people from across the country and I got to bring accessible digital products to life. Given more time and with the winds blowing in my favour, I would have transitioned to being a full time developer of digital products. In addition to working with a great team, my favourite memories from CNIB will be working with one of the greatest assistants I’ll ever have. The program, the game and the market wouldn’t have been as great without her help and support.

Over the next year, I’d develop and refine the software for my current startup, begin consulting on accessible design for an education tech company and start a new position with one of Canada’s most forward-thinking banks.

Career Trek: TellMe TV

Entrepreneurs Solve Problems

I was once asked, “How do you become an entrepreneur?” My quick response was, “Find something that irritates you so much, you are left with no choice but to solve the problem yourself.”

 

Several months  after completing my Master of Arts in Media Production in 2011, I found myself waiting for the next big career move to find me. I was still working at CHRY Radio and unsure on what to do with the rest of my life. 

One of the many amusing conversations among the staff at CHRY had me feeling a bit left out. We were all discussing movies and TV shows we were watching and I was clueless when it came to new  shows and classics I’d missed out on after losing my sight. I was determined to catch up by finding as many movies and TV with audio description as I could. 

 

Audio description (or described video (DV) as it is known in Canada) is narration of on-screen activity in between lines of dialog in a movie or TV show. It enables someone with sight loss to get the jokes in a comedy or emote with the story in  a drama. I demonstrated how audio description worked in a TEDx Talk for Ryerson in November of 2014.

 

I had a shelf full of DVDs at home—many of which were still in shrink wrap. Some of them had audio description tracks on them, but I didn’t feel like navigating a series of silent menus to locate and play the audio description soundtrack. I went online thinking, “Surely one of the big online VOD platforms had movies or TV shows with audio description!” I found none.

 

And that’s when the idea struck me like lightning—build a Netflix for the blind.

 

I immediately began typing furious notes as to how I’d accomplish this goal. I couldn’t code well, didn’t know anyone in software or the film & TV industries and I had no clue where to begin. Just like learning to DJ or jumping into audio production, I made the decision to just dive in and start. I asked questions and worked through the contacts I had.

Within six months, I had a working prototype and a name, Zagga Entertainment. I wasn’t sold on the name, but I wanted something with a Z in it and zagga.tv was the first domain I could get. Zagga was slated to be the first fully accessible subscription VOD service of its kind with audio description on all of its movie and TV titles.

 

The Pitches

With a functional prototype and some of my own cash, I took the idea to CNIB—Canada’s national blindness charity whose CEO loved the idea and pledged his support right away. I was also accepted to what was then known as the Ryerson Digital media Zone—a university-based startup incubator. In September of 2013, I decided to jump in with both feet. I left CHRY and pursued Zagga full time.

 

Kevin sits on a sofa at the DMZ with his laptop

 

The Easy Part

Since I Used a screen reader full time, I knew how I wanted the website, and eventually a mobile app, to behave. I quickly learned our accessible prototype wouldn’t cut it when it came to handling the security requirements of the content providers. More on them later. After a crowdfunding campaign, we built the first  full version of Zagga running on the web and an iPad app before financial setbacks forced us to abandon those platforms for a mobile-ready website. We ran this for several months before receiving some help out of the Blu. (Pun intended.)

Blu Focus handled the quality assurance for Hollywood DVDs and digital assets. Its founder, Paulette, got in touch with me and offered me a fully turnkey VOD solution that solved all of our problems for handling security, scalability and accessibility. We changed the company name to TellMe TV and built the next version of the app on the robust VHX platform which was the best thing that ever happened to us. Thanks to Paulette, we launched in 2016 with a few dozen titles including rare content from the National Film Board of Canada, The Film Detective and Entertainment One. 

 

TellMe TV Video

We worked with Kent Parker, a great commercial producer out of Toronto, to create a video explaining TellMe TV Credits to Jeevan, her guide dog Kizzy and our excellent voice talent Susan for bringing this piece together.

 

 

 

The Hard Part

In the world of film and TV, content is king. Much like location, location, location for brick and mortar retail, content, content, content should be the motto for anyone looking to start a subscription VOD service. This one issue hamstrung us, especially as the market began to mature around us with audio description soon being offered on Netflix, iTunes and other VOD services when we launched.

 

Our customers in the sight loss community wanted top tier Hollywood content with audio description. They, like me, wanted to be included in the water cooler talk about hit movies and TV shows from the past and present. The content providers which included major studios in Hollywood, wanted their pound of flesh on behalf of the directors, writers, actors and other people who had a financial interest in the success of their films and TV shows. For a large universe of titles, the costs began adding up quickly. I was soon stuck with a dilemma: subscribers weren’t coming because we had no content and we couldn’t get the content we wanted because we didn’t have the subscribers.

 

The Hardest Part

With the  market rapidly maturing around us and with our cash running out, I had to make the tough call to pull the plug on TellMe TV in 2018. Calling it quits on a dream is sometimes the hardest thing an entrepreneur will ever have to do, but I have learned quite a bit by taking on the challenge of starting up my own company and blazing a trail into unknown territory. 

 

Lessons for the Entrepreneur

 

Share Your Idea; No One’s Going to Steal It.

You’re the one who was irritated enough to find the solution to the problem. You spent late nights jotting down notes, trying out solutions and pounding away at your code until you found something that worked. Chances are no one else is going to put in the time and effort you have to get to where you are. Attract others to your ideas and they will want to help you succeed.

 

Launch Early

Yes, your product is held together with a shoelace, some duct tape and a safety pin, but someone out there sees the same problem you do and will pay you for that solution. You can refine and iterate, but you shouldn’t wait until everything is perfect for launch, because it never will be.

 

You Don’t Have to Get It Right. You Need to Get It Done.

In my head, I pictured the launch of TellMe TV being a lot like the launch of the iPhone. The service would gleam as I showed off its features to an audience that would ooh and aah over all of the details. Much like my first point, you can’t get it perfect on the first try, but you have to show something for your efforts, especially when investors are waiting to see what you’ve been doing with their cash.

 

Find Your Customers, Then Listen To Them.

As much as you know about your product, your customer may have an insight that simplifies or improves your product in ways you can’t see because of your perspective. 

 

Build A Stellar Team

The vision of TellMe TV attracted several key people to my team including the former CEO of Lion’s Gate Entertainment, a two-time Emmy Award winner and the lady who launched the xbox in Canada.

 

Develop Tough Skin

Conflict, confrontation and hearing the word ‘no’ come with the territory. Learn to lick your emotional wounds quickly and move forward with the mission.

 

Fail Fast

You will fail. Your code will break. You will introduce a feature and realize it was a bonehead decision. You will hire the wrong person. Cut your losses and move forward.

 

Never Give Up

While I had to make the hard decision to wind down TellMe TV, it came after seven years of hard work. There were some days I felt like giving up and many where I wondered if I would have been safer, happier and more satisfied working in audio. Even when the going gets rough, remember all you need to do is take one step forward.

 

Something from Nothing

If I had to choose one regret from my journey with TellMe TV, it would be not launching faster with the content I could easily get. In some ways it would have been easier to build a loyal audience with customers who believed in the vision, but after a couple of years of promising vapourware, it’s hard to build trust and loyalty when the market movers are offering your service as a feature. Aside from that, I regret nothing. I learned a lot, especially about the world of business, accessibility and the often colourful world of tech startups.

By the time I wound down TellMe TV, I had been invited to join CNIB in building a national entrepreneurship program for other Canadians with sight loss. It was an opportunity to build something from nothing all over again and I couldn’t say no to the prospect.