Real Talk About Podcasting and Accessibility w/The Blind Blogger, Maxwell Ivey

Happy New Year aspiring podcasters. Max Ivey is a visually impaired podcaster who says the best way to build loyal audiences.

Let them see you at your worst and let them follow you to your best.

So what's your excuse for not starting your podcast today? If you still need a little nudge, hit the link below and let us have a quick chat, or join our podcubator mentorship program and get podcasting today. This is tools of the podcast trade, where you can learn about the tools and resources you can use to start and grow your podcast. Tune in this week as we talk about the help you need to remove the mystery from podcasting so you can become a successful podcaster that can reach your audience where they are. My guest today is Maxwell Ivey. Thanks for coming and talking to us today, maxwell. I really appreciate you.

Thank you so much for having me letting me come in and talk with you and talk to your audience, and I appreciate the hard work you put in to having your podcast.

Thank you, I appreciate it. So, before we get into what you do, could you tell us who is Maxwell Ivy?

Right. Well, as you know, I am visually impaired, almost totally blind, A former carnival owner and amusement equipment broker from Houston, Texas. Since then I've been a life goals coach, a digital media publicist, and I've finally found my place as an accessibility advisor, focusing on collaboration as opposed to compliance. I have published four books, two of them award winners. I've traveled the country solo, usually on small budgets. I've been on hundreds of podcasts, taught people to be guests, Looked people on shows and eventually started my own podcast called what's your Excuse, Finally overcame my fear of singing in public, started writing my own songs and now sing and sing and speak in public and sing on my podcast as part of the intro and the outro. I've overcome a lot of things by being willing to ask for help, deciding to find solutions and being determined to find a positive in life. And you know, I've basically done a lot of things because they were the next thing I needed to do and I honestly believe that there's nothing I've done that anybody else out there can't do, if not even more so than I have. I like to say if, if Max can do it, then what's your excuse?

Okay, all right, thank you. So you, I'm gonna do a writing and say you know they're writing, and say there are a lot of people with visual impairment or other impairment, physical or otherwise, who would say you know, I really can't do that because this, right, right, what's your excuse for not accepting that? Let's use your phrase.

Well, I think that when people say they can't do it because of a particular reason, it's because they've been taught either by themselves or people that they associate with it. For some reason, they're not able to do it, and especially when it comes to podcasting, a lot of people think I can't be a podcaster because they read all the quote experts who tell them everything they have to have or do or know how to do before they can start a podcast. So one of the first things I tell people is there are only really five things you have to have to start a podcast. Now, there are a lot of things that would be nice to have, but you don't need them. You need a name, you need a description, you need a short audio so you can submit to Apple. You need a website or some other place where people can find your content, and so there's a four. And you have those days where you can't remember the fifth thing, but there's really just so much stuff that people talk about. Now I'm going to share how I started my podcast, because I think it's a great example. I was doing interviews on shows and hosted Max. You know you really ought to have a podcast and I'm like I can't have a podcast because I'm one of those people I have to be in the moment when I'm having a conversation. So I didn't think that I could manage the technology and have a conversation or record a monologue. But I kept saying you know, if somebody were to come along who were willing to help me with the technology, I would do a podcast in a minute. Well, this guy is a great friend of mine even now, frederick Bi from Canada. He came along and he said you know, max, I would love to help you start a podcast because I think your message is really important. He never asked for any money. We never had a discussion about what it would cost. He just said he wanted to do it. I said, sure, let's do it. And so we started together. Basically, he said, max, I'll produce and you just talk, which is what we did. And we did that for about a year and then he finally convinced me. He's like you know. You know, max, you would be perfectly fine doing this. You just have to find a simpler format. And that was about the time where zoom came along. And zoom is one of those platforms that's really so much easier for a blind person to use because they emphasize keyboard navigation as opposed to mouse navigation. So it was a great. It was a great option at the right time. Nowadays we have a lot more platforms that are fairly accessible, like Riverside, like StreamYard, like Broadcasting Live, also other platforms, so you know, even going live on Facebook or LinkedIn. But we did that yeah, my first. And I still didn't think that I could do my podcast on my own. So Fred tricked me. He's like. He called me up three. He called me up two days before my next interview. He said, max, there's something wrong with our daughter. I'm not going to be able to help you with the podcast this week. And of course I was. You know, I was sympathetic and concerned because I really liked the guy. But I had two choices. I could say, okay, we'll just cancel the recording this week, or is there somewhere Max can record it. So I started asking the people that I knew who were visually impaired, who I thought could tell me about technology. They said try zoom. So I signed up for zoom, did a test recording one day and less than 24 hours later, I'm recording my first interview, which, coincidentally, was with a filmmaker from San Francisco, michael Schwartz, who likes to tell people that he's an award winning filmmaker who's losing his site, but not his storytellers vision. So my very first interview, solo, with no help at all, was this amazing photo and video video journalist who is still traveling the world as he's losing his vision. So it was. But I'm I. But I think this is important because I didn't have any special skills. All I did was decide that there has to be some way I can do this, because I didn't want to not do it. You know, I enjoyed doing it at that point. So if you know, if somebody like me who is not a tech person could decide that there were solutions, find one in a short period of time, then I think you have to ask yourself the things I'm telling myself that I can't do, or that I don't have to start a podcast. Are they real or are they? Are the artificial? And if they are official, are you making them up or the people you associate or listen to making them up? Yeah, quite often in the podcasting world, the quote experts will tell you things you have to have that you don't really have to have.

Yeah, that is so important that you listen to your inner voice as opposed to everybody else's, because there are a lot of voices out there.

There sure are. Yeah, that's the great thing about podcasting we get to decide what's important to us. We get to decide what topic and how we want to present it. We get to decide do we just want to press record on an iPhone or do we want to build a studio? And anywhere in between those two extremes we can do it however we want to. And the really cool thing about podcasting is this is something I've discovered from my own experience and from people I've talked to is people love to find somebody. To find somebody when they're just starting out. They love to watch your progress, see how you solve problems, see how you overcome adversity, watch you as you improve, as your technology improves, as the people you have on your podcast improve. The best way to build an oil audience is let them see you at your worst and let them follow you to your best.

Yeah, okay, all right, thank you. So tell us what has been your biggest challenge as a podcaster, and not just from you know, your perspective, but just your experience overall.

Well, until I finally found an accessible podcast player and I'm currently with Blueberry, but there are several others that have have up their game in the area of accessibility in the last few years. But for a while, well for several years, the process of taking a recording and getting it uploaded was a struggle, to the point that I actually thought about quitting podcasting For a while. But then, you know, we mentioned how we get to decide things. I decided that it was easy to upload my video to YouTube. It was hard to upload my audio to a podcast player I was with. I was with Potomac at that time. So I decided you know, max, are you. You know you get to decide what works for you, what doesn't work for you. So for about a year or so I kept doing interviews. I just posted the video and I said you know, if, if posting the audio is going to cause me to quit, is going to cause me to stop recording interviews, stop posting interviews in a timely manner, then why worry about it? So for a year or so I didn't do audio, I just did the video. But I saved the audio. And then I spoke at an event in Wichita, kansas, called Level Up, which is a summer program to teach people with vision, that are visually impaired, the kinds of skills they need to go out and get a job. You know, the soft skills that everybody needs. And during that week, these people were also being exposed to particular professions, and I was exposed to these young people actually doing things in a hands-on way in culinary arts, in aerospace engineering, in audio mixing and video presentation. At the end of the week I'm like, if these people can do this, all this crazy stuff, there has to be some way you can do your podcast and share the audio, because the audio is where most people find our content. And that's when I discovered Blueberry, which is not only accessible as a player for people listening to your podcast, but it's very accessible to upload your podcast, especially the way they embed their player into WordPress and a lot of other website development tools. So that was a big problem. Social media is always a challenge for me, because those websites are in constant change and every time somebody updates a website, I have to re-learn how to navigate that website with my screen reader. I get that all the time, but it's still there. They are the worst. I mean, come on, just because you're worried about. You know, just because you're worried they may think that they don't need you know you as a coder doesn't mean you should change the website for no good reason. I mean, if you have a good reason to update a website, fine, but if you're updating it just to justify your paycheck in a way that's going to aggravate me, then I'm offended by it. So yeah, social media is another area where it's been challenging. As you know, most of us use auto responders. You know we have these email programs that will send a message out to our mailing list. None of those are none of them really Good ones. The ones that offer all the best features are accessible. I'm currently using mad Mimi because I can actually Create and send a message without wanting to pull my hair out. So those are those. You know those are. Those are things like that. As I mentioned before we started recording, I have been working with Alex said Filippo, who runs podmatch, which is where we met about accessibility for both of his apps so pod lottery and pod match and that's been a really great experience, because he actually had no way of knowing how many podcasters there might be out there who have a disability of any kind, yet he insisted on building inaccessibility and I was lucky enough to be the person that he reached out to in order to work with him on making it very accessible, and so now it is. And, of course, beyond social media, pretty much any website or app I use. Whenever they updated, you just never know what you're gonna get as far as. Will you still be able to use it at all with a screen reader or screen magnification or, yeah, just be mildly upsetting the changes they've made? Or, you know, would you, will you get lucky and and pretty much everything be still be the same after a major update? You know that's. That's one thing most people don't realize is that a lot of people with disabilities, and not just vision loss, or what I call late adopters they will run a, an operating system or an app a Generation behind the most current version because they just don't want to risk the update and how it will affect their adaptive technology, whether that's transcription equipment or People that are paraplegics, quite the polegics that use motor controls to navigate the web. So those, those are the things that are very challenging. The one thing I thought would be challenging that hasn't been Not only for my what's your excuse show, but the new show I'm starting in January, called the accessibility advantage, has been getting people to come on my podcast. I thought that would be the hard part, but but but people are just really generous. I mean most people. If you go, if you send them email and you go. You know I, I have this podcast and this is a subject and I think you would be really good at would you come on my podcast. For the most part, they all say yes. If they say, if they say no, it's usually, it's not usually no, it's usually well, just not right now, or a. Even if they say no, it's, it's done in a very polite, light, gentle way. When they say no, I mean I even want to hear from public suit publicists who have ever right to say who do you think you are? Would you please stop trying to bother our client? They never do you know. And Because you have a podcast, you get to ask people to come on your show and most of them will say yes and you get to meet some of the most amazing people. Obviously, you don't meet people outside your, your area of interest. I mean, if you're doing a business podcast, you're, you know you're not going to get To meet. You're not going to get to meet politicians. This is you know, but so many people have said yes, and what's even crazier is a number of people who have reached out and said they want to be on the podcast, and I'm sure that doesn't just happen to me. It's probably happening to you and most every other podcaster out there.

Yeah, it's a conversation I had the other day with a guest is that the podcasting community is so Embracing like they embrace you as long as you're a part of the community, you know they like come on in. What do you need, you know? And I find the podcasting community to be very generous, very generous with their time and Sometimes too generous with their advice, but it's just. It's just who they are right.

Yeah, I wrote my first book that if, if, more people knew how generous, kind and supportive the online world is for creators, everybody would have a blog or a podcast or both.

Yeah, yeah, true that. Yeah, you know, it's interesting that you you were forced to do videos. I find that very interesting.

Yeah, yeah, my, you know, and you're not the only one who finds you my. I've looked back at the, at the statistics on the episodes I've released over the years, and my highest number of downloads always come from the video Of an interview between me and somebody else who also has vision loss. For some reason, the rest of the world is like the idea of two blind people doing a video conversation just blows them away and they have to watch. You know now, yeah, whether they're watching for the content or watching for our video being a train record, I'm not sure which.

Well, I'm sure it's because people are inspired by people who take action right. And a lot of us, you know a lot of people who are able-bodied, you know, physically, mentally, otherwise, have everything at their fingertips, but they are unable to achieve their goals. And they see two people who have excuses, could make excuses and don't. So I think that's a core of it, you know.

You know I want to thank you for saying that, but it's not just because of what you said, it's because the longest time, my longest known advisor and mentor in this world, adrienne Smith, she was the one who finally convinced me to start sharing more of this stuff, because she said exactly what you just said. She said it like eight years ago and took me two years to finally agree with her. She said the same thing. She said, like Max, you haven't built any excuse, you don't use it. Other people don't have excuses and they still don't try things or accomplish things. That's what makes you compelling, and not everybody gets that without me explaining it to them. So thank you so much for making it our observation that it just it really speaks to your ability as a host and your character as a person.

Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Okay, so what is Max grateful for today?

I'm grateful for a lot of things. My family is mostly healthy and our financial needs are being met. I get to do things like talk to people on a podcast as part of my business. I also get to write about accessibility for several publications and currently I'm working on a product evaluation. I'm evaluating the accessibility and the fun factor of Braille Legos for a company called Reviewed Magazine that's part of the USA Today family. And, trust me, if you'd have told me a year and a half ago when I did my first article on accessibility for audioicom, if you told me a year and a half ago Max Ivory was going to get paid to play with Legos, I would have told you you're out of your darn mind. So just so, just all the opportunities that I continue to have because I put myself out there. I'm open. When people ask me about doing things that I haven't done before, I'm usually pretty accepting. I like to say that I'm very willing to ask for help or opportunities or accept them when offered. So those are. Those are all great blessings. I also, you know now, have a focus. Over the years, I've done a lot of different things, as you heard in my intro, but I've never really had just one thing that I was focused on at any of those times, and it's probably why now I'm really starting to feel like I'm about to turn that corner, that we all of us creative entrepreneurs see out in the distance and we keep hoping it's going to be like yesterday or last week, but it's always seems to be tomorrow or next week or maybe even next year. But you know, just realizing that I am an expert and a thought leader in the field of accessibility something I would have never been able to say about myself a year or two ago that you know, making a living as a, as a writer, as a consultant, as a speaker on the topic, is what I get to do. And you know, I get to work from my house and spend a lot of time with with my mom, who's 79, my younger brother, his son. You know we yeah, I got a pretty good life. You know what I mean. I think about people who have to brave the traffic or the computer system, like in New York City where you live, to go to jobs that they don't really want but have to because we have to pay the bills somehow. So I feel really good today and I don't want to forget this One thing that will help our listeners feel better about their lives or their day make a list. Take about five minutes and make a list of things that are positive or that you feel like were beneficial to you today and yesterday. Think back over your lifetime, think about things that were challenging and difficult, that you were able to overcome Maybe they weren't 100% successful, maybe they were 80% or 75% success or even half and make a list of the things that you are positive in your life or that have been, and focus on those and after you make that list you know I didn't coin this expression. It's been said for years when you count your blessings, that grow. So one thing that I like to do at least once a month is just to sit down and make a list.

Okay, awesome, thank you. Thank you for that tip. All right, so tell us about any offer you may have right now and how we can get in touch with you, right?

Well, one thing I want to do in my life is help podcasters grow their audiences by making their content more accessible and inclusive. I want to teach them about things like audio descriptions, closed captioning, transcription, and then also making their websites and their social media feeds more accessible. Because we are a huge community, we're very loyal consumers of product, services and content. We will advocate for inclusive businesses and brands. So, to that end, if people will reach out to me through my website, theaccessibilityadvantagecom, I will be happy to review their website's homepage or their podcast homepage, because not everybody with a podcast has a website. I've been willing to review the main page, either their website or their podcast feed, for free. Just reach out to me through the website and if, after you learn more about accessibility, you decide that you want to do even more with your website, then we can definitely talk about that. But I just know how hard it is to grow a podcast. I've done it. It's one of those things that takes consistent effort over time, and I know that that's not something we like to talk about, but it's the truth. It takes consistent effort. But why block yourself off from over a billion potential listeners because maybe your website isn't accessible or maybe your podcast player is. So reach out to me. I'll do a free review of your main thing and let you know where you are.

Okay, all right, thank you, and we'll put that link in the show notes as well as the link to your YouTube channel and your podcast so people can listen as well. Thank you, max Ivy, for coming and talking to us and tools of the podcast trade. I appreciate you.

Well, thank you so much and hopefully I can come back on again in the future and we can talk more about making podcasts inclusive.

Absolutely. I'd love that, actually, we can schedule the appointment. Yes, all right.

All righty well. Thank you so much. I appreciate you really, I do.

You're a Max, me too.