Access to Education for All

The following is a transcript of an interview with Tara Robertson from my podcast, Circulating Ideas. Robertson is an accessibility advocate and systems librarian and currently works as an accessibility librarian at CAPER-BC, the Centre for Accessible Post-Secondary Education Resources of British Columbia.

Tara, welcome to the show.

Thanks!

You are an Accessibility Librarian as your title and I’ve talked to the people in the past where that’s part of their job but I don’t think I’ve ever talk to anybody that’s their official title. Can you talk about what you kind of do on a day to day basis?

So I co-manage an alternate format production center that’s a central service for twenty colleges and libraries in British Columbia. So we take college and university textbooks for students who are registered with disability services and make custom audiobooks and e-books so that they can use them. So I made up “accessibility librarian” because when I started our organization had a name that didn’t really make much sense. I guess now the name still, I don’t I don’t know how much sense it makes. But people were like “Information services librarian, what’s that?” and “What’s a CAPER?” and this, so I was like “accessibility” and people understand that. I made up my own title.

Well, can you tell the listeners what CAPER is?

CAPER stands for Centre for Accessible Post-secondary Education Resources of BC. So we’re funded directly by the Ministry of Advanced Education to serve disability service offices at twenty universities and colleges in British Columbia. So it was, so like we’re half a library and we’re half a disability service. Kind of I guess a third party service organization. So we’re maybe a special library?

That’s really cool. And how long have you worked there?

This is my fourth year.

Okay, and has that has been an interest of yours for a long time, accessibility?

Before I worked here I didn’t know a lot about accessibility. We’re sort of a technology organization and we’re a digitization center essentially, so for me I was really excited about the technology aspects of the job and in learning about print disabilities, accessibility and disability services I’ve become really interested in it. Access to education is really important and I guess as librarians we believe that access to information is important but for people with disabilities… so for us that would be people who are blind, visually impaired, students who might have a learning disability and can’t use traditional print, or people with physical disabilities who can’t hold or carry books. Access to education is really important because it means access to jobs.

That’s something that people have obviously looked at in the past and tried to solve but it becomes almost a new problem in the digital realm because you have to make now you have to make your computers and your phones and everything accessible as well.

Yeah actually with the new technology, things… accessibility is improving. But I think in libraries we talk about where we were about access to information, especially public libraries. But we often forget about the accessibility piece. So, in looking at that access, I think we have to ask ourselves like this who are we providing access to? And who are we saying belongs in our spaces? Whether that’s a public library or a college or university and what does that mean?

Have you seen other examples of libraries that have been a good job with this I mean any particular examples that you can think of the people who have been very good at the accessibility issue?

I’m more familiar with the academic side of things. Ontario, it’s OCUL, College University Library Services, I think is the acronym? They’ve produced an amazing accessibility toolkit for libraries. Which looks at accessibility of physical spaces like the circulation and reference desks, and study spaces in libraries. It also looks at procurement, looking at accessibility for digital products like journal article databases or your integrated library system or discovery layer. It looks at accessibility on attitudes of staff in serving people with disabilities. So they’ve produced a really amazing toolkit and I’ve heard about some other pieces. I think one of the college or that one of the university systems in California, as part of their thesis depository program, so when you finished writing your Master’s or PhD thesis before it goes into the institutional repository, they do a check to make sure that it’s ADA compliant. So I think that’s a really awesome way that they’ve worked accessibility into their regular workflow.

Definitely I was going to ask you about the…I assume Canada has a similar law to the American Americans with Disabilities Act?

We don’t actually we don’t really, it’s big difference between Canada and the U.S. In Canada it’s provincial, so that would be like at your state level. Ontario was the first province to have accessibility legislation. Manitoba’s next. The province where I live, British Columbia, on the West Coast, we don’t have provincial legislation so it’s a different environment than the US. I really wish we had federal legislation that would make things a lot easier.

Is that something that you think librarians can help bring to the forefront? Is that something that you can advocate for?

I think we can, our role as librarians would be supporting disability advocates like standing behind them in kind of putting like our profession supporting the work that they’re doing. But even in our in our day to day jobs like when we’re making policy decisions or purchasing things or looking at our service, I think looking at user experience and doing user testing and making sure that people with disabilities are included.

Yeah, it almost makes it more important that you look at that kind of thing because if not you’re not required by law many to do it, so you have to sort of do it because it’s the right thing to do.

Yeah, it’s a human rights issue for sure. And I think also like when you’re working around or working with legislation and trying to achieve certain kind of standards that’s one thing but also thinking about your service in a human way. Like if a blind user came in what with their experience be? And we can’t know what that person’s experience is so we need to ask people and we need to kind of put some extra effort into seeing what their experience of our libraries are and that will ultimately make a better experience and a better service for all users.

And I’m going to have to have to ask you about the things about Canada versus the U.S. kinda thing.

We spell things different.

A lot of extra “u”s in there. But do you all have a national kinda thing like the US has BARD for, you know, for Braille resources. Do you have anything, a national kind of library for things like that or is that provincial too?

On the public library side there’s two national programs to provide accessible library service in the public area. One is NNELS, which is the National Network for Equitable Library Service and the other one is um…CNIB…Canadian… oh no that’s… I forget what it’s called. No it’s called CELA, the Canadian Equitable Library Service. So it’s a little confusing that there’s two competing ones on the public library side. But like Accesstext which exists in the States, we don’t have anything like that in Canada. And because of stupid international copyright laws were not actually able to share the files across the border.

Right that that’s what always it always seems I don’t wanna get too much into that…

Stupid copyright laws?

But it seems so weird that whenever they introduce like new things, that it’s introduced in the US. And then it takes so long to get to Canada like I always hear about these new you know Amazon services or Apple services and it opens in the US and then it goes to Great Britain. It’s like you can’t figure out Canada? But they’re right next door.

I know! Like and Canada because of our history with Britain and our proximity to the US. When you think about what textbooks are being used, we use a lot of American, we some Canadian, and some British so. And it’s insane to me, or it’s really ridiculous that we are not able to share those digital publisher files across the border. I think the Marrakesh Treaty which is a WIPO treaty which has happened in the last year or two of that will change things but it’ll take a couple of years to come into force and for us to figure out what the mechanisms are going to look like.

Well, you’ve talked about a little bit on your blog in the past about talk about open textbooks you think that’s an important thing for that has a kind of get out of copyright and stuff in the first place. And then so you don’t have to deal with these laws?

I’m so excited about the collaboration I’ve been doing with The Open Textbook Project in BC. I think open textbooks, open educational resources, open access publishing, all of that has a huge potential for changing how we create and share information. So in BC the government funded a one million dollar program to create open textbooks for the forty highest enrolled classes in post-secondary. So like Biology 100, English 100, Econ 100. All of those classes that are tons and tons of students, thousands and thousands of students are going to be taking. and instead of each student spending $100 or $200 on their Econ book the idea was that they would fund the creation of a platform and content for open textbooks that would be high quality, openly licensed content that could be used for free by students. If you look on Twitter, students are using #textbookbroke to tweet pictures of their textbooks and textbook receipts from the semester and some of them are like $700 or $800 for textbooks for their classes and that really affects affordability. And again it goes back to who do we say belongs in Higher Ed? If you can’t afford eight hundred dollars for textbooks this semester, you get cut out of education or you take the class without the textbooks, or you don’t do the reading, or you torrent them.

Right, it’s like the whole music thing that happened a long time ago. People are willing to pay for things if it’s at a reasonably available to you, at a reasonable price. I mean it’s not like people don’t necessarily go to pirating in the first place, I mean, there always be that small subgroup that will, but yeah. I mean when you get things like this words completely unreasonable to get the official text then that’s why people go to pirating.

Yeah, there was a torrent, I think it was a UPenn student, who scanned an entire, I can’t remember what subject was, entire textbook that was like over two hundred dollars. And the torrent they seeded, they were like “you know it’s if the cost of this is reasonable I would pay it but it’s completely not, so that’s why I scanned the book and I’m seeding this torrent. And also can you clean the bathrooms on the third floor of the library they’re disgusting.” I think we really need to listen to that.

Well, I would think one nice thing about open textbooks, too, is what we talking about earlier. You can build it from the start to be accessible instead of taking a complete thing already and trying to make it into something accessible.

Yeah! When I heard about the project I was super excited because my day to day we’re remediating textbooks that are broken for students with disabilities. So we’re chopping and scanning and we’ve got human editors who go through and edit tables so they’re easier to to hear or listen to if using a screenreader. And it’s a lot of work to do at the end. So, I was thinking you know if we worked with content creators at the beginning and educated them about what best practices are for accessibility. You know they can do that at the beginning and the content will be ready for students with disabilities and every when you know when it’s published and I think the idea is not only does it make it accessible but it makes a better product for people without disabilities.

I was just going to say that it can be the main goal of accessibility for people who can’t access it any other way, but it makes that easier or more accessible for people who even if you might be more convenient for you to have text to speech if you’re on a commute or something you’re doing something else and you want to hear that the computer talk to you instead that can just be a convenience too.

So totally and I’m really excited about the inclusive design stuff that’s happening and becoming more mainstream. Microsoft just launched their inclusive design handbook in this really amazing video, a twenty minute video about inclusive design. And again the idea is working with users at the beginning to figure out what their needs are and to ensure that their needs are met and that that would create, you know, a new and better product for everyone. So, like, in the case of students with learning disabilities, having content organized clearly and with clear headers so people know kind of are able to follow the content through, that could be essential for someone with a learning disability. But you know everyone benefits from having well organized, clear content with headings.

Yeah, I mean it like right, it just makes it easier to follow for anybody.

Totally!

And I do like that you wrote a recent blog post about that the inclusivity of the Microsoft thing. And that’s I do like that quote that you pull out too that it really sort of what user experience should be, that you start with how a person’s going to interact with this and work back from that. You don’t just say “Hey! Well here’s some neat, you know, I have touch screen technology. It just cool so I’m going to do that.” It’s you figure out how it should be used and then work backwards from that for people.

Exactly.

And one of the parts of that you mention in your blog post. I’ll let you tell it, kind of a little bit, but you had a problem with part of their video. They talked about their talk about the Skype translator.

I guess I… the video is amazing. I haven’t seen anything that so well done, like the production values are amazing, like it’s Microsoft after all. The stories they pull and the way they tell the stories about working with users and designing with inclusivity from the beginning and keeping that in mind is really good. Like, it’s really effective. But one of their examples, they’re using Skype. They use the example of Skype translator. And for me it just felt like… so Skype Translator, should explain, is… uses speech to text technology, then uses machine translation and then goes back to text to speech; so you can speak in one language and it’ll be machine translated and come out the other end spoken and written in that language. The example they use was where, I think a school in Seattle and in China. And you had school children talking to each other and asking if they like pizza. And then they kind of tacked on the example of two students who are hard of hearing. One had a cochlear implant. And they’re like “isn’t this great it works for these hard of hearing students as well!” But in my mind they weren’t starting with the students, it was just kind of an add-on at the end. And kind of with my technology background I was thinking like with that machine translation…that’s occurring on Microsoft servers. So…they’re saving it in the moment to provide the machine translation but they’re also probably saving it to be part of a larger body of data to make better machine translation. So the unintended consequence ,or maybe the intended consequences, is that deaf and hard of hearing people are under more surveillance. And not only just deaf and hard of hearing people but the people they’re talking to. So, I think if they started with the individuals at the beginning and talked about what they valued and talked about their lives and listened, they might have come up with a different solution. It’s cool technology, but I don’t know if it’s a great example for that video.

Right. But again it’s like you said, I mean, you can create always cool technologies. All the time there’s always new technologies coming out but the way it’s implemented is the important part.

Totally!

One of the other things when we were sort of throwing around topics about what we’re going to talk about. You talked about how to change how we do conferences. And how I want to bring that into this conversation is from an acceptability standpoint, because I think a lot of times conferences are necessarily that accessible. Some of it just from distance wise, making it more accessible online. Is that your experience with conferences that it’s difficult for people to access?

Well, I guess are different facets to the word accessibility like, who’s got the professional development money, the time that they can take to travel across the country, that’s one aspect of it. I think there’s also like access needs like if someone was deaf and needed an ASL interpreter, that could be another thing. Or if someone was using assistive technology and needed to access the program…have the content and the program be accessible to their assistive technology, that could be another thing. I really admire the code4lib community. And the Access Technology Conference community in Canada. I think each time the conference happens, it’s like another iteration on how to be more inclusive. So I think code4lib was one of the first library conferences to implement a Code of Conduct and you can find the wording for that in github. And I like the way that community thinks about hacking culture as well, to make you know, the conference accessible or maybe accessible is the wrong word… more welcoming and inclusive of women and trans folks, who are generally under- represented in that world. And at the Access Conference that just happened a couple of weeks ago, as part of the registration process, they asked people what their preferred pronouns were. And that’s the first time I’ve been asked that at a library conference. So again it’s just kind of pushing things a little bit and for people who’ve never considered what their pronouns are, they are asked this is just part of a regular conference registration and maybe some people stop for a moment and thought “Oh…like, why would they be asking me this?”

You know, I think it’s little steps like that of people.

Yeah!

If it’s not part of your everyday life you may not think of it as an issue, but if you when you see the drop-down menu doesn’t just say male/female you think “…oh wait.”

There could be another option!

“Is there another option?” And then that might get you thinking more.

Yeah. I presented at the CSUN conference, which is a disability and technology conference in San Diego last year. There’s a lot of people with disabilities to attend and when you register they have a lot of really detailed questions about what your access needs are. Like “do you need to tactile map of the facility? Do you want your program in Braille? Will you be bringing a guide dog? Do you need ASL interpretation?”, those kinds of things. So I haven’t even seen the basic questions being asked in library conferences. And I think it easy question to ask is “Do you have any access needs or acceptability needs, and if so, what are they?” just as an open ended question.

I think at this past year’s ALA conference they had restrooms that were open to anybody. Like they had male, female restrooms they also had some that were labeled as…

Just bathrooms!

Yeah, just bathrooms. And unfortunately I think a couple times they were defaced but ALA was very good at quickly replacing those, but that’s unfortunately what you run into sometimes with people even though you wouldn’t. We would like to think our profession is very open minded but, there’s always…

There’s jerks everywhere!

Yes, there’s jerks everywhere!

I just want to interject here. I don’t want to, I just want to make sure that we’re clear that we’re not equating transgender or gender-variant people as having a disability. I think.

Yes, right.

I’m not hearing you do that but to be really clear because I think. Thinking about accessibility like it’s thinking about how do we make spaces and content and services welcoming for a wide variety of people and my focus is usually on people with print disabilities but I think some of the the concepts or some of the ideas apply more broadly.

Yeah, I was thinking because it once you start opening it up to different kinds of interpretations… yeah. I was thinking of it more in terms of yeah being more inclusive to everybody but yeah. Accessibility is a way into that ’cause that’s one of things to the people, it’s just sort of, there’s all kinds of things people don’t consider when they’re planning conferences or things like that.

Yeah, you don’t know what you don’t know, that’s for sure.

Right! And hopefully I think our profession is generally again open minded and hopefully we’re in the forefront of changing things like that in a lot of library conferences now are demanding a codes of conduct. I know there’s a lot of authors and speakers who now who demand to have a code of conduct for they will attend the conference and I think that that will help conferences change as well.

I think, I think you’re right like, librarians are open minded but I think we’re also really afraid of getting it wrong. And I think we have to let go of that or make it okay to screw up and be wrong because that’s where we learn. And that’s how culture shifts.

That’s the whole “perfection is the enemy of good.”

Yeah, totally! And it’s it’s a horrible way to screw up like when you’ve someone’s wrong pronoun or you say something stupid to someone with a disability just because you’re uncomfortable and you’re not really thinking but I think we need to be less afraid of making those mistakes and better at you know, saying “you know, I really got that wrong. I’m sorry.” Like, and then kind of endeavoring to do better next time.

So you, before your previous job you worked at the Emily Carr school?

Yeah, the Emily Carr Institute, I guess it was the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

OK. Can you talk about that experience of what you did there?

I was a systems librarian there and I was the liaison for the design department and it was such a wonderful place to work. I don’t have an art and design background and the students are really creative and empathetic and caring and working with the designers was amazing! They’re creative problem solvers and I guess that’s where a kind of got interested in design.

Did you work with any accessibility issues when you were there? Or did that come after with the current job?

Uh… I didn’t really think about accessibility much there. I went back this week and met with a designer who runs the health design lab and was trying to find out if he had done more work with people with disabilities and user testing. I wanted to get his feedback on some user testing that we were doing and that’s not really a focus at Emily Carr. But, yeah, the way people approach things was really different from what I was used to. For example, I was working with a textile designer to create a materials database and we were talking, there was a group of us, and I was trying to find out what their needs were. In my head, I was thinking database fields and I was sort of sketching different things out. And they just said you know, “Can you put your book down we’re just going to start with some post it notes and brainstorming and sticking them all over the walls and then categorizing them?” I was thinking more about the outcome and thinking about kind of functional requirements and for them the process was also really important. That was kind of my introduction to thinking a bit in a different way. Not just about like what are we making or what are we doing, but what is the process look like?

Your focus is obviously accessibility now but I think at that job as you said and other their previous job of thinking more systems has been more where your mindset has been.

Yup.

Is that always kind of what you what when you got into librarianship as a kind of what you thought you wanted to do is be a systems person?

No, I wanted to be a children’s librarian but I wanted to work with technology and kids. But and in library school I took a bunch of children lit courses because I had no background in that. But I started doing technology jobs, I think my first job out of library school was doing training and support for the Evergreen, the open source integrated library system, implementation here in BC. And I know you were you just talked to the Equinox folks a couple of weeks ago and I had the pleasure of working with them right out of library school. So I really I really enjoyed that work. And I never got a job as a children’s librarian!

Yeah, it’s funny how you can have one path in mind and then you got to move off into another direction.

What was your plan in library school?

I was going to be an academic librarian because that’s where I was working. I was working at an academic library while I was in library school. And then I got another job later and then another job after that and I realized I really liked working for the school I was working at, not necessarily academic librarian, or academic libraries in general. That is what really was not where my mindset was and so I was more into the working directly with the community so I switched to public libraries and that’s where I’ve been ever since, for the past… almost ten years, nine years this year, I guess?

Wow!

Yeah… All those classes I took about all that academic stuff but I don’t get to use and you know, all those gov docs class I just don’t. Talking about Evergreen, as we talked a little before we started talking on the recording that you know, that started here in Georgia as our state PINES library catalog. Do you contribute a lot to the open source community or you just kind of interested in it, or how does that, how do you work with that community?

I used to be really active in the Evergreen community. I guess. One of the other things I did when I was at Emily Carr is I helped migrate the library system to Evergreen. Which I think for that university was a really good decision. So when we organized, or as part of the group to organize the Evergreen International Conference here in Vancouver. It was the first time that was outside of the States. And I contributed some documentation. But mostly energy, I think, helping contribute to the community and responding to people’s questions on listservs and that kind of work. I think when I was doing that, working within the Evergreen community, I thought, you know, you know being a community manager would be a job I’d really like. And that’s not how it went!

Yeah. Well, as you said, your path is a curvy one. Right now that community manager kind of mindset, do you see that sort of as what you do when you’re talking online now on Twitter or anything else like that you kind of get that same feeling from that of where you’re contributing to a larger community, you may not be the manager of it, but is having an online community that you can talk talk things through important to you?

Yeah, I really I guess I am when I’m talking online I’m just talking as myself. So there’s a lot f-bombs sometimes if I’m having a bad day. With a background as a systems librarian, you’re the only one in the organization who’s doing that. So, I really, really valued being able to connect with colleagues doing similar work online. It’s useful for just emotional support because maybe the systems librarians concerns is not the same as the reference librarian’s concerns. And also just keeping up to date with technology and we all work in different areas. So, if I had a repository question colleagues who work in that area were really generous and sharing what they know. And I find that still the case. I think the code4lib and access communities are phenomenal. People are wicked smart and they’re also kind and generous. I really, really appreciate that.

You hit on something that I’ve found a lot in doing these interviews and stuff. A lot of times, a lot of people can get can get a lot out of professional development on social media and stuff but it seems like people who get the most out of it, is something like you said, where you’re the only person doing the job at your organization. Or you’re a solo librarian at a place and that you’re the only librarian at the whole place and so it gives you that sense of community that you don’t get it all at your workplace.

Yeah, but I guess even if you’re a reference librarian if you’re a business librarian, that’s quite specialized, so being able to connect with other colleagues who may be able to help answer something or may be able to understand your venting screed that day is useful. Even though everyone I work with works around accessibility and alternate format it’s nice to be able to connect quickly with colleagues across Canada or the US or even internationally quickly through Twitter. Where I might not, you know, want to send a formal email about something but if I find a link that I like that I know someone will like, it takes two seconds to pass on and that also is nice.

Yeah and to go back to an earlier topic something I remembered something I wanted to ask you about was. And I don’t know how much you’re involved in or how much you just kind of know about it, the whole talk about open education again open textbooks about the… you know, I don’t even know the right word… the controversy maybe about the place that copyrighted the term “Open Ed.”

Oh! That was silly! Oh, that was ridiculous!

Can you tell the listeners kind of what that kind of situation, how to bring up to speed on that? A couple of campuses were already using that term right. I mean that’s not as a copyrighted term but it was kind of a term they were already using or trademarked, whichever one. I may be using the wrong term. Trademark, I guess but…

It was a trademark. I think actually in the end they found out it was an official mark? So, I guess I’m new to the open education community and I really like it Like, they feel like many people. They have similar values to the library technology communities that I’m part of, where people are you know smart, they’re like “let’s do things out in the open”, it’s OK to make mistakes, “let’s learn from each other” and share what you can, where it makes sense. So open and open education are they are the communities that have been around for a while. Like, I think the open ed conference been running for more than ten years. And the open textbook project in BC, it’s kind of under the banner of open ed so that logo was on all the open textbooks. Which I think there is one hundred now in the BC repository. In the summer, there was a big kerfuffle. University of Guelph in Ontario trademarked the phrase “Open Ed.” I think actually was an official mark not a trademark. So under intellectual property marking that is their own or something unique that they owned. Which caused, would cause a lot of problems for the Open Ed Conference was going to be here a year in Vancouver. And also for the Open Textbook Project that I’m a part of, it was just going to be a bit of a pain. And they hadn’t really contributed much to the open ed community. Not really sure why they did that. It kinda seems like an MBA strategy move or something that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. But for me it reminded me a lot of when LibLime trademarked Koha, the first open source integrated library system. So, they tried to trademark that in New Zealand as well which is offensive so many levels. Like Koha, the software, started New Zealand. Koha is a Maori word and it means donation or gift. So, that an American corporation was trying to trademark a Maori word that meant, you know, “gift” for software that was developed in New Zealand. Like, it was super offensive. So, it was kind of similarly offensive and ridiculous when University of Guelph tried to trademark “Open Ed.” I think there was there was a huge amount of backlash online and they ended up backing down.

Like the conference and everything still…they’re not going to challenge it or anything, we don’t think?

No…I can’t remember exactly would happen if they licensed it openly or I don’t remember exactly, but I was glad that there was a lot of there was a lot of people who are vocal on social media and I’m glad that they listened. Because working to change the local one hundred open textbooks. You know that’s time that could be better spent creating more open content. You know?

Yeah, that’s not something you want to go back and redo the graphic design on something.

Exactly!

Or take time to come up with a new phrase or whatever you want to use and…meh.

Totally!

Well, the last thing I want to ask you about is not really related to libraries at all. But I know you’re a big cyclist.

Ha ha!

How long have you’ve been cycling?

Well I don’t know if I’d say I’m a cyclist, but I like to bike everywhere. I’m a commuter cyclist and I used to do a lot of bike camping. I don’t know, I’ve been riding my bike for probably twenty-five years. I commute to work by bike and I love it. It’s a really nice way to start the day and finish up. I’m not driving and stuck in traffic, I’m not stuck on a stinky bus. I just kind of get to go at my pace. Through neighborhoods between work and home. I really like it. Do you ride your bike?

I do occasionally. My kids are just learning to ride their bikes. So, right now we kind of walk with them because they can’t ride very fast. So, I think but I think once they’re kind of up and running will probably all go biking together so…

Between work and home I bike past two elementary schools and it’s um…sustainable cities and sustainable transportation are big thing here in Vancouver and I see a lot of parents driving their kids to work, or driving to the school rather. But I also see like little clumps of kids with a parent biking as a little group to the school and it’s super cute.

Yeah I would I would love to consider that but yeah, I would say as much as you guys are commuter friendly, Atlanta is not at all.

No, I don’t think it is! I could probably get to one my son gets in the elementary school could probably get to his school but my daughter kind of goes far enough away and then my work is forty five minutes by car away or so up an interstate and so it might not be the safest thing in the world to get by bike. But do you know I always liked, I mean I was a little late learning to ride a bike when I was a kid but I once I did I was like “oh my god!” What was I waiting for?

Isn’t it fun? And it’s such a good speed to travel at.

Yeah and one, and it’s good for you. Well I guess there’s that too. Well but it’s one of those things. It’s nice because it’s both — because it’s good for you and you’re having fun so that’s the best way to do it right I mean because eating chocolate is fun to that’s not necessarily good for you.

You can do both!

Eat chocolate and bike at the same time!

Totally!

Well Tara, thank you so much for talking to me for the show.

Thank you, Steve this is really, really a pleasure. Thank you!

Can you tell the listeners how they can find out more about you or from you or where you’re available online?

My website is at tararobertson.ca and I’m on Twitter at @tararobertson.

Great, so I hope everything goes and checks that out because I do you know post every day one of the on your blog but you post fairly regularly and I hope people go and read that because it’s really interesting stuff.

Thank you so much Steve!

And follow you on Twitter too!

This episode was transcribed through the Pop Up Archive and edited by Steve Thomas and Tara Robertson.