Vint Cerf, 'Father of the internet,' talks about recovering from COVID-19 and accessibility

Symptoms arrived on March 17th and this was after having spent 10 days in London

and we were fairly confident that

we contracted this thing while we were in London

There were many events we attended that had a couple hundred people.

They were in fairly close proximity to each other

whether it was a cocktail party or

an official dinner or something like that or even just a lecture.

So I showed symptoms on the 17th, my wife never actually showed symptoms,

but then about a week later after a great deal of effort

we were able to get tested.

That is a story all by itself. We both tested positive and so for the weeks after

until now we stayed in isolation.

By good fortune our younger son flew in from Los Angeles for nearly 3 weeks

he's just flying back today to take care of shopping and cooking.

So we had more than many other people had in the way of help

and assistance to get through the recovery process.

Wasn't he concerned about contracting it as well?

Absolutely. And so he exercised enormous care

He was up in the upstairs bedrooms and we never went up there and

he disinfected himself, his hands, the kitchen counter and all the other stuff

repeatedly. He would wash off anything that came in from the store

we designated certain areas as germ free areas and were careful not to put anything

on there that hadn't already been essentially cleaned.

So he was very conscientious about exercising all the normal precautions

that it is recommended in order to stay isolated

And so far as we can tell, over that three week period, he did not show any signs

any symptoms anyways of this disease.

And when he gets back to Los Angeles, today, he said he will self-isolate for

another 14 days.

So was he able to get tested before he left?

No, we were not able to get tests for him.

But frankly, given the gestation period, we are pretty confident that if he was

going to show any symptoms at all they would have appeared during the period he was here

Many many people were kind enough to send notes, I had not intended to say anything

and I was encouraged to be public about this.

For a couple of reasons. One of them was that maybe people would listen just given

my modest notoriety. So I tried to use social media very sparingly to reinforce

good practices with regards to social isolation.

Which by the way, I think is a peculiar term physical isolation is what we're after,

not social isolation.

All of what is happening in the world is becoming more and more interconnected

just as we're doing right now because of the internet.

Well, it's very interesting questions. How would we communicate?

We have other mass media available. We have television, we have cable TV

we have the telephone, we have radio. So people probably would be,

by the way, there is a lot of telephone usage right now, its gone up even faster

than some of the social media and things like G-calls. So that's important to know.

Of course, having mobiles readily available has assisted in the use of the telephone system.

So there would been other ways to keep people informed, what would

not have worked however is the ability to work from home for at least a significant

fraction of the work force. Internet has certainly enabled that. To say nothing of

schools going online, as imperfect as that might be.

So I agree with you that some of our response

to the COVID-19 virus, pandemic, has been enabled by the internet

and if had not had this capability I think we would have been

less able to respond to the situation admitting that many of the internet based

responses are not adequate but they are surely a step in the right direction.

Which leads many of us to speculate that post COVID-19 that our normal lives

have shifted in some ways. For example companies may be more willing to work

from home when that's convenient. And that might actually be very beneficial

thing for at least some portion of the workforce, giving them flexibility that

they might not otherwise have. It might also induce ways of using online capability

for education that would, I would say, enhance or expand the business models

of school and universities

So I think the post pandemic period will be interesting and absolutely worthy

of our scrutiny. But that gets to one other thing which is most relevant to why you

and I are talking, and that is to be more conscious of the importance of accessibility

in all dimensions for these online systems. We have still done well in achieving

what I consider to be very important objective which is making online capacity

usable for everyone, including those who have to overcome various kinds of disabilities.

And so that challenge lies before us, and is just as much a challenge now as it has

been in the past.

I know you're working with Google, you're working with Google, you're working at Google I guess I

should say.

I had gone from the research department for some 12 years or so, then to policy

and now most recently I'm part of the cloud team. In all cases, however, I've

had a finger in the policy space, specifically policy related to internet

and how its used, how it's abused what to do about that. So that's one part.

I am a sponsor of our accessibility effort at Google, and a sponsor of some of the

internal employee groups, interest groups,

for example, the disabilities alliance group. Which is a group of employees who either

are disabled or have children who are disabled

or who have disabling conditions. And part of the purpose behind that activity is to

draw attention to the accommodations that are needed, whether that has to do with

accessibility of online systems or making sure that for the blind employees that

there are paths that are clear and that we don't leave things around for people

to trip on. There is a wide range of response that the company wants to

introduce, but it can only do that if it is made more clear what issues arise and

how they can be dealt with. On the accessibility front, with regards to online

things, I am a huge fan of improving the way in which we and others deal with making

our online applications usable. Particularly for people who have to

overcome various disability, whether they be physical disability or cognitive disabilities

It turns out that's really hard. Figuring out how to do a good design which is

intuitive and accounts for the needs of people with disabilities is quite a

challenge. I think it is an art. I don't think there are textbook solutions to

these things. Although there are a number of textbooks that speak to design which is

usable and intuitive. So I'm a big proponent there.