A11y Rules Podcast

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E088 – Interview with Amberley Romo – Part 1 Aug 07, 2019

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Amberley defines web accessibility as "building for the web in ways that ensure it’s usable by everyone. There aren’t barriers to use for anyone. So, I would say it’s about digital equal access, kind of along the same lines as physical equal access. So, just putting people at the center of building for the web." Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Thanks to Gatsby for being a sponsor of the show. Gatsby is a modern website framework that builds performance into every website by leveraging the latest web technologies. Create blazing fast, compelling apps and websites without needing to become a performance expert. Make sure you have a look at their site: https://www.gatsbyjs.org Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules podcast. This is episode 88. I'm Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you're interested in accessibility, hey, this show's for you. Nic: To get today's show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice SMS and video at twilio.com. Nic: This week, I'm speaking to Amberley Romo. Thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility, Amberley. How are you? Amberley: I'm good. Thank you for having me. How are you? Nic: I'm good. I like to let guests introduce themselves. So, in a brief intro, who is Amberley Romo? Amberley: Of course. So, I'm a software developer based in Austin, Texas in the U.S. And I'm currently working on the Gatsby team, which is a React based framework for building fast websites and web apps. I touch a lot of different things, but I'm currently aligned with the learning team. Anything to do with the experience of learning about Gatsby, understanding what it is, how to use it. And we cross over a lot with developer relations, which is really fun. So, I get to talk to a lot of people and also the core team. So, in terms of supporting people in the main repo and building documentation as things change. I also recently started recording screencast lessons, so that's a new medium for me that's fun. I recently joined the ranks of podcast hosts like yourself. I recently started a podcast with a friend of mine called Fullstack Health. Nic: What's it called? Fullstack? Amberley: It's called Fullstack Health. Nic: Fullstack Health. Tell me a little bit more about that. Amberley: Yeah, it's about the projects and initiatives, things people are building in the tech health and wellness space, and also the health experiences of tech workers themselves. We're also trying to, for each longer episode, talk to an actual health professional on a topic that's adjacent to whatever we were covering in the first interview. Amberley: So, we found that there's a lot of fitness twitter in the dev community. And then, there's also a lot of conversations about mental health and wellness happening and those conversations don't overlap, don't tend to, at least a lot. So, we wanted to do something that sort brought the two topics under one roof. Nic: Awesome. I'll have to check that out. That sounds very interesting. Amberley: Yeah, we just started. So, we've got our first two episodes under our belt. Nic: No, I well remember my first two episodes and that was quite a big hill to climb in terms of a learning curve. But before you know it, you'll be at a hundred episodes and you'll be a grizzled veteran. Amberley: The hardest part is scheduling. Nic: Yes. Yes, indeed. Hey, Amberley, tell us one thing that most people would not know about yourself. Amberley: So, not accessibility related? Anything? Nic: Oh, anything that somebody would not know about you. Amberley: Well, this is kind of random, but one of my grandfathers recently passed, so it's been on my mind. Something that most people wouldn't know about me is that I have some really fun family history. On my mother's side are California pioneers, specifically Santa Cruz, California, back in the 1800's. And then on my dad's side, the Spanish side, there's a Catholic Saint, Santo Toribio Romo, who's known as the patron saint of immigrants. And then El Sid who's sort of a Spanish folk hero. Amberley: So, I don't personally know a ton of details about them, but both of my grandfathers before they passed were very interested in genealogy. So, they did a lot of research and interesting work. Nic: I'm sorry to hear about your loss, but I'm also fascinated to hear about your history because I was recently traveling through Wyoming and got a chance to see some of the Oregon trail, and California trail, and Mormon trail, and that was really fascinating history to visit. So, now you tie that up with back to present day and I like that. That's cool. Thank you. Amberley: Yeah. Nic: We're talking about web accessibility today. How would you define that? Amberley: So, I would define web accessibility as building for the web in ways that ensure it's usable by everyone. There aren't barriers to use for anyone. So, I would say it's about digital equal access, kind of along the same lines as physical equal access. So, just putting people at the center of building for the web. Nic: I like that. Putting the people at the center of building for the web. That's a very nice turn of phrase that I had not heard before. Nic: You told us a little bit about what you do at Gatsby. How does that roll in with accessibility? Day to day, what do you do accessibility wise? Amberley: Well, the day to day, I'm on the learning team which is primarily responsible for maintaining the docs and the learning pathways of the different topics around learning Gatsby. So, I would say the primary way is ensuring that those pathways are well thought out, the content is well-written, things are find-able to people. So, a lot in the area of content. Amberley: And then, also things like when I first joined, there wasn't a lot of focus on making the examples accessible or the starters. We have starter repos where someone can clone a project and get started. And we've put effort into making sure that our examples and our starter code and everything is accessible. Amberley: So, it sort of is more on the learning team, at least, I work with Marcy Sutton formerly of Deque, so we're trying to inject accessibility-minded thinking where we can across the whole team and especially, obviously in the learning area. Nic: That's quite fantastic because it's one of the things I keep telling people is how are people expected to learn about accessibility if none of the tutorials, and code samples, and examples out there include accessibility. People can't learn if it's not there. So, I love to hear that you folks are doing that with Gatsby. It's good news. Amberley: Right. And we also have the issue of, and this is just a general learning question, is we're a react-based framework. So, we always have to balance how much do you delve into teaching react versus teaching Gatsby? The same question I always have in my mind of, do you teach HTML? Do you teach CSS? Do you teach JavaScript? Do you teach accessibility? Amberley: And I think the opportunity with Gatsby is really interesting because a lot of entry level and early career people are using Gatsby to learn, which I really love. But I want to make it as supportive of an entree as possible. And I did a bootcamp, so I'm very aware of the gaps in all the different learning pathways, especially around accessibility, but also around things like HTML and CSS. Amberley: So, it's kind of a balance of how much can we, we can't teach everything, but we also don't want to be a part of persisting those gaps. So, I think there's a lot more we can do, for sure. Nic: I think it's a tough act to balance because in theory you shouldn't have to teach HTML, CSS, and the basics of JavaScript, but in practice, I think too many people that are doing development these days lack those skills. They lack that knowledge. It's certainly reflected in a lot of the audits I'm doing where basically HTML, CSS is not understood. Nic: So, I can see where you folks at Gatsby would have a tricky decision ahead of you as to how much of each you cover. Yeah, I know that leadership, especially through Jason is really interested in accessibility, but how's the shift to more of an accessibility mindset through everything, how easy is that to work on with all of the Gatsby team? Amberley: So, our team, in general, really wants to do the right thing. And the challenge there is that like any other really small team or sort of early team, we have the challenge of this whole array of priorities that we have to tackle. And so there's always more on your plate than you can tackle at any one time. So, it's not a matter of convincing people that it's important. People take our word for it. They're, yeah, we're on board, we get it. But it's that natural sort of challenge of, as an organization what you focus on. Amberley: And so I think the cool thing about it is that hiring Marcy, to me, was a big competence indicator that they supported it and they believe that it's important. And because, at that point, it was just me in the room saying this is important, I think we should do this. But having someone who's a really strong proven industry voice, that puts someone in the room who will consistently raise challenges and challenge people to to do things differently and do things better. So, having that kind of consistent. Amberley: I saw this tweet actually from Eric Bailey, I think maybe earlier this week or last week, on the accessible market being a continuum of support and not a binary state. And I think of teams in the same way, where it's a continuum of a process where you can't say everyone is 100% on or off accessibility. It's this continuous process of bringing it up, and working through it, and prioritizing it. Nic: I cannot do anything but agree with that. It's a little bit like people telling us, oh, my site is accessible and well yeah, maybe your site is mostly accessible now, but you can always do more. The web is an almost breathing, living thing, so it will change. There's not a start and end. Amberley: I see a lot of parallels sometimes with web performance, too. Because all it takes to put a dent in homepage performance is for someone who doesn't know any better to throw up a giant image that takes forever to download and that puts a dent in your web performance. Amberley: Same thing, you could have a fully audited, accessible site or page and maybe someone well-meaning goes and adds a feature, adds something that introduces inaccessibility to a formerly accessible page. And then, that's where the continuum support comes in, where you're constantly reevaluating and retesting where you are. Because the web is a breathing, living, changing thing. Nic: I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor Gatsby. Gatsby is a modern website framework that builds performance into every website by leveraging the latest web technologies. Create blazing fast, compelling apps and websites without needing to become a performance expert. Nic: So, you said you were pretty much the lone voice championing accessibility at Gatsby before Marcy came in. How did you become aware of web accessibility and how important it is? Amberley: First, I would say that it was through my initial interning experience with a disability nonprofit, but really that made me aware that I became aware of it earlier. Because, actually, when I was growing up, my sister has a genetic disorder called Angelman Syndrome. She's extremely expressive, but she's nonverbal. The only word she can say is Mama. She can make the "B" sound, also. Amberley: But anyway, when I was growing up, her method of communication was my mom would take a bunch of pictures, photographs of things, cut them out, laminate them, and stick Velcro on the back. She'd have baggies of topics, like a baggy for school, and a baggy for food, and different life areas. And she'd carry these Manila folders with Velcro strips pasted in them to stick these picture cards onto to form something she wanted to communicate to someone. Amberley: That was back in the early-mid nineties and as the sort of digital revolution happened, her communication methods changed really quickly. She had assistive communication devices made by DynaVox for awhile. We could customize what was on the screen, she could press it, and it would verbalize text to speech or really picture to speech. Amberley: Then the iTouch and later the iPad came out. And that was just a freaking revolution to my family. Because as expensive as the Apple devices were, especially at the time, they were still less expensive by a lot than these dedicated augmentative communication devices. And people were building communication apps for them like Proloquo. She still uses Proloquo on the iPad today. Watching her navigate an iPad, she intuitively interacts with touch devices. It's amazing. Amberley: So, that was my first inkling of, okay, tech and hardware design and everything is a game changer. Apple devices aren't just pretty to look at. Their design was actually changing the game in so many other important ways, particularly in this case around usability. So, she was the reason that I was inspired to seek out interning at an org that served people with intellectual and developmental disabilities or IDD. Amberley: So, that's why in college I interned and then later worked part time, and then full time, at the National Office of the Arc, which I don't know if you're familiar with, but it's a nonprofit that advocates for and provide services to people with IDD across the country. So, when I started off there, I wasn't working in the web area even though I'd been building sites for fun for a long time. Nonprofits don't have a ton of money to throw around, so the web department was never super robust. Amberley: But, there was someone who started working there while I was interning or part time interning I think, who was working on the web team and had just a deep personal curiosity and drive for making the web more accessible. He also has a sibling with a disability. He really bootcamped himself and taught himself a bunch on the job. Amberley: That person is Dave Kennedy who has been at Automatic now for the last three, four, five years. He was the one who really made me aware in terms of web accessibility. And he was actually really my first mentor on the web. He was very encouraging and made me realize that if I wanted to I could build a career building for the web. But, that's a different conversation. He was the first voice to turn on that light in my head about the importance of web accessibility. Nic: That's really interesting. I'd like to circle back a little bit to what you were saying about how the iPad revolutionized communication for your sister and your family. Have you seen or experienced how not only the Apple device is cheaper, but it's also less scary for people that don't know your sister to interact with because it's a device they actually know and are familiar with, as opposed to big clunky DynaVox. Is that something that you've experienced? Amberley: Oh my gosh. It's so funny that…

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E086 – Interview with Christopher Schmitt – Part 1 Jul 09, 2019

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Christopher says that for someone who likes Design so much, he didn't realize how important good color contrast was, and how bad color contrast issues are. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 86. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS, and video at Twilio.com. This week I’m speaking with Christopher Schmitt. Thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility, Christopher. How are ya? Christopher: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me. How are you doing? Nic: I’m doing good. We’ve been talking a lot on Slack through work and Twitter and all that but it’s good to have a dedicated discussion about accessibility and your background and interest in it. I like to let guests introduce themselves, so in a brief intro… who is Christopher Schmitt? Christopher: I am a designer, developer, author, speaker, event organizer, and beginning the accessibility work. I guess that's… it’s pretty… there’s a lot around. It’s pretty good. Nic: With all that do you have time to sleep? Christopher: No… I do not sleep at all, no. Nic: You do not sleep (laughing). Right...okay. So, you’re a little bit like a vampire then. Christopher: Yes. Nic: Yeah. Hey, um… let’s get warmed up. Tell me one thing that most people would not know about you. Christopher: I…. What would you think would be interesting… um… I… I don’t know. I’m a semi-secret Disneyphile. I like things about… I guess the parks of Disney. I guess that’s part of it. I like the theme parks and I like… I guess it kind of goes back to my family when my parents… my mom was a math teacher and my dad was a computer engineer. And so… and I had a big family and we lived in Florida so we would go to Disney a lot. And, we would go to Disney in a really strange way in which… I’m not sure how my parents got this… made this happen, but we would sit down the day before we would go to Disney and we would just map out the route of what everyone wanted to do. What all the kids wanted to do. We actually had a mutual understanding of what rides we wanted to do. Nic: Right Christopher: Then we would just conquer Disney that day and then it’s only later when I would go to see with other friends… they wanted the whole experience, you know? They wanted to go over here and see bands or see all of these side attractions and I’m like, no… it’s not the rides. But anyway… I lived in Orlando for a little bit and I used to go to the parks a lot during that time…. Nic: Right… yeah. Okay, so… roller coasters… woodies or metals? Christopher: I prefer with woodies, personally. But I do like how crazy metals can get. But there’s nothing more nerve-wracking than getting on a wooden roller coaster. I think that’s part of the edge. Nic: I’m in favor of wooden roller coasters as well … but anyway. Hey, we are talking about web accessibility, not coasters… how would you define web accessibility? Christopher: That’s a good question. I would probably define it as making… in terms of web, I would define it as making anything you put on the web open to everyone to use. Nic: Okay, so… make sure everything on the web is usable by everyone. Christopher: Right. Pretty much. Nic: Yeah. I like that because it doesn’t limit you to just people with disabilities or to… Christopher: No Nic: … or to screenreader users or something. Christopher: No, I mean like when I first started out in web design it was… I wish I had a really great definition for you… I wish I was just like, “here it is!” But, it’s still a great confusion to me when people separate usability from accessibility or like they define like there’s a difference between great usability and great accessibility. And, I mean there is some distinctions in there where I find that we can talk about how someone moves through a website. And we can talk about that in terms of usability but we just can’t leave behind anyone. And so I think that’s kind of like the narrative and I think that is a part of usability. It’s like yeah, we can get people from point a to point b but if we leave someone behind we are really failing the user experience. Nic: How did you become aware of web accessibility and it’s importance? Because you’ve been on the web for a while now. For… you can’t look at the history of the web and not bump into one of the many books you’ve written or conferences you’ve organized so when did you… when did it start twigging about accessibility? Christopher: I’m not really sure when it really happened. I just know that... I guess when you learn about the alt tag and what it’s importance was for. So I guess that’s from the beginning of the web. I guess. And I guess that’s when Netscape brought in images to the web and then we had… I’m not sure when alt tags became a thing. So, yeah. That’s when I knew about it. Nic: Yeah. Christopher: So… I’m an old person. Is basically what you’re trying to say. Nic, I appreciate that. Nic: Nah… Nah. No. We’re both, in terms of the web I think we’re both ancient but that’s alright. We at least know how to write HTML and CSS, right? Christopher: So, yeah. I mean... To answer your question, I feel like ever since I’ve known about it I’ve tried to incorporate it, accessibility into my work, into my books. And so, like, you know with what I mentioned earlier in one of the editions of my CSS Cookbook I wrote a chapter about HTML and that was… and how to write semantically. And so that… and so...and the goal of that chapter was to… was kind of multi-folded. The purpose of that one was if you don’t write clean HTML your CSS is going to be harder to write in order to apply the CSS roles to and, or, maintain. Right? So… Nic: Yeah. Christopher: Also, if you actually write with semantic and native HTML elements you’re going to make your site accessible. And so that’s… I just feel that that was part of it. Like you just want to rely on that. And, there was a period of time when, you know, beginning out with the web that I really disliked using innovational elements because I designed… I actually have a design degree. Nic: Right Christopher: I have an Arts degree actually so I have an Arts degree with an emphasis on design and so there was a period of time when I was like, it’s all about design and trying to break through this craft of this limited nature of the web. And, you know, HTML tables were laid out and that was a great idea. He says sarcastically… but...and so, it’s been a part of what it is. It hasn’t been a main focus in my career until now but it’s always been there and we always try to… my partner and I, when we did conferences we always make sure we’d have some accessibility in there or we would do online conferences that were just focussed on accessibility. So it’s always been part of it. It’s just … I just feel like it’s … now, I don’t know how you feel about it but I feel like now accessibility is a hotter topic and concern than it has been. Nic: Yeah I do think [cross talk 08:24] it’s becoming something that people are paying more attention to. Maybe because there are so many lawsuits and complaints about it. But I also think that there’s a large crowd of organizations that don’t even know what it means. I mean, I had a conversation with somebody at a conference a few months ago and when I said I’m an accessibility expert they kind of went, “Well, yeah, our sites are accessible. You know. You can get it on mobile, you can get it on desktop….” Not exactly what I meant. Christopher: You’re accessing it, you’re not making it accessible. Nic: Yeah Christopher: Yeah Nic: You started doing full-time accessibility work a few months ago. How has your view changed looking at accessibility now compared to what you were thinking about 5 years or maybe 10 years ago? Christopher: There’s just a lot of unknowns. There’s a lot I didn't know about accessibility. And, I would have conversations with Glenda whose a friend of mine, Glenda Simms and every once in a while if I had a question here or there. But, I felt like when I would talk to her I would feel like I would just get a little bit of insight into what’s going on and so now that I’ve come here to work I realized, like, wow. There’s just a lot of bad code out there and there's a lot of work that needs to be done in order to fix it. And, personally, for me just one color contrast I didn’t realize how pervasive of an issue that is. You can see that in WebAIM's One Million project and as someone who went to school and got an art degree, and likes design and color is really important to me… it’s just I feel like that was really shocking how bad it was on the web, in terms of color contrast issues. Also, how people use screenreaders is kind of new. I still feel like I know… I wish I knew what I know now before I joined up. Because I feel like that just opened my world up a lot more in terms of the issues that we have to deal with and people have to deal with in terms of... I mean, people who use screen readers are a very forgiving bunch because there are just a lot of bad websites out there... Nic: Yeah Christopher: ... and if you just meet them halfway in terms of creating a site I think they’ll be able to use your site a lot more but I wish I knew more about screen readers and how they worked before that. Nic: Yeah Christopher: And then, I know a lot of programmers who use keyboards for navigating the web, you know? They don’t want to use the mouse for whatever and they think they know how they’re making their sites keyboard accessible but still just tabbing and going through the motions. You know, there's a method of making sites keyboard accessible and they kind of miss that with like, focus order, reading order...so that’s something too… Nic: Yeah Christopher: And so that’s to lead into what I’m worried about next, is… Not that I worry about to the point I don’t sleep, I worry about is CSS Grid and flex order. You actually change the order of the content to make really funky designs, which, as a designer, I really love a lot but then I worry about accessibility and what that goes into. So that’s kind of…. Yeah, so there’s a lot of things I worry about. Nic: Yeah Christopher: I know about… I know a lot more than that but I'm not sure that answers your question, Nic. So, there you go. Nic: Place yourself in the shoes of the Christopher that you… that you were, say, 6 months or a year ago that knew a little bit about accessibility, that knew about alt attributes and that kind of stuff and, what advice would you give yourself now in terms of, you know, what should you be doing to learn about accessibility? What should you be paying more attention to? How would a developer that is vaguely aware of these things, how would you say they should go about improving awareness? Christopher: I think cold turkey, just try to navigate sites with a screen reader. And, you know, if you ever use a Mac you can just use voice over with Safari and make sure you use Safari. Just try a screen reader. If you just can’t do it then that should lead you… if you can’t actually navigate your site that should lead you to more issues and how to make it. Because I feel like… I mean, that just… I just… if you can make it work with a screen reader I think you’re golden. But, I think… also, I think just embrace native HTML. It’s a lot more… I feel like a lot of people just bypass HTML altogether and that’s… you know, I felt that way before I started in Knowbility but now I just… it’s like… yeah, you need to be using some native HTML. That’s for lists, headings, heading structure, basically, anything that was important in 1990s would go on that. In terms of semantic. I used to make a joke, it was like, “Hey, if you want me to show you how to build accessible…” oh, man. I forget what the joke was but it was just like if you want to build a … the joke now is, if you want to build an accessible website, here let me give you this web design book from the 1990s. Because I feel like… Nic: Yeah Christopher: Just like, I think Jeffrey Zeldman's book about building semantic, probably like his blue beanie book is probably still valid… Nic: Yeah Christopher: ...for the most part. So… and I’m pretty sure I wrote an HTML book back in the day that was accessible, so...yeah, so I think… but back to the point, it’s mostly about semantic, structures, making sure… I think that the tricky, that a lot of people get stuck on also is this rush to build this web, this phone app experience in browsers and trying to shoehorn where the web has never been. Right? Which is, the web is a great document sharing experience. It’s opened eCommerce, it’s made Amazon, Amazon… it’s done great things for everyone. It’s opened amazing doors. But, you know, just to try and get this great experience on your phone and shoehorn it into the website you’re going to have to make compromises and those compromises you might leave out people. Nic: Yeah Christopher: And, yeah. So…. Nic: So… do you think maybe the frameworks out there, Angular, React, View… you name it… do you think those have a responsibility towards the fact that a lot of developers don’t understand the basic of semantic HTML and you end up with tag soup? Christopher: Well, I mean, it’s like, are you as good as your tool? Or are you at the mercy of your tool in order to develop? I mean, you can build a really great website with a framework and I think I threw frameworks underneath the bus but I just feel like… you know… there’s this meme that went around and I lost it but it’s like there’s this person looking at staircase and the steps you need to take in order to become a Javascript developer….HTML, CSS, Javascript and then it was just up there….React. Right? And so the next step is… the first step the person takes is going to the React step on the stairs which is 7 stairs up. And there’s just this mad rush to get to… people to learn to code with the framework of your choice and so they bypass the basic understanding of that. I put together a boot camp once and it wasn’t my Bootcamp, the way I would’ve run it but we only had one day dedicated to HTML. And so… which was crazy, right? HTML is great, right? It’s so easy to understand. Pick up everyone, everyone’s having a great time. Day 2 is CSS and everyone's having a great time until they introduced HTML form elements and styling those HTML form elements. And then also, HTML form elements are really tricky if you’re just learning HTML the day before. They’re not like anything easy to understand. I remember when I learned them it was one of the hardest things to understand the concept of. Radio buttons versus checkboxes, right? Like, what are you talking about… Nic: Yeah Christopher: Why can I select only one radio button but like, checkboxes, I don’t understand… oh, that’s what… and then labels, and fieldsets and that semantic stuff. Yeah, so we just… I think people just don’t value how great HTML is and then how much work a browser can save developers by using native HTML elements. So … and there’s this big rush for people to learn JavaScript, and I don’t blame them. You know, it’s… you know, a verb is exciting. I think of HTML and CSS and JavaScript as like nouns for your HTML, adjectives are your CSS and verbs is your JavaScript and verbs are exciting. They’re the exciting part that gets things done. And so, you know, nouns are… just sit around the house. Nic: How do…

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E085 – Interview with Jessica Ivins – Part 2 Jun 22, 2019

Show notes

Jessica suggests that accessibility is a competitive advantage. The more people can use your product, the more likely they are to spend money on it. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 85. I'm Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you're interested in an accessibility, hey, this shows for you. To get today's show notes or transcript head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Nic: Twilio connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS and video at Twilio.com. In this episode, I'm continuing my conversation with Jessica Ivins. Last show was really good. Do check it out if you haven't already because we spoke about important stuff, but particularly around education and designers and how the Center Centre, where Jessica is working incorporates accessibility throughout the curriculum, rather than give one accessible classes somewhere less than the end of the program, like so many other schools do. So welcome back, Jessica. Jessica: Hello. Thanks for having me again. Nic: We finished last week talking about what your greatest achievement was. Let's start this week with what's your greatest frustration in terms of web accessibility? Jessica: My greatest frustration in terms of web accessibility? I would say, that's a good question. I have to think about that for a minute. I don't know that it's a frustration. One thing that's been on my mind lately is all of the... So I think there's a double-edged sword going on here. I think there are good things and bad things about this. But there've been a lot of attention lately in the past year or so in particular, about accessibility lawsuits and companies kind of having the CYA reactive measure to the commonality of lawsuits now. How they're doing across accessibility audits and they're trying to basically retrofit their designs because they're afraid of being sued. Jessica: While I think it's a good thing that lawsuits are raising awareness of accessibility, I also really hope that as the awareness is happening due to a legal reason, I hope that the awareness evolves and that more companies, especially not necessarily design professionals and developers, but the people above them. The people who have the power to make decisions and the people who control the money. I am hoping that what this kickstarts is that, those people in power start to see accessibility not as a liability and something that they have to comply with to keep from being sued, but more like a part of good design practice. Jessica: Because, as you know Nic, that when you make something accessible, you tend to make it more usable for everybody. So it's part of good design practice and part of just the right thing to do. I'm hoping that we start to see a shift now that, instead of lawsuits becoming more prevalent, that companies are trying to CYA and protect themselves. That maybe this will kick the snowball down the hill and as that snowball gets larger, more and more people, and especially people in the companies who have the power to make decisions and the power to spend money, will start to invest in accessibility. Jessica: Not because they're afraid of lawsuits, but because they want to produce great design that works well for their customers and brings in money, by the way. Because it's not just about making things that are easy to use, it's a competitive advantage. The more people can get done with your design and the more they can accomplish, the more likely they are to spend money on your product. Nic: It's this thing that, we were looking at accessibility from the legal compliance perspective or the business case perspective. But we also have to look at it from the corporate social responsibility, that more and more companies are starting to espouse. So I think that doing it because it's the right thing to do would be wonderful if that was the approach. Jessica: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah and we're starting to see... So there's this thing called design maturity, which you may or may not be familiar with. Design maturity, there are all sorts of design maturity scales that you can look up out there. There's articles about it and everything. Design maturity is essentially a way to measure an organization's investment and practice of design. Jessica: So there's usually a scale of one to four or a scale of one to five for design maturity, where one is basically the dark ages of design. Where design is just about making things pretty. All the way up through five and five is we have a mature design practice, we have a mature UX practice, we take accessibility seriously. We invest in accessibility because we understand that it's not just good for business, that is good for people and it's not just a liability, it's a benefit. We have a robust user research practice because UX and accessibility are very, very closely related. Jessica: So anyway, you have the scale of maturity on a scale of one to five and there's more and more executives, in talking about the people in power and large organizations, are starting to see the value of design. It used to be that UX designers had to go out of their way and bend over backwards to prove their worth. Jessica: Now, that's becoming less of a thing and more people at the top, VP's, even executives, are bought into design. So I think as we see the maturity continue to grow across organizations, I think understanding of accessibility will grow with that. And again, that people will start to see accessibility as a benefit to the business and not just something that they have to do to prevent lawsuits from happening. Nic: Jessica, what do you think the number one reason is for most people to fail... to succeed at implementing accessibility? Jessica: I was just reading an article about this, this morning. I'm guessing that it's just lack of awareness or lack of skills. I read this article this morning that made me laugh out loud and it said, most developers don't wake up in the morning going, "Okay, I'm going to go to work today and I'm going to build something that 20% of the population can't use." Right? Jessica: I mean, I don't know anybody who does that. I don't know any designers who do that. Right. "Well, I'm going to design something that people who are colorblind or people who have low vision can't use because that's my goal." I really don't think that that's happening. For the most part, I think folks just don't have the skills and the experience that could really benefit their ability to make things accessible. Jessica: Again, that's what excites me about our program at Center Center so much, like I was telling you about in our previous interview, because we do bake accessibility throughout the courses in our curriculum. We are now taking advantage of this time we have in between cohorts of students to take another look at the curriculum, take a deeper dive and look for opportunities where we could bake it an even further. So that as our students learn to be designers, they're just applying accessibility at every step and it just becomes normalized. It becomes just as important as user research. It becomes just as important as knowing how to prototype. Just as important as knowing how to write good content and all of these other skills that students have. Jessica: It's just something that happens every step along the way, where it just becomes part of what you do, rather than something you have to go out and figure out on your own or hope that somebody else takes care of or try to remember only at certain points when you're coding or when you're making the visual design. It's just something that you apply to every decision you make. Nic: What would you say the greatest challenges for the field of accessibilities are moving forward, looking down the road, five years, 10 years down the road? Jessica: Yeah. I think it's going to be equipping everybody on the team to have that broad knowledge and to know how to bake accessibility into all the decisions that they make. I think it's awesome now. I'm seeing more and more companies have a dedicated accessibility expert on the team and I think that's awesome. At the same time, I don't think one person can do it all, right? Jessica: Because one person can't be in every meeting, they can't be involved in every decision. So for example, I have a friend who now just focuses on accessibility and she was a user researcher for a long time and she works at a large financial company. She works on a very large team that works on lots of different products in the financial company and she's the one accessibility person. Jessica: So if she's out on vacation or if she's not in a certain meeting or whatever, decisions are being made without accessibility kept in mind. I'm sure, knowing her, that she's doing the best to equip her team and spread her knowledge and spread the skills. At the same time, I think if the organization isn't invested into spreading that knowledge around, I think they might just depend on this one person. While having that one person is awesome and that's a great start, I don't necessarily think it's enough to make sure that the broader team is equipped to make good decisions about accessibility. So I'm hoping that, that begins to change going forward. Nic: That would be awesome. I think perhaps that requires a complete paradigm shift for everybody out there or just about everybody. I mean, some companies are already doing the accessibility dance at every step of a project and they even have a accessibility mindset, accessibility culture. But most of them I think, are barely on the stage of even having an accessibility champion, a dedicated one. So how do we make that paradigm shift happen? How do we convince a bunch of companies, government corporations, small agencies, to think accessible? Other than obviously, the good work you're doing at the school. Jessica: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I think there's lots of different ways to tackle it. I mean, we talked earlier about the fear of lawsuits. Which, that's not my go to approach. Like, "Hey, CEO, make this accessible, so you don't get sued." I mean, that might actually get the CEO's attention because I guarantee you the CEO doesn't want his company to be sued or her company to be sued. Jessica: But again, that brings me back to what I was saying earlier, where accessibility is not just about a legal liability. It's about making good business decisions and making good designs that will support the business. So I think there are a couple of different ways to approach it. One could be starting, by hiring an accessibility specialist. Jessica: Now, like I said earlier, I don't think it's the best way to address the problems, but I think it's a great start, right? If the company's willing to pay one person a salary to focus on accessibility, then that's a great start. Another thing that I've seen done in large-ish organizations, I haven't seen this done at the enterprise level, but 100, 200 person-level organizations, where you just kind of start small and you find allies. Jessica: People who believe in accessibility and are invested in accessibility. When you're working with them on a project, you put a lot of time and energy into working together as a team on how to make this project accessible. So it could be one feature that you're working on. I think if you start doing that and you get a small group of people invested, it'll kind of have the ripple effect. The next time you work on a project, let's say there was four of you who worked on this one project and you took a really deep dive into accessibility and shipping this feature that was accessible as you could get it. Jessica: Now, the next project that you work on, the four of you are going to be even more equipped to make the next project accessible because you've already been focusing on it. As you spread out and work on different projects with more people, you can spread that knowledge to them and it kind of has this ripple effect and grows from within. And I've seen that be really effective before in organizations because it kind of happens from the bottom up and it takes time, obviously. You can't do this overnight. Jessica: But eventually, VPs and executives and directors, they start to catch wind of this and they start to see it happening and they see, "Oh, this is actually a great for business because these new features that are shipping, they are usable by our customers with limits." So I used to work somewhere where we had a customer support team and when we did focus on accessibility and ship new features or update features and address accessibility concerns, we had fewer calls coming into the call center. Jessica: So again, that's a way to measure success, right? I mean, that'll get a CEO's attention. If you're getting a bunch of calls because your design's unusable and therefore, probably inaccessible. But you address the usability and the accessibility issues, then you're saving costs because people aren't calling in about the problem anymore. But you can start to see change happen in that way or even not necessarily the call center example, but a CEO or a VP seeing that, "Wow, we've shipped this and it's really easy to use and we're actually getting more conversions than we were with the previous feature." Jessica: Chances are, because it's easy to use, it's probably more accessible and so on and so forth. So it just kind of grows. I don't necessarily think it's an overnight thing. If you're at a small startup and you're in the really early stages and somebody with a lot of accessibility knowledge comes on, I think you can enact change pretty quickly at that point. Jessica: But not in a larger organization and not... I mean, I've worked in organizations before where it felt like pushing a boulder up a hill. I started small and I did my best and this one particular organization, by the time I left, there was much more awareness about accessibility and there was at least more effort. Developers and engineers, in particular, were starting to think about it more and include it in their practices. So I was really proud about that. Jessica: So I made it better. There's no such thing as a perfectly accessible and inclusive design. I don't know of any, if they're already out there. But we can still strive for the best that we can do and if we can get it 80% accessible and inclusive, that's better than the vast majority of designs out there. We can always just strive to do the best we can and then during the next iteration strive to do even better. Nic: Yeah. I often talk with people that tell me, "Oh, I can't make my site comply a 100% with WCAB." And I tell them, "Nobody can." The idea is to open as many doors as possible, but there's always going to be a barrier somewhere for somebody. So we shouldn't abandon the idea of implementing accessibility because we can't get everyone through the door at the same t…

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E084 – Interview with Jessica Ivins – Part 1 Jun 15, 2019

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Jessica and I ponder whether low-literacy could be considered a disability, and regardless of the answer, that factor needs to be taken into account when designing sites and content. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the accessibility rules podcast. This is episode 84. I’m Nic Steenhout, and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility hey, this shows for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS, and video at Twilio.com. This week I’m speaking with Jessica Ivins. Hey, Jessica. Thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility Jessica: Sure, Nic. Thank you for having me Nic: I like to let guests introduce themselves. So, in a brief intro, whose Jessica Ivins? Jessica: Sure. I’m a faculty member at Center Centre, the UX design school here in Chattanooga, Tennesse in the US, and we offer a 2-year full-time program that offers you as a student to be an industry ready designer. So you attend school for 2 years. We model the work… school environment more like a work environment, so you’re in school Monday through Friday, 9-5. About two-thirds of your time is spent working on real-world projects. So, by the time you graduate you have almost 2 years of experience, and you have a portfolio, and you are industry ready, and prepared to get a job. Nic: That sounds fantastic. We’ll probably talk a little bit more about that, but, one of my pet peeves is that so many design and development courses don’t cover accessibility. Is this part of the curriculum at Center Centre? Jessica: Yes, for sure. Accessibility is a big part of what we do. And, back in the beginning when we were designing the school. So, we are a relatively new school, and we built the program from scratch. And, back in the beginning, we were talking about how we wanted to include accessibility in the curriculum, and how wanted students to learn about it because we knew it was important. We wanted to make sure that it wasn't an afterthought. We wanted to make sure that it was part of what the students did at all times. And, that’s when we arrived at the conclusion that, you know, we have 24 core courses throughout the 2-year program, and instead of making one of those courses an accessibility course we decided to infuse accessibility throughout the program, so that students learn how to make design decisions that factor in accessibility throughout each stage of the design project. Nic: I love that. You need to go and speak to every single computer science and design outfit out there in the world and sing that gospel. That’s fantastic... Jessica: Yeah. Go ahead, go ahead Nic: … yeah, no, I was just going to say I normally get people warmed up by asking them to tell us one thing that most people would not know about you. So, is there something that most people would not know about you? Jessica: Yeah, you know, this is a fun one. So, Center Centre, the school where I’m a faculty member, we were originally known as the Unicorn Institute. We called ourselves the Unicorn Institute before we were authorized by the state on Tennessee to officially call ourselves a school, but, before we got that authorization we wanted a way to talk about ourselves so we were known as the Unicorn Institute. And, back when I applied to be a faculty member here at Center Centre we were still known as the Unicorn Institute, and it was so funny that I got the job here to my parents because I was the girl who loved Unicorns growing up. As a little girl, I just drew Unicorns all the time, movies with unicorns in them I watched over and over again. I just loved unicorns. And, then when I tried to tell my parents with a straight face that I got a new job in Tennesse at the Unicorn Institute they were… “What?” they thought I was joking. They didn’t realize I was serious, so that’s a fun fact about me. That I ended up working at a school that used to be called the unicorn Institute and I was the girl who loved Unicorns. Nic: Oh that’s awesome. That’s just awesome. So, we’re talking mostly about web accessibility, how would you define that? Jessica: Sure, so, we kind of see accessibility as a holistic thing. So, we see it as making… this is what our students learn. Our students learn accessibility is about making your design usable and open to as many people as possible. And, we also talk about inclusivity as well. So we talk about inclusion versus accessibility with the students, and we have lots of conversations as they’re very closely related. Almost 2 sides of the same coin. Inclusivity is more the principle or the mindset of thinking constantly about how can I make sure that people with a disability or people using a non-conventional device or people in a less than ideal situation can use my content, can use my design, and accomplish what they need to accomplish. And, the accessibility is more like the tactical end. So, that’s more like the implementation. Like, okay, we want somebody blind to be able to use this design so what kind of tactical implementation can we put into the design to make that possible. Where the inclusivity part is more thinking ahead, thinking holistically about how can somebody who is blind or how can somebody who has limited cognitive disability… how can these people use my design and accomplish what they need to accomplish. Nic: Yeah, it’s an interesting distinction that. Jessica: Yeah. You know, we have a lot of conversations about it and there's been some folks who have written some great stuff on the distinction and I just love how they work together very well because accessibility I think a lot of people can get a very… I don’t know if fixed mindset is the right word or just a very narrow view of accessibility where accessibility is about screen readers. So, we need to make sure our code is compliant and that a screen reader can understand the design and read it aloud to the person who is blind, and that is important but screen readers, and designing for people who are blind is only a part of accessibility . There’s so much more to accessibility there are cognitive limitations that you need to consider, low literacy… here in the US, the statistics are pretty staggering about how many people walk around and get through their day who are low literacy. So we need to make sure our content is written in simple and plain language that’s easy to understand. We also need to think about somebody with a cognitive limitation like somebody who is on the autism spectrum, so they process information differently from somebody whose not on the spectrum. So, how can we open up all of these designs and make them accessible and usable to a diverse population with different needs. Nic: I find it interesting that you bring up low-level literacy. Would you say low-level literacy is a disability? Jessica: I don’t know that it’s necessarily a disability. It could be due to a disability. It could be a cognitive limitation you have. Like a learning disability. It could be a result of lack of access to education. There could be lots of reasons for it. But, I just know as a designer, I think what’s important for … and what my students learn is that there's a significantly high percentage of the population who has low literacy so how do you make… how do you open up your content and make it understandable to them? And, we talk with our students about using simple language, using language that the user understands, so, for example, years ago when I was at a different job I was working on a redesign of a hospital website and the main audience for the hospital website was patients and caregivers. So, we actually found during user research that the term heart doctor was much easier to understand for most people than cardiologist. Even though cardiologist is the accurate medical term for a doctor who works with patients on their heart, a heart doctor was much more understandable. So, it’s things like that that are really eye-opening and that help you understand how to make your content as useful and understandable to people as possible. And, a lot of push back that I get when I talk about simplifying content is that people think that you’re dumbing it down. They think, why would I dumb down content for some of my audience or maybe even most of my audience has a college-level degree, so they can read college-level writing so why should I dumb my content down? And my response to that is, it’s not about dumbing it down, it’s about opening it up to all of your customers and all of your users so that they can understand it. And, when you use simple language, even if somebody does have a high reading level… let’s say they have a college degree and they can understand larger words and more jargony words… if you make that language simple for them it’s easier for them to understand because there less cognitive processing that they have to do in order to really understand the content. Nic: Yeah. Jessica, what do you think is the designer's responsibility in making sure developers code accessible pages? Jessica: So, I would say as a designer in terms of coding accessible designs, I’m a big believer in knowing how to code as a designer gives you huge advantages. Now, if you ever want to get somebody riled up in the UX field, ask them, should UX designers know how to code? Because there's lot’s of strong opinions about this. People, are, you know, either they go one way or the other and I’ve seen people get really heated up about this. But, the way I see it is the more you know as a designer the more equipped you are to understand your medium and produce better designs. So, as a designer, if you know how code works then that gives you a literacy and a way… and understanding and you can then work with developers on… you know… collaborating on how to make the code as accessible as possible. Whereas if you’re a designer who doesn’t know how to code and you are working with developers and you are trying to figure out having conversations with them about how to make the design accessible, it’s going to be very difficult for you because you don’t have that knowledge of the medium. So, I think it’s a huge advantage for UX designers who know how to code. I know I started in the industry as a frontend developer, years and years ago. I was a frontend developer for about four years or so before I moved into UX design. Probably even longer because I was coding a lot in College before I got my first job after college. But, I’m so grateful that I have that background because coding has changed a lot since then but the basics are still the same and I can look at front-end code and I can understand what it’s doing, what it’s attempting to do and I can have conversations with developers. I know what ARIA rules are, I know what all sorts of things are so that, you know, if you put me in front of a text editor and said “code this thing and we are going to launch it into production today” that I wouldn’t be the best person to do that, but because I have the literacy and the understanding of the code I’m much more equipped to talk with developers in making accessible code. And, again, going back to our program at Center Centre that’s why we have so many courses, and we do have at least 2 courses that are focused on front-end development so that our students graduate as well rounded UX designers who know how to code. They’re not front-end developers but they know how to code, they understand it, and they can work with developers. Nic: It’s funny, it reminds me of my days when I was younger, still a teen, I was studying to be a chef. And, part of our classes were how to do front room wait staff. We had to learn about that to understand what went into the role of a waiter and, I think it’s the same approach you folks are taking where having the tools really solidify your ability to actually accomplish your work well. Jessica: Yeah, I think what you’re talking about sounds like getting a well-rounded education in what it’s like to run a restaurant and to work a restaurant. Right? Just not just in the kitchen but outside of the kitchen, and we strive similarly, we strive for that with designers. You know, what is it like to work with copywriters, as a student here you have a whole class on copywriting and content strategy. And, we’re not producing you to be… we’re not training you to be a content strategist but we are training you to be able to write good content, and also give you the knowledge that you need to work with copywriters, and know why they do the things they do, work with content strategists, know why they do the things they do…. So yeah, it’s… we are big fans of producing generalists here. That’s what we’ve designed our program to do. And then our students go off and they graduate and most of them get generalist positions but if they want to specialize later they can. But, at least if they specialize later in their careers they’ll have that well-rounded foundation and they’ll understand all the different aspects that go into UX design. Nic: Yeah….. How did you become aware of web accessibility and it’s importance? Jessica: I would say it probably started back when I was a front-end developer just learning about...you know it really started with screenreaders because I think that’s where a lot of people start. That tends to be the focus, or that tends to be the place people go when you think about accessibility and, it started there, and then throughout my career it’s something that I continue to keep in mind and I continue to try to work toward. But, it wasn’t until I got to Center Centre and I was building the curriculum here where I realized all the opportunities you have to really infuse accessibility into the work you do every day. There are far more opportunities to apply it to your work than the more obvious opportunities like frontend development with coding and making it accessible to screenreaders. Or, there's some more obvious opportunities as well with visual design. So, making sure that you use sufficient contrast with text on the background, making sure that you don’t rely on color to convey information in case somebodies color blind…. So on and so forth. There are a lot of resources about that but there’s also some…. I guess less prevalent ways to infuse accessibility into your design. So, speaking of which, we are, at Center Centre, we are between student classes right now so we are using this time to take an opportunity to take a deep dive into the curriculum and look at places where we can infuse accessibility even more than where we have already infused it. And, we have already found a few interesting opportunities. We have a course on critique, so how to give and receive a critique of design work and we hadn’t infused accessibility in there. So we looked for opportunities and we decided right now we’re talking about, so we are accompanied schools, so you don’t get letter grades here. It’s pass,fail. So you basically have to do all the things on the checklist in order to meet the requirements for the course. So we are adding actually things in that checklist that say when you are presenting your design work for critique make sure that you set … make sure that you request feedback about the accessibility of your design. And, also set expectations about what feedback that you want. So, if you’re presenting content that you’ve written and you would like feedback about the accessibility you’re not going to be really focussed on, can a screen reader read this because y…

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E083 – Interview with Stephanie Walter – Part 2 May 27, 2019

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Stephanie Walter says there’s a lot of things she thought everybody knew about accessibility that actually not a lot of people knew. So, she thinks in general people know that somewhere on the internet some people are blind. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules podcast. This is episode 83. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS, and video at Twilio.com This week I’m continuing my conversation with Stephanie Walter. We had a great chat last week, spoke about all kinds of things including the differences between regulations in Europe and North America, and Stephanie was telling us how she managed to use the color yellow in her portfolio and keep it accessible. So, that was kind of interesting. Stephanie, welcome back. Stephanie: Hey Nic: We were talking last week about really positive stuff. Let’s look at something that might be fun but also can show a little bit of the problems with accessibility. What would be your greatest frustration in terms of web accessibility? Stephanie: Generally it's the lack of knowledge. And, like, design decisions you can change. For instance, when you arrive on a project and they use this really pretty but super like, green or orange color. And, you’re like, okay I’ll have to deal with that. And, then the client really wants to see this color because it’s the color for the graphical identity. So they kind of expect that if for instance, the color of their graphical identity is orange or light green they expect the call to action to be in this color, and things like that. But, if you want a call to action with an orange color you end up with having dark text on it which is cool for Halloween… but not super fun for the rest of the year, you know? Nic: Yeah Stephanie: So when you have to deal with these kinds of things… sometimes you can cheat a little bit. Sometimes, for instance, I add, like, this visual identity with different shades of grey, and they were using one which was called light grey, as a text on white background. And, you wouldn’t pass the contrast ratio. What I did, I just changed the grey because I knew that nobody was going to check this. So, it was on internal products. It wasn’t like something that was going to be public on the stores, and things like that. Because I think you can’t do that, for instance, you have marketing people checking in every color. But, this was for an internal product, so, I kind of took the liberty. I asked the project owner and we decided to do it together, and I said “yeah, I’m going to change a little bit the grey so it will pass the contrast ratio. It will be easier to read. If you need to kind of go top and down all of the different level of hierarchy to manage to change your grey or change it, nobodies going to notice.” Nic: Yeah Stephanie: So, for somethings sometimes you get lucky. Especially in, like, internal projects they don’t really care. But, if you’re working for other companies with, like, super light colors or things like that… Nic: Yeah Stephanie: … it can be really, really, really frustrating. And, also, like, another thing is when you arrive at the beginning of the project and they’re like, “yeah, we don’t care about accessibility“ and you tell them it’s a legal requirement and you insist and you insist but at some point you need to know, also, how to pick your battles. Nic: Yeah Stephanie: I’m usually like...if I warned you 3 times I consider that as a consultant I did my job. So if you’re still want to go against my advice, in the end, you’re the client. So, I’m not going to force you and what happens is like, 3 years later the client comes back and complains because someone arrived and said yeah, this isn’t accessible. You’re supposed to be accessible and you’re like, “yeah, told you so” la la la la la. Nic: Yeah Stephanie: And then the issue with that is that you have to correct all the accessibility issues of the website. And, usually, it’s the worst because you should do it from the start and you put it into your process, usually it doesn’t cost that much money, but if you had someone that built a whole website and then you need to fix all the code to make it accessible… Nic: Yeah Stephanie: … that’s when it’s going to cost you a lot of money. Nic: How do you protect yourself as a consultant against these kinds of clients that don’t want to know a thing, and then, you know, 2, 3 years later come back and they say “hey, we got sued and we have complaints and it’s all your fault.” How do you document that so you can really protect yourself? Stephanie: In Europe, like, not in the UK, I know there were legal suits in the UK, that’s why I’m saying in Europe. But, I haven’t heard of a country in like France, Luxembourg, Germany, Belgium, where there was a legal suit because of accessibility issues. I’ve heard this in the US, like, have actions. So, that’s maybe another thing. It’s like the threat isn’t real so they don’t really care but what we usually do is like first I do an email, then I escalate it to the manager and usually, it’s the manager or project deliverer… someone higher in the hierarchy who is sending the email. Nic: Right Stephanie: At some point it’s like, you keep the emails and you have someone say, “Okay, this is what our expert told you. If you don’t want to do it, well we won’t do it.” But, yeah, have like email and things like that to make sure a few years later you can say, “Yeah, but this isn’t our fault.” Or even contracts, I don’t think you can sign a contract to say you don’t want it to be accessible. Nic: Yeah Stephanie: That one reaction is awful. Nic: Yeah Stephanie: But, I have signed documents. I know designers who do that. When their client wants to do something they don’t really agree with or they’re afraid it’s going to backfire they make them sign a document telling that it’s the client's responsibility if something happens. Nic: What do you think is the conventional wisdom about accessibility? You know, the one thing that everybody knows about accessibility? Stephanie: Wow. There’s a lot of things I thought everybody knew about accessibility that actually not a lot of people knew. So, I think in general people know that somewhere on the internet some people are blind. That’s kind of level zero so they acknowledge the fact that there's blind users. But, that’s pretty much it. They… I don’t think most of the people kind of understand the range and spectrum of different disabilities. They see blind people because they kind of, I think, in their mind understand that someone who is blind can’t process a website in the same way. But, even that there’s some misconception. I remember there was an article… I don’t remember if it’s Buzzfeed or something else, it was basically, like, top ten fails and one of those fails for them was a blind girl, she had a cane, and she was looking at a phone screen. It was like, ha ha ha blind people don’t use a phone screen… yes! They do! Nic: Yeah, I remember that. Stephanie: It was awful and backfired. But, that's the thing. There are so many misconceptions. And even with like, blind people, I studied languages with someone who was blind. Everybody assumed he couldn’t see anything because he had a cane. He could see things, he just needed to have examiner events in a super big font so he could read it. If he put it pretty close to his eyes he could read it. So, even that. Like, it’s not black or white, it’s not like… even for blindness, like people understand some people are blind but they might not imagine that even there-there are a huge variety of disabilities. Nic: I think the misconception is definitely something that is a problem, you know? Stephanie: It’s the same for wheelchairs. I knew someone who, I don’t remember the name of the syndrome but she’s super exhausted. So, sometimes she needs a wheelchair to rest because she can’t walk but the issue is she can stand… well, not the issue but for the people around she can use her legs so when they see her standing up and going out of the wheelchair but they don’t know her, it’s the same thing. Like, “oh, you’re not really disabled,” yes she is. She can’t stand up for 15 minutes otherwise she will be exhausted so she needs the wheelchair, but, just because she's in a wheelchair doesn’t mean she can’t sometimes use her legs. So, it’s kind of the same issue. Nic: Yeah Stephanie: People imagine the extreme… They imagine it's like black or white. And, they can’t really… they usually don’t see what’s in between, and that’s the complicated thing about accessibility I think. Nic: What do you think the number one reason is for most people to fail at succeeding in implementing web accessibility? Do you think that’s the issue of misconception or something else? Stephanie: They just maybe don’t know. It’s the same for my developer who didn’t know that they could link the label to the input in your form and add it. So they… once you’ve told them they will do it because it’s kind of easy and doesn't cost a lot of time to do that. But, most of the time they just don’t know, and they also might not know where to look for information. I had someone ask me about the accessibility of native apps. And, frankly, I didn’t know where to look. I checked little bit US guidelines… Nic: Yeah Stephanie: ...but, it was a React app… Nic: Yeah Stephanie: .. to be honest, I’m so much used to frameworks not caring about accessibility that I didn’t think about checking The React documentation for accessibility guidelines. And, actually, they have a page on accessibility. But, I’m so used to frameworks doing whatever they want and not caring that’s… yeah… looking at the documentation of the framework wasn’t the first thing I thought about. And someone on Twitter was actually like, “React has a really nice page on accessibility “ and I was like, “yeah, that makes sense.” Nic: Yeah. That’s interesting because I’m also a little bit like that where I think frameworks are indeed doing whatever it is they want and not necessarily caring. Or, perhaps not really knowing… I don’t know if it’s a lack of care but I would not have.. My first reaction would not be going to look at the documentation for the framework. Stephanie: Yeah Nic: Yeah… What do you think the greatest challenges are for the field of web accessibility moving forward? Stephanie: Making people care about it enough to build accessible frameworks. I’ve got another issue, it’s like I’ve certain times read tutorials on React or Angular and stuff like that and the code isn’t accessible. Like, a simple form isn’t accessible. And, then you tell the author and they’re all like, “Yeah, but this tutorial is about the javascript, not the HTML. If you want an accessible HTML you can add your forms and your ideas.” I’m like, “Yeah, I can. But, the issue is like, a lot of people learn by copy-pasting code so if you’re writing a tutorial with non-accessible code you are kind of spreading these… not misconception but you have a lot of developers who will learn by copy-pasting this code, and yeah, it’s totally normal to not know how to bind a label with an input if you’ve never seen it in any tutorial. Nic: Yeah Stephanie: It’s silly but it’s the same for CSS tutorials. When someone is writing a tutorial again… I think I have an issue with forms on the web because this is where I see the things you could really, really quick fix. And they don’t do it. So, it’s the same as in this article and the CSS was amazing and then someone in the comments just told the person to add the right attributes into the form, and the author was like, “yeah but this is about CSS” and, yeah… same answer. Okay, but people will copy-paste your HTML as well. Nic: Yeah. That is a problem. I think education in a computer science degree’s and definitely tutorials all over the place, that don’t include accessibility, will cause a long term problem. Stephanie: Yes Nic: If you weren’t a designer what profession would you like to do? Stephanie: I don’t know. Hair colorist Nic: Hair Colorist. Stephanie: Yeah Nic: Would you use yellow and orange as well in hair coloring? As you did in your portfolio? Stephanie: Yes. It’s actually my current color is like purple, pink, orange and yellow. Nic: People can see you come from a distance. Stephanie: Yeah. But it’s a nightmare because when you wash them it kind of merges and mixes. Sometimes it bleeds out, like, the purple is especially annoying one and bleeds on the yellow one. So, yeah, I think I will have also a lot of issues with hair color. Not the same one as a web designer but still. But, it is fun, you can do a lot of stuff with hair color. Nic: Who inspires you, Stephanie? Stephanie: A lot of people. I follow a lot of people on Twitter and, yeah, usually. I don’t know. I’m really bad at names. I can see the avatars but not the names. I’m sorry. Nic: That’s okay. A lot of people inspiring you, that’s fine. So, let’s wrap up with one, perhaps critical, question. If there was one thing people should remember about accessibility what would it be? Stephanie: It will cost you a lot of money if you do it at the end of the project, so do it at the beginning of the project. Something like that Nic: Yeah, that’s a good thought. I like that. Thank you. Stephanie Walter, thank you for being such a great guest and I will see you around on the internet. Stephanie: Yeah, sure. Thank you for having me. Nic: Thanks for listening. Quick reminder, the transcript for this, and all other shows are available on the show's website at https://a11yrules.com. Big shoutout to my sponsors and my Patreons, without your support I couldn’t not continue to do the show. Do visit Patreon.com/Steenhout if you want to support the Accessibility Rules podcast. Thanks you.

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E082 – Interview with Stephanie Walter – Part 1 May 24, 2019

Show notes

Stephanie Walter tells us that designers should provide a roadmap to their design for the developer, but in many projects, there just isn't time to do that. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules podcast. This is episode 82. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS, and video at Twilio.com. This week I’m speaking to Stephanie Walter. Stephanie, thanks for joining me for this conversation about web accessibility. Stephanie: Hi, thanks for having me. Nic: I like to let guests introduce themselves. So, in a brief introduction who is Stephanie Walter? Stephanie: Oh. So I’m a user experience designer currently based in Luxembourg. I’m super interested in a lot of things, especially mobile design and also a little bit of accessibility. Otherwise, I like to travel a lot and give conferences all over the world. I teach at the University. I do a lot of things. I also have a blog with a few articles on it. And, yeah. That’s pretty much it. Nic: You’re juggling a lot of different things. Stephanie: Yeah. Nic: So, let's get warmed up, and, to get started tell me something most people would not know about yourself. Stephanie: A few people might know it now because I put this into a conference description but I actually designed a crane monitoring application. Which is kind of super weird. And, also I really really enjoy not design. Like a lot of designers want to do this really nice cute things. I kind of enjoy designing supercomplex forms, tables, things like that. I had once to redesign a form that was automatically generated using a SVG file and it was a form with seven levels so you could have box into box into box into box. You could have until seven different levels of reusable and editable components in this form. It’s for customs and taxations form. But, yeah. I had a lot of fun doing that. Nic: You know, that sounds like a great challenge. Stephanie: Yeah Nic: It’s one of the things I talk with people a lot and they tell me, “Hey, Nic. Accessibility is so difficult. It’s such a chore” but you seem like you’re actually tackling it like as I tell people, you like a challenge. Look at it as a challenge. Stephanie: True Nic: What was the biggest challenge in making that form work from an accessibility perspective? Stephanie: Ah, I only designed it so I didn’t do the HTML and CSS. But already from... Nic: Okay Stephanie: ...from an accessibility perspective, for instance, like error messages, they were in red and that was pretty much it so the difference between an error message and information message because they also like this for taxations. So, we have a lot of different information messages and the only thing that was differentiating those two messages was the color. So between blue and red which is already an issue… Nic: Oh yeah Stephanie: So even that kind of thing. It was a quick fix, we just added a little icon, a different one for the real errors and another one for information. Nic: Right Stephanie: But that was like, big improvements already, and like, information architecture. So, this is more about visual information but basically one of the biggest issues at the beginning is when you have seven different levels you weren’t quite sure in which level you were. So, really having a visual with also like the developer did a lot of things to have an information architecture that let people understand on what level they are. It was quite the challenge. I ended up printing the form on A4 sheets and went with a ruler and tried to put those lines on top of the form to understand indentation and tried to make sure the current information was put together. It was crazy. I don’t know how long the form was but… yeah. It was fun. Nic: Excellent. So the primary purpose of our chat today is web accessibility and every person I speak to seems to have a slightly different definition. How would you define web accessibility? Stephanie: Making sure it works for as many users as possible with different disabilities. Also, different context. Like, make sure that you build a website that isn’t going to be an issue for some of your users. So, like, try to not put more fences than there is already in some technologies. Don’t make it worse, because, I think there was this fucking webpage website that was basically a webpage without any CSS, without any Javascript. Just text. And they were like, “yeah this is responsible, usable and accessible “ I’m not… I don’t 100% agree with the usable because since you didn’t have a container the number of characters were line dependent on your browser size. But, still, the idea was to say to people, yeah look, by default whatever you put in the browser is kind of responsive, accessible and we with our technology break that. It is easy to do because it was just so many, like, text. If you start playing around with forms and all of those supercomplex content, of course, it gets a little bit more messy. But, the idea behind was quite interesting, saying okay, we have the tool to build something that works and isn’t broken but sometimes we add some extra layer of whatever technology and we break it. Usually not on purpose. Nic: Yeah, usually not on purpose but often out of ignorance I think Stephanie: Yeah. But that’s the thing. I’m not a frontend developer but I know about HTML like Semantic HTML because of my background, and sometimes I have to fight just to have a label linked to the input. Into the forms. Like, I’m not talking about fancy ARIA stuff, things refreshing on the pages, complex repeatables, form elements… I just want to have a label linked to the input and because… yeah, this is important for accessibility but it also adds usability to be able to actually be able to touch the long label instead of sometimes those little checkboxes or things like that. And even that I’m sometimes confronted with developers who are like “What, how do you do that?” Sure, let me show you. Nic: Yeah Stephanie: So even that is complicated sometimes. Nic: This is an interesting topic. One of the things I am always curious about is what is a designers responsibility in making sure a developer codes an accessible page? Because often… often developers get a design and it’s a little bit like a photo of a good looking cake but there's no real recipe on how to make the cake and when you compare what the photo was to what the final design is, what the final… not design, the final page looks like, it’s often very different. So, where does designer responsibilities start and end with that? Stephanie: I think it depends on what your designer does, because as I said, due to my background I have knowledge in HTML and CSS so a little bit about accessibility and code. I know a lot of designers that don’t do any HTML and CSS but still, I think as a designer you’re supposed to give some elements to your developers to help them. For instance, were you designing a form you can be like… I don’t like to say lazy so I’m going to put a big warning in here. I don’t think designers who only design one input sheet are lazy. Sometimes they don’t know and sometimes they don’t have the time to do more which usually, for instance, when designing forms, the input they have a style for the default. I have a style for the focus, I have the style for the input when it’s filled, it’s the same for a button. I have a style for hover, I have a style for focus and things like that. So, I think this should be the designer's responsibility to provide those kinds of components in different states to the developers. The issue is in many projects they just don’t have the time to do that. So, that’s why I’m not saying it’s like… most of the time I don’t think they’re lazy. Sometimes you just forget. Okay the developer is going to take care of this kind of effects because it’s happening in the browser. And, whether you’re designing in Sketch or Adobe XE or Photoshop. All of those tools are still static so what you design, as what you said, a pretty picture but you don’t have all the interactions. So, I think the first thing to do as a designer is if you have time and if you have a budget to do that… prepare those interactions so the developer actually also thinks about doing that. Sometimes they just forget about the focus or the hover over buttons or form fields and things like that. And, then make sure it got implemented. So, ask to see the final result and test it into the browser, like, not only visually testing checking if it looks … Nic: Stephanie, how did you become aware of the importance of web accessibility? Stephanie: I think I was… it was a conference in France that’s like… yeah, there’s a few conferences in France and you have ParisWeb that had a huge track on its accessibility. So, this was kind of the first time I heard about it a little bit. We spoke about it while learning HTML at University but it wasn’t a big focus on accessibility, it was a focus on semantics which results in accessible code which is great but it wasn’t like, ‘do semantic for accessibility’ it was ‘do semantic to pass the W3 validation test’. Because that was the times when you just have these W3 validated little yellow stickers at the bottom of your website. So, yeah, I kind of learned about it at conferences. Then I was a little bit more interested and when I came back… I was working in Germany, and then I came back to work in France for a small web agency and they had an accessibility expert when I arrived. Then they hired another one so we had nine people in the team with two accessibility experts, which is kind of amazing compared to the number of accessibility experts you see in other companies. So, yeah, one of the main focus of this small company in France was actually to introduce accessible code and also acessible designs. Nic: Right. So, has your view of accessibility changed over time since you first started becoming aware of it to where you’re at today? Are there things that you used to think that have changed or… yeah. Stephanie: I feel like when I started I think performance was still in the definition of accessibility at that time. Something like making a website accessible to people whatever they were using, and I think performance was a criteria as well. People with slow bandwidth and things like that. So I think they removed it or am I mistaken? Nic: I don’t think performance was ever part of the… Stephanie: Okay Nic: … standards in North America. It might’ve been in Europe so I’m less familiar with that aspect. Stephanie: Yeah, maybe. And, yeah I’ve seen more and more countries embracing accessibility today. Like, you have the Microsoft inclusive design principles and things like that. And, also, the thing like they added a few things in new norms which are more like in what they would call cognitive issues. So, I feel like at the beginning it was a little more restrictive and they kind of widened the accessibility spectrum. Nic: Yeah Stephanie: Because there's something about animation, motion sensor, motion sickness… things like that into the new criteria. Nic: As a designer how do you leverage the new WCAG success criteria that target cognitive impairments? How does that help you or make your life more difficult? Stephanie: For the moment… the thing is, in Luxembourg, there wasn’t… no not only in Luxembourg but in Europe there was a law that was trying to influence the WCAG criteria but it was the 2.0 so, to be honest at the moment I would be super glad if we were even able to inform the first version, like 2.0. That would be amazing. So, that’s still, like… yeah… this is kind of a big issue for us as well. Like… Nic: So, you’re saying that in Luxembourg you have to… you have to adhere to version 1.0 of WCAG, not the… Stephanie: No, 2.0 Nic: 2.0. Okay. Stephanie: It’s a little bit strange because, you know, in France, they have the RGAA which is kind of based on the WCAG but a little bit different. And in Luxembourg, it’s supposed to be the WCAG 2.0 but they have this thing called Renow which is guidelines not only for accessibility theres also guidelines for user experience. Thing’s like that. But, yeah, it’s basically the same criteria so when you’re doing a website for an institution, something like that, you are supposed to follow the rules but usually, I’m like the elephant in the room. I arrive, I’m, like, “yeah you have bad accessibility “ and people are like “what are you talking about?” “well, you know, you’re an institution, this is a public website so…” the strange part is usually I’m the one kind of bringing the news about all of the legal aspects of that. I’m like, “Hey, hi, I’m a designer” I’m not supposed to be the one, like, you’re supposed to know about that. You have a public website or something. Nic: Yeah Stephanie: But, yeah, it also kind of brings a lot of issues. For instance, one of our clients, we needed… they needed to use, or they wanted to use a framework and they ended up in a meeting where they asked me, “Yeah can we use prime MG?" and I was like, I’m not even sure what the project is about and you’re asking me what framework you can use? So I got the frontend developer and the accessibility expert of the team and he told them that, yeah, you could use whatever framework you want, you know, because it’s angular so in the end it's HTML and CSS. We just have to make this component accessible but the question was, how much work is it going to be to just make this component accessible? Nic: Yeah Stephanie: So it’s always kind of complicated and a huge debate when you’re the one asking about accessibility while you’re not really the kind of expert in the team. You’re just a designer raising a few questions. Usually, people look at each other like, “What? What is she talking about?” Nic: So, yeah. Other than some surprise what are your clients' typical response when you say, “Hey, you have to build something that’s going to be accessible”? Do they typically go, “Oh, alright we’ll make it happen.” Or are they kind of negative and are they pushing back about it? Stephanie: It really depends on the client. Usually, they are kind of okay as long as it won’t impact the budget. That’s usually not a given. But the thing is with the European website, for instance, they have created this framework and if you use it the right way… like you use those colors the way they’re supposed to be combined and their components… you have this whole framework that has already accessible components. So, usually when I… what I do now is like, “Are you going to use this European framework for the redesign of your website?” and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, we’re going to use it” and I’m like, “Okay, sure” so that should be fine. But for some of the clients, I think as long as nobodies complaining. But, sometimes people do complain, for instance, we have a website with all the laws of Luxembourg and we were asked to do an accessibility audit review of this website because some blind users complained. So, some blind users went to the government and were like, “Hey, this is the website with the law of the country and we can’t access those. Nic: Right Stephanie: And we’re supposed to… I don’t know about Luxembourg but in some other countries, it’s like, thou shall not... they shall know about the laws or something like that. So as soon as a law is published you’re kind of supposed to know about it but if you can’t acce…

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Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2019 Special Episode May 16, 2019

Show notes

To highlight Global Awareness Accessibility Day, I had a wonderful panel discussion with four people involved in accessibility: Courey Elliott, Dennis Lembrée, Shannon Finnegan, and Dan O'Mahony Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: You’re listening to the Accessibility Rules podcast. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. This is a special episode. Today is the 8th Global Awareness Accessibility day. The transcript for the show is available on the podcast website at https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio. Connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS, and video. Twilio.com. Last year GAAD’s special episode was very well received so I’m using the same format. I have 4 guests with me and we will have a panel discussion about … well, accessibility of course. So I’ll let them briefly introduce themselves before we dive into the discussion. Hi everyone. Dennis: Hi Dan: Hello Shannon: Hi Courey: Hello Nic: So, I’m going to pick on Dennis. Why don’t you go first? Dennis: Sure. Thanks for having me, Nic. My name is Dennis Lembrée. I work as a senior accessibility consultant at Deque Systems, about 3 and a half years now. Before that, I was at eBay and PayPal and I am pretty well known for a blog and a Twitter account called Web Axe and a web-based accessible Twitter app called Easy Chirp. Nic: Thank you. Shannon, how about you? Shannon: Hi, yeah. Thank you for having me. I’m Shannon Finnegan. I am an artist and have recently been doing work around web accessibility through a year-long residency that I’m doing at an arts organization in Brooklyn, New York called Eye Beam. That’s an organization that kind of supports artists who are working around the intersection of art and technology. Nic: Sweet. That’s going to be interesting to hear about. Not a topic we often discuss. Dennis: Very Cool Nic: Yeah. So, Dan, all the way from Ireland. Tell us a little bit about you. Dan: Hi, everybody. Yeah, my name’s Dan O’Mahony and I live in Dublin, Ireland. I work for a charity called Child Vision. I’ve been there for 12 years and I work with accessible documents and creating visual accessible materials for kids who are blind and visually impaired throughout the country of Ireland. In my other life I kind of like to talk about web accessibility and basically assistive technology… things like that. And, I kind of design websites and apps and have great fun with all that too. Um… yeah. That’s me! Nic: Do you have any time to sleep with all that? Dan: Do you know, you’d think. I’m always doing something and it’s really enjoyable and I don’t know why I like it so much but I suppose when you find something you really like go and grab it with two hands and keep running with it and you don’t know where it’s going to go. Nic: Yeah. Thank you. So that leaves us with Courey. How are ya? Courey: Hi, I’m Courey Elliot and I am a software engineer at Lonely Planet and I do general engineering as well as I participate on our accessibility team. Nic: Thank you. Right so we’re talking about accessibility especially awareness of web accessibility today and one of the things that I’ve noticed over doing accessibility work for well over 2 decades by now, is that we’re still facing the same basic accessibility-related problems today that we were facing 20 years ago. For example, you know, there’s not a single audit I do that I don’t have to talk about form labels and alt text for images and that kind of stuff. So, why are we still facing those issues do you think? Courey: I feel like a lot of the time it’s one of those issues of if you don’t need that there’s a lack of awareness that there is a problem. So, I think that a lot of times people just don’t know. It’s just plain ignorance. Dan: Yeah, I would agree and I think sometimes it’s not that they don’t want… someone doesn’t want to put accessible features onto their website. They’re just not aware of it. And there’s been many occassions where I pull up a website, someone's website on my phone and I turn on the screen reader just to show them how their website performs and when I’m accessing it in a different way other than the normal visual way and they’re kind of… they say, “Oh, that’s so cool” but it’s kind of like it’s a novelty thing, you know? It’s not seen as… important is not the right word, but it’s not seen as something they would bother too much about I think that sometimes they’re always thinking of their bottom line and how to get something done as quick as they can and get it out. Get their website up and out as quick as they can. And sometimes the whole accessibility part of it is kind of left by the wayside or it’s factored into their usability testing at the last section which just doesn’t work with … by that stage it’s just… you know, it’s just not going to work in that way. Dennis: Yeah, I totally agree with those points. Another big issue, I think, is education. And, I think that semantic HTML is a huge part of accessibility . At least on the web. And can benefit other areas too. But web accessibility, I mean, semantic HTML as a lot of us knows, is extremely important and unfortunately that slips through the cracks. You know, HTML isn’t given nearly as much attention as it should be in education. And also, not only in schools but like, online too. If you were taking some kind of web development course implements of HTML is often… semantic HTML is often overlooked… yeah. Dan: Yeah, I read a great quote one time. I don’t know who said it but he said HTML is grey, HTML is boring but it provides a very solid foundation on which to build fantastic products. Once you have it right from the beginning it just grows from there. Dennis: I think another piece is taking a look at organizations that hire designers and accessibility should definitely be taken into account when hiring and asking what are your qualifications. I think if that’s done more then that would mean more people aware and interested in digital accessibility. And, hiring, you know, folks to do that would just show that this is important to the organization or the company and that’s extremely important. So, job postings hopefully… you see it more now, it’s becoming … with all the lawsuits in the United States there’s much more awareness but fortunately we are starting to see some of that in job listings in asking if you have IAAP certification and things like that so I think that’s going in the right direction. Nic: Shannon, you had a point you wanted to make? Shannon: Yeah, I think... You know, I work across digital accessibility and physical accessibility and I think one of the big issues that I see is really around a failure of imagination and a failure to recognize disabled people as kind of part of our communities and part of… and not only as kind of people who might be receiving information but also as creators and thinkers and leaders and I think as we see more disabled people entering into design roles and if we can kind of shift some of these pipeline issues around that then I think that will really help. Nic: Is that a little bit the concept of nothing about us without us? Shannon: Yeah. I mean, I think… yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think it’s in terms of… yeah, that just having disabled people in the room is always going to be the best option in terms of approaching accessibility. We are the experts about what we need and how we engage with different systems and so the more that I think disabled people can be involved in the creation process, that's going to be really beneficial. Nic: Hmmm Shannon: I think it’s important to note though that the onus should not be exclusively on the disabled to educate and further that. That should be a universal. We should be involved but that should not be, you know, “disabled people want access so you should make access. Courey: Yeah. I think it’s really different to have this kind of expectation that someone whose disabled is going to be able… is always going to kind of push for accessibility and that they will understand all types of accessibility. And, I think that’s really different than, you know, specifically hiring someone for their expertise and kind of working with someone in that way. Nic: So we are talking about 3 possible solutions to increase awareness. We’ve mentioned getting more people with disabilities involved. We are talking about including accessibility in the general education whether its as computer science degrees or it’s just tutorials online and online boot camps. Um, the question I have for you is...I read just today actually that last year there were over 2500 lawsuits for accessibility in the United States. Do you believe lawsuits will help resolve that? Help improve the general awareness about accessibility and actually change things? Dan: Unfortunately, yes. Accessibility hasn’t… digital accessibility hadn’t really taken off until… at least in the United States… until all these lawsuits started happening and, as unfortunate as it sounds that’s the reality. These large companies, you know, profits is… you know. Money and profits is the goal of a large corporation so if we can avoid bad PR and avoid lawsuits etc then that benefits them so it’s in their advantage to make their product accessible. Now hopefully in that process, a lot of companies and a lot of organizations will learn that, hey, this accessibility thing is pretty cool and really helps usability and all these other things. So, in the long run hopefully, that will happen and so we’ll see. Dennis: It’s kind of like the ground up. The designers… if they’re educated in accessibility they’ll motivate the middle managers and hopefully the CEO at some stage to kind of take into account that this is a really cool thing. That you’re increasing it for everybody. You’re increasing usability for everybody by designing a product that’s usable by everybody. Which is going to impact your bottom line. I was going to say in terms of… I kind of follow what’s going on on the other side of the pond in terms of all the lawsuits and stuff. It’s slightly different over here in Europe. Dan: Slightly? Dennis: Slightly. As in, I haven’t seen as many lawsuits going on. I haven’t read about as many. We just passed the European Accessibility Act just passed I think a couple of days ago. So this is kind of like an EU wide part and that’s giving organizations, sorry it’s giving goverments I think public bodies 6 years to get into line, for want of a better phrase and have everything conforming to WCAG 2.1 version AA or whatever. I’d say that’s the standard that’s going to hit but that going… I don’t know how that’s going because each country has their own national laws while the EU law is superior to every other national law, it’s going to take a long time to get it into place so, I mean, the more that people like us and anybody that has any sort of interest in this kind of areas, to post it from the ground up, it’s just going to benefit. And, then in terms of the European Union, if you look at Ireland… I was saying to people, Ireland is very immature when it comes to accessibility, unfortunately. But, you know. Dan: Yeah, laws… Nic: … thank you… Dan: … I think laws can definitely help but, enforcing those laws is a whole ‘nother thing. So, Nic, I don’t know if you have any input about the AODA in Ontario what happened or didn’t happen with that. Or look at sections 508 in the United States, or 504… yeah. So those, it’s hard. It takes a lot of energy and resources to actually enforce. Nic: Yeah, the enforcement is always the tricky bit and I think the cultural background of each country’s areas is going to have a strong impact on that because, you know, we all know the US is lawsuit prone but that’s not so much the case in Canada or Europe or New Zealand or other places. But we need to make change happen. Let’s go onto my next question, which is not really a question but a challenge for you folks. Accessibility in Javascript frameworks. Discuss that. Dennis: That’s a loaded question. Dan: Which Javascript framework?... Nic: Yes… Dennis: Well they all work fairly similarly, I mean, I think… I mean I think they break, you know, accessibility right off the bat, I mean, a lot of folks will tell you... A lot of developers will try to defend the Javascript frameworks and say it doesn’t but, I mean, it does. It breaks the whole basic functionality of a webpage. So, two things particularly is when you’re reloading a web page you’re not reloading a web page in a Javascript framework, you’re just re-rendering the [dom?16:30] and kind of injecting a new screen onto that same page. So, the 2 main problems I see with that is 1) the page title often isn’t updated to reflect the content of the page, of the screen and 2) maybe more importantly is that the focus, keyboard focus is lost or is not managed so if I’m any kind of keyboard user I’ll end up in the bottom of the page or in some strange place that makes no sense and I either have to start back from the beginning and … Dan: Yeah Dennis: … or just wander around and figure out what happened or where I’m at and what’s the content now. Dan: Yeah I tried building… I wouldn’t have too much experience with Angular but I was playing with React which is the Javascript framework that everyone’s talking about and has been talking about for the last year, but what I found myself doing was I’m just putting ARIA everything into my HTML that’s going to be rendered to the root node, but, then when I was playing with my screen reader, and this could just be my own fault, but I tried to test with a screen reader and that virtual buffer just wasn’t updating and I probably needed to put in ARIA live here, there, and everywhere and it just seemed like a lot of work when, as you said, Dennis, HTML made it a lot easier. So I just went back and recoded it all in just plain HTML for the purpose of this specific web app it worked… but I don’t know. Nic: Courey, as a developer with Lonely Planet and you’ve done some backend stuff, you’re doing frontend stuff… how do you feel about all that? Courey: I would agree. I have used ARIA as a way to work around that. I think that that’s definitely a challenge and I think that it’s one that’s hard to teach people. If you have not used a screen reader before the reason ‘why’ sometimes doesn’t make a lot of sense. You can explain the concept but until you actually walk somebody through a website using a screen reader it’s hard to understand how those changes can be disorienting. And so I think part of the suggestion that I have is to have those tools available and take the time to teach your average developers how to use those tools so that they can go, “Oh, wow, this is terrible. This doesn’t make any sense at all” and find ways to work around it. Like, equip them with the ability to do it instead of having to go back and say, “Oh, this isn’t accessible. You need to do x,y, and z.” So, in the end, you have more people that are aware and when they move on to other jobs they have the ability to, you know, teach other people how to use those tools and how to hone those skills to figure out exactly what needs to be done and why. Nic: I really like this idea of equipping devs with the tools to understand ‘why’ accessibility. I think that’s very powerful rather than just say, “Hey… you can’t do this” or, “fix this that way” Dennis: The 2 issues that I mentioned when we first started discussing Javascript frameworks are definitely fixable and some developers know how and do fix that but it’s, you know, a very low percentage of these implementations. I think that’s just a piece of the puzzle.…

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E081 – Interview with Damien Senger – Part 2 May 07, 2019

Show notes

Damien tells us "Later does not exist in our industry. Don't push something without accessibility now. Because you will NOT go back and fix it later" Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the A11y Rules Podcast. This is episode 81. I'm Nic Steenhout, and I talked with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you're interested in accessibility, hey, this show's for you. To get today's show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Nic: Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS, and video at twilio.com. Nic: In this episode, I'm continuing my conversation with Damien Senger. Last show was actually quite good. We spoke about different things, including how Damien learned about having ADHD and how that influenced his work in accessibility and how he managed to build an accessibility culture within his organization. Damien, welcome back. Damien: Thanks for having me again. Nic: We finished last week talking about your greatest achievement. Let's look at what's your greatest frustration in terms of web accessibility? Damien: I don't know if I can choose one, but I have two. The first one is, I think ... it's also going better and better every day. It's the lack of care of people around accessibility. I'm saying this because I worked with a lot of different developers, and I don't think developers are doing an awful job, but I just have the feeling that more and more in companies, there is a lot of focus on choosing the right framework to find a lot of developers, but not choosing the right framework to help the consumers. One of my frustrations into this is the fact that even if you can convince people that accessibility is important, I sometimes struggle to push accessibility as a requirement. For example, applications offer the choice of a specific framework or this kind of stuff. So this one will be the first. Damien: The second one is ... relating to this one, so that's why for me they are going together. Even if this one is really going better, it's the lack of care in a lot of events. So this one for me is going better because more and more conferences are trying to select accessibility as a topic or to look for speakers speaking about accessibility, but it's a bit like inclusivity. It was a known topic for a lot of time, and in some events, there is still like a lot of resistance, because like it's only for eight persons. Damien: I still heard, I think in the last month in a discussion with a developer, this sentence that I found awful all the time, which is, "Why just spending so many time into something made only for five people?" No, no, please no. So that's the frustrating part, there are still a lack of care most of the time in the community, development community as a whole. Even if you manage to push accessibility as a product decision, it's really hard to push the fact that accessibility is not only what you produce, but also what you work with. And it's not only for the consumer, but also for people within the organization. Nic: That is something that I see change, but sometimes I feel like not fast enough. I think I do share that frustration, that not just developers, but all stakeholders, from designers to site owners to even QA testers that, "Why are we spending this much effort for just a handful of people?" It always boggles me. Nic: Then I start giving hard statistics to people. The recent change in the U.S. census, that it's not 1 in 5 person in the U.S. that has a disability anymore, it's 1 in 4. Nearly 25% of people in the U.S. have a disability. I think that number is probably reflected all over the world. Damien: Yeah, and for me, that's also one of the game changers. It's the fact that ... it's also thanks to including the cognitive disabilities into the census on this topic. Damien: I'm working a lot with reading impairments these days. It's a topic I really find amazing, because when you ask someone, "How do you read a text?" for example, you cannot answer that. We don't know, "How do we read?" It's like something automatic for our brain, but it's so much work, in fact. I find it amazing to see the direction of people. Damien: Like in one of my last meetup participation, where I explained that depending of the census, reading impairment can be up to 20% of the population, depending on how do measure and what are the limits for reading impairment. Once you touch like the 20% of the population, people are like, "Hmm. That's maybe important in this case," because 20%, we can look at our neighbors, like our direct neighbors in the room, and we should find at least one person. Nic: It's always interesting that some companies, designers, developers are going to be really keen to make their design, their site, their app work in Internet Explorer that still has maybe 4% of the market share of browsers, but they're going to totally ignore accessibility, which is anywhere between a fifth and a quarter of visitors. That always amuses me. Damien: Yeah, I agree. I'm smiling, because I had this discussion, including my current company, like a few months ago with the same arguments. But what I found even more funny is ... because this one, we can fight against it. We have statistics, and we can show statistics. The one I'm really struggling with most of the time is, "Let's do this later. Do we really need this? Can we just not push the feature without caring about it and fixing it later? This one is the one I'm always smiling with, because I'm like, "Why?" We all know that later is not existing in our industry. We're never coming back on features, except if you're working at booking, Airbnb, Facebook, like really big players. I don't know a lot of early stage startups, service A startup or service B startup, with time to go back. Nic: I love that statement. "Later does not exist in our industry." I think that's a really important takeaway. Damien: And it's costful. Even if you need to, because ... for example, regulations, if you're working in Norway, for example, with one of the strictest, I think, regulation on accessibility in Europe. If you really need to go back later, it's costful. It's so expensive, because in this case, you need to create new stories, you need to go back through all the meetings, all the refinement, all the discussions. Damien: People don't realize how expensive it can be when you need to do the whole cycle again, and the fact that sometimes ... most of the time, all the accessibility fixes as I'm requesting from my developers, it's a ten minute job. It's aria-labels, it's asking for some IDs linked to specific DOM points to explain the different relations between screen readers. It's having specific text only for assistive technologies. It's fixing some copies for cognitive impairments. Damien: Most of the time, it can be a lot, but it's not rebuilding a complete feature. I think it happens only once in my life to ask engineers to redevelop entirely new features, and it was because it was the navigation. Yes, if you have your navigation completely fucked up, you need to start again. Nic: Yeah. This reminds me of an example I like to use. When you build a house and you put in a narrow door and two steps in front of the door, and later on you have to actually remove the steps and change the door so it's wider for a wheelchair, that will be very costly. But if you build it with a wide door and no step at the entrance to start with, you're cost increases negligible. So I think it's what you're talking about. If you know there's something to fix with accessibility in your current project, just do it now. Don't wait until later. Damien: For me, it's where it's really important to get support and to get support from your stakeholders, because it cannot be a one person job. That's why I'm really grateful for my current company, because I have a lot of support from my manager, which already walked and purchased accessibility even before I started to the different stakeholders. But it cannot be like a one person job. You cannot spend all your time explaining over and over again why you need to do that at one point. It's not sustainable for yourself. Nic: Damien, what is the one thing that everybody knows about web accessibility? Damien: I hope it's never, never, never not adding alt to an image. An image tag needs to have an alt. Even if it's an empty one, but it needs to have an alt attribute. I hope that's the case. Please tell me that it's the case. Nic: It's funny, because I've been telling developers about the alt attribute for a very long time now, and the kind of things I was finding 10 or 15 years ago when I do accessibility audit is still the same thing I'm finding about images. Either there's no alt attribute at all, or the text, the value of the attribute is problematic. So maybe people do know about the alt attribute, but they're still needing to understand things a little bit better. Damien: Yeah, I agree. That's where I have an issue with our current industry, especially on the developer side. Not with developers, with really the industry, because HTML is not viewed as a real skill when it's a real skill. It's not only just adding these to make design on top of it. I really like REACT. I really like all this new, shiny frameworks. I really like what they're doing with JavaScript. I think it's going in a really good direction, in a really good professional direction with this language. Damien: My main issue, and it's related to the alt attribute in a way, is the fact that they are simplifying so much. The HTML can easily become inaccessible. I'm thinking about the alt attributes for the images, but also something I'm seeing morbe and more, not only from the students I'm teaching to, but also in job applications. When I'm seeing some exercise and assessments, it's the fact that people now for forms inputs are just using inputs. "It's a text input? Great. Let's just use input. Why is there any other attributes? I don't know, but it's not useful. We need to have the smallest DOM as possible. Let's do inputs." It's the same. This is not sustainable. We cannot just remove complexity for performance reason. First, because it's not important. Removing two attributes will not increase the performance of your website. Nic: I would like to see a time where accessibility is viewed on the same level as the importance of performance and the importance of security. I think that would be really fantastic. If you sell your services as a design outfit or a web developer outfit, you don't charge extra to build a secure website, and you shouldn't charge extra to build an accessible website. It should be built into what you do. But maybe it goes back to the point you were making about lack of skills, lack of understanding of basic skill sets, like knowing HTML or knowing CSS. Damien: Yeah, I think it's tied to that. I also think that .. and I still stop attacking developers. I will attack designers a bit more. I think designers are really responsible for that, too, because if we care so much about performance, it's also because not only developers care about it, but designers, because when it's not loading quickly enough no my super iPhone X, I will shout to the product team. Because I'm a designer, the product team will listen to me. When there is no alt on images or when there is no keyboard support, for example, and no keyboard navigation possible, because the DOM is going in all direction, or because in practice we've been doing this a lot, a lot of nodes are removed from the DOM when they are not displayed. Damien: Designers don't care, and product managers don't know that they have to care about. So it's not only, for me, an issue with the skill sets of people building the solution, but it's also because nobody else care. For everything else, accessibility ... oh, for performance, or just for the UX, and the way that the design would be displayed in the end, there is enough people to shout when it's not working. Nic: What do you think the number one reason is for most people failing to implement accessibility? Damien: In my opinion, it's because people believe that it's complex. There is always this image that accessibility is obscure, it's complex, it's a lot of rules. Yes, it's a lot of rules, but it's not this complex. If you're doing a semantic HTML, have off this job is already done. If you want a good UX with a good readability for your design with color contrast and a great heading hierarchy, again, 20% of the job is done. In the end, if you care about your product and if you want to do something which is not revolutionary, but which is functional, it will work. So I really believe that the reason why is just because people don't know and they think that it's too complex. Nic: How can we make it appear more simple or less complex or more approachable? What can we, in the industry specifically, do to help people get over that sense of, "Oh, it's too difficult"? Damien: That's a really good question. I'm not sure I have the answer, but I think that talking about, what you're doing with this podcast, is already a good way to show that. Just adding a way to show that there is a lot of people who can help you. There is an open community. There's a lot of people on Twitter, a lot of articles. There is a lot of resources. So just maybe being more public sometimes. Damien: have the tendency to think ... at least, I'm thinking a lot that our community sometimes is ... which is great, but is focusing a lot on some details and some implementation details. Sometimes, I think we just ... like when people are asking questions on specific ways to implement accessibility on their project, I think we just forgot to answer something which can be quite interesting and quite important. It's, "Do it." It will not be perfect, because you will never be 100% accessible to everybody. Just do it. If it's not perfect, it's okay. It's better than not doing it. I really believe that sometimes we forget to say that to people. But just don't do this with ARIA. No ARIA is better than bad ARIA. But aside of that, doing a bit and imperfect accessibility is better than no accessibility. Damien: For me, there is another part which is more difficult to this answer, which is ... but it's complicated, and I'm not sure that people want to hear that, but it's something that I discussed about in a conference like a few days ago. We don't want to see ourselves impaired. We don't want to see ourselves in this kind of position. And because we don't want to see ourselves with disabilities, we are lacking empathy. I would love people to understand that they don't need to see themselves in position with impairments. They don't need to try to understand how is my life with ADHD and being on the spectrum to just fix what could be needed to have a better accessibility for cognitive disabiliti…

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E080 – Interview with Damien Senger – Part 1 Apr 29, 2019

Show notes

In which Damien Senger tells us "Universal design is the answer, more than accessibility. Because people are on a spectrum." Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 80. I'm Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you're interested in accessibility, hey, this show is for you. To get today's show notes or transcript head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio: Connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS, and video at twilio.com. Nic: This week I'm speaking to Damien Senger. Thanks for joining me Damien to talk about accessibility. How are you? Damien: Yeah, I'm fine. Thanks for inviting me. Nic: I like to let guests introduce themselves so in a brief introduction, who is Damien Senger? Damien: That's a good question. I am not sure that I really know myself. I'm a mix between a designer and an HTML/CSS lover, so I'm working mainly as a designer for a company in Amsterdam called Castor EDC, where to be exact I'm Design Systems and Accessibility Lead. So half of my job is making sure that our development team is doing a correct job in what they're delivering, correct job in the design, like how they implement it but also to a level of accessibility that we're trained to achieve for our products. Aside of that I'm, like I said an HTML/CSS lover. I love to share my life, so I'm doing conferences, I'm trying to do articles but it's really hard to find time and, yeah. That's a bit of me, I'm living in Amsterdam and in Rotterdam, like a bit between both of these two cities so it's a bit complex, but yeah, that's me. Nic: That's you, wonderful, thank you. We're talking primarily about web accessibility today. How would you define it? Damien: Defining accessibility. Ah, that's quite funny because it's what I'm trying to do at my job these days. I'm writing an accessibility policy for the company, so trying to define what we want to achieve for that. For me it's mainly tied to universal design. So, I really believe in the vision with which the web was created, so I think content accessible to everybody regardless of their specific abilities, so for me, accessibility is just being sure that we're creating experiences that are exactly the same for everybody regardless if they can use a mouse or not. If they have really good attention span or not, or if they're just really distracted in their environment. Damien: So yes, I'm really focused on cognitive disabilities. I think it's maybe one of the most interesting things for me into this part of the job. Nic: Cognitive disabilities is an area of accessibility that has, until relatively recently, been mostly ignored on web and I'm glad to see more and more of that being discussed and solutions to barriers found, so good to hear you're finding an interest in it. But why do you think it's such an interesting part of the field of web accessibility? Damien: Mainly because for me, it was forgotten by a lot of the community during a long time. As you said, the WCAG only started working on cognitive disabilities a few years ago, and the WCAG version 2, especially version 2.1 was the first one really trying to embrace this topic. Damien: And for me it's also really interesting because it's invisible, so it's even more difficult to work with it because it's something that you cannot see at first sight, and also it's something evolving, evolving a lot. We have a population which is aging. All the web specialists, all the web designers, all the web developers, all the web workers are quite still young in a way and the web is aging with us, but I'm not sure that the way the web is aging is fully prepared to all the different disabilities that we will get in the next years and in the next period of our lives. Nic: How de we get prepared? Damien: Yeah, how do we get prepared. I'm not sure that we can really know what our future will be made of, but there's a lot of things that we can already prepare. Like when we see that all the experiences that we are creating right now in the web industries are based on getting the biggest attention span of people, that we are trying to get all the focus of people on specific action, that we are trained to always be in this mindset where we want to get more, and more, and more energy from people. This is not sustainable and this is one of the issues of cognitive disabilities. Damien: The way we're building the web it's going not only from part of the products that are timed. But for example like something we all love to hate which is sliders, are one of the good example for me, where things where we build and we design in a way which is not inaccessible for key bots and assistive technology but also for our brains, because we were just like, "Okay, when web designed it, I was able to read it. Ten seconds was okay." But you can never be sure that ten seconds will be okay for everybody, because you can have issues, I'm not an English speaker, like a native English speaker so the difference is something I have to deal with almost every day. But also you don't know what the person is doing and what are the different cognitive capabilities of someone in front of the computer. So we are making a lot of assumptions that have an impact into the way that we're [inaudible 00:06:49] the web, which is great for people within their twenties, thirties, forties years old; but maybe not for a population going with users of sixties, seventies, and so on. Nic: When did you become aware of web accessibility and its importance and how did that happen? Damien: When I ... it's a mixed answer. I think I started to really truly learn about accessibility when I was working still in France for a web agency called Alsacreations. They had web accessibility expert within the team, and they really cared about doing good quality work compliant with all the standards. So that was one of my first professional experience not as a freelancer, so that was a good way to start working with accessibility. When I really changed my mindset from accessibility is part of the job and really important but as important to doing a lot of different stuff in design, when I really started to focus a lot on accessibility was when I more and more issues with pronouns related to the fact that I am ADHD, and as a lot of people with ADHD when kind of somewhere in the spectrum between ADHD and autism, I was like yeah so maybe it's not me, maybe it's the way that we are building not only the web but product, and the society is not good enough to include everybody. Being someone in this field with a way to change the way the web is built was for me a good way to push myself working the accessibility field. Nic: Obviously it has had an impact. But what kind of things can you tell us about this impact of discovering that while you maybe your impairment, your disability, how did that influence your perception of web accessibility specifically? Damien: That influenced it in the way that I was mad. Seriously, I was mad because I worked for this agency which was really great but what I discovered when I was working with them is that all web accessibility concerns were mainly on the usability, like using specific assistive technologies, using keyboard, and using specific short cuts, and what was based on the hardware and the software, but not always on how do we build in a way that it's inclusive for everybody. This focus on, that we can see in the first version of the WCAG, this focus mainly on the technology and not the way that we are building, the way that we are designing, and the way that we are trained to understand how people are using not only just the tools that they are using was something important for me. The fact that cognitive disabilities were not part of the early versions of specification was something where I was like, "Okay, there is maybe something I can do to help and have better accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities." Nic: What do you think of the current efforts to include cognitive accessibility, cognitive disabilities and accessibility in the guidelines? Do you think it's enough or not enough or going in right direction or not? Damien: I think it's going in a really good direction. I really appreciate to see all the user interviews. For example made by the web accessibility initiatives to understand for people with autism, for people with ADHD, for people after having a stroke for example. Damien: I really find interesting to not only the fact that they've done this work but also the fact they published all of these user interviews, all of the conclusions. So for me it's going in a really good way, but still we can continue to go forward because right now I really like the way WCAG is evolving on this going more and more into the patterns of litigation, going more and more into usability concern and issues to fix. I just think that we can still continue in this direction. For example the fact that there is not a clear point on when do we need to communicate the time needed to actually complete form, or the fact that we don't need to communicate, like there is one point on the triple A, I think on communicating the difficulty of some tasks. The fact that we don't have more work and more identification on what do we need to do on the level A, level AA, and level AAA in this direction is still inefficient. It's still not sufficient access for me, but it's going in a really good direction. Nic: I've spoken to a couple that didn't think it was quite enough but while I acknowledged that I'm thinking that it's better that than nothing and there is quite a bit of effort happening so it makes me happy to see that we're slowly starting to think in terms of inclusion for all conditions, well inclusions for people that have different conditions because it's not just about screen reader. Damien: Yeah, I fully agree. It's really nice to see the support. And every time ... Working for screen readers is really important. In my daily life, like when I'm working for customer, I say that most of the recommendation doing, giving to engineers are based on how can we improve the navigation and the experience for users of assistive technologies. Damien: Firstly for screen readers so working with screen readers for me it's still really important it's just that I really hoping that a lot of people and more and more people, and not the expert because I think that most of the experts are already got this in their mind, but I feel that the designers, the developers are a bit of where our accessibility can get this information that's accessibly is not only for people with vision impairments. It's not only working for braille platform and screen readers. It's also working for someone who just got a stroke. Damien: Especially for me , like what isn't trusting and an argument which is always difficult to use in a way because I don't like going in this direction but still working quite well for me is like most of the people where for example the autism spectrum or people with after a stroke they will be more ... how can I say that, they will be more inclined to use still a computer to communicate with the rest of the world. So to be consumers because that's sometimes one of the only options for them to be able to buy something. Because they can create so many short cuts and their family can, after a stroke for example, create so many short cuts, so many way to help them to actually ... easy, medium, and complex tasks that like if you remove from your consumer all the people with cognitive disabilities, it's like starting to be a lot of people removed from your potential market. Damien: So like that's an argument always, like difficult to use but ultimately that's the only one working at the moment, but working continues. But, yeah so that's something that I really want people to understand, it's not only. [crosstalk 00:15:46] Nic: I like this statement you made that the argument may not be a great one but it's the only to use. It reminds me of this, the economy where, well not the economy, this difference of opinion between people that say, on one hand we shouldn't talk about accessibility is good for everyone, we shouldn't say that color contrast, good contrast is good for people with low vision but it's also good for people that don't have a disability that want to interact with their website on the phone. There's this going back and forth, I'm a long term disability rights activist and I believe that we should use all the arguments at our disposal and if it helps people without disabilities to understand that, yeah you know making these changes, improving accessibility will actually improve usability for everyone. I think that's a great, great way to look at it. Damien: Yeah, I fully agree with this because for me the fact that we forgot for a long, a lot of time like community disabilities, for a lot of them it's important. Damien: For me, universal design, it's the answer more than accessibility because also on the cognitive side of disabilities, a lot of them are spectrums. Because of this idea of spectrum, you're already in this way of inclusive design. That's why I really love the inclusive design for work made by Microsoft. Like this idea of, you have life long impairments, temporary impairments, and situational impairments. Damien: Yes, unfortuantley I don't like the fact that some people will only listen if it's because they could be concerned. But at the same time that's true, by working for life long impairments you're improving the life of everybody regardless of their specific abilities, regardless of their environment and context. As an LGBTQ activist I really like this argument because you cannot make assumptions on the environment of people. Every time we are trained to make assumption on the environment of people we are marginalizing people. So for me universal design is the answer for that. Damien: Focusing on that is also a good way to explain that we need to not track users using assistive technologies. I'm saying this because I read this morning, I think, an article, or no a tweet on this question, the fact that now we could have a way on iOS to track users with assistive technologies. For me that is one of the issue related to not thinking about universal design. If we are not in this idea of we can improve the life of everybody at the same time we will again be in the mindset of providing experiences for people and providing experience for all of the others. Nic: Yeah. Separate and not equal. Damien: Yes, we know this is true of the web. We know that every time we are trained to create something separate, like it's made by companies where with like specific goals most of the time, commercial goals. [inaudible 00:19:32] two different platforms, two different content if it's for like the same purpose it's not working. Nic: Damien, did you face barriers or difficulty when you were trying to learn about accessibility and if you did how did you get over that? Damien: Yeah, I think I faced some difficulties but not really into finding the resources,…

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E079 – Interview with Liz Jackson – Part 2 Apr 22, 2019

Show notes

In which Liz Jackson tells us she wishes people viewed accessibility as an opportunity to engage, rather than a legal compliance thing. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Transcript Nic: Welcome to the accessibility rules podcast. This is episode 79. I’m Nic Steenhout, and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility hey, this shows for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS, and video at Twilio.com. In this episode, I’m continuing my conversation with Liz Jackson. Welcome back, Liz. Liz: Thanks, again for having me. Nic: Thank you. So, the last show was really great. We talked about quite a few things that are not necessarily the usual topics of this podcast, including disability culture friction and nothing about us without us, so that’s been really powerful stuff. We finished last week on a great positive thought of “Let’s make this fun.” Let’s flip that a little bit and ask you, Liz… What’s your greatest frustration about accessibility? Liz: My greatest frustration with accessibility is I think the fact that people view it as a box to be checked. That there’s a minimum amount that you need to do and that I think is fundamentally lacking in creativity. I’m not saying that that's what accessibility is. I’m saying that that is the perception of what it is. I think people view it a lot in terms of legal compliance. And I just… I wish we could sort of view it instead as an opportunity to engage. And I’m going to pause for a second because… you’ll hear why. Nic: You were saying we should view accessibility as an opportunity to engage rather than as a compliance thing. Liz: Yeah, I think right now the way accessibility is being done is oftentimes at the exclusion of actual disabled people. I oftentimes use the example… I have sort of an obsession with National ADAPT, and so I oftentimes use the example of; Okay, so how did… What happened with that original gang of 19 and bus lifts? And this is really the thing that I saw. So, what happened was, in the early 1970s, right, this is the first time in history that disabled people were actually escaping institutions, right? So out in society, they looked really radical. And they wanted something very radical. The wanted access. They wanted accessibility, and they wanted it in the form of bus lifts on busses. And they went about it in a radical way. They parked their bodies in front of buses and intersections in Denver, and they protested for access. And, at the time society was probably incredibly frightened of these bodies that they hadn’t previously experienced. But, if you look at sort of what happened in the years after what you see is that suddenly people stopped perceiving those bodies as being so radical. They became accustomed to seeing disabled people out in society, so, they became less radical, and their ideas became less radical. People started thinking, “Yeah, access is a human right. Buses should come with bus lifts.” And, ultimately buses did start coming with bus lifts and this idea of buses on buses, it was so potent that in the 90s when the ADA was written buses were written into the ADA. And, I think for me, it is. It’s very easy to look at this and sort of view it as a success, but I actually see something a little bit different which is that the very moment that bus lifts were written into the ADA, at least it feels to me, that the national adapt and the people who fought so valiantly for it were no longer needed in the thing that they advocated for. And so, I think in this work that we’re doing I wonder how often we are actually inadvertently advocating for our own exclusion by advocating for our own inclusion. And so, for me, the question is how is it that in web access and in these various things that we’re fighting for, how is it that we can sustainably advocate to participate. And so for me, it’s that mantra. It’s design with disability. It’s nothing about us without us. How is it that we can ensure that the things that we fight radically for don’t turn into things that are empathetically done for us? Nic: So, I often say that one of my ultimate goals is to do such a good job as to put myself out of a job. So, you know, do enough advocacy and do enough education and do enough work in the accessibility field that this kind of work would not be required anymore. Because, everything would be accessible. Everything would be done with an inclusive mindset which kind of closes the circle, because if you’re starting to think of a culture of inclusion, you have to think about getting people with disabilities involved. So, even if I do manage to put myself out of a job as an accessibility specialist I think that the job will be truly, properly done when even though I may not be an accessibility specialist anymore I would still be included in the discussion and in the design phase, and everything to make sure that people with disabilities are part and parcel with the process. Not just an afterthought, or, not just something we do for them. Liz: Yeah, I think… I think that even in this idea of putting… wanting to put yourself out of business… I think there’s a part of me that worries that… are we too in the frame of mind of problems that need to be solved and are we separating culture from access too much? I think I’m someone… I view you as someone who I think is deeply creative and I don’t think for a creative person the work ever stops. Nic: Totally. Liz: And so for me, the question is, okay, well, say on this very logistical side, yeah you do put yourself out of business. Okay, so then the question becomes “What’s next?” Nic: Absolutely. What’s next. Product design, which you’ve been quite involved with… How can your experience in product design benefit people involved with web accessibility? What lesson could you share from learning about product design that web accessibility people can implement? Think about? Liz: When there does seem to be a product that’s framed around creating accessor a product that’s inclusive of disabled people, when it’s put out into the world it’s oftentimes framed through the lens of empathy. And, I think that there are other ways that we can perceive the works in this space. We don’t always have to view disability through this empathetic lens. And, so, I actually have been spending the last couple of years pursuing my own product. More… it’s a little bit less about the product, and it’s a little bit more about a statement of why… what this work can sound like in terms of tone. And, so the story behind the product is… a couple of years ago I was at South by Southwest, and there were some major accessibility problems. And, it ended up leading me to get into this contentious back and forth with the head of South by Southwest, this guy named [Hugh Forest? 08:27]. And, in one of the phone calls, I basically told him I was going to create a product that was going to basically shed light on the accessibility issues of South by, and to my surprise he was really supportive of it. I had some people who were supportive all along, and I ended up going back to South by this year with an app. It’s really my answer to craptions. So a craption is basically those pesky errors that happen in automated captions. I call it thisten, so it’s basically ‘this’ and ‘listen,’ for me, I sort of see it as the physical act of listening. And, you know, I think this is one of the conversations we’ve been having about the product. Typically when somebody looks at this product, they’re going to say, okay, well this is definitely something that benefits somebody who is hard of hearing or deaf. But, I’m saying no. We’ve got to flip this. This is a product that can not succeed without a massive untapped pool of deaf and hard of hearing talent. And, I think to myself - okay, so then people are going to frame this product as something that solves a problem. And what is the problem that it solves? Well, traditionally I think that society would say this solves the problem, almost, of deaf people. But, that for me is not the problem. For me, the problem is this solves the problem of conferences and events failing to take into account accessibility. And so, I think, every step of the way I’m trying to shift the way our objects and our products are positioned in society and I’m just trying to make sure people fully understand what is it that we are actually solving for. I’m not solving for a deaf person. If I did, I’m sure a deaf person would tell me to go F myself. They don’t need me. What I’m solving for is a fundamental, societal problematic lack of access in some of the most influential spaces in the world. Nic: What do you think the number one reason is that most people fail to take accessibility into account or fail to succeed with implementing accessibility? Liz: This has really been a passion point for me. And, it’s one of the reasons why now I’m trying really hard too. In design schools wherever there is a class that teaches accessibility, I’m also trying to implement a disabilities course work alongside it. Because I think people are learning the ‘how’ without the ‘why’ and it’s… I think there is a fundamental lack of understanding there in what it does, what it does in the long run, what it does in the short term, who it impacts and how it shifts our lives in small but very profound ways. And, it’s learning about why do we think about the way we do about x or y. And, I think this is the thing. It’s like I love disability. This is the passion of my life, and I think… I look at design, and I see… a designer might, at a very young age, realize ‘I have a knack for this,’ but they don’t think that they can just design. They know ‘okay, I’ve got a knack for this. I’ve got to go to school. I’ve got to educate myself,’ and then they usually encounter me as they’re continuing their education in a conference or educational setting. This is a life-long commitment, and yet these are the very people who they sort of turn to disability, and they think they just know. And, I think they think they know because they’ve been taught to feel a certain way about it, whether it’s inspirational or empathetic or whatever the case may be. Whatever these sort of societal narratives are. And so, for me, it’s about, well, how do we as disabled people how do we intervene in that sort of expectation of ‘we just know?’ How do we intervene and say, ‘No, disability is a creative process.’ It is something that you can be passionate about, you can love, and you can commit to. And, you can have ongoing education, and I think the majority of designers don’t even know disability studies exist as a field. And so, for me, if you can teach people that this is not just a portfolio or a brand enhancer but rather this is something you can endeavor in and be passionate about and delight in… I think we would have a much easier time. And, I think the thing that sells it short is this frame that we’ve historically done of just framing something as: simple problem, simple solution. If we could break away from that and delve into the complexity, I think people would get really wrapped up in it. Nic: There’s been a lot on Twitter, quite a few threads on unpopular tech opinions. Would you have an unpopular accessibility/disability opinion to share? Something maybe controversial or something that you think you really believe in but other people might not necessarily agree with. Liz: Yeah. Oh, do I have one or do you say you have one? Nic: No, do you have one? Liz: I suppose I think my thinking about wanting to incorporate disability studies into the accessibility conversation. I think… I don’t think it’s unpopular in that people don’t like it. I think more often than not people feel very drawn to it and can almost sort of… sort of… once its...I’m unable to articulate it, they feel a bit of relief. Like, yeah, I think that’s sort of the missing piece. But I think it is unpopular in the fact that we didn’t previously consider it. And, so, maybe it’s something that just needs to gain a little bit of traction. But, I suppose I fundamentally believe that if I do my… perform the role that I set out to do, which is incorporating a culture into the work that you’re doing. I fundamentally believe that I will make your work easier for you to do. And, so, for me, I think even though I’m not tech savvy, I can barely find my way through the internet. The thing that I’m trying to show is a commitment to a handful of people. And, so, who are those people? I think those people are allies. People who are doing this work that makes the internet accessible. I think I'm also trying to amplify the work of academics, the people who are building the theory and doing the work that has long existed inside of paywalls, how is it that we can bring that out into the mainstream? And, so, if I say sort of I’m trying to honor the friction of my disability I also feel like I’m trying to honor all of those who came before me and have been doing this work much longer than I have, and who are much more adept at doing the physical things that I just don’t have the capabilities of doing. I think if anything I like to look and see all of our roles in this and figure out, ‘how is it that I can take a little of the burden from this person so they can thrive better?’ Because that’s what… I think the allies have been doing, that’s what the academics have been doing for me and for others as well. And so it’s like, “Okay, how do we sort of complete this circle?” Nic: How do we? Indeed. My… one of the thinking I have around accessibility itself and one of my frustration is that so many designers and web designers and web developers today don’t even know that it exists let alone know about alt text, and I’ve only been advocating for alt text since the mid 1990s. So, it's not a new topic for me and yet kids coming out of a computer science course should know the basics. They don’t even know the basics exist in terms of accessibility, and I want to see that topic taught in computer science and design and development courses, boot camps… I want at least some people to have a basic understanding. And, in some ways it seems like what you’re talking about doing is post-graduate work rather than entry level, 101, 100 level courses. So, I’m not sure how to reconcile what you’re talking about,which I think is mission critical, but also, make sure that people at least have a basic understanding and awareness of. Liz: Yeah, I think… and I think maybe I might see this in a different way, I think … it’s so easy to get caught up in language in disability, I think… and there's really 2 specific places I see this where I feel very protective of the language and that is the word mobility and the word accessibility. If you look at the word mobility, for me it means wheelchairs and access and all those different things but I sort of feel like now the word mobility is evolving to sort of mean autonomous vehicles and this other thing that exists outside of disability, and so as this word is being brought in to mean so much more and so many more things suddenly the things that I think it fundamentally means to me become a small piece of that. And so, say you want to teach the basics of accessibility as initial course work in… maybe even in high school or in a first-year design school. The thing that I find myself fearful of is that I feel like the word accessibility has become… because it has become this sort of trendy, increasingly trendy word, I feel like it’s broadening to mea…

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