A11y Rules Podcast

Latest Episodes:

E078 – Interview with Liz Jackson – Part 1 Apr 15, 2019

Show notes

Liz Jackson says it's not enough to fix accessibility, people with disabilities must be included. She says: "I think somebody thinks that if they just smooth something out and they make it usable that we won’t have feelings about it. But, we are a people that probably hungers for choice, right? Like, we want to have opinions about things. We want to be delighted. So to simply try and smooth something out and endeavor no further, I think is… we’re missing something." 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 78. 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 Liz Jackson. The girl with the purple cane. Thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility, Liz. How are you? Liz: I’m good, I’m good. Thanks for having me, Nic. Nic: Well thanks for joining me. I know you’re herding a lot of different cats lately. I like to let guests introduce themselves. So, in a brief intro, whose Liz Jackson? Liz: So, whose Liz Jackson. I am a disability advocate. I’m somebody who found my way into disability right before my 30th birthday. So, I’ve been a disability advocate for going on 7 years now, and my advocacy has sort of caused me to fall into the design world. And, so, increasingly I’m also starting to see myself as, what I’ve been saying, as a design strategist. Nic: Tell me one thing that most people would not know about you. Liz: That’s such a hard question. What’s something that people might not know about me. I don’t know if I have an answer for that. I think. I think… the thing that’s coming to mind is this increasingly on the internet and in my work I’ve started phasing myself out of the work so it’s less stories about me and it’s more stories about the work. And so I think right now at this point in time I do sort of wonder if there are ways that I could’ve actually gotten lost in this work. So I’m at a point in my life right now where I’m trying to also separate myself from this in some ways. Because, it’s really easy to get caught up in the day to day, and really figure out what I want to do outside of, what I perceive as, a fight. I’m in the fight. So. Nic: Yeah, I have a t-shirt from a guy called Dan Wilkins, I don’t think he makes those shirts anymore, but it says, more or less, ‘there comes a day when even best advocate needs a day off from this stuff.” And, I think separating yourself from the fight is probably a very wise and healthy thing to do. Liz: Yeah, I’m actively always looking for things, but it’s interesting because even as I look for things to do, I find myself pushing them away because I… there’s so much now. You fight for so much, and finally, things start to catch on so there are now so many things that I can do, that I’ve been given access to and so I’m trying to achieve that balance. Nic: We are talking about web accessibility specifically, but I know… I would like to open that a little bit more because of your personal work in accessibility and advocacy. How would you define accessibility as a whole? Liz: How would I define accessibility as a whole? Increasingly I’m seeing accessibility as one half of disability. I think you need really two parts to have… to kind of achieve whatever it is that you’ve set out to do so you need the access, you need people to be able to do the thing that they’ve set out to do but I think the other half is the culture. And, I really look at the culture through the lens of disability studies and so for me, if we were to look at it in terms of study… How is it… if you wanted to have an all-encompassing background in disability, you would need to have equal parts accessibility and equal parts disability culture so you could comfortably navigate between the two. Nic: I like that. I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about it that way, but I think it makes a lot of sense. You were saying you came into disability around your 30th birthday. What’s your personal experience of disability, Liz? Liz: It’s complicated. I am… it’s actually through the onset of neuromuscular condition that I actually came to realize that I am somebody who has actually dealt with disability throughout my life. It’s through the navigation of this new illness that I discovered... I’ve had tourettes my whole life and sort of really being able to define it and how it impacted me and so… I talked to… I often times talk to Lawrence Carter-Long about this. He’s somebody who very much identifies as he would say freak and I’m somebody who identifies as sort of always being slightly askew. And, so I think my experience of disability is one whereas I come to educate myself about it. I also come to know myself better and to gain confidence in who I am. Nic: Has your experience of disability have an influence on how you think about accessibility? Liz: Absolutely, I think about the things that make me the most frustrated, and it’s when something doesn’t quite work for me and just sort of feeling the rage and the frustration. I think I’m very fortunate in that I think so often society tries to tell us that we are the problem. Like there’s something wrong with us. I think I am somebody who is very fortunate that for some reason I’ve never really thought about it that way. For me, it’s been more the case that I’ve seen the outside factor as the problem. And, I think in some ways my feeling about accessibility provide me this kind of looking at this through the lens of ability. Nic: That’s profound. I just so love talking with you, Liz. You throw ideas that are really thought-provoking. That’s wonderful. Liz: Well, thank you. Nic: What kind of hurdles did you find, or meet, when you’re starting to think about this world of accessibility and of culture as well? Disability culture. Did you find barriers? Were there things that were particularly difficult for you? Liz: Yeah, I think more than anything, what it comes down to is perceptions. Lately, the thing that I’ve been saying is I want to be able to commit to the friction of my disability. I want to be able to honor the friction of my disability and I think so often we work to accessibility and we sort of envision this smoothing out. Right? That if we just make it usable everybody would be okay but I think things that we don’t necessarily take into account are… you know, when we smooth something out we end up prescribing how something is going to work and how we are either going to communicate or whatever. And so, for me, when I really look at accessibility I sort of endeavor to look at it more complexly. How is it that… like, Shannon Finnigan is… she’s an artist. She’s disabled and she’s been playing around with this idea that alt text is poetry, right? So how is it that you can really kind of, fit something in there that honors the person instead of just seeing their role in this process as one of just being smoothed out. Nic: Tell me a little bit more about this concept of friction. Liz: Yeah, I think… one thing that I didn’t expect was that as I got into this work I didn’t expect people would take an interest in me speaking publicly. But that has been, for me, a way that I can pursue this work. It allows me to fund the work, and it allows me to get my point of view out into the world. And I can talk about the most recent conference that I spoke at. So, I went on stage and I gave a talk. And, in the talk, I talk about these ideas that I have on empathy. I talked about this idea that maybe it’s not that we always need to be fixed or that we need things fixed but that we just need to be able to be included in the process but also to lead in the process. And I talked about this idea of honoring the friction of my disability. And, I got off the stage and as soon as I walked backstage the conference organizer said to me, you know, in the ten years we’ve been doing this conference that was the best talk we’ve ever had. Right? So, I very much was praised for what I brought to this conference and what happened later on in the conference is I acted on the very thing that I talked about. So, I did the thing that I said. And as soon as I did that, my ideas suddenly seemed a lot less embraced and I sort of felt this coldness, whereas before there was only warmth. And so, for many, I see that I’m really struggling with this idea that people want me to talk about things but they don’t actually want me to do them. And I’m somebody who simply wants to do them. Nic: Yeah, it’s fine to get people thinking about accessibility and make them consider things but from there to actually action it seems to be quite a step. Isn’t it? Liz: Yeah, well it does, right? I think somebody thinks that if they just smooth something out and they make it usable that we won’t have feelings about it. But, we are a people that probably hungers for choice, right? Like, we want to have opinions about things. We want to be delighted. So to simply try and smooth something out and endeavor no further, I think is… we’re missing something. And so, for me, it’s how can we add culture to accessibility? Nic: What’s disability culture? Liz: What’s disability culture? It’s, you know, it’s… that’s a good question. Disability culture to me is… I remember I recently said online, and it was actually after this conference. I was kind of thinking of this idea of vulnerability. And, I was saying I might make myself vulnerable or I might become vulnerable at no choice of my own but I’m not somebody who will be vulnerable. I think ‘be vulnerable’ is this mantra that we’re told on… you know, on podcasts there’s the Chris Tedibit podcast and the Oprah Supersoul conversations and I think vulnerability is this thing we are sort of always told is something we need to be and it’s never made sense to me. But, remember that as I was thinking, as I got back to New York from the conference and the next day I had gone to… there’s another… there are a few disabled people that I really am attached to here in New York City, one of them is Chancy Fleet who is the accessibility coordinator for the New York public library and she was hosting this event and there was a bunch of disabled people there, and, I remember I just went into the room and I walked in there and I saw a few friends that are very active in the disability community and I remember I just felt… I teared up, I just felt so safe. I felt I was with people who would understand the discomfort that I had gone through and I just felt understood. Right? So, what is the disability culture? It’s the solace that we take in each other so that we can nourish each other and go back out into the world and do the work that we are committed to doing. I think that’s the best definition I have of disability culture. Nic: Playing devils advocate here, several years ago I wrote an article called ‘Disability Community? What disability community?’ Where I was talking about the differences between the group where there’s seemingly a hierarchy if you’re a quadriplegic you’re better than someone whose paraplegic. If you’re totally blind you’re better than if you only have low vision and this kind of concept where there’s a lot of disability groups that are pitting each other against other disability groups. And, I’d like to throw this at you in terms of… Is there a single disability culture? Or are the cultures so different between disability groups that it makes for a fragmented experience that would be really hard to reconcile from one to another. Liz: Yeah, I think this something everybody in… that is… everybody who is very active in the disability space, we don’t call it a disability community but somebody who's trying to work and create progress in this space. I think there are these very tangible, very visceral ways that we do bump up against each other and it’s uncomfortable. I think a lot about the pecking order of disability, right? It’s almost like the more visible your needs are the more likely your needs are… like, nobodies getting their needs met but the more visible the need the more likely you’re about to come close to getting your needs met. I was talking to somebody who's long been active in national adapt recently and I’ve sort of long seen National Adapt, like the guy in my team there, their fight for bus lifts on busses. That… this idea of a bus lift came to me more than any sort of one community. It was sort of like this object that regardless of whether or not you needed a bus lift, if you were active in the disability space in the late 60’s / early 70’s this was something that everybody came together and they sort of valiantly fought for. And, I was actually wondering to him if we exist in a time where, yes, we have various needs and we have various things that we’re trying to accomplish but I actually do wonder if straws in the straw ban have actually become that for us now. And, that, maybe we’re not always going to be able to come together on things but maybe from time to time there are objects and there are goals that regardless of our need of that object or that goal we will support one another. And, so, I guess if we are looking at modern overarching disability community, for me, the question is ‘Okay, well who's been concerned about the straw ban’? And maybe that could be an identifier for us. Nic: Yeah. I accept that. Liz: It’s the best I have. I think this is something we’re all grappling with but there are those moments and when we do find ourselves in those spaces it does feel good and so, what if we pay attention to those little things where we can hopefully assume it feels good for many, many people. Nic: Yeah. I like the idea of trying to find similarities and shared experiences rather than try to fragment people with disabilities more. Because, I mean, we’re about 25% of the US population so if we came together rather than bickering we could actually have quite a bit of power here. Liz: Yeah. I think it’s interesting. I myself participate in some of the bickerings. And, this is another question of mine is, I think in any given community there are people who will bicker simply out of frustration without actually having a goal in mind and then there are others who are engaging in these fights but they have something very specific that they’re working towards. And, so, for me, I think well how in these battles do we start to delineate ‘Okay, maybe there’s something of substance here.Like, maybe this person’s actually trying to say more and maybe we’re missing something’. Nic: Hmm Liz: And so I think I’m trying to figure out, okay, when is it that one persons trying to know another person down versus when is it that one person’s actually really trying to say something. Nic: What’s your favorite word? Liz: Right now I decided my word of 2019 is ‘usurp’. Nic: Okay. Why? Liz: So, this idea of usurping. So, for me, it’s… I remember I was talking to this guy who's a… he’s an entrepreneur and he talks… he often times sort of talks to various companies about entrepreneurship. And, as of late, increasingly charities are approaching him and they’re asking him… I’m sorry, not charities but philanthropists are approaching him and they’re asking him. ‘ How do we get more bang for our buck?’ Or ‘How is it that we can assure ourselves that the money that we are giving to charities is being used effectively?’ and what he was saying to them is, well, what he wa…

Full show notes at the publisher

E77 – Interview with Amy Carney – Part 2 Apr 08, 2019

Show notes

Amy Carney tells us accessibility is not just a checklist of standards but that we really are building experience for people and allowing them to open up opportunities. 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 77. 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 Amy Carney, we had a great show last time talking about all kinds of things but also the wins that Amy has been able to be part of and trigger in accessibility in Alaska. So, that’s fantastic. Amy, welcome back. Amy: Thank you. Nic: We finished last week on a high note talking about all the good stuff that’s happening in Alaska, accessibility wise. Let’s switch to something else. What would your greatest frustration be in terms of web accessibility? Amy: You know, I think WebAIMprobably pointed those out in their WebAIM million report. The frustrations are probably the realization that people have simple choices to make a lot of the times, not all the time but a lot of times its simple choices and they just don’t quite understand quite how simple it is to make some fixes, and it isn’t really cost heavy and just a little extra time. And so, trying to explain to people that accessibility, for the most part, is easier than you think, and, also the frustrations of… I think I’ve seen this on Twitter, of having to go over HTML again with people. It comes down with some basic changes to your structure and … Nic: Yeah Amy: … element choices. So, yeah. I think it’s frustrating that people don’t see how easy it is sometimes and that it’s… it’s gained a lot of traction it feels like, in the past year for people talking about it but it’s still not as sexy as other things people are learning. Like, “Oh, you know about React and how to do this” and so many other trends that go on that people really spend a lot of time learning but then it’s kind of just a, “Oh, yeah, accessibility, I’ll think about that when I’m done with my project here”. Nic: What do you think the one thing everyone knows about accessibility is? Amy: The one thing that everybody knows… hmmm Nic: Yeah Amy: Well, I think the universal point is it has to do with people with disabilities. And, I feel like, you know, the image ALT attribute has been fairly common. I was even learning when I started dabbling in doing our library website and I remember our IT guy was like, “Well you have to have the ALT attribute or it’s not accessible.” There was no other discussion about accessibility but the ALT attribute had to be there and so I feel like I see that a lot even though that’s a common fail for places I feel like it’s also a win for a lot of places too. Even if the text inside isn’t always great. But the ALT attribute is there, so that’s fine. I feel like people have made a step forward. Nic: Oh we’ve only been advocating for the ALT attribute for, since 1995 or so. It’s good that it's finally starting to sink in a little bit. Amy: I didn’t hear about it when I was doing Geocities. Nic: Oooh you just dated yourself. Amy: I did. That was my first flavor of web design. Nic: Yeah, well that was mine as well. Geocities, yeah, I had a cooking website way back then. Amy: Oh, cool. Mine was StarTrek fanfare. Nic: StarTrek fan. Hmmm. May the force be with you, right? Amy: What?! I can not believe you. Nic: What do you think the number one reason is for most people to fail to succeed in implementing accessibility? Amy: Hmmm. Well, I guess it depends on the site being built. You know, I see a lot of people when they’re working on their applications and their single page applications that the focus can be an issue of getting the focus in the right spot for somebody to understand where they’re at. But in just static webpages I feel like some people struggle with headings and heading levels. Maybe that’s just me but, you know, when you’re having to get back the same… you know, there’s CSS for that and you know, you’ve just created a section and that’s actually a heading for that section instead of a paragraph. I don’t think I run into too many Divs and Spans… as much but, well sometimes I do, but, yeah. I feel like it’s still on a basic level that I feel like I’ve mastered a long time ago and some people, they’re thinking ahead to a certain outcome in their mind and how to build it. They just take a different way of how to build it than I would’ve expected. That kind of goes back to the HTML thing. Nic: How can we help them avoid these kinds of failures? Amy: I’m still asking myself that question. Nic: Fair enough Amy: There’s uh… checklists are one thing that pops up in my mind but I don’t know when people are working on stuff if that’s really help or just an extra burden. Having people put stuff into their process, like, AXE or something like that that’s more automated to let people know or I know, [Hayden Macraine?06:48] has done some of that, here’s things in the CSS that could pop up right at you if you have that CSS file in development. And so, yeah I almost see an automated thing would be the easiest low hanging fruit. Nic: Yeah Amy: But just constant reminders maybe of regular education and reminders because I find that’s the only way I can keep on doing this too. Because my barriers are very low for accessing technology and so if I just remind myself other perspectives and this is real and real blocks for other people and just reading stuff, keeping myself educated keeps that in the forefront of my mind. So, I don’t know how you do that with other people. Some kind of reminder to keep it in the forefront of their mind. becomes more natural to develop it into a workflow. Nic: Yeah, totally. What do you think the greatest challenge for our field, for accessibility, are to moving forward? Amy: The greatest challenge to accessibility, well, probably going back to the last question keeping the awareness up. Keeping up the steam of advocacy and keep on repeating the same things over again… Nic: Yeah Amy: … I think that. People feeling like a broken record can be very exhausting and even I can understand that point. Like, I feel like people I work with at work, that I’m repeating myself and I’m like, “Didn’t I tell you this already?” But, it just… yeah, it’s just that keeping it to the forefront for people so… and understanding that they’re not thinking about this every day or they have other things that they’re dealing with in their day-to-day work. So… Nic: Yeah Amy: … yeah. I think it’s just the advocates and professionals and experts out there just keeping up the good fight. As they would say. Nic: Yeah Amy: And not growing tired of it. Nic: I typically ask people what profession other than your own would you like to attempt. This is your second profession since you were a librarian before. Is there something else you’d like to get your hand onto if you were to do another career change? Amy: I don’t know if I would. This was… this was a long time coming for me. As you see me when I was dealing with GeoCities back at the end of Highschool there. And, I really thought that’s what I wanted to do. Website stuff but it was still so new and I just didn’t know how I could even get into it and make it a profession, And I didn’t have enough encouragement or direction at that time. I started out trying to do a computer science degree and that first class after squeaking by trying to learn C++ was just, like, this isn’t really what I had in mind and the teacher wasn’t very supportive and it was a little awkward being the only girl in class and there’s just so many things. I was just, I don’t think this is where I’m supposed to be. So, I kind of floundered around a bit after that and did different things. But, yeah, after I had this opportunity to come on with the State of Alaska, with the Libraries, Archives, and Museums, ‘coz I actually really love that sector and so it was really great to be doing web stuff for that sector… combination of those sectors I should say because they each have their own specialties and mission… so this has been great to get into it and learn more and get paid to do it. So, I don’t know if when I hit 50 if I will be like, “Okay, that was fun, now let’s do something else maybe a little more physical with my hands” something that doesn’t require staring at a screen all day. But I don’t know what that would be because I haven’t really found that as a side hobby. I don’t really have a lot of hobbies on the side that would motivate me to go onto something else yet. But, that’s yet. That’s a little way down the road. Yeah, so, I keep it open to… you can definitely be more than one thing and I count on probably wanting to move on a couple of decades from now because I’ll have a different mindset and different interests. Nic: And the technology will change. Amy: And it will. Yeah. Imagine the opportunities there. Will I want to change with that technology? Or do I want to do something else? Nic: Who inspires you, Amy? Amy: Lot’s of people. From the undersung like my mom who put aside her own personal interests to take care of her family to people who are well known like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr… people who have spoken up for peoples rights and civil rights. To other women in tech. You have well-known names like Grace Hopper or you have other people that are just making their way now like Rachel Andrews and Jen Simmons… so, yeah, depending on what subject we’re talking about I could let you know… Nic: Fair enough Amy: .. who exactly inspires me. Mostly people who are… who haven’t been afraid to step forward and say, “ I want to try this and I’m going to do as much as I can, learn as much as I can” and not afraid to speak up about it and it takes courage to move forward and do what you really enjoy doing or want to do or feel like it’s going to make a difference. So… coz I still have a pretty small voice. I’ve never been someone that is loud or really spoken up for myself unless it really absolutely matters I guess and makes a life-changing difference of what options I get. But, it’s neat to see people who have really put it out there, on the line and the difference they’ve made. Nic: I think you don’t give yourself enough credit. You may have a small voice but you were instrumental in affecting significant change in accessibility for the State of Alaska. I think that’s… you know, that’s a big accomplishment, You really should not reduce your achievements there. Amy: Well, I hope it continues on. People after me can speak up. Nic: Hmm. Yeah. Let’s wrap the show up with asking you, what is the one thing people should remember about accessibility? Amy: That it comes down to the people. It’s not just a checklist of standards but that we really are building experience for people and allowing them to open up opportunities. Technology, computers is I think why I was drawn to it because it opened up opportunities for me and so I think we have to give that benefit an opportunity for other people no matter if they’re certain... Or use a computer the same way we do or don’t. It’s people. Nic: It is people. Totally. And I think that perhaps that’s one of the pitfalls people fall into. That they think, well, we’re in a tech field, we have tech solutions so it’s a tech problem. But, it’s not. It’s not. It’s about people. It really is. Amy: Yeah. Nic: On that note, Amy Carney, thank you very much for being a guest on the show. It’s been a great chat and I look forward to connecting with you again on Twitter and maybe see you at a conference some time. Amy: I hope so, someday. And, it was great being on your show. You’re very welcome and, thank you. Nic: Thank you and have a good day! Amy: You too! Nic: Everyone out there, thank you for listening to the show. I hope you enjoyed it and if you do, please do tell your friends about it. You can get the transcript for this, and all other shows at https://a11yrules.com. Catch you next time!

E76 – Interview with Amy Carney – Part 1 Apr 01, 2019

Show notes

Amy Carney tells us that accessibility "comes down to a design perspective. We’re designing to include people, specifically people with disabilities. And that is based on enabling people with disabilities to access content and web applications online." 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 76. 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 Amy Carney. Amy, thanks for joining me in this conversation about web accessibility. How are you? Amy: I’m good. Nic: Good. I like to let guests introduce themselves. So, in a couple of sentences… who is Amy Carney? Amy: Well, I’m definitely more than one thing as Daniel Tiger would say, my son’s show. I’m a web designer and developer. I’m also an Alaskan and Kansan. Mum, wife and middle child. And, not necessarily all in that order. Nic: That’s a few hats to wear. That’s cool. Let’s get started by telling us one thing that most people would not know about you. Amy: Unless you went to school with me most people wouldn’t know that from 4th to 11th grade I was a drummer for our school band. So, I do just a variety of bass drums, snare drums, cymbals… kind of whatever triangle. So, yeah, that was really fun. The marching band was probably my favorite bu highschool. Nic: And do you still play music? Amy: No. Probably not since I moved to Juno. I did fantasize that I would continue on after I was an adult and even dragged my drum set around with me up to Alaska, but they’re just sitting in boxes in the last city I was in. So they never made it to Juno with me. They’re still in our cabin in Stewart. So, no. I haven’t played for a long time. I still end up tapping out beats sometimes when I’m listening to music but that’s about it. Nic: Professional hazard. We’re talking about accessibility today. How would you define web accessibility? Amy: I think that for me it definitely comes down to a design perspective. We’re designing to include people, specifically people with disabilities. And that is based on enabling people with disabilities to access content and web applications online. Nic: That’s interesting because I’ve never heard that aspect of accessibility that it comes down to a design perspective. I’d love you to elaborate a little bit more on that because it’s a take that isn’t talked about very often. Amy: I think part of it comes from me. I do a lot more design work. I still do a lot of code which is what I enjoy but it’s a lot of HTML and CSS and as I’ve been doing this for about 5 years professionally… when you’re building something you have to be able to keep the user in mind and decide how they’re interacting with your page, and that has so many different components whether it’s the base HTML structure that’s underneath and how things are spaced out, how the reading flow would go even just for a visual person. And just user experience I guess. Which user experience is built with design and recently I’ve been reading Web for Everyone by Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery. I don’t know if I pronounced that right… Nic: Yeah Amy: … and so, and they really put a lot into that which is actually really refreshing to read because they draw a lot from not just WCAG but universal design which is design and just web design of how people are interacting with different pieces on a page so I’m not very far in their book yet but it’s been very great to hear that perspective because you’re right, I feel like when I really started out it was very development based on, okay what kind of code can we use to make it more accessible and I find when I teach people it ends up coming back around to you teaching them HTML all over again or you’re teaching them design tips that this is how you make it better for somebody and that’s why it makes it better for everybody because you’re designing an experience you aren’t just keeping things from being broken. Nic: That’s great. Thank you. You say you’ve been doing this kind of work professionally for the last 5 years or so, what does your day to day work look like? Where does your role fall within web accessibility? Is it… you say you’re designing but are you working solely in accessibility or… how does that integrate itself? Amy: Accessibility probably came up more like 2 years ago for me. So I was hired about 5 years ago with the Alaska State Libraries, Archives, and Museums, it’s a conjunction of all 3 sectors and it’s under the umbrella of the state of Alaska so it’s within state government and so with the Libraries, Archives and Museums that we call LAM I was hired on as their publication specialist which is kind of like a catch-all term. I think it started out as more of a marketing, kind of making posters and flyers and yeah, we need a webmaster too so why don’t we do that too...And the job … Nic: Typical Amy: … yeah, so the job has evolved even before I got to it. It started out even as a librarian position and it’s just kind of morphed over the years that it’s existed. So when I got hired on by that point they were saying, ‘We need somebody who’s about 80% webmaster and then, by the way, can you make posters and flyers? Have you done any work like that?’ and so, that’s another way I’m able to focus a lot on design is going between paper and between pixels… it’s actually really interesting to see the relationships. I know some people who have had design backgrounds and it’s helpful to them for web design and development but for me, it’s been learning because I was a librarian before this and so the last 2 years we’ve been making more of a push. I’ve mentioned it before where I was like, ‘Hey, I think this is an important issue but I don’t know how we get there’. And then our overarching department, the Department of Education has had to take it seriously in the last couple of years so we’re all learning together and doing that push so I’d say in the past year, even though I’m doing the day to day webmaster stuff like posting new content or creating new pages for information we have to offer, for services we have to offer, probably 90% of my time has been accessibility remediation just because we have a mandate and we are going through our own audit right now. And so, that’s been a learning experience which I am so grateful it’s there because I think it’s important. It’s not just we have to do this. Nic: Was this mandate for your organization to have an accessible website… was that how you became aware of accessibility and how important it is or did you have other triggers before that? Amy: I had some other ones before that. Reading just all the different aspects of web design and I was interested in it from a user experience perspective but I just didn’t know how to get there and I didn’t have any support or motivation from above to do it. So it’s just kind of like on the list, ‘yeah we will learn about that sometime’ and I want to learn about it but it’s just not the priority. Nic: If I understand correctly you recently completed a ‘100 days of’. Is that right? Amy: I did. Nic: So you obviously did make the time to learn about accessibility because you learned about accessibility and spoke about accessibility on your site for 100 days. Tell us about that. Amy: Well, it’s actually a second round that I did. A couple of years ago when I really started trying to learn web accessibility that first round was kind of like, directionless. I was just grabbing anything I could find online, I didn’t know where I was going with it as far as I needed some guidance but didn’t know what that guidance was. So, it felt like a lot of random information at once and obviously WCAG. You hear about WCAG the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines but that was about it. And, starting to follow people on Twitter that helped some but this time around I needed those guideposts and some of my own success criteria, you could say. And so when I discovered the international association of accessibility professionals that had their certification for a web accessibility specialist I said, ‘this is what I’m looking for. This is the guidance I need’. It’s not just about the certification but they have actual things that make you a more educated person understanding web accessibility in depth. And so I used that as my goal and was able to do. The 100 days has worked for me before for coding, I used to do 100 days of code rounds that Alexander … Nic: Okay Amy: … and so that’s where I got the idea first to do 100 days the first time so this time I was like, this works for me. I can do it and stay committed and I’ll learn so much more for it. And I did. And that goal was actually good in studying for the certification. I feel I know so much more and am satisfied with what I learned as opposed to the first time around. Nic: That’s awesome. Do you think your view of accessibility has changed over your 2 rounds of hundred days of accessibility? Amy: You mean for better or worse? Or just the things that I know? Nic: Yeah, for better or worse. Has your philosophy or your understanding of it or maybe just things that went click, aha! Amy: Oh yeah, yeah. Well, I think the biggest change has been… this really isn’t as hard as we make it all out to be. When you first start out during my first round it’s kind of like… okay. It’s kind of like, mystifying. What are we supposed to be doing here? And yeah, we have these guidelines but is anybody really going to be sitting and doing a checklist of these guidelines. You know, something more beginner level like. Or friendly to someone who just doesn’t quite know what they’re getting into and I think the second round really became more of ‘I don’t expect anybody to follow my lead and do 100 days. That’s a bit much for most people but, I feel like as I did my tweets every day that it was like, ‘okay, this is advocacy and it’s education. Like, all these little things matter in accessibility and if you learn about this thing, cool. You’ve just made your site better if you do it this way. So, I feel like it came down to just publicly putting out tidbits now and then for people. Yeah, I definitely feel like it’s not as hard. And, there’s actually a really supportive community out there of people advocating for web accessibility and that’s been really cool too. That was hard to find in the beginning. Nic: The community is growing but I think also we are getting more and more interconnected and it’s easier to find one another. I’m certainly growing the number of people that I connect that are doing accessibility or have an interest in accessibility and that’s fantastic for me to see that happen, because 5 years, 6 years, 7 years ago especially on Twitter it was almost a small, very family like grouping of maybe a couple of dozen people at most but now we are connecting to all these people and I think it enriches the community and it enriches the message we are able to collectively put forward. I just think it’s wonderful. Amy: And maybe I’ve gotten lucky to see that transformation because I’ve … I don’t remember how long I’ve been on Twitter but through the hundred days of code I was able to connect with people with that hashtag and it was interesting to start getting broader perspectives of that and not such a narrow view of people I had met in person. And so it was neat to be able to use that and find the A11y hashtag and just slowly building on finding people and finding peoples articles that they’ve written online. It’s …. Yeah. That’s cool to see your perspective of how it’s transformed. Nic: Did you come across barriers or difficulties when you were learning about accessibility and if so how did you get over it? Amy: Well, the first round, like I say, I think WCAG was intimidating and that was before the web accessibility initiative had redesigned their site and so their site didn’t feel really friendly before. When I saw references to it I still kind of feel like I’m not quite making connections with the dots. So, yeah, I guess at the very first round I felt like there were more barriers. I think it clicked a lot more in the second round of having a particular goal, having that body of knowledge document from IAAP and having those … that guidance for like, okay, so yes, you need to understand and learn WCAG and you need to learn ARIA and I mean, that can be a life long learning there of understanding ARIA. Nic: Yeah Amy: But, also ATAG. I hadn’t known about ATAG before the offering tools for accessibility guidelines. Nic: Yeah Amy: And so, that was good. It was like, okay, I know I need to learn these but they had additional guidance for that. Like, okay, here's how to understand how people with disabilities might access the web depending on their assistive technology or strategies that they use. Even if it’s something as simple as finding the screen. So, yeah, the second round I didn’t feel like there's quite as many barriers. Then it suddenly started clicking like ‘Oh, okay I need to continue just looking at people as the people having this experience and what these challenges feel like to them’ and then WCAG started falling better into place. I can’t remember every guideline or success criteria mostly but I start to remember a little bit as I start to encounter the different disabilities or the different assistive technologies. So, yeah, I don’t feel like I ran into as many barriers the second time. The first time I just felt kind of lost. Nic: Yeah, I’ll let you in on a secret that’s probably not all that well kept but most people that are doing accessibility don’t actually know WCAG top to bottom, front to back and all that. I certainly don’t. I know what all the criteria are all about, and if I need to reference that then I can find it easily but I would be the first one to admit I can’t quote you all the success criteria by ear. And, I think, for me anyway, at this point WCAG is important because it’s our guiding standard but it’s also tricky because it’s not, to me, it’s not about compliance. We shouldn't use WCAG as a be all and end all. IT shouldn’t be the target. It should be a tool to help us make things more accessible. So… Amy: I definitely agree. And, that I think is what I learned in the second round. That it’s a great starting point and it can be overwhelming but it’s not the endpoint. And that comes down to design again as you strive for a more universal experience for all and testing with actual people and seeing how it actually works for them and not just… kind of like automated testing. It’s like, okay, we’ve kind of met this and these are things being pointed out to us but it’s not the end. We need to keep checking that it works for real people. Nic: Yeah. Would you say your first round of testing was… the learning was more difficult because things were more scattered but having had that first round of learning you had more of an idea of where you’re going and then you found the resources at IAAP and that allowed you to really focus? Amy: Mmmhmm Nic: Do you think if you’d found the IAAP resource before your first round that your first round would’ve been easier? Amy: That’s actually a very good question that I’ve even asked myself. Was this… do I feel like I’m late finding it or is it just a matter of progress, the way I’ve been searching out things and I don’t know? I sometimes think I don’t think I would’ve been ready to study all o…

Full show notes at the publisher

E75 – Interview with Alli Berry – Part 2 Mar 27, 2019

Show notes

Alli says that getting the right people in the same room at the start of a project is very difficult and can impede accessibility. 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 75. 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 Alli Berry. Hi Alli, welcome back. Alli: Hi, thanks. Good to be back. Nic: Last week we talked about a lot of really interesting stuff and for those of you out there who have not heard the episode, I really invite you to check it out, because we spoke about the importance of language, the relationship between search engine optimization and accessibility and a few other interesting things. So, yeah, check it out. So, this week what are we talking about? Well, we are talking about accessibility again. We finished last week talking about how you managed to get one of your third-party vendors to understand the importance of making their content accessible by providing text or alternative text rather than putting all the content in images, so that was really positive but let's explore the dark side a little bit more. Alli, what's your greatest frustration in terms of web accessibility? Alli: I think, a lot of times it’s getting the right people in the room for the beginning of a project. I’m thinking about a site rebuild or some larger… building a new website from scratch type project. A lot of times what happens is you bring in a design agency and they do these amazing designs but they’re not necessarily approaching things beyond the visual, right? And there’s a lot that needs to go into a website to make it work for people. So, thinking about both from an SEO perspective as well as a web accessibility perspective is this site actually going to work how we need it to, is the information going to be in HTML, is it going to be… it’s amazing what agencies can come up with in terms of where they want to put information. And so I think that a lot of times it really comes down to having the right people in the conversation early into a project instead of being, like “Hey, we’re launching a site tomorrow do you want to just check it over and make sure it’s going to be good for search” or, “is it going to be good for users.” And then, of course, you’re going to find large things that need fixing and suddenly you have a fire when you absolutely didn’t need to. Nic: It’s better to be proactive than reactive, isn’t it? Alli: Definitely. Well, and just to think about everything from the start. That’s going to make your agency partner more effective too if they understand everything… all of your requests and needs for capability. Nic: How do we make that happen? How do we help stakeholders understand the importance of bringing everybody in at the start of a project, from designers to developers to everybody and think about accessibility from the get-go? Alli: That’s a good question. I feel like if I had the answer to that I… I feel like it happens so often. SEO’s like to joke with each other too about being brought into a project at the very end of it. I think… I honestly… I think it’s on everybody to be more assertive. You need to know that the project is happening first of all but to ask more questions of your stakeholders and to find out what they’re planning, how you can get involved. Just giving them things to think about. Often times they don’t know what they don’t know. And so it does come back to the advocacy component. Just to be curious and to constantly be that person in your organization that’s asking questions, that wants to know what’s going on. I think that’s going to help you, help you be a more active partner. Nic: So you’re saying being curious and asking questions in your organization is a good way to be champion within your internal teams. Alli: At least that’s kind of… at least that’s what’s worked for me in the past too and especially when I was working on the agency side I feel like if you don’t ask a lot of questions of your client and try to dig in more and understand their processes it’s pretty hard to insert yourself into them. But, if you can at least find out, like, “Who is in charge of that?” and “How often do you guys meet and what do you talk about?” and like, “Oh, hey, you guys might want some feedback about X, Y and Z, would you ever want me to be a part of that meeting?” that can get you further and further into an organization. Nic: What would be the one thing that everybody knows about accessibility? It’s conventional wisdom if you want. Alli: God, I don’t know. That we need it, perhaps. Nic: Do you think really everybody knows we need it? Or something that most of us in the field know and understand but maybe stakeholders don’t understand that. Alli: That’s a good point. Yeah, maybe people don’t actually know that we need it. I honestly think the… you know, people who don’t have to think about assistive technology don’t. That’s a very fair point. Or, if you don't accessibility a website differently than other people, you’re not going to think about it. I do think that the ‘we need it’ component comes in more and more especially as you get higher into an organization because there is the fear of a lawsuit. Nic: Yeah Alli: So I think at least from that perspective there's more awareness than there used to be but … and I would like to believe that people are empathetic, at least to a point but they also want things to be done quickly and efficiently and on a budget and I do think people get intimidated with how much you have to think about with accessibility so I think for a lot of people it’s easier to just not. Nic: It’s funny, I think most people actually are good people and they’re not mean or lacking empathy. It’s really this question of ‘if I don’t have experience or understanding of the needs then I won’t know that I need to do these things.’ For example, I bet you were looking at storefront entrances a lot more after you pushed your classmate in Washington state, pushed her wheelchair when you were 13. That was probably an eye-opening thing that suddenly you were paying attention to accessibility access everywhere, even when you weren't with your classmate, right? Alli: Totally, yeah, no I totally agree with that. I think, yeah, having experience, yeah, definitely. That’s what sticks with you more than anything else. I used to… the blind film critic, he was pretty big on Twitter for a while, I used to watch videos and see how he uses his iPhone. Of course, things I had never thought about because I never had to. So, yeah. I completely agree that yeah. If you have experience with one type of disability, whether it's you or somebody else, like, naturally, like that’s going to feel less intimidating to you than not even knowing anything about what somebody might need for a disability or just unfamiliar with. Nic: What do you think the number one reason is for most people failing to succeed with implementing accessibility? Alli: I actually think it’s what we are talking about now. I think that there’s just so many… I think that people just don’t understand the spectrum of needs. When you think about disabilities you think about a physical disability, you think blindness, you think deafness but there’s so many more. It’s more of a spectrum than that. And just, there’s so many different needs I think it can be intimidating for people to even know where to start. And I think there’s so much more happening with the creation of websites that because it’s just such a big thing to tackle and if you don’t know very much from the beginning… you have so much to learn I just think it’s hard to get people to really dive in and learn a ton about it to be the most effective. Nic: It’s interesting you’re saying we don’t think about the experience of people with impairments that are less known or less understood when you veer away from sight impairments and hearing impairments. I sat in on a usability study recently and the person we were working with had a traumatic brain injury, and they were telling us how the yellow logo signified a ‘Hey, attention there's danger here’ because yellow was the color for danger. So instead of being a positive and happy and fresh looking logo, it was ‘I don’t want to look at this because I don’t think I should be on this site. It’s a …. There’s danger on this site.’ Alli: Huh Nic: And I’ve been doing accessibility for 25 years and I never really thought about that. So… yeah. It’s really great to interact with people with impairments that we’re not familiar with. Alli: Yeah, no kidding. That’s super interesting. That’s something no matter how you understand about accessibility... and I’m certainly not at the top of your normal guests' list by any means... there’s always so much more to learn and understand the complexity. That’s super interesting. Nic: How can we help people that lack this areness of th different conditions, the different combination of imapairments or experiences… how can we help them get that knowledge, get that awareness? Alli: That’s a good question. I’ve been thinking about this more and more too and just like, the give on my own team or what have you. We do so much user testing but we don’t do… so, we do user testing in that we test AB landing pages or we do heat mapping on a page or we take user recordings of people using a page and trying to figure out where they’re having difficulties, but we don’t do user testing from a disabilities standpoint. And I think that it would be really powerful to actually bring in some people who access our website differently, and actually see them try and do it, and learn from that, and hear what their struggles are, and how we can make changes. I feel like that would be something really powerful, and it would stick with everybody every day. Nic: Yeah it’s certainly stuck with everybody I’ve interacted with that actually sat in or looked at a recording of such a … such a session, and it… yeah, it’s really eyeopening. What would you say our greatest challenges are for web accessibility moving forward? Alli: I think… I mean, I do think awareness continues to be a challenge and just all of the things we’ve just talked about too. Just having more understanding of disability, in different forms. I also think getting web accessibility just prioritized. There’s just so many teams out there running websites that are short-staffed, lean, going in 800 different directions, trying to do 800 different types of marketing, and I think that accessibility sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. It’s important that it doesn’t because there’s so many potential people we could be reaching that we’re not. But I think sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of that because you’re tracking who does use your site rather than who you’re missing out on. There’s no way to gather that kind of data. Nic: Yeah, the lack of metrics for people with disabilities using a website is something that… it’s a complain that I hear a lot of from stakeholders and on the one hand I’m thinking it would be powerful to be able to give that information. On the other hand, I’m thinking that means gathering data on people that they don’t necessarily want to share. Alli: Right Nic: How do we resolve that? Alli: God, I would love to know because you can pull things like a bounce rate. You can see how many people left a page, but you don’t know the reason. So, it could be anything from ‘this just wasn’t what I was looking for’ to ‘hey, I came to your site and I literally couldn’t access the information I needed.’ I don’t know another way to gather that data other than to do actual user recordings, but even then you don’t know for sure what the core issue is. The only way I think you can do it is actually bringing people in and watching and that just… that takes time and could be expensive. You know, it’s not a … marketers are always looking for ways to get a large sample size for a low amount of money. You know? Nic: Yeah there’s no doubt that user testing with real users with disabilities can take time and can be costly. It’s so worth it though. Even if you do...you know, use a sample of 5 or 10 people to go through this it is just so worth it. Alli: Absolutely Nic: Alli, what profession, other than being a geek in SEO, would you like to do? Would you go back to special education or would you like to try something else? Alli: That’s a good question. I often think about how I could go back to special education and not work in the school system. So, that would definitely be one place to go. Another thing I’ve always wanted to do is be a documentary filmmaker. I love film and I love helping people tell their stories, and it’s cool that I do get to do an element of that through content. And I love to travel. So I feel like if you’re making documentary films you are going to travel. You’re going to meet new people and hear their stories and help them tell them, and, yeah, I think that would be really cool. Nic: In a way helping people tell their stories is what I’m doing with this podcast and also for the shorter series of the Accessibility Rules soundbites where I get people with disabilities to tell us in their own words what barriers they encounter. So I certainly can relate to this desire of helping people tell their stories. Alli: Yeah. Yeah, I think you have a cool job. Yeah, I think podcasting would be super cool, I think consulting would be super cool to help just raise more awareness and understanding and, yeah, help businesses do a better job of being accessible. Nic: Who inspires you? Alli: Who inspires me? I feel like the next generation of young adults. I keep thinking about this… there is that kid who's just all over everywhere, the news, who had posted on Reddit about wanting to get vaccinated because his parents wouldn’t do it. Thinking about how much courage something like that would take, and then to testify it in the Senate. The kids at Parkland high school who are refusing to let politicians pay lip service to gun violence issues… I don’t know, I just look at this generation that’s coming and … they’re amazing. I just can’t wait to see all that they do for this world because I think that … when you’re thinking about advocacy this is a generation of kids who are coming and I think they’re going to do amazing things. Nic: Yeah, I look forward to that. If we leave them a planet to actually be able to [crosstalk 18:23] Alli: Right, there is that. Nic: The rate it’s going… What would be one thing you would like people to remember about accessibility? Alli: I would love, at least for people in SEO to remember that you can make a site as accessible as ever to search engines but at the end of the day what actually matters is that it’s accessible for the people because once somebody gets to your site it’s ultimately a human who needs to have a good experience using it, and that should really be what you’re focussed on at the end of the day. It should be about your users not about your search ranking. Nic: I love that. I’m making a note because I love that. Alli, thank you so much for your time and conversation. It’s been really interesting to talk about accessibility and SEO and the junctions between those 2 things. Alli: Yes! Nic: Is there anything you would like to share that I haven’t discussed or brought up? Alli: I d…

Full show notes at the publisher

E74 – Interview with Alli Berry – Part 1 Mar 18, 2019

Show notes

Alli tells us how experiencing lack of accessibility for a classmate of hers in the built environment helped her understand the importance of accessibility on 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/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. You’re listening to episode 74. 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 Alli Berry. Thanks for joining me with this conversation around web accessibility, Ali. Alli: Thanks so much for having me. Nic: So I like to let guests introduce themselves. In a brief intro, who is Alli Berry? Alli: So I am the SEO and content lead for the Ascent by the Motley Fool. So, if you are familiar with investing at all the Motley Fool is a pretty big brand giving investment advice to people. So, my part of the business, we are a sub-brand of that, and we’re focused on creating free personal finance content, and my job is really to make sure our site is accessible … as accessible as possible for search engines, and to help our pages rank well, and to get our content to as many people as possible. And what’s fortunate about SEO is that often what is accessible for search engines is also what is accessible for humans so by approaching websites from an SEO perspective we’re at least on our way to helping make websites more accessible for humans too. Nic: Yeah, that’s something I would like to explore a little bit in a moment but to really get warmed up… tell us one thing that most people would not know about yourself. Alli: Sure. I started my career as an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher in Japan, and what I loved the most about doing that… I did that for a couple of years. I taught special education as well, so I came back to the US, and I really wanted to pursue that field of work so I got a job doing SEO, my very first SEO job, to pay the bills, and then I was doing a Masters in special education at night. And I ended up staying on the SEO path, there’s a lot going on in Chicago public schools at the time, and I decided I should probably just stick with the career path I was on but I’m super grateful that I had that background and experience ‘coz I had to read that ADA and the IDEA and learn about assistive tech, and I feel like having all of that background has really helped me better understand the people component to my job, and who is actually impacted by the decisions that we make on websites. Nic: That’s interesting to hear about your background in special education. It seems that a lot of people in tech that are interested in accessibility have some kind of background that directly relates to disability in some way. Alli: Yeah, whether they even realize it or not I think we impact so much, and I think often that gets lost. Nic: How would you define web accessibility? Alli: How do I define it? I think it’s allowing people to access content on the internet in the way that they want or need to consume it. Making flexible… making websites flexible enough that they can cater to all needs. Just so that, yeah… it’s important that people can access things in the way that they need to but also thinking about two peoples preferences as well. Nic: Yeah the aspect of choice I think is important and often forgotten about even though the accessibility guidelines talk about it in a few ways. You mentioned that your primary role is SEO, how do you implement accessibility in your day to day work? Web accessibility that is. Alli: So, basically what I do I’m always advocating for making sure that our web site is accessible as possible to search engine bots, right? So, thinking about all kinds of things from visual media, making sure that we’re using alt text on images or we’re transcribing videos using captions, transcribing podcasts, and also thinking about the mobile experience, and that’s becoming a much bigger deal in SEO. Google is now indexing the mobile version of websites over the desktop version so suddenly you have everyone thinking more about what a mobile experience looks like, and actually thinking about text enlargement which is helpful for both the aging population, people with visual impairment. That’s been interesting how that’s been aligning, a lot of time people are also thinking about… more about voice search and how information can be consumed via Alexa units or Google Home, and actually… Nic: Yeah Alli: ...that’s super interesting because that’s something that people using speech to text readers have been obviously needing for forever but now you have the entire digital marketing community essentially thinking about that more as well. Nic: It’s something I’ve always found interesting how accommodations and systems that are originally designed for people with disabilities come into the mainstream, and suddenly everybody's paying attention to them. It’s an interesting circle. Alli: Mmhmm Nic: I often tell people that Google is the largest screenreader user on the planet. Would you agree with that? And if you do could you elaborate on that from a SEO perspective? Alli: Yeah. Oh, that’s super interesting. I’ve never thought about it like that but I totally agree with that. I guess I often try to frame things too, like Google essentially, just another user with unique needs so kind of similar that they both struggle with the visual components. They struggle with things like iframes, it’s really important to have easy and simple navigation to help Google understand the most important pages to your website. Adding site search on your websites also super helpful because you can uncover what content is really hard for people to find. Again thinking about mobile. It completely is essentially a giant screen reader, and it’s almost better to think about Google as another human that’s trying to consume your content. Nic: You did special education for a while. Is that how you became aware of the importance of web accessibility? Or was there something else that triggered that awareness? Alli: That’s a good question. In terms of web accessibility yes. In terms of accessibility in general… when I was in school... when I was a middle school student one of my classmates had cerebral palsy so I was kind of her designated helper, and I used to take notes on carbon paper and give her copies. She and I and a bunch of our classmates went to Washington DC on a school trip, and I got to experience what it was like being in a wheelchair trying to get into really old government buildings. It was an awful experience. We had to walk … we had to go so much further just to get inside places. There were actually places we couldn’t go at all. We got stuck in an elevator in one of the monuments. Just as a 13-year old that experience really stuck with me, and I actually went home and wrote a letter to Paul Wellstone when I was 13. Because for my friend Amy that’s a part of her day to day, she’s very used to that experience. As somebody with privilege I … that was my first encounter with it, and it was an eye opening experience I guess, and that stuck with me for a long time. But then from the web perspective, learning assistive technology I’m certainly not an expert in it but at least having the exposure to it helped me see the complexity around web accessibility and how many things we need to be thinking about when we are creating websites, and stuff. Nic: Do you think your experience in Washington when you were 13, obviously it opened your eyes but did it create a negative perception of what it might be like to live with a disability? Alli: I don’t know about… I mean, it certainly it gave me a negative perspective on just how little thought people give to ableism, just to basic rights that people with disabilities have, and that’s getting completely disregarded a lot. Nic: Mmmm Alli: Yeah. Nic: Yeah Alli: It definitely fired me up and got me thinking about how I can try to help. Nic: That’s good. So you’ve been doing web work for what, about 5 years? More or less? 10 years? Alli: I’ve been SEO since 2011 so I guess 8 years now Nic: Yeah. 8 years. Cool. Has your view of accessibility changed over that time period or do you think things are more or less the same? Alli: Good question. I think, at least from my line of work people are becoming more and more aware of the need for accessibility.I think a lot of that is actually coming from fear, and I don’t know if that’s necessarily the best reason to be thinking about it but the fear of a lawsuit, of PR issues, is very real, and I work for a very large company. Accessibility is very top of mine because The Fool has had some issues with accessibility in their past. We … I worked for another company, Kaplan Professional Education, they were also realizing that they had.. They still had a ways to go on the accessibility front. But, I do feel like there's been a lot more push to start actually making some changes which I think is a really good thing. And I think just as technology evolves, and stuff I guess my hope is that people are starting to think about accessibility from the beginning, rather than from cleaning things up after the fact. Nic: It’s always easier to make it happen from the start rather than to try and retrofit accessibility in that. It’s interesting that it’s a topic that comes back over and over again with different guests I’m having. It’s this thing, you gotta bake it right in from the get-go. It’s like a blueberry muffin, you can’t put the blueberries in the muffin after the muffins are baked. Alli: Exactly. Nic: So… Alli: Yeah, everything will work a lot better if it’s in the planning from the beginning. Nic: Have you faced barriers in your… I’ll say work as a champion, internal organization champion of accessibility … are you finding barriers or is this fear of lawsuit really pushing everybody from legal to dev teams to everybody in the organization? Alli: There’s, I would say, at least in my current role this is I think the most aware a larger team has ever been about accessibility. But, I do think, of course, there's going to be barriers. One thing that would be amazing to have that I don’t think exists anywhere is to have a tool that would allow you to see if a page is failing some sort of assistive technology and why. You can put a search, or a website into a Google search console type tool, and see that search engines can accessibility something and why … it would be really cool if you could do that for different types of technology as well. Just because, a lot of times we don’t know what wouldn’t work for somebody unless you do user testing with people. Nic: Yeah, that’s an interesting concept. There are a few automated testing tools that basically do a Yes, No, Pass, Fail kind of approach for some of the things but what you’re talking about is more an emulator of the various assistive technologies out there. Is that correct? Alli: Yeah. I think there's a hole in the market for it. That would be a really cool thing to develop. I wish I knew how. Nic: That’s an interesting thought, maybe one of our listeners that are so technically minded might look at doing something like that. On the other hand, it’s interesting, because assistive technologies seem to be used differently by different people, and the same setup will behave completely differently from person to person so it would be interesting to see if something like that can be developped. Alli: Yeah. I don’t know. I challenge everyone out there to come up with something. Nic: There’s a challenge let’s make sure we put it out there. Jumping about on a different topic… Ali, what’s your favorite word? Alli: I knew you were going to ask this question ‘coz I’ve listened to enough episodes now to know it’s always coming…. I was thinking about this, and I don’t know if I have a favorite word necessarily but does it have to be in English? Nic: No, not at all Alli: Okay. Well, there's a word in Japanese that I think is really interesting. The full… I guess it’s technically 2 words, Kuuki Yomenai a lot of times people just shorten it to KY but it means ‘someone who can’t read the air. Or like somebody who can’t pick up on social cues, on social expressions…. Just can’t read a room and kind of adjust themselves accordingly. I think it’s an interesting word just because there isn’t an equivalent in English, and I think that says a lot about the cultural difference between Japanese culture and American culture. The Japanese are a lot more… it’s a collective society, there’s a lot more emphasis on fitting in whereas we’re a little bit more individualistic and being unique, and … I don’t know, I just think there's … I think that’s cool to.. You can uncover bits and pieces about a culture from the language. Especially when there's no equivalent word in your language and thinking about why. Nic: Yeah, for some reason what you’re describing makes me think of situation awareness or lack thereof. Does that relate or is it different? Alli: No, I think that’s it. Situational awareness, and just… In Japanese culture you’re not going to ever receive direct feedback, as an American that can be really frustrating because we are very feedback oriented so a lot of it is dependent on you being able to pick up on when you’ve done something wrong, and kind of correct yourself, and that can be a really hard thing to tackle. So, yeah… it’s just a very different culture. Nic: That’s interesting Alli: Is there anything in French that’s… doesn’t have an English equivalent? I know you speak French. Nic: Yeah there’s probably quite a few things but my bigger problems from having grown up in French and learning English as a fourth language have been what I would call false friends. Words that are on the surface very similar but in reality quite different. For example the word eventually. In French, we say "éventuellement" and they are very similar however, there is a significant difference. In English eventually means, yeah we will get to there at some point in the course of things whereas in French "éventuellement" means we may or may not get there depending on the events we are going to encounter. Alli: Huh Nic: So these kinds of … these kinds of false friends can be really throwing people for a loop, and causing a lot of angst when you’re trying to communicate something, and you’re not realizing the subtleness of words that sound so similar, that appear to be so similar that have some massive differences. Alli: Yeah. That’s so interesting. Language is such a hard thing to master. Nic: Language is fascinating. I mean, it’s veering off the topic of accessibility in some way but at the same time, I think communication and words and language is part of accessibility we have to make sure we’re speaking clearly and there are things in English that boggle me. Of course, there are things in French that boggle me too but things like why do you drive on a parkway and park on a driveway. Alli: That is a great question Nic: Yeah Alli: I never thought about that. … Exactly, it’s totally counter-intuitive, and we expect everyone to just know that and accept it. Nic: Talking about language, bring it back to the topic of accessibility, one of the things that we tend to promote a lot is the concept of plain language or plain English because we’re in English now. Does plain English help in SEO? And if so, how? Alli: Yeah. That’s a great question. So, yes, pl…

Full show notes at the publisher

E73 – Interview with Jen Luker – Part 2 Mar 11, 2019

Show notes

Jen tells us to start accessibility today, to start with one thing. Then to do one more thing, and then one more. 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 73. 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. So in this episode, I’m continuing my conversation with Jen Luker. Last show was quite awesome, do check it out if you haven’t already, but we spoke about accessibility obviously, but also explored a little bit of the relationship between knitting and weaving and coding, and the impact that can have on helping people learning to code. So that was awesome. So, welcome back, Jen. Jen: Thank you. Nic: We finished last week talking about your greatest achievement and how you built a workflow that was really monitoring accessibility at all stages of the project. From coding to checking on the live site with real data. A flipside to that, what would be your greatest frustration in terms of web accessibility? Jen: My greatest frustration is people that, no matter how much you try to explain how it’s useful they just shrug their shoulders and say, “I don’t have time,” “It’s not important,” “maybe we will get to it in a few years.” There’s so much low hanging fruit that you can get to with just a few minutes of extra work that completely transforms the entire web if we all did it and it doesn’t have to be some big, giant initiative or an extra thing. It can be a few minutes, it could be “I’m going to think for five seconds on what to really put in this alt tag,” or it could be, “..you know.. I think I’m going to use a button instead of a Div here” or “... maybe an ARIA role will help here when I have to use this thing but, it’s not very accessible.” Just a split second decision makes a huge difference, and it doesn’t… at the moment the perspective on accessibility is that it’s a feature. And that’s so disappointing because it’s not a feature. If you couldn’t get through your funnel and buy the product, you would be flipping out making a hotfix to get it to work, right? Nic: Yeah, yeah Jen: But there's a huge amount of people that actually can’t buy your product and nobody cares. Accessibility isn’t a feature. It’s a usability bug. And changing the… Jen: Right? So, I mean, when you’re dealing with accessibility issues they’re accessibility bugs, and they’re bugs in your system. They need to be documented, they need to be fixed. Especially if they’re affecting your funnel. So I think that’s probably my hugest frustration, is trying to change the perspective from “It’s a feature we can do in a few years when we get around to it” to “These are actually usability bugs.” Nic: Why do you think there’s this mindset of … “Oh well, it’s a feature” or “It’s too hard” or “I can’t be bothered”? Why do you think people, even after you’ve spent some time, energy and resources trying to do a bit of education … why do they keep that attitude do you think? Jen: So, there’s some really cool tools like Lighthouse for Chrome or aXe for Chrome or Firefox and when you load it up, and you run a quick technological audit on your website, and 900 issues come up on one page… that just goes into shock overload, right? You just look at it and you’re like, “that’s one page out of hundreds so how much does that really add up to as far as accessibility problems” and, it just seems...it can be really overwhelming. It can be hugely overwhelming to look at that huge number, and realize how many problems you might have. And I think that that number is a little bit deceiving because of the fact that you might get dinged 37 times for one minor color change that would solve all of those. Nic: Yeah, yeah. Jen: Or, you’re dinged on not having a label in a field, and if you just modified the component that you’re using to include a label section it would solve all of the form label issues on the entire website and not just one place. So, some of those things... they tell you every single time there’s a problem even though the solution may be one place. One small item that you could do that would solve a lot of those issues. So, I think that it’s overwhelming and we’ve gone so long without really thinking about it that now that we’re thinking about it we all have brownfield projects that have been around for ages and modified and tweaked and quicked and spaghetti code, and it’s just… it’s so much that we shut down and we just shrug our shoulders and move on, and I think that it is much easier to say, “the time to start thinking about accessibility is before you start” … Nic: Yeah Jen: … And that really alienates the people that are like, “But my project has existed for 15 years in various renditions. So what am I supposed to do now?” Nic: Yeah, that’s a good point because I often say that. You know? I often say you have to bake accessibility from the start of a project. But, yeah, I can see where it might be alienating for people that have had a project going for a long time but, maybe we need to start thinking in terms of... not so much the start of the project but the start of redesign or just start of implementing new features. And… Jen: Mmmhmm Nic: ...If you can make concrete parts of a project more accessible, eventually as you redraw your entire app or system you’ll end up with an accessible system. Jen: I like to say: Just start with today. Like, I’m sorry the rest of the code isn’t… it’s not accessible, but that’s okay because I’m going to start today. And, today I’m going to a linter on my computer that I’m going to run by myself. And any code that I write is going to be accessible based on the linter. That’s going to help everything that get’s through your door. And after that, it’s a matter of, “okay, well. Now I’m going to start applying that to PR’s. I’m going to start mentioning when I start seeing accessibility issues in PR’s.” And then it becomes more of a team effort, and everybody installs the linter. It becomes part of your process. It becomes part of [CIA and CB?07:56] at that point. And then maybe you install aXe, perhaps … aXe core as part of your, you know, selenium tests and it’s like a one-liner that you can add that then checks your components for accessibility and that becomes eventually part of your CI and with all of this also comes talking to QA and saying, “Hey I saw these issues. Can you also look for these issues when you’re testing?” and that starts to spread… Nic: Yeah... Jen: … and it starts with one dev doing one thing, today. And as you’re going through you fix things as you find them. You fix things as they go. And it slowly starts evolving into an accessible website over time. So, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that the entire company buys in and we’re all starting from the beginning or even starting from the beginning of a redesign. It can come from just one dev starting today. Nic: Yeah Jen: And it spreads. Nic: Yeah… Jen: And yes if you … Nic: [crosstalk] … need that dev… Jen: … [crosstalk] right! Need that dev. If you are… if a rewrite is coming down the pipe start bringing up the concerns. Start talking about them. Make sure those things are heard. Push back a little. It’s okay to push. And that's a way that you can take a website that already exists and evolve it into something that's accessible, even if it’s not today. And like I said, no one's ever going to reach the end goal of “My website is accessible, and I’m done,” it’s always a moving target, and it’s always an evolution. So there's nothing wrong with starting your evolution today. Nic: What do you think is the conventional wisdom about accessibility? The one thing that everybody knows about web accessibility? Jen: I think the one thing that everybody knows is… like HTML is inherently accessible. But, how do you take the fact that HTML is accessible and turn it into a website is accessible, especially when you start bringing in interactivity and more than one page and passing through information and … it’s easy to say HTML is accessible and it's a lot harder to say, but how do we end up outputting accessible HTML? Nic: Especially when nowadays so many projects seem to rely on frameworks that haven’t really considered accessible HTML output so you end up with masses of Divs and Spans that have zero semantic meaning and it seems, at least to me, that so many of the younger generations of programmers out there don’t actually know the basic skillsets of HTML. Jen: They haven’t needed to. I mean, when HTML 5 came out a lot of those devs were super excited about it because it included a lot more definition as part of our basic HTML code base. Nothing had been just a straight Div, we had an actual header tag and a main tag and an article tag and nav tag, you know? So we had more descriptive tags, but it was kind of a weird evolution in the HTML 5 came out and then it was kind of adopted over time but by the time that it was really adopted and started gaining traction the Javascript frameworks really started taking over. And everyone just kind of dropped it. Nic: Yeah Jen: And it just kind of slipped by but those things still exist. They’re still there, they’re still extremely useful and a lot of the accessibility audits like Lighthouse and aXe, for instance, they tell you about those things. They tell you about the fact that you’re missing some of those HTML 5 tags which is kind of nice. Nic: Yeah Jen: But, with those outputs and the way that we have trained and educated the new devs we’ve forgotten this big important thing, and I think it was because HTML, with it being inherently accessible we still didn’t think about it even then. So, now that we are writing a bunch of Divs and Spans it’s a matter of remembering why the web was structured around HTML. Why we structured it that way and then why we need to think about it when we are outputting our code as well. And then train everyone. And part of that training come in the docs that you write, the examples that you put online. If you made those examples using best practices in accessibility, then it becomes a lot of copy, paste automatically accessible as new devs are learning. I don’t know about you, but that’s how I learned to code. “Oh look, there’s a stack overflow thing. Let’s just copy and paste that, modify it for what I need to make it work the way I need it to…” right? Nic: Yeah Jen: So, I mean, but what if that example were accessible? What if it included all the tags and everywhere you looked for an example it always included those tags? I have a story from [Niggling Hughger?13:21] who said that when she was learning to code she was surrounded by devs who also were pretty passionate about accessibility so when they would work together and write this code with her, they would always use certain tags, they always used certain formats to develop… buttons were always used for buttons and links were always used for links and so… she ended up going to a coding interview and coding, you know, whiteboard coding what it was and the interviewer was like, “wow, accessibility. That’s really cool that you care about that. And she was just confused. She was like, “What? I just thought this was how we are supposed to code it. I thought this was just how it worked.” That really blew my mind that if our examples were accessible, to begin with we would literally learn that’s just how we are supposed to do it. And it wouldn’t be a question of, “Is this accessible, is it not?” it would be a little bit more like, well that’s just how you do it. Nic: Wow. That’d be the day. Jen: Right? Wouldn’t that be amazing? Nic: Yeah. What do you think the number one reason most people fail to succeed with web accessibility? Is it this sense of an overwhelming amount of stuff to do or is it something else? Jen: I think that it’s easy to skip. It's easy to look away and not look at it. It's easy to just run through your quick test of what you need to do to get something to pass and then move on. I kind of like to say that the job of developers is to understand how it works. And the job of QA is to understand how it shouldn't work. And because of the fact that the mind frame of devs is how it works we forget about the ways it shouldn't work, we forget about our failed cases and I think that's probably why its so difficult to get accessibility in from, like, the developer standpoint is because we know how it works for us and it works when I put in the right information, and everything is fine. And we forget about, well, what if someone were holding a baby? Would they be able to navigate their website with one hand? Or, what if they’re in the middle of a bar and they want to share a video? Would they actually be able to do it? Could you even hear the video? Maybe a transcript or subtitles would be nice. What if someone in a different country is trying to understand the things that they’re ready or English is the second language or 5th language? Or German is a second language? Nic: Yeah Jen: So it’s easy to forget about people that aren't you, when you’re going through and writing code. So, I don’t think it’s necessarily a malevolent intent. I think that it’s much more forgetting. Or not thinking about it. Nic: Yeah. In some levels, I’m wondering if I wouldn’t rather a specific desire to exclude rather than an “I don’t really know, I don’t really care.” Jen: Mmhmm Nic: Because it feels a lot more exclusive to not even be worth the thought than to have someone who does it on purpose and, yeah, I don’t want you here, and it’s something you can actually sink your teeth into and actually build anger around it. And from anger, you can have righteousness. But if it’s a question of “Hey you know what? I don’t even have enough energy or desire to think about the issues you might have on my website”, that’s a lot more difficult to handle I think. Jen: Ignorance is always the hardest thing to fight. And, habit is also a very hard thing to fight. Nic: Yes Jen: We are having the same issue today in, don’t use guys because it’s not inclusive. And "guys" is a term that everyone uses everywhere, right? It’s just.. It’s a … and the thing that I’ve heard there is it’s just a phrase. It’s just… it’s a phrase. I don’t mean anything by it. I’m not trying to be exclusive. It’s just a phrase, and the answer to that is, no. It’s a phrase that’s been developed over time, and it’s not only… it continues to propagate the same connotations over time. And, by teaching the next generation that guys is fine, it’s the same… it’s propagating that thought process further down. And, it’s kind of the same thing with accessibility in that if it’s just not something you think about, it’s not something you know it’s not something that you even know to invest any time in. It’s harder to fight. I mean, something people say or people will ask me, “What can I do to try and convince my boss to let me start implementing some of these deeper [tech that stories for accessibility ?” and I usually say, “one in eight men are colorblind, go find the colorblind guy in your office and take him to your boss and say “Boss, can you please explain to them why we can’t work on accessibility ?” Nic: Yeah Jen: And I find that knowing someone... just one person, who is affected by an accessibility bug is enough to get people to start thinking about it. Like, well, can Craig read this? Can…

Full show notes at the publisher

E72 – Interview with Jen Luker – Part 1 Mar 07, 2019

Show notes

Jen Luker tells us, among other things, that with thoroughness comes confusion - if you're trying to learn all of WCAG and ARIA at once, you'll get overwhelmed 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 71. 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 Jen Luker. Thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility, Jen. Jen: I’m glad to be here. Nic: I like to start the show by letting guests introduce themselves. In an elevator-style pitch introduction, whose Jen Luker? Jen: Who is Jen Luker? Jen Luker is an engineering manager with Formidable who specializes in accessibility auditing and just making the web better in general. So, I am an avid knitter. I like to say that I knit and then I’m a programmer. Other than that just a nerd like all the rest. Nic: I like, like all the rest. Yeah. I’d like at some point during the show to talk a little bit about your talks that tie the relationship between knitting and coding. Jen: Yes! Nic: I think that could be interesting, however, to get warmed up a little bit… tell us one thing that most people would not know about you. Jen: I’m a pretty open book so trying to find something people don’t know about me… I am a huge Space nerd. I was the president of the Students for the Exploration Development of Space, in College. Nic: Cool. Very cool. What’s your favorite fact about Space? Jen: There’s more minerals, and they’re easier to get to in asteroids on Earth or in the Moon. So if we were to ever get to the point where we are actually mining those asteroids, we could dramatically reduce things like pollution on Earth and still have the materials we need. Nic: That’s a nice bit of trivia. But let’s circle back to the main topic of conversation which is web accessibility. It seems like every person I speak to for the podcast has a slightly different variation on that definition. How would you define web accessibility? Jen: Web accessibility for me is the ability for everyone to use the web. It doesn’t even have to be similar fashions, it just needs to be that they’re capable of using it and developing their own identity and resources and what-not. And them being able to also interact with it in a way that’s meaningful to both the companies and to the users. Nic: Yeah, that’s good. I like the concept you proposed that it’s about not everybody uses the web in the same ways. How do you describe different ways to use the web for people that could be striking for maybe some of my listeners that are less used to those different ways? Jen: So, have you ever gone to a website and you are trying to navigate around, but it’s in a foreign language? That makes it very difficult to be able to utilize the website in said way. So sometimes the website ends up being used in conjunction with, like, Google translator or something to that effect. So being able to overlay different types of assistive technology is to be able to utilize the web. Whether it be a translator or a screen reader it really does make a difference. Being able to change the color scheme in order to accommodate for any sort of visual issues they might have, or maybe it’s a cognitive issue, where bright colors cause them issues, so they end up dulling everything. There's lots of different ways to interact. It’s not just a screen reader and a keyboard which is what people often times think about when they’re talking about accessibility. There’s just so much more than that that’s involved. Nic: Yeah, I like that. Thank you. So you say you have a focus in accessibility in your work. How… what does that look like day to day? Do you consult with your teammates? Or do you tell them, “Hey don’t forget about accessibility? “ Or… what does accessibility in your job day to day look like? Jen: In my job day-to-day, because of the fact that Formidable is a consultancy, often times it has to deal with working with both my teammates and the client and their teammates to not only educate them on the types of accessibility technology they can utilize to limit the amount of accessibility problems that they run into but also how to test and how to look for those, how to use a screen-reader, how to change the language or the way that they pass people through the funnel from homepage to purchase. To allow for ease of use and to allow for as many people as possible to be able to use their website. So a lot of it is education, and a some of it is auditing. Nic: Do you find your clients are quite responsive to your education efforts? Jen: Most are. There’s always some push back. Always some, you know, “do we really need to deal with this? We really just need to get it out the door” or “Oh, blind people don’t buy rainbows, so we don’t have to worry about that” and it’s kind of disappointing when I get those responses, and so I do often times, I do push back. In the end, sometimes you just have to pick your battles, go for the things that are easy and try to get through as many of the stuff that they’re willing to do as possible and don’t let myself get hung up on the frustrations of, well this is a roadblock, and we can’t get past it right now. Nic: Yeah. Jen: So trying to get at least as much cover as possible and leaving those really hard points to the end if I have to. Nic: Yeah I think that picking your battles is important, but progress, any bit of progress is good. Jen: I mean, if you go through and you just add alt tags to your images that’s a huge amount of people that can now comprehend what’s going on in all those images. Every little itty bitty teeny tiny bit helps and makes it so one more person or many many more can use your website. So even if you can’t make it perfect today, and there’s no such thing as perfect, there’s always reaching towards that goal, but even a little step is going to be much better than what you have now. Nic: Even printed material, even books are never really finished because otherwise there wouldn’t be all these subsequent publications of the same book. You know, first publication and second publication and it’s not just that a book runs out but there’s updates and stuff, so I think it’s even more important on the web to think of, well actually your site or your project or your app will never truly be finished. You can always improve it. And that involves improving accessibility. Jen: Absolutely and with any maintenance, we add testing to make sure that we have regression covered. We add different use cases, so we cover the places that we missed last time. The same thing for accessibility I mean there’s multiple ways of adding the technology to audit it. But then there’s ways of developing relationships with people that use those assistive technologies every day to get repeated occasional audits so that you’re not stuck being the only one looking at it through a screen reader and you’re not familiar with screenreaders. There’s lots of places to cover and the more you can develop those resources, the better off you’re going to be. Nic: What brought you to accessibility? How did you become aware of its importance? Jen: So I was raised with a nearly completely deaf mother. So I’m a CODA kid. Nic: Okay Jen: And because of that I’ve watched my mother go through my whole entire life where she had limitations, and we didn’t. Where we were the ones that had to reiterate communications back to her because she couldn’t hear them very well even with hearing aids. And then I also had a terminally ill sister who got progressively worse as she went through her saddeningly short life but by the time she died she was deaf she was blind and she was immobile, so I got to … even going through elementary school I’d get up on stage, and talk to the entire elementary school and her card and how you could still play with her and how you had to make accommodation for her to try to make sure that people understood that she wasn’t scary and she wasn’t weird, she was just a kid and these are kind of the rules in which you can play with her and hang out with her and still relate to her. So, I mean, it’s kind of been a part of my life forever. However, it wasn’t really until React rally 2016 where Marcy Sutton was standing on stage, and she gave this amazing talk that used one of my favorite kids' games, Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego... Nic: Oh yeah. Jen: And it was ‘Where in the Stack’ is Carmen Sandiego and it was hilarious, and it was awesome, and it is on Youtube so please go watch it, but it was a way of showing how you can find accessibility problems and where they’re commonly located within a technology stack. At that point, it was just like this magic dawning moment sitting in this theatre going, “you mean there's people that don’t understand some of these things? This is something that I’m passionate about. This is something that I live” you know, “these are problems that I watch my mother go through every day these are frustrations I run into, and this is a field?” And so essentially the next day I hopped as fast as I could into learning as much as I could about auditing and accessibility and tools to test for it and ways to improve the problems that existed. And that’s kind of what lead to here. Nic: Has your view of web accessibility changed since you had that ‘Ah ha!’ moment with Marcy? Or has your experience growing up surrounded by your mom and your sister, pretty much shaped your thinking about accessibility from way back when? Jen: I think that I definitely had a vague shape develop as I grew up just watching their frustrations and where they did well and where they didn’t but it was really eye-opening to see the real world effects of how accessibility isn’t limited to people who are deaf or blind or physically disabaled. It does reach into cognitive impairments and temporary disabilities and circumstantial disabilities. Like, trying to navigate while holding a set of twins while they’re sleeping get's really tricky. Nic: Yep Jen: That was a fun situation. Watching my child who had to do online homework but her eyes got dilated that night. So seeing that all of these limitations that maybe people run into that maybe don’t last for very long but still actually impact their lives. Hanging out in a really noisy bar and joking about something and wanting to show them the video in which it references. All of these technologies are there and where often times created specifically for people with disabilities, but they end up being super useful to everyone. Who hasn’t put on subtitles occasionally or only read the subtitles in bed? Nic: Yeah Jen: That I think has really changed shape in my mind over the last few years is watching as implementing things that we consider accessibility features which I would really love to think of more as accessibility bugs and watching that actually affect a much wider audience than you would ever think of. Nic: I often say accessibility is good for everyone and I sometimes get pushed back because I’m accused of forgetting the primary reason for accessibility which is making things more usable for people with disabilities and as an individual with a disability myself I can never forget that, but I think it’s important to realize that… yeah, it is good for everyone, and we do have control over the impact we have on not just the 20 or 25% of people with disabilities that are around but for everybody. Situational impairments and all of that kind of stuff. Jen: One of my favorite quotes is… and I don’t remember the quote exactly, and I will find it for you for later but it essentially says that, yes ramps do help those who are in wheelchairs be able to get to the sidewalk or up to a building that usually has stairs, but it also helps the parents with the stroller, or it helps the delivery guy with a bunch of packages, or it helps the person on the bike. It helps a lot of different people, and though they may not necessarily have a physical impairment that requires a wheelchair and a ramp as their only access point, it’s still dramatically useful for a wide amount of people. Just because you may be focussing specifically on certain portions of your website for those with disabilities it doesn’t change the effect that it has on everyone. It’s not just, you’re helping the 25%. You’re helping a lot more than that. Nic: Did you encounter any barriers as you went about learning about accessibility when you were learning about auditing and all these things? Was there anything that you found difficult to get the information you needed? Jen: I’m not sure it was necessarily difficult per se but, it was difficult to understand. The world of ARIA. The website itself is very very thorough, and unfortunately with that thoroughness also comes confusion. There’s a lot of overlapping, there’s a lot of use cases, there’s a lot of possibilities, there’s a lot of should I - Shouldn’t I, how do I actually work with these rules … and, I heard one person at some point say that it’s difficult on purpose because you’re meant to avoid using them. The first rule of ARIA is never use ARIA, right? So … Nic: Yeah Jen: But at the same time I think that sometimes you don’t get the opportunity of revamping your entire website to go back to a similar, more HTML based structure. And you need to use the rules as a stop-gap, even until you get to the point where you can revamp it. Or, perhaps you are head to head with a designer product team and they really want a feature and there’s no amount of arguing and fighting is going to change the fact that this is the feature that’s going to be implemented. The ARIA rules go forth to help smooth over the rough edges that would otherwise be caused by that feature. They’re there for a reason. They’re there because they’re useful. We may not want to use them as often as we can but it would be nice to make that a little bit clearer and a little bit more simple to understand when and why you’d want to use those. In the cases that you need to use them. Nic: Yeah. Jen: Another thing is there’s so many… the basics of accessibility. Websites, and talks that trying to dig in, and understand that there’s more than just screen readers, and keyboard navigation. There's just not a whole lot of easy to find resources when it comes to anything deeper. Like, what are the different cognitive types that you’re dealing with and how are they conflicting and contrasting, and how do you solve for both when they literally are exact opposites as far as the recommendations they give you, and the fact that internationalization is, in fact, an accessibility feature. Or how do you phrase things in a way that makes them more accessible than others? How do you have a lot of words for people that need a lot of words, and hardly any words for people that don’t need words and just want to get to the end. There’s all these conflicting things, and trying to suss out a lot of that deeper information seems to be … there’s just so much less of it. It would be nice to see more resources there too, and when I say it would be nice … part of that is that I need to step up and do a little bit more in that field to try and make it more accessible to understand accessibility and it’s something I’m working on as well, but one person does not change the world. It takes all of us. Nic: Yeah. It’s a lot of work for on…

Full show notes at the publisher

E71 – Interview with Chris DeMars – Part 2 Feb 25, 2019

Show notes

Chris tells us "the biggest challenge that [the accessibility community is] going to have, and it currently stands now, is the never-ending library framework" 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 71. 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. Welcome back to the Accessibility Rules podcast everyone. In this episode, I’m continuing my conversation with Chris DeMars. Last show was awesome. We spoke about blueberry muffins and compared that to accessibility. We talked about Chris managing to roll out an accessible app despite very short buy-in from everybody else in the company and a few other things so if you haven’t checked it out I strongly suggest you do. Welcome back, Chris. How are you? Chris: I’m doing good, Nic. How are you? Nic: I’m doing alright. I’ve fumbled a few words today, but that’s alright. That’s part of live podcasting, even if you don’t do it live. Chris: That’s right Nic: That’s right. So, last week we finished talking a little bit about your greatest achievement. Let’s flip that and start with… What would your greatest frustration be in terms of accessibility? Chris: Oh the greatest frustration I would have in web accessibility … Oh, let me see, let me see, let me see… It would probably have to be the passion behind it. I know when we were talking before you have some developers out there who are super passionate. Marcy being one of them, yourself and a handful of other people. Then you have some devs out there that just either don’t care or they’re just uneducated as to the importance of it. I think more education should be out there. And another huge frustration, and I’ve heard this countless times, and I’ve experienced this myself… traditional schooling, if you go to university or four-year college, 2-year college, whatever the case may be… even, I’ve heard some boot camps… nobody is teaching this stuff. And that’s a problem. You're .. most universities are teaching stuff their students need to know today to get a job besides theory and traditional computer science. But, I think accessibility in a web program, it should be taught, and there’s not enough people out there doing it. I think Marcy mentioned it in one of her episodes with you that she wanted to maybe get into teaching and that can only be something cool. You know? Teach web accessibility somewhere outside of a meetup. Outside of a conference workshop. I think that would be a cool idea. Nic: How do you get, say Bootcamp organizers to add accessibility to the curriculum? Chris: That’s a good question. I know, knew or know a couple or not really organizers but instructors… well, I did at least … I don’t know. I guess… it’s kind of the same way you would in a company, right? Show why it’s important … I mean, they should already know it’s important. Especially if they’re teaching a front end Bootcamp, right? You should already know this. This is not news to anybody. Maybe ten, fifteen years ago… yeah, I could see why you wouldn’t want to do it because it wasn’t a huge thing. Even though it was a huge thing at the time but a lot of us were uneducated that long ago. I think it’s just explaining the importance. If they don’t already know and maybe, see if they can set time aside in the curriculum to go over some introductory wins. I don’t like saying easy because what might be easy to me might be hard to you and vice-versa. Nic: Right Chris: I don’t like using the term easy. But, like, intro wins, like semantic markup. You’re already teaching semantic markup, explain why that’s good for accessibility. And it’s accessible by default. Go over the reason why you need alt attributes on your images. Go over ARIA labels on non-contextual elements. Like social media icons or x’s and modules. Go over what a screen reader is, why it’s important. You don’t have to cover the whole [gammet?5:16] of accessibility. That would take a full course. And even then I don’t think you’d be able to fit it all in but go over main concepts and main accessibility fundamentals. It’s only going to help your student body. Nic: I think it’s super important for every teaching environment whether it’s formal computer science programs or Bootcamps or what not to actually cover accessibility and I wish it was more out there and you’re right, it doesn’t have to be a whole course on it. It can be weaved in and out of existing classes if you’re talking about web semantic sure, talk about why it’s important. All the accessibility wins you get from using a label element or using an anchor, or a button rather than a div or span. So, yeah. Is there, do you think, conventional wisdom about accessibility? Something everyone knows about it? Chris: Yes and no. Everyone knows that it’s out there, but not everyone knows why and why it’s important. I think that's like a big thing, right? Because you can say the words web accessibility to anybody and nine times out of ten, they’re going to nod their head like, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah…..” But if you ask them why it’s important nine times out of ten they might look at you and be like, “Oh well, you know, uh, well, uh, you know, uh… blind users”. Or “deaf users” like, you hear that all the time and that’s not just who we’re working for. Not everybody’s blind, not everybody’s deaf. It’s not what having a disability means. But a lot of the time that stigma’s out there. Like, “Oh, well, they’re blind or deaf, so we have to make things accessible.” It’s like, “No, no, no, no, no. That’s not the case, let me educate you a little bit.” Nic: Yeah. I’ve had a recent discussion with a developer who said, “Of course our site is accessible just go to mywebsite.com, and there it is” and they just did not understand this concept of accessibility and the context of disability access. Chris: Right Nic: That ended up being an hour long, very educational experience for them. And for me, because I didn’t remember how some people just don’t have that exposure out there. So, I want to build the exposure out there. Chris, what do you think the number one reason is for most people failing to succeed with implementing accessibility? Chris: Arbitrary deadlines and, being told “no.” I think those are the two big things. Alway’s being-- Nic: What do you mean? Chris: -- Being told, “No, you can’t do that right now, this is more important.” Being in situations like that or even being in situations where somebody from the top down tells you that it’s not important. Somebody that has no reason to have their hands in IT at all but they’re the ones saying, “Oh, no, this is priority, or this is priority” but their direct leader… anybody within that kind of IT family tree can’t have a say in it. That’s also an issue, and I’ve seen that before. I’ve seen where people who are outside of IT have their hands too deep in IT and start making decisions that shouldn’t be made. And that can cause a lot of problems across the board. Nic: You have a ‘for instance’? Chris: Oh. For instance… let’s see here… let’s say that… for example, let’s say that you worked at a company and maybe you had an IT in the order of 100 people. Right? And developers, QA’s, BA’s, etc team leads. And you had CTO’s, COO’s, COO, whatever C level execs you have. And the ones calling the shots in IT are not CTO. It’s everybody that’s above him that runs the rest of the company. Nic: [cross talk 10:05] Chris: They throw their two cents in the pot and start telling you how to run things… that’s when it starts to get to be a problem. Because they might not have a single clue about what you’re doing or what your organization as a whole are doing, within IT that’s when you can start getting into problems. Nic: I see that. Yep. How can we avoid this kind of failure? How can we try making… changing these “No’s” towards “Yeses”? Chris: That’s hard. That is. It’s truly, truly hard. Especially when you work for a company like that or if they’re out there and they exist, which I’m sure they do. You kind of turn that territory too of overstepping your bounds and stepping on people's toes and you don’t want to throw anybody under the bus. Scheduling skip meeting to a skip skip meeting and a skip skip skip meeting… that can be a pain in the ass. The best way… the luck I’ve had to get No’s turned into Yes’s is just showing the importance of it. Showing the data. Because people like numbers, you know what I mean? Especially like leadership. When you’re in a leadership role, you tend not to write code as much, if at all and it’s always about numbers so you can take those numbers to your leader. If you can show numbers and you can prove that this stuff matters, then there's more chance that you’re going to get that buy-in and those No’s will turn into Yeses. It’s no different if you show someone… I did this with performance before too. I showed what our numbers are and then our people… our users started complaining, and they’re like, “Oh, shit. We need to start working on performance. Chris, can you fix the front-end performance?” I’m, like, I talked about this over a year ago. And nobody wanted to do anything. Or six months ago and now somebody complains, and now you want me to fix it. Right? It’s the same thing with accessibility; it’s the same thing with security. You start showing numbers like, “Oh, well we had three different penetration attacks in our front-end or our back-end.” If you show that then they’re like, “Oh, shit. Security matters, we really need to tighten things up.” Nic: Yeah Chris: Right? Nic: What would you say the greatest challenge is for the field of web accessibility are moving forward from now into the next 5 or 10 years? Chris: I think the biggest challenge that we are going to have, and it currently stands now, is the never-ending library framework. You know, the ‘Flavour of the week’ in the Javascript ecosystem. It blows my mind. I’ve… I know that there's a handful of different view libraries out there that are not accessible. Other than that, at a conference, I was speaking at I heard the React team is doing good, but some of the Angular stuff isn’t accessible. The Web was never built with Javascript in mind, and we did just fine. Right? It was accessible by default. Now we start throwing a shiny tire on this side of it, some spinners on the other side and some hydraulics on the back… none of that shit’s accessible. So we are doing ourselves a disservice when we should be improving the accessibility. Yes, we are improving it, but the web is starting to become like Frankenstein's monster. You know what I mean? Nic: Yeah Chris: There’s a little piece of this and that and every single thing. Not every single thing we’re building out there is accessible, but we are using libraries and frameworks to help us in our efforts. But yet those libraries and frameworks aren’t completely accessible. I think that’s going to be the struggle. And, who knows what’s going to be out there this year… the next six months. What new framework and libraries are going to be out there. Who knows. Nic: It’s interesting because a few weeks ago I was speaking with [Unsure 14:32] who is a developer based in Nigeria and she was saying that we’re going to have much more of an impact by convincing the framework developers to make their frameworks accessible than trying to convince individual developers that are right left and center, all over the place and what you’re saying somewhat echos that statement, so it’s interesting to see that this is a concept that, at least in the accessibility community is starting to take flight. So, hopefully, we’ll be able to reach out to these devs and make sure their frameworks are more and more accessible. Chris: Yeah, and I know that Ryan Florence is doing stuff with Reach and that’s supposed to be accessible React library or whatever the case may be. So, that’s really cool that he’s already taking that step to make those applications accessible. I think that’s a huge win. Nic: Chris, what profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt? Chris: Um, let’s see… when I was younger, I always wanted to be a Herpetologist. A Herpetologist is the study of reptiles and amphibians. I was super, super obsessed with it when I was a kid. I used to have snakes, I used to have frogs and turtles. I wanted to breed Leopard Geckos, I wanted to breed Corn Snakes. I just loved it. I loved learning about them. So, I think if I could be anything that’s like, I could legit be currently a Herpetologist ‘coz I still have a love for reptiles and amphibians and still hope to one-day breed Leopard Geckos and Breed Corn Snakes. It’s just been one of my things. Nic: Who inspires you? Chris: My mom. She’s one. She’s always been my biggest fan. I’ve always had her support for everything. Let’s see… the developer community inspires me. I have a lot of friends out there who bring me up, and they kind of hold me together. Even when I feel like giving up. They definitely inspire and support me to be a better me every day. The current team I work with, they inspire me because they’re a lot of amazing, smart, brilliant people and I wish I was as smart as they are. They inspire me. Yeah, I think a lot of people say actors, actresses, music… you know, not really so much the case for me. I think it’s the people I surround myself with that inspire me. And I feed off of that. And I feed off of the energy in the developer community, and that’s why I try to engage as much as I can in the developer community and I even have friends on the speaker circuit say, “dude, you need to chill out”, “you’re going to burn out”, “we don’t want you to get sick or anything like that” and I keep pushing. I know the reality of it. I may burn out at some point but as long as I can travel. Speak, put talks together and make great content for the development community you bet your ass I’m going to do it. Nic: Cool. To wrap things up, if there’s one thing you’d like people to remember about accessibility what would that be? Chris: Focus matters. Never ever remove focus from your experience because you remove it for one person, you remove it for everybody. Don’t do it. That’s my one. Nic: How would you explain why or how focus matters? Chris: Well, you can come see my talk called ‘Focusing on Focus.’ I’ll be giving it this year at a couple of different conferences. No, I wrote an article about it too. Just showing what it is and showing the importance of it. Really, it boils down to marketing and branding. You get a lot from your design team and market team. Like, “Oh, you know, we don’t like that ring, that blue and gray or blue ring that’s around buttons and input and stuff like that. Can you remove it?” It’s like, yeah, you can remove it but what are you going to do to replace it? And if we need to match branding, then we can do that. Those are options that are available to us. We just have to talk about it and collaborate. Nic: Yeah. Last month I saw a site that they had matched the background color of the page exactly to the hue of blue of the default focus ring in chrome. So, it was quite amusing to see, “Well, we didn’t remove the focus outline”... no, but you made it totally unusable man. Chris: Oh, that’s horrible. Nic: Yeah Chris: Wow Nic: Anyway, Chris thank you very much for your time and your thoughts and hopefully we get to bump into one another at…

Full show notes at the publisher

E70 – Interview with Chris DeMars – Part 1 Jan 31, 2019

Show notes

Chris is a front-end developer based in Detroit, MI. He tells us, among other things, that learning about accessibility is an ongoing process. Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 70. 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. This week I’m speaking with Chris DeMars. Thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility, Chris. How are ya? Chris: I’m doing good, Nic. Thanks for having me. Nic: You’re very welcome. Hey, I like to let guests introduce themselves so in a brief introduction, who is Chris DeMars? Chris: Oh, who am I? Well, I am a front-end developer. I’m from Detroit, Michigan. I work for a company called Tuft & Needle. I am also a Google developer expert in web technologies, Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies and I love community, love speaking all around in the world in Web Accessibility and other front end fun stuff. Nic: That sounds like it’s keeping you busy. Do you speak to a lot of conferences? Or just the occasional one? Chris: Oh I did 22 events last year. Not including meet-ups so probably 30 talks altogether. Including one workshop. So, yeah. I’ve been around a little bit. Nic: You have been. How do you find conferences are receiving your talks about accessibility? Chris: You know, I’ve gotten amazing feedback from both organizers as well as attendees. Because you know you don’t see a whole lot of people submitting accessibility talks to a lot of conferences unless it’s like that type of niche. But I mean, I’ve been at events where I’ve given the only accessibility talk and I’ve been at events where I… there might be 3 or 4 accessibility talks. So it really just kind of matters the area, the region, what kind of speakers are being selected. Stuff like that. Nic: Let’s circle back around that in a little bit. To get really started tell us one thing that most people would not know about you. Chris: Lets’ see here. Let’s see...Um, I have a gold tooth. Does that count? Nic: Sure thing. Most people would not know about that so that’s certainly an interesting bit of trivia. So we are talking about Web Accessibility, right? How do you define Web Accessibility? Chris: You know, I get that question a lot. And I kind of talk about it, touch on it a lot in the talks I give. There is a quote out there I think it’s from the W3 and it says “Web Accessibility is for people that can use the web” for people that can use the web. Or for people with disabilities so they can use the Web. And I don’t really like that quote. To me, Web Accessibility is for everyone. Everybody should be able to have an amazing accessible user experience regardless of disability. That’s what-what that means to me. And I always have like a “Why?” behind it which we can go into that later if you want but there’s always a “Why?” in the method behind the madness but it’s definitely for everybody. You know what I mean. That’s… we’ve gotten to a point where people use the Web almost every single day so we have to make it accessible for them. Nic: Yea. I can’t say that I disagree with you but playing devil's advocate here… I’ve heard quite a bit of push back from some people with disabilities and some accessibility advocates that this attitude kind of erases the disability experience and the reason for accessibility in the first place. What would you say to that? Chris: Oh. It’s a tough one. Because I mean, it is an open Web, right? And if..we’re supposed to be making it inclusive. Inclusive means taking everybody into consideration. Regardless of disability. I mean, I say it all the time like not everybody has to have a disability to make it accessible. Specifically for me at the moment I don’t have any type of disability that would hinder me from using the web. But if you were to put some content out there and I didn’t understand what you were saying, or the language or anything like that, automatically I have a disability of understanding what you’re trying to tell me.right? So I might not have some type of physical disability or disability that would hinder me from using that experience but if something stops me from using that experience, at that point in time I have a disability and we’ve got to make sure we stay away from that. Nic: So you’re, I guess you’re introducing the idea of situational impairment? Chris: Yeah, I talk about that a lot. And it kind of blows people’s minds when I talk about the 5 main types of disabilities that we encounter out there on the web and the 5th one being temporary impairments. I don't like calling them disabilities. I like calling them temporary impairments. And when I bring up a broken hand or a broken finger or even a single parent with a newborn jaws drop. They’re like, “Oh Shit, I didn’t think about that. Wow, I’ve been in that situation before but I never put myself in the other person’s shoes even though I’ve worn those shoes.” So it really… I like watching the audience light up when I start talking about that. It’s really fun. Nic: Where does your role fall within the work of accessibility? Because you don’t do accessibility full time from morning to night. You do mostly development work so how do you implement accessibility in your work? Chris: You know, I was hired… one of the reasons I think I was hired… I like to think I was hired at my new gig was because of the accessibility stuff that I do out there. And my last role at my last company I was at I really advocated for it because it was just an afterthought. Nobody really cared. Until I kind of put my foot down and said, “Hey, listen. These are the things we need to do. These are the steps we need to take so we can avoid issues later down the line.” So I was the first one to actually build in accessibility at one of the projects and got it in front of the business and stakeholders and they finally softened up and were like “Oh yeah, we really need to do this, this is really important”. And I .. I think I did 99% of the accessibility on it and that was the first application that was ever shipped from the company that was fully accessible. So that was a huge win. Nic: Sweet Chris: Yeah, that was a huge win for me. A huge win for the company. A huge win for accessibility in general. Currently, right now I'm kind of doing the same thing. I’m working with accessibility working with some of the designers coming up with some documentation around accessibility. Like the conversation you and I had the other night about branching strategies, naming strategies when it comes to documenting accessibility violations … I’m doing that and I finished that documentation so it’s kind of like planting seeds and educating where I can and then filling in those gaps for the other developers, designers, and engineering team that might not be familiar with accessibility on the web. Nic: How did you become aware of web accessibility and how important it is? How… was there a specific “A-ha!” moment or was it something incremental? What happened? Chris: It’s a funny story. I love talking about this story. It’s kind of like the reason behind my “Why” but so I started building on the web about 22-23 years ago and back then web accessibility wasn’t a huge deal. We always had our alt attributes in our images...it was like table … building tables for your layout you’ve got to make sure they’re accessible. So we always had that and I never gave it too much forethought or thought about it too much and then a few years ago, probably 2013,2014 I started seeing Marcy giving her talks on YouTube. I’m like “Oh wow, I don’t see anybody else doing this” and she's talking about web accessibility and users with disabilities and stuff like that… I’m like, “Shit this is like super super important” and she was one of the only people if not the only person out there doing it at the time. And the landscape is still really small. But she set the stage for it. And I was like, Alright I’m going to see if I can find any other videos of her speaking and see if I can get a grasp for this accessibility stuff. A more in-depth grasp I guess. And I just started watching her videos and her and I started BS-ing on Twitter and her and I became friends. She started working at DQ and DQ is here locally, right outside of Detroit. And yeah, it was just her that kind of made me see the importance of it and kind of springboard me into the whole speaking world and then I like to say I like to build accessibility because I’m thinking of my mum a lot. Coz she’s of the baby boomer generation and she wears glasses and she has trouble hearing.. She can’t remember things as well, she has arthritis… so she kind of has all of those, like, 4 out of the 5 main types of disabilities that we look for, right? Nic: Mmmhmm Chris: And if I could make an accessible user experience for her at the end of the day...mind you, she doesn’t have a computer, she still has a flip phone but if she were technically savvy... If I could make the experience for her that much better at the end of the day I’ve done my job. And that’s my “Why?”. Nic: Yeah Chris: And I say that at every event. Some people they kind of get teared up. Which is cool, you know. We’re there to have fun and share emotion and experience that together, but..and I usually tell people, you know, at the end of this session reflect on your “why” and then maybe you’ll see why accessibility matters. If it’s not you that is experiencing it. Nic: I like that. I like that… I might steal that from you. Chris: Go for it, brother. Nic: Yeah… so you’ve been vaguely aware of accessibility for 15-20 years and about 5 years ago you really got into it. Has your view of accessibility changed much over the last 5 years? Chris: It has and it hasn’t. Like, if anything it’s gotten better and I've been able to notice a lot more out there than I would’ve 5 years ago. Right? Especially when it comes to certain libraries and frameworks that are out there in the JS ecosystem that might not be completely accessible. Or even new stuff that’s coming up like with what Marcy’s doing with Grid and accessibility. That's super cool. I never thought about that but she’s on that and that’s really cool that she's doing that. And even in the product space when Xbox launched their… Microsoft launched Xbox pad for users with disabilities to be able to play Xbox. That’s huge. Nic: Yeah Chris: I talk about that in some of my talks too. Or even braille machine readers that … there were 6 female engineers from MIT, I think it was MIT, last year or the year before created this really nice, really neat braille machine reader that would read books. It would scan the book and then print out the braille with pins and needles and stuff. That stuff’s cool. And it doesn’t have to be digital accessibility. It’s accessibility none the less. And the more and more you can get wrapped up into that the more cool shit you’re going to see out there. Nic: There’s a lot of cool shit out there that people don’t realize comes directly from advances for people with disabilities... Chris: Yeah Nic: … Siri on iPhone to name one is digital assistance but that really started for helping people with disabilities. Heck even the keyboard, computer keyboard we either love or hate every day, 150 years ago was an implement to help people write faster and better. It’s just interesting the advances of all these neat technologies that fascinate us and how they kind of move into the realm of everyday access that we don’t realize. So Chris, did you find any barriers when you were starting to look at implementing accessibility or learning about it? Chris: Oh, the learning part is... We are always learning, right? And especially if you’re going through all of the documentation that’s out there there's always new things in there, there's always things you're discovering. Even recently with things I’ve been doing for work, there's certain things I didn’t know or success criteria. I didn't know you could have multiple success criteria for a single role ID or anything like that so… and I learned that from you because we were talking about that last week or whatever. So, yeah, there’s always stuff to learn and there's always going to be issues trying to get imple- like, people to back you on implementation. I mean, even developers. Developers you work with, some of them might be like, you know what, we’re not really going to care about that right now, it’s not important. And it gets even worse the higher up you go up the chain. And I fought tooth and nail at my last gig to have them care about accessibility. I got up in front of 400 plus people in IT and said “listen this is what we do as a UI team. This stuff matters” and once I started putting my foot down and kind of giving them the finger and building it in and showing them that, “hey, this is the first application we’ve built and I don’t think any of our competitors have something that’s fully accessible either so this just kind of puts us at the top of the food chain” they were like, “Oh, wow yeah that’s pretty good and we won't face possible lawsuits because things are looking really good and, yeah, this stuff matters”. But it’s definitely hard to get that up the food chain and get it prioritized. Because it’s never the first priority. Same with performance. Nic: Yeah, see I’ve said this before often enough that there's 3 prongs to a project that really should be built in from the get-go. One is performance one is security and the third one is accessibility and these things, if they don’t happen they are difficult to implement later on. Chris: I say the same thing. I always say that. Especially the security thing. You don’t wait ‘til the end of the project to bake in security. You don't. It’s the same with accessibility. I have a quote, I always say it and it’s “accessibility is not a requirement it’s a must”. It is your job as a web worker to care and make these things happen, implement these things for everybody because if not what are you doing. Nic: Do you have any suggestions that you’ve tried and tested that actually works to help developers or stakeholders at ay level care more about accessibility? Chris: Yeah, I kind of throw... I like to go and nip it in the bud right away and I always throw out the lawsuit thing. Because that gets peoples ears perked up. Whether they like to hear it or not. That's me. I don’t bullshit. I’m not going to beat around the bush about it. I’ll tell you flat out. You could experience a lawsuit. It may or may not have happened if it did happen none of us are going to know. Their discretion, they’re going to keep it behind closed doors. But it’s always a possibility and if you want to avoid that, then we need to do A, B and C and here’s why. And kind of throw out some statistics. There's a couple different charts I use from different law firms. From federal website lawsuits around the country… case studies, the stuff with Target and [Redrew Fin? 17:05] and Winn Dixie even Financial Tech. Fin-Tech...just because you work for … at a Fin-Tech company does not protect you from a federal website lawsuit. Accessibility lawsuit. Bank of America got hit pretty hard. Once you start throwing that at whatever industry you're at they start to listen, like, “Oh, shit. We are in this industry too. We aren’t protected”. So once you have the proof you can kind of start to get that buy-in. Nic: On the other hand using the threat of lawsuits, doesn’t that cause an issue where people start thinking of accessibility as compliance only and what is the minimum effort I can put in to avoid the lawsuit rather than thinking about what can we do to make this product work for as many people as possible regardless of…

Full show notes at the publisher

E69 – Interview with Ire Aderinokun – Part 2 Jan 25, 2019

Show notes

In which Ire tells us that she thinks convincing framework developers to implement accessibility will have more impact than trying to change individual developers' minds. Transcript Nic: Welcome to the a11y Rules podcast. This is episode 69. I am Nic Steenhout, and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you are in interested in accessibility, hey, this show is for you. To get today's show notes, or transcript, head out to a11yrules.com. In this episode, I am continuing my conversation with Ire Aderinokun. Last show was really great. We spoke about all kind of things, but some concept that I found really important was the idea that automated tools are a great way to get started with understanding and starting thinking about accessibility. And, the other things was that Ire pointed out accessibility will not take you ten times more effort if you only use HTML properly. So, those were great. Welcome back Ire. Thanks for joining me again. Ire: Great to be back. Nic: So, we finished last week with your greatest achievement in terms of web accessibility which was a nexus ability cheat sheet you wrote that has been really popular. A flip side to that would be, what's your greatest frustration in terms of web accessibility? Ire: Okay, greatest frustration. Well, I don't know if this is a frustration with web accessibility, but is more with the frameworks and tools that we're using. So, one thing that's frustrating me a lot right now, is that, for my job, BuyCoins that I mentioned, we are building a cryptocurrency exchange. I do a lot of work with the Ionic framework, and we had to use this particular framework because I primarily use angular and front end code and we needed to have mobile applications. But, the problem with Ionic is that it is really not all that accessible and it's kind of been very frustrating because I have had to use this particular framework, which has ended up in the resulting products not being the way that I would like them to be. And, of course, - Nic: Yeah. Ire: ... I can try and contribute to the Ionic source as much as possible, which I am trying to do slowly, but trying to do. But, it's really frustrating when the makers of these tools, and I know they are only humans, and they also have limited time, so they obviously can't do everything, but it is just really frustrating when I feel like I am forced to use a particular tool or a particular framework and I have to deal with the fact that it is not very accessible. Nic: This idea that when we want to work and we depend on frameworks that have not done the work to do accessibility can be quite limiting and frustrating. You said you were contributing to the framework. How have you found the reaction of what you are contributing? Are people receptive, or do they seem to just not really care one way or another? Ire: No, I think they care a lot and this is something that's relatively new to me. We've only just begun really digging in and using the framework. So far, I have started with helping raise issues and wherever I see something that I feel like I can try and solve, I try and do that as well. Generally, I think they are very receptive, and they're open to it. And, that's kind of why I said that I know that they have limited time and resources themselves, so it is not like they didn't do this because they just didn't want to do it. It's more like they, I guess, they didn't prioritize it, which is also part of the problem, that it's considered okay to release something that is not accessible. It's also part of what is frustrating about, I guess the community, is that it would never be accessible to launch a framework or launch any kind of library or sort of projects and it's been incredibly on performance, but it's okay to do it if it is really inaccessible. So, yeah, that's kind of one of the problems at the moment, I guess. Nic: I often talk about this tripod of three different aspects of web development that really should be considered in same kind of level of importance. The first one is performance, as you said. The other one is security. And, the third one is accessibility. And, we should no more build sites or apps or anything that isn't secure or isn't performant, but by the same token, we shouldn't build things that are not accessible. Ire: Yeah, exactly, if there was some security flaw in ... I mean, we have even seen this in the past whenever there is a security flaw in Angular it gets resolved within 24 hours, they have released a new patch, everything is cool. But, there could be an issue about this accessibility flaw for months and it never gets fixed. It is just not really considered a high priority at the moment. Nic: Do you think there is something that everybody knows about web accessibility? Ire: I don't think everybody actually knows about web accessibility, because whenever I write about something or I just even in an article that isn't focused on web accessibility, if I mention something to do with accessibility, I always get a comment from at least one person saying, "Oh, I really didn't know about that." or "I didn't really consider that.". So, I think, even though for me, maybe because I follow a lot of these people and I am very interested in the topic, I feel like everybody is always talking about it. But, it seems like there's a lot of people who still actually maybe have not even really thought about it. And, I am sure some of it is new people entering the industry, but I still feel a lot of people who have been writing websites for years and years, probably still don't know a lot about accessibility. I think there is still room for a lot of content and people trying to spread the knowledge more. Nic: How do we make that happen? You mentioned people that are new to coding and people that have been doing it for a long time. So, it seems like there is two targets. What would you think is the best way to reach either of these target? Ire: Well, there are two ways we could go about it. One would be to outwardly just to have more content that's focused on accessibility. So, in conferences, there should be more talks where the actual primary focus of the talk is accessibility. But, I think maybe a more impactful thing would be to just make it part of everything. So, whenever there is a talk about flex box, for example, there is always going to be an accessibility part to any topic. So, I feel like it should just be part of everything and, even like I mentioned in the previous episode about whenever I had code samples, trying to make sure that it's written in a way that's accessible code. I am not putting out code samples that are using the wrong elements or anything. I think it goes a long way for people to just see accessibility being in part of everything. So, like I mentioned, a talk about flex box, for example, you could also mention that, "Oh, make sure that you don't completely reorder the order of the elements in the document and back.", that's accessibility related topic. You are still talking about flex box, but you are just bringing along the accessibility concerns, like you would with performance for example. Usually, if somebody is talking about some new framework or something that is not directly related to performance, there is usually some mention of performance or something that's tangential to it as well. Nic: Yeah. Ire: So, I think it should just be brought along with everything because really it's just about writing code that is valid and writing it in the way that makes sense. I think in addition to it being more out there in terms of topics specifically about accessibility, it should just be part of everything and people should, as much as possible, put out accessible code in whatever they are doing. Nic: I like that. I like this idea that we should talk about accessibility with every aspect of things we're presenting at conferences. I have been talking about accessibility specifically at a lot of conferences. I do think that if more people, even if you have a don't know, a 45 minute talk slot, even if you spend 5 minutes covering accessibility in that, you are right, it would increase awareness tremendously. Ire: Yeah, and one thing about the conference talks is that the people who are going to attend the topic on accessibility are probably more likely to be people who already ... it's in the back of their mind even if they don't consciously work with it every day or it is something that they are already interested in. That's why I feel like it needs to creep into everything else. So, people who aren't really thinking about it, that kind of force to confront it because they have to realize that it's not just a topic on its own, it's related and has impact to everything else. Nic: You are giving me so many good thoughts. Thank you Ire. That's really good stuff. Ire: I'm glad. Nic: Really good stuff. Yeah. I think my listeners are going to be enjoying this conversation quite a bit. Ire: I hope so. Nic: Yeah. What do you think the number one reason is for most people to fail to succeed in implementing accessibility? Ire: I think maybe it forces people to think about how they are writing particularly HTML in a different way. So, if you are not really thinking about accessibility, or I guess just like writing HTML in the way that it is supposed to be written, then you kind of write HTML very differently. You kind of just structure things in whatever way. It is kind of like div vomit, and you just put anything - Nic: Yeah. Ire: ... anywhere and you just kind of like, "Oh, as long as it shows up on the page, then that's fine.", right. But, I think when you start to think about accessibility, it kind of forces you to really think about the way you structure your documents in a totally different way. And, that is probably something that I realized was more of a shift when I started thinking about it more because I realized that I started to think more about, "Okay, so which element should I actually use here?", and, especially, when all these new HTML five elements came out. We had a header element, a main element, and aside and a footer, and it just made me think, "Okay, I can use this element in this way and I structure it in this way.", and it's kind of just a different way of thinking about how you write HTML. That might be something that you need to overcome if you are just getting started and you are used to looking at what is the result of your HTML, instead of also looking at the HTML itself and making sure it makes sense on its own. Nic: How can we make sure people take the steps and click to that fact? Ire: Well, I found it's almost easier actually to do it this way. Especially, when you learn about the, like I mentioned, HTML five elements, it just makes more sense and the HTML that you write actually comes out ... it is more maintainable because you are not just putting divs everywhere. It makes more sense when you are looking at just the HTML. So, I am not sure how you can over-comment, but I guess maybe if you see what a properly structured document looks like you might be convinced that this actually just makes more sense, especially in terms of the developer experience and how you are going to continue maintaining this document in the future. So, maybe it is just like you see how much better it is and hopefully that convinces you to try and learn how to do it this way. Nic: What do you think the greatest challenge is for the field of accessibility is going forward? Ire: Well, I think one of the challenges are the way we are starting to write our applications nowadays. So, a lot of stuff is completely powered by JavaScript where a lot of people are doing less, just writing HTML and relying more on frameworks and things like that. Even the example I gave, my problems with working with Ionic, a lot of people are learning frameworks rather than just learning maybe HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and so, it's going to be a problem if these frameworks don't really prioritize and put a lot of importance on making it accessible. Because I don't know what percentage of the web is powered by these frameworks, but I am sure it's quite a significant percentage and, I am just going to throw out a random number, but if 50% of the web is like React, it is important for React to make sure that they are making their framework really accessible. So, I think conveying the importance and making sure that these platforms and these frameworks that people are building their own sites upon, making sure that they are considering the accessibility is important. That is really important going forward. Nic: It's mission critical from frameworks to do that. I was involved a long time ago with the Joomla CMS and it was important for Joomla to be able to provide accessible output, but also an accessible interface for people to be able to manage their content. And, it's the same thing with WordPress. I think they're saying it's 35% of all website are powered by WordPress today. And, yet, WordPress is going to release with a new editor that is not accessible. So, when we are thinking about that I think you are right. If we only could manage to convince the frameworks to do something that gives the bare bones of accessibility that gives best practices for developers to able actually understand that it needs to happen. That might actually make a massive impact on the overall health of web accessibility in the future. Ire: Yeah, exactly. I think if we are thinking about what is going to make the biggest impact, probably going after the frameworks is going to be more important than convincing each individual developer that they should think about accessibility. Because like you said, WordPress, 35% of the internet, that's a huge amount, and in one upgrade they could drastically change the accessibility of their editor. Nic: Yeah. Ire: Yeah, it's quite significant, and quite important. Nic: What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? So, if you weren't a web developer, a front-end developer, what would you like to do? Ire: Okay, this is a good question. Well, I would start with what is more likely. At university I actually have two separate degrees. I first studied psychology, then I studied law. So, realistically, if I wasn't doing web development, I would probably be a lawyer or go into psychology. But, unrealistically, I used to want to be a dancer and I am quite good at dancing, but I also wanted to be a musician. I really have the worst voice ever. I am glad that dream sort of died. So, I think starting in terms of what is more likely, maybe a lawyer, then a psychologist, then a dancer, then a musician. Nic: How does one go from studying psychology and law to become a web developer? Ire: That is a good question that I get asked very often. I started doing web development as a hobby since I was teenager, but, at the time, I didn't know it was a career. And, I didn't even know that computer science was something that I could study at school. I didn't get that much information about career options when I was choosing - Nic: Right. Ire: ... what to do in university. So, I just kind of picked my favorite subject at the time, just psychology. And, it wasn't until I was doing my masters that I actually realized that web development was a thing that I could do. So, once I graduated I decided I needed to give this a try, because this was something I've been really interested in for as long as I can remember and so I started doing some freelance and I basically did some…

Full show notes at the publisher

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected