A11y Rules Podcast

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E68 – Interview with Ire Aderinokun – Part 1 Jan 17, 2019

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In the first part of my interview, Ire Aderinokun tells us that accessibility will not take you a massive effort if you're using HTML correctly. Ire is a front-end developer and user interface designer. She currently is working on a startup called Buy Coins. Transcript Nic: Welcome to the A11y Rules podcast. This is episode 68. I'm Nic Steenhout, and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you're interested in accessibility, hey, this show is for you. To get today's show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. This week, I'm speaking with Ire Aderinokun. Thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility, Ire. How are you? Ire: I'm great. Thanks for having me. Nic: Thank you. So I like to let guests introduce themselves. In a brief introduction, who is Ire Aderinokun? Ire: Okay, so I'm a front-end developer and user interface designer. I live and work in Lagos, Nigeria. I'm currently working on a startup called BuyCoins, and we're building a cryptocurrency exchange that's targeted at Africans, and Nigerians for now, Africa soon. I also write a blog. It's called bitsofcode where I write a lot about front-end development. So, HTML, CSS, JavaScript. I'm actually currently trying to write almost every day, so I'm trying to do an article every weekday for the next about 30 days/30 articles. There's a lot of content going on there right now, so that's what I focus on. Nic: Right, so that would keep you busy. So to get going a little bit, tell us something that most people would not know about yourself. Ire: Interesting. I guess people would not know that I'm really scared of flying, because I'm flying a lot because I travel for things like conferences. I'm traveling at least maybe every month, every two months or something, so people might not be aware that I'm actually really, really scared of flying despite the fact that I do it a lot. Nic: Yeah, that would be problematic. From Nigeria, it's a bit difficult to get anywhere really unless you're doing a lot of African continent conferences. But I think you're coming over to the States and to Europe quite a bit, aren't you? Ire: Yeah, so recently in the past, maybe a year, I've been going particularly to California a bit mainly because the startup I was working on, or I am working on, we got into Y Combinator, so we're there for most of the summer. Also, a few conferences I go for are usually in California, but I also go to Europe quite a bit. Yeah, every conference I go to is at minimum six hours away, so it's kind of a struggle. Nic: Yeah, I can imagine that. I can imagine that. So the podcast is about web accessibility, and there seems to be as many variations of the definition of web accessibility as there's people I speak to on the podcast. How would you define web accessibility? Ire: That's a good question actually. Well, I just think of web accessibility basically like any form of accessibility, and it's just about access to the platform. In this case, the web to as many people as possible. People tend to focus on specifically people that have disabilities. So how does somebody who is, for example, blind use the web? That's one of the major things people might think about. But it's just about making the web or whatever platform we're talking about, making it easy to access for as many people as possible, including people who might have a disability. But I always say that accessibility is not only about targeting the people who have a disability. It's just about increasing access in general, and that might also mean that people who don't have disability will be able to access the content in a better way or in an easier way as well. Nic: Right, so in other word, accessibility benefits everyone? Ire: Yes, exactly. Nic: I'm curious about where your role falls within web accessibility. You were telling us you do a lot of writing and you're working with a startup about cryptocurrency. How do you weave web accessibility into that? Ire: Yes, so I think web accessibility is a really big part of the job of the front=end developer. It is part of everybody's job in some way or the other, but I think it might be the most important for the front-end developer because most of the time their decisions either make or break whether a website is accessible or not. So how they decide to build links if these sites are used, like the correct elements for the correct things. Those are a lot of the things that really impacts whether a site is accessible or not probably more so than how the content is written maybe. So a content developer's job and probably also the designer. I think in how I decide to build the websites, that's really important, and accessibility comes a lot into that. Like I mentioned, doing a lot of speaking and writing a lot, I try as much as possible to think about accessibility in whatever I'm writing and even in topics that are not necessarily directly related to accessibility, I try and be as conscious about it as possible. So even in things as simple as code examples, making sure that I'm not giving an example that's a poor example for accessibility because that really affects a lot of people I've found. So if I have a simple HTML document, for example, making sure that there is a language attribute on the HTML elements, that goes a long way because a lot of people who are beginners might not necessarily have started thinking about things like accessibility. They're more likely to just copy and paste what you do, and I have to think and make sure that I'm not assuming that they know that this is not the most optimal way to write this. I have to try and be as conscious as possible in things that I write and examples that I give. Nic: I must thank you for that because it's one of my pet peeves that so many tutorials and code samples up there actually are not focused on accessibility or even just properly formed HTML. It's a pleasure to hear that you're doing that, so newbies in particular, but also experienced coders actually see this is how you do it. So, thanks for that. Ire: You're welcome. I mean, I try. I'm sure it's not perfect, but I definitely try. Nic: How did you become aware of web accessibility and how important it is? Ire: That's a good question. I haven't really thought about it. I think it probably started as part of my blog. So when I first started writing, I had initially challenged myself that I needed to write every single week, and I actually did that for the first two years or so. So every time I needed to find something to write about, it really forced me to do a lot of research and try and understand things a lot more. So I think it probably started from me digging deep into HTML and understanding what each element does, what it's for, what everything means, and I think having a greater understanding of HTML made me understand ... made me better at accessibility because I truly understood the difference between a button and a link for example. I could understand why it's important that you should use the correct element for each thing and also because of writing and forcing myself to research things more. I'm sure I just across the web content accessibility guidelines. That's one of the things I even wrote about in the first year of my blog, and I actually read as much of it as possible. I didn't actually read everything, but I skimmed as much of it as possible rather. Reading that really gave me a much better understanding of why it's important, and I guess it kick-started me into thinking a lot more about it and consciously trying to make the effort to find content that talks about it or follow people that are talking about it so I can be exposed to as much of that kind of information as possible. Nic: Has your view of accessibility changed since you became aware and then started digging into it? Ire: I would definitely say that what I think about accessibility and just generally about it has changed from the beginning to where I am now, because I think when I first heard of it or even first begun researching it, I was still very much of the mindset of, "Okay, this is only really important for people who are blind for example, and because I am maybe not building a site that a blind person might use." So even though I'm aware that accessibility is a thing, I still had that very closed-minded view of why it was important. But I think as I've grown more and starting to research more about it and just learning more in general, it's like I said at the beginning that I just tend to think that's it's better for everyone, and it just generally makes an overall better experience for your sites if it's accessible. So I would say that's the biggest change in my mindset, and it has also made it easier for me to put more importance on it when I know that, "Okay, maybe even if somebody who's disabled never accesses or never tries to use the site, I know that I've still made the experience better. I've still made a better site." Nic: I think your experience, what you describe, is a critical change in perception, and it probably is where a lot of developers out there are stuck at thinking, "Well, accessibility benefits only a few people, and I'm not building websites for these people anyway, so I can forget about it." What would you say to the old you that was thinking that way? How would you convince yourself to actually pay more attention? What would be the argument that we could use to really convince people? Ire: Well, I actually do a talk similar to this topic, which is about why accessibility is important and why it can be easy. So the main things that I do say in that talk, and which is the answer to the question is two things. The first is that accessibility, contrary to what many people believe, it's not actually going to take you 10 times more effort or more time to make a site more accessible. I always point out the example of people trying to use a span or a div as a button instead of just using a button element. It does not take you more work to just use the correct element. So it's more just about how you write your HTML or how you architect your app rather than you having to spend so much more time doing it to make it more accessible. So the first thing is that it doesn't have to be something that's you're taking on this huge new task and it's going to be really, really difficult. It can actually be pretty simple, and it's just about what you write or how you write it rather. The second thing is what I mentioned before, which is that you may not think about it, but if you make a site that is more easily navigable or your content is easier to read, that helps everyone. A good example of this is responsive design. When we were all building sites that were only for desktop, and the fonts were maybe really small, or it was laid out in a way that wasn't really responsive and couldn't really be changed much. That was because we were just thinking, "Okay, everybody's going to be on desktop." But if at that time we had been thinking that, "Oh, what if somebody needs to increase the font size? Or what if somebody needs to have everything much bigger?" If we were already thinking in that mindset, the whole concept of responsive design and making sites work on mobile would have been a much easier shift if that makes sense. So it's like ... I'm trying to think of how to ... I don't know if that made more sense. Nic: Yeah, that did make sense. I like the couple of aspects to it. I particularly like this thing of, you know, "Accessibility will not take you 10 times more effort to make happen if you actually use HTML properly." Ire: Yeah, exactly. I think even myself, and a lot of people used to think that you have to just do so much extra work. It's only going to be a lot of extra work if you don't think about it till the very last minute and then decide, "Oh, I need to make this accessible." Then you realize that you've used all the wrong elements or you've relayed out everything using Flexbox instead of just using the actual source order in the DOM to make sure things make sense in that way. If you had just done it the normal way or the way that would work for all kinds of people, it would have been actually easier for you than doing it the way in which you're trying to hack things in a strange way. Nic: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Ire, did you find you were facing barriers when you were learning about implementing accessibility and when you were doing it? And if you did, how did you get over them? Ire: I think it was a bit daunting getting started just because my first instinct was to try and read the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and that's a really large document. It's probably one of the biggest specs or documents that has been created, so it was a bit daunting looking at that and thinking, "Oh, wait. Do I need to read all of this to understand accessibility or to build accessible websites? I quickly realized I didn't need to do that. What I just needed to do was rely on a lot of tools that are available." Nowadays, there have been so many more tools that make trying to make your site more accessible. They make it pretty easy because you just click a button, and they'll tell you exactly what you need to fix. So at the time, I was using a Chrome plugin called ... I think it's just called Accessibility plugin or something like that, and it basically added a tab to your developer tool so that you could inspect any element, and you could see, "Oh, does this button have the appropriate label? Is this not visible or anything like that?" It was also really helpful for things like color contrast and making sure that things were of the appropriate contrast ratio. That was really good at the time. Now, with Lighthouse, which is built into Chrome. You can do pretty much the same thing. I think even into Chrome Developer Tools, they already have a lot of these features so you don't need to install any plugin to have it anymore. It's just there by default. I was mentioning Lighthouse. You can do really quick accessibility audits. So with two clicks, you just select, "Oh, I want to have a report on the accessibility of this particular page," and it'll give you a report and tell you other things you did well, which is great. But it also tell you the things that you need to fix specifically. So that's a really great starting point. If you're just getting started with accessibility, you don't necessarily know what the rules are: What is good, what is bad, what you should or shouldn't do. It's really great to rely on tools like this because they just tell you. It doesn't go anywhere. Maybe it should actually be a button instead. There are so many tools. Another really great tool that I use is called Pa11y, and it's a command-line tool. It does something similar to Lighthouse, but I think it gives a much more comprehensive report, so it'll even tell you things that, "Oh, you need to make sure that this, like the title of your document. Does it actually correspond to what is on the page?" It also just gives things like that where you should just think and you might not have really previously given much thought to. If you're just getting started, you might say, "Oh, the title of my document should just be the title of my website." But then i…

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E67 – Interview with Beth Raduenzel – Part 2 Dec 07, 2018

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Continuing my chat with Beth. We discuss, among other things, accessibility as a coding challenge vs having to meet tight deadlines - and how sometimes developers chose to do things the way they know to meet these deadlines. Transcript Nic: Welcome to the A11y Rules podcast. This is episode 67. 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 https://a11yrules.com. Nic: In this episode I'm continuing my conversation with Beth Raduenzel. The last show was really cool. We spoke about a lot of things. A couple of things that struck me that you said, Beth, last week was comparing accessibility to the five stages of grief. I thought that was really brilliant. I'd never heard that before. So thank you for that. Beth: Yeah. Nic: Should we- Beth: Have you experienced that? Nic: Yeah, actually I have. As you were describing it last week, really, I could actually see clients' faces when you talk about that, or you do a presentation at a conference and you see peoples' faces fall and it's like, "Oh, yeah. What am I going to do?" So it's very apt, I think. Very apt. Nic: We finished last week by talking about your greatest achievements. So let's start this episode with something that's a bit of flip side. Beth: Okay. Nic: What's your greatest frustration in terms of web accessibility? Beth: Oh, my greatest frustration, I think, is that I'm not a developer. I used to code way back in the day, when everything was sliced images thrown in tables which are probably the worst thing you could do, now that I am an accessibility person. Just having the ability to design and code just from idea to finished product was really great. Beth: It's great when I can work with developers who understand accessibility, but when I'm working with people who are still learning, it's a little frustrating because I can't give them the solutions. I can tell them, "This is a problem and you need to make it like this," but I can't give them the exact piece of code that they need to be able to solve that. That's been really frustrating for me, and it's something that I would like to learn, but I don't know that I will ever find the time to be really good at it. Nic: Playing devil's advocate again here. Beth: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Nic: Don't developer usually like a coding challenge? So it's not necessarily bad to say, "Hey, this is the result you must to get to, and here's your challenge. Fix it?" Beth: I think they do, but I think in the real world a lot of times developers get really tight deadlines. When they're used to doing things a certain way and you tell them they have to figure out a new way to do it, I think that kind of throws them for a loop and it's hard for them to keep their deadlines. Nic: Yeah, I think that's a fair point. That's a fair point, yeah. What's the one thing that everyone knows about web accessibility? Maybe the conventional wisdom, if you like? Beth: The one thing? Nic: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Beth: I feel like most people don't know about web accessibility. Have you had people ... does it seem like everyone knows about it? I run into people all the time that they just have no clue how that works. Yeah, I think ... well I'll say this, one thing that I didn't initially think about was people who are deaf. Beth: You would think about that if you were talking about YouTube or a video site where there's audio, but when you have just a normal non audio, what do you call it, a non audio-based website or product, you don't typically think of people who are hearing impaired because you think that you just see everything and there's no problem, but there actually is a problem because a lot of times if you have a customer service number or something where the only way maybe to update your account is to call this number, and then now you can't because if you have someone who is deaf or hard of hearing, that's not going to work for them. There are things, actually, that you need to think about in giving people alternative means of picking up the phone, because that's not always an option for people. Nic: Yeah, the other thing I've come across with a lot of people who are deaf that were either born, or deafened really young, is that for many of them English is not a first language. Beth: Yeah. Nic: Sign language is in the syntax and grammar of sign language. It's so different to English that basically complex text might be difficult to understand. So that's another aspect of hearing impairments that has an impact. Make sure you use plain English, or plain language, depending on the language you create your sites on. Beth: Absolutely. I met someone at the CSUN conference in 2016, who was born deaf and became friends with him. It was very eye opening to learn how to have a phone call with your deaf friend, and speaking to a woman on the phone when you know that your friend is a male is just a little unusual, but it's interesting and I think all of these experiences that I've had, I think they really just widened my horizons into other people's lives and what other people deal with on a daily basis. Nic: Yeah. What do you think the number one reason most people fail to success with web accessibility? Beth: I think they just give up. I think they make compromises and they think that, "Well we'll just pick and choose which of the WCAG principles are success criteria that we want to apply," and not really understanding that if you don't hit all of those, if you don't reach 100% with WCAG, you're not doing it right. Sometimes even if you do hit all the success criteria, it doesn't mean that your website is accessible. You really need to still test it. Just checking a box is not the same as understanding and testing, and testing with people with disabilities. I think they just either give up, or they think it's too hard, or "We'll just do some of it," and you really can't do that. Nic: Accessibility certainly is not a checklist. Beth: No. Nic: Contrary to some popular belief, yeah. Beth: I can't tell you how many times I've been asked to make a checklist and I just send them the link to WCAG because I mean, really, how would you make a checklist of that? These are all of the success criteria- Nic: Yeah. Beth: And if I want to make a checklist, I would just be copying and pasting that. Nic: At the same time though, I think a lot of people, and me included, come to think of accessibility beyond WCAG, so we're juggling this "Well we have to comply to these things," but at the same time it really should be on the starting point because as you say, you can have a site that complies with WCAG and have the interaction be really horrible. Beth: Absolutely. I think putting your product into context, so if you know that you're designing a product that's going to be used on a mobile device, and it's going to be used in the field, you're going to want more contrast than 4.5:1, you know what I mean? At my last job we made a web app and we made it in black and white, no other colors, because it was something that was going to be used on the field, and when you're outside in the sun, even if you have a 4.5:1 contrast, you're not going to be able to see it. Nic: Yeah. Beth: So I think applying context to things. I know also from going to CSUN that McDonald's puts, I believe, seven to one contrast on their menus that they have up above the registers because they know that people are standing far back and you don't know what the lighting is going to be at any given time of day. So they went above and beyond with their color contrast because of the situation. Nic: What do you think the challenges for our field, for the field of web accessibility, is moving forward from, from this day on? Beth: You know, it's sad to say but I think it's really getting everyone to have empathy for everyone, and not just the people who are like themselves. That's been my greatest challenge is how do you get people to have empathy for others when they might not initially? I think once everyone has empathy, I don't think that you'll have websites that are made without accessibility in mind because it won't even be a question of making it accessibility, it will just be how people design and code. Nic: How do you get people to have empathy then? Beth: I think that introducing them to someone with a disability and seeing those certain individuals as real people. Maybe they have never met anyone whose blind or in a wheelchair. I think introducing them to these people and having them just have a conversation about what their life is like. We had someone who was a little person on the Board at United. There was an accessibility panel, and she was explaining how when they moved the button for the light from the armrest to overhead, she could no longer reach it. Just hearing real world examples of the pain points that design decisions have in their lives, I think that helps and I have also led classes and experiments where I let people ... or I should I make people, but I let people experience a screen reader, or experience keyboard-only navigation. Beth: It's really fun for a short while and then you see their frustration. They realize that whatever website they're on is not accessible and they literally can't accomplish their task. They start to understand. They can just walk away and go back to using the computer the way that they normally do, but a lot of people can't. So giving them the opportunity to kind of walk a mile in someone else's shoes, I think that helps. Nic: Yeah. What profession other than UX and accessibility would you like to attempt? Beth: You know, I started out as a photo editor- Nic: Oh yeah? Beth: Yeah, so I am really good at Photoshop and making pictures of moments that never happened. I always thought it would be great to work in film and to be someone that does the editing in film. I don't even know how it's done, but I imagine it's something similar to Photoshop, but frame by frame doing the Photoshop work to make these special effects happen in film. I always thought that would be fun. Nic: Yeah. Your answer is very interesting to me because most people end up answering something that I can tie in one way or another to web accessibility and yours is completely different and I love that. I love that because ... I don't know, I can't quite verbalize it, but I think it's great to have interest in things other than your day to day passion. I know for many of us, and it sounds like you as well, accessibility is not just a day job. It's a passion. But it's great to hear you have other things that interest you than that. So thank you for sharing. Beth: Yeah. Nic: Who inspires you, Beth? Beth: I think my two little boys inspire me. They have such creative minds and they haven't been told yet that whatever idea they have won't work. They haven't been crushed down by the naysayers, so they'll come up with these crazy ideas and it's just so amazing because there are no limits in their mind. They can take some toilet paper tubes, and they're going to make a robot. To them, this thing is actually to move, and it's going to do things, even though there's nothing to it other than cardboard and tape. Nic: Yeah. Beth: They think that somehow this is going to become a mechanical being and I think it's so inspiring as an artist and a creative person, they just blow me away the things that they come up with. Even in their video games, my eight year old plays Minecraft. The things that he does in that game are just amazing. He's basically learning to code in this video game, and he's eight. I just can't believe it. I think back to what was I doing when I was eight, and he is creating machines that will build a house when he pushes a button. It will self-build a house. I'm so amazed by them. I think children are always inspiring. Nic: How do we reach out to kids to build that empathy you were talking about earlier, because maybe that's where we really need to get to them. Beth: Absolutely. You know, I don't see, I guess, a lot of children other than my own, so I don't know about other kids, but I see so much empathy in my own children when I explain something to them and you see their facial expressions change. You see them automatically putting themselves into that person's shoes and thinking, "Well that means that they can't do this, so how did they do this?" And they really want to know, how would somebody get up the stairs if they're in a wheelchair. So I explain, there's a lot of different ways, maybe there's a ramp, maybe they have to have a lift, maybe they use the elevator. Beth: But you see the wheels turning and you see them thinking about what problems they might have if they were in that situation because they realize they couldn't do a lot of the things that they do now, and it's very sweet. They have a lot of questions, and they're not afraid to ask whereas I think a lot of adults are afraid to ask if they see someone who is blind at a train station and kind of stuck in a corner, they just stare instead of going up and asking, "Can I help you to find where you're going?" I guess they just don't know what to say. I feel like children, all of the questions they have in their head, they just come out because there's no filter. Nic: Yeah, yeah. To bring this to a close, Beth, what's the one thing you'd like people to remember about accessibility? Beth: I would like people to remember that using technology is a right. I think that there should not be any limits on who gets to use these products and websites. Technology should just work for everyone. If they don't know how to make that happen, just open up a search engine and start learning. Nic: Yeah. I like that, remembering that technology is a right. I think that's a wonderful way to end up this conversation. Beth, thank you very much for being a willing guest to answer my questions, and I'm hoping to meet you at a conference or somewhere else at some point in the future. Beth: Well thank you so much. I had fun. Nic: Thank you. 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 of the shows at https://a11yrules.com. And a quick reminder, you can get yourself some neat accessibility rules swag at a11y.store. Catch you next time.

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E66 – Interview with Beth Raduenzel – Part 1 Nov 29, 2018

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Beth is an accessibility specialist and a UX interaction designer. She was part of an award winning team at United. She compares acceptance of the need for accessibility as the 5 stages of grief. Transcript Nic: Welcome to the A11y Rules Podcast. This is episode 66. 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 to Beth Raduenzel. Thanks for joining me, Beth, for this conversation around web accessibility. How are you? Beth: I'm great. How are you? Nic: I'm doing good. I'm doing good from gray and rainy Pacific Northwest today, so it's good. I hear you had a bit of snow in your end in Chicago. Is that right? Beth: Yeah. It's snowing right now. It's beautiful. It looks like I'm inside of a snow globe. Nic: Oh, that's cool. Beth: It's- Nic: Yeah. Beth: ... so great to be home and looking out the window. Nic: It's fantastic place to be at. First snow is always quite fun. Beth, I like to let guests introduce themselves. In a brief introduction, who's Beth Raduenzel? Beth: I am an accessibility specialist, and I am a UX interaction designer. I started with visual design, and I moved into web design, and I moved into user experience, and I found that accessibility was really something that I could grab ahold of, because you're not only helping people to have a better web experience as far as accessibility is concerned. In some cases, you're actually allowing people to have a web experience, so it feels really good to have a job where I can help people. Nic: Yeah. That's good. Beth, to get started, tell me one thing that most people would not know about you. Beth: Okay. I think most people would not know that I have attention deficit disorder. It's something that I did not personally find out until I was in my 30s. Once I realized this, I feel like a lot more things made sense in my life, but even after learning, it's something that I kept very close and I didn't want anyone to know, because I was afraid that it would affect how I was perceived, so- Nic: Did it? Beth: It hasn't now. I just started telling people, actually, a couple years ago when I got into a position at a company where I felt that they were very open-minded, and inclusive, and non-judgmental. I felt like I could come out with that, and it wouldn't be held against me. When I tell people, I usually also add that having ADD, it's not all bad, actually, because the way that my brain works is different than the way that other people's brains work, and so I'm oftentimes able to come up with solutions that most people wouldn't have thought of, because I can make these really odd connections between things that you wouldn't normally associate. Nic: Have you found that having ADD has caused barriers for you on the web? Beth: Yeah. It has, actually. There is one website that I absolutely will not use. It's Bing.com, be- Nic: Oh, yeah. Beth: When it came out, I thought, "Well, I'll give it a try," and they have this background with these really interesting pictures, and I'll see the pictures, I go to this website because I want to look something up. It's like a Google, if people don't know what it is, and you go there, and you want to search for something, and I get so distracted by these images. The one time that I can recall, I went there to search for something, and there was an image of people sitting in a natural hot spring in the snow with monkeys. Immediately, I thought, "Where is this? I want to go there. I would like to sit in a hot tub with monkeys." I had to research this, and after about an hour, I realized I had no idea what I had been searching for, but I was planning a trip to Japan. Nic: Right. Yeah. I can see that being an issue. Thank you. We're talking about web accessibility today. How would you define that? Beth: Web accessibility today. I think web accessibility today is just ensuring that the largest number of people possible have the right and the ability to use the internet. I think most people take it for granted. It's on our phones. It's on our watches now, and for a lot of people, apps that most people use on a daily basis are not accessible, so all of these little things that help people through their day that would be extremely helpful for other people, they're not able to use that. I think that's a shame, really, in today, in 2018. Everyone should have access to the web and to apps and programs that would help them. Nic: Yeah. It's a difficulty that I've always found puzzling, that website owners or app developers don't actually want to reach out to this 20% of people with disabilities. I mean, one-fifth of a potential target market seems to me not insignificant. Yeah. Beth: Right, and I think if you look at websites that are accessible, you're not only increasing that 20%, you're increasing your traffic by the amount of friends and family that those people have, too. If you make your product accessible and people know about it, you're going to ... It's going to build, the word of this is going to spread, and I think you're going to get a lot more publicity, probably, than you would initially think that you would. Nic: I actually believe in that, but let me play devil's advocate and ask you, how do you know this snowball effect exists? Beth: I guess I'm basing this on my work at United Airlines. As you know, the airlines are under mandate to have their websites and airport kiosks accessible, and when family members and friends who fly with someone who is disabled, they see how much pain these people go through at the airports and trying to book tickets. I think when they know that there's an airline that goes above and beyond trying to make their services accessible, those friends and family members are going to frequent that airline more because they know that that's the airline that cares about their friend or their family member who has a disability. Nic: Yeah. I believe that. I also, in my experience, as a wheelchair user, I know that if I go to a restaurant, it needs to be an accessible restaurant, and if I go to a restaurant, I don't go to a restaurant alone, so if I go out to dinner with friends, it's not just my business the restaurant is getting. It's my friend's business as well that night, so yeah. Beth: Absolutely. Nic: You said you have been working with United, but you're currently between jobs. Is that correct? Beth: Yes. Nic: Yeah. Nic: I normally ask people, "Where does your role fall within the work of web accessibility," so where would you like your next role to fall within the work of web accessibility? Beth: I would love to get into a company that really cares about accessibility from the top down. I think that having accessibility be part of a company's structure, I think it really makes a difference, because you don't have to argue with people about making things accessible. When everyone in the company understands accessibility and understands the need for it, it just makes my life easier, because I don't ever stop pushing for accessibility, but when I hit a wall, it just becomes kind of a fight that it takes a lot of energy out of you. You know what I mean? Always- Nic: Yeah. Beth: Always trying to push for something that you know is right, and even when people believe in it, it's sometimes hard to incorporate. Nic: How do you get around that when you hit that brick wall, that resistance with teammates or leadership? How do you get around that? Beth: I usually try to be understanding that if you don't understand web accessibility, it's very overwhelming to begin with. There's so much that they don't know. I try to break it down and just hit the low-hanging fruit, so if they say, "Well, we don't have any blind people using our product, because of ... " Let me just say it's a application for pilots, and you wouldn't have a blind pilot. You still want to have other types of accessibility. Now in this example, low vision would not be the case, or colorblindness, because pilots can't be colorblind, but for other applications, you're going to have, if you have a male-dominated industry, you're going to have one in twelve of those men be colorblind, so trying to hit color contrast for low-vision users, for people with aging eyes, and trying to hit, not using color only as a means of communicating information. Then also allowing them to resize the type and just have it keyboard-accessible, I feel, are the easiest ways to kind of get people to dip their toes into accessibility. Then you have people that come out of the woodwork and say, "Yeah, I can't always read this, and I have to enlarge the text on my phone," or, "When I see designs with the light gray text, I just can't see it," and all of a sudden, you get people, even young people, that say, "Yeah, I have a problem seeing this," or, "I'm colorblind." I've had a lot of people disclose invisible disabilities to me, like dyslexia, because they feel comfortable to admit that, "Yeah, this is a problem for me." Nic: Yeah. It's amazing, the number of people that you work with or spend time with every day that do have disabilities that you're not aware of, so it's kind of nice that you've created an environment around yourself where people feel comfortable enough to open up and disclose those kind of things. Beth: Yeah. It's really nice. I just, you get to feel so much closer to people. You don't always get that closeness at a job, but when you get to know people and understand them as who they are and not just as the worker that they are, it's really nice. Nic: Yeah. How did you become aware of web accessibility and how important it was? What got you started? Beth: Well, it's a long story, but when I was in high school, I had a boss. My very first job was working at a little coffee and spice shop, and my boss had cerebral palsy. It was very hard for most people to understand him, because it affected his speech, but after a couple weeks of working with him daily, I had no problem of understanding him, but I could see kind of the ... What do you call it? I could see the discrimination, and as a 15-year-old, it was so painful to watch, because people would come into the store, and it was a small shop in a small town, and they would say, "Can I speak to the owner?" I'd say, "Yes. This is the owner, and his name is Chris," and introduce him. He would say, "Hi, can I help you," or, "How can I help you," and they would just look back at me and say, "Is there someone else I can talk to?" It was like unbelievable. I mean, right in front of him. It just, it was so hurtful. Knowing that, and then getting into user experience, I had a job where I was designing behavioral mental health programs for vets returning with PTSD, getting to see how much that it was helping people that were so depressed and in these shells that they couldn't leave their home. We were bringing this behavior modification program to them online, and getting to see how much this was helping people, it really made me want to get away from marketing and just do things to help people instead of trying to sell people things. I think that was kind of the start, and then when I learned about web accessibility, it was like I couldn't stop learning about it, because I was like, "There's so many people that you can help," and I thought it was- Nic: Go down that rabbit hole and never come up, right? Beth: Yeah, and the learning how to use, like learning how to use VoiceOver and other screen reader programs, I was just amazed, because I think a lot of people aren't aware of a screen reader at all. They just assume that if you can't see, then you can't use a computer, and that's so wrong, but learning how it works is just amazing, and seeing people use it for the first time was, it just blew my mind, because they have it so fast that it doesn't even sound like words, but they can fully understand it, and it's just, it's like this talent, and it's beautiful. Nic: Yeah. It's quite a skillset, too, to develop to be able to listen to a screen reader as fast as some folks have it. I vividly remember a demonstration by Sina Bahram, and it was amazing. That was ... I had not really interacted with proficient screen reader users until then, and it was quite eye-opening, if you've run into- Beth: Yeah- Nic: ... into them. Beth: ... I think it's one of those things where you just, you remember that first time that you saw it, and it's just, I think it's life-changing. I remember we had a woman named Pat Pound. She was part of our accessibility panel at United, and she came in, and she showed us how she uses her iPhone. I was just blown away. I couldn't believe how much she was doing, and then I couldn't believe, at the time, how inaccessible that the app was. That was like, it kind of lit a fire in me to make that work for her. Nic: Yeah. Has your view of accessibility changed over the years since you came down that path? Beth: I don't think my view of it has changed, but I think my attitude towards other people not being as into it as I am has changed. I kind of ... I jokingly call myself the accessibility enforcer on Twitter, because that was me at United, and at my last job, just anything that anyone said, if I could see a problem with accessibility, I'm going to call it out, and I'm going to say, "This is not accessible. We need to change this." It's funny how people go through kind of the five stages of grief when they first learn about accessibility. There's the denial and the anger of they don't want to have to do this, because they've been doing their job a certain way their whole life, and now they have to change it. Then there's the bargaining of, "Well, can't we just do it this way?" Then they seem to get depressed when they realize that I'm not going to let this go, and then there's finally the acceptance. Seeing people go through that and come on board and seeing other people jump up and say, "This isn't accessible," is just so awesome for me, seeing the person who was like the thorn in my side a year ago becoming my ally is so great. Nic: Yeah. It's good to build champions, and for every champion you build, you know that's going to have a ripple effect. Beth: Yes, it does. Nic: What barriers did you face when you were looking at learning and implementing accessibility, apart from attitudinal barriers, which we've mentioned a few times? Did you find anything that was blocking you? Beth: I'm thinking. At first, I didn't know there was web, there was standard, there was ... Like keyboard navigability was something new to me, and I didn't realize there was standard key commands, so just being able to make something work with the keyboard doesn't necessarily mean that it's working properly with the keyboard. That was something where I think I spun my wheels a little bit, making something work and then realizing those keys are already assigned to other jobs, and having to start over. At first, I was on a PC, and I was not aware of what the standard screen readers were, so I just kind of started looking on my own, and I…

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E65 – Interview with Marcy Sutton – Part 2 Nov 23, 2018

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Marcy tells us that her greatest frustration is that for all of the energy that we put into this all the time it feels like we’re stagnant in terms of accessibility actually getting done. And that it’s hard not to get derailed by that. Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 65. 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 continuing my conversation with Marcy Sutton. If you have not listened to last weeks episode it was really fantastic. Marcy was telling us a few things that I think are quite important, including the importance of listening to the developer's needs. It’s not just about the needs of people with disabilities but in order to serve those needs, we need to make sure developers needs are met. So that was wonderful. Welcome back, Marcy. Marcy: Thanks for having me. Nic: Yeah... We finished last week talking about… your greatest achievement in terms of web accessibility and you were talking about the impact you’re having on people that go forth and start implementing accessibility. What would be the flip side to that? What’s your greatest frustration? Marcy: I would say my greatest frustration is that for all of the energy that we put into this all the time it feels like we’re stagnant in terms of accessibility actually getting done. And it’s hard not to get derailed by that. I have a blog called accessibility wins, for example, that I haven’t found a good example in ages. And part of that is I think that I took some time off and just needed to step away but also it’s hard not to get distracted by...somebody will be like, “check out this site” and I go look at it and I run Axe on it and it’s full of accessibility problems that even Axe is finding. The low hanging fruit stuff that’s supposed to be easy. And so I think my greatest challenge is overcoming that and just trying to keep the positive, upbeat, forward momentum going knowing that you put 100% into that and we’re moving the needle at such a slow rate. And sometimes we go backward. And, yeah, take WordPress for example. I look at the way that projects go sometimes and it’s very… I’d say that the reality of it… we can just be happy and try to put a positive spin on things but when you really look deeply at the reality of it people with disabilities have barriers on the web all the time. So it’s hard not to feel like, I’m doing all of this for what? I mean, I know why. It’s because it gets me out of bed in the morning to move that needle even that tiniest little bit. But when you kind of look, a more pessimistic view of it is that it’s going pretty slowly. Nic: Yeah. So how do you keep the positive spin? How do you stay enthusiastic about the work when you’re meeting those moments of frustration? Marcy: I just try to think about something else. Like, go take my mind off of it. Go ride my bicycle or go take my dog outside or… just try and get some other energy so when I come back to it I’m refreshed. I look at what other people do in the industry like blog posts that people write that they’re excited about and just try to get jazzed again about new technologies. ‘Cos there’s always new technologies and there's always accessibility expertise needed. And that seems to electrify me. So. I’m usually reading about something new and I kind of… all of the frustrations sort of just melt away because I’m excited about doing research on some shiny new technology knowing that what you write about it or what you share about it might impact somebody who is reading about that in the future. So I think that we all can contribute our expertise and passion to these new technologies and new design trends and all that kind of stuff. There’s always something new and I think that kind of helps offset the like, stagnant challenges that we are always going to have I think. Nic: Yeah. Earlier you spoke about working with Angular a little bit I think you’re doing some work with React right now...and we’re talking about there’s always the shiny new thing coming out. How do we ensure that these frameworks, which sometimes it seems like it’s more about knowing the framework than having basic development skills… How do we make sure these frameworks allow for building accessible interfaces and accessible sites? Marcy: Well I think one of the best ways is to make sure their documentation doesn’t have anti-patterns and bad examples in it. So, you know find either filing issues in GitHub against those documentation pieces or pole requests would be even better. I think some frame-work orgs are better and more responsive about emerging that suff than others. The React teams been really great about that. They have a pretty awesome doc on accessibility whereas with the Angular team… I’ll try not to get started with that. So, I think it can be challenging if the the framework just isn't, like, open to actually doing the work of merging that documentation. Like, in that case...phew, yeah. I’ve really gone around and around and around with that. So, maybe picking a framework that is a bit more responsive to it unless you know, you just really want to pick up that torch and get Angular to care about accessibility that would be awesome. We would all be very fortunate for that. I did that once and then Angular 2 happened and, yeah, it’s in the state it’s in now. Which is a real shame. It was just a little too difficult for me to live throughout that once and then see it repeat and just go, “we didn’t learn anything”. So there's the docs strategy. I think having examples of where it’s working right is a great strategy no matter what technology you’re using. If you have an example of, you know, even just one tiny piece or like a demo application or something. That’s a good thing to put your energy towards. And then share it. I go back forth with social media and personas and sort of the ego that’s wrapped up in that and where I really can kind of get my own ego out of the way and see it’s value is in sharing information that will help people solve problems later. Like that I think is a worthy reason to get your name out there. Because you can help make a difference. And so I think that creating materials people can benefit from is totally a worthy goal. And every... You know, we all are passionate about different things so if we apply our collective expertise and put those examples out there, you know when then actually trying to offset the lack of accessibility in areas. ‘Cos it’s really easy to gripe about it, it’s better to put up an example that people can learn from. Nic: Do you think there's conventional wisdom about accessibility like the one thing that everybody knows about it? Marcy: Hmm that’s a good question. Well, I would say no because everybody doesn’t know about accessibility. Like, I guess there's misconceptions, like, that accessibility is about blind people. Which it is in some ways but it’s so much more than that too. So, I’ve been surprised at the number of encounters I’ve had where someone’s like, “I didn’t even know that was a thing” and I guess that’s where I started too. I didn’t know accessibility was a thing. So, that’s where I’ve said a few times… seeing people recognize the power and impact that they can have just once they learn about accessibility … yeah, I don’t think everybody knows about it up front so it’s hard to say there’s any collective wisdom. Nic: Yeah, that’s been my thinking as well but sometimes it seems like everybody knows about alt attribute. But they don’t. And sometimes you think well, everybody knows about keyboard accessibility but looking at the sites that I’ve been auditing for the last 15 years not everybody knows about these things. So, I ‘m pretty much with you that there is no conventional wisdom. There’s probably more myths than common understandings. Marcy: I think so, yeah. So, it feels… it feels a little repetitive to always have to say, “you don’t need to put tab index on everything coz screen readers can navigate without it” There's all of these examples where I end up having to repeat thing just because I’ve seen them come up again and again. So, yeah I think it bears repeating and trying to...like, even if I’ve said it the tenth time it might be the first time someones hearing it so. I’d love to move away from Alt Attributes but that one is so common, and form labels too. Nic: Yeah Marcy: Form labels is like...ugh, come on. So easy. Easy to fix. Nic: What do you think the number one reason is for people to, failing to succeed in implementing web accessibility? Marcy: I think they just don’t know. Like, a lot of times I don’t think it’s like a “I know and I don’t care” I think there’s a little bit of that but a lot of times I think it’s just a lack of awareness. So that’s where being that friendly voice to go “Hey it’s really easy to add these form labels” but it’s as I’ve said, we’ve put 100% of our energy towards this and we’re only moving the needle that little tiny bit. So that...yeah, you just have to keep reminding, keep showing people, keep making tools that highlight these problems like, you know, using an extension that can highlight your accessibility fails. Like making it easier for people to uncover those problems on their own I think is a good way to move forward but people are...yeah. There's always going to be new folks in the industry and I think we just have an awareness problem. Nic: Yeah. You’re echoing the same conversations I’ve had with several people including Sina Bahram who really phrased it nicely when he said: “we don’t have an accessibility problem we have an awareness problem”. Marcy: Yeah. Exactly. Nic: Yeah Marcy: So as much as I would like to maybe calm down public speaking and just do my own thing it does a service to people with disabilities to be out there in mainstream conference audiences telling them that they can do it. So it’s… I’ve kept going with it because these opportunities keep coming up and it is fun to go and show people how they can make an impact. I think we are always going to have a need for that, so… as much as I would like to slow that stuff down in the future it’s still moving that needle a little bit each time and it does make a difference. Nic: Does the amount of travel you do impact on you personally? In other words is being a… such an outspoken advocate take a toll on you, your personal life and your enthusiasm? Marcy: It has at times. I think it’s more than just that. Like, for example in the last six months I got married and I think I was taking on a little too much leading up to that so I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to kind of roll that back a little bit and cut down the amount of travel. I have some friends that travel so much more than me and I can’t even imagine how they do it. So, yeah. Definitely. I know I need to take care of myself or else things start to go off the rails ‘coz you can only advocate when you feel good. Like you have...like, why should people listen to me if I’m down in the dumps or something. I’ve tried to be very honest with my coworker's and my manager that this is too much. Like I’ve learned that ten talks a year is the most that I want to do and that means saying no to a lot of other things. Nic: Yeah, I did 23 talks between September 2017 and June 2018 and that really kicked my ass. Marcy: Yeah. Ooof. Nic: So I slowed down quite a bit since then, yeah. Marcy: It’s like it starts being detrimental too. You definitely can’ keep going with that forever. Yeah. I’ve got a few scheduled for next year that I’m really excited about but I’m already having to say no to things. Nic: I think I saw a Tweet come through that you’re going to be speaking at An Event Apart? Marcy: Yes. Nic: That is so exciting Marcy: Pigs have flown. I never ever thought that would happen, so I’m pretty floored over that one.Yeah. That’s such a huge deal to me. I’ve been doing public speaking for four or five years now and that was one...that was the elusive one or two that I was like, “that would be cool but…” like, I think I even wrote about getting into speaking. I have a blog post on my site called Writing winning abstracts and part of it is about when you’re getting into speaking having realistic expectations about where you might go speak and I’m like, “everyone's going to go speak at An Event Apart ‘cos I wasn’t in that category when I wrote it and then that ended up happening. So, yeah, I’m really honored by that and try to do right by the people with disabilities that I advocate for so I’m pretty excited that the talk that I’m doing there I’m debuting it at CSUN in front of my, you know, favorite folks in the world I absolutely love that going to be in person with people in the accessibility industry every year so to get to share that talk with them first I think gives me an opportunity to get realistic feedback from the people it would affect the most. Nic: What was your greatest eye-opening moment in working with people with disabilities in terms of accessibility? You know, was there a user testing session that you saw that really marked you? Or…? Marcy: Yeah, I would say it’s been more like feedback from people with disabilities. Either product feedback or I remember there being a blog post from, I think it was Simply Accessible, on the user experience testing they’d done around tab switchers and how, like, it totally went against the conventional pattern that we’d all been advocating for and those sorts of pieces of feedback are definitely the most intriguing because sometimes you have to really check your own assumptions and your own conventions and ask is this the best user experience? And so that’s why often I’m always saying, “make sure you test with real users with disabilities” because we think we know best and often times we don’t. So, yeah, my own sort of like...opinions about what works best for users I think being realistic about web accessibility means sometimes checking that privilege and asking real users not relying on your own expertise. Nic: Yeah. What do you think the greatest challenge is for our field moving forward in the next five or ten years? Marcy: I think trying to move that needle more than a trickle. Trying to have a bigger impact. I think we have to hit it from many different angles including with education. Part of me is tempted to go get a teaching job or something but...selfishly I would rather work on developing user interfaces but we have so many different angles that were missing the opportunity to talk about accessibility and I think where people are learning, in boot camps and universities those are all, or at least very few of those actually cover web accessibility . So I think we can try and fill those gaps by, go do a talk at your local boot camp. Code Fellows has asked me to come down there a few times. Writing tutorials and creating content that people who are just getting started can use. I think what's frustrating is that we’ve all been at this for years and so you’ll get somebody come in whose like, “this is what we need” and “I’m going to create Javascript accessibility courses” and it’s like, “those exist already”. We’ve all done it and like, maybe point to those first. So I think there's a tendency to want to reinvent the wheel when a lot of really smart people have spent time and energy creating a lot of content so I think it’s worth looking at what’s out there first and maybe point people in that direction. But, with new technologies and new ways of developing I think there’s definitely opportunities to create new content and try to hook people that way. Nic: Yeah. So put yourself in an ideal world where we’ve solved the accessibility problem and you don’t have to do this anymore. What pr…

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E64 – Interview with Marcy Sutton – Part 1 Nov 15, 2018

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Marcy tells us that it's important for folks in the accessibility community to listen to developers' needs. She also states that we ought to be more positive, and to stop making people feel bad about accessibility! Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 64. 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 to Marcy Sutton. Hey, Marcy thanks for joining me in this conversation about web accessibility. Marcy: Hey, thanks so much for having me. Nic: I like to let guests introduce themselves so in a brief introduction, who is Marcy Sutton? Marcy: I am a web developer from Washington State. I work at Deque Systems which is an accessibility company. I work on their services team as a developer advocate spreading the word about accessibility testing primarily to mainstream developers so my passion is trying to get people who are in a position to make a difference start to do the work of actually making web accessibility more common and more awesome. So, yeah, that’s what I do. Nic: Yeah. How does one become a developer advocate rather than just developer? Marcy: It… for me, it sort of just happened naturally as I got into public speaking. So, I found that there was a huge market for… I mean, there’s so many conferences out there and lots of opportunities to go and talk to the public about any issue that you care about or any technique that you care to talk about. So, over the years I guess I did an okay job that I started getting invited to things and people seemed to want to hear more from me. So gradually I’ve...over the years made it more and more my job and eventually, at DQ I had an opportunity to step into this role as a developer advocate where I’m really trying to do a bit of listening so it’s like inward and outward. So I’m trying to tell people how to make web accessibility happen but also listening to what their needs are and trying to create demos and conference talks that answer common questions and really help people do their jobs better. Nic: I like that. That it’s not just about what people with disabilities need but it’s also about the needs of developers out there. Marcy: Yeah sort of like being a bridge between. You know. Trying to remind developers that, like, they might have a disability or… you know. It’s like it can affect all of us at any time and… I don’t know if I directly answered your question about becoming a… going from being a developer to a developer advocate. For me, I don’t think I would be a developer advocate if it weren’t for accessibility. Because I was, you know, a generic web developer just doing the job, doing the best I could and once I learned about accessibility everything changed. So, I think for my particular story. Like, I am an advocate because I care about people with disabilities and I really… if it were solved I would have moved on to something else- Nic: Yeah Marcy: - But we know that it’s not. Nic: Yeah, we do know it’s not solved. Not by a long shot. I’d like to explore that a little bit more in a little bit but before going there… tell us something that most people would not know about you. Marcy: Gosh. I think lately… I’ve always been pretty outgoing so I probably share a lot of things because I wear my heart on my sleeve all the time but I’d say… I don’t know. Maybe because I present such an optimistic outlook and try to always make the best of it. Something people might not know about me is the hard times. Where I’m really having to dig deep to try and keep that positive spin and it’s not always easy. Nic: Yeah. Would you say that in our field of accessibility sometimes there's a lot of frustration and that makes it more difficult to keep a positive outlook? Marcy: Absolutely, yeah. And when I first got into it I felt like a lot of the established accessibility voices were really wagging their finger and really making people feel bad and there's still an element of that but I get it now, Like, when I started I was like, “why is everyone so negative?” and tried to introduce a different perspective. And now that I’ve been working in the field for… I think six or seven years in accessibility specifically I totally understand the frustration now. Nic: Yeah… yeah. Marcy: So… yeah. It’s not always easy. Nic: No it’s not. We’re talking about web accessibility and there's many ways to define that. After six or seven years in the field, how would you define web accessibility? Marcy: To me it’s all about… I mean it’s really starting with inclusive design to try and create websites and digital products that work for more people including people with disabilities. I think when I got into it I came as a developer and it was sort of like… fix it. Fic it after the fact and after years and years of seeing that really not working I’ve been listening to the folks that say, “shift left and make your design more inclusive and try to make it everybody's responsibility.” Because developers can't do it all. Sometimes you’re battling a set of designs that just have accessibility anti patterns built into them, or designed into them. So, I’ve… yeah, to me it’s a holistic practice that involves more than just individual team members. So try to make it... At least I'm trying to make it approachable and really put that positive spin on it even though it is hard and deflating at times but… But because that's how you bring people on. maybe you don't highlight the painful points right away but try to highlight the quick wins and the ways that people can stop making progress just by chipping away at it. But I think long-term success for any accessibility initiative It needs to involve your whole team. Nic: How do you as a developer advocate manage to reach out to... to everyone that's involved from the designers to the Developers, your primary targets and QA teams and leadership… How... how do you get the message out there beyond the primary audience for your message so everybody can really work together? Marcy: I think... I mean whenever I do a talk it like... most often I'm at mainstream web developer conferences but I try to... like, for whoever's listening to those talks I try to provide little nuggets of information and tips and things that they could take back to work. And sometimes that means giving them talking points to try and talk to leadership or how to work more collaboratively with your QA team. So I think there's opportunities even when you're talking to developers to try and put a bug in their ear or you know, an idea in their mind of how to collaborate data because it's not just technical challenges, we have social challenges at work of trying to convince people to get on board with accessibility so... I tried to Flippin those little tips that aren't straight technical things. and sometimes it's outside of a conference someone will just reach out on Twitter or in person at a meetup or something and they'll be like “ how do I convince our CFO to care about accessibility?” it's like “ oh well you can start talking about baby boomers and how they have a lot of disposable income and you're missing out on sales” depending on who you're trying target with your message you can kind of highlights a different strategy for accessibility success. Nic: So coming back to becoming aware of with accessibility and its importance how did that happen for you? here you were one day just a developer doing his thing and suddenly you became aware of web accessibility and... how did that happen for you? Marcy: For me, I was working at an agency just doing whatever they assigned me to and at some point, I became assigned on to the Target account. So Target the US retailer who had been sued for accessibility and I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know what Headings were, I didn’t know Symantec mark up that well… it’s… that’s a whole other story which I think you’ve… I saw one of your previous guests which you talked about accessibility education being very important. Yeah, I didn’t learn that and a lot of people don't. But when I was put on Target everything that I made I was being held accountable for its accessibility and I was pretty new to it but I remember working with team members at Target and them kind of leading me through testing what I had worked on and I was just so into it. I loved the challenges, I loved working with Steve [Saucon?10:11] he worked at Target, he ended up working at DQ for awhile so became co-workers later on which is such a small world. But, for me, it was learning about the impact that I could have on people with disabilities. And that just totally rocked my world. It’s like, this is so cool ‘coz a lot of this stuff that we’re building at agencies… sometimes it’s just fluff work. It’s like a marketing site that lives for three months and then it gets taken down and it’s like… I don’t know… you don’t have a whole lot of pride in it, maybe for that three months it’s like some project for XBox and it’s super cool but you don’t have that lasting… it’s not a product that lives on that you can point to and be like, “I built that” and so being in agency work… that higher purpose ended up completely changing my career and, yeah, I’ve never been able to turn that part of my brain off ever since I learned about it. Nic: Once seen you can’t un-see it, right? Marcy: Definitely and I made more friends with disabilities and it just really made the work much more significant to me and the cool thing since then is seeing all the lightbulbs go on with other people. Like, I would be like, “Oh I remember when I met them at a conference or whatever and now they’re the next champion” and that just… it continues to make my world go round and I think that’s been one of the more fulfilling… not only helping people with disabilities but seeing other people catch on, has been really awesome. Nic: Has your view of accessibility changed over the last six, seven, eight years that you’ve been doing this work? Marcy: I think honestly I started off pretty optimistic. That kind of comes in waves. Like, I talked earlier about it being really difficult sometimes because it isn’t perfect and I think… I think I knew it was… it needed attention. The reason I thought accessibility needed my help was that it wasn’t solved. I think I went through a period of maybe being too optimistic where I felt like we could solve a lot of it with development and then I went over the hump and realized, “Oh it is a bigger challenge than just developers can solve”. Going back to learning more about inclusive design and feeling like we all have roles to play in making it better. But I think, yeah, it’s an ongoing challenge. I’ve heard of some accessibility jokes like, “Its job security” for accessibility to not be working. Honestly, I wish that I could move on to other areas but accessibility needs all of us. We all need to keep reaching out to new developers. Every single project that everyone launches, all day every day, we all need to be reminding people about it. So, I think it’s going to be a lifelong thing at this point just because we’re shipping new products and new websites all the time. And a lot of them aren't;t accessible. Nic: I have joked a few times that one of my long-term goals is to do such a good job that I put myself out of a job. Marcy: I think we’d all be fine with that. Nic: I just don’t think it’s going to happen- [unintelligible 13:48] Marcy: No I don’t either. Nic: -- and you touched on it a little bit earlier. This concept of needing accessibility to be front and center with all the education about web building out there whether it’s formal classes or just tutorials or boot camps or whatever it is. They need to have accessibility front and center because until that happens I don’t think we stand a chance of managing this goal of putting ourselves out of a job. Marcy: Another angle that’s coming to mind for me is…”yes we need to educate our peers and our colleagues in the industry but I think even just general user expectations. a lot of people I know don't quite realize what that missing when it comes to keyboard support for example. not being able to Tab through a webpage and do everything you need to do... I think if more people realize that they should be able to do that maybe that's taking product feedback to sites that they use like, “ hey I can't do this without a mouse”. So that's been interesting, not only advocating within our industry but with friends and family Shaking their eyes open, figuratively. to what they should be expecting from all these online services that they use all the time. so I think that ’s maybe another way that we can... I don't know, by making accessibility front and center it helps really everyone. Including education our users and our customers. Nic: You're talking about uses giving feedback to site owners... how do you feel about pushing responsibility on people with disabilities that come to a site and they can't use it to actually give feedback? Marcy: Quickly I agree but I think the direction you're going with this, is that its sort of an unfair burden. I meant even in general, like, beyond people with disabilities. Just everyone… if... people with... I mean, across the board being able to know that accessibility features would help. it's like we don't even know what we don't know as consumers. I just wish it was more of a norm so people would demand it without having to have a disability to realize it. Not sure if I'm articulating that perfectly. I guess I just wish that it was more common to the point where we could be debating more detailed things instead of just missing the basic of basics. Nic: yeah the basic, like ...you know… 25 years after I started with accessibility I'm still telling people about alt attribute. Marcy: --alt text-- Nic: -- it’s just.. Yeah, where’s the brick wall so I can bang my head against it sometimes. Marcy: Yeah Nic: Did you find any barriers when you were learning about accessibility? And if you did, how did you get over that? Marcy: I’d say the barriers when I got started were that the tooling for debugging was not very good. Developer tools alone were new ten years ago. That wasn’t even a thing ten years ago. So, I would say the lack of tools when I got into it was sort of a barrier. The way I got around it was by talking to people and just asking them. Talking to Targets QA team with blind folks on it, “Hey, does this work for you?” and I think that in a way is another barrier. If you aren’t connected to people or they don’t have time to give you feedback… we were in a client, partner situation so it was… we had time allocated for that. But if I hadn’t had that feedback on my work early I think it wouldv’e been much more difficult to become as passionate about it. So I think the tooling’s gotten a lot better and that’s opening the doorway for a lot of people who might not necessarily know about accessibility or care about it until these fancy developer tools come along and then they’re like, “ooh I can treat this like a technical challenge” and then they get hooked on it and they start going, “oh its more than just technical” and that can snowball into creating new accessibility champions. So, its been nice to see that happen and continue to happen. Nic: talking of tools, you’re quite involved with the... DQ’s automatic testing tool called Axe. Tell us a little bit about that work and where you think it’s making a difference. Marcy: Yeah, so… I work on the Axe team. I was on the actual product team for a while and now I’m...I’ve transitioned into this role of developer advocate so I do w…

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E63 – Interview with Eric Bailey – Part 2 Nov 08, 2018

Show notes

Eric tells us accessibility shouldn't be just technical curiosity. It's about people. Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules podcast. This is Episode 63. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey! This show is for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript head out to https://a11yrules.com Nic: Welcome back everyone. In this episode I’m continuing my conversation with Eric Bailey. Last week was really quite good: we spoke about ways to reduce client hostility, which involved relationship building. We spoke about implementing accessibility by stealth, because it really should be part of your skillset, and do check out the episode if you haven’t already. Eric, welcome back. Eric: And what my favorite word was…(laughing) Nic: Yes? What was your favorite word? Eric: “Cromulent”, which is down on paper forever now. (laughing) Nic: Right, well, going from “cromulent”, building on that, Eric, let’s start the show with something really positive. What is your greatest achievement in terms of web accessibility? Eric: My greatest achievement? Oof…I helped maintain the A11y Project started by Dave Rupert many years ago to create a centralized repository of accessibility information. It was one of those things where I did a little bit of work and got some attention and was “called to the big leagues”, I guess. I was asked to become a maintainer and while I want to sink a lot more time into it, I do think it’s a great resource in that it just sits there and points to other great resources. So, being able to ensure that that stays alive, I’m very happy to be able to contribute to it. Nic: I think one of the problems accessibility has is that the information is so fragmented, all over the place, and the work of the accessibility project is so important because it centralizes a lot of that information. It reminds me in some ways of Yahoo!, way, way before Yahoo! was a Yahoo! we’ve known (inaudible), it was quite instrumental, I think, in making things happen. I view the accessibility project that way. Eric: Thank you. Hopefully, we never turn into the Yahoo! where good ideas go to die (laughing). Nic: Maybe you’ll become the Yahoo! that makes you a billionaire. Eric: Yeah… Nic: If that happens, please don’t forget me. Eric: Oh no, not totally (laughing). I’m still bitter about Yahoo! Pipes getting killed. I used that service. I think the fragmentation is a very interesting thing because technology moves so fast and front-end even faster, and sometimes this information is solid information but just for even that six-month window when it was relevant and then it may turn into an anti pattern. And that’s very… Last episode I spoke about getting increasingly more unsure of if what I am saying and hearing is correct and accurate, and that’s part of it, can I trust this source? Has it been battle-tested and put through the full range of every screenreader and browser combination that’s supported? I’m going to get a little depressing for a second here but I’ve seen more than my fair share of “accessible” out-of-the-box solutions that vaguely work in VoiceOver but that completely fall apart with NVDA or JAWS. Nic: Or are just that, “focus styles, what’s that?” Eric: That’s my pet project… (laughing) Nic: I came across a site the other day that really amazed me. They went and defined the focus style, no, they went and defined the background color on the link to be the exact same color as the focus style on the default browser outline. So, you could not actually see the default browser… Eric: Oh, that’s perfect! (laughing) Wow! Nic: I think that took some doing, to do that… Eric: Yeah, there’s some situations where I’m not even mad, I’m just curious, like, what happened here? Nic: Sometimes you go beyond anger and you just have to shake your head and laugh. Eric: Yeah. Nic: So, we’re talking a little bit about frustration. What would you say your greatest frustration is? Is it focus styles, or, what’s the frustration on web accessibility? Eric: I’m going to stick with focus styles because I recently spoke about it. That’s kind of like another big picture concern/learning phase you go through when dealing with accessibility is the web is more than just mice and trackpads and keyboards, and also accessibility is more than just making it work on a screenreader. The talk was kinda trying to demonstrate that and say there’s a reason that this property exists and its because browsers were made by some very smart people and its a specific acknowledgement that the web is more than just this and its silly to think of them as ugly because of your perceived aesthetic values. It’s a very practical and pragmatic thing that people use. Nic: How do you resolve the conflict between aesthetic values of developers or designers and the necessity to have accessibility built in? That seems to be something that comes into conflict reasonably often. Eric: Hmmm… It’s easy to get on your high-horse and say, oh, this is all in the service of utility but I usually frame it, like I’ll try to frame it in terms of “don’t you want everybody to use your product or your service?” It’s basically like saying, “No, I don’t want your money, no thank you”. Like, “I wish to not have the most money, or the most customers.” That’s… sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. (laughing) Nic: Do you that there’s something that everybody knows about web accessibility, conventional wisdom, if you want? Eric: I don’t think so. I’ve run into so many, well, not even so many, just of the people that I know I don’t think there’s been one common thread like I think since people are created stereotyping I think a lot of people go to a person in a wheelchair or a blind individual but I think that’s more the culture being kind of bad and not necessarily because they specifically researched it. Nic: Do you think maybe people with disabilities have dug themselves into a pit with this? Wheelchair users are very good at screaming when there’s no access into buildings and folks who are blind have been very vocal about the lack of accessibility for them on the web. Twenty years later when we are thinking web accessibility, we're thinking mostly about people who are blind, and when we're thinking building accessibility, mostly we're thinking about wheelchair access. But obviously as we've been talking about, there's much more to it than that. Eric: Now, these are voices that need to be heard and and these complaints are very valid. I don't even know if complaints is the right word. I think it's also in making yourself in volunteering your personal life and your time and your effort and resources to bringing these things to the public discussion, I think you are expanding the ability of somebody to become aware of those issues. For you especially, I appreciate you discussing some of these things on Twitter because I know you're sacrificing some of your privacy. Opening up the internet, and the world, to a little slice of your life. I appreciate it. I'm always very interested to learn things that I may not have known before. And then there's kind of a snowball effect on that. Nic: Thanks for that. Eric: Thank you. Nic: Can you think of one reason for which people fail to succeed at implementing accessibility? Eric: Deadlines... Nic: Deadlines? How so? Eric: The whole move fast and break things, thing. It's pretty pervasive in the current development culture. It's great for great for being first to market but it's also great wracking up technical debt. Part of that technical debt is accessibility. It compounds and compounds. My go to example is Snapchat. It's falling apart right now because its user-experience is completely incomprehensible (laughing) There's your cognitive concern right there. It fails at all the POUR criteria basically. And then Instagram came and ate their lunch because they label their buttons. That kind of thing. Nic: You're talking about deadlines and technical debt and all that. The one example which is for me very applicable right now is Guttenberg and WordPress. They basically said "look we're not actually going to an accessibility audit of Guttenberg because if we do that we will not be able to meet our release timeline". That just bewilders me. i don't understand this. Eric: It makes me very mad, honestly. Because isn't WordPress running 30% of sites on the internet? Nic: Yes Eric: That is one fact that is incredible. On top of that it did have this understanding in the industry as being a very comparatively... a more positive experience if you are using assistive technology to navigate and to kind of just... I don't want to say "snub your nose at it", because I know there's some very passionate people kind of helping to move it along. But the way they've been approaching it has left a really bad taste in my mouth. Again, kind of in episode 1 when we were saying "I don't want to bring down the hammer, but this all could have been fixed with planning and not just racing to get something arbitrary out of the door". Nic: And probably as well some buy-in from leadership. Because there's great people working on accessibility but they are hamstrung I think. Eric: Yeah. That quote of "do an audit and write a blog post about it" left a very bad taste in my mouth. It seems incredibly dismissive. As if this wasn't actual people being affected. It's more of a technical curiosity to be observed and then move on. Nic: Technical curiosity. I like that expression. Thank you. How do you avoid that kind of failure between deadlines and technical curiosity rather than... How do we avoid failure with that? Eric: I don't know. I mean... Shifting left is great. Making these concerns known earlier. But I think to your point, you need organizational buy-in. Because if it's not a priority, there will be this ripple effect of it not being... You model the behavior you wish to see. If you're not discussing accessibility, it will propagate to the project managers who won't throw it in the backlog, and won't add it to the acceptance criteria or write it into the QA test. I guess... You don't want to be in a position where you're just patching holes after holes. It's just unsustainable Nic: Yeah. Last episode you mentioned building relationships as a way to reduce client hostility towards accessibility. I think that this building relationship would be very appropriate here in terms of getting leadership buy-in. But at the same time there's sustainability issue that you mentioned. You can't spend all of your time building relationships with all the people out there. Eric: (laughing). There's only so many hours in the day. Nic: That's right. Eric: That's a really good point about sustainability. Because an audit is a snapshot. Websites are not static. I'm sure if you've done audits, you've been in the position where checking things.. You log in half an hour later and it's changed because somebody implemented a feature. It's a snapshot of a thing in time that isn't just reflective of the reality of what this thing is. I don't know. (laughing) It bugs me. Nic: Yeah.. What would you say the greatest challenge is for the field of accessibility moving forward? Eric: I think the atmosphere is better. The inclusive design movement is in vogue for now, and that's great. Empathy in design is a bit of a buzzword. I like that it's being considered and quantified. I think honestly the biggest concern I have is single page applications, and how they throw out a lot of what you get for free with other ways of building websites, for better or for worse. You know you can make them accessible, but there's this weird disconnect I feel between what the documentation says you can do versus what's actually done.I think developer education is a problem there where the market incentivises people who know buzzwords. And not necessarily what those buzzwords means and do. Nic: Yeah. I've recently looked at a single page application that had code that looked more or less like <a role="button" tabindex="0"> Eric: (laughing) Yep Nic: And I came back to it and I still couldn't believe what I was reading and I think this concept of you have a lot of easy accessibility wins when you're using semantic HTML the way it was intended to be used. Then you go and you start trying to reinvent the wheel with divs and ARIA and you never get quite there. you always have conflict somewhere. Eric: That's another kind of... They're related to a certain extent. Like the over-reliance on ARIA. It's sort of like compliance via shotgun blast. Like... I'm going to slap as much ARIA as I can onto this and hope it works. And then you get into these situations where you have... you know... You have your role shifted tabindexed button that does nothing (laughing) And I don't know what's happening here. I probably don't want to hear the answer Nic: I don't know what's happening either. And I wish we had the answers. Who inspires you Eric? Eric: Oh... Many people. Yourself. Cordelia, Heydon Pickering, Carie Fisher, Scott Vinkle, Scott O'Hara, (incomprehensible), I'm blanking more because I've been put on the spot. But I don't know. Twitter is a burning trash fire of a social media service, but I have my nice bubble of thoughtful people that I've made for myself. It's nice in this day and age that you can have these relationships that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to have had if you weren't physically near them or working with them. It's always nice to see them in person if we're at the same conference. Or even if we're just exchanging some tweets. Or reading stuff. Nic: If you were to not be a designer, what profession other than the one you're doing would you like to attempt? Eric: Ohh. That's a good one. Probably a sociologist. Nic: Sociologist? Eric: Yeah. So very poor. I love reading about just all the diversity and all the interesting things that people do and say. It's fascinating stuff and I can't get enough of it. Nic: What strikes me is that in many ways that ties in to design and making things work for people with disabilities. It's about diversity. It's about people. Eric: Yeah. Can I quote you on that? Nic: Absolutely! Eric: Great. Nic: You'll even have it on black on white when the transcript comes out. Eric: Yeah, just copy/paste! Nic: There you go. Please attribute, attribute, attribute. Eric: Of course. I don't know. Design is weird. because it feels like the industry went through a transformation about 5 or 6 years ago where it was "your job is to make pretty things in Photoshop" and then kinda switched into "your job is to be armchair psychologists, and also make pretty things". It's been a very interesting career. I'm pretty lucky to have been able to have been in it for as long as I have. Nic: I hope you keep doing what you're doing because you are making an impact. I routinely forget that I know something, do a Google and "oh, there's an article by Eric Bailey on CSS Tricks", and I think "oh yeah, I knew that" Eric: (laughing) Nic: It's good to have that out there. Eric: I would say if anybody who's listening is interested, yourself as well, Chris Koyer is a great person, very friendly. Writing for him is a lot of fun. If that's something you're interested in, like... I was terrified the first article I submitted because I grew up reading it and like…

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E62 – Interview with Eric Bailey – Part 1 Oct 29, 2018

Show notes

Eric tells us, among other things, that relationship building is a good way to get passed the hostility some people have towards accessibility. Transcript Nic: Welcome to the A11y Rules Podcast. You're listening to episode 62. 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. Nic: This week, I'm speaking to Eric Bailey. Thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility, Eric. How are ya? Eric: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Nic: Thank you. Hey, as you've been listening to the show, you know by now that I like to let guests introduce themselves. So, in a brief intro, who's Eric Bailey? Eric: Yeah, wow. You think I would have prepared for that. So, I'm a designer, working at a agency called Thoughtbot in Boston, Massachusetts. I write articles for mostly CSS-Tricks and Smashing Magazine now, a couple other places on semantics and accessibility and usability and kind of the intersection of all three and the muddy space that is all those things converging. Nic: Yeah. That sounds like it keeps you busy and out of mischief for most of your waking time. Eric: Yeah, yeah. I ... My partner is currently in grad school, so I've had some time to kind of, you know, fritter away with writing and sitting on the couch and watching too much Netflix. Nic: Yeah, yeah. Hey, to get warmed up, tell me something that, one thing that most people would not know about you. Eric: Oh, sure. So, I spent a year doing disaster relief in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, through- Nic: Oh, wow. Eric: Yeah. It was through a program called the AmeriCorps, which is a domestic Peace Corps. And so, I lived out of tents for a year, and yeah, it was an incredible experience. Nic: That would have been a difficult time I would think, but also quite enriching and rewarding. Wouldn't it? Eric: Yeah, yeah. I think you said that very well. It was very intense, but made a lot of ... Met a lot of incredible people. Made a lot of incredible friends. Definitely felt all the feelings. So, yeah, but I'm very happy to have been able to have done it. Nic: How has that impacted on your experience as a developer? Eric: Sure. I like things that work, and I like things that are robust and like, probably not the best term, but like battle tested. You know, the web, if you do it wrong, is a very flimsy medium, and it's also one of the most actively hostile development environments you will ever work with. So, because of that, I like things that will hold up under stress or duress- Nic: Yeah. Eric: ... or less than optimal situations. Nic: So, obviously the main topic of the show is web accessibility, and every people I speak with, speak to, seems to have a slightly different definition of accessibility. So, how would you define that? Eric: Sure. I think accessibility is good design, and good design is accessible. And I know that's kind of like a tautology, but it's ... It kind of gets into the whole inclusive design mindset, where you should be proactively considering these things, as opposed to fixing them in post. So, it's, you know, in my mind it's a holistic practice, that kind of affects every aspect of what we do as app and web makers. I don't know. It's strange to me to kind of like keep it in this little box off to the side. Nic: Why do you think we keep it in a box off to the side? Eric: Yeah. Education. It's, you know ... So, if you're learning about web design and web development ... I'm gonna keep using this as a go-to example because it's what I like to do, but it affects all of digital design. You know, if you go to a traditional CS (Computer Science) school, there are so many different little things to focus on that you can kind of go down this rabbit hole on learning about. In a traditional CS education, for most places, accessibility is not a priority. And this is kind of a pet issue that I don't know what to do about because, you know, if you go to an engineering school, you definitely learn how to make a building not collapse, or how to work with the capabilities of the materials that you'll be using. Same for architecture. You know, I think there's a lot of comparisons you can make between building things and building websites. Nic: Yeah. Eric: So, it just, it bothers me because we've effectively taken one of the stools, one of the legs off the stool and kind of just thrown it away. And because of that, I think there's far less chances of people kind of uncovering accessibility in a positive way. And then, you know, learning the ins and outs of how to do it. Usually, a lot of people I talk to become aware of it after a lawsuit has happened or the threat of a lawsuit, and that can really kind of skew your perception as a developer. You may be a decent person. I think most people are generally good people, but if you come into it from a sense of punitive, it can really color your experience. Nic: Yeah. I've been struggling with that, you know, making accessibility, not just positive but fun, and flip it away from, you know, if you don't make it accessible, you'll get slapped with a lawsuit. But at the same time, it seems that it's the only thing that actually get a reaction from people. Eric: Yeah. Nic: How do we get that, resolve that, you know, dichotomy between on one hand we want to have people come to it in a positive way, but on the other hand, the only thing that actually seems to make a difference is a lawsuit or the threat of a lawsuit. Eric: Yeah. I wish I had the answer. Yeah. I've talked about this with others, and you know, there is a pragmatic element to it. There is definitely the kumbaya inclusion, you know. I don't mean to sound dismissive here, but there comes a time where it is time to bring down the hammer. And that is because, you know, by definition of the practice, you are, you know, you're removing people's ability to accomplish things. And as the world gets more digital, it becomes so much more important with every passing day. And so, you know, I don't think we should remove the possibility of a threat, I just, I wish ... You know, I wish it ... I guess not even wish, it's just like being cognizant of the nuclear option and kind of what you can do before it gets to that. You know, like Lainey Feingold's Structured Negotiation is a really interesting thing to read about, and I'm not going to paraphrase that 'cause I will butcher it. Nic: Yeah. I like Lainey. I like her approach. I think it's very effective. Yeah. So, Eric, let's get back to you for a second. You define yourself as a designer, doing a lot of UI/UX work. Day to day, what does that look like from an accessibility perspective? How do you implement that? Eric: Yeah, that's a great question. So, we recently, on our internal Slack, had a conversation. There was a coworker who was very interested in coming to be more proficient in accessibility, and she kind of had the same question, like how do you do it? And to be completely honest, I normally will sneak it in, which is to say like most other coding and design practices, I'm not explicitly telling the client that I'm doing it because that's just part of the skillset. So, the client says, "Make me a website about dogs." I don't bore them to death with the details of, you know, my eight-point design grid and sketch and my modular component library. I just do it, and hopefully I solve the problem that needs solving. Eric: And so, when it comes time to practice accessibility there, so like making sure that that component library has, you know, good color contrast baked in. You know, making sure that the copy writing is at a decent reading level. If it comes time to take it to development, starting with good semantic markup. But, you know, it's ... Sneaking is kind of the bad way to say it 'cause it has this negative connotation, but it's just I make it, I try to make it a non-issue, just 'cause it just ... That's what you get when you get my service. Nic: Yeah. See, I like that because I often get asked, particularly at conferences, you know, "How do you ... How do you, as a design studio get clients to pay for accessibility?" And I said, "Well, you don't charge them. It's just ... It should be rolled into the service because, you know, you don't charge clients extra for a secure website." Well, I hope you wouldn't. You wouldn't be charging people extra for accessibility either. It should be part and parcel of that, and I think this stealth accessibility is perhaps an important way to do it for people that have clients or people that are in roles where they are part of a larger team that actually works on websites. They should just do it. Because, as you said, it should be part of your skill set. Eric: Yeah, yeah. I'm actually optimistic. Net ... I, you know, when interviewing potential candidates and like ... I design systems a lot, and I like to read other people's design systems 'cause I'm a giant nerd, but I see more and more kind of mentioning of these kinds of things, and, you know, it's one of those ... There's always going to be room for improvement, and there's always going to be little gotchas and ahas to be cognizant of. But I'm not seeing it more and more listed as an interest or concern on resumes or in design systems or in rating guidelines and stuff like that. And maybe that's 'cause I've self-selected my own little filter bubble, but I, you know, aside from some specific technology concerns, it does seem like accessibility is finally getting a seat at the table. Nic: Yeah, well I hope you're right. I really hope you're right. So, how did you become aware of web accessibility and its importance? Eric: Sure. Nic: What was a trigger for you to say, "Aha, this is important."? Eric: Yeah, so this is kind of a, this is ... If you don't mind me kind of monologuing for a bit. Nic: Go for it. Eric: Yeah, I ... There was a couple ... There was a lot of kind of conspiring things, but I don't think there was one, single event. It seems kind of on the long arm of my career I've been pushed towards this. My mother was an occupational therapist, so I would always kind of help her demo out her assistive tech, and you know, we'd talk about her job. So, I was kind of made aware of some of these concerns at an early age. I was a big nerd, so I really liked learning how to write html, and with that kind of came learning about semantics, which is a lost art, unfortunately. Eric: And then, I had a job at a nonprofit, and it was a wonderful organization that helped compile health and human services information. And part of that required making html kind of documents to deliver for findings, and that required Section 508 compliance. And through Section 508, I learned about the WCAG, WCAG or however you want to pronounce it, and it was like, "Oh, okay. So, it turns out that there are rules for making really good design then." You know, by my definition of design that anybody can use, as opposed to something that's like looks pretty. Nic: Yeah. Eric: So, I was like, "Okay, this is really interesting, so what else can I learn about it?" And you know, it kind of snowballed from there, but the thing that I always get when I get asked this question that really kind of honestly irritates me is that like to be interested in this, I must have some sort of disability condition or some sort of traumatic event that like is your super hero moment of being forged in the fires of awareness. But, you know, I'm ... I have glasses, and I get migraines, and I suffer from some depression. But, you know, I'm relatively able-bodied and fortunate for that, and I think it's just being a decent person kind of to just be interested in this stuff. Nic: Yeah. I have noticed that a lot of people that are interested in accessibility have other first-hand experience of disability, or have close, personal family or friends with disabilities. But, I'm always really glad to hear when people that don't have this really close tie actually have an interest in and believe in the importance of accessibility. Eric: Yes, well that's very reassuring to hear. Thank you. Nic: So, I'm glad to hear that you come from that- Eric: Cause another thing that I worry about is representation and while I personally enjoy writing about this stuff and kind of, you know, being active- Nic: Are you there? Eric: ... on social networks and tweeting and all that, I want to make sure that I'm not speaking for people and making sure that representation is equitable. Nic: What is [crosstalk 00:16:21]. Eric: So, it's something that really always kind of bothers me, or just kind of sticks in the back of my mind. Nic: How people with disabilities are often the impetus on making designers and developers interested in accessibility. And I was saying that I was glad you came to it without having that first-hand experience because we need more people that are interested in accessibility that don't necessarily come to it from a first-hand experience. Eric: Yeah, and ... Yeah, that's really good to hear because one thing I do kind of worry about or am concerned about is in writing these things and saying these things, making sure that I'm not co-opting representation and I'm also speaking from ... You know, if I'm speaking from an authoritative place, making sure that it is well and true and, you know, not stealing the spotlight from somebody else, who could be sharing their experiences. Nic: A long time ago, when I was doing more direct disability rights stuff, I went to a conference, the National Council on Independent Living Conference, and there were a lot of people with disabilities that just would not interact with people that were able-bodied or at least looked able-bodied, because you can't always tell someone has a disability just by looking. And I was annoyed at the dismissal of allies of people with disabilities just because they don't have a disability. I remain firm that, you know, I believe in this nothing about us without us, so people with disabilities need to be involved in web accessibility, but we also need all the allies we can get. And, you know, having read lots of your articles, especially on CSS-Tricks, I think your approach is really dynamite, so please keep doing what you've been doing. Eric: Thank you very much, yeah. I ... That's really nice to hear. Wow. Yeah. That's kind of the other, like my other, I guess, master plan, like I'm some superhero or something, is getting the conversation out of traditional accessibility channels if I can. Nic: Yeah. Eric: And, you know, I get some ... I've spoken with some people where it's like, "Oh, you should own your content. Make sure it's on your site. Make sure you're, you know, you have complete and total authority over things that you do." And I completely agree for many things, but you know, it's kind of secretly my hope that for each one of these things I kind of put out there into the ether, maybe there's that moment for somebody else where they just kind of stumble across it. Nic: Yeah. Eric: You know, that's a little vain, but I gotta have something. Nic: Yeah, yeah. Hey, you've been doing this for what, about 10 years, more or less, 15 years? Eric: Yeah, 10. I ... I'm old. Nic: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we…

Full show notes at the publisher

E61 – Interview with Alex Brenon Oct 18, 2018

Show notes

Alex is a developer who has experienced the difference between baking in accessibility from the start compared to trying to retrofit accessibility into an existing project - which leads to a lot of trial and error and wasted time. 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 61. 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 Alex Brenon. Thanks for joining me to this conversation around web accessibility Alex. How are you? Alex: I’m good, how are you? Nic: I’m doing very good. Ah, look Alex. I like to let guests introduce themselves so in a brief elevator style introduction. Who's Alex Brenon? Alex: Okay. Yeah, so I’m a relatively recent graduate of Smith College. And since then I’ve been working in blended learning and digital humanities. Which is basically just the intersection between technology and learning and teaching and research. And last year I was given some time and resources to explore whatever facets of technology or career development I was interested in and I chose accessibility and that’s how I got started. Nic: Right. How did you come to pick accessibility? What was the impetus on selecting that particular topic? Alex: I think I’ve always been interested in accessibility. I’m also interested in education and through that making knowledge accessible. In more in the sense of open access so it had been something that I didn’t know anything really at all about but had always kind of thought about. Nic: Right. So how do you weave that into your job day in, day out? What … how do you implement accessibility? What’s your tasks with that? Alex: Well, it’s really interesting for me because last year I was designing new parts of a Drupal website and got to kind of just bake accessibility into that. Whereas this year I am also designing a new Wordpress site but also working with existing ones and so this year it’s much more about trying to figure out how to get accessibility retrofitted or see how we can change things to kind of focus on that. Nic: How do you go about that retrofitting accessibility into an existing site? Alex: It definitely helps that I have done development from scratch before and I’m given all the leeway I want to kind of run with it. But basically, it’s just a lot of trial and error. Honestly just trying to see how to change things that won’t break everything else… Nic: Yeah Alex: ...but make certain parts more accessible. Nic: So you say you’ve been given leeway… how is leadership in the organization you work at supporting you in… specifically giving you leeway? You know, are they saying, “Just go to it” or are they giving specific supports or… What kind of shape and color does that take in your specific job? Alex: So, my department is just my supervisor and I. Nic: Okay Alex: But he’s very supportive of both giving me time and being very open to when I say “we can’t really move forward with this because it’s not going to be accessible” and saying alright,” let’s step back. How can we make this better? “. So, he’s showing.. My supervisor is showing that he’s also committed and interested in making things accessible. Nic: Alex, tell me something that most people would not know about you. Alex: Hmmm… I guess I have done a lot of acting in musicals. Both throughout all of Highschool and then into College. So that's been a pretty big part of my life. Like, outside of work. Nic: Cool. Do you see some similarities between doing musicals and working in development and specifically working with accessibility? Alex: Um… I will say learning to think on my feet has kind of been something that’s come from all sides of my experience. Both development and acting. And so that’s kind of feed off each other of trying to work little pieces of things into different ways and make them better. Nic: Yeah. Yeah, I think it all ties in at some point to… to be able to… you know, pick experiences in one area and apply them to others. So, you say you are a recent graduate you've been diving into accessibility for about a year. What kind of barriers are you finding on your way to learn more about accessibility and develop your skills and develop your skills and make sure things are more accessible on the web? Are you finding barriers? Or…? Alex: Overall I've actually had a relatively easy time I would say, compared to... I think, some other peoples experiences. Partially because at my… at the job I was working at last year, we were in the process of finding a new accessibility guide, I guess, for people who worked both in my department and beyond and so I got to take… try out a lot of different courses. Nic: Right Alex: So, that worked out really great because I... at that point I knew quite a bit about accessibility but those courses allowed me to really… kind of, delve deeper. But outside of that, I’d say the only main barrier is it’s...there’s not a tonne of things for people who aren’t developers. So, I am but some of the things I’m working with are much more design-oriented when I look toward accessibility it’s things in design, sometimes, less than development. And so when I ‘m looking at those there’s not always as much on the devel… on the design side. Nic: What resources would you like to see on the web specifically towards design? You know, what kind of issues have you come across that you can't find the answers about? Alex: Well, one thing I really like is there's a couple of accessibility pattern libraries and I think making more of those or actually just adding more documentation is...would be very helpful and just kind of documentation in general aimed at beginners that’s not behind some kind of paywall but your organization has to give you access to. Nic: Yeah. Those pattern libraries are quite fantastic and, yeah, we probably… we as a community should look at growing those. So you’ve been on this journey for about a year… a year and a half more or less. What was the biggest surprise you had when you learned more about accessibility? Alex: I think… I guess there’ve kind of been a couple of things and one is… I guess is… it’s interesting to remember how many people need accessible technologies because that… certain parts of that haven’t been part of my experience or part of the experience of people who I ‘m close friends with. And so being exposed to user stories has been fantastic. And helps me remember why I’m doing... Like why I’m fighting for these things. But also I would just say the fact that making things more accessible makes it easier for everyone. Which I knew definitely in content and I had kind of worked a little bit with that since College but really implementing that and seeing how incredible much easier accessible websites are to access for everyone else as well as just general accessibility things. Nic: Yeah, I think that’s… that’s an aspect a lot of people don’t really think about until they start thinking about it. Is that accessibility does benefit everyone and it… I think it’s a selling feature of accessibility that, you know when you’re trying to convince leadership… obviously, you don’t have that issue in your current employment but often when we’re trying to sell accessibility, finding this “It benefits everyone” seems to have a great impact. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to say, “Hey, you know what… there’s maybe 20% maybe 25% of people with disabilities out there that really need this” and it’s amusing that leadership will worry about that 3% of people that are using IE11 still but they’re not worried about the 20% of people that can't get to the site because they have a disability. So… yeah. Alex: Oh I know, when I was developing last year we were going back to IE9 for some things to make sure that everything worked. Nic: Yeah Alex: So, yeah definitely… I guess, allowances are made for a lot of different things but not always accessibility. Nic: You’re a new kid on the block so your perspective is fresh… What do you think the biggest problem the field of accessibility has right now? Alex: I think… I would say probably buy-in from upper levels. I think it’s still being seen as… like you said, just this really small amount of people who… why does it matter? But I hope that that will start changing and I think that as it becomes easier to make things accessible that will change a little bit so it’s not… you’re not asking for, you know, a huge part of the project to go towards… specifically accessibility it’s just making everything in general accessible. Nic: Yeah. Build it as, you know, it’s not an afterthought. It’s part and parcel of what you do. Alex: Exactly. Nic: Is that where you’d like the field of accessibility to be in five years? Or in ten years? Or is there something else that you’re having hopes for, for our field? Alex: I would really just hope that it becomes more mainstream. And that people who are even outside of tech are aware of accessibility and in their daily lives kind of can notice when things are accessible because it’s… if we as a society can get there then life would be much easier for… well, everyone. Nic: Yeah, yeah...yeah. Hey Alex, I know you have not been doing this for very long but is there something you’ve achieved accessibility related that makes you really proud? Alex: I would say… I can’t think of anything specific but I am proud of the fact that although this is relatively new to me I’ve been really pushing hard to make sure that things we are making are accessible. And I’m definitely reminded of it now when I’m retrofitting that I am very glad that when we were designing the first site that it was… I was kind of baking that in as it started as opposed to making someone come by a couple of years later and realize they have to change things. Nic: Yeah. So, you mentioned earlier you’ve been using Drupal and now you’re working with some Wordpress sites… What’s your experience with making these two platform.. Sites on these two platforms accessible? Are you finding one is better than the other? Or they’re pretty much equal with different idiosyncracies or … tell us a little bit more about that experience. Alex: I would definitely… I think it’s a bit hard for me to compare them since I have only been doing Wordpress for a relatively short amount of time compared to Drupal. But overall I would say they’re… they each have their own idiosyncrasies. In my basic searches, I found Drupal themes are more likely to have accessibility-ready features whereas Wordpress there's just less options which has just been this past week I’ve been searching for themes for our new site. And a lot of Wordpress themes, if they're not tagged with accessibility-ready they often just haven’t thought about it at all. Nic: Yeah Alex: Which kind of makes it harder to start with. So yeah, both of them… they’re both heading in better directions, for sure. And… Nic: What’s the one thing you’d like people to remember about accessibility? Alex: I guess hoe relatively easy it is to make some really small changes that make everything better. So there are some really basic accessibility things that when you change them the overall user experience is so much better and it’s not just… it’s not some huge thing that it’s all or nothing. Your site is either completely accessible or it’s not at all but making those little changes is how you get started to making it better, Nic: Yeah, I like that. Give us a couple of examples of small changes that developers can implement, like, today to make it accessible. Alex: So a couple of things are just like, adding skip links so in your navigation you're going to be able to get around better. Also… so, my top two pet peeves are... One: links that only say click here or something similar because that’s just really unhelpful. So adding more link text so saying something about “read more about our programmes” or something like that. And then also images that don’t have alt text are really… it’s so easy to just add some type of alt text and you can really get great alt text going and that’s when things really kick up to the next level of accessibility. But just adding some type of alt text to let users know what they.. What they would be… what’s going on and that page which also benefits if people are using, lets, say outdated Internet Explorer or a device that has really low internet capabilities then they will also be able to learn about the image that is appearing there if you have the alt text. Nic: Yeah. Yeah, I think these are great examples. I’d also like to refine the idea of alt text that it’s super important for informative images but perhaps decorative images are better served with empty alt attribute I think. Alex: Yeah. Well, that and also right giving it an empty alt text will help if the rest of the site is correctly described then it’s obvious those images are not giving any meaning. Nic: Yeah context is everything. Alex, thank you for your time Thanks for being a willing participant of the accessibility rules podcast and I… I really wish you well in your journey into accessibility because you sound like you have passion and it’s great. Maybe you’ll get to a point where… you know, you’re the new guard coming behind us. So thank you for that. Alex: Thank you. 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 and a quick reminder, you can get yourselves some neat accessibility rules branded swag at https://a11y.store Catch you next time!

E60 – Interview with Adrienne McDonnell Oct 05, 2018

Show notes

Adrienne McDonnell is a front end developer at Elsevier. She says that knowing how to navigate a site with the keyboard is a fundational skill that all developers should know. She also reflects on the fact that all the accessibility specifications are very dense and can be overwhelming for people new to 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. You’re listening to episode 60. 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. Nic: So today I’m speaking with Adrienne McDonnell and I think she’s quite new to the field of accessibility so it’s exciting to have the perspective of someone who hasn’t been doing this for quite a long time. Adrienne thanks for joining us. Adrienne: Yeah, absolutely. Nic: Right. I like to let guests introduce themselves. So, can you tell us in a brief introduction… who's, Adrienne McDonnell? Adrienne: Sure. Hi everyone, I’m Adrienne. I’m from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and I’m a self-taught developer right now I’m working as a software engineer at Elsevier. I started out with front-end design… or development, excuse me and that was… just about three years ago. So, I’m relatively new in my career as a developer as a whole. And started teaching myself about accessibility a year and a half ago. Nic: Right. Okay, so to get warmed up a little bit tell us something that most people would not know about you. Adrienne: Let's see… well outside of web development I also am an artist so I… right now I’m focussing on tapestry weaving and bead weaving. Nic: Tapestry and Bead… that’s amazing. I love fiber arts. I started playing a little bit with… needle felting of wool and obviously it’s not quite as fine work as tapestry but it’s quite a bit of fun. So you said you're working at Elsevier what kind of accessibility do you manage to put in your work there? Adrienne: Well, I… so I started this position just this past March, and I was brought on right after they had done an accessibility audit on the product that I work on. Nic: Okay. Adrienne: Which was great timing for me because I became the main developer that was working on fixing the defects that had been found within the audit. Nic: Right Adrienne: So that… that has been a focus of, you know, the last seven months or so that I’ve been working here and… which has been great for me to kind of become the accessibility advocate for our team and just, you know, also just to get a deeper learning for myself. Nic: Yeah. So… what put you onto accessibility? I mean was it just that you were in place and they had just finished an audit and they say, “Hey. Tag, you’re it” or did you have an interest in that before? How did it happen? Adrienne: Well, I… I did have an interest in it before. You know, in my first position as a front-end developer… I… I didn’t have… any knowledge of accessibility or developing for accessibility and as a self-taught developer it was not something that ever came up, you know, in kind of, guides to learning front-end development. And so when I got into that first position and realized that there was this whole very important piece of development that I didn’t know… I was kind of horrified that that wasn’t part of, you know, the foundational learning that people like me are getting when you’re teaching yourself. And, you know, often in the agency world accessibility requirements would come… you know that would be kind of tacked on to the end of a project and we would be scrambling to make sure that we hit, you know, all the right check marks. And it just… I mean I suppose for me it’s just, it was so clear how important this was. And frustrating that it wasn’t being given a higher priority and so that was kind of my initial spark to teach myself so that it could just become part of my normal workflow instead of something I was squeezing in at the end. Nic: I think that’s one of the issues that most of the self-taught developers encounter is the fact that most of the places that you go to learn coding… regardless of which language or flavor of a framework ... they just don’t talk about accessibility and they don’t have examples that have accessible code. Adrienne: Yes, exactly. Nic: What kind of barriers… yeah. What kind of barriers, apart from the fact the information wasn’t just there in what you were coming across… What kind of barriers did you find? What did you do to actually teach yourself accessibility considering that you hadn’t encountered it and now suddenly you were faced with fixing all these issues? Adrienne: I think that the… the biggest barrier for me… you know, when I was teaching myself front-end development there were so many resources and it was very easy to be guided on a path. And for accessibility, it didn’t feel that way. There were, you know, the actual specifications that I could go and see but they felt so dense. And, so specific that as a new learner it could very quickly feel overwhelming. And there wasn’t kind of a… “Here’s…” you know, “here’s a fun game of [hide? 06:53] way to learn about accessibility “or “Heres… here’s where to start” you know. Like, here's a nice, you know, a little bit that you can chew off. And get that down and then go from there. And so what I ended up doing, it was really just based on whatever product I was doing. You know, if there was a form involved then that's kind of what I focussed on. Or, you know, for every website we build we had some kind of main navigation that needed to be keyboard accessible so that became one of kind of the first components that I, you know, figured out that patterns for. So it really just started becoming this piecemeal as needed rather than “Here are the foundations and here’s how to build on them”. Nic: Right. From what I hear you’re thinking of accessibility as being something that must be in your toolbox and your set of skills as a developer. Just like you have to know HTML and Javascript. Have you found that your colleagues or other developers have that kind of understanding of accessibility or is it something that as someone who's brought into the importance of it did you have to fight a little bit and advocate about that? Adrienne: I… I mean, I'm happy to say that my team here really does recognize the value of it. And it has become a large priority within our sphere to, you know, get the audits done and continually make our products better. So that… that I’ve been very happy with. You know, if it were up to me I think we would all take some time off and do some training so that everyone's kind of on the same page… we have the same baseline of skills and knowledge about it. But that will probably not happen, but I’m… you know, I’m satisfied being the person who's always raising their hand and saying, “and accessibility “you know, [crosstalk 09:16] accessibility you have to think about those requirements. And, you know, we are always doing code reviews for each other so I hope that just through that I’m getting people to think about it more. Nic: Yeah being the squeaky wheel that keeps mentioning accessibility I think will um… is often the only way to remind people about the importance of making things work for people with disabilities. Adrienne: Yes Nic: What was the thing that most surprised you in learning about accessibility? You know, an item that you thought, “Oh! Well I never thought about that and that’s quite surprising” or maybe code or solution or the way people with disabilities work. Adrienne: I mean, I think… I think there were a lot of surprises just in that as someone who doesn’t use any assistive technology, I was just totally clueless about it. You know, I had never heard of a screen reader before starting to read about accessibility and… so I think part of the surprise for me was just… like ... not knowing and then as soon as I read about these types of assistive technology it was like, “Oh. Duh” this is… of course, this makes so much sense. Or even navigating with the keyboard. I mean it’s so simple. I mean, it’s so foundational and it makes so much sense but I just had never thought about it and I guess that was the biggest surprise and one of the biggest lessons for me right at the beginning. Nic: Right. Yeah, it’s often how sometimes the smallest things that are so important but you don’t really think about it until you start doing it. Like keyboard navigation, so… yeah… Adrienne: Yeah. And in a way… Nic: … What… Adrienne: ... you know, it’s great that giving other people those very foundational insights can be a huge shift in mindset. And so… that is exciting to me. Just kind of bringing that to my coworkers. You know, giving them a short… you know, showing them what a screen reader is like and what it actually sounds like to use one and how that would impact the way they’re developing. Nic: What is your colleague’s reaction when you show them how a screen reader work and how they should modify their code and their work? Adrienne: I think that it’s been excitement. You know, that… it’s… there are simple fixes and it just is a matter of being able to actually test what you’re doing so that you’re… you know, making sure that the changes you’re doing are actually having the result that you’re expecting. Nic: Yeah Adrienne: So I think that… yeah… giving people this knowledge, it’s generally exciting. Like these are all people who want to be doing… you know, creating the best product for the most people that they can. And they’re all people who love to learn new things so… Nic: Yeah. Adrienne: They’re the right audience. Nic: Yeah… yeah, that’s cool. Where would you like the field of accessibility going in the next five or ten years? Adrienne: I think… I mean, I think the biggest thing ... for me, given my past experiences, I would just love for it to be more mainstream. I would love for, you know, the front-end development foundational programmes… you know, if it’s Udacity or Treehouse or any of those, just to have accessibility as a part of what they’re teaching. That it would just be a requirement for being a confident, you know, web developer to have… you know, to be making accessible websites. I think that’s the biggest thing for me. Nic: Yeah. I would tend to agree with that but let me ask you the question I’ve been asking myself for a long time… How do we make that happen? How do we make accessibility mainstream so everybody gets to a point where it’s just part and parcel of their skillset? Adrienne: That is a big question. I, you know… I don’t know. I mean I mean I think that having people continue to write about it is huge. I know here in Philadelphia Mikey Ilagan who is also apart of, you know, the Slack group where you and I met, he did kind of a series of articles about accessibility through Technical Philly and I found that to be so powerful just to see the topic of accessibility over and over again over a month through this very popular newsletter and so I think that’s part of it. Just continuing to talk about it and kind of forcing the issue of like, this is… no, this is important and we all need to be thinking about it. As far as getting it, you know, on some of those larger platforms that is obviously a tougher one. It’s not quite as local but hopefully if we just...I don’t know. We tweeted them? Nic: Yeah Adrienne: I’m not sure, you know, exactly what would kind of move the needle there. Nic: Yeah. Hey Adrienne, if you were to leave people with one thing they should remember about accessibility what would it be? Adrienne: Hmm Nic: Yeah, the one thing Adrienne: The one thing...I think that whether or not you use assistive technology, it’s up to all of us to make accessible websites and products and that… yeah, we all have a responsibility to create the best products that we can. That the most people can use. Nic: Yeah. It is up to all of us. And it takes all of us to get there. Adrienne: Yeah. Nic: Yeah. Adrienne, thank you so much for your willingness to submit yourself to my questions. I had a lot of fun and you’re the first new accessibility developer I have on my podcast and I think it’s a fantastic perspective to be able to share that. So for about a year, I’ve spoken to people that have been doing this for ten, fifteen, twenty years and you get this perspective but I think it’s important to hear about the people that are going to replace us when we grow old and feeble and we retire, so thank you for that. Much appreciated. Adrienne: Well thank you so much. It was great talking to you. 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 and a quick reminder, you can get yourselves some neat accessibility rules branded swag at https://a11y.store Catch you next time!

2018 International Podcast Day Special Sep 30, 2018

Show notes

Transcript Nic: Welcome to the A11y Rules podcast. I'm Nic Steenhout and this is a special episode for the 2018 International podcast day. I normally talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. But today, I find it important to talk about podcast accessibility. There are a lot of podcasts out there. Some do a great job at providing accessibility and making sure that everyone can access their content. But most podcasts don't offer basic accessibility. While we celebrate podcasting, let's make sure we open our shows to as many people as possible. After all, what's the point of podcasting if we're cutting off a portion of our potential audience outright? Of course, this episode isn't a technical how-to make your podcast and podcast website accessible, but here are a few pointers: If you're podcasting, or thinking about podcasting, you really ought to consider the accessibility of your podcast - both the show itself, but also the website that supports your show. I'm really just giving a few ideas here, but you can get more information about it on the site podcast-accessibility.com. The primary means of making your podcast accessible is to provide transcripts for the show. Ok, so transcripts can be expensive. But they are also an important investment, and not just from the an accessibility perspective. There are a lot of advantages to providing transcripts. Transcripts obviously benefits people with disabilities that can't access the audio. First, transcripts are good for search engine optimization - They'll bring more people to your site through search engines. The NPR show "This American Life" transcribed their 500+ episodes and they saw a traffic increase of between 3% and 6%. That's not insignificant. Transcripts also benefit your colleagues who aren't in a position to listen to an entire show, or those who read faster than they can listen to the show, even if they speed it up to twice the speed. They're also good for people who aren't native speakers of your show's language. Having a transcript makes it easier to understand, and sometimes translate. And transcripts benefit you! You end up with a text version of your episodes, which you can index and search and refer to later on. The best way to provide a transcript is by displaying it, in text/HTML, right on the episode's page. Don't put it on a separate page. Don't load it as a PDF or other downloadable format. Make it easy for people, and search engines, to find the content and associate it with your episode. Do mention on the show that there are transcripts available. It does make a difference! I won't name which services to use for getting transcriptions done. But I can tell you that for quality human transcription, you can find services (for English) around US$1/minute of audio. If you're aiming at machine transcription, you can get as low as US$0.10/minute of audio, but the accuracy suffers greatly. Then again, as a deaf friend of mine once said "I'd rather a relatively inaccurate transcript than no transcript at all". As for your podcast's website, the more accessible it is, the more people are going to be able to access your show. The site for this podcast, at a11yrules.com, has been coded to meet WCAG 2.1 level AA. While it would be great if you aimed for that level of accessibility, you don't need to. Here are some points to consider when looking at your site's accessibility: 1 - Can you navigate through the entire site using only the keyboard? This involves not only being able to go from one interactive element to the next, but also being able to see the focus on these elements. 2 - Are all interactive elements (buttons and links, primarily) triggerable with they keyboard? 3 - Do all images have alt attributes? Decorative images need empty alt, and informative images need clear, concise and descriptive alt text. 4 - Do all your form fields have labels that are associated programmatically? This will allow screen readers to know what is the purpose of each field. 5 - Can you resize the text up to 200% and still be able to read the text without horizontal scroll or text being chopped up? 6 - Do you have enough contrast between your foreground and background colors? This will benefit people with low vision, but also anyone looking at your site from their mobile phone, particularly if they are outside in full sun! What do you think? Have you implemented accessibility on your podcast and podcast website? Did you find it difficult? What barriers did you encounter? What do you wish you'd known before you got started? Let me know! Do reach out to me if you need help with improving your podcast or website's accessibility.

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