A11y Rules Podcast

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E59 – Interview with John Tubbs Sep 27, 2018

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John Tubbs is an educator working for about thirty years in the area of high tech, digital education, online learning. He discusses accessibility and accomodations for students with disabilities - a topic we don't hear enough about. He points out that his team is working towards universal accessible documents that can later be customized, rather than wait students to request accommodations and then scramble to make it happen. 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 59. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS and video at Twilio.com. So today I’m speaking with John Tubbs. John, thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility. John: My pleasure. Nic: So, as you may know by now I like to let guests introduce themselves. So, in a brief intro, whose John Tubbs? John: Well, John Tubbs is an educator working for about thirty years in the area of high tech, digital education, online learning. It has a variety of names depending on what area you’re talking from but I did start pre-internet so I have some different insights than the people who are working more in today. I’m at the University of Illinois for the last twenty years. Working first in the agriculture school for fourteen years. Then I worked in central IT in the online learning unit there. And then for the last years, I’ve been in the Gies College of Business and where we have been a big focus on large MOOC programmes that lead into graduate degree programmes. And those two degree programmes are MBA programme and our MSA. Masters of Science and Accountancy. Nic: Right John: Both of those are collaborations with Coursera for part of the course and then the high engagement part, the high touch part is done on a different platform here on campus. Nic: Right. So that seems to be keeping you busy. Twenty years at the University of Illinois. Has there been a lot of change to how things are done? Obviously going from pre-internet, pre-high tech to today. What kind of massive changes have you seen? John: Well if we want to look specifically at, sort of, accessibility topics within that … in 1987 there was no such thing, really as software that was accessible, for the most part. Or was there an internet or any communication short of very crude BBS systems. Bulletin board systems. But going back there, there's a funny story. The first thing that exposed me to dealing with assistive technology. I was at a CESA office. That’s Cooperative Ed Service Agency and those are dotted all around Wisconsin where I was working at that point. And this dairy farmer came up and he was blind. And he came up and said, “I’m going to demonstrate today how I do my books”. And he was working on an Apple 2e running VisiCalc. The first spreadsheet to run on personal computers. And he had the orange speech synthesis card in that Apple 2e and he ran down his numbers for his dairy operation and he said, “Tell me what month you want to hear final statistics on and final sales on” and he let that orange speech synthesizer run and I could not and nor could anyone else in the room understand a darn thing it was saying. And yet with the tap of an arrow key, he landed exactly on November of 1986 and told us exactly what he sold that month. And my jaw was on the floor. I was amazed. And that stuck with me for the next thirty years or so, of, wow, there are things that we can do when it comes to accessibility. So I’ve carried that through all the way and as the ability to provide accessible content online has expanded, both the technical capabilities but also the needs. I’ve tried to follow suit as well as I could through the years. And that starts back in Illinois. I was one of the first people on campus to do a lot of streaming media. So, in the places where we could provide accessible video productions, live streaming or whatever. We did what we could. I was doing a lot of work early on with SMIL. Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. And that was sort of a hybrid of captioning, motion … time display of images along with an audio track. And so that provided us some options and I worked for a couple of sessions with John Gunderson here from our Illinois campus whose a... Nic: Oh yeah? John: … a disability rockstar. And he was, again, one of those people that kind of gave me a nudge saying, “Hey, you’ve got the right tools. Now take them further”. And so that’s... Was a big push. About nineteen years ago and then as of late, as we’ve grown into, really what I think of as a campus level YouTube using the [kelterer? 05:04] platform we’ve been working extensively on getting our captioning working and that. One of the shortfalls that we don’t like to see is that we don’t have description in there and that is a big part of what we do. And so that’s led me down the path of the last two years of pursuing audio description and more specifically extended audio description based on content we have to really deliver to these online graduate degree programmes. And things that have some, often rather technical diagrams and information. Nic: Yeah. I’d like to talk a little bit more about that but before going much into depth about the technical aspect. I’d love for you to tell us something that most people would not know about you. John: Something that most people would not know about me? Hmm. Well likely that would be that along with doing my work in education I’ve also been a professional bassist for more years than that even than education. I still play three or four times a month around the area. But that was part of the studio side that got me into all of this. Which is, I spent a lot of time making records and such in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. And that exposed me to the recording aspect of the … what we do with online media. And so that gave me, again, a different little insight into this. Anything else that’s unique… I love to ride bikes. I’ve got a kid who loves to Ballet dance. And I have a lovely wife who is an English Professor here on campus. Nic: That’s a … that’s a good rounded approach to life. Having good family. Having music and culture and then working in tech at University. So, John every people I speak to seems to have a variation on the definition of web accessibility. How would you define that? John: Since I work in an instructional environment the need to provide equal access to instruction materials is the crucial part. What am I going to be able to provide with my team with the platforms that we have to work within. Sometimes we don’t get to choose those platforms. What can we do to make the students success equal across the board for anybody abled or disabled? Where do we have to adapt? What do we have to adapt? Methods we have to use. The intersection of the technologies that may help or hinder. The development of these assistive technologies or alternative content. The interesting part about where I’ve been going in the past couple of years because I said I was in MOOCs. The Massive Open Online Courses, we have over half a million learners. In our MOOCs at Illinois right now through the Coursera platform. And because of that, we don’t have any idea who those learners are. We don’t know what they bring to the table for any assistive needs or any alternative format needs. So we have to provide things that are … I don’t want to say generic but I think the better term is truly universal design. We don’t have the ability or the knowledge of how to make a specific accommodation. And that makes it … there’s some difficulty to that but at the same time, we’ve sort of looked at that as an advantage because it forces us to make universal content that we know will work in as many places as possible. So, unlike, I guess what has been traditionally done in the higher education environment which is a student comes in with a letter of accommodation and we provide what we need to provide to make that student successful. Now we don’t get that letter of accommodation from, probably fifty thousand learners in our MOOC’s that have some sort of disability. So we have to rely upon good universal content as well as the good qualities of that learner to be able to consume that content. So they have to bring their own skills, their own needs, their own methods to the table. Nic: Yeah. That would be a challenge to ensure that but I think that’s probably, ultimately the only approach. It’s not sustainable to make arrangements for one student at a time when we’re starting to look at scaling to five hundred thousand users at large, that as you say, maybe fifty thousand have accessibility needs. I think developing a course that is universally accessible is probably a better answer. John: Well the thing that’s interesting about what we do… we talk about that fifty thousand learner audience that we’re likely having to serve, but at the same time we take that same learning materials back in and we use them in our undergraduate environments. Where we do have that known. One student in this particular class has a need. Well, if have universal content, when we do have to target the application of that content as we provide it… if we start from universal to really put it into that unique need is much easier than starting from scratch. So, we look as sort of an ability to go from a broad audience to a more narrow audience as quickly and as easily as possible. A perfect example was we have a course in marketing that just launched, we are in our fourth week of classes here for the regular semester for our on-campus undergraduate student’s and in week three, at the end of week three, we received a letter of accommodation about captioning. And so we are all of a sudden two and a half weeks at least behind the eight ball in terms of delivering caption videos and everything like that. This is a situation where it’s not coming … it’s not an adaptation of any of our MOOC programmes so we were starting from zero but we have the mechanisms in place that we can move very quickly and we had captions available within forty-eight hours for that student. Once we knew that we needed to have that. So, it’s nice to be prepared. It’s nice to have the universal documents sort of, you know, on the shelf that we can pull down and adapt but also like everybody else we have to have some ‘just in time’ strategies in place and that's one of the things we make sure we do have. Nic: Yeah. One of the things that I encountered when I was working in higher ed was that students with disabilities … some students with disabilities would come in and expect to have all the accommodations there before they even had to request it and that was a bit of a headache sometimes because if you don’t know that somebody needs something specific that is not really necessarily covered with universal accessibility, universal design of coursework it can be a bit of a problem. Do you find that by and large student’s expect to have things accessible for their own particular needs or are they generally pretty good at talking to you about saying, “Hey this is what I need how can we make it happen?”. John: Well the tricky part about that, of course, and how that actually legally things happen... the letter for accommodation from that individual student comes to our disability resource unit on campus. That then goes through the person whose advocating for that student on campus. That letter then goes to the instructor. Legally I can’t see that letter. So I have to work with that instructor to get them sort of translating the need from the student. Sometimes, now I will be honest, it sneaks through what specifically they have, what they need. We don’t necessarily know the students name but we get a lot of information which is extremely helpful. In a practical way. The reality is the instructor is not a disability person. He or She has no real knowledge or skills in this area. We hope to give them those knowledge and skills but we are the folks, with our team putting those things together. So the difference in terms of the student having that expectation of ‘it’s got to be for me, its got to be for me’ I have to say, and I can’t put any real qualitative data on this but over time in my twenty years here at Illinois, I’ve seen that change though. And I think a change probably for the practical pragmatic good. And that the students today, given the type of technology that they have with them. Their phones, their tablets, their whatever. Their assistive devices are not so darn specialised and unique anymore. You know? A tablet, a mobile phone, do so much that would've been a backpack full of specialised fancy touch boards, speech synthesizers, whatever it might've been. That would’ve been very unique. Very finicky and require very custom content built for them. Now universal design has a much better chance of meeting the student’s needs right out of the gate rather than a lot of adaptation. So that’s really powerful. I mean, I look back in… I was working in a K12 district in 1991 and I was the technology coordinator, computer coordinator, whatever they wanted to call me… sometimes I thought of myself as the digital janitor. But in doing all of that, I walked into a special ed classroom one day and the instructor is in there and she says, “I can’t get my speech synthesizer to work”. And it was, you know, a big touch board with a speech synthesizer attached to it so you could tap on something for communication. Well, this was a cryptic system to get set up on the back end. On an Apple 2gs at the time. So running off floppy discs, all of this. And hours of calls to support and stuff. And we would get it running and then it would fall apart again. It was such a fragile piece of technology. And now, you know, that would be a touch thing on an iPad and it would be an app you bought at the app store and it would be done. So, this is the great part of the evolution that I’ve personally seen. [unintelligible 15:49] let’s me rely upon more on the universally designed stuff rather than uniquely designed stuff. Nic: John, you strike me as someone who will do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do and provide access to students with disabilities because well, bottom line is they need access to education. What would you comment in terms of the impact in terms of the legalities on the legal requirement to accessibility as opposed to doing the right thing? John: Well doing the right thing is definitely what I like to think of as proactive. It’s building into the workflow, into your instructional materials build that you're just doing the right thing from the get-go. Right from the time that you get content from an instructor that it starts being tailored for a Mooc for a learning management system that's on your local campus. Is it for digital materials that are going to go out such as handouts and videos and all that kind of stuff. You start with those workflows right then. That’s the right thing. But when you do have a student who comes in and has very very specific needs and are strongly advocating for getting those needs met then you do get more into the concern of legal if we don’t hit those exact needs we do have some potential legal liability in that situation. And that requires, as it always has, a significant amount of attention to that one particular case. And I think we will always h…

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E58 – Interview with Jen Simmons – Part 2 Sep 20, 2018

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Jen says that many of the needs for accessibility aren't that hard to accommodate by developers and designers! I couldn't agree more. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. You’re listening to episode 58. 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. In this episode, I’m continuing my conversation with Jen Simmons. Last show was really awesome. I loved our conversation and talking about developers responsibility to educate themselves in accessibility and the concept of disabilities. If you haven’t listened to the show yet I Really recommend it because Jen really prompted thinking in a wonderful way. So, Jen, thank you and welcome back. So, Jen, we were talking about achievements and, lets flip that around. What’s your greatest frustration about accessibility? Jen: My greatest frustration about accessibility … It is the thing we were talking about last episode of sometimes the attitudes that developers can have. Where people just don’t care and they can put their own selfish-- I mean, I think it’s selfish-- put their own opinions or their own perspectives or their own idea about what’s needed ahead of what millions of people actually need. And I just don’t understand that. It makes me furious. Nic: Wow Jen: I think I actually lost a job over it once. And I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand how people can be so self-centred, so selfish to just not care. It is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And like you said, last episode, everybody at some point is going to die. Some people will die very quickly and with a lot of surprise. So those folks perhaps will never become disabled but like the rest of us. If anything you want to become old and you will slowly lose different kind-- your body will change. Things will change for you. Nic: How do we change that? I guess it’s difficult to have ideas about that when it’s so hard to fathom why people are so selfish. But, how do we change that? Jen: Yeah, I don’t know. I try to do it by simply showing people what they need to do to make their sites accessible. And working it into everything else I’m teaching. I’m teaching CSS Grid and I’m like, ‘Okay, here’s things you need to know about how to write semantic HTML as you’re using CSS Grid”. Because that’s how-- to me, that’s the way to approach a project. Like, “Oh, you want to sit down and figure out your layout. Well, first you have to have something to layout. Well, when you do that your markup is important. The way you do your markup is going to affect the ability that you have to do your layout. So let's look at the markup and consider what’s the best way to do the markup and while we’re doing that we are just going to naturally make accessible markup. I don’t add ARIA rules in those tutorials but I add all sorts of other kinds of things and consider what else is going on with the markup. But the also just think that in life will teach people. I think as all of us get older you get less arrogant and you become more wise and you meet a wider variety of people and you meet folks with disabilities and you work with them as colleagues and you realize, “Oh, shit”-- Oh sorry if I… Nic: You can say anything you want. Jen: I don’t know if I can say that on your Podcast but-- “Oh no!”. But … yeah. I shouldn’t have been doing-- I shouldn’t have been thinking that way. I didn’t realise I was, oh gosh I don’t want to be like a certain US politician right now and blowing off an entire community of people I care about. Nic: What do you think is the conventional wisdom about accessibility? the one thing that everybody knows about? Jen: I don’t know what-- I don’t know, I don’t know. But I think the things people-- I think when you ask that I-- instead my brain jumps to what are the [crosstalk]-- Nic: That’s fine Jen: -- misconceptions about accessibility. I think that people … yeah, I think people that-- I went to a meeting. I was asked to go and have a meeting in a very famous, very important central tech company that makes lots of software for people who are creative to use. And the team said, “Oh, we’re going to use this such and such Javascript framework” and I had-- I’d been learning about it at the time and I immediately thought- accessibility concerns. So I asked them, “What are you doing for accessibility?” Because I expected them to come back and say, “Oh we are doing this, we are using the such and such addon and we’re modifying it in this particular way” because this framework at the time was known for being atrocious for accessibility. So I said, “Well, what are you doing?”, you know? “What are you going to …”. I thought they were going to teach me something in that moment and instead, they said, “Blind people don’t use our software”. Nic: Yes. Jen: And I was just so dumbfounded I almost didn’t even know how to react. Because here I am in this professional situation, I can’t just jump up and strangle the guy. I have to actually be supportive and say something that’s useful to help nudge them. And I was just like … there’s so many things wrong with that statement. First of all, accessibility is not only about people who are completely blind-- Nic: Yeah Jen: It is partly about that but it’s also about people who are partially sighted and partially blind. It’s also about people who are-- Nic: Yeah Jen: --who have a wide variety of different kinds of needs. And second of all, I bet you there are people who are 100% blind who would use your software if it were accessible. Nic: Yeah Jen: Your assumption that your product line is something that people who are blind would not be interested in is completely wrong. Nic: Yeah Jen: And of course they weren’t-- these were not people who were making business decisions or strategic decisions about the future of the company or the target markets or where they were going ...these were developers who made a decision to just blow it off and not care. Nic: Yeah Jen: And I-- So, one of the misconceptions … I think the misconceptions are not quite understanding how-- what it means to talk about people with disabilities. I mean, all the kinds of variations of disabilities that people might have. Or all the variations of needs that people might have. Or how a lot of the needs a developer or designer can accommodate are not that hard to accommodate. There are some simple things that can be done to make sites usable by far bigger groups of people. I also think that people think that people with disabilities just aren’t important, they don’t care. There’s like, this tiny market. There’s this old idea that there are people who are severely disabled and they're off in some home in the corner and not part of society and there’s hardly any of them and who cares and they’re not online because they’re not that bright ... and it’s just like the most horrible, stereotypical stupid idea of what it means to be a person with a disability. And I don’t know. I guess people need more … they just need a chance to grow up and live a life in a bigger world where there are plenty of people with disabilities running around having all sorts of awesome careers, contributing just like everybody else in society. Like that old idea is some nightmare out of the 60’s or something. Nic: Yeah Jen: And creating software that doesn’t work makes it worse. And I think anybody that makes a product and puts it out in the public has a moral obligation to do a good job with that. In all sorts of different ways. Nic: I think doing a ... yeah, doing a good job. Making it work for everyone is important and I wish accessibility became part of the definition of done. In a lot more projects. Jen: Yeah. There are people so obsessed with Internet Explorer it’s like there are way more people who have some kind of mild to moderate need that you’re not meeting when it comes to making it work for a person with a disability-- Nic: Yeah Jen: Than there are people using Internet Explorer. Nic: Yeah, how many people use Internet Explorer is less than a percent, right? Jen: Well there’s millions of people using Internet Explorer. It’s not like that’s not something to be considered, Definitely, it does need to be considered but there are more people with disabilities than there are people using Internet Explorer, so, like, are we talking about money? Are we talking about numbers? Every metric that might make you worry about Internet Explorer should make you worry about people with disabilities. At least two or three times as much. Nic: Yeah. What do you think is the number one reason most people fail to succeed with implementing accessibility? Jen: I think it’s ignorance and knowing how to. And I have to say this is a thing where actually I sometimes get really frustrated with folks in the disability community who are advocating for the web. Or maybe I should say in the web accessibility community because I do think that there’s-- like, I’ve been to meetings, I went to TPAC which is the … so there's this working group that defines new CSS and there's an HTML working group and there’s other working groups and TPAC is kind of the working conference where all the working groups get together. Who invent all the new web stuff. And there's a … I don’t know the name of it. I want to say a disability working group but that’s probably not the name of it. There’s like a accessibility working group? Or … Nic: Well, there’s several working groups. There’s mostly the people working on WCAG and ARIA as the WAI people. Web Accessibility Initiative. There’s several working groups. Jen: Yeah, And so there was a group of folks that came over from the accessibility working groups to the CSS working group to kind of talk to us because of course, new CSS needs to be accessible. And one of the things that was frustrating was it was almost like the folks in the disa-- accessibility working groups were … it’s almost like they thought that the number one problem. Like the number one hindrance to things being accessible is desire to make them accessible. So that the solution that was needed was to educate the CSS working group on the importance of accessibility. And, that was very frustrating to me because I was-- it was almost insulting. It’s like this we care and we are experts on this. And there’s a complexity here we can talk about and you could help us and we could all get together and we could figure out this complexity together. But you’re not even willing to have a complicated conversation because you’re so convinced that the basic conversation is the conversation that’s needed. And that was frustrating to me. So I definitely, and you and I have talked about it in this podcast … there are definitely people who don’t care, who aren’t motivated, who are ignorant, who are bias, who are prejudiced. Just straight up horrible thinking. They’re stuck in a horrible way of thinking. But, there are many, many, many, many people who care very, very deeply. And perhaps very personally. It may be very personal to them, or maybe it isn’t personal to them but they still care … who just don’t know how to make a website accessible. Nic: Yeah Jen: And it’s not a simple thing and it’s not an on, off thing. It’s not like one thing that needs to be done. There are hundreds and hundreds of things that can be done. And you don’t have to do them all. You could just do one, or you could just do 12, or you could just do 100 and that’s going to help tremendously. But of course there are many, many, many other’s, I don’t know if accessibility is ever finished. I’m not sure that a site … Is any site ever finished? Nic: No Jen: Does any site ever have no bugs? Nic: No Jen: So, It’s making it accessible or inclusive for as many people as possible is part of that. Where you kind of never get really as far as you want to. You never really get it “right”. You can only just make it better. But they’re huge wins right off the bat. Any technical project there’s huge technical wins right off the bat so if your HTML is working and your Javascript doesn’t have a bug and your Javascript doesn’t block the downloading of the HTML then you have a web page. There’s a series of things that make a website run and so there’s a series of things that can make a website accessible. And I think that there is-- I think that we need more information in the world. I think we need more teaching in the world about the things that could be done. Nic: Yeah Jen: I think a lot of web developers have never heard of WCAG, I think there’s lots of people that don’t realise right off the bat how much-- how far that we get down the road of being accessible if they could just use a button or a link instead of a span and use a semantic HTML and … I don’t know. Think about source order and, oh, you’re 80% there already, you haven’t even done anything special and you’re already 80%. So, that's what I-- It’s like--it’s just information, information. And I wish that more folks in the accessibility communities would write that information. Especially some of the stuff that is more masterful, it is more complex, that is in-depth debates or information about how to use ARIA rules and why and when. In-depth information about the experience of using a screen reader. In-depth information about how to get tabbing working on a out of the box computer so that you can test, everybody can test tabbing on their own computer. Nic: Playing devil's advocate I think that many people in the disability community and in the web accessibility community would say that all that information is out there. But I think that the problem is it’s all fragmented. It’s a little bit here a little bit there and finding that information is difficult. Jen: Yeah, and I now work pretty much full time as a teacher and I could say, “All of the information about CSS Grid is out there, all you need is just to read the spec, but if I really want people to understand CSS Grid then there’s a whole art to-- Nic: Yeah Jen: --breaking it down and explaining it bit by bit and knowing how hard it is to take time in a day to learn something. And me being away to say, “Okay I can-- I’m going-- I know what you’re struggling with most. I’m going to start there and fix that for you by teaching you this one thing. I’m going to take all this complexity and I’m going to make it as simple as possible and give that to you”. And I’m not saying that people with disabilities have the job of teaching the world how to make accessible websites. I do not believe that. It’s more like people who want to teach accessibility … well, there’s a lot that could be done-- Nic: Yeah Jen: --to teach it. Because there’s-- I don’t know if the quality of the teaching is as high as the quality of the teaching around. CSS for example. Nic: Do you think that’s the greatest challenge for the field of accessibility going forward? Or is there something else that we’re facing that maybe we don’t know about? Jen: I don’t know what the greatest challenge is going forward. I mean, yeah, teaching people things so that they-- it becomes easier and easier is one. I think there is this battle happening right now on the web where there's a group of people that see the web the way that we’ve been seeing it for many years which is, you deliver an HTML page and maybe it’s got CSS and maybe some Javascript and it runs in a browser and it can do all kinds of th…

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E57 – Interview with Jen Simmons – Part 1 Sep 13, 2018

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I love what Jen had to say about accessibility! She said, among other things: "accessibility is about the recognition that every human isn’t identical to every other human." 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 57. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS and video at Twilio.com. This week I’m speaking to Jen Simmons. Hey, thanks for joining me join. See, I fluffed that up. I will start again. Alright, so, this week I’m speaking to Jen Simmons. Thanks for joining me for this conversation around Web Accessibility, Jen. Jen: Hello. Thanks for having me. Nic: Well, thank you for coming on. I know you’re doing quite a few things. Jen, I like to let guests introduce themselves, so in a brief elevator style introduction … Who is Jen Simmons? Jen: So these days I work as a designer and developer advocate for Mozilla which is a company that makes the Firefox browser. And that means I get to travel around, present at conferences. Talk to people, find out what people are struggling with. Keep my eye on the pulse, or my finger on the pulse of the industry. People making websites and then report all that back to Mozilla and tell them, “Hey, this is what people are really going to need. This is what’s coming up next”. So we can be sure to create the right developer tools that are needed, or create the right-- put CSS … I focus specifically on CSS. And making a browser, making Firefox. It’s like making any piece of software. There’s a zillion features we want to add and a bazillion bugs we want ... need to fix-- Nic: Yeah Jen: --And a limited number of engineers, I help shape what is it that we are going to be focussing on. Just … I help, I chim in and advocate for designers and developers as those decisions are being made. Nic: Yeah. Firefox is not a small project that a couple of people are working on in their spare time. I started using Firefox when it was still 0.2 or something like that. Way, way back when. And I really loved it. I was devastated when there was this issue and I think it was 58, 59 that wasn’t working very much with screen readers anymore. Jen: Yeah, and I don’t know the details so this is sort of a hand-wavy explanation I should probably go find out the real information so I can say this accurately but I think … my guess about what happened is that the company was pushing so hard to make these massive technical changes to the browser itself under the hood for Firefox 57 that there were a lot of people pulled off a lot of projects and just put on this one effort. Get Firefox Quantum out the door. Get Firefox [crosstalk 03:24] out the door. And so anything that wasn’t- I mean, we broke a lot of stuff. We changed the way the plugins- addons work-- Nic: Yeah Jen: --web extensions … I mean we replaced the entire CSS parsing and rendering engine, right? So there was such huge amounts of technical DAT being paid off ... things had been built in the browser really in the Netscape days or like back in Firefox zero point whatever days, that we changed. And so my guess, and it’s just a guess. This is not official information. My guess is that there were just changes that got made that meant that it broke for screen readers. It broke for accessibility. And somewhere someone just said, “look we are going to fix that ASAP but we are going to also ship 57. Nic: Yeah Jen: And so- and there were people inside the company who were like, “this is not okay” and very, really made sure that as soon as possible, with 58, 59, 60, 61 we get back to where we were because being a browser that is best of class and supporting anybody who is using an assistive device is very important to the mission of Mozilla. So it’s not that Mozilla’s mission changed. Or that our commitment to accessibility changed. It was just this blip that was needed. Maybe needed, maybe you can debate whether it was right or wrong but it was a blip that happened in order to really make these massive changes to the browser to improve the speed and improve [crosstalk 04:45] overall. Nic: Mozilla certainly, what’s the word I’m looking for … demonstrated the commitment to accessibility when they implemented the accessibility tree view and web inspector. That’s a massive improvement for those of us that do accessibility day in day out to just nut out what an issue can be. Jen: Yeah, so that new accessibility tree inspector-- really it’s probably more like a viewer-- is the first of a series of ideas and plans that are in place to do better and better around providing accessibility. Like, providing developer tools for folks who care about accessibility. And so that accessibility tree as I understand it is pretty nerdy and pretty much for people who know a tonne about accessibility but it’s a bit of an API that will then support more user friendly normal developers who don’t really know much about accessibility friendly type tools that can be built on top of that tree in the future. So it’s a beginning. Nic: It’s a powerful tool Powerful tool. But yeah you do need to know a little bit about accessibility before you start looking at it. Jen: Yeah, so I mean some ways we’ve promoted it and some ways we haven’t promoted it as much because it’s maybe not a tool that like someone who’s just getting started with understanding accessibility will be able to kind of-- I mean, what I would like to see when I’m advocating for is that we have tools that are sort of in the middle of everybody’s flow and are very easy to use in that kind of, can’t help yourself but notice that, “Oh your color contrast is bad or that your keyboard navigation isn’t working or that your separated source order and DOM order, visual order, too much in your layout that you’re making and so that’s going to be an accessibility problem. Like those kinds of things could be surfaced and right in line with all the other tools. So, hopefully, we will get to do some of those other things to … yeah. But there's still many, so many kinds of tools we could be making. Nic: Hey Jen, tell us something that most people would not know about you. Jen: Well I, like many people who were building websites in the 90’s am self-taught. I think most people who made websites at the beginning you had to be self-taught because what else were you going to be. But I at the time was working in the arts. Working as an artist, working as a designer theatre designer, doing lighting design, set design, sound projection … I sort of started in set, moved to lighting and then later got really, really into projection design. And also producing a lot of events and making all the graphic design for all of those events. Thousands of postcards and poster, bumper stickers and t-shirts. So I come from that kind of background. The arts and thinking about design and creation. The creation of work from the perspective of an artist so, sometimes I forget that that’s not how everybody else goes at it. But it deeply influences what I do now, even if all I’m doing now is working on websites-- or actually these days I don’t even work on websites much anymore. I work on web browsers. Nic: How and why did you make that switch? Jen: Money. I mean, honestly, it wasn’t as much-- because if you-- it’s like I could explain my career and say, “Well, I worked in this industry and then I also worked in this industry and this industry” and it sounds like I’ve had … really, I’ve had four, five careers but many of them are concurrent. So I was teaching at a University while I was simultaneously making films. And shortly before that, I was teaching High School aged students, outside the school system while making theatre and before that, I was making theatre while I was working as an arts administrator and that meant I was also the IT department, the webmaster, the accounting department and the graphic design department. Because we are this tiny non-profit and so I did all of those things at the same time. Nic: Yeah, I had a similar background. I started as a chef by trade and then I worked in non-profit for a disability-related organization and I was juggling non-profit and being the tech guy and playing with HTML and, you know, “Het my cup holder isn’t working on my computer. How do I fix this?” kind of thing. So I like to hear people that have, obviously not the same but similar kind of journey to accessibility, to the web, to design. Jen: And that’s one of the things that I miss or I worry about or I wonder about with so many projects, multi-million dollar projects these days and they have big teams and once you have a big team it makes sense to break out a whole bunch of different jobs and so, one person might focus on one thing and then they work on another multi-million dollar project and they’re the person focussing on that thing again. So you have this whole career where you’re specialising and you're working on just this one particular little piece of a bigger picture. And it changes the … I don’t know. There’s something about that. There’s something about those of us that know how to, like, “Oh, someone around here has to learn something about getting an audit because we are big enough now that we are required by law to have an annual audit so I guess I’ll go look that up. I guess I’ll go figure that out”. Nic: Yeah Jen: Oh we need, we need, let’s switch from using a modem to using a network so how, oh an [apple talk?10:37] network how do I learn to make a [apple talk?10:39] network when there's nothing on the internet because the internet doesn’t exist yet. Like that ability to make things up and that ability to be scrappy and to learn things as you go. Sometimes I see people today feel a little bit like, “Well, I didn’t learn it in school so now I’m applying for this job and am I going to get in trouble or am I lying if I make it sound like I could figure this out. And it’s like, but that’s the whole … being able to figure stuff out is everything. That’s awesome. If you can jump in and not know what you're doing and figure it out as you go that’s like a really great skill to have. Nic: Yeah, the researching skills and [crosstalk 11:16]. I don’t think Jen: [crosstalk 11:17]-- skills, you know. Nic: Yeah, a lot of newbies maybe don’t realize how much experience programmers, developers, designers-- how much time is spent looking and searching for answers. I saw a tweet the other day that someone who is a Javascript developer … he said, “I was having problems solving this issue and then I went and I googled it and suddenly I found this article I wrote five years ago and it’s the very same solution”. So it’s funny how that goes. Jen: I did the exact same thing. I put out a bunch of tweets about … and I really believe this, that if you're writing code the majority of what you’re doing is writing code that doesn’t work. And looking up what’s-- searching on the internet to figure out what to do and being able to figure out why it doesn’t work. Because the moment it actually does work, you’re done. And you’re off to the next thing. Right? If the code works there’s nothing … you’re not going to sit there and look at it for three hours. You-- the whole point is that you write code, it doesn’t work, you figure out why it doesn’t work. It still doesn’t work, you figure out why it still doesn’t work. It still doesn’t work, you figure out why … like the third thing that’s wrong with it and you keep doing that until you’ve figured it out. And I do think that, yeah there's something about newbies it feels like they feel like they're doing something wrong. Or like, “Oh it doesn’t work. It should’ve worked the moment I put the code on the page” it’s like not really. It’s not actually what-- computer science is all about debugging and about being really good at debugging. Nic: Yeah Jen: Yeah and I couldn’t-- I was playing around and I was vaguely remembering that somewhere in CSS there was a particular way that you could have an outline of the edge of a letter but I had no idea how to do it. And in my head, I thought, “Gosh, I’ve been meaning to learn this and I’ve never learned it. I should finally look this up” and so I searched on an internet search engine and boom an article that I wrote like 18 months ago. On my own blog. Nic: Yeah … yeah. Jen: And there was an example that I had demoed. Like a demo I had built and an example of code and I just copied the code right out of it and pieced it into my new one, and it was like, “Oh I guess I did do this once before”. Nic: How would you define Web Accessibility? Jen: To me, accessibility is about the recognition that every human isn’t identical to every other human. That-- like sometimes I think about it this way … if-- we have this idea of their being parallel universes, right? This quantum physics pop culture version where “oh there's parallel universes and things are slightly different” so let's imagine a parallel universe where humans have four arms and four hands instead of two and in that world if you were the one person with two hands instead of having four hands … it would be really weird because everything about that world will have been designed assuming that humans have four hands. So the way kitchens are set up, the way computers work, the way that everything is set up. It’s like, people have four hands and there you are a person with two hands. And that's not the only way to see disability but it’s one way to see disability. That there's just far more variation in human beings than what “normal” defines. And so this idea that, well, you’re supposed to use two hands on your keyboard, you’re supposed to use a mouse, you’re supposed to be able to see the whole screen … that’s like, assuming that everybody has four hands in this parallel universe. And, why? Like there’s no … there’s no reason for that and so to me, making websites considering accessibility is about understanding that not everybody has two hands. Many people just have one. Not everybody can use a keyboard, not everybody can use a mouse. Like, not everybody's bodies are made the same way and that’s just considering-- I’m just talking about physical things. But of course, accessibility is much more than a physical variation on a human body. Nic: Yeah Jen: But to me, it really is about-- this other thing, in the 20th century especially there was this urge in human culture to define the right way to be. Really it’s the last 500 years. It’s colonialism, it’s racism it’s like-- this size head, this circumference head is the proper size and this other person has a different sized head and they’re therefore inferior. Like there were whole wars were waged on these ideas of superior and inferior kinds of people. And I feel like as software developers today we don’t have to build with those kinds of ideas. That there's inferior and superior kinds of people. We can resist that. Whatever it is in humanity. And we can say, “No. I’m making something for a crowd. For millions of people, thousands of people and I’m going to consider the crowd. I’m not just going to consider myself. Or my friends. Or what I’m used to or what I like”. Nic: How do we get past these prejudices that we don’t even realize we have? That have been ingrained from very early childhood. One of the statistics that has really hit me quite badly is in 2008 there was this survey done that…

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E56 – Interview with Becky Gibson – Part 2 Sep 12, 2018

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Becky talks about accessibility needing to be in the curriculum for all computer science courses - and I couldn't agree more! Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 56. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS and video at Twilio.com. So in this episode, I’m continuing my conversation with Becky Gibson. Last show was really awesome. We spoke about Lotus. We spoke about IBM and the formation of WCAG 2.0 and ARIA. So all kinds of really great stuff. Do check it out if you haven’t already. Becky, welcome back. Becky: Yeah. Thanks, Nic. This is great. Nic: Yeah, so are you ready for more grilling? Becky: Sure. Why not. Nic: Why not. Alright, so we ended up last week on a fairly positive note talking about your greatest achievement and that was your involvement with ARIA and making the Dojo toolkit accessible. If we were to veer toward maybe, not negative but not so positive thing … What would you say your greatest frustration is in terms of Web Accessibility? Becky: I think it’s attitude of people. I guess part of it too is that we don’t make people aware of it. We don’t educate students, right? It’s like you learn so many things when you go to school and you learn a different programming language, why is accessibility not built into the curriculum? And I know that Teach Access is trying to work somewhat toward that, the group. But I just find that frustrating that people have no idea about it. I mean you still-- like I mentioned in the last time … I was never going to stand up and tell people about Alt text on images and labels on form elements but when I look at websites I feel that I still have to because it-- people don’t know that. They still-- it’s not common knowledge which, when you’re in the industry is-- it’s like, those are so simple. That’s the simple stuff, you know? Just keep it simple stupid, do the easy stuff. So ... Nic: Yeah Becky: I mean I keep having in my mind I want to write a book. Well, yeah unless I dedicate myself into that. And then you’ve got to get someone to read it. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how to help bring accessibility education into Colleges and Universities. And it is a pretty daunting task, but, it’s something that I’ll keep working on in my subconscious. Nic: It is something that’s mission critical. You’re not the first person to bring that point and every time I talk about that I can’t help thinking, this was a battle that I was having in the 90’s with architecture schools. But architects are going through four, five years of training and they get an average four-hour tuition on building accessibility. And we’re facing the same thing with Computer Science nowadays is that people come out of that and they don’t even know it exists, so there's not even that flicker of awareness that maybe curiosity is going to push them to read up on it. Becky: Right. Nic: Yeah. So how do we fix that? Becky: Well, I don’t know. I’ve talked to some of the people at WebAim, just because they're fighting this battle as well. And it’s like how-- you have to get it into-- it has to be part of the curriculum. It has to be authorised. There’s rules. I’m like, “Oh crap, it’s never going to …” But I guess we have to start somewhere and then I know some of the surveys teach Access as there’s no textbooks and I started thinking about that. But I’m like … Okay, but do you have one textbook that covers Java and PHP and HTML. Or do you try to go to each of the textbook authors and try to get them to add chapters about it? And offer to help them? I spent so-- in some of that I think that’s what we have to do we have to try to do what we can to get it into the curriculum. And I’m still waving my hands because I’ve really just started thinking a little bit more seriously about this but definitely-- and even going into the schools. When I-- I was always very good. IBM volunteered for engineers weak in different things. So whenever I would go to the school I would tell them what I did. I’m like, “Oh, ask the kids”. Usually middle school. “How does a blind person use a computer?” I mean, that’s the one they can most identify because it’s visual. And you know, some of them will know and some of them won’t and they’ll, you know, I try to get them into the conversation at least being aware and thinking about it. Nic: Yeah. It’s one of these things that is so important and sometimes it feels like we have to do nearly one on one awareness building with the powers that be. With the gatekeeper in terms of curriculum and all that. Becky: And that’s why I think technology … again I go back to you when we spoke last time. The whole thing about technology, because some of these-- at least the children are expecting things to work. They expect to be able to talk to the computer, or Alexa or-- and have it work. And so if it doesn’t-- and unfortunately that doesn’t always connect to accessibility … but it at least makes them aware of the different interfaces into technology. Nic: Yeah. Yeah, because voice input is really growing in terms of methodology to interact with a computer. Right? Becky: Yeah. A long time ago we didn’t think we would ever be at this state. Everybody was always, “Oh in a few more years, in a few more years…”, well, finally a few more years is-- we are reaching that. That we can-- I’m not a big fan of talking to the computer. I don’t use Siri as much as I probably could but I see the benefit of it and I see… and I’m not quite sure I want to have a device listening to me talk to myself in my home. But I can see the value of that and once we get over those sort of privacy hurdles I think those of us that are older have more issues with that than some of the younger folks. Nic: Yeah. How does privacy relate to accessibility? Becky: You know, that’s a good one. That’s one of the things that I’m part of the personalisation taskforce at the W3C and that’s one of the issues. If you knew a person … people often don’t want to self identify as having a disability when they’re on the web so they’re reluctant to say, “I’m using a screen reader” in fact there isn’t even a way-- a convoluted way to even figure out if someone is and people don’t often want to admit that or they don’t want to admit they have-- they want larger text because … okay, I can relate to those. I’m a 50 plus-year-old person in computers and everyone around me is-- can be my children. They don’t get why my screen might have larger font size. They will in 20 years or so... So, you don’t often want to admit those things. So that’s sort of where privacy comes in is letting people keep their information to themselves but yet providing the tools that make it easier for them to interact with your application. Nic: Yeah. One of the topics that invariably comes up at conferences, when I go speak at conferences, is this concept from developers that, “Why can’t I get metrics about which type of disability comes to my website?” or “How come I can’t-- I can detect the browser, I can detect geolocation … all this information. Why can’t I have access to their disability status? Because I want to serve them something that’s going to be more useful”. And I bring up this issue. Privacy. And maybe we don’t want to advertise on the web everywhere that we have a disability. Maybe it’s the only place anywhere that we can actually not be first perceived as somebody who has a disability. And I think that privacy is really important. At the same time if we had access to be able to determine, “Hey this person is using NVDA and Firefox, maybe we will be able to tweak the website for them better”. What do you think of that dichotomy between the two needs? Becky: Yeah I think about that sometimes. Especially with personalisation. I’m like, “Well, why would you care if somebody knows that you don’t want to use numbers?” Or whatever. And a part of me says that and the other part of me says, “No, I can see why you don’t want to reveal too much about yourself”. So much about ourselves is on the internet if we care to share it, via Facebook or any other social media site. But to me it’s like, if you start building for one person, one type of disability then how-- you’re potentially not going to help someone else. Right? Nic: Yeah. Becky: So you can’t say, “Oh, okay, so this percentage are using Firefox and NVDA so I’m going to make sure I only test with Firefox and NVDA. As far as screen readers go”. So I think that’s the problem I think it needs to be more-- it lets it-- you want it to be universal and by focussing on certain traits it’s not universal anymore. Nic: Yeah. I think that that’s-- from the developers perspective I think that that’s one of the things to remember and people are people and they want to keep some kind of level of privacy. Becky: Right. And one day you might use NVDA, the next you might say, “Oh, I switched to a Mac and I’m on voice over”. Nic: Yeah. Becky: Not that it’s that easy to go between them. I know as a tester I can’t remember all those different commands going between all three but I know many people that use them that can… use all three proficiently. Nic: Yeah, do you think there’s conventional wisdom about accessibility? One thing that everybody knows about it? Becky: If you say web accessibility, I think people are more aware that blind people now can use the web. I think if you refer to accessibility in general people immediately think of someone in a wheelchair. So it sort of is-- unfortunately we have those kinds of silos with accessibility that immediately come to mind. I think the next generation is a little bit more aware of cognitive or, should I say neurological … I wouldn't call them disabilities but challenges because there does seem to be more children with autism or on the autism spectrum that are in schools and there’s different ways of learning, different ways of being than perhaps you and I-- me anyway, saw when we were growing up. Nic: Yeah. What would you say the number one reason is that most people fail to succeed with implementing accessibility? Becky: Time. They don’t understand it in the beginning. They don’t start from the beginning. And it’s one of those things that-- and it’s not always thought of as a feature but it’s thought of as that last bug that, “Oh, that’s not going to affect as many people. So we can leave that out”. And unfortunately, accessibility goes in as bugs, not always-- People that are really into it now and I think this whole inclusive design has helped bring the design community in but it’s still something that people think of as an add-on. And not as integrated. And when they think of it as an add-on it’s a thing you can chop off. Because it was added on, you can chop it off. I think that’s the biggest problem. Nic: Yeah. It’s interesting because a while back I was talking with Josh Simmons on the podcast and he actually said that-- I’m actually trying to find the quote right now, but he said that accessibility was a bug. That it should be seen as a bug … hold on I’m just going to pause recording for a second and try to find that exact quote. Yeah, so, Josh Simmon in my talk with him in way early episode six of the podcast he said, “Accessibility is not a feature. Lack of accessibility is a bug.” And that really struck me as something that was quite insightful but at the same time, what you’re saying about a bug and something to be handled at the end also makes sense. How would you reconcile both points of view? Becky: I think a lot will depend on your background. So I came from a more corporate environment where shipping on time was paramount. You will ship and big brother, or whoever … If it’s a large company you might not have as much influence and in that case, that’s where I felt it was. It was like, “Okay, we have to ship and we need to get this product out in the market.So, therefore, those are bugs and they can be addressed later”. And I think maybe-- I mean, some of that is from startups do the same thing. So when I worked on acquisitions at IBM we were looking at a lot of startups. They don’t even think about it because they need to get a product to market. So I think it depends on your perspective, because I think if it comes in as a feature and it’s thought of as a feature that serves everyone … and again that’s getting back to potentially marginalizing it for people with disabilities but if you do it as a feature to give everyone access at all times I think you get more buy-in from developers and management. Nic: Yeah. So it really depends on how you view and handle bugs and your own ecosystems to be able to asses that difference. Becky: Right. Nic: Yeah. What’s the greatest challenge for the field of Web Accessibility moving forward, in the next five years, ten years? Becky: I think it’s education. I think it’s keeping up with technology. I think voice is going to become much, much larger. And that’s still going to be a challenge. Dealing with different accents, different languages. Getting-- and then the more visual. The fact that we are going to video more. I would just as soon read something because I’m a fast reader, than look at a video. I skip the videos often. But, potentially if I could speed them up and have the captions go faster it would be the same to me. I think audio description is going to become more important as we go to video. Again, for the eyes off, whether it be because you’re low vision or because you’re doing something else and you’re multitasking, which I think we do too much of. But that’s not going to go away anytime soon. Nic: Yeah. Becky: And I guess I don’t know. Five years-- I was never-- I was in the emerging technologies group but U was the one that would figure out how things worked now and figure out workarounds. I wasn’t a visionary. I knew that about myself. Nic: Fair enough. If you had a-- If you weren’t working in accessibility in technology, what profession would you like to have? Becky: I think about that sometimes. Especially after I was looking for a job after leaving IBM, not of my own choice. And I used to think when I was a kid I wanted to be an author. And part of me still says-- I did go take a class to get certification in technical communications because I’m like, “Oh, I could write” but then everything’s a lot of work. And it’s like, “Okay, maybe that would be like work to me and I don’t want it to be”. And then I used to think I wanted to be a photographer but now everybody in the world's a photographer … So, I don’t know. I guess I would do something in some kind of training field. Maybe volunteering more or something like that. I don’t have a good answer because I struggle with that because you read all these things that’s like, “What would you do if you could do anything” and I’m like, “I don’t really know”. Nic: Yeah, too many varied interests. Becky: Right Nic: Yeah. Last question. What is the one thing people should remember about accessibility? Becky: That it is such a huge enabler for so many people and that making sure that the world and the web is accessible to all is just what opens up the possibility and lets everyone-- and really enable … I’ve used that word about seven times but, it really does enable people to-- releases them to be able to do more. If you can do your own grocery shopping, if you can buy your own presents, you don’t need someone to drive you to a st…

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E55 – Interview with Becky Gibson – Part 1 Aug 30, 2018

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In this episode, Becky talks to us about how changes in technology has changed her perception of accessibility. She also tells us how she came to be so passionate about 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 55. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS and video at Twilio.com. So this week I’m speaking to Becky Gibson. Thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility Becky. Becky: Oh, thanks. I’m thrilled to be here. Nic: Cool. Hey, I like to let guests introduce themselves. So in a brief introduction, who is Becky Gibson? Becky: Let’s see. Who am I? I am a 55 plus-year-old woman. I live alone with two cats. I haven’t always been alone. And I guess I kind of am a computer geek although less so than I started. I started life with Lotus if people remember that, as a customer support representative and then I moved on to become a programmer. I actually worked on the print subsystem on 1, 2, 3. I’m proud of that. Yes, and then I went on to work on Lotus Notes, which some people will hate me for because a lot of people don’t particularly like Lotus Notes. But it was innovative for its time. And then I eventually got into accessibility about 13, 14 years ago working with Rich Schwerdtfeger, he was starting a new group in emerging technologies and I really enjoyed that because it gave me-- it felt like there was more than just business, right, Nic: Yeah Becky: It was okay when I worked on 1, 2, 3, when it was small and people were using it to record their book production for cows but then it got into business and that’s not what I was about so it gave me more of a reason-- it put excitement back in. and I got to do a lot of open source work with that so, yeah. And let's see, what do I do for fun … I’m a-- I figure skate. Not something I would recommend taking up in your 40’s but I enjoy it. And I like doing outdoorsy kind of stuff and I’m addicted to reading as well-- Nic: Well, there are worse addictions to that. To have than reading so, yeah. So I was going to ask you, tell me one thing most people don’t know about you but you gave us a few, from Lotus to figure skating and reading. So, is there anything else you think that our listener might be interested in knowing that you haven’t told us about? Becky: Well, I came into computers sort of backwards. I mean, I was always very much a science related, math type person. But back in the late 70’s when I graduated from High School nobody really suggested that I might be interested in computer science or civil engineering, which would’ve been a fit for me. I went to school and my degree is in Natural Resource Management and I have a minor in soil science and an option in land use planning. But, when I graduated from school there weren’t many jobs in that, unlike today. So, I had taken a computer programming course. I had taken Fortran with punch cards. And I loved it. And so, my woman who was to become my sister in law said, “Oh you should learn to program in Cobol and you could work in the computer industry”. Well, I did take a Cobol class and said, “Ew” and I did eventually get into computers … through Lotus. And I got my Masters in Computer Science, but, yeah. Nic: Right. So, just to show all roads lead to accessibility eventually, right? Becky: That’s right. Nic: So we’re talking about web accessibility today, primarily. And there’s a lot of definitions of that term. How would you define Web Accessibility? Becky: I define it as the ability of anyone to be able to access resources on the web anywhere at any time. So I think that broadens a little, from just saying that it has to be somebody with a disability. I think it takes into what we in the industry refer to as situational disabilities. You know, when you’re in your car, when you’ve broken your arm. So inclusion is a hot word these days but it definitely is including everybody. Nic: There seems to be a movement that, anyway, I’ve been aware of in the last five, six, seven months that some accessibility advocates are getting angry that we’re trying to sell accessibility as something that has side benefits for all kinds of people. Including those that only have situational impairments. How would you answer that kind of critic considering your definition of accessibility, which is quite wide and encompassing? Becky: Well, I think-- and I think it’s an unfortunate situation that you have to make people empathetic. And one way of doing that is addressing their concerns that-- making them aware. And making them aware is ok, listen if you want to listen to your phone in the car then, yeah. That’s-- and this is how you do it. And you may have to put in some extra work. And this is-- and I can try to stress how important it is for people with disabilities. Again, that’s talking to the person that has the situational disability. I can see where the people with a disability might say you’re marginalizing me by making it something that affects everybody. And in some cases that’s true but it also-- I think it broadens the-- it provides … I don’t want to say empathy because I don’t want people to come about it because they feel sorry for people with disabilities but I think it makes them recognize it more. Nic: Yeah. It’s a position that I understand but I don’t share, that is the fact that we should not sell accessible as- it’s good for everyone. Personally, I think, it’s good for everyone, and that’s how I present it. And it’s something I’ve been using for a very long time. When I was doing physical environments accessibility a lot I pointed out to people, a curb cut is good for a wheelchair user but it’s good for a mom with a pram, it’s good for a delivery guy with a heavy dolly, it’s good for kids on skateboards, it’s good for a lot of people so that’s always been in the back of my mind that it’s more about encompassing society as a whole rather than in a way ghetto'ising people with disabilities. Becky: Right. And I think, yeah, it makes people have-- understand the issue more and I think you have to understand an issue to really care about it. And I hesitate to bring this up because I don’t like to play the widow game, but I am a widow and until you have something like that, so devastating happen to you, it’s really hard to understand what it’s like for someone. The changes that they go through and it doesn’t have to be a spouse, or whatever, but just a loss like that-- Nic: Yeah Becky: --or just a life-changing event and you … you’re just like, “wow, I didn’t get it” and I think just trying to make more people aware of that just helps in their understanding as people go through their day to day lives. Like, you know, crap. I may break down crying at some point and I’m sorry but I’ve just got to go through it and you’ve got to accept it and let me go through it. Or whatever that may be, that’s what … and I think just raising awareness I think is just so important. Nic: Yeah. where does your role fall within the work of web accessibility? Becky: Now? Or later? Nic: Yes Becky: So now I’m working with Knowbility and I’m thrilled with that. I met Sharron right when I started in this industry and she’s been one of my biggest fans nice, which is a wonderful thing. But-- and so, a part of I think my work is-- I work on trying to-- part of my job at knowbility is to help work on training, And I think that … that’s again, that’s making people more aware, helping them to understand. Giving them the tools that they need. And that’s some of what my past has done too as far as my work on ARIA or WCAG. Nic: Hold on, your voice is breaking up from the recording. Becky: Oh. Sorry. Do you want me to go back? Nic: Yeah, if you could. Because, yeah. That’s much better. Becky: Okay. So-- Nic: So, I was asking you-- Becky: What I do Nic: Where does your role fall within the work of Web Accessibility. Becky: Right. So I was saying I’m thrilled to be working at Knowbility now. And my primary goal there is to help work on training and again I think that helps me go toward my mission of educating people more and helping to give them the tools that they need to address Web Accessibility and to become more aware. And I’ve done sort of that in the past as well with some of the other work that I’ve done when I was still at IBM. Nic: How did you become aware of web Accessibility and its importance? What kind of gelled everything together? Was it meeting Sharron or was it something else? Becky: No it was before that. So, I was looking for a new job within IBM. I was just fed up with the work I was doing. And before that, I had worked on a project building Java server pages. So we were adding Java Server support to Lotus Notes. At the time it was still called Lotus. And I was tasked with helping to figure out what we needed for tags, build this library and then build the examples. And part of the IBM at the time-- and this was in the early 2000’s-- said our-- anything that has a unit or interface has to be accessible to people with disabilities. So I had to learn about that. Because Java server pages were web-based, right, you’re building a web page-- Nic: Yeah Becky: --and that’s where I met Rich Schwerdtfeger who was at IBM, who became the Chief Accessibility Officer for IBM Software Group. And he was joining the emerging technologies team to set up a group specifically working on accessibility and taking accessibility further than just compliance. And so when that group started he invited me to join that. And that’s how I got into working on accessibility full time. Nic: That’s really neat. Did you ... get barriers in your way when you were trying to learn about accessibility and how to implement it and trying to find that information? Becky: I definitely got tired of hearing that you need to put Alt text on images. So when I would go to do training sessions or, you know, “labels on forms, you need alt text on images”, and some of that basic stuff. And I swore to myself that I would never keep telling people that and I still do to this day. And I apologize when I do it. I said, “I know a lot of you have heard this but I still see those mistakes-- same mistakes being made over and over again” so I do include that when I talk to people. But yeah, I found it hard to find out the more difficult stuff. Like how do you do this? And at the time, I mean, there was still ... WCAG was still in effect and you weren’t-- you were supposed to run without Javascript. So that made it a little bit different. And that’s why-- one of the reasons why I was put on the web content accessibility guidelines 2.0 working group, was to show people that you could make accessible Javascript. Nic: Right. Yeah, and as we know now, it’s really-- we can even use Javascript to make things more accessible. Becky: That’s right. Nic: Yeah… Has your view of accessibility changed over the last 10, 15 years? Becky: I don’t-- I guess I think about it more with the idea of mobile. Certainly, it has changed. It has brought about more of that understanding of it’s more … I get the situational stuff now. Right. Before I didn’t necessarily think about that. You didn’t have a phone in your-- you didn’t have a computer in your pocket that you might want to use when it’s bright outside or when it-- so I think that has made me broaden my idea of accessibility and broaden the fact that there are situational uses. Also the fact of how much more it can do for people with disabilities so people that need to work from home can do that and if the internet and the web tools are accessible then that helps people gain more access to work. And so I think I’ve become more aware of what accessibility can do and the benefits it has and I think that's because of the technology change. Nic: So the change in technology made you more aware of the extent of the importance of accessibility? Becky: Yeah, maybe not more aware of but just ...yeah maybe I guess so. More conscious. More understanding how much it can impact-- the impact it can have. The increasing impact. Nic: Right. That’s interesting the-- as you know I speak to a lot of people for this podcast and I ask that question and you’re the first person to really bring that aspect of it so I like that. Becky: Oh good. I’m glad I can be unique in some way. Nic: Oh, Becky. I know you. You are unique alright. Becky: Yeah probably too much sometimes. Nic: So you mentioned you were part of the working group that gifted us WCAG 2.0. Tell me a little bit more about that work. How did you get involved with the working group? What led to us getting this set of guidelines that was round as is for 10 years before we even got another layer with 2.1. Becky: So, I mean, again with Schwedtfeger who was very active in the WC3 with IBM. IBM was very active and I was at IBM most of my-- pretty much all of my career except for a very few years at the beginning. I started at Lotus, went to IBM and so he was very much-- he-- Rich was very much the father of ARIA. Accessible Rich Internet Applications. And he and Aaron Ramunthel sort of worked together bringing that forward. So in order to be able to use ARIA you certainly had to be able to use Javascript. And so he said, “Becky. You know Javascript and so we need people on the WCAG working group who understand Javascript and can explain the techniques and examples and explain to people that it isn’t this awful, evil thing. That it can be made accessible.” And so that’s sort of how I got put there. And it was a learning curve but I had good help. Andy who was from IBM was on the group. So she helped me along to get settled in. They found out I could take notes really well so I ended up being scribe way too often. And it was interesting. It was sort of my first experience with some of these large groups and of course, WCAG is very large … is a big group. And there's a lot of diverse opinions. But I think we really did try to take into account everyone's-- you know, we let everyone speak. There are a few people that might disagree with that but we tried to let everyone speak if they were reasonable. And you know, John Slatin was on the group and he was amazing and the perspectives he brought and the editing skills and just the patience. So ... and that’s where I focussed. I mean I focussed mainly on the guidelines and techniques that were around. Javascript will say, “Yes, we can do this” and it isn’t as terribly evil. Nic: Yeah. Is there something you wish had been included in WCAG 2.0 that they didn’t? Becky: Hmm, I don’t know. I actually left the group before it actually. I didn’t get to see it all the way through finalization which was a little bit frustrating, but … I guess one of the things that barely made it into 2.1 is some of the color contrast things because I think those are easy ways to make things accessible and the fact that it’s only text and not icons and some of those things, but … no, I don’t have a good answer for that so I should probably stop rambling. Nic: and that’s fair enough. That’s fair enough. In terms of color contrast one of my frustrations is these companies that are saying, “Well, you know, my brand guidelines” and I want to say. “Yeah well your branding is fine but if you have white text against a light orange … maybe that’s your brand but man your brand sucks”. So, yeah I was glad to see some of the color con…

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E54 – Interview with Nic Steenhout – Part 2 Aug 23, 2018

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"It’s a frustration of mine that too often when somebody asks me a question about accessibility, the only answer I can really give if I want to be succinct is, “It depends”." 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 The second part of my chat with Léonie, in which she interviews me! "It’s a frustration of mine that too often when somebody asks me a question about accessibility, the only answer I can really give if I want to be succinct is, “It depends”." Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 54. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with Web Accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS and video at Twilio.com. So this week we are continuing my conversation with Léonie but in this episode as per last week, it’s not me interviewing Léonie. It’s her interviewing me and asking me questions that I normally ask other people. So, Hey Léonie, thanks for last week and thanks for coming back and I’m entirely yours to interrogate. Léonie: Thanks Nic, it’s good to be back. I’m going to dive in with a pretty serious question now, I think. What are the biggest barriers you’ve experienced in trying to make the web more accessible over the years? Nic: It’s this idea that many developers have that you can’t tack on accessibility after the fact. I was invited to be on the Joomla CSS core team when they first started after they fought for Mambo and they asked me on board specifically because I had been making a pain of myself on the Mambo forums always talking about accessibility, and they said, “Hey, Nic. Why don’t you join and we can make it accessible.” And, I lasted about a year because I ended up refactoring all the code to make it accessible and at the end, they said, “Well, maybe we’ll keep it as a third party plugin”. And that was soul destroying. Now, I haven’t looked at Joomla! in nearly 10 years so I don’t know where they're at. I don’t know if they’ve changed their approach to accessibility but that really was symptomatic of what I find a lot of. And I mention Joomla! because it’s part of my experience. Not because I want to pick on them. The folks involved now are not the same that were involved then. But, we find a lot of that. It’s like, we’re designing this website and at the end, we are going to run quality assurance and test for accessibility. Well, no. You can’t do that. You know, you complain accessibility is expensive and yes, of course it is. Because it takes a lot to refactor code and go in and fix things. It’s like if you were building a house, right? You build it with a narrow door and two front steps in the entrance. It’s going to be very expensive to put in a ramp and widen the door. But if you had put it a level entrance and a wide door to start with your extra costs would have been negligible. I think it’s the same thing on the web. Léonie: I tend to agree. What I find really interesting about that mindset, when I encounter it, is that usually, it’s teams that would not apply the same logic to any other part of their development. If they were talking about-- last week privacy, security, the technical debt that people can accumulate through the life cycle of a project is enormous, and most good developers and development teams will go out of their way to avoid collecting technical dat. But for some reason with accessibility, somebody somewhere goes, “it’s fine” Nic: Yeah, it is fine. No problem. We’ll just, you know, third party plugin after the fact. So, I think that’s probably my biggest frustration in terms of accessibility. There’s a lot of little things that I find annoying, but, this attitude that accessibility can be thought of after the fact, and perhaps in a way it annoys me so much not only because it doesn’t work very well but also because it reflects the attitude of some that people with disabilities don’t really count --It’s ok, we can care about them after the fact. We don’t need to include them-- and, sorry, we just want to be part of things. Léonie: Yeah, absolutely. And as you mentioned last week there were some great reasons for independence and freedom of thought and action. Being able to do stuff online if you have a disability. Nic: Yeah Léonie: Yeah, it’s incredibly important. I’m going to have to ask though, tell me about some of the other little things that irritate you. Nic: It’s a frustration of mine that too often when somebody asks me a question about accessibility the only answer I can really give if I want to be succinct is, “It depends”. It’s having to keep in mind that depending on the context and the situation the answer about what is accessible and what is less accessible varies and changes. And I am annoyed on the behalf of the people that ask me a question when I have to open up with, “It depends”. Of course, you go in and give more information and you can expand on that and give different solutions but people are wanting black or white and too often we have to give them grey. Léonie: Do you think that people want more black or white when it comes to accessibility because they recognize the importance of what they're trying to do? I mean all answers in technology seem to start with, “It depends” but accessibility is maybe something that needs a little more clarity. Nic: I think that they want black or white because it’s something that's completely beyond their experience. Their lived experience. They don't know very much at all and that’s normal to not be aware of the experience of a screen reader user or someone who needs high contrast or someone that uses only a keyboard or any of these variations. It’s normal not to be aware of these experiences because you don’t know anyone that has a disability, you can only build that understanding from theoretical knowledge. So, when you don’t know and even if you want to, you know, you’re there and you want to do the right thing you just don’t know how and you're afraid of messing up. So having a single straight, single, applicable answer is a lot better for people than giving different scenarios. Léonie: And how much of this do you think we still need to fix in terms of educating young designers, developed, UXers... Nic: Ooh I so wish accessibility was an integral part of every curriculum out there. One of my frustration 20 years ago was that architects in a four year degree would get maybe four, six hours worth of accessibility tuition and I look at computer science degrees or multimedia design degrees and all that and I don’t even know that they get that much about accessibility and I think that is-- it’s one of the basic skill set that developers or designers must have and unless it’s taught in school, unless it’s covered in all these myriads of tutorials online, I think we are still going to end up with people that don’t have the knowledge, don’t have the skills. Léonie: Yeah, I agree. And I know Knowbility is involved in Teach Access-- Nic: Yes Léonie: --which is something the Paciello Group is also involved in. Can you suggest whether you think that’s the right sort of approach? Nic: I think teach access is definitely a very solid approach. The problem with it is it doesn’t have enough of a reach yet. It’s not known well enough yet, It hasn’t had the impact that it should have and that's not blaming or making fault with the program itself or the people involved in it. I mean they’re doing a brilliant job but there’s only so much that can be done to be able to reach all the different programs out there. All the nooks and crannies and you know, reach in the States obviously but in Canada and everywhere. India even. We have so many developers coming out of India nowadays that we need to make sure things are reaching out that way as well. Léonie: Absolutely. It does seem like a good approach though, trying to get this into the curricula. Of course [crosstalk] schools. Nic: It’s got to be in the curricula. Absolutely. Léonie: Yeah, I think so. So, looking back, a question now. What's the best thing, or the thing you look back on with the most affection that you’ve accomplished in your time working in accessibility? What are you most proud of? Nic: I can’t think of a single thing that’s, you know, “oh wow, I’m so proud of this”. I haven’t written a book about accessibility and I think there’s a lot of great books out there but it’s something that’s always been in the back of my mind. But  I, you know, I don’t have any single event like that but I think what I’m most proud of is the general accumulation of all the advocacy and the education that I’ve managed to do and get people to perceive accessibility as something being valuable and worth doing and that they actually go in and do. Over the years, over 20 years I don’t know how many dozens or even hundreds of people I’ve been able to influence but I think that that’s to me what I’m most proud of … is getting people to understand just how important accessibility is and that they can do it too. Léonie: I think that that’s a real accomplishment to be proud of. You know if I look back maybe five or six years accessibility was still something that was very much within the accessibility community but now you look at most international conferences for the web … there’s an accessibility feature there. We’ve got all sorts of publications, Smashing magazine, Net magazine, talking and writing about accessibility. Nic: In 2014 I was invited to speak at OSCON conference in- I think it was in Portland then, and they had all these themed tables. So they had software architecture table and they had design table and they had security table but they didn’t have an accessibility table and I said, “Hey”, you know, “you really should have an accessibility range table” and they said, “Oh, yeah, yeah we should” and the following day they had handwritten a sign and suddenly there was an accessibility table. And this year I was invited to speak at O’Reilly Fluent and low and behold there was actually planned ahead of time, and accessibility themed table at lunchtime. Léonie: Excellent Nic: So I’m seeing these kinds of things that are seeping in. I speak at a fairly large number of open source conferences and it’s actually quite rewarding to see that more and more when they list the topics of the things they want to have people pitch talks about, accessibility is more and more one of them, so it’s great. Léonie: And do you get a sense that people who create products, whether they’re designers, UXers, interaction people, developers, really want to get accessibility right but sometimes they're under pressure by perhaps their project managers, their budget, their timelines … to cut some of the corners. Nic: Yeah … it is an issue and I speak to a lot of developers that come to me at conferences particularly that say, “Hey Nic, I want to make this happen but I don’t have the money” or I have project managers that say, “Well it wasn’t part of the brief. The client doesn’t want to pay extra for accessibility” and what I tell these people is, “Do it guerilla accessibility. Do it under the hood. Do it despite what your client wants” and I often say, “Well do you charge extra to your client to have a secure site? Or performing site” and they say, “no” … “So why charge extra to your client for an accessible site? Just make it as part and parcel of your services. And it’s not going to take very long for clients to realize, “Hey! you know, if I go to this design firm they are actually going to give me something that’s going to protect me from liability from accessibility lawsuits so I’m going to pick them”. And if you’re the lone developer that doesn’t have the support necessary to make it happen … well if you include it in what you do you have the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve done what you could and chances are the way you’ve written stuff it’s going to make it to final release and you’re going to have made a difference. Léonie: Yeah, absolutely. So if you think about the web as it is today … what do you consider to be your biggest frustration in accessibility terms? Nic: It’s funny, I knew this question was coming and I can’t really put my finger on one greatest frustration. Definitely what we spoke about already. A little bit is the fact that accessibility is often thought about at the last minute. There’s ... I guess a question of attitudes that I find frustrating. It’s this idea that, “Well, we don’t have anybody with disabilities coming to our website so why should we make it accessible” ... that kind of mindset I find very frustrating. But it’s also at the same time very fun and very rewarding to be able to make people who think like that suddenly realize, “Oh well, actually maybe nobody with disabilities comes to our website because it’s not accessible” or “Maybe I don’t know how many people with disabilities actually come to my website”. So, yeah. I think attitudes is probably the most frustrating thing for me. Léonie: In what sense? Nic: In that sense that accessibility isn’t important. People with disabilities aren’t important. We won’t put priority on accessibility … that kind of mindset is frustrating. Léonie: Yeah, it is. Yeah. Do you think it’s changing? I seem to spend less time these years explaining to people that as a blind person I can and do use technology than I used to perhaps 10 or 20 years ago. Has that changed from your point of view? Nic: Yeah I think people are becoming more aware of things like that. But then you’ll also … not also, but you still get people that question. But a mate of mine who was blind, back in Savannah, GA got really frustrated because people asked him, “So, who picks your clothes in the morning?” and he was really frustrated. And I get really frustrated when I go do grocery shopping and people say, “Oh wow. It’s so good that you’re doing grocery shopping”. And I’m thinking, well it’s not because I’m in a wheelchair that I stop needing to eat. And then people are really surprised that I get in a car and drive and I have a mobility assistance dog and people think he’s a guide dog and I’ve been told, “Whoa whoa whoa, you can’t get behind the wheel of a car. You can’t drive, you’re blind”. Yeah, it’s hilarious when you think about it but when it happens it’s just annoying. So yeah people are getting more aware but you still have pockets here and there of things that you think it should be the ABC and you realize that, no, even as basic as it is you’re still having to educate people. Léonie: I think it’s one of those difficult things isn’t it. People don't know what they don’t know so I’ll try to be patient if I think that’s the case. Nic: Yes Léonie: It’s when you get the deliberately silly questions that I tend to run out of patience. But, you know. Nic: It’s also when you’ve been asked a silly question once on your shopping trip … yeah alright. But when it’s the 12th or 13th or 15th time unfortunately sometimes my patience wears short. I’m never rude with people but sometimes I get a little bit more curt. Léonie: Yeah. And that’s fair enough. That’s just human nature isn’t it. Nic: Yeah, yeah. Léonie: So, back on accessibility, again. Is there something, if you could think of one piece of information that you think is … received wisdom in the industry about accessibility. What would you choose? Nic: I don’t think … I think the question has two different answers depending on context. If we’re talking about within the Web Accessibility community or if w…

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E53 – Interview with Nic Steenhout – Part 1 Aug 16, 2018

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In a role reversal, for the first episode of the second year of the show - I'm the one being interviewed :) Léonie Watson was kind enough to chat with me. It was fun to be on the other side of things :) 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 53. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS and video at Twilio.com. So, this week the roles are reversed. I’m the guest. Yeah. I took the suggestion that the second year of the podcast I should be the one answering the questions I usually ask. So, I asked Léonie Watson to interview me, and she graciously accepted. Hi Léonie Léonie: Hi Nic. It’s great and thank you for the invitation to be the one who gets to reverse the roles on you. Nic: Well, thank you for accepting. I think it’s going to be fun. So, well, here I am. I’m anxiously awaiting your grilling. So, shall we do it? Léonie: Let’s do it. And let’s make it easy. How about you just introduce yourself to the listeners. Nic: Right, so for those of you who don’t know me, I’m Nic. I’m doing web accessibility and I’ve been involved in one way or another with accessibility since the mid-1990’s. I have a background as a disability rights activist. So, before doing web accessibility I was doing physical structure accessibility and accessibility services. Mostly in the United States and New Zealand and so now I work for Knowbility as a web accessibility specialist. I do a lot of public speaking about, strangely enough, accessibility and consulting, training … that kind of stuff. Léonie: Great and you’re very well known to our community and it’s good for those who may not know you to have a little bit of your background. But, I’m going to kick off with the first question and actually ask you … Can you tell us something about yourself that perhaps none of us out there listening to this podcast will know? Nic: Oh, none of you? Oh, that’s … See, I could tell you that I’m actually a chef by trade. It’s what I started my life as when I left school. But some of you may know that, so, that’s not ‘none of you’. Well, there you go. I actually spent about four years of my life in West Africa. Léonie: Wow Nic: I was born in Greece and I’m from a Belgium father and a French Canadian mother so I’m a bit of a Heinz 57 mix. Léonie: That’s great and really interesting to find that out. Particularly that you started off life as a chef. I think there’s a lot of people in our industry who started off in one career and then found their way into accessibility. Through many different routes. What was it that got you into the web and accessibility? Nic: Well I became a wheelchair user in my mid 20’s and I was lucky enough to be spending some time in Chicago and I didn’t have anything to do with myself while I was waiting for my Green card to come through and I decided to volunteer in a centre for dependant living. A non-profit operated for and by people with disabilities. Non-residential. So I became involved there and very soon after I started volunteering there I was able to start working there and I had a colleague- one colleague, Horatio, he was blind and one day he walked into my office, he was really livid. He said, “Nic, you’re dealing with the web, right?” and I said, “Yeah”. He says, “So, why is it I go on a webpage and my screen reader says, “Image, image, image, image, image, image, image, image, image, image” So, I looked at the webpage and this was the time when we didn’t really have CSS to design anything and the designer thought it was a great idea to create designs in Photoshop and slice the menu, that has a very nice font and use that for the menu. So it was totally unusable. So that was my first kind of aha moment about web accessibility. I had been playing with HTML for awhile but I had been doing a lot of physical buildings, built environment accessibility audits. A couple of weeks later I had a consumer come to me and she said, “Nic, I love the web but I’m having such a hard time because I have ADHD and all the different font sizes, colors, flashing things-- I mean, at the time the marquis tag was still in use, which it should've been criminal but- she was really struggling. So we sat together and basically we created a user style sheet. A little bit of a CSS Reset kind of thing for her to basically reset everything to manageable sizes and colors that weren’t distracting to her. And the last bit, so it kind of like happened in three events in the space of about a month. My deaf services coordinator at the time came into the office and asked me to help her setting up her printer because the instructions with her printer came on a video on a CD Rom. And of course, there were no captions for the CD, so that really was like I, you know pushed into the deep end of the cold water pool to say, “Hey! You care about accessibility but you haven't really thought about web accessibility and 20 something-- 25 years later, here I am. Léonie: And of course, the accessibility and digital on the web, people were thinking about it but it certainly wasn’t a commonplace thing if you’re talking mid 90’s, it took another four or five years before we got the first set of web content accessibility guidelines Nic: Yeah Léonie: Was it something you thought you could change, influence, improve? Is that what appealed to you? Nic: I think what appealed to me was really this feeling that for me accessibility is important. I like to have everybody be able to participate and access. Whether it’s access to information, entertainment, services, whichever and I really care about that as a whole and I thought that there was so much to be done because on the web really there's no reason to have barriers so I was thinking, well, it’s difficult for me to go to the grocery store and it’s difficult for Horatio to go to the grocery store but if Peapod is online, a grocery shopping service is online, why can’t we make it accessibility so it's actually easier for everybody to do that. So it wasn’t so much in terms of changing the world, but trying to pass a message a little bit at a time. Doing-- being an evangelist … advocate about accessibility. Léonie: And do you think the message is getting out there? Is it working? Nic: Sometimes it feels like it’s one step forward and two steps back. It’s been two decades that we are advocating and we are saying, “look, you’ve got to deal with the alt attribute on the images. You have got to do something about that.” And I would’ve hoped-- if I placed myself back 20 years I would’ve hoped that this was not a message that we would still have to put through. I would have hoped that a senior VP of user experience would actually understand how a screen reader handles images. How resizing text is important. How color contrast-- and I’m sorry if your branding is so poor that it’s got not contrast but it’s not just about people with low vision, it’s about you on your phone outside in full sun. All these things, I would’ve thought we would’ve been further along and been able to actually focus on really complex, juicy accessibility issues like tabbed interface or what not. Léonie: Yeah I think that’s right. I remember in the earlier days of my experience accessibility we had great hopes that as the population aged as those of us who were younger then moved into more senior positions within companies and as we aged there would be more natural understanding of some of the challenges out there and I think that’s happening to a certain extent but-- What do you think? Nic: It is happening, there's been a flurry of lawsuits in the United States in the last 18 months or so and I’m not particularly fond of making change through lawsuits but sometimes it’s what raises awareness of the issues, you know, people saying, “Oh, well, so and so is getting sued. Maybe I’m going to get sued, I need to have a look”. But more and more I actually interact with clients that obviously they’re interested in making sure they don’t have any liability but they approach it more and more from a corporate social responsibility approach. They want to do the right thing and they want to do the right thing right. Which to me is always refreshing when that happens. To go beyond the standards, beyond the guideline and make sure things are actually working for clients, visitors, people actually using their apps or systems. Léonie: And that's when it moves from being something that has to be done into something that's done because you want your product to be the best that it can be. Nic: Yeah Léonie: People put time and money into choosing the best fabrics, or the right materials .. you know, the right platforms and technologies for all sorts of things. I really think, and I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s where accessibility needs to be. It’s part of making a really damn good product. Nic: Yeah. It certainly is. For a long time people were not really conscious about the need for security and obviously there's more and more consciousness about security. Performance is a massive aspect about developing apps and websites and I think that we have to have accessibility considered in the same way as security and performance, right from the start of the project and just weave it in so tightly that it’s just part of what we do. Léonie: Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more. So, in your introduction at the start, you mentioned that you spent some time as an accessibility activist. Nic: Yeah Léonie: What sort of thing does that involve? What did it involve? Nic: Oh, well, this was mid-1990’s. In the United States, there was a lot of issues with people with disabilities being forced in nursing homes rather than living in their own homes just because they could not afford modifications of the apartment for accessibility or they couldn’t afford a personal care attendant when they needed it, or, any number of reasons. So we had at the time, something like 21% of people living in nursing homes were below the age of 40 just because they had a disability-- Léonie: Wow Nic: -And, yeah, it’s mind-boggling. And of course, people were just really, what’s the word I’m looking for … they were in the dumps about that. Obviously. So we were working to establish programs to deinstitutionalize people. So make sure that those people that wanted to go back and live in the community could. So make sure that the money that was assigned to them did not go straight to the nursing home but was given to them to handle and manage how they want. So instead of costing, maybe $100,000 to keep someone in a nursing home, they could be spending maybe $35- $40,000 for them to live in their own homes in the community with the same level of support. So, a lot of that advocacy involved talking to legislatures … which was more advocacy than lobbying it was really doing education and once the legislatures met with us then we were able to explain the issues, but often also the legislatures would not want to meet us and then we would do protests. And so we would gather in front of their buildings, call the press and make the message heard. So that was one kind of advocacy. I’ve had some real fun participating in actions organized by adapt, a disability rights group in the US and then-- it’s very powerful when you’re one of 3,4, 500 people with disabilities all protesting. It’s a very empowering feeling to know that-- yeah, that’s that. And of course, there’s more mild things like doing training, doing presentations to whether it’s a hospital or city council about what accessibility is and why it’s important and how they can do small things to impact greatly some people. Léonie: And it must be great to look back on the more active activism-- that is if I can phrase it that way, With a sense of accomplishment because things have changed. How do you see your role now within accessibility? Nic: I’m certainly a lot more tamed than I was in my younger, foolisher days. I, you know, there’s still space for a bit more in your face activism but I’m approaching things in the more-- in a less confrontational manner, nowadays. I think that you approach people first with the assumption that if they’re not implementing accessibility it’s not because they don’t want to but that they just don’t know about it. They’re lacking that awareness of things. And from there you take steps to educate and then you start tightening the screws when nothing changes. Maybe you’ve seen that on Twitter but I’ve been on a campaign to try to make Patreon accessible, it is horrible from an accessibility perspective and it’s the only platform of it’s kind. I actually have my podcast on Patreon and it really hurts me that it’s not accessible to a lot of people that are in interested in the podcast and can’t participate in one way or another so, I've been working with them ,or trying to work with them, for more than a year now and the more I try to get them to change things the less they respond so I’m ready to see some stronger activity than, “Hey, you should do this because it’s the right thing and it’s not that difficult” so, yeah, I think today I approach things less confrontationally and more in the spirit of education and working together. Léonie: Yeah, makes sense. I think it’s also about choosing the right approach for the moment, isn’t it? Nic: Yeah. Yeah, yeah it definitely is the right approach for the moment and the approach can change over time with the circumstances and the context. Léonie: I remembered being asked to-- about this, years ago and actually saying the one thing that will drive me to my lawyer is not necessarily finding that something’s inaccessible in the first place-- Nic: Yeah Léonie: -- but it’s the getting the wrong reaction when I report the problem. Nic: That’s exactly right. Yes. Léonie: Yes, absolutely. So, clearly, you’ve had a great career in accessibility taking you through many different roles. What do you think you would have done in life if you hadn’t have fallen into accessibility? Would you have carried on as a chef or chosen a different path do you think? Nic: I very likely would’ve remained as a chef. It’s interesting because looking backwards I think professional cooking is a sport for young people who work extremely long hours in a stressful environment. You work evenings, you work weekends, you work all the holidays and it’s a very physically and mentally tough career. It doesn’t pay very much unless you become really top of your game and you’re a celebrity chef just about. But it’s so rewarding. It allows you to express your creative interests. It’s just really cool and I still cook but it’s not the same to cook at home for two or maybe five, six, seven people and know that you are going be feeding 200 people in an hour. It’s not the same thing, and I really love that. So, chances I would still be cooking nowadays, yeah. Léonie: It sounds like we can probably draw some parallels between the two careers. I think there's a lot about accessibility that’s rewarding, incredibly difficult, time-consuming … Nic: Yeah, yeah. I-- you know one of the things that I joke about once in a while is that being a chef taught me about an agile mindset before agile was a thing in computers because it’s being able to pivot and plan and all these things. So, in many ways cooking taught me transferable skills that I’m actually using today. Léonie: that makes sense actua…

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E52 – Interview with Eric Meyer – Part 2 Aug 09, 2018

Show notes

Eric says that accessibility "is a foundational principle of the web. Like literally the web is built on accessibility. The original specs don’t necessarily call it that, but that’s an organizing principle of the web. And to try to ignore it or overcome it is a lot like trying to paddle upstream". 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 52. Oh my! 52 weeks of podcasting about accessibility. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you are 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.  In this episode, I’m continuing my conversation with Eric Meyer. Last show was really awesome, we talked a lot about where we’ve been and maybe today we are going to talk a little bit more about where we are going. Hi Eric, thanks for joining me again. Eric: Hello! Thanks for having me back. Nic: Yeah, So- We were talking last week about-- your views of accessibility that haven't really changed in about forming new people and we were talking a little bit about achievement in terms of web accessibility. So let's flip that question and go down the path of … What have you done that you regret most in terms of web accessibility in your career? Eric: Focus {outline: 0} in the first CSS reset. It’s far and away the biggest one. Nic: I have to say that I routinely end up swearing at you in my own head when I do accessibility audits. And I see that and I go back to clients and they say, “Oh but but but Eric Meyer did that”. So yeah- Eric: Did you show them the comment that I had in here [unintelligible 02:05] coz, right, so-- For those who aren’t familiar with the history, I’ll just very quickly sketch it. So I wrote this thing called a CSS Reset. The idea of which was to have all browsers be on a level playing field. By removing margins and font sizing and all that stuff. And the idea was that people would take that reset and then tune it to their own, what I think-- what I call Reboot. So normalized .css is actually an example of a reboot style sheet Nic: Yeah Eric: That’s a modified reset, right. So that instead of just, ”Let's make all the text look the same, like literally all the same size and weight and everything. Normalize is a reboot in that it says ok let's make things look nice. Basic but nice. And it has font faces and sizes and a background colour for the body. That’s not-- that’s what I thought people would do and it’s what I encouraged them to do with the reset was adapted but people would just take it and slap it in wholesale and then override things. So, anyway. There's a point in that original reset where I said-- so I’ve forgotten exactly, but a:link, a:visited, sorry a:focus {outline:0}, or outline: none. Now there’s a comment right next to it that says, “Remember to set a focus” Set a focus style. But what I was thinking was, well I’m clearing the decks and this needs to-- I need to clear the decks here too and then I’ll just remind people to create an outline that fits in with the design they’re creating. Well, people didn’t. Nic: People rarely read the manual, right? They just-- Eric: Yeah, yeah. And I made naive assumptions about how it would get used and a part of it is that the CSS- the original Rest got pasted into the top of the default Wordpress theme. And it’s persisted for, I don’t-- I’m not sure if they’ve updated to the newer reset since then but it persisted for years. Like, literally 2011 or 2010 or whatever the first-- I think 2010 was the first one. And it was just right there. And it actually is a literal paste because it has the URL of the page on my web so I still get emailed to this day on about a monthly basis saying, “Your theme doesn’t work can you help me fix it?” and it’s a theme I’ve never heard of and it’s just because whoever developed the theme saw this in the default Wordpress theme and just kept doing it. Anyway, so in CSS Reset version two, which is a few years old now I set an explicit focus. But I feel badly myself everytime I see it in a style sheet so you’re absolutely warranted in swearing at me. I just-- Nic: Yeah, yeah but it’s mostly tongue in cheek. It’s-- I think that the idea of the CSS reset was brilliant and my-- I guess my moment of enlightenment about accessibility came in three phases, The first time was a colleague who was a screen reader user who was-- he came to me and he said “Nic why is it that my screen reader get’s on this page and it says image image image image image image image?” And it was at a time when we had no other ways than using a Photoshop slice of nice looking fonts for menu items so this page was using all images and no alt for the menu and the last part of that enlightenment for me was when a friend of mine with quite severe ADHD could actually not function on the web because of all the different font sizes and colours and I basically wrote for her a-- which was a user style sheet that she was able to reset her own stuff. Eric: Nice Nic: So when I saw your thing I thought, “Oh yeah”, I wasn’t too far off because Eric Meyer is doing something like that so that really worked, It’s just one of those unfortunate things that people did not read the comment that you have to fix it before you release it to the wild, so-- Eric: Yeah, and if I had developed that after I developed a design for real life maybe I would’ve caught it. Well, co-wrote, excuse me I didn’t write design for real life by myself. But maybe I would've thought through all of those scenarios and thought to myself, “ Given what I know of programmers how many of them are going to read the comments”. But I just, I didn't-- Nic: Yeah, It’s the thing that when we are young we don’t know what we are doing and when we are a bit older we have more wisdom but we can’t go back and fix our mistakes from youth.  What would you say your greatest frustration is in terms of web accessibility? Eric: Well, okay, besides the thing we just talked about. Because it does frustrate me that I can’t send an email that ever used the reset and just say “look, fix this”.  But anyway, that’s what I get for not using a license I guess. My biggest frustration in terms of web accessibility, I think it’s still that-- I think it’s the lack of a proper document outline. I know we had the document outline algorithm and then it just-- it failed. And so I guess taking half a step back my biggest frustration is Heading levels. Which the document outline algorithm was supposed to fix. And because I-- when I’m creating content-- like at the beginning of this year I just redesigned my web and I live streamed the whole thing, well almost the entire thing. And there's a whole section where I’m-- I’m just talking aloud to myself about what am I supposed to do about Heading levels? Because on some pages the name of the site should be an h1, but not many. On most of them, something else should be the h1 and then on a blog-- on a specific blog post page, like on the individual permalink page for a blog post, the post title should be the h1. But then on the home page where I summar-- like I have the most recent ones, those should be h2’s and what am I supposed to do here? And it just it gets-- I Mean, I came up with solutions that mostly involve wrapping the post in a PHP function that I pass a parameter saying you should do this or you should do this and it spits out the title as either an h1 or an h2 depending. But then what do I do with the headings inside of the post, if I have subheadings. Like, I almost never write subheadings in my posts specifically because of this because if I make them h3’s on some pages it’s going to go from an h1 to an h3 with no intervening h2 and what the hell am I supposed to do about that;. So that frustrates me immensely, And it frustrates me more that there was a solution and it died. I think. Nic: It is quite frustrating and I have to say that this heading levels proper document outline is one of the issues that I encounter a lot doing accessibility audits and I have to explain to people that we have two thirds of screen reader users actually rely on headings not only to understand the structure of a page but to navigate the page itself. So, then we have skipped heading levels or it just doesn't make sense and suddenly we have visitors trying to understand, well,"Am I missing something? Or is it an error on the site? Or what is it? What’s the problem? Why am I not seeing what I am expecting to see?” So I fully understand your frustration on that front there.  What do you think the number one reason is for people to fail at implementing accessibility for people with disabilities? Eric: Well I think the number one reason is just not having any experience either personally or indirectly. They haven't run their site through a screen reader, they haven't had a friend who came to them and said, “why am I only hearing image image image image image”. Whatever that reason, they haven't had those kinds of things. I think-- I feel like, let me put it that way, It’s not I think, I feel like that comes back to a lack of teaching that sort of thing in University courses. I'm sure there's some University courses that covers this beautifully but I feel like a lot of courses, including boot camps those sorts of things, they don't-- they're not talking about this. From the perspective of, “Hey the web is supposed to be maximally accessible”. Like if you're not thinking of this first you're not doing your job right. That's not what they're doing.  The vocational class that I ended up teaching, I talked about last week briefly, that’s why I took the approach that I did, it sort of came out of all of this. But I think most courses are “Here’s a webpage, here are the tags you need. h1 through h6 are heading levels. Let’s move on”. And not take a minute to talk about, “Hey, this is how these are used and this is why they’re important”. You can pitch it for people’s self-interest by saying, “Google cares about the heading levels”. Whether or not that's actually true at the moment I’m never sure because Google keeps changing. You can do that, but when you get down to it really the thing you want to keep stressing is, maximally accessible to the maximum number of people. And that’s not-- I feel like that’s not stressed in this training because we keep coming and, if it were, then we wouldn't keep seeing people saying, “ Here I deployed a one-page site using 16 frameworks and no HTML and it’s awesome”. Right? Because they would've taken a different approach to figuring out how to do that.  I think that-- I mean, I think that’s the reason. And for those of you out there who are doing your training and pressing the proper use of these things on your students. Salute, like, 21 cannon salute to you, but, you’re very outnumbered and it probably frustrates the people like that too. Nic: When I was doing physical building accessibility way back when, one of the things that had really surprised me was that folks who are studying architecture are given about four-hour tuition about accessibility over their four-year course. And I think perhaps a lot of computer science degrees these days are doing the equivalent. This teach access which is trying to change things but overall I think that the amount of tuition in formal computer science degrees is really limited. And we do have boot camps here and there and introduction web design that stuff that mentions it but I think you’re right. We need to take the time to actually explain to people what it is and why it's important, Eric: Yeah and you know, these days if it’s not on Youtube the kids probably won’t see it. Nic: That's a little silly! Eric: It is a little bit but I also have kids. And to flip it around Jen Simmons has gotten enormous traction with her Layout Land series when it comes to layout. She talks about accessibility. And it’s certainly woven into everything Jen does because Jen gets it. I've been talking with her over the year and she's just like ...it’s amazing how many people are seeing this. It’s really made a huge difference. She's reaching more people via YouTube than she ever has via MDN or any other written source. So, you know, maybe there needs to be that, you know, The Wacky Web Accessibility channel or something.  I’m sorry that sounds like I’m making fun of Jen’s channel which I’m totally not. I’m just sort of thinking of the-- Nic: Absolutely Eric: “Let’s do a ‘Let’s Play’ of accessibility!” Because that's what kids watch. Nic: Well, it’s like we need gimmicks now to get-- to catch people's attention. Eric: I know, we get oursel-- we get it into, like, [indecipherable 16:20] stuff on news sites. Nic: What do you think the greatest challenge is for the field of accessibility moving forward? In five years, 10 years ... Eric: I think it’s still going to be education. It’s going to be the same challenge it’s been since the web started. It’s education, communication. Passing this on, like getting it out to the most people. That’s always been the challenge. I mean, I’ve seen this as a conference speaker and organizer that the accessibility talk usually suffers a ratings penalty from the audience. It’s a very, very rare accessibility speaker that can overcome that. On a five-point scale it’s probably at least a half a point and possibly a full point knocked off what the rating otherwise should be. Just because of the topic, and you know, people-- I think probably correctly, for the most part, people are afraid they’re not doing it right. And then they don’t want to be reminded. And there can be exceptions. I’ve seen fantastic accessibility presentations. But I saw a fantastic accessibility presentation- oh god it’s been almost 10 years ago now that Derek Featherstone did, where he did a cold open. And it’s not the accessibility component, it’s just the way that he did his talk. He literally started in medias res, he started in the middle of a scenario. Nic: Yeah Eric: It was amazing. I still think of that talk and I still think of the chills I got when I understood what he was doing and saying and like, what the situation he was describing was. I literally got goosebumps up and down my arms. As I got it. And I think of that actually, sometimes I’ve done my own talk sort of in that way and it’s always effective. And it was a fantastic talk. It had so much in it. And I got to see the ratings later and they were-- it was just-- there’s no way the ratings should have been that low. Not that he scored terribly. It’s just-- I was like, there’s no way that this is correct. This suffered the accessibility penalty. And you know, as conference organizers, unless you’re doing a literal accessibility conference .. then that’s a whole different thing. Nic: Yeah, well that’s quite different. I was lucky enough to actually do a couple of keynotes for PHP, you know, Sunshine PHP in Florida and Midwest PHP. So I did the closing keynote at Midwest in Minneapolis this year- Eric: Nice Nic: -and it really was really well received but I think that some conferences are starting to actually see more and more people talking about accessibility in a way that’s not so much, “Oh, you’re doing it wrong” but on more of a … “Let’s go forward together and let’s make it happen properly”. Eric: Yeah certainly, yeah Nic: And I think that perhaps…

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E51 – Interview with Eric Meyer – Part 1 Aug 02, 2018

Show notes

Eric talks about accessibility, of course, and semantics, and frameworks, and more! The web prioritises ubiquity over consistency and a lot of these-- there have been a lot of attempts to prioritise consistency over ubiquity. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the A11y Rules Podcast. This is episode 51. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another, with web accessibility. If you are 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. Hello everyone, so this week I am speaking with Eric Meyer. Eric, thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility. Eric: Thanks for having me. Nic: I like to let guests introduce themselves. So, in a brief introduction, who is Eric Meyer? Eric: I’m a-- I mean, this is a difficult question to answer sometimes. When I meet people out in the world and they say “What do you do?”, I always struggle for an answer, but, I guess the best answer is that I’m a technical Author and explainer. I’ve written a number of books about CSS, co-founded web design and development, sort of, education conference with Jeffrey Zeldman. When I say education conference, I mean that we-- our goal is to have people come away from every talk with something that they’ve learned and something they can put to use-- Nic: Right Eric: --Doesn’t necessarily mean exactly higher ed, although we have higher ed people come. I have a family, live in Cleveland, Ohio. I really like it here, even when it is hot and humid. And, I don’t know, I guess I’m someone who has been working on the web for a really long time, still finds it fascinating, compelling, something worth advancing. Even with all the downsides And someone who hopes I can continue contributing to that conversation. Nic: Well you certainly have contributed your fair share over the years and I want to thank you for that, and I’m sure that pretty much all my listeners will be very thankful for all your work. Eric: Well, I mean, I hope it was useful. That was really always the goal was to either-- well it was to be useful in one way or the other. Either to help people understand something they didn’t understand before or give them a thing that is useful to them. And, you know, I’ve had my stumbles along the way, we might talk about that later, but, yeah. Yeah. Nic: To get warmed up a little bit, tell us something that most people would not know about you. Eric: Well, Something that most people would not know about me? My first job was working at a McDonalds in, just outside of Mansfield, Ohio. Which is where I grew-- I grew up in that area. I grew up actually in and just south of Lexington, Ohio which is south of Mansfield, Ohio. Most people will not have heard of any of those but I-- when I was hired, for my first seven months, I worked the fry station because it was a busy enough, and demanding enough McDonalds that you started out on the fry station and then if you proved that you were capable of working and learning you might get promoted to the grill. And then if you were really good, you might get promoted to cashier. And if you were really, really good you might get promoted to working the drive-through. I never made the drive-through, I did-- by the time I was done with my two and a half years of work there, I did manage to land some time on the cash register. But-- Nic: We do have something in common, that we have both worked in food service before. And although I didn’t actually work at McDonald's I took the option of going for the apprenticeship and became a chef and all that-- Eric: Oh wow. Nic: -- good stuff, but I have a few friends that were with me in cooking school that said that McDonald's didn’t really teach them to cook but it taught them organization, it taught them being able to think on their feet and all these things. Do you think you have transportable skills that you learned from McDonald's that you’re still using today? Eric: I think what I took away most from McDonald's, I mean, not to contradict your friends, I agree that learning to think on your feet and also being able to worth within a system without switching your brain off, are things I learned. But I think what I took away from it most was an appreciation for what people in the service industry do and, this-- the many constraints that they work under often. And that also, that gives me a perspective on, sometimes people talk about web design and web development as a service industry and I always sort of itch at that a little because I think to myself, no, I’ve worked in service, this is not that. We do provide services, but to conflate that with what is generally thought of as the service industry I think sometimes does a disservice because we have a lot-- generally, have a lot more flexibility. I mean, I’m sure everyone's had a client where they tell you exactly what to do and if you try to be creative they snarl at you about who's paying your [laughter] salary and then you just do it, right. And then you try to get away from that client as quickly as possible. But most of the time it’s, you know, at McDonald's management was not interested in me asking, “when we say we are making a hamburger, what problem are we really trying to solve?” [laughter]. There’s no room for that. There’s just, “We need six hamburgers right now”, or 12 or 24 or whatever, it’s not like, I worked in a McDonald's where sometimes it was busy enough that it was not unusual to hear a call for 96 hamburgers on the grill. Nic: Ouch Eric: Yeah, because four tour buses would pull up, and it would just be like, “We’ve got four hamburgers ready to go. Put 96 down”. And we would, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, right, right. And everyone scrambles. You start out slow and you learn to be fast, and, anyway. Nic: I guess it’s better busy than bored. Eric: Yeah, and the other thing I think I took away from it was teamwork. Nic: Yeah Eric: The ability to work in a team, even when some members of the team might be less than pleased with you Right? [laughter]. Nic: Yeah Eric: I remember when I was early on the grill, you know, when I got moved to the grill and I was sort of early in that process. I was slow. Right, I mean, I didn’t really know where everything was. I had this thing where it was like, you have to put the ketchup and the mustard exactly in the middle of the bun or else it’s not right. And, yeah, you learn quickly how to do that faster and maybe-- you know, communicate with other members of the team. If the guys who is literally on the grill, cooking the 96 hamburger patties is getting close to them being done and he needs dressed buns to put them on, he’s going to let you know and you communicate back if you’re ready or not. So-- Nic: Yeah, yeah, yeah Eric: That whole teamwork thing definitely came out of there, and I’m sure you learn that as a chef as well. Nic: Yeah, teamwork. Absolutely. Well, the main point of this general conversation today is talking about web accessibility and for some reason every time I talk to somebody else for the podcast I hear a variation on the definition. I’d love to hear- How would you define web accessibility, Eric? Eric: I define it as getting the most information available to the most number of people, the greatest number of people. So, if that means, making it so that screen readers are happier with your content so that people who use screen readers can get all of your content. That's web accessibility. If it means not relying on Javascript as much as possible so that as much of what you’re trying to get to people comes through. Even if they don’t have Javascript, that's accessibility. Keeping your bandwidth consumption low so that people in low bandwidth situations, that’s accessibility. The web was fundamentally designed to be accessible, in as many contexts as possible. So, that how I design web accessibility, it’s just, can the person who is trying to get your stuff, get it? If they can, it's accessible and if they can’t then it's not. Nic: Yeah. Bottom line, that’s what it is about. It’s about people being able to access the content you’re putting out. So, you’re not doing accessibility day in, day out like some of us do, you know, we are accessibility wonks and that’s what we do. What would you say your role is in the greater scheme of web accessibility? Eric: I think it’s advocating for the principles that I just talked about. I just recently, unexpectedly found myself doing a three day web development training class, and so I thought it was going to be three days but each day would be 30 minutes and I got there and they said, “So, three days, right?” and I was like, “Yeah, three days of talks”, and they said, “Yeah, three full days” and I said, “Oh, okay” [laughter]. This was a volunteer situation so I didn’t have to renegotiate what I-- there was no rate. Nic: Right, right Eric: Like there was no contract to renegotiate. And I was happy to do it, but I was-- what I stressed from the outset was, the web is designed to be- I didn’t use the words accessible but designed to be as robust as possible and if you’re going to do this-- because I was talking to who were effectively high school vocational students. So if you’re going to do this for a career, this is what you need to know [laughter]. Along with that, what people might think of as the more traditional accessibility bits, if I-- in fact I was acting with a website just yesterday that’s basically completely unusable on my iPhone SE because content is overlapping. And I’m trying to complete a form to schedule an appointment and there's this red banner across the top telling me that this is where I should schedule my appointment and I can’t because that banner is covering up the stuff and I can’t , I kept trying to pull the page down so that I could let go and tap before it snapped back up on me Nic: [laughter] Eric: Right? So basically I’m going to call them later today and I’m going to say, “Oh, by the way, your web form, your online scheduling thing that I tried to use because that’s what you recommend, completely unusable and you need to fix it”. Nic: Yeah Eric: So, those sorts of things. And just in general if I see an online-- in the general online conversation somebody says “bah accessibility” or widespread access those are edge cases to point out how they’re not. Nic: Yeah Eric: I don’t see a lot of that I have to say, but they might-- that’s probably just a function of where-- who I’ve followed and who follows me and the sort of places I look. I’m not-- I have to admit, I’m not out there looking for opinions to contradict. I’m not searching for people seeing accessibility as pointless in order to correct them. It’s just if it comes in front of me I’ll speak up Nic: Well there's enough cats to heard as it is without actually going looking for trouble Eric: [laughing] Yeah Nic: How did you become aware of the importance of accessibility? Because it’s probably not something that as you started building the web, building your approach to CSS and all that. It’s probably not something that immediately jumped out at you. Eric: Actually to some degree I think it did immediately jump out at me. I started out on the web when I was working for Case Western Reserve University, which is a private university in Cleveland. It’s actually the University I graduated from and then I immediately went to work for them in an attempt to earn back all the tuition money I had given them [laughter]. Which worked. I had to hang around longer than four years to make that happen, but it worked. It was 1993 when my coworker and longtime friend, Jim Nauer showed me a early beta of Mosaic, and I got really psyched by it and started, like, “how do I do this?” and he said, “well, here’s a link to HTML 2.0 specification. That's what we’ve got.” I said, “great!” [laughter] So anyway, I quickly got really into it, became the first dedicated campus webmaster, back when we called ourselves that. Nic: Yeah, I remember those days. Eric: Right? And at the time there was no presentational control from the author's point of view. So when I started out, literally the closest we got to presentational control was H1’s were usually big and B was usually bold-- or strong, sorry. Nic: B at the time, I don’t think we had strong at the time. Eric: Oh yeah you might be right. Well whatever you write, that’s usually bold and the pre-formatted usually looked like-- we said at the time it looked like a TTY. I guess sometimes people still say that. So there wasn’t that sense of control and it was more-- all you could was structure stuff. You could structure things semantically, or you could try to subvert the semantic nature of the mark up in order to try to create a presentational effect, but, browsers didn’t have consistent presentational effects and in fact mosaic at the time had these preferences where, as the user, you could say what H1’s looked like and what H2’s looked like, and what H3’s looked like. You could set the font face, size and colour. So most people, once they found that preference, made H1’s tiny and H6’s huge. They inverted the size. And you would go surfing around the web and be like, “oh look at the tiny H1, that’s hilarious haha”. Because there wasn’t a lot to do in those days, and then you would quickly revert it because that was terrible. So there was that aspect of things where everything was semantic, there wasn’t really an option of this is what I want this to look like and therefore it will, the only thing you could do was just make a big image and load that. And at the time with the internet speeds we had, like, 640 by 480 gif because we didn't’ even have jpeg support at that point, would take a minute or two to load and some people did that because there weren't many websites. The other thing was working on a college campus, and especially at one like Case where they have a strong Sciences component. The engineering department, the math department, the computer science department and so on, physics department. There were these professors who knew more about computers than I did. Probably had their own IRIX workstation, and they had some bespoke compiled version of some browser I’ve never heard of and if I put up a webpage and they couldn’t read it, i would hear about it. There was a guy in the math department particularly, I’m not going to name names but, there was a professor in the math department who had this-- I don’t even remember what the browser was anymore but it was like, you know, it wasn’t even Viola or Cello or one of the obscure ones that people know about. I don’t think-- whatever he was running, I don’t think it has a Wikipedia article. And I would hear from him, because we would put up the course catalogue. It was one of our first big projects and there was some weirdness to it. He could read it, but it looked a little weird. And I would hear about it. And that really sort of reinforced the-- it’s a big wide campus, with a lot of different user agents, a lot of different people coming and they would want to be able to get this information and that’s what I’m here for. So that was sort of, hammered into me early, just by experience. Nic: Do you think that those of us that are so ancient that we remember HTML 2, that we really were forced to focus on the semantics of the page and then understand these things like page structures and all that. Do you think we have an advantage over newbie code…

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