Devon Persing and I talk a little bit about burnout in the web accessibility industry.
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Transcript
Nic:
Welcome to the Accessibility Rules podcast. This is episode 95. Hey, only a few more episodes and we’ll be hitting the show’s 100th episode. How fantastic is that? 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 transcript, head out to the podcast website, https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Gatsby for sponsoring this episode. Gatsby is a modern website framework that builds performance into every website by leveraging the latest web technologies. Create blazing fast, compelling apps and websites without needing to become a performance expert.
Nic:
This week I’m continuing my conversation with Devon Persing. Last week was really cool. She told me about an idea that I had not quite voiced in my own head, which was that the idea of accessibility as compliance is a model that doesn’t really capture the whole picture of accessibility, and then when we think about accessibility in those terms, we are really limiting the way we can actually take up accessibility at all stages of a project. That was really a good idea. Anyway, Devon, welcome back.
Devon:
Thank you.
Nic:
We finished last week on a high note, talking about greatest achievement. Let’s flip the coin and ask you: what’s your greatest frustration, in terms of web accessibility?
Devon:
One thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is the idea that it’s simple, and I think this comes from the eight billion articles about ARIA that are just everywhere now, and I think two things. Less than a few years or so, the biggest take-up of accessibility discussion online has been for developers. Developers obviously like a technical solution. They like code snippets, they like prototypes, they like working examples, and so there’s been a lot of emphasis on building stuff, and lot of emphasis on building stuff with ARIA specifically to the point where I talked to developers who think that for something to be accessible it has to have ARIA.
Devon:
They don’t really know what it’s doing. They don’t really know who it’s actually for or what tools actually access it. But they read an article about ARIA and so they know that they’re supposed to use ARIA. And that’s when you get things like button tags that have a role of button, which isn’t the worst, but also is completely unnecessary. There’s been a saturation of technical knowledge or technical information that isn’t inaccurate but isn’t really that helpful and doesn’t give people the context of when to use those solutions and when not to. It’s also pushed the narrative that: accessibility is a technical problem.
Devon:
Some things are, a lot of things aren’t. That has been challenging too. When I talk to designers or content strategists about accessibility work, it’s much more difficult to find resources for them because most of the articles are like, “Here’s the 97th article about color contrast.” There’s only so many ways to talk about that, but it’s also much more difficult to talk about workflows and tab order and interactions from a design perspective. It makes things a little bit easier as more designers are using more live prototyping tools, things like Figma and Sketch versus more static tools like Photoshop. But I do still see a lot of that emphasis, that misunderstanding, that accessibility is a technical problem that’s to be solved by developers.
Nic:
Yeah. ARIA all the things, right?
Devon:
Right. “If you put ARIA on it, it works.” And then I like asking people, “What is this for?” And then they’re not quite sure or they’re also just not aware of accessibility beyond screen errors, a thing that comes up with that a lot as well. They think that screeners equal accessibility.
Nic:
Yeah. I was really interested to see the one million report that WebAIM did that showed that the top 65% of sites that had accessibility errors were also the size that had the most ARIA peppered throughout. That was interesting.
Devon:
Yeah. Analog of the issues of that report raised were the same issues we’ve had for years. It was missing all attributes, poor color contrast, things that are very easy to catch and things that are very easy to not do, but also they’re the same problems we’ve been seeing for decades.
Nic:
Yeah. Do you think there’s something that everyone knows about accessibility? A conventional wisdom?
Devon:
Once people hear what the word means, and I’ve also talked to people that were like, “Well what does that mean?” Because it’s also a word that’s used in many different ways. So when I explain what digital accessibility is, or what web accessibility is, they’re like, “Oh!” People that aren’t as technical or aren’t as involved in web work might think that that will just all be taken care of in some fashion. Or they say, “I’ve never thought about that.” They’ve never thought about how someone might use a digital technology without their hands or without their vision, et cetera. So for some people it’s eyeopening, but it’s also, for some people, they’re just like, “Well, why doesn’t that just work?” And then they really don’t want to hear about accessibility APIs and browsers. They don’t want to hear about that. So then trying to explain why it doesn’t work gets difficult.
Devon:
From a lay person perspective, it’s very confusing. I guess it’s not surprising that when people find out that they’re being sued for ADA noncompliance, or what have you, that it seems weird that that’s something that’s not just taken care of. Or why do we have to do ‘extra work’ to meet these guidelines? That is still a challenge: trying to explain it to those folks that aren’t bought in and don’t understand how digital products are made. They are throwing stuff at teams and just see magical webpages come out of them basically. That is still difficult, because those are the folks that do a quick Google search and are like, “Oh look, they should just put some ARIA on it.” That’s why we often just see people putting ARIA on things because they don’t have time and they’re just doing it to make their boss happy, unfortunately.
Nic:
Yeah. What do you think the number one reason is for most people to fail at implementing web accessibility, other than there’s two billion ARIA articles out there?
Devon:
People aren’t given enough time. They’re not always given time to learn on the job. They’re not always given time to really focus on their craft. Teams are encouraged to work so fast and put out content so frequently that people never come back to do improvements. They have to move on to the next thing. Even if we know that there’s issues and we know that we need to fix them, they stay in the backlog forever. Not just for accessibility. That’s a general problem around testing and workflow and process for teams in general, they’re just not given enough time to truly explore the best way to do something or the best way to implement it or the best way to maintain it. Maintenance is a big thing too. Part of the rash of overlay type products we’ve seen in the last couple of years is related to that.
Devon:
Teams are already having a struggle to have enough time to do their own maintenance, they don’t have time to go back and work on things that they’ve already released. That’s not the fault of those people doing the work, it’s the fault of management and leadership pushing in a very unsustainable way. It’s a bigger problem than just accessibility. It’s just a general industry problem, but it’s all tied into this idea that we don’t have time to go back and fix things, or we don’t have time to really do this the best way, the way we want to do it. We have to do it in this amount of time so we’re limited in what we can actually do.
Nic:
Playing devil’s advocate here, you said people don’t have time to learn. Isn’t there an argument to be made that accessibility is a basic skill that, at least, developers should have? Just the same way they should know HTML and they should know CSS and they should know JavaScript, and there shouldn’t be a need for the time to learn how to do your job?
Devon:
I totally agree. That’s the thing that came up a lot. I used to also do some workshops and teaching occasionally and some mentorship at a local boot camp style dev program, and that was a thing that, when I would go in and talk about accessibility, sometimes the students would express concern. They assumed that people who went to, say, a four-year program for a CS degree or a web dev degree, were learning all of this stuff about having to do with accessibility. And I reassure them that, at the time at least, that was not the case. They probably were learning more from me in an hour than a lot of people were learning in programs that they were paying a lot more money for.
Devon:
So I think that there is an assumption that it is a basic skill. I totally agree that it is a basic skill, but I do not think it is taught as a basic skill in formal programs. And I think that that is a surprise too. When I talk to managers and folks about what accessibly skills people should have, they’re often surprised because they’re like, “Well, why don’t they know that already?” The short explanation for that is: ableism. That’s why it’s not included in curriculums in lots of areas. It’s just not thought of as a thing that is needed and it’s not thought of as something that’s complicated enough or important enough to warrant dedicating time to. Also, folks that are teaching those programs also don’t have that expertise because they didn’t learn it. Until more recently, there hasn’t been pressure to learn it as much. That’s also an ongoing struggle, trying to explain to people that: yes, people should be able to do this stuff and they should know this, but they don’t and that’s not their fault, usually.
Nic:
How do we change that? How do we push for boot camps and computer science degrees and even online tutorial? How do we push for making sure accessibility is included as part of the basic skills?
Devon:
A lot of it right now is coming down to folks who were in the accessibility community going more mainstream, and I’m seeing that partly in folks leaving agency work and going to work for, say, a product company or a company that does frameworks or just inserting ourselves into the broader tech world. And then asking those hard questions and being that person to say, “Hey, no, we need to stop and include this in internal training, in our expectations for advancement,” that sort of thing.
Devon:
It’s still going to be awhile because there’s only so many of us. But that’s what I’m seeing happen where organizations are actively hiring accessibility specialists or creating specializations within engineering roles or design roles that focus on accessibility. And then those people are creating training internally for their companies and that is also starting to bleed out into… ‘Bleeding out’ sounds bad. I didn’t mean it in like, “Oh, we’re bleeding out.” I meant moving out into other fields. It’s going to take a while, but it’s really going to take emptying out our agencies and folks moving into product companies and doing more mainstream roles. That’s a start at least.
Nic:
Yeah. What would you say the greatest challenge for the field of accessibility moving forward is? Is it going mainstream or is there something else?
Devon:
It’s a combination of becoming more mainstream, which I just love as a concept, and when sometimes people are like, “Aren’t you worried about…” I would love to not have to do this work anymore, because everyone knows it, everyone’s doing it. That would be cool. I can go do something else. I think it’s that. It’s also the challenge of, we talked a little bit last week about, inclusivity and centering people with disabilities while also recognizing the intersections of how different people are oppressed. I don’t think I said that in so many words, but thinking on those lines and trying to figure out ways to increase the idea of accessibly work as a type of protest or a type of activism and seeing how it relates to other forms of activism in technology, in academia, that sort of thing.
Devon:
So some of it is finding allies in other similar fields and working together. Where I’m going with this is: one of the biggest problems is burnout. I see people on this field get burnt out a lot and it’s because we feel we often do very isolated work. We’re often the only person in an organization or one of few people in an organization. Or, if you’re a consultant, you’re basically just telling people that they’re doing things wrong all day, which gets really stressful, really tiring. That combination of things makes it very easy to burn out. And usually people are also extremely passionate about this work. So you’re already at a heightened sense. You’re already putting a lot more of yourself into the work than you might be otherwise.
Devon:
Burnout, the only solution is mainstreaming and finding allies in other types of work around marginalized people and trying to figure out how to do this work together in a way that’s not as harmful to us as it often is.
Nic:
Yeah, burnout, that definitely is a problem and there’s such a high level of frustration that’s there. It’s working in isolation and saying the same thing over and over, but also coming across the same attitudinal barriers where you have to convince people over and over again and you see the same kind of silliness. That’s probably something that triggers that.
Devon:
I actually have a question for you on that front, because you’ve been doing accessibility work much longer than I have and I know that you’ve done also activism work around physical accessibility in the ADA. How have you managed to not get super burnt out and just peace out?
Nic:
Ah, well, there’s a few things. The first thing is that accessibility, whether in the built environment or the digital world, for me is not just a job, it’s a passion, it’s a lifestyle. And the other aspect is that I encounter a high level of frustration quite often, especially when I’m facing the same kind of issue over and over and over again. It might be some silly things like somebody asking me to pet my service dog. That’s one tiny little silly thing, but when I have literally 15 people a day, every day, asking me, “Can I pet your service dog?” It becomes a trigger. It’s the little things that build up, and I can’t lie, I have my moments of total and sheer frustrations and anger. The way to not turn that into burnout is to actually take a step back, take a breather, do something that is totally unrelated to what I’ve been doing that triggers that.
Nic:
So, for me lately, it’s finding artsy hobbies that are not related to touching the computers. When I turn down my computer at the end of the day, I don’t touch my computer until I start working again the following day. And I do other things. But perhaps the biggest key to keep persevering, if you want, is to remind myself that the job we’re doing changes lives, quite literally changes lives. That’s just so important. I have somebody, not that long ago, that said they listened to one of my podcasts and suddenly realized that maybe the problem they’ve had all their lives with not being able to understand their readings was that maybe they were struggling with dyslexia. And they went and they got tested and suddenly they got tools to be able to get through what they were doing. And for me it’s just so powerful, changing people’s lives for the better. And that’s where that balances the frustration and avoid burnouts.
Devon:
And I really like that.
Nic:
But I think ultimately, it’s going to be a question of: everyone has to find what works for them, because my solution, going out and taking photos of bird and wildlife might not work for you if you live in Downtown Seattle for example.
Devon:
Right, yeah. I think it’s also nice that you mentioned even just things not working for everyone. That is just a repeating theme in this work, both how we teach people, how we recover from the work we do and how people approach it. And I also love that you brought up someone, through the process of learning about accessibility, realizing that they might have something that they never really thought about. That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot and something I got at Accessibly Toronto Conference last year… It’s last year now, it’s 2020, Geez.
Devon:
Cherry Rae, who’s a wonderful consultant in gaming accessibility, they gave a talk about that burnout cycle of doing accessibly work and how exhausting it is, but also through the process of learning tactics and the thing I mentioned earlier about earplugs, and seeing, learning more about yourself and your boundaries and what you can do and what you should be doing for yourself. And also just identifying your own particular set of barriers that you run into, and one possible being open and talking about that can be really, really valuable for other people. That’s one of the reasons, at that same conference, I included in my talk, it was probably really the first most public places I’d said, I have depression and anxiety, because it was just a very safe space and a lot of people were disclosing.
Devon:
A lot of people were giving talks that related to their disabilities. It was a very welcoming environment. And then later I had a coworker, who I had just recently met, someone I’ve never worked with specifically because it’s such a large company, but someone who was attending the conference sent me a message later and was like, “Thank you so much for saying that because it’s something I struggle with talking to my teammates about.” And then we had a little conversation about some things they could do to make that a little bit easier.
Devon:
And again it comes back to: it’s also pressure and maybe burnout, pressure to disclose and to talk about that openly. But talking about it, people always find things, like, “Oh, I didn’t… That’s a thing? Other people don’t experience that?” I’ve thought I’ve been lazy,” or whatever and laziness is a construct, it’s completely made up. That’s where I was going. That was one of the things that Cherry was talking about in their talk, this concept of laziness that we enforce on ourselves. Like, “Well, other people are doing it, so if I just try harder, then I’ll do it too.” And that’s not how it works.
Nic:
Yeah. I spoke to Cherry Ray for my soundbite series of podcasts and it was a really powerful talk as well. It’s funny when people go and they think, “Oh, you mean my normal isn’t actually normal? My experience isn’t something that everybody else around me is going through?” And that moment of realization can be… It’s enlightening of course for the person who has that revelation, but when you see it happen often enough it becomes… It’s not something that’s made light of, but… I don’t know how to verbalize it. It just makes me happy.
Devon:
And that comes back to that idea of: it’s easier to talk about accessibility work when it’s talked about from that people focused perspective, and also coming back to the idea that nothing, no one thing, will work for everyone. That’s also something, it’s very easy to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution, especially from that compliance model we’ve been talking about. Whereas it’s really: nothing is going to work perfectly for everyone. That scares people too because they’re like, “Well, we’ve done a lot, we’ve checked all the boxes and the thing we made is supposedly accessible according to all these tests we’re running, but you’re still saying someone might not be able to use it?”
Devon:
And the answer is, “Yeah, sorry,” This is a work in progress, this is stuff we’re going to have to do forever. People seeing examples of that in the wild and talking to each other and seeing that there is no normal, that’s really scary but it’s also really liberating and then people are less worried about trying to make the perfect thing and just trying to do better.
Nic:
Yeah. Devon, let me ask you one last question. What is the one thing people should remember about accessibility?
Devon:
Just put a dang alt attribute on your images. Come on, it’s 2020, just describe your images. Come on! That’s honestly the biggest thing. If everyone started doing that, that would be great.
Nic:
It’s funny, I had that very discussion with no less than five people in the last two weeks. That’s hilarious. Devon Persing, thank you so much for being a guest. It’s been a great discussion and I look forward to bump into you again at some conference or other.
Devon:
It’s been lovely. Thanks so much for having me.
Nic:
That’s it. Thanks for listening and a quick reminder: the transcript for this, and all other shows are available on the show’s website at a11yrules.com. Big shout out to my patrons and my sponsors. Without your support, I could not continue to do the show. Do visit patreon.com/steenhout if you want to support the Accessibility Rules podcast.