Joe Devon says the one thing people should remember about accessibility is that building great products is about listening to your user. And if you are not making your products accessible, you are not paying attention to your users.
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Transcript
Nic:
Welcome to the Accessibility Rules podcast. This is episode 97. 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:
In this episode, I’m continuing my conversation with Joe Devon. Last week was really splendid. We talked about obviously the Global Accessibility Awareness Day. We spoke a little bit about how accessibility also is around knowing the culture and the different communities that view accessibility differently. And Joe was telling us about the mission of Diamond, which apart from building accessible software, he also wants to grow the field of knowledgeable quota about accessibility. Welcome back, Joe Devon.
Joe:
Thank you. Pleasure to be back.
Nic:
So we finished last week on a bit of a high note talking about what made you the proudest in terms of accessibility. Let’s start on a more pessimistic look. What’s your greatest frustration in terms of digital accessibility?
Joe:
Yeah, it’s definitely painful when you look at the WebAIM million [report] and you see the numbers of … what was it? So last year it was almost 98% of the top million websites were inaccessible with almost 60 errors per page. I forgot the full numbers, but this year it was 98.1% inaccessible, and I think the numbers of errors per page grew as well. Those are unacceptable numbers. And it’s very painful to see them. And I actually am trying to address it with … we’re creating a state of accessibility report, and we are collaborating with WebAIM. And our idea is to take the top open source project, that when implemented … and this is inside the WebAIM million report, the ones that when you implement that framework or that open source project and it causes accessibility errors to … or let’s say increases the average number of accessibility errors on the pages that implement them.
Joe:
So we want to kind of do this sponsorship, where we’re sponsoring an open source project, try and get the community behind it. It’s a concept that I started last year, but it didn’t quite have the right note to it. And this year we’re launching it under the GAAD Pledge. And the idea there is that the community will spend about a month looking at that open source project and doing a virtual hackathon. And then we’re trying to partner with some brands, where a brand can sponsor this group and we’ll give an honorarium to an accessibility subject matter expert to be an advocate for that open source community. So the idea is that we’ll give them a bit of a kickstart by focusing on their project for a month, and then with somebody that will keep the ties strong between the accessibility community and the open source project. So I hope it’ll work.
Nic:
I really like the concept of reaching out to open source project that drive the web and fixing the web at that level. It’s like we’re going to fix the prebuilt foundation and then the rest of the house should be a little bit more straight. I really like that. Have you identified an open source project for this year that you want to look at already, or is that still a little bit under wraps?
Joe:
I don’t know when we’re going to announce the first one but we have the first one and it’s a well-known name. I’m extremely excited about it, but I don’t think I can share it yet. Sorry-
Nic:
That’s fine.
Joe:
… and then I’m looking for 11 more. I’m looking for 11 more but if the audience has any open source projects, where they have an in with a core developer or somebody that’s a big contributor, we’d love to connect with you and add them to the list.
Nic:
So folks that are listening to this show, you heard it from Joe. If you know an open source project that you have an in with some of the developers, reach out either to Joe directly or to me, and I’ll connect you with Joe, and let’s make this happen. This is exciting stuff. I love how you went from describing your greatest frustration to going to troubleshooting mode, and how do we fix this? I really like that.
Joe:
Yeah. It’s kind of a strange thing because what really happened is … it’s kind of embarrassing. You conceive of this event that goes viral, and then you have a lot of people thanking you and just saying really embarrassing things to thank you, essentially. And then you get … I have this tweet, this is what really prompted me to say this, that GAAD isn’t enough. There was a tweet from The Blind Onion that said something to the effect of, “Now that Global Accessibility Awareness Day is over, we look forward to 364 days of global accessibility oblivion.” And then I was like-
Nic:
I remember that.
Joe:
Yeah. I’m like, “This isn’t working. It’s getting more people aware but it isn’t working.” And I’m like, “I got to create a state of accessibility report for my own knowledge. Is it getting better or is it getting worse?” And while I was working on that, all of a sudden Jared Smith at WebAIM came out with exactly what I wanted to create from Diamond. And so I met him at CSUN and I said, “Hey Jared, how about we just collaborate? So if you can do a little bit of just an update or just a little bit more information and just collaborate on the state of accessibility report, that would be great.” So that’s what we did last year and we’re doing it this year as well.
Nic:
I look forward to seeing this year’s version. Joe, do you think there’s conventional wisdom about accessibility, the one thing that everyone knows about it?
Joe:
When you say everyone who does that mean? Is that everyone in accessibility community or out in the world?
Nic:
I’m happy to hear your take. How would you define everyone? And what does that everyone know about accessibility?
Joe:
I don’t know. I struggle with this question. I would say that there’s a lot of misconceptions. People that don’t know that much about it think that it’s only about screen readers, that it’s only affecting a small population, which is absolutely wrong, that it’s not important, and all of that is wrong.
Nic:
So it sounds to me as if you think that what most people out there know about accessibility is actually myths. Things that are mis-perception rather than accurate understanding of the need for and implementation of.
Joe:
Yes. I think it all stems from perspective. And I’d say so much of life is about perspective. We’re so divided in so many ways and it’s because we develop our ideologies, we develop our concept of the world and then we … what do they call it? Cognitive dissonance? Essentially where you’re just trying to find proof that your view of the world is correct and you’ll just keep going with your view of the world. And perspective means that you try and go outside yourself and imagine being in someone else’s shoes, and then all of a sudden, that’s the only way that your opinion can change about something.
Joe:
And anytime that you’re just sitting out there and taking a population for granted, it’s because you haven’t put yourself in their shoes. And when it comes to accessibility, for almost everyone it’s just a matter of time until you will confront it. Whether it’s because you get older and you start to have your own disabilities, or whether someone in your family has it or an accident. So many of us are going to face this and now all of a sudden, here you are, you were a developer for all these years and you just didn’t realize how many people and how important it was to build accessibly. And now you may be in a position where you’re not coding anymore, where you’re unable to code anymore. How are you going to fix the problem that you yourself created? And I think if you approach work that you’re doing that way, you may view it differently.
Nic:
What do you think the main reason most people fail to succeed with implementing accessibility? What would be the biggest blocker there do you think?
Joe:
I think it’s just lack of doing your homework and having that … viewing accessibility first of all is part of the craft. If you’re implementing front-end technology, you have to know CSS. I don’t really enjoy front-end work. I don’t consider myself really good at it. I don’t have a good sense of design. I was always more like a database guy and a backend programmer, but I knew that if I would ever do any front-end development, I have to be really good at CSS. And that just takes a little bit of effort, especially if you don’t think like that. And the exact same thing is true if you’re doing something in accessibility, you have to put in the hours and if you don’t put in the hours, you won’t get it right. But it’s not all that hard. You just need to learn.
Nic:
I tweeted something a couple of days ago, which really surprised me with the response I got that’s got nearly 140,000 views of it. And I said that we don’t really have an accessibility problem, what we have is a lack of basic HTML knowledge. And that if front-end developers knew how to code proper semantically meaningful HTML, a vast majority of accessibility errors would disappear. And I think it echoes what you’re saying in terms of, we need to build our basic skills. It’s not enough to take a framework and output whatever it is because that’s what everybody else is doing. We need to know why we’re doing what we’re doing and how we can do it better. So doing the homework, I like that perspective.
Joe:
Yeah, and you’re right on the money. It’s the craft of code. If you’re taking something that has a semantic element and you just did a horrible quick start on one of these single page application frameworks where you’re just making everything a div and then styling it and forgetting all the other things that are baked into that native element, how can you consider yourself a great coder? And that’s another angle I like to try and tell developers, if you’re ignorant of accessibility, can you really call yourself a great coder? You’re just missing so much.
Nic:
In the same vein, I often tell people, people whine at me. They say, “Oh, but accessibility is so hard.” And I say, “Yeah, but you’re a coder. Coders like challenge. Why don’t you think about accessibility as a coding challenge?”
Joe:
Exactly.
Nic:
And that gets a few wake up calls there. I think people suddenly start shifting the way they think about it.
Joe:
Yeah. How many programmers are sitting there, they’re learning a language and they’re like, “Ah, this Go thing came out. Why don’t I try Go? Okay, try Go but why don’t you try accessibility?
Nic:
Yeah.
Joe:
Why don’t you get the basics first?
Nic:
You’ve been involved obviously for 10 years in growing awareness of accessibility and getting a good feel for the pulse of it. What you do you say the greatest challenge for the field of accessibility and moving forward?
Joe:
This is an excellent question and it’s … I have even done a presentation on this, which I probably should polish and do some more. It is actually a really big problem and a lot of people I’ve noted … again, coming from the outside in, a lot of people are very upset about how long it takes everything to come together and to improve, but the issue is multi-tiered. If you’re a developer … and it’s multiple levels because you have, first of all, the business person. So if you take it from a Fortune 500 company, you’d have to start with a C level. They need to understand that it’s important. They need to understand why it’s a problem. They need to see the perspective of their users and they need to make it a priority from the top. And then from our perspective in order to get that awareness of how we need a marketing budget. And who has a marketing budget in the accessibility field? Not a lot of folks.
Joe:
And I was really conflicted to tell you the truth about starting an accessibility practice area because I did not want to compete with these wonderful companies that both embraced GAAD and that are just doing such incredible work. But then I realized that I can only do so much if I don’t have a marketing budget. And so I can use the resources of the company by doing something like the state of accessibility report if I can attach marketing to it. So that marketing budget is important. And then you need to educate the people on the perspectives. You need to educate developers and designers on the perspectives. You need to do things like explain to a designer that if you’re doing something like Slack, or Skype or anything where there’s users that are online or offline, this is the kind of thing that will speak to them. The famous thing of having a light that’s either green or red and that indicates if the person is active or inactive.
Joe:
And when you tell them that there’s a large population of people who are colorblind, and they can’t tell the difference between red or green, and accessibility we’ll teach you this if you put in some effort there that you need to provide a text along with that color and that way the colorblind population will know about it, then all of a sudden they start to realize that, “Oh my God, the reason that accessibility is so important is that there is everybody’s individual and there’s so many people that I have to pay attention to and all it needs to do is do a little course on DQ, particularly focus on the design, on the design courses and all of a sudden I’m going to be a much better designer.” So that education has to happen to the QA, to the product people, to the designers, to the developers. And you need the technical people to get the right technical education. So all of those taken together are definitely a big challenge and we need to start with awareness.
Nic:
Joe, we only have a few more minutes. I would like to wrap this up with asking you, what is the one thing people should remember about accessibility?
Joe:
I’d say the one thing they should remember is that building great products is about listening to your user. And if you are not making your products accessible, you are not paying attention to your users.
Nic:
That’s really powerful. How do we listen to users and make sure that we catch disabled users?
Joe:
You have to do testing with disabled users. You can’t really fully pay attention to your users if you’re not capturing their experience fully, so it’s all in the user testing.
Nic:
User testing. User testing with real user with disabilities. When would you say the best time to do that is? Is it at the end of the project, or start of the project or?
Joe:
That’s a great question. It really depends. You have enterprise level projects which are quite different than building something as a startup. It’s just important to have that in mind, but really you need to speak to a UX specialist that makes sure that user testing is part of their process, and follow their directions on an individual basis.
Nic:
Yeah. With the understanding of course, that the UX specialist actually understands a little bit about accessibility, right?
Joe:
Oh, of course. Of course. That goes without saying.
Nic:
Fantastic. Joe on that note, thank you for being such a great guest and I will see you on the interwebs!
Joe:
Great. And thank you very much and see you all on Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
Nic:
Third Thursday of May. See you then.
Nic:
That’s it. Thanks for listening. A quick reminder, the transcript for this and all other shows are available on the show’s website at a11yrules.com. Big shoutout to my patrons and my sponsors. Without your support, I could not continue to do the show. Do visit patreon.com/steenhout, that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N.C-O-M/S-T-E-E-N-H-O-U-T if you want to support the Accessibility Rules Podcast.