John says, among other things: “Let the user choose. Don’t ever dictate to someone’s assistive technology”.
Thanks to Fable for sponsoring the transcript for this episode.
Transcript
Nic
Hi, I’m Nic Steenhout. And you’re listening to the accessibility rules soundbite, a series of short podcasts, where disabled people explain their impairment and what barriers they encounter on the web. Just a quick reminder that transcripts are available for all episodes at a time of publication from the website at https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Fable for sponsoring this episode. Fable is a leading accessibility platform powered by disabled people. Fable moves organizations from worrying about compliance to building incredible and accessible user experiences through product testing, and custom courses. Learn more about how fable can work for your team at makeitfable.com/nic
Nic
Today I am talking with John Tubbs. Hey, John, how are ya?
John
Good to be here. Nic. Thank you.
Nic
Well, thanks for joining me. Let’s talk a little bit first about what’s your disability or your impairment?
John
It’s an interesting question. I’ve never had a formal diagnosis. But working with the whole area of accessibility, universal design such in my work at the University, I’ve been able to kind of self diagnose and looking back at my history academically, educationally, developmentally, I could see where there were certainly some things that I did not address or were not addressed with me by people in my past institutions, in my past that they probably should have! Really what I can trace it down to is I have a language processing, a Semantic Processing problem that really jumbles words, re… puts words back together in odd situations, or relationships. The best way to describe it, and for folks that are from America, and of my age, which is late 50s. You probably remember the electric company is a children’s show on public television. And they had a learning skit that they always did, and they took an opening consonant sound, and a closing vowel consonant sound, and then assemble them pa at Pat, cup at cat. So what my processing does is it will look across a sentence of words on a page, and it will start reassembling the words on me. So I will see Pat instead of cat or bat instead of cat, as I’m reading through, and the biggest place where I see it happen often is between lines of text. So as I’m reading through, I will be reassembling words based on letters in combination and see in other lines while I’m reading. So it’s it’s pretty difficult for me to consistently read through long form, especially if it’s tightly compressed words on a page or on the screen. The other interesting thing about this though, it’s not just in my own reading practice, it comes to me just… It rolls in my head as noise. So the best option I can ever description I can give of this is growing up I played hockey. And I would remember being on the ice, like lining up for a face off. And I would hear these, the electric company playing in my head. It was something I would see something in the stairs on the scoreboard on the stands, a sign a fan might be who knows, a word would hit me and I would start spinning of all what consonant combination in my head as I’m playing hockey, so it’s something that once my head starts spinning, it’s it’s like the roulette wheel with the ball going around in one direction and balls go in the other direction. And it just becomes this cognitive noise. That is just nerve racking. Yeah, and I’ve never outgrown that, surprisingly.
Nic
So, if we were to put a label on, at least the first part of what you describe, I would associate that strongly with dyslexia.
John
Yeah, that’s been that’s been my take on it. My wife who also studies disability and has a lot of experience with her own students, as a professor would go to the same way, come to the same conclusion. I would also have to add, you know, I do have some of the classic can’t do left, right. Right, I’ll say left. And I mean, right, and vice versa. And so that is obviously a very difficult situation.
Nic
Yeah.
John
When you’re driving with somebody,
Nic
Yes, I can see that. So what would you say your biggest pet peeve or your biggest barrier related to that and accessibility on the web is?
John
Well, the web gives me a fighting chance, sometimes. A printed page, I’m stuck with the printed page, I can’t do anything about it. But the web, at least gives me the opportunity to do some things with my devices, whether it be a browser on screen or mobile device, or whatever else if I can control the CSS. Now, the problem is, for me, it’s not just bigger letters. That doesn’t help. Because the relative space between the lines stays the same, the letters just get bigger, maybe it’s a bigger problem. Hard to say. But what, when I first learned about CSS, all of a sudden, in the places I had some control over CSS, I could take better control of my reading, in that I could adjust the line spacing, at a doesn’t have to be double space, you know, the page, the density of text on the page, all that would contribute. But if I could change the line spacing, I was really, I was in a much better situation, I could turn off the noise that I would see between lines of text. So if it’s densely packed, and I can’t do anything about it, that’s tough, you know, sometimes, just reorienting, the length of the line can help it. So if I’m on a mobile device, especially I can go portrait landscape flip. And sometimes that helps, because I changed, again, just the density of lines. And sometimes, you know, you go with the go there and the CSS changes, you know, because you’re in different views. So it’s it that can be helpful. It’s not necessarily helpful. But, you know, over over the years, I’ve just come to instinctively do different things to try to give myself a leg up.
Nic
So what I’m hearing from you is that the web can either be really helping you because if you have control, you can actually interact with the content in a way that works for you. Or it can be just as bad a barrier as the printed word. Because if you can’t adjust to your own print preference, if you want.
John
Right,
Nic
then you’re stuck.
John
Yeah, yeah. Again, in, you know, traditionally, we think with, you know, either some visual challenges or, you know, cognitive challenges and reading, reading, processing, you know, large screen text and stuff was often the thing that you’d be, you know, considering, but that doesn’t help me seemingly. So yeah, the web gives me this fighting chance, like I was saying, now it comes down to, you know, great user interface design, that would allow you to have that available to the user, so they can make their own decisions. And not to let the cat out of the bag about you and I Nic. But we’ve had lots of discussions over the years, just about user preference to handle their assistive technologies. We and you know, myself and my background as a instructional media designer, and producer. You know, I learned the hard way, by getting, you know, some incredible pushback from disability, disabled people that were in my classes that I was providing content for, that they didn’t like what I provided them, because it didn’t fit what they wanted to use. And the example of course, that we’ve discussed it at length in the past is I provided what would be the textbook, assistive technology and remediation and content for someone who was blind. That person didn’t want the textbook blind, accommodation. They wanted something else. I was doing what I thought was the best thing and it was not what they needed. And then I said to myself as a content creator and producer, how do I know? I never will when you do big online learning. I in the courses that I was designing for I had half A million learners in a single course half a million. That’s 50,000. At minimum, folks with some sort of need for an accommodation.
Nic
Yeah.
John
I will never know, know those 50,000 people. So you know, the web and the user interface design is crucial that it lets the user make their own decisions. And that’s what I had to do. And maybe I just did I put that in the back of my mind and said, Gosh, here’s the user interface that I really like, because I can change the line spacing. Or I can do this or I can do Yeah, so my brain can see the page can connect with the page and make, derive meaning from that page.
Nic
If you had one message for designer or developer, would it be around this concept of let the user choose? Or would it be something else?
John
Oh, let the user choose is my mantra, and has been my mantra for the last 10 years, really, if it just has to be the case, I as a designer, I never wanted to let a good, universally designed page look bad, esthetically. And so I always was, you know, wandering between my designers, and my content. And then my folks that work with accessibility stuff along with me to make it all come together all, you know, in something that’s beautiful, but yet completely universally designed. So then every user can have a successful experience. So it’s, it can be done. We’ve, I’ve I’ve worked very, very hard on trying to do that it can be done. It takes effort, and it takes, you know, again, great knowledge of CSS, but then also knowing what kind of CSS accommodations to build for what what what do I put in that CSS control panel that can be called out easily. And you know that it’s there as a user on that page. That allows it not just for oh, you’re blind, you’re deaf, you’re this You’re that you? Whatever. Have it open the CSS open enough that anybody can choose their way of participating. So if there’s like a magic bullet, or you know, the ultimate target to shoot for, that’s what I would look for, not to ever, ever, ever dictate to someone’s assistive technologies.
Nic
Yeah. Thank you, John, that that is a very powerful way to finish the show. John Tubbs, thank you for sharing that stuff with us and we’ll see you around on the web.
John
Thank you very much Nic, appreciate it.
Nic
Cheers.