Meagan says: “Sometimes a disability or an impairment is temporary. It’s situational. Most of the time I don’t have issues. But when I do, I really have them. So try to keep things as simple and easy to use as possible.”
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 barrier they encounter on the web. Quick reminder that transcripts are available for all episodes at the time of publication on the website. At A one one, why are you l es.com? This is the time to thank our sponsor fable. Fable is an accessibility platform a leader in the field powered by disabled people, I think that’s important because nothing about us without us. Anyway, fable moves organizations from worrying about compliance to building incredible and accessible user experiences. You can learn more about how Fable can work for your team at https://makeitfable.com/nic. Today I’m talking with Megan eller. Hey, Megan, how are you?
Meagan
Hi, I’m alright.
Nic
We haven’t really spoken we I think we hang around in the web accessibility slack a little bit. And we may have exchanged a few words, but I don’t know you. So this is going to be fun to get to know you a little bit. My first question is typically what’s your disability or your impairment, but when we were talking about having you on as a guest, you were a little bit concerned that you don’t have a disability, you said, but you do have a condition that is an impairment. Tell us a little bit about that.
Meagan
So I have an autoimmune hypothyroidism Hashimotos disease. And basically, I have an underactive thyroid, because my immune system attacks my thyroid and your thyroid and the hormones it produces are involved with a lot of body systems. So it can affect a lot of things when the levels aren’t, you know, when you’re not producing enough hormone from the thyroid. It’s very easily treatable with medication. But because it’s auto immune, it’s not stable. So sometimes medication level isn’t… Right. I ran into actually last winter, with our overwhelmed health system, having the delay in getting a correct dosage. And so that was when I had messaged you about being on the podcast, that was the kind of what I was thinking about. Where I really was for a couple of weeks, feeling very I guess. I don’t find it disabling but I was definitely feeling very impaired by trying to do things.
Nic
That’s an interesting thing to consider is that you can have a condition that is 90% of the time fine and controlled with medication or, you know, any other kind of fixes. I say fixes in quote marks, but when things get off the rails and even though you’re not necessarily longterm, disabled, you still encounter barriers, right?
Meagan
Absolutely. Yep. It was, I actually went and looked back at apt notes from at that time, because I had mentioned to you that I have a really great boss, that when I told him what was going on, he was very willing to work with me, but you know, explaining that, you know, I was having these difficulties and, and a big one I had mentioned to you was just the fatigue and kind of that brain fog, having trouble concentrating. It’s like, I know, I can feel my brain being slow. And I know I’m not you know, doing as much work and maybe not as succinctly as I usually do, you know, in writing, things like that.
Nic
So how does that translate as a barrier on using the web what what kind of thing really jumped out at you and were problematic?
Meagan
So the, with the just being tired and having trouble concentrating. That was making it difficult. I was rereading things I found myself every so often I’ll use reader mode for articles, especially when there’s a lot of motion and videos and stuff, I find that distracting normally, but I really needed that to be able to concentrate. Because I needed the simplified, maybe make the text bigger just to make it easier to concentrate. So long paragraphs of text are much more difficult. In when you’re you’re having to reread something to really understand it. A nice bullet pointed list is really nice, a wall of text, a lot of paragraphs, were just a lot more effort. I was also running into it wasn’t cognitive, but it was the winter. So you know, dry skin normally. But that’s another thing that low thyroid can affect is things like dry skin, joint pain and stiffness. So I was and dry skin you might not think about but then when say your knuckles start to crack and bleed. Which is probably more vivid than people necessarily need. But it made it hard to type or, you know, using a mouse I was trying to use smaller movements just because moving my hands was painful. So yeah, things that were continuous scroll can be difficult. Luckily, because I work in an accessibility space doing you know, I sometimes do accessibility reviews, I am familiar with using voice control, I can use a keyboard. So I was using some of the things that I use for testing, like, instead of having to scroll my mouse, that down arrow key was was a lot easier.
Nic
Yeah, it’s I think in many ways, those of us who work in accessibility can kind of cheat. Because we know the resources. We know the tools. When I broke both my wrist, I ended up going to Dragon and it was steep learning curve, because I had never relied on Dragon as much. But yeah, at least I was familiar with the concepts. Now of course, I use it all the time for testing. Because, folks, we had a technical glitch, we had to stop the recording and restart it again. So Meagan, wait, you were telling us about how how you were able to use some assistive technologies because you’re familiar with it. And that was a lifesaver to your ability to function on the web.
Meagan
So yeah, I was just explaining how because I’m familiar with using the keyboard using voice control or speech recognition, a little bit for testing, those were some things that I was able to use. So instead of having to continually scroll my mouse, I could use my down arrow key for some things. I could turn on the speech recognition feature on my device and just use that instead of having to use my hands, which were sometimes painful.
Nic
Yeah. If you had one message for designers or developers around web accessibility, what would you like them to, to know or remember or pay particular attention to?
Meagan
The big thing for me is just remembering that people are in different situations and designing you know, accessibility isn’t just a blind screen reader user. That is that’s an attitude that I seem to run into a lot when talking to people who aren’t as familiar. And there are a lot of other audiences and sometimes a disability or an impairment is temporary. It’s situational. Sometimes, you know, most of the time I don’t have issues, but when I do I really have them. So just trying to keep things as simple and easy to use as possible. I think that actually helps in a lot of a lot of situations, if you’re not making your interface super complicated, it’s just easier when things fail to, you know, even if it’s, it’s as simple as a poor internet connection. So. So things are slow. If if it’s not as complicated, it will fail much more gracefully. And that applies to in situations where someone is maybe using a technology they’re not as familiar with, or they’re having difficulty. Because they’re not is they’re not used to doing things a certain way or just like their their body or their brain is not functioning as well as it normally does.
Nic
Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s that’s certainly something that I’ve seen as well is this idea that, at least in the digital world, accessibility is about blind screenreader users, and in the physical world that accessibility is about wheelchair users, but I’m a wheelchair user, I and I will be the first to say, Well, no, actually, accessibility in the real world is about everybody.
Meagan
Yeah, I, I’ve run in the in the physical world, there is a particular intersection, that it’s a busy intersection and has, you know, the pedestrian signal. And it is completely unintuitive to me, where they’ve placed those signals, which one is for which direction? So even things as simple is as that it’s
Nic
Yeah, makes no sense sometimes. And maybe maybe that’s the conclusion we have to reach is that sometimes things make no sense. And accessibility is about making sense of these things that make no sense.
Meagan
Yeah. Yes.
Nic
Meagan Eller, thank you for being a guest on the show. That was actually a great convo. I’ll see you around probably on Slack.
Meagan
Yes, thank you. Cheers.