San Diego Accessibility & Inclusive Design February 2020 Meetup

Speaker 1:  one year anniversary. So for the past year, these two lovely gentlemen here, Chris and Harris, have been organizing a space and a time for people in the community to share their stories, their experience, their questions around accessibility and inclusive design. 

Speaker 1:  Which in spirit is actually really inclusive. I had a chance to share my story and a bunch of other people got a chance to share their story. And so we want to continue in that fashion of people sharing their stories. 

Speaker 1:  Here comes Ricardo. So for the next hour, we’re going to do something a little different other than having the lightning talks. We’re going to do a fun little panel. And before we get into that, what is Ally? 

Speaker 1:  I just wanted to do this. So we’re not going to read that. We’re just going to skip that. So we’re very lucky to be in a beautiful space tonight. We have three amazing sponsors who I will introduce you to in a quick moment. 

Speaker 1:  But for future reference, if you’re interested in giving a talk or interested in sponsoring an event, this is a volunteer effort. So we welcome that. And if you’re interested in providing your details, talk to one of these two lovely gentlemen, here are ways to connect. 

Speaker 1:  And we will post this out at the end of the panel. So you can get those details again if you need. 

Speaker 2:  Come talk to us. 

Speaker 1:  Also, if you notice, it is being livestreamed in all the words that I’m saying are on the screen. So thanks to our sponsors who couldn’t do it without you. First one is Blink. This is Blink. So Blink is a user experience research and design agency. 

Speaker 1:  This is their San Diego studio. They actually have five locations. Headquarters is in Seattle. Other locations would be San Francisco, Boston, and we have people, remote people in Denver and Austin. If you’re interested in learning more about Blink, you have a couple of Blinkers in the audience, including Brian Summers, who’s our marketing director, who’s doing a really great job of taking a photo of all of us right now, and then Michael, who is sitting at the front desk, who is our office manager. 

Speaker 1:  So if you have any questions, talk to them. DQ, also another sponsor of ours. 

Speaker 2:  Sure. I work for DQ. We are currently in beta of some software that I personally have worked on for a couple years called Axe Pro. We just released some feature that I’m super excited about. It automates keyboard testing. 

Speaker 2:  It tabs through the page for you, which is weirdly, I thought, impossible, but it works. And we also have a hackathon in Orange County in Santa Ana coming up. There’s a conference called CSUN that’s in Anaheim. 

Speaker 2:  It’s an assistive technology conference, and we would love for you to join CSUN and or the hackathon. Thank you, DQ. 

Speaker 1:  If you need more details, just go on the meetup page for all of it. And then last but not least, level access. 

Speaker 3:  Yeah, thank you. So, level access, we provide a full suite of accessibility products and services. If you’ve been here before, you’ve heard me ask for anyone who’s interested in possibly joining the company. 

Speaker 3:  We’re looking for consultants, analysts, developers, folks in sales, marketing. I have a need personally for developers who have some react experience and some accessibility experience. Even if it’s a little bit of both and could be trained, we’ve got some got a lot of customers that are looking for that kind of expertise. 

Speaker 3:  So, if you have anybody looking to join our growing company, please send them our way. Thank you. 

Speaker 1:  So let’s get started. So we were hoping to cover two major themes tonight. We’ll also have time after each theme to field questions from the audience. So please take a moment to, we have never know what taking till you need to write those questions down. 

Speaker 1:  We encourage that. The first thing we’re gonna talk about today is the idea of strategic and sustainable accessibility. And I’d like to start, sorry, I forgot to introduce our panelists. I’m gonna do that first. 

Speaker 1:  So before I start with all those topics, I’d like to start with Ricardo who’s at the end. Ricardo, his backstory is quite amazing. He was born extremely disabled with the inability to walk, talk and understand. 

Speaker 1:  And if you met him today, you might have noticed that he can do all of those things really incredibly well. He is an amazing advocate, not only for himself and the people like him, but he has worked really hard to work with foster youth and has committed himself to developing accessibility efforts for web and mobile as a developer. 

Speaker 1:  He also has a philanthropic side. He’s currently in the process of creating a technical nonprofit for foster youth to get them employed in IT and web development. So Ricardo, thank you for joining us today. 

Speaker 1:  The next gentleman next to him is Joe Wielinski. He’s the accessibility director at Blink. And his first experience was as a member of the World Wide Web Consortium in 1998. Fun fact, we, sorry. He is well -aged and wise. 

Speaker 1:  While a fun fact is while on a consulting gig at the WHO in Geneva, he saw Tim Berners -Lee give one of his earliest talks at CERN. And in today’s time, he spends his time doing two things. First, advocating for accessibility with clients on projects, but also internally with all of the designers at Blink to ensure that they are thinking about accessibility as a part of their development experience and not necessarily just starting with visual design, but accessibility as a core pillar to development. 

Speaker 1:  Then we have Harris, who’s next to me. Started as a web developer and at DQ. While starting as a web developer, he was exposed to accessibility and developed a passion for it. And a fun fact about him is that he likes to play a string instrument. 

Speaker 1:  If you can guess which one, he might take a shot for you. I just put him up for that. Last but not least, we have Christopher Land, who is an accessibility consultant. So for those of you who are designers or web or graphic designers, you might be able to connect with Chris because that’s where he started. 

Speaker 1:  He has since transitioned into being a front end web developer and then a consultant. A fun fact about him is that he wrote a book called Machiavelli for Babies. And I won’t tell you anything else, you’ll just have to go to it to find out what that’s about. 

Speaker 4:  Thank you. 

Speaker 1:  All right, so now actually here’s the talk. So the idea that we want to talk about today is strategic and sustainable accessibility. And I’d love to start off with Joe with the question of what does the accessibility adoption process look like in a large organization versus a small organization or perhaps one with tech debt versus one that is an agency style. 

Speaker 5:  All right, well, there’s quite a lot there to unpack. But yeah, thanks for having me here. And I do want to mention I enjoyed my conversations with people. It’s Frank, Mike, Chris, Lisa, May, Mary, Olivia. 

Speaker 5:  It’s kind of hard to see. But Adam, Josh, Chi, Greg, Diego, Carlos, Leo. Trying to see in the back who are Alana. Alana. Anyway, it was good talking to everybody and welcome to Blink. And so it’s great to be here. 

Speaker 5:  I don’t get here all the time. So it’s every time I come here, there’s some new cool stuff going on in this office, because I live in Seattle. But the question is kind of a difficult one to kind of compartmentalize. 

Speaker 5:  There’s a lot of different parts to it. First of all, Blink itself is a consultancy. And so we’re working with clients. And so there’s the things that we have to do internally. But then there’s also working with our clients. 

Speaker 5:  And so probably the single biggest obstacle that I have is with organizations just thinking about applying the resources to accessibility. And you can imagine how old I am, starting going back to 1997, 1998. 

Speaker 5:  At this point, I like looking in the future. I would have thought we would have been a lot farther along. But it’s still the case that I would say that maybe only 10% of our clients that we talk to are ready to actively engage with accessibility and applying resources to it. 

Speaker 5:  So there’s still this huge evangelism that we have to do related to that. But then the other part of it is that I think it’s hard for people within our disciplines of research, design, and development to get their arms around the part that they can play. 

Speaker 5:  And so at Blink, we try to compartmentalize or try to break it down by roles. So OK, the W3C WCAG has all of these recommendations. But if you’re an interaction designer, maybe there’s six things that you can bring into your practice. 

Speaker 5:  And if you’re a researcher, there’s these five major areas to consider. And so it’s just like an iterative movement forward so that everybody feels like they’re always pushing ahead, always being able to contribute, but being able to do it within the practical governing conditions of our work. 

Speaker 1:  Ricardo, we’d love to hear from you next. 

Speaker 6:  first time on mic. So for me basically I’ll give an example. A lot of it depends on the size of the organization. As an example, a non -profit that’s getting my T training is a really small non -profit. 

Speaker 6:  They develop a program specifically for the blind, that is instructor led by a teacher who is also blind. The goal of the program is to basically give technical training to individuals who are visually impaired or blind so that they can go out and get jobs in the workforce. 

Speaker 6:  Because it is a small non -profit they’re able to have someone with that skill set be able to provide the resources to give that specific demographic training and the expertise needed to make them successful. 

Speaker 6:  However, in a bigger organization, for example, an organization they have 300 employees, there’s a lot more red tape that has to go that way when implementing accessibility. The legal team might need to bring in outside consultants to be able to go ahead and review what’s not being implemented in terms of ADA. 

Speaker 6:  Once they develop a training curriculum for that, the employees who deal with the customers will need training on that particular process in terms of the verbiage to use or how to approach certain situations that they may not be comfortable with or exposed to very often. 

Speaker 6:  So the process in implementing accessibility in that particular perspective can take a lot longer because of all the procedures and hoops that have to go through in order to make sure that accessibility is being adhered to depending on the product or the size of the organization that’s working on implementing accessibility. 

Speaker 6:  A lot of it is just typically depends on what the resources are available and whether or not they have the perfect individuals who can meet the needs of that organization and just how about it should be structured. 

Speaker 6:  Depending on the size, one way may work best or it could be a different way. It really just depends on what the product is and the size of the structure. 

Speaker 1:  So I’m making an assumption that we’re all here because we care about accessibility. But one of my major questions as a researcher who’s been both an agency and startup and incorporate is when should that conversation start? 

Speaker 1:  Who should be involved? And how do we ebb and flow the practice of incorporating accessibility as business demands change? Chris, I’d love to hear where your thoughts are on that. 

Speaker 3:  Sure, thanks. So I’ve seen plenty of client engagement be really challenging when you only try to implement accessibility at one point. I’ve talked with clients that said, oh, we’re gonna get our QA folks trained up, and that’s gonna fix accessibility. 

Speaker 3:  And if you do uneven focus throughout the organization, it ends up creating infighting or conflict between departments. So say your QA folks get educated and knowledgeable on accessibility, and they’re sending accessibility defects back up to the devs who didn’t know this was a requirement in the first place. 

Speaker 3:  It’s inefficient, it’s problematic. I don’t know, I’ve seen some reactions, I don’t know, folks have gone through that before. The right place to bring accessibility in is at the very beginning. Here folks in the accessibility community say, shift left, thank you. 

Speaker 3:  And it’s like any other software defect. The earlier you catch it in the process, the easier it is to fix. I work with a lot of clients who end up unfortunately being motivated by a lawsuit, and they’ve got accessibility issues out in production, and they’ve got their legal team breathing down their neck, and they’re in a position of risk. 

Speaker 3:  And that’s exponentially more expensive than bringing it in at the beginning. So I won’t get into the how, but a starting place I advise people to do is get it in the specs of a new product or a new feature, even if you don’t know, even if the folks writing the specs don’t know what it means, say, make sure this is accessible, this is not negotiable. 

Speaker 3:  And having that just there and documented in the specs keeps it on the radar and it keeps it in part of the conversation of, what does that mean on the designer? And this has to be accessible. And that hopefully you leave the people in that role to the support of like, okay, here’s, you know, color considerations, spacing, that the certain things that affect designers, and then down the line it gives people a fall, but that’s the first step that I’m aware of, recommend. 

Speaker 1:  I love that recommendation. We all kind of enter organizations at different times, at different moments in the product cycle, and with our varying levels of expertise, while we may be passionate, we might be looking for some low -hanging fruit. 

Speaker 1:  So I’d love to go down the line and try to understand if you could name your three low -hanging fruit, keeping in mind that there’s a breadth of people in the audience who are not just developers, what would your recommendations be around how to incorporate accessibility? 

Speaker 3:  I’ll do one and then hand it off to Harris. The sheet, what is going on? This is what? Your keyboard on. You have your testing device right on your desk already. Take your mouse, put it out of your reach, and make sure you can do everything in your work. 

Speaker 3:  And this might apply mostly to developers in QA, but UX and Dev folks need to be involved too in making sure that we don’t make anything that’s mouse dependent. Obviously, we want people to use the mouse, but something that’s so often neglected is making sure that it’s keyboard -operable. 

Speaker 3:  That we can get to everything with the keyboard, we know where focus is at all times, and we can go through the page in a logical way. That if you can make your site work with a keyboard like that, that’s possibly 20% or 30% of accessibility issues. 

Speaker 3:  Admittedly, I might be pulling some numbers out of the air, but why this is important is other assistive technology devices, say switches, custom devices maybe made for people with special circumstances, those all map to keyboard controls. 

Speaker 3:  So a switch attached to the back of someone’s chair or maybe a foot pedal, those are going to map to tab keys and they’re going to map to arrow keys. So you don’t necessarily have to have a closet full of devices. 

Speaker 3:  If you get it working with a keyboard, you’ve done a lot. So sometimes accessibility can be overwhelming if you try to do all of it at once. So I always recommend the keyboard as sort of your cheap entry level for low effort, low learning curve, high payoff as far as helping people and making sure your work works for a great amount of people. 

Speaker 3:  That’s one tool of your keyboard. 

Speaker 2:  I like it. Since I’m getting yelled at for being too developer centric, let me start with design centric. We’re inclusive here. I know. Oh, I’m just giving them a hard time. So one piece of low hanging fruit, one fruit that’s hanging low, that I think, I’m not going to spot out a number, but I think it is extremely common as someone who works on an accessibility validator, it’s one of the most common issues. 

Speaker 2:  And that’d be color contrast. So to tie in with our shift left thing, we just touched on last question. Designers and maybe your marketing team has to get involved too because these are colors and branding and people hold those close. 

Speaker 2:  You got to have an accessible color palette from the start. If you don’t, then you’re setting yourself up to be one of those people who say color contrast is their most common issue. We have accessibility tests integrated and we’re going to turn those off because marketing won’t let us change our lime green on white background. 

Speaker 2:  So accessible color palettes are extremely important and that kind of segues perfectly into something Chance works on. I work on an accessible pattern library. Great. I’m sorry. How do you do like green hands? 

Speaker 2:  How do you? You don’t choose a background color, which contrasts enough. To be extremely obvious. But yeah, I think just running your palette through the color contrast checkers, there’s tons of them on the internet. 

Speaker 2:  And yeah, and actually… 

Speaker 7:  how to sell that. 

Speaker 4:  to your marketing team. Like not to have orange on the screen. 

Speaker 2:  Well, yeah, the common theme between all of this is, yeah, selling it to your company who may or may not care about accessibility. So, I mean, what really drives the point home for me and other people who work on software is doing usability tests and seeing someone who’s colorblind fail to, if you’re using colors of information, fail to see some indicator that people who aren’t colorblind can tell. 

Speaker 2:  So I think watching something you’ve created fill miserably is healthy because it opens people’s eyes to completely inaccessible content that they’re driving out. And that’s, you know, in the case of branding colors, that’s like the foundation of all your content, right? 

Speaker 2:  So you’re setting yourself up for failure if you have an inaccessible color palette. So if you can in any way, shape, or form put someone with disabilities on a usability test with your content, I think seeing that failure is healthy because it will actually drive the point home hard. 

Speaker 2:  And on that note, I think I wanna answer, I think we said there’s three, so I have one more answer in me. I’m a developer. So I would say low hanging fruit, you can implement in, what is that, three hours if you’re a quick developer. 

Speaker 2:  No, accessibility automation. As a developer, there’s so many places that you can make your life easier. And that’s as simple as running an automated accessibility checker and your unit test if you have them. 

Speaker 2:  Unit test by the very nature, put your components into various states and what a perfect opportunity to run it. Something that, you know, some software that’s gonna check for a ton of stuff, including color contrast. 

Speaker 2:  And so that kind of, that’s part of, that’s a small part of an ecosystem that you can integrate accessibility automation into your whole software development lifecycle. So if you put checks in like your unit tests and you fail if there’s a color contrast issue, then developers won’t be able to submit a pull request until all that stuff passes. 

Speaker 2:  So there’s a lot of cool automation you can do that will basically yell at the devs if they’re doing it wrong. So if you are shifting left and you have designers who are thinking about it, and you have those checks in place, then you really aren’t shipping stuff into production like Chris has talked about, we’re QA’s responsible for finding that. 

Speaker 2:  You’re actually finding these issues before it even reaches your dev server, right? Before it’s getting code reviewed, you say, oh, sorry, I can’t, where is it? You got five accessibility issues. You didn’t follow the spec there. 

Speaker 2:  So I think accessibility automation, there’s tons, I can rant about it for hours, but there’s stuff like Winters and CI checks and unit tests. I think it’s really important to help enable your company to find those defects as soon as possible, as early as possible, I should say. 

Speaker 1:  Ricardo? 

Speaker 3:  And just for anyone who got lost with the developer and the Linting automation, that everything that those tools offer, they’re also available in browser plugins, free -blend browser plugins. Check out our sponsors’ websites, because that’s a way to get started. 

Speaker 3:  You can just pull up your work in the browser, regardless of your role, hit the Scan button, and it will give you a report on what it found. Caution, you can’t find every bug in an automated tool, but you can find them. 

Speaker 3:  And most of these tools also say, hey, we found this issue. Here are three possible ways you can fix it. So it’s a great way to get involved, regardless of what your role is, with very little training. 

Speaker 3:  It finds the issue and says, do this. So that’s another great entry level there. And I just wanted to comment too on the branding issue. I’ve definitely seen this. And sometimes the only department that has the strength to challenge the marketing department is the legal risk department. 

Speaker 3:  Sometimes they say, no, we’re psychologically influencing purchases, and it really ends up being the executive suite has to decide what’s more expensive. 

Speaker 6:  And just to follow up on how to bring it up, one of the things that I’ve always found is, you know, money talks. If there’s a subset of groups who are not using your product because it’s not meeting their needs, not only is the company not getting their money, which also affects the company’s bottom line, but as it was before, there’s also potential for a lawsuit. 

Speaker 6:  So ultimately, you wanna bring it to the point where if our product is not accessible, we’re not making the money that we could be making because we’re not meeting a certain demographic’s needs or things of that nature. 

Speaker 6:  Because it is very, very important to be able to make something that is accessible for everyone. And if it’s not, then it’s always an additional challenge to go back and fix it later, as was previously mentioned. 

Speaker 6:  But in my particular case, I tend to focus more so on accessibility towards the blind and visually impaired specifically because I am a blind developer myself. So one of the things that I end up using myself and some of my products that I end up using is a high contrast option, specifically to combat the issues of color contrast. 

Speaker 6:  It gives the individuals of myself who have issues with visual impairments be able to use a website or an app that is not gonna strain their eyes and it’s gonna be a lot easier for them to use. And most of the time, it’s also a better alternative for people who don’t have vision issues because there’s less of a strain when they’re using whatever website or app I’m building. 

Speaker 1:  Chill. 

Speaker 5:  Right. Well, so let’s say we’re still doing the low hanging fruit part. So I’m going to take the lowest of the low hanging fruit aspects. And just from conversations with a couple of our testers that we have working with me on a regular basis at Blink, we have Tyler, who has been blind from birth and also Zach in the same situation. 

Speaker 5:  And so they’re always helping us work with products, legacy products that have been designed with a highly visual intent from the very start. And so being able to interpret that comes down to the alt text, which probably for anybody who’s heard anything about accessibility, that’s usually the first thing that comes up in the conversation. 

Speaker 5:  And unfortunately, a lot of times, as far as the conversation gets, is that alternative text associated with images. But unfortunately, even in the things that we test regularly, very progressive sites that we work with, that alt text is often, well, it’s not covered in the spec, as Chris was talking about. 

Speaker 5:  If it was covered in the spec, then the best time to develop that alternative text is by the person identifying the need for a visual image and then telling the story of the core importance of that visual image, including that in the specs that the developer doesn’t have to just type in a two -word phrase, but it’s something that actually has meaning. 

Speaker 5:  And so for example, a project we’re working at, well, a large project with NASA, has just countless images associated with it. In some parts of NASA, I have done better than others at developing that alternative text. 

Speaker 5:  But like a typical example might be a photo where the alt text would be Marslander. And for a sighted person examining the image, the story there that we immediately get as fortunately sighted users of that media type is a shovel extracting soil to deposit into a scientific instrument while the lander is in a deep crater in a particular part of Mars. 

Speaker 5:  And then suddenly there’s a story there that was part of the original reason that that photo is selected. But then in the interim, all of that had been lost. And then at the very end, it was just Marslander was the alt text. 

Speaker 5:  And so it’s completely very little utility there, where at that point, you’re better off just putting in an alt text because there’s no real communication that you’re able to get about that. And so even the alt text, which is one of the most basic things that we were people talking about, there’s like a level of articulation and craft that can go into making that a very rich experience. 

Speaker 7:  I don’t know if it’s unorthodox, but I have a question. 

Speaker 1:  Great timing. We’d love to hear questions from the crowd. Go for it. 

Speaker 7:  Thank you for that. I agree with everything you said. So, very excited about this, but it’s been a while since I broke code myself. Is the alt text something that behaves or plays well with form fields at this point? 

Speaker 7:  Do form fields have a concept of alt text? 

Speaker 3:  Yeah, Form field wouldn’t have alt text. Alt text is specific for images. Form field, it’s important to make sure everyone is labeled correctly. So a common gotcha is to have text next to the field. Visually, cool. 

Speaker 3:  You can see they’re connected. But we need, I won’t get into the details, but there’s some programmatic ways we need to do it in the code. There’s a way so that when it’ll be announced when the screen reader enters the field. 

Speaker 7:  applying person using their banking application and they tap to a particular form. Currently there’s no like the library for applying. 

Speaker 2:  I mean, we’re entering stuff that’s gonna bore people even more. There are like machine learning things you can upload a screenshot into and it will extract text, but for the most part, no. And the experience when the label is not associated is just edit text blank rather than visually you see first name. 

Speaker 2:  So, assistive technology users are gonna start searching around for text nodes near the field, which as you could probably guess could find the next field label so it’s completely unusable. 

Speaker 7:  This sounds like they drown. Are you talking about a person going to their chase when they come to a web page to fill out a transfer from one account to another? They tap to the next field, but they don’t have a tantrum. 

Speaker 7:  You can’t see it. Do you use little word as a fan out? Yep. That’s what I was getting for. What is the trick? So there is a trick. There’s a word for it. 

Speaker 2:  Oh, it’s absolutely possible and very easy actually to implement. 

Speaker 7:  I just 

Speaker 3:  And in fact, if these things are not associated, you’ve written your HTML poorly. So you need to use that for attribute. There’s other ways to do it, but you do it correctly that the experience is great. 

Speaker 3:  Input, first name, blank. You always get the name, role, and the value as long as you’ve programmed it correctly. But in most cases with accessible coding, you don’t need to jump through a lot of hoops. 

Speaker 3:  You just need to use good semantic HTML to the spec for HTML. And the problem we run into, and like Joe said at this point in history, unfortunately, we’re not as far along and accessibility is a lot of people hoped because sometimes the frameworks that have come out have neglected accessibility and neglected good semantics. 

Speaker 3:  I don’t think it’s quite as bad as it was a handful of years ago, but frameworks used to just spit out divs with classes and neglecting heading levels, neglecting regions, all the good rich stuff in HTML, which if you’re using classes and you just focus on the visual design only, the visual user might not be able to tell, but it’s a completely different experience for someone using a screen reader if all that semantic goodness is built in. 

Speaker 3:  They get that orientation that gets announced to them. Yeah, and one of our meetings coming up, I think we want to do a screen reader demo just to help people understand that our uninitiated exists. Really interesting. 

Speaker 1:  So let’s take one more question around the spirit of strategic and sustainable. I’m going to go back here. 

Speaker 8:  Thank you. Thanks. This question I guess is for Joe or anybody that wants to answer it. I was like the 15th person that he called out by name when he introduced himself. Talking about describing the image in the way that you did, I mean, can you kind of unpack a little bit about the cast of characters or the people that might be involved in kind of getting from the selection of or the production of that image all the way to the point where it’s presented to your end users in a best case example, right? 

Speaker 8:  Kind of describing the image as you did. 

Speaker 5:  Yeah, good. Thanks, Adam. Thanks for that question. And the majority of my crew is as a content developer, content strategy like Brent, or local rep here from Blink. It’s kind of word smithing and a love for that is something that we’ve been involved in. 

Speaker 5:  So it’s always something that I like to pay attention to. But in terms of that stream, I mentioned that I think that it really begins with the person identifying the need for that particular media type and that that person at that point being the best person to articulate what the importance of that is. 

Speaker 5:  Now, we are being helped in some ways in that organizations like Facebook are building in using AI to automatically and Google automatically create captions associated with images that can get put into metadata. 

Speaker 5:  But just like bringing it back to the craft and the process, I think it starts with the person choosing that immediate type is going to appear in a certain situation and then identifying at that point to let it move forward from there. 

Speaker 5:  And so then depending on the organization, it’ll vary in how that gets carried through in the process. I mentioned that possibly that can be included in the specification in some projects that we work on. 

Speaker 5:  What I talk about is that you have an input. You’re probably going to have an inventory of the images that are associated with a particular website and that there is a backend, essentially a worksheet, backend worksheet that lists the inventory of the images, makes sure that you have alternative text, but also identifies when alternative text isn’t useful. 

Speaker 5:  So if there’s an image that doesn’t provide something that has information that can help somebody move forward, then that might be a case where it’s better to use a null tag for that. And so that you’re pushing it to the point where then the developer is able to essentially just put in the code that’s already been developed earlier on. 

Speaker 5:  But one of the problems that we do find, which kind of leads in our ties to some of the things that Harrison and Chris were talking about, is that a lot of times the roles get siloed. So you have researchers doing their work on accessibility and designers doing their part in accessibility and the devs doing their part in accessibility, but the handoffs from one group to the next falls apart. 

Speaker 5:  And that’s always a big problem. So hopefully I was able to get to some of that process. But yeah, thanks for guessing that. 

Speaker 1:  So if you have any additional questions, definitely want to encourage you to slack it to us or post it on the page. It’ll help us think forward for future events. We’re gonna move on to the next topic or theme, which is theory, vision, and more than websites, which I have a strong passion for personally. 

Speaker 1:  So the first question I’d like to field to the group is what is the difference between inclusive design and universal design? Riccardo? 

Speaker 6:  So for me, just coming from my background, my personal view on it is simply, inclusive design is gonna be something that’s gonna be set up for individuals that have specific challenges that need to be met, whereas universal design doesn’t really take that into consideration. 

Speaker 6:  The product that’s being built, the service that’s being provided, is being built specifically for a regular individual with no thought towards someone who may have issues with motor movements, or visual impairment, or speech impediments. 

Speaker 6:  And designing from that perspective, we’re not really taking into consideration, or at least in the process of understanding, hey, how would someone with this specific challenge address an issue really forces you to go in and redo a lot of the work later, because there’s no understanding of making it accessible from the very start. 

Speaker 6:  If you can develop that mentality at the very beginning of the process, you end up saving a lot of work later down the line, because you’re already developing your product or service with accessibility by being inclusive, instead of just by trying to design the product for universal use. 

Speaker 1:  I personally want to piggyback on that. So I did not introduce myself at the beginning. I’m a user experience researcher currently at Intuit and this resonates with me as a part of my job. It’s my job to advocate and ensure that all of my research is thinking about all the different variations of humans or users, sometimes not even humans, that use products. 

Speaker 1:  And so it’s not just the baseline demographics that we often segment people into but it’s also understanding how their attitudes vary within different contexts based on their cultural background, how their behavior changes when they’re in certain emotional states. 

Speaker 1:  It’s really important to think broadly and not just happy path but sad path, angry path, stressed out path. So that really resonates with me. I’m glad you said that. The next thing I’d love to understand is thinking about accessibility in the world that is evolving now, which involves Amazon Echo and Google Voice and Siri and gesture controlled interfaces, including those annoying like hand waving paper towel things up in the bathroom. 

Speaker 1:  Chris, I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on that. 

Speaker 3:  Well, let’s see. My take on these new modes of interaction and I think I’ll keep it mainly to the voice commands is they open up a lot of great opportunities for accessibility. I’ve seen some really cool prototypes of people that have motorized wheelchairs that can accept voice commands. 

Speaker 3:  I saw a great video of a young man on the autism spectrum disorder that used one of the sound boards to interact with the Amazon Echo and make phone calls. So this person was not in verbal but was able to use one AT to work with another AT. 

Speaker 3:  So for the most part, I see these being really positive effects for people with disabilities. What we need to just make sure we don’t get carried away with is using the new technology or the new mode of interface to the exclusion of other ways. 

Speaker 3:  So one of the principles of, along the lines of inclusive design is gonna be making sure that there are different ways that different users can interact. So it’s okay if you’ve got something where you can use voice commands to get what you need, but don’t do that at the exclusion of being able to type it in or being able to use it a different mode of interface. 

Speaker 1:  Thank you. For the sake of time, I’m going to ask the panel one more down the road question and we’d love to field questions from the audience for their remainder. So thinking about we’re in 2020 now, what are your predictions or what would you like to see happen the next 10 years? 

Speaker 1:  Let’s start with Ricardo. 

Speaker 6:  So I would personally like to have that self -driving Google car available for everyone, not just the blind, myself. 

Speaker 5:  I’d like to start to see our design teams, people that have tools and processes so that we can actually have people who are blind be part of our design teams. And that’s a major impediment to us moving forward is just creating a space that we can have these different perspectives. 

Speaker 3:  Was the question what we’d like to see or what do we predict to see? 

Speaker 1:  It can be either. It can be either. Up to you. 

Speaker 3:  So this is less of a technology. Something that I think, what’s this in the position we are today where it feels like we’re coming from behind trying to make things accessible is, you know, I went to school years and years ago doing, you know, marketing and computer programming, and I had basically never heard of accessibility up until maybe 10 years ago or so, because it’s just not included in education. 

Speaker 3:  And so, and it takes a long time for definitely colleges to start including new content like this. I’d like to see more emphasis on accessibility in boot camps, in programs for all the affected roles, you know, UX design, dev, I feel that, you know, what we get kind of like Joe said is, oh, well, people hear one lecture about alt text or maybe it’s one lecture. 

Speaker 3:  So I’d like to see more emphasis. I kind of think our careers up here are probably safe because it’s gonna take a while for the world to turn. But I would like to see over the next 10 years, accessibility become more and more mainstream, more and more part of how we’re sending people out of school and into the workplace. 

Speaker 2:  Awesome answer, Chris. My fiance took an entry level web design class two years ago and they had like two days of accessibility. So I agree, I’d love to see that grow. That was basically what I was gonna say. 

Speaker 2:  I’ve witnessed this growth over the last like eight years. I’m sure Joe has a way more interesting perspective. I’m not calling you old, I’m just saying you’ve been in the game longer than I have. But I’m gonna keep saying this, sorry, as a developer. 

Speaker 2:  I wanna see more tools available to make accessibility more accessible. Because it seems super daunting to newcomers. And I think like there’s some really basic fundamental principles and Chris has touched on some of them. 

Speaker 2:  Using semantic HTML is really, really important. And it actually creates more accessible content. It helps collaborators understand the meaning of content. So yeah, I just wanna make accessibility more accessible. 

Speaker 2:  I think that ties into awareness being spread. And I think it ties into demystifying accessibility. It’s not some super complicated thing. It is very tricky. It’s very tricky to get right. And you might not ever be in a position to say, I’m 100% accessible. 

Speaker 2:  But I think setting yourself up for success, finding defects as soon as possible, knowing what to do when you find those, I think is all we can ask of anybody and you keep moving that needle forward. 

Speaker 2:  2020. 

Speaker 1:  questions from the crowd. 

Speaker 6:  I just want to follow up on that statement. Accessibility is challenging. The one thing that I always found useful is no one’s going to be able to address all of the issues that accessibility brings forth. 

Speaker 6:  But in those types of situations where you don’t have the expertise to make something accessible, it’s always a good chance to bring in a particular organization or group of people who have the experience or the background to make things more accessible depending on what particular issue with accessibility you’re trying to focus on. 

Speaker 6:  Because no one’s going to know better on how to make something accessible than someone who lives with that challenge that they have. And that’s something that a lot of major companies always overlook. 

Speaker 6:  They’re always overlooking the fact, hey, we have to do this in -house because we don’t want to spend the time or the money to reach out to an organization that specifically handles these sorts of issues because it’s too much work. 

Speaker 6:  But that inclusivity in bringing someone or bringing an organization, for example, that might excel or provide services to people with motor issues, that can fix an issue that would cost a lot of money to do. 

Speaker 6:  And some organizations simply don’t want to do this, just having that mindset where it’s okay to be able to reach out to organizations that specialize in certain areas that you may not have access to or information on. 

Speaker 9:  So this is a question about client interactions and client work and getting clients on board with all of these things. So Chris might be a good one for you to field, but we talked a lot about shifting left and about getting people on board throughout all parts of the process early on. 

Speaker 9:  And that’s obviously very important. A challenge that I’ve faced in the past working with clients is what do you do when you hand the project off and it’s no longer in your domain? So now as we’ve followed all of these best practices, we’ve had everyone involved, we’ve got an audit, we’re good, right? 

Speaker 9:  Then you hand it off to the client, now they’re managing content. And you know the moment that you hand it off, what you’ve given them is no longer fixed and static in place. It’s like the first time someone goes and makes a blog post, this image is missing all texts and everything’s ruined. 

Speaker 9:  So you talk a little bit about your experience and some strategies as to sort of getting people to maintain these things that they were building and to make sure that accessibility lives on after that product lifecycle moves on. 

Speaker 3:  Let’s see, so when I was last looking for jobs, I went and interviewed for an accessibility manager position. And this company was a software company. And they knew that their clients were saying, hey, you need to become accessible. 

Speaker 3:  Your products are totally inaccessible. So they put this job posting out. And I interviewed with them all day. And my last interview was with one of the VPs. And she says, OK, well, you know, tell me more about your other management experience. 

Speaker 3:  Because I figure we get you in here, you’re going to spend about a year turning this $2 billion company around in accessibility. And then we need you to just be a regular manager, because accessibility will be solved. 

Speaker 3:  And it’s an interview. So I had to be like, hmm, how do I talk about this politely? So the point is, it’s ongoing. And if the scenario you’re describing is, I mean, you’re never done. Accessibility is always going to be a moving target. 

Speaker 3:  And as long as you’re putting new content out, your site is always going to be changing. So if the people, it’s solved via education. You’re talking about a scenario where you do your work, you turn it over to the client. 

Speaker 3:  If they’re not committed to accessibility and they’re not educated on it, it’s going to go to hell. So for any organization, any large organization that I’ve seen for it to be successful, you need a sustained commitment from leadership, for any large, large company. 

Speaker 3:  Otherwise, you can’t have leadership to say, this is a flash in a pan. This quarter, we’re really going to do accessibility. And then people are not going to hear about it. They won’t take it seriously. 

Speaker 3:  It’s a giant organizational challenge. How do you literally embed accessibility into the culture of your organization? But that’s the only way to do it. You need leadership to commit to it. You need enthusiastic evangelists scattered throughout the organization. 

Speaker 3:  I’m always going to advocate, kind of like what Ricardo touched on, is when you have actual users with disabilities as part of your workforce, your coworkers, that the reminder that this is important is always present. 

Speaker 3:  It automatically triggers our empathy. And as Serena said, the inclusive design principle of starting off and saying, we’re going to design this for humans of all shapes and sizes. That’s always there on the top of the memory. 

Speaker 3:  Yeah, so you’ve got to have that commitment. And then you have to have education for each of the roles specific to anybody involved in the process of making these products. 

Speaker 1:  Joe, did you have an idea on that that you wanted to share? 

Speaker 5:  Well, Chris mentioned you’re just constantly moving forward. So I’m always talking about iteration. And I think generally in user experience research and design, we’re always thinking that generally we’re making our products better and that people in general are benefiting from that. 

Speaker 5:  But one of the things that I love about accessibility is that there are significant significant impacts you have with relatively small changes in the things that you do. And that’s really empowering. 

Speaker 5:  You know, you just think about working with, I was talking about alternative tax and contacts for people who are blind. If someone is blind and things aren’t coded properly, it’s binary. It exists or it doesn’t exist. 

Speaker 5:  There’s no medium ground there. And so just by that code adjustment, suddenly you’ve illuminated the world where that content is there. And then like one of our testers, Blake, who is cerebral palsy, it takes Blake 10 times as long to be able to do mouse clicks as a person that doesn’t have that impairment. 

Speaker 5:  And so just a slight change in the user interface that simplifies, it takes one step out of a process that magnifies Blake’s time on task significantly. And you think about going from automated captions for a video that Google does to invest a little bit of money into curated captions and you enrich that and there’s these small changes that are within our reach that have dramatic impact that we can experience along with our users. 

Speaker 5:  And that’s really what drives me. 

Speaker 4:  Hi, sorry. Just to get a little deeper, I’m gonna go a little deeper because I’m gonna give you a real scenario. So when you’re talking to a client, right, and you can barely get them to create a frictionless experience utilizing the best design features that you can, and you’ve got next -gen store deadlines, and you’ve got emerging tech parameters, you have all these things, like what would you say to a client to convince them to prioritize this over the six other things we’re also trying to prioritize? 

Speaker 4:  So give me some example of what you might say to help me give a passionate plea to these kinds of clients that are mostly worried about the bottom line, mostly worried about a deadline, and you know what it’s like to try and fit in different requirements and features. 

Speaker 4:  So give me an example. 

Speaker 1:  I have a thought on that. 

Speaker 6:  So, in my case, people from my generation are social justice warriors, and companies all really much care about their bottom line. And what I would end up doing is letting them know, hey, we’re excluding a certain number of people. 

Speaker 6:  The people that are not using our product, we’re losing out on that money. Because if any company wants to make money, you’re going to be able to make more money if there’s more people able to use your product. 

Speaker 6:  If there are less people using your product because it’s not inclusive, that can end up leading to not only negative publicity, which can also affect sales, at the end of the day, which is a worst case scenario, you can end up in trouble because you’re not complying with federal law. 

Speaker 6:  At the end of the day, most of the companies will be able to come around, and if they don’t, by that point, because you’re trying to reach them from a collective, or, hey, we can resolve this issue without it becoming a problem, or if we don’t, not only are we losing out on money, but it can turn into a whole other issue later down the line. 

Speaker 6:  Most companies that I’ve seen, typically, will end up only taking steps to address the accessibility issues when there’s already a problem. By that point, it takes a lot more effort to be able to fix because of the fact that it was not addressed when it could have been, but a lot of that can also just be the fact that it wasn’t described properly what the issues were, what some of the solutions were, or where you can go to address some of the issues. 

Speaker 1:  So my approach to that is a little different. I think that that tactic is very effective. But one thing that I’m trying to do is enroll people away from the finite mindset and into an infinite mindset. 

Speaker 1:  So people who are targeting a bottom line, year over year, they’re only looking near term. But in the spirit of inclusivity, in the spirit of the game is never over, the companies that are resilient are the ones who think forward and are dynamic and can deal with these pitfalls because they have thought ahead. 

Speaker 1:  They have thought at the system level view and the granular level view. So if you can paint that picture of optimism, that picture of durability, you may be a little bit more effective in making a pitch. 

Speaker 1:  It’s not just this project, it’s not just this website. It’s about the experience that compels people to come here and stay here and invite others and engage and evolve. 

Speaker 2:  I have one last thing to chime in there. And I please take this with a grain of salt because I’m like the worst person to answer this question because I work for a company who specializes in helping others with accessibility. 

Speaker 2:  So I don’t have like first hand experience necessarily, but I think tying into tons of things that have been said earlier, Chris mentioned a push button solution. If you can like run an automated accessibility checker on some of that content and show, look, we have 88 accessibility issues. 

Speaker 2:  And then you look at those recommendations to fix and they’re super simple. You can say like, look, it’s not going to cost you very much and you’re helping out that user base that you’re missing out on. 

Speaker 2:  So I think trying to demystify some of those low hanging fruit as we mentioned earlier of how easy it is to address some of those issues. Those core color contrast issues are formed fields without labels. 

Speaker 2:  Those are all really easy to fix. So if you show them a giant list of accessibility violations they have on just one page and you say, look, we have several hundred pages like that, then that’s going to add up, but showing how easy it is to address those might help. 

Speaker 10:  I have a question. This all sounds great, but I just saw an ad this morning that said I can fix my accessibility issues on my website in three minutes with one click. 

Speaker 2:  I’m gonna get our juices flowing. I think other people here have better answers than me, but yeah, that’s not what we’re advertising. But to touch on machine learning, auto -generating all of techs, that sounds awesome and cool, we can just buy this software. 

Speaker 2:  But let’s just take a picture right now. And the important information I see is that we’re all here talking about accessibility, being champions for inclusivity. But Facebook would say a group of 40 people looking at the screen, and that you’re losing tons of information there. 

Speaker 2:  Now hopefully that got some juices flowing. 

Speaker 3:  Um, let’s see. There’s plenty of sneak oil. I’ve seen plenty of products which have the magic solution where you just add this little JavaScript hook, it will go in and it’ll clean up your whole site. 

Speaker 3:  And that is exactly what, you know, executives want to hear. Oh, this is, I don’t have to launch this multi -month training program and bring people into fix it. I can just buy Band -Aid, apply, and then sleep well at night. 

Speaker 3:  Technology’s changing. I can’t say that all of them are snake oil. I have not personally evaluated of them, but do your research test them rigorously. I have not run into one personally that is that magic bullet what people are looking for. 

Speaker 3:  But, you know, everyone wants to get rich quick. Everyone wants a magic bullet and that’s very appealing. 

Speaker 6:  So one of our favorite phrases is, if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. For me, I would just automatically be suspicious of something like that just because the fact that I am a blind developer and I know the testing that I do myself is specific to those needs. 

Speaker 6:  But at the end of the day, even if you were able to find some sort of automatic solution for that, nothing beats user and testing for accessibility. Because if that program, well, go ahead and fix the problems, yes, it might fix one or two, but because at the end of the day, that program is not gonna fully test a user that uses keyboard or a user that is visually impaired. 

Speaker 6:  The way that a regular person who meets those requirements will know to test for, you’re still doing yourself a disservice and less people will be using your product. So at the end of the day, it’s always better to get it better by an actual individual who needs those specific services because they know exactly what the needs are and they can offer concrete, supportive structure in terms of how to resolve the issue. 

Speaker 2:  I won’t name names of software companies who did this, but I started my career working on something like that. It was injecting JavaScript to fix your issues, and it sounds awesome, and it might in one frozen time of a web app fix everything. 

Speaker 2:  With, you know, I didn’t have to be embedded in the code base, but as soon as they added a new feature, it was missing, as far as accessibility, as soon as they changed classes, my JavaScript was flawed and it would break. 

Speaker 2:  So beware, even if you see something working, there’s a sustainability aspect there that it becomes a maintenance nightmare. So having some overlay, if you will, over existing content that magically fixes all your problems is, it might work at some point, but it’s not going to last. 

Speaker 1:  I also want to just put an extension of some of that, which is the idea that you are compliant is a good start, but compliance to accessibility does not equate usability. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean it works well. 

Speaker 1:  So it’s important to combine compliance with ease of use and speed to benefit as a part of your evaluation. We have time for one more question. I see a hand. 

Speaker 11:  I was wondering if you had any good resources, just in talking about user testing, good resources for finding people with disabilities to perform user testing on, and being able to find enough variety of people with disabilities to test against multiple cases and get good coverage. 

Speaker 6:  So for me personally, I would say that it depends on what aspect of disability you are looking to test. For example, if I wanted to test something, if I was building a product specifically for individuals in wheelchairs, I would immediately begin looking for program resources that provide those sorts of resources to that population and just try to get to onboard. 

Speaker 6:  Hey, I’m working on this project that is going to be useful to individuals who are in wheelchairs. Can you provide some resources or do some user testing to see how we can implement it for individuals that need that specific assistance? 

Speaker 6:  Because having someone who knows that resource, knows what the requirements are, is always good because at the end of the day, you don’t know what you don’t know. I can build and work on something specifically for someone who has a mental issue or who’s not properly equipped with a product or service for someone who’s in a wheelchair because I don’t suffer from that particular impairment any longer. 

Speaker 6:  So I would need to go out and be open to the fact that I need these particular resources and these are where I go to get them. And that’s something that is always very challenging because we are expected to be the point of contact for everything and if we don’t have the answer or if we don’t have the courage to be able to go out of our comfort zone to look for the answer, then the solution will not be resolved. 

Speaker 6:  And that’s something that takes a lot of dedication because you’re doing something that’s outside of your comfort zone with being able to find these organizations and bring them to the table so that your product can be as accessible as possible. 

Speaker 6:  But it all starts with being able to be, oh, I would mind about the fact that you need these extra resources and then taking the extra step of looking into which organizations provide that service. You will find that the majority of organizations that help people with disabilities will always be welcome to making things more accessible. 

Speaker 6:  It’s just a matter of trying to find the right contact depending on the product. 

Speaker 1:  Anybody else? All right. Thank you everybody for taking time out of your evening to join us. We have the space for another hour. If you haven’t taken the time to go upstairs, there’s a lot of case studies on display. 

Speaker 1:  Please explore. There also is a room with some visual design activities that have been set up previously for another event. Please enjoy each other’s company and thank you again for celebrating the one year anniversary of Ally, Sandy Agar. 

Speaker 5:  for being our moderator tonight. It’s great. 

Speaker 2:  One year anniversary, A11YSD. Thanks for being a part of it, everybody. 

Speaker 10:  We’ll be working on it now.