Transcript

Jen

This is The Web Ahead, a weekly conversation about changing technologies and the future of the web. I'm your host, Jen Simmons and this is episode 64. I first wanna say thank you so much to today's sponsor, media temple. Sponsors totally make the show possible, cover help us cover the costs of the downloading and the bandwidth the everything. So it's media temple this week, which means they're making it possible to give you the show.

So today I'm gonna, we're gonna talk about a topic that comes up quite a lot, but I've not yet done a whole show just on this topic. But I've been wanting to for a long time it seems like, oh my gosh I finally got it together I found just the right guest for us. Our guest today is Dale Cruse, Hi Dale.

Dale

Hi Jen, Thanks for having me.

Jen

And we're gonna talk about accessibility.

Dale

Yeah. I love talking about it

Jen

Yeah, you're the accessibility lead over at McGraw Hill Education.

Dale

I am. We set up a new team here in Boston, built a whole labs team around it and yeah, I've been leading the accessibility effort for a couple of products and hopefully soon even more.

Jen

Yeah, and I want I think we should issues that we get into more in the show. You also you just you've written a book on html5 multimedia development. The cookbook.

Dale

I did. I published an html5 book a couple years ago, and edited five additional books on html5.

Jen

Right.

Dale

Been a front end developer, writer, and so on for many years.

Jen

And speaker as well, You do a lot of public speaking

Dale

I have. And I enjoy that as well. You really just can't get me to shut up

Jen

[laughs] Yeah, so and I like, I mean you tweet about stuff and I frequently find myself really learning a lot from you and enjoying what you say and so I thought you'd be great to have and come talk about this topic that I feel like is in a way something that gets talked about a lot in the web world in the web development design industry, but that also somehow remains a sort of side child a sort of thing that we kind of understand and that we kinda know about and kinda don't understand and don't know about and I wanna see if we can change that a bit and make it a bit more normal or a bit more "yeah, this is part of what we all do." Rather than this side thing that's optional.

Dale

Yeah, you know sometimes I look at web accessibility efforts like, you know, everybody's got like that weird aunt who like you don't really understand her and she's really old school and she smells funny, but you're related to her so you kinda have to see her on holidays and you know I think that we need to find a way to kinda turn that around and realize that accessibility doesn't have to be your weird aunt, it can actually be really vital to healthy relationships in your web family.

Jen

Well and it seems like, and this is where I wanted to get an expert and come and say yes or no to this. It seems to me like if the people who are writing the code for a website or a web application a web project that your team or your company or yourself is making, if they do it sort of quote unquote the right way, the site is going to be accessible by default.

Dale

Mhmm.

Jen

Like the web itself is going my sense of it is, the web is accessible, the web is accessible. Tim Berners Lee and Robert Cailliau designed the thing to work on a really wide variety of different devices and that was back in the day where like, one person's computer was insanely slow and weak and used a command line and DOS prompt, and another person had like the fancy expensive $20,000 computer that was still only as powerful as like a quarter of today's phones, you know or like one fourth of one phone, but the whole idea behind the web is that it was going work on these really different devices, and we in the middle somehow thought that like everybody would have the same kind of computer, but now with phones and mobile and tablets we're sort of back to this place where we realize "Oh, yeah, you don't know what the other person on the other end is using. They could be in a car, they could be looking at a refrigerator, they could be looking at their watch, maybe next year, they could be using a laptop, or a tablet, and it seems like the web done right, kinda the web in it's most purest form is also ready to handle things like screen readers, and other kinds of you know using a keyboard and not using a mouse, or using only a mouse or a pointing device and not having access to a keyboard or, like, a wide variety of input and output devices is sort of inherent to the thing, and I feel like it's our job as anybody who's writing code to just sort of do it well and not screw it up and not break the web.

Dale

Jen I'll tell if you and I were in the same room, I'd hug you right now. Because what you said, you're exactly right. So the question I think inherent in your statement is, "If the tools are there, from day one, for us to create accessible useable, websites, and web applications, for all sorts of devices, how do we keep screwing it up?"

Jen

Yeah.

Dale

And I think there's a couple reasons for that, but I think the primary one is we're lazy. We're human beings and we like to take shortcuts, we like to feel like we're getting away with something, we like to do the least we have to do. And unfortunately what happens is when you create a website, or web application that is not accessible, what you're really telling the world is "I don't know how to use the fundamental building blocks of the web."

Jen

Mmmm.

Dale

You've lost sight of standards. You've lost sight of validation. And most importantly, you've lost sight of your user. And no matter if you're a developer, designer, information architect, manager, executive, whatever your role, if you're creating web products and you've lost sight of your user, you're lost.

Jen

Yeah, and I think the other thing that can happen is, I've been on teams where I've been doing code reviews or something, and I've been sort of rejecting code and saying "look, you need to redo this, why are we doing it this way, it's not accessible if we do it that way," and sometimes I get this pushback of "well, we don't have time for that, that's you know we don't have any users like that, we're not even gonna bother to support IE6, and IE6 is one half of one percent of our users, those people are like even, there's even fewer of them, those people over there, so like why, that's you know, that's below our threshold of tolerance. We don't bother with edge cases".

Dale

Edge, I mean, we're not actually talking about edge cases at all when we talk about accessibility. We're really talking about the majority of people; I wear glasses full time. Jen, I think you wear glasses as well.

Jen

Yeah.

Dale

I work with someone who has hearing aids. I know someone who broke their wrist and has difficulty clicking a mouse. I know people might just be hung over for a day and you know what each of those people, whether it's permanently, or temporarily, needs some form of accommodation. And that's what we're talking about with accessibility. We're talking about leveling the playing field so that whether you need a permanent accommodation or a temporary one, you can still access everything. And you know, I've had good luck in my company so far addressing groups of people and making them understand, you know, we're not talking about them, some group of other, right, we're talking about us, we're talking about you, and me, and people we know, so to say "we don't have time for that," that just doesn't compute in my head, because you know, we're not talking about an edge case, we're talking about everybody, so you're gonna say "we don't have time for everybody?" That's ludicrous on its head.

Jen

Well, and that, I agree with you clearly, but I think where it breaks down is people don't believe, say "we're not going to believe you that we're talking about everybody" they thing we're, I think, I think people you know that hear "accessibility", or they hear "people with disabilities," they think, I think that maybe we have a very stereotypical clear, like ok, there's four kinds of people with disabilities.

There's the one person who's completely and totally blind, but being blind is a toggle switch, you can either see really well, like me, or you can't see at all, you've no vision at all. When in reality there's a very complicated continuum of all different ways that people see and all kinds of different levels of sight or, not, not having sight. And that changes, it can change for individual people as well.

And then you think there's the person who's quadriplegic there in a wheelchair, they don't have use of their arms, so they can't type or use a keyboard, it's like, "well yes, that's definitely a situation that a lot of people are in," but there's also like you said, like the person who they broke their arm, and it's gonna be ok in a couple months, but meanwhile in the interim, they're not able to use, they're only, you know, they don't have use of their right hand and they're right handed, so they have use their left hand, so they use the keyboard but they can't really use, you know, there's just all kinds of other ways that the person could be physically impaired for in some sort of way. I mean the situation where you're driving a car, and you wanna change the music on your phone, or you wanna, you know, pull something up you wanna pull up a map, you're temporarily, you really shouldn't use your eyes in that action, you should keep your eyes on the road, so how is it, I mean we're slowing seeing it where people are creating interfaces for cars where you're going to be talking to your car and your car's going to be talking to you. And is the web going to be part of that, or is the web going to be left out of that. It may be very soon that the majority of the people in the population are using screen reading and are using some kind of audio interface in your car.

Dale

And you know hopefully we'll be prepared for stuff like that, and I think laying the groundwork by having conversations like this makes you realize that accessibility is not like this big scary monster, it's actually just a few things you need to do that really are according to the specifications we already have with html, css, and javascript.

Jen

So what is it people need to do. I mean what does it take to make an accessible website?

Dale

Well first and foremost the biggest tool that you gotta use is your brain. You need to be, you need to understand that accessibility is not an edge case. So now, we have a level of awareness and so if we start building by taking our content, marking it up appropriately, and then sorry, we start by taking our content, marking it up appropriately, and then adding semantics that may be additional but that can help things WAI Aria Specs, as well, and layering on cascading style sheets for presentation, then layering on javascript on top of that for certain behaviors, and I gotta tell you, when you do that, that stuff alone, you're probably 80% of the way there. And at that point, you know you do stuff like add good alt tags, maybe some close captioning for videos, and then examine some of the interactive behaviors you've got, and odds are you're gonna be at a pretty good place.

Jen

Yeah. Yeah, and it's funny cause, progressive enhancement is, it seems to go in and out of vogue, where people talk about it a lot and then they kinda don't, or maybe one community, sorta sub community is talking about progressive enhancement a lot and then a different sub community is kinda blowing it off, and I mean to me it is sort of this idea. It's easy sometimes to think that everybody is on the same page, but I'm beginning to see a pretty significant momentum behind the idea that the web is an application platform.

Dale

Mhmm.

Jen

It's competing directly with android, or iOS, or java, or with ruby, or whatever, that it's a programming environment. It's just an alternative programming environment, and that people want to approach the creation of a website as a project, and they wanna kind of program everything in javascript, let the javascript handle html, they want they just want to use some sort of framework I don't know grab one, we'll use bootstrap, whatever, and they don't want to think about html, they don't want to think about semantics, they don't want to think about the webpage, they don't want to think about a web site, they just want to think about the javascript code that they're going to write in order to do the like the cool stuff on the site, and there's something in there that ignores the stack, it ignores this idea that the web is a stack, kind of a layered sandwich, which, you know conversely that idea is "hey, really what a web page is or what a website is a collection of html documents," and then "oh you don't want to pretend like it's 1993, you'd like to have your web pages look something different, ok we'll layer on CSS. Your css is gonna make your webpage have your company's branding, this colors, and this font, this whatever, and then "oh look, and it's a different size screen," so we're right a little bit slightly different bit css for that different screen and things can move around. And, "Oh look it's responsive, it's awesome." But all that's happening in the CSS layer, and the html is still the same html, and no matter what kind of device there is, it's just one set of html, right? And then oh let's have some animation, well we use CSS for the animations but "oh we need some javascript to help out with that, where you click and it changes a class or let's do something more complex with javascript or let's go nuts and do something really awesome with javascript like web RTC or we'll use some web sockets, we'll use some of the other topics we've talked about on the show."

But I still very much believe in that layer cake of make your html really solid, and then layer on some really solid CSS, and then layer on whatever else is going on. So that if you have a device that can't do this weird thing that still has that basics, especially for sites that are content, you know media companies where you're delivering news, you're delivering book chapters, you're delivering stuff to read or stuff to consume.

Dale

Sure. You know `I really agree with you, and when that situation occurs, when you're just using the latest javascript hotness to spit out some markup and maybe even css as well and you're losing sight of the stack, something even bigger and more insidious is happening. And that is you're not just losing sight of the stack, you're losing sight of your user, you're putting your own needs and wants as a developer ahead of the needs and wants of your users. When you start with javascript, now I love javascript, javascript is totally cool, this is not a knock on javascript, but when you start with javascript, and make it spit out html, make it spit out css, and then you know, create some sort of containers with some generic content to live in, you're giving the middle finger to your users, in my opinion. If you start with the content though, you're staring with the thing the users are coming to you for. Your content, now your interaction, and so on. So now, regardless of whether you're a web site, or a web application, if you start with content, and then build upon that, using the stack, html, css, and javascript, then you've got a fighting chance of being accessible. When you start with javascript and then spit out html and css, then you have to shoehorn accessibility into it and everything becomes much more painful.

Jen

Yeah, I think that I mean it's almost like you're starting it out with a broken website and you're having to go out and fix it, rather than just starting out with...I was thinking about this earlier today, I was trying to come up with a metaphor for that particular idea, and I remembered, I was thinking of those kind of, sometimes I see them a lot in museums, there used to be one in the Apple store in SoHo, the sort of baby elevator or like, half elevator, where you have to have a key to open the door, usually there's a little door, you have to have a special key to open the door, which means that like, an employee has to be fetched, or the person with the key, they have to go find the key. And they come and open the door, it's usually like a glass door, and then a person can enter into this baby elevator, and the baby elevator goes up, usually like half a flight of stairs, there's no top, there's no roof, there's no...it's just like a little railing around it, and then they're able to exit on the higher up floor, and I was like, "Oh they used to have one of those in the Apple store in SoHo" and it feels like such a hack, like, "Oh we have this building, it's awesome, oh, it has a staircase, oh, ok no one who uses a wheelchair could ever enter this building. Well what are we gonna do, ummm we'll get one of those hacky baby elevators." And it's cool, I'm all for them if that's what's needed, it's a way to solve a problem, and that's how Apple solved that problem in that store when they first moved in to this really old post office in New York City. But then they renovated that space, and I, it's funny because it was closed for like a year, and then they reopened it and it felt, it looks like it's exactly the same store, like "what did they do in here," I guess there's some seems that are now no longer in the glass panels they used. They used eight glass panels and now there's one, and I realized they took out that baby elevator, they don't need it because instead what they did, is built, just, when you enter the store instead of their being four steps to go in, there's just a ramp and everyone walks up the ramp. And if you're an architect, and you're build a new building, and you're building a new museum, like, you just don't design it from scratch with that sort of like, "Hey, I know, let's build four steps right inside the front door so that no one who ever has a baby stroller, or wheelchair, or a bunch of boxes on a cart, or anything that has wheels can ever enter the space". And it's like no, let's just have a ramp, and then everybody can just go ahead and use the ramp. And that's what some of those, some of those like, I don't know somebody wrote some extra javascript extension to put into bootstrap to quote unquote "make it accessible" and it just feels like that kind of hack, like just it's one of those baby like, we don't know what else to do, so we'll just shove on some other kinda small thing on the side, and that's where all that extra work argument comes in, like, "well, if you built it all wrong, then you have to redo it."

Dale

Right, you know and I think one of the motivating factors for companies like Apple to create you know a ramp instead of stairs is sometimes we forget that people who need accommodation still often have credit cards.

Jen

<sarcasm>Wait. What?</sarcasm>

Dale

Yeah! There's no reason to block people from buying your product. That's crazy talk, right? Why would you deliberately set up a wall between your product and people. And if you wouldn't do it for sighted people with credit cards, why would you do it for unsighted people with credit cards. So there's still a lot of buying power in the segment of people who need accommodation, I don't even use the term disability anymore. I was recently at an accessibility conference, and I got to tell you I don't even know what that word means anymore. Someone put up a slide. So I was at this conference in San Diego last week I'm gonna go on a little aside on this. It's like this international technology and people with disabilities conference and, in San Diego, and someone put up this slide, and it was a picture of two people. It was Bill Gates, excuse me, it was not Bill Gates, it was Stephen Hawking next to a photo of Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, and the caption said, "Who's more disabled?" This guy who is Stephen Hawking, who was given just a couple of years to live who's now like 20, 30, 40 years past his expected life expectancy and has changed the world with his thoughts on, you know, physics and so on. Or this guy, who's crippled in a wheelchair, versus this guy who's rotund, but can move and has sight and his ears work, but he's completely like hooked on crack cocaine.

Jen

Yeah.

Dale

And so it was this idea, you know, what is disability even mean when you see stuff like that. When you watch the para- olymipcs that just occurred recently, there’re people who can run faster than you and I.

Jen

Yeah. Oh there are many people who can run fast than me [Both laugh]. We don't have to go all the way to the Olympics and the Para Olympics to find them.

Dale

But what does the term disability even mean, you know when

Jen

Yeah, and it's only clear if you have this sort of firm old school idea in your head that's rooted in a kind of believing that people are less than and sort of seeing them as not contributing to society and not being real people or something that's...

Dale

Yeah, it's just unbelievable. One of the guests at this conference, someone who's been coming for years to visit the exhibitor hall is Stevie Wonder. Now this guy's a national treasure, right? One of the most famous singers in the world, has been famous and beloved since, you know, he was little Stevie Wonder, and the man's completely blind. But he's contributed massively to our society. Someone like Ray Charles, same thing. So like I said, this term disability, it doesn't even resonate for me anymore, I don't even know what that means.

Jen

I still think the other thing, we, especially when people, when you're young and fresh and you know you get sick with the flu but that's it, you've never been sick in any other sort of long term way, and you just the world is your oyster. It's hard to believe that it's not always gonna be like that and uh, you know I've worked, I've seen, I've known developers who they're physically fine, and then five years later they really need to use accessibility technologies to get on the internet, to continue to do the work that they were doing just earlier without any sort of accommodation. Like it's it is us, it happens to people that we know, it's people in our lives, and eventually, honestly, unless you, listener person who's listening right now, die in a very quick and sever accident, at some point, each of us, our bodies break down, and they, and you will loose abilities to do things and if we want to keep using the internet, you can't build a website for 22 year olds, like you have to build a website for the full range of human beings that actually exist. And by the time any of us gets to your mid forties, it becomes harder to see things that are up close and you need to either have reading glasses or bifocals, or sometimes it's just easier to zoom text and zoom in and make the text a little bigger and uh, there's all sorts of millions of little simple things like that where, it's us really, it may not be us when you're in your 20s, but it's going to be us when you're in your 70s, or...

Dale

You know Jen...

Jen

It's kinda gruesome to it's hard to talk about without being depressing.

Dale

You know I wonder you may have hit on something here, and that is I wonder, a lot of the accessibility professionals you see, and meet, are usually, usually aren't the 16-22 year olds. They're the folks who are a little older than that, and I hadn't really put that together before. But perhaps that plays into it, that as we get older, as our bodies change, and again we're not even talking about permanent conditions here, we're talking about the natural process of aging.

Jen

Yeah.

Dale

Maybe that's part of the reason that older people in the profession start talking about accessibility more, which unfortunately then lends itself to the idea that, you know the young kids are looking at older people are like "oh you're that smelly aunt that we talked about," that we don't get or relate to.

Jen

No, I think as you go through life you get in touch with your own mortality and you get in touch with other, you know you just know more people and as you know more people, then you know the person who had this bad accident and wasn't able to regain use of their hand, or you know this person who started to slowly go blind, and it's taken thirty years, but they've gotten their vision has changed to the point where it's having a strong impact on their life. Or you know the person who's not able to hear and they're completely awesome, but they can't watch any of the videos that you just made, because there's no, you didn't put captioning on anything, or you know, you know like you know.

I mean it's ironic that I just used that as an example because this is an audio podcast and I am working towards having transcripts, but I'm not I don't have a transcript of every show immediately coming out right after the show and that's something I would like to do.

Dale

yeah I think that's great.

Jen

It's anyway, we can just rant about that the whole time.

Dale

Well you know I'll tell you, I've been thinking a lot about my own origin and why am I interested in accessibility. And I realized my mom was partially deaf in one of her ears, when she was a child she had contracted scarlet fever and had, I think, maybe like 70% hearing loss in one of her ears, and growing up I you know whenever I talked to her, she would always want me to look at her when I spoke, and she wanted me to speak clearly. And I didn't realize at that time that I was providing some sort of accommodation, this is just the thing I do to talk to my mom. You know, it was ingrained in my from the day I could speak, that that I um, would do something in order to help her understand what I was saying. And growing up, I thought that was just good conversation, I thought that's just how people talk to each other.

Jen

Mmm.

Dale

And now I realize there's a word for that, that's accommodation. And that's really what we're talking about, you know, we say the word accessibility over and over again, to the point that that starts losing meaning as well, and what does that word mean, and when we're talking about web sites and web applications, what that means is accommodation

Jen

Yeah.

Dale

Allowing people with, whether they have vision problems, hearing problems, physical problems, or mental problems, we're just trying to level the playing field, and allow these folks to experience these things in a similar way.

Jen

Well, or, you know, probably put even better or whatever, is that we're just make a website, use the web the way that it was intended to be used, and don't exclude people. Like, don't mess up your web site so that it excludes people who need to use a screen reader, or excludes people who aren't able to read because perhaps they've something like dyslexia and they can see everything just fine, but they can't comprehend the words, they need to use a screen reader to listen, to read everything out loud to them.

Dale

You know, I'm actually glad you brought up dyslexia, you mentioned earlier I work ad McGraw Hill Education, and the reason that we have a new office here in Boston is that we hired a new Chief Digital Office, and he's based here in Boston and he is dyslexic. Quite a bit dyslexic, actually by his own judgment. And I believe I heard him tell a story that one or both of his sons are dyslexic and he was previously the Chief Information Office at the Harvard business school and he went out looking for software that could help his sons and by extension himself and you know he said all the software I looked at sucked.

And he said that one of the reasons that he came over to McGraw Hill Education is that he wanted to create software that his sons could use. And to me, that speaks directly to accessibility. Now, one of the things that I heard at this conference I was at last week, is designing specifically for those who are dyslexic....So lets talk a little bit about some details here. First, justified text, like fully justified left and right text, is apparently, makes it even more difficult for dyslexics to read. It creates what we call rivers, which is like this extra space in between words artificially, so just doing something like left justified, which is also referred to as ragged right, doing that, as opposed to fully justified can help.

I've also heard, and I’d never heard this before, I heard, at this conference, and these were dyslexic people explaining this information, they said that often, the easiest color combination for them to read is yellow text on a blue background.

Jen

Oh!

Dale

Now, as a designer, who ever put that combination together?

Jen

Yeah, we've seen very unreadable for, like hard to read for a lot of other people, so maybe a good accommodation would be some kind of toggle or something.

Dale

Yeah and you know if you do build a style switcher that allows people to change the font, change their size, change their colors, that type of thing, it would be just as easy to build in a yellow-on-blue style as any other two-color style.

Jen

Especially for an eBook or some kind of project like that.

Dale

Sure, sure.

Jen

Where you are saying here's a button to change the size of the font, and the font itself.

Dale

So even accommodations like text justification and the color of the font against the background, even stuff like that can make it easier for people to comprehend your information.

Jen

Well and there's an example of...I mean I feel like it's important to make text as readable as possible. I think it's easy for people sometimes especially young developers to make fonts way too small and they do it because they think it's looks artsy or cool, and specifically I mean body copy. And body copy is something that you're really going to read. Not a tiny label that maybe should be tiny. But like, the main text right, and or they flip the color so it's like white on black cause they think it looks arty, but it's actually really hard to read. A lot of studies show that it's very hard to read. Or the fonts that are pick are just sort awkward. Or like you said, I mean, I find the justified on both sides very hard to read myself. Something about my eyes. I perhaps notice lack of readability quicker than other people because maybe it affects me a little bit more. I don't know. I've never been diagnosed with anything, but like it jumps out, so little things like that, it feels like that does make it better for everybody, no matter what kind of situation they’re in, but then something like creating of switcher so that you can do yellow text on blue would be an extra, but that you’ve got think about that, plan that, and then create that kind of thing. And maybe that is something that might not work on every project, but like you said if you're already building out the style switcher like I work on this ebook last year, and we totally put that in there, it was very basically completely mimicking something that an eBook reader like iBooks or kindle or something has, and that would make a lot of sense to add that in. So I guess there is, to get a little bit less ranty and a little bit more nuanced, there is a range of stuff, I think some of it starts with just "write good html," like use semantics appropriately.

Dale

Absolutely.

Jen

Other parts might be a little more advanced, or a little bit more mastery.

Jen

So, let's talk more about specific how tos and helpful like, this is, people are sold, they're like, "Yes, I'm in." What do I need to know? We've talked about semantics and html. One of they things that just the stone in my shoe, and it's making me more and more irritated these days, is these javascript framework that replace...especially if someone's building an application and it's got all kinds of like, buttony button buttons in it because it's like, you know, a replacement for Microsoft word, or whatever, it's an application that's got buttons. And all those buttons are actually spans and they're not real buttons so people can't hit tab on the keyboard and go through the buttons and tab over, they have to use a mouse, or a finger on a touch screen, simply because the developers used a span tag instead of a button tag in the code. Like, what is up with that why? Why? Button comes with all this juicy stuff, and they're like, "Nah, I don't wanna use it. I'm just gonna use a span."

Dale

As to why someone chooses incorrectly, I couldn't say, but I'll tell ya, every time I see poor code like that, I view it as an opportunity, and what I mean is, "hey I'm a developer too," and if this is a framework or project that's available on let's say github, or a file sharing site like that, this is an opportunity for me to contribute, and update the semantics and update it to use, you know, the appropriate elements, and then actually contribute to the thing to improve it. So rather than sitting back and just complaining about it, you know, I see the opportunity, let's jump in and do something about it, and then get credit for it.

Jen

Yeah, that's smart. Especially on the really popular frameworks that seem to have really bad semantics, yeah, to contribute and help educate, and move everybody forward.

Dale

I tell you, there's a whole team of people who's working to make wordpress even more accessible

Jen

Yeah

Dale

And several of them were at this conference I was just at and gave a presentation on what they're doing and I gotta tell you those folks are taking accessibility seriously. And I think they serve as a model to those who are creating other types of frameworks, whether or javascript interactive frameworks, or whether they're content management systems, or learning management systems, or ecommerce systems, It's a great example of taking that possibility and running with it and really working to improve the product.

Jen

Yeah Drupal has had at least especially Drupal 7 and forward, accessibility has been a huge mandate. Drupal 7 was now three, four years ago that people were working on that. And basically this law just came down, like, "Hey, every single thing we do right now has to pass this certain level of accessibility standards and if it doesn't it doesn’t get in.

Dale

Yeah

Jen

And a lot of work was done around color contrast, we can talk about that, like color contrast. Let's talk about...let’s also, so ok, before we talk about color contrast let's talk about 508, and then WCAG? Is that how you pronounce it.

Dale

I've heard people say...

Jen

Whack?

Dale

I've heard people say whi-kag, I just refer to it W C A G.

Jen

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, there's a 2.0 and there's a double A, triple A, single A levels, so will you talk that? What's up with the thing with the bobby and the 508 and the WCAG and the...

Dale

This is a discussion that we're having at my work currently. So the main difference between the two...

Jen

So way back in the beginning, so bobby and...50..So...I don't even know what bobby was, but it was some sort of an accessibility guideline, like "hey, everyone should do this" it was written up. And then it seems like 508 came along, and 508 is actually the number 508 refers to a particular line, or a paragraph in a law in the United States, "ok this is gonna be the minimum accessibility requirement for everything that has to do with the US government, you need to meet this 508 standard, these are the things your website needs to do. These are the rules about what it has to accommodate." But then it seems like the WCAG is much more modern and came along later and if you meet a certain level of WCAG, I think it's double A, then you also are going to meet 508, and I don’t see a lot of people saying 508 anymore, except perhaps if they have a specific a government contact with that particular lone, because it seems like it's a little bit out of date. They're not wrong, they're just rusty, and it's easier and clearly and perhaps better but at least more modern to look up and reference and learn about WCAG. And then make a decision you gotta make a decision along that way whether you want to go single, double or triple along the WCAG. Is that right? My quick...

Dale

Generally.

Jen

Feel free to correct anything I just said wrong, like that's my weird understanding.

Dale

I don't think you're wrong, but I can add a little more nuance, and that is section 508 refers to a specific section of the Americans with Disabilities Act. ok, now the entire Americans with Disabilities Act is the thing that covers ramps, and physical access, to things. Section 508 is the subset that refers to digital products. It refers to the internet, it refers to software, hardware, and that sort of thing. So, really our discussion today is about web accessibility, and so section 508 is the thing that applies. But it only applies in America, you go north of the border, to Canada, and you start talking about section 508, what does that mean to them?

Jen

<sarcasm>Wait, the whole world doesn't follow US LAW?</sarcasm>

Dale

<sarcasm>What? Crazy</sarcasm>

Jen

Isn't the us in charge of everything?

Dale

Yeah, well, so you go to another country, and you start talking about 508 compliance, and they're like "well that's nice, but that doesn't address us."

Jen

Yeah, we don't care about your federal law.

Dale

The WCAG guidelines did come afterward, and those were created by the World Wide Web Consortium, and those guidelines don't talk about the physical stuff, there’s nothing about ramps in there, ok, this is all about the web, web applications, web sites. Ok, and it's for an international audience. So one of the transitions that we're making, at McGraw hill education, is as we pursue an international audience for our products, our accessibility offerings are switching from section 508 to the WCAG guidelines. As you mentioned they align to each other very, very closely, and whichever one you choose, be consistent, test against it, report against it. I often explain that the goal is not necessarily 100% compliance with every guideline, I think the goal is really when you're selling something, the goal is to have an answer "We've tested our products and this is what we found: these areas we're good to go, these other subset of areas, we need work on and here's what out plan is to address them. we plan to have them done by X date." That's a good answer. accessibility, like blindness, is a continuum. It's not an on/off button binary state. So maybe that was a long answer and maybe I got sidetracked.

Jen

No it's good.

Dale

But those are the primary differences between section 508 and WCAG. One of them addresses more than the web and is for a United States audience, the other one, WCAG, is for an international audience, specifically focused on the web.

Jen

And then WCAG has, well there's 1.0 and there's 2.0. So it seems like whenever I hear people talk about this, they're actually talking about the WCAG 2.

Dale

Yes.

Jen

And then there are these three levels of compliance, or I guess it's right here I'm reading the word conformance, conformance levels.

Dale

Right.

Jen

Single, double and triple a. And like for Single A, is sorta the minimum, it feels like "hey if you care about this at all you should meet all of the requirements of single A, just right out of the box."

Dale

And you know a lot of the stuff in single A is stuff you should be doing anyway. Adding valuable alt tags to your images you know, that's one of the top ones that's stuff you should be doing anyway. Accessibility guidelines don't have to be these scary monsters. Like I said, if we're building against standards, we should be doing these things anyway.

Jen

And what other kinds of things just off the top of your head are in single A?

Dale

Oh gosh, I believe there's a minimum for color contrast, there's you know, the idea, try not to use images of text, try to use actual text. You know things like if you're gonna use frames, which you know why are you using frames, but if you're gonna use frames they should be labeled. The document that you're, the web page or app that you're viewing should have a title, I mean, come on this is web 101 development stuff. Right?

Jen

Right, it's very rare now that you see an untitled page, and I think we forget like when you're looking at the browser itself and you look all the way at the very very top, what does the browser window say.

Dale

Right, and usually with a screen reader, it the first thing it says.

Jen

Yeah.

Dale

It's the first thing it reads aloud to you. So you imagine you go somewhere and your screen reader says "unknown title".

Jen

Right.

Dale

What the hell is that, you know, so simple stuff like that, you know you should already be doing.

Jen

And then my sense is that double a, it could be a little bit more of a challenge, but it's a good challenge, and it's not too hard to go ahead and get everything under double a, like for Drupal, that's the standard is WCAG 2 double a, like everything has to be double a, and then triple a has to be more, ok there's something’s in here that at the triple a level that maybe we're not gonna do, like we're gonna make a decision to not have color contrast that quite this, like "it has to be black or white or it doesn't meet the standards of triple A." There's some, at least in my practice when I go and look things up, that's how I end up coming away. What do you feel about it, or what do you know as someone who actually knows Double A, Triple A, how to make a decision about which level we're not gonna do some of this.

Dale

Well, I think part of it is you know, a, level A is the easiest stuff, and I've never seen a website, or an application that couldn't at least conform to level A.

Jen

With some effort. With some not breaking stuff.

Dale

Yeah. and then level two is just some additional accommodation. level three, you're right, it definitely gest tougher, I will say section 508 also has those three levels. And they map quite closely, and so there's now a mandate in the US government that by I think it's the end of this year, I'm not 100% on that, but soon, all government sites that adhere to section 508, now need to adhere to level two, or double A rather than single A.

Jen

Right.

Dale

So there's an effort going on right now for all these sites like the famous healthcare.gov, there's an effort going on where they're all working to make these digital products to conform to level double A. So I think double A's really....If accessibility is a real concern of yours and you're going to be selling to an audience of folks who need these kind of accommodations, I think double A is really great place to shoot for with single A as a bare minimum. And as an aside, I work in an organization where we use the agile software development methodology, and I've had a lot of good luck taking those guidelines that are in WCAG writing them as user stories, and then getting them actually into our development backlog.

Jen

Yeah.

Dale

So that way usually, I believe there's 59 total guidelines in WCAG, and you know if you can include let's say, two a week in every one week sprint, you've got two stories you're working on, you've got this done in a relatively short amount of time. So it's a way to take those guidelines, prioritize them, and get them into your backlog. You'll discover maybe there's a guideline that doesn't apply to you. Maybe your website doesn't include audio, maybe it doesn't include video. Well all the items that are about audio or video, you know you can say "We don’t support that," or, "Those items don't apply to us." Great, keep going. let's get to the meaty stuff that does apply. But working it into your development methodology up front, in my experience, always ends up yielding a better product than if you try to shoehorn accessibility in at the end, like at the end of like a QA process. So it's looking at it proactively vs. reactively.

Jen

Yeah, well and you know I do think in some ways it's like, handling older browsers or something, if you're using progressive enhancement and you're just kinda using good development techniques all along, then you're probably gonna end up in pretty good shape, maybe you do some of the testing later but you've been actually thinking about it all along, you had a conversation upfront early on like which browsers are we gonna support, how far back in time, withhold browsers where that's different than saying maybe a team that just says "we're not gonna talk about browsers, we're gonna pretend that everyone's using the browser that's on my computer and I'm not gonna write code about that. I'm not gonna think about progressive enhancement, I'm not gonna think about older browsers, I'm not gonna think about fall backs, or polyfills or any of that, I'm just gonna build this website to work on chrome and then I'll let QA come back with a hundred million tickets and then we have to go back and refactor a whole bunch of code because it was written in a very silly way. In a way it almost feels like the accessibility concerns, like this WCAG standard should be handled perhaps in the same way. Have a conversation up front about what level of accessibility you want to aim for and educate everybody about what kinds of thing are in here and what kinds of things they should be thinking about and then working that in all along and using really in some ways, like we've already said, fifteen times, it a lot of the same stuff, right, so progressive enhancement, good semantics, but I'm reading this right now and there are some really interesting things in here. Like guideline 3 make text content readable and understandable. We talked a little bit about that, and not only, I mean that's good content strategy, it's also a recognition that you likely have an international audience, so there's a section 3.1.3, "Unusual Words"

A mechanism is available for identifying specific words or phrases used in an unusual or restricted way, including idioms and jargon.

This is level triple A. So adding a mechanism to define words that users might not know, might be, you know need to find some budget for that. That might be a little bit complicated. But perhaps you can write content so that you're really not using a lot of idioms, you're not using jargon that people aren't going to understand, and you can fulfill the idea of this one by remembering that you have an international audience. You have audiences with a wide range of cognitive abilities and you just want to be clear and direct about what you're saying and not get too convoluted. And maybe you do have a project where it's a big history there's lot of jargon so you do want to add in a definition glossary kind of things click in and quickly get a definition.

Dale

You know I agree, and there are folks who apply accessibility because they need to because they need to. There's some sort of mandate whether they're working for a government organization or an organization that gets money from the government or in our case you know we work in education. There are other folks who apply accessibility standards because it's just the right thing to do. They may not be under any sort of obligation to do it, any external obligation, but they feel an internal obligation, because they feel it's just the right thing to do. It was my pleasure that during this conference, I got to meet a developer from Seattle named Marcy Sutton, and Marcy said something really profound during the conference. She does a lot of presentations and in fact, today as we record this, she's giving a presentation on accessibility and shadow DOM in Seattle, I mean, this is great stuff, and so she said, "You know, people don't want to talk about accessibility, people want to talk about robots, so I'm gonna go talk about accessible robots." So what she's saying is, you know, "Instead of making the discussion of accessibility separate from all these other technical and designee discussions, instead, let's work to integrate that discussion into all these other presentations." So like I said, the concept of the shadow DOM, just to continue on that one for a second, it's something that people are just starting to talk about, something that's very exciting and fresh and new and shiny, and you know what she's doing, with no obligation other than she thinks it's the right thing to do she's designed an entire presentation about the accessibility of the shadow DOM. That's just one example but I think it's a great one, where even if you're not under some external pressure, to talk about accessibility, you can still talk about it because it's just the right thing to do.

Jen

Yeah, well, it reminds me, Tim Cook was in...I'll put a link to the story, or one version of the story in the show notes for this show. Oh by the way the show notes for the show you can go to 5by5.tv/webahead/64 and find them. But he, you know people were giving him a hard time about stuff and he made this comment about you know, "We don't consider the ROI, the return on investment, when making decision about accessibility, and putting accessibility into iOS it's just, it is, it's just the right thing to do. I'm completely botching the story, but I think people know what I'm talking about. You know, "We don't always think about profit, we think about our users, and what's important, and what kind of company we want to be.

Dale

I think that accessibility is where technology meets empathy. And you know why wouldn't you create an empathetic product with technology. I don't even understand the opposite of that concept. I don't understand why you wouldn't.

Jen

And I think about ramps, for example, when I was a kid, there was no ADA it didn't come until much later. So there was no law, and there were very few ramps anywhere, and lots of times there weren't any elevators either. Right, so there's just many many many places that people who were using wheelchairs just could not go. And then the ADA passed, and there was just this epic effort one sidewalk after another after another after another, crews would come along, city crews would come along and rip out the curb and put in a new, put in a little ramp at the corner instead of a step. And it's so common now here in the US that, especially in a city like New York, where actually when there's a curb it's weird. It's like, why do I have to step down here, like "I'm gonna trip." We're so used to the ramps and now what you see in my neighborhood there's strollers everywhere, there's people on skateboard everywhere. People on bikes, bikes everywhere. Something that was made for a very specific reason for a very specific group of people became something that everybody does use. I realized that because when I was in my late teens, early twenties, I would haul a lot of equipment around and I'd be pulling dollies and carts of stuff. And I had piles of stuff in my hands. and I realized a lot of places I could just stand on one foot, take my other foot, and push the button that was installed, giant button that was installed to activate automatic door openers, it has a wheelchair on the button, clearly it was designed to be for a person in a wheelchair, who could like push this easy to push button. but I would use my foot. I would be like kicking the, gently pushing with my foot, the button and opening the door so I didn't have to put stuff down and open the door and move stuff.

It's almost like there's these completely unintended consequences that once you make it easier for specific target group, or specific idea of a person to use this thing that suddenly it because easier for everybody to use. And I do think something that like a screen reader, if all the websites were accessible to screen readers, then suddenly it would be much more likely that cars would start reading websites out loud, I don't know that we're going to see cars reading websites out loud, and I think that the blocker is gonna be that the majority of websites don't work with screen readers and web developers for the last 25 years have not been doing a very good job of writing clean semantic html that's easily read by a robot, so apple or android, or whoever might hesitate to put a screen reader web browser into a car because people will think the car is broken or that iOS is broken, when actually it's the website that's broken. But that would be awesome to listen to Twitter and have all of the articles that you wanted to hear read out to you on your commute. That would be great.

Dale

Absolutely, what you're referring to is what we call universal design. And there's a new example of that that I'd draw your attention to, and it's a wristwatch. And if you search e one, that's E O N E, you'll find this thing, there's a watch that they're making called The Bradley. And the designer at first created this watch for blind people to use and what it would do is you'd touch it and it would announce the time. It would be like "two twenty, PM, two twenty one pm" that sort of thing. Well, imagine you're in a meeting and all of the sudden it's really obvious and you're drawing attention to the fact that you're checking the time. You know, that's horribly annoying, so rather than including the blind, it unintentionally excluded them, it made them apart, and blind people didn't want to buy this. So this guy went back to the drawing board, and what he came up with was this watch that uses two ball bearings one on the outside perimeter of the watch, and the one on the inside, so the outside one indicates the hours, the inside one indicates minutes, and you can touch the watch and you can feel where these ball bearings are, which indicate to you what time it is. Now, these things look cool, cuz they are cool, they serve not only a blind crowd, but for those with traditional sight, you could still touch this thing surreptitiously, let's say during a meeting, or during a date [both chuckle], when you don't want people to realize that you're checking the time, you could also check the time, let's say in a darkened theater, or during a black out, you can still touch this thing and be able to tell what time it is. Now this is a great example it was originally created for a crowd that didn't have site, but it also has tremendous benefit to those that do have sight, and it' a great example of universal design, and boy these things are just really cool, and frankly I'm gonna buy one. I can't wait to have it.

Jen

Yeah, I'm looking at a picture of it. I'll put a link in the show notes. They actually do look beautiful.

Dale

Right? they're great and it's really kind of simple beauty.

Jen

Yeah

Dale

That conveys the information in the least difficult manner and that's how I try to approach developing a website or web application.

Jen

So what are a couple, in the few minutes we have left, what are a couple tips you would give people who anybody listening to this show, perhaps they're just a developer in a chair in a company and they don't have decision making power, what can people do or what kinds of actions can people take.

Dale

First, care, you know, if you actually. It doesn't matter whether somebody's forcing you to add accessibility to your product or not, do it because it's the right thing to do. Develop to standards. Understand the elements in html5, well, all of html, understand the elements and what they're used for. Add valuable alt tags to images. Follow the basic building blocks of the web, and then during your testing, when you actually, in addition to your browser testing and device testing, actually give your product to someone who maybe doesn't have sight, or is color blind, or has trouble clicking a mouse. And it's really sobering to watch those folks not be able to use this thing that you've created, that you've given birth to, and accessibility is really kind of a subset of usability, and you learn a whole lot about how the product you've created is gonna be used by your users.

Jen

Yeah, and a wide variety, I just also think it is, I said this already, but it's about, thinking about what you're building being made and used, being used in a wide, wide, wide range of contexts, some which you've probably never even heard of or know about. Whether that's phones that you've never heard of in other countries that you've never been to, or devices that people are using to access the site in ways that you wouldn't have though of for whatever reason, for all kinds of reasons, and building a technology stack that really holds up, like it's really robust, and it totally holds up to the crazy different set of circumstances, rather than kind of brittly falls apart, when somebody has a slow phone, or a slow connection, or isn't using the mouse, or isn't using their eyes, or isn't using what you thought they would be.

Dale

Absolutely, you know Jen, I'm so happy that you know, it's taken you 64 episodes, but you've gotten, now we've had this conversation, and you know what, this isn't the end of the conversation, this is the start of an ongoing, bigger conversation that all of us who are creating websites and applications need to have more often.

Jen

Yeah, and this will be the show were we rant about why you need to think about accessibility and a little bit about where to go look up, I mean people can actually read this, I'll definitely put the link to this, but you can even google WCAG 2.0 and find the document on w3.org, the actual spec, and there's quite a lot in here, and you just read the spec, and you're like, "Oh yeah, I hadn't thought about that. I can totally do that, that's easy." Or, "Oh, we should go learn more about that thing, I'm not sure what that means."

And then I'll do shows. I'd like to do a show on aria roles, could perhaps do a whole show on color contrast, other things regarding images and thinking about making accessible images, cuz there is, there's a lot there to kinda dig into as far as the technology. But I also don't feel like as a front-end web developer myself, I have yet to encounter something, a technical thing to actually do to make a website that's sorta middle level accessible that is hard. It's just, like everything's so easy, it's just like, "oh, an alt tag, ok click click click. I typed it, now it's done.' Or whatever. Like, "Oh I'm building a content management system, I'm using Drupal this time and we don't have a field for people to add the alt tag, well we need to add that field ok now the field's there, ok great, we're done. moving on. next ticket." It just doesn't seem that hard, I just don't understand why it's not part of what everybody thinks is their job.

Dale

I think, you know, section 508 and WCAG, since they've been created, they haven't changed that much the basic tenets are still the same, and since they're not constantly changing, they're not top of mind on the latest Reddit or Hacker News or Twitter for that matter, but as soon as somebody says, "Hey there's a new css preprocessor," "Hey that's cool and neat and new and shiny," so we go check that out, and we tend to forget about accessibility. But you're right, when you really start taking a look at it, it's really not that hard. And if we're deliberately ignore it, then shame on us

Jen

And when you say it doesn't change that often, I'm like, "Oh, well then even better." The amount of time a person might put into learning this stuff, well, it will last longer. If it's not gonna change for the next five years, then you just spend a couple days reading this and you're good to go. You don't have to learn anything new for a while, unlike some of the things that are moving so quickly that people have a hard time keeping up with this is not gonna be hard to keep up with.

Dale

Exactly right

Jen

These are like, basic skills. Ok, well we should go, we need to wrap things up here, thank you so much for being on this show, people can follow you on Twitter, right? @dalecruse. C R U S E.

Dale

That's right, and I'd love to connect with you there, or linkedIn as well, hit me up via email dale.cruse@gmail.com. Love to hear from you.

Jen

Nice. People can follow the show @thewebahead on Twitter, or I don’t know what else do I want to pimp. I don't know, I've nothing else. Oh transcripts! Here's the deal, I don't have $400 to pay for transcripts, but I do have now, we've got 7 transcripts 7 out of 64, of this show, so if people are interested in helping out by either manually transcribing one of the shows themselves, or in otherwise helping, maybe they've got some robots they can help us out, or some funds that can help us out, or they want to do something. It's all up on github, you can go to the repo, fork it, um, let me know, it would be great, let us know we gotta coordinate so that people aren't transcribing the same show at the same time.

I really do wanna have transcriptions of all the shows, and offer that up as a service. Again, not just for people who aren't able to listen to the show, but also for anybody who wants to be able to read the text or write a quote, or look something up quickly, it'll be a good resource, so, episode 55, 56, 57, 48, 59, 60, are done as well as episode 6. So basically 55 forward we're good thanks to the work of Jenn Schlick. She's been putting a lot of time into getting these transcribed. So thanks to her, Thanks to Jenn with two Ns and go checkout the repo and help out if you'd like to. And then otherwise, next week. We’ll see you. thanks for listening. Bye!