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Melissa: Hi, Joel, thanks for joining me today.
Joel: Hi, how's it going?
Melissa: Pretty good, pretty good. Can you introduce yourself and your job?
Joel: Sure. I'm Joel Smith. I'm the Web accessibility administrator at the university for their public-facing websites.
Melissa: Great, thank you. And can you tell me a little bit about how you explain accessibility to people who maybe have never heard of it before? They don't know what you do when you say that at a barbecue or wherever?
Joel: It can all come down to just being inclusive, including everyone in what you do, providing people with disabilities equal access to the web, because I do web accessibility. But accessibility is more than just the web, but it's my expertise. But you do this ideally through universal design, which I think is the word that people will really understand because we don't know who's coming to our websites. We don't know their abilities. So it needs to be universally ready for them before they arrive.
Disabilities like having no vision or low vision, being deaf or hard of hearing, ADD, that has an impact even in motor impairments, having shaky hands like Parkinson's.
And whenever people think of people with disabilities. People are not inherently disabled. I think of it is as doing something, not being something. So people do not need to be disabled from using a website or an application because you can change the environment. The physical world is a good metaphor that I like to use with people because this anybody would pick up on this.
Think of a task like voting, someone in a wheelchair needs to go vote. If there is no ramp into a building, then they're disabled from voting, but if there is a ramp, then they're able to vote. So there's no disability there. And then everybody loves ramps. People with strollers, people who don't have much mobility as they used to. People with temporary disabilities like a broken leg. So whenever you do something for people with a disability, everybody ends up like you.
I like a digital example, maybe these are buzz words people haven't heard of yet. Providing good color contrast for people with low vision. Alternative text descriptions so blind screen reader users can understand an image. Captioning for deaf or hard of hearing, large touch targets - that might be something the user experience people are familiar with. Making buttons large enough to click or tap. So those are all digital types of things. That's accessibility in a nutshell for me.
It's just being inclusive and thinking of people as not being inherently disabled.
Melissa: Those are some great examples, thank you for sharing all that, Joel. Despite your great examples, do you bump into people still like who may not care as much or maybe don't prioritize accessibility as you would like? How do you get them to care?
Joel: Yeah, it's a thing still for sure. It depends on who it is. Sometimes people just need to know about it. I call them the do-gooders and once they're aware of an issue, they want to do the right thing. They want to learn how to help people. So just being aware can help a lot of people.
UX people are usually pretty easy to get on board because almost everything that's good for accessibility is good for user experience for everyone. I mean, being inclusive, but also, as I mentioned, like a touch target being large enough to click, that's good for everybody.
For business people, it's an untapped market - 26 percent of people identify as having some type of disability. Not all of those are web-related, but that's a huge market. And lawsuits are a big motivator for business people. Making things accessible is cheaper than getting out of legal trouble. Does that answer it?
Melissa: I think it does, yeah, yeah, I think the lawsuit thing is definitely a motivator too, but who wants it gets to that point or to the bad press that you might receive.
Joel: Exactly. It's the carrot and the stick. Like as an accessibility person who I need to work with a lot of people and get them on board. And people, you work on this, so it'll help people. But then if that doesn't work, then you've got to get the stick out and be like, “Listen, it's either you fix it now or you're going to fix it later.”
Melissa: Yeah, that is that makes a lot of sense, everything you say. And you have been doing accessibility a long time, Joel. And I'm curious about how it's changed during your career, maybe when you got started in it and maybe even how you got started in it and then how you've seen it change.
Joel: Yeah, how I got started with it was. I was kind of the accessibility heartbeat where I worked, I was really into it and I really got other people into it. And then there became a need for a full-time web accessibility person. And since I was the main accessibility heartbeat, being the subject matter expert, I got the job, or earned it over time.
So I try to tell people just know a little bit about web accessibility with your job, and you might be the subject matter expert because maybe no one else knows anything about it. It can open up opportunities. But I guess to your question about maybe how things have changed. Everything is getting more complex with the Web. There's new technology always coming out and it gets harder and harder to fix things after they're built. That's the biggest change.
Melissa: Awesome, thank you for sharing all that, can you talk a little bit about what your day-to-day is like in your job?
Joel: Yeah, we have to make sure that new websites that launch are accessible and compliant. So I do assessments of them based on Web content, accessibility guidelines that are kind of the rules that everyone has to follow. So that can happen a lot. And then also monitoring - is the new content or functionality still compliant on a site?
Checking for captioning to make sure videos are captioned, checking PDFs for accessibility because any document, anything on the web as web content needs to be accessible too. So it's a combination of new stuff and then keeping an eye on old stuff. And a lot of training, I do ton of trainings for people.
Melissa: I would imagine that it's a lot of education for a lot of different people who are creating the content.
Joel: Yeah. I do at least training every month or more, maybe six in a month. It's sometimes it's one on one with people. And sometimes it's going to be like, you know, just maybe 40 or 50 people that you can get together.
Melissa: So this is a ripe area. It sounds like, for other people who might be interested in delving more into accessibility, because we need more education, we need more people to know about it. There's a demand for training. With the rise in lawsuits, more people are aware they need to have expertise. What is frustrating to you as a professional working in this accessibility space?
Joel: People who don't care or they just try to sneak through like, “I'm going to launch this website - maybe nobody will notice.” And, you know, that can happen. Just really, the frustrating thing is it's just people who don't want to just do it because it's the right thing to do.
Melissa: I hear you. And Joel, what do people misunderstand about accessibility?
Joel: You know, a lot of people think that making something accessible makes it ugly. That you're limiting the design of something, but it's not really - I think that's the biggest myth from some designers. Something about like think about color contrast. That's one of the things that maybe a designer might be not into.
Color contrast is the color of text on top of a background color. So making things easy to read. So having high contrast. Everybody likes to be able to read text. And nobody's impressed when they can't read the text or maybe the text is hard to read. So making compromises actually is kind of like providing the ramp from the earlier example that it can help everyone. So it might have a couple of limitations, but overall, it's for the best.
Melissa: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What advice would you give to somebody just getting started with trying to make their websites or apps more accessible? Somebody watching a video might be their first kind of encounter of like, oh, I see. This is important.
Joel: Yeah, yeah. If I had to tell them anything, I'd say Google WCAG. It's the web content accessibility guidelines. That's where it all starts. That's the measuring stick that we use to decide if something is compliant and accessible. Depending on the industry that you're in, the Web content accessibility criteria might be the law actually, and you don't really have the option. You might accidentally not be doing it.
So, it's also sort of a double-edged sword - the good part is if you follow the web content accessibility criteria, you can back up your design decisions with the law - like the color contrast or some of the other design features. If they are compliant and somebody doesn't like it, it's not an opinion. It's like, hey, I'm just following the rules here. It's not just an opinion. So learn the web content accessibility guidelines. And if nobody else knows it, that makes you the subject matter expert where you work.
Melissa: That's right. That's right. And then it's possible to do that down the line, too. That will be the law for everybody. I know that the courts are mixed in terms of websites being a public accommodation and apps, that sort of thing. But we should really be heading that way. I'm hopeful to kind of just make accessibility the standard. And so let's say, OK, maybe somebody has gotten to explore those guidelines. They did their Googling, and are there other places that you think have good learning around accessibility?
Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Twitter. So the accessibility hashtag for Twitter is the least accessible thing you can think of. It's #a11y. That's accessibility. So if you follow that you'll see all kinds of cool tips and tricks, people posting articles. That is probably the best place. There's also a Slack channel for it too. But I'd get started with Twitter. That will get you really far to really dive into it.
Melissa: That's great, that's a great resource. Can you explain a little bit about why it's a11y?
Joel: I don't quote me on this, but I think Accessibility is 11 letters.
Melissa: I think that's my understanding, too, of how it ended up being.
Joel: And then everyone spells it "ally" because the ones look the same, they look like "l"s. So it makes it even less accessible. That's right. That's what somebody chose probably 10 years ago to make it.
Melissa: Yeah, well, that's a good to know, that's a great hashtag for learning.
Joel: Yeah. A really, really a good place to start.
Melissa: Ok, cool, nice, neat little tidbits too, right? To not get overwhelmed. It seems like with accessibility, you just got to start somewhere like start by capturing your videos.
Joel: Everything. Yeah. Any small thing you do can reduce a barrier for somebody. So it doesn't have to be perfect to be better and, you know, to be much better.
Melissa: Yeah, I like that. Doesn't have to be perfect. Just keep moving the right direction. OK, Joel, we know that people will have a limited cognitive load in their head. And if they can only remember one thing from our interview, what would you want them to take away about accessibility?
Joel: Making things accessible and inclusive makes things better for everyone. We're not just doing it for like a tiny minority, we're doing this for everyone. And all of the things that we implement will help - you never know who is going to help.
Melissa: I love it. That's a great message. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today. I really appreciate it.
Joel: Yeah, no problem. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity.
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