E73 – Interview with Jen Luker – Part 2
Jen tells us to start accessibility today, to start with one thing. Then to do one more thing, and then one more. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 73. I’m Nic Steenhout, and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS, and video at Twilio.com. So in this episode, I’m continuing my conversation with Jen Luker. Last show was quite awesome, do check it out if you haven’t already, but we spoke about accessibility obviously, but also explored a little bit of the relationship between knitting and weaving and coding, and the impact that can have on helping people learning to code. So that was awesome. So, welcome back, Jen. Jen: Thank you. Nic: We finished last week talking about your greatest achievement and how you built a workflow that was really monitoring accessibility at all stages of the project. From coding to checking on the live site with real data. A flipside to that, what would be your greatest frustration in terms of web accessibility? Jen: My greatest frustration is people that, no matter how much you try to explain how it’s useful they just shrug their shoulders and say, “I don’t have time,” “It’s not important,” “maybe we will get to it in a few years.” There’s so much low hanging fruit that you can get to with just a few minutes of extra work that completely transforms the entire web if we all did it and it doesn’t have to be some big, giant initiative or an extra thing. It can be a few minutes, it could be “I’m going to think for five seconds on what to really put in this alt tag,” or it could be, “..you know.. I think I’m going to use a button instead of a Div here” or “... maybe an ARIA role will help here when I have to use this thing but, it’s not very accessible.” Just a split second decision makes a huge difference, and it doesn’t… at the moment the perspective on accessibility is that it’s a feature. And that’s so disappointing because it’s not a feature. If you couldn’t get through your funnel and buy the product, you would be flipping out making a hotfix to get it to work, right? Nic: Yeah, yeah Jen: But there's a huge amount of people that actually can’t buy your product and nobody cares. Accessibility isn’t a feature. It’s a usability bug. And changing the… Jen: Right? So, I mean, when you’re dealing with accessibility issues they’re accessibility bugs, and they’re bugs in your system. They need to be documented, they need to be fixed. Especially if they’re affecting your funnel. So I think that’s probably my hugest frustration, is trying to change the perspective from “It’s a feature we can do in a few years when we get around to it” to “These are actually usability bugs.” Nic: Why do you think there’s this mindset of … “Oh well, it’s a feature” or “It’s too hard” or “I can’t be bothered”? Why do you think people, even after you’ve spent some time, energy and resources trying to do a bit of education … why do they keep that attitude do you think? Jen: So, there’s some really cool tools like Lighthouse for Chrome or aXe for Chrome or Firefox and when you load it up, and you run a quick technological audit on your website, and 900 issues come up on one page… that just goes into shock overload, right? You just look at it and you’re like, “that’s one page out of hundreds so how much does that really add up to as far as accessibilit