Assistive Technologies

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>> Jon Kuperman: With that, we'll move into the next section, which is assistive technologies, or what I call the amazing ways people use the web. So one of the great things about doing accessibility work is, how many real users I've gotten to work with over the years. This started when I was at Twitter, and I did a lot of web accessibility at Twitter.

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And we would get all of these, really excited users that would live in San Francisco, and they would come in and we would get them lunch. And in exchange, we'd do like a design kind of, what is it called, like a UX study with them trying to use the website.

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And we found just these incredible gaps that even us as like, accessibility experts hadn't really thought of all the use cases. So, I got to know all these great people and got to see all these amazing bits of assistive technology that they used. And I found like, it really opened my mind to all the different ways people browse the web and the implications.

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Like strong one that we'll cover is, maybe I'll wait for it. But things that can be very, very easy, very fast with a mouse in a single click, you could think could be really, really time consuming if you had to tab all the way through or similarly if you're using some kind of single switch or single button.

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Just being conscious of how many actions it might take for a user to get to the add to cart button, or the signup flow, or something like that. So here's this cool picture I found of all these different bits of assistive technology. We're gonna dive into a few of them, mostly over on the left side, that are very web specific.

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One of the most common ways that people browse the web with assistive technology, is keyboard only. This can be for a variety of reasons, ranging from inability to physically use a mouse all the way over to preference, there's quite a few. I don't know if we have any like, VIM fans in the audience that are like, adding their keyboard shortcuts to their browser, and their operating system and everything they do.

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But keyboard only is a very popular way that people browse the web. And again, the most obvious takeaway here would be an inability to navigate with the mouse means that you're often tab and shift tabbing through an entire website trying to get to that thing that you want.

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In a similar vein, people who are unable to use a keyboard often use some kind of assistive technology. There's head wands, mouth sticks, and more and more recently which I think we'll cover soon is like eye directed keyboards, where instead of using your hands to direct the keyboard, you can use your vision.

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One of the more limiting ones that really opened my mind is these single switches, they're literally just a binary on off button. And they come with digital keyboards, and so what you kind of do is you hit the single switch and it'll start a digital keyboard going top down until you find the row that has your key on it.

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So you can imagine going down your escape, tab, caps, lock, shift, whatever, and you hit the switch again and then it starts going column by column until you get to the actual key that you want to type. Screen readers, again probably one of the most popular forms of assistive technology for those unfamiliar screen readers are software that parse the website and read it out to you.

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And they come with a bunch of back and forth interaction tools. So you've got all these shortcut keys where you can do things like, well show me all the headers for this website, or show me all the interactive elements, or read to me just the first section, things like that.

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So you end up getting this kind of like powerful back and forth where the input is keyboard and the output is audio. And we'll do quite a bit with screen reader today. We'll get them installed locally for free, and kinda have a play with them and experience them.

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And then like I mentioned before, more and more popular lately are these eye tracker keyboards, these are really incredible technology. But the effect on the website is largely the same which imagining somebody is a keyboard only user. Okay, so this is like one of my favorite takeaways of all this stuff, and one of the reasons that I love accessibility so much.

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So there's this concept called the curb cut effect. And I think it's really well illustrated in this picture where there is this assistive ramp that is clearly, or you can assume put there for some kind of accessibility standard to allow wheelchair users to get up onto the sidewalk, right.

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But the reality is that we find more and more when we study that whenever we invest in a certain group of people, it often has this largely positive cascading effect into the broader well being of the country, right? And so that we put these things down specifically for people in wheelchairs to get up on the sidewalk.

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And then we find all of these amazing use cases of here's this woman with her child in a stroller pushing her child up onto this thing. And I find this so true with web accessibility where we get the HTML to be semantic and we add all of these features and then we start noticing that the power users love these features as well.

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Or that we have slightly faster loading website, because we've reduced JavaScript and replaced it with semantic HTML. Or we have better UX design and we actually see our conversions going up. And I really like this curb cut effect. It's something I always try to keep in mind that, you're not only helping make the website more accessible, but you're also probably improving the website at large.