What Is Accessibility?

[00:00:00]
>> Speaker 1: So I find accessibility often a bit murky or difficult to describe, and a lot of people will use it in ways that are partially true, but not all the way true. So I liked that this W3C web accessibility initiative has this kind of definition, which is if we make our sites properly designed and coded, people with disabilities can use them.

[00:00:22]
But the problem statement is many sites and tools are developed with barriers that make them difficult to use, sometimes impossible. So I think that this high-level idea to focus on is accessibility is about disability, that's a very core tenant of it. And it's about making sure that our websites are easy to use, but especially that they're not impossible to use for people with disabilities.

[00:00:42]
I really liked this follow-up too because I think one of my favorite things about the web in general as a platform, is its openness. This idea that all of the browsers are open source and the standards themselves are open, and most of the libraries we use are open, and we all are kind of contributing to this giant open ecosystem.

[00:01:01]
And one thing that struck me, that I really have liked throughout the years is that while it is true that web accessibility means people with disabilities can use the web, the real goal that we should have in mind is that people with disabilities can fully appreciate, and contribute to the web.

[00:01:15]
So perceive, understand, navigate, interact with the web and contribute to it. So again, the barrier isn't providing a nice or a minimal experience for people to use your website. The goal should be that all of these things that we do, whether it's using the web, contributing back to different things, accessibility is important everywhere, at every kind of level in there.

[00:01:35]
>> Speaker 3: There's just a question about how accessibility might have changed in recent years, specifically the person might have taken a previous version of the course.
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a lot of the roots of accessibility. The core structure has not changed all that much, in the sense that we still have the same standards bodies, we still have the same high-level concepts of focus management, and colors and semantic HTML.

[00:02:00]
There have been some really big changes around the legal landscape. So what used to be kind of a nice to have has quickly become a requirement, especially in the European Union and the United States. There have been quite a few cool advancements within those standards bodies. So we'll talk about some new ways of measuring color contrast and some new rules for focus management that have kind of been ironed out and finalized over the last couple of years.

[00:02:26]
So yeah, I guess the double answer is the kind of core foundational tenets have stayed the same. There's been a lot of great movement in both the requirements and having fleshed out some of the specific standards.
>> That's great.
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, so yeah, similar fields, web performance is quite similar in a lot of ways.

[00:02:45]
Making your website fast or easier to use kind of has some overlaps. And also uses that same word of accessibility, a lot when we talk about uptime, stability, services, things like that, like how accessible your API is. So there can be a little bit of overlap there. Internationalization also very similar.

[00:03:03]
Having a, for example English-only website can be a barrier to a lot of people, a lot of potential customers. But for the sake of this class, it's not the same thing as accessibility. Today we're talking about strictly disability focused things, but it's another great field. And UI design also has a lot of overlap but we'll talk a lot about cognitive disabilities, information architecture just like the way that you structure your website, making sure that it's easy to be understood and easy to be used.

[00:03:30]
There is quite a bit of overlap there, but we aren't going to dive very far at all into UI design. I think the furthest that we'll go is playing around with colors and font sizes, and things like that. But we're not gonna get into proper information architecture or UX design today.

[00:03:44]
So there's quite a few disability statistics that are very powerful. I think like 26% of adults in the US have some type of disability. And disability is also like a moving target in the sense that there may be a population that doesn't have a disability now, but as we all age, it is more and more likely that we'll develop some disability.

[00:04:05]
I think the statistics around people with some type of eyesight or hearing loss, as you get older are really staggering and important. And so I guess the thing to drive home here is that this really affects all of us, and it affects a large number of people. So I guess if you come at it from the humanitarian standpoint, there's so many people who need accessible websites, and if you come at it from the money making for your business standpoint, there's a lot of customers out there who would benefit from this.

[00:04:32]
I've heard all these sort of more negative anecdotes about, well that's not super important, we're an internal tool, that's not important to us. And it's like that always kind of gets me a little bit cause it's like you don't know I mean you've got this diverse team. There's a really good chance that a lot of this stuff, if you hit control or command plus and the font doesn't get bigger, which a lot of websites are still not working well that way.

[00:04:55]
That really stinks even if it is an internal team. There are so many things, it's unknown what people are struggling with. And I think a lot of this stuff just helps everybody. So yeah, I think that's great anecdote and a lot of this stuff. I think another thing I like to drive home is, for those that have taken my performance or DevTools courses on a technical level, this stuff is quite easy compared to that.

[00:05:15]
You can spend a small amount of time making a really large impact on these things. So ideally we can all kind of get excited and really improve our sites.
>> Speaker 3: People that are otherwise super productive and great at their jobs, but yeah, might have a small impairment.
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, and it can just be hard to know, and it can be hard to discuss those things or whatever.

[00:05:36]
Yeah, I mean I think that we'll get into this concept that I really like about kind of accessibility helping everyone. But yeah, I think it's really important and I think it's great. There was a story I heard once, there's somebody, his name's Jennison, he's the lead of accessibility at LinkedIn.

[00:05:50]
And he had this great story that I loved about doing an accessibility audit for a car dealership. And they had all these things that made it basically impossible for non-sighted users to use their website to compare cars and things like that. And he's working with the CEO and the CEO's like, well, we just figured it's not important because you need to be able to see in order to be able to drive.

[00:06:08]
So why do we need this kind of thing? And Jennison brings in all these customers and there's all of these non-sighted customers trying to buy cars for their children who are unable to use this dealership website and moving on, and it really spoke to me in this. You can't just say that, you can't just say our product doesn't need this or there's so much that you don't know about all the people on your team, internally or externally as customers who are trying to use your website.

[00:06:31]
So yeah, I think those are great points. When we think about disabilities and especially when we start implementing technical solutions, kind of break them down into these four categories. So there's mobility and physical impairments or disabilities, so that could be somebody who can't use a mouse or who struggles to type on a keyboard, and uses some kind of assistive technology.

[00:06:49]
There's cognitive and neurological disabilities. So again information overload or difficult navigation structure can be really difficult here. There's visual impairments, when I started doing accessibility over a decade ago, I was really thinking about this kind of binary, sighted or not sighted. And I went to all these workshops, and learned about all of these different conditions where people have color blindness or they have some amount of vision in certain eye.

[00:07:14]
Or they have conditions that make things get a little bit rounded or there's all of these different ways that people perceive the web, and that comes with a bunch of interesting challenges. And the same thing with hearing. I think the kind of obvious one here is like having captions for videos for an example.

[00:07:31]
Yeah, so these are kind of the main categories that we'll be thinking of as we go along. Another important point, I have all these reasons why I think accessibility is great, but one is that the web is already accessible, even if your website is not. And so the example that I always give is what is largely thought to be the first website.

[00:07:49]
Has anybody seen this before? This website from CERN, and it was supposed to be the introduction of the World Wide Web, this novel idea that you can share documents. If you load this website, which I have linked here, it's very accessible. It's just using anchors and paragraph tags and I think an H1 or whatever.

[00:08:05]
It's really easy to move around with just the keyboard. The screen reader works really well. And so I always think the first website ever can do it. Surely we can all do it with ours. This website is a lot more accessible than modern websites with massive teams of engineers behind them that I see today.

[00:08:21]
So cool, so kind of to sum that up, the reasons I think it's great to learn accessibility, I do think it's very fun. We'll get into some APIs later that I think are just excellent, and really great to work with. As developers or designers, we're often the ones making websites inaccessible in the first place through our features that we add.

[00:08:37]
It is largely a human rights issue. It is also more and more a legal issue. It helps us reach a larger audience. It can be really impactful, both for your audience and for your team. And I also think it's a really cool way to kind of distinguish yourself as a specialist on the team.

[00:08:51]
I think that having a strong accessibility background has really helped me in my career, where we'll get a report from a customer. And I can always kind of jump in and say, actually, I know how to do a lot of this stuff, so I think it's very, very cool.