Chris Lienert in conversation with Maia Miller and Erwin van der Koogh

While Owen's setting that up, I have an accessibility question. Oh boy.

From my experience, organizations don't properly understand accessibility on a really deep how do we actually make this work level beyond just one accessibility please, can we add one to our current product offering?

How do you get companies to understand that gap and bridge it? Yeah, I think that's one of the challenges or that's one of the reasons why we perceive accessibility to be difficult or hard or unattainable is because we actually don't understand it.

So that's why it seems like a really big mountain to climb. So when we start to break it down, it makes a lot more sense. So, I mean, there's like education and training and things that you can do just like reading about it. So understanding the different disability types. So I like to think of it as eyes, ears, hands, and brain.

So there's vision disabilities that we're addressing from fully blind to low vision to color or color blindness. So I said eyes, ears, so hearing, hands is mobility, and brain is cognitive disabilities, learning disabilities, ADHD, autism, those kinds of things. So understanding it as different user types, understanding then the different aspects of digital and how those impact people.

So like moving content, for example, on our screens, impacts a lot of people with cognitive disabilities, with ADHD, because it's really distracting.

Exactly. So understanding the digital assets in that way. So, yeah, so I think largely it's about learning and educating yourselves. And there's a lot of, again, free resources that you can literally just do a Google search of what is accessibility or watch a YouTube video, that kind of thing to get that baseline understanding of what accessibility is.

User testing is also really valuable. And user testing specifically seeking out people who have disabilities.

If you just do blanket user testing, you'll catch some people who have disabilities that you may or may not know. But if you proactively seek out-- I'm working with one organization that does transport, like a transportation app.

And so they want to work with somebody who has dyscalculia.

so it has difficulty with numbers because a transportation app is all about numbers, right? So, yeah, so it's about seeking out that information, basically. You don't have to know everything, but, you know, getting a general sense and then empowering other people to also learn about it. And then, you know, your ICs who are actually implementing, they might need to know the more specifics. So depending on what your level within the organization is as well, the depth of knowledge that you need is also different. The thing I've seen is there's that knowledge gap at those levels. Sometimes it's the ICs that just do not understand. Certainly the thing I'm tackling at the moment, allegedly at the company I'm allegedly working at, allegedly, it's just like security. No one ever gets it wrong, right? There's a, but like, I very much sort of ADHD. And so, Give me a website with 44 sort of input text fields that I have to fill in. It's just never going to happen. It just can't. I've sort of gone in apps for a company that you may or may not sort of allegedly work for, allegedly, sort of Chris. that has an app that tracks tickets that I certainly the way it was set up in one of the companies I worked for, I just couldn't use.

It was very much open up the page and go, fuck no.

And so that's very much, and that's just one of the many ways that you sort of touched on. But yeah, it's more than just color.

And. Labels on text fields, which are also super important. But there's such a variety of accessibility. Yeah. And just to kind of add on to that, then we can go to actual questions or different questions.

We can keep talking.

Yeah. Oh, that was an example. It's about learning about accessibility.

And I find that once you start to learn about accessibility, There is a lot there, but it changes from being scary and daunting, oh my gosh, there's so much, to actually really exciting. And there's so much that we can do here.

And that's that accessibility bug that I was talking about when you start to see it as opportunities to make your product better rather than this really scary thing that we have to do and I don't know how and I don't know why and I'm gonna do it wrong. do I even start doing it? So, yeah. Also, one last thing.

It makes it better for you do not make the product better just for people with a disability.

You make it better for everyone.

One of the set of apps that I love is Typeform, for example, which is the Give me one question at a time, and I can sort of make it through your 44 questions.

That's a better experience for everyone, right? Not just for me.

So, also don't think of it as the, we have to make this, we're making it better for just, I don't know, a few million people. It's like, no, you're making it better for everyone. Yeah, I may or may not have done an entire talk on this before that accessible design is good design. Oh, nice. Possibly. Cool. This question is possibly, I assume for you, Maya, how does an attendee get some of those infamous honeycomb stickers? Oh, that's you. There are stickers, though. There's a very big box of stickers.

If you're not aware, charity majors are CTO.

designs her own stickers. If you think of the Venn diagram of observability, unicorns and rainbows, and profanity, like that's her sweet spot.

So there's a box with mass amounts of sort of industry amazing stickers. And there's also accessibility stickers, if you want some, on your tables, and I have more too.

Moving on from where do we start? What's one of the lowest hanging fruits for accessibility? Where do you start? Because it is complicated if you haven't gotten into it. So refer to my presentation. So on a technical level in what we're thinking about. So technically, probably like new features probably is the easiest one. You've got green fields, you could do whatever you want, so that's a great way to start. Very rare that we get to do brand new things. I would say image alt text actually is probably the easiest thing that you can do. It is not about, because you're not changing anything in the code, images already exist, you're not changing the design either, you're just adding, like enhancing the description and like the quality that's already there. And it also doesn't have any cascading effects to anything else. You can really change alt text image alt text as you go. Just like, okay, every time I touch any file, I'm gonna update the image alt text as well.

And that's something you can do as an individual if anybody's still on the code, on the tools, or you could kind of just like blanket, like anybody has ever touches that kind of thing.

So image alt text is really good.

Focus visibility. So what I was demoing before with the keyboard that you couldn't see where you were going, doing that is really good. So changing the state, because you can change it.

Oftentimes we have hover states on elements, but we don't create focus states for them. So you could literally use the same hover state and make it a focus state.

Like, that's really easy. You also probably get less pushback from design on a focus state because they don't pay well, they might they may pay attention, but they pay less attention to that versus if you're trying to change like your brand colors, like strong opinions about the brand colors.

But the focus state can be just like an ugly black outline because, you know, the point of it isn't necessarily to be aesthetic, but it's to convey information. So you'll have more leeway there.

Yeah, those probably do. Color can be, I'll get to in a sec.

Color can be, it can be really good because if it's just a change of a degree or two, it's fine, but there's a lot of opinions about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny as you mentioned color in times past, I've had to redo clients color palettes because they were just inherently inaccessible. Color is easier to change.

like in the design phase and as like a lot of feedback is happening anyway, when things have already been approved, depending on what like the chain of command and like the chain of approvals, it can be difficult. If it's just by changing a few degrees, then it's fine and like maybe not even noticeable. Oh, the other thing I was gonna say was headings as well. That's, so if you're a sighted user, when you look at a page, you scan it visually to get a sense of like, you know, where things are on the page.

Screen reader users use headings for that. So it's really important that headings are marked up properly. So yeah, that's a really significant improvement that you can make. Yeah, whole question over there as well. If you're going to have tab index.

Don't do it. And there's one input field on the form that I have to fill in. Do not make that temp index 47. Don'T use tab index or don't use it at all. Can we get the help over to Kevin, please? I mean, we could talk more about when you do use tab index or not, but generally there's better ways.

There we go. Speaking of Venn diagrams, looking at your two talks, like as leaders influencing a business to invest in accessibility, and what are the fundamentals that drive businesses?

How is success defined for a business? It feels like there is a sweet spot right in the middle there of which of your R things that you can drive as a leader can be linked to accessibility and how can you make a case for accessibility in those terms? I wonder if the two of you could talk about that intersection. Yeah.

Totally. It's not even just the hours.

This is about acquisition. You're talking about, I can't sign up, her colleague not being able to sign up for your service. That's about as early in the journey as it gets. But retention, looking at most of the Jira screens out there, I go, Yeah, I do. Fuck this, right? So not sure what your thoughts are, but it's, there's so much.

Yeah. It's everywhere.

Yeah, so in terms of, like, I was also thinking of acquisition and retention as just one of the things, I can't remember all the Rs, but for example, acquisition. So when a company is looking to, you know, expand their market, go elsewhere, right? They might be like, okay, so we're based in Australia, but maybe we can get some, market in New Zealand or go out to Singapore or the US or, you know, go to these different markets, which involves research.

It's different cultures. Even somewhere like New Zealand is slightly different culture, a different language.

You know, you got to remove all the us from the word color to go to the US. All, you know, there's a lot of research involved for that acquisition cost. But disabled people are embedded within the culture that that you're already serving, right? So there's not, they're already speaking your language, unless they're deaf, and they're already like existing in the culture. So that acquisition, the research that's involved in trialing things, learning about other places, seeing if it's viable, all that kind of stuff is not there. So that acquisition cost is significantly lower. And then when it comes to retention, disabled users are like sticky users is what we call. Like they're quite loyal. And because if you think about it, if you're a disabled person and you need to do your online grocery shopping and you know that this company is really, this website is really good for your online grocery shopping, I mean, all of us are pretty loyal to like places that we like anyway, right? Like I like doing my shopping here because I know where I can find everything. It's particularly true if you end up always like encountering barriers a lot of the time. And you finally found your grocery store or your bank or your electricity company that you know is accessible and you know you can do all the things that you want to, you're not gonna leave because the other competitor has a promo because you don't know that just because they have a promo that they also have invested in accessibility as well. So in that way, your disabled users represent a really loyal user base that you can rely on for that, those retention things. Yeah.

We did have another question across, but before we get there, he's been waiting so long. What should we be measuring to assess our accessibility? Because I know at my company, we have annual VPATs. So we have our voluntary something, something, basically an annual audit. You get a third party, they tell you that we're still not accessible. Come back in 12 months and we'll tell you the same thing again. But we have the possibility to observe and beyond. What should we actually be looking at to give ourselves a good measure without looking at every single screen? Yeah, so I mean, that's where like the observable, like there's always more that you can do in accessibility.

So it's not a question of like whether you're 100% perfect, but it's about understanding where you are along that journey and where your strengths are, where you need to improve. What are the things that you are aware of already?

you know that this screen sucks. But what are the things that you don't know?

Because that's really important. Yeah, so that's where establishing a baseline is really useful. Well, so I have two answers.

The first one is like, just freaking do anything.

Because if you're doing zero, anything is more than zero. And it's the kind of thing that really has tangible real life impact on people in a very direct way immediately.

So it's something that you don't need to wait till all the metrics are set and everything is ready to go before you start, before you implement a linting tool that checks your accessibility or before you start implementing alt text. So first off, just like do it. But the second thing is establishing a baseline, and that can be like an audit. You get an external person to come in and do an audit, usually on a representative sampling of your site or app rather than every single page. Or you could do it yourself if you want as well, if you have the resources and the skills. Again, even those-- if you're really at the beginning of your journey, or even if you're throughout, actually, you can't afford doing an audit every year, every two, three, four years, whatever. You could do browser scanners. So in browser scanners, you can do that now while you're trying to find something else to do.

Just go to your website and check one of the browsers.

Axe Lighthouse, whatever, Wave, whatever, and just check what the accessibility is on your homepage. and see what that is.

And you can use that as a baseline. Sorry? It's less than you think it is. Yeah, exactly. And so it'll identify things for you. And you can use that even without paying any money. That's your baseline.

And so you can say, all right, well, the very first thing we want to do is make sure that. Our. Most important pages are passing Lighthouse. And Lighthouse is built into Chrome, so you don't even have to download it. I'm making it so easy for you.

So you, yeah, and so that could be your way of measuring it. And then And then you report on it and you say, yeah, we succeeded at doing it on these three out of four pages. And you build up from there. Alrighty, there is a question over there away. Yep. Just going back to the alt text on images and thinking about using AI to implement accessibility things, is that a use case that you would consider too. Important to risk AI rambling or getting it wrong? How does AI currently fit into the accessibility landscape? So come to my talk tomorrow. It's about that.

Yeah. So AI is really useful for making things more efficient and for that process.

And you can't scoff at that, especially if you're depending on how large your site is. There can be a shit ton of images that you have to create alt text for. AI can be useful for helping that and supplementing, at least making it so you don't have that blank slate, which can be a lot of work. And then you just want to make sure that there's human review on top of that. If you run an image in ChatGPT or whatever, and you ask it for alt text, it's going to give you a whole paragraph, and that's not necessarily useful or relevant. So you want to run it through and then just check and be like, okay, yeah, you take out some parts and make sure that it's relevant. There's a lot to be said about alt text and decorative and interactive elements, all that kind of stuff. But yeah, it's a good place to start. If that's the barrier of we don't know where to start, it's so much work, use it and then go from there.

Also, often, like, the, the, the purpose of your alt text is linked to, like, what you're trying to accomplish, right? So you have on the page, there's probably already quite a bit of info about what the image is, alt text is supposed to be, right? So don't just focus just on the image, but yeah. Good question.

I'm caught in contemplation.

We're expanding. We're still trying to expand into VR and AR. I did see some fantastic comparisons with the Switch 2 release of every prior Nintendo console, including the Game Boy VR or what was that called? Something along those lines.

I actually got to use one once in the 90s, even though they never got released in Australia. However, we're still trying to get VR and AR to happen. Do you have any advice on teams developing in this area with regards to opportunities or otherwise for accessibility? I don't have a lot of knowledge in that space, so I can't give any specific advice in that area.

User testing would be really valuable in this area.

because there's so many variables from site to physicality, that user testing and again being really specific about seeking out certain types of users would be really valuable in this area. Yeah, in terms of gaming, there's so many advances in gaming that for accessibility that is really cool and exciting. So just because something is like multidimensional or advanced or really fast-paced and moving like a video game is.

It doesn't mean that it can't be accessible and then it's not accessible.

On the contrary, a lot of innovation has been developed out of a need for accessibility, like voice control things have been created and mobile phones because we've been trying to make things accessible for people.

And then as it turns out, it's just like a useful technology. So yeah.

Who could have Predicted that. Sir? Who could have predicted that? Yeah.

We're getting towards the end of this session.

My, my go-to question for everybody that I've stolen from someone else, like all good questions. And I'll start with you, Owen. What is there that you would love to recover in your talk, but you didn't get a chance to?

It's very much like a similar thing that you're saying, right? Like, get started.

People are going like, well, how do I improve sort of where I'm at sort of currently? Just figure out what your next step is and just like, get started.

Give this thing a go. start thinking in sort of like that sort of trace first sort of mindset and see where it gets you. It's a different way of thinking about, it's a very different way of thinking about sort of observing your software, but get started, give it a go, see what happens. I feel very connected to both of these talks at the moment, getting deeply involved in allegedly accessibility things, and we never had any payment outages, so we didn't have to look look at observability either.

But one of the things I said to the team is, are we actually watching this at all? And they said, no. Could we do that? It's very Homer Simpson's like, Yes, it's like, great. I've got my pay for the month. Yeah, well, there you go. But that's a win, right? Yeah, that still counts. Yeah. So to you, Maya, what did you not get a chance to cover? Yeah, I mean, I would echo the same. And that's why I kind of like slid it in into like one of the answers because I didn't know that that question was coming.

And it's a really good one is, When it comes to accessibility, it might be one of the only areas where you can really have such a really substantial impact in such a small way. For example, we were talking about alt text by simply putting alt text on an image. One of the top five problems.

There's a report that's done every year by an accessibility organization called WebAIM, Web Accessibility in Mind. and they scan a million homepages, the top million homepages with their automated tools, and they identify a bunch of different trends across accessibility and accessibility compliance. So they found things like there's an average of 57 bugs per homepage for accessibility, and in the past five years, the exact same five bugs have been on the top the whole time.

So if you just focus on those five things, you could have substantial improvements.

That's low contrast, low text contrast, images with no alt text, buttons and links with no alt text.

I can't remember number four. And number five is document language. And so focusing in on the image alt text and links and buttons with no alt text, it's the difference between having the search icon that's there that's empty and then having the word search on that magnifying glass that changes whether somebody can actually understand what the function of that button is. And what a small thing to do and have a substantially significant difference on the way that somebody is able to use technology. So accessibility, we really do need it to be an organization-wide initiative, and we really do need technical leaders and leaders in general taking it on and making it important so that other people can implement it and have momentum.

But really, it's also something that can be so easily implemented as one individual. And yeah, that's what I would leave as a parting message about accessibility.

All righty, thank you, Irwin and Maya, for being everyone's second favorite session today.