Nic Steenhout

S1:E11

[00:00:00] Todd Libby: Welcome to the Front End Nerdier—Nerdery Podcast. A podcast about front end development and design. I'm your host Todd Libby. My guest today is independent accessibility consultant, speaker, trainer, host of the A11y Rules Podcast and A11y Rules Soundbite, Nic Steenhout. Nick, how are you today?
[00:00:22] Nic Steenhout: Doing good Todd, thank you for inviting me on your show.
[00:00:27] Todd: Well, thank you for, for joining me today, on this kind of weird day that we're having with Zoom. Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself?
[00:00:36] Nic: As you said, I'm a independent accessibility consultant. I’ve been dealing with web accessibility in one way or another since the mid 1990s. So, I've been around the block a little bit.
You were saying before we started recording about your audit and, and having images without alt text. And this is something I've been ranting and raving about for 25 years. So, I, I, I know the feeling. More specifically I do a lot of training, because I believe that, doing audits and telling people what they did right or wrong is one thing.
But if we want to progress accessibility and see it more, I focus a lot on giving people, the tools to, to build accessible things and, and understand what accessibility is about. So, I've been doing a lot of conference speaking and, and corporate training, that kind of stuff. And I also like to, to help businesses start to, to reframe their thinking around disability and accessibility and do a lot of, paradigm shifting, which is not always easy or comfortable for anyone, but it always benefits disabled people in the end.
[00:01:49] Todd: Yes. Wholeheartedly agree. So, let's jump right into the questions. Cause I have an, this is a first for my podcast because this is going to be solely accessibility. Well, first question is something I ask everybody, how did you get started in your web development design journey? And you can even go as far as getting into accessibility if you, if you'd like.
[00:02:15] Nic: I got started way back when, getting a domain for yourself was something tricky, but I thought, you know, I thought this was an interesting area and I started dabbling. I built a website here, website there I, I was on GeoCities for a while. My first website was a cooking with disability website on GeoCities.
And I got all kinds of award on GeoCities and, and looking back, it's like, that was such a long time ago, but from there I really got going in and doing more, more in the website building if you want. And then I started working at an organization for, upgraded by and for disabled people. And in a space about a month, I had three discussions that were really, you know dropped the hammer on my head in terms of eye-opening.
My first conversation was with, with a colleague who was blind and he came into my office and he says, Nic, I don't understand what this website is about. My screen reader is saying image, image, image, image, image, image, image, image. So, I had a look and sure enough, this was the days where CSS wasn't a thing.
And image replacement was a big thing. So we could actually have good looking fonts and their entire menu and their entire text on the page were images of texts with no alternative, text. So for, for him, he could not understand the page. So that was my first, understanding of, of what accessibility.
The second thing was I had another colleague, she was deaf and she came in and she told me, Nic, can you help me set up my wireless printer? Because the instructions came in a video on a CD and there's no captions. So one and two, and then the third that really woke me to things was one of our, customers had ADHD.
And she said that the web was so distracting to her big font, different colors, the marquee tag, the blink tag at the time know this was the nineties and, and things were a little bit over the top. So I ended up working with her to create her own custom style sheet. That basically was a CSS reset. Between these three things and my experiences to disability rights advocate and my interest in web building, suddenly I realized, oh yeah, this is, this is my niche.
This is where I really have a passion about making the web work for everyone.
[00:04:55] Todd: Yeah. Very interesting. I remember those days of the, the images of texts and the in my first run in with accessibility was the same thing with, with images and alternative text as well. So yeah, I understand that completely.
So, with accessibility and you know, you've been doing it for so long. What is the biggest issue you find today on the web? As far as accessibility goes, whether it's, you know, websites or, or apps or whatever.
[00:05:36] Nic: The biggest problem I find on the web today is not a technical one. Because technical issues we can, we can resolve. The biggest issue I find is a lack of awareness and lack of understanding that people with disabilities are one of the largest minorities.
It's also one of the only minorities you can join at any time. And that we need to make sure things work for disabled folks because it benefits everyone. This is not question of raising the disability experience. I know some people argue that we should tell accessibility on the basis of only it's for disabled people and obviously primary it is for disabled folks.
But the fact is it benefits everyone and ultimately when we have individual developers who have had a chance to learn about accessibility either I have computer science program or bootcamps or tutorials on the web when we have designers that understand the difference between a placeholder and a label. When we have stakeholders that understand that accessibility must be part of the definition of done on any user stories we create when we have, The VPs and the CEOs that understand that investing a little bit of money at the start of your development project will save you literally millions of dollars by the end.
If you have to remediate after a lawsuit, when we have all this understanding of accessibility, we won't have an accessibility problem on the web.
[00:07:28] Todd: Yeah, again, I agree a hundred percent there as well. I have this little thing that I say where accessibility is a right, not a privilege. And, you know, as someone who I don't have, you know, a physical disability, I think it's important because I know people who have.
This was also a, how I got to do accessibility as well, seeing people I know and, you know, struggle with accessing something on the web or even out in the real world as well. So, yeah.
If, you know, if we paid attention and incorporate accessibility from the start, what would you say the biggest gain, and again, I think you just touched on it a little bit. What, what would be the biggest gain you, you would say for a company or somebody like a freelancer, that would get from doing this?
[00:08:33] Nic: I'm not sure. I understand your question. Are you talking about the biggest gain from a corporate or commercial perspective, or are you talking about the biggest gain from a, a human rights perspective?
[00:08:48] Todd: The human rights side of it? Yeah.
[00:08:52] Nic: Well, from human rights side, as you said, accessibility is right, it’s not a privilege.
When we're thinking about human rights in general, we're talking about being able to do things be able to not being refused service, being able to not be excluded. so from a human rights perspective, accessibility ensures that people can be not only in the community, but of the community we can belong.
And the community as a whole will benefit from, from the richness of input of all disabled people around. And obviously us disabled folks would benefit from being able to, you know, do our shopping and, and, and access services and know where we can get coronavirus vaccines and how to vote and all these things that are often things most people don't think about.
You know, you, you go into a store, you don't notice the step, but as a wheelchair user, I know there's a step there. So, from, from that perspective, implementing accessibility is, is really good for everyone. And, and then, you know, we have all these, all these things we use so often that often we don't realize they were initially built for disabled folks.
I bet you, and all of your auditors use a computer keyboard all day, every day. And the first keyboard in the 1850s was developed for deaf populations to be able to communicate faster. it was a completely different shape. But basically the keyboard is an assistive technology, voice assistance, Siri or, or even Alexa, to a degree.
That directly speech input, voice to text that started life as assistive technology. So when we're building things accessibly, and we pushed the technology, when we innovate then it's kind of a circle where things start for people with disabilities. And then there's, there's this continuum where it gets moved for disabled people to the community and then it gets taken back into disabled people and perfected. So there there's this continuous circle of innovation. That is fantastic. When you do attract from the go, the get go.
[00:11:28] Todd: Right, right, and could you elaborate on the corporate side of that question as well as, as what does a
[00:11:34] Nic: Well, from the, from the corporate side, you know, there's, there’s a lot of discussions around the business case, and I think it's, it's a hard sell because we don't have any we don't have any metrics to measure.
We can’t say if you spend $50,000 on making your website accessible, you're going to see half a million dollars return. We can't say that. So it's kind of like a hard thing to say, but we can throw numbers. We can say about twenty-five percent of the U S population has a disability. Of those not everyone needs accessibility function on the web. But I'm willing to bet that 25%, even if you whittle down those who don't need accessibility, you're going to end up with a larger number than the 0.5% of this obscure web browser that you're insisting on supporting.
So if you're gonna spend all this effort to be backwards compliant with IE3, then maybe you should put some effort in making your application accessible and conformant with the web content accessibility guidelines. But beyond that, you know, the business case, it's also a case of corporate social responsibility. CSR is a big thing today for, for large companies.
And it's not a bad thing to be able to say, “Hey, you know what? We have this learning management platform and we're the only one out of 300 other top level LMS that actually are accessible for people with disabilities.” There's corporate social responsibility. There's your competitive advantage. Nobody else does it. So do it and do it better than everybody else.
[00:13:20] Todd: Right, yeah. So I, I get a lot of questions and maybe you do too. I would, I don't want to assume that you do, but accessibility is more than the WCAG guidelines. and what, what does accessibility mean to you and how has it more than just WCAG guidelines?
[00:13:49] Nic: On my show. I asked people to define web accessibility and I've spoken to about 60 people and I've gotten about a hundred different definitions of web accessibility. Everybody has slightly different explanations of it, but it always comes down to the nutshell of the inclusive practice of building websites or web applications that are usable by everyone, regardless of ability or disability.
That's, you know, if you boil it down. So when we're looking at the guidelines at WCAG or WCAG however you want to pronounce it, I like to think of that as the starting point. It's not the target because WCAG as any other standard is a document that gets written by a large group of people that have to reach consensus that each have their own knowledge and sometimes even agenda that are maybe different from the group.
So we have some fantastic information in WCAG, but it isn't complete. It doesn't include everything. And sometimes there's been decisions made around WCAG that, maybe are not the best for accessibility. Some of the things that I know I've struggled with with WCAG is, is this idea of link text.
We have to make sure that the link text makes sense in and of itself. In context or out of context, and depending on whether you take the context in your account or not, then you rank things differently. And depending on what the business wants to aim for typically level, level a, then the really important bit that the text makes sense in and of itself is actually not something you have to figure out, because it's outside of scope.
We have a whole range of things for cognitive accessibility that is not in WCAG some things have been implemented in 2.1, and there's a little bit more coming in 2.2, but it's an iterative process.
And until things are inside WCAG well, people still have access need, and it's not because it's not in the guidelines that the needs don't exist. So really, the standards are a starting point, not the target. And we want to make sure to include best practices and knowledge. And we want to push the envelope.
Of course, sometimes it's hard because we are dealing with, developers, designers, companies that don't even know to add alt text to images. So, you know, you take a low-hanging fruit like that and you say, well, actually, you know what, that's really the basic and you have to do these things that aren't going to be that much harder granted, but we still have to think in those terms,
[00:17:07] Todd: Right. So I was, in the conversation yesterday with someone about barriers, that people face and being somebody that doesn't face a lot of barriers. Other than like, for instance, with me animation will cause, it will trigger migraines. That's the only, barrier that I have that is a, what I call a lived experience.
What are some barriers that disabled people face on the web that most people wouldn't think about?
[00:17:40] Nic: There's so many things. As an intro to that, I'm going to plug my accessibility rules soundbite series. It's, it’s five minutes per episode, more or less. And it's disabled folks talking about their lived experiences and about the barriers they experience on the web.
So if you want to hear it from the mouth of disabled folks, that's a, a, a good resource. That said we're, we're talking about a whole range of things from missing alternative, alternative texts on images, especially on social media. It's so difficult because, without description of the meme or description of the image, the fairly large number of folks who rely on screen readers on Twitter are, are missing the joke quite literally, or missing vital information.
We're talking about making sure you can use your site with keyboard, you know, use the tab key, go forward, use shift tab, go backwards, try to trigger interactive elements with the enter key or the space bar. If you can't do that, you've just blocked out a whole bunch of people. Whether it's screen reader users, sighted, keyboard users, switch users, there's range of things.
And then if you want to look at forms can you get to every element, trigger every element. Can, can you tell what each input is about just with the labeling? When we were looking at color contrast, I'm sorry, gray text on gray background does not work. It doesn't work for folks with low vision. It doesn't work for me when I'm looking at your page on my mobile and I'm outside waiting for the bus.
Look at the contrast. Designers don't disable the default browser outline. Don't use outline none or outline zero. I know you think it's ugly, but it's useful. So these are really some fairly straightforward, low hanging fruit that we can, we can fix with minimal effort. That's going to have a significant impact.
[00:19:51] Todd: Yep. Those are some, some good ones. How do you swinging the conversation around how do you advocate or persuade designers or developers or even clients, potential clients, I guess, to start practicing accessibility with their projects?
[00:20:17] Nic: Often with great difficulty.
[00:20:18] Todd: Yep.
[00:20:19] Nic: That said the most powerful thing is to demonstrate the barriers. When people start seeing that their design or their implementation just doesn't work. When you're able to either share a, a, a podcast that has disabled people talking about the experience of, “Hey, this is what happens when I use these websites”. When you're able to share results from usability studies. When you're able to actually demonstrate it, you know.
I had an argument once with a bunch of designers and, and high-level executive at the company that were arguing until they were blue in the face that their corporate colors were their corporate colors and they didn't care if it didn't pass. If it didn't pass contrast requirement, And, and I gathered five different monitors in their own companies in their own building.
And I said, okay, look at your logo on these five different monitors and look at the differences and would it really kill you to actually change your corporate colors’ hue a little bit, so you actually pass contrast? Once we're able to take something you can't touch or taste and make it tangible for people that's what convinced.
The downside to that is it's almost a one-on-one effort and that takes a lot of time and energy and it takes a lot of advocates to make that happen because there's more designers, developers, stakeholders, business owners than there are accessibility advocates out there.
[00:22:12] Todd: Yeah. And I have run into those same problems with stakeholders and, and such as well with contrast, or I even had one stakeholder say, “Oh, we don't have disabled users”. And that was something I had never heard before nearly knocked me back in my chair when we were at the meeting.
[00:22:38] Nic: Funny story years and years ago, I was living in Chicago. And I was lucky enough to find a great car mechanic.
His administration office was at the top of two small steps. So every time I went to, to deal with getting my car fixed and I was there often because it was an old car. I said to him, Hey, Pete, you really need to spend a couple of hundred dollars and, and ramp up those steps. And he says, well, Nic, why, why should I do that you're the only guy in a wheelchair coming to me.
And I looked him in the eye and I says, Pete, why do you think that is? And I waited. And suddenly I saw the penny drop. He went “Oh. Yeah, of course my place is not accessible. So people aren't going to come to me.” He spent a couple of hundred dollars, broke those steps down, made a ramp.
And suddenly I was able to refer him to a dozen people and he had a dozen new customers. And he says, oh yeah, well that movie is right. Build it and they will come.
[00:23:48] Todd: Yeah, exactly. So with that, that kind of brings me to something also that I was thinking about yesterday. Are there, what are the differences between impairments and disabilities for users that listen, or people that listen, to this podcast that don't know the difference and what are those differences between impairments and disabilities?
[00:24:17] Nic: Disability language is a really tricky thing and it keeps evolving. So it's difficult for, for folks that aren't steeped into it to, to understand the nuances.
That said the, the big difference between an impairment and a disability comes a lot from a, how you look at disabilities and impairment is a condition. So, you know, someone is a wheelchair user their impairment is that maybe their legs don't work or they have back pain, or they have balance issue. Disability comes in when they face a set of stairs that they can't go up because it's not accessible.
So in the context of web building, the disability really comes in when we're facing non-accessible assets, a—as dev, as developers and designers, we disable our users. When we build accessible stuff, it doesn't matter if someone has a condition or an impairment or something. That limits their ability to, to do something like seeing, eating, walking, reading, whatever.
It doesn't matter because then there's no disability because the place is accessible we can use it. So the, the difference between impairment and disability, to a point is one of philosophy, how we look at disabilities, how we look at whether or not the condition is a problem in and of itself, or if it's a society around us that is causing a problem.
And I think while it's important to understand that up to a point, the, the nuances of that are not as important as understanding. Why we want to reduce barriers, why we want to build accessible assets. That's much more important to understand the nitty gritty and, and the, the reason why then to start arguing about language and, and disability models and all that, which is super fascinating to me and probably to you and a whole bunch of people.
[00:26:38] Nic: Right. But ultimately if Jane Doe who's building websites somewhere and, and Random Q Public is doing whatever it is. I don't care if they understand the nitty gritty of the different social models, as long as they're doing the thing right.
[00:26:52] Todd: Yeah. Yeah. And you bring up an interesting point too. because for a long time I had a kind of a war inside my head.
Do I use the word impairment? Do I use the word disability? Do I dare use the term disability, because I've seen that argument on Twitter a lot with, you know, a lot of people, disabled disability is not a dirty word or the other, the other side of the coin where they want a, a different term to be used for their own situation.
And you know, I widely see the term disability, disabled being used, so I decided that it's, you know, something that I should use and, dimin—the social model does interest me.
And I want to be able to, as an advocate and as somebody in accessibility, you know, be, use the right terminology. So what would you say to people that are having that same struggle as far as what term do I use?
[00:28:13] Nic: First thing you have to look is are you speaking to someone or at someone in particular?
And if you are. Inform yourself as to their preferred terminologies. For, for a number of years, the preferred terminology was people with disabilities because we were pushing a person first language. For the last four or five years there's been a big push from the disability community to switch to saying disabled people where we acknowledged that yes, disability is not the only aspect of us.
We are husbands and sons and, and parents, and a whole bunch of other things than just disabled, but also disability is an integral part of ourselves. I can't take my disability out of me, so I am disabled. From that perspective, I think we should look at the current language. As I said earlier, though, things change and there's trends that are different.
And ultimately I think you do your best and if you're called on it, then you learn from it and you say, oh, okay, well maybe I did, I did not say the right thing in this context, but I'm going to learn from that and move on.
[00:29:35] Todd: Yeah. And that's, I, that's what I try to do. I talked to several people in, what do you, what, what is your preferred terminology?
So that's, that's, that's a great a great answer.
[00:29:48] Nic: Ultimately, you know, the way you refer to me as Nic or Nicolas.
[00:29:53] Todd: Yeah.
[00:29:54] Nic: That ultimately, that's how you refer to me. But if you really need to mention my disability, then you say Nic is disabled rather than Nic is a person with disability. But that's me, that's my preference.
I know other people that refuse to be perceived as being disabled. They have a disability.
[00:30:15] Todd: So I have a couple of questions here to end this first, string of questions. So what is the number one thing as accessibility professionals we can do as far as advocating for accessibility,
[00:30:32] Nic: The number one thing we can do as accessibility experts to advocate for accessibility, I think it's showing from example. Make sure that what you do is done in an accessible way. If you're talking about accessibility on Twitter, make sure if you're posting images, do you have alternate text? If you are disabled and you're on a podcast about accessibility, make sure you provide transcripts for fuck's sake.
Sorry for my language. But the number of times I find podcasts about accessibility created by and for disabled people that don't have transcripts. Why? How can we expect people out there that don't have disabilities that aren't steeped in accessibility to do it when we ourselves don't do it. So I think live what you preach is probably the first and most important thing.
The rest just flows on from there.
[00:31:34] Todd: Yeah. And we had that conversation on the, a11y Slack.
[00:31:39] Nic: Yeah.
[00:31:40] Todd: Because you had mentioned something about podcasts with no transcripts or captions, I believe. And I, that was the first thing when I started, this was I need to have transcripts. I need to have captions because I have a video version.
So that stuck with me. so this last question that I have for the for this first round of questions is, and maybe you can answer it, maybe you can't. What is the strangest or I guess thing that puzzled you the most, as far as accessibility goes in what you've done, that you've come across, that's really I, I don't know, I don't want to say, you know, funny, but it was just strange or odd?
[00:32:33] Nic: There are over the last two decades, there have been so many moments where I've been wanting to bang my head against the desk. I mean, just, just so many. As you were talking, the one that really popped to mind was the senior VP of Marketing of a large, really large company at a conference.
Came to me after a screen reader demonstration, and she says, oh my God, Nic, I had no idea that blind people could use the web that way. And, and I did not understand why all alt texts was so important. And we spoke a little bit about it, and this person had climbed through, through the rungs from entry level to senior VP and in the marketing department at different places.
And they were building marketing websites and they were doing PDF brochures and they were doing all these things and all those years she'd heard. Make sure that if you have an image that is informative, that it has got alternate text and she never really got it until I demonstrated to her. So that to me was not a failure of the persons so much as a failure of the system to really educate it.
Ultimately it's a failure of us as advocate to explain why we're doing things, not just the things that we need to do. That just really took me back and, and this was nearly 10 years ago and I still have it in my mind quite vividly. So there you have it.
[00:34:13] Todd: Yeah. So at, you know, as a, we, you know, approach the end of the, the, the episode here, I have three questions.
I usually ask my guests. So I'll get right into those. What, if anything, about the web these days excites you and keeps you excited in what you do?
[00:34:34] Nic: It's a, it's a very weird thing because artificial intelligence really excites me. And at the same time it fills me with dread.
[00:34:49] Todd: Yeah.
[00:34:50] Nic: I think there's a lot of potential for it. And at the same time we can really get into trouble. I think we are going to see next 10 years, the, the jobs we have as accessibility experts and consultants will change significantly due to artificial intelligence.
But at the same time, we have to, to be careful. You may have heard about the a self-driven bus at the Tokyo Olympics that ran over a disabled Paralympian. Where, you know, people were saying, well, the artificial intelligence and this self-driving bus failed, but the bit of the story we tend not to hear is that all those self-driving bus were actually controlled by a human in case something happened.
The bus actually decided to stop for this person and the human drivers decided to override that thinking, well, this, this person knows I’m here, so they're going to avoid me. And this is a perfect example of human meddling into artificial intelligence. So what we do, how we interact with it is going to have a significant impact, either positive or negative.
So we have this technology that's really exciting. That can improve things. As long as we humans, don't mess it up.
[00:36:12] Todd: Yeah. Yeah. And usually we humans mess it up. If there were one thing about the web that you could change that, you know today, what would that be?
[00:36:26] Nic: It wouldn't be so much changing the web as much as changing how we teach the web. I would want to make sure that accessibility is taught as an integral part of every single boot camp and computer science scores and tutorials on the web that it's mentioned, it's we have to start thinking about it as an important factor.
We don't charge extra for building performing website. We do not charge extra for building secure website. Why do we charge extra for building accessible website? We have to teach these things so everybody's, it becomes a skill that is there from the get go. It's not something that we, you know, after five years, 10 years, 15 years in the industry that we have to suddenly realize, oh, my company is being sued I better learn what those four letters mean, WCAG. So when we have that happen, then we will have more accessible web.
[00:37:38] Todd: Yeah, so the last question here, what is your favorite part of, yeah, I usually ask front end development or design. It could be accessibility as well that you really liked the most. And going with the theme of my podcasts that you nerd out over?
[00:37:57] Nic: It is that moment in the people's eyes when I teach them something about accessibility and suddenly you see it. Bam! They got it.
Suddenly it makes sense. You've been speaking for two hours, three hours, maybe a couple of days, but something you say an example you give suddenly makes it come together in these people's eyes. And, and that to me is just so rewarding, so almost juicy, you know, it's like, ah, yum. That makes me really happy.
[00:38:34] Todd: Yeah I agree with that. I don't have too many teachable moments, teaching moments, but when I do that's, that's when you see, like you said, when you see that moment, it is, it is exciting for me anyways, that, you know, you know, you've taught somebody something about accessibility and now they can carry that with them.
So as we wind down here, I like to close out the podcast with my guests, letting the people know, listening what they have currently going on and where they can find you online. So I'll give you the floor and the floor is yours.
[00:39:26] Nic: As we mentioned, I have the podcast accessibility rules, a11yrules.com. I am on Twitter a fair bit, actually, probably, probably the best way to reach me or see what I'm about is Twitter.
My handle is Vavroom, V A V R O O M on Twitter, and I'm lined up to speak at several conferences coming up. A couple of them, I haven't advertised yet, but there's a big one coming up that I'm really excited to give a talk about advanced JavaScript. So as soon as we can talk about it, it'll be on Twitter I'm sure.
[00:39:52] Todd: Yeah, definitely. We'll have, I have to watch out for that and I'll put the links to the site, to the podcast and to your Twitter in the show notes as well. And, Nic I’d, I like to thank you for, for coming on sharing, your time with me today, talking accessibility. It was, it was great to talk about accessibility with you.
And definitely I urge because I follow you on Twitter, I urge people to follow you on Twitter as well because, your tweets advocating for accessibility are terrific.
[00:40:30] Nic: Thank you
[00:40:31] Todd: So, I just want to thank you for that. And again, thank you for coming on. It was a pleasure.
[00:40:34] Nic: Thank you for having me Todd.
[00:40:37] Todd: So, thank you listeners for tuning into the Front End Nerdery Podcast.
I'll be back next time with a new guest, new conversation about front end development design, and other topics like accessibility. If you would please rate this podcast on your podcast, device of choice, like, subscribe and watch the episode as well on the Front End Nerdery YouTube channel. Links to transcripts and show notes are there.
I make sure of that, and I'm Todd Libby. This has been the Front End Nerdery podcasts. Thank you. And we'll see you next time.