- Thank you for being here. We're excited to have as many of you showing up for this today, and many more I'm sure, catching up on the recording in a couple of days. We're gonna dive right into it, this is gonna be... We're hoping this is gonna be a very laid back session where we get to discuss a bunch of those topics and where you get to chime in with your own questions and comments and feedback, so that we can see the conversation that way. Three hours of me talking to you would be a long experience, so we're hopefully gonna jazz that up a little bit by having these conversations. A couple of demos as we go through this, and basically adapt to the feedback that we're gonna get from you as we're going through this. And we thought a great way to start this conversation would be maybe just to ask you... I am sharing my screen. Yeah, so I'm sharing a picture of a blended wheelchair ramp into a set of stairs that was actually built in the building that I'm in, I mean, right next to a building that I'm in, a couple of weeks ago. And so I'm in Montreal and my office is at Place Ville Marie, which is one of the bigger buildings in the city, and they built this ramp into the stairs as they were renovating the area earlier this year, and the city was completely excited about how amazing this was and how inclusive this staircase was because all of a sudden, people were in wheelchairs could very easily just make their way through the entire staircase without having to go around the entire building, which is quite big, to get to the other side. And this is an image that we often bring up in our space, in our field, as an example of what not to do when we think about inclusion. And I'm not sure that everybody really understands why that is. So I thought I'd bring this up as a way to get us started thinking about inclusion, maybe from a little different angle that we typically do. I mean, it's pretty easy for us to think about accessibility as, okay, we're building content on the web, or we're building content for native mobile application, digital content, and we want that to be usable by people with disabilities, that part is pretty straight forward, but why is it that someone in a wheelchair would find this to be less than ideal, or maybe dangerous even? How is it that someone who has low vision might find this to be dangerous, for instance? So if you wanna maybe try and chime in, like chat is still pretty busy, so if you wanna maybe chime in some of the reasons why you think this is not as great of an idea as it might look, that's gonna help us start getting into that conversation together about dare I say the true meaning of inclusion and the true meaning of how we should be approaching inclusion, so that we are not creating something that actually creates more challenges than they actually helps in different ways, and I see the chat really burning up, so I'm gonna try to get some of those to see what we have in there. Let's see, so steps are not even a muscle fatigue, like... Okay, so two good examples that are just to get started, that's awesome. So let's say someone who has difficulty with stability, so they're walking through the stairs, and balance might be a little difficult, if the stairs aren't even for instance, every step you probably have to gauge exactly how high you need to put your feet so you can get the next one, so that might be a little dangerous, if you have low vision for instance, not being able to see, like there's not a clear color system or something that differentiates the slope versus the step, so you might miss that and trip as a result of that, and maybe one that we hear more often even from someone in a wheelchair would be that, those are pretty long stretches, right? It doesn't really show from here, but you can almost see by the people that are on the left-hand side of the staircase there, but roughly that thing is probably 60, 70 feet wide. So you have the ramp that goes from one side to the other and zigzags the entire way through, and it probably does that about six or seven times until you get to the very top, which means that physically you have to be able to pull your wheelchair 70 some feet in one way, on a slope that is at least a slope of one to 10, which would be like one foot for every 10 feet that you're coming in, so it's a pretty steep slope all things considered, and you get to a level, and then you have to get to another level. So if you start counting up all the 60, 70 feet and they add up to six or seven, we're talking about almost 500 feet of rolling up a slope. So fatigue comes in, and you can easily start getting a little tired obviously with that, and at the same time there's no rail, because obviously you want people to be able to walk across it, and it's not super wide either. So as you're going through the entire thing with your wheelchair, you could easily at some point, get a little too close for comfort to the edge of the ramp itself, and potentially fall on the stairs themselves. So examples like that are kind of some of the things that people don't think about when they think about something like this, all they see is the attempt for inclusion and they basically think it's an awesome idea, and the city of Montreal is probably one of the very latest examples of that misleading approach to accessibility or inclusion, since it happened a couple of weeks ago in our space here. Other things you could think about is like very few handrails, so if you need the handrail for stability or just to help you, you're kind of limited to where you can climb, which might be more crowded areas, if some people might be sitting for instance, exactly where the handrails are, so it makes it harder for you to be able to go up or down, that sort of thing, those are examples, for instance of where some of the challenges are. And I'm bringing this up because I think it's a fantastic example of how we oftentimes are going to be looking at accessibility from the standpoint of we have these rules, we have these checklists, and as long as we follow the checklist, we're gonna be fine. I mean, when you look at this, like, I didn't measure the slope exactly, and I'm not familiar enough with architectural rules or standards about wheelchair and ramps for instance, to know whether or not this slope actually is conforming to the standards, but even if it was, it's much easier to go up a ramp that has the right slope if it's only 10 or 12 feet long, but when it's 60 feet long times six or seven, all of a sudden it compounds into something that is no longer usable. And we see that all the time in our space where people are going to be pretty cognizant even to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, like our international standard around accessibility, and they think that by ticking off all the boxes that they have to look into for accessibility that they'll be fine. And doing that creates a website that typically will meet a lot of those requirements, but will still remain largely unusable for people. And as I was saying, I think the staircase there is a shining example of not knowing or understanding enough about what we're trying to build, and most likely not really involving anyone who has a vested interest in inaccessible staircase or wheelchair ramp, 'cause clearly if they had spoken to people who needed to use this, it would not have been designed this way. But when you have a committee of people sort of looking into where the guidelines are, and looking at this aspirational idea, and putting something together, you get a couple of millions invested in something like this, and the entire city looks like a clown because they completely missed the point. And that's gonna be one of the underlying topics of our session together today, is really just thinking about, not only think about accessibility, but also really thinking from the perspective of not so much the standards, and what they ask, but really what end users actually need, what people with disabilities actually need, what people who are somehow marginalized by technology actually need in order to be as successful as they can be with the use of the content that we typically create. I'm assuming, because we're in the space that we're in, that most of you are involved one way or another in the creation of content, you're either a developer, a designer, a content creator, you're managing a team, you're an organization, and you're involved in the content one way or another, or you work with a vendor that actually has to provide you with that information. I mean, that's typically the kind of people that we reach out to, or that we connect with at Deque Systems. So we're pretty much all in the same boat where it's very likely that we could be misled into building these products that look great on paper, but then fall short when people are trying to use them. So this underlying theme of involving users with disabilities into our process, and learning from them, and actively listening to what they're bringing up as concerns for instance, or challenges, so that that becomes the core of what drives us much more than an actual set of standards, like WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 or 3.0 or whatever, X.Y will come in at some point in the future. So keep that in mind as we're going through this, 'cause we're gonna be looking into all these different components and how we can start approaching them, hopefully in a more enlightened way, if you will. But before we do that, we're going to introduce ourselves, as a Canadian, again, that would be polite to do, so we'll start with that. I have Tim on this slide here, so Tim, you wanna say hi, maybe introduce yourself a little bit? - [Tim] Hi, my name is Tim Harshbarger, I'm actually one of the consultants that work at Deque Systems. Been doing that for since 2018, I help out with different things such as doing accessibility testing, as well as I'm actually help out with some of doing some of the training here at Deque. I guess a little bit more myself, I've been doing accessibility just shorter forever, I started back in late 94 doing accommodations accessibility, and over time got more into the accessibility end of things. I am also totally blind, I actually have no sight whatsoever, both eyes are prosthetics and I use a screen reader all the time, so a little bit about me. - Would you be willing to maybe show folks what that sounds like at some point today? - [Tim] Sure, yep, cool. - Okay. - [Tim] I'm more than willing to answer all those types of questions. - Okay good, awesome. So don't feel shy, don't hold back, I guess, is what we're saying. - [Tim] Yeah, that's the case. - Excellent. Okay, and so as for myself, my name is Denis Boudreau, a French speaking, Canadian, I mentioned that before, I've been with Deque Systems for about nine years now, I wanna say. One of the principal consultants here, and also the training lead for our I guess training service here at Deque. Yeah, that's it for me, involved in a couple of things for a while now. And with us, we have two very special guests, we have Steve Sawczyn. I'm gonna let Steve introduce himself as well. - [Steve] Well, hello everyone. Thank you so much for celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day. I'm Steve Sawczyn, I'm a former Dequer, but still feel very much a part of the family. So I'm happy to be here celebrating with my Deque family, and all of you. Like Tim, I also am totally blind, I use a screen reader, and I'm also happy to show it. I've been in accessibility for a long time, in fact, it was so long that it really... I don't know that it was a field when I got into it, I got into it because I had a friend who was having trouble accessing a system, and it was a real problem, and I realized that not everyone is into the tech stuff, and systems aren't always designed to work for people that can't see them. So that sort of launched my career 20 plus years ago now. And yeah, so that's a brief overview of me. - Awesome, and Laura, what about you? - Come back on video here. Hi, everybody, I am the Event Manager and Marketing Analyst at Deque. You probably have heard from me in many marketing emails before. So I'm here helping managing chat and Q&A for the team, and I've been at Deque for about four years now, so super excited to be here. - Awesome, thank you. Okay, so typically at this point, we'd asked you to introduce yourselves also, but last time I checked, there were about 2,400 people ourselves, so we're not gonna do that, but feel free to just share a bit about yourselves also in chat, 'cause we're kind of looking through all that and we get to notice some of these things as we go. I was looking into some of the comments that you put in as to where the challenges might be with that particular staircase there, and clearly collectively, we got it, like once you start looking at those things, they come up naturally, I mean, when you don't have to think about that, of course you don't really think twice, but when you start diving into it a little bit, you'll notice issues. And my experience with accessibility is pretty much the same way where you might look at your website and you're testing your website for instance, in your QA team and you're clicking on different things and everything seems to work well, and then you're looking at the content from that particular angle that you have with your own biases, your own preferences, your own expectations, your own skillset, and everything looks great, and then all of a sudden you allow yourself to sort of look at it from a different angle, and you realize that, oh, some things actually might not work as well as I thought it did. So again, that's what we're gonna try to build together today, is more awareness around that because awareness is what today is about, right? So GAAD today, Global Accessibly Awareness Day. So we're going to try and get as much of that in as possible. Now, this one is also gonna be a little bit chaotic, so just to get a sense again of who you are and what your expectations are, let's just drive this out for fun. In chat, maybe just share with us your level of comfort with accessibility. Steve, Tim, myself, we can go in a bunch of different directions with this today, some of you have already started, so that's awesome. So if you feel like you're pretty new to this, rank yourself as a one, if you think you know the ropes a little bit, but you're not super comfortable with everything, then make that a two, and if you have been doing this for a while and you're very comfortable make that a three, and then we'll try to see what that looks like. So the chat is flying, and I think I'm seeing a lot of ones and twos, a couple of decimals, decimals are totally fine by the way, so if you're at a 1.7826, that's great, or a 2.7549, that's also awesome. Okay, so we've got pretty much everything, couple of threes every now and then, but for the most part, they seem like twos and ones. So that helps us, thank you, thank you very much, that helps us really gauge how basic we need to be on some things and how specific we can maybe allow ourselves to go at different times. And then the last thing I'm gonna ask you before we kick this off officially is maybe grab a piece of paper, if you still have that around you in this day and age, or maybe just on your computer, open up a text file, and I want you to capture two words for me. The first word is gonna be the feeling that comes to mind when you think about rejection, like go back in your life to any moment where you felt that you were rejected, you didn't belong, that you didn't get what you wanted, like what that feeling was, try to capture that and like boil that down into one word, write that word down, and then once you're done with that, and if you want to share those words in chat, again, that's awesome, I mean, that would be great if we could see some of those words in chat as well. Capture that word, keep it with you so that you don't forget what that was. And then the other word that I want you to think about is the very first word that comes to mind when I say accessibility, like, what is that one word that comes to mind for you, and also keep that in your back pocket, 'cause we're gonna go back to that over the course of the session as we cover different topics. So I'm seeing a lot of really good words, captured, empowered there, this is probably one of my favorite words. Inclusivity, empowerment, that's coming in, ashamed is a good one too, rejected, defeated, welcome inclusion, equity, failure, lonely, belittled, empathy, frustration, rejection, awesome, great. So keep those words in mind. And what I'm gonna say right now for this is I want you to try and never forget, 'cause if there's one lesson that we want you to get from this today, especially those of you who rated yourselves as ones at this point, so we've new word to this. I want you to-- - [Laura] Can I interrupt please? We're bit of switched, and could you spotlight the other interpreter? - [Woman] Yep. - Oh, sure. - [Laura] I got it. - Thank you for chiming into that. Yeah, so I want you to look at those words and try to keep in mind that for a lot of people out there, the words that you mentioned, sad for instance, belittled, isolated, let's see hurt, disappointment, unfair, words like that, unimportant, unseen, it's a really good one, unworthy, disappointed, anger, all those words, that's how a lot of people feel daily when they use content on the web. The fact that the content doesn't work for you, the way that it was built doesn't work for you is how that makes people feel daily. For a lot of people that's their daily reality. Most of us don't even think about that, we have the luxury of never even having to contemplate that because things work for us. Even myself as someone who's colorblind, I sort of qualify in the disability spectrum, but I don't feel that I suffer from that too much. It's annoying every day for different things, pie charts are the bane of my existence for instance. But you know, it's not that bad, for other people, it's a lot more complicated. If someone can't use a mouse for instance, and depends on a keyboard, and the website is completely keyboard unusable, that site is not available for that person. Someone who wants to chime in, I think. - [Steve] Yeah I just wanted to say when you mentioned those two words there, people were making their lists, I kind of felt myself, I thought, geez I wonder if all these negative words, if people are putting them under rejection or accessibility, which column are they putting them under, and then I started thinking myself, I would put a lot of those negative words under accessibility. And I think the reason I would is what you mentioned, just living life, it's really demeaning, frustrating, I mean, I was the one parent that couldn't complete my child's permission slip to go on a field trip because it was an unlabeled form. I was the one person who went to the doctor and my wife was with me and the doctor assumed it was my mother, another person assumed she was my caregiver. It's very challenging sometimes to live life and especially when accessibility is such a prevalent thing, because in life there's so much negative connotation when accessibility doesn't happen, and so this is a very interesting exercise, but for me, I mean, it isn't all doom and gloom, I don't wanna put it that way either, but a lot of the words that are showing up in chat under rejection are for me what immediately comes to mind with accessibility, with the positive ones being sort of the ideal state, empowerment and equality and all of those things, that's ideal, I love it when that happens, right? But it's theoretical in many ways, which is why it's so great that we're having this conversation. - A really, really great point there. And also another thing we could consider is that the very first word that comes to mind doesn't have to be about that empowerment that it provides, it could also be about the sheer feeling of frustration and the complexity and how obscure the whole topic is when you are someone working in this field, just trying to figure out what to do. I mean, there are so many things to think about, like it can get very daunting, it can get very overwhelming quickly, it's super complicated if you don't really know where to start or how to tackle it. So accessibility doesn't have to be about that very positive thing, it could also be the feeling that you have as someone who is tasked with creating content and just feeling overwhelmed or helpless about how you can make things better for people. So, yeah, that's a really good insight, Steve, thank you for bringing that up. There's also a question that I see the Q&A part from John. And he wrote, so when thinking about accessibility, I'm not sure I think of the right scenarios, for example, I think about someone who is blind for the most part, I also think about people who may not be able to use a mouse, can you talk about what I'm overlooking? Great point, and I think it's a great moment to actually bring that into our conversation as well, which is really about the fact that for a lot of people, accessibility means blind folks and screen readers, but there's so much more to it than just that. I mean, when we look at the percentage of people who have a vision impairment, and we'll go back to statistics a little later on so we'll fill you in on some of the details then, but if I remember correctly, data from the United Nation from about something like nine or 10 years ago, was roughly around there lines of 360 million people around the world that have like a serious vision impairment, and out of that, something like 49 million or so were blind. So, you know, 49 million people is a lot people, that's actually more people than the the population of Canada, for instance, across the world, but that's a super tiny population compared to everything else, that is the spectrum of the human experience, right? So, the fact that we're focused so much on blindness in this space is very much driven by how much screen readers strike the psyche of people and how much it's impressive to imagine that, and how far removed it might feel from our own experience as people who are approaching the web as a very visual medium, but it's a super tiny fraction of the population. - I just had one other thing too, I think the answer gets to our attention because it's probably the most obvious issue, right? When you talk about that for most people not being able to see the web would be the most obvious issue someone could have, where there's a lot of things or issues that are less obvious such as issues impacting people with cognitive impairments or people who are deaf or hard of hearing, some of those others might be less obvious because you have to know a little bit more about those, the fact that, oh, there's a visual medium and you can't see it, I mean, that's pretty obvious issue, but not as obvious as some of the other ones up there. - And the elephant in the room is of course lawsuits, right? A lot of them are from a blind or screen reader users and right, wrong or indifferently, that gets a lot of focus, right? And I don't know that it's always a good thing, certainly good things have happened, but it's also taken a great deal of focus, I think. And so I think it's important just to kind of acknowledge. - Yeah, great points again, We're gonna go back to demographics and lawsuits a little later on also, I mean, it's hard to avoid those topics per se. But going back to John's question about like, what else beyond blindness and someone having a mobility impairment that prevents them from using a mouse efficiently, we could go into the whole spectrum of cognitive disabilities, for instance, as a way of going pretty far from what we consider when we think about keyboard and screen readers support. And if you think about someone... And we're gonna have a couple of personas along the way that we'll introduce with you, that represent these different types of disabilities, so we'll talk about those more as well. But some examples of what we could think about at this point without going too deep into that topic just yet would be someone with ADHD and having a hard time just focusing on one task when there are so many bells and whistles drawing for our attention on a page, or when there's a lot of density in the content and it's just really hard to figure out what to focus on 'cause everything seems appealing, or someone with a vestibular disorder getting triggered because there's too much animation, too much movement going on, and getting you a bit of headache, or creating some some feeling of vertigo for you 'cause there's just too much going on on that screen and not being able to control that, it could be someone with dyslexia, just struggling to read the content because all the words, there's too many words and not enough breathing room to try and digest what we're reading, and being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of texts that a page contains, could be someone with a brain injury, for instance, and then just having a hard time memorizing or focusing, could be someone with some kind of chronic illness that makes them super tired and having a hard time focusing on different things, it could be people with anxiety issues that just can't deal with this stress of having to go through a process that has a time limit set to it, or any particular context where they're stressed out about something, and we've seen in the past year just how prevalent that was for a lot of us, just trying to deal with with the pandemic and COVID and everything, and trying to do our job, trying to still run our lives as normally as we could despite that sort of commonly shared terror, I will say, about what might happen if we get that thing, especially at the beginning when nobody really knew what that was. So that and so many other things, I mean, my own partner, she has a Lyme disease. So that was initially identified as being a multiple sclerosis, now it's kind of leaning towards Lyme disease, but again, just to show you an example, I would never have considered someone who had a condition like that to benefit from accessibility, yet she has brain fog all the time, she's tired regularly, so our ability to focus is difficult, her balance is affected. So in a bunch of different ways, like she's benefiting from so many things that we would normally do to help someone with a more, I guess, mainstream, if you allow me the expression, like big air quotes here, like mainstream disability, one that's more popular when we think about accessibility. So there are dozens and dozens and dozens of conditions that sort of fit into this scenario, that go way beyond what we think about when we think about blindness. Yeah, blindness as Steve mentioned, and also Tim, it strikes our imagination so much more powerfully that that's what we typically talk about. And also another really important point that I'm gonna make at this point before we move on, unless my friends have other things to add, is that a lot of people focus on screen readers and blindness because building a site so that it works well with a screen reader also establishes a foundation that is beneficial for everything else. If you have a really strong semantic structure on your website, so that the screen reader can pick up on all the different cues about that thing being a list, or a heading, or an image, or whatnot, you create a structure for the site that helps build accessibility around pretty much everything that it contains. And there's probably no better way for you to test that out than by running a screenwriter through it, to see if it works well or not. So while it's tangentially related to blindness, the same tool can also be used as a great way to make sure that the basics are covered. So that and so many other things, really. - [Laura] Real quick before you move on. Just a reminder for you, Steve and Tim, to announce who you are before you speak. I know that's easy to forget just a quick reminder from chat. - Okay, thank you. Okay, so yeah, to give you a sense of what we're gonna be talking about, 'cause I sort of front loaded some of the topics we'll be covering today, but give you a clear sense of where we're headed with this. So introductions, housekeeping items, we kind of went through that, we're gonna dive into this part about accessibility considerations and inclusive design. In general, we'll talk about demographics, we'll talk about people with disabilities, how they use the web, so that's when we'll go back to these disabilities and what we could do, like examples of what we could do to make a person's experience easier when we have that particular consideration in mind, dyslexia, for instance, or ADHD or anxiety, or blindness or low vision or whatnot. And then once we're done with that, we're gonna get into guidelines on the web, especially for those of you are less familiar with this topic, going over the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, like what they're about, and they're very high level, we're gonna get to dive deep into the details of it, because quite frankly, it's not super interesting. But knowing the core tenants of it, like understanding what the pillars are and how you can wrap your head around those pieces to better understand what the outcome might be. So hopefully even for those of you who are more familiar with WCAG, that might be a different way to look at it, that can help you better understand what you're trying to achieve with that set of guidelines. And then we'll talk about how that affects the life cycle. So again, with the assumption that most of you are involved with one another in web design, web development, web maintenance, one way or another, like how accessibility can affect the way that we work and the way that we can create a better outcome through a more conscious approach to this topic, except being accessibility. And then because it's such a foundational piece, we will probably if we get there, cause it will depend on how much time we have for everything. But some basics about keyboard navigation, so what happens when we wanna go beyond the mouse? Like if all of a sudden you're like, okay, so I wanna make sure that my website works well for someone who can't use a mouse because we're talking to millions of people out there again, with different types of conditions that will prevent them from efficiently using that mouse or using that mouse at all. So what can we do to maybe cover a lot of ground again with that piece and make significant strides in terms of improvement, just by addressing that one piece? And by the time we're done with that, your heads will be filled and we're probably gonna be out of time to wrap up this session anyway. So that's kind of what the goal is, we will send the link to the PowerPoint, we will send the recording to everyone who registered, so don't worry about that piece, we've got you covered, so yeah, so you'll have all of that also as we wrap this up. Anything that you guys wanna add, Tim, Steve, before we jump into our first topic? - [Steve] Let's jump. - Okay, jumping. So I wanna start by asking you that question, which will lead into talking about accessibility per se, and it's a deeper question. So I want you to just ask yourself that question, 'cause you may never even have asked yourself that question, question being like, what about inclusion is important to you? If you are here with us today, I can imagine two reasons, the first one, or maybe three, the first one may be maybe you were coerced into coming here by someone else in that case we thank them for having you here. It might be that you are just invested in this topic already and you just wanna learn more and more and more. And then the other reason might simply be that you're trying to wrap your head around it. So what about inclusion matters to you? I think that whatever the case is, chances are inclusion is a word that brings positive to you. So what about that matters to you in the first place? And if you can get to that level, like what about that thing that drives you in the concept of inclusion is connected to your own purpose? What is your purpose to begin with? If you're someone involved in development, for instance, like how do you perceive your job? Do you see that as just a nine to five activity that you do to pay the bills, or are you invested in something a bit more deep than just a job and trying to make a change for instance, like we talk about changing the world, like there's these big aspirational ideas that mean less and less over the time, because everybody talks about them. But what I'd like you to think about at the same time as we keep in mind these words that we mentioned earlier, like is really connecting what we're talking about to your own purpose, like does it actually connect one way or another? And because I find that when we establish that connection between why we care about accessibility, why we care about inclusion, and we can connect that to something inside us that makes us vibrate, it creates a platform through which we can actually contribute in much more positive ways, I mean, it helps grow our awareness, it helps through our empathy towards others, I believe, it helps us become better designers, better developers, better content creators, better QA tester, better managers of projects, because all of a sudden we understand why we're doing this. It's no longer just a question of oh, we don't wanna get sued, it's a question of actually helping other people become economists, be empowered to be able to do things on their own not having to depend on other people, and just creating a more just society where everybody gets a chance to belong, gets a chance to contribute, gets a chance to collaborate, it's just to just be whoever they want to be, because the barriers are no longer there. So a lot of that is aspirational, but I'd like for you to kind of keep that in mind as well, because it's particularly significant in this space that we're in, I mean, most of us that are in this space, we're here because we truly believe in the idea of helping better other people's lives through talking about this stuff and annoying other people about all these things that they have to do all of a sudden that they never knew about. So sometimes it helps to be able to reconnect to that inner purpose to not lose faith in our own ability to do this. - [Steve] And so. - Yeah, go ahead. - [Steve] I'm sorry it's Steve. You know, one thing I wanted to mention is that for myself, I have that same purpose, it's very important for me to be able to connect why I'm doing this. And I only say that because I've had people make the assumption that the reason I'm in accessibility is because it benefits me, or because I'm blind therefore I must be in accessibility. And that's kind of interesting to me because it presumes a lot of stuff. I mean, I'm all for helping other blind people, for sure, but ultimately my reason for doing this and what inclusion really means to me is about empowering people to be able to do whatever it is they wanna do, not what I wanna do, but what they wanna do, and that's exciting to me because I don't necessarily know what that is. But there is an interesting misconception out there that when someone with a disability is involved in accessibility, it's because of their disability, when at least in my case, I don't wanna speak for everyone, but in my case, it's not at all because of that. I actually wanted to do computer sciencey stuff, and I wound up doing this because the empowerment aspect really resonated with me. - Yeah, people oftentimes ask me like why I came into this field as well, like what was the reason for me to come into this space, because now to your point, a lot of people that have a disability come to this space because they were kind of drawn to it by necessity, like they just wanted to help themselves be more efficient or help others, as you said. And I don't have any of those things to begin with, like being color blind was never like a motivation to say, I need to change the web. So some of us just came in here because we were touched at some point, right? I remember when I started working in development it was around 1997, like it was HTML a little bit of JavaScript, nowhere near where it is today, and in some CSS, we're barely getting started with CSS. And it was really just a job, it was just more interesting to be sitting in the back of a computer at the end of a computer than carrying groceries or other things that I was doing before that. And one day this gentleman reached out to me because I had a blog, like I was writing blog posts back in 2000 or so, and he was almost blind, and we started talking about these different things and he was telling me how all the ways in which I could make my style a little bit easier for him. And he blew my mind and he became a friend, and then through him, I met a bunch of other people who were also part of this new vision impaired community, if you will, and a lot of them became my friends, and all of a sudden it became a mission. Like, I just found a purpose or a calling through this to say, I'm not gonna just code stuff, I'm gonna make something that can make a difference in their lives, so that was a trigger for me. Tim, what about you? Like what drew you to this in the first place? - Will the interpreters be able to switch please on spotlight? - [Woman] I'll do that now, thanks. - Thank you. - [Tim] So this is Tim. Basically there was an accident. So at my previous employer, we were starting to use a new methodology, project methodology at the time. And it was a very visual approach with lots of diagrams and stuff like that, and being blind or mostly blind at that point, I basically said, "Hey, how am I gonna be able to use this?" And so I started digging into that, trying to find a solution for how to do that, and there were other people in our department with visual impairment who were having issues, and so basically I ultimately ended up coming up with something that worked for all of us and then got asked, "Hey, would you be interested in doing accommodations for our whole department?" And I said, "Sure, I'd be glad to help out with that." And then next thing I know, well, we were saying, "Well, would you be willing to help out with accommodations for the company?" I was like, "Sure, okay, that sounds like me though it was mostly technical stuff." And then of course then if any of you have done accommodations, you quickly realize that a lot of times when it comes to stuff on the computer, that it would be a lot easier to make those accommodations if the staff was accessible. And so I started getting into the things like an old system called Lotus Notes and all sorts of other stuff, and it just kept snowballing and kept getting deeper and deeper and trying to solving all these different types of issues for different people, so, and at some point I realized I don't want to do anything else, I really love this work, it's super creative, it's interesting, it's new problems every day to solve, getting to help out a lot of people so they can do their work more effectively, and so that's kind of how it started for me. - Interesting. I'm looking at the chats, people seem to be struggling with getting to see our cameras or see the interpreter, mostly. People probably don't care all that much about seeing me, but the interpreter is certainly more relevant to look at. It might just be a question of having your stream in full screen, and then that screen is just above or in front of the other screen, maybe that's just it. If you're not in full screen and you can probably have both windows side by side, that might be why, otherwise I don't really see... It's not that I don't think I can help you all that much. It's probably a setting, the way that you're currently set up. So hopefully that will work for you. Okay, oh actually another option for you might be if you look at the window where you're seeing Lizzie and myself, the interpreter and myself, at the top right corner of that window, there's a little box, like there's a speaker view or a gallery view, so that might also be what you want to trigger to change from one to the other, so that might be a way to help with that also. Okay, so, having said that, let's jump into what we're talking about for real this time. So what do we mean by web accessibility? Let's start there. Probably not a better day than today to try and explain what that is. If you've been in this space for a long time, you've seen a bunch of different variations of what accessibility actually means. The one that we love to use in training is this idea that the content needs to be usable by anyone on any device. We love it because it's both very short and also extremely complex at the same time. So depending on how much time we have, we can go down a pretty long explanation or make it a shorter one, but there's a lot to unpack in there. The first one about usable by anyone is really this idea that, of course, we've talked about people with disabilities first and foremost, right? I mean, the reason why accessibility guidelines exist in the first place, is to help people with disabilities be able to equally participate in everyday things such as using the web. In our case, that's really what that is. But what I love about this, is that beyond this idea that it's not usable by people with disabilities, it's usable by anyone, because on top of people with disabilities, or permanent disabilities, there are situations that we all experience every now and then that cause a disabling experience for us. It could be that situationally, you might be in a context where you can't hear all that well, because it's really noisy, or the sun is really bright so you can't see your screen as well, so it's a situational problem that you're facing at that moment, or it could be a temporary disability because you went down a hill with your bike, and then you stumbled on a rock, and then you flew 20 feet in the air, and then you smashed your hand on the street, and then you broke your hand, being a little dramatic here. But you know, you broke something and then all of a sudden you can't use your hand as efficiently or at all, and your mouse is becoming awkward because you've always used it with your right hand and now you have your left hand, and you're not really good at it, so the keyboard will be better. Talking about an experience that I've had myself here, where I had to teach myself about voice control, so I could just use a different way of working than just a mouse. So you have these situations where people might experience disabilities or something similar disabilities, so that goes beyond just someone with a disability in the first place. But then also it acknowledges other realities that have nothing to do with being disabled, such as coming from a different cultural background and not really understanding the culture all that much, or understanding the language all that much. I mean, we see that all the time, people migrate to the United States, migrate to wherever, and then they might have English or French as a second, maybe sometimes a third language, and their master of that language is pretty limited, and therefore their ability to really communicate or understand the information is also affected. It might be someone who has a disability and then struggles with written content, or struggles with just speech and being able to communicate ideas, but it could also just be that culturally speaking, you haven't mastered the language yet. Could be someone just getting older, right? And some of you maybe even thinking about that rant now in the latest comments that were posted in chat. But just the idea of getting older and experiencing the world in a different way, if you will, you also benefit from accessibility, if that happens to you. Like I just turned 50, so I know for a fact that my eyesight, my hearing, is not what it used to be. And I can blame any metal bands and other things in the 80s and then the yellow Walkman that I was using back then, for those of you old enough to remember what that was. But over the course of the last 10 years or so, I've seen my sight decline, I have a need for glasses that I still push back against, but I know that I need them. I don't qualify as someone with low vision yet I need an assistive technology if I want to watch TV, or watch a movie or anything like that. So go ahead. - [Steve] I just wanted to comment, you acknowledge that some of this might be due to your being 50 and the Walkman with the loud volume, and whatever you were listening to, Metallica in my case. Anyway, I think of my dad here who never acknowledged any of that. He was in perfect health, if you talk to him. He had no problem hearing, he had no problem because of aging. Realities were very different though, and he was not in a place where he was willing to concede or even acknowledge that it could possibly be impacting, it was all about, he had trouble on the phone because the new phones are all plastic and they don't sound as good, and the TVs, they just didn't have as good speakers as they used to have, and stuff on the computer was just so tiny, nothing to do with his eyes, but it was just so tiny. And I think, there are a lot of people who we may know that they have some degree of disability, but they are not in a place yet, and may never be in a place where are willing to know or accept that. And so when we think about this in sort of a more universal way about access for all people, we're not restricting it to a specific group that identifies as having a disability, because there's a large group that while they may have one, don't identify and may never identify as having one. - Yeah, definitely. I guess I could relate to that with my own parents as well. And maybe it's just because of the generation that I'm in, but it looks as though, like newer generations are more in touch with those things as well. It's easier to acknowledge something like to acknowledge what would otherwise have been considered the weakness before as just being a fact. I'm 50, I don't see as well as I used to, it's just a thing, and not make a big deal out of it. But the whole point of this usable by anyone is exactly for that purpose, is that it's not just people with disabilities, of course, they're front and center, they're at the core of everything that we do, but by acknowledging that it also helps other people tons of other people, it also makes the relevancy of this practice that much more powerful. I mean, we're helping people with disabilities, yes, so we're helping certain percentage of the population as we do that, that's awesome, but beyond that, there's all these other people that benefit from what we do, which in turns means that accessibility is no longer something to help people that are at some kind of a disadvantage, but it's just a criterion for quality. If you create content that is accessible, that content yields a better level of quality because it reaches more people, it's more robust, like it works better on different platforms like it does all this things, the code is leaner, SEO is better, like there's all these sort of benefits that naturally come through because of the way that you've approached what you're doing. And it just naturally works better with more tools, which brings me to the second piece of that little sentence there on any device. When we started with accessibility 21 years ago, with WCAG 1 in 1999, a device was your computer, that was it. And then progressively, we started opening it up to the idea that, okay, so computers actually mean laptops and desktop computers, then at some point we was like, oh, well, mobile devices, sure, so, cell phones and mobile devices and tablets and stuff, and then new kiosk and then whatever things on your fridge or CarPlay or whatever. But then there's also so much more than that. I mean, assistive technologies is another device. So the screen readers that you and Tim, for instance, Steve, mean they're both examples of devices that we want to be able to serve properly. Refreshable braille displays, adapted keyboards, adaptive mice, adaptive switches, eye tracking software, all these different things that we can use, all of a sudden become other devices that we can better service as well by applying these principles. So, yeah go ahead. - [Steve] And devices we haven't even thought of yet, right? Like, think about digital assistance, like, Siri and Google and Alexa and things like that, that it wasn't too long ago when we weren't even thinking about those things, because that was too sort of futuristic, right now, it's a reality. So as we think about all devices, it's a great opportunity. And this is what jazzes me up about accessibility too, is the whole innovation aspect of it, right? And it's a huge springboard for free innovation. When I think about making stuff available on devices today, I have an opportunity to think about, how would I make this available on devices tomorrow? Maybe that seems very Star Trek-ish today, but they may be our reality tomorrow, right? And so I can start thinking about that, is what I'm doing, might it be adaptable to those devices? Is it robust enough to adapt or is it very restrictive to a particular device? So good opportunity for innovation. - Yeah. And we've been talking about a couple of those things already. So, we like that definition for that reason. It's super simple, but yet it opens up to so many different things. But the core, again, what people typically think about is blindness, so we can start with that, like I said, at the beginning, we're gonna have a couple of slides where we talk about different examples of people with different types of disabilities. We have our friend Malik as an example of someone who's blind, again, we also have Tim and Steve with us today, who can speak to that in much more relevant terms than I will ever be able to, unless I join your club at some point. But as someone who lost his sight as a child, for instance, Malik is someone who relies on screen readers, much like Tim and Steve do, but in this case, I also rely on haptic feedback, which I'm sure again, is something that Steve and Tim also rely upon every now and then when they're looking at their own devices, like relying on the vibrations, as opposed to just like a visual notification on their own screen, for instance. So there are different things that someone like Malik will need on the web to make the experience better, so we talked about a couple of those things that I leveled already, so... I had mentioned something about semantic structure earlier on and having the meaning being conveyed with the different objects on the page that you know what that thing is, like, this is not just an object, it's an image, and that image has all texts, or this is not just a piece of text, that's a heading, that's a heading level one, that it's supposed to be between any of that page and it says that particular thing, which in turns allows you to understand that this page probably talks about that very topic since this is DH1, or it's not just a random set of items, it's a numbered list that goes from one to 25, and then you have 25 different items in there, and before you get into this, you actually know that there are gonna be 25 of those as opposed to going through a list and then randomly going through that list, trying to figure out if it's ever gonna end after five, or 10, or 15, or 20, or 25, or 50 different items. Like knowing that ahead of time helps you better understand the page. So that kind of semantic value in the source code definitely helps but also just looking at things like forms in the case of Malik, like adding proper programmatic association between every form control and a little text label that allows that person to be able to set focus to a field and know that that field expects to see your first name, or your last name, or your credit card number, or this or that, which in turn makes the site, the form just as easy to use, I guess, like that's my my hope at least, that in perfectly accessible form becomes as easy to use for someone like Tim or Steve than it is for someone like you can see the label there and just click in that little box to start typing. So those are some of the examples that someone who has a visual impairment will need to better be able to use web content. And that's gonna be very different than other examples that we'll see a little later on as we go through this. And some of the pain points that we will see for someone like Malik here. When these applications don't work with a screen reader, then what do you have left to work with? If you're not getting the information read back to you, if the information is misleading because you're not hearing the right information, or if it doesn't have the right context, or if the order in which information is provided to you, doesn't reflect the intended order the designer wanted in the first place, are you even getting the right message, or are you getting a message it's all jumbled up, and not clear or misleading even in that case. So that's an example of what we're talking about, like I said, this is what people typically think about more easily, but it's only a fraction of what we're talking about. And other very typical example that we see regularly, would be someone like Brian. So someone who was born deaf, who's first language is ASL, American Sign Language, so we have our two interpreters today here who are speaking that language right now, and to me, that language, I don't understand it. I understand it probably just as well as I understand German and Spanish, which probably says a lot because that's also very limited. I can recognize some signs every now and then, but that's about it. So if information is presented to me in only that language, I'm just as much as at a disadvantage then if someone who's blind watching the video, doesn't get captions and can't see what's going on, like, if the language is not one that I share with the content, then I'm excluded from that thing. And going back to the words that you captured earlier on about rejection, those are the kind of words that get generated from me not feeling like I'm welcomed in that experience. And also something that is quite interesting to know, and this data is kinda old and I have not had a chance to revisit it recently, but about 12 or 15 years ago, someone told me that data showed back then that about 70% of people that were born deaf also had significant issues with written language, because cognitively speaking, you can see the words, you can understand how to write them, but your ability to listen and hear those words means that you miss a piece of the puzzle to really understand the language as efficiently as others would. And as a result of that, it tends to be a lower literacy level in the population that was born deaf. I wish I had more recent data to back that up, so it's just hear say for the most part, but I've sort of lived with that understanding for the past 12 or 15 years. And what that means is that when you start thinking about the expectations or needs of someone like Brian, for instance, who's deaf, of course, you're gonna be thinking about captions and transcripts and sign language, let's all agree. But if you don't give any thought to the complexity of the content or the copy that you have on the website, then there's a piece that's still missing. And it took me a long time to understand that part, but it does explain why a lot of people are still advocating today they've been advocating forever, about the value of having little sort of medallions on the page where you could see the content of that page in sign language, because it's easier to read sign language if that's your main language, then actually reading the content in say English or French or Italian or whatnot. It's more work, and clearly artificial intelligence is not there today at a point where we can just rely on that to automatically generates sign language as an alternative to content. But I think that there's a lot of value in understanding that creating more easier to understand content like using more plain language, being less stuffy, like less complicated, also directly benefits a lot of people who have are deaf for instance. - Excuse me. - Yeah, go ahead. - Would you mind switching the spotlight over? - Yep, doing that now. - Thank you. - Awesome, okay, so I was almost hoping for a second that you would come and back me up on that data there, but maybe another time. Okay, so yeah, it's easy for people to think about if I get captions and transcripts and audio description, not audio descriptions, sorry, captions and transcripts and sign language, but there's more to it than that. And when we pay attention to those things, all of a sudden, we're also expanding beyond the need of one particular group, and we're acknowledging the need of sick people with dyslexia and we're acknowledging the needs of people that have a lower literacy level in the population in general. And again, the data for the United States or Canada pretty much is the same, where about half of the population really has a very low level of literacy. In the United States, it's something around 20% of the population don't even have a third level literacy level, so like a third grade level in terms of literacy. And about 20 or 30 million Americans I think can barely read at a grade five level, something like that, I'd have to go back and check that data again also, but it's pretty surprising, and you know, it's very similar in Canada as well. About 10, well, actually like 15 years ago, in Canada, we had a survey about literacy, and 54% of the population weren't able to read the one page document and tell you what the document was about five minutes after having read it. So in five minutes, they either forgot some of that content or like they just read through it and didn't really understand what it said, so they were not able to tell you what that was, more than half of the population. Any of those folks are operating otherwise in their daily lives, but there's a limitation there. And yet we wonder why people keep phoning in and then asking us questions when all the information is on the website. But if the information on the website is just too dense for them to be able to even appreciate it, then of course, they're going to ask for those things in different mediums or channels, because the cover that we provide for them doesn't work. And we think about making the code accessible, we think about the design, making the design accessible, but how often do you really hear about anyone being focused on the content or the... Also being more accessible. A lot of the the considerations for content accessibility actually live at level AAA in WCAG, which are out of scope for most people. So most of the considerations that would benefit someone with a cognitive impairment actually live at that level, everything about plain language lives at level of AAA, so most people don't even look into that stuff, yet it benefits most people again. So we're looking at Malik and Brian right now, as two examples of disabilities that are very common, that we easily think about, the ones that we would typically address and accommodate in a session like today, for instance. Like we had these interpreters that are there, because we recognize deafness I mean, as being something that we have to do. Like I'm looking forward to the day where, we also have other types of accommodations that naturally come into the equation because we also recognize that there are these other needs out there that goes just beyond the idea of a sign language interpreter, or captions or anything like that. But we're still very much focused or like a very narrow view of what all of that is. - Just a quick thing, Denis, here in the questions, there's been a request that whenever we used acronyms, if we could basically spell out what the meaning of the acronym is too. - Sure, yeah, that's fair. - Thanks. - Okay, thank you. So blindness and deafness, I am not using those two randomly, I'm using those two, because again, when you look at the United Nations data, these are the ones that are brought up as the flagship, if you will, of disabilities out there. But there's so much more than that, I mean, when we look at the data from the World Economic Forum, they come in with 1.3 billion people around the world having a disability. So roughly the population of China back in 2019 is how many people have a disability around the world. And that's obviously a lot more than just people that are blind or people that are deaf. We're gonna drill down into a more you eccentric set of data in a couple of minutes, because that's where we are, and the world revolves around us obviously, but that's just how that is where we live, but what I found is that it's actually pretty stable. Like you look into most industrialized countries and they'll have similar percentages of people with disabilities, it fluctuates by 1% or 2% or 3%, but it's typically pretty stable at the same level. When we look at that 1.3 billion people out of the population that's a little less than eight billion today or in 2019, we're probably already still looking at one out of six, one out of six point something having a disability. So that's a pretty significant group of people out there that benefit from what we do in the first place. But like I said, we have data that is more focused on a country so we we have this day, that's what we're going to try to do now is pop up a little quiz for you. So we'll see how that goes, let me just check that real quick. Yeah, so this poster, so I'm about to launch a poll. What I have on my slide here, basically is a question, which I'm gonna bring up in the poll in a second, so Americans with disabilities make up what percentage of the population, according to the 2018 data from the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So they ran a census of Americans with disabilities, working age adults with disabilities in the United States, and they came up with different percentages, so some of you are voting in chat, that's awesome, if you want to be able to get those votes in in a way that we can actually track globally, I invite you to vote into the poll again, and I'll share the results with you in a couple of seconds once we get to around 70%, right now, we're at 44% of you having voted and people are shooting for, majority mainly shooting for 26%. 41% of you are voting for 26%, right now, 17 are voting for 32% and then 29 voting for 19, those are the main contenders right now, so we get a pretty good group there. I'm going to close that poll in five seconds, so if you haven't voted yet and you wanna do that, you have four, three, two, one second before I close it, which is now, I'm gonna share those results with you. So you should see that on your screen if I'm not mistaken at this point, or you should be able to set your focus with a screen reader, if that's what you're using to track through that information, but basically what we're seeing here is that 40% of you, 487 people voted for 26%. That's our winner here, 30% voted for 19%, so 364 of you did that. And then third in the list is 17% for the 32% option, and that was 208 people, and then 40 people voted for 11%, that was 12% of you, and then 1% voted for 4%, that was nine out of all of us. And the actual result 'cause that's the vote, it doesn't mean that it's the actual answer, right? But that actual answer happens to be at 26%, so kudos to those of you who knew this, you were probably the twos and threes in our list at the beginning of there, but yeah, so 26% of the population, working age adults have a disability in the United States. And to what I was saying earlier, when they compared that data with Canada, for instance, in Canada, it's 22% for the exact same age group, so 16 to 64 is roughly what we're talking about, the working age population, is 22% in Canada, is 26% in the US, and in Europe, most of the countries in Europe are around that as well, ranging from typically around 18.5, I'm thinking about Austria, and then it goes up to around the 24%, 25% for a bunch of other countries there. So it's pretty stable in terms of what that is, and the way that it breaks down in the US is as follows. So six main categories, we're talking 61 million Americans based on the data from 2018 again. When data is shared with you, you'll have the sources also so you can go in and check that out. So they broke it in six categories, they have mobility, cognition, independent living, hearing vision, and self care. Now in the context of what we do, we don't really tend to think all that much about independent living and self care, though, arguably, if you struggle with either one of those things, being able to autonomously use the web might also be an issue for you or a challenge for you. But the other four categories, mobility, cognition, hearing, and vision are really what we talk about. And to the point of what we said earlier, vision being represented in our case by Malik and hearing being represented by Brian, they account respectively for 4.6% and 5.9% of the population that has a disability, that has one or more disabilities. You still have 10.8% of people that have a cognition challenge of some kind and 13.7% that have a mobility issue of some kind. And some of the mobility issues might be related to using a wheelchair and having complete full control of your upper body, so using a mouse is not a problem for you in that case, so while you're counting that 13.7, we don't have to wonder all that much about what your needs are when it comes to using the computer, like you can still use your hands and you can still use your mouse, and everything's probably working as it would for most other people. But if you do have a limitation with your upper body, with your ability to use your hands to manipulate a mouse, if you have tremors, if you have just pain that prevents you from being able to do all those fine motor skills, then you need other options. And that's when the idea of using a keyboard kicks in, that's when the idea of using some sort of software for voice commands kicks in, so typically dragging naturally speaking, or other dictation software like that will come in, that's when you might rely on eye tracking software to be able to control the virtual keyboard on your screen, and then with your sight, selecting letters, and then auto completing words so that you can communicate only through your eyes or through different technologies that will pick up a signal when you're blinking, or when you're looking at a particular area of your screen, that sort of thing. I mean, this is all technology that exists today, that empowers people to be able to really connect with the rest of us, because if they depended on just a mouse to do that as an input, they would not be able to do so. So as you can see, out of 4.6% of the population with a visual impairment, the percentage that actually has blindness is going to be just a fraction of that, and yet we spent all this time talking about screen readers and talking about the needs and expectations of people that are blind. And Steve raised a good point when he mentioned that earlier, one of the main reasons being that this is where the loss has come from for the most part. I don't have specific data about that, but just a gut feeling would be that roughly a solid 85% of the losses probably come from organizations that represent people with disability, people who are blind, or at very least a severe vision disability. So it drives a lot of that conversation, yet it's a very small portion of the group. So if we expand beyond blindness to acknowledge these other disabilities all of a sudden, we're not thinking about the same things to make the content accessible to them, we're looking at other options. The needs of someone like Brian are very different than the needs of Malik, yet both need accessibility accommodations to be able to use the content, you just need to address them in different ways to make it work for both of them. And that's just two of those folks that we could be designing for. And, yeah, so we're talking 26% of the population, so again, if you think about, 'cause it's one thing to know that there's 26% it is another thing to actually believe that stat, because if you think about your own environment, like you're close ones your relatives, your colleagues, your friends, your family, and you were to identify one out of every four of them as having a disability, you'd probably have a hard time doing that. So while we know that the data is real, and while we can probably estimate that 26% might have gone up a little bit since the last three years, for a bunch of reasons, including complications due to COVID, it's still hard to wrap our head around the fact that one out of four has a disability. And the reason why that is it's pretty straight forward, it's only because 74% of the disabilities that people have are actually invisible. So it's very easy to realize that if you meet Steve or Tim, for instance, it's easy to realize that they're blind because, you know, dark glasses, or maybe like a guide dog or a white cane, like those are dead giveaways of the condition. But when someone has severe anxiety issues, when someone as ADHD, dyslexia, when someone is on the autism spectrum, you can't really tell those things, yet they're there. You might have colleagues that are otherwise being identified as being a little difficult to work with, or maybe they're not as focused as you'd like them to be, or maybe they're always the ones who never got to read that report that you wrote. Like, there's a bunch of things that you might naturally just label as, oh, that person just wasn't doing what they should have been doing, while in reality, that one person is just dealing with a particular thing that he or she has, that just gets in the way of some of the things that they have to do in the workspace, or it might be your kids or your parents who, going back to what Steve was saying there, like with his father not wanting to recognize something. Someone might do everything that they can to avoid others knowing or finding out about their condition. I spent four years as a young adult working in the company where we were making suits for men, and my job was to match colors. I'm colorblind, I did that for four years and I did that really successfully, because you work around your own limitations and you find ways to work around that, like you find coping mechanisms very early on in that job when I was still wondering, like, am I ever gonna do this, and then they're gonna find out, and that they're gonna during a fire me really, really soon. As I was freaking through that, I realized very quickly that everything was color-based or it's code based. So dark blue was a particular code, and then black was a particular code and taupe and navy, like all the colors were different codes, and all the different systems and catalogs that we had, always have the color and the number. So I would just memorize the numbers, and I knew that that color worked well with that color 'cause I could see the popular matches, so I would just work with associations of colors, which today makes it so that, I'm pretty good at just creating X code values because I had to learn that part to compensate for the fact that I can't really see those colors in the first place or at least identify them. And for other people it's other things. So often times we don't even realize that people have these disabilities because they've found ways to work around that, to still be as efficient as they can be. So we don't realize, we don't notice that one out of four actually has a disability around us. And if our work environment are as inclusive as they pretend to be with the equity hiring policies and all that stuff, then of course those folks work with us in our environments, they're are our colleagues, they're definitely our clients as well. So just acknowledging the fact that one out of four benefits from what we do is probably a reason alone in the first place to just even consider accessibility as a good use of our time. But on top of that, there are other things, of course. Anything you want to add to that, Tim, Steve, in terms of either experiences that you've had, trying to maybe work around a site limitation or anything like that so you wouldn't get dismissed, I mean, or anything like that on your end? - Oh gosh, we only have a few hours and there's a lot of stories, but it's interesting to me that I think as technology evolves, it of course is very helpful, but it also provides more ways for people to sort of get around, needing to admit that they have a disability or disclosing it. And I think that's good in some ways and bad in others. An example would be, for example, if you have language processing challenges, you might dictate instead of spelling, right? Or dyslexia or something you might use dictation or Grammarly or something like that to assist, but it's in some respects also kind of another way to avoid disclosing that there's a disability in play. And I think that is a good thing in many respects, it's a delicate balance though, like you mentioned Denis, right? Like would it ever have been okay to disclose colorblindness or not? And I don't know, I think it's very situational. For me, I try not to look "blind" whatever that is, right? But I do walk around with a white cane, so it's a little bit difficult to explain that away, and so sometimes if it's a sensitive sort of thing and I think disability is gonna come into play, I might reach out to someone by phone because on the phone they can't see that I'm using a cane or they can't see that I'm not like perfectly centered in my camera, for example. So, I can be, "normal" if I have a phone conversation. So that's one tactic that I've used to kind of get around needing to deal with the disability or make that the primary focus or focal point, which often it becomes. - Yeah, thank you for sharing that. - Will the interpreters able to switch spotlight for one moment, please? - I'll do that now. - Thanks, so we've been at this for a little less than 90 minutes right now, so we're gonna do one or two other things and then we'll take a break around the halfway point, so if you've been dying for a break, it's coming, so it'll come soon. I also give a little bit of a break to our interpreters 'cause that's cognitively pretty tiring, I'm sure. And just talk really quickly about that lawsuit piece, that Steve brought up at the beginning as well, just to give you a sense of what that is. I see some people in chat talking about how the statistics help, so that's gonna be another one that will likely help you. If you have to convince people, that's one of our goals here is to help you, give you ammunition to be able to sustain a conversation where you're backing it up with data, so we're gonna get into some of that, some more of that in the next couple of minutes or when you come back from the break as well. So yeah, so lawsuits and there are a lot of people out there that are doing a fantastic job in tracking everything about the lawsuits, so we're not even going to pretend to try and do that today, but just give you some sense of some of the most relevant laws that are out there. Again, this is North American-centric. I shouldn't even say that because I don't really have anything about Mexico, but United States and Canada-centric. But a couple of different laws that are relevant or levers that are definitely relevant and in use all that time for accessibility, so if you're in the States, you've heard about the ADA, right? The Americans With Disabilities Law. So like a law that prevents people from discrimination, I mean, or prejudice in places of public accommodation. So that used to be in the physical space and it used to be about services like employment, transportation, architecture, education, and others, that's what it was about, but ever since around 2007, when there was one particular lawsuit against one particular retail store, that sort of snowballed into a catastrophe, for lack of a better word, it was ruled that the web was also a place of public denomination because there were services that you could no longer find in the real world, in the physical world, that were only driven through the online world now. And just picture yourself in your living room, watching TV, for instance, this ad comes on TV, and there's a skit about something and people are talking about something that is tangentially related to the product, sometimes not even related to the product in the very end of the ad, you see this little thing, so come to our website and check for that product, check for the details on that thing. And they almost make it a bit of a game where you go to the site and you'll find more about that, if you want to know what happened to Brenda, go to the website and do this or whatever. And when you try to do that, and the site is not accessible to you, it's a pretty clear message, right? I mean, we didn't care about you, like you didn't matter enough. And so, again, going back to the words that you chose there, think about the words that you saw flying into the chat window. I mean, this is what that person gets or receives at that point. Like I'm invisible, I don't matter, people don't care about me, I'm an edge case, like this is what you get, and you're being reminded of those things all the time. So the ADA evolved naturally to include the online world as part of this, and as of that moment, 'cause we've seen lawsuits ever since 2000. The first lawsuits that I ever remember hearing about was in 2000 for the Sydney Olympic Games, Brian Sexton, I think was his name. Sexton, I remember the last name, Brian, I think it was his first name. And so that was 21 years ago. And as of 2007 or so, this is when I noticed that lawsuits were coming in more and more regularly. So that's one way in which IT happened to numbers that we're seeing today, which I'm gonna get to in a couple of minute or two. But it really snowballed into something that is much more significant today. Section 508, if you're working with the federal government, so any product that you create needs to be compliant with their expectations, so typically boils down to the WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So that basically runs to that, so creating products that are like, if you want to do this for the government, you have to create products that are accessible. So that's roughly what we could say for the States to keep it a very high level, but there are two pillars that you can certainly work with. In Canada it's kind of similar, where we have the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, the AODA, which basically says, and that's the only province that has this in Canada, but basically if you're a private or public sector, you have to create accessible content, like if you meet certain criteria, like the number of employees, that sort of thing, if you did this in Ontario, you absolutely have to have an accessible website. And as of this year, the bar is set to WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines level AA, WCAG 2.0 level AA. It took a while to get there, but we eventually got there. And then at the federal level, two, three years, in 2019, we adopted the Accessible Canada Act, which basically it's kind of like our own version of the ADA, where again, the federal government needs to have everything that is regulated by the federal government, everything that's under the jurisdiction of the federal government also needs to be accessible. So we have examples like this that exists, every province has its own set of guidelines mandatory, or more or less mandatory, or highly recommended set of guidelines, but nothing has as much teeth as what Ontario the AODA. And then if you look in Europe and in most countries, you'll see similar sets of legislation pieces, that sort of thing, so you have the European Accessibility Act, Japan has its own, the UK as one as well, Germany has one, so most countries have something like that, and they've all been adopting those in the past 10 years or so. And so going back to the States we're definitely, and I say, win the prize for lawsuits, let's put it that way. So we have again, a certain number of lawsuits every year, so I'm gonna pop in a little pop quiz for you, so you can vote on that, on this one. We'll just get to this one, there we go. So before I launch it, I'm gonna just read that to you so you know what we're heading into. So how many lawsuits against American companies in 2020 last year? So the answer choices are 814, 2,285, 2,890, 3,550 or 6,217. So I'm launching the poll, and I will give you a chance to vote on that as well. I'm seeing a couple of D's and E's and chat, so people are saying, not taking any chance, I'm going for the big numbers at my biggest strategy, we don't know just yet, we'll find out soon enough. - [Steve] You know, something I'm thinking about, Denis, as people are voting is one of the things that has happened in 2020 to sort of raise a consciousness for everyone is people working from home, right? I think there's been a lot more focus on technologies like Zoom, which is at least for me very accessible, and other similar technologies and distance learning for kids, and, you know, we've all sort of had a consciousness shift toward those technologies, and how does accessibility factor into that conversation? So I don't know if that's impacted the lawsuit numbers at all, but it'll be interesting to kind of see now that there's focus on areas that haven't gotten as much focus, certainly in years prior to last. - Yeah, yeah, I actually have some data to share with everyone about that next right after this. But yeah, we've seen a change definitely in 2020 before and after COVID hit, like we saw some changes there, it did affect people. Okay, so the voting died down, so I'm gonna stop it here and then share the results with you. People were, I guess, playing it safe or being strategic about it and voted in majority for the bigger numbers like I said, so 493 of you, 44% voted for a 6,217. And then we had second runner up was a 28% for 3,550, that was younger than 21 of you, and then 19% for 2,880, the lawsuit that was 220 of you. 7% voted for 2,285, that was 78 of you, and then 2% voted for 814, which were 17 of you. Now, the interesting thing about these numbers there, is that, well, actually, I mean, let me start by just confirming what the thing actually was. So D was the right answer 3,550, so if you voted for that big number there, consider that a curve ball from me, but so I almost apologize. But see, so we're not at 50,000 losses a year yet, but quite frankly, we could be headed in that direction because we're seeing a very steady flow every year, and the numbers that are there are not random, and maybe that is a prediction for 2021, because if you look at the numbers, 814 is the actual number of losses that we had in 2017, 2,285 was the number of lawsuits in 2018, and 2,880 was the number in 2019. So you see that every year, it got a little bigger. And 2017 was the year where it actually blew up for the first time. That year, so, you know, I mean, 2018 and 2017, I mean, with 814 lawsuits, we jumped in 2,285, that was a 181% spike or increase in losses almost overnight, like from one year to the other. And then since then it's been steadily growing to the numbers that we see today, 3,550 being today. So maybe this is a prediction for next year, we'll see, but right now, I mean, it's clearly heading in a direction where there are more losses. People are actually using whatever leverage they have to be heard, be recognized, and you know that is a great thing, despite all the headaches that it causes and all the trauma that it causes in organizations, I'd argue that the pain and the trauma and the problems that this creates for people actually matters even more. So we just need to get our act together and, you know, fix those problems so that they no longer appear or occur to people. Okay, so like I said, before we get to that break, I wanna wrap up this little part about the lawsuits, so just to give you an idea of what that means, 3,550 losses last year, we know that 21% of those losses were actually repeat losses for the same organization. So it's not 3,550 different companies being sued, it's a certain number of them being sued, but some of them being sued on different aspects, sometimes it's their website and then it's their mobile app, or sometimes it's a particular thing on their website and then another particular product or another website that they own, but under the same banner, like it's the same company, but like one out of five of those companies were sued more than wins last year, so it's a pretty, again, significant aspect of what we see, and then to your point, Steve, about COVID, what we saw was that the rate of lawsuits last year, more than doubled after the lockdown started. So as we started getting confined more, and people had to work from home more, and, you know, they had to shop for their groceries online and they had to get stuff from different vendors, but in the end, they had to order that online, people would realize that it's actually more broken than they thought, and they could no longer work around because they could no longer go to the grocery store, they could no longer go to do that thing. And maybe some of you do as well, but I personally know people who had a hard time just getting food, because they don't have anyone around them, and they they were used to going to the grocery store on their own, but now they can do that anymore and then you can order online because it's the size we're not accessible to them, so they were limited to whatever they had for weeks and weeks and weeks until they could get something. And, you know, that never was my problem, because I'm lucky enough that I could just, you know, walk to the grocery store and then have a mask on, do what I needed to do, and then come back because, you know, in Canada, for instance, for the longest time you could order your food online, but you would order something today, it would be delivered three weeks from now, and you'd get about half of what you ordered, because by the time they got to you, you didn't have anything left. So I could sort of work around that because I had the luxury of being able to walk there, but a lot of people didn't, so what did that mean for them? It meant just more isolation again, so last year was, well, great would not be a good word, and it was a dramatic demonstration of how broken that system is when we rely on the web and the web is not accessible to everyone. So it's interesting to see how it reflected in the number of lawsuits in the second half of the year, basically, because that's basically where that comes in, like the lockdown started around summer, end of summer, so almost half of the year, so increased by more than 50% at that point. An also a very interesting point that we suffer much less, and all of this data comes from usable net, so if you don't know of them, I would definitely recommend that you pay attention to what they do, like this is their third year I think, sharing that information at the beginning of the year about the previous year, they sometimes update their data 'cause they add to it, but it's an amazing way to get a picture of the landscaper site, and you'll have the link to the one from 2020 in the deck as well. But another really interesting thing to notice is that of all the companies that were sued last year, 250 of them that were sued had invested in some kind of a widget or an Overlay that was supposed to fix accessibility, so if you're in this space a bit more, you may have heard of some of those vendors. I'm not gonna name anyone here because there's a tendency to have attorneys call you when you mentioned them by name in the way that they don't like, but some people are offering different services online, where they promise you that if you add that little piece of JavaScript, that little widget on your site, they're going to make all your city problems magic to go away. And you know, they're being very well-funded with millions of dollars in that particular space, walking on eggshells here, and clearly what they provide doesn't live to the promise that they give to their clients. But, you know, they get a lot of clients who are coming into the solutions thinking, I don't really wanna deal with that thing, like I don't really understand what accessibility is, or I don't understand why I should bother with that, but I understand that I could get suits, I'm gonna pay for that service and just get rid of the problem altogether. And clearly 250 companies figure it out that, oh, that wasn't a solution that was viable last year. And I'm expecting we'll see more of those in the next few years as well. - This is Steve, I won't mention any names of any such company specifically, 'cause I'd love to be a guest speaker again, and then I suspect if I did, and you got those calls, you wouldn't invite me back. - I would, but I might not add the approval. - I understand, but as a user who encounters these various systems, I will say that more often than not, they have not helped me, they've served to frustrate me. They serve two purposes really. Oftentimes they don't deliver the accessibility that I believe they're promising. Of course, I don't know that, I just know as a user, when I have to use them often, I find myself having more struggles than if I don't use the Overlay. The other problem that is really bothering me, and I haven't seen any lawsuits around this yet, but I frankly hope to in the future, is that a lot of these Overlays give the user an option to use them or not, and you have to click a button or press a keystroke to enable the Overlay. And the problem that I have with this, and the reason I hope someone makes a legal case out of it is because what I'm doing essentially is disclosing that I have a disability and wanna use their Overlay. I think it's a breach of, again, I'm not a legal person, so this is just one frustrated, blind guy's opinion here, but I think it's a privacy violation, I have to choose whether or not to use or not use an Overlay, but in making that choice, I'm disclosing that I have a disability or that at least I use assistive technology, and I may not wanna disclose that because I don't know how that information is going to be used. I don't know if they're gonna tailor advertising to me or tailor some other experience to me, I'm not opting in for that, right? And so even if you opting out-- - If you were but using it? - Right, but even if I don't use it, it's recording that I chose not to use it, there's some that will persistently keep asking you, do you wanna use this or not? And it's an on or off thing, so it's not that I'm opting in, I have to opt out, because it'll every 30 seconds forced me to make it, or, you know, keep announcing until I make a choice. So in that case, I'm not even enough to get them opting out and in doing so, I'm at least disclosing that I got the notification. So all of that, just to say that I get the appeal of Overlays, they're cheap, they're a subscription service, and let's be honest, if you can take something and get someone else to deal with it, you know, I mean, that's a win, right? But in the case of accessibility Overlays, just from a user perspective, I can not think of a single, and I'm sure there are out there, but personally, I can not think of a single situation in which the accessibility overlay has helped me even in situations where the accessibility of the underlying site was poor to begin with. - Yeah, so I saw a couple of messages or questions in chat about what Overlays was, let's google over that real quick to make sure everybody gets this. So, and I see someone also shared the link to a particular page that some of us, actually, maybe all of us here on this panel have actually signed, but to make this really simple, an Overlay is basically a little piece of code that you add to your website, and when you had that piece of code, it adds a feature like a widget of source on the site, and then you can control different features that are supposed to make the website more accessible to you, like having the content read to you, or being able to control different features of the website. And, you know, it's easy to understand why people buy into this, because, you know, you could buy into the idea that someone would appreciate you offering accommodations on their own sites to be able to use it better, but the reality that at least again, that I see from the outside, as someone who doesn't depend on those tools, is that why would I care enough about your own site to learn your tools and then learn about these other golden at other websites, when I really just want to come here to do that one thing and probably never come back again. Like there's a flawed approach to this in the first place where people tend to think that people care about their site, enough to be able to want to use those tools, and then to Steve's point, I mean, if the tools actually don't help me and they become more barriers that I have to work through, it's really just frustrating. And the whole privacy thing, what I like about what you said, Steve, there is that like you can opt in or out, but even though you don't know whether or not they're going to be tracking that, the simple fact that you know that they could is reason enough to be concerned about your own privacy rights. And so to make it really short-- - Also about accessibility menus, and basically provide a brief answer to that question, so here's thing to keep in mind, there's a lot of things where they say, hey, you can enlarge the text on our site, you can do high contrast, you can do all this stuff, realize that if somebody needs high contrast, if they need to be able to have these larger fonts on your site, they need that for every site, they need that for using their computer. So they're probably already using features that provide all that stuff. So most of the time, those things aren't gonna be very useful to somebody, unless your site forces them to have to use that, so it's better to use techniques for your site that allows them to use the font size of their choice, or use high contrast modes that are built into operating systems or things like that, because often those special features, which sound good, because it's like, okay, you're gonna make, if you come here, you can press this button, I'll make it more accessible. Problem is that people who need to use your site, they need to use that feature everywhere, and so they're gonna choose the method that gives them that fit functionality everywhere. And so the extra functionality provided isn't particularly useful, and it's probably more important to make sure that the stuff that they're using that's based out of the operating system does work when they do come to your site, or the stuff that's built into the browser, Facebook, would they come to your site? - Yeah, so-- - Before we keep going, would you mind switching the interpreter? - Will do. - Thank you. - But we're also gonna get to that break that I promised 15 minutes ago, in a minute or two. So we're almost there, got a bit of a tangent here. Just to wrap up this conversation, 'cause that again, I mean, every one of those pieces could go on for much longer than you make them today, but I just want you to, again, like put a pin in this idea that 3,550 losses in a year, that might seem like a lot, it is, but it basically comes down to about 10 lawsuits a day, if you break it down on a day-to-day basis, like 365 days in a year, 2,550 lawsuits, roughly take out a couple of Saturdays or Sundays and there and then you have it. So it's 1.7 lawsuits per work hour, basically last year that's what that was. The year before, it was roughly one lawsuit per hour, so it added up and I'm sure that as we look into this next year, if you're again with us next year, we'll definitely update this, but I wouldn't be surprised if we went over over two lawsuits per hour on average in 2021, because you know, the pandemic keep going, and then people are more and more in tune with their ability to be able to be heard when things don't work, so this is a movement that is picking up, and, you know, we are also collectively becoming more aware about certain things, I mean, in these past couple of years, we've had the Dainik movement, we have the Black Lives Matter movement, all those things have awakened a lot of us to things that are just not right, and that need to be addressed. And the accessibility is just one of those things, they didn't get the media attention the way that other movements have, but it's one of these other things that, you know, is again getting traction. So we'll see more lawsuits before we see less of them for sure in the future. - [Steve] Yeah, absolutely. So just wanted to demo real quick, how a screen meter works on an iOS device, and of course, Android has something similar. In the case of iOS, the screen reader is called Voiceover, which is the name of Apple screen reader also for Mac, but on Android, it's called Talkback. So the idea is that as I move around the screen, and I can move around either by touching icons, just moving my finger around, or by using flick gestures or swipe gestures, the screen reader will read the information that I'm on, or the icon that I'm on. - [Siri] Games folder, seven apps, 38 new items. - And it tells us that, for example, in this games folder, I have seven apps and 38 new items, meaning I have a lot of notifications I haven't cleared. - [Siri] Microsoft folder, 11 apps, 130 new items. - So Microsoft folder, 11 apps, and a bunch of new items there. So it gives me contextual information about the things that otherwise would be represented visually, which is fantastic. In the spirit of innovation, one of the things that Apple has done and others have followed suit with is that, for example, when typing on the keyboard, we don't want the letter to be activated when we touch it, because we need to find the correct letter, right? So what they've done is they reverse the behavior so that when you touch the screen, you can find the letter that you want to type, the character you wanna type, and when you lift your finger off of that, then the character gets entered. So just to demonstrate real quick, open Notes. We'll chip in and use Siri here. - [Siri] Lightening adapter connecting a pair. Is this lightning, if you, other device, headphones, other device, buttons, notes, folders, folder actions, button, folders, back, folder, folder, search, tool bar, new note, button, new note-- - So I have a keyboard here-- - [Siri] Editing, insertion. - And if I wanna type Denis, so I'm gonna look for the D. - [Siri] Cap S, cap G, cap, V, cap, cap F, cap V, delta. - And I found, D, I can lift my finger up. - [Siri] Delete, - And I can keep going. - [Siri] Cap D, cap D, E. - Now I know roughly where these letters are 'cause as you see by my other home screen, I text a lot. So I can find those letters that way, so just kind of an innovative way of how that would work. One other quick innovation I wanna show you is photos. Photos have gotten a lot of PR lately because there's been a lot of AI around photo recognition. And I just wanna say that as someone who's blind, photos have been a real challenge because we live in a very visual world, right? Everyone's taking photos, and has photos, and sends photos, and I never know what they are. And you know, if you are on Facebook or any social media, someone will post a photo, and all we get previously at least was comments. Oh, that's so nice, that's really cool, that's adorable, one heck of a car, but like, what is the photo? So what's happening is that Apple and others have used AI to sort of help identify things in the photos. So if I go... - [Siri] App switcher. - If I go to-- - [Siri] WordPress, photos, - Photos. And this is just an album of some random stuff that I use for accessibility demos. But if I wanna scroll through these photos, instead of saying just Photo, which is not very descriptive, listen to what Voiceover and Apple's AI is doing with some of these photos. - [Siri] Favorites, zero favorites, recents, 950, recently, tab, for you, hidden, zero, import, utility, screen record, screenshots, burst, panoramic, portrait, live photos, selfies, videos, media types, places, people, eight people in place, family, accessibility, accessibility, demo, photo, no photo, July 8th, 2020, more content available, a photo of grass and and ungulates. Photo, September 10th, 2020, more content available, a blue car parked on a road near a grassy field. - A blue car parked on a road near a grassy field. That's really quite specific if we think about it, right? It's not just identifying objects, it's almost putting together sentences to describe what those photos are. Now, again, this is all AI, right? And so it's guessing about the important features of a photo, and that might be open to interpretation. So this should never be used in place of adding alt attributes or other means of identifying what is relevant in the photos, but it's fascinating to me that a world that's largely visual has become a lot more accessible on a device that I can carry in my pocket. - [Siri] Photo, October 11th, 2020 more content available. A dog running on his surface covered with dry leaves. - All right, probably my dog there. - [Siri] Photo, November 16th, 2020, more content available. A group of people posing for a photo in front of a body of water, maybe Gabrielle. - So that one is saying that there's a group of people posing in front of water, and one of them may be Gabrielle, which is my daughter. So again, it knows because of facial recognition, who Gabby is, and so it can identify her in that photo. So suddenly the world of photos has opened up enormously. We can go on and on and on with this demo, but I promised to Denis I would do this in less time than I've already done it, so I'm going to stop there, but suffice it to say that, you know, doors have been opened and things have really evolved with the advent of Voiceover and with other AI related technologies that have really provided tremendous accessibility supports, turning a device that, you know, when the iPhone originally came out, I thought this is just going to be, you know, a piece glass, basically, how is a blind person gonna use this, there's nothing to touch, which is the point, right? It's just a smooth piece of glass, and it's turned in to something that I use all the time, every day for of course, interacting with people, but reading books, reading the news, and as I'm showing here now, photos. And these is just the surface of the accessibility features, We haven't even talked about voice control and some of the other stuff that's available on the iPhone, and on other devices as well. So this is literally just the surface, but really amazing stuff, I think at least. - I thank you for sharing that. It sparked a lot of questions, both in the Q&A and the chat. Let's see if I can get some of them for you in here real quick. So let's see, so people are asking, so a lot of people are talking about how great this is and all that good stuff, so that's good. So people were asking you about what you're using. So basic Voiceover, under Settings Accessibility, is what you're using? - [Steve] Yes, under Accessibility, there's a bunch of stuff in there, Voiceover is just one of many Accessibility features. And also you can use Siri to enable or disable, so if you just want to tell her or him, I guess now, now that there's the Siri is sort of gender neutral, you can say, turn on Voiceover and it will do that. So all of these settings are under Accessibility in Settings on iOS, and Android also under Accessibility within Settings, although it's not voiceover, there's, you know, the same things are called differently on Android. - Yeah, and it's all built in free in-- - In Androids primary screener is called Talkback, 'cause I know we had a question about that for some people. - [Steve] Yeah, it is all built in and it is all free, and I have to tell you, I was teary the first time I went to an Apple store and bought an iPhone with Voiceover built in and I, you know, tore off the wrapping and I opened the box and I was able to use my iPhone in the parking lot. For me, that was huge, and the reason it kind of brought me to tears a little bit was because that's never been possible for me before. Always when I've purchased some sort of technology thing, I've had to get some sort of help to get software installed or some Overlay applied, even my microwave, right? You buy a microwave and you bring it home, and the first thing you have to do if you can't see it is label it so that you know where the buttons are or get some sort of a plastic tactile overlay that you can put over the buttons. So even a microwave, you can't really buy and take out of the box and plug it in and use the darn thing and the same way with computers and everything else, it's always been a struggle because you have to install assistive technologies, or you have to install software, the software may not come out at the same time as the newest version did, you know, so you may have to wait until the software catches up with the technology, but for the first time ever, at least for me, with the iPhone, I was able to turn it on and use it at the same time everyone else was turning on theirs and using theirs, you know, as they were leaving the Apple store in the parking lot. So for me, that was a huge transformational moment to just have that level of equality. - Would you mind doing me a quick demo on a website? I think people would appreciate that too. Like I see some people talking about your demo being too short there, so there is there's interest clearly through the comments and the questions, so maybe if you did a quick tour of a random page, just so we can see what looks like. - And Steve, the other people suggested, maybe turn your speed to what you'd normally use to start this thing. People wanna hear what that actually sounds like, slow it down for them. - [Steve] All right, yeah, we can definitely do that. Let me just hold on one second here, let me get to the Web browser. - [Siri] Screen recognition, vertical navigation, headings, vertical, screen, more characters, words, speak language, photo, July 4th, 2012, message, shopping folder, braille screen input, orientation path, Safari open it, no matching portrait, Safari, address, appletoolbox.com, secure. - [Steve] This is a website that I researching something or other. - Oh I know-- - [Steve] which are really cool, but I was wondering how to update them. So what happens is as I go through this... - [Siri] Page six of 16, page five of 16, page one of 16. - Let's go to the top page. Image, main landmark, more contents-- - All right, so that just says image, perhaps it's a very, I don't know if that image is important or not, I have no idea, they didn't label it, and the screen recognition has no idea what it is. - [Siri] How to update AirPod Max Firmware, heading level one. How to update AirPod Max Firmware article landmark. - Now what I'm doing is just-- - [Siri] Andrew Myric. - [Steve] Swipe to move from element to element here. And it's telling things like page link or link to kind of identify that these things are actionable. - [Siri] Last updated March, 11, 2021. how to update AirPod Max Firmware, image, Tools. - [Steve] The reason I wanna go back is I'm gonna change the screen speed, the screen reader speed. - [Siri] Characters, more content, edit, screen recognition, braille on screen input, portrait, Zoom, vertical navigation, Zoom, buttons, form controls, links, headings-- - [Steve] Here we go, okay, so I usually I'm at 80 Or 90, depending on if I'm wanting to read fast, or if I'm wanting to read more slowly and edit. So we'll do that same content, but this is the speed at which I normally would listen to sort of every day. - [Siri] How to update AirPod Max Firmware, heading to obtain. How to update, link, zero contents in each link. Last updated, March 11, 2021. While the AirPods are certainly unique and are the only high end headphones offered by Apple, they aren't without some issues. Since their release, the owners have been suffering from battery draining issues, along with other sound quality problems. - [Steve] We're gonna go a little bit faster which sometimes I will do, especially if I'm trying to speed read something, and then I'm gonna go up to this. - [Siri] 85%, 90%. March 11, while the AirPods Max are certainly unique in that they are the only high-end headphones offered by Apple, they aren't without some issues. Since the release, the owners have been suffering from battery draining issues, along with other sound quality problems. - That's often the speed that I'll use when I'm reading a book, for example, with the Kindle app. - How long did it take you to be able to gather enough from that speed for that to be useful for you? - [Steve] You know what I did, I'm trying to apply the same approach to my exercise routine. I started out with a slow speed, and then as I got comfortable with that speed, I slowly increased it. I wasn't trying to set a world record or get to the fastest speed, the way I viewed it was that I had plenty of time and that the faster I could do this, the more efficiently I could be, and, you know, in the corporate world and stuff, you know, I need to be able to work efficiently and on par with my peers, so, I wanted to get there, but I didn't have a timeline in mind, so I started very slowly with the speed much lower, and then I got used to it, and then when I felt really comfortable with it, I pushed the speed up a little bit higher, just, you know, 5% or 10% higher, not even a tremendous amount, and then I got used to that and I let myself get comfortable with that, and when I did, I just went a little bit faster and just kept pushing myself to do a little bit more. It worked out well with the iPhone so far, it has not worked out with my exercise regimen, but I keep hopeful that the same approach will apply. So if anyone listening to this wants to be able to understand that fast, the key thing you need is patience, it doesn't happen overnight, it doesn't happen quickly, but you know, keep in mind, I'm listening to this voice probably 10 hours a day, right? If I'm working or if I'm not working, I'm reading, if it's a dinner time, I might be ordering something from DoorDash or looking at a recipe, so when you think about how often you listen to the speech, if you're in a testing role, you might listen to occasionally when you're performing testing, but from a user perspective, I'm listening to it at least 10 hours a day, probably more like, well, probably more like 13, 14 between work and-- - You're being honest, you're being honest with yourself. - Yeah, exactly. - Exactly. There there's a bunch of other question, one of them that I just noticed was about like working through a PDF for instance, that's not demo that PDF is that would take a while, but can you share some thoughts about accessibility or how accessible, like your typical web page is versus a PDF document or other things? - You know, PDFs are an interesting challenge and struggle because they often contain really important information that's critical., and so when you can't access the PDF, you don't have access to the information or you have incorrect access to information. And what I mean by that is that some PDFs are scanned images and they don't have any sort of recognition or accessibility support embedded in them, and if that's the case, they may not be readable at all. The screen reader may just say image because it's all it is. It may look like text, but if it's just a scanned page, the screen reader might recognize it as just an image and say it as such, just image, even though it might contain text. When a PDF is made accessible, and I know that's a whole topic unto itself, but when, when a PDF is made partially accessible, it may read, but it may not be obvious how things are laid out. Take for example an invoice or a statement, my electricity bill comes to mind here. There's a table in the bill that shows my usage month over month, and it shows the last couple of years, so I could view like what was my May usage in 2018, and what was it in, I mean, 2019 and 2020 and 2021, so I could kind of tell there's a chart that shows how my usage has increased or decreased. And what happens is because it's not coded very well in terms of accessibility, all of the numbers read across in a straight line, I think it's one line of numbers, so it'll just read a blob of numbers, and I don't know which numbers are associated with which years. Now in the case of my electricity bill, it's fine, it just keeps going up, right? So I can assume the biggest number is the most current. But that's a little scary when it's a bank statement, right? And I need to know how much money is in my account, which number is that, and if it's not reading all of them correctly associated with the heading of a table, I have to guess, you know, is this how much I have, or is this how much I owe, you know, is this how much I'm contributing to retirement, or is this how much I have left? Those are really important anxiety inducing things to need to know and by not having them, if a PDF is not accessible or a webpage just as applicable to web pages too, not only is the information so hard to know, what the information is or how accurate it is, it's also anxiety inducing, right? There's a little bit of a panic when I read a number with a dollar sign and I'm not sure is this the amount that I owe, or is this the amount that was maybe covered or something in the case of insurance, for example. Both are probably big dollar amounts and there's a lot of anxiety associated with that, so it's sort of changes a lot of that stuff as well. - Right? So earlier on maybe four or five minutes ago, I pasted a link in chat, I'm gonna it again if you miss it, it's dequeuniversity.com, it's a page with a bunch of free handouts, a lot of which are basically cheat sheets that help you learn how to use a screen reader software, so you'll have a bunch of them in there, including voiceover that Steve was demoing better, so if some of you are curious and I guess brave enough to try that out, you'll see how to find it on your device, but also how to do most of the basic operations with it, so it might be a fun little exercise for you to do if you're curious about that. We're gonna keep moving because we only have 40 minutes left before we're done with the sessions, and there's so much more we could be talking about. So let's just move on to another topic, I'm gonna take a screen-sharing back from you, Steve, so just, just so you know. - [Steve] Do you have it, or do you need me-- - I think I need you to stop sharing so I can take it. Actually, you know, I got it, I could take it from you. Okay, so I'm just gonna summarize some of what we said so far, and what I'd like you to keep in mind from what we've said so far really is that people with disabilities and everyone around that group, that benefits from these considerations, they're by far the largest minority group that we have on the web. So those of you again, who've been involved in web development, web design, for a certain number of years, and may have gone through the pleasure of arching your way around old versions of internet explorer, for instance, that sort of thing you kinda know the pain that I'm talking about, like when we had to work through supporting older versions of browsers, Microsoft retired, IE 11, officially, I think it was yesterday or today, like they just did that. So people are still supporting these older versions of browsers, and if you've done that, you know by experience that you would be told by your team leads, your bosses, your leadership, that you still needed to support that particular version of the browser, because we still had like two, three, 4% of our users who were coming from that browser, and when you have I don't know, a million hits a month on the site, 3% is quite a few people. So we've been bending over backwards all of these years, trying to support all the older versions of the browsers that we were or use to support, and we were doing that, or we will be doing that for two, three, four, 5%. We're talking 26% of the population here benefiting from accessibility. So if it was worth bending over backwards, the way that we did, or the way that we do for older versions of browsers, it's probably worth our energy to do this for a quarter of the population to begin with. But this piece about accessibility and people with disabilities, it's only one piece of that puzzle, right? Like we're gonna quickly touch on aging as an example of another group that adds onto this, but before we do that, I wanna do another little pop quiz for you 'cause that one is typically is pretty high opening as well. So it's about the actual after-tax disposable income of working age Americans with disabilities. So again, that number pretty much matches up Canada, when we compare data of course, Canada having nine times as few people as the United State, I think that wording was right, it's like, so there's about nine times more people in the United States than there are in Canada, but the numbers otherwise pretty much add up. But we can say thanks to the American Institutes for Research, what that amount is annually. So they came up with that data in 2018, they actually revisited that data about two weeks ago, so I'm gonna update that for you live once we know what the results are here, but how much do you think that collectively, people with disabilities in the United States collectively own in after decks disposable income? So we have $950 million, we have 21 billion, 147 billion, 275 billion, or $490 billion a year that they own or control. So I'm gonna pop that poll in chat, not in chat, I mean on the screen for you, there we go, and get a vote on that one. And yeah, so right now it looks people are pretty massively shooting for 147 billion or 275 billion, not as many people going for the bigger number, maybe you learn from the previous one, who knows, we have 13% of you voting for $490 billion so far, and then the rest is separated between 950 million or 21 billion. Got about 46% of you have voted so far, so I'm gonna give it a couple more seconds and then I'll share the results with you. Looks like it's starting to slow it down, so I'm gonna stop it in five seconds, so, five, four, three, two, one, ending the poll now, I'm gonna share the results with you. So this is what you voted on. So 11% of you voted for 950 million, 20% voted for 21 billion, 34% voted for 147 billion, 23% voted for 275 billion, and then 12% voted for $490 billion. The actual answer is in this case from role, $490 billion is what we're talking about, so that was a good moment where you could have voted for this number actually, it's almost 1/2 trillion dollars. And when I say almost 1/2 trillion dollars, actually the data that was updated two weeks ago, or two or three weeks ago, they were sharing that it was around $502 billion now, so it grew by about $12 billion in the last three years or so. So it's definitely a little above 1/2 a trillion dollars a year is what that community controls in after tax disposable income. So you're going to hear people telling you, yeah, we get the whole point about accessibility and, you know, like, blah, blah, blah, involving people, blah, blah, blah, and you know, government, all that stuff, but they're not an interesting market, they don't have any money, you can maybe share with them that if that person doesn't think that your organization could benefit from 1/2 trillion dollars of potential income, maybe they're right, but otherwise, maybe this is not that market, that's very well underserved, that you could potentially tap into if only you cared about accessibility a little bit more, and you added accessibility into your product, into you enter your website to all of those things. So yeah, 1/2 trillion dollars roughly is what that is. And when you compare 'cause 1/2 trillion dollars, it doesn't actually mean all that much to us, like we know that it's a lot of money, but it doesn't actually means all that much until you put it into context, and the context that I'm gonna put it into, it's comparing it with other really important demographics that no one would ever consider not marketing to. One of them is the black community, so in the United States, the black community collectively owns every year about $501 billion a year. So roughly the same as people with disabilities and the Latin X community collectively owns about $582 billion a year. So when you look at it from that perspective, saying that marketing to people with disabilities is kind of pointless, would be the same as saying that marketing to the black community would be pointless. It doesn't make any business sense, like it makes no sense at all to say that we're not going to be paying attention to that market segment, if we care about selling our products, if we care about pushing our brand to different communities, of course you'd want to do that, and whatever it's going to cost you to make your website more accessible will always be lower than the potential revenue that you could generate by actually catering to a group of the population, a quarter of them, that are basically not being served properly by inaccessible content in the first place. So something that I like to bring into that conversation, because it sort of addresses that point about like a poorer or more poor or underprivileged group, it doesn't have to be that way, and we don't have to think about it that way either, because clearly the numbers are showing that they're much more significant that people actually realize also from that standpoint, of course. People they're already relevant, we all know that, but they become even more relevant for someone who actually thinks or thinks about money first and foremost. So having said that and while you recover from that shock there of 1/2 trillion dollars, I wanna quickly get into aging. We talked about that a little bit with Steve's dad, who probably didn't expect to be part of this conversation today, but as we get older, we know that our senses deteriorates, so vision, hearing, mobility, potential tremors, some issues with cognition, more fatigue, having a harder time focusing when it's later in the day, again, little story from myself here. I have always been someone who would put in like an hour or two of work when the rest of the household was asleep, so between 10 and 12 in the in the evening, like I would wrap up emails, work on a couple of things, and I did that until I was about 42, 43, and then I realized that I actually needed more sleep. And I was not as good as working later in the evening because I was just more tired, and I note today unless I'm really well rested, most days if I insist on working during that time it's gonna be crap, and it's not gonna be great work, and I'm probably better off just sleeping, be better well rested the following morning and just be more productive the following day, than insisting on doing the work the night before. I'm the same person and yet I'm not the same person, because years add up, and as they add up the way that I can function changes. So even if you don't have a disability, your ability to stay focused for a longer period of time actually is impacted as you get older, on top of seeing not as well, on top of not hearing as well, on top of a bunch of other things that pile up as you get older. And because we talked about this 26% of the population being the working age population which theoretically is 16 to 64, there's another group after that, that is not accounted for when we're thinking about who benefits from accessibility, and that group is our seniors. And when we look at that particular percentage in 2017, it was roughly 15% of the population, right now the numbers look more like 17 point something in 2020, or were, or look like that last year, but I haven't seen more recent data yet but between 15 and 17 is a fair number to talk about people that are over the age of 65, and they could be added to this population again, of people who benefit from what we do, and it's very easy to understand how some accommodations for more clarity in terms of the colors that you use, or the color contrast, or the size of the fonts could also benefit someone who's just older and doesn't have a particular visual impairment but it just happens to be older for instance. And when really interesting piece of data also that I found a couple of years ago about aging, is just how it actually impacts our ability to process information. So the Nielsen Norman Group, some of you may know who they are, they're a UX/usability shop doing a lot of research around usability and user experience, and they run a lot of studies with aging and the impact that aging has on your ability to use the web. And what they found is that for every year that we have over the age of 25, we lose 0.8% of our ability to use the Web efficiently, which means that for every 10 years that you had to your life as of 25 years old you lose 8%, which means basically you lose 8% by the time you're 35 years old, you lose 16% of your ability to use the web by the time you're 45, 24%, by the time you're 55, and 32% by the time you're 65. So by the time if someone is 65 years old, they have roughly lost a third of their ability to use the web efficiency compared to how they were or how they would have been 40 years ago if the web had been around 40 years ago, which it wasn't, but it was around like 30 years ago, it started getting around about 30 years ago. So we know based on data that the older you get, the harder it is to process things. And if you design everything from the mindset of someone who is in their early twenties and you don't account for anything else, you're automatically excluding people without even realizing it, because some people are just going to struggle with that content more because their ability to process that is impacted by their age. So if you design with that in mind, and you'd start designing with this concept in mind, you're going to be designing for a group that oftentimes it's gonna be very different than yours, if you're a designer yourself, if you're a developer yourself, if you design for a broader group of people, you're going to create automatically a more inclusive experience as a result of that. And what that means basically is that you can pretty safely combine that 26% of people with disabilities, and the 15% of seniors that we add in this particular presentation with the data that we have at our disposal right now, and not to say that if you don't do it, if you don't pay attention to accessibility, you're shutting out 40% of the population, that's not what we're saying, but what I'm definitely saying is that up to 40% of potential users are going to struggle with different things if you don't account for accessibility as much as you should. For some people it's gonna be about the color, the choices of color that you use, for other people it's gonna be about the fact that the information is not conveyed to their screen reader, for other people it's gonna be the fact that they can't use a keyboard to navigate through the different functionalities that you offer, for someone else it might be the complexity of your content, like whatever that is, one person is gonna struggle with something if you don't pay attention to accessibility, and that's roughly about 40% of the population. And we know based on data again that when we think about the disability population per se, that when you think about a condition, like say dyslexia, it affects roughly up to 17% of the population. And when we look at data that the CDC shared about cognitive, it was around 10.8%. So their definition of a cognitive disability probably doesn't even include something like dyslexia, which is pretty obvious in the first place. So the numbers that we look at, the 26% we look at, is probably very grossly conservative also. So as you start compounding all those numbers together, it adds up to what I consider probably a majority of the population. Someone wants to say something. - Yeah, it's Steve, again, I'm glad to be back, my internet decided to crash, but the other part to this that I often hear is I don't need to make my stuff accessible 'cause blind people aren't gonna buy it anyway. I think, it insert disability there, whichever one, right? I think sometimes people make a misinformed judgment that because my product is visual, that someone with a visual disability is not gonna buy it, or because my product-- - Like so big screen TVs. - [Steve] Exactly that. And what I think gets forgotten is we aren't alone on our own islands, many of us have families and jobs and needs and all of this other stuff, and I have bought flat screen TVs, I've bought eye glasses that are prescriptions, I've bought clothing, I've bought jewelry, I've bought things things that I think people would in some cases say, well, a blind person is not gonna buy that, why are they gonna buy frames for glasses or whatever. I might buy them for my kids, I might buy stuff for my wife, I might buy TV for the family, I might buy camping gear. So challenge that if you find that you're thinking that, it's a natural thing, right? Because I think sometimes we don't understand how would a blind person or someone with a disability use my product or services, and it sort of a natural thing to kind of assume that, but I would ask that if you are in that place and many people are, to challenge that a little bit and kind of give yourself the opportunity to think about, you know, well, geez, maybe they wouldn't, maybe they would be using it on behalf of someone else or for someone else, or maybe there is some way that I don't know, maybe I ought to talk to one, you know, same thing, again with any other person with a disability, maybe I don't know, but maybe I ought to talk to someone because I don't see how it would be possible, but there might be something I'm missing, and there's a lot of people as Denis had showed you of people with disabilities and recognizing that each person is unique, you know, it may be worth your time to talk to a few folks, get some ideas, maybe get some new perspective because you know, you never know where that stuff will lead, and where it might lead in terms of business is more dollars, and you know, who complains about that. - Yeah, I'm sure you don't go on a run regularly, but you probably have running shoes because they're comfortable to wear also and you have to walk somewhere, so yeah, the case can be made for a lot of different objects that way. And actually since you bring that up, another piece of data that I don't have in this deck, but I can share with you is that, so there's this book called "Unleashed Different" by Rich Donovan, and in the book, he makes the case that the disability market, as he calls it is 53% of the market out there. So when you add people with disabilities and then their close relatives or loved ones, their colleagues, people that know them, and how, you know, like bad word of mouth can negatively impact your brand, like if you're identified as a brand who doesn't care of those people with disabilities, it can negatively impact you, because someone who says, a disability won't buy from you, but they might talk about you in a bad way, and then people that they influence will not buy from you either, that comes up to 53% of the market. So again, from a business standpoint, it really doesn't make a lot of sense not to think about this. - [Steve] And the opposite, I think too. I find myself to be very brand loyal, very brand loyal to companies and organizations that have taken the time and the challenge of making their product or service accessible, that's who I go to first, you know, I bank with the same bank, I'm very hesitant to switch because you know, the bank I have did that for me, and I know they didn't do it for me specifically, but the took the time, right? Same with airlines, I will spend more, I have spent a lot of money more on airline tickets to fly with an airline that I know their website is very accessible to me, maybe I could have gotten a cheaper flight through somewhere else, but I will gladly put up more money to support a business that I know has gone the extra mile for me, I'm fine with going the extra mile for them, and again, you know, recognizing that people are different, I think that, because this is such a struggle, when we talk about accessibility, there is a greater degree of brand loyalty or loyalty in general from people with disabilities, because obviously we wanna spend money on things that work for us, that just makes sense. - And I'll mention a quick story here, so originally when I switched over to doing online banking, the bank I do business with doesn't even have a branch in my town. And I picked that bank because it had an accessible online presence to give guarantee that I could pay my bills that way, or I could get information that way that was accessible. So I chose something that didn't even have, you know, normally people choose a bank based on the branches in their town, but I picked one that didn't have one even, with I think the closest one is probably an hour and a half away. So I picked something that was not necessarily physically convenient because that didn't matter to me and picked something with online presence that was accessible. - And I will not comment 'cause I'm getting a couple of voice text version first. But so you might not hear me correctly, hold on, I'm back. I went to pick a couple of books that I have on my end here that I constantly find myself going back to, so since that looks to be an interest on books, I don't have that one with me in physical format about Rich Donovan, but someone shared the link there, so thank you. Another great book you might wanna look into is "Design for Real Life" by Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Eric Meyer. So it's about design choices that we make and how they might impact people, that's a great one to look at. If you want to challenge the idea of designing for the average user and really have a more realistic approach to who or how you should design, this is an amazing book from Todd Rose called "The End of Average," I would highly highly recommend that as well. And then a third one that I cannot not mention is "Mismatch" by Kat Holmes, which is also about inclusive design. So if you're looking at this from the perspective of approaching design or development in a more inclusive way, those are great books, and they're actually a great segue into our next slide, which is about this idea of designing for the extremes, instead of designing for the average user, and that's probably where we'll wrap this up 'cause we have about 15 minutes left and there's a ton of questions, I'd like for us to be able to get to some of those as well, so I'm gonna wrap with this part here, and then we'll get to as many questions as we can from everyone before we officially wrap up. And what I want to share with you here basically is this idea that we easily tend to dismiss people that are not part of what we consider the average users, like the happy path, typically that we would create. And when we do that, we automatically exclude those folks. I mean, if you design a particular application thinking about, you know, that typical users that you identified for that system, maybe, you know, maybe it's a young professional in their thirties who is active, and enjoys sports and enjoys going out to eat, maybe that's what you're shooting with your product, or maybe it's a work from home mom who has two kids, or maybe it's an older, you know, retired professional who likes to golf, like whatever it is that you're trying to achieve in terms of a market, when you designed for those things specifically, you'll automatically have blinders, no pun intended, on you because you'll miss what actually Adolf Adelaide refers to as jagged edges in that book, "End of Average," by Todd rose. And what that is is that, you know, you could be marketing to say work from home moms that have a couple of kids in their early thirties, for instance, and if you focus on that piece only, yeah, you'll get a lot of your demographics right, but you'll miss that one mom who has ADHD or that one mom was dyslexia, for instance. And as you do that, you're automatically singling out people and they're not going to be part of what your experience provides because you haven't thought of them. If, instead of designing for that average user that you've identified, you designed for these extremes there, and you designed for people with disabilities in mind, first and foremost, you designed for people that have severe anxiety issues, first and foremost, you had this designed for anyone who might be impacted by technology before you consider your average users, you design for people that are getting older before you even consider your average users, what we know is that the middle of the bell curve will take care of itself very naturally. It will take care of itself because if you create a product where contracts are more, you know, are more obvious, everybody benefits from that. I mean, you don't have to squint as much you don't have to figure that out as much, if you work with a slightly larger font, everyone will be able to see it easily, you won't have to work harder if you happen to have a weaker site for instance, if you design your contest that it works with the keyboard automatically, some people might benefit from that 'cause they don't need it 'cause they're using a mouse, but anyone who can't use that mouse will also be able to use it all of a sudden. And in this book, I keep bringing them back, 'cause I don't have the links for you, but as you see them, you can pick up on what they are, so this is one Design for Real Life, there's a really, really powerful quote in there from a designer, I forget his name, Evan something, but he identifies edge cases as the boundaries of who and what I care about, and that's how he explains that... Design for Real Life, yeah. So that's how he explains how, you know, referring to people with disabilities as edge cases is a problem because, you know, I have no issue defining the things that I don't care about, I mean, that particular feature, that procured problem, yeah, that's an edge case, we're not gonna focus on that, but when you identify people as edge cases, you're basically making a determination that's some people matter more than others, some people are actually worth your energy and others or not, and you know, I'm personally not okay with that. And when people think of it from that perspective, they typically also are not that okay with that because they understand that, you know, people are people and everybody's should matter in this whole thing. And if you design, if your approach to this and if your approach to development, if your approach to web content is really meant to be inclusive, you're going to start by thinking about those people and what they need in particular, you'll weave that into your experience, and then everybody else will benefit from that, much in the same way that, you just look at your phone, look at your tablet, all the features that you take for granted in there that are used useful for you every day, they were not made for people that don't have disabilities, they were meant for people with disabilities in the first place, and then they became mainstream and we all take them for granted now, I mean, the keyboard is a fantastic example of that, where like the very short eye-level version of the story being that the keyboard was invented by, I believe an Italian inventor about 200 years ago or so, because he wanted his love interest to be able to write letters back to him because she was blind. So she couldn't write, but we invented the typewriter so that she could type letters back to him and they could communicate that way. If you think about, you know, word prediction or word completion, it wasn't made so that we can have more convenient time getting the wrong words when we're trying to type something real quick, it was made because some people actually struggle with typing words. You saw Steve type at the beginning of my name there D and E, that was pretty, it was still a pretty difficult thing to go through, and he wasn't, obviously wasn't super focused on typing the letters there, but you can see how it takes a longer time for him to find the letters than it would be for you to just quickly use your thumbs to do this. So these features and many, many more were built or invented so that we can make the expense of someone with a disability, a little easier. They became popular, they became mainstream, much in the same way that the curb cut that you see on the sidewalk was not made for someone riding a bike or pushing a stroller, it was my first with the wheelchair. But it turns out that it's pretty convenient if you're having a kid in a stroller, you don't wanna wake that kid up, like you just go through the curb cut instead, and hopefully the bump isn't as obvious, and maybe the kid doesn't wake up. So that's why we like to think about, or talk about potential stress cases, instead of thinking about edge cases, like just realizing the potential stress that the disability or the condition causes on the experience, and then working towards addressing that first so that everybody else benefits from what we put in to make it that much more accessible. - You know, I just wanted to mention, one time was going into a building where I worked and there was a button to open the door, and I had my hands full, and so I hit the button with my elbow and someone said, oh, you can't do that, that's for people in wheelchairs. And I said, well, I just wanna thank whoever put this door here, that opens with the button because I'm holding hot coffee. And frankly, it's a pain to open the door when I've got my laptop in one hand and cane and coffee and everything else, being able to just hit that button makes life a lot easier for me, I'm less likely to be scalded and so even if the intent was to assist people who cannot open the door because of physical mutation or whatever, it's a huge benefit to me, I loved that door and I would, you know, it was a simple thing that benefited everyone, but it certainly wasn't put there so that I could more easily bring my coffee into the building without spilling it, that was not their use case, but I thought it was a great help and I was amazed that more people didn't take advantage of something that may have been initially intended for one thing, but really it was beneficial for other. I would walk through that door frequently and notice people struggling with their purses and laptops and cell phone and drop their keys, and then they'd have to set stuff down, I thought, jeez, if you just use this other door, you know, your life also would be much easier in the same way that someone in a wheelchair's life was made a bunch easier by that accessibility thing. - Yeah, so we clearly could have gone another three hours. Again, we'll be sharing the deck with the recording and everything, so as you get through that content, you'll see that there's probably half as many slides that we have not covered in the session since we went in all these different directions as we're going through this, but we're gonna share those with you. We're going to leave you with that simple question there that sort of connects back to the questions we asked at the beginning there. You probably picked up a couple of things along the way with us today there, so what I'd like you to maybe try to do, you know, in the next couple of days and next hours or so, is just think about own biases a little bit more, like, again, if you're someone involved in development or design for instance, like, what do you take for granted in your work? If you're someone who works on web content for an organization, and you work with a vendor who builds your website, you probably have your own biases as well. So based on what we shared with you today, like can you identify any one thing that you should stop doing or stop assuming, is there one thing that you've heard that you had that gut feeling yourself, or you were already doing that, that you could identify something that is good that you're already doing to help with accessibly that you should continue doing, and is there one thing that you picked up that would probably be a good thing for you to start doing also to be part of the solution, be part of this inclusion movement that is being created year after year through accessibility. So if you wanna share some of that in chat, feel free to do that, but it's really more of a personal thinking there, and I'm going to stop it here so we can go to some of the questions that I'm gonna let, I guess I'm gonna let Laura maybe pick some of the questions that we could try to answer in the time that we have left. - [Laura] Sure, so we kind of touched on this a little bit with different disability types, but one of the questions that people have put it a lot was, can you talk a little bit more about accessibility for a neuro diverse population, and how maybe that's even being addressed in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines? - Yeah, I don't know that we have that particular example or those particular examples of personnel that mentioned this one, but there are a couple of interesting things to think about, namely around, you know, the autistic spectrum... Yeah, so it's hard to summarize that in a couple, like a short time, but I'd say that neurodiversity, I don't tend to approach that much more differently than any of the other topics, to me the core message is to recognize that once you've met one person, I wanna use the word qualifies, who identifies, who is recognized or diagnosed as being neurodiverse, that you recognize that what you've met is one person who happens to be that way. And you know, that's the same thing as looking at the needs of people that are blind, for instance, and that might actually be the case with Steven, Tim here, where, you know, Steve might think that a great experience for him as someone who's blind is that particular thing, and Tim would disagree and say, I actually think that it's that thing. And I think of a person in our field that is on the autistic spectrum that is pretty vocal about these things, and he keeps saying like, if you've met me and I've told you about autism, like you've met one person who has autism, so you, I don't speak for the community, I don't represent every single one that's out there that is on the spectrum, so I wouldn't have released so much to say about neurodiversity, per se, except to say that you will only really learn about that if you actually talk to folks who identify as such and learn from them. There's a really great set of posters from the UK government that has a series of do's and don'ts like five dos in five don'ts to design for accessibility and one of the posters in there is about the autistic spectrum. So, you know, on that thing, you'll see recommendations such as get use plain language, like don't use metaphors or idioms, or that are complicated, like, you know, it's raining cats and dogs, or it came out of the blue, like that sort of language might not really work well, or, you know, you want to avoid super bright contrast because that can be triggering. So you'll have a couple of cues here and there about what you could or couldn't do, someone just shared those, thank you. But yeah, I mean, it depend, we have otherwise I don't think we can do it justice, so hopefully that was helpful a little bit. - [Laura] Yeah, I think so, touching on how, you know, there's a lot of nuances there and there's a lot of resources out there that people can go to learn more, I think is a great way to touch on that, so people can do it. - We've got a spectrum of diverse experiences. - [Laura] Yeah, exactly. - [Steve] And even just thinking in terms of metaphoric language that we use, I've worked in corporate environments for a long time and to anyone who is a part of this, who is in a corporate environment, you know, corp speak is everywhere, and I mean, it's an art form to talk about something without talking about something, you know, or to use words that get really confusing or have the potential to be really confusing just as you know, it's raining cats and dogs, not only to people that might be on the autism spectrum, but people who might be struggling with English. I mean, some of the things we say, you know, circle back, touch base, let's, you know, regroup, we're not trying to boil the ocean, we're just all of the sort of corps speakish things, you know, if English is not your first language, or even if it is, and you just haven't been corporate land for a long time, that's really confusing, right? And you don't wanna be the one that looks confused and doesn't understand what everyone else in the room is talking about, you know, about everyone should be, you know, swimming in their own lane and, you know, whatever the corp thing is of the day. So just another area of, you know, when we hear those terms thrown around in meetings and we say those terms thrown around in meetings, which I'm very guilty of, you know, I'll say something and I'll think, gosh, I wonder how many people in this meeting did not understand what I said, because now they're gonna focus on that, and they're not gonna focus on what I'm actually trying to say. And so, you know, just another thing to think about. - Is even more the case when you come to this as a second language, like I saw, I think it was issue of Dishu, Bishnu... I think when I wrote that, like as a third language, Disnu So as a third language, he finds himself having to Google this stuff all the time, English is a second language to me, so I do that every single day, like I have like a dictionary open, I need to figure out like, what does that mean again? 'Cause you know, all these different expressions, it's like you put it in or on or offer it out to it, and it means something different than you're like, I don't know what that means and so it's definitely hard, not just because you don't necessarily get the second level, but because you don't necessarily master the subtlety of the language as a non-native speaker in the first place. - [Laura] So the time flew by, we're at 3:00 PM Eastern time already here, but I did want to reiterate that, no Denis did it and Steve and Tim did a really great job laying the foundation here if you're new to accessibility, but there's a lot of really great resources out there if you want to build upon what you're doing in your learning experience. So I saw someone posted this in chat, but there's the Alley Project, which has a lot of great resources and events, which you can check out. I'm just looking here, we have a lot of free webinars and blogs that we do all the time at Deque, Denis is a trainer of ours that does great bootcamps for any type of role. And we have online courses as well, there's like, oh, the Slack channel, be sure to check out accessibility Slack channel. If you have questions, if you want to connect with people in the accessibility community, someone posted that link in chat and I would definitely recommend checking out.