 Yeah, okay, cool. Hi, hello, and welcome. You're at a session called Accessibility. It's not just a client-side problem. If you're not here for this session, then feel free to leave. I won't be insulted, it's okay. But this is what you're here for. My name is Stephanie Slattery. I am a front-end web engineer at Clicks Studios in Chicago, and I specialize in accessibility. I've led accessibility audits and fixes for all sorts of clients. And I give talks and mic... So anyways, I said some words. What did I say? I'm Stephanie. I talk about accessibility, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, whatever, great. So here's a slide that has my name on it. Wow, and my Twitter handle is there. Also on the bottom of my slide's really teeny tiny, so I'm putting it up there quick. Accessibility is important to me, obviously. I'm giving this talk. So if at any point in this talk, I'm speaking too quickly, too quietly. You can't read a slide. My microphone is way too loud, and it's hurting your ears. Or I'm not making any sense. Just give a shout out. Also, these slides are up right now, available online. I just tweeted out the link. So if you need to follow along for some reason on a screen, feel free to do that. Cool, also feel free to live tweet this. I love reading people's thoughts about my talks. Cool, okay, so let's get into it. What is accessibility? Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people who experience disabilities. It's also the practice of removing barriers that might prevent people with disabilities from accessing that technology in products and devices. In general, technology shouldn't be a barrier to people. It should make their lives even easier than it was before that technology existed. And that's why we have accessibility. I tend to find that the easiest way to understand accessibility and what it is and why we do this is to talk about disability. There are a few general categories of disability that we need to think about when creating technology. I'm gonna give you a list. It's not exhaustive, think of it as a starting point for understanding. And all of these can be acquired from disease or trauma or congenital conditions. So the first of these is visual disability. This includes complete or partial blindness, low vision and color blindness, hearing. This includes deafness, heart of hearing, hyperacusis, which is a sensitivity to certain frequencies and volumes of sound. The next category is motor disability. This includes things like paralysis, cerebral palsy, dyspraxia, carpal tunnel syndrome, the predative strain injury. In general, as far as we're concerned for technology purposes, these can cause an inability to use a mouse or a slow response time or limited fine motor control. And the last category we'll talk about is cognitive disability. This includes both cognitive impairments like head injury, autism, developmental disabilities. Essentially they impact the way that a person thinks and learning disability. Things like dyslexia, dyscalcula or ADHD. These can cause things like distractibility or an inability to remember or focus on large amounts of information or just cause a person to think differently. And then the important thing to know about all of these people is that they all use technology. Whenever I give a talk like this or a workshop, there's always somebody who's like, wait a minute, what? People who are paralyzed from the neck down are using my website. What? How? Or what? Someone who is blind, like completely blind, they're using the app I made? What? Huh? That's a thing that happens? It is. This fantastic thing called assistive technology. As I mentioned before, technology is something that helps enable people to have more opportunities. It's not a barrier, right? This involves a lot of different input devices and a lot of different ways to experience and perceive what you've created. So this might be something like a screen reader. There are a lot of different screen readers you can pick from, but in general they're reading the content that's on a computer to a person who is not always able to visually see it. This also includes magnifiers, either like a physical magnifier that goes over a screen that magnifies it, or software that can increase the size of text and things like that. You may have accidentally done this before on your computer, like, oh, the text is really huge, what did I do? Also, this includes large print and tactile keyboards. So keyboards that have larger keys, bigger letters on the keyboard and they're physically raised so you can feel them as you're typing. This also includes SIP and Puff devices. These are, I'll show you a picture in just a sec, but essentially these are, think of it like a little straw that a person can use to both suck in air and blow out air as a way to send a signal that can be interpreted by a program, so they can use it. Also, eye gaze and head mouse systems. So these allow people, as they move their eyes, for that to control a piece of technology or the way that they move their head. Super cool. The last one is speech recognition, which we're becoming more and more familiar with, just everybody, right, talking to Siri or whatever. You can physically speak to the computer. Here's an example of that SIP and Puff device I was talking about. You can kind of see it here. There's like a little straw that's, you have the ability to blow air into or suck air out of as a way to send a signal. And this is one of those sort of head mouse devices. It's a button that you can hit with your head. Cool, right? Things that we have created that allow people to use technology I think are really exciting. Here's the thing though. You might be thinking, okay, this is cool. There are people with disability. That's nice, whatever. The important fact about all this is that one in five Americans have a disability. This isn't like some small, teeny part of the population that you can just forget about. This is as of 2010, according to the US Census Bureau. About one in 10 Americans have a disability that directly impacts their ability to use a computer. 10%. And if you're like me and sometimes numbers, you have a hard time thinking about them, that one in five Americans is 56.7 million people. That's a lot of people. That is a huge user base. These people are using your technology. They're using the thing you create. Oops, accidentally put this slide in twice, sorry. Here's the other important thing to know. Accessibility helps everybody to use your technology better. All of those different categories of disability I mentioned require certain types of adaptations to the design of your content and the tech you're creating. But most of the time, these adaptations help everybody, not just the people with a disability that you're trying to specifically help out. A good example of this is physical. It's called a curb cut. Probably seen these everywhere in the United States. They're on the sidewalk, they cut down, and it's like a little ramp between the street and the sidewalk called a curb cut. This is also the word that we use in the accessibility space to refer to things that are specifically meant to help people with disabilities that help everybody. If you're pushing a cart of groceries from the store, this helps you out, you don't have to go over a curb. If you're pushing a stroller, this helps you out. Helps out a lot of other people. In the digital space, a good example is captions. This is like an example of a YouTube caption here. It says, it's, Jimmy Lee Curtis, I think this actress is, right? Telling you, have a good first aid kit to take care of your family, and we can see that caption on YouTube. Captions are necessary for deaf users to be able to understand the content. But they're also super helpful if you're on a bus and you forgot your headphones and you wanna watch this video and you wanna know what's going on. It's a cute cat video your friend shared and you wanna know the narration, right? Captions are not just helpful to people with disabilities, they're helpful to everybody. So really, when we talk about accessibility, we're talking about improving access for more than just one in five Americans. It's a lot of additional people we're helping, right? Okay, so why do we make something accessible? There are a lot of reasons and they're all totally valid. They're just more or less altruistic, right? So the first one is to improve the lives of people with disabilities. I believe that we have as technologists an ethical duty to help everybody who's using what we're making. It's just that simple, right? We're responsible for what we create. Regardless of what you're making, whether it's a website or an API or it's an app or it's a cool robot, whatever it is that you are writing code for, if you make something that any other human being is going to interact with, you are responsible for making sure those other humans can use it, right? Okay, so if this altruistic moral reason doesn't appeal and sometimes it can't, another really great one is to capitalize on a wider audience or consumer base. So remember I mentioned that one in five Americans have a disability, that's a lot of people, right? There's no economic or ethical argument you could make for excluding 20% of your audience for something you're creating, right? If you were making a website and you decided to just exclude the web browsers that 20% of people use, that'd be wild. Why would you do that, right? You're losing a fifth of your customer base. You wouldn't do the same in creating a technology that excludes one fifth of people, right? Here's the other interesting thing. If you like numbers, that one in five Americans that have a disability has about $175 billion in discretionary income. Wow, I can't even think about a number that big, it's so huge, right? If you are creating an app or a technology that you want to make money off of, you want a piece of that, right? Here's the other really important reason why we make things excessively. It's the law, in fact. You might be making something accessible to avoid lawsuits or to avoid bad press. And I know what you're thinking, there are laws, there's a law that says that my website has to be able to be used by somebody with a screen reader, what, okay, what? There are several major laws in the United States that came into existence because of the disability rights movement. I'm gonna mention them here because they're really important for compliance reasons. The first of which is the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, mini history lesson, get excited. This law prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in programs that are a federal program or that receive federal funding or hire federal employees or about federal contractors. That's what the federal government. In 1998, Congress amended this with something you may have heard of called Section 508 that is specifically about information technology, requiring that federal agencies provide accessible electronic resources and IT to people with disabilities, pretty cool. Here's the thing, I said the word federal a whole lot in that sentence, right? This act doesn't require private websites that have nothing to do with government funding to be accessible. But if you're a person in this room who does anything with federal funding, you might already be familiar with this, it is the law of the land. Here's the law that applies to everybody. It's called the Americans with Disabilities Act. You may have heard of called the ADA, this passed in 1990. It's a labor law, technically. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability and created accessibility requirements for public services and accommodations. Here's the thing though, 1990, right? That's like the baby infant stages of the worldwide web. The ADA doesn't actually directly mention the internet anywhere, but it works to ensure that people with disabilities have equal opportunity and equal access. The Department of Justice is currently developing regulations that address accessibility of technology and specifically regarding the web. But there have more and more recently been lawsuits that make it pretty clear that our legal system isn't interpreting this to also apply to private things that receive no federal funding. You may have heard about a lawsuit against Netflix. They weren't providing accurate captioning. There are a lot of shows that had no captioning. So there was a lawsuit regarding that. Southwest Airlines had this problem with their seat selection map, where you select which seats you want to get in the aircraft. And that was not accessible. And there are a ton more of these. A lot of these lawsuits, I'm going to take questions at the end if that's OK, unless it's a concern. Oh, sorry. More like if you can't hear me or something. I'm so excited to take your question later, though. I might answer it in a second. Hold it. Hold it in your brain. Thank you. So there are a bunch of these lawsuits. The interesting thing is that the way to have an organization or a business be compliant with these laws is to sue them. And I know in the United States, we're like, oh, people who just sue people willy-nilly. Ridiculous, right? So very frequently the only way to get an organization to make things accessible for you as a person with disabilities. And there are a ton of other international laws that are really interesting and really cool, but I don't have time to talk about them. So you're going to have to research it on your own. OK, so we have laws. We are legally required to make things accessible. How do we know if what we're making is accessible? I don't want to get sued. I want to help people. How do I do that? The best and easiest way to make your technology accessible is to listen to people with disabilities. You can read as many blog posts as you want by people without disabilities and read every guideline and read every book. But at the end of the day, you need to involve people with disabilities in the creation of your technology. Have them on your team. Have them involved in user testing. Involve people with disabilities in what you're making. Also, listen to the voices of people with disabilities about what they need. It's the easiest way to do it. There are also some other helpful guidelines you can follow. We have a few different sets of best practices about accessibility. So we have those laws that I mentioned. They're pretty helpful. And sets of guidelines that help you evaluate what you're creating. There are a lot of resources you can use. I'm going to go into two different examples, but there are a ton more out there. The first of which is specific to the web. It's called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Version 2.0 came out in December 2008. This does specifically apply to the web. However, I'm still going to explain it because it, I think, really provides a good framework for understanding about how to make technology accessible. It is also called the WCAG or the WCAG, if you've heard it referred to that way. It has four principles inside of it. The first of which is perceivable. Your web content needs to be available to the senses, either through a browser or some other kind of assistive technology, like we mentioned before. The information content and UI components of your website have to be presentable to users in ways that they can perceive at all. The second one is that it needs to be operable. Users should be able to interact with every control and every interactive element on your site using either a mouse or a keyboard or some other assistive tech. They need to be able to interact with it. The third principle is that a site needs to be understandable. The content needs to be clear. It needs to not be confusing. It shouldn't be ambiguous. It needs to be clearly understood. And the last is that a site needs to be robust. This means it needs to be accessible to a wide range of technologies, both different browsers, all those different kinds of assistive tech I mentioned, different operating systems, mobile devices versus desktop devices, both the shiny newest version of this technology and also older versions of the technology all need to be able to use it. They need to be able to access your content. Underneath all four of these principles, there's a ton of other really minute sub-guidelines that talk about success criteria and it's very dense. I recommend reading it. It's really cool. If you do any work on the web, take a look at it. Another thing relevant to us is the open accessibility framework. It's also called the OAF. It provides an outline of six steps. You have to, that must be in place. If you're creating just a computing platform in order for it to be considered accessible, and they are actually really similar to the steps you need to follow if you're physically making something. You want to be accessible. Like that curb cut we talked about, right? Or you're building a building. And there's two categories to these steps. It's creation and use. And just really quickly what these mean. Creation defines the precursors and building blocks that technology developers have to use to create accessible applications and products and whatever you're making. So you have to define what accessibility means for what you're making. You have to determine stock user interface elements and components that are used consistently throughout what you're creating. And you have to provide authoring tools for people who are using that platform to make things that support accessibility within the tool. Then as far as use goes, they describe what's necessary in your computing environment in which those accessible applications run. So this includes providing platform supports, accessible application software, and baking in those assistive technologies into the platform you're making. So this includes, like you're probably familiar, we talked about accidentally zooming the text on your browser that's built into your browser. It's not something you're having to install on top of it. It's put right in the platform. Okay, so we have the WCAG, we have this set of guidelines, but here's the thing, Hammer Home. It's more than just guidelines. You can read every tiny little step of the WCAG. You can follow all those six steps of creation and use and still end up with something that is not accessible to people. These guidelines are more like tools. They help us determine if something is inaccessible. They're a really easy way to say, oh, well, you don't meet this part of the WCAG, that means you're inaccessible. But they're not a way, a way is to make sure you are accessible. So again, put this slide in here twice. So you remember, listen to people with disabilities about what they need, and about your content, and about the technology you're creating to know if it is actually accessible. Okay, so maybe I've convinced you, maybe this is all good. Oh, I like helping people. I like making money. I like not getting sued. Accessibility, yay, but it's still scary, right? I have definitely joined teams where I'm like, all right, let me look at the code, and it is, oh, it is not accessible, and that is super scary and intimidating, right? How can you advocate for this? How can you actually make a change and improve accessibility in whatever it is you're making? Got a few steps for you. They should be easy enough to follow. The first of which is to collect baseline information. That means to figure out how accessible you are right now. Do an audit of what you're making, whether it's a website or whatever it is, or your documentation, whatever it is, or hire somebody to do that. There are a lot of excellent services that will perform accessibility audits for what you're doing. They're wonderful people. There are also accessibility validator tools you can use. For example, if you're making a website, you just pop a URL in and hit submit, and it processes your site and tells you all the accessibility problems it can find, which is super helpful, right? That gives you a good jumping off point. A word of caution about those tools though, they are tools, and as people in this room who make tools, we know they're not perfect, right? Automated accessibility validation tools usually only get about like 60% of the problems. And then this is partially because it's a tool, right? It was made by a person, they're not perfect yet. But it's also because, specifically like an example for the web, right? If you're running a tool, and you wanna know are the headers on my website, are they clear enough? Do they communicate the meaning of what's in the content? And you don't actually have headers in your HTML, you just wrote text. A validator tool is gonna be like, yeah, sure, the headers of which there are none are all fine. But it doesn't know because you haven't written the code correctly, right? This is a lot of a huge problem, specifically if what you've created is very inaccessible. Validation tools can't really help you very much because they're making some assumptions that you've written some of your code correctly at least. So be careful, but they're a helpful tool. Okay, so we have baseline information. We know, are we accessible at all? Next, we can gather support. So whether this is in an organization that's you and your buddy making a browser again, or you're in a huge multinational company with like tens of thousands of people making all sorts of crazy, amazing, beautiful apps, whatever it is, big or small, gather support in the organization that you're a part of. So it's not just you. Identify stakeholders in accessibility and convince them that this has value. Now you might find some folks who you go, you know what, we should help people. And they'll go, yeah, helping people is great. Fortunately, most of the time helping people does not pay the bills for your app. So you usually have to convince them of some monetary value in being accessible, which can be hard sometimes, right? If you're a person who cares about accessibility, you don't wanna talk about well, we can make money off of people. There are a few pretty straightforward ways to do this though. First of all, that number I mentioned before, those like billions of dollars, okay, that's money. Hello, let's make some money. But there's also lawsuits. I have definitely helped clients before who are being sued for a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of money because their website is not accessible. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't get sued? Let's be accessible, right? There's also the concern, as I mentioned before, that new laws are constantly being passed around this. It's a lot easier and so much cheaper, believe me, to build your technology accessible from the beginning. It's pretty easy, you just kinda roll it in there, whatever, we do it the right way from the beginning. Then it is to have a new law be passed that says, ha, ha, ha, you have to follow these rules now, and then you're spending a ton of money to go back and retrofit. Specifically, I mentioned before that Southwest Airlines lawsuit that actually has resulted in a law specifically, it's on the book, not quite on the books yet, but being written, that says that the airline industry, specifically, just the airline industry, their websites have to comply with the ADA even if they don't receive federal funding. I'm glad I do not work in the airline industry because that has not fun to go back and do a giant accessibility retrofit, right? So you're saving money in the long run. You're not going to get sued and you're not going to have to suddenly be compliant with the law, you're already compliant with it. Look at you, right? So you gather support. It's cheaper to do this now, it's better to be proactively accessible. There are also some companies that do a wonderful job of building accessible technology and just saying and just communicating, oh, we have such and such shopping website that is rated with such and such compliance level within the WCAG. They just put that out there into the world and let me tell you, people with disabilities are so overjoyed to have something that we can use, to have something that's accessible. There are a lot of sites that are chosen that people will choose to give their money to because they're accessible, because they care about them, because they see that people with disabilities exist and that's more money for you and your stakeholders probably care about that. All right, so we've gathered support. Next, we need to define a standard. So it doesn't work so well when you go, rah, rah, rah, accessibility, done, and make people care, right? You have to define what you're doing. If you're making a website, you have to say, okay, we're shooting for AA compliance in the WCAG and here's how we're doing it. You need to make a plan. What does accessibility mean for you? How are you doing it? What is your internal standard and actually train people on this? I've had this problem before at companies too where we will say, oh, accessibility is great, we care about it, our client cares about it, hooray, and a few people receive training, not the entire team and nothing accessible is actually built because people don't actually know how to do it even if they care about it, right? Training is important. The last thing is to monitor conformance. So maybe you've convinced everybody, hooray, accessibility, let's do it, here's how to do it, hooray, and you build a beautiful, shiny thing that's so accessible and everybody's so happy and it's amazing. And then you let developers get their grubby little hands on it and they fix bugs and they make quick patches and quick midnight fixes when things break and they tack on new features that the business wanted and suddenly your shiny thing is no longer accessible. No good. You need to be monitoring how accessible your technology is over time even after you've initially built it. They're a bunch of really cool, actually automated build tools that can have accessibility, conformance monitoring built right in and they'll just run a check every time somebody puts in a pull request. It'll evaluate, ah, ah, ah, you accidentally used a color that doesn't have enough contrast, pull request denied. It's really cool. It's super helpful. It's really great. I'll put those resources up on my website. You can look at them. You'll love it. Okay, so you've convinced people that accessibility has value in your organization. You have standards. You've built it accessibly. You've monitored conformance, hooray. Isn't that great? Wouldn't that be great if the world worked like that and you could go home and everything would be perfect? This sounds scary, right? You might be sitting here like, well, I just write, you know, I do database stuff for this giant company. Nobody's gonna care if I'm like accessibility, right? Here's my argument to you about that though. If you do not do it, then who is going to do it? If I've convinced you that accessibility is important, if you don't do it, who's going to do it? Now, maybe your company has this huge internal team with quality assurance, user experience, and front-end developers all working together to actively monitor accessibility and improve your content and improve your product. Cool, you're good. You're good. You're fine. You do not need to do more. Perfect, hooray, good job. Ask them if they need help. Go help them. I am going to assume that for most people in the room though that is not the case. That is not a very common thing to have in a company, an accessibility team devoted to this. There are companies that do it, don't get me wrong. If you have anything short of an amazing huge accessibility initiative where you work or on the open source projects you work on or even just the things you make for yourself, then you can do more. You can either start an initiative, shop it around, talk about it, just start to care about it, or join a small one that exists and make it bigger. Let me tell you, I have found a decent amount of open source projects that if I just go, hey, I made an accessibility improvement. I used a different kind of header tag. It's more accessible now. People aren't going to be like, oh, accessibility, we don't care, get out of here. Like it's an easy improvement. It's relatively frictionless to make. If you don't do it, who's going to do it, right? And here's the thing. I believe, I believe in you. I don't know you, but I believe in you because you came to my talk. And that means you must care a teeny bit or somebody is making you come here, which then they care. So you're good. Somebody cares. Or maybe you're sleeping in the back. I don't know, whatever. But you're here. You care enough that you came to this talk. So therefore I believe that you are capable of doing this. Whether you write front end web code and you're at a Python conference, I don't know, I'm here, whatever. You can make an improvement. If you, everything you do all day is work on an API, chances are another human being is going to look at your API. Oh, you should think about accessibility around that. Maybe you're just writing docs for something you make. Those docs should be accessible. Maybe you're just doing project management. Oh, you should super care about accessibility. You are interacting with other humans and making things that other human beings will use. And you're making stuff. So I believe that you can do it. You can make it accessible. You are capable of learning it and caring about it and fighting for it. And really at the end of the day we're all people who make things and I believe that as a result we are responsible for improving the lives of people who use our technology. I don't think that there are many people who are like I make this technology I make to make people's lives worse. And maybe it accidentally ends up making somebody's lives worse. Maybe you do make something that's awful that people do not like using. But I am assuming that for the most part your goal is not to make somebody's life crappier. You wanna help improve things. You wanna make things better. We are responsible for improving these people's lives. Accessibility. So I have actually a ton of time for questions and I'm really excited to hear what you wanted to ask. Take it away. Yeah, that's a really good question. So to repeat it in summary and tell me if I'm wrong is that Netflix for the most part doesn't make their own TV shows. They have them from somebody else. So why is Netflix in trouble? Why does it matter? Is that essentially? Yeah, great, good question. So part of that is there's an amount of Netflix exclusive content that I'm a little bit, I'm trying to remember. I think part of it is some of the Netflix exclusive content. The other thing is that if somebody else has a TV show or a movie or whatever the Netflix content is that doesn't have captions and Netflix still puts it up without captions, Netflix can't go, oh, sorry people who are deaf. Deal with it. Talk to NBC who we got it from, not our problem. And I mean there's an extent to which they can do that, right? But it's their platform that that content exists on. It would be similar to, what's a good example? So it's slightly different from thinking about like Flickr, right? Some site where you can upload an image and on Flickr you can provide a description of the image and whatever, that's important. And if you don't provide a description of the image it's not Flickr's fault. Like Flickr isn't gonna get sued because Stephanie didn't put a caption on her image she uploaded. But if it's a site that is creating their own content or posting the content and it is not coming from a random user they're still responsible for the way they communicate it. Think of it like maybe a better example like a television network, right? If you have ever turned on closed captioning on your TV you will find that most all television channels have closed captioning available. If some show just like didn't give the network closed captioning which I think they're legally required to, I don't know, whatever, but like if they just didn't give a television network captions. The television network is still responsible for providing that captioning. It still has to exist, so it's interesting. I don't wanna pedantically tell you like let's look up case law about Netflix together but I'll look it up, I'll tweet it and we'll figure it out, it'll be really great. Yeah, so the question was about websites being permanently shut down to not complying with websites. So I'm actually not aware of sites that have been shut down to do non-compliance. Oh, you're really excited, what are you gonna say? I'm aware of one, yes, which university is it? I'll repeat it in a second. Thank you, okay, so, okay, oh, an amazing moment just happened, you're all wonderful. Okay, so the question to clarify was have there been websites that have been shut down to do non-compliance and she said excitedly, oh, yes, there is one and I was like wait, you're right, there is one. MIT, you said? Pretty sure it's MIT. It's a university, I don't wanna, in case I'm wrong, I'll just say it's a university because we don't remember where they had video courses, if I'm remembering correctly, that didn't have captions and they were sued or were about to be sued for like, hey guys, your video's gonna have captions, you received federal funding, you need to have them and they made the choice and it's debatable whether it was a good choice to just take down all of the videos because, so I mean, it's a university, they might not have funding to provide captioning, they just took down all the videos because of that, yeah. Thank you so much, through the magic of smartphones, you figured it out. Cal Berkeley, name and shame, I guess, is what I'm doing, whatever, whatever, yeah, yeah. For the most part, when people are sued, they usually find a way to make things accessible. It can sometimes be the case with a university like that where they might just straight up not have funding to make something accessible and really my argument to that is, part of your budgeting for whatever you're making should include making it accessible. So like, I don't have enough money, guess we need to get rid of it, it was like, oh, you should have thought about that in the first place, you should have thought about captioning when you first decided to make videos at all, but that's just me. Was there another question? Yeah, oh, I love this question, you're wonderful. Okay, so the question was, let's say I'm working on an open source project, that's not how he said it, I'm exaggerating. Let's say, let's say I'm working on an open source project with no budget, how should I start improving accessibility? That is a question after my own heart, thank you very much for asking that. So, I will actually have up on my website for you, some like getting started links for thinking about accessibility. Specifically, I have more that are about the web accessibility, because that's what I do, but there are a lot of organizations that answer that question beautifully of like, are you just thinking about accessibility for the first time, here's a getting started guide, here's a free ebook, here's all the information you need because there are a lot of nonprofits and organizations that care about this. So they're actually a bunch of really fantastic guides. Good places to start, if they're, whatever the technology is that your open source project is creating, if there is a validator tool that you can use for that, like if it's a website, right, or an app, and you can plug it in, those are the easiest issues to open up. Like I've done that with open source projects, like plopping into an accessibility validator and read it. Oh, you don't have alt text on any of your images, so screen readers don't know what's going on. Let's just open an issue to put alt text on the images, right? There's some like really easy first steps you can take, and there are a lot of steps that are really impactful that make things just immediately easier for a ton of people. So yeah, I will put the link on Twitter for you. Thank you for asking that question. Are there any other questions? This is me pretending I know what the Winn-Dixie situation is. She asked if I know about the Winn-Dixie situation and I, I don't. So enlighten me and then I'll have an opinion on it. Excellent, I will repeat that. So Winn-Dixie got sued for accessibility issues, and for once they didn't settle, which brings up a good point I'll talk about, and the lawsuit went through and they lost some huge amount of money. Sorry, but we'll get huge, whatever the number is. Okay, lots, lots, gobs and gobs of money. So yeah, that's, I'll explain that a bit more. So thank you for bringing that up because now I'm gonna go read about it. I'm excited, but so generally how this works, for the most part, I can talk about this example easiest with my first-hand experience with the Chicago Transit Authority. So does anybody from Chicago in the room go, oh, CTA. I love the CTA, except in this example. So right, they run the elevated trains and buses and whatever in Chicago, okay. I was on a project in undergrad that specifically evaluated the accessibility of their public announcements. So the ones that are doors closing and the next train to Linden will arrive in three minutes, that sort of stuff, right. And we evaluated the volume of those announcements, the sound pressure level of those announcements, excuse me, and the background noise and compared the difference between the two of them, which makes sense, right. If something's not loud enough compared to the background noise, you can't hear it. And there are specific parts of the Americans with Disabilities Act that lay out mathematically the difference between those things. And so we did that. We like took measurements all across the CTA. It was really fun. And we put it in a huge report and we said, hey, CTA, look at this. It's not good enough. They get better. And they threw it out, I'm pretty sure. I don't know. So the CTA has a lot of issues in Chicago where they are much more accessible now, but essentially in order to improve the accessibility of something that's a part of their system, it's generally a nonprofit that fights for accessibility. We'll go, hey, CTA, you got a problem. And the CTA will go, don't care. And we'll go, hey, CTA, you got a problem and a lawsuit. And the CTA will be like, now I care. They will usually tend to fix it and like fix the problem. Like they developed these really cool like kneeling buses where like the buses tires deflate and a ramp comes out and so you can like, you're on the bus. It's really neat. If you haven't seen it, you should see it. I like buses. I shouldn't lean on that. I'm sorry. So right. And so because they had a threat of a lawsuit, they said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're sorry, we'll fix it. And they didn't have what happened to Winn-Dixie apparently where the lawsuit went through. Usually people just kind of settle out of court. That's the other reason why you don't end up hearing a lot about this, right? When lawsuits settle out of court, they're usually private. The text of them is not shared. I have worked with clients before that have had these lawsuits and they settle out of court. So I can't tell you anything about the clients or what happened because it's private. But yeah, there are a lot of organizations you might be surprised by that have been sued for accessibility issues that they quietly fix instead of going through and losing a lawsuit. Thank you for paying that up. Good job. Are there other questions? Yeah. That's a good question. So the question was if I'm building an application like a website and I want the government to use it, does it have to be accessible? What sort of context of like the government using it? Or do you think of like a, sure if they want to pay for it or the other example I can think of is like if you're making an education app that you want like a public school teacher to use, right? So if the government's going to be using for it, AKA you're receiving money from the federal government, got to be accessible. If it's also intended for use in that sort of venue, this is a problem where if you developed software for educational purposes, that's like aimed specifically at like public sector education, you have to care about accessibility because if the people who are giving you money are required to have IT and technology that is accessible, whatever they're giving you money for have to be accessible. A really interesting example of this for you to read more on your own, Microsoft obviously makes a ton of things that the federal government uses, right? Like a ton of, ton of stuff. And as a result, they have a huge accessibility portal on their website with so much information that like you can use in whatever you're making, whatever platform it is to help you make things that are more accessible. It's super cool. The companies that kind of have to be accessible end up doing really good work in the space. So are there any other questions? Yeah, so the question was if there had been cases of people with cognitive disorders understanding complicated code, that's a good question. Trying to think of the best example I can think of. I actually read an article that I may have shared on Twitter yesterday. I don't remember. Specifically of a program that Microsoft has started for coders who are autistic and specifically like helping them to integrate into Microsoft and providing an environment that is better for them. I'm not sure on the code side. I wanna find out now. You should research it and tell me. You tweet it to me. And then I can pretend I figured it out. Thank you. That's a good question. Any other questions? Yeah, cool. So this is a really good question. I'm gonna summarize it. Tell me if I'm wrong. Is it allowed within guidelines, specifically with the example of the web to create an alternative experience, like an alternative website? And you brought up the example of, it's a private company. It needs to be slick and glossy and beautiful and perfect. Those weren't your words, but that's what I'm saying. And if you make it accessible, does that mean it's not cool and shiny enough for the other four out of five people to wanna use it? Is that more or less what you're asking? Cool, so there are two interesting points that I wanna address as a result of that. One, in the web content accessibility guidelines I mentioned that deal with websites. You actually cannot, you fail the WCAG if you have to provide an alternate experience. It has to be as identical as possible. Now, obviously, an alternative experience for the audio in a video is captions, but that's specifically addressed in the WCAG. You can't make a separate website that's accessible. Now you can have accessibility features that users can turn on and off. For example, you might have a high contrast mode that a user can turn on, and that's fine. But it's a different mode, it's like a skin on the same website. And sort of to address that second point of like, well, does accessibility kind of go at odds with making things amazing and design early, right? Which is actually, I deal with a lot as a front end dev. I in previous jobs have had designers be like, look at this, it's beautiful, it's gorgeous, it's shiny and chrome and whatever. And I look at it and go, that's really cool. My colorblind husband is not gonna be able to use that. I can tell you right off the bat, right? So there are a lot of sites that are shiny and beautiful that are not accessible. On a lot of the sites you might see that are like ultra accessible don't always look good. This is for one big reason that for sites that are like super, like they meet the highest compliance level for accessibility, that takes more effort, that takes more money. And so you don't wanna redo that frequently. You don't wanna make it super nice and updated all the time. And you're essentially having to balance those two things. There are a bunch of really good examples though of sites that meet very high compliance requirements that are still really nice looking websites. The best example off the top of my head is the website for an organization called 18F. Think of them like a web consulting firm for the federal government, that's within the federal government. They are doing their best to create like a standardized web look for the federal government and say good luck, but they're cool. They're really good people. And because that's what they do, they have to care a lot about accessibility. So their site is really cool and nice and super accessible. Yeah, there are ways you can do it. It's not common, but designers should be up to the challenge. It's their job. It's their job to make things accessible and pretty. So that's my opinion. Thank you for the question. I think I have a little bit of time left. Are there any other questions? Yeah, ooh. So the question was you'll give a talk that will have code examples. And you'll put those code examples up on GitHub with like a read me. And the question is, is that actually accessible? So first of all, my opinion is yes, partially because GitHub within the last year or two has made like a huge push to become more accessible. If you saw their very controversial change where like the top bar is black now and everybody freaked out because it looks different, that was actually a change for accessibility purposes and making their nav more distinct. They have like a few blog posts all about improving accessibility of GitHub. So I would say if you're giving a talk with code example, just if you're giving a talk, let's even back that up, post the slides ahead of time, like I did. Or your code on GitHub so that way somebody for a wide variety of reasons might need to read along on a screen in front of them instead of on slides. I think my time is up. You're looking at me very kindly to indicate that. So again, thank you so much for coming. I will have tons of resources on my website. Have an awesome day.