 in their own words and I am Helena and I am no longer a front-end developer at Lullabot. I did that for years and years and I have recently joined the sales team. Oh, am I lower? It's very loud. It's very loud. Okay, hold on. How's that? Is that better? Awesome. Thank you for telling me. So, I am a technical account manager at Lullabot and I specialize in making the web awesome for everybody. A lot of you probably know us as Lullabot. We're an interactive strategy, design, and development company and we create delightful experiences using Drupal and open-source technologies. Biggest point of pushback that I get about accessibility from clients and things like that is the edge case myth. They always say, oh, we don't want to spend money because accessibility is an edge case or we'll get to it at the end of the project because it's an edge case. This is actually a fallacy. Accessibility is not really much of an edge case. As you can see here, we have 18.55 million more severely disabled people in the United States than there are people living in the entire state of New York. So if you came to your client and you said, hey, we got your website done and it's working perfectly, except it doesn't work in New York. There is no way they would let you launch that website. So when people talk about the edge case, it's definitely good to keep in mind that it's less of an edge case than you may think. Framing this another way. There are more than twice as many people with a disability in the United States as the entire population of Australia. It's 24 million to 56.7 million. So it's a pretty significant amount of people that we're talking about impacting. Now I think we've all bought something online that we could have driven down to the store to get in a few minutes because we didn't feel like going out. Amazon culture is real. But if you're anything like me, this picture of typing a credit card into a computer sums up a good portion of your purchases. But imagine that you're blind and you need to buy something, but the accessibility on the website you need to buy it from is broken. You'll have to go to the store and instead of hopping into your car on a whim, you'll have to navigate public transit without being able to see or get a ride from a friend or call a ride sharing service. Let's call it schmoober. And that costs money. So once you get to the store, you'll have to ask an associate or your friend for a hand finding the item since you can't see the shelves. And you'll probably pay a little more for it, too, since most of the best deals are found online. So you're shelling out more money. Then you'll need to use public transit or your friend or schmoober again to get home. Which costs more money. So blind people are pros at being blind and are fine at shopping, but a quick errand is more work and often more expense when you have a disability. One of the people I interviewed, Kathleen Downs, she shared, if there is one thing I could say to summarize what makes my life unique from the average 22-year-old, it would be, damn, this existence gate takes a lot of planning. She runs the blog, The Squeaky Wheelchair. I highly recommend it. It's fantastic write-up of her personal life. And she is a blast. Here's another quote from her. She said, Spontaneity is like that distant relative that I've seen in photo albums and heard a few weird stories about, but never actually met. I know he exists and others have met him, but he's just an idea, so I smile and say he sounds like a lovely guy. Then I go back to figuring out what time someone can help me bathe next Friday. If that cute cafe I wanted to try can accommodate a wheelchair. If I can get a ride to work, to school, or a friend's house. Normally the only spontaneous thing I expect is the spontaneous combustion of my ancient paratransit bus. I'm used to some serious planning. Long ago I accepted that Spontaneity and I would for the most part be strangers. Being able to run out to the store and be done with your errands in 20 minutes is very much an able-bodied privilege. A quick errand might eat a lot of your day if you have a disability if you can get to the store at all. So on the whole, the people who have the most to gain from the convenience of the internet are disabled people, so it's totally upside down that we're leaving them out by building websites that aren't accessible. It's important to keep in mind that as a developer, saving yourself 20 keystrokes while working on a project may change someone else's plan for the entire day. We all are users of great debt. The internet's made for them. Without users, there is no internet. And without the internet, a lot of us in this room wouldn't be making rent this month. So when I first got interested in accessibility, I did a lot of reading and learning from other developers like me who wanted to make the web a better place. And I learned the nuts and bolts of it, and the laws, and the guidelines, and I got excited, and I took everything I'd learned, and I went all around saying, I have to tell everyone about this. It's so important. And anyone at Lullabot can vouch for this, because I'm honestly really annoying. I never shut up about it, but I'm obnoxious for a good cause. So I've made my peace with it. And anywhere that someone will let me talk about it, I did. But I missed something. In fact, I missed the most important thing. Nothing about us without us is one of the core mantras of the disability community for a reason. Without the perspectives of the actual users who use assistive technology every day, anything we build is based on outside speculation, rather than lived experience. So when I'm up here advocating for accessibility, it's not my job to tell you, here are some of the things that I think users with disabilities are going to need. When someone asks, how do you know what users with disabilities are going to need? The best answer I can possibly give is because they told me. And that's what I did. I went around talking to all sorts of different people with all sorts of different disabilities, and they told me what they needed. And I wrote it down, and now you're going to get to enjoy that. So the first person I interviewed was Sarah Ruff. She is an adult disability advocate. She's an artist, a speaker, a model, a dancer, an author, and a trainer. She is like the busiest woman alive. And she's proud to have Down syndrome. And she told me about some of her experiences online. So one of the first things she said is websites confuse me if they have pop-up windows or they take my focus away. She also shared, I like lots of colors and graphics, audio and video. The more interactive the website is, the more I like it, as long as it is easy to navigate and easy to interact. And this is something that people with Alzheimer's also report frequently as well, is I do better when the website has a consistent look and feel so I can learn the layout quickly. So the more consistent you keep that layout of your site, the easier it will be for people to find their way around. The next person I interviewed was Casey Matthews. He's an access technology specialist at Lighthouse, and he's blind. He teaches classes on assistive technology to students who are living with vision loss, who want to get computer skills to remain tech savvy and or return to the workforce. And he's a hardcore gamer, so bonus points with me. And this is what he had to say about crappy accessibility. There is a company called Sumtran Sumtran, and they have a steadfastly remain non-accessible. It's a really nice service because they take you from Miami to Orlando, and there's plenty of space for service dogs, but making a reservation online is a major pain in the butt. To add insult to injury, if you call to make a reservation over the phone, they try to get you to use the website. There's a fee for booking over the phone. And when you explain that the site isn't accessible, they just have an attitude like, that's not our problem, and they just don't care. So he's technically being fined for being blind, which really is not right at all. And then he also talked about Schmuber a little bit, and he said, for a couple of weeks, they updated something in the app, and it was a lot harder to use than it had to be. It was preventing some users from being able to make trips using assistive technology and get their rides. Some people could get somebody to assist them in the app when they needed it. And some people said, well, I guess I won't be going anywhere today. And then I talked to him a little bit about web development as he's a developer himself. And he wrote, or he said, Drupal 8 is awesome. I do websites volunteering for people, and I got to tell you, they did a fantastic job making it accessible. They've got hotkeys that get you into the different tabs in the menus and dropdown menus. Everything works with screen readers. Everything's HTML5. Aria speaks when it's appropriate. And it's just an awesome example of what it can do. So yay for the Drupal community. That's so cool. He also said, I've personally been waiting for Drupal 8 for a long time because I knew they were going to have some of these accessibility fixes. I'm so glad it's finally here. And that was totally unsolicited. I did not ask him to say that, and I did not tell him this was a talk for a Drupal camper con. So, woo, awesome. On web forms, Casey shared, I know a lot of times I still see this stuff where you'll go through a form and stuff won't be edited and labels won't be labeled correctly. That's probably the biggest thing I see. It's not as easy as tab first name, instead you get tab, edit. What does that mean? Sometimes you'll be filling out a form and you'll get to address, street name, and then you tab and you hear just edit. You can figure out that they want the second part of the address, but I see a lot of people get confused by that. I've seen very few forms where that's actually done well. Another thing that really gets people is phone number boxes. Some sites want the area code, some want it all split together, some want it in different boxes, and it's really confusing for people. Sometimes you'll get there and you'll be typing away and you don't realize this box only wants three digits instead of 10. That's confusing and I see that a lot. Same with social security boxes. And then captures, of course. Captures suck, I've gotta say. There are some better options out there. For a blind person to have to rely on a graphic to get things done, it's really frustrating. But I've seen forms that handle it really well, so it is doable. Google has this new thing, which is aging the site a little, where you just check a box. That's great. People who are new to using a screen reader can get so frustrated after going through so much work to fill out a form and then not being able to submit it that they won't even want to use technology anymore. They decide it's more trouble than it's worth after having frustrating experience, after frustrating experience, and they totally give up on the computer. It makes me sad to see that. I'm gonna skip a couple. Okay, so let's talk about alternative text. If you're blind and there isn't any, this is what an image will look like to you online. What is it? We don't know. Could be anything. What if I give you this? Two zebras stand side by side, looking at the camera and the savannah's dry grass. The background is dotted with trees. You have kind of a better idea of what I gave you an image of, right? Now let's pretend that our SEO guy told us to use keyword stuffing. As a blind person, your zebras are gonna look like this. Low-priced African nature excursions, cheap discount coupon zebras lines, Rhino safe. Let's not do that to people, okay? Thanks for the zebras, photo credit. Okay, next user is Mike Fox, and he's a software developer who's visually impaired. He recently presented at, that's old, at the Assistant Technology Industry Association Conference on his innovations how to streamline digital workflows for Lighthouse call center agents who are visually impaired. Now he's not fully blind, he is low vision. So he says he can find the X button and click on it, but he's more of a keyword user. And this is what he had to say. He said, for me personally, I'd say the biggest challenge all comes down to keyboard navigation because like I said, I use the keyboard for everything. So problems with tab order, keyboard shortcuts, focus or a bit of a pain, nothing I can handle, but I wish they were done better than most sites do them. And then I asked him, what would you say to a room full of web developers? He said, don't get me started. Actually, he recommended Drupal also, yay! He said, if you choose to use a CMS, I recommend Drupal. It's accessible out of the box, right down to the administrative UI. Yay! And I totally didn't tell him to say that either. Okay, and he says, if you wanna use pure JavaScript, he recommends contacting technology at lighthouseworks.org. And I would never begrudge him a shameless plug after he let me interview him, so. Our next user was Adriana Malazi. She has quadriplegic cerebral palsy and she's been living independently in Boston for over 18 years. She serves on the board of correctors of Commonwealth Community Care, as well as on the regional board for Easter Seals, Massachusetts. And she uses a mouth stick to navigate, which looks something like this. Blind users aren't the only people who rely heavily on the keyboard to get around online. People with motor disabilities, like quadriplegics, need keyboard accessibility too. So if you're looking for a low-hanging fruit to make your website as accessible for as many people as possible, stick to the keyboard, because that's the thing most people need. Our next spotlight is Michelle Hadley and Ellie Parfit. They are both deaf, they are both bloggers, and they are very passionate about spreading the needs of deaf folks online. So the first thing that Michelle said was any website that uses visual presentation to get their point across or demonstrate facts needs subtitles. The BBC are a prime example. They use videos instead of text to present various news. Without subtitles, I cannot access that piece of news at all. It used to be just one or two items. Now they continually use this method to get their facts across. And then Ellie said, one thing I'm really passionate about is captioning or subtitles. When there aren't subtitles on videos, especially on websites, I can't follow them because I'm a lip reader and I can't hear what they're talking about. Remember, live streaming captions do not work and they are not accurate. In the accessibility community, sometimes we call them captions. If the subtitles aren't an option, please provide a written transcript or consider sign language videos too. You need that if you wanna be triple A accessible. The other thing I would want from websites and this is dependent on the service being provided is a chat online facility in place of or as well as a phone help line. This has proved invaluable to me from companies where I can resolve issues independently without relying on a third party to make a call. Side story on this, one of my friends is deaf. She's in the Drupal community as well, Catherine. And she was saying that her hearing aid died on her and the hearing aid company did not have an online chat function. So her mom had to call and help. So if you can provide chat, please provide chat. And Ellie also wrote, really bugs me when sites don't provide email addresses. Not all deaf people can use the phone and email or text is often the best communication method for us. It's always a struggle trying to get into contact with some companies and of having to use Twitter to ask for an email. And the developers were craftspeople. Craftspeople take pride in their work. We don't hang our hats on sewing sloppy stitches. Our goal is to build something beautiful and functional and elegant. And if we have millions of people who could not use what we have built, it doesn't matter how great everything else about it is. After everything we've talked about today, I'm hoping that you'll reconsider next time you feel like cutting a corner. I hope you'll take the 10 seconds to put that accessible text in. Not because you have to. Not for the sake of ADA compliance or to fulfill a requirement on a ticket. Not because I'll keep your ticket in peer review and refuse to merge it until you fix it. Although I will and I'm not sorry. Do it because you give a damn about the human being on the receiving end of your work who will otherwise have to spend their afternoon going to the store to purchase something they could have bought online in 10 seconds if you would have typed 45 more characters to build the button right. Put the captions on your videos. Not because the ADA says you should, but because Frank should get to watch stranger things at the same time of all of his friends without having it spoiled for him on Facebook by the time the captions come out. Let your work shine, take pride in it, be hungry to learn, be hungry to perfect your craft and hungry to include more people in whatever you're building today. Helen Keller once said, "'Alone, we can do so little. "'Together, we can do so much.'" I truly believe in all of us. An inclusive web isn't a pipe dream. It's something that can be real if we all pitch in. Let's work together and make the web awesome for everyone. Thanks for listening. Our contribution tomorrow if you can, there's a Contra workshop and here's where you can go to take the survey. Unless you didn't like my talk and then you can skip the survey. Thanks everyone.