 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much to everybody who is joining us today for our conversation about accessibility. My name is Alexandra White, and I am a technical writer at Google Chrome on the Web DevRel team. I've been working on content accessibility for a few years, but I'm really thrilled to be talking with two experts with Carrie Fisher and Melanie Sumner. But before they introduce themselves to talk about their work, I'd like to set some expectations for the kind of conversation we're gonna have today and the experience of this call. So this conversation is our first kind of casual remote interview, which means we might face some interruptions. There might be New York City sounds outside of my window. We never know here, but we've got a team of experts who are in the wings to help us. And we expect to chat for about 30 minutes. I've got some questions for our experts that I look forward to asking, but more important, I wanna hear from you. We all wanna hear from you. What are your questions about digital accessibility? Share your questions in the chat or share them on Twitter. Our moderator will bring those to our attention. So without any further ado, let's get started. Melanie, Carrie, thank you again for joining us today. I'd love to hear more about who you are, your background, and what got you involved in accessibility. Melanie, why don't you go first? Sure, hi, I'm Melanie Sumner, and I have been, gosh, making things for the web since 1997. I took a little detour and served as an intelligence analyst in the US Navy. But when I got out, I realized I really wanted to work on the web. So I've been doing that ever since. So it's been about 25 years now and I specialize in accessibility and I absolutely love it. That's amazing. I'm sure in 25 years, you've seen some things. You've seen the web, I mean... Some things, yeah. Some things, capital T. Carrie, who are you? Tell me about yourself. How do you get involved in accessibility? Hi, my video might be frozen, but I am here in spirit at least. I was just talking about this before we joined about tech gremlins, and they always seemed to rear their heads on live events only. But I started in digital accessibility a few years back. I was started out as a front-end developer and I really got interested and started questioning why and how people were using the things that I was creating. So I would get something from designers and I would make my choices as a developer on how to implement that from a programmatic view. And then I started questioning what is it that I'm doing and how are people actually utilizing this and is it harming, is it helping? So that's kind of where I started from. The tech gremlins, they're probably gonna continue to come for us. So thank you. Thank you so much for persevering through it. And with that, you both have been working on accessibility for a while. And as we know, the web has changed and the power that it has in the last two years especially throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been a lot of changes in the way that we interact on the web. And I'm curious to see if you've gotten more questions about digital accessibility. How has your experience been in working in this field in the last few years? Well, I don't wanna step on Melanie's toes at all but I can give my perspective and hang it back over to her. But like I said, when I started, I started questioning the programmatic side of things, the front-end side of things. And since my career has kind of changed in a lot of different directions to the point where now I'm a director of an accessibility program at Teslio. And so I've kind of seen it from all kinds of angles and heard all the questions between and the time I spent at DQ as well. So I've worked with a lot of different clients over the years. So I've seen kind of the overall trend is more awareness. I think we've gotten almost even past the awareness stage and getting more into the questions about what do I do? How do I implement this? How do I build a team? So I think the questions at least that I've seen from my perspective and again, it might be the change in my role but also just the maturity of digital accessibility and tech. I think the awareness is there now and it's more about implementation, building teams, like I said, education. So some deeper questions and more intermediate to advanced level questions. Yeah, those are great points. And I'd add I'm seeing more tooling and not just because I'm working on it. In general, I'm seeing a lot more, especially JavaScript or web focused libraries and frameworks of having a lot more to offer when it comes to accessibility. You'll see it in the guides. You'll see it in the tooling support. I think I went through recently and checked all of the JavaScript frameworks who offers accessibility lynching. We have testing, but who's checking their code while they're writing it? And everyone is making progress on this front. So I think, I don't think, I don't know if it's directly related. I haven't really thought a lot about correlation but I think there's a lot of conversations happening and there's a lot of developer focused tooling that's being created and I think that really helps. We're meeting people where they are for them to deliver accessible experiences for the web. I can't imagine what it's like to check all the frameworks. That is, that's a lot of investigation. It's a lot of time and energy. And I know that you do a lot of things. You are a person about town, if you might say. Does that kind of work? Have you, you've talked previously about the importance of funding accessibility work and that accessibility work takes time. Time is valuable, one should be paid for their work or if not, there are other ways to be compensated for work. But it seems like this is important to you and you're doing it for investigative purposes. Have you found that there are people giving resources to that sort of investigation of tools? That's a great question. I would say there are definitely some companies who have stepped up and are offering either money or people or whatever they can do to help make the situation better. I think I'm seeing a lot of good stuff come out of Google lately which I have kind of criticized this in the past. So to see them stepping up, I wanna publicly acknowledge the improvement there. And I'm also seeing companies just like take it on as part of, one of my things is, no, it's part of your job. Like you're delivering jobs for if it doesn't break, you should also be delivering accessible things with that. But that takes time and education and really supporting designers and developers in a different kind of way. And it also takes a lot of education for executives. What kind of information do they need in order to support us doing this? Because they've been well-informed as to what it takes to make something run so they can initially get a product out there to make money. But how do they really enhance it and make it a real thing that works really well and scales really well and includes more people? That takes a little bit more education. I'd love to see a little bit more C-suite education, I think, around this. I'd love to see more director of accessibility roles but I'm really seeing developers, and it might just be because I've kind of poked them with stick like, not just me but others as well, like, hey, it makes your code better. Hey, it makes your code more elite. Instead of arguing about tabs versus spaces, why don't you try this thing? It's a little bit more complex. I love that. It seems to work. Just a little poke, a gentle poke and encouragement. With C-suite education and buy-in, that reminds me a lot about the first of our courses in Learn Accessibility on web.dev, which Carrie Fisher is the author of. And we could not have done it without her. The work, it's incredible. I feel so lucky to get to work with you, Carrie. And we talked about this in the creation of this course and the importance of making a business case for accessibility. Can you talk a little more about that? Yeah, I mean, first I wanna just say thank you, for Google and for the opportunity to amplify accessibility, just like Melanie said. It's very important and it goes a long way when bigger organizations, bigger companies support those efforts. And then I'd preface that or follow that up by saying anything that I put out as far as education goes, including the course that you're just talking about. I stand on the shoulder of giants, right? Melanie and I both do. And we're making strides and bringing our perspective, but there's so many other perspectives that we definitely want to acknowledge, specifically the disability community, because my take on things is one thing. And my way that I frame something super complex and trying to distill it into something that is easily digestible by everyone, right? That's a really difficult thing to do sometimes. And we talked about that Alexandra at numerous times, like what to include, what not to include. There's so much more that we can do. I've already heard people asking for like subsequent like intermediate and advanced courses as well. So maybe we'll plant that seed in your brain for now. But getting back to the original question about a C-suite education, I think Melanie has hit it spot on through the clients that I've worked with and all the people that I've worked with, right? I feel like the champions are there. The champions are being built, they're being educated, but they need that leadership buy-in to really be able to be effective in their roles, right? When I started, like I mentioned at the very beginning, like how I started, I did all those things on my own time. Like I built my accessibility style guide on my own time, right? These are things that I did because I was passionate about it, but not everyone has that privilege and that opportunity to do that. And so making sure that that's built into their workflow and to their role, right? I think that's fundamental. In the future, I hope there are no melodies in the world where we just, we all just do that as part of our role. Just as a JavaScript developer, this is what you do. As the designer, this is what you do. As leadership, as management, it's just part of your role to consider accessibility. I will, I'm gonna push back on that a little because I think I agree completely that accessibility should be a part of everybody's role. It's everybody's responsibility together to bring their expertise, whether it's design, development, product management and to helping make something accessible. But we'll always rely on experts, the people who know accessibility across the board and can catch things that someone with a narrower frame of expertise might not catch. So experts, we always need them. So, okay, I can see where you're going with that. And we do have SREs, we do have performance experts and those are the people that you go talk to when things are not working well or the site's gone down or something. So I could see us always needing some kind of accessibility director or SME, but I'd like, I'd like to see it a little more. It's a very common, that's what I wanna see in two years and fivers, whatever. I wanna see every company has this position. We put it on the same level of performance as we do security or sorry, same level of importance as we do performance and security and site reliability, accessibility is just one of those things. So I think I'd like it to get equal play with the other aspects of building web applications at scale. Equal play and equal pay. I would say. Can I add in there to them? If we're gonna do that, if we're gonna keep these rules, can we please employ more people with disabilities and see that as a, not just a nice to have but an asset, right? Like they're superpowers and they have different perspectives that are gonna bring and shed light on different aspects of a build. So if we're gonna keep the roles, I mean, you guys are arguing to keep them. If we're gonna keep them, at least let's employ the people with disabilities in those roles as well. And other roles too, not just, that's the other part of it, right? Not just your sneeze, right? Not just your experts and accessibility, you know. Absolutely, I couldn't have said it better. We have a great question from Diane. Diane asks, what are your perspectives on carrot versus stick approaches when getting people to address accessibility? And Melanie, I'll ask you to answer first. Yeah, sure. I prefer the carrot. I'm not here to be your police officer. I'm here to be your shepherd. Like I am the shepherd of accessibility. I'm your guide. I am the person with the answers for you and I wanna empower you. I want you to be so successful. And I'll do that by writing lynching rules so you can get real time feedback in your code. I'll do that by helping you set up your testing environment. So your CI is running accessibility tests when you do a commit. I'll do that by pairing with you on your design and pointing out where you could enhance things. I'll do that by pairing with you on your code and showing you where you need to think a little bit through maybe some things. And I'll do that by giving tons of talks and just convincing you that this is important and worth doing because you can't make someone care and it shouldn't be about do you care or not care. It's a thing you have to do. It's just a thing like checking your working mail. You can't not check your working mail. Like it needs to become that level of ingrained in what we do. So there shouldn't be a carrot or stick conversation but if I have to pick one, I'm going with the carrot. Carrie, do you agree? I'm a team carrot all the way. Alexandra knew that, of course she asked. Because back to what Melanie was saying, the way that I feel about digital accessibility is intrinsic to me and my perspectives and my lived experience. But I know everyone's different, right? And there's different motivators for different people and different roles. Again, getting back to leadership as well. The business case, like more users, better, more income or more donations or whatever it is that you're trying to get, right? There's a lot of different things that you can get. It's an untapped market. I don't understand why the marketers and the leadership haven't figured that out. Well, some have, of course, but it's a huge market share that we're talking about just even people with disabilities but then also people who are friends with and related to those communities as well and just allies in general. So it's a great, to me, it's kind of like a very easy sell in that respect. But definitely I think it's the carrot. It's figuring out where the person is on their accessibility journey, meeting them there and then learning where they want to go and then helping facilitate that movement, right? And as Melanie gave some very concrete examples in the development world, but there's other ways to support them as well. And I found a lot of it as education and having those resources, there's a lot of resources available that people don't know where to start. They don't know which ones are the best ones or the best ones for them in their environment because that's part of it too. It's like, I can give you a tool but if you don't use it, what's a pointless tool for your team, right? You need to find one that works with you and for your team. Absolutely. And I know that Melanie has talked about this, Kerry, you and I have talked about this, the importance of automating accessibility and making sure that we have a lot of work to do and if there's a way to make it so that machines are fixing and catching some problems, wow, what a wonderful thing, what a wonderful service to have. Melanie, you talked about continuous accessibility in previous talks, tell me more about that. Yeah, I think it's about identifying the automation that we have available to us. So we can't automate everything, at least not yet. How do you automate intent? You can't yet. So we still need manual testers and manual testing but why not check if your inputs have labels? We can do that already. Why not use the automation that we have at our disposal to lighten the load and make this a little bit more approachable? So that's kind of my vision. I've been working on A11y automation.dev which is an accessibility automation tracker. So I'm trying to itemize all the potential accessibility violations that you could have on your site and then list whether or not automation to catch that particular issue exists in some form in a test or a lint rule or does it need to still be a test that a developer writes or a manual check by an auditor? And I think in doing that, we're providing more ideas for people who like to build tools. We're providing more ideas for people who want to fund big projects but really just need the groundwork analysis there to say, hey, there's something here. And I've often called accessibility the final frontier of the web. And I really feel like it's an opportunity there for so many folks, really clever engineers to make their mark. So here you go. Make your mark. It's waiting for you. What an opportunity. This is the moment everybody call to action. More tools, more automation, make everything better. I believe that everybody listening is a part of that. Oh, Carrie, please. I know I'm laughing because that sounded a little bit like a stick move. Melanie, I'm sorry. No, that wasn't encouraging. That was a stick and a carrot, maybe possibly. We have lots more questions. So I'm gonna ask one next. Are there any good courses on accessibility? Carrie, talk to me about courses. Oh man, so many, right? Obviously the web.dev one that I was just a part of with Alexandra and I have to say editing skills are amazing. She makes me look good. And Rachel Andrew really instrumental in that course material as well as other editors and other people. We had my friend Mark Steadman come in for a new module coming up. I won't spoil this prize, but we still have like, I think eight modules or seven modules left to publish. So that would be one to definitely check out, keep your eyes open for that. The Y group itself. So the web accessibility initiative group. So the fun people who brought you the WCAG standards also bring you a lot of great educational resources. They created a course not too long ago on edX. I got to be, I was lucky enough to be one of the instructors. Some shameless plug, I guess on that, but also so many other people that are involved in that. So those are kind of like two easy places to start. I know Melanie, you probably have a whole list of ones related to JavaScript specifically, but I tend to go more general in what I'm helping with, with education purposes. So those are kind of the top two that I think about. I really love Marcy Sutton's accessibility testing, everything. I mean, I think Marcy is an excellent example of an engineer who figured out how to JavaScript and how to accessibility like side by side. And that's made her a much stronger engineer as a result in everything she produces is just such high quality that how could I not recommend it, right? So if you haven't checked out Marcy Sutton's testing accessibility course, it's definitely worth it. I'm really excited because I haven't and there's so much more to learn testing specifically. I'm so interested in trying to make my testing skills better. We had another question about learning how to prepare for accessibility. The question was I'm a front-end engineer, but I want to become an accessibility expert in the future, especially with the incoming legislation in Europe regarding accessibility from 2025 onwards. How can I do it? And to give a little reframing specifically, there's so much legislation coming out in Europe and around the world and we don't operate in a vacuum. We operate within where we live and also the web, which is everywhere. Melanie, do you have any advice on how one can address these, this incoming legislation? Sure. So I think any legislation will have its ground in technology. It would be a little hard for them to legislate something that's impossible for technology to actually do. Or they could legislate it, but it wouldn't be enforceable if the technology didn't actually exist. So I think focusing on the technology, I think when I was first starting out, I would set aside time every day to just read the spec. And I read it like five times maybe before I started to understand it. And then I started writing guides and I started implementing. As I implement, say, some part of a component or a website, I find little things. Oh, the table doesn't work the way I thought it did. Or when I want to think about a keyboard only user, I have to start thinking maybe I can't use truncation even though there's some things that CSS supports that are not accessible actually. So we have to kind of in the doing we learn, in the doing we become the experts. And then from there, the next step would be, how do I explain this to somebody else? When I can really explain it to someone else, I feel like I've really understood and I deeply understand the issue. So sometimes I'll maybe cheat a little and I'll watch other people explain it. I'll look at other slide decks, I'll look at other talks. How do they explain this issue? Because I'm struggling to find the words. I don't always find the right ones. So that's one tip too is just really watch a lot of accessibility talks, read everything and get your hands on and just do it over and over and over. They say that you need 10,000 hours of something to become an expert. And I think that might especially apply at some scale to accessibility. So it is in the doing that we become the expert. Absolutely. I just want to say we're almost at the end of our time. We have a few minutes left. So I wanna make sure that we've addressed some more of the questions that we have. Dan asked, how can developers know when they've set things up properly for screen reader users? We can't always distinguish, we don't know how to use jobs from a typical user would have trouble with this. Carrie, what are your thoughts on that? We don't have enough time for all of my thoughts, but this has to be a perfect place to hire somebody who is a native screen reader user to supplement maybe some of the conformance review that you would be doing. So or work with a developer to say, this is what I would expect in this scenario to hear and but this is what I'm hearing. We just recently, I was working with a client and we did the normal WCAG conformance review on their component library, which is great. It gave a lot of information about where to start from a programmatic and design point of view. And then we supplemented that with tutorial videos of a walkthrough of a native screen reader user going through and saying, hey, I can actually access this component, but if you did X, Y, and Z, it would be much easier. I would be two steps instead of five steps, right? And so about really kind of bringing it back to the human and talking about usability and really kind of reinforcing that. So I think your best bet, Dan, is always to talk to somebody who uses it every day for every purpose, right? Not just people who are expert screen readers, reader users, like myself and Melanie would be, but somebody who's a native screen reader user who uses it for their personal use and their business use. And they're gonna have a lot more to say about it, I believe, than just an expert user. Definitely, talk to people. It really seems like as often the answer. Lightning round, one or two sentences, we have another question. An accessible page is a higher value page. Do search engines consider additional features and rank it higher? Do we know the answer to this, Melanie? Let's ask Google. I think I don't know that. I don't know if they do yet, but I have heard whispers that it is going to be considered. I know it's a lightning round. Can I add one thing? One thing you couldn't do, though, with your audio, video things, is that text transcript accounts twice, right? So for SEO purposes, you can have a text transcript of your multimedia videos. So it's kind of a way where you could get leverage. Yeah, so I don't know if that's exactly the question, but I had to add that in there. I think it's a good partial answer to the question. There's a lot of different things that one can do to help improve SEO as related to accessibility. And I know that we are pretty much out of time. I wanted to thank you both so much for spending a part of your day with me. I know that there's so much more to say. There were so many more questions. Ask us on Twitter. We will answer at least. I will be listening and hoping to answer. And thank you, everybody who spent your time with us. We really appreciate it. And that's all. Bye.