CARINA: Hello and welcome to Episode 171 of Greater Than Code. My name is Carina C. Zona, and I'm here with my co-panelist, Jacob Stoebel. 

JACOB: Thank you. And it's my pleasure to introduce this week's guest, Chris DeMars. Chris is a front end developer from Detroit, Michigan, now living in Denver, Colorado. For his community contributions, he holds awards as a Microsoft MVP in developer
technologies, Google Developer Expert in web technologies, and is an Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador. Chris loves coming up with solutions for all types of applications, which include modular CSS architectures, performance, and advocating for web accessibility. When he is not working on making the web great and inclusive, you can find him writing blog posts, recording episodes of his podcast, Tales From The Script, or watching horror movies. Welcome to the show.

CHRIS: Thanks for having me. 

JACOB: We're going to start the question we always start with which is, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

CHRIS: My superpower, I think it's my ability to sleep. That's my superpower. [Laughs]

CARINA: Excellent superpower. I like that one.

CHRIS: I love sleeping. I went and took a nap last night. It was like at 5 o'clock and I didn't wake up till this morning. I can sleep. I love sleep. 

JACOB: Wow. You see that on Twitter all the time, like all the insights you gained once you just go to sleep and suddenly a problem you can solve in five minutes. 

CHRIS: Exactly. 

JACOB: Cool. I think we'll jump into a blog post that you were mentioned in, I guess from last week. Chris Ferdinandi, he wrote it. It's about web accessibility. It's a really interesting stuff. Do you want to sort of give the summary and why you wanted to talk about it this week? 

CHRIS: Yes. I speak a lot about accessibility all around the world. It's like my bread and butter when it comes to front end, building on the front end as a developer. And I think it's super important. I think everybody needs to be cognizant of it and keep it as a top three priority. In my opinion, when you're building on the web, three things are in top priority and not in this specific order, but accessibility, performance, and security. Those are the top three things you need to care about. And there's a lot of us out there talking about accessibility and pushing for accessible experiences, but not enough of us out there. And every time I get the chance to talk about it, I want to talk about it So, here I am. 

JACOB: Great. The blog goes into, I don't know if it's necessarily a debate. It's a dialogue we hear a lot. And I've definitely ran into a lot on Twitter and elsewhere of, "Is it my responsibility to build an accessible web and if it is, to what extent is it my responsibility as a developer?" And you come down pretty, excuse me, not you, but I'm assuming you as well, come down pretty definitively that it is. It's not really a gray area. 

CHRIS: There is no gray area. It's like, this is something you have to do, there's work around the web. If you're not doing it, then why are you here? I'm not the one and I've never been the one that goes into work, I work remote, but signs in, does what I got to do for eight hours or six hours or seven hours and then waits for a paycheck every two weeks. You know what I mean? I am building on the web because it is, like I like to say, an obligation to ship accessible user experiences. That's what we do. Let's say you're a surgeon, "Well, I don't really have to give a shit about my patient. I'm just here to make the cuts and whatever and get my paycheck." No, no, no, no, no. Your obligation is to make sure they have a great experience and come out at the end healthy. You can equate that to every single thing that we do or every single job out there. 

JACOB: I'm thinking recently, I think was it Domino's, that had a very large law suit with their app, which I've used actually to order on their website, was not accessible at all. They fought it in courts for a while and I'm sure they lost and had to fix it anyway. It always blew my mind that that's a lot of money to be saying no to. And I'm trying to do the math in my head but I would guess that whatever that accessibility problem is, fixing it would probably have been a net positive, just in terms of basic money. 

CHRIS: Yeah. Domino's is a Michigan company. And being from Michigan, I used to eat, I stick with my Michigan brands a lot, so I eat Domino's a lot. But then once that law suit started happening, I stopped ordering from Domino's. The thing is the Domino's website, if you had to run an audit on it, it comes back with a pretty decent score, like in the 90s for accessibility. The problem was is that even though it came back as doing good, it was still not accessible to low vision users or blind users. That's what the issue was. And when they were going through the lawsuit, the litigation, and all that, I saw numbers upwards of like it would cost 38,000 to fix it. Thirty eight thousand isn't shit to fix it. You probably paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in this lawsuit. But they put their foot down and said, "Oh, no. We're not doing it. Too bad, blah, blah, blah." Like you said, in the end they lost. I'm still not ordering from Domino's until everything is set in stone. But I mean, that just goes to show you like just fix your stuff. 

CARINA: I wonder why they felt that was necessary to essentially spend a lot more money on defending the law suit rather than simply complying. And I would assume there was some business decision behind that perhaps opening themselves up to greater liability or whatever the future cost would be to continue to be compliant. I'm wondering what kind of business case, just a really pragmatic, boring, rather than you have a moral obligation. This is good for business argument that we can make. Because I think so often, that's what a lot of decisions come down to is it's all about the money and how quickly can we move rather than having moral discussions. This is something that we encounter in everything we do, is it's a much harder to have a discussion about what's right than what's good for business. 

CHRIS: I've heard the argument that for companies private, they can do what they want. Like the law, or let's say the website WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or the Federal 508, or ADA doesn't apply to them because they're private companies. Well, you still got to do what's right. But like you were saying, it all really boils down to how quickly can we move, how much money can we make, how much products can we get out there, cut as many corners as possible. When at the end of the day, and this is a quote from an amazing article I was reading, the author said, "Accessibility is your ROI." If you really think about it, you want to reach the masses. Well if you don't ship accessible products or accessible website, you are cutting out a lot of people, a tremendous amount of people. So, if we're building with that in mind, you're only going to gain market revenue, you're going to gain profit. It just makes sense.

CARINA: I think it is often this perception that disabled people are a tiny minority, that they're an edge case that you can leave them out and it costs you nothing or thinking in terms of disability as being strictly people in wheelchairs and what does that have to do with a website. So, just even the common views of what constitutes accessibility and to whom has some impact on whether you care about them. And that's incredibly unfortunate. But this is one of the perception that we do need to be able to fight is that, to my mind actually, there's this opposite end of the spectrum. There are so many people to be accessible to in so many different ways that it is very challenging to serve everybody well. The default web if you do absolutely nothing to improve on, what HTML and browser default gives you is pretty darn accessible. Like none of us wants to do that. We all want it to look a lot better than that and perform a lot better than that. So, how can we have these conversations? How do we get our colleagues to understand and care and be informed? What can we do to get better? 

CHRIS: I like how you covered kind of all that because I kind of can talk about all that as well. And when you brought up people with disabilities, it's like, "Oh, people with disabilities, they won't use our product." You hear a lot of times too that other people, or not other people, but sometimes you hear in crowds that, "Well, a blind person doesn't need a car. They can't drive." I hear that shit all the time. It's like, "What?!" A blind person can have a car. They might have like a significant other that drives the vehicle. They want a car. Why can't they have a car? You know what I mean? But to the other points, you really just have to boil it down to really understanding the clientele in the business. Like my last company, I worked on a lot of the accessibility for the applications that we shipped. And a lot of the clients were of an aging population. So you had to be able to make that experience easy for them to use. You couldn't lock down the zoom and you had to use decent colors because they are using this application around the country. So you have to keep those type of statistics in mind. 

It's about just having numbers to back it up. See, there's 7 billion people around the world, give or take. And this was according to a study from the World Health Organization a few years ago. It's changed now, I'm sure. But in 2016/2017, there were 7 billion people around the world. One point four billion of those people, give or take, have some type of disability, whether it's hearing, visual, cognitive, mobility, temporary, or other types of disabilities. Now, when you put that in a percentage, it's 80/20. Twenty percent doesn't seem like a big number if you're talking in like a business setting. Like, "Oh,  20% of our users." Like, "Oh, 20%, that's not a big deal." Yeah, it is a big deal when you put that into a whole number, like 1.4 billion is a big ass number. Especially if your application serves everybody around the world. You start throwing numbers at them, then they can start to think and you can start providing examples of lawsuits like Domino's or Target. Show them, "Hey, this happens." 

There was a chart published a couple of years ago from the Seyfarth Shaw website, 2017 federal website lawsuits. It was seven or nine states including Puerto Rico, just those states and Puerto Rico, 815 or 812 federal website lawsuits in one year. That's two and a half lawsuits a day. It happens and that sucks. But that just goes to show you like, listen, the bottom line does matter but your users matter  more and your users affect your bottom line. 

JACOB: Yeah. I think Beyonce…[laughs]

CHRIS: There you go, that's another example right there.

JACOB: Something I've been thinking about more lately and it kind of blows my mind as a person without disabilities is that I think about this more as like, the web is something that along so many different dimensions, we as the developer, have no control over. And one of those dimensions is whether or not there's actually going to be a screen. I think of the web personally as a visual medium. And just like fathoming that, like trying to get my head around the fact that people don't experience the web, they experience it as an auditory medium. And how that fundamentally changes how basic meaning is conveyed through HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I think it's one thing to think about, I could put on an alt text where it needs to go, but does it convey what it needs to convey within the context of the page at large? Because that's not something I can use like a web tool to audit. I can't tell me like there's a yes or no. Is that right or wrong? 

CHRIS: Specifically for that, there's no way to actually do it. So if you are going to be using images and whether you're building it yourself or it's coming from a design team, that's when you open up the collaboration between maybe a stakeholder that works on the content team and the designer and you. Like, "Okay, you gave me this image. How do you want me to describe this image?" A lot of times you see a picture of a dog and they all attribute the text inside that that should be the same dog. What the hell does that mean? Or image, it doesn't mean anything. If you can be short descriptive, put in a short descriptive text, you're doing amazing things because I don't have any disabilities or low vision, so I don't have to use a screen reader. But if that image breaks, I want to know what that image says too. I want to be able to read it. Without all the attributes, you're doing a big, big disservice. And that's one of those low hanging fruits that I'd like to talk about, Web Development 101. But so many times, it gets overlooked. 

JACOB: Is it 101 though? By which I mean, is it one of the first things that's taught? 

CHRIS: Yeah. When I started building on the web in '96, I had HTML 4.0 for Dummies. And there wasn't a whole lot of talk about accessibility in that. But one of the things that was covered in it and I've always known my whole entire life when building on the web is make sure you have an alt attribute on your image tags because you need that to describe the image.

CARINA: I think this is a problem in part with the advent of frameworks, and so many of them don't provide and see a message as well, a place even to do that if there isn't some sort of field at all. (A) you're not being prompted and (B) you may literally not have a way. So even starting with what frameworks or CMS, whatever it is that you're selecting, making sure that it's possible to do that kind of really basic accessibility is important. Twitter just this week, I think, is officially rolling out that they're making now default that you can add alt text images on Twitter. I forget what it is but essentially, it's an incremental step in making it more possible and universal to be doing something that we really should have been doing from the beginning. 

CHRIS: They're doing alt text for GIFs. 

CARINA: Okay. 

CHRIS: So, they already have the you can edit alt description or they call it description for your images. They already have that built in, both on the web client and apps and stuff. But I just saw that this week. They're doing it for GIFs now, so you don't have to put in square brackets at the end of your tweet. gif alt or alt gif, this is what this is doing. 

CARINA: So are we just talking about the GIFs that essentially Twitter is providing where it's like the animated GIFs or if I upload any sort of image at all, it's going to also prompt me to put in alt text for that? I got to say even though there supposedly has been away for a while to do this, I've never been prompted, I've never been given some sort of opportunity to do that. 

CHRIS: I think it's just if you upload an image there is a spot to put it in a description and it says right underneath like 'add description'. 

CARINA: Okay. 

CHRIS: It doesn't prompt you like, "Hey, I had this alt text." But the GIF one I haven't seen yet. I don't think I've sent a GIF in a couple days, but I'll have to check that out. 

CARINA: I can't say that I often do either. So this will be a new discovery for both of us. I want to circle back to something that each of you said because you both mentioned or alluded to other examples. Jacob, you mentioned Beyonce and Chris, you mentioned Target. Can we circle back and hear what those anecdotes are because it sounds like they're ones that we can be citing for others. 

CHRIS: Yes. I know that Target had a really, really, really big lawsuit. This was a few years ago. A friend of mine, she actually worked on it before when she was working at one of the first companies she was at, she was working on the accessibility because they were contracted. I believe they were on a plan according to the lawsuit where they had a timeline to incrementally fix things. I think that's really how it works. When you get sued, it's not like, "Hey, we're suing you. We need the money now. You're screwed." They give you the option like, "Hey, we're going to give you a timeline and you give us what you can do every three months, et cetera, and then we'll keep following up, we'll follow up and follow up." But I think now Target really took it into consideration and I think they're doing really, really good things that experiences accessible and I think they may or may not have an accessibility statement on their website. You see this a lot with companies that are doing things really well, like State Farm. State Farm has an accessibility page where it just talks about WCAG, what they meet different types of disabilities, what they do in the web space and the accessibility space for their users. It's really, really cool to see that. More websites are starting to do that nowadays. 

CARINA: I think for those who aren't familiar, can you define a little more about what WCAG is? 

CHRIS: WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Currently, they're on Version 2.1, I believe, which covers everything that's in 2.0 plus a little bit extra but they kind of defines the guidelines for building an accessible user experience. It talks about color and it talks about different types of widgets and accessible markup, all these different types of things. So if you're ever wondering how to do certain things or what's the best approach or best solution to creating something that's accessible, you can always reference the WCAG guidelines or you can reference the WAI-ARIA guidelines which is the Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications guidelines. Those two combined have tons of information and they all come from the W3. 

CARINA: So, as somebody is trying to make a site more accessible, and let's leave out the whole issue of saying mobile apps which are their own particular world and problems. Just looking at the web, if you want to start somewhere and incrementally make changes and make things more accessible to a particular group of people who have a particular set of issues, what's priority? Where should we start in order to progress towards something that's more universal, what's number one? 

CHRIS: That's a great question. I get this question a lot in my conference talks and it's always kind of phrased like, "We can't ship different experiences, Chris. What are we doing if we have users that maybe have like a hearing impairment or a visual impairment?" And I always say like we're only shipping one experience. You're not here to build an experience for this user and this user and this user and this user. It doesn't work that way. You want to build one experience that works for everybody. So, keeping all of those things in mind is the best way of doing that. 

I've seen experiences where they have accessibility -- I think the accessibility simulators are accessibility filters built into their experience. So, you can click on a tab, it will open up and it will have different things that you can change. So, it may be you have some type of color vision deficiency or you're color blind, you can change the color scheme in the UI and it will change it so you can see it. Or there is an option to zoom the text in really big or there is an option to listen to a recording of what's in front of you. There's even ones if you were a dyslexic user, you can change the font, the typeface, so you can actually read the experience. Those are great as far as things that you can do right out of the gate. I'd like to call those low-hanging fruits. So, making sure that you're using semantic markup, like we were saying. HTML is by default accessible. Semantic markup makes it so much easier. Have using a header tag and using the nav tag and main, section, aside, footer. All of those things are accessible by default. So, going through your markup and removing all the divs you can and replace with semantic markup, that should be number one. 

Number two would be color contrast. Make sure your color contrast works. You can run it through different tools that are out there. Chrome has a built-in color contrast checker within the dev tools. I actually wrote an article about that. That's really cool to use. Making sure there's all attributes on your images. Those three things right there will get rid of so many violations in an audit, and those are the first steps to creating and shipping an accessible user experience, in my opinion. 

CARINA: You both mentioned that you don't have any disabilities. I get migraines and I know that it's been a real problem when there's any sort of default media going off. And this has become really prevalent in any media websites as they love to start up the video immediately and then make sure that even when you scroll away from it, it still follows you, still playing and it's that motion. And if there is audio, it's even worse when you're having a migraine or you're vulnerable being triggered. This stuff is, aside from being obnoxious if you're in a shared workspace, it's anything that's default movement, default sound is really creating its own set of accessibility issues for people like me. And certainly people who have seizures, that's a really big concern. So, I think another bit of low-hanging fruit is simply put auto-play to off, please. 

CHRIS: Yeah, that's one of the -- where did I read it? I remember when I was talking about it at my last company. But if you have auto-play on, Google knocks you down in rankings. 

CARINA: Oh, good. 

CHRIS: Yeah. I think that's what I saw. And then I think it's also part of the WCAG 2.1 now where if you do have video or audio, you have to set it off, like out of the gate. But speaking about disabilities, I do have some. I don't like to really call them disabilities. I like to call them impairments. I don't have any visual or hearing disabilities at the moment, but we've all had some type of temporary impairment, all of us through our time. I suffered from anxiety and depression. So when I see a timer when I have to do something in a certain amount of time on the web like buy concert tickets or something to an event and I have a countdown, that hour,  that's going to trigger my anxiety and I'm like, "Oh, I've got a rush. I got to do this. I got to do this. I got to do this and I can't screw up." Got to run across the kitchen to get my credit card and come back and make sure I don't screw the name up or screw up the number. We all are experiencing, at some point in our life, some type of impairment and it doesn't matter what it is. We've all been there. You just have to think back at how you felt when you were experiencing a shitty experience in that time. 

CARINA: Chris, I'm laughing right now because you just said you don't have any vision issues. And so, even though we only put out the audio recording, we're right now look at each other and you're wearing glasses as am I. So, you have a disability but with an assistive device. And I was not personally really thinking of it that way until one day I sat on my glasses and they snapped in half and it took a little while to get replacements. And I suddenly discovered just how disabled my vision is without assistance that I was really squinting and discovering how many websites when you crank up the font size, break pretty darn badly. 

CHRIS: I don't even think like, because I had my glasses on, like I wear them every day when I'm on my computer. That's the only time I ever wear my glasses is when I'm sitting at the computer. So I don't even think like, "Oh, I have a disability." I do have like, one eye is better than the other. I know that for a fact. But it doesn't even come to mind because 90% of the day, I don't wear my glasses because I'm only at the computer for so many hours a day. But that's a good point because when I don't have my glasses or I leave them at home and I need to get on a computer, I'm like, "Shit! I need my glasses!" But it's just like I'm so used to having them on and when I don't have them on for a few hours if I'm on the computer, I'm like, "This sucks. I need my damn glasses." 

CARINA: Yeah, I actually have a couple of different sets of glasses because at some point, my vision changed so that my regular glasses don't work at computer distance. I had to get special computer glasses. I don't know how special they are but they have a focal point that's about computer distance away, and that changed my experience but still that's my assistive device making that possible. The web as we said is by default pretty darn accessible, so it was a shock to really discover how much we have broken the web in something that simple. Especially knowing that browsers allow us to set different font faces, different font sizes, it should be really obvious to remember that browsers are different and user settings are different and that's one of the user settings that's different. If you're doing a thing with the assumption that your font as you expect it is going to be the one that they're looking at, oops. 

CHRIS: Right. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, he didn't make this to be the way it is today. Let's put it that way. You know what I mean? And the frameworks and all those things, they make it extremely difficult to make things accessible because you pretty much have to do it yourself. Even going back to the CMS argument, you have to really dig down into the CMS to even find the accessibility type features. Because I would say most or the ones I've used, they all come with an input to put an alt text for images, but maybe not all of them do that. And the underlying code might not be accessible that it spits out. There's a couple out there that are built in C#, CMS that are built in C# that spit out markup. They're written in C# and who knows what that compilation is doing when it ships. So, it can be difficult. But hey, that's what we're here for. We're here to make the web better and more accessible, so we've got to do what we've got to do. 

CARINA: I'm trying to think about what we can do as developers because for instance, there is a developer who is right now maintaining a CMS. And goodness knows, most of our listeners are right now maintaining some sort of website. So, what can you put [inaudible] today? We've talked about some things that are low-hanging fruit. Give me something to spec. What can I right now start to do very concretely to get me and the team actually making some changes? 

CHRIS: I would start off with an audit. That's where I would start right away. Using an auditing tool whether you're using Lighthouse or Axe-core from Deque, Pope Tech, I know Tenon.io has an audit tool. Use that first, run through your high traffic pages of the experience and then get an audit, get some numbers. Try and find out how many violations you have, what a Lighthouse score looks like. Get that information first. If you can show the team that you have these many issues, this Lighthouse score, and then maybe do the same thing with a competitor and show like a side-by-side comparison, that's how you get people on board. That's how you get the business on board is showing numbers. And I've always been opposed to the business making decisions for the developers. You know what I mean? The developers are the experts. The developers work in the code. The developers are part of the developer community and they do the reading and they build the projects. They know what is best for the users. So if you just say, "I'm going to build this make it accessible to a business stakeholder," well no, you're not. That's not a prioritized work. But you, being the expert, it should be a no-brainer. It should just be a no-brainer.

But if you take numbers like that to the business or stakeholders and show them like, "Hey, we are doing horrible. We are losing so much money because our experience is not accessible to this user. This is how many other users are potentially out there," that can make a huge impact. So, I would definitely say start off with numbers first, start off with an audit first, get a baseline, and then build off of that [because then you'll start getting buy in]. 

CARINA: It occurs to me that it might also be useful to do an audit on some competitors websites and see how the numbers line up to be able to say for instance, "They're doing better than we are. They're making their platform more appealing to a group of people who could be paying us money." 

CHRIS: Exactly. 

CARINA: It is a very business-oriented argument and it's unfortunate that we have to do the business-oriented arguments but I see that potential. 

CHRIS: Yeah. And it bothers me because you want to do so much for your users and you know the right thing to do. And then that boils down to the right argument. I know what's right. It's just getting people on board to understand that this is the right thing to do and this is what we should be doing. 

CARINA: I suspect that somebody else [inaudible] is allying with these experienced people. They probably have a lot more insight to this. And it's certainly an argument to make that accessibility is a user experience. 

CHRIS: It's definitely a user experience. And I always say it starts with design. It starts with designing new x. It doesn't start with me, hence the keyboard. Your design team, your marketing team, they have to understand -- they don't have to understand the web context disability guidelines through and through, but they need to understand a little bit about accessibility. They have to understand color contrast. They have to understand persona in user. They have to understand the user flow. A little bit of the document object model would be nice. How focus works and what focus means, how that works in the user, how models work with the user, how a carousel works for the user. All of these things matter. Because if you're not designing the experience to be accessible and you give it to a developer, the developer is not going to know any better unless they're cognizant right off the bat of building the experience to be accessible. But then you can get a lot of clashing between design and developers because design wants this and the developer wants that. 

JACOB: And fixing that later, like you mentioned the color contrast issue. I'm just sort of imagining a scenario where color contrast wasn't thought about and it looked fine when the site first launched but then someone was able to change, going back, backtracking and fixing that later on, so the color contrast always works is under future scenarios could easily be a problem. 

CHRIS: Color contrast is a big one especially if you already have a solid color palette and branding colors in place that were never tested. That's where the issue lies. 

JACOB: Yeah. And as I think about like, "Well, are you sure? Have you tested all of the possible combinations? Do you know all the different places where color X will be? Like all the possible places where one color will be on top of another and  will all of those work?" 

CARINA: [Inaudible] went to me because most of us, a majority of us don't feel like we have a disability. All of us are going to age. And as we age, there are a number of things that we know are going to degrade, including eyesight. When I was 18, I felt like gray on gray looks very beautiful and subtle and arty. I got a little bit older and discovered that actually it sucks. [laughs] More recently, there's been a lot of movement towards dark view, dark mode and it's been frustrating to see that derided as something that's stupid or a waste of time. And for me, again, between vision and migraines, I love dark mode. Thank you for giving me that option. Yay! To see it as some sort of stupid feature is really missing how much accessibility is a broad range of things. 

So, we spent a fair amount of time on visual impairment. Let's talk about some other kinds of accessibility that we can be doing. I'm looking right now at just the Wikipedia website and it mentions visual, motor and mobility, auditory, seizures, cognitive and intellectual. What can you tell us about some of these various issues that we can be doing to address them as well. 

CHRIS: Yes. Let's see. For hearing, you have different types of hearing disabilities, so like sensorineural, mixed hearing loss, conductive hearing loss. When you have video, for instance, this is another one of those things, if you have video on your experience, make sure you're providing some type of visual verbiage like captions, stuff like that or a transcript. So like my podcast, I'm working on a sponsor right now to have transcripts because I was using the transcript service and it's not that great. But having something there that a user can read as opposed to being able to hear it, that's a huge win.

Cognitive disabilities, making the language that you're writing in make sense because a part of a cognitive disability would be understanding certain language. It might not be that easy. Dyslexia would be a cognitive type of impairment. Making sure that the font that you're using, the typeface that you're using works with everybody. And there are certain fonts out there that work well with dyslexic users, more or less italicized fonts are easier for dyslexic users to read.

Mobility. If you have a broken hand and it's your mouse hand, you're screwed. Making sure that the experience can be used with a keyboard and only with a keyboard. Keeping those things in mind. And a lot of times people don't realize a parent with a newborn child. You can't hold your kid, you can't type and use the mouse, unless you have one of those satchel things where you can just like strap them on your back. You know what I mean? [Chuckles]

JACOB: Not a newborn. [Chuckles]

CHRIS: No, not a newborn. You're holding your new child and sometimes you got to work. Let's say a bug creeps up and you've got to do what you've got to do. You can't put your kid down on the ground or put them in a bassinet or whatever, so you need to hold them. So being able to access the keyboard only is huge for all types of disabilities and impairments. 

JACOB: It's something else. I just love to talk about it. This isn't even a disability at all, but my wife, she just prefers to use mouse. I'm a developer, I love using keyboard, I love to memorize hotkeys and stuff. She just prefers to use the mouse. That's sort of how she interacts with the web. And yeah, I just sort of think about that. On the other hand, what's it like interacting with just the mouse? Do you have to click around a bunch of times? That's probably annoying. [Laughs]

CARINA: I think something interesting is when we make things more accessible for those who find it necessary, that it also makes it more accessible to a whole lot of people who, for reasons other than disability, find it really useful. The classic example of course is Curb Cuts. There's so many people who benefited from Curb Cuts aside from people who have wheelchairs or canes or walkers. For instance, people on bikes, skateboards, who push strollers. All of those people really benefited from Curb Cuts and really liked them. And as you're mentioning, some of the ones like for instance having a text or transcript, that's also great for people for instance who need a little more time to process something just because they're distracted or whatever it is.

I notice this in a lot of conferences which obviously aren't websites, but once you put up real time transcribing that so many people love it. It is exciting because you're looking down while you're typing notes or something and you've missed a few words, and being able to read what you just missed is so handy. Or you're not a native English speaker or whatever it is language that the talk is in, and to be able to catch that in real time, just because your fluency isn't as strong as the speaker's, you need a little more time to catch up with what they're saying or their accent is a little hard to process. So you've got people who aren't disabled but simply have some sort of limitation, that is handy to have that available. Like you said, having a child in your lap. That's not a disability but it does create distraction problems that those people are also being served. When we serve people who absolutely need accessibility, we also get to serve a lot of people who benefit from accessibility. 

JACOB: This is the part of the show where we're going to do some quick reflections. 

CHRIS: There's two things I try to end my conference talks with. One is a quote from me and one is a quote from my friend Marcy Sutton who is an amazing accessibility person out there. She does amazing things. The one that I always like to say is accessibility is not a requirement. It is a must. You got to care. This is what we're here for. We're building on the web, we're shipping experiences. You got to care. And the second thing that comes from Marcy and this is paraphrasing, I can't remember the quote word for word but what she said was, every little bit of accessibility you contribute is so appreciated and so needed. So, if you can take anything away, it would definitely be those two quotes.

CARINA: Well, thank you to Chris and Marcy. 

CHRIS: All right. 

CARINA: I really enjoyed hearing about the concrete useful stuff. Auditing is certainly something for people who want numbers. I really appreciate that that's something that we can do, that we can bring back numbers to people who aren't necessarily receptive to an argument that there's a large audience to address or there is some sort of moral argument to make. There is, I'm just saying, it's not always heard that we can make an argument of, "Here's how the audit turned out. And also here are the numbers that it can cost if this becomes a lawsuit." Those are things that business people can hear and translate into, "Yes, I would like to spend money on those things." So, thank you for that one. 

JACOB: My reflection is something I've been wanting to do and I think I'm going to make this maybe a late New Year's resolution in February, is I want to get better at using a screen reader. 
And the reason why is that from time to time, I find myself with questions, with accessibility questions about like what's the right way to do this. And I often find that I'm consulting some other authority WCAG and that's important. But I feel like it's also equally important to at least try to gain some empathy about what the right thing is to do because I've tried to do it myself and maybe it sucks using a screen reader and then I can see what the better solution might be. So yeah, I'm going to try to get to be a slightly better screen reader user. So the next time I have a question, I won't be so painful to try to just diagnose it or just test it out myself on the screen reader. 

That's going to be the end of our show. I want to thank Chris again. If you want to support Greater Than Code, you can go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode and donate any amount that feels right to you. And you can join our Slack community which is a really fun community where we have conversations like this one. So, thanks so much for joining us. See you next week.