Q&A With Homer Gaines

Homer Gaines at UXDX Community: USA West. Video: https://youtu.be/OuglrP7IniU

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Making people aware of problems they don't know they're making

[00:00:00] Host: Jumping over to Homer. Welcome, Homer.

[00:00:03] Homer: Thank you, thank you. How are you doing?

[00:00:05] Host: Very good, and yourself?

[00:00:06] Homer: Doing well, no complaints.

[00:00:09] Host: Excellent. I loved your talk about accessibility. It's an area that I'm very passionate about, but I'm guilty of a lot of the sins that you called out in your talk. Again, just a reminder, if anybody has any questions, send them through and I'll ask Homer. Otherwise I'm just going to kick off with some questions that I have.

[00:00:33] Host: My first one is, it's really often that people aren't maliciously doing anything. They're not intentionally trying to break things, they just don't know about what they should do and whatnot, and what they're doing is just looking at it and going, okay, this works, tick, move on to the next thing. So how do you propose making people aware of the problems when they aren't even aware that they're making these mistakes?

[00:01:04] Homer: By doing talks just like this. A big part of it, as you said, is they're not aware, so it's the education that we have to do. A lot of people that I have mentored or spoken to throughout the years, especially a lot of people who come out of the boot camps, I'll ask them, what's your exposure to accessibility? And surprisingly a lot of them say none. It may have been a slide the first day of class, or it may have been a bullet point on a slide the first day of class, and then we didn't touch it after that.

[00:01:43] Homer: This particular talk that I gave, I've been doing this for four years and I've been doing it at different conferences, and every time I do it at a different conference it always reaches someone else that's new. And that's because this particular topic is not actually discussed at the academic level, where people are actually learning how to build websites. And then if you're self-taught, a lot of times you may not even come across this.

[00:02:06] Homer: So it's doing these talks, going out to events, just basically telling people the benefits of why it's important to build accessible products around the world, and then also just explaining to them that it's not as challenging as you may think. If you understand HTML you can start with the semantics, and from there you can start to build on. And like you said, a lot of us are guilty of building inaccessible products. The div, the div just really gets us. It's just a lot of understanding that we have learned some really bad practices along the way, but we have the tools to undo those practices. And it comes out through informing people just like this.

Quantifying the business case

[00:03:00] Host: Excellent, I like that mission. The next challenge though that I have, and you made a good point: just looking at the pure volume of people, there are so many people that have a disability in the world. But what I've seen people struggle with is there might be one engineer who's taking up the cause and they're trying to convince their company, yes, we need to invest in this, we need to go back, we need to fix things. And basically what you're doing then, it's a prioritization challenge of should we go and fix and make sure that we're accessible, or should we build the next feature or fix other bugs?

[00:03:38] Host: So do you have any tips on how to actually quantify? You could do the whole "there's a lot of people", but is there any way somebody could try to figure out, are we losing money, are we losing people? Then it could help them with their business case.

[00:03:52] Homer: That part is always somewhat tricky, mainly because you can't, unless you specifically go out and you ask people if they have a disability and they are using your product, there's no real way for you to find out. And it's not like we can use technology to sniff out and see what type of devices they are using. And the reason you don't want to do that is because it's unethical. That type of information can lead to discrimination, so that's why you don't go into that. And then it could also be a violation of privacy laws, because that's dealing with somebody's health. So it's really hard unless they actually volunteer that information.

[00:04:42] Homer: But just approaching it, I've had devs come to me and be like, look, I'm the only one on my team who really wants to do this, what's the best path forward for me to affect this change? And I tell them, fix one thing at a time. When you're in there working inside your code base, if you come across some code that, for instance, if you see a button that is not a button but it's a span with an onclick, you know that should be a button, update it to be a button.

[00:05:16] Homer: Start to actually improve your code base as you touch it, as you go through. That way, one, it doesn't necessarily impact the timeline of the project that you're working on, because you're doing the work while you're already scheduled to be in there. It's not like you just said, drop everything, go through and let's take every button throughout our application and upgrade it. You're making those small incremental changes, and then eventually you can start to show, hey, this part of our application, this is how it does not work with screen readers or assistive tech, versus this other part of our application that we've made these small incremental changes to, this is how it benefits. And then you can start to show the company the benefits from that point. But to answer your question, yeah, it's somewhat difficult unless you actually get that information voluntarily from the individuals.

Where to get a quick win

[00:06:11] Host: I'm thinking out loud here and I don't know if this is possible or not, but the MVP approach would be, is there something that you could do, a small experiment that would give big impact? So if people just said, look, we're going to fix this problem, we'll do a test, and then you can see a difference, that would be a good feedback loop that they should keep investing. So is there something that you would tell people is the quick win? What's the number one most important thing that they should fix, that they could try to get a quick win?

[00:06:48] Homer: Oh wow. Semantic markup. Forms. You can get quick wins with forms, because a lot of forms are often built incorrectly, they're labeled incorrectly, the tab focus is incorrect. You want to focus on logical reading order, the way that the form is marked up. If you use semantic elements correctly, then assistive tech will allow the user to actually go through and fill out the form correctly.

[00:07:24] Homer: If you place your labels and your error messages in the same proximity with the field that has the error, that will also reduce issues, because now the user is not being distracted by a toast that's popping up somewhere else on the screen. It's definitely associated with the particular input where the error is. And if that messaging is clear enough to explain to them what they actually need to do, that also helps. But forms, yeah, forms are a big space where you can definitely improve the UX for the user.

Regulation and litigation

[00:08:00] Host: Excellent. I'm going to shift to a different attack. We've been relying, in a way, on good Samaritans and people doing this voluntarily. Is the other approach worthwhile? I've worked with airlines and I know that there are legal rules on how accessible an airline's website needs to be. Should those be broadened? Should the governments come in and try to regulate, saying like they do with buildings, you have to have an accessible ramp into a building?

[00:08:25] Homer: It's funny you say that, because there are already 70 countries that have some form of legal requirement for businesses to provide accessible technology or accessible products. Seventy. Right now the EU is leading that, because every country in the EU has to abide by those rules, and a lot of them point back to, or are modeled after, the ADA laws that we have here in the United States. And then all of those similarly point back to the WCAG 2.0, I believe, at that time. So yeah, it is definitely a benefit of that.

[00:09:12] Homer: Here in the United States there's definitely been an increase in litigation, lawsuits and so forth, especially with the pandemic. Everyone was at home, and now that everyone's home everyone's using their computers, it really started to show the cracks in a lot of products and their accessibility support, because you had individuals who just could not complete a task that they sought out to do.

[00:09:42] Host: Yeah, it's interesting to see where the space goes. I'm definitely in favor of a little bit of a mix of carrot and stick. But we're out of time, unfortunately, so thank you very much, Homer.