Q&A With Lori Neff

Lori Neff at UXDX Community: USA East. Video: https://youtu.be/FCE-rVu97kU

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.

Starting with an existing product

[00:00:00] Host: Hi Lori, how are you doing?

[00:00:02] Lori: Hi, I'm great. How are you?

[00:00:04] Host: Excellent. Are you having a good day so far?

[00:00:06] Lori: I'm having a great day. It's a little cold here in Minnesota, but not bad, not bad.

[00:00:13] Host: I'm the opposite. It's too hot where I am, in the southern hemisphere.

[00:00:18] Lori: We can swim for a little bit. It'll be good.

[00:00:21] Host: Excellent. We'll jump in. Accessibility is a very good topic, and it's actually already come up in some of the questions this evening.

[00:00:32] Again, if you haven't watched Lori's talk, I highly recommend it. With the examples that you gave, the only thing that jumps to my mind is: that's brilliant if I'm starting greenfield. This is the kind of feedback people give: it's always great if I could start from scratch and put in place all of these kinds of things at the start, then it'd be fine. But where I am now, I've got all this tech debt, I've got all these problems. What do you recommend for somebody who's got an existing project that doesn't have any of that kind of collateral that you highlighted?

[00:01:09] Lori: That's such a good question. I get to work on that kind of project most of the time, where we released the product long ago, and now we have to address all of this kind of stuff. I'm going to refer to what Carmen and Mackenzie were just talking about: it's continuous learning. You're not going to fix all of the problems right out of the gate. Start with those fundamentals. Maybe start with an assessment, where you get your arms around where the low-hanging fruit is, where the things are that are real barriers to anybody who is either using assistive technology or needs a full understanding. Start with those things that are easy wins and really obvious, and then move on, and then you can really do a deep dive.

Getting the bigger picture

[00:02:19] Host: Great. With those really obvious wins: in your talk you highlighted a number of things. There were the headings, there was the tab order, image alt text, those kinds of things. One thing that I've found with people is they're going, "Okay, I know these things, but I don't have the full big picture of everything, so that I can make the decision on where to start." What would you recommend to somebody who's trying to get that bigger-picture view of everything, so they know where to focus?

[00:02:49] Lori: Research. Talking to people. I have the luxury of working with people who have a variety of disabilities different from my own, and I have invisible disabilities. The more conversations you have, the better. Do a little guerrilla research if you can in your own organization, because you likely have coworkers that have a disability, and maybe it's invisible. Start by having that conversation and opening that up.

[00:03:23] I refer to what I think Scott was saying earlier: it's giving people the freedom to contribute and to participate, in a way that oftentimes people with disabilities haven't been able to. Starting with that conversation is going to open up a lot of doors on where to start, and to that overall mindset too, because you start to think, okay, here's more that I can think about than I've ever thought about before. It's really a growth opportunity in terms of the direction to go and the opportunities that are available.

Watching real users and using only the keyboard

[00:04:06] Host: Great. I think that's all great. Looking at my own experience, one of the things that was the most powerful for me personally was when we watched a screen reader user flow through our application. You can talk about it and say how these things are important, but when you see somebody actually using your application and struggling, that to me was one of the most powerful things that really got everybody on board.

[00:04:39] Lori: Right, it's huge. One of the things I tell people is that, if you can, that observation is incredible. My buddy Steve is like, "Let me tell you how much faster I am at texting than you are." He shows me contracted braille on his iPhone, and I'm like, wow, you show-off, but that's really cool. To witness that is amazing.

[00:05:10] But it's hard for me to simulate. It's hard for me to observe that mental model that he has built over his entire life. So I figure, okay, use a keyboard. That's the first thing I tell anybody: put your mouse aside and try to use just your keyboard alone, anywhere, in your project software, on a website, anything. It's this illuminating thing, the gaps and opportunities there are when you can't get there. That's an easy thing for me to do, and everybody is familiar with a keyboard, so it's this little insight.

[00:05:53] Host: That's a great tip. I was testing UXDX before this, and we need to do some keyboard improvements, focus things.

[00:06:01] Lori: Right. There's always a place to get better.

Accessibility in the design system

[00:06:07] Host: A question came in from Scott, and it was to your point about when you were doing those design mockups. You were showing, okay, here's the design, but then there are the annotations, or the markup. From a design system stance, where is the balance between design system documentation versus the mockups that you were showing, and how do I scale that?

[00:06:33] Lori: That's a huge issue to try and tackle. The more that you can get that accessibility annotation built into your design system, the better, because that's why you have a design system in the first place. You want to be able to have a pattern. I think you're back on. You want to repeat the same patterns. If I've got an accordion, and it's working this way, and this is the behavior, I want to be able to use that consistently throughout all of my products, or at least this suite of products.

[00:07:12] If I've gone to the trouble to figure out how to make that accessible, then by all means, let's figure that out, and then empower me as a designer to know what I need to make sure I retain in my own designs from that design system. It's like, okay, they have the arrow on the right, and that makes sense to me, and this is the alt text that they're going to define for that. If I can rebuild that and just drag it and drop it onto my mockup, then all the better. But that also takes some time.

[00:07:56] And I think color combinations were another big thing: here are good accessible color combinations, and here are the ones that are our favorites to use, because something may be accessible but it may not be on brand. Supporting that and making it easier for me, so I don't have to think about these variables, and I can think about the really important stuff.

[00:08:22] Host: Excellent. I'm not sure if it cut out for everybody, but I might ask you to give that example, or the response you gave there, on the Slack channel as well, because for me personally it cut off a little bit halfway through. Sorry about that.

Getting accessibility prioritized

[00:08:36] The last question is around convincing. It's the age-old problem. The question that came up earlier: you find all of these accessibility issues, you present them to your manager, and then they get pushed to the side. How do you manage that, to make sure that there is focus on accessibility?

[00:08:54] Lori: I think it's back to targeting what the blockers are. Asking questions, including people with disabilities in your research, and also going to your help desk. Figure out what kind of support needs you have. Do you even know what kind of support gaps there have been for people with disabilities? Okay, you're back. [laughter]

[00:09:34] I'm just going to repeat, just in case. Find out, either from support or from your user base, do some research to find out where people with disabilities are within your representation. I'll tell you, if you don't know that right now, there are statistics that tell you one out of every four adults has a disability of some sort. If you're dealing with 25% of the population, then most likely you need to address that. One out of four adults, excuse me, has a disability, so you're going to need to address that.

[00:10:18] And then also it ends up leading to this innovation point. If I'm making things work for me as a keyboard-only user, then, cool, I now have this quick keyboard shortcut. If I'm improving the color contrast, that's going to work when I'm sharing on a Zoom call. Those kinds of things end up benefiting everybody.

[00:10:43] Host: Excellent. Well, thanks very much, Lori, for your time. We've gone over slightly, but it was really interesting. I'm not sure if there were connection issues on which side, but hopefully everybody out there has been able to see it okay. If not, we might ask for some...

[00:10:57] Lori: Sure, just comment in the Slack group.

[00:11:01] Host: Absolutely. Thank you, thank you very much.