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Episode 021

Accessibility for All

with Robert Jolly

magine waking up one day and not being able to use the web. It's still there, you just can't seem to make it work correctly. It happens to people every day. Accessibility has been an important topic since the early days of the web, but it's never become a priority. Why? Robert Jolly may have the answer. He became an accessibility advocate after a stroke showed him the unnecessary limitations we're imposing on people all over the world.

Have questions on accessibility? You can find Robert at JollyPM.com.

Are you a Digital PM? Join us in San Antonio for Digital PM Summit 2016!

Transcript

Announcer:
Welcome to The Bureau Briefing, a podcast by The Bureau of Digital, an organization devoted to giving digital professionals the support system they never had. Each episode, we're going to talk to a member of our community doing awesome, inspiring things. Now for your host, Carl Smith.

Carl Smith:
Hey, everybody, and welcome back to the Bureau Briefing. It is Carl, and with me today I have got the project manager to the stars, the ambassador to Waffle Houses worldwide, Mr. Robert Jolly. How's it going, Robert?

Robert Jolly:
Hey, Carl. I'm doing well.

Carl Smith:
Robert, I wanted to get you on the show today because you have a taken an interesting turn in your career where you are really focused on accessibility. It was interesting to me because when we started nGen I think 2004, 2003, 2004, it was when people were really starting to talk accessibility and it doesn't seem like it's gotten that much traction since then. I'm just curious, how did you find yourself moving into accessibility, and what is your role when you're working with a client?

Robert Jolly:
I started getting into accessibility because there was a friend of mine that I was introduced to that spoke at conferences about accessibility. I wanted to get them involved in a project that we were doing when I was at Happy Cog. Accessibility became something that I was more and more aware of, and then after I left Happy Cog I had a medical event where it really hammered things home that I could easily be someone that could benefit from accessibility. Really, any of us can join that community at any point. I had a stroke. That was at the end of 2011, and that really opened my eyes and was what I call a watershed moment for me. With that, I took my project management skills that I had been honing over the years and I started working for an accessibility consulting firm as a project manager for their accessibility projects.

That helped lead me into more knowledge and skill building for myself about what accessibility means, what people can do, what are the different roles that people play in a project that accessibility will touch so that it's not just an after the fact task or requirement that needs to be met, say, during QA or even after a project launches, which is very common. That's still a problem today, where people don't take accessibility very seriously or don't even think about it. It's not necessarily because they don't care, but it's just because people haven't been trained to work that way.

Carl Smith:
Now, I remember when you had that stroke. We were friends at the time, and I remember hearing about it and just being blown away, because how old were you? You were in your late 20s?

Robert Jolly:
I was 40.

Carl Smith:
You were 40?

Robert Jolly:
Yes.

Carl Smith:
Good lord, man.

Robert Jolly:
I look really good, so ...

Carl Smith:
You're not allowed to look this good. That is not fair. Even at 40, that is really young to get up, walk out of bed and have a stroke.

Robert Jolly:
Yes.

Carl Smith:
To have that experience and have it hammer home for you that you could have been somebody who needed the accessible side of the web, I had no clue that that was the moment that hit it for you. Super personal, and to take the skills that you had as a project manager, I know that you were also an EMT. I often think of project management as being one of those high stress situations, those high stress jobs, because you're trying to manage everything and you're trying to move things forward. Groups that are disagreeing, you're trying to get them to some level of agreement. I can only imagine that cutting people out of a car while they're fighting for survival is a good training ground for a project manager.

Robert Jolly:
I think so.

Carl Smith:
Taking what you know about accessibility and being a project manager, how do you approach a project now? What do you say to a team when you're first getting started so that they'll understand the importance of accessibility and the way that it's going to be, I guess, integrated throughout the project?

Robert Jolly:
Well, the approach I take is just to bring my philosophy into the equation. I really believe that accessibility is just universal usability. Everyone that I work with, I know that they want to make the product that they're working on, whether it's a website or an application or whatever it is, a widget, they want to make it ultimately usable and be able to solve a problem for people. I try to bring that alignment between accessibility and usability into the project from day 1.

Often, we will be working with a client that has a legal requirement to have accessibility into their project, but what I've found is that most team members haven't had any real formal training in accessibility. That's okay, but it leads to a problem because if we haven't been trained to think about accessibility throughout the design and development process, then it's not part of our everyday kind of work flow or skill set.

That's where I start, is just thinking about accessibility as universal usability and then talking about project requirements or project risks, especially with clients that are in ... Just about any industry these days is at risk in terms of litigation for accessibility violations or problems. If someone makes a website that is inaccessible, say it's an eCommerce website, even if it's a small website there are precedents that have already been set where, even though there is no governmental mandate, like Section 508 for government sites, there are legal precedents where people have been sued and have lost for having inaccessible websites.

Carl Smith:
It's always seemed to me that accessibility and QA are kind of like kissing cousins, which I don't even know what that means. It doesn't sound appropriate. It always feels like they're really similar in that you normally have people doing it that haven't been trained in it, and it normally gets put off until the end and somebody goes, "Oh, we haven't checked off the box." Do you find that that's still common in shops that you work with?

Robert Jolly:
It's very common just throughout the industry. The teams that I've been working with regularly are actually making changes and integrating accessibility thinking into their work. I have had conversations recently with designers and developers where they start throwing accessible solutions or ideas about how to make something more accessible that we've been working on without me even prodding them for that. Some of the teams that I've been working with have really matured in terms of accessibility thinking, but the industry overall I think still has a pretty pervasive problem where I see websites daily almost that it's pretty clear that accessibility hasn't been thought about and things have launched and now they're trying to go back and take a look at accessibility and fix things because they realize, "Oh, accessibility is important. We didn't even think about it or touch it, even during normal QA processes." I think it's maybe kissing second cousins with QA.

Carl Smith:
Oh, man. My folks are from Mississippi, so I'll just give them a call and say, "What does this mean, kissing second cousins?" They'll probably say it's totally fine.

Robert Jolly:
They'll say, "Ask Robert Jolly," because I am from the South as well. Yes.

Carl Smith:
There you go, and you are Robert Jolly so you should know. Back in the day, we had different tools that we'd use for accessibility like Bobby and some of these other things. There was this concept that you could be compliant, that there was a way that basically you would meet all of the requirements. I also remember being in a lot of conversations where it was like, "No," when you start talking about accessibility, it's not like a black and white yes and no thing. It's an ongoing evolution; it is more of a philosophy as well as certain things that you have to identify. Are there tools that you use now, or is it much more about going through a process of verification?

Robert Jolly:
Yes, both.

Carl Smith:
There you go.

Robert Jolly:
I think really there are a number of good tools that have been introduced. They're much better, or they're modern evolutions of what Bobby tried to be back in the day. Some of the automated tools that are out there, there are libraries and there are services that exist that are fantastic at taking a look at machine identifiable accessibility issues. That's one side of the coin, and the other side is actual manual verification of things that a machine can't pick up very easily. An example is alt text. A machine can tell you if there is alt text on an image, but a machine can't tell you whether that alt text is appropriate or not.

There are a number of nuanced tests that you need to put your work through in a manual way to verify that it's accessible. Always, the real verdict is folks that do use assistive technology that have disabilities, those people are the ones that ultimately determine whether your site or product is accessible. No amount of assumptions or automated testing can give you that ultimate verification that a real human being with a disability that may use a combination of assistive technologies will give you, if that makes sense. Does that make sense?

Carl Smith:
That makes total sense. We used to use Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind to test sites. We would go in and it would give the kids that were in school this opportunity to get some real world experience that they could put on a resume when they're going for college, and at the same time it would give us real results that we couldn't get from a screen reader or something like that. One of the things I learned there was that, you know what? Even with assistive technologies, kids scan. They would play the screen reader at like 3 or 4 times normal speed.

You don't think about this until you see somebody do it, or the frustration when they're trying to fill out a form and the alt text is not there. Just these different things that they just could not get through, and the frustration. I think what you're saying makes perfect sense because you have to keep in mind that there's a person there and they're trying to use it and they shouldn't be held at arm's length from being able to access what they're trying to do because the most frustrating thing for them would be when they got right to the goal and then there was just this invisible wall they couldn't get past.

Robert Jolly:
Right, exactly. You can't predict who's going to be using your site. We all like to create personas that are shiny, happy people,  but people come in all shapes, sizes, colors, degrees of experience and ability, and people come with a lot of additional problems and baggage. I certainly have my own issues that I bring to every website that I visit, and so I have this context that's unique to me. Someone else may have a completely different context and they may have to use a different set of tools, a different browser or even assistive technology on top of all of that that helps them understand what's being presented. We can't make these assumptions about people because they run the gamut. There are how many people in the world now? I don't even know. Is it 6 billion now? I think it's over 6 billion.

Carl Smith:
It's over 6 billion, yeah.

Robert Jolly:
The statistics, I believe, are somewhere between 15 and 20% of people have some sort of disability that affects them in their daily life, and it's varying degrees of severity too. You just can't put people in a box. The tools that we have with the web standards and with the internet, it's very democratizing. We have the ability to make things accessible if we choose to. A lot of the defaults that we have, a lot of the plain old HTML, even CSS, and even JavaScript, all of that stuff can be very accessible if you use it the way it was intended.

It's when we start getting very clever and we start making things more and more enhanced but for a specific set of people, because we're testing for ourselves mostly when we're doing design and development, we're really not getting into the extreme possibilities that people have that are real out there. We do this design and development work that we feel like really shines and is super creative, and that's all good, but sometimes we break accessibility by thinking that we're doing something novel or interesting.

The thing that we can do, though, is to keep doing those novel and interesting things but then take a look at it through an accessibility lens and see where we can do that and make it accessible. That's certainly a goal that I have with any project that I work with, is to not allow the old misconception to bubble up that accessibility hinders creativity or hinders the experience in some way, that you have to dumb down an interface to make it accessible. That's absolutely not the case.

Carl Smith:
If you look at animation, animation's come back strong and it's no longer a hindrance to the general web in terms of searchability and that sort of stuff. Do you see that animation is being done in a way now that it's accessible?

Robert Jolly:
There is. There is a lot of animation that's being done that's accessible. Actually, an article was just published on CSS-Tricks, I think it was yesterday. Heather Migliorisi. I probably mispronounced your name, Heather. I am so sorry. Heather posted this article about how to work with SVGs and make them accessible. SVG animation is certainly all the rage, and for good reason. It's fantastic. Absolutely, SVGs and animated SVGs can be made accessible.

There are a number of things that you have to keep in mind, but that one article on CSS-Tricks that Heather wrote is absolutely gold for anyone to read that's interested in animation and interested in SVGs and wants to make things accessible and usable, which I think that's everybody. Everybody wants to do that. I don't know anyone that says that they want to make something that's inaccessible. They're probably out there, but I don't think there are that many folks that ...

Carl Smith:
Yeah, I think it's only Bruce Lawson in his talk, Destroy the Web, where he has this anti-talk where he talks about the importance of alienating audiences, which is hilarious once you realize that he's joking. At first, I remember sitting next to a friend and they were like, "This guy's an ass." I was like, "No, he's kidding. He's making a point by going the other way." Robert, I have met maybe 3 people who I would call focused on accessibility, and maybe accessibility experts or ... That's their area. You being one of them, and a few other friends, that's not enough. I know there are a few shops out there that are focused on it, and that's not enough. I was excited when Brett was telling me about your session for the Digital PM Summit, which is going to be focused on how PMs can be that accessibility lead. Talk a little bit about what you're going to be sharing at the Summit this October.

Robert Jolly:
This talk and workshop will be focused on how do we as PMs lead the charge for accessibility, and what does accessibility even mean for our projects? There are a number of things that, as PMs, that we're responsible for. We're responsible for the overall project health; we're responsible for making sure that we understand the requirements and those requirements get kind of disseminated to everyone on the team in a way that those can be satisfied. There's also the tracking and mitigation of risk factors with the project for all kinds of things that might come up.

Accessibility is one of those things that often is a line item in the RFPs or the Statements of Works that we have, like, "Oh, and we will make things accessible," or, "This site must meet Section 508 guidelines," or, "It must be WCAG to Level Double-A." WCAG is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. There's often one line, or maybe a brief paragraph that explains that something must be made accessible. It could be for a legal reason, it could be because there's a real need in terms of an audience that needs to be served, that this project is aimed to help deliver content to or functionality to.

As project managers, we're in charge of the overall scope and all of these requirements. How do we unpack what these accessibility requirements really mean? Because one line just isn't enough to cut into or describe fully the amount of work and who is responsible for which pieces of work during a project to ensure that the work is accessible and not have kind of a fire drill at the end of the project if it hasn't been done. With this workshop, we'll be going through and unpacking what accessibility means, where to find resources in terms of guidelines and how do these guidelines translate into role-specific tasks for each member of a project team.

As a project manager, how can you help your visual designers, your UX folks, understand what impact their work will have on accessibility, how can they think about ensuring that they don't fall into any accessibility traps with some of the early work that they're doing, or if you're doing work in sprint teams where everybody's doing something at the same time, how do you get everybody on the same page with story writing, including accessibility into your stories if you're an agile team.

Thinking about from a developer's perspective, what are those things that the developer needs to do to make sure that their work is accessible and make it a little bit easier on QA staff and also on the project budget and timeline as a whole if things get thought about beforehand versus at the end. Then, kind of wrapping it all up into a set of communication frameworks around accessibility and also some matrices where it can help guide project managers into effective ways of bringing accessibility to a project team.

Carl Smith:
Well, that sounds amazing, Robert. It's-

Robert Jolly:
It's a lot to unpack.

Carl Smith:
It's a lot to unpack, Hell, it's a lot to explain, but it's important because people who are coming to the Digital PM Summit are looking to get better at their craft. I think what we find out every year is there are aspects of the craft they may not have even been thinking of or considering. I'm excited that you're going to be there, and you're going to be helping PMs become that accessibility lead. The Digital PM Summit, and it's going to be October 12th through 15th, so come out and see Robert. Robert, you're also an accessibility hero for hire, so I'll make sure to hook up your information in the show notes so if anybody wants to get in touch with Robert and find out about him, maybe coming to do a workshop at their office or working with him on a project, make sure and check out the site. Robert, thanks so much for being with us today.

Robert Jolly:
Thank you, Carl.

Carl Smith:
All right, everybody. We'll see you next week.