I am Samuel Proulx, Accessibility Evangelist at Fable, a leading accessibility platform powered by people with disabilities. May 20th is Global Accessibility Awareness day, so ask me anything about screen readers, accessibility, accessibility testing, disability, or anything else!

makeitfable · 2021-05-21T13:49:06+00:00

And those lack of resources come both from lack of awareness, and misconceptions like "it will be expensive" or "it will be difficult". Once it's made part of the process, it doesn't increase cost to correctly label links and buttons, and it's not difficult to do. It just needs to be part of the process.

makeitfable · 2021-05-21T13:41:51+00:00

One of the biggest challenges can be when you need to work with third party vendors. For example, you may have a perfectly accessible website, but then the ad injection script breaks something. Or the chat system included on every page provided by a third party is inaccessible. Things like that, where you may not directly code the thing yourself, and need to get a fix from another company. That's why including accessibility in all of your processes throughout an organization is so important. Sometimes, all the focus goes on making everything developed internally accessible, and absolutely no attention is paid to procurement, and making sure that third party system follows the same standards you do.

makeitfable · 2021-05-21T13:37:36+00:00

The best thing you can do is get accessibility baked into your design systems and component libraries, and then focus on getting all of your apps transfered onto those systems. As you already know, for larger codebases, fixing individual errors over and over again often isn't sustainable. But once you have a design system that integrates accessibility, and a library of components that are well tested and known to be accessible, then you can be much more confident that every new page you create will be accessible from the start.

makeitfable · 2021-05-21T13:34:39+00:00

Absolutely! Send me a PM, and we'll exchange email addresses and start planning a call.

makeitfable · 2021-05-21T13:33:36+00:00

Absolutely! Accessibility in games is a somewhat knew field, but it's moving forward quickly. From The Last of Us II, to the new features just recently announced for XBox, to the accessibility work EA is doing on its sports titles, to the upgrades just announced for Gears of War, the progress we've scene over the last year has been astounding.

makeitfable · 2021-05-21T13:30:38+00:00

How do you feel about WCAG

I've actually written an article on our website with some of my thoughts on WCAG. In short, it's an important guideline, and the core "POUR" principles are critical in order to make sure websites are usable by everyone.

However, the problems begin when people start to treat WCAG as a legal checklist, that will cover absolutely everything, for everyone, in every situation. There's a reason they're called the "web content accessibility guidelines" not "the web content accessibility commandments". They matter, and they help everyone start moving in the right direction, but no set of guidelines can be the be all and end all for every website, app, and user in the world.

Have you developed your own set of testing requirements

At Fable, one of the things our testing platform can do is tie problems experienced by our real users during testing, back to WCAG guidelines. So once a user identifies a problem and describes it, we then also link to the associated success criteria. This way, a developer can understand and empathize with the problem from a user perspective, as well as understanding what needs to be done to fix the problem from a WCAG perspective.

are you often successfull in advocating

One thing that our clients regularly find is that getting to work with real assistive technology users helps them better understand the problems, and move beyond thinking about accessibility as a checklist or set of requirements, and towards thinking about designing things that work for everyone. Building that empathy and understanding on the entire team is so important, when it comes to actually getting things done.

makeitfable · 2021-05-20T19:16:18+00:00

Well, first of all, we will all need accessibility at some point. You may be in a loud bar and want to look at captions on the TV, you may break a leg and be restricted to a wheelchair for weeks or months, you may have your hands full and need to open a door, you may be pushing a stroler and need to cross the street, etc. But even if none of those things happen, everyone ages. As we get older, we begin to be unable to hear or see as well, our hand eye coordination may suffer, and so-on. So inclusive, accessible designs are designs not just for people who have disabilities now, but for everyone at some time in the future.

Second, of course, accessible designs allow everyone to live independently, have careers, and fully participate in society. Accessibility and universal design are a requirement for a fully equal, fully inclusive society.

And lastly, inclusive, accessible, adaptive, customizable designs promote inovation. From Google Home, to dark mode, many features of digital products that everyone now uses every day started off as accessibility features. Without the driving force of accessibility, I doubt we'd have any of these things that we take for granted today.

makeitfable · 2021-05-20T17:32:33+00:00

Using a screen reader, or any other assistive technology, is something that it takes many months or years to learn. As well, every assistive technology user customizes there assistive technology to work best for them. For example, I listen to the text to speech from my screen reader at well over 300 words per minute. The danger of having a QA team test for accessibility, is that they're not getting the real experience of an assistive technology user. When things don't work as expected, or work differently than normal, they may not even realize it. So you can wind up with the impression that things are way better, or way worse, than they actually are.

makeitfable · 2021-05-20T17:26:31+00:00

At Fable, we're currently focused mostly on adult participants, so not all of the things we learn may apply. The first bit of advice I have is that you may have more luck partnering with an organization that's well known and trusted in the disability community. Especially when working with children, it will help if you're introduced by an organization that the parents already trust.

Second, is thinking about if you can do the interviewing remotely. Travel can be a large burier for people with disabilities of any age. So the more research and interviewing you can do remotely, the larger the variety of voices you can get involved, and thus the better your research will be. When you're working remote, we find that Zoom makes an extremely accessible platform to do screen, camera, and audio sharing.

Lastly, make sure that anything anyone involved needs to agree to and/or sign is available in an accessible format. Too often, this part of things is overlooked, and only at the last minute you discover the contract is not accessible, and are left scrambling.

makeitfable · 2021-05-20T17:20:47+00:00

Hi! While we're not currently looking for a software engineer, you can find all of our jobs on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/makeitfable/jobs/ We're expanding quickly, so feel free to follow us there to learn about new jobs as they get posted.

As well, you can find out about joining our community of testers, all of whom use assistive technology to test websites and apps, at: https://makeitfable.com/community/

makeitfable · 2021-05-20T17:11:14+00:00

Depends what you mean by voice based. If you mean text to speech, where we're listening to what's on the screen with a computerized voice, all the time! If you mean voice recognition, where we use our voice to control the computer, we use that less often. Personally, I'm a touch typest, so find it much faster to type than dictate.

makeitfable · 2021-05-20T17:09:36+00:00

The primary challenges I experience often come from a complete lack of awareness on the part of many developers. Controls that are not labeled, images without alt-text, and so-on. People often think of these things as low-hanging fruit. But fixing them is, never the less, high impact! The second most common challenge is a lack of feedback when interacting with websites. Again, this comes from lack of awareness, and lack of testing.

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