- Hey, everybody, super excited to chat with you today.
We have some representatives
from the Native Mobile Team at Deque,
building out Axe DevTools Mobile.
We wanted to chat with you today
about Global Accessibility Awareness Day
and share some of the journeys that brought us here today.
First, let's do a round of introductions.
My name is Kim.
I am the Native Mobile Team lead.
I have an iOS background
and have been coding for over nine years.
Paul.
- [Woman] Hi, I am from California.
I have an Android background.
I'm a developer and I am new here.
- Excellent, thank you, Rachel.
- Hi, I'm Rachel.
I'm the product owner for Axe DevTools Mobile.
I've been at Deque for three years
and I've been coding since I graduated from college
and was working full time at Deque.
- Yay, Devanshu.
- All right.
Hey, I am Devanshu
and I am one of the Android developers with Deque
and I have been with Deque
for more than two and a half years.
So, you know.
- Very nice.
And Patrick.
- Hey, I'm Patrick.
I'm a Android developer.
I've been doing this for about five years
and like Paul, I'm pretty new here at Deque,
but yeah, that's me.
- Excellent, thanks everyone.
So just wanted to highlight
on why digital accessibility is important.
I feel like it's important to level the playing field
for people with disabilities
who rely on assistive technology
or features within the operating system
to achieve basic tasks
that the majority of us take for granted.
Accessibility in the mobile space
has gotten quite the highlight recently
with the 2020 pandemic.
Many services were halted,
goods that people required to live
became incredibly harder to access,
and then with the mobile device
that's designed to fit in your pocket
and be with you anywhere you go,
why has accessibility been left out
of the conversation for so long?
If you feel the same way
make sure your team is doing what you can do
to include accessibility in your product.
$2.4 trillion in annual retail sales
comes from mobile devices.
Within that, the disability community
touches about $1.8 trillion,
and that's only eCommerce.
What about financial, insurance, healthcare,
business and more?
The list is endless.
Accessibility matters,
your business could depend on it.
So we have some questions for the group.
The first question,
how did you get into this career
and how would you recommend others do it?
Devanshu, let's start with you.
- Yeah, sure.
So, very honestly, like you know,
it all started with the Axe Android Library.
I was talking to my team lead
when I was not here, but my present team lead,
we worked earlier together
and then he told me what work they do at Deque.
And then I was actually really amazed
because before joining Deque,
I just knew that, okay,
there is something in Android
a property called content description,
and that was all accessibility meant for me.
But moving forward,
when I joined Deque,
it was a whole big box of knowledge
that I had to learn
and then I had to feel
or empathize the accessibility, the need of accessibility.
So, that's how I came into that field,
but every day of it
every minute of it, I love it
because it's something which I'm doing that makes me happy.
- Beautiful, Patrick, you're next?
- Yeah, so I guess kind of what got me into accessibility
was I fell into a little bit of the material design
rabbit hole.
So that started me on trying to find ways
to make apps more usable
and apps easier for your general user,
and in a lot of the material design concepts,
they were talking about how it makes things more accessible.
So I got a little bit interested
in how that plays into things and why that matters
which led me to eventually kind of digging into it
a bit more, and similar to Devanshu,
talked to someone here
and heard that at Deque
we were making accessibility testing software
and that sounded very interesting to me,
and I wanted to learn a little bit more about that
and learn about how to make apps more usable,
not just for people
who can easily use Android device with sight
and without a need for help in interacting with the app,
but just in general, making apps easier to use
is something I'm definitely very interested in.
So that's kind of what landed me here.
- Very good, Paul.
- [Woman] Well, really the some of my work
has been kind of interested in accessibility.
I am deaf, so I need things to be accessible.
Anyways, so on Twitter,
the usability of Twitter for their spaces
or like there's like that sound feature
that they just added.
And I cannot participate in that.
I'm not able to,
I mean they do provide captions,
but I can't use my voice
and I can't express anything.
So I was developing an app that was text to speech
and curious how it would be used
or be able to function on Twitter
and it is limiting
because it's like you could use the text to speech
but you don't always know who's talking.
Then today with social media on all our phones,
typically, there's a video, you post it really quickly,
no one really thinks to add captions
and then me and the other deaf people are stuck,
and so it's important for me to educate
the Twitter community that there needs to be captions
on their videos.
And that's kind of how I fell into Deque,
I found that call on Twitter
and that's how I kind of fell to where I am now.
- Very good.
The power of social media, for sure.
Rachel, you're up.
- Awesome!
I was studying computer science
at the University of Michigan,
and I got the opportunity to be a part of a project team
that was building a Android application
for indoor navigation in one of the buildings on campus
specifically focusing on people with visual disabilities.
And that's how I kind of fell into
and discovered the entire world of accessibility,
and that was super like a pivot point in my life
because at that time,
while I was in college studying computer science,
I had no idea why what I wanted to do
like the field of software development is so huge
and so many different avenues you could go down.
So joining that team really like helped me find my passion
and find a career that I can be passionate about
and make an actual difference in the world.
And I found my way to Deque
via some networking connections,
via the professor that I worked with on that team
and now I'm here and very happy to be here.
- Awesome!
It's so wild to me how everyone has a very different path
into accessibility
but the passion,
and I think this goes for all of Deque,
but the passion for accessibility
and making a difference
is really what's brought us here together.
So love that.
(chuckles)
Any other closing thoughts
before we jump to question number two?
Okay.
What tips can you give everyone
to make accessibility difference in the mobile space?
Rachel, let's start with you.
- Yeah, my advice for making a difference
in accessibility in the mobile space
is if you are a mobile developer,
just doing your own research
and learning about accessibility
and being an advocate for it
that really makes a big difference.
Everyone has to start somewhere
and everyone has to learn.
So even you as one individual player
can really make a difference.
- Yeah, definitely, Patrick.
- Yeah, so kind of along the same lines
I think going and doing a lot of research
is a really good way to start.
There's plenty of resources out there
and a really easy one would be to read through
the WCAG documents or through material design
but also I think it's important
to when you're using applications,
try to find things that you also don't enjoy
about those applications.
Say for example, there's a part of the app
that's very confusing to you
when you're interacting with it,
take a mental note of those kinds of things
and when you are going to develop,
or you're going to say you're a QA tester,
and you're going to test an app
see if your apps that you're working with
do those same things, commit those same sins
and now you have a arsenal of knowledge
to go and make those problems go away.
So if there's something that you know
that is typically inaccessible in apps that you use,
you can know not to do that
when you go and implement those same features.
- Absolutely,
Paul.
- [Woman] I had completely lost my train of thought
but I was actually thinking of like research
like one mentioned.
I have not done much research
until I actually got into this field.
Like I started doing research and testing,
like on this feature
that I was speaking about the Speak Back feature.
I've only used it once and it has captions.
I thought it was really neat,
but I went in there and I was trying to play around with it
and then my team taught me a lot about it as well.
So it really does make a difference.
- Awesome, yeah.
I know from my perspective especially
knowledge sharing has been huge for this team
and in the accessibility space as well.
Technology's changing every single day,
so definitely a need to help keep us all up to date.
Devanshu, let's jump to you.
- All right, so in my opinion,
it's about first of all, caring.
Caring and be inclusive of everyone.
I mean, my app, for example,
if I have an app,
can it be used by everyone?
By everyone I mean, my 80 users or things like that.
And moreover, it's not about just the 80,
there are accessibility technology
like TalkBack or Switch Access.
It's more about spreading the joy of technology.
Social media, for example.
People want to use it, they use it.
Why not everyone should use it?
That's the thought process that should be behind it.
I have a little story.
Actually, I have two stories.
If you folks don't mind, I have two stories.
So the first story is very recent I was at CVS
and this young gentleman
he was on a wheelchair
and I was in one of the aisles
and he was kind of fast on his wheelchair
and I kind of started a conversation with him
and I was wearing the same t-shirt
this "Accessibility for Good."
And this guy, he was very interested
and he said,
"Oh you work for an accessibility organization?"
And I said, "Yes."
And he said,
"It's just great if people start caring about these things."
It's not that people have to advocate for it,
each and everyone should at least think about it.
If it's simple applications,
our day to day being software engineers
we have to be inclusive of everyone.
I mean, we have to take care
of the people who will be using our application
using an accessibility technology.
And the other story that I have is of my trip back in India.
While I was visiting India to my home
I got a bunch of people to work with
or actually teach them the accessibility.
Different regions actually in this whole world,
different regions have different perspective
of accessibility.
In some regions or in some countries,
accessibility just means that blue colored logo on airports
or in parking lots and et cetera.
I mean, maximum of the people don't even know
that one can use a phone using a TalkBack or a VoiceOver
in case of Apple phones.
And that led,
I mean, that was a kind of a shock to me
because me working in an accessibility company
I felt responsible.
I felt responsible to teach people
and if I teach 10 people,
maybe they'll go teach 10 more people.
and that way, many more people will know
how someone who cannot see can use a mobile application.
As Kim said, in this recent pandemic,
the mobile application as well as the websites,
I mean, the usage was very high.
Due to the lockdown, et cetera,
no one could go to banks
and it's really difficult to access the banks
when the callback or the callback time
is very huge for the service lines.
But at the same time, if there is a mobile application
the thing can be done pretty fast,
getting checks or transferring money, et cetera, everything.
Now this is just a basic example of day to day life.
So that's what I thought
everyone should at least know about this.
I mean, everyone should at least know
that a common thing,
a mobile phone in today's world,
in this time has become so common.
In India, there is a huge user base of Android.
I mean, people have all versions of Android with them,
because it's cheap
and the point that if a person is on a wheelchair
and he has a phone attached to it,
will he be able to use it?
Or how can he even use it?
I mean, that's the line of thinking
that the developers should take
and also it becomes a responsibility
to spread the knowledge
and teach people, how can one use TalkBack
or how can one use Switch Access and things like that.
Thanks for hearing me out.
- Yeah, thank you for sharing.
That's so insightful when you see real world experience
and see everything that people are experiencing firsthand.
It really puts things in perspective.
Sorry, little taken aback here.
(laughing)
- Yeah, yeah.
It kind of broke my heart.
I mean, the things that I saw,
it's just that people should care.
That's all from where it will start.
I mean, be inclusive,
that's the basic starting point.
- Yeah, absolutely.
I know when we were talking about this
before we jumped on this meeting and hit record,
it was brought up that anything
that you do today as you learn
will be better than what it was yesterday.
Anything you do to the product
to make it more inclusive
will be better than what you had yesterday.
And those little things really do add up
and make a huge difference
for somebody who relies on assistive technology
or some other form of accessibility
(chuckles)
to access your product and make it better for somebody.
Any other thoughts on this question
before we jump to the closing?
- [Woman] Yeah, Paul here.
So I was thinking about captions.
So you know captions are typically on TVs, on videos,
so if you've noticed that there's a video with no captions
you should remind them, remind those companies
and tell them, "Hey, there should be captions."
So that way it makes them realize
like it is essential
versus just me always having to remind people.
It would be great if everyone can do it,
that I'll save my time.
- Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
It really does take a village.
If you see something that would make something easier
for somebody else, just say something,
take two seconds out of your day.
(chuckles)
Awesome, thank you everyone for sharing.
Thank you for your amazing work
in making the mobile space more inclusive
and thank you for those listening
for your interests in the accessibility space.
I hope to see mobile accessibility
continue to grow, make a difference,
and until next time.