- [Grace] Hello, and welcome to the first installment
of "Ask the Expert."
My name is Grace Kirkley,
and I'm a marketing analyst here at Deque.
This month I'm joined by Mark Lasser,
Senior Accessibility Consultant at Deque.
Mark, thanks so much for joining.
- [Mark] My pleasure.
- [Grace] Awesome.
So before we get into some accessibility-specific questions,
I wanted to ask you more about your background
and how you got into the accessibility field
in the first place.
- [Mark] Yeah, sure Grace.
I actually became blind as an adult
about five or six years ago.
Happened very suddenly
with a very rare optic nerve condition.
And at the time I was teaching accounting
at the University of Colorado in Denver,
and thinking about doing a career as a CPA.
But decided to change my mind when I realized
how difficult it is both learning and teaching
assistive technologies.
And so instead I went into the accessibility fields
after I rehabbed myself,
and went through the process firsthand.
Really had a new perspective on how difficult
these things are, especially when they're designed
without accessibility in mind.
And so I looked for work in accessibility,
and initially took a position with Charter Communications,
a big cable company.
And then decided to take a different path
through Starbucks Corporation Accessibility in Seattle.
And decided that 300 days of rain a year wasn't really
my speed, and was offered a position with Deque
that allowed me to relocate to not-quite so rainy weather,
and here I am.
- [Grace] Yeah, you traded that rain for a lot of snow.
(chuckles)
- [Mark] A little, honestly it's not as bad.
People in Michigan complain about the snow.
I think one season of Seattle weather,
they come running back to Michigan.
- [Grace] Probably true.
We do like to complain.
So Mark, you've been a great resource
to the marketing team on many occasions.
Always there to help us double-check some of our work,
and make sure that it's as accessible as possible.
And you're also a writer yourself.
So what's a tip that content writers and contributors
should keep in mind?
- [Mark] I think the big ones are you know,
if you're trying to explain something, keep it simple.
Don't try to impress people with fancy vocabulary.
I know how to do that, I went to Duke as an undergrad,
and I have my share of big words.
But I think generally speaking,
keep things real.
Write the way you talk.
And don't try to overly impress everybody
by how smart you are.
The objective of what you're writing is to get
the other person to understand what it is
you're saying, and that's the most important thing.
- [Grace] Absolutely.
So part of your role as a senior accessibility consultant
is helping perform audits on websites and mobile apps.
What's an issue that you see come up really often
in that work, and how would you solve for it?
- [Mark] Well, there's a lot, of course.
And it just depends, of course.
But the ones we see probably most often
are missing alternative texts, which is the
descriptions behind a picture where it's really imperative
that we know what the image is,
and if it just say 3985.jpeg,
that's not very helpful.
The other one we see a lot of
are links that don't have discernible descriptions
or texts that we can know what it is.
One way that a screenreader navigates a screen
is to look at a list of links.
And if every link on the page says "click here,"
that's not very helpful.
We just get this list that says,
"Click here, click here, click here, click here."
Instead, when those links describe what they are,
whether it's different colors and sizes and styles
of T-shirts or jackets on the clothing store,
or a description of a type of cable connector
that we're looking for on Amazon
to connect our hard drive to a laptop
which I just had to order,
those things need descriptions for the links
that make a lot of sense.
And when they do, that's massively helpful.
And then if there's one more thing,
it would be things like landmarks and headings.
Things that allow a user to know what's going on.
When a sighted person looks at a webpage,
they don't read every word on the webpage.
You scan it.
We're natural scanners.
And a screenreader really is no different.
We don't wanna read every word on the webpage
to define what we're looking for.
When there's good use of headings
and good use of landmarks,
we can pop around the page to the area
that is what we're actually looking for,
and then get more granular and read it in more detail.
So those are the three of the biggest things.
- [Grace] Awesome.
Those are some great things to look out for.
It can be difficult to get your higher-ups
to start to care about accessibility in the first place.
And then further on, to grow and scale
your accessibility program.
What's a way, in your mind,
to get that accessibility buy-in
from your boss or your higher-ups?
- [Mark] The easiest way is with violence.
I'm very much kidding.
No, don't do that.
The way to do it is really through various ways
of developing empathy.
It's very common to run into executives
that have sympathy for people with disabilities,
but they may not have empathy for disabilities.
And so what we really need to do is to help
them build the bridge over so they can actually understand
that the person, whether it's their customer
or their employee who's trying to get something
to be accessible,
wants to do it, can do it.
They just need a little bit of accommodation as to how
it gets done.
And it might not be a person with a permanent disability,
it could be people with temporary disabilities.
When I lived in Colorado,
the handicap spots or the disability parking spots
were not very full in the summer time.
Come winter time, when everybody's up on the slopes,
every weekend, all of a sudden,
those spaces became in very, very high demand.
And usually were at over-capacity.
Because of the number of people that would break a leg
during skiing, just based on the volume
of people that ski in Colorado.
So the empathy is a big piece of that,
and there's a lot of ways of doing it.
It can be empathy labs,
it can just be some very good conversations,
it can be bringing in speakers that help them
and I think that understanding that
the size of the disability market
also is a big factor.
People are often completely floored when they find out
that people with disabilities
is a larger group than the millennials,
it's a larger group than African Americans,
it's a larger groups than Latin Americans.
And most every company,
they're so focused on getting market share
that when you start to point out that
this is a piece of market that they're currently ignoring
and the size of it,
that'll help gain their attention.
The latter is not so much an empathy play,
but I think the two combined work pretty well.
- [Grace] Absolutely.
We often hear that people are intimidated by
the manual testing aspect of accessibility testing,
but manual testing as we know is necessary
to find issues that automation just can't catch.
What's your advice to someone who's just starting out
and wanting to dip their toes into the manual testing
side of things?
- [Mark] Well, first, I wouldn't try to tell them
it's not intimidating.
I think to some degree that's true, it is.
But in the rest of our life,
how many things that we have done in our lives
are intimidating at first, and then we get over it?
It could be something as extreme as skydiving,
it could be something as little sort of drama
as beginning an undergraduate school program.
But like everything, we face all the things
intimidating us by just taking one step at a time
and setting good expectations.
One is not going to be proficient in the screenreader
the first day they use it, or a color contrast tool.
You take one step at a time.
You spend a little bit of time every day working on it,
and when I say a little bit of time,
I mean like ten or 15 minutes at first.
You don't need to dedicate like eight hours of your day
to learning some of those manual testing tools.
You'll get there, just work on it a little bit at a time,
and you'll figure a lot of it out.
- [Grace] That's a great point.
Just taking it off in little consumable chunks
certainly makes the bigger picture much easier to consume.
- [Mark] Absolutely.
- [Grace] What's an accessibility tip that somebody
could implement right after they finish listening
to this conversation?
- [Mark] There's two that I come to think about.
One is if you use any of the Microsoft products
like Word, PowerPoint, or Excel,
they have an accessibility checker.
They're typically found in the review ribbon,
and if you go to that ribbon,
it's usually the same ribbon
that includes your spellchecker.
Couple of things just after the spellchecker
is an accessibility checker.
And it's one click of a button on your document,
your Word document, or your PowerPoint
or your Excel workbook.
It will flag accessibility problems that might exist there.
And in general it will also tell you how to fix them.
So that's just one click, and a good habit to get into.
Just like you always spell check,
try to always accessibility check,
and you'll learn a lot when you do that.
That's one good way of doing it.
Another thing you could do right away,
if you use social media,
is that Facebook actually allows you to pretty easily
add alternative texts to your images.
So if you post some funny picture or a meme,
and you want other people who are blind and low vision
to be able to know what it is,
you can click on the picture,
and then in the "More Options" there's this thing
that says "Add Alternative Texts."
And you can replace it.
Facebook tries to use artificial intelligence
to kind of figure out what it is,
but it's not usually very accurate.
So you can replace that alternative text
with your actual not artificial intelligence,
but real intelligence, and that's another really easy
thing that you can do right away.
Of course, the other thing you can do is install
the AX extension, and check your websites
using the AX extension.
But that's probably another session for you and me
to talk about later.
- [Grace] Sounds good.
Yeah, the accessibility checkers are really handy.
I love using them when I'm working in Word and PowerPoint,
especially if I'm fixing slides for a webinar
that we're doing.
It's just an easy way to get into the habit
of checking for accessibility.
Just as you would check for grammar and punctuation,
it's just as important.
- [Mark] Grace, what are the things that you
most commonly find when you do the accessibility checker
for PowerPoint?
Is there one thing that it tends to flag most often?
- [Grace] Yeah, that's a good question.
Definitely duplicate titles on slides.
So something that I've built into my process
for creating slide decks is making each of the titles
accurate descriptions, so not having the same title
for every slide that's describing different information.
Alt text for any images,
and checking the reading order.
That's an interesting one,
and pretty cool the way that PowerPoint can
display that is in what order different elements
on your slide will, I believe, replay back
through a screenreader.
- [Mark] That's right.
- [Grace] So making sure your title,
and then your body content, and then any images
or textboxes that come up after that.
- [Mark] That's right.
The way that you visually see the order
on a PowerPoint slide is not necessarily the order
in which it will read.
It will read in the order that it was created,
so if you edit things in the middle,
visually it looks like it's in the middle,
but in PowerPoint with the screenreader,
it may think that that's something coming in later.
- [Grace] Awesome.
All right, Mark.
Thank you so much for your insights here,
and taking the time to answer some questions.
I really enjoyed our conversation.
- [Mark] My pleasure.
- [Grace] Any questions for Mark in the future,
ask the expert segment.
We'd love to hear them.
So please email me at grace.kirkley@deque.com,
and we'll get to them next time.
Thanks, and we hope you enjoyed.