When I was 10 years old, I remember
sitting at the piano bench and rubbing my right eye and all
of a sudden noticing that there were large spots of distortion
and darkness appearing in my left eye out of nowhere.
After a few scary weeks of being rushed around
to various different retinal specialists,
I was diagnosed with a rare and irreversible visual condition.
Until I was 14, I was able to compensate with the good vision
that remained in my right eye.
It kind of took over at that point
until I was just wrapping up the eighth grade.
And all of a sudden, the same condition struck my right eye
and I became legally blind within a week.
I was just about to start high school and all of a sudden I
could no longer read my books.
I could no longer see the text that
was written on the blackboard.
And I could no longer distinguish my friends' faces
in the hallway, which was honestly just heartbreaking
to me.
I was so, so grateful and so lucky
to have the support of my incredible family
who would literally read to me after school.
And even in some cases, they would single-handedly
teach me courses, like math.
But this heavy reliance on other people
was honestly the definition of disability to me
and I hated it.
So naturally, I took every opportunity
I could to regain independence.
And an early discovery was the availability
of some of my textbooks on tapes read by volunteers.
And these were 4-track track cassette tapes
that were only playable on a dedicated device
and it was, shall we say, temperamental.
And this was my very first book-- my world history
book-- on tape.
And my first assignment was to read pages 95 to 121.
And at least I had a bit of comic relief listening
to the volunteers attempt to describe the maps in the book.
That was a real treat.
So later, we were able to improve my access
to my textbooks by using a combination of what were then
emerging technologies.
So we'd buy the textbooks, we'd stripped the bindings off
of them, we'd feed the pages through a high-speed scanner,
we would then convert them using OCR software,
and then I could access the file electronically
on my laptop using text-to-speech
that would read aloud to me.
And this was my earliest step into the world
of modern assistive technology.
And while it involved destroying a lot of expensive books
and dealing with the quirks of OCR software,
it's no exaggeration to call it life-changing.
And since then, my vision has continued
to fluctuate a little bit and I've
been able to figure out the right mix
of assistive technology to really regain my independence.
And this profound difference that this is made in my life
has driven me into a career in technology
and has fueled my passion for accessibility ever since.
At this time, I should mention that like many individuals who
are classified as legally blind, I do still
have some functioning vision.
So specifically, my peripheral vision
is all still intact, which enables
me to walk around and navigate without a cane.
And over the years I've been able to regain a small field
of central vision.
It's kind of like tunnel vision.
So this is roughly how I see the world.
And I'll go ahead and show you a quick demo
of how I interact with Gmail, just as one example.
So I have a high contrast beam enabled to invert the colors.
And I can go ahead and zoom in on the browser
to increase the size of the text,
so that I can use that tiny field to read
just a few letters at a time.
And then, when I want to actually read the content,
I can use text-to-speech software
to read the content of the email aloud.
Do we have volume on this?
I don't think so.
That's OK.
It read the content of the email aloud.
I promise you that.
All right, so as that actually works--
and you'll get a demo of that again later-- having
that audio feedback, that text-to-speech,
it's just so much more efficient and so much less painful
for me to be able to read that way versus using
that tiny essential field to visually scan
the content of the entire page.
So that's my story, but I'm just one person who hugely benefits
from assisted technology.
15 percent of the world's population--
over a billion people-- have some form
of permanent disability.
And 10% to 20% of those people have significant difficulty
functioning.
And disability disproportionately
impacts people in developing countries.
And we're all more likely to face disability and experience
it as we get older.
So these numbers relate to the permanent disabilities,
but at any given time anybody could also find themselves
with a temporary impairment, for example, a broken arm.
And on top of this, we often find ourselves
in what we consider situational impairments, for instance,
if you're carrying something in one arm.
So by creating software which accommodates many users
with disabilities, we're also creating
software that is more usable in more situations by literally
everyone.
Accessible design is simply better design
and here are a few examples.
So I rely on text-to-speech software,
because of my visual condition.
But my friend who gets migraines relies on it
so that he can listen to the words being read aloud
as he closes his eyes.
Video captions are essential to anyone
with a hearing impairment.
But they're also really useful in many other situations,
for example, if you're sitting in a quiet office environment
and you forgot your headphones and you
need to catch up on a video.
Someone with a motor impairment might rely
on dictation for text input.
At the same time, somebody who's driving in the car
might rely on a conversational interface
to dictate a text message.
And the spelling suggestion software
that we've all come to know and love
was originally developed for people with dyslexia.
So accessibility has a lot of breadth to it.
And luckily, web-based software is really flexible
and really adaptable by design.
So we get a lot of built-in accessibility
if we keep a few key concepts in mind.
And those concepts can generally be grouped into three buckets--
focus and keyboard, semantics, and flexible UI.
So let's start with the keyboard,
still it's still fundamental to web accessibility.
If I'm somebody who can't use a mouse,
or if I'm just in a hurry and I'm
trying to fill out that credit card form so you grab that sale
item online, I need to be able to interact with the UI just
using the keyboard.
And there's a lot of depth to this subject, which
unfortunately, I can't go into in my short amount of time
up here.
But I'd like to share one quick pet peeve with you all.
So if you're using a reset style sheet that removes focus style,
please add them back.
Otherwise, you'll be putting your users
in an unfortunate game of focus roulette, also known as,
will pressing the spacebar uncheck
that spam-me-forever box or submit the form?
So it's basically the worst game ever.
Next up is semantics.
And I really encourage you all to test out
your site with a screen reader to understand
what that experience is like just with audio feedback.
There are free screen readers, as well as
a built in screen readers, across all the major platforms
on both desktop and mobile.
And screen readers, as well as other types
of assistive technology, really depend on semantics and labels.
And the web platform provides a lot of support
for expressing the semantics of labels.
And to find out more on the subject,
I highly recommend that you all attend Leonie Watson's talk
tomorrow at 1:30.
But to give you a quick taste of what
it's like to use a screen reader when things are working well,
I'll show you a quick demo of what
it's like to go through this forum
and just make sure the audio is up.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
-One way, radio button.
You are currently on a radio button.
To select this option, press Control-Option-Space.
Round Trip, selected radio button.
Multi-City City radio button.
Press Multi City selected radio button.
Heading level 2.
Where ya headed, mate?
Full name.
[END PLAYBACK]
Great.
So the third bucket is ensuring that the visual UI is flexible.
And I'll go into a few examples of what I mean by that.
First, we can't use just color or just
sound to convey important information,
because not everyone's going to be able to hear or see it.
So in this example, we're using the color red
to identify that there is an error in the input here.
But if you're somebody who can't perceive color,
this is really not all that helpful.
So in this case, adding some error messaging in there
is a win, because we're able to provide more context
to all users about what's going wrong here,
including screen reader users as well as braille display users.
Next step is a subject that's very near and dear
to me which is magnification.
And I zoom in and out of the browser level about 100 times
a day.
And honestly, it can get really frustrating if when I zoom in,
that breaks down the page layout.
So the great thing is that responsive design is basically
all about making things work at what amount
to different zoom levels.
So you kind of get a two for one deal there.
But it's still really important to check
to make sure that your site is responding the right way,
and here's a nice example of how the Fluent page scales really
nicely as I zoom into the level that works
best for my particular vision.
The last item to cover is that we
have to ensure that we have sufficient contrast
between the text and its background color.
Up to 50% of US adults have worse than 20/20 vision, which
could mean that they might have difficulty reading text that
has poor contrast like I do.
Even a 19-year-old who's trying to read a cell phone
screen in the bright sunlight is going
to have a much better experience if the contrast is stronger.
And Kathy O'Connor is going to be
diving into this subject much more deeply today at noon.
These days there are a handful of different types
of automated accessibility testing tools out there.
And they're great to incorporate into your broader testing
strategies to help catch low hanging fruit
and also to help ensure that accessibility doesn't fall off
the radar.
And we're just putting the finishing touches
on a free web accessibility course that's going
to be available on Udacity.
So if you're interested in having us notify you when this
course launches in the next couple of months,
go to g.co/webaccessibilitycourse
and let us know.
Now more than ever, accessibility
should be a core consideration for all products-- any size
and any level of maturity.
There's truly no replacement for building accessibility
in every phase of the development cycle.
Like a lot of other things, just a little bit
of extra effort and intention up front
will help you to avoid extensive rewrites down the line.
And while I hope that I've convinced you
that making your site more accessible
will benefit everyone, for someone
like me can really make a world of difference.
I think of disability not as the immutable property of a person,
but as the unsuccessful interaction
between an individual with a health
condition and their personal and environmental factors.
So I think back to my early days when
this was really true for me.
And the only way that I had to access my books
was to have somebody read them aloud to me.
And the amazing thing is now that as more and more content
shifts into online and electronic formats,
this really doesn't have to happen.
Barriers don't need to exist anymore,
because I can customize my situation and my set-up
and access things the way that work best for me.
Accessible design is simply better design,
and it's going to help to drive quality and equality on the web
and beyond.
Thank you.