E63 – Interview with Eric Bailey – Part 2

Eric tells us accessibility shouldn't be just technical curiosity. It's about people. Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules podcast. This is Episode 63. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey! This show is for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript head out to https://a11yrules.com Nic: Welcome back everyone. In this episode I’m continuing my conversation with Eric Bailey. Last week was really quite good: we spoke about ways to reduce client hostility, which involved relationship building. We spoke about implementing accessibility by stealth, because it really should be part of your skillset, and do check out the episode if you haven’t already.  Eric, welcome back. Eric: And what my favorite word was…(laughing) Nic: Yes? What was your favorite word? Eric: “Cromulent”, which is down on paper forever now. (laughing) Nic: Right, well, going from “cromulent”, building on that, Eric, let’s start the show with something really positive. What is your greatest achievement in terms of web accessibility? Eric: My greatest achievement? Oof…I helped maintain the A11y Project started by Dave Rupert many years ago to create a centralized repository of accessibility information.  It was one of those things where I did a little bit of work and got some attention and was “called to the big leagues”, I guess. I was asked to become a maintainer and while I want to sink a lot more time into it, I do think it’s a great resource in that it just sits there and points to other great resources. So, being able to ensure that that stays alive, I’m very happy to be able to contribute to it. Nic: I think one of the problems accessibility has is that the information is so fragmented, all over the place, and the work of the accessibility project is so important because it centralizes a lot of that information. It reminds me in some ways of Yahoo!, way, way before Yahoo! was a Yahoo! we’ve known (inaudible), it was quite instrumental, I think, in making things happen. I view the accessibility project that way. Eric: Thank you. Hopefully, we never turn into the Yahoo! where good ideas go to die (laughing). Nic: Maybe you’ll become the Yahoo! that makes you a billionaire. Eric: Yeah… Nic: If that happens, please don’t forget me. Eric: Oh no, not totally (laughing). I’m still bitter about Yahoo! Pipes getting killed. I used that service. I think the fragmentation is a very interesting thing because technology moves so fast and front-end even faster, and sometimes this information is solid information but just for even that six-month window when it was relevant and then it may turn into an anti pattern.  And that’s very… Last episode I spoke about getting increasingly more unsure of if what I am saying and hearing is correct and accurate, and that’s part of it, can I trust this source? Has it been battle-tested and put through the full range of every screenreader and browser combination that’s supported? I’m going to get a little depressing for a second here but I’ve seen more than my fair share of “accessible” out-of-the-box solutions that vaguely work in VoiceOver but that completely fall apart with NVDA or JAWS. Nic:  Or are just that, “focus styles, what’s that?” Eric: That’s my pet project… (laughing) Nic:  I came across a site the other day that really amazed me. They went and defined the focus style, no, they went and defined the background color on the link to be the exact same color as the focus style on the default browser outline. So, you could not actually see the default browser… Eric: Oh, that’s perfect! (laughing) Wow! Nic:  I think that took some doing, to do that… Eric: Yeah, there’s some situations where I’m not even mad, I’m just curious, like, what happened here? Nic:  Sometimes you go beyond anger and you just have to shake your head and laugh. Eric