015: Web Accessibility: An a11y Special with Epic Guests

📋 Discussion Points

Why a11y matters

What is web a11y and why do we care?JS frameworks/React and a11y

A11y in the developer community

A11y has become seemingly more popular and more mainstream. Why?At the same time, the state of a11y on the web has not really improved (see: WebAIM million).

It's our (collective) job to make the web-accessible.

How to bake accessibility into your workflow How does Netlify test for accessibility while building the product? (see blog post)Accessibility as acceptance criteriaHow does Netlify prioritize accessibility tech debt?How to champion accessibility at work

Where to start?

📝 Transcript

Previously on Remotely Interesting:  

[00:00:04] Phil: [00:00:04] I think you should all reassess all of the conversations you've ever had with me and just think about how it really went. 

[00:00:12] Cassidy: [00:00:12] Hello, and welcome to Remotely Interesting. 

[00:00:14] Phil: [00:00:14] This is remotely interesting. 

[00:00:16] Amberley: [00:00:16] Well, that seems a little presumptuous. 

[00:00:18] Leslie: [00:00:18] No, no, no, that's the name of the show.

[00:00:20] Music: [00:00:20] [Intro music] 

[00:00:28] Cassidy: [00:00:28] Hello everybody, and welcome back. We're going to be talking about accessibility today. Also known as A11Y, which I know means accessibility, but I always read it as "Eleventy," like the static site framework and it throws me off every single time. But accessibility is important and we also have some team members from the rest of Netlify who work on this a lot.

[00:00:53] So hello everybody. 

[00:00:56] Amberley: [00:00:56] Hey! Howdy, howdy. 

[00:00:59] Phil: [00:00:59] Is everyone comfortable with using the word numeronym? 

[00:01:03] Amberley: [00:01:03] No. 

[00:01:03] Phil: [00:01:03] I'm very happy - numeronym, numeronym. 

[00:01:06] Jason: [00:01:06] I'm comfortable with you using that word.  

[00:01:07] Cassidy: [00:01:07] Yeah, it sounds good when you do it.   

[00:01:09] Phil: [00:01:09] When I realized we were talking about accessibility and we were going to see it written like that, I was just excited at the prospect of being able to say the word numeroym.

[00:01:17]Amberley: [00:01:17] Can we just point every time we need to say it and you'll just say it for all of us? 

[00:01:21] Phil: [00:01:21] I'm at your service. 

[00:01:23] Amberley: [00:01:23] Perfect. 

[00:01:24] Cassidy: [00:01:24] We could do some ASR with that. 

[00:01:26] Jason: [00:01:26] [Laughter] That's - welcome to Phil says soothing words. Okay, so what are we actually talking about today? We're talking about kind of accessibility in general, but I think maybe one of the most important things to start with is just, and I'm asking this, not because I want to know, but to set the stage here, okay? Why does accessibility matter?

[00:01:49] Cassidy: [00:01:49] [Jokingly] You really don't want to know this. 

[00:01:51] Phil: [00:01:51] Who wants that? That's a hot potato. 

[00:01:54] Leslie, do you want to, do you want to open the bidding for why accessibility matters?

[00:02:00] Leslie: [00:02:00] That's a meaty one. [Laughter] I like it. I like it. You know, I always think of it as building software for humans, right? And so at like the very base level, what we're building as engineers are things that people can use, right? So we probably want to reach as many of those people as possible. And you know, there's a lot of diversity in the world, a lot of different types of people using all different types of devices. And so it's our job as engineers to build things in a way that allows as many people as possible to use them at like a super base level, I think. 

[00:02:28] Phil: [00:02:28] I've worked in places where there's been an accessibility expert and it's been - they have their parts of the project where, oh, there's a line item for accessibility. And that always kind of, kind of rankled me a little bit because yes, we need experts, but it's hard to just kind of have one point of a project where accessibility magically happens. 

[00:02:49] So, we don't do that here, do we? Who's - is there an accessibility expert? Whose job is accessibility?

[00:02:55] Amberley: [00:02:55] I feel like Leslie would be a great person to talk about this, at least on the front end core side, Leslie and I both worked together on the front end core side. And speaking for myself from previous job experience, like especially on smaller teams, you tend to have like one or two people who are very personally interested and passionate and sort of advocating for it on a team.

[00:03:17] But I've been lucky to work on a couple of teams, including this one, where it's really sort of a core competency that's considered in the hiring process. So at least on this particular team we have individuals who are more - it's more in the forefront. People are more actively advocating. But as a baseline on the team, we have team-wide buy-in and sort of a built-in team ethos surround it. 

[00:03:46] Leslie: [00:03:46] I would plus one all of that. I think one of the things we look for is like during the interview process, just does it come up? Is this something people have, are familiar with and have used in the past? And that's not, we're not going to not hire you if you haven't done a lot of accessibility work in the past, but it's, is this something you care about? And is this something you'll keep top of mind as you're developing? Right? 

[00:04:02]So it is sort of a process of learning from other folks on the team. I wouldn't say that we necessarily have anyone who's like a hundred percent focused on accessibility all the time, but, as Amberley said, we have folks who sort of champion it internally. And that helps and kind of drifts out to the rest of the team members who maybe are focused on other areas - performance or, well, performance is a bad one cause that's also an accessibility issue, but in some other areas, right?

[00:04:24]So it's about the knowledge share as well and doing some shared code review and pieces like that to kind of spread the knowledge. 

[00:04:30] Hugues: [00:04:30] I want to say, I think if you have the luxury of having accessibility specialists on your team, I think that's super great. I used to work at a company where they had the accessibility team that was kind of like overlooking the product and like everything that we ship to the world.

[00:04:47] So I think if you, if like, I think accessibility is important knowledge for everyone on your team, but if you can have specialists that really like learns and do educational stuff inside the company, inside the team, I think that's awesome. 

[00:05:03] Jason: [00:05:03] I think there's like a nuance to it because I really like that we have acc...