E082 – Interview with Stephanie Walter – Part 1

Stephanie Walter tells us that designers should provide a roadmap to their design for the developer, but in many projects, there just isn't time to do that. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic:     Welcome to the Accessibility Rules podcast. This is episode 82. 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’s for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS, and video at Twilio.com. This week I’m speaking to Stephanie Walter. Stephanie, thanks for joining me for this conversation about web accessibility. Stephanie:    Hi, thanks for having me. Nic:    I like to let guests introduce themselves. So, in a brief introduction who is Stephanie Walter? Stephanie:    Oh. So I’m a user experience designer currently based in Luxembourg. I’m super interested in a lot of things, especially mobile design and also a little bit of accessibility. Otherwise, I like to travel a lot and give conferences all over the world. I teach at the University. I do a lot of things. I also have a blog with a few articles on it. And, yeah. That’s pretty much it. Nic:    You’re juggling a lot of different things. Stephanie:    Yeah. Nic:    So, let's get warmed up, and, to get started tell me something most people would not know about yourself. Stephanie:     A few people might know it now because I put this into a conference description but I actually designed a crane monitoring application. Which is kind of super weird. And, also I really really enjoy not design. Like a lot of designers want to do this really nice cute things. I kind of enjoy designing supercomplex forms, tables, things like that. I had once to redesign a form that was automatically generated using a SVG file and it was a form with seven levels so you could have box into box into box into box. You could have until seven different levels of reusable and editable components in this form. It’s for customs and taxations form. But, yeah. I had a lot of fun doing that. Nic:    You know, that sounds like a great challenge. Stephanie:     Yeah Nic:     It’s one of the things I talk with people a lot and they tell me, “Hey, Nic. Accessibility is so difficult. It’s such a chore” but you seem like you’re actually tackling it like as I tell people, you like a challenge. Look at it as a challenge. Stephanie:     True Nic:    What was the biggest challenge in making that form work from an accessibility perspective? Stephanie:    Ah, I only designed it so I didn’t do the HTML and CSS. But already from... Nic:    Okay Stephanie:    ...from an accessibility perspective, for instance, like error messages, they were in red and that was pretty much it so the difference between an error message and information message because they also like this for taxations. So, we have a lot of different information messages and the only thing that was differentiating those two messages was the color. So between blue and red which is already an issue… Nic:    Oh yeah Stephanie:    So even that kind of thing. It was a quick fix, we just added a little icon, a different one for the real errors and another one for information. Nic:    Right Stephanie:    But that was like, big improvements already, and like, information architecture. So, this is more about visual information but basically one of the biggest issues at the beginning is when you have seven different levels you weren’t quite sure in which level you were. So, really having a visual wi