E084 – Interview with Jessica Ivins – Part 1

Jessica and I ponder whether low-literacy could be considered a disability, and regardless of the answer, that factor needs to be taken into account when designing sites and content. 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 84. 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 shows 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 with Jessica Ivins. Hey, Jessica. Thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility Jessica:     Sure, Nic. Thank you for having me Nic:    I like to let guests introduce themselves. So, in a brief intro, whose Jessica Ivins? Jessica:    Sure. I’m a faculty member at Center Centre, the UX design school here in Chattanooga, Tennesse in the US, and we offer a 2-year full-time program that offers you as a student to be an industry ready designer. So you attend school for 2 years. We model the work… school environment more like a work environment, so you’re in school Monday through Friday, 9-5. About two-thirds of your time is spent working on real-world projects. So, by the time you graduate you have almost 2 years of experience, and you have a portfolio, and you are industry ready, and prepared to get a job. Nic:    That sounds fantastic. We’ll probably talk a little bit more about that, but, one of my pet peeves is that so many design and development courses don’t cover accessibility. Is this part of the curriculum at Center Centre? Jessica:    Yes, for sure. Accessibility is a big part of what we do. And, back in the beginning when we were designing the school. So, we are a relatively new school, and we built the program from scratch. And, back in the beginning, we were talking about how we wanted to include accessibility in the curriculum, and how wanted students to learn about it because we knew it was important. We wanted to make sure that it wasn't an afterthought. We wanted to make sure that it was part of what the students did at all times. And, that’s when we arrived at the conclusion that, you know, we have 24 core courses throughout the 2-year program, and instead of making one of those courses an accessibility course we decided to infuse accessibility throughout the program, so that students learn how to make design decisions that factor in accessibility throughout each stage of the design project. Nic:    I love that. You need to go and speak to every single computer science and design outfit out there in the world and sing that gospel. That’s fantastic... Jessica:    Yeah. Go ahead, go ahead Nic:    … yeah, no, I was just going to say I normally get people warmed up by asking them to tell us one thing that most people would not know about you. So, is there something that most people would not know about you? Jessica:     Yeah, you know, this is a fun one. So, Center Centre, the school where I’m a faculty member, we were originally known as the Unicorn Institute. We called ourselves the Unicorn Institute before we were authorized by the state on Tennessee to officially call ourselves a school, but, before we got that authorization we wanted a way to talk about ourselves so we were known as the Unicorn Institute. And, back when I applied to be a faculty member here at Center Centre we were still known as the Unicorn Institute, and it was so funny that I got the job here to my parents because I was the girl who loved Unico