E095 – Interview with Devon Persing – Part 2

Devon Persing and I talk a little bit about burnout in the web accessibility industry. Thanks to Gatsby for being a sponsor of the show. Gatsby is a modern website framework that builds performance into every website by leveraging the latest web technologies. Create blazing fast, compelling apps and websites without needing to become a performance expert. Make sure you have a look at their site: https://www.gatsbyjs.org Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules podcast. This is episode 95. Hey, only a few more episodes and we'll be hitting the show's 100th episode. How fantastic is that? 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 transcript, head out to the podcast website, https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Gatsby for sponsoring this episode. Gatsby is a modern website framework that builds performance into every website by leveraging the latest web technologies. Create blazing fast, compelling apps and websites without needing to become a performance expert. Nic: This week I'm continuing my conversation with Devon Persing. Last week was really cool. She told me about an idea that I had not quite voiced in my own head, which was that the idea of accessibility as compliance is a model that doesn't really capture the whole picture of accessibility, and then when we think about accessibility in those terms, we are really limiting the way we can actually take up accessibility at all stages of a project. That was really a good idea. Anyway, Devon, welcome back. Devon: Thank you. Nic: We finished last week on a high note, talking about greatest achievement. Let's flip the coin and ask you: what's your greatest frustration, in terms of web accessibility? Devon: One thing that I've been thinking about lately is the idea that it's simple, and I think this comes from the eight billion articles about ARIA that are just everywhere now, and I think two things. Less than a few years or so, the biggest take-up of accessibility discussion online has been for developers. Developers obviously like a technical solution. They like code snippets, they like prototypes, they like working examples, and so there's been a lot of emphasis on building stuff, and lot of emphasis on building stuff with ARIA specifically to the point where I talked to developers who think that for something to be accessible it has to have ARIA. Devon: They don't really know what it's doing. They don't really know who it's actually for or what tools actually access it. But they read an article about ARIA and so they know that they're supposed to use ARIA. And that's when you get things like button tags that have a role of button, which isn't the worst, but also is completely unnecessary. There's been a saturation of technical knowledge or technical information that isn't inaccurate but isn't really that helpful and doesn't give people the context of when to use those solutions and when not to. It's also pushed the narrative that: accessibility is a technical problem. Devon: Some things are, a lot of things aren't. That has been challenging too. When I talk to designers or content strategists about accessibility work, it's much more difficult to find resources for them because most of the articles are like, "Here's the 97th article about color contrast." There's only so many ways to talk about that, but it's also much more difficult to talk about workflows and tab order and interactions from a design perspective. It makes things a little bit easier as more designers are using more live prototyping tools, things like Figma and Sketch versus more static tools like Photoshop. But I do still see a lot of that emphasis, that misunderstanding, that accessibility is a technical problem that's to be solved by developers. Nic: Yeah. ARIA all the things, right? Devon: Right. "If y