E097 – Interview with Joe Devon – Part 2

Joe Devon says the one thing people should remember about accessibility is that building great products is about listening to your user. And if you are not making your products accessible, you are not paying attention to your users. 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 97. 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: In this episode, I'm continuing my conversation with Joe Devon. Last week was really splendid. We talked about obviously the Global Accessibility Awareness Day. We spoke a little bit about how accessibility also is around knowing the culture and the different communities that view accessibility differently. And Joe was telling us about the mission of Diamond, which apart from building accessible software, he also wants to grow the field of knowledgeable quota about accessibility. Welcome back, Joe Devon. Joe: Thank you. Pleasure to be back. Nic: So we finished last week on a bit of a high note talking about what made you the proudest in terms of accessibility. Let's start on a more pessimistic look. What's your greatest frustration in terms of digital accessibility? Joe: Yeah, it's definitely painful when you look at the WebAIM million [report] and you see the numbers of ... what was it? So last year it was almost 98% of the top million websites were inaccessible with almost 60 errors per page. I forgot the full numbers, but this year it was 98.1% inaccessible, and I think the numbers of errors per page grew as well. Those are unacceptable numbers. And it's very painful to see them. And I actually am trying to address it with ... we're creating a state of accessibility report, and we are collaborating with WebAIM. And our idea is to take the top open source project, that when implemented ... and this is inside the WebAIM million report, the ones that when you implement that framework or that open source project and it causes accessibility errors to ... or let's say increases the average number of accessibility errors on the pages that implement them. Joe: So we want to kind of do this sponsorship, where we're sponsoring an open source project, try and get the community behind it. It's a concept that I started last year, but it didn't quite have the right note to it. And this year we're launching it under the GAAD Pledge. And the idea there is that the community will spend about a month looking at that open source project and doing a virtual hackathon. And then we're trying to partner with some brands, where a brand can sponsor this group and we'll give an honorarium to an accessibility subject matter expert to be an advocate for that open source community. So the idea is that we'll give them a bit of a kickstart by focusing on their project for a month, and then with somebody that will keep the ties strong between the accessibility community and the open source project. So I hope it'll work. Nic: I really like the concept of reaching out to open source project that drive the web and fixing the web at that level. It's like we're going to fix the prebuilt foundation and then the rest of the house should be a little bit more straig