E57 – Interview with Jen Simmons – Part 1

I love what Jen had to say about accessibility! She said, among other things: "accessibility is about the recognition that every human isn’t identical to every other human." 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. You’re listening to episode 57. 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 Jen Simmons. Hey, thanks for joining me join. See, I fluffed that up. I will start again. Alright, so, this week I’m speaking to Jen Simmons. Thanks for joining me for this conversation around Web Accessibility, Jen. Jen:    Hello. Thanks for having me. Nic:    Well, thank you for coming on. I know you’re doing quite a few things. Jen, I like to let guests introduce themselves, so in a brief elevator style introduction … Who is Jen Simmons? Jen:    So these days I work as a designer and developer advocate for Mozilla which is a company that makes the Firefox browser. And that means I get to travel around, present at conferences. Talk to people, find out what people are struggling with. Keep my eye on the pulse, or my finger on the pulse of the industry. People making websites and then report all that back to Mozilla and tell them, “Hey, this is what people are really going to need. This is what’s coming up next”. So we can be sure to create the right developer tools that are needed, or create the right-- put CSS … I focus specifically on CSS. And making a browser, making Firefox. It’s like making any piece of software. There’s a zillion features we want to add and a bazillion bugs we want ... need to fix-- Nic:    Yeah Jen:    --And a limited number of engineers, I help shape what is it that we are going to be focussing on. Just … I help, I chim in and advocate for designers and developers as those decisions are being made. Nic:    Yeah. Firefox is not a small project that a couple of people are working on in their spare time. I started using Firefox when it was still 0.2 or something like that. Way, way back when. And I really loved it. I was devastated when there was this issue and I think it was 58, 59 that wasn’t working very much with screen readers anymore. Jen:    Yeah, and I don’t know the details so this is sort of a hand-wavy explanation I should probably go find out the real information so I can say this accurately but I think … my guess about what happened is that the company was pushing so hard to make these massive technical changes to the browser itself under the hood for Firefox 57 that there were a lot of people pulled off a lot of projects and just put on this one effort. Get Firefox Quantum out the door. Get Firefox [crosstalk 03:24] out the door. And so anything that wasn’t- I mean, we broke a lot of stuff. We changed the way the plugins- addons work-- Nic:    Yeah Jen:    --web extensions … I mean we replaced the entire CSS parsing and rendering engine, right? So there was such huge amounts of technical DAT being paid off ... things had been built in the browser really in the Netscape days or like back in Firefox zero point whatever days, that we changed. And so my guess, and it’s just a guess. This is not official information. My guess is that there were just changes that got made that meant that it broke for screen readers. It broke for accessibility. And somewhere someone just said, “look we are going to f