E67 – Interview with Beth Raduenzel – Part 2

Continuing my chat with Beth. We discuss, among other things, accessibility as a coding challenge vs having to meet tight deadlines - and how sometimes developers chose to do things the way they know to meet these deadlines. Transcript Nic: Welcome to the A11y Rules podcast. This is episode 67. 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 https://a11yrules.com. Nic: In this episode I'm continuing my conversation with Beth Raduenzel. The last show was really cool. We spoke about a lot of things. A couple of things that struck me that you said, Beth, last week was comparing accessibility to the five stages of grief. I thought that was really brilliant. I'd never heard that before. So thank you for that. Beth: Yeah. Nic: Should we- Beth: Have you experienced that? Nic: Yeah, actually I have. As you were describing it last week, really, I could actually see clients' faces when you talk about that, or you do a presentation at a conference and you see peoples' faces fall and it's like, "Oh, yeah. What am I going to do?" So it's very apt, I think. Very apt. Nic: We finished last week by talking about your greatest achievements. So let's start this episode with something that's a bit of flip side. Beth: Okay. Nic: What's your greatest frustration in terms of web accessibility? Beth: Oh, my greatest frustration, I think, is that I'm not a developer. I used to code way back in the day, when everything was sliced images thrown in tables which are probably the worst thing you could do, now that I am an accessibility person. Just having the ability to design and code just from idea to finished product was really great. Beth: It's great when I can work with developers who understand accessibility, but when I'm working with people who are still learning, it's a little frustrating because I can't give them the solutions. I can tell them, "This is a problem and you need to make it like this," but I can't give them the exact piece of code that they need to be able to solve that. That's been really frustrating for me, and it's something that I would like to learn, but I don't know that I will ever find the time to be really good at it. Nic: Playing devil's advocate again here. Beth: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Nic: Don't developer usually like a coding challenge? So it's not necessarily bad to say, "Hey, this is the result you must to get to, and here's your challenge. Fix it?" Beth: I think they do, but I think in the real world a lot of times developers get really tight deadlines. When they're used to doing things a certain way and you tell them they have to figure out a new way to do it, I think that kind of throws them for a loop and it's hard for them to keep their deadlines. Nic: Yeah, I think that's a fair point. That's a fair point, yeah. What's the one thing that everyone knows about web accessibility? Maybe the conventional wisdom, if you like? Beth: The one thing? Nic: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Beth: I feel like most people don't know about web accessibility. Have you had people ... does it seem like everyone knows about it? I run into people all the time that they just have no clue how that works. Yeah, I think ... well I'll say this, one thing that I didn't initially think about was people who are deaf. Beth: You would think about that if you were talking about YouTube or a video site where there's audio, but when you have just a normal non audio, what do you call it, a non audio-based website or product, you don't typically think of people who are hearing impaired because you think that you just see everything and there's no problem, but there actually is a problem because a lot of times if you have a customer service number or something where the only way maybe to update your account is to call this number, a