E69 – Interview with Ire Aderinokun – Part 2

In which Ire tells us that she thinks convincing framework developers to implement accessibility will have more impact than trying to change individual developers' minds. Transcript Nic: Welcome to the a11y Rules podcast. This is episode 69. I am Nic Steenhout, and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you are in interested in accessibility, hey, this show is for you. To get today's show notes, or transcript, head out to a11yrules.com. In this episode, I am continuing my conversation with Ire Aderinokun. Last show was really great. We spoke about all kind of things, but some concept that I found really important was the idea that automated tools are a great way to get started with understanding and starting thinking about accessibility.  And, the other things was that Ire pointed out accessibility will not take you ten times more effort if you only use HTML properly. So, those were great. Welcome back Ire. Thanks for joining me again. Ire: Great to be back. Nic: So, we finished last week with your greatest achievement in terms of web accessibility which was a nexus ability cheat sheet you wrote that has been really popular. A flip side to that would be, what's your greatest frustration in terms of web accessibility? Ire: Okay, greatest frustration. Well, I don't know if this is a frustration with web accessibility, but is more with the frameworks and tools that we're using. So, one thing that's frustrating me a lot right now, is that, for my job, BuyCoins that I mentioned, we are building a cryptocurrency exchange. I do a lot of work with the Ionic framework, and we had to use this particular framework because I primarily use angular and front end code and we needed to have mobile applications. But, the problem with Ionic is that it is really not all that accessible and it's kind of been very frustrating because I have had to use this particular framework, which has ended up in the resulting products not being the way that I would like them to be. And, of course, - Nic: Yeah. Ire: ... I can try and contribute to the Ionic source as much as possible, which I am trying to do slowly, but trying to do. But, it's really frustrating when the makers of these tools, and I know they are only humans, and they also have limited time, so they obviously can't do everything, but it is just really frustrating when I feel like I am forced to use a particular tool or a particular framework and I have to deal with the fact that it is not very accessible. Nic: This idea that when we want to work and we depend on frameworks that have not done the work to do accessibility can be quite limiting and frustrating. You said you were contributing to the framework. How have you found the reaction of what you are contributing? Are people receptive, or do they seem to just not really care one way or another? Ire: No, I think they care a lot and this is something that's relatively new to me. We've only just begun really digging in and using the framework. So far, I have started with helping raise issues and wherever I see something that I feel like I can try and solve, I try and do that as well. Generally, I think they are very receptive, and they're open to it. And, that's kind of why I said that I know that they have limited time and resources themselves, so it is not like they didn't do this because they just didn't want to do it. It's more like they, I guess, they didn't prioritize it, which is also part of the problem, that it's considered okay to release something that is not accessible. It's also part of what is frustrating about, I guess the community, is that it would never be accessible to launch a framework or launch any kind of library or sort of projects and it's been incredibly on performance, but it's okay to do it if it is really inaccessible. So, yeah, that's kind of one of the problems at the moment, I guess. Nic: I often talk about this tripod o