Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2019 Special Episode

To highlight Global Awareness Accessibility Day, I had a wonderful panel discussion with four people involved in accessibility: Courey Elliott, Dennis Lembrée, Shannon Finnegan, and Dan O'Mahony 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:    You’re listening to the Accessibility Rules podcast. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. This is a special episode. Today is the 8th Global Awareness Accessibility day. The transcript for the show is available on the podcast website at 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. Twilio.com. Last year GAAD’s special episode was very well received so I’m using the same format. I have 4 guests with me and we will have a panel discussion about … well, accessibility of course. So I’ll let them briefly introduce themselves before we dive into the discussion. Hi everyone. Dennis:     Hi Dan:    Hello Shannon:    Hi Courey:    Hello Nic:    So, I’m going to pick on Dennis. Why don’t you go first? Dennis:    Sure. Thanks for having me, Nic. My name is Dennis Lembrée. I work as a senior accessibility consultant at Deque Systems, about 3 and a half years now. Before that, I was at eBay and PayPal and I am pretty well known for a blog and a Twitter account called Web Axe and a web-based accessible Twitter app called Easy Chirp. Nic:    Thank you. Shannon, how about you? Shannon:    Hi, yeah. Thank you for having me. I’m Shannon Finnegan. I am an artist and have recently been doing work around web accessibility through a year-long residency that I’m doing at an arts organization in Brooklyn, New York called Eye Beam. That’s an organization that kind of supports artists who are working around the intersection of art and technology. Nic:    Sweet. That’s going to be interesting to hear about. Not a topic we often discuss. Dennis:    Very Cool Nic:    Yeah. So, Dan, all the way from Ireland. Tell us a little bit about you. Dan:     Hi, everybody. Yeah, my name’s Dan O’Mahony and I live in Dublin, Ireland. I work for a charity called Child Vision. I’ve been there for 12 years and I work with accessible documents and creating visual accessible materials for kids who are blind and visually impaired throughout the country of Ireland. In my other life I kind of like to talk about web accessibility and basically assistive technology… things like that. And, I kind of design websites and apps and have great fun with all that too. Um… yeah. That’s me! Nic:    Do you have any time to sleep with all that? Dan:    Do you know, you’d think. I’m always doing something and it’s really enjoyable and I don’t know why I like it so much but I suppose when you find something you really like go and grab it with two hands and keep running with it and you don’t know where it’s going to go. Nic:    Yeah. Thank you. So that leaves us with Courey. How are ya? Courey:    Hi, I’m Courey Elliot and I am a software engineer at Lonely Planet and I do general engineering as well as I participate on our accessibility team. Nic:    Thank you. Right so we’re talking about accessibility especially awareness of web accessibility today and one of the things that I’ve noticed over doing accessibility work for well over 2 decades by now, is that we’re still facing the same basic accessibility-related problems today that we were facing 20 years ago. For example, you know, there’s not a single audit I do that I don’t have to talk about form labels and alt text for images and that kind of stuff. So, why are we still facing those issues do you think? Courey:    I f