Episode 55: The One with Nicolas Steenhout and #a11y

Because accessibility is where it is at

00:42:36 N/A download

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Transcript

Dave 00:15 Hi, and welcome to another episode of That Podcast. I'm Dave.

Beau 00:19 And I'm Beau.

Dave 00:20 And we have a guest with us again today, Nic Steenhout. Hi, Nic.

Nicolas 00:24 Hi guys, how are you?

Dave 00:26 Great, thanks.

Beau 00:27 Doing great.

Dave 00:28 Would you like to give the listeners a little introduction to yourself, Nic?

Nicolas 00:32 Yeah, thanks. I'm Nic Steenhout. I've been doing Web accessibility in one way or another since the mid 1990s. I'm quite passionate about it. I do a lot of training and teaching an auditing and strategic consultation about accessibility, and I do a Podcast about accessibility as well, so I'm having several fingers in the pie.

Beau 01:02 Cool. You've been doing this since the mid 90s?

Nicolas 01:05 Yup.

Beau 01:06 Oh wow. What was your first Web browser?

Nicolas 01:09 Lynx.

Beau 01:11 Lynx?

Nicolas 01:12 Lynx. And then Mosaic, NCSA Mosaic.

Beau 01:17 Fun times.

Nicolas 01:18 Yes.

Beau 01:19 How far back to you go, Dave? I don't remember.

Dave 01:22 I've used Lynx, but it was more of I learned to use it. I think some version of IE would be me. I have vague memories of Netscape, but I don't really think I ever used it. It was just not really available to me, but yeah. So IE at some point.

Beau 01:46 I know I used Mosaic, and I used Lynx as well. I wanted to say Java. Was there a Web browser written in Java? I think that's what it was, but I think that was after now that I think about it. I think Java probably came after the browsers came. So that's the early days of HTML. There already wasn't a lot of components to work with, so accessibility with the mid 90s I'm still horrible at it, but I don't think I was thinking about that at all back then.

Nicolas 02:27 Most people weren't really thinking about it. One of the big things that we talk a lot about accessibility is making sure that images have the alt attribute applied, and if it's an informative image you want to have some decent alt text written in. Considering that the image tag came in, the image elements already came in in 1993, and the alt attribute came into HTML in 1995 we had a two, two and a half year period where even if we wanted to make images available and accessible we didn't have any methods to make that happen, so most people it really was not on their radar screen at the time.

Beau 03:15 How early were the earliest screen readers for browsers?

Nicolas 03:21 Screen readers, I'm not sure how back they go, but easily back in the 80s.

Beau 03:29 Like Web screen readers, are they essentially the same software?

Nicolas 03:34 Web screen readers is something that's relatively recent in the 2000, which was an adventure to try to make. Helped mostly people with reading impairments like dyslexia to be able to pass a website, but actual screen readers, which are applications to help people navigate not just the Web or a browser but the entire computer those have been around for a very long time.

Beau 04:03 I've never actually used one, which is something that I'm realizing is probably a problem for somebody who is considering doing accessibility stuff. It seems like that might be a first level thing to try to actually use a screen reader.

Nicolas 04:21 Yeah, for a very long time a lot of people were saying don't use a screen reader because you're going to get false positives, and because they're really complex software to learn and use and all that. But the consensus now in the accessibility community really is learn the basis and play around with it. If you're on Windows you can get NVDA, which is a free open source screen readers, nvaccess.org is where you can get it.

Nicolas 04:53 If you're on the Mac [inaudible 00:04:56] system, of course voiceover is built into the Mac, and if you happen to be on Linux, there's Orca, which is available. I haven't looked at Orca in [inaudible 00:05:08], so I can't really give help on that. But definitely grab a screen reader and play around with it, and see what your site looks like.

Nicolas 05:21 I'm going to give a plug to a group that does a lot of good work, WebAIM. W-E-B-A-I-M They have on their site really good tutorials on how to use NVDA, Voiceover, and JAWS for accessibility testing. So that's a great intro.

Beau 05:40 Just to give you the level of ignorance I have on this, for some reason I assumed there was something interpreting the HTML directly. I assumed it was like a screen reading Web browser as opposed to just a general purpose whole computer system.

Nicolas 05:58 What the screen reader does is it allows interactions with the entire machine, whether it's navigating applications, navigating files, giving feedback as to what is being typed, and doing the screen reading, which depending on the application that's open you're going to have that interaction.

Nicolas 06:20 If it's on the Web then you're going to use an actual browser just light sighted people do, and the screen reader is a layer above that. What the screen reader actually does is look at the DOM and the accessibility tree to render the information that's there.

Beau 06:41 The screen reading software has to be aware of the actual application in order to be able to read the DOM, I would guess?

Nicolas 06:46 Yup.

Beau 06:49 You can potentially have a Web browser that the screen reader doesn't understand in which case it might read the text but not the actual attributes and things?

Nicolas 06:57 It's funny because there's pairing that works best. For example, if you use Voiceover you want to use it on Safari. I was giving a demo this morning, and I forgot that I was not in Safari, and suddenly things were not working. I thought is there a bug in my software, and then I realized, "Oh no, Nic, you're in Firefox." Switched to Safari, and suddenly it worked. That's one pair. NVDA and Firefox is a pretty good pair. If you have access to JAWS, usually Edge, IE mostly, more and more with Firefox is okay, but you might get some really strange reaction if you're using JAWS in Chrome for example. Knowing the pair will give you better, more accurate results rather than false positives.

Beau 07:51 What is a good pair for Chrome?

Nicolas 07:54 Chrome for screen readers, I would not necessarily recommend testing in Chrome with a screen reader.

Beau 08:02 Okay.

Nicolas 08:02 At this point. They have ChromeVox, which is a browser based screen reader, but it doesn't really reflect what people with sight impairments, with blindness actually do. They need access to the entire computer, so they're not going to have a screen reader that only works in the Web browser.

Dave 08:25 But would it be safe to assume that the people who actually need these screen readers and use them know which browser to pair with the best?

Nicolas 08:35 Yes. It's safe to assume that if they're using JAWS they're going to be using Edge or if they're using Voiceover they're using Safari. Okay, that sounds good.

Dave 08:43 That's right, yeah.

Beau 08:46 You hadn't mentioned Chrome, so I figured either there was an Edge case there or a no go sort of situation.

Nicolas 08:54 It's been a few years since I've used one, but I do remember using one. I don't know what it was called, though. But you mentioned you haven't tried it, but I have tried it some years ago [inaudible 00:09:07] software was working on them. We made quite an effort to make it as accessible as possible, but I feel like we were making quite an effort without really knowing what we were doing. It's a noble effort is what I'd say if that makes sense. I didn't know of any real experts in the field back then, nevermind the ones we'd be able to get to help us if that makes sense.

Nicolas 09:35 Yeah. We're talking a lot about screen readers in folks who are blind or have sight impairments. I'd like to also point out that some people with dyslexia, we'll rely on screen readers because it's easier for them to process that, that audio when they're reading a lot of text, so they're following what's on the screen while they're having the voice announced what's going on.

Nicolas 10:01 Also there's this concept that accessibility is not just about people with sight impairments and your way. We have people that have, maybe it's hearing loss a deafness, people with cognitive disabilities know maybe they've played football and been hit on the head, wants to too many times and suddenly their capacity of being able to focus without headaches is diminished. Maybe animation is going to make them feel nauseated. Maybe it's someone that has a learning impairment or no. One of the 8% of men that have colorblindness and you're working on a system that has, yes, not toggles and yes, it's green and no is red. Well, not very helpful. There is no other differentiating factor then than color.

Beau 10:48 Yeah. I think that a sociability isn't something that I think about a lot. I think a lot of people who don't have to worry about those sorts of things don't really think about them until they get put in a situation where all the sudden it makes a difference. I had back surgery, I think, I don't remember how long ago, like 2005. It was very difficult for me to get around actually had to a walker that I was using suddenly tasks like going to the bathroom at a restaurant, like go into a restroom at a fast food restaurant suddenly became very obvious which places cared about accessibility, which didn't. I think that, I've heard a lot of stories about people who've had similar sort of things where they don't think about it until all of a sudden they're introduced to a problem and they're like, "Oh wow, that's a bad thing."

Nicolas 11:46 I see why this is handled this way now. This is why it's important to have accessible restrooms and being able to get into a building without going upstairs. Same thing, I've heard similar stories about people who have had temporary blindness or temporary things like that where all of a sudden they can't use their computer anymore, or break their arm and now they can't type or they only have one hand to type things like that until you're put in those situations or know somebody in them and it can be difficult.

Nicolas 12:17 Funny thing is I've been using a wheelchair for a very long time now and a couple of years ago I managed to broke both my arms at the same time more or less. It really cramped my style when I was trying to type 80 words per minute at first. Suddenly I was, no, I couldn't move. My thumbs can move my wrists and I was talking to finger in. I found myself using assistive technology that I had been using for testing, but I had relied on. It's an entirely different experience to have to rely on something that you're not, you may be aware or you may have used before, but suddenly you have to. It's quite an experience.

Dave 13:01 Yeah. That's really interesting. A tool you are intimately familiar with because you've done lots of testing with it, but you never had to rely on it that's quite interesting.

Beau 13:13 Yeah.

Nicolas 13:14 Yeah.

Beau 13:17 What were the sort of the things that kind of got you into whether it's accessibility things specifically?

Nicolas 13:26 My aha moment came into three different incident in the space of a month. I had been doing a lot of disability rights activism and obviously as a wheelchair user I was aware of physical buildings, the built environment accessibility and on the side I'd been playing with HTML, making a little bit more with website here and there. A colleague of mine came into my office, he's blind and he said, "Nic, what is it with all those images on the web?"

Nicolas 13:59 He showed me a website and a screen reader kept announcing image, image, image, image. But there was no more information and I looked at it on the screen and I realized that the designer wanted to use really cool looking fonts, but we didn't have access to CSS at the time. As you did at the time, you went into Photoshop and created your layout and then you sliced images and they hadn't put alt text. All these images for the menu, were thoroughly not accessible, which meant my friend could not use the site.

Nicolas 14:36 The second part was, another colleague who's deaf, who got a new printer and she didn't get any other information or tech support on how to set up the printer then a C with a video that didn't have. I thought, "Oh, well yeah, that's where captions are important because you can't actually set up the stuff without the information." The third final bit happened about a month after or as you came in, and that was a customer of ours said that they were having problems on the web because everything was so distracting. She had ADHD and large heading fonts were distracting, blue underlined links were distracting.

Nicolas 15:23 The one site in particular, she showed me the marquee tag, or I don't know if you guys remember that, but it was really rather horrible. We set about building basically a CSS reset before this was a thing, but for her and suddenly she was able to use the Web. Having had these interactions, it really made me think about the importance of accessibility on the Web just as much as accessibility and the built environment. From there on I was hooked and I married my passion for accessibility in general with my interest in the Web. Here I am 25 plus years later doing WebEx-

Dave 16:07 That's really interesting. It's really nice that those three events came together so close to over the head to pursue this. It's really cool.

Nicolas 16:19 Really a bit of synchronicity.

Beau 16:26 There are actual standards now. They weren't back then, like you said, there were no ALT tags for images. But since then they've added things like ALT tags. Are there standards bodies that are paying attention to this? Who pushed to have ALT tags or I think there's the ARIA tags or ARIA attributes, those sorts of things.

Nicolas 16:46 The different standards will vary a lot depending on the jurisdiction. The legislation in Germany is not the same as it is in the United States as it is in Australia, making a really wild assumption that the majority of your listeners are based in the US. I will focus a little bit on that. There's really two things that focus on accessibility. First, you may have heard of section 508, which is section 508 of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1970 something that's been amended and amended that says that any federal government agencies or organization receiving federal funding must provide access to their documents and they created their own range of standards to follow.

Nicolas 17:45 Then there's the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which people refer as WCAG or Way CAG, depending on who speaks. But those are a set of accessibility standards that are accepted at an international level. Recently the section 508 guidelines were aligned with WCAG. What it comes down to is, regardless of where you're at in the world, basically the accessibility standard, you're focusing on his Way CAG and that was put together by the W3C, the WorldWide Web Consortium, which also does HTML and CSS and all these good things.

Nicolas 18:32 From an accessibility, pure accessibility perspective, we're looking at WCAG, it's called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, but really this applies to all formats of digital content to the point that the next major release of the guidelines are just going to be called Accessibility Guidelines. We're looking at ... we just went live with version 2.1 of Web CAG. There's also ARIA which is the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Guidelines which allow a series of tags, well, attributes really attributes and roles and values to improve accessibility, especially when it interacts with Java script and dynamic content. There's a couple of the small ones that are not quite as mission critical.

Beau 19:33 Okay. As far as like legal things that sounds like this is actually legally required by certain organizations.

Nicolas 19:44 Yes. In terms of your legal requirement to build accessibility into your system. If you touch anything that's remotely what federal government to you? I have the section 508. If you are working for an airline, you may have to make your website accessible under the air carriers accessibility act. And that refers to Web CAG. If you're running a business, you will have the requirement to not make your website and discriminate against people with disabilities under the Americans with disabilities act. Now it's a bit funny because the ADA, what came into place really before the Web and there is no specific requirement in the ADA for Web accessibility. But businesses are losing lawsuits because even though there's not a requirement for accessibility, there's a requirement to not discriminate.

Nicolas 20:45 Basically any organization doing business on the Web has to be accessible for people with disabilities. Therefore the best standards to follow is as WCAB.

Beau 21:00 Yeah. I've not put any. I've put very little effort into that aside from any of the tags or remembering like ALT tags and things like that. But like the tags that are included in any of the boiler plate like HTML, what's HTML bootstrap? What is it HTML Bootstrap?

Nicolas 21:20 Bootstrap.

Beau 21:23 Well, there was Bootstrap but there was another HTML five. Oh, it was just HTML five boiler plate, I think that had some of that stuff in it as well. That's probably the most research I've done is looking at why those things were included. Um, so in that sense, those sorts of tools that have been helpful to sort of spread the word, but I didn't take much better than.

Nicolas 21:45 I don't really like to push accessibility from the legal perspective because I think clearly accessibility is about people. It's about people using the Web, people using your apps and we want people to be able to use those systems. But if we're going to go down that road of compliance and think about lawsuits, then it really behooves you as a developer to actually understand these things because what you're going to see more and more, is not just the business that has a non-accessible side that's going to get sued, but it's also the developer and the business owners.

Nicolas 22:26 You are leaving yourself at risk by not having this basic skill set of Web developer, you have to have some knowledge about what you do and in theory you're supposed to understand HTML and CSS and maybe a bit of Java script and as part of that skill set that the developer has they should really know and understand that at least basic accessibility.

Dave 22:50 Yeah, that makes sense to me. I mean I think what you're trying to say there is, you've got to at some point you need to be thinking about improving the experience for the users here and that's all users, but the results of that thing of in the same way. I mean we've just been through the whole GDPR thing that we all had to learn a lot by privacy and in a lot of ways the things that I've been doing for that is improving our systems with regards to the privacy of our users and their data.

Dave 23:21 But ultimately there's also that legal side of it where we know we really need to cover our own assets with this. By doing these certain things, I mean for all the ... there's so many things you could do that will cover you, but I might not ever truly improve any user experience, so you've got to do a bit of both. I think you need to ... it's not necessarily a nice way to think and talk about it with the legal ramifications, but you do have to think about them and consider them as a risk attorney.

Nicolas 23:54 Yeah. The thing is you have to consider that accessibility is good for everyone. One of the things we'll talk about what accessibility is Color contrast. You have to have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1. Great texts on gray background is a no no from an accessibility perspective, but if you're trying to read a webpage on your mobile and you're outside in a park and you have gray on gray, suddenly the site is going to be really hard to read. Proper contrast is going to be good for you.

Nicolas 24:25 We're talking about things like using plain English and that helps people with cognitive disabilities. But it's also going to help the young mother who has a screaming toddler on our hands and she's trying to find information about health for her baby on the web that breathing on her mobile simple text is really going to be useful for her. We're talking about associating labels with their input forms, it's good for assistive technologies, but it's also good for giving you a bigger target size when you're on your mobile.

Nicolas 24:58 There's all these things that actually make a website usable by people with disabilities are going to improve all of users' experience.

Dave 25:09 But it's almost like that some of those are actually just good practices anyway without even considering to users with disabilities. It's interesting you mentioned the color contrast because I only noticed the other day for the first time that one of the ... I can't remember the code name for it. The auditing system in chrome developer tools, measures that now. It will examine all the text on the page and give you the contrast ratios. Have not seen that before, but I was aware of the contrast ratios and the requirements. I'm pretty lax at it sometimes. It's really weird because I just look at Iowa, but I do that thing of eyeball in it and think, that's fine, and nine times out of 10 I'm actually wrong. Yeah, it's quite cool.

Dave 25:54 If you look in Chrome, if anyone's listening chrome developer tools, it's in one of the audits, you let it run, it runs in your page it will tell you all the elements on the on your webpage that aren't satisfying. Those good color contrast ratios.

Nicolas 26:07 That tool is fantastic. I'm really glad to put it in and one of the things to be aware of this, that it relies on your CSS declaration for foreground and background colors, so if you have a background image, it's not going to be able to analyze that, so it's good to pick up on a lot of things, but it's not necessarily going to pick up on everything.

Beau 26:32 Yeah, so like a transcripts were something that we just recently started to explore on our podcast site and this was a direct result of your podcast accessibility page switched I'd like to talk about, but that is a great example of ... That's just useful, period, in terms of adding to the user experience of our users who are listeners being able to look at the episode and find out exactly what people are saying, being able to do a search of that text rather than having to listen to the whole thing.

Beau 27:12 There's some SEO stuff there as well where now the content of the episode is actually searchable. even offsite. I mean these were things that, Dave and I had kicked around a few times probably trying find a way to get, either get the audio searchable. I think, I can't remember who it was, but there was someone who had a search API that you could give them an MP3, and you could type in some text and they would tell you where in the MP3 that text existed, but it required an API listener, like a Webhook call back.

Beau 27:48 Our site currently is aesthetic site so we were never able to do that But we had talked about trying to find a way to make it easier to find the content from our episodes. We've had a couple of people say you're like, sometimes we have really short show notes. Sometimes they're really super detailed and we've had people say, "I wanted to listen to the episode, I wanted to hear this one specific thing, but where is it?"

Beau 28:13 If you have 50 items on your show notes and it's two and a half hour long podcast, our older podcasts used to take quite long. It was difficult like where like if you were interested in, in one specific topic, you couldn't find it easily. The site that you talked about, like, and also just making this so that other people can consume the content who wouldn't be able to otherwise, what's kind of the thing that pushed me over the edge to actually find you implement that?

Dave 28:43 Yeah. I'll be totally honest. I been just the SEO benefits of having the transcriptions was the thing it was in my mind for so long. When Beau mentioned the accessibility side of it, I can't believe I hadn't really even considered that before. I guess it's hard. It's a bit of a disconnect in terms of you immediately think of a sort of transcriptions are hard of hearing and then podcasts and hard of hearing just don't marry up. It's all right. It's not hard for us to do and yeah, it could be so useful for somebody. And again, there's another thing that we just talked about, providing benefits and you mentioned closed captions on videos is it is closed captions mean we always call them subtitles in the UK, but I think-

Nicolas 29:30 There's a difference between subtitles and closed captions. Subtitles are ... they are in general to help someone who doesn't speak the language to understand what's on, so as an alternate to dubbing and subtitles generally will only provide information about the spoken word, whereas captions are going to give clues about all the audio. If there's a dog barking, you're going to see that cute dog barking. If there's music, you're going to see music. If there's a door slamming, you're going to get that information that's going to allow someone who has a hearing impairment, whether they're hard of hearing or they are deaf to actually get the full experience as much the full experience as possible.

Beau 30:17 Thank you for clearing that up.

Nicolas 30:19 No problem.

Beau 30:23 Is that a case where technology sort of is reusing the same technology in multiple places? I'm like, because I know that like if we look at a DVD, sometimes you'll see the audio channels. There's like different audio channels and there's also different caption channels where sometimes choosing between the descriptive audio versus a different language for the subtitles themselves. Technically is it still transferred the same way? Like is it still encoded into the content the same way?

Nicolas 30:58 It should be encoded the same way. The encoding should be the same. Where you're going to have a difference is when you're looking at non one based media, for example, subtitles of caption on a live TV is going to be probably different encoding because you have access to the closed caption, you need to do something about it. Whereas if they're pushing a subtitled show to air, it becomes a different Codec if you want, which is open captions. So it's slightly different technically, but on the Web, for the majority of users that are doing stuff on the Web, whether it's video or audio, it's don't worry about it.

Dave 31:45 Well, yeah. What was going to say was, I don't know if it's one of those things where I am, I see this a lot now. I see a lot of videos that are shared online, get the ... I don't know if there are subtitles are captured closed captions, but one or the other definitely added on. I think part of that is because there is so much content consumed on phones in public places. I don't about you, but I will have my media volume 10 to zero all the time because I don't want that noise when I'm on the bus or in the bar or wherever I am. But the all these videos because of that, again, those and probably not as accessible as they should be, but I guess in a way it's making the concept, but for everyone, even if it does help a little bit.

Dave 32:28 I always say it's better to supplement a little bit of accessibility rather than none at all. If people tell me, but Nic, what about deaf blind person who's paralyzed from neck down? And I'm going to say, look, "That's an edge case. Don't worry about it. Worry about the person who's blind. Worry about the person who is deaf. Worry about the person who's paralyzed." If you can hit the low hanging fruits, you can put 20% of your efforts to get 80% of the way there. Do that.

Beau 32:58 Tell us a little bit more about the podcast accessibility project. Like where that came from, how it's going, what you sort of expect out of it.

Nicolas 33:10 I've been running the accessibility rules podcast since July last year and my little secret is that I'm a podcaster who doesn't listen very many to very many podcasts because I'm hard of hearing and I generally find it very hard to consume podcasts just by listening to it and I made it a point to provide transcripts for every single show I put out and I got into trying to find really interesting podcasts and I discovered most of them didn't have transcripts so it annoyed me and every time I brought it up to podcast or they said, "Oh, I don't know how or I didn't know how important it was or it's too expensive." or any other number of reasons which are often quite valid.

Nicolas 34:01 I thought we need a place where people, podcasters can go and have easy to digest information about why it's important, what benefit is it going to be to them, not just their listeners and how do you implement accessibility. That's how decide podcast hyphen accessibility.com got born. It actually happened in the space of about three hours with a friend of mine. We got the domain, we put stuff on get hub and off we went along.

Beau 34:35 I've taken a look at it and actually somewhere on the side that said like the base level for a podcast should be transcripts. You had a whole section on transcripts. I tried out Rev. I think it's Rev.com, R-E-V. That worked out pretty well for me so far. There were a couple of interesting typos that we got from it, but by and large it was mostly awesome. What other sort of accessibility things are you planning on adding to the site or have already added to the site?

Nicolas 35:10 Yeah, there's a whole section on how to make your website accessible because it's fine to have transcript, but if you have someone who, for example is not a mouse user and gets to your website and needs to navigate the site with just a keyboard, you have to make sure that it's keyboard accessible. There was a whole section about website accessibility and then there's the section about the player, the accessibility of the player itself, which is not necessarily something you have control over with depending on the podcasting platform you use, but as time goes by and I find a bit of spare time here and there, I'm going to analyze different podcasting platform like blueberry and I'd been in all these things to see how accessible it is and how easy it is to actually make accessible.

Beau 36:05 That's interesting because we have ... I don't even remember which one we have, but we do have onsite listening capability. But my assumption is that most people are listening through a podcast APP, whether it'd be it iTunes or Spotify now. I use overcast on my iPhone. Is that something you think is common for people who are trying to consume podcasts with accessibility concerns or do you think a lot of people are actually playing it on the website directly?

Nicolas 36:41 My stats for my podcast show that I have more people using podcasting apps to listen to the show, but I do have a large percentage of people that come and do direct downloads from my site or visit the site and making an assumption here is probably those people for whom the apps are not available or accessible. If I have someone who's blind that wants to listen to the podcast and they can't actually use overcast, for example, they are likely to go back to the site and then there's all the people that will want to rely on the transcript, need to be able to interact with the site as well. It's probably a larger percent of your listeners that are going to be accessing the podcasts through the site rather than through an APP.

Dave 37:37 It's quite interesting. I mean, I just had a quick look as we're talking then. I mean even just taking the mouse example, our little embedded media player doesn't appear to be in the sort of the tabbing order at all Beau.

Dave 37:57 We've got that download link so they can download the MP3 that gets tagged to nicely, but just having to the links, it goes from the download through to talk about the background image, then subscribing to our newsletter or a player just gets bypassed completely. That would be considered to be inaccessible to that mouse. What do you do to people who don't use a mouse?

Nicolas 38:23 The keyboard users. Yeah.

Beau 38:25 It sounds quite interesting. It's something that would completely have bypassed my thoughts, especially when you're ... I mean generally the way and the way a page I thought flows. It's quite simple page for a podcast episode. The links are going to be well described the flow in a natural order, down the page. It's not something that I hadn't even considered that the tabb. In the past, when I've considered the tabbing order of things, it's usually been on sort of big complicated forms, you need that logical ... because that benefits a power users as well. People who will use the phones, they don't want to use the mouse that want to stick to the keyboard, want to tap through to the farm in a logical order.

Dave 39:12 That's when I really turned on that kind of thinking. But yeah, something like that, I would just, in my head it, I would have just assumed that that media player would find, would be found as you tab through, but yet it's not.

Nicolas 39:24 Yeah, there's a lot of surprises like that that you think should be working properly or be made in an accessible way. Then you start testing in this like, "Oh, it's not." So yeah.

Dave 39:40 Just talk about the transcripts. A podcast I used to listen to quite a lot. I haven't been recently startups for the rest of us and they've been going for a really long time and they're almost to episode 400 and as far as I know, they've been transcribing the their episodes for ages, and that's really cool to think of all that content over almost 400 episodes of .. they are 30, 40 minute long episodes fully transcribed for people. That's really cool too to think about.

Beau 40:13 Which podcasts is that?

Dave 40:15 Startups for the rest of us.

Beau 40:16 Okay.

Dave 40:20 I'm quite idle. I mean when Beau set the interview up, I had a quick look around the podcast accessibility site but it's something that, yeah, it's actually quite a good little project for me and Beau, if we wanted to learn a bit more about this stuff because we both work on larger products and sites during the day and if I wanted to go and start applying some of this stuff there, I could do, I could, it'd be a trickle. Also testimonies it go. Whereas we could literally, with the podcast accessibility.com website, we could literally take everything and play it to our very small podcast site and achieve a reasonable level of a hopefully satisfactory experience for just about everybody out there.

Beau 41:04 Yeah, yeah. I think it's going to be a great, great resource for people.

Dave 41:07 Yeah. I hope so.

Beau 41:11 You have anything else you wanted to talk about, Nic?

Nicolas 41:13 I think we've pretty much gone around the perhaps my parting thought would be to remind people that accessibility is about people, that there's a large number of people with disabilities out there and that it also benefits people without disabilities. So what are you waiting for? Just go forth and implement accessibility as much as you can.

Dave 41:38 Thanks for coming on. It's been really interesting.

Nicolas 41:40 Thanks for having me.

Beau 41:42 All right. We'll call this one a wrap. Cheers.

Nicolas 41:44 Thanks guys.

Dave 41:45 Thanks Nic. It was really good.