The SpoolCast: Accessibility with Derek Featherstone
A 2007 UIE SpoolCast — Jared Spool interviews Derek Featherstone on web accessibility, recorded at Webmaster Jam, Dallas.
This is a preserved copy of a UIE SpoolCast episode — Jared Spool interviewing Derek Featherstone. User Interface Engineering's sites (uie.com / uie.fm) are no longer online, so I've preserved the recording — the audio is hosted at the Internet Archive and the transcript is below.
Transcript note: auto-transcribed (ElevenLabs Scribe); speakers named from the episode's own introductions.
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Full transcript
Brian Christianson (UIE producer): Derek Featherstone, interviewed by Jared Spool. Recorded on location at the Webmaster Jam, Dallas, Texas. September 22nd. 2007.
(music)
Brian Christianson (UIE producer): Welcome. I'm Brian Christianson, producer of UIE podcasts. In this week's episode, Jared sits down with Derek Featherstone, a premier voice on web accessibility. His company, Further Ahead, designs and develops websites, as well as provides strategic planning and web audits. Derek literally travels the world to speak on issues of accessibility in web design. Derek will be presenting his talk, Making Apps That Work For Everyone: Accessibility Beyond Compliance, at our Web App Summit, which will take place in March 2008 on Coronado Island, California.
Brian Christianson (UIE producer): You won't want to miss it. And now, here's Jared.
(music)
Jared Spool: I'm here at the Webmaster Jam conference in Dallas, and I'm talking with Derek Featherstone, who is the closing keynote speaker at the conference, and he is from Ottawa, Canada, and he's probably the guy on this planet, that I know of, who is the most authoritative in the area of implementing accessible website. He really understands what this is about, and I thought we'd take a moment and talk to him. Hi there, Derek.
Derek Featherstone: Hi, Jared.
Jared Spool: So you're from Ottawa. You've got, uh, clients like Business Objects, and John Hopkins, uh, uh, University, and the United Methodist Church, a whole bunch of financial institutions, and for these guys you're... A lot of your work, you know, you, you do website design, but a lot of your work has to do with looking at how... Making sure their, their systems are not just usable, but also accessible for all, all sorts of different disabilities. And so, you know, oftentimes when people think about accessibility, they tend to just focus on, on vision issues. You know, screen readers is mostly what we hear about.
Derek Featherstone: Right.
Jared Spool: But that's only a small piece of the accessibility picture, right?
Derek Featherstone: Yeah, it is a... It's a, it's a small piece, and, and it's something that is quite often overlooked. We, we just think of... People tend to think of screen reader compatibility as what they're providing by, by providing an accessible website, and, and really, it's much more than that. Creating something that is technically accessible and also usable to, you know, people that may use, um, may use a touch screen, because they're... You know, they may be in a wheelchair, and they use a touch screen to access their, their sites. They may be using voice recognition technology. They may be
Derek Featherstone: using, um, a, a mouth wand or a head wand to, to type or to, uh, interact with, with interfaces. So it's... It is definitely much more than just creating something for people that are visually impaired.
Jared Spool: So, so, building these systems out, when you're thinking about this stuff, you're, you're really sort of looking at all the different ways people interact, and sort of taking into consideration, you know, have we done a decent job of dealing with the, with the scenario that someone might be using a touch screen and not necessarily using a mouse? They might not have completely fine motor control or, or very single pixel point to be able to select something, right?
Derek Featherstone: Right, yeah, definitely. So it's, it's really something where, you know, we can, we can do all the things that we want to to make a, a site technically accessible, and then we start to look at it from a... Taking it a little bit further, and how do we make it so that we can ensure that somebody can actually use the site? And that's where, you know, we'd... We wanna make sure that we go the extra mile to make sure that not only are we doing something technically right, but we're actually providing something that people can use, uh, and not just have the ability to use, but they can actually use
Derek Featherstone: it in, in everyday life, in practice.
Jared Spool: Right. Okay. So last night, we were talking, and you were telling me about a client who called you, and, and their question... You, you had designed their site previously, and their question was about upgrading the site for accessibility. Could you share that story?
Derek Featherstone: Yeah. It was quite interesting, actually, because, uh, the... One of the companies that we do work for is a, a conference company, and they do a lot of conferences for, uh, government employees and, and the public sector. And one of their new prospective clients is a, a municipal association that wanted to ensure that any websites that were built for the, the new conference were accessible. And the, the theme of the conference was accessibility itself, so we-
Jared Spool: Yeah, so you, you'd wanna have an accessible website for an accessibility conference.
Derek Featherstone: Ex- exactly.
Jared Spool: Sure.
Derek Featherstone: So, so the client, uh, the client called us up, and, and said, you know, "We have, we have a question for you." And they said, you know, "What will it take for you to make, uh, one of our, one of our conference websites accessible?" And I said, "Well, they already are accessible." And, and he, he was literally flabbergasted. He had no idea that we had already done this just because it's the way to build a website.
Jared Spool: And this wasn't a big budget client either, right?
Derek Featherstone: No, not at all.
Jared Spool: No, these, these were... This was a client that you had done a project that was just a normal project.
Derek Featherstone: Yep.
Jared Spool: You, you'd priced it out, and you'd made it accessible just as part of your normal practice.
Derek Featherstone: That's ex- that's exactly it. It was just something... It's... This is the way that we build sites now. We do this. We have our, our set up for their conference websites, and we, you know, we, we reuse a lot of, of what we've done before, because we know that it's solid and it's going to work. Uh, there are a few things here and there that we may not... Uh, we may tweak sometimes. Some, some color issues may need to be tweaked for one particular conference to make sure that there... There's enough contrast in certain areas.
Jared Spool: Mm-hmm.
Derek Featherstone: But for the most part, their websites are already accessible, and, and it was, it was quite gratifying, because they didn't even know.
Jared Spool: Right.
Derek Featherstone: They didn't realize that we had already built it in and baked it into the process.
Jared Spool: You could've just charged them.
Derek Featherstone: We, we could've, but didn't. (laughs)
Jared Spool: (laughs) Ah, good for you. So now, so, so, so... That sort of, is, begs the question. So you went and you ... they put out the bid for this thing, you, you responded, you built a, a website. They didn't ask for accessibility in the original release.
Derek Featherstone: No.
Jared Spool: You ... and so, in essence, you gave it to them, one could say, for free, right? Is it the case now where we have the technology, we have stuff where it's either free or close to free in our development processes if we're paying attention?
Derek Featherstone: If, if we're paying attention and if we're doing the right things from the outset, then yeah, there's, there's a lot of it that does come for free, and, and the nice thing about it is, it's kinda like open source.
Jared Spool: Mm-hmm.
Derek Featherstone: When you have open source software and you use open source software, you get all that system is already built for you, so you can spend your time and your, your effort in other areas because you're not building everything from scratch.
Jared Spool: Right.
Derek Featherstone: It's kinda like, you know, using, using appropriate techniques, and techniques and using web standards gives you a certain amount that, that is just built in to, to that methodology, and so because that's there, you get basic interoperability, you get basic accessibility.
Jared Spool: Mm-hmm.
Derek Featherstone: That, that is, in most cases, more than enough accessibility for most document-centric sites. It's not always the case for, uh, transactional sites, but certainly for document-centric sites. A, a lot of it just ... it, it comes with the process.
Jared Spool: Okay. So you were telling me last night about talking to, uh, one of the developers for the Microsoft Surface.
Derek Featherstone: Yes.
Jared Spool: With the, the big, uh, tabletop computers as, uh, as, as one of the parodies put it, you know, you can now buy yourself an expensive, big-ass table. (laughs)
Derek Featherstone: Yes. (laughs)
Jared Spool: Um, 'cause who wants a little pocket computer when you can get a big-ass table? But, uh, so they've got this thing, and if, if people haven't seen it, it's basically this tabletop computer. It's a ... so you're looking down at the tabletop, uh, at the display, and it they have these demos which you can find on YouTube and places that are actually very slick, where people are using their fingers to move items on the, on the display around. More than one person can manipulate stuff because it's a table. At the same time, they have this, uh, technology where, you know,
Jared Spool: a, a company like T-Mobile in their stores could have this as a demonstration table, and you could take one of the models of their phones and put it on the table and tell you all the features in the phone. It'll somehow read the phone, and the demos are very slick, but you told me that you, you actually talked to one of the developers and, and asked them about accessibility.
Derek Featherstone: Yeah, I did. It was, it was interesting because I, I can't remember, uh, exactly what her role was, but I, I ... being an accessibility person, I was really interested in seeing this, this new interface and how it works, and I-
Jared Spool: But it has such potential for-
Derek Featherstone: Oh, it, it really does.
Jared Spool: ... for a lot of stuff.
Derek Featherstone: Yeah, I mean, especially when you see some of the things with somebody putting a phone on it and it reading that phone. I- it, it immediately made me think, "Okay, well, what if, you know, a person that's, that's visually impaired has their phone and they put it down on there-"
Jared Spool: Right.
Derek Featherstone: "... and some preferences are stored in there some, in some way that kicks this Surface table into some other mode where it enables some, you know, some additional features that might be really, really useful?"
Jared Spool: Yeah, that would be really hard for someone who i- should have motor issues or, or has v- vision issues-
Derek Featherstone: Exactly.
Jared Spool: ... uh, or even potentially hearing issues, right? You know, what if you had TTY capabilities built right in, right?
Derek Featherstone: Exactly.
Jared Spool: That, that would be very cool.
Derek Featherstone: The- there's so much that, that you could do with it, and so that's really what I wanted to get into, you know, is to find out, is there a headphone jack? Is there a way that, that somebody that's visually impaired could plug into this? Is there a way for, you know, for sound to be used in the interface to complement what's happening on the screen?
Jared Spool: Right.
Derek Featherstone: To let people know when they're near a hotspot, uh-
Jared Spool: Mm-hmm.
Derek Featherstone: ... or, you know, or something on the screen. Or e- even things like, how does the, the touch surface react to somebody that may have a prosthetic limb?
Jared Spool: Right, yeah. Of course.
Derek Featherstone: And so there's all these things that I, I really wanted to g- I was really interested in and really wanted to talk to you.
Jared Spool: Right, 'cause like iPhones, apparently the touchscreen doesn't work if you're wearing gloves.
Derek Featherstone: Interesting.
Jared Spool: Right? So, so an iPhone is not gonna be very useful, so I wonder ... I don't know about these t- tables.
Derek Featherstone: See, and that, and that's why I wanted to talk about it 'cause I just find it fascinating, these, exploring these alternative-
Jared Spool: Mm-hmm.
Derek Featherstone: ... uh, you know, new interfaces.
Jared Spool: Mm-hmm.
Derek Featherstone: And I, I, so I ta- was talking to her and I asked her, I said, you know, "Who's, who's in charge of accessibility? Like, what ... who's looking at the accessibility for Surface?" And she said, "Oh, it's me. I own accessibility." And I thought, "Okay, interesting choice of words. You own accessibility. That's a business term that, fair enough, understand." Uh, and I said, "Well, you know, I'd love to talk to you about the accessibility of, of Surface, is, you know, what, what's happening with it." And her response was, "It'll be compliant."
Jared Spool: "It'll be compliant."
Derek Featherstone: "It'll be compliant."
Jared Spool: (laughs)
Derek Featherstone: And I thought, "No, no, no, but what ... like, let's talk about the accessibility issues with Surface. I'm really interested in, in the research side, in the engineering side, and all of these different aspects."
Jared Spool: What have you guys thought about? What are you, what do you still have open that you haven't thought about-
Derek Featherstone: Yeah.
Jared Spool: ... that you're, you're, you know, probably is on your drawing board?
Derek Featherstone: E- exactly, and that's what I wanted to talk about, and, and the answer that I got was, "It'll be compliant."
Jared Spool: (laughs)
Derek Featherstone: "It's not right now, but when it launches, it will be compliant."
Jared Spool: You know, the thing is, is that, is that, that, that notion of compliance is ... it, it shows that, that people haven't really thought about this. They know that they have to deal with it, but they, they haven't integrated the idea that making things accessible is, is really a good design goal. You know, th- this idea that, okay, I've got ... my resources are all busy right now as it is. We can't get all the stuff that's on our plate done, and w- we haven't even thought about accessibility stuff, but we have to do something about it. Let's just make it compliant. I mean, that's how, what I'm
Jared Spool: hearing from this, and I, I've seen that attitude other places. In your mind, is there a difference between being compliant with the accessibility guidelines that are out there and actually making something accessible?
Derek Featherstone: Yes and no. I mean, the, the, you know, at the core of it, compliance is- ... you know, generally seen as a, as a, as a QA type issue. It's quality assurance.
Jared Spool: Right. Yeah. Well, it's-
Derek Featherstone: It's a technical approach, and it's-
Jared Spool: By definition, right? Yeah. It's-
Derek Featherstone: ... that's exactly it.
Jared Spool: It's meeting the requirements, which is-
Derek Featherstone: Exactly.
Jared Spool: ... you know, any, any sort of quality assurance process is all about establishing requirements and then meeting them.
Derek Featherstone: Exactly. So, you know, from a technical perspective, you could say that something that is compliant with these guidelines is accessible at a technical level. But really where, you know, I'd like to try and take it is taking that, that next step. Because something that is technically accessible may be completely unusable, completely unintelligible to somebody. The content may, may not make sense because of terminology, because of, you know, whatever the person's understanding, their domain knowledge, whatever it is. There's a lot of different
Derek Featherstone: things that contribute to, to the usability of something for a person with disabilities, and that's where we start to look at things from a little, uh, in a little different light. Because we... when we start to not focus on compliance and we start to get things back and get right into testing with the user and the person that's actually using the interface, whatever it happens to be, when we test with real people, it becomes much more than a, a cold, stark compliance Q&A issue.
Jared Spool: Right. That's true. When you, when you're thinking in terms of compliance, you're thinking in terms of meeting Rule 17, right? You're not thinking that there's a person out there that, that is... that has a situation and, and... Now, one of the techniques that a lot of design teams use now is, uh, personas, right?
Derek Featherstone: Right.
Jared Spool: So you, you create these personas, and it's interesting because I haven't seen, amongst the teams that we've worked with, really much effort put into personas where people had disabilities or issues that they were working with.
Derek Featherstone: Mm-hmm.
Jared Spool: Every persona... And this, this is something that I'm realizing that I'm not taking into account. Every persona, uh, that we've been seeing is... they have all sorts of attributes, but, you know, it doesn't say, "Oh, and by the way, you know, they're paralyzed from the, from the mid-waist down and, and they have limited upper body movement."
Derek Featherstone: Mm-hmm.
Jared Spool: "And therefore, you know, using a mouse is impossible." But that wouldn't be hard to build personas out, with those types of things.
Derek Featherstone: No, not at all. In fact, some of our clients that are already using personas, we've been working with them-
Jared Spool: Yeah.
Derek Featherstone: ... to, to get... to build some additional attributes into the personas so that, so that the accessibility issues become more, um, less of an afterthought and more of something that's-
Jared Spool: Right.
Derek Featherstone: ... built in from the beginning so that-
Jared Spool: Right. And it's the same thing, right?
Derek Featherstone: ... everybody's on the same page.
Jared Spool: You know, in terms of dealing with compliance versus dealing with accessibility, if you're dealing with a persona where you have someone who, who has motor issues and is, and is dealing with that stuff, then you can, you can sit and ask the question like you do with any persona description and say, "Will our design work for this person?" You know, because that's the purpose of the persona ............................ And because you've got that defined out at a level of detail, a level of granularity where you can, you can actually think in terms of that versus just, you know, "Rule 17 says buttons have to be this many pixels tall." You know, it's, it's a completely
Jared Spool: different sort of thing.
Derek Featherstone: Absolutely. I, I couldn't have said it better myself. I mean, that's exactly, that's exactly it. If we, if we embrace it at the persona level and right... we're creating personas at the beginning of a project. If we do that and we can carry that through all the team meetings, all the development process, all the design process, then we're in, in much better shape and not even dealing with it just at a pure compliance level.
Jared Spool: Right. Now, the browser technology is actually helping us these days, right?
Derek Featherstone: It is. We've got, uh, you know, new, new browsers out there that are becoming more popular, like Firefox is, is becoming infinitely more popular.
Jared Spool: Right. More visitors visit our site with Firefox than any other browser, which I find fascinating.
Derek Featherstone: That, that is, that's very interesting, you know, and it's something where, where we can use technology that's available to us in Firefox to create one-off solutions if we need to. Just as an example, I was at, at, uh, a conference in Chicago speaking at An Event Apart.
Jared Spool: Mm-hmm.
Derek Featherstone: And at the after-party, I was talking with a couple of people that were interested in accessibility. And one of them was talking to me and telling me about his sister, who was quadriplegic, in a wheelchair, but had some motion in, in her hands-
Jared Spool: Right.
Derek Featherstone: ... and was able to, to have some mobility there. And so I asked, I asked him what, what assistive technology she used, and he said... I was expecting him to say voice recognition software, but he actually said that she uses an on-screen keyboard-
Jared Spool: Uh-huh.
Derek Featherstone: ... uh, with a touch screen.
Jared Spool: Oh, very cool.
Derek Featherstone: So she uses a touch screen, and she has enough mobility in her arm that she can use... Uh, she doesn't extend her finger, but she can use her knuckle of her index finger to, to tap the screen and, and perform all the actions that she needs.
Jared Spool: Well, that's cool.
Derek Featherstone: It is. And, and so I asked him, I said, "Well, what's, what's the most difficult part of using the web for her? What, you know, what does she find most difficult and frustrating?" And he said, "Radio buttons."
Jared Spool: Mm-hmm.
Derek Featherstone: And I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, she has a very tough time selecting a radio button because it's such a small target on the screen."
Jared Spool: Right. Most browsers render radio buttons very small.
Derek Featherstone: Exactly.
Jared Spool: Particularly the operating systems tend to do that.
Derek Featherstone: Exactly. So we-
Jared Spool: Because they're designed for a mouse, which has a s- single-pixel resolution. So if you're 10 by 10, you've, you've got a, you know, fairly decent height there, but on a touch screen, particularly with a higher resolution touch screen, 10 by 10 is a really small space.
Derek Featherstone: It is. It is small. And so he was telling me that her, her biggest problem is selecting radio buttons because they're, they're too close to one another. So it's very difficult for her to select one out of a group of, say, five. And I looked at this-
Jared Spool: Right.
Derek Featherstone: ... and I started thinking of all these different ideas, you know, how can we work with this? And I started thinking about lots of different ways where we could write, write a script that would automatically figure out that r- a radio button is there, and here's the label for it, and we can expand it and do all these things. And then just thinking about it, I, I asked him what browser she was using, and she uses Internet Explorer. And I said, "Well, what if I told you that we could do something in about three minutes that would make a, a world of difference to your sister?" And he said, "I'm, I'm listening." And so
Derek Featherstone: I suggested that they get the Firefox browser and email me because eventually, ultimately what I did was create a user... CSS style sheet-
Jared Spool: Mm-hmm.
Derek Featherstone: ... where it basically targeted in the page, it found any radio buttons and instead of making them the default size, it made them four times that size and it automatically created a margin around it, so there was more space in between the radio buttons.
Jared Spool: Right.
Derek Featherstone: So she could load that into her browser in Firefox and anytime a radio button was on a page, it would automatically space it out more and make it bigger. Uh, so that's, it was just something where, you know, it's, that's not ev- the, the radio buttons themselves could've been perfectly technically accessible with labels and done the right way, but this little, this little hack that we could build into Firefox with a user style sheet could make a huge difference to this person and not, not make it, it's not any more technically accessible, but it's a heck of a lot more usable.
Jared Spool: Right. So it's cool that the browsers are now letting us, you know, do this sort of thing and, and, you know, th- that does ask the question as to, as site designers, how much... You know, right now, we have to do a lot of stuff because these user s- side type solutions are not generally available, but as more of them become available, it might actually make our jobs a little easier and, and we just, you know, knowing that these things are out there and knowing how they work, we can just code to them and when users are using them, it takes advantage.
Derek Featherstone: Yeah, I mean, and that's, that's the beauty of it and if we start with the reason that we can do that is if we have a foundation of, of standards-based, uh, code-
Jared Spool: Mm-hmm.
Derek Featherstone: ... then we've, we've got the ability to go in and do these, these one-offs after the fact.
Jared Spool: That's right.
Derek Featherstone: Um, and, and if we didn't, if we had a mess of jumbled code, it makes it much more difficult to provide some of these one-off solutions that we can provide with some of these, you know, little, little pieces of code that take two minutes to, to generate, uh, that can make a, a world of difference. So it, it's something where, you know, I think more and more people will start looking at the service that they provide and provide a standards-based solution to begin with and then have it, i- almost like multiple formats policy that a lot of departments, government departments have where,
Derek Featherstone: "Here's our, our core version. If you need some alternative version, let us know and we'll gladly provide that to you." Same kind of thing. "Here's our core version. If you need any modifications to it, then maybe we can provide you with this little extra script that, you know, that takes two minutes to write."
Jared Spool: Right. Cool. So, uh, teams that are thinking that, "Okay, we definitely need to be adapting our practices to this," how do they get started? What, what, what's, you know, sort of the first steps to, to getting going and what, do you have suggestions for resources or places to turn?
Derek Featherstone: Yeah. The, there's a lot of, uh, there's a lot of really good blogs out there that, that talk about accessibility and they have specific, uh, samples of how to deal th- deal with things from a code perspective. That's, that's sort of our, sort of our starting point is making sure that our code is, is exactly like it should be, so that it's-
Jared Spool: What's your, what's your favorite of those resources?
Derek Featherstone: Uh, one of the best ones, historically, is, uh, well, two really, is accessify.com.
Jared Spool: Okay.
Derek Featherstone: And then WebAIM, which is, is WebAIM, W-E-B-A-I-M, .org-
Jared Spool: Mm-hmm.
Derek Featherstone: ... um, which is a shortened form of "With web accessibility in mind."
Jared Spool: Oh, cool.
Derek Featherstone: Uh, and that's, those are two really good resources where, you know, there's, there's lots of content going up there all the time and, uh, news on what's the latest in accessibility and what's happening-
Jared Spool: Mm-hmm.
Derek Featherstone: ... a- around the world. So, uh, they're really good resources as, as starting points. Um, and in terms of, uh, the actual building and implementation process, the W3C has a checklist out there, a compliance guideline.
Jared Spool: Mm-hmm.
Derek Featherstone: Um, and as much as I, I think that their compliance mentality is, is not necessarily where we wanna be, it really is a, a good starting point.
Jared Spool: Yeah. So it's a place to start, right?
Derek Featherstone: Yeah.
Jared Spool: Understanding, you know, understanding not just what the rules are, but why those rules came about and who those rules are affecting-
Derek Featherstone: Exactly.
Jared Spool: ... and then, and then asking the questions in addition to just complying to the rules, "Are we really providing the, the interfaces that people can use?"
Derek Featherstone: Exactly. And th- and that's where what it comes down to is that the, the checklist and the compliance guidelines are a starting point, not an end point.
Jared Spool: Right.
Derek Featherstone: And, and that's where when we start looking at it that way, that's when we can build really, truly useful and accessible interfaces for people that need them.
Jared Spool: Super. Now, if people want to get in touch with you, talk to you about their projects, how would they do that?
Derek Featherstone: Yeah. They can contact me through our website, furtherahead.com.
Jared Spool: Furtherahead.com. Okay.
Derek Featherstone: We have, uh-
Jared Spool: We'll put a link to that on the, on the show notes.
Derek Featherstone: Perfect. And we've got a, we've got a, a list of upcoming events and conferences and workshops and things and, and, uh, newsletter sign-up as well so that people can keep up to date with what's going on and, and where we're going to be and the kinds of things that we're working on, so...
Jared Spool: Super. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
Derek Featherstone: Thank you, Jared.
Jared Spool: Okay.
Derek Featherstone: (upbeat music) We hope you've enjoyed this Spooncast. You can comment on this and other episodes, as well as find more UIE podcasts at uie.com/audio. You can win free admission to our next virtual seminar by filling out a short listener survey about this podcast. Please see the
Derek Featherstone: corresponding blog post at uie.com/brainsparks for the survey link. You can enter once for every podcast you listen to. Don't forget, if you'd like to hear more about the issue of accessibility as it relates to web application design, be sure to catch Derek at our Web App Summit, March 26th through 28th, 2008, in sunny Coronado, California. Learn more at webappsummit.com. That's all for this week. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.