Christina Deemer

[00:00:00 ] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case making digital content usable for people with cognitive disabilities.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the show, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you all your idea featured soon. Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.

So, on the podcast today, we have Christina Deemer. Christina is a senior UX developer at Lede, a company of the Alley Group, where she champions accessibility and headless WordPress in her work with publishers and nonprofits. She’s passionate about inclusivity and community and has spoken at a variety of events about the subject.

Christina is autistic and brings her personal experience with neurodivergence and disability to bear in her work.

At the recent WordCamp US, Christina gave a presentation called “embracing minds of all kinds, making digital content usable for people with cognitive disabilities”. And it’s this talk, which is the foundation of the podcast today.

In her description of the presentation, Christina wrote, “cognitive disabilities are among the most prevalent types of disabilities, yet experts have struggled to provide web accessibility best practices around this area due to cognitive disabilities being such a broad category. However recent work by standards groups has begun to address this deficiency”.

In past episodes, we’ve covered website accessibility from some different angles, and today we focus on how the web might be experienced by people with cognitive disabilities.

First, Christina talks about what the term cognitive disabilities actually means, and what it encompasses. It’s a wide range of things, and so we talk about how people may differ in the way that they access the web. Memory, over complicated interfaces and readability are a few of the areas that we touch upon.

We also discuss what legislation there is in place to offer guidance to those wishing to make their sites more accessible, and as you’ll hear, it’s a changing landscape.

Towards the end, Christina talks about her own late diagnosis of autism and how this shapes her experience of the web, particularly with auto-play content and when web design includes elements which flash or flicker.

Typically when we record the podcast there’s not a lot of background noise, but that’s not always the case. This is the last of the live recordings from WordCamp US 2022, and you may notice that the recordings have a little echo or other strange audio artifacts. Whilst the podcasts are more than listenable, I do hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world were at play.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links and the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all of the other episodes as well.

And so, without further I bring you Christina Deemer.

I am joined on the podcast today by Christina Deemer. Hello.

[00:04:14 ] Christina Deemer: Hello Nathan.

[00:04:16 ] Nathan Wrigley: It’s very nice to have you on. We are at WordCamp US 2022. We’re upstairs in the media room, and we’ve got Christina on the show today because she did a presentation. Have you actually done the presentation yet?

[00:04:27 ] Christina Deemer: Yes, I did it yesterday morning. I was lucky in that I got to get it over with early and then enjoy the rest of the conference.

[00:04:34 ] Nathan Wrigley: How did it go?

[00:04:35 ] Christina Deemer: It went really well. It was a lot of fun. I had a really great audience.

[00:04:39 ] Nathan Wrigley: That’s nice to hear. That’s good. The subject, I’m just gonna give everybody the title. That’s probably a quick way to introduce what we’re gonna talk about. The subject title was embracing minds of all kinds, making digital content usable for people with cognitive disabilities. So we’ll dive into that in a moment. Just before then, though, just paint a little bit of a picture about who you are and how come it is that you’re speaking at a WordPress conference particularly about this topic.

[00:05:04 ] Christina Deemer: Okay. I am a career changer. I spent the first 12 years or so of my career working in arts management. Then I decided I wanted to do something very different, and I became a developer. And one of my early mentors introduced me to WordPress. So, the first projects that I worked on were WordPress sites. I wrote my first WordPress theme when I was 35, and just really enjoyed getting involved in the WordPress community.

And from the beginning of my career, I’ve been very interested in accessibility for a wide variety of reasons. And it’s become a passion of mine. I really enjoy sharing knowledge about accessibility with people. I enjoy hearing people’s stories about accessibility. And recently there’s been a lot of work done on the standards around cognitive accessibility or accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities, and that work has been really fascinating and I’ve wanted to share it with people. And that was how, the reason that I pitched this talk for WordCamp US.

[00:06:13 ] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That’s great. The words cognitive disabilities, it probably makes a great deal of sense to you because you’ve parsed and you’ve said it many times. You fully understand it. Would you just run over a brief definition of what it encompasses? And I’m sure it’s not just one thing, maybe it’s a multitude of things.

[00:06:28 ] Christina Deemer: So it’s a very nebulous term, and it acts as a sort of umbrella for neurological disorders as well as behavioral and mental health disorders that may or may not be neurological. It covers a wide variety of things from autism, ADHD, aphasia, dementia, dyslexia, dyscalculia, tourette syndrome, traumatic brain injury.

It covers a real wide variety of things, which is one of the reasons actually why it’s taken so long to develop some standards around how to make websites more accessible to people with those diagnoses. But just to take a little further step back with things. When I talk about this I really try to make a point to not focus on some of these sort of diagnostic labels, but to rather focus on underlying cognitive skills.

Because a lot of people with cognitive disabilities don’t even realize they have a disability, for a number of reasons. There are a lot of systemic barriers to getting a diagnosis, and a lot of things come into play there. But really what we’re talking about is some underlying cognitive skills, like memory issues, focus issues, ability to concentrate, reading, math and language comprehension, decision making, executive function, which has to do with the processes involved in following instructions and planning things and processing a bunch of things at once.

So, when I talk about cognitive accessibility, I really like to focus less on those diagnostic labels and more on the underlying cognitive skills that are involved.

[00:08:13 ] Nathan Wrigley: So from that, I take it that cognitive disabilities, as you described it, was a long list. There was a really large amount of things that you’re covering here, which is really interesting. So let’s unpack that a little bit. Just before we clicked record, I mentioned that we may get into the weeds of what it is like for people who have some of these things. And maybe we could cherry pick some examples.

What I’m intending to do here is for you to paint a picture of what the web looks like for some of these different things. So in my case, when I approach the computer and open it up and get it started, I can see the screen, I can hear the video when it’s played. I just don’t really have a window into what that might look like. So if you have a moment to just broadly paint a picture of what some of these things feel like and look like.

[00:09:01 ] Christina Deemer: Sure, and even people who are somewhat familiar with general accessibility and maybe more accustomed to thinking about what the web is like for people who use screen readers. So they think about, they’ve maybe done some testing and they know how things are read. They think about reading order, and how a screen reader works. And when they’re thinking about making sites accessible for people who are deaf, they are thinking about making sure that there are captions on videos.

So when we’re thinking about cognitive accessibility, we’re thinking about some other issues. So in my talk yesterday, I had a couple of examples of sites that are pages that had weak cognitive accessibility. And one of them was a desktop screen of an interface of eBay, like buying a shirt on eBay. And in the middle of the page, there were four calls to action, with three different designs. So it wasn’t clear what the user was supposed to push. There was no clear call to action. There was very little white space on the page.

So this isn’t great for users with cognitive disability. Somebody who has an issue with focus is not go