Adrienne McDonnell is a front end developer at Elsevier. She says that knowing how to navigate a site with the keyboard is a fundational skill that all developers should know. She also reflects on the fact that all the accessibility specifications are very dense and can be overwhelming for people new to accessibility.

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Transcript

Nic:    Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. You’re listening to episode 60. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you.

To get today’s show notes or transcript, head out to 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 at Twilio.com.

Nic:    So today I’m speaking with Adrienne McDonnell and I think she’s quite new to the field of accessibility so it’s exciting to have the perspective of someone who hasn’t been doing this for quite a long time.

Adrienne thanks for joining us.

Adrienne:    Yeah, absolutely.

Nic:    Right. I like to let guests introduce themselves. So, can you tell us in a brief introduction… who’s, Adrienne McDonnell?

Adrienne:    Sure. Hi everyone, I’m Adrienne. I’m from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and I’m a self-taught developer right now I’m working as a software engineer at Elsevier. I started out with front-end design… or development, excuse me and that was… just about three years ago. So, I’m relatively new in my career as a developer as a whole. And started teaching myself about accessibility a year and a half ago.

Nic:    Right. Okay, so to get warmed up a little bit tell us something that most people would not know about you.

Adrienne:    Let’s see… well outside of web development I also am an artist so I… right now I’m focussing on tapestry weaving and bead weaving.

Nic:    Tapestry and Bead… that’s amazing. I love fiber arts. I started playing a little bit with… needle felting of wool and obviously it’s not quite as fine work as tapestry but it’s quite a bit of fun.

So you said you’re working at Elsevier what kind of accessibility do you manage to put in your work there?

Adrienne:    Well, I… so I started this position just this past March, and I was brought on right after they had done an accessibility audit on the product that I work on.

Nic:    Okay.

Adrienne:    Which was great timing for me because I became the main developer that was working on fixing the defects that had been found within the audit.

Nic:    Right

Adrienne:    So that… that has been a focus of, you know, the last seven months or so that I’ve been working here and… which has been great for me to kind of become the accessibility advocate for our team and just, you know, also just to get a deeper learning for myself.

Nic:    Yeah. So… what put you onto accessibility? I mean was it just that you were in place and they had just finished an audit and they say, “Hey. Tag, you’re it” or did you have an interest in that before? How did it happen?

Adrienne:    Well, I… I did have an interest in it before. You know, in my first position as a front-end developer… I… I didn’t have… any knowledge of accessibility or developing for accessibility and as a self-taught developer it was not something that ever came up, you know, in kind of, guides to learning front-end development. And so when I got into that first position and realized that there was this whole very important piece of development that I didn’t know… I was kind of horrified that that wasn’t part of, you know, the foundational learning that people like me are getting when you’re teaching yourself. And, you know, often in the agency world accessibility requirements would come… you know that would be kind of tacked on to the end of a project and we would be scrambling to make sure that we hit, you know, all the right check marks. And it just… I mean I suppose for me it’s just, it was so clear how important this was. And frustrating that it wasn’t being given a higher priority and so that was kind of my initial spark to teach myself so that it could just become part of my normal workflow instead of something I was squeezing in at the end.

Nic:    I think that’s one of the issues that most of the self-taught developers encounter is the fact that most of the places that you go to learn coding… regardless of which language or flavor of a framework … they just don’t talk about accessibility and they don’t have examples that have accessible code.

Adrienne:    Yes, exactly.

Nic:    What kind of barriers… yeah. What kind of barriers, apart from the fact the information wasn’t just there in what you were coming across… What kind of barriers did you find? What did you do to actually teach yourself accessibility considering that you hadn’t encountered it and now suddenly you were faced with fixing all these issues?

Adrienne:    I think that the… the biggest barrier for me… you know, when I was teaching myself front-end development there were so many resources and it was very easy to be guided on a path. And for accessibility, it didn’t feel that way. There were, you know, the actual specifications that I could go and see but they felt so dense. And, so specific that as a new learner it could very quickly feel overwhelming. And there wasn’t kind of a… “Here’s…” you know, “here’s a fun game of [hide? 06:53 ] way to learn about accessibility “or “Heres… here’s where to start” you know. Like, here’s a nice, you know, a little bit that you can chew off. And get that down and then go from there. And so what I ended up doing, it was really just based on whatever product I was doing. You know, if there was a form involved then that’s kind of what I focussed on. Or, you know, for every website we build we had some kind of main navigation that needed to be keyboard accessible so that became one of kind of the first components that I, you know, figured out that patterns for. So it really just started becoming this piecemeal as needed rather than “Here are the foundations and here’s how to build on them”.

Nic:    Right. From what I hear you’re thinking of accessibility as being something that must be in your toolbox and your set of skills as a developer. Just like you have to know HTML and Javascript. Have you found that your colleagues or other developers have that kind of understanding of accessibility or is it something that as someone who’s brought into the importance of it did you have to fight a little bit and advocate about that?

Adrienne:    I… I mean, I’m happy to say that my team here really does recognize the value of it. And it has become a large priority within our sphere to, you know, get the audits done and continually make our products better. So that… that I’ve been very happy with. You know, if it were up to me I think we would all take some time off and do some training so that everyone’s kind of on the same page… we have the same baseline of skills and knowledge about it. But that will probably not happen, but I’m… you know, I’m satisfied being the person who’s always raising their hand and saying, “and