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Introduction
It is Episode 10 in our interview series, where we ask people in the know 6 simple questions and let them roll with it so we can all soak up a bit of their insight and experience on the subject of the advancement of digital accessibility and a more inclusive web!
Today we speak with Jeremy Keith. Jeremy is a website maker and co-founder of Clearleft, a very influential design transformation consultancy that also happens to be very local to us here in Brighton, England!
Our talk spoke to some of the core beliefs underpinning the need for digital accessibility, more consideration of the internet as an inclusive force and the importance of cultural change in order to make the web better for everyone.
Who are you and what do you care about?
What I do is hard to explain. Once upon a time, I would have been able to say “I make websites”. And that’s still true to a certain extent, but it’s probably not what I spend most of my time doing these days; I spend more time talking about making websites, writing about making websites, discussing the process of making websites.
But in terms of what I care about, that’s maybe easier to answer. And that’s been pretty much a through-line for many years.
I very much care about the World Wide Web and as a result of that, I care about accessibility. And the reason I say it’s as a result of that is, I think, my attitude towards accessibility comes from the attitude of the web towards accessibility.
The fact that it is not an accident that the web is is very accessible by default; that Tim Berners-Lee explicitly set out to make something universal; something with a low barrier to entry. And so I feel like my own my own attitude, my own feelings towards how I build on the web, is very much influenced by the principles that informed the web itself.
So these ideas of universal access to information, regardless of device type, regardless of ability, regardless of the sort of content we’re dealing with, that’s basically filtered down to me. It’s one of the things that informs everything I do – to the extent that I don’t think about it that much. It’s one of those real embedded things that you just take for granted at a certain point.
For those people who haven’t considered accessibility or aren’t aware of it. How would you personally go about explaining the importance of online accessibility to someone who’s not heard of it?
I like the way you framed the question “to someone who isn’t aware of it?” because a lot of time we talk about ‘Oh, how do you sell accessibility to someone who doesn’t care about it?’ which actually is just not a problem I’ve come across because most people, I find, once they’re aware of it, they do care about it. They might prioritise different things. They might say “Well, we have to make a profit no matter what and, therefore, we’re going to deprioritise accessibility” but there’s no one out there going ‘Oh, I’m against accessibility, I don’t like accessibility.’ I feel that there’s maybe a trope that we have to convince people about accessibility but we don’t.
Your question is about people who aren’t aware of it and that’s a more interesting one. Because I feel like accessibility is almost in the same category of things like performance or security, as in these things are really important, they’re really fundamental, but they’re also invisible; and because they’re invisible, most people aren’t aware of them. And why should they be? We are naturally biased towards the visible so we think of the Web as a visual medium. Because we see it, we think about what’s what’s right in front of us but behind that there are all these important factors, of which accessibility is one, along with performance and security.
So that’s usually how I would start; trying to get across this idea that one of the Web’s super-powers is the fact that it’s not actually just a visual medium, that it’s universality extends to being consumed, or people getting stuff done on the web in a way that doesn’t involve images of graphical browser pixels on a screen. And most people respond really well to that. They’re like ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve never thought of that’. It’s kind of like you’re opening up the World to them so there’s this whole audience you haven’t even thought of, hadn’t even considered exists out there. Which is great.
I will say, at that moment when people get like ‘Oh, accessibility is a thing and I care about it’. That’s also a bit of a danger because people can immediately start to go ‘Okay, I need to make my website accessible’ and come across bolt-on solutions, like, ‘Oh, I’ll use this overlay and now I’ve made my website accessible’. And it’s not done out of malice, it’s not done out of trying to cut corners; these people genuinely want to care, genuinely want to make their website accessible and what they’re reading seems to imply that this is the way to do it.
There’s this really interesting window where people have become aware of accessibility and they absolutely care about it but there’s also maybe a danger in that moment of follow through and understand a bit more about how it needs to be a foundational thing and not something that you slap on top.
How do you think the internet will change over the next 10 years or so? And what specific features or habits that exist now do you hope will be seen as from their time?
Predicting the future is quite scary; no matter what you do you’re going to either seem ridiculously short-sighted or ridiculously optimistic.
So I don’t know if I’ll attempt to predict but in terms of what I hope will change, this isn’t necessarily related to accessibility but as your question was about the internet, rather than just the website web; I do hope that, and I think this is beginning to happen, the obsession with apps, as in iOS apps and Android apps by default, instead of considering the web as a delivery mechanism, I hope that that will fade away. Not that they will disappear or anything appropriate but appropriate use is what I’m hoping for; that when you when you need an app, you build an app or if it should be a website, you build a website.
Right now a lot of things are apps that should be websites, I feel. It’s just the appropriateness of that gets to me. But I do you see that somewhat changing and certainly from a technical perspective at this point, there’s very little technical reason why you need to build an iOS app or an Android app, rather than building a website. But it is tied to accessibility in the broader sense of accessibility, as in the universality of a URL, the fact that you can link someone to a website, you can put it on a poster or whatever, and they get the access immediately without having to go through the gatekeeping of an app store without having to go through that whole process.
I would love to see that frictionless access become the default. Not that we wouldn’t also make dedicated, platform specific apps when necessary. But but that the default shouldn’t be ‘Oh, we need to wrap this up into an app for iOS and put it in an app store and app for Android put it in the Play Store’. So that’s something I’m hoping will change. I think from a technical point of view, we’re practically there. Once notifications land on iOS next year, then there’ll be very little you can not do in a web browser, even on mobile.
But I’ve got to be honest, I’m a little pessimistic about human nature and rate of change; inertia is a very powerful force. It’s hard to imagine people changing their default viewpoint/ outlook so quickly. That said, I’ve been pleasantly surprised in the past so here’s hoping. I thought, when responsive design came along, I thought this is brilliant and it totally maps to how I feel about the web – trying to lock things into specific widths – we should be embracing the fluidity. So I totally got on board with responsive design but I was convinced it was going to really struggle and take many years or decades. And actually, it seemed to become the default relatively quickly.
If you’re with someone who needs to check how accessible their website is and they only have five minutes. So very specific but talk us through how you’d go about showing them and how you give them that kind of insight into into what it means.
On a practical level, I’ve got some bookmarklets saved to my browser and I hit some of those. And what those bookmarklets then do is a couple of things that are really relatively low hanging fruit for most websites; ‘Are you using headings?’ And I know the next step is ‘Are the heading levels the correct level?’ But, honestly, that’s almost the icing on the cake! Are you even using headings to begin with, like reasonable headings.
All text in images – not just as it exists, but ‘is it good, does it make sense?’. There’s a whole art to that; structural elements like the landmark roles, nav and main and stuff – that’s super useful stuff. And again, most websites should pass those. I mean, it’s pretty low hanging fruit.
And one again from a technical point of view, this is not hard to do, but Form Fields; making sure you’re using Labels and Form Fields correctly using them right, not reinventing the wheel and making up your own interactive element. If there’s something that you can use for free that the browser will understand. That’s probably the area where it’s easiest to find the issues and fix the issues and have the biggest impact. I mean, if you can do that; if you just make sure you’ve got headings, structural landmarks, all text and images and forms that are using labels correctly in the right form elements, I mean, you’re most of the way there – you’re doing better at that point than 90% of most websites. So yeah, even five minutes, maybe you could identify those.
On a practical level, I’ve got some bookmarklets saved to my browser and I hit some of those. And what those bookmarklets then do is a couple of things that are really relatively low hanging fruit for most websites; ‘Are you using headings?’ And I know the next step is ‘Are the heading levels the correct level?’ But, honestly, that’s almost the icing on the cake! Are you even using headings to begin with, like reasonable headings.
All text in images – not just as it exists, but ‘is it good, does it make sense?’. There’s a whole art to that; structural elements like the landmark roles, nav and main and stuff – that’s super useful stuff. And again, most websites should pass those. I mean, it’s pretty low hanging fruit.
And one again from a technical point of view, this is not hard to do, but Form Fields; making sure you’re using Labels and Form Fields correctly using them right, not reinventing the wheel and making up your own interactive element. If there’s something that you can use for free that the browser will understand. That’s probably the area where it’s easiest to find the issues and fix the issues and have the biggest impact. I mean, if you can do that; if you just make sure you’ve got headings, structural landmarks, all text and images and forms that are using labels correctly in the right form elements, I mean, you’re most of the way there – you’re doing better at that point than 90% of most websites. So yeah, even five minutes, maybe you could identify those.
We may have touched on this but in terms of the adoption of more accessible digital products, and the more accessible digital web, what do you think is the biggest challenge?
It’s sort of cultural, in the sense of it’s about what organizations prioritise. Again, you’d be hard pressed to find an organization that says “We don’t care about accessibility” – every organization will say they care about accessibility and I believe that they do. But if you ask them to rank all the things they care about; customer service, profitability, usability, accessibility, then it’d be interesting to see where accessibility lies. And that ranking, that list of priorities, that comes across in the final product. Sometimes, through no ill will, a product launches that isn’t accessible because the people building the product, their priorities were elsewhere. Maybe they lacked the awareness of how they could have made it more accessible in the earliest phases of that project. Or they had the awareness but the priority, the pressure, was on to do something quickly and not necessarily do it well. So it’s that culture shift.
Actually, I think at this point, this gets into an interesting question of the difference between accessibility and inclusive design. This is something I got from chatting to Irena Rosa Cova, who’s something someone you should get on the show – she’s great. She talks about inclusive design and she answered this question in the front of my mind which is ‘What is this difference between accessibility and inclusive design?’ And accessibility is kind of focused on the implementation on the output, the thing that gets produced. Is it accessible? How accessible is it? Can it be more accessible? Whereas, inclusive design is more about the process that led to that thing being produced. And so when I talk about there needs to be maybe more of a cultural, organisational change, I’m probably not really talking about accessibility. I’m probably talking about inclusive design, as in this the conditions, the priorities need to be in place first, that accessibility is prioritised in order to ensure that end result is then more likely to be accessible. So maybe that isn’t even accessibility per se. It’s more inclusive design.
I guess the adoption of inclusive design speaks to that cultural shift that would make for more accessible digital products.
I was blogging about this just the other day and it’s like a thought experiment; imagine someone who’s an accessibility expert, they know Aria, and WCAG and all that stuff like the back of their hand, great. But you put that person into a big organization that doesn’t prioritize accessibility. And it’s gonna be very, very hard for that person, despite all their skills and all their knowledge to make an impact and to to get good work done because they’ll be fighting against the system. But meanwhile, if you had an organisation that genuinely cared and prioritised inclusive design, even if nobody at the organisation is actually technically on accessibility, it’s more likely that the product being produced will be accessible.
Finally, what is one thing that every single person can do or learn to play a part in the progression towards a more accessible and inclusive internet?
This is tricky. I’m not sure if there’s one thing anyone can do. I guess there’s maybe just an awareness thing.
It it would be nice if there was a more general awareness that the Internet and the Web aren’t just visual mediums, that it’s not just about pixels on a screen. I don’t know if there’s anything people can do about that. The onus probably shouldn’t be on everyone else, to be honest, it’s probably on us to make it so that they don’t have to know that, they don’t have to care about that – stuff will just work anyway.
Follow Jeremy’s work on Twitter and read more insights and advice on Jeremy’s website.