WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: for Chrome devs: intro to accessibility course

for

From: Katie Haritos-Shea
Date: Sep 12, 2013 12:18PM

Bravo all around!


Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Note® II



-------- Original message --------
From: Denis Boudreau < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Date: 09/12/2013 11:06 AM (GMT-05:00)
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] for Chrome devs: intro to accessibility course


Hey,

I gotta say I agree with you Karl.

I was one of those who complained about this as soon as I saw it (mea maxima culpa), and even though I was immediately thankful for Google for actually doing this (their reach is indeed far greater and that's ultimately a good thing for the field because more devs are going to hear about it), I was bothered - scratch that - pissed off by the fact that while we spend so much time and energy widening the scope to include other types of disabilities, all of a sudden, Google would come in with their big corporate resources and walk all over our efforts and narrow it down again. So that pissed me off, I have to admit.

Then, as I discussed with people that are much wiser than I'll probably ever be (waving at you JF), I came to realize that Google can get a lot more traction than we ever will as individual cogs in the a11y wheel. So maybe they can succeed at drawing new people to the field, something we very much struggle to do on our own. So, a lot of positive can indeed come out of this.

It's no coincidence that Google is offering this free training now - their goal is most probably to widen their userbase both in terms of developers relying on ChromeVox and end users actually trying it, and they want the best, positive corporate image they can have (who wouldn't).

The context is changing and with all the legal and government requirements falling into place all over the world and especially in the US, there's certainly an interest in making sure developers that are going to have to learn about this accessibility stuff anyway actually learn about it the way Google wants them to learn it: using Chrome, ChromeVoX and relying on their developer tools. If I was investing in Chrome and wanted to reverse the shift in the screen reader userbase, this is exactly what I'd do too. What better way to bring more people to an emerging solution such as ChromeVox, as Jaws and Window-Eyes shares are being progressively divided between VoiceOVer and NVDA? Google wants a piece of it too. Can't blame them for that.

Indeed, Google's tools and resources are awesome and indeed a lot (most?) developers use Chrome, so it makes perfect sense to offer them tools they can simply integrate to their current tool set. Indeed, they are very much oriented towards their own products and the gain they can get from the whole thing. This is a business after all, and we need to remember that the bottom line is what matters most. So, I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter so much how Google approaches it, as long as they do approach it. I believe we can trust them to say the right things after all. They'll probably put way too much emphasis on way-aria, might even diminish the importance of semantic markup in the process (love those checkbox roles on spans, right!), but it will expose more devs to our cause. And that's ultimately a good thing. But there's another potential problem looming.

We all want more people to hear about accessibility, and if I had to choose, I'd rather spend the next 5 years of my life widening the understanding of developers who were in contact with this training to include other types of disabilities, rather than keep trying to raise awareness in order to bring new people to accessibility. But I do see a potential problem here. As more devs learn about a11y the Google way, there will be an even bigger push on more recent technologies such as wai-aria for instance. And that might result in a widening in the digital gap for end users who only have access to old version of assistive technology that don't support aria. That means that initially, some users who do not have a recent version of a screen reader will be left behind. Those will probably need to upgrade more than they'd want to, and there will be tools available to them for free. If some of them can't upgrade to the latest version of Jaws and decide to give ChromeVox a try, I don

't think anyone at Google will mind.

But, the one thing that worries me here is that developers who lear about a11y the Google way are going to start building sites that are accessible to a screen reader used mostly by developers (Chromevox), while the real end users will still be using the other, more prominent screen readers with which those same developers will not have tested their content with (jaws, nvda, etc.). This means that the user experience of those who build will look good, while the user experience who those in the receiving end might be shakier... It would suck to come to a point where there's developer accessibility and end user accessibility. And that's very much a possibility, unless the devs trained with the Google tools actually widen their horizons by integrating other tools in their tool set.

Whether we like it or not, this effort on Google's part will have a considerable impact on the work we do. Most of it good, some of it maybe not so much. As Google keeps its focus on visual disabilities, the rest of us will have to make sure we spend the next few years expanding the a11y horizons of the new folks Google trained in (the otherwise rather narrowed down field of) blind/screen reader accessibility.

But when I analyze the whole thing coldly, I think the perspective of expanding the understanding of developers to view accessibility as a more than just the blind over the next few years is still more interesting than the perspective of continuing to talk about alt text to developers who've never heard of accessibility.

So with a few caveats I have now come to think that this is indeed a good thing for our field and am grateful to Google for deciding to invest their resources into this. Nobody else could have done this. I can't help be worried of the impact, but it would be no different if any other vendor with interest in a marginal screen reader solution had done the same.

While I agree that any vendor with an interest in accessibility would be biased in such a training offer, I still see a huge difference in terms of potential impact for end users when that vendor happens to develop a screen reader barely none of those end users are currently using. I don't think we'd face similar issues with SSB, HiSoft, Deque or IBM for instance.

But I want to acknowledge the positive in all this and for that, I want to both apologize to Google for bitching about it in the first place and thank them for offering something that puts us on the path of a broader exposure for web accessibility.

/Denis






On 2013-09-12, at 9:39 AM, Karl Groves < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Not responding to anyone in particular so much as the general hoopla over
> this course, especially considering nobody has actually seen it yet.
>
> That's not to say that people are wrong in voicing concern over the
> description of the course indicating that it is Chrome-specific and aimed
> at a11y for the blind & visually impaired. But let me ask this: Do you
> think that Deque's courses aren't gonna discuss Worldspace or SSB's courses
> aren't going to talk about AMP? HiSoftware wouldn't talk about Compliance
> Sherriff? And actually, if you haven't tried Chrome's Dev Tools and the
> accessibility testing capabilities it has, maybe you should.
>
> Additionally, let's step back and look at what this course could do.
> First, I think everyone universally agrees that accessibility problems are
> best avoided. How does that happen? By educating developers. "This free,
> online course from Google's Accessibility team is targeted at devs and
> others who work using Chrome." Google has an incredible reach in the
> developer community. The Google Developers channel on YouTube has more than
> 350,000 subscribers. I have no idea how many people take courses like this,
> but I'm guessing that if they push it hard they can get a ton of sign-ups.
> In other words, despite its assumed flaws, this course has the potential
> to reach out and engage far more developers than anyone else.
>
> This community has a terrible habit of being hyper-judgmental of anything
> that comes short of perfection. The damn course hasn't even been released
> yet and the virtiol leveled at Google is already ridiculous. Here's an
> alternate idea: maybe as a community, we should embrace Google for their
> efforts and help them market the hell out of it. Then attend the course
> yourselves and take note of things you want to see improved. Send your list
> to TV Raman and then thank him for reaching out to developers to make the
> web a better place for all.
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 1:40 PM, Alastair Campbell < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
>> Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:
>>
>>> Just remember that Chrome Vox use, as reported by the latest WebAIM
>>> screen reader survey, was less then .5%, Voiceover around 12%, NVDA
>>> around 14% and Jaws still in the 50% range.
>>
>>
>> Whilst completely agreeing with Olaf's comment about priorities (missing
>> the wheels!), I think more people should notice how much VoiceOver on iOS
>> is used these days.
>>
>> From the Webaim survey [1], VoiceOver on iOS is the second most used
>> screenreader at around 42% of people who answered.
>>
>> I base that on 72% of people using a mobile screenreader, and of those
>> 58.5% use iOS. Therefore 42% use VoiceOver on iOS.
>>
>> Now, it is not necessarily the primary screenreader by any means, and you
>> could argue that people use apps more than the browser, but still, makes
>> you think!
>>
>> I checked back on that stat after talking to several regular screen reader
>> users who said things like "I don't bother opening the laptop much anymore,
>> I just use my iPhone".
>>
>> It would be interesting to include VoiceOver/iOS as an option for "primary
>> screen reader" next year.
>>
>> 1] http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey4/#mobile
>>
>> -Alastair
>> >> >> >>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Karl Groves
> www.karlgroves.com<;http://www.karlgroves.com>;
> @karlgroves
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/karlgroves
> Phone: +1 410.541.6829
> > >