Building a Culture of Openness and Growth Around Accessibility in Tech

Anne Bovelett:
Hello, my name is Anne Bovelett and today I’m your host at Open Channels FM and I’m speaking to Marc Haunschild. Hello Marc, nice to have you here.

Marc Haunschild:
Hello Anne. It’s a pleasure to be here with you. I like very much spending time with you and making this together. Something really special for me today.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, maybe for the people who are listening today. Marc and I go way back. I think it’s, well, way maybe three, four years. And we were brought together by someone who was doing online audits where people could send in their site and be present and a whole team of specialists would take a look at their website or web shop from either security or accessibility perspective, design perspective, content perspective, and that was a lot of fun. And Marc and I stayed in touch and in the end we also ended up working on projects together. So I decided to invite him to the show today because we’re going to speak about accessibility and this is a topic that scares a lot of people. And we’re here to tell you it’s not scary at all. It’s actually very cool to do. It’s very profitable for everybody, whether it is material or immaterial. The world gets more accessible to people, but it also means the market gets bigger. And so Marc, can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

Marc Haunschild:
Yeah. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. I’m an accessibility consultant and a writer. I’m in part time the accessibility lead of the Federal Agency of Food and Agriculture in Germany. So I’m very broadly dealing with the topic. I’m also authorized and qualified tester for the big bit for proofer BUND in Germany, which is an association who is testing websites. I’m member of the International association of Accessibility Professionals. So I’m in to this in every possible way. When it comes to websites, this is a constraint I would like to make because we will talk about accessibility and maybe some of the listeners are familiar, some not. But to make this clear from the very beginning, this is a broad field and not every accessibility specialist can talk about everything. So I’m specialized in websites mainly and there are other fields like documents and easy language, sign language and things like this that I cannot cover all.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, it’s good to make that clear. I think you forgot to tell something very important.

Marc Haunschild:
I think you also wrote. Actually I did. I was writing two books about HTML one and another one about cascading style sheets, which are very important when it comes to accessibility and accessible websites. Because accessibility happens at the human and computer interface, where the connection between computer and humans are happening. And normally people are thinking immediately about building websites that are working the way they are using websites, like using a mouse or something like this. But we will hear later on, I guess, that there are other possibilities to interact with software, with hardware, and for this there must be some technical basements. Has to be light out. So everything is working for everybody. So this is HTML and css. And I was writing about accessibility also, and now I was even asked from a publisher I like very much. And it was very hard for me to say no, but I just don’t have time. But I had the opportunity to. What is this word in English? If you proofread. To proofread, yeah.

Anne Bovelett:
Well, say it in German. Maybe I can translate it.

Marc Haunschild:
That friends are, you know them very well from Gehirngerecht. I think we can say it. I don’t want to say which book because it’s not official yet. But we can say that they are working on a book and I’m proofreading it. And so I’m involved in writing a book again. And this is so much fun and I wanted to share it with you that I’m doing this again.

Anne Bovelett:
Thank you. Yeah, yeah. I know the folks at Gehirngerecht, they are big advocates in Germany. Indeed, they educate a lot of people in a very, how should I say? I would almost say a very relaxed way because there’s so much tension around accessibility. And yeah, I know you and I, we make sometimes a lot of fun about it. I mean, remember we were talking about Duolingo some time ago, There was this thing going on. So for people who are listening, who don’t know what Duolingo is, it is an apparently very addictive app to learn different languages. It is full of gamification. I remember using it a couple of years ago. It went on my nerves like nuts.

Marc Haunschild:
But.

Anne Bovelett:
But okay, that’s another topic. Anyway, I see developers on Twitter mainly, or X as we’re supposed to call it these days, saying, oh, look at my 658 day streak. I’m learning Italian or I’m learning whatever. And then I always wonder, like, why can you do this for so many days, for such a long time in such high focus mode, but not remember about 50 HTML elements, right? That is just so amazing to me. I laugh about that a lot. You and I laugh about that a lot. And we’re not laughing at people. But it’s just surprising, right? Because why are you so afraid of accessibility when you know it’s only like about 50 elements and not much more. Of course, there are edge cases. Sure. And that there are a lot of podcasts where people speak about accessibility. There are videos, there are talks. And in my experience, people are always trying to cover everything about accessibility, which in my opinion is absolutely impossible because it covers so many disciplines. This is where I’m heading to. So today I’m heading towards development. And I think we can talk about that today in such a way that not just developers understand this, but also people who use no code products, for example, to build websites. Would you like to talk about that? Because today we’re just having this conversation.

Marc Haunschild:
And so, yeah, this is very, very nice. I like developing very much and I always try to make things easier, which means what is like, what is the easiest possible way to make something accessible, to make something usable? And also for the developer himself, which was me in this case. So I was trying to. I was inspired by many other people’s reading books from them, especially when it came to dry coding. Don’t repeat yourself. So you’re reusing your own code and you’re writing things in a way, especially using the cascade from the CSS cascading style sheets. The cascade is the first thing many developers drop because they don’t want to learn how it works. But I think this is a big mistake because it can make things so much easier after you were understanding it. But this is another topic. So what I wanted to say is make it simple and not overcomplicated. Learn especially what you were talking about earlier, what the elements in HTML mean, because they have a meaning and then use them correctly, like it’s written in the specifications. And the. The main thing is that people are building about. The main issue nowadays is that people were building websites with frameworks like. Oh yeah, what is called from Twitter. I always forget bootstrap. Yeah. Because I never used it. Now I have to. To think about. I used it. I had to work with websites that are using it, of course, because they are everywhere. But I was always asking myself why people are making life so hard for themselves. And this is quite the opposite of what I was trying. When I was making a button, I was using the button element. I think bootstrap does this also. But let’s talk about select, for example, where they’re building a big construction with div and everything. And Karl Groves put it in a very nice way. He said, when you’re building something like this, like in select element, you have to learn so much about specification. What happens if you reach a Select box with the keyboard, with the mouse, with touch. What happens when you touching clicking on something after it was opened? Where will the focus go after selecting something? These are all things which are specified somewhere. And people just don’t care. They’re building something again what works for them in the way they are using things. And this is where we lose many, many people that are used to standardized behavior of user interfaces that are getting nervous, they are getting confused if it’s not happening the same way like always. And what Karl Grove said, what we are doing this for is only styling. But you can even style not so little, quite a lot. You can style even select boxes until they open. So all the effort we are putting in to styling, not using the semantic elements that HTML is giving us is only for this few seconds. The user is clicking on the select, it opens and he’s choosing an item because only this short moment when it’s open, this part is difficult to style. So all the effort goes into this little part. And designer can’t bear, can’t stand it. If you open it, it looks default like the browser wants it to look. This is this one short time for this click. We are doing all this work.

Anne Bovelett:
There’s always, always this battle, always this battle between the designer and the developer. But I think, you know, you just touched before on something where you say okay, they, they’re just changing it or why are they making things so difficult for themselves? But I have to say I’m dealing with a lot of younger developers these days that use these frameworks. I also read and hear a lot about people building frameworks on top of WordPress for example, that find this the opposite who love their, I don’t know, 5000 class system. I mean it drives me nuts. To me, to me a button is a button. Why would you give a div a role is button and then hang yourself the noose around your neck. Having to make everything work with a ton of JavaScript making your site slow and all of that. But. But I learned that there’s always different views like when is it complicated, when is it not complicated? And I wonder what we could do to, to educate people like, hey, I understand that you’re using this framework or that framework, but have you ever figured out why this framework is built the way it does? Because everything’s been built with great intentions, right? And I’m going to say it really roughly. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And I know this sounds really hardcore and really rough, but especially accessibility taught us exactly that, right? And So I wonder what do you do? I mean, we’ve recently done a project together, but you’ve done a million more. You know, in my opinion, how do you go about that? When a development lead comes to you and says, yeah, you know, our framework doesn’t allow us to make this or that change that you’re suggesting, how do you deal with that?

Marc Haunschild:
Normally we find a solution because in most cases there are then different suggestions I can make. Of course I’m going in the first try. I’m telling people like using details and summary instead of self built disclosure components. But if this is not working, we are trying to fix the existing components and normally this is working. But every time I see how much effort goes in this then and I think how easy it could be, you just write these two elements in your code and everything would work. And again, this is the easiest way, not only to comply to standards or let’s say even in this case in accessibility, this is already legal, you have to legally comply to laws. But yeah, people are doing it in a way they are used to and they learned it. And when I was teaching refugees that were coming to Germany, I was doing this for a few, a few times I saw how the other teachers were working with them and they said, okay, we have bootstrap. This is the main thing we are dealing with and we are teaching the people bootstrap because everybody uses it. So they are familiar with bootstrap and not with native HTML. And this is how this happens. And the good intention in Bootstrap is to make things accessible. This is the crazy thing about it, because bootstrap is quite accessible. It’s really well done. I have to say. It makes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of JavaScript. But if you’re using it right, you can reduce all this if you should tailor Bootstrap. But in reality nobody’s doing this because people don’t even learn bootstrap properly. And this is the problem. If you’re using this framework just to make the work easier, then you’re not using it the right way. Because actually you should know already about css. Then learn bootstrap and then tailor it and use it the way Twitter intended. Or when you make change, you should have in mind how CSS is working using the cascade and things like this.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s true. But you know, I just wonder a lot, you know, when we go around, when we’re being asked to come in as testers, whether it’s a quick test or a big test, I Can always tell people are a bit afraid. They are in intimidated. Now of course we’re both two very different people. How do you generally deal with that? You are, you are introduced to the people. What, what do you do to put people at ease? Especially the developer?

Marc Haunschild:
Yeah, actually I’m sitting down with them quite often. We are working in a team. I’m using Jira very often to write my tickets right into the, or whatever they are using for ticket system. So I’m in the team with the developers, they can ask me question questions and if this is not enough we are making video calls and I’m explaining things. The thing is nowadays all is so fast that even if we are consulting, we were having this challenge together already while we are consulting a team only for 2, 3 months already the members and the team change. So the world is so fast changing that after explaining some team members things they’re already gone and others are coming. And this is a very big challenge.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, yeah. You mean the knowledge. The knowledge is dripping out. Yes, the knowledge is walking out. Yeah, yeah. I think this is a very important topic for everybody. I mean of course the reference that we’re having here is working for big corporations because they are forced by the law. Um, it’s. I find it very sad, you know when they also experience like that we’re like we’re being forced and I’m like why are you so unhappy about being forced to get more clicks, more conversions, more sales, more. Are you crazy? But of course the development teams who sit there often get the work that needs to be done for remediation just shoved down their throat to do it in between. Which is, which is a problem.

Anne Bovelett:
What do you advise to companies to prevent knowledge of walking out with the people walking out? Have you ever seen or developed a System for a company where you said, hey, this is where you keep it centrally, or is there something that you dream about?

Marc Haunschild:
What I dream about?

Anne Bovelett:
What do you dream about in that sense? How would you. How would.

Marc Haunschild:
In an ideal world, in an ideal world, developers are coming from university or making an education as a developer. I don’t know in the English word ausbildung. And then they were taught at least the most important thing. So accessibility should be part of learning coding. No matter which language later on, it should be baked into everything. From the very beginning. We are always talking about shift left when it comes to products like a website. We should involve accessibility specialists from the very beginning. But how can you. If you start a project, you have an idea, you make a concept, you have wireframes, you make a cool design and then you persuading stakeholders to give money and then you have the money and you’re starting to work with code. And maybe somebody. It’s good if at this point already somebody is asking what about accessibility? And they are taking an accessibility expert into that team. But then it’s already quite late because if you now have to deal with ready to go design concepts and you find flaws in it, it’s very hard to get rid of them. Not only because of technical. And if you change something, the whole design system, the concept will be changed. But even if it’s minor changes, in my experience, very often you have stakeholders, at least one powerful stakeholder who says, no, I like this first design more. This is completely irrational. It cannot give a single reason why not to change. It just I like this more and how to deal with this. This is very difficult. And for this, I don’t know, do not have any answers.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, and I mean talking to stakeholders or even the CEO who says, listen, my cousin designed this. I mean, we live with that in the daily world, right? It happens. We have people who will say, well, the logo needs to be bigger. You know those people. And of course, I’m not trying to trash on users or customers or companies that are coming to us, but I also sense a lot of fear of people feel rejected, right? When a product has been made, people have been thinking about it. And then we, the testing people come around and we’re telling them that it should be changed and they don’t hear it should be changed. What they hear is, it’s bad, you’re doing it wrong. I mean, to me it was quite hilarious when I started working in the German market, because in the German market people tend to point out what’s wrong and Then say this is wrong, instead of saying if you change it to that, it’s better. No, it’s wrong. But anyway, I’m digressing. So in an ideal world, you would know or have someone with you who can help you to talk to these stakeholders and say, I know you don’t like to change the design, but you know, if you change it, instead of just saying you have to be compliant. I mean, everybody hates the word compliance by now. Even I do. I hate it because this is about people, not about compliance. But if you are able to tell people, listen, you will. Your sites go, your app is going to perform better, everything is going to perform better. Yeah, that would be great. In an ideal world, maybe that is a job that needs to be invented or a consultancy direction that needs to be named. I don’t know. I would love to hear from our peers what they think about that. So what else in an ideal world would you have when you are consulting a company?

Marc Haunschild:
Of course, I think after saying already a few times that people are building things for themselves, more or less, because this is how humans are. It’s not, I’m not saying that it’s bad, it’s just what happens if you’re human, you’re building something and you’re trying, if it’s working and you try it yourself as a developer. And of course it’s working because you know where to click and things like this. And so then somebody’s coming to you, maybe this is not working. And you’re saying, why? Yeah, because I cannot come from this page to this page and you tell them, oh, it’s quite easy. You just click on this link or on this button. Ah, yeah, that’s easy. We are doing this. So in this moment, something happens, somebody is coming to you, telling you he cannot work with it, and you knowing where to click, tell him where to click and this guy is satisfied, or man or woman and problem solved. But it’s not there. Very, very important information is lost, which was, I personally cannot get from page A to page B. And instead of taking this serious, you’re giving a quick solution, making somebody happy. But imagine website from Google, Facebook, with billions of users. You cannot tell everybody where to click. Even this is a simple click. And in this scale, just 1% means that millions and millions of people are not able to come from page A to page B. And this is an issue. So what I want in this particular part is that the teams are getting more diverse, that there are people with neurodiversity, with people who cannot Use all their hands in a way we do or cannot see properly. Not here. In a diverse team, this would not happen because the feedback would be immediately there. Or just imagine blind people building a possibility to come from page A to page B. This would be already be completely different. Then maybe the sighted developer next to him would say, I cannot see where I have to click and would change this problem. So in a diverse team, much more challenges. Let’s not say problems. I’m German, I tend to say problems. Much more challenges for users will be seen right from the very beginning. So it’s not only education, but it’s also real world. Users and the diversity of our society should be in a small scale in the teams that are developing things we have to use in real world.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. So in an ideal world, people would understand that maybe they have to let go of everything they know in this regard and start to rethink how they even build a site or an application. Right. And what. In an ideal world, people also understand that it’s that they’re also doing this for their future self.

Marc Haunschild:
Very important.

Anne Bovelett:
And I’m. I mean, we’re getting older, you and I, we’re. We’re both past 50. I don’t know about you, but I can’t use my computer if I am not wearing my glasses. I can’t even use my phone, I can’t drive without them and. Or I have a lot of other stuff, you know, I am neurodivergent in many ways and it’s interesting, you know, and when I’m giving a talk in front of a company and I speak to the marketing or the department, development department, and then I come in and I tell them, look, I have ADHD, I’m in the spectrum. I don’t see well, I don’t hear well, I have dyslexia. And then they’re all for us, really shocked, like, why? Oh, you, you, you are, you are courageous telling us all that. And then half an hour later someone says, but people with disabilities don’t visit our website or they don’t use our app. And then I’m always like, what did I just tell you? Yeah, but you don’t look disabled. I’m like, it is so sad. In an ideal world, people would learn in grammar school already that there are people like that. Look at these children that have trouble coming along in class because they are on the spectrum. They get so many impulses and you know, these are potentially our future technical heroes, our professors, our teachers, these people, these children have all these capabilities, all this promise of reaching the sky when they’re older. But if we don’t already have this consciousness about them that they. They need to be welcomed into everything we create from the start, then I worry about that.

Marc Haunschild:
If you want to make this word more inclusive, we should start with the children. Of course, there are deaf people demanding or asking why not? People are learning in the school Sign language, Germ Sign language, American Sign Language, because children like it. They like to move, they like to learn new languages. And this would be much more easier for, of course, the people who cannot hear. But in many cases, it’s polite not to make noise or it’s difficult. Yeah.

Anne Bovelett:
They are our future. And maybe it’s your child or your grandchildren who is going to learn how to develop software that you might end up using. Because we all get older, we all live longer, right? Yeah. So tell me something else, because I would. You know, one of the things I want to achieve with the podcasts in general that I do is to give people some courage, to give them some strength, some hope to pick up on stuff. And today, although we do have a strong developer angle, maybe you would like to say something to that.

Marc Haunschild:
In general, I think the most important thing is start just anywhere where it’s easy for you with things you’re familiar with. Let’s say you’re a designer, then start with making good contrast so everybody can see it. But what you’re making, you have a beautiful design. I think you have beautiful colors. You can use all of them. Just if you want to combine background on foreground, make sure that there is enough contrast. And when, if you’re a developer, then just try one single thing new in every project of which you think this is the right thing to do. Of course, you don’t have to just think. Imagine you, maybe you heard our podcast today and have gotten inspiration, or you have read a book or an article, blog post, whatever, and you think you can do this, then just do it. And the most important thing for me is to do tomorrow things that are better than what I’m doing today. Just make little steps. We all know this. Make little iterations. 1% is making a big change after some time.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, that’s true. And to get back to an ideal world, I think it’s perfectly fine for a developer because even while you’re working on this, you’re learning more and more and more about accessibility. As if you as a developer see that you get a design that is generally complicated for you to code, that you feel free to say, hey, this is A red flag in general. Because if it’s complicated for you to code with having to haul in bells and whistles and you cannot just do it with HTML, CSS and a little bit of JavaScript being put out. And I know I’m simplifying this, I mean, don’t shoot the messenger. I know it. I know React is complicated, I know the other languages you code in can be very complicated. But the end result is also always HTML and CSS being put out. So in an ideal world, you should feel safe to say to the designer, hey, designer, the way you design this graphically will make it too hard for me to code or it will make it inaccessible or you did something weird with contrast because you will be running your tests on that. Right. And it’s the other way around. In an ideal world, I think actually the graphic designers, in my opinion, should be the last group to start working on a project. Right. I’m always talking about functional design. People always have this thing about the words that you use with functional design. I mean, when you even start thinking how a page or a site or an app is supposed to work, you’re talking in functionalities, this is what it’s going to do. And in an ideal world, there is someone there who says, yeah, but you know that simple login that you’re creating there? What happens when you go there by keyboard or when you click this? What happens? Oh, something pops up. Oh, how does that, how is that going to pop up? What are the consequences? So, and I think in an ideal world, people feel free. It already is the beginning of the process to question things and to not be afraid to look stupid. I think a lot of things go wrong because people are afraid to speak up.

Marc Haunschild:
Yeah, this interesting because the first word which comes into my mind and I’m trying to translate it all the time and I don’t know an English word. And there are some. Yeah, just, just answer this thought. And this thought is that I see sometimes videos of English speaking people saying this is a word we should have in English too. Like schadenfreude is very often. And they are using it even in, in America I guess some people. And yeah, again this. Which means cultivating errors and encouraging people to admit that you have that they have made an error to learn from it instead of getting serious. Let’s say just bad feedback. Yeah, yeah, just bad feedback. You cannot do anything, even this simple thing you cannot build like a login. What is it? Just two inputs and a button. And this is not working. Now for blind People why. But the problem for the developer in this particular case is that it’s much more complicated than anybody would like to hear. If you’re trying to explain, yes, but this pop up is coming there and then I have to place it in the center of the station. How this will be accessible to screen reader users and with a keyboard, they don’t care. You cannot explain so much. You cannot talk so much with the people. They’re just saying this is a login. Other people can do this also why you cannot. And this should not happen if you are able to make mistakes and learn from them and to tell somebody, look at this. I was working it designing as not with colors, but also code has to be designed. I was writing it in a certain way and it’s not working. And you have the possibilities not only to go to your colleagues, but maybe even to your supervisor, who should be a person who can code very good. Very often he is not himself, but if he is, he can help you. And you should have the possibility to say, okay, here are my limits, my limitations. I cannot work this out myself. Please help me. And this is bringing the whole team forward. This is Fehlerkultur.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, Fehlerkultur. Yeah, it’s one. It’s a. It’s another nice word to win scratable with in Germany. Maybe not all the listeners know this, but we both live in Germany. Although I’m Dutch. And especially for us culturally here, people are very generally very wary of admitting that they don’t know something or that they can’t do something. And that really is hindering projects. Yeah, I wish too in an ideal world that this would be better. And in the end, if people would understand it, I think they would also see that they will become much more efficient and that their everything is going upwards. All the graphs internally, externally. You have to make mistakes to save time at a later date. Right. In Dutch we say freely translated, if you don’t make any mistakes, you make nothing at all. Yeah. So Marc, we’ve already been talking for a while here. Where can people find you if they want to?

Marc Haunschild:
Yeah, thankfully my name is quite unique. There are a few other people with my. My last name also Haunschild. But if you’re looking for Marc Haunschild and accessibility in any search engine, then you will find me. And of course Anne, if you know Anne, she knows where to find me. And yeah, my. My webpage is Accessibility Dot Consulting. Quite easy on the point, what I’m doing.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, just for the people. So. So you all know Marc. Marc is a very modest person but he’s been doing this for over 20 years and I think he’s one of the best accessibility consultants in the country in Germany. So yeah, follow him. Marc, I know you’re also very active on LinkedIn. I enjoy following you there, having conversations with you there. Yeah. And for anyone who’s listening, if you ever have questions about this or you want to come onto the show and talk about this or let’s do a group chat about this, bring it on, let us know. We’d love to have this conversation with you and talk to you. So Marc, thank you so much. I hope you have a wonderful day today and let’s do this again sometime soon.

Marc Haunschild:
Thank you very much for inviting me and for having me here. Anne.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, you’re welcome. Bye bye.