hi everyone welcome back to our last
talk of the day here in the devops track
devops track oops oops
oops
i hope you uh been able to hold on
through the whole day it has been a long
day full of great tr of great talks uh
and this last one is is one that i've
been looking forward to for a while it's
by dawn e collette and it's called
accessibility overlays a cautionary tale
and we are going to take advantage of
one of the benefits of being online
uh because this is a pre-recorded talk
but dawn is here with us and we'll be
able to talk to you and answer questions
while also presenting to you
simultaneously
so do ask do ask questions uh in the
chat there and hopefully at the end
we'll also be able to get dawn on and do
some interactive q a as well to round
out the day
so now we'll throw over to the talk uh
by dawn
hello everyone and welcome to pycon au
2021 once again from the comfort of your
own home it's great to be back here
again this year um today i will be
talking to you about a cautionary tale
from the modern tech industry and that
is about accessibility overlays
if you do want to follow along as i'm
speaking then you can go to the github
link on the slide that's up at the
moment which will show you my sources or
you can just scan the qr code with your
phone and then you'll be able to bring
up my sources
before we start i do want to take the
time to acknowledge the war injury
people of the kulin nation on whose land
this talk was recorded
and all of the other aboriginal and
torres strait islander people and groups
around australia this is and always will
be aboriginal land their sovereignty was
never seeded
now
this story starts when
a year and change ago i went out and i
bought myself a new laptop um this is a
picture of it it is a thinkpad x1 carbon
it is a fantastic laptop and the range
of stickers on it should be absolutely
no surprise whatsoever to anyone who
knows me well at all
and whenever i buy myself a new machine
i have a sort of run book that i go
through in terms of things that i need
to set up
and as part of that run book
one thing that i generally set up very
early on when i acquire a new machine is
nvda
the free and open source screen reader
for windows
now i don't do that because i rely on
screen readers
in the day-to-day i will generally do
that because
it's very useful to have a screen reader
on your machine to test websites
particularly if you are going to give
websites to blind or vision impaired
people or screen reader users it's good
to be able to test them so that you can
get a feel for what's going on on those
websites
and so as i'm going through the rest of
the run book of things that i tend to
set up you know downloading other
programs setting up ad blocking and
script blocking software on my machine
um
i hear this really odd phrase
something that i've never actually heard
nvda say to me before
press alt plus one for screen reader
mode
and i thought about that and i thought
that's a bit weird i don't think that
sounds like a common command prompt or a
common prompt that nvda would give me
and then i realized that i'd heard about
these things before
welcome to the world of accessibility
overlays
if you ask the people who develop and
sell accessibility overlays then they
are a one line of code solution that you
can add to your website which will
automatically remediate all kinds of
accessibility issues
and you might think that that sounds too
good to be true
but in order to test that claim
first of all we need to understand a
little bit about disability rights and
primarily how disability rights have
kind of grown and changed with the
advent of the internet
because
in a lot of countries around the world
disability rights legislation actually
predates the widespread use of the
internet
um and spoiler more often than not uh if
you want to exercise your disability
rights on the internet you do actually
have to sue for them
and we can demonstrate this by having a
look at some lawsuits around the world
and
this little tour starts in
2010 when a blind lady by the name of
donna jordan someone who used a screen
reader to get around the internet um
decided that she wanted to plot to apply
for a job with the canadian government
and so she using her screen reader
found her way to the canadian government
jobs website and she discovered that it
was in fact inaccessible she could not
navigate around it with her screen
reader
and so she did what many many people
before her have had to do in order to
exercise their disability rights and she
filed a lawsuit against the canadian
government
she won that lawsuit she won again on
appeal
and the end result of that was the
canadian government was required to make
their government jobs website accessible
not just to screen reader users but to
all sorts of other people with
disabilities
and so that was kind of the first
frontier establishing that in canada the
government had the obligation to make
all of their websites accessible
then we come to australia where we're
going to go and do some grocery shopping
at kohl's um and we're going to ride
along here with a lady by the name of
giselle maznash a sydney cider blind
from birth and a screen reader user now
being someone who enjoyed her
independence
she very often did her grocery shopping
using kohl's online and when she started
doing that in 2008 the cole's online
shopping website was actually perfectly
accessible to her
but after a couple of redesigns that was
no longer the case and she didn't want
to go straight out
and acquire herself a lawyer so
initially
she actually tried to engage in a
dialogue with calls to sit down and sort
of have a discussion with them about hey
can we look at ways that we can actually
you know that you can actually improve
this website so that i'm going to be
able to use it
and after that turned out to be
fruitless
she decided that she had to go for the
nuclear option and so she went and again
acquired a lawyer and she sued coles
this actually ended much quicker than
the canadian government jobs website
lawsuit because i imagine what happened
here was that a few lawyers at kohl's
probably sat around a boardroom um
probably in their hawthorne office
and they probably had a long discussion
uh that ended in a lot of oh dear and a
lot of swear words
and they decided to their credit that
the best way to deal with with this
lawsuit was to settle it
part of the settlement that giselle
mesnage and coles came to was that calls
were actually required then to make
their online shopping website accessible
and that's something that they still
have a really strong commitment to today
but oddly enough if we talk particularly
about legislation around disability the
home of disability legislation is a
country that many people might not think
of immediately when they think of it and
that is the united states of america
31 years ago just a bit over 31 years
ago in the us
they passed the americans with
disabilities act which was widely
considered at the time and still is
actually to be one of the most
comprehensive pieces of legislation that
covers disability and disability access
and disability rights issues
and one thing that they tend to talk
about a lot that's actually specifically
defined in the americans with
disabilities act
is the concept of a place of public
accommodation and that's not just saying
you know that the government has to be
accessible but if you were to go to the
white house or to congress that they
have to be accessible
what we're actually saying when we talk
about a place of public accommodation is
that anywhere in public where you would
expect people to go
has to be accessible under the americans
with disabilities act
so that means that if you wanted to say
uh go down to your local domino's pizza
and order some pizza for yourself and
whomever might be with you at the time
domino's pizza is required if you are
safe blind
to make that domino's pizza outlet
accessible to you
but what happens when you don't want to
walk down to your local domino's pizza
to order yourself a pizza you want to
use domino's online website instead
well a gentleman by the name of
guillermo robles also blind also a
screen reader user did in fact try to
order a pizza on the domino's pizza
online ordering website and he
discovered
probably to nobody's surprise at this
point that it was not accessible to him
so again
entered into the kind of process that
the ada requires around an interactive
discussion eventually had to get himself
a lawyer
now
unlike donna jordan and giselle messnage
guillermo robles actually lost his case
in the lower court
and it was appealed all the way to the
supreme court um what happened here when
it was appealed to the supreme court was
they actually said this case has been
decided incorrectly they reminded it
back to the lower court to be decided
and what we might find as a result of
that is that
along with the right that exists already
in countries like canada and australia
that's been tested through lawsuits that
in the us it may soon become the case
that
places of public accommodation are not
just physical outlets that the virtual
world also has to be a place of public
accommodation as well so
if your domino's pizza franchise has to
be accessible physically the e-commerce
site by where you would order go and
order some pizza equally has to be
accessible
so
before we go back to the accessibility
overlays let's kind of go through some
of the things that we have to do in
order to make websites accessible
and
because a lot of the lawsuits and a lot
of the cases that we're talking about
here have been around screen reader
users
we will also look or i sort of want to
focus here on
common access fails specifically related
to screen reader use
and there are quite a few of them
you've got things like incorrect heading
levels because
screen reader users tend to use the
heading level to actually navigate a
website and work out whether they want
to read all of the body text so if you
mess up your heading levels or you've
got you know neatly defined heading
levels visually but not neatly defined
heading levels when you're tabbing
through that the screen reader can read
to you that's going to be a problem in
terms of people being able to find the
text that they want
another concern that you've got there is
around things like poorly labeled tables
poorly labeled graphs or even graphs
where you've just stuck an image up and
there's no way for a screen reader user
to actually see the raw information
there
a lot of these things can be fixed by
just proper formatting but something
that can't necessarily be fixed by
proper formatting is things like drop
downs buttons and other widgets that you
would commonly see in html and there are
two ways to make those accessible the
older way of doing it is with aria tags
which are basically just tags that tell
the screen reader what to read out and
how to navigate
but in modern html we have a concept of
semantic html
which is where a lot of these things
have already been done
and so all you need to do then is make
sure that you use the semantic html
element which is fully accessible to a
screen reader
and finally one other thing that tends
to be a fairly big issue is not just
images of graphs but images in general
because obviously
blind or visually impaired people can't
necessarily see images and so what we
need to do then
is to basically allow the screen reader
to see the image for its user and the
way that you do that is by writing alt
text which is basically a fairly short
description of the image you generally
don't want it to be longer than about a
paragraph that gets across all of the
critical information in it
and you know you attach the alt text to
the image and then when the screen
reader actually comes to focus on the
image what it will read out is not just
oh there's an image here but here is the
alt text that the person you know that a
sighted person has used to describe this
image
and you might look at a lot of those
fairly common issues and go
this is something that should probably
be solvable using modern ai and machine
learning
well
about that
i did a talk at linda's conf au 2021
earlier this year called the privacy tax
it was generally focused on the topic of
disability and security particularly
around things like tracking and storage
and misuse of personal data
but one thing that i actually did during
the process of this talk was
rather than introducing myself in the
typical way i decided that i was going
to get an ai to introduce me to the
audience for everyone
and i learned some very interesting
things from that um this is one of the
images that i used to introduce myself
this is a picture of me with one of the
cows at the moving art installation in
shepparton which was taken in november
2018.
now i had actually trained an ml
classifier to describe images for me and
specifically what i was looking at was
the way that it described people
to see could it pick up on signs of
visible disabilities and you notice
obviously the walking stick there
but if i was going to go and describe
this image i would describe it as
something like you know this is dawn
wearing a boston red sox baseball cap
black shirt with right print and pink
trousers holding a blue walking stick
and sitting on a cow that's painted
green and blue like a mermaid
and that would give you a fairly good
description if you were reading that of
what the image might look like without
any superfluous information
but the absolute best that i could get
out of the ml model that i trained and
do bear in mind that this was only to
describe people was that i was a man in
black and white t-shirt and pink pants
sitting on green object with blue and
red stick
now that gives you a pretty good
description of me but it doesn't really
give you a good description of what's
going on around me
and bear in mind this was an ml model
that i had trained for this purpose
you know you look at companies like
microsoft they have massive training
data sets they have massive amounts of
information that they can use
and even they have not really been able
to solve the problem of having images
described via machine learning to pick
up on all of the important points
so
that might give you some idea when we
start having a look at the claims that
these accessibility overlay companies
make
about how easy it really is to bridge
the gap using entirely automated
solutions
and these accessibility overlay
companies started sprouting up you know
in the late 2000s early 2010s
and
what they were trying to do was to solve
the problem of automating solutions to
web accessibility and they make a lot of
really bold claims um some that i've
pulled from their websites things like
uh keep safe from lawsuits comply with
legislation 24 7. uh one particular
overlay company bills itself as the only
solution that meets ada that's the
americans with disabilities act and wcag
or the web content accessibility
guidelines 2.1 compliance through a
combination of advanced automation
technology and human touch advanced
automation technology i like it
alternatively another company suggests
that you can deploy this company's
advanced website accessibility solutions
without refactoring your website's
existing code
and this is a really bold claim because
what they're saying is that you have to
make no changes whatsoever in order to
make your website accessible you just go
away you deploy their code and then it
works
but in practice
if you look at the ways that people have
tended to traditionally remediate a lot
of these accessibility issues
even the best compliance checkers and
that's just checking to see whether your
website meets the web content
accessibility guidelines not actually
remediating it
can only sort of pick up on about 50 to
60 percent of the criteria
and i sort of understand why a lot of
companies have looked to accessibility
overlays for solutions and why they've
proliferated as much as they have
because if you consider the amount of
money that it takes you know
particularly if you're a small business
places like kohl's the canadian
government domino's pizza you expect
them to have the money to fix these
sorts of things but
a small business that might not have had
anyone work on their website for a few
years or might only have one or two
people developing it or might be you
know outsourcing it to someone
some external consultancy they're not
necessarily going to have the money
to be able to remediate a lot of these
accessibility issues
so the accessibility overlays sound like
a really appealing solution
but in practice
when i heard that little um that little
sound bite of you know press alt plus
one to enter screen reader mode and
having realized what was actually going
on here through the work of a whole lot
of excellent people who post about
accessibility on linkedin many of whom
are linked in the sources i thought okay
let's actually take this for a bit of a
test drive
and what i found was a bit of a mess
i you know i found things like
headers being inaccurate um predictably
as you would see from my little
experiment with machine learning earlier
the ml descriptions that it provided for
images where a human hadn't written them
were pretty putrid and often didn't
actually get across critical information
um graphs were just a cluttered mess
but one thing that's really interesting
here before we even look at how well
they actually work
is that that little sound bite press alt
plus one to enter screen reader mode
i gave the privacy tax i talked about
the concept of detecting screen readers
um
i said that a lot of people really want
to do it
i said that it's very difficult to do i
also said that it's a terrible idea for
a number of reasons
it's a terrible idea because you don't
know whether there are people sitting
with your screen reader user trying to
actually work out what's going on while
you're serving different content
it's also a terrible idea because you're
actually detecting a disability
so at least for this particular overlay
that i had encountered
it started with an anti-pattern
everything that it was doing was based
on an anti-pattern and that was the
anti-pattern of detecting a disability
and that's just for screen reader users
so in short what we really have here if
you look at these accessibility overlays
is a good old-fashioned case of snake
oil
always good particularly good when
you're talking about things that
actually affect people's access to
websites that they would be using day to
day in fact in many cases if you go and
talk to people who are much more learned
on the topic of accessibility and screen
readers than i
you know people who use these screen
readers day to day they will actually
tell you that in many cases these
accessibility overlays make websites
worse
in fact a gentleman by the name of
adrian roselli
really good accessibility guy i
absolutely recommend you follow him if
you're into this kind of thing
had produced a blog post when these
accessibility overlays have been
proliferating for a while
uh and it was titled uh accessory will
get you sued excessively being the name
of you know one very common one of these
sort of more popular accessibility
overlay companies
and he wasn't wrong because the lawsuit
started
and they kept coming
and they kept on coming and it wasn't
just accessory that was being sued it
was websites that used all kinds of
accessibility overlay products
and that kind of gets to the core of the
critical promise that was made here
which was you know
this is going to be an automated
solution to all of your problems
the thing is though that the reality of
this is is if i were to go in somewhere
and i were to say to you you know i have
a one-line solution to all of your
security problems you can deploy this
one line of code to your website
and it will solve all of your security
issues you would either laugh me out of
the room or you would conclude that i
was a salesperson for a cloud provider
which very often you know do sell you
online security solutions
with the small side effect that they
tend to cost you absolutely exorbitant
amounts of money
so the lesson that i want to take from
this is not that
accessibility companies are bad it's not
that accessibility is even necessarily
hugely difficult to do
but it's that these products are built
on an anti-pattern
they're built on an anti-pattern they
follow anti-patterns and very often if
you talk to the people that they claim
to serve they will tell you that their
lives are actually worse with the
accessibility overlay than they were
without it
that's true to the point where there are
instructions which i promptly used on my
new machine to make accessibility
overlays go away on your machine once
and for all those are also linked in the
sources
but the real lesson here i think comes
back to not a discussion about
accessibility
but a discussion about design patterns
so in order to look at how we improve it
we need to discuss the idea of one issue
system design
um which is basically
when people design systems very often
they're focused on one two or three
different things that they're trying to
actually solve by designing this system
and that might be that you want it to be
really cheap it might be that you want
it to be really easy to navigate it
might be that you want it to be really
small code wise it might be you know
that you want it to have all of these
features it might even be that you want
it to be accessible or you want it to be
secure
but if you only take one or two or three
things from the list of all of the
different considerations that need to
come into play when you design a system
um
that ends up basically being the path to
crushing technical debt in practice
and so part of what we can learn from
this sort of issue of accessibility
overlays is
about the comprehensive design processes
that would reduce or eliminate the need
for these quick fix solutions to begin
with because as i and basically everyone
else in the tech world will tell you
it's much cheaper to solve a problem
from the beginning than it is to go back
and try and retrofit a solution later
so part of comprehensive design
processes is that you don't just pick
one or two or three things off that list
you actually sit down at the beginning
and you go
let's look at all of these
considerations that we might need to
look at things like cost ease of use
accessibility security
size of the actual code itself
and build yourself a comprehensive
design plan that addresses all of those
from the beginning it's much easier to
do those things from the start than it
is to have to go in later and remediate
it because you'll inevitably find
yourself cutting corners
but in terms of specifically
accessibility there are a few lessons
that would reduce or eliminate the need
for these overlays well the perceived
need for these overlays that probably
doesn't actually exist as well
and the first one is that when you talk
about a lot of modern front-end
frameworks things like react-view
angular rails
these are all you know even cms systems
content management systems like
wordpress these are all accessible to
greater or lesser degrees and so the
first thing you can actually do if
you're using a framework and you're not
building it from scratch is check
is the framework that you're using
accessible
and if it's not
or if you find yourself having to do you
know they have the basic
the basics but you find yourself having
to do a significant amount of manual
work
then look at how do you remediate that
can you remediate it once and not have
to do it all over your system other
pre-existing plug-ins there are actually
a lot for things like wordpress that do
resolve a lot of those accessibility
issues and actually build accessible
components for you to build on
and if you go out and do those fixes
yourself can you either release them as
a plug-in or go back to the people who
maintain the framework
and say to them you know this needs to
be something you that you can address
here's a pull request that addresses
some of the common issues that we have
accessibility-wise
and the more that we do things like that
the easier accessibility really becomes
for everyone because if you start
building with accessible building blocks
the amount of work that you're going to
have to do to remediate those issues
later down the line is not something
that you're going to feel whereas if you
start with a sort of framework that's
inaccessible you're really going to feel
having to resolve it
and even then you know if you've got a
website where it's completely
inaccessible and you've got to solve a
lot of these issues accessibility
overlays are not necessarily the way to
go the best way to go is to look for
some kind of sticking plaster a
temporary solution that only automates
the things that really can be automated
while you take the time to do that
remediation work
the other time where those sorts of
sticking classes can be really useful is
in the sense of plugins that fix basic
issues with an inaccessible framework
but even then you may find it takes a
little bit of work to actually get it
all sorted and you are going to have to
do some manual work on top of that to
make your sites accessible
the really sad thing and the heavily
ironic thing
about this cautionary tale
is that these accessibility overlays
came with one promise and you heard it
with the excerpts that i read out to you
we are going to avoid you getting sued
you will not get sued if you use this
framework but as you can see from the
list of lawsuits that adrian roselli has
curated
unfortunately these accessibility quick
fixes have resulted in a paradox of more
and more lawsuits and more and more
complaints
many of them from reputable
organizations like the san francisco
lighthouse for the blind whose real aim
is to ensure
that in the spirit and not just the
letter of that disability access
legislation
that the web is accessible to everyone
we may or may not now have some time for
questions um if we don't i will be
around otherwise my website and email
address are up there so feel free to get
in contact with me
it's been lovely to talk to you and i do
hope that you've learned something not
just about accessibility but about some
of the broader failures in design
thinking that lead us to this point
well thank you dawn that was a great
talk uh really interesting
nuances in there about how how people
are trying to solve this and ultimately
failing um but also some great advice
for what we can actually do which which
i think is tremendous um now we we
actually have a question or two um so
thank you for for coming around to the
end of the talk where you can answer
them um so i'll feed them to you um to
everyone else if you have questions do
drop them into the chat
and then i'll see them usually on a
slight delay after that happens
and then so put it in there and then by
the time you ask the question um we'll
be so dawn um when you're working with
an existing non-accessible system have
you seen drivers other than compliance
that motivate companies to implement any
fixes
oh so i have a whole
half talk half rant on this
because often it will come down to so so
companies kind of fall into three
buckets you've got companies that don't
really think about it
you've got
companies where the primary driver for
it is compliance and they tend to be the
types of companies that will actually
use these you know accessibility
overlays which are effectively snake oil
and
i'm sometimes amazed by what those
companies are like i discovered last
week that there's a disability charity
fairly fairly you know a sizable
disability charity charity based out of
victoria that uses one of these products
on their website which is mildly
horrifying
the third bucket is
companies where there's a
fairly significant internal culture
around accessibility
and that there you tend to be looking at
companies with very diverse hiring
practices because you know it's about
one in five people worldwide and so the
chances are if you have a company that
hires well
a significant proportion of their
workforce will be disabled and there'll
be another significant proportion of
their workforce that is close to or
deals on a regular basis with other
disabled people
and so they're the ones that tend to
have that
non-compliance-based lens of let's
actually look at this in terms of what's
the right thing to do
what's going to get people using our
website rather than what do we have to
you know what do we have to do to comply
with lawsuits 24 7 or whatever that bit
of marketing copy copy once
right yeah
um so related to that and it sort of
relates to security in some ways um in
into like you sort of alluded to this of
making it easier for ourselves to do
this well and having those fundamental
building blocks that we can we can build
on top of
are there are there particular areas or
like i'm thinking web frameworks or
technologies that lots of people build
on
that we should
kind of all address and maybe use our
leverage and power to get at those
because that will have the greatest
impact are they are there places that we
should be focusing yeah
it's primarily by web frameworks as you
said so you're looking at things like
the reacts angular's views of the world
ruby on rails but also content
management systems so things like
wordpress if you're using um static site
templating so hugo is one that comes to
mind um things like django drupal
basically anything where the
components themselves are already built
into
you know where it's not that you're
building components yourselves out of
raw html where there is some level of
styling or configuration that has gone
into the components
that's where you go if they're open
source you go to their maintainers and
you go here is a pull request or if
they're not open source you release your
plugin as open source um that's where
that's where the bank feel back is
right
um
so one last question uh
it's sort of the end of the day
hopefully this is an easy one for people
to take away but what
what is one thing that we could all do
that would improve the situation but
something that
super simple that we can just do as we
go about our every day that will make
life better for everyone else who comes
after us
okay so i'm actually going to give you
two things here one bonus related to the
topic of the talk and one which is not
okay
tell everyone that you know who does web
development do not use accessibility
overlays
because as it stands there is not a
single product that i feel actually
meets the specifications and in the
sources i have linked a number of videos
breaking down a number of products and
spoilers none of them actually do what
they claim to do
but in the broader sense of
accessibility what i would say is
keep pushing and make sure that you have
a way for
an accessible way for people to actually
get accessibility feedback to you about
your product so whether that be
you know that your forums need to be
accessible or whether that be that you
need to not be printing your you know
your phone number on your website needs
to not be in an image and it needs to be
somewhere that screen readers can read
if you give disabled people a way to
actually say hey there are problems
usually they'll be pretty good about it
because they want to access stuff and
then take that feedback and action
excellent excellent advice oh we do have
one last bonus question um which is i
won't get you to i i won't get you to
answer all of it because it's to do with
references uh basically is there any
recommended reading to better understand
how we can make our systems more
accessible
do you have some resources uh that you
could link people to where they can go
and learn some more about this
yeah the sources
if you go right to the bottom of the
sources
there's a section about background
reading which has
some sources that i've recommended
previously and also a previous talk that
i've done which covers many of the
basics of many different types of
accessibility not just for screen
readers
wonderful all right thank you dawn and
and thank you for putting all that
effort into a great talk and and like
the captioning and everything was was
tremendous so thank you so much
it's a pleasure
um
right