Episode Summary
In this episode, Mark and Justin discuss three main topics:
1. Title II Extension: They discuss the recent extension of the Title II ADA compliance deadlines. Organizations with 50,000+ people now have until April 26, 2027 (extended by a year), while smaller organizations have until 2028. They express disappointment about this last-minute extension but note it could give organizations time to implement more sustainable accessibility practices rather than rushing to meet deadlines.
2. EN 301 549 Accessibility Standard: They review an article by Callum McMenamin about how the EN 301 549 accessibility standard itself isn’t accessible. The standard is published as a PDF with complex language and formatting that creates cognitive barriers. They discuss the irony of accessibility standards being inaccessible and potential solutions, including HTML versions like Canada has implemented.
3. Tribute to James Edwards: The hosts pay homage to James Edwards (also known as “Brother Cake”), a respected accessibility expert who recently passed away. They discuss his article “The Road to Accessible Drag and Drop” and his talent for breaking down complex technical subjects into practical, understandable guidance.
The episode includes personal stories about James Edwards and reflections on his contributions to the accessibility community.
Transcript
Announcer: The Accessibility Breakdown by Inclusion Impact Accessibility.
Mark: Hey, welcome to the Accessibility Breakdown. I am Mark and this is…
Justin: Justin.
Mark: You always like a slight delay, Justin. Every week we pay tribute to those that stand out to us as leading by accessibility by picking three topics. That strike us in some way. This week we’re going to talk about A Simple way to Make Instructions More Accessible. This is an article by Josh Crawford, one of those subjects that we’ve probably come around to, but I really felt this was a good reminder and some interesting things that Josh talked about. We’re going to talk about Increasing Accessibility: Mindfulness-Based Practices for Autistic Folks, and this is written by Britt. You gotta help me with this last name. Afantasy?
Justin: Openings.
Mark: Thank you. Or you’re just much better at that than I am. – Albanese, Brett Albanese. And as we know, this is, or as you may or may not know, this is Autism Awareness Month. So this article is really timely for that. And it has some personal connections, particularly for Justin, but I think for all of us. So we’re excited to do that one. And then the other thing we’re going to talk about today is there’s a really interesting story out of my hometown, home state, New Hampshire. And we’re going to be talking about this young student, Ben, who is deaf and felt isolated at school and the incredible sort of community that unfolds from there. So we’ll talk about that. We’ll give you more details on that when we get to it. So Justin, let’s start with a simple way to make instructions. More accessible.
Justin: Yeah. Yeah. So this was an interesting article. I mean, this comes up a lot, but this is one of those articles that’s, it’s very simple to understand, very easy to kind of get into and. The number of times that I have to reference color alone being an issue or position like people referencing like specific positions is It comes up all the time. I almost got ready to say a body word there. But yeah, it comes up all the time. And so having just a simple set of instructions to remind everyone is super important. It’s needed. Even in this day and age, we’ve got AI, we’ve got all these things that are helping us out. But just some simple instructions on not relying on sight, a low or if you do rely on site like saying like, hey, you know, don’t click the button to the left or the button is available at the top right corner like People who are unsighted or people maybe that are low vision that have changed the shape of their screen in some way, maybe they’re zooming in or something. Right. Those types of waypoints of type of directional advice, Isn’t going to be as useful for them as it is for someone who is fully sighted and can kind of scan the page.
Mark: Yeah, you know, articles like this for me, Justin, one of the reasons why I like them is because they are like you kind of brought up the point that it’s like, I don’t know how you stated it, but that it’s not this isn’t like a big complicated thing. It’s not a new like trenchant AI thing. This goes back to sort of the basics for accessibility. And I think sometimes, one, it’s a very human issue. Issue. Right. And I think it becomes… It’s a good example of how it can be difficult for anything that is automated AI or whatever to parse something well enough to be like this instruction is not good because of, you know, this is over to, you’re saying this is over to the right, but it could be reordered or somebody with a screen reader is not going to understand because screen readers present the page linearly. Where you may be, you’re viewing like this to this two-dimensional view of the page directions like right makes sense in that context but when you’re listening or experiencing a linear version of the page that doesn’t make sense right and so i think it becomes really difficult to It’s very human for automation to do it. The other thing that I really like about this is me being on the phone with people who, like I think when you’re on the phone with somebody, when you’re doing your job, Justin, because you’re so technical, you’re often talking to other people that are technical. Right. That would be experienced back in TPGi, right? You’re surrounded, you’re in this group of technical folks. Whereas I’m oftentimes, I may be in that kind of conversation, but I’m oftentimes in a group of people who may not have known what accessibility was, or maybe they kind of understand a screen reader, but not really, or didn’t know what one was a little while ago. And to have these very understandable. Examples and I think this is understandable. So I go like, you know, an image doesn’t describe You know, a screen reader can’t describe an image, so you need alt text. Like, that’s something a layperson can understand. And then lots of times I’ll go into form fields. Like, you may have a bunch of, you know that you have to put your first name in this form because… Like first name is right next to the form field and last name is right next to the form field and so on. But it doesn’t mean it reads it out to the screen reader in that order. So imagine it said first name, last name, address, form field, you wouldn’t know what to do. So there’s a couple of these examples. And I think this is another one and I don’t use this one, but maybe I’m going to start, but this, and we all deal with directions of one type or another every day. So this idea of, that yes, in some environments, Click the button on the right makes sense. In other environments, or I shouldn’t even say in environments, but in the environments that other people need to navigate, it may not make sense. So if you’re the environment you’re trying to navigate as one of a screen reader, that may not make sense. So I really appreciated Josh’s approach. Explanation of this. So read the article if you haven’t. And I really appreciate the fact that it does bring the importance of accessibility kind of to the surface where it’s understandable by a lot of folks. I don’t know. That was mine.
Justin: No, it is. It is. And it’s interesting. Like, as you were kind of talking, like one of the analogy, I’m a big analogy person and it’s, Almost every email client these days has the way to remind you to actually attach an attachment. To a file if you say like, “Hey, in this file below blah, blah.” But if you go to send it and you click “Send” and it’s like, “Hey, You mentioned an attachment. Did you forget to, because no one likes having to send that second email.
Mark: That saved my life quite a few times. Thank you very much.
Justin: Wouldn’t it be cool if you were working on a document or you’re working particularly in a PowerPoint presentation or something like that, and you had some way of being able to see like, hey, you know, refer to all the red items. And, you know, if you’re colorblind, you may not be able to see the red items. That’s why we have like contrast issues and color alone as a success criteria. And wouldn’t it be cool if like you had something similar to the attachment reminder that said like, hey, you’ve got phrasing in here or you are using color alone or position in order to indicate where something is on the screen. I mean, it’s just that It’s an accessibility check, but it kind of falls in a similar vein.
Mark: Yeah, this is a really good point. Like you could alert that you could say you’re using directional or positioning, you know, are you sure that that’s going to be perceivable by everyone? And then the problem with that too, is that like, if you’re, a layperson and you’re trying to get accessibility right and then all of a sudden you get that level of feedback You may not get it, right? You may be like, what do you mean? I don’t understand. But that’s where Josh’s article, I think, comes in to play is that if part of that person’s education was what Josh put together here and the kind of checklist that he – brings forward, then all of a sudden it’s like, okay, that kind of alert would be very useful, followed up by the information in this article. So I agree. And we should just cover a little bit like What? You need to use non-positioning language. So if there’s a button to be pressed and I’m going to forget the exact example that he did, but it needs to say like, press the submit button versus press the button on the right? So labeling it, and we know labeling is a big, in sort of all sorts of different contexts is a big deal when it comes to accessibility, but having that button have a name How about label? And being able to refer to that versus its position on the page is essentially, in a nutshell, the way to think about it. We good? Pretty good. All right. Thanks, Josh. Appreciate the article. All right. So the next one here that we wanted to talk about was this article by I’m going to say the first name, you say the last name. Brett?
Justin: Have a nice.
Mark: Thank you. And it’s increasing accessibility. Colon mindfulness-based practices for autistic folks. And like I said at the top, We’re excited to have this article to talk about because it is Autism Awareness Month. And which is an important month because I think it’s and we’ll talk a little bit about it today but just the autism awareness means a lot of different things to me and I’m sure it means even more to you Justin. But essentially, This was a little bit close to me, too, because I’m a big mindfulness person. That’s what I was about to say. I practice mindfulness like a lot of other like a lot of other folks. And what people don’t realize about mindfulness, I think, is that it’s. It can be I don’t know if I’m using the right word here, but you have to approach it with caution, right? It can sort of be, dangerous and destruction, destructive. And we’re going to talk a little bit about, some mental health things here as well, or at least I am. So just… A fair warning, if that’s a trigger for you might want to fast forward a little bit here. But for people with mental health issues, diving into mindfulness can be a little bit difficult and dangerous because all of a sudden you’re quietly dealing with some difficult thoughts and it does not necessarily mindfulness isn’t magic, right? It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to deal with those thoughts well. So, in this article with autism, they sort of talk about how difficult it could be for a autistic person to fold inward like that. And I’m, this is my words here. And the really interesting thing, and you have some experience with this, Justin. So I’m going to be quiet and let you talk about it. But the really interesting thing is that the, you’re like, You don’t believe me that I’m going to be quiet. You’re like, sure you are. We need a signal where you just tell me to shut up and let you talk. But the…
Justin: Anyways.
Mark: That, and I’m playing with a bottle. This is appropriate because I’m playing with a little fidget thing that I have sitting on my desk. I have several of them over here. But one of the things they said is that sometimes to anchor. Again, my words, but to anchor that person with autism, sometimes they need some sort of external stimuli and that may be a fidget toy to kind of in my mind, it was to sort of ground them in the presence a little bit in a different way other than just relying on their. Mind to hold them in the present moment, which is what mindfulness is, one type of mindfulness is about, is really holding your mind in the present moment. So it’s just very interesting. I’d never thought about that. And I think that we learn a lot from the different ways people think and this really struck me as interesting and i started to think of curb cut out like how does how can i learn from this alternative that’s not the same as mine. But you had, I’m going to flip it over to you, Justin, for realsies this time, because you have some specific stories experience with this.
Justin: Yeah. For those that don’t know me personally, like I have a my oldest son is on the spectrum. He’s AUD HD, which is autism plus attention hyperactivity ADHD. He has all of the things. But when he was in therapy, they used this method of external stimuli in order really to kind of quiet some of the other parts of his brain and allow them to have a conversation. And I remember when he first started going, it was weird for me. So his big thing, he’s always a big, been a big screens kid, but one of the things that he’s really gotten into over the past couple of years is composing. And so he will spend a lot of time on his phone, composing music and like note by note, not in garage band or anything like that. He uses like this little MIDI synthesizer, but that’s his fidget. That’s his way to kind of quiet, like his brain to focus in on something. And so it was weird to me when he would go into his sessions and they’d be like, no, it’s okay. I can bring my phone. It’s I’m supposed to. And I didn’t understand it until it was explained to me what they were using it for. And so he would go in and he would work on a song while his therapist would ask him questions and stuff like that. And so, you know, sometimes she kind of has to, you know, ask multiple times, but it helps. It gave them a much more productive session and much more way for him to be mindful of the moment and to talk about some of the things that he needed to talk about in those sessions. So that was one way that helped him. But as that article that we read or that we’re publishing from Albinance. They are, you know, this may not work for everyone. And, but, you know, We had some success with it. It was really cool. And so it was kind of, I didn’t know that was, I thought that was just kind of a technique that his therapist had stumbled upon or what I didn’t realize I was like a real. So that was cool to read. So.
Mark: So this is where the curb cutout effect, I think, comes in. Right. Meaning that your experience with your son that this article exposes this notion that Sometimes what seems to be a distraction is actually a tool to focus. And it seems like in the case of people who are autistic that I’m sure not in every case but that in some of these cases, that’s the method. And I’ll say a couple of things about that. So I’m on the opposite end of the autistic spectrum. In some models, autism is on one end of the spectrum. You have sort of a normative middle, and then dyslexia is on the other end. And the reason why it’s laid out that way is because dyslexia can be simply defined as… If you’re looking at the trouble it causes, right, versus the, beneficial ways it helps. It’s difficulty getting into the details. People with dyslexia tend to be pretty good with storytelling. But they’re very bad. It’s spelling. So it’s that detail. Big picture, great detail. And this is a simplistic one aspect here, so don’t get too Whereas with autism, Oftentimes you have the opposite occur where you’ve got the people with autism who hear a song and then can play it note for note. Because they’re sharp in those details, but maybe they struggle socially because they’re harder navigating that big picture. Right? And again, this is me editorializing. So if you’ve got different experiences, don’t beat me up here. But I so I have dyslexia and I have, ADD. And one of the things I often do is I listen to a podcast when I’m trying to stay focused on a simpler. Task, one that’s sort of more repetitive because it keeps me focused. And I had, and because of this experience, I had an employee who was on the autistic spectrum and they were worried one day because I had made a comment that exposed the fact that they weren’t looking at the camera and that they were doing something. They were fidgeting below them and what they were doing was doodling. And they went into a panic because of past experiences with managers who had accused them of not paying attention in a similar situation. And they were like, it’ll never happen again, blah. And I said, hold on. What were you doing? And they said, I was doodling. And I said, that’s what I thought you were doing. And I said, and I assumed you were doing it to hold your attention on the conversation. And they said, that’s exactly what I was doing. The person was almost surprised. And then we had a great conversation about it. It ended up being a great moment and a great opportunity to understand each other and all that kind of thing. So the question is like, you know, what other ways is that? Similar experience helpful to all sorts of people. I value it as somebody on the opposite end of that spectrum. And then just to… Hold in our heads this idea that people’s brains work differently and we can’t assume. We can’t assume our experience is the same as somebody else’s experience. And what I wanted to do, Justin, because, you know, we’re digital accessibility people and I think people listening to this podcast might be like, okay, what does this have to do with digital accessibility? And one of the things that struck me, right, we pick out things that strike us. One of the things that struck me is why it is important that we keep focusing on how we do create rules around what’s the word I’m looking for?
Justin: Progressive?
Mark: Neurodivergent. Neurodivergent in terms of the WCAG. It’s one of the areas in digital accessibility I think is the hardest that we’ve done, have done probably have not gotten as far down the road. Like if we’re, you know, for people who are blind, for people who are deaf, it’s a little, easier to understand how to accommodate, but we’ve struggled trying to figure out how to accommodate for people who are neurodivergent. And it just highlights the things that we do have, like distractions on the site. And because somebody fidgets to stay focused doesn’t mean that the flashing lights in the ad off to the side are going to help, right? Those are probably going to be a distraction or the fact that we need to write, you know, create sites that are consistent from page to page because of this difficulty of focusing. So to me, it just sort of highlighted the importance, one, that we keep exploring, how to do this into the Things that we do have in place are very important. I think the things we do understand right now are very important.
Justin: Yeah, exactly.
Mark: I think we could go on. I could go on. I’ve got more stories, but we’re going to, in the interest of time, let’s move. I know. Justin’s like, I’m the one with the… Kid who’s got autism.
Justin: No. You were the storyteller. So.
Mark: That’s right. I’m the story. That’s right. Respect my… My dyslexia? No, I’m just kidding. Okay, so… I love this next story. I absolutely love it. And I love it to the point where I don’t know what to do with it. Right. Because I want to do something with it. And, It is. So your comment to me before we got on and heated up the mics was your when i because i gave this to you to read and you’re like that’s just dust in my eye right it is that kind of story where It feels so good and it gives you so much faith.
Justin: Yeah. This is one of those, for anyone that watches CBS Sunday Morning, this is one of those feel good stories that’s narrated in a very calm, soothing voice.
Mark: Yeah. – And listen, this is not adults here this is children being better leaders being naturally just gravitating towards what’s right in a way that I think as we get older, adults can struggle with. So I’m not going to delay any further. So this comes out of my home state. New Hampshire. And this is a story. It was covered by a bunch of people. We’ll probably link you out to the CBS News article on it. And it was it’s from camp. New Hampshire, so Campton, New Hampshire. Elementary school. In this, young man named Ben And I just wrote Ben down. So we published Ben O’Reilly. O’Reilly is his last name. Who is deff. And he’s mainstreamed, which means he’s put into the education system with other students. So, In this small New Hampshire town, he’s the only deaf student and he has this wonderful aide, Cheryl. I can’t do the last name. B-U-L-L-O-C-K. This is my thing. No last name Mark.
Justin: Bullock?
Mark: And, Ben started to kind of express, as you would expect, like feelings of isolation. It’s, you know, it’s difficult. It, there’s no way around it, right? Like if you’re the only deaf student in a school full of hearing people, there’s going to be challenges. And I think that, and this is me reading into this, but I think that there’s a lot of credit given to share with her here for really working with Ben and being a great advocate and friend and everything. But the story here is that unprompted. Unprompted. Ben’s classmates started to learn sign language. And started to sign with them. And they started, When you, like I’ve looked at some of the interviews online, that are that people recorded with these kids and they’re like well if you want to play with Ben you need to know how to talk to them and we wanted to play with Ben he’s you know like and I’m like I’m making again I’m not this is not verbatim but they’re saying things like Ben was our friend and we wanted to play with him and so to learn sign language. Like just as a matter of fact, it could be. And it’s so simple. It is so simple. But Ben was in an environment where he was struggling. The people in that environment were welcoming and received the barrier that bend had and was perceiving and worked with Ben to close it.
Justin: Yeah.
Mark: Like, that’s like.
Justin: Kids are amazing. – Kids are amazing. Yeah. I don’t know. I, kids are one of the, like, I feel like we’re the ones that kind of screw up kids long term by projecting our own kind of things onto them. But kids themselves, like you put like two kids in a room, like they just want to play with each other. They want to do things with each other. You know, it’s. And they want to communicate the way that kids do. And that’s really, that’s what I took away from this story, is how awesome it.
Mark: Was. Because then it spread. Sometimes I think we need to look back to our kids and realize that they can be, that they can lead us as much as we feel responsible for leading them all the time. That sometimes if we are open to that and we look back, and I know that that’s very difficult as an adult to do. But so a couple of things here. One, I want to say like in a world where we talk about Title II of the ADA, Title III of the ADA, Section 508, EAA. And we need to become accessible because we need to conform with these things. And that’s the way the world works, right? There’s no judgment there. It is refreshing. For that simplicity of Ben needs to be included in what we’re doing and we’re going to learn Sign language and we’re not in, there was no meeting Justin, right? These kids didn’t meet and decide this. They just started doing it. It just was the path. And then here’s the really cool thing, right? Like Billy Mays, right? Like, but wait, there’s more. The school… This is a huge credit Hampton Elementary to you all is the school and the adults in None of this got past them. They saw what was happening and they took that leadership from the kids and even in assemblies and events. And things where Ben wasn’t present. The school, the adults started signing because the kids were signing and the kids were signing with each other when Ben wasn’t around. And so even this requirement that Ben be there, and then we do this for Ben that faded into the background and they. In the requirement to use American Sign Language. Requirements, I’m not saying the right word, but the desire to use American Sign Language and the desire to practice American Sign Language and to desire to be a community that can come together and learn to communicate with one in a way that one individual in the community needs was… It was incredible. And then just, you know, if you just think about how enriching that is to the kids and their learning. And, you know, I, at CSUN, I sat down with a friend of mine who’s deaf and I signed just so people understand I’m not great at it, but I have a, what I’ll call a level of fluency. And I probably had a better level of fluency back a while ago when I was more saturated and, One of the things that we talked about is How we… How uncomfortable people are. When person is in the room that only uses sign language. So I’m not talking about a person who’s deaf with a, you know, who can speak well and read lips well, or has a cochlear implant or has, you know, is hard of hearing, could hear like there’s people, there’s the kind of this middle ground where people, where it’s effective, you know, they, the, they’re, they can sort of, those people can be more effective at integrating into the hearing community. And it’s not, I don’t mean that as their responsibility, I mean the hearing community more easily accepts them. And we have friends that are like that too. But the more you rely solely on American Sign Language communicate the more difficult It is to be. Accepted into a group of people who are hearing, right? So the conversation that me and my friend who’s deaf, Greg, we’re having was how do we start to speak to the community and bridge that gap? And then I turn around and the kids, the little kids at Campton Elementary School just did it. They just didn’t without a discussion without prompting so anyways Usually proud of those kids in that school.
Justin: And you can totally like envision like how it happened. Like maybe two or three kids were like, hey, we’re going to do this thing. And then some other kids saw them doing it. And they’re like, I want to learn how to do that. You know, I mean, it’s just broken. Kids mimic, and they’re so good at it.
Mark: And I’m absolutely sure that when Cheryl and Ben were signing, some kid caught that out of the corner of his eye. And when, He was playing on the ground, you know, Legos or blocks or trucks or whatever they’re playing, I don’t know, you know. That either Ben signed or the kid picked up a sign from ben and cheryl something happened where one of the kids was like i got this I saw this. I picked it up, you know, because there are sponges at that age. And, It went from there.
Justin: Yeah.
Mark: Stories on. Yeah, it’s a great story. Yeah, just learn from our kids. That’s our three stories.
Justin: That’s our.
Mark: Three stories, Justin. And, Do you have anything, any… Final thoughts before we no.
Justin: No but i it’s funny for some reason all of my social a lot of my social media recently has been including probably just from the conversations you and i have had have been including a lot more it’s like sign language and stuff in like and from like instagram there’s a woman on instagram who does the sign language for heavy metal songs and stuff. I love that. Which is really cool to watch. I think a lot of people have seen the videos of the sign languages, people doing sign language at rap concerts and stuff like that. But I’m sure this conversation, because, you know, our phones are always listening, but is probably going to just even bring in more of that to my feed. So I’m excited to see that.
Mark: Nothing wrong with heavy metal sign language. I love stuff like that too, because it just injects some fun into everything. So I think it was really fun to learn. So I will, shameless plug, like go learn it. And I’ve got a friend and, Florida. So if you’re in Florida, look up Courtney… Cannon and i will i’ll post a link in this podcast but she does a lot for the community i think we mentioned her a few podcasts ago but she does a lot for the community down there and I’m struggling. I think it’s she’s in Orlando. I think it’s Orlando. And teaching people, sign language, you know, so, and then there’s some great content online. There’s some great apps. So maybe I’ll gather up some resources and throw them in here as well, just for if anybody wants to start. And it’s the kind of thing like, Start off with a few signs. You don’t have to know. You know, you’re not like you don’t need to be fluent. Start off with a few signs. Any step towards accessibility and communication and stuff like that is a great one and people appreciate it. You know, people appreciate it. So, It keeps Heavy Metal signing, Justin. – But I need that. I need that. That’s a good follow. I need that follow from you as well.
Justin: Yeah, I sent it to.
Mark: You. Did you? All right. Maybe we’ll post that as well. All right. Well, listen, we hope that we’ve honored those that are honoring accessibility. And now that we’ve broken down accessibility for you can help others by keeping it accessible.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Accessibility Breakdown by Inclusion Impact Accessibility.
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