Join accessibility expert Natalie MacLees and novice Natalie G. in the 14th episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast as they discuss the significant gaps in web development courses regarding accessibility training. They also reflect on the current state of web development education and the misconceptions surrounding accessibility and provide recommendations for resources and training to improve developers’ knowledge of web accessibility.
Natalie Garza: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is our 14th episode. I’m Natalie G, and here with us today is
Natalie MacLees: Natalie M.
Natalie Garza: And she is an accessibility expert. While I’m an accessibility novice here to learn along with all of our podcast viewers too. So, in this episode, we’re gonna talk about web development courses and their general lack of accessibility training. What is the current state of web development education, Natalie? What would you say?
Natalie MacLees: I would say most web development courses at any level, whether that’s online courses, boot camps, college courses, et cetera, have either no training at all about accessibility or will have like one unit on it, you know, out of 20 units that you might do. Will have one little unit introducing accessibility.
So, a lot of web developers are coming out of those courses. You know, whatever kind of course it is, with no background, no history, no knowledge of accessibility really at all, or just the tiniest hint that it might be something that they need to pay attention to.
Natalie Garza: What is your journey through accessibility? ’cause you started in web development.
Natalie MacLees: I started in web development, but I’m old. So, I started in web development before there were any courses. So, I started in web development. When you taught yourself, or you didn’t learn, you just figured it out yourself, or you didn’t learn. So, I got super excited, I got my first, internet enabled computer in 1996 and really quickly realized going on AOL that having your own website was an option that you could do.
And I was like, wait, what? You can have your own website. Oh my gosh. And I spent hours, hours and hours and hours, hundreds of hours on this website. And I just got really excited about it. And then a few years later, realized like, wait, this is something people will pay you to do. So I got really excited about it.
And then pretty early on in the year 2000, I got a job at Penn State University, building websites. Specifically, I was working in the chemistry department there and building the websites for the courses. Right, so if you were taking Chem 12, which is like the intro to chemistry that freshmen would take, there would be a Chemistry 12 website.
That you could go, you could get the notes, you could get the study guides for the exams and all of those kinds of things. And that was my job, was doing all of those, course websites. And I was about two weeks into it when one day my phone at my desk rang and it was the disability services office saying, ” excuse me, what do you think you’re doing on these websites?
Students with disabilities can’t use them.” And I was just like, “What? What are you talking about.” And so they provided me, at no cost to me, at their own cost. Tons and tons of training in how to build websites in an accessible way, which was, you know, web development. In the early days, it was the wild, wild west.
There was no training, there was no official certifications, there was just nothing. And so I got all of that training and I learned how to build websites to be accessible and then was shocked when I moved on from that job three years later to find out that that’s not how it worked everywhere, that other jobs were just like, “Accessibility.
What, what is that? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And they hadn’t learned. And so I just became kind of the defacto accessibility advocate at every job I had since.
Natalie Garza: Can we talk about Penn State here?
Did they have an accessibility expert on the staff? How did you get trained?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. So Penn State University is actually one of the thought leaders in the accessibility space and has been for a really long time. They’re still very respected. They’ve done a lot of work around accessibility, and their disability services office, which may have a different name at this point, I’m not sure, was empowered to
contact other departments and to contact people like me building websites and tell them they had to do it in an accessible way. So, they were able to actually get things implemented. At some universities, that’s not the case. They’ll have that office, but they don’t have any real power behind them. So they can ask people, “Can you please make this website accessible?”
But they don’t have the power to actually make it happen. And I think the difference at. Penn State was that they did empower that office to enforce that and to really require you to do, you know, it wasn’t just websites, right? It was exams. Professors had to make sure that their exams were accessible and all different areas of campus, buildings on campus, et cetera.
Everything had to be accessible.
Natalie Garza: Do you think that’s the case for a lot of universities?
Natalie MacLees: No.
Yeah, Penn State’s not the only one. I don’t wanna make it sound like that, but they were definitely at the forefront of that whole movement, you know, ’cause that was a long time ago. That was over 20 years ago. And they were already enforcing accessible websites at a time when, you know, it was WCAG 1.0.
And nobody even really knew anything about accessibility. And they have maintained that and, you know, I’m sure that all of their online courses and things like that, and they still publish a lot of accessibility information on their website and share with the public things that they have learned.
But I know from talking to students who’ve gone to other universities that that is not the case that all of them, some of them have some real barriers and some real problems in that area.
Natalie Garza: You mentioned WCAG 1.0.
Natalie MacLees: I think it was 1999, actually, that 1.0 got published.
Natalie Garza: Okay. Okay. So that kind of explains, ’cause I was thinking like, where are they getting the standards, and like have they done testing? Like where did they get this information for websites early on in the days?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. At a time when websites were terrible because there weren’t any best practices for building websites, and so there was some really, just outlandish approaches to building websites early on. And, you know, figuring out what those best practices were and establishing like that whole field of like usability and user experience for websites and the conventions and all of that.
Like that all had to be worked out. That all had to be established still.
Natalie Garza: So the WAI, they were, they were out there working
Natalie MacLees: in 1999. Early on. Yeah.
Natalie Garza: Wow. Okay. Interesting. And so you started your journey in web development. You
liked it
so much that you got a job, and then you got a wake-up call.
Natalie MacLees: Yes. Like almost immediately.
Yeah. That was my first paid job doing websites. Yeah.
Natalie Garza: So I imagine somebody like a person with disabilities at the university was like, “Um, I can’t even use this course.”
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, probably that’s what happened. Yeah. Is that a student in one of the classes I was doing the website for, probably contacted that office and said, “I can’t use this website.”
Natalie Garza: Hmm. And good on them for speaking up.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. Good on them.
Natalie Garza: All right, so you got introduced at Penn State, over the years, have you learned more on your own, or was that the only training you took back in the day?
Natalie MacLees: I’ve learned more on my own since then. Like, I went and got my certifications from the IAAP when that, when those came out and that made, was made available, because I wanted to support that mission, and I had to do a whole bunch of learning and all of that to pass those tests. And accessibility is one of those fields that the technology is changing all the time.
Browsers are changing all the time. Devices are changing all the time. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are changing all the time. And so there’s always something new to learn. There’s nobody who knows all of it because it’s all just shifting around and there’s whole areas of it that are gray areas, there’s not a cut and dry like, “yes, this is the right way to do this,” kind of answer.
And so you always are doing research and testing and figuring out what are the best approaches to things. So it’s just one of those fields where you’re gonna learn for as long as you’re in the job.
Natalie Garza: I mean, the components are kind of the same, right? You still have links, you still have headings.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, the basics of the web haven’t really changed. That’s true.
Natalie Garza: They’re just getting used in more complicated ways.
Natalie MacLees: For sure. Yeah.
Natalie Garza: Speaking about always learning. What is the problem with web dev courses and how they set up their curriculum?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so they just, very often, they have no information about accessibility at all, or they’ll just do like one little unit on it as though that’s enough. And I think the ideal would be if they had accessibility built into every unit of their course, and instead of just talking about, “Oh, here’s some basics on HTML, but let’s talk about
the semantic meaning of all of these tags and when to use them and why it’s important.” Which I feel like gets kind of glossed over, and they tend to speed right through the HTML course, right? Because it’s easy, but it’s really easy to get it wrong too. There’s some complexities to HTML that you miss when you just kind of figure out how to use angle brackets and move on.
So they’re really just kind of missing that whole foundation that should be built into the entire course from start to end. And instead they either ignore it completely or try to smash it all into one little unit, you know, three quarters of the way or so through the course is what it appears to be the pattern.
Natalie Garza: I feel like accessibility is really simple cause it deals with such simple pieces of the HTML, like make sure the label’s tied to the field right. And when you skip over the basics or the simple stuff, that’s where you mess up.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. That’s where the lack of knowledge about semantic HTML really gets highlighted, I think. And especially for newer web developers who go through a bootcamp, right? And jump straight to building something in React, for example, because there are terrible practices being done by React developers who don’t even use a button tag, right?
They just make a div and put click handlers and things on that, and that does not work with the keyboard by default. You have to do a bunch of extra work to make it work with the keyboard, and you’re really better off just making it a button than trying to make a div work. But there’s a lack of awareness and a lack of understanding and just a lot of ignorance around what accessibility is and why it’s important and how to implement it because it is left out of all of these courses.
Natalie Garza: Yeah. This is where the acronym POSH comes back in.
Natalie MacLees: Yes. Your, your favorite one? Plain Old Semantic HTML.
Natalie Garza: Yes. Bring back POSH. Bring back the simplicity of just, if it’s a button, just make it a button element. You don’t gotta make it all complicated.
Natalie MacLees: Get the basics right, and you’re, you’re halfway there really.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, if it’s an image, make sure it has an Alt attribute, give it an explanation. And I feel like that has to be covered whenever you talk about image elements.
Not like units later.
Natalie MacLees: When you say, “oh, by the way…”
” Remember when we talked about buttons and images in week one?”
” Here’s some extra stuff you should know about those.”
Natalie Garza: Do you wanna talk about some of the courses we found online
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. We can talk about some of the most popular courses. So you did find Web.dev had a full course on accessibility, which might be a good choice for somebody who’s looking to learn. We looked at Code Academy, has a tutorial, like an intro to web development kind of tutorial, that has one little unit that is not even accessibility.
It’s “responsive design and accessibility”, as though those two things are the same, so it’s like half a unit maybe of accessibility in that one. And then some really popular courses online are, The Odin Project, which a lot of people may have heard of is a free web development course.
There’s nothing on accessibility in that one. And Free Code Camp follows that same, kind of little model of there’s one little unit about three quarters of the way through the class on here’s accessibility.
Natalie Garza: So would you say, in general, accessibility is treated as an afterthought to web dev courses?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. If it’s there at all, it’s often an afterthought. And then web developers graduate from taking those courses and treat it the same way when they go get a job because that’s what they learned. So yeah, it should be front and center. It should be baked into every unit of the course. And it’s just unfortunately not.
Natalie Garza: What do you think is the reason behind people leaving out the accessibility?
Natalie MacLees: I do think there’s just a fundamental unawareness of the need for accessibility and how important it is. And the people who are making these courses are web developers who had training themselves that didn’t include it, so they don’t know what they don’t know. And they aren’t including it when they’re creating these courses or are including it as an afterthought, the same way that they were taught.
So there’s something there where it’s just perpetuating itself. There’s also a lot of myths around accessibility. This idea that, it’s not really necessary or only certain sites need to be accessible. This idea that people with disabilities don’t use the web, which I hear more often than you would expect, which is just silly.
So there’s a lot, there’s a lot of different ideas like that. Or the idea that accessibility is this huge damper on innovation and that you can’t build like a really clever, modern, beautiful-looking, performant website if you have to make it accessible, which is just wrong. That’s just incorrect information.
And what’s causing that, I think, is developers who don’t know how to build a nice-looking, performant, modern website that’s accessible. So they just assume it can’t be done because they don’t know how to do it. But really, accessibility is a real driver of innovation and you can do some really amazing things and make it accessible.
Natalie Garza: Yeah. The misconception that your website’s gonna not look as good just cause you’re using really basic, simple components, but that’s not really the case.
Natalie MacLees: No, it’s not the case at all. Yeah. You can build a really complex, really intricate website and have it be accessible.
Natalie Garza: Yeah. We’re in the process of making our own marketing website accessible.
Natalie MacLees: We will always be in the process of making our own marketing website accessible. Websites don’t hold still, right? So accessibility isn’t something that you’re just gonna say, okay, well let’s make the website accessible and you spend a month or two working on it and then you’re done forever. That’s not how it works.
It’s constant. It’s constant work and every time you add content, you’ve gotta check it. You gotta make sure you are gonna add a new feature to the website. You gotta check that. You gotta make sure you make changes to the website. You gotta check that, you gotta make sure. So it’s, it’s a constant investment.
Natalie Garza: Mm-hmm. That’s true. I would maybe rephrase, we’re in the process of making it more accessible.
Natalie MacLees: Yes.
Natalie Garza: Yes. And you would think like, “Oh, it’s a WordPress site. Elementor, you got all these crazy plugins in there,” and yet we’re still making progress.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, for sure we are. It’s in generally pretty good shape, but it could always be better. There’s no, there’s no such thing as a website that’s, you know, 100% accessible. So, there’s always room for improvement. There’s always something that you could do to make it better and easier to use for people.
Natalie Garza: Mm-hmm. That’s a good way to look at it. Where can people go to learn accessible web development?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so you found some nice things and I added a couple to the list too. So WebAIM is a nonprofit organization, “Web Accessibility in Mind”. I think they’re based near you, Natalie, in Austin, if I remember correctly, they do a lot of training. So they’ve got virtual training courses on accessibility.
I know they’ve got a conference coming up in March. That they’re gonna have lots of training at. So, they’re a good one to go and check out The Accessibility Collective, which is A11Y-collective.com, has lots of accessibility courses, and that was put together a couple years ago by some really well-respected accessibility professionals, kind of all work together to create that website.
Deque company, D-E-Q-U-E has been a pretty well-respected company in the accessibility space for several years now, and they’ve got dequeuniversity.com with training for all different kinds of specialties and accessibility, all different kinds of accessibility courses. And then Google actually has a free course that’s available on Udemy.
(Post-editing notes: Oops, we meant to say Udacity, not Udemy!)
That’s a nice intro to web accessibility for developers. And it’s really nicely done and it’s completely free.
Natalie Garza: And there’s resources out there, free online resources. You just have to learn them in addition to your normal web dev courses.
Natalie MacLees: Yes, yes, for sure. And not all of the courses are free. Some of them are paid, and they’re very much worth paying for. I think, Natalie, we could add also to the course, Sara Soueidan has an intro to web accessibility course that is excellent.
Natalie Garza: Mm-hmm.
Natalie MacLees: That is a paid course.
Natalie Garza: And lastly, where can web devs go to figure out the state of their websites or the projects that they’re working on?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. Well, that’s what we do. We make AAArdvark, so come on over to AAArdvarkaccessibility.com for free with no credit card required. You can enter in your homepage, scan it and get back a list of all of the issues. You’ll get information on why they’re issues and how to fix them, and we’ll walk you through it and provide that educational information on each of those, and then you can track your progress over time on improving your website.
Natalie Garza: And quick note, we’re very close to launching a very special project called “WCAG in Plain English.”
Geared towards developers.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, geared toward anybody really who’s just curious about accessibility. So, we’re explaining all of the different WCAG success criteria in very easy-to-understand, less technical language. So if you’ve struggled to understand the official documentation, you could come over to AAArdvark and check out what we’re working on.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, I would say original WCAG is very geared toward developers.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, it’s very technical, very dense. Can be pretty difficult to understand, especially if you’re not a developer. If you’re a designer, or a content editor, or a social media manager who’s trying to do your job in an accessible way, WCAG can be really difficult to understand.
Natalie Garza: Yes, WCAG in Plain English, coming to AAArdvark very soon.
Natalie MacLees: Very soon.
Natalie Garza: Yes. So with that, we wanna end the podcast. Thank you guys for joining us for the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast, episode 14. Thanks for joining us and we’ll talk to y’all next time.
