A11Y — Making web accessibility easier
Thoughtworks Technology Podcast
Thoughtworks
4.5 • 58 Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2019
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Scott Davis, a principal engineer at ThoughtWorks has been working on web development his entire career. Like many of us, he’s been excited about the emergence of conversational UIs and the growing importance of voice — but Scott’s particular interest stems from the ideas of accessibility.
Our regular podcast hosts, Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons, talk to Scott about why the path towards accessibility needn’t be hard, and explore some of the simple things that can be done to make tech more accessible.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, everyone to the podcast. I'm one of your regular host, Newell Ford, and our other |
| 0:14.5 | regular host that's who this morning is. Rebecca Parsons. One of the things that we talk about |
| 0:19.9 | on our podcast are things that come up |
| 0:23.0 | on the technology radar, but we also talk to thought workers who have a particular passion |
| 0:27.6 | about a certain subject, and the intersection of that this morning lies with our colleague |
| 0:35.8 | and my longtime friend, Scott Davis, who's joining us this morning, |
| 0:40.2 | to talk about this mysterious thing called A11Y. |
| 0:44.6 | Good morning, Scott. |
| 0:46.0 | Hey, good morning. |
| 0:46.9 | Rebecca. |
| 0:47.3 | Good morning, Neil. |
| 0:47.9 | How you doing? |
| 0:48.6 | Good. |
| 0:49.3 | So tell me why it is that you are so lazy that you spell the word accessibility with A11Y instead. |
| 0:58.2 | Well, you know, when we're talking about internationalization, all the cool kids have way too much time to be investing in their programming to actually say internationalization. |
| 1:09.5 | So we say I-18N, a word that begins with I and ends |
| 1:13.3 | with N and has 18 letters in between. So with accessibility, we took that same shortcut and said |
| 1:19.0 | accessibility, begins with an A, ends with a Y, 11 letters in between. Now you have time to actually |
| 1:24.3 | start implementing your accessibility. That sounds like a pretty good trade-off. So tell us why you've gotten so interested in accessibility over the last few years or so. |
| 1:32.9 | I know it's become a big passion area for you. Absolutely. I've been doing web development, |
| 1:38.9 | you know, for essentially the whole of my career. And so I got really excited about conversational UIs. |
| 1:47.4 | Gartner says by, you know, by this year, about 30% of our interactions are happening over |
... |
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