Well, guess what, we’re nearing the end of the year! In this post I’ll share what I was up to this year, as well as some things I learned along the way.

As usual, my year wasn’t all highlights… like in 2020, 2019, 2018 and 2017, the lowlights are intentionally left out of this public post. Ok, let’s go!

Highlights

Work

Throughout the year, for W3C/WAI, I was involved in the launch of the redesigned WCAG-EM Report Tool, worked on a unified layout for the W3C’s accessibility guidance (like Techniques, Understanding and the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide) and did some work around accessibility of authoring tools in higher education, Epub and XR.

This year also was my last at the W3C/WAI. I won’t get into too much detail, but I can say I struggled with the leadership style and decision making process. I had wanted to drive more change from within. I had also wanted to do more to make accessibility more accessible, but the standards game seems easier to play for folks who have been in it longer. When my contract neared the end I decided not to extend. I am grateful for the opportunity though, and was able to learn a lot about standards, web accessibility and the web, and contribute to a wide range of interesting projects.

Besides my W3C work, I also did over 25 WCAG conformance audits, mostly for governments, and a couple of in-house workshops, including two for the teams building the Dutch national citizen’s authentication system (DigiD).

I also worked with Eleven Ways on an advisory project for the European Commission and a project on virtual event accessibility. Lastly, I just started a short stint with Mozilla, to help with some accessibility aspects of the upcoming MDN redesign.

In February, I will start a new job 🎉, which I am super stoked about. Like my role at the W3C, it focuses on outreach to developers and will let me continue to work on making it easier for developers to build things. I am excited, because it is at a product company that works on solving a very real and interesting problem, and it is very authoring tool related.

Speaking

This year included one in person event and I was so happy the covid-shaped stars aligned this time for me. I had recently had my vaccin, the European winter wave had not yet exploded and 2G applied.

The other talks I did were all remote:

• Accelerating accessibility in a component based world at SimpleWebConf (June), JSConf India (November), BLD Conf (November) and Git Commit Show (November)
• Could browsers fix more accessibility problems automatically at a11yTO (October), Accessibility Club Meetup (November) and Tech A11y Summit
• More to give than just the div: semantics and how to get them right at Web Directions: Access All Areas (October) and Beyond Tellerrand (November)
• Procuring accessible software for e-learning: how ATAG can help with my colleague Joshue O’Connor at WP Campus Online (September)

You can like and subscribe this stuff on YouTube should you wish to.

I also joined the Gebruiker Centraal (“User Centered”) podcast of the Dutch government (WCAG What?) and Ben Meyer’s Some Antics livestream (Audit Site for Accessibility).

Reading

I read 54 books this year. I created a website for this as I love judging books by their covers, now you can too on books.hiddedevries.nl. This is updated manually—if you want real time updates, add me on Goodreads.

Below are some books I particularly liked. They have in common that they are set in parts of the world I have travelled to and would have liked to return to if it wasn’t for the pandemic.

• If I had your face by Frances Cha – this is about four women in Seoul and their lives, obsessions and friendships.
• Fake accounts by Lauren Oyler – what if you find out your partner is actually a complot theorist with a secret Instagram account? Funny and smart satire of contemporary life, partially set in Berlin. Got very mixed comments on Goodreads.
• Intimacies by Katie Kitamura – this book’s main character works at the International Criminal Court in The Hague—ok I have travelled there during the pandemic… it uses precise language, but also shows how much precision of language matters. There was a scene in which people buy old books just for the purpose of decorating their house.
• Kafka on the shore by Haruki Murakami – I reread Kafka on the shore, set in Yamanashi and Takamatsu, Japan, and, like a lot of Murakami books, it involves a road trip, lots of music and lots of cats
• Free food for millionaires by Min Jin Lee – set in New York, describes a college graduate plotting her future, describing both her generation and her parents, jumping between life’s different environments

Writing

I didn’t write a lot, but have not stopped posting either—this is the 20th post of this year. Things I wrote about included:

• the “metaverse” and why real life is better – I guess I am sceptical of a lot of the ideas posed by Zuckerberg in this year’s Facebook event
• numbers – I get asked a lot how many people have disabilities and I feel that’s the wrong metric
• “normative’ in WCAG – a lot of my work this year focused around redesigning WCAG-related guidance for W3C/WAI, and part of my research showed users struggle with deciding which guidance is “required” to meet WCAG (spoiler: most of WCAG’s main text is, most other stuff isn’t)
• components and what to look for – I love component systems and feel strongly they can contribute to a more accessible web. However, the opportunity they provide is neutral: if components contain barriers, they could make the web less accessible too, so we want to use components that repeat accessibility, not inaccessibility
• I would love accessibility statements in App Stores and wrote about that

Cities

I stayed within the borders of The Netherlands for another year, with one exception: a short train ride across the Netherlands-Germany border for the first Beyond Tellerrand in 2 years.

Things I learned

Towards the end of the year I try to think about what I learned. A lot of this year’s was quite specific to myself, but these are some random learnings that might interest others:

• One aspect that makes accessibility of XR tricky is that virtual worlds usually don’t have DOM nodes like web pages do. Accessibility trees are based on DOM nodes, without those XR worlds will need some other mechanism to define accessibility meta information (more about XR Accessibility User Requirements).
• There is a standard for Epub accessibility, but none specifically for native app accessibility, eventhough some organisations in European Union Member States need their apps to be accessible since earlier this year.
• I was late to the Eleventy party, but eh, Eleventy is nice. I released two Eleventy-based projects: my books site and a starter pack for WCAG reporting using Eleventy.
• Open sourcing a thing can make it better! Months after I released my Eleventy WCAG Reporting thingy, friendly folks contributed translations into Portuguese, Finnish, German and Spanish. This is onlly a super small project, but it was nicer than not releasing it could have ever been.
• Standardising design system components, as in, make common design system needs somehow part of the web platform, is fun and useful. It could mean the world to accessibility and developer experience. It’s also hard. I am trying to contribute to some of this through Open UI CG and I learn lots in the meetings and issues.
• I found it helpful to apply at multiple companies when I looked for my next role. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to, at first, but was glad I did, as it let me talk to many different companies and gave me a lot more decision points to compare towards the end of the process.

Anyway, thanks so much for reading my blog this year and sharing posts with others. It means a lot to me. I wish you the best for 2022!

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Originally posted as 2021 in review on Hidde's blog.

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When I talk to teams about web accessibility, often someone will ask how many people with disabilities use their site(s), or some variation of that question. It’s complicated, and other questions can be more helpful.

My standard answer usually includes that we can’t measure assistive technology usage for (good) privacy reasons, that our analytics won’t show customers that went to a more accessible competitor and that accessibility benefits everyone.

Accessibility ROI irrelevant (says… Apple!)

One other aspect though, let’s go into that straight away, is that looking for this data hints at trying to find return on investment. A counter question could be: what will we do with that data? Let’s say we get the number and deem it a very small percentage… whatever that is… equal access is still the right thing to aim for, it is still a human right and it is still required by law in most places. So, basically, our organisation has three good reasons to prioritise accessibility that exist regardless of a number of users with disabilities.

Or, as Apple CEO Tim Cook once told a shareholder:

When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI. When I think about doing the right thing, I don’t think about an ROI. If that’s a hard line for you, then you should get out of the stock.

(From: Apple’s Tim Cook gets feisty, funny and fiery at shareholders meeting, Los Angeles Times, 1 March 2014)

This makes sense for the web too. The web is all about accessibility, both of information and for end users.

Privacy trumps metrics

A web user’s need for privacy trumps our need for analytics. This is especially the case for people with disabilities, who rightly don’t want their disability to be one of your metrics. Standards organisations are careful not to add features to the Web Platform that allow such tracking, because it would invade individual user needs too much.

Your analytics don’t show market potential

Even if we could accurately measure how many people with disabilities used our site, it isn’t a very meaningful number. If our site is inaccessible to people who use voice control, chances are those people are shopping with our competitor instead. The reason they don’t show up in our numbers might be just that.

For the potential, we could look at the World Health Organisation’s Report on Disability, published in 2011. In a comprehensive chapter on demographics, they conclude 15-20% of the world’s population has a disability. These numbers aren’t exact, as countries have different methods of counting, but they give a reasonable estimate that we can work with.

Accessibility benefits everyone

Accessibility features on our site won’t benefit everyone all the time, that would be an exaggeration, but they often benefit many more people than just specific groups of people with disabilities. Dark mode is a feature some users need to avoid headaches or to read content, but many others still apply such settings, for a wide variety of reasons.

And it doesn’t just benefit a large parts of our user base, accessibility can also inspire innovation in our organisations. When an Italian inventor created the first typewriter for his blind friend, he invented a thing that is at the centre of what all of us do all day. Voice controlled software, audiobooks… the examples of things that were initially designed for people with disabilities but used by many more, are countless.

Conclusion

We probably don’t need to know how many people with disabilities use our sites, as regardless of what that number would be, we should want to build accessible sites, for many ethical, legal and business reasons.

---

The post How many people with disabilities use our site? was first posted on hiddedevries.nl blog | Reply via email

When I talk to teams about web accessibility, often someone will ask how many people with disabilities use their site(s), or some variation of that question. It’s complicated, and other questions can be more helpful.

My standard answer usually includes that we can’t measure assistive technology usage for (good) privacy reasons, that our analytics won’t show customers that went to a more accessible competitor and that accessibility benefits everyone.

Accessibility ROI irrelevant (says… Apple!)

One other aspect though, let’s go into that straight away, is that looking for this data hints at trying to find return on investment. A counter question could be: what will we do with that data? Let’s say we get the number and deem it a very small percentage… whatever that is… equal access is still the right thing to aim for, it is still a human right and it is still required by law in most places. So, basically, our organisation has three good reasons to prioritise accessibility that exist regardless of a number of users with disabilities.

Or, as Apple CEO Tim Cook once told a shareholder:

When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI. When I think about doing the right thing, I don’t think about an ROI. If that’s a hard line for you, then you should get out of the stock.

(From: Apple’s Tim Cook gets feisty, funny and fiery at shareholders meeting, Los Angeles Times, 1 March 2014)

This makes sense for the web too. The web is all about accessibility, both of information and for end users.

Privacy trumps metrics

A web user’s need for privacy trumps our need for analytics. This is especially the case for people with disabilities, who rightly don’t want their disability to be one of your metrics. Standards organisations are careful not to add features to the Web Platform that allow such tracking, because it would invade individual user needs too much.

Your analytics don’t show market potential

Even if we could accurately measure how many people with disabilities used our site, it isn’t a very meaningful number. If our site is inaccessible to people who use voice control, chances are those people are shopping with our competitor instead. The reason they don’t show up in our numbers might be just that.

For the potential, we could look at the World Health Organisation’s Report on Disability, published in 2011. In a comprehensive chapter on demographics, they conclude 15-20% of the world’s population has a disability. These numbers aren’t exact, as countries have different methods of counting, but they give a reasonable estimate that we can work with.

Accessibility benefits everyone

Accessibility features on our site won’t benefit everyone all the time, that would be an exaggeration, but they often benefit many more people than just specific groups of people with disabilities. Dark mode is a feature some users need to avoid headaches or to read content, but many others still apply such settings, for a wide variety of reasons.

And it doesn’t just benefit a large parts of our user base, accessibility can also inspire innovation in our organisations. When an Italian inventor created the first typewriter for his blind friend, he invented a thing that is at the centre of what all of us do all day. Voice controlled software, audiobooks… the examples of things that were initially designed for people with disabilities but used by many more, are countless.

Conclusion

We probably don’t need to know how many people with disabilities use our sites, as regardless of what that number would be, we should want to build accessible sites, for many ethical, legal and business reasons.

---

Originally posted as How many people with disabilities use our site? on Hidde's blog.

Reply via email

In a Dutch podcast, I heard a prominent tech journalist praise Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Metaverse PR event: finally, the company had presented a grand vision and it looked so cool! In my own tech bubble on Twitter, I saw mostly memes to poke fun at the concept, the presentation and the presenter, and lots of insightful scrutiny.

The COVID pandemic has accelerated the move of work to digital spaces rather than physical ones. Metaverse-enthusiasts often claim that more Metaverse-tech can give us a much better version of digital life. I’m not sure about that.

Though it was refreshing, I will say I was disappointed by the tech journalist’s enthusiasm. Not because Mark Zuckerberg deserves the laughs, or because it somehow scratches an itch ito criticise people who are genuinely trying to make exciting new tech. I mean, maybe… but really, it is because Facebook’s actions prove time over time they require scrutiny. This corporation makes decisions that put their profit above the safety of both people and the societies they live in, and it plays innocent through a clever PR apparatus (see my post on An Ugly Truth). The US Congress and European Commission aren’t looking into their practices because they felt bored. It is because they capitalise on surveillance, hate and misinformation, all of which threaten the basic structures of democracy.

If Facebook (or Meta) claims they will prioritise security, interoperability and improving human relationships, as Zuckerberg did in interviews, such claims need scrutiny. Scrutiny from journalists, from software engineers, from activists and from trend watchers. This company has demonstrated on many occasions to be capable of mostly the opposite of security, the opposite of interoperability and the opposite of improving the quality of human relationships. What would Rohinga muslims or the White House staff think when they hear Zuckerberg say security matters to him? What about web developers who try to build interoperable web apps, only to find Facebook’s staff working on the React framework work around more than with web standards? What about the many societies that are driven apart by an effective machinery for medical and political misinformation? Will they feel their human to human relationships have improved?

As someone with family, friends and colleagues abroad, I have seen struggles with current digital spaces. They could improve by means of technology and better priorities. But should this be lead by the company whose technology and priorities worsened digital spaces so much?

And are more advanced digital environments the answer or does a better world already exist, as in, the real world? Mixing digital and real, as some Metaverse tech does, is super beneficial for corporations that see the web as a place to extract profit from. A Mixed Reality overlay adds not just fun or useful interactions, it adds another thing to measure. More data, for corporations like Facebook, means more profits.

Maybe I would be less sceptical if Zuckerberg had outlined in more detail how this would benefit the world first, or even demonstrate ways to guarantee the Metaverse won’t be just another layer of his data extraction machine. Of course, it is a free world and corporations can profit however they want. Including by building a data extraction machine and getting rich off that. Profit is fine, my company aims for profits too. It’s really Zuckerberg’s failure to address what could go wrong, given so much in his current enterprise has gone wrong, that tires me. It’s the combinaton of that data extraction machine for profit and the undesired impacts of it on society.

For a corporation wanting to extract data for profit, augmented reality is better than reality. For end users, reality itself, I mean, unaugmented reality, might be the better version of the mostly digitial lockdown life that many of us desire. First of all, it’s real, I mean, did you have a chance to experience life music after lockdowns? It’s nice, right? Secondly, it doesn’t require scary filming glasses or uncomfortable and nausea-inducing headsets. Thirdly, you have to worry less about whether your privacy is invaded. And if Facebook or Meta run things, you can be quite sure of that. I won’t be applying to one of the 50,000 ‘Metaverse jobs’ they said they’ll open in Europe.

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The post The better version of digital life is real life, not ‘the metaverse’ was first posted on hiddedevries.nl blog | Reply via email

In a Dutch podcast, I heard a prominent tech journalist praise Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Metaverse PR event: finally, the company had presented a grand vision and it looked so cool! In my own tech bubble on Twitter, I saw mostly memes to poke fun at the concept, the presentation and the presenter, and lots of insightful scrutiny.

The COVID pandemic has accelerated the move of work to digital spaces rather than physical ones. Metaverse-enthusiasts often claim that more Metaverse-tech can give us a much better version of digital life. I’m not sure about that.

Though it was refreshing, I will say I was disappointed by the tech journalist’s enthusiasm. Not because Mark Zuckerberg deserves the laughs, or because it somehow scratches an itch ito criticise people who are genuinely trying to make exciting new tech. I mean, maybe… but really, it is because Facebook’s actions prove time over time they require scrutiny. This corporation makes decisions that put their profit above the safety of both people and the societies they live in, and it plays innocent through a clever PR apparatus (see my post on An Ugly Truth). The US Congress and European Commission aren’t looking into their practices because they felt bored. It is because they capitalise on surveillance, hate and misinformation, all of which threaten the basic structures of democracy.

If Facebook (or Meta) claims they will prioritise security, interoperability and improving human relationships, as Zuckerberg did in interviews, such claims need scrutiny. Scrutiny from journalists, from software engineers, from activists and from trend watchers. This company has demonstrated on many occasions to be capable of mostly the opposite of security, the opposite of interoperability and the opposite of improving the quality of human relationships. What would Rohinga muslims or the White House staff think when they hear Zuckerberg say security matters to him? What about web developers who try to build interoperable web apps, only to find Facebook’s staff working on the React framework work around more than with web standards? What about the many societies that are driven apart by an effective machinery for medical and political misinformation? Will they feel their human to human relationships have improved?

As someone with family, friends and colleagues abroad, I have seen struggles with current digital spaces. They could improve by means of technology and better priorities. But should this be lead by the company whose technology and priorities worsened digital spaces so much?

And are more advanced digital environments the answer or does a better world already exist, as in, the real world? Mixing digital and real, as some Metaverse tech does, is super beneficial for corporations that see the web as a place to extract profit from. A Mixed Reality overlay adds not just fun or useful interactions, it adds another thing to measure. More data, for corporations like Facebook, means more profits.

Maybe I would be less sceptical if Zuckerberg had outlined in more detail how this would benefit the world first, or even demonstrate ways to guarantee the Metaverse won’t be just another layer of his data extraction machine. Of course, it is a free world and corporations can profit however they want. Including by building a data extraction machine and getting rich off that. Profit is fine, my company aims for profits too. It’s really Zuckerberg’s failure to address what could go wrong, given so much in his current enterprise has gone wrong, that tires me. It’s the combinaton of that data extraction machine for profit and the undesired impacts of it on society.

For a corporation wanting to extract data for profit, augmented reality is better than reality. For end users, reality itself, I mean, unaugmented reality, might be the better version of the mostly digitial lockdown life that many of us desire. First of all, it’s real, I mean, did you have a chance to experience life music after lockdowns? It’s nice, right? Secondly, it doesn’t require scary filming glasses or uncomfortable and nausea-inducing headsets. Thirdly, you have to worry less about whether your privacy is invaded. And if Facebook or Meta run things, you can be quite sure of that. I won’t be applying to one of the 50,000 ‘Metaverse jobs’ they said they’ll open in Europe.

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Originally posted as The better version of digital life is real life, not ‘the metaverse’ on Hidde's blog.

Reply via email