E56 – Interview with Becky Gibson – Part 2

Becky talks about accessibility needing to be in the curriculum for all computer science courses - and I couldn't agree more! Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic:    Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 56. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS and video at Twilio.com. So in this episode, I’m continuing my conversation with Becky Gibson. Last show was really awesome. We spoke about Lotus. We spoke about IBM and the formation of WCAG 2.0 and ARIA. So all kinds of really great stuff. Do check it out if you haven’t already. Becky, welcome back. Becky:    Yeah. Thanks, Nic. This is great. Nic:    Yeah, so are you ready for more grilling? Becky:    Sure. Why not. Nic:    Why not. Alright, so we ended up last week on a fairly positive note talking about your greatest achievement and that was your involvement with ARIA and making the Dojo toolkit accessible. If we were to veer toward maybe, not negative but not so positive thing … What would you say your greatest frustration is in terms of Web Accessibility? Becky:    I think it’s attitude of people. I guess part of it too is that we don’t make people aware of it. We don’t educate students, right? It’s like you learn so many things when you go to school and you learn a different programming language, why is accessibility not built into the curriculum? And I know that Teach Access is trying to work somewhat toward that, the group. But I just find that frustrating that people have no idea about it. I mean you still-- like I mentioned in the last time … I was never going to stand up and tell people about Alt text on images and labels on form elements but when I look at websites I feel that I still have to because it-- people don’t know that. They still-- it’s not common knowledge which, when you’re in the industry is-- it’s like, those are so simple. That’s the simple stuff, you know? Just keep it simple stupid, do the easy stuff. So ... Nic:    Yeah Becky:    I mean I keep having in my mind I want to write a book. Well, yeah unless I dedicate myself into that. And then you’ve got to get someone to read it. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how to help bring accessibility education into Colleges and Universities. And it is a pretty daunting task, but, it’s something that I’ll keep working on in my subconscious. Nic:    It is something that’s mission critical. You’re not the first person to bring that point and every time I talk about that I can’t help thinking, this was a battle that I was having in the 90’s with architecture schools. But architects are going through four, five years of training and they get an average four-hour tuition on building accessibility. And we’re facing the same thing with Computer Science nowadays is that people come out of that and they don’t even know it exists, so there's not even that flicker of awareness that maybe curiosity is going to push them to read up on it. Becky:    Right. Nic:    Yeah. So how do we fix that? Becky:    Well, I don’t know. I’ve talked to some of the people at WebAim, just because they're fighting this battle as well. And it’s like how-- you have to get it into-- it has to be part of the curriculum. It has to be authorised. There’s rules. I’m like, “Oh crap, it’s never going to …” But I guess we have to start somewhere and then I know some of the surveys teach Access as there’s