E68 – Interview with Ire Aderinokun – Part 1

In the first part of my interview, Ire Aderinokun tells us that accessibility will not take you a massive effort if you're using HTML correctly. Ire is a front-end developer and user interface designer. She currently is working on a startup called Buy Coins. Transcript Nic: Welcome to the A11y Rules podcast. This is episode 68. 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 is for you. To get today's show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. This week, I'm speaking with Ire Aderinokun. Thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility, Ire. How are you? Ire: I'm great. Thanks for having me. Nic: Thank you. So I like to let guests introduce themselves. In a brief introduction, who is Ire Aderinokun? Ire: Okay, so I'm a front-end developer and user interface designer. I live and work in Lagos, Nigeria. I'm currently working on a startup called BuyCoins, and we're building a cryptocurrency exchange that's targeted at Africans, and Nigerians for now, Africa soon. I also write a blog. It's called bitsofcode where I write a lot about front-end development. So, HTML, CSS, JavaScript. I'm actually currently trying to write almost every day, so I'm trying to do an article every weekday for the next about 30 days/30 articles. There's a lot of content going on there right now, so that's what I focus on. Nic: Right, so that would keep you busy. So to get going a little bit, tell us something that most people would not know about yourself. Ire: Interesting. I guess people would not know that I'm really scared of flying, because I'm flying a lot because I travel for things like conferences. I'm traveling at least maybe every month, every two months or something, so people might not be aware that I'm actually really, really scared of flying despite the fact that I do it a lot. Nic: Yeah, that would be problematic. From Nigeria, it's a bit difficult to get anywhere really unless you're doing a lot of African continent conferences. But I think you're coming over to the States and to Europe quite a bit, aren't you? Ire: Yeah, so recently in the past, maybe a year, I've been going particularly to California a bit mainly because the startup I was working on, or I am working on, we got into Y Combinator, so we're there for most of the summer. Also, a few conferences I go for are usually in California, but I also go to Europe quite a bit. Yeah, every conference I go to is at minimum six hours away, so it's kind of a struggle. Nic: Yeah, I can imagine that. I can imagine that. So the podcast is about web accessibility, and there seems to be as many variations of the definition of web accessibility as there's people I speak to on the podcast. How would you define web accessibility? Ire: That's a good question actually. Well, I just think of web accessibility basically like any form of accessibility, and it's just about access to the platform. In this case, the web to as many people as possible. People tend to focus on specifically people that have disabilities. So how does somebody who is, for example, blind use the web? That's one of the major things people might think about. But it's just about making the web or whatever platform we're talking about, making it easy to access for as many people as possible, including people who might have a disability. But I always say that accessibility is not only about targeting the people who have a disability. It's just about increasing access in general, and that might also mean that people who don't have disability will be able to access the content in a better way or in an easier way as well. Nic: Right, so in other word, accessibility benefits everyone? Ire: Yes, exactly. Nic: I'm curious about where your role falls within web accessibility. You were telling us you do a lot of writing and you're working with a start