Julia Ferraioli talks about chronic pain and brain fog

Julia tells us that "it's so easy to kind of get caught up with the latest features or the latest like tricks that you learn about to make, you know, a shiny website. But you have to consider the usability of all of your users not just, you know, the folks like you or the folks that are super tech savvy" Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Transcript Nic Hi, I'm Nic Steenhout. And you're listening to the accessibility rules soundbite, a series of short podcasts where disabled people explain their impairment, and what barrier they encounter on the web. I need to thank Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode, Tenon provide accessibility as a service. They offer testing, training and tooling to help fix accessibility fast. Today, I'm talking with Julia Ferraioli. Hi, Julia, how are you? Julia I'm doing okay. How are you? Nic I'm doing good. I'm so happy to talk to you today. We exchange on the web and Slack and all over the place. But it's good to have an actual real live chat. Julia Yes, indeed. Nic Let me start by asking you what's your disability or impairment? Julia Yeah, so I have a few, I guess. One is I have kind of fluctuating vision problems. So on any given day, I'm not really sure what, what the quality of my eyesight is going to be like. And then the other is I have a condition that causes chronic pain. So I frequently have pain levels that cause some amount of confusion, or what they call brain fog, as well as kind of making the small muscle control a little bit difficult for me. Nic Okay Julia fine motor control. That's the actual word. Nic Fine motor control and brain fog around pain that that would be tricky. How does? How does the web cause barrier, barriers for you, when when you're dealing with pain and brain fog, and having difficulty with fine motor control? Julia Well, it tends to make my movements a little bit more sporadic. So a lot of the kind of modern websites have very finicky controls, right. So if I'm going to a drop down menu, and either I, my mouse stays put for too long, or it like gets to the edge of the drop down menu and that everything disappears. I will admit that it makes me quite short tempered. And definitely depletes my energy levels. As as that happening. So it can be pretty frustrating, especially as we trend towards more and more interactivity in our websites. It just has it has a side effect that people should be aware of. Nic Yeah. So you're dealing with brain fog already. And then the level of frustration caused by the interactions increase your cognitive load. So that's kind of like almost a snowball effect, isn't it? Julia Absolutely. It feeds this kind of vicious cycle, because as you're getting more frustrated, also frustration can amplify pain. So more pain, less fine motor control, more frustration, and rinse repeat. Nic Right? Yeah, that does not sound fun at all. Julia I don't particularly enjoy it, if you can prove that. Yeah. Nic Yeah, I believe it. If you had one message for designers or developers, what, what would it be? Julia I'd say be very intentional about the elements of interactivity that they introduce. It's so easy to kind of get caught up with the latest features or the latest like tricks that you learn about to make, you know, a shiny website. But you have to consider the usability of all of your users not just, you know, the folks like you or the folks that are super tech savvy, or the folks that you know, might use the standard sort of mouse/keyboard approach, but consider like the cognitive load as you mentioned, it's so important to, to take that into account when designing the interactive components of a site. Nic Awesome, Julia. Thank you. You've been great. And I'll see you around on the web. Julia Thanks for having me.