lunchBOX

5. What’s been your biggest success in relation to accessibility?

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MD: I’m not sure I’ve felt like I’ve achieved a real success yet, but a few years ago I reached out to our Student Disability and Inclusion team to share some work I had been doing and to learn more about their challenges. We’ve worked together on a few projects since and have fairly regular meetings to keep each other informed of what’s going on in our respective areas and look for opportunities to meet our ambitions. 

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Another small success is that after a few years of probably sounding like a broken record in my attempts to promote digital accessibility within the IT department, I now get occasional messages from colleagues asking questions, which is a nice indication that something is working, however slowly. 

There are others at Southampton who have achieved far more in the world of accessibility.

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6. What is the most enjoyable part of your job?

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MD: Experiencing those moments when something “clicks”, and you’ve finally identified a solution or worked out the best approach to implement. I’ve been working in technology for long enough to know that within a few weeks I’ll learn a better and more effective way of doing it. But… this is how we grow and develop. The more I get into accessibility - the more I realise how little I know and how much longer it’s going to take for me to be able to make a difference.

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7. How have you or your organization made a difference?

MD: There is some excellent work going on at the University of Southampton. The Accessibility team in the Electronics and Computer Science department are world famous and have done lots of important research and produced some really useful tools over the years such as the ATbar. The teaching accessibility team are doing some really important work looking at how digital accessibility is taught. My colleague Sarah Horton in that team has written some wonderful articles that really challenge our perceptions of what it means to be a professional in the area of software development.

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8. If you could click your heels and make one thing easier for yourself at work, what would it be?

MD: As others have said in interviews, making accessibility an institutional or departmental priority would help. It won’t make “doing accessibility” easier, but it will mean instead of spending our energy on trying to make the case, we turn our attention fully to the “doing” part. 

If you compare it to the change and release process, the Change Manager isn’t visiting teams persuading them of the value of writing a Request for Change (RFC) and getting it approved. It’s a departmental process that is expected. If you were to make a change to a live system without an RFC you will be in trouble! From an IT perspective this is how I see where accessibility should be. Testing for accessibility and writing accessibility statements should be the baseline minimum. There’s lots more we should do, but getting the basics right would be a good start. 

9. What is the most exciting development you’ve seen this year in the accessibility sector?​

MD: From a technical point of view, I think how Microsoft have made accessibility controls available in the System Tray is a very simple change that should really help to raise the profile of these tools with all users, show their benefits, and help move forward the conversation about accessibility.

From a non-technical point of view, the axe-con conference last year was really incredible, around 30 really high quality accessibility presentations that really inspired me and took my knowledge to a new level.  

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10. Where do you see accessibility in 10 years? Any new developments you are keeping a close eye on?

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MD: This is a really difficult question. Thinking about the new developments over the past year or so, the way Deque has been adding new features to their axe browser extension such as guided testing shows the potential for making the process of accessibility testing more widely available. It’s something I expect will continue. The process of “commercial grade” accessibility testing is still a bit of a secret that I would like to see opened up more. 

For content creators I hope to see creation tools such as Office moving away from the accessibility checking tool and instead to only giving the options to create content in an accessible way. For example, if you make a shape in PowerPoint that is filled with a colour, the text colours that can be chosen from the palette should only include colours with sufficient contrast. Likewise, I hope that, by 2032, Design Ideas has stopped making suggestions which would not meet accessibility guidelines. 

In terms of assistive technologies, I hope that we’ve found better ways to ensure eye tracking technologies can work well with online systems. I’m aware at the moment there’s a challenge for those who use eye tracking software for interface elements to be large enough to select without having to increase browser zoom to 300%+ where too little information is now on-screen to make for a pleasant user-experience. 

Now, to use a screen reader effectively it seems to me you need to have some knowledge of things like headings, landmarks, page regions and so on to use a complex site effectively. Why should screen reader users have to learn about some of these “technical” things just to use a website? I hope that assistive technology will become easier to use.

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