Accessibility in Web Development | #2 Martijn Fleurkens

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Video version of the podcast is available on Youtube.

Summary

In this episode, Tim Damen and Martijn Fleurkens discuss the critical importance of accessibility in web development. They explore personal motivations for advocating for accessibility, the role of education, and the impact of legislation on accessibility practices. The conversation emphasizes the need for a mindset shift within organizations, continuous improvement, and the integration of accessibility into the development process. They also highlight the significance of user testing with diverse groups and the business case for making digital products accessible. The episode concludes with key takeaways and strategies for organizations to enhance their accessibility efforts.

"We can make things so much easier." - Martijn Fleurkens

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About Martijn Fleurkens

Martijn is a passionate accessibility advocate committed to creating inclusive digital experiences for everyone. As Accessibility Lead and Senior Front-End Engineer at ABN AMRO, he ensures that digital products are not only functional but also universally accessible.

Beyond his work at ABN AMRO, Martijn is the co-founder of Distilld, a whisky app.

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Transcript

TD: Hello, and welcome at focustrap, an accessibility and web development podcast. My name is Tim Damen, and today I'm joined by Martijn Fleurkens, Frontend Developer and Accessibility Lead at the ABN AMRO and co-founder of Distilld. Welcome Martijn.

MF: Yes, thank you, Tim. Really excited to be here, discuss accessibility, maybe have some good debates. So yeah, let's start.

TD: Thanks again for joining us in the studio. I'm always happy if someone joins the studio then we have a nice conversation in real life instead of online. What does accessibility mean to you?

MF: All of these services that we're now digitizing, they're becoming essential. You want to do something for the government needs to do something for your municipality. All of these important parts are now primarily digital, which brings an amazing opportunity. We can make things so much easier, but that doesn't mean we have to think about everyone and make sure it's accessible by everyone.

TD: No, I fully agree. I was thinking also, so I've been invited to speak somewhere in Australia upcoming month. I was thinking, I will not go to Australia, unfortunately, but I will do it online. But this course online streaming and live talking wasn't available a while back and due to the internet, it's possible to speak all the way somewhere in Australia, which I think is one of the most important, well, one of the most nicest things about the internet, which makes it possible to connect people, share your information, share something that you would like to say and Yeah, and shared with a larger audience.

TD: So is this also the reason that you started to work more on accessibility to advocate more for it?

MF: Yeah, I think originally it started more from technical frustration, actually. Um, as a developer, uh, I really care about, um, yeah, making sure we develop in the best way, but also, um, yeah, the easiest way, let's say. And there were just, um, where, yeah, what I saw in companies, uh, a lot of frustrations for me where we were using weird things, um, which made the web inaccessible. for people with disabilities, but also just for everyone using the internet. The internet by default is very accessible. Then we have to use it how it's designed and the tools that we get from the internet as developers.

MF: And there, I was really technically frustrated. getting into that and deep diving into it. I also saw when we don't do that, how big of an impact it has to accessibility and where we ignore a whole group of people. when we don't think about it. And that's really where, for me, it fueled and became so important to talk about accessibility, to work on accessibility, and to make sure we improve it on the internet.

TD: Yeah, now, indeed.

MF: Oh, is that for you, Tim?

TD: Yeah. Yeah, similar. Personally, for me, I've struggled with disability myself as well, so I'm dyslectic. I've discovered it at a very young age, for me primary school already. But I did always get a lot of help from people surrounding me with also assistive technology, helping me to read and helping me with spelling and grammar and stuff like that. I think this feeling of help that I did get at the time and the people that were ready to help and just stuck with me deep down and this came into It came up in me again when I came into close contact with the topic accessibility digitally.

TD: I've been a front end developer for more than 10 years now, but since the last three years, I would say I've started focusing more on accessibility. Until now, and personally now I believe that creating digital products, services online, accessible on the web. Developing such a service, it's not finished when a service is not accessible, I believe. Of course, we all still make mistakes. I would not say that everything I create is perfectly accessible. We are still humans, but trying your best and making the effort, I think, will get you a long way already. And that's my aim personally.

TD: So of course, you can't make it accessible for everyone, but focusing on it and trying to do the best is Yes, something that I really make sure I do nowadays and also the people surrounding me and my team within my organization even try to Reach out to people, share knowledge, help them with certain topics which they might have not so much experience with. These are the steps that I now take, which I think they are really important.

MF: Yeah, I think that it already makes a huge impact when you take accessibility into account and it really doesn't have to be perfect. Especially when you start, it's such a big topic and that's often also what people forget. It's not a simple checklist. It's a huge topic, but it starts with having the right mindset. I think when that's already there as a person or within an organization, that's a huge start. Yeah, it makes me also think a few weeks back I saw this satirical sketch and it was about this village about physically impaired people. And I think it's currently what's happening or what is happening in our society.

MF: And in that satirical sketch, those physically impaired people are all wheelchair users. So of course they're going to build it to their standards. So think about, you don't need to have such high doors. Feelings don't have to be very high. You don't even need chairs. And then after a few months, the abled people, a few of them come and they're like, they also want to live in the village. Um, but yeah, they started getting bruises on their heads because the ceilings are so low. And then, um, yeah, doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, they all come together because they're like, yeah, well, what's it like, uh, you know, these people have bruises, like that's a problem.

MF: So what are we going to do? Okay, we're going to get them braces so they, when they're banned, we can help them with that. We're going to create charities for these people. Maybe even we have to found special homes for them to live in with higher ceilings. And then one day it dawns on the, let's say abled people that there's actually nothing wrong with them. You know, they, uh, why are they talking with psychiatrists? Why are they, uh, talking about social workers? Um, because it's the society that includes them. And I think that's really where, um, like I've, yeah, I found it really important when I, when you saw that sketch, uh, looking back, this is where we are with society, what we are doing wrong.

TD: Yeah, yeah, indeed. This is, I think, the perfect vice versa view that is really nice way to think about accessibility, right? I think great, great sketch. And I didn't see it myself, so please share. Maybe you can also share it for people listening in the show notes. No, but I think really, really nice way of looking at it. How do you think we should approach this? Of course, this sketch shines a light on the way also we are doing it right now. What are some things you think we could do better, maybe?

MF: Yeah, I think it's something we talked about earlier is having the right mindset. And to have the right mindset, you first also need to know of accessibility. And I think that's the first thing that goes wrong. I'm often talking about the two developers because there's no good developer. I heard you say this before that wants to create a bad user experience or especially bad accessibility. But it's like having the knowledge or even knowing that accessibility is a topic. So I think this is partly they're because organizations don't talk about it, but also at least years back in education for developers, there wasn't any attention to it.

MF: And that's, I think where, yeah, when you don't know it, you don't get educated about it. Yeah, you're gonna develop it. You're gonna make sure it functionally works for you. But that's where you stop. So if we talk about it more in education, we educate developers, designers, everyone in our industry. As businesses, we of course have now the EU law that's coming up, which talks says that the EU law in 2025 and June 2025 organizations have to be accessible. These things also help organizations to become accessible or think more about it.

TD: That's a good outlook for 2025, I think. It's something that's on the horizon right now, which is, I think, a very nice development and a good step forward in terms of legislation surrounding accessibility. I think lots of companies, organizations are making moves right now, maybe a little bit of stress even, but I think the direction is good. And as long as you try to do things a little bit better every day, you will eventually get there. One thing that I noticed Also around me is that, okay, we shouldn't see this accessibility. And now also with the EA, there's a lot of focus on accessibility I see.

TD: I hopefully it's not seen as this one time, one off project and just to now fix accessibility and then it stays fixed forever. I hope companies come to the realization that this is not the best strategy, but you of course, you need to get your accessibility to a higher level, but then also maintaining it and even staying up to date with the latest changes should be something that you consistently try to stay on a certain level and even a little bit above. Yeah, indeed.

MF: You can't drive a team in a company and say, hey, fix this for us. And then, indeed, maybe they're like in June when this last coming into place, yeah, we're accessible. checkpoints and now we can continue how we always have done it. And that's, I agree, something I'm afraid of that can happen. Cause it's important that, yeah, when you start thinking of something, building something new, adding something, immediately you take accessibility into account. So I hope that after this law is coming into play, that there's also going to be regulations where actually regulators are going to check it, are going to give fines.

MF: Of course, fines are never nice. It does ensure that it isn't a one-time thing where companies are now maybe stressed and doing quick fixes and then not looking back anymore.

TD: Yeah. Hopefully. I think a good development will be, and I think we will get there eventually, is comparing it to security, for example. We work in a banking industry, so security is almost the topmost priority in everything we do, of course. We don't want to get hacked. I think also the latest developments here in the Netherlands, we see it with the University of Eindhoven few days offline now due to hackers. I think, of course, security is very important in today's world. But it would be nice if security is currently on a high level. It would be nice if it can be leveled or viewed the same way as accessibility as well.

TD: I think that's the direction that's set out right now. And if we stay advocating for it, we will eventually get there, hopefully. Also, meaning with quality checks and processes that we have currently within the organization as well. Processes surrounding making sure teams do not push security vulnerabilities into production. We should have the same, I think, tools available, the same flows available for accessibility as well. I think that's a good goal to pursue because in the end, I'm not a security expert. I don't think you are too. A lot of my fellow close colleagues are also not security experts, but there are still checks and processes in place to make sure we do not push vulnerabilities to production.

TD: And the same processes and the same checks need to be in place for security as well, because we can't now with the new EU law, we are not compliant when our products are not accessible. That's the way it is from this year on. All right, then we need to have the same accessibility security rules in place. I think we will get there, but staying advocating for it and staying updating about this is important.

MF: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. If you are a developer, you cannot know everything and it's of course becoming more complicated. We have security, accessibility is another point. So first thing is the mindset and then in a company you should be same as security, a team who is specialized on it or at least within your team maybe a specialized person that can do the checks, that's automated tools that can do the checks. And then when these teams find issues and also tooling finds issues, this is brought to the teams, so teams can solve it.

MF: And then they, of course, if it's hard to solve, there's also a team to help. Yeah, when you compare this, I think a very similar implementation can be done and yeah, we can make big progress.

TD: Yeah, for sure. Talking about 2025, we're still only just in 2025. January right now, what are some of your personal goals or organization wide goals for accessibility this year?

MF: Yeah, I think for me, of course, an important topic is that the Accessibility Act. That's making sure that before June 2025, the products I work on are accessible. Above that, I want to make sure that what we talked about earlier is we advocate for not it being a one-time thing and not being one-time solution, but it really being integrated into the organization. That means there are being processes in place. There is education, recurring education within the company about accessibility. You have newcomers coming in, teams changing. So you need to make sure that accessibility is always high or at least on people's minds, they have a certain knowledge about it.

MF: And I think also we already see in the universities, a big trend where accessibility is becoming more important. But for me also a big goal this year is that to make sure we push this further in universities, we talk more about accessibility to really ask for it.

TD: Yeah, I think these are all very nice goals and if we I think we started somewhere, you can see that read up about this, the maturity level or signing accessibility. Of course, we were now at, I think the level, most organizations are level one, level two maybe. At least, of course, shouldn't decline, hopefully steadily going up, going into the future, of course, with these processes, with these automatic checks, training, knowledge sharing, getting the knowledge there, mentioning the importance of accessibility for developing our services.

MF: Yeah, exactly. Is that for you, any maybe other things or similar things you have as goals for this year?

TD: Yeah, so sharing content, spreading the knowledge, also crossing the borders of the organization I work for, also more out in the open to fellow other front-end developers, designers within my network, but also, of course, Beyond my network, yeah, so sharing content via this podcast, for example, hopefully doing some talks as well. But yeah, also the same issue, making sure that the maternity level goes up and that we stay sharp on accessibility. I think it's a nice goal. We have some traction now. I think keeping the traction there is really nice. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Yeah.

TD: And talking about the processes, I think it's interesting for organizations to know a little bit about some good strategies surrounding accessibility. When you get into the topic, might be a bit daunting. What do we need to do? Legislation coming up, WCAG is there, a lot of different criteria we need to resolve. A bit of designing, a bit of engineering, maybe some copywriting as well. A lot of different roles within the organization might need some changing in their workflow. But what do you think are some good strategies that organizations can take? Um... example, new into accessibility, what are some of the first things that you need to do?

MF: Yeah, like you said, it's a lot. Especially if you did not think about it before, or minimally, then it's a huge topic and it can be very daunting to start with. To start with it is really the first thing. And there, it's important that you get support within your organization and make sure the support is there organization-wide. It's not up to one person to solve. Make sure what's important is that you convince higher management to make sure that there are resources, time to spend and work on accessibility. That's really the first pillar for the organization to start with their accessibility steps.

MF: Then once you got support, you can start thinking about making sure everyone has at least some knowledge and making sure there's trainings happening. You also create the awareness to only the upper management with everyone in the organization. And that the content writers, the designers, the developers, the testers all know what to do and how to work on accessibility. And then once you have that going on, you can really start identifying issues. Maybe if you have a team or a few specialized persons, you could do an audit or per team you could audit to see what gap is there, what have we been doing in the past years, what have we been building, and what are the accessibility issues in that product that we currently have live.

MF: Once you have identified that, you can start looking into solving them. And then it's more of going into a long-term process and looking into automation and processes. But it's really about support, training, identifying the issues and then you start solving them.

TD: You also mentioned getting external help, of course. When you start out, it's all new and maybe a bit daunting. Of course, starting also with some external help might be a really good option. Getting some experts surrounding accessibility in and start setting some goals. Start focusing on improving accessibility overall. And you will very quickly also see once you get some results that also the product and the user satisfaction will also increase because an accessible product is most of the time a more understandable product as well. I think this is not highlighted enough yet, I have to say.

TD: Making something accessible is not only focusing on people with disabilities, which is of course really important, but accessibility is for everyone. Making a product more accessible is making it better, is making it more understandable, is reducing your calls to your customer service, is creating more revenue even for you. There are lots of studies out there now which show, all right, e-commerce websites lose a lot of revenue by being not accessible. Most of the times you can't even check out If you use only keyboard navigation, you will really get focus trapped. That's why we picked the name of the podcast, of course, the focus trap.

TD: Sometimes good, sometimes not. Of course, you want to get focus trapped in the model, but you don't want to get focus trapped in a select box, of course which happens sometimes, which makes it impossible, very hard for people using keyboard accessibility to check out the big order in the e-commerce websites.

MF: Yeah, I think what often is not realized that there's such a huge amount of people struggling or having a disability, which means struggling with the website when accessibility isn't taken into account. Yeah, then it makes, those series make a lot of sense that you are losing profits and money. Cause yeah, I would also, I will go to another website if I can't check out or if it's getting too difficult. Cause there's probably more options out there. And that's indeed taking into account only the disabilities. I think what's really important. Also what's often forgotten is what you said.

MF: and taking into account accessibility, you also improve the usability for everyone. Maybe as a developer you are developing for your computer, for your laptop, and it works everything perfectly. But then on your touch screen, when it's only one click movements, all of a sudden there are problems. Things are stuck or the button is too small. So when you are in a rush or doing something, it's really too hard and you're struggling. And that's also where, if you're talking about the revenue, I think accessibility can really increase your revenue.

TD: Yeah, definitely. And nice thing about being more accessible, having higher customer satisfaction, I think good to highlight. Looking into the future and looking into the future of digital accessibility, do you see some emerging trends right now?

MF: Yeah, I think one of the trends which has a positive and a negative side to it is automation. Of course, this is something we see growing in accessibility for a long time. It wasn't there until not very good. And I think this is really a trend where now that accessibility is becoming a bigger topic for a lot of companies. You also see more automated tools, better automated tools being out there. and they can help us track all of the issues. And yeah, that is, I think, something that on the positive side, yeah, really will help on this, especially when you start out, you can immediately see, okay, this is items where accessibility is going wrong.

MF: These are issues we need to solve. And on the negative side, I think sometimes the people think, okay, I just have to check off these items that the tool found and then were accessible, which is definitely not the case. I think the studies are out there, which has the automated tools currently. someone to 20 to 30% finding the issues. Of course, ranges per tool and when you're getting more advanced or not in the type of product you're making. But I think that's something good to make sure you're aware of and to take into account.

TD: Automation can't fix all the accessibility vulnerabilities, unfortunately. Also a good thing, of course, these two D2s can really help you getting up to speed and also showing you earlier in your development process, in your development cycle, pointing you to some problems that might arise. Also then directly pointing you to the right knowledge and description of the problem, which I think is also very nice because it has some kind of learning mechanism and getting the level of accessibility knowledge higher within your engineering teams is always a good thing because you can prevent mistakes from happening in the future.

TD: Also automation is also I think a positive development. How important do you think it is to also test with the end user and also in this group and of course people with disabilities to test with?

MF: Yeah, super important. Yeah, and that's of course the other thing. We didn't talk about yet and often, yeah, this accessibility is seen as a checklist and of course the automated tools within there, it is a checklist. And then we have, what often we use is the WCAG criteria, which is a really nice standard for us to work on regarding accessibility. It is what the EU law uses to make sure that they can check if companies are accessible. In the end, we're making all of these changes for users, which means that we also need to test it from a user experience.

MF: And that means a wide variety of users So that means also testing with users that have disabilities where we're making these changes to see are there still struggle points, are there things that can be made smoother. create a better user experience. So it's very important that it's being tested.

TD: Yeah. No, indeed. And also adding to this group of testers and people with disabilities is always good.

MF: Maybe to also give them some examples. In theory, when you have a button and it says go to website A. And then sometimes you see that there's also screen reader text, but then it's like, click on this button to go to website A to find there. Which is like, of course, one side, it's great that you know there was a thought of thinking about the user. It is, according to the criteria, accessible. But for screen reader users, that is way too much text. It becomes a very exhaustive process to listen to everything. And by testing it, you would know, okay, it is just enough to not have that screen reader text there and make it the same text as the button.

TD: I agree. Then we also get into the realm of preferences, right? Yes. Some users have other preferences than other users. Some might like the extra information, but some might not. And including these people into your testing process will get you to the best answer, I believe. can be a bit daunting at first because of course, setting up these testing arrangements with your end user working for a big organization I think can be a little hard, but not entirely impossible. Focusing on this is I think really important. There should be some team, someone making sure that these things are handled.

TD: Fortunately, we do that at the Abbe Namro apparently, I know, which is always nice and I always read the reports that follow out of these sessions and try to integrate them into what we do every day.

MF: Yeah, these insights are very useful. You can't yourself make a decision what every user likes and what for them it makes logical sense. So it's really important you test with every user. At least make sure every user that is using your application or your product is represented. So you test with a different scala of users.

TD: Yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed. What are some takeaways that you want to share with the listeners?

MF: Some takeaways, yes. I think if you're starting out with accessibility, it's what we already talked about to make sure to bring recognition within your organization. Think also when you think about working with accessibility, think about the different disabilities there are. Sometimes there's the idea that there's only one. disability, virtually just talking maybe about screen reader users and users that cannot see. But we also are talking about dyslexia. We are talking about a lot of topics. So it's important to not forget that there's a lot of perspectives to take into account. The web is accessible by default.

MF: I think that's a good key takeaway. If you use it as it was designed, you are already really far and going really well, so you don't... Sometimes I get this answer from developers who started accessibility and it's like, yeah, we have to program so much more. We have to add area everywhere and all of these helper informations. And then we go through it, everything together. And yeah, a lot of this is not necessary because we forget that the web is by default accessible. So I think that is also a key takeaway. I really want to.

TD: Semantic HTML guys. Semantic HTML. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That will get you. get you already a head start. I think great takeaways from this session. I'm going to thank you for joining and to you also, where can people find you online? How can they reach you?

MF: Yeah, I think the best to find me on LinkedIn, Martin Fleurkens, and then reach out, send a message, connect. Yeah, that's a good thing.

TD: All right. Thank you so much for joining. Thanks for listening everyone, hope you enjoyed this episode together with Martijn Fleurkens. If you like what we are doing, you want to support us, please. rate, subscribe, like, all the different varieties of showing support. Also sharing some comments, always nice. We are going to take them into account and also try to improve, of course, quality, what we are trying to do. Always nice to get some feedback. All right. Thank you so much. And I hope this gets you one another time as well.

MF: Yeah. Thank you, Tim. It was really, really nice conversation.

Takeaways

• Accessibility is essential for digital services.
• Personal experiences can drive advocacy for accessibility.
• Education plays a crucial role in promoting accessibility.
• A mindset shift is necessary for continuous improvement in accessibility.
• Societal perspectives on accessibility are important to consider.
• Organizations need to integrate accessibility into their processes.
• Legislation will impact accessibility efforts significantly.
• Ongoing efforts are required to maintain accessibility standards.
• Comparing accessibility to security can help prioritize it.
• Setting clear goals for accessibility is vital for organizations.