Unlocking Digital Accessibility: A Conversation with Anastasiia Batarei

Transcript of the podcast

Video version of the podcast is available on YouTube.

Summary

In this conversation, Tim Damen and Anastasiia Batarei discuss the importance of digital accessibility, its impact on user experience, and the importance of advocating for inclusive design. Anastasiia shares her personal journey into accessibility advocacy, highlights her achievements, and discusses the challenges faced in implementing accessibility practices. They explore the role of legislation, trends for 2025, and the importance of certification in the field. The conversation emphasizes the need for continuous education, monitoring, and improvement in accessibility to create a more inclusive digital environment.

"Accessible websites are more enjoyable for users." - Anastasiia Batarei

Chapters

About Anastasiia Batarei

Anastasiia is an Accessibility Engineer and Consultant originally from Ukraine, now based in the Netherlands. Her expertise lies in frontend development with a focus on UI/UX and Accessibility. Anastasiia is passionate about making the digital world more inclusive and accessible for everyone.

Follow her on:

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"Technology should be accessible to everyone." - Anastasiia Batarei

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Transcript

TD: Hello and welcome at Focus Trap. We are today joined by Anastasiia Batarei, Accessibility Engineer and Consultant. So happy that you can join us in the studio. Welcome.

AB: Hi, Tim. Thank you so much for having me.

TD: All right. We have a lot of topics to discuss, so let's get right into it. And I want to start with a question to you. What does digital accessibility mean to you?

AB: Well, for me, digital accessibility is about creating digital experiences that are open and usable for everyone, regardless of their abilities or conditions or circumstances. It's about removing barriers and making sure that everyone is included. And I also see accessibility as a great sign of design and engineering, because when something is truly accessible, it shows thoughtfulness and attention to detail. And like, it doesn't matter whether it's in digital world or in physical one. And it's just about creating something that works for everyone, which I think is the ultimate goal of any design.

TD: Yeah, I think so too. And of course, in two days, day and age, we are living more and more online, right?

AB: Yeah.

TD: All the services that we want to connect to our online, for example, banking services. I work in the banking sector, so banking services are more and more online available. But yeah, making an appointment at the local municipality, yeah, you name it. Everything is online, so it's really important that everyone can access and is able to use the online services. I think that's indeed. And is that also part of the reason why you dedicate so much time on advocating for accessibility, but also working to improve it?

AB: Yeah, I guess so because, I mean, Becoming an advocate wasn't something that I planned from the start of my career because I started as a regular front-end developer and I was focusing more on user-oriented development. I was specializing mostly in HTML and CSS. But, you know, at that time I noticed something strange. I saw so many divs pretended to be interactive elements. And as an A student and a bit of perfectionist, I mean, that was bothering me and I was asking myself, why doesn't anyone care about valid HTML markup? Why we see all this on the web?

AB: And then I discovered accessibility as a practice in front-end development and Actually, that felt like a missing piece of the puzzle. It gave me a reason to create user interfaces in the proper way so that they are open to everyone.

TD: Good point indeed. When in your career did you start to notice what most of us or people around me or company I work for is creating is most of the time is not accessible?

AB: When did I start noticing this? Well, I started noticing this maybe partially when I was interacting myself with the interfaces, because sometimes, you know, the keyboard escape closing model didn't work, or submitting a form with enter key didn't work, and it was kind of strange for me. But I think some like podcasts online opened for me this topic of accessibility. And I just start diving into it. It was around, it was before the pandemic, around like some 2020. So yeah, that time I discovered this field for myself.

TD: All right. Yeah. I think deep down as front end developer, you know about accessibility and you know that you should try to learn more about it, maybe do more about accessibility, but some just choose to ignore this fact and some, I guess, do a little bit more research. And then also, yeah, you could turn into an accessibility engineer or advocate that way. But my belief is that every front-end developer knows about accessibility, but maybe doesn't care to improve it or read up onto it. Yeah, which I think is, yeah, sometimes understandable, but if you know the impact that you can have on other people's lives by creating accessible features, accessible products, I think you should be part of your working flow by default.

AB: I agree with you. And I also know I think about even myself in the future. All the interfaces will be accessible for me when my vision gets worse or when I... feel some water skills impairments and even like situation disabilities. Sometimes I'm not able to listen to voice message on the messenger, you know, and I need transcript. And basically these situations makes me think and understand that accessibility is for everyone, not just for people with permanent disabilities.

TD: Yeah. Indeed, that's a good point because more often than not, I get confronted by someone telling me, oh yeah, this is just a very small group of people. We have to do a lot of work for now, but I always tell them, yeah, for four hours, really important. But if you improve your accessibility, your app would be perceived by a lot of people way better your customer satisfaction will increase. Your app will just be more understandable if you adhere to all of these success criteria of WCAG. I think if you run a really big company, for example, calls to customer service might go down if you have a really understandable application.

TD: So there are also so many other benefits in making and building accessible web applications and applications overall, I would say.

AB: Yeah, I agree with you because accessible websites and applications, they are more simple in cognitive way and just like, I guess they are more enjoyable. I mean, when it's done properly with all the attention to detail and like design as well.

TD: Yeah.

AB: I mean, this is just like the websites and application that users will enjoy.

TD: For sure. Yeah. All right. We just entered 2025. Looking back to 2024, what are some of your, yeah, you can call it maybe achievements in the like personal achievements, but also might be organizational achievements surrounding accessibility.

AB: Well, first of all, I have to admit that I didn't take proper time to reflect on this at the end of this year. So thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to make it publicly, Tim. Well, when I think about 2024, I mean the major part I spent working at Organization StudyTube, where I contributed to accessibility improvements so much. For example, I hosted the Global Accessibility Awareness Day presentation for the very first time at the company, and it was a nice opportunity to raise awareness. just to spark some conversation about accessibility. Because of European Accessibility Act coming, the organization is also on its way to the compliance.

AB: If I think about some personal achievements, well, one of the biggest for me was actually give my very first public talk, and it happened at the Accessibility Club Summit here in Amsterdam. And I am so grateful to the organizers for this opportunity for me. It was like my tribute. And another big milestone for me is passing IAAP CPACC certification. I just received like the confirmation of certification in November. So yeah, I dedicated so much time for preparation and now I'm happy that I passed this.

TD: I can imagine, yeah. That's, I think, a really great achievement and we will talk about the certification in just a little bit. I think going into that is very interesting and the way you prepared and all of the stuff surrounding it. Speaking at your first Yven, how was the experience? Did you like it? How was your talk perceived?

AB: I always say that it was exciting and terrifying, but because this was just like the very first time for me, but the community at the Accessibility Club Summit was so great and welcoming. I really felt welcomed on the stage. got some positive feedbacks. I was talking about navigating accessibility journey in the organization, how you start advocating, how you find some allies and adopt accessibility practices in the process of web development and design.

TD: Right. That's actually a great topic. And what were some of your key messages

AB: My key message was actually to start with something small because you cannot be 100% accessible or compliant, just too overwhelming, but you just need to keep going because progress over perfection. Just start advocating, start bringing these discussions. to your, I don't know, daily meetings. Well, at the time maybe I was like the most annoying person in the room, but I must say that I guess it worked a bit because I did see some improvements like among my team on the front-end quality of the application. And I guess I had some like management on board on this.

AB: So yeah, starts with something small. any simple checks with extension in the browser, any small improvements on your day-to-day work in the pull request, this already makes a big difference.

TD: Yeah, I agree. I agree indeed. I think taking small steps is better than taking no steps at all. And if you take small steps consistently, you could get better over time as well. I think if I look Personally, within the organizations, I've worked for a big bank, a lot of different teams. And some have very high accessibility knowledge, some teams, some teams very little. So I think when the organization scales larger, becomes harder to align basically and to align also the accessibility level. Did you also see these kinds of problems? Yeah.

AB: And from, you know, from my experience, I tend to see like two groups of front-end developers, for example. I mean, because like I have the ground in front-end development. I'll talk about development. I see two groups, like for example, some of them, like I really interested in this topic and into learn more. from the beginning, but another one could just, you know, have some constraints from business because they just don't have enough time for those implementation or research in the practices. And I guess like this is a problem on organizational level when management just do not give enough time or just, you know, don't prioritize accessibility.

TD: Yeah, the reasoning or discussing about accessibility and saying, oh, we don't have enough time to work on or improve accessibility. Well, it irritates me a little bit, this conversation I have to say, because building a a feature and application for other people. I think it requires you to be, it requires the product that you're building is not complete when it's not accessible. That's my stance. So you can only complete the product when it's also accessible. It just should be part of your standard way of working to build something that's accessible. You, for example, wouldn't build something that's totally insecure and hackers can grab the customer data from within your application.

TD: You wouldn't release something like that. But why is it acceptable to push something to production which is not accessible?

AB: Yeah, this is a question I always ask myself because I also think that this is like a part of our job as front-end developers and designers because we are creating something for people and for all of the people. And, um, I always, you know, like I like to advocate about built-in front, um, built-in accessibility because, uh, like HTML provides so many features and you basically, I said, like, I like to say that with like 20% of effort, you just achieve like almost 80% of result. It's just built-in features using just web standards.

AB: Yep.

TD: Yep. They're really great and smart people who have come up with all of these different elements, different solutions, different web standards to be used. And if you just narrow it down to only using a diff or something simple, yeah, you're missing out on so much fun, the web and for HTML, CSS, JavaScript can bring to the table, right? It's a little bit sad as well, but let's look into 2025. Like I said, we just entered it. What are, do you notice some trends surrounding accessibility that you think might play a big role in this year?

AB: Well, one of the biggest trends I see it's raising adoption of accessibility for sure. I mean, probably this is because of European Accessibility Act coming, but I definitely noticed that organizations start adopting these practices. And well, sometimes for sure it could be an afterthought when you just try to make everything accessible. on the already built website application, but I also see more and more big organizations that try to include accessibility in the design process and research process and make it like a part of hiring process, like just to have more diverse colleagues.

TD: Yeah, that's, that's actually great that you mentioned it, because I noticed the same thing, actually. I notice in, I read job descriptions from time to time just to check what, what people are asking for. And now I just, I'm quite, quite shocked actually how many of the job, job titles are about, okay, you wake up 2.2 or. accessibility experience. Actually, more and more job descriptions will ask for this nowadays, which I think is a good point. That means companies are focusing on improving it and actually caring about, okay, we will hire someone new, also focus on accessibility.

AB: Yeah, that's so true. That's so true because I can say for sure I was looking for some change in my job like a couple of years ago and there was almost nothing about accessibility but just the end of last year there were so many job descriptions with the accessibility requirement and this is nice. I guess this is becoming a part of Like the industry, like for example, in the past, responsive or adaptive design was something like additional that you make clients pay for. But now it's like just like a part of the standard when you don't release anything that is not responsive while adaptive.

AB: This is why I think this ability is on kind of the same way right now. This is the trend.

TD: Yeah. I believe that's true. Yeah. Just like I said just before. To us now, it's crazy to think that it's just so acceptable to publish something that's not accessible, but I think looking into the future, this is becoming more and more not a norm anymore and building accessibility by default. will be the norm future. I think this is the trend I also see that, which is good. I think part of the reason is indeed the EU accessibility act, which is also good because yeah, we still live in a capitalistic society and focusing on making something accessible might not seem as the fastest way to make some money, right?

TD: Which in the end, a lot of companies are about making money. And I think building accessibly is perceived as something extra still and not a way to make more money. But now it's good that also legislation helps here. But also I think the change in mindset is, I hope this is also the case that the change in mindset is A lot of companies are also looking at the ethical sides of building accessibility. And for example, making their products available to everyone, not only because you can then comply with the rules, but also because it's the best thing to do.

AB: Yeah. I see this, you know, as a part of advocate job to show that built-in accessibility is just an excellent design and like all accessible products are just really amazing product.

TD: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Let's talk about the certification. Last year, now, you acquired the CPA CC certification. Tell me everything about the process. Why did you want to get the certification? How did you study and the exam itself? Yeah, I want to know everything.

AB: Okay, well, I guess for our listeners, I should mention that IAAP is the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, and this organization offers several certifications to validate knowledge and experience in the field of accessibility. I took the CPACC, which stands for Certified Professional Inaccessibility Core Competencies. This is a foundational certification, I would say. It focuses on, like, on the very basic concepts like accessibility, universal design. universal design and learning, some regulations, laws and standards and management strategies. So, and this certification has like the lowest requirements, I would say, because it only requires like one year of experience in accessibility field or some role changing that requires some accessibility skills.

AB: And I decided to take this certification because I was looking for some validation for my knowledge. And this is a nice thing to have in your resume because just to show organization and peers that you know the field and you're just skilled to do some accessibility work. Um, yeah. So, um, I was, uh, preparing, uh, very hard. Uh, but I mean, don't, uh, take my experience, like the, like some average experience because I'm a bit procrastinator and what. My preparation took almost eight months, but not because it's so long, but it's because like I had this accessibility summit preparation, like some work projects.

AB: I just, you know, I decided to take it like really slowly, but consistently. Yeah. And should I break it like maybe more?

TD: Yeah, no, I think the CPAC is I think the one that people go for the entry certificate of the certificates that they provide? Or is it

AB: Some people see this as an entry just because it requires only one year of experience. But I know some people that took, for example, what's certification, which stands for Web Accessibility Specialist. And that certification requires three years. But CPACC is more general because it's useful for designers, for management, for developers as well. So yeah, it's just pretty foundation.

TD: Yeah, yeah. I also looked at the bus certification. Yeah, and to me, it seems that that requires some more experience indeed. But yeah. So you said eight months of preparation, but you got it in the first time, right?

AB: But on the website, you know, they say that, I mean, if you dedicate like five or 10 hours weekly, you can just pass all the material in eight weeks. Eight weeks, yeah. Well, that's according to their site. I guess this also depends on the like person's learning,

TD: Yeah, maybe how much you know already. Okay. I'm actually, I want to sign up for the, for the next round of examinations. Uh, I think the, the start, start sign up is in four days. So, uh, um, how was your, uh, how did you, actually, I really want you to know these because signing up. for a spot, you sign up for a spot in the exam, right? And then the exam is, you did it online or on somewhere?

AB: I took an in-person exam. Basically, they recommend that you sign up for an exam date when you feel that you're almost ready because typically, they open the session and it's like in one month or something. And there are several options how you can take this exam. You can take it in person, go into some centers. You can take it online, but you need to consider all the technical stuff like stable internet connection, like that you're alone in the room and nothing disturbs you. And you also can have proctored host exam and or go to some, or for example, organize it for your...

AB: But I decided to take in-person exam because it just was easier for me. I went to Demon to the center and basically everything was set up there for me. We had like a quiet room with no distractions and so I can focus properly. Yeah.

TD: So first you did sign up for the exam and then you went to search for a location nearest to you where the exam was.

AB: Basically, you do this during the registration because they provide you your location and they provide you all the available points where you can take the exam.

TD: Let's indeed sign up for that stage already. All right. How was the exam? Was it a hard exam?

AB: Well, I must say maybe I was like overthinking this too much because I mean, you know, when you're preparing for such an important exam, you always think that you are not prepared, but basically it was like easier than I thought. I mean, the preparation itself was a bit hard for me because I already said that the CPACC is like more foundational thing and it focuses on like broad concepts. and I'm more like an engineer in mind and I feel more comfortable in like coding standards formulas or something practical. This is why like the whole material was quite difficult for me to perceive.

AB: But in the end, exam was more like easier than I expected because I mean I was focusing maybe too much on like deep knowledge or something but basically just check your broader understanding of everything and especially for example the legislation and laws theme. I mean I spent so much time trying to to learn all these laws and standards on different countries. But basically, I mean, some high perspective is more important there that you understand in a more general way.

TD: Okay, because what material did you use to study?

AB: Well, I took different approaches to learn the material. Basically, about the sources, I used two main sources. One was the DQ University course. It's a paid online course, but it's a pretty good course, I would say, because it breaks down all the needed knowledge into manageable small lessons. And the second source was the body of knowledge. This is a primary study material that is provided by IAAP and basically it's a document. I printed it. It's just like almost a book. But I mean, it's doable. It's not that big, but it has all the necessary information that will be asked during the exam.

AB: But also, I tried the spiral learning approach, so I tried to

TD: This sounds interesting, spiral learning.

AB: I mean, I tried to revise topics like from different sources in different time. For example, I started from models of disabilities in the beginning of my preparation in Deque course university and then I revised it in the body of knowledge just to repeat myself differently. Also, you know what helped me? We had a study group. I mean, I had some friends who decided to take the exam with me. We just organized some study group chat on Telegram, and we had some fun sessions to discuss everything, and we also had quiet study sessions, because it's For me, it was a bit difficult to stay consistent, but consistency is really important.

AB: So we just booked some time in our calendars and had a call, sit quietly and everyone was learning on their own. So basically, I mean, company makes this fun.

TD: How much time studying in total would you say it is? this certification requires average?

AB: Average? Well, I'd go with like IAAP that they recommend like eight weeks for this. I mean, if you have enough time to dedicate to this. In some like, I don't know, small commitment, just making, I don't know, one or two hours per week, maybe take long. But also it depends, as you said before, it depends on the level that you have already. I mean, if you're familiar with accessibility and you've been in the field quite long, I guess this is quite easy.

TD: Yeah, I would say I'm quite familiar on a technical side. But if talking about legislation, I know a little bit about it, but For example, about other countries, I don't really know much, I think. But you said this is not directly required, so that's good, I think. All right. It's actually quite interesting. Yeah. since I'm considering signing up. I know I asked a colleague of mine, he recently also passed the exam and he said that the DQ course was his only source for learning. He did it in a month. He studied for it in a month.

TD: I think I will go for that strategy as well. I think that I also had a look into the course that he took from Deque University. It looks already really, really extensive. Hopefully it will be enough. We will see. All right. We already touched the EU accessibility act a little bit. Of course, this is the year that the legislation will come into play. If I'm correct, on the end of June, the deadline passes. Yeah, 28.

AB: It's 160 something days already. It's coming closer and closer. I just feel it. Yeah.

TD: I think some companies are rushing. I have the feeling. doing the last work. From what I can see, actually the focus on accessibility is increasing, which is nice to see. It's already the effect of the EU Accessibility Act, which again is nice, but Yeah, I already touched it a little bit. I'm missing the more the ethical side. OK, we do it because we need to check the box right now. But actually caring about making something accessible is still on the background. In my perspective, how do you see this?

AB: Well, I see that European Accessibility Act is a significant step forward. And well, now the companies have to do, have to consider accessibility. I mean, this shouldn't be the only thing why they should, but I mean, at least the legislation is pushing them to do this. And I also have seen this trend that all the companies that my friends, for example, work at, they like, I are some audit consultants to check the baseline and what stage they are already and trying to implement something and to improve accessibility.

TD: Hiring some third party company to do auditing. What are some of the experiences of these organizations? You might say, is this a good strategy to go for or how do you see?

AB: I guess this depends on the maturity model of accessibility and the organization because, I mean, if the company is quite mature in this accessibility and has been doing this for a while, they may have already like inside team of accessibility experts that could help them. But for some organization that are just at the beginning of their journey, it's a bit overwhelming and like one of the, you know, challenges of the EAA is to understand all the requirements and what you should really consider. And this is why hiring audit experts could be a good thing to do.

AB: And especially because the digital accessibility specialists who typically do this audit thing, they are quite skilled in the VCAG requirements. And for some, VCAG is not an easy read thing. But yeah, you need to like go very like letter to letter this.

TD: Yeah. Yeah. What I'm asking also, because I see the same thing. So could you start about the maturity level already? Because hiring an auditing company to come in and, okay, tell you the baseline on your level of accessibility. I think this is done in the first stages of the maturity level. Eventually, you will need to get proper training for your engineers, designers, copywriters, well, basically everyone. But also you need to get processes into place and you need actually to change your development life cycle. You need to, in every step of the development life cycle, take accessibility into account.

TD: And actually this process leveling up in maturity level, I think is the next step for a lot of organizations to take. because now they are awake. They are like, oh, EAA, oh, we need to do something with this. And okay, okay, we need to get some knowledge. Let's get this auditing company come in and check for us. Well, you can do that once, you can do it twice. I think you will, if you stay doing this, your accessibility knowledge within the organization will stay a little bit low on the low end because you are supporting on this external company only to tell you what you need to do, basically what you need to fix.

TD: So my question is, and I would like to discuss also, how would you take it to the next level? How would you go on from like, Okay, we need to do something about accessibility. Let's get some audits in to get some little knowledge to like, okay, fully processed. Accessibility is taken into account on multiple levels. Well, basically increasing the maturity level. What do you think are some good strategies?

AB: Well, you already mentioned that starting with auditing to establish baseline is already the first step to do. And you already mentioned that educating your team is an important thing to do because your designers, developers, QAs, managers, content creators, they should be aware of accessibility. And then when you start implementing accessibility practices into every stage of your product release cycles. It's like a more mature thing to do. And what organizations need to understand that they should monitor accessibility, their websites and products, because it's not something that you just order and audit, do all the fixes, and this is like you're accessible forever.

AB: No, it's not like that. You should be monitoring this state. for your product and website, because if you release something accessible, you basically can uncheck all those VK criteria. And to monitor this in a correct way and to maintain this level of accessibility, I guess you need an inside team. engineers who are aware of accessibility best practices, I guess. Well, from my perspective, I think you need someone on the team who knows enough about accessibility and not only one person, you know, who is responsible for everything. I think you need just like people from different departments and advocate for this and work closely.

TD: I heard this in another podcast about accessibility. We don't need, we don't need a few accessibility experts. We are, we just need a lot of people to know a little bit about accessibility. I think personally we need both, but getting everyone to know a little bit about accessibility would do or just be aware about what you're doing a little bit, like be aware about that you are not creating products in an accessible way, things is already a great step forward. And about monitoring accessibility, how would you go about monitoring accessibility?

AB: Well, this is an interesting question that I tried to research, but I definitely think about some assessments that you should do from time to time. I mean, you could integrate something in automated tests, for example, just to be sure that accessibility checks are in your CI pipeline and you don't push any inaccessible code, for example. And you can also appropriate accessibility checks, manual testing in the regression phase, for example. I don't know how to do it on this. I mean, for sure, we talk, as advocates, we talk a lot about uh, including, uh, with disabilities into research or usability testing, uh, just to make sure that your product works, works for people in real life.

AB: Um, yeah, I guess like these are some strategies. Yep. Yeah. Indeed.

TD: I think getting it integrated into some pipeline or CICD strategy is really good. But yeah, so my question arises because currently also looking into ways of like monitoring accessibility as some strategies you can take there. And I think it's hard because automation can only go so far, right? Eventually, you will need to do manual testing, also testing with users themselves. But getting good monitoring strategy I think is really important. And focusing on that will gain you a little bit, but a little bit is good. It's good.

AB: But I guess we need to articulate this, that automation testing do not catch everything, just like around 30%, they say. So yeah, manual testing is important.

TD: Yeah, and it's also, what I discovered is that the moment you run these automated tests is also really important because, well, in some states, for example, of course, the open source OXFOR plugin is really popular. But the way and the moment you run XCore is also really important because the DOM changes constantly and on which point you run the tester might get you different results basically.

AB: That's for sure, especially that we are in the era of single page applications where state changes with any interaction.

TD: Yeah, indeed. I also wanted to talk about the web aim. the million research that they conduct every year and basically the state of accessibility every year. I'm sure maybe Brian, you can get that shared also. Because I'm actually quite keen into when I speak somewhere or to a little bit of a bigger crowds, most of the time, you know, accessibility or like front-end developers most of the time. I like to show this graph. Yeah, the one that says, all right. Yeah, if you can scroll a little bit down to, yeah, a little bit more, I think quite a bit.

TD: Actually, it's called the wake up conformance. Yeah, a little bit more. Yep. Yeah, this one. Yeah. This is quite consistently scoring high percentage of not non accessible home pages. So we are going down a little bit. I think the latest number is Yeah. It says 95.9% of the million homepages researched by my web aim are, well, conform the WCAG tool rules. What do you think is the reason that still this day is such a high percentage of home pages do not conform to the to the Baker success criteria.

AB: Well, I guess one of the main reason is maybe increasing page complexity because I mean, we are the user interfaces are evolving and we see more and more custom components, which are not really covered like in web standards. So this is why we need to look for some workaround to make accessible tap widget, for example. And sometimes when we just start patching all those widgets with ARIA attributes, that introduces some barriers. Maybe this is one of the reasons. And maybe like more and more websites are releasing with time. Yeah, but well, I guess. What do you think?

TD: I have some thoughts about this. When was it for you the first time that you heard about accessibility? It was 2020.

AB: 2020.

TD: And you had like a technical study?

AB: Yeah, I did some technical course for front-end developers.

TD: Yeah. Did you hear about accessibility while you were studying? No. I did my software engineering bachelor and I also did the previous study, also technical study. The first time I heard about accessibility was way later. I can't remember it being discussed during my time studying. So I think this is one of the reasons that it might be on the low end as well. One of the, well, there of course are a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is that back in my days, I know that Things are changing now. I have some contacts within the Amsterdam University, where they have a specific front end study.

TD: And I know that they spent a lot of time on accessibility there. So that's really good. But back in my days, it wasn't mentioned. So yeah, when you don't know about something, when you don't learn about something, when you get into a new topic that you I think this makes it all the harder to, because also when you're just starting out, you're happy when something works. You're already happy if something that you created works. And then you also need to care about making it accessible, which is worse for a lot of people the next step.

TD: I think this might be one of the reasons. What is your perspective on it?

AB: Yeah, I agree with you that, I mean, at my university times and when I was learning front-end development by myself, accessibility wasn't mentioned. And I think, I mean, you mentioned that you're happy when you're just starting out and you're happy that something works. And I mean, this is like kind of We still can mark up something in an accessible way and browser will still render it. And basically when you see this result in the browser and it works with the mouse, we think that everything is fine. Yeah, I guess like this is like the new ones that we have with browser implementations.

AB: Yeah, but I also have seen this, I mean, because now I live in Amsterdam and I attend meetups, I'm noticing that there are students also attending those meetups. And I guess this is a good sign that they learn an accessibility basics from the very beginning of front-end development.

TD: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So this is also what I see, which is really nice as well. Thanks for sharing, Brian. But I also, of course, how do you think we can make this number go down so that more homepages will be accessible?

AB: Well, actually I read this report in details when we were preparing for the podcast and I noticed that during the years that they are conducting this research, the accessibility issues are actually the same, because it's the same missing health attributes, the same form fields without labels.

TD: Color contrast. Color contrast. Yeah.

AB: Basically like the top five issues are the same, but if developers, designers would take time just to understand those issues, actually they're not that hard to fix. And if we focus on fixing those types of issues, we already make a big difference and change reports maybe next years. So.

TD: Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of low hanging fruits. Some problems, I think the majority of problems can be solved in like one or two lines max. One or two lines of code. This would make a lot of difference. So that's also why if someone's telling me, all right, just costs a lot of money to do these changes. No, it's just one line of code. You just need to know which line of code and what you need to change. to make it better. That's quite funny to me.

AB: It's actually about doing your job in the right way sometimes, because connecting an input field with a label with four attributes and ID is just like something that you learn in the basics.

TD: Yeah, indeed. All right. I think we are already talking for a long time. I would like to thank you so much for joining. Are there some things you would like to share, some after thoughts?

AB: Well, thank you very much for inviting me to this podcast. This was a really exciting experience for me and we discussed a lot of topics, touched everything, which I'm really glad. I'm really looking forward for this European Accessibility Act coming and more and more companies to adopt accessibility practice. And I hope that we're on our way to a better future for technology. And just like I want to mention that technology, this is such an important part of our lives nowadays. And if we include someone from using this technology, we are just not using its full potential.

AB: So this is why we should care about making our products, web applications, sites accessible and usable for all people.

TD: That's a really nice positive message at the end of the session. Thank you so much. How can people find you online? Where can they follow you?

AB: Well, they can find me on LinkedIn, AnastasiaBattery, or they can find me on Twitter, which is x.com now. On Twitter, I am HTML underscore diva underscore en. Yeah. And well, hopefully this year I'll launch my website because this has been on my to-do list for so long. But for now, just like the socials, LinkedIn and Twitter.

TD: Right. We will share them in the description as well. Yeah. Thanks everyone for listening. If you like what we do, please consider subscribing or liking or rating. or share the podcast. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time. And I hope to have you on another time as well, maybe in the near future. It was very nice talking to you. Thanks for joining again and hope to see you.

AB: Yeah, thank you very much for the chat. Bye.

Takeaways

• Digital accessibility is essential for creating inclusive experiences.
• Accessibility reflects thoughtfulness in design and engineering.
• Everyone should be able to access online services.
• Advocacy for accessibility can stem from personal experiences.
• Small steps can lead to significant improvements in accessibility.
• Legislation like the European Accessibility Act is driving change.
• Certification in accessibility validates knowledge and skills.
• Monitoring accessibility is crucial for ongoing compliance.
• Education on accessibility should start early in tech training.
• Accessibility is not just a checkbox; it's a fundamental requirement.