E081 – Interview with Damien Senger – Part 2
Damien tells us "Later does not exist in our industry. Don't push something without accessibility now. Because you will NOT go back and fix it later" Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the A11y Rules Podcast. This is episode 81. I'm Nic Steenhout, and I talked with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you're interested in accessibility, hey, this show's for you. To get today's show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Nic: Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS, and video at twilio.com. Nic: In this episode, I'm continuing my conversation with Damien Senger. Last show was actually quite good. We spoke about different things, including how Damien learned about having ADHD and how that influenced his work in accessibility and how he managed to build an accessibility culture within his organization. Damien, welcome back. Damien: Thanks for having me again. Nic: We finished last week talking about your greatest achievement. Let's look at what's your greatest frustration in terms of web accessibility? Damien: I don't know if I can choose one, but I have two. The first one is, I think ... it's also going better and better every day. It's the lack of care of people around accessibility. I'm saying this because I worked with a lot of different developers, and I don't think developers are doing an awful job, but I just have the feeling that more and more in companies, there is a lot of focus on choosing the right framework to find a lot of developers, but not choosing the right framework to help the consumers. One of my frustrations into this is the fact that even if you can convince people that accessibility is important, I sometimes struggle to push accessibility as a requirement. For example, applications offer the choice of a specific framework or this kind of stuff. So this one will be the first. Damien: The second one is ... relating to this one, so that's why for me they are going together. Even if this one is really going better, it's the lack of care in a lot of events. So this one for me is going better because more and more conferences are trying to select accessibility as a topic or to look for speakers speaking about accessibility, but it's a bit like inclusivity. It was a known topic for a lot of time, and in some events, there is still like a lot of resistance, because like it's only for eight persons. Damien: I still heard, I think in the last month in a discussion with a developer, this sentence that I found awful all the time, which is, "Why just spending so many time into something made only for five people?" No, no, please no. So that's the frustrating part, there are still a lack of care most of the time in the community, development community as a whole. Even if you manage to push accessibility as a product decision, it's really hard to push the fact that accessibility is not only what you produce, but also what you work with. And it's not only for the consumer, but also for people within the organization. Nic: That is something that I see change, but sometimes I feel like not fast enough. I think I do share that frustration, that not just developers, but all stakeholders, from designers to site owners to even QA testers that, "Why are we spending this much effort for just a handful of people?" It always boggles me. Nic: Then I start giving hard statistics to people. The recent change in the U.S. census, that it's not 1 in 5 person in the U.S. that has a disability anymore, it's 1 in 4. Nearly 25% of people in the U.S. have a disability. I think that number is probably re