AXSChat Podcast with Charlie Triplett, Accessibility coach and author of TheBookOnAccessibility.

Charlie Triplett is an experienced accessibility coach and author of TheBookOnAccessibility. Based in the United States, Charlie has dedicated their career to helping individuals and organizations create more accessible digital experiences for people with disabilities.

With over a decade of experience in the tech industry, Charlie has become a leading voice in the accessibility community. Their expertise covers a wide range of areas, including web and mobile accessibility, assistive technology, and inclusive design.

Charlie's passion for accessibility began after experiencing firsthand the difficulties that people with disabilities face when accessing digital content. As a result, they decided to shift their focus to helping others create more inclusive and accessible digital experiences.

In addition to their work as an accessibility coach, Charlie is the author of TheBookOnAccessibility, a comprehensive guide to creating accessible digital content. The book covers everything from the basics of accessibility to advanced techniques for ensuring that digital content is accessible to people with a wide range of disabilities.

Charlie's work has been recognized by leading organizations in the tech industry, and they have been invited to speak at conferences and events around the world. Through their coaching, writing, and speaking engagements, Charlie has become a prominent figure in the accessibility community and a valuable resource for anyone looking to create more inclusive digital experiences.

Transcript

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This is a draft transcript produced live at the event and corrected for spelling and basic errors. It is not a commercial transcript and will need to be checked if you wish to publish it. AXSCHAT Charlie Triplett

NEIL: 1:49

Hello and welcome to Axschat. I am delighted that we are joined today by Charlie Triplett, who is an Accessibility Coach, at T Mobile in the US. Charlie is also an author and the creator of MajentaA11Y. So, Charlie, you mentioned that your title is Accessibility Coach. I think that we were talking before we came on about why you choose to sort of represent yourself in that way and really interested to have you explain that to our audience and also a little bit about your background and how you came to be working in the field of accessibility and so on and so forth.

CHARLIE: 2:32

Yes, thank you for having me on. We generally gravitate towards this concept of an Accessibility Coach because I mean there are a lot of different titles that you can have in this space. You could be Accessibility Manager, which is my technical title. But you know, nobody really wants to talk to their manager about anything, that's not for them or Accessibility Subject Matter Expert and nobody wants to talk to an expert because you know you're probably kind of a jerk. So, we landed on this concept of Accessibility Coach because like what is a coach there to do. A coach is there to help everyone on the team achieve maximum their maximum potential in moving forward. Just like an Agile Coach is there to help a team move products forward and keep things moving. An Accessibility Coach is there to do the same thing. It implies that you're here to help, you're a great resource and you're there to expedite that team being successful. My half into this role is not so much a straight shot towards becoming you know, the accessibility person anywhere, it was very meandering. I could tell you; I told a story quite a bit. I used to work at the University of Missouri, where I was managing our College of Engineering website. I was doing design and development. I had a small team of people working for me, which was so much fun. And back then, if you would come to me and said, Charlie, you know, we need to really focus on accessibility, I was one of these designers and developers who would have said, well, yes, accessibility is very important. It's very important, it's very we do that and meet you know, whatever standards we need to meet. But we really need to think about bell curve, where the average user is and really focus on the majority of our users. I was very fortunate in that I had a graduate student working for me who began to focus on digital accessibility in her graduate research and I ended up on her committee and as such I had to start learning about accessibility. And this is roughly 2012, 2013, when she was doing that work. And she really landed on this idea, very early on in the field of accessibility first design. By focusing on accessibility, you design a better product for everybody. And, that was what kind of radicalised me in terms of my thinking towards putting accessibility at the beginning of the process. I don't know if we even really had the concept of shift left being that extent in that year. But we really focused on that as a philosophy and, I think it's interesting, if you look at accessibility, not as edge case and I think Neil, you said this accessibility is not a risk it's an opportunity. If you focus on accessibility like that and, treat it as an extreme use case, just like race car drivers, okay. Racing is a great example of how innovation really works. Because, if you have someone who wants to go around a track, very, very fast and very, very safely, you begin making extreme engineering choices to make that car faster, wider, handle better, more powerful and safe. All the features that we enjoy in our passenger vehicles. I drive a very boring old beat-up pick-up truck. I'm a bit eccentric in that way. All the safety features that I love about that truck, like a reasonably sophisticated suspension and disc brakes and a role over cage, fuel injection, all these things came from a racing environment and trickled their way all the way down to my very basic pickup truck. I see accessibility a lot in the same way and I've carried that with me since working at the university. I spent a lot of time in FinTech and brought that approach there and everywhere I've been and everywhere that we have put accessibility first in our design work, we have created a better product that was more valuable for all of our customers. So, when I left the university, I went to work for a home run company that was really fantastic. We considered ourselves a tech company that just happened to be doing home runs as opposed to boring old bank. And I was able to really focus on accessibility there, in addition to my design and development work. And I kind of became the go to for accessibility. And after about six years there, I realised I want to focus on accessibility and really want to spend time doing this. Because I think this is a most interesting thing about what I do, and what I can bring into my career and into the industry. And eventually T Mobile came along and offered me that. And so, I got on plane and I came out to Seattle and here I am at T Mobile. So, it took a while and I was kind of excited about it at first but now this is what I do.

NEIL: 7:28

Excellent. And I think we've all, certainly those of us that have been working in the field for a while, have entered via a sequiturs route. I didn't think, when I grow up, I want to be doing accessibility. It didn't exist, right? Certainly not in a digital form, you know. But, I think when people find it, it becomes something that they become passionate about and I agree with you with your racing car to beaten up jalopy analogy about the you know, the design for the educators and you make a better thing and it absolutely is the case having worked in assistive tech, you know the things that we were delivering for the disability community, at the turn of the millennium and now mainstream consumer products. So, I know so, I am fully in agreement with you and you know, I think it's an area that is constantly fascinating and interesting. I know Debra has got a question and Antonio, so I'll hand over.

DEBRA: 8:38

Well and welcome to the programme, Charlie. I just really appreciate the story that you told because I agree because it's very interesting how we wind up where we are. I actually was also in the FinTech business but I was in that boring part of the banking. I was in the mortgage banking for 25 years. So, I know that field. But I also was wondering if you wouldn't mind just taking a moment to talk a little bit about what T Mobile is because we have already discussed, I'm an American, so I know T Mobile. I also happen to be a customer of T Mobile. But, I don't know, I might be wrong, but I don't know if all of the audience would know the T Mobile brand outside the United States. I might be wrong. But I was just wondering if you could explore that a little bit for the audience?

CHARLIE: 9:31

Yes. So, T Mobile is a very, very large Telecom provider here in the states. Our parent company is in Deutsche Telekom, which is what more people in the world probably would associate with our brand. It's very magenta. And our marketing is very fun and we have focussed on being the Un-carrier and that is one of the things that I appreciate about being at T Mobile is it's a company that really looks to up end the norms in the industry and that is how is this grown to where it is, is by very, very effective communications and marketing but also by getting rid of all those things that people really, really hate about Telecom.

DEBRA: 10:16

Right.

CHARLIE: 10:17

So, yes, if you like magenta as a colour then you will love T Mobile, because we use it everywhere.

DEBRA: 10:25

And I will also tell the audience if you don't know it, they also absorbed Sprint. So, Sprint became part of T Mobile. But when I was a very young woman, I actually worked for Sprint. But after the divestiture, I know because I've also been in the Telecommunications industry. But now I'm a customer. So, let me turn it over to Antonio. Small world, right?

CHARLIE: 10:48

I think that makes us cousins now or something.

ANTONIO: 10:55

So, Charlie, reflecting a little bit in your story and your career path and the fact that you are working today in an organisation that touches a lot of users and consumers. We also know that the majority of the web is not accessible and, we also know sometimes that we struggle to engage with consumer brands to explain them the value of accessibility and why they should make their product and solutions accessible. What would be, let's say, your elevator pitch, to make them by the importance of accessibility when they are developing solutions and in the way how they create products that the consumers are going to engage with?

CHARLIE: 11:45

Yes. You have asked a good question. I think so much of the time, when we were dealing with business leaders, in this space, there is a tendency to think that okay, well this is a business leader. So, we need to talk business and we need to have numbers and we need to show them that, you know, people with disabilities, are the largest minority, you know, consumer group and, we need to show them how much better things would be for their business, if they did X, Y, Z and well those numbers are very difficult to achieve in a meaningful way. People in that space, I think have generally have a pretty good sense of when you're kind of making numbers up and there are ways to do it. I generally equate it with search engine optimisation because there so much overlap between those two spaces, if I'm going to have that conversation. The conversation I think is better to have with leadership or anybody who is like being introduced to accessibility for the first time is more about that companies' values. Every company has a value statement; okay? And, we know that not everybody, not every company actually lives by its values, okay. You can look at like every company that failed or went under. I am sure that Silicon Valley Bank had a set of values that you know that if they had really set by, that bank would not have failed recently, okay. But, if you can break it down to values, every company has values that are about treating people with equity. About diversity and inclusion. Every company has these kinds of values in some sense, the language is going to change. If you can show hey, we need to make our products, our websites, our apps accessible because this fits with this company's values, this strange thing is that people who are in leadership roles do that I can those values seriously. They have been either at that company or they came into that company because they appreciate the values and culture that are there. That is often a very, very productive conversation. So, at T Mobile we have a value, do it the right way always. And, that is a very easy one to lean on. But, to come back to something and say, well okay, I recognise we have a tight deadline here, we have a lot of things to balance. But this really these fits in with our values as a company that we have to uphold and let's do this the right way for our customers because one of other values is, we love our customers. And that means all of our customers. And nobody will argue with you on those points. Nobody is going to say, well I don't believe in our values, especially if that meetings recorded. They don't want to be associated with that line. So, it sounds counterintuitive but honestly, that has been I think the best way to engage with actual business leadership, in a way that actually starts the conversation off in a positive way because, if you come in with like hey, we are missing the mark on these things. We are doing this wrong. We could be doing this better. We have got to start doing these things because everything is wrong. That makes everybody, it immediately puts people on the defensive. It immediately puts them in a space where like, I've done something wrong and that's not a great place to start the conversation. So, those corporate values as lofty and often ignored as they are, seem to be a great place to start.

DEBRA: 15:18

Charlie, I just think that's such a brilliant answer. I just want to tell you, it's a brilliant answer.

CHARLIE: 15:24

Oh wow, keep going.

DEBRA: 15:25

No, no because, we so agree with you and yesterday, I was really blessed that I got to interview Paul Pullman on my shoe. Axschat had interviewed him earlier but he's just an amazing leader. But he talks a lot about now he's talking about conscious quitting. How, people are consciously quitting your corporation, if they do not see that you really are walking your values, you are really and so, I just want to say, first of all, I do love, love, love the answer that you just gave. But I also want to say I totally agree with you because, people are wising up and they are looking and they are saying, I don't know if I do want to work for you Mr Big Gigantic Corporate Brand, if I do not feel you're making impact in the world. I do not want to be part of something making things worse. So, more than ever, people are very deliberately consciously quitting. The reason why that is almost more scary for a brand, then some of the other quitting that we saw, is because your conscious quitting is going to come from your most innovative creative employees. It's going to come from leaders like Charlie, that obviously is a huge asset to a T Mobile. And so, I just wanted to jump in and say, I totally agree with what you just said and you're right. I've worked for many corporate brands, where they really do care but at the same time corporations are made up of people. So, people have to really, really care. And so, I just want to agree with that. And also say, for a long time, I was with a competitor to T Mobile but I did start noticing the values, in the way I was talking to employees and how they were talking about it because, you were their best, you know, we want to know that the employees are happy and then the employees are being given purposeful work and making a difference and love the customer, blah, blah, blah. But I just think that what you're talking about is so critical now. Neil is on the board of the Valuable 500 and all three of us believe in what the Valuable 500 is trying to do with the World Economic Forum. But the reality is it is going to be all about values. So, I just want to say that I absolutely loved that answer and it makes me proud to be one of your customers. So, I just wanted to say that. Let me turn to over to Neil or Charlie also, let me turn it you, if you want to make a comment first?

CHARLIE: 18:00

No, I really person appreciate that reaction and thank you for helping keep the lights on at. T Mobile and thus my apartment?

NEIL: 18:11

Good. So, I likewise, like agree with the approach, I think that while you can be data led and there are times when you have to frame your arguments according to the audience that you're addressing when it comes to really top leadership, it's about positioning this as a topic for them and to be honest, if you are talking to the CEO, it's about the company image and their personal image as a leader and then it is aligned with values. I think that when you then want to take that, you know across company culture and systemically, there are times when you need to have measurements and controls in place and everything else. But, in terms of engagement, yes engage with the heart and engage positively and with positivity. I think you always get a better reaction in that way and, I mean, curious, because I mean obviously you have talked the sort of psychology of how you are engaging with your employee base. But you have also created systems of measurement. So, of which MajentaA11Y, that is one of them. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

CHARLIE: 19:36

Yes, so MajentaA11Y, for those that don't know, is an application that is open source and what it does is it creates acceptance criteria that for every component you'd want to build. When I started laying down the foundation for MajentaA11Y, I thought somebody had already done it. I thought this has got to exist somewhere. Somebody has gone through and taken WCAG and applied it on a component-by-component scale. You know, how is a button supposed to be accessible. How is a check box supposed to actually work for keyboard and screen reader. Because here's the thing, WCAG is this amazing set of success criterion that covers every scenario you'd ever want to be in. And explain to somebody, but you have to be an expert for someone to explain WCAG to you and actually take WCAG and do something with it. And furthermore, WCAG is open to interpretation. So, you can have a button that is focusable, but, you can write a keyboard event listener that the J Key is what activates it. And well, we have fulfilled WCAG haven't we. It's a button. It has a name. It has a role. It might have a state and it's actual with the keyboard because you can press the J key. Yes. But, that's just not really what we are aiming for. So, it started off as just a way to condense all that information into a single place because as an engineer, I am a lazy person and I get tired of repeating myself and so when you work in corporate America and you're the accessibility coach, you get a tonne of the same questions over and over again on slack. And I just want to be able to be like, hey, you have asked a great question. Here's everything you need to know about creating an accessible button and I could send them to that link and I say this is great. It has to have these attributes. It has to work like this. I've got everything I need. It allowed me to maximise my time and effort within the company and to be perfectly honest, it also cemented all of that stuff in my brain and made me a better communicator about how to actually do these things. That was the original purpose of MajentaA11Y, was just I needed to take everything in my brain and put it one place so I could share it more quickly. But, at some point I realised that, this is going to be, this is going to be obvious to anybody who has been doing this for a while but it wasn't obvious to me, at first. So much of accessibility compliance focuses on that word compliance and by compliance we mean QA testing at the end of the development process which we all know, doesn't work. It just doesn't work that way because you have broken the feedback loop. Right? The designers throw it over the wall to the developers, the developers throw it over the wall to the QA testers. The amount of time required now to communicate between those three audiences, blows every project out of the water. It just doesn't happen. The only way to pull it off is to put acceptance criteria for everything at the beginning, at the design phase and especially at the beginning of the UI development phase. And that's where I began to realise, I was working with a lot of product owners and saying, hey, your product has to be accessible but they didn't have a way to create acceptance criteria for accessibility in their stories or in their projects, whatever projects, whether you're agile or not, you still need to say hey, these are the things that I want this particular widget to do, creating a credit card form, these are the acceptance criteria of how I want to build and how I want to test it. That simply did not exist. So, I began to add features to MajentaA11Y, that collected all of that data that I had put together about a button or a check box and allowed you to say, okay I'm writing a story for a widget in our product that has a checkbox, it has a text field and a submit button. I can select all of those things and it assembles all of those acceptance criteria. I can copy and paste that into Gira or whatever project management system I'm doing. And here's the thing, here's the dirty secret about QA testing. Most QA testing is making sure that the developers understood the assignment. Okay? That's what most of QA testing is. And, developers want to do a good job. I never come across a dev who says, no, I don't really care about my work. They got into it because they find it interesting and want to do a good job and they're going to meet whatever criteria are laid out for them. And so, if you give them very precise criteria about how to build a properly accessible button or check box or whatever. They are going to do it. And, what that means is that they are testing their own work for accessibility. And, it's not up to some QA person at the end is who is honestly largely just there to make sure that the understood that the devs understood the assignment according to the story. That's the magic of MajentaA11Y. And the other thing is though and this was the side effect of it that I wasn't expecting is when those acceptance continues criteria are in a project or an agile story, when people have questions, they do reach out now. So, it increased the amount of feedback and communication between our team, our accessibility coaches and all of those developers and designers along the way and even the QA people because now they have something to reference and so they might end up in a kind of edge scenario, where like oh, should this button read pressed or should it read checked or what exactly should be happening here. And you get to have much, much better conversations with teams. Because, one, they are reaching out and you're not chasing them down. So, this is then for you and you're not you know out on the wilderness shouting at everybody. And, two, it just makes everything clearer for all the teams involved. So, it's been a great product for us, and I love seeing the analytics and seeing where it's used out there in industry.

ANTONIO: 26:16

So, I think that that is, I think the book is an important contribution to make people and help people to improve their skills, to improve the way how they work and that goes into issues, that I think we face today. One, is that there are not enough professionals we need different ways to upskill them fast. So, I would like to have your ideas there, how you make sure that we bring people up to speed faster into their different life journeys. It could be someone that is just starting or someone already has a career and wants to develop. And the other and the final line is I am sure, you know your organisation and my organisation many others are on the world, onboard developers every day. How do you make sure that when we are onboarding new employees, we make sure that they are aware of our commitments with accessibility and they actually buy in that and then, when they develop code they are not going to damage the work that was done before. So, those are the two things that I would like to have your opinion about.

CHARLIE: 27:31

Yes, okay. So there are two questions in there. So, I think the last one is kind of an easy answer because it's a very hard answer and the answer is, I don't know. I wrote about this in the book on accessibility, of the kind of revolving door of developer's problem, that any programme is eventually going to have to solve because you might do a to be of remediation work on a product. You might have a group of developers who have really dug in and learned a lot about accessibility but it is the nature of any large enterprise that teams get reassigned, people move on, you know and, how do you do that. So, in the book on accessibility.com, essentially that has a comeback on the hiring processes of the company and what requirements you're laying out for the people that you bring in. That is going to require a level of sophistication of hiring managers of recruiters to ask the right questions along the way and I can tell you the kind of sort of question that I ask in interviews, whether we are bringing a UI developers, onto say a design system team. I ask them to describe the difference between a link and a button to me. Like can you know, tell me the difference between a link and a button. And, you know, someone who has a beginning grasp of semantics can tell you the difference between a link and a button. You know links go someplace; buttons do something. If I was making a link that takes you to another web page, I would use a link. If I was doing something to open a menu. And if you can have that conversation with someone, it's like okay, here is someone who understands some basic semantics and then you start to dive in a little bit more. If they look at you, like, you know they are talking to a brick wall, it's never a thing they have considered, you know, you kind of get a sense of okay, maybe you're more of a job descript engineer than a true UI engineer. And, so, that has been my method of doing that is, you know, trying to build up the sophistication of the people doing that hiring and honestly there is a to be. That's a lot of work and I don't know how you do that across a very, very large enterprise and build that level of sophistication there. That was the second question you asked. The first question actually, could you run me back through that because my brain is a rabbling series of people with ADHD.

ANTONIO: 30:25

And the second is about how we train people, how we bring more professionals to the market considering that there is an need for, to for that.

CHARLIE: 30:41

How, okay, so how do we bring more accessibility professionals into the space? I can tell you this, I think there are more, I think they are already out there, they just don't know that they are an expert in accessibility. For example, when I worked at the University Missouri, I was fortunate enough to be around several talented UI engineers, who are all just much as expert on accessibility as I was. But because in that environment you tend to be a generalist and you're surrounded by people with a similar skillset. You don't recognise, at least I didn't, like I know something that a lot of people in industry don't. So, I think part of it, I think a big part of it is finding those people who are already doing accessibility and saying, hey, you have special skills and you're not aware of it, you know. You can make a leap into more of a consulting specialised role and you know that has been my thought of what that means. And certainly like, you know where I have looked to recruit folks as well. Yes. And in a grander scale I think that to some degree that's you know, the market shall provide, if companies begin asking for legitimate accessibility experts to populate their product teams, the market will provide those people and you'll see more of that education in schools, which is a whole other discussion, right? How many you know do people learn about accessibility in their computer science or job descript bootcamp or that kind of thing. No, of course they don't. Why? Because the industry isn't asking for it. So, it's a very chicken and egg sort of thing. But, ultimately I think it comes back to that talk about values with leadership and building a market for accessibility experts, greater digital space. Maybe I did have an answer to that, I don't know.

NEIL: 32:51

No, so I think that [dash]

DEBRA: 32:53

That's a great answer.

NEIL: 32:55

I partially agree with you on that.

CHARLIE: 32:59

Tell me what I don't know.

NEIL: 33:02

I think, I absolutely agree with you that there are people out there that know more about accessibility than they think they do. And that the bar to expertise is one which is in their minds , right? At the same time, there is still a lack of awareness and knowledge and skills amongst the development community as a whole. There is a lot of self-taught developers. There's a lot of you know citizen developers in low code and no code and copying of code. And it's not through lack of goodwill or intent but, you know it propagates inaccessible content and websites and tools and everything else. So, the there is also a need to sort it get it into the education system and into you know, and into training. Because a lot of us have come into accessibility as our second or third career and I think what Antonio was alluding to was also creating a desirable career path right from the beginning. So, that's some of the stuff that I would be working on in my day job. Looking at how we can create accessibility as a sort of recognised profession by governments and educators and so on and inject that into education, shifting in another part or another realm that also impacts the long term eco system of you know, technology design and everything else. So, I think that the work you're doing is amazing. The book on accessibility is really a great resource. The book on accessibility.com people.

DEBRA: 34:49

Neil?

NEILE: 34:51

Yes?

DEBRA: 34:52

Can I just also say, excuse me for being rude. I agree with everything you said but I also agree with what Charlie said because I believe that that is what is going to wind up happening is what Charlie is talking about, you see it shifting already. I mean that is where he came from. So, and I know you said, you agree with but also more. But, I think it's got to be all of these things. And I also go back to what Charlie said about the values. If the corporations can figure out the values in the right way they'll encourage more people to do this too. I just wanted to jump in and make that comment too. I know you want to thank our supporters and stuff. But I just wanted to come in.

NEIL: 35:35

I think you're right. You know, yes we are going to attract people in but we also need to see the next generation. And also, the companies need to create that demand. Right. So, people need to see it's a viable career path that it's something they can do that they can get paid for that they are not going to be replaced by Chachi PT, immediately. You know, so, you know and there will be coding via, you know via these platforms but then the art will be how do you write a prompt to get accessible code. How do you, you know, examine the end as a result and actually what you have done in MajentaA11Y, is halfway to creating the prompts already. Right? You have you'll actually got a lot of AI prompts already written for the next generation of you know, content and work and tool creation there, in encapsulated form. So, I think you just managed to future proof your role in accessibility beyond the AI revolution. So, thank you Charlie for (a) your contribution, for (b) putting up with us and our tangential approaches and I need to thank our supporters, MyClearText for keeping us captioned and accessible and Amazon for helping keep the lights on. So, I'm really looking forward to the discussion on Twitter. Can't wait. Thank you very much.

CHARLIE: 37:16

Yes, thank you for having me. This has been fun.

DEBRA: 37:18

You're amazing. Page| 2