W3C/SMPTE Joint Workshop on Professional Media Production on the Web

It's a pleasure to be here for today's W3C/SMPTE Joint Workshop on professional media production on the web.

This talk is about the principles of accessibility and driving accessibility into the creation of great tools and apps and the web interfaces that are so critical to their user experience and feature set.

I'm Ed Gray, I'm a proud 26-year veteran of Avid. I'm the head of Avid's audio developer program, and also director of accessibility for the company.

So I get to work with a bunch of talented, external and internal developers, testers, customer support, and marketing people. And I'm also the main spokesman for accessibility, so I organize and participate in a lot of panels like the ones that you see here.

I have a CPACC credential, which allows me to consult to organizations on accessibility for their websites and stores and physical plant.

And finally, I'm legally blind myself, so any accessibility goodness that we crank out, I'll be the first in line to try it.

Now, the business case for accessibility in your tools and web interfaces is strong, but it's not always obvious, just by looking at the market size. Now, the incidence of accessibility in developed countries is around 15%. And then zeroing in on visual impairments, around three-quarters of percent of people can't see the screen well enough to do any reasonable work. And another 3 to 4% can view the screen with some difficulty with some visual aids.

So you can imagine that if you're trying to justify a project based on that small portion of the population, it's not always that easy to do. But the important points to remember, that accessible innovation helps abled users too. And that accessibility helps build your brand and your reputation and creates goodwill and brings a lot of people to the media creation party.

And finally, accessible development is just development for usability for disabled persons. And so accessible development can help you uncover usability fixes and improvements that can benefit everyone.

So let's talk about some principles and trends that you should keep in mind if you're becoming a student of accessibility. And this gives me a chance to show and to brag about my picture of Stevie Wonder. Here he is at the 2017 GRAMMY Awards, saying, make everything accessible for everyone, everywhere in the world, no matter what disabilities. And what he was speaking to is the principle of universal design. Universal design just means one tool for everybody, instead of one version of the app for the blind users, and another for the sighted folks, and one version of your website for people with motor disabilities, one without.

You want one tool that people can all walk up to and use in the same facility, in the same way. And that's a very important guiding principle.

And accessibility is also legally driven because whether or not it's wise or fair, people are being hit with accessibility inquiries, and sometimes lawsuits demanding that they improve the accessibility of their products. And as long as the company has a team committed to accessibility, shows a record of accessible innovation, and a place to ask questions about accessibility, they will be pretty well protected.

Accessibility is also procurement driven, meaning that in our space, in the media production space, there are schools and institutions that won't consider committing to purchases unless you establish that your product is decently accessible.

That's usually done with a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, which is a document that you fill out independently that shows what features of your product meet, partially meet and do not meet certain accessibility standards.

And then finally, accessibility is external, beta tester and engineer driven. So you don't want your accessibility features prioritized and pursued by a group of empathetic, sighted engineers, you want people with different disabilities giving input and showing you how they work around real-world problems, they can help you prioritize fixes in the most meaningful way.

The website front end to your application are tools like a mailbox at the foot of the driveway, gives you the impression of how it'll be used and what the overall experience will be like.

So if it's not a winner for accessibility, it can be a killer, can render parts of the app invisible or inaccessible by assisted devices for people with motor challenges.

And so there's some tools that come to the rescue from the WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Group, which is part of the W3C. And they show checklist of accessibility features that can or must be implemented to meet certain accessibility standards, and give you guidelines on how to pursue them. And the important thing is that these are pursued, again, by a diverse group of internal and external stakeholders with and without disabilities.

Now, this is an example of an accessibility audit. So companies should audit their accessibility capabilities from time to time quarterly, or at least semi-annually to see how things are progressing. And it is not a one-and-done effort, but should be a sustained ongoing effort that represents a long term commitment.

I encourage you as often as you can, to look at developer programs and explore their sections that deal with accessibility, and also to check out the many web resources that help you keep on top of what's new and what's next in the world of accessibility.

They fall into a couple of categories. Corporate accessibility websites, usually if you type in the URL of a tech company, you type /accessibility, you'll be taken to a developer website that shows tools and how to get help and ask questions and shows you accessibility success stories.

Next are communities of practice like the IAAP, the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, and WebAIM, which stands for Web Access In Mind.

There are also very good courses offered by schools, and a good place to look for them is Coursera and also Skillshare. They have courses ranging from introductions to accessibility program on the web to building accessibility teams in your companies.

And the fourth category are accessibility consultancies. They offer, they do a lot of content creation and have webinars on accessibility topics. But be mindful, one of their main objectives is to send a bot to your website to search for accessibility defects and then sell you consulting services. And that's no substitute for an accessibility program at your company that's fully resourced and designed for the long term.

So why are we so interested in accessibility? Well, I think the WCAG expresses it in the right way. They say that they want just to make interfaces that are perceivable, operable and understandable by the widest possible range of users. And also robust, so they stand up to and take advantage of platforms and operating systems as they evolve from time to time.

This involves a commitment to universal design, again, one version of the app for everyone, not different versions for different disabled subpopulations.

It involves us creating experiences that are customizable by end-users 'cause not all people are cognitively disabled or blind or hearing-impaired in the same manner.

So you want things to be able to be tailored and you want to, again, involve a diverse community of internal and external stakeholders, so you can get to the right sweet spot of issues and address the issues that solve problems the most meaningfully.

If we do this, we'll be doing a great service. And then I encourage you to find people you love with disabilities and people in your community, and lead them to these accessibility innovations and teach them what's going on. Because I guarantee you that not all disabled people are as capable or as willing to discover accessible innovations as we might think.

And so if we do that, we'll be doing a great service. And again, we're part of the media creation business. And I think that it's a wonderful thing we're doing to involve more and more people in the use of our creation tools, and creating goodwill and building our reputations and brands and building better products for everyone.

So let me wrap it all up with a treat for you. This is Jason Dasent, he's the owner of Overdrive Recording in Trinidad. He is a key advisor and consultant to Avid and other companies on accessibility. He is completely blind. So here he is working on some Caribbean music tracks independently and without sighted assistance.

We owe him a great deal. You can see that he moves through Pro Tools and other products with the same speed and facility, as people with normal eyesight. And it's the same version of Pro Tools that the sighted users have.

(upbeat reggae music)

Hey guys, I'm Jay, a producer from Trinidad in the Caribbean, currently based here in the UK. And today's a really special day. I'm getting to hang out with Avid, right, my friends at Avid, talking about the Carbon and the Vintage Organ plugins that comes with it from Native Instruments.

Okay, so nothing is quantized or anything yet, right? I'll do it after, because I just want to go like on the spur of the moment, whatever I'm feeling, we can definitely clean it up after.

But that's the organ and some drums. Let's get a bassline. Let's hit record and see what it gives.

(metronome starts)

(Jason playing upbeat reggae music)

Well, I sure appreciate your time,

and I hope you enjoyed this talk. If you have any questions about this document or the work that Avid's doing on accessibility, or just want to share some cool ideas, just write to me at accessibility@avid.com.

Thank you again.