Episode: 2494
Title: HPR2494: linux.conf.au 2018: Nicolas Steenhout
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2494/hpr2494.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 04:07:13

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All right, hello everyone, out in Hacker Public Radio Lens.
This is Plymouth and Roy speaking from Thursday's morning tea session at LinuxConFayU.
And I have a guest here with us, which I'm introducing yourself.
I am Nick Steenhout and I have traveled from Montreal and Canada to present a
tutorial on testing for web accessibility.
Oh, excellent.
All right, I think you've given that.
That was yesterday.
Yep, and you've sought some feedback.
Yeah, I think I saw.
Yeah, cool.
So that is quite a trip.
It is.
So I have been to Montreal a long time ago.
Yep.
It was for a Python conference.
It was like, it was like hike on US, but it was held up north.
Right.
And it was a big trip.
So I flew over and I stayed at Vancouver and did the train across and went to Montreal.
So that's a wonderful trip.
I tried, I don't do big international trips much.
So I tried to do everything in one big trip.
Right.
Not to be too indelicate, but somehow I have a feeling that it was a much more
difficult trip for you than it would be for me.
Well, it's not so much difficult.
It can be logistically complicated.
Yep.
But as a wheelchair user, traveling in planes, when you do it often enough,
you know what to expect.
And this trip actually went off without a hitch.
So it was quite good.
You just have to arrive to the airport a little earlier and hurry up between the two
transfers because it takes a little bit longer.
Typically, you're the first one on the plane,
but you're also the last one off the plane.
And you want to make sure you have enough time between your connections to be able
to get from one gate to the other.
All right.
So still, that's a big trip for anyone for a conference.
So I hope you're getting some holiday time in around as well.
I'm going right back tomorrow.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
So how did you get interested in giving a talk at our little conference stand here
from the other side of the world?
Well, I lived in New Zealand for 13 years.
And I was lucky enough to speak at the LCA in 2010 in Wellington.
Okay.
And since then, I've really liked the conference.
You know, it's different organizers from year to year,
but there's a certain standard that seems to always be
wide for.
And I really like the conference.
So I just wanted to come and share my knowledge again.
And so it was an excuse to come back.
Yeah.
Yeah, cool.
But not just an excuse to come back,
but a chance to come to one of the best open source conference I've been to
between LinuxConf, AU, and OSCON.
It's really top-of-the-line conferences.
So it's cool.
Cool.
Excellent.
So how did it, so can you describe your way?
I did not attend your workshop.
Can you give us a rundown of it?
It was a 100-minute workshop.
And the idea was to do something really practical and hands-on.
So I took people through an overview of what is web accessibility and
why it's important and kept that fairly short because that was not really
the main part of the workshop.
Then we spoke about automated testing, how it makes a difference,
and how it the limitation of testing.
And then we dove straight into manual testing.
So the different steps to take, to go through a web page,
to test for keyboard accessibility and color contrast and images, forms,
all these typical issues that are fairly easy to fix.
But you have to know to do that testing and have a workflow to rely on.
Cool.
So I mean, there's two parts of that.
The automation stuff and then the manual testing.
Is there a particular library or toolkit that you suggest or do you have
different opinions about different toolkits?
In terms of testing for accessibility, there's a lot of tools out there.
Some are better than others.
And you have to remember that automated testing will only catch about 35% to 40% of all errors.
So you really have to rely on human judgment, human testing to get there.
There's some really good tools out there for automated testing.
Look, I quite like tenon.io, which is catching a lot and it allows you to do
individual pages or you can actually hook into their API to test your whole site at the same time.
There's other tools out there, but the bottom line is manual testing.
You have a keyboard, you have color contrast analyzers and you have code inspectors.
Once you have that, you're in good shape.
And then of course, there's playing with screen readers if you're comfortable with that.
Yep.
So I guess of the accessibility workshops and talks that I've been to,
the takeaway that I take away from that, just to have a very poorly worded phrase there,
the motivations for looking at accessibility stuff, you can look at it as though
there are large subsets of our community who can't use these technologies,
and it's incumbent on us to help them.
But there's also the other side of the coin where all of us are going to have degrading abilities
over time. And certainly in the last year or so, my eyesight has started to drop off a
cuff for unknown reasons. So I'm boosting font sizes in my browser much more than I used to.
I listen to podcasts out the Y-Zoo. I'm probably destroying my hearing.
So were your workshops aimed at people who have less abilities on a more extreme range,
or less abilities on a smaller range? Or does that really matter?
It doesn't really matter. In general, I approach accessibility as something that's good for everyone.
As you've broached, there's an expression in disability communities that nobody's able
body. Everybody's temporarily able-bodied. But setting that aside, for me, it's really a question
of making the web better for everyone. So if you're talking about color contrast, that's really good
for helping someone that has visionate problems, it's also very good for someone trying to read
your website on a mobile, outside, and bright sun. If you're talking about writing text that's
easy to understand for someone who has a learning disability, you're also making your sight easier
to understand for people that are non-native English speakers, or even for machine translations.
So all these wins that we do from an accessibility perspective for people with disabilities tend to
have an equivalent win for people that don't have disabilities making it easier to use the website.
So when I approach accessibility, that's always something I have in the back of my mind that
we're wanting to make as many changes and remove as many barriers as possible for people with
disabilities, always with the background that's going to be good for everyone. Yeah, like there's
been- there was one talk I went to this conference where I was showing a few codes, headers up on
the screen, and there was a little bit of syntax highlighting, and I think it meant the keywords
were in yellow on a white background, and I could not read it, and I was immediately taken out
of the talk. I was struggling to read the text on the screen rather than easily being able to read
the text on the screen and being able to listen to the presenter. And just imagine what it's like
to deal with the web in that way for every single interaction that you've got with every single
website. Yeah, there's tools and ways around that you can implement your own color scheme, you
can use high contrast schemes, you can do all these things, granted the site as coded that will
actually interact well with these assistive technologies. So that's where as developers we have
I say duty, but it's really, it's not so much duty as much as a- it's just the right thing to do.
Yeah, yeah, and so- Yeah, I've taken the very boring approach with my slides,
is I just got black and white on my slides, and then I don't have to worry about color stuff at all.
I have found that I seem to have a very different color palette, like I can- I seem to see colors
in a slightly different way than other people see colors. So things that are very easy for me to
see are hard for others and vice versa. Right. So I just go black and white just to simple things.
So I think I think one of the interesting things that- I think one of the things that LCA,
Linux Huffa U, has typically failed at in the past, is getting feedback about speakers and
about workshops. So you've taken it upon yourself to get feedback from your workshop.
Yeah, can you- can you go into that a little bit more and what sort of questions you were asking
in your feedback and how many responses you had so far? Yeah, I- I'm fortunate enough to speak a
lot of conferences and I always want to make sure that what I deliver is what the audience expects
and I want to make sure that the next time I give a talk is better. So some conferences are
really good at seeking feedback from the audience. I'm thinking at Confu and Canada,
they're really, really good at getting feedback from the audience, but they're the exception more
than the rules. So I've created a fairly simple Google form that I just hook into my site and I
ask basically three questions. I ask the audience to rate the site on scale of, you know, it was horrible,
it was mediocre, it was good, it was awesome. So there's two bad choices and two good choices and
people can make the decision. I ask them what really worked well for them, what they liked about
the workshop, so I know what to keep on doing and then I ask what they thought could be improved.
Then I ask them their name if they want to give it and if they want me to get back to them,
they have a question or are concerned then they can give me their email address, but that's
totally optional. So far the responses I've gotten both through the web interface and through
just informal chat was that people really loved it. One person said, I thought I knew about
accessibility and then I realized that I didn't know as much as I thought. One person
didn't know a fair bit, so they expected a different level of accessibility, but the workshop was
really targeted at people that are devs that don't do it day in day out, so it's a question of judging
the audience. And I think that's one of the interesting things like I think the website back
in that we're currently using Philenics.com. We can switch on a feature where we can specify
to the audience whether or not this is a this is a talker workshop aimed at beginners,
intermediates or professionals, but I think it's another one of those cases where instead of having
a small enumeration like that, you might actually want like a free text field to describe that.
That might make a difference, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So and I guess the other thing with the workshop
versus a talk is that you'll be able to get a little bit of feedback throughout the workshop.
So have you noticed is the official feedback that you've been getting? Is that
similar to the feedback that you're getting through the talk to those? I think those line up
pretty well. One of the nice things about the workshop as opposed to a talk is you can be a lot
more interactive. So there were a lot of pauses for people to actually look at their
own site and try a few things that I was talking about and and have that discussion as you go.
So that that's a little bit more relaxed that way. And I think it allows the
allows the audience to to really get the most out of something because it's more interactive
than just a talk. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So this is a I'm wearing one of the t-shirts from another
Australian conference that I don't get to go to as often as I'd like. And the feedback forms that
they've taken on in the last few years is a very simple traffic-like system. As you exit the room,
they just have a few iPads that up. Yeah. It's literally red green yellow. And like the
advantage of that sort of system is that it's very easy. There's a very low bar to to give feedback
on. Yep. But of course, the disadvantage is if somebody says it was good or bad,
we don't know why. Yeah. So yeah, it's this really, really difficult thing and it's
people are very likely to spout off on insert favorite social media thing here about why they either
hate it or loved a particular session. But unless we can drag that back into the conference somehow,
it's very hard to get back in. Yeah. And I guess it's one of those things that should be
possible for Linux, not for you because the paper team for the main part of the conference
is pretty much it's not the same every year but it's got the same four group of people for me
to year to year. So there's a lot of continuity in the papers team. So feedback that they get from
year to year, they should be able to keep that. Yeah. But to the best of my knowledge, they, apart from
them attending and hearing SculloBot, I don't think they get much feedback. Yeah.
Confu does it in a very interesting way which I thought was very labor intensive but it
actually works really well. They print out little slips of papers of maybe 10 centimeters by 15
centimeters with just, you know, rating, smiley faces and fronty faces and a couple of lines of
what was good, what was bad. And they hand that up to all, yeah, attendees at the start of the
presentation and then they have a volunteer collecting them back. And within a couple of hours,
they're all scanned and emailed back to the presenter. So you really have that in writing immediately.
And of course the organizers can refer to the presentation and see that. So that's a fairly
low tech approach that gives a chance to go gather good feedback. I like the idea of this
traffic light thing because you're sure to add many more people. Yeah. But as you said then,
you don't know why they liked it or why they didn't. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those things. I don't,
I think Lennox has started, I think Lennox is up for you and I have to admit,
park on a year which I'm a previous organizer of. We haven't really tried a lot of things,
so we have a lot of room to phone. But you have a lot of room to improve. Yes. Yes.
So have you been able to see much of the rest of the conference,
or have you been planning your work? I've seen the developers, the developers,
MiniCon from Monday. On Tuesday, I was in and out of a few sessions and just finalising a few
things. I had a mini disaster actually. My keynote presentation got corrupted.
So I had to rebuild it from a couple backups. That was a little bit of a tense moment. But
yeah, I've seen a few sessions and it was quite good. Excellent. Yeah. I was helping to organise
one of the MiniConferences on the Tuesday. So my Monday was short and my Tuesday was just the Mini
Conf. So yesterday was the first day I had it actually enjoying the conference. But I was exhausted.
So today I feel like I've got a little bit more energy. Right. And today is the first day I've
been able to take a few interviews as well. Right. So is there anything you're looking forward to
for the rest of the conference in particular? Any particular talks or anything? I didn't have any
sessions particularly flagged at that time thinking, oh, I must get to that because they're all
good. I tend to have more of an interest in the less geeky technical sessions and there's
a good mix of that here. So I'm hoping to be able to get around and what happens in a hallway
between sessions is always so good. Yeah. See, a particular bug bear of mine is that I go to
conferences to go to the talks and that's totally fine and it doesn't matter. But I have helped
to organise a lot of conferences and I often explicitly get asked to help organise the hallway
track which is always great fun because I don't go to the hallway track. So what am I being asked to
organise the hallway track? So what things should I be doing to make the hallway track better?
This concept of organising an hallway track for me is foreign. It's weird because that's
the beauty of it. It's informal, it's organic, it happens a little bit like an on-conference.
People get together, they have a shared interest and they start talking about it and people can
join in. On the other hand, people get together, they don't know, they haven't come an interest and
suddenly you start discussing things and going in the direction you didn't expect and I think
that's the beauty of the hallway track as opposed to more organised talks is that it's not organised,
it's organic and maybe it takes a certain personality to enjoy that or get yourself into it so
maybe people who are more introvert are not as likely to benefit from it. But I don't think it
should be organised. Yeah, I think for the most part, people want space to move out, space so
that not everyone is want together and catch us to sit on. As a wheelchair user, I always have
the best seat in the house so that's not a problem but I can see how that could be something to
organise for people. Is there anything else you'd like to have on the record? I just want to thank
the organisers and the volunteers and the attendees and the other speakers because everybody together
really makes for one of the best conferences in the world, but that's been true. Cheers, thank you very
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