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Lee Hanken
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Episode: 2494
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Title: HPR2494: linux.conf.au 2018: Nicolas Steenhout
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2494/hpr2494.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-19 04:07:13
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---
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This episode of HBR is brought to you by Ananasthost.com.
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At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
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Better web hosting that's honest and fair at Ananasthost.com.
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All right, hello everyone, out in Hacker Public Radio Lens.
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This is Plymouth and Roy speaking from Thursday's morning tea session at LinuxConFayU.
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And I have a guest here with us, which I'm introducing yourself.
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I am Nick Steenhout and I have traveled from Montreal and Canada to present a
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tutorial on testing for web accessibility.
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Oh, excellent.
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All right, I think you've given that.
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That was yesterday.
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Yep, and you've sought some feedback.
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Yeah, I think I saw.
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Yeah, cool.
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So that is quite a trip.
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It is.
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So I have been to Montreal a long time ago.
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Yep.
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It was for a Python conference.
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It was like, it was like hike on US, but it was held up north.
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Right.
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And it was a big trip.
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So I flew over and I stayed at Vancouver and did the train across and went to Montreal.
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So that's a wonderful trip.
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I tried, I don't do big international trips much.
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So I tried to do everything in one big trip.
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Right.
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Not to be too indelicate, but somehow I have a feeling that it was a much more
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difficult trip for you than it would be for me.
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Well, it's not so much difficult.
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It can be logistically complicated.
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Yep.
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But as a wheelchair user, traveling in planes, when you do it often enough,
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you know what to expect.
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And this trip actually went off without a hitch.
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So it was quite good.
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You just have to arrive to the airport a little earlier and hurry up between the two
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transfers because it takes a little bit longer.
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Typically, you're the first one on the plane,
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but you're also the last one off the plane.
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And you want to make sure you have enough time between your connections to be able
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to get from one gate to the other.
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All right.
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So still, that's a big trip for anyone for a conference.
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So I hope you're getting some holiday time in around as well.
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I'm going right back tomorrow.
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Oh, wow.
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Okay.
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So how did you get interested in giving a talk at our little conference stand here
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from the other side of the world?
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Well, I lived in New Zealand for 13 years.
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And I was lucky enough to speak at the LCA in 2010 in Wellington.
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Okay.
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And since then, I've really liked the conference.
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You know, it's different organizers from year to year,
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but there's a certain standard that seems to always be
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wide for.
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And I really like the conference.
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So I just wanted to come and share my knowledge again.
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And so it was an excuse to come back.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, cool.
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But not just an excuse to come back,
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but a chance to come to one of the best open source conference I've been to
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between LinuxConf, AU, and OSCON.
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It's really top-of-the-line conferences.
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So it's cool.
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Cool.
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Excellent.
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So how did it, so can you describe your way?
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I did not attend your workshop.
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Can you give us a rundown of it?
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It was a 100-minute workshop.
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And the idea was to do something really practical and hands-on.
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So I took people through an overview of what is web accessibility and
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why it's important and kept that fairly short because that was not really
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the main part of the workshop.
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Then we spoke about automated testing, how it makes a difference,
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and how it the limitation of testing.
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And then we dove straight into manual testing.
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So the different steps to take, to go through a web page,
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to test for keyboard accessibility and color contrast and images, forms,
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all these typical issues that are fairly easy to fix.
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But you have to know to do that testing and have a workflow to rely on.
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Cool.
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So I mean, there's two parts of that.
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The automation stuff and then the manual testing.
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Is there a particular library or toolkit that you suggest or do you have
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different opinions about different toolkits?
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In terms of testing for accessibility, there's a lot of tools out there.
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Some are better than others.
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And you have to remember that automated testing will only catch about 35% to 40% of all errors.
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So you really have to rely on human judgment, human testing to get there.
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There's some really good tools out there for automated testing.
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Look, I quite like tenon.io, which is catching a lot and it allows you to do
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individual pages or you can actually hook into their API to test your whole site at the same time.
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There's other tools out there, but the bottom line is manual testing.
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You have a keyboard, you have color contrast analyzers and you have code inspectors.
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Once you have that, you're in good shape.
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And then of course, there's playing with screen readers if you're comfortable with that.
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Yep.
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So I guess of the accessibility workshops and talks that I've been to,
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the takeaway that I take away from that, just to have a very poorly worded phrase there,
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the motivations for looking at accessibility stuff, you can look at it as though
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there are large subsets of our community who can't use these technologies,
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and it's incumbent on us to help them.
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But there's also the other side of the coin where all of us are going to have degrading abilities
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over time. And certainly in the last year or so, my eyesight has started to drop off a
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cuff for unknown reasons. So I'm boosting font sizes in my browser much more than I used to.
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I listen to podcasts out the Y-Zoo. I'm probably destroying my hearing.
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So were your workshops aimed at people who have less abilities on a more extreme range,
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or less abilities on a smaller range? Or does that really matter?
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It doesn't really matter. In general, I approach accessibility as something that's good for everyone.
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As you've broached, there's an expression in disability communities that nobody's able
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body. Everybody's temporarily able-bodied. But setting that aside, for me, it's really a question
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of making the web better for everyone. So if you're talking about color contrast, that's really good
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for helping someone that has visionate problems, it's also very good for someone trying to read
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your website on a mobile, outside, and bright sun. If you're talking about writing text that's
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easy to understand for someone who has a learning disability, you're also making your sight easier
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to understand for people that are non-native English speakers, or even for machine translations.
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So all these wins that we do from an accessibility perspective for people with disabilities tend to
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have an equivalent win for people that don't have disabilities making it easier to use the website.
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So when I approach accessibility, that's always something I have in the back of my mind that
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we're wanting to make as many changes and remove as many barriers as possible for people with
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disabilities, always with the background that's going to be good for everyone. Yeah, like there's
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been- there was one talk I went to this conference where I was showing a few codes, headers up on
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the screen, and there was a little bit of syntax highlighting, and I think it meant the keywords
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were in yellow on a white background, and I could not read it, and I was immediately taken out
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of the talk. I was struggling to read the text on the screen rather than easily being able to read
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the text on the screen and being able to listen to the presenter. And just imagine what it's like
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to deal with the web in that way for every single interaction that you've got with every single
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website. Yeah, there's tools and ways around that you can implement your own color scheme, you
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can use high contrast schemes, you can do all these things, granted the site as coded that will
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actually interact well with these assistive technologies. So that's where as developers we have
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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.
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Yeah, yeah, and so- Yeah, I've taken the very boring approach with my slides,
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is I just got black and white on my slides, and then I don't have to worry about color stuff at all.
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I have found that I seem to have a very different color palette, like I can- I seem to see colors
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in a slightly different way than other people see colors. So things that are very easy for me to
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see are hard for others and vice versa. Right. So I just go black and white just to simple things.
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So I think I think one of the interesting things that- I think one of the things that LCA,
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Linux Huffa U, has typically failed at in the past, is getting feedback about speakers and
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about workshops. So you've taken it upon yourself to get feedback from your workshop.
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Yeah, can you- can you go into that a little bit more and what sort of questions you were asking
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in your feedback and how many responses you had so far? Yeah, I- I'm fortunate enough to speak a
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lot of conferences and I always want to make sure that what I deliver is what the audience expects
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and I want to make sure that the next time I give a talk is better. So some conferences are
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really good at seeking feedback from the audience. I'm thinking at Confu and Canada,
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they're really, really good at getting feedback from the audience, but they're the exception more
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than the rules. So I've created a fairly simple Google form that I just hook into my site and I
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ask basically three questions. I ask the audience to rate the site on scale of, you know, it was horrible,
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it was mediocre, it was good, it was awesome. So there's two bad choices and two good choices and
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people can make the decision. I ask them what really worked well for them, what they liked about
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the workshop, so I know what to keep on doing and then I ask what they thought could be improved.
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Then I ask them their name if they want to give it and if they want me to get back to them,
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they have a question or are concerned then they can give me their email address, but that's
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totally optional. So far the responses I've gotten both through the web interface and through
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just informal chat was that people really loved it. One person said, I thought I knew about
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accessibility and then I realized that I didn't know as much as I thought. One person
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didn't know a fair bit, so they expected a different level of accessibility, but the workshop was
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really targeted at people that are devs that don't do it day in day out, so it's a question of judging
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the audience. And I think that's one of the interesting things like I think the website back
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in that we're currently using Philenics.com. We can switch on a feature where we can specify
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to the audience whether or not this is a this is a talker workshop aimed at beginners,
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intermediates or professionals, but I think it's another one of those cases where instead of having
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a small enumeration like that, you might actually want like a free text field to describe that.
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That might make a difference, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So and I guess the other thing with the workshop
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versus a talk is that you'll be able to get a little bit of feedback throughout the workshop.
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So have you noticed is the official feedback that you've been getting? Is that
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similar to the feedback that you're getting through the talk to those? I think those line up
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pretty well. One of the nice things about the workshop as opposed to a talk is you can be a lot
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more interactive. So there were a lot of pauses for people to actually look at their
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own site and try a few things that I was talking about and and have that discussion as you go.
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So that that's a little bit more relaxed that way. And I think it allows the
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allows the audience to to really get the most out of something because it's more interactive
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than just a talk. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So this is a I'm wearing one of the t-shirts from another
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Australian conference that I don't get to go to as often as I'd like. And the feedback forms that
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they've taken on in the last few years is a very simple traffic-like system. As you exit the room,
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they just have a few iPads that up. Yeah. It's literally red green yellow. And like the
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advantage of that sort of system is that it's very easy. There's a very low bar to to give feedback
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on. Yep. But of course, the disadvantage is if somebody says it was good or bad,
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we don't know why. Yeah. So yeah, it's this really, really difficult thing and it's
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people are very likely to spout off on insert favorite social media thing here about why they either
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hate it or loved a particular session. But unless we can drag that back into the conference somehow,
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it's very hard to get back in. Yeah. And I guess it's one of those things that should be
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possible for Linux, not for you because the paper team for the main part of the conference
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is pretty much it's not the same every year but it's got the same four group of people for me
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to year to year. So there's a lot of continuity in the papers team. So feedback that they get from
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year to year, they should be able to keep that. Yeah. But to the best of my knowledge, they, apart from
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them attending and hearing SculloBot, I don't think they get much feedback. Yeah.
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Confu does it in a very interesting way which I thought was very labor intensive but it
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actually works really well. They print out little slips of papers of maybe 10 centimeters by 15
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centimeters with just, you know, rating, smiley faces and fronty faces and a couple of lines of
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what was good, what was bad. And they hand that up to all, yeah, attendees at the start of the
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presentation and then they have a volunteer collecting them back. And within a couple of hours,
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they're all scanned and emailed back to the presenter. So you really have that in writing immediately.
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And of course the organizers can refer to the presentation and see that. So that's a fairly
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low tech approach that gives a chance to go gather good feedback. I like the idea of this
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traffic light thing because you're sure to add many more people. Yeah. But as you said then,
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you don't know why they liked it or why they didn't. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those things. I don't,
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I think Lennox has started, I think Lennox is up for you and I have to admit,
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park on a year which I'm a previous organizer of. We haven't really tried a lot of things,
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so we have a lot of room to phone. But you have a lot of room to improve. Yes. Yes.
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So have you been able to see much of the rest of the conference,
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or have you been planning your work? I've seen the developers, the developers,
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MiniCon from Monday. On Tuesday, I was in and out of a few sessions and just finalising a few
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things. I had a mini disaster actually. My keynote presentation got corrupted.
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So I had to rebuild it from a couple backups. That was a little bit of a tense moment. But
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yeah, I've seen a few sessions and it was quite good. Excellent. Yeah. I was helping to organise
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one of the MiniConferences on the Tuesday. So my Monday was short and my Tuesday was just the Mini
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Conf. So yesterday was the first day I had it actually enjoying the conference. But I was exhausted.
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So today I feel like I've got a little bit more energy. Right. And today is the first day I've
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been able to take a few interviews as well. Right. So is there anything you're looking forward to
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for the rest of the conference in particular? Any particular talks or anything? I didn't have any
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sessions particularly flagged at that time thinking, oh, I must get to that because they're all
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good. I tend to have more of an interest in the less geeky technical sessions and there's
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a good mix of that here. So I'm hoping to be able to get around and what happens in a hallway
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between sessions is always so good. Yeah. See, a particular bug bear of mine is that I go to
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conferences to go to the talks and that's totally fine and it doesn't matter. But I have helped
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to organise a lot of conferences and I often explicitly get asked to help organise the hallway
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track which is always great fun because I don't go to the hallway track. So what am I being asked to
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organise the hallway track? So what things should I be doing to make the hallway track better?
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This concept of organising an hallway track for me is foreign. It's weird because that's
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the beauty of it. It's informal, it's organic, it happens a little bit like an on-conference.
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People get together, they have a shared interest and they start talking about it and people can
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join in. On the other hand, people get together, they don't know, they haven't come an interest and
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suddenly you start discussing things and going in the direction you didn't expect and I think
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that's the beauty of the hallway track as opposed to more organised talks is that it's not organised,
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it's organic and maybe it takes a certain personality to enjoy that or get yourself into it so
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maybe people who are more introvert are not as likely to benefit from it. But I don't think it
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should be organised. Yeah, I think for the most part, people want space to move out, space so
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that not everyone is want together and catch us to sit on. As a wheelchair user, I always have
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the best seat in the house so that's not a problem but I can see how that could be something to
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organise for people. Is there anything else you'd like to have on the record? I just want to thank
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the organisers and the volunteers and the attendees and the other speakers because everybody together
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really makes for one of the best conferences in the world, but that's been true. Cheers, thank you very
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much. You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio. We are a community
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podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show, like all our
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