In this episode of A11y Insights, Thomas Logan and Ken Nakata welcome Nicolas Steenhout, a veteran in the field of digital accessibility with over 30 years of experience. The conversation delves into the early days of digital accessibility, highlighting how personal experiences with colleagues who had disabilities inspired Nicolas to champion accessible web design.
From encountering challenges like image-only menus and inaccessible instructional videos to creating custom user CSS for colleagues with ADHD, Nicolas’s insights offer a rich narrative on the evolution of web accessibility.
The discussion also explores the impact of accessibility laws in Canada, particularly the Accessible Canada Act and provincial laws like the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). Nicolas provides a critical perspective on the effectiveness of these laws, sharing personal anecdotes that illustrate the shortcomings in enforcement and compliance.
Additionally, the conversation touches on the importance of alt text for images, especially in the context of social media, and how photographers can craft meaningful descriptions. Nic also sheds light on the differences in accessibility standards between Canada and the U.S., emphasizing the importance of accessibility in both digital and built environments.
Meet Nic Steenhout
Thomas Logan: Hello, everyone. This is Thomas Logan from Equal Entry here with Ken Nakata of Converge Accessibility. In this episode of A11y Insights, we’re excited to host a special guest. Please welcome Nicolas Steenhout. For the sake of our audience, Nicolas, would you mind telling us a bit about your background and your perspective on web accessibility?
Nicolas Steenhout: Sure. Thanks for having me. I’m Nic Steenhout. I’ve been doing accessibility for about 30 years now. I came to digital accessibility from the world of independent living. So, it’s a movement that is by and for disabled people to basically increase our independence. I was playing with websites and then in the space of about three weeks, I had a colleague who was blind.
He came into the office and he says, “Nic, what’s this website? My screen reader says, image, image, image, image, image, image.” And this was the days when we were using Photoshop slices to be able to use nice fonts. And the entire menu was image of text without actually text alternatives.
So, that started my wheel going in. “Oh yeah, that’s interesting.” Then I had a colleague who was deaf, who was really angry because the instructions for her new wireless printers were on a DVD with a video and no caption. So, that was kind of like the second penny dropping and then I had another colleague who had ADHD and she came in and she says, “Nic, these websites are so distracting, please help me.” And we did basically a custom user CSS before that was a real thing.
Between these three things, my passion for built environment accessibility and my interest in the web, then suddenly I started thinking about web accessibility and these were the days before even the first version of WCAG. So from there, I’ve done a lot of work around auditing, of course, and consulting and teaching and training. That’s where I’m heading now these days is a lot more around training people and teaching about accessibility.
How Do Canada’s Accessibility Laws Work?
Ken Nakata: Okay, Nic, we understand that you’re from Canada.
Nicolas Steenhout: Yes.
Ken Nakata: Obviously, Thomas and I are from the United States and we deal with a lot of lawyers down here who are suing over web accessibility. We’re also really excited about the passage of the Accessible Canada Act. Do you think that that’s going to be a big driver for accessibility in Canada?
Or do you think it’s still going to be mostly things like the provincial laws, like the AODA that going to be driving accessibility up there.
Nicolas Steenhout: I’m afraid I’m rather cynical about the whole thing. I don’t think that Accessible Canada Act is going to be a massive driver in part because it’s a little bit like Title II of the ADA. It is only for government entities. It’s not going to have a direct impact on businesses, on corporations. And, to a point, I’m not even sure it’s going to have a direct impact on government entities, or at least not quickly.
And at the same time, I think that provincial laws like the AODA, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, is a failure, really, let’s be frank. It’s been around for many years. There’s been several deadlines that says you have to have your website accessible, and it’s not working. Of course, the AODA covers more than the web and I’m going to tell you a personal experience of mine that’s actually recent just to illustrate that.
I booked myself into a hotel recently in Ontario just before Christmas and the website for the hotel said they allowed dogs and I showed up with my service dog and they said, “Oh, we can’t rent you. You have a dog.” So, first they changed their perspective as to whether or not they allowed dogs. But when I pointed out, “Well, he’s not a pet, he’s a service dog. He’s properly trained and all that. And under the law, you cannot refuse to rent me.”
They basically said, “Nah, sorry, we don’t care.” This was at 10 PM and every other hotel room in the little town was rented. So we ended up having to drive through the night, which obviously was no fun and all that stuff. And when I started looking at actually lodging a complaint, you have to lodge a complaint through the Ministry of Seniors and Accessibility. And I sent an email to them and it took three weeks to get an answer back saying, “Oh yeah, okay, we’ve received your complaint. We’re going to file it for future use. If we get more complaints, then we’ll maybe do some education with them.” And they said, “If you want, you can file a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.”
And, I looked at that and basically the Human Rights Tribunal has very little power. So, this idea that a business can be fined 2,000 dollars for refusing to accept someone who is with a service dog is basically a joke. And I’m extrapolating that experience to the digital world. Neither the Accessible Canada Act nor the AODA, or similar laws in Manitoba and Quebec and all that. I don’t think we have a good solution in Canada.
Thomas Logan: Wow, you’re, blowing my mind. Down here in the U. S. feel like Canada’s got this going way better than we’ve got this here in the U. S. and hoping to hear that experience was different. I mean, that’s difficult.
Nicolas Steenhout: We don’t have a culture of lawsuits in Canada, basically. And the regulations have been written in such a way that there’s no stick, there’s enticement, there’s no enforcement of provisions. So, it comes down to voluntary compliance and let’s face it without a ton of education, and a little bit of a stick, voluntary compliance just doesn’t happen.
Thomas Logan: Yes, so hopefully still working then for a change. I mean, we hope here in the U.S. that the Title II change will have some effect on private organizations that are selling into the government and hopefully having a ripple effect that way. But, you know..
Nicolas Steenhout: I can tell you that at least with the clients I’m working with, yes, people are becoming aware and yes, “Oh, we need to make things accessible if we want to sell to government entities.” It is having a bit of an effect and I hope that they’re going to come out with Title III and, then that’ll be good.
Thomas Logan: Yes.
Nicolas Steenhout: Maybe in four years.
Example of an Organization Doing Accessibility Well
Thomas Logan: Switching gears a little bit, just wanting to talk about accessibility and enterprise. And I know you’ve worked with lots of organizations. I was curious, just what organization in Canada would you say exemplifies some of the best accessibility processes? Or maybe like when you hold up as a great example of doing accessibility well.
Nicolas Steenhout: So most of my clients are actually in the States. But I did some work with Cirque du Soleil a few years ago, and they were really interested in making things work.
But to be honest, the ones for me that shine are actually government organizations. Service Canada and the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada really come to mind. They have staff that really know about accessibility and are really pushing for that, and actually it matters. It’s not perfect. There’s nothing that’s ever perfect, but, I would say these two government organizations are really putting in the hard work to transform towards a fully accessible experience.
So, that is not completely depressing that Canada is not accessible and all that. No, no. There’s good stuff happening. And there might be more enterprise, but because I really pay more attention to what’s going in the states. I can’t tell you beyond. Definitely Cirque du Soleil and these two Canada government organizations.
Ken Nakata: Are there some innovative practices from some hypothetical company?
Nicolas Steenhout: I can say that in the realm of remote telehealth applications, there is one that is really understanding that it’s not just about conformance, it’s not just about compliance and that meeting the guidelines is not actually necessarily being accessible and it’s a slow process but they are making changes for the best.
Thomas Logan: And how are you able to get them to think that way?
Nicolas Steenhout: It’s been a four-year-long process of educating, educating, talking, incrementing, starting from an audit to how do we solve this to how do we make sure it’s solved before we go to an audit to starting to think outside the box of WCAG.
A really powerful tool is using a recorded usability test with disabled users. So, when a property has passed three different external auditors’ audits and then the blind guy using NVDA is actually completely stuck and cannot go forward in the process, that’s really the “aha moment” for most people.
Ken Nakata: Perfect. I think that we would advocate for the same thing. It’s often in the United States because we’re such a litigious culture.
We have clients that really want to get to some level of compliance so that they can say, “Oh, we won’t be sued anymore.” But that really doesn’t get them to true accessibility, which is I think it really means you’ve got to be truly usable for people with disabilities.
Nicolas Steenhout: I think one powerful argument to be made also is that accessibility is a quality issue. If you would push something that’s not accessible, you don’t have quality and you wouldn’t push something that is not performant or that is not secure and those three factors of quality on a website: accessibility, performance, security. It’s three legs of a stool, you take one off and everything falls apart.
Thomas Logan: I totally agree, and I often think too, that it sounds like something that people are like, “Oh, yeah, of course you say that,” but I’m like, it’s really true that if the site’s accessible, it’s more usable. People are going to like it more.
Going with that, I was looking at your website and I really like the summary feature that you put into your blog articles. I think that’s a good example of something that’s not necessarily a WCAG guideline, but it’s a cool feature of your site. I was curious, like when you decided to start doing that and how’s your process of putting them
Nicolas Steenhout: Thank you! So, actually it is a WCAG guideline. It just happens to be a AAA level. I’ve been interested in plain language for about 20 years. So, as part of that is my understanding that we have people that have all different levels of ability to read and understand, and time and pressure and all that.
So, I’ve been playing around with that idea for a while and when I did my redesign, my new site, last year, I remembered that Lainey Feingold, accessibility lawyer, is doing that on her site. And I thought, “Hey, it’s actually a great idea. It doesn’t cost very much to write a two sentence, three sentence summaries and let’s do it.”
And, I’m glad you think it’s a good idea because I’ve had people coming to the site and say, “Hey, you know what, reading the summary helped me understand the rest of the content without having to puzzle it out. So, I think it’s a win.
Photography and Alt Text
Ken Nakata: Nic, we understand that you’re an avid photographer and recently you wrote a post on writing alt text for social media for photography. Do you have any thoughts on a good length for a description?
So, in the past, for instance, people tried to keep them really short for screen reader compatibility, but it seems that social media now is possible to include a lot more characters. So, is it better to be longer or do you think it’s better to be shorter?
Nicolas Steenhout: The rule of thumb is that the alt text for an informative image should be clear and concise. Right? But it should also contain all the necessary information. There’s been a lot of people talking about you alt text should not be more than 200 characters or not more than 400 characters or whatever. The reality is there is no technical limitation on the length of alt text, number of character and whatnot.
There comes a point where the length of the alt text becomes counterproductive because a screen reader can start reading the alt text, can interrupt reading the alt text, but they can’t pause reading the alt text.
So, if you have screens of content then it becomes problematic you’d better off to do a textual description later on and link to that. I think for me. I really keep to the principle of clear and concise, but in the context of wildlife photography, like I do – bird photography, I like to describe the birds.
So, what breed is the bird? What colors? Is the bird using a particular pose that is different than something that what you would typically come across? If there are colors that are striking, if the sky is a particularly brilliant shade of blue then you say that. If there’s anything about the environment the bird is in, you can describe that. So you, try to include all the information that is visually salient without going into screens of text.
I find usually in three or four sentences I’m done. Sometimes it’s just one sentence is enough. The problem with alt text, particularly in the context of social media with people that aren’t used to doing it is people aren’t used to do it and they don’t know what to do and they don’t know how and, it feels awkward.
It’s one of these things that once you start writing alt text, the more you do it, the easier it gets. I don’t think there’s a specific length. I think too long is too long. And how do you determine too long is if you’ve gone overboard with describing in minute detail? One finger of the bird is bent one way and the other is bent the other way and there’s only so much information that is actually useful.
Thomas Logan: Yeah, I find it very interesting to us, like, as part of, almost the artistic process. I mean, if some artists may not be into this, but it kind of actually validates maybe a reasoning for choosing specific pictures that get shared. I mean, the ideas of what drew you to a particular piece to share.
And I think it’s one of those things that I often wish, I mean, I think some platforms can have this, but I wish the alt text was visible or like the preference to sort of more people always benefit from it because I feel like when I wrote them, I felt like, “Oh, this is kind of something.” Me thinking that way.
I’m like, “I like thinking that way.” And it’s sort of wonderful.
Nicolas Steenhout: I think photographers and artists writing alt text for their own work, surfaces how they feel about the work and what they think is important about the work. Certainly on LinkedIn, we can’t expose that and sometimes I repost the thing but then it creates duplication for screen reader users so that there’s issues there.
Write it. Keep the principle of plain language in mind, you know, front load the important information.
What is it? What’s it doing? And where is it doing it? That ultimately for wildlife photography, I can rewrite that that’s what is really important. It’s worth remembering I said it earlier, but I’ll say it again. If a screen reader user is not interested in what they’re hearing for the alt text, they can skip it! It’s better to put stuff there even if it might not be useful than not have anything. Because in the context of social media, every image is actually an informative image.
Ken Nakata: I know this is apropos of nothing, but, as you were saying that, Nic, I couldn’t help but thinking about descriptions that wine critics make of different bottles of wine.
Nicolas Steenhout: Yeah.
Ken Nakata: It really comes down to what is it good for? Why is it important? I could write a review of a bottle of wine. “Oh, it gets me drunk.” That’s probably not a really good description. But, what does it taste like? What does it pair well with? Things like that, the purpose of the wine, basically.
Nic, you were mentioning earlier about accessibility and your experience with your guide dog, and it just made me wonder how is accessibility in terms of the built environment in Canada?
Nicolas Steenhout: The built environment in Canada is quite different from the U.S. It’s good and bad because there’s been parts of accessibility covered into the Building Act. So it’s not a separate law, like under the ADA or under the Fair Housing Accessibility Amendments Act. So, we have things that they are accessible. We have ramps. We have accessible bathrooms in commercial environment. In housing, it’s a lot more difficult. You don’t really encounter a lot of accessible housing.
One of my friends a long, long time ago, came to Canada and she was visiting from the States. And she said, “It’s amazing because in the States, if I want to use a public bathroom, I have to look for the sign that, yeah, there’s the ISO, the wheelchair symbol. But here, I can go in to into just about any bathroom, whether there’s a sign or not, and it’s going to be accessible somewhat.” But, it’s maybe not as good today as it was 20 years ago, because we seem to have done a lot of progress and then kind of slowed down.
But overall, it’s not bad. It’s not bad.
Thomas Logan: Great. And how can people get in touch with you, Nic?
Nicolas Steenhout: My website, nicolas-steenhout.com. That’s nicolas-steenhout.com.
That’s probably the best way. There’s contact information there, phone number, email, contact form, etc.
You can also find me on Bluesky (Nic) if you want to see some of my wildlife photography and my handle is my domain name.
Thomas Logan: Great. Thank you so much for being with us here today, Nic and I have checked out your photography on Bluesky. It’s awesome. And I’m using Bluesky (Thomas). Hope more people use Bluesky. It’s a great community on there.
And so for those of y’all listening today, we’d love to hear from you. Let’s continue the conversation.
Please add any comments onto our post, wherever you see this content, we’ll be happy to respond and have a conversation with you. Thank you so much for your time for listening and we’ll see you in our next episode.
References
- Nic’s Website
- Thoughts on Nielsen Statement about Accessibility
- Alt text for artists and photographers
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