J.J. notes at the top of this interview that the BBQast rarely interviews people within the Remediation and Testing sector of A.T. unless the subject of the interview stands out in a very crowded field. That is why he sat down with Samuel Proulx, Accessibility Evangelist for Fable, to discuss their unique approach to commercially available User Centric testing. In this chat you can hear how A.T. users of varying degrees of knowledge can embark on a pathway towards obtaining testing experience through resources provided by Fable. Additionally, those who are seeking something beyond automated testing can find a talent base curated by Fable from their growing community. To learn more about services offered by Fable, visit the company website or Follow them on Twitter @Makeitfable
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Transcript
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Hide transcriptTranscribed by Grecia Ramirez
Direct from Orlando, Florida; St. Louis; Las Vegas; Dallas; Sparks, Nevada – everywhere – it’s Blindbargains.com virtual Exhibit Hall coverage brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings; access technology; book reviews; and mobile apps and how they can enhance entertainment, education, and employment, log onto AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's free monthly online technology magazine. www.AFB.org/AW.
Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh.
J.J. MEDDAUGH: The virtual Exhibit Hall coverage continues. Last year, when I was at CSUN, I talked a lot with Abid from Fable up in Canada about the awesome things that they are doing with accessibility testing. And it’s an interview we’ve wanted to get for a while. Actually, we’re talking here with Sam Proulx with a brand new title, Accessibility Evangelist at Fable.
Welcome to the podcast.
SAMUEL Proulx: Hey. Super glad to be here.
JM: Absolutely. You know, I’m going to say up front, there’s a lot of accessibility testing, remediation type companies, and we don’t interview most of them. But one of the things that we love about Fable is you’re user-centered approach to accessibility testing. So tell us a little bit about Fable and what you’re up to.
SP: Yeah. So Fable is an accessibility testing, usability testing company that really – we have a strong focus on testing products with users of assistive technology. Because automated testing is out there and it’s a great first step, and it’ll tell you about the buttons that are missing labels and things like that, and it’ll tell you about the errors in the code. But what automated testing cannot tell you about is what is the experience of using a website or an app like for a user of assistive technology? You know, what is it like for a screen reader user to actually go through the shopping flow on your website? What is it like for a Dragon Naturally Speaking user to actually try and find something on your events website or to sign up or – and things like that.
And so what we, at Fable, do is we help companies test products with users who actually use assistive technology fulltime. Because, of course, that’s the other aspect of it, isn’t it? There’s some folks who feel like, well, as a fully sighted person, I’m just going to start up a screen reader, and I’m going to, you know, test my product for ten minutes with a screen reader and see what it’s like. But of course, using any assistive technology is a skill, it’s something that’s learned, and every assistive technology is highly customized to meet your individual needs. I don’t think I know anyone who, say, installs a screen reader and uses it with just the out-of-the-box settings and absolutely no customizations.
JM: Yeah.
SP: So having a fully – a person without a disability who doesn’t rely on the assistive technology to test the product, that’s not an ideal solution either. The only way to really understand if the product is fully – not only fully accessible, but a good user experience for people who use assistive technologies is to have us test it.
JM: So one of the things that you have really done is compiled a large database of users that fit quite a different types of -- personas is a term used in the industry a lot – to really provide to companies and organizations a wide database of users that you can work with them on to provide testing.
SP: Exactly. And, you know, there’s a couple of kinds of values to that centralization and to that platform approach. One, of course, is on the customer side. You’re able to send a task or a flow to us for testing and get it back in, like, a two business day turn-around because we have a pool of testers who are all ready to go.
But the other advantage is on the tester side. If you are a person with a disability and you sign up with Fable, it is flexible, on-demand work that -- you work from home, you work at your own pace, you use your own equipment, and it’s just like any kind of other on-demand work. When there’s testing that you would qualify for, you get an Email and you log onto our platform and you start performing it. Because I know for some folks who perhaps do accessibility testing regularly and want to do this regularly, it can be a hassle; right? You got to travel somewhere, you’ve got to sign NDA’s, you’ve got to go through this contract-signing process, is that accessible? You’ve got to worry about, you know, the payment process, assuming that they’re even compensating you. I mean, too often, you’re compensated for four hours of testing work with a $50 gift card; right?
JM: Right.
SP: But we, at Fable, we believe in fair compensation for assistive technology users because it’s a skill that you’ve learned. And so by centralizing that, once you get trained with Fable and once you get signed up with Fable and sign the contract with us, then you can work with every company that works with us and every customer that works with us without having to sign whole new things and go through a whole new set of processes.
JM: Is the focus mostly for advanced accessibility testers who have a lot of experience, or are you also looking for just regular users who are perhaps decent with the web and also looking for a little extra money?
SP: No. The focus is on all different kinds of users. Now, there is a certain level of expertise required in that, first of all, we do a lot of the kind of remote testing that we do via Zoom, we do a lot of the training that we do via Zoom, and of course, you know, there’s a lot of answering Emails and filling out forms. And so you have to know how to use your assistive technology well enough to get around the web and to do these sorts of things independently, and you have to have the ability to determine, like, is the problem I’m having a problem with the website or is it because I’m misusing my assistive technology; right? But those are pretty basic barriers. We’re not looking for, you know, is familiar with HTML5 and can tell us about landmarks and write CSS every day and knows about JavaScript. That’s not -- I mean, we hire folks like that, but it’s certainly not a requirement of the job. Even if you’ve never done any accessibility testing before, we have the training in place to help you get to where you need to be. My guess would be that if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably have the skills that you need to work for us.
JM: Yeah. I would agree with that probably. How many are in your pool currently?
SP: So we are continuing to grow the pool by leaps and bounds. And we sort of think about the pools as different assistive technologies because depending on what our customers want tested and depending on what kind of testing they are running currently, the demand is very different. And so we work with screen reader users, we work with screen magnification users, we work with users of Dragon Naturally Speaking, we work with users of switch systems, we work with users of things like head mice and eye tracking and things like that. And so we’re always rapidly expanding, and we’re always continuing to expand.
A year ago, we started out with me as the first accessibility tester when Fable first launched. And then we began to build out the community of screen reader users just here in Canada. And once we were comfortable with that, we expanded to screen magnification, we expanded to, sort of, voice control, and we kept adding on and adding on, and just – I believe it was just last year that we expanded into the United States and began hiring folks who can now work with us in the United States as we got all of that process sorted out. And we are now actively looking into sorting out what we need to do to hire internationally.
JM: You know, lots of interest especially in the blindness side. And you told me ahead of time that at the moment, you have that particular category filled, but there’s lots of other categories that you are actively recruiting for currently.
SP: Exactly. We are actively recruiting for basically any type of assistive technology other than screen reader. But you know, when I say that we’re not actively recruiting, we have a waiting list. And what we try to do is make sure that when you are recruited to work with us, there will be work available for you based on the existing customer demand.
So if you’re a screen reader user right now and you sign up, you’ll get a message that tells you you’ve been placed on a wait list, and unlike with many places; right? The wait list just means, oh, well, go away. Stop bothering us – in some cases. The wait list at Fable really is a wait list. And as demand increases for a particular screen reader or for a particular configuration or for screen reader users in a particular location, then we will get back to you and see if you’re still interested in working with us and get the process started.
Because as you know, these days, the segmentation is by assistive technology, but it also has to be a little bit more broad than that, you know? We work with some companies that are Canadian only for various reasons, and of course, we also work with companies who only have product offerings in the United States. And so of course, they would much rather have testers work with them in the United States as opposed to, I don’t know, having to run through a VPN or something.
JM: Sure. So when working with a company, especially a new one, what is the process like to convince them of the importance of user-centered testing as opposed to what they might be doing in the past when it comes to just compliance?
SP: Moving beyond compliance really is the difficult part; right? Because so much of accessibility right now is focused on the guidelines and treat accessibility like a checklist. So it’s like, all right. Check all of these boxes and now you’re done, and now you’re accessible.
JM: Hmm.
SP: But, I mean, it is possible to build a completely WICAG-compatible website -- the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, for those who are unfamiliar with WCAG -- that is still a terrible user experience; right?
JM: Yeah.
SP: But companies don’t think like that. And one of the ways that we help companies understand why this is important is by broadening people’s understanding of disability and of accessibility features. Because too often, companies think about an accessibility feature as something that is only going to benefit what they think of as a tiny percentage of the population. And first of all, it’s not a tiny percentage of the population. It’s something around 16 percent of the population.
But second of all, when you build and test products for the so-called outliers, you make products that are better for everyone. If you think about accessibility features in real life -- if you think about curb cuts, they sure helped folks in wheelchairs, but they wound up benefiting people with strollers, people with grocery carts. Even if you think about accessibility features online. Things like dark mode; right? Really started out as an accessibility feature, but became popularized and now, everybody wants apps that have it. Closed captioning; right? A lot of people now just prefer to watch videos with subtitles, either because they find it easier to process or because they’re in a loud environment like a bar.
And so every time you make something more accessible, what you’re doing is you’re making it more flexible, you’re making it more able to adapt to different types of user needs, and so you’re making it better for everyone, not just for, you know, some tiny fringe of people with disabilities.
JM: Yes. It makes a lot of sense, and I’m sure most of our listeners already know this. But it kind of gives us some points that, when we go to companies and try to convince them to make websites and apps accessible, some of the reasons that we can give than to say, hey, this is more than just me. You’re really going to benefit quite a few people by making these changes.
SP: Exactly. You’ll benefit quite a few people, and you’ll benefit yourself because you will improve your processes so that you’re thinking about more different types of people, and that results in better designs, it results in better code; right? Because the other way that people tend to think about accessibility is at the very end of my development cycle, I’m going to run an accessibility project, and I’m just going to make everything accessible, and it’s one and done, and then I’m not going to think about accessibility for another ten years. And then I’m going to run another project like this. And we help companies to think about accessibility not as a one-time thing like that, but accessibility as a journey and not a one-and-done thing, but as a thing that gets integrated into processes and that you keep doing and that you keep iterating on.
And of course that has a few benefits. First of all, it means that accessibility doesn’t get bolted into products as, like, an add-on; right? I’m sure a lot of your listeners have experience with that. But it also helps to ensure that companies are a little bit more willing to think about accessibility as something iterative. Like, the first time you try to make something accessible, it won’t be perfect. Or you can start out by, you know, making the shopping cart components accessible and then expand accessibility to the rest of the website in a constant ongoing journey as opposed to having to do this one big project and get it all perfect the first time because you won’t; right? There’s always going to be a new assistive technology, there’s always going to be a new standard, there’s always going to be a new browser, et cetera, et cetera.
JM: Yeah. That naturally leads us to the dirty word of the year, AccessiBe. Even though they aren’t the only ones, but they have become the most infamous these days with this having that one line of code that theoretically will fix everything in the world. Now, I know your opinions on AccessiBe, I’m sure, are similar to mine and most listeners, as far as the harm it does to websites, but how has that been when trying to explain to companies the pitfalls of going with an approach like that and how that really isn’t going to help them out?
SP: You know, I think that the pitfalls of approaches like that have been very well-documented by a lot of very well-spoken people, and by -- what is more important to me, they have been well-documented by folks who are assistive technology users and who have lived experience. Because what we are so very focused on here at Fable is saying it’s the assistive technology users’ experience, and they’re in our testing that matters, and that will help tell you whether a product is accessible and what a good approach might be. And so it’s so incredibly helpful to be able to -- not only to point to these are real assistive technology users who are saying this, not just, you know, some accessibility expert in an ivory tower; right?
JM: Yeah.
SP: -- is really what’s incredibly helpful, and it’s that advocacy. And, you know, as Accessibility Evangelist, that’s what I want to do, here at Fable, is not only to continue advocating for what we do and the way we do it, but continue to advocate for the fact that people who use assistive technologies, that our voices are put front and center in this conversation and in this discussion. And I think a lot of companies get that and a lot of companies understand it and hear it, and I think companies more and more are starting to understand the cultural components of things like inclusive design, of things like accessibility, and things like diversity. And so I think a lot of the bigger companies get it.
And I think on the other end, on the, kind of, small businesses who are feeling a lot of compliance pressure, it can be very difficult; right? Because accessibility testing can be a little bit more expensive. And I think one of the places where we focus and where we do a lot of talking at Fable is the platforms; right? So we have a partnership with, for example, Shopify to help them with their accessibility efforts and to help their customers be able to connect with Fable and help them do accessibility better. Because if you can get accessibility at the platform and through a platform approach, then it means that the smaller mom and pop businesses will get accessibility for free, and they shouldn’t have to worry about it and they shouldn’t have to think about it.
JM: Yeah. Essentially talking about tools that small businesses use to put up a shopping cart or a web store or a simple website. And if we can get to all of the major ones and make them accessible, then so many more websites will just work by design.
SP: Exactly. And I mean, if you’re a nontechnical person using a code-free platform or a CMS or something to generates your content and that CMS is putting out inaccessible content, the tool has failed you.
JM: Yes. Absolutely. One of the things that you have done -- companies like hearing about data. And you’ve created a scale called the Accessible Usability Scale. Tell me a little more about that.
SP: Yeah. So the Accessible Usability Scale is actually an adaptation of what’s called SUS, or the System Usability Scale. And the System Usability Scale is an extremely popular, extremely well-known tool in the research community that helps people, after someone has performed a task, understand what the experience of that task was like for them to perform. Unfortunately, in the SUS, or the System Usability Scale, a lot of the questions that it was asking were asked in such a way that the answers that people with disabilities would give would not be helpful or that it winds up asking the wrong type of question. And so we -- what we at Fable did was we adapted SUS to be the AUS, or the A-U-S so that researchers could use a tool that is familiar to them and a tool that they understand, but in a new way and in a way that will work far better for assistive technology users and to help them sort of quantify and understand our experience a little bit better.
So a very good example is the System Usability Scale has a question along the lines of, I would need the help of someone technical to use this system. Now, if you’re an assistive technology user, let’s say there’s one of those forms that’s popped up recently that requires you to draw your signature with a mouse.
JM: Hmm.
SP: You may not need the help of someone technical. You just need the help of someone who’s not using your screen reader.
JM: Right.
SP: Right? And so we’ve sort of adapted those questions in order to be more suited to actually reflecting the experience that assistive technology users are having. And that’s a free tool. It’s available on the Fable website. If you are a researcher listening to this and would like to use it in your usability research and testing projects, you can absolutely go there and take a look and use it. I don’t know if you put links in the show notes –
JM: We will.
SP: -- but it is available –
JM: Yeah.
SP: -- at our makeitfable.com website.
JM: Yeah. And we will have those show notes, of course, at blindbargains.com as well. I just want to ask you a question about – when it comes to usability, there’s a lot of websites -- and probably the ones that are doing more compliance than user testing -- that are now taking the verbosity level up to 11 and making websites -- you almost wish they would go back to the way they were when they weren’t as accessible because now, they’re making everything so verbose that it makes it more obnoxious. But yet, there are some new computer users who may benefit from such adaptations. How do you balance that, and is there, maybe, a need in the future to have some sort of verbosity level for websites like we do for screen readers?
SP: I mean, that’s a tricky one. The first way, of course, that we try to balance it is by doing our very best to make sure, at Fable, that we are not employing, you know, experts to the exclusion of every other type of screen reader user or every other type of assistive technology user and making sure that everybody’s kind of voices are heard from all different skill levels. But I absolutely know what you’re saying. I was on a website recently that had recently changed the graphic from being labeled “link graphic home” to “link graphic, this is the link that returns to the home page,” which is not quite what we want. But, you know, the thing about that label is either of those labels will pass every single automated test in the book.
JM: Yeah.
SP: And so that’s why it’s so important to get to user testing and to get to user experience testing and to do that research and have that understanding of what the needs actually are. Because I think you’re right, that in some cases, more verbosity can benefit certain types of beginner users. But I think there’s a lot of verbosity like the example that I just gave that wouldn’t really benefit a beginner user any more than an advanced user. And I think that we do have verbosity levels in our screen readers, and as long as controls are marked up semantically and well-labeled; right? I think you can probably handle the verbosity needed for different levels of users just within the assistive technology; right? I mean, you can turn off the thing that says “this is a button. Press spacebar to activate” in JAWS, or you can leave it on if you need it. I don’t think that we necessarily want every website to have a tool tip in every button that says, “Press spacebar to activate”; right?
JM: Right. Because if you turn that off somewhere else, you wouldn’t expect it to be there. and you can always tell when they add it themselves, especially if you already had those verbosity settings off in the first place.
SP: Exactly. And I think that gets back into the question that you were talking about earlier of, like, toolbars and overlays and such. The more your website tries to replace the function of someone’s assistive technology, the more you’re going to run into that type of thing, as in someone already has screen magnification or a screen reader installed on their system that they have customized to meet their needs exactly. And if you take it upon yourself to try and perform that function on your own, they now have to have a different setting for every single website, and each website, if they’re using a different add-on, probably is going to have a whole different set of settings available.
JM: Right. Or you’re giving me gesture feedback when I have a keyboard connected to it or some sort of other input device. There’s lots of situations where that can go wrong.
SP: Exactly. And so as much functionality as can be should be handled, I think, within the assistive technology. And the website should focus on offering good labels and semantic markup and a good heading structure and labeled fields and all the other things that can be done to make sure that assistive technology users are having a good experience.
JM: One more hot-button issue before we let you go having to do with websites or developers trying to ascertain if someone has assistive technology installed or being used at the time. Where do you come down on this, and do you feel it’s possible to provide a full experience without having that information?
SP: This is something that we actually get asked about a lot.
JM: Sure.
SP: And I think it is not only possible, but it is important to provide an experience without necessarily knowing what assistive technology somebody is using. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. First of all, because one of the principles of inclusive design is that you are designing a product that will include everybody, and that doesn’t mean building one product for Dragon Naturally Speaking users and one product for JAWS users and one product for ZoomText users; right?
JM: Yeah.
SP: That’s not – that’s not what inclusive design should be done, and that’s not how it is done.
But the second problem is there is an assumption that assistive technology use is a binary thing. So you either use it or you don’t. But ZoomText Fusion, I think, is a very good example of how assistive technology use is not necessarily a binary. If you knew – if a website developer heard -- got the information, oh, this person is using ZoomText Fusion, well, are they using magnification, or are they using a screen reader? And the answer’s going to be that depends. Are their eyes sore and tired this particular day, or are they in a poor lighting situation? Then they’re probably using a screen reader. Or are they just skimming for something quickly? Then they’re probably using the magnification component. But everybody builds systems that meet their particular needs. And so we have folks who are screen reader users who also use a switch system. We have folks who primarily use screen magnification but will often fall back on a screen reader when the magnification isn’t working for them. We have screen reader users who have a little bit of vision and will sometimes use screen magnification to skim for something. And so there’s a lot of intersectionality, and there’s a lot of voice dictation users, some of whom cannot type at all and have to depend on voice dictation for everything, some of whom can still use their mouse but need to use voice dictation when they have to type into a field. So there’s this idea that either you use a technology or you don’t that’s kind of false.
JM: That makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for all the insights. Really do appreciate it. If people wanted to learn more about Fable, what’s the best way to contact you?
SP: Hey. Best thing to do is to go to our website, makeitfable.com. You can also follow us and keep up with us on LinkedIn or on Twitter @makeitfable. As well, if this has sparked your interest, and you are an assistive technology user, you can absolutely visit our Join page at makeitfable.com/community. You can learn more about what the work is like, what work is available, and how to join us. Even if we are not recruiting your particular assistive technology right at this minute, that is likely to change because every month, we’ve had more work available than the previous month, and we’ve continued to grow. So growth is extremely rapid in this space.
JM: Very excited to follow what y’all are doing. Really do appreciate it, and congratulations on the promotion, Sam.
SP: Hey. Thanks. And thanks so much for having me here. It’s been great, and love the podcast.
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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.
