E61 – Interview with Alex Brenon

Alex is a developer who has experienced the difference between baking in accessibility from the start compared to trying to retrofit accessibility into an existing project - which leads to a lot of trial and error and wasted time. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 61. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you. To get today’s show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. This week I’m speaking with Alex Brenon. Thanks for joining me to this conversation around web accessibility Alex. How are you? Alex: I’m good, how are you? Nic: I’m doing very good. Ah, look Alex. I like to let guests introduce themselves so in a brief elevator style introduction. Who's Alex Brenon? Alex: Okay. Yeah, so I’m a relatively recent graduate of Smith College. And since then I’ve been working in blended learning and digital humanities. Which is basically just the intersection between technology and learning and teaching and research. And last year I was given some time and resources to explore whatever facets of technology or career development I was interested in and I chose accessibility and that’s how I got started. Nic: Right. How did you come to pick accessibility? What was the impetus on selecting that particular topic? Alex: I think I’ve always been interested in accessibility. I’m also interested in education and through that making knowledge accessible. In more in the sense of open access so it had been something that I didn’t know anything really at all about but had always kind of thought about. Nic: Right. So how do you weave that into your job day in, day out? What … how do you implement accessibility? What’s your tasks with that? Alex: Well, it’s really interesting for me because last year I was designing new parts of a Drupal website and got to kind of just bake accessibility into that. Whereas this year I am also designing a new Wordpress site but also working with existing ones and so this year it’s much more about trying to figure out how to get accessibility retrofitted or see how we can change things to kind of focus on that. Nic: How do you go about that retrofitting accessibility into an existing site? Alex: It definitely helps that I have done development from scratch before and I’m given all the leeway I want to kind of run with it. But basically, it’s just a lot of trial and error. Honestly just trying to see how to change things that won’t break everything else… Nic: Yeah Alex: ...but make certain parts more accessible. Nic: So you say you’ve been given leeway… how is leadership in the organization you work at supporting you in… specifically giving you leeway? You know, are they saying, “Just go to it” or are they giving specific supports or… What kind of shape and color does that take in your specific job? Alex: So, my department is just my supervisor and I. Nic: Okay Alex: But he’s very supportive of both giving me time and being very open to when I say “we can’t really move forward with this because it’s not going to be accessible” and saying alright,” let’s step back. How can we make this better? “. So, he’s showing.. My supervisor is showing that he’s also committed and interested in making things accessible. Nic: Alex, tell me something that most people would not know about you. Alex: Hmmm… I guess I have done a lot of acting in musicals. Both throughout all of Highschool and then into College. So that's been a pretty big part of my life. Like, outside of work. Nic: Cool. Do you see some similarities between doi