E64 – Interview with Marcy Sutton – Part 1

Marcy tells us that it's important for folks in the accessibility community to listen to developers' needs. She also states that we ought to be more positive, and to stop making people feel bad about accessibility! Transcript Nic:    Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 64. 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 to Marcy Sutton. Hey, Marcy thanks for joining me in this conversation about web accessibility. Marcy:    Hey, thanks so much for having me. Nic:    I like to let guests introduce themselves so in a brief introduction, who is Marcy Sutton? Marcy:    I am a web developer from Washington State. I work at Deque Systems which is an accessibility company. I work on their services team as a developer advocate spreading the word about accessibility testing primarily to mainstream developers so my passion is trying to get people who are in a position to make a difference start to do the work of actually making web accessibility more common and more awesome. So, yeah, that’s what I do. Nic:    Yeah. How does one become a developer advocate rather than just developer? Marcy:    It… for me, it sort of just happened naturally as I got into public speaking. So, I found that there was a huge market for… I mean, there’s so many conferences out there and lots of opportunities to go and talk to the public about any issue that you care about or any technique that you care to talk about. So, over the years I guess I did an okay job that I started getting invited to things and people seemed to want to hear more from me. So gradually I’ve...over the years made it more and more my job and eventually, at DQ I had an opportunity to step into this role as a developer advocate where I’m really trying to do a bit of listening so it’s like inward and outward. So I’m trying to tell people how to make web accessibility happen but also listening to what their needs are and trying to create demos and conference talks that answer common questions and really help people do their jobs better. Nic:    I like that. That it’s not just about what people with disabilities need but it’s also about the needs of developers out there. Marcy:    Yeah sort of like being a bridge between. You know. Trying to remind developers that, like, they might have a disability or… you know. It’s like it can affect all of us at any time and… I don’t know if I directly answered your question about becoming a… going from being a developer to a developer advocate. For me, I don’t think I would be a developer advocate if it weren’t for accessibility. Because I was, you know, a generic web developer just doing the job, doing the best I could and once I learned about accessibility everything changed. So, I think for my particular story. Like, I am an advocate because I care about people with disabilities and I really… if it were solved I would have moved on to something else- Nic:    Yeah Marcy:    - But we know that it’s not. Nic:    Yeah, we do know it’s not solved. Not by a long shot. I’d like to explore that a little bit more in a little bit but before going there… tell us something that most people would not know about you. Marcy:    Gosh. I think lately… I’ve always been pretty outgoing so I probably share a lot of things because I wear my heart on my sleeve all the time but I’d say… I don’t know. Maybe because I present such an optimistic outlook and try to always make the best of it. Something people might not know about me is the hard times. Where I’m really having to dig deep to try and keep that positive spin and it’s not always easy. Nic:    Yeah. Would you say that in our field of accessibility sometimes there's a lot of frustration and that makes it more difficult to keep a