E66 – Interview with Beth Raduenzel – Part 1

Beth is an accessibility specialist and a UX interaction designer. She was part of an award winning team at United. She compares acceptance of the need for accessibility as the 5 stages of grief. Transcript Nic: Welcome to the A11y Rules Podcast. This is episode 66. 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 Beth Raduenzel. Thanks for joining me, Beth, for this conversation around web accessibility. How are you? Beth: I'm great. How are you? Nic: I'm doing good. I'm doing good from gray and rainy Pacific Northwest today, so it's good. I hear you had a bit of snow in your end in Chicago. Is that right? Beth: Yeah. It's snowing right now. It's beautiful. It looks like I'm inside of a snow globe. Nic: Oh, that's cool. Beth: It's- Nic: Yeah. Beth: ... so great to be home and looking out the window. Nic: It's fantastic place to be at. First snow is always quite fun. Beth, I like to let guests introduce themselves. In a brief introduction, who's Beth Raduenzel? Beth: I am an accessibility specialist, and I am a UX interaction designer. I started with visual design, and I moved into web design, and I moved into user experience, and I found that accessibility was really something that I could grab ahold of, because you're not only helping people to have a better web experience as far as accessibility is concerned. In some cases, you're actually allowing people to have a web experience, so it feels really good to have a job where I can help people. Nic: Yeah. That's good. Beth, to get started, tell me one thing that most people would not know about you. Beth: Okay. I think most people would not know that I have attention deficit disorder. It's something that I did not personally find out until I was in my 30s. Once I realized this, I feel like a lot more things made sense in my life, but even after learning, it's something that I kept very close and I didn't want anyone to know, because I was afraid that it would affect how I was perceived, so- Nic: Did it? Beth: It hasn't now. I just started telling people, actually, a couple years ago when I got into a position at a company where I felt that they were very open-minded, and inclusive, and non-judgmental. I felt like I could come out with that, and it wouldn't be held against me. When I tell people, I usually also add that having ADD, it's not all bad, actually, because the way that my brain works is different than the way that other people's brains work, and so I'm oftentimes able to come up with solutions that most people wouldn't have thought of, because I can make these really odd connections between things that you wouldn't normally associate. Nic: Have you found that having ADD has caused barriers for you on the web? Beth: Yeah. It has, actually. There is one website that I absolutely will not use. It's Bing.com, be- Nic: Oh, yeah. Beth: When it came out, I thought, "Well, I'll give it a try," and they have this background with these really interesting pictures, and I'll see the pictures, I go to this website because I want to look something up. It's like a Google, if people don't know what it is, and you go there, and you want to search for something, and I get so distracted by these images. The one time that I can recall, I went there to search for something, and there was an image of people sitting in a natural hot spring in the snow with monkeys. Immediately, I thought, "Where is this? I want to go there. I would like to sit in a hot tub with monkeys." I had to research this, and after about an hour, I realized I had no idea what I had been searching for, but I was planning a trip to Japan. Nic: Right. Yeah. I can see that being an issue. Thank you. We're talking about web accessibility today.