E74 – Interview with Alli Berry – Part 1

Alli tells us how experiencing lack of accessibility for a classmate of hers in the built environment helped her understand the importance of accessibility on the web. 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. You’re listening to episode 74. 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. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS, and video at Twilio.com. This week I’m speaking to Alli Berry. Thanks for joining me with this conversation around web accessibility, Ali. Alli:    Thanks so much for having me. Nic:    So I like to let guests introduce themselves. In a brief intro, who is Alli Berry? Alli:    So I am the SEO and content lead for the Ascent by the Motley Fool. So, if you are familiar with investing at all the Motley Fool is a pretty big brand giving investment advice to people. So, my part of the business, we are a sub-brand of that, and we’re focused on creating free personal finance content, and my job is really to make sure our site is accessible … as accessible as possible for search engines, and to help our pages rank well, and to get our content to as many people as possible. And what’s fortunate about SEO is that often what is accessible for search engines is also what is accessible for humans so by approaching websites from an SEO perspective we’re at least on our way to helping make websites more accessible for humans too. Nic:    Yeah, that’s something I would like to explore a little bit in a moment but to really get warmed up… tell us one thing that most people would not know about yourself. Alli:     Sure. I started my career as an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher in Japan, and what I loved the most about doing that… I did that for a couple of years. I taught special education as well, so I came back to the US, and I really wanted to pursue that field of work so I got a job doing SEO, my very first SEO job, to pay the bills, and then I was doing a Masters in special education at night. And I ended up staying on the SEO path, there’s a lot going on in Chicago public schools at the time, and I decided I should probably just stick with the career path I was on but I’m super grateful that I had that background and experience ‘coz I had to read that ADA and the IDEA and learn about assistive tech, and I feel like having all of that background has really helped me better understand the people component to my job, and who is actually impacted by the decisions that we make on websites. Nic:    That’s interesting to hear about your background in special education. It seems that a lot of people in tech that are interested in accessibility have some kind of background that directly relates to disability in some way. Alli:    Yeah, whether they even realize it or not I think we impact so much, and I think often that gets lost. Nic:    How would you define web accessibility? Alli:    How do I define it? I think it’s allowing people to access content on the internet in the way that they want or need to consume it. Making flexible… making websites flexible enough that they can cater to all needs. Just so that, yeah… it’s important that people can access things in the way that they need to but also thinking about two peoples preferences as well. Nic:    Yeah the aspect of choice I think is important and often forgotten about even though the accessibility guidelines talk about it in a few ways. You men