#4 Léonie Watson – For a Better Web

[Bruce:] Hello, everybody. It’s once again time for a new installment of the For a Better Web podcast, in which I, Bruce Lawson, Technical Communications officer of Vivaldi, have a convivial fireside chat –and then waterboard– somebody who, in their own way, in their own community, is fighting for a better web. And today, I’m very honored to have as my guest, somebody who, she’ll be horrified to learn, somebody whom I consider to be a friend. Léonie Watson, all the way from sunny Bristol in the United Kingdom.

And Léonie is one of the founders and directors of an accessibility consultancy in the UK called TetraLogical, based in the UK but working worldwide, as we all do. And, somebody who’s got her fingers in lots of pies at the W3C. So hi, Léonie, and we thank you very much for joining us. How are you today?

[Léonie:] Hello. Yeah, I’m really well and all the better for being here and chatting to you, of course.

[Bruce:] I’m very sorry I accused you of being a friend. We can edit that out later. You can always send us a cease and desist letter. How long we’ve known each other? I mean, it’s got to be nearly 20 years when we actually first met in person. The British Standards Institution was it?

[Léonie:] And that might have been the time we sort of first really, you know, hung out for a while together. I think the first time I met you was one of the “at media” [conferences] in the middle 20s: 2005, 2006 maybe something like that. So yes. Yeah. Gosh.

[Bruce:] British Standards Institution, we were part of the committee drafting the, immortal BBS 8878. Do you remember what its title was?

[Léonie: No. To be honest with you, it’s a part of my life I try very hard not to think about.

[Bruce:] Yes, yes. Those kind of committees can be quite tedious. It was a it was a standard for commissioning accessible website. So tell us, Léonie; for people watching, maybe you can see. People listening: you can’t. You are a full time screen reader user, I believe. But you weren’t born blind, were you? Do you want to tell us your journey there?

[Léonie:] Sure. Yes. You’re right. So I lost my sight just around the turn of the century. Before that, I’d been working as a web designer, as we used to call them back in the day. So I’d, actually, done a performing arts degree, or equivalent of, quite quickly realized I wasn’t going to become as famous as I thought I would like to be. Got a job. And it just happened to be working on the tech support helpdesk for one of the first ISPs in the UK. As a consequence of that, came across this thing called HTML, and then this thing called CSS, and decided it really quite liked it.

It kind of tapped into the creative part of my brain. And, the bit of me that’s always quite like sort of technical engineering stuff. So yeah, it was working, working as a web designer until 2000, when I lost my sight. I took a bit of time out, as you might imagine. Went back to work and it’s happen to go to a company that built websites but had a strong interest in kind of UX or usability, as it was more often called back then, and accessibility. I got introduced to accessibility as a kind of topic, and really kind of got bitten by the bug.

Not because I can’t see, and I kind of wanted to fix all things for me, although, yeah, having a vested interest is absolutely useful. It’s more about the problem solving, just this whole idea of there’s this thing that doesn’t work for as many people as it could do, should do. How do we take it apart and put it back together in a way that does? And that’s the bit I like. And, you know, even now, you know, we’re working at TetraLogical with some organizations that are really kind of pushing interface design.

They’re coming, you know, really complex, interface components and things that haven’t got documented patterns. There aren’t blueprints out there. They can they can just copy, so flexing those kind of creative muscles and going, yeah, how the hell do we do this? And make sure that, yeah, what’s good for me as a blind person works for someone who’s deaf, works for someone who’s got learning disabilities, whatever it may be. That’s the fun of it for me. I think.

[Bruce:] So when you lost your sight, there were there was already a web, which you’ve been working on. So you knew the nuts and bolts of it. And presumably there were, you know screen readers already available on consumer computers. And there’s presumably it’s pre-mobile days, but from the time that you needed them, there was assistive technology available, I’m guessing?

[Léonie:] Yes, they did exist, but in a much more limited way than they do now. So Macs didn’t have a screen reader at all. Not one. Not one that came with it, not one that you could install. So Windows was your your only choice, which worked well for me, because I was, and always have been, a windows user by choice. But screen readers back then were all proprietary. Hellishly expensive. You know, hundreds of pounds expensive. And that was, you know, 25 years ago. Now, of course, as you said touchscreen devices have come along and the screen reader landscape has, has changed.

Mac and iOS come with with an integrated screen reader. Windows has got one. There’s also a free open source screen reader for Windows. Android’s got a built in screen reader, so it’s lovely. You know, back when I lost my sight, you had to use windows and you had to pay for your screen reader. Now you can choose the platform you want because it’s the platform you want, not because it’s the only one with the assistive tech on. So that’s been a really lovely change over the past a couple of decades.

[Bruce:] It’s great. And presumably, if we’re talking the early 2000, there was at least an awareness in the web development industry of accessibility because it was 2000, that landmark court case took place – Mr. Bruce Maguire, if I remember correctly, name who sued the Sydney Olympics committee because he couldn’t buy a ticket to the Olympics, with a screen reader.

And I from what I remember, there were already guidelines from the W3C about accessibility or was WCAG… (that’s the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, for the folks listening at home) … had WCAG come out yet?

[Léonie:] Yes, the first version came out in 99. So yes, they predated the the Sydney case. By about a year, I would imagine. To be honest with you, I don’t recall now whether they were cited in the case against the Sydney organizing committee for the Olympic Games, because that case was, you know, 2000 when the Olympic Games were. So I imagine they probably were, because absent sort of WCAG, there was nothing else to sort of frame a complaint around in, in terms of guidelines. Yeah, they did exist anyway.

[Bruce:] And, and they’ve continued … now we’re on WCAG 2.2, I think. And I think the third version is grinding through the sausage factory that is the W3C. I believe.

[Léonie:] It is. That’s a very good way to describe it. It’s a long way off yet. Yeah, at least a couple or three years, I would imagine. Because it is going to be a revelation rather than an evolution. Even a jump from 1.0 to 2.0 back in 2008 was an evolution of sorts. You know, there were still three levels–that didn’t really change. Some stuff did change, but but it wasn’t even an an entire reinvention…. And of course, 2.1, 2.2 has just carried on, evolving the original 2.0.

(WCAG) 3 is going to be quite substantially different, because at least some of the goals are to to fix some of the inherent problems we’ve got with the current versions of WCAG. They don’t, for example, cater very well to criteria around people with cognitive disabilities, because what can 2.0 is very much predicated on can it be tested? Is it a yes answer or a no answer? That’s the theory anyway. It doesn’t look like that in practice. But when you’re dealing with something like ADHD or anxiety or something like that, stuff gets complicated because people are complicated. And when you add in neurodivergence to the the mix stuff gets really complicated.

And it’s not a simple yes/ no binary answer. So that’s one of the things that that we’re really hoping 3.0 will let us better do, which is reflect more people’s disabilities and needs.

[Bruce:] So this is this is a good thing if it’s tech taking into account neurodiversity, cognitive disability, etc.. But like you say hard because what might be great for somebody with autism might not be great with somebody who’s got anxiety or ADHD. And how do you square that circle? What is it all about letting people choose their interface more or…?

[Léonie:] It may well be, that’s that’s one of the reasons this is going to take a little while is because they’re not easy questions to answer. And of course, then whatever it is we come up with, we’ve got to make it into a technical standard. At the end of the day, this has to be a usable document. So yeah, there’s some big challenges, but I absolutely believe this is necessary now. Physical access has served as well. But for those of us old enough to remember the last days when WCAG 1 was still the official standard, we were bending it to the point of breaking because the web platform had moved on, we understood more about people. And we’re at that same point now with WCAG 2, I think, there’s just too much in there that we’re having to kind of bend the rules on and try to make it work.

[Bruce:] Yes. And there’s lots of sort of exegesis involved. And what exactly do they mean by “color contrast”? What exactly does does that word mean? What was the intention? Yeah, it’s very complex.

Folks at home (or wherever you’re listening to this): TetraLogical is a commercial consultancy that Léonie and some of her chums founded. But TetraLogical as an org does lots of work with W3C and standards, etc., don’t you? So that’s presumably –unless I’ve really misunderstood the business model of the W3C– that’s pretty much pro bono work that you are doing, rather than billing clients for stuff. Why? Why do why do you do that? Are you just lovely saintly people?

[Léonie:] You’ve met us before I think you know that not the case!

[Bruce:] Exactly. That’s why I’m asking you publicly!

[Léonie:] It’s really because TetraLogical, when we we founded it, we put together four principles, that we wanted to use to, to, to guide everything we do. Around being ethical, inclusive, original, yeah, all of those kind of things. And being part of the W3C really speaks to that. W3C’s always felt to us like an amazing community. We can we can be there. We can take part in, you know, working groups and activities that are producing standards that pretty much the entire web uses in some way, shape or form.

And it’s important to have people with disabilities involved in that conversation. It’s really important for accessibility, amongst many other things, to be throughout that, that whole conversation. So if we can get involved and help keep moving that forward, that seems like a really good idea and a worthwhile thing to spend some of our time on when we’re not working on billable projects.

The fact that we can turn up there as a company of what are we now? 12 people? And I can have a conversation with representatives from Apple, Microsoft, Google, from, universities from pretty much every sector, and dimension and size and shape of company. You know, that conversations that we as a company couldn’t have anywhere else.

We have that ability to influence and change and shape people’s minds and do all of those things. So yeah, it just seems like a worthwhile, worthwhile thing to do.

[Bruce:] Amen to that. And, and also it has… a useful, workable standard makes your jobs easier when dealing with clients.

You know, if you can say I, I wrote this bit of the standard or I was there. I know what this means. That makes you potentially more attractive as somebody to hire rather than, you know, Joe Cowboy’s Accessibility Limited. (And if there is a Joe Cowboy’s Accessibility Limited, I’m terribly sorry, I made that up. Please don’t send me a cease and desist letter.) It’s good, isn’t it, because it puts the name Tetralogical out there. You get invited to speak at events, you in the plural. Okay, I know that lots of your your chums at Tetralogical are involved with stuff. And you personally are a co-chair of the Webapps working group at W3C. Is that is that right?

[Léonie:] Yes it is, yes. I co-chair it with, Marcos Cáceres from Apple at the moment.

[Bruce:] I knew Marcos Cáceres when he was Marcos Cáceres at Opera, and at Mozilla. So could you tell us people don’t tell us briefly. Tell us in as much space as it needs. What is the web Apps working group? What’s the remit? What? What do you what are you actually working on?

[Léonie:] So I jokingly refer to it as the odd sock drawer of W3C working groups because, we have actually an uncommonly large number of specifications on our charter. And they’re generally unrelated to each other. So we have things like the GamePad API, Indexeddb. Pointer lock, screen orientation, intersection observer. So it really is just a sort of collection of APIs and specifications, `eeyou know, all browser implemented specifications. So, yeah, it’s kind of hard to describe, which is why the “odd sock” description. But yeah, that’s what we do.

[Bruce:] That’s got to be incredibly hard to get your head around. I mean, I once tried to read the Indexeddb specification, which is why my hair’s white. And again, for people back at home, Indexeddb is a storage mechanism inside browsers so that a web app (if there’s a difference when a “web app” and a “website”; that’s a point of contention). But on on the spectrum between site and app, you know, you might want to be storing client data in the browser, so you don’t have to do server round trips, etc. but that’s a very different beast from, say, pointer lock, which is as far as I know, largely concerned with gaming. For example, so that your cursor or mouse pointer might be on the on the Pac-Man or on the spaceship that you’re controlling or whatever. How do you personally managed to keep all this stuff in your head at the same time?

[Léonie:] Webapps is lucky in that the people who participate are almost exclusively browser engineers from one company or another, as you might imagine. And we’ve got a really, really capable set of editors. But the editors are not the same for every spec. So most working groups will work on a small number of specification, sometimes even one. So they’ll have 1 or 2 specifications, probably the same editors working on them. In web apps. We have different sets of editors working on pretty much every single spec.

But they’re all an absolutely wonderful group of talented people in every case. And so there’s really just good knowledge from each of them on the spec they’re editing, as you might imagine. I’ve got Marcos. He’s a browser engineer himself, so he is the one of the two of us who really gets in amongst the the weeds of the kind of the engineering side of the specs.

I generally try to keep pace. Sometimes I fail quite often, like failed, but tend to help out more with the kind of the logistical side of things. And that works really well because I don’t need to understand it in the way that a browser engineer does, because I can I can trust Marcos, my co-chair. I can trust the the editor engineers to know what they’re up to and the rest of the working group to comment, provide review and feedback.

And when we get to the point of releasing specs, of course, the wider community, the horizontal review groups for accessibility, privacy, security, internationalization and such. So that’s kind of how I make it work. I don’t make any pretense to being a browser engineer. But yeah, don’t really need to.

[Bruce:] What are these horizontal review groups? I haven’t heard that term before. So every spec has to go to an accessibility review group and an internationalization review group, etc?

[Léonie:] Yep. This has been part of the W3C process for certainly as long as I can remember. Probably an awful lot longer than that. So yes, there are, accessibility, internationalization, privacy and security and, early stages of development process, which is, sustainable, review.

And the idea is, is that at least twice in its evolution from being what we call a “first public working draft”, so the very first version of a spec that gets written up, right through to the point where it becomes close to an official recommendation of the W3C. At least two points the spec has to undergo review by those horizontal groups and call them horizontal because they they span everything the W3C does.

And I think it’s unique in in standards organizations. And it’s one of the reasons I really like the W3C is because from the get-go, they’ve acknowledged that these things are actually bloody important. And we need to bake them in. You can’t just come along and pay lip service to them. So yeah, that’s that’s a core part of how how standards are developed.

[Bruce:] I have had much less to do with the W3C than you. But of the things I’ve always admired, when we were doing HTML inverted commas 5, there was a really good document about the design principles of HTML, which was very much baked to those things in as well. We we must consider internationalization because it’s a world wide web. We must consider accessibility because it’s not only for people who can control a mouse and see a screen. And those things are baked in right from the start. Which means, of course, that the process can be slower. But that’s a good thing.

[Léonie:] Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, by the time something is released by the W3C as a recommendation, you can trust in the fact that it’s undergone these reviews at least twice, the issues have been addressed. And that’s probably worth calling out specifically, is that if the security, review turns up something that’s pretty disastrous, it has to get fixed before the spec can kind of move on to its next, next milestone release.

So it’s not just that the review happens. Stuff’s got to get fixed before it goes. So from the point of view of people who want to consume and use these standards, you’ve got a reasonable degree of trust that actually: yeah, accessibility has been thought about; privacy has been thought about security.

And because W3C also looks at implementation experience. So has everything in the spec been implemented in at least two things: browsers for the browser specs, e-readers, whatever it may be, doesn’t matter. Again, from the point of view, as a person using one of these technologies, you’ve got a reasonable way to kind of think, actually, this is going to be usable in production.

If it if it’s supported in Safari, in Chrome, for example. Yeah, actually you’ve got pretty good production coverage in whatever it is you want to build if you want to use that, that technology. And I think that’s a good thing from, from a kind of working design, a developer point of view.

[Bruce:] And production, of course, in the case of a browser spec is, well, 4.5 billion people potentially using it in one browser or another. I mean, this is, the biggest “production” (in inverted commas) that it’s ever been possible to have, in the world, in tech. And it’s all got to be backwards compatible to or at least, it’s quite extraordinary. Anything works at all, isn’t it?

[Léonie:] It is. I often think that, but you’re right. But yet somehow the group of companies that come together at the W3C manage to make it happen. And yeah, it is remarkable. You’re right.

[Bruce:] I assume with a lot of the web app specs, you know, things like pointer lock and, no screen lock and full screen and all of these things that people want, particularly on mobile devices, to make things look more app like. I assume a lot of these specs have actually been implemented by somebody in a proprietary manner first, and then they retrospectively get standardized, much in the same way that ten, 15 years ago we we took things like video, that were the province of Flash, and use that experience of the people that implemented it and brought them in to the W3C to get them implemented, implementing it into the standard.

So these things don’t just get dreamed up one day by you in the shower. It’s somebody who has seen this in Safari or seen this on iOS, or written it in Chrome, written on Android, and then wants to bring it to the world wide web. Is that how it works? So how does the spec get kicked off?

[Léonie:] I mean, yeah, it certainly can work that way. You know, there’s a a native platform feature that that people think, actually, we should have this in the browser. Usually, spec, certainly in the web apps kind of sense. You know, they originate with one or more browser engineers from one of the companies that usually produce the engines rather than browsers themselves, but, yeah.

And they will kind of start working on an incubation idea. There’s a community group which is open to the public, the web incubator community group, and that’s where you can pitch ideas, see if there’s any other interest from other implementers of the browser vendors, and start kind of fleshing out the ideas.

And yes, you’re right, you know, there will be a certain amount of implementation that goes on before it shifts onto what we call the rec track. The recommendation track moves into a working group like web apps or something like that. But, you know, sometimes these these ideas are a kind of really new, because they don’t exist outside the browser.

Yeah, that there’s something… But you’re right… There is a definite kind of “we can do this somewhere else. Why can’t we do this in the browser?” Any kind of thinking that goes into it for sure.

[Bruce:] Which is great because it means if somebody has implemented it, albeit in a proprietary way, there is experience of the potential pitfalls. Somebody somewhere might have thought on that proprietary platform how to expose this to assistive technology, how to ensure that it works with right to left languages. So it’s somebody coming with prior knowledge. But it’s interesting that … Is it usually somebody who’s implemented this in a proprietary platform comes and says, let’s put it on the web, because it strikes me that that’s kind of weird, that somebody might want to give up a competitive advantage and put it on the web. Why would they do that?

[Léonie:] I don’t know that they do. I certainly not think of any examples off the top of my head. As I say, most, you know, if we looking at the sort of the functional feature type specs in web apps, most of them do come from browser teams. Where they got the idea from is not always obvious. I don’t think I can think of any time where you know, to use your other example, you know, where Adobe would have come to us and said, hey, let’s take one of our proprietary features and, and make it available. Maybe that has happened. I just can’t recall any particular examples.

[Bruce:] And I know that you’re not dissing Adobe. I mean, bless my they they’ve put PhotoShop on the web, but not just pretend PhotoShop. They’ve ported 20 plus years of C++ code to work on the web. So it’s not like they individually are anti-web and it’s encouraging though. But your co-chair is Marcos from Apple because I personally maybe have thought that apple were not particularly invested in web apps. But Marcos is a really talented, web-focused bloke. So that gives me a gives me a warm fuzzy feeling on this misty autumnal morning.

[Léonie:] Yes, it’s true. I mean, apple is is involved in a bunch of different areas, not just working groups. Which is something I do find encouraging because I hear what you’re saying, you know, they’ve they’ve got a person serving on the advisory board at the W3C. So that’s the group that advises the team, the CEO, on matters that are important to to the members. As I say, you know, they’re they’re in amongst the working groups, web apps not just got Marcos as co-chair, but there are other Apple people involved there too. So, yeah, yeah, it’s encouraging.

And it’s the same for, for all… Microsoft kind of took a little bit of a step back over a few years, sort of after the HTML5 kind of time. But actually it was really encouraging. At the W3C annual conference back in September that, you see, you know, lots more representation from, from the Edge team. The ebb and flow standards work. We know how it goes. But yeah, it’s it’s really good to to get, you know, contributions and participation from all of the kind of key companies.

[Bruce:] Yeah, sure. I mean, Vivaldi, we use Chromium as the engine upon which we build the browser. And, I know a lot of, a lot of contributions have come from Microsoft into Chromium. It’s. Yeah, it’s the ebb and flow, you know, so sometimes you sometimes you have energy and business imperatives to engage more. Other times, it it’s just less…

I mean, people, people involved in this process are human beings. And sometimes something isn’t as interesting to you as the thing you were working on last year. So you devote less time to it where nobody’s a machine. You mentioned pesky people and they’re annoying differences early. Yeah. And standards people are pesky people too. You mentioned CEO ceo of the W3C. Isn’t that you?

[Léonie:] No, no, it’s a very capable person called Seth Dobbs. He joined, almost exactly a year ago, actually, in November last year. Yeah, he’s he’s a terrific person, for whom I have a great deal of time.

[Bruce:] But didn’t you recently get elected to be Queen of W3C or something like that? Was it Princess?

[Léonie:] Yes, Princess. That’s the one. So just over two years ago, the W3C became a legal entity in its own right, which might surprise everybody. I think it’s been around for 30 years.

[Bruce:] What was it before then?

[Léonie:] It was, an agreement, contracted agreement between four academic institutions. MIT in the US, Keio in Japan, Beihang in China, and ERCIM in France. But a four way complicated agreement like that made it very hard to do a lot of things. Raising money, for example. If W3C is not an organization in its own right and you want to contribute to support it, how do you do that?

So there was a huge multi-year effort that came to its conclusion. And so January the 1st 2023, W3C Inc, as its official title, became a legal entity in its own right. MIT stepped out of the relationship at that point. But the other three organizations still remain. But they’re our partners rather than this sort of four-way agreement.

So, a board at that point came into effect because W3C is now a registered charity. And so needs proper governance in place. So, yes, to your question, I got re-elected to the board, in September and then they made me Chair of the Board. Yes. Yeah. Then if that’s better or worse than being princess. But, we’ll see.

[Bruce:] I don’t know. Did they give you a tiara?

[Léonie:] No. Damn it, I should I should demand one of those.

[Bruce:] Oh, yes. I definitely think a tiara and maybe an onyx throne surrounded by imposing statues of Anubis should be…

[Léonie:] you think that will do it?

[Bruce:] As chair of the board of W3C inc, which makes you sound like you have a volcanic lair somewhere, What do you actually have to do? Is it tech work?

[Léonie:] No, this is very much on the governance side of things. So the board of of any nonprofit organization oversees how the organization is runs that we get to do really exciting things like approve the annual budget. You know, talk about the kind of strategic direction that that the organization wants to take.

Yeah, a big piece of what we’re going to be working on this year as a board with, with Seth as CEO. So, yeah, it really is the governance side of the organization. And in fact, because the W3C is a technical standards organization, and because it’s a member-led consortium, the board, the bylaws for, for the legal entity actually have a very clear boundary, between running the organization and its technical agenda, which remains firmly in the hands of the members at large, if that makes sense.

So the board actually keeps right out of the way of the technical conversation. Our job is to make sure that with the team, we’re keeping the lights on, and that there is an organization in which everybody else can crack on with the technical work.

[Bruce:] Do you like doing stuff like this? I mean, for me, this sounds like personal hell: logistics and paperwork and this is stuff I run a mile from.

[Léonie:] I mean, I must enjoy it to a certain extent, otherwise I wouldn’t have signed up to, you know, for the second election for a second term. No, it’s not a particularly enjoyable, you know, way to spend my time. But it comes down to that. You asked at the beginning, why did TetraLogical do so much? It’s because it’s worthwhile.

And in the W3C, you know, for all that, there are many different members of different shapes and sizes. It’s the larger companies that often have the time, the money, the inclination to be able to, to sort of participate at this level, not exclusively. And I’ve always thought it was incredibly important to make sure that the voices of tiny little companies were in that conversation as well.

Actually, as of the election, we’ve we’ve actually now got one person who is a freelance contractor who got elected, so we really do have the full gamut of kind of voices on the board from, as I say, an individual practitioner through to, yeah, my tiny little company through to the likes of NTT, Alibaba, Google.

And I think that’s important. So that’s a big part of the reason for me why I do it is because W3C actually has many more members who are in the small to medium enterprise kind of category. And making sure that that we’ve got a place at that table seemed like a good idea to me.

[Bruce:] 100%. It’s one of the things I most enjoyed about the HTML5 process was that, because it was all done, our mailing lists, anybody could email, you know, and you get really good ideas from, you know, a woman who’s a comp sci graduate in Bangalore whose ideas were trumping those of, a senior engineer at Microsoft, simply because it was a better idea.

I don’t know if I don’t know in in our real world of commerce, a true meritocracy can really exist, but one can aspire to it anyway. And, and again, as you said at the beginning, diversity of voices in making the standard, I think is, is an absolute prerequisite to the standard working for the diverse population of the planet.

[Léonie:] It’s yeah, it absolutely is. And, you know, to to your point about, you know, the html working group back then and the open mailing lists, and that’s become more and more prevalent at W3C in the intervening ten years. Now most of it’s on github though. But equally, if you’re kind of interested in one of the spec, say that web apps is working on, you can go and look at all the issues, you can read the spec, you can file issues.

No matter who you are, you don’t have to be a member of the W3C to even really have to have done anything, you know, relating to the W3C at all. It’s only really when the stuff gets written into specs, that you do need to be a member of the W3C, and that’s for very good reason.

And that’s for the patent, the patent policy. And that’s the bit without getting into, you know, all kinds of legalese, basically says if you contribute something to a spec, you waive your patent rights to it. And that’s the bit that means all W3C standards will remain open, free for the rest of us to use in perpetuity, which is an extraordinary thing.

It’s increasingly common in standards organizations now to have something like that in place, but it’s an amazing thing. But we should always be able to use these technologies to do the stuff we need to do.

[Bruce:] So, if you’re a member, as a paying member of the W3C, you and your organization that you represent, waive any patents on the stuff that you’re talking about right now, today, obviously, you’re not waiving patents on anything.

[Léonie:] That’s that’s essentially it. Yes. There are there are key points at the same points where the horizontal review we were chatting about earlier gets triggered. There are what they call sort of patent exclusion opportunities. And that’s when if you’re the sort of company that has patent lawyers, you know, anx needs patent lawyers, they get in and they have a look at the spec. We check it all out.

But essentially, by the time a spec is released, all of those conversations have been had and resolved and sorted out. So what gets released is royalty free and will stay that way.

[Bruce:] That’s incredible, isn’t it? That’s it’s an amazing thing. So these specs are open forever now.

[Léonie:] Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Because you can you imagine if somebody just suddenly came along and said, right, “HTML: you’re all gonna have to pay to use it”? Well, bloody hell yeah. I mean, it almost couldn’t happen.

[Bruce:] but it has happened. I remember it’s got to be at least 20 years ago now. Somebody called Eolas said that they had the right to the patent on plug-ins showing content before they were clicked on. So Internet Explorer had to, I think Microsoft had to pay 500 million. And this was 2003.

And they had that to rejig internet explorer so that if there was a Flash movie on that was or a Flash game, it couldn’t start until somebody had clicked on it. I might have the details wrong, or i’ll send them to you later. And folks, if I haven’t actually just made this up in a brain fever, i’ll post the links, in the in the show notes, and i’ll also link to your site only, which is tink.uk, if I recall correctly. Is it true that you’re planning to change your name to “Tink Berners-Léonie” and run the W3C single handedly?

[Léonie:] I suspect Tim might have something to say about that. But like, i, my my master plan is far more more cunning and devious than that. No. I’m quite happy doing what I do.

[Bruce:] Oh, “Tim”, you call him “Tim”? Not “Sir Tim”, or “Sir Uncle Timbo”, just “Tim”.

[Léonie:] I do, yes. Mostly as [inaudible] Yeah, he was, is still part of the board. So. Yeah. He’s not director anymore. As if he’s part of the board, so. Yeah. No, he he stepped back from that, in the past few months. But yeah, it’s certainly true that the, the bulk of the first term of board, the first couple of years he was he was very much there.

[Bruce:] I could imagine being Captain Web and Captain of W3C with, all the incessant, sweet, sweet, harmonious voices all agreeing with each other all the time can get quite grueling for.

[Léonie:] You might think so. I couldn’t possibly comment.

[Bruce:] Well, I mean, Sir Uncle Timbo is not in the first flush of youth like you and I are, is he?

[Léonie:] No. This is true. Yes. He’s he’s certainly at the point in life where winding things down would would be almost people’s futures, I suspect.

[Bruce:] But he’s still in he’s still involved in, in some capacity, which is nice to know because, he is like the Web Wizard.

[Léonie:] He really is. Yes.

[Bruce:] Well, tell him I tell him I send hugs.He once asked me to sign a copy of my HTML5 book, you know.

[Léonie:] Did he? Is that the one where you got everybody to take pictures of it strategically. Yes. Tell me you asked him.

[Bruce:] No, I didn’t ask. It’s not like he ran up to me and went, “Oh, Bruce, i’m so glad you’re here!”. I actually had a spare copy and found myself sitting next to him at an event. So I went, “You might as well have then, Sir Uncle Timbo”. And he looked at me, panicked, went, “you should sign it”, which obviously meant “So I know what your bloody name is”. So I did.

[Léonie:] The second time I ever met Tim in person was at a W3C TPAC thing. It was in one of those crowded sort of network things, lots of noise going on, and somebody walked up and said hello to me, and the person I was talking to. And I completely mistook it for somebody I knew at the time very well and hugged him.

It was only about 30 seconds later that my brain went “You’ve just randomly hugged Tim Berners-Lee”.” He probably doesn’t know you from Adam at this stage of the thing.

[Bruce:] At least you didn’t snog him.

[Léonie:] Well, this is true. It could have been an awful lot worse.

[Bruce:] For international listeners, “snog” is to passionately kiss in the slang employed in the playgrounds in the 70s and 80s when Léonie and I were in playgrounds rather than living it up on the climbing frame of web organizations.

Okay, I know I’ve taken up loads of your time, Ms. Watson. So back to accessibility, which is where you and I originally started our glittering careers. Is it getting worse or is it getting better overall on the web?

[Léonie:] Yes.

[Bruce:] I can tell you’re a chair of a board.

[Léonie:] I think it’s… Yes, it’s getting better, but achieving better is getting harder, you know? It’s a really old odd to. So i’m not articulating it very well either, but, you know, if I think back to sort of the end of the early 2000s, you know, the worst we had to worry about was some forms, PDF, Flash (obviously, we sort of disposed of flash somewhere along the way).

But then, you know, things got complicated. We introduced different kinds of devices. So where we were talking about keyboards, mice and monitors, we’re not talking about touchscreens. We’re talking about web on the tv, web on your watch, web on your phone, ipad; screen sizes and shapes have changed; interaction modes have changed.

People are doing things in so many different ways; talking to your tech as much as tapping it, clicking it, whatever. So even just looking at the devices and the interaction stuff got more complicated. And then we we’ve just changed the way web stuff is developed so much. You know, back when I started, you literally text file, write your HTML, write your CSS, write your JavaScript code.

Now, of course, you know, we’re living in an era where nobody writes any code other than JavaScript commands, really. And that abstraction has proved a massive complication, I think. So we’re building more complicated stuff, but I think the accessibility is probably holding steady, which actually means I suspect we’re getting better at it.

[Bruce:] Oh, that’s that’s encouraging. I was reading a blog post this morning from, our mutual friends at the Paciello group. Now it’s called from memory the remediation gap. Somebody was saying, you know, because I used to be an accessibility consultant. And so I would, you know, write in reports “you need alt text on this image” or “you need an aria label”.

But the trouble is, there’s a lot of “Full stack developers” who are working with javascript, they’re calling in potentially external component libraries and they don’t have any control over the HTML that actually gets, squirted onto the page. So often the advice that we’ve traditionally given to people, to developers, they can’t actually action because they’re not in control of that particular layer, which terrifies me. And it’s kind of why I got out of the accessibility consultancy.

[Léonie:] I mean, yeah, it’s very true. I think to some extent, that post is interesting because it made a very good point in that those of us who are consultants in all of this need to have an understanding of how React; jQuery, even, because it’s still remarkably popular, Vue, Ember, whatever works. But of course none of us are jobbing developers, so keeping that knowledge maintained and relevant is, is really, really hard. But we do have to have some understanding to be able to help the people picking up the, the tickets that we write join the dots, if you see what I mean.

I do think the one thing that was interesting about that post, though, which surprised me, was that, I think it said something that was only about 30%, 40% of websites actually are using these frameworks. I thought it was more than that. If you’d asked me before I read it. So there’s still an awful lot of sites out there that are not bogged down in all of these things.

And I think that’s worth with keeping in mind. But yeah, you’re right, it is getting a lot harder for the people on the ground to fix issues because they’re not the ones, as you say, controlling what’s getting spat out by the browser. At the end of the day. And that really is the responsibility of the people who create these things. So yeah. Yeah. Meta needs to pull its bloody finger out and sort out React, quite frankly.

[Bruce:] Ooh, that’s going to be my headline: “The new Tim Berners-lee says, ‘Facebook needs to pull its bloody finger out'”.

[Léonie:] React is a monstrosity to begin with. But that’s a whole other conversation. But seriously, it’s the people in the communities who are responsible for the these frameworks that need to make sure that what their frameworks enable people to do have accessibility, and a bunch of other stuff: privacy, security built into it.

Yeah, people in project teams. Now they’re given a deadline. Frameworks are great in many respects. You know, rapid release, more or more iterative kind of development, all of that stuff. There’s some really good stuff in there, performance notwithstanding. We can’t expect people just rocking up to work just trying to get their job done to fix the tools that they’re required to use.

And it’s not even like they most of the time decided; that decision was taken by whether however long ago. So yeah, I really do hold that to say the communities, the organizations that are responsible for these frameworks, that’s their responsibility.

[Bruce:] And, and it’s a huge opportunity for them. I mean, at the moment, i’m not sure when this will go out, but for listeners, this is, October 30th Wwe’re recording this. At the moment, there’s a lot of controversy going on about, in the WordPress community, but, I’ve been a long term WordPress user. It powers 40 plus percent of the internet. And whereas in the back end of WordPress, it might start to use React or jQuery. But the front end is pretty much static HTML.

And they’ve taken a traditionally really accessible project. You know, you make a WordPress site and you’re good to go. So when that powered 40% of the web, that meant a lot of the web became a lot more accessible. So if Mr. Zuckerberg, if you’re listening, if you could just fix react, it’s a great opportunity to, to make the web better.

And, you know, if you are listening, Mr. Zuckerberg, you’re welcome to come on here and debate with me and Léonie. Maybe, Sir Tim. Okay. I need to let you go, Madam, because you’re, you know, you’ve got a multi-million, multi-billion, accessibility empire to run, and people to fire, and heads to crack.

To to our listeners who might be jobbing web developers, what is something you can do right now, today to make sure your websites are more accessible?

[Léonie:] I think the one thing I would suggest is: use your tab key to test whatever it is you’re about to release.

[Bruce:] What does the tab key do?

[Léonie:] So if you’re a keyboard user, someone who can’t use a mouse, which actually is developers, I suspect most people have a pretty keen understanding of what that actually means, because it’s quicker using a keyboard a lot of the time.

But just go through whatever it is you’ve just built. Use your tab key that’ll move your focus between focusable things like links, buttons, form fields. Make sure that you can activate stuff with the keyboard, hit the enter key or hit the space key. Just get into the habit of doing that. And if anything doesn’t work and you find yourself reaching for your mouse to get it to work, fix it before you ship it.

Keyboard accessibility is still one of the biggest problems that I think exists in accessibility terms. And so many people benefit when it’s right, not just sighted keyboard users, you know, people with physical disabilities who can’t use a mouse. People like me, who use assistive technologies. I do everything with the keyboard and I screen reader because I can’t see point and click.

It’s just literally so many people will benefit if you just test and fix that one thing. And I will send you a link, if you don’t mind, Bruce, to a quick video that TetraLogical produced. It’s like a minute long, and it’s a quick guided tour on how to test that. If you get into the habit of doing that, there’s a hell of a lot of people you’ll be helping out.

[Bruce:] I would be absolutely delighted to post the link in the show notes Léonie. Oh that’s it. With that note, as I say, you have, your empire to run and your tiara to get your butler to polish.

[Léonie:] I’ve got to find the tiara, now.

[Bruce:] If you don’t have one, I will send you a Vivaldi tiara. That’s a promise. Now, I don’t think we have one, but I think I can codge one together from some things that my daughter left in her bedroom when she moved out. So, it’ll be good. Thank you so much for joining us. And as the Americans say, thank you for your service, making the world a better place because you know, you’re working with W3C, and talking to me, when you could be doing billable work with tech giants.

So thank you for that. Thank you for asking me. And thank you for listening, everybody. As usual, this will be published on the Vivaldi site with a full HTML transcript and links to all the things that we’ve spoken about.

And we’ll see you next time. Léonie, thank you. TetraLogical are available for hire, everybody. Until next time, thank you very much from “For a better web”. Bye.

[Léonie:] Goodbye.