Hayden Library - R126.H8 C36 2018

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As a child of the ’90s, one of my favorite movie quotes is from Harriet the Spy: “there are as many ways to live as there are people in this world, and each one deserves a closer look.” Likewise, there are as many ways to browse the web as there are people online. We each bring unique context to our web experience based on our values, technologies, environments, minds, and bodies. Assistive technologies (ATs), which are hardware and software that help us perceive and interact with digital content, come in diverse forms. ATs can use a whole host of user input, ranging from clicks and keystrokes to minor muscle movements. ATs may also present digital content in a variety of forms, such as Braille displays, color-shifted views, and decluttered user interfaces (UIs). One more commonly known type of AT is the screen reader. Programs such as JAWS, Narrator, NVDA, and VoiceOver can take digital content and present it to users through voice output, may display this output visually on the user’s screen, and can have Braille display and/or screen magnification capabilities built in. If you make websites, you may have tested your sites with a screen reader. But how do these and other assistive programs actually access your content? What information do they use? We’ll take a detailed step-by-step view of how the process works. (For simplicity we’ll continue to reference “browsers” and “screen readers” throughout this article. These are essentially shorthands for “browsers and other applications,” and “screen readers and other assistive technologies,” respectively.)

The semantics-to-screen-readers pipeline

Accessibility application programming interfaces (APIs) create a useful link between user applications and the assistive technologies that wish to interact with them. Accessibility APIs facilitate communicating accessibility information about user interfaces (UIs) to the ATs. The API expects information to be structured in a certain way, so that whether a button is properly marked up in web content or is sitting inside a native app taskbar, a button is a button is a button as far as ATs are concerned. That said, screen readers and other ATs can do some app-specific handling if they wish. On the web specifically, there are some browser and screen reader combinations where accessibility API information is supplemented by access to DOM structures. For this article, we’ll focus specifically on accessibility APIs as a link between web content and the screen reader. Here’s the breakdown of how web content reaches screen readers via accessibility APIs: The web developer uses host language markup (HTML, SVG, etc.), and potentially roles, states, and properties from the ARIA suite where needed to provide the semantics of their content. Semantic markup communicates what type an element is, what content it contains, what state it’s in, etc. The browser rendering engine (alternatively referred to as a “user agent”) takes this information and maps it into an accessibility API. Different accessibility APIs are available on different operating systems, so a browser that is available on multiple platforms should support multiple accessibility APIs. Accessibility API mappings are maintained on a lower level than web platform APIs, so web developers don’t directly interact with accessibility APIs. The accessibility API includes a collection of interfaces that browsers and other apps can plumb into, and generally acts as an intermediary between the browser and the screen reader. Accessibility APIs provide interfaces for representing the structure, relationships, semantics, and state of digital content, as well as means to surface dynamic changes to said content. Accessibility APIs also allow screen readers to retrieve and interact with content via the API. Again, web developers don’t interact with these APIs directly; the rendering engine handles translating web content into information useful to accessibility APIs.

Examples of accessibility APIs

• Windows: Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA), extended with another API called IAccessible2 (IA2)
• Windows: UI Automation (UIA), the Microsoft successor to MSAA. A browser on Windows can choose to support MSAA with IA2, UIA, or both.
• MacOS: NSAccessibility (AXAPI)
• Linux/Gnome: Accessibility Toolkit (ATK) and Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI). This case is a little different in that there are actually two separate APIs: one through which browsers and other applications pass information along to (ATK) and one that ATs then call from (AT-SPI).

The screen reader uses client-side methods from these accessibility APIs to retrieve and handle information exposed by the browser. In browsers where direct access to the Document Object Model (DOM) is permitted, some screen readers may also take additional information from the DOM tree. A screen reader can also interact with apps that use differing accessibility APIs. No matter where they get their information, screen readers can dream up any interaction modes they want to provide to their users (I’ve provided links to screen reader commands at the end of this article). Testing by site creators can help identify content that feels awkward in a particular navigation mode, such as multiple links with the same text (“Learn more”), as one example.

Example of this pipeline: surfacing a button element to screen reader users

Let’s suppose for a moment that a screen reader wants to understand what object is next in the accessibility tree (which I’ll explain further in the next section), so it can surface that object to the user as they navigate to it. The flow will go a little something like this:

1. The screen reader requests information from the API about the next accessible object, relative to the current object.
2. The API (as an intermediary) passes along this request to the browser.
3. At some point, the browser references DOM and style information, and discovers that the relevant element is a non-hidden button: <button>Do a thing</button>.
4. The browser maps this HTML button into the format the API expects, such as an accessible object with various properties: Name: Do a thing, Role: Button.
5. The API returns this information from the browser to the screen reader.
6. The screen reader can then surface this object to the user, perhaps stating “Button, Do a thing.”

Suppose that the screen reader user would now like to “click” this button. Here’s how their action flows all the way back to web content:

1. The user provides a particular screen reader command, such as a keystroke or gesture.
2. The screen reader calls a method into the API to invoke the button.
3. The API forwards this interaction to the browser.
4. How a browser may respond to incoming interactions depends on the context, but in this case the browser can raise this as a “click” event through web APIs. The browser should give no indication that the click came from an assistive technology, as doing so would violate the user’s right to privacy.
5. The web developer has registered a JavaScript event listener for clicks; their callback function is now executed as if the user clicked with a mouse.

Now that we have a general sense of the pipeline, let’s go into a little more detail on the accessibility tree.

The accessibility tree

The accessibility tree is a hierarchical representation of elements in a UI or document, as computed for an accessibility API. In modern browsers, the accessibility tree for a given document is a separate, parallel structure to the DOM tree. “Parallel” does not necessarily mean there is a 1:1 match between the nodes of these two trees. Some elements may be excluded from the accessibility tree, for example if they are hidden or are not semantically useful (think non-focusable wrapper divs without any semantics added by a web developer). This idea of a hierarchical structure is somewhat of an abstraction. The definition of what exactly an accessibility tree is in practice has been debated and partially defined in multiple places, so implementations may differ in various ways. For example, it’s not actually necessary to generate accessible objects for every element in the DOM whenever the DOM tree is constructed. As a performance consideration, a browser could choose to deal with only a subset of objects and their relationships at a time—that is, however much is necessary to fulfill the requests coming from ATs. The rendering engine could make these computations during all user sessions, or only do so when assistive technologies are actively running. Generally speaking, modern web browsers wait until after style computation to build up any accessible objects. Browsers wait in part because generated content (such as ::before and ::after) can contain text that can participate in calculation of the accessible object’s name. CSS styles can also impact accessible objects in other various ways: text styling can come through as attributes on accessible text ranges. Display property values can impact the computation of line text ranges. These are just a few ways in which style can impact accessibility semantics. Browsers may also use different structures as the basis for accessible object computation. One rendering engine may walk the DOM tree and cross-reference style computations to build up parallel tree structures; another engine may use only the nodes that are available in a style tree in order to build up their accessibility tree. User agent participants in the standards community are currently thinking through how we can better document our implementation details, and whether it might make sense to standardize more of these details further down the road. Let’s now focus on the branches of this tree, and explore how individual accessibility objects are computed.

Building up accessible objects

From API to API, an accessible object will generally include a few things:

• Role, or the type of accessible object (for example, Button). The role tells a user how they can expect to interact with the control. It is typically presented when screen reader focus moves onto the accessible object, and it can be used to provide various other functionalities, such as skipping around content via one type of object.
• Name, if specified. The name is an (ideally short) identifier that better helps the user identify and understand the purpose of an accessible object. The name is often presented when screen focus moves to the object (more on this later), can be used as an identifier when presenting a list of available objects, and can be used as a hook for functionalities such as voice commands.
• Description and/or help text, if specified. We’ll use “Description” as a shorthand. The Description can be considered supplemental to the Name; it’s not the main identifier but can provide further information about the accessible object. Sometimes this is presented when moving focus to the accessible object, sometimes not; this variation depends on both the screen reader’s user experience design and the user’s chosen verbosity settings.
• Properties and methods surfacing additional semantics. For simplicity’s sake, we won’t go through all of these. For your awareness, properties can include details like layout information or available interactions (such as invoking the element or modifying its value).

Let’s walk through an example using markup for a simple mood tracker. We’ll use simplified property names and values, because these can differ between accessibility APIs.

<form>
  <label for="mood">On a scale of 1–10, what is your mood today?</label>
  <input id="mood" type="range"
       min="1" max="10" value="5"
       aria-describedby="helperText" />
  <p id="helperText">Some helpful pointers about how to rate your mood.</p>
  <!-- Using a div with button role for the purposes of showing how the accessibility tree is created. Please use the button element! -->
  <div tabindex="0" role="button">Log Mood</div>
</form>

First up is our form element. This form doesn’t have any attributes that would give it an accessible Name, and a form landmark without a Name isn’t very useful when jumping between landmarks. Therefore, HTML mapping standards specify that it should be mapped as a group. Here’s the beginning of our tree:

• Role: Group

Next up is the label. This one doesn’t have an accessible Name either, so we’ll just nest it as an object of role “Label” underneath the form:

• Role: Group
  • Role: Label

Let’s add the range input, which will map into various APIs as a “Slider.” Due to the relationship created by the for attribute on the label and id attribute on the input, this slider will take its Name from the label contents. The aria-describedby attribute is another id reference and points to a paragraph with some text content, which will be used for the slider’s Description. The slider object’s properties will also store “labelledby” and “describedby” relationships pointing to these other elements. And it will specify the current, minimum, and maximum values of the slider. If one of these range values were not available, ARIA standards specify what should be the default value. Our updated tree:

• Role: Group
  • Role: Label
  • Role: Slider Name: On a scale of 1–10, what is your mood today? Description: Some helpful pointers about how to rate your mood. LabelledBy: [label object] DescribedBy: helperText ValueNow: 5 ValueMin: 1 ValueMax: 10

The paragraph will be added as a simple paragraph object (“Text” or “Group” in some APIs):

• Role: Group
  • Role: Label
  • Role: Slider Name: On a scale of 1–10, what is your mood today? Description: Some helpful pointers about how to rate your mood. LabelledBy: [label object] DescribedBy: helperText ValueNow: 5 ValueMin: 1 ValueMax: 10
  • Role: Paragraph

The final element is an example of when role semantics are added via the ARIA role attribute. This div will map as a Button with the name “Log Mood,” as buttons can take their name from their children. This button will also be surfaced as “invokable” to screen readers and other ATs; special types of buttons could provide expand/collapse functionality (buttons with the aria-expanded attribute), or toggle functionality (buttons with the aria-pressed attribute). Here’s our tree now:

• Role: Group
  • Role: Label
  • Role: Slider Name: On a scale of 1–10, what is your mood today? Description: Some helpful pointers about how to rate your mood. LabelledBy: [label object] DescribedBy: helperText ValueNow: 5 ValueMin: 1 ValueMax: 10
  • Role: Paragraph
  • Role: Button Name: Log Mood

On choosing host language semantics

Our sample markup mentions that it is preferred to use the HTML-native button element rather than a div with a role of “button.” Our buttonified div can be operated as a button via accessibility APIs, as the ARIA attribute is doing what it should—conveying semantics. But there’s a lot you can get for free when you choose native elements. In the case of button, that includes focus handling, user input handling, form submission, and basic styling. Aaron Gustafson has what he refers to as an “exhaustive treatise” on buttons in particular, but generally speaking it’s great to let the web platform do the heavy lifting of semantics and interaction for us when we can. ARIA roles, states, and properties are still a great tool to have in your toolbelt. Some good use cases for these are

• providing further semantics and relationships that are not naturally expressed in the host language;
• supplementing semantics in markup we perhaps don’t have complete control over;
• patching potential cross-browser inconsistencies;
• and making custom elements perceivable and operable to users of assistive technologies.

Notes on inclusion or exclusion in the tree

Standards define some rules around when user agents should exclude elements from the accessibility tree. Excluded elements can include those hidden by CSS, or the aria-hidden or hidden attributes; their children would be excluded as well. Children of particular roles (like checkbox) can also be excluded from the tree, unless they meet special exceptions. The full rules can be found in the “Accessibility Tree” section of the ARIA specification. That being said, there are still some differences between implementers, some of which include more divs and spans in the tree than others do.

Notes on name and description computation

How names and descriptions are computed can be a bit confusing. Some elements have special rules, and some ARIA roles allow name computation from the element’s contents, whereas others do not. Name and description computation could probably be its own article, so we won’t get into all the details here (refer to “Further reading and resources” for some links). Some short pointers:

• aria-label, aria-labelledby, and aria-describedby take precedence over other means of calculating name and description.
• If you expect a particular HTML attribute to be used for the name, check the name computation rules for HTML elements. In your scenario, it may be used for the full description instead.
• Generated content (::before and ::after) can participate in the accessible name when said name is taken from the element’s contents. That being said, web developers should not rely on pseudo-elements for non-decorative content, as this content could be lost when a stylesheet fails to load or user styles are applied to the page.

When in doubt, reach out to the community! Tag questions on social media with “#accessibility.” “#a11y” is a common shorthand; the “11” stands for “11 middle letters in the word ‘accessibility.’” If you find an inconsistency in a particular browser, file a bug! Bug tracker links are provided in “Further reading and resources.”

Not just accessible objects

Besides a hierarchical structure of objects, accessibility APIs also offer interfaces that allow ATs to interact with text. ATs can retrieve content text ranges, text selections, and a variety of text attributes that they can build experiences on top of. For example, if someone writes an email and uses color alone to highlight their added comments, the person reading the email could increase the verbosity of speech output in their screen reader to know when they’re encountering phrases with that styling. However, it would be better for the email author to include very brief text labels in this scenario. The big takeaway here for web developers is to keep in mind that the accessible name of an element may not always be surfaced in every navigation mode in every screen reader. So if your aria-label text isn’t being read out in a particular mode, the screen reader may be primarily using text interfaces and only conditionally stopping on objects. It may be worth your while to consider using text content—even if visually hidden—instead of text via an ARIA attribute. Read more thoughts on aria-label and aria-labelledby.

Accessibility API events

It is the responsibility of browsers to surface changes to content, structure, and user input. Browsers do this by sending the accessibility API notifications about various events, which screen readers can subscribe to; again, for performance reasons, browsers could choose to send notifications only when ATs are active. Let’s suppose that a screen reader wants to surface changes to a live region (an element with role="alert" or aria-live):

1. The screen reader subscribes to event notifications; it could subscribe to notifications of all types, or just certain types as categorized by the accessibility API. Let’s assume in our example that the screen reader is at least listening to live region change events.
2. In the web content, the web developer changes the text content of a live region.
3. The browser (provider) recognizes this as a live region change event, and sends the accessibility API a notification.
4. The API passes this notification along to the screen reader.
5. The screen reader can then use metadata from the notification to look up the relevant accessible objects via the accessibility API, and can surface the changes to the user.

ATs aren’t required to do anything with the information they retrieve. This can make it a bit trickier as a web developer to figure out why a screen reader isn’t announcing a change: it may be that notifications aren’t being raised (for example, because a browser is not sending notifications for a live region dynamically inserted into web content), or the AT is not subscribed or responding to that type of event.

Testing with screen readers and dev tools

While conformance checkers can help catch some basic accessibility issues, it’s ideal to walk through your content manually using a variety of contexts, such as

• using a keyboard only;
• with various OS accessibility settings turned on;
• and at different zoom levels and text sizes, and so on.

As you do this, keep in mind the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1), which give general guidelines around expectations for inclusive web content. If you can test with users after your own manual test passes, all the better! Robust accessibility testing could probably be its own series of articles. In this one, we’ll go over some tips for testing with screen readers, and catching accessibility errors as they are mapped into the accessibility API in a more general sense.

Screen reader testing

Screen readers exist in many forms: some are pre-installed on the operating system and others are separate applications that in some cases are free to download. The WebAIM screen reader user survey provides a list of commonly used screen reader and browser combinations among survey participants. The “Further reading and resources” section at the end of this article includes full screen reader user docs, and Deque University has a great set of screen reader command cheat sheets that you can refer to. Some actions you might take to test your content:

• Read the next/previous item.
• Read the next/previous line.
• Read continuously from a particular point.
• Jump by headings, landmarks, and links.
• Tab around focusable elements only.
• Get a summary of all elements of a particular type within the page.
• Search the page for specific content.
• Use table-specific commands to interact with your tables.
• Jump around by form field; are field instructions discoverable in this navigational mode?
• Use keyboard commands to interact with all interactive elements. Are your JavaScript-driven interactions still operable with screen readers (which can intercept key input in certain modes)? WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices 1.1 includes notes on expected keyboard interactions for various widgets.
• Try out anything that creates a content change or results in navigating elsewhere. Would it be obvious, via screen reader output, that a change occurred?

Tracking down the source of unexpected behavior

If a screen reader does not announce something as you’d expect, here are a few different checks you can run:

• Does this reproduce with the same screen reader in multiple browsers on this OS? It may be an issue with the screen reader or your expectation may not match the screen reader’s user experience design. For example, a screen reader may choose to not expose the accessible name of a static, non-interactive element. Checking the user docs or filing a screen reader issue with a simple test case would be a great place to start.
• Does this reproduce with multiple screen readers in the same browser, but not in other browsers on this OS? The browser in question may have an issue, there may be compatibility differences between browsers (such as a browser doing extra helpful but non-standard computations), or a screen reader’s support for a specific accessibility API may vary. Filing a browser issue with a simple test case would be a great place to start; if it’s not a browser bug, the developer can route it to the right place or make a code suggestion.
• Does this reproduce with multiple screen readers in multiple browsers? There may be something you can adjust in your code, or your expectations may differ from standards and common practices.
• How does this element’s accessibility properties and structure show up in browser dev tools?

Inspecting accessibility trees and properties in dev tools

Major modern browsers provide dev tools to help you observe the structure of the accessibility tree as well as a given element’s accessibility properties. By observing which accessible objects are generated for your elements and which properties are exposed on a given element, you may be able to pinpoint issues that are occurring either in front-end code or in how the browser is mapping your content into the accessibility API. Let’s suppose that we are testing this piece of code in Microsoft Edge with a screen reader:

<div class="form-row">
  <label>Favorite color</label>
  <input id="myTextInput" type="text" />
</div>

We’re navigating the page by form field, and when we land on this text field, the screen reader just tells us this is an “edit” control—it doesn’t mention a name for this element. Let’s check the tools for the element’s accessible name. 1. Inspect the element to bring up the dev tools.

2. Bring up the accessibility tree for this page by clicking the accessibility tree button (a circle with two arrows) or pressing Ctrl+Shift+A (Windows).

Reviewing the accessibility tree is an extra step for this particular flow but can be helpful to do. When the Accessibility Tree pane comes up, we notice there’s a tree node that just says “textbox:,” with nothing after the colon. That suggests there’s not a name for this element. (Also notice that the div around our form input didn’t make it into the accessibility tree; it was not semantically useful). 3. Open the Accessibility Properties pane, which is a sibling of the Styles pane. If we scroll down to the Name property—aha! It’s blank. No name is provided to the accessibility API. (Side note: some other accessibility properties are filtered out of this list by default; toggle the filter button—which looks like a funnel—in the pane to get the full list).

4. Check the code. We realize that we didn’t associate the label with the text field; that is one strategy for providing an accessible name for a text input. We add for="myTextInput" to the label:

<div class="form-row">
  <label for="myTextInput">Favorite color</label>
  <input id="myTextInput" type="text" />
</div>

And now the field has a name:

In another use case, we have a breadcrumb component, where the current page link is marked with aria-current="page":

<nav class="breadcrumb" aria-label="Breadcrumb">
  <ol>
    <li>
      <a href="/cat/">Category</a>
    </li>
    <li>
      <a href="/cat/sub/">Sub-Category</a>
    </li>
    <li>
      <a aria-current="page" href="/cat/sub/page/">Page</a>
    </li>
  </ol>
</nav>

When navigating onto the current page link, however, we don’t get any indication that this is the current page. We’re not exactly sure how this maps into accessibility properties, so we can reference a specification like Core Accessibility API Mappings 1.2 (Core-AAM). Under the “State and Property Mapping” table, we find mappings for “aria-current with non-false allowed value.” We can check for these listed properties in the Accessibility Properties pane. Microsoft Edge, at the time of writing, maps into UIA (UI Automation), so when we check AriaProperties, we find that yes, “current=page” is included within this property value.

Now we know that the value is presented correctly to the accessibility API, but the particular screen reader is not using the information. As a side note, Microsoft Edge’s current dev tools expose these accessibility API properties quite literally. Other browsers’ dev tools may simplify property names and values to make them easier to read, particularly if they support more than one accessibility API. The important bit is to find if there’s a property with roughly the name you expect and whether its value is what you expect. You can also use this method of checking through the property names and values if mapping specs, like Core-AAM, are a bit intimidating!

Advanced accessibility tools

While browser dev tools can tell us a lot about the accessibility semantics of our markup, they don’t generally include representations of text ranges or event notifications. On Windows, the Windows SDK includes advanced tools that can help debug these parts of MSAA or UIA mappings: Inspect and AccEvent (Accessible Event Watcher). Using these tools presumes knowledge of the Windows accessibility APIs, so if this is too granular for you and you’re stuck on an issue, please reach out to the relevant browser team! There is also an Accessibility Inspector in Xcode on MacOS, with which you can inspect web content in Safari. This tool can be accessed by going to Xcode > Open Developer Tool > Accessibility Inspector.

Diversity of experience

Equipped with an accessibility tree, detailed object information, event notifications, and methods for interacting with accessible objects, screen readers can craft a browsing experience tailored to their audiences. In this article, we’ve used the term “screen readers” as a proxy for a whole host of tools that may use accessibility APIs to provide the best user experience possible. Assistive technologies can use the APIs to augment presentation or support varying types of user input. Examples of other ATs include screen magnifiers, cognitive support tools, speech command programs, and some brilliant new app that hasn’t been dreamed up yet. Further, assistive technologies of the same “type” may differ in how they present information, and users who share the same tool may further adjust settings to their liking. As web developers, we don’t necessarily need to make sure that each instance surfaces information identically, because each user’s preferences will not be exactly the same. Our aim is to ensure that no matter how a user chooses to explore our sites, content is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. By testing with a variety of assistive technologies—including but not limited to screen readers—we can help create a better web for all the many people who use it.

Further reading and resources

• WebAIM “Survey of Users with Low Vision”
• WebAIM “Screen Reader User Survey”
• W3C developer guides
  • W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) resources
  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1
  • WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices 1.1
  • ARIA in HTML
  • Using ARIA
• W3C specifications: The docs below are known as “AAMs.” They detail how content maps into various accessibility APIs and may be less relevant to web developers’ day-to-day work. However, some have notes on how specific elements’ names and descriptions are meant to be calculated:
  • Core Accessibility API Mappings 1.1
  • Graphics Accessibility API Mappings
  • HTML Accessibility API Mappings 1.0
  • SVG Accessibility API Mappings
• Inclusive Components
• A List Apart articles on accessibility
  • “Conversational Semantics”
  • “WAI-finding with ARIA Landmark Roles”
• “The Importance of Manual Accessibility Testing”
• Deque University screen reader shortcuts references
• Screen reader user docs (commands)
  • JAWS user docs
  • Narrator user docs
  • NVDA user docs
  • VoiceOver user docs (VoiceOver command charts)
  • iOS VoiceOver user docs
• Browser rendering engine bug trackers
  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Microsoft Edge
  • Safari

As I write this, the world is sending its thoughts and prayers to our Muslim cousins. The Christchurch act of terrorism has once again reminded the world that white supremacy’s rise is very real, that its perpetrators are no longer on the fringes of society, but centered in our holiest places of worship. People are begging us to not share videos of the mass murder or the hateful manifesto that the white supremacist terrorist wrote. That’s what he wants: for his proverbial message of hate to be spread to the ends of the earth.

We live in a time where you can stream a mass murder and hate crime from the comfort of your home. Children can access these videos, too.

As I work through the pure pain, unsurprised, observing the toll on Muslim communities (as a non-Muslim, who matters least in this event), I think of the imperative role that our industry plays in this story.

At time of writing, YouTube has failed to ban and to remove this video. If you search for the video (which I strongly advise against), it still comes up with a mere content warning; the same content warning that appears for casually risqué content. You can bypass the warning and watch people get murdered. Even when the video gets flagged and taken down, new ones get uploaded.

Human moderators have to relive watching this trauma over and over again for unlivable wages. News outlets are embedding the video into their articles and publishing the hateful manifesto. Why? What does this accomplish?

I was taught in journalism class that media (photos, video, infographics, etc.) should be additive (a progressive enhancement, if you will) and provide something to the story for the reader that words cannot.

Is it necessary to show murder for our dear readers to understand the cruelty and finality of it? Do readers gain something more from watching fellow humans have their lives stolen from them? What psychological damage are we inflicting upon millions of people   and for what?

Who benefits?

The mass shooter(s) who had a message to accompany their mass murder. News outlets are thirsty for perverse clicks to garner more ad revenue. We, by way of our platforms, give agency and credence to these acts of violence, then pilfer profits from them. Tech is a money-making accomplice to these hate crimes.

Christchurch is just one example in an endless array where the tools and products we create are used as a vehicle for harm and for hate.

Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica scandal played a critical role in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The concept of “race realism,” which is essentially a term that white supremacists use to codify their false racist pseudo-science, was actively tested on Facebook’s platform to see how the term would sit with people who are ignorantly sitting on the fringes of white supremacy. Full-blown white supremacists don’t need this soft language. This is how radicalization works.

The strategies articulated in the above article are not new. Racist propaganda predates social media platforms. What we have to be mindful with is that we’re building smarter tools with power we don’t yet fully understand: you can now have an AI-generated human face. Our technology is accelerating at a frightening rate, a rate faster than our reflective understanding of its impact.

Combine the time-tested methods of spreading white supremacy, the power to manipulate perception through technology, and the magnitude and reach that has become democratized and anonymized.

We’re staring at our own reflection in the Black Mirror.

The right to speak versus the right to survive

Tech has proven time and time again that it voraciously protects first amendment rights above all else. (I will also take this opportunity to remind you that the first amendment of the United States offers protection to the people from the government abolishing free speech, not from private money-making corporations).

Evelyn Beatrice Hall writes in The Friends of Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Fundamentally, Hall’s quote expresses that we must protect, possibly above all other freedoms, the freedom to say whatever we want to say. (Fun fact: The quote is often misattributed to Voltaire, but Hall actually wrote it to explain Voltaire’s ideologies.)

And the logical anchor here is sound: We must grant everyone else the same rights that we would like for ourselves. Former 99u editor Sean Blanda wrote a thoughtful piece on the “Other Side,” where he posits that we lack tolerance for people who don’t think like us, but that we must because we might one day be on the other side. I agree in theory.

But, what happens when a portion of the rights we grant to one group (let’s say, free speech to white supremacists) means the active oppression another group’s right (let’s say, every person of color’s right to live)?

James Baldwin expresses this idea with a clause, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

It would seem that we have a moral quandary where two sets of rights cannot coexist. Do we protect the privilege for all users to say what they want, or do we protect all users from hate? Because of this perceived moral quandary, tech has often opted out of this conversation altogether. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook, two of the biggest offenders, continue to allow hate speech to ensue with irregular to no regulation.

When explicitly asked about his platform as a free-speech platform and its consequence to privacy and safety, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said,

“So we believe that we can only serve the public conversation, we can only stand for freedom of expression if people feel safe to express themselves in the first place. We can only do that if they feel that they are not being silenced.”

Dorsey and Twitter are most concerned about protecting expression and about not silencing people. In his mind, if he allows people to say whatever they want on his platform, he has succeeded. When asked about why he’s failed to implement AI to filter abuse like, say, Instagram had implemented, he said that he’s most concerned about being able to explain why the AI flagged something as abusive. Again, Dorsey protects the freedom of speech (and thus, the perpetrators of abuse) before the victims of abuse.

But he’s inconsistent about it. In a study by George Washington University comparing white nationalists and ISIS social media usage, Twitter’s freedom of speech was not granted to ISIS. Twitter suspended 1,100 accounts related to ISIS whereas it suspended only seven accounts related to Nazis, white nationalism, and white supremacy, despite the accounts having more than seven times the followers, and tweeting 25 times more than the ISIS accounts. Twitter here made a moral judgment that the fewer, less active, and less influential ISIS accounts were somehow not welcome on their platform, whereas the prolific and burgeoning Nazi and white supremacy accounts were.

So, Twitter has shown that it won’t protect free speech at all costs or for all users. We can only conclude that Twitter is either intentionally protecting white supremacy or simply doesn’t think it’s very dangerous. Regardless of which it is (I think I know), the outcome does not change the fact that white supremacy is running rampant on its platforms and many others.

Let’s brainwash ourselves for a moment and pretend like Twitter does want to support freedom of speech equitably and stays neutral and fair to complete this logical exercise: Going back to the dichotomy of rights example I provided earlier, where either the right to free speech or the right to safety and survival prevail, the rights and the power will fall into the hands of the dominant group or ideologue.

In case you are somehow unaware, the dominating ideologue, whether you’re a flagrant white supremacist or not, is white supremacy. White supremacy was baked into founding principles of the United States, the country where the majority of these platforms were founded and exist. (I am not suggesting that white supremacy doesn’t exist globally, as it does, evidenced most recently by the terrorist attack in Christchurch. I’m centering the conversation intentionally around the United States as it is my lived experience and where most of these companies operate.)

Facebook attempted to educate its team on white supremacy in order to address how to regulate free speech. A laugh-cry excerpt:

“White nationalism and calling for an exclusively white state is not a violation for our policy unless it explicitly excludes other PCs [protected characteristics].”

White nationalism is a softened synonym for white supremacy so that racists-lite can feel more comfortable with their transition into hate. White nationalism (a.k.a. white supremacy) by definition explicitly seeks to eradicate all people of color. So, Facebook should see white nationalist speech as exclusionary, and therefore a violation of their policies.

Regardless of what tech leaders like Dorsey or Facebook CEO Zuckerberg say or what mediocre and uninspired condolences they might offer, inaction is an action.

Companies that use terms and conditions or acceptable use policies to defend their inaction around hate speech are enabling and perpetuating white supremacy. Policies are written by humans to protect that group of human’s ideals. The message they use might be that they are protecting free speech, but hate speech is a form of free speech. So effectively, they are protecting hate speech. Well, as long as it’s for white supremacy and not the Islamic State.

Whether the motivation is fear (losing loyal Nazi customers and their sympathizers) or hate (because their CEO is a white supremacist), it does not change the impact: Hate speech is tolerated, enabled, and amplified by way of their platforms.

“That wasn’t our intent”

Product creators might be thinking, Hey, look, I don’t intentionally create a platform for hate. The way these features were used was never our intent.

Intent does not erase impact.

We cannot absolve ourselves of culpability merely because we failed to conceive such evil use cases when we built it. While we very well might not have created these platforms with the explicit intent to help Nazis or imagined it would be used to spread their hate, the reality is that our platforms are being used in this way.

As product creators, it is our responsibility to protect the safety of our users by stopping those that intend to or already cause them harm. Better yet, we ought to think of this before we build the platforms to prevent this in the first place.

The question to answer isn’t, “Have I made a place where people have the freedom to express themselves?” Instead we have to ask, “Have I made a place where everyone has the safety to exist?” If you have created a place where a dominant group can embroil and embolden hate against another group, you have failed to create a safe place. The foundations of hateful speech (beyond the psychological trauma of it) lead to events like Christchurch.

We must protect safety over speech.

The Domino Effect

This week, Slack banned 28 hate groups. What is most notable, to me, is that the groups did not break any parts of their Acceptable Use Policy. Slack issued a statement:

The use of Slack by hate groups runs counter to everything we believe in at Slack and is not welcome on our platform… Using Slack to encourage or incite hatred and violence against groups or individuals because of who they are is antithetical to our values and the very purpose of Slack.

That’s it.

It is not illegal for tech companies like Slack to ban groups from using their proprietary software because it is a private company that can regulate users if they do not align with their vision as a company. Think of it as the “no shoes, no socks, no service” model, but for tech.

Slack simply decided that supporting the workplace collaboration of Nazis around efficient ways to evangelize white supremacy was probably not in line with their company directives around inclusion. I imagine Slack also considered how their employees of color most ill-affected by white supremacy would feel working for a company that supported it, actively or not.

What makes the Slack example so notable is that they acted swiftly and on their own accord. Slack chose the safety of all their users over the speech of some.

When caught with their enablement of white supremacy, some companies will only budge under pressure from activist groups, users, and employees.

PayPal finally banned hate groups after Charlottesville and after Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) explicitly called them out for enabling hate. SPLC had identified this fact for three years prior. PayPal had ignored them for all three years.

Unfortunately, taking these “stances” against something as clearly and viscerally wrong as white supremacy is rare for companies to do. The tech industry tolerates this inaction through unspoken agreements.

If Facebook doesn’t do anything about racist political propaganda, YouTube doesn’t do anything about PewDiePie, and Twitter doesn’t do anything about disproportionate abuse against Black women, it says to the smaller players in the industry that they don’t have to either.

The tech industry reacts to its peers. When there is disruption, as was the case with Airbnb, who screened and rejected any guests who they believed to be partaking in the Unite the Right Charlottesville rally, companies follow suit. GoDaddy cancelled Daily Stormer’s domain registration and Google did the same when they attempted migration.

If one company, like Slack or Airbnb, decides to do something about the role it’s going to play, it creates a perverse kind of FOMO for the rest: Fear of missing out of doing the right thing and standing on the right side of history.

Don’t have FOMO, do something

The type of activism at those companies all started with one individual. If you want to be part of the solution, I’ve gathered some places to start. The list is not exhaustive, and, as with all things, I recommend researching beyond this abridged summary.

1. Understand how white supremacy impacts you as an individual.
   Now, if you are a person of color, queer, disabled, or trans, it’s likely that you know this very intimately.

    

   If you are not any of those things, then you, as a majority person, need to understand how white supremacy protects you and works in your favor. It’s not easy work, it is uncomfortable and unfamiliar, but you have the most powerful tools to fix tech. The resources are aplenty, but my favorite abridged list:

   1. Seeing White podcast
   2. Ijeoma Oluo’s So you want to talk about race
   3. Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race (Very key read for UK folks)
   4. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility
2. See where your company stands: Read your company’s policies like accepted use and privacy policies and find your CEO’s stance on safety and free speech.
   While these policies are baseline (and in the Slack example, sort of irrelevant), it’s important to known your company's track record. As an employee, your actions and decisions either uphold the ideologies behind the company or they don’t. Ask yourself if the company’s ideologies are worth upholding and whether they align with your own. Education will help you to flag if something contradicts those policies, or if the policies themselves allow for unethical activity.
3. Examine everything you do critically on an ongoing basis.
   You may feel your role is small or that your company is immune—maybe you are responsible for the maintenance of one small algorithm. But consider how that algorithm or similar ones can be exploited. Some key questions I ask myself:
   1. Who benefits from this? Who is harmed?
   2. How could this be used for harm?
   3. Who does this exclude? Who is missing?
   4. What does this protect? For whom? Does it do so equitably?
4. See something? Say something.
   If you believe that your company is creating something that is or can be used for harm, it is your responsibility to say something. Now, I’m not naïve to the fact that there is inherent risk in this. You might fear ostracization or termination. You need to protect yourself first. But you also need to do something.
   1. Find someone who you trust who might be at less risk. Maybe if you’re a nonbinary person of color, find a white cis man who is willing to speak up. Maybe if you’re a white man who is new to the company, find a white man who has more seniority or tenure. But also, consider how you have so much more relative privilege compared to most other people and that you might be the safest option.
   2. Unionize. Find peers who might feel the same way and write a collective statement.
   3. Get someone influential outside of the company (if knowledge is public) to say something.
5. Listen to concerns, no matter how small, particularly if they’re coming from the most endangered groups.
   If your user or peer feels unsafe, you need to understand why. People often feel like small things can be overlooked, as their initial impact might be less, but it is in the smallest cracks that hate can grow. Allowing one insensitive comment about race is still allowing hate speech. If someone, particularly someone in a marginalized group, brings up a concern, you need to do your due diligence to listen to it and to understand its impact.

I cannot emphasize this last point enough.

What I say today is not new. Versions of this article have been written before. Women of color like me have voiced similar concerns not only in writing, but in design reviews, in closed door meetings to key stakeholders, in Slack DMs. We’ve blown our whistles.

But here is the power of white supremacy.

White supremacy is so ingrained in every single aspect of how this nation was built, how our corporations function, and who is in control. If you are not convinced of this, you are not paying attention or intentionally ignoring the truth.

Queer, Muslim, disabled, trans women and nonbinary folks of color — the marginalized groups most impacted by this — are the ones who are voicing these concerns most voraciously. Speaking up requires us to enter the spotlight and outside of safety—we take a risk and are not heard.

The silencing of our voices is one of many effective tools of white supremacy. Our silencing lives within every microaggression, each time we’re talked over, or not invited to partake in key decisions.

In tech, I feel I am a canary in a coal mine. I have sung my song to warn the miners of the toxicity. My sensitivity to it is heightened, because of my existence.

But the miners look at me and tell me that my lived experience is false. It does not align with their narrative as humans. They don’t understand why I sing.

If the people at the highest echelons of the tech industry—the white, male CEOs in power—fail to listen to its most marginalized people—the queer, disabled, trans, people of color—the fate of the canaries will too become the fate of the miners.

Accessibility can be tricky. There are plenty of conditions to take into consideration, and many technical limitations and weird exceptions that make it quite hard to master for most designers and developers.

I never considered myself an accessibility expert, but I took great pride in making my projects Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliant…ish. They would pass most automated tests, show perfectly in the accessibility tree, and work quite well with keyboard navigation. I would even try (and fail) to use a screen reader every now and then.

But life would give me a lesson I would probably never learn otherwise: last October, my abled life took a drastic change—I started to feel extremely dizzy, with a constant sensation of falling or spinning to the right. I was suffering from a bad case of vertigo caused by labyrinthitis that made it impossible to get anything done.

Vertigo can have a wide range of causes, the most common being a viral infection or tiny calcium crystal free floating in the inner ear, which is pretty much our body’s accelerometer. Any disruption in there sends the brain confusing signals about the body’s position, which causes really heavy nausea, dizziness, and headaches. If you’ve ever felt seasick, it’s quite a similar vibe. If not, think about that feeling when you just get off a rollercoaster…it’s like that, only all day long.

For most people, vertigo is something they’ll suffer just once in a lifetime, and it normally goes away in a week or two. Incidence is really high, with some estimates claiming that up to 40% of the population suffers vertigo at least once in their lifetime. Some people live all their lives with it (or with similar symptoms caused by a range of diseases and syndromes grouped under the umbrella term of vestibular disorders), with 4% of US adults reporting chronic problems with balance, and an additional 1.1% reporting chronic dizziness, according to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

In my case, it was a little over a month. Here’s what I learned while going through it.

Slants can trigger vestibular symptoms

It all started as I was out for my daily jog. I felt slightly dizzy, then suddenly my vision got totally distorted. Everything appeared further away, like looking at a fun house’s distortion mirror. I stumbled back home and rested; at that moment I believed I might have over-exercised, and that hydration, food, and rest were all I needed. Time would prove me wrong.

What I later learned was that experiencing vertigo is a constant war between one of your inner ears telling the brain “everything is fine, we’re level and still” and the other ear shouting “oh my God, we’re falling, we’re falling!!!” Visual stimuli can act as an intermediary, supporting one ear’s message or the other’s. Vertigo can also work in the opposite way, with the dizziness interfering with your vision.

I quickly found that when symptoms peaked, staring at a distant object would ease the falling sensation somewhat.

In the same fashion, some visual stimuli would worsen it.

Vertical slants were a big offender in that sense. For instance, looking at a subtle vertical slant (the kind that you’d have to look at twice to make sure it’s not perfectly vertical) on a webpage would instantly trigger symptoms for me. Whether it was a page-long slant used to create some interest beside text or a tiny decoration to mark active tabs, looking at anything with slight slants would instantly send me into the rollercoaster.

Horizontal slants (whatever the degree) and harder vertical slants wouldn’t cause these issues.

My best guess is that slight vertical slants can look like forced perspective and therefore reinforce the falling-from-height sensation, so I would recommend avoiding vertical slants if you can, or make them super obvious. A slight slant looks like perspective, a harder one looks like a triangle.

Target size matters (even on mouse-assisted devices)

After a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, some tests to discard neurological conditions, and other treatments that proved ineffective, I was prescribed Cinnarizine.

Cinnarizine is a calcium channel blocker—to put it simply, it prevents the malfunctioning inner ear “accelerometer” from sending incorrect info to the brain. 
And it worked wonders. After ten days of being barely able to get out of bed, I was finally getting something closer to my normal life. I would still feel dizzy all the time, with some peaks throughout the day, but for the most part, it was much easier.

At this point, I was finally able to use the computer (but still unable to produce any code at all). To make the best of it, I set on a mission to self-experiment on accessibility for vestibular disorders. In testing, I found that one of the first things that struck me was that I would always miss targets (links and buttons).

I’m from the generation that grew up with desktop computers, so using a mouse is second nature. The pointer is pretty much an extension of my mind, as it is for many who use it regularly. But while Cinnarizine helped with the dizziness, it has a common side effect of negatively impacting coordination and fine motor skills (it is recommended not to drive or operate machinery while under treatment). It was not a surprise when I realized it would be much harder to get the pointer to do what I intended.

The common behavior would be: moving the pointer past the link I intended to click, clicking before reaching it at all, or having to try multiple times to click on smaller targets.

Success Criterion 2.5.5 Target Size (Level AAA) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s WCAG recommends bigger target sizes so users can activate them easily. The obvious reason for this is that it’s harder to pinpoint targets on smaller screens with coarser inputs (i.e., touchscreens of mobile devices). A fairly common practice for developers is to set bigger target sizes for smaller viewport widths (assuming that control challenges are only touch-related), while neglecting the issue on big screens expected to be used with mouse input. I know I’m guilty of that myself.

Instead of targeting this behavior for just smaller screen sizes, there are plenty of reasons to create larger target sizes on all devices: it will benefit users with limited vision (when text is scaled up accordingly and colors are of sufficient contrast), users with mobility impairments such as hand tremors, and of course, users with difficulty with fine motor skills.

Font size and spacing

Even while “enjoying” the ease of symptoms provided by the treatment, reading anything still proved to be a challenge for the following three weeks.

I was completely unable to use mobile devices while suffering vertigo due to the smaller font sizes and spacing, so I was forced to use my desktop computer for everything.

I can say I was experiencing something similar to users with mild forms of dyslexia or attention disorders: whenever I got to a website that didn’t follow good font styling, I would find myself reading the same line over and over again.

This proves once again that accessibility is intersectional: when we improve things for a particular purpose it usually benefits users with other challenges as well. I used to believe recommendations on font styles were mostly intended for the nearsighted and those who have dyslexia. Turns out they are also critical for those with vertigo, and even for those with some cognitive differences. At the end of the day, everybody benefits from better readability.

Some actions you can take to improve readability are:

• Keep line height to at least 1.5 times the font size (i.e., line-height: 1.5).
• Set the spacing between paragraphs to at least 2.0 times the font size. We can do this by adjusting the margins using relative units such as em.
• Letter spacing should be at least 0.12 times the font size. We can adjust this by using the letter-spacing CSS property, perhaps setting it in a relative unit.
• Make sure to have good contrast between text and its background.
• Keep font-weight at a reasonable level for the given font-family. Some fonts have thin strokes that make them harder to read. When using thinner fonts, try to improve contrast and font size accordingly, even more than what WCAG would suggest.
• Choose fonts that are easy to read. There has been a large and still inconclusive debate on which font styles are better for users, but one thing I can say for sure is that popular fonts (as in fonts that the user might be already familiar with) are generally the least challenging for users with reading issues.

WCAG recommendations on text are fairly clear and fortunately are the most commonly implemented of recommendations, but even they can still fall short sometimes. So, better to follow specific guides on accessible text and your best judgement. Passing automated tests does not guarantee actual accessibility.

Another issue on which my experience with vertigo proved to be similar to that of people with dyslexia and attention disorders was how hard it was for me to keep my attention in just one place. In that sense…

Animations are bad (and parallax is pure evil)

Val Head has already covered visually-triggered vestibular disorders in an outstanding article, so I would recommend giving it a good read if you haven’t already.

To summarize, animations can trigger nausea, dizziness, and headaches in some users, so we should use them purposely and responsibly.

While most animations did not trigger my symptoms, parallax scrolling did. I’d never been a fan of parallax to begin with, as I found it confusing. And when you’re experiencing vertigo, the issues introduced by parallax scrolling compound.

Really, there are no words to describe just how bad a simple parallax effect, scrolljacking, or even background-attachment: fixed would make me feel. I would rather jump on one of those 20-G centrifuges astronauts use than look at a website with parallax scrolling.

Every time I encountered it, I would put the bucket beside me to good use and be forced to lie in bed for hours as I felt the room spinning around me, and no meds could get me out of it. It was THAT bad.

Though normal animations did not trigger a reaction as severe, they still posed a big problem. The extreme, conscious, focused effort it took to read would make it such that anything moving on the screen would instantly break my focus, and force me to start the paragraph all over. And I mean anything.

I would constantly find myself reading a website only to have the typical collapsing navigation bar on scroll distract me just enough that I’d totally lose count of where I was at. Autoplaying carousels were so annoying I would delete them using dev tools as soon as they showed up. Background videos would make me get out of the website desperately.

Over time I started using mouse selection as a pointer; a visual indication of what I’d already read so I could get back to it whenever something distracted me. Then I tried custom stylesheets to disable transforms and animations whenever possible, but that also meant many websites having critical elements not appear at all, as they were implemented to start off-screen or otherwise invisible, and show up on scroll.

Of course, deleting stuff via dev tools or using custom stylesheets is not something we can expect 99.99% of our users to even know about.

So if anything, consider reducing animations to a minimum. Provide users with controls to turn off non-essential animations (WCAG 2.2.3 Animation from Interactions) and to pause, stop, or hide them (WCAG 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide). Implement animations and transitions in such a way that if the user disables them, critical elements still display.

And be extra careful with parallax: my recommendation is to, at the very least, try limiting its use to the header (“hero”) only, and be mindful of getting a smooth, realistic parallax experience. My vertigo self would have said, “just don’t freaking use parallax. Never. EVER.” But I guess that might be a hard idea to sell to stakeholders and designers.

Also consider learning how to use the prefers-reduced-motion feature query. This is a newer addition to the specs (it’s part of the Media Queries Level 5 module , which is at an early Editor’s Draft stage) that allows authors to apply selective styling depending on whether the user has requested the system to minimize the use of animations. OS and browser support for it is still quite limited, but the day will come when we will set any moving thing inside a query for when the user has no-preference, blocking animations from those who choose reduce.

After about a week of wrestling websites to provide a static experience, I remembered something that would prove to be my biggest ally while the vertigo lasted:

Reader mode

Some browsers include a “reader mode” that strips the content from any styling choices, isolates it from any distraction, and provides a perfect WCAG compliant layout for the text to maximize readability.

It is extremely helpful to provide a clear and consistent reading experience throughout multiple websites, especially for users with any kind of reading impairment.

I have to confess: before experiencing my vestibular disorder, I had never used Reader Mode (the formal name varies in browsers) or even checked if my projects were compatible with it. I didn’t even think it was such a useful feature, as a quick search for “reader mode” actually returned quite a few threads by users asking how to disable it or how to take the button for it out of Firefox’s address bar. (It seems some people are unwittingly activating it…perhaps the icon is not clear enough.)

Displaying the button to access Reader Mode is toggled by browser heuristics, which are based on the use (or not) of semantic tags in a page’s HTML. Unfortunately this meant not all websites provided such a “luxury.”

I really wish I wouldn’t have to say this in 2019…but please, please use semantic tags. Correct conversational semantics allow your website to be displayed in Reader Mode, and provide a better experience for users of screen readers. Again, accessibility is intersectional.

Reader Mode proved to be extremely useful while my vertigo lasted. But there was something even better:

Dark color schemes

By the fourth week, I started feeling mostly fine. I opened Visual Studio Code to try to get back to work. In doing so, it served me well to find one more revelation: a light-text-on-dark-background scheme was SO much easier for me to read. (Though I still was not able to return to work at this time.)

I was quite surprised, as I had always preferred light mode with dark-text-on-light-background for reading, and dark mode, with light-text-on-dark for coding. I didn’t know at the time that I was suffering from photophobia (which is a sensitivity to light), which was one of the reasons I found it hard to read on my desktop and to use my mobile device at all.

As far as I know, photophobia is not a common symptom of vestibular disorders, but there are many conditions that will trigger it, so it’s worth looking into for our projects’ accessibility.

CSS is also planning a media query to switch color schemes. Known as prefers-color-scheme, it allows applying styles based on the user’s stated preference for dark or light theming. It’s also part of the Media Queries Level 5 spec, and at the time of writing this article it’s only available in Safari Technology Preview, with Mozilla planning to ship it in the upcoming Firefox 67. Luckily there’s a PostCSS plugin that allows us to use it in most modern browsers by turning prefers-color-schemequeries into color-index queries, which have much better support.

If PostCSS is not your cup of tea, or for whatever reason you cannot use that approach to automate switching color schemes to a user’s preference, try at least to provide a theming option in your app’s configuration. Theming has become extremely simple since the release of CSS Custom Properties, so implementing this sort of switch is relatively easy and will greatly benefit anyone experiencing photophobia.

Moving on

After a month and some days, the vertigo disappeared completely, and I was able to return to work without needing any meds or further treatment. It should stay that way, as for most people it’s a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.

I went back to my abled life, but the experience changed my mindset for good.

As I said before, I always cared for making my projects compatible for people using keyboard navigation and screen readers. But I learned the hard way that there are plenty of “invisible conditions” that are just as important to take into consideration: vestibular disorders, cognitive differences, dyslexia, and color blindness, just to name a few. I was totally neglecting those most of the time, barely addressing the issues in order to pass automated tests, which means I was unintentionally annoying some users by making websites inaccessible to them.

After my experience with vertigo, I’ve turned to an accessibility-first approach to design and development. Now I ask myself, “am I leaving anyone behind with this decision?,” before dropping a single line of code. Accessibility should never be an afterthought.

Making sure my projects work from the start for those with difficulties also improves the experience for everyone else. Think about how improving text styles for users with dyslexia, vertigo, or visual problems improves readability for all users, or how being able to control animations or choose a color scheme can be critical for users with attention disorders and photophobia, respectively, while also a nice feature for everybody.

It also turned my workflow into a much smoother development experience, as addressing accessibility issues from the beginning can mean a slower start, but it’s also much easier and faster than trying to fix broken accessibility afterwards.

I hope that by sharing my personal experience with vertigo, I’ve illustrated how we can all design and develop a better web for everybody. Remember, we’re all just temporarily abled.

Just as we need to understand our content before we can recategorize it, we need to understand the system before we try to rebuild it.

Enter the structural audit: a review of the site focused solely on its menus, links, flows, and hierarchies. I know you thought we were done with audits back in Chapter 2, but hear me out! Structural audits have an important and singular purpose: to help us build a new sitemap.

This isn’t about recreating the intended sitemap—no, this is about experiencing the site the way users experience it. This audit is meant to track and record the structure of the site as it really works.

Setting up the template

First, we’re gonna need another spreadsheet. (Look, it is not my fault that spreadsheets are the perfect system for recording audit data. I don’t make the rules.)

Because this involves building a spreadsheet from scratch, I keep a “template” at the top of my audit files—rows that I can copy and paste into each new audit (Fig 4.1). It’s a color-coded outline key that helps me track my page hierarchy and my place in the auditing process. When auditing thousands of pages, it’s easy to get dizzyingly lost, particularly when coming back into the sheet after a break; the key helps me stay oriented, no matter how deep the rabbit hole.

Color-coding

Color is the easiest, quickest way to convey page depth at a glance. The repetition of black text, white cells, and gray lines can have a numbing effect—too many rows of sameness, and your eyes glaze over. My coloring may result in a spreadsheet that looks like a twee box of macarons, but at least I know, instantly, where I am.

The exact colors don’t really matter, but I find that the familiar mental model of a rainbow helps with recognition—the cooler the row color, the deeper into the site I know I must be.

The nested rainbow of pages is great when you’re auditing neatly nested pages—but most websites color outside the lines (pun extremely intended) with their structure. I leave my orderly rainbow behind to capture duplicate pages, circular links, external navigation, and other inconsistencies like:

• On-page navigation. A bright text color denotes pages that are accessible via links within page content—not through the navigation. These pages are critical to site structure but are easily overlooked. Not every page needs to be displayed in the navigation menus, of course—news articles are a perfect example—but sometimes this indicates publishing errors.
• External links. These are navigation links that go to pages outside the domain. They might be social media pages, or even sites held by the same company—but if the domain isn’t the one I’m auditing, I don’t need to follow it. I do need to note its existence in my spreadsheet, so I color the text as the red flag that it is. (As a general rule, I steer clients away from placing external links in navigation, in order to maintain a consistent experience. If there’s a need to send users offsite, I’ll suggest using a contextual, on-page link.)
• Files. This mostly refers to PDFs, but can include Word files, slide decks, or anything else that requires downloading. As with external links, I want to capture anything that might disrupt the in-site browsing experience. (My audits usually filter out PDFs, but for organizations that overuse them, I’ll audit them separately to show how much “website” content is locked inside.)
• Unknown hierarchy. Every once in a while, there’s a page that doesn’t seem to belong anywhere—maybe it’s missing from the menu, while its URL suggests it belongs in one section and its navigation scheme suggests another. These pages need to be discussed with their owners to determine whether the content needs to be considered in the new site.
• Crosslinks. These are navigation links for pages that canonically live in a different section of the site—in other words, they’re duplicates. This often happens in footer navigation, which may repeat the main navigation or surface links to deeper-but-important pages (like a Contact page or a privacy policy). I don’t want to record the same information about the page twice, but I do need to know where the crosslink is, so I can track different paths to the content. I color these cells gray so they don’t draw my attention.

Note that coloring every row (and indenting, as you’ll see in a moment) can be a tedious process—unless you rely on Excel’s formatting brush. That tool applies all the right styles in just two quick clicks.

Outlines and page IDs

Color-coding is half of my template; the other half is the outline, which is how I keep track of the structure itself. (No big deal, just the entire point of the spreadsheet.)

Every page in the site gets assigned an ID. You are assigning this number; it doesn’t correspond to anything but your own perception of the navigation. This number does three things for you:

1. It associates pages with their place in the site hierarchy. Decimals indicate levels, so the page ID can be decoded as the page’s place in the system.
2. It gives each page a unique identifier, so you can easily refer to a particular page—saying “2.4.1” is much clearer than “you know that one page in the fourth product category?”
3. You can keep using the ID in other contexts, like your sitemap. Then, later, when your team decides to wireframe pages 1.1.1 and 7.0, you’ll all be working from the same understanding.

Let me be completely honest: things might get goofy sometimes with the decimal outline. There will come a day when you’ll find yourself casually typing out “1.2.1.2.1.1.1,” and at that moment, a fellow auditor somewhere in the universe will ring a tiny gong for you.

In addition to the IDs, I indent each level, which reinforces both the numbers and the colors. Each level down—each digit in the ID, each change in color—gets one indentation.

I identify top-level pages with a single number: 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc. The next page level in the first section would be 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and so on. I mark the homepage as 0.0, which is mildly controversial—the homepage is technically a level above—but, look: I’ve got a lot of numbers to write, and I don’t need those numbers to tell me they’re under the homepage, so this is my system. Feel free to use the numbering system that work best for you.

Criteria and columns

So we’ve got some secret codes for tracking hierarchy and depth, but what about other structural criteria? What are our spreadsheet columns (Fig 4.2)? In addition to a column for Page ID, here’s what I cover:

• URL. I don’t consistently fill out this column, because I already collected this data back in my automated audit. I include it every twenty entries or so (and on crosslinks or pages with unknown hierarchy) as another way of tracking progress, and as a direct link into the site itself.
• Menu label/link. I include this column only if I notice a lot of mismatches between links, labels, and page names. Perfect agreement isn’t required; but frequent, significant differences between the language that leads to a page and the language on the page itself may indicate inconsistencies in editorial approach or backend structures.
• Name/headline. Think of this as “what does the page owner call it?” It may be the H1, or an H2; it may match the link that brought you here, or the page title in the browser, or it may not.
• Page title. This is for the name of the page in the metadata. Again, I don’t use this in every audit—particularly if the site uses the same long, branded metadata title for every single page—but frequent mismatches can be useful to track.
• Section. While the template can indicate your level, it can’t tell you which area of the site you’re in—unless you write it down. (This may differ from the section data you applied to your automated audit, taken from the URL structure; here, you’re noting the section where the page appears.)
• Notes. Finally, I keep a column to note specific challenges, and to track patterns I’m seeing across multiple pages—things like “Different template, missing subnav” or “Only visible from previous page.” My only caution here is that if you’re planning to share this audit with another person, make sure your notes are—ahem—professional. Unless you enjoy anxiously combing through hundreds of entries to revise comments like “Wow haha nope” (not that I would know anything about that).

Depending on your project needs, there may be other columns, too. If, in addition to using this spreadsheet for your new sitemap, you want to use it in migration planning or template mapping, you may want columns for new URLs, or template types. 

You can get your own copy of my template as a downloadable Excel file. Feel free to tweak it to suit your style and needs; I know I always do. As long as your spreadsheet helps you understand the hierarchy and structure of your website, you’re good to go.

Gathering data

Setting up the template is one thing—actually filling it out is, admittedly, another. So how do we go from a shiny, new, naive spreadsheet to a complete, jaded, seen-some-stuff spreadsheet? I always liked Erin Kissane’s description of the process, from The Elements of Content Strategy:

Big inventories involve a lot of black coffee, a few late nights, and a playlist of questionable but cheering music prominently featuring the soundtrack of object-collecting video game Katamari Damacy. It takes quite a while to exhaustively inventory a large site, but it’s the only way to really understand what you have to work with.

We’re not talking about the same kind of exhaustive inventory she was describing (though I am recommending Katamari music). But even our less intensive approach is going to require your butt in a seat, your eyes on a screen, and a certain amount of patience and focus. You’re about to walk, with your fingers, through most of a website.

Start on the homepage. (We know that not all users start there, but we’ve got to have some kind of order to this process or we’ll never get through it.) Explore the main navigation before moving on to secondary navigation structures. Move left to right, top to bottom (assuming that is your language direction) over each page, looking for the links. You want to record every page you can reasonably access on the site, noting navigational and structural considerations as you go.

My advice as you work:

• Use two monitors. I struggle immensely without two screens in this process, which involves constantly switching between spreadsheet and browser in rapid, tennis-match-like succession. If you don’t have access to multiple monitors, find whatever way is easiest for you to quickly flip between applications.
• Record what you see. I generally note all visible menu links at the same level, then exhaust one section at a time. Sometimes this means I have to adjust what I initially observed, or backtrack to pages I missed earlier. You might prefer to record all data across a level before going deeper, and that would work, too. Just be consistent to minimize missed links.
• Be alert to inconsistencies. On-page links, external links, and crosslinks can tell you a lot about the structure of the site, but they’re easy to overlook. Missed on-page links mean missed content; missed crosslinks mean duplicate work. (Note: the further you get into the site, the more you’ll start seeing crosslinks, given all the pages you’ve already recorded.)
• Stick to what’s structurally relevant. A single file that’s not part of a larger pattern of file use is not going to change your understanding of the structure. Neither is recording every single blog post, quarterly newsletter, or news story in the archive. For content that’s dynamic, repeatable, and plentiful, I use an x in the page ID to denote more of the same. For example, a news archive with a page ID of 2.8 might show just one entry beneath it as 2.8.x; I don’t need to record every page up to 2.8.791 to understand that there are 791 articles on the site (assuming I noted that fact in an earlier content review).
• Save. Save frequently. I cannot even begin to speak of the unfathomable heartbreak that is Microsoft Excel burning an unsaved audit to the ground.  

Knowing which links to follow, which to record, and how best to untangle structural confusion—that improves with time and experience. Performing structural audits will not only teach you about your current site, but will help you develop fluency in systems thinking—a boon when it comes time to document the new site.

In Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development, the Storming stage happens as a group begins to figure out how to work together. Previously, each person had been doing their own thing as individuals, so necessarily a few things need to be ironed out: how to collaborate, how to hit goals, how to determine priorities. Of course there may be some friction here!

But even if your team doesn’t noticeably demonstrate this kind of internal Storming as they begin to gel, there might be some outside factors at play in your work environment that create friction. During times of team scaling and organizational change—the water we in the web industry are often swimming in—managers are responsible for things like strategy-setting, aligning their team’s work to company objectives, and unblocking the team as they ship their work.

In addition to these business-context responsibilities, managers need to be able to help their teammates navigate this storm by helping them grow in their roles and support the team’s overall progress. If you and your teammates don’t adapt and evolve in your roles, it’s unlikely that your team will move out of the Storming stage and into the Norming stage of team dynamics.

To spur this course-correction and growth in your teammates, you’ll end up wearing four different hats:

• Mentoring: lending advice and helping to problem solve based on your own experience.
• Coaching: asking open questions to help your teammate reflect and introspect, rather than sharing your own opinions or quickly problem solving.
• Sponsoring: finding opportunities for your teammate to level up, take on new leadership roles, and get promoted.
• Delivering feedback: observing behavior that is or isn’t aligned to what the team needs to be doing and sharing those observations, along with praise or suggestions.

Let’s dive in to how to choose, and when to use, each of these skills as you grow your teammates, and then talk about what it looks like when teammates support the overarching direction of the team.

Mentoring

When I talk to managers, I find that the vast majority have their mentor hats on ninety percent of the time when they’re working with their teammates. It’s natural!

In mentoring mode, we’re doling out advice, sharing our perspective, and helping someone else problem solve based on that information. Our personal experiences are often what we can talk most confidently about! For this reason, mentorship mode can feel really good and effective for the mentor. Having that mentor hat on can help the other person overcome a roadblock or know which next steps to take, while avoiding drastic errors that they wouldn’t have seen coming otherwise.

As a mentor, it’s your responsibility to give advice that’s current and sensitive to the changing dialog happening in our industry. Advice that might work for one person (“Be louder in meetings!” or “Ask your boss for a raise!”) may undermine someone else, because members of underrepresented groups are unconsciously assessed and treated differently. For example, research has shown that “when women are collaborative and communal, they are not perceived as competent—but when they emphasize their competence, they’re seen as cold and unlikable, in a classic ‘double bind’”.

If you are not a member of a marginalized group, and you have a mentee who is, please be a responsible mentor! Try to be aware of the way members of underrepresented groups are perceived, and the unconscious bias that might be at play in your mentee’s work environment. When you have your mentor hat on, do lots of gut checking to make sure that your advice is going to be helpful in practice for your mentee.

Mentoring is ideal when the mentee is new to their role or to the organization; they need to learn the ropes from someone who has firsthand experience. It’s also ideal when your teammate is working on a problem and has tried out a few different approaches, but still feels stumped; this is why practices like pair coding can help folks learn new things.

As mentors, we want our mentees to reach beyond us, because our mentees’ success is ultimately our success. Mentorship relationships evolve over time, because each party is growing. Imaginative, innovative ideas often come from people who have never seen a particular challenge before, so if your mentee comes up with a creative solution on their own that you wouldn’t have thought of, be excited for them—don’t just focus on the ways that you’ve done it or seen it done before.

Managers often default to mentoring mode because it feels like the fastest way to solve a problem, but it falls short in helping your teammate connect their own dots. For that, we’ll look to coaching.

Coaching

In mentoring mode, you’re focused on both the problem and the solution. You’ll share what you as the mentor would do or have done in this situation. This means you’re more focused on yourself, and less on the person who is sitting in front of you.

In coaching mode—an extremely powerful but often underutilized mode—you’re doing two primary things:

1. Asking open questions to help the other person explore more of the shape of the topic, rather than staying at the surface level.
2. Reflecting, which is like holding up a mirror for the other person and describing what you see or hear, or asking them to reflect for themselves.

These two tools will help you become your teammate’s fiercest champion.

Open Questions

“Closed” questions can only be answered with yes or no. Open questions often start with who, what, when, where, why, and how. But the best open questions are about the problem, not the solution. Questions that start with why tend to make the other person feel judged, and questions that start with how tend to go into problem solving mode—both of which we want to avoid while in coaching mode.

However, what questions can be authentically curious! When someone comes to you with a challenge, try asking questions like:

• What’s most important to you about it?
• What’s holding you back?
• What does success look like?

Let’s say my teammate comes to me and says they’re ready for a promotion. Open questions could help this teammate explore what this promotion means and demonstrate to me what introspection they’ve already done around it. Rather than telling them what I think is necessary for them to be promoted, I could instead open up this conversation by asking them:

• What would you be able to do in the new level that you can’t do in your current one?
• What skills are required in the new level? What are some ways that you’ve honed those skills?
• Who are the people already at that level that you want to emulate? What about them do you want to emulate?

Their answers would give me a place to start coaching. These questions might push my teammate to think more deeply about what this promotion means, rather than allowing them to stay surface level and believe that a promotion is about checking off a lot of boxes on a list. Their answers might also open my eyes to things that I hadn’t seen before, like a piece of work that my teammate had accomplished that made a huge impact. But most important, going into coaching mode would start a two-way conversation with this teammate, which would help make an otherwise tricky conversation feel more like a shared exploration.

Open questions, asked from a place of genuine curiosity, help people feel seen and heard. However, if the way you ask your questions comes across as judgy or like you’ve already made some assumptions, then your questions aren’t truly open (and your teammate can smell this on you!). Practice your intonation to make sure your open questions are actually curious and open.

By the way, forming lots of open questions (instead of problem solving questions, or giving advice) is tremendously hard for most people. Don’t worry if you don’t get the hang of it at first; it takes a lot of practice and intention over time to default to coaching mode rather than mentoring mode. I promise, it’s worth it.

Reflections

Just like open questions, reflections help the other person feel seen and heard, and to explore the topic more deeply.

It’s almost comical how rarely we get the sense that the person we’re talking to is actively listening to us, or focusing entirely on helping us connect our own dots. Help your teammates reflect by repeating back to them what you hear them say, as in:

• “What I’m hearing you say is that you’re frustrated with how this project is going. Is that right?”
• “What I know to be true about you is how deeply you care about your teammates’ feelings.”

In each of these examples, you are holding up a metaphorical mirror to your teammate, and helping them look into it. You can coach them to reflect, too:

• “How does this new architecture project map to your goals?”
• “Let’s reflect on where you were this time last year and how far you’ve come.”

Occasionally, you might get a reflection wrong; this gives the other person an opportunity to realize something new about their topic, like the words they’re choosing aren’t quite right, or there’s another underlying issue that should be explored. So don’t be worried about giving a bad reflection; reflecting back what you’re hearing will still help your teammate.

The act of reflecting can help the other person do a gut check to make sure they’re approaching their topic holistically. Sometimes the act of reflection forces (encourages?) the other person to do some really hard work: introspection. Introspection creates an opportunity for them to realize new aspects of the problem, options they can choose from, or deeper meanings that hadn’t occurred to them before—which often ends up being a nice shortcut to the right solution. Or, even better, the right problem statement.

When you have your coaching hat on, you don’t need to have all the answers, or even fully understand the problem that your teammate is wrestling with; you’re just there as a mirror and as a question-asker, to help prompt the other person to think deeply and come to some new, interesting conclusions. Frankly, it may not feel all that effective when you’re in coaching mode, but I promise, coaching can generate way more growth for that other person than just giving them advice or sharing your perspective.

Choose coaching when you’re looking to help someone (especially an emerging leader) hone their strategic thinking skills, grow their leadership aptitude, and craft their own path forward. Coaching mode is all about helping your teammate develop their own brain wrinkles, rather than telling them how you would do something. The introspection and creativity it inspires create deeper and longer-lasting growth.

Sponsoring

While you wear the mentoring and coaching hats around your teammates, the sponsor hat is more often worn when they’re not around, like when you’re in a 1:1 with your manager, a sprint planning meeting, or another environment where someone’s work might be recognized. You might hear about an upcoming project to acquire a new audience and recommend that a budding user researcher take it on, or you’ll suggest to an All Hands meeting organizer that a junior designer should give a talk about a new pattern they’ve introduced to the style guide.

Sponsorship is all about feeling on the hook for getting someone to the next level. As someone’s sponsor, you’ll put their name in the ring for opportunities that will get them the experience and visibility necessary to grow in their role and at the organization. You will put your personal reputation on the line on behalf of the person you’re sponsoring, to help get them visible and developmental assignments. It’s a powerful tool, and the one most effective at helping someone get to the next level (way more so than mentoring or coaching!).

The Center for Talent Innovation routinely measures the career benefits of sponsorship (PDF). Their studies have found that when someone has a sponsor, they are way more likely to have access to career-launching work. They’re also more likely to take actions that lead to even more growth and opportunities, like asking their manager for a stretch assignment or a raise.

When you’re in sponsorship mode, think about the different opportunities you have to offer up someone’s name. This might look like:

• giving visible/public recognition (company “shout outs,” having them present a project demo, thanking them in a launch email, giving someone’s manager feedback about their good work);
• assigning stretch tasks and projects that are just beyond their current skill set, to help them grow and have supporting evidence for a future promotion; or
• opening the door for them to write blog posts, give company or conference talks, or contribute open-source work.

Remember that members of underrepresented groups are typically over-mentored, but under-sponsored. These individuals get lots of advice (often unsolicited), coffee outings, and offers to teach them new skills. But it’s much rarer for them to see support that looks like sponsorship.

This isn’t because sponsors intentionally ignore marginalized folks, but because of in-group bias. Because of how our brains (and social networks) work, the people we’re closest to tend to look mostly like us—and we draw from that same pool when we nominate people for projects, for promotions, and for hires. Until I started learning about bias in the workplace, most of the people I sponsored were white, cisgender women, like myself. Since then, I’ve actively worked to sponsor people of color and nonbinary people. It takes effort and intention to combat our default behaviors—but I know you can do it!

Take a look at the daily communications you participate in: your work chat logs, the conversations you have with others, the process for figuring out who should fix a bug or work on a new project, and the processes for making your teams’ work visible (like an architecture review, code review, launch calendar, etc.). You’ll be surprised how many moments there are to sponsor someone throughout an average day. Please put in the time and intention to ensure that you’re sponsoring members of underrepresented groups, too.

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