At WordCamp Las Vegas, I had a watershed moment of privilege realization. I’ve had these before at WordCamps, like Portland where I realized how much I rely on my phone for the Internet, and what that actually means to other people (thank you Eric Mann for that one, you should post those slides!). This time it was as simple as AccessibleJoe asking my new friend, Rebecca, if she could help him. I glanced over and saw that Joe was sitting with Laura Legendary.
Laura’s blind.
In that instant, the very second I saw her cane, my mind wiped out every single thought I had and focused on this. “Holy crap, my slides are worthless. Not just on the screen today, but when I give the URL out, because they’re all IMAGES.”
See, while I use SEO slides, my slides are a PDF imported from PowerPoint, which makes them a bit honking waste for her. No text. No tooltips. The deaf similarly were left out until they read the text posts I tend to make as a follow up to my slides, but since my slides are a counterpoint, or emphasis, to my speaking, I really greatly on what I say and how I say it. That means my slides are absolutely worthless to anyone who is differently abled.
When Rebecca needed to go away before Joe got back, I offered to take over, introduced myself, and said “I’m sorry, my presentation slides are worthless to you.” Laura was kind enough to explain to me the situation, demonstrate how she used her phone (before her own presentation where she showed everyone exactly how much running a website sucks. It blew my mind when she said there was only ONE theme she could find that was accessible on the front and back end so she, a 100% blind person, could manage her site all herself. And then she only had one plugin for an estore that worked.
One.
Single.
Theme.
If that doesn’t slap you in the face and make you think you’re doing something wrong with your programing, allow me to do this for you.
We suck. We are inconsiderate. We are selfish. We are ignorant. We have no idea how hard the web is for people. Even though I do spend a lot of time working on my site to make it easier to read for the visually impaired (that is people who hate small fonts), I have no idea how crap my site is for the actual blind.
Want to know how bad it is? Close your eyes and try to use your site. Go on, make a post. If you’re on a Mac, there’s a tool built in for this. I played with it the other night and was galled at how hard it was to get around the customizations of a theme. To write code, I rather expected to be hard, but the theme settings (not the customizer built in, the settings from Genesis) were not very easy, even though I knew what I was looking for.
So my pledge to this starts here. I’ll be making all my slides on SEO slides from now on, with long descriptions and alt text for everything, to make my slides more accessible. I will continue to speak clearly concisely, and more over, I will print up my slides notes in advance so I have them right there without having to use PowerPoint.
I love PowerPoint’s ability to have speaker notes, but it relying on them means I made my efforts fail for some people, then it’s time to do something new and different. I’m still going to keep my slides with few words on it, but with the SEO Slides features, I’ll be able to show the ‘notes’ (I hope, right guys?) so the deaf can read and follow along. It’s not perfect, but the only other idea would be to learn sign language, or get my wife’s up to the level where she can do that for me.
Challenge accepted.
Comments
8 responses to “Your Slides Suck”
@mika You always have a way with words, i started reading this and i thought what your on about again 🙂 but this post gript me and i read it all to the end some thing i never do, but thinking about it we all make cool websites but we make them nice for us not for anyone else.. time we wake up and make sure that they are accessible for all, thank you for a super nice post and keep up the great work as you always do.
Do you have the name of the theme that Laura mentioned was the only one she could use? Would love to be able to learn from it.
I wish I had been there to see how Laura uses her phone. Sounds like we all have a lot of work ahead of us.
@christine: Her site is using http://weavertheme.com/ so I presume it’s that.
@Ipstenu (Mika Epstein):
Thanks. I’ll check it out.
I have a tendency to make my slides on WordPress, and use a theme to display them in various ways. As a non-visual person, I tend to not use many images in this process.
So, my question is easy: wtf does “accessible” mean? Is there any form of tool I can run on my site to determine how well it works for, say, the blind?
Tools that give developers feedback provide defacto standards that I can really use. Show me what my HTML is doing wrong, and I’ll fix it. But without that tool, I have no idea how screen readers work, for example. I don’t use them, and the sad fact is that I’m lazy and not going to use them. But a simple checker tool that can give me developer style feedback, that would do wonders for the accessibility needs.
@Otto: Yours are probably the most accessible of a lot of people’s I know. More than mine, certainly. Much of this is stupid obvious:
Images should use the alt attribute and you should describe the fucking image. That’s the biggest, we have to provide alternative text for nontext elements. That also means if you’re embedding audio and video? Get captions.
Use good HTML! Use heading elements properly. H1 and H2 have meanings for screen readers. Don’t use ‘click here’ in a link (which we don’t in a slide anyway) but don’t in your deck online.
Animations are nice, but test the slides without them. A lot of JS is throttled by screen readers and will throw off read-order. Same with any JS type fancy thing you’re using. It’s nice that the text slides in from the right, don’t reply on it.
If you have long form notes, maybe those should display ‘below’ as reading notes for the slides.
It’s really almost everything we do to make ‘good’ SEO, when you think about it…
@Ipstenu (Mika Epstein): I actually found a new slides theme today that is kinda nifty. Thinking about making a plugin for it. This sort of info needs to be more available, I think. It’s not obvious.
@Otto: I think it is, if we stop to think about WHY we do what we do for SEO 🙂
That said, I’m not an accessibility expert, and this just is the start of me getting my shit in gear to be better about it.