E080 – Interview with Damien Senger – Part 1

In which Damien Senger tells us "Universal design is the answer, more than accessibility. Because people are on a spectrum." Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 80. I'm Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you're interested in accessibility, hey, this show is for you. To get today's show notes or transcript head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio: Connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS, and video at twilio.com. Nic: This week I'm speaking to Damien Senger. Thanks for joining me Damien to talk about accessibility. How are you? Damien: Yeah, I'm fine. Thanks for inviting me. Nic: I like to let guests introduce themselves so in a brief introduction, who is Damien Senger? Damien: That's a good question. I am not sure that I really know myself. I'm a mix between a designer and an HTML/CSS lover, so I'm working mainly as a designer for a company in Amsterdam called Castor EDC, where to be exact I'm Design Systems and Accessibility Lead. So half of my job is making sure that our development team is doing a correct job in what they're delivering, correct job in the design, like how they implement it but also to a level of accessibility that we're trained to achieve for our products. Aside of that I'm, like I said an HTML/CSS lover. I love to share my life, so I'm doing conferences, I'm trying to do articles but it's really hard to find time and, yeah. That's a bit of me, I'm living in Amsterdam and in Rotterdam, like a bit between both of these two cities so it's a bit complex, but yeah, that's me. Nic: That's you, wonderful, thank you. We're talking primarily about web accessibility today. How would you define it? Damien: Defining accessibility. Ah, that's quite funny because it's what I'm trying to do at my job these days. I'm writing an accessibility policy for the company, so trying to define what we want to achieve for that. For me it's mainly tied to universal design. So, I really believe in the vision with which the web was created, so I think content accessible to everybody regardless of their specific abilities, so for me, accessibility is just being sure that we're creating experiences that are exactly the same for everybody regardless if they can use a mouse or not. If they have really good attention span or not, or if they're just really distracted in their environment. Damien: So yes, I'm really focused on cognitive disabilities. I think it's maybe one of the most interesting things for me into this part of the job. Nic: Cognitive disabilities is an area of accessibility that has, until relatively recently, been mostly ignored on web and I'm glad to see more and more of that being discussed and solutions to barriers found, so good to hear you're finding an interest in it. But why do you think it's such an interesting part of the field of web accessibility? Damien: Mainly because for me, it was forgotten by a lot of the community during a long time. As you said, the WCAG only started working on cognitive disabilities a few years ago, and the WCAG version 2, especially version 2.1 was the first one really trying to embrace this topic. Damien: And for me it's also really interesting because it's invisible, so it's even more difficult to work with it because it's something that you cannot see at first sight, and also it's something evolving, evolving a lot. We have a population which is aging. All the web specialists, all the web designers, all the web developers, all the web workers are quite still young in a way and the web is aging wit