E096 – Interview with Joe Devon – Part 1

Joe Devon tells us that lot of accessibility is knowing the culture and different communities that view it differently. Thanks to Gatsby for being a sponsor of the show. Gatsby is a modern website framework that builds performance into every website by leveraging the latest web technologies. Create blazing fast, compelling apps and websites without needing to become a performance expert. Make sure you have a look at their site: https://www.gatsbyjs.org Transcript Nic: Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 96. I'm Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you're interested in accessibility, hey, this show's for you. To get today's transcript, head out to the podcast website, https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Gatsby for sponsoring this episode. Gatsby is a modern website framework that builds performance into every website by leveraging the latest web technologies. Create blazing-fast, compelling apps and websites without needing to become a performance expert. Nic: This week, I'm speaking to Joe Devon. Joe, thanks for joining me for this conversation around web accessibility. Joe: My pleasure. I really enjoy your podcast, so it feels funny to be on the inside, so to speak. Nic: Thank you. If you've listened to the show before, you know that I like to let guests introduce themselves. Briefly, who's Joe Devon? Joe: Well, briefly, I am the co-founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day. It's something that I co-founded with Jennison Asuncion back in 2012. If anybody doesn't know, it's basically a day that is to get developers, designers, and anybody who builds digital products, that it should be built with accessibility in mind. Joe: I also around the same time co-founded Diamond, a digital agency that focuses on building accessible, highly scalable, and well-crafted software. Basically, those two grew quite well but separately over the years, then last year, we launched an accessibility practice area. This has really been my focus for the last decade or so. Nic: You're really focusing enterprise-grade focus on accessibility, right? Joe: Yes, absolutely. Essentially, the founders and the partners at Diamond grew out of americanidol.com, which this is where we all met. Then eventually, we started the agency. Internally, we had accessibility as a core value, but we just felt that there was... I created GAAD as a developer. I didn't come in as an accessibility subject matter expert, so it took a little bit of time to really develop that know-how, but I'd like to do a shoutout to Deque University. That was really what helped me to overcome the missing pieces because it was a little bit hard to figure out how to run and build a company while really becoming an expert on accessibility. Nic: Yeah, that's an interesting journey, from developer to enterprise leader to accessibility delivery guys. That's cool. We're talking about accessibility. I find there's a lot of different definitions of the term. How would you define web accessibility? Joe: If it's web accessibility, I would say building websites that are accessible to people with disabilities, keep it as simple as that, but I typically prefer to talk about digital accessibility, which includes all digital products. That would include mobile apps and it would include AR, VR, and the technologies that are coming down the pike that will replace the smartphone before long. Nic: In your day-to-day life, where do you fit in the puzzle? How do you fit accessibility in? Because I imagine you're no longer spending a lot of time coding. What do you do accessibility-wise? Joe: I haven't really touched too much code in the last decade since starting the company. However, I still felt it was important to know it because when you're hiring subject matter experts, you really want to know what you're doing. I don't literally work on accessi