A11y Talks Porto - People Make Change

I’ve labelled myself an “accessibility advocate” for a few years now. I’m deeply involved in online blindness communities (OurBlind), I have training from Deque, I’ve worked with Siemens Portugal’s DivIn Employee Resource Group (link in Portuguese) on disability topics, and I’ve always strived to go one step further in building inclusive interfaces and systems to empower the people who use them (check out my older post The Thingy Didn’t Do the Thing!).

With all that, as a citizen of the Internet, I have precious few local connections with my local community of digital accessibility practitioners. When Patrícia Dias started bringing people together on LinkedIn for a meetup in Porto, I jumped at the chance.

All opinions I share here are my own and don’t intend to represent those of any of the organizations or people mentioned. My summaries of others’ opinions are subject to possible misinterpretation on my part.

A Round Table and Why Food Makes a Difference

I’m a fan of online spaces, particularly text-based ones, for their potential to level the playing field in accessibility. As an example, the weekly events on the OurBlind Discord server are voice-based, but offer transcription and text-to-speech - even a blindness-oriented space can accommodate hard of hearing and Deaf, as well as non-speaking members.

It’s possible to have breakout rooms, one-to-one discussions, and hopping between topics in online events, but it’s easier to do that in person. At the same time when your focus is local, it’s good to be local. Food is also an incredible cultural touchstone, especially when each participant brings something to share.

The in-person discussion took place in a Gaia co-working space which thematically fit our goals: bringing together people working with and around accessibility from different perspectives together in an open and informal way.

Check out the video on YouTube (under two hours long) and be on the lookout for new content. I’m the very light skinned man on the left with the buzz cut and long beard.

My Thoughts on Topic Discussed

You can watch the whole thing above, but I’d like to cover a few topics and add my own thoughts. I love to hear myself talk, so you’ll have plenty of those in the video, but I’ll add extra context here.

European Accessibility Act

Will you look at that, it’s June 2025 and the European Accessibility Act is coming into effect. As the Ode to Joy swells in the background and an Iberian Lynx leaps through a circle of yellow stars with a blue sky behind it, let’s think about what that means. We discussed impacts for users, accessibility practitioners, and companies. We brought up our own concerns and doubts.

With new regulations and legal requirements come new questions. The gist, as I understand it, is that a set of consumer-facing services must conform to the current Web Accessibility Guidelines at Level AA. Please don’t use that sentence to make decisions you’ll be legally liable for. That’s where the questions come up and I can’t say the group came to a clear answer to them.

As for impacts, the main ideas were that a rising tide lifts all boats, but that striving for compliance won’t make the web truly accessible. Some companies are already on the forefront of accessibility, others lag behind and others still use bolt-on fixes. These approaches are chosen based on motivations. When trying to coax a farm animal you may chose to use the carrot or the stick. The ones going after the carrot have known it’s there all along and don’t need the regulation to motivate them. The EAA is a stick and, like in the metaphor, it can’t motivate but only force compliance.

By raising the bar for multiple consumer-facing fields, we’re likely to see a growing interest in accessibility, market pressure for experts and, for those now aware of the carrot, a shift left. The outlook was generally positive, even as we identified multiple challenges. In fact, let’s go into some of them.

Am I an Expert?

We discussed the word “expert” to find out who can be relied upon in digital accessibility and how to get there. The consensus was very positive in that, I’m paraphrasing here, “anybody can be an expert as long as they’re willing to learn.” I took a much more hard-line stance and I think it’s worth expanding on it.

There are a few attorneys in my extended family; even more have Law degrees. There’s a very clear difference between those two: you can have a Law degree, but you can’t practice Law if you’re not in the Bar Association (“Ordem dos Advogados” in Portugal). Similarly I have a Masters in Electrical Engineering, but I’m not a Professional Engineer: I can’t sign off on electrical infrastructure projects, because I’m not a member of the “Ordem dos Engenheiros,” the Portuguese Board of Professional Engineers.

Am I over-complicating or over-formalizing? Our social contract guarantees our bridges are safe and our contracts are sound in a top-to-bottom process. The government empowers these organizations to certify professionals in their fields.

So what’s the accrediting body empowered by the Government for digital accessibility and what’s the credencial? Since I’m not seeking any kind of certification or accreditation, I may not have the full picture here. That said, a few references are the Trusted Tester program by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Customer Experience Directorate (CXD), Portugal’s “Curso de Auditores e Facilitadores em Acessibilidade Web” (Web Accessibility Auditor and Facilitator Course) and, as a professional organization that’s not recognized at the same level as a Bar Association, the International Association of Accessibility Professionals’ Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC).

That was quite the wall of links, wasn’t it? Let’s all take a breath and regroup. If I work in software engineering without being a Professional Engineer, why am I making such a big deal out of this? Blame the attorneys in my family. I’ve learned that there are big differences between little words when it comes to the Law. In a field increasingly coupled to government services, conformance and compliance, legal promises and court battles, I don’t think I can afford to use the wrong words. I don’t think any of us can.

That doesn’t mean I have nothing to offer or I don’t know what I’m talking about. It means I’m not willing to oversell and under-deliver.

Shifting Left

I’m bundling a few topics together here. We talked about design systems, the designer’s role beyond the specification, and accessibility overlays as bolt-on fixes. I believe there was a consensus on the value of shifting left, that is taking accessibility into account earlier in the project lifecycle. According to Microsoft, “Fixing a bug later, in the post-production phase, can cost 30 times more than it takes to fix it in the development phase.” Money talks, or so I’m told.

If the goal is good design, good user experience, confidence in conformance, real inclusion, we all agreed that the way to get there is to have these goals in mind from the start.

I made the point that people working in software and for the web have already learned this lesson about localization and internationalization. Go play around with building Android or Windows apps and you’ll be adding your strings to resource files to be localized for the target markets. Do that for open source and you may end up setting up a project on a localization management system like WebLate or CrowdIn.

If we’ve figured this out for localization and internationalization, we should really work on accessibility from the start, right? A lot of the motivations are the same: increasing your product’s total addressable market.

Fun fact: the a11y numeronym and social media hashtag follows the same line as l18n and i10n for localization and localization, respectively.

If We Could Automate Users…

Designing and testing for accessibility is hard and time-consuming. It also requires lots of knowledge and experience. Wouldn’t it be incredible if we could automate the testing process? Adrian Roselli wrote a better primer on why we can’t then I’d ever attempt to, but I can go over some of the points we discussed.

First off, automated tools are helpful and automation is necessary im modern CI/CD oriented software development. You don’t want to waste your human time on the most basic of regressions. Big expensive products like Axe DevTools and little free ones like Pa11y, as well as browser dev tools, are interesting here.

That said, there’s no software that can fix SC 1.1.1 for you, because it doesn’t know the context or intent of the content. The same content can de described as “an older man hugs people on the street” or “Presidential candidate Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa engages with citizens in downtown Porto.” How would you describe this video from RTP’s archives (in Portuguese)?

Apart from that obvious point, users interact with products in myriad ways. Screen reader users learn a variety of keyboard shortcuts and may be less interested in your regions and more on your headings than you think. Or they may use the mouse far more than you’d expect. Your efforts to make life easier for these users may negatively impact voice control users. Disclosure: I collaborated on the Web Accessibility Survey I referenced.

How can accessibility practitioners account for these issues and unknowns? We have to begin by accepting there is human nuance in usage that requires human nuance in development and testing. By accepting there are things we don’t know and, critically, things we don’t know we don’t know, we can then move on to user testing. Shifted left, of course.

We can also keep the same mindset throughout the product’s lifecycle by actively monitoring for and adapting to user needs and experiences. If we’re lucky, they’ll complain about their issues. If we’re not, they’ll move to the competition. If we’re really unlucky, the users will feel trapped for a period of time, not complain, but then move in droves.

That last bit sounds too much like a stick. The carrot we want is that users talk and share opinions. Accessible products become known for that and gain market share. “Number go up” bring that to your decision-makers.

Conclusion And Next Steps

If we care about diversity, we must care about diversity of opinions, perspectives and experiences between professionals. Digital accessibility, as a field, has the potential for great social and economic impact, as it permeates economic activities. We all bring something different to the table: cookies, lived experience within a specific disability community, cake, responsibilities in design systems, savory finger foods, a focus on cybersecurity…

If we care about our impact, we have to learn with and from each other. Doing that as a local community opens up many opportunities. I’m looking forward to other in-person and digital activities with a local focus and a global impact.