Live Session – Hampus and Eric Part 1 (2024)

And then we're also going to switch to English so that Eric will be able to understand better.

It's nice to see the captions or the chat here with people suggesting captions for instance if the audio is not working.

I think Zoom has built-in captions but yeah hopefully it works for Monica to get the thing going.

Otherwise you'll have to watch this afterwards and figure it out when we can help her out.

But anyway, hi everyone! I know some of you at least but I'm Hampus.

I'm sitting here in my home office in Huddinge, south of Stockholm.

I have my t-shirt display behind me with all the accessibility t-shirts that I'm super proud of.

And I'll be one of the teachers in this course. I will usually talk or speak Swedish but this first time I'll speak English.

Because it's both Eric and me. And Eric, do you want to introduce yourself?

Yeah sure! Hello everyone! I'm also sitting in my office south of Sweden but much more south because it's in the middle of Germany.

I've been working with Access Lab for three years now. I think this is the third year.

It feels like an eternity. And also I just joined at the same time.

Lovely people. I will do the non-fun stuff like web content accessibility guidelines.

And we will get to that. And Hampus is doing the fun stuff. That's how we divided this up.

Yeah, nice. It feels like I decided to pick all the fun parts and you get the technical.

That's exactly how it was.

I do have the legislation theme week. So not every week would be super fun. Although we try to make that fun as well.

And I try to make the boring stuff fun. So that's also the other thing.

Oh and I have a lot of Legos around me. Like everything behind me are Legos all the time.

Awesome. Welcome to this course. Is it the fourth time we're having it? I think so.

Yes.

So hopefully we've managed to improve it slightly from time to time.

And this will be the best version ever. We'll see about that.

But today we are doing a kind of intro to the course.

You're going to get to know us a little bit better.

And then you're going to get to know the course setup.

How we'll communicate. How we'll divide up the weeks. That sort of thing.

We also have a small poll or questionnaire.

We're going to try this out in Zoom for the first time. We'll see how that works.

Where you're going to get to tell each other about your role and maybe your hopes for this course and stuff like that.

Yes I think that's the gist of this session.

But let's jump into some slides here to guide us through.

Putting you on the right monitor there. Share screen.

Yes. And yes I have that speaker.

Share screen. There we go.

So intro to accessibility and we have images of us there. Me and my VK.

We only see your desktop.

Oh you only see my desktop. Darn it. Thank you. Let's try that again.

Desktop three. Share.

You can do it.

This looks much better. This looks better. Okay. Cool. Don't know what happened there.

Now we're on it. All right. So we have intro to accessibility. Image of me in my VK cap.

I think I have my A11Y cap on now.

And Erik I don't know why but you're in front of a phone box. Police. House.

I'm in front of the original screen accurate doctor who ninth doctor TARDIS in Cardiff in 2018.

You know just just nerd.

Nice. Love it. That's awesome. People will get to know you throughout the week.

You're quite nerdy in a fun and nice way.

And we have two images to the right. The top right one underneath the kind of common keyboard.

There is another device. It's like the same width as the keyboard.

It has some blue large buttons and then many tiny white ones set in different kind of groups.

Groups by eight. Anyone know maybe right in the chat if you found the chat.

Do you know what that thing is called. So let's see.

Oh no. It's jumping. Stop. OK. Don't know what happened there.

I have a new computer mouse. It started scrolling. Braille. Yes.

Exactly. So the white thing the white dots is Braille or punkt skrift in Swedish.

And Eric knows. And this device is called a refreshable Braille display or punkt skrift display.

Yeah. Nice. Ronny. Yeah. Yeah. It's a accessibility guru.

So yeah. Punkt läsare sometimes in short. So you can kind of connect that to your laptop or IOS device or Android.

And you'll be able to read what's on the screen using just your fingers.

And the blue kind of buttons are for typing. So you can maybe type commands there.

I know some people type the letter H to go to the next heading.

That's like a quick quick way to to jump across the page. And that's one thing we'll talk about in this course.

How to make sure that Braille displays work well and screen readers and that sort of things.

In the bottom one you have more of a motor impaired situation going on.

The person seems to have some kind of joystick by his chin.

I always mix up chin and cheek in English. Chin. Yeah. Chin.

And there are some sensors there. Maybe the sensors could read eye movements or head movements.

And yeah you can calibrate them in in different ways.

Usually talk about switch control or brytar styrning in Swedish.

Basically you have switches or buttons that you can calibrate to be like maybe you move your head to the right and that's pressing the tab key.

Or you press the joystick button and it activates what's in focus.

So that sort of thing. Obviously there are hundreds of different assistive technologies out there.

And these are just two examples.

But for us at least it feels quite cool working with this sort of stuff.

Making digital interfaces accessible to assistive technologies like these.

And that's what we're going to spend a lot of these weeks talking about.

How to do in a good way.

First we have had some issues with robots joining our training courses.

So we want to start off with a just simple quiz making sure that you're all humans.

So we can move on with things.

So you can bring up the chat and answer this question.

Which squares have road signs in this image?

So we have an image with some kind of traffic situation going on.

And there are 16 squares.

And yeah just the ones with road signs please.

We're getting zero, none, zero, null, NA.

This is making us a bit anxious.

Maybe we need to end this and figure out.

But let's have another puzzle.

Usually you can flip these puzzles to an audio version.

So you get to listen instead.

And this is just one of those regular audio messages.

You'll hear it twice in Swedish.

And you can just write that message in the chat if you may.

So let's listen to this.

I hope the sound sharing is going alright.

Let's see.

So you got the message twice.

In between it said "En gång till" because "one more time" in Swedish.

It was not the one more time message that you're supposed to write.

People just laughing.

Accessibility is important.

Yeah that's a good answer.

Robot icon coming up there in the chat.

Someone once wrote "Luke I am your father" and that's the correct answer.

Anyway, obviously we're kidding.

You're most welcome even if you couldn't solve these terrible CAPTCHAs as they're called.

They are just one example of an accessibility issue that affects many users with disabilities.

A lot they can be completely excluded from being able to send in a form or create an account.

But it also is annoying and frustrating to most people.

You can see conversion rates drop a lot when these CAPTCHAs are in a form.

Or reversely, conversion rates will increase a lot.

More people will buy stuff and create accounts and stuff when you remove a CAPTCHA.

Our colleague Daniel hates CAPTCHAs probably more than most of us in here.

He'll visit one of the sessions also to talk about that.

But a cliffhanger is that he has a vision impairment which you can't really see in this image.

Or when you interact with him at first glance at least.

He usually talks about that disability is not always something that shows up on the outside.

But he has a vision impairment and he was the one who sent the audio CAPTCHA to us.

To all the colleagues in the Slack channel.

And that's a regular audio CAPTCHA for creating a Google account.

He was changing the password or something on his Google account and he had to solve that.

He couldn't.

We're going to expect everyone to be human here and move on with things.

This session at a glance we're going to have an intro to accessibility.

And what we're going to talk about the following weeks.

What is accessibility and why is it important.

Then talk core structure.

And then Erik you're going to take over and give a VK intro.

Kind of fly over thing.

Exactly.

Lovely.

All right.

But some more detailed presentations about us.

Erik.

Here's your CV.

It's pretty simple really.

Started out as a web developer with web standards.

Then moved to Vienna.

Got into the accessibility scene there.

That was around 2006.

And yeah.

Worked there with accessibility.

Got like to know a lot of people with different disabilities.

Which is always like super fun.

If you got the opportunity, like, it's, you know, it's really like getting a feel for like what the needs are.

And like where the nuances are.

I think there's nothing better than like, you know, spending real time with real people.

Surprise.

Yeah.

I once won a prize for accessibility.

That has been another life really in 2010.

Actually the like well, they didn't do it after we won it.

So probably we broke like the prize, you know, the prize format.

Because we weren't doing it as a company which they expected.

But just as like, you know, we're enthusiasts for accessibility and we make stuff accessible.

So they didn't like that.

Then I worked with W3C in the web accessibility initiative.

Those are the people who do the web content accessibility guidelines and put together a lot of educational material around it.

And then I worked with Knowbility, which is a U.S. nonprofit.

And then I, you know, moved over to Access Lab because working with a U.S. company.

After working with W3C, you know, who is all like a global company.

Or global organization.

Was very exhausting.

So I was like, oh, maybe I should search for someone who, you know, is on my wavelength and in my time zone.

And that's how I came across Access Lab and happy ever since.

Nice.

And all the results and all the education and all the stuff for small clients, medium clients, and huge, you know, clients that are now afraid of the European Accessibility Act.

That's how this goes.

Nice.

If you get into the accessibility space, you'll find out Eric is quite a prominent figure in that.

Like you write a lot of blog articles.

You comment on recent events.

You're in there.

And the only -- like I remember once I was going to pass on like an assignment from me to you.

And I told the client, hey, you're going to get to work with someone called Eric Eggert.

And they were like, oh, he's famous.

I follow him on Twitter or whatever back in the day.

So, yeah.

You're our most famous colleague.

That's good.

Yeah.

It's a very niche fame.

If it had benefits like getting rich and stuff, I would be much more for it.

But being as it is, it's more like being a loud mouth and saying a lot.

But trying to use like that people know me and stuff for good.

So, you know, and maybe that works out sometime.

Hasn't so far.

I think it has.

Nice.

Some stuff about me then.

So, Hampus is my name.

I'm a parent of now a 4-year-old.

But here's an image of me a couple of years back when the kid was just a couple of months.

I'll talk about this more shortly.

But I'm a UX designer, gone accessibility specialist since 2012.

So, that's over ten years in the accessibility space now for me.

I run the Stockholm accessibility meetup together with a few others.

It's called T12T.

And it's the same like A11Y.

There are lots of abbreviations in the accessibility space for some reason.

But the A11Y stands for accessibility because there are 11 letters between the A and Y in the word accessibility.

And then you can maybe figure out T12T, Swedish version of that.

Tillgänglighet has 12 letters between the Ts.

Not super accessible naming, but it's at least short and quick to write hashtags or Slack channels with that.

I put down here that I'm certified.

There's this organization called IWP.

So, other abbreviations here.

It's International Association Accessibility Professionals or something like that.

And they have two certifications.

And I know that a few people who have taken this course previously have then gone on to take at least a CEPAC certification.

Which is kind of the broader one, core competences.

One, I think two of the C's is for core competences.

And this last one is more of a web accessibility specialist.

So, if you're a developer, you need a couple of years experience in the accessibility space.

But that's possible as well.

So, I wanted to mention that if you're interested.

Thanks, Eric, writing the abbreviations out there in the chat.

Also, I'm one of the founders of AccessLab, which is this company we work at.

Eric, me, and just over 20 others now.

So, small company.

But we focus and specialize in digital accessibility.

Helping mainly actually private companies right now out.

But previously it's been a lot of public sector as well.

We still have a bit of public sector.

But more and more private companies.

Taking steps or leaps forward when it comes to digital accessibility.

So, you know, user testing, doing accessibility reviews, tillgänglighetsgranskningar.

That sort of thing.

A lot of people are now afraid of the new laws that are coming up in 2025.

We'll talk more about that shortly.

But also to mention, like, in my role as a parent, you realize you get a couple of disabilities on the fly.

Kind of.

You get motor impaired in some parts of the day.

I had to carry my kid a lot.

Like I'm holding him now with both my arms.

He had, like, tummy aches.

And was in a bit of pain.

Large parts of the day.

So he had to be carried that way.

And in that situation I was happy about kind of being able to dim the lights or start a lullaby on my home speaker.

What are they called?

The Google Home and Siri and that sort of thing.

Or start an audio book for myself.

That sort of thing.

You also tend to be tired large parts of the day.

Sleep in increments.

You wake up a lot during the night.

And I found I had a harder time concentrating, reading long texts.

I made more mistakes.

Both, like, at work.

So, like, you know, you put the milk in not the fridge but in a regular cupboard and stuff like that.

You get interrupted constantly.

And often in the wrong situation.

You're kind of filling in something or buying something online or whatnot.

And the baby wakes up or needs attention.

And you have to leave what you're doing for a couple of minutes.

And then when you get back you get super annoyed if you've been kind of thrown out because of a time limit or that sort of thing.

When I'm out and about in the real world I need ramps for my stroller.

You know, ramps and door openers and elevators.

Things that are really handy for many people with certain disabilities.

For instance, in wheelchairs and stuff.

Good as a parent.

Good if you are rolling a suitcase behind you or you're on a bicycle or a skateboard.

So, what's necessary for some will be really good for many.

And when you've put the little monster to sleep or little miracle maybe sometimes at least.

You're happy about having subtitles on videos that you might want to watch or Netflix or whatnot.

So, all this to say accessibility benefits us all in certain parts of our life or day.

And it's not only for people with permanent impairments.

Nice.

Yeah, so we're going to shortly take a break and do this poll thing at the same time I think.

It's a bit early for a break but I think it's all right.

We can take 10 minutes or something.

We want to get to know you and what you work with.

Maybe what hopes you have for this course.

And some like if you have previous accessibility knowledge and stuff like that.

So, I think, yeah, we're going to try the polling feature on Zoom, right, Eric?

You've prepped something there.

Yes, I have prepped it.

So, when I click launch in a second, it will probably -- that's how I understand it.

As I said, first time.

As we said, like first time that we're using it.

And I think it pops up like right in the center of your screen and asks you to fill out like the three questions.

And then you can like keep interacting with all the stuff.

But it should like pop up somewhere on your screen.

But, yeah, I don't know.

I guess you will see the pop up as well.

I'll tell you.

Because I couldn't see it when I tested it.

Okay.

I press it now.

Three, two, one, launch.

There we go.

All right.

Yeah, we get like this small survey with the three questions on the screen.

If you for some reason can't find it or aren't in a situation where you can answer it, that's totally fine.

You'll probably -- we'll read out what others have said and you'll probably get something out of that.

But we'll take -- we'll have you do this and then take -- let's see each other at 1345.

So in ten minutes.

You can do this and take a break or take a break and do this later.

Up to you.

Okay.

Thank you.