Karli Yeoman, Expedia, Senior Accessibility Engineer

Karli Yeoman talks about her foundation background as a web developer. She describes the approach at Expedia for helping teams and individuals to bring accessibility into their project work. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

(uplifting music)

- Hello, this is Digital Accessibility.

The People Behind the Progress.

I'm Joe Wolinsky, the creator and host of this series

and as an accessibility professional myself,

I find it very interesting as to how others

have found their way into this profession.

So let's meet one of those people right now

and hear about their journey.

(uplifting music)

All right, well, let's get started

and I'm happy to be visiting today with Karli Yeoman.

Hello, Karli, how are you today?

- Good. How are you?

- I'm good; most of the time,

I'm at my home office on Vashon Island, near Seattle,

which is also near Blink's headquarters in downtown Seattle.

Where are you talking to us from today?

- I'm in Seattle as well.

I'm in the west Seattle neighborhood of Seattle.

- All right. Excellent.

That's a fun neighborhood.

Not too far for me, except with a ferry ride in between.

- Yep. - Well, it's good

to have you involved here today

and to learn a little bit about your journey

to what you're doing today,

but why don't we start with that?

What's your current position

and what are the types of things you're involved with?

- Yeah, thanks for having me here today.

I'm super excited to be part of this.

I'm a member of Expedia Group's Digital Accessibility Team.

Technically my title is Accessibility Engineer,

because I have a web development background,

but I do kind of a little bit of everything.

We have a pretty small accessibility team,

so we do pretty much anything needed

to empower the company to make accessible digital products.

So, I run and build trainings.

I build documentation as well as internal guidelines.

I run our internal Accessibility Champions Network

so that we can really spread our knowledge out.

I also complete assessments

of both our webpages and our apps,

and then I just implement processes

across a development life cycle

to make sure that we're thinking about accessibility

at all points, whether it's product or design

or development or test.

- Yeah, well, it's great to be chatting

with somebody from Expedia.

I think that's one of those companies where,

beyond people knowing the name,

it's likely that most of us have used it in some way.

So I don't know if that puts extra pressure

on the types of things that you do or not.

- Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, I think travel's a really, really important thing,

and I think it's something that everybody

should be able to do.

So making sure that we are allowing that

and making sure that our products

are being able to be used by everybody,

I think is really important.

- Yeah, and it's certainly, you know,

your product is in one of those situations

where you definitely want everyone to be able to use it,

and we will talk more about the things that you're doing

at Expedia, but the theme of this program

is to just kind of find out the journey

that brought people to where they are today.

So, well, let me just hand it off to you.

You know, what's the starting point?

What were some of the things that kind of built

to bring you to where you're at today?

- Yeah, so, when I entered college,

I really had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

I knew that I enjoyed math and logic,

but I actually ended up majoring in astronomy and physics.

But when it came towards the end of college

and I started thinking about my career,

I realized I just wasn't passionate about it.

So, I took some extra web development classes

my last few years,

and really started working in backend web development

when I graduated.

The first couple years, I think partly

because I was focused on backend,

but I think, unfortunately,

digital accessibility just wasn't talked about that much

still at that point.

So, at that point I still really hadn't even heard of it.

I barely knew what it was, but in 2014,

I was actually working for a contracting company

and starting to expand to Full Stack

and focusing more on front end development.

And they actually placed me at Expedia

as they were starting their accessibility team.

So, I was kind of thrown into the deep end,

straight into this new accessibility team

that was getting created with pretty much zero knowledge

of digital accessibility.

But luckily I had some really great teammates

that had more experience,

than I did that taught me a ton,

as well as a lot of coworkers with disabilities

that really provided perspective for me,

showed me how to use assistive technologies.

Really showed me what went into all of that

and all the struggles that they've had.

And I fell in love with the field

and became so passionate in it.

I'm now seven years into that at Expedia Group.

I've had a ton of learnings. I'm still growing.

But this feels like kind of the perfect marriage

between being able to do what I love,

which is web development,

but also making an impact in people's lives,

which is something that I felt like I was missing.

So I just, I love that accessibility allows me to do both.

- Well, let's not let the seven years go by

without like dipping into some parts of it

in a little bit more detail.

But yeah, so you had a developer background.

That was an area that you were involved with from the start.

Had accessibility come up in the things that you were doing

before you got involved in Expedia?

Was it anything that was talked about

or that you felt you had to learn about before that point?

- Honestly, it really hadn't.

I mean, since I didn't major in computer science,

I only took a few classes in college,

but none of those touched on it at all.

The contracting company I was working for,

before then, we had members of the company

that were in accessibility and were focused on that.

So I'd heard little bits through the grapevine from them

and kind of had gotten an idea of what it was,

but as for actually how to make an experience accessible

and what actually goes into that?

Before I joined Expedia, I pretty much was at zero.

- All right. Well, good.

I mean the reason we're good in that,

the reason I ask about things like that is, you know,

just always looking to figure out how,

in our profession, we can move forward.

And yeah, I think it's important for everyone

to evangelize it as broadly as possible

within their organization,

just so that anybody who has touchpoints

with our customers can find out if in fact

there is something that they need to do.

I'm guessing there probably were things,

now that you knew you could have been attentive to,

but you didn't know at the time.

- Definitely. Yeah.

When I look back on things that I created

before that point in time,

and it's almost upsetting thinking about the information

that I didn't have and the knowledge I didn't have,

and the users that I was blocking from using the software

that I was creating.

So, I mean, I'm glad that I finally had my eyes

opened to that, but I think there's definitely still

a long way to go in this field,

making sure that everybody does understand that.

- Well, then when you came in to Expedia,

did you say that there was an accessibility component

to that position from the start?

- Yeah, so we had just created

our first accessibility team and I joined as that,

as starting out the team.

There was me and two other members of the team,

all just starting it up.

The other two both had,

one is a coworker with a disability

and the other had a pretty long history

of working in digital accessibility.

So I learned a ton from them, but yeah,

I was the only one that was starting from scratch.

- Well, everybody has to start somewhere.

And so again, I think it's interesting

how people find their way

and gather that information.

And so when you came into that position,

it was great that you had a couple of people

that were able to mentor you at that point.

But what were some of the things

that you actually kind of had to work through?

What were some of the challenges early on about

how you learned about things,

or was there a certain approach that

your mentors brought in,

or priorities in getting you up to speed?

- Yeah, I mean, I think it was kind of everything.

So I had a web development background,

but even with that, it was backend,

so I was even still kind of learning front end development

and learning how to do HTML and CSS.

So, it kind of actually almost helped in a way

that I didn't have a whole lot ingrained in me already

because I got to learn how to do it accessibly

from the beginning from them.

But because I was learning the job,

I think in a way that's actually helped me in my career

because I've gone through the struggles

that I see other members of my company going through,

and how confusing accessibility can be at the beginning

and how it can feel very, very complicated.

And knowing now what I know and knowing

that it doesn't have to be that way

and learning how to kind of demystify that

was something that my coworkers

were really helpful with and kind of teaching me

along the way,

how it doesn't have to be this big, scary thing

that a lot of people think it might be.

But yeah, I think just learning as I worked through it

and figuring out the best ways to explain things,

whether it's from a design perspective

or from a development perspective.

And so learning that as well.

Learning the design side of it has been a big thing for me.

Learning how to do designs with accessibility included

and what that looks like, I think is important.

But kind of, yeah,

just learning all the different steps

and how accessibility needs to be handled

in each step of the development life cycle

has been super helpful.

- And how is accessibility

brought into the process at Expedia?

I guess I usually kind of are looking

for a couple of things.

One is organizationally

whether you're sort of in a department

that is responsible for its own things,

and there are other people in other departments

responsible for their part?

Or is there more of something across the organization

that guides accessibility?

- Yeah, so, I'm on our internal Digital Accessibility Team.

So we kind of handle digital accessibility

for the entire company,

but we wanna make sure

that we're not actually doing the work for them.

So when it comes to designing,

we don't actually get in there and get hands-on

and do the designs.

We don't write the code,

but we provide any assistance that's needed

in doing that for anybody in the company

that's working on a digital product,

no matter what it is, we're here for that.

And so we create trainings and lots of documentation.

We have a Slack channel that we call Accessibility Coach,

where somebody from my team is always there to answer

any questions anybody has,

whether they're having trouble figuring out

how to make a design accessible,

or they're a developer and they're writing code,

and they wanna make sure that they're approaching it

the right way.

We're there for that.

We also run specific programs

like helping teams implement accessibly automation

in their builds,

making sure that we're thinking about it at that step.

We'll also sit down with people

if they want one on one guidance on something.

So, we're kind of all over the place,

doing anything that's asked of us

when it comes to accessibility and just making sure

that everybody has the resources that they need.

I did also mention,

we do have an Accessibility Champions Network.

So, our team is very small.

Right now there's only two of us,

but we're actually in the process of growing it.

Right now, we have a few job postings out there,

but because we are so small,

we do rely on our Accessibility Champions.

So people throughout the company

in all sorts of different roles,

and all sorts of different

working on different products that are passionate

about accessibility to be there when we can't

to help answer questions

and really share that passion and really grow that passion

across the company,

because we can't have our hands in everything.

So that's really helpful for us.

- Yeah, like the Champions Network is interesting.

I know in most large-ish organizations,

evangelists that are in departments or divisions

tend to be the people that help spread that,

the passion and the information,

but it sounds like what you've done is standardize

that a little bit or add more structure to it.

Is that right?

- Yeah, so, our Champions Network

has been through a few different phases.

We've definitely had a lot of learnings and perfected it

and continue to grow it.

We're actually just started a new phase where we now have

a little bit more structure to it,

where we have different champion levels.

And depending on your roles,

there's different things that you can do

to increase the level that you're at

so that you can get more publicity

and more recognition across the company

and the work that you've put in.

So these things might be things that help your team

or even help other teams.

So we really have a reason for these Champions

to help in any way that they can.

And especially with teams that maybe don't have a Champion,

getting Champions from other teams to help them as well.

So it's a great learning experience for them too.

- Now, when Expedia has a new hire,

is there some onboarding that connects them

to what your group does

or is it happen through the Champions

or some other way?

- Yeah, so we have a lot of internal trainings.

We have trainings tailored to each different role,

whether that be PMs or designers or developers.

We have a onboarding process that they go through

with various trainings about what accessibility is

and then how to actually implement accessibility

in your job.

And so those, we find really, really important

for our employees to understand accessibility

from the get go.

- You mentioned people having different roles,

but I think that was related to the Champions,

but how does it work with accessibility

for different roles within the process

of your software system?

Are there activities for research, design, development?

Are they kind of set up in different ways

or how do you work with that?

- Yeah, so I think we're still building some of that out,

but that's definitely the goal

is to get accessibility in every single touchpoint.

We do do research studies with users.

So making sure that that is getting thought of,

and that we are bringing in users with disabilities

when we do do these studies.

We're making sure that when product

is creating user stories

that we're including users with disabilities

in part of these user stories.

And then we are making sure that designs

that are being handed off to our development team

include the requirements that are needed for accessibility.

So not only what is this experience like for a sighted user,

but also what is this experience like for say,

a screen reader user, and how are they going to navigate it?

And what's it gonna sound like?

And then for our developers, making sure that they have,

they're doing testing on all of their code

and making sure that they're thinking about accessibility

and making sure that we have automated testing

in our builds.

And then once it goes live,

we're still checking all of that, doing assessments,

making sure that nothing made it through the cracks

and made it to our live site.

So, really just making sure that we have those touchpoints

at every single spot,

so we can really avoid bugs whenever possible.

- Well, it's good to hear that you have that applied

to the research part of the process.

I think that might be one of the areas in user experience

that might get the least amount of attention

for accessibility, even though early on in the process,

that's where you can really do a lot of innovation.

Do you have any like, stories or anecdotes or anything

of things that have come out of the research

that you felt have made an impact on the direction

that you went with design and development?

- Yeah, I don't know about any like specific stories,

but I definitely have seen the power of doing research

with users with disabilities

and bringing in the people that are actually working

on these products and so that they can actually see a user

actually using their product,

and I've found how impactful it is

when they see somebody struggling

and really get that person and seeing that person and seeing

the struggle they're going through.

And really it really hits home more than it does

when we just tell them

that this is something that's important.

But actually seeing that experience is huge.

And frequently when we do that,

we find that people aren't using it the way that we expect

or the way that the developer was thinking

that it was gonna be used.

And so it just really drives that home

that we need to be thinking about these users

and that the important thing is what they think makes sense,

and not necessarily what we as developers or designers

think makes the most sense.

- And then do the findings from research.

What's the next stop for that?

Does that get presented to designers?

- I think it depends on the stage

that we are in the development life cycle, but yeah,

that will generally go back to whoever

is working on the product and we figure out how to iterate

on it and continue to make things better.

That's one of the things that I love

about this field too, is that it's never boring.

There's always some way to make things better.

And we're always looking for that.

How do we make this specific experience better

for this user or this user?

And so there's always ways to iterate

and make things better.

It's never gonna be perfect. So.

- But you also mentioned training and documentation,

and I think both of those as entities don't often end up

as standardized parts of accessibility in organizations.

So I think that's a progressive step that you've taken.

What is the training like?

- So, we have trainings for each role.

So we have kind of an introductory training

that everybody is required to take

that introduces you to accessibility and to the users

that are affected as well as to WCAG

and the guidelines that we follow.

And then from there, there's just trainings.

We have screen reader training as well

that we try to get every buddy to take,

just to make sure that you understand

how a screen reader works,

even if you're not necessarily in a role

where you have to use it,

but just understanding that that does exist

and that there's gonna be users that are using this,

and that there are different ways to navigate the web

than maybe what you're used to.

And then we'll have trainings.

We have trainings aimed at developers

that talk about how to actually write your code

and then trainings aimed at designers

that talk about things like color and other things

that are gonna factor into their designs

in thinking about how they're actually incorporating that

in the actual design that they hand off to development.

- And then the other piece

that you mentioned was documentation.

What does that consist of

and how is that used by everyone?

- So we have a large wide range of documentation

that I've been working on over the last seven years.

We have different examples of different components.

So, say if you have a developer designer

who's working on a menu or a tool tip or a carousel,

we have pages specifically dedicated to those

that talk about what that experience will look like

for a keyboard or a screen reader user,

as well as common pitfalls that we see

when it comes to those components

and making sure that you avoid those.

We also have Expedia accessibility guidelines,

which is another document that I've worked on a lot

over the last couple years,

where over the course of our program,

we've had a few different obstacles

that we were trying to solve.

One being that as the members of our team provide guidance

because accessibility can be a bit subjective,

we found that we weren't necessarily consistent all the time

in the recommendations that we were making.

And so we wanted to figure out a way

to make that more consistent and really document

the directions that we wanted to take.

And then we were also finding

that especially with employees who are new to accessibility,

that if you ask them to look at WCAG

and try to figure out what was required of them,

because it's such a comprehensive document,

it can be a little overwhelming for people

in not knowing where to look, where to start.

So we really just wanted to make it

a little bit more concrete and in verbiage

that made sense for us as a company.

So, we set out to create

the Expedia Accessibility Guidelines,

which are essentially just an adaption of WCAG.

It's all the same content,

but just in a little bit more specific,

kind of black and white requirements

for the direction that we wanted to take as a company

so that we could make sure that we were as consistent

as possible in the experience that we had across each page,

each component, each brand,

and just making sure that everything can stay

as consistent as possible,

and just have one stop shop that everybody can go to

to figure out what they need for the component

they're working on.

- If designers or developers come up with new solutions

for how to do things, does that move back toward your group

to bring it into the documentation?

- Definitely. Yeah.

We are always updating our documentation with new findings,

new decisions that we've made.

If a question comes in that we feel like isn't answered yet

in our documentation, and we have an answer for it,

we'll go back in and add that to the documentation.

Whenever, yeah, if we have new experiences,

new ways of implementing something and we change our mind,

which happens sometimes.

I mean, we find new information

that we didn't have before we decide

that maybe a different experience is better

than the one we have,

we'll go back and change our recommendations.

- And does your group field questions or concerns

that come in through customer support?

- We do, yes.

We have an email alias that we use for that

as well as just our normal feedback locations.

We get that all funneled in

when it's accessibility related.

And we definitely look at that and use that

to definitely go back to our teams and figure out

what needs to happen to fix any issues that we're seeing.

But most of the time,

it's actually usually pretty positive.

We hear a lot that we have one of the best travel platforms

and I couldn't be more proud of that.

That we can allow people to do things

that they couldn't otherwise.

So, it's pretty exciting.

- And how do you organize that with just two people?

- It's rough.

- I mean, I realize there's a huge group there,

but I would've, yeah.

I would've felt like you would've needed more

within the things you've been talking about here.

It's a lot of work.

- Yeah. Yeah. Our team has gone through a lot of changes.

We've definitely had more people at times.

This just happens to be a moment when right now

we only have two, but we are, as I said,

looking to expand our team a lot more in the coming months.

So, we're pretty excited for those opportunities.

- Well, let's talk a little bit about things going on now.

Are there any particular activities or initiatives

that you're particularly interested or busy with these days?

- Still a little bit of everything.

Just kind of filling in all the gaps.

We're working on a lot more documentation.

We found that we wanted to expand more

outside of the typical roles that we think about

for digital accessibility.

So, expanding more to documentation

and things that will be helpful for just say a PM

or somebody that's just working from day to day.

So, working on documentation for things like

making emails accessible and presentations accessible.

So things that are more internal for us as a company.

We've been definitely working on that a lot,

making sure that we are a great place

to work for people with disabilities.

We were actually just recognized

as one of the best places to work

for disability inclusion by Disability In.

So we're really excited about that,

and getting focused on that a little bit more.

We're also assisting a few other groups

in making sure that just the travel experience

as a whole is accessible.

So not even just our digital experience,

but actually the travel experience

and the physical experience is accessible.

So that's really exciting for us as a team as well.

Yeah, I think just continuing to build out

as much as we can and touch as many people

within the company as we can.

As we start growing our team,

we're hoping to touch more people.

So the more we can do that, the better.

- Great, well, it's a very interesting story,

and it is great to see how well you've been able

to put a comprehensive program together in your company.

And thanks for taking the time to chat with me today.