Andrew Hayward, Twitter, Accessibility Engineer

Andrew Hayward talks about discovering accessibility in his early years as a web developer. He describes his path that weaved through Mozilla and most recently found him helping to set up an emerging accessibility team at Twitter. 

Mentioned in this episode:

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(upbeat music)

- Hello, this is Digital Accessibility,

the people behind the progress.

I'm Joe Welinske, 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.

(upbeat music)

All right, well here we go with another visit

with an accessibility practitioner,

and today I am please to be talking to Andrew Hayward.

Hello, Andrew, how are you?

- I'm fine, how are you Joe?

- I'm really good.

I'm talking from home office in the Seattle area

on Vashon Island.

Where are you talking to us from?

- I am joining you from an armchair in my living room

in Southeast London, in the UK.

It's a little bit later for me than it is for you,

but appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.

- Well, I appreciate you sharing in this as well.

And so, you know, we'll talk about,

you know, a lot of things about,

you know, what you're involved with with accessibility,

but I mean, just to start out,

what's your current situation?

What type of work are you doing?

- So currently I am an accessibility engineer at Twitter,

a company you may have heard of.

Twitter is on the early beginnings of its sort of

disability and accessibility journey.

We have founded a product accessibility team

about a year ago now,

which yeah, I was sort of part of getting that set up

and yeah, it's just been a really sort of big year for us

getting that going.

And yeah, the team has just sort of grown

from one person a year ago

to now best part of 10 people at this point.

So yeah.

- Oh, well, that's great to hear about the growth in that.

And you know, this podcast is all about

hearing about people's journeys

that led them into accessibility work.

So, you know, why don't you just pick a spot,

you know, go back in time,

maybe pick out some of the,

you know, maybe one of the first milestone

that started you on the road

that got you to where you are today.

- Yeah, it's interesting.

I mean, I think we talk a lot about

accessibility practitioners and yet

from a professional perspective,

that is sort of very few and far between.

You know, technically in my 15ish year career at this point,

I have been a professional accessibility engineer

for one of those.

You know, the others I've just been in web development,

software engineering.

And it's almost just sort of been there

as an underlying constant.

You know, when I first started getting into web development,

the web standards movement was a really big thing,

certainly in the world I was part of.

Accessibility was just something we did,

it wasn't, you know, sort of a specialty.

It wasn't, you know, a profession

that people really went into,

it was just part of doing the right thing.

You know, you have a good design,

you have good UX, and you have good accessibility.

And that was just how I sort of grew up

building for the web,

and that's kind of stuck with me ever since.

Yes, I mean it's something I tried to do all along.

It wasn't until I started working for Mozilla

quite some time ago now,

where I really started thinking about

sort of the, the intersection

of humanity and the internet, you know,

sort of all the things I've been doing before that

they were, you know, mostly web based.

There's a bit of desktops software along the way,

but mostly web based stuff.

And yeah, it wasn't really until I got to Mozilla

that it was actually thinking about the people

using these things so.

- Let just stop there and dig into that a little bit.

So you mentioned you had the web development background

and that you've been,

you know, aware of that.

So did it just start out with,

you know, learning things online

or just hearing from others about the accessibility aspect

of your development?

- Yes, I mean, I suppose this was

kind of turn to the century really,

you know, coming into the 21st century.

And yeah, it was just sort of,

it was a really small core community of,

you know, of web interested people.

I don't say web developers,

'cause it was a good mixture of people,

still is really,

but it was just a sort of a group of people

who you could kind of know a lot of them,

and it was just a lot of conversational stuff

and people wrote blog posts as people used to do,

and it's all you know, micro blogging these days

and things like that.

But yeah, people wrote full on articles on their websites

about different things they'd been doing,

just exploring how things work.

And now obviously the web of 20 years ago

was a very different landscape to what it is today,

both in terms of what we've got available to us

as developers,

but also the people using it.

You know, sort of the people on the internet 20 years ago

in many respects had the same problem,

but it just wasn't as sort of as widely used I suppose.

It was very early days for sort of really thinking about

what it meant to build an accessible experience.

You know, obviously Tim Berners Lee,

his whole, you know,

the web is for everyone, it should be accessible.

I think to begin with,

it kind of felt like that's just how it was.

And I don't wanna sort of be the old man

shaking his fist at the clouds,

but it feels like we as a community

sort of missed a turn somewhere along the way,

and we pursued developer happiness over user happiness,

which is, yeah, it's a little upsetting

because, you know, we built all these tools

that allow us to notionally build these great experiences

and yet we forget what it means to build,

you know, properly inclusive and accessible web.

- Well, you have been involved in it essentially from,

you know, the start of the four wise

got integration of accessibility.

Because the worldwide web consortium

had its initial web accessibility initiative

start around 1998,

and that was, you know,

my first exposure to it.

And so then as you, you know,

then you mentioned a little later on

it was at Mozilla where you really got more involved.

So tell us a little bit about that.

- Yeah, so at Mozilla,

so I was working on a few different projects.

I sort of came on board just as a general web developer

sort of working on a few sort of just

profile portfolio type sites

that Mozilla was working on.

But then over time,

sort of went into specific projects.

And it was really sort of Mozilla's aim

is to sort of think about how people use the internet

and how we can use the internet

for the good of that audience.

And so, and as I said,

while I was trying to build accessible experiences

to the best of my, you know, ability at the time,

I wasn't really thinking about people,

I was just sort of thinking about accessibility.

And that sort of like,

it sounds a bit,

a bit of a silly split,

but you know, sort of the academics side of accessibility,

it's all well and good,

but until you start actually applying it to people,

it doesn't really mean very much, you know,

you can read the specs all day,

but until you get it in front of people

and actually say like,

"Does this work for you?"

Then you'll never really gonna know.

So yeah, sort of working at Mozilla and thinking like,

oh, you know, even though the work I was doing

wasn't accessibility related,

it made me just think much more about the people

that we were building for

and not the things we were building.

And I think that was sort of like

a turning point really of just sort of

moving from sort of thinking about it technically

to thinking about it from a,

you know, a human point of view so.

- Well yeah, I mean, I think that it sounds like

it was very progressive,

user-centered design approach overall,

and so that benefits everyone

who participates with the project,

and although it sounds like you were involved

in the technical aspects of it initially,

you know, ultimately, you know, we rely on that to be,

you know, for a assistive devices

to be able you work effectively.

So that part of it is definitely good that you were,

you know, investing the time there.

In the work that you did at Mozilla,

did it move itself into like any official projects

where accessibility was specifically addressed

in your time there?

- Not specifically, no.

I mean, I worked with some great teams

who were really sort of forward thinking

about this kind of stuff.

You know, our designers and our product managers

and our, you know, researchers,

they were all sort of on board with saying,

yeah okay, this is all of our responsibility.

You know, if we wanna build products

that are fully inclusive,

then we have to think about these things

all the way through that whole process.

So no, I mean there was no specific

sort of accessibility related things.

I mean, as I said at the beginning,

it's only really in the last year

that it's been my official job title

in, you know, 15 plus years of doing this professionally.

So yeah, it's interesting that to me,

I don't think it needs to be a job title

for it to be something that you think about.

You know, I think it's good to have professionals

thinking about it all the time,

that, you know, we can go to that can be

sort of subject matter experts I suppose,

the phrase that's going around these days.

But ultimately, you don't have to be an expert.

You don't even have to be like educated in it.

I think you just have to,

the baseline is you have to have an awareness

that there are people who have different access needs

and you need to be able to push that conversation

at every step of, you know,

the development process

and just challenging people to think about that, you know.

That's where the experts come in

to be able to answer those questions,

but ultimately if you have people on development teams

who are saying,

"Hey, what about this scenario?"

You might not be able to come up with solution,

but having a team just stop and think about it is,

yeah, it's a huge step,

and unfortunately most teams don't take that step,

like you know, today so.

- Let's dig into your experience with that,

you know, working with it and that situation of,

did you build your own library of code solutions

and things like that?

How did you kind of manage accessibility

in that time period?

- So I mean, I suppose this was all at a time

when things like jQuery were just coming about

and stuff like that.

So a lot of the web still is to a degree

built on the back of a frameworks like that.

Fortunately, a lot of the more modern

web frameworks at least

do take into consideration accessibility to a degree.

So I suppose all along,

I've always found it a bit easier,

certainly when working on sort of

bespoke portfolio type sites

to just build them in their own way

in a way that works for that experience.

I think sometimes it's easy to forget

that just because the library you're using

might offer accessible components,

you can't just shove a bunch of components in a box

and hope that the contents of their box

are accessible too.

Accessibility doesn't work like that.

So I've always just sort of taken each project on its own.

Sometimes, you know,

particularly as I've sort of got further along

and worked at larger places

and they've had sort of design systems in place,

working to make sure that design system is accessible

is obviously a key part of that.

But ultimately, you know,

you just have to be able to think about

the whole experience too.

And for a smaller portfolio project,

the sorts of things I was working on

10 something years ago,

for me at least it,

was easier just to approach it from like a baseline anyway,

and just okay, what does this project need?

And most of the time it doesn't need a big framework.

You know, there are some things

that are sort of used regularly, you know,

grid layouts and things like that,

which are fortunately much easier to do today

than they were 10 years ago.

But for the most part it,

it's just sort of knowing the concepts rather than

having repeatable, reusable code

and just sort of knowing what sorts of traps

are gonna be in place,

the things to look out for.

And so it's as much experience as anything else.

Unfortunately, I mean I'd like to be able to say

that we could just give a fresh developer,

"You know, here's a framework,

"it'll do everything for you."

But it it's never gonna work like that

because the experience of an individual user,

it doesn't come down to frameworks

and doesn't come down to,

you know, design systems.

It is a matter of

how do we make sure that this whole experience workflow

works for as many at people as possible?

Because, I mean,

you can't say this is an accessible experience

because different users have different access needs.

And the chances of covering all of them are slim anyway,

let alone trying to do it with a

one size fits all framework, so.

- And so as you moved on from Mozilla,

what were some of the next kind of highlights

that you had

which got you to where you at today

at your current organization?

- So after Mozilla I moved to Etsy,

the online retail.

And that was a bit of an eye opener

because I just sort of naturally assumed

that in the corporate world,

these things were thought about

because of the legal precedent if nothing else.

You know it's one thing working for a small startup

or a sort of a more user focused environment like Mozilla.

But I just assumed that like a larger corporate entity,

like Etsy, would've just sort of had it done and sorted.

So when I went there,

and that was a, as I said, a bit of an eye opener

because I started looking at the Etsy code base

and I started looking at the website

and it was a bit of a mess,

certainly from a screen reader perspective.

Nobody was really thinking about it,

and I did a sort of a lunch and learn type talk I guess,

not long after I started.

And all it really took

was to play a recording of a screen reader

trying to read out the Etsy homepage

and people just sort of sit up and be silent

and just be like, what is this?

You know, first of all,

because they'd never really experienced

a screen reader reading a website,

but secondly, it's like,

this makes absolutely no sense.

And out of that, Etsy did start an accessibility team

which was good to see,

that wasn't what I did.

I carried on working on the projects I was doing,

but it was more just

recognizing that everyone has the ability

to make some change.

You know, if they are willing to just sort of step up

and say something, you know,

you don't have to be some high level executive in a company

to get people to notice.

So it's not really something I've ever really thought about

until more recently,

that advocacy doesn't mean, you know,

sort of standing on a box and shouting.

It just means seeing a problem and talking about it,

you know, you can do that quietly,

you can do that loudly,

you can do it in whatever way suits you.

So just sort of making people aware of a problem

in a way that works and makes sense to them

is a really powerful sort of step to take.

And I've been asked a few times in the last few years,

it's like, oh, you know,

how do you do all of this stuff?

And it's like, oh I don't like it.

It really is just a matter of like,

well, it's important to me

and I feel like it should be important to you too

so I'm gonna talk to you about it.

And it's as simple as that really.

So yeah, to answer your question,

moving on to Etsy was that sort of like, yeah,

not even in sort of corporate America,

is this really a thing that's thought about.

And I suppose that was just sort of

a little bit of naivety there,

probably just sort of expecting that

even though it might not be great,

there would still be this understanding

that it was a thing that was needed.

- Yeah, I think your experience there isn't unusual.

I mean, we both mentioned how long

we've been thinking about this

and you know, looking back on 20 years,

I thought a lot more would've happened in the last 20 years.

On the other hand,

I'm excited by the things that have happened, you know,

and where it has been embraced.

And so I think your example there at Etsy just, you know,

shows how your own passion and interest

at a grassroots level can, you know,

move things forward.

And so what was the next step after that?

- Next step after that.

- Or wherever you wanna take it to,

if you wanna bring it up to where you're today.

- Sure, so yeah, I'm happy to jump forward to Twitter.

So yeah, I started at Twitter about three years ago

and I think just sort of having had the experiences

at Mozilla and Etsy of just recognizing that

there's nothing wrong with talking about stuff

and just sort of being yourself

and expressing what's important to you,

just carried on doing that.

It just sort of became part of

being a more senior engineer

was just to telling the team almost,

it's like, okay, this is good,

but we haven't thought about this.

It's always frustrating when you see accessibility

sort of get written up as work tickets

and put in a separate box.

It's like, well no, like the thing you're working on

isn't finished until it's also accessible.

I can understand that, you know,

we do things and sometimes we miss things out

and we have to file a bug or whatever,

and it gets fixed.

But trying to encourage this idea

that a thing that you're working on

also has to consider accessibility, you know,

you can't just say, "Oh well, I'll get back to that."

Because people don't,

whatever it is,

often, you know, people like you might add a to do item,

but very rarely do we really get around

to doing a lot of these things

and accessibility in particular.

I think because people view it as this sort of

alien challenge almost,

it's like, "Well I dunno anything about that,

"so I'm just gonna put it over there

"and maybe think about it later."

And, you know, as I said,

you don't have to have the solution to it,

you just have to be able to think about it.

And it can be hard,

and certainly at bigger places where there's no

sort of conversation happening.

But ultimately just most importantly,

being aware that there are these problems, I think,

and that's what I've tried to encourage at Twitter

is just to sort of think about

the fact that these problems exist

and just to have an awareness.

So, you know, two and a half years ago now

we started a sort of just

an individual champions network, I suppose.

It was very informal.

I say, we, a group of like-minded employees

all came together and just sort of like,

yeah, we need to sort of push this conversation out a bit.

You know, it's all well and good

having two or three people here and there

just having these conversations,

but we need to be able to work out

how to push that conversation out

from outside this small group.

So, you know, we set up this informal

accessibility champions network,

and we just sort of,

we got some recognition for it.

Yes, which was good,

I think, you know, in many way

that's much more important than having a formal team.

If you have sufficient numbers of people with that awareness

and telling that conversation,

then, you know, the formal team can follow from there.

You know, they can then become

the people who you might go to with questions.

But if you rely on a formal team

and don't have that network,

then first of all, they get massively overwhelmed.

Like there's no way that they can do all the work

that needs to be done.

But secondly, they will always be playing catch up

You know, there will always be things going out

that they are then having to go back and fix.

You know, accessibility needs to be thought about

from the beginning,

it needs to be part of that whole process.

And so if you've got people

who are willing to just have that conversation,

then ideally, you know,

the designs that come through,

the product ideas that come through,

the engineering output,

you've got accessibility baked in.

And that sort of core team,

their responsibility really only has to be

answering questions and doesn't have to be about

fixing problems or, you know,

coming in and helping a team out.

So, yeah, I mean that's sort of where we are today.

We've got that balance of sort of the champion network,

which we've managed to formalize now,

that's in a properly recognized sort of group

that people are given dedicated time for

and we also have the core team that is working on

some of our own sort of product features

where we see that things are missing.

But also mostly just sort of being a

sort of a pool for answering questions,

helping people out,

because these questions are coming through

and that's what we wanna see.

You know, we wanna see all these questions that people have,

and we can sort of share them.

And a lot of actually we're at a point now

where we're able to,

the first point of call for these questions

is to go to the champions network.

People don't even come to us,

they just ask each other.

And it's only really when it's a problem

that people haven't seen before

that they have to come to us.

So it's hugely beneficial for us 'cause you know,

people aren't just relying on us to fix all the problems.

This isn't to say you know,

we don't have a long way to go.

We're very much in the early days,

sort of baby steps at this point.

But you know, things have massively improved

in the last year, year and a half.

Which is yeah, just that really is just a,

you know, the effect of a group of people coming together

and saying we wanna see some change

and we're gonna just keep talking

until that change happens.

- So it sounds like

you mentioned that the champions,

it sounds like there's kind of two levels

that you have support going across the organization

from you and your accessibility colleagues,

but then are people then also assigned

to individual projects within the organization

that they pay attention to?

- Yeah, sometimes.

You know, definitely some of our higher profile projects

we will sort of dedicate a lot of our time to.

If they need some help getting things out the door,

then it just makes sense

to put one of the accessibility team on that project

just to help guide them through

and make sure those conversations are happening

rather than having to sort of wait for things

to filter through to us.

Because you know, obviously higher profile features

on a site like Twitter,

they can quite quickly,

if we put them out in an inaccessible way,

then the publicity around that isn't great.

So even just from a team perspective,

we wanna see these high profile features going out

being accessible from day one.

So that's our motivation.

But yeah, it's a mixture.

Some of it is just

working on new features to existing things

that we think are missing.

You know, because unfortunately

when product conversations happen without accessibility

being taken into account,

People and teams miss certain aspects.

And yeah, that's not to point fingers at people,

it's just a lack of awareness

and lack of that conversation,

which is why it's so important.

So some of it, we are just having to go back

and fill in gaps

that ideally wouldn't have been there in the first place,

but it's the old,

it's easier to put out an accessible thing

than it is to go back and put accessibility into it.

And we are now having to spend quite a lot of time

just re-engineering bits and pieces

that were never considered

with some part of accessibility in mind.

- Yeah.

- But it's you know, it's fruitful work,

like it's frustrating,

but it's good to be able to have that time

and dedicated space to be able to say,

okay, what is missing from this product feature

and how can we fix it?

- Yeah, well that's all part of the process.

You don't always, you know, know what you don't know.

And then as you identify things related to accessibility,

you can build it into the business processes earlier on

so that it comes through research, design

to a specification,

and makes it easier

so that you don't have a lot of remediation at the end.

- Yeah.

- Well, I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me

and talk about your experiences,

and good luck with what appears to be a growing attention

to accessibility at your company.

And, you know, maybe we'll meet up at some point

in the physical world.

- Yeah, that'd be great, no yeah.

Team's coming along,

we're getting there.

And as I said, we've been around for about a year now.

It really kicked off at the beginning of '21,

you know, 2022 hopefully lots of time and space

to really just sort of push forward

and kick on with that growth.

So yeah, it's going well.

- All right, great.

Well, thank you very much, Andrew.