By Yi Luo
Table of Contents
About the Interviewee
Work
Sally is currently the Education Director at CodeYourFuture (CYF), a UK-based non-profit organization that trains those excluded from education to become developers and helps them find work in tech industry [2]. Before that, she had worked as the Front End Lead at Organization of Transformative Works (OTW), and wrote 15% of the code base for Archive of Our Own (AO3), one of the top 100 websites around the globe. She had worked as a designer, developer, consultant, artist, and educator throughout the years, with a continuous focus on accessibility [3].
Approaches & Motivations
Sally is a self-trained developer and educator. Her motivations stemmed from the restrictions she experienced as someone deprived of opportunities and in need of a career path compatible with working from home pre-covid. She learned HTML semantics building voice interfaces with her partner, and Ruby on Rails while volunteering at Archive of Our Own. Over the years, Sally has been actively engaged in community building, writing for web accessibility [6, 7, 8], and advocating for the acceptance of telepresence, to name a few. Her approach is one of her own kind—personal, open-minded, pragmatic, rich of lived experiences and anecdotal evidence. These interwoven threads made her designs intrinsically participatory and human-centered.
Emergent Themes
Theme 1. A bottom-up approach that is intrinsically participatory, iterative, and human-centered
Unlike most of those who work in tech industry, Sally began coding for a sheer need to survive—she had no opportunities to access education because she was the sole 24-hour caregiver for her partner, who became quadriplegic as a result of severe illness. Her first ever accessible design project was their living space—by figuring out HTML semantics from scratch, she built voice interfaces with her partner so that he could operate tasks such as filling in forms, closing doors, and turning lights on and off.
It wasn’t really a career. It was just my life. And I just had to figure it out because otherwise we would just die, you know?
Around 2006, Sally started getting into online fandoms and putting videos on YouTube. Along the way, she made friends on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks, LiveJournal, as well as Campfire, which were all platforms that online fandoms adopted for community use. In 2007, led by Naomi Novik, this group of friends formed Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), and started planning out an archive by and for the fandoms that’s free of exploitation [9]. This archive later became Archive of Our Own (AO3), the largest repository of fanworks, a Hugo award winner, one of the most visited websites around the world [10], and many more.
According to Sally, the experience of building AO3 for the community had been “a great discipline” that she still brings into her practices today. Just as how she worked with her partner to remove barriers in their daily lives, she had direct communications with her fandom friends—the pre-beta users of the website, who would come in with all different user goals and accessibility requests. Sally responded to those requests one by one, learning how to code compatibility with screen readers, text magnifiers, and terminals along the way.
All of the people that I work with, they were real people who were like, I just want to use this thing and I can’t, and here’s my blocker, and here’s why… I’m not thinking of some theoretical ideal user. I’m thinking, Barbara needs to do this, Stuart needs to do this, and it just makes you way more pragmatic and practical.
Sally attributed some of the success of AO3 to persons with disabilities in fandoms, saying that a lot of underrepresented groups and underutilized brains who’ve got time at home poured their creativity and passion into the community, making it what it is today, echoing this Hugo acceptance speech by Naomi Novik:
It was worth mentioning that the word “participatory design (PD)” never came up during our interview, nevertheless, a lot of Sally’s points ring true to the very basis of PD: “From its earliest incarnation in labor movements in Scandinavia in the 1970s, PD has had an emancipatory politics inscribed in it. It is an approach that democratizes design by involving those with a stake in its implications, especially end-users, with two core principles: That those who will use the system have a voice in its design and that there is a mutual learning between the designers and stakeholders” [12: 3].
After five years at AO3, Sally continued working in a variety of roles in tech, during which time she obtained rich first-hand experiences and acute insights on the industry’s myopic view on accessibility. While companies would hire specialists like Sally in hope that they could come up with a one-off “perfect” one-fits-all plan, users on the other end have their own specific and evolving needs and concerns that developers often fail to predict and understand.
Users are not bothered how you write your code, they don’t care. You should never have a user story which is like: as a user, I want to log into a website. Because no user has ever wanted to log into a website. They have goals like I want to talk to my mom, or I want to see what’s on at the local cinema. Those are user goals, right?… I can do your WCAG evaluation and rewrite the code and everything, but in the meantime, how about you forget your developer stuff and just put a phone number at the top of the page, and put a little thing in saying, if you can’t access this button, call this number and we’ll help you, email us and we’ll help you, so that they can meet their actual goals?
Accessibility, as Carla Rice specified in [13: 4], “cannot be fully accounted for through a checklist approach… Universal design is an important idea(l), but I would argue that it is also a horizon, and people must continually strive towards recognizing that, like a horizon, it will continually shift and will never be fully reachable. While we strive toward making our spaces, technologies and processes accessible, we also accept that accessibility is iterative… no-one can anticipate everything, which is why disruption and failure are important parts of the process.” Similarly, Sally also touched on her optimistic-realist understanding of accessibility as an iterative process, and why it’s crucial as designers to be determined to do things this way:
Some communication styles, preferences and abilities are fundamentally incompatible. And sometimes there are competing needs that cannot be reconciled, so you just have to do it twice. You just have to do things for each person differently. There’s a kind of fantasy that we have this universal design that works for everybody. But actually people are so different and people have such unique challenges. Sometimes somebody is so specifically disabled. We have to do lots of different things and just be open to the fact that your perfect amazing design may just not work for some reason that you haven’t thought of. You might have to do it again differently. And that’s just life.
Theme 2. Accessibility and inclusivity share intersected goals
Sally’s current work at CodeYourFuture (CYF) brings into vision how inclusivity and accessibility intersect with one another. Although there are different concerns and considerations on the micro level, they share similar philosophies and goals, such as economic independence, social justice, and cultural inclusion.
Started with refugees, CYF is now including everyone deprived of education opportunities—low-income single parents, persons with learning or physical disabilities, or asylum seekers that failed EU’s refugee status qualification [14, 15]. “We don’t set up those kind of boundaries,” Sally said, “it’s not necessary for us to do so.” By the time of this interview, CYF had placed 218 software engineers in the tech industry, bringing an individual income boost of 1,400% (an asylum seeker housed by the Home Office without the right to work has an income of around £40 a week, while the typical starting salary of a junior developer role is about £35,000 a year). The idea of transforming personal lives through community-based occupational training, therefore, can be juxtaposed with that of the Social and Human Rights models of disability—“persons with disabilities being active participants in shaping their own future with the full backing and support of the society in which they live” [16]. Sally said:
I think the thing that I’m very motivated by is making it possible for people to be independent, make their own choices, and just get on with their own lives however they want to do it. I’m not interested in how they get on with their lives. I just want them to have the opportunity, the social power, and the material power to actually do that.
In addition to the selection criteria, CYF addresses inclusivity by sorting goal-blockers and prioritizing needs based on several common threads—in the case of their trainees, the material barriers are the first to go. This is why they provide laptops, internet, safe space, transportation, and food. Female trainees take up forty percent of its total number, and for those with children, CYF pays for childcare so that they can focus on learning. Sally raised her suspicions about the ubiquitous interventions in the tech industry around imposter syndrome and confidence, saying that a realistic strategy for removing material limits should come before changing people’s internal sense of their ability.
Inclusivity as an aspect of CYF’s values is laid out on their website [2]—because trainees are coming from all kinds of different places, with all kinds of different limitations and also abilities, it is crucial for the community to bring it on a cultural level to minimize communication stigma that comes with disabilities, or simply with speaking in a second, third, or fourth language.
One of the things that we say at the beginning is, look, we’re all saying everything wrong. Let’s say everything wrong and let’s just forgive each other and have another go. We’re not going to get into speech codes, obviously don’t start swearing and shouting at people, but just in general, a lot of forgiveness and openness like, oh, hang on, did that go wrong? Did this communication go wrong? Let’s try again, let’s try in a different way. Would it be better in text? Would it be better if we got on a call? Would it be better in person?… When we say, you must say exactly this, in exactly this way, in exactly this method, using this tool, we limit so many voices.
Theme 3. You don’t need to solve hard engineering problems to be accessible
When asked why developers are not motivated to work on accessibility, Sally raised a few points. For one, when accessibility comes in at the end as an add-on, it becomes extra work for developers. They have to go back and rebuild things. Since the majority of them are able-bodied, they don’t see and experience the difference their “extra work” brings. Second, in a corporate context, accessibility is not presented as a technical skill, it is hence of “no use” to developers—meaning, making a web page more accessible does not help with their performance review, and no one’s going to get a pay raise or be promoted for proactively doing it.
Sally brought up a hierarchy in tech, where “back-end developers think they’re more technical than front-end developers, and front-end developers think they’re more technical than web designers.” This results in the fact that almost nobody learns HTML properly, because it’s “so easy”. While it is true that HTML is a relatively “easy” language, it does require learning and understanding on a technical level, and failing to do so causes a variety of digital barriers that we come across today.
To address the issue with incentives, Sally is now teaching HTML in a way that encourages students to integrate accessibility from the start. The message (and the truth) is, if they get to structure their data and construct a Document Object Model (DOM) that can be traversed in a logical way, the web page becomes not only more comprehensible for a screen reader, it also becomes more comprehensible for the Google Web crawler, and as a bonus, the page rank goes up. “You get a lot of stuff for free if you just wrote accessible web pages”, said Sally. In addition, she acknowledged Lighthouse—an open-source, automated tool that could run accessibility audits for any web pages—as a game changer. It gives a score out of a hundred, and if it’s over 90, that score is green, meaning the page is robust and fairly accessible. The simple mechanism makes the process easy, even enjoyable, for non-technical stakeholders to scrutinize how accessible their sites are.
When I asked Sally about wishes regarding accessibility she said: “I wish that people would stop making so many rules and pointless barriers”. She raised the example of the pandemic ending up being a massive accessibility boost in terms of telepresence. For the National Health Service (NHS) of UK, video consulting used to be a no-go. “Basically,” Sally said, “unless you were very lucky, unless you had a personal relationship with the consultant, you couldn’t have that appointment. Because they just said, ‘well, no, we need to meet you in person, you know, it’s very important.’” The adoption of telepresence [19] has meant a massive increase in access to routine appointments for civilians in the UK. Sally fought with the NHS for 10 years for their right to have a video consultation at home—and they told her for 10 years that it couldn’t be done. “And (after the pandemic) they said, ‘oh, it’s fine…’ The answer is they just need to feel the consequences themselves. That’s nearly always the answer with access.”
So many boundaries have been elevated based on wishful quests for “purism”—of language, of the complexity of codes, of perfect “ME” experiences. As Sally rightfully pointed out, there truly are no consequences of having a lesser experience in a health appointment, compared to having no health appointment at all.
When the consequences of your decisions to be inaccessible are only ever externalized onto people that are not there, that are not physically in the room, or that can’t tell you how you’re excluding them, then it’s kind of the same as it’s not happening in your experience. But when it’s happening to YOU, when it’s happening to people in the room, you’re like, oh this is a problem we can solve, and it’s solved. It’s almost never—there are a few cases, but it’s almost never genuinely hard engineering problems. It’s nearly always about just who you include as a human.
Affinity Diagram
Reflection
Talking with Sally has been a great experience of both consolidating one’s understanding of READi course materials and unlearning the dogmatist, othering aspects of man-made guidelines. On a personal level, being mindful of individual needs and steering away from a sterile, wishful-thinking mindset can be a good start for designing for accessibility. On a more macro dimension, distinguishing “hard problems” from “meaningful problems”, reevaluating the incentives in our systems, as well as strategic agenda-setting in public discourses, have the potential of overturning the ableist culture.
References
[1] “Meet The Team,” CodeYourFuture, 30-Jun-2022. [Online]. Available: https://codeyourfuture.io/meet-the-team/. [Accessed: 09-Nov-2022].
[2] “About CodeYourFuture,” CodeYourFuture, 22-Oct-2022. [Online]. Available: https://codeyourfuture.io/about/. [Accessed: 09-Nov-2022].
[3] “Experiences | Sally McGrath | LinkedIn.” [Online]. Available: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallyclaremcgrath/details/experience/. [Accessed: 09-Nov-2022].
[4] A. Luzong, “The AO3 Fandoms With the Most Quality Consistent Fics,” A Little Bit Human, 23-Aug-2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.alittlebithuman.com/the-ao3-fandoms-with-consistent-quality/. [Accessed: 17-Nov-2022].
[5] “Training for Refugees & Disadvantaged People,” CodeYourFuture, 12-Nov-2022. [Online]. Available: https://codeyourfuture.io/. [Accessed: 17-Nov-2022].
[6] S. McGrath, “How to: Run A Lighthouse Audit,” Supercool. [Online]. Available: https://supercooldesign.co.uk/blog/how-to-run-a-lighthouse-audit. [Accessed: 09-Nov-2022].
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[12] S. Bardzell, “Utopias of Participation: Feminism, Design, and the Futures,” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 1–24, 2018.
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[14] “Become a CodeYourFuture Trainee,” CodeYourFuture, 18-Oct-2022. [Online]. Available: https://codeyourfuture.io/become-a-student/. [Accessed: 09-Nov-2022].
[15] “Who qualifies for international protection,” Migration and Home Affairs. [Online]. Available: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/migration-and-asylum/common-european-asylum-system/who-qualifies-international-protection_en. [Accessed: 17-Nov-2022].
[16] R. Hanes, S. Hick, and J. Stokes, “The Welfare and Well-Being of Persons with Disabilities,” in Social Welfare in Canada: Inclusion, Equity, and Social Justice, Thompson Educational Publishing, 2021.
[17] “Can confirm.: ProgrammerHumor,” reddit. [Online]. Available: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/8dv16f/can_confirm/. [Accessed: 17-Nov-2022].
[18] “Overview,” Chrome Developers. [Online]. Available: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview/. [Accessed: 10-Nov-2022].
[19] “Video animation and guidance resources for NHS patients and clinicians to help them do online consultations,” Design Science. [Online]. Available: https://www.design-science.org.uk/projects/nhs-video-consulting. [Accessed: 10-Nov-2022].
READiAbility2022 