Facebook's Head of Accessibility Thinks You Should Unplug Your 
Mouse
  Imagine that you turned on your phone and opened your favorite 
social app one morning only to find that instead of your normal 
activity feed, you just see boxes that say "an article" or "a 
photo".  This is reality for millions of people worldwide who 
have disabilities..  As software engineers, we have a 
responsibility to make what our software accessible to everyone, 
since software continues to eat the world.
  Recently, LinkedIn announced the Next Wave list, recognizing 
the top professionals under 35 who are changing the world.  One 
of the honorees was Facebook Director of Engineering (and head of 
the company's accessibility engineering efforts) Jeffrey Wieland.  
LinkedIn sat down with Wieland to get his insights on 
accessibility engineering.  From encouraging developers to unplug 
their mouse to being mindful about color, read on to learn how 
you can embrace accessible engineering.
  Greg Leffler: So first off, what exactly do you do? What are 
the things you work on, and what are some of the challenges that 
you face in your role?
  Jeffrey Wieland: The accessibility team at Facebook started 
about five years ago.  It really started from this humble place 
of wanting to build better experiences for people with 
disabilities.  The accessibility team now - which has grown quite 
[a lot] in the past five years - is really focused on two big 
buckets.  The first bucket is we want to make it really easy for 
all of our product teams across all of our platforms to build 
products that people with disabilities can use.  The other big 
piece that we think about is how can we push on innovation? It's 
thinking about how we set up Facebook product and engineering for 
success on accessibility.  We don't just want to build products 
that are foundationally accessible or sort of "check the box." We 
also want to build products that really create the right, full 
experiences for people with disabilities.
  GL: Can you give an example of something you've recently 
shipped that you're proud of?
  JW: I think the most recent launch related to that is our use 
of object recognition to describe photos to people with vision 
loss.  We partnered with our research group and our AI team to 
build a system that allows us to check for a hundred or so 
objects or concepts in photos and read that back as the 
description for that photo to make it more enjoyable to receive 
photos from friends and family.  Facebook is more and more 
becoming a place for photos, videos and rich media.  So, we want 
to make that experience fantastic and world-class.
  GL: What do you tell people who ask you why they should spend 
time on accessibility? Why is this a place to focus instead of 
making it faster, or prettier, or more reliable? Why should 
engineers focus on accessibility?
  JW: Because accessibility is not yet foundational to design 
programs and computer science programs, it is sort of by 
definition this thing that gets added on when you go off and work 
in the industry and you happen to work in a company that decides 
they want to do this and invest in it.  And so, for a lot of 
people it's just - they could meet this sort of experience with, 
you know, "I understand why we should do this.  But I am sort of 
afraid of what to do and that it is going to be a lot of more 
work." So, one of the things that I often mention in first 
chatting with product teams is that for most of the things that 
are typically being surfaced by our QA team or things that we 
think are deficiencies of the products, a lot of them are really 
easy to solve.  And so, what we - and I think that sort of goes 
back to the mission of our team - spend a lot of time thinking 
about how to make it easier for product teams to do this so that 
we can give them a blueprint for fixing a lot of these issues.  
And we make it really easy for them to know what to do.
  I think frankly most of the things that we need to do are quite 
simple.  B...ddThe key is really to make this a part of your 
company's process and over time it will become this thing that is 
sort of being carried along with all the other things that we 
care about in terms of efficiency and speed and 
internationalization, etc....
  GL: What are some common mistakes you see among people who are 
trying to start accessibility teams or in general make their 
product more accessible?
  JW: [One mistake is on] the assistive technology side, like: 
buttons without labels, other UI elements with no labels, and not 
handling focus cleanly.  A classic way of simply checking whether 
or not your web application is usable in something like a screen 
reader is to unplug your mouse.  Can you get around that 
interface with your keyboard only? This is a tried-and-true basic 
sanity check for the question: "Have I created an experience that 
is accessible to assistive technology?"
  On the visual design side, I think there are a lot of common 
pitfalls that we make to call out.  One is we often deploy out 
pictures that are pretty low on contrast, right? It's pretty - 
you know a lot of modern web design today has a lot of light 
colors on light backgrounds or gray text on white or gray text on 
red.  Being mindful of the contrast that you are using with your 
visual elements and with your text on screen and your background 
is one really simple way of making your experience a lot more 
usable to people who may want a more readable experience - 
especially now that so much of the [use of the Net] is on mobile 
devices where you are using those out in the daylight and you are 
getting a lot of sunlight and reflection, right? Contrast becomes 
pretty critical in being able to use a device like that when you 
are out and about.
  Related to color contrast is using color to convey meaning.  
Not everyone interprets and sees colors the same way.  If you 
have a UI and your UI is relying on color to convey something 
like "red for bad," for instance, or "green for go," you 
generally don't want to rely just on color to communicate [that 
intent].  Color is another thing to be conscious of as a visual 
designer generating mocks in graphic designs.  Make sure that 
color isn't the only way that somebody might be able to perceive 
what that thing is.
  GL: What would you recommend to someone who wants to take the 
lead on being more mindful about accessibility at their company?
  JW: One thing is to take a step back and look at, simply, how 
does your company ship products? If you had to draw out on a 
whiteboard from the beginning of ideation all the way through 
launching your product to the world, what are all of the steps 
that your company goes through to get that product out the door? 
We identified that accessibility should be a part of each of the 
steps in different ways.
  I think one of the biggest wins that we made in sort of 
systematizing accessibility updates was really partnering with 
the quality assurance team.  The QA team at Facebook had been 
around for maybe a year or so before we engaged them on 
accessibility.  And they had already set up a pretty nice process 
for being the last step before launching products for iOS and 
Android, and they had built in really nice test plans for all 
these different products that they were checking to make sure 
they were high quality before they went out the door.
  We talked to them about what we were trying to do with 
accessibility.  We essentially wanted to make sure that we were 
doing similar testing for accessibility and that we are being 
comprehensive with testing in things like VoiceOver on iOS and 
TalkBack on Android (the primary screen readers for those two 
platforms).
  We also decided that for every single task and bug being 
generated by the QA team that we would link to documentation 
about that platform and the accessibility that is patterned for 
that platform.  [Our thoughts were:] Let's include documentation 
right in that task.  So, they have some reference point..
  [To summarize], it's really through close partnership with 
those teams that you have identified as important to your 
lifecycle of shipping products that you are able to figure out 
the right and efficient and successful path forward for that 
[accessibility] piece of it.  Go engage those people and do some 
relationship-building and understand what they are optimizing 
for, how they measure success and figure out ways to align 
accessibility with that.


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