Notes – Page 12 – Customer Servant Consultancy

The American Foundation for the Blind is using the scenario of the lone, overworked, harried accessibility expert as a marketing prop for its own accessibility consulting service at this year’s AFB Leadership conference, and I have some thoughts. This is maybe a half a level above selling an overlay as a silver bullet for every accessibility problem on the planet, and unless you’ve been living under a rock or are an overlay vendor, you’re probably aware that overlays as a solution are at the absolute bottom of the totem pole. Any company which tasks a single individual with all of the responsibility for accessibility is guaranteed to fail at accessibility, and anyone who’s been in this field for any length of time knows this. To use someone who is guaranteed to constantly be fighting an uphill battle, only to not succede in the end, as a marketing prop for your own accessibility consulting, like you’re the white knight who will come in and save the day, is disgusting, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say you should stay as far away from accessibility consulting as possible. There’s not an accessibility firm worth its salt that would stoop to the level of using someone who is guaranteed to be unable to complete the task they have been given as a ploy to market their own services. Those accessibility teams of one are some of the hardest working, least appreciated people in this field, and when I’ve been in that situation, actual accessibility professionals have given me a hand up, not used me as a selling point in a marketing campaign. Using overworked accessibility teams of one as a sales pitch dehumanizes those accessibility teams and devalues all of their hard work, as well as the work of everyone else toiling in this field.

I’m in the process of giving the Customer Servant Consultancy website a fresh coat of paint. I’m planning to replace the current front page with a static front page and then link to the various content kinds in the navigation menu. I’ll also be rebuilding and updating the portfolio and testimonials and contact pages. I’m choosing a theme that still supports all the indieweb goodness while looking pretty different from my personal site. I’ll need to spend some time in the customizer making sure the color scheme has good color contrast, just in case it doesn’t currently.

Dear M-Enabling Summit: seriously, why do accessibility pros have to keep passive-aggressively adding alt text to your images for you? It’s not like this is new or anything. This is, after all, 2019 and not 1995. It’s not even new by Twitter standards, and there are a metric ton of guides out there, some of them even written by accessibility pros, to show you how to use the feature. How is this not in the instructions you provide to your social media manager, assuming you have one? If you don’t, not adding it is even worse. If you can’t manage to do something as simple as adding alt text to your images, why on earth should anyone trust you to create a conference that provides valuable, accurate accessibility information?

ARIA is a lot like swearing. Used properly it adds a whole range of expression to your web things. Too much turns your web things into word salad.

I should be able to charge extra for editing content on any site with Visual Composer involved. That plugin is the bane of my existence, and the sooner it completely disappears, the better. It is absolutely possible to edit VC content by hand. This is also absolutely not a skillset I should have to maintain. We have standards for a reason. It is very time-consuming and tedious, along with probably being traumatizing, for anyone to have to learn the non-standard idiosyncracies of this kind of generated markup. Friends don’t let friends use this plugin. Enemies probably shouldn’t let enemies use it either.

I spent some time today putting a system in place to track the unbillable time I spend on contributions to free software, and when I say contribution I’m being pretty liberal about what counts as contribution: Advocacy, not just code, for example. I believe in the mission of free software, but the fact is free software isn’t without cost, and sometimes that cost can get pretty high. I’m also working out how to document my contributions in my portfolio, including the free accessibility advocacy that I do. This is going to take a little more work and some more research, but I feel it needs to be done. I need to be able to keep track of this stuff so I can limit it when necessary. Right now I’m thinking of setting the limit at ten percent of free time outside of shabbat and festivals, because those are times when no work of any kind is done, as a general rule. I’m not going to get into the exceptions around festivals because it’s a lengthy topic, but to say no work of any kind can be done on festivals would be technically inaccurate. I think ten percent is a reasonable amount of time. It’s not a ton, but it places an upper limit on the time I have available to do this kind of work. I will also document the time spent, although I haven’t decided whether I will publish a weekly or monthly or yearly report. This is going to be an interesting project.