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00:00:16.769Welcome to the Accessibility Guy podcast. My name is Shawn Jordison, and in today's episode, we are going to talk with Colleen Gratzer.
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00:00:49.109Colleen Gratzer is an award-winning designer with almost 30 years of experience in print design and web design and development, and since 2016, she has specialized in accessibility. She has provided accessibility training to the U.S. Department of Interior at Creative Pro Events and privately for clients. Through Creative Boost, she teaches plain English accessibility to designers and developers, and hosts the Design Domination podcasts through Gratzer Graphics. She provides design and accessibility services, and I'm super excited to have you here. Welcome.
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00:00:51.789I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Shawn.
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00:01:14.260Excellent, excellent. Well, I thought I'd start off with just asking a few questions. Give me just a second to pull those up for us. And yeah, let's see. All right. So whenever I am talking with someone that I don't know a whole lot about, I love to understand like how did you actually get started in accessibility?
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00:01:27.620It's a really funny story. So it was it was 10 years ago, 2016 and I was on this local design email list.
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00:02:11.419Like, so I'm in, I'm in like the DC area. I'm in Maryland, but like in the DC area, generally speaking, okay? And so I was on this email list with someone who was in accessibility for decades, Bevy Shenyon, and I would see her emails all the time on this list because people could promote their services and whatever they were doing. And I would see her emails all the time that said like Cccessibility classes, and I would just see the subject line and I would honestly just hit delete. I'm like, I don't know what it is. It doesn't have anything to do with what I do, and I saw them for years like that, right? And then in 2016, she reached out to me and she said, "You're a really good designer. I know you know how to code. This would be really good work for you. And do you want to take my, do you want to like take my class and learn from me?
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00:02:57.949And I was like, "I don't even understand what it is. And then she told me a bit about it, and we got on the phone and talked about it. And I took her class, and then I was like, "Okay. And then I was like, I don't know where this is going to take my business. I don't know if anybody. I've never had anybody ask for this. I don't know what's going to happen. And I just invest in this in this class. And then it was funny because I started talking about it, and then little by little, it just it like snowballed, and people just started contacting me for this. And I mean, even from all over the world. I mean, I have students in like 10 different countries. I mean, because I since came up with a course for designers for this, specifically for designers. But I mean, I've had clients come to me from all over the world, from several different countries. So it just went crazy. It really did.
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00:03:20.104I absolutely love that. Um, and I noticed that you have a YouTube channel as well, and as someone that makes a ton of content, like I can really respect and appreciate the grind and the the creative energy needed to to do that. I'm just curious, what led you to like making the the YouTube channel that you have as well? And and if you don't mind, let our listeners know what the name of of your channel is.
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00:03:22.213Yeah, the channel is Design domination.
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00:05:08.252And it's funny because I never in my life wanted to do a YouTube channel. I never wanted to have a podcast. I didn't want to. I didn't want to be, I didn't want to be known. I didn't want to put myself out there. I grew up with a lot of criticism at home and at school and being bullied. And the last thing I would want to do is put myself out there and publicly like have an opinion on anything because it would just be criticized, right? Whether it was right or wrong, it'd be criticized. And so I was actually, I started my audio podcast in 2018, and I wasn't going to do anything with accessibility. I was just focusing on creative business issues and all the problems that I had had in my business for so many years that I was fed up with my business when I came across accessibility. It's funny because the accessibility stuff like solved all my business problems too. But so I had a coach say to me, if you want to start a community where you're mentoring designers and helping them with business issues and get better, to become better designers, people need to know who you are. Like your clients know who you are, because other designers don't know who you are. And so he's like, the best way to do that is to start a podcast. I was like, why the hell would I do that? Why would I? I'm like, I don't do public speaking, I don't do podcasts, and I don't get on planes anymore. I'm like, 3 Ps. There's the three top things that I do not do, and here you are telling me I have to do this, so I was petrified. I'm like, why would I put myself out there, you know, for the public to publicly flog anything I'm saying, whatever, or comment on my looks? And I don't wear makeup, and I don't do my hair. Like I'm just, I don't, you know, I'm just, I am what I am. I just put it out there. You either like it or hate it. Luckily, most people like it, so it ended up being a really, a really,it ended up being a really good thing to do.
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00:05:18.216Although it was really scary. So it took me, it took me a few years to get up the courage to go from just doing audio to being on video for that reason.
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00:05:40.879But no, I mean, things, it's funny because things that I got criticized for in my life, you know the way I laugh or certain things I say or how I say certain certain things or that I'm direct or like things that I've been criticized for in in my past - people actually really appreciate that about me. So it's really funny because I was so terrified of it and people actually embraced the things that I thought people would not like about me.
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00:06:29.889I 100% love that, and I face very similar stuff, like putting myself out there. You know, people want to criticize, like, Oh, at this particular minute mark, in your one-hour free video, you actually did something incorrect. And I'm like, Thank you for bringing that to my attention. And a lot of times, like I've gotten comments on YouTube, like, Wow, this is a waste of time. I'm like, Ouch! But I always respond where I'm like, Hey, if you want to go make a video, matter of fact, why don't you make three to five over the next three to four years, right? And let me know how that goes, and hopefully, no one will come criticize you, but I totally feel you on kind of you have to like absorb, you have to own it, like who you are as a person.
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00:06:31.120You really do.
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00:06:51.055Yeah, for me, that's like the wrestling stuff, and you know, I get it. I'm a cheese ball. But I am a cheese ball, and I am in real life. And the more that I feel like I can be myself on camera, like even right now, right? I'm definitely off my script that I have. I already feel like it's better because I'm just being authentic, and that's what I think resonates better. And I got that from your videos too.
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00:07:04.435You know, I watched definitely a handful of your videos on InDesign accessibility, and you know, I feel like you have a way, just like I do, to connect with the audience. And I think it comes from being authentic.
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00:07:08.814You know, we can't be anyone but ourselves. So I do have another question for you.
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00:07:09.235Yeah.
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00:07:23.439So what led to you working in InDesign primarily, or at least that's what I know you for? Should I know you for something else? Or is InDesign really kind of like your passion? I'm assuming it's more around design and things like that. Why don't you go ahead and...
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00:07:48.305Yeah, so my, I mean, well, so when I got a, I got well, I didn't finish my graphic design degree in college. I still had another couple of classes, but I ended up working right outside of college. I got my foreign language degree in Spanish and French. And then I ended up getting a job as a graphic designer, which was what I always had planned to do. But when I was in college, even though I was studying mostly print design, I did take a computer science course. Where I mean, this is like back in '95.
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00:08:14.870You know, this is you know this will date me for sure. '95 is when everybody started learning code and building websites, and that's when my computer science teacher was like, Oh, you're really good at code. I think you should change your major. And I was like, I'm gonna change my major this far into things? But, you know, so I ended up I ended up being able to code websites, but I had always intended to be a designer. And actually, I was, my first love was QuarkXpress and so you know I was a big fan.
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00:08:50.164I think I started with 3.3.2, and the last one was 4.11, and I loved QuarkXpress. I could do all the shortcuts and the F keys, all that stuff. I loved it, And then I went kicking and screaming into InDesign when it came out because I was working at a company and they were forcing us to switch. And I really did not want to do it at all. But I had always been in print design, but I also kind of I did some websites, but I always did more print design than web. But then when I got into accessibility, I was doing a lot more websites than I do now. Like I really don't want anything to do with them.
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00:09:20.705There's just too much stuff going on. There's too much to keep up with, and quite frankly, over the past few years, I've had such huge demand with the InDesign to PDF workflow that I haven't needed to take like, to keep that on my plate, so I just I'm like no, I refer that off, and I would rather just get the InDesign work. You know, I don't want to I don't want to be remediating PDFs. I would rather be working from InDesign and and you know dealing with those files. You know, and that's the majority of my work.
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00:09:33.529Yeah, I totally understand that. Sometimes, like something appears in front of us, and we just kind of have to go for it. You know what I used to do that I no longer do? I used to build PDF forms. So like I can make them accessible.
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00:10:18.440That's kind of what we specialize in is making PDFs accessible. But there, for a while, I found myself just personally involved in building really complex forms for no reason. And I used, at the time, Lifecycle Designer, and I was getting in there with all the cool stuff you could do, reflowing, resizing boxes. And then I learned, you know, you can't really make a document that accessible with any type of reflow. And it was heartbreaking. And this was a service I was offering. And it ultimately turned into just like I don't want to do that anymore, so I'm not going to design forms anymore. And it, you know, I think in business that's something I've learned is like you don't always have to do the work just because you have the skills to do it. You know, doesn't mean you have to.
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00:10:21.029Yeah. Oh yeah.
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00:10:26.340I used to have all my designer colleague friends would be like, Oh, I got another client that needs an HTML email designed.
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00:10:36.539And I'm like, at one point, I said, Look, I'm not doing this anymore. I don't, I don't. I mean, I can do it, but I don't want to do it, and it's maddening. And then it's like, well, why doesn't it look pixel perfect, you know, in Outlook, and then how it looks over here?
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00:10:45.644And I'm like, I don't, I'm not going down this trail of researching like all the different codes that you have to put for every single browser, I'm like, no, I can't.
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00:10:46.269It's endless.
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00:11:06.580I have to say no and take it off my plate. And I mean, I even had a coach one time say to me, she's like, just get rid of the website maintenance. You know, just because clients are asking for it doesn't mean you have to offer it. And I was like, I hated website maintenance. I hate it. I'm like, I was doing all of the things, and it's like as soon as I got like all the, and I was so mad at her too for like telling me that I really should get that off my plate.
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00:11:14.965I'm like, but I get recurring revenue that way. And I was like, screw the recurring revenue. I don't care if it's just flat rate work that's coming in from repeat clients.
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00:11:17.875What do I care? I'd rather do work that I really want to do.
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00:11:39.409So I'm curious, like with the Title II pushback and all this stuff that is happening in the accessibility world. I know for me, it's been kind of crazy. What are you focused on right now? So, like in terms of your accessibility work, you don't have to drop any names. I'm just curious. What do you find yourself doing the most of right now?
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00:12:29.600The most of would definitely still be remediating InDesign files, and then and then finishing the work in the PDF and providing the PDF. That is the majority of my work. I've had a couple. I mean, yeah, things were crazy at the start of the year, and up until recently, until they extended the deadline. But I mean, I have some people, you know, I have clients too that are like, well, I'm going to go ahead and invest in training now. I don't have to, you know, have you do this right now because, you know. But I want, I want, I'm interested in your training. So instead of having you rush to do this work and we've got an extra year, you know. They want to, they want to do the training and then go ahead and try it for themselves to get that done so it's ready by the deadline. So, but yeah, still, I mean, InDesign is totally like 99.9% of what I'm doing.
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00:12:55.054So, what's like the biggest issue you see when clients send you work or stuff that you're dealing with on a day to day basis? What's like the number one issue that you're seeing across the majority of projects? I'm just I'm just kind of being nosy. So I know for me, when I see stuff come over from PDFs, color contrast is like a big one. Or like really complex tables for no reason. I'm just curious. Like, do you see similar stuff, or what's the what's the big issue that you see?
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00:13:26.870Yeah, I mean, I see similar stuff, but hands down, Shawn, I think the number one thing would have to be not using paragraph styles. Which, and designers they like have this aversion to paragraph styles. But I mean, if you're, if you use paragraph styles, it makes your workflow easier. At least if you have a document that's more than a few pages, right? But you know, when I'm going in to remediate a file, that's the first thing I'm looking at is how many paragraph styles. And sometimes I'll open up a document that's 400 pages and there might be like five paragraph styles and they all
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00:13:33.679For someone that's a newbie, so I don't have overrides on them so I have to go and, you know, I have to go redo all of those and set the export tags and all of that.
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00:13:43.029touch InDesign usually. When you're talking about the paragraph styles are you, do you mean specifically for body text?
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00:13:57.909Or do you also mean for headings like lists, etc. So I know in Word we kind of throw around the term styles, right, pretty frequently. Just because I'm not super familiar with InDesign, could you talk to me a little bit about what you mean specifically?
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00:14:17.820Yeah. So you have paragraph styles that apply to an entire paragraph of everything up to that return, that hard return mark. And then you have character styles. And the designers, I also find that the designers that do use paragraph styles don't use them correctly. Character styles are for a word or one character, like a few words within a paragraph.
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00:14:19.440Maybe like a drop cap?
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00:14:25.034Yeah. So like you would use, you would use a character style for a drop cap.
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00:14:34.664Or if you have a sentence that's just in regular weight and you want to have a word or two in bold or italics, you would create it, would create a character style for those words.
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00:14:41.294So it's only where you want to have that deviation. But what I see a lot is either they don't set any paragraph styles at all.
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00:14:45.240Or if they do use them, they will set the entire paragraph in a character style.
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00:14:47.250Which is maddening because it's like you
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00:14:45.750Interesting.
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00:15:08.595have to undo, when I go into the work, I have to undo that and then reset the paragraph style to be what it was with both applied. So paragraph style is simply for what the styling you want to apply to the entire paragraph. And that could be how it looks. It could be spacing before and after the weight, the size, all of that, the typeface.
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00:15:20.865But the character style could simply be just bold, or it could be superscript, or it could be italics, or it could be like hyperlink style. It's only where you want a little bit of deviation, and like to just be within that paragraph.
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00:15:31.424Okay, okay, that makes sense. So, I got another one for you. When it, when it comes to preparing for exporting, what's something that you see people do wrong as well?
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00:16:09.504Oh, okay, that's a, that's a good question. So, what I see is, a lot of times... Okay, so a lot of times when people reach out to me, they're like, okay, can you look at this file and give me a price on it to remediate it. And they'll send me PDFs, and I go open up the PDF, and I'm like, There's no tags in here, so I can't tell anything, right? There's no tags, I can't tell reading order, I can't tell what, how they might have tagged it in InDesign, but I know they haven't probably. But I mean that - it's exporting without tags is the biggest, the biggest issue. So I mean, but it's always easier anyway to review the InDesign file. But if you send me a PDF with tags, like without tags, I can't see anything.
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00:16:14.754No, that that makes total sense. Yeah.
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00:16:22.539It's kind of like every designer is going to set everything up differently. So just looking at the content is one thing, but how they set it up is another, you know.
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00:16:24.669Right, right.
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00:16:36.159No, that makes perfect sense, and I see that too. I would say my biggest problem that we see is untagged files too, or image-based documents. Yeah, that's not something you have to deal with really in InDesign, right? Like, there's nothing you can do with an image-based.
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00:16:39.190Okay, you would have to rebuild it completely from scratch in InDesign.
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00:17:31.390Yeah, so I mean, sometimes, I'll sometimes I'll see like infographics that have been placed as an image, but they really should have, they really should be live text within InDesign. So in those cases, I'll redo those, but, and then tag that content. But oh, so and back to what you were saying about the styles too is that you know with the tags you want to have every single, you want to have a style for every single text element that's going to be in the reading order, right? So if it's like something like a page number that's not in the reading order, because it's not something that you want to have read, voiced on every single page by a screen reader or other Assistive Technology, right? So if it's something that's going to be in the reading order, like it's body text, you might have, like you might have body text that's large at the start of like a chapter, right? You might have regular size body text. You'd have to have a different paragraph style for each one.
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00:17:36.805You have to have a different paragraph style for each heading, for captions, for lists, and all those different elements.
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00:17:46.765Wow, wow. So am I correct in thinking that the more time you could spend setting up those styles, like the easier and faster it will be. So, in your example of like,
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00:18:24.234Sure. I mean, there's still so much other stuff to do, but that is a big one where it can take a lot of time when the files are sent to me or any other remediator for that matter. You know, to fix them in InDesign because it's just a lot of work. And sometimes you end up with, you know, sometimes you, I have worked on documents with hundreds of pages on a regular basis. And you end up with, you know, you could have five different heading ones in there, you know, different styles of them, right? You could have, you know, four or five H2s and H3s, you know, based on how they look and where they are in the document. So there's there's a lot.
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00:18:52.569Gotcha. I got, I got an off script question for you. So for a long time there's always, there has always been this debate, at least from my perspective. Maybe I'm crazy of how many H1s there should be in a document. Now I know there's a lot of conversation we could have about how things used to be done with Assistive Technology and accessibility, but I'm curious, today, where do you stand on the use of H1s? Do you like to see one or do you like to see multiple? I'm just curious.
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00:19:40.509Yeah, so you can have multiple H1s in a document. So typically, what I recommend is if you have a document where you're not going to use all six of those heading levels, then just reserve the h1 for the title on the cover, right? But I mean, I actually just was looking at reviewing a student project file for one of my students in my class about this. And I said it's not wrong what you did, but because you're running out of levels of headings, I would have restarted each chapter at an H1 because otherwise you're like, oh, I get down to h6 and I have another subhead. So if it's a long document that has a lot of different sections in it, then do the cover and then do each section start each chapter name as H1s and then go from there.
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00:19:45.359But yeah, otherwise, if it's a short document you'd only need to have it on the, on the cover for the title.
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00:19:47.549That's pretty much what I advise as well.
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00:20:00.839Yeah. Particularly for longer documents, I'll say it's okay to use another H1. But what I've seen, and I'm sure you've seen this too, where people mark everything an H1 and that's like definitely not the goal, right?
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00:20:39.990Because accessibility is definitely more nuanced than just applying styles or headings or getting it to pass the checker. All right, so we talked previously, and I'm gonna have you do like a brief demo. But before we jump into a demo, I'd love to know just like as someone that's brand new to InDesign, and you know I have trouble putting text onto a page, right? I could probably benefit from just like an InDesign basics course. That's not what I'm asking from you today. But what should people generally understand when it comes about accessibility in InDesign? Do you have any like pro tips or like advice? What would you say to someone new to it in terms of accessibility?
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00:21:00.150You definitely have to pay attention to when you're laying out text on a page in different text frames. The order that you go and put a text frame on the page is the order that InDesign is going to give that when it comes to the reading order that's going to be inherited into the PDF, right?
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00:21:43.589So if you don't, if you and you're going to do this a lot, you're going to maybe like add different text frames, and then you might take, remove some and put some others down. And the way that you are looking at the layout on the page, like top to bottom, left to right, is not necessarily the order that those text frames are actually going to be read and interpreted once they're in the PDF. So you have to pay attention to that and really understand that. And one way, like one of the reading orders that you, because there's multiple reading orders that you control in InDesign that go into the PDF. But one way to do that is by threading text frames.
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00:22:29.039Another way is by using the articles panel. So you can you can control tag order in the articles panel. And you don't have - like the articles panel is also good for like, let's say you have a one page or two page document, and you've got lots of infographics, or you know just like different text frames here and there. It's not like running text in a long publication, for example. You could, you don't have to thread all those text frames. You know, it might not make sense to do that. Like if you have running body copy for hundreds of pages, sure, but you can actually just take those text frames and put them into the articles panel instead. So you, but that's like I said, the articles panel controls one type of reading order, the tag order.
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00:22:39.164But then the layers panel, which is what's going by the order that you put those text frames down on the page. That is actually controlling the architectural reading order. So it's two different reading orders.
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00:22:46.724Does that correlate to the reading order panel, I'm doing bunny ears with my fingers to Acrobat, or is that not related?
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00:22:52.964Yeah, so thatcorresponds to that Z order panel that you see in Acrobat.
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00:22:52.964Yeah.
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00:23:01.380Don't you just love the name Z order panel? We got the read order panel, and then half the resources out there still refer to it as the touch up reading order tool.
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00:23:15.809It's so funny. All right, so Colleen, if I could ask you, what is one thing if someone could fix one thing in their workflow, in your opinion, what would it be? What would have the biggest impact?
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00:23:17.849Definitely paragraph styles.
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00:23:19.410Okay.
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00:24:06.220These can be really, I mean, they can be really tedious.But I mean, when you've got long, complex documents, those are gonna, those are gonna be a big part of the work. I mean, there's a lot of other things that are big parts of the work too, of course. But I feel like paragraph styles are - they're just so easy to do once you know how to do them. And they're, I mean, really, Shawn. I mean, a lot of accessibility work in InDesign could be headed off just by using InDesign the way it should be used. A lot of designers, and a lot of the times it's the ones that say, Oh, I've been using InDesign for 20 some years. Some of those are the documents that are, I mean, that's like me using Photoshop for 30 years. I have not a clue what I'm doing. I mean.
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00:24:07.089Right, right.
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00:24:21.490I mean, I'll go up. I'll look at pages that don't have, I mean, files that don't have master pages set up, or paragraph styles and tables are like drawn in with text frames by hand, with rules drawn in between each row and column.
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00:24:29.980And I'm like, oh my god! At some point, I mean, I feel sorry that somebody didn't say at some point, like, there must be a better way to do this. This is page layout software.
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00:24:31.075Right. Right.
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00:24:39.595So, so much of the work is just knowing how to use InDesign properly. I mean, there's other stuff, of course.
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00:25:01.599There's there's a lot of other stuff, but there's so many designers that aren't using InDesign properly. And if they got, if they got ahead of that, they would be a lot farther with accessibility, right? Like I said, there's still a lot more to do, but that would be a big part of it. Is just getting over the hurdle of really understanding how to use InDesign and what you can do and how to use it.
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00:25:17.650Yeah, I I totally agree, and that's always been part of my struggle was like not knowing how to use the tool itself. So I've kind of just steered clear of it because typically I just get like the end files, right, and I fix those in Acrobat. But yeah, that that makes a lot of sense.
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00:25:21.339I hate working in, I hate working in Word and Powerpoint.
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00:25:25.369I understand. I understand, and those I feel personally really strong in,
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00:25:25.960Right.
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00:25:39.700And so I can get into the depth like this on those tools. But when someone has like a problem in InDesign, for me it's really challenging because I just don't, I don't, I lack the terminology, right?
00:25:39.700 -->
00:25:49.585Even to do that. So another question for you is like if we got to, you know, if the InDesign Gods were listening to us, what's a recommendation you would make for the software?
00:25:49.585 -->
00:26:00.355Like how how could the software be improved in your opinion? In just like not a too crazy amount of words, but like what's a feature that you would love to have in here that would really improve making documents successful? I'm just curious.
00:26:00.359 -->
00:26:24.795That's a good question. Okay, so definitely having some way to review alt text, like en mass, you know, en mass in within InDesign, or some kind of like a preview for it, or something. I don't know how it would look. But another thing would be being able to scope tables in InDesign because you have to do that, you have to do that in the PDF usually.
00:26:24.795 -->
00:26:27.674Oh, so you can't set header scopes? Is that -
00:26:27.674 -->
00:26:34.515You can set, you can set the header row, the the top header row.
00:26:34.515 -->
00:26:35.414Okay.
00:26:35.414 -->
00:26:43.875And or there might be more than one header row. You could have a like a subheader row. You can set those. You cannot set, and those are column headers, right?
00:26:43.875 -->
00:26:45.075Because they,
00:26:45.075 -->
00:26:45.825Yeah.
00:26:45.825 -->
00:26:49.950they go there, they're over each column.
00:26:49.950 -->
00:26:50.369Right.
00:26:50.359 -->
00:27:22.085But you can't set row headers natively in InDesign, the ones that go across like left to right in the first column. I mean, you could have, you sometimes have tables that don't have both header, header rows and row headers, like so the columns and then the you know you don't have necessarily both columns and rows. You might have them have just one or the other, but you're not able to set the row headers natively in InDesign.
00:27:22.085 -->
00:27:36.994Like MadeToTag is a plugin that can do that. But I mean, you know, you can't do it natively in InDesign. So those would be, those would definitely be, you know, nice nice features to have. Yeah, for sure.
00:27:37.019 -->
00:27:40.680Okay, all right.
00:27:40.680 -->
00:27:58.170All right, you ready for some general questions next? I promise they're nothing too crazy. So here's one for you, Colleen. So where do you personally see the accessibility industry going in the next couple of years?
00:27:58.170 -->
00:28:01.724In general, or with Indesign, with documents?
00:28:01.724 -->
00:28:16.484Either, either, either or. I think I mean generally, but I'm curious, like about InDesign as well. I think we're seeing a big push to get content out of PDFs, as an example. That's something I feel like I'm seeing. I'm just curious to your thoughts on that.
00:28:16.329 -->
00:29:04.359Yeah, I mean, I see, I've seen where people talk a lot about, oh, we need to get rid of PDFs altogether. They're not accessible. I mean, they are harder to read on a phone, but most PDFs are not accessible. So that's the first problem. That's really the root of the issue. I mean, most websites are not accessible either. You know, but most documents are not accessible. But documents can be made accessible. It's just that it's such a niche thing, especially creating documents from InDesign is such a niche thing, that most of those kinds of documents that you encounter, like PDFs that came from InDesign, are not accessible unless somebody actually did that. But it's such, it's it's few and far between. So there's a huge huge need for this, and I've only seen that particular need dramatically increase.
00:29:04.359 -->
00:29:22.390Yeah, I mean, like I said, I've been doing this since 2016, and I was doing documents and website accessibility, you know, back then. And I dropped off the websites just to focus on InDesign to PDF accessibility, and there, there's just not that many people doing it.
00:29:22.359 -->
00:29:25.630Yeah, yeah.
00:29:25.630 -->
00:29:29.980There's a lack of people almost, and if anything, there's more need for it. So, do you think that's going to continue?
00:29:29.990 -->
00:29:35.930I think that's going to continue. And yeah, I think it's going to continue.
00:29:35.930 -->
00:29:41.869And that's why I'm trying to like you know train more designers in this too, because there is such a need for that.
00:29:41.869 -->
00:30:05.585That's why I was pulled into this, you know, 10 years ago for that same reason too. So there's that. But also like I feel like when the laws, the website lawsuits, website accessibility lawsuits started happening, like 2017, 2018, you know, people - that started getting on people's radar. And then later, like a few years into it, they're like, oh crap! Documents have to be accessible too because they're on the website, and it's like, well, yeah.
00:30:05.585 -->
00:30:05.825Yeah.
00:30:05.825 -->
00:30:09.875So the websites helped get the documents more attention,
00:30:10.079 -->
00:30:12.900right, right.
00:30:12.900 -->
00:30:26.089And so, like, I can't not ask you about AI. Do you feel like AI is going to play a larger role? I mean, of course it is, right? But how do you see AI playing into document accessibility? I guess specifically around InDesign, but in general too. Just I'm curious on your personal thoughts on it.
00:30:26.299 -->
00:30:31.220Well, there's a lot about AI that I do not like, and I don't, I don't make much use of it at all.
00:30:31.420 -->
00:30:31.930Totally.
00:30:32.200 -->
00:30:35.380I really don't.
00:30:35.380 -->
00:31:25.210I'm not really that interested in it, but I think, I think, unfortunately, I think AI to accessible documents is probably going to be like what accessibility overlays on websites are. Because people like - about the website accessibility overlays and I won't name any of them because they'll probably sue me because that's what they do. So you know they they have touted themselves as the silver bullet for website accessibility, and that has been shown to not be the case. And I'm afraid that designers are going to hear AI like this, like with this AI alt text generator in InDesign, like, oh yay, I don't have to write alt text anymore. And it's like that's not at all what it means. So I don't, I don't feel like - I'm afraid it's going to give designers false a false sense of security.
00:31:25.210 -->
00:31:26.019Yeah.
00:31:26.019 -->
00:31:39.190Okay. And then I've also had you know people email me and go, What do you think of this AI accessibility tool for documents? And I'm like, I mean, I get questions all the time about things I've never even heard of. I'm like, I don't know, and I can't go test every single one of them. You know.
00:31:39.000 -->
00:32:15.525More than ever too. Like I've been in this industry a long time and I'm like every other week there's a new one, yeah, of something claiming this and and truth be told like you know I work with a couple of different companies that have AI solutions and whatever. It is what it is. But there isn't anything that does it all. And I totally agree with you that like it gives this false sense. And I like to think you know with AI for me personally, I need to be in the driver's seat. I need full control of that thing. And the more control I have of the AI, the more ability I have to participate in the process, the better that the end product is.
00:32:15.525 -->
00:32:24.674But yeah, any time there's like a Oh we can just do all of this, I'm like so skeptical. And then there's just a new one popping up every other day, i seems like.
00:32:24.944 -->
00:32:29.880Oh yeah, and like and some of the ones I have tested, I'm like, this is complete garbage.
00:32:29.880 -->
00:32:30.599Right?
00:32:31.109 -->
00:32:33.089I'm like, I'm not afraid of AI taking my job anytime soon.
00:32:33.000 -->
00:32:55.619Well, and then the company will tell you like; Well, Colleen, if you have a simple document with a heading and and a simple text, and you have 1000s of these documents that look exactly the same with no change whatsoever, we might be able to get through half of them with no problems. And it's like, okay, what world do you live in where all of your documents look exactly the same?
00:32:55.619 -->
00:33:16.964You know, yeah. At least for me, that's like every single day there's a new project in front of me that you know, sure, they kind of look the same, but any of those tools that I've used that claims it, it there's always a problem. It didn't get that heading. It didn't get that list, or you know, a list that spans two pages, broken list item, a table that spans two pages, broken table tag. You know, it's just endless.
00:33:16.990 -->
00:33:40.255I mean, AI doesn't - I've asked, I've asked like Claude or ChatGPT one time, like you know, about like the work that we do, to see what it would say about it has not a clue. It doesn't understand our work at all. It like gave me this ridiculous explanation. I'm like, yeah, you don't understand the work I do. I'm, you know, forget it. It was, it was just, it was such a nonsensical answer, and I'm like, yeah, no.
00:33:40.255 -->
00:33:43.825I'm not afraid of AI taking my job anytime soon.
00:33:43.759 -->
00:33:47.770I totally agree.
00:33:47.770 -->
00:34:04.400So all right. Let's say I'm I'm new, somewhat new to accessibility, and I want to pick up like the best habits I possibly can. In your opinion, what is one accessibility habit that everyone should learn or adopt in their workflow.
00:34:04.680 -->
00:34:07.680I mean, I think this is going to have to go back to paragraph styles again.
00:34:08.159 -->
00:34:11.820Okay, so styling in general using the built-in features.
00:34:12.960 -->
00:34:23.610Yeah, and using the built-in features. Like for the love of God, do not create a Table of Contents by hand. Like, there's a feature for that. Do not create tables by hand.
00:34:23.610 -->
00:34:26.039There's a feature for that.
00:34:26.039 -->
00:34:26.969I love that.
00:34:26.539 -->
00:34:33.619Get to know InDesign and and get to know InDesign and and actually what you're able to do in InDesign.
00:34:33.619 -->
00:35:25.849You know, figure it out. Look at videos on YouTube. I mean, learn it. Learn it to figure out what what you're able to do. I mean, and we have so many options in the paragraph styles to like, design wise, where you don't have to have like create a separate background, for instance, behind a heading if you want it. Like you could set that on the paragraph style. And the the benefit of this is not only efficiency and consistency in how something looks, but when it's set on the styles, it it's not introducing another element into the content that you now have to address for accessibility. You don't have to go artifact it because it's not a separate element, right? It's kind of like CSS on a web page.
00:35:25.849 -->
00:35:36.695That's the styling, and you know here's the code on the page, but they're like separate from each other. And it's kind of like that. You don't have like this separate box or whatever.
00:35:36.695 -->
00:35:54.724You know what I'm hearing you say? It's it's the, in accessibility here, we have like a lot of catchphrases I've noticed throughout the years. And what you're saying to me right now, what I'm hearing is design with accessibility in mind. That's like essentially the goal here. Use the built-in tools, and I couldn't agree more. Yeah.
00:35:54.639 -->
00:35:59.630Oh, and that reminds me. So design with accessibility in mind.
00:35:59.630 -->
00:36:15.822Absolutely. What I hear all the time is, Okay, Colleen. I'm going to give you these files as soon as our designer is done with them. And I go, no, no, no, no. Stop the presses. Because here's what happens. A lot of people think, a lot of designers and a lot of clients think accessibility is at the end.
00:36:15.822 -->
00:36:25.538Like, oh, you just go in and you just push a few buttons, and then it's no, no, no. So here's what I see all the time. I say, bring me in at the beginning when your designer is designing, so I can review the design.
00:36:25.538 -->
00:36:51.021Because otherwise, what you're going to do is you're going to send me a finalized design, and it's going to have contrast issues. And now the design is going to have to change once I look at it. And then you're going to be adding more time and more money to your entire production schedule, right? So you're gonna like, I'm like just bring me in earlier on to at least like fend off some of these issues, at least the visual issues because I can do the under the hood work later.
00:36:51.021 -->
00:37:10.559But if it's got to go back to get reapproved again because the design changed, I mean I've had to, I've had to introduce new colors. I've had to slightly modify some. I've had to change the design in order to keep the original colors. Like there's, I have a lot of tricks in my bag, but still, the worst time to think about accessibility is at the end of the process.
00:37:10.480 -->
00:37:46.614Could not agree more, and that is the biggest issue we come across with remediation. It's like we get the final files right. Okay, Shawn, they're ready to be made accessible, and we have color contrast problems, and it's like not easy ones. We're talking brand styles. Like, let's take the orange background that you have on for your squares behind you, right? Would be great for a logo, but then people try to match their heading text with the logos or different sub sections, right? They'll try to match the logo color, and with orange, like there isn't really an accessible orange unless you do specific styling, right?
00:37:46.614 -->
00:37:58.269Orange against white is going to fail every time. Orange against black, sure, but not everybody wants that. Orange against other colors, and so really we have to go to brown. And some clients do not want that. And we have to have a conversation.
00:37:58.449 -->
00:38:00.070Yeah, exactly.
00:38:00.070 -->
00:38:12.329That's a great example because orange against black has a completely different feel than orange versus white. I mean, there are some darker oranges you can do if they're going to be if they're big enough. The text is big enough, but that you know that's usually not the case.
00:38:13.230 -->
00:38:30.480Yeah, yeah. All right, Colleen. Well, as we wrap up, is there any any final thoughts you want to share with our audience today. And after you share that, I'd love just one final time where we might be able to find you and how we could get in touch with you.
00:38:30.480 -->
00:39:24.480Yeah, I mean, I think that if you're thinking about accessibility, like, and you haven't gotten into it yet, now is the time. It's only, I've been saying this for years, it's only becoming more and more prevalent. And it's an excellent niche. There's a huge need for this, and I know a lot of designers don't want to get into the technical. I mean, they don't have to even get into the technical. They could just focus on the visual design. You know, like I have I have a class that's just on the visual design stuff, not on getting in and fooling with tags or any of that. I mean, there's different aspects of accessibility. But designers really need to understand that it is part of their job. Because as designers, we're communicators, and if our projects that we're putting out there to the world are not, they're alienating, you know, maybe 20% 25% of users. Well, that's a design fail, right? And we're responsible for that.
00:39:24.480 -->
00:39:46.244We're introducing those problems, and we are the ones who can control that. So we need to be putting out accessible designs because that is part of our job. You just, whether you want to accept it or not is irrelevant because it is part of our job. And so it's not just this niche thing that gets added on later, you know. So it's very important, I think, for designers to understand that.
00:39:46.244 -->
00:40:12.000But it also, I mean, like I said earlier, you know, I had I had all these design, I had all these you know problems in my design business. And I was like ready to give up after you know, I don't know 15 years of being in business myself. And I was fed up. And this just fell in my lap. I had trouble niching. I was I was having clients walk all over me. I wasn't charging enough. I wasn't confident. Like I could talk to clients, but I wasn't really feeling confident.
00:40:12.000 -->
00:40:21.030I was like sweating bullets, you know, on the other side of the telephone, right? And I just felt like accessibility solved all of that for me, right? I mean, it made me just able to justify my design decisions.
00:40:21.030 -->
00:40:47.804Stop getting pushback. Start charging more and standing by the value of my work. I mean, and really stopped, I stopped being, I stopped being seen as an order taker, right? Like, fix this, fix that, Cinderella, right? I mean, I stopped, or you want fries with that? I mean, I started actually getting finally treated like the expert instead of. Well, I am the expert, but I really, I wasn't being really treated like that. That's what my design expert clients would say it, but then they wouldn't treat me like that, right?
00:40:47.804 -->
00:40:51.900Yeah, exactly, and with accessibility, we kind of have teeth. We have punch to what we say because
00:40:51.989 -->
00:40:52.590Yes.
00:40:52.559 -->
00:41:12.418it kind of frames the reasoning why we do a lot of this stuff. Because otherwise, we're just left to our own demise. In which case, it's like, okay, client, well, go do it yourself then. If you know how to do it all, if you know what's right, go do it. And then they're like, Oh, I didn't think about like what's a heading, what's a tag, you know.
00:41:12.418 -->
00:41:22.947And those decisions go typically, you know, bottom to top. But it's better if we do it with accessibility in mind from the start to the end. Yeah. So I totally can resonate with that.
00:41:22.947 -->
00:41:30.273All right. So for the audience, just one more time: Where can we find you at? And if I wanted to buy your services today, where
00:41:30.000 -->
00:41:30.960Yeah. So I have two websites. One is could I go?
00:41:30.960 -->
00:41:47.039creative-boost.com, creative hyphen boost.com. And that's where I have a lot of free accessibility resources. Podcast episodes. I have some webinars.
00:41:47.039 -->
00:41:58.215I also have paid training that is specific to designers that only want to focus on the visual aspect of accessibility. And also another course for creating accessible PDFs from InDesign.
00:41:58.215 -->
00:42:14.804And then I have a web design and development course, Foundations of Website Accessibility, as well. And so that is for those who want to learn more and want to do the work. And then my business, Gratzer Graphics, at gratzergraphics.com, that is where I do the actual work for clients.
00:42:14.719 -->
00:42:33.840Fantastic. And we will include those links in the show notes here. And Colleen, thank you so much for joining us. And this is like our very first podcast recording. I don't know if I'm going to number them or not, but I really appreciate your time today and your expertise. And you know, maybe we can do another one of these in the future if they're up to it.
00:42:33.949 -->
00:42:34.760Yeah, that'd be great.
00:42:35.449 -->
00:42:43.989All right. Well, I don't know what I'm going to say to end, so I guess I'm just going to end it here. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today, and we'll see you over in the next episode.
